On Whetsday (8 page)

He took the eyepad shield completely off and set it down on the shelf so he could take a closer look at the boxes around him. If there was any writing on them, or anything at all to tell you what was supposed to be in inside, he couldn't see it. Maybe the cithians could tell what was what by smelling the boxes. Or by tasting them with the little sensors he knew they had on their forelimbs. Denny couldn’t do that.

He turned to the shelf on the left and grabbed the box at eye level. Denny thought about turning and leaving, but he also thought how bad it would be to get back to the quarter and discover that what he'd picked up wasn't a maton after all. He fumbled at the box with his cloth wrapped hands. There were some grooves in the package, but they seemed to be designed for the tiny manipulators at the end of a cithian mid-limb, and were way too narrow for Denny to get his fingers in, even when he slipped them out through a gap in the heavy cloth wrapping. He tried to pull the top off, but it wouldn't come. He pressed and poked at the edges, but nothing happened. Finally he simply turned the box over and shook it.

The top came off, and something small, rounded, and silvery fell from the box. Denny dropped the box and tried to catch the object, but it struck the hard floor with a metallic clang and bounced away. Clumsy in his moltling disguise, Denny shuffled after the gleaming ball as it wobbled along between the shelves, but he only managed to kick it with one of his fake front feet, and when he stepped forward to try and catch it, he kicked it harder. The device went spinning away, wobbling and twisting along the aisle. The shape of the device wasn’t a perfect sphere, and it tended to roll to one side, but its turn almost exactly matched the curve of the shelves. It just kept rolling and rolling. Denny hurried after it, with his real legs thumping against the empty front legs of his disguise and the spare set of arms bouncing against his chest.

When the silver thing finally fetched up against the bottom of a shelf, Denny bent down to pick it up. The weight of the plastic shell on his back almost caused him to fall over, but with a little arm waving, he managed to stand up again and get his first good look at the device.

There was nothing to it. Just a slightly lumpy silver ball. Denny turned it over carefully, but there were no buttons, no knobs or dials or screens. “Are you a maton?” he said, hoping that the little device might reply. It said nothing.

“Hello?” Still nothing.

Denny looked around. He had walked so far in chasing the fallen device that he couldn't even see the box it had come from. He went back along the curving aisle... and stopped.

The fallen box lay in the middle of the aisle. Bending over it was a cithian. An adult cithian with the red stripe of the Jukal Plex Legal Authority across its shell.

Denny slowly backed away. When the curve of the shelf was enough to hide him, he started to walk faster. When he got to the next aisle that cut across the sets of shelves, he turned right toward the outside of the building. Behind him, Denny heard a clicking, scrabbling sound. A movement sound. He started to run as fast as his disguise would allow.

He reached the outer wall of the building, but still couldn't see anything of the door where he had come in. The wall was a dark gray, and seemed to be nearly covered in wires, pipes, ducts, and grids, all of them painted the same color. There were no labels or signs that Denny could see. Some of the old buildings in the human quarter had signs above the outside doors that said “Out.” Some of them had arrows on the floor that pointed to these doors. The cithians apparently didn't believe in such signs.

Denny wasn't sure which way would take him back to the door, but he turned right again and kept running. A few steps later, he skidded to a halt. The bright twin suns of Pairday were shining right through the broad open door just ahead, spilling a cone of brilliant light into the otherwise gloomy space. But silhouetted against that light was the form of another adult cithian. Denny backed away. He pressed his plastic shell against the wall, peering toward the entrance from around the side of a large pipe.

From out of the shelves, another cithian appeared. It could have been the one Denny saw by the fallen box, but he couldn't really tell. It joined the cithian standing in the entrance. The two cithians bent close together and touched forelimbs, as cithians often did when speaking to each other. After a moment, they moved apart, and both of them headed into the shelves, moving in different directions. Denny gave them ten seconds to get away, then started for the door.

He had barely taken half a step when two more cithians appeared. And two dasiks right behind them. The newcomers didn't hesitate, but started immediately into the stacks, fanning out to cover all the aisles.

“Earth,” Denny said, but he said it very, very quietly. He back away until he once again had the shelves sheltering him from the view of the nearest cithian, and then he turned and ran again, staying to the outside. He thought that maybe there was a door on the other side of the tall building, but even if there was, it seemed likely that there would be a cithian or a dasik there, too. In fact, if there was another door, maybe cithians had already come through it. Maybe they were coming toward him. Maybe he was running straight toward them. And what about the cithians who had gone up the center aisles, wouldn't they get to the other side long before Denny made it by going around the outside wall?

