Bourbon, Sugar, Grace

by Jessica Reisman

  * * *

  Fox’s usual salvage came from the closed mines and abandoned study sites; she scavenged things that facilitated the continuation of life in a settlement they’d only been meant to inhabit for, at most, a decade. Bits and pieces of prefabs and old equipment; there wasn’t anything of value beyond that to be had on Sloe—until this, whatever it was. Stupid. Damn you, Ryuu. And damn your ownself, too, Fox. Stupid.

  Out beyond the ring of combine atmos equipment sunk into the rock of Sloe, the small planet was not habitable at all without full deep space suit, kit, and sealed habs, items to which no inhabitant of Sloe had access.

  She came limping into Drumtown with the earliest suggestion of dawn scratching across the sky. As she reached the richer air of the settlement, she imagined she could feel the filament sigh in relief as its load lightened, boosted by Drumtown’s higher oxygen content. The squat buildings and blocky towers, all furred with algae, gained a brief grace in the light. Soon enough, as she made the shelter of her own tiny cubby on the dregs of her energy, the usual pall fell as the planet’s sun rose past the thick recursion of the assisted atmosphere.

  Falling onto her bunk, Fox lay still, just breathing, before she pulled off her gloves and struggled back up to get the med kit from the water closet, a few feet away. She grabbed a supplement bar, refilled the water bulb—long since emptied in the trek home—from the distiller, then hobbled back to the bunk.

  She was queasy, but ate the bar anyway, for grounding. Then she looked at her leg. Shit shit shit. She soaked a cloth in water with some biotics from the kit and put it over the place where the remains of the suit leg were stuck to her blistered skin.

  Fox sucked in a breath at the apprehension of pain, but pain stayed at a distance.

  Sweat dripping from her face and her hands trembling, she picked all the bits of the suit out, treated the burned sores, then sprayed the leg with synth bandage. She drank down more water and lay back trembling.

  Sliding a hand into the loosened front of the suit, Fox took out the rock and set it on the bed. As she withdrew her hand, pain from her leg bit so hard she cried out, sucking the yell back on a curse.

  Hand back on the object, pain receded.

  Fox fumbled several pain killers out of the med kit, downing them and staring at the rock, inert and innocuous-seeming on her bunk.

  Fox knew that, unlike Pisque in the story of the Sloe Ghost, she didn’t always do the right thing at the right time. She heard Administrant Jope’s voice in her head, graceless. Fox had fucked up, drinking when she shouldn’t. She moved out of the co-op before Jope could kick her out, leaving to save face for her moms, so they wouldn’t have to intervene.

  And now, looking at the rock and considering the small, deep tug she was beginning to feel for it, Fox dug out the bottle of alcohol she’d been saving. She knew it was the wrong thing to do, at the wrong time. But she needed that swallow of familiar, warm calm.

  It was a bottle of the mash liquor Ryuu made. He used the corn speciation the co-op grew in its hydroponics and aged it in scorched casks of wood—rare as rare could be, that—out of some gravity well. Fox had salvaged the casks from the remains of a storage fire. The resulting alcohol was dark and smelled like smoke and memory and drank far too easily.

  Sometime later, Fox lay on her stomach, the heavy slag glass bottle she’d been drinking from listing in one hand as she leaned on her elbows, examining the spiral amoeba in the rock.

  Several drops of amber liquor splashed onto it. The rock gave a tiny jolt, barely there, and the color in the crystalline spiral bled from indigo to gold, glowing briefly. Fox stared at it, waiting, but that was all. Once more it was inert, though touching it still played havoc with her senses, distancing the medication- and alcohol-dulled pain from her leg even further, bringing sounds from outside her cubby closer—the churning rhythm of the nearby turbines, her neighbors’ voices.

  * * *

  A few hours later, as Sloe’s short span of daylight sank into the long dusk of its twilight, Fox went to see Ryuu. She tucked the rock safe away on her person, not wanting to leave it in the cubby.

  As she came out a side door into the chill, a prickle across her shoulders and the backs of her hands made her keep to the darkest shadow in the alley. Leaning against one wall, the algae cold against her cheek, she watched two shapes enter her building—which was nothing more than three floors of cubbies—from the street. Blanchard and peeing man—his height and curved slouch were distinctive. And in Blanchard’s fingers, the wheezer glinted as she flipped it back and forth. Cold sweat shivered Fox’s skin, a flush of fear, her breath shortening merely in reaction.

