by Chloe Garner
“Thank you,” he said. He didn’t know what else to say. She nodded at her stew.
He reached across and took her hand in his. She looked up and smiled.
“I don’t know if I’m doing right or wrong, building the things that I know. If you tell me I should stop, I will.”
“We don’t know much of anything,” Palk said. “We’ll just be careful, and we’ll see what happens.”
She smiled again, and returned to her lunch.
*********
The days turned into weeks, and the weeks into months.
The gun worked.
So did everything else Starn attempted.
The quilting ladies began to produce fabric and clothing made from Tiedmont taims’ wool, and at the next livestock drive, the Tiedmonts brought it to Traverse and sold it, first to the livestock handlers, then to the livestock traders and, not long after that, to merchants who came specifically from King’s Port to meet with them.
Starn led up the delegation of women who sat down with the merchants, writing contracts, setting terms.
More women came. There was work - women’s work - in Transit, and everyone was eager.
Starn paid a commission to Tiedmont on top of the cost of the wool. Money rolled around and people started to feel easy.
The gun was the first generation of Starn’s ideas for firearms. They got sleeker and more elegant with each new design. Tiedmont hired a second and a third blacksmith and secured a line of iron to supply Starn and her fabulous contraptions.
Palk began hunting the plinth in earnest. He could shoot them from dozens of yards away, with men to cover his back. Unsurprisingly, the rate of poaching went down, too.
Little by little, Tiedmont began to buy ranch land both from the neighboring ranches and in the next district.
Money was cheap. Ideas were everything.
The ranch grew, month by month, every train brining new people with shiny hope in their eyes.
Clean water.
Indoor temperature control.
She was experimenting with forms of energy that could be harnessed to create motion and light without any work from the user, without burning anything.
And then there was a knock on the door.
They’d moved out of the bunks and into one of the larger, dedicated homes on the ranch, just a little way from the ranch house, where they could cook their own meals, if they wanted, and where they didn’t overhear every fight that one of the married couples had from through the wall. Palk went to open the door to find a light-skinned man standing there.
He didn’t speak for a moment, shocked. Everyone here was blue or green or gray. This man was pink. Tan. Like Starn and Palk, and no one else.
“Aren’t you going to invite me in?” the man asked. “I’ve come a long way to find you.”
He spoke their original language. Palk found the sound of it odd and distressing for reasons he couldn’t have named.
“I don’t know who you are,” Palk answered.
“I guessed that,” the man answered. “Given that you’ve gone completely native. How I wish I had a camera to show everyone back at the base what jumping looks like. Oh, the glamour. What’s up with that hat?”
Palk put his hand to his head. It was a habit, at this point. He answered the door with it on, as a status symbol, just to be sure everyone knew who he was. He jerked it off of his head now, and the man laughed.
“I need to talk to her. You guys have been gone long enough, and it’s time to come home.”
He knew what a camera was.
He knew what a base was.
He just didn’t know where they could possibly be. How they could be. He looked over his shoulder.
“Starn?” he called.
“Who’s there?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” he answered, using their local language. “I don’t… know.”
He heard her leave her workbench upstairs and come traipsing down the stairs on soft, bare feet, feet he loved.
There was something wrong.
Something slipping.
The bottom falling out, only this time it wasn’t because a plinth had gored her. She would be fine.
He was going to suffer this one alone.
“Starn,” he whispered.
She came in view of the door and stopped dead.
“No,” she said.
Palk turned to look at the stranger, who gave the two of them a look that might have been sympathy.
“So it is both of you.”
“No,” Starn said again. “You should go. Whatever it is you’re here to tell me, I don’t want to know it.”
“Cassie,” the man said. “You have to. You don’t belong here. You know that, I know that, and the ape knows it.”
Palk knew what an ape was. He knew that he was insulted, because the stranger was talking about him. He felt immobilized, frozen over his feet, like if something had brushed against him, he’d have fallen down.
“We’re happy, and we’re not going back to whatever it is you think we should come back to.”
“They stole you, Cassie. From you.” The man looked at Palk. “Look. If you want to stay here, play cattleman for the rest of your lives, that’s fine with me. I’m not here to stop that. But you deserve to know what it is you’re leaving behind.”
“Leave. Now,” Starn said.
“You don’t know enough about how to shield a jump,” the man said. “They took something away from you. I’m just going to give it back.”
“I don’t want it,” Starn said. “I don’t want it.”
The man came in, closing the door gently behind him, then looking around the house.
“You really can’t keep a Palta down,” he said. “You know, I’ve been looking for you for months. Finding the planet, that was hard enough, but tracing the two of you once after that? Like searching for grass in the breeze. But you shine like a beacon, Cassie. They can’t make you into one of them, no matter how hard they try. Everyone talks about the woman inventor, now. It took long enough to get your name around, but they all talk. And I just followed the stories.”
