by Kij Johnson
“Fuck,” I sighed.
“Would you like to peruse their reputation notes?” the harbormaster asked. And for a moment, I thought maybe the harbormaster sounded concerned.
No. He was just being fair. He’d spent two hundred years of bargaining with ships for goods, fuel, repair, services. Fair was built-in, the half-computer half-human creature in front of me was all about fair. Fair got you repeat business. Fair got you a wide reputation.
“What’s the offer?”
“Half a point on the package,” the harbormaster said.
“And we don’t know what the package is, or how long it will take . . . or anything.” I bit my lip.
“They assured me that half a point would pay off your debt and then some. It shouldn’t take more than a year.”
A year. For half a percent. Half a percent of what? It could be cargo they were delivering. Or, seeing as it was a crew of scientists, it could be some project they were working on.
All of which just raised more questions.
Questions I wouldn’t have answers to unless I signed up. I sighed. “That’s it, then? No loans? No extensions?”
The harbormaster sighed. “I answer to the Gheda shareholders who built and own this complex. I have already stretched my authority to give you a month’s extension. The debt has to be called. I’m sorry.”
I looked out at the darkness of space out beyond Ops. “Shit choices either way.”
The harbormaster said nothing.
I folded my arms. “Do it.”
Journey by Gheda
The docking arms had transferred the starship from the center structure’s incoming docks down a spoke to a dock on one of the wheels. The entire ship, thanks to being spun along with the wheel of the station, had gravity.
The starship was a quarter of a mile long. Outside: sleek and burnished smooth by impacts with the scattered dust of space at the stunning speeds it achieved. Inside, I realized I’d boarded a creaky, old, outdated vehicle.
Fiberwire spilled out from conduits, evidence of crude repair jobs. Dirt and grime clung to nooks and crannies. The air smelled of sweat and worst.
A purple-haired man with all-black eyes met me at the airlock. “You are the Friend?” he asked. He carried a large walking stick with him.
“Yes.” I let go of the rolling luggage behind me and bowed. “I’m Alex.”
He bowed back. More extravagantly than I did. Maybe even slightly mockingly. “I’m Oslo.” Every time he shifted his walking stick, tiny grains of sand inside rattled and shifted about. He brimmed with impatience, and some regret in the crinkled lines of his eyes. “Is this everything?”
I looked back at the single case behind me. “That is everything.”
“Then welcome aboard,” Oslo said, as the door to the station clanged shut. He raised the stick, and a flash of light blinded me.
“You should have taken a scan of me before you shut the door,” I said. The stick was more than it seemed. Those tiny rustling grains were generators, harnessing power for whatever tools were inside the device via kinetic motion. He turned around and started to walk away. I hurried to catch up.
Oslo smiled, and I noticed tiny little fangs under his lips. “You are who you say you are, so everything ended up okay. Oh, and for protocol, the others aren’t much into it either, by the way. Now, for my own edification, you are a hermaphrodite, correct?”
I flushed. “I am what we Friends prefer to call bi-gendered, yes.” Where the hell was Oslo from? I was having trouble placing his cultural conditionings and how I might adapt to interface with them. He was very direct, that was for sure.
This gig might be more complicated than I thought.
“Your Friend training: did it encompass Compact cross-cultural training?”
I slowed down. “In theory,” I said slowly, worried about losing the contract if they insisted on having someone with Compact experience.
Oslo’s regret dripped from his voice and movements. Was it regret that I didn’t have the experience? Would I lose the contract, minutes into getting it? Or just regret that he couldn’t get someone better? “But you’ve never Friended an actual Compact drone?”
I decided to tell the truth. A gamble. “No.”
“Too bad.” The regret sloughed off, to be replaced with resignation. “But we can’t poke around asking for Friends with that specific experience, or one of our competitors might put two and two together. I recommend you brush up on your training during the trip out.”
He stopped in front of a large, metal door. “Where are we going?” I asked.
