The Widow Page 2

Even though everything I’d ever learned had told me that Earth life couldn’t live off of non-Earth life, it made an odd sort of sense. Even back in the heyday of colonization, when standards were decidedly low, this moon had been judged as only marginally capable of supporting human life. It had air and water, but the temperature was barely within the tolerable range and it was deemed incapable of supporting a self-sustaining colony. Yet here I was, sitting with a descendant of the people who had defied the Colony Board and stayed on the rock anyway. How they had managed to eek out a living and survive here was a minor mystery and earned them a two paragraph blurb on the Colony Board’s fact sheet where they might otherwise have gotten only one. If the answer to the riddle was that they were surviving off of nelfs, I was in big trouble.

  The brightest minds on a dozen worlds had worked on the problem for over a hundred years and decided that there were only two ways around it. The Colony Board could lift the ban on human genetic alteration and let them tinker around to make our digestive tracts less fussy, or we could take the slower, safer path and wait for evolution to make the necessary adjustments naturally. The first option had been rejected out of hand. Whenever anyone suggested ‘improving’ humanity, posters of people with horns and tails cropped up in all the transit hubs on Earth and Mars. Personally, I rather liked the idea of having a tail, especially if it was prehensile, but I knew better than to admit that where anyone might hear me. As for the second option, I liked to picture a group of narrow-minded bacteria in out-dated suits sitting around a very small table, arguing about the viability of the human gut. But again, that wasn’t something I was going to admit. I was on the verge of asking how I was expected to evolve before dinner time when he let out another little laugh.

  “We don’t eat them,” he explained, “but you don’t have to get nutrients from something for it to make you tipsy.”

  I should have felt relieved, but there was something about his laugh that bothered me. It was a bit too high pitched and might even have qualified as a giggle if it hadn’t also been a bit forced.

  A dozen questions came to mind and I was on the verge of pressing for answers when Sebastian thrust his head back in the hatch and waved for us to hurry up, as if we’d been keeping him waiting instead of the other way around. He was gone again almost immediately and Julian gave me an apologetic shrug as he retrieved his flask from where I’d dropped it and downed another healthy slug before sliding it back into his inner pocket.

  The ride on the sled was almost exactly as unpleasant as I’d expected. There were only two molded seats, and whether it was a need to balance the weight as he claimed or out of some less noble impulse, Sebastian made me sit in the back with him while Quince and Julian hunkered down in the front. With the mast between us, I couldn’t even see them, let alone carry on a conversation.

  I might have watched the scenery of my new home, but as it turned out, there wasn’t any. All that I could see in any direction was ice. Not mountains clothed in ice, or rippled drifts of it, just ice in one expressionless, flat, endless sheet. The sky was low and a dark, steely gray that was uninterrupted by even the faintest hint of a direct light source.

  That left only the sled itself to occupy myself with as we whipped along, and even that proved difficult. Every time I leaned forward or tried to crane my neck to see what the various lines Sebastian was constantly fiddling with did, he would grab my shoulder and jerk me back against his chest, the last place I wanted to be.

  We slowed after a few hours, though we didn’t stop, and he dug into a pocket and handed me a strip of dried meat. I shook my head emphatically, which his expression told me he took as yet another slight. I gave up and dozed for what I assume was the rest of the afternoon, and woke only when we came to a stop with a jolt I felt all the way in my bones.

  Quince jumped out immediately and dashed off toward a cargo container a few yards away, leaving the rest of us to extricate ourselves from the insane contraption at our leisure. I half fell over the side and onto the ice, only to find that my legs, cramped and stiff from being in one position for too long, had no desire to take my weight. My arms windmilled and I would have gone down if a pair of strong hands hadn’t grabbed me. I turned, ready to thank Julian, only to find Sebastian glowering down at me.

  “I liked you better when you were unconscious,” he yelled over the wind.

  “That’s funny,” I shouted back, pulling free of his grasp. “I liked you better when I was unconscious, too.”

  I leaned into the wind and started toward the cargo container, only to have Julian step in my path.

  “You can go next, if you like,” he told me and I realized that Quince’s haste to get inside probably stemmed from a need to relieve himself, though where and how he was doing it in the tiny structure was beyond me. The last one certainly hadn’t had any facilities that I recognized. I was suddenly very thankful for the blisters of medicine that had been stuck to my back before I got in the coffin. They not only provided me with all my nutritional needs, but also stopped my body from producing any waste until they were removed. If I left them on too long they’d kill me, of course, but that was a chance I was willing to take at the moment.

  Quince emerged and I waved off my turn, saving explanations until we were all inside and warm. I stamped my feet, trying to keep my circulation going, and decided that if we had to do this again tomorrow, I would wait in the relative shelter of the sled until everyone had had their turn.

