Isabel gave a slight frown. Was Ghuh’loloan’s work inadvertently discouraging outside trade? Were alien merchants reading her essays and becoming concerned that their business was doing more harm than good? The creds-or-barter issue required some serious ironing out, yes, but . . . but they did need that stuff. She wondered, with a sudden heaviness in her midsection, if this cultural exchange would hurt them in the end.
Ghuh’loloan continued her thread. ‘Instead, she’s interested in making a donation.’
‘What kind of donation?’
‘Well, she mentioned ambi storage facilities—’
‘That wouldn’t be of much use here.’
‘That’s what I said. I suggested that rather than her deciding what would be of help from an outside perspective, I could perhaps open a line of communication to the Fleet itself to see what would be of most use.’
‘I can tell you exactly what the labour guilds’ consensus would be,’ she replied. ‘Exodan problems require Exodan solutions. They’ll say we’ve already relied too much on alien charity.’
‘Charity from the GC parliament, and from Aeluons collectively. But this is a representative of a civilian business offering what amounts to a personal gift. A potentially enormous gift, but a gift nonetheless.’ Ghuh’loloan took another disquieting gulp from her mug. ‘The thing about gifts is, with correct, careful phrasing, they can always be turned down. Plus, you have me as an . . . an ambassador of sorts. I can easily deflect her if this offer would be poorly received. But I felt obligated to, if nothing else, pass the message along.’
Isabel tapped her fingertips together as she thought. A personal gift. Yes, that might open some doors. ‘I could set up a meeting with the resource oversight council,’ she said. There was no harm in a conversation, right? Like Ghuh’loloan said, they could always say no. But you couldn’t know what you were declining until the option was at least on the table.
‘Splendid,’ Ghuh’loloan said. ‘I’ll hold off on my reply to Tirikistik, then.’ She raised her mug in a mimicry of a Human cheer.
Isabel returned the gesture with a smile. As she drank, she thought of the artigrav nets beneath her feet, the solar harvesters orbiting outside, the limited-cognition AIs installed in public corridors for safety’s sake. All gifted in decades past by species who couldn’t imagine life without such things. Now, it was her own species who couldn’t imagine life without them. She wondered what else could – and would – be replaced. What essentials would disappear.
Kip
Kip (10:13): are you awake
Ras (10:16): yes
Kip (10:16): can we meet up
Kip (10:16): I need to talk
Ras (10:20): I can’t, I have chores
Kip (10:20): I really need to talk
Ras (10:21): there’s nothing to talk about
Kip (10:21): uh yes there is
Ras (10:21): no
Kip (10:21): Ras come on
Kip (10:22): this is serious
Ras (10:23): I have to study
Ras (10:23): like actually study
Kip (10:23): okay fine I can come over
Kip (10:23): we could study together
Kip (10:25): and I could help with chores
Kip (10:30): Ras?
Kip (10:42): come on man
Kip (10:48): stop ignoring me
Kip (10:54): stop
Kip (10:54): ignoring
Kip (10:54): me
Kip (10:75): Ras please I just want to talk
Bastard.
Kip had hoped Ras would change his tune after they’d both slept and sobered up – both of which had been a profound fucking relief. Or at least, it had been a relief, until Kip had awoken enough to realise that everything that had happened really happened, and that the conversation they’d overheard wasn’t a dream or a trip or anything so convenient.
Somebody had hid a body. It wasn’t exciting, like it was in vids. This was terrifying. This was real.
As soon as the garden had cleared out, Ras had made it clear that he got how fucked up this was, but that they weren’t going to say anything. They didn’t know who those people were, and if they told someone, those same people might come after them. They might end up down in cloth recycling, too. Ras had left no room for argument. End of discussion. They didn’t hear anything.
Except they had. They had heard it, and there was no forgetting it. There was no wishing it away, no matter how hard Kip tried.
He lay in bed, staring at the ceiling. He was starving, and his mouth was so dry his tongue felt sticky. But he hadn’t left his room, even though he’d been awake for hours. The thought of facing family was too much. He couldn’t put on an easy face. There was no pretending with something like this.
