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    And then, as the tribe crossed the last stretch of the perfect void before entering their new solar system, there came a time of inactivity.

    Months passed, with nothing to interrupt their passing. Day blurred with night, rest followed sleep, fiction mixed with thought, food grew stale. Despite her earlier warning to Thilykto, lifespans both short and long were being thrown to the wind with abandon, and there was precious little any of them could do to spend them on anything, let alone spend them wisely. She longed sometimes to take Thilykto up on his offer of some great quest of vengeance, but even thoughts like those were getting hard to think.

    These people could sleep for years, and they often did. Many of them were doing so now, and more were joining them. She could see it happen; one by one she would notice a man wandering aimlessly across the hull, when his movements would slow, as he made the fateful decision that he had nothing better to do. He would then check a few pipes and valves, pluck at some silk to ensure it would hold, then he would take a long, long look around at the stars, sometimes staring for hours, drinking all the distant flecks of light into his memory, so as to make his dreams pleasant. And then, with a brief farewell to his fellows that he phrased “See you on the day”, he would return to his own ship, curl up in a hammock of silk with the sun shining on his photosynthetic biopools, and none she had seen do so had ever moved again.

    She understood what Keeleeticktick’s father had meant about 700 years seeming much too short. When it came down to it, an eon is an easy thing to waste.

    Perhaps this was just the nomads’ way, their ordinary way, and the activity and life and laughter she’d been treated to so far was nothing but the lingering excitement of an alien’s arrival, the joyous echoes of a welcome break in monotony. Or perhaps her interruption hadn’t been welcome; perhaps they preferred the monotony, and the sleep, and were glad that life aboard the convoy was finally settling down to a flatline.

    And she was left.

    The one creature that felt naturally restless, the one person who had to move every night, the single one for whom such inactivity was a mental and medical detriment. She certainly didn’t like it, feeling herself growing fat and brittle and weak, counting rivets on her pod, remembering fondly of many things, longing in sleep to wake and in waking to sleep. She didn’t like it, but there wasn’t anything to do about it.

    She counted the nights until she needed to clean her suit again, and then she took her time at it, and then was glad it was over and that she could go back to sleep.

    Nothing happened.

    Until one night, when one of the other nomads decided otherwise.

    She awoke to the sound of a voice coming through her radio, a hushed and rhythmic vocalization just on the threshold of hearing, and it had already been talking for several hours by the time she awoke.

    With a grunt of strain and exhaustion, she unstrapped herself from bed, pushed off a wall with one hand, and drifted over toward the pod’s window. She opened the shutters a peek to see who was talking.

    It came from a man named Rickakticktacka, reclining in the crow’s nest of one of the nearer cargo ships, with a small book in his hands, and the eyes of many among the convoy turned to him.

    “He the brave the bold, the bold who knew his purpose, his purpose so humble and so galant as to save the life of a friend, the purpose of the bold, he the bold, he led the chase…”

    She had no context for the speech he was reading, and many of the words were unfamiliar to her, and the sentence and grammatical structure was completely dissimilar to the language she’d been learning so far. So despite her best attempts at listening, it all sounded like absolute gibberish.

    “An underorbit, he thought, he prayed, though the spinning lines of the Galvito, the lines that many a man had met in crueler times, through the spinning and whirling and wolf-haunted lines of the Galvito he set his course, and prayed for his luck, would take him to where the witch would be…”

    She turned up the volume in the radio, and listened harder. She’d taught herself one of their languages, hadn’t she? If only she could take this in bits and pieces, hear it more gradually, perhaps it might share some similarities, some common meanings between words.

    “The witch he knew, he saw, saw before she slipped into the veil, saw before the haughty laugh she gave, saw that she was burning hard to prograde, her light a sick and greenish flame that pushed her ever higher…”

    There was… Something about laughing? And… A burn, a thruster impulse? A greenish thruster? All being spoken in 3rd person…

    As she sat and listened, it slowly became clear that he was telling a story. And as she listened a little longer, she came to understand the method of its telling.

    It seems the natives had a second language besides the one she’d known, or at least another ‘mode’ for the language they had. This second mode was slower, denser, more methodical, more detailed, and more poetic. By the sound of it, sentences didn’t hop quickly from one topic to the next, they didn’t really get to the point, but as they ran on and on and lingered on nuance, they grew in depth of detail and feeling. They went back on themselves, they looped, they referenced backwards and forwards. This language lengthily elaborated the emotion behind single words, gave a snapshot into the thoughts of characters and even the thoughts of the speaker himself, to paint a story, and sing a story, instead of to tell it.

    She couldn’t pretend to understand much of any of it, couldn’t honestly say that she caught more than every 4th word or so, but the words she did catch were pretty, and the language itself so rhythmic and sing-song, that she quickly gave up on trying to decipher the particulars, and let herself get lost in it, let it carry her away to someplace she didn’t recognize. She turned her radio volume up a little higher, wrapped her blanket around her, and closed her eyes.

    The story seemed to be about… It was about a warrior. Or a prince, maybe? Somebody noble, yet stubborn and unthinking. He was in some kind of asteroid field, (probably the rings of a planet, since she kept hearing orbits being mentioned). Anyway, somebody the prince had loved had been taken from him, by some kind of monster. The monster was thrusting prograde, to push into a higher orbit, but the prince figured he might overtake it by building up speed in a lower orbit, and using… Using something down there to change his direction and sling back up. It was a trick he’d learned from his father.

    The prince’s friends were chasing after him, but they knew they could never catch him or convince him to stop, so they kept pace close behind him, and tried to follow him through his maneuver so they could help him in his eventual fight.

    And the prince was conflicted, because on the one hand, the monster was escaping with his loved one and the only way to catch it was this risky maneuver, but on the other hand, his friends would never let him go alone, and to take the risk himself would be to risk all of them as well… Meanwhile the monster was gaining distance, and one of his friends was slowly dying of some sickness even as he traveled alongside, and there was a voice in his head speaking to him and telling him to turn back.

    The story took almost two hours to get where it was going, and when it got there, she didn’t really understand the climactic cliffhanger it reached. The monster was up close all of a sudden? And there was a flash of green light? A whole lot of words she didn’t understand, a brief musing on the folly of mortal men, and then the chapter ended.

    She came away from the story as if from a deep sleep, and realized she’d enjoyed herself. She glanced out the window at Rickakticktacka, who was closing the book. “I need to take a rest.” He gestured to his antennae-nerves with a chuckle. “Haven’t read in quite a while. Exhausting.”

    “You’re doing good!” Somebody else called over.

    “Yeah, it’s a good story!” Another added.

    “I’ve never heard this one before, it’s really cool!” Thilykto was down for anything.

    “I enjoyed it.” She leaned closer to the window.

    “Oh, you did, Missus Fikes?” He glanced in her direction. “Didn’t think you would understand it.”

    “It’s the same language, really.” She shrugged. “Just… Just stretched out, I guess.”

    “More like uncropped. That’s the full language, you know.” He chuckled. “Everybody used to speak like that, before they invented rockets, and guns, and emergencies, back before anybody was ever in a hurry… Nowadays, people just want to hear it and get it over with, so nothing’s ever said really properly unless it’s worth taking a long time to say. Like stories. And songs.”

    “Quit going on about ‘the good old days’, Rickakticktacka.” Somebody chided. “That was before your grandpa was born.”

    “Yeah, yeah, call me old fashioned, but ‘the good old days’ is where the best books come from.” He waved the book in his hand.

    “I don’t mind.” She shrugged. “I mean. We’ve got all night.”

    “That we do.” Rickakticktacka paused for a moment to rest his antenna, though he knew he would be reading more tonight, for he’d found a new fan.

    “I’m sorry if you don’t understand the story, Missus Fikes.” Thilykto apologized to her. “It’s one of those crazy fiction stories, with adventure and magic and a witch, so you might not get it.”

    “I don’t think I’ve ever heard any of you use those words.” She laughed. “What’s a witch, first off? That was the evil kidnapping monster, right?”

    “Oh, yeah. Feshkilaki, the sorceress from the center of black moon. A witch is just a woman that uses magic. And magic is… Wait, what’s magic? Like, uhhh, shooting fire? Or putting a curse on somebody so something bad happens to them? That’s why her thrusters were green… Or, uh, or using spirits for power or-”

    “Oh, magic!” She laughed. “Oh I get it, it’s a fantasy book! That’s great! Yeah, we had fantasy books on Earth too! Yeah, uh… my dad used to read me Lord of the Rings when I was a kid. Great adventures. Pretend places, pretend people, even… Like pretend types of people too. Elves and dwarves and orcs and ents…”

    “Oh yeah!” Thilykto perked up. “Yeah, the main character in this book is a pretend type too, called an Elkakik.” (The word she’d been translating as prince was actually more similar to ‘elf’) “They’re like normal people, but older and more dignified, and they have a close connection with a wise double in the spirit world, so they can’t ever die or fall in love until they complete their purpose.”

    “Interesting.”

    “You’re both a couple brain-vented nerds.” Somebody teased. “Hey Rickakticktacka, let’s have a true story next.”

    “But true stories are boring!” Thilykto waved a tentacle dismissively, then looked up to her pod for support. “Right Missus Fikes?”

