by Mike Allen
“Oh,” said Ursus, to Nacek, “that tale isn’t true. I won the cloak in a card game.” And next Ursus, looking into the young man’s eyes, fixed him in the gentle trance, then touched and took, respectful and with care, leaving him in exchange fitter and more sturdy, handsomer even—as Nacek’s fiancée would observe, when again he met her.
But Nacek himself (knowing not a jot of any of that) would always count himself a perfect idiot. He had sat in the Bear’s own study, with every possibility to wring from him the whole story. And Nacek had sipped Italian wine and fallen asleep like a child. When he woke in the morning, someone had carried him back to his bed—one of the tower servants, he concluded. And he had slept wonderfully well. They all had, it seemed. And really, if he had not uncovered the truth, none of his fellow officers had either.
As, if it came to it, none of them, ever, would.
Natura Vacuum Abhorret (Nature Abhors a Vacuum)
François Rabelais
(1494(?)–1553)
After the Latin of Plutarch
I COME FROM THE DARK UNIVERSE
Cat Rambo
I’d made it through an interminable day of scraping up cash to pay unanticipated back taxes—the government had changed again, this time to Alliance, and revised its finances accordingly. When the sour and steamy wafts from the soup cart in Tenney Corridor caught me, I figured I deserved a treat.
Three coins for hai-paji, spiced the way it was on my homeworld, pricey and time-consuming to merge the three ingredients. I’m patient. The vendor stirred a sludge of metallic particles before serving it to an Anoogah, who clicked away on its tripartite legs, clutching the plastic cone and sucking the liquid through its trunk tentacle. Finally the fragrant soup was ladeled into a cone for me; unlike the Anoogah, I merited a spoon.
Turning, I saw a woman crouched under the wall collage of tattered food advertisements, watching the passersby and holding out a hand. Whenever a rare moment of sympathy moved a tourist to give her money, she tucked the chit away and held out her palm again, ignoring the giver as though they no longer existed.
She was cartoonish beautiful: midnight hair artfully tangled around pen stroke eyebrows and dark eyes, a smudge of violet shadowing them; wide and generous mouth; pallid skin mottled with old bruises and older dirt. She wore the blue rags of a faded uniform whose insignia, an eye atop a black triangle, I did not recognize.
I could not figure out what it was about her that tugged at my groin. She looked wrong, sounded wrong, was the wrong height and weight and gender. I told my body that it was mistaken. It ignored me, which was a bad sign. I continued to watch her.
It had been years since I sexed—ironic for a person in my profession, brothel manager. My needs are particular, and no others of my species live on this station. A few pay rare visits, years between. In other Houses I’ve worked at, the employees took this fact as a challenge, trying to stir my interest, but at this House, The Little Teacup of the Soul, they take no for an answer, and understand there is nothing personal about it.
Sex would be nice, I admit, but you get used to the ache, the loneliness. If you pretend hard enough, you can make it vanish.
For a while.
Anyhow.
I squatted beside her, not speaking. She paid me no attention, only muttered to herself in low gutturals. A language I didn’t know. That surprised me. Two hundred years in a spaceport and a good ear has taught me most of them.
After the lights had flickered twice to indicate the passing of a quarter hour, I said, “Are you hungry?”
She looked at me, but didn’t answer. I couldn’t read her expressionless face, couldn’t figure out whether or not this was the result of incomprehension.
“I can offer you a meal and a place to sleep for now,” I said. “Maybe some kind of work, depending on what you’re suited for.”
She still did not answer. But when I rose to my feet and walked away, she followed. We moved through the court, which smelled of fried dough, rotting fruit, the tang of metallic green blocks, motor oil and walnuts, meats of every shape and size prepared a dozen different ways. I stopped at a bakery nook to buy day-old pastries sprinkled with sweet sap and tiny purple seeds. Both I and the human whores liked them, and they were cheap.
