Complete Short Fiction, page 147
And, in fact, the Iffrin was nowhere to be seen amid the thick fungal ribs that filled much of its farm, just an empty chair and a wheeled tank filled with water. A poorly adjusted circulator thumped somewhere underneath the tank, sending regular ripples across its dark surface.
I caught a movement and ducked. I looked more carefully, and finally saw foot-long gill flukes, sleek and shiny, as they slithered among the hanging fungal ribs. As I watched, one fell and flopped on the soft shredded floor. It was clearly supposed to drop into the tank. I reached to flip it in. It slashed a pair of sharp hooks at me, and I jumped back. Now it dug them into the floor, seeking its target. Its back grew duller. The Iffrin better finish its dealings, even if they were more profitable, before it lost its ostensible crop.
Iffrins suffered heavily from parasites, fungal growths, and infections, and some of them had turned that weakness into a business, nurturing those parasites within their own bodies and selling them on to those nations who got use or pleasure out of them.
Still, I knew these gill flukes were a delicacy, and it couldn’t afford to waste them. I knew it might be reluctant to talk to me, so I shoved the tank into the growth at the pod’s far end, put the chair in front of it, and sat down, trying to look casual despite the sharp ridge in the middle intended to support a widely separated Iffrin ass. I dropped the annoying bag I had to carry, hearing the eyeballs click inside it. In revenge, maybe, for giving up the jacket, Nurri had insisted that the eyeballs had to go that very day. I couldn’t argue. I’d dispose of them before I got home . . . or maybe just hide them under my bed. Depended on how much energy I had after this job.
Another fluke fell from the ceiling. This one struggled for much longer, flopping hard against the floor. I looked around for gauntlets, or a grabber of some sort. Nothing. This one too finally flipped itself over and started to spread itself out on the floor.
“They were looking for you,” someone said behind me, in a grating traffiq optimized for analytics and negotiation. “They must have followed you here.”
I’d forgotten how quietly Iffrin moved on those flat feet of theirs. I stayed in the chair, despite the pain from the damn ridge. It’s always hard to identify individuals of a nation not your own, and Iffrins, with their internal orientation, were particularly bad at it. I thought it had me confused with some other Om, perhaps a potential customer.
“Are you sure you didn’t bring them here yourself?” I tried to keep my tone midrange, generic, hoping it would give up something more.
It didn’t work. “Who are you?” it said.
Iffrins were thickheaded, purple-skinned bipeds, shorter than Oms but wider. This one wore a too-large Paowan cloak over its various layers of shredding integument. Something had chewed on the quilted surface, leaving gouges in concentric circles.
“You know something about a client of mine,” I said. “Dothanial Serg.”
“I don’t know him. I am a commercial farmer.”
“I don’t care what your business is. I care about what you know about what happened to him.” Two more flukes fell. One scraped at my shoe as it sought for purchase. “Who buys these?”
The Iffrin looked at the nearly half a dozen flukes that now rested on the floor. “Brumbugs place them in their gills, a memory of infestations of old, then gain their revenge by eating their one-time tormentor.” It pulled a fluke off the soft floor, deftly dealing with its writhing hooks, and shoved it under its cloak, somewhere in the layers of shedding integument, to nourish it. “A delicacy.”
“Come on. Dothanial messed you up. Your plan. If you tell me what you know, I might be able to find a way that he can make you whole.” That they’d had some scheme together was just a guess, but a reasonable one.
“If they dry out here, they become too chewy. Their value drops.”
“Just tell me about Dothanial.” I was glad to get up off that damn chair. It would take a while for my cheeks to make friends again. “How you knew him. What you two had planned that night.”
“He can’t make me whole. He deserves his punishment.”
“Just tell me what happened.”
Together, the Iffrin and I maneuvered the tank into the farm’s center and watched the ceiling. Three flukes dropped in and sank peacefully to the bottom. I was starting to be able to see which of them was ready to drop in its turn. The Iffrin tried to tug the tank. I held onto it.
