Record of a Spaceborn Few

  Such misalignments were unpredictable, and blameless. Nothing that could’ve been foreseen. Nothing that could’ve been prevented. Isabel told herself that as she stood helplessly at the transport pod platform as . . . something nearby kept shutting down Ghuh’loloan’s cart. She’d been fine on the elevator, fine as they crossed the platform. As soon as she approached the transport pod, though, the cart stopped in its tracks, as if someone had thrown a switch. Isabel had tugged her backward, and the cart had come back to life. But as soon as Ghuh’loloan drove herself across some invisible line, the wheels froze and the engine audibly slumped. None of her colleague’s increasingly agitated flicking of switches had any effect.

  ‘Weird,’ the transport attendant said in schoolroom Klip. He scratched his head. ‘It’s got to be . . . I don’t know.’ He switched over to Ensk and gave Isabel an apologetic shrug. ‘Some kinda signal interference from the pod. I’m sorry, M, I don’t know where to start.’

  Isabel glanced around as she mentally scrambled for a solution. A small crowd had gathered, because of course they had. They kept their distance – out of respect and wariness in equal measure, no doubt – but their interest was unapologetic, and anything but subtle. How often did you get to go home and tell the dinner table about the alien you saw stuck on the transport deck? Isabel was aware that they were watching herself as well, the obvious responsible party, the one who would come up with something clever.

  She did not.

  ‘I do not hold you at fault,’ Ghuh’loloan said to the attendant. ‘Nor you, dear host. These things happen!’ Her tone was bright, but her tentacles still flicked switches in fading hope. She pulled in her tendrils, and her eyestalks shut for a moment. ‘M Transport Attendant,’ she said, perking back up. She had yet to get a proper hold on honorifics, and the overdone result was often charming. ‘Do you think you are capable of carrying my cart? It weighs approximately sixteen kems.’

  The transport attendant – clearly tickled at being called ‘M’ by an alien visitor – nodded. ‘Yes, I can lift. But, um . . .’ He paused, searching for words. ‘I’m not sure I can carry it and you same. Together?’

  ‘Together,’ Isabel said.

  He nodded again. ‘It and you together.’

  ‘Oh, you won’t need to worry about that,’ Ghuh’loloan said. ‘Isabel, would you—?’ She gestured at her cart, and Isabel caught on. She grabbed the edge of the cart and dragged Ghuh’loloan a short ways backward. Right on cue, the cart hummed to life again. Ghuh’loloan pressed a few controls, and a compact ramp extended slowly from the side.

  Understanding her colleague’s intent, Isabel looked at the floor. Smooth, dry metal plating, just like everywhere else. Clean, but hard to say what had been on it, or what it had been cleaned with. A bit of solvent residue, a bootprint with traces of fertiliser, or an unseen patch of spilled salt were all enough to make a Harmagian itch for the rest of the day. Isabel frowned with concern. ‘I’m sure one of us can carry you.’

  ‘No,’ Ghuh’loloan said. ‘You can’t.’ She angled her eyestalks toward Isabel’s bare forearms. Right, Isabel thought. Soap. Skin oil. Lotion. And you couldn’t forget the clothes, either, undoubtedly still dusted with detergent. Stars, but Humans made a mess of getting clean.

  Isabel looked to the crowd. ‘Does anyone have any water with them?’ she called out in Ensk. ‘A canteen, or . . . ?’

  The faces in the crowd looked surprised to be addressed, as if they’d just discovered they were playing a sim instead of watching a vid. But they responded to the question, opening satchels and digging through backpacks. Bottles, bags, and canteens were raised up.

  ‘I’m sorry to ask this,’ Isabel said. ‘But we need to rinse off a path for her.’

  Ghuh’loloan wagged her facial tendrils. ‘What are you saying?’

  ‘I’m asking them to clean off the floor for you.’

  ‘Oh, dear host, I’ll be all right, really—’

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ Isabel said, and turned again to the crowd. ‘Any volunteers? Clean water only, please, no tea or anything flavoured.’

