You would think Denny would have trouble getting in so much… trouble, all in just one of Rask’s short days. Though some previous episodes have only edged 2,000 words, this week is better than 12,000. That’s a lot of Whetsday. In fact, there’s about a fifth of the book in this single episode.
But there’s a reward if you make your way through it. Two rewards. No, three!
First off, tonight has not one, but two new examples of Amy Jones’ fantastic sketches for On Whetsday. I’m telling you, it was worth the effort of writing the thing just to see these images.
And then there’s… something else. Lurking. Way down there. Twelve thousand words under the break. But you have to read all of the in between stuff to get there. No skipping.
Though I tell you what. I’ll make you a deal. If you’d rather not read all that, you can listen to the audio version read for you by genuine actor, Raymond Shinn, a man who has been on a real stage, making with the words.
Okay, I know I can trust you. Flip the switch, it’s time to start the show.
PAIRDAY
13
On Pairday, Denny became a criminal. In one way, that really didn't seem like much of a change, since the cithians often acted like humans had done something wrong, even when they did nothing at all. Even though the humans had been told it was okay to walk around town, cithians were always drumming at Denny, or stopping him, or acting like he was somewhere he shouldn't be. Other humans got treated the same way. Or worse. Even Cousin Kettle, despite his uniform and his job, and his lack of offensive hair, was always getting thrown off the transport or treated like he'd done something bad. Once the authority had held him for two days in a tiny room with no lights or windows, and they never even said why.
The difference was that this time Denny really had done something wrong. Or at least, something that he knew cithians would think was wrong.
Early on Pairday, with both suns up and spiraling slowly toward the center of the sky, Denny left his own place and went down the hall to the lift. Cousin Sirah and Cousin Yulia were there, talking quietly. It was surprising, since neither of them lived close by. Yulia was not even in the same compartment building. As Denny came closer, Sirah smiled. Yulia had her usual worried look. Then Sirah saw what Denny was carrying, and her smile turned to a frown.
"You're not," she said.
Denny shifted the box in his arms and shrugged. "I guess I am," he said.
Sirah peered over the rim of the box. "But that was one of my favorites."
The lift arrived and Denny stepped on. "They're all my favorites," he said.
Sirah and Yulia rode with him to the ground, and then Denny headed out on the street, back to the block of buildings that had been turned into Poppa Jam's Porium. This time, Jam already had the door open when Denny arrived. Cousin Haw was carrying a big chair toward the back of the store, while Poppa Jam leaned on the counter, waving warm air toward his face with a plastic fan.
Poppa Jam looked up, saw Denny, looked away, then looked back at him again. The old man's woolly eyebrows shot up. "Well now," he said. "Look at this." He put his palms flat on the counter top and straightened himself. "Come on in."
Denny hesitated a step, then came over to the counter and sat down his tattered box. "I'm interested in selling this," he said.
Poppa Jam pushed Denny's hands away and tugged at the pressed paper side of the box. The box tore open under Poppa Jam's eager attention. Inside was a piece of metalwork not more than two or three hands high. A piece of what Denny's father had called "sculpture."
It wasn't possible to say exactly what it was. On the other hand, it was also hard to say exactly what it wasn't. The whole thing had been made from bits and strips of different metals that Denny's father had worked with hammer and heat into a swirl of shapes, colors, and textures. Looked at one way, it seemed like the base of the thing was a dark iron sea, where something sleek was forcing its way up from tumbling waves. Seen another way it looked like a hand pressing down, weighted by links of bronze and green-stained copper. Were these little rust-flecked bits the shapes of small creatures trying to escape the teeth of something larger? Was the jagged edge a line of figures ascending a long stair? No... but also yes.
Poppa Jam let out a long sigh— the kind of sound someone might make when they ate something really nice. "Now this is worth some picture books," he said.
"I don't want picture books," said Denny.
"You don't?" Poppa Jam's eyes came up to meet Denny's. "What is it you want?"
"I need a maton."
Denny had never seen the color leave someone's face as fast as it did Jam's. "You..." Jam stopped, looked around the Porium, then continued in a whisper. "You know better. Humans aren't allowed to have those things."
"I know we're not allowed. But do you have one?"
“No." Sweat appeared on Poppa Jam's forehead. "I don't have one. Never had one. Of course I don't have one. Don't know why anyone would want one." He looked back into the store. "Now, I have some things here you'd like. I've got..."
"If you don't have a maton," said Denny. "Then where can I get one?"
Poppa Jam ran a hand across his sweaty face and gave a nervous laugh. "You can't. You don't get one. Humans aren't allowed to have them."
"Oh. Okay." Denny dragged the torn box toward him and carefully got his arms under the little metal sculpture. "I guess I'll take this back."
Poppa Jam reached a hand across the counter. "Wait," he said. "I'll make a deal with you." He wiped at his face again with his free hand. "The klickiks, they really like these things. You let me sell this one to them, and I'll give you..." He paused a moment and Denny saw Jam's eyes go up and to the side as he thought the deal through. "Half," he said at last. "I'll give you half the credits the klickiks give me. That’s a fair deal, you see, because I’m the one that has to arrange the meeting, and I have to—"
"Do they have one?”
“What?”
“Do the klickiks have a maton they will trade to you?"
"No!" Poppa Jam's voice soared past whisper and right into a shout. “Earth, boy, will you stop asking about that? The klickiks will give you good credits. Good red chips. Maybe even...” Poppa Jam wiggled his heavy brows. “Maybe even blue."
Denny tugged the box free and stepped back from the counter. "I don't need any credits."
"Everyone needs credits." Poppa Jam started around the end of the counter. "With credits, you can get whatever you want. Whatever..."
"Can I get a maton?" "No, but you can get..."
"Whatever they'll let us have," said Denny.
Cousin Haw came out of the shelves, gnawing at a block of orange chez. "What's going on?"
"Nothing," said Denny. He shifted the broken box and started toward the open front of the Porium. "I was just leaving."
Every now and then Auntie Talla managed to lay hold of enough sugar to make some sweet bakla or a pan or two of just-pie. When Denny was little, he looked forward to those times more than anything else in the worlds. He remembered a day when his father had been slow to start out for Restaurant, and Denny had practically jumped out of his skin worrying that they would be too late to get their small, sweet share. As Denny started out the door, that same feeling seemed to come over Poppa Jam.
The old man came around the counter actually wringing his hands. "Think now, There's got to be something that you want."
"There is," Denny said, still half turned toward the door. Poppa Jam winced. "Don't say..."
"I need a maton."
"What's a maton?" Haw said, rather loudly, from halfway across the store. This time Poppa Jam didn't just wince, he looked like someone had punched him in the stomach. "Shut it, Haw," he said. He looked at Denny and drew a deep breath. "Look, kid, you want the picture book? It's a deal. You want pops? Take a dozen. But I can't trade you a maton, because I don't have a maton."