“Here is your room for the next three days.” Oslo opened the large door to a five-by-seven foot room with a foldout bunk bed.
My heart skipped a beat, and I put aside the fact that Oslo had avoided the question. “That’s mine?”
“Yes. And the air’s billed with our shipping contract, so you can rip your sensors off. There’ll be no accounting until we’re done.”
I got the sense Oslo knew what it was like to be in debt. I stepped into the room and turned all the way around. I raised my hands, placing them on each wall, and smiled.
Oslo turned to go.
“Wait,” I said. “The harbormaster said you were freelance scientists. What do you do?”
“I’m the botanist,” Oslo said. “Meals are in the common passenger’s galley. The crew of this ship is Gheda, of course, don’t talk to or interact with them if you can help it. You know why?”
“Yes.” The last thing you wanted to do was make a Gheda think you were wandering around, trying to figure out secrets about their ships, or technology. I would stay in the approved corridors and not interact with them.
The door closed in my suite, and I sat down with my small travel case, no closer to understanding what was going on than I had been on the station.
I faced the small mirror by an even smaller basin and reached for the strip of black material stuck to my throat. Inside it, circuitry monitored my metabolic rate, number of breaths taken, volume of air taken in, and carbon dioxide expelled. All of it reported back to the station’s monitors, constantly calculating my mean daily cost.
It made a satisfying sound as I ripped it off.
“Gheda are Gheda,” I said later in the ship’s artificial, alien day over reheated turkey strips in the passenger’s galley. We’d undocked. The old ship had shivered itself up to speed. “But Gheda flying around in a beat-up old starship, willing to take freelance scientists out to some secret destination: these are dangerous Gheda.”
Oslo had a rueful smile as he leaned back and folded his arms. “Cruzie says that our kind used to think our corporations were rapacious and evil before first contact. No one expected aliens to demand royalty payments for technology usage that had been independently discovered by us because the Gheda had previously patented that technology.”
“I know. They hit non-compliant areas with asteroids from orbit.” Unable to pay royalties, entire nations had collapsed into debtorship. “Who’s Cruzie?”
Oslo grimaced. “You’ll meet her in two days. Our linguist. Bit of a historian, too. Loves old Earth shit.”
I frowned at his reaction. Conflicted, but with somewhat warm pleasure when he thought about her. A happy grimace. “She’s an old friend of yours?”
“Our parents were friends. They loved history. The magnificence of Earth. The legend that was. Before it got sold around. Before the Diaspora.” That grimace again. But no warmth there.
“You don’t agree with their ideals?” I guessed.
I guessed well. Oslo sipped at a mug of tea, and eyed me. “I’m not your project, Friend. Don’t dig too deep, because you just work for me. Save your empathy and psychiatry for the real subject. Understand?”
Too far, I thought. “I’m sorry. And just what is my project? We’re away from the station now; do you think you can risk being open with me?”
Oslo set his tea down. “Clever. Very clever, Friend. Yes, I was worried about bug
s. We’ve found a planet, with a unique ecosystem. There may be patentable innovations.”
I sat, stunned. Patents? I had points on the package. If I got points on a patent on some aspect of an alien biological system, a Gheda-approved patent, I’d be rich.
Not just rich, but like, nation-rich.
Oslo sipped at his tea. “There’s only one problem,” he said. “There may be intelligent life on the planet. If it’s intelligent, it’s a contact situation, and we have to turn it over to the Gheda. We get a fee, but no taste of the real game. We fail to report a contact situation and the Gheda find out, it’s going to be a nasty scene. They’ll kill our families, or even people you know, just to make the point that their interstellar law is inviolate. We have to file a claim the moment of discovery.”
I’d heard hesitation in his voice. “You haven’t filed yet, have you?”
“I bet all the Gheda business creatures love having you watch humans they’re settling a contract with, making sure they’re telling the truth, you there to brief them on what their facial expressions are really showing.”
That stung. “I’d do the same for any human. And it isn’t just contracts. Many hire me to pay attention to them, to figure them out, anticipate their needs.”
