How could a creature grow to adulthood and know so little of biology? “Yes,” he conceded, knowing from experience that explanation was futile. “A trail of notes.” And mostly discarded.
“So nobody read your notes?” For all her ignorance, the Human was sometimes frighteningly insightful.
“I don’t know what you mean.” He busied himself with an orbital shaker and its cargo of cell cultures. They’d be a good source of blestomerase, which could be used to make enska, a drug popular with—
“No Ms. Keevor. No little Keevettes. Keevites. Keevles.”
“No.” No Keevles. He didn’t care about that. But Lakna, now . . . Her ijva had tasted of spring days and swamp musk, of lacy clouds and moonshine, her little pheromone packets sealed with love and longing. Until . . .
“Didn’t work out, hey?” How could she know? With that tiny olfactory complex in its sad little housing on her face, Mae could hardly be expected to scent the flood of sadness his ijva was leaving across the floor. “I’ve known you a while now, Keeve. When you think about her, your tentacles get all googly. And there’s a smell of ocean.”
Never judge a nose by its size. The wisdom of Plexis. “It’s complicated. Go check on the dextrose delivery.” There was always a delivery. Plexis ran through drugs like a swamp bat through a vine tangle.
She laughed. “I’m going. But maybe it’s time to stop moping and do something, hmm? Think about it.”
* * *
• • •
He’d thought about it. Not for the first time, of course. When Lakna had first turned away from his trail, he’d thought of nothing else. He’d come up with new complexities of packaging, woven pheromones into clever bouquets. He’d invented whole new classes of messenger, hijacked viruses to carry and assemble tiny factories that made their own sensory apparatus, that delivered delicate impressions of admiration, beauty, desire. And still she’d turned away.
“It’s impressive, Keevor. I’ve never had a lover so talented, so skilled with his ijva. You do things I’ve never imagined, made me feel things I never dreamed of. But . . .” He’d known it was coming. How could it not? “It’s all so . . . earnest.” So honest. “So . . . boring. I’m sorry, but there it is. It’s beautiful, what you do. But it’s boring. You’re an artist, Keevor. You deserve someone who appreciates you.”
“‘It’s not you, it’s me,’” agreed Mae, when he tried to explain it to her at last. “Every species has a line like that. Sucks for all of them.” Her eyes took on a distant, sad look. “Us, I guess.” She shook her head. “But you’ve got to get past it.”
“With drugs?” That seemed to be her preference.
“If that works for you, yes. But you’re made of tougher stuff, Keeve. You need something more creative. It’s not as if there aren’t plenty of Mocsla Fems coming by all the time. Whatever’s in that trail of yours, they like it.”
He twitched his mantle in a shrug. “They’re—”
“Yeah, yeah, not Lakna. I’ve heard that sob story before, Keeve. Seems to me you’ve got two choices—love what you are, or learn to be that bad frat your lady wanted.” She reached out a hand and stroked his upper foot segment, with its trace of ijva. She’d never touched him before, couldn’t know what it meant. “I know what I’d choose.” She took her hand back, inhaled. “Cinnamon,” she said. “Maybe a touch of basil.”
* * *
• • •
He embarked on a process of experimentation, with himself as the subject. Lakna had wanted . . . what was the opposite of earnest? Frivolous? Dispassionate? Exciting?
He devised whole new metabolic cycles, and inserted genes for them not just in regions of his feet, but of his mantle, cells manufacturing messengers to be spread through the air as well as his ijva. His new pheromones were dark, jolting, vibrant.
“Oh!” said Mae one morning. “That stinks.” She turned her face and blinked her eyes wide. “Sorry, Keeve, but . . . wow. What did you eat last night? I laid out your dinner myself; same green stuff as always. Are you okay? Should I call a . . . someone?”
“I took your advice,” he said. “What do you think?”
“My advice? When did I say . . . Oh.” She swallowed, contorting her limited face. “So, this what a . . . um . . . Mocsla bad frat smells like? Like . . . creosote?”
