Walter hissed to himself. He turned to his mother’s bed, ready to deal with what he’d been putting off emotionally and mechanically for so many years, when he noticed he wasn’t the only thing hissing. There was a whir of air coming from the breathing unit. A fan had begun spinning, and then a motor chugged to life. A worn belt squeaked over a poorly balanced flywheel. Walter turned to the screen, his heart thumping, and saw green phosphorous text burst across the display:
RESUME? YES/NO_
Walter hurriedly jabbed the “Y” and hit enter. The tubes leading away from the machine lurched and kicked as fortified air surged through them once more. He spun around to his mom, following the wires and tubes, and saw her arms falling to her bed and away from the fogged mask over her mouth. Walter let out a cry of relief, of sorrow and frustration and anger. He sat on the edge of the bed and held his mother’s thin, feeble hand.
“It’s okay,” he told her. “Everything’s fine.”
As Walter consoled his mother, he looked from the blue veiny web beneath her silvery skin to the machine that had nearly let her down. He watched it chug and whir dutifully, and pictured himself ripping the flanking thing to pieces.
Once his mother was settled, and Walter had regained some semblance of trust in the machines keeping her alive, he stole out through the back door to get some air. The night was already muggy with the looming rains—it had the foul odor of mildew Walter had come to associate with poor pickings. What little tourism Palan got from nearby planets came in a rush right after the rains. Locals on Palan called the foreign invasion “second floods,” and the great mounds of alley trash and filth deposited like seeds by these off-worlders would soon grow until they threatened to clog the streets in their eventual tumble toward the ocean.
For most Junior Pirates-in-Training, the humid stench was a sign to lay low and watch for the rains. For Walter, it was a chance to have the city to himself, just him and the locals with their empty pockets and heads full of rumors. It wasn’t that Walter had a dislike for money, nothing could be further from the truth, it was just that he had a powerful lust for anything valuable. And information could be a wondrous commodity.
Walter exited out of his mother’s alley by the Regal Hotel. He glanced toward the lobby to see if the homeless and low-liers had begun moving in, but there was just the normal amount of stragglers milling about in the flickering fluorescent lights. For him, the Regal Lobby was the ultimate barometer for the weather. You could listen to several dozen predictors and prognosticators to try and time the next rain, or you could look to the Regal for a grand average of all those resources. It was a curious thing, a mob. They tended to heighten aggression, which made them look stupid, but they could also be more accurate than a lone expert, their individual ignorance somehow cancelling each other out.
Walter watched one of the Lobby’s occupants stumble out into the street and nearly fall headfirst into the wide gutter. He shook his head at the thought of so many idiots providing him with reliable information.
He looked the other way down the street and considered heading toward his Uncle’s hideout, Hommul clan’s inglorious basement headquarters. If everyone was asleep, he could do some snooping, or get started on the programming assignment he should’ve completed a month ago. That’s what he would do: get cracking on his finals hack.
First, though, he decided he should go by the market to see if any of the booths had been left untended. He figured it wouldn’t hurt to put off the programming another few hours. He turned toward the spaceport, padding softly past the sleeping cabbies in front of the Regal lest any of them wake and demand what fares he owed.
Walter’s jaunt to the market played out like a pirate training session of sorts, complete with arbitrary and false-serious rules: The sporadic cones of light shining from overhead bulbs were to be avoided at all cost; loose pavement and noisy rubble needed to be spotted ahead of time, lest he be heard by any others roaming the night. Walter practiced these things as if his mother were watching him, the looming specter of her disapproval forcing him to hone the trademark abilities of a Palan pirate. No book reading for him, no sir. Not when anyone was around, anyway. It was hacking until you slept in a haze of code. It was picking the dozen locks on the front door while she watched from her bed, and doing it until he could make it slick as a key. It was going on raids, and smash-and- grabs, and in-and-outs, and bang-your-deads with his uncles. It was whatever it took to keep her alive and happy. Walter had become just one more machine chugging and hissing and propping up her sickness, delaying the inevitable.
He wouldn’t have minded the career he’d been born into, of course, but if only he’d been born into it someplace else! Anywhere but Palan, that word of filth built on a bedrock of lies and peopled by a race who had evolved the ability to smell a fib. What did that say about the last few million years of their biological development? Nothing good, that’s what.
For a long time, Walter had complained about the irony of his people’s heightened olfactory sense and the malodorous nature of their planet. Then, one day, it had dawned on him with the suddenness of the floods: the stench they made with their garbage was no accident. It was a blanket, like the shroud of darkness he stole through toward the market. It was fostered by the collective unconsciousness of so many habitual liars, all terrified of anyone sniffing what they were thinking. The putrid stench that drove everyone else away? It was the smell of Palan guilt hiding under a fog of rot.
And Walter hated it. He hated the idea of living out his life on the planet’s only natural continent. To him, the butte of bedrock rising out of Palan’s oceans was no cleaner than the massive rafts of detritus that drifted to and fro on the water’s rough surface. If it was up to him, he would use his wits in other ways. He would’ve stayed in school, kept acing his tests, won a minority scholarship to a Terran world, a world where he could reek of guilt and nobody would ever smell it. A world so ripe with easy pickings, he could steal without even knowing he was doing it.
His mother would kill him for even considering such a scheme. The worst beating he’d ever gotten from her was after she’d found his stash of books in the ceiling tiles. Of course, the lying about them had contributed to the blows, but she was plenty angry to start with.
“Out to enrich just yourself, are you?” his mother had asked him. “Don’t care about the clan your father made, is that it? Ready to run off and live like a Human boy, pink and stupid?”
“I was gonna sell them,” Walter had said—a lie far too ripe for a day so soon after the floods.
Years later, Walter had to grind his teeth as he recalled what had followed. The memory made the moist Palan air adhere to his skin, beading up and dripping through his clothes. Walter wiped his forehead and smeared his palms on the seat of his pants.
“Floods take me,” he murmured to himself. “Floods take me the flank out of here.”
Walter skipped over the last gutter and entered the markets. He quickly scanned the quiet booths and sparse crowds. There weren’t any shuttles standing upright beyond the collection of tents, no passengers coming or going, so the nighttime trading appeared to be as slow as it got. On the surface, at least.
He knew from accompanying his uncle to other, more clandestine deals, that this was a busy time for lucrative transactions. Walter cared little for such Senior Pirate scheming. Who was in charge which month meant little to him and impacted his life almost none. His own clan was too small for it to matter which table the crumbs tumbled from, if they even tumbled at all.
Weaving his way through the center of the market, Walter scanned the shabbier tents for easy pickings. Each one had a guard posted out front, usually a family member from the tent’s clan, but like Walter, all boys couldn’t be expected to care for the family business. He was looking for someone shirking their duty, when he felt a bad presence nearby—a faint whiff of ill intent drifting up from behind.
Walter scooted over to get behind a bald Palan walking slowly in the same direction as he. Surreptitiously, he glanced up at the back of the man’s silvery head and scanned the fishbowled reflection of the crowd behind him.
There! A figure slid over in Walter’s wake and ducked behind another late-night shopper. Walter matched pace with the bald man while he scanned the crowd ahead of him. He needed someone fat. Why weren’t there more fat people on Palan?
Ah, a man in a trench coat, the next best thing. Walter took a last glance in the silvery dome ahead of him, then slid around the bald gentleman. He used him for cover as he angled for the guy in the trench coat heading the opposite direction. As soon as he passed the second man, he whipped around and fell into his shadow, heading back the way he’d come. He hugged the Palan’s elbow, swinging wide as whoever was tailing him strolled past behind their own escort.
