Got Ya! This Ain't Porn! it's....
...another fine selection from THE ADVENTURES OF GREGORY SAMSON, SPACE EXPLORER:
A FARTHER ORBIT
The Phibbix Nebula streaked foggily past the windshield. Even beautiful nebulae lost their charm when seen from within; Phibbix, ugly from the outside, was downright depressing at close range. I’d seen better scenery wading through sewage. Pockets of gas formed diarrhetic threads outside that could have been inches thick and meters distant, or light years thick and parsecs distant. It didn’t matter, and I didn’t care. The place looked like a literal shithole.
I’d hurried to the cockpit when Rell announced we were coming out of warp, thinking we were close to the station itself. I was mistaken.
“Tell me again why we had to slow down so much?” I did my best not to sigh, because that would have been petulant. I didn’t pull it off.
“No,” Rell said.
--If you fly through a nebula too fast, your ship catches on fire--
--If you warp through a nebula, your ship catches on fire at sixteen hundred times the speed of light--
--Best thing you can say about that is that it’s a quick death--
“Yeah, yeah.” I wrinkled my nose. The answer was obvious, and Rell had already explained, but I was horribly, desperately bored. I’d been staring at fog for three hours and my eyes were starting to cross.
“Good Christ this is monotonous,” I muttered.
“You could always go back to the hold,” Rell said.
“And miss my first station?” I said. “No way. Is that it?”
The object in question bounced off the ship.
“No, that was a rock,” Rell said.
--That’s two hundred and sixteen so far--
--You’ve asked about seventy-seven of them--
I looked around the cockpit. “You have not been counting them.”
--I count everything!--
“No surprise there,” Rell said. “You two are done training?”
“Cab started me fighting giraffes,” I said. “I think he’s bored, too.”
--I thought I was--
--And then we came up here--
I leaned on the back of Rell’s chair. “You should get a co-pilot’s chair,” I said after a minute.
“If I got a co-pilot’s chair, I would have to endure a copilot.” Rell checked the distance to our destination. He did that a lot when I talked.
“Yeah, it’d be a real shame if you had to be nice to someone all the time,” I said.
“Samson,” Rell said, “I’ve given this a lot of thought. In spite of our prior agreements, if you don’t stop talking, I’m going to eat you.”
“Mum’s the word,” I said. He rolled his eyes. Another two rocks bounced off the ship at odd angles. After ten silent minutes, I lay down on the floor and started tossing my wallet to myself.
“So,” I said, a while later. Rell growled.
“The station is at the far side of the nebula,” I said. “Right? By those little stars. How come we’re coming at it from this end?” I miffed my throw and my wallet landed in Rell’s lap. He picked it up and looked at it.
“Cab, what about his clothes?” Rell said. “This smells like hide. Did you clean up the materials he brought aboard?”
--Oh, shit, I forgot--
Rell snapped his teeth. “Asshole. I’d be dead already, if you’d forgotten.”
--Yeah--
--Don’t sweat it, Magilla--
Rell nodded. “I’ve known Yui a long time, Samson,” he said. “And I trust him…at least, I trust him to a point. I don’t think he’s trying to have me killed. But, well, someone is. Someone is trying to sell Shipkiller seeds to the Krr. And they could be aboard Phibbix Station.” He shrugged. “If we come at Phibbix from this angle, they won’t see us until we’re very close. And if I dock under an assumed identity, Yui won’t know we’re aboard until we call him. I want to keep our heads down.”
He pulled out my driver’s license and read silently. “What’s one thousand nine hundred and eighty eight?”
“The year I was born,” I said.
“You people have been keeping track of time for less than two millennia?” Rell said.
“Well, it’s more than two millennia now,” I said, “but no, there were other calendars before that.”
“How long has your species been active in its current state?”
I lifted my head off the deck and looked at him. “Ten thousand years or so? I dunno, I think there’s some debate. Or I just don’t know.”
Rell shook his head. “How can you not know a thing like that?” he muttered.
I couldn’t think of anything appropriate to say, so I didn’t say anything. Rell reloaded my wallet and tossed it on my stomach and went back to the controls, and I lay still thinking about how long ten thousand years was supposed to seem, and how long it seemed to me, and how long it was in the grand scheme of things, and how that wasn’t very goddamn fair. It’s ok to think useless things, as long as you don’t say them aloud. After a few minutes I started to lurch towards sleep. We’d trained hard, and I was tired. Not sore, just tired. And it was nice to lie there boneless on the deck with the funky mossy soft carpet like Rell must have grown up with. Comfortable. I was a lucky man.
“Samson!” Rell said. “Wake up! We’re almost there.”
“Oh.” I sat up and wiped the drool off my cheek. I had to blink to get clear of the thin haze over everything I saw. “How long was I asleep?”
“Ninety minutes,” Rell said. “I figured you needed the rest. And it was nice to finally get some peace and quiet.”
“You were an only child, weren’t you?” I said. Rell grinned and wiped his hands on his pants and stood up stiffly.
“Man the tiller, would you? I gotta take a leak.” He bounded out the door and was gone.
“What?” I said to the empty room. I sat down and stared at the controls. Man the tiller? Rell, or the translation machine? The toshein didn’t strike me as yachting people.
“Hey you know that driver’s license was just for like, ground cars? I’ve never flown anything but Cab!” I shouted. There was no answer. “Christ.”
The joystick to my right seemed like a good place to start, even if it was too big for me. I grasped it and every screen in the cockpit flared red.
“ALERT!” The computer bellowed. My gut wrenched. “IMMINENT COLLISION WITH PLANETARY MASS!”
“What?” Really, it was less of a word than a yelp. “Cab, I thought we were in a nebula!” I pulled at the joystick and nothing happened. A high-pitched monkey scream tore out of the hidden speakers, followed by a rhythmic beeping, and another scream.
“ALERT! ASSUME CRASH POSITIONS AND COMMENCE PRAYER! INITIATE POSTERIOR AUTO-OSCULATION!”
Rell’s computer began to cry.
“OH GOD THIS CAN’T BE HAPPENING! I’VE NEVER SEEN THE CORE! I’M STILL A VIRGIN!”
All of this was delivered in a one hundred and fifty decibel monotone.
“Now, hold on,” I said. Rell tumbled into the cockpit, grunting happy laughter.
“Help, help, we’re gonna crash,” he gasped. I glared at him, but Cab was giggling too hard for me to put any venom in the expression. Rell rolled onto his back and kicked his hands and feet helplessly, screaming under his breath. “Help me. Save me from the rogue planet!”
I got up and leaned against the wall. After a second I started to laugh, because Cab wouldn’t stop, and because, honestly, it was a solid prank. And it was good knowing that people made jokes, out here. Another familiar note to remind me these were still people.
“All right, well played,” I said. “Dick.”
Rell hauled himself up and sat in the chair, still chuckling.
“You just looked so peaceful,” he said. “I couldn’t resist. Really, though, we’re almost there.” He typed something and selected a file from a list, and then grunted a humorless laugh. “We are now the Goro, a Ragarag ship hauling a load of cribbage.”
“Like, the game?” I said.
--Produce--
“Ah,” I said. Without Rell noticing, I pinched myself in the arm.
--Oh, knock it off, you know you’re not dreaming--
--You’re just being dramatic--
A bright dot appeared in the shitstorm outside. Over the course of a long, drawn out half-second, it grew to fill the screen, an enormous ten-mile wide trapezohedron. Rell was right. Yui had built something a lot more impressive than the tiny sphere on the map, by then.
