alt.human (5 page)

“!¡
strong | assertive
¡! We weren’t rebelling against their presence,” said Callo. “We were defending ourselves. Everything had been fine until they started encroaching, squeezing us, steadily eradicating us. If things had carried on, we would have been wiped out in no time.”

She snorted at that.

A sudden dark blur flashed across my vision, and then hands seized my shoulders. The grip was strong, painful. I gasped and swallowed back a yelp of pain.

I felt my body pulling away from the niche, teetering.

My feet were still in contact with the rock-face... and then they were not.

I hung in mid-air, feet swinging, over a four-storey drop, held only by the powerful, painful grip on my shoulders.

I looked at my assailant, and Sol glowered back at me. She was a powerfully-built woman, but still, her strength surprised me. It felt as if her thumbs had gone right through the muscle of my shoulders and hooked themselves under the bone.

“!¡
controlled-anger
¡! Just give me one good reason why I’m still holding on to you,” she said.

I don’t know how, but I could
feel
that gulf of space beneath my dangling feet. “!¡
bowel-freeing fear
¡!” I clicked. “!¡
panic
¡!”

“!¡
calming
¡! Because you are his nest-mother and he is one of us,” said Callo softly. She put a hand on Sol’s arm and I saw the muscles twitch as if my nest-mother was about to release me into the void.

The moment seemed to draw itself out forever. I couldn’t breathe: for fear, for anger with myself at betraying my position, for anger at even having followed them in the first place.

I had been such a fool!

Sol glared deep into my eyes and it was as if her look was digging into my soul in the same way her thumbs and fingers were gouging into my shoulders.

Then she turned at the waist, dragging me roughly over the terrace wall.

She dropped me in a heap, and my legs hurt from striking the wall, and my head clanged like a clocktower bell from hitting the ground, and I cursed and cursed at myself for having ended up in such a position.

I
MUST HAVE
blacked out, briefly, because the next thing I knew I was sitting on a wooden bench on the terrace, Callo pressing a wet cloth against my head with a click of “!¡
sympathy
¡!”

They must have scanned me, as Marek said, “!¡
business-like
¡! Your pid-boy is clean. No bugs. No tracers.”

“!¡
reluctance
¡! That we know of,” said Sol. It was true: our scanners were good, but we could never be entirely sure they were up-to-date with whatever new tech or biota had just come in at the skystation.

“!¡
aggression
¡! So, why did you follow us here?” demanded Sol. “Why were you spying on us?”

I met her look. “!¡
defensive
¡! I wanted to know what was going on,” I said.

“!¡
anger | hierarchy-reinforcing
¡! That’s not your business,” she said, leaning so close to me that I swear I could feel the heat radiating from her flushed face.

“!¡
defensive | stubborn
¡! You had thirty or more people with false pids risking detention and worse today,” I said. “None of us knew why. We just had to trust your judgement that it was worth it...”

“!¡
superiority
¡! You just said it. I am your nest-mother and you have to trust my judgement. !¡
indignation
¡! I don’t have to defend my decisions to a nest-pup who believes he’s above his station!”

A calming hand on Sol’s arm from Callo again, distracting her, disrupting the outpouring of her anger. “Perhaps we should be harnessing the boy’s curiosity, not snuffing it out?” she said.

Sol glowered at her with a dismissive click from deep in her throat.

“!¡
calming
¡! It’s not as if we have any great secrets,” said Callo, her tone still soothing. Her voice was like a blanket, smothering any anger, impossible to resist. She was a woman with great wiles and depths, I realised. “Our only secret is that we survived Angiere.”

Marek joined in, then: “!¡
sensible
¡!All the rest will emerge soon enough. If word of Angiere’s destruction hasn’t already reached here, then it will do so soon. We cannot be the only survivors of the city’s final days.”

Sol turned away with clicks of barely suppressed anger and frustration.

The moment was broken by a streak of light across the northern sky, stabbing down at the skystation, like a needle-straight bolt of lightning. Another arrival from the stars, reminding me again of the vastness of what was beyond. There was not just a whole world I had barely seen, but space, the stars, the cosmos. I was not even a speck of dust in the vastness of it all.

