Love and Rockets Read online

  I tried to sit up, and this time, after a host of misfiring signals and unintended motions, my body almost obeyed me. I managed to turn over and push myself up off the polished drainfloor. I stumbled over to the fresher controls and turned on the high pressure hot. Side showers sent cleaning particles blasting me from all directions except the mirror wall side. I turned and twisted, lifted arms that more and more responded to my control, stretched my legs. I turned my feet to the blast, and my back. I worked the cleansing beads through what there was of my hair.

  “Coming in,” the doctor said through the doortalker.

  I hit the off button. The blast of cleansing ceased. The bodymark still showed on my thigh. Maybe it took special solvents to get it off.

  Dr. Shalabi came into the fresher, accompanied by Dr. Maxta, the head of Emergency Medicine. He looked me up and down from not very far away. The hospital freshers weren’t meant to hold more than two people at a time.

  “Gateway Night. Fah,” he said. “Why can’t we get through one of these damned festivals without this kind of nonsense?”

  “What happened to me?” I tried to ask, but all that came out of my mouth was a jumble of words I didn’t understand.

  Dr. Shalabi sighed. “It’s a shame, Fassi. You’re a good nurse, but you’re useless to us now.”

  I shook my hands at her.

  “Oh.” She closed her eyes and swayed. We had both been on shift a long time. “Yes, I suppose you don’t know what happened. It’s one of the Second Deaths of the Shurixit, a thala—looks like it laid claim to you. I knew it was trouble when that First Death Man came in here.”

  “Gateway Night,” said Dr. Maxta. “Just an excuse for bad behavior without consequences. They’ll say it’s a festival accident and no one will pay. Dr. Shalabi, I leave you to it. Nurse, put some clothing on.” He left, shaking his head.

  I looked for the clothes I’d been wearing when I stepped into the fresher, but didn’t see them. I went to the closet slot and tapped it. A pole with uniforms on it extended from the wall, and I found one my size and shrugged into it. I wondered where my hospital ID had gone.

  I shook my hands at Dr. Shalabi again, and she said, “The thala’s put its clan mark on you. Most of the Second Death ghosts don’t re-embody, but every once in a while one gets the idea it would like to walk around in a body again, and it finds one. Mostly they re-embody in Humans, because we don’t have the defenses live and First Death Shurixit have. We haven’t discovered a sure way to detach them once they settle in. I’m sorry no one noticed you hadn’t clocked out sooner, Fassi. If the process is interrupted, the ghost sometimes dissolves without possessing a person, but you’ve been in here a while now; it is probably adequately integrated.”

  I said, “Kumalli nelle kisna?”

  “No, there’s nothing to be done now. We have a halfway house for people this has happened to. I’ll send you there and they can explain it to you.”

  Oh, great. She could understand what I was saying, and I couldn’t. “Can someone at least teach me the language?” I tried to say, but it came out as other words.

  “No, I don’t think you should go to the Shurixit Quadrant,” she said. “Why would you want to?”

  I couldn’t tell her I wasn’t even talking for myself. Or could I? I headed for the nearest report screen, which was not in the fresher. It was out in the ER. I got to it and looked back. The doctor followed.

  I set my hands over the word pads and typed in: I’m not the one talking! I glanced back at her, and she came to see.

  “Oh,” she said. She cocked her head and studied me.

  I don’t even understand what I’m saying, I typed.

  “How can that be?”

  I don’t know, I typed. I need to learn Shurixit.

  “Is there no crossover of understanding between you and the thala?”

  I closed my eyes and listened in my head for a voice not my own. I had no sense of Other there at all. I looked at Dr. Shalabi and shook my head.

  “I don’t know enough about this kind of invasion,” Dr. Shalabi said. “I don’t know if every case is like yours. Let me ask a couple questions. Who are you?”

  I pointed to my chest and lifted my eyebrows. She’d been calling me by name, even though I didn’t have my ID. I was pretty sure she knew who I was.

  “No. No. Not you, Fassi. The thala,” she said. “If this works the way it has already, just talk, and she will answer, no?”

