Emily C Skaftun - [BCS299 S04]

by Only the Messenger (html)

  Only the Messenger

  Emily C. Skaftun

  Dozens of lives I’ve lived now, as all manner of things that swim, run, slither, and fly, and it’s the same damn story every time. You may think you’ve found love of a profound and timeless nature, but that love will still swim away from you when the current is right. If you’re very, very lucky, it won’t happen until you die and get reincarnated on opposite sides of the galaxy.

  I’d give three tentacles to be that lucky, just once.

  Zaraell is the closest thing I’ve ever found to a soulmate, and the last holo message from Roptrango-A makes it clear that that’s over. Holo messages are slow. She recorded that one almost a full Trango year ago, which means that the ranch-style coral home we sang into shape together has already been dismantled, the seeds divided among our offspring. I can barely think about what must remain, my portion left sick and sinking into the shifting sand leeward of West Volcano Spaceport.

  Better to think of happier times: our first launch together; the day our first clutch of offspring hatched and the pride we felt in the survivor of the post-natal melee; the last time we mated, Zaraell’s sinuous tentacles twined in mine until neither of us knew where ours ended and the other’s began— Actually, thinking of happier times isn’t helping either. My third stomach churns with sick bile. I can’t live with your choices anymore, Zaraell’s holo image had said, grainy image of zir head softly shuddering. Or is it that I can’t live without them?

  I can’t live without zir.

  So what am I doing on this heap of an interstellar trader speeding faster-than-light away from my truest love? I’ve been thinking about that a lot since I watched Zaraell’s latest message, and I still don’t know. All I know are three true things:

  1) Illegal cargo is lucrative cargo. We’re going to make a cloaca-load on this trade, bringing lab-grown meat to the Tro’o, if we can steer clear of the Intra-Stellar Trade Organization (ISTO).

  2) The universe is stupidly, laughably big. Even with the hummingest star drive, it would take lifetimes to get from one end to the other (assuming there are ends—I have a vague memory of an edge, a starless pool of nothingness I may once have seen, many lives ago, but you can’t really trust memories from toddler lives, so who knows?)

  3) There is no such thing as a soulmate.

  And yet...

  The InstaComm pings, reminding me that I’m lost in the space of my own head. Words scroll out on the console’s screen—a return message from the Tro’o, acknowledging our new ETA and providing new coordinates for the exchange. A moment later, a fresh sphere rolls out of the chute.

  A shiny, rubbery sphere where a second ago there was nothing.

  This new InstaCom unit has me baffled, and I’m the best engineer in this arm of the galaxy, if I do say so myself. To instantly—and I mean instantly, not at light speed or even faster-than-light, but right exactly now—send a message anywhere in the universe, you just type up a message, pop in a sphere, the machine does its thing, and the flattened disc that was the sphere comes out for disposal. When a message comes back, the machine spits out the message along with a fresh sphere to “fuel” your reply. It’s not any kind of matter transfer I ever learned in school, and I’m itching to take the thing apart and uncover its secrets. But there is a very serious warning label on the sucker, and if even half the rumors about InstaComm are true, it’s no idle threat.

  Besides, these things are expensive. I’ve only been on two ships could afford one, and the captain’d have my beak if I broke this one poking about. So I shove off toward the stasis chamber to get the fresh sphere tucked away until we need it. You won’t believe what the rumor mill says could happen to us if I don’t.

  Living on a little trading jumper like this one is tough for us Roptralians. I can hear everything that happens, whether I want to or not, vibrating through the hull and inner bulkheads and even the air.

  So I know that Captain KrunZo, gruff and scaly in person, sings Kranellian arias in his grooming pod. I know that our pilot, Jorusz, wakes regularly from nightmares about his last life, in which he was an indentured guard for his species’ royal family, a great humorless flying thing who was kept chained at night and eventually fed to a clutch of royal fledgelings. All through his sleep cycles his shoulderblades twitch, phantom escape attempts from muscles where in this life wings do not attach. I try to make allowances for his recent trauma when he (frequently) lashes out. I know that Quonka’s calm and cheerful façade isn’t phony—that she dances to the happy tunes in her head anytime gravity allows, humming along with them even while performing surgery and scrubbing out infected wounds.

