by K. M. Szpara
I sigh, look around. Across the room, a short, sharp-featured officer in the uniform of Alliance Treaty Enforcement glares at—me? No, at Miran Anyuwe. My interface works again, the error messages recede. The officer is a man, by the name of Adhus-Barin, with about half a dozen more lineage-names after his first. A nobleman from the Empire of Three Stars, one of the more socially conservative members of the Alliance.
“Maybe we can try this again,” Adhus-Barin says. He looks about as angry as a noble in a mere Alliance captaincy position can be expected to look, his auburn-brown skin darkening further. His systems are probably frantic, trying to avoid a stroke. “You might wish to rephrase what you’ve just told me.”
Miran Anyuwe seems proud as ever, but as my body processes the influx of magic, I can already tell the politician radiates fear, apprehension and…brokenness, somehow. An impression of someone caught in the act.
“I was escaping from the Isolationists who were after me,” Miran Anyuwe says, “I wouldn’t have made it to Alliance space if not for these excellent people.” They nod at me. Am I supposed to smile, murmur thanks? I remain silent. They continue: “One of whom doesn’t even understand the Code of Life and Balance, I must say.”
What is that? If I hear one more word about how I’m supposed to be some kind of slavery apologist…
Adhus-Barin also glares at them. Is he waiting for Miran Anyuwe to incriminate themselves?
The politician continues, shifting pace as if realizing they are no longer talking to their home crowd. “As you are no doubt aware, the Isolationists oppose our negotiations to join the Alliance, negotiations that I am leading…” They pause, uncertain for a moment. “Between two rounds of talks, I returned to Ohandar, where I was summarily attacked, and after my attempted escape, even my security detail deserted me at Idhir Station, so I had to seek out a private vessel for help…”
“Your security detail betrayed you?” Adhus-Barin turns oddly mild, almost gentle. I don’t have to pry into his thoughts to sense a trap being readied.
“They were all Isolationists, they turned against me—” Voice rising. Miran Anyuwe is losing their cool.
“Oh, those kinds of roughshod mercenaries don’t appreciate going unpaid,” Adhus-Barin nods with empathy.
“What could I have done? The talks were almost over and the funds—” They halt mid-sentence.
I stare. At Adhus-Barin smiling, his thin mouth turning up in almost a sneer, at Miran Anyuwe standing statue-still, with only stray tremors breaking through their rigidity.
The security detail going unpaid. Isolationists going unpaid.
“Thank you,” Adhus-Barin says, “I do believe this will be enough.”
As if a dam breaking through, Miran Anyuwe starts blabbering, words tumbling over each other. The statue falling apart. “The Alliance has to understand, the Alliance knows—isolationist sentiment has always been strong on Ohandar, we had to show the populace that isolationism was extremism, we had to—”
“So you backed the Isolationist movement, steered them into violence,” Adhus-Barin says, one step away from gloating. “Created and funded your own rivals, so that you could point a finger at them and say, we are not like those people. So that you could revel in the position of the peacemaker.”
“The Alliance knows! Don’t deny it! The Alliance knows!”
“May I?” the Ereni says, then waits for the captain’s nod. “The Alliance knows. That doesn’t mean the Alliance assents.”
“Exactly as Officer Enisāyun has it,” the captain nods at them again. “Undesirable allies often incriminate themselves during the accession process, as we have found.” He says it as if the Empire was innocent of all possible wrongdoing, and I wonder if Miran Anyuwe knows how the Alliance had taken its present shape, what had prompted the member states to create Treaty Enforcement, back it with real power and threat. I sneak a look at Enisāyun, and the Ereni glances back at me, shrugs.
Miran Anyuwe mutters word-fragments, all sense lost in overwhelming anger, directed at us who thwarted the plan. We all gaze upon the spectacle. I pull my personal wards tighter around myself in case Miran Anyuwe lashes out.
Officer Enisāyun asks to speak again, then gestures toward me. “The esteemed leader might wish to thank the young māwalēni here for saving their life.”