Oslo leered. “I’ll bet.”
I wasn’t a fuckbot. I deflected the leering. “So tell me, Oslo, why I’m risking my life, then?”
“We haven’t filed yet because we honestly can’t fucking figure out if the aliens are just dumb creatures, or intelligences like us,” Oslo said.
The Drone
“Welcome to the Screaming Kettle,” said the woman who grabbed my bag without asking. She had dark brown skin and eyes, and black hair. Tattoos covered every inch of skin free of her clothing. Words in scripts and languages that I didn’t recognize. “The Compact Drone is about to dock as well, we need you ready for it. Let’s get your stuff stowed.”
We walked below skylights embedded in the top of the research station. A planet hung there: green and yellow and patchy. It looked like it was diseased with mold. “Is that Ve?” I asked.
“Oslo get you up to speed?” the woman asked.
“Somewhat. You’re Cruzie, right?”
“Maricruz. I’m the linguist. I guess . . . you’re stuck here with us. You can call me Cruzie too.” We stopped in front of a room larger than the one on the ship. With two beds.
I looked at the beds. “I’m comfortable with a cubby, if it means getting my own space,” I said.
There was far more space here, vastly so. And yet, I was going to have to share it? It rankled. Even at the station, I hadn’t had to share my space. This shoved me up against my own cultural normative values. Even in the most packed places in space, you needed a cubby of one’s own.
“You’re here to Friend the Compact Drone,” Cruzie said. “It’ll need companionship at all times. Their contract requires it for the Drone’s mental stability.”
“Oslo didn’t tell me this.” I pursed my lips. A fairly universal display of annoyance.
And Cruzie read that well enough. “I’m sorry,” she said. But it was a lie as well. She was getting annoyed and impatient. But screw it, as Oslo pointed out: I wasn’t there for their needs. “Oslo wants us to succeed more than anything. Unlike his parents, he’s not much into the glory that was humankind. He knows the only way we’ll ever not be freelancers, scrabbling around for intellectual scraps found in the side alleys of technology for something we can use without paying the Gheda for the privilege, is to hit something big.”
“So he lied to me.” My voice remained flat.
“He left out truths that would have made you less willing to come.”
“He lied.”
Cruzie shut the door to my room. “He gave you points on the package, Friend. We win big, you do your job, you’ll never have to check the balance on your air for the rest of your damned life. I heard you were in air debt, right?”
She’d put me well in place. We both knew it. Cruzie smiled, a gracious winner’s smile.
“Incoming!” Someone yelled from around the bend in the corridor.
“I’m not going to fuck the Drone,” I told her levelly.
Cruzie shrugged. “I don’t care what you do or don’t do, as long as the Drone stays mentally stable and does its job for us. Points on the package, Alex. Points.”
Airlock alarms flashed and warbled, and the hiss of compressed air filled the antechamber
“The incoming pod’s not much larger than a cubby sleeper,” Oslo said, his purple hair waving about as another burst of compressed air filled the antechamber. He smiled, fangs out beyond his lips. “It’s smaller than the lander we have for exploring Ve ourselves, if we ever need to get down there. Can you imagine the ride? The only non-Gheda way of traveling!”
The last member of the team joined us. She looked over at me and nodded. Silvered electronic eyes glinted in the flash of the airlock warning lights. She flexed the jet black fingers of her artificial right hand absentmindedly as she waited for the doors to open. She ran the fingers of a real hand over her shaved head, then put them back in her utility jacket, covered with what seemed like hundreds of pockets and zippers.
“That’s Kepler,” Cruzie said.
The airlock doors opened. A thin, naked man stumbled out, dripping goopy blue acceleration gel with each step.
For a moment his eyes flicked around, blinking.
Then he started screaming.
Oslo, Kepler, and Cruzie jumped back half a step from the naked man’s arms. I stepped forward. “It’s not fear, it’s relief.”
