Date Point: 14y2d AV
BGEV-11 Misfit, Armstrong Station, Cimbrean System
Xiù Chang
She dreams of being hated.
She’s in a warehouse, or something. An industrial, cold building full of little rooms, delineated by cheap, dirty, coarse chipboard walls. Each room has, little tables, little whiteboards, little chairs…and somebody she cares about, waiting to finally confess their hatred.
It’s not an angry or shouty kind of hatred, but it’s relentless. All her friends, her family, her loved ones, line up to calmly, sadly and unflinchingly tell her how disappointed they are, how much they dislike her. She knows it’s a dream, but she’s powerless to stop the catalogue of criticism mercilessly playing out behind her eyes.
She tries to argue back, but her own guilt grinds her down. She did run away, after all. From Gao, from her Sisters, from her Clan. From her family, from Earth, from her ambitions…
The worst room has Allison in it. Her expression is stony and cold, her eyes sad. She says nothing, just shakes her head, turns her face away.
The room is an airlock. Xiù bangs on the glass, pleads for forgiveness but none comes. Just the hiss of the door opening. She turns, the blast of air lifts her and throws her into the void—
Xiù woke with a gasp.
The real Allison was peacefully asleep just a few inches away and Xiù took a moment to examine her face and fix it in her mind, remembering the little solid minutiae that were the hallmark of the real world. The real Allison had a pair of small brown moles in front of her right ear, some light acne scarring on her jaw and forehead, and a faint splash of melasma on her cheekbones and nose. There were tiny dimpled spots in her ears, lower lip and left nostril where some old piercings had healed, and she’d never plucked her eyebrows in her life.
She was gorgeous.
And apparently she was psychic, because after only a few seconds of being scrutinized she sleep-scowled, grunted, then blinked her eyes open. It took her a few seconds to focus on Xiù’s face, but when she did she smiled faintly and raised a hand to excavate the sleep grit out of one corner of her eye.
“…Hey.”
That little smile had been exactly what Xiù needed to see. “Hey,” she replied, with forced lightness.
Allison wasn’t fooled. She stretched a little more then settled back down. “…You okay?”
Xiù shook her head. “Bad dream.”
Allison made a soft, sympathetic sound and scooted closer to cuddle her. “Amazed I didn’t have one myself,” she confessed, rubbing Xiù’s back. “How bad?”
“…You hated me.”
“Owch.”
“Yeah.” An alarming spike of insecurity shot through Xiù’s head and she pulled back from the hug to look Allison in the eye. “You don’t hate me, right?”
“No!” Allison even laughed, which was a sound Xiù hadn’t heard in days. “No, dummy. I definitely don’t hate you.”
Xiù relaxed and buried her head in Allison’s chest. “…Sorry.”
Allison laughed again, more softly this time, and kissed her hair. “Dummy,” she repeated fondly, then scooted away and threw the blankets off.
“We don’t need to get up yet…” Xiù pointed out. The wall clock said 05:30, ship time. Heaven only knew what time it was on Cimbrean or Gao.
“Yeah, but I gotta pee.”
“Oh.”
Figuring that neither of them were going to sleep again anyway, Xiù rolled out of bed herself. While Allison used the bathroom and shower she folded the blankets and sheets, then packed the bed back down into couch mode before stowing it away in the wall. She stretched upward to the ceiling, bent down to touch her toes, twisted her back from side to side and took a few meditative breaths to clear her head.
“Coffee?” she called.
“Love you!” came the reply. Xiù took that for a yes, and two steaming cups of coffee were waiting on the counter when Allison emerged from the shower while scrubbing her hair dry. The absence of the usual cloud of steam suggested a cold shower this morning.
She kissed Xiù on the cheek as she grabbed her cup, sniffed appreciatively at the scrambled eggs sizzling in the pan, and ambled across the room to grab a tablet and check their messages.
Seconds later she gasped. “Babe? Babe!”
