Dark Space (Sentients of Orion) Read online

  Jilda’s hands fluttered in protest.

  Franco jolted from his seat and leaned across the table as if he might slap Marchella’s face. ‘I will not have such filthy conversation in my house: conduct yourself properly or leave. What did you come here for anyway, mia sorella?’

  ‘I want to know, Franco: why do you continue to hoard the best of everything for your Enclave?’ she asked. ‘On the plains, the miners live and work in dangerous conditions. It is not necessary.’

  Trin sat straight in his chair, distracted from his own troubles by Marchella’s temerity. The woman was like an island stoat with a fleshy fish in its teeth.

  ‘This is not a suitable discussion for dinner.’ Franco bestowed another warning glare on her. ‘A young world like Araldis cannot afford the widespread luxuries of the established OLOSS planets.’

  ‘It is not about luxury, Franco. It is about your greed.’

  It was true, Trin knew, that the mines ran on archaic technology—rubber conveyors and primitive mechanical crushers. Even the screens were metal. But he did not think Marchella was speaking of those things.

  ‘Your feudalism stops our world from progressing. You keep Araldis in check as if it were one of your women.’

  ‘What would you know about acting like a woman, mia sorella? You choose manliness over your true sex. That is the truth.’

  ‘At least that way I have a choice. That way no man can force me to bear his bambini,’

  Franco hit her then, in front of Jilda, Trin and the Galiotto servants.

  Marchella fell from her chair, stifling a cry.

  Trin found himself half out of his seat. He looked to his mother but she did nothing except call for a dressing for Marchella’s bleeding mouth. The Principessa had seen this before and she seemed almost pleased that Franco had asserted his right.

  Yet Trin had never heard Cipriano traditions so vehemently and shockingly challenged before. He believed it was his choice as to when and with whom he would father children, and that no familia woman had a right to refuse him. At the Studium he had heard whispers of a secret women’s group that opposed Franco and the old traditions but they appeared to be nothing other than ginko-incited grumblings.

  Marchella climbed slowly to her feet. Her gaze met Trin’s as she retook her seat, dabbed her mouth with the cloth and delicately drank down her small glass of wine. She seemed neither repentant nor cowered. She seemed... satisfied.

  This was for me!

  The calculation of her act shocked Trin almost as much as Franco’s violence.

  A Galiotto entered the silence carrying a large silver platter. Jilda clapped her hands with appreciation. ‘Aaah, polenta dumplings!’

  JO-JO RASTEROVICH

  Jo-Jo Rasterovich was a Cerulean, a blue-planet kid. At least, that was how he thought of himself. The truth was (and Jo-Jo had some difficulty with that concept) that his family hadn’t lived on that world, in that constellation, for a thousand years. Yet something deep in his often-rejuvenated psyche stayed immovably Cerulean. He even still thought of the blue planet as ‘Earth’ although most of the Orion Sentients had never heard the name.

  Sole Entity had entered Jo-Jo’s life just in time to save him from a rather unpleasant permanent biological death (or perhaps Sole had caused the death, in which case the point was moot). Adrift on the edge of an uninhabited system due to some dodgy navigational software that he had purchased cheaply from the Spiral Arms swap-meet in Vega and which had bugged his propulsion start-up, Jo-Jo had strayed into an uncharted gas tube.

  Instead of low-density X-rays, the space anomaly was crammed with high-density microwaves. The last thing Jo-Jo remembered, as life support faded, was the propulsion bay glowing blue as he tried uselessly to cold-start his ship.

  When he regained consciousness the propulsion system was back on line and breathable air flowed sweetly. One part of him felt unhappily as if it had just been tipped out of a freeze-dried sachet and mixed with ice cubes into a lumpy consistency. Another part of him suggested running diagnostics to see what had caused the problem.

  Jo-Jo staggered to his bridge-cum-bedroom and lit up a fat smoke of chang-lo hemp. Something BIG had happened. Something WEIRD. Jo-Jo hadn’t run a full diagnostic check since he’d earned his licence. Even then he’d failed to do it properly and had had to bribe the astrogator to pass him.

