Accessing the Future: A Disability-Themed Anthology of Speculative Fiction Read Free Page B

to think he was going to wake her by flicking her nipples.
    “Haven’t even seen one like her in a while,” he said, rubbing his scrap glass eye, a sort of endearing nervous tic once you got to know him. “Kind of forgot they made ’em like this.”
    “With two eyes and two whole titties?” said Diallo. “Not every woman’s like your New Pelican dock-workers, Kell. Back up, man, an’ stop gettin’ in the light. This one’s never seen anything ugly as you.”
    Kell grinned. “I’m sure she’ll just love that child-fucker smile you got.”
    Rumer ignored their dick-swinging. “Who brought her?” he asked.
    Diallo shrugged. “She was the only thing alive on that boat, Captain, her and that mess o’ turtles.”
    Rumer frowned. “Bad time to have a hitchhiker, you forget that already? What’re you thinking we’re gonna do with her when we have to make our drop?”
    “Don’t ask me,” said Kell. “You ask me, we shouldn’t have the stuff in the first place.”
    “Right. But I didn’t ask you, and we do have the stuff, and we’re going to have to make a drop before much else happens.”
    “You mean before the shit’s no damn good to anybody, or before big Papa Kang figures out who took it and sends a team after us? Because I can guarantee you that second thing’s already happened.”
    “I’m thinking, Captain,” said Diallo, making the sort of diplomatic silencing gesture that made Rumer like him, “she is very far from home. She might help. With carrying, with distribution. In exchange for passage, you know.”
    Rumer cocked his head. Nodded.
    “It’s useful to have someone who looks like her, where we are going, what we are doing. People trust someone who looks like that. Nice pretty white face. They’ll take it from her. No need to tell her where it comes from.”
    “So she plays little White Mother for us, we put her down wherever she wants, she goes on home having gratefully agreed to tell nobody, and everybody’s happy and still alive, is that it?”
    Diallo grinned wide and white. “She won’t even have a ship’s name to tell her mother.”
    “It might work,” said Rumer. “If we don’t run into any transit police or any Peacekeeping Officers she feels like chatting to.”
    “Why would she talk to any Blueberries?” asked Diallo. “Why leave the ship at all? We are just some nice men of varying degrees of handsomeness taking her to port.”
    Kell laughed at that, his loud bulldog bark. “I’ll agree with that! Why leave the ship at all? Hell, I’ll teach her to have fun sittin’ in one spot.”
    “You’ll wait ’til she’s awake, you ugly fuck,” said Rumer. “If she don’t immediately bite your balls off and run screaming from your very presence.”
    Kell laughed again, louder and longer. Rumer turned to Diallo.
    “She’ll get her ride, but she’ll have to work. You think you can get her to work?”
    Diallo paused. The girl’s green eyes flickered open. And she sat up.
    Or rather, she tried to sit up, squirming strangely for several minutes before going limp, and saying, in a slightly strained voice: “Could one of you please help me up?”
    Nobody moved for a second. Diallo took her by the arm, and when that proved insufficient, grabbed her by the armpits, and propped her against the corner. Her feet were bare, and her legs dangled off the edge of the bunk, limp and pale. “Thank you,” she said.
    Diallo answered with a nod.
    The girl looked around her, not exactly frightened. Not exactly . But looking a little like she’d been thrown into an icy gray lake, and was just now bringing her head up out of the water to discover which of them had done it to her. “Who… What… happened? Where is this?”
    Rumer thought it best to let her have it all at once. “I am the more-or-less captain, Rumer Pilgrim, and you are currently a passenger aboard my ship, this streamlined and classically engineered cargo vessel you see before you.”
    “Why…?”
    “Well,