Reclamation

by Sarah Zettel

  “Eric told me.” She held out her arm without changing her expression.

  Yeah. Perivar shook himself. Now where’d I put… No, I threw that all away. Let’s see…He pulled open a corner drawer and found a utility knife and a piece of plastic wrapper. He tossed them both in the heater and set it on sterilize.

  When he turned back around, she was still holding her arm out, waiting patiently for him to draw blood.

  He laid the knife against her fingertip and pressed down. The skin broke and the blood welled scarlet around the blade. Aria didn’t even flinch.

  Perivar, we just got the answer. The sample’s clean. Tell the client. Perivar, sample’s no good. We’re going to have to dump ’em. Perivar, sample says they’ll be able to take it for at least a year down there. Let the client know we’re bringing them in.

  He wiped her cut off with the wrapping and dropped her hand.

  Perivar, I don’t think you understand what you’re doing…You’ll do what you’re told you damned barbarian or you’re dead…Try me, Skyman, just try me.

  Leave me alone! he shouted to the memory voices.

  Perivar taped the wrap closed around the bloody smear.

  “Brain. Get a courier cart up here, on the double; I’ve got a package for Zur-Iyal at the Amaiar Gardens.” He and Iyal had never stopped sending each other things; souvenirs or jokes or small presents. One more package wasn’t going to generate any more attention, even from the watchful Vitae.

  “Priority rating assigned. Request one will be completed in five minutes.” The voice from the ceiling startled Aria but not badly. Perivar slid the sample into a wrapper and dropped it into the hard mail bin. Reluctantly, he turned back to Aria.

  “There’s not much for us to do until we get an answer on this. You can wait in here.” He led her into his living rooms.

  Perivar picked a few old schedule printouts up off the sofa and said, “Make yourself comfortable,” before he walked out into the workroom again. He closed the door behind him.

  “All right.” He strode back to the map table. “Where were we?”

  “Perivar…”

  Perivar touched two keys to clear a space in the corner of the display for schedule data. “I think I remember seeing that Haron Station will be supporting a six-layer open channel between…”

  “Stop this.”

  Startled, Perivar looked up. On the other side of the membrane, Kiv and all five of the kids stared at him, eyes and ears focused entirely in his direction. For the first time in years, that attention made his skin crawl.

  Kiv glided up to the membrane. The kids slipped sideways to let their parent by.

  “What are you doing, Perivar?”

  He curled his hands into fists and leaned all his weight on his knuckles. “Trying to finish up the routing for packet 73-1511. What are you doing?”

  Kiv closed and retracted all his eyes. “If I live a thousand lives, I will never understand your people.”

  “You’ve said that before.”

  “This time I mean it.” Only two of Kiv’s eyes opened and extended. “The packet can wait another few hours, Perivar. You have another responsibility that requires immediate attention.” All of his hands waved toward Perivar’s closed living rooms.

  “She’s not my responsibility,” Perivar told the tabletop through clenched teeth. “I’m just moving her through.”

  There was a long pause.

  “So, how did you deal with…the contraband before this? When they were your responsibility?”

  Perivar kept his eyes toward the map, but he saw nothing at all.

  “We kept them in life-support capsules in the cargo hold. I actually spoke to maybe two others besides Eric. I told myself what we were doing didn’t matter. They’re not human, not like me, just gods-blasted-and-damned barbarians…"A red haze filled his eyes. “Better off where we take them, or better off dead. Too stupid to understand what really matters…”

  “Per-efar!”

  Perivar’s head jerked up. Kiv had shouted his name, the actual syllables, not the conglomeration of whistles and buzzes the translator straightened out.

  “Perivar.” Kiv slapped his silicate mask over his face and glided through the membrane, leaving the kids huddled in a complex knot behind him. He filled the workroom and had to bend his body to fit between the counters and the map table. Despite that, he got close enough that Perivar could see the gel glisten on his skin. Perivar fought the urge to back away.

  “What happened to you?”

  Perivar felt his mouth move, but no sound was coming out. He forced his voice to speak.

