Near + Far

by Cat Rambo

  "Hard to do. In that location, they can recoup a very large sum quickly. Larger than I can raise against them."

  "You can wait them out and see what happens next time the government shifts."

  Kallakak shook his head. "Then they'll have been the most recent occupants—most law will lie in their favor."

  "It's a shame," Bo said. "I remember when you arrived—took you a year to save up enough to buy citizenship, let alone start to make claim to that space. When you and your wife first came ... " The sentence trailed off in awkward silence.

  "All done and gone," Kallakak said. He drank the last of his tea, now cool.

  Back at the shop, he swore when he saw the mess Sla had created. The scarves, draped against a wall still damp from washing, had bled mottled dyes onto the wall's plastic.

  "I didn't mean to," it said, shrinking unhappily into itself. Tedesla came up behind it and touched its shoulder, giving Kallakak a look that reminded him of Akla. By the end, she had learned to play his guilt-strings like a musical instrument. The emotion glittered in his mind like Sla's unhappy eyes.

  "It doesn't matter," he sighed. "Take those down and fold them. We'll sell them to the Jellidoos for a decent sum, I'm sure." He frowned at the colored wall; the pink and green dye had left pale, feathery patterns like fern leaves.

  Late that night, he heard them whispering together, admonishing Sla. After they finished, he heard the smallest cousin weeping and then the other two comforting it.

  "Of course it is strange here," Desla said. "But tomorrow we will go and get the little cream pastries from the Food Court that the woman was talking about. Sweet and light as air, she said."

  "We'll bring some back," Desla murmured. "He deserves to be taken care of, now that he no longer has his wife."

  "He never speaks of her," observed Tedesla.

  "Never," said Sla. "Do you think she died of something gruesome?" The other two shushed it and lapsed into murmurs that he couldn't make out.

  When the hallway lights brightened to morning shift white, he let the increased angstroms tug his eyelids awake and drank another of the sour bulbs. His bladder felt much the same as it had the day before, irritated and a little sore, but at least it was no worse.

  Sla was cheerful. Kallakak gave the three the day free, with a handful of coupons and vouchers he had gathered through exchanges with other merchants.

  Alo2 was sweeping out the aisles as he entered.

  "Where's your entourage?" it asked. He shook his head. "Sent the pack of them off to the Food Court."

  "Good. What are you going to do about the Jellidoos?"

  "There's not much I can do," he said. Moving over to the card-reader, he tapped at it, checking the totals. "I'm going to see the Undersecretary today. Can you watch over the shop again?"

  "And the cousins?" the mechanical said.

  He shook his head. "I told them they were off today and to meet me at evening to eat together."

  "They tried to ask me questions about Akla yesterday."

  "What did you say?"

  "That I didn't know anything. I think they don't understand that non-Ballabel can lie yet. Not that I'm complaining. I had the middle one fetching and carrying for me yesterday when I described the pain that sudden movements caused to my resistors."

  He laughed. "They'll learn soon enough, I'm sure." He drank another juice bulb, feeling his outlook improving. His cheer was confirmed when the Undersecretary saw him with surprising promptness, but the emotion fled when the official bluntly mentioned the sum the Jellidoos had already provided.

  "I can't match that in the short term," Kallakak ventured. "But perhaps over the course of time ... "

  The official shook his head. "Things change too quick around here. There hasn't been a government that's lasted more than six months in over a decade," he said. "Who's to say what could happen? Better to grab what I can while I can."

  "All right," Kallakak said.

  Bo was similarly discouraging. "Chimp down in the Click Bar said the Undersecretary picks up lonely sailors every once in a while, treats them to a good meal and usually breakfast too, isn't too picky about looks. I don't have anyone that could lean on him."

  "And the Jellidoos are better at brute force anyhow," Kallakak said. He sighed. "Thanks anyway."

  Coming home through the Food Court, he came across a noodle vendor screaming at the cousins, who stood in a line before the livid, red-faced man, their upper and midhands clasped together in embarrassment.

  "What's happened here?" he asked, hurrying up.

