“Oh, lady,” says the old man. “You pile up heads like dust.”
And somewhere the last of Utu-Samesh goes into the dark like a stone skipped on a lake—far, and far, and farther still, and sinking.
* * *
“And what then, Sarge?”
“Well.”
“Well, what.”
“Well, then she won.”
“Obviously she won, she’s our captain now, but how? Scorpion’s dead, she’s killed her kid brother in the blast, and then what?”
“Scorpion’s dead, shipmind’s crippled and might as well be dead, yeah.”
“Yeah. But the old man—”
“The old man was like, Fuck this for a loss, keep the ship as your inheritance and I’m done with you—”
“Which is why we’re done with him!”
“Labbatu’s the greatest of all the mercenary captains that ever came out of the House of An!”
“—pretty much—”
“She kill him, Sarge?”
“Oh, fuck no, she stuck him on her gunship and spat him out in the nebula to suck up enough helium to buy a ticket somewhere civilized. Old man’s somewhere on some rich soft planet now, minding his own business. Last I heard.”
“I don’t believe it. Our Labbatu? After what Daddy An did to her first crew, she just lets him slide?”
“He was the only blood family she got left, after what happened to Utu-Samesh. After she happened to Utu-Samesh. I think—and I never asked her about it, seems really impolite—she didn’t want to bathe in kin-blood ’less she had to. Robbing him of his power and this flagship was enough.”
“Huh. Maybe. . . . And Ash-Iku? What happened to him?”
“Oh, him. Him, he hears from his thug, the one who has a mouth that still talks, and he’s like, Fuuuuuck me, Labbatu, I guess you won this one.”
“More like, Oh, please, fuck me, Labbatu, your genitals, look how amazing they are, I admit I’ve been overmatched, girl, dang—”
“Uh-huh. Sure. Anyway he’s like, Your greatness is unparalleled—”
“And so is your cunt!”
“It is the captain. No one could compete with our captain anyway, in genitals or in anything else. . . .”
* * *
against those who are disobedient to her
she stirs confusion and chaos
she speeds carnage and incites the floods
she is clothed in terrifying radiance, a furious storm, a whirlwind,
she is clothed in the garments of ladyship.
She cuts to pieces those who show her no respect.
A south wind, an unharnessed lion, a leopard of the hills
a pitfall for the rebellious, a trap for the hostile.
My lady, let me proclaim your magnificence.
Who can compare with you?
Rest upon the lapis lazuli of your dais
let your divine dwelling place say to you:
Be seated.
Anonymous praise poem, adapted from the Sumerian
(Old Earth, approximately 4300 years before planetbreak)
AUTHOR’S NOTE
* * *
“Inanna Takes Command of Heaven” and “Inanna and Enki”—the two Sumerian myths (well, the two fragments of epic poetry) this story is constructed out of—are not the usual, expected Inanna myth, the one where the Queen of Heaven descends to the underworld and confronts her dark sister Ereshkigal. These two are older and more fragmentary. They’re origin stories: the first being an explanation of how Inanna became Queen of Heaven in the first place, and the second being about how Inanna stole all of human knowledge (in the form of me¯s, specific cultural aspects like “victory” or “weaving” or “prostitution” or “beer brewing”) from Enki, the god of knowing-things, and kept them to disperse as she liked. Inanna in these stories is a wild thing, sexually voracious, vicious and proud, sneaky, arrogant, unashamed. She is all these things and also a woman, though a woman who possesses masculine characteristics without difficulty. She is a kinslayer and a lover at once. I wanted to write that woman, before questions of underworlds and dead husbands to retrieve. That woman is the sort of woman who captains starships. It was simple to imagine a space opera version of these stories, especially when I wove them together. And since they come to us in fragments of poetry, distorted over time and through retelling, this version too is distorted, fragmentary, and retold.
* * *
ARKADY MARTINE
WILD TO COVET
BY
* * *
SARAH GAILEY
THET IS WAS A WILD thing washed up out of the wheat. Not the strangest gift to walk out of the field—no white bull was she—but strange enough. It was Cor Ellison’s field she wandered out of at dusk, looking all of five years old but with eyes that stared right through you like she’d been to war, and Cor took her in. He always took ownership of what came out of his wheat, whether what he took wanted to be an owned thing or not, and the girl was no exception.
Young Thetis was a barefooted, tangle-haired creature, howling at the moon and curling her lip up at mittens in the winter. She’d look out the window at the hills one morning and that night be gone, back a week later with mud in her eyebrows and a cape’s worth of rabbit pelts slung over one shoulder. When her baby teeth started falling out, she took to yanking the loose ones herself and tossing them into the hearth before they could fall out. She nearly cut her thumb off trying to free a wolf from a trap just off the edge of Cor’s property. Not a soul doubted her when she said it was the trap that got her and not the wolf. No one had ever heard of a wolf brave enough to bite Thetis.
Thetis wasn’t a domesticated creature, but she was curious about tameness, a fox nosing around a dog’s kennel. She watched close when people’s noses turned red and sniffly, and her eyes got catlike tracking the way folks stepped to avoid puddles. She felt fabric between the pads of her fingers and tasted anything anyone would offer her, and it was as if she’d never lived before, which it’s fair enough to say she hadn’t. For all that she tossed her neck at shoes and hairbrushes and handkerchiefs, she was fascinated, too, and folks said that Cor kept her knee-deep in pocket watches and pepper grinders just to keep her from running off back into the wheat for good. So long as she had something new and small and human to study, Thetis stuck close. She wandered plenty, but she always came back.
The problems started right on time. Thetis started to go from creature to girl, and it was a small town, and nearly everyone in it had eyes. She was never quite pretty, but she was something to notice even when she wasn’t walking into church with a fresh-trapped pheasant in her fist. There were cornfield whispers in the way she talked, and the tilt of her head was hawk-sharp. Once her legs sprouted up coltish, looking turned to staring and staring turned to talking, and people understood without having to say so that she was going to be a woman to watch out for sooner than later.
Uncle, who lived on the farm with Cor and Thetis, got her a dress to replace her poor abused overalls. It only took him a day and a half of shouting and door-slamming to convince her to wear it to church, which per Thetis’s usual habits was a formality of a fight. She was softened by the beauty of the thing, by the ribbons and layers of floating linen. She walked into the service in that dress looking almost like she’d taken to the bridle—but the prettiness of it was scarred by the leaves stuck to her feet, and by the barn owl that perched on her shoulder, his wicked talons drawing blood. She didn’t flinch at the owl’s grip.