  She pressed back against the algae, and then faded down the alley, slipping into the maze of unregulated structures sprawled up and down Drumtown’s cratered terrain. The structure with her cubby sat roughly center of town.

  Drumtown’s alleys and byways ran between makeshift, puzzle-boarded walls of printed metal alloy and scavenged mineshaft panels—some scavenged by Fox—patched with ceramsteel castings and haphazardly grown over with a chemical lattice for algae. The walls leaned close as Fox navigated a path. Scents of cooking and the humid fetor of humans living in what was essentially a closed and artificial atmospheric system. Clashing threads of music and conversation, argument and rhythms of activity reached her and, once, then twice, close, breathless words of intimacy.

  The fog drifted through Drumtown, familiar to Fox as the sound of her moms’ voices. Ryuu lived at the opposite edge of town from the co-op. Because the liquor Ryuu made provided a much needed pressure valve on Sloe’s population, what there was left of authority—the council—cut him some leeway in the matter of resource and energy consumption.

  Ryuu’s cave was an igneous bubble in the side of a crater, a rough curl of rock overhanging the entrance, where he’d put in an old ship panel as a wall, with a hatch for a door. Fox climbed over the lip and into the flicker of light from a metal sander as Ryuu worked on something. The cave had three chambers: this one, uneven walls dark green with algae, had a long table and shelves of tools, bits of tech, and the projects and jobs Ryuu was working on, all in various states of construction or deconstruction; the room at the back of the workshop, little bigger than Fox’s cubby, was his living space; and under that was a hole dug with bots where he distilled and aged the liquor.

  Ryuu bent over a sander, sparks and lines of light reflecting in the scratched visor obscuring his face.

  Fox waited until he took a break. Ryuu was comfortable and stolid, his skin the same light ochre as the striations in the formations of the Pyres. He and Fox were the same age; she’d known him forever.

  “Ryuu.”

  He looked around, visor reflecting light, shelves, then Fox, in a curve.

  “You get it?”

  Arms folded across her chest, Fox gave a nod.

  Ryuu sat back on his stool and lifted the faceplate to perch on his head. “What’s wrong?”

  “Ry, this thing is something … alive? Maybe? It’s…” Fox shook her head, chewed her lip. “And two combine flaks are looking for it. They came to my cubby.”

  Ryuu’s brows rose. “You’re—are you okay?”

  “They just missed me, I’m fine.”

  His gaze flickered to her leg, but he said only, “Huh,” and sat, clicking his tongue—thinking, Fox knew, but she wasn’t feeling patient.

  “Exactly what did the scientist who set you on this salvage say, Ry? These were combine flaks—they’ve never given a damn about any salvage before.”

  Fox suddenly remembered, picturing it in her head, the bottle she’d left on her bunk, a finger’s worth of dark liquor remaining, the little star and barrel symbol Ryuu etched into the slag glass as a label cutting a facet of light out of the dim.

  It wasn’t a secret where Sloe’s best liquor came from.

  “Shit.”

  “Yeah?”

  “They’re gonna come here.”

  “So”—Ryuu gesture
d with the hand not holding the sander—“I’ll contact the customer and we’ll do the handoff now; let the flaks hash it out with her. If they get here before, we just give it to them, yeah? It was a nice dream, getting new collectors for the co-op, but—” he shrugged.

  Fox rolled her shoulders, feeling angry and stubborn—downright recalcitrant, she heard Ohnee say in her head, as she had when Fox was small—and unsure why.

  Weird sense-manipulating qualities aside, even possible proto-life aside, it was just some salvage.

  * * *

  Ryuu’s scientist was in the med clinic, and had been since the train accident. Turned out, she’d been the one carrying the amoeba rock on the train.

  She was a woman with hard muscles under doughy flesh. Her pale hair was shaved close, her face an interesting cross between pointy-featured and flat-planed. Currently, she sported dark hollows under the eyes, cuts and bruises still showing under synth skin. Her left side was bandaged from waist to knee.

