Unconstant Love

by Timothy J Meyer

  White smoke threatens to clog and overtake the close chamber, escaping only through the cracks in the ceiling high above. Cactus by cactus, the blaze overtakes the entire horde as Nemo and Odisseus stand, transfixed by the spectacle. Now and then, the Captain swats away a conflagrant cactus that staggers too close. Odisseus, meanwhile, nearly wretches from the combined stink of smoldering flesh and panicked, rapturous spores.

  {Cleanse us, Vesselborn! We are unclean! Free our unworthy souls for God Beyond!}

  Eventually, Moira’s fighting slows and stops, coming to gape at Nemo’s handiwork. The three of them stand there, watching the fireworks, a few score lives going up in smoke. Then Odisseus hears something, growing louder and more insistent over the crackling flames and general pandemonium.

  Nemo is laughing.

  It starts as a low chortle, somewhere in the back of his throat. It gains strength and mirth, however, the longer the fire burns. Soon, he’s cackling, clapping his hands delightedly, like a child playing peekaboo. He points, giggling, at a pair of Gitter that, blinded by smoke and flame, slam into one another and collapse to the mud.

  At its guffawing heights, it’s the sort of laugh a younger Nemo might have laughed. Odisseus could imagine it perfectly, echoing down an airlock during a boarding action or peaking the comm’s audioceiver during a dogfight or while watching the Valladian Shipping Line burn.

  Before long, all the swarming Gitter are reduced to heaped charcoal on the cavern floor or have gone shambling down the side passageways. Of those that escape, their flaming bodies light the passages as they stagger away, become giant waddling torches of their own.

  The three pirates are left bewildered at the center of a smoking circle of charred Gitter corpses, Nemo still twittering a little.

  “Where’d the, uh,” Odisseus ventures, his voice deafeningly loud in the sudden silence, “torch get to?”

  Moira sweeps an arm across the field of burning cactoids, a dozen open flames licking hungrily among them.

  Nemo takes this suggestion to heart. He wades into the ashes, looking for a likely candidate and wrapping his robe’s sleeve around his bare hand. The one he chooses, the grisliest choice possible, is visibly a Gitter’s hand, its withered fingers wreathed in flame.

  “So!” Nemo, bearing aloft his new torch, turns back to his comrades. “Which way’re we headed?”

  Moira can read the signs. With every step, she’s more and more certain she chose the right path.

  For one thing, the ground’s substantially muddier down this passage. The moss has given way to a slurry of free-standing water, occasionally trickling past them in little streams. For another, the vegetation’s begun to fall away, exposing more blank wet stone. This doesn’t, as Odisseus makes the point, lessen the stench of offal and fertilizer that comes wafting down the tunnel. Even this, though, Moira knows is another good sign.

  Lastly, the breeze grows still stronger. Beneath all the stink, that breeze ferries something else, something dusty and arid, to their noses, something that reminds Moira of the desert world above. By now, that breeze has become Moira’s guiding light, the beacon that will lead her from this dark underworld, no matter the path’s twists and turns. As long as Moira places her faith in that breeze, she and her train of followers will win through to the outside world.

  She keeps silent, however, even as her certainty grows. Should she be proven wrong, should this whole tremendous gamble explode in her face, she’ll not give certain members of the Lover’s crew the slightest chance to mock or disparage her.

  On the other hand, should she be proven right, Moira is prepared to endure zero buhoxshit about her adverse weather gear, her trail rations, her Tebi-Gali routines. Without Moira’s “survivalist whack-job shit”, they’d all be fertilizer by now.

  The group’s morale – by which she means Nemo’s morale – had actually been on the mend. Paradoxically, that life-and-death struggle with the deformed Gitter had only hardened their resolve to survive, rather than plunging them further into hopelessness. Moira’s not certain what a second such attack might do to their spirits, particularly with Odisseus down a weapon. She does know that, this time, she’d lead with the torch.

  The Captain seems to have overcome whatever his querulous bad mood was about. Apparently, the death and destruction he’d accidentally sown amongst the Gitter came as quite a boost to Nemo’s downcast mood. Now, he was skipping along quite happily. He was helpful with the torch when Moira requested it and he could even be heard, every now and again, to whistle a bar or two of Cosmic Vomit’s Plagues For Sale.