“She asked you to leave,” Palk said ineffectively. The man held up a hand.
“I’m getting to you, Troy.”
Troy.
Like standing on a pile of sand in a storm, it was melting away underneath him, and he didn’t know how far down it went. Or what he was going to find underneath it.
“I don’t want to go back. This is better,” Starn said.
“You shine,” the man said. “Don’t you wonder why?”
“Of course I do,” Starn said, suddenly violently angry. “But I know that I left terrible things, when I came here. I won’t go back.”
“Just…” the man said quietly, holding up his hands. “Okay. It’s okay. I’m not here to make you do anything. I’d look at him for backup when I say that no one could ever make you do anything, but it’s not like he would know anymore, would he?”
“No one makes her do anything,” Palk said. The man laughed, flashing Palk a grin that he would have liked, under different circumstances.
“I’m not going to force you to do anything. I just need you to know who you are. To not be lost any more.”
He scratched at his arm, peeling off a layer of skin. Palk turned his head to the side, not wanting to watch, then it was done, and the man stuck it to a fork on the table.
Gross.
What he expected to accomplish with that, Palk couldn’t imagine, but it broke the spell, and Palk took a step forward to physically remove the man from his home.
And then the fork sang.
No, it didn’t sing, it played.
A rhythm, a beat, a melody, all out of silverware.
Starn gave the man a skeptical look, and the man shook his head.
“Sorry, it’s out of key. I thought that would be steel. My mistake.”
Steel.
Guns should be made out of steel. Sewing machines should be mad
e out of steel. Everything should be made out of steel. Iron was too corruptible, too weak, too unreliable. Palk put his hands over his ears. He didn’t want to know what happened when you popped the bubble.
The music changed under the stranger’s fingers, and Starn looked away.
“Just feel it, Cassie,” the man said. “You know this.”
It didn’t make any sense to Palk, but after just a moment, his wife, his love, the only real truth in his life, nodded.
“I can’t believe they got me,” she said, her voice different. The man shrugged.
“It happens. There are precautions you can take, but you have to have heard about some of the tricks to build them in.”
Starn shook her head.
“Why? I mean, obviously most of the people they’d catch aren’t ever going to be very useful.”
She motioned at Palk. Palk felt like he should have been insulted. Again.
“You’ve been a yokel too long,” the stranger said. “Where are your electronics?”
Her hand went to her arm, and she tipped her head to the side.
“They’re idiots,” she said. The stranger grinned.
“There’s my girl.”
She shook her head.
“The currency isn’t worth anything to them, unless they have intergalactic trade. And here I sit on a cattle ranch in the middle of nowhere. And they’ve got a piece of digital information that says they’ve got a lot of money.”
“Yes,” the stranger said. “An awful lot of money, once they got you. They just have to figure out what to do with it. An economy is a funny thing to manage when you bring in lots of cash with no new assets. And if they started spending the Palta account, I’d have been here much sooner. They haven’t got a clue what to do with it.”
“None of them have a clue about anything,” Starn said. She looked at Palk.
“Oh, Troy. You know, I really can’t complain. I have a hard time coming up with any period of my life that I’ve been happier.”
“Starn,” he said. She shook her head.
“Starn is gone, sweetheart. I’m Cassie.”
“No,” he said. “You’re Starn. You still are, and you always will be.” The memory was sharp, fresh. “We looked at each other, that first day, and we knew. You were mine.”
“And you were mine,” she said. “It’s actually true, it just never worked like that for us. I’m sorry.”
“Yeah,” the stranger said. “That part I actually do feel bad about.”
“How do we get him back?” Starn asked.
“He’s a bit harder, since the Burdalae music never worked on him. I’m going to have to take a look at his brain and see how to switch everything back over.”
“This really is just a high-tech mugging?” Starn asked. The man nodded.
“And we need him back on Earth,” he said. “You can do whatever you want, but they desperately need him.”
She smirked.
“And I thought you came to rescue me.”
The man shrugged.
“I did. But if you wanted to stay here and play cowpoke or whatever it is you two do to pass the time, that would be fine with me. He’s got a situation back home.”
“Stay away from me,” Palk said. “I don’t know what you did to my wife, but I’m going to get her back.”
“No, Troy. We’re going to get you back,” the man said, taking a hold of Palk’s arm.
*********
The world blinked away.
He was in a room full of…
… computers.
The technology was well beyond him, but it was of the kind that made his fingers itch to go play along the buttons, to fiddle with switches and dials and figure out what all of the things did.
“Xhrak-ni,” the woman who had been Starn said. “I didn’t think you came here anymore.”
“It’s the only place in the universe I know of where I can come do medical procedures without anyone minding,” the stranger said. He looked at Palk.
“I need to see what they did to you,” he said. “Cassie could get around it all on her own, but I need to see it for myself, so I can put it all back where it goes.”