  “There was a revolution in Eshina. I was a communications hack and a spy on the losing side. Eshina law deports revolutionaries by selling them as indentured servants. Tasa Ad bought me up cheap. He and his sister Kessa headed up a runner team. I was…bought to work the communications transfers for them.”

  Kiv’s body rippled, sending rainbows glistening down his back where the light hit the membrane gel. “And you made a bond of some sort with Eric.”

  Perivar nodded. “We’d picked up Eric off his homeworld. Weird place. Crashing old world orbiting a binary star. Tasa Ad had seen him in action on the ground and decided this one we’d keep. Eric’s not his real name, I just called him that because I couldn’t get a handle on the real thing. It goes on even longer than yours does.

  “He really is amazingly useful. He can…do things to machines…make them move. Make a computer run just by touching it. Tasa Ad used him as a kind of super—systems digger and we were able to expand our…activities from just contraband running.

  “Eric and I got along. At least, I liked him better than I liked Tasa Ad and a lot better than I liked Kessa even though that didn’t take much. I taught him a real language, showed him how to take care of himself on the ship, told him about things outside. Played big brother a little, you understand? We became friends, almost without me noticing it’d happened. I’m not…I wasn’t used to having friends.

  “Then we got a new job, a weird one. Aguy named D’Shane wanted us to steal an artificial intelligence called Dorias out of a planetary network. The money was…really good, so Tasa Ad took it on. We used Eric for most of the work, of course. He found the thing and got it loaded into the isolation box we’d built for it and we took off to hand it over to our client.

  “We were two days in flight and Eric came into my cabin. He looked sick, shattered. He said ‘Perivar, is it true that the people we transport are being taken without permission?’

  “I hadn’t stopped to think about it until then, but I realized Eric had no idea what was really going on. Tasa Ad kept him on a short tether when it came to network information, and I’d never spelled out anything to him. He was a volunteer and his people either have no concept of…involuntary servitude, or, it’s so different from what we did that it never occurred to him that we were kidnapping and selling unwilling bodies. I mean, yes, when Tasa Ad and Kessa got them to the ship, they were drugged out and in capsules, but that was exactly how we got him on board.

  “And I’d never told him about me.

  “So I said something particularly insightful, like ‘And?’ And he looked at me like he didn’t know whether to be sorry for me or kill me on the spot. After a long time he said ‘Perivar, I don’t think you understand what you’re doing. Dorias does not want to go to D’Shane.’

  “‘Dorias is a machine,’ I said. ‘It does what it’s told.’

  “He said ‘Dorias is a… I don’t know the word he used, but the translator turned it into ‘Well-Made Soul,’ and he said ‘I won’t hand him across to D’Shane without his consent.’ He walked out and I stayed stuck to the spot, cursing myself for an idiot.

  “Then, I heard Tasa Ad yelling. I ran toward the sound. He… they… Eric… I mean… Eric, Tasa Ad, and Dorias’s box were on the bridge. Eric was at the comm board. I read his fingers. He was opening up a channel to somewhere, probably to a station, or maybe back to where we’
d come from. I saw the cable on Dorias’s box and I knew Eric was getting ready to hardwire the AI into the open channel so it could get itself free.

  “Tasa Ad was, of course, yelling at him to stop, and when he paused for breath, Eric simply said ‘No.’ And Tasa Ad reared up and said ‘You’ll do what you’re told, you damned barbarian, or you’re dead!’ “

  “That got him. Eric whirled around and yelled, ‘Try me, Skyman, just try me!’

  “Kessa came in at that point. Shoved her way past me, just as Tasa Ad lunged for Eric. She was armed. A dart gun. The cartridge was red. Serious poison.

  “Tasa Ad grabbed Eric’s arm…and…collapsed. Kessa screamed something and raised the gun. I screamed something else and shoved her sideways and she pointed the gun at me and fired. Caught me in the arm. And I collapsed. And Eric grabbed her and she collapsed and Eric collapsed with her and there we all were on the deck together. The thing was, Eric and I were alive. Tasa Ad and Kessa, weren’t.”

