"Well, I guess it's a good thing we're not on your planet." The human male whipped his hair again, and Dan'knor had to refrain from scolding him. "Say, this is a pretty cool bike. Never seen anything like it."
Dan'knor let out a gurgle of offense. Who was this guy to tease her about her octocycle? Yes, it was a cheap, bottom-of-the-barrel clearance cycle from Splurtlemart, but it was the best she could afford. Just as she was about to tell him off, he offered to buy the bike from her.
"Forty bucks," he said with a straight face.
"What!" Dan'knor accidently let load of ink slip. Thankfully, it blended neatly into the black asphalt. "You've got to be kidding me!" Forty Earth dollars would get her back home, first class!
"Okay, Okay. One-fifty, but just so you know, I'll be eating ramen for the next month and a half."
Dan'knor growled and snapped her beak to the side of each of his cheeks, in the way that was customary to show thanks for such generosity, but the human recoiled, knees shaking so hard they knocked together.
"I'm sorry if my offer offended you," he spoke again, voice strained and two octaves higher than it had been before. "Three hundred dollars, that's really the best I can do."
"Deal!" Dan'knor struck out four of her tentacles, and closed them around the human male's sweaty palm. Three hundred Earth dollars? She was rich beyond her wildest dreams! She could travel to Euri and live out the rest of her life in luxury. "Thank you so much, human male."
"You can call me Zeke."
Dan'knor shuddered at the obscenity. Who in their right mind would name their child after such a horrid act of gangliary eroticism? She shook her head. They were merely humans. Simple creatures, still bumbling their way up the evolutionary ladder. Dan'knor reached out and smoothed down his tendrils, reminiscing about the fondest of her broodlings…Jym’bahg, Bal’aae, and sweet Tra’vul who'd been the last to stop visiting home on High Quenching Day. But this human male and his wet-heartedness reminded Dan’knor the most of her very favorite. "If it is okay, I would prefer to call you…Lu’unch,” she said, giving in to the urge to wrap him up tightly in her suckerflesh, and taking comfort in the subtle trembling of his body.
###
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THE ATMOSPHERE MAN
BY NICKY DRAYDEN
First Published by Rayguns Over Texas, 2013
Anise tells me things. Things she really shouldn't. I've mentioned it to her, reminding her about doctor-patient confidentiality and all that. But over the past ten years, I've become more like a sounding board to her than a husband. She talks past me, words flowing freely like an O2 pipe with a blown pressure valve.
She apologizes profusely for being late to dinner, says her last appointment ran long. Kitpeh, her young Errtyllian patient, had a major setback. She'd shown up to their session with her tail bandaged, hints of blue and green bruises peeking from underneath. My wife doesn't think it was an accident, but Kitpeh wouldn't tell her what had happened. She suspects Kitpeh's foster parents had a hand in it.
Anise is so caught up in the minutia of her day that she doesn't notice how upset I am as I place flanks of herbed otterboar upon our dinner plates. They'd been perfectly tender an hour and a half ago--such a delicious shade of pinkish brown, but now the skin is dried and buckling away from the meat. The tulip centerpiece I'd bribed the Station's horticulturalist for has already begun to wilt.
"... so I don't want to accuse them without sound evidence," Anise says, taking a seat at the dining table. "Her foster parents don't have any previous reports of abuse, and it's tough to find someone who's willing to take in an Errtyllian, even one who's had her claws amputated." Anise shakes her head, then whips her cloth napkin into her lap. "I'm going to try to get her to open up to me tomorrow. We'll get out of my office and walk around the Station, maybe all the way down to the Newtonian Arboretum for some fresh air. I bet seeing some of the trees from her home world would put her at ease."
I press my lips together, hoping she'll notice the lengths I'd gone through to recreate that special night--the meal I'd scarcely been able to afford and the variegated tulips I'd spent half of my water rations to raise from bulbs. It'd been worth it to see her eyes light up, and even now, all these years later, I still remember the way her smile made me feel like we were the last two people in the universe.
Anise looks up at me, down at her plate, up at me.
"Oh, Harlan," she says, smacking the side of her head. "Happy Anniversary. You must think I'm awful."