  Isabel hadn’t expected differently, but was pleased to see everybody with water come forward to help. She knew a good deal of the motivation was self-serving – not only did they see an alien in a pinch on the platform, but they got to help. Still, the unquestioning willingness to pitch in made her proud. The onlookers emptied their drinks, tossing the water in forward-moving splashes. One small girl upended her equally small cup straight down in front of her. It did little for the task at hand – most ended up on the girl’s shoes – but she got the point. Every bit counted.

  After a minute or two, a glistening path stretched from the Harmagian cart to the Exodan pod. ‘Thank you, friends,’ Isabel said. ‘And thank your families for us, too.’ That water had come from many, after all.

  ‘Yes, yes,’ Ghuh’loloan said, having caught a familiar word. Her dactyli unfurled like waking leaves. Had she continued in Klip, she likely would have delivered a truly Harmagian declaration of gratitude, but instead, she exercised one of the few Ensk phrases she knew: ‘Thank oo mutsch.’

  The crowd was delighted.

  Ghuh’loloan’s eyestalks shifted to the ramp. ‘Now, if you will forgive me further, this will take some time.’

  And with that, Ghuh’loloan began to crawl.

  There were a few muffled sounds from the crowd – a smothered gasp, a nervous laugh. Isabel looked sharply to them, giving everyone the same look her grandkids got if reaching for something forbidden. But in truth, she was one with the crowd, choking back her own instinctive yelp. She’d never seen a Harmagian leave xyr cart. She knew, logically, that vehicle and rider were two separate entities, but the visual confirmation was cognitively dissonant. She had imagined, given the Harmagian lack of legs, that Ghuh’loloan would simply slide, like the recordings she’d seen of slugs, or perhaps snakes. But instead, Ghuh’loloan’s smooth belly began to . . . stars, what was the word for it? Grab. Pull. It was as if Ghuh’loloan’s stomach was covered with a thick swath of fabric – several bedsheets, maybe – and behind the bedsheets there were hands, and the hands pushed against the sheets, curling, grasping, dragging the rest of the body forward. Dough, Isabel thought. Putty. There was no symmetry to it, no pattern easily discernible to a bipedal mind. And the result was slow, as Ghuh’loloan had intimated. Isabel imagined trying to walk alongside her like this. She’d have to take two short steps, then wait two beats, then two steps, then two beats, on and on. This was why Harmagians had spent so much of their evolutionary history enjoying the quickness of the sea before adapting for the riches of the land. It was why they’d invented carts. It was why their tech was so incredible. It was why they’d become so good at defending themselves – and at taking from others.

  Ghuh’loloan heaved herself forward, a lumbering mass inching across the wet patch of already clean floor that had been rinsed with pure water for the sake of fussy, fragile skin. Isabel watched, and marvelled.

  The former conquerors of the galaxy.

  Eyas

  ‘Need a hand?’

  Eyas stopped spreading compost and turned her head. A man was there – younger than her, but not a kid, either. She looked him in the eye, thrown by his question. ‘Sorry, what?’

  ‘Do you need a hand?’ he asked again in an accent she couldn’t place. It was rough and bright and thick as pudding. He gestured to her cart. ‘Looks like you have a lot to get through. I can’t say I’ve ever really gardened, but I’m sure I could chuck dirt around.’

  Eyas slowly brushed off her gloves and stood up. ‘I’m—’ She tried to straighten out her baffled brain. ‘You know this is compost, right?’

  ‘Yeah,’ he said.

  They stared at each other. ‘You know what compost is, right?’

  ‘Sure.’ His face suggested he was starting to doubt that.

  ‘Are you a trader, or—?’

  The man laughed. ‘No. The accent gave me away, huh?’
r />   ‘Yeah,’ she said. That, and other things. She knelt back down to the compost she’d been distributing, waiting for him to leave.

  He did not. ‘Do you sell it?’

  ‘Do I what?’

  ‘Do you sell this stuff? Or is it just something you make at home?’

  Eyas lidded her canister, walked to the edge of the planter, and looked seriously at the man. ‘These are Human remains,’ she said in a low voice. ‘We compost our dead.’

  The man was mortified. ‘Oh. Wow, I’m . . . jeez, I’m sorry.’ He looked at the cart full of canisters. ‘These are all . . . people? Like, individual people, or . . . oh man, are they all mixed together?’

