Sticky
by Libby Maeve
The first time Captain and his late wife slept together, she said, “Do whatever you want. That’s what I like.”
He took Lucy’s instruction seriously. For the duration of their relationship and rapid marriage, they both did what they liked.
Lucy had Morris danced (with no training) on the day of their wedding – kicking her heels to different corners of the town hall. She’d pulled his shoes off too. They’d staggered round the dancefloor in socks, drunker than any of their guests. She’d been sick on the paper tablecloth halfway through the reception. Captain took Lucy to the bathroom, but – at her insistence – left her there, curled around the toilet bowl, to go and lead the Conga. She’d woozily rejoined an hour later. Lucy’s dad pulled her aside to ask what the hell her husband was playing at, leaving her in that state. She’d rolled her eyes. “We do our own thing.”
He’d felt a warm buzz, overhearing. He feels it again now, gazing out the front of Ship, the Spacefish he’s currently piloting solo.
To ensure human control of Ship, Captain’s been catheterised, bound to the fleshy console by tubes of various sizes. They’re en route to pick up a copilot, since Captain’s last two crew members quit at their last spaceport.
Lucy’s long gone. That absence could hurt, if he thought about it.
Captain chooses not to. Instead, he takes the pleasure of remembering for what it is.
Eli is dropped at Nottingham spaceport by a robot car. When he slams the door, the car starts to drive off with his suitcase still in the trunk. For a few long moments, he watches it go. Then Eli thinks of six years without his books and, wearily, gives chase.
Suitcase in tow, he enters the spaceport to sign the paperwork. Six years on a freighter transporting luxury goods (and some medical supplies), from Felicity to a colony between stars in the Carina constellation. The document is thick. Eli thumbs past chunks of pages, signing and initialling himself numb. The final dotted line barely registers.
At last, Eli takes his place on a shaky short-haul pod. The company will transfer him to Felicity space station, where he’ll board the long-haul space freighter towards Carina.
Carina. He turns the word over, smooth as the perfect skimming stone. Vaguely wonders about the colleagues he’ll be working with, for all that time. Another vodka-tasting thought involving his husband Arthur pushes at Eli. He resists. He fiddles with his metallic buckle. Thinks of tadpoles.
Captain’s detachment is completed by Felicity’s violet-clad regional support team. They clip the tubes, and he sees them slither out one by one. Ducking, filtering and draining, the team members look like cartoon bugs; all so alike that Captain struggles to count them. They’re terribly professional. They don’t even hold their noses as his two-week-old fluids hit the air, turning it rancid.
When they’re nearly done, and Captain’s genitals are concealed, the highest-ranking bug clears its throat to read from a clipboard. “Your new co-pilot will join you shortly. Eli Stedman, 36. One terrestrial contact remaining, for emergencies. It should all be installed in your Ship’s interface.”
“She’s integrated it already, clever girl. Any chance I could have a walk on Felicity, before we set off?”
“Full roster most likely to be filled out in three years at Carina, not sooner as intended. Apologies from the company.”
Captain opens his mouth to complain, but grunts instead. His final tube has been released, and snakes out into a wet coil on the floor. A bug gathers it up.
The team checks his vitals. Finally, someone injects him with a stimulant, and they all leave.
Captain vibrates, feeling the stimulant jar as it courses through his system. The artificiality of the high reminds him of old, wild times on Earth. It pales in comparison.
Eli shuffles into the bio-spaceship’s cockpit in a camo raincoat. He’s six foot five, gangling close to the ceiling. His hair is matted in what could pass for depression, or white dreadlocks. Either reek of dissatisfaction.
Captain grins at him. “All right, buddy? Stedman, right? Welcome! You can call me Captain.” His voice is scallop-edged from the time alone, but the stimulant is still working, creating a rusty, manic effect.
Eli reaches for a handshake. He drops the hand, when he sees.
Captain shrugs. The movement lets out a resounding crack in his spine. “Sorry pal. We might not get to create a secret handshake any time soon. I can’t be released from the interface till you’re linked in, and if you’re linked in… well, you see the problem. It’s pretty definite, the linking. You know how to connect?”
Eli nods, watching a few bubbles rotate in the translucent interface. When he speaks, it’s so soft Captain strains to hear. “I didn’t know it’d be one of these.”
“A living ship?”
“I did the general training years ago, but – I only ever flew metal freighters. Helicopters, a couple of times.”
“Well. I’m thrilled to have you on board. First British copilot I’ve had. Sorry we didn’t stock up on tea and scones at Felicity, ha ha.”
Eli ignores him. “I never even saw one in person. I remember the articles, though. I’m not sure I…”
Captain cracks his neck. “You’ll catch on quick. She looks after us, don’t you Ship?”
“How long have you worked on… her?”
“Five years.” The console makes a soft shlick sound around his wrists. Captain grits his teeth. “Would you mind… she’ll mould to you, if you reach out close enough. Flat palm. Like you’re feeding a horse. Sooner the better. Forgive me, it’s been a while since I’ve stretched.”
“I was at the Salford protests against bio-ships. Three-four years ago.”
Captain sighs. “We had a few of those in the Bay. Like I said, you’ll catch on. All that shit about involuntary whatever-it-was has been disproved. We wouldn’t be using them now otherwise.” Eli looks back the way he came.
Captain keeps his voice warm. “We’re already on the move, by the way. Not that you can tell. She’s a real smooth ride. Look. We can talk it all through once I’ve had a walkabout. All right, buddy?”
Eli looks at Captain, then the console. His face smoothes. He puts his hands down flat. Ship’s console takes in his hands. Her nerves assemble around the slender digits of his fingers. Her flesh, like dense gelatin, packs Eli’s arms in tight.
Captain is disconnected. He nearly moans as he rises. He bounces from the knees, windmills his arms. Each movement emits a different pop, click or clunk. “I’m gonna do a few laps of Ship’s intestines. Holler if you need anything.”
Eli tries to stand. Held by his wrists, the motion forcibly flops him back into his chair. “What am I supposed to –”
“Nothing. We’re set on course for the next three months. I wouldn’t sweat it – just don’t do anything yet. But, you know, if anything seems weird, give me a shout.”
“But – can’t you – I mean, shouldn’t you –” Eli’s face reddens.
Captain backs away. “Don’t worry, pal. We’ll copilot most of the time, except for sleeping shifts and mandatory recreation. Right now I just need to… move, you know? You’ve got this.” Captain claps him on the shoulder, then leaves the cockpit.
Eli hears drumming, a relentless, repetitive pulse. He tastes salt, tugs at his wrists. Nothing happens. Briefly, he considers yanking his arms off at the socket. Is he strong enough to do that? Why didn’t he work out more, back home?
On the brink of hyperventilation, he hears Arthur’s voice. A decisive ghost stroking his temple, his hair. “Calm down, babe. One. Two. Three. Play the noticing game, OK?”
Eli plays the noticing game. He notices his body, supported by the viscous chair. He notices the tension in his jaw, breath coming swift and shallow. “Slow it down. Slow. Slow.”
He notices the flesh of the console. How it feels beneath his fingers; like silly putty left out the container a little too long. He notices the absence of a metallic engine’s hum. Instead, the general gurgle of Ship’s interior organs, digesting, circulating. The papery walls of the cockpit.
At last, he lets himself notice the huge window in front of him. To see the stars, he has to look through Ship’s pupil. Lens. Cornea. Her colossal iris frames him, immobilised and pathetically human. In a wet quiver of adrenaline, Eli looks straight through. It’s real. His new home – for most of his waking hours – is here. Embedded like a parasite in the left eye of a colossal Spacefish.
I’ll be here for years, he thinks. And it’s what I deserve.
When the shadow appears at the top of Ship’s eye, he barely notices. It rests there for about a quarter of an hour. That first time, he thinks nothing of it.
Eli’s first unsupervised stint stretches out hours. He loses track of time, trying to keep noticing, trying not to cry.
When Captain finally returns, Eli’s too shattered to do anything but let him take control. He only half-listens to the instructions on how to find his sleeping quarters. He ends up stumbling from one of Ship’s internal sacs to another for half an hour. When at last he finds his bed – a cartilaginous divot, frilled with lobes – he slips at once into uneasy, nauseous sleep.
Eli dreams of Arthur stroking his hair. Soft. A bitter mouth taste. Arthur kissing it out. “What have you done this time, baby?”
The next morning, Captain is singing. He’s come up with something like a sea shanty. “Yo ho ho, it’s the spacefish life for me. Yo ho ho. Just so long as I don’t need a tube to pee.” His voice is high and childish, nothing like the grating rasp from yesterday.
Eli hovers in the doorway. “You a musician or something?”
Captain keeps humming. “Morning, sunshine. How’d you sleep?”
“Badly.”
“Sit down, sit down, we’ll catch up. Feel free to grab a nutri-drink first – back wall.”
Eli heads to the fleshy wall, its ridge hosting an array of beverages. “Any of this stuff vegan?”
