Across the Spectrum (7 page)

It’s only fair. I’m wondering about them.

Who were these people, following her into the unknown for
the sake of someone equally unknown? Who were any of them, defying unis to work
among the wreckage of the neighborhood? Clustering around the dangers instead
of running away as any duster would do?
Take nothing for granted and take
what you can get,
one of the common duster phrases. One would say it, and
all others within earshot would finish with the chorus of “And then move on!”

It’s only fair. I’m wondering about me.

Shadia moved on, all right. She waited for the first
tentative head to poke out of the half-height tunnel and she started climbing
the pole. She took them up two levels and stepped off onto the platform.
Remembering the layout of the wreckage they’d seen, she took them further into
the structure, through an even smaller access hatch until they were just about
to balk—and then she clambered out into the wreckage itself. So close to the
edge, where it tumbled straight out into the core. The floor beneath her feet
seemed to give a little quiver when the second person came out, and when the
third appeared there was no doubt.

The third was the uni, covered with dust as were they all.
He gave her a guileless smile—and he bent down to instruct the others to wait.
“It’s not secure,” he told them. “You shouldn’t be here.”

None of them should be here. And yet here they were.

“Found someone!” the second person, a woman in an expensive
work suit from which she’d already ripped the inconvenient frills. Her voice
held a vibration of excitement that made her next words seem lifeless. “No.
Never mind.”

The uni joined her as Shadia inched around the wreckage; a
fourth person eased out into the open and began to cast around, hunting the
owner of the elusively dangling arm. What had seemed so obvious from below was
hardly that from amidst the tangle of walls and upholstery and crushed
electronics.

“Good Lord, what’s that
smell?”
exclaimed the man
who’d just joined them; his hand covered his nose and mouth, but from what
remained of his expression, it had done no good. The woman was the first to
spot the source.

“There!” she said, flinging up a hand to point.
“That.”

That. Cowering into the smallest possible bundle in the only
dark, intact corner left in the residence—the upper tier of a closet, it looked
like—was a mostly hairless slothlike creature. The crumpled remains of a
den-cage, barely recognizable, were not far away.

Aw, ties and chains.
The Rowpins. And Feef, their
survivor.

She must have said some part of it out loud; the others
glanced at her. Then the uni said, “I found a second one,” and the tone of his
voice was clear enough. Too late. Both dead.

“That’s all there is,” Shadia said, her voice very small as
it fought to get out of her throat.
Nothing’s permanent.

The uni looked at her, somber. “These are the people you
were asking about when you first came.”

Shadia nodded.

He gave a little nod back at her, a small gesture that
shouldn’t have made her feel as it did . . . as though she were
part of something. Something bigger than she was or he was . . .
bigger than all of them. She frowned, caught in the moment.

“Go on back down,” the uni told those people still waiting
in the tunnel. Waiting to help . . . except no one here needed
it. “There’ll be crews here to deal with . . . what we’ve
found.” The flooring gave a decisive tremble beneath them, and his voice grew
crisp. “Go on, then. We’ll get their animal and be right after you.”

They meant well.

They coo’d and they called, unable to reach the akliat
through the rubble, wanting badly to preserve this creature belonging to those
people they
hadn’t
been able to save. But the flooring gave a wicked
shudder and Feef’s odor-signals only grew more intensely offensive. A gridnews
hovercam floated past, stopped short, and wandered into the destruction,
wavering slightly in mid-air as it soaked up the scene for its operators.
Shadia, retreating to familiar duster ways—
nothing’s permanent
—eased
back toward her escape. It was all too much, this
joining in
, this
caring
 . . .
she’d learned the lesson once as a child and learned it well. She hadn’t
thought she’d be learning it again, that she’d been foolish enough to let
herself care about these people who loved their akliat.