Denny thought for a moment, “If these klickiks like my dad's stuff so much, how do you know they won't trade you a maton for it?”
Poppa Jam shook his head, “They won't. You have to trust me. Trading with all these guys is what I do, and I can tell you none of them is going to give a human any kind of complex electronics, like a maton. It's against the rules. The big rules."
"But... why?" asked Denny.
"Does it matter?" Poppa Jam said with a shrug.
Denny opened his mouth to say more, but really, there was no more to say. Instead, he turned slowly and left the Porium. Behind him, he could hear Poppa Jam saying something to Cousin Haw. He sounded angry.
Without a maton, there was no way to tell what else was on the memory the chug had given Denny. Maybe it didn't matter. After all, the only thing they'd been able to see with Loma's reader was the story about the old disease, and Denny couldn't see how that mattered to anyone. It was just a story from old Earth. A dead story, like the ones in Loma's books. Probably the whole thing was just trash, something the chug was throwing away.
Denny was almost back to the compartment house when someone came hurrying up beside him. He was surprised to see that it was Cousin Yulia, hunched in her big coat with her tumble of curls spilling out over her shoulders. In the bright light, her hair looked surprisingly red, which was a color Denny wasn’t used to seeing on humans.
“Hey,” she said. She reached, the fingers of her hand barely emerging from the end of a jacket sleeve. See seemed like she was afraid, but there was something else lighting up her pale eyes besides fear. “I saw you in there.”
“I saw you too,” said Denny. “Did you find something at the Porium?"
"Yes," said Yulia, then, "No. I mean... nothing I have the credits to buy." She glanced over at Denny, looked away, then glanced at him again. She bit her lip so hard Denny could see the skin turn white.
"What's wrong?” he asked. "Do you want to borrow some credits?"
"It's not that. It's... I know."
"Know what?"
Cousin Yulia moved around to step in front of Denny. "I think I know where you can find a maton."
14
Yulia looked quickly around the street. Then she surprised Denny by reaching over and grabbing at his hand. “Come this way,” she said.
Denny opened his mouth to reply, but before he could get a word out he found himself stumbling forward as Yulia tugged him quickly across the cracked street toward the long-abandoned building that stood opposite the Porium. Denny had to hurry to keep up with Yulia and several times he almost spilled the little metal sculpture from its torn box. Only when they were in the deep shadows beyond the sagging blue doors did she finally release him.
“What are you talking about?” Denny asked. “How can you know about matons?”
Yulia’s pale eyes flicked left and right and Denny could see her throat work as she swallowed hard. “I was in the Porium. I heard what you were saying. I...” She peeked out at the street and quickly took a step back into the shadows. “Come over here.”
She stepped away from him, nearly disappearing along the dim hallway.
Denny hesitated for a moment, and then followed her into the gloom with the metal figure his father had made clutched tight. He had never liked this building. It wasn’t very tall, just a half dozen floors, but the upper levels leaned in on themselves like carelessly stacked plates. Years of being open to the weather—and years of humans carrying off parts of the building for other uses—had left the place with warped walls, leaky ceilings, and floors with cracked and missing tiles. The lift had long ago stopped running, and the pipes and wires had been hauled away for many ten cycles. Down on the bottom floor there were chairs, lots of chairs, but they only hard plastek and far too small for most humans. Not even Poppa Jam could be bothered to cross the street to collect them. Denny had sometimes wondered if the building had once been used by some other kind of people. Someone like humans, only smaller.
On top of everything else, the place smelled bad. Stale and moldy. As Denny tried to keep up with Yulia, he could hear the soft movement of little creatures around him. Scuttles, certainly. Maybe scats. Denny’s father had always told him to stay out of this place. It was one rule that Denny had never really been tempted to break.
Yulia went down the hall, stepping around a jumbled pile of the undersized chairs and past a long row of tall metal boxes that were lined against one wall. The doors of the boxes hung open, and there was just enough light for Denny to see peeling flakes of green paint separated by wide patches of rust. Inside the boxes there was nothing but darkness. He tried to imagine what had once been kept in this place, but it was just another thing that had long been forgotten.
Yulia’s footsteps made a soft crunching as she walked across clumps of fallen plaster and stepped into a room at the end of the hall. She disappeared into shadows. Denny came forward slowly, waving his hand to feel ahead. He felt nothing. Saw nothing. The darkness was absolute.
“Yulia?”
There was a popping sound ahead, and suddenly there was light. Denny blinked. Not light, but lights, a whole series of tiny, bright, blue-white lights appeared overhead. At first they seemed like just a mess, but as Denny took another step, it seemed to him that there was something half familiar about these little glimmering points.
Under the faint glow, Denny could see that most of the room around him had been cleared away. There was rubble in the corners, along with still more of the too-small chairs, but the center of the room was empty, and more or less clean. On the walls there were old pieces of paper, stained brown by time and curled at the edges. Some of the paper had splotches of faded colors. One of them looked at first like it had words, but after a moment Denny realized it was just all the letters shoved next to each other in an order that made no sense.
He looked up again at the lights. They were clearly not part of the old structure. Thin wires had been stuck to the moldy ceiling with lots of tacks and handfuls of gloop, From the wires, hair-thin lines descended, each one tipped in light. It wasn’t part of the building at all. It was new. “Who did this?”
Yulia shrugged, her shoulders making a soft sound as they moved up and down beneath her heavy jacket. “I did.” She stepped to the center of the room and sat down in the clean space, crossing her legs as she settled onto the hard floor.
Denny took a step closer. Some of the lights dangled down far enough that they floated in front of his eyes. Others seemed to be fixed hard against the stained plaster. Again he had the feeling that there was something to them. Something he should know.
“I thought there was no power over here,” said Denny.
“There’s power,” Julia replied. She shifted around a little, pulling her feet up under her legs. “You just need to know how to find it, and how to hook it up.”
Denny stared down at her for a moment, then picked a spot a pace or two away and joined her on the floor. The concrete felt cold through his thin clothing. “But why?”
She shrugged again. “I wanted a place of my own. Not like the compartment. More like... like where I used to be when I was still with my parents.”
It took Denny a moment to remember. “You came from Halitt Plex, right? Did they have lights like these?”
“Sort of,” said Yulia. “We had stars.”
Stars. Denny glanced up again at the sprawl of tiny lights. Sometimes—only in the darkest part of Dimsday, and only if you were in just the right place—you could see the stars. They were faint; so faint that you couldn’t look at them straight on. You had to see them from the corner of your eye. And even then it was just one or two stars, or maybe a handful if you were lucky. There were nowhere near as many stars as there were lights on Yulia’s ceiling.
Denny started to say something about this, but Yulia tipped her head back, her thick curls falling from her face as the bluish lights reflected in her eyes. “Halitt Plex wasn’t like here. For one thing, it was colder. My father said it was north, but I don’t really know what that means.”