  But the same overly sensitive tentacles that make crewmate overshares a certainty also make Roptralians great stardrive mechanics, so what are you going to do? I tune out what I can and I ignore the rest. When gravity allows, I spend as much time as I can floating in a ball; not touching anything really helps reduce the noise.

  But it leaves me alone with my thoughts, which are presently mired in contemplation of the size of the galaxy versus the size of this growing unease in my hearts.

  From our present location, if we turned around and burned hard, our little ship could make it “home” to the Trango System in about 1.3 Trango years. Not that KrunZo would do such a thing with a payday on the line. If I really want to get back, my best bet would be to jump ship at the Tro’o rendezvous. Who knows? Maybe I could get hired on by something faster, make it back home in less than a year.

  Home. Is it still home if you don’t live there, and your partner has left you, your house un-sung and surrendered to the seas?

  How did I let it get this far?

  One cargo at a time, that’s how. One better payday than the last; one more puzzle to solve, carrying me a little farther along, then a little farther, then a little farther still.

  I feel so small, a speck in the vast uncaring universe, going the wrong direction.

  And then I hear a knock at the door.

  It’s a testament to my preoccupation that I barely register the oddity of a knock on my hatch—the crew knows to leave me alone when I’m in my bunk—before I realize the knock isn’t at my hatch. I uncoil one tentacle, uncovering one eye, which happens to have a perfect view out my porthole.

  I gasp involuntarily, tentacles splaying, air bladders inflating. There is a face peering in the window. A cute little mammal face, with white fur and whiskers not even frozen by the vacuum of space. So I’m hallucinating. But then the knock comes yet again, and then an adorable fluffy paw waves at me, pointing one digit toward starboard. Toward the nearest airlock.

  This is how those scary holos always begin, I think. But I swivel toward the hatch anyway.

  In case we are about to be murdered by the Thing From Outside, I swing past the captain on the way to the airlock. KrunZo is a FranKoporp, another species you’d think would want to avoid the spacefaring life at all costs. Mostly round, covered in thick scales with stubby limbs and a thick, thick head, KrunZo maneuvers in low-g like a bowling ball propelled by anger. Planet-like gravity makes the ship even worse for him, turning it into a mountain of ladders too big for those poor little limbs to climb easily. KrunZo stays on the bridge most of the time, or in his quarters, and uses Captain’s Prerogative to make the rest of us do his running about for him.

  “Come quickly!” I say to him as I swim past his perch—a little running joke he rewards with the usual frown. “There’s someone at the airlock,” I continue.

  “Funny,” he says. But his tone suggests he doesn’t think it’s funny.

  “Permission to let zir aboard?”

  “Of course,” KrunZo says with a barely perceptible wa
ve of a forelimb. “It’s bad luck to ignore impossible things that cannot be happening.”

  I choose to perceive only the permission and ignore the sarcasm. The airlock cycles, and in floats... something. It’s small for a sapient, a little smaller than me and maybe a third the size of the other crew members. It looks like a mammal, one of those fluffy little pets from Earth that are all the rage? A kitty? Except. It’s been a while since I was near Earth, but I’m pretty sure kitties don’t have eight legs. And I also suspect they can’t survive in vacuum. And their eyes aren’t vast purple oceans of intelligence and love.

  Those eyes spark something in me I haven’t felt in lifetimes. Something I’ve been missing.

  “What are you?” I blurt out, like some kind of mollusk who’s never left the shell. “And how are you? I mean, how did you get here?”

  The ship AI’s security and medical protocols finish scanning the airlock’s contents, the various scanner beams and decontamination flashers cause a rippling blue-green light show to dance across white fur and ocean-gray walls, almost like a sunset back home. Then the inner airlock door hisses open.

  The octo-cat doesn’t say a word, just rams zir head right into me and nuzzles, purring softly. I feel like I could almost understand the purring, if the frequencies ze used were just slightly more... cerulean? But I don’t need to understand it because I feel soothed by it, rocked in a gentle current that’s almost like the warm waters of...

