by H C Turk
“What if the ground suits are all the way up top?” Parno wondered.
“I don’t know,” Kathlynn replied, nearly moaning.
“Do you know exactly where they are?”
She looked left, then right, then all the way up as though searching the sky.
“Not…exactly,” she admitted.
“Kathlynn, maybe they’re collapsible and stored in a tiny box or itty-bitty bag. When we find the suits, will you recognize them?”
“I’m sure of that,” she replied firmly.
Parno found a path for walking, which led to a narrow passage the length of the “closet.” Looking to either side, the Earthers found failure. They found that the chamber’s opposing ends were dark, consisting of fear and doom and desolation.
“Geez,” Parno grumbled, “another room with ghost paths.”
“I didn’t learn anything good about that,” Kathlynn moaned.
She continued walking, passing a metalette stalk topped with a frothy sphere like steel wool, twenty paces high, offset, unbalanced.
“Don’t ask,” she muttered, and proceeded to a more open area of the closet. She turned left, but Parno looked right.
“What is that area that resembles, uh, an alien picket fence higher than a house?” he asked.
“That’s where the weapons are stored,” said the semi-alien fem. “We won’t be able to enter the arsenal.”
“Maybe we should get a weapon to protect ourselves,” Parno suggested.
“Against what, smoke, a spirit, dead emotion?”
“I was hoping for a ghost gun.”
“I don’t know anything about the weaponry here.”
“We don’t want to shoot ourselves in the foot.”
Kathlynn began walking away, and Parno grabbed her shoulder.
“Kathlynn,” he whispered, “I see something moving in the weapon bin. Could it be something automatic, a guard function?”
Between and through the semi-transparent slats of the arsenal’s enclosure, the Earthers saw movement the size of a man. An inhuman man wearing an alien suit. An unliving man filling an Earth ground suit with his smoke.
Though placing her hands to either side of her face as though shielding her eyes, Kathlynn continued looking. And walking.
“Oh, Parno, I can’t face him again. I don’t want to see myself dead again.”
Suicidal Kathlynn stepped nearer, nearer.
“Kathlynn?” Parno said, “should you…?”
“I have to see what he’s touching,” Kathlynn whispered.
Translucent slats of no discernible hue did not shield the ghost from the Earthers’ view. Wielding the ground suit, the alien ghost manipulated a massive apparatus resembling a food hopper’s protein slip.
“Oh, Parno, I don’t want to remember this,” Kathlynn cried, looking intently toward that movement.
Kathlynn stopped, continuing to stare. Parno stood beside her, looking between Kathlynn and the ghost.
“It’s not a weapon,” she whispered. “It’s a detritus allocator, a tool for planetary refuse. It transforms solids into liquids so they flow without guidance into containers for disposal.”
Then she looked only to Parno, her expression showing disappointment, and awe.
“I know he’s a man. He’s going to obliterate the vessel.”
Unsteady and awkward, the suited ghost pressed against the refuse apparatus with movements that suggested strain. The Earthers saw a mortician adjusting his pyre within the plasmetal mausoleum that marked the vessel’s grave.
The alien expert then turned to flee. Kathlynn ran along a passage, clambering up an extended surface that proved to be a climbing lane. Parno followed. Kathlynn’s actions and facial expression told only of fear, but fear had retrieved another alien datum that seemed memory to the Earth fem. Abnormal moments later, Kathlynn slid her hand along a horizontal surface resembling molded sawdust. Her motion resembled zipping, Kathlynn reaching within a space the size of a float car trunk to remove two dresses in sacks.
“Let’s go,” she hissed, then began running back along the same path, followed by Parno.
They did not slow until the arsenal came into view. There, a dead man sought greater death, that of a grand vessel and its Earth-norm inhabitants.
The Earthers strode quickly toward the panel with the ribbon cylinder. Finally, Parno had to speak.
“Kathlynn, can we gain a weapon and destroy our ground suit? Wouldn’t that end his ability to work physically?”