"We've all got our priorities." My words come out more spiteful than I'd intended. How can I hold a grudge against someone whose passion is piecing together the lives of broken children? I fondle the velvet box in my pocket, wondering how my wife and I had managed to lead such amazingly fulfilling lives, and yet still be drifting apart from each other.
Anise's lips screw up into a sour pucker. "Don't make this all about me. You're the one who's gone four nights a week, harassing innocent people just because they have scales or blue skin or claws."
"We don't profile, Anise. We act on solid evidence. Same as you. Only instead of keeping children from destroying themselves, VACI keeps people from destroying the Station." I want to keep going, to tell her about all of the Errtyllian terror plots that Vero Avalon Central Intelligence has foiled, but I bite my tongue. There's no point in dredging up old arguments that I thought we'd put to rest years ago. I heave a sigh, then retrieve the velvet box from my pocket and slide it across the table towards her.
"Harlan, I can't--"
"Let's not fight. Not tonight."
Anise takes the box. I can tell she's embarrassed about not having a gift in return. She looks up at me, but our eyes don't quite meet. "It's not Argonian pearls, is it? I won't wear them. They use slave labor to harvest them, you know."
I know. I'd made that mistake three anniversaries ago. She'd given me an earful about how after all the years we'd been together, I didn't know her at all. But this year's gift will be different. It'll show her how much she means to me, and the lengths I'll go through to keep us from drifting further apart.
Anise pops the top open, then takes out the small aluminum canister. It's heavier than she'd anticipated, and she nearly drops it. "Air? You got me air for our anniversary."
"Not just any air. Twenty-two pounds of atmosphere. From Earth."
The blood drains from Anise's face. She puts the canister into the box and pushes it back. "Earth air is contraband," she whispers to me.
I raise an eyebrow. As if I of all people wouldn't know that. "I thought you'd like it. It's a little piece of your old life."
"It's a little piece of a twenty-year prison sentence is what it is! How could you bring this into our home?" Anise glares at the box, so much longing behind her eyes. Her chest rises and falls, lips glistening ever so slightly. I'll never understand the draw of reminiscing over a dead planet, but then again, I was born on Vero Avalon--a babe among the stars. I'd been to several dozen planets, but never found myself attached to any particular one. But Earth is a part of Anise. Always has been and always will be.
"Relax," I say. "This can't be traced to us. I've got a source, and I can promise you he won't be talking."
"You have a source?" She scoffs and rolls her eyes, but I notice that she hasn't taken her hand from the box.
A smile creeps up onto my lips. I nod nonchalantly, pretending as if this little gift hadn't cost me two months' salary, and possibly my career if anyone with VACI ever finds out.
I'd arranged a meeting with The Atmosphere Man a few months ago, at a little thatched hut bar in Whennyho City. The resort had been terraformed from a barren moon--a sloppy, rush-job with a piss-ton of cheap, fast growing obich palms boasting broad waxy leaves. Minimal biodiversity. The whole place would be dead again in fifty years, probably less. But the beaches were plentiful, and the drinks cheap, as were the women. And its proximity to Gamma Port made it the ideal getaway for the typical middle class schlep that I'd been posing as.
He was taller than I'd expected. Taller than his VACI file listed him as at least. He leaned against the rattan bar, swatting at the green and silver bloatflies buzzing about his drink--a nauseatingly pink concoction with a matching toothpick umbrella. He made contact with one of the flies, and it careened past my ear like a drunken zitherball, its swollen body rupturing on impact with the wall. I tried to hold my breath, but too late, the stench of partially digested fruit infiltrated my lungs. I coughed.
The Atmosphere Man saw me and waved me over. "Jedd? Good to meet you!" He shook my hand in both of his. He was older, in his sixties, with tan discoloration along his face and chest that most would think were age spots and not pseudo-recessive Jorahn genes. It also explained the height.
"Wolosalai!" I said to him, the fabricated Whennyhoan greeting that pretty much meant "I'm here to get shit-faced, how ‘bout you?"
"Wolosalai, brother." His eyes narrowed. I don't know what it was--my walk, my smell, the way I parted my hair--but I could tell he'd made me. Still he smiled wide, and offered me a seat on the barstool next to him.
