by Jo Clayton
She opened her eyes, yawned. The storm was still yowling outside the deflectors, though the winds were dying down, the rain slackening. “You know the most frustrating thing? I was on Spotchals two months before Aslan’s shipment left Weersyll. Two damn months.” She glanced at the storm with impatience, all pleasure in it gone, sat up and ran her hands over her hair, pulling control like a coat around her. “You can follow that ship?”
“If we can set some ticks. We’ll know more about that shortly. Pels, get on to Kinok, have him start a run on Weersyll, then you get hold of some of your dubious friends, see what they can give you. If they need time, have them message you at our drop on Helvetia. Kumari, see if you can get through to ti Vnok; say we’ll make Helvetia three weeks on. If he wants to meet, have him leave time and place at the drop.” Quale got to his feet, stood back to let the others move past him. He glanced after them, turned to look down at Adelaar. “Helvetia first. We have to settle the escrow and register the services contract.” His mustache lifted in a smile reflected in his pale eyes. “Even Bolodo won’t mess with Helvetia.”
“They could wait beyond the Limit, jump us there.”
“Slancy Orza has a trick or two. Hmm. Give you a few hours’ sleep and the world won’t be so grim.” He bent, reached under the table. “I’ll have a serviteur clear the table. Anything you’d like?”
“The storm to end.”
“Won’t be long now. Relax.”
She made an impatient gesture. “If your lander can’t work through this little disturbance, what good is it?”
“It’s being droned down, no use taking chances for a miserable half hour that we can make up with no trouble once we’re insplitted.” A brow lifted, another smile, then he too was gone.
She sat and watched the rain thrum down, watched it diminish abruptly to a trickle. The clouds raveled, paling, thinning; patches of sky appeared, vividly blue in contrast to the shadowed whites and pale grays of the vanishing clouds. Shafts of sunlight shot down, touching droplets of rain into blinding glitters; the greens outside the garden shimmered like polished jade. Quale read her too well, curse the man, her gloom dissipated with the storm. Her ambivalence remained. Action was on hold for the moment, once it began it’d go with a rush. Out of her control. Before, she’d been in charge, now he’d be. Quale.
Enigmatic man. She smiled, a wry tight thinning of her lips, as she remembered Lyggad stroking his pile of faxsheets, wrinkled atomy, big-eyed elf. The first part of his life Quale was a violent brute with a strong skilled body and enough intelligence, or maybe it was cunning laced with Luck, to acquire a ship and hold together a motley crew of scavs, a sleazy, crude scavenger whose idea of subtle attack was rip and run, then he’d tangled with the Hunter Aleytys and suddenly he was something more. A clever man, quiet, calm, cutting ties to his former… well, you couldn’t call them friends, say associates, pals, buddies, whatever. A man who kept clear of trouble. Lyggad said it was like Aleytys gave him a brain transplant. He giggled when he said it, but obviously more than half-believed it, Aleytys was part Vryhh and who knew what those types could do when they put their minds to it? He said some of Quale’s ex-buddies got nosy and demanded to know what happened, implying in forceful though limited language (that was Lyggad being prissy) that the woman had castrated him. They didn’t ask twice. In that, Quale hadn’t changed, he was fast and nasty when the occasion required. So Lyggad said.
Slancy Orza. Rummul empire trooper, Lyggad said, mostly shell and drives when Quale acquired it, a wreck flying on kicks and curses. The drives used to be huge clunkers that ate fuel like it was free. Quale yanked those and put in new drives; they were nothing standard according to the few folk who got a look at them and were willing to talk. Huge, sleek, powerful Slancy Orza (Lyggad’s voice went wistful, his tongue caressed the words), she can outrace a Sutt Aviso, sit down on a 3g world without bursting a seam and lift cargo nearly equal to her own weight.
She heard a quiet rumble, went down the stairs to stand, on the grass looking up at a small lander as it dropped toward the ground. The pad, she thought, Worm must be gone by now. She drew her hand down over her face, sighed, started for the house.
IV
1. Three years std. earlier.
Aslan aici Adlaar daughter to Adelaar aici Arash riding to an unknown destination in the hold of a Salado transport.
Aslan muttered and blinked as she came out of a dragged sleep. She lifted her head, let it fall back as pain lanced from ear to ear. “Stinking… what now?”
