Near + Far (31 page)

I don't know, Six said. Torture me if you like, as they did, and I will tell you everything I told them, which was nothing.

The Interrogator leaned still further in, pressing harder, smelling the scents it gave off while sunk deep in pain. Finally the touch pulled back, and Six was alone again.

The act was repeated every few hours. In the dim light of the cell, as the cycles passed, as it came again and again, severed limbs began to regrow, and the places where they had pried away pieces of carapace healed and thickened, except for the tormented spot the Interrogator had chosen, ulcerated and sore, not healing.

Long after Six's regenerated limbs could flex as their predecessors once had, Five was allowed to see it. It stood well away, flanked by guards, so Six could not touch it from where it lay bound, no matter how it yearned toward its clutch-mate.

It asked the same question the Interrogator had. Why was Six still alive? One and Three had accomplished their mission, it said, and Four had died in a similar operation. Only Two and Five were left. But now they were suspect, clutch-mates of a renegade and no longer trusted soldiers. They had found work as cleaners, and subsisted on the gruel fed to drones, barely enough to keep their specialized frames alive. Five's eyes were dull, its delicate claws blunted from rough work. It did not think Two could survive much longer.

What can I do? Six asked. It felt itself dying inside, untouched. The Interrogator stood to one side, watching the interaction, sniffing the chemicals released into the air as they talked.

We are suspect, because no one knows what you have done, Five said. Tell them what you have done, and that we are not involved.

I do not understand, Six said. It was slower in those days. Its mind talked to itself but no one else, and it had grown lonely and unaccustomed to thinking. I have done nothing, Six said.

Then Two and I will work until we die, Five said.

Six could feel the thoughts pressing against its own, trying to shape it. I understand, it said finally. And Five went away without another word.

And so Six confessed to the Interrogator an hour later that it had told the Espen of their tactics, of the caverns full of training captives, of the plans it knew. It said its clutch-mates knew nothing. The Interrogator stood watching it talk. Six could not tell what it thought of the lie, but after that it came no longer.

A few days later, they placed Six in a cage, hung high in the air, and the armies marched past to look at it.

Two and Five passed below, reinstated, but they would not look at it with their faceted, gleaming eyes. It looked at them, touching them with its sight, hoping that they would be well, that they would remember it.

It thought the priests would kill it then, but they sent it back to the Espen, with the message, here is your spy. And they sent it to another planet and then another, until finally someone opened the cage's door and said, we will provide for you no longer, you're on your own.

It lived as it could for a while, hiring itself out for high-altitude or delicate work that clumsy fingers could not perform. But there are many drifters on a space station like this one, TwiceFar, and people hire their own kind. It was not until it met the manager here that it realized uniqueness could be an asset.

The Universe is large, and the war of its people and that race of soft-fleshed is very far away now. But Six's race remembers its missing member, the one who they believe sold them all for life. Its image hangs on their corridors amid the words of war and tangles of foul scent adorn it.

Without the touch of its clutch-mates, it feels its intelligence fading, but each time the webs rouse it for a moment, and remind it who it is, who it was. And then it goes downstairs and finds a patron who wishes it to bring them pleasure, to torture them, or be tortured, or who will pay it to say what they wish, and earn enough to keep it alive another day.

Six drawers in its room hold the emotions that keep it alive—the thoughts of those who would see it dead. Six drawers. Soon they will all be full.

Afternotes

The first TwiceFar story that I wrote, this piece was inspired by Octavia Butler's series,
Lilith's Brood
and the idea of someone taken and tortured by an enemy who, when released, is treated just as badly by their own kind. Pondering the subject led to Six, a creature sustained by contact, forced to rely on hate to keep itself alive since it's the only sort of contact its fellows will give it.

The brothel in the story is named The Little Teacup of the Soul, which is a name I really like, and in my original vision for the series, the Teacup was the center of all the stories. However, when it appeared only peripherally in "Kallakak's Cousins," I ended up revisiting that decision. Still, the idea of what an establishment providing sexual services would look like in a multi-species setting is one that is interesting to explore, and certainly it's an establishment heavily affected by the station's economic flux.

The story was originally written in first person. It was purchased by Sean Wallace for
Lightspeed
, where it appeared in 2010.