Captain barks a laugh. “Seriously? Yeah. The green one. Tastes like ass.”
Eli mixes a nutri-drink and sinks into the second chair. Captain watches Eli avoid looking at the console. Eli is also not looking at Captain. It’s actually quite impressive, the way he’s avoiding looking at most things, but still has his eyes open.
Captain clears his throat. “Look, buddy, I’m sorry for yesterday. Not the ideal first afternoon on the job, eh? I shouldn’t have ditched you like that.”
“Why did you?”
“Honestly? I was piloting alone, these past couple weeks. They rigged me up OK – I wasn’t sitting in my own shit or whatever – but I hadn’t stood up that whole time. Made me a bit stir-crazy.”
Eli takes another sip. “OK. It won’t happen again?”
“Not till you’re confident you know what you’re doing. Sound fair?”
Eli nods. He puts one hand in the console, allowing Captain’s right hand to release – he lets out an appreciative “mmm.”
Captain runs Eli through the basics of their job: twitching and tweaking the console to monitor Ship’s internal systems; reporting space junk (common) and other ships (rare) back to the company; keeping tabs on their trajectory. “I’ll monitor that,” says Captain. “Don’t sweat it. Don’t sweat most of it, honestly. As long as we’re plugged in, we’ll feel if anything goes wrong. It almost never does.”
Then they chat. Captain tells Eli about his five years on Ship; the many colleagues who “couldn’t hack it.” How he went from second bio-mechanic to secondary co-pilot to lead co-pilot. The boredom. The interior sound system. The most transcendent constellations he’s seen. The occasional underwhelming alien. “And the perks,” says Captain. “We’ll let you settle in first, but you’ll like them. Everyone does.”
Eli tells Captain about his husband back on Earth. It’s not a topic he seems to enjoy, though his eyes light up every time he says the name Arthur. “It’s a money thing, really, me going.” He says. “No money in metal freighters any more. It was stressful, me scrabbling about. And his mental health isn’t so good. Long distance made sense to us.”
After two hours, Captain leaves. “Bathroom. Won’t be long.”
Eli gets used to being alone. He learns to operate the sound system, by twitching some of the console’s nerves just right. This vibrates a nearby section of Ship’s internal muscle strata, inducing the clearest surround sound he’s heard. Many of his favourite songs have been preloaded on. There are thousands of files, each seemingly attached to a different previous crew member. It passes the hours, browsing through the directory. Someone called Ronaldo really loved 2040s punk rock.
Sometimes, Eli imagines he’s playing the music himself, a conductor rooted into his own orchestra. He tunes into the occasional news alerts from Felicity, which feel irrelevant, unless the British settlement is mentioned. It rarely is. Once, he starts recording a message to Arthur. “Hey, hi. Just checking in. How are the tadpoles doing? Are they frogs yet?”
Captain comes back from another of his long stints. Eli snaps the connection.
“All right, buddy?” Captain’s beaming. There’s a glossy sheen over his eyes.
Eli fingers the snapped connection in the console, which is already mending, threading itself back into the inner strata. “Where you been?”
“Seeing the sights, my dear.”
“I’m serious.”
“Ooh, you’re serious.” Captain leans down, peering into Eli’s eyes. “No, I can tell. You’ve got your serious face on. Wait, Stedman, actually, do you have any other faces?”
Eli’s shoulders pinch into their sockets.
Captain carries on. “You need to lighten up. Nothing on Earth could be – ahh. See?” He sinks into his seat, nodding like he’s made a good point.
“Are you drunk?” Eli spits.
“Drunk? Stedman, you’re thinking small. I’m not drunk. I’m happy.”
“Where do you even go?”
“Look, I can leave you to your thoughts if –”
“No!” Eli flushes. “No. I’ve been alone here for four hours. It’s your time in sole command. I haven’t slept – I haven’t –”
“Okay, okay, you’ve got it, buddy.” Captain sinks his hands into the console. Ship latches on, recognising him as primary pilot. Eli springs away at once, flexing his wrists. He stretches his arms as big as he can get, then pushes against the cockpit wall, so hard it leaves a temporary mark. Captain snorts.
“What the fuck is wrong with you?” Eli says, looking back at Captain.
“You’re unhappy.” Captain says.
“No shit.”
“My bad. I should’ve told you, once you started being miserable.”
“Told me what?”
“I shouldn’t’ve saved it till now. But we’re not meant to tell people about the perks till we’re sure they can handle it.” Captain’s smiling again. He looks like a smug older brother who’s got insider info from their parents. That they’re getting ice cream, or going to Disneyland. Or the dentist. “I think you’re ready.”
Eli presses his shoulder into the wall, looking at the exit, then Captain. He’s been the younger brother, in a different life. Then, as now, he knows that he’ll ask. “Tell me.”
Captain leans back in his chair, pleased. Clears his throat.
“Ship’s more than just a ship, right? She’s a – she’s got a body.”
Eli snorts.
“But her body’s different from ours – or Earth fish, obviously. Her body’s not sensitive here, where we are. A lot of work went into that, so when we’re piloting it doesn’t hurt, it’s an interaction, you know? Most of her interior body doesn’t have nerve endings in the way you’d think.”
“Yeah, I know. Or I’d never have…” Eli swallows.
“Her outside’s different, though. Ever see an Earth fish swimming in the water?”
Eli doesn’t bother nodding.
“If you grabbed it, it’d flinch, right? Wriggle all slick out of your hands. Wouldn’t wanna be touched like that, and it’d let you know. But, listen. You go outside of Ship, through the exit gill. You go up on her, lie down in a certain spot. She doesn’t wriggle – she wouldn’t. She… reacts.”
“Reacts.”
“You lie down, there’s a certain way, a bit of you sort of fuses with a bit of her – not like you’re thinking – and she lets something out, something that goes up into you. This – chemical something. It’s not –” Captain breaks off, looking dreamy. “It’s good, buddy, I’ll tell you that. It feels extremely fucking good.”
“You. Put something into her?”
“She does it back. I’m not explaining it right. It’s a feel it to believe it kinda thing. Press the right buttons, bam, you get a reward.”
“That happens naturally?”
“Sure. Well – they might’ve geared it up a notch.”
“They?”
“The science lot.”
Eli baulks. His next words come out stiff. “And you think she enjoys it? Based on – what, exactly?”
“I mean, she can’t say. But yeah, she enjoys it. Why wouldn’t she?”
Eli leans against Ship’s wall, a hand digging in to stabilise himself. When he feels what he’s doing he flinches away.
Captain’s still got that dreamy look. “You can try her out now, if you like. I don’t mind.”
Eli goes back to his room. A soft throat palpitation makes him aware that he needs to vomit. He does so in his garbage can – a construction of detachable cartilage.
The sick swims before him, streaked with bands of different coloured nutri-drink. Eli thinks about taking the garbage to empty in the digestion chamber, but finds himself lying down instead, pulling tulle-ish lobes over him, till he’s cocooned. When he wakes, the scent of acid is overriding Ship’s warm natural must. He thinks it’ s been hours. Not that he has any grasp on time any more.
Another week passes after Captain tells Eli what he does out there on Ship. Eli’s started to read aloud from Interstellar Ethics any time they’re on the console together.
“Disparate species,” he says, “are as deserving of respect as any humanoid, humanesque android or similar.”
Captain tries to talk about the cosmic weather, or his wife Lucy – “what a catch!” – or Carina. Eli just keeps reading.
“Chill out, Stedman,” Captain says, “please.” When this makes no difference, Captain gives up. Then he goes out.
When he goes, Eli pictures every aspect of Captain’s actions in graphic, lurid detail. What Eli pictures isn’t quite the truth, though he’s grasped the basics.
Captain exits via the olfactory bulb. Out of Stedman’s view, his gait lightens, despite his feet sticking to Ship’s pyloric cecum. To the untrained eye, her exterior pocket would appear to be an oddly dimensioned, fleshy corridor.
Captain remembers his training years ago. Watching that strange shaky-cam footage of those early living ships in a remote basement on the CSU campus. The guy next to him went ice white – almost blue. Captain had never been grossed out by the idea of occupying an animal’s interior. From the start, he’d felt a childlike urge to get in. He’d wanted to touch the soft meat of the insides. Finger paint with the excretions. He still has that urge, but likes to think, since meeting Ship, it’s more profound.
By the exit gill, Captain finds the space suits. Five limp shrouds – extensions of Ship’s living body, harvested back when they had more copilots – hanging in stasis. Three are currently unclaimed.
Captain unhooks his suit by the neck and drops it. He steps bare feet into its mouth. When it wakes, he’s engulfed, swallowed whole in a gulping peristalsis. The clear form shapes around his limbs, turning Ship’s oxygen even sweeter as it breathes.
“We’re going out front,” he tells his suit. Its doleful eyes sharpen over his own.
Captain slides out the top gill, suit velcro-sticking to Ship’s scaled side. He clambers up, adjusting to the vacuum with ease. When he crests her torso, Ship glows up a bit in recognition, a soft, sunset blush atop her head.