Xiù’s heart leapt into her mouth. She abandoned the eggs and dashed to Allison’s side. “What? What happened?!”
“Read!” Allison thrust the tablet into her hands.
F 330142Z-CIM SEP FM DUCKTAPE/[email protected]// TO MISFIT/[email protected]// INFO STAINLESS/[email protected]// T O P S E C R E T SAR-BROKEN-STATUE DEEP-RELIC SUBJ/(U) STATUS UPDATE-AKYAWENTUO// ► (C//SAR-BS) Situation now resolved. BIG HOTEL presence nullified, planet now believed to be secure. PLAYBOY and others are well. ► ► (TS//SAR-BS-DR) To properly secure the system, we require a FOOTBALL be deployed to the Akyawentuo L2 stellar-planetary lagrange point. Your mission on return will be to effect this deployment under Ten’Gewek witness. Please record the moment for future posterity and make certain the People understand the ramifications. A combined briefing from the Department of State and the Foreign Office is included. As you are the extant experts on Ten’Gewek language and culture, you should translate as appropriate. ► ► (U//FOUO) As this is an opportunity for interspecies diplomacy, we are preparing a courtesy package with food, educational material, and other such amenities as suggested by Professor Hurt. See enclosed list and amend as appropriate. ► ► (U//FOUO) This mission has been coordinated with Byron Group and your services contracted in accordance with the FAR and the terms of our Agreement. See riders, attached. ► ► (U) Further questions can be directed to my office or to me directly, if the need is urgent. You are authorized prep time and funding for this mission immediately, to depart no more than 72-hours from the time of this message. Further instructions to follow shortly. Pure relief shot straight down Xiù’s back and knocked the knees out from under her just from reading the first paragraph. She didn’t really notice the way she sank to the ground as she read the rest, nor really absorbed anything else about the message on the first readthrough—All the important content was neatly contained in the five words of the third sentence.
“Christ,” Allison leaned against the wall. “All that stress and…everything, and it’s over like that.”
“I’m not complaining. I’m really not complaining!” Xiù told her. She read the message again, drinking it in.
“I wonder what swung it, though,” Allison said. “One minute it’s like a flat ‘no’ and the next out of the blue everything we asked for just…what the fuck happened?”
Xiù nodded, but let out a huge sigh that seemed to blow all the stress of the last few days out with it, and stood up again. “Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth?” she suggested.
She handed the tablet back, and returned to the eggs, which she hastily took off the heat and stirred up a bit—they’d been on the brink of burning. Allison nodded, read the message again, then put the tablet down and reached up to deploy their table from its roost in the ceiling. She looked every inch just as relieved as Xiù felt
“Yeah,” she agreed. “I’m just glad that everyone’s alright…”
Date Point: 14y3d AV
Planet Akyawentuo, Unclaimed Space, Near 3Kpc Arm
Julian Etsicitty
Vemet met his final rest in a sky burial.
Julian wasn’t quite prepared for the finality of the thing. He’d thought they’d probably light a funeral pyre, maybe leave Vemet’s body exposed somewhere out of the way…but that wasn’t at all how Ten’Gewek paid respects to their dead.
For them, it was all about balance. Balance demanded a man Give the last of himself to the gods, and the best way to do that was in a high place where all could see. The top of a mountain, for instance.
“You come,” Yan had said. “Vemet would want.”
It was the Given-Man’s duty to transport the body up the mountain, on a litter bedded with young Ketta foliage. Vemet’s face had been painted with white and red clay, a wide leather strip had been tied over his eyes like a blindfold, and two more gently bound his ankles and wrists, arranging his body into a dignified posture with his hands folded across his chest and his tail coiled between his feet.
It wasn’t a difficult hike, for Julian. The People were perfectly mobile on the ground, but they were far more comfortable in the trees and a human’s longer and straighter legs made easy work of terrain that they found exhausting.