Phibbix Station was an enormous ten-sided diamond covered in spindly scaffolding, branches that stretched for five miles in every direction; a briar patch of vaguely-organized docking conduits and deep-space shanty-towns and enormous cargo ships bolted into place and repurposed as permanent living spaces. Residential neighborhoods built into the side of the station. The whole thing was speared from pole to pole by a massive central pillar extending eight miles out into space on either side. It came to a point at both ends, and in many ways the station resembled nothing more than a child’s top covered in coral.
Ships of all sizes and shapes flitted over the surface and around the scaffolds, a chaotic swarm that made the parking lot after a rock concert look like a deserted country road on Christmas morning. We moved into the press, and I realized that Rell didn’t have his hands on the controls. He saw my look, and waved dismissively.
“Station control will guide us in,” he said. “Don’t worry.”
The closer we got, the less spindly the scaffolding looked. Most of it was in excess of a quarter mile thick, covered in more scabbed-on structures and ships that had been too small to see from our original vantage point. Some of the ships we passed were huge, as big or bigger than Rell’s. One, an enormous swooped aerodynamic shape with five angular rocket engines built into its middle, had to be at least a mile and a half long.
We aimed for a conduit so wide it was almost flat, a parking space between a squad of saucers docked in a stack and something that looked like a bag of glowing orange fat.
“Oh, you might want to close your eyes,” Rell said. The ship rolled over on its side and flipped right without altering its original course, continuing the motion until it was falling belly-first. My eyes screamed that I was standing on the front wall, now, while my feet and inner ear remained convinced I was standing on the floor. The internal argument was nauseous.
“Oh god,” I said, clutching my stomach. The ship snapped around me and I hopped into the air with my eyes closed. After a moment, my perceptions aligned. I took a deep breath and forced my breakfast back into my stomach.
“Samson?” Rell said. I dropped to the floor and dismantled the helmet.
“I was not expecting that flip,” I said. “I’m ok. All is well.”
“Good,” Rell said. He got up and climbed out of the cockpit, towards the hold. “I would hate for you to have to clean puke off the bridge.”
I hopped into space and landed next to him, seventy meters down.
“I’ve noticed you and Cab have a bit of vomit fixation,” I said.
“Vomit is an unfortunate byproduct of balletic movements through free fall,” Rell said. “Thus, it remains high on the seasoned spaceman’s list of pet peeves.”
“Y’all don’t fuck with Dramamine?” I muttered.
In the hold, the airlock was dinging happily and chattering about how good a seal it had made with its Phibbician counterpart.
“Good good good good good,” it exclaimed as we approached.
“Is it, now?” I said.
“Good good good yes good yes yes safe safe safe safe good. Good?”
“Yes, ship, well done,” Rell said absently.
“Thanks thanks thanks bye.” The door clicked and went silent.
--Kiss-ass--
“No sense of kinship?” I said.
--With that thing?--
--Hell no--
--There’s a reason everyone is so impressed by me--
--That thing is as dumb as smart rocks--
--No offence, Rell--
“I didn’t buy the thing for the conversation,” he said. He opened a cabinet in the wall next to the hatch and put on an armored vest with a high neck, and replaced his sidearm with a pair of menacing snub-nosed pistols. Then he checked the load on a weapon that I could call a sawed-off shotgun, if I were willing to concede to understatement and ignore the fact that it was obviously an energy weapon. It looked like an antitank gun. He strapped it to his back, shrugged his shoulders, and said, “Lose the ship.”
“No?” I said. The longer we stood in front of the door, the more nervous I felt. Cab’s mood wasn’t too calm, either. God only knew what was on the other side. Going through naked, as it were, was unthinkable. The ship already felt less like my privilege than my due. My norm. My skin.
“You’ll draw attention to us,” he said. “Besides, it’s not like it takes you long to suit up.”
He did have a point. How many seven-foot robots did these people see on a daily basis? Then again, I thought, how many seven-foot robots did these people see on a daily basis? I had no idea. Maybe Phibbix was awash in seven-foot robots. I concentrated, and grew little blaster things on my forearms and bigger turrets on my shoulders.
“Ok, Cab, this is where we come back to if we need the ship,” I said. “Got it?”
--You bet--
“And the standing order is to shoot every weapon you see as soon as you have a clear shot.” I dismantled the ship and looked at Rell. “Do I at least get a gun?”
He rummaged in the closet and came out with a whistle, which he offered with raised eyebrows.
“I’ll pass, thanks,” I said. We stood in front of the airlock and my heart started to thud. I had no idea what I was getting into, and I was getting used to the sensation. It was less a surprise than the normal course of things. Confusion and uncertainty were already my constant companions, but this moment was particularly anxiety-provoking. I wasn’t just doing the unthinkable, I was about to open up my reality to the unthinkable in a way that dwarfed anything else I’d ever done.
--Your brain is lit up like the Vegas strip--
I nodded. “You’ve never been to Vegas.”
--I have all kinds of pictures--
--Video, too--
Rell pushed the airlock open and we stepped inside and waited for the pressure to equalize.
“Am I ready for this?” I asked. “What if I trip you up?”
Rell put his hand on the inner door right as it flashed green. “A word of advice, Samson. Don’t think so much.” He looked at me. “You excited?”
I was about to be taken into an alien refugee camp for god knew what by a big green gorilla cat with an insect affect and dark past. Excited was as good a word for it as any. I shrugged and nodded. “Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, I am.”
“Good,” Rell said. He patted me on the back and pushed the outer hatch open and stepped past me. I took a deep breath, and followed him.
We were on a subway platform. A long, dingy underground train shaft, dimly lit by flickering lights, full of cold, mineral air and the twinkle of falling water. There was wind, minimal and uniform in temperature; there would have to be, because the tunnel must have gone on for miles. I stepped through the hatch into a puddle that was up to my ankles. The gravity was just short of what I was expecting, and something small was rotting in a far corner. The place was ugly as sin. I looked at Rell with a stricken expression, and he grinned.
“Welcome to Phibbix Station,” he said.
“No wonder Yui keeps this place hidden,” I grumbled as we tromped down the awful tunnel. “Do people burn down shit-holes for the insurance money? Because that would be a good place to start, here.”
“Hey, you’re the one who got your hopes up,” Rell said. He was walking at a normal toshein pace, which meant that I had to jog to keep up, but I was doing all right. My wind has been pretty good ever since I met my charming dorsal companion.
“Is the whole place like this?” I said, chugging along. “Where is everyone?”
Rell sighed. “Do they have harbors on your planet?”
“Yeah,” I said slowly.
“Are they nice places?”
I thought about it. “No, not really.” Rell nodded.
“This is a harbor. I have a big ship, so we had to land a ways out in the harbor. We are making our way towards the nicer part of town.” He shrugged. “I also parked in an isolated area so you didn’t go into culture shock and have a moment.”
“Oh,” I said. “Fair enough. Wait, culture shock?”
“It happens to a lot of folks,” Rell said. “First time off planet, there’s a lot of potential for sensory overload. A lot of truly alien sights, laid one on top of another. People lose the ability to distinguish one thing from another. My advice, keep your eyes on what’s in front of you. Concentrate on things that are close. Ok?”
“Ok,” I said, confused.