He was really hungry, though. Like, really hungry. He had a weird headache, too, and he felt tired to his bones. He was never doing smash again, he decided. Not fucking worth it.
Maybe somebody’s already found him, he thought. Yeah. Yeah, that was comforting. If those people had stuck the – stars – the body down in cloth recycling . . . well, there were lots of people who worked there, right? Somebody would have to find him. Even the people who’d put him down there knew that. Yeah, somebody else would find him – had found him already, probably. Somebody had found him, and the patrols would take care of it, and Kip didn’t have to worry about it. Nobody would know that he knew.
He wondered if someone was looking for whoever it was. His hex had to have noticed that he hadn’t come home. The dead guy had been a bad dude, if he was working for those folks. But . . . he’d been someone, right? He’d been someone. They’d called him ‘kid’. Someone else had to be looking.
Kip dug around the clothes lying by his bed and found his scrib. He did a skim through the news feeds. Bot upgrades, council meetings, Aeluons at war, Toremi at war, boring Human politics, boring alien politics – nothing about a body down in cloth recycling.
Shit.
He rubbed his face. Maybe they just hadn’t found it yet. They’d find it today, though, definitely. Kip thought back to the time he’d won the shit lottery and spent two tendays in the recycling centre. He’d been on food compost, not cloth, but he’d walked through there, and seen all the folks washing and folding and stitching, all the folks walking by the . . . the . . . the giant piles of cloth. The piles you’d never get through in one day.
Kip thought about what it would be like to pick up an armload of everyday laundry and discover something horrible shoved underneath. A dead face lying silent. Cold eyes staring still. He wondered how it would be – how it would look – if the body lay there for a few days. His empty stomach knotted. He didn’t want to think about that. He didn’t want to, but now that he’d started, he couldn’t stop.
Someone else would find the body, yeah. Someone else would find it, and xe wouldn’t expect it, and it’d be the worst day of xyr life.
And those people he’d heard the night before . . . they were gonna get away. Throw a person away like it was nothing and hop to some planet where no one would ever find them. That wasn’t okay. That wasn’t right.
That wasn’t right.
Kip thought about what Ras had said – how those people in the garden might come after them. He thought a lot about that. That thought made his stomach hurt, too. But he also thought about the opposite: what if they went after someone else? What if they did this again? Could he sit with that? How would his stomach feel if he read the feeds one day and . . . and . . . ‘Fuck it,’ he muttered. He sat up and searched for some trousers. His head tightened, the last remnants of smash sleep still making him feel crunchy around the edges. His heart hammered, too, but that wasn’t because of the smash. That, he’d done on his own.
He stood at his bedroom door for a while before waving it open. Mom and Dad were in the living room, reading their scribs, drinking tea. The scene was so normal, so boring. So comforting. His heart beat harder, and even though there was nothing in his stomach, he wanted to thro
w up.
‘You came home late,’ Mom said. Her voice was annoyed, and her face was, too, right until she looked at Kip. The lines around her eyes let go. ‘Kip, what’s wrong?’
Kip had barely realised that he’d started crying. Stars, he was such a fuck-up. His parents were dumb, but they cared, in their own dumb way, and they’d always cared, and then he went and did shit like this. He stood there stupidly, hands in his pockets, trying to pull the tears back. He failed. Fine. He failed at everything else anyway.
He cleared his throat and frowned at the floor. ‘I need to tell you guys something.’
Eyas
Eyas sat in her chair and stared at Sawyer’s corpse, lying ready on her worktable. This was a typical sight, an everyday tableau, and the tasks ahead were normal as could be. But nothing about this body was normal. Nothing about this was okay.
She sat for half an hour before she finally got to her feet. She walked to her cabinet, opened the top drawer, and took out a belongings bag. The bag was made of throw-cloth, clean and well-stitched. A neutral way to contain objects that were anything but. She turned to the body, hesitant like she’d never been. Knowing him in life wasn’t what troubled her. She’d prepared corpses of people she’d known, and known far, far better than a one-time acquaintance such as this. Hexmates’ family members. Her favourite childhood school teacher. Her grandfather, which had been bitterly difficult. No, her reticence came from elsewhere. This wasn’t a heartbreak. This was a desecration.
