Unconstant Love

by Timothy J Meyer

  This, unsurprisingly, does comparatively little to cool him down. As the minutes wear on, Odisseus can feel an almost tangible pressure from above, the sun somehow strong enough to stoop his back and nearly drop him to all fours.

  At this rate, Odisseus would be lucky to survive fifteen minutes on the planet, not to mention the several days it would likely take to complete this phase of the caper.

  The same heat that completely staggers Odisseus only seems to vaguely irritate his companions. Moira’s mono-black ensemble’s not doing her any favors, the reek of sweat palpable on her. The Captain’s certainly the coolest and soon to be the most sunburnt. When push came to shove, Nemo neglected all the desert gear Odisseus recommended he wear, even for this short jaunt. Instead, he favors his ratty bathrobe and ratty t-shirt combo, with the notable addition of a pair of flipflops.

  The same heat that vaguely irritates the Ortok’s companions has zero impact on those gigantic cactus dudes over there.

  The crew of The Unconstant Lover stand in the shadow of their looming spaceship, clustered together amid what remains of the unmelted ice. Ahead, across a field strewn with brambles, stands a much larger cluster of fifteen-foot tall, ambulatory cacti.

  To a plant, they’re each sprouting six or seven or ten separate arms. To a plant, those arms carry a wide variety of gleaming bladed weapons. It’s their faceless trunks, spiny green flesh utterly devoid of expression or emotion, that’re the most unnerving.

  In truth, Odisseus might find this unexpected warband somewhat comical, were there not seventy of them, each three times his height and carrying a castle's armory worth of swords.

  For more than three minutes now, they’d stood at tense stalemate, neither party certain whether to make a move or, indeed, which move to make.

  “Nope,” sighs the Captain, slapping the Attaché fruitlessly against his hand.

  “Nothing?” mutters Odisseus, unsure whether the indigenous people actually have ears to overhear him with.

  “Not a thing,” confirms Nemo. “That’s for ‘cactus’ and for ‘natives’. Any other suggestions?”

  “Try ‘indigenous’?” suggests Odisseus with a shrug.

  “Aboriginals,” is Moira’s curt suggestion.

  “Um,” Nemo stammers, “can you spell either of those for me?”

  Thus far, the Attaché contained no mention of sword-swinging native barbarians or fifteen-foot cactus men or really any aboriginal population on Gi, no matter how exhaustively they searched its expansive files. In fact, none of the supposed experts they’d spoken to – not Gella Borsk, the booze baroness, nor Zuraga Tuss, her ex-spice ranger head of security – made any reference that could lead them to suspect such a presence down here.

  Considering how few people in the history of the galaxy have ever set foot on the planet, it’s perhaps understandable that Two-Bit’s notes on this particular phase of the caper were a little sketchier. Still, it’s difficult for Odisseus to consider the exclusion of an entire sentient species anything but a glaring oversight.

  Bloodshed looks like the only possible outcome here. The chances the two parties could or would communicate peacefully seemed microscopically low, considering the zero cultural touchstones between pirates and cacti. Moira’s not wrong, Odisseus supposes, in training Righty and Lefty on the eerily still forest of savages that somehow stares them down without actual eyes to stare.

  Instead of spelling out either word for Nemo, Moira simply sniffs twice and Odisseus looks up suddenly. One of the cacti, the one Odisseus subconsciously assumed to be the leader, advances a single step, bridging half the distance between its gang and theirs. On instinct, both Odisseus and Nemo draw weapons – his Wreckingball from his holster and his pistol from his robe pocket, respectively – to match Moira.

  The head cactus, meanwhile, brandishes its primary weapon – a haft of green wood, nearly its own height, fitted with a notched axehead. In one smooth movement of three arms, it stabs the weapon deep into the dirt. This done, it drops to its knees with a thunderous boom, empty hands upheld.

  “Um, hi and stuff,” Nemo greets dumbly, to seemingly no response from the enormous plant.

  Up close, Odisseus notices a few things about these weird-ass natives that dust and distance had hidden from him. He notices the dome of speckled blue flowers that sprout from the crown like a full head of floral hair. He notices the raiment, made from treated vines, and the vicious weapons hanging from every conceivable hook and loop – made of sculpted glass, he realizes now.