“Remember: You may have had an easy time with me because you and I are structurally and culturally similar enough to avoid any real shock. There’s a lot more diversity out here than you’re expecting, and this is a refugee station, so you’re bound to see an awful lot.”
“Ok,” I said again, slower.
“Still,” Rell said, looking around, “I suppose mostly it is a shithole.”
I went on jogging. This was starting to sound scary.
--Christ, I can’t believe you can see straight through all this--
His voice was a whisper in my head.
“I’m ok,” I said. “I’ll be ok.”
--Well, listen, have you considered…not being a total wimp?--
“Whatever you say, gear breath.”
--You’re the one who’s breathing, meatface--
“Analog asshole.”
--Ape pussy--
“Floppy disc dick.”
--What the hell do I need genitals for?--
“Were you ever worried about talking to yourself back on Earth?” Rell cut in. “When you met Cab?”
“Yeah.” I grinned at the memory. “Yeah, it was real hard to keep quiet sometimes. I was scared people were gonna think I was crazy.”
“Well, they’ll think you’re crazy out here too, so keep it to yourself,” Rell said.
I took a deep breath and stuck my tongue out and blew a ten-second raspberry. Rell chuckled and shoved me into the wall. I think he meant it as a friendly push, but he was a lot bigger than me.
The tunnel bent slightly and joined another, and suddenly I lost the sense that we were alone. I still didn’t see anyone, but the trash looked fresher, and I heard something like city sounds off in the distance. The light felt warmer.
Rell came to where the tunnels merged and walked easily across the empty space between the platforms.
“Force field,” he said without looking. “Come on.”
“What?” I bent over and looked carefully at the edge of the platform. There was something there, if I let myself believe I could see it. I walked across and joined Rell on the other side.
“We’re gonna get a train,” he said.
“Of course,” I said.
“It’s three miles, I don’t feel like walking,” he said.
“Sure,” I said. We stood still for several moments. Rell patted the pistols on his hips and brushed his right hand over the long gun on his back. Cab shifted nervously.
“Try not to do that, Cab,” Rell said.
--Yeah, yeah--
“Are you expecting trouble?” I asked.
“Caution is important,” Rell said.
The wind picked up in one direction, and then a string of ten train cars came shooting down the tunnel and stopped dead in front of us. They were unsupported and disconnected, seamless and silent, with windows that were only transparencies in an otherwise uniform material, but train cars are train cars the galaxy over. They were covered in graffiti that rearranged and translated itself depending on where I looked.
“Come on.” Rell led me into the last car and sat down. I sat down next to him and stared at the other two occupants. One of them was a bulb of plated organic material supported on a dozen dozen tiny lobster legs, with a tiny crabby head and four crabby arms, and the other was a flickering, indistinct mass of light sitting halfway down the car from us. I couldn’t get a good look at him, and it took me a moment to realize that this was by design, a sort of camouflage.
“Can you see that guy?” I said, nudging Rell and pointing.
“Hey,” he said. He pushed my arm down. “Hey. Haven’t you ever ridden the subway? You don’t point at people for God’s sake. Yes, I see that guy. Yes, he’s hard to see. He’s a Queckian, their skin messes with the visual spectrum. Jesus. I can’t take you anywhere.” He smiled at the other guy and nodded. The bulb stood up and walked to the exit.
“Sir.” He nodded at me and stepped out onto the platform. The door closed, and we took off like a shot. The Queckian started to laugh.
“He is dirty!” He yelled. He had an odd lack of an accent, even though his cadence suggested an accent. I looked at Rell, and he shrugged.
“Not me, sir!” The Queckian said. “I am clean.”
“Me too,” I said, loud enough to be heard. The Queckian laughed, a little too much.
“That is good, sir,” he said. “That is good. I am glad you are clean.” The train stopped, and he got up and walked out of the door nearest to us. He was tall, and might have been bipedal, but I still couldn’t tell for sure. He spat on the floor in front of me as he walked by.
“Hey!” I stood up. Rell put his arm across me and I bounced back in the seat as the door closed. We took off again.
“What the fuck was that about?” I said. “Was that because I’m a human?”
--Prejudice is an ugly thing--
Rell looked at the door and put his arm back in his lap. “I don’t know what that was,” he said. “They wouldn’t have reacted like that if they thought you were human.” He rubbed his jaw. “I figured people would think you were a robot or something.”
I grumbled. “Man, if you want people to think I’m a robot let me put on the ship.”
“No, not that kind of robot,” Rell said. “I want people to think you’re a wimpy robot.”
--Burn!--
I rolled my eyes and stretched out about half as well as Rell. The first one had been scared, the second…not angry so much as confrontational. I hate it when people spit at me.
The train stopped again, and Rell stood up and motioned me off. There was some kind of sound muting machine at work aboard the cars, something that compensated for outside noise the same way the inertial dampener had compensated for the forces generated by our speedy approach, so that when I stepped onto the platform I was met with a sudden inrush of crowd noise from the middle distance. People. My heart thumped.
The rest of the passengers were already nearly off the platform, over the hump of the end of the tunnel, a bright opening in the darkness, beyond which I saw things I couldn’t comprehend. The crowd blended together into obscurity and disappeared, and every time I tried to focus on the vista ahead of us, my eyes skated back to the foreground.
--Rell, wait--
--It feels like he’s nightmaring--
--Help--
Cab sounded plaintive. Rell looked in my face and then turned me around, away from the end of the tunnel, and tapped me just short of painfully hard on the side of the head. His face filled my field of vision.
“Hey,” I said. “I’m fine.”
“Take a breath,” he said. “Take a minute.”
“I’m fine, Rell,” I said. “I’m just having a hard time focusing on anything.”
“And that’s fine?” Rell smiled ruefully. “Listen, remember your feet, all right? No matter what you see, your feet are still your feet. If you start to feel overwhelmed, look at your feet.”
I looked at him and put my hands in my pockets. I still had half a tube of chapstick. I clutched it, felt the greasy bit around the edge of the cap, and stared at my feet. My old Frye boots, cracked and shiny. My feet, warm and dry inside. My toes. Me, with me. My heart slowed down some.
“You didn’t just come up with that,” I said.
“Nope,” Rell said. He clapped me on the shoulder and led me towards the light. “It’s an old trick. Good advice for first-time travelers. Your feet are familiar. You grew up with them. You get scared, look at your feet.”
I glanced down as we walked. My stride. The kathud sound of my stacked heels on the deck. I felt calmer.
We stepped up to the end of the tunnel, and I stopped dead.
“Remember your feet,” Rell said.
“Yeah, yeah…” I mumbled. I was going to need more than feet for this.
The interior of the station was one hundred square miles of unbroken cityscape. Ten triangular boroughs, one for each face of the trapezohedron, each with its own definition of ‘down,’ so that if I looked straight up I saw another city directly overhead, with denizens who seemed to hang by their feet from the ceiling. Except it was nearly impossible to see clear to the streets on the other side of the station, because nearly all the available space was covered by skyscrapers that were nestled so intricately amongst one another that it was hard to believe they weren’t connected. But they couldn’t have been. Not with competing internal gravity fields. Flying machines flitted in and out of every available space, banking and dropping from gravity well to gravity well with practiced ease. Everything was lit up in darkness-inducing neon and incandescence. Water condensed and fell from brief clouds in one spot, while heat lines rose from another.