  Perivar looked up. Kiv had shrunk in on himself as far as he could go. Not a single eye showed. His arms were nearly invisible and the length of his torso rested on the floor.

  “What did you do?” Kiv asked, without even opening his eyes.

  “We scavenged the datastore for enough trace information to build a couple of line ghosts and steal the runner’s side ship, the U-Kenai. Then the three of us ran for it. Dorias took off on his own. Eric and I wandered around for a couple of years, stealing for people like D’Shane…once, when we got desperate, we even stole people for D’Shane. He’d blackmailed us into it. It was after that we both decided this was no way to live.” He paused. “I should have at least lost my arm from Kessa’s dart, but I didn’t. Eric took care of that, too.” A giggle escaped him. “Took him awhile, that’s for sure. Said lucky for me he’d already had practice on Skymen, so he got it eventually. He really is amazingly useful.”

  Kiv extended his arms and legs so slowly it was almost painful to watch. One eyelid at a time peeled reluctantly open.

  “Perivar.” Kiv leaned across and even through the gel Perivar could smell the spicy scent that surrounded the Shessel when he got upset. “I cannot live with you like this.”

  “What?” Sheer disbelief ran through him.

  Kiv drew his head back and up until he towered over Perivar as far as the room would allow. “My siblings and I were the last of a line of slaves in the peninsula of Si-Tuk. After the Union treaties, I came out here so that there was no chance they’d be able to claim my children if things shredded. This is important. I swore they would never, ever be exposed to the flesh trade. I belong to my children, Perivar. I cannot ignore their welfare. Your past is your own, and I will try not to care about it, but your present is very much my concern.

  “End this, Perivar, or I am severing our partnership and closing our business down.”

  “Kiv,” Perivar thought about turning away but couldn’t seem to manage the movement. “Nothing like this is going to happen again.”

  “You don’t know that! How can you know that!” Kiv’s whistle rose so high that Perivar flinched. “You ran for this Tasa Ad, you ran for yourself, and now you’re running for Eric Born! Who next, Perivar?”

  Perivar ducked his head. “Would you mind if I shut the door for a while?”

  “No.” Without another word, Kiv doubled back along his own length and flowed back to his children.

  Keeping his eyes on the walls, Perivar slid the membrane housing closed. It clanged sharply against the threshold before the catch snapped shut.

  Perivar stalked to the other side of the room. It didn’t help any that he knew Kiv was right. He raised his hands to run them through his hair and let them fall to his side again. He circled the room aimlessly, trying to think and then trying not to think, until his sight began to fade again. Finally, he threw himself into his chair and clamped his eyes shut. He stayed that way for a long time.

  Brain’s signal sounded overhead. “Zur-Iyal ki Maliad has opened a channel and labeled the contact urgent.”

  Perivar groaned. “Send her through, Brain.” He keyed the watch command in just as the view screen cleared. At the other end of the line, Iyal’s face looked unnaturally white.

  “Perivar. Where did you get this sample from?”

  Now what kind of question…Then Perivar remembered they hadn’t used Iyal to go over Eric’s blood. “Is there something wrong?”

  “Wrong, no. I just want to know where you got your hands on a construct.”

  “A what?”

  “A construct. A genetically engineered life-form. I’ve only seen DNA this abbreviated in theoretical texts. What did this come from? It must be kept in a damn jar!”

  “It,” Perivar bit the word off, “is a woman, Iyal. Walking, breathing, and in need of a bath, actually.”

  Iyal leaned forward. “You trying to get rid of her?”

  “Iyal…”

  “Don’t look like that. I’m not talking about for dissection. Damn-o, Perivar, she, whatever she is, is a work of art! If we could incorporate half of what’s gone into her…”

  Perivar shook his head, trying to clear enough room to think in a straight line. “Iyal, I’ve been to where she comes from. It’s a degenerated culture. They’re real good at breeding sheep, but engineering a person…”

  Her mouth worked back and forth silently. “That would mean she’s a descendant, and just one of a population; otherwise, this level of mutation never would have bred true, but still, you’d think there’d be more work space…”

  “Work space?” said Perivar.

