Larry Niven - Footfall

Well, there was dust and rust, and it came off. There were wads of goop and soil and feathers in the filters. And, moving around in the pipes, she began to learn a kind of skill. There were no handholds; of course not, the horrors had never expected that living things would need them in here. She learned to move in a zigzag jumping style, swiping at the sides with the cloth. It worked.

It worked, and she was getting better at it, but it was makework, and she couldn’t wait to get back to the garden, with its open spaces.

Some of the plants were sprouting. Alice was afraid to touch them. Mrs. Woodward chuckled. “Rice. I might have known it would be rice. Rice likes it wet.”

“What do we do now?”

“Nothing. There ain’t any bugs here. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Maybe we want to block off the water pipes that feeds some of the other stuff.”

Alice nodded. She pushed herself back to look at the vegetable plot. Was that another tuft of green, where they’d planted corn and runner beans together? Alice belatedly realized that she was too far from a handhold.

It didn’t bother her much. She was used to free-fall. She floated, waiting for Thuktun Flishithy’s minuscule thrust to pull her someplace useful.

Something wrapped around her ankle. She jumped as if she’d been electrocuted, and looked down at a cluster of tentacles, a broad brown head, wrinkled with age, and recessed eyes. “Raztupisp-minz?”

“You have learned to recognize me? Good. How is your health, Alice?”

“I’m fine.”

“Your plants are sprouting. I am pleased. I think our plants will grow in your world.”

Alice held her face expressionless. Dawson had suggested if the plants grew well, Earth would become more desirable to the horrors — and she hadn’t believed him. Should the plants die … easy enough, but she’d have to go on eating what they fed now.

“I want to explain something,” the teacher said. “You may have noticed that some of the fithp are acting strangely. The mating season has started for one class of us, the sleepers, and it affects their behavior. They are not turning rogue, but do not irritate them.”

“You’re not a sleeper, are you? And Takpusseh is.”

“Mating season goes with the females, the sleeper females are spaceborn, and so is Tashayamp. For most of the year, many days to come, you may see me as neuter.”

She studied him, but there was nothing to be read in his alien face. Yet this was a teacher and a manipulator. “Can you hear thought?”

“Hear thought?” He snorted. “No! But I can see. You talk of mating with females. You shy from males when you can. You are thin in the hips, your breasts are flat. Sometimes there are fithp who are shaped like females but never come into season.”

Alice leapt away, back to the seed plot, back to the company of the other prisoners. Nobody had ever suggested such a thing to her! They thought she was strange, yes, but a neuter? A freemartin? If she didn’t like men, it was because men were … were …

She feared the teacher would follow, but in fact he was was speaking to another fi’ — to the other teacher, Takpusseh.

She remembered, now, that men had tried to tell her that she was strange, to put her on the defensive. Fuck me to prove you’re a woman.

The thought of being raped by Raztupisp-minz was ludicrous and horrible… mostly ludicrous, she decided. No man had ever started by telling her to think of him as a neuter.

Tashayamp took her back to the cell, with Mr. and Mrs. Woodward and Wes Dawson. They were there long enough to eat and use the toilet. The only thing that could have made that tolerable to Alice was watching how it bothered the others.

An hour’s rest, then fithp came to escort them to the ducts. None of the humans had noticed that she wasn’t talking. Maybe they were glad.

Alice broke away from the others as soon as she could, and let the wind carry her away, farther than she’d ever gone before. She wasn’t feeling sociable. Presently she braked herself and began desultorily to clean the walls.

The wind had grown cold. It matched her mood; she hardly noticed at first. But the wall was even colder, on one side. Here was a curve to mark a side channel in the duct, but it was blocked by a hatch. She passed it. Soon the wall warmed.

Alice went back.

She didn’t like taking orders, and she didn’t like knowing that things were hidden from her. The goddam psychiatrists always had something they weren’t telling her.

There was a slot to house the hatch. Alice got her fingers into a crack and pushed, and the door moved back against springs, enough to let her through.

The air was terribly cold and still. She followed a short duct and found a grill.

Ten yards beyond was a peculiar surface, black and nearly smooth, but with undulations in it, like very dirty ice. With her face pressed to the grill Alice could see the curve of it, like the inner wall of a cylinder.

She studied it for a time. There was a bulge in the surface … like an unfinished raised relief painting… a frieze of one of the horrors. Dirty ice? Dawson had said… what? The horrors liked mud. It puzzled them that humans bathed in clean water. But frozen mud?

The grill was loose in her hands.

She pushed it aside and floated in.

It was frozen mud on one side, a ceiling of painted friezes on the other. The artwork was weird, alien, sometimes beautiful. Horrors — fithp — half hidden among weird trees; she recognized some from the Garden area. Here a good representation of one of the horrors faced a block covered with alien script. And sculpted into the opposing mudbank was a similar shape…

She’d freeze here. Alice backed into the duct, pulled the grill after her, and set it in place.

Alice didn’t like secrecy. She would have to learn more. She found an exit from the air shaft.

This part of the ship was strange, and she didn’t know how to get home. It was hard, stopping one of the horrors in the corridor She said, “Raztupisp-minz,” and followed it after it gave up trying to talk to her.

She was tired and she ached. The horrors on Earth had stopped her before she got around to collecting conveniences like cosmetics and liniment. Cleaning out air ducts was so much like flying! She hadn’t noticed how hard she was working. She wanted Ben Gay. She wanted to curl up and wait for the pain to go away.

“Alice wants to tell you something,” Melissa said.

Jeri stirred wearily. “How do you know?”

“She keeps looking at you. But she wants to see you alone. I know, Mom. I can tell. Alice is—”

“Yeah.” Interesting. Can you read her mind? Or are you guessing? Or what? Jeri floated lazily over to grip the wall beside Alice.

“How’d it go?”

Words bubbled out quickly. “Jeri, I found a peculiar place. Cold enough to freeze your ass off. Locked off. Black ice everywhere, or something like it. A long way from here.”

“Storage room? Anything stored there?”

“No, just ice, all along the one wall, the hull wall. Dawson said they like mud. Maybe it’s their idea of a big spa. Why would they freeze their spa?”

“Let’s ask Arvid.”

Alice looked afraid again.

“He won’t … he’s a good man, Alice.”

“Oh, all right …”

Rogachev frowned deeply. “Frozen solid?”

“I didn’t touch it. It must have been. It was cold.”

“No gravity. No spin, because we are mated to the foot. They cannot bathe in mud under those conditions, but from the pictures they showed us we know they enjoy that. They will have a place for mud, and they must keep it when there is no gravity. Da. So they froze it in place.”

“That makes sense,” Jeri said.

“Yeah,” Alice agreed. “All right, explain this one. There was a shape in the mud, like a frieze — like one of those horrors under a blanket.