He stood against the wall. His breath was coming hard and his heart was beating in his ears. The sweat he had worked up getting to the building was now icy under the many layers of cloth.

One thing was sure, Denny could not get caught. His disguise might fool another cithian if he was just passing them in the street, or even talking to them at a distance, but there was no way the cithians wouldn't notice something strange if they were right beside Denny. For one thing, he didn't even have his eyepad shield. It was still lying on the shelf back where he had been looking for a maton. No cithian was going to look at his eyes peeking out between the folds of cloth and think that he was anything but a human.

Denny imagined the authority cithians grabbing hold of him with the hard manipulators of their forelimbs. He imagined them dragging him through the city. He imagined Overcontroller Hiser looking at him, not in the kindly, protective way that he sometimes did, but in a way that said Denny was in serious trouble. If he was caught now, it wouldn't be just no chez for a week. It meant Hiser telling Denny that he was going to be consigned today, right now, this moment. And not consigned to the place where his father had been sent. Not to a place where anyone had been sent. Consigned to a place where he would never see Cousin Sirah, or Auntie Talla, or irritating Cousin Kettle, or even Poppa Jam. A place where he might never see another human. Ever.

There was a scraping sound ahead. The sound of a hard cithian foot on a hard floor.

Denny turned left, the plastic shell bumping against the wall made a plonking sound as he moved, which made him wince. He looked left. Right. Then instead of staying near the wall he plunged into the space between the curving shelves. The shelves on one side were all covered with boxes that were bigger than Denny. Here and there, there were gaps in the boxes, and a dozen steps in Denny made a sudden decision. He jumped into one of these gaps, slid between two of the boxes, and lay still.

There was the sound of his breathing, and the pounding of his heart. Otherwise, the whole vast space seemed silent.

It wasn't until he was laying there that Denny realized he was still clutching the silver thing that had fallen from the box in his right hand. He raised it up to his face. His breath misted the silvery sides as he carefully turned if over. It was nothing but a slightly lumpy silver ball. He was going to be sent away for nothing. Only...

Denny brought the thing closer to his face. One spot on its surface was flat. One small, square spot. One spot just about the same size as... He shifted the ball to his left hand, then dug into his pocket and produced the little purple cube the chug had given him.

There was a scrabbling sound nearby. One of the cithians was coming through the space through the shelves right next to Denny. The tap-scrape-tap sound of its long dark, jointed feet on the hard floor came closer, closer... and then it was moving away, walking quickly through the dim space. It had gone past him.

Denny let out a slow breath that until that moment he hadn't realized he had been holding. He raised the silver ball, turned it so that the little square was exposed, then brought the cube up to it. The size was right. Just right. Denny touched the cube to the ball.

His hand exploded in agony.

18

Working...Working...Working...

Memory core...detected.

Neural connection...nonstandard.

Performing transformation matrix.

Tracing...Tracing...Tracing...

Link established.

19

The pain was gone. Denny was still lying on the shelf, wedged between two boxes–two kind of blood red boxes, now that he thought about it–bracing himself against the flood of pain. Only there wasn't any pain. Whatever had happened when he touched the cube to the silver ball, it didn't seem like it was happening now.

Denny slowly raised his face to look toward the thing in his hand. He sort of expected to see that his whole hand had been blasted off, but it was still there. So was the maton. He turned it around, noticing that the purple cube seemed to have pulled itself into the silver ball so that it was almost even with the surface. There was just a little rim of purple visible above the silver surface. Except for that, it looked the same.

Just then, he noticed that he wasn't alone. Standing in the space between the shelf where Denny was hiding and the next, was a woman. A human woman.

Denny grunted in surprise, his voice muffled by a layer of cloth that had fallen against his face. He shoved himself back against the boxes. As he bumped against the side of the shelves, the silver ball slipped out of his fingers and rolled away from his hand.

The woman rippled, as if she was painted on a flapping curtain, and vanished.

Denny gulped down a lump in his throat. He twisted around, looking to see where the woman had gone, but there was no one in sight. From somewhere down the next aisle, he heard the sound of a cithian moving quickly past. “Serration 34 unoccupied,” said a cithian voice. Another cithian replied. The voice had the weird, muffled sound that came from being on some kind of radio.

The scrabbling sound came again. The cithian was getting closer.

Moving as slowly as he could with his pounding heart and his wrapped-up limbs, Denny slide further back along the shelf, tucking his knees up against his face. The soft form of his fake legs were pressed up against the shelf above him. The plastic shell under his back made him feel unstable, with every breath ready to send him rocking from side to side.