  The med clinic was in one of the original hab structures at the center of Drumtown. It smelled of the generations of algae that had lived and died on the walls, lattices replenished countless times.

  Fox and Ryuu stood by the scientist’s cot, nodding to the on-duty med tech as he cautioned them about tiring the patient and then left. Movable screens provided privacy, diffuse light slanting through the shadows from collector panes in the walls.

  “You have it?” These were the first words out of the scientist’s mouth. She had the irritated, querulous tone of someone who’d been laid up and rubbed raw by injury and inactivity.

  Ryuu looked at Fox and Fox shifted. She slid a hand into her pocket and grasped the rock, pulled it out, and then just stood, frozen.

  The scientist held out her hand. Fox’s hand with the rock in it stayed where it was, hovering.

  Slowly, the woman lowered her hand. She frowned. “It got to you, didn’t it?”

  Fox swallowed. “What is it?”

  The scientist grimaced, rubbing at a spot above her bandages. “I’m an astromaterials geophysicist. The combine has had me poking around in the closed mines and sites of geothermal reactivity”—the gurges, she meant—“for some time now. Since about the beginning of colony overstay.”

  She let that hang a moment. “Then I found that”—she lifted her chin toward it and hesitated before finishing—“rock. Near the gurge sinks of the Outlier.” The Outlier was mine number seven, furthest out from Drumtown.

  Fox rolled that around in her mind, clutching the amoeba rock and staring down at it.

  Ryuu, always quick to leap from fact to conclusion, said, “Are you telling us that rock is why the combine abandoned us here—hoping someone would find it?”

  With the rock in her hand, Fox could hear the scientist’s heart beating, the push of her blood, and sense Ryuu’s curiosity and concern as little touches and twitches on her skin.

  “The toxic lace at the Outlier is treacherous—and there were multiple meteor strikes recently, making it worse. The mine itself is off limits; but that’s where the combine told me to go.” Her mouth worked a moment, as if she would say more, but the words stuck in her throat. Instead, she picked up a worn, grimy link globe from beside the cot and cupped it in one shaking hand—shaking with rage, not weakness, Fox thought.

  “Outlier recording bex-alpha-eight.”

  The muted, layered colors of Sloe’s twilight sky and a stretch of barren terrain softened by low fog filled the space over the scientist’s cot. Whip sound of wind, hiss of sand over rock. It had been recorded from the shelter of the mine entry, it looked like, and the perspective put the link globe affixed to the scientist’s suit at the shoulder. A counter that seemed to hover in the middle distance along the bottom of the recording showed time elapsing, date, location coordinates.

  The feed turned into the mine entrance, beam cutting a hard angle over rock, into darkness.

  “Skip to index four-seven-nine,” the scientist said.

  The recording jumped. Down in the mine. The link globe’s beam showed rock debris, bits and pieces of the wreckage of the mine, then went around a fenced-off gurge sink, toxic heat waves smoking off it. Along a rock strewn corridor, more gurge disruptions and crumbling patches, to what looked like … it took Fox a moment to resolve what she was seeing: a section of mine wall had sheaved open like a split geode. A suggestion of faceted, rough crystal and a low-simmering glow came from within it.

  Fox held her breath as the recording led them inside the split. The rock and crystal flickered with a kind of luciferase veining through all the matter within.

  The scientist climbed over rough, veined cubes and facets of rock and crystal. The veining intensified to a knot at a central point in the heart of the split. Gloved hands hesitated before them, then reached into the heart of the veining, where the rock was crumbled into smaller cubes and rubble, and dug. What should have been hard rock matter sloughed away from the scientist’s hands, oily looking, fresh flickers of luciferase veining were revealed and then an oblong rock, the glinting in its rough surface fading as it came into the air. The scientist picked it up and turned it in gloved hands. The amoeboid spiral on one side was dark and rough, crystalline facets snagging the globe’s beam.

  The scientist switched off the globe and the holo image went out, leaving the med clinic dim and flat.

  “Whoa,” Ryuu breathed.

  “I was taking it to the only exo-biologist on planet; he’s shacked up with one of the mining techs still living out at Furrow’s end. And fucking Sloe tried to swallow the train,” she gestured at the cot.

