alt.human (9 page)

I thought of the night on the terrace at Villa Mart Three, the kiss. She hadn’t even met my eye since my return.

“!¡
earnest
¡! It is,” said Saneth. “!¡
directing-juniors
¡! You must protect your own. You must protect what you have that is special and sacred.”

“!¡
hesitant
¡! I saw it all in Satinbower,” I said. “They must have slaughtered hundreds in the crowd, and flattened whole blocks.”

Saneth paused, and I realised she-he was consulting some data-source. “!¡
factual reporting
¡! Thirty-six humans were killed during the incident. One additional death by heart failure could not be directly attributed. One building was damaged. This was the Satinals’ clan-nest on Red and Hythe.”

“So I exaggerated...”

Saneth slowly turned that mod eye to face me. I felt as if the eye’s tiny black pupil was drilling through me. I swallowed, chilled, even though I knew there was some kind of phreaking involved, subtle mood-shifters making me feel tiny and insignificant before the ancient, lauded one.

“!¡
admonishing junior scholar
¡! You must be required to consider this with due gravity,” the chlick said slowly. “Those of your type in Angiere learned to do so. !¡
inappropriate humour
¡! There are better ways to learn than the way they learned.”

“!¡
confrontation
¡! Why?” I asked. “Why are they doing this?”

It was Marek who answered. He seemed to be the leader of the four refugees, a tall man, with sharp bones and a trimmed line of dark beard down his jaw. “This is what we have been trying to establish,” he said. “But with all due respect” – he nodded to the chlick – “how can we possibly know what is in the mind of an alien?”

“!¡
concurrence
¡!” clicked Saneth. “!¡
humouring junior
¡! Just as it is hard for one such as we to see what occupies the mental processes of the human variety.” She-he said this like a man talking to a lesser being, to a dog or a goat.

“So why...?”

“!¡
authority
¡! As Marek says,” said Callo. “It’s almost impossible to understand. Saneth knows a little, but there are so many factions and species. We observe their actions, we see what they do, but we do not see why. They want to weed us out. They want to find some of us and kill the rest. It’s like some kind of harvest.”

“Others just appear to want to kill us,” added Marek. “All of us, regardless of who or what we are. It is as if humankind is a pest to be eradicated, a nuisance. That’s what ended up happening at Angiere.”

“!¡
tentative
¡! Maybe they’re scared of us,” I said.

Marek barked a short laugh, but was silenced by an impatient slap-click from Saneth.

“!¡
encouraging junior scholar
¡! It is a possibility that they are scared of what you might become,” the chlick said. “It is a possibility that they are scared that you may be special. Lauded-one Saneth-ra contains within both the she and the he; what potentials does the scholar pup Dodge and those who are like him hold within? It is a possibility that they fear that you may be what they could never be.”

Chapter Eight

S
PECIAL.

Let me tell you about special.

Hope was special. That girl with the honey-brown bangs and the look in her eye that would stop a man in his tracks with his heart racing and his mouth dry. The girl whose memories started with darkness and an explosion of voices in her head. The girl with no pids, no identity, nothing. The girl who had survived an attack that had turned a seaside hospital into a lake of melted black glass.

Hope.

T
HERE WAS A
road leading away from the beach, and she walked along its blistered asphalt surface. The road was narrow as it cut through the dunes, away from a small parking and recharge area. On leaving the beach, the road was bounded by tall, dark hedges that kept the day’s sun from her.

The night in the dunes had been cold and full of strange noises: birds piping on the beach and in the air above; the occasional drone of a troopship, its lights dancing over the sea; the whistling and drumming of the wind in her ears. None of it was enough to smother the voices in her head.

The road led to a larger highway, this one with traffic, and that scared her. Those who had attacked the hospital had departed in troopships, but what if there were others travelling by ground transport? Or road blocks to keep the curious away? In her institutional sleeveless shirt and bare feet, she must look like an escapee.

She did not want to be caught by the beings who had burned the hospital to glass.