“I don’t know,” he admitted. “The trail Lakna left me for was insipid, vapid . . . banal. It had no. . . . no subtlety.”
“So you thought, ‘Hey! Maybe if I smell really bad, she’ll be distracted? She won’t notice my uber subtlety in all the stink?’ That is not what I suggested.”
He shrugged. It was what he was doing.
“Look, maybe I didn’t say it well. You’ve got Mocsla Fems down here all the time, Keeve. They like you the way you are. Me, too.” She smiled. “And the old you smelled a whole lot better.”
“Let’s see,” he said, and triggered one of the new pheromone diffuser pits on his mantle. The pheromones diffused out, settling onto all sorts of surfaces he hadn’t even touched. He’d stolen the idea from moths. Of course, a Mocsla wouldn’t pick the taste up unless she happened to walk across it, but the approach was novel, even if the diffuser pits were a little unsightly. Even his takis avoided them.
“Oh, my—!” Mae coughed. “Got to— Check something. Later.” She sped out of the shop.
* * *
• • •
His new regime cut down on the visits to his shop. The proportions changed, with fewer smell-sensitive species, and more that relied on vision and sound. Even Mae, with her tiny nose, spent more time building her distribution network, and less time in the shop.
“I’m sorry, Keeve,” she said. “But now you smell like something dead. Really dead. Rotting. I love you, bebe, but it’s gross. And now it’s coming out your mantle and everything. You’re . . . you’re oozing.”
He missed her company, but the Mocsla who came by made up for it, in some ways. They were types he’d never have spent time with back home—artists, writers, outlaws.
“Criminals,” one admitted in an unguarded moment. “I’d love to go home again, you know. Ever go to the wetlands outside Parthratin? I swear, you could spend days there deciphering old messages. All the great ones have composed there, and the shrubs incorporate it all, through their roots. Bits and pieces of old poems all stuck together, so that when you eat one of the leaves, it’s like a whole course of Third Era literature all in one bite, but with a dark, menacing quality. That’s what brought me here. Your trail reminded me of that.”
“Thank you,” he said, his tentacles stiffening with pride.
“So complicated, so . . . malevolent, I guess. But now that I’m here, it’s not . . .”
Keevor sighed, a trick that he’d learned from Mae. “Not what?” he asked heavily, firing off a diffuser pit.
The other slithered around a bit, tasting the new mix. “Mmm. Different. But not . . . sincere, you know? I mean, it’s complicated and unique, and I can see you put a lot of work in it. But it’s . . . artificial, I guess. It feels like you worked at it. All it tells me is that you’re talented.”
* * *
• • •
“Sure it’s a good thing,” Mae said, when she stopped in briefly. “Not that smell. That’s as foul as week-old sewage. Can’t you smell it?” He couldn’t, of course. But it tasted interesting. “Talent is good. But what do you use it for? Look, where I grew up there was a huge gallery for this guy, Unaetum, they called him. Very famous. Very talented. And what did he do? He went around making drawings that looked like a four-year-old did them. Talented, sure, but not good.”
“Someone must have liked them, if he was famous.” Mae operated more on emotion than on logic. All Humans seemed to.
“Sure, some people did. A lot, maybe. But I think they look like garbage. Just the way you smell, now. And that’s a friend tel
ling you. Ease up on the smells, Keeve. Mix in a little spice from time to time.”
* * *
• • •
The business grew. They did well enough that he bought a long-term lease on a larger space, with a bar area to accommodate the customers that did come by. Well enough that he could afford to eat out on occasion. There was a nice place called the Claws & Jaws, run by some sort of arthropod with too many eyes. They’d encouraged him to order out, though, even waiving the delivery fee eventually.
“Not everyone loves an artist,” Mae said. “I don’t care for them myself.” She’d grown colder over the months, as his experiments grew more extreme, and his mantle and tail grew crowded with diffuser pits, secreters, and what even he could only call oozers. His ijva was thick now, and golden, like a river of sunlight across Plexis’ steel floors.