Rather than show that off however, Julian walked along with Vemik and the Singer, whose young new apprentice Dancer—so new that she hadn’t yet properly given her name to the gods, according to Vemik—was trailing behind carrying several large and awkward bags, baskets and pots. Nobody seemed to be offering to help her and she didn’t seem to expect help, so Julian left well enough. Presumably it was all part of the magic of becoming a Dancer.
Despite the fact that the climb was obviously taxing for Ten’gewek, they shared a lively conversation and stories about Vemet: enduring moments, embarrassing ones, or simply poignant memories. Julian’s contribution was the anecdote where Vemet had almost fallen out of his tree the first time he heard Julian’s rifle fire, on a hunt.
“He tried to play it off like he was hanging by his tail on purpose, too. Didn’t fool me.”
[“He was crafty like that!”] Vemik had settled into his native tongue for this, and Julian followed suit.
[“He liked to sneak up on me, too.”] Julian chuckled at the memory. Ten’gewek were remarkably stealthy in the trees, but couldn’t stack up to some of Nightmare’s critters. Vemet had taken Julian’s practiced vigilance as a challenge and an opportunity to practice.
Vemik trilled, [“Maybe you’re easy prey, Jooyun!”]
[“Nah. He only got me sometimes. He was a better wrestler than you, though.”]
[“Old men know all the tricks.”] Yan nodded sagely at that, just as they reached the summit. The mood was suddenly much more solemn. He gestured to Vemik, who helped him lift the litter onto a prominent flat rock. There were faded red and white markings on the rock, which the Dancer skipped around and touched up with fresh paint.
That done, the villagers formed two circles around the body. The smaller inner circle was his closest friends and relatives—Yan, Vemik, a couple of Vemet’s nephews and cousins—and the outer one was for all the other men and women of the village, plus Julian.
The Singer stood by the body, looking toward the sun. She raised her hands, spread wide, and sang.
Julian had heard her plenty of times. It was a kind of punctuation to Ten’Gewek daily life. There was the song for the dawn, the song for high noon, the song for sunset. There was a song for food, a song for a successful hunt, a song for children and for healing. There were songs for purely spiritual moments, when the People were just being people, gamely facing down a harsh universe with a knife in one hand and spirit straightening their backs.
He’d never heard the song for the dead before. She sung it from her belly, supporting and lifting it so that it sounded strong even unaccompanied on a windswept hillside save for the thump and rattle of her singing-stick and the clattering of her Dancer’s bead jewelry and the heartbeat rhythm of her drum.
He listened intently to the words—he wanted to remember them.
[“Gods of the sun, the fire and sky! Gods of the earth, gods of the bones of the world! We Give you our brother Vemet, who tapped on stone! You Gave his life to us and he lived as one of the People, but now his life is in balance! What he Took from this land, he Gave to his tribe, and now he can Give no more! Gods of the rain and wind, gods of the tree and beast, carry his spirit and accept his body! Care for him and love him as we loved him, comfort and strengthen us as we prepare for the days without him! Smile on him, and on us all until the day we meet again and the world is in balance.”]
She lowered her hands, then bent forward to plant a kiss on Vemet’s forehead. With that last gesture, she backed away from the body and took her place in the outer circle.
Yan led the inner circle in stepping forward, and rested his hand lightly on his friend’s upper arm.
[“Vemet Stone-Tapper, you were my good friend, and you never gave me bad counsel. I ask the gods for your wisdom,”] he said.
Vemik laid his hand on Vemet’s hands. [“Vemet Stone-Tapper, you were my father and you always lifted my spirits with your words. I ask the gods for your laughter,”] he added.
The other three members of the inner circle made similar requests, honoring Vemet’s skill as a hunter, his bravery, and—a request that sent a trill of laughter around all the mourners—his success with women.
Yan looked around to ensure that the last request had been made, then bowed his head sadly.
[“And now…we Give you to the gods, Vemet. We love you.”]
