In Space No One Can Hear You Scream by Hank Davis Read Free Book Online Page A

floated over to the water maker-cone and planted my feet against the ship wall. I pulled on the end of the bump. The ship wall dimpled out at my touch. I pulled harder. The cone grew in length, became more a tube than a cone. It reeled out like a hose, flowing from the material of the wall itself. I needed it to be long enough to reach Aleria.
    So I pulled it out farther and farther. I wrapped it around my elbow and a thumb, the way I’d seen Da roll up the extension cord for the leaf blower. The extension cord was orange. The hose was a light shade of gray. I missed colors.
    When I had enough length, I pushed off. I let the water hose trail out behind me as I sailed across the room.
    Aleria had flowed out of the globe and pushed off a way, like a couple of yard sticks away. She was beginning her after-feed stretch. I needed to catch her before she spread out to her full size. At the moment, she was about the size of one of those big rubbery exercise balls like Mom used to have. A Pilamies ball, or something like that.
    Aleria extended a sensing stalk in time to notice what I was doing.
    “Darling daughter, I said to bring a towel, not more water, now please—”
    “Stop calling me that,” I said. My voice was sort of a growl and it surprised even me. I’d never made that mean a sound before. “I’m not your child, and you’re not my mother.”
    I reached the end of my tether, the water tube. With a squeeze of my hands around the tube’s end—the end looked kind of a like the tip of an elephant trunk—I opened the spigot and let the water flow. There was back pressure behind it, and out the water came.
    Water doesn’t flow in zero g the way it does in gravity. Even before Aleria took me, I knew about zero g. I had seen Youtube videos from space shuttles and the space station and stuff in science class at school. But the one thing I had never seen was what water does when it meets something floating in zero g.
    It clings.
    It jiggles like crazy, but it won’t come off.
    You can’t shake it off. You can shake off a few droplets, but if there is enough of it, it isn’t going anywhere no matter what you do. Without something to absorb it and overcome that surface tension, water sticks like glue.
    It sticks like frog egg glop does to frog eggs, the gunk that holds the eggs together in a big clump. All for one. One for all.
    In the creek, or in some little kid’s water bottle.
    Living or dead.
    For a second, it seemed like Aleria thought I was trying to do something nice for her, something extra. She paused there, floating, out of the globe and maybe a yard or two away from it, but not completely expanded yet. She let me bathe her. And then I bathed the other side of her. I bathed her all over.
    And I kept the spigot open. It’s pretty simple. You squeeze the orifice and it relaxes some kind of stopper on the end.
    And when she tried to move, to ooze outward, the water went with her.
    I squeezed the spigot open, and then the bubble of water around her expanded. She was inside it, like a milky-white pit. It was jiggling around her, but it wouldn’t come off.
    I remembered those frog eggs.
    Oh, she struggled. She twisted and turned. On her own, all the squirming would have gotten her to a wall, certainly. If she’d been by herself in the ship, she would have had a scare, but even her random motion would probably have saved her, allowed her to intersect with a hard surface, an extended piece of the bridge pod, anything. And then one of her pseudopods would have been able to find a footing, pull herself free from the coating of water.
    But I was here now.
    I was careful and alert, like the teachers always wanted us to be during carpool pickup. I circled Aleria with the water hose. I used pressure from the water tube hose for flying around fast, and the strap holds the ship had grown for me all around the wall for anchoring myself when I needed to. The moment Aleria looked like she was drifting close to a wall, I sent