Adhus-Barin makes a face. The meaning is clear—he would rather the politician would have perished, murdered by their own erstwhile allies. Let alone called esteemed leader, but then again the Ereni are fond of formality… and its ironic flipside.
Enisāyun smiles softly. “We will make sure that the young māwalēni receives all due payment for services rendered—though from whom might be uncertain at this point…”
Miran Anyuwe collapses.
“It wasn’t me,” Enisāyun says, voice shaky. “Captain? It wasn’t me, Captain.”
“I thought they were warded from all outside—” A voice from the back of the Alliance crowd, then another, “I warded them!”
A door seal hisses, and my master dashes in, the familiar clang of boots on ship-metal. “Were they threatening anyone? I felt they might be threatening someone, so it seemed safer to shut them down.”
“Excuse me?” Adhus-Barin seems utterly lost. It’s that kind of day, the Ereni thinks at me and I suppress a chuckle.
“I have a policy of not interfering with clients’ minds, but they severely disrupted my ship, interrupted the jumping procedure—”
Officer Enisāyun is shocked in the back of my mind.
“—so I thought it would be safest to plant my safeguards on them just in case. They had no defenses to speak of.”
An understatement, recognized by everyone present as such. When did my master have time to do this? I consider the events of the day, fail to find the exact moment. An intervention performed off-hand, with a stray thought…
As Adhus-Barin regains his calm and goes through the motions of the cleanup, organizing transport for Miran Anyuwe to Alliance Central where they will no doubt have to endure another round of castigation before getting booted out of Alliance space, my attention is elsewhere. I knew my master was more powerful, I tell myself, but I understand at the same time that it’s not about power—or, rather, that power entails more than raw control. It entails being straightforward, honest, upright.
And I know that between the two of us, we don’t need a planet.
Master Sanre offers me a hand and I stand up—then they grab me, hold me tight to themselves, their tears trickling down my curls.
I met him first at a New Year’s party. It was my friend Arthur’s party. Friend is not quite the right word—Arthur was promoted and was then a few rungs above me; upper-management. With Arthur’s promotion came more money, and thus better champagne at his parties, so I was happy to keep getting invitations even after he left me in the dust. It was a swanky party—women dripped in jewelry, the canapés catered, the whole nine yards. Everything shone; everything was crystal or diamond or mirrored. Light bounced around the room like a ricocheted bullet. It was getting on near midnight, and I had my eye out for an acquiescent girl to kiss when the clock rang in the new year. Arthur, freshly married, stood in the center of the room laughing with his new wife.
It was 11:57 PM, and in he walked: a wiry man, all long and rakish black hair, wearing a thickly cabled green fisherman’s sweater over a pair of olive-drab pants he might have picked up at an army surplus store. His face was bruised; I remember the greenish-purple smear of it across the left side of his jaw. And his eyes, his eyes were jade and emeralds—a deep, enraged piercing green. Where everyone else in the room, myself included, reflected the light this man in monochromatic green seemed to drink it in, to absorb our reflections and with them our sense of merriment. He stepped inside Arthur’s foyer and slammed the door behind him. The force of it rattled a chandelier. Conversation ceased. Arthur turned to see what the commotion was. “You!” he breathed.
And the man in green stepped forward,
that accusatory bruise catching the light, holding the light. “Yes. Me.”
Arthur sputtered into speech. “What are you—”
The bruised, plainly dressed man held up a key. “I’m returning this,” he said. “I hear you married.”
Arthur’s wife asked who the man was. We all wanted to know. The numbers on the clock turned to 11:59 PM. Arthur stiffened; the interloper let out something like a disgusted growl. The possibility of violence shimmered in the air. And I, propelled by I still don’t know what, stepped forward and took the interloper gently by the elbow. Some residual loyalty to Arthur maybe. Some petty hope that he would see and pull me up the corporate ladder with him. Some alchemy of all of that plus the champagne. I can’t say. I took the man’s elbow, and he turned his burning green eyes on me. “Come on,” I said very softly, very gently. “I’ll walk you out.”
