On Whetsday Read online

  Mark Sumner

  Word Posse

  Acknowledgements

  My thanks to Tom Drennan, Laurell K. Hamilton, Rett Macpherson, Deborah Millitello, and Sharon Shinn for their help in putting this into shape. Special thanks to Marella Sands, who not only helped with the manuscript but did yeoman work in turning that manuscript into this book. Additional thanks to Susan Gardener, Barbara Morrill, Laura Clawson, Vicki Grove, and Markos Moulitsas Zuniga at Daily Kos, who surrendered space on the front page and got the Saturday evening installments of the serial up on time even when I was late. It's all an experiment. Now let's go check the results.

  Interior artwork for On Whetsday was created by Amy Jones. The cover for this edition is from Brian Zick. Both Amy and Brian stepped forward with fantastic work even when the whole project looked rather shaky. I love all of it, would recommend either of them for anything, and no, I will not say which of them was more accurate in drawing a cithian.

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  On Whetsday, Mark Sumner

  Visit us at www.wordposse.com

  Copyright © 2016 by Mark Sumner. All rights reserved. This book, or portions thereof, may not be reproduced by any means without permission of the author. This book has been typeset in Fanwood. Titles and headers are in Alien League.

  ISBN-10:1-944089-00-4

  ISBN-13:978-1-944089-00-9

  1

  Whetsday

  On Whetsday, Denny danced at the spaceport. It was a good place to dance, if you didn’t mind the heat that boiled off the acres of asphalt or the noise of the rising shuttles. You could meet a dozen races in single morning: lithe little skynx, scarlet klickiks, and sluggish chugs with their curtains of eyes brushing the ground. Most of the passing visitors had never seen a human, and fewer still understood what Denny was doing. Dancing was a rare thing among the races of the galaxy. But they understood enough to toss shiny credit chips or small bits of scrip into the box by his feet. They understood begging. Begging was universal.

  Cousin Kettle had told everybody that Denny was not a very good dancer, but Denny didn't let that opinion slow his feet. Kettle had a job helping out at the port, a very responsible position for a human; though the truth was Kettle just cleaned food troughs, and scrubbed fouled pacer bays, and carried stuff. When Denny came to dance at the port, the door guards would sometimes come out to watch, but Kettle stayed away. Denny could tell that Kettle was embarrassed.

  Most of the guards were lesser dasiks, and Denny thought that they liked his dancing. The speech badges clipped to the dasiks' uniforms were coded only with phrases like “do not cross the green line” and “present your identification,” so he could not be sure, and the dasiks never dropped a chip in Denny's box, but when they passed him, they would often pause and watch. The dasiks were very tall, and everything about them was long. Long feet. Long hands. Long faces. When they watched Denny dance, their long necks swung from side to side and their long mouths opened to reveal double rows of long needlely teeth. They never once pressed the button that said “leave this area immediately.”

  Close to noon, when the dull red sun and the tiny blue-white sun were so tight together in the sky that everything at the port cast one set of deep violet-fringed shadows, a very old chug came out of the main terminal in a burst of cold ammonia-scented air. Denny could tell it was very old because, even though the eyes at the top of the chug were still rich shades of brown, and blue, and orange, those at the bottom had turned dead white. Some of the stalks were even missing their eyes altogether. Denny could see some of the chug's many limbs swaying and clicking though the gaps left by the missing eyes.

  One of the dasiks put its long head through the terminal door after the chug and pressed the button that said, “Follow the blue dots to the air taxi.” The chug angled a dozen brown eyes at the pavement, and it shuffled forward as if it were going to comply with this advice. The guard clicked his long teeth together and went back inside. As soon as the door closed, a cluster of orange eyes tipped Denny's way, and the chug stopped.

