by J. L. Hilton
What a glorious thought. “You were in a trance, and I took you home. Nothing else happened.” Did she detect the hint of disappointment in his voice? Had she noticed that he’d gone into her compartment at 0910 and not come out again until 1330? If she asked, he could answer with honesty that he was watching over her, making sure she recovered from her trance. It wasn’t a lie. But it wasn’t the entire truth.
“I don’t believe you. You’re acting kind of strange.”
“I’m a Glin, I’m always strange. Odd. Bizarre. Alien.”
“Evasive. Shifty. Stonewalling.”
“You were a bit…” he wasn’t sure what to call it. He settled on, “Emotional.” Love was taken very seriously by the Glin. What if love was one of those things that humans didn’t want to discuss? If she didn’t remember him bringing her home, did she remember telling him about her feelings for Seth?
“Look, I promise I won’t touch a drop of the stuff, ever again. And I owe you one. Have you had dinner? Come over and I’ll make you something.”
“You want to share food with me?” First, tea, then the raspberry, then whiskey. Now an entire meal.
“It’ll be rice and sweet potatoes, but it’s the least I can do,” she said. “And I won’t cook yours.”
He didn’t think that sharing food was as meaningful for humans as it was for Glin. Still, Duin felt it wasn’t right to refuse. “I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
Within ten minutes, he was in her stairwell.
“That was fast.” She laughed when she let him in.
“You should see me in the water,” he replied, and then regretted it as his mind swam to thoughts of what he could do with her in the water. It was both torture and joy to be near her, since he let his mind imagine the things his body could not indulge, and his heart rushed ahead to feel the things his mind said were not possible.
The truth was, he might be in love, as well. And that would be a very difficult truth.
Chapter Six
Genny couldn’t bring herself to watch the colony camera archives of Duin dragging her drunk ass home. She didn’t care that her followers found the vids and dissected them in laborious detail. What she regretted was losing Duin’s respect.
Not that he would ’fess to having lost any. He still came to see her every morning. He still provided interviews. If anything, he spent even more time with her than before. He worked in the garden, helping her build a chicken coop and paying rapt attention to her explanations of holistic horticulture.
But something was different. Restrained, she decided. And that wasn’t like him. Maybe he was uncomfortable with the new discussion thread started by some ludicrous shippers—people who insisted that she and Duin were either in a relationship or should be. Seth’s public accusation at the pub and Duin carrying her home only fueled the explicit speculation. Duin did not reply to those discussion threads and neither did she.
“J’ni?”
Duin’s voice hailed her from the wall. For someone who spoke her language so well, he still mispronounced her name. It was one of his quirks, along with the way he pattered his fingers on her arm, like raindrops, when he was speaking to her. Or how he’d pace the room whenever he didn’t need to sit still. Then there was the sun thing. Duin didn’t like being in the garden at noon, but he loved to be there in the dark.
“I’m here, Duin.” The window showed him sitting in Mose’s classroom. Two-year-old Estrella stood beside him, playing with a glowing blue-green ball.
“I would like to return to Aileen’s tonight, and have dinner there, with you—no, don’t put that in your mouth,” he told Estrella. She did it anyway, and grimaced. “I warned you.” Then he turned back to Genny. “It will be my gift.”
“It’s on you?”
He looked confused.
“Your treat,” she said. “You’re buying.”
“Ah. Yes.” He nodded. Then he had to stoop to retrieve the glow ball from under the table. “I know many of your words,” he told Genny, when he reappeared. “But the idioms continue to challenge me.” He handed the ball to Estrella.
After what Seth said, Genny wasn’t sure if she should take Duin to the pub again.
Duin picked up on her reluctance. “Or…we could go elsewhere, if you prefer. But I thought you liked Aileen’s.”
“I do.”
The light from the ball faded. Estrella gave it to Duin and went to play with some of the other children.