  His mind felt like it had been crapped on, rolled in and dissected.

  He toked deeply, hoping that the killer cannabis might reglue things but all it did was activate the smoke alarms. In among the warm fog of the hemp and the unnatural patterns of his altered thinking, he felt a presence enter his mind.

 

  Jo-Jo inhaled so deeply that the butt burned his lips. There’s nothing out there, he told himself sternly, but a big fat bundle of microwave radiation. Oh, and those leech-shaped things. But I imagined them. He fumbled in his utilities bag for a second scoob and sucked noisily until he passed out.

  Later, when the narcotic hangover cleared, his mind had two new and persistent voices in it. Jo-Jo was left to confront the fact that he’d discovered another type of life (or it had discovered him, because for all intents and purposes it had killed him and then resurrected him: no sentient species he knew of had the ability to do that) which had altered his mind, and that perhaps he should make the most of it.

  So Jo-Jo set about making a living off the story that he’d discovered Sole Entity, a benevolent type of god-thing that had strayed in from the fathomless stretched space between galaxies.

  He paid no attention to the nagging feeling that he had forgotten something really important, or the sneaking notion that Sole Entity was not in fact benign but rather more like a cosmic-sized feline toying with a blind, legless lizard.

  The story, as it stood, earned him enough lucre to purchase a biozoon from a black-market slaver and have it luxuriously appointed in a manner suitable for a wealthy space-nomad bachelor. He dubbed the biocraft Salacious II and planned to live out the rest of his life travelling through lesser-known sections of the galaxy.

  In general Jo-Jo liked other sentients well enough, particularly humanesques, as long as he didn’t have to spend too much time with them. He had a particular dislike for some of the slug species on Lucas’s World and found he had a severe allergy to korm odours.

  But mostly he preferred his own company.

  He washed infrequently, swore aloud when he liked, and kept a substantial array of bizarre recreational flesh- simulations for which no one could reprimand him. His relationship with the hottest sexpot sims of Galaxy Productions was as close to perfect as Jo-Jo could imagine.

  In short: he didn’t want a wife.

  His closest, most terrifying scrape with a real woman (which had rather set the seal on his bachelorhood) had been on the planet of Ikar. He’d been delivering a Sole recount to a theatrette bulging with Studium smarts. Afterwards, a woman with several degrees, more than her fair share of chins and equally shivery thighs (which he could see through the strips of material that wound around her legs like snakes) asked him to stay behind for a drink. The faint repulsion he felt at her physical appearance was well offset by the swollen credit voucher she waved under his nose.

  They drank and caroused vociferously, until Jo-Jo found himself behind rows hess and thess of the theatrette with his face trapped between the woman’s thighs.

  ‘Can’t breathe,’ he snuffled.

  ‘I’m assuming that you are having trouble breathing,’ she warbled. ‘I am told that it is the most erotic movement in my repertoire. I can clench for indefinite periods of time given the right mood. And you, God-discoverer, have put me in the mood.’

  ‘Let go,’ gasped Jo-Jo.

  But the smart didn’t seem to hear him.

  ‘I don’t mean to be forward,’ she continued, ‘but you could be the recipient of other such delights for a small favour. I cou
ld be persuaded to perform in a number of ways, including my formidable chin massage—my chins massage you, ha! ha!—in return for an introduction to God.’

  Chagrin was too insipid a word to describe how that made Jo-Jo feel. The woman was bribing him with sexual suffocation. Furious and desperate, he resorted to a move told to him by a court-martialled special-forces hermaphrodite on Bosun.

  He bit her pubis with all musterable ferocity.

  As the smart collapsed in pain, her legs fell apart.

  Jo-Jo struggled to his knees and wiped his damp face on the plush theatrette seats. Then he climbed to his feet and ran like fuck.

  For months afterwards he had nightmares, which only abated if he drank vodka chasers and played Malconfunk arias after his evening bong.

  * * *

  Despite the chin and thigh affair, Jo-Jo’s Sole-wealth bought him another hundred years of rejuve, which fitted in nicely with his desire to continue exploring. As long as he returned periodically to a civilised world with the necessary technology to do a disease appraisal, everything in Jo-Jo’s life was, to use a Cerulean term, hunky-dory.