His Mocsla visitors grew ever more outre, as word spread, and Plexis ventured back into systems closer to home. Art critics came and wrote reviews both stunned and devastating. “Brilliant!” they said. “Innovative!” “Genius!” but also “Soulless.” “Contrived.” and “Complex to the point of falsity.”
And, in the end, she came, as he had hoped she would.
“Hello, Keevor,” she said, as if they had had just happened across each other at a garden party. “How have you been?”
They circled each other, tasting and leaving pheromone packets, messages, poems. Their ijva mixed, his golden trail layered on her silver one until they annealed into an amalgam of brass and yearning.
Missed you, his said, and swamp grass at midnight, and years like centuries and seconds.
Heard of you, hers said, and the other guy didn’t work out, and so impressed.
For you, he signaled, and love letters like grains of sand underfoot, sharp and hard and true, and trails that cross and cross and finally meet. Though her trail seemed plainer and shallower than he recalled.
Sand in the trail, and I’m a company manager now, and so dark.
She left after less than an hour. You’re so talented, she’d signaled at the end. I always knew you’d be something big. I have trouble with just the sales reports I write. I can’t imagine how you manage this. And the cost to you! I’d never be that brave. You’ve changed so. I just wish . . .
They both knew what she’d wished, and he’d been hard put to keep the anger from his ijva. He’d slithered over her trail until the words were gone, and she was back on her ship.
I wish it were more you.
* * *
• • •
“This is me!” he cried to the only person that would listen. “This is the me I made.”
“Is it?” asked Mae from behind her mask. She wore a paper coverall now, when she came to pick up the drugs. She shrugged. “Maybe it is. Now. I . . . whatever. Got to go.”
“Wait!” he cried. “Wait,” for all the world just like the day of his arrival, when he’d pleaded with her to let him stay.
She turned back, eyes like steel. “Wait for what? You have some new stink you want to try on me? Sorry, Keevor. I’m no critic. I can tell you now I won’t like it.”
How had it gone? There had been some alcohols, some aldehydes designed to react with oxygen on exposure. He slid forward, one cautious, uncertain step, and reared up to present his front foot.
She looked him over, her eyes doing the water trick they sometimes did, and reached a tentative, paper-gloved finger toward him. She touched his foot gingerly, and drew her hand back swiftly. She held it trembling before her nose.
“Now that’s some cinnamon,” she said haltingly, as the eye-water dripped into her mask. “It’s not good,” she said. “But it’s real.”
. . . Truffles continues
11
THE NIGHT ZONE abandoned us. Loud music and raucous enjoyment fled, along with shadow and stars as I stepped into what seemed daylight, typical of a sol-standard star. It wasn’t. On Plexis, the spectrum was chosen to show the goods on display at their best. For a price. Storefronts choosing another spectrum erected canopies and offered their own lights.
While portlights hovered over each planter.
As for the impact of such unnatural lighting on the variety of beings moving in the concourses? Morgan had shown me a sign at the tag station, hard to spot and in very small print, stating Plexis wasn’t responsible for the impact of any environmental condition within the station on visitors.
Shop at your own risk, in other words.
Some knew. Nrophrae huddled together under parasols—available for a fee—while spindly Trants basked. Most appeared unconcerned. Presumably, they wouldn’t notice any boils or burns until safely on their way.
I squinted until I could see properly and shrugged. Everywhere I’d gone with my Human, there’d been similar revelations, Morgan delighting in the how and the why of what everyone else took for granted. There were times I could wish my Human wasn’t so good at finding answers.
But didn’t. Ignorance led to mistakes, potentially dangerous ones. A lesson I’d learned for myself.
We were bound, as I’d guessed, to meet with a being Huido described variously as “despicable,” “a blight upon honest cooks,” and, rarely, “handy to know.” Keevor. The Every Kind Friendly Eatery was better known among spacers as Keevor’s Swill and Heave due to the chancy quality of the food and drink. Cheapest on Plexis.
Which said it all.