North. Denny rolled the word around in his mind. He had heard it before. No. He had seen it. He’d seen it in Loma’s book. The dog people in the book lived in a place that was north. “Was it cold there?”
Yulia nodded. “Colder than here, anyway. There wasn’t just a little frost on Dimsday. Sometimes there was real snow.”
Snow was another word that Denny knew from the book Loma had given him. He thought that maybe he should tell Yulia about the book with the dog people, but first... “You said you know where to get a maton.”
She hesitated, and then nodded. The blue light shining down left shadows across her cheeks and around her eyes. “Like I said, Halitt Plex was different. It was a lot smaller. It was a new city, not like Jukal. There were no big sleeping stadiums. No real units at all. And no human quarter.”
“No quarter?” Denny sat down across from her. The floor was cold through the thin fabric of his pants. “Where did you live.”
“With the Cithians.”
Denny would have been less surprised if Yulia had told him she had lived on the blue sun. “They let you stay with them?”
“Well, not exactly.” Yulia rocked back, looking off into the shadowy corners of the room.
YULIA’S STORY
15
Hallitt Plex was the end of the world. Or at least, the end of the land.
There were no real oceans on Rask, which was the name of the planet that was home to both Hallit Plex, and Jukal Plex, and every other plex. The home to every cithian. But if Rask didn’t have an ocean, it did have many large lakes and swamps and marshes that stretched on to the horizon in every direction. Hallitt was perched on a long sliver of low ground, flanked on one side by dull gray water and on the other side by dull gray swamp. It was a bitter cold place on Dimsday, barely above freezing on Whetsday, and raked by sharp winds on every day. It was one of the few places on crowded old Rask that cithians had never lived. For good reason.
But then a survey team found minerals beneath the little swamp island, minerals that were valuable across the planet and off the planet. So cithians came to build a new settlement at Hallitt, and they brought humans with them.
At first there were so few cithians in Hallitt that it was more an outpost than a village. When Yulia was born, there were actually more humans in Hallitt than there were cithians. Humans were everywhere. Humans worked in the mines. Humans drained away the swamps and built long dikes that made the island bigger. Humans built the new city where everyone would live.
Of course, humans didn’t do this by themselves. Humans didn’t have the skills or knowledge to lay out the mines, or plan the dikes or design the buildings. Cithians did all that. Humans just did the work.
All the humans in Hallitt Plex had jobs. It wasn’t like Jukal where most of the humans just waited for one day cycle to turn into the next. Humans in Hallitt Plex worked.
Even Yulia was given a job while she was still very small. There had been a big, flat belt that came out of the mine carrying rocks to a building where they were crushed. Some of the rocks were the right kind of rocks, the valuable kind. These were blue. Some of the rocks were not the right kind. They were brown or black or gray or sometimes they were also blue—only the wrong kind of blue. It was Yulia’s job to reach onto the moving belt, pull off the rocks that were the wrong kind, and throw them onto a pile. There were other children, and sometimes old people, who also did this job. They would stand in a line, grabbing out the not-right rocks, and tossing them away. Every day Yulia’s hands were wet and cold and bruised from the rocks, but she did a good job. She worked hard.
Other people had the job of coming for the not-right rocks with little carts and carrying them to the edge of the island, where these rocks were used in making the dikes. They were not right for making whatever it was that was made from the blue rocks, but they were fine for making the low walls that kept out the water. Nothing went to waste in Hallitt.
There were many other sorts of jobs. Few of the cithian crops would grow at Hallitt, so Yulia’s mother worked in a building where bright yellow cathik and bright green wheat were grown under banks of lights. Yulia’s mother, whose name was Natia, tended the plants, and cut the plants, and ground the plants to flour. Natia’s job was also very hard. She came home at the end of each long shift aching from the work she had done all day, but sometimes she was allowed to bring some of the flour home with her. When she did, she and Yulia would use it right away to make flat bread. Which was somehow better than any other flat bread Yulia had ever eaten, even the flat bread made by Auntie Talla, which was very good.
Yulia’s father had a different sort of job. He worked in building the city, but he didn’t work with a hammer or push a cart like most of the humans. Yulia’s father went every day to the place where the new city was being built. He helped the cithians in putting in pipes and in putting in wires. He knew a lot about how the city was to be built. Even the Cithians said he was very smart—for a human.
On Dimsday, when the cithians slept, the humans would keep working. On those days, the Cithians would sometimes tell Yulia’s father what to do, and he would tell the other humans. Her father’s name was Bram, but people called him Uncle Boss. Sometimes they said it smiling. Other times not.
And sometimes, after Yulia had worked most of the day, her father would take her to see the new city being built. He showed her how the wires brought power through the city and how the pipes brought water. He showed her how to connect the wires, and how the water was controlled by valves. He showed her how stone and sand and water could go together to make concrete, which could make walls that would not only go up and down, but could also make curves and arches and domes. He showed Yulia how some of the buildings in the new city would be one shape, and some would be another. Together all the different shapes would form a unit, where all the buildings went together to provide supplies and workshops and places to sleep and places to do other things. Hallitt would have two of these units, and when they were done it would be Hallitt Plex—Hallitt the city—and they would all have big warm buildings with lots of space.
At the very end of Dimsday, when the sky was such a deep purple that it was hard to find any color in it at all, Bram would take Yulia through the growing city to its south edge, where both of them would stand on one of the new dikes and look out across the swamp to where lights glowed on the horizon. The lights were from the crew laying tracks for the new ground train that would link Hallitt to other cities. Every Dimsday the tracks were closer. Every Dimsday the buildings were higher. Every Dimsday the stars were bright overhead.
Bram was very excited about living in the new city. Yulia was excited too. Where they lived was not big and certainly not warm. The Cithians had long, curved-top buildings where they worked, slept, and did their planning. The humans lived under the Cithians, in rooms carved out of the frozen ground that never melted. Yulia and her mother and her father lived with two other families beneath one of the cithian buildings, in a space so low she couldn’t stand up, even as a child. Because the cithians liked Yulia’s father, because he was Uncle Boss, they had extra room. But not much. For sleeping they all huddled together, wrapped in many, many blankets. Even then the cold would soak in and in and in until by the time she woke Yulia’s hands and feet would ache, then burn, then ache some more.
One Dimsday, when Yulia was twelve, her father came to the mine to find her. By then, Yulia didn’t work on the belt as a picker anymore. That was a job for small children. Instead she walked in and out of the mine, following the moving belt, making sure that no rocks got stuck inside all the rollers that made it go. Being a belt walker was an important job. If the belt got stuck, the mine would have to stop until it was fixed. Yulia’s mother and Yulia’s father were both proud that Yulia had been trusted to do such an important thing, even though working inside the mine could be dangerous.
That Dimsday, Bram was even more excited than usual. The train had reached Hallitt a few days before, and now train after train was coming, bringing all the supplies that a city needed. All the buildings were almost finished. It was almost time for everyone to move to the new buildings. Yulia’s father could barely wait to show it all to her. Yulia said that she could not come. She was too dirty from working all day at the mine.