“I gave them water from my last trip to Glin. They say it improved the quality of the beer, which I will trust is the truth and not try to find out for myself.” He made a face not unlike Estrella after she put the glow ball in her mouth. “But they insist on giving me several meals. I’d like to share them with you.”
Well, if they were giving him food, then they must not mind him being there. “Sure, Duin, I’d love to.”
He met her in the hallway and they took the 90s across Sectors K and L. Several artists were creating digital paintings along the walls of the thoroughfare with programmable brush tools.
“I’ve got an email from my editor, J.T.,” Genny said, checking a priority notification on her bracer. “He says INC is under assault by several hackers. The target is my blog.”
“Mm. Persistence is a bad trait to have in an enemy. Will these hackers be able to remove your INC blog the way they removed our additions to the Glin wiki?”
“I don’t know. INC has awesome security. Which means this is probably more than a few conspiracy theorists or religious nuts. But why would they go to so much trouble?”
“Oppression can only survive through silence.”
“Why would anyone on Earth want to oppress Glin?”
“An excellent question.” Duin stopped to admire a 3D reproduction of Van Gogh’s Starry Night Over the Rhone.
“It could be the ESCC. Maybe they’re afraid people will stop buying contracts. But if it was the consortium, why wouldn’t they just throw you out?”
Duin didn’t answer right away, but admired the painting a little longer. “Perhaps someone wants humanity to remain ignorant. Knowledge is power over others. Secrets preserve oppression and tyranny. Information is freedom.”
They walked on. A stairwell door opened ahead of them and several people entered the thoroughfare. Duin and Genny passed by them.
Someone snarled, “Alien-loving bitch.”
Before Genny knew what was happening, she was seized and separated from Duin. “Demon!” she heard someone yell. “Fucking frog!” Then she was stunned by a blow to the side of her head.
“Unnatural slut!”
Genny screamed. The scream, her elevated heart rate and changes on the surface of her skin triggered the 911 app on her bracers. Live feeds from the cameras on both bracers, and a locator SOS, were sent to the colony police, in case they hadn’t already noticed the attack on the colony netcams.
“Shock!” she yelled, and her voice pattern activated the electroshock app. Her bracers glowed red and jolted the man who held her right arm. He let go and crumpled to his knees. Genny was grabbed around the neck by a woman and choked into silence.
The digital paintings along the hallway disappeared, replaced by the Asteria avatar. “Emergency distress has been detected in this area. Colony police are responding in 30 seconds… 29… 28…”
Genny twisted, threw the woman off, and punched her in the face. The knuckles of her hand throbbed in pain from the blow, but it stunned her attacker. She looked for Duin and saw him surrounded by a knot of people, two of them lying on the ground at his feet. Blood ran down the side of his head.
A man swung a thick piece of PVC pipe, but Duin blocked it with one arm and smacked the man in the middle of the chest. A crack of purplish light sparked where Duin hit him, and the man hurtled backward several feet from the blow. Duin grabbed the next closest human by the throat, lifting him up until his feet were off the ground. She saw more flickers of light. The man convulsed and Duin dropped him when the colony police ent
ered the thoroughfare.
Duin turned to her and held out his arms. “J’ni?”
She slipped into his embrace and he held her until she stopped shaking. “I’m not very hungry any more. Can we go to my compartment?”
“As you say.”
In her block, she l’upped the netcam archives and watched the attack from two different angles. Duin found some cloth napkins and filled a large bowl with water. Sitting beside her, he wet one of the napkins and dabbed the blood at the corner of his mouth. “How do you feel?”
She shrugged. “I’m all right.” Genny had a lump on her head and her hand hurt, but it was nothing serious.
Duin watched her punch the woman on the vid. “Did you break her teeth?”
“I didn’t find any in my knuckles.”
“Unfortunate.”
Genny imagined Seth’s reaction would be very different. He’d tell her that she got what she deserved, or tell her it was too dangerous and she should return to Earth.