  ‘If you have questions, I’m sure someone at the Centre would be happy to give you a tour.’

  ‘The Centre. That’s where you . . .’ He gestured vaguely to the canisters.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And that’s . . . your job.’

  ‘Yes.’ She threw a pointed glance back at the plants. ‘Which I am not doing.’

  The man held up his palms. ‘Right. Sorry. Really sorry.’ He turned to leave.

  Eyas turned back to the plant and began to crouch down. For reasons unknown, she turned back. ‘Where are you from?’

  The man stopped. ‘Mushtullo.’

  ‘And you’re not a trader.’

  ‘No.’

  She squinted. ‘Do you have family here?’

  ‘Heh, everybody asks that. No, I’m just trying something new.’

  Oh, stars, he was one of those. She’d heard others complaining about said same, but never encountered it herself. Young grounders had made a thing of showing up on the Fleet’s doorstep hoping to find kin or connection or some other such fluff, succeeding at little except treating everyone’s home like a zoo before learning there wasn’t any romance in it and heading back to cushier lives where every problem could be answered with creds.

  Except here was this one, standing there with his hands in his pockets and an irritatingly eager smile. She should have let him walk away, but . . . he’d asked to help. He’d offered to help.

  ‘Do you have work?’ she asked.

  ‘Not yet,’ the man said. ‘I went to the job office and everything, but they said the only openings they had were for sanitation. And not to be picky, but—’

  ‘But you were picky.’

  The man gave a guilty shrug. ‘I’m just hoping something else will open up. I’m good with code, I’m good with customers, I could—’

  Eyas removed her gloves, folded them over her belt, and sat at the edge of the planter, bare hands folded between her legs. ‘Do you understand why they tried to give you a sanitation job?’

  ‘They said—’

  ‘I know what they said. There were other openings, I promise you.’ Lots of them, she knew. ‘That’s not the point. Do you understand why they tried to give you that job?’

  The last traces of his easy grin evaporated. ‘Oh.’

  Eyas sighed and ran her hand through her hair. He thought this was a matter of bigotry. ‘No, you still don’t get it. They tried to give you a sanitation job because everybody has to do sanitation. Everybody. Me, merchants, teachers, doctors, council members, the admiral – every healthy Exodan fourteen and over gets their ID put in a computer, and that computer randomly pulls names for temporary, mandatory, no-getting-out-of-it work crews to sort recycling and wash greasy throw-cloths and unclog the sewage lines. All the awful jobs nobody wants to do. That way, nothing is out of sight or out of mind. Nothing is left to lesser people, because there’s no such thing. So you, coming in here at – how old are you?’

  ‘Twenty-four.’

  ‘Right. You’ve got ten years of potential sanitation shifts to make up for. You’re here eating the food we grow, sleeping inside a home somebody worked hard to maintain, drinking water that is carefully, carefully managed. The people at the job office knew that. They wanted to see if you were actually willing to live like us. If you were more than just a tourist. They wanted to know if you were serious.’

  The man straightened up. ‘I’m serious.’

  ‘Well, then, go muck out a sewer like the rest of us have to. Do that, and they might let you put some code to use.’ Eyas was sure they would. There was need for that kind of skillset, no question. It just needed to be in the hands of someone with the right principles.

  ‘Okay,’ the man said. ‘Yeah, okay. Thank you. Thanks very much.’ The smile returned. ‘I’m Sawyer, by the way.’

  She gave him a polite nod. ‘I’m Eyas.’

  ‘Eyas. That suits you.’

  ‘No.’ She got to her feet and put her gloves back on. ‘It really doesn’t.’

  Kip

  ‘Trust me,’ Ras said. ‘This is totally safe.’

  Kip wasn’t so sure. His friend was smiling his usual smile, but he had a bunch of weird shit spread out on the floor between them – a patch scanner, some complicated cables, an info chip labelled ‘BIRTHDAY.’ All of it looked hand-hacked, and none of it was anything Ras had ever given any indication he knew how to use. ‘Where’d you get this stuff?’ Kip asked.

  ‘Mail drone. I had some creds saved up.’

