by Jody Wallace
It balanced out.
Su Abfall trotted ahead of the cart with admirable stamina, not even seeming to notice the stench and rot of the vast cargo hold they traveled through. The greyish glow of the open bay doors lit this floor better than the one above them, and he checked behind them to see if he could spot the cat.
Nope. The orange hell beast would show up, out of nowhere, when it pleased his furry butt, and not one second before. But at least Pumpkin had pushed that gang upstairs into letting them go without much of a fight.
Wil did not like to kick and punch people without warming up—and without his body armor. The loss of his costly thin-guard was another ill he could place at the four feet of the cat.
When they reached the exit, Su preceded the cart down the bumpy, wide ramp, and he got his first look at Trash Planet proper. Grey skies, grey rocks, grey mountains in the distance, grey, grey, grey. Some skeletal plants. The tang of salt and metals, perhaps a nearby ocean. Flashes of colorful clothing on people waiting in line to enter the cargo bay brightened the scenario, but Wil shuddered at the drabness of it all.
“Goat, stop,” Su said to the cart once they hit the pavement. Men in blue uniforms—at least they weren’t grey—scrutinized her cargo. Why in the world did they care what trash the pickers left with?
“Any trouble inside?” a tall guy asked Su, making notes on a tablet computer. “You’re that little one that got the head start.”
“Oh, it’s all jewels,” she assured him. “And I had help.”
The other guard stared at Wil as if measuring his ability to assist. “He don’t look like a fighter, Abfall. You know, I got a brother. He’s a good brawler, not too smart, but he’s loyal and he’s looking for work.”
“Here?” She pushed her hood back, revealing a mass of dark, long hair. “Why would he want to get a job here?”
The man who seemed to know her lifted his chin. “It’s honest work, recycling. I’ve been with Pish long enough to figure that.”
“You tryna sell up your brother again?” one of the other uniformed people asked. “He shouldn’t have been late so many times, and he’d still be with Pish.”
“He’s got a baby that don’t sleep,” the man retorted. “Anyway, you look like you could use some help. Especially today. I saw them others, and I wouldn’t trust ‘em, but you never treat me bad, Abfall. You’re one of the good ones. You want my brother’s deets?”
“Uh.” Su glanced at Wil as if asking him whether she should hire this guy. But she could have been concerned Wil would learn more about her than she wanted him to. They had no instant camaraderie just because she’d saved his life. “Sure, Bart. Let’s swap.”
“You won’t regret it.” The man raised his chrono, tapped it to Su’s, and waved her through. “You’re clear. Glad you had good hunting.”
Su kind of shook her head, restarted the cart, and hopped onto the front. She grabbed a pole and the cart picked up speed, headed across a grey—of course—paved expanse toward a plethora of shambling land vehicles. A few older speeders. Not a hover-yacht in sight and no landing space for larger airships.
“Are you worried about your…hairy friend?” she asked, stopping the cart behind an ungainly, reinforced rectangle on wheels. “Leaving the ship without him doesn’t feel right.”
“No.” This wasn’t a private enough location to rock Su’s existence the way Pumpkin had rocked his that fateful night they’d met. “Let’s just say he can avoid any situation he doesn’t like a lot more easily than we can.”
On the plus side, Pumpkin claimed to have excellent instincts about human nature, which was how he’d chosen Wil and presumably Su Abfall. Wil figured he could trust Su as long as Pumpkin thought they needed her. On the minus side, Pumpkin had no qualms about lying when it suited him. Or when it amused him.
When Wil stepped off the cart to help Su load her truck, she waved him into the cab. “You’ll tear up your feet.” She stomped the pebbly ground for emphasis.
Wil was aching, tired, and unsure of the future, and it was tempting to slack off. It had been driven into him since he’d been young to preserve his feet or he wouldn’t be able to dance. Lose a finger or two, sure, but without feet, he might as well be a zero-g flipper.
But he couldn’t stand by and let someone else work while he idled. He figured out how to unlatch the straps securing Su’s crates and began handing them to her to shove into her cargo area. Shifting positions meant he lost the warmth of the blanket around his feet, but the coveralls she’d loaned him were surprisingly toasty.