“I told you I don’t know how to enter the arsenal, Parno,” Kathlynn declared. “Would you care to discuss it with the ghost?”
“Snippy-lipped brat,” he mumbled.
“I heard that!”
“Shut up—you’ll wake the dead.”
As they entered the ribbon conveyor, Kathlynn handed Parno one sack, and turned the other over in her hand.
“It looks like one of those erg-insulated cushions that jet jockeys use when they’re hand-feeding ether ore to fussy nucleonics,” Parno mentioned.
“It’s just a container for the environ abettor.”
“How do you open it?”
“I love that question,” she said, looking to the plas-like material. “I’d love an answer better.”
Kathlynn then held the sack before her face as though trying to stare it down.
“Open up, you bastard!” she shouted, and lingerie fell at her feet.
As Kathlynn lifted the fabric, it draped in her hands as though a filmy negligee with a hat whose brim sported a mosquito net.
She turned to Parno and tossed it against him. The environ abettor surrounded him, covering from above his scalp to beneath his shoes. He felt as though he had been painted with a fluid so viscous it even slipped beneath his soles. The headpiece was visually transparent, but the remainder of the alien suit gave the appearance of the finest net.
“I can barely see it,” Kathlynn observed.
“Kathlynn, I can hear you as though we wore nothing.”
“Of course, Earth-norm acoustics.”
“What a beautiful phrase.”
“‘Earth-norm acoustics’?”
“No, ‘as though we wore nothing.’”
Parno kicked one leg as high as possible. The fabric followed as though a coating.
“Wow,” he said. “I wonder how protective these are.”
“They’re suitable for space,” Kathlynn told him. “Beyond that, I’m not sure of their durability.”
“Beyond that?” he quipped. “There’s nothing beyond space, except this hell hole. By the way, alien super, why aren’t these suits stored closer to the entry airlock?”
“I believe that these are just spares in the closet,” Kathlynn offered. “The remainder are stored near the airlock doors. That area is now a ghost path.”
“Oh.”
When the ribbon stopped, Parno and Kathlynn ran through the wall opening, taking one step before falling to their faces.
Either the suits or the floor cushioned their fall. Looking to each other in ignorance, they rose together, thereafter moving more carefully.
“I feel unbalanced,” Kathlynn noted.
“I wonder how long it took the smoke ghost to learn how to run in our suit,” Parno said as he stepped with Kathlynn to the translation arena’s starry panel.
“I don’t know, but outside the process margin, he was running faster than I can in this.”
“He weighs less,” Parno said.
They pressed through the panel, entered the ribbon, and moved with more waiting. Kathlynn clenched her hands, squeezing her eyes shut.
“I only want to verify that I can arbitrate informations in the process margin while wrapped in an environ abettor,” she said.
“Oh. You have to be able to work the controls while wearing that suit in the warehouse.”
“That’s what I said, isn’t it?” she fumed.
After the wall automatically opened, Parno and Kathlynn ran through only to stumb
le after one step, having been cursed with Earth-norm memories while in a state of anxious desperation. This time, they did not fall to their faces, only stumbling, stepping smartly along thereafter, having learned not to run in the warehouse.
At the process margin, prostrate death awaited them, static death, settled death.
“I hate seeing those poor dead people,” Kathlynn moaned, continuing to the creativity cusp. “You can stay there.”
“Kathlynn, did you learn how the aliens, er, how the inhabitants died?” Parno wondered.
“They died by the indigenes’ fire,” she said while stepping between covered bodies. “I’m sure of that, but I’m not sure what it means. Either the aliens provoked their own death by tampering with the indigenes’ rituals, or the indigenes murdered them.”
Kathlynn tapped the wall with her toe, and the creativity cusp activated outward. Grasping stretched shapes, massaging translucent rods, and pulling apparent clumps of hair, Kathlynn twisted her upper body before settling a few inches against the groin connector.
She had never appeared more romantic.
Pulling herself away from the process margin, smiling Kathlynn whirled to Parno.