  Without meaning to I reach one tentacle up to just stroke the creature’s fur.

  It’s still cold.

  “Now hold on a second,” I say, pulling back and vibrating myself into a more alert state just as Quonka’s shiny horn pops into view.

  Technically Quonka is the ship’s doctor, but her species’ calming pheromone secretions make her a useful asset in brokering deals. She also tries to be around when we get boarded by ISTO, which is more and more frequently.

  The creature visibly relaxes as Quonka enters. “Who is your new friend, Astrill?” she asks. Anyone else on the ship would be mocking, but Quonka sounds sincere.

  “I am...” the kitty thing says, looking around as if searching for the answer. “...just a traveler.”

  “Um, no,” Quonka says, horn glinting and hair tumbling as she shakes her pretty head. “One does not just bump into random travelers in the vastness of space. Especially not travelers without space suits or supplies. The odds are, well, astronomical. And if we had just bumped into you somehow, at these speeds, the impact would have turned you into a splat on the hull—or into shards of meaty ice, since you ought to be frozen solid.”

  The kitty thing backpedals in the air, all eight legs working, until zir tail touches the bulkhead and wraps itself around a handhold there. Prehensile tail. Do cats have those? The tail almost seems to lengthen as it grabs.

  “At least tell us your name,” I say.

  But again the thing looks around like this is a really hard question, zir violet eyes flicking back and forth. “Call me... Ennesta,” ze finally says.

  “Okay, Ennesta,” Quonka says, reaching one three-fingered hand out in greeting. “That is a start.”

  But Ennesta doesn’t seem to like that gesture. Ze launches off the hatch and into my tentacles, sending us both spinning.

  As we spin, I see another new visitor in the area outside the airlock room. Jorusz is here, and as always he brings his aura of cold-blooded menace. Jorusz is like an anti-chameleon; he always uses his metachrosis to clash as much as possible, and therefore right now he’s an angry bright orange-red.

  “Let me question it,” says Jorusz. “It’s probably from ISTO.”

  “Ennesta does not look like an Intra-Stellar Trade Organization agent,” Quonka says, head tilted.

  “And Ennesta isn’t an ‘it,’” I add, trying to prize Ennesta far enough away from me to look at zir. “Hey, are you—” Ennesta looks up, huge eyes wielded like a weapon. “Does your species have gender?”

  Ennesta looks around at the three sapients in the small space like choosing from a menu. “Female?” she answers, but it sounds like a guess.

  “That was convincing,” Jorusz hisses, rolling one eye while keeping the other fixed on Ennesta.

  In the end, the matter is settled by KrunZo, who apparently found the commotion interesting enough to leave the bridge. He comes barreling in and almost crushes me and Ennesta (by now three of her four pairs of limbs are wrapped around me), but Quonka catches one of KrunZo’s forelimbs and swings him into a relatively stationary position.

  “Are you a spy?” KrunZo demands.

  Ennesta manages to squeak out a ‘no’.

  “Then welcome aboard,” the captain says. “And Jorusz? Pull yourself together. You really getting bent out of shape over this slip of fluff?”

  Jorusz flushes an even more glaring orange, and for a moment I fear he’s about to challenge the captain. But a moment later he skitters off, muttering so low that only I can hear him. “Slip of fluff that can live in space. That shit ain’t right.”

  He’s right, of course. So says my brain, at least, despite—or even because of—how the newcomer’s purring tugs at the rest of me like a syzygetic tide.

  Ennesta stays. The ship has empty cabins, but she commandeers mine, climbing into my hammock and leaving me to choose whether or not to join. I’m torn, so torn.

  Her presence on the ship is suspicious. And it feels disloyal to Zaraell...

  But the sting of Zaraell’s last message and the stingless absence of her tentacles are wounds that Ennesta’s eight furry limbs staunch to a surprising degree. I give in, and, wrapped in her desperate embrace, I sleep better than I have in many lunar tides.