Captain rests the seat of his sticky suit on the crown of her head, and crosses his legs, with effort. He peers down into her right eye. He much prefers her right – the one without Stedman behind. Ship has to keep looking where they’re going, but on his side, it feels more polite to make eye contact. An observer – if there could be one that didn’t immediately asphyxiate or explode – would see a speck for Captain. A speck perched atop a monumentally large fish. Incredibly large. The kind of large that embarrasses blue whales and Everests. The kind of large you don’t really want to put into context. Ship’s pilots are supposedly trained to handle it. Captain simply does not.
Captain gives Ship a good scratch beside her eyes, just how she likes. Ten minutes of slow, hard scratching is tedious for him, but just past nothing for her. Time differences are something he’s had to adapt to, piloting a Spacefish. Recently it’s been helpful to know that these tense hours working with Stedman would condense to barely a minute for Ship. There’s no rushing in open space. In some ways he envies Ship’s steady, unwavering course, the way she charts from star to star; the lifetime no human has seen the end of yet. They’re a blip.
As Captain starts scratching slower, he begins to salivate. Some saliva floods the face of his sticky suit, and the suit squirms, responding to his anticipatory adrenaline. He pats the top of Ship’s head, as thanks for what he sees as a trade. Ship’s body is ancient as fungal networks, and similarly capable of creating pleasure. His breath catches, and he feels the familiar blend of invincible and invisible – the good kind of invisible. Not beholden.
Captain stretches back. He carefully aligns his encased spine over Ship’s; his vertebrae parallel to, yet dwarfed by hers. Her dorsal fin to the west, now casting shadow.
He lands right the first time. As he lies down, through the suit, his spinal column reacts to a section of hers. The most important section; one containing a buzzing, enigmatic chemical. One humans can’t make. The skin of his suit fuses with Ship’s skin, which acts as a conductor. An electric hum probes upwards.
It moves through his body. Coursing capillaries, expanding, wiping his mind clean of boredom, strain, Stedman. Everything niggling, heavy or painful – goes. A release like cracking your neck after years of buildup. His limbs splay out. He moans and gazes at the sky. Above and below look the same. It’s all sky to him.
Bliss swoops along Captain’s tailbone, wrapping his spine. The pleasure takes root at the back of his tongue, where the seam meets his throat. It rests there and hums. He tastes; eyes rolling back til they close. The crisp white of each star-speck mirrors his sweat through the suit.
Eli sees the edge of Captain’s shadow, right at the top of Ship’s cornea. He knows the routine by now, but still feels sick. As a child, he convinced himself that he was allergic to bananas, just by overthinking the texture of them. Even now the taste brings up bile. He’s thirty-six and can still ascribe a sickening overthought to anything, with time. He’s near to that now; thinking about what Captain is doing, or about to do, to poor Ship, who can’t object. If I was home, he thinks savagely, I would protest this sort of thing. I would lobby against it. Him and Arthur, side by side on the picket line, waving sticks. Making change. He hears Arthur’s dry, low voice. “That’s not helpful now, is it?”
Eli swallows back a chunk of nutri-drink powder, tweaks the interface a little, and sends another voice message home, zipping through the cosmos. Home to Arthur. Their dog Sherry. The frogspawn at the bottom of the garden.
Afterwards, he thinks about Arthur some more. The hollows at the base of his spine. The laugh he only does during sex, fervent and a bit shocked, like he can’t believe they’re allowed to do this. Eli notices, with horror, that he has an erection. He shifts, hoping it will give up if he thinks of other things. A flash of Arthur’s hands on his chest – pushing him away, off, give over will you please.
Eli leans forward to take another sip of the drink. He misses, and manages to send the cup flying, Ship’s gravity working too well. It spews powdery mulch across the corner of the dash and over the floor.
“Fuck.”
At least the erection is gone.
Miserable, waiting for Captain to reappear, Eli’s thoughts start pushing at the limits he’s set for himself.
Uneasy memories. Not long back. Calling Arthur from the club. Then again from his friend Leandro’s, 3, 4am, whenever the bag comes in gets fuzzy, though at the time it sharpened, didn’t it? Slurring down the phone to him, Come over to us come on don’t be a spoilsport baby I need you. Eventually going home, still feeling the high, cracking through the window like ice when he couldn’t find the key – no –
Captain rejoins Eli after an hour. He’s peaceable. The feeling reminds him of being two sangrias deep with Lucy at The Chequers on a hot day.
He squeezes Eli’s shoulder (Eli flinches), then spots the oblique smear of nutri-drink. One of Eli’s socks lies turgid on the floor beside the mess – just out of reach of his newly bare foot.
Captain smirks. “Done some spring cleaning, pal?”
Eli keeps looking ahead. “Take control again so I can clean it properly.”
“He speaks!” Captain crows. “Nooo, no, you stay there.” Taking his time, Captain grabs some lichen sponges from storage, and mops up, with a rare delicacy. Eli’s fingers claw inside the console.
“Want me to whip up another?” says Captain.
Eli doesn’t respond.
“I said –”
“I don’t want another fucking nutri-drink.”
“Sorry, sorry. Forgive me.” Captain wipes another errant smear, and begins to whistle.
“It’s a good day, Sted, if you can’t tell.”
“You’re having a good day.”
“You’re the only one having a bad day here, Sted, and that seems pretty self-inflicted to me.”
“Not the only one.”
Captain rolls his eyes. “What are you on about?”
“What you do to Ship. Not like she has a say, is it?”
Captain scoffs, pushing a pocket of air behind his lips. “She has no problem with it. What kind of creature evolves for second-party operation if it doesn’t like it?”
Eli blinks his eyes, hard. “Take over, will you?”
Eli relinquishes Ship’s control to Captain, and returns to his cosy pocket of spleen.
Captain presses play on his music. Ke$ha’s final album. Lucy loved this one.
Eli can’t sleep, so he reads Interstellar Ethics in the Post-Wars Era for the twelfth time. Eventually he dozes, diverging philosophies bumbling around his head. Hard line approach. Divergent, irreconcilable philosophies. Necessary perpetuation. When he wakes, his head is pounding, a sentence not printed in Interstellar Ethics lodged in his head. This evil shit.
When Eli comes into the cockpit to share control again, Captain is speaking to Ship.
“Beautiful thing. I’ll be out again later.”
“Lucky her.”
Captain’s head jerks around, then he laughs. “Relax, Stedman. You haven’t felt it yet.”
“I don’t want to.” Eli reaches roughly into Ship to share control. “I don’t need some false sense of intimacy. I’ve got people back on Earth.”
“Sure, sure. Not that you’ll be seeing him.” Captain assumes a placatory tone. “I know it’s a lot to give up. And I get it. Though there’s no one left for me back there.”
“Your people died?”
“Just person. My Lucy. Out with a bang, like always.” He smiles wide. Eli zeroes in on the chips in his veneers. The gums around them seem raw. “Can’t get sad about it. She wouldn’t want that. Wouldn’t even let me stick around when she got sick cause she always said –” he pitches his voice up, a parody of his dead wife – “look, life is what it is. Take what joy we can from what we have. So that’s what we should do, Sted.”
Eli’s face – which had briefly softened – now turns sour.
“See?”
“See what?”
“It is taking. What you’re doing to Ship.”
Captain pushes his chair back, lifting his hands out the console. Eli sees Captain’s face. For the first time, something like anger brews beneath it. “I’m going to bed.”
“We’re meant to share control for –”
For a second, Captain seems like he might punch Eli. Instead, he leaves the cockpit.
Eli turns silently back to Ship’s eye. Once he’s sure Captain’s out of earshot, he starts recording a message. “Hey, Arthur, baby, just checking in, just seeing how you’re doing. You’d never believe, my co-pilot, what a nightmare – he’s doing it again…” When he finishes one message, he starts to record another.
It isn’t long before he sees the shadow again, at the top of Ship’s eye. It stays there for a shorter period, but Captain doesn’t reenter the gills for a long while.
When Captain thinks of Lucy, he thinks of the smell of expired deli soup. Straining garbage bags, full of half-empty tubs in her bedroom. Letters screwed up sealed by the door, red labels still just visible in all caps: DO NOT IGNORE, FINAL WARNING. When he visited her apartment the first time, he had felt at home there at once; among the detritus that signalled a life free of urgency.
Neither of them had to pretend to even want to seem put together. She didn’t worry, and she didn’t mind that he didn’t, either. Everything could be easy. It was, for as long as it could be. He moved in, doubling the household’s intake of soup and alcohol. There were many times walking that they gurgled in unison.
She’d have loved Ship, too, he thinks, shuffling his spine into place. Then he stops thinking.
Eli’s been alone at the console so long, he doesn’t know which artificial day it is. Arthur’s mailbox is full, but he keeps trying.
A buzz.
Eli blinks, tongue poking at a dried bit of nutri-drink in his beard. How long has that been there?