    “Well.” Her gaze wandered across the convoy, taking in all the other lazy, lethargic travelers, who had taken up myth and fiction to escape from their own lives. And it seemed to her in that moment that anything at all would make for a better story than reality. “Yeah.” She agreed. “Yeah, pretend stuff is pretty fun.”

    “Alright then. So… On with this one?” Rickakticktacka opened the book again.

    “Yeah.”

    “Sure.”

    “Let’s go.”

    “Oh, alright.”

    “I wanna see how it ends.”

    And without any further hesitation, he launched into the next chapter.

    Perhaps it was these distant, alien feelings of adventure she’d absorbed from the story, perhaps it was out of curiosity or sheer restlessness, but as he read, she turned away from the window, climbed into her suit, and left the pod for a short stroll around the convoy.

    It was the first time she’d done so in almost a week, and perhaps only the third time she’d done so in the past month. Her body had decayed to the point where even pushing herself off of surfaces and slowly climbing across the silk nets had grown wearying, so she took every excuse to not; maybe she had a mind for the safety of her fragile bones, maybe she was just lazy, or maybe she was trying to hide herself from her own reality too.

    She found Keeleeticktick where he always was, out on the hull of his ship. She turned down the volume on her helmet’s radio.

    “Hey Keelee, I’ve been wondering, what’s a woman?”

    “WHAT?” He glanced at her sharply. “What in the void do you mean by that?”

    “I’ve heard people using the word here and there, but never in context, and by this point I’m almost afraid to ask.”

    “Did you not have women on your planet?”

    “I don’t KNOW! MAYBE! What’s it, some kind of monster? A species? Like what the heck?”

    “Okay, okay, it’s… Oh dear… They’re not monsters, they’re sentient, they’re just people. Same exact species. It’s… It’s the other half of the species. The people who… You know. Make kids. Instead of working, they make the young ones and the silk.”

    “Oh.” She realized what he meant. “Oh geez, yes. Yeah, we have women on Earth. I feel really silly now, like, that’s so obvious.”

    “Ah. Heh. Yeah. Sorry about that. Probably heard it from Thilykto, huh? Kids his age tend to think about little else.”

    “Yeah, it’s the same way with humans.” She shook her head. “In school, my brother… Oh, never mind… Yeah, all this time I figured you people didn’t have women. I thought you split, or budded or something. Didn’t know there was a difference between women and… What’s your word for the opposite of women?”

    He told her the word for ‘man’, and it was one of the words she’d been translating as ‘people’. “Oh… Okay.”

    “Yeah.” He nodded. “Strange topic to go asking about, I recognize.”

    “Yeah.” Her eyes wandered across the convoy. “So which of you people are men, and which are women? I was peeking up your dresses for my first couple weeks before I gave up trying to guess.”

    “Well, these are all men, of course.” He gestured inclusively. “I can’t think of when you would’ve ever seen our woman.”

    “Wait, woman as in singular? There’s only one in the whole tribe?”

    “Well, the whole tribe has a few. But yes, our convoy only has one. She lives in there.” He pointed to one particular ship, which carried nothing but a single enormous spherical cargo pod. “She might’ve come out once or twice since you arrived, but only briefly, and you’re a heavy sleeper.”

    “Huh.” Her eyes strayed over the mysterious pod, wondering at what it must conceal. Besides for tanks and crates and enclosures for hammocks, none of the tribe’s other ships had any interiors to speak of, making this one unique. Perhaps there was something similar to a house or a human home within; perhaps all the hard, utilitarian engineering of the outside gave way to something more civilized on the inside, something fit for a lady. And as for the woman herself, her imagination went wild. Perhaps the nomad’s society was secretly built to some matriarchical structure like bees, with the few women leaders specialized for child-making or egg-laying and little else. She would be something regal, or beastly, or gravid, or beautiful. To think that this was the only other woman besides herself for thousands of miles around… And had been this entire time… “…Do you think I could meet her?” She had to ask.

    “No!” He snapped before he had time to think.

    “Woah, sorry, hey, I… Wait, why not?”

    “You could hurt her, I don’t…! You…! It’s just…” He seemed to catch his own metaphorical tongue, and paused for a moment to think. “The thing is, Missus Fikes, that a tribe’s woman is a tribe’s woman… And though we have shared everything we have with you, and you know I trust you, we can’t-”

    “Woah, cool it man, I was just curious! Wasn’t meaning to… To interfere with any traditions or with the family or anything, I just wanted to see what she looked like, yeah? I mean, I know I’m not a part of the tribe, but as an alien, and a friend, you have to understand how curious I am.”

    “I understand… But curiosity can go too far. And you’re a very strong and rough man.”

    “I’m a what?”

    “Just…! Just don’t touch her, how about?”

    “Well-WAIT OH HECK NO, I ain’t gonna touch her! Why would I touch her?”

    His eyes narrowed. “Well… You know.”

    Hers widened. “Geez man.”

    His shifted away. “…Ah… Of course. Of course, yes. Why would you indeed?”

    “Ten feet.” She indicated the distance between herself and him. “I won’t even get near her.”

    “Hmm.” He nodded. “Very well then… I’ll mention it to the others. And I’ll put in a good word for you.”

    She didn’t know what to say. Not even sort of. “Thanks… I guess.”



    ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~



    The two men behaved with all the pomp and solemn seriousness of soldiers as they showed her to her destination. She’d never before seen any of the nomads acting so militaristic, but she didn’t think it was out of distrust or ill will toward her; it seems they perceived the stakes as merely being that high. In any case, they both carried a holstered tool that could have been a weapon, and came to a stop on either side of a circular hatch on the woman’s cargo vessel. One of them unlocked it. “She’s inside, and is expecting you. Don’t linger too long.” He warned her. “And don’t get any funny ideas. We’ll be ready to respond to any undue activity, and so will she.”

    “Got it.”

    The other handed her a heavy pack overflowing with scrap silk. “To keep her from panic, tell her you’re only here to deliver this. Pass it to her gently, and don’t throw it or make a sudden movement. And keep your distance.”

    “Umm… Got it?”

    The hatch opened in front of her. There were curtains on the other side.

    “Hey, wait a minute, am I in any danger here, or-“

    The hatch closed behind her. All radio signals from the convoy outside were instantly cut off, and she was alone.

    She drifted past the curtains, and stopped.

    The cargo pod had no interior walls, no doors, no furnishings of comfort. She’d been expecting something like a home or even a nest, but instead her eyes met a wide empty space, lit by dim and orangish light; the warm, comfortable color of the nomad’s first homeworld. The pod’s only furnishing was a large padded cradle, which held one of the convoy’s fishing vessels in the center.

    The vehicle held so gingerly on display was nearly identical in size and shape to the others she’d seen around. The hull was taller than it was wide, with 8 main rearward thrusters in 4 clusters, supplied by 8 fuel tanks. Engineering sections were in the middle and on top, cannons protruded from near the middle, a mining talon was folded against the bottom, and to either side were the wing-like protrusions which were used during fishing to anchor the silk lines.

    But much unlike the tribe’s other fishing vessels, this one was constructed entirely out of flesh.

    Its thrusters and fuel tanks were structured similarly to those on the men, membranous as the wings of bats, now deflated and wrinkled and empty. Countless unclear organs floated like clouds beneath transparent skin, and a cultivated garden of benign tumors grew across the surface. The cannons were unloaded, and curled against the front of the fuselage. The mining talon was a ring of barbed tentacles surrounding a cluster of enormous beaks. And instead of the wings, there were six boney anchors of the same purpose, each crested with hundreds upon hundreds of spinnerets.

    Its sensory organs would be perceptive enough to pinpoint asteroids and radio-emitting objects across interplanetary distances. Its spinnerets could be able to ensnare and engulf targets in hundreds of miles of unbreakable fiber. And the beaks were strong enough to crush up asteroids or chew through a spacecraft’s hull. And with such capabilities apparent, she realized she recognized this thing.

    “A leviathan…” She barely dared to breathe.

    The word which she’d been translated to mean ‘monster’, and had been equating to the ancient sea serpents of Earth, had actually meant nothing of the sort. Its proper translation was something closer to ‘pirate’, ‘savage’, ‘rogue’, or ‘loner’. A tribeless, wandering female, who had either rebelled or escaped or had been raised among the wicked. Sad and lonely souls, lawless and fiercely hungry.

    So as little as she knew of such matters, and as similar as it looked to the beast which had widowed her, she realized that this was not a leviathan.

    Above the cannons, in front of the brain, a fleshy fold eased open, and a pair of eyestalks slowly extended, their enormous lenses coming to bear. The largest of the eyes were the size of the mirror of the hubble telescope, but were entirely blind and clouded over. So it was only a score or so of smaller eyes which perceived the visitor, and focused in on her with a silent, unknowable expression.

    “Uh! I! I-I-I came to bring you this!” In a moment she remembered the pack of silk, and pushed it lightly through the air toward the creature. “I. I-I just. J-just wanted to see you. I… I don’t mean to scare you.”

    One of the barbed feeding tentacles raised in a slow arc to intercept the pack, and the hooks on the end were dexterous enough to untie the knot. One of the beaks reached inside and began to eat the silk.

    For digestion.

    For recycling.

    To reuse the old protein and the nanofiber and secrete it back out again…

    Her eyes wandered upwards, past the end of the boney anchors and the spinnerets, and she saw a great number of winches on the perimeter of the cargo pod, each one reeling slowly inward, drawing silken threads out of the creature. Storing it for use in industry, so the nomads could weave it into cables, nets, paper, and clothes.