  I finally tromped into the container after the all clear was waved and was confronted with a smell not unlike public bathrooms everywhere. I breathed through my mouth and looked around. It was essentially the same as the last one, the pallets were in a different configuration, two to a side instead of all in a row, and the heater was in the center of the room but... I looked around. Pallets. Heater. Nothing else. I looked closer and realized the thing was actually some kind of toilet. Then, as if that wasn’t bad enough, Quince knelt in front of it and it began to hum. Heat began to pour off of it and with it came a stench I will not even begin to try to describe. So I had been right the first time, in a way. It was a heater. It just didn’t use any of the more traditional fuels.

  I laid down on one of the pallets, suddenly exhausted in spite of my afternoon nap, and tried to forget where I was. I had a thousand questions, but none that couldn’t wait until I was in a more accepting frame of mind.

  I put a pillow over my face and drifted off to sleep, knowing things couldn’t help but be better in the morning.

  Chapter Two

  The City of the Grotesques

  Morning came too early, literally. I woke long before dawn, cold and logy from too much time asleep. There was a smell clinging to the inside of mouth that no amount of pillow could snuff out, so I pushed it aside and sat up.

  The others were all still sound asleep. Julian looked peaceful enough, but Sebastian snored loudly and Quince tossed from side to side, startling me every time he did it. They’d left the door open a crack, which explained the cold and why the stench from the heater seemed to have dissipated, though it was still churning out heat.

  I got up to close it, then realized we were in an air tight cargo container meant to travel through space and that with the little heater going and four adults breathing, the air inside would turn toxic very quickly. I settled for reaching my hand out into the black night and grabbing a chunk of snow from the drift beside the hatch. I let it warm a little in my hand, then popped a small chunk into my mouth to try to banish the taste that had settled there. The animal and plant life of foreign planets might kill us, but as far as I knew water was just water everywhere. Still, after it had melted and I’d swished it around, I spat it back out into the night just to be safe.

  I laid back down, hoping to be able to drift off again or at least arrange my thoughts, but the smell seemed more pronounced on my pallet. I sniffed at my clothes and hair
, then at the pillow and finally at the blanket I was laying on. Ah ha. The blanket smelled decidedly foul, and yet oddly familiar. It was the smell of the Nelf liquor Julian had offered me, and it was clinging to a blanket exactly like the one I’d mopped the swill up with after spitting it out.

  A thought occurred to me. Not really a suspicion yet, but certainly the beginnings of one. I would have noticed if Quince had brought anything ask bulky as our bedding out of the old container and into this one, which meant that either this moon was populated by clumsy drunks who spilled booze everywhere, or the two containers were actually the same one and we’d just spent an uncomfortable day traveling in circles. While Quince couldn’t have brought anything into this one without my seeing him, he and the others had all been alone in it long enough before I entered to tidy it up and move things around enough to make it look different. The only question was why they would bother.

  A hundred possible answers presented themselves, but I discarded all but two. The first was that they wanted me to think that my drop sight was farther from their settlement than it really was. I thought this unlikely for a number of reasons, primarily that knowing where the container I’d ridden down in was unlikely to do me any possible good. If they anticipated my trying to escape, there was nothing in the container that could help me. It was a little more than a box that could withstand entry into an atmosphere. They were designed to be cheap, disposable, and have as few moving parts as possible. My watch was more sophisticated. And if it was only my luggage that they were trying to keep me away from, they could have accomplished that with a lot less effort. That left my second answer, which seemed more likely but even less appealing. They were waiting for something, and they didn’t want me to know it. Again, I was puzzled by why they would go to the trouble. I was completely within their power. If they wanted me to sit and wait, I’d be forced to do it. The only reason I could think of for the subterfuge was that they didn’t want to have to force me to do anything. They wanted me cooperative and so needed to appear to be treating me well. That, at least, was heartening. But before I allowed myself to get lost in hypothetical reasons, I needed to prove that my guess was correct and this really was the same container.

  I pushed back my hood and unleashed my hair from the fierce bun I’d had it penned in since before I first got in my coffin. It was slightly knotty to spite my care, and the worse for not having been washed in forever, but it was a deep, rich brown, curled naturally, and fell so far down my back that I tended to sit on it if I wasn’t careful. One of my few childhood friends had confided to me that it was the only thing I had that would ever make anyone jealous. Of course, that was before puberty when my other assets became apparent.

  I ran my fingers through it, selected a single strand, and yanked it out. Suddenly wary of being caught, I crept to the hatch and laid the strand against the inside seal where it wouldn’t be noticed, or damaged by the closing of the door. I licked my finger and ran it down its length, letting my quickly freezing spit stick it there like glue.

  I went back to my pallet and flopped down, unable to sleep until I knew how my little experiment had turned out. Instead, I sat up the rest of the night, my sleeve rolled back, and fiddled with my watch.

  It kept track of Earth time, which was useful if you were going between stars and still wanted some reasonably reliable way of telling how old you were, but it also supposedly kept track of the day night cycles of strange planets and eventually learned enough to tell time there as well as other useful things, like relative compass directions and season. I’d plugged all of the data about my new home into it before leaving and was eager to see if it was working yet.

  “You should wear it like that all the time.”

  The voice startled me, and I only then realized that Sebastian’s snores had stopped some time ago. How long I couldn’t be sure. Had he seen me at the hatch?