He was a disturbed old ex-duster. I didn’t do anything
besides bring him a few meals, sneak out some of the family’s old clothing and
once a pillow. An old ex-duster who wanted to return the kindness, to save me
from the misleading perm ways of my family. I understood that later. And in a
way I suppose he did. When he took me away from all I knew, it was the
strongest lesson I ever could have learned. Nothing is forever. Things change,
whenever and wherever. So embrace the change. No ties, no extended responsibilities
to others, nothing to lose. Dive into the change and ride it like a wave.

The uni shouted warning; a huge chunk of flooring broke away
and tumbled down the levels, leaving the others scrambling for safety while
Shadia clutched the edge of the maintenance shaft. Time to leave.

“That’s it, people,” the uni said. “He’s not coming to us. I
wish there were something we could do, but—”

“Give me your uni coat,” Shadia said abruptly.

He gave her a baffled, resistant look, one arm raised to
usher the other two back toward the shaft.

Shadia stepped away from it. “Your coat,” she insisted. The
man and woman hesitated by the exit, watching them. “You want to save the
akliat? Hand it over!”

Still baffled, less resistant, he peeled it off and passed
it to her, a long, dark tailored thing that smelled of sweat and stress and
physical labor. Shadia tented the collar over her head. She put her hands
halfway up the sleeves that were way too long for her anyway, and turned the
coat into a draping cloak, turning her upraised arms into cave-enclosed
branches. She didn’t have to warn the others to hush; they’d done so on their
own, letting their hopes burst through to their faces.

Shadia raised her arms a little higher within her
self-imposed cave and gave one of the casual little chirrups she’d often heard
from Feef. A long trill with a few clucks at the end, a soft repetition . . .

He sprang from his corner, scuttled across the rubble, and
climbed her like the nighttime tree she pretended to be. Fast enough to make
them all gasp. And then she steeled herself for the stench of him . . .
but the stench had transformed to perfume, a crisp pervading caress of a scent;
his soft, suede-skin arms clung to her not with fierce intent, but gentle
trust.

Slowly, filled with a sweetness she could just barely
remember, she let the coat slide down to her shoulders and closed it around the
both of them.

They clapped for her. The man, the woman, the uni . . .
the people several levels below on the first intact inner ring, watching it
broadcast on their PIM gridviews. She met the grin of the uni with a surprised
gaze, and he nodded at the maintenance shaft. “Go.”

The others went. And Shadia turned to follow, awkward under
the burden of coat and akliat, in wavering mid-step when the uni shouted and
the grid-watching crowd gave a collective gasp of horror. She saw it from the
corner of her eye, the bulk of falling debris, screeching metal against metal
as it bounced on the way down.

She’d never get out of the way. Not in time. Duster-like,
she was ready for that . . . except within her whispered a
long-forgotten child’s voice, something that treasured the newly rediscovered
sweetness in life and didn’t want to give it up again so soon . . .

Something hit her hard. She twisted, trying to cushion the
akliat even as she protected him from above, and all the while he exuded his
scent of trust. A horrible crash buffeted her with sound and everything went
dark, dark with a great heavy weight upon her.

She waited for the pain.

“Close one, eh?” said the uni’s voice in her ear. “Come on,
then. You’re the one that knows the way, I think. Let’s get you and your new
friend out of here.”

I don’t understand. He could have been killed. He doesn’t
even know me, doesn’t have any of a perm’s affection for those they keep around
them.

I don’t understand.

She led him through the darkness and back to the dimly lit
pole shaft. She did it in silence, moving carefully to protect Feef, moving
slowly to accommodate the tremble in her limbs. When they reached the level
they’d come from, he put a hand on his own coat and stopped her before she
remembered that dusters didn’t like to be touched by strangers. That everyone
was a stranger.

“I work the duster turf, mainly,” he said, and his voice
held an understanding she’d never heard before. “Never yet met one who hadn’t
already lost too much to listen, but you . . .”

She looked at him, going wary. Feef snuggled against her and
before she could stop herself, she stroked the absurd fluff of his topknot
where it poked out at her neck.