  Nothing like immolating a few people to put the spring back in Nemo’s step.

  Odisseus, meanwhile, continues his sulking unabated. For the moment, Moira chooses to assume he’s taking his rearguard duties very seriously and leave things at that.

  There’s not much conversation on this last leg. Odisseus nurses his funk, Moira concentrates on trailblazing and Nemo hums idly.

  The final nail in the “Moira’s right, everyone else’s an idiot” coffin comes when they round the next bend. Sunshine peeks into view around a jut of jagged rock, catching Moira fully in the face and practically blinding her. So long spent squinting in Fernhollow’s darkness, she cowers before the purple blaze, throwing an arm up to shield the glare.

  The feel of sun on her face, the smell of ashen wasteland on the breeze, the blistering heat from somewhere beyond and above; Moira knows for a certainty that she’s made it. She lowers her arm and takes a few triumphant steps from the tunnel and into the Splitspine nursery.

  Walls of familiar stone – dry and jagged towards the top, slick and muddy towards the bottom – yawn out to either side, describing the depth and diameter of an impressive sinkhole. Before thoughts of climbing those bare rock walls can even occur to her, Moira’s eyes fall upon the length of Skyscratch-woven cord, dangling down from the sinkhole’s edge, the very one Moira used to escape the nursery yesterday morning.

  Floors of familiar mud – littered with pools of standing water and Gitter saplings – spread out before her, a strangely well-tended swamp of squat, ugly vegetables. Moira blinks once and realizes that all the seedlings in sight have been smashed. Every single Gitter plant, across the entire spread of the nursery, has been squashed or uprooted. The work of stomping feet as much as weaponry, it’s not difficult to imagine the victorious Skyscratch rampaging down here, ensuring their hated enemy might never spawn again.

  Moira spares a glance at the catalyst of this tribal cleansing, where he stands whistling his astrogrunge chestnut.

  Last and most captivating of the nursery’s sights are the sun and the sky. Moira wanders a few feet towards the nursery’s center, eyes locked upward. Only a fraction of Gi’s amplified sun is visible from down the sinkhole, hanging low in the western sky. Together, the sun and sky are a rich shade of royal purple, a planetary oddity that a Moira two days and one execution younger thought benign and boring. Now, freed from her subterranean prison, there’s nothing more beautiful than the violet sky that hangs over the planet Gi, even crosshatched by its climatic field.

  She stands there, drinking in this magnificent sight, as her companions mill around the sinkhole behind her.

  “Hey,” realizes Nemo, that famous wit, “this is that place from earlier. The, uh–”

  “Splitspine nursery,” supplies Odisseus. “That puts us somewhere way southwest of Fernhollow.”

  The true realization hits Nemo before it does Odisseus, though he certainly appreciate it less. “And the ship,” he adds, matter-of-factly.

  “And the fucking ship!” it strikes Odisseus profoundly, spinning to gauge his crewmate’s reactions. “It’s, what, six some hours north?”

  “Thanks, Moira,” she mutters under her breath, unheard, unappreciated.

  “We could be there tonight!” continues Odisseus, almost yipping with the euphoria of cheating death. Five minutes ago, they were wandering endlessly through twisting tunnels, as good as corpses. Th
en, without warning, there was food and shelter and his beloved compression nozzles and attitude thrusters no more than a few hours away, across the cool desert sands. Moira too is captured a little by his excitement.

  “Would be nice, get something to eat,” Nemo allows, tossing the dismembered torch away in a sudden fit of disgust for the thing. “I’m so hungry, I could eat my dick.”

  “Maybe a shower,” grunts Moira, her entire person slick with mud.

  “Or, you know,” Odisseus suggests significantly, “fucking escape?”

  Nemo doesn’t follow. “Escape?” He jabs a finger up and out of the sinkhole. “We did.”

  “The planet?” Odisseus tosses both paws out wide. “The blooming blockade?”

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa.” Nemo distances himself from this suggestion with both palms open. “The fuck’re you talking about? We ain’t remotely done here.”

  Odisseus, however, is adamant. “We absolutely are done here.”

  The Captain screws up his face, profoundly confused. “How do you figure? We’re down here, with no weapons, no Attaché and, most importantly, no Gitter sapling.”

