by Alex Oliver
"Trouble?" he exclaimed, insulted. "I'll tell you what the trouble is. Your people were going to kill my crew-mates. I watched them melt a guy right in front of me. They were going to do that to Desultory, and the doctor."
Did the doctor have a name? Maybe while he was being all self-righteous he should ask what that was.
"Indeed." The goddess sat at the large table that stood at the opposite end of the hall, keeping both table and fire-pit between them and herself. She smiled at him like a patient mother who realizes their child is overtaxed. "We are fighting for your lives against such beings as this," her elegant hand indicated Desultory, who had flattened himself to the ground like a lemon-yellow carpet. "Our enemies, the giants, the dark alfr and the dead are all protean as this one is. Changeable, with no fixed shape of their own. They are innately deceiving. Forces of chaos that wish only to tear the ordered world apart. We cannot permit such a thing on our ship, right in the heart of us. We've been betrayed too many times before."
Yas had no idea what to say about the protean menace or her past betrayals. He considered them irrelevant, the concern ridiculous. "Desultory is not one of your enemies," he said instead. "He's an Ocuilin. They share our galaxy. They were the first alien race our people ever—"
Freya narrowed her eyes. He had the impression she was going to start hissing.
"…ever met at the point where we knew what alien races were," Yas corrected. "And we love them. We get on really well."
"They will betray you."
Yas deflated. He could tell from the tone that she wasn't going to be moved on that point. What could he say? He thought about Ruari, grieving for his giantess friend, and an inspiration came to him. "Wait, though. You let the light alfr serve you because they choose not to change their shape. That's right, isn't it? What if Desultory also chose not to?"
"Can it help it?" Freya asked, looking at Desultory as if he truly was the slug he sometimes resembled.
"We have suits back in the ship. He could fill up a spacesuit. With the helmet closed he would look like a human. It would be just like Ruari and your other slaves. And he would be so grateful—"
"As if I need the gratitude of such a creature." Freya scoffed, but her face softened. "Yet your gratitude I would like to have, Yas. I would like to know what it would take to soften your hard heart. Suppose I asked you to choose between restoring this creature to my service and seeing your sister again?"
Yas hated her in that moment, but he hoped he managed to hide it. "I suppose if Dezba was alright and alive, then I would choose Desultory. If you want me to choose between their lives, I won't."
She watched his face with a smile that was like the curve of a scimitar, but seemed to relent. "I will not ask you to make that choice. If it's really so important to you, you may have the creature. But get him inside a suit fast, because my people do not like having to see him. The other will be destroyed."
"That is acceptable to me," the doctor said in his ‘you’re getting this diagnosis whether you want it or not,’ voice.
"Well it's not acceptable to me!" Yas exclaimed. "Ma'am, why should he die? He can serve you too."
"It is a construct," Freya said, peering at the Ocuilin patterns that flashed over the doctor's face plate. "We do not need machines to do our doctoring. We have the alfr. Creatures who have souls and an appreciation of goodness and beauty. Not calculating machines who care nothing for the flesh they cut open."
"He cares," Yas protested. "Just because he's made of metal doesn't mean that--"
"It doesn't mean that I cannot appreciate your beauty, radiant goddess," the doctor interrupted. He cleared his faceplate and switched his distinguished human face back on. "I have not had the opportunity so far to praise you as I have wished, but do not mistake my construction as evidence that I am not grateful either to live or die for you. I will praise you if you decide I may live. But I will praise you if you decide I should die. I do not care either way, only that I may please you."
"Oh," Freya's smile turned into something more genuine. She raised a hand to her cheek as if to cool down a blush. "What a charming thing to say. You are at least very well made, construct. I suppose you may continue your existence as long as you teach young Yas here to love me as you do. I appreciate loyalty and devotion. It is the only thing, ultimately, that protects us in this uncertain universe."