  "They pick up soup unit, get it all mixed around, bad programming!" the man yelled, his voice grating across Kallakak's ears. "Expensive machine!"

  "We were just looking at it," Sla said sullenly, its tail lashing.

  "We thought that you might get one for the shop," Desla said.

  "How much to fix?" Kallakak said to the merchant. He wished he could lie, wished he could pretend this trio, so clearly linked to him, were of no relation, no consequence. But their every movement proclaimed them his.

  "Fifty credits."

  "Give you ten here and now or twenty store credit."

  "Fifteen here and now." The merchant swiped Kallakak's card through his reader, punching in the numbers as he eyed the cousins. As though his money wasn't flowing away rapidly enough, he thought.

  "You're not paying him, are you?" Sla asked. "We were just looking!"

  "Apparently you punched a few buttons," Kallakak said tiredly. They followed him as he circled around the entrance of the Midnight Stair, towards the shop.

  "You could sell a lot of food in your shop," Sla said.

  "We aren't zoned to sell food."

  "But you sell the chocolate and fruit boxes."

  "Those are sealed."

  "Oh," Sla said.

  "Tonight you can watch over the store with Alo2," he said. "First two of you in a five hour shift, then Desla by itself."

  "All right," Tedesla said agreeably.

  "What will I do by myself?" Desla asked, alarmed.

  "You can go sit in the shop with them. You just won't be working. Although if you get bored, Alo2 can show you how to weave hiber baskets. We sell a lot of those."

  "And what will we do when Desla is working?" Tedesla asked. "Sit and weave baskets as well?"

  "You may also wish to go and fetch yourselves some food at that point, and perhaps bring some back for Desla. In such a case, do not look at or touch any machines, but allow the vendor to hand you the food," he said. "At any rate, I will see you in the morning."

  But in the solitude of the room, things felt empty. Much as they had after Akla's departure, full of strange echoes and spaces that could not be filled with boxes of Corrinti jellies and bioluminescent inks. He drank another bulb of medicinal juice and chewed his way through a pack of dried protein flakes, washing them down with swallows of meaty, buttery tea, while his midhands spread lotion on each other, brushing away bits of accumulated, overgrown skin and picking away the cuticle in order to burnish each sharp, curved claw.

  "I do miss you," he said aloud to the empty air. "I do."

  The next day, Desla managed to flood the shop. All three had had digestive problems due to an excess of cream pastries and the eliminatory near the shop had overloaded and backed up. He waded through an expanse of dirty water, opening the shop door to see more water pooling in the aisles, bearing on its surface a film of dust, lint, and scraps of packing material. He turned the water off at its source and sent for a registered plumber before setting the trio to mopping. They carried the water, four dirty buckets at a time, to the recycler so he could reclaim at least some of the fee.

  "Look," he said to Tedesla. "The three of you might search around for another job. I will lose the shop in three days to others with a prior claim, and I will not have anything for you to do."

  "We can do that," Tedesla said. It patted his arm. "Do not worry, Akla's husband. We will help provide for the household, and keep you in t
he style which she would have wished."

  "That's not what I meant," he said. "I mean, I will have an excess of goods and no place to put them while I look for more shop space. The room will be quite full."

  Tedesla's ear frills quivered eloquently with disappointment, but all it said was "I see" before going back to helping mop the water from the floor.

  In between researching ways to save the shop, he tried to find them living space, but there was an influx of visitors—a trade market was being held within the next three days and so he resigned himself to another week of their presence. He kept them on a schedule opposite his own, pointing out its efficiency in keeping the store constantly open, and paid Alo2 double the usual wages to keep an eye on them.

  Meanwhile he found a private access unit and searched through endless datanets, trying to find a legal loophole in between constant trips to the eliminatory to soothe the burning in his groin. He stopped on the way home for more bulbs and ignored Ercutio's questions. Every search had closed another door. When he got to the store, he found Bo waiting with advice.

  "One of the new employees came from a Jellidoo background so I asked them about the culture," he said to Kallakak. "You need to be careful of what you say to them. Their specialty is libel and slander, and they'll provoke you into saying anything that you can possibly be sued for."