A pair of five-sided pillars dominated the middle of the overgrown space. They were anchored at either pole, and narrowed slightly towards the top, where an odd, spherical lattice connected them to the tallest buildings in the center of each borough. There, at least, they had managed to compensate for the competing gravities, and build together. A huge device shaped like a fat almond hung suspended in the middle of the lattice. It was clearly important, if placement was anything to go by. Nobody ever put something trivial on so grand a pedestal.
“Welcome to Phibbix Station,” I said to myself, and looked down.
I’d expected the corridor to end in a staircase. It didn’t. Instead, the ground simply pitched forward sixty degrees and continued on as if that were a normal, everyday thing. I stuck out my hand and felt the point where ‘down’ changed direction.
“Bad idea,” Rell said. “Unless you finally want to toss your cookies.” He took a long step forward and landed easily, then hopped up and down twice to settle himself. “Get it over with, Samson.”
I looked at the city, and then at my feet. “Ok, Cab, you ready to explore strange new worlds?”
--Sure thing, Earthling--
“You’re as much an Earthling as I am.”
--I know--
--Don’t tell anyone--
I took a deep breath and stepped forward. The change was vertiginous, but not unpleasant. Nothing I’d want to make a habit of, but I’d felt worse in the cockpit, when we docked. I hopped in place like Rell, and felt better.
The train station was wide, with an open architecture and no ceiling. There was a designated entrance at one end and an exit at the other, with a central ticket kiosk facing the far wall. Advertisements blared silently along the walls in languages I didn’t recognize, using symbols that didn’t make any sense to me, but as I focused on them, they resolved themselves into familiar words and shapes: Malt liquor, payday loans, lawyers. Massage parlors. Entertainment sources of all kinds catering to senses I didn’t even have.
And everywhere, people. Not aliens, although they were alien in shape; people. They were too focused, too intent, too mundane, too human to be anything else. And they moved too much for me to focus on any of them. I looked around, lost the thread of what I was seeing and stared convulsively at my feet. Rell pulled me towards the exit.
The press wasn’t as bad outside. Most people were heading in the opposite direction, towards the center of town, while we were walking away, towards the slums. I was grateful. You don’t think about how important small cultural cues are to your understanding of the world until they’re all taken away.
We turned a corner and were mostly alone. I leaned against the wall and breathed deeply and looked around. More ads. More storefronts. Bodegas, odds shops, pawn shops, an entertainment depot hawking a format I didn’t recognize. It was just a neighborhood. A pair of huge, white-furred old men with enormous black eyes and three tree trunk arms apiece were playing some kind of dice game for coins on an overturned half of a barrel down the block from us. They had enormous hairy spider fangs. One of them was wearing a shapeless hat, and the other was smoking an ugly cigar.
Something across the street screamed its last, and I whipped around with Cab fluttering on my shoulders. Three pink leathery men with long tails and barbed snouts were taking bites out of a fresh kill. It was a gruesome scene, but the animal in question was on a plate, on a table with a cloth and settings in front of a glass-fronted business that could only have been a restaurant. One of them watched me, chewing, and then touched two fingers to its brow. I returned the gesture, looked away and screamed like a little girl.
--Easy--
--Take it easy--
--That’s a welwleul, they’re from your neck of the galaxy--
--You’re practically neighbors--
The welwleul was resting on its rear-facing mass of tentacles, leaning against a wall. In its left tentacular mass, which I assume was analogous to a left hand, it held a mismatched collection of liquor bottles. The labels were unfamiliar, but liquor bottles are liquor bottles. The mass on its right side drew idle designs in the dust, while a center mass rested across a much larger tentacle that I assume was meant to function as a leg. I closed my mouth and kept walking.
“Is there anything in there?” I muttered.
--Mostly tentacles--
--Why mess with perfection?--
The welwleul emptied one of the bottles into a mouth full of tombstone teeth and tongues, licked its lips, belched at me and said, “Spare some change, sir?”
Rell tossed some coins. The welwleul caught them in midair.
“Thanks, man,” he said.
“Sure,” Rell said.
“You have homeless people in space?” I hissed when we were out of earshot.
“Putting aside the fact that this is a refugee station, yes, we have homeless people in space,” Rell said. “Anywhere there’s haves, there’s have-nots.”
“But,” I said. Rell looked at me.
“But what?” He said.
I blew the air out of my mouth. “I don’t know,” I said. “I guess I thought things would be better out here.”
“Nope,” Rell said. “It’s just us folks.”
“But you have all this,” I said, waving my arms at the awesome cityscape above us, “and you still can’t fix the little problems? How can you have a warp drive and poverty?”
Rell turned around and put his hand on my shoulder hard enough to stop my dead.
“First of all, Samson, poverty is far from a ‘little’ problem,” he said. “But beyond that…cut it out. The galaxy is not perfect. We are not perfect. This is how it is. This is what we are, and you need accept it. We are not Star Trek. Now stop bitching and start walking. We need to find you a change of clothes and burn what you’re wearing. You stink of rot.”
I followed him unhappily for a block. I don’t know what I’d been hoping for. I might have thought that a utopian society would have been able to take my troubles off my hands, although it was nothing I had articulated, even to myself. I was just disappointed. These people were a lot like the people I’d left behind, tentacles or not.
A pair of melons flew by, flapping long stiff leaves like hummingbird wings. They stopped short ten yards ahead of us and hovered close to one another, curling long vines together and bumping fronts. Both of them began to blossom, and I realized they were lovers. They were lovers, and Rell was a crook. There was an ad for a movie, or a play, or something, Constant Sky, floating way up above me, and there was another bum sitting cross-legged across the street holding a sign that said, “I’d really like a beer.” The melons pulled apart, and their blossoms closed. One of them danced closer to the other, and then flitted down the street. After a moment, its fellow followed. They came together at the corner and crossed together, their vines comingling. There was good along with the bad, here, same as everywhere else. I hadn’t traded down. I hadn’t traded up. I just had more, now.
“Give me some money,” I said. Rell gave me a ten-dollar bill, and I jogged across the street. The bum watched me warily, and sat up straighter. I squatted down in front of him and held out the money. He didn’t take it.
“What’s your name?” I asked. He took in some air and still didn’t take the money.
“Pete,” he said.
“Pete what?”
“Sir…Mouzza’s gone,” he said. “It’s just Pete, now.”
“Who the hell is Mouzza?” I said. Pete flinched and sagged. He still hadn’t taken the money.
“Sorry.” I said lamely. I dropped the bill on the ground in front of him and walked away.
Rell took off walking. “What was that all about?”
“I’m trying to acclimate,” I said, “and apparently I’m doing a piss-poor job of it. I wanted to know his name. He got weird when I asked him.”
Rell sighed and shook his head. “You see that blue ring around his left eyestalk? That means he’s a Mouzzan Calita, not Groussan.” He looked at me and grinned wickedly. “Right. It’s you. Ah, his culture’s naming structure was derived from their geographic position at the moment of birth on their home world. A lot of them figure, if they’re not on their planet, they have no name. You put your foot in your mouth.”
“I didn’t know,” I said.
“I’m aware,” Rell said. We walked on, leaving a strange wake of confused, wary people behind us. I figured they’d never seen anything like me, and tried to look inconspicuous.
“Ok,” I said finally. “Wait. This has been bothering me. Language is one thing, the French, the Spanish, whatever. But how the hell do you know about Star Trek?”
Rell smiled. “Star Trek is cool,” he said. “You people have been dumping your telecommunications into space for a century. You really think we haven’t been listening? Earth media is as salable as anything else. More, even. It’s got that novelty factor, people love to see how humans live.”