I
didn't hope for much when I went around to Roderico's office. Maybe a chance to record some new tapes, at least, get a little spending cash. The Institute covers room and board, but not much else. And lately, they've proven less willing to fund me on sales missions, visiting system to system to pitch their services—my success rate has been bad.

I don't know if Roderico's a timesnip like me or not. His office doesn't have the usual retro-detritus as décor that many do. Lots of the timesnippers take sidetrips and grab things they like. As long as they don't fall into the category of Artifacts, no one calls them on it. I'd have volunteered for the job if I could have, but timesnips can't become snippers, because of the physics of it all. They yank us out of the timeline, there's a buzz and whirl of interviews, and then when the dust settles, there you are, trapped in the future while the person you used to be labors on in the past.

Roderico was napping in his office when I went in. I tapped on the desk and he jerked awake, relaxing when he saw it was me.

"Greetings, Victoria," he said, yawning and stretching. "Did you have an appointment?"

"No," I said. "But I'm low on cash, Roderico. Any projects up for grabs?"

"Let me run a query." He tugged a data window open in the air before him and began to scroll through it. I settled onto a chair to watch him.

His face is lean and dark, Mediterranean blood somewhere in his background—or tweaked into it, I reminded myself—and eyes glittering like a dark war.

His eyebrows rose. "You're in luck. This has been in the system about thirty seconds so far if you want to jump on it. We've got an Initial Pitch ... "

"Put my name in," I said.

"No details?"

Initial Pitches are major money. "Just put my name in," I said. In a few minutes the outside records would update and every saleslancer in the system would be aware of it. I wanted it.

He keyed my name in and sent it. It would take a few minutes for the system to confirm that I had the job, and there was no guarantee someone hadn't already spotted it and earned a tipoff fee. But the window chimed and we both smiled.

"All right," said Roderico. He glanced over the details. "You'll leave in a day—here's a datasheet." He gave me a silvery coin and I tucked it away.

I set a tea cube steeping and wandered through the pages of the datasheet. I didn't have the air interface that Roderico boasted in his office, so I unrolled my own square of black shiny fabric, no sign of its weave, and slotted the disk into its pocket.

The Tedum were a patriarchal, polygamous society, one of the many spread out human colonists. I rolled my eyes at that—I've never been fond of patriarchies. It's my greatest disappointment in the future, that the men's nonsense hadn't been eradicated. Instead, you had every possible variety of it, and only a handful of female dominant or egalitarian populations. Luckily, the largest of the gender neutral systems was Galactic Citizenship, and I'd bought my way into that as soon as I could.

Still, an Initial Pitch was major money. I kept reading.

The Tedum had harems. Younger men tended to be enlisted in the armies—three rival nations kept up ongoing, bloody conflicts that kept the number of males who reached thirty, the age for marriage, relatively low.

The documents had been badly translated—I suspected that no program had been available and some non-Standard language speaker had taken a stab at it.

I didn't have much time and I'd never been a fast reader. They say they can input data into your head faster than you can think, but I still need to go over it piece by piece and worry it into the right shape in my mind. So I picked the following to read on the three-day trip:

The geographical overview: A mountainous planet whose largest predator was a six legged ursine-type that stood two meters tall and blended with the rocky cliffs. Two major cities, with trade flowing between them. I would be staying in Tabor, the larger of the two, which focused on textile manufacturing. The smaller was called Luxat.

The economic overview: A small trade in handicrafts and high end goods, including furs from the ursines, which were called Rawrs. Minerals used in manufacturing glass. Dried fish that were consumed by several species. A thick woven wool cloth.

I read through several months backlog of their primary mediapubs as well. There were men's and women's sections, with the men's devoted to trade agreements, finances, military skirmishes, exchanges with the bandit tribes living in the hills, sports, which focused on a sport called Pummel, a sort of team-based wrestling/boxing.

The women's section held weather, housekeeping, and a surprisingly rich literary scene. Five of the eight pages were reviews of literary magazines and poetry, rhyme schemes patterned like jeweled bracelets, intricate and rich with formal strictures.

At the spaceport near the Ardus System, I left the larger cruiser for a shuttle down to the planet. The spaceport was loud and busy, lines of people crossing other lines, the floors marked with thickly textured symbols designating different companies.