Then she drew herself up and faced Yas sternly. "Do you understand, Yas? I don't know why your devotion is so weak—why you must question me all the time, even though you know I am facing attack daily to defend your worlds—but I cannot abide disloyalty. We have enemies enough outside the homestead, we must not have enemies within. Though it will grieve me, if I have cause to question you again, I will have you dissolved and your bones used as fertilizer for our soil. And if that happens, your two friends will go with you. Do you understand?"
The threat came as something of a relief. He'd been feeling it in the air since he arrived. It was reassuring to know he'd been right about that, to have it out in the open. "Yes, ma'am. I understand perfectly."
CHAPTER TWELVE
The beginnings of a plan
Though both Yas and the doctor argued that they should be allowed to return to the ship to fetch the spacesuit, an alf was sent instead. They were escorted back to their quarters by Disa and four other guards, who took up posts at each of the doors. Ruari raised an elegant eyebrow at the sight of them and seemed to sigh.
With the departure of the dark alfr, the celebrations were dying down. Yas was not alone, apparently, in considering the unprovoked attack on the colony an outrage and the fact that they had not done anything to stop it a humiliation. It had put a dampener on the drinking. Now the bowl of the chariot was clearing, only a few people were left, lying drunk on the meadow, or under the trees.
The crew had relocated to a grassy area by the side of a small brook. Lieutenant Vasto was there, barefoot. He'd obviously been wading, but now he was trying to talk to a puzzled and faintly disapproving local about how he was the same person as Lieutenant Mari.
"Lieutenant Vasto!" Yas exclaimed, dropping thankfully to his knees on the side of the stream. "May I have a word?"
Vasto shrugged and came over, his legs dripping. He too looked puzzled and disconcerted and threw himself down by Yas with relief. "Sub Lieutenant Sundeen. Desultory. Doctor. Glad to see all three of you back. She approved you then? I knew she would."
"About that," Yas dipped a hand in the stream and used it to wipe his face. After the many stresses of the day, he was suddenly exhausted and the cold water helped wake him up. "We found out that Freya's enemies are called the proteans because they can change shape. That's what the giant did when we were inside it, and it's what she objected to in Desultory. I don't think it's wise for you to be telling any of these people that you change gender, or that you use the teleport to change your body to fit. Just, maybe try to pretend to be your own brother or something."
"That can't be right," Vasto reached out a hand and Ruari turned up to drop a towel into it. Once Vasto had dried his feet, Ruari took the towel away and offered them both goblets of warmed wine. "No one's uncivilized enough to force a gender-fluid person to choose, surely. Not in this day and age. Even if they were, Freya isn't. I know that for a fact."
"Do you?" Yas felt the mossy ground quake a little as the doctor knelt beside him. He might look like an articulated skeleton wearing a large black bag, but his components were heavy. "Why? Why are you all so sure she's perfect?"
"I am sure. It's my job to be sure," said Sasara, coming over to join them, but there was a frown on her face, and now he looked closer he could see she had bitten her nails down to the quick. Her hood was up again, despite the sun. "I would recognize if there was some kind of psychic projection, some kind of brainwashing going on, and nothing like that has touched my mind."
Brainwashing, she had said, as though she was thinking it herself, somewhere beneath the layers of compulsion.
"Then c
an you explain why everyone is like this?" Yas exclaimed, beyond frustrated. He wanted to tell her about how their shipmates had almost been executed, but he wasn't sure any of them would listen.
"It's simple," Sasara ducked her head as if embarrassed. "I think we're in love. She's so..." She shook her head and buried her face in her goblet. "She's so amazing. Just imagine what she's seen—if she's the same person that people worshiped on Earth long before we'd even invented electricity. How primitive we must have seemed to her. It must be hard for her to adjust to the idea that we're capable of ruling our own lives. But she's so gracious with it. She'll get there. She just needs... guidance. Someone to talk her through the current state of the galaxy and help her to understand. I can't think of anything else I'd rather be doing with my life. An actual goddess! Who'd have thought?"
The little sun appeared to be going down. It was now a shield of boiling russet balanced on the rim of the chariot. It must move along its supporting struts. Perhaps it was set up as if to orbit the vessel, going down to light whatever happened below the valley, where the axis of the cart would be. Where that airlock opened, down which the melted woman had been poured.