    And she conceived that the creature was constrained here; tied helplessly to the cradle by thin nets. It was never fed enough ice to fill its tanks and fire off its engines. Never permitted to hunt its own food or make use of its great size and strength. Never even allowed enough distance to make use of its great telescopic eyes, so that they became blind. It merely sat here, stagnant in its pod, its monstrous reef of biopools soaking up artificial sunlight and artificial planetshine, while machines continuously milked it of its silk.

    But it wasn’t a farm animal.

    Was it? It was a person.

    It was a woman.

    She opened her mouth to speak. A question formed on her lips, a horrified, disturbed, outraged question, but it didn’t escape, didn’t quite form itself into coherent words, couldn’t trim itself down to a single thought. The woman watched her passively, with its fewish working eyes, and waited for her to speak.

    “…What’s your name?” She finally managed to ask, her voice a whisper. One of the first phrases she’d learned of the native’s language, now the only words she could think to say.

    The massive emitter nerves along the woman’s flanks throbbed with gradual power, causing a weighty buzzing in the radio, and then the words that came forth were deep, and slow, and uncomfortably loud inside the shielded cargo pod. “My name.” The voice slowly and gently thundered. “Is Kinthalikal. And you, I know well, are Missus Fikes.”

    “I…” She turned down the volume of her helmet; the voice was just too loud. “I am.”

    “I’ve heard much about you, Missus Fikes…” The woman said. “An alien of many powers and many disabilities. Ever restless, yet often resting. Unnaturally strong, yet never seen outside your armor. Some say you’re here to spy us out for your own people, or to kill us while we sleep, or to do other savage things. Many speak poorly of you behind your back, but those who know you speak well of you.”

    She nodded. “Hmm.” Was the only noise the came forth.

    “But don’t worry about that in here.” The woman told her. “These walls are made for privacy… But as for me, I see beyond the suit. And behind the glass I see brown eyes, in a brown face; they belong to a gentle creature, from a gentle world. Is that you?”

    “…It is.”

    There was silence for a moment longer, while they stared at each other.

    “You seem confused.” Kinthalikal observed.

    “I am.”

    “What do you see before you?”

    “I don’t know what I see.” She blinked. “A woman? But I don’t know what that means all of a sudden.”

    “Did the women on your world not resemble this?”

    “Back on my world, the women looked the same as the men!” She burst. “They were the same kinds of people…! I don’t know what you are! What happened to you to make you so huge…? What…? Why do they have you here? Are you a criminal? An animal? What are those computers plugged into your eyeballs? What’s a leviathan?!? Like… GEEZ GIRL, are you okay? Are you in pain? What happened to you? How long have you been in here?”

    “I am not an aberration!” Kinthalikal thundered.

    “Then what are you??”

    “I’m normal! I’m… I’m beautiful… And if you don’t like it, then you can just leave it.”

    “Huh…? No, no, I didn’t mean it like that! I… I-I just…” While she stuttered over herself, Kinthalikal’s silk anchors pulled in close, and her mining talon curled up beneath her. Her eyestalks retracted halfway in what could have been shame. “I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean it like that! I didn’t mean to let all that out, I was just confused, I’m sorry.” She folded her gloves across her helmet over her mouth to try to take back the words. “You are normal, you…! Oh, I don’t know what beautiful is to the men, but I think you’re beautiful, and…! Ooooh, they told me not to touch you, but I just want to give you a hug, I’m so sorry.”

    Something seemed to click in Kinthalikal’s mind, and she glanced at the visitor in sudden realization. “Missus Fikes… Are you a woman?”

    “I… I am.” She admitted.

    “…Ah.” The creature considered that for several long seconds, and it’s posture adjusted slowly into something more careful. “…I think I’m beginning to understand.”

    “I… I don’t know if it’s a good idea to go spreading that around?” She shrugged. “I don’t know what they’d say…? And I do a man’s work, and I think they think I’m a man…”

    “They do… I won’t tell.”

    “Thanks.”

    “…I understand your confusion, Missus Fikes: I see you know nothing of our people.”

    “…No… I guess I don’t.”

    “I’ve never had to explain before, so give me a moment.”

    “Of course.”

    The giantess sat perfectly still for many long minutes, thinking old thoughts of memories of stories and stories of memories, organizing them into a single narrative she could share. And when she spoke again, her voice carried some of the sing-song tone of the old story-language, though she kept her words as simple as she could.

    “A woman is not an expansion.” She said. “She is not an aberration, not a stretching or a growth of the design of the species. And neither is she an alternative to the design. Rather, what you see before you is the species as she is, and as she was. This is the species as herself, developed, unmitigated, uncropped. The others that you’ve seen, the men, for the greatest length of history they were nothing. They were nothing but an occasional symbiote, a gross organ, a downtrodden and peripheral side-effect of the reproductive process, and the life of history was lived by women. Even nowadays you can see hints of the old order, reflected and over-simplified within their machines and their ships.”

    “The fishing vessels are designed exactly like you.” She observed.

    “Which is hardly a coincidence.” Kinthalikal agreed. “They are designed for the same purpose, to improve and replace. In old times women hunted and fished the rings of their world using the same methods and tactics. They drifted place to place at their leisure and whim, they wove nets to catch the great things, they carved homes in holes in icy rocks and filled their bellies with snow. And the fuel they got from splitting that ice they used in little calculated gusts of thrust, for slow and cautious journeys. They formed great tribes. They built mighty cities. They fought long wars.

    “And the men. Men are born the size of infant children, and their bodies never grow.” She pointed one tentacle toward a long organ beneath her skin, one of her wombs, containing a fetus the full size of a nomad man. “In the old way, boys clung to their mothers and helped her with her work until they were mature enough to be men, and then she forced them into her cannons and fired them off, to find wives in other tribes. They would wander and fend for themselves for years until they found women who would accept them.

    “But life is rare in the void, and resources scarce. So once they formed a union, formed a family, nature did a thing which I gather it doesn’t do for humans. To prevent wasting fuel on two separate sets of thrusters, the male would bite into the female, and the two would become one body. His beak would secrete an acid to dissolve the junction, their blood systems would link, and most of his organs would atrophy away. A family was a single creature.”

    “That’s crazy.” She blinked. “So… The man just… Just dies?”

    “No. He keeps his mind, and his limbs, and his soul, and his beak and throat metamorphosize into a long tether, so that he remains himself, only tied to her. He is a limb well-suited for removing parasites, trimming tumors, assisting in navigation, and in the use of tools. He is an ideal helper, driven always to improve efficiency and comfort and health. We females were too often content to drift passively, but men are ambitious and driven and hungry, it is they who push us toward accomplishment and purpose and toward our own betterment… And at some point in history, it was a man who invented the first artificial rocket motor.”

    “Oh.”

    “He invented it to ease his wife’s labor, to relieve strain on her old and failing hearts, to let her carry cargo and perform her work even in her old age, so that they would not perish in poverty. And she gave the design to her daughters, whose sons brought it to their wives, and a revolution of industry followed. And slowly, ever so slowly, as women became ever less ambitious and men became ever more relevant and inventive, things changed. Everything a woman could do, a man could then do with the right equipment. And since his mind was bent toward the efficient benefit of his woman, he would invariably choose the equipment, for equipment uses less fuel, entails less danger, works quickest, works longest. Eventually, birth control and genetic methods allowed them to limit female births, and thus to surround every woman in a caring, industrious tribe of men that would accomplish her every need, to make sure she would never need to hurt or fear again… Eventually, a woman’s only task was to produce silk and children… And now here we are, at the furthest end of history, and I am what you see before you.”

    She nodded slowly, her mind heavy and her heart beating hard. Her eyes wandered across the woman nervously. “And… So… So you must have a man then? A mate, attached somewhere to your body? Where is he? Is he listening?”

    “Men don’t do that anymore.” Kinthalikal pointed to a globular patch of thick skin above her wombs. It was covered in triangular scars the size and shape of a male’s beak, and each scar was surrounded by old, healed acid burns. “They get better genetic diversity from a single female by alternating mates, so that’s what they do… And at some point, they lost either the ability or the willingness to put aside their individuality long enough to enter into marriage. So whenever they try to attach themselves… They never end up sticking.”

    “That looks like it really hurts…!” She winced.

    “They give painkillers. I’m never even fully conscious.”

    “WHAT? But that’s almost even worse! It…! BUT…!” She glanced around once more for any nearby men, even reached past the curtain to pull the latch on the door, and make sure it was securely sealed. Pulling on the latch hurt her weakened arm, and she cradled her elbow as she spun back around. “But how could you let this happen??” She demanded. Throughout the entire history lesson, she’d been waiting for this woman to make some complaint about the situation, voice her desire for freedom from her intense oppression. She’s been waiting for the woman’s tears, for a lament to the death of tradition and dignity, for a hatred for the men who wronged her, for a hope for an end to this wicked new order. Her own voice raised to a feverish pitch over the crime. “Don’t you see that all the men are using you as a whore?” She didn’t know the translation for the word, and hoped the meaning would come across in her tone alone. It did. “Don’t you see that they’re using you as a farm animal?” A drop of spit struck the inside of her visor. “They treat you like another of their machines! And not even a machine as dignified as the fishing vessels, not even as a thing close to your own talents, your own worth, but as a factory! A recycling dump! If females really are the center of the family, the heart and the face of the species, then the men are disgracing themselves as well as you! They broke you! They enslaved you! They hid you! They abused you! They who were supposed to serve you! To love you! T-they… K-Keeleeticktick has a son? He was a part of this?!? One of those scars is his? He seemed like a nice guy! How could this…! Why aren’t you mad? How can I help?!?” Her attitude was bullish and hasty and hot with anger, a passion born from a desire to make things better than they were. It was a very mannish attitude to have. “What can I do?!?”