  I opened my mouth, and words came out.

  “You don’t want to cooperate?” Dr. Shalabi asked.

  I made my mouth move, but this time, there was no sound. I tried to force my voice out of my mouth. My throat hurt. No words.

  “I need to send you to someone who knows how to deal with this, Fassi. I’m sorry.”

  Words burst out of me, fast and full of strange sounds I didn’t know how to make.

  “Not if you won’t tell me who you are and what you want,” Dr. Shalabi said.

  What did I say? I typed.

  Dr. Shalabi clicked her tongue, the way she did when she was irritated. “I’m not used to this,” she said, “you being two people. She wants you to go to the Shurixit Quadrant and contact one of the elders, the First Dead.”

  If it’s her brother, he’s probably hanging around outside, I typed.

  Words poured out of my mouth.

  I didn’t know what she was going on and on about, but I typed, What, you didn’t see him when he came in here and touched me with the madness? He was looking for you.

  Dr. Shalabi listened to what my mouth was saying, and told me, “He’s not the one she was looking for. That’s the one she’s running from. She wanted protection from him. That’s why she embodied.”

  I kept talking. She cocked her head and listened, but she was sagging against the wall. I was tired myself. “That one,” she said, “has kept her in a soul cage, when her greatest desire has been to intustikiya with—I’m sorry, Fassi. I’m too tired to make sense.” She reached into a pocket of her jacket and pulled out a prescription pad. She spoke into it, then said, “Go to the pharmacy. I authorized a translator for you. I have to go flop now.”

  “Thank you, Doctor,” I said, only it came out as, “Kreekree, alanka.”

  “You’re welcome,” she said. So I guess maybe the thala and I meant the same thing at the same time, for once. “It was a pleasure working with you.” She left out the part about “before this happened.”

  I headed deeper into the hospital to the pharmacy, only I was stopped at the first door. I didn’t have my ID. I couldn’t explain it. The thala tried to tell them something, but it didn’t get us any farther. I tried to ask myself what I had done with my clothes, where I had my ID pinned, but my other self wouldn’t give me words.

  I went back to the report screen and typed. I knew from before that my rider could read and understand the Standard I had learned before I came to Kata Station. Clothes, I typed. ID. Where are they?

  I answered my own question in a language I couldn’t understand.

  Can you speak Standard? I typed.

  “Ohnno,” she said.

  Can you say Dr. Maxta? I typed. Dr. Maxta at least knew what had happened to me, and might still be on shift.

  “Alanka Maxta,” I said aloud.

  “Say it louder. Ask—” I looked behind me and saw Mbanji Holari, a nurse who, I thought, liked me all right. “Ask that man for Dr. Maxta.” I went to Mbanji and tugged on his sleeve.

  “What is it, Fassi? You look terrible,” he said.

  “Alanka Maxta,” I said.

  He frowned. He said something in Shurixit, and I answered him. I rolled my eyes, impatient with my own problems. Mbanji and my rider had a protracted conversation.

  “That’s all right,” he said. “I can take you to the pharmacy.” He reached for my hand. Without even thinking, I jerked it away.

  “What’s the matter?” he said.

  I said something, and he laughed.

  “No
, Itana, that is Human-Human touch, and it is permitted. However, we can go without it.” He turned and led me through the various security barriers into the bowels of the hospital and to the pharmacy, where he and the pharmacist had a conversation that sometimes included my rider, and I finally got my translator and installed it in my left ear.

  “Know you me now?” I said aloud, or she said it aloud in Shruixit, and it finally made some kind of sense to me. I had to think to figure out what my rider meant.

  “Kind of,” I tried to say, but she had total control of the mouth and throat.

  “You okay now, Fassi?” said Mbanji.

  I shook my head. If I wanted to talk to my rider or anyone else, I needed something with type pads. Or sign language.

  “We go,” said my rider. I found myself walking toward the exit. No, I thought. She’s the rider. I’m not. She doesn’t get to walk us around. I thought myself into the muscles of my legs. I tried to tighten them and stop us moving forward. It took me longer than I liked to halt us and topple us over.

