Unconstant Love

by Timothy J Meyer

  “Not really, no,” Nemo admits, as he spins back around.

  {In those days}, the soothsayer starts to recall, the ceremony in full swing down below, {ever were the floodgates open and the Starsea would rain down its waters, morning and night, to wet the earth and feed the people}. To compliment this image, it tosses several handfuls of sapphire dye into the air and stands, in quivering awe, beneath the falling powder.

  “Involuntary subjugation to another or others.”

  Odisseus snaps one claw and points vigorously at Moira. “That’s the one.” All this accomplishes is deepening Nemo’s scowl and widening Moira’s smile. “Okay, first,” Odisseus elaborates, “you gotta imagine we get outta here alive. And with the tree. And sell to Gella.”

  “Okay, yeah, sure, yeah, okay, granted,” Nemo answers in a quick rush.

  Odisseus twists to follow him as he trudges past. “That’s when it’s slavery. The selling part. We take a tree who thinks and we sell it for money to somebody else and then it’s their property forever. It’s the selling part and the property part that make it slavery.”

  “That’s what makes it slavery, he’s saying,” Moira confirms, looking up from the glow of the Attaché.

  “But, like,” argues Nemo, pointing at that same Attaché, “that’s not on there.” With sudden purpose, he takes three strides to Moira’s side and nearly loses his balance again in the process. “Like,” he snatches the Attaché from Moira and starts to thumb through its contents, “nowhere on here does it say anything about slavery or talking trees or what to do when the planet’s already occupado.”

  “That’s certainly true, yeah,” Odisseus is forced to agree.

  {Then came the sickness}, the soothsayer reminds the crowd somberly, the turning point in their little pageant.

  “So, all I’m doing,” Nemo attests, “is sticking to the plan.” A little too late, he throws his hands up in a gesture of innocence. “The plan. Two-Bit’s plan. The plan of Two-Bit. The plan Two-Bit died planning.”

  “He did die,” Moira reminds Odisseus knowingly.

  “And what I’m saying is,” Odisseus adds, planting a paw on his chest, “is that plan involves slavery now. Because of recent events and shit that’s come to light.”

  “But that’s like,” Nemo starts to whine, “fucking the worst case. It doesn’t have to be, I mean, it probably isn’t actual slavery, if they’re like, really blooming jazzed to go, right?”

  Odisseus, still smacking those lips, starts to shake his hairy head. “I don’t thi–”

  An idea strikes Nemo so tangily that he almost loses his balance again. He whirls around, hands wide open like a gunfighter. “Watch this shit.”

  Nemo thrusts his hand into his holster and comes up with his clumsy firearm, looking for all the world like he does when he’s about to murder someone in cold blood and on shaky pretenses. Instead, he thrusts the pistol high into the air and fires three explosive shots, lighting the whole canyon with flashes of bright blue.

  The ceremony below grinds to an immediate halt. All the cacti stand utterly motionless at this sudden display of violence from their guest of honor.

  “Hear ye, hear ye, ya pricks!” The Captain’s voice echoes weirdly off the curving glassrock walls and the littered bones of the Gitter nursery. “I, the immortal Vesselborn and haver of the biggest balls, decree that, from this day forth, I am to be referred to only as ‘Badass Supreme’. It is my right and true name, given to me by, you know, Whomever With The Thing Up There.” He is answered only by more silence, his own voice bouncing faintly off the canyon walls. “It shall be so!”

  An immediate aromatic agreement comes wafting up to the tuskwood table. {As you wish}, vows the eager cactoid crowd and {We grow to serve} and {At your command, Badass Supreme}.

  This seems even enough to convince Moira. “He makes a good point,” she mentions offhandedly to Odisseus.

  “They think we’re gods, dude,” explains Nemo. “Blooming gods. They’re shitting themselves to do whatever I say.” He gesticulates wildly with his pistol, in a manner some sober part of the Ortok’s brain knows is very unsafe. “This part of the job couldn’t be easier if it was sucking our dicks.”

  “Ew,” grimaces Moira quietly.

  “Easy?” Sure,” Odisseus agrees, turning his attention back to the food. “Slavery? Definitely.”

  “The fuck, man,” mutters Nemo, back on his perpetual pacing warpath. Odisseus spends the next few seconds rooting through nuts as the Captain gets his scatterbrained thoughts together. “You know what you are? You’re a shit.”

