Gravlander

by Erik Wecks

  Jo fidgeted in her chair and finally stood up. Knowing it to be impossible for her to assist, she slipped out for a walk, leaving it to the old midwives and their backward religion to find a way. In the last couple of weeks, Jo had taken to walking without one of her ever-present minders whenever possible. She’d been to the market a few times and even purchased a thing or two from one of the stalls that would do business with her. She wouldn’t exactly call her reception warm, and she had no doubt she paid a Gravlander tax on everything she bought, but that didn’t matter to Jo. It just felt good to be on her own, doing what she could for herself, and if the Timcree needed to cheat her to let that happen, so be it.

  As she arrived in the market, she noticed that a crowd had gathered in the open space where only a few months before Kolas had been stabbed. Jo stood still. She had no interest in getting anywhere near one of the Timcree clan feuds. She watched carefully, tense, ready to bolt, but to her eye the crowd seemed excited rather than angry.

  Jo relaxed but decided against pressing into the crowd and instead stepped up onto a low walkway that ran around the wall of the room some distance away. In the center of the crowd, two Timcree wrestled on the ground. The slightly smaller juvenile worked desperately to keep to the center of the ring, while an older and larger Timcree worked almost as hard to throw him out. Jo realized that she knew the Timcree kid. He had come to her clinic a couple of weeks ago. He had looked like an upright skeleton then, eyes bulging. He looked marginally better now, a notch or two healthier than walking death.

  Jo knew instantly what she was witnessing. Tanith had told her about the Timcree krisbleipen some time back. A young Timcree who kept at least some part of his body in the ring for five minutes would be considered an adult by the community. He was then eligible to choose for himself which clan he would support with his time and labor.

  The way Tanith had described it, the whole thing was a legitimate test of strength, and boys often failed. However, in this case, it had a different feel to it. although the boy was not doing well against the healthy Timcree adult, and the adult didn’t look like he was taking it easy on the kid. Every time he came close to the edge, the crowd there seemed to harden, pushing back, supporting the boy, refusing to let him lose. The boy himself made valiant efforts to fight back, but he resembled a rag doll more than anything else. It seemed the crowd wanted the sick kid to win.

  Any other day, Jo might have been interested in observing a coming of age ritual, but today, having been excluded from the birthing room for her tainted status as a Gravlander, Jo felt less inclined to take an interest. Then she realized that almost all of the gathered crowd were men, which meant that the market was largely populated by women.

  Jo decided she would take the opportunity to interact with some of them—a rare chance for an outsider who counted as neither male nor female to the Timcree. Within a couple of minutes, Jo found herself wandering a part of the market she hadn’t yet visited, a place where racks of used clothing mixed with bright-colored cloth. Around her, a few women haggled with sleepy vendors.

  Having little need for clothing or cloth, she was just about to turn around and walk out of the area when something caught her eye—a bright white jumpsuit with all its Ghost Fleet insignia missing hung in the back of one of the stalls. Jo paused and noticed several of her personal items lay in trays on the counter. All of it had been left behind on the ship at her arrival. In the weeks that followed, she hadn’t been able to go back for any of it.

  Anger born of her loneliness bubbled to the surface. Her treatment as an object of scorn and exclusion had been difficult enough in the last few months, but the theft of her personal property was too much.

  How some of her things had ended up here she wasn’t sure, but she doubted that Kolas sold it to the vendor. First, that didn’t strike her as something Kolas would do, and second, it would have meant that Kolas had taken something of hers without payment. Jo thought that, in the context of their relationship, Kolas wouldn’t have done that.

  However, theft among the Timcree was a funny thing. She had no doubt that a Timcree who didn’t know her wouldn’t have considered it theft if they took something from a Gravlander and the Gravlander didn’t know. That would simply be good business—and a great story to tell when you arrived back in your clan.

  Looking up from her seat in the stall, the Timcree vendor momentarily recoiled when she saw Jo looking at her own things. Jo savored her discomfort while she considered whether or not to begin haggling to purchase back her personal effects. The injustice of that idea frustrated her, but seeing the opal necklace that was her one remaining connection to her mother, she decided to do what was necessary. She was just about to ask for a price on the object when she hit upon an idea.

