Accessing the Future: A Disability-Themed Anthology of Speculative Fiction Read Online Free PDF Page A

told her that wasn’t the right thing to say to someone like him.
    And when she’d asked where the toilets were, he’d gone into another dark narrow, metal closet where he lifted up the false floor to reveal the dark, deep, seatless hole.
    “How do I use that?” she’d asked, a little pale.
    “How did you sit the toilet in that big, fancy cruiser before it broke?” he asked.
    “It had a seat-back, and armrests, and a fall-guard. And… I usually have droids.”
    “Same general principle,” he’d said in an absolutely unbearable voice. “Squat, let loose, and get well out the way before you flush.”
    (She did end up doing it, a full hour and ten minutes later, squatted on all fours with her dress up over her head, one leg on either side of the hole. She felt marvelously defiant, even as she emerged to a round of sarcastic applause from the crew.)
    Margo had fully intended to keep to her closet-room as much as possible until they’d come to a UN Sky station. But whenever she asked Diallo, the grinning pilot, how close he thought the nearest one was, he would call her a little dictator and offer her some of his reconstituted soup (the sort of lumped up stuff that poor people ate before there were food labs). Also, Pilgrim Pilgrim and his one-eyed first mate seemed to be much more comfortable when she stayed put, and Margo didn’t see any reason to make them comfortable.
    So, she dragged herself all around that filthy, rusted-out ramjet, seeing what she could see.
    They were hiding something. Margo had figured out that much. They were carrying something—in the cargo bay, maybe elsewhere too—that they didn’t want found. There were a few too many halted conversations to ignore. A few too many badly suppressed glances in her direction.
    Not that they were afraid of her finding it, necessarily. Even if they’d known who she was, she doubted it would mean anything to most of them. Most stepped right around her and carried on with their work when she crawled by, looking down to grin at her only when she called out cheerfully to keep from being stepped on.
    But Kell and Captain Pilgrim had guessed something about her. The captain would straighten when he saw her, and ask her if there were any particular reason she needed to be there, wherever there happened to be. And Kell, whenever he came on her by accident, usually turned directly around and walked in the opposite direction.
    “You don’t let it bother you,” Diallo had tried to tell her. “You must excuse a degenerate like Kell. Raised on a prison colony, the American kind. No hope of learning good manners, no experience with women. His mother was not a very successful prostitute.”
    Margo smirked. “How can you be raised in a prison colony?”
    Diallo shrugged. “Perhaps his mother was also a less than successful terrorist. I can’t claim to know.”
    Margo studied his smile a moment. “But there areno prison colonies anymore.”
    “No?”
    “Not in UN space,” she said, sounding like a teacher even to herself. “The Security Council ruled a long time ago that abandoning prisoners on far-world correctional colonies constitutes inhumane punishment. The ruling was just upheld again the year I was born. It’s illegal.”
    Diallo smiled, or at least showed his teeth. “That is comforting to know. Thank you.”
    “It’s true.”
    “I’m sure you’re right.”
    “That’s the whole point of UN Sky. To make sure stuff like that doesn’t happen.”
    Diallo was silent for a moment, and then said, with irritating slowness, “As you say. It does seem to me that people will always discover a place to put away the things they do not want, so that they don’t come back again. But I’ve never been very clever with names.”
    Later, while she lay in her bunk trying to think of all the things criminals would not want UN Peacekeepers to find in their cargo bay (nukes, sonics, VX gas, high-power low-precision lasers?), Margo could not help thinking about