He closed his hands around Vemet’s shoulder joint, sighed deeply, and—
He pulled the arm clean off Vemet’s body as easily as Julian might snap a stick, then broke it apart at the elbow with just as much ease. Vemik flinched at the sickening cracks but nodded solemnly when Yan handed him the grisly pieces. He laid them down reverently, reached for his good steel knife and set about flaying them to the bone.
Julian stood there, stunned and disturbed right down to his gut and fighting back a sudden nauseated surge that tried to claw its way up his gullet.
[“We Give him to the sky.”]
Right. Yes. Disassembling the body. It was a necessary part of any sky burial, so that the body could re-enter the food chain quickly and cleanly rather than decomposing…but in all the beautiful sadness, Julian had forgotten. He hadn’t been mentally prepared to see a man he’d liked and respected being literally…
…Well, butchered. Lovingly. By his own son.
Yan moved on, breaking Vemet apart and handing the pieces off to different mourners. Mercifully, the mourners didn’t ask Julian to join in; Ten’Gewek really weren’t dumb, and they knew perfectly well that Sky-People had their own ways, so none of them objected when Julian bowed his head and tried not to listen too closely.
Yan made very quick work of it, thankfully. Within minutes Vemet had been more or less completely pulled apart, his bones snapped and the marrow exposed, his skull split open, and his flesh neatly placed on the bare rock where the carrion birds and insects would pick him clean in a matter of hours. The weather would do the rest, and presumably the mourners would come back to do something with the clean bones in time. The Singer sung another deep, powerful song to the gods while the Dancer scattered a powder about the site.
The whole thing was…traumatic, but strangely healing, in that it left Julian feeling sickeningly connected to his own mortality. It was a literally visceral reminder that today he was alive but one day he wouldn’t be, and that they were all just animals in the end. Like a lot of things about Ten’Gewek life it was unflinching in the face of reality and not for the squeamish…but all the more potent as a result.
The men scrubbed their hands and arms with finely powdered ashes or something from one of the Dancer’s larger pots once they were done, until their dark grayish-brown skin was almost chalk white.
Yan offered the pot to Julian. “Bones of men-before,” he said in English. “We remember.”
Julian nodded, took a deep breath, then imitated what he’d seen them do. The fine, soft powder stuck to him like flour and caked in his arm hair. Yan grunted, nodded, and then spread some in two lines on Julian’s face as well, a T shape across the forehead and down between his eyes.
[“We only do this for men of our People,”] he added, reverting to his native language, [“but…Vemet would have wanted this, too.”]
[“Then I will honor him,”] Julian promised. Yan gave him a knowing half-smile.
[“It’s not your way, I know,”] he said. [“How do you honor your dead?”]
[“Different tribes have different ways.”] Julian told him. [“Some do it like this. Others burn their dead into ash. Sometimes, on a great fire we call a] pyre. [Others bury in something called a] grave…” He thought for a second, then decided to speak his mind. [“…Mine has some words I think are appropriate.”]
[“Then say them.”] Yan waved a hand.
Julian wasn’t any kind of a priest, and he wasn’t exactly devout in any case. But still, he knew the words from his youth and they felt…right, somehow.
He spoke in English. “We commend Vemet Stone-Tapper to Almighty God; and we commit his body to the ground. Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust…amen.”
Yan nodded approvingly, and returned his attention to the burial. The birds were circling already. “…Good words,” he said, also in English.
[“…This is actually the first funeral I’ve ever been to,”] Julian confessed.
[“May it be many seasons until the next.”]
[“…Thank you. What happens now?”]
Yan shrugged. [“You take as long as you want. Think. Say something…sing, if you want. When you are ready, you walk away. It takes as long as it takes, and there is no shame if you leave first.”]
He clapped Julian on the shoulder, leaving a powdery handprint, and left him to his thoughts.
Julian…hovered. He honestly had no idea what to think, or say. And as for a song…nothing came to mind. In the end he just closed his eyes and let the world soak in through his skin, his nose and his ears. The biggest presence was the wind: its fresh clean mountain scent, its rumble as it plucked at his tattered shorts, and its silky coolness down his arms and across his face.
