Eliana is thrown forward from her seat by the collision and slams up against the cabin view-port, this time full-bodied. She lingers there, watching the tentacled foetus within the egg breach, its massive tendrils ripping at the collapsing barrier. With each stroke, it reveals itself more fully until it is free.
She watches as her son stretches tendrils to the distant stars, light radiating from its pulsing, burning core. Radiative heat boils off the stellar entity, its external membrane burning a bright, pulsing red. Eliana forces her eyes to stay open as her retinas burn with the brightness of her son’s awesome new form. A swell of pride blooms up within her. His new body will not succumb to the ravages of disease, nor age, nor infirmity. Here, in the limitless black of space, he will live, undying.
For a moment, the tentacled stellar creature swells, drinking in the ambient radioactive energy of the deep black around it. And then it turns its spherical mass upon the wreck of the Lacrima, the ship collapsing in segmented stages, one portion of the hull after another crumpling in like an accordion. Drawn by the bleeding heat and light of the dying ship, and the meager warmth of the entity within, the interstellar entity falls on the crumpling hulk and wraps it in a tentacled embrace.
As the cabin is bathed in burning, pure-red light, the tentacled mass of her newly reborn child crushing up against the already-weakened glass, Eliana exults in her son’s final embrace. Metal crumples and folds in on itself in sharp, swift strokes, pinning her and crushing the breath from her lungs. And as the tentacles scythe through the hull and find purchase on her form and close tight around her, cracking bone and turning muscle to pulp, one thought repeats endlessly in Eliana’s mind.
He has come back to her.
PEOPLE ARE READING WHAT YOU ARE WRITING
By Luso Mnthali
Luso Mnthali was born in Malawi, grew up in Botswana, went to university in the United States, and now lives in beautiful Cape Town, South Africa. Luso hikes in the mountains because it helps her get over her fear of heights.
IN A ROOM ON the top floor, maria typed. And she typed and she typed. After two days, she looked up and saw a man, a short man with a clean-shaven face, standing in front of her. He watched her silently until she looked up, alerted by breathing not her own, when she needed to stretch and yawn at last. On another world, her stamina would have astounded many, but here on the New World, new human feats were always in motion, such that people were constantly re-evaluating what was humanly possible. These humans breathed differently, slept less, did more. They were also capable of retaining more information, and were also able to shut out the world when need be.
When maria at last stopped typing, she was not surprised to see him standing, watching her.
“How long have you been there?” she asked him.
“Oh, a couple of days,” he answered. He was face to face with her, as she sat there, at that table, her hands vibrating above the keyboard.
“Why are you here?” maria asked him.
“maria without the capital M. You are making them nervous.”
“What do you mean?”
“Punctuation, spelling, all done with a certain…flair, or done differently. Truth and honesty, to the extreme. Killing off characters that we…that we like. Where do you come up with these stories? They’re just stories, are they not? And your new word creation. Why can’t you stick to the approved list? You’re making a lot of important people angry, Maria.”
“No, my name is ‘maria’. Not…not ‘Maria’. Simply…‘maria’.”
Her large, determined, brown eyes did not waver; there was no perspiration on her bald head.
The man pursed his lips even more, until the straight line blurred with his features. “maria without the capital M. You are making them nervous.” With that, he disappeared and she simply continued. She made her spelling “mistakes” when necessary, creating new colours and new words, and new moods to feed a crowd. Soon, her fame spread throughout the land and people wanted to crown her Queen. “Chiphadzua,” they called her. The one who kills the sun with her beauty.
She thought and thought about it. How people, even now, after the voyage to the New Planet, insisted on the old languages and ways of doing things. She had all bloods within her, yet people still chose to see her as from the Old Planet. The Old Ways still remained very much a part of their existence. They did not believe that the wars of the past could happen here, that the Old Ways were still very much a part of the New World, on the New Planet. Perhaps her Xhosa ancestor, Maria, for whom she was named, was strongest in her blood. Her Old South African heritage told her of the First People. Maybe this is what the Council feared the most. That the oldest blood was the strongest. Perhaps Mallika of the Iyer in Old India gave her the gall, the necessary courage. Mallika with her long, black hair and big, shining eyes. An intellectual, famed ancestor. And Maita, the Kalanga woman in Old Botswana, asked her to dare and keep on daring. She also knew that Mireille, neither Hutu nor Tutsi, and not fully French, would give her courage, ask her to remember faith and the Old God, and to travel. These were all her ancestors. But somehow, the last country she lived in, Old Malawi, was stated in her bio. She wouldn’t escape that, didn’t want to, but she remembered what it meant.
In the Old Ways, women were not free to inherit from their deceased husband’s estate when they became widowed. In the Old Ways, very few women were educated. Those who were educated, sometimes chose not to show how smart they were. Sometimes, they gave up the Freedom education had given them to have families. They bought into what the Council would eventually build—a New World. They gave up fighting for more freedoms, all around the world, for more women. The reasons for this were varied and she wrote about them often. Telling the people, so they would not forget. New Planet agents wanted the people to forget how unequal the society remained. Your bloods and your past remained with you, were documented in your bio and were used to keep you within a certain level of society. Even though the New Constitution stated that there would be no discrimination based on nationality, race or country of origin, discrimination in the New World was rampant. But maria was a woman with a past. Her bloods and history marked her as a person ripe for dissent. Her bloods marked her as a rebel, even amongst women in other parts of the New Planet. Women who believed maria was to be saved from herself and follow the ideals they espoused. Therefore, she stayed in her prison, built shortly after she had arrived on the New World, and plotted dissent quietly.
The short, bald man with dull eyes and hardly any lips visited her again over a few days.
“I hear you will be crowned Queen,” he said to her.
“No, I will be a queen. Just like that girl over there, in the past world, who writes poetry and is still controlled in her tweets. Who does not dance all over the world and all over the place and keeps her face in place. She is unlike me, but she is a queen.” maria stopped the tapping across her keyboard and looked directly into his eyes. He backed away a little.