  Feigning disinterest, she asked casually in halting Kree, “How much for the jumpsuit?” At least, she hoped that was what she said.

  Now the Timcree vendor had a choice. She could by all rights pretend not to have heard Josephine, but Jo knew that speaking Kree made this a much more difficult ruse to maintain.

  The vendor chose to negotiate. “Six hundred jen.”

  Even Jo knew the price was ridiculous, and she scoffed openly.

  Jo started the slow process of wearing her down to something reasonable. It was a dance she had by no means mastered—the vendor always had the upper hand.

  “Where did you get these?” she asked casually.

  The vendor lied brazenly. “My brother brought them in on his ship.”

  Jo reached down and picked up the necklace. “This looks interesting. What is it?”

  The vendor stammered. “Oh, that? That’s nothing. It’s not worth much.”

  Oh, if you only knew! Josephine put it back down and suddenly looked the vendor in the eye, an action she knew made the Timcree uncomfortable. “Actually, to me it’s worth more than your whole booth, but I give it to you. Tell your brother it’s a gift to you from the Gravlander. In fact, all the things he stole from me, I give them to you.” Allowing her no time to react, Jo turned and walked away from the stall.

  She knew her words had achieved their desired effect when she heard the vendor exclaim, “Gravlander! Gravlander, no! Take them. They are your things. Take them.”

  Jo smiled to herself.

  Several of the other vendors who had been feigning disinterest stopped pretending to be straightening the clothes in their stalls.

  Triumph surged through Jo. She took a breath and stood straighter. Hearing the panic in the woman’s voice, she smiled to herself. If they wouldn’t accept her, she would at least force the Timcree to respect her.

  She was just about to turn around and go back to collect her belongings when a hand upon her shoulder caught her attention. Tanith stood there looking down at her, the Timcree version of a grin on his face. He spoke loudly enough for all to hear.

  “Gravlander, Zonezah has given birth to a girl, and she is healthy.”

  10

  Tortuga

  Several months later, Jo found herself in a very different flea market, surprised to find a relatively modern emergency stabilizer sitting in the dingy stall. Jo turned aside. As soon as she did so, the man in the stall spit on Tanith. “Get out, you filthy Grigaro!”

  Jo spun around to see Tanith wiping human spittle off his face with one hand as he put an ancient micro-scanner back down with the other.

  Red fury pooled under Jo’s skin, its bitter tang made all the more poisonous by the impossibility of doing anything to stand up for Tanith. For just a split second, Jo imagined herself charging across the tables at the back of the booth to pummel the angled, stubby face of the owner, but fear smashed the impulse and enforced a ruthless calm. Jo gently put her hand on Tanith’s forearm.

  Tanith looked down at his companion. “Kree pa, Josephine.”

  “Kree pa,” Jo answered grudgingly, giving Tanith a strained smile as they walked out of the booth. The Kree hardly ever smiled, but Jo hadn’t given up the very human habi
t, even after eight months on Korg Haran.

  Jo hated the phrase Kree pa. It seemed to embody both the best and the worst of the Timcree. Although the words were translated as “Timcree, yes,” in reality, the best Jo could make of it was the idea that life should be lived with an unquestioning faith that things would work out. Sometimes it just seemed to be a justification for Timcree impotence in the face of a system stacked against them—an analgesic for the pain of life’s unfairness.

  Still livid at the market-stall owner, Jo clenched her jaw. She wanted no such painkillers.

  The booth owner couldn’t help one more taunt as they walked away. “What the hell are you doing with the likes of him, Pumpkin? Did he steal you from your mother?”

  Jo gritted her teeth. Fuck off, little man! she thought. She sucked a breath through her teeth, reply at the ready.

  As she started to turn, Tanith’s gentle touch on her shoulder kept her in check. When he spoke, Tanith spoke in Kree. Jo still couldn’t keep up with the language unless she translated it into English. “This gargan isn’t worth it, Meeta.”