  “Okay,” allows the Ortok, flustered at the very idea that anyone would question him on this. “I think we can all agree,” he stipulates, throwing a glance toward Moira, “that we’re nowhere near the plan or anything even resembling the plan.” He waggles a paw back toward Nemo. “What’d you say, we’re down here, we got no weapons, no Attaché, no–”

  “Gitter sapling!” cries Nemo, like those two words solves the whole debate. “You wanna, what, abandon the whole caper? Abandon two years of work and planning and buhoxshit? Because things got a little wonky for a bit? I mean, what’s Gella gonna say? Fuck, what would Two–”

  Odisseus is already shaking his head. “Not a whole fuck of a lot, I’d wager, on account of his being dead.” The incontestable fact hangs in the air a moment. “And,” Odisseus continues, eager to hurry away from that particular point, “zottibles off his plan.”

  “Two-Bit’s plan,” Nemo enunciates insultingly for the Ortok’s benefit, “is to steal one of those little trees. There’s nothing further off the plan than not stealing one of those trees.”

  “Well,” Odisseus barks in response, spinning savagely around in search of something, “take one of fucking these, then. They’re all the–”

  Nemo makes a grimacing face, like he finds this whole line of inquiry distasteful. Moira beats him to the punch with the straight fact. “They’re all smashed.”

  “Yeah!” agrees Nemo, snapping and pointing at Moira. “These’re all smashed!”

  “There’s gotta be one,” Odisseus resolves, bent double and stalking away to scan the sinkhole for the evidence he needs to cinch his argument.

  “Can we not ignore,” calls Nemo after them, “the larger issue that you’re trying to pussy out again?”

  “The larger issue!” The Ortok’s paws come up defensively. “I’m reacting to the situation at–”

  “You’re pussying out.” Nemo, with a heavy sigh, buries both hands in the pockets of his filthy robe and cranes backward, seeming to beseech answers from the very God Beyond. “What a fucking coincidence that, soon as another minor snag comes up–”

  “Having very nearly died,” the Ortok reasons, stopping dead in his search to level a claw at Nemo, “I take extreme exception to the description of all that shit,” he throws the claw back towards the tunnel they emerged from, “as a minor snag.”

  “A kinda major snag,” Nemo grants begrudgingly, if only to sate his saltbrother’s semantics, “and it’s this whole sermon again, about what Two-Bit’s plan actually entails and risk versus reward and all the other lectures you’ve exhausted by now.”

  “Your unquestioning faith in Two-Bit’s all-knowing plan is–” The Ortok stops both his search and his exclamation short, spinning around again to sweep the entire nursery with sight and sniffing. “For Jotor’s sake, there’s gotta be one–”

  “There isn’t,” Moira assures him. “They’re all smashed.”

  Nemo throws up his hands. “So, we’ll improvise! Don’t forget.” He points two very serious fingers at his two companions. “It was only ‘cause I improvised last time that we got the tree we got, remember?”

  “How, then?” Odisseus abandons his search and begs the question. “Explain to me – to us, rather – exactly how you’d improvise.”

  Nemo stammers in the spotlight a second. “Uh–”

  “Bearing in mind,” the Ortok’s quick to remind him, “that all our weapons, plus the Attaché, plus the sapling, are a day’s march up and into the mountains, in a tiny little valley we’re never gonna find–”

  “I can find it,” attests Moira quietly.

  Odisseus ignores her. “Bearing also in mind, all that shit’s guarded by an army of very militant barbarians that’re pretty much convinced that we’re evil incarnate–”

  “That’s,” Nemo disavows, holding up his hands to show innocence of the claim, “maybe a bit of an overstatement.”

  “–and,” the Ortok finishes, a conclusive thought occurring to him then, “the fact that there’s no reason to assume, if they smashed all these saplings, they wouldn’t have smashed the one we potted too?”

  Nemo is silent for a long moment, absorbing all this. “These’re all,” he eventually concedes, “persuasive points.”

  “Why thank you. Can we admit that–”

  “But,” interrupts Nemo, his upraised finger a clear indication he enjoyed interrupting Odisseus a little too much, “you’re forgetting the cardinal rule of this whole enterprise.”

