by Anthology
“You lack faith, old friend. That there is a genuine upfront payment from Watch-captain Ripka Leshe herself.”
Tibs did not look as impressed as Detan would have liked. “Payment for what?”
“She’s hired us to steal Thratia’s lovely new airship, the Larkspur, of course. Seems the ex-commodore is getting a mite too comfortable here in Aransa, and needs to be shown her place.”
He beamed up at Tibs, relishing the slow shock that widened his eyes and parted his lips. It was good to surprise the shriveled smokeweed of a man, but it didn’t last. Tibs’s eyes narrowed and his shoulders tensed. “That doesn’t sound much like the watch-captain.”
Detan frowned. “No, it doesn’t, does it? But that’s the way it’s been played to us. We just have to get a step ahead.”
Tibs sighed and cast a longing look at their downed bird. “Sounds like a mess. Maybe we should just take the money and move along. Thratia isn’t known for her forgiving nature, you know, and monsoon season’s coming. Wouldn’t want to get stuck in a sel-mining city come the rains, would we?”
Detan flinched at the thought of being stranded here, so very close to the Smokestack. All that tempting selium being pumped out from the bowels of the world no more than a ferry ride away. It was hard enough keeping his sensitivity to himself when they were in the sel-less reaches of the Scorched. Stuck in a city full of it? He’d give himself away in a single turn of the moon.
For the barest of moments he considered writing to Auntie Honding for enough grain to get the flier airworthy again. But he knew well enough that any response from his dear old auntie would come with strict instructions to return home at once for a lengthy stay, complete with brow-beating. And he knew damned well that lingering at Hond Steading, with its five selium-producing firemounts, would make hiding his sel-sensitivity from the proper authorities a sight more difficult than managing Aransa’s single mine.
Detan squared his shoulders, forcing his body to display the confidence he wished his mind held. They had time before the rains came. He was sure of it. “Make off with Ripka’s money? She’d have us hanged if we ever showed up here again!”
“More like have our heads lopped off.” Tibs grimaced and spat into the dust.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“City’s all worked up over it. Seems a doppel got caught impersonating some puffed-up mercer. Our new benefactor took his head clear off at sunrise. Not a friendly town for sel-sensitives of deviant abilities, you understand.”
At sunrise. He glanced up the city toward the station house, and though he couldn’t see it from this vantage he imagined all the little watchers returning to it after a good morning’s work.
Takes some time, to lop a man’s head off and clean up the mess. Enough time for Ripka to make it back to the station, little more than a mark after sunrise, to question him then kick him loose? And what of those who had arrested him—they’d said they were acting on the captain’s orders. Where had she been, to see him and order his arrest at the Blasted Rock in the wee hours of the night while preparing to execute a man? He’d never seen her at the inn, true, but…
Detan cleared a sudden hitch in his throat, and Tibs narrowed his little lizardy eyes down at him. Stranger yet, in all her talk of doppels Ripka had failed to mention that she’d done one in just that morning.
He decided not to mention the watch-captain’s lapse of memory to Tibs. It was usually best not to worry the man with silly things like that. Ole’ Tibs liked straight paths, and dithered at forks. Tibs would spend his life wasting away at a crossroads if Detan wasn’t there to push him along. He smiled at what a good friend he was.
“Don’t worry yourself overmuch, Tibs, it’ll give you wrinkles. Now, the watch-captain has asked for our help and on my honor I won’t be leaving the poor woman without assistance. Could you do that? Just leave her here with Thratia itching to take power?”
Tibs gave him a rather ungentlemanly look, but Detan fancied himself too well-bred to be given a rise by that sort of thing.
“I suppose we must help the watch-captain,” he grated.
“Splendid!” Detan clapped his hands as he sprang up and strode over to the downed flier. “Now we have to get this old bird airworthy again.”
“I thought we were soon to acquire a much finer vessel?”
“Have you no sentimentality? We can’t just leave it!”
A little smile quirked up the corners of Tibs’s dry, craggy face. “I suppose not.”