“Does no one here use roundabouts or cargo ships?” he asked as they worked. The vehicles around them were grungy and rugged, like the planet itself.
“I’ve got one airship back at the factory, but fuel costs too much for anything that flies. It’s also safer not to be in the air if a freak storm hits.” She directed the dolly to roll up a ramp in the truck. “That’s everything. Get in the cab. Let’s chat.”
Once inside, she programmed the autopilot and slung her knee up on the seat, facing him. She regarded him with unmistakable curiosity in her dark eyes. Pumpkin had chosen well. Most people wouldn’t have accepted the strangeness of finding a man and a cat in the trash with such aplomb, though the cat’s mind-push probably had something to do with her cooperation.
When the effects of the push wore off, would she still help? That was the part that depended on him. And he had limited time before he passed out in a rebound from the cryo process.
“As you may have noticed,” he began, “I was set upon by people with very poor manners, stripped naked, and shoved into a container bound for the trash.”
She raised an eyebrow, tightening the skin around the tip of the scar that decorated her cheek. On Gizem Station, his clients had not had scars. Or worn quilted coveralls. Or faced down gangs of large men with bravado and a blow torch.
And they would not have helped a man in the trash.
“I’m going to need you to tell me something I don’t know,” she countered. “Why don’t you care about leaving your cat behind? Why were you pretending a cat can talk? Did the, ah, trip here do something to your head?”
“I’m not wormy.” He’d been placed in temporary cryosleep as part of his torture to extend his suffering. When Su had opened the container, it had awoken him abruptly. He had no idea how the cat had come to be in the container with him. When Casada’s guards had been threatening him, trying to get him to reveal the location of the cat, the cat had not deigned to show his whiskered, treacherous face.
But now Wil couldn’t decide how treacherous the cat was, since he’d arranged for Wil to be found by Su and survive this mess.
“Let me tell you a story,” he decided. “How long before we reach your place?”
“My factory is a ways,” she hedged. “If you pass out, I have people to help me carry you in. Promise I won’t strip you naked and rob you.” She grinned.
He’d never imagined someone who worked with trash for a living would have that much to smile about, but it seemed Su created her own humor. Trash Planet, her home, passed outside the windows in a lumpy, grey nothingness with plumes of smoke on the horizon. Occasional traffic passed, going the other way. The fortified buildings that dotted the sides of the road were evidence of enough civilization that humans could endure here.
Wil hadn’t been meant to endure. But it wasn’t a miracle.
It was a cat.
“I’m a dance instructor,” he told her. “I teach royals, wealthy people, elites, how to perform the dances of our ancestors as well as standard forms.” He’d also won a number of South Rim Royal Dance Competitions during his career. Before Pumpkin, he’d been training several likely apprentices. But students came and students went, and with a reduced teaching load he had more time to plumb old generation ship databases and seek the arts and culture of the centuries before the Obsidian War. Aside from dances that evolved in isolated areas of the Rim—and one’s own imagination—old databases wer
e the best way to snag new dance material.
“It’s a living. A good living.” He watched her expression carefully, noticing where she flicked her gaze, how far she lowered her chin, whether she leaned toward him or away. Working with elites had made him an expert in body language and subtleties. A person’s posture said a lot about their state of mind and which way they might jump next. Su was still reading as interested. “But dance training requires a certain degree of physical contact that can be misinterpreted by the occasional student.”
“Are you a prostitute, too?” she asked. “Steady work if you can build up a decent clientele.”
“Nah.” His schedule didn’t allow for the kind of fawning courtship that being a companion for elites required. “But that doesn’t mean—well, you know elites. They don’t like to take no for an answer.”
“I don’t know them as well as you apparently do.” Su shifted, leaning back against the door and crossing her arms. Uh-oh. She was relaxing—but closing off. Which meant she wouldn’t be as open as he needed her to be for the next part of the story. “I figure you are an elite. You look like one, and you smell like one.”