“I can’t believe no one ever made contact,” I said. “Even just to tell us that we weren’t alone.”
Rell shrugged. “Star Trek wasn’t that good.”
I’d hurried to the cockpit when Rell announced we were coming out of warp, thinking we were close to the station itself. I was mistaken.
“Tell me again why we had to slow down so much?” I did my best not to sigh, because that would have been petulant. I didn’t pull it off.
“No,” Rell said.
--If you fly through a nebula too fast, your ship catches on fire--
--If you warp through a nebula, your ship catches on fire at sixteen hundred times the speed of light--
--Best thing you can say about that is that it’s a quick death--
“Yeah, yeah.” I wrinkled my nose. The answer was obvious, and Rell had already explained, but I was horribly, desperately bored. I’d been staring at fog for three hours and my eyes were starting to cross.
“Good Christ this is monotonous,” I muttered.
“You could always go back to the hold,” Rell said.
“And miss my first station?” I said. “No way. Is that it?”
The object in question bounced off the ship.
“No, that was a rock,” Rell said.
--That’s two hundred and sixteen so far--
--You’ve asked about seventy-seven of them--
I looked around the cockpit. “You have not been counting them.”
--I count everything!--
“No surprise there,” Rell said. “You two are done training?”
“Cab started me fighting giraffes,” I said. “I think he’s bored, too.”
--I thought I was--
--And then we came up here--
I leaned on the back of Rell’s chair. “You should get a co-pilot’s chair,” I said after a minute.
“If I got a co-pilot’s chair, I would have to endure a copilot.” Rell checked the distance to our destination. He did that a lot when I talked.
“Yeah, it’d be a real shame if you had to be nice to someone all the time,” I said.
“Samson,” Rell said, “I’ve given this a lot of thought. In spite of our prior agreements, if you don’t stop talking, I’m going to eat you.”
“Mum’s the word,” I said. He rolled his eyes. Another two rocks bounced off the ship at odd angles. After ten silent minutes, I lay down on the floor and started tossing my wallet to myself.
“So,” I said, a while later. Rell growled.
“The station is at the far side of the nebula,” I said. “Right? By those little stars. How come we’re coming at it from this end?” I miffed my throw and my wallet landed in Rell’s lap. He picked it up and looked at it.
“Cab, what about his clothes?” Rell said. “This smells like hide. Did you clean up the materials he brought aboard?”
--Oh, shit, I forgot--
Rell snapped his teeth. “Asshole. I’d be dead already, if you’d forgotten.”
--Yeah--
--Don’t sweat it, Magilla--
Rell nodded. “I’ve known Yui a long time, Samson,” he said. “And I trust him…at least, I trust him to a point. I don’t think he’s trying to have me killed. But, well, someone is. Someone is trying to sell Shipkiller seeds to the Krr. And they could be aboard Phibbix Station.” He shrugged. “If we come at Phibbix from this angle, they won’t see us until we’re very close. And if I dock under an assumed identity, Yui won’t know we’re aboard until we call him. I want to keep our heads down.”
He pulled out my driver’s license and read silently. “What’s one thousand nine hundred and eighty eight?”
“The year I was born,” I said.
“You people have been keeping track of time for less than two millennia?” Rell said.
“Well, it’s more than two millennia now,” I said, “but no, there were other calendars before that.”
“How long has your species been active in its current state?”
I lifted my head off the deck and looked at him. “Ten thousand years or so? I dunno, I think there’s some debate. Or I just don’t know.”
Rell shook his head. “How can you not know a thing like that?” he muttered.
I couldn’t think of anything appropriate to say, so I didn’t say anything. Rell reloaded my wallet and tossed it on my stomach and went back to the controls, and I lay still thinking about how long ten thousand years was supposed to seem, and how long it seemed to me, and how long it was in the grand scheme of things, and how that wasn’t very goddamn fair. It’s ok to think useless things, as long as you don’t say them aloud. After a few minutes I started to lurch towards sleep. We’d trained hard, and I was tired. Not sore, just tired. And it was nice to lie there boneless on the deck with the funky mossy soft carpet like Rell must have grown up with. Comfortable. I was a lucky man.
“Samson!” Rell said. “Wake up! We’re almost there.”
“Oh.” I sat up and wiped the drool off my cheek. I had to blink to get clear of the thin haze over everything I saw. “How long was I asleep?”
“Ninety minutes,” Rell said. “I figured you needed the rest. And it was nice to finally get some peace and quiet.”
“You were an only child, weren’t you?” I said. Rell grinned and wiped his hands on his pants and stood up stiffly.
“Man the tiller, would you? I gotta take a leak.” He bounded out the door and was gone.
“What?” I said to the empty room. I sat down and stared at the controls. Man the tiller? Rell, or the translation machine? The toshein didn’t strike me as yachting people.
“Hey you know that driver’s license was just for like, ground cars? I’ve never flown anything but Cab!” I shouted. There was no answer. “Christ.”
The joystick to my right seemed like a good place to start, even if it was too big for me. I grasped it and every screen in the cockpit flared red.
“ALERT!” The computer bellowed. My gut wrenched. “IMMINENT COLLISION WITH PLANETARY MASS!”
“What?” Really, it was less of a word than a yelp. “Cab, I thought we were in a nebula!” I pulled at the joystick and nothing happened. A high-pitched monkey scream tore out of the hidden speakers, followed by a rhythmic beeping, and another scream.
“ALERT! ASSUME CRASH POSITIONS AND COMMENCE PRAYER! INITIATE POSTERIOR AUTO-OSCULATION!”
Rell’s computer began to cry.
“OH GOD THIS CAN’T BE HAPPENING! I’VE NEVER SEEN THE CORE! I’M STILL A VIRGIN!”
All of this was delivered in a one hundred and fifty decibel monotone.
“Now, hold on,” I said. Rell tumbled into the cockpit, grunting happy laughter.
“Help, help, we’re gonna crash,” he gasped. I glared at him, but Cab was giggling too hard for me to put any venom in the expression. Rell rolled onto his back and kicked his hands and feet helplessly, screaming under his breath. “Help me. Save me from the rogue planet!”
I got up and leaned against the wall. After a second I started to laugh, because Cab wouldn’t stop, and because, honestly, it was a solid prank. And it was good knowing that people made jokes, out here. Another familiar note to remind me these were still people.
“All right, well played,” I said. “Dick.”
Rell hauled himself up and sat in the chair, still chuckling.
“You just looked so peaceful,” he said. “I couldn’t resist. Really, though, we’re almost there.” He typed something and selected a file from a list, and then grunted a humorless laugh. “We are now the Goro, a Ragarag ship hauling a load of cribbage.”
“Like, the game?” I said.
--Produce--
“Ah,” I said. Without Rell noticing, I pinched myself in the arm.
--Oh, knock it off, you know you’re not dreaming--
--You’re just being dramatic--
A bright dot appeared in the shitstorm outside. Over the course of a long, drawn out half-second, it grew to fill the screen, an enormous ten-mile wide trapezohedron. Rell was right. Yui had built something a lot more impressive than the tiny sphere on the map, by then.
Phibbix Station was an enormous ten-sided diamond covered in spindly scaffolding, branches that stretched for five miles in every direction; a briar patch of vaguely-organized docking conduits and deep-space shanty-towns and enormous cargo ships bolted into place and repurposed as permanent living spaces. Residential neighborhoods built into the side of the station. The whole thing was speared from pole to pole by a massive central pillar extending eight miles out into space on either side. It came to a point at both ends, and in many ways the station resembled nothing more than a child’s top covered in coral.
