Stone in the Sky

by Cecil Castellucci

The map is always changing.

  The thought of that always made my self-preservation kick in. It galvanized me even though I knew killing him would likely bring about my own death. Meanwhile, time marched on, and that day always seemed to slip further and further away as years passed and Brother Blue’s position in the Imperium and with Earth Gov became more and more solidified.

  Brother Blue was out there, free, and I was stuck here, broken. I would have to ruin him if I ever wanted peace.

  I closed my eyes to calm myself, repeating one of the lessons that Heckleck had taught me when I was first on the station.

  “Think of the big picture, Tula Bane. One week. One month. One year. Five years. Ten. One hundred.”

  By the time I got to one thousand years away from this moment, I had regained my calm. The all clear blasted, and we emerged from our safe shelter cocoon.

  I took the lift and walked to the living quarters to get Trevor, the mining robot that I looked after for Caleb, and to wash the thirty-plus hours of alien sweat off of me. Life on the space station returned to normal. We all pretended that there was no more danger.

  But nothing was ever normal on a space station, and by the time I reached my quarters, the whole station was buzzing.

  During our lockdown, an unknown non-Imperium ship had crashed on the planet Quint.

  3

  The difference in my life from last year or from when I was first abandoned on the Yertina Feray was that I had elevated myself from living in the underguts of the space station and bartering to stay alive to being an almost respectable citizen here.

  For so long my only goal had been to leave and, if I could, kill Brother Blue. But I had softened. Circumstances and experience had changed me. Or perhaps I had just grown up.

  I had managed to talk my way into my own living quarters on one of the residence rings as well as secure space for a water, salts, and sweets shop on the entertainments deck.

  If there was one thing that I had learned was true in the universe it was that no matter how bad things got, people always wanted their home-world water and their home-world sweets. And every species needed salts. All were welcome in my place, and in a pinch, one could always trade me a favor for some low-grade water to drink.

  I called it the Tin Star Café, although I hadn’t tasted anything that resembled coffee since I was on Earth.

  “What’s coffee?” aliens would ask me. I would try to explain it to them, although truth be told, I could barely remember it exactly except for the smell. Coffee was something that my mother and father would drink in the morning, and I would get a taste of it on special occasions as a child. But I could still remember the smell of it, and that was something. The aliens would shake their heads and say a different word for a different thing that did the same thing from where they were from. When a ship came in with that item, they would bring it to me to taste. None of them were coffee, but all of them were interesting.

  The Tin Star Café would be the best place to get information on the castaway below, and I was as curious as everyone else. It was an event. When you lived on a nearly empty space station along a trade route that no one really used anymore, any event was significant. The Yertina Feray used to be less desolate when there had been mining on Quint, but those days were long gone. No one ever went down to the planet anymore; it was so depleted.

  When I’d left the underguts, I hadn’t taken advantage of all of the empty quarters. My living space was not large—just a small room—but it was mine, and it was better than the metal bin I’d lived in for two years in the underguts. Having real quarters made me a bit sad, though. It seemed to cement the fact that I was here to stay on this station.

  “On, Trevor,” I issued a command to Caleb’s robot, which was in rest mode in the corner of my room, and then stepped into the sonic shower to clean myself. It felt good after having been squashed in with aliens for so many hours.

  Trevor had other uses besides music, news, and companionship. He was, in a way, my protector. One word, one secret word uttered from my lips, and Trevor could do great damage to whoever menaced me. He had arms that could mine through bedrock. He had data that went back 500 years. He had no voice, but I swore that he had personality.

  I had found him in a warehouse when the Yertina Feray had been in transition between governments. I had painted a face on him, but until Caleb had fixed him, he had done nothing but turn on and off. Now, Trevor did so much more, but with his painted on face, he looked almost comic and docile.

  Until you noticed that he had knives tucked in his hands.

