Collected Short Fiction, page 222
As Sheerluck would say, don’t ask me, I just lurk here.
THE NEXT DAY, I show up with Dove and List Checker looks like she’s never seen anything like us before. She’s got our names, but she doesn’t look too happy about it, which annoys me. List-checking isn’t a job that requires any emotion from her.
“You’re the attorney?” she says to Dove, who is eye-level with her, tentacles sedately furled.
“Scan me again if you need to,” Dove says good-naturedly. “I’ll wait. Mom always said, ‘Measure twice, cut once.’ ”
List Checker can’t decide what to do for a second or two, then scans us both again. “Yes, I have both your names here. It’s just that—well, when she said an attorney, I was expecting—I thought you’d be . . . a . . . a . . .”
She hangs long enough to start twisting before Dove relents and says, “Biped.” Dove still sounds good-natured, but her tentacles are now undulating freely. “You’re not from around here, are you?” she asks, syrupy-sweet, and I almost rupture with not laughing.
“No,” List Checker says in a small voice. “I’ve never been farther than Mars before.”
“If the biped on the other side of that portal is equally provincial, better warn ’em.” Then as we go through, Dove adds, “Too late!”
It’s the same guy with the poles, but when Dove sees him, she gives this crazy whooping yell and pushes right into his face so her tentacles are splayed out on his skin.
“You son of a bitch!” she says, really happy.
And then the Poler says, “Hiya, Mom.”
“Oh. Kay,” I say, addressing anyone in the universe who might be listening. “I’m thinking about a brain enema. Is now a good time?”
“Relax,” Dove says. “ ‘Hiya Mom’ is what you say when anyone calls you a son of a bitch.”
“Or ‘Hiya, Dad,’ ” says Poler, “depending.”
“Aw, you all look alike to me,” Dove says. “It’s a small universe, Arkae. Florian and I got taken hostage together once, back in my two-stepper days.”
“Really?” I’m surprised as hell. Dove never talks about her biped life; hardly any of us do. And I’ve never heard of anyone running into someone they knew pre-sushi purely by chance.
“I was a little kid,” Poler says. “Ten Dirt-years. Dove held my hand. Good thing I met her when she still had one.”
“He was a creepy little kid,” Dove says as we head for Fry’s room. “I only did it so he wouldn’t scare our captors into killing all of us.”
Poler chuckles. “Then why you let me keep in touch with you after it was all over?”
“I thought if I could help you be less creepy, you wouldn’t inspire any more hostage-taking. Safer for everybody.”
I can’t remember ever hearing about anyone still being friends with a biped from before they were sushi. I’m still trying to get my mind around it as we go through the second portal.
When Fry sees us, there’s a fraction of a second when she looks startled before she smiles. Actually, it’s more like horrified. Which makes me horrified. I told her I was bringing a sushi lawyer. Girl-thing never got hiccups before, not even with the jellies, and that’s saying something. Even when you know they’re all AIs, jellies can take some getting used to no matter what shape you’re in, two-stepper or sushi.
“Too wormy?” Dove says and furls her tentacles as she settles down on the bed a respectful distance from Fry.
“I’m sorry,” Fry says, making the pain face. “I don’t mean to be rude or bigoted—”
“Forget about it,” Dove says. “Lizard brain’s got no shame.”
Dove’s wormies bother her more than my suckers? I think, amazed. Lizard brain’s not too logical, either.
“Arkae tells me you want to go out for sushi,” Dove goes on chattily. “How much do you know about it?”
“I know it’s a lot of surgery, but I think I have enough money to cover most of it.”
“Loan terms are extremely favourable. You could live well on that money and still make payments—”
“I’d like to cover as much of the cost as I can while my money’s still liquid.”
“You’re worried about having your assets frozen?” Immediately Dove goes from chatty to brisk. “I can help you with that, whether you turn or not. Just say I’m your lawyer, the verbal agreement’s enough.”
