by Hugh Howey
Nothing.
Walter hissed to himself. He turned to his mother’s bed, ready to deal with what he’d been putting off emotionally and mechanically for so many years, when he noticed he wasn’t the only thing hissing. There was a whir of air coming from the breathing unit. A fan had begun spinning, and then a motor chugged to life. A worn belt squeaked over a poorly balanced flywheel. Walter turned to the screen, his heart thumping, and saw green phosphorous text burst across the display:
RESUME? YES/NO_
Walter hurriedly jabbed the “Y” and hit enter. The tubes leading away from the machine lurched and kicked as fortified air surged through them once more. He spun around to his mom, following the wires and tubes, and saw her arms falling to her bed and away from the fogged mask over her mouth. Walter let out a cry of relief, of sorrow and frustration and anger. He sat on the edge of the bed and held his mother’s thin, feeble hand.
“It’s okay,” he told her. “Everything’s fine.”
As Walter consoled his mother, he looked from the blue veiny web beneath her silvery skin to the machine that had nearly let her down. He watched it chug and whir dutifully, and pictured himself ripping the flanking thing to pieces.
••••
Once his mother was settled, and Walter had regained some semblance of trust in the machines keeping her alive, he stole out through the back door to get some air. The night was already muggy with the looming rains—it had the foul odor of mildew Walter had come to associate with poor pickings. What little tourism Palan got from nearby planets came in a rush right after the rains. Locals on Palan called the foreign invasion “second floods,” and the great mounds of alley trash and filth deposited like seeds by these off-worlders would soon grow until they threatened to clog the streets in their eventual tumble toward the ocean.
For most Junior Pirates-in-Training, the humid stench was a sign to lay low and watch for the rains. For Walter, it was a chance to have the city to himself, just him and the locals with their empty pockets and heads full of rumors. It wasn’t that Walter had a dislike for money, nothing could be further from the truth, it was just that he had a powerful lust for anything valuable. And information could be a wondrous commodity.
Walter exited out of his mother’s alley by the Regal Hotel. He glanced toward the lobby to see if the homeless and low-liers had begun moving in, but there was just the normal amount of stragglers milling about in the flickering fluorescent lights. For him, the Regal Lobby was the ultimate barometer for the weather. You could listen to several dozen predictors and prognosticators to try and time the next rain, or you could look to the Regal for a grand average of all those resources. It was a curious thing, a mob. They tended to heighten aggression, which made them look stupid, but they could also be more accurate than a lone expert, their individual ignorance somehow cancelling each other out.
Walter watched one of the Lobby’s occupants stumble out into the street and nearly fall headfirst into the wide gutter. He shook his head at the thought of so many idiots providing him with reliable information.
He looked the other way down the street and considered heading toward his Uncle’s hideout, Hommul clan’s inglorious basement headquarters. If everyone was asleep, he could do some snooping, or get started on the programming assignment he should’ve completed a month ago. That’s what he would do: get cracking on his finals hack.
First, though, he decided he should go by the market to see if any of the booths had been left untended. He figured it wouldn’t hurt to put off the programming another few hours. He turned toward the spaceport, padding softly past the sleeping cabbies in front of the Regal lest any of them wake and demand what fares he owed.
Walter’s jaunt to the market played out like a pirate training session of sorts, complete with arbitrary and false-serious rules: The sporadic cones of light shining from overhead bulbs were to be avoided at all cost; loose pavement and noisy rubble needed to be spotted ahead of time, lest he be heard by any others roaming the night. Walter practiced these things as if his mother were watching him, the looming specter of her disapproval forcing him to hone the trademark abilities of a Palan pirate. No book reading for him, no sir. Not when anyone was around, anyway. It was hacking until you slept in a haze of code. It was picking the dozen locks on the front door while she watched from her bed, and doing it until he could make it slick as a key. It was going on raids, and smash-and-grabs, and in-and-outs, and bang-your-deads with his uncles. It was whatever it took to keep her alive and happy. Walter had become just one more machine chugging and hissing and propping up her sickness, delaying the inevitable.
