by Tony Daniel
Two bodies, lying down on the deck. One clearly human. One clearly not. Movement. Breathing. The nonhuman had a bright white line leading to it from a nearby . . . tank.
Excellent. “Somebody thought fast,” Leher said. “Looks like the sceeve is hooked up to heliox. Leakage must account for the heliox in the pod atmosphere.” Leher considered. “But what about the pressure?”
“Adequate for sceeve,” said the geist. “About sixty p.s.i.”
Guardian normal atmospheric pressure was much higher. The effect on the sceeve after this amount of exposure to what was to him low pressure couldn’t have been good. On the other hand, opening up the lifepod wasn’t going to change anything in that regard.
“So, we’ve got churn containment, that sort of thing in place?” Leher asked.
“Absolutely,” said Coalbridge.
“Well, I guess it’s time to open it up,” said Leher. “Any idea how?”
“Simple code, Lieutenant Commander” said DAFNE, who suddenly appeared standing next to Coalbridge. “I should have it in—”
A circular door formed in the previously smooth surface of the lifepod. It irised open from the circle’s interior outward, leaving a man-sized portal into the craft. Warm air rushed out, hitting the colder DOCK atmosphere and forming a cloud of fog. The lifepod seemed, for a moment, to be exhaling.
“I want to go in before the marines,” Leher said, suddenly imagining one or two of the heavily armed fighters barreling into the lifepod and indiscriminately tossing everything around to be sure the area was “clear.”
“Sure. Like I said, your show, Griff,” Coalbridge quietly replied.
Leher nodded. He walked to the lifepod entrance, hesitated a moment, then stepped inside, with Coalbridge right behind him. Coalbridge had drawn his trunch, and it was glowing purple.
The interior was about the size of a mid-sized van. But windowless and covered with old-fashioned and non-chroma electronics. Several boards blinked and beeped. And was that a steering wheel? On a spacecraft? Yes.
On the floor of the lifepod lay the two forms Leher had seen on the scan.
Now it was clear that one was a woman. A cute woman. Porcelain-white skin. Black hair pulled back into a curly ponytail. Two petty-officer stripes on her uniform.
“Japps!” said Coalbridge. “I’ll be damned!”
Coalbridge bent down over her. “Melinda? Can you hear me?”
Movement. A mumble.
“Japps! Hey, Japps!”
“You know her?” asked Leher.
“Yes,” Coalbridge said. “From shore leave about a year ago.”
Then it dawned on Leher. “Ah. You know her know her,” he said.
The woman opened her eyes, mumbled something incomprehensible. She sighed and closed her eyes again.
“Let’s get her out of here.” Coalbridge rocked back on his heels, called to two marines outside to come help him lift the woman.
Leaving Leher staring down at the sceeve.
His sceeve.
A heliox canister and plastic hose to the muzzle. Somebody, possibly this Japps, had been thinking. Saved the sceeve’s life.
But was the nervous system damaged? Had the sceeve starved to death? Could it talk?
He knelt down next to the form. Was startled, though he shouldn’t have been, when the chest rose and fell. He’d seen that it was alive on the sonogram.
Alive. The first living sceeve he’d ever seen. Leher reached over. Gently touched the creature. Yes. Mushroom. Ocular vasculation. A sceeve blink. It turned its huge black eyes, its bat-like muzzle, toward him.
For a moment, human and sceeve gazed into one another’s faces.
Then Leher broke away, looked down. The sceeve was covered by a simple black tunic. A Sporata officer’s uniform, Leher corrected himself. Lieutenant, junior grade. There was the sheath for the knife. It was empty.
He examined the hands next. Smaller. Farther down. The uniform was clasped with a flap between the legs. Leher almost reached down and felt for the positor but then reflected on how he would like a strange alien grabbing his dick.
Not much.
Anyway, the sceeve was obviously a male.
A sick male. A darker marking across the sceeve’s facial skin. Internal damage below the exocartilage. Maybe organ failure.
The sceeve closed a hand around Leher’s wrist. Leher started. But it was merely a gentle grip. He looked down. A slight ripple in the sceeve’s lower muzzle.
Speech glands, thought Leher. He’d viewed reproductions, re-creations, numerous images, of course. But this was real. For the first time, real.
I’m seeing actual Guardian speech glands in operation.
He’s talking to me.
Suddenly the lifepod was suffused with an ammonia smell. Ammonia, bergamot. Trace of alcohol-based volatility identified—
It all came back to Leher. His work. His years of study.
The postcards. The decision to remain useful, despite it all.
Despite his broken promises.
Despite Neddie.
The alcohol aroma was a hypha identifier and a name marker, of course.
The others were familiar odors, as well.
Leher strung the esters together in his mind without effort. He’d smelled these scents before.
I am called Expresser of Rhythmic Composition in Lofty Elevation.
The Poet.
