This Alien Shore

  Hell you can! Don’t listen to her!

  You have to ...

  “Shut up, shut up!” The words were barely whispered, but Verina’s stem warning followed nonetheless: Say nothing out loud, you don’t know who may be listening.

  God, if this went on much longer, she was going to go crazy for real.

  Listen. It was Verina again, always calm, always rational. We’ve gotten away from the station, that was the most important thing. Whoever was looking for us doesn’t know where to search next. The fact that the ship is changing nodes is a stroke of real luck That’ll muddle the trail even further. We’ve got a little time to think now ... and to come up with some kind of long-term plan.

  I want to see the ship, Raven sulked.

  Later, Verina told her. For now, can you alter that debit chip so it can’t be traced as easily? Raven was the closest thing they had to a programmer.

  It’s a fucking debit chip! Derik snapped. It’s got a fucking account at the other end that it’s got to connect to, and if it doesn’t, there’s no money. What the hell do you think she can do, conjure credit by magic?

  I’d like to see that, whispered one of the child-voices,

  Shut up, shut up, SHUT UP!!!!! Jamisia put her hands up to her ears as if somehow that could shut out the noise. Look, Verina’s right. We need a plan. Now.

  Startled by Jamisia’s uncharacteristic aggression, the others subsided.

  I don’t think he believed our story, Jamisia told them. So he’s going to keep asking questions, or else maybe get someone else to do it. Right? So we need some kind of story that he’ll really accept, for a cover.

  He’ll know it’s a lie, Zusu warned. We’re not good enough to fool him.

  Jamisia could feel Derik bristle angrily. Speak for yourself, twit!

  Katlyn, normally silent in such debates, moaned in exasperation. Hello! Remember teamwork? Working TOGETHER? Isn’t that what we’re supposed to be doing here?

  That quieted them all for a moment. Thank God. Silence.

  Look, Katlyn said, We need an ally on this ship. Someone who’ll work for us, maybe warn us of trouble coming our way. Cause we sure as hell can’t trust them all, and I don’t like the fact that we’re helpless out here.

  A “friend?” Zusu said suspiciously.

  Derik was less inhibited. Jesus fucking ...

  We know what kind of friend YOU mean, Katlyn.

  Jamisia thought of what it would be like, to sit back and let Katlyn take control, to watch her work her games on one of the crew members. To her surprise, the thought was less sickening than usual. Was she getting used to it? That was a very, very frightening thought.

  Katlyn demanded, Look, does anyone have a better idea?

  For a moment there was silence. Then: No, Raven grumbled. A few Others reluctantly followed suit.

  Jamie? Katlyn asked.

  Jamisia was startled. Never in all their time together had any of the Others asked permission to take control, or attempted to gain her cooperation in ... well, in anything. Was Katlyn really concerned with how much her actions might upset Jamisia? If so, that was a new development. She hardly knew how to respond to it.

  Whatever we have to do, she thought at last. She could feel-her heart pound as her brain formed the words, and she sensed that she and the Others were now moving into a new realm of relationship. Katlyn had made the gesture of asking for her input; now she had to prove that she could work with the Others, as opposed to merely enduring them. I ... I trust you.

  New words. New feelings. She could feel them sinking into the depths of her mind, where a dozen strangers absorbed them. Only not quite strangers any more. Not quite family. Something else.

  Okay, Katlyn said. If there’s an opportunity, then, I’ll take it. In the meantime I suggest the rest of you try to learn what

  you can from this ship. And with a half-amused smile that the others could sense, she added, Variants, huh? That’ll be a new twist.

  Jamisia tried not to shudder.

  It was Sumi who was given the job of befriending their passenger. Any one of the crew could have done it, of course, but Allo had already come off as too aggressive, and Tam-Tam would probably confuse the poor Earthie, and as for Calia, she had a pretty strong distaste for the Earthbom, which might make things difficult. So Sumi it was.