Her father said that was nonsense. Even though it was Dimsday, and very cold, he took off his own coat and wrapped it around Yulia to hide her tattered jacket. Then he walked on in his shirtsleeves, saying that he was not cold at all. He was so proud of everything they had done, that he could not be cold.
There were many more cithians around than there had been on other Dimsdays. Many were cithians from other places who had come on the new train. Yulia thought these cithians seemed upset that a human was going in and out of their buildings. Some of them even rose up on their back legs and sounded their clackers in protest. Yulia’s father said she should not be afraid. “They’re new here,” he said. “They don’t know how we do things in Hallitt Plex.” He said the “Plex” part with a big smile. After so long on the edge of things, now they were a real city.
Her father took Yulia first to see the new sleeping stadium, which was the biggest building she had ever seen. There were ranks and ranks of sleeping cradles arranged in big circles for the cithians. Even though there were no cithians inside the building yet, it was already deliciously warm. Yulia asked where the humans would sleep.
“I don’t know,” said her father, tousling Yulia’s curly hair. “There’s room for everyone. Maybe this time they will give us the top!”
He took her next into the big square workshops, then into some of the smaller control rooms, and then through one of the stations for the ground train. It was all new. All amazing. Yulia’s father could not help showing her things about how the buildings were designed. He was proud of how his work, and the work of many other humans, had helped build the Plex.
Finally he took Yulia into one of the huge domes at the center of each unit. The domes were full of shelves and the shelves were full of... everything. Crates and boxes and barrels. Casks and packages and cans. Not every shelf was full, but the trains had been coming and coming and coming with new things ever since the tracks reached Hallitt.
For the first time in her life, Yulia saw dasiks. She had been told there were other kind of people than cithians and humans, but Hallitt was too cold for most of them. Now that the new buildings had come, dasiks had come with them. Long lines of dasiks were carrying things in from the trains and putting them on the shelves. To Yulia the dasiks looked very big, and their teeth seemed very sharp. Her father only laughed.
“They work with the cithians,” he said. “Just like us. We all work together.”
Bram took Yulia into one of the aisles that ran between the high shelves. The variety of sizes and shapes that rose up around her made Yulia a little dizzy. “What are all these things?” she asked. And he told her.
Later, they stood on the south wall, the way they had on many other Dimsdays, and looked out over the frozen land. The tracks where finished. The city was finished. Everything looked very different than it had the first time Yulia could remember coming to that place. Only the stars overhead seemed the same.
While they were walking back to their home, two cithians stopped them. These were not strangers. They were cithians that had worked with Yulia’s father for years while the city was being built, only this time there were several dasiks with them. The cithians asked Bram to come with them, and he agreed. Of course he agreed.
“I will see you at home,” Yulia’s father told her. “Tell your mother to pack up our things. It’s time to move.”
Yulia might have said that they had very little to pack; just a few cooking things and a few worn clothes and a few old blankets. The blankets were all stiff and smelly and impossible to keep clean. All the way home, Yulia thought how nice it would be to leave the old blankets behind and sleep in the warm sleeping stadium instead. When she got home, her mother was not there. She waited. But it was not her father who came to find her, or her mother. It was cithians who came, cithians and dasiks. Yulia was put on a train the next day. She never saw either of her parents again.
16
When she was done with her story, Yulia stood up. “It’s very warm in Jukal,” she said, as she shifted inside her oversized coat. “But somehow I’m always cold.” She shivered and pulled the big jacket tight against her. Then she walked out, her hair brushing aside stars as she went.
Denny stayed there for a long time, under Yulia’s stars. Finally, when he thought he understood what he needed to do, he stood and walked out of the dark room. It was almost surprising to find that it was not Dimsday outside, the way it had been in Yulia’s story, but still the same warm Pairday it had been when Denny had followed her across the street. He didn’t see Yulia anywhere as he crossed back over the cracked pavement.
When Denny came back into the Porium, Poppa Jam looked at him with cautious hope. "Decide there was something else you needed after all?"
Denny sat the torn box back onto the counter, and nodded. "Yes." He thought for a moment and pointed across the counter. "I still want the picture book," he said. Then he turned and nodded toward the rear of the store. "And I want some other stuff."
17
It took Denny two trips to bring his purchases and other supplies to the old building at the edge of the human quarter. He had no way to lock the doors, and no way to explain what he was doing to anyone who saw him carrying his burden to the building. Denny wasn't sure that anyone had ever said they weren't allowed in the unused authority buildings, but he was pretty sure no one had ever said that they were. If one of the cithians stopped him, Denny would probably be in serious trouble.
No cheez for three days sort of trouble. Maybe worse. But he saw no one.
There were only two rooms inside the old building. The first room was cleaner than the other, with a series of benches, but it also had a window that looked back into the quarter, a window someone might look through and see Denny inside. So he dragged all his things into a corner of the second room. This room had no windows. One wall of the room was lined with water pipes and nozzles. There was a dented metal sheet at one end, which would come in handy.
The room smelled bad, an ugly mix of rotting wood and chemicals. When Denny came in, there were red scuttles as big as his hand gnawing at some paperboard boxes. The scuttles moved out of his way slowly, like they were irritated about being disturbed. There were some chairs at the side of the room, but the scuttles had also gnawed at them, grinding them down until they were barely more than the ghosts of chairs. They surely weren't sturdy enough to sit on. Denny wrinkled his nose and put his things on top of a sagging box.
Carefully, he pulled out the spare clothing he'd brought in his duffle and began to assemble his disguise. There was a thick sweater that had belonged to his father. Two shirts, three belts, two pairs of pants, and a bag full of towels and rags. Denny meant to wear it all.
He put the extra set of pants in front of him, and looped a couple of belts together to hold them in place. Then he stuffed rags down the legs. He put an extra shirt on over his shirt, and stuffed more clothes into the arms. When all the human clothes were on, Denny took the bolts of the thick, coarse cithian cloth that had come from Poppa Jam's Porium, and began wrapping it around himself.
It took longer than Denny had hoped to finished winding the cloth around his face and body. By the time he stumbled toward the stained square of metal to see how he looked, Denny was sweating and feeling very uncomfortable under the many layers of cloth. The clothing, which included an old coat that Denny had outgrown and the blanket from his father's unused sleeping mat, bulked Denny up until his figure seemed nearly round as a ball. He had taken special care to wrap up his shoulders so that his head and body seemed all of a piece, with little sign of a neck, and his hands were reduced to vague mittony shapes. But the strangest thing was that the figure in the glass had both an extra set of arms and a spare set of legs.
Denny shoved a pair of socks onto the end of the extra legs. Some towels he had never used went into the arms. The extra set of arms was positioned below his own, where the mid-limbs would be on a cithian. Denny tried raising and lowering his real arms, and saw that the fake set moved with him–though not very much. For the fake legs, he'd put the cloth-filled pants actually in front of his own so that with every step the extra limbs would bounce along. He could move, but he sure wasn't going to do any dancing.