  Jo only nodded her agreement back. She was afraid of what might come out if she opened her mouth.

  In her eight months with the Timcree, Jo couldn’t decide if their talent for boxing up their emotions and putting them aside infuriated her or enticed her; she simply didn’t have that ability. She would have liked to just forget it, but she knew that she would likely replay the scene over and over in her head until she fell asleep that night—if her body allowed her to sleep. On the other hand, Tanith would hardly even remember that it happened in an hour or two.

  However, eight months with the Timcree had taught her that all their emotions didn’t disappear into the aether. It went somewhere. All the Timcree loved their vices. Among other things, the Timcree liked to drink, heavily—a habit Jo had started to master herself in the last few months.

  Jo knew that Tanith was, of course, correct to stop her from mouthing off. In a place like the market on Tortuga, any outburst on the part of the Timcree would create little or no sympathy. If Jo said the wrong thing, Kolas and his whole crew might get thrown out, wasting the three and a half weeks’ worth of fuel it took to get here. Jo had no doubt that such an incident would be the end of her hard-won place in Kolas’s clan on Korg Haran.

  Jo walked on, taking slow breaths, trying not to replay the sound of the man spitting as she walked. Shaken and lost in their own thoughts, neither of them approached a market stall again for quite some time.

  Run by the Maximus Syndicate, the bulbous asteroid Tortuga existed in a state of limbo that suited both the reigning Unity government and its owners. It and other syndicate sites around the galaxy functioned as semi-sanctioned black-market hubs. Of these, Tortuga was perhaps the most notorious haven for all things illicit.

  Jo knew little of the syndicates other than what was commonly known around the galaxy. Three syndicates vied for control of the tacitly sanctioned black market. Of these, the Maximus Syndicate was by far the most powerful and the most secretive—even the leadership of the syndicate remained a mystery. It was commonly speculated that the syndicate was run by the Unity board of directors itself. Syndicates were a kind of boogeyman that scared many outback settlements and small stations. Rumors of shakedowns and extortion schemes abounded, but to Jo it always seemed to be somebody’s uncle who ran into a syndicate’s crosshairs, never the storyteller himself.

  Five kilometers wide at its most narrow point and honeycombed to the point of instability, artificial gravity literally glued Tortuga together. The name had started out as a purely humorous reference to the ancient Earth pirate island, but once given, a better name had not been found.

  During her two days in port, Jo hadn’t even explored a tenth of Tortuga’s offerings. Still, she had seen enough to know that she didn’t want to find out about the seedy side of this place, and with Tanith’s guidance, the two of them had kept to the tamest and most public venues Tortuga had to offer. If the stories she had heard in the Ghost Fleet were to be trusted, there were corners of Tortuga where one could purchase weapons as big as Mark VIII nukes, genetic mutations, slaves, and even pleasure-stimulating nanites so powerful, those who took them often wrote suicide notes and wills before they started.

  Here in the main market, Jo felt relatively safe. In fact, she found that after eight months of life on Korg Haran, human contact picked at the scab of her isolation. She was desperately attracted to her fellow Homo sapiens. To her contact-starved soul, every one of the smugglers, whores, and refugees who brushed past her brimmed with life and beauty. Part of her would easily have fled from Tanith just to have a place among them. These were her people, not the Timcree. Yet at the same time, those very same people seemed unfamiliar and exotic.

  I inhabit my own void, she thought. I am truly alone. Jo’s throat constricted as she shoved down her tears.

  She felt more than a little guilty for wanting to run away from her Timcree hosts, especially when Tanith had to endure so much scorn for merely daring to walk around. Besides, she thought, I haven’t finished on Korg Haran.

  Kolas’s plan to prevent Gravlander besh by having Jo teach Tanith to do the treatment had hotly divided the Timcree community. It was a widely known secret that Tanith only understood how to treat disease because the Gravlander hize had taught him. Jo had laughed when she heard that it was rumored that the Gravlander had made a blood sacrifice to the devil to get a cure for the plague that haunted Korg Haran.