    Kinthalikal flinched beneath the visitor’s verbal onslaught, cowered backward in her restraints, found her eyestalks retracted, looking down through her transparent skin at her own insides, and seeing her status in life a little bit like how her visitor saw it, and it was not flattering. In her visitor’s words she could hear the untold story of a world where man and woman followed the same orbit, where people had the freedom to be free and marriage was willing… But more than that, she heard the story of a world of peace and plenty, where people had so little worry of predators and enemies and rival factions that they had no concern for efficiency, where deep and dark matters could take it for granted, where people concerned themselves with equality and happiness more than survival. Earth was a place where people did not even need to be nomads.

    “Men aren’t evil.” She said.

    Her visitor’s frown remained unbroken.

    “Keeleeticktick is a good man. And a kind man… This I know from his reputation. And as for the rest, some are known as good, some as bad, but what do I know? For all I can tell, they’re all kind, at least to me.”

    “Yeah, well they don’t seem kind to me.”

    “How do they seem to you?”

    “They—” Her words caught on her tongue, for really, with few exceptions, for her entire stay, they had treated her with nothing but kindness. “They’re lazy.” She claimed, as if grasping at straws. “And kind of gross…? And the way they treat you… I guess… I guess I just don’t understand you people at all.”

    “Hmm.”

    “…How do they seem to you?” She asked.

    “I don’t envy them.” Kinthalikal told her. “They are creatures of action, but their fathers gave them an unforgiving and lazy portion in life, and they only know how to give their sons the same. All their days and nights they spend idly milling about, until there appears the slightest opportunity to exert themselves, to justify themselves, to prove themselves; when it comes, they will latch onto it. You have seen how quickly and proudly they spring into action when there is a survivor to save from disaster, or a monster to hunt, or an asteroid to capture. They long for trouble, and for purpose. Unfortunately for them, this means their purposes are so seldom their own, and they are prone to being sent on ridiculous quests… So it was in the olden days, when their mothers launched them off to find women to cling to. So it is now, when they undertake agonizing journeys of lifetimes to escape from cruel empires, and spheres of armor must conceal the objects of their worship…”

    “Worship?” She scoffed. “They don’t ‘worship’ you.”

    “Don’t they?” She rapped a tentacle against the wall of the pod. “Have you seen how jealously they guard me? They hid my loud voice from predators and scanners, they made me immune to bullets. And now look at the gentle colors, listen to the life support, can you feel the comfort? These things are made with loving care. You haven’t heard the sweet things they say when they visit me, haven’t heard the stories they tell, can’t see the worlds they gave me to explore in virtual reality behind my blind eyes. It really does equate to worship, the way they treat me. Worship, or queenship, or the guarding of a precious treasure. How long did it take them to even mention me? Their reverence is just that thorough. So who has it better in this arrangement? Certainly not they. So who is subjugated? …Maybe we both are, but not by each other, not entirely unequally, and certainly not by intention… So what if I’m trapped in here? In the end, I am safe here. And I am at peace. And that is more than could be said of most other places in the universe, and most other times in history.”

    “But… But how could you consent to something as… As perverted and… And degrading and restricted and… And… You were supposed to be free! Freer than any creature had ever been! And… And you let this happen to you? Just let it? How could you consent to something as unnatural as this?”

    “’Consent’…? You don’t need to consent to something for it to be the way that it is… And to imagine that I’m the one telling you that! From what I hear of your nature, Missus Fikes, you’ve consented to far worse than I. Was it your choice to float the void for the rest of your days? Or did somebody put you to it?”

    She had to think about that for a minute. “We set out with the best of intentions.” She finally answered. “Something just… Happened along the way.”

    “Same as the man who invented the rocket motor had the best of intentions.” She agreed. “As did the woman who first began organizing ships into convoys. As did the men who built the ion engines. As did my mother. As do these men… Something just happened along the way.”

    It made sense.

    “But… But it’s so… So messed up though.”

    “Perhaps it is.”

    “…I need time to think about this.” She stuttered. “This is a lot to take in.”

    “I suppose it is… Come back to visit, then.” Kinthalikal requested. “…I think I would enjoy stories of your world.” And then she sat back in her restraints and returned to her original resting position, utterly unchanged from how she was a month previous, save for some strange and alien thoughts to fill her head.

    Her visitor groped almost blindly along the wall and past the curtains, but before she turned the hatch to step back outside, she looked back over her shoulder. “…Kinthalikal…?”

    “Yes?”

    “The men… The men see me as an equal. Or something close to an equal. They see me as one of them… Is there anything you would have me say to them?”

    Kinthalikal thought about it for a minute. “…No.” She finally answered. “No, nothing passes the mind.”

    “…Don’t consent to more than you have to.” Her visitor told her. “Maybe some of it you have to… But never more than that… Please. For your sake.”

    “I could say the same to you.”

    “Hmm.”

    She twisted the hatch open, and pushed out through, back into the emptiness of space. The glare of the sun and the harshness of the black hurt her eyes after her time indoors. The freedom of the expanse was all around her, it pressed down on her, it opened before her, and as she made her way back home, she spoke not a word to the idle men she passed.

    Finally she arrived back at her pod, which was tied as it always was to the side of one of the cargo ships. And tonight she looked at it as a man would look at it, with an eye for efficiency.

    She saw clearly for the first time that the pod was small and hard and crudely engineered; an ugly, battered pill of a spacecraft, which appeared dense and abrupt next to the gracefully diffuse constructions of the natives. Its walls were thick enough to survive reentry or an ocean landing, its colors gaudy and brightly striped, its life support overbuilt and robust enough to recycle the wastes of more than 20 human souls, and it had seats and supplies for the same number.

    She didn’t need this ungainly, massive prison of a pod.

    She needed something else.

    And so she crawled inside, unpacked her tools, and began a chore which would take her weeks.

    “Missus Fikes, what are you doing?”

    “Working. Got some things I’ve been meaning to do.”

    “Can I help?”

    “…No… No, this is something I need to do on my own.”

    “Okay.”

    “I might need you later though. Don’t go far.”

    “Cool.”

    It started with unbolted 19 of the seats, and most of the wall paneling, bringing them outside the airlock, and tying them all up to keep from floating away. Then she opened the inspection and repair manual, and began picking her way through the mechanisms within the walls, determining the purpose of each, assessing which were crucial and which were superfluous, answering mechanical and electrical questions she’d never before asked. This step of the process would not have been possible without Keeleeticktick’s help.

    After several nights of research and work, they found a way to disconnect 2 of the pod’s 6 booster engines, one of the algae nutrient vats, and most of the air handling systems. She reset the computer to recognize their absence.

    Eventually, her pod was nothing but a bare, naked metal cylinder, with a window at the front and complicated mechanisms on the back; only barely airtight. Wall insulation was the last thing she removed, and it was bitterly cold in her pod the last night she slept in there. Then, early the next morning, she began the longest, most treacherous spacewalk of her life.

    She took an angle grinder, and she cut the pod in half. The two cylinders, front and back, drifted apart.

    Then she cut the window off the front half, and welded it back on to the severed end of the back half, resulting in both a leftover half-length of hull, and a complete pod which was twice as ugly, but half as large. Generous application of resin patches around the joint made it airtight once again, and she cycled the airlock to make sure it still worked. It did.

    Then, after reinstalling the insulation and life support, she took the seats and extra engines and all the nonessential parts she’d removed, tied them all together into a single bundle, crammed that bundle into the scrap half of the pod, and let the whole mass of junk out on the end of a tether. The other end of the tether she tied to the roof of the new pod, and then there were two masses, joined by a line. She fired up the engines, and they began to rotate each other.

    Her feet touched the ground, and she had artificial gravity. But this time it wasn’t gravity that relied on Thilykto piloting a dingy on the other end, or on a loaned mass from elsewhere in the convoy. This time nobody else could lay claim to any part of it, it was made entirely of her own possessions, and she would never again have to spin it down. It was hers alone, and for good. A floor felt good beneath her feet.

    She smiled.

    The natives cheered.

    “You did it, Missus Fikes!”

    “You made your own ‘down’!”

    “And you didn’t need our help!”

    “We knew you could do it!”

    It was only 5% Earth gravity inside, but she was still having trouble walking. She struggled over to her toolbox, retrieved a marker, and began to write an exercise regime on the wall. So many sit-ups, so many pushups, so many chin-ups, so long jogging in place, such-and-such stretches. The numbers she wrote down were large, audacious and ambitious, and she set a date for when she would spin up the gravity to 10%, and then 20%. And once she reached that, maybe she would make longer-range plans for 50%, even 100%.

    And finally, at the conclusion of all her work, while the males were still cheering her resolve, she gazed out the window, across the convoy, and her eyes landed on Kinthalikal’s cargo pod.

    “Here I consent.” She said.