“I smell…” He stopped himself from sniffing. She meant it as a metaphor.
A corner of her lips quirked. “You smell like my coveralls. Garbage and mech fluid.”
“Well, I’m not an elite. Because of that, when I said no to the wrong people, I found myself stranded on Gizem Station and low on funds.” She didn’t need his whole background, any more than he needed hers. All she needed was to accept the crazy truth about Pumpkin, so she could be convinced to hide their existence from anyone who might come looking.
Would they realize Wil wasn’t dead and the cat had scarpered? Or would they continue to turn Gizem Station upside down in search of the scientific miracle that Pumpkin represented? Whether or not he and the cat were safe now, if Pumpkin continued to insist they fill their coffers with games of chance, they’d get noticed again soon enough.
“So you stole a cat?” Su guessed.
“No, but this is where my story becomes weird instead of simply random.”
“How can you get weirder than ending up naked in a trash ship with a cat?”
“The cat…” How should he say this? “The cat is an anomaly. The cat can talk and he’s smarter than any human I’ve met. He can also do this weird transporting thing, like the minute you’re not looking at him, he’s gone…and he shows back up wherever he wants to.”
Su made a disbelieving noise. “You’ve got cryo brain.”
“When the cat appears at your factory out of nowhere, will you believe me then?” Pumpkin didn’t tend to pop into moving vehicles, but Wil wouldn’t put it past him.
“There is no way some helpless pre-War animal could escape those ship rats, much less find its way across Trash Planet,” she said without raising her voice. “So yeah, sure, I’d believe something was different if it showed up at my factory.”
“The cat is a he,” Wil corrected, before Pumpkin had to. Su did not want to be corrected by Pumpkin. The push gave you a headache for days. “His name is Pumpkin. He won’t tell me why he can do the things he can do, but he has definitely used those abilities to keep us out of trouble. Sort of.”
She bounced her foot against the seat. The top and pants she’d had on under the coveralls were cozy but fitted, revealing a trim and toned body. Not the graceful shape of a dancer but someone who used her muscles and hands for a living. Yet the sharp intelligence in her eyes—her very alertness—suggested that she used her brain as much as she did her body.
And he had never seen so much hair on one person in his life. He guessed, in a climate like this, the long, dark mass helped keep her warm. Most of the pickers capable of growing facial hair had had some, though their unkempt, scraggly beards bore little resemblance to Su’s extravagant…tresses.
The only word worthy of her hair was tresses.
“What in the Rim does Pumpkin mean?” she finally asked.
He tore his gaze from her hair. From wondering if it was heavy. If she got it caught on things. If she slept with it braided.
“Beats me. Pain in the ass?”
She spat out a laugh, as if she hadn’t been expecting him to be funny. “Is it? He? A pain? I can’t believe you left him.”
“Trust me. He’s fine.” Pumpkin had been exceedingly coy about why he could talk, why he could push humans with his brain, why he could pop through thin air—and why he needed loads of money. But since he’d been very, very efficient at helping Wil win DICs in the casinos, Wil had decided he didn’t care.
For the first time, Wil had been rich. Rich enough to access whatever generation ship databases he wanted to study. Rich enough to buy all the best dance shoes, clothes, food. Rich enough to only take the students he wanted to take. Rich enough to pretend he was able to afford a real cat as a pet.
As long as Wil and Pumpkin hit the casinos at night and raked in the dough, Pumpkin was happy. Wil’s thirty percent was plenty, and where Pumpkin’s seventy went after Wil transferred it to various accounts, Wil had no clue. Wil and the cat lost enough games to look skilled but not fraudulent, and by casino-hopping they’d avoided notice for a long time.
Until someone had noticed. And someone had decided he wanted the cat for himself.
“The cat can read human minds a little,” Wil continued. “Can convince them to do things.”
Su’s chin lowered. “Is that so?”
“Yes, he did push you,” Wil admitted. “To come find us and help us. This isn’t what you’d normally do, is it?”
She regarded him a moment and then a crooked smile lit her face. “Pluck strange men from the trash and take them home? All the time. I’m all the time finding good looking richies in the garbage and keeping them for myself.”