The last day or two dropped away like a bad dream, and when he opened his eyes he found himself thinking about the future again, rather than just living to see the next minute. It felt like waking up.
He turned, and walked away. He wasn’t the first.
Date Point: 14y3d AV
Planet Akyawentuo, Unclaimed Space, Near 3Kpc Arm
Professor Daniel Hurt
“Daniel? You look like you’re a mile away.”
Daniel jumped slightly, jolted back into the here and now. He did a little menta l filing, figuratively bookmarking his thoughts so that he’d remember where he left off, then cleared his throat and stood up.
Julian looked…well, he looked back. Behind the dusting of white ash on his arms and face his expression had regained its usual affable quality, rather than the knife-sharp terrifying lethality of a killer in pure survival mode.
“Good service?” Daniel asked him politely.
Julian considered the powder on his skin for a moment. “…Not for the faint-hearted,” he said, “But I’m glad I attended. It was…good for the soul.”
“Say no more. I think I’m too faint-hearted to know the details,” Daniel told him. He gestured down the slope, and they strolled back toward the village together. “I’ve been doing some soul-searching of my own.”
“Yeah?”
“Well…we won. Right? No more Abrogators?”
Julian nodded. “That’s what JETS and the Air Force say.”
“It’s a pyrrhic victory though,” Daniel said. “All our high-minded ambitions about cultural conservation are…well, they’re just not feasible any longer.”
Julian paused, and when Daniel turned back to look up at him he was resting his weight on one leg and had crossed his arms over his chest. He was a lot more intimidating in that posture than he seemed to realize, especially while covered in tribal markings.
His words were gentle, though. “…Yeah. I’ve been worrying about that too.”
“I was thinking about different approaches we could take. I think…the Ten’Gewek understand the threat we pose to them now, but I think they know how to play with fire and not get burned. We succeeded there, at least.”
Julian looked like he wanted to say something but he held his peace. His lips pursed thoughtfully for a second, and Daniel decided to prompt him.
“Say it, please.”
“…What do you know of my people?”
“Which ones?”
“Any of them.”
“I confess, I never studied the Dutch.”
Julian’s solemn expression split into an involuntary smile and he chuckled softly, which was a thoroughly welcome sound after the last few grim days. “They like cheese, I hear.”
“Who doesn’t?”
“Navajo didn’t,” Julian pointed out. “Severe lactose intolerance. Neither did the Ojibwe, but they adapted. The French, of course…”
“Of course.”
“But that’s the funny part. I’m half native, right? I grew up with my grandfather, knew people who were active in, uh, movements. I’ve been to Pow-Wows, I make a mean frybread…” Julian gestured to his upper arm, indicating his natural skin tone where he wasn’t covered in white dust. “But sometimes the only thing that maybe gives me away is black hair and a good tan. If I’ve got any kinda stubble at all I’m basically a white fella…and I happen to love cheese.”
Daniel gave him a solemn look up and down. He wasn’t wrong—If they ever came to make a movie about the Misfit crew, the hunt for Julian’s actor would most likely involve wading through a lot of well-tanned European hardbodies. The hard part would be finding a guy who could get the attitude right, rather than a physical match.
“You’re…well-integrated,” he ventured.
“I’m what they call an ‘Apple’,” Julian said bitterly. “Red on the outside…”
“…Right.” Daniel shook his head.
“Xiù got called a ‘banana’, too. It’s…whatever.” Julian shrugged. “I dunno about integration, ‘cuz if you take the Ojibwe their myth is…well, when the missionaries and the voyageurs came along, converting them to Catholicism didn’t take much convincing. They go together, almost eerily well. In a generation the Metis people had their own language, and two generations after that they were already dying out. Then there were the Indian boarding schools, the Dawes Act, all sorts of sad stuff…”
Daniel had spent enough time around rambling academics to recognize a man who liked to think up his hypothesis on the fly while he was in the process of describing it. He’d long since mastered the art of poking them in the right direction with a few simple words.
