by Clayton, Jo;
“We couldn’t afford Nossik’s prices.”
“Either beer or bed. Who’d ever pick bed over beer?”
“We can sleep anywhere anyhow, but Nossik’s ale is only in Nossik’s kegs.”
“We hauled the Ferryman out of bed.”
“Oh he was mad, oh mad.”
“Got a real educated tongue, never repeated himself, not once.”
“Once we got over, well, it was a nice night, a little fog settling in, but that’d keep the roadlice off us.”
“So we just kept going.”
“But the horses needed to rest and graze.”
“So we made a camp, caught some fish, they cooking now. And broached a keg of Nossik’s ale.”
“And we saw you riding by and we said hey there’s a one who knows a story to two to pass the time. And we thought that one she might like a taste of fish and a touch of ale and maybe would tell us maybe huh a story or two about what it’s like now on the other side of the Gate.”
Four pairs of hazel eyes watched her from under four thatches of moonsilver not-hair that stirred restlessly in the warm thick air.
Skeen chuckled. “Feed me and water me, and yes I’ll tell you a tale or two.”
A TALE OF TIBO’S YOUTH.
or
THE FIRST TIME I SAW THAT SNAKE.
“A story about the other side. Hm. When you’re a traveler, after a while you begin learning to slide into new folkways like a frog sliding into a new pond. It’s all around you and you take part of it into you but only that part nearest you and when you leave again, that part slides away and is mostly forgotten, though it leaves its mark on you one way or another. Dip, splash, move on, adding a few words and sounds to the store of languages in your head and after a few more dips you forget where you got them and what was the larger context where they took their meaning. There are many kinds of travelers. Company folk whose home is not the ship but the corporation in whose mothering arms they are born and live until they lose their usefulness and are discarded. Free trader families living in the belly of a world ship that sails between the stars and never ever touches earth. To touch down for them is to die. Travelers, yes—mercenaries, gamblers, smugglers, thieves, assassins working or looking for work, players of all kind, dancers, singers, entertainers who do things it would take a month to describe and still you wouldn’t understand. I’ve seen them and I don’t understand. Pilgrims and missionaries from a thousand and one religions, going where they’re going, doing what they’re doing for reasons only they comprehend and sometimes even they don’t really know why they are where they are. Colonists, explorers, marginals who drift because that’s the way they’re made; if there’s a place to go they have to go there, if there isn’t a place they haven’t seen, they’ll find one. I suppose you know fairly well what I’m talking about—you’re travelers, too. You have your reasons for moving along just as I do. And like Nossik’s Inn, there are places that most travelers know, places where they can stop a while, rest, meet their kind, buy and sell according to their needs and desires, get high or drunk or absent to this plane, chat with friends they haven’t seen for a handful of years and won’t see again for as many more years, pass on things they’ve heard and seen … rumor and fact, speculation and explanation. We call these places Pit Stops. Don’t ask why, I don’t know.
“Some years back I nosed in at a place called the Nymph’s Navel. I’d been rambling about doing this and that for over a year, alone most of the time because my last Companion had turned out to be a macho jerk, so I was wanting company pretty bad. Nymph’s Navel is a place you can relax and not worry about your back or who’s got his hand in your credit belt. I don’t say there aren’t fights and folk getting killed and plundered there; stupidity is its own reward, if you know what I mean. But if you took reasonable care, you didn’t have to worry about phluxes jumping you to feed their habit, or Noses landing on you for something they think you might have done. Even blood feuds are parked outside a Pit Stop.
“I got in about midday local time, spent most of the afternoon unloading my cargo. Already had buyers waiting for the biggest part of the load; the rest I passed on to the local jobbers on consignment, so by nightfall I was awash with gelt and ready to celebrate. Picarefy was wanting to redecorate, so I arranged a credit line for her, Picarefy is my ship. She’s technically not alive, eh, how do I explain it, say it’s like a sailing ship that could talk to you, never mind how it’s done. I stashed most of the gelt with Picarefy so I’d have going away money; Picarefy would scold me sober before she let me get my hands on that stash. I caught the syncline to the Juwell bubble and proceeded to have myself a fine time in the Glass Madonna’s house of varied pleasures. I won’t sully your innocent young ears with what I did. Huh? You want to be sullied? Forget it, kid, that’s another story. Anyway, round the fifth cycle I was feeling a bit tired and about ready to take off again. I was sitting in a fingerbowl, getting some of the kinks out of my spine and other assorted parts when a really odd match-up came strolling in.