“But the money’s back in the Dirt—”
“And you’re here. It’s all about where you are. I’ll zap you the data on loans and surgical options—if you’re like most people, you probably already have a form in mind, but it doesn’t hurt to know about all the—”
Fry held up a hand. “Um, Arkae? You mind if I talk to my new lawyer alone?”
My feelings are getting ready to be hurt when Dove says, “Of course she doesn’t. Because she knows that the presence of a third party screws up that confidentiality thing. Right, Arkae?”
I feel stupid and relieved at the same time. Then I see Fry’s face and I know there’s more to it.
THE FOLLOWING DAY the crew gets called up to weed and re-seed the Halo. Comet fever strikes again. We send Fry a silly cheer-up video to say we’ll see her soon.
I personally think it’s a waste of time sowing sensors in dust when we’ve already got eyes in the Main ring. Most of the sensors don’t last as long as they’re supposed to and the ones that do never tell us anything we don’t already know. Weeding—picking up the dead sensors—is actually more interesting. When the dead sensors break down, they combine with the dust, taking on odd shapes and textures and even odder colorations. If something especially weird catches my eye, I’ll ask to keep it. Usually, the answer’s no. Recycling is the foundation of life out here—mass in, mass out; create, un-create, re-create, allathat. But once in a while, there’s a surplus of something because nothing evens out exactly all the time, and I get to take a little good-luck charm home to my bunk.
We’re almost at the Halo when the jellie tells us whichever crew seeded last time didn’t weed out the dead ones. So much for mass in, mass out. We’re all surprised; none of us ever got away with doing half a job. We have to hang in the jellie’s belly high over the North Pole and scan the whole frigging Halo for materials markers. Which would be simple except a lot of what should be there isn’t showing up. Fred makes us deep-scan three times but nothing shows on Metis and there’s no sign that anything leaked into the Main ring.
“Musta all fell into the Big J,” says Bait. He’s watching the aurora flashing below us like he’s hypnotised, which he probably is. Bait’s got this thing about the polar hexagon anyway.
“But so many?” Splat says. “You know they’re gonna say that’s too many to be an accident.”
“Do we know why the last crew didn’t pick up the dead ones?” Aunt Chovie’s already tensing up. If you tapped on her head, you’d hear high C-sharp.
“No,” Fred says. “I don’t even know which crew it was. Just that it wasn’t us.”
Dubonnet tells the jellie to ask. The jellie tells us it’s put in a query, but because it’s not crucial, we’ll have to wait.
“Frigging tube-worms,” Splat growls, tentacles almost knotting up. “They do that to feel important.”
“Tube worms are AIs, they don’t feel,” the jellie says with the AI serenity that can get so maddening so fast. “Like jellies.”
Then Glynis speaks up: “Scan Big J.”
“Too much interference,” I say. “The storms—”
“Just humour me,” says Glynis. “Unless you’re in a hurry?”
The jellie takes us down to just above the middle of the Main ring and we prograde double-time. And son of a bitch—is this crazy or is this the new order?—we get some hits in the atmosphere.
But we shouldn’t. It’s not just the interference from the storms—Big J gravitates the hell out of anything it swallows. Long before I went out for sushi (and that was quite a while ago), they’d stopped sending probes into Jupiter’s atmosphere. They didn’t just hang in the clouds and none of them ever lasted long enough to reach liquid metallic hydrogen. Which means the sensors should just be atoms, markers crushed out of existence. They can’t still be in the clouds unless something is keeping them there.
“That’s gotta be a technical fault,” Splat says. “Or something.”
“Yeah, I’m motion sick, I lost the O,” says Aunt Chovie, which is the current crew code for Semaphore only.
Bipeds have sign language and old-school semaphore with flags but octo-crew semaphore is something else entirely. Octo-sem changes as it goes, which means each crew speaks a different language, not only from each other, but also from one conversation to the next. It’s not transcribable, either, not like spoken-word communication, because it works by consensus. It’s not completely uncrackable, but even the best decryption AI can’t do it in less than half a dec. Five days to decode a conversation isn’t exactly efficient.
