Strange Noises Fiction by Rachel Greenham

“Sam…”

She’s sitting by the stove in the kitchen. I’ve sent Asuti on into the house.

“I’m really sorry, okay? I didn’t mean to—”

“I know.”

She’s still angry then. Do I go to her, plead with her? Would it just make her angrier, saying that I was ‘doing the bishoujo thing’ again?

“You’re not going to… go away, are you?” I ask; my real fear. Don’t leave me. My voice shakes.

Now she looks at me. “Where would I go?” She looks thoughtful. No, she’s performing looking thoughtful. “Hmm, I could go around breaking into old tombs and seeing if there are any pretty girdles lying around for me to try on.”

“Oh Sam.” In the game, one of the random artifacts the players might find in a treasure haul was a Girdle of Femininity – or Masculinity, whichever quality the character that first foolishly tries it on most lacks.

I don’t know why, but I go round the table to Sam. I kneel on the hearth-rug next to her feet and rest my head on her knee.

After a moment I feel her hand rest on my head, and stroke my hair a little.

“I’m sorry,” I whisper.

“It’s not your fault.”

Except…

“Asu… ti is going to grow up into a man’s body,” Sam says. “There’s nothing on this Earth that can stop that.”

“A Satthei can,” I say.

Pause. “Huh, the oil, yes. She can make him a chemical eunuch. Is that the only choice?”

I nod, my head moving against her knee. A Satthei would take him, being a windsinger, and he would grow up an androgyne. And that’s probably the least worst option available.

Or there’s the surgical kind of eunuch, which slavers do to the male kids they take to make them more manageable, or so the stories tell it. If we’d been taken on the atoll, maybe they would have done it already. And Asuti would probably have bled to death, or be dying even now from an infection in the hold of a slaver ship.

I’ve already thought about this, lying on the cabin roof, looking at Asuti’s back as she watched the water, deep in her own thoughts, thinking that even that, even that risk might come to seem to her to be preferable to the long coming betrayal of her own growing body.

I might have chosen it. I’ve sat in the bath with a long, sharp kitchen knife held to my genitals, not much older than Asuti is now, trying to be brave enough and stupid enough to drive it into the deformity.

Only ever when my parents were in the house, so my screams would have brought help, and someone who could call an ambulance. There’s stupid-desperate and there’s just moronic.

“I’ve been talking to the others,” Sam says. I think it’s easier for us to talk when we’re not looking at each other sometimes. “Chi was on Master Retican’s ship too. She says Asu… Asuti’s been dressing as a girl on and off for the last three years, going by that name, on-ship. People noticed, because most kids – most marketeer kids even – don’t gender-play that long. But no-one had a problem with it until Beni came aboard. So… So I guess I owe you an apology.”

I sit up straight on my heels and look at her. “She means well,” I say.

Sam nods. “This isn’t back home. There just isn’t the same kind of… bullshit about, um, these kinds of things.”

“Except what we bring,” I say softly.

Sam nods. “Beni’s not on some moral crusade here. She just… she worries that indulging Asuti now will just set her up for more hurt later.”

I shake my head. “I don’t have any memories of being a little girl,” I say. “Well, a few now I suppose, from Taniel. But… Scraps. I miss it. I’ve missed out on that forever. I want her to have memories she can treasure, whatever happens when she grows up. I want her to have those memories of being a girl at least for the time she’s got.”

Sam looks thoughtful about that, but if she has any thoughts in particular she doesn’t share them. “We agreed,” she says, “Asuti can be a girl, at least while it’s up to us. None of us are going to make it a problem.”

I sigh with relief. “I wish you’d waited until I’d got back before talking about it,” I say.

“I know, but you can get awfully defensive, and they’d get all deferential around you and nothing would get decided.”

I bite my tongue on any response. She’s probably right. It’s still not fair though.

“Anyway, Chi was advocate enough, I assure you. She laid it on the line pretty strong with Beni.”

“Chirasel?”

“Think there’s a bit of a marketeer vs islander thing going between those two. Different ideas about how to bring up kids… and most other things. Chi was all, ‘what right have you got to decide what Asuti wants to do? You were leaving Deregan anyway and Asuti’s my shipmate too, I have at least as much say as you do!’”

“God. Sounds intense.”

“Yeah, she can be.”

“Anyway, it’s decided,” I say, making sure.

“Yep.”

Silence.

“You know, you never called me a he, since coming here,” Sam says suddenly.

“Uh…” I have to scramble for an excuse. Luckily I find one. “You never asked?”

Her look says she hadn’t thought of that. “Heh. No, I didn’t, did I?”

“Is that… Do you want that?”

She looks thoughtful again. Finally she sighs. “Guess it would be confusing to the others. Leave it.”

I have to hide my relief. Whatever her mannerisms she has such a pretty face, and such a nice feminine figure, it would be hard to remember.

I wonder if that makes me a hypocrite as well.

No, I decide. Back in that former life I never expected anyone to treat me as female. I’d already decided I wouldn’t ask that of anyone until I could pass well enough to not make it impossibly hard for them. Even if that seemed an impossibly long way off.