  “I’m a what?”

  “A shit.” There’s a new edge to Nemo’s voice, something more sinister than the teasing tone they usually throw at one another during boarding actions and gunfights. “You’re one of those big, nasty, ass-splattering shits that always seem to follow the Dysentery Basket, you know, the one from Tapeworm King on the Second Ring.”

  “Moons,” remarks Moira longingly. “That sounds so good.”

  “Because why?” objects Odisseus. “Because this is obviously slavery and that’s too blooming, what, inconvenient for you?”

  {Sealed were the floodgates. Sickly and jaundiced grew the sky}, the soothsayer continues, a sorrowful note creeping into her scent. All the cacti turn downward, in a pantomime of wilting. {Much that was green and growing browned and fell dead}.

  “Because everything, man,” continues Nemo, spinning on his heel. “Because your blooming attitude, every moons-damned stage of this thing.”

  “My attitude?” scoffs Odisseus wetly. “Are you drunk?”

  “Yes,” Nemo answers instantly.

  “Me too,” Moira chimes in.

  “It’s all the whining, man,” whines Nemo. “It’s the fucking whining.” He starts to count on each finger, starting with his pointer. “First, it’s the molecular strip and how blooming difficult that’s gonna be to acquire and then install–”

  “It was blooming difficult!” barks Odisseus. “I don’t recall you digging throu–”

  “Then,” Nemo continues, counting on his pointer finger again, “it’s the remote batteries and the atmosphier and the internal damage to the Lover–”

  The Ortok crosses his forearms pertly. “That’s a completely justifi–”

  “Next,” Nemo continues, counting on his pointer finger a third time, “it’s the blooming idents and how I’m suddenly a speciesist and how come Two-Bit couldn’t magically pull ironshod Ortoki idents outta his bloo–”

  Odisseus clenches his teeth. “I will admit–”

  Nemo couldn’t be further from caring. “Now, we’re actually fucking here, we’re past all the tough shit and these people,” he thrusts a pointer finger across the crowd, “are jumping outta their green skin to trip over themselves to beat each to obeying my every fart. And guess what?” He throws his arms wide, his thesis achieved. “You’re still. Blooming. Complaining.”

  “Well, technically,” Moira makes the point to Nemo, “right now, you’re complaining.”

  “How quickly we forget,” Odisseus exclaims, tossing his paws in the air, “that I nearly died out there.” He sweps a paw toward the canyon and the wasteland beyond. “Less than like, fucking an hour ago?”

  “How the fuck could I?” snorts Nemo. “You won’t shut your bleeding mouth about it.”

  Odisseus shrugs. “Well, it’s kinda a big deal to me. My own death, I mean.”

  {So changed our planet}. This ceremony commences without a hint of movement, the cacti’s stiff bodies intended to represent the planet’s barrenness or their deity’s suffering or something. {Bitter tears of crystal did God Beyond weep, so grieved and afflicted, that rained in brilliant showers onto the earth below}.

  “You’re like, addicted to missing the point.” Nemo staggers through his rhythmic pacing routine. “Imagine for a second these guys are just regular, dumb-ass trees. What happens, then, when we crash and then, boom, we’re here and we’re wandering around in the desert a
nd the driftcart’s busted and you’re like, ‘I have heat stroke! Feel bad for me!’ and then fall the fuck over?” He stares wide-eyed at the Ortok like the answer’s staring him in the face. “You die, dude. You fucking die.” He waves an indistinct hand towards the congregation below. “Stalkchopper and those assholes, they saved your life.”

  “I’m not the one who wants to enslave them!”

  “Okay, yes, fine, whatever, moons, you caught me,” snaps Nemo. “I confess – I wanna enslave one of them. Like, a baby one. The littlest, dumbest, babiest one.” He pants a few haggard breaths into the following silence. “And get paid sixty-eight million credits to do so!”

  “There,” burps Odisseus, tasting all the innumerable Gitterpeaches a second time. “See? That’s all I was ever saying, man. It’d be slavery, if we did it.”

  To no one’s surprise, this still doesn’t sit well with Nemo. “No, you know what?” he decides, stopping his pacing and lunging back towards the table. “Let me be clearer. I don’t want that. Two-Bit Switch wants that. Two-Bit Switch died wanting that.”

  “He did die,” comments Moira, seeming to realize this for the first time.