  Truth be told, he wasn’t unprejudiced himself, and he knew he would have to work hard to keep an edge of hostility from his voice whenever he addressed her. This was, after all, a member of the race that had abandoned his own people when their need was greatest. Oh yes, he understood that the Hausman Effect had been terrifying, that the sudden divergence of human evolution into a thousand different directions was more than Earth could handle ... but did that mean all lines of supply had to be cut so suddenly? Granted, no living creature should ever have been subjected to the Hausman Drive again, for fear of creating monsters ... but did that mean that robots couldn’t have made the trip? His people had just put up their first crude homes when the curtain of Isolation fell, they still needed seeds and embryos and medical supplies from home to insure their success as a colony. Supplies which would never come. That first winter was hard, so hard. Earth had made it hard. Callous Earth, who wrote off its injured children, rather than supporting them in the few ways she still could. Oh, yes, Sumi hated Earth as much as any Variant did, as much as Calia, if not more ... but this girl hadn’t been around back then. She wasn’t part of all that, except by an accident of birth. And so he tried to divorce his feelings about Earth from his feelings about her, and he was a fair enough man in his heart that for the most part he succeeded.

  There was another advantage to having him approach her. The unique Variance which his people suffered had evolved in time into a sensory advantage, which might give him insight into her true nature. He remembered the last time he’d been in her presence, tasting the sour tang of fear rising up from her skin, molecules of hormonal exhalation that drifted through the air to be caught on the moist surface of his tendrils. Few humans knew just how acute the Medusan particulate sense was, or how much it could reveal of an individual’s state of mind. Allo knew. Which is why Allo gave him assignments like this, where emotional insight was a key factor. Usually Sumi was the one who dealt with customs officials, and other situations where diplomacy was crucial; today it had netted him this job.

  If only she weren’t an Earthie.

  Her door was closed, so he raised a hand and knocked on it. “Who—” she began, and then she seemed to realize that it hardly mattered who it was. “Open,” she commanded, and the door obliged.

  Her smell was different than before; he noticed that immediately. There was still the lingering taste of fear in her exudate, but now other things were mixed in as well. He felt his tendrils begin to glide forward instinctively to catch a better sample, then saw the look on her face as they did so. So. The Earthie wasn’t used to Variants. He stiffened, and forced the fleshy appendages back to the rear of him, where his own scent overwhelmed anything he might pick up from her. All right. He’d be subtle, then, and spare the Earthie from having to confront his “deformity.” Which was a good deal more consideration, he thought darkly, than her ancestors had ever shown for his.

  “I came to see if you were comfortable,” he offered.

  She had unfolded the monitor screen and was in the process of reading something on it, he saw. He’d have to warn Tam to make sure that all their private files were inaccessible. They so rarely had guests on the ship that it wasn’t something they normally worried about.

  It was strange to see her sitting there, without a headset on, reading thus; like a vision from another age. But that was often true of Earthies, he’d heard; they used their brainware for specific tasks, having not yet made that mental adjustment which turned it into a natural appendage. Without even thinking, he flashed up an icon in his own field of vision which gave him access to what she was reading. General information from the ship’s library, mostly on P
aradise Station. All right, that was safe enough. He flashed a quick note off to Tam about limiting her access to their database, then turned his full attention to her again. Outworld etiquette said it was rude to indulge in lengthy internal dialogue when there was a real person sitting right in front of you. Not that folks didn’t do it all the time anyway, but with strangers he liked to be proper.

  “I guess,” she said. Then she smiled; it was an expression of genuine gratitude, if not true relaxation. “Thank you so much for taking me aboard. I don’t know what I would have done if you hadn’t.”

  There was his opening, clean and simple. And he didn’t take it. She’d be far more off her guard if he didn’t question her immediately. That was the mistake Allo had made, and he didn’t intend to repeat it.

  “You said you’d like to see the ship. I can give you the tour now, if you’d like.”