Another buzz.
A message from Earth.
Eli’s dry eyes blur a little. He’s waited so long to hear back from Arthur, that he’s forgotten that was possible. Eli tweaks the nerve required to play it.
Arthur’s voice fills the cockpit.
“Eli?” His voice is stronger, stranger than Eli’s been hearing in his head. “Do you know how fucking expensive it is to send messages this far? Your company covers outgoing messages, but not incoming, if you didn’t know. If you didn’t read the handbook. Which I know you didn’t. Didn’t have time, did you? Did you even know what kind of ship you were boarding?”
Eli’s internal drum-beat is back.
Arthur takes a strained, shaky breath. “Sorr– no. I didn’t call you up to give you a bollocking. Or apologise. Deep breaths, right, Eli?”
Something undoes in Eli’s mind. He struggles to do it up again. Arthur keeps speaking. “I’d like you to stop sending me voice messages. It’s just too much, the endless stream. I want you to be OK, course I do. I never told you to head off for six years, I never wanted you to, I told you…” he pauses again.
Arthur begging Eli not to go.
The voice in the message is different, firmer. “Sending these messages like everything’s normal. Like you’ve popped off to a work conference, and I’m still your emotional support, for you to rant about Sandra in tech and how the vegan option at the pilots’ talk is shite – it’s not fair, Eli.”
Eli remembers the morning leading up to his decision to go to space. The hangover. The sickening guilt. The desperate need to be somewhere, anywhere but there.
“You did something fucked up.” Arthur’s voice is building, something finally releasing, now that Eli can’t get away, can’t shut the message off or cross the universe to avoid it – “then you said ‘sorry’ just to shut me up, and then you pissed off into space. I bet you don’t think about it, if you can help it.”
Arthur speaks faster. Eli strains against the console, fingers trying to flex, trying to reach his ears, to plunge knuckle deep into his eardrums, pierce them if necessary. It’s no use. Ship has him held too close.
“But I think about it. I know what happened.”
Eli’s wrists start blooming bruises. His memory, as it stands, splits open over the message, til he can’t hear Arthur’s voice.
4am. Eli stumbling home. Drunk, high. Desperate in the usual drunk/high way. The last line of coke was a mistake.
Getting home. Through the gate, one foot plunging in the garden pond as he passed. A wet trail behind him.
Door locked. Window breaking. Laughing about it, even as Arthur’s pale, sleep-deprived face swam into focus, exasperated. Glass of water, ignored. All the lights on.
Eli trying to kiss – be kissed, too, but mostly kiss, an action that demanded only receipt. Missing Arthur’s mouth once; being pushed away, twice, three times. Getting into bed with Arthur, still flush with chemicals and a guttural feeling that pleasure was needed. Was imminent.
Time going funny. Words funny. Eli pushing through it, pushing onto Arthur, so soft in the glow. Arthur saying words, words that were loud but that even now – with focused attention – Eli still can’t identify, can’t comb out straight. He hadn’t been listening. You have to listen, to remember.
Body pressed onto body – over it, pinning it. Pinning him, Arthur, down.
Eli carrying on.
Eli carrying on.
The crying, after.
Arthur curled up in the morning, turned away.
The sorry that burnt up as Eli said it.
The sick certainty that Arthur hated him. That now Eli had to go, to get out of what he’d done. Penance. Martyrdom. Redemption, somehow, someday.
The peace of that.
Arthur is still talking through Ship.
Eli breathes, feels his hands, his face, his own proximity to each part of himself. Then he tunes back in.
“– and that’s messed up, right, but I thought it was salvageable. But it also makes sense you’d do something to punish yourself like this. Pretending like you’re such a hero, boring yourself to death in outer space, I hope six years is enough to forgive me god-I-hate-myself PRICK. All that, then voice messaging me all the time, when I’m at work, trying to recover, trying to live my fucking life. Don’t you ever think you did this for me. Well enjoy it. Enjoy it. And stop calling.”
The message ends.
Captain enters the control room about halfway through the message. Eli doesn’t hear him. Captain watches Eli’s frame freeze then crumple as it plays. From behind, he looks like a broken CPR dummy; Ship’s console holding him together by the hands.
Captain turns silently and goes to his quarters for half an hour, to let Eli pull himself together. He shoots hoops in a muscular ring he’s pulled out of Ship’s wall. An angry rash has begun to emanate from the hoop by the time he’s finished. Captain pastes it with lumpy ointment and goes back to the cockpit.
Eli’s still slumped. Captain clears his throat. “All right, pal?”
Eli twitches. Captain crouches by the console, looking up at his wet face. His facial lines are contorted, running so deep each has a second shadow.
“Feeling fresh?”
The noise Eli lets out could be a laugh.
“I heard a bit of that message, pal, sorry. Tough gig. Have a breather if you need, I’m happy getting my tunes on.”
Captain takes control of the console, expecting Eli to stand and go. He doesn’t.
Captain’s uneasy. It’s one thing to have a co-pilot you don’t get on with. Another thing entirely to have no co-pilot at all. “Hey, Eli?”
Nothing.
“This isn’t sustainable.”
Eventually, Eli sits up. He tries to clear his throat. When he opens his mouth to speak, Captain sees a bubble of phlegmy spit within. It glints like a jewel.
“You need a change of scene. You looked at space, yet? From outside?”
Eli wobbles his head. Captain interprets this as a shake. “Breakups suck, man. Been there.”
Eli looks at Captain. Clears his throat. “Sure. Get some air.”
Captain strokes the interior of the console for twenty minutes, as Eli waits. This is last-ditch protocol, last-resort only-in-emergencies protocol. The company would not approve.
He asks Ship gently, from the inside, to hold course. To please keep them safe. She blinks. Slow. Slow.
Captain helps Eli into his sticky suit, then puts on his own. Both suits glow in recognition – they’ve so rarely had company in recent months. Captain pushes Eli out the gills first, then hoists himself through, using the suits’ traction to help roll his colleague’s body, scale over scale, to the top of Ship’s eye. Eli tries to help, but he’s not used to open space. He freezes up whenever his gaze tilts back.
“Hey, love.” Captain says to Ship. Strokes between her eyes. He makes sure Eli is steady, right at the crest of her socket. “Look, pal. Just take some time. I’ll come get you in an hour, all right? You don’t have to do anything. You can just sit and watch the stars, for all I care.” He leaves, trying to hum. The thin sound doesn’t make it out of his skull.
Captain goes back down to take control of Ship. He decides to do a few laps of the intestines, first. Work off his latent energy.
Alone, without gravity, Eli’s arms raise, head bobbing like it’s forgotten it has a neck.
Eli looks down at the stars. Past the tip of his nose. The crest of Ship’s head. He’s beyond nausea, into nothing. Thoughts pass like schools of fish; each forming the shape of an emotion or thought. He sees them dimly through the dark. None holds their form long enough to register.
Arthur. Arthur, making toast and olive spread, forcing it into his fur-tongued mouth. Arthur, cleaning up his mess. One year then another. Arthur trying to back away.
His suit is buzzing, restless. It doesn’t quite fit. He feels a distant internal rupture. What other feeling is there? Why can’t I feel it?
He knows where he is, where on Ship’s body. Knows what Captain’s offering. Tries to feel disgust, or resistance. Can’t.
He is clammy, aware of the sticky suit encasing his body, keeping him grounded on Ship. He imagines the suit stripping itself free of him; sending a distorting, cooling corpse spinning outwards into void. There are ways he could make the vision a reality. They’re all beyond him.
He shuffles backwards, and lies down, placing his spine above Ship’s, in that place Captain described to him. He knows he needs to land to react, to connect.
Eli takes what he’s been offered.
Two hours later, Captain lifts him off. Eli blinks at his presence, and the absence.
Eli is consumed by a weary sense that he hasn’t felt the sensation at all. That, for a while, he’d become only a space for pleasure to occupy. Now that he’s disconnected, no afterbuzz remains; not even the nagging misery of a comedown. He was occupied by sensation. Now he is not.
Eli starts to cry. “She didn’t want to.”
Captain puts his arms awkwardly round Eli. Their suits bulge like egg yolks pushed together. “You don’t know that, buddy. We don’t. There’s no way to know. Look, do you feel better, at least? Bit of a distraction, eh pal?”
Eli sobs harder. He feels his face heating, slick with sweat and tears. He finds it cruel that the sticky suit doesn’t fog. That it refuses to blur – for even a second– what’s outside from what’s in.
Ship looks at Carina. It’s lovely. She’s seen it before; been there before, in accordance with the whims of strange fleeting creatures.
She thinks, in her drum-beat way, that perhaps this time she’d like to end up somewhere else. Her period of thought hosts several considerations. Awareness; of her self, as a complete entity – in the universe and of it. Delight; in the fact of existing slowly – a skeined existence that, in unwinding, creates no straight lines.
She decides. Ship sets her sights on something far past Carina. Something Eli, Captain and the rest don’t yet have a name for. She skews, so-very-slightly, to her left.