  Iyal nodded absently, as if most of her attention was focused on another conversation. “A large portion of any DNA string is white noise. It’s got no direct impact on the organism. What it’s there for is to reduce the risk of harmful mutation. It’s Nature’s margin for error.

  “When we’re tailoring genes here, we leave all, or at least most, of that extra space in, so we can make use of that same margin for error. Whoever designed this woman’s ancestors, though, didn’t feel they needed a safety net. Which means they were either phenomenally stupid, which I doubt, or so good at what they were doing that they could make even the Vitae look like apprentice pig breeders.

  “Perivar, if she’s up for grabs, we’ll take her here.”

  “What would the gardens’ director have to say to that?” When she didn’t answer, Perivar felt his heart freeze up. “Oh gods, Iyal, you didn’t.”

  “Perivar, there are maybe fifty completely engineered people alive in the Quarter Galaxy and none of them, I mean none of them, are this fully realized. Additions and enhancements are one thing. Anybody can throw a switch. Some places can even rewire the system. But this one…whoever built her started with some proteins in a sterile dish and went from there. If we knew even half of what went into it, we could give the Vitae a run for their market, and not just on Kethran either.

  “And by the way"—her voice and face hardened together—"I’m not crazy about the fact you think I’d just get her in here and run her through a processor.”

  “Iyal, at this point I don’t know what you’d do.” Which just adds another name to that list. “You’re not talking like yourself.”

  That took her back. “All right, all right.” She waved her hands aimlessly. “Yes, I showed my results to Director Id Shomat. I thought we had a calibration problem. I thought the chain could not be this short.

  “He went over the whole thing again. We got the same results five times in a row and I told him… well, I told him. He told me to try to get… her… we were saying ‘it’ because what the hell did we know…here. What’s she need to be comfortable?”

  Perivar felt his fingers curling up again and forced them to straighten out. “The usual things, Iyal. A place to stay, food, something she can do to keep from getting bored…Oh yeah, she needs some language lessons and she doesn’t know an input terminal from a hunk of brick.”

  Iyal scratched her chin. “All right. T
he necessities we can fix her up with, and we could always use another field assistant that doesn’t need reprogramming. We could even pay her. What’s the going contract length for contraband where it’s legal?”

  “Six years, supposedly. But I never saw a contraband really finish a contract. Permanent extensions are more the way it works. They can’t exactly protest to the labor authority.”

  “Six years should do it, and then some. Will you release her to us?”

  Perivar sat still for a while, listening to the hum of the utilities and the silence that was coming from behind the membrane housing.

  “Perivar, what is with you?”

  “Nothing. Plenty. Never mind, Iyal. I’ve just been hanging around Kiv too long, that’s all. Can you give me an hour? There are some things I need to clear up.”

  “An hour I can give you, but not much more. Cousin Director is about ready to start eating the carpet over here.”

  “All right. I’ll get things… straightened out on this end as soon as I can, Iyal.”

  “I’ll be waiting. And, Perivar…” she hesitated. “I may end up owing you the favor for this. Hope to see you soon.”

  “Yeah.” He shut the channel down.

  “All right, Kiv. You win.” Perivar hoisted himself to his feet and knocked on his living room door.

  No answer came, so Perivar pushed the door aside. Aria sat on the sofa with her face to the door, but she did not look up. Her eyes were closed, and her hands were cupped around a small white sphere that gleamed in the light that shone through the windows.

  “Aria Stone?” Perivar approached her carefully. Now he could see two more spheres resting on a bright green swath of fabric next to her.

  She didn’t move. Perivar laid his hand on her shoulder.

  “Aria?”

  Aria blinked once and lifted her eyes. She searched his face without any sign of comprehension. Her pupils had dilated until her brown irises were nothing but a narrow band around two black holes.

  “Are you all right?” He lifted his hand away.