  “That rock is the key to making the combine lift us off this rock—they want it, badly.” She looked up at Fox. “Whatever it is. It doesn’t matter if it’s—” She waved her hand.

  “If it’s what?” Ryuu said. When neither of them answered, he said, “Well fuck the combine anyway—we do all right for ourselves.”

  The scientist shook her head. “You have no idea how fragile our existence is.”

  “Course I do,” Ryuu said. “But it always is, yeah? There’s not that much more guarantee on a habitable planet, a station, or a spin ship.”

  “There’s far more guarantee, more opportunity, more civilized daily life—on any central planet or station—but you two wouldn’t remember that.” She shook her head. “You’re really Sloe’s children.”

  Fox held the rock, fingers curled around it. It was warmer, in the chill of Drumtown, than Fox’s own body heat could account for.

  Then she smelled a distinct, sharp funk and heard Blanchard’s voice, “You’re killing me, man, again?” as peeing man pissed against the outside wall of the med clinic.

  “Two flaks,” Fox said, “outside.” She lifted her chin. “They followed me somehow—they’re here for the rock, aren’t they?”

  The scientist cursed. “If they take it we have nothing to bargain with. We need it for leverage with the combine.” With a sharp gesture, she said, “Go.” When Fox hesitated, she flung out her hand. “Go. I’ll tell the flaks we need assurances from the combine.”

  * * *

  Fox and Ryuu slipped out another side of the clinic hab and into Drumtown’s maze. Ryuu peeled off to confuse things if the flaks followed, while Fox threaded the tangle of byways toward to the one place she knew that would both welcome her and provide a thin layer of security: the co-op where her moms lived.

  It was full dark, and though there were lights here and there, Fox navigated as much from memory, the map in her mind, as by sight. And the boost in her senses from the rock—every algae-furred wall was a presence she felt on her skin, the distant sift of wind over the open spaces surrounding town reached her, haunting as the voices of interstellar space.

  She came out past a series of jutting crater artifacts, curved and broken rock, to the ramp that went to the co-op’s entrance at the base of a silo, the landing site’s original equipment warehouse. A woman straightened from a slouch by the entry at the top of the ramp. />
  Fox had salvaged almost every panel and bolt of the ramp.

  “Ayo,” Fox greeted the woman and Ayo slung the puffer gun she carried back and resumed slouching with a lift of her chin in greeting. Her gaze returned to scanning the area before Fox passed her. Fox knew there was another guard, up above, in the shadows.

  Inside, the productive, ordered chaos of the co-op slipped around Fox, familiar as an old jacket. The silo had been converted over time with a ring of multiple levels. Variously salvaged and crafted walls and screens created cubbies and networked spaces for individuals and families, with community space, dedicated hydroponics, and workspace on the first level, from which there was a view all the way up past the circling floors to the silo’s domed, collector-paned roof. Sometimes, on rare, clear nights, you could see stars. Every wall or screen that could support it grew vertical crops of lettuce, beans, edible flowers, speciated rarities. The watering and reclamation systems were brutally complex.

  It was as quiet now as it generally ever got, most inhabitants settling in for the night. A child shrieked a laugh somewhere above. Fox nodded to several people, some working, some just sitting and talking; the late-burning hydroponic lights glowed behind crop-spiky walls.

  The stairs up to each level were more patchwork. The last set, to the top level where Fox’s moms had their place, creaked, in need of shoring. Down a short corridor, past two other cubbies, around a screen.

  Her moms sat at the little table, a covered oil lamp between them limning their hands and faces, Ohnee’s bush of hair, a sheen on Taf’s braids. The third chair was still there. Her moms kept it for guests, but it was also, always, Fox’s chair. She slid into it.

  “Hi, Foxy girl,” Ohnee said, a flash of teeth in her dark face, and Taf leaned over to wrap an arm around Fox’s shoulder and hug her to him, his warm scent—the speciated miniature sandalwood he grew in wall pots—calming. His hair was in two long braids and he wore his much mended kimono of fee silk that Fox had always loved. The worn silk was violet, originally stitched with tiny amber and green beads, though few of them remained, in figures that Taf said were foxes, the old earth mammal for which they’d named her.