On the highway, cars like translucent teardrops passed at great speed, while heavy goods transporters rumbled more slowly along the paired central tracks. In the near lane, occasional horse-drawn wagons passed. It was one of these that took her to the city, the old driver insisting that she ride with him because he was easily bored, and she had a nice voice for chatting and she would make the dull scenery so much more attractive.

She didn’t say much, and in her tattered, grubby shirt she was hardly a pretty sight, but the man made her smile, and that was good, because she had not felt capable of smiling at all until he had stopped for her.

T
WEEN WAS NOT
quite an Indigenous Peoples’ Preserve, but generally the aliens treated it like one, ignoring what went on there. It was a grey zone in the city of Angiere, a margin, a quarter where everyone turned a blind eye.

This suited Hope perfectly.

She slept in a little square of parkland that first night, one of the clanless, one of the unaffiliated. She was not the only one who slept there.

She had a blanket now, given to her by the old man who had brought her to the city on his wagon. He had great heaps of them in the back, neatly folded and rolled and secured with string ties. That was his trade, blankets. During an evening of wandering aimlessly from street to street, she had worn hers as a shawl, but at night it was large enough to wrap herself in, like a scratchy cocoon.

In the darkness, the voices were a constant murmur, the jostle and bustle of a crowd all trapped in her head.

The sound was almost soothing, like ocean waves, but that was even worse. She didn’t like to be lulled by them.

She roamed through Tween the next morning. Early, there were wagons pulled up to shops and bars, delivering fresh supplies and taking away debris from the night before. The buildings were tall and narrow here, made of tiny clay bricks, and many of them painted with flowers and the sun and moon and stars, birds and people and all manner of strange beings.

She came to a bar, a corner-building with thick, distorting glass in its windows and a frontage of dark, varnished wood. As Hope passed, the door burst open and a woman staggered out, belching and giggling. She paused, straightened her almost non-existent wraparound skirt, gave Hope a big leery grin and staggered off along a side-street.

The door had stuck, half-open, and Hope peered into the gloom. There was pipe music and laughter and the overpowering smells of beer and smoke and heady, woozy phreaks.

She was not sure if these people had started drinking early today, or if they were still here from the night before.

A man in a skimpy vest, skinny as a straw, had one arm draped around an alien, or maybe another man with add-on alien parts – grafts, body-mods, growths. The thing turned to face the first man and Hope saw that it was a man, too, after all, the face human with pale features and a wisp of a moustache. He blew smoke into his partner’s face, and then their mouths met, locked, ground together.

A woman walked across Hope’s line of view. She wore only tiny black underwear, and her tattooed body was pierced so much that she jingled as she moved. Alien pods were attached down her spine, as if feeding on her, giving out little puffs of phreak as she moved and jangled and her tattoos swirled as if they were alive and her hair was snakes, writhing and twisting, and Hope realised that something had got to her, a vapour, a phreak, something had latched into her brain and... and...

“!¡
friendly
¡! You coming in?”

It was a man. Tall. Pale. He had big brown eyes and dark hair that ran down along his jaw in a neatly trimmed beard.

She glanced sideways, along the street where the belching, giggling woman had gone. She took a step backwards.

“!¡
friendly
¡! We don’t bite,” said the man. “!¡
humorous
¡! Well, you know...”

Hope relented. The man was doing friendly, like the old man on the wagon had done friendly earlier. That had worked out. She’d got a blanket out of that, now draped across her shoulders against the morning chill.

“Drink?”

In the bar now, the man held an arm as if to put it across her shoulders where the shawl was, to guide her, engulf her. Instead, he held his arm back, ushered her in.

She went to stand at the bar.

“I... I have nothing,” she said. “Just a shirt.” And the blanket.

