Nine in Number
A trail of nine freckles curls down the shadow of your spine, some so small they might not be counted as proper at all, but I count them, one by one by one, with fingers and lips and tongue.
It will change everything, you say. Your back arches under my firm kiss on the fifth freckle, this near the curve of your waist. This freckle tastes like salt.
Yes, everything, I say, and slide lower, counting the freckles aloud. But maybe nothing, I add, your fingers moving through my loose hair, a fist and then fingers blossoming open when you can't hold on, have to let go because you always let me go in the end. What if I let the intel go? What if we stayed on our side of the galaxy? What if we stopped counting other worlds and focused on our own?
Your mother—
I don't want to talk about my mother.
Her blood is no longer on my hands, but some nights I feel it. Tonight, I don't, only because you're in my hands and I'm counting freckles and not potential planets. I can't see my mother sprawled on the ground, her life's blood spreading blue as oxygen sparks color into it, into the documents she killed for. The documents I also killed for.
Do you...
You trail off and I lift my head. I know what you're going to ask, your eyes shining like eclipsed moons in the half-light that falls over my bed.
Do I believe the scientists’ findings? Yes. My mother would not have killed if she didn't believe in it—wouldn't have killed to cover it up if she didn't believe that life existed beyond this world we know. It terrified her, that life could do that—be something we couldn't control, but how can you control anything? Can you control the way you feel when my tongue slides past that ninth freckle?
Nine freckles like the nine smudges of light they pulled from the night skies; nine dreams, nine hopes. Maybe eight, they argued—one is so very small and distant and impossible. Only one lingers in the zone of habitability, only one gleams vaguely blue and green even at this vast distance. Oxygen and nitrogen and warmth and liquid water and maybe, maybe life.
My fingers slide down over your belly, over the life that may even now spread within you.
They will know I killed her, they will know she killed the others; she smashed their telescopes, and meant to burn their research, but I couldn't allow that, could I? Not if I mean to rule in ways my mother never did.
I don't have to ask you; we've had this conversation before, and you won't stop me. You won't stop me from walking out that door in the morning and telling the world what they found, what she tried to cover up, what I killed to reveal.
You won't stop me. But sometimes, oh how I wish you would.
© 2022 E. Catherine Tobler
About the Author
A finalist for the Sturgeon, Hugo, Nebula, Ditmar, Aurealis, and World Fantasy awards, E. Catherine Tobler has never won a blessed thing. She has published seven novels with small press markets, and co-edited the fantasy anthology Sword & Sonnet. Her short fiction collection, The Grand Tour, was published with Apex Book Company. She currently edits The Deadlands.