Ships of all sizes and shapes flitted over the surface and around the scaffolds, a chaotic swarm that made the parking lot after a rock concert look like a deserted country road on Christmas morning. We moved into the press, and I realized that Rell didn’t have his hands on the controls. He saw my look, and waved dismissively.
“Station control will guide us in,” he said. “Don’t worry.”
The closer we got, the less spindly the scaffolding looked. Most of it was in excess of a quarter mile thick, covered in more scabbed-on structures and ships that had been too small to see from our original vantage point. Some of the ships we passed were huge, as big or bigger than Rell’s. One, an enormous swooped aerodynamic shape with five angular rocket engines built into its middle, had to be at least a mile and a half long.
We aimed for a conduit so wide it was almost flat, a parking space between a squad of saucers docked in a stack and something that looked like a bag of glowing orange fat.
“Oh, you might want to close your eyes,” Rell said. The ship rolled over on its side and flipped right without altering its original course, continuing the motion until it was falling belly-first. My eyes screamed that I was standing on the front wall, now, while my feet and inner ear remained convinced I was standing on the floor. The internal argument was nauseous.
“Oh god,” I said, clutching my stomach. The ship snapped around me and I hopped into the air with my eyes closed. After a moment, my perceptions aligned. I took a deep breath and forced my breakfast back into my stomach.
“Samson?” Rell said. I dropped to the floor and dismantled the helmet.
“I was not expecting that flip,” I said. “I’m ok. All is well.”
“Good,” Rell said. He got up and climbed out of the cockpit, towards the hold. “I would hate for you to have to clean puke off the bridge.”
I hopped into space and landed next to him, seventy meters down.
“I’ve noticed you and Cab have a bit of vomit fixation,” I said.
“Vomit is an unfortunate byproduct of balletic movements through free fall,” Rell said. “Thus, it remains high on the seasoned spaceman’s list of pet peeves.”
“Y’all don’t fuck with Dramamine?” I muttered.
In the hold, the airlock was dinging happily and chattering about how good a seal it had made with its Phibbician counterpart.
“Good good good good good,” it exclaimed as we approached.
“Is it, now?” I said.
“Good good good yes good yes yes safe safe safe safe good. Good?”
“Yes, ship, well done,” Rell said absently.
“Thanks thanks thanks bye.” The door clicked and went silent.
--Kiss-ass--
“No sense of kinship?” I said.
--With that thing?--
--Hell no--
--There’s a reason everyone is so impressed by me--
--That thing is as dumb as smart rocks--
--No offence, Rell--
“I didn’t buy the thing for the conversation,” he said. He opened a cabinet in the wall next to the hatch and put on an armored vest with a high neck, and replaced his sidearm with a pair of menacing snub-nosed pistols. Then he checked the load on a weapon that I could call a sawed-off shotgun, if I were willing to concede to understatement and ignore the fact that it was obviously an energy weapon. It looked like an antitank gun. He strapped it to his back, shrugged his shoulders, and said, “Lose the ship.”
“No?” I said. The longer we stood in front of the door, the more nervous I felt. Cab’s mood wasn’t too calm, either. God only knew what was on the other side. Going through naked, as it were, was unthinkable. The ship already felt less like my privilege than my due. My norm. My skin.
“You’ll draw attention to us,” he said. “Besides, it’s not like it takes you long to suit up.”
He did have a point. How many seven-foot robots did these people see on a daily basis? Then again, I thought, how many seven-foot robots did these people see on a daily basis? I had no idea. Maybe Phibbix was awash in seven-foot robots. I concentrated, and grew little blaster things on my forearms and bigger turrets on my shoulders.
“Ok, Cab, this is where we come back to if we need the ship,” I said. “Got it?”
--You bet--
“And the standing order is to shoot every weapon you see as soon as you have a clear shot.” I dismantled the ship and looked at Rell. “Do I at least get a gun?”
He rummaged in the closet and came out with a whistle, which he offered with raised eyebrows.
“I’ll pass, thanks,” I said. We stood in front of the airlock and my heart started to thud. I had no idea what I was getting into, and I was getting used to the sensation. It was less a surprise than the normal course of things. Confusion and uncertainty were already my constant companions, but this moment was particularly anxiety-provoking. I wasn’t just doing the unthinkable, I was about to open up my reality to the unthinkable in a way that dwarfed anything else I’d ever done.
--Your brain is lit up like the Vegas strip--
I nodded. “You’ve never been to Vegas.”
--I have all kinds of pictures--
--Video, too--
Rell pushed the airlock open and we stepped inside and waited for the pressure to equalize.
“Am I ready for this?” I asked. “What if I trip you up?”
Rell put his hand on the inner door right as it flashed green. “A word of advice, Samson. Don’t think so much.” He looked at me. “You excited?”
I was about to be taken into an alien refugee camp for god knew what by a big green gorilla cat with an insect affect and dark past. Excited was as good a word for it as any. I shrugged and nodded. “Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, I am.”
“Good,” Rell said. He patted me on the back and pushed the outer hatch open and stepped past me. I took a deep breath, and followed him.
We were on a subway platform. A long, dingy underground train shaft, dimly lit by flickering lights, full of cold, mineral air and the twinkle of falling water. There was wind, minimal and uniform in temperature; there would have to be, because the tunnel must have gone on for miles. I stepped through the hatch into a puddle that was up to my ankles. The gravity was just short of what I was expecting, and something small was rotting in a far corner. The place was ugly as sin. I looked at Rell with a stricken expression, and he grinned.
“Welcome to Phibbix Station,” he said.
“No wonder Yui keeps this place hidden,” I grumbled as we tromped down the awful tunnel. “Do people burn down shit-holes for the insurance money? Because that would be a good place to start, here.”
“Hey, you’re the one who got your hopes up,” Rell said. He was walking at a normal toshein pace, which meant that I had to jog to keep up, but I was doing all right. My wind has been pretty good ever since I met my charming dorsal companion.
“Is the whole place like this?” I said, chugging along. “Where is everyone?”
Rell sighed. “Do they have harbors on your planet?”
“Yeah,” I said slowly.
“Are they nice places?”
I thought about it. “No, not really.” Rell nodded.
“This is a harbor. I have a big ship, so we had to land a ways out in the harbor. We are making our way towards the nicer part of town.” He shrugged. “I also parked in an isolated area so you didn’t go into culture shock and have a moment.”
“Oh,” I said. “Fair enough. Wait, culture shock?”
“It happens to a lot of folks,” Rell said. “First time off planet, there’s a lot of potential for sensory overload. A lot of truly alien sights, laid one on top of another. People lose the ability to distinguish one thing from another. My advice, keep your eyes on what’s in front of you. Concentrate on things that are close. Ok?”
“Ok,” I said, confused.
“Remember: You may have had an easy time with me because you and I are structurally and culturally similar enough to avoid any real shock. There’s a lot more diversity out here than you’re expecting, and this is a refugee station, so you’re bound to see an awful lot.”
“Ok,” I said again, slower.
“Still,” Rell said, looking around, “I suppose mostly it is a shithole.”
I went on jogging. This was starting to sound scary.
--Christ, I can’t believe you can see straight through all this--
His voice was a whisper in my head.
