Michael Payne - The Language of Ghosts

“Behold the mighty eggplant!” Lynn heard Orel’s raspy voice announce. “Noblest of all vegetables!”

A shiver twitched down her back even in the dusty afternoon heat; she stopped there in the middle of the road and let out a groan. Next to her, Malcolm cleared his throat. “Uhh, Lynn? I think your rachnoid—”

“Don’t say it, Malcolm.” She glared at him. “Don’t even breathe it!”

Malcolm shrugged, and Lynn couldn’t help noticing how his rachnoid rode out the motion of his shoulders without even a click of complaint. He reached up and stroked the little robot. “You want me to send Keshia after him?”

The simple question, the assumption that she couldn’t manage her own rachnoid, that was somehow worse than if he’d just started laughing at her. Lynn tried to keep her mouth from tightening. “Don’t worry about it. You just go on ahead; I’ll see you later in town, okay?”

He shrugged again. “How ’bout if Keshia keeps an ear open, then? In case he blows a gasket or something.”

Keshia stirred on his shoulder. “Indeed, Miss Baden-Tan. Though it grieves me to speak so of a brother and colleague, Orel is far from the most reliable of our cluster. Please allow me to monitor the emergency frequencies should you find you require assistance.”

“That’s okay,” she got out through clenched teeth. “I mean, thanks, but he’s just being stupid. Like usual.”

Malcolm shook his head. “I don’t get it. Your Grampa did a great job on my Mom’s rachnoid when the combine grabbed him last fall: you’d think he could fix Orel up no problem.”

Lynn tugged at her backpack. “You’d think that, wouldn’t you?” She forced a smile. “I’ll see you at dinner.”

“Okay.” He gave Keshia another pat. “Oh, the Conovers were going into town today, too, so I invited them to join us. Hope you don’t mind.” He smiled, turned, and started back along the road toward town.

Lynn stared after him. Mind? Why should she mind? Just because he had invited her parents’ best friends along on what she had thought was going to be her first date, her first romantic evening alone with Malcolm, an evening she had been dreaming about all week! Why should she mind that her whole life was ruined?!

She spun away then, stalked to the edge of the path and down into the eggplant, all bloated and purple and shiny. Orel’s tinny voice led her straight to him, clinging to a bush with all eight legs and muttering, “So round, so firm, so fully packed…

Like things weren’t bad enough. She snapped her fingers in front of him. “Come on, Orel; this is not how I planned to spend my only day off this week.”

His eyestalks fluttered toward her. “But mistress! Acres and acres of eggplant! How can such things be? ”

“It’s the only stuff that’ll grow out here: you know that.” She wiped the sweat from her forehead and squatted down. “Now are you going to walk, or do I carry you?”

His stalks wavered between her and the bushes. “Would you carry me, mistress? I’ll be able to see the eggplant better from the vantage of your shoulder.”

“Fine. But I don’t want to hear one word about how my walking shakes you up, you get me?”

“I shall so endeavor, mistress.”

She reached out an arm, watched him creep up the denim of her shirt, then tipped her head to give him room to settle on her left shoulder, his legs stretching all prickly down along her neck. She blew out a breath, made her way up the slope to the road, and set off toward town again.

It just wasn’t fair. Here she was, the granddaughter of Dr. Marcus Baden-Tan, the man hailed throughout space as the leader of the only successful human colony on an already inhabited world, and she had to live with this stupid, malfunctioning rachnoid. Grampa could blather all he wanted to about Orel’s delicate balance of organic and mechanical systems, the breakthroughs this was supposed to represent, but that didn’t fool Lynn: Grampa always used big words when he was stumped.

Orel was vibrating on her shoulder now, his scratchy voice mumbling things like, “Hear how I shall rave and rant the virtues of the sweet eggplant!” and “All ten worlds proclaim your fame: oh, eggplant, let resound your name!”

Hopeless. Her dreams evaporating under Chaldi’s pale blue sky, Lynn set her jaw and kept walking.

Soon, native plants started appearing in the fields, umsu with its red flowers, tall fronds of boratch, the eggplant now only in a row along the road. Single rendar trees stood at regular intervals, growing closer and closer together as the flats crumpled into hills, until the fields became forest, reddish leaves dark against the blue-white of the sky.

At least now she was out of the sun, though the muggy air of the long Chaldi summer kept things more than hot enough. Soon, pointed roofs began appearing among the trees, so she snapped her fingers in front of Orel till his eyestalks jerked back. “My apologies, mistress. What are your wishes?”

“My wishes?” Lynn spat out a laugh. “I wish I didn’t need you along to talk to the tayshil. In fact, I wish you were on the next warpship out of here. Or I wish I was.”

“Now, mistress.” One of Orel’s stalks bent around to blink at her. “We are both too organic to survive travel in warp: you know that. And as for the tayshil, even if their vocal range were not beyond human hearing, their languages—”

“Yes, thank you, Mr. Science.” She batted the eyestalk away. “Just remember: no talking to anyone on your own about eggplant. You only translate what I say, right?”

“I shall so endeavor, mistress.”

“Good. Now plug in.” She pulled her hair away from her ear, felt a tickle as Orel ran his translator leg up to her neural shunt, a slight jolt as he plugged in, and the silence around her bloomed with sound, pixigs chirping in the trees, the garbled chatter of a metin scuttling through the underbrush beside the path, tayshil voices from the town ahead, the tinkle of the crystal nets that hung from every market stall on a trading day. The road wound around an outcropping, and then Lynn was passing through the gate posts into Hasquirk.

Not that this was really Hasquirk. Lynn had only been to the actual city down along the coast a few times with Grampa, but its neat, round houses and red glass spiral buildings sure made this place seem like the subordinate farming village it was. Lynn looked from the thatch huts to the packed-dirt road, and blew out a breath.

Orel stirred on her shoulder. “Did you speak, mistress?”

Lynn didn’t bother to reply; she just stalked past the huts, through the row of red adobe warehouses, and out into the marketplace. Booths sat in zigzagging lines, dark-furred tayshil examining the wares or shouting from the stalls, the shimmering chime of the crystal nets filling the air. The spicy scent made her smile despite everything, and with it being market day, no one had a radio blaring: the rattles and quacks of tayshil music made her teeth ache.

“Sure, and if it isn’t Miss Lynn!” a voice called, and she turned to see Mr. Chonik, recognizable by the golden rings flashing from the floppy tips of his ears: the only other tayshil who wore jewelry were the officials Grampa met downtown, and Mr. Chonik was the local mayor or something. He flicked a claw at her from his booth. “Bright waters to you, miss, and how be that grandfather o’ yours?”