His mouth twitched. He cut a final vicious look at Arthur and allowed me to escort him out. All throughout the city the clocks struck midnight as Arthur’s front door closed behind me. Shivering slightly in the cold, the man I’d escorted out paced back and forth, full of unsettled energy. “That lying fuck,” he hissed. He lit a cigarette and tucked his free hand into his armpit for warmth.
“That’s a nasty bruise,” I said. The man let out a mirthless laugh. The clocks still sang of the new year around us. He peered at me. He smiled a wild, manic smile. He grabbed the collar of my shirt and pulled me to him, kissed me full on the mouth. His tongue slid against mine, intrusive but not wholly unwanted, and I tasted the acrid smoke of his cigarette. The surprise of it, the rough scratch of his stubble, the heat of his mouth contrasted with the frigid air outside, all of it set me spinning.
He pulled away when the clocks stopped singing. He smiled and took another drag of his cigarette. “Well,” he said. He said the single word like a full sentence: Well. “Well. At least we made the deadline. A kiss to hold off a year of loneliness.” And then he was gone, off into the black birth of the new year.
It’s strange the way a Terran tradition followed me out of Terra’s orbit. The months that followed Arthur’s party were accurately predicted by that first moment of the new year: it was unexpected, and masculine, and far from lonely, and far from safe. The year that followed was green through and through.
I speak, of course, of my lived year; in the actual passing of hours it was at least twice that. It took less than a month after the party for Arthur to get me transferred off-world. He sought me out for a lunch meeting and asked a handful of nervous, probing questions about my interaction with the green-eyed man in the green sweater at his party. Three days later I was promoted and sent to “oversee emerging markets” a few stars over. I was an ideal candidate—demonstrated loyalty to the company, a definite sense of adventure, useful but ultimately expendable skill set, and the sort of immediate mobility that comes with being youngish and in good health and socially untethered. I knew very little of outbound life when I left Terra. I knew only what you see on news reports, what you glean from cousins of friends whose aunts once went on an interstellar cruise. They didn’t prep me; they told me to keep an open mind, paid my way onto a Versa-steered interstellar craft, and impressed upon me their faith that I would do well out there.
They sent me to Stahvi, which back then few Terrans had heard of and fewer had been to. I realized when they woke me from craftsleep that what had happened was less a promotion than a banishment. I—and the knowledge I’d accidentally gleaned—had sent me far out of the way, well beyond the scope of scandal makers. I’ve never been an ambitious man. I’ve organized my life to ensure I live comfortably, and that’s really been the driving force: a comfortable life scraped out with my decency more or less intact. And the banishment was comfortable. The company paid for my apartment. I had a generous living stipend. My work was so vague and undefined that virtually anything I did counted. There was no oversight; I had no one to report to. I was supposed to be “gauging interest” and “building relationships” and “laying groundwork” for when the company decided to set up a satellite economy there on Stahvi. I was in exile, but it was a very accommodating exile. It really wasn’t that bad a deal.
Terrans are behind the curve when it comes to intercultural exchange. Stahvi is what I’ve read Tangier was like way back before the Cultural Exchange, back when aliens were humans born a different shade of brown. Stahvi sits on a rare habitable world equidistant from three life-infested star systems. The Versa are there, obviously, but Stahvi plays host to the Lii and the Silvans, as well. At the time I was exiled to Stahvi Terrans had a solid working relationship with the Versa, had begun to forge some relationships with Lii mercantile ships, and had only heard stories of the Silvans. Stahvi was an oddly polite place despite its lawless nature. In a mark of the difference between Terran psychology and alien psychologies I was rarely hassled. The Versa more or less ignored me since they’d gathered on my trip over I had no money or intel. But I made many Lii friends—friends I still have. I learned two or three Lii dialects. I was paraded around at Lii garden domes on one Lii’s frond or another, passed back and forth between them like an in-vogue accessory. Of all the aliens, the Lii looked most at home on Stahvi—they were as green as Stahvi’s sky. They had the same silky fineness of Stahvi’s smooth soil. They weren’t from Stahvi, but it was hospitable to them. The Silvans mostly kept to themselves underwater. There are amphibious markets on Stahvi, places where the land-dwellers can go haggle with the aquatic Silvans, but I’ve always been scared of drowning and I confess I did little “relationship building” or “interest gauging” with the Silvans. Who knows what “emerging markets” I lost for the company there. My most sincere apologies to the shareholders.