In the hazy saffron light, sitting in the chariot's basin was like sitting in an alpine valley between two mountains. The palace and its outbuildings twinkled, roofed with gold. The streams shone steady, and the meadow gave way to forest and then to high tundra, up and down which he could see the trains flowing like blood in golden veins. He wished he too could wholeheartedly give himself up to the pleasure of being here.
"How can you all be in love with her?" he asked, "Are all the women in the crew gay? Are all the men straight?"
"How can you not be in love with her?" Vasto exclaimed, getting in a moment before Sasara could. She nodded along. "She's perfect."
"I believe it may be a viral or bacterial agent in the air," said the doctor suddenly. "A pheromone, perhaps. Your own immunity is puzzling."
Their conversation drew Keva's attention. She joined the circle, handing Yas a large hank of bread, which he halved. He ate one half and added the other to water and wine in his goblet, passing it to Desultory when it was nice and soupy—the Ocuilin did not easily eat solid food.
"She's the goddess of love," Keva pointed out. Yas was curious as to why her scaffolding of exoskeleton had not been regarded as another change of shape, but perhaps the people here thought of it as some kind of war wound. "Do you seriously not know who Freya is?"
"I'm Diné," Yas objected. "Why should I?"
"And I am programed with every piece of medical research since the twenty second century," the doctor agreed. "Not obscure mythologies."
"Okay, well. In my culture she's the goddess of love. Not all love—family love is dealt with by Frigga—but, you know. Sexy love, romantic love—the love you feel for a partner. It only makes sense that's what we'd feel for her. You know? Of course we would. And so, of course we'd do anything for her." She laughed. "We're so goddamn lucky! How many people go all their lives and don't get to fall in love with an actual goddess? She lets us stick around and everything!"
"Pheromones are indicated,” the doctor murmured. “An antidote, antigen, Antigone—”
"Can you seriously not be in love with her?" Keva asked.
Yas thought about that. "Well, I'm aroace so she's firing blanks as far as I'm concerned. But I'm not the only aroace human in the galaxy. We're about half a percent of all people? That means there have to be other people in the crowd of viking wannabes who aren't as impressed with her as they should be. I wonder what happens to them."
The thought of the execution chamber recurred to him unhappily, but he consoled himself with the thought that anyone born aboard this vessel would have been raised from birth with the adoration assumed, drummed in and reinforced every day... Actually that wasn't a comforting thought at all.
Ruari returned with a handful of lanterns on tall metal spikes, which he proceeded to arrange artfully around the party. Behind him came another of his people, dragging the Raggy's spacesuit by its armpits. He laid it on the ground and Desultory oozed inside, the remoras hopping up and wriggling to get in there with him. It was only just big enough to fit him—Yas and Vasto had to hang their weight off the helmet to get it to latch—and with the tinted faceplate hiding the flex of colors on his skin it was no longer possible for him to talk. He sat beside the doctor and, though the body-language of an alien slug who communicated in color should not have been similar to that of a human, Yas interpreted his boneless slouch as despair.
Despair hit him too, like a psychic echo. If he said yes to the doctor's plan of trying to create an antidote they'd have to get past all the guards between here and the ship. He would probably be forced to kill innocents, breaking the crew's hearts in the process and almost certainly sentencing Desultory and the doctor to execution, even if he himself was spared.
"Maybe it's better this way," he said, unconvinced. "Maybe this is where we were all meant to be."
The air weighed on Yas heavily. No, it was his bones that had turned to lead. His breastbone ached as if he'd been sucker-punched and it was hard to breathe, even though the air was obnoxiously fresh and lightly scented with the chamomile mixed in with the grass on which they sat. A faint, star-bright dew was beginning to rise from the river and a tiny artificial moon had risen, like a Cheshire cat smile. It was beautiful and he wanted to die.