He reached down clumsily, barely able to bend inside all the layers, picked up the biggest thing he had purchased from Poppa Jam, and hung it on his back. The plastic moltling shell wasn't heavy, but it took Denny a few tries to get the straps tied while reaching backwards with his wrapped up arms. When he finally got it in place and turned around again, his reflection showed a cithian moltling.
Denny stared through a slit in the cloth bindings. The figure in the glass looked a little lumpy, a little uneven, but so did a lot of moltlings. He crouched forward, and then took a slow step, letting his body tilt to the side. Then he took another slow step with the other leg. The motion didn't look right at first, but Denny backed away and approached the metal again, this time taking care to bend his knees less, extend his legs further. He pulled his hands up, holding them at the level of his shoulders, letting the extra set of arms bob a bit at each step. Then he backed away and did it again.
When he thought his movements looked enough like Omi's, and those of the other moltlings Denny had seen in the street, Denny picked up the eyepad shield that was the last of the items he had gotten from the Porium, and slid it onto his face. The tint of the shield was so dark that Denny had trouble seeing anything at all, but he hoped the heavy glass would keep anyone from noticing his very human eyes peering through a slit in the cloth wrapping.
He wished he had time to practice more, but he worried that if he stayed too long in the old building, he would be caught. After all, the building where the few remaining guards rested was right across the street. Denny shuffled to the door, sending more of the scuttles running as he crossed the room. He twisted around to get the plastic shell through the opening, and stepped outside.
There was no one in the narrow street near the old gate to the quarter. Denny moved as quickly as he could to reach the next corner, then settled into the slow, tilting shuffle that he hoped looked like that of a moltling. Already he was sweating under the many layers of cloth. The plastic shell, which had felt not so very heavy at first, swayed against his back and the straps dug into his shoulders at each step. Though the dark eyepad shield he could see only a vague outline of the street ahead. Even though both suns were well up in the sky, it was like walking in the darkest part of Dimsday, with no lights anywhere. He kept walking, concentrating on making the right turns to get to his destination.
Denny had always been kind of happy that there wasn't a big cithian work complex very close to the human quarter, because it let him walk around without running into too much trouble, but now he sort of regretted it. Because he needed a work complex to find what he needed, which meant that he had a long walk ahead in his uncomfortable disguise. And the longer that walk, the better the chance that someone would see he wasn’t really a moltling at all.
He sweated his way past one big block of smaller buildings after another. It was the same curving road he had followed on his long walk to see Loma, only this time Denny found every step to be an effort. After a few minutes, he found he didn't have to fake the wobbly side to side walk of a moltling, because he really was that close to tipping over. He was so wrapped up, he feared he might fall onto his back and never be able to stand.
He had been walking for close to an hour before he reached a place where there were road ferries regularly moving along the street. He stayed far over to the side, as he had seen real motlings do, and kept traveling at his slow pace. At first, he was sure that every ferry was about to stop, and that the cithians were sure to see through his disguise, but they just kept moving. Denny even passed a motling moving in the other direction. Like Omi, this moltling was nearing the end of its soft period. It had discarded most of the cloth wrapping, and its feet were hard enough to clack against the pavement. Denny held his breath as it drew near, but the young cithian passed him quickly, never even turning its eyepads his way.
Finally, when he'd walked so far that his wrappings were damp with sweat, Denny came to one of the circular complexes with a dome-shaped building at its center and a series of taller blocky buildings around it. Following what he remembered from Cousin Yulia's story about the place where the supplies were kept, he turned into one of the narrow paths that angled in toward the central dome. A trio of adult cithians went past, close enough that Denny might have reached out and touched the nearest, but none of them turned or showed any sign of seeing the human behind the cloth and plastek. Denny had the sudden urge to go back. Better yet, to tear off the layers of clothing, discard all the rags, throw the stupid shell on the ground and just run back to the quarter. But he didn't. Keeping himself to the slow tilt-step-tilt shuffle of a moltling, he went into the opening of the dome.
There was no door or curtain that Denny could see, but between one awkward step and the next the air became much cooler. There was a dry, sort of metallic smell and the distant sound of voices, but at first Denny didn't see any cithians at all. What he saw looked kind of like Poppa Jam's Porium... but only if the Porium had been much, much larger. Ahead of him, the building was filled with rings of shelves. These were stocked with boxes of every size, most of them in shades of yellow or brown or red.
The shelves were at least twice as tall as Denny. Cutting through this series of rings were aisles that shot straight toward the center, where a tall round tower rose up out of sight toward the top of the dome. Somewhere overhead a ring of white globes glowed, but the light barely cut through the gloom of the huge space.
Denny stood there, the sweat cooling against his skin, and wondered what to do next. Cousin Yulia had told him that the cithians kept everything in buildings like this, making them available to all the cithians who lived in the unit of buildings that surrounded each storage dome. But just knowing that the cithians kept everything in a storage dome didn't help as much as Denny had thought it would. Because the cithians kept everything in the storage dome. Everything. The dome was huge. There was also another problem, because now that he really thought about it, Denny had no idea what a maton looked like. He didn't even know if the thing he was looking for was small enough for him to carry when he found it. If he found it.
Denny scanned the row of boxes in the nearest shelf. He didn't know if he should be looking at those as small as his hand, or those large enough to hide a whole cithian. He took a clumsy step forward.
"Objective," said a voice.
Denny jumped, which made the plastek shell rise and thump against his back. He twisted around awkwardly, trying to see who was speaking, but there was no one near.
"Objective," said the voice again.
As far as Denny could tell, the voice was coming from nowhere. Or maybe everywhere. "Hello?"
"Objective."
"Uhh..." He thought about making something up. After all, if there was a cithian watching him from somewhere else in the big room, the cithian might have already noticed that Denny didn't look quite right, or didn't sound like a moltling. There could already be cithians from the authority on the way, or a team of dasik guards ready to hurry Denny to consignment. Only Denny didn't see anyone. Plus, there was something about the voice. It was sort of... not real, like the voice that came from the buttons on the dasik uniforms.
"I need a maton," he said.
"Specify model," said the voice.
"Uhh..." Denny said again. He wasn't sure what the voice meant by "model." He hoped it meant that the voice understood what he was looking for, but he didn't know what to say next. "Do you have a maton?"
"Specify model."
"Can I have one?"
"Specify model."
"Can you show me how to find it?"
"Transaction ended," said the voice. Then after a short pause. "Objective?"
Denny took a deep breath and tried again. "I need a maton."
"Specify model."
"What is a model?"
For a moment, there was no response. Then the voice spoke again. "The following models are available at this facility. Ocelli A. Ocelli A four. Malpighian fourteen. Trochanter B. Trochanter C. Subesophageal Nine..."