  ‘Yeah, but from where?’

  ‘You remember that job I worked for M Aho—’

  ‘Not the creds. This . . . hackjob stuff.’

  Ras lowered his voice, even though they were safe in his room. His mom had ears like you would not believe. ‘Have you heard of this feed called Picnic?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘It’s like . . . serious black market modder shit. Implants, code, ships even. You name it. Whatever you want, somebody there has it, or knows where to get it. And it’s totally off the map. You can’t find Picnic in public searches.’

  Kip wasn’t super comfortable with the sound of that, but he didn’t want to look like a wuss. ‘So how’d you find it?’

  ‘Toby told me about it. It’s where his sister gets all the gear she needs to make smash.’

  ‘Wait, Una? She makes smash?’

  ‘Do you not know that? I thought everybody knew that. How do you think she bought her own skiff? Anyway, the supplier I got this from, xe told me—’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Who’s the supplier?’

  ‘Just . . . you know, it’s anonymous, everybody’s got codenames and—’

  Kip leaned forward. ‘Who?’

  Ras cleared his throat. ‘Xe’s called fluffyfluffycake.’

  ‘Fluffyfluffycake.’

  ‘Xe really knows xyr shit, man, I’m telling you—’

  ‘You bought a hack kit from somebody called fluffyfluffycake.’

  Ras rolled his eyes and pulled back his wristwrap, exposing the implant beneath. ‘Look, I already did me.’ He picked up the patch scanner – definitely hand-hacked, there were two different colours of casing fused together – and swiped it over his wrist. He turned the scanner screen toward Kip so he could read the ID data it had just pulled. ‘See?’

  Kip read, blinked, raised his eyebrows. ‘Huh.’

  ‘Yeah, huh.’

  ‘And it’s . . . okay?’ Kip remembered the standard before, when the Newet had gone under quarantine because somebody came back from some neutral market with a bot virus – Marabunta, they called it. Hijacked your imubots and gave you seizures, then hopped to anybody you brushed your patch against, whether it was a hug or a handshake or a crowded transport car or whatever. Kip remembered seeing pictures of the victims on the news feeds – folks tied down in hospital beds, mouths strapped shut so they wouldn’t break their own teeth. Everybody’d been really freaked out. At school, they’d gotten a big long boring talk about how you should never, ever get unlicensed bots and you should never, ever go to an unlicensed clinic. He could hear that lecture playing dimly in the back of his head, but the reality of his friend sitting in front of him was much louder. ‘You feel okay?’ Kip asked.

  ‘Stars, I get us something awesome, and you turn into
my mom. Yes, I feel fine. I did it yesterday before I asked you over. What, did you think I was gonna test it out on you first? C’mon, I’m not that much of an asshole.’

  Kip’s pulse thudded in his ears. If Ras’d done it, and he was okay, and the hack hadn’t messed up his bots or anything, then . . . it was okay, right? He stared for a second, then pushed up his own wristwrap – blue and green triangle print, frayed around the edges. The one his dad had given him last Remembrance Day. ‘All right,’ he said.

  Ras grinned. ‘Only takes a sec.’ He connected one end of the cable to Kip’s patch, then the other end to his scrib. He popped the info chip in an empty port and gestured at the screen. ‘You want to keep your actual birthday, yeah? Easier to remember.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Kip said. He shifted his weight as Ras worked. ‘What if somebody we know sees us?’

  ‘Well, if we’re not stupid about it, they won’t. We can go to one of the other districts and it’ll be fine.’ He waved his hand, and the scrib made a completed ding. ‘All right, let’s see what we got.’

  ‘That’s it?’ Kip asked.

  ‘That’s it,’ Ras said, picking up the scanner. ‘I told you, fluffy-cake knows xyr shit.’ He swiped the scanner over Kip’s wrist, gave a nod, then handed the scanner over.

  Kip took it and looked down at the screen.

  GC citizenship record:

  ID #: 9836-745-112

  GC designated name: Kristofer Madaki

  Emergency contact: Serafina Madaki, Alton Madaki

  Next of kin: Serafina Madaki, Alton Madaki

  Local name (if applicable): Kristofer (Kip) Madaki