To be honest, I’m kinda surprised the two-steppers who run JovOp are still letting us get away with it. They’re not what you’d call big champions of privacy, especially on the job. It’s not just sushi, either—all their two-stepper employees, in the Dirt or all the way out here, are under total surveillance when they’re on the clock. That’s total as in a/v everywhere: offices, hallways, closets, and toilets. Bait says that’s why JovOp two-steppers always look so grim—they’re all holding it in till quitting time.
But I guess as long we get the job done, they don’t care how we wiggle our tentacles at each other or what colour we are when we do it. Besides, when you’re on the job out here, you don’t want to worry about who’s watching you because they’d better be. You don’t want to die in a bubble waiting for help that isn’t coming because nobody caught the distress signal when your jellie blew out.
So anyway, we consider the missing matter and the markers we shouldn’t have been picking up on in Big J’s storm systems and we whittle it down to three possibilities: the previous crew returned to finish the job but someone forgot to enter it into the record; a bunch of scavengers blew through with a trawler and neutralised the markers so they can re-sell the raw materials; or some dwarf star at JovOp is seeding the clouds in hope of getting an even closer look at the Okeke-Hightower impact.
Number three is the stupidest idea—even if some of the sensors actually survive till Okeke-Hightower hits, they’re in the wrong place, and the storms will scramble whatever data they pick up—so we all agree that’s probably it. After a little more discussion, we decide not to let on and when JovOp asks where all the missing sensors are, we’ll say we don’t know. Because the Jupe’s honest truth is, we don’t.
We pick up whatever we can find, which takes two J-days, seed the Halo with new ones, and go home. I call over to the clinic to check how Fry’s doing and find out if she managed to get the rest of the crew on The List so we can have that picnic on her big fat bed. But I get Dove, who tells me that our girl-thing is in surgery.
DOVE SAYS THAT, at Fry’s own request, she’s not allowed to tell anyone which sushi Fry’s going out for, including us. I feel a little funny about that—until we get the first drone.
It’s riding an in-out skeet, which can slip through a jellie double-wall without causing a blow-out. JovOp uses them to deliver messages they consider sensitive—whatever that means—and that’s what we thought it was at first.
Then it lights up and we’re looking at this image of a two-stepper dressed for broadcast. He’s asking one question after another on a canned loop; in a panel on his right, instructions on how to record, pause, and playback are scrolling on repeat.
The jellie asks if we want to get rid of it. We toss the whole thing in the waste chute, skeet and all, and the jellie poops it out as a little ball of scrap, to become some scavenger’s lucky find.
Later, Dubonnet files a report with JovOp about the unauthorised intrusion. JovOp gives him a receipt but no other response. We’re all expecting a reprimand for failing to detect the skeet’s rider before it got through. Doesn’t happen.
“Somebody’s drunk,” Bait says. “Query it.”
“No, don’t,” says Splat. “By the time they’re sober, they’ll have to cover it up or their job’s down the chute. It never happened, everything’s eight-by-eight.”
“Until someone checks our records,” Dubonnet says and tells the jellie to query, who assures him that’s a wise thing to do. The jellie has been doing this sort of thing more often lately, making little comments. Personally, I like those little touches.
Splat, however, looks annoyed. “I was joking,” he says, enunciating carefully. They can’t touch you for joking, no matter how tasteless, but it has to be clear. We laugh, just to be on the safe side, except for Aunt Chovie, who says she doesn’t think it was very funny, because she can’t laugh unless she really feels it. Some people are like that.
Dubonnet gets an answer within a few minutes. It’s a form message in legalese but this gist is, We heard you the first time, go now and sin no more.
“They all can’t be drunk,” Fred says. “Can they?”
“Can’t they?” says Sheerluck. “You guys have crewed with me long enough to know how fortune smiles on me and mine.”
“Spoken like a member of the Church of The Four-Leaf Horseshoe,” Glynis says.
Fred perks right up. “Is that that new casino on Europa?” he asks. Fred loves casinos. Not gambling, just casinos. The jellie offers to look it up for him.