"Ocelli," said Denny. "An Ocelli A four. Yes, I want a Ocellia A four model of maton." He had picked it mostly because, of all the models that the voice had listed, this was the easiest to say.
There was no immediate response, and Denny wondered if he had ruined things by interrupting the voice. Then a thin line of yellow-orange appeared on the floor. The line pulsed slightly with light. It led from Denny's feet–his fake, front feet–down the nearest aisle toward the center of the room.
"Thank you," said Denny. The voice did not reply.
Denny began walking across the room. Once away from the door, it was dark enough that Denny had to hold the eyepad shields up with one hand and peek under them to see the line. He forgot, for the first few steps, to keep up his imitation of a moltling's walk. Then he slowed down, hunched over, and started his tilting back and forth. Just because the voice came from something like a maton, didn't mean that there wasn't someone out there watching.
The yellow line carried on past a dozen or more ranks of high shelves, then turned right between two curving rows. Between the shelves Denny felt a bit trapped. The space was narrow enough that the plastic shell tapped against shelves on either side with each rolling step. The top shelf was high above his head, and the curve of the row meant that he could only see a few steps in either direction. He passed by one of the aisles pointing to the tower at the center of the room, but the yellow line kept pointing around the curve, so Denny kept following.
He felt like he had gone so far that he was about to be back where he started, when suddenly the line ended. Denny looked up at the shelves on either side and saw that there were many, many, many boxes, all of them about the size of his head, and none of them with any clear label.
Denny looked up at the shadows overhead. "Where is it?" he said. "Hello?" The voice either couldn't hear him, or wasn't interested.
He took the eyepad shield completely off and set it down on the shelf so he could take a closer look at the boxes around him. If there was any writing on them, or anything at all to tell you what was supposed to be in inside, he couldn't see it. Maybe the cithians could tell what was what by smelling the boxes. Or by tasting them with the little sensors he knew they had on their forelimbs. Denny couldn’t do that.
He turned to the shelf on the left and grabbed the box at eye level. Denny thought about turning and leaving, but he also thought how bad it would be to get back to the quarter and discover that what he'd picked up wasn't a maton after all. He fumbled at the box with his cloth wrapped hands. There were some grooves in the package, but they seemed to be designed for the tiny manipulators at the end of a cithian mid-limb, and were way too narrow for Denny to get his fingers in, even when he slipped them out through a gap in the heavy cloth wrapping. He tried to pull the top of the container off, but it wouldn't come. He pressed and poked at the edges, but nothing happened. Finally he simply turned the box over and shook it.
The top came off, and something small, rounded, and silvery fell from the box. Denny dropped the box and tried to catch the object, but it struck the hard floor with a metallic clang and bounced away. Clumsy in his moltling disguise, Denny shuffled after the gleaming ball as it wobbled along between the shelves, but he only managed to kick it with one of his fake front feet, and when he stepped forward to try and catch it, he kicked it harder. The device went spinning away, wobbling and twisting along the aisle. The shape of the device wasn’t a perfect sphere, and it tended to roll to one side, but its turn almost exactly matched the curve of the shelves. It just kept rolling and rolling. Denny hurried after it, with his real legs thumping against the empty front legs of his disguise and the spare set of arms bouncing against his chest.
When the silver thing finally fetched up against the bottom of a shelf, Denny bent down to pick it up. The weight of the plastic shell on his back almost caused him to fall over, but with a little arm waving, he managed to stand up again and get his first good look at the device.
There was nothing to it. Just a slightly lumpy silver ball. Denny turned it over carefully, but there were no buttons, no knobs or dials or screens. "Are you a maton?" he said, hoping that the little device might reply. It said nothing.
"Hello?" Still nothing.
Denny looked around. He had walked so far in chasing the fallen device that he couldn't even see the box it had come from. He went back along the curving aisle... and stopped.
The fallen box lay in the middle of the aisle. Bending over it was a cithian. An adult cithian with the red stripe of the Jukal Plex Legal Authority across its shell.
Denny slowly backed away. When the curve of the shelf was enough to hide him, he started to walk faster. When he got to the next aisle that cut across the sets of shelves, he turned right toward the outside of the building. Behind him, Denny heard a clicking, scrabbling sound. A movement sound. He started to run as fast as his disguise would allow.
He reached the outer wall of the building, but still couldn't see anything of the door where he had come in. The wall was a dark gray, and seemed to be nearly covered in wires, pipes, ducts, and grids, all of them painted the same color. There were no labels or signs that Denny could see. Some of the old buildings in the human quarter had signs above the outside doors that said "Way Out." Some of them had arrows on the floor that pointed to these doors. The cithians apparently didn't believe in such signs.
Denny wasn't sure which way would take him back to the door, but he turned right again and kept running. A few steps later, he skidded to a halt. The bright twin suns of Pairday were shining right through the broad open door just ahead, spilling a cone of brilliant light into the otherwise gloomy space. But silhouetted against that light was the form of another adult cithian.
Denny backed away. He pressed his plastek shell against the wall, peering toward the entrance from around the side of a large pipe.
From out of the shelves, another cithian appeared. It could have been the one Denny saw by the fallen box, but he couldn't really tell. It joined the cithian standing in the entrance. The two cithians bent close together and touched forelimbs, as cithians often did when speaking to each other. After a moment, they moved apart, and both of them headed into the shelves, moving in different directions. Denny gave them ten seconds to get away, then started for the door.
He had barely taken half a step when two more cithians appeared. And two dasiks right behind them. The newcomers didn't hesitate, but started immediately into the shelves, fanning out to cover all the aisles.
"Earth," Denny said, but he said it very, very quietly. He backed away until he once again had the shelves sheltering him from the view of the nearest cithian, and then he turned and ran again, staying to the outside. He thought that maybe there was a door on the other side of the tall building, but even if there was, it seemed likely that there would be a cithian or a dasik there, too. In fact, if there was another door, maybe cithians had already come through it. Maybe they were coming toward him. Maybe he was running straight toward them. And what about the cithians who had gone up the center aisles, wouldn't they get to the other side long before Denny made it by going around the outside wall?
He stood against the wall. His breath was coming hard and his heart was beating in his ears. The sweat he had worked up getting to the building was now icy under the many layers of cloth.
One thing was sure, Denny could not get caught. His disguise might fool another cithian if he was just passing them in the street, or even talking to them at a distance, but there was no way the cithians wouldn't notice something strange if they were right beside Denny. For one thing, he didn't even have his eyepad shield. It was still on the shelf back where he had been looking for a maton. No cithian was going to look at his eyes peeking out between the folds of cloth and think that he was anything but a human.
Denny imagined the authority cithians grabbing hold of him with the hard manipulators of their forelimbs. He imagined them dragging him through the city. He imagined Overcontroller Hiser looking at him, not in the kindly, protective way that he sometimes did, but in a way that said Denny was in serious trouble. If he was caught now, it wouldn't be just no cheez for a day cycle. It meant Hiser telling Denny that he was going to be consigned today, right now, this moment. And not consigned to the place where his father had been sent. Not to a place where anyone he knew had been sent. Consigned to a place where he would never see Cousin Sirah, or Aunt Talla, or irritating Cousin Kettle, or even Poppa Jam. A place where he might never see another human. Ever.
