A/N: This is my entry for Round Three of the Short Story Smackdown. Part of the prompt is the song in the header, 'Tarantula' by Aussie band Pendulum. What came out in response to this prompt is a love story, but please don't let that put you off. There's drugs, death and betrayal if you keep reading.
Say what you want about the Venusians, they've certainly made some questionable biological choices, I won't argue with you there, but they thirst like the rest of us. That makes them human.
Aalia hated her thirst. She hated the collective human thirst that forced her to cycle between Venus and the Oort Cloud on a never-ending quest for water. Venusian humans consumed water as soon as it arrived on the planet. It was a human weakness, this need to consume. The Water Corps existed to feed this need.
No one chose to enter the Water Corps. Doctors and engineers who made the mistake of being too good at their job were conscripted. An invitation to join the Water Corps was a great privilege. No one refused. There was no way to refuse. Aalia hadn't meant to be too good at her job. The threat of the Water Corps loomed somewhere in the back of her mind, but she was distracted by the task at hand of combining elements from the air with elements from the dirt to build cheaper materials for spacecraft. The Venusians prized cost cutting. Aalia cut costs better than most, and so, the day after her sixtieth birthday, she was rewarded with the impossible-to-refuse invitation that had ruined thousands of lives before hers.
Her husband had waited for her. At least for the first cycle—five years for her, but 40 for him. He was 100 when she returned, still young for a Venusian, and still in love with her it seemed. He was ready to spend her six month on-planet break as if she had never been away. The problem was Gaman, the doctor on board the Icebreaker, a veteran of 15 cycles, her only crewmate and the man tasked with completing her on board training.
Like every new recruit, Aalia had been terrified of boarding the icebreaker named Slake--a ship the size of a small city--and spending five years hurtling through space with only one other human to keep her company. Gaman was waiting for her in the control room, sitting in the captain's chair, grinning, his three eyes twinkling and his red hair floating around his head. He stood and touched her shoulder in a gesture of welcome and she couldn't speak, couldn't breathe, for a moment. Her mind whitewashed by this man. This was why she had been conscripted to the Water Corps. She was meant to meet Gaman, a man who should have been dead 200 years before Aalia was born, but thanks to humans' biological need for water, he was here, standing in front of her. Every molecule inside her pushed against her skin, straining to get to him.
And then, just like that, 15 cycles and 75 years later, Gaman was forced to retire. He had served his 30 cycles. Congress clipped his wings and gave him a house with a garden and a couple of monkeys. It was the least they could do since everyone he had once known was dead. Everyone except Aalia, and she was stuck on an icebreaker with a rookie, weaving through planetoids in the Venusian territory of the Oort Cloud.
"You know what she said to me?" Eshwar, the rookie, said when he boarded Slake for the first time. "I won't wait. Forty years is too long." He buried his face in his hands. "We've been married for fifty years, and she won't wait for me."
"She's right," Aalia said. "Forty years is too long."
Gaman knew what it was like to be forgotten. That didn't mean he would be strong enough to wait for Aalia. She didn't know, really, how he felt about her. She knew what he said. She knew how she felt. And she hoped it was enough.
Eshwar should be with Aalia now, learning how to watch a sentient ship perform its work with no need for human intervention. Instead, he was off enjoying the ship's ability to simulate any human. He could pretend his wife never left.
Aalia watched through a window as a giant spider jumped off the ship and rappelled down a silk rope onto a rock. It wasn't a planet, this rock, it was a comet fragment, a thin crust encasing an aquatic treasure chest. The spider that scuttled across the treasure chest was three times the size of a human, black and synthetic and covered in sensory hairs to sample the air, the soil, the water. The water, of course, was the most important. It was, after all, why they were here. Any useful elements were a bonus.
It was freezing out there in the space surrounding the comet fragment. A human would die within seconds. Aalia laid her hand on the glass window and thought about punching through and letting the cold envelop her. She didn't try. She knew she would fail. The ship would stop her. It didn't care how she felt. It only cared about bringing its cargo of six billion tonnes of Oort cloud ice and two lonely humans home to Venus.
