Lethal Cargo

by Felix R. Savage

She nodded. “After my stint on Fanellespont A, I guess you could say I had my eyes opened to the cruelties we inflict on people—not because we’re trying to, or because we’re naturally cruel, but just as the cost of doing business. So, it’s not much, but I volunteer at the juvenile resettlement center downtown. We try to move kids out of there and into foster homes as soon as we can. Our foster families are the salt of the earth—honestly, I can’t say enough good things about them. I would foster myself, but I’m not married, and my apartment’s about the size of this table, so …” She trailed off. That pretty blush touched her face again, making her cheeks look like the insides of seashells.

  “Where do you live?” I said, to help her over the speed bump in the conversation.

  She gestured towards the back of the café. “213th and DeBosco, right over there.”

  “Nice area.” I put down my froth again without sipping it. “Christy, I’m not gonna lie. I was hoping you knew someone in the asylum processing department, who might be able to …”

  “Reverse Pippa’s decision?”

  “Yeah.”

  Christy shook her head reluctantly. “I don’t think there’s any chance of that.”

  “Oh, goddammit.”

  “They would have to reverse the actual diagnosis, and that—”

  “It’s the other two kids,” I said. I felt like I’d lost my queen and was now fighting to save my bishop and my rook. “They’re determined to go with her. To that? They have no idea! And having heard what you said about your work with foster families, I’m positive that would be better for them. They’re not sick—”

  “How did she get kuru in the first place?”

  “No one knows. Not even her. Or if she does, she’s not telling.”

  “Could it have been at that refugee camp where you found her?”

  “I highly doubt it. There hasn’t been a single other report of kuru out of that place.” Actually, I hadn’t specifically checked, but I hadn’t heard any such rumors, and it was the kind of thing you would hear about.

  “OK. All the same, I think you and your crew should probably get tested. Just in case, you know?”

  I shook my head. “We’re Shifters,” I said absently, thinking about poor little Jan and Leaf.

  “So?” Christy said.

  “We’ve got souped-up immune systems.”

  “Really? I didn’t know that.”

  I ventured a gently teasing tone. “You work at a Shifter school. I would have figured you know all about us.”

  “There’s a lot I don’t know, obviously.” She was blushing again. This time, she rallied on her own. “I’ll tell you what I can do. I have a contact at the quarantine center on Space Island. I can ask her to talk to Jan and Leaf. Maybe they could come on a day trip to the resettlement center, meet the other kids—it might change their minds about staying.”

  “That would be great.” I was shamefully aware that it would also save me a lot of money if they decided to stay, as I wouldn’t have to pay their deportation costs. Well, I didn’t have to, but I felt obligated.

  “I’m really sorry I can’t help more,” she said, and I could tell she meant it. This woman had never met “my” three kids, yet she had already taken them into her capacious heart and wanted to save them. How do you get a heart that big? Was she born with it, the way she was born with delicate white cheeks and hazel-flecked green eyes?

  “You’re not drinking your frothofee,” she said, smiling at me.

  I realized I had been staring at her like an idiot. I confessed, “I can’t stand this stuff.”

  “Oh no, I’m sorry. I just thought it would be a nice place—”

  “No, no, it’s a great place.” The clink of handmade pottery cups and sithar music floated through the air. The people at the next table were arguing intensely about Sopwithian biological autarky. I was genuinely enjoying the low-key ambience. It was so nice to get away from Shiftertown, away from the constant sense of crisis that besets Shifter lives. “It’d be even better if they served whiskey. But you can’t have everything.”

  “That’s just an excuse,” Christy said, taking my flip remark as a considered philosophical statement. “We live in a post-scarcity society. We should be able to have everything. There’s no actual reason why some of the children in Lucy’s class should come to school without breakfast, or why a child like Pippa should be deported to Yesanyase Skont.”

  I admired her idealism, but I was through with talking about it, my own outrage blunted by the increasing conviction that there was nothing I could do about it. “Sorry, just a moment,” I murmured, pushing back my chair and nodding in the direction of the toilets.