“It works!” she beamed while stepping toward him. “All you have to do is—”
And she burst into flames. A thoughtless step of satisfaction had placed her foot directly onto a dead inhabitant’s suit. The spirit of fire made to cleanse the universe of Kathlynn’s life.
Chapter 13
Night With No Gravity
Flames rushed up Kathlynn’s leg, engulfing her, the gases so dense that Parno could not see through. Before he could try to smother Kathlynn with his own suit without stepping on another alien, the fire subsided. So did Kathlynn’s suit. The environ abettor fell away as though melting, drooling onto that pile of ashes on the floor. The ashes on which Kathlynn stood.
Parno looked to her foot, her leg, her coverall, her hair, her face…. He smelled smoke, but not from Kathlynn.
“Are you injured?” he asked.
Kathlynn lifted her foot from the ashes. Nothing of the environ abettor remained but the contents. Though appearing to be viscous, the suit’s material dropped off dryly as Kathlynn raised her leg.
“I, I don’t feel anything, except terrified,” she wheezed. “And stupid. Oh, Parno, I ruined the environ abettor. We’ll have to start over.”
Kathlynn had been correct: the aliens were a superior race. When conflagration confronted Parno in his Earth suit, the emotion of the experience had penetrated. In contrast, the alien suit had sacrificed its corpus to protect Kathlynn.
Parno began removing his environ abettor.
“Take this,” he said, and Kathlynn barked:
“Parno, are you trying to be a hero, or a fool?”
“I’m trying to be a smart ass instead of a dumb ass. You wrap on this abettor and get to work. I’ll run to the closet for another, then continue to the guidance cell. I have to leave here anyway—it only makes sense.”
“I’m sorry, you’re right, you’re a hero,” she said with some melancholy, allowing the environ abettor to wrap around her figure. “I only—”
Parno could not hear her final words, for he and Kathlynn were in different worlds.
He turned and ran across the floor, moving through the panel and onto the ribbon. Parno did not find this graceful passage invigorating. In a hurry, he felt stultified. Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go…, he thought, and finally arrived at the graceful ribbon’s end.
Once in the closet, Parno intentionally ran in the wrong direction: not toward the climbing passage, but toward the arsenal. He felt an alien type of relief to see that the smoke ghost in his suit continued working behind the slats. Parno then turned, finding himself lost.
He remembered running past the big, sideways steel wool tree. Yes, and slipping between the plasboard boxes and condensation of malmetal vacuum-foil couplings. Finally, he arrived at the alien stairs, ascended, proceeding to the frozen-sawdust chest he couldn’t open.
Imitating Kathlynn, he casually slid his hand along the top. No response. Then he clawed at it with five digits while bending and scowling in fury.
“Open up, you alien bastard, before I burn you to hell with my breath!”
Despite the strain in his face and neck, Parno had only whispered. He did not want to speak directly to the smoke ghost.
The upper surface parted, and Parno removed four parcels, all that remained. Then he ran away, down the clambering passage, away from the industrious ghost preparing to destroy this magnificent vessel, beneath the angular cotton wad, through the panel, along the ribbon, across the lobby, more running, more waiting, more worry, eventually arriving at the guidance cell with ghost paths, dead people in a foreign repose.
Aliens in their work clothes stood upright forever. Though the walls likely exhaled vibrations Earthers could not hear, Parno sensed only silence. Except for his breathing. He panted, the sound disruptive in this intimate chamber, dead people at work waiting for eternity, which always arrived. Only Parno was disrupted, his hands shaking as he pulled opened an abettor’s sack and wrapped on the fab.
Curved shelving held implements that might have been mementoes. When grasped by an inhabitant, that crisp device would reveal vids of family members, released by the bearer’s smile.
The resting dead have no need for smiles, mementoes, or memories.
“Kathlynn?” Parno said quietly while stepping to his own workstation.
Kathlynn spoke as though a single pace away, pronouncing one word, which might have been “Parno” in alien.
“At least one of us is not speaking English,” he said, pleased that no dead men turned to him, having been interrupted from their endless sleep.
“Parno?”
“Yes, can you hear me?”