“Are you sure you don’t need to see Dr. Geber?” she asked. The wound on his head was scabbed over with thick, dark blood.
He waved his hand.
“How can you be so calm? Like this sort of thing happens every day.”
“Mm.”
She knew what it meant when he made that noise. “Duin?”
“It has happened before,” he admitted. “Several times, after I first arrived in the colony. No more than two or three humans. Never ten. And only in certain places. After I learned to avoid those places, and after I…zeet!” He gestured with his hand and made a sharp buzzing noise. “They left me alone. The colony police were never involved. And I would heal. As you see.” He gestured to his noggin.
“Assholes. What’s wrong with people?”
Duin shrugged. “Pebble. Ripples.” He reached out and cupped her cheek in his hand, turning her face away from the wall and placing a damp cloth to her bruised head. “Perhaps water will not help you the way it helps me, but it can’t hurt.”
He shifted to the edge of the chair to get nearer to her. She smelled the heavy herbal scent of him, almost like her garden, and it soothed her as much as the cool cloth on her head. She assumed the smell came from his wallump suit, which he made himself—hunted and skinned the animal, scraped its hide, and treated it with a process he’d explained to her using several Glinnish words for the various plants and animals involved. The suit was expertly tailored to hug the muscles of his arms, legs and torso. Muscles strong enough to lift a human off the ground with one hand. Duin was well built, but she didn’t realize he was so strong.
“The colony police are going to want to question you, after they review the archives.” Especially after they see the flashes of light coming from his hands.
“They never bothered to question me after previous altercations.”
“But what was that light, when you hit the guy? Do you have some kind of weapon?”
Duin let go of her, set down the cloth and held his hands up in the air, wiggling his fingers. Lavender light crackled across his open palms, like small lightning bolts.
“You have zappy hands?”
“Another Glin adaptation.”
She flinched when he reached to reapply the cloth to her head again.
“It won’t hurt you,” he chuckled. “It is entirely under my control. I assume zappy means generating bioelectricity?”
“Yes.” She patted the translator, tucked inside the front of his suit. “It’s Z-A-P. Verb. To zap. Zapped, past tense. I made up zappy. Adjective. Don’t you want to add it?”
“I will later.” Instead, he continued to cup her cheek, and began to rub his thumb back and forth across her chin. It was the smallest of movements, but it moved her greatly. Her heart raced.
“Why didn’t you show me the zapping before?”
“I didn’t need to hunt, before. That’s what Glin do with our hands, we hunt. I don’t like using it on humans, J’ni. I wish they hadn’t attacked us.”
“There are some desperate people here, Duin. Impoverished in body and in spirit.”
“Yes. I come from a world of similarly impoverished people.” He sighed. “The loss of hope inspires either revolution or depravity.”
“And fear inspires violence. I want to undo that fear, Duin. I want people to understand that the Glin pose no threat, that you aren’t demons. If they want to see demons, they should look at themselves.”
He gazed at her in such a way that for a wild moment she thought he would try to kiss her. But he didn’t. Instead, he said, “Why aren’t you afraid of me, J’ni? Why are you different from other humans?”
“There are a lot of people who aren’t afraid of you, Duin.”
“But you were the one drop which caused the rest to overflow.” He spread his arms. “There is a Glin saying: Don’t question the rain. So, I will be silently grateful for your peculiarity.”
Somehow, Genny doubted Duin could ever be silent about anything.
Genny linked vids of the attack to her blog and replied to several discussion threads. Blaze called to tell them their assailants were confined to cells in the military zone because they didn’t have compartments of their own.
“Looks like your new fans had the usual pre-colony criminal records—skimming, drug fraud, spam, identity theft,” said the colonel.
“Could they be the ones trying to take down J’ni’s blog?”
“I doubt it,” said Genny. “Hacking INC would have to be done from Earth, because of the lag.”
