“Nets don’t put themselves on poles!” someone shouts. “If the tall netcatch goes to the public jars there is no reason for us to waste time building tall nets!”
“Then let the town buy some dragnets and put some children to work towing them!” Ridgeback answers. “Share out the catch among all, landowners and tenants.”
That gets a loud response. About half the people in the commonhouse are tenants—netmakers, stonecutters, openwater fishers. The craftworkers love the idea of getting catch for free, so they support Ridgeback loudly. The fishers want the right to drag nets over private lands themselves, so they’re a bit more muted. The landowners hate the whole idea, and say so. The apprentices are just making noise for the sake of noise, hoping a fight breaks out.
Broadtail hates the idea more than most. His Sandyslope property is off at the upstream end of town, exposed to the cold currents, and his pipeflow is cold and thin. His channels produce only slow-growing plants like ropevine and springbranch, and those can’t back many beads. Almost half his food is netcatch, and he has three expensive new tall nets on his land. He waits for the noise to die down and then jumps in before Ridgeback can continue. “How about letting the landowners pay a rent for the right to put up nets? Maybe an eighth of the catch?”
Some of the landowners like that, but most of them just want to be able to put up whatever they want on their own land and eat whatever they catch. The fishers don’t like the rent idea at all, because it sounds too much like the idea of charging a toll on openwater. They fight that notion at almost every meeting.
Ridgeback doesn’t like it either. “Give landowners the right to rent common water and it’s not common anymore! They can trade the rights back and forth, and buy and sell and sublease them. The waters become the property of the richest landowners instead of everyone. I imagine the waters full of nets, blocking navigation.”
That really gets the fishers going. They don’t like anything which might snag a dragnet or tangle a line. And none of the tenants like the idea of the landowners being any wealthier than they already are. Broadtail is momentarily deafened by some angry pings directed at him. When he gets his hearing back, Ridgeback is calling for a vote.
It’s a close one. The tenants are all for the proposal, of course. Many of them vote for anything Ridgeback proposes, as if by reflex. Even the fishers are grudgingly in favor—Broadtail’s warning has only convinced them that the choice is between public dragnets and a tangle of private ones, and this way they at least get a portion.
Then the landowners vote. Each gets one vote as a citizen and then another based on flow rights. Broadtail himself gets only half an extra vote because his flow share is so small, but big owners like Flatfront 6 Ventside have six. As a group, the owners have the bulk of the voting power, and can usually pass anything they wish, but this time they are divided. Big rich owners don’t care much about netcatch and like the idea of feeding tenants and apprentices at no expense to themselves. Some of them want to reassure the fishers and craftworkers that they aren’t trying to monopolize the waters. The small owners like Broadtail are solidly opposed to Ridgeback’s plan, but they just don’t have enough votes. In the end, the motion squeaks by.
The next speaker with a motion is Sevenlegs 26 Archrock, who wants to reapportion flow rights based on pressure instead of pipe size. She brings it up whenever a meeting is called, but her explanation is so complicated nobody can even tell if it’s a good idea or not. Broadtail’s too mad to stay and listen, so he crawls to the doorway, angrily pinging any adults in his way, and shoving apprentices aside.
Outside the quiet is almost shocking, as if he’s gone deaf. Some children are curled up in the pathway asleep, and Broadtail kicks them out of the way with unnecessary force.
He’s tired and hungry, and he needs some stingers to stay awake long enough to get things in order at home. Widehead 34 Foodhouse sells stingers and doesn’t ask any annoying questions. Her shop is just across the public road from the commonhouse, set on a tiny plot with no flow rights at all. The front part of the shop is actually on public land, and only the kitchen and Widehead’s own quarters are behind her boundary stones.
Broadtail goes inside and taps at the shell by the door for service. Widehead comes out promptly and pings the room. “Broadtail? Is the meeting over?”
“The important part is. Ridgeback’s foolish plan to abolish tall nets passed. I need some stingers.”