It will take several months for the pilots to notice.
He took Lucy’s instruction seriously. For the duration of their relationship and rapid marriage, they both did what they liked.
Lucy had Morris danced (with no training) on the day of their wedding – kicking her heels to different corners of the town hall. She’d pulled his shoes off too. They’d staggered round the dancefloor in socks, drunker than any of their guests. She’d been sick on the paper tablecloth halfway through the reception. Captain took Lucy to the bathroom, but – at her insistence – left her there, curled around the toilet bowl, to go and lead the Conga. She’d woozily rejoined an hour later. Lucy’s dad pulled her aside to ask what the hell her husband was playing at, leaving her in that state. She’d rolled her eyes. “We do our own thing.”
He’d felt a warm buzz, overhearing. He feels it again now, gazing out the front of Ship, the Spacefish he’s currently piloting solo.
To ensure human control of Ship, Captain’s been catheterised, bound to the fleshy console by tubes of various sizes. They’re en route to pick up a copilot, since Captain’s last two crew members quit at their last spaceport.
Lucy’s long gone. That absence could hurt, if he thought about it.
Captain chooses not to. Instead, he takes the pleasure of remembering for what it is.
Eli is dropped at Nottingham spaceport by a robot car. When he slams the door, the car starts to drive off with his suitcase still in the trunk. For a few long moments, he watches it go. Then Eli thinks of six years without his books and, wearily, gives chase.
Suitcase in tow, he enters the spaceport to sign the paperwork. Six years on a freighter transporting luxury goods (and some medical supplies), from Felicity to a colony between stars in the Carina constellation. The document is thick. Eli thumbs past chunks of pages, signing and initialling himself numb. The final dotted line barely registers.
At last, Eli takes his place on a shaky short-haul pod. The company will transfer him to Felicity space station, where he’ll board the long-haul space freighter towards Carina.
Carina. He turns the word over, smooth as the perfect skimming stone. Vaguely wonders about the colleagues he’ll be working with, for all that time. Another vodka-tasting thought involving his husband Arthur pushes at Eli. He resists. He fiddles with his metallic buckle. Thinks of tadpoles.
Captain’s detachment is completed by Felicity’s violet-clad regional support team. They clip the tubes, and he sees them slither out one by one. Ducking, filtering and draining, the team members look like cartoon bugs; all so alike that Captain struggles to count them. They’re terribly professional. They don’t even hold their noses as his two-week-old fluids hit the air, turning it rancid.
When they’re nearly done, and Captain’s genitals are concealed, the highest-ranking bug clears its throat to read from a clipboard. “Your new co-pilot will join you shortly. Eli Stedman, 36. One terrestrial contact remaining, for emergencies. It should all be installed in your Ship’s interface.”
“She’s integrated it already, clever girl. Any chance I could have a walk on Felicity, before we set off?”
“Full roster most likely to be filled out in three years at Carina, not sooner as intended. Apologies from the company.”
Captain opens his mouth to complain, but grunts instead. His final tube has been released, and snakes out into a wet coil on the floor. A bug gathers it up.
The team checks his vitals. Finally, someone injects him with a stimulant, and they all leave.
Captain vibrates, feeling the stimulant jar as it courses through his system. The artificiality of the high reminds him of old, wild times on Earth. It pales in comparison.
Eli shuffles into the bio-spaceship’s cockpit in a camo raincoat. He’s six foot five, gangling close to the ceiling. His hair is matted in what could pass for depression, or white dreadlocks. Either reek of dissatisfaction.
Captain grins at him. “All right, buddy? Stedman, right? Welcome! You can call me Captain.” His voice is scallop-edged from the time alone, but the stimulant is still working, creating a rusty, manic effect.
Eli reaches for a handshake. He drops the hand, when he sees.
Captain shrugs. The movement lets out a resounding crack in his spine. “Sorry pal. We might not get to create a secret handshake any time soon. I can’t be released from the interface till you’re linked in, and if you’re linked in… well, you see the problem. It’s pretty definite, the linking. You know how to connect?”
Eli nods, watching a few bubbles rotate in the translucent interface. When he speaks, it’s so soft Captain strains to hear. “I didn’t know it’d be one of these.”
“A living ship?”
“I did the general training years ago, but – I only ever flew metal freighters. Helicopters, a couple of times.”
“Well. I’m thrilled to have you on board. First British copilot I’ve had. Sorry we didn’t stock up on tea and scones at Felicity, ha ha.”
Eli ignores him. “I never even saw one in person. I remember the articles, though. I’m not sure I…”
Captain cracks his neck. “You’ll catch on quick. She looks after us, don’t you Ship?”
“How long have you worked on… her?”
“Five years.” The console makes a soft shlick sound around his wrists. Captain grits his teeth. “Would you mind… she’ll mould to you, if you reach out close enough. Flat palm. Like you’re feeding a horse. Sooner the better. Forgive me, it’s been a while since I’ve stretched.”
“I was at the Salford protests against bio-ships. Three-four years ago.”
Captain sighs. “We had a few of those in the Bay. Like I said, you’ll catch on. All that shit about involuntary whatever-it-was has been disproved. We wouldn’t be using them now otherwise.” Eli looks back the way he came.
Captain keeps his voice warm. “We’re already on the move, by the way. Not that you can tell. She’s a real smooth ride. Look. We can talk it all through once I’ve had a walkabout. All right, buddy?”
Eli looks at Captain, then the console. His face smoothes. He puts his hands down flat. Ship’s console takes in his hands. Her nerves assemble around the slender digits of his fingers. Her flesh, like dense gelatin, packs Eli’s arms in tight.
Captain is disconnected. He nearly moans as he rises. He bounces from the knees, windmills his arms. Each movement emits a different pop, click or clunk. “I’m gonna do a few laps of Ship’s intestines. Holler if you need anything.”
Eli tries to stand. Held by his wrists, the motion forcibly flops him back into his chair. “What am I supposed to –”
“Nothing. We’re set on course for the next three months. I wouldn’t sweat it – just don’t do anything yet. But, you know, if anything seems weird, give me a shout.”
“But – can’t you – I mean, shouldn’t you –” Eli’s face reddens.
Captain backs away. “Don’t worry, pal. We’ll copilot most of the time, except for sleeping shifts and mandatory recreation. Right now I just need to… move, you know? You’ve got this.” Captain claps him on the shoulder, then leaves the cockpit.
Eli hears drumming, a relentless, repetitive pulse. He tastes salt, tugs at his wrists. Nothing happens. Briefly, he considers yanking his arms off at the socket. Is he strong enough to do that? Why didn’t he work out more, back home?
On the brink of hyperventilation, he hears Arthur’s voice. A decisive ghost stroking his temple, his hair. “Calm down, babe. One. Two. Three. Play the noticing game, OK?”
Eli plays the noticing game. He notices his body, supported by the viscous chair. He notices the tension in his jaw, breath coming swift and shallow. “Slow it down. Slow. Slow.”
He notices the flesh of the console. How it feels beneath his fingers; like silly putty left out the container a little too long. He notices the absence of a metallic engine’s hum. Instead, the general gurgle of Ship’s interior organs, digesting, circulating. The papery walls of the cockpit.
At last, he lets himself notice the huge window in front of him. To see the stars, he has to look through Ship’s pupil. Lens. Cornea. Her colossal iris frames him, immobilised and pathetically human. In a wet quiver of adrenaline, Eli looks straight through. It’s real. His new home – for most of his waking hours – is here. Embedded like a parasite in the left eye of a colossal Spacefish.
I’ll be here for years, he thinks. And it’s what I deserve.
When the shadow appears at the top of Ship’s eye, he barely notices. It rests there for about a quarter of an hour. That first time, he thinks nothing of it.
Eli’s first unsupervised stint stretches out hours. He loses track of time, trying to keep noticing, trying not to cry.
When Captain finally returns, Eli’s too shattered to do anything but let him take control. He only half-listens to the instructions on how to find his sleeping quarters. He ends up stumbling from one of Ship’s internal sacs to another for half an hour. When at last he finds his bed – a cartilaginous divot, frilled with lobes – he slips at once into uneasy, nauseous sleep.
Eli dreams of Arthur stroking his hair. Soft. A bitter mouth taste. Arthur kissing it out. “What have you done this time, baby?”
The next morning, Captain is singing. He’s come up with something like a sea shanty. “Yo ho ho, it’s the spacefish life for me. Yo ho ho. Just so long as I don’t need a tube to pee.” His voice is high and childish, nothing like the grating rasp from yesterday.
Eli hovers in the doorway. “You a musician or something?”
Captain keeps humming. “Morning, sunshine. How’d you sleep?”
“Badly.”
“Sit down, sit down, we’ll catch up. Feel free to grab a nutri-drink first – back wall.”
Eli heads to the fleshy wall, its ridge hosting an array of beverages. “Any of this stuff vegan?”
Captain barks a laugh. “Seriously? Yeah. The green one. Tastes like ass.”