  She stared at him for a minute, her eyes weirdly vacant. He might have assumed she was accessing the ship’s net, if she’d had her headset on. But she didn’t. Very strange. Was Earth producing brainware that could access a network directly ? It had been tried once before, with disastrous results. You needed some kind of portal mechanism to weed out garbage, lest some teenager’s pet virus made it into your brain and started rearranging your neurons. Yet she had no headset on, and was clearly accessing ... something.

  Was that why she was being hunted, for something that was in her head? Shit, he thought, envisioning the tangled mess of bioware and brain matter that was inside his own skull. You couldn’t get at one without pretty much destroying the other. If so, I’d run, too.

  But when she finally said, “I’d like that,” she picked up her headset from the room’s small folding table. Which meant that she needed it. So that wasn’t her secret.

  He took her on a tour of the few parts of the small trading vessel that a stranger was allowed to see ... all in all, not much. It was a functional ship with little room to spare, and half of its chambers were now filled with boxes of contraband. But if she noticed anything missing in the tour, she didn’t mention it. She seemed almost more interested in him than she was in the ship ... and the result was a strange mix of signals, which he couldn’t quite interpret. She was pretty clearly obsessed with his Medusan mutation, and he caught her staring at the proud crest of sensory tentacles whenever she didn’t think he was watching her. He knew that their natural movement disturbed most Earthies, sinuous twining and unexpected flicks not unlike the movements of a cat’s tail. He’d braided them into a mohawk pattern today—mostly to keep them away from his face—so they rose from his skull like the crest of some exotic E-bird, waving slowly as if in some unseen breeze. So all right, she had every reason to stare (by Earthie standards, anyway) and even to be marginally repelled. Given her background, he pretty much expected the latter. But she also stood very close to him, closer than normal, and that seemed very strange. Was it an Earthie habit? He’d met very few people who came from the planet itself, maybe this was normal for them. It was said the motherworld was hellishly crowded, maybe people there weren’t used to having the room to spread out. She wasn’t so close that he had to move away, or ask her do to so, but she played at the border of his personal space as if she knew exactly where it was ... oddly disconcerting, that. It made him intensely aware of her, even when she was walking behind him. Good thing she wasn’t more familiar with Medusans, or she’d be able to read his agitation in the twitching of his tendrils.

  Then, when they reached the bridge, the whole formula changed. Suddenly he was all but forgotten, and the suddenness with which she moved away from him was so unexpected that it felt almost physical. Quick and curious, she moved with eager steps from one control panel to another, pausing only to take the measure of a screen readout, muttering things to herself as she moved. There was nothing wrong with such behavior per se, but the suddenness of the change was ... spooky.

  Calia was the only one there at the time, and she shot Sumi a quick flash: IS THIS WISE? He didn’t answer. He was too intent on watching the Earthie, on trying to figure her out.

  She was making comments about the equipment now, as she walked about the small chamber. “You have an Austin navicomp ... that’s rare in a ship this size ... coupled with Microtech’s 912-EX amp ... that’s not really compatible, is it? Must be a customized interface ... bet that has a hell of a kick when you get moving....” She continued to rattle off technical terms, many of which he only half understood. Even Calia looked up from where she was working, and flashed him a quick thought. ENGINEER? He flashed back, DON’T KNOW, then checked the ship’s innernet to see if the girl was requesting any information from their database. She’d put on her headset on the way here, so it was possible. But no, that link was silent. Whatever detailed knowledge she was drawing on, it was all in her head.

  She was a strange one, all right.

  At last he had to almost physically drag her off the bridge, so intent was she upon studying everything within it. She seemed almost angry with him for forcing her to go ... and then, as soon as they exited the control chamber, that mood was gone. As if anger, too, was a mask she simply put aside, her whole mood banished in an instant.

  “Where did you study tech?” he asked. He didn’t necessarily expect a straight answer—no one who worked the ship had credentials they’d discuss with a stranger—but he figured she’d at least reveal something of her background in how she chose to answer him.

  But what he got wasn’t helpful at all. She turned to look at him with those strange blue eyes—they had to be artificial—and seemed almost puzzled herself.