He wouldn’t have minded the career he’d been born into, of course, but if only he’d been born into it someplace else! Anywhere but Palan, that word of filth built on a bedrock of lies and peopled by a race who had evolved the ability to smell a fib. What did that say about the last few million years of their biological development? Nothing good, that’s what.
For a long time, Walter had complained about the irony of his people’s heightened olfactory sense and the malodorous nature of their planet. Then, one day, it had dawned on him with the suddenness of the floods: the stench they made with their garbage was no accident. It was a blanket, like the shroud of darkness he stole through toward the market. It was fostered by the collective unconsciousness of so many habitual liars, all terrified of anyone sniffing what they were thinking. The putrid stench that drove everyone else away? It was the smell of Palan guilt hiding under a fog of rot.
And Walter hated it. He hated the idea of living out his life on the planet’s only natural continent. To him, the butte of bedrock rising out of Palan’s oceans was no cleaner than the massive rafts of detritus that drifted to and fro on the water’s rough surface. If it was up to him, he would use his wits in other ways. He would’ve stayed in school, kept acing his tests, won a minority scholarship to a Terran world, a world where he could reek of guilt and nobody would ever smell it. A world so ripe with easy pickings, he could steal without even knowing he was doing it.
His mother would kill him for even considering such a scheme. The worst beating he’d ever gotten from her was after she’d found his stash of books in the ceiling tiles. Of course, the lying about them had contributed to the blows, but she was plenty angry to start with.
“Out to enrich just yourself, are you?” his mother had asked him. “Don’t care about the clan your father made, is that it? Ready to run off and live like a Human boy, pink and stupid?”
“I was gonna sell them,” Walter had said—a lie far too ripe for a day so soon after the floods.
Years later, Walter had to grind his teeth as he recalled what had followed. The memory made the moist Palan air adhere to his skin, beading up and dripping through his clothes. Walter wiped his forehead and smeared his palms on the seat of his pants.
“Floods take me,” he murmured to himself. “Floods take me the flank out of here.”
Walter skipped over the last gutter and entered the markets. He quickly scanned the quiet booths and sparse crowds. There weren’t any shuttles standing upright beyond the collection of tents, no passengers coming or going, so the nighttime trading appeared to be as slow as it got. On the surface, at least.
He knew from accompanying his uncle to other, more clandestine deals, that this was a busy time for lucrative transactions. Walter cared little for such Senior Pirate scheming. Who was in charge which month meant little to him and impacted his life almost none. His own clan was too small for it to matter which table the crumbs tumbled from, if they even tumbled at all.
Weaving his way through the center of the market, Walter scanned the shabbier tents for easy pickings. Each one had a guard posted out front, usually a family member from the tent’s clan, but like Walter, all boys couldn’t be expected to care for the family business. He was looking for someone shirking their duty, when he felt a bad presence nearby—a faint whiff of ill intent drifting up from behind.
Walter scoo
ted over to get behind a bald Palan walking slowly in the same direction as he. Surreptitiously, he glanced up at the back of the man’s silvery head and scanned the fishbowled reflection of the crowd behind him.
There! A figure slid over in Walter’s wake and ducked behind another late-night shopper. Walter matched pace with the bald man while he scanned the crowd ahead of him. He needed someone fat. Why weren’t there more fat people on Palan?
Ah, a man in a trench coat, the next best thing. Walter took a last glance in the silvery dome ahead of him, then slid around the bald gentleman. He used him for cover as he angled for the guy in the trench coat heading the opposite direction. As soon as he passed the second man, he whipped around and fell into his shadow, heading back the way he’d come. He hugged the Palan’s elbow, swinging wide as whoever was tailing him strolled past behind their own escort.
As soon as his stalker went by, Walter jumped out and jabbed the kid in the ribs, his knuckles pointed sharp. The unsuspecting youth jumped and hollered with the fear of discovery. Walter smacked him on the back of the head for good measure. “What the flank are you doing, Dugan?”