“Brilliant! One step ahead already!”
***
They hired a cart to help them move the flier up a few levels to the inn Detan had scouted on his way through the city. It wasn’t upcrust by any stretch of the imagination, and he figured that made it the perfect place to lay low. Thratia never came down this way herself, and Ripka only when there was something that needed cleaning up. It was a nice bonus that the innkeeper didn't know him, and that he was less likely to run into any of the uppercrusts he'd swindled in the past.
Their room had a half-door in the back that swung open into an old goat pen, just big enough to stash the flier in. Wasn’t likely anyone would steal it, but he felt better about having it close. From the edge of the pen they could see the sweep of Aransa, or at least all those levels that tumbled out below their room.
The downcrust levels were a hodgepodge of daub and stone construction with a few brave souls throwing up the occasional scrap-wood wall. The houses huddled up the side of the mountain, clinging to the good stable rock beneath, and the city was a mess of switchbacking streets. Glittering black sands reached across the distance between Aransa and the Fireline Ridge, the firemount they called Smokestack spearing straight up through the center of the ridge, belching soot and ash. The winds were in their favor today, and so the greasy plume drifted off to the desolate south instead of laying a film of grime over all Aransa.
Blasted dangerous place to stick a city.
From this far away, the glint of metal holding leather-skinned pipes to the Smokestack’s back was the only evidence of the firemount’s rich selium production. Dangerous or not, there’d be folk settled here until the sel was gone. Or until the whole damned place blew.
“Enjoying the view?” Tibs slunk up beside him and wiped his hands on the filthiest rag Detan had ever seen.
“Hasn’t changed much, has it?”
“Don’t suppose it has a need of change. Anyway, bags are stored and the flier’s tarp-tied. Smells like goat piss in there so don’t come whining to me when the whole blasted contraption stinks of it later.”
“I’d never blame the odor of goat on you, old chum. Your bouquet is entirely different, it’s…” He waved a hand to waft up the right word. “It’s distinct.”
Tibs ignored the slight and kept his eyes on a brown paper notebook clutched in one hand. Somehow he’d rummaged up a bit of pointed charcoal and was using it to sketch broad strokes that eventually came together to form their flier. Or, what would have been their flier, if it were in one piece. New formulae appeared around their cabin, and Detan went cross-eyed.
“You can’t possibly know what you’re doing there.”
“Just ’cause you’re an idiot doesn’t mean everyone else is. Sirra.”
“We’re gonna need something to wreck,” he said, anxious to be of some use, “a decoy.”
Tibs just grunted.
Detan grinned. Couldn’t help himself. Some sense was emerging from the mist of numbers and angles, familiar shapes made bigger, stronger. Their tiny little cabin adapted for an entirely larger vessel all together. Adapted further to be modular, easy to piece apart and slap back together again. Easier still to wrap around their current cabin until the time it would be needed.
It was perfect, really. This way they didn’t need to know what Thratia’s ship looked like ahead of time—all ships had cabins on their decks of some kind or another. Once the ship was in hand, he and Tibs could break off Thratia’s original and leave it as a
wreck somewhere in the scrub beyond the city. Work up a good fire around it and no one would go looking for the rest of the ship; they’d assume it’d all burned up and give up the trail.
Then he and Tibs could shift the knock-down cabin from their flier onto the deck of Thratia’s ship to cover any holes their hasty carpentry might leave behind. Nothing more suspicious than a big ole ship trundling around the skies without a cabin.
“Oh, that’s clever!” he blurted as Tibs’s plan crystallized in his mind.
“One of us has to be. I’ll need to get a look at the real bird to make sure it all connects, but it should work well enough for a quick switch.”
He gave Tibs time to work out the finer details, then watched in admiration as the crusty man ran his charcoal bit back over all the salient points, thickening the lines as he committed them to memory. When he was finished, Tibs tore the page out, crumpled it, and shoved it in his pocket.
Detan threw an arm around his shoulder. “Come along, now. Let’s go spend some of Ripka’s grains.”