The spider stopped probing, satisfied. Aalia was connected to the ship. She could feel what it felt. What it wanted her to feel. The spider lowered a set of pincers and started to drill. Water leaked out of the hole, staining the sandy surface and the spider drank, water filling its abdomen. A minute or two later, the initial tests results floated into Aalia's head. No major contaminants or toxins. The water was clean.
It was Eshwar's job to confirm the test results in the ship laboratory. To ensure that any water they collected would not poison the innocent Venusians waiting at home with open mouths. This was, in effect, Eshwar's only role here, the only reason why he had been ripped from the arms of a pragmatic wife. Like most humans, Venusians couldn't trust the synthetic sentient beings that had allowed them to infest the solar system, so they sent two humans on each ship as a symbol of impotent control. They had tried to send one to save costs but all the solo voyagers went insane.
Aalia didn't know what the ship was doing to Eshwar right now, it wouldn't let her see that, but she knew that he was nowhere near the control room or the lab and the spider with its water-filled belly had almost finished scaling the silk rope. Doing Eshwar's job, Gaman's old job, would give her something to do for half an hour at least.
She walked through the grey soulless corridors, past the kitchen and lounge and down to the toxicology lab. The spider was already standing in the lab filling the space between benches and machines with its huge body and long hairy legs. Its eyes, all eight of them, swivelled to face Aalia and its mouth opened. It stood, motionless, waiting for her. She picked up a suction hose and stepped into the its mouth. Fangs, taller than Aalia dripped sticky liquid onto her face as she tried to attach the hose. He could eat her in a snap, the spider.
The fangs splintered into a shower of sparks and the suction hose bulged in her hands, twisting and writhing in time with her heart beat. More liquid splashed onto her face, sliding into the sacs under her eyelids and snaking down into her mouth. It was sweet and warm and it tasted like Gaman and she was light, so light, that she floated out of the spider's mouth and hung in front of his face and he winked at her with one of his eyes and it was a green, blue, turquoise, turtle-coloured eye and a turtle poked his head out of the eye and sniffed the air and nodded as he squeezed out of the socket and began swimming around the room. Aalia rolled onto her back and started swimming after the turtle, flapping her arms like fins.
She forgot why she was flapping so she stopped. She hung there, in the air, warm and mellow and yellow and light.
And then sounds crashed in. Someone was stomping and pounding right next to her head. Maybe inside her head. And that person had sandpapered her mouth and the inside of her eyelids. She opened her eyes and light stabbed right through her skull, sawing at the grey mess inside. She closed her eyes and opened her mouth to tell the stomping, sandpapering stabber to go and inject their eyeballs with capsaicin.
The lights dimmed. "Welcome back," said a soft voice inside her head.
She pushed herself up into a crouch. Throbs pummelled her brain. She laid back down and pressed her forehead against something soft and flat.
"Where's Eshwar?"
"Busy."
"He needs to test the water."
"All test results have been confirmed. Water is clean. We have a full load and are halfway between the orbits of Pluto and Neptune."
Aalia sat up again and ignored the army of pick axes hacking at her head. "But it's contaminated. Hallucinogenic compounds. Wait, how can we already be halfway between Pluto and Neptune?"
The ship made a non-committal noise, a little like a cough.
"They'll kill us if we take back toxic water. Did Eshwar authorise this?"
Another cough.
Rage burned through Aalia, sweeping away the pickaxes. She stood and staggered out of her quarters and ripped open the door of the room next to hers. It was empty. So was the kitchen, the lounge, the lab and the gym.
She found him at last in the control room, sitting in the captain's chair, grinning at her.
"Man, how much did you have? You've been out for months. I was starting to worry you wouldn't wake up but Slake said you were fine. She's been monitoring your vitals and your brain activity."
Aalia felt a scalding hate for this small man sitting in front of her with his potato coloured skin and his ridiculous purple eyes. "Isn't that your job? You're the doctor on board."
"Don't get all high and mighty on me. I didn't see you do much of the taking off or navigating on the way here."