“Yes. I think that happens due to anxiety. I’m ready, Parno. Let’s go!”
Directed by Kathlynn, Parno essentially repeated the sequence of pressing and feeling and adjusting his limbs and body. Before concluding, Parno suffered a discomforting thought, which he shared with his supervisor.
“Kathlynn, you’re hoping that the inner airlock door will open because you’ll be standing near and properly suited. But I’ll be way over here. What if the door opens, but closes because you’re waiting for me instead of entering?”
“Parno, I don’t know,” she admitted. “I could stand in the threshold so the door would have to run into me in order to close.”
“Don’t do that,” he insisted.
“I won’t do that, Parno. But I hope we’ll learn the proper thing to do right now.”
More fingering colors along a malleable length of non-rope stretched from a vertical panel displaying data as a felt change of texture. Then, waiting.
A rush of alien breath filled his ears. Kathlynn’s voice.
“Kathlynn, you’re speaking alien again.”
“What, Parno, are you there?” she replied in English. “One moment, one moment. Parno, are we speaking English now?”
“Yes, speaking and hearing, superfem.”
“Oh, Parno, I apologize for my anxiety, but that’s because—we’re through! I’m sure we’ve succeeded. All I have to do is….”
Then she screamed, a single word.
“Parno!”
Too far away to aid, he waited for her gasp of death. Instead, he heard a cry of life.
“Parno—the inner airlock door opened—and I’m not even near!” Kathlynn then spoke alien for a phrase, followed by English. “I’m looking into the big, beautiful airlock. Hurry—run down and we’ll enter together, then close the door behind! When we open the outer door, we’ll see pink sand and a glorious ocean!”
He had never heard her so enthused, so happy. He could not wait to see her happiness again.
“I’m on my way, Kathlynn!” he called out brightly.
Pulling himself away from his impersonal workstation, Parno proceeded through the guidance cell. Concerned wit
h disturbing the dead, he would not move rudely in a cemetery and touch an upright alien, rushing so foolishly that he careened into a death suit only to achieve an admonition of flames.
Slowing to preclude Earth-norm stumbling, he proceeded through the entry panel. The alien environ abettor was more noticeable than an Earth ground suit, feeling like a permanent brush of wind against bare skin. After waiting for the ribbon’s rapid, too-slow ride, Parno rushed into the lobby to see Kathlynn waiting.
Parno was so startled that he nearly stumbled again. Staring at Kathlynn, he could not speak at first. She smiled, her expression clearly visible through her suit. Her Earth ground suit.
“Kathlynn? What in the world is going on?” he asked.
Proving herself a superfem, Kathlynn responded twice. Parno heard alien words, which did not emanate from the mouth he viewed. Immediately before him, Kathlynn stepped toward Parno. Her expression changed. Kathlynn smiled, revealing teeth and tongue. “The woman who shows me her tongue shows me her sex,” quoth the old poem. In the sex verse composed for Parno, Kathlynn metaphorically spread her legs.
She evinced no awkwardness in walking despite the impediment of having one hand against her vulva.
“I wanted to screw you at first sight,” she said.
Parno had never heard such speaking from Kathlynn, but he had seen this pose before. Unwrapped from the function retainer after seeing the ghost, Kathlynn had displayed uncharacteristic eroticism, but only for seconds. Alien-norm seconds. At that time, the ghost Kathlynn saw had been wearing an Earth ground suit.
“Are you ready to screw now?” she asked.
Kathlynn walked slowly, her awkward gait likely due to that hand grasping her crotch.
“Would it make you feel better if I screwed you?”
He did not retreat. That smile, the way she moved her lips and eyes: exaggerated, yes, but fantastically sexy. Kathlynn removed the three parcels from Parno’s hands and dropped them to one side. Then she reached to caress his neck with both hands, Parno feeling a chill across his flesh, doubly false. Of course, he could not feel Kathlynn’s flesh—they both wore protective suits. But he imagined her touch, that light pressure causing him both a chill of excitement and passionate warmth from his head to his heart.