As I said, when I got there Terrans were rare on Stahvi. It was months before I encountered another Terran. I heard her before I saw her: a human woman’s laugh trilling in a Lii garden. It was so strange, and yet so familiar, so immensely unexpected that I teared up. I’d begun to think of myself as the Last Man. Or First Man. At the very least a Singular Man. I collected myself and edged through the party, gently nudging through the Liis’ petals and leaves and stalks until I saw her, a tall human woman, dark-haired and green-eyed swathed in a green silk robe. I stared at her as if she were a mirage. It took her some seconds before she noticed me, and even then it was only because her Lii companion pointed me out. She startled. She laughed again; her voice had a husky depth to it. She gestured me over.
I willed myself to walk over slowly in what I hoped was a genteel and languid way. She handed me a pod of nectar. “Another Terran here on Stahvi?” she asked.
“Another Terran here on Stahvi,” I said.
“Pity,” she said. “I came here for the escape. Why are you here?”
“Business,” I said. I smiled and leaned in a hair closer, conspiratorial. Flirtatious. I was horribly attracted. It had been nearly a Terran year of living among aliens; the idea of sex with a mammal was extremely enticing. “Banishment.”
She raised her eyebrows. Her Lii companion whispered something to her and sauntered off, graceful and fluid. “What’s your name?”
“Gavin. Gavin Camayo.”
She held her hand out to me. “Lydia Brightlake. Call me Lake,” she said. We traded inane chatter—where did you grow up? How do you know the host of this garden? What about those Silvans? Just idle chatter the likes of which you really can only do with another human. It was inordinately pleasant.
As the conversation went on, there was an increasing sense of familiarity. It tugged at me, nagged at me. The green of her eyes. The glint of her black hair. The arrogant jut of her chin. The cadence of her voice. These little things, these very small things began to knit together. It was a shrewd disguise, truly, but when you’ve been so starved for human contact, and when a memory is so very indelible, disguises fall apart. “Lydia Brightlake,” I said. I’d interrupted her. She gave me a curious smile. “Lake, I think you’re the reason I was banished.”
A strain of fear froze her expression. It’s funny how transparent human faces are when you’ve been immersed so long among the aliens. You have to try so hard to read their cues, and then you come upon one of your own and it’s so easy. She covered her face with her hand. “Well. Shit.”
“But you were a man!” I said.
She shrugged. She blushed. She grinned. “I flicker,” she said.
“You flicker?”
“It’s not my first time out of orbit.”
“Versa bodyscaping?” She shrugged again. She sipped her nectar with a canny smile. A dozen question crowded my tongue—isn’t that illegal? Expensive? An urban legend? What I asked instead was: “How?”
“How what?” asked Lake.
“How do they do it?”
“Oh.” She cocked her head to the side. “Gavin, really, I’m no Versa. I don’t really know. Something about taking you all apart and putting you back together again, tiny piece by tiny piece. They do…well. I don’t know what they do. It’s beneath anything we can do, below even the cellular level. It’s like they break apart this tiny piece of reality—the tiny piece of reality that is your body—and construct a new one. I don’t know. I’m not a scientist. I’m no Versa. It’s not unpleasant, though. They’re consummate professionals.”
“How many times?” I looked her over; no scars, no telling marks anywhere. But she was still herself. Himself. The same person, but re-imagined. The same emerald-jade eyes. The same black hair. The same peculiarities of speech.
“Oh, I don’t know. Six or seven. I flickered back and forth for that bastard Arthur three times—man, intersex, man. This is the first I’ve been a woman in some time.” I wondered, when she said it, if Arthur’s wife was one of these mercurial Terrans, these unmappable people who changed, who were such uncertainty, such flexibility incarnate. Probably not. The scandal would have kept him from marrying her.