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  The job comes with an implant, punched into the fleshiest part of Chimezie’s thigh. It’s still aching as he walks down the quay to the waiting wormship. Iron-laced snow falls from the dark sky. Fever sweat freezes on his few exposed slices of skin: forehead, eyelids, the back of his neck. His breath is a ghost.

  He hopes the wormship is warm inside. Someone is working on the exterior, climbing among the slow-writhing cilia with a nutrient spray. When he gets close, they scuttle down the side—no safety harness—and jump down onto the quay.

  Chimezie’s crewmate for the six-month haul is wide-shouldered, slim-hipped, clad in company black. He catches a glimpse of a nonstandard protective mask before it pulls away from a porcelain face, nose blotched red. Her eyes are chemical yellow.

  “I’m Mola,” she says, and he realizes that despite her captaincy she is no older than he is. “Chimezie?”

  Chimezie nods.

  She offers the graphene contact point on the elbow of her company jumpsuit; he taps it and feels data slither into his hindbrain. The linked shipnet is simple. Bare-bones. His company profile joins Mola’s in the void and revolves there slowly like a vented corpse.

  “Just you and me and the Naglfar,” she says. “Welcome aboard. Watch your fingers.”

  She burbles in her throat, maybe a laugh, and jabs the wormship’s ventral curve. The entry expands like a wound, shunting steam into the perpetual winter.

  Chimezie climbs inside.

  * * *

  The job is a survey job. Detling & Dronyk have found a candidate for core-mining, a small rocky satellite with a bellyful of zinc. Because of archaic colonist legislation, the company—which is a sprawling digital organism, a mulctuary machine mind—is required to use two of its numerous human-flesh extremities to claim the moon in person.

  Mola explains this, among other things, while she shows him the Naglfar. Chimezie has to duck his head and fold his shoulders; the corridor needs dilating. Its glistening walls are lit from inside by a disease-green bioluminescence. Every so often, conduction fluid drips from the ceiling and splatters against his scalp.

  “The engine stalk starts out as an ovipositor, of sorts,” says Mola, a flitting shadow ahead of him. “It has to be flensed and refashioned to house the Schrӧdinger drive. Any eggs are rerouted back into its digestive system.” She turns over her angular shoulder. “We feed the Naglfar its own children. What do you think of that?”

  Chimezie has not been asked things for a long time. Mola’s chlorine-gas eyes are fixed to his. He imagines them seeping out into the air between them and burning his mucous membranes.

  “Wormships aren’t grown with brain anymore,” he finally says. “So the wormship’s not bothered.”

  Mola nods, seems satisfied. “It’s not bothered,” she agrees. “They do grow brain still, though. We just scoop most of it out.”

  * * *

  The Naglfar unwraps itself from the frosty pier and crawls up the sky, down Bheur’s curving gravity well. The cilia writhe and swell to inhale a last snatch of atmosphere. The burning tip of the engine stalk brands the dark firmament like a firefly.

  Chimezie is in his cabin, which is formed from a small pocket in the wormship’s flesh. The tilt of its floor and curvature of its dimensions seem designed to funnel him back out into the main. He suspects this is to encourage movement and interaction amongst the crew on their long journeys through impossibility. The bed, when he tests it, ends at his anklebones.

  He sets to unpacking his things. The company provided him a membranous stowbag three days ago, and from it he now pulls his spare boots and undershoes, his rumpled worksuit, his vapor pipe and a dozen cartridges, his nail-knife and epilator, his black-shelled moska, and finally the Object.

  The Object is fist-sized, angular, verdigris in color. It bears his own scarlet thumbprint, preserved under a tiny drop of smartglass.

  He is not sure of his Object’s purpose; the company briefing did not specify. He slots his other possessions into the small greedy holes palpitating beneath his bed, then takes his Object in hand and allows himself to be funneled out. He hopes that when Mola sees it, her reaction will offer a subtle gauge of its significance.

  * * *

  As he is leaving, a sort of spindly limb descends from the ceiling and strokes the space between his shoulder blades. He spins and reflexively grabs hold of it. The appendage is wickered with small keratin protrusions that somehow recall both teeth and nails.

  He releases his grip. It folds itself back to the ceiling, returns to slumber.

  * * *

  The induced gravity weakens at the wormship’s center. Chimezie is mostly adrift by the time he finds Mola in the galley, the backs of her thighs suctioned to a curved bench made of rubbery gray cartilage. The light is red and warm here, embryonic. One of the sunken walls is covered by elaborate cysts in a carnival of colors.

  Mola has a rough disc of collagen sitting on her lap. She jabs here and there with a needle, directing the living tissue’s slow creep across its wireframe, sculpting a familiar shape.

  “Are you settled?” she asks, eyes cleaved to her work.

  “Yes, enough,” Chimezie says.

  The cysts prove on closer inspection to be myriad masks, variegated in form. He sees one harsh and tangled, slitted eyeholes half-hidden in a nest of curlicued iron. He sees one yolk-smooth, with a pigmented red mouth and no other features. A mask with fluttering ears and telescoping lenses, a mask with cherubic cheeks and yellowed mandibles, a mask that could almost be Mola’s face, but split down the center by a gold-toothed grotesque emerging from its interior.