The clack of cithian rear-claws against a hard surface came again. Denny saw the shape of a cithian come around the next line of shelves and start up the row where he was hiding. The cithian had barely taken a step toward him when Denny saw the silver maton. It was lying on the edge of the shelf, tipped so far out into space that it was a wonder that it didn't fall. All the cithian had to do was look down, and he would see the shiny surface of the little orb gleaming in the dim light.

Denny started to reach for it. His fingers were almost on it when he remembered the pain he had felt when touching it the first time. Maybe it was a one-time thing. But then, maybe it wasn't.

The cithian took another slow step. Denny grabbed the sphere.

At once the shock ran through him as if he had swallowed an electric cable. He ground his teeth together to keep from screaming.

The strange woman was back. She was standing right beside the cithian. She was green. Or at least green-ish. Her whole body and face and even what Denny could see of her clothes and hair seemed to be made out of the same thing, some kind of sparkly pale green stone with little flecks of red and white. Denny could see the stony length of her bare legs, and her stone feet laced into stone sandals. He could just see her stone hands dangling below the hem of her stone robe.

The cithian would see her. Had to see her. She was right beside him.

There was a soft beeping sound. “Serration 33 clear,” said the cithian, standing no more than an arm's length from Denny. The hard back claws of its rear limbs clattered past as it moved on along the row.

Denny lay very still for several seconds longer. The pain was mostly gone, but his arms and legs still ached, like when he had moved something very heavy or when he ran up the stairs to his compartment on a day when the lift wasn't working. Carefully, making as little noise as possible, Denny leaned to the side to look up at the green woman.

The stone eyes were fixed on his face. There was something funny about the woman's features. She was made out of some kind of rock, which was funny on its own, but it was something more than that. Something about the shape of her nose, the curve of her cheeks, the way her forehead met the rest of her face. She was definitely human–Cousin Sirah had a little of the same look–only she seemed a different kind of human than Denny.

She was absolutely motionless. Frozen. Somewhere, maybe in a picture book, Denny could remember seeing a person carved out of a block of stone. A statue, like the ones his father made of metal, only different. That's what this woman was like. Only not.

Denny glanced at the silvery ball in his hand. He knew that, somehow, it was making this woman. Like the images of the people with the terrible disease that had appeared when the memory had been placed inside Loma's player, this ball was somehow making the image of the woman. She wasn't really there. It was just a picture. Only the picture's that Loma's player made had seemed like just that–pictures floating in the center of the old woman's tiny room. They didn’t seem real. But this woman...

The green woman moved. Her arms might look like stone, but they flexed like muscle. The stone robe she was wearing shifted like cloth. There was no center to her red and white flecked eye, but still Denny could tell that she was looking at him.

The stone face leaned in toward him, the stone eyes staring right into Denny's own. “Hello, Denning Carrelson, resident 14723, Human Containment Facility, Jukal Plex, Rask,” she said in a bright, friendly, and quite loud tone. “I'm Athena.”

It took everything Denny had not to drop the silver ball again. “You know my name,” he whispered.

“Oh, yes,” said the green woman. She nodded, and the corners of her stony mouth were turned up in a slight smile. “I have access to quite a large store of information.”

Denny tried to twist around to see down the row, but with the boxes and shelves all around him and the wrappings, and the extra clothes, and the plastic shell, he could barely see past the woman. “You need to be quiet,” he whispered. “They'll hear you.”

The woman's smile didn’t falter. It almost seemed to Denny like she found the situation he was in funny “Oh no,” she said. “I'm speaking to you by direct neural connection. No one else can hear, see, or detect my presence in any way. Which reminds me.” The woman straightened herself. “The automation nexus on which this interface is operating is specifically not designed for human operation. Use of this nexus can cause discomfort.”

Denny took a second to process her words. “Does that mean every time I touch this ball, it's going to hurt?” The green woman, Athena, nodded. “Also, continued use may lead to medium to long term injury. I am sorry.” She was still smiling.

No matter how long he thought about this, it didn't sound good. Denny looked away from the woman at the silver ball as he turned it over and over in his hand. “If I went back to get a different maton...”

“All such devices available in this facility are encoded with similar lock out mechanisms for human use,” she said. The woman leaned toward him and winked one stony eye. “They thought it would hurt so much you would never use it. You've surprised them.”

“Surprised who?” asked Denny.

Athena raised a hand to her mouth and her eyes widened, then... something happened. Her lips moved, but no sound was produced. Her face and her arm jerked from one position to another in an instant, and she was again looking at Denny with a smile.

He started to ask her again, but just then the sound of cithians moving through the big space returned. From the sound, Denny could tell it was more than one cithian moving his way. At least two. Maybe more. They were coming slowly, and as they approached he heard a slight groan of metal, the sound of something being slid out of the way. The cithians were checking the shelves.