The Iffrin finally gave up and fell back on its ridged seat, gathering its big Paowan cloak around it. Rents in it showed various growths, patches of fungi, colonies of writhing worms, what looked like a puffball ready to burst . . . this Iffrin’s body showed a lot of lines of business. A string of yellow insects emerged in one spot and migrated to another hole in the cloak, whether to start a new colony or just for variety was unclear.
“I had an opportunity. This farm was at the far end of the growhouse, with a soft new membrane. And the growhouse structure was being reconstructed, leaving an opening to the cliff beyond.
“This was two months ago,” I said.
“Yes.”
“And it gave an unexpected access to the exterior of the Lorani incubator ”
“Yes.”
“Oms like Lorani fluff. But how was that an opportunity for you?”
“The fluff is made softer by a small insect that infests it. So some have said. No one is sure, because no one actually acquires any fluff. They merely talk about how close they got to doing so.”
“But you were optimistic that you could find someone who would. Given the new access.”
“I was just as wrong as anyone else who believed in the reality of fluff.”
Lorani incubated their grubs at the very tops of the big hives in which they lived. That might have once been to ensure that predators breaking in from above got to their useless offspring first, or to get rid of waste. Who knew? Lorani kept to themselves, and didn’t gab too much about their child rearing practices.
But when winter came, those exposed grubs up there produced fluffy insulation on their abdomens. It shredded off over time, and filled their little chambers. That insulation, “fluff” to fans, was a miraculously soft and luxurious material, and, because of its rarity, extremely valuable.
So daredevils and treasure hunters of all sorts made their way to the only real approach to the Lorani hive, the wet depression of Onkmire, and tried to get up to the incubator. Finally annoyed by all the interlopers, who usually just ended up in their living quarters, the Lorani had hired the Mimnurm to enforce an exclusion zone, one that caught pretty much everyone who made the attempt and, not incidentally, got the Mimnurms skilled high-altitude workers for their deep excavations.
“You couldn’t get up there yourself,” I said. “But you found someone.”
“I heard talk in the market. Dothanial the Om. It could climb. It had a reputation. False and undeserved. Another irrelevant story Oms tell themselves.” It paused. “Three feet over, they are ready there.”
Even though it was being unpleasant, it was talking, a behavior I wanted to reinforce. I shoved the tank forward in time to carry a handful of falling flukes. They were coming down like black rain now, each sliding into the water and settling peacefully to the bottom to await a passing gill in which to reproduce. They had no idea they’d soon be served to some Brumbug seeking to rectify millennia of evolutionary injustice by turning its former parasites into canapes.
“It certainly seemed prepared,” the Iffrin said. “That night. It came with ropes, equipment, wedges to enter between the plates that protect the top of the hive. No sign of fear. It had planned out a route, down to the saddle below, up a short steep slope, into the incubator, and then all in reverse. I peeled open the membrane as soon as the coldest night came, and it went out. I never saw it again.”
“What went wrong?”
“It never went up. It did not try. I could not see the slope it was to climb, so could not check on its progress. An hour, it had told me. Two at the most. I waited all night with the pod membrane open, risking contaminants, unprofitable infections. I waited until Umber glowed, then let it heal.”
The Iffrin stooped to pick up a dead fluke and tripped over the trailing hem of the vast cloak. It was an unusual style choice. Male Paowans wore that garment only for rare visits to check on the health of gestating females. During pregnancy Paowan females secrete a wide range of allergens that can send males into the equivalent of anaphylactic shock. The allergic reaction is particularly strong for the male who was the parent of the embryo. So a male could confirm paternity by almost dying while paying a visit to its mate, even with the supposed protection of the cloak.
The now-dangerous garments were always disposed of by burning after a single visit. That rule was severely enforced, but it seemed that the Iffrin had its own sources of contraband. It was still a clumsy piece of clothing.