Dim blue light. A cylinder. She was on a cot inside a tincan, cots spreading out on either side, above and below. She was catheterized but was not uncomfortable with it, the appliance was more resilient than most; there were restraints on her wrists and ankles, but they had sufficient play to let her sit up, even hang her legs over the cot’s edge. She was surprised that she wasn’t under full automatic care, her body processes reduced to a low hum. This waking restraint was wasteful and from what she knew of contract labor transports, unusual. She tried again and this time made it up. When her head stopped pounding, she looked around.
The other contractees… no, she thought, don’t funk the name… slaves, some of the slaves were stretched out sleeping, some were sitting up, staring morosely into the blue gloom, others were talking together, still others had books and were reading or earphones, listening to flake players. She hadn’t seen any of them before, Bolodo had kept her in solitary for months, probably so she’d have no chance to pass on anything about the Oligarchy and what they were doing to the Unntoualar; she had two coveralls, one clean each day, whatever flakes or books she asked for, but nothing from her own gear. She’d asked for that, but no one bothered to listen to her and she decided they’d ashed her things, just another paranoid precaution. Hmm. My own personal paranoid was too too right, mama’ll beat me over the head with that for the next hundred years. She clicked her tongue, smiled as she remembered her mother’s habitual t’k t’k that used to irritate her so much when she was a teener.
She went back to inspecting her companions. They were past adolescence, none of them old (making allowances for ananiles and mutational differences). All of them seemed to be sprouts on the cousin stem and there was a more intangible likeness-they were all professionals or artisans (no slogworkers in the mix) wearing the kind of gear experienced travelers chose, plenty of zippered pockets and easy to take care of. She looked down. She was back in her own tans, boots and all, the Ridaar unit in its belt case. Evidently they hadn’t ashed everything. Refusing to think about that, she slid off the cot, stretched, the tethers stretching with her, the catheter giving her no trouble.
Her equipment cases were strapped beneath the cot where she could get at them if she wanted to.
She edged around and stared at them, despair cold inside her. They are by god sure I’m not going to get back, unless… She uncased the Ridaar, ran through the overt index, then called up the last of the hidden files.
Report: deepfile Ridaar: re: Unntoualar
Code: icy eagle’s child damn you Tamarralda I am not 324sub e minus one one half.
… I’m sure of it now, subject Zed has opened up enough to feed me some songs. It’s the usual thing, they’ve made an accommodation with the new powercenters and they’re not about to endanger their survival to help a transient female of more or less the same species as the invaders who took their world from them. The Unntoualar I’m living with are confused, on the one hand I seem to be here with the blessing of the invaders, on the other they’ve been quick to see the not-so-hidden hostility to me. I’ve been careful to limit my inquiries to their songs and the story tapestries connected with these, with those dozens of thready fingers it’s no wonder they’re marvelous weavers. No color vision, so line and texture dominate; almost but not quite writing; from what I’ve seen so far (which I admit is severely limited) they never did develop a written language, which was another clue since most races with a high psi quotient don’t, concepts are t
oo complex for the forced simplification of the written word. Why am I deepfiling this? Their psi-capacity is the hot spot; whenever I get anywhere near that, Zed, Wye, even crazy Tau start sweating blood. Mike and Sigurd have done wonders with the language, it’s a stinker, Tam, you’d guess it would be since a good half the nuance comes from esp fringes. Duncan lived up to his reputation by producing a crystal set, so the youngsters could record a good portion of those fringes and give us access the Unntoualar and the Styernnese don’t suspect. I hope.
They’re projective telepaths, that’s clear from the songs, one of the few such capable of transferring images into the minds of species alien to them. Physically nonaggressive but not passive. Their aggressions came out in psychic attacks; before the colonists came, they were the dominant species on Styernna, having more or less wiped out all competition. Zed pulled a sneak on the censor, included a song in the first batch he let me flake about the arrival of the colonists and the short depressing settlement war; I haven’t any idea why he did it, there’s no evidence he can read me, maybe a gesture of rebellion, one he understands is probably futile. The Unntoualar tried their standard attack on the invaders, but the full force and flavor of it was blunted by the stolidity of those alien minds. Their single weapon was not only useless but proved to be disastrous for them; their most vicious attacks were perceived as surrealistic and erotic dreams. The last part of the song is one long wail against Fate as the Unntoualar realize this and begin dimly to see what it means for them.