  Standing beside the urinals, I called Nanny B. She reported that Lucy was brushing her teeth in preparation for an early bedtime. Did I want to speak to her? No, I said, that’s OK. Tell her I have to work late and I love her very much.

  I leaned my forehead against the cool black ceramic wall. I wondered if there were cameras even in here, watching me. A normal man, struggling with a normal decision. And yet, such a difficult one.

  I washed my hands and went back out to Christy. She was putting cinnamon sticks and packets of sugar powder into her handbag. “I’ll block the cameras for you,” I joked, standing between her and the nearest security camera.

  “Oh! I always think—I mean, it’s all right to take them. That’s what they’re here for, isn’t it?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “They’re for the kids at the resettlement center. The food is—well, it’s fine, but it’s just a bit blah.”

  The post-scarcity society.

  We went out onto 202nd. A yuriops herd was passing. We stood back against the windows of the café to avoid their massive sleek haunches and swinging horns. Their loud, yodelling voices forced me to raise my own. “Would you care for a post-frothofee drink?” I said. “Something slightly higher-proof?”

  “Like whiskey?”

  “That’s exactly what I had in mind.”

  Her upper arm was touching mine. I was intensely aware of the small point of contact with the heat of her skin. She moved away as the last yuriops passed, freeing up the sidewalk. “That would be really nice, but I haven’t had supper yet.”

  “Ah …” Neither had I, unless you counted a couple strips of pork belly gnawed in the cab of my truck on the way here. “Do you like barbecue?”

  “Like, Shifter barbecue?”

  “Yup.”

  “I’m going to be completely honest with you,” Christy said, looking into my eyes with that blend of anxiety and determined honesty which so entranced me. “I mean, I don’t want to get into a habit of half-truths. I can’t stand that stuff.”

  I laughed out loud.

  “They serve it at every school event. The parents appreciate it, I think, but personally—the stickiness, that really strong soy sauce flavor, the sheer fat content … ugh.”

  “Well, OK, then,” I said. “Memo to self: do not invite Christy for barbecue.”

  She laughed. She had a good laugh, not a giggle, not a guffaw, and not fake. “Anyway, I have some lentil salad at home I have to finish up before it goes bad,” she said.

  “I’ll walk you home,” I said.

  31

  As Christy and I walked north on DeBosco, I told her about the origins of the strong soy sauce flavor of Shifter barbecue. It was not to disguise half-rotten meat, as people think. It came from the cultural origins of the first San Damiano colonists. To the extent that terrestrial ethnicities still existed at that time, some of them were from the Japanese archipelago, and others came from Europe and North America. They brought a medley of flavorful herbs with them, but the pepper plants died. The mint plants died. So did the coriander, the ginger, the nutmeg, the shiso … you get the picture. All they had left was soybeans. And to top it off, native bacillae got into the mold used to ferment the soy sauce, which gave it the distinctive pungent flavor that wafts out of every Shifter barbecue joint today.


  “Out of desperation, creativity,” I finished, as we crossed a narrow street lined with shrubs and medium-rise apartment buildings.

  Christy gave me a shrewd look and said, “I can see you don’t think the post-scarcity society is an unalloyed good.”

  “Well,” I said, “if it ever actually came to exist, I’d be out of business. So there’s that.”

  “You’re in sales?”

  I realized she didn’t know exactly what I did. I started to say I was in the shipping industry. Then a montage of what my job had actually consisted of recently flashed before my eyes. I remembered her saying No half-truths. I said in as light and humorous a tone as I could manage, “Sales, shipping, plus occasionally fighting Travellers, rescuing refugees, fighting with other Shifters, assisting shipwrecked customers …”

  I expected she would think I was joking. But she slid another of those glances at me, half-earnest, half-scared. “Yeah, I … I’ve heard stories from people at school. Not about you, of course, but just in general. Shifters really live on the edge, don’t they?”

  “You could put it like that.”

  “Anyway, this is me.”