“But the thing is—” he prompted.
“…But the thing is, we’re still here.” Julian said. “The Navajo? Well…there’s a reason my grandpa moved to Minnesota. There was nothing for him in Arizona. At all. Some tribes were wiped out, others were warlike…on and on. But the Ojibwe? We’re still here.”
“Are you, though?” Daniel asked. “Or are you just another subset of white people nowadays?”
“Well…if you asked me fifteen years ago if I would settle down on the rez and marry a nice indian maiden like grandpa wanted? I’d have laughed and said no, except that would’ve made grandpa sad. So…what does that make me?”
“Somebody who doesn’t really give a crap about your own ethnicity, perhaps?” Daniel suggested.
Julian shook his head. “Nah. It’s…I don’t think of myself as indian. Never really did, ‘cuz firstly, which tribe? Ojibwe and Navajo aren’t anything alike.” He paced around a bit, slightly agitated. “And secondly…we’re not supposed to talk about it. But a lot of the tribes are broken. Like, fundamentally. They’re basically under the BIA’s thumb and that…yeah. Sorry.”
“Why?”
Julian shrugged hugely. “I dunno. I got ideas but they ain’t very nice.”
“If Ten’Gewek sky burials are anything like Tibetan ones, I know what you just watched. So, to Hell with nice. Today isn’t a day for nice. In fact, this is shaping up to be a bad decade for nice in general.”
“…Yeah. I’ve been thinkin’ on that, too.”
Daniel could tell there was a complicated knot of inter-related thoughts playing themselves out in Julian’s head. He was really quite intelligent, but introspection and eloquence weren’t his strongest skills…Not that he’d ever really had the chance to develop them. He needed a teacher.
“Okay. Have a seat, big guy. Tell me what’s really gnawing at you.” He gestured to a nearby rock.
Julian looked at it, then shrugged again and sat down.“…This is gonna sound totally unrelated to all the other stuff,” he said, “but…kids.”
“Ah. One of the big ones,” Daniel said sympathetically and sat down next to him.
“Thing is, I’m pushin’ thirty. Xiù an’ Al aren’t far behind me. And I’ve got this mission, and for the life of me I can’t see that I can do all the things I need to do all at once.”
“Oh?”
“Well, okay. I think the People need me. Well, no. I think they need someone like me, and I’m not sure there are many people who fit the bill.”
Daniel nodded. “Big, physical, and you come from a sympathetic place.”
“Right! Exactly that.”
“So make it simple and just say that they need you, if for no other reason than another Julian isn’t likely to show up and even if he does he won’t share your history with them.”
“…Right.” Ah, Minnesota Nice. Nothing seemed to beat it out of anyone.
“Seriously,” Daniel pressed him. “The People need you. Own it.”
“Okay. Right. They need me. But, here’s the thing. What does that mean? It means I gotta live here with them, right? I gotta do People-stuff with them. That means I gotta be People. I’ve gotta probably do their manhood thing, I gotta hunt and survey…and I gotta train my ass off, too. Books and weights, probably a lot of both.”
“That’s a big commitment,” Dan agreed, understatedly.
Julian tucked some hair back behind his ear, unheeding of the powdery gray smudge he left in it. “And if the girls stay here with me, then that puts kids out of the picture because gravity plays fuckin’ hell with pregnancy…”
“Low gravity, for sure. The jury is still out on high gravity, but…”
“Not taking the chance.”
“Nor should you!”
“And then there’s the Byron Group who might just tell us to get out of here and start making them money again…”
Daniel nodded. “But you’d feel like you were abandoning the People if you do either of those things.”
“Yeah. But if I quit the exploration I’d also feel like I was abandoning humanity.”
“Julian, I think on that point you can quit guilt-free,” Daniel smiled. “We aren’t exactly short on people fighting in our corner.”
“Even still…”
“No, I get it. So. Let’s think this through. What would it take for you to stay? I’ll be honest I very much want you here, because I’m a soft old man and I need someone like you as an ally.”