“I’ve led what you might call a varied life, which by the way is a lot more entertaining to look back on then to live through. And I’ve seen a thing or two, but that was just about the funniest pair I’ve ever chanced across. You expect weirdness when the pair or set or whatever is a cross-species mix. I mean, once you’ve seen a Kombui eight-legs with a Yoka-poe no-legs and a Pavchid all-mother all three dancing a tango, mixes don’t surprise you much. But same-species weirdness is something else, makes you go ukk! and huh? and how do they manage and I’ll leave it at that. This pair. Male and female. She was … tall. Yes. Tall. The essence of tall. Two and a half meters. Say you set Hal on Hart’s shoulders, about that tall. And thin! You could fold her up and pass her twice through the eye of a needle. She wore this red thing that fit like it was painted on her. You could count every rib and dive in her navel. Her breasts were like oranges cut in half, her nipples were cherries perched atop the orange halves. She had a long thin face with a long thin nose and a tiny pink mouth and huge, really huge no-colored eyes. Though it doesn’t sound like it, she was pretty in an austere way. Marvelous skin—even from as far off as I was, I could tell it was velvet soft and flawless. She had a shock of butter yellow hair. It stood out from her face like dandelion fluff. Looking at it you’d think you could put your hand on it and your hand would sink and sink through its softness. That was the woman. Her name was Alelo. One other thing. Her voice. It was deep and warm and honey on the ears, fit to enchant even an argebost than which there are few things nastier not human.
“The man was short. Next to Alelo he looked a dwarf. Ders, if he stood looking at you, his eyes would maybe clear your navel. A meter and a half, if he stood toe-tip. Bald. No eyebrows. He was the color of Nossik’s dark ale, eyes the bluest of any blue you ever saw, the blue of the sky on a summer day when you lie flat on your back and stare up and up into the bluest part. He had small hands and feet, was well-muscled in his upper half though he was wiry rather than a little bull. Limber and neat. Pointed ears. Handsome. A grin to charm the rings off a matriarch. A tongue hinged in the middle and oiled with glamour-glow, able to charm you even when you knew very well he was a scheming little prick who hadn’t meant a word he said since he popped from his mother’s womb. Tibo he was. Tibo whose name was anathema on so many worlds he couldn’t count them, not having learned numbers that high, or so he always claimed. He wore a gold lamé shirt and gold shimmersilk pants with Barunda leather boots, the dark crimson leather that cost a fortune and a half for a single skin. And diamond and ruby earrings and firestones on four fingers. On the hoof that first time I saw him he was worth a ship’s ransom and then some. Tibo the Slide, master of his trade, riding a streak of luck a lightyear wide.
“I crawled out of the fingerbowl into a party to end all parties and forgot I was tired.
“A lot of cycles later, I lost count in the middle somewhere, Tibo, Alelo, me, a gyoser named udJian, a mixed pair of dancers from Kemur named Beeba and Beeka, an
d a yumrick Gefurn named Squeeze, we landed finally in a slumbabounce, half-asleep half-awake, and altogether out of touch with whatever passed for reality round there. I don’t know who started, but after a while, one by one, we were telling stories, things that happened to us when we were children. You want a story from beyond the Stranger’s Gate, here’s Tibo tale. I do not guarantee the truth in it.
“Tibo was a naked little man, drifting from pouf to pouf. His voice came to us here there, rambling on until we forgot the teller in the telling.”
We were contract players on a Gancha worldship, a wide-bind family, my bodyfather and bodymother, my teaching mothers and training fathers, my sisters and half-sisters and line sisters, my brothers and half-brothers and line brothers, the cross cousins and parallel cousins, the adopted affiliates and so on. We were one of the oldest and largest wide-bind families living in the ships. I was born and suckled on ship Samal Haran, learned the family trade in ship Eyasta Hus, and left the world ships forever after what happened in ship Chiar Frawa. Let me tell you about world ships. The travelers buying transport, the traders buying space, they know the upper levels, those around the garden of shipheart where even the poorest of passengers could roam where he pleased for an endless round of delights, among them the Player families dancing, tumbling, performing in playlets, juggling, jesting, all the things Player families do. That passenger might even have got a little deeper out, into the outer edge of crew quarters. But he’d never make it all the way to us. We would not permit that. Though we had little clout with the Family that owned the Ship or the Captains in their aeries, that they granted us, treating us Contract Families like their own people. If a passenger visited crew, it was outsider crew—hire-meat, the pursers and stewards, the clerks in shops when they weren’t part of a Family, waitresses, cleaners, scut workers—not the real Crew that ran the Ship and had shares in her.