It had suddenly come home to him that this might not be a temporary adventure before they got back to the rest of their lives on board the Raggy. In his heart, though he had protested the posting, he had more or less come to terms with the idea of scouting out into the edge of infinity, sending messages home with scientific discoveries whenever he could. Doing good, honest work for a government he largely trusted, to advance a future for the human and the Ocuilin races that they had agreed on and were looking forward to.
Staying here to be the latest recruits in a over-powered alien's army, where everyone else had lost their minds over how wonderful she was, and he had to fight every day for respect to be shown to his crew-mates? Spending a lifetime as a feudal warrior for someone who ran roughshod over the right of humans to govern themselves? Just staying here all his life? Ugh. It took all the delight and energy out of his soul.
"Better for you." The harsh voice startled him upright. It had come from the spacesuit. Oh, clever! Desultory must have altered the in-helmet camera to pick up on his color changes. There was a speech synthesizer set into each suit by standard, so that humans and Ocuilin could work together on spacewalks. Unexpectedly, but welcomely, the suit had given Desultory a voice that everyone could hear. "Staying here would be better for you, perhaps," he repeated. "But I don't want to have to stay in this thing for the rest of my life. It's unnatural, and cramped, and it hurts. My companions are near to suffocating—it's cruel to keep them pinned in here. And for what reason, except that of prejudice?"
"The gods have had uncomfortable experiences with shape-changers," Ruari offered unexpectedly. He had been standing just outside the group, looking like he should be doing something, but that he was unable to finally commit to walking away. Or perhaps looking like he wanted to join in, but couldn't find the nerve.
"And is that any reason to kill them all?" Desultory objected.
Ruari took two quick steps into the group and held out his hands in a cautioning gesture. "Please don't talk so loud."
"I must speak while I am still alive to do it. They almost killed me today—this alien and her humans. Sub Lt. Sundeen managed to save me." The ungainly helmet turned slowly to face Yas, "For which I thank you. But what about the rest of my people?"
Yas's heaviness seemed to grow. It was as though the gravity had been turned up—he half expected to be crushingly pulled straight down to the center of the... oh, but it wasn't a planet. Pulled straight down to that execution chamber and squashed between the the two silver circles there. Why hadn't he thought of this?
"She will make an excepti
on for me, perhaps, as long as I squeeze myself into a box of her choosing. But she has said the Milky Way galaxy belongs to her. When these alfr and giants are defeated, and the humans have been made her slaves, what of my people? Do you think she will allow us to live, providing we cram ourselves into some aesthetically pleasing container? Do you think my people would agree to that? I can tell you, we would not. Not even me, and I am known for my adaptability, and my inability to stand up for myself."
"You think she'd kill you all?" Captain Harcrow abandoned his own conversation and turned to join in, while Lt. Zardari and Chief Yueh resettled themselves so they could look on too.
"I do."
The captain shook his head, smiling. "She wouldn't. She's not like that."
Unexpectedly, Ruari knelt in their midst. "I can tell you what she would do. There is no difference between the dark alfr and my people, except for this one choice. Many thousands of your years ago, long before humanity existed, the gods put this very same yoke on us. Abandon your chaotic changeability and join us on the side of cosmic order. Order is the side of civilization, of light, and reason. Order is the way the universe structures itself into particular things, and the way of change is the way of chaos, entropy and death. My people chose to serve the gods, and we have remained in the same form ever since. It's..."
He smiled. Everyone was smiling these fake smiles, Yas thought, and yet no-one seemed to be happy.
"It is the form that takes the lowest degree of effort for us. So I suppose in that sense it is our true form. But sometimes the deprivation is unbearable. The wish to become something new, to express the reality of what we feel? It is like a fire in the bones, like a plague in the mind. It hurts. It hurts. " He nodded at Desultory with fellow feeling. "You know what I mean."
Desultory nodded back, the movement of the suit boneless, not quite human, but closer than he had ever come. There was an uncanny-valley horror to watching the fluid alien try to express himself like a man that brought home to Yas, distantly, the distress they were talking about.