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Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3 - Part 4

    And then, as the tribe crossed the last stretch of the perfect void before entering their new solar system, there came a time of inactivity.

    Months passed, with nothing to interrupt their passing. Day blurred with night, rest followed sleep, fiction mixed with thought, food grew stale. Despite her earlier warning to Thilykto, lifespans both short and long were being thrown to the wind with abandon, and there was precious little any of them could do to spend them on anything, let alone spend them wisely. She longed sometimes to take Thilykto up on his offer of some great quest of vengeance, but even thoughts like those were getting hard to think.

    These people could sleep for years, and they often did. Many of them were doing so now, and more were joining them. She could see it happen; one by one she would notice a man wandering aimlessly across the hull, when his movements would slow, as he made the fateful decision that he had nothing better to do. He would then check a few pipes and valves, pluck at some silk to ensure it would hold, then he would take a long, long look around at the stars, sometimes staring for hours, drinking all the distant flecks of light into his memory, so as to make his dreams pleasant. And then, with a brief farewell to his fellows that he phrased “See you on the day”, he would return to his own ship, curl up in a hammock of silk with the sun shining on his photosynthetic biopools, and none she had seen do so had ever moved again.

    She understood what Keeleeticktick’s father had meant about 700 years seeming much too short. When it came down to it, an eon is an easy thing to waste.

    Perhaps this was just the nomads’ way, their ordinary way, and the activity and life and laughter she’d been treated to so far was nothing but the lingering excitement of an alien’s arrival, the joyous echoes of a welcome break in monotony. Or perhaps her interruption hadn’t been welcome; perhaps they preferred the monotony, and the sleep, and were glad that life aboard the convoy was finally settling down to a flatline.

    And she was left.

    The one creature that felt naturally restless, the one person who had to move every night, the single one for whom such inactivity was a mental and medical detriment. She certainly didn’t like it, feeling herself growing fat and brittle and weak, counting rivets on her pod, remembering fondly of many things, longing in sleep to wake and in waking to sleep. She didn’t like it, but there wasn’t anything to do about it.

    She counted the nights until she needed to clean her suit again, and then she took her time at it, and then was glad it was over and that she could go back to sleep.

    Nothing happened.

    Until one night, when one of the other nomads decided otherwise.

    She awoke to the sound of a voice coming through her radio, a hushed and rhythmic vocalization just on the threshold of hearing, and it had already been talking for several hours by the time she awoke.

    With a grunt of strain and exhaustion, she unstrapped herself from bed, pushed off a wall with one hand, and drifted over toward the pod’s window. She opened the shutters a peek to see who was talking.

    It came from a man named Rickakticktacka, reclining in the crow’s nest of one of the nearer cargo ships, with a small book in his hands, and the eyes of many among the convoy turned to him.

    “He the brave the bold, the bold who knew his purpose, his purpose so humble and so galant as to save the life of a friend, the purpose of the bold, he the bold, he led the chase…”

    She had no context for the speech he was reading, and many of the words were unfamiliar to her, and the sentence and grammatical structure was completely dissimilar to the language she’d been learning so far. So despite her best attempts at listening, it all sounded like absolute gibberish.

    “An underorbit, he thought, he prayed, though the spinning lines of the Galvito, the lines that many a man had met in crueler times, through the spinning and whirling and wolf-haunted lines of the Galvito he set his course, and prayed for his luck, would take him to where the witch would be…”

    She turned up the volume in the radio, and listened harder. She’d taught herself one of their languages, hadn’t she? If only she could take this in bits and pieces, hear it more gradually, perhaps it might share some similarities, some common meanings between words.

    “The witch he knew, he saw, saw before she slipped into the veil, saw before the haughty laugh she gave, saw that she was burning hard to prograde, her light a sick and greenish flame that pushed her ever higher…”

    There was… Something about laughing? And… A burn, a thruster impulse? A greenish thruster? All being spoken in 3rd person…

    As she sat and listened, it slowly became clear that he was telling a story. And as she listened a little longer, she came to understand the method of its telling.

    It seems the natives had a second language besides the one she’d known, or at least another ‘mode’ for the language they had. This second mode was slower, denser, more methodical, more detailed, and more poetic. By the sound of it, sentences didn’t hop quickly from one topic to the next, they didn’t really get to the point, but as they ran on and on and lingered on nuance, they grew in depth of detail and feeling. They went back on themselves, they looped, they referenced backwards and forwards. This language lengthily elaborated the emotion behind single words, gave a snapshot into the thoughts of characters and even the thoughts of the speaker himself, to paint a story, and sing a story, instead of to tell it.

    She couldn’t pretend to understand much of any of it, couldn’t honestly say that she caught more than every 4th word or so, but the words she did catch were pretty, and the language itself so rhythmic and sing-song, that she quickly gave up on trying to decipher the particulars, and let herself get lost in it, let it carry her away to someplace she didn’t recognize. She turned her radio volume up a little higher, wrapped her blanket around her, and closed her eyes.

    The story seemed to be about… It was about a warrior. Or a prince, maybe? Somebody noble, yet stubborn and unthinking. He was in some kind of asteroid field, (probably the rings of a planet, since she kept hearing orbits being mentioned). Anyway, somebody the prince had loved had been taken from him, by some kind of monster. The monster was thrusting prograde, to push into a higher orbit, but the prince figured he might overtake it by building up speed in a lower orbit, and using… Using something down there to change his direction and sling back up. It was a trick he’d learned from his father.

    The prince’s friends were chasing after him, but they knew they could never catch him or convince him to stop, so they kept pace close behind him, and tried to follow him through his maneuver so they could help him in his eventual fight.

    And the prince was conflicted, because on the one hand, the monster was escaping with his loved one and the only way to catch it was this risky maneuver, but on the other hand, his friends would never let him go alone, and to take the risk himself would be to risk all of them as well… Meanwhile the monster was gaining distance, and one of his friends was slowly dying of some sickness even as he traveled alongside, and there was a voice in his head speaking to him and telling him to turn back.

    The story took almost two hours to get where it was going, and when it got there, she didn’t really understand the climactic cliffhanger it reached. The monster was up close all of a sudden? And there was a flash of green light? A whole lot of words she didn’t understand, a brief musing on the folly of mortal men, and then the chapter ended.

    She came away from the story as if from a deep sleep, and realized she’d enjoyed herself. She glanced out the window at Rickakticktacka, who was closing the book. “I need to take a rest.” He gestured to his antennae-nerves with a chuckle. “Haven’t read in quite a while. Exhausting.”

    “You’re doing good!” Somebody else called over.

    “Yeah, it’s a good story!” Another added.

    “I’ve never heard this one before, it’s really cool!” Thilykto was down for anything.

    “I enjoyed it.” She leaned closer to the window.

    “Oh, you did, Missus Fikes?” He glanced in her direction. “Didn’t think you would understand it.”

    “It’s the same language, really.” She shrugged. “Just… Just stretched out, I guess.”

    “More like uncropped. That’s the full language, you know.” He chuckled. “Everybody used to speak like that, before they invented rockets, and guns, and emergencies, back before anybody was ever in a hurry… Nowadays, people just want to hear it and get it over with, so nothing’s ever said really properly unless it’s worth taking a long time to say. Like stories. And songs.”

    “Quit going on about ‘the good old days’, Rickakticktacka.” Somebody chided. “That was before your grandpa was born.”

    “Yeah, yeah, call me old fashioned, but ‘the good old days’ is where the best books come from.” He waved the book in his hand.

    “I don’t mind.” She shrugged. “I mean. We’ve got all night.”

    “That we do.” Rickakticktacka paused for a moment to rest his antenna, though he knew he would be reading more tonight, for he’d found a new fan.

    “I’m sorry if you don’t understand the story, Missus Fikes.” Thilykto apologized to her. “It’s one of those crazy fiction stories, with adventure and magic and a witch, so you might not get it.”

    “I don’t think I’ve ever heard any of you use those words.” She laughed. “What’s a witch, first off? That was the evil kidnapping monster, right?”

    “Oh, yeah. Feshkilaki, the sorceress from the center of black moon. A witch is just a woman that uses magic. And magic is… Wait, what’s magic? Like, uhhh, shooting fire? Or putting a curse on somebody so something bad happens to them? That’s why her thrusters were green… Or, uh, or using spirits for power or-”

    “Oh, magic!” She laughed. “Oh I get it, it’s a fantasy book! That’s great! Yeah, we had fantasy books on Earth too! Yeah, uh… my dad used to read me Lord of the Rings when I was a kid. Great adventures. Pretend places, pretend people, even… Like pretend types of people too. Elves and dwarves and orcs and ents…”

    “Oh yeah!” Thilykto perked up. “Yeah, the main character in this book is a pretend type too, called an Elkakik.” (The word she’d been translating as prince was actually more similar to ‘elf’) “They’re like normal people, but older and more dignified, and they have a close connection with a wise double in the spirit world, so they can’t ever die or fall in love until they complete their purpose.”

    “Interesting.”

    “You’re both a couple brain-vented nerds.” Somebody teased. “Hey Rickakticktacka, let’s have a true story next.”

    “But true stories are boring!” Thilykto waved a tentacle dismissively, then looked up to her pod for support. “Right Missus Fikes?”