Malka Older
https://malkaolder.wordpress.com
Tear Tracks(Short story)
by Malka Older
This story was originally published on Tor.com on October 21st, 2015.
Nobody expected them to look human. If anyone still harbored that kind of anthropocentric bias, they kept it bottled up with their other irrational fantasies (or nightmares) of successful contact. The biophysicists had theorized alternative forms that could support higher intelligence: spiraling cephalopods, liquid consciousness, evenly-distributed sentience. The Mission Director, who was known for being broad-minded, even invited some science fiction writers to work with the scientists in imagining what intelligent alien life might look like. The collaboration didn’t generate many usable ideas for the Mission (although it did lead to half a dozen best sellers and a couple of ugly lawsuits). And after all that thought and effort and retraining of assumptions, the first intelligent extraterrestrial life-forms they found were humanoid.
Not completely human, not like actors in silver face paint, but bilaterally symmetrical, bipedal, with most of the sensory organs concentrated in a central upper appendage that it was difficult not to call the head.
“We need a new word, a whole new vocabulary,” Tsongwa said, as he and Flur reviewed hours and hours of long-distance surveillance video. “A term to remind us that they’re not human, but still give them equal importance and intelligence.”
Because not only were they humanoid (the word did not satisfy Tsongwa, but it caught on and stuck), they were clearly intelligent, with societies and civilizations. They lived not in the caves or intelligent-organic complexes or mind-alterable environments hypothesized by the scientists, but in identifiable buildings, in cities. (The Mission Director promptly brought in architects, urbanists, psychologists, forensic archeologists, urban psychologists, forensic architects). They were “advanced” (Tsongwa insisted on putting the word in quotes) enough that first contact with them could be via radio, and then video. Many of the linguistic problems, not to mention the initial shock of alien existence, could be worked out long before Flur and Tsongwa got anywhere near the planet.
The Mission Director insisted on the importance of a protocol for contact, flexible enough to use in as many different contexts as they could imagine (an optimist, he was still hoping to discover intelligent spiraling cephalopods), yet structured enough to allow for some degree of standardization. Two ambassadors, one male, one female (the Mission Director did not point out that they were also of different “races,” another word Tsongwa used only in quotes). They would go armed, but imperceptibly so. They would go with scientific objectives—as much observation and recording as possible—but also with diplomatic goals that were more important: they were to bring back, if not a treaty, at least an agreement. “A framework,” the Mission Director explained, “for future relations.” He made a template for them, but encouraged them to modify it as necessary. The next day he came back with a few more templates, to give them a sense of the range of options.
Flur, the brilliant young star of what they call the Very Foreign Service, smiles and nods, but he’s overselling it. She’s pretty sure she can figure out the acceptable options, maybe even some the Mission Director hasn’t come up with, just as she’s pretty sure she can charm these aliens by respecting and listening to them, by empathizing, by improvising. Maybe more than Tsongwa. She likes Tsongwa, but he’s so serious, and places too much importance on semantics. She knows he’s supposed to be the experienced balance to her youth and genius, but nobody’s experienced anything like this before. And he’s not actually that much older; it’s just the deep lines on his face and the slow pace of his consideration that make him seem so.
Flur is aware of another probable advantage: as far as they have been able to tell, most of the alien leadership is female. Or the equivalent of female, what looks like female to the humans, which means human females will look like leaders to the aliens. Even Flur’s skin color is closer to the rosy purple of alien flesh. Though no one has mentioned either of these cultural elements, Flur prepares herself for the possibility that she will need to act as the head of the expedition, even if she remains technically subordinate to Tsongwa.
Her confidence, or overconfidence, does not pass unnoticed. But it doesn’t worry the Mission Director or Tsongwa much. Flur is never disrespectful, and she works hard, studying the video and audio recordings, diagramming and re-diagramming what they understand about political structures, writing short treatises about cultural practices.