  Then Sole mind-spooked him again.

 

  Jo-Jo took some time to decide that the mind-voice and its pretentiously commanding greeting was real—so to speak. In fact he ignored it until his head reverberated like a tuning fork.

 

 

  With a flash of quick thinking Jo-Jo ordered his shipcom to ‘record and convert patterns to something audible’. The ‘record’ bit was actually redundant. As a precaution against getting so stoned that he couldn’t perform basic ship functions, he’d instructed Salacious II to monitor constantly his neural activity. When his brain turned to mush it administered him a fluid flush and a vitamin boost.

  The ‘audible’, though, was a better signpost to Jo-Jo’s personality than a Rorschach test. See, Jo-Jo was a person who liked to verbally restate things. If a problem was outside his ability to solve (as things often were), he would find inumerable different ways to say, Crap, that’s hard, or Fungul, who but a teranu brain-master would know that?

  Restating gave him comfort.

  He also liked to hear things out loud. Somehow it made the whole process of mind-talk with an unfathomable energy entity less wholly bizarre.

  The audible came through precisely 1.263 seconds after he heard it in his head, causing a slight echo effect. Jo-Jo eyeballed the ship’s filmdisplay as if he could look at the Entity.

  ‘You just don’t get the “person” thing, do you? I have a name. J-O J-O RAS-TER-O-VI-CH.’

  —Sole’s voice, generated through Salacious II’s decoder and replayed, lacked inflexions. Corresponding fractals of the thought energy, mutated across the bridge’s main filmdis like algae,

  Jo-Jo spent a moment recalling the ménage lounge. His flawless mind-catalogue of bars and clubs was a source of some pride to him. Uncomfortable chairs, gaudy urinal. Distinguishing features: uuli hum and exclusive academic clientele.

  ‘But I have business on one of the teranu worlds,’ he protested.

  Actually he planned to attend a symposium on how to enlarge the pleasure centre in the humanesque male cerebrum—but he didn’t think he needed to be precise.

  Although he wasn’t entirely sure that Sole couldn’t read his mind as well as talk in it.

 

  ‘Er... no,’ he said out loud and with feeling. ‘Fuck off.’

  The long silence that followed suggested that Sole had taken his advice and Jo-Jo climbed into his bridge hammock with a self-satisfied grin. ‘That showed it,’ said the master of restatement.

  Not long after, however, a peculiar sensation began to seep through him. It started in his toes and fingers and crept upwards along his body until it converged in his head. His mind fell into thin slivers as though someone had carved through his skull with a large egg slicer.

  Only, in Jo-Jo’s case, the egg was soft and made a God-awful mess.

  SOLE

  manifestspace

  little creatures/ cross’m void void

  cleave’m/thoughts thoughts

  commune’m/change change

  Expand’m/way way

  Find’m secrets

  TRIN

  Trin flew straight to Loisa after dinner. He didn’t speak again to Franco or Jilda and took only a small reticule of clothes, the remains of a canister of bravura, his bora—a pouch containing his hereditary seals—and the lucre he’d found in Jilda’s bureau when he’d been looking for calmatives.

  He flew at a reckless speed, wishing only to put distance between himself, his familia and the Palazzo Cavaliere who shadowed him. You are having me watched now, papa? What is next? Imprisonment?

  Luck favoured Trin’s carelessness and the air traffic was scant as he left the Dockside environs and swept onward into the mining belt. Below him the rainbow of mine lights streamed and flickered in erratic patterns across the ground. He fixed the nav-set, then switched to Autopilot and slumped against the window.

  Marchella’s words disturbed him still. If her visit had been designed to draw attention to the plight of the mining towns then she had uncanny timing. Trin had cared little for the poor conditions in the belt previously, yet now he had been banished to one without the immunity or privilege of name. The irony irritated him.

  He drifted into gloomy thoughts and, eventually, sleep.