“We’d need…the girls and me, we’d need to be able to make a life here.”
“True, but you just jumped way ahead. Think more immediate first. What do you need to do?”
Julian rested his prosthetic foot on his opposite knee and thought about it for a long moment, tinkering with it as he did so. “Well…I need to be a man in their eyes.”
“Whose? The People’s?”
“The other twenty thousand Ten’Gewek I haven’t met yet. They see me, they just see a strange tall thin-skinned tailless little guy. These cavemonkey fellas are big on first impressions and what they all think of me right off the bat is weak.”
“You’re neither little nor weak, though,” Daniel reminded him.
“Nope, and this mission is why. But I’ll need to keep training as hard as I can so that I’ll eventually compare to their average man. That’s a lot of broscience…which hey, it’s fun! But…well. There’s more. They have rites. I know they involve drugs.”
Daniel rubbed his palms together thoughtfully. “So the metacontext here is that you’ve clearly thought hard about this and already made up your mind.”
“…Yeah. And what’s eating me is I don’t wanna do it. Or…I do, but I don’t wanna pay the price. After the last couple days, I…” Julian sighed. “I know what I need to do to keep their respect, and I know it’d basically involve throwing away…a lot. But if I don’t then I’m…I dunno. No better than the voyageurs. Or worse: They at least had no idea what they were doing.”
“But you do.”
“Yeah.”
They sat thoughtfully for quite some time. Occasionally, one of the mourners from up the mountain would traipse past them, headed back toward the village and lost in their own thoughts. It was a thoughtful day. Judging from the big fire that had been lit down in the village, the drumming, singing and the generally pregnant air of potential debauchery building up among the People, however, the night was going to be far less cerebral.
“So…” Daniel began, after turning his thoughts over in his head at some length. “The question is, what is our strategy for the People? Is the original plan dead? Do we have to be missionaries now? Are we…guides to a strange new future? Or are we maybe the sages on the mountain that they have to go through many trials just to seek our wisdom?”
Julian stared at him blankly for a moment, and then slowly a gentle, trollish grin spread across his face. “You…really do love the sound of your voice, don’t you?”
Daniel chuckled. “I’m an academic who spent years going on talk shows to promote my own books, Julian. If I could marry the sound of my voice we’d have eloped years ago.”
“I’ll take forest living and…hell, I guess meatslabbin’ any day over that.” Julian grinned for a moment but it quickly faded into a furrowed brow. “But…I dunno. I feel like no matter what I do, someone’s gettin’ fucked over.”
“Okay. So. Who’s the last person you’d ever fuck over?”
“Allison and Xiù,” Julian replied, immediately. There wasn’t a microsecond’s hesitation.
“Well then. Question answered.”
“…Is it?”
“Well, did you bother to ask them how they felt about all this?”
“I haven’t exactly had the chance!”
“Then it’s a question for another day.” Daniel stood up. “Right now what you should do, if you’ll let an old fart who loves the sound of his own voice convey some wisdom on your meathead skull—” He earned an amused snort for that. “—Is go to that big party that’s brewing up down there, pick a fight, get drunk, sing, throw your axe, whatever you do to have fun, and cross your bridges when you come to them.”
“…We do have that beer they sent over…”
“Then maybe risk a little cultural contamination and get Yan and Vemik rip roaring drunk.”
“…That’s surprising, coming from you.”
Daniel shrugged. “Maybe we need to stop worrying about slavishly maintaining something that can’t survive the future. We’re deathworlders, let’s damn well act like it. They’ll keep what they can, discard what might harm them and the rest…is cheese.”
Julian gave him a Look, of the kind that Daniel mentally inserted a capital letter onto. “…‘The rest is cheese’?” he asked, skeptically.
“Eh. It’s a good book title at least.” Daniel turned away down the hill and followed his nose toward the scent of roasting meat. “Come on.”
He listened carefully, and had counted to five when he heard Julian finally stand up and follow.