  We were standing on the beige-tiled forecourt of a building ten storeys tall and no wider than my armspan, exaggerating only slightly. It was just like its neighbors except that it had a column of round windows going up its façade, instead of square or flower-shaped ones, or pocket-sized balconies. This is how normies live, if they can’t afford the private community lifestyle. All the privacy in the world, no community.

  Christy placed her hand on the biometric pad by the door. It opened. I looked up into the camera over the door.

  “Can I come up and see how the other half lives?” I said.

  She’d been giving me mixed signals, but I felt pretty sure that I was interpreting those signals correctly. At the same time, I was aware that I was pushing pretty hard. I braced for rejection.

  Even in the tastefully dim light from the lobby, I could see her blushing again. “I don’t have any whiskey. But I can offer you lentil salad. Or herb tea?”

  I reached out and curled my fingers around hers. Small and fine-boned, they stayed in my hand. “I hate herb tea,” I said. “But I’ll be fine with whatever you’ve got.”

  Her apartment was even smaller than Dolph’s, but as different as could be. Houseplants perched on fiddly little shelves, and dangled from the ceiling in tiny hand-painted pots. Pink and white Christmas lights radiated a gentle ambiance. A waterfall curtain created an artificial partition between the kitchenette and the bedroom. Shoes and stacks of folded clothes and art materials occupied every surface. For the first time tonight, I was well and truly beyond the reach of police surveillance. Tension left my body … and another kind of tension, thick and primal, replaced it.

  In that tiny space, there was nowhere we could stand and not be within touching distance.

  I stood behind Christy as she messed with the electric kettle, pretending to make tea.

  She went still, like a cornered prey animal. Her hands stopped moving. She put the kettle down. Then she turned to face me. Desire sparked and cracked between us like electricity, rising into her face, turning it pink.

  As I bent to kiss her, she rose on her tiptoes and met me halfway, twining her slender arms around my neck.

  I was conscious, for a little while, of smelling like Rafael Ijiuto, and not having shaved, and being clumsy. I was rusty, of course, not having done this for a while. I hadn’t done it sober since Sophia. There you have it. More than that, though, Christy made me feel clumsy because of her physical delicacy. Her arms were exquisitely slim, her breasts small enough to cup in a palm. Her nipples were tiny nubs, the same pink as her cheeks when the excitement rose in them. Her apartment reflected her petiteness—her bed was so hemmed in by little shelves and doo-dads that my feet, sticking off the end, brought down a shelf of knick-knacks. It made me feel loutish, like a wild animal inside a walk-in jewellery box. But then, as I say, I forgot about that—until she reminded me.

  I was lying with my knees bent up on the too-small bed, breathing heavily, my body limp with the afterglow of pleasure. She was breathing heavily, too. I was pretty sure it had been good for her. Sophia had rarely come during regular sex with me—in retrospect, a bad omen for our marriage. My success with Christy pushed that failure farther away into the bottom drawer of my memory.

  She lay half beside me, half on top of me, twirling her fingers in my chest hair. “Is this the color you are,” she asked softly, “when you … you know?”

  I scrunched my chin into my chest to see her face. Her cinnamon hair lay coiled in sexy locks on my chest hair, which is brown, a shade darker than the hair on my head. “When I Shift? No. Wolves are more kinda gray.”

  “You’re a wolf?” she questioned, looking up at me.

  Then I remembered she knew about the tiger and that damn jaguar, but I hadn’t told her about the wolf. Three forms, well, three wasn’t completely unheard-of. “Sometimes,” I said, hoping she’d leave it at that.

  But I was wrong. She wasn’t interested in how many forms I had or what they were specifically. Only Shifters care about that kind of thing.

  It was Shifting itself that intrigued her.

  She stroked my chest and biceps, her fingers pleasantly soft, tickling. “What does it feel like?” she said, her voice husky with lust. “If I’m crossing the line, just ignore me. I’ve just … never seen it.”

  “You’ve never seen someone Shift?” I said, half-amused, half surprised. “But you work—”

  “At a school in Shiftertown, yeah. I know lots of Shifters.” She sat up, arranging the sheet over her lap in a self-mocking performance of prudery. “But it may surprise you to learn I’ve never slept with one before.”