“Godsdamnit, Walter, that hurt!”
Walter jabbed him with another knuckle between the ribs. “I asked you a question.”
“Floods, man, I was just practicing for next week. I was gonna come ask you if you wanted to play some Rats with me and the other trainees.”
“You were coming to ask me to play a game of Rats,” Walter repeated.
“Yeah, I swear.” Dugan jerked his head toward the deeper markets. “Dalton’s uncle has the gambling parlor shut down until after the floods. He’s letting us use the pits.”
“And I’m invited?” Walter sniffed the air while Dugan thought about his answer.
“Of course,” Dugan said.
Walter smiled. He forced himself to think about cool baths and empty alleys and all the refreshing, happy things he kept at the ready. He exuded positivity and peace for Dugan’s nose. It was the Palan way of thinking: Sustain a world of lies on the mind’s surface and dwell on them while conversing. Use the back of your brain to hear the words of your speaker and form a reply, but do not actually think on them. Thinking on them causes the body to know it’s lying. If, however, you think on other things and just spit out your replies without truly contemplating them, you come out smelling fresh as a flood. Walter was better than most at pulling the trick off. One more talent for his dearest mother to be proud of.
“Lead the way,” Walter told Dugan with a smile. As he said it, he pictured being taken to piles of gold and heaps of fresh food—not to his fellow trainees.
••••
It wasn’t Walter’s first time in the casino, but it certainly felt like it. Without the haze of smoke and the perpetual dinging and clacking from the luck boxes, the place had an altogether different vibe. The absence of a crowd made the stained and threadbare carpets, littered with tables and silent machines, feel like a warehouse just storing things. Walter followed Dugan through the deliberate maze of gambling stations, back toward a distant ruckus.
As they rounded the poker tables with their individual, airtight, and odorless Palan-proof playing pods, Walter saw what looked to be his entire training group, three dozen Junior Pirates or so, gathered around the Rats pits. Those not playing were yelling advice to their comrades, pointing and shouting. Walter followed Dugan as the boy strolled up to the pits and weaved his way through to the railing.
“Look who decided to join us,” someone close by said.
Walter ignored whoever it was and leaned out beside Dugan to see who was winning.
They were playing one-on-one, just two boys matching wits and skill. Each of them had a long Rats pole in their hands with its small, flat paddle on the end. The pit between them was full of a few feet of water that had turned brown and foul with the signs of several rounds played. There were two rats paddling on the surface of the water, their noses twitching for air. One had been painted silver, the other black. The goal was to drown one’s own rat before the opponent killed his.
Walter watched with some interest as the two boys jousted from opposite ends of the oval pool. Neither kid seemed keen on playing straight offense by just holding their rat under. They took turns reaching out and knocking the other boy’s paddle away from his rat while corralling their own animal closer. Wielding sticks a dozen feet long was taxing after a while, so both boys had the same strategy of trying to get the rats to their side of the pool where they could wear out their opponent by forcing them to use a longer reach.
Someone bumped into Walter from behind.
“Excuse me, your heinous!”
Several of the boys nearby laughed.
“I mean, your highness.”
Walter turned and gave Dalton the finger. He’d know his distant cousin’s dry voice and even drier wit with his nose cut off.
“So, the Pirate Queen extended your curfew, eh?”
Dugan turned from the action in the pits. “Flank off, Dalton.” He yelled it over a sudden round of jeers from the boys paying attention to the match.
“I’m talking to my cousin,” Dalton said with a wry smile.
“You’re being a dick,” Dugan said.
“Nonsense. Why would I be rude to my future king?”
Walter ignored him and returned his attention to the pits. Both rats were gone, the boys’ paddles jostling beneath the water’s surface. He couldn’t tell who had what, but the crowd was furious with excitement.