“I did not know what happened,” the Iffrin said. “Then, by chance, I heard the story in the market. About its fear. Its inability. It was caught far below, descending, without fluff, without having even attempted the climb. Fleeing, and leaving me.”
That certainly matched the description of Dothanial’s arrest. Presumably, he had assumed he could do it, but as he tried, the panic overwhelmed him. That was the kind of thing that happened to peak performers when they lost their edge. And Dothanial, whatever his other shortcomings, had been that kind of performer. It was what had attracted Nurri in the first place.
“Have you had any communication with him?” I said.
“It sent word, it would get me what I wanted, but I would have to wait.” It had eviscerated the dead fluke with its complex manipulating hand and was pulling organs out one by one, presumably to check if this parasite had any of its own parasites that might be of marketable value. “But there’s no way back up now. I hope the Mimnurms value their new prisoner. One that is afraid of heights. But one that won’t admit it.”
I kicked the tank over a bit to catch the last few falling flukes, and left it to the legitimate side of its business.
I stepped off the last of the wide stairs of Seghast’s restaurant district and into the cold muck of Onkmire. I’d ducked into a restroom near the bottom to change. A waiter had pounded on the door, demanding I come out and show myself—and when I did, he fell back persuaded by my dark-red jacket that I was a wealthy customer.
I looked particularly legitimate because I’d coordinated it with other pieces of clothing, something someone my age would never do. I was actually a bit embarrassed to have that waiter see me wearing it that way. But no matter how desperately I wanted to, I wasn’t showing myself off here—it was the piece itself. Which was good, because the sling full of eyeballs distracted from the impression.
Aging infrastructure in the district high above had long ago led to leakage from water storage glaciers. By the time anyone had gotten it together to do repairs, that extra water had become an entitlement for various nations, who rioted and ambushed repair teams until the effort was abandoned. An entire ecology now subsisted on various generations of that once-unplanned-but-now-expected water, which ended up under Onkmire, floating mats of waste and plant growth over a dark pool of unknown depth.
The clink of plates and the murmur of conversation faded quickly as I penetrated the mossy growth. Branches spread fat leaves over me, flying insects probed my ear canal, and low creatures retreated into their hiding places, to glower at me from safety. Generations of Mimnurrn tubes about half my height in diameter crisscrossed the muddy soil. Transparent cylinders that had once held nutritive substrate for tube growing lay in piles under the trees. The trail wiggled to get around them, sometimes climbing over one on a pile of wood and dirt.
I’d never expected to come back here.
The year before, I’d come here looking for the greasy lumps and streaks of dark yellow that might mark an ancient Bik molt cache. Some records hinted the Bik had had a colony here at the beginning of their tenure in Tempest. I did find a few ambiguous signs, but if there had ever been any Bik molts, the sagging crust that held them had sunk too deep beneath the icy water for recovery.
I knew now that Dothanial hadn’t come up through here, the usual route to make an attempt on the smooth bulk of the Lorani hive. Instead, he’d been caught as he descended, unwilling or unable to climb back up to the rear of the growhouse where the Iffrin waited.
All the Mimnurm tubes I could see were the natural crystallite microfibrils secreted by one Mimnurm. I didn’t have enough taste buds to adequately perceive its name, much less say it, but Filo, the Om who had somehow gotten himself a decent position down here, called it Squinch. Filo and Squinch were the ones who had captured Doth. I was sure no one had questioned them in any detail about it. This was their job, after all, which they did on the cheap, shaking down various violators for their own profit.
The growth grew sparser, and the smooth slope of the hive’s glacis loomed above the trees. Filo really should have shown up by now. I knew the area was full of sensors, and was designed to duct potential violators into areas where it was easy to capture them. A brilliant red bird fluttered above some flowers, dangling a startling tail. Life could be a pleasure, even if I was working—
“Beauty is a distraction.” Filo stood at my shoulder.