"That's because you've been off with one of the human proxies the whole time." Aalia was shaking. Eshwar looked at the floor while her words bubbled over him like lava. "Do you know what the penalty is for bringing contaminated water? For wasting Congress' resources?" Aalia leaned over Eshwar, her hands on the arms of the captain's chair. She spoke very softly and stared into his eyes, purple irises ringed by blood. "Your life." She stood up. "And mine."
"They've already taken my life. And this water is not toxic. It's a gift. It takes you wherever you want. We need that. Imagine how much this is worth. How much people would pay for this."
"You'll never get it past customs, you idiot."
"Government employees aren't known for their intelligence. I'm sure Slake can outsmart them."
"You aren't sure of shit. You've never done this before."
Eshwar picked up a glass, leaving a wet ring on the control pad. "That's right. This is my training run. I am not the responsible officer on this mission." He lifted the glass to his mouth. Aalia smacked it out of his hand before he could drink. He watched the glass smash on the floor and the water splash up the walls. "No matter," he said. "There's plenty more where that came from."
Aalia wanted to smack his head and smash it against the wall like the glass.
"Empty the hold," she commanded without speaking. "And turn around. We are going back to collect clean ice."
A whiny wheedling voice entered her head. "I'm sorry but I can't do that. We would miss our delivery date by eight months if we turned back."
"I'm the commanding officer," Aalia said out loud. "And I command that you release the contaminated ice and turn back."
The ship hummed, or perhaps it said nothing and the humming came from Aalia's own ear drums.
"Connect me to the Water Corps ground control."
The emergency sprinkler system opened and misted the room with liquid. Aalia covered her face with her arms and headed for the door but it snapped shut in her face. She huddled on the ground face down.
"I won't drink it," she shouted in her head.
And she didn't drink it. But the liquid weaved its way into her ears and her eyes and her mouth and the floor buckled around her, bending and flexing to bounce her up into the stars. The stars weren't so hot after all. Or big. They were palm-sized fireflies whizzing around her, spiralling into a vortex that sucked her inside. In the middle of the vortex, Aalia found Gaman.
He led her into a room made of blocks of stone held together by something sticky. The stickiness stretched out of the walls, running between Gaman and Aalia and rows of chairs and a block at the front of the room where Eshwar lay sleeping, holding them all together inside its web. Aalia pushed against the web. It was soft and springy but it didn't give way, even when she pushed with her whole weight. Eshwar lay on his block in a red velvet suit. A bunch of flowers covered his chest. Aalia giggled. Flowers and velvet didn't suit Eshwar. Why wasn't he moving? It was time to wake up and fix the water. Three people standing beside him turned to look at her, frown lines disfiguring their faces. They had cried, these people, and their tears stuck to the web in front of them, suspended in space.
There was another man near Eshwar, not part of the crying three. He stood next to them but not with them. There were no tears in front of him. He wore a long robe and a shiny golden cross on his chest. "Taken away too soon," he said. "Performing the highest service for our people. More tears gathered in front of the trio, bowing the web, threatening to break it.
And she knew why Eshwar wasn't moving.
The web started to wind around her throat and up into her nostrils suffocating her. Aalia opened her mouth and screamed. Gaman lifted her from behind, covering her mouth and carrying her out of the church. He put her down on the moss-covered hill outside. The sky was high and blue and clear. There was no web out here.
Gaman laid one hand on Aalia's cheek. "I'm sorry," he said. "I never meant for him to die. I didn't know he would take too much."
Aalia stared at Gaman, at this face she loved, at this man who had waited for her, and she tried to understand what he was saying.
"I only wanted him to be decommissioned so they would have to take me back."
Wind floated through the sky, blowing around Aalia, making her sway.
"We went to that comet fragment a few cycles after you joined the ship. We couldn't take the water because it was laced with a chemical, a neurotoxin that must have come from a simple organism like bacteria. The fragment must have been in a habitable space once."
"The ship," Aalia said. "You and Slake."
Gaman cradled Aalia's head in his hands and rested his forehead against hers. "I can't live here if you aren't here."
A tiny red brown spider scuttled up Aalia's leg and bit her thigh. She brushed the spider off and pushed Gaman away.
"I need some water," she said.