There was a scraping sound ahead. The sound of a hard cithian foot on a hard floor.
Denny turned left, the plastek shell bumping against the wall made a plonking sound as he moved, which made him wince. He looked left. Right. Then instead of staying near the wall he plunged into the space between the curving shelves. The shelves on one side were all covered with boxes that were bigger than Denny. Here and there, there were gaps in the boxes, and a dozen steps in Denny made a sudden decision. He jumped into one of these gaps, slid between two of the boxes, and lay still.
There was the sound of his breathing, and the pounding of his heart. Otherwise, the whole vast space seemed silent.
It wasn't until he was laying there that Denny realized he was still clutching the silver thing that had fallen from the box in his right hand. He raised it up to his face. His breath misted the silvery sides as he carefully turned if over. It was nothing but a slightly lumpy silver ball. He was going to be sent away for nothing. Only...
Denny brought the thing closer to his face. One spot on its surface was flat. One small, square spot. One spot just about the same size as... He shifted the ball to his left hand, then dug into his pocket and produced the little purple cube the chug had given him.
There was a scrabbling sound nearby. One of the cithians was coming through the space through the shelves right next to Denny. The tap-scrape-tap sound of its long dark, jointed feet on the hard floor came closer, closer... and then it was moving away, walking quickly through the dim space. It had gone past him.
Denny let out a slow breath that until that moment he hadn't realized he had been holding. He raised the silver ball, turned it so that the little square was exposed, then brought the cube up to it. The size was right. Just right. Denny touched the cube to the ball.
His hand exploded in agony.
18
Working... Working... Working...
Memory core... detected. Neural connection... nonstandard. Performing transformation matrix.
Tracing... Tracing... Tracing... Link established.
19
The pain was gone. Denny was still lying on the shelf, wedged between two boxes–two blood red boxes, now that he thought about it–bracing himself against the flood of pain. Only there wasn't any pain. Whatever had happened when he touched the cube to the silver ball, it didn't seem like it was happening now.
Denny slowly raised his face to look toward the thing in his hand. He sort of expected to see that his whole hand had been blasted off, but it was still there. So was the maton. He turned it around, noticing that the purple cube seemed to have pulled itself into the silver ball so that it was almost even with the surface. There was just a little rim of purple visible above the silver surface. Except for that, it looked the same.
“Bootstrap complete,” said a calm, but quite loud voice. “Integration sequencing.”
Standing in the space between the shelf where Denny was hiding and the next, was a woman. A human woman.
Denny grunted in surprise, his voice muffled by a layer of cloth that had fallen against his face. He shoved himself back against the boxes. As he bumped against the side of the shelves, the silver ball slipped out of his fingers and rolled away from his hand.
The woman rippled, as if she was painted on a flapping curtain, and vanished.
Denny gulped down a lump in his throat. He twisted around, looking to see where the woman had gone, but there was no one in sight. From somewhere down the next aisle, he heard the sound of a cithian moving quickly past. "Serration 34 unoccupied," said a cithian voice. Another cithian replied. The voice had the weird, muffled sound that came from being on some kind of radio.
The scrabbling sound came again. The cithian was getting closer.
Moving as slowly as he could with his pounding heart and his wrapped-up limbs, Denny slide further back along the shelf, tucking his knees up against his face. The soft form of his fake legs were pressed up against the shelf above him. The plastek shell under his back made him feel unstable, with every breath ready to send him rocking from side to side.
The clack of cithian rear-claws against a hard surface came again. Denny saw the shape of a cithian come around the next line of shelves and start up the row where he was hiding. The cithian had barely taken a step toward him when Denny saw the silver maton. It was lying on the edge of the shelf, tipped so far out into space that it was a wonder that it didn't fall. All the cithian had to do was look down, and he would see the shiny surface of the little orb gleaming in the dim light.
Denny started to reach for it. His fingers were almost on it when he remembered the pain he had felt when touching it the first time. Maybe it was a one time thing. But then, maybe it wasn't.
The cithian took another slow step. Denny grabbed the sphere.
At once the agonizing shock ran through him as if he had swallowed an electric cable. He ground his teeth together to keep from screaming.
The strange woman was back.
She was standing right beside the cithian. She was green. Or at least green-ish. Her whole body and face and even what Denny could see of her clothes and hair seemed to be made out of the same thing, some kind of sparkly pale green stone with little flecks of red and white. Denny could see the stoney length of her bare legs, and her stone feet laced into stone sandals. He could just see her stone hands dangling below the hem of her stone robe.
The cithian would see her. Had to see her. She was right beside him.
There was a soft beeping sound. "Serration 33 clear," said the cithian, standing no more than an arm's length from Denny. The hard back claws of its rear limbs clattered past as it moved on along the row.
Denny lay very still for several seconds longer. The pain was mostly gone, but his arms and legs still ached, like when he had moved something very heavy or when he ran up the stairs to his compartment on a day when the lift wasn't working. Carefully, making as little noise as possible, Denny leaned to the side to look up at the green woman.
The stone eyes were fixed on his face. Their was something funny about the woman's features. She was made out of some kind of rock, which was funny on it's own, but it was something more than that. Something about the shape of her nose, the curve of her cheeks, the way her forehead met the rest of her face. She was definitely human–Cousin Sirah had a little of the same look–only she seemed a different kind of human than Denny.
She was absolutely motionless. Frozen. Somewhere, maybe in a picture book, Denny could remember seeing a person carved out of a block of stone. A statue, like the ones his father made of metal, only different. That's what this woman was like. Only not.
Denny glanced at the silvery ball in his hand. He knew that, somehow, it was making this woman. Like the images of the people with the terrible disease that had appeared when the memory had been placed inside Loma's player, this ball was somehow making the image of the woman. She wasn't really there. It was just a picture. Only the picture's that Loma's player made had seemed like just that–pictures floating in the center of the old woman's tiny room. They didn’t seem real. But this woman...
The green woman moved. Her arms might look like stone, but they flexed like muscle. The stone robe she was wearing shifted like cloth. There was no center to her red and white flecked eye, but still Denny could tell that she was looking at him.
The stone face leaned in toward him, the stone eyes staring right into Denny's own. "Hello, Denning Carrelson, resident 14723, Human Containment Facility, Jukal Plex, Rask," she said in a bright, friendly, and quite loud tone. "I'm Athena."
It took everything Denny had not to drop the silver ball again. "You know my name," he whispered.
"Oh, yes," said the green woman. She nodded, and the corners of her stoney mouth were turned up in a slight smile. "I have access to quite a large store of information."