"You're here to talk atmosphere," he said.
"You are The Atmosphere Man."
"I did this dump, you know. Not some of my better work. Seems like everyone with an investor and a big enough rock is throwing together these porta-planets." A breeze blew in through the open-air bar. The Atmosphere Man lifted his nose, parted his lips, breathed in his creation. "Smell that? Twelve parts Sea Breeze, three parts Lush Tropical Vegetation, one part Fishing Boat, one part Passion Fruit, and just a smidge of Venereal Disease to keep people honest."
I eyed the silhouettes of fishing boats off the coast. All a part of the illusion. There wasn't a single fish in the Whennyhoan Ocean--an "ocean" that was fifteen meters at its deepest.
I took a sniff for myself. "Impressive. Hard to imagine this whole atmosphere coming out of a little canister."
"Several thousand little canisters for a rock this size, but yes. You starting a porta-planet of your own, or are you just looking for a souvenir? I can get you a thousand pounds of Whennyho City for a couple hundred kalax. Plus local and Eastern Cascade taxes, of course. Just pop it into your air intake, and it'll smell like you're on vacation all year ‘round!" The Atmosphere Man was teasing me. A man of his sort wouldn't dabble with souvenir canisters.
"Actually, I had something quite different in mind." I leaned in close to his ear. "I'm looking to get my hands on some Earth air."
The Atmosphere Man feigned shock. "That'd be illegal, Jedd!"
"And very profitable." I handed him a flimsy duffle bag with "Whennyho City Resorts" screen-printed on both sides. The zipper was cheaply made as well, and barely functional, but nevertheless, The Atmosphere Man forced it open and peeked inside at the stacks of kalax. It wasn't a fortune, maybe half as much as he'd gotten to air up this place, but I was betting that the paper I clutched in my hand would be much more valuable to him. I laid it out on the bar and dropped my charade. "Before you make any decisions, I want you to know that this is a personal matter, not a professional one. Still, if you're agreeable to this trade, I can make these VACI files disappear."
The Atmosphere Man swiped his finger across the sheet, looking at twenty years worth of dirt VACI had accumulated on him. Admittedly it wasn't much. Not even a real name to go with the blurred surveillance photos. He was quite the illusive criminal, always managing to stay just to the right of VACI's radar, but I'd invested more than a healthy amount of man hours strategically digging through the details of his exploits-- pole-skimming on environmentally sensitive planets, bribing and blackmailing members of the Open-Air Alliance, and of course, dealing in contraband atmosphere.
"Why are you doing this?" The Atmosphere Man asked.
"For my wife. She's Earthborne." Despite myself, I flinched at the word. It was a mild slur used for those who'd stayed behind after the Major Exodus, and the next dozen or so of the minor ones. The stubborn people who refused to admit that the Earth was dying.
"You don't say. Not many of them made it off."
"She was lucky." I was lucky. I couldn't imagine not having her in my life. And there I was in the presence of a known criminal, begging him to help me keep her.
"There's no shame in thinking you can change the inevitable," The Atmosphere Man said, sucking the boifruit off the pointed tip of his toothpick umbrella. "They fought a good fight. Repopulated a couple seas, found a vaccination to combat the dais blight, decontaminated the runoff from dozens of thermonuclear bombsites. Who knows, if they'd started a few years earlier, maybe they would have succeeded."
"Perhaps."
The Atmosphere Man leaned back, his elbow propped casually against the bar. "What you're asking could get you into a fair amount of trouble if you're caught."
"I won't get caught."
"So sure of yourself, are you? This wife of yours ... " The Atmosphere Man shifted forward on his stool, fingers steepled at his lips. Flecks of gold rimmed his irises, and in the span of milliseconds, the thin membrane of secondary lids blinked across his eyes. I wondered if any other VACI agents had ever gotten so close to him.
"What about her?" I said, gravel in my voice.
"You're sure she's worth it? I mean, one slip of my tongue and your whole world could come crashing down, faster than one of these porta-planets."
A threat. But I too could play that game. "Oh, she's worth it, Yoris."