  “I read a lot,” she said at last. And it was clear from her tone that this the closest thing to an answer he was going to get.

  Their tour completed, he led her back to her own room. It was little more than a closet with a bed, in size, but he supposed that when you were running from someone you didn’t much care how big your bedroom was. Calia flashed him a message that she had copied the security transmissions from Reijik Station into the ship’s own database, and was struggling even now to decode them. Soon enough they’d know what the situation was with this girl ... and how it might benefit them to exploit it. Sumi had worked with Allo for over twenty E-years now, and knew how the Castilian’s mind worked. Everything that came on this ship paid for itself ... and that included passengers.

  A pity, with this one. He rather liked her, for all her strangeness. She intrigued him.

  At the door of her room he muttered a polite leavetaking, and began to move back toward the bridge, where he had work of his own to do—but she put a hand on his arm, gently, tentatively, to stop him.

  “Yes?”

  She seemed about to speak, then shut her mouth without making a sound.

  “Raven?”

  Strange, how she looked at him when he said that name. Almost as if she didn’t recognize it.

  She drew up a hand to his shoulder, curved gently, like the hand of a dancer. After a few seconds, one of his questing tentrils brushed against her. The taste of her skin was a not unpleasing mixture of tension and female essence; he wasn’t all that sure of his ability to interpret the exudate of Earthies, but there seemed to be a hint of sexual interest, too, barely discernible on her skin. Was that really possible? He should have been repelled—a Terran was hardly a desirable sexual partner in his circle—but something about her manner made the thought more arousing than repellent. He could feel his tendrils stiffening in response and flashed a quick, somewhat embarrassed instruction to his wellseeker, which drained enough blood from the offending appendages that their appearance returned quickly to normal.

  Gotta be careful there, he thought. Don’t want to scare the poor little Earthie too much.

  A cryptic, minimal smile curved the comers of the girl’s mouth, hinting that perhaps she had guessed at his train of thought and no, it was not repellent to her. Then she drew back her hand from his arm, but slowly; slender fingers stroking the fabric of his jumpsuit with just
enough pressure to be felt. Such a simple motion, not suggestive in any obvious way, but his heart started to pound nonetheless. So he told his wellseeker to deal with that as well, and felt the sharp bite of mechanical activity in his arm as the autopharmacy embedded in his flesh released a drop of the proper medication into his bloodstream. Thank God for modem medicine. He’d have to make sure he had enough sedative compounds for future use; he had a feeling he’d need them.

  “Thank you,” she said quietly. Almost a whisper. “For the tour.”

  There was nothing more to say. He mumbled something that might have amounted to “you’re welcome,” then nodded a stiff leavetaking and backed out of the room.

  Worms. That’s what they reminded her of: moist, repellent worms, like the ones they had studied in Earthbio 101. She remembered her tutor encouraging her to reach out and touch one, to experience its nature through all of her senses, not just the computer-enhanced visuals she usually relied upon. It was cold and clammy and soft in a squishy, nauseating way. Later he had shown her pictures of worms mating, wrapped in some gelatinous gook, and she had pictured touching that, and the sickness had welled up inside her. Only the prompt action of her wellseeker had kept her from throwing up right in the classroom. Could it help her now? She wasn’t so sure.

  How can you even think about him that way? she asked Katlyn. Scrubbing her hand as she did so, trying to scour away the memory of contact with Sumi’s moist, repellent appendages. The thought of having any kind of sexual contact with the Variant, damp and snakelike tendrils against her naked skin ... she leaned over the side of the bed suddenly and did throw up, her whole body heaving as if trying to force out the image. And no bottie was going to clean it up for her, either. She was going to have to deal with the mess herself.

  You’ve got a lot of growing up to do, kid, Katlyn told her.

  God, if only the Others would go away. Just for an hour. Just one blessed hour of being a normal human being, one human being in all her parts—not trapped in a body that did things which repelled her, or endangered her, or ... or anything.