We came up through the Midnight Stair, past the incense sellers, each cart surrounded by a scent-cloud passing from floral to musk, to fruit, to sex, to pine and citrus, to dung. Other vendors, selling perfumed body ornaments, called to us as we passed.
“Buy a pretty for your pretty, Bo,” one coaxed me, but I shook my head.
She said something to the others and they exploded into laughter.
We moved on.
The Teacup sits atop the Midnight Stair, its doorway marked in stripes of indigo and aubergine neon. Passing inside, we went past the security bot sitting in the vestibule clicking to itself and into the main room. About a third of the handlers were in their rooms; a few joes were there socializing, either waiting until someone caught their desire or else lingering post-coitus.
Silver paper covered the walls, overlaid with flocked purple scallops, reflecting a dim vision of the inhabitants. KayKay noodled out some repetitive caterwaul on the music board, ignoring the joe who sat watching him. Linor must have been on break.
The kitchen’s staff-only. I took her in there for the quiet. Net sat at the table that dominates the center of the room, shuffling tiles and dealing himself hands of solitaire.
Net’s a whore like the rest, but he takes the types who want their grandfather to tell them stories or offer them wisdom and only occasionally fucks them. Prime human stock, wide-shouldered and white bearded, wrinkles around his eyes like a maze of attentiveness. He nodded as we came in, eying the girl but said nothing.
I doled her out a bowl of soup and she sat hunched over it, sopping it up with chunks of bread, thrusting each into her mouth, although they were almost too big to fit.
Pouring two mugs of chai, I sat to watch her eat while I nibbled one of the pastries I’d bought.
Her eyes were enormous, dark, long-lashed. I regarded them with a connoisseur’s delight, mentally applying shades of make-up and calculating the look produced.
It wasn’t an otherworldly beauty; I’ve seen a thousand races now, maybe more. But it was something indefinable, something more alien than alien, as though she came from someplace with different physical laws, where even the atoms dance differently, or perhaps don’t exist at all.
“This is a brothel,” I said. “Do you know what that is?”
Net snorted and dealt another hand.
She eyed me, then nodded.
“Can you speak Common?” I said.
“I can,” she said. Her voice was harsh and low, like a rusty hinge. It held a peculiar buzz, as though coming from a transmission from incalculable distances away.
“Good,” I said. “Are you human?”
She shook her head.
“Compatible with humans?”
“Compatible?”
I illustrated with my fingers. “Sexually compatible.”
“Yes,” she said.
“You can stay here tonight in any case. We’ve plenty of beds. Think about whether or not you’d like to work here. If you pass the meddie tests, that is. Are you clean?”
She rubbed at a grubby forearm with a wry expression, but understood what I meant. “Yes.”
The fey look about her bothered me.
“Where are you from?”
“I come from the Dark Universe,” she said.
“There’s only one Universe. Hence the name,” Net said, his tone edged with combativeness.
“There is space, there is time,” she said. She relinquished her soup long enough to gesture, reaching a hand out as far as it would go. “There is this, which spreads out in all directions—reach high, reach low, and you are moving outward like this universe. There is time as well. But there are other universes, lying across this one like piles of crumpled cloth. Like internal
organs. Like clocks. Reach inside, reach outside, reach anywhere but in the directions that describe this universe, and you will find another one.”
She drank from her mug and wiped her lips, leaving a streak of dirt across her pale, almost green skin. “I came from one of the other ones. This is how I came to this here and now, where everything is enclosed and you cannot see the stars.”
Net gave me a look that said as clearly as words, she’s crazy, but I listened.
She said, “In the other universe, which we will call the Dark Universe, although like this one it has no name because it is all that there is, there is the Immaculate Shadow, which spreads outward taking new worlds. Its armies are infinite, because each fallen foe becomes a new soldier.”
I nodded at her uniform. “And you’re one of these soldiers.”