Less known—my Chosen made a point to be aware—neither food nor drink formed Keevor’s main product. His establishment contained a state-of-the-art laboratory which was the primary source of recreational drugs onstation, most well beyond the credits of working spacers, drugs that were species-specific and guaranteed. Customers for those, mostly gold airtags, used the discreet side door.
The rest used a gaping opening wide enough for two Carasians side by side, not that Plexis had seen such a thing. Beaded rope made a curtain I wouldn’t have touched with bare flesh if it meant parts for the Fox.
We arrived just as the trio of spacers I’d followed earlier pushed through the beads, two holding up the third who was, yes, heaving. A dreadful smell wafted out with them, suggesting the curtain itself was some type of containment field.
And that heaving was the least of what could be caused by a visit.
Morgan touched the back of my hand. A part of Plexis you needn’t experience, my Lady Witch. Aloud, “Wait here, chit.”
“If you’re going, I’m going.” Instinct approved, that growing imperative to protect our link. So did common sense. The place would be packed with inebriated spacers, the majority down-on-their-luck and desperate, the rest ready to prey on the unwary. “You might need a distraction.”
“But I don’t,” with emphasis. An unnecessary reminder of my Human’s ability to blend into any crowd, should he choose. Something, admittedly, I’d yet to learn.
Staying outside made sense. That didn’t mean I had to like it. I glowered my displeasure, then gave a short nod. Beneath: Be careful.
With a too-innocent look, Morgan put a hand over his breast. “Always.”
He laughed when I “humphed” in answer.
* * *
• • •
Standing alone outside Keevor’s, at a distance from either entrance, all at once I felt—different, as though I’d stepped out of a fog. While we had indeed walked and danced through any number of shared aerosols—something I preferred not to ponder deeply—that wasn’t it.
For the first time since leaving the safety of the Fox, I felt anticipation. I was here, on Plexis Supermarket, the most famous space station in the Trade Pact. At least within the Fringe. Famous enough.
With opportunities on every level. What sort of trader would hide away on their ship? Or worse, sit on a bench—especially a bench outside the Swill and Heave?
As co-owner of the Silver Fox, I reasoned, surely it was my du
ty to at least look at what was being offered.
I worked my way across the steady flow of beings without being trampled or giving offense, a success in itself, reaching the row of storefronts across from Keevor’s. This was the wholesaler’s district, where the goods on display were samples to entice traders like me—so I did my utmost to appear disinterested, fascinating as the displays were. Salesbeings lurked, ready to trot, slither, or lunge forth at the mere hint of a paying customer.
Pay, I couldn’t. Even if I could, our hold was full of truffles. Which, I thought cheerfully, narrowed my search to future trade items. If my selection impressed my captain, perhaps he’d ignore my latest misadventure with the plumbing, presently growing a tiny black puddle in the emergency air lock.
To my chagrin, the first display I encountered featured the only tech I’d no desire whatsoever to learn: servos.
On Plexis, servos were impossible to avoid. A bewildering multiplicity populated the maintenance tunnels—a machine-only world I knew better than most—while out on the concourses the more affluent used them to carry purchases, and/or themselves. Yes, they served, but that didn’t mean I enjoyed their company. The notion of machines with minds and purpose of their own made my skin crawl—in that I was still very Clan—much to Morgan’s amusement. My Human tried to convince me the Fox’s navsystem was such an enhanced device, but I’d noticed he didn’t let it speak, preferring to press buttons and insert trip tapes.
As for the display? Racks of the things swung from hooks overhead like so many dismembered body parts, implying one could put bits together to suit a required function. All of it cargo I did not want in our hold. With a shudder, I walked past.
My too-quick steps landed me in the midst of the live merchandise section. The smell was no worse than the night zone, Plexis insistent on that, but the plas crates and tanks stacked to either side contained organisms destined for consumption and most appeared well aware of their pending fates, protesting in an array of squeaks and howls, or curled in sullen lumps. Also not cargo for the Fox. As Hindmost, I’d trouble enough keeping vermin out of the hold, thank you.
The Clan Chronicles--Tales from Plexis Page 31
