Bastion Science Fiction Magazine - Issue 4, July 2014 by Alex Hernandez George S. Walker Eleanor R. Wood Robert Quinlivan Peter Medeiros Hannah Goodwin R. Leigh Hennig Read Free Book Online Page B

asked, clearly trying to lift the scrutiny away from them.
    “No.” She provided no further information.
    It donned on Ignacio that there was no sign of this large school the marine creature had spoken of. There were no other towering spines on the horizon, no thrashing tails. Wahgohi was alone with these foreign primates. “Are you sure you want to carry something so different?” he asked, sympathetically. After all, it was her body that would play host to aliens. He wanted to shudder at the thought, but his exoskeleton held him tight. “Could you love something not entirely Mokoani?”
    “I’m not sure anymore,” her voice broke like waves, like his heart. She started to shove the ramp with her short pelvic fins, awkwardly squirming her bulk back into the sea. “I’m sorry,” she offered.
    “No wait!” Ojore fought the current her shifting immensity created and splashed toward her, reaching out to her cold, resplendent scales. “Let’s keep talking. We’re good people.”
    Ignacio went after him. Ice seeped into his chest as he moved deeper. He seized the struts of his husband’s exoskeleton and pulled him back with all his strength just as the sentient fish vanished beneath the waves.
    He held Ojore’s shivering frame. Another failure. More hopes dashed. How much of this could their relationship take? He knew the next few months were going to be hard. His eyes caught sight of the jeering protesters—the righteous childless—bobbing the distance and read, “This is unnatural selection!”
    “Why did you have to ask her that?” Ojore yelled through clattering teeth. There was more anger in it than Ignacio could bear.
    He closed his eyes. “I needed to know, all right? I need to know our child will be loved.”
    “You didn’t have to hit her with the heavy stuff on our first meeting!”
    “Look, she was right about one thing: we’re not going to be a huge part of our child’s life. If anything, we’re the surrogates here. I just want to make sure we pick the right mother, you know?”
    They held each other in the frigid artificial pond on a crushing alien world. No one spoke. Neither wanted to contact Nakamura and admit defeat. There was nothing but static and surf all around.
    Then a row of sapphire spines sliced though the gelatinous water.
     
    #
     
    Wahgohi was an ebony ghost floating in the darkness, swathed in a thousand pinpricks of bioluminescent microorganisms. Even though they were 2,900 meters under water, Ignacio couldn’t help but think of her as a gigantic starship moving through space, which was rather ironic given that at that moment he was more vessel than anything else.
    “What is she doing?” asked Ojore over their private channel.
    “Eating, I think.”
    Wahgohi carefully herded a shoal of shiny slippers with spurts of electromagnetism into her gapping mouth. Yemaya flitted around her mother, zapping slippers with enthusiastic bursts of static, disrupting Wahgohi’s careful work, but managed to swallow one herself.
    “I did it!” she broadcast her joy on all channels.
    “Good job!” Ojore shouted and snapped his cybernetic fluke, launching himself toward their daughter. They wrestled and played in the jade gloom, scaring away the rest of their lunch. He tried to hug her, clumsy in his rig—it was half spacesuit and half torpedo—but she giggled and evaded with the grace of a dolphin.
    “Do humans usually praise their fry for things that are expected or is this shortcoming specific to Ojore?” The translator was able to capture the exaggerated frustration in her voice, but insisted on referring to their child as fry .
    “Oh, we’re going to spoil her rotten.” Ignacio coasted up to Wahgohi, hoping his visor hid his smile. “Hard to believe it’s been three months now; sometimes it feels longer—living in this suit is getting old—but she’s growing up much too fast.” They had taken six months of parental leave to swim with Wahgohi and Yemaya, from the