  Already there were a dozen chips gathered at the bottom of Denny's box, and the Whetsday heat was scorching. Normally, he would have been thinking about going home, but this was the first real audience of the day—the first person to truly stop for him instead of just tossing a chip—and he wanted to put on a good show. He raised the volume of his singing and the energy of his dance. He clapped his hands, which made the brown eyes jerk away, and stomped his feet, which made the blue eyes open wide, and sang “all alone, Old Poppa Stone, rolling home.” He rose up onto his toes and spun around.

  A ripple went through all the eyes. “You a human?” said the chug. Its voice was soft and windy and it was hard to tell what part of the chug produced the sound, but it spoke Xetosh very well.

  Denny stopped singing and tipped down from his toes. “Yes,” he said. “That's right.”

  There was a skittering, clicking sound from somewhere beneath the eyes, as if a number of tiny metal switches were being thrown very quickly. Four blue eyes raised up and looked toward the distant city, six brown eyes directed themselves at the door to the terminal. The cluster of orange eyes kept their gaze on Denny. “I understood that humans were not allowed out of the containment facility.”

  “The containment facility?” Denny had never heard anyone call part of Jukal Plex a “facility,” but after a moment's thought he smiled. “Do you mean the human quarter?” He glanced back over his shoulder. The tallest buildings of the plex were clear on the skyline, with the great pale spike of the Cataclysm standing above all the rest, but the buildings near the human quarter were shorter, and Denny could not make them out.

  The quarter itself was far too small to spot. Despite the name, it wasn't a fourth of the great city, or even a four hundredth. It was just a few buildings, a few streets and a handful of compartment houses, most of them empty. Like everything else about humans, once it had been more important. “When there were lots of humans, we used to have to stay in the quarter—you know, so we didn't get in the way,” Denny explained. “Now that the cithians have consigned most of us on to other cities, they let us move around more.”

  “How many?” asked the chug.

  “What?”

  “How many humans?”

  “In Jukal?” Denny had to think for a moment. “Fifteen. No...thirteen. Auntie Jo and her baby went off last month.”

  There was some rustling among the eyes, and more than a few of the stalks twined around each other as brown eyes turned to look into orange eyes and blue stared into blue. “So few?” There was more of that switchy clicking and clacking.

  “That's just in Jukal,” Denny said with a shrug. “People get moved. Anyhow, there used to be more.”

  “Yes,” said the chug. “There did.” It waved toward Denny's feet with a twitch of multicolored eyes. “What is this thing you do?”

  “Dancing.”

  “Is it a human thing?”

  “Yes. I've heard that the skynx dance too, but not like humans.”

  “Dance like a human,” said the chug. A hundred eyes tilted toward Denny. “I want to see a human thing.”

  Denny grinned. He didn't think the chug was making fun of him. It was dangerous to read emotions into races you didn't know well, but he thought the old chug seemed sad. Perhaps if he danced well enough, the chug m
ight toss a red chip, or even a blue.

  He tilted back his head and sang, “Hey Judy, hey Judy, hey” to the hard white sky. He shook out his shoulders, and flung up his arms. He let a wave move through him that curved his neck, then his back, then his hips, then his knees, and then his feet. Left, right, left again. He sang the old music and tossed himself this way with a “hey” that way with a “Judy.” He shook his head at the part about being “sad,” and nodded when the song got to “better, better, better.” The two suns were straight overhead, red touching blue, and the heat made sweat roll down Denny's face. In the near distance, a shuttle shot upward with a rumble that shook the ground, crackling yellow lightning at its tail. There was a smell of ozone, like the air before a storm. Denny kept his head back and watched the shuttle all through the long “nah, nah, nah” part of the song.

  When Denny lowered his head, he was very surprised to find that the old chug was gone. He looked down the line of blue dots, but did not see it moving toward the air taxis. He looked down the line of green dots, but there were only three cithians pulled in under their hard black shells as they waited for the ground transport. Denny thought the chug must have gone back inside the terminal, but the glass was tinted and he could not be sure.