“I’m ok,” I said. “I’ll be ok.”
--Well, listen, have you considered…not being a total wimp?--
“Whatever you say, gear breath.”
--You’re the one who’s breathing, meatface--
“Analog asshole.”
--Ape pussy--
“Floppy disc dick.”
--What the hell do I need genitals for?--
“Were you ever worried about talking to yourself back on Earth?” Rell cut in. “When you met Cab?”
“Yeah.” I grinned at the memory. “Yeah, it was real hard to keep quiet sometimes. I was scared people were gonna think I was crazy.”
“Well, they’ll think you’re crazy out here too, so keep it to yourself,” Rell said.
I took a deep breath and stuck my tongue out and blew a ten-second raspberry. Rell chuckled and shoved me into the wall. I think he meant it as a friendly push, but he was a lot bigger than me.
The tunnel bent slightly and joined another, and suddenly I lost the sense that we were alone. I still didn’t see anyone, but the trash looked fresher, and I heard something like city sounds off in the distance. The light felt warmer.
Rell came to where the tunnels merged and walked easily across the empty space between the platforms.
“Force field,” he said without looking. “Come on.”
“What?” I bent over and looked carefully at the edge of the platform. There was something there, if I let myself believe I could see it. I walked across and joined Rell on the other side.
“We’re gonna get a train,” he said.
“Of course,” I said.
“It’s three miles, I don’t feel like walking,” he said.
“Sure,” I said. We stood still for several moments. Rell patted the pistols on his hips and brushed his right hand over the long gun on his back. Cab shifted nervously.
“Try not to do that, Cab,” Rell said.
--Yeah, yeah--
“Are you expecting trouble?” I asked.
“Caution is important,” Rell said.
The wind picked up in one direction, and then a string of ten train cars came shooting down the tunnel and stopped dead in front of us. They were unsupported and disconnected, seamless and silent, with windows that were only transparencies in an otherwise uniform material, but train cars are train cars the galaxy over. They were covered in graffiti that rearranged and translated itself depending on where I looked.
“Come on.” Rell led me into the last car and sat down. I sat down next to him and stared at the other two occupants. One of them was a bulb of plated organic material supported on a dozen dozen tiny lobster legs, with a tiny crabby head and four crabby arms, and the other was a flickering, indistinct mass of light sitting halfway down the car from us. I couldn’t get a good look at him, and it took me a moment to realize that this was by design, a sort of camouflage.
“Can you see that guy?” I said, nudging Rell and pointing.
“Hey,” he said. He pushed my arm down. “Hey. Haven’t you ever ridden the subway? You don’t point at people for God’s sake. Yes, I see that guy. Yes, he’s hard to see. He’s a Queckian, their skin messes with the visual spectrum. Jesus. I can’t take you anywhere.” He smiled at the other guy and nodded. The bulb stood up and walked to the exit.
“Sir.” He nodded at me and stepped out onto the platform. The door closed, and we took off like a shot. The Queckian started to laugh.
“He is dirty!” He yelled. He had an odd lack of an accent, even though his cadence suggested an accent. I looked at Rell, and he shrugged.
“Not me, sir!” The Queckian said. “I am clean.”
“Me too,” I said, loud enough to be heard. The Queckian laughed, a little too much.
“That is good, sir,” he said. “That is good. I am glad you are clean.” The train stopped, and he got up and walked out of the door nearest to us. He was tall, and might have been bipedal, but I still couldn’t tell for sure. He spat on the floor in front of me as he walked by.
“Hey!” I stood up. Rell put his arm across me and I bounced back in the seat as the door closed. We took off again.
“What the fuck was that about?” I said. “Was that because I’m a human?”
--Prejudice is an ugly thing--
Rell looked at the door and put his arm back in his lap. “I don’t know what that was,” he said. “They wouldn’t have reacted like that if they thought you were human.” He rubbed his jaw. “I figured people would think you were a robot or something.”
I grumbled. “Man, if you want people to think I’m a robot let me put on the ship.”
“No, not that kind of robot,” Rell said. “I want people to think you’re a wimpy robot.”
--Burn!--
I rolled my eyes and stretched out about half as well as Rell. The first one had been scared, the second…not angry so much as confrontational. I hate it when people spit at me.
The train stopped again, and Rell stood up and motioned me off. There was some kind of sound muting machine at work aboard the cars, something that compensated for outside noise the same way the inertial dampener had compensated for the forces generated by our speedy approach, so that when I stepped onto the platform I was met with a sudden inrush of crowd noise from the middle distance. People. My heart thumped.
The rest of the passengers were already nearly off the platform, over the hump of the end of the tunnel, a bright opening in the darkness, beyond which I saw things I couldn’t comprehend. The crowd blended together into obscurity and disappeared, and every time I tried to focus on the vista ahead of us, my eyes skated back to the foreground.
--Rell, wait--
--It feels like he’s nightmaring--
--Help--
Cab sounded plaintive. Rell looked in my face and then turned me around, away from the end of the tunnel, and tapped me just short of painfully hard on the side of the head. His face filled my field of vision.
“Hey,” I said. “I’m fine.”
“Take a breath,” he said. “Take a minute.”
“I’m fine, Rell,” I said. “I’m just having a hard time focusing on anything.”
“And that’s fine?” Rell smiled ruefully. “Listen, remember your feet, all right? No matter what you see, your feet are still your feet. If you start to feel overwhelmed, look at your feet.”
I looked at him and put my hands in my pockets. I still had half a tube of chapstick. I clutched it, felt the greasy bit around the edge of the cap, and stared at my feet. My old Frye boots, cracked and shiny. My feet, warm and dry inside. My toes. Me, with me. My heart slowed down some.
“You didn’t just come up with that,” I said.
“Nope,” Rell said. He clapped me on the shoulder and led me towards the light. “It’s an old trick. Good advice for first-time travelers. Your feet are familiar. You grew up with them. You get scared, look at your feet.”
I glanced down as we walked. My stride. The kathud sound of my stacked heels on the deck. I felt calmer.
We stepped up to the end of the tunnel, and I stopped dead.
“Remember your feet,” Rell said.
“Yeah, yeah…” I mumbled. I was going to need more than feet for this.
The interior of the station was one hundred square miles of unbroken cityscape. Ten triangular boroughs, one for each face of the trapezohedron, each with its own definition of ‘down,’ so that if I looked straight up I saw another city directly overhead, with denizens who seemed to hang by their feet from the ceiling. Except it was nearly impossible to see clear to the streets on the other side of the station, because nearly all the available space was covered by skyscrapers that were nestled so intricately amongst one another that it was hard to believe they weren’t connected. But they couldn’t have been. Not with competing internal gravity fields. Flying machines flitted in and out of every available space, banking and dropping from gravity well to gravity well with practiced ease. Everything was lit up in darkness-inducing neon and incandescence. Water condensed and fell from brief clouds in one spot, while heat lines rose from another.
A pair of five-sided pillars dominated the middle of the overgrown space. They were anchored at either pole, and narrowed slightly towards the top, where an odd, spherical lattice connected them to the tallest buildings in the center of each borough. There, at least, they had managed to compensate for the competing gravities, and build together. A huge device shaped like a fat almond hung suspended in the middle of the lattice. It was clearly important, if placement was anything to go by. Nobody ever put something trivial on so grand a pedestal.
“Welcome to Phibbix Station,” I said to myself, and looked down.