  “Don’t do that,” she said. She flopped around a bit, and managed to put a hand to our cheek. We’d come down face first. I tasted blood.

  If you’re going to take the body, give me back my mouth, I thought, but couldn’t say.

  I sat up, and she let me do it without interference. I went to the report screen. You have to tell me what you want and why, I typed.

  She talked.

  Gateway Night was still going strong when we took to the corridors. I heard laughter, singing, and music played on instruments I had never heard before. We passed tipsy groups that included Human and Hallen, Oeria (at least their flyers) and Shurixit, and various animals people had brought to the station as pets. I heard drinking songs I’d never heard before, with very bawdy lyrics—my translator worked on everyone’s speech. So I finally realized the Hallen I passed every day on my escape from the hive to the upper regions were propositioning me and telling me how good I smelled. I also realized they said it to all the females of any species, even if they had female characteristics themselves, and they never reached for me.

  My rider helped me not flinch when the Hallen approached. She rattled off compliments to them and wished that their eggs would be many-colored. They frilled their topscales and said I had learned manners since the day before.

  We had crossed half the Human territory toward Shurixit when the First Dead man who had entered the ER earlier caught up with us.

  “Itana. Itana. What have you done?” he wailed, and reached for us.

  “Stop, Shringil!” We had donned the regular filters, plus a body sheath just for him, before we left the hospital. He grasped my arm above my gloves and I did not feel it. “I was never yours, and I am not yours now. Stop pursuing me.”

  “It is not you alone I want but your undead match,” he said. He pawed at my arm, as if to break through the sheath of filter I wore.

  “Stop,” she cried, and then she called out in high Shurixit, and three strange Shurixit broke off their conversations with others nearby and came running. Each had only one caste jewel on his or her forehead, and their fur matched the color of their jewels: lilac, lavender, poppy, colors of flowers from a planet to which I had never been.

  “I here denounce and abjure this one who was once my brother,” my rider said, “and cast him into the third death. Witness it for me. Hear me and see me and swear me.”

  “We hear and see and swear,” they said, and some strange current of air moved over us, so cold it raised goosebumps on my arms. I couldn’t think how weather like that could happen in the corridors, which were maintained at a constant temperature just this side of comfortable for all Known Races. “Shringil Eftsolan, you have passed the third gate,” they said, and he shrieked and fell to the ground and lay still.

  I couldn’t tell whether a First Dead had actually died again. It wasn’t something they taught in med school, at least not the one I’d gone to on Frillium. I looked at the still form on the corridor floor and was only glad that his eyes were closed. I remembered the hopeless, overwhelming love he had forced on me with touch, and almost, I longed for that to happen again. In those few moments, I had had a purpose. I had had a home.

  Itana spat on him, using my lips and my saliva. She stepped over him and walked on. I made us look. He did not move behind us.

  We strode past the revelers, and she accepted a few sips of ria wine from some, a savor of scents from others, a cupcake here and a candystick there. She walked us into the center of the Shurixit Quadrant. Light came in nets and slices from above, fretted by narrow sword-shaped leaves of purple plants. A dank metallic taste rode the air. Slim rivers ran down the centers of their corridors, and cropfruit grew from niches in the walls, dangling orange and purple globes above the ground. She reached for one and raised it to my mouth. I managed to stop the gesture before it reached its end. I held out my other hand in front of us and shook it.

  “Oh! I am sorry, Body,” she said. “I forgot.” She set the fruit on a nearby ledge.

  Several Shurixit challenged us as we traveled. The rider spoke to them, and they looked to the ground and waved us on.

  At last we came to an entrance in a rough, rocky wall that had a single blue gem above it. Itana stood in front of the entrance and sang.

  Lost.

  We have lost.

  We are lost.

  We were reft.

  Cut like thread.

  Sliced in two.

  Death moved between us.

  Splice the rope.

  Reweave the thread.

  Bind the wound.

  Find me.

  Find me.

  Find.