Widehead brings him a pair of stingers and Broadtail taps the sharp end of the first one with his feeding tendrils. There’s a mild pain, and then a nice tingly numbness as the neurotoxin spreads through his system. It relaxes his muscles but makes him feel much more alert and alive. He taps the second and savors the sensation, then calls for another pair.
After half a dozen stingers Broadtail finds the sound of his own pulse almost deafening. He gropes clumsily in his pouch with one foot and eventually gets out three of his beads for Widehead. He goes homeward, trying to move as quietly as he can, but of course his half-limp legs betray him with every step. Outside it sounds as if the meeting in the commonhouse is breaking up. Broadtail doesn’t linger; he’s tired and hungry and he wants to get home without talking to anyone.
He almost makes it. Nobody stops him until he’s on his own property, going to his own door. He hears a loud ping that makes his shell feel as if it’s shattering. It’s Ridgeback, standing in the public pathway beyond the marker stones. “Broadtail! Come here!”
“What?”
“I am disappointed. You usually vote with me in meetings.”
“You usually have good ideas. This one is terrible. I need my tall nets.”
“But you get your share of the public catch! You can devote your time to other things and still get food!”
“I get more from my own nets. Schoolchildren pulling a dragnet don’t catch much. They slip away, or eat the catch themselves.”
“We can put someone in charge of them.”
“Who needs to be paid. All too costly for my taste.”
“Broadtail, you are too miserly.”
“I am miserly because I have a cold barren plot and can’t afford to waste my time and wealth winning the friendship of a lot of tenants and apprentices!”
“They are useful friends. They balance the power of the big landowners.”
“And small owners like myself are ground up in between.”
“Because you have nobody to protect you. If you were my friend I would help guard your interests. And so would my other friends.”
“By banning my nets? Go away. I need to eat and rest.”
Ridgeback moves closer to Broadtail and lowers his voice. “I am preparing a motion for the next meeting which makes great changes. If you support it you can gain wealth, perhaps even more flow.”
“I do not wish for gain, only to be allowed to use what I have and be left in peace.”
“You are foolish, Broadtail. Everyone calls you the most intelligent adult in the village, yet you waste all your time digging up old stones and trying to read carvings. A landowner should concern himself with practical matters like politics.”
“Get off my property,” Broadtail pings loudly. He’s sick of Ridgeback’s big promises and schemes, and wants to go inside and run his feelers over a good book before sleeping.
“You should not speak that way to me.”
“Go!”
Ridgeback steps forward past the boundary stone and raises a pincer, and in Broadtail’s tired and stinger-addled brain an ancient instinct kicks in. Invader on my territory! He charges Ridgeback and shoves him hard. Ridgeback folds his pincers and shoves back. For a moment the two of them strain and push, their feet scrabbling for purchase on the path.
Then one of Broadtail’s feelers gets caught in Ridgeback’s pincer, and a couple of segments at the tip get snipped off. The pain makes him even madder, and he raises one of his pincers and jabs it down behind Ridgeback’s head. Ridgeback isn’t expecting this, and there’s a
gap between his headshield and his back carapace. The tip of the claw neatly pierces the soft skin and plunges deep into the flesh beneath.
The two of them stand frozen for a moment. Broadtail’s shocked by what he has done. Ridgeback wiggles his feelers wildly, but the rest of his body is absolutely still. Then Broadtail pulls out his claw and Ridgeback collapses.
“Ridgeback!” Broadtail pings him and tries to pick him up, but the wound behind his head is spewing fluids like a vent and he’s not moving.
Broadtail steps back and bumps against something. It’s one of his marker stones. He listens for a moment to get his bearings and gets another shock. During the fight he must have shoved Ridgeback into the pathway. The corpse is in common territory. Killing on private property is a personal matter, but this is murder.
Broadtail doesn’t know what to do. His body does, though. It’s been far too long since Broadtail last ate or slept, and the fight used up any reserve he might have had. He staggers past the marker stone onto his land and passes out.