“Synchronicity is a real thing, it’s got math,” Sheerluck is saying. Her colour’s starting to get a little bright; so is Glynis’s. I’d rather they don’t give each other ruby-red hell while we’re all still in the jellie. “And the dictionary definition of serendipity is, ‘Chance favours the prepared mind.’ ”
“I’m prepared to go home and log out, who’s prepared to join me?” Dubonnet says before Glynis can sneer openly. I like Glynis, vinegar and all, but sometimes I think she should have been a crab instead of an octopus.
OUR PRIVATE QUARTERS are supposed to have no surveillance except for the standard safety monitoring.
Yeah, we don’t believe that for a nano-second. But if JovOp ever got caught in the act, the unions would eat them alive and poop out the bones to fertilise Europa’s germ farms. So either they’re even better at it than any of us can imagine, or they’re taking a calculated risk. Most sushi claim to believe the former; I’m in the latter camp. I mean, they watch us so much already, they’ve gotta want to look at something else for a change.
We share the typical octo-crew quarters—eight rooms around a large common area. When Fry was with us, we curtained off part of it for her, but somehow she was always spilling out of it. Her stuff, I mean—we’d find underwear bobbing around in the lavabo, shoes orbiting a lamp (good thing she only needed two), live-paper flapping around the room in the air currents. All the time she’d spent out here and she still couldn’t get the hang of housekeeping in zero gee. It’s the sort of thing that stops being cute pretty quickly when you’ve got full occupancy, plus one. I could tell she was trying, but eventually we had to face the truth: much as we loved her, our resident girl-thing was a slob.
I thought that was gonna be a problem, but she wasn’t even gone a day before it felt like there was something missing. I’d look around expecting to see some item of clothing or jewellery cruising past, the latest escapee from one of her not-terribly-secure reticules.
“SO WHO WANTS to bet that Fry goes octo?” Splat says when we get home.
“Who’d want to bet she doesn’t?” replies Sheerluck.
“Not me,” says Glynis, so sour I can feel it in my crop. I’m thinking she’s going to start again with the crab act, pinch, pinch, pinch, but she doesn’t. Instead, she air-swims down to the grotto, sticks to the wall with two arms and folds the rest up so she’s completely hidden. She misses our girl-thing and doesn’t want to talk at the moment, but she also doesn’t want to be completely alone, either. It’s an octo thing—sometimes we want to be alone but not necessarily by ourselves.
Sheerluck joins me at the fridge and asks, “What do you think? Octo?”
“I dunno,” I say, and I honestly don’t. It never occurred to me to wonder, but I’m not sure if that’s because I took it for granted she would. I grab a bag of kribble.
Aunt Chovie notices and gives me those big serious eyes. “You can’t just live on crunchy krill, Arkae.”
“I’ve got a craving,” I tell her.
“Me, too,” says Bait. He tries to reach around from behind me and I knot him.
“Message from Dove,” says Dubonnet just before we start wrestling and puts it on the big screen.
There’s not actually much about Fry, except that she’s coming along nicely with another dec to go before she’s done. Although it’s not clear to any of us whether that means Fry’ll be all done and good to go, or if Dove’s just referring to the surgery. Then we get distracted with all the rest of the stuff in the message.
It’s was full of clips from the Dirt, two-steppers talking about Fry like they all knew her and what it was like out here and what going out for sushi meant. Some two-steppers didn’t seem to care much, but some of them were stark spinning bugfuck.
I mean, it’s been a great big while since I was a biped and we live so long out here that we tend to morph along with the times. The two-stepper I was couldn’t get a handle on me as I am now. But then neither could the octo I was when I finished rehab and met my first crew.
I didn’t choose octo—back then, surgery wasn’t as advanced and nanorectics weren’t as commonplace or as programmable, so you got whatever the doctors thought gave you the best chance of a life worth living. I wasn’t too happy at first, but it’s hard to be unhappy in a place this beautiful, especially when you feel so good physically all the time. It was somewhere between three and four J-years after I turned that people could finally choose what kind of sushi they went out for, but I got no regrets. Any more. I’ve got it smooth all over.