  Trevor began a steady outpouring of news from the galaxy. I had programmed key words for him to scan, so the news was read out in a jumble as he skipped around doling out tidbits of information. My heart always sank at any news report about another planet that had fallen to the Imperium. Every victory for the Imperium felt like a wound.

  While I washed and dressed, I listened to the stream of shipping news trying to learn what items of use would be coming into the station and what would move off. Knowing what was around to barter, even though it wasn’t my trade anymore, was a habit I could not shake.

  I had also programmed Trevor to find any hint of what had happened to Caleb and Reza on the Outer Rim. Where were they? Were they even alive? Every time I thought of how I had poisoned them to sleep and shipped them out in cryocrates to the far rim of the galaxy, I was wracked with guilt.

  It had been hard to be the only Human on the Yertina Feray, and when Reza, Caleb, and Els had arrived, I had not wanted to know them. But they had been more than friends to me; Caleb, with his soft ways and his heart on his sleeve, a friend that I could talk to in a real way. And Reza. I had tried to push the idea of love or romance away. What did I need of that when all that fueled me was hate? But Reza had changed all that. With his warm, brown eyes. With his strong arms. With his deep kisses.

  And then there was Els, who had betrayed us all. She was the real reason I had sent Reza and Caleb away to the Outer Rim.

  But now she was dead, and they were gone.

  I had tried to save them when Brother Blue demanded that Els and I kill them to prove our loyalty. I had used Els to get close to Brother Blue, but things didn’t go as planned. She had been killed because of what she knew and because Brother Blue thought that she was me.

  What had I done?

  Earth had been in civil war, half of it wanting to remain isolationist—Earth Gov—and half of it kowtowing to the Imperium so it wouldn’t be stripped. We had been caught in the middle of it. These were things and machinations too large to understand.

  Caleb and Reza were lost and probably dead, but I couldn’t stop hoping that I’d hear news about them. That they would get word to me and tell me that they were all right.

  I had meant to send Reza to Earth and Caleb, along with his robot Trevor, to the Outer Rim to search for allies for Earth, thinking that would give the rebellion its best chance. Instead I had sent Caleb and Reza both to the Outer Rim and Trevor had been left on the docking bay.

  What had I hoped when I sent Caleb and Reza away? That somehow Reza would spark a revolution to form a united Earth? Unfortunately, until recently Earth was still mired in infighting, with the power tipping back and forth. Now, the rebellion—made up of those who had wanted to remain isolationist—had been quelled and the Outer Rim remained eerily quiet. Except for the news of Pirates.

  If Caleb were still alive, would he have found a group of aliens willing to press in from the Outer Rim and help Earth overthrow the Imperium and its tyranny over species and worlds?

  I had done it all wrong. I had stumbled in my mission to kill Brother Blue. I had been cowardly, and I played dead once again. I had used my precious travel passes on what was likely little more than frozen corpses by now.

  I was not as clever as I’d thought.

  I shook off the dark thoughts and familiar feelings of failure and hopelessness. There was work to be done. There was a life to be lived. I was young, a
nd if my old mentor had taught me anything, it was that time had a way of making the right moments for action travel toward you. In the long game, long was short and short was long. Patience was the key.

  There was nothing I could do about the past. I shut off any part of me that missed Reza or Caleb and focused on the beats of my moment-to-moment survival. There was still a war going on, and I was still the way most aliens got their necessities. That was worth something. That was what I could do instead of dwell on the regret of what had not been done.

  “Reports on station docks,” I commanded.

  Trevor switched to listing the ships that were docked at the station and the ships that were leaving or scheduled to arrive. Only two. Every ship carried water. All life needed water. At least those two ships would have water that I could trade for. I listened to any hint of the identity of the crashed ship, but there was no mention of it, as though it was not large enough to merit a mention. That was interesting unto itself.

  Heckleck had always reminded me, “There are volumes of information in silence.”

  “Music,” I commanded Trevor.