That she thought he was good looking pleased him, but it shouldn’t matter. The only reason they were interacting was because she’d been pushed into it by a cat.
“Trust a stranger. Help a stranger. Leave a cat behind in a cargo ship,” Wil said. “Open a container marked hazmat. Half the things you’ve done today, I’m willing to bet aren’t things your common sense leads you to do.”
Her lips tightened. “When you’re a picker, it pays to open every single box.”
“You’ve questioned why you’re helping me at least once and decided to do it anyway,” he guessed. He knew how the cat worked all too well. Pumpkin didn’t push Wil much anymore, because Wil had learned to fight him. The effort was too much for both of them. Now they just argued until Pumpkin got his way. “That’s the cat’s doing. Not that I don’t appreciate it. You saved my life, Su Abfall, and I will never forget it. And we will pay you.”
If his accounts hadn’t been frozen.
But Pumpkin had assets. He just, as he’d explained to Wil, needed a human front with opposable thumbs to accomplish his goals.
“That…is true,” she admitted reluctantly. “I’m low on common sense today. Some would say I have been for twenty years, but today especially.”
“Did you hear a voice in your head?” That was how Pumpkin’s ability sometimes manifested.
“No.” She rubbed her forehead. “Maybe.”
“Pumpkin got the other pickers to let us pass,” he added. “The ones I suspect were going to try to beat our asses.”
“Try?” She cracked out a laugh. “Wil, I’m scrappy, but I couldn’t handle more than two or three of them.”
“I can hold my own.” He trained in martial arts and parkour as part of dance; as long as the combat remained hand to hand, his skills were not negligible.
“Oh, sure.” She quirked that half smile again, the one he realized made him want to touch the tiny dimple in her cheek.
“Doesn’t matter. Pumpkin only failed to defuse a bad situation once,” he told her. “And it was the one that ended up with me in a hazmat crate.” He paused, thinking of the circumstances that had led him here. Thinking of his mortality, of what he was g
oing to do next. Could he dance and teach without Casada hearing about it? If not that, what? “I assume I was intended to die in there, slowly and painfully.”
She pulled a face. “That was a stupid plan on your enemy’s part. Pickers open crates.”
He averted his gaze as the vehicle zoomed along a mountain road. To one side, bluffs. To the other, a gully, not too deep, with what looked like a crust of snow at the bottom. He hadn’t seen traffic in some time. “They don’t open hazmat crates.”
She tapped the brassy goggles that perched at her hairline, keeping her hair somewhat out of her face. “I know my hazmat. It didn’t read as hazardous.”
Su was a hell of a lot more interesting to watch than grey rocks. Her expressive features hid little of her opinions, but it wasn’t as if she avoided sharing them. “Maybe Pumpkin didn’t want you to read it as hazardous. Maybe it wasn’t intended to end up in the cargo ship. I don’t know what else to say. The cat is an evil genius who wanted to be rich, so we started cheating casinos, and somebody didn’t like my winning streak.”
Su raised a hand and covered her mouth as if hiding a smirk. A yawn. A grimace. Something. “Whoa. You have a casino boss after you?”
“They think I’m dead. So ‘after me’ is relative, though they’re probably tearing up Gizem Station looking for the cat. Little do they know,” he said with a tired sigh.
Persuading her wasn’t going to be easy without Pumpkin’s help. In the four hundred days he and the cat had run this scam, he’d never explained about Pumpkin before. All he’d done, six days ago, was try to convince people that Pumpkin was not an evolutionary miracle, and he’d failed.
Because it had been a lie. Pumpkin was a miracle. And Wil had never been a good liar. So why was it so hard to convince Su of the truth?
“I could look you up on the cybbie,” she said. “We get Gizem’s feed here. Wil Tango. Is that your real name?”
“It’s the one you’ll find on the cybernet,” he said. Wilbur Suggs never needed to see the light of day again. “Along with holos. I am unmistakably who I say I am. You’ll probably see me with my…cat…from the past several seasons. I was moving in some high circles for a bit.”