“Speaking of lag,” said Blaze, “any minute, I’m expecting a granny’s bra-full of email and high priority requests about the security of the colony, the status of the prisoners and the price of tea in China. Try not to piss off anyone else for a few hours, if that’s possible.”
Duin started a pot of tea in the kitchen corner. A call came in from Genny’s reclusive neighbor, Nik, but when Genny answered, the window appeared to contain another Glin.
“Great Ocean,” said Duin and almost dropped the canister of tea. “Pa’boul da’Glinna ercheswa.”
“’Sup, your Glinness,” said the Nik-avatar. His voice burbled as if he were underwater. “Scope my incarnation.”
“Remarkable,” said Duin.
“Mysteria just added Glins. They get a +5 bonus to all water-based actions, electric attack in hand-to-hand combat, and a 2x modifier on healing.”
Healing. Genny glanced at Duin. What had been a vicious slash on the side of his forehead was nearly gone, within less than an hour.
“This is not another Glin?” Duin asked.
“It’s my blockmate.” Genny pointed at the dot-2 compartment. “That’s not really what he looks like, it’s an avatar. Kind of a digital puppet.” She wasn’t sure if they had puppets on Glin, but that seemed to satisfy him.
“Gotta go,” said Nik. “’Tacked by a band of Hellions. Later.” Nik’s window disappeared.
“What happened? Is someone after him, too?”
“He’s playing a game.” Genny launched Mysteria in a new window and tapped a few of the names in the players list. More windows opened, showing the game from those players’ perspectives. “It looks real…well, aside from the unicorns, magic spells and flying fairy ferrets… It looks real, but it’s not real.”
A green-skinned troll ripped the wings off of an angel and blood sprayed across the marble walls of a temple. A long-eared, scantily clad wizard riding a unicorn impaled a djinn on her enchanted, barbed spear. With a practiced twist, she sliced his belly open and his glowing guts poured onto the ground.
“Great Rain,” said Duin. “This makes our skirmish in the thoroughfare look like a neep hunt.”
Duin poured her a cup of tea, poured one for himself and sat down at a second tabletop keyboard. He typed and she read the block of text on the wall.
In fear, you stop thinking, you stop feeling anything else. There’s no room in a frightened mind for compassion, or reason, or empathy. There is no room in a frightened min
d for the risk of freedom. When someone loses the ability to think unencumbered by fear, then the loss of liberty is not far off.
I do not hate the people who attacked us. Why should I? I reserve my abhorrence for the Tikati, who did not attack Glin out of misplaced fear. The Tikati came with arrogance and insidious designs. Not to hate us, but to steal everything from us.
He stopped to reach for Genny’s bruised hand, using great care as he slid his fingers under hers. “Do you regret helping me, J’ni?”
“Absolutely not,” she replied.
By the next morning, her blog reached the INC Top 100. It would have happened faster but for the lag.
***
“I can’t believe you asked for raw potatoes,” Genny said as they left Aileen’s. Dinners at the pub had become part of their pattern: They worked together on the blog during the day, Duin visited the children in the afternoons while Genny continued editing and uploading, they went to dinner, and then they worked in her garden in the evenings. He didn’t stand and recite quotations in the Colony Square any more.
“I don’t like cooked potatoes. They get all mushy.”
“That’s why they’re called mashed potatoes.”
“Why not mushed potatoes?”
“I don’t know.” She laughed.
They waved to Owen as they passed. He nodded.
“They’re crunchy, like apples,” said Duin. “You eat apples, don’t you? Not mashed apples.”
“We cook apples, too, sometimes. It’s called applesauce.”
“Then why not call the other potato sauce?”
They headed down the 70s thoroughfare in Sector H.
“Are these the great questions you want answered about the human race?”
“I’m trying to understand. We don’t cook anything on Glin, we just eat.”
“What about meat?”
“Ooh,” he whistled through pursed lips, making a sound similar to the wind blowing. “What I wouldn’t give to tear into a fwap.” He clenched his fists and gnashed his teeth in exaggerated hunger.