Beside me, the clinking of tiles as Net laid out another hand said to me: Play out this folly if you will, but don’t expect it to come to anything.
She said, “The day I first awoke, I did not know who I was, other than a soldier. I had the language, the concepts, and the skills, but of the person who occupied this flesh before me, there was no trace. I was clumsy at first, learning patterns of movement. There are whispers among Its soldiers that sometimes there are memories in the body: a way of holding an object, a familiar sensation when encountering a new thing, even preferences of taste and color, but I had nothing like that. It’s only me in here; the ghost is gone.”
Her voice was hypnotic in its cadence, a drone like I’d never heard, her soft, sweet purplish lips speaking each word as though chewing it.
“I don’t know any technology that can animate the dead and make a corpse think it lives again,” Net said.
She shrugged. “I do not know the science. I suspect it would not work here. Every day I look at my body and wonder when this universe will notice me, and flick me away, or make me crumble into dust, or however else it wishes to express itself.”
She set down the mug and gave us a tired look. “Sometimes I think I live by force of imagination alone. Or lack of it. I cannot imagine not being alive, even though I am dead.”
There was a commotion outside: a client gone awry or drunk. I told Net, “Find her a room to sleep in for the night.”
And to her, “We’ll talk again in the morning.”
Out in the room a drunken soldier wearing Alliance colors was grappling with KayKay.
“But you love me,” he bawled, tears gusting down his face. “You love ME.”
They circled the room in a clumsy dance. KayKay’s tail swished in angry arcs and his claws were starting to show. The security bot was stuck in the doorway, two of the soldier’s fellows holding it back.
I shouldered the first soldier and the object of his affection apart. Two of the whores went over to the soldiers holding the bot and coaxed them into corners, whispering quiet solicitations. The freed bot behind me, I walked the soldier out, counting myself lucky that it’s illegal to wear weapons on Twicefar. Some port stations don’t enforce that rule.
“Don’t come around any more,” I said to the soldier. “Alliance are welcome, you’re not.” I didn’t want him filing a complaint against our place for discrimination; this port is a maze of petty alliances and power struggles and I try to keep out of the way of the major players.
Tears coursed across his face, outlining a ragged red scar that marked his jaw.
“But he loves me,” he said. “He loves me.”
I shook my head. “You don’t pay for love here,” I said. “You pay for pleasure. You’re buying the body, not the mind.”
He went to his knees, holding himself with a desperate clutch as though keeping his guts from spilling out. “He loves me,” he whispered. He looked up at me, his jaw jutting out and motioned to his face. “He’s the only one who ever looked past this.”
“Sober up, then try finding love elsewhere,” I said. I swiped his ID across my record tablet and handed it back to him. “There’s other Houses here, man. Some will say they love you. We don’t.”
I left him there by the mouth of the Stair.
Inside, the two soldiers were gone, as were the whores who’d been talking to them, presumably off adding to the Teacup’s bottom line. I gestured KayKay over.
“I didn’t do anything,” he said, shoulder rising in a sullen shrug.
“Yeah,” I said. “I know, I know. But you treat them nice when they’re here, KayKay. Don’t go cold on them just because they did something to piss you off.”
“He was showing me trophies,” he said. “Battle trophies. From little kids.”
KayKay’s culture, like my own, holds harming children taboo. Some species don’t. I’ve lived long enough to watch taboos stronger than that one violated, but he was still young, had come to us only a year or two after becoming adult. I didn’t want to inquire whether the trophies were ears, or eyes, or scalps. People collect all kinds.
“What am I supposed to do when that happens?” KayKay said, his voice challenging.
I leaned close to him. “Play it nice. You never let a joe know that you find them anything but appealing. Got it?”
In the kitchen, a pattern of tiles lay like a mandala in front of Net.
“You get the girl settled in?” I asked.