  What Odisseus notices most, however, is the smell. The scent is overly saccharine and extremely invasive, creeping into his nostrils and seeming almost to swim around his brain.

  He snuffs a moment, pawing at his nostrils and attempting to shake the sensation that something tangible has crawled into his nose and lodged there. To tell from their scrunched-up expressions, Odisseus is fairly certain his crewmates too have caught the scent. What makes these cacti so potent, the Ortok’s no idea, but the scent is instantly recognizable.

  “Moons,” the Captain comments, making no attempt to hide his disgust, “he stinks, doesn’t he? What is that?”

  “You’re telling me that you don’t recognize it?” Odisseus marvels.

  Moira blinks at him. “Should we?”

  {I am Foreplanter}, announces an unwelcome voice, somehow speaking from the base of the Ortok’s nasal gland, {and the auguries tell me that you must be Vesselborn and therefore venerable}.

  Thoroughly unnerved, the Ortok huffs and tosses his head a few times, trying to shake loose the speaker from where it perched inside his nose.

  “Did anybody else,” ventures an uncertain Moira, “smell that?”

  “I have no idea what that means,” stipulates Nemo, “but yes. Yes, I did.”

  {Your confusion}, continues the speaker, {casts a shadow of doubt. Do mine roots deceive me? We stand before your vessel, do we not?}

  “No, no, we do,” answers Nemo, addressing his response toward the kneeling cactoid barbarian. “She’s mine, alright.”

  {Then it is to you that we owe obeisance}, the speaker concludes, now confirmed to be the cactus by the deeper bow it makes. {We are the Gitter of the Skyscratch grove. I must be forgiven – we are come equipped for water-hunting, I am afraid, not for ceremony}.

  “That’s cool,” forgives a confused Nemo with a wave. “No big.”

  On some unspoken cue, the entire raiding party, clustered behind Foreplanter drops or sheathes their naked weaponry. There’s a minor seismic shock as three score cacti drop simultaneously to their knees, mimicking their tribal leader’s own pose.

  Only one cactus still stands tall. Towering over his kneeling comrades, the eight-armed dissenter is immediately distinguishable by the painful spread of puckered burn marks that mar a substantial portion of its trunk. Its harness clinking together, it advances angrily through the cluster of its companions. When it comes within range of the Ortok’s noise, Odisseus is nearly bowled over by the fierce spike of its signature scent.

  {Obeisance? Use thine roots, old fool! Never before have Vesselborn–}

  {Lean thy place, Firstseed Flamescar}, Foreplanter urges, its own aroma now swelling in the Ortok’s nose. {Why must you ever, in the presence of the Vessleborn, bring shame to the Skyscrat–}

  {The presence of the Vesselborn?} the one called Firstseed Flamescar retorts, thrusting a spear towards the Lover’s crew and nearly earning a salvo from Lefty in the process. {These infidels are no Vesselborn – that much is plain! Whither come the Vesselborn without harness? Whither come the Vesselborn as passengers upon God Beyond’s tears, like some crawling parasite? Whither–}

  One rooty foot after another, Foreplanter rises from his crouch and confronts the vastly shorter Flamescar. All the while, Odisseus feels the argument rage back and forth within his nasal passage, both scents fighting for dominance. Something’s in there, the Ortok’s convinced. Something foreign has made a new home atop his sensitive receptors and, no
matter how much he sniffs or sneezes or throws his head around, he cannot seem to evict it.

  Before long, the combined fourteen arms of the two cacti are filled with glassy blades. {I draw breath yet, Flamescar, and I’ll suffer no upstart–}

  {A mere sixarm deserves not the honor of Foreplanter–}

  The report of a familiar firearm stops the scuffle immediately. Nemo stands, pistol upraised, cloud of ditrogen wafting in the yellow sky. Both Foreplanter and Flamescar stand stock still, all fight stolen from them. A heartbeat later, Odisseus nearly drops to his knees from the combined stink of the cacti’s accumulated fear and awe at Nemo and his comparatively crappy firearm.

  “Let’s get one thing straight,” the Captain announces to his captive cactoid audience. “I am the Vesselborn here and nobody dies,” he declares, lowering the smoking pistol, “unless I kill them.”

  {I humbly beg the Vesselborn’s forgiveness}, Foreplanter immediately acknowledges, as though its rival had vanished in a puff of smoke. {Were Firstseed Flamescar any wiser, many a lesson it might have learned from its namesake, the numerous past lessons given at your hand}.