The Atmosphere Man's eyes bulged at hearing his name. His spots darkened, then faded again. He nodded, then shoved the VACI sheet inside his duffle bag, struggling with the zipper before finally giving up. "Ah, well. Send Anise my best, then, will you?"
I tensed. He'd known my identity before I'd walked into this humid pit-stain of a bar. The Atmosphere Man swatted another bloatfly to the ground, stomped its juicy carcass, then left without another word.
The next morning I woke to the smell of Whennyho City blowing through an open window that had been shut and locked when I'd gone to sleep. On my nightstand sat a small aluminum canister with a bloatfly buzzing futilely next to it, wings pinned to the cheap wood veneer with a pink toothpick umbrella.
I couldn't go back on my word. Not if I didn't want to end up like that fly. I quickly dressed and shoved the canister into my pocket. I nearly dropped it. It was a lot heavier than I'd expected. My VACI badge got me through Gamma Port customs without any problem, and yet I kept checking over my shoulder to make sure no one was onto me. The concourse was filled with harried vacationers in gaudy flower-print shirts, with dewy-eyed newlyweds--some tentacled, some scaled, some blue, some with tails, all with that same sappy-assed look--like they could plunge face first into a gravity well and everything would be all right because they still had each other. God, I missed that feeling. Back in my office on Vero Avalon Station, I ran a recursion program to erase all traces of The Atmosphere Man from the rimNet. The guilt wrung from my heart as I realized that after a decade of sapping the life from my marriage, VACI owed me this one indiscretion.
"I can't believe you actually did this," Anise says, opening the velvet box once again. Her words feel heavy, teeming with an awkward mix of emotions.
I don't say anything, because there is nothing left for me to say. She holds the canister for a long moment, then goes over to the atmos unit, dials the particle filter to low, the pathogen filter to max, and plugs the Earth air into the manual intake.
Anise pours herself a glass of twenty-year-old Tungsian wine and settles into the sofa. She breathes in deeply as the air begins to circulate. I do the opposite, shallow breaths through parted lips, but it doesn't do much to dull the sting in my nostrils, the stench at the back of my throat, the fire in my lungs.
I stifle a cough.
"I'd almost forgotten acid rain," Anise sighs, her eyes suddenly far, far away. "Towards the end, it could eat through steel. We had to replace our roofs every eight weeks. Fran--I've told you about Fran--she got caught out in it once. Not long, just
half a minute. Poor thing spent the next six months getting skin grafts and reconstructive surgery." She says all this with longing, not a hint of bitterness.
I can't fathom what she finds so pleasurable about this. The Earth is a perfect stranger to me, distant and unknowable, but the only way I'll begin to learn is if I engage in this moment. I stop holding my breath. All I smell is soot. "What is that, the prominent smell? Factory smoke?" I'd heard of the abundance of factories, refineries, and industrial centers puffing clouds of black up into the atmosphere.
Anise shakes her head. "They were all abandoned by then, no one left to run them once the dais blight hit. We napalmed towns for many years before we found the vaccination. Dogs, cats, livestock, people--anyone who'd eaten or handled infected plant material became a host to fungal spores. It was the only way to keep it from spreading faster than it did."
"That must have been awful." I sit down beside her, lay a hand on her thigh.
Anise takes another long sip from her wine. "It was what it was. But through it all, we were always able to cling to hope. We fought hard every second of our lives, and because of that, each breath we took became something precious."
I try to imagine how powerful this scent memory is for her, but I'd grown up with sterilized, formulated air--any odors that happened to occur during my formative years were sucked up through the filters and scrubbed clean before they could imprint on my memories.
"It's sort of ... beautiful," I say, but she finally looks directly at me with hard, spiteful eyes. I see I've said the exact wrong thing.
"I don't expect for you to understand."
We're sitting inches from each other, and yet the rift between us grows. I thought the Earth air would fix things between us, but it's only highlighted how different we really are. I think of her patient, Kitpeh, a wounded creature with so much anger seeded into her DNA. Sooner or later, despite all of the hours Anise spends with her, Kitpeh will slip up. She'll assault someone or make threats against the Station, and she'll end up on VACI's watch list. It's inevitable, and yet Anise keeps trying to save her. It makes no sense to me--all those resources poured into a cup with a crack running through the bottom.