Eli mixes a nutri-drink and sinks into the second chair. Captain watches Eli avoid looking at the console. Eli is also not looking at Captain. It’s actually quite impressive, the way he’s avoiding looking at most things, but still has his eyes open.
Captain clears his throat. “Look, buddy, I’m sorry for yesterday. Not the ideal first afternoon on the job, eh? I shouldn’t have ditched you like that.”
“Why did you?”
“Honestly? I was piloting alone, these past couple weeks. They rigged me up OK – I wasn’t sitting in my own shit or whatever – but I hadn’t stood up that whole time. Made me a bit stir-crazy.”
Eli takes another sip. “OK. It won’t happen again?”
“Not till you’re confident you know what you’re doing. Sound fair?”
Eli nods. He puts one hand in the console, allowing Captain’s right hand to release – he lets out an appreciative “mmm.”
Captain runs Eli through the basics of their job: twitching and tweaking the console to monitor Ship’s internal systems; reporting space junk (common) and other ships (rare) back to the company; keeping tabs on their trajectory. “I’ll monitor that,” says Captain. “Don’t sweat it. Don’t sweat most of it, honestly. As long as we’re plugged in, we’ll feel if anything goes wrong. It almost never does.”
Then they chat. Captain tells Eli about his five years on Ship; the many colleagues who “couldn’t hack it.” How he went from second bio-mechanic to secondary co-pilot to lead co-pilot. The boredom. The interior sound system. The most transcendent constellations he’s seen. The occasional underwhelming alien. “And the perks,” says Captain. “We’ll let you settle in first, but you’ll like them. Everyone does.”
Eli tells Captain about his husband back on Earth. It’s not a topic he seems to enjoy, though his eyes light up every time he says the name Arthur. “It’s a money thing, really, me going.” He says. “No money in metal freighters any more. It was stressful, me scrabbling about. And his mental health isn’t so good. Long distance made sense to us.”
After two hours, Captain leaves. “Bathroom. Won’t be long.”
Eli gets used to being alone. He learns to operate the sound system, by twitching some of the console’s nerves just right. This vibrates a nearby section of Ship’s internal muscle strata, inducing the clearest surround sound he’s heard. Many of his favourite songs have been preloaded on. There are thousands of files, each seemingly attached to a different previous crew member. It passes the hours, browsing through the directory. Someone called Ronaldo really loved 2040s punk rock.
Sometimes, Eli imagines he’s playing the music himself, a conductor rooted into his own orchestra. He tunes into the occasional news alerts from Felicity, which feel irrelevant, unless the British settlement is mentioned. It rarely is. Once, he starts recording a message to Arthur. “Hey, hi. Just checking in. How are the tadpoles doing? Are they frogs yet?”
Captain comes back from another of his long stints. Eli snaps the connection.
“All right, buddy?” Captain’s beaming. There’s a glossy sheen over his eyes.
Eli fingers the snapped connection in the console, which is already mending, threading itself back into the inner strata. “Where you been?”
“Seeing the sights, my dear.”
“I’m serious.”
“Ooh, you’re serious.” Captain leans down, peering into Eli’s eyes. “No, I can tell. You’ve got your serious face on. Wait, Stedman, actually, do you have any other faces?”
Eli’s shoulders pinch into their sockets.
Captain carries on. “You need to lighten up. Nothing on Earth could be – ahh. See?” He sinks into his seat, nodding like he’s made a good point.
“Are you drunk?” Eli spits.
“Drunk? Stedman, you’re thinking small. I’m not drunk. I’m happy.”
“Where do you even go?”
“Look, I can leave you to your thoughts if –”
“No!” Eli flushes. “No. I’ve been alone here for four hours. It’s your time in sole command. I haven’t slept – I haven’t –”
“Okay, okay, you’ve got it, buddy.” Captain sinks his hands into the console. Ship latches on, recognising him as primary pilot. Eli springs away at once, flexing his wrists. He stretches his arms as big as he can get, then pushes against the cockpit wall, so hard it leaves a temporary mark. Captain snorts.
“What the fuck is wrong with you?” Eli says, looking back at Captain.
“You’re unhappy.” Captain says.
“No shit.”
“My bad. I should’ve told you, once you started being miserable.”
“Told me what?”
“I shouldn’t’ve saved it till now. But we’re not meant to tell people about the perks till we’re sure they can handle it.” Captain’s smiling again. He looks like a smug older brother who’s got insider info from their parents. That they’re getting ice cream, or going to Disneyland. Or the dentist. “I think you’re ready.”
Eli presses his shoulder into the wall, looking at the exit, then Captain. He’s been the younger brother, in a different life. Then, as now, he knows that he’ll ask. “Tell me.”
Captain leans back in his chair, pleased. Clears his throat.
“Ship’s more than just a ship, right? She’s a – she’s got a body.”
Eli snorts.
“But her body’s different from ours – or Earth fish, obviously. Her body’s not sensitive here, where we are. A lot of work went into that, so when we’re piloting it doesn’t hurt, it’s an interaction, you know? Most of her interior body doesn’t have nerve endings in the way you’d think.”
“Yeah, I know. Or I’d never have…” Eli swallows.
“Her outside’s different, though. Ever see an Earth fish swimming in the water?”
Eli doesn’t bother nodding.
“If you grabbed it, it’d flinch, right? Wriggle all slick out of your hands. Wouldn’t wanna be touched like that, and it’d let you know. But, listen. You go outside of Ship, through the exit gill. You go up on her, lie down in a certain spot. She doesn’t wriggle – she wouldn’t. She… reacts.”
“Reacts.”
“You lie down, there’s a certain way, a bit of you sort of fuses with a bit of her – not like you’re thinking – and she lets something out, something that goes up into you. This – chemical something. It’s not –” Captain breaks off, looking dreamy. “It’s good, buddy, I’ll tell you that. It feels extremely fucking good.”
“You. Put something into her?”
“She does it back. I’m not explaining it right. It’s a feel it to believe it kinda thing. Press the right buttons, bam, you get a reward.”
“That happens naturally?”
“Sure. Well – they might’ve geared it up a notch.”
“They?”
“The science lot.”
Eli baulks. His next words come out stiff. “And you think she enjoys it? Based on – what, exactly?”
“I mean, she can’t say. But yeah, she enjoys it. Why wouldn’t she?”
Eli leans against Ship’s wall, a hand digging in to stabilise himself. When he feels what he’s doing he flinches away.
Captain’s still got that dreamy look. “You can try her out now, if you like. I don’t mind.”
Eli goes back to his room. A soft throat palpitation makes him aware that he needs to vomit. He does so in his garbage can – a construction of detachable cartilage.
The sick swims before him, streaked with bands of different coloured nutri-drink. Eli thinks about taking the garbage to empty in the digestion chamber, but finds himself lying down instead, pulling tulle-ish lobes over him, till he’s cocooned. When he wakes, the scent of acid is overriding Ship’s warm natural must. He thinks it’ s been hours. Not that he has any grasp on time any more.
Another week passes after Captain tells Eli what he does out there on Ship. Eli’s started to read aloud from Interstellar Ethics any time they’re on the console together.
“Disparate species,” he says, “are as deserving of respect as any humanoid, humanesque android or similar.”
Captain tries to talk about the cosmic weather, or his wife Lucy – “what a catch!” – or Carina. Eli just keeps reading.
“Chill out, Stedman,” Captain says, “please.” When this makes no difference, Captain gives up. Then he goes out.
When he goes, Eli pictures every aspect of Captain’s actions in graphic, lurid detail. What Eli pictures isn’t quite the truth, though he’s grasped the basics.
Captain exits via the olfactory bulb. Out of Stedman’s view, his gait lightens, despite his feet sticking to Ship’s pyloric cecum. To the untrained eye, her exterior pocket would appear to be an oddly dimensioned, fleshy corridor.
Captain remembers his training years ago. Watching that strange shaky-cam footage of those early living ships in a remote basement on the CSU campus. The guy next to him went ice white – almost blue. Captain had never been grossed out by the idea of occupying an animal’s interior. From the start, he’d felt a childlike urge to get in. He’d wanted to touch the soft meat of the insides. Finger paint with the excretions. He still has that urge, but likes to think, since meeting Ship, it’s more profound.
By the exit gill, Captain finds the space suits. Five limp shrouds – extensions of Ship’s living body, harvested back when they had more copilots – hanging in stasis. Three are currently unclaimed.
Captain unhooks his suit by the neck and drops it. He steps bare feet into its mouth. When it wakes, he’s engulfed, swallowed whole in a gulping peristalsis. The clear form shapes around his limbs, turning Ship’s oxygen even sweeter as it breathes.
“We’re going out front,” he tells his suit. Its doleful eyes sharpen over his own.
Captain slides out the top gill, suit velcro-sticking to Ship’s scaled side. He clambers up, adjusting to the vacuum with ease. When he crests her torso, Ship glows up a bit in recognition, a soft, sunset blush atop her head.