  “No kidding,” agrees Nemo with an uncomprehending grunt.

  At this insult, Odisseus detects a fresh surge of outrage from the scarred cactus. It shuffles backward into the crowd and makes no objection, however, save refusing to kneel.

  “So,” Odisseus murmurs, “do we have any idea what the bloom ‘Vesselborn’ is supposed to mean?”

  At least Nemo’s honest. “Sure don’t.”

  “The spice rangers,” provides Moira flatly. “They come from spaceships, they’re vaguely humanoid, they wear harnesses. The only offworlders these guys would’ve had any contact with.”

  “Yeah,” Nemo agrees, a moment later. “I mean, obviously.”

  “You see that shit they’re wearing?” Moira indicates Foreplanter with the snub of her pistol. “Look familiar to you?”

  “Uh,” stammers Nemo. “It’s grass and leaves and sticks and shit.”

  “Grass and leaves and sticks and shit,” Moira agrees, “designed to resemble a spice ranger’s harness. It’s idol emulation,” she explains slowly. “They worship the spice rangers.”

  “As gods?” Odisseus wonders.

  “As something. Who blooming knows?”

  “That still doesn’t answer,” Odisseus points out, “how in all the moons of Jotor we’re understanding them.”

  “Well, no,” Moira concedes. “Spores? Pheromones?”

  “What,” scoffs Nemo, “like Phnuki porn stars have? Maybe I’m in the minority here but I ain’t exactly overcome with the urge to fuck any of these big spiky–”

  {A thousand pardons and more, most noble Vesselborn}, begins Foreplanter, in a strangely polite manner, {the warriors of mine grove has emerged but recently from battle most victorious against the thorncloud. We would all rejoice at the chance to drink deeply of this holy water thou hast so graciously provided us, the beleaguered souls of the low–}

  “Bloom me out,” comments Nemo, as overwhelmed by the formal speech as Odisseus is by the contradictory smells. “Be my blooming guest.” He sweeps an arm aside, towards the heaps of melting ice that’ve collected all around the base of the Lover.

  Given this permission, the entire cacti crowd shuffles forward, eager to sink their roots into the muddy earth. They hardly make three steps before a second gunshot stops them all in their tracks. A wispy trail of yellow ditrogen snakes into the air between the two parties, a patch of bleached dirt now blasted black.

  “On one condition,” sneers Moira, the barest hint of a smirk on her lips. “We need a–”

  Odisseus places a paw correctively on Moira’s shoulder. “Favor. Say we need a favor.”

  Moira’s face crinkles in confusion. “What’re you on about? All we need is a–”

  “Let’s trust Odisseus this once,” the Ortok recommends. “Ask them for a favor. To be collected at a later time, let’s say?”

  Scowling with distrust, Moira actually does as she’s bid. The cactoid crowd receives the news stoically, their attention focused on the quickly melting ice. {Of course, honored Vesselborn. We grow to serve}, is Foreplanter’s automatic response.

  Once they’re given the all-clear, the entire cacti grove come hustling forward. The Lover’s crew are actually forced to scoot aside, lest they be trampled by the gargantuan plant-men. Regrouping a few feet away, at the edge of the Lover’s shade, Nemo, Moira and Odisseus watch the cacti warband jostle for position, seeking the wettest patches to sink their rooty feet into. As they drink their fill, waves of aromatic pleasure assault the Ortok’s nostrils.

  “Care to explain to me,” Moira hisses, as soon as she supposes they’re out of earshot, “why we need an unspecified favor, instead of a blooming Gitter tree?”

  “A Gitter sapling,” Odisseus corrects.

  Nemo’s scowl suddenly matches Moira’s. “And?”

  “Have you not smelled these guys?” Odisseus wonders, nudging his muzzle in the cacti’s general direction, all distracted by their delicious space water.

  Nemo’s description is elegant in its simplicity. “Yeah. They stink like ass.”

  “Why, Odi?” prompts a frustrated Moira. “What do they smell like?”

  “Gitter,” Odisseus supplies. “Raw and unprocessed, yeah, but it’s Gitter.”