The man grabbed me in a desperate hug, clinging to me, his hands patting my face, shoulders, as if reassuring himself someone was really standing in front of him. “It’s okay,” I whispered. “You’ve been in there by yourself for days, with no contact of any sort. I understand.”
He was shivering in my grip, but I kept patting his back. I urged him to feel the press of contact between us. And reassurance. Calm.
Eventually he calmed down, and then slowly let go of me.
“What’s your name?” I asked.
“Beck.”
“Welcome aboard, Beck,” I said, looking over his shoulder at the scientists who looked visibly relieved.
First things first.
Beck got to the communications room. Back and forth verification on an uplink, and he leaned back against the chair in relief.
“There’s an uplink to the Hive,” he said. “An hour of lag time to get as far back as the home system, but I’m patched in.”
He tapped metal inserts on the back of his neck. His mind plugged in to the communications network, talking all the way back to the asteroid belt in the mother system, where the Compact’s Hive thrived. Back there, Beck would always be in contact with it without a delay. In instant symbiosis with a universe of information that the Compact offered.
A hive-mind of people, your core self subjugated to the greater whole.
I shivered.
Beck never moved more than half a foot away from me. Always close enough to touch. He kept reaching out to make sure I was there, even though he could see me.
After walking around the research station for half an hour, we returned to our shared room.
He sat on his bed, suddenly apprehensive. “You’re the Friend, correct?”
“Yes.”
“I’m lonely over here. Can you sleep by me?”
I walked over and sat next to him. “I won’t have sex with you. That’s not why I’m here.”
“I’m chemically neutered,” Beck said as we curled up on the bed. “I’m a drone.”
As we lay there, I imagined thousands of Becks sleeping in rows in Hive dorms, body heat keeping the rooms warm.
Half an hour later he suddenly sighed, like a drug addict getting a hit. “They hear me,” he whispered. “I’m not alone.”
The Compact had replied to him.
He relaxed.
The room filled wi
th a pleasant lavender scent. Was it something he’d splashed on earlier? Or something a Compact drone released to indicate comfort?
What’s Human?
“That,” Kepler said, leaning back in a couch before a series of displays, “is one of our remote-operated vehicles. We call them urchins.”
In the upper right hand screen before her, a small sphere with hundreds of wriggling legs rotated around. Then it scrabbled off down what looked like a dirt path.
Cruzie swung into a similar couch. “We sterilize them in orbit, then drop them down encased in a heatshield. It burns away, then they drop down out of the sky with a little burst of a rocket to slow down enough.”
I frowned at one of the screens. Everything was shades of green and gray and black. “Is that night vision?”
Oslo laughed. “It’s Ve. The atmosphere is chlorinated. Green mists. Grey shadows. And black plants.”
The trees had giant, black leaves hanging low to the ground. Tubular trunks sprouted globes that spouted mist randomly as the urchin brushed past.
“Ve’s a small planet,” Kepler said. “Low gravity, but with air similar to what you would have seen on the mother world.”
“Earth,” Oslo corrected.
“But unlike the mother world,” Kepler continued, “Ve has high levels of chlorine. Somewhere in its history, a battle launched among the plants. Instead of specializing in oxygen to kill off the competition, and adapting to it over time, plant life here turned to chlorine as a weapon. It created plastics out of the organic compounds available to it, which is doable in a chlorine-heavy base atmosphere, though remarkable. And the organic plastics also handle photosynthesis. A handy trick. If we can patent it.”
On the screen the urchin rolled to a slow stop. Cruzie leaned forward. “Now if we can just figure out if those bastards are really building a civilization, or just random dirt mounds . . . ”
Paused at the top of a ridge, the urchin looked at a clearing in the black-leafed forest. Five pyramids thrust above the foliage around the clearing.
“Can you get closer?” Beck asked, and I jumped slightly. He’d been so silent, watching all this by my side.
“Not from here,” Kepler said. “There’s a big dip in altitude between here and the clearing.”