  “Hobby of mine,” Mola says, and holds up the unfinished one. “To while away a few hours on the long hauls.”

  Chimezie inspects the pallid lump. “You grow them from the ship?” he asks.

  “Yes,” Mola says, glaring at him now, perhaps thinking it an accusation. “A minute diversion of nutrients, well within the company’s waste allowance parameters.”

  “They remind me of the Elliptic Festival,” Chimezie says.

  The words dilute Mola’s harsh stare. “I’m unfamiliar with that one,” she says. “Is it common to Bheur?”

  “No,” Chimezie says. He is becoming comfortable with his voice again. “It’s common to Aker. Near the bacterial sea where I grew up. I freightered from there to Bheur seven years ago, to work.”

  Mola eyes him, estimating length of telomere. “As a child, then,” she says, resuming her own work. “And now you are on a wormship destined for the nebula’s farthest extremity. Do you so detest civilization?”

  “The pay is good,” Chimezie says. He pauses. “When you told me to watch my fingers, was that a joke?”

  “Oh.” Mola’s lips flex a smirk. “You and the Naglfar have been getting acquainted.”

  “An arm came down.”

  “Wormships are ravenous by nature,” Mola says. “How else would a beast evolve to burrow through the body of god? But you’re quite safe from its appetites.” She taps her needle gently against her thigh. “The implant sees to that.”

  Chimezie rubs the ache through his pantleg. “Oh,” he says. “Good.”

  * * *

  They increase the gravity before they eat together. Chimezie sits on the bench and a table unfurls from the floor, cratered with bowls. Mola fills them from a great membranous sack not unlike the stowbag in Chimezie’s cabin. The pinkish sludge slops and settles. He inhales the steam, suddenly wolfish.

  “You were eating by dole, down on Bheur?” Mola asks.

  “Same as everyone.”

  Mola breaks open a withered seedpod and shakes a familiar black spice into her bowl, then offers it to him. He does the same. The flecks curl and dissolve and the aroma puts a jet of hot saliva under his tongue.

  Mola pulls a shallow spoon from the end of the table. “Can I see it?” she asks. “The stoma?”

  Chimezie pauses, because for a moment it feels as if she is exchanging the spoon for the sight. But he is not ashamed, so he unhooks his shirt from his trousers and peels it chestward, exposing the small plastic beak nestled under his lowest rib. All workers on Bheur, whether they labor in the meat factories or hunt phantoms in simulacrum, bear the same artificial mouth. It’s efficient.

  “It’s very much like the Naglfar,” Mola says, eyes narrowed to yellow shards. “I wonder which came about first. Inspiration is so often cyclical.” There is an underpinned longing or jealousy in her voice, which she seems to hear and startle at. A curious flush spots her cheeks as she hands over the spoon. “Here.”

  Chimezie begins to eat, careful with the unaccustomed tendons of his jaw. The spice runs his nose and waters his eyes. The meaty-earthy taste, the fill-and-swallow satiety, offer a transportive comfort. He becomes nostalgic for childhood meals, fibrous things grown in volcanic soil.

  “We’ll dig our first hole once we’re past the ice cloud,” Mola says, slurring through a full mouth. “Then re-emerge in normal space about a kiloparsec on. Those recruiters down on Bheur, did they brief you on Schrӧdinger sickness?”

  “Bodily dissociation,” Chimezie says. “Minor hallucinations. Loss of time.”

  “All that and more.” Mola’s bowl is nearly empty; she tilts the table to get the dregs. “But unless we need to evade a Friar blocktrap, it should only be three or four holes to reach the planetoid. Ample recovery time in between.”

  “What are my duties during the haul?”

  “None,” Mola says. “I tend to the ship and to the Schrӧdinger drive. Your duties begin when we reach the planetoid.”

  Chimezie remembers the Object, and pulls it from his suit’s marsupium. “Do you know what this is?”

  Mola’s face shows no flicker. “A talisman,” she guesses. “Brought from your homeworld.”

  “It was given to me by Detling & Dronyk,” Chimezie says, recalling the prick of his thumb, the warm trickle. “When I bled my name for the job contract.”

  Mola’s high shoulders shrug higher. “We serve inscrutable masters. Are you finished eating?”

  Chimezie’s withered stomach is bulging, but the smell lures him back to his bowl. He spoons the last of it into his mouth and holds it there, relishing primal endorphins. On the sunken wall across from him, one mask parts its stained red lips as if to be fed.

  * * *

  The Naglfar has no true porthole, but there is a circular screen of smartglass, like a scrying pool, set in a dark heave of flesh. Chimezie watches there as the wormship emerges from the ice cloud. They are towing a frozen chunk behind them, chewing at it with toothed cilia, filling the bladders.

  Beyond them, the starry void. Chimezie was freightered from Aker to Bheur in hibernation, one of a hundred saline-veined demi-corpses, so he was not privy to the view. Now that he is untethered from any world, the immensity of the spaces between them—the eyeline of a nucleus to the edge of its electron cloud, an angstrom made carnate—staggers and terrifies.