  The old chug, it seemed, did not care much for Denny's dancing. Maybe Cousin Kettle was right.

  2

  At first Denny thought the chug had left no payment, but when he looked more closely, there was something new in his box. It wasn't a fat red chip, or even a slender green chip. It was a small cube, scarcely bigger than the end of Denny's thumb. Sitting in the box the cube appeared to be a pale, dusty purple, but when Denny picked it up between his thumb and first finger, little sheets of other colors ran across the sides. He had never seen anything quite like it before. It might only be a piece of trash, something the chug had left behind to mark its dislike for Denny's dance. Or maybe it was some other kind of scrip, some kind they only used on...wherever chugs came from. Whatever it was, Poppa Jam or Auntie Talla might be willing to trade for it if they knew where the little cube could be sold.

  No shuttles had landed since the old chug appeared, and the long dance under the paired suns had Denny in no mood to wait for the next. Not as many shuttles seemed to come to Jukal Plex these days. Once they fell like a shower, spilling all the different kinds of people. But for cycles they had been spaced farther and farther apart. Denny frowned toward the cool glass doors of the terminal. He was thirsty. There was water at the troughs and fountains inside the port, but humans were not always welcome there. Denny might have stolen a quick swallow, or bought something from a dispenser, but some of the workers at the port made a fuss if they saw him inside and Kettle would probably give him a bad look.

  Denny picked up his box, and gave a little smile at the sound of the chips clicking together. There was enough there that Denny could buy his way back to the quarter on the ground transport, and still have enough to trade Poppa Jam for a picture book or sweetpop. That was good, because otherwise Denny would have to sit outside the port and wait for the free transport that carried Kettle and the rest of the crew back to the city. Waiting for Kettle would mean sitting in the heat for another hour, which wouldn't be so bad, except Kettle would be angry to see him and make Denny beg for a ride. Denny didn't mind begging the visitors at the port so much. He did not like begging his cousin.

  Denny tucked his box of credits under one arm and hurried down the green dot path toward the ground transport. When he got to the platform and saw that the cithians were still waiting for pods, he wanted to do another dance. A frustration dance. Denny wouldn't be able to ride on the next transport, because humans weren't supposed to ride in the same pod as cithians. It wasn't respectful. You could ride in the same pod as dasiks, if there were any dasiks and if the dasiks didn’t press the button that simply said “No,” but it was best to wait until you found an empty pod.

  When the next transport showed up, Denny stood back and watched the cithians climb on. One of them was ranked high enough that its glossy black shell rose up past the top of its bowed head and the edge on either side had been carved with grooves indicating some kind of important title. Denny squinted at the little grooves, but he didn’t know all the cithian ranks. He didn’t know this one. The weight of the tall shell made the cithian's movements slow and ponderous. The hard tips of its four rear limbs clacked sharply as it tipped from left to right and back again. It took a pod by itself. The other two cithians shuffled into the second pod, and as they did one of them turned round and looked at Denny standing in the doorway. Right away the blunt knobs of its clangers began to rasp out a warning on the edge of its shell.

  Denny lowered his head and stepped back. Humans were supposed to be grateful to the cithians. For saving them, and giving them a place to live, and stuff. Sometimes that was hard.

  3

  Passday

  On Passday, Denny got to eat. There was food on other days—orangey blocks of chez and goopey brown nutter that came in gray boxes from the Human Assistance Authority. Denny stood in the line most mornings and waited like everyone else to get his boxes from cithians who wore tight plastek gloves over their forelimbs and hard plastek masks over their faces. Sometimes there were also boxes of dry little crackers. Sometimes there was powdermilk mix for drinking. But most of the time there was just chez and nutter, nutter and chez.

  Except on Passday. On Passday, Auntie Talla did Restaurant.

  Auntie Talla had a place on the lower floor of an old compartment building. It had been the gather room of the building back when there were enough humans in Jukal to keep all the little rooms packed, but now it was a nothing room. Just another of those places that once had people, then didn't.