My bodyfather was a tumbler and an acrobat and that was what I was taught. We had actors and seers of all kinds, read anything for you, dancers, singers, gamers, and others. We were a family rich in talent and passions, a noisy brawling close—ah close—family.
When I was fourteen I fell desperately in love with an affiliate, a girl we adopted in not long after we changed ships, she came from hire-crew, the bodydaughter of a food designer who doubled in a pleasure house, the daughter being destined to follow her in both, something she hated the thought of. She auditioned for us and we adopted her. She was a little older than me, a dark small creature, agile as a newt on a hot wall, and she had more courage and spirit than a dozen ordinary folk. From the time she came into the family, she was thirteen then and I was seven, I was her slave, followed her everywhere. She was good-natured about it. She liked to talk and I was a willing audience. She liked to do crazy things and she needed an audience for that, too. I adored her like a sistermother when I was seven and when I was fourteen I wanted her for lovemate.
A worldship’s skin isn’t solid or smooth, even on the outside. Costs being what they are, the ships grew as the Family could afford to build on more space. Chiar Frawa was a hundred generations old and immense. And the rind was so complicated even shipmind didn’t know all the ins and outs. Works like this. There’s the outshell, the sealerskin, then a space filled with metal sponge, then layers of air, then more sponge alternating with air filled with crawlways and springbeams. Then the meddashell, then the serviceways in a very wide airspace filled with beams and braces, ducts and boards—every three steps off the catwalks you’re in a hole with a whole new shape. An endlessly permuting mazeway. The walkways were kept cleared because the crew used them just about every day, and even if they didn’t the children of the Worao Crew Families spent part of each day in there keeping the fungus off them. In the off-spaces though, the fungus grew thick and strange. Other things grew in there, too. They are damp places, warm. There are orchids and other epiphytes, even small trees in catch-pockets, vines, exotics from a hundred worlds, passengers bringing in spores on their clothing, sometimes even seed. Rats, birds, lizards, worms of all sorts. Other things, dangerous things. The cleaning children were generally under guard by an armed adult in some sections, specially where the ways were narrow and seldom used. The light didn’t go far from the walks, but there were clusters of luminescent fungi that produced almost as much light as a glowstrip, so there were a lot of temptations for imaginative children. The guard was there as much to keep them herded on the ways as to protect them from rat swarms and other things.
Though we were Player Family and not required to work on the ways, my love Qessara and I often volunteered to join clean-gangs. It was scut work but it got us out of scutwork for the Family that was a lot more boring; besides, more often than not, we could sneak off and explore that marvelously complex jungle. It was deadly dangerous out there; children and adults both had got lost before in that maze and were never seen again. Qessara knew it and looked on the danger as spice to the pleasure of exploring, but she wasn’t stupid. We both carried mark-sprays to leave a trail that would take us out again and well-sharpened knives to discourage attack. She needed those brushes with danger more than any drug, every brush with horror a reaffirmation of her worth; she never talked about her life before the Family, but I’d learned enough about her to make guesses that got me hot and sick and furious at my helplessness before her pain. She was a dancer who could madden a crowd, men and women alike. I watched her dancing once and I hurt so much for her I never went again. That dance was a cry for help so desperate, so hopeless … ah well, she used to say she didn’t know what all the fuss was about and she certainly came back into the Family space so cool and unconcerned I never got it straight in my head whether she was just performing or she’d learned like most of us to deny the thing that hurts.