  Some time later Autopilot woke him from his wine-drowse, bleating for landing instructions. Ignoring all normal air protocols Trin sent the AiV into a spiralling descent into the darkened, narrow viuzza in front of the local Carabinere building. His escort landed in a more orderly fashion in the well-lit AiV bay at the side.

  The dust-dimmed solar ground lights revealed a building similar to the flat-roofed elliptical familia offices in Dockside. It was surrounded by equally plain villettes of the Nobile, and beyond them Trin caught a glimpse of the simple, mud-and-cellulose casas of the non-familia and ginko workers.

  In the short walk up the path to the Carabinere building, the searing wind caught in his throat like hot smoke and dried the perspiration from his face before he felt it grow damp. He sealed the hood of his fellalo against it. Loisa had no protective bubble like Dockside or Pell. He had heard that the building environmentals battled to keep structures cool enough for comfort. Death from dehydration was common enough among the miners.

  Urgency sent Trin banging on the door. How foolish to come in unexpectedly at night: even with his fellalo sealed he could perish out here in this hotwind. Will the Palazzo Cavaliere help me? What had Franco instructed them to do? Surely he did not wish his son dead?

  A shadowy movement inside caught his eye. Was someone in there? He banged again, calling out, but the movement was not repeated. It was as if he had imagined it.

  In the clutch of panic, Trin retraced his steps to the AiV and set the cabin temperature to its coolest. He would be comfortable, and he would not give the Palazzo Cavaliere the satisfaction of asking for their help.

  He lit the last of his hemp and inhaled with deliberate determination. When the smoke had calmed his fears he laid back the seat and slept.

  * * *

  ‘Pellegrini?’ A bull-necked Carabinere in an immaculate white-dress fellalo roused Trin from a cramped slumber. Light had barely reached far enough to lend colour to the day but already Trin could feel the rise in the air temperature. He shifted and unwound his legs, realising that the grinding sound in his dreams was the straining AiV engine. The air blowing on his face now was barely cool.

  ‘Pellegrini?’ The Carabinere’s voice again—muffled through the cabinplex.

  Trin slipped back his hood and swept the pile of hemp ash from his clothes, embarrassed at the state of his dress. He squeezed the ‘kill’ command on the exhausted engine and opened the cabin.

  ‘Don Pellegrini,’ Trin replied.
r />   ‘I am Capitano Christian Montforte.’ The man’s voice was clipped with disapproval and he didn’t extend his hand. He waved his pouchfilm before Trin’s face. ‘Jus Malocchi says you are to be kept occupied but are unused to work. How in Crux will that be of use to me here?’

  Trin glanced towards the building. ‘Do you not keep your station manned, Capitano? I could not raise a soul last evening.’

  ‘It is manned, Don Pellegrini. But only for those with real emergencies.’

  Trin swallowed down a quick rise of anger. ‘My reticule is in the back,’ he said.

  ‘Then I suggest you bring it with you.’ Montforte turned on his heel and walked away.

  Trin wavered between belligerence and the knowledge that it would gain him nothing. The heat was already suffocating and he badly needed to bathe, so he dragged his reticule from behind the pilot seat and followed Montforte inside to a catoplasma-grey room that was—by the look of the dusty floor and the red trails of excreta—only rarely cleaned.

  They both unsealed their hoods.

  The Capitano wore his hair short and his face clean. His cheeks were full-fleshed like those of a man who enjoyed his food. ‘We have no Galiottos here. Our cleaning nanos are replaced once a year and when they fail we must wait for the next batch,’ he said.

  Trin lifted his gaze to the walls and ceiling and the cracks in the internal joins. The quality catoplasma, he supposed, had probably gone to the local Duca and his chambers.

  ‘This is your office. I am in there.’ Montforte pointed to a door on the other side of the room. Then he slid aside a partition next to the shortcast unit. Behind it was a tiny space with a bed and pinched-out shelves set into a rounded alcove. A small cooking unit stood tucked into another corner, and the smell of engine oils drifted through the air vents from the services yard behind. ‘You will live here.’

  Trin hid his shock. How could he live in such a place? ‘What is my occupation?’