The time and place of the landing are set, and there is a flashy ceremony for the departure from the base station, full of flags and symbols and fine music, scripted and simulcast. Flur has an odd longing to wave to her mother, but manages to quell it. Fortunately, the Mission Director has managed to fend off requests to simulcast the mission itself (largely by reminding politicians and media executives about the unlikely but real possibility of a grisly end to the adventure). The closing air lock leaves Flur and Tsongwa alone, except for the eighty-two mission staff looped into their communications and recording network. They beam down, a slang phrase for what is in practice a long, bumpy, and dangerous trip into the planet’s atmosphere on a shuttle known as the Beamer. This is Tsongwa’s expertise, and Flur is appropriately grateful for it as she copilots. He ably navigates them to the designated landing site, an extensive field outside of the alien city.
Flur takes a deep breath once they are settled. Through the small window she can make out tall, curving shapes: the aliens, the natives of this planet, have gathered as planned. From the screen on the dash the Mission Director looks back at her, almost bathetic in the way emotion and overwhelming awareness of the significance of this moment play openly on his face. Flur checks her comms and stands up. For a moment she and Tsongwa are face-to-face in the narrow aisle between the seats, and though his chin is level with her forehead Flur feels for the first time that they are looking straight at each other. This moment, though it is being recorded and transmitted in a dozen different sensory and technological combinations, is still theirs alone. There is a mutual nod—Flur doesn’t know which of them initiates it—and then Tsongwa leads the way to the hatch.
Stepping out of the Beamer, Flur finds that the aliens look less human at this close range. Their extended bodies curve gracefully into hooks and curlicues, partially obscured by flowing robes that give the impression of square-sailed ships luffing to the wind. When two of them step forward with extended hands, Flur can see that their three fingers are flexible as snakes. They cover the lower part of their faces with more cloth, but above that their noses have only a single nostril, flat on the face, opening and closing like a whale’s. Unsettlingly, it is the eyes that are most human: none of the giant pupils or extended slits of old science fiction movies, but (what appear to be) irises and robin’s-egg sclera within the familiar pointed oval shape, although they each have only one. In the popular pr
ess they are already known as the Cyclopes, but Flur finds each eye startlingly (perhaps deceptively?) expressive.
The two aliens have paused, hovering at a safe distance. Maybe that’s their idea of personal space? Flur glances at Tsongwa, a sideways slant of the eyes obscured by her goggles, but he is already stepping forward, arms up and out, mimicking the circular alien gesture that they have identified as significant and positive. Through her speakers, Flur can just make out the sound of him clearing his throat.
“Greetings,” he says, in an accented Cyclopan that they hope is comprehensible . He pauses. In what is surely the best moment of either of their lives, the aliens say the same word back to him.
The two designated humanoids approach, and curve more so that their singular eyes are nearly on a level with their visitors’. The skin of their faces looks parchment-like, worn and creased, like oak leaves pasted together, with striking lines trailing down from both corners of their eyes. They pronounce elaborate welcomes which Flur only partially understands. Their names are Slanks and Irnv, and they are happy to welcome their most esteemed visitors from another planet and take them in this honorable procession to the capital city of their island, where they will meet their leader. Flur almost lets out a reflexive giggle at the irony of it all, but she squelches it, and accepts instead the folds of material that Irnv hands her. “A costume more suited to our climate,” Slanks says, as he hands the same to Tsongwa.
Flur, cozily padded in a latest-model spacesuit, had not noticed any issues with the climate, but at least the local dress resolves one concern. There had been some worry at Mission Control that, having transmitted visuals of humans in their native habitat to the aliens, they would find the sight of them in their tubed breathing apparatuses disconcerting, but the alien clothes include fabric to cover the lower face, so that should help.
It is a moderately long walk to the city, and Flur keeps an eye on the visit clock ascending without pause in the corner of her view, and the bars representing her life support resources shrinking ceaselessly. A milky fog obscures much of the landscape, but Flur stares at the fragments of organic material at her feet, twigs and leaves in strange shapes, or maybe shells or corals, or something they have no word for yet. She longs to scoop up a sample, but is embarrassed to do so in front of their attentive entourage.