Yesterday he brought in Rho and Nu, alpha males like him, they picked out a new tapestry and started singing, but the song had shit-all to do with the images. It was about what was happening to the Unntoualar now. Since the Final Dispossession, the Oligarchs have hoarded for their own use the most powerful of the PT’s (their name in the song is a complex combination of dream dancer, custodian of race memory, spear of the Unn, verbal shorthand: Stahoho idam kaij), parceling out the lesser PT’s for the entertainment of their favorites. All very secret, of course. The homeworld has rules for handling the natives and Styernna can’t live without help yet; besides they know the ordure that will splatter over them if what they’re doing gets out, plus the fact that half the scavs in the universe will come zooming over to harvest their share. Oh Tam, what they’re doing, it’s a lot worse than forcing a PT to do his thing. They’re torturing the miserable creatures to get more piquant dreams out of them. Sickening.
I didn’t want to hear that, Tam, makes me nervous. I don’t know what the hell’s going on, I thought I’d better get this deepfiled before Zed’s plot (whatever it is) starts fruiting. Question: Is this a setup? Are the Oligarchs using Zed to snooker me into accusations I couldn’t possibly substantiate? Is Zed doing this on his own? Is he working with or for other Unntoualar? What do I do? Well, I’ve got the kernel down, up to you to see there’s heavy pressure put to investigate the Oligarchy and how it’s using the Unntoualar.
Distorted, bleeding, the Unn staggered into the circle, shrieking with voice and mind, ululating interling and Unnspeech, flopping in front of Aslan, accusations foaming out of him, curses on the name of the Oligarch who owned him, tortured him, stole his dreams out of him.
Guards surrounding her taking her away, taking away the Unn, dead Unn, twisted tormented. Dead too late for her. At least she was alone, Duncan and the others were at the base camp two sectors away, oh god, she was alone, Mama was right, she shouldn’t have come.
2
She stood looking at the palm-sized plate for a long sick moment, then she sighed and canceled the read. If they’d bothered to locate and erase those files, she’d have had a sliver of hope that she could get out of this. They hadn’t. Even the overt record was untouched.
She crawled back on the cot and sat with her legs dangling, the fingers of her right hand moving around and around the old burn scar on her left wrist, a scar she’d gotten when she was nearly four and being punished by her foster mother for something or other, she couldn’t remember what, but it was about two months before Adelaar came for her. When she noticed what she was doing, she stilled her fingers and smiled at the scar, a fierce feral grin. Bolodo doesn’t know you, Mama, nooo indeed, you’ll blow the bastards out of their skins before you’re finished with them. Hmm. Better for my self-esteem if I don’t sit around sucking my thumb waiting for you to show up. Problem is, what do I do and how do I do it?
She pulled her legs up onto the cot, pushed herself along it until she was, sitting with her back against the hold wall, then started thinking about contract labor. Like everyone else, she’d accepted its existence as something morally reprehensible but generally necessary. Blessed be the Contractor for he takes away the ugliness of life. Societies always have those they class as criminals, anything from mass murderers and big time thieves to heretics and skeptics who question the way things are. Your average citizen, he’s more comfortable if he doesn’t have to look at the poor, the handicapped, the mildly crazy and wildly crazy, the drunks and druggers, the different, the dregs. Why not keep your citizens happy, reduce taxes, remove focuses of disturbance-all that in one fine swoop? A way of using what would otherwise be a drag on the economy, a way of protecting the comfortable assumptions of the majority from any sort of challenge. Besides, new colonies need labor they can eject when the job is done so the workers won’t pollute the paradise, heavy worlds need miners whose health they don’t have to worry about, everywhere an infinity of uses for workers who can’t object to miserable conditions and miserly pay. And there you have it, contract labor. A marriage of greed with respectability. Blessed be the Contractor (but don’t let him live in my neighborhood).