Denny tried to twist around to see down the row, but with the boxes and shelves all around him and the wrappings, and the extra clothes, and the plastic shell, he could barely see past the woman. "You need to be quiet," he whispered. "They'll hear you."
The woman's smile didn’t falter. It almost seemed to Denny like she found the situation he was in funny. "No they won't," she said. "I'm speaking to you by direct neural stimulation. No one else can hear, see, or detect my presence in any way. Which reminds me." The woman straightened herself. "The automation nexus on which this interface is operating is specifically not designed for human operation. Use of this nexus can cause discomfort."
Denny took a second to process her words. "Does that mean every time I touch this ball, it's going to hurt?"
The green woman, Athena, nodded. "Also, continued use may lead to medium to long term injury. I am sorry.” She was still looking at him with that faint smile.
No matter how long he thought about this, it didn't sound good. Denny looked away from the woman at the silver ball as he turned it over and over in his hand. "If I went back to get a different maton..."
"I have completed an inventory review of this material crèche. All such devices available in this facility are encoded with similar lock out mechanisms for human use," she said. The woman leaned toward him and winked one stony eye. "They thought it would hurt so much you would never use it. You've surprised them."
"Surprised who?" asked Denny.
Athena raised a hand to her mouth and her eyes widened, then... something happened. Her lips moved, but no sound was produced. Her face and her arm jerked from one position to another in an instant, and she was again looking at Denny with a smile.
He started to ask her again, but just then the sound of cithians moving through the big space returned. From the sound, Denny could tell it was more than one cithian moving his way. At least two. Maybe more. They were coming slowly, and as they approached he heard a slight groan of metal, the sound of something being slid out of the way. The cithians were checking the shelves.
Denny put one hand on the floor and pulled a little more of himself out into the aisle. "Can you help me?" he asked, speaking as quietly as he could.
She knelt down next too him, the edge of her strange stone robe settling over her knees. "I'm sorry," she said, "but my physical interactions are strictly limited.” Denny guessed that meant that she couldn’t help.
There were sounds now from several directions, but most of the noise came from off to Denny's left. More footsteps, and more grating noises of moving boxes. The cithians were no more than two shelves away, and perhaps closer. "Can you tell me how to get out of here?" he asked. "Without being caught?"
Athen's expression remained just the same. "I can direct your actions toward the path most likely to lead to success," she said. She turned her head for a moment, apparently looking toward the tower at the center of the room. "I am interfacing with the automation nexus for this facility. That will allow me to locate all movement visible to the overhead cameras."
Denny hadn’t known there were overhead cameras. He guessed they weren't on all the time. Otherwise the cithians would have caught him already. "Won't they know what you are doing?"
"No," she said simply. After a few seconds, Athena gave an abrupt nod and turned back to Denny. "Come out now," she said.
Denny heaved his way free of the shelves. He could hear the cithians still working their way toward him, and it was difficult to get out without making noise, especially while still holding onto the maton. Athena stood over him as he twisted and wormed his way onto the floor.
"Alacrity is desirable," she said.
"What?"
"Move faster."
Denny made it out from between the shelves and boxes, and struggled to his feet, stepping on one of his own fake feet in the process and almost falling onto his face. Finally he was standing.
"This way," said the green woman. "Follow me."
She headed down the aisle at a fast walk. Denny could hear the slap, slap of her sandals on the floor, but he had to assume that, like her voice, it was a sound made only for him. He was surprised by how tired he felt as he walked after her. The disguise still made him clumsy, but it was more than that. His legs and arms felt weighted down. The plastek shell felt like it was made of thick metal.
"Stop," Athena said suddenly. She raised a hand, and when Denny ran into it he was surprised that he actually felt something, like a slight, but real, pressure against his skin.
From down the aisle, a dark figure moved. A shape flicked toward Denny for a second, then was gone.
"Continue." Athena started moving again, walking even faster than before. Denny struggled to keep up.
He was feeling worse at every step. His head swam. His stomach lurched. "I think I'm going to be sick," he said, speaking louder than he probably should.
Athena turned to look at him with stony smile still in place. "You are feeling the result of prolonged use of the automation nexus. I suggest you stop using the device now to avoid long-term damage."
Denny nodded. He looked at the ball in his hand. His hand was shaking. "How will I talk to you when I put it down?" he asked.
"Communication is impossible without the nexus to mediate," said the green woman. "I'm sorry."
Denny swayed on his feet. If he put the maton down, he wouldn't have Athena to show him out, but if he held on, he might soon be too sick to move. "Get me out of here," he whispered to her. "Quickly."
Athena cut a path across the center of the room. Twice more, she stopped Denny as they waited for cithians to pass, but Denny felt so bad he barely looked up. Finally, they reached the outer wall again. Denny looked around, expecting to see a door nearby, but there were only all the pipes and ducts and wires.
The green woman raised her stone hand to point at a dark gray handle set nearly flush with the dark gray wall. "Pull this down," she said,
Denny stumbled forward. On his first attempt, the cloth-wrapped fingers of his left hand slipped from the handle, but when he tried again it came down. With a slight whoosh of moving air, a small opening appeared on the wall. It was barely as tall as Denny's knees and maybe twice as wide as his shoulders.
"Crawl through there and you'll be outside," said Athena. Her stone eyes studied Denny's face. "Please cease use of the automation nexus immediately to avoid substantial permanent damage."
Denny nodded wearily. His head was splitting, his limbs aching, his stomach rolling over and over. He almost wished the cithians would catch him. Carefully, he tucked his hand into the many folds of cloth over his stomach, then released the maton. At once, he felt a little better. But only a little. Athena was gone.
He got down on his knees and looked into the low tunnel. It was short. He would have to take off the plastek shell and drag it behind him, but he could see the bright purplish light of Pairsday shining through the other end of the tunnel.
With a groan, Denny got down on his knees and unstrapped the shell. Moving only a hand-length at a time, he made his escape through the tunnel. He could feel the compact weight of the maton hidden in the folds of cloth. He hoped it was worth it.
All right, text over. That was one long day for Denny and it’s really not quite over yet. Still, you’ve done enough. Here’s your reward.
It’s a cithian mask! Brian Zick, who created the amazing art for the trade paperback cover of On Whetsday, has taken the time to make a special version designed to be printed out and turned into a mask. With this mask, you can fool aliens of all kinds. Enter the sleeping stadiums on Dimsday! Steal a maton from the storage building! Maybe even catch a ride on the sky trains! Do it all, and you can brag about it next day cycle at Restaurant.
And here’s an extra bonus: send me a picture of yourself wearing a copy of this mask. The best examples of using the cithian mask while exploring this world (or any other) will net you a copy of On Whetsday when the book hits the shelves. Which is soon. Real soon. So soon that I really should be over there looking at page proofs and stomping on typos. So print your mask, take a pic somewhere interesting, win a book.
And don’t forget to listen to the audio version of On Whetsday where Raymond Shinn had to read all this long, long section. Wheh.