  He began to play a soft Hort music, full of bells.

  I patted Trevor on the head. His painted-on face did not express anything, but it made me feel connected to the robot. This was something that we all did, not just Humans, I’d noticed. We endowed inanimate objects with personalities. It was a universal thing. Aliens had pets, dolls, and nicknames for computers. I loved that we all had something in common. It was what I looked for. If an alien was too alien, I could always start there, with the things we anthropomorphized.

  When I was ready to leave, Trevor shut down the music and rolled along behind me. Trevor was not my servant. He was more like a pet.

  If I were still on Earth, he might have been a dog.

  4

  Even though the station kept a twenty-six-hour day and there was no day or night per se, there was a natural rhythm to the hours we all kept. The Tin Star Café was either open or closed, but mostly, with the help of a young Nurlok named Kelmao, it was open.

  Most aliens made do with the various protein paks for basic sustenance, but when it came to indulgences, a sweet, salt, or water was the only true piece of home. At the Tin Star Café, the aliens came in and drank their water, ate their sweets, got their salts, and, of course, they talked. It was a few tables, a bar where my intergalactic sweets, salts, and bottled water were on display. On occasion, I’d serve real food, which was hard to come by on a space station.

  Stretched high along the entire back of the room was a window. Through it I could see a glimpse of Quint, and, of course, I could also see the stars.

  On the sill I had placed my alin plants. From their pots, long tendrils of the infrequent yellow bloom and green leaves cascaded down behind a protected plate of glass. I didn’t want anyone touching my plants. Alin, even from poor-producing plants such as mine, was hard to grow in the galaxy. It had vast medicinal properties that made it worth stealing. The plants bloomed when they could, which was almost never. I had three plants now, two were cuttings from my first plant, which had kept me alive when I first arrived on this space station.

  Trevor rolled to the corner and began playing some contemporary Loor music.

  Too many low tones, I thought. Without antennae I couldn’t appreciate the full beauty of the piece, but others could appreciate it. Soon enough the style of music would change.

  There was only one kind of music I didn’t care for anymore.

  Human music.

  It reminded me too much of what I had lost.

  In my place, I was proud that those species who traditionally did not get along—gutter rats, ambassadors, pirates, and the rare travelers—sat next to each other and played simple parlor games: sticks and stones, zero ones, and poppop bon. If they poisoned or betrayed each other, it didn’t occur at the Tin Star Café. Instead, it happened at my competitor, Kitsch Rutsok’s. I think Kitsch was proud that his place had such a rough reputation.

  Let him keep it, I thought. As long as I stuck to treats and specialties and not the things that he dealt in—imbibing, gambling, and other perverted comforts—he mostly left me alone.

  The castaway on Quint was the only thing that anybody could talk about. Quint had once been a planet full of ores used for various technologies. The ores were mined by aliens with robots like Trevor to cut the rocks and earth. No one had been on the planet for two hundred years. There was no reason to go. There was nothing there.

  “Any news?” I asked a Per whom I knew was from the Ministry of Travel. It had a drink in each of its four hands.

  “Not on any of the manifests. It’s a small ship.”

  That made me feel better as it eliminated an Imperium ship from the possibilities. The stranger was someone wanting to fly under the radar, which was not uncommon to visitors on the Yertina Feray. We were far enough away from the central core systems and unimportant enough these days to be a place to come to and disappear from the rest of the universe.

  As the crowd ebbed and flowed, rumors abounded as to who it was.

  Rebel. Slavers. Traders. But no one knew.

  The poor soul had obviously gotten caught in the solar flare and had its ship’s electrics fried. With the station on safety protocol, an SOS would have gone unheeded. Not being able to dock, there was only one place to go.

  Quint.

  Throughout the day my eyes kept unconsciously drifting up to the window so I could see outside. It offered no great view like the arboretum, but it was my window, and so its view pleased me.

  Who was down there? I wondered. Were they still alive?