  Both his companions deepen their scowls at this and, much as it may disgust them, sniff a little deeper of the pungent odor. Odisseus watches the realization dawn on them both – Nemo first, Moira second – as they recognize that familiar aroma, the one found at the bottom of every bottle of Gitterswitch Gin.

  “Bloom me out,” murmurs Nemo.

  “It’s the flowers,” explains Odisseus. He points a claw toward the blooming crown of the closest cactus, its host of blue speckled flowers wafting slightly in the breeze. “That’s where the smell’s coming from, anyway. Probably what’s allowing us to communicate and, I wouldn’t be surprised, is probably the base form of the spice.”

  “Which means?” presses Nemo, his face still scowling.

  “We don’t need to go looking for the trees,” Moira realizes. “They came looking for us.”

  “I mean, that’s even what they call themselves,” Odisseus recalls. “The Gitter, remember, of the Such-and-Such grove?”

  “No fucking wonder, then,” Moira puts together, “that the Consortium is keeping all this shit under wraps. If they’re harvesting, what, their organs?”

  To that, Odisseus can only shrug. The volume of information still unknown about these unexpected inhabitants of Gi was too immense for him to draw any conclusion that he couldn’t immediately ferret out with his trustworthy sense of smell.

  In that moment, watching these gigantic cactoid savages squish and slosh about in the muddy water like Vapheads denied their paralyzing fog, Odisseus longs suddenly for the earlier stages of the caper. How much simpler did the molecular strip, the posing as a spaceberg, all the tumult aboard the Franchise, even the six week exile aboard the Lover, seem now, in contrast to this? Here, they were faced with an entire species of sentient desert plants that communicate by stinking and can swing half-a-dozen swords apiece.

  “Whaddya suppose Two-Bit would say,” Nemo wonders, reading his saltbrother’s mind, “were he here right now?”

  “Nothing intelligible, I expect,” predicts a sour Moira, “since I’d be throttling the shit outta him.”

  “Hm. Well, there is actually one more thing we–” Nemo realizes. Drawing the Attaché from his pocket, he starts to punch some more letters into its search function. Odisseus stoops over his shoulder and watches him painstakingly type “G-I-T”. Before Odisseus can warn him of the fruitlessness of such a search, the caper files immediately start to spike with thousands upon thousands of results – “Gitterpeach”, “Gitterspice” and “Gitterswitch” first among them.

  “Oh,” realizes Nemo, a little forlorn. “Sure.”

  {Most noble Vesselborn
}, Foreplanter’s voice somehow interjects from within the Ortok’s nose. He glances upward to see all the cacti have stopped moving and now stand, eerily still. {We are now watered and refreshed and wish to return to our nursery, to share this bounty with our saplings}.

  This word stops all three in their tracks. “Saplings, you say,” repeats Nemo, his voice piqued with interest.

  {In accordance with our custom, thou hast our humble invitation to come and make great ceremony with us}, Foreplanter extends to them, gesturing discreetly with several of his six arms. {Doubtless, thou hast much divine work that begs attending but it would greatly please mine grove and me were thou to accompany us there and receive our ceremony}.

  Nemo doesn’t need to glance back to his allies for confirmation, this the only and most solid lead they were likely to find. “Lead on, then.”

  Moira feels woozy and isn't sure why.

  Many times in her checkered past had Moira Quicksilver endured all manner of debilitating buhoxshit, ranging from near-fatal blood loss to heavy anesthesia. Under her current circumstances, Moira would have assumed she's suffering mild to severe heat stroke but something about this diagnosis doesn't quite feel right.

  Something about her symptoms feels uncomfortably familiar to Moira.

  She didn't notice anything was amiss at all until she was slogging uphill through knee-high sand for the fourth consecutive hour. Every step of their overland journey was a battle – against fierce desert squalls, against rugged terrain, against the punishing sun. Even once that sun started to sink in the sky, the planet's conditions became no less brutal, the baked sand radiating as much heat as the noonday sun ever did. Then there's the inhospitable countryside they journeyed across – mountainous foothills, part sand dune, part volcanic crag.

  Heat stroke, with a side order of fatigue, seem like the obvious answers, then. Were she suffering heat stroke, however, Moira would expect more nausea, more headache and a lot more signs of dehydration. A constant fear whenever embarking into the trackless desert, Moira made a specific point to keep hydrated with her aquafier, its effects somewhat depleted in the planet's parched climate.