  I laughed, and at the same time, the roundabout confession of vulnerability touched me. I admitted, “I haven’t done this in a while, either.”

  “So what does it feel like?”

  “Good. Damn good.” I reached out to touch her through the sheet. The sight of her like that was turning me on again.

  “Oh … Never mind.”

  I knew what she’d really meant. I moved my hand to cup her flank. “You want to know what Shifting feels like?”

  “Not if you’re not allowed to tell me.”

  What did she think, there was some kind of a rulebook that got handed out? “It’s just … hard to explain.” I was about to leave it at that, but I saw the flash of disappointment in her eyes. She could tell I was fobbing her off, the way we do tend to fob normies off, because it is hard to explain, and because the truth ain’t pretty. I didn’t want her to pull away from me. I reminded myself that we were being honest with each other here. “OK. Have you ever had a root canal?”

  “Uh, yeah. Years ago.”

  “OK. Now multiply that by an order of magnitude, and imagine your whole body is a nerve. The bones, muscles, blood vessels, everything has to drastically realign. No way that’s not gonna hurt.”

  “Oh.”

  “So the short answer is, Shifting hurts like a son of a bitch.” I hastened to add, “But you get used to it. And it only lasts a few seconds, anyway. The more you do it, the faster you get.”

  “Wow,” she said uncertainly. She wasn’t touching me anymore.

  “But in all other respects, we’re exactly the same as you,” I said. Wishful thinking? Yes, of course. I reached for her and pulled her down on top of me. Her mouth landed on mine, her slender thighs clamped my hips ...

  And my phone rang.

  It didn’t actually ring per se. It loudly began to play the song “Beast Mode,” which we used to blast on Tech Duinn when we were getting ready to roll out.

  That meant it was Dolph, and it was an emergency.

  “Oh, Jesus,” I said. “Sorry. I have to take that.”

  I rolled off the bed and located my phone in my jeans.

  “What?!?” I growled.

  It was Dolph’s phone, but Martin’
s voice. “Are you guys complete space rocks? This man is in severe shock. His pulse is up, his temperature is down, his skin is clammy, he’s unresponsive.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Shit.” I could hear Dolph murmuring in the background.

  “Dolph called me to ask about the symptoms of heatstroke.” Martin was the ship’s medic, insofar as we had one. The rest of us? Graced with Shifter immune systems, we didn’t know a blessed thing about medicine. Obviously. But at least Dolph had had the sense to doubt his own diagnosis, and called Martin, which was more than I had done. “So I come over to take a look at the patient, and I find him on the brink of death. He’s got to be moved to hospital. Immediately. Can you get here, or do we need to call an ambulance?”

  “I’ll be there in fifteen,” I said.

  Swamped with guilt from all sides at once, I got dressed at Shifter speed. Christy sat on her bed, hugging her knees, watching me.

  I hit the door in two strides. “I wasn’t kidding about my job being exciting,” I said with a pale attempt at humor. “I’ll call you. OK?”

  “OK,” she said in a stunned little voice, blinking at me through her waterfall curtain.

  I got in my truck and bombed back to Shiftertown.

  32

  As soon as I got to Dolph’s apartment I saw that Martin was right. Rafael Ijiuto’s skin had a blue tinge, and touching him felt like touching a frog, despite the hot and stuffy night. Martin stood back, holding a blood pressure cuff and shaking his head. “Better start thinking about where to dump the body.”

  “No way,” I said. “This is the guy who killed Kimmie.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “We need to find out—

  “If you believed he did it,” Martin said, “you’d just let him die.”

  I threw up my hands. “Right, I don’t know that he did it, and therefore taking him to hospital is the right thing to do.”

  “On your own head be it,” Martin said. “Shoreside General?”

  “Nope,” Dolph said, lifting Ijiuto’s legs. I took his shoulders. “Dr. Zeb’s.”

  “He’s a normie, right?” Martin said.