  “I’ve had it on the whole time,” I told him curtly, holding out my wrist. The small screen was imbedded in the skin there, almost invisible amid a scattering of freckles.

  “I meant your hair,” he told me, coming over on hands and knees to investigate my arm. “That,” he said, motioning to the screen, “you should keep covered if you can. People here have very strong ideas about augmentation.”

  I tried to recall my history lessons from school. Two hundred and fifty years ago, when this colony was founded, would have been at the height of the human/machine culture, when people were having everything from music players to video screens implanted on their person. There had been a lot of opposition to the technology back then, and these people hadn’t been around to witness the backlash movement of ‘pure humanity’ or the eventual, more responsible re-adoption of some of the same devices.

  “I’ll keep that in mind,” I said, letting my sleeve fall and pulling my hair back into its bun just to prove that his opinion of my appearance meant nothing to me.

  “What does it do?” He asked.

  I thought of any number of rude responses but ignored my impulse to cruelty. There was no harm in him knowing and he had, after all, just done me a good turn.

  “It measures the spin of the planet and the day night cycles and eventually tells me the time,” I explained.

  “You could just ask,” he said, grinning. The half smile pulled his scar tight and made him even more repulsive.

  “I prefer knowing to asking,” I said and crossed my arms in front of me. I was suddenly aware of how close he was sitting and how his eyes, or eye rather, had a tendency to slip from my face.

  “Will it even work here?” He went on, ignoring my hostile body language and the fact that I scooted away from him on the pallet. “You know this isn’t a planet, right?”

  “Pluto isn’t a planet either,” I informed him haughtily, “but it’s still considered polite to call it one when talking to the people who live there. You’d be surprised at how sensitive they can be.”

  “A moon by any other name...” He said with a shrug, dismissing the subject and moving back to his own space.

  I leaned back against my pillow and pretended to doze, trying to figure out why he bothered me so much.

  “You know,” he said softly from across the room. “I didn’t have to bring the doctor and I didn’t have to tell you who I was, or wasn’t. Quince certainly wouldn’t have. I could have just let you think what you wanted until I got you back.”

  The thought of arriving in the city to find myself a laughing stock for having been duped into carnal relations with the wrong man sent a jolt of anger through me. Even if he hadn’t done it, he’d clearly thought about it. I sat up and glared at him.

  “Are women in such short supply here that you have to steal them from dead men?” I asked snidely.

  The only answer I got was a single bark of laughter. A few minutes later, his snoring resumed.

  I spent the next day as I’d spent the last, huddled in the hull of the sled, trying to pretend I was somewhere else. It was a jostling, jarring ride as we sailed across the ice, heading I knew not where.

  When we finally arrived at the next waypoint, I wanted to rush in first, but held my place in the sled until everyone else was done, so as not to arouse any suspicion. When Julian poked his head out to wave the all clear, I tried to make sure I was last in line, but Sebastian lingered at the sled, fiddling with the spikes that anchored it to the ice. I had to make do with a fake slip as I came in the hatch, and clutched the frame to regain my balance.

  I examined the place by the seal, but there was nothing there. I wasn’t sure if I was disappointed or relieved.

  Sebastian grabbed my arms roughly and placed me on my feet, but didn’t release me. Instead he spun me around and bent low so that his hideous face was only inches from mine. He held his hand up between us and there, twined around his glove, plain as day, was one of my long, dark hairs. I expected him to yell or hi
t me but instead he raised his one good eyebrow, as if he were more amused than angry.

  “No more games,” he whispered.

  All at once, it occurred to me that it was his scar, more than his behavior, that I found so unsettling. On Earth, such a deformity would have been corrected as a matter of course. Only a criminal, denied all but the most basic health care, or a religious fanatic who destained modern medicine, would bear such an obvious mark. Since both classes were people I made a point of avoiding, I naturally felt prejudiced against him. I promised myself I would try to treat him with a little more charity in the future and he instantly made me regret it by shoving me into the cargo container so roughly I nearly fell in earnest.

  Julian caught me in his arms and steadied me, shooting Sebastian a scathing glance while he did so.

  I realized I was, if anything, worse off than I’d been before and sighed.

  I still suspected that they were driving me around in circles all day, and this was the same cargo container we had stopped in every time. The pallets were in different spots, but Quince had again entered first and could easily be shifting them around.

  The smell on the blanket, reminiscent of the alcohol Julian had mopped up, was certainly a clue, but with the hair in Sebastian’s hand, I still couldn’t be sure. He’d been awake and watching me fiddle with my watch. It was easy to assume he’d also been awake to see me place the hair. He could have pulled it off this morning, or five minutes ago when he took his turn in the bathroom. That left me with more suspicions and questions and still no proof. What was worse, he now knew that I was up to something, and would watch me even more closely. I wasn’t likely to get another chance.

  The question of why they would bother with such a ruse was even more nagging. I could confront them, but in my experience, confrontation seldom leads to anything but lies and denials. Better to watch and wait.