Her nose itched beneath her heavy breathing mask. She rarely wore a mask at work, not even when the person had been old or the death had been gruesome. But then, she’d never worked with a corpse in this state. It wasn’t dangerous, of course – it had gone through a decontamination flash on arrival like all the rest. However, it was in the early stages of unchecked decay, and neither Eyas nor any of her colleagues encountered that regularly. This corpse hadn’t been brought to the Centre on the day of death, accompanied by a grieving family and sombre medical staff. This corpse had been brought in by a patrol team, still retching and moaning over what they’d found hidden away.
Are you sure you want to take this one? her supervisor had asked. They’d been assembled that morning, every caretaker and apprentice, sitting in shock as it was explained what had been left for them.
I’m sure, Eyas said. She’d volunteered, and no one had argued. Everyone knew it was right. She was the one who’d gasped when the patroller displayed a picture of the corpse’s face. She was the one who’d known the deceased’s name.
Someone had thrown Sawyer away. Like garbage. Like a thing unwanted, used up. The thought filled Eyas with silent rage. The feeling smouldered in her chest as she removed a soiled shirt, a pair of thick socks, a trinket ring of alien make. It rattled her hands as she washed the body and saw flecks of trash floating down the drain. It wrenched her jaw as she reset visibly bent bones. She hoped whatever happened had been quick. Stars, she hoped it had been quick.
Sawyer was just one death, but the indignity, the aberrance, the slackness brought on by improper storage made her think of the tendays following the Oxomoco. She remembered cleaning body after body after body, laid out not in the seclusion of her workroom, but in the chill of a repurposed food storage bay. She remembered the day spent aboard the Oxomoco itself, when it had been her turn to take a shift cleaning out the abandoned Centres. She remembered learning what bodies looked like when they’d only composted halfway, remembered the smell that lingered on her exosuit in the airlock, remembered spending a standard afterward hand-grinding bones that hadn’t disintegrated properly after exposure to air.
That time had been worse than this. An exponential amount worse. And yet, tame as Sawyer’s corpse was in comparison, she knew the details of this day were going to bolt themselves to a similar spot in her mind. She didn’t know this man, really, but he’d . . . he’d trusted her. Blindly trusted her, just like he’d blindly trusted the people who had led him to this table. If she’d been more patient with him, if she’d answered his letter and become his friend, if she’d given him a few more than five minutes of her time, would he – no, no, no. She knew better than to get dragged along by ifs in situations like these, and she shut that line of questioning down. The guilt lingered, even so. Ghosts were imaginary, but hauntings were real.
She turned over the corpse’s right arm, studying the hole where his wristpatch had been. The removal had been rushed and clumsy, and there wasn’t much she could do about the damage. She wrapped it with a cloth bandage, for decency’s sake. She’d read about patch thieves who prowled the grittier sides of spaceports, but – even though she had no experience with such things herself – her gut said this wasn’t that. She’d never heard of that flavour of crime in the Fleet, and she doubted, under the circumstances, that someone had jumped on that particular bandwagon now. No, someone didn’t want anybody to know who this corpse had been. But she knew. She’d given patrol a name, a place of origin, and a scrib path. We can work with that, the patroller had said, visibly grateful. That was a shred of comfort, at least. That was something.
She lifted the corpse’s arm and inserted a length of thin, fluid-filled tubing connected to a bot reclaimer. She hit the switch and heard a mechanical hum as the reclaimer activated Sawyer’s imubots, directing them to parade up the tube and into the soon-to-be-sealed receptacle. Eyas would then send them along to the hospital, where they’d be sterilised and reset and injected into someone else. Nothing went to waste in the Fleet.
She looked at the thrown-away corpse, the skin bruised and blue. Nothing was supposed to go to waste.
