Чарли Андерс - Six Months, Three Days, Five Others

I don’t woman. I just don’t.

Oh, I have the involuntary responses just like everybody else. When I meet a particularly stout outringer, my ruhr feels a little itchy. I make a habit of wearing a scarf when I clean the outringers’ quarters, so they won’t see anything. But I just don’t like the idea.

A couple of days after the poem, Dot turned up again. Oh, be didn’t come over and say hi like a normal person. Of course not. Instead, be turned up in the cafeteria where we’d first met, perched on top of the air shaft on ber knees. Be had all fourteen fingers on a big flarinelle and was playing some dirge-y shanty while moaning about how ber heart was imploding for the love of me. Be wore an outfit with a million laces and buckles, maybe just to remind me just how clever ber fingers were.

I wanted to turn and run back to the dailys’ hab areas, but my sibs all grabbed me and cried all over my favorite quicksuit. I had to stay and listen to the whole fucking thing. Dot couldn’t sing to save ber life. After that, I was the dailys’ greatest romantic hero ever. When was I going to send a poem back? When would I acknowledge Dot’s suffering?

The next day, I was on my hands and knees scrubbing the boides’ segment. They always claim our knees and backs are genetically engineered to make us better scrubbers. They’re filthy liars. Or at least it’s not enough. I hate cleaning up after the boides, who track all sorts of crap from the power units. At least I don’t have to clean the power units themselves, since my body isn’t designed to withstand those forces the way the boides are.

Anyway, I was crawling around trying to clean up some stuff that I didn’t even want to think about. I heard some motion behind me, and scuttled around to see a boide staring at where my ass had just been.

At first, I thought po wanted to sexually harass me, which is what the boides usually want when I’m working. Dailys, like me, are pretty much the only dar the boides can man. They woman to the pilots, the outringers and the breeders. I’ve heard the boides can man the spirers, too, but it probably doesn’t happen much.

“I had a great love once,” the boide said. “And I let zm slip away, and I’ve never forgiven myself.” Oh great. Romantic advice. All of a sudden, I wished the boide would just grope me. I could tell po wanted to, from the matching bulges on either side of por hip bones. But no. “We’re in space for countless decades, but in all that time you may only get one chance at a great love,” po said.

“Just because you blew off some dumb breeder once, doesn’t mean you get to give me advice.” I looked por over: a little less squat and greasy than most boides, but still a solid brick of muscle and radiation-resistant hide. But nimble, the way you have to be if you manipulate the City’s power grid.

“The breeders and the pilots are different from you and me,” po said. “They have higher concerns, loftier thoughts. When they train that light on us, it can feel like we’re going to burn up. But it’s the closest to real meaning, to glory, we can get.”

Normally, the boides treat us as if we’re way beneath them. It’s only in comparison to a pilot that po and I could become “we.” Or if po wanted to man me, we might be “we” for an hour or two. And po did want me, those twin bulges don’t lie.

“Thanks for the advice,” I said. “I feel loftier already.”

“Don’t laugh it off. When love comes, you have to,” blah blah blah. Po kept it up for the next hour or so, while I scrubbed and scraped. There are cleaning machines, of course, but they don’t do such a great job with the really nasty stains. And the spirers are too busy doing “exalted” things to upgrade them.

It went on like that. People giving me advice. Worse, the other dailys wouldn’t let me touch them anymore after lights out. “Mab, we let you touch us when there’s nothing better around,” Idra told me while we waited to step into the bathing tubes. “But a pilot! I mean, don’t you think you should save yourself?”

“For what?” I asked, but then the tubes opened and we stepped in, to fall through a tunnel where water, and then supercompressed air, sprayed us. I’ve heard the pilots and spirers have baths.

I could never get tired of seeing Idra naked, even though I’ve bathed with ym so many times now, and touched ym in yr bunk. Even though Idra drove me nuts with yr crushes and yr face-pastes and yr romance dreamliminals, y kept me sane. I didn’t know what I’d do if I couldn’t talk to Idra. Maybe I even loved ym. A little.

We’d met back in the Cluster, when we were both training for this voyage. Idra and I had been grown for this mission, but we still had to train and prove ourselves. Basic safety stuff, mostly, since the City can’t replace us if we get ourselves killed out here. Idra was the only other one, besides me, in our class who’d asked about other stuff, like how the City navigated and how the power grid worked (or failed to, sometimes).

I’d started hanging out with Idra all the time between classes, and we’d laugh at the silly questions some of the other dailys asked, about how to get face-paste in the City. I’d thought yr and I would always share everything, until the City launched and y fell in love for the first time, with an outringer. Ever since then, it was one crush after another, putting Idra in an elliptical orbit away from me and then back to me when it fell apart. I’d mostly gotten used to it.

“You know,” I told Idra when we were dressing afterwards. “There are only two reasons people are so love-crazy around here. Because the only children in the City are the dormant embryos in the breedpods, waiting for planetfall. And because it helps us forget we’re stuck at the bottom of the heap forever.”

“If you talk to Dot like that, be’ll drop you like a used snot-catcher,” Idra told me. Y had a warning look in yr eyes and mouth, but yr nose wrinkled the way it always did when I made ym laugh.

“That’s a good idea,” I said. “Maybe I’ll try that.”

Actually, here was my problem. I wanted to say no to Dot, but be never gave me a chance. Be never even asked me if I wanted to pair-bond with ber, or go live in the Pilot Quarter, or whatever. Be just kept sending little crystal cameos, serenading me from a safe distance, paying other dailys to make little delicacies for me. (A pilot wouldn’t know how to cook to save ber life.) Be never came close enough for me to respond.

And yet, I was cruel. I was coy. I tormented Dot. Or so Dot claimed, and so the balladeers announced to the whole City. I was killing a pilot, one of only 500 in the whole City, with my coldness. Had anyone ever been as cruel as me? In the entire history of the City, and the Cluster before that? Speaking of which, I was famous enough now that my sibs back in the Cluster were going to hear about this.

“I don’t get it,” I told Idra. “What am I supposed to do anyway? When be threw all those bright catsilk bandanas down to me from the upper walkway, I tried to avoid catching them, but you guys grabbed them for me. How am I supposed to respond?”

“Write back,” Idra said. “Write a poem, or if you can’t manage that, a regular letter. I’ll tight-beam it for you. You don’t even have to write it yourself, I’ll write it for you.”

Oh, Idra. I never wanted to be you, but I always want to be with you. I certainly never wanted you to want to be me.

“Can I write a letter asking ber to leave me alone?”

“It’ll just make ber try harder. Or maybe be’ll go away permanently, throw berself into the boides’ radiation zone. You can’t trifle with love, Mab. Love is the most powerful force in the universe. Love is unstoppable, unfathomable.”