  Odisseus is skeptical. “You don’t know what Two-Bit Switch would’ve wanted to do.”

  “Oh, yes,” Nemo nods viciously, “I do.” With quick fingers, the Captain reaches out and snatches the Attaché again. “Two-Bit Switch,” Nemo announces, clutching the device to his chest, “wanted us to pretend to be an asteroid, sneak down here, steal one of those fuckers,” he thrusts the tablet in the vague direction of the ceremony, “escape and sell the thing to Gella Borsk. For, lemme repeat, sixty-blooming-eight-blooming-million-blooming-credits.”

  In a sudden explosion of violence, Nemo throttles the Attaché back and forth with murderous enthusiasm. “Two-Bit was pretty fucking specific about what he wanted!”

  {In place of lifegiving water}, explains the mournful soothsayer, {all God Beyond had strength to send were messengers}. With a creaking gesture, the soothsayer stretches a limb towards the tuskwood table, dust and dye falling from its limbs. {The noble Vesselborn, sailors upon the Starsea, who revealed onto our parched people a truth dire and terrible}.

  Odisseus looks away from Nemo’s mounting madness and returns his attention to the spread of fruit and nuts all across the table. He shuffles his paw listlessly through them, their hard shells clacking against the tuskwood. “Can you not see that circumstances have changed? Not even, like, a little?”

  “Can you hear yourself?” Nemo spits back, tossing the Attaché dismissively onto the table, to crash amid the fruits and figs. He stands there, staring and fuming at his saltbrother, until an idea occurs to him. “Do you know who you fucking sound like?”

  “Don’t.”

  “You do,” Nemo swears, nodding fiercely. “You know exactly who you sound like.”

  “Who?” Moira is curious to know.

  “Don’t you dare,” Odisseus growls between gritted fangs.

  Nemo throws his hands wide in a gesture of helpless exasperation. “You sound like fucking Abraham, man.”

  “Oh,” Moira realizes.

  Before he quite understands what he’s doing, Odisseus is on his feet, catapulted off the boulder he was sitting on. He’s vaguely aware, as he swaggers up to Nemo, that the spores and the heat exhaustion and the intoxication are bringing on this unusually aggressive behavior. Try as he might to rationalize this, however, thinking back on all the hardships he’s endured at Nemo's behest doesn’t exactly calm him down much.

  Odisseus towers over his saltbrother, swaying drunkenly on his feet. “Do I now?”

  {The sickness}, whispers the soothsayer, {is of our own making}. All the Gitter arranged behind the soothsayer begin a bloody pantomime, playing at violence and destruction in great mocking strokes. {By our vice and rapine and bloodletting was God Beyond, a witness through the floodgates, made so ill}.

  Nemo shows a glimmer of sense here and shrinks a step from the looming Ortok. “You heard me.”

  “Actually,” considers Odisseus flatly, “I must not have because I think I just heard you compare me to that Grimalti shitheap.”

  “I’m pretty sure you did,” Moira regrets to inform Nemo.

  “Why,” snarls the Galactic Menace, “is there some appreciable difference between the two of you that I’m missing?” He’s all too aware how much his tone and his expression will rile Odisseus up.

  Much as he knows his tail’s being yanked, the Ortok cannot help the righteous rage that swells and surges within him. It's entirely possible that these emotions have been conjured by the intoxicating Gitter spores he's been huffing all evening, but he intends to act on them anyway.

  “Gee,” ponders the Ortok, “lemme think of some. Have I spent the past two years as a drunken sot, so far gone on booze and fucking melancholy I can’t hardly puke straight?”

  “I mean,” interrupts a quiet Moira, “besides, like, right now?”

  By now, both Nemo and Odisseus are experts at ignoring drunken Moira. “What about singing my incessant sea shanties, day in and day out, all doom this and gloom that?”

  “So, obviously–” Nemo starts to pontificate, with big, dramatic gestures but Odisseus doesn’t give him the space to continue.

  “Have I so derelicted my duty,” Odisseus asks the heavens, unintentionally mimicking the Captain’s gestures, “that, in the midst of yet another alcoholic stupor, I actually tried to sa–”

  {Only by our sacrifice can God Beyond be cured of this malady}. With as elegant a gesture as a seven-armed cactus can make, the soothsayer reaches a limb around to pluck something that hangs from an elbow joint. {In these scorched lands, water is now our treasure most cherished}.