Denny put one hand on the floor and pulled a little more of himself out into the aisle. “Can you help me?” he asked, speaking as quietly as he could.

She knelt down next to him, the edge of her strange stone robe settling over her knees. “I'm sorry,” she said, “but my physical interactions are strictly limited.” Denny guessed that meant that she couldn’t help.

There was most noise from off to Denny's left. More footsteps, and more grating noises of moving boxes. The cithians were no more than two shelves away, and perhaps closer. “Can you tell me how to get out of here?” he asked. “Without being caught?”

Athena's expression remained just the same. “I can direct your actions toward the path most likely to lead to success,” she said. She turned her head for a moment, apparently looking toward the tower at the center of the room. “I am interfacing with the automation nexus for this facility.”

“Won't they catch you?”

“No,” she said simply. After a few seconds, Athena gave an abrupt nod and turned back to Denny. “Come out now,” she said.

Denny heaved his way free of the shelves. He could hear the cithians still working their way toward him, and it was difficult to get out without making noise, especially while still holding onto the maton. Athena stood over him as he twisted and wormed his way onto the floor.

“Alacrity is desirable,” she said.

“What?”

“Move faster.”

Denny made it out from between the shelves and boxes, and struggled to his feet, stepping on one of his own fake feet in the process and almost falling onto his face. Finally, he was standing.

“This way,” said the green woman. “Follow me.”

She headed down the aisle at a fast walk. Denny could hear the slap, slap of her sandals on the floor, but he had to assume that, like her voice, it was a sound made only for him. He was surprised by how tired he felt as he walked after her. The disguise still made him clumsy, but it was more than that. His legs and arms felt weighted down. The plastic shell felt like it was made of thick metal.

“Stop,” Athena said suddenly. She raised a hand, and when Denny ran into it he was surprised that he actually felt something, like a slight, but real, pressure against his skin.

From down the aisle, a dark figure moved. A shape flicked toward Denny for a second, then was gone.

“Continue.” Athena started moving again, walking even faster than before. Denny struggled to keep up.

He was feeling worse at every step. His head swam. His stomach lurched. “I think I'm going to be sick,” he said, speaking louder than he probably should.

Athena turned to look at him with stony smile still in place. “You are feeling the result of prolonged use of the automation nexus. I suggest you stop using the device now to avoid long-term damage.”

Denny nodded. He looked at the ball in his hand. His hand was shaking. “How will I talk to you when I put it down?” he asked.

“Communication is impossible without the nexus to mediate,” said the green woman. “I'm sorry.”

Denny swayed on his feet. If he put the maton down, he wouldn't have Athena to show him out, but if he held on, he might soon be too sick to move. “Get me out of here,” he whispered to her. “Quickly.”

Athena cut a path across the center of the room. Twice more, she stopped Denny as they waited for cithians to pass, but Denny felt so bad he barely looked up. Finally, they reached the outer wall again. Denny looked around, expecting to see a door nearby, but there were only all the pipes and ducts and wires.

The green woman raised her stone hand to point at a dark gray handle set nearly flush with the dark gray wall. “Pull this down,” she said,

Denny stumbled forward. On his first attempt, the cloth-wrapped fingers of his left hand slipped from the handle, but when he tried again it came down. With a slight whoosh of moving air, a small opening appeared on the wall. It was barely as tall as Denny's knees and maybe twice as wide as his shoulders.

“Crawl through there and you'll be outside,” said Athena. Her stone eyes studied Denny's face. “Please cease use of the automation nexus immediately to avoid permanent damage.”

Denny nodded wearily. His head was splitting, his limbs aching, his stomach rolling over and over. He almost wished the cithians would catch him. Carefully, he tucked his hand into the many folds of cloth over his stomach, then released the maton. At once, he felt a little better. But only a little.

He got down on his knees and looked into the low tunnel. It was short. He would have to take off the plastic shell and drag it behind him, but he could see the bright purplish light of Pairsday shining through the other end of the tunnel.

With a groan, Denny got down on his knees and unstrapped the shell. Moving only a hand at a time, he made his escape through the tunnel. He could feel the compact weight of the maton hidden in the folds of cloth. He hoped it was worth it.

20

whetsday

On Whetsday, Denny learned the truth about the cithians, about the humans, and about his father.

It was only after he had reached the outside of the tunnel that Denny realized that the eyepad shields were still somewhere back inside. Not only that, but the rest of his disguise was tattered and stained. There seemed little chance it would fool a cithian now at any distance.