The reclaimer finished its task. Sawyer’s body was ready for storage. Eyas wheeled it into the stasis chamber and shut the door. The corpse was gone, but she could still feel it in the room with her, a mess that would never be clean. She looked at the bag she’d put the clothes and trinkets in. There was a delivery label printed on the front of it, waiting for a name and family address. She found a heat pen, and wrote the only piece of information she had. She hoped the patrollers would fill in the rest.
She removed her mask, washed herself as hastily as good hygiene would allow, and left the room in a hurry, taking the belongings bag with her. She passed colleagues in the hall, but didn’t meet their eyes.
‘Eyas?’ someone called. ‘You okay?’
Eyas said nothing. She continued to the main chamber and took the elevator down to the cupola. She kept everything placid, everything inside, just in case there were any families down there, seeking the same quiet she was.
The elevator came to rest. Thankfully, thankfully, Eyas found herself alone.
She sat on one of the benches surrounding the domed window in the floor. Stars spilled out beneath her feet. The Centre wasn’t sunside, but it was right on the cusp. Bright fingers of light teased past the thick windowsill, upstaging the delicate glitter beyond. The constellations changed as the Asteria continued its unending orbit, but the view from this spot always felt the same. The constancy was a comfort, a reminder that whatever unpleasantness you’d just been through was only a moment, only a blink within a vast, slow splendour.
Or it was a comfort, most days. All Eyas could feel now was the smouldering, the shaking, the wrenching. Assured of her solitude, she did something she hadn’t done in a long time, not where bodies were concerned. She held the belongings bag in her lap, and she wept.
Part 5
We Are Not Lost
Feed source: Reskit Institute of Interstellar Migration (Public News Feed)
Item name: The Modern Exodus – Entry #14
Author: Ghuh’loloan Mok Chutp
Encryption: 0
Translation path: [Hanto:Kliptorigan]
Transcription: 0
Node identifier: 2310-483-38, Isabel Itoh
[System message: The feed you have selected has been translated from written Hanto. As you may be aware, written Hanto includes gestural notations that do not have analogous symbols in any othe
r GC language. Therefore, your scrib’s on-board translation software has not translated the following material directly. The content here is a modified translation, intended to be accessible to the average Kliptorigan reader.]
* * *
Before I was Ghuh’loloan, my body belonged to someone else. Something else. By definition, I cannot remember this time, but I can tell you, from having visited my own offspring while they were in development, what it would’ve been like. The Being That Was Not Ghuh’loloan had no name, no identifying distinction beyond parentage. Xe was a polyp, an unfeeling mass anchored to a rock face alongside a hundred or so siblings. That being had the beginnings of the tentacles I do now – tiny buds waving in the simulated tides, pulling in the nutrient mix the minders routinely pour into the nursery pools. All Harmagians begin this way. For the first ninety tendays before we become ourselves, the polyps do nothing but hold fast and eat while engaged in the taxing business of growing a brain.
When the brain is sufficiently formed, the polyp detaches from the rock. Xe floats freely in the water for another tenday at least, wriggling constantly and without direction. Slowly, slowly, the new brain masters locomotive control, and the swimmer becomes strong enough to navigate around the pool. It is marvellous, dear guest, to watch the near-instantaneous shift from hapless writhing to purposeful experimentation. The child – for it is a child, now – does not have fully formed eyes or dactyli yet, nor is xyr gut developed, nor will xe venture out of the water for another eight tendays. But xe has control. That is when a Harmagian begins life. That is when I became Ghuh’loloan.
Biologically, I find that other species understand this phase of transition quite readily. What they do not understand is that culturally, we consider the moment of the polyp’s detachment to be a death. To a Harmagian, this is obvious. What else could it be? The form and behaviour of a polyp are so different from that of a mature Harmagian that they can only be seen as separate entities. How could I have been Ghuh’loloan if I did not have a brain to understand what Ghuh’loloan was? How could I claim that polyp as a part of myself if I have not even the faintest recollection of that experience? (I do of swimming in the nursery pools: a hazy memory of a dash around a very tall rock, an image of an adult’s enormous tentacle reaching underwater to fix an oxygen filter). Remember, we are a species that does not sleep. Our lives are defined by the aggregate of all that happens during the waking.
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