“I put her in the third hallway, one of the unused rooms,” he said. “Says her name’s Zoolie, or rather that’s the name given her by the Immaculate Shadow.” He rolled his eyes. “You sure know how to pick ’em, Bo. She’s too crazy to work here, you do realize that?”
We’ve had crazies before; I had to agree that we didn’t need any more. There were plenty of prima donnas and drama queens in the House if we wanted entertainment. But I still felt that itch.
“Yeah … ” I said, drawing the word out like gum.
He eyed me. “What aren’t you telling me?”
“It’s complicated,” I said.
He stared at me until I dropped my eyes, looking at the plastic swirls of the floor. “Well, I’ll be,” he said. “Bo, the creature of stone, wants to fuck her. I thought you couldn’t do that outside your own race.”
“I can’t,” I said. “But somehow—I don’t know how—she’s outside that rule.”
“You’re a loony moon. She does believe she came from another dimension, you know.”
“We’ve got workers from all over,” I said. “They end up here, because Twicefar’s a way point between so many galaxies. And some crazy isn’t too bad. Remember Dililo? It kept having false pregnancies, but all we had to do was humor it.”
“Some crazy, yeah. Not ‘I was a soldier in the zombie legions’ crazy.”
I rubbed the bridge of my nose between thumb and forefinger. “Maybe.”
That night, before sleeping, I stripped and looked at myself in the wide mirror. To most, I look like a human male when clothed, despite my white, waxy skin. Pudge has settled around my midsection from too many pastries, but I am still strong enough to hold two humans at arm’s length above the floor.
Unlike most humans, I have no body hair, except for colorless eyelashes, and the turquoise blue of my eyes would be unusual on a human—even though that race is now so widespread and divergent that it’s hard to find any trait not held on one planet or another. My hands, four fingered, are supple and well-manicured.
Unclothed, though, it would be hard to consider me male; my cloaca rests behind a star of pale flesh that is not unattractive.
A long-dead lover once wrote a poem to that star: called it a flower, a meteor, the center of its universe. It recited the poem while coaxing the star open, a sexual preliminary I have always enjoyed. A long slow shiver worked its way down my arms and legs at the thought.
It would be years before another of my kind came to this station, and even then, there was no guarantee they’d be of the right sex. I sighed and passed my hand over the swell of my belly, and tried to pretend.
* * *
In the morning, Zoolie was sitting in the kitchen, e
ating again. We take turns cooking—KayKay was at the stove, flipping pancakes for anyone who wandered in.
“Come with me when you’re done,” I told her. “I’ve got errands to run, and we can talk.”
Pushing her chair back, she rose. She’d taken advantage of the facilities to clean up; the grime was gone, and her hair was combed. Someone had lent her a clean black shirt, which she wore over the uniform trousers and boots.
She fell into step, matching my stride.
“How long have you been a soldier with the Immaculate Shadow?” I asked.
“Four years.”
“How do you measure time?” I didn’t know if she meant a lifetime or a flicker.
“I don’t know how long my race lives,” she said. “I trained, and then I saw four battles.”
“Training doing what?”
We descended the Midnight Stair and headed inward towards the Admin offices. I meant to feed the soldier’s ID into Records and write up a formal complaint. I had no desire to punish him, but if he came back and there were problems, I wanted it on record. I’ve learned caution and patience over the years.
She glanced around her as she walked, not looking at me. “They wanted to get us used to killing. So we practiced. First on animals, then on people. If we didn’t do it …” She shrugged and kept on walking.
“What happened if you didn’t do it?”
“First they cut your ears and nose off, or whatever you had that served you that way. Balk a second time, and you were an example for someone else to kill.”
“How many people did you kill?” I asked.
Her face was hard. “Counting battles? Hundreds.”
“But how did you come here?”
She paused in the corridor, under the flickering lights, looking at me.
“There was a battle,” she said. “The ship—I’d gotten to be friends with it; it called itself Morning—was damaged and couldn’t fix itself. It couldn’t move against gravity any more.”