    “Well.” Her gaze wandered across the convoy, taking in all the other lazy, lethargic travelers, who had taken up myth and fiction to escape from their own lives. And it seemed to her in that moment that anything at all would make for a better story than reality. “Yeah.” She agreed. “Yeah, pretend stuff is pretty fun.”

    “Alright then. So… On with this one?” Rickakticktacka opened the book again.

    “Yeah.”

    “Sure.”

    “Let’s go.”

    “Oh, alright.”

    “I wanna see how it ends.”

    And without any further hesitation, he launched into the next chapter.

    Perhaps it was these distant, alien feelings of adventure she’d absorbed from the story, perhaps it was out of curiosity or sheer restlessness, but as he read, she turned away from the window, climbed into her suit, and left the pod for a short stroll around the convoy.

    It was the first time she’d done so in almost a week, and perhaps only the third time she’d done so in the past month. Her body had decayed to the point where even pushing herself off of surfaces and slowly climbing across the silk nets had grown wearying, so she took every excuse to not; maybe she had a mind for the safety of her fragile bones, maybe she was just lazy, or maybe she was trying to hide herself from her own reality too.

    She found Keeleeticktick where he always was, out on the hull of his ship. She turned down the volume on her helmet’s radio.

    “Hey Keelee, I’ve been wondering, what’s a woman?”

    “WHAT?” He glanced at her sharply. “What in the void do you mean by that?”

    “I’ve heard people using the word here and there, but never in context, and by this point I’m almost afraid to ask.”

    “Did you not have women on your planet?”

    “I don’t KNOW! MAYBE! What’s it, some kind of monster? A species? Like what the heck?”

    “Okay, okay, it’s… Oh dear… They’re not monsters, they’re sentient, they’re just people. Same exact species. It’s… It’s the other half of the species. The people who… You know. Make kids. Instead of working, they make the young ones and the silk.”

    “Oh.” She realized what he meant. “Oh geez, yes. Yeah, we have women on Earth. I feel really silly now, like, that’s so obvious.”

    “Ah. Heh. Yeah. Sorry about that. Probably heard it from Thilykto, huh? Kids his age tend to think about little else.”

    “Yeah, it’s the same way with humans.” She shook her head. “In school, my brother… Oh, never mind… Yeah, all this time I figured you people didn’t have women. I thought you split, or budded or something. Didn’t know there was a difference between women and… What’s your word for the opposite of women?”

    He told her the word for ‘man’, and it was one of the words she’d been translating as ‘people’. “Oh… Okay.”

    “Yeah.” He nodded. “Strange topic to go asking about, I recognize.”

    “Yeah.” Her eyes wandered across the convoy. “So which of you people are men, and which are women? I was peeking up your dresses for my first couple weeks before I gave up trying to guess.”

    “Well, these are all men, of course.” He gestured inclusively. “I can’t think of when you would’ve ever seen our woman.”

    “Wait, woman as in singular? There’s only one in the whole tribe?”

    “Well, the whole tribe has a few. But yes, our convoy only has one. She lives in there.” He pointed to one particular ship, which carried nothing but a single enormous spherical cargo pod. “She might’ve come out once or twice since you arrived, but only briefly, and you’re a heavy sleeper.”

    “Huh.” Her eyes strayed over the mysterious pod, wondering at what it must conceal. Besides for tanks and crates and enclosures for hammocks, none of the tribe’s other ships had any interiors to speak of, making this one unique. Perhaps there was something similar to a house or a human home within; perhaps all the hard, utilitarian engineering of the outside gave way to something more civilized on the inside, something fit for a lady. And as for the woman herself, her imagination went wild. Perhaps the nomad’s society was secretly built to some matriarchical structure like bees, with the few women leaders specialized for child-making or egg-laying and little else. She would be something regal, or beastly, or gravid, or beautiful. To think that this was the only other woman besides herself for thousands of miles around… And had been this entire time… “…Do you think I could meet her?” She had to ask.

    “No!” He snapped before he had time to think.

    “Woah, sorry, hey, I… Wait, why not?”

    “You could hurt her, I don’t…! You…! It’s just…” He seemed to catch his own metaphorical tongue, and paused for a moment to think. “The thing is, Missus Fikes, that a tribe’s woman is a tribe’s woman… And though we have shared everything we have with you, and you know I trust you, we can’t-”

    “Woah, cool it man, I was just curious! Wasn’t meaning to… To interfere with any traditions or with the family or anything, I just wanted to see what she looked like, yeah? I mean, I know I’m not a part of the tribe, but as an alien, and a friend, you have to understand how curious I am.”

    “I understand… But curiosity can go too far. And you’re a very strong and rough man.”

    “I’m a what?”

    “Just…! Just don’t touch her, how about?”

    “Well-WAIT OH HECK NO, I ain’t gonna touch her! Why would I touch her?”

    His eyes narrowed. “Well… You know.”

    Hers widened. “Geez man.”

    His shifted away. “…Ah… Of course. Of course, yes. Why would you indeed?”

    “Ten feet.” She indicated the distance between herself and him. “I won’t even get near her.”

    “Hmm.” He nodded. “Very well then… I’ll mention it to the others. And I’ll put in a good word for you.”

    She didn’t know what to say. Not even sort of. “Thanks… I guess.”



    ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~



    The two men behaved with all the pomp and solemn seriousness of soldiers as they showed her to her destination. She’d never before seen any of the nomads acting so militaristic, but she didn’t think it was out of distrust or ill will toward her; it seems they perceived the stakes as merely being that high. In any case, they both carried a holstered tool that could have been a weapon, and came to a stop on either side of a circular hatch on the woman’s cargo vessel. One of them unlocked it. “She’s inside, and is expecting you. Don’t linger too long.” He warned her. “And don’t get any funny ideas. We’ll be ready to respond to any undue activity, and so will she.”

    “Got it.”

    The other handed her a heavy pack overflowing with scrap silk. “To keep her from panic, tell her you’re only here to deliver this. Pass it to her gently, and don’t throw it or make a sudden movement. And keep your distance.”

    “Umm… Got it?”

    The hatch opened in front of her. There were curtains on the other side.

    “Hey, wait a minute, am I in any danger here, or-“

    The hatch closed behind her. All radio signals from the convoy outside were instantly cut off, and she was alone.

    She drifted past the curtains, and stopped.

    The cargo pod had no interior walls, no doors, no furnishings of comfort. She’d been expecting something like a home or even a nest, but instead her eyes met a wide empty space, lit by dim and orangish light; the warm, comfortable color of the nomad’s first homeworld. The pod’s only furnishing was a large padded cradle, which held one of the convoy’s fishing vessels in the center.

    The vehicle held so gingerly on display was nearly identical in size and shape to the others she’d seen around. The hull was taller than it was wide, with 8 main rearward thrusters in 4 clusters, supplied by 8 fuel tanks. Engineering sections were in the middle and on top, cannons protruded from near the middle, a mining talon was folded against the bottom, and to either side were the wing-like protrusions which were used during fishing to anchor the silk lines.

    But much unlike the tribe’s other fishing vessels, this one was constructed entirely out of flesh.

    Its thrusters and fuel tanks were structured similarly to those on the men, membranous as the wings of bats, now deflated and wrinkled and empty. Countless unclear organs floated like clouds beneath transparent skin, and a cultivated garden of benign tumors grew across the surface. The cannons were unloaded, and curled against the front of the fuselage. The mining talon was a ring of barbed tentacles surrounding a cluster of enormous beaks. And instead of the wings, there were six boney anchors of the same purpose, each crested with hundreds upon hundreds of spinnerets.

    Its sensory organs would be perceptive enough to pinpoint asteroids and radio-emitting objects across interplanetary distances. Its spinnerets could be able to ensnare and engulf targets in hundreds of miles of unbreakable fiber. And the beaks were strong enough to crush up asteroids or chew through a spacecraft’s hull. And with such capabilities apparent, she realized she recognized this thing.

    “A leviathan…” She barely dared to breathe.

    The word which she’d been translated to mean ‘monster’, and had been equating to the ancient sea serpents of Earth, had actually meant nothing of the sort. Its proper translation was something closer to ‘pirate’, ‘savage’, ‘rogue’, or ‘loner’. A tribeless, wandering female, who had either rebelled or escaped or had been raised among the wicked. Sad and lonely souls, lawless and fiercely hungry.

    So as little as she knew of such matters, and as similar as it looked to the beast which had widowed her, she realized that this was not a leviathan.

    Above the cannons, in front of the brain, a fleshy fold eased open, and a pair of eyestalks slowly extended, their enormous lenses coming to bear. The largest of the eyes were the size of the mirror of the hubble telescope, but were entirely blind and clouded over. So it was only a score or so of smaller eyes which perceived the visitor, and focused in on her with a silent, unknowable expression.

    “Uh! I! I-I-I came to bring you this!” In a moment she remembered the pack of silk, and pushed it lightly through the air toward the creature. “I. I-I just. J-just wanted to see you. I… I don’t mean to scare you.”

    One of the barbed feeding tentacles raised in a slow arc to intercept the pack, and the hooks on the end were dexterous enough to untie the knot. One of the beaks reached inside and began to eat the silk.

    For digestion.

    For recycling.

    To reuse the old protein and the nanofiber and secrete it back out again…

    Her eyes wandered upwards, past the end of the boney anchors and the spinnerets, and she saw a great number of winches on the perimeter of the cargo pod, each one reeling slowly inward, drawing silken threads out of the creature. Storing it for use in industry, so the nomads could weave it into cables, nets, paper, and clothes.