SIXTEEN
10 January 2076
Vicinity of 82 Eridani
USX Joshua Humphreys
Gitaclaber floated in and out of full consciousness. Life was a helium dream. Was he the drifting cloud or the breather of its sustaining moisture? Was he on the other side, the Sea of Words, the imaginary land that was the stuff of his storytelling mother’s ramblings during his childhood?
Too many stories she’d told him, and not the approved versions, either. She’d also beaten him when she was drunk on cheap ammonia. He’d never mentioned a word of getting hit to anyone. That was not why they took her away. No, they’d gotten wind of the kinds of stories his mother told through a careless word Gitaclaber had dropped to a neighbor child. They—in this case, the Department of Wellbeing—ordered his mother to the parenthood-testing facility. There they sliced her mind into pieces and stuck it back together like so many shuffled playing cards. She was returned to him, two cycles later, when he was nearly an adolescent. She didn’t hit him then, but she also didn’t love him. His father had been a starcraft officer, away, away. No one to turn to for a two-cycle-old boy. Only the childcare machine, the Mam, at the DOW prepubescent housing unit where they kept him after his mother was taken.
He’d come to love that rag-doll robot. His memories of clinging to the cloth dummy, sucking her juice through his feet, were stronger than his memories of his own mother.
The Mam’s blank eyes. Her warm, silent nostrils breathing a lullaby over and over again, always the same song. The same song.
His dumb child love flowing into that nothingness.
Unrequited.
His sobbing whine when he was forced to part with the Mam. Writing the memory into his gid, his “always” thoughts, so he would never forget Mam—
His child’s trust that she would not forget him, either, her little son.
Which she wouldn’t. Since she’d never known him to begin with.
He would hate the Administration forever for that.
But then he turned his head, felt the ache in his neck, and knew this was not the Sea of Words. There was air, of a sort. Gravity. A bit too much of that. He was lying on a reclining couch, in some sort of transparent bubble of material. Ah, the pressure was finally right, finally right.
There was light, much too bright, streaming from somewhere overhead.
Still the deep, impossible ache in his body. He could feel that he was dying. He could feel the life ebbing away. The sickly sweet smell of decay in his nostrils.
But not quite yet.
A strange form leaned over Git
aclaber, blocked the light. Adjusted something near his head.
The light caught a face. Horribly deformed. Gashes instead of features.
Humans. He was with the humans. Somewhere.
What a way to gutter out this life. Among squalid traders. But what could you do? Oh, his father would love this if he were still alive. One more failure from his failure son. His son the would-be poet, the weak-footed scum sucker who would always be defective, imbecilic—and ultimately mateless.
Well, you weren’t wrong about that, Father. Although he’d certainly spread his seed around the hands of the sex houses.
Could he help it if whores reminded him of the Mam?
But now he was a success, even if his father would beg to differ. He’d completed the task set for him. He had made it to the humans.
I warned them, I—
But he hadn’t quite, now, had he? He hadn’t communicated the message he was asked to deliver. Not fully.
He hadn’t told them the most crucial piece of information they needed: the rendezvous point.
Failure. Father was right.
Again he drifted out of awareness—this time, into his poems. He’d achieved a small fame with his youthful verse, published a small volume under his own, real name. It was called The Night Craft, after his first tour of duty, and had been well-received.
The star-sailor poet, he was called. “Ode to the Waste of Alher,” “The Star Slayer’s Lament.” Whatever. He’d hated all those poems the moment they’d come out of his nostrils.
No, the poetry he had truly wanted to write would land him in prison. Or dead. Or worse, he’d end up like his true mother, chopped to pieces, a blithering idiot.
So he’d written it anyway. And set it to music when he felt like it. And distributed it through back channels, over the samizdat networks of the Shiro. Sold it in the Souk. He’d even used the Mutualist press when he had to, although he had absolutely no interest in their philosophy of “symbiosis.” It was as bad as the Regulators demanding their paeans to parasitism.
Neither side much cared for poets. At least the Mutualists let him be, and even helped him when he was saying something they believed might prove useful to their cause.
So he had acquired a certain fame among their number. He was careful. He published everything anonymously, of course. He became the Poet.
Though the Mutualist distribution channels, Gitaclaber’s poetry and protest songs had become a staple in the dissident community in general. They’d become so well-known, in fact, that even a few in the famously tin-ear Administration literary establishment were beginning to suspect a connection between the Poet and the flash-in-the-pan poet, Gitaclaber.
His newer poems were many times more powerful than anything young Gitaclaber had been able to muster, however. Even he could see that. He had no false modesty about his work, only his own role in it. In so many ways, he was merely a tidal pool, an estuary’s inlet, for the Sea of Words.
He sank into those poems now. The strong turpentine brew of his “Epic of Hoarding the Big Pieces.” His “Migration Song,” its sweet anise tang cut through with bitter camphor. That poem was Gitaclaber’s signature song of protest against his own crushed individuality. If he would be remembered for anything, it would be that poem, its famous snippet:
The sun is dead. The stars blink broken code.
I have traveling to do
away from this endless necessity to feed.