  A thought is carried to him across that black sea: The wormship does not burrow because it is hungry. It burrows because it wants to hide.

  “I’m activating the drive,” Mola says, when she finds him at the glass. “You might do something to relax yourself. A drug, or a meditation.”

  Chimezie pats his marsupium, but the pouch holds only the Object; his vapor pipe and corresponding cartridges were left in the cabin. Mola reaches down past him and strokes the smartglass off, turning it back to an inert black slab. She pulls a swathe of the Naglfar’s skin across it for good measure.

  “I’d hoped to watch,” Chimezie says.

  “Nothing to see,” Mola says. “And it would damage the instruments.”

  She sits where she is; the floor bubbles up to meet her, forming a soft throne. Flesh envelops her feet and weblike ligaments bind her arms across her chest. Just when he thinks it might swallow her whole, it stops. Her exposed face, bloodless and unconcerned, peers out at him.

  “Is it a violent passage?” Chimezie asks.

  “No,” Mola says. “But you may feel a restlessness, as if every part of your body wishes itself displaced. The cocoon helps it pass.”

  He fingers the bruise on his thigh, then sits and lets the ship slither over him. He finds himself holding tight to his Object, as though it truly were a talisman from his homeworld, as though he’d arrived on Bheur with anything more than his emaciated body.

  He accesses the shipnet and sees time trickling through a geometric gauge, a countdown beside it in company numerals. He and mummified Mola stare at each other. The Schrӧdinger drive activates, and the wormship turns a universe inside out.

  Chimezie feels crackling pockets of emptiness all around him, all through him. There is a cavern behind his mouth, phantom limbs beckoning his real ones, sprouting from the same joints. He can’t inhabit the tempting spaces, but the Naglfar’s cocoon alleviates him of the responsibility.

  The feeling passes, in a minute or an hour, and Mola stands upright.

  “That’s it,” she says. “We’re tunneling now.”

  * * *

  Unreality is banal. Only the shipnet assures him they are churning through the underbelly of the universe; they could as easily be gliding slowly through real space or docked utterly still on the frosty piers of Bheur. Mola suggests he begin a sleep cycle.

  Chimezie circumambulates instead, trying to purge the last restless tremors from his legs by following the ship’s twisted innards. In the scant time since the Naglfar launched, its corridors seem to have widened themselves. He can walk tall without brushing his head against the jelly ceiling.

  More curiously, the corridors seem to cant downhill. As he was funneled out from the cabin, he is now funneled back toward it by whatever processes—algorithmic or biologic—govern the wormship’s mutable physiology. He decides not to begrudge it. He returns to his quarters.

  Inside the cabin, he places his Object on the shard-like shelf a half meter above the bed, then retrieves his vapor pipe and cartridges. He selects from among the latter. His reawakened nostalgia directs him to the cyan extract, which carries all the pungent sprawling eucalyptus groves of Aker in a tiny sarcophagus.

  He slots the metallic flake into pipe. Suckles at it. When the cold flume tickles his lungs he feels cold Bheur melt away, as if those seven years were sublimations. He returns in his mind to the village by the bacterial sea. He thinks: he was a happy child until circumstance intervened.

  Once the pipe has extinguished itself, and Chimezie’s head is softly electric, he retrieves his moska from below the bed. The artificial organism murmurs inside its glossy shell. He lies back as if for Procrustes, his tingling feet hung over a cliff, and places the moska on his bony chest. Two tiny hooks emerge from its shell. Like an embalmer, he guides them into his nostrils.

  They find the conduit to his hindbrain, the small silicon bundle built into all skulls at birth, and connect themselves. He descends into the dataflow. The shipnet offers its handshake; he ignores it. He prefers to keep his thoughts to himself.

  Here in the murmuring moska, buoyed by cannabinols, he peruses his own curated memories. He skips and sprints through transplant orchards, playing hide-and-find. He rides in a skimmer, slicing across bioluminescent waves with his white-haired nopa steering. He watches freighters descend from cloud-cloaked sky, their lumbering geometries so unlike the writhing Naglfar. He attends the Elliptic Festival, sees the leering lurid masks, one of them red-lipped.

  All the while, a digital lockbox drifts over his shoulder, home to those fragments of memory he hewed away from himself, quickly and clumsily, the very first time he used the moska. There is a reason some call it the memory eater.

  Chimezie thinks again of the wormship’s frenzied burrowing, its deep need to hide deep. In that way, more than by the stoma that interpolates his gut, he and the Naglfar are linked.

  * * *

  The moska drains his head of dreams and he sleeps well, curling fetal to fit the bed. He awakens absolved, to find the dimensions of the dim-lit cabin have contracted on all sides. Earlier this would have alarmed him, would have seemed the wormship’s aborted effort to smother him. But he recalls the cocoon, and intuits it as an embrace instead.

  He retrieves his epilator, scours his skin. The bristles fall slowly, lazily, carving back and forth in the air. Gravity has changed again. He dresses, and when he leaves the cabin to go to the scrying screen he finds it uncovered, displaying the smoky pillar of a nebula.

 

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