“It’s everything else that’s a distraction.” I like to think I hadn’t jumped. Filo was irritatingly better at his job than he should have been, given his odd obsessions.
He was a big man, looming over me, hair curling to his shoulders. He wore a vest of some dark hide and wide trousers that swirled down past his ankles. The vest was decent, but usually he wore something more striking.
“Now that’s a nice piece.” He examined my jacket intently “Rokko? He does good work. A bit conservative, maybe, particularly with that bag . . .”
I pulled back on the sling of Bik eyeballs. “I prefer ‘classic.’ ”
“Classic might be enough to spare you a violation.”
“Maybe. If I was violating anything.”
He smiled gently at me. This was risky. I understood Filo’s needs and so suspected they sometimes overwhelmed him. I was in the exclusion zone. There was no way to enter Onkmire otherwise. Most casual visitors got ignored. But if he decided he wanted that jacket he could threaten arrest, and I would have to give up Nurri’s jacket. I needed his attention, and his respect, if he was to talk to me. I thought the risk was worth it.
“At least you learned your lesson from that last time you were here,” he said.
“Oh? And what did I learn?”
“That it takes work to impress someone with better taste than you.” This time, as he stepped away, I caught a glimpse of a pair of scarred Amtoum boots. Those were a real coup. The inhabitants of Amtoum, no matter what their nation, guarded their specialized fashions with fierce intensity, as if every piece was an essential organ.
Then he stopped, and his trousers hid the boots again.
“You want something,” he said. “What?”
I had to be careful. Dothanial had been arrested and sentenced, and Filo had no interest in reopening the case. The only way to get him to talk about it would be to imply more guilt on Dothanial’s part.
“When I was here last, I was looking for molted body parts Biks might have left, centuries ago. I didn’t find anything, but lately I got to thinking I had missed something. Dothanial’s a friend of my cousin’s, and he offered to check it out for me, while he was out here.”
Filo smirked. “You just can’t trust people, can you? That boy was way up the glacis. That’s solid, no remains there, nothing. He was going for his own thing.”
We both looked up the slope. From here I could see a Mimnurm tube stretching up the slope, so makeshift it was already pulling free and collapsing back into the trees. But it really had gone an extraordinary way up. I thought about those substrate cylinders under the trees. Some of them must have fueled that growth.
“He got way up there? So you almost missed him.”
“Go ahead, Miss Rokko Jacket, congratulate yourself. You gave him some good suggestions on how to get through here, didn’t you? He evaded most of the detectors, even the hidden ones. But no one gets through here. Not him, not you. Not saying me and Squinch didn’t have to hustle. When I got the alert I was just drinking something hot, wearing a soft shirt from Ranugar and a pair of velvet lounging pants.” He sighed at the memory of how well dressed he had been. “But I got up and out, Squinch shot a tube up, all easy. Sosh were out that night, not like them, but they didn’t bother us.”
“Nothing keeps you as warm as the sense of being well dressed,” I said.
Was it hearing the Sosh that had made Dothanial freak out and fail to reach the Lorani incubator? That certainly would have been my reaction.
“Capturing him must have been a disappointment.” One thing Dothanial wouldn’t have done was dress for Filo. It just wasn’t in him.
“Doing my job is never a disappointment.” Filo was no good at earnest. “But I made it work.” He wiggled his feet in the Amtoum boots. “Not too bad, in the end.”
There was something odd about this. Dothanial had been climbing down, to try to get out to Seghast via Onkmire. Why hadn’t Filo just waited for him to get down to ground level, where it would be easy to grab him? That tube really had been extruded in a panic, as if they were chasing someone they might lose.
And I couldn’t imagine Dothanial wearing Amtoum boots anywhere, much less for a tricky climb.
“Thanks for clearing that up,” I said. “I was worried I’d gotten him in trouble with my request, but it looks like he deserved what he got.”