“Migration Song” and the others had made his name within the Mutualist resistance. Or made the name of the Poet, for there was always a portion of “Migration Song” he must leave out by necessity. The dedication line. It was too personal and might give him away. He supposed no one would ever take in the complete poem as he’d conceived it.
He’d been so careful no one but his beta publisher knew his true identity—or so he had believed. Somehow, one individual had found him out, had tracked him down. Captain Arid Ricimer. Such a strange character, Ricimer. Not a Mutualist. Not anything, really.
He’d reminded Gitaclaber of himself in a way.
Alone.
He’d always resisted becoming a tool of the resistance. But with Ricimer, it was different. Ricimer understood that Gitaclaber’s work must stand as it was, that the Poet’s independent voice was his greatest strength.
And so it was from Ricimer he’d taken on his assignment. This assignment.
His final and only true assignment within the Sporata.
And failed.
It was time to let go, time to be reclaimed.
—nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing—
But what was that?
Vanilla. No. Maybe. Vanilla?
Why was he smelling paper in his dreams? He’d never written a poem about writing a poem. Never been that pathetic, at least.
Definitely vanilla. Gitaclaber opened his eyes, fought his way back to full awareness.
What the hell? The hideous human form again. Was it the same one, different? There was no way of telling. This form was holding a sheet of paper.
What could this mean? Was it trying to hurt him with it? To tell him something?
“You idiot human, you don’t understand. You have to scratch it if you want to read it,” he puffed out weakly.
The human made a horrible sniffing noise. Unnaturally wet. Then the gash in its face . . . did something. Something awful, something that showed the white stones inside. Disgusting. It raised one of its tentacle-like hands. It was holding something.
Something that spoke.
The odor was faint but understandable.
“I know how to read,” it said. “Understand to scratch. This device I use now is limited. Writing notes better. You read?”
“Yes, of course I can read.”
Another gash movement on the human’s head. Then it/he/she? It scratched the paper.
Good evening, Lieutenant Gitaclaber. I saw your name tag. My name is [garbled nonsense]. You are currently being held on a United States Space Craft originating from planet Earth, Sol system. Although I am able to understand your language to some extent using my sense of smell and a computer translation device, the other humans aboard this craft cannot.
The tentacle-finger lifted from the paper for a moment, and the words ceased flowing. Then the human continued scratching across the page.
We have grave concerns for your health, Officer Gitaclaber. We’re doing all we can, but it may not be enough. In the meantime, I am able to understand much of your language. You speak Long-Arm Hypha Standard, if I am not mistaken?
“How do you know this?” Gitaclaber wheezed out.
The human sniffed, nodded its square-shaped head. Then it manipulated its fingers over some sort of device. A moment later, Gitaclaber heard a familiar sound. He turned this head to see—could it be? Yes. A computer printer. How had the humans obtained such a thing? But then he realized they must have come across it in wreckage or some such place. They had been able to destroy the occasional smaller Sporata vessel—though mostly through dumb luck. Or so the propaganda said.
The human pulled the sheet from the printer and began scratching the words out once again.
I am an analyst specializing in Guardian languages and cultural activities. We have acquired various Guardian texts, and we have carefully monitored your broadcasts for years. There are a few of us who have trained ourselves to “hear” your speech through our own sense of smell—although this is a rather primitive ability in comparison to what you are capable of, of course.
“The other human, the female who saved me? Is she alive?”
Now the human made sounds so low they were vibrations toward the device in his hand. It wafted out an answer through a tube into Gitaclabber’s confining bubble.
“We have been able to restore her. See, she is well.”
The human, the Speaker, Gitaclabber thought of it, made a sudden motion with one of its extremities. After a moment, the human female, the one who had saved him, came into view across th
e translucent barrier. The Speaker rumbled again.
“She has been by your side,” came the words through the tube.
“Good,” said Gitaclaber. “Tell her . . . will you tell her she has my thanks?”
A moment’s pause. A thunderous exchange of noise between the humans.
“She has heard you,” the human said via its speech-producing device. “She says she could not have made it without you, either.”
The human returned to the writing device again—it was using some version of a symbol pad—and created another sheet covered with words from the printer. Despite the dull pain that never quite left his body, Gitaclaber had to admit he found this . . . amusing. He was only Sporata by necessity, of course. This was his true calling—playing with words.
We believe that you are the broadcaster we call the Poet. In your last broadcast, we have determined that you encoded information concerning vessels that would be arriving in or near our system. The cinnamon code key was clever, by the way. Furthermore, we received the schematics of the weapon the vessel carries. The next part of the broadcast was cut off, however.
I was staying quiet so that monster DDCM goon Transel couldn’t hear me, Gitaclaber thought. But no matter. No matter. He touched the paper and continued reading.
After this point, you abruptly ceased transmission. We did not receive the location for meeting. Are there coordinates? Some signal to look for? A time and place we should know?
Gitaclaber slowly breathed in, sighed. He was going to do it. Explain. He would be able to fulfill his mission.
The human held out its hands, palm forward, and closed them into fists—the proper gesture for “So, then what?”