The uni gave the smallest of smiles. “We’re not so dim as
you dusters think, perms aren’t. Sure, we lose things, and then it hurts. It’s
just . . .” He shrugged, losing most of what little composure
he’d had. “It’s just that—it gives us—”

She thought of people rushing to help strangers and other
strangers cheering her success with Feef and yet other strangers who mourned.
Perm strangers, who somehow weren’t really strangers at all, not as dusters
defined them. Perms left themselves open and vulnerable to the hurt and
disillusion that dusters scorned, but . . .

“You could have been killed,” she said. Killed, tackling her
to take them both flying into their only safety instead of diving there
himself, a certain save.

“Yes,” he admitted.

“A duster wouldn’t have done it.”

“No. A duster wouldn’t.”

“You leave yourself open to lose things,” she said, and
looked down at her hand a moment. Then, gently, more naturally than she’d have
thought possible, she offered it to him. A perm gesture. “But it gives you
this.”

His uncertain expression made way for a smile. It cracked
the dust on his face and crinkled the corners of his reddened, irritated eyes.
He looked terrible, and he looked wonderful. “Yes,” he said, taking her hand.
Only for the briefest moment. Then he coughed and said rather brusquely, “Let’s
get you and your new friend home, then.”

Feef’s House. Sounds like a good name for a petcare
center.

An early story of mine, this is close to my heart and contains some nifty imagery.
It won the second annual Phobos Fiction Contest in 2002.

∞ ∞ ∞

When Raven first led the people from the third world to
the fourth, the sky was black and empty all day long. A great chief kept the
sun and the moons and the stars hidden in a cedar box, with some icy rocks to
keep the box from burning up.

Greedy Raven wanted these pretty baubles for himself. He
changed into a lichen flake and floated into the drinking cup of the chief’s
daughter, who drank him up. Raven grew in her belly for one-third of a year,
and then was born as a beautiful boy. The chief doted upon this grandson, and
would give him anything he wanted.

One day Raven pointed to the box and cried and cried until
the chief gave it to him. Once he had the box in his hands, Raven returned to
his natural form and flew out the smokehole with it. But the box fell open as
he flew, scattering its contents in the sky.

Released from the box, the sun shone hotly down on the
world. So fierce was its heat that all the water and even the air began to boil
away. Raven tried to pull the sun down from the sky, but he could not fly high
enough. He went to Black Cedar and asked the tree to lift him up, but even then
he could not reach. So he cut a hole in the tree and packed it with caribou
tallow. Then he built a fire at the base of the tree and climbed up into its branches.
The tallow inside the tree caught fire, and the tree burst into the air with
Raven clinging desperately to it.

Raven and the tree flew through the air for many days until
they came to the sun, but it was wedged firmly in the sky and Raven couldn’t move
it. Nearby, though, he found some of the icy rocks that had been in the cedar
box. He gathered up as many as he could and brought them back to the people.
The rocks made it a little cooler and a little wetter, but everyone could see
that many, many rocks would be needed to make the world cool and wet again.

That is why the sun and the moons and the stars shine down
from the sky, and why the world is dry, and why the people build totems of
black cedar and go to hunt the ice boulders.

That is why we have the great hunt.

∞

When I was a young man, just a few years older than you,
the elders saw the signs in the sky and declared it was time for the great
hunt. They sent all the clan’s hunters to cut a black cedar tree, while the
gatherers set up camp at the traditional carving place.

Every step in the preparation of the great hunt totem must
be performed exactly according to the ancient ways, or the totem will lose its
way. Or even worse! In my father’s day a clan near Irkaluit was destroyed by a
great fire while carving their totem.

Only the wisest elders and the hunters with the surest hands
do the actual carving. I was with another group of hunters, who went to the
encampment of the glass people for trading.

No, they are not made of glass! Who told you that? Well,
your sister is wrong, and you can tell her Grandfather Ukaliq told you so. We
call them the glass people because they make so many things of glass. Even
their houses are made of glass! In my great-grandfather’s day they wore glass
hats that covered their heads completely, but they are not so vain today.