Sol took a swig of the spirits they had been drinking, and visibly calmed.

“We need to prepare,” she said. “!¡
authority | resolve
¡! We need to be ready, without stirring up panic in the Ipp. Maybe Dodge can help, after all...”

I studied Sol closely. I had always looked up to her, but now she seemed right on the edge, unpredictable, volatile. I realised then that she was scared, and that did little to help settle my own nerves.

“!¡
cautious
¡! I heard some of what you were saying,” I said. “Angiere. How can we prepare for that if they turn on Laverne?”

Sol looked down. “!¡
defeat | frustration
¡! I don’t know,” she said softly.

“We don’t even know it’s coming here,” said the other woman, Pleasance. She was much quieter than the others, with a hesitant, nervy manner. “We don’t know why they hit Angiere, we don’t know what provoked it. We just don’t know.”

Her mate, Lucias, hugged her, squeezing her shoulders with his big hands.

I looked again to the north, the skystation, and remembered my earlier line of thinking. We were – all of us together – not even a dust speck on the face of the cosmos. Tiny. Insignificant. Things happened, on scales we couldn’t even imagine. At best, we were no more than rats, cockroaches, cowering in our little niches, feeding on the scraps of the greater races. We didn’t understand why suddenly someone was trying to stamp on us, or rather, why they had suddenly stamped on Angiere, and why should we? How could we?

“We don’t know that it’s
not
coming here, either,” I said. “We might not know why, we might not know when or even whether, but” – I nodded towards Sol, my nest-mother – “it’s what she said: all we can do is prepare, be ready to protect ourselves, or flee, or whatever it is that we’ll end up doing. We might not be in control of events, but we can try to ride them, turn tragedy into opportunity. It’s what we do. It’s what we do
well
.”

Callo was nodding. “You see?” she said to Sol. “Aren’t you glad you didn’t let him fall?”

L
ATER, THERE WERE
just four of us, and then Marek and Sol retreated into the villa and I was left alone on the terrace with Callo.

We stood leaning on the enclosing wall, watching the city lights, the silence between us comfortable. It felt like we already had a bond, forged at the transit station in that brief exchange of pids.

“There.” She pointed as another bolt of light split the sky, another arrival or departure at the skystation. In daylight you could see the ’station’s towers and gantries, reaching for the stars, but the nightly light-show was always more dramatic.

We had talked for a long time, so that now it would not be long before the eastern sky was afire with dawn. Slowly, I had built up a picture of what had happened at Angiere – the world beyond the city of Laverne was largely unknown to me, and this evening was one of the first times it had started to take form, like random tiles suddenly falling into place in a mosaic.

The most deadly strikes on Angiere had come from the sky, beam weapons burning entire blocks to glass, something I did not even know was possible. Squads of grunts had gone in too, snatching community leaders who may or may not have had some involvement in the opposition. The squads were a mix of orphids, craniates and chantras, overseen by watchers and chlicks.

When Marek had said this earlier, I’d interrupted. “!¡
confusion
¡! But today... at the transit station. You were with a chlick.” I remembered the being’s ancient features, remembered wondering how many generations of my own kind she-he must have lived through.

Marek had turned to me. “!¡
chiding
¡! There are good aliens,” he said, “and bad. Just like there are good people and bad. Just because Saneth-ra is a chlick, it doesn’t mean she-he’s the same as the chlicks who led the raids on Westwalk and Seagreen in Angiere.”

“Multiply that,” Callo had added, echoing the line of my own thoughts earlier. “!¡
awe
¡! Up there. Good, bad, all shades of the rainbow in between. !¡
sadness
¡! Motivations that are neither good nor bad but something else entirely, and something else, and something else. It’s hard to know what’s in one chlick’s head, let alone a million of them, a billion. Alien minds hold thoughts that we could never form, just as our minds hold thoughts that they could not shape.”

“This is how it is,” said Sol. “Aye, this is how it is.”