  "As though taking the store were not bad enough?" Kallakak grumbled.

  "Rumor says we might be in for a governmental tumble," Bo said.

  "So soon?"

  "This has been a pretty apathetic government; a lot of old-timers aren't too happy with it."

  "But still, if it were to change within two days, that would be a quicker change than any I've seen here," Kallakak said.

  "True," Bo said, "But I thought the mention of it might cheer you up. How are your new additions doing?"

  "They haven't done much so far today," Kallakak said. "Sla tried to eat a tourist's pet last night, apparently, but Alo2 stopped it in time."

  Bo snorted.

  "They're coming for dinner anytime now," Kallakak said, glancing at the light level in the corridor.

  But the next people to come in the door were not the cousins, but rather the pair of Jellidoos. Kallakak smiled politely at them and signaled unobtrusively with a midhand to Bo, who drifted nearer, staring at them.

  "We have heard that there have been acts of sabotage in the shop," the man said. The woman pointed at the colors on the back wall. "And water," the man added. "There has been a broken pipe?"

  "A small problem, quickly solved," Kallakak said. Sla and the others came through the door just in time to catch the last.

  "Is there a problem?" Sla asked. The three came to look at the Jellidoos as well.

  "We do not want any more damage to our property," the man said. "We are prepared to offer a sum for immediate vacancy. Or else we will begin charging for damages to what will be our property."

  "Never!" Sla said indignantly and behind him, Bo rolled his eyes at Kallakak, mouthing the words "libel and slander."

  "You have no right to oust Kallakak! You are very bad people to do so!" Desla added.

  "Tell me more," the woman said, listening avidly. "Why should we not oust him?"

  "He named this shop after his wife and she remains to watch over it, with love and affection!" Tedesla said despite Kallakak's frantic signal.

  Kallakak opened his mouth to correct it, then shrugged and remained silent.

  "How so?" the man demanded. "Do you mean she still lives here?"

  "In her death, as in her life, she remains by his side!" Sla declaimed. "Looking after him with eternal devotion."

  "A ghost!" the woman exclaimed, paling. She and her compatriot exchanged glances.

  "It is a trick," he said, but she shook her head. "Ballabels cannot lie," she said. "See his ear frills?"

  Although they could, Kallakak thought, neglect to correct mistaken impressions. Akla had left aboard a freighter, saying that she wanted to "find herself" and had never come back. No sane Ballabel chose a life of solitude, and he had not wanted to correct the cousins in thinking her dead. She would have, he thought, preferred that.

  "Will you be withdrawing the claim?" he said to the man as the Jellidoos pushed their way through the cousins towards the door. The woman spat and made a gesture he did not recognize as his only reply.

  "Nicely done," Bo said as she exited.

  Kallakak beamed at the cousins with effulgent satisfaction. Fumbling behind the counter, he took out an unopened decanter of spirits and fumbled at the stopper.

  "So the shop is safe?" Tedesla said.

  "Yes," Kallakak said, pouring drams into mugs patterned with glittering stars.

  "We don't need to get jobs after all! We can keep working in the shop!" Sla said.

  "Well," said Kallakak. "I don't know if I'd go that far."

  Afternotes

  While at Clarion West, I wrote two stories ("Amid the Words of War" and "I Come From the Dark Universe") set aboard a space station named TwiceFar. "Kallakak's Cousins" is the third story I set there, and was the first to sell, to Sheila Williams at Asimov's. In it, I deliberately used physical elements to force reader identification with the beleaguered Kallakak, and then followed up by heaping problem after problem on him. I'm also fond of the cousins, as well as the Ballabel social structure's intricacies. Akla will surely get her own story at some point.

  My vision for TwiceFar is that it's a station prone to revolution as well as frequent hostile takeovers, in a constant state of economic and political flux, a theme that I tried to explore in a fourth story, "On TwiceFar, As the Ships Come and Go." A fifth story has been hovering for a while in the back of my mind and hopefully will make its way out by the end of this year.