  Several gray-striped Shurixit drifted from the entrance and listened as Itana sang. They looked at each other and then at me. One with two blue caste jewels in his forehead came to me and knelt. “Oh, my beloved, are you there? Are you there?” he sang, with a melody that echoed her song.

  “Oh my beloved, I am here, I am here.”

  “Can we now be as one, be as one?”

  “Be as one,” she sang. She put my hand under his chin and tilted his face up. His eyes were pale green beneath the blue of his jewels.

  “Will you be with me? Will you accept me?” she sang, and he responded, “It is my dream. I will be with you.”

  She knelt, too, and brought my face toward his. I tried to pull back. Skin to skin, Human to Shurixit, I’d already tried that once and look where it got me! But she didn’t stop. She pressed my forehead against the stranger’s.

  His caste jewels burned with more than color. They pulsed and pierced into my forehead just while I was thinking, Hey, I don’t love this guy, even though he touched my unprotected skin.

  “Ow!” I cried, and then, “Oh!” A wind blew through my brain, picked up my rider, and carried her away.

  I woke cradled in soft, furry grass, cupped in a depression in some rock inside a cave in the Shurixit Quadrant. “Hello?” I said.

  My mouth. It worked again. I could speak my own language. I touched my cheeks, then pressed my forehead, where I felt a small hard bump.

  “Hello.” A male Shurixit came to stand over me. “How do you feel?”

  I tapped the ear with the translator. I couldn’t tell whether he was speaking Standard or Shurixit. I guessed it didn’t matter. “Better,” I said, for the second time that day.

  I sat up and looked around. The rock that held me had several depressions cushioned with grass in it, and the cavern we were in opened up, with a higher ceiling, just past the edge of it. A clear pool of water lay to one side of the cavern, and a pit with a fire ring sat in the other. The ceiling was sooted with smoke. It was hard to remember I was still on Kata Station.

  I looked at the stranger and realized I knew him. He was the one my rider had sung to, only now he had a third caste jewel in his forehead, half green and half purple. I poked my forehead again and wished I had a mirror. I suspected the bump in my skin that itched so much was one of th
ose jewels.

  “Itana is gone, isn’t she?” I asked.

  “I am here now,” he said, and patted his stomach, or where a stomach would be if he were a human.

  “Good,” I said. “I’m going home. You don’t need me anymore, do you?” I checked the timeblock on the back of my hand. It was almost station midnight, and still the same day. Gateway Night.

  “I’ll show you the way,” he said.

  “Thank you.”

  We walked without touching through a maze of rocky corridors. “Memorize this pathway,” he told me as we went. “You will always be welcome here.”

  “No offense, but I’m not sure I want to come back,” I said.

  “I know you,” he said, and then he hugged me, stroked his hand over my head. Still, I didn’t fall into hopeless love with him. I kind of liked him, though. “You might never come back,” he murmured, “but know you can.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  We came to the edge of the Shurixit Quadrant, and he stood in the corridor, watching as I headed toward the entrance to downunder, where my compartment was. He watched me until the corridor turned and we no longer had a line of sight.

  Sleeping people lined the corridor, some wearing wreaths of butterflies, some entwined with others, some muttering to themselves. I ducked down into my compartment and studied my image in the mirror there. Sure enough, I had a blue-green jewel in my forehead now. I guessed I could scratch it out or remove it surgically. But I liked it.

  THE WOMEN WHO ATE STONE SQUID

  Jay Lake

  I studied the virteo screen. The lander’s sensors jibed with what we’d probed from orbit these last weeks. Partial pressure of O2 a hair below 1.3 bars—perfectly breathable and not quite concentrated enough to induce oxygen toxicity. CO2 just about absent, with about 79% inert gases. At least that last bit was Earth-normal, though the nitrogen component was slightly reduced in favor of helium, wherever that was coming from, and some NO2. The air was maybe not so good for human tissue over extended exposures, with humidity like an old bone stored in high orbit. This planet’s seabeds were as dry as Joan Carter’s Mars, but local conditions had held stable since I’d grounded, oh, fourteen hours ago.