So later, when the others had retired and it was just me and Callo pointing at the starship’s sky-trail and being reminded again of the scale of things, I said, “Sometimes... !¡
tentative
¡! Sometimes I wonder how we hang on. Like cockroaches.” Had I said this already earlier, or just thought it? “Why they let us survive at all...”

“‘Let us’?” asked Callo, turning to me with a click of humour. I had not really paid much attention to her before. A woman maybe ten years my senior, she was a handspan shorter than me but gave the impression of being taller, something to do with the authority in her voice and manner. Her dark hair had a coppery tone to it, her eyes green, her skin a pale olive.

After a brief silence she continued. “They don’t let us hang on, Dodge. That’s not how it is. Whose planet do you think this is? Whose territory?”

“!¡
awkwardness | distraction | attraction
¡! I... Well...” Talking in click betrays much. It’s hard to conceal your immediate responses and I was thrown by my sudden reassessment of this refugee from a destroyed city.

“!¡
humour | interest
¡! It’s ours, Dodge. All of it. We are the indigenes. This is our home, and yet we are confined to Ipps and the wilderness.”

I shrugged. I didn’t know how to respond. As I say, I never was a one with high principles; I had no agenda, no manifesto other than to survive as comfortably as possible. I was no revolutionary.

“We shouldn’t be hiding in the shadows, Dodge. We shouldn’t be waiting for them to eradicate us, like they did in Angiere. Just think: what might we have been if we weren’t over-run by aliens? What is our true potential? And why do they want to snuff it out now?”

Chapter Five

I
DREAMED OF
her that night. I dreamed of her soft authority and of how she could arouse herself to sudden intensity and passion, and of the fire that sometimes roared but always smouldered deep within her.

I dreamed of her kiss.

The night had ended shortly after that exchange. I looked into her eyes and realised that she was exhausted, kept awake only by the heat of her words and the tail end of the day’s adrenalin. There were faint crow’s feet radiating from the corners of her eyes, but otherwise her skin was flawless, a smooth olive tone that ran to dark pools beneath each eye.

“Thank you, Dodge,” she said.

For a moment I wondered what she was thanking me for, and then I realised she was thanking me again for my role at the transit station, for getting her through that final barrier on her escape from the destruction of her home city.

I shrugged, then looked away with a click of awkwardness.

“You’re special,” she said. “!¡
sincere
¡! Do you realise that? Really special.”

I felt like an awkward teenager then, out of my depth.

“!¡
dismissive
¡! No...”

She put a hand to my cheek, her touch soft, almost imperceptible.

Her lips pressed against mine, firm and cool, over in an instant. I flinched, surprised, and clicked, “!¡
fear | excitement
¡!”

I reached for her but she had turned, stepped away, and almost before I could react she was pausing at the entrance to the villa, dipping her head to me in parting, and then she was gone.

I could taste her on my lips still. I could close my eyes and feel the pressure of her mouth on mine.

I went down through the caverns and found my way to a sleeping chamber; for what little remained of the night, I slept on my rock shelf and dreamed of the woman from Angiere.

I
WAS WOKEN
by Immy, one of the pups I sometimes looked after at Villa Mart Three. Small hands on my shoulders, like pincers or birds’ claws, shaking me vigorously. I woke, shards of dream slipping away, and saw Immy’s sharp little face looming too close to mine.

“!¡
urgency | importance
¡! Mama Sol wants you,” she shrilled.

“Huh? !¡
alarm
¡! What... what is it?” Visions flooded in of swarming black flies destroying everything in their wake, of beams from the sky that turned all below to molten glass.

“!¡
dismissive
¡! Has a job for you. Lazy Dodge, silly Dodge.”

I found Sol in the main chamber, sharing a mug of tea with a man I vaguely knew as a street trader from the Pennysway Ipp.

Sol broke off from her conversation when I arrived, and said, “Got a job for you, boy.” She produced a fold of paper, sealed with wax. “Run this over to the Loop. It’s for Boss Frankhay. Only for his eyes, eh?”

A message. Running errands. I looked at it, took it, tucked it into the front pocket of my breeches. Was this punishment for my foolishness the night before? Was it some kind of test, to see how I would react? Was it the first step in preparing for the worst?