  But while she may have found it funny, many of the Timcree did not. Many women still trusted the old ways, and many suffered as a result. However, as more and more Timcree found help at Tanith’s hand, the shrill arguments seemed to be waning. As far as Jo could figure, Kolas believed the best treatment for besh to be healthy Timcree, which explained the motivation behind this trip. He wanted to purchase a medical scanner so that Jo and Tanith could expand their work beyond the plague to all matters of Timcree health.

  Jo had to agree. The more Timcree she treated through Tanith, the more people talked to her in the market. In her mind, it would only be a matter of time before she could treat them herself.

  Jo had small pangs of guilt about that. She was supposed to have returned to the fleet when her work with the Timcree was finished, but in all the rush, no one had clearly defined finished for her, and she still believed that if she was going to be an ambassador for the fleet, then she had to stay long enough for the Timcree to stop fearing her. At least, that’s what she continued to tell herself, but some part of her wondered if she would go back at all.

  When Kolas had mentioned the scanner, Jo loved the idea and said so. Now that they had worked around their language barriers, she found Tanith to be an eager and capable student. Tanith himself showed no preference one way or another; he simply did as he was told.

  Jo was still fighting a lump of frustration in her throat when she noticed a woman about her age with almond eyes, olive skin, and straight black hair handing out some kind of synth meat to an older man wearing a mechanic’s pressure suit. As she handed the luscious-smelling kabob across the counter, she smiled and caught Jo’s eye. Something in Jo melted into the warmth of that cast-off moment of connection. She felt her cheeks flush, and as she walked away, she imagined working in the stall and going home at night to dinner with the woman. Tears welled up, and Jo found herself blinking quickly.

  It’s been too long since someone smiled at me, she thought.

  Tanith reached out and gently squeezed her arm, an uncommon act of compassion from the normally reserved Timcree. Jo felt grateful that he seemed to understand.

  She had just wiped her blurry vision when she realized that four men had encircled them, walking very close. She started to turn toward Tanith but was prevented from doing so when one of the four grabbed her around the waist and pinned her to his side.

  “Why don’t you and I leave this Grigaro behind and go somewhere private like?” The medium-height man smelled badly o
f too much cologne. His bright purple silk shirt, black breeches, and white smile made him stand out in the rough-and-tumble crowd of Tortuga as much as Jo and Tanith did. Everything else in the place seemed to be covered in a film of red dust, but the man looked miraculously clean.

  Surprised, Jo looked over at her shipmate and saw that he was standing straight and stiff, his large eyes locked on hers. The three other men had surrounded him. One of them had a large knife pressed up against Tanith’s back with one hand, while he twisted hard on Tanith’s lanky arm with the other.

  The adrenaline cocktail coursing through Jo’s body cleared her head as fast as the repressed anger and aching loneliness had clouded it. She had no intention of letting herself go off alone with anyone.

  Struggling in his grip, Jo planted her feet firmly on the ground and said loudly enough to make a scene, “No!”

  For a moment, the man’s eyes opened wide, and he loosened his grip on Jo ever so slightly. Jo tried to pull away, but the man ratcheted up his grasp until it became painful. With an unnaturally white smile that came out as more of a snarl, he said, “Now, little lady, I think you misunderstand me. It wasn’t a request. Let’s be reasonable, or your friend here might get hurt.”

  Jo’s mind raced, giving her answers before she had time to think them through. “You’re not going to kill him here on the street. Tortuga has rules about that kind of thing.”

  The man smiled again and leaned in, letting Jo smell the overly fresh mint on his breath. He spoke with nauseating sweetness. “Now, dearie, those rules might apply to you, but they don’t apply to him, and they certainly don’t apply to me. I could gut me a Grigaro right here in the middle of everything and then say that he stole from me and no one, absolutely no one, would ask me another question, so be reasonable, love, and come along—quietlike.” Without waiting for her consent, the disgusting man started to pull her along after him.