We went running through the jungle like large gray rats. The Law Mother knew well enough what we were up to when we volunteered and scolded us apart and together for playing the fool with our lives, lives that belonged to the Family and weren’t ours to squander, but we earned pay-points for the Family and favored status among the Contractors and much good will, so she never forbid us our games. There was something else. More than once we brought back rare and beautiful orchids. The Worao claimed half the price for them, since it was their fields we raided, but even with that the Family had gelt to buy luxuries undreamed of before our games, so no one cried foul and forbid us. But certainly no one encouraged us—quite the opposite. My bodyfather reddened my butt each time I got home late and glared unhappily at Qesarra who led me astray and my uncle-father who taught me juggling and games of chance scolded me for endangering myself and my auntmother who taught me my letters tried to reason with me and with Qesarra. But reason and pain and shame have little effect on the crazy and I had that infection from Qesarra. And nothing serious had ever happened and like all children who are tenderly raised, I had a bone-deep conviction that nothing bad would happen.
This went on until I was fifteen and Qesarra past twenty. During that year the disappearances began to increase in tempo until it was a loud staccato thrum, staccato from the empty spaces where Crew, hire-crew, and Contract Crew used to stand. The edict came down, bristling with dire punishments for those who ignored it. No more children on the service ways, not for any reason. Something prowled the jungle out there, a demon with an everdemanding gut. Only the passengers knew nothing of the fear that tightened around the rest of us. I heard the whispered stories and was afraid, not so much for myself as for Qesarra.
There was a Sound. It was a sigh like wind through grass, seeping into crew quarters and ours. It first it seemed such a harmless even rather pleasant sound. It teased at us, seemed to whisper secrets just beyond our ability to hear. The Worao Captains sent SP crew into the ways, armed with laser snappers and flamethrowers, but the Sound was everywhere; the ways wound for stads and stads. Those that came back saw nothing but plants too soggy to burn. Those that didn’t come back—who knows what they saw. The High Captain withdrew with the Wora
o Elders to see if they could worry out a way of clearing the Insul without crippling the ship. There things stayed while the Worao argued.
Skeen interrupted the story. “To appreciate the problem the Gancha Family Worao faced, you should know that were the ship Chiar Frawa set down on top of us, it would not fit between the mountains, not half of it, not a tenth of it. Were you to ride across it at twenty stads a day, trading horses every ten stads to keep up the pace, it would take a thousand days to ride across the widest part of it. Just to clear a small segment of the Insul, that area between the meddashell and the serviceways, would be like trying to sweep all the dirt off the plain. You see? Right. So back to Tibo and his story.”
On the fifth day of the Sound, Qesarra was so jittery she couldn’t sleep or eat. I watched her closely because I was afraid she’d do something even I knew was stupid. I followed her to the dance space. I hated all the folk who came to see her, hated them for sucking at her terror and desperation; it was like they were one huge beast feeding on her. When her dance was done, they called her back and back to dance some more until she was exhausted. Abla and Jerron, two of our cousins, had to carry her back to the Family space. I went to do my part of the Family Act and forgot about her for a short while because the brother and sisters who worked with me would make my life unlivable if I messed up. Besides, I was the best tumbler of them all outside my bodyfather. I had my pride.
When our part was done, I hurried to Qesarra’s cubby. She wasn’t there. I stood by her mussed bed and wondered what to do. The Sound went on and on. We were all used to it by now, we tuned it out, but I started listening to it because it was somehow different. Focused. I began to feel it working inside me, looking for a hold on me. And then I knew where Qesarra was. All the grishes to the serviceways were warded now, those anyone knew about, with alarms to bring Worao SP running if anyone tripped them. I let the Sound catch me and lead me. There had to be a grish no one knew about or why did folk keep disappearing. I tried to close off everything but the will to follow. I didn’t want the Sound to dump me or take me somewhere Qesarra wasn’t. I was frantic not knowing how long Qesarra had been gone, but I tried to look casual as I moved through the family cubbies and the Green Space, where the Families grew vegetables, where children played among the waterbins. There were some younguns there with an Amamother keeping an eye on them; she frowned and looked worried when she saw me. I grinned at her, waved, and hurried on. Old Amamothers were apt to have intuits at the most inconvenient times and I cursed chance for letting one get a look at me now. As anger flared in me, the Sound seemed to retreat like I burned it. I forced the anger back and tried to calm myself. I succeeded enough that the Sound grew complacent and teased me along faster. It was a grish close to the Green Space, hidden when a new waterbin was moved in. There was just enough room to squeeze around the bin and slide the panel back.