Captain rests the seat of his sticky suit on the crown of her head, and crosses his legs, with effort. He peers down into her right eye. He much prefers her right – the one without Stedman behind. Ship has to keep looking where they’re going, but on his side, it feels more polite to make eye contact. An observer – if there could be one that didn’t immediately asphyxiate or explode – would see a speck for Captain. A speck perched atop a monumentally large fish. Incredibly large. The kind of large that embarrasses blue whales and Everests. The kind of large you don’t really want to put into context. Ship’s pilots are supposedly trained to handle it. Captain simply does not.
Captain gives Ship a good scratch beside her eyes, just how she likes. Ten minutes of slow, hard scratching is tedious for him, but just past nothing for her. Time differences are something he’s had to adapt to, piloting a Spacefish. Recently it’s been helpful to know that these tense hours working with Stedman would condense to barely a minute for Ship. There’s no rushing in open space. In some ways he envies Ship’s steady, unwavering course, the way she charts from star to star; the lifetime no human has seen the end of yet. They’re a blip.
As Captain starts scratching slower, he begins to salivate. Some saliva floods the face of his sticky suit, and the suit squirms, responding to his anticipatory adrenaline. He pats the top of Ship’s head, as thanks for what he sees as a trade. Ship’s body is ancient as fungal networks, and similarly capable of creating pleasure. His breath catches, and he feels the familiar blend of invincible and invisible – the good kind of invisible. Not beholden.
Captain stretches back. He carefully aligns his encased spine over Ship’s; his vertebrae parallel to, yet dwarfed by hers. Her dorsal fin to the west, now casting shadow.
He lands right the first time. As he lies down, through the suit, his spinal column reacts to a section of hers. The most important section; one containing a buzzing, enigmatic chemical. One humans can’t make. The skin of his suit fuses with Ship’s skin, which acts as a conductor. An electric hum probes upwards.
It moves through his body. Coursing capillaries, expanding, wiping his mind clean of boredom, strain, Stedman. Everything niggling, heavy or painful – goes. A release like cracking your neck after years of buildup. His limbs splay out. He moans and gazes at the sky. Above and below look the same. It’s all sky to him.
Bliss swoops along Captain’s tailbone, wrapping his spine. The pleasure takes root at the back of his tongue, where the seam meets his throat. It rests there and hums. He tastes; eyes rolling back til they close. The crisp white of each star-speck mirrors his sweat through the suit.
Eli sees the edge of Captain’s shadow, right at the top of Ship’s cornea. He knows the routine by now, but still feels sick. As a child, he convinced himself that he was allergic to bananas, just by overthinking the texture of them. Even now the taste brings up bile. He’s thirty-six and can still ascribe a sickening overthought to anything, with time. He’s near to that now; thinking about what Captain is doing, or about to do, to poor Ship, who can’t object. If I was home, he thinks savagely, I would protest this sort of thing. I would lobby against it. Him and Arthur, side by side on the picket line, waving sticks. Making change. He hears Arthur’s dry, low voice. “That’s not helpful now, is it?”
Eli swallows back a chunk of nutri-drink powder, tweaks the interface a little, and sends another voice message home, zipping through the cosmos. Home to Arthur. Their dog Sherry. The frogspawn at the bottom of the garden.
Afterwards, he thinks about Arthur some more. The hollows at the base of his spine. The laugh he only does during sex, fervent and a bit shocked, like he can’t believe they’re allowed to do this. Eli notices, with horror, that he has an erection. He shifts, hoping it will give up if he thinks of other things. A flash of Arthur’s hands on his chest – pushing him away, off, give over will you please.
Eli leans forward to take another sip of the drink. He misses, and manages to send the cup flying, Ship’s gravity working too well. It spews powdery mulch across the corner of the dash and over the floor.
“Fuck.”
At least the erection is gone.
Miserable, waiting for Captain to reappear, Eli’s thoughts start pushing at the limits he’s set for himself.
Uneasy memories. Not long back. Calling Arthur from the club. Then again from his friend Leandro’s, 3, 4am, whenever the bag comes in gets fuzzy, though at the time it sharpened, didn’t it? Slurring down the phone to him, Come over to us come on don’t be a spoilsport baby I need you. Eventually going home, still feeling the high, cracking through the window like ice when he couldn’t find the key – no –
Captain rejoins Eli after an hour. He’s peaceable. The feeling reminds him of being two sangrias deep with Lucy at The Chequers on a hot day.
He squeezes Eli’s shoulder (Eli flinches), then spots the oblique smear of nutri-drink. One of Eli’s socks lies turgid on the floor beside the mess – just out of reach of his newly bare foot.
Captain smirks. “Done some spring cleaning, pal?”
Eli keeps looking ahead. “Take control again so I can clean it properly.”
“He speaks!” Captain crows. “Nooo, no, you stay there.” Taking his time, Captain grabs some lichen sponges from storage, and mops up, with a rare delicacy. Eli’s fingers claw inside the console.
“Want me to whip up another?” says Captain.
Eli doesn’t respond.
“I said –”
“I don’t want another fucking nutri-drink.”
“Sorry, sorry. Forgive me.” Captain wipes another errant smear, and begins to whistle.
“It’s a good day, Sted, if you can’t tell.”
“You’re having a good day.”
“You’re the only one having a bad day here, Sted, and that seems pretty self-inflicted to me.”
“Not the only one.”
Captain rolls his eyes. “What are you on about?”
“What you do to Ship. Not like she has a say, is it?”
Captain scoffs, pushing a pocket of air behind his lips. “She has no problem with it. What kind of creature evolves for second-party operation if it doesn’t like it?”
Eli blinks his eyes, hard. “Take over, will you?”
Eli relinquishes Ship’s control to Captain, and returns to his cosy pocket of spleen.
Captain presses play on his music. Ke$ha’s final album. Lucy loved this one.
Eli can’t sleep, so he reads Interstellar Ethics in the Post-Wars Era for the twelfth time. Eventually he dozes, diverging philosophies bumbling around his head. Hard line approach. Divergent, irreconcilable philosophies. Necessary perpetuation. When he wakes, his head is pounding, a sentence not printed in Interstellar Ethics lodged in his head. This evil shit.
When Eli comes into the cockpit to share control again, Captain is speaking to Ship.
“Beautiful thing. I’ll be out again later.”
“Lucky her.”
Captain’s head jerks around, then he laughs. “Relax, Stedman. You haven’t felt it yet.”
“I don’t want to.” Eli reaches roughly into Ship to share control. “I don’t need some false sense of intimacy. I’ve got people back on Earth.”
“Sure, sure. Not that you’ll be seeing him.” Captain assumes a placatory tone. “I know it’s a lot to give up. And I get it. Though there’s no one left for me back there.”
“Your people died?”
“Just person. My Lucy. Out with a bang, like always.” He smiles wide. Eli zeroes in on the chips in his veneers. The gums around them seem raw. “Can’t get sad about it. She wouldn’t want that. Wouldn’t even let me stick around when she got sick cause she always said –” he pitches his voice up, a parody of his dead wife – “look, life is what it is. Take what joy we can from what we have. So that’s what we should do, Sted.”
Eli’s face – which had briefly softened – now turns sour.
“See?”
“See what?”
“It is taking. What you’re doing to Ship.”
Captain pushes his chair back, lifting his hands out the console. Eli sees Captain’s face. For the first time, something like anger brews beneath it. “I’m going to bed.”
“We’re meant to share control for –”
For a second, Captain seems like he might punch Eli. Instead, he leaves the cockpit.
Eli turns silently back to Ship’s eye. Once he’s sure Captain’s out of earshot, he starts recording a message. “Hey, Arthur, baby, just checking in, just seeing how you’re doing. You’d never believe, my co-pilot, what a nightmare – he’s doing it again…” When he finishes one message, he starts to record another.
It isn’t long before he sees the shadow again, at the top of Ship’s eye. It stays there for a shorter period, but Captain doesn’t reenter the gills for a long while.
When Captain thinks of Lucy, he thinks of the smell of expired deli soup. Straining garbage bags, full of half-empty tubs in her bedroom. Letters screwed up sealed by the door, red labels still just visible in all caps: DO NOT IGNORE, FINAL WARNING. When he visited her apartment the first time, he had felt at home there at once; among the detritus that signalled a life free of urgency.
Neither of them had to pretend to even want to seem put together. She didn’t worry, and she didn’t mind that he didn’t, either. Everything could be easy. It was, for as long as it could be. He moved in, doubling the household’s intake of soup and alcohol. There were many times walking that they gurgled in unison.
She’d have loved Ship, too, he thinks, shuffling his spine into place. Then he stops thinking.
Eli’s been alone at the console so long, he doesn’t know which artificial day it is. Arthur’s mailbox is full, but he keeps trying.
A buzz.
Eli blinks, tongue poking at a dried bit of nutri-drink in his beard. How long has that been there?
Another buzz.
A message from Earth.