  The story was reprinted in several places, including Russian magazine Esli, and appeared in audio form on the most excellent podcast, Escape Pod.

  AMID THE WORDS OF WAR

  Every few day-cycles, it receives hate-scented lace in anonymous packages. It opens the bland plastic envelope to pull one out, holding the delicate fragment between two forelimbs. Contemplating it before folding it again to put away in a drawer. Four drawers filled so far; the fifth is halfway there.

  "Traitor," say some of the smells, rotting fruit and acid. "Betrayer. Turncoat. One who eats their own young." Others are simply soaked in emotion: hate and anger, and underneath the odor of fear. It lets the thoughts, the smells, the tastes fill it, set its own thoughts in motion. Then it goes downstairs and sits with the other whores, who make room uneasily for it.

  It is an anomaly in this House. Most of the employees are humanoid and service others like themselves. It is here for those seeking the exotic, the ones who want to be caressed by twelve segmented limbs even though it is only the size of their two hands put together. They want to feel chitin against their soft skin, to look into the whirl of multicolored eyes and be afraid. For some, it only has to be there while they touch themselves to bring them to the flap and spasm of mammalian orgasm.

  Others require its physical assistance, or its whispered obscenities telling them what they want to hear. It has learned what words to say.

  It has never seen others of its race in this port. If it did, it would know that this place, far away from that distant front and its fighters, had been invaded by one side or the other, that soon the bombs, the fires, the killings would begin.

  It was raised a soldier. Its clutch-mates and it were tended until old enough to have minds, and then trained. It was one of six—a small clutch, but prized for its quickness and agility. They learned the art of killing with needle throwers, and once they had mastered that, they were given different needles: fragments that exploded, or shot out acid, or whistled until the ears of the soft-fleshed creatures who called themselves the Espen, their enemies, exploded.

  Over the course of their training, they were provided with hundreds of Espen. They were allowed to select their favorites. Some of them played unauth
orized games. They told the prey they would be freed if they killed a hunter or if they killed each other, because it made them fight harder.

  When they were dead the clutch-mates were allowed to take fluid from their bodies. It liked the taste of their spinal liquid: salty plasma tinged with panic, complicated enzymes that identified where they came from. It became a connoisseur; it could name each of their three continents and tell you on which its victim had been spawned. None of its siblings could do the same.

  The names such creatures call their clutch-mates differs according to many factors: the social position both hold, the spatial relationship, the degree of affection in which they are held that day. For the sake of simplicity, call them One through Five, and reserve the name Six for it. One was simple-minded but direct, and never lied, in contrast to Two, who loved to talk and tell stories. Three was jealous of everyone; anytime the others were talking, it would intervene. Four was kind-hearted, and had to be prodded before it killed for the first time. Even after that it would hesitate, and often one of the others would perform the final stroke. Five and Six were often indistinguishable, the others said, but they thought themselves quite separate.

  In those early days they lived together. They groomed the soft sensory hairs clustered around each other's thoraxes, and stroked the burnished chitin of carapaces. It did not matter if what they touched was themself or another. They sang to each other in symphonies of caress, passing thoughts back and forth to see how they unfolded in each other's heads.

  They were not a true hive mind. They depended on each other, and one alone would die within the year lacking the stimulation of the others' scent, the taste of their thoughts, to stir their own. But they were their own minds; it acted by itself always, and no other mind prompted its actions. It insisted that until the end to the Interrogator.

  They were like any clutch; they quarreled when opinions differed, but when others intruded, they held themselves like a single organism, prepared to defend the clutch against outsiders. At sleep time, they spun a common web and crawled within its silky, tent-like confines to jostle against each other, interlocking forelimbs and feeling the twitches of each others' dreams. Five and Six had the most in common, and so they quarreled most often. Everything Six disliked about itself, the fact that it was not always the quickest to act and sometimes thought too long, it saw in Five, and the same was true for the other. But there was no fighting for position of the sort that happens with a clutch that may produce a queen or priest. They knew they were ordinary soldiers, raised to defend the gray stone corridors in which they had been born. And beyond that—raised to go to war.