On her left a youngish man was stretched out, sleeping. Some time ago his hair had been sprayed into lavender spikes, there was a lavender butterfly tattooed on the bicep next to her; his hands were square and muscular with short, strong, callused fingers. There was a heavy silver ring on his little finger; she couldn’t see much of it, but the design looked familiar. A friend of hers on University had hands like those and a habit of giving rings like that to his students. Sarmaylen. He was exploring an ancient and long neglected form of sculpture, working every kind of stone he could get into his studio, threatening the neighborhood with silicosis from the dust he was raising. She leaned over, tried to see past the collapsed spikes; as far as she could tell, she didn’t know the boy (she smiled, getting old, woman, when you look at a man like that and see a boy), he was young enough to be only a year or two out of school and she wasn’t much into Sarmaylen’s life these days. Snuffling marble dust didn’t appeal to her; besides, she wasn’t really interested in the more exotic varieties of the arts, couldn’t talk to him about them because he snorted with disgust at every word she said. That was one of the reasons Sarmaylen was only an occasional sleeping companion though she found the touch of his callused, work-roughened hands electrifying. She smiled at the memory of them, smoothed her fingers across and across the burn scar. His hands were eloquent, his tongue was not, at least in the public sense, a pleasant change from her other friends and lovers. She was fond of him; if she never saw him again, she’d hurt a lot, but she could no more live with him than she could with her mother. Their casual off again on again relationship seemed to suit him as well as it did her, though she sometimes wondered what he was getting out of it besides the sex, which was something he’d have plenty of without her. She frowned at the boy. A student of Sarmaylen, a sculptor. How did he wind up here? Artists and artisans like him never signed with Contractors. Not voluntarily. Trashed like me, I suppose. Or was he just out and out snatched?
Her neighbor on the right was a small fair woman. Huge eyes in an oval angular face with prominent cheekbones. Energetically thin. Sitting, she seemed in flight like some birds Aslan had known. Her hands were narrow and bony, rather too large for her slight form though she managed them gracefully, her feet were narrow and bony, distorted by the stigmata of a professional dancer. She was turning a music box around and aroun
d in her fingers though no sounds issued from it, if she disliked the dull muttering silence in the hold (the tension in her body and the fine-drawn look of her face suggested that she did), the music of the box would remind her of the restraints that kept her tethered to the cot, so she left it silent. Her mouth twitched into a smile so brief it was like the flash of a strobe light. “Kante Xalloor,” she said. Her voice was deep, husky, easy on the ears. “Dancer. Bolodo must have kept you stashed somewhere?”
“Aslan aici Adlaar. Xenoethnologist.”
“Yipe. What’s that when it’s home?”
Aslan tapped the Ridaar unit. “Sitting around listening to native remnants tell stories about how the world began.”
“Weird.” Xalloor looked past her at the sleeping youth. “You know him?”
“No. I don’t know anyone here. Back there, I saw four walls and an exercise mat. Bolodo didn’t want me talking about some things I got mixed up in.”
“Snatched you?”
“Not exactly. Bought me out of a trashing; I suppose I should be grateful, the maggots that did it were going to top me. You?”
“I was on Estilhass, I’d finished a situ with the Patraosh and had an offer of another on Menfi Menfur. Maybe you know the feeling, mishmosh and jigjag, hard to sleep, no reason to stay awake, nothing to do but wait for the ship to take me off. There was this stringman I met in a bar one night, I woke up in restraints on a Bolodo scout, no stringman in sight, just a pilot who looked in on me to see I was still alive, then ignored me. He wore Bolodo patches, made no mystery about who had me, which was hellishly depressing if you thought about it, and I didn’t have much else to do the next bunch of weeks till we got to the substation.” She shrugged with her whole body, a vivid electric summation of her feelings. “We’ll see what we see when they drop us. Him you were watching, he’s called Jaunniko, he says he thumps rocks for a living.” Her thin brows wriggled skeptically, then rose in wrinkled arcs as Aslan nodded agreement. “The big lump on the other side of him, the one with his nose in a book, that’s Parnalee, he’s always reading. He says he’s out of Proggerd, that’s in the Pit, the Omphalos Institute whatever that is, he got drunk the first night in the pens, he had a bottle of tiggah in his cases; he says he’s the best designer in fifty light years any direction, didn’t say what he designs. The three women next him, they’re a group, the Omperiannas, you heard of them? Ah well, it’s a big universe. They were my music the time I was touring the Dangle Stars. The little bald man who’s doing all the scribbling, the one who looks like he’s made of tarnished brass, he’s Churri the Bard.” She arched her mobile brows and converted her limber body into a question mark as Aslan’s eyes snapped wide. Aslan twisted around, leaned forward and stared at her father. Curiosity seethed in her and a bitter anger against him for abandoning her, though she knew it was idiotic to think like that, he didn’t know she existed; Adelaar had been careful to tell her that, her mother had a sentimental attachment to him which was both amusing and peculiar in a woman so icily unsentimental in other ways. That the man who’d fathered her could be sitting here so close to her, absorbed in his tablets, completely ignorant of their relationship, was absurd, it was the god she didn’t believe in playing games with her life. She sighed, settled back, gave Xalloor an encouraging nod.