“!¡
soothing
¡! So I see,” said the man. Then: “Hey, Ubrey,” to the bald man behind the bar. Ubrey was standing there, watching his left hand as it turned almost a full turn, then back the other way, over and over, over and over. There was something mechanical about it, and then Hope realised the barman had a prosthetic arm, and there was something wrong with it. At the other man’s call, Ubrey straightened and let his arm drop, the broken hand still rotating back and forth.

“!¡
business-like
¡! Get the girl a drink, would you? Beer? And maybe a ham fold?”

Hope turned to him. “Thank you,” she said.

The man already had a drink on the bar. He took a long draw at it and a line of froth stuck to his upper lip. “You looked lost,” he said, leading Hope to a table in a dark corner. “And you’re wearing an infirmary gown beneath that raggy blanket. !¡
curious
¡! I bet you have a story to tell.”

“I don’t know,” she said. She did not know what her story was. Her head was full of a clamour of voices. That was her world, her story.

“!¡
cautious
¡! I know people,” the man said carefully. “They tell me there was an infirmary, down the coast at a place called Anders Bars. A military place run by watchers. The kind of establishment they keep quiet and which never appears on maps. !¡
pressing
¡! The kind of place someone might escape from with only the clothes on her back and not much idea what was going on.”

The voices in her head were like a hammer. She slumped forward, catching herself on the wooden table between her and the man who knew too much.

Her head was spinning, her mouth dry; when she looked up a woman was looming over her: the woman she’d seen before, all tattoos and piercings and breasts bulging out of a low-cut shelf bra. “Your food and your drink, my love,” said the woman. “And if Marek here’s bugging you, just tell me and I’ll have his nuts on a dinner plate. Okay?” She smiled, tweaked Marek’s ear, and returned to the bar.

“!¡
calming
¡! It’s okay,” said Marek. “Eat your food. I promise I won’t keep bugging you. You can trust me, please. Eat.”

She looked down, saw a napkin with a meat-filled fold of flat bread on it and a tall mug of beer.

She ate.

She could not remember the last time she had eaten. It must have been at the infirmary, she guessed.

“They burned it,” she said, eventually. “Anders Bars. The infirmary. It’s gone. Destroyed.”

Marek nodded. “!¡
encouraging
¡! So we’d heard. It’s not the first place they’ve wiped out, and it won’t be the last. You want to know how I worked out you must have come from there?”

He was smiling, clicking reassuringly.

Hope just looked at him, as she chewed her ham fold.

“!¡
mildly disconcerted
¡! Your top,” he said, gesturing with a hand. “It says ‘ABI’ on the collar. Anders Bars Infirmary. We really must find some new clothes for you.”

Hope glanced down, saw the letters. She hadn’t noticed them before, had not really had any cause to look at herself except to note the goosebumps on her arms the day before.

“I have no money,” she said. This man might be doing friendly, but she knew that there were usually limits to friendly. She could not get new clothes without trading something.

He waggled his head from side to side. “!¡
reassuring
¡! I know some people,” he said. “Some people who would like very much to hear your story. They will take care of you in return.”

Trading. She understood trading. She would give and they would give in return. She could do that.

W
ITHIN A SHORT
time, Hope had established herself in Tween. She paid attention to people, and here she learnt that this was something that most people did not do: they cared about themselves, their own needs, their own voice being heard. Hope listened. She responded. She fitted in.

One day she woke to Marek moving around the tiny room he had found for her. He wore only a tiny pair of under-shorts, enough to cover his bony arse and his pencil-thin cock.

This morning he wasn’t doing friendly.

He didn’t usually stop over, but last night there had been a disturbance in the Tween and he had shown up long after curfew, breathing raggedly and limping. She had gone to the window immediately to see if there was any sign that he had been followed. She knew to do this, although she did not know what it was that he did on nights like this when he was out with a shadowy group he called the Vanguard. There’d been lights over the Tween. Sentinels buzzing the rooftops with flashes and bolts of blue; a troopship hanging heavy in the air above the Citadel, white beams tracking movements in the streets.

“Trouble?” She rarely asked questions, but that night his excited demeanour had almost seemed to demand it of her.