BY an unspoken arrangement, Rob took over as maintenance tech on the drones and sensor gear, communicating with Sergei via notes in grease pencil on the door of the workshop. Since Henri had monopolized Rob’s services before dying, everybody was already used to doing their own photography and image processing anyway.
Four days after he returned to work, Rob started finding little people.
The first one was on the bench in the workshop, a little figure made of swabs and tape with one cotton-tipped arm raised in a cheery wave. Rob figured it was something Sergei had put together in an idle moment, and left it on the shelf when he finished work.
The next day he found two more figures. One was a little dough girl sitting atop the micro wave in the galley, and the second was a wire dancer poised in the middle of his regular table.
Rob spent half an hour that night exploring the station to see if the little sculptures were maybe just a kind of fad. Maybe everyone was making them, just to pass the time and decorate the station. He didn’t find any others, though. In his room during the work shift he lay awake for a couple of hours, reverting mentally to age fourteen and wondering if the little figures were somehow part of a plot by everyone else to make fun of him.
On the third night there were half a dozen of them. One, cut from a strip of scrap plastic, on the sink in the bathroom nearest his room in Hab Two. The second, folded from a sheet of nori, in the galley. The third, molded from caulking compound, on the back of the chair in the workshop. Another origami figure made of foil inside the tool cabinet. And a wire angel posed above the hatch into Hab Two where he’d be sure to see it on the way back to his room.
The sixth figure was sitting on his pillow. It was a girl made of swabs and foil, with her cotton hair colored black and a tiny smile on her little cotton face. She was holding a folded note.
BREAKFAST TOMORROW AT 2200?
Rob wasn’t any good at sculpting, but he was a decent freehand artist. He sacrificed a page from his personal journal and drew a little cartoon of himself surrounded by tiny figures. The caption read Sure. He stuck it on his door and went to bed. The station used a twenty-four-hour clock, and for simplicity the day began at the start of the first “day” shift. So 2200 was an hour before even the early risers would be up and about. Rob finished rebuilding the flex linkage on one of the drones at 2130, and spent the next half hour fretting about what to do. Should he go meet the mystery person? Should he shower and change?
At 2145 he decided to go ahead and meet whoever it was. If this was some elaborate plan to give him crap about Henri’s death, then whoever was doing it was an asshole and Rob could tell him that face to face.
He wound up sitting in the galley at 2150, wondering if this was all some kind of joke. But at 2200 exactly, Alicia Neogri came in and flipped on the lights.
“Why are you sitting in the dark?” she asked.
“Oh, I—”
“Lying in ambush to see who would come?” She put a little
figure made of plastic tubing on the table. “What shall we have for breakfast?”
Figuring out what to cook at Hitode was always difficult. For a team of scientists who had grown up in a world of agricultural oversupply, with even the most obscure ingredients available at any market, being limited to what the hydroponic farm could produce was almost intolerable. Everyone brought along personal supplies, and hoarding and bartering were a way of life.
Rob, being an American, had used most of his ten-kilo personal food allotment for sugar and caffeine. But one of the few vivid food memories he had from childhood was eating scrambled eggs on a camping trip with his cousins, so on a whim he had packed a hundred grams of egg powder.
“I’ve still got some powdered eggs left. We could have scrambled eggs.”
“What about an omelette? I have cheese and there are some fresh mushrooms.” When Rob looked uncertain, she laughed. “I will do the cooking.”
So Rob grated cheese and sliced mushrooms while Alicia put some synthetic oil in the pan and got it hot.
Cooks on Ilmatar had to follow an entirely different set of rules. The tremendous pressure at the bottom of the ocean affected everything. Water didn’t boil until it was hot enough to melt tin, bread didn’t rise, and foods like rice and pasta practically cooked themselves at room temperature. Added to that were the limits on what was available. The hydroponic garden produced plenty of greens, tomatoes, potatoes, and soybeans, but no grains. They had shrimp and a few catfish but no meat. Dairy products and eggs existed only in powdered form.