    And she conceived that the creature was constrained here; tied helplessly to the cradle by thin nets. It was never fed enough ice to fill its tanks and fire off its engines. Never permitted to hunt its own food or make use of its great size and strength. Never even allowed enough distance to make use of its great telescopic eyes, so that they became blind. It merely sat here, stagnant in its pod, its monstrous reef of biopools soaking up artificial sunlight and artificial planetshine, while machines continuously milked it of its silk.

    But it wasn’t a farm animal.

    Was it? It was a person.

    It was a woman.

    She opened her mouth to speak. A question formed on her lips, a horrified, disturbed, outraged question, but it didn’t escape, didn’t quite form itself into coherent words, couldn’t trim itself down to a single thought. The woman watched her passively, with its fewish working eyes, and waited for her to speak.

    “…What’s your name?” She finally managed to ask, her voice a whisper. One of the first phrases she’d learned of the native’s language, now the only words she could think to say.

    The massive emitter nerves along the woman’s flanks throbbed with gradual power, causing a weighty buzzing in the radio, and then the words that came forth were deep, and slow, and uncomfortably loud inside the shielded cargo pod. “My name.” The voice slowly and gently thundered. “Is Kinthalikal. And you, I know well, are Missus Fikes.”

    “I…” She turned down the volume of her helmet; the voice was just too loud. “I am.”

    “I’ve heard much about you, Missus Fikes…” The woman said. “An alien of many powers and many disabilities. Ever restless, yet often resting. Unnaturally strong, yet never seen outside your armor. Some say you’re here to spy us out for your own people, or to kill us while we sleep, or to do other savage things. Many speak poorly of you behind your back, but those who know you speak well of you.”

    She nodded. “Hmm.” Was the only noise the came forth.

    “But don’t worry about that in here.” The woman told her. “These walls are made for privacy… But as for me, I see beyond the suit. And behind the glass I see brown eyes, in a brown face; they belong to a gentle creature, from a gentle world. Is that you?”

    “…It is.”

    There was silence for a moment longer, while they stared at each other.

    “You seem confused.” Kinthalikal observed.

    “I am.”

    “What do you see before you?”

    “I don’t know what I see.” She blinked. “A woman? But I don’t know what that means all of a sudden.”

    “Did the women on your world not resemble this?”

    “Back on my world, the women looked the same as the men!” She burst. “They were the same kinds of people…! I don’t know what you are! What happened to you to make you so huge…? What…? Why do they have you here? Are you a criminal? An animal? What are those computers plugged into your eyeballs? What’s a leviathan?!? Like… GEEZ GIRL, are you okay? Are you in pain? What happened to you? How long have you been in here?”

    “I am not an aberration!” Kinthalikal thundered.

    “Then what are you??”

    “I’m normal! I’m… I’m beautiful… And if you don’t like it, then you can just leave it.”

    “Huh…? No, no, I didn’t mean it like that! I… I-I just…” While she stuttered over herself, Kinthalikal’s silk anchors pulled in close, and her mining talon curled up beneath her. Her eyestalks retracted halfway in what could have been shame. “I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean it like that! I didn’t mean to let all that out, I was just confused, I’m sorry.” She folded her gloves across her helmet over her mouth to try to take back the words. “You are normal, you…! Oh, I don’t know what beautiful is to the men, but I think you’re beautiful, and…! Ooooh, they told me not to touch you, but I just want to give you a hug, I’m so sorry.”

    Something seemed to click in Kinthalikal’s mind, and she glanced at the visitor in sudden realization. “Missus Fikes… Are you a woman?”

    “I… I am.” She admitted.

    “…Ah.” The creature considered that for several long seconds, and it’s posture adjusted slowly into something more careful. “…I think I’m beginning to understand.”

    “I… I don’t know if it’s a good idea to go spreading that around?” She shrugged. “I don’t know what they’d say…? And I do a man’s work, and I think they think I’m a man…”

    “They do… I won’t tell.”

    “Thanks.”

    “…I understand your confusion, Missus Fikes: I see you know nothing of our people.”

    “…No… I guess I don’t.”

    “I’ve never had to explain before, so give me a moment.”

    “Of course.”

    The giantess sat perfectly still for many long minutes, thinking old thoughts of memories of stories and stories of memories, organizing them into a single narrative she could share. And when she spoke again, her voice carried some of the sing-song tone of the old story-language, though she kept her words as simple as she could.

    “A woman is not an expansion.” She said. “She is not an aberration, not a stretching or a growth of the design of the species. And neither is she an alternative to the design. Rather, what you see before you is the species as she is, and as she was. This is the species as herself, developed, unmitigated, uncropped. The others that you’ve seen, the men, for the greatest length of history they were nothing. They were nothing but an occasional symbiote, a gross organ, a downtrodden and peripheral side-effect of the reproductive process, and the life of history was lived by women. Even nowadays you can see hints of the old order, reflected and over-simplified within their machines and their ships.”

    “The fishing vessels are designed exactly like you.” She observed.

    “Which is hardly a coincidence.” Kinthalikal agreed. “They are designed for the same purpose, to improve and replace. In old times women hunted and fished the rings of their world using the same methods and tactics. They drifted place to place at their leisure and whim, they wove nets to catch the great things, they carved homes in holes in icy rocks and filled their bellies with snow. And the fuel they got from splitting that ice they used in little calculated gusts of thrust, for slow and cautious journeys. They formed great tribes. They built mighty cities. They fought long wars.

    “And the men. Men are born the size of infant children, and their bodies never grow.” She pointed one tentacle toward a long organ beneath her skin, one of her wombs, containing a fetus the full size of a nomad man. “In the old way, boys clung to their mothers and helped her with her work until they were mature enough to be men, and then she forced them into her cannons and fired them off, to find wives in other tribes. They would wander and fend for themselves for years until they found women who would accept them.

    “But life is rare in the void, and resources scarce. So once they formed a union, formed a family, nature did a thing which I gather it doesn’t do for humans. To prevent wasting fuel on two separate sets of thrusters, the male would bite into the female, and the two would become one body. His beak would secrete an acid to dissolve the junction, their blood systems would link, and most of his organs would atrophy away. A family was a single creature.”

    “That’s crazy.” She blinked. “So… The man just… Just dies?”

    “No. He keeps his mind, and his limbs, and his soul, and his beak and throat metamorphosize into a long tether, so that he remains himself, only tied to her. He is a limb well-suited for removing parasites, trimming tumors, assisting in navigation, and in the use of tools. He is an ideal helper, driven always to improve efficiency and comfort and health. We females were too often content to drift passively, but men are ambitious and driven and hungry, it is they who push us toward accomplishment and purpose and toward our own betterment… And at some point in history, it was a man who invented the first artificial rocket motor.”

    “Oh.”

    “He invented it to ease his wife’s labor, to relieve strain on her old and failing hearts, to let her carry cargo and perform her work even in her old age, so that they would not perish in poverty. And she gave the design to her daughters, whose sons brought it to their wives, and a revolution of industry followed. And slowly, ever so slowly, as women became ever less ambitious and men became ever more relevant and inventive, things changed. Everything a woman could do, a man could then do with the right equipment. And since his mind was bent toward the efficient benefit of his woman, he would invariably choose the equipment, for equipment uses less fuel, entails less danger, works quickest, works longest. Eventually, birth control and genetic methods allowed them to limit female births, and thus to surround every woman in a caring, industrious tribe of men that would accomplish her every need, to make sure she would never need to hurt or fear again… Eventually, a woman’s only task was to produce silk and children… And now here we are, at the furthest end of history, and I am what you see before you.”

    She nodded slowly, her mind heavy and her heart beating hard. Her eyes wandered across the woman nervously. “And… So… So you must have a man then? A mate, attached somewhere to your body? Where is he? Is he listening?”

    “Men don’t do that anymore.” Kinthalikal pointed to a globular patch of thick skin above her wombs. It was covered in triangular scars the size and shape of a male’s beak, and each scar was surrounded by old, healed acid burns. “They get better genetic diversity from a single female by alternating mates, so that’s what they do… And at some point, they lost either the ability or the willingness to put aside their individuality long enough to enter into marriage. So whenever they try to attach themselves… They never end up sticking.”

    “That looks like it really hurts…!” She winced.

    “They give painkillers. I’m never even fully conscious.”

    “WHAT? But that’s almost even worse! It…! BUT…!” She glanced around once more for any nearby men, even reached past the curtain to pull the latch on the door, and make sure it was securely sealed. Pulling on the latch hurt her weakened arm, and she cradled her elbow as she spun back around. “But how could you let this happen??” She demanded. Throughout the entire history lesson, she’d been waiting for this woman to make some complaint about the situation, voice her desire for freedom from her intense oppression. She’s been waiting for the woman’s tears, for a lament to the death of tradition and dignity, for a hatred for the men who wronged her, for a hope for an end to this wicked new order. Her own voice raised to a feverish pitch over the crime. “Don’t you see that all the men are using you as a whore?” She didn’t know the translation for the word, and hoped the meaning would come across in her tone alone. It did. “Don’t you see that they’re using you as a farm animal?” A drop of spit struck the inside of her visor. “They treat you like another of their machines! And not even a machine as dignified as the fishing vessels, not even as a thing close to your own talents, your own worth, but as a factory! A recycling dump! If females really are the center of the family, the heart and the face of the species, then the men are disgracing themselves as well as you! They broke you! They enslaved you! They hid you! They abused you! They who were supposed to serve you! To love you! T-they… K-Keeleeticktick has a son? He was a part of this?!? One of those scars is his? He seemed like a nice guy! How could this…! Why aren’t you mad? How can I help?!?” Her attitude was bullish and hasty and hot with anger, a passion born from a desire to make things better than they were. It was a very mannish attitude to have. “What can I do?!?”