  Talla and Cousin Sirah had dragged in a bunch of mismatched tables and chairs that came from empty compartments and closed stores. They had made shelves of stacked boxes, and a bar from a length of plastek with scorch marks along one end. Plates and cups and spoons had come from everywhere, no two alike.

  It had been Denny's father who helped Talla build a stove out of sheet metal from a scrapped transport. They beat the metal into shape, with a firebox down below and the middle domed up like the shell on a cithians' back. Denny had been there, watching, waiting for a taste of the first meal off the new stove. He still remembered how Talla had traded with a klickik—old human junk in exchange for vegetables and spices—and how the stove had been covered deep in a layer of pop peppers mixed with loops of brown mummion and snapping strips of meat. The whole thing had smelled so good that Denny couldn't help dancing from one foot to the other while he waited for the food to finish.

  His father had put a hand on Denny's shoulder and grinned down at him. “Hold your horses,” he said. “We can't eat until everyone gets here.”

  That was the last thing Denny's father said before the blue door at the other side of the long room swung open and a handful of cithians came in, their shells rasping against the sides of the human-sized door. Behind them had come a dozen of the dasik guards. Half the humans in Jukal had been sent away on consignment that night, including Denny's father. Denny never had learned what horses were, or why he should hold them. No one who was left seemed to know.

  Later, when all the humans had been hurried away and the cithians had squeezed back out through the same door they had entered, Talla had said they should eat all the food that had been cooked so it didn't go to waste. It was the only time Denny could remember having more food than he could eat. It was the only time he could remember not being hungry.

  That had been two years ago. Since that night, Restaurant had been a lot less crowded. A lot less noisy. A lot less happy.

  4

  When Denny came through the door for Restaurant, there were only four other humans there. Auntie Talla was brushing oil across the big stove. Denny could see that there were plates of vegetables already chopped and waiting for their turn on the heat. There was some kind of meat, too. Something that Tall
a had bought at the market. Usually the meat came from the klickiks, in pinkish gray strips peeled off something that lived far away. Sometimes the meat was something sold by the cithians. Something that, before it was pried from its shell, looked a lot like a bigger version of the little red scuttles that prowled under boxes and in the shut-ups of Denny’s compartment. Denny didn't look too closely. Usually it was better not to look at the meat until after it had been cooked.

  Auntie Talla glanced up long enough to nod at Denny when he came in, but she quickly turned her attention back to her stove. She swiped at the oil as it dripped down the sides of the domed metal, pushing it back to the top with a practiced twist of her curved stick even as the oil sizzled, popped, and took on a brownish color. As soon as the oil was pushed up the metal dome of the stove, it started to ooze back down. There were little white scars all along the backs of Talla's fingers were the oil had burned her, but with fast work she could make just a spoonful of the stuff last out a meal.

  Even if the oil had allowed her more time, Denny doubted Talla would have given him a greeting. She seldom said more than a few words in an evening these days and Denny could not remember the last time she had joked, or laughed, or even smiled. People had called Talla an Auntie for years, though she was barely nineteen and never anyone's mother. It was just that she was so serious, and she had watched over Cousin Sirah ever since Sirah's parents were consigned five years earlier. Young as she was, there were already lines of worry pressed into Talla's thin face, and in the last weeks Denny had noticed strands of white mingling with her dark hair.

  Once this would have been about the time when everyone got together and did a jilly-ho for Talla to welcome her into the ranks of adults. There would have been a ceremony, and music, and dancing, and talk about who Talla might marry–Kettle, if it happened now, it would have to be Cousin Kettle or Cousin Haw and Denny could not imagine Auntie Talla with Haw—and more talk about when she might have children. But all that would have to wait until Talla was consigned to somewhere else. There just weren't enough people left in Jukal Plex for a proper ceremony. It didn’t seem fair that Talla was treated like an Auntie, when she never got a jilly-ho.