“Forget him,” Walter told Dugan. He pointed up to the scoreboard where the vitals for the silver rat could be seen. Its heartbeat was racing. The betting line began to tilt in that boy’s favor, and a flurry of wagers took place all around, little of it with any potential payoff now that the end was near. The boy with the black paddle released his rat and began pushing and prodding the silver paddle, hoping to free the drowning Earth mammal and win it a precious breath. The silver player had excellent control, however. He leaned into his end of the paddle, flexing it as he poured on his weight.
The black rat bobbed to the surface and began panting furiously for air, kicking at the turbulent water with its tiny paws. The silver rat breathed its last. A steady buzz and flat pulse relayed its victorious demise.
Cheers and groans mixed as the game went final. Walter watched money fly back and forth between the boys, the sight of so much of it making him feel a rush of giddiness. Despite the half-truths of Dalton’s jabs, the reality was that Walter stood to inherit the poorest clan in the history of Palan pirates. What little his father had been able to forge had just as quickly been scrapped by the ineptitude of his uncles. And his mother, despite her drive and brilliance, had been sidelined by a type of pneumonia likened to a slow, inexorable drowning. The running joke, for those who were able to laugh about it, was that her clan was going to go down with her.
Dalton, meanwhile—the descendant of a Hommul clan outcast from so many generations ago—had now been born into the once maligned and now dreaded Smiths clan, which had ruled Palan for dozens of floods. The ironic reversal was not lost on Walter at all. Perhaps that was why he longed to be exiled from his own people: He was envious of what that long-ago action had done for Dalton’s great-grandfather and by extension, his greatest rival.
While Walter mused clan history, he scanned the crowd of forty to fifty boys arranged around the uneven rail of the Rats pit. He wondered which of them his uncle and mother would be able to land for the looming finals. The Smiths, by currently holding power, would get the top picks. The Savages would get next, and so on. None of the higher clans would take Walter, no matter how highly he had scored in prior examinations. Too many clans had been sabotaged from within as distant kinsmen wrested power for their own blood clan. At least it meant Walter didn’t have to do anything to try and impress the clan leaders or his peers. There was that.
“You’re nexssst,” Dalton hissed into Walter’s ear, in English.
Walter reached b
ack and shoved the boy away, then dug into his ear to remove the invasive whisper.
“I challenge Walter Hommul!” Dalton yelled over the pits.
Walter watched the group of boys look up from settling their bets.
Murmurs grew to cheers.
Dugan elbowed Walter and hissed some foul-smelling good luck.
“I just got here,” Walter complained.
Boys normally waited hours for their chance to play.
“And it’s my uncle’s place,” Dalton said, “so I can challenge whoever I like.”
With a dozen prods and pushes, the gathering of boys ushered Walter toward one end of the pool. He hissed at the crowd, but found himself slotted into the little jut of railing leaning out over the black side of the pit. A ratpole was placed in his hands, and someone thumped him on the back of his head. Above the pit, the scoreboard was reset to zero and the names “Hommul” and “Smiths” blinked across the LEDs. Dalton took his place in the silver slot and grabbed his paddle from another boy. He waved the long pole out at Walter, taunting him.
Walter held his own pole out and tapped the surface of the mucky water a few times, getting a feel for the heft of it. He’d played enough Rats in his day to wield a paddle with some skill. He could hold a twenty foot pole with a ten pound paddle at arms-length for half a minute, no problem. He also knew Dalton played every day and could do the same with one hand and for twice as long.
A countdown began on the scoreboard, and the crowd chanted along with the falling numbers. Walter tightened his grip on his paddle and glanced up at the underside of the scoreboard to follow the countdown. Dalton whacked Walter’s paddle smartly, and Walter nearly dropped his pole into the water. He tightened his grip even further. When the crowd got to zero, a hole opened in the scoreboard and two rats fell out, each covered in paint. The animals clung to one another in a feisty, hissing, mid-air ball as they tumbled down and splashed into the pit.
The crowd erupted, and Walter and Dalton sparred from opposite sides, using their long paddles to draw the two frightened creatures closer to their own ends.