Eli’s dry eyes blur a little. He’s waited so long to hear back from Arthur, that he’s forgotten that was possible. Eli tweaks the nerve required to play it.
Arthur’s voice fills the cockpit.
“Eli?” His voice is stronger, stranger than Eli’s been hearing in his head. “Do you know how fucking expensive it is to send messages this far? Your company covers outgoing messages, but not incoming, if you didn’t know. If you didn’t read the handbook. Which I know you didn’t. Didn’t have time, did you? Did you even know what kind of ship you were boarding?”
Eli’s internal drum-beat is back.
Arthur takes a strained, shaky breath. “Sorr– no. I didn’t call you up to give you a bollocking. Or apologise. Deep breaths, right, Eli?”
Something undoes in Eli’s mind. He struggles to do it up again. Arthur keeps speaking. “I’d like you to stop sending me voice messages. It’s just too much, the endless stream. I want you to be OK, course I do. I never told you to head off for six years, I never wanted you to, I told you…” he pauses again.
Arthur begging Eli not to go.
The voice in the message is different, firmer. “Sending these messages like everything’s normal. Like you’ve popped off to a work conference, and I’m still your emotional support, for you to rant about Sandra in tech and how the vegan option at the pilots’ talk is shite – it’s not fair, Eli.”
Eli remembers the morning leading up to his decision to go to space. The hangover. The sickening guilt. The desperate need to be somewhere, anywhere but there.
“You did something fucked up.” Arthur’s voice is building, something finally releasing, now that Eli can’t get away, can’t shut the message off or cross the universe to avoid it – “then you said ‘sorry’ just to shut me up, and then you pissed off into space. I bet you don’t think about it, if you can help it.”
Arthur speaks faster. Eli strains against the console, fingers trying to flex, trying to reach his ears, to plunge knuckle deep into his eardrums, pierce them if necessary. It’s no use. Ship has him held too close.
“But I think about it. I know what happened.”
Eli’s wrists start blooming bruises. His memory, as it stands, splits open over the message, til he can’t hear Arthur’s voice.
4am. Eli stumbling home. Drunk, high. Desperate in the usual drunk/high way. The last line of coke was a mistake.
Getting home. Through the gate, one foot plunging in the garden pond as he passed. A wet trail behind him.
Door locked. Window breaking. Laughing about it, even as Arthur’s pale, sleep-deprived face swam into focus, exasperated. Glass of water, ignored. All the lights on.
Eli trying to kiss – be kissed, too, but mostly kiss, an action that demanded only receipt. Missing Arthur’s mouth once; being pushed away, twice, three times. Getting into bed with Arthur, still flush with chemicals and a guttural feeling that pleasure was needed. Was imminent.
Time going funny. Words funny. Eli pushing through it, pushing onto Arthur, so soft in the glow. Arthur saying words, words that were loud but that even now – with focused attention – Eli still can’t identify, can’t comb out straight. He hadn’t been listening. You have to listen, to remember.
Body pressed onto body – over it, pinning it. Pinning him, Arthur, down.
Eli carrying on.
Eli carrying on.
The crying, after.
Arthur curled up in the morning, turned away.
The sorry that burnt up as Eli said it.
The sick certainty that Arthur hated him. That now Eli had to go, to get out of what he’d done. Penance. Martyrdom. Redemption, somehow, someday.
The peace of that.
Arthur is still talking through Ship.
Eli breathes, feels his hands, his face, his own proximity to each part of himself. Then he tunes back in.
“– and that’s messed up, right, but I thought it was salvageable. But it also makes sense you’d do something to punish yourself like this. Pretending like you’re such a hero, boring yourself to death in outer space, I hope six years is enough to forgive me god-I-hate-myself PRICK. All that, then voice messaging me all the time, when I’m at work, trying to recover, trying to live my fucking life. Don’t you ever think you did this for me. Well enjoy it. Enjoy it. And stop calling.”
The message ends.
Captain enters the control room about halfway through the message. Eli doesn’t hear him. Captain watches Eli’s frame freeze then crumple as it plays. From behind, he looks like a broken CPR dummy; Ship’s console holding him together by the hands.
Captain turns silently and goes to his quarters for half an hour, to let Eli pull himself together. He shoots hoops in a muscular ring he’s pulled out of Ship’s wall. An angry rash has begun to emanate from the hoop by the time he’s finished. Captain pastes it with lumpy ointment and goes back to the cockpit.
Eli’s still slumped. Captain clears his throat. “All right, pal?”
Eli twitches. Captain crouches by the console, looking up at his wet face. His facial lines are contorted, running so deep each has a second shadow.
“Feeling fresh?”
The noise Eli lets out could be a laugh.
“I heard a bit of that message, pal, sorry. Tough gig. Have a breather if you need, I’m happy getting my tunes on.”
Captain takes control of the console, expecting Eli to stand and go. He doesn’t.
Captain’s uneasy. It’s one thing to have a co-pilot you don’t get on with. Another thing entirely to have no co-pilot at all. “Hey, Eli?”
Nothing.
“This isn’t sustainable.”
Eventually, Eli sits up. He tries to clear his throat. When he opens his mouth to speak, Captain sees a bubble of phlegmy spit within. It glints like a jewel.
“You need a change of scene. You looked at space, yet? From outside?”
Eli wobbles his head. Captain interprets this as a shake. “Breakups suck, man. Been there.”
Eli looks at Captain. Clears his throat. “Sure. Get some air.”
Captain strokes the interior of the console for twenty minutes, as Eli waits. This is last-ditch protocol, last-resort only-in-emergencies protocol. The company would not approve.
He asks Ship gently, from the inside, to hold course. To please keep them safe. She blinks. Slow. Slow.
Captain helps Eli into his sticky suit, then puts on his own. Both suits glow in recognition – they’ve so rarely had company in recent months. Captain pushes Eli out the gills first, then hoists himself through, using the suits’ traction to help roll his colleague’s body, scale over scale, to the top of Ship’s eye. Eli tries to help, but he’s not used to open space. He freezes up whenever his gaze tilts back.
“Hey, love.” Captain says to Ship. Strokes between her eyes. He makes sure Eli is steady, right at the crest of her socket. “Look, pal. Just take some time. I’ll come get you in an hour, all right? You don’t have to do anything. You can just sit and watch the stars, for all I care.” He leaves, trying to hum. The thin sound doesn’t make it out of his skull.
Captain goes back down to take control of Ship. He decides to do a few laps of the intestines, first. Work off his latent energy.
Alone, without gravity, Eli’s arms raise, head bobbing like it’s forgotten it has a neck.
Eli looks down at the stars. Past the tip of his nose. The crest of Ship’s head. He’s beyond nausea, into nothing. Thoughts pass like schools of fish; each forming the shape of an emotion or thought. He sees them dimly through the dark. None holds their form long enough to register.
Arthur. Arthur, making toast and olive spread, forcing it into his fur-tongued mouth. Arthur, cleaning up his mess. One year then another. Arthur trying to back away.
His suit is buzzing, restless. It doesn’t quite fit. He feels a distant internal rupture. What other feeling is there? Why can’t I feel it?
He knows where he is, where on Ship’s body. Knows what Captain’s offering. Tries to feel disgust, or resistance. Can’t.
He is clammy, aware of the sticky suit encasing his body, keeping him grounded on Ship. He imagines the suit stripping itself free of him; sending a distorting, cooling corpse spinning outwards into void. There are ways he could make the vision a reality. They’re all beyond him.
He shuffles backwards, and lies down, placing his spine above Ship’s, in that place Captain described to him. He knows he needs to land to react, to connect.
Eli takes what he’s been offered.
Two hours later, Captain lifts him off. Eli blinks at his presence, and the absence.
Eli is consumed by a weary sense that he hasn’t felt the sensation at all. That, for a while, he’d become only a space for pleasure to occupy. Now that he’s disconnected, no afterbuzz remains; not even the nagging misery of a comedown. He was occupied by sensation. Now he is not.
Eli starts to cry. “She didn’t want to.”
Captain puts his arms awkwardly round Eli. Their suits bulge like egg yolks pushed together. “You don’t know that, buddy. We don’t. There’s no way to know. Look, do you feel better, at least? Bit of a distraction, eh pal?”
Eli sobs harder. He feels his face heating, slick with sweat and tears. He finds it cruel that the sticky suit doesn’t fog. That it refuses to blur – for even a second– what’s outside from what’s in.
Ship looks at Carina. It’s lovely. She’s seen it before; been there before, in accordance with the whims of strange fleeting creatures.
She thinks, in her drum-beat way, that perhaps this time she’d like to end up somewhere else. Her period of thought hosts several considerations. Awareness; of her self, as a complete entity – in the universe and of it. Delight; in the fact of existing slowly – a skeined existence that, in unwinding, creates no straight lines.
She decides. Ship sets her sights on something far past Carina. Something Eli, Captain and the rest don’t yet have a name for. She skews, so-very-slightly, to her left.
It will take several months for the pilots to notice.