    Kinthalikal flinched beneath the visitor’s verbal onslaught, cowered backward in her restraints, found her eyestalks retracted, looking down through her transparent skin at her own insides, and seeing her status in life a little bit like how her visitor saw it, and it was not flattering. In her visitor’s words she could hear the untold story of a world where man and woman followed the same orbit, where people had the freedom to be free and marriage was willing… But more than that, she heard the story of a world of peace and plenty, where people had so little worry of predators and enemies and rival factions that they had no concern for efficiency, where deep and dark matters could take it for granted, where people concerned themselves with equality and happiness more than survival. Earth was a place where people did not even need to be nomads.

    “Men aren’t evil.” She said.

    Her visitor’s frown remained unbroken.

    “Keeleeticktick is a good man. And a kind man… This I know from his reputation. And as for the rest, some are known as good, some as bad, but what do I know? For all I can tell, they’re all kind, at least to me.”

    “Yeah, well they don’t seem kind to me.”

    “How do they seem to you?”

    “They—” Her words caught on her tongue, for really, with few exceptions, for her entire stay, they had treated her with nothing but kindness. “They’re lazy.” She claimed, as if grasping at straws. “And kind of gross…? And the way they treat you… I guess… I guess I just don’t understand you people at all.”

    “Hmm.”

    “…How do they seem to you?” She asked.

    “I don’t envy them.” Kinthalikal told her. “They are creatures of action, but their fathers gave them an unforgiving and lazy portion in life, and they only know how to give their sons the same. All their days and nights they spend idly milling about, until there appears the slightest opportunity to exert themselves, to justify themselves, to prove themselves; when it comes, they will latch onto it. You have seen how quickly and proudly they spring into action when there is a survivor to save from disaster, or a monster to hunt, or an asteroid to capture. They long for trouble, and for purpose. Unfortunately for them, this means their purposes are so seldom their own, and they are prone to being sent on ridiculous quests… So it was in the olden days, when their mothers launched them off to find women to cling to. So it is now, when they undertake agonizing journeys of lifetimes to escape from cruel empires, and spheres of armor must conceal the objects of their worship…”

    “Worship?” She scoffed. “They don’t ‘worship’ you.”

    “Don’t they?” She rapped a tentacle against the wall of the pod. “Have you seen how jealously they guard me? They hid my loud voice from predators and scanners, they made me immune to bullets. And now look at the gentle colors, listen to the life support, can you feel the comfort? These things are made with loving care. You haven’t heard the sweet things they say when they visit me, haven’t heard the stories they tell, can’t see the worlds they gave me to explore in virtual reality behind my blind eyes. It really does equate to worship, the way they treat me. Worship, or queenship, or the guarding of a precious treasure. How long did it take them to even mention me? Their reverence is just that thorough. So who has it better in this arrangement? Certainly not they. So who is subjugated? …Maybe we both are, but not by each other, not entirely unequally, and certainly not by intention… So what if I’m trapped in here? In the end, I am safe here. And I am at peace. And that is more than could be said of most other places in the universe, and most other times in history.”

    “But… But how could you consent to something as… As perverted and… And degrading and restricted and… And… You were supposed to be free! Freer than any creature had ever been! And… And you let this happen to you? Just let it? How could you consent to something as unnatural as this?”

    “’Consent’…? You don’t need to consent to something for it to be the way that it is… And to imagine that I’m the one telling you that! From what I hear of your nature, Missus Fikes, you’ve consented to far worse than I. Was it your choice to float the void for the rest of your days? Or did somebody put you to it?”

    She had to think about that for a minute. “We set out with the best of intentions.” She finally answered. “Something just… Happened along the way.”

    “Same as the man who invented the rocket motor had the best of intentions.” She agreed. “As did the woman who first began organizing ships into convoys. As did the men who built the ion engines. As did my mother. As do these men… Something just happened along the way.”

    It made sense.

    “But… But it’s so… So messed up though.”

    “Perhaps it is.”

    “…I need time to think about this.” She stuttered. “This is a lot to take in.”

    “I suppose it is… Come back to visit, then.” Kinthalikal requested. “…I think I would enjoy stories of your world.” And then she sat back in her restraints and returned to her original resting position, utterly unchanged from how she was a month previous, save for some strange and alien thoughts to fill her head.

    Her visitor groped almost blindly along the wall and past the curtains, but before she turned the hatch to step back outside, she looked back over her shoulder. “…Kinthalikal…?”

    “Yes?”

    “The men… The men see me as an equal. Or something close to an equal. They see me as one of them… Is there anything you would have me say to them?”

    Kinthalikal thought about it for a minute. “…No.” She finally answered. “No, nothing passes the mind.”

    “…Don’t consent to more than you have to.” Her visitor told her. “Maybe some of it you have to… But never more than that… Please. For your sake.”

    “I could say the same to you.”

    “Hmm.”

    She twisted the hatch open, and pushed out through, back into the emptiness of space. The glare of the sun and the harshness of the black hurt her eyes after her time indoors. The freedom of the expanse was all around her, it pressed down on her, it opened before her, and as she made her way back home, she spoke not a word to the idle men she passed.

    Finally she arrived back at her pod, which was tied as it always was to the side of one of the cargo ships. And tonight she looked at it as a man would look at it, with an eye for efficiency.

    She saw clearly for the first time that the pod was small and hard and crudely engineered; an ugly, battered pill of a spacecraft, which appeared dense and abrupt next to the gracefully diffuse constructions of the natives. Its walls were thick enough to survive reentry or an ocean landing, its colors gaudy and brightly striped, its life support overbuilt and robust enough to recycle the wastes of more than 20 human souls, and it had seats and supplies for the same number.

    She didn’t need this ungainly, massive prison of a pod.

    She needed something else.

    And so she crawled inside, unpacked her tools, and began a chore which would take her weeks.

    “Missus Fikes, what are you doing?”

    “Working. Got some things I’ve been meaning to do.”

    “Can I help?”

    “…No… No, this is something I need to do on my own.”

    “Okay.”

    “I might need you later though. Don’t go far.”

    “Cool.”

    It started with unbolted 19 of the seats, and most of the wall paneling, bringing them outside the airlock, and tying them all up to keep from floating away. Then she opened the inspection and repair manual, and began picking her way through the mechanisms within the walls, determining the purpose of each, assessing which were crucial and which were superfluous, answering mechanical and electrical questions she’d never before asked. This step of the process would not have been possible without Keeleeticktick’s help.

    After several nights of research and work, they found a way to disconnect 2 of the pod’s 6 booster engines, one of the algae nutrient vats, and most of the air handling systems. She reset the computer to recognize their absence.

    Eventually, her pod was nothing but a bare, naked metal cylinder, with a window at the front and complicated mechanisms on the back; only barely airtight. Wall insulation was the last thing she removed, and it was bitterly cold in her pod the last night she slept in there. Then, early the next morning, she began the longest, most treacherous spacewalk of her life.

    She took an angle grinder, and she cut the pod in half. The two cylinders, front and back, drifted apart.

    Then she cut the window off the front half, and welded it back on to the severed end of the back half, resulting in both a leftover half-length of hull, and a complete pod which was twice as ugly, but half as large. Generous application of resin patches around the joint made it airtight once again, and she cycled the airlock to make sure it still worked. It did.

    Then, after reinstalling the insulation and life support, she took the seats and extra engines and all the nonessential parts she’d removed, tied them all together into a single bundle, crammed that bundle into the scrap half of the pod, and let the whole mass of junk out on the end of a tether. The other end of the tether she tied to the roof of the new pod, and then there were two masses, joined by a line. She fired up the engines, and they began to rotate each other.

    Her feet touched the ground, and she had artificial gravity. But this time it wasn’t gravity that relied on Thilykto piloting a dingy on the other end, or on a loaned mass from elsewhere in the convoy. This time nobody else could lay claim to any part of it, it was made entirely of her own possessions, and she would never again have to spin it down. It was hers alone, and for good. A floor felt good beneath her feet.

    She smiled.

    The natives cheered.

    “You did it, Missus Fikes!”

    “You made your own ‘down’!”

    “And you didn’t need our help!”

    “We knew you could do it!”

    It was only 5% Earth gravity inside, but she was still having trouble walking. She struggled over to her toolbox, retrieved a marker, and began to write an exercise regime on the wall. So many sit-ups, so many pushups, so many chin-ups, so long jogging in place, such-and-such stretches. The numbers she wrote down were large, audacious and ambitious, and she set a date for when she would spin up the gravity to 10%, and then 20%. And once she reached that, maybe she would make longer-range plans for 50%, even 100%.

    And finally, at the conclusion of all her work, while the males were still cheering her resolve, she gazed out the window, across the convoy, and her eyes landed on Kinthalikal’s cargo pod.

    “Here I consent.” She said.