A Tedum, dressed in a briskly formal uniform with golden rickrack along the pockets, checked my ID disk, sliding it through the boxy reader he carried on a woven black wool strap. As he handed it back, looking politely over my shoulder to avoid meeting my gaze, he said, "A word of caution, ma'am. You'll want to dress more circumspectly on the planet."

I do hate patriarchies, so I'll admit I might have been spoiling for a fight. "What do you mean?" I said, staring at him.

"Our women wear dresses," he said.

"Your women don't conduct diplomatic missions, either," I said. "I'm afraid that on this trip, you will have to treat me as an honorary male."

Standard policy, but I took relish in saying it.

"Yes, ma'am," he said, still looking over my shoulder. "Have a pleasant stay on Argus-3, ma'am."

The shuttle was small—seven of us, counting the pilot, who was a borg-box. The other passengers were all male Tedum. One, Avi, was my guiding attendant, come to accompany me to Tabor. Like the other men, he would not look me in the face, but he chattered to me pleasantly enough.

"So how far in time have you come forward?" he said.

"Four hundred and thirty two years from the point where they took me," I said. "Humans had an average lifespan of approximately fifty years at that point."

"It must have been quite a shock for you!" he said. "What was the biggest change?"

"The food," I said. "We ate less processed food."

"You will like Tabor, then," he said. "The residence where you will be accommodated has a fine cook. Usually she serves the Ambassador from Luxat, but he has offered her up to your service to show that Luxat also wishes to welcome the Institute."

Sometimes the Institute is a hard sell to a population, but it was clear that this one already saw the advantages of being able to snip leaders from its past and bring them up to advance the current civilization. I relaxed in my seat. Despite the social structure, it would be an easy tour, and I'd go home with a split of the overall contract, enough to carry me through almost a year, maybe more, depending on how heavily the cities wanted to buy.

I had declined language training. My mind just isn't suited for it—it gives me migraines and still leaves me unable to assemble anything but the most rudimentary sentences. So Avi would be my interpreter.

He was fair-haired and pale, thick blonde hair falling to obscure the age lines marking the corners of his unfocused blue eyes. A line of thin garnets was set into the cartilage of his right ear, extending upward, graduated in size to become smaller and smaller until they were only dots against the pink skin. I would bet they weren't ornamental, but I couldn't guess their purpose. As I watched, though, he absently fingered the edge of his ear, in a pattern that seemed deliberate. A covert communication device, then, I thought.

He was human, like myself, the descendent of the bio-modified settlers that had landed on the planet two hundred years ago. I had skimmed their history, which had presented that landing in bland, uninformative terms: a group of 5,000 from Earth, divided into the two settlements.

There were no mention of the names of those who had settled them, and the history seemed to start at approximately fifty years after the original settlement. It was an odd gap, and one I'd have to investigate.

"Have you visited many planets since you arrived here?" Avi asked.

"This will be my sixteenth."

"Ah, you are quite experienced, then."

Another passenger whispered something to the man by his side, and they chuckled, glancing at me before returning their gazes out the window.

"We will arrive in another two hours," Avi said, leaning forward and drawing my attention away from the pair. "I will take you to your accommodations, and let you refresh yourself. This evening there will be a celebration at General Nazra's estate and you will meet a great many people. The following day, you will present your company's offerings to a government assembly. Many of the attending will be the same at both events. I have prepared a list that may be of use to you."

I unrolled my interface and took the dataload in order to study it for the rest of the flight. Avi passed around juice bulbs to everyone and I sucked on the liquid as I scrolled through photographs and notes. The General was a grizzled, scarred man with piercing green eyes. Like Avi and every other man in the shuttle, his hair was luxuriant and long.

Sometimes I wondered if that was what had surprised me most when arriving in this century: everyone was so perfect. You didn't see rotting teeth, or eyeglasses, or bad breath, or any of the thousand other flaws that people had been riddled with in my century. Susan B. Anthony squinted, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton was overweight. It was an odd sensation, although I'd never been dissatisfied with my face or figure. Without the benefit of genetic manipulation, I'd lured in marks and stockbrokers, spoken before the United States Congress, and even in my fifties, or so I was told, had enticed an English banker to defy his parents and marry me.

The planet wobbled towards us on the front screen: a brown and white marble rolling downhill. Avi smiled.

"About twenty minutes more," he said.