  “Okay,” Nemo consents, in a rare display of understanding. “Fair enough.” Before Odisseus can react to this unprecedented turn of events, however, the Captain thrusts a new finger in the Ortok’s face. “Can I tell you what you have done, then?”

  Odisseus makes a beckoning gesture. “Can I stop you?”

  “Second guessed my ass,” Nemo spits, barely waiting for the Ortok’s answer. “All day blooming long. I can’t show my face on Ostara or Chandani or wherever because that’ll make the bounty hunters come leaping outta passing ships to get me. I can’t smoke one single cigar in the mess hall because, guess what, that’ll short the atmosphier’s filtration matrix and then we’ll all die gagging. I can’t take five steps outside my own spaceship without lathering up ten coats of DermEndure–”

  “Because I almost died out there and I–”

  “You don’t seem to understand that it ain’t me calling the shots here.” He jabs his finger back toward the tuskwood table and the tablet that’s resting there. “You gotta problem with the plan, there’s a pile of ashes in some Trijan gutter you can go take it up with.”

  “Bloom me out,” growls Odisseus, resisting the urge to strangle with all his might. Instead, he follows Nemo’s gesture, pointing a paw towards the deactivated Attaché. “It’s not some holy text, Nemo, for fuck’s sake. Just because–”

  “It is too!” Nemo suddenly screams. That something, that ravenous intensity flares to life behind the haze of drunkenness. All the features of his face are twitching, his whole body trembles with outrage and those eyes go dangerously wide. Confronted with this changed Captain, Odisseus flinches, shuffles back a step and, thanks to his boozy equilibrium, nearly loses his balance.

  All across the nursery, Skyscratch cacti snap free their own Gitterpeaches and thrust them up toward the tuskwood table, toward the uncaring Vesselborn. {To you, venerable Vesselborn}, addresses the soothsayer, {do we commend our cherished water. By our hardship, may God Beyond be nurtured back to health and know of our sorrow, our shame}.

  “I don’t know,” Nemo adds huskily, looking around at their surroundings and somehow the entire caper along with them. “Maybe Abraham was right,” he concludes with mock defeat, only irking Odisseus all the more. “Maybe you oughta just fuck of
f to someplace lame, with your moonshine and your shanties and shit, like he fucking did.”

  “I will never fuck off.” The words come roaring out of Odisseus before he can restrain them. “Are you too thick the fuck to understand that? We made a bond in salt, you ungrateful motherbloomer, in case you’ve somehow forgotten. That’s a bond that actually means something to me, one I will die before I break.”

  The next thing he knows, Odisseus is staggering forward, uncertain how much is drunkenness, how much is vulnerability. “You’re the one who fucked off, thirteen fucking years ago, and I’m the one who came sniffing after you! That’s the way this works! If anyone can reasonably be expected to do the fucking off, between the two of us, it’s gonna be–”

  {A spy! A spy! A spy in our midst!}

  A great and silent uproar arises from the nursery. A cocktail of alarmed, outraged and frightened pheromones reaches the noses of the Lover’s crew and shocks them completely out of their argument. The pageant below is also interrupted, the soothsayer and all its fellow performers shoved from the center of the canyon. The incomers, a squad of the shorter Gitter, come parading into view. At their head marches Stalkchopper, dropping immediately to its knees before the Vesselborn.

  {Foreplanter, most honored Vesselborn, we have apprehended a Splitspine scout, skulking around our outer pickets}. Another wave of shocked spores rolls across the canyon. {It is my belief this one may not have acted alone and may have collaborators, absconding even now into the countryside}.

  {Vile Splitspine weeds!} comes Foreplanter’s scent. {Too long have they coveted our wealth and our might}.

  {It is my fear}, continues Stalkchopper, {that some foul treachery may be afoot, perhaps even now. I humbly beg the wisdom of my betters on how best to proceed}.

  {What says Badass Supreme?} wonders Foreplanter.

  There’s a sizable pause here, the length of time it takes Nemo to realize that he’s being addressed. He spins suddenly to look down at the gathering, like he’s been caught at mischief. “Hm? Oh, well, yeah, sure, okay. Bring forth that motherfucker!”

  {It stands before you}, Stalkchopper answers after a moment and, after another moment, nudges one of the random adjacent cacti, one Odisseus mistook for a simple Secondseed.