For bulk, the staff could always fall back on the pure glucose and synthetic lipids produced by the food assembler. You could have them separately, or combined in a kind of greasy syrup which sounded utterly nasty until you came in from a day in freezing water and wanted nothing but calories in their purest form. Without the hydroponic farm morale would suffer; without the assembler the crew of Hitode would starve.
Alicia was a good cook, at least on Ilmatar. Rob watched admiringly as she flipped the omelette out onto a plate one-handed. It was by far the best thing he’d eaten since leaving Earth.
“So what’s up?” he asked after getting a few mouthfuls into himself. “Why the little statues?”
She looked a little embarrassed. “I thought they might cheer you up,” she said. “But I didn’t want to disturb you.”
Rob tried to make sense of the situation. They weren’t friends—at least, he didn’t know her any better than anyone else at Hitode. Why was she being nice to him?
“Thanks,” he said. “It was really nice of you.”
They met again for breakfast the next day, and as they finished their toasted bean cakes, Rob cleared his throat and tried to sound casual. “You know, you don’t have to get up early. We could meet at 0100 tomorrow if that’s better for you.”
“Everyone else will be up.”
“I know.”
“It’s hard to flirt when there’s an audience,” she pointed out.
“We’re flirting?” he asked, startled. She laughed, and he joined in, trying to pass it off as a joke.
They agreed to keep having breakfast together early, but that eve ning at 1500, when most of the staff were relaxing after dinner, Rob sat with Alicia in the lounge playing cards. There were half a dozen others in the room, and aside from a few furtive glances, nobody reacted to Rob’s presence.
Encouraged, he started joining Alicia earlier and earlier in the eve ning, until they were dining together with the “second seating” in the galley at 1300. Rob realized he looked forward to spending time with her, and rearranged his work schedule to let him see more of her. In the process, he wound up spending more of his time out of his room when others were about, and he found he didn’t mind it so much after all. A week passed, and then another; Rob hardly noticed.
He was just starting to wonder if she would sleep with him when the aliens arrived.
THE braking burn was brutal. Tizhos lay strapped to he
r bed, which for the occasion had extruded itself from what was normally the aft wall of her cabin. The fusion motors roared, and the force mashed Tizhos down into the cushions. She tried to estimate how hard—twice Shalina-normal gravity? Three times as much? How much could the ship stand before it broke apart?
The entire voyage had a distressingly thrown-together feel to it. Just to get out of orbit they’d used half a dozen strap- on boosters, and there were drop tanks attached to the drive section to allow faster transit in Otherspace. The expense of getting all that lofted into orbit on short notice was simply staggering— this one mission seemed likely to cost more than a year of interstellar probes.
Instead of popping out on a long, cleverly plotted minimumfuel rendezvous orbit, they’d drained the drop tanks for a high- speed pass dangerously close to Ilmatar’s sun, and now were using half the ship’s internal fuel for this punishing deceleration.
She watched the display projected in the center of the cabin. At the moment the ship was passing low over the cloud tops of the giant planet the humans had named Ukko. It would swing out again, matching orbits with the moon Ilmatar, and do a final burn to start circling the moon. All these extravagant maneuvers would leave the ship with just enough fuel to get back to Shalina on a four-month low-energy trajectory through Otherspace.
The motors shut down, and Tizhos unstrapped herself. She rather liked zero gravity. She called up a window, and watched the red and yellow swirls of Ukko’s atmosphere beneath the dark sky. Ilmatar was already visible as a little white crescent, rising steadily above the giant planet’s cloud tops.
According to the display, Tizhos had about two hours before she needed to strap in again. The perfect time to work on her little personal project.
She had joined the Space Working Group in order to learn about alien life. But until now, she had never left Shalina. The Ilmatar voyage was a wonderful opportunity to study two different alien species: humans and the natives of Ilmatar. The visit would be short, so Tizhos wanted to be able to gather as much information as she could in the time available. After a little thought, she had come up with a clever plan.
A Darkling Sea Page 4