“You don’t have to condescend to me,” Palk said. “You’re telling me that someone blocked access to my long-term memories in a selective manner, and that you’re going to do a brain scan to figure out how,” Palk said. He was angry. He didn’t want to be the person who knew all of this.
He wanted to be the man at home with his wife.
“Well,” the stranger said, surprised. “That was mostly accurate.”
“It’s a funny division of the personal from the technical,” the woman who had been Starn said. “I could guess what happened, but it’s better to just get the data.”
There was a quick conversation that Palk truly didn’t understand, and then the stranger, pointed at a wall.
“You mind going to stand over there?”
This was the moment.
It was all gone, he could tell that already, but here was his moment to fight. Pointlessly, hopelessly, and completely ineffectively, but he could say no. This far and no further.
The problem was that Starn was gone.
He knew it. It wasn’t a feeling, it was a fact. The woman he had lived with for six months had vanished before his eyes to a fork playing music, replaced by a woman he’d never known and who didn’t love him.
It was all gone.
“I’m going to miss it,” he said to her, now. “Biscuit is never going to behave for anyone else.”
She shook her head.
“No, but they’ll take care of him, anyway.”
“Biscuit?” the stranger asked, bemused.
“I wouldn’t tease,” the woman who had been Starn said. “It may be simple, but it’s very real.”
The stranger shrugged.
“Big fish, small pond,” he said.
It was a whole world. He had been important in the world.
And now he was on another one.
One where he was insignificant and ignorant.
He went and stood in front of the wall.
Starn and the stranger looked at a glass screen for a moment, then talked to each other quietly.
Palk waited.
He was waiting to die. To let someone else reclaim his body, a body he had apparently stolen without the consent of its former owner, all of their assumptions aside.
They’d jumped there.
He didn’t understand how jumps worked, but he knew he’d never understood them. And something about the jump had been rigged, and they’d taken a lot of money from them.
Someone had.
But they’d taken away their identities, too.
And now Palk had to give it back.
“Just be still for me,” the stranger said. “It’s not a complex change, and they did it clean. I’ll be able to fix it from here in just a second.”
Palk took a breath and closed his eyes, smelling the dust and the scent of taim faintly on his clothing.
He was going to miss all of it.
*********
Identity was a funny thing, Troy reflected.
He was drinking coffee in his apartment, by himself. They’d come back through the portal room, the way protocol dictated, and he’d left with Cassie, not answering any questions, though he could see them everywhere.
He’d passed Celeste in the hallway and her eyes had bugged out, but they’d been moving too fast.
It was all too raw.
He remembered.
He remembered everything. He could look at Palk dispassionately, as an unevolved version of himself, what he might have been, if the world he’d grown up in hadn’t been quite so technical and scientific and intellectually rigorous, or he could look at him with slightly more truth: what he would have formed himself into, if the world had been fresh and new and without boundaries.
The ranching, that was tangential to it. The identity was everything.
It h
ad always been his identity, but he had expressed it exactly how it came to him, without conforming to social expectation.
And he’d loved Cassie.
He’d loved her so hard it hurt, even now, to think about it. Passionately and resolutely. Unquestioningly.
He’d never loved anyone, ever, like that. He’d thought he wasn’t capable of that kind of emotion, that he didn’t even believe in it.
When he let himself think about it from too closely, he found his chest tight and that he was unable to breathe.
Because it wasn’t real.
It had been.
But it wasn’t now.
It had evaporated the moment Jesse had woken Cassie from her amnesia, and there had been absolutely nothing he could have done, nothing in the entire universe, to make it go back. Even wiping her memory out again, that relationship had been gone.
He wasn’t even sure that he was able to feel that way, now, as himself, with all of his own memories and all of his own knowledge. He knew that Cassie and Jesse planned on returning to the planet - one whose name he never even learned - and dealing with the king who had taken Troy’s identity and Cassie’s money. Jesse said that there were vendors out there who sold systems to poor planets, ones that were designed to help them fleece unsuspecting users of technology. They didn’t often net Palta, because Palta were clever enough to protect themselves proactively, and even when or if they did, they only got the personal fortune of that individual Palta.
The problem was, Troy gathered, that Cassie and Jesse had access to the entire Palta net worth, now that the Palta had been wiped out by their own AI, and Jesse had no intention of a tin pot dictator figuring out how to use those vast fortunes.
Troy wasn’t sure what he was supposed to do next.
He wanted to check in at the lab, to see how everything was going, and how everyone was doing, but he’d been gone for just over six months. He’d been unwelcome, before. He had no idea how he’d be received, now that he’d just abandoned them for that length of time.
And he couldn’t tell them.
He couldn’t tell anyone.
In his closet were the cloth and leather goods he’d been wearing when Jesse had come to get them, and part of him wanted to go put them on, just to feel like that again, like the world was normal and simple and that a giant cat was the biggest enemy he had in the universe.