  But Jorusz does not pull himself together. Well before my next shift, his vibrations cut through Ennesta’s purring like a klaxon. Astrill, report to the bridge, Jorusz whispers. Don’t bring the hairball.

  Jorusz is a deceptively mellow mottled teal shade when I get there, strapped in to the comms chair rather than his normal pilot’s station. He points to the screen as I arrive, then switches the display to holo. A life-sized Ennesta springs into the air, slowly rotating like a showroom model. “I found it,” he says, slapping one hand through the holo image for emphasis.

  “Found what?” I croak. It’s too early for riddles.

  “I found Ennesta’s species. If that is her real name. She’s a toyopop.” He says it like a dirty word.

  “So?”

  “So,” Jorusz says, rolling his bulbous eyes, “it took me forever to find this out, and it’s a miracle I did at all, and you know why? Toyopops aren’t sentients. They can’t even talk. They’re pets engineered by the Argotenkers for their deep space workers.”

  That wakes me up. A tingling chill rolls from my beak to my suckers like the ghost of a purr. “Wait, so...?”

  “So she’s not what she appears.”

  And then, of course, because we are talking about her, there she is, a silent presence that we nonetheless notice right away. “Oh, hi,” I say, waving a couple of tentacles feebly. I feel tossed like flotsam in a storm. All I really know about Ennesta is how comforting I find her. What if she really is a spy? What will Jorusz do to her if she is? What will he do to her to find out whether she is?

  “I missed you,” she says, but her eyes are glued to the larger-than-life holographic version of herself as it rotates slowly in the silence. Its ears are different than hers, longer and thinner, and its paws look different too, less fingery.

  Ennesta—the real Ennesta—looks from the holo to me with a question in her eyes that borders on accusation.

  The InstaComm chooses that moment to ding, a message from the Tro’o scrolling onto the screen. Ennesta screams for about a millisecond before turning it into a yelp, while something like a shudder roils down her long body, making her look for a moment less than fully solid, like a thing about to explode.

  A fresh message sphere plops out into the net.

  “We’ll finish this conversation
later,” Jorusz hisses, turning to the screen. He grabs the sphere and spins it to me. “Make yourself useful and take this to stasis.”

  Ennesta is looking around the space in a sort of panic. One of her hands darts out toward the sphere as if to intercept it before it gets to me, but she pulls back.

  “Aye-aye, captain,” I say sarcastically—Jorusz, as pilot, does not outrank me—but I wrap a tentacle around the sphere anyway, grateful for any excuse to get out of there.

  Ennesta’s eyes burn into me as I grab the sphere, and her mouth opens as if to say something. I wait for a beat, but her words don’t come, and the terror in her eyes mutates into something more like despair. “You got something to say to me?” I ask, harsher than I mean to.

  Ennesta dips her furry chin.

  Her big sad eyes follow me all the way down to the stasis chamber, and if I go back to my hammock they’ll just follow me there, too. And then we’ll have to talk, and after talking is when folks usually start leaving. And I’m not ready to be left, not so soon.

  So I take the fresh sphere to the ship’s smallest stasis chamber, open the door, and slot it into the new racks we installed in there, next to the scant half-dozen others we were able to buy. Then I head to the engine room to get an early start on the cycle’s routine maintenance.

  I see Ennesta lingering in front of the stasis chamber, her eyes darting shiftily between the chamber and myself.

  We start burning to slow our way to the Tro’o rendezvous, so gravity returns to the ship. Jorusz and Quonka are relieved, and they start the usual chatter about stretching their bones—I don’t really understand bones, but I guess gravity is good for them. KrunZo has bones and an exoskeleton, because evolution wasn’t messing around on his home planet, but though he loves planetary gravity, he hates the ship’s gravity more than anyone. I can hear his complaining loud and clear even over the roar of the decelerating star drive.

  According to the info on toyopops that Jorusz dug up, Ennesta, as a standard-issue mammal, has bones too. But I have my doubts. Sometimes the way she curls up in my hammock makes her seem more sinuous than should be possible for something with a spine.