  “Am I?” Odisseus makes a gracious gesture. “Enlighten us.”

  Nemo’s swelling to make his grandiose point but, once again, Moira beats him to the punch.

  “It’s what Two-Bit would have wanted.”

  Odisseus stares at Nemo a long moment. “Really? Two-Bit would’ve wanted us to march up there with zero plan?”

  Nemo sees his opportunity and snatches it. “Two-Bit would’ve wanted us to play things by ear.”

  “Yeah,” agrees Odisseus brusquely. “That does sound like Two-Bit, the one who painstakingly devised this extremely complex plan in nineteen-and-a-half phases.” The Ortok laughs bitterly. “To play things by ear.”

  “You know,” Nemo starts to propose, that flinty edge to his voice, “you wanna stay home, you can stay home. Nobody’s got a gun they could even put to your head.”

  “Splitting up’s,” returns the Ortok, “about the worst thing we could do at this point.” His eyes land on Moira, a spark of inspiration striking him. “Which begs the question. What’s Moira wanna do?”

  One by one, they both turn to regard her, standing in the center of the nursery. Having spoken very sparingly through the entire argument, Moira takes even more time replying. She sniffs and glances upward again. Above, the sunset’s nearly past and the green tinge that heralds full night is coloring the edges of the sky.

  “There’s one thing you’re both forgetting,” she states gravely, before bringing her gaze back down to consider them both. “They’ve got Righty and Lefty up there.”

  THIRD INTERLUDE

  Two-Bit Switch was wounded by that. “I’m wounded by that.”

  “Switch-you’ll be more than wounded,” Sifer made the point, clacking his beak threateningly, “if, by the count of number-three, Switch-you’re not making foot-tracks away from place-here.”

  Two-Bit was staggered a little backward, planting a hand in the center of his chest in mock affront. “I wend to you as a mate, mate–”

  “Switch-you come to Sifer-me as an ouch-pain in my cloaca-hole.”

  “–with a, how’d you jabb, a ‘profitable business opportunity–’”

  “Use that doughy humanoid meat-brain of Switch-yours,” Sifer suggested, gazing upwards into the bundles of wiring over his head, “and try to remember the last time-place one of your ‘business opportunities’ was profitable for anyone-else but Switch-yo
u.”

  “Well,” Two-Bit thought back, a little daunted by the task, “what about last time? That thing with Ormont?”

  “Last time-place?” scoffed the Zibbian, a strange sound that involved his siphon deflating. “Last time-place, Sifer-I spent six days-weeks laying low on Balaria-where. Last time-place, there was a nine thou bounty-price on my head-sac. Last time-place, there was–”

  “To be level,” Two-Bit felt the need to stipulate, “that sweets was technically for ‘Unidentified Zibbian Malefactor’, so.” He shrugged a little, hoping that would clear things up.

  “Sifer-I was the only Zibbian-person,” Sifer enunciated with three pinched feelers at the end of his tentacle, “on the planet-rock. Which is a desert planet-rock. Which doesn’t have an ocean-splash deep enough for Switch-you to get your fuck-dick wet in.”

  “Did you,” Two-Bit attempted to rationalize, “or did you not get scored?”

  “Sifer-I did not get paid!” the Zibbian shrieks, so shrill he manages to draw the attempt of the passing derelicts. “That-there was the worst aspect-part! Half-money upfront, like all-we agreed, and then Ormont-douche disappeared into the fucking wood-work with my fucking other half-money.”

  “Yeah,” reflected Two-Bit, “he was kinda a cuntstain.”

  Two of his tentacles still working, two more cross below Sifer’s beak in a very humanoid gesture of disappointment. “Ormont-he wasn’t the one-person that tried to pay Sifer-me in bakebugs-yum.”

  Two-Bit screwed up his face. “I thought you liked bakebugs-yum.”

  “Sifer-I do,” Sifer sighed, “but bakebugs-yum are no substitute-thing for actual fucking money-cash.”

  “Are you sure?” Two-Bit proposed, sliding a package seductively across the counter toward Sifer.

  The Zibbian extended one tentacle, its suckers cracking open the package to peer inside. Those goopy Zibbian eyes craned upward from the box’s contents to stare at Two-Bit. “Switch-you shifty bastard-beak.”