  “You won’t be able to see them,” Tournour said, interrupting my daydreaming.

  I loved the sound of his voice. There was a tone that Loors had that Humans could barely hear, but I imagined that was what made his voice sound so warm to my ears.

  I hadn’t seen him since we’d all been on lockdown. His antennae moved slowly from side to side, indicating that he was concerned about something, but not too worried. In the past year, I had come to know and depend on him in a way that I had never done with anyone before. He was the only thing I had left. Somehow, we fit together, the two of us, cast out from our homes and secretly trying to fight the Imperium.

  Even if it felt like most days I had nothing, I still had something.

  One thing.

  “I was looking for the color blue,” I said.

  “It’s out there,” he said. “But you should leave that color be.”

  He was trying to steer my heart away from whom it hated most.

  Tournour ordered a bottle of Loor water and sat down, signaling to the other aliens there that all illegal transactions should be put on hold. Aliens either left my place and went to Kitsch Rutsok’s, or settled down to more casual social interactions. Tournour was of the law.

  He placed his currency chit on the counter, which I pushed back to him. It was a game we played. Whatever he ordered, it was always on the house.

  “He ruined everything in my life. He abandoned me on this space station and tried to kill me,” I said.

  “Twice,” he reminded me and took a long swallow of water. He put the bottle down and smiled. Loors, despite their antennae, triangle patch of colored skin, and lack of eyebrows, were more similar to Humans than most aliens in their expressions. With a Loor, a smile meant a smile.

  I smiled back.

  “You don’t sound glad that Brother Blue kept his word and made sure that we’re forgotten,” he said.

  “When you say it like that, you make it sound like I should be thankful for something that man did. I will never be thankful for anything that he does.”

  “He kept his word,” he said. “That’s more than most.”

  I started to get agitated. Most days it was something that I pushed to the bottom of my thoughts. It was either that or let the powerlessness I felt about Brother Blue drive me mad. Tournour shifted, and I could see him holding himself ba
ck from trying to calm me down. It was a strange thing about Loor biology that when they were mated to someone, they would release a scent when their partner was in danger or upset. It was a way of bonding. Sometimes it made me feel uncomfortable to have the responsibility of his heart, as much as I needed his care.

  “I just expected…” I continued.

  “What?” Tournour took my hand. He knew the things I was frustrated with. Being here. Being the lone Human. Feeling powerless. Thought of as dead. Being worldless. He was a careful observer of everything but also, of all things, me. He also knew that I was from a species that needed to state and restate the obvious all of the time. He’d learned, through my careful instruction, that sometimes I just needed to vent. That it didn’t mean I was angry or in danger. It was a necessary Human emotional release. I let my breath out in a big sigh and changed the subject.

  “What’s the news on the castaway?” I asked.

  “Hard to say,” Tournour said. “We don’t know if the alien is alive or dead. There is a distress beacon on Quint, so we know where it is, but it’s automatic. We’ve had no word from an actual alien, and we don’t have the resources to send someone down there.”

  “So if they are alive, they will just live there on Quint? Alone and abandoned?”

  “Assuming it has the nanites to help its lungs with the atmosphere. And assuming its kind can.”

  Not every species benefitted from nanites. They only regulated the gases of most species so that complicated masks or suits were not required on some stations, ships, and certain planets. Of course, it all depended on your physiology. Many aliens had nanites and still had to wear masks. Nanites were still useful for language if not breathing for those species.

  Tournour knew that I didn’t like to think of things being left behind and forgotten.

  “Eventually someone will go down there to get them, alive or dead,” Tournour said softly. “It’s just not a priority. I don’t want to make a request to the Imperium because it would put us on their radar.”

  The rules of rescue meant that a ship that could assist in an SOS could salvage any and all parts and ware from the wreck in exchange for safely returning the survivors, if any, over to the closest habitable planet or space station to be questioned, treated, and then sent on their way.