I’d expected the corridor to end in a staircase. It didn’t. Instead, the ground simply pitched forward sixty degrees and continued on as if that were a normal, everyday thing. I stuck out my hand and felt the point where ‘down’ changed direction.
“Bad idea,” Rell said. “Unless you finally want to toss your cookies.” He took a long step forward and landed easily, then hopped up and down twice to settle himself. “Get it over with, Samson.”
I looked at the city, and then at my feet. “Ok, Cab, you ready to explore strange new worlds?”
--Sure thing, Earthling--
“You’re as much an Earthling as I am.”
--I know--
--Don’t tell anyone--
I took a deep breath and stepped forward. The change was vertiginous, but not unpleasant. Nothing I’d want to make a habit of, but I’d felt worse in the cockpit, when we docked. I hopped in place like Rell, and felt better.
The train station was wide, with an open architecture and no ceiling. There was a designated entrance at one end and an exit at the other, with a central ticket kiosk facing the far wall. Advertisements blared silently along the walls in languages I didn’t recognize, using symbols that didn’t make any sense to me, but as I focused on them, they resolved themselves into familiar words and shapes: Malt liquor, payday loans, lawyers. Massage parlors. Entertainment sources of all kinds catering to senses I didn’t even have.
And everywhere, people. Not aliens, although they were alien in shape; people. They were too focused, too intent, too mundane, too human to be anything else. And they moved too much for me to focus on any of them. I looked around, lost the thread of what I was seeing and stared convulsively at my feet. Rell pulled me towards the exit.
The press wasn’t as bad outside. Most people were heading in the opposite direction, towards the center of town, while we were walking away, towards the slums. I was grateful. You don’t think about how important small cultural cues are to your understanding of the world until they’re all taken away.
We turned a corner and were mostly alone. I leaned against the wall and breathed deeply and looked around. More ads. More storefronts. Bodegas, odds shops, pawn shops, an entertainment depot hawking a format I didn’t recognize. It was just a neighborhood. A pair of huge, white-furred old men with enormous black eyes and three tree trunk arms apiece were playing some kind of dice game for coins on an overturned half of a barrel down the block from us. They had enormous hairy spider fangs. One of them was wearing a shapeless hat, and the other was smoking an ugly cigar.
Something across the street screamed its last, and I whipped around with Cab fluttering on my shoulders. Three pink leathery men with long tails and barbed snouts were taking bites out of a fresh kill. It was a gruesome scene, but the animal in question was on a plate, on a table with a cloth and settings in front of a glass-fronted business that could only have been a restaurant. One of them watched me, chewing, and then touched two fingers to its brow. I returned the gesture, looked away and screamed like a little girl.
--Easy--
--Take it easy--
--That’s a welwleul, they’re from your neck of the galaxy--
--You’re practically neighbors--
The welwleul was resting on its rear-facing mass of tentacles, leaning against a wall. In its left tentacular mass, which I assume was analogous to a left hand, it held a mismatched collection of liquor bottles. The labels were unfamiliar, but liquor bottles are liquor bottles. The mass on its right side drew idle designs in the dust, while a center mass rested across a much larger tentacle that I assume was meant to function as a leg. I closed my mouth and kept walking.
“Is there anything in there?” I muttered.
--Mostly tentacles--
--Why mess with perfection?--
The welwleul emptied one of the bottles into a mouth full of tombstone teeth and tongues, licked its lips, belched at me and said, “Spare some change, sir?”
Rell tossed some coins. The welwleul caught them in midair.
“Thanks, man,” he said.
“Sure,” Rell said.
“You have homeless people in space?” I hissed when we were out of earshot.
“Putting aside the fact that this is a refugee station, yes, we have homeless people in space,” Rell said. “Anywhere there’s haves, there’s have-nots.”
“But,” I said. Rell looked at me.
“But what?” He said.
I blew the air out of my mouth. “I don’t know,” I said. “I guess I thought things would be better out here.”
“Nope,” Rell said. “It’s just us folks.”
“But you have all this,” I said, waving my arms at the awesome cityscape above us, “and you still can’t fix the little problems? How can you have a warp drive and poverty?”
Rell turned around and put his hand on my shoulder hard enough to stop my dead.
“First of all, Samson, poverty is far from a ‘little’ problem,” he said. “But beyond that…cut it out. The galaxy is not perfect. We are not perfect. This is how it is. This is what we are, and you need accept it. We are not Star Trek. Now stop bitching and start walking. We need to find you a change of clothes and burn what you’re wearing. You stink of rot.”
I followed him unhappily for a block. I don’t know what I’d been hoping for. I might have thought that a utopian society would have been able to take my troubles off my hands, although it was nothing I had articulated, even to myself. I was just disappointed. These people were a lot like the people I’d left behind, tentacles or not.
A pair of melons flew by, flapping long stiff leaves like hummingbird wings. They stopped short ten yards ahead of us and hovered close to one another, curling long vines together and bumping fronts. Both of them began to blossom, and I realized they were lovers. They were lovers, and Rell was a crook. There was an ad for a movie, or a play, or something, Constant Sky, floating way up above me, and there was another bum sitting cross-legged across the street holding a sign that said, “I’d really like a beer.” The melons pulled apart, and their blossoms closed. One of them danced closer to the other, and then flitted down the street. After a moment, its fellow followed. They came together at the corner and crossed together, their vines comingling. There was good along with the bad, here, same as everywhere else. I hadn’t traded down. I hadn’t traded up. I just had more, now.
“Give me some money,” I said. Rell gave me a ten-dollar bill, and I jogged across the street. The bum watched me warily, and sat up straighter. I squatted down in front of him and held out the money. He didn’t take it.
“What’s your name?” I asked. He took in some air and still didn’t take the money.
“Pete,” he said.
“Pete what?”
“Sir…Mouzza’s gone,” he said. “It’s just Pete, now.”
“Who the hell is Mouzza?” I said. Pete flinched and sagged. He still hadn’t taken the money.
“Sorry.” I said lamely. I dropped the bill on the ground in front of him and walked away.
Rell took off walking. “What was that all about?”
“I’m trying to acclimate,” I said, “and apparently I’m doing a piss-poor job of it. I wanted to know his name. He got weird when I asked him.”
Rell sighed and shook his head. “You see that blue ring around his left eyestalk? That means he’s a Mouzzan Calita, not Groussan.” He looked at me and grinned wickedly. “Right. It’s you. Ah, his culture’s naming structure was derived from their geographic position at the moment of birth on their home world. A lot of them figure, if they’re not on their planet, they have no name. You put your foot in your mouth.”
“I didn’t know,” I said.
“I’m aware,” Rell said. We walked on, leaving a strange wake of confused, wary people behind us. I figured they’d never seen anything like me, and tried to look inconspicuous.
“Ok,” I said finally. “Wait. This has been bothering me. Language is one thing, the French, the Spanish, whatever. But how the hell do you know about Star Trek?”
Rell smiled. “Star Trek is cool,” he said. “You people have been dumping your telecommunications into space for a century. You really think we haven’t been listening? Earth media is as salable as anything else. More, even. It’s got that novelty factor, people love to see how humans live.”
“I can’t believe no one ever made contact,” I said. “Even just to tell us that we weren’t alone.”
Rell shrugged. “Star Trek wasn’t that good.”
All content ©2014-2017 Benjamin Mumford-Zisk
Even the silver.
Don't steal anything.
Even the silver.
Don't steal anything.