we take them over when they wander in, it’s not reciprocal,” I said. Vosth-Menley put his hand against the porthole; his silver fingers squished against the composite. I stepped back. “You know it all; who gets notified if an infested colonist tries to walk into the habitat?”
Her face screwed up. I guess that wasn’t on her exam.
“I’ll find out,” she said, turning on her heel. “Don’t create an interspecies incident while I’m gone.”
She flounced away.
I turned back to the porthole, where Vosth-Menley had smooshed his nose up against the composite as well. I knocked my helmet against the door.
“Leave,” I told him. Them. It.
He stared, dead eyes unblinking, then slouched away.
I didn’t sleep that night. My brain played old-Earth zombie flicks whenever I closed my eyes, staffed by silver monstrosities instead of rotting corpses. Endria thought I’d create an interspecies incident; I thought about how many people would be trapped without e-suits if a Vosth infestation broke out. How many people would be screaming and convulsing and then just staggering around with dead silver eyes, soft hands pressing into portholes, skin teeming with parasites ready to crawl into anyone they saw.
I talked to the governor on duty the next day, who confirmed that the colony would “strongly prefer” if the Vosth weren’t allowed to walk around in naked fleshsuits inside the habitat. She even sent out a public memo.
Three days later, Endria came to give me crap about it. The way she walked into my lab, she looked like someone took one of the governors, shrunk them, and reworked their face to fit that impish craze back in the ’20s. She even had a datapad, and a button-up tunic under her hygienic jacket. “I’m not going to enjoy this, am I?” I asked.
“I came to interview you about civil law and the Vosth,” she said. “It’s for a primary certification in government apprenticeship. I’m going to be a governor by the time I’m sixteen.”
I stared at her.
“It’s part of a civics certification, so I can make you answer,” she added.
Wonderful. “After these titrations,” I told her.
Endria went to one of the counters and boosted herself onto it, dropped her datapad beside her, and reached into a pocket to pull out something colorful and probably fragrant and nutrient-scarce. “That’s okay. We can make small talk while you’re working. I know titration isn’t demanding on the linguistic portions of your brain.”
Excepting the Vosth, there was nothing I hated more than people who thought they knew more about my work than I did.
“Sit quietly,” I said. “I’ll be with you shortly.”
To my surprise, she actually sat quietly.
To my annoyance, that lasted through a total of one titration and a half.
“I’m going to interview you about the sentence passed on Ken Menley in colony record zero-zero-zero-three- zero-four,” she said. “According to my research, you were the youngest person there, as well as the only person there to meet Menley again. You have a unique perspective on Vosth-human interactions. After the incident a few nights ago I thought it would be a good idea to focus my paper on them.”
“My perspective,” I started to say, but thought better of calling the Vosth names usually reserved for human excrement. They were shit, they were horrifying, they were waiting out there to crawl inside us, and if Endria was going to be a governor by age sixteen she’d probably have the authority to rehabilitate me by sixteen and a half. I didn’t want her thinking I needed my opinions revised. “I have no perspective. I don’t deal with them.”
Endria rolled the candy around in her mouth. “I don’t think any of my friends are friends with you,” she said. “Isn’t it weird to go past two degrees of separation?”
“Wouldn’t know,” I said. My primary degrees of separation were limited to my supervisor and the quartermaster I requisitioned e-suits from. I wouldn’t call either of them friends.
Endria kicked her heels, tilting her head so far her ear rested on her shoulder. “Everyone thinks you’re a creep because you never take that e-suit off.”
“That’s nice,” I said.
“Are you afraid of the Vosth?” Endria asked. She said it like that was unreasonable.
“I have a healthy skepticism that they’re good neighbors,” I said.
“And that’s why you wear an e-suit?”
“No,” I said, “that’s why I’m active in colonial politics and took the civics track with an emphasis on interspecies diplomacy.” I set down the beaker I was working with. For irony.
Endria sucked on her teeth, then gave me a smile I couldn’t read. “You could go into Vosth research. It’s a promising new area of scientific inquiry.”
I pushed the beaker aside. “What new area? We’ve been here for a generation. Bureaucracy is slow, but it’s not that slow.”
“It’s a hard science, not sociological,” she said. “We couldn’t do that before. I don’t know much about it, but there’s all sorts of government appropriations earmarked for it. Don’t you read the public accounting?”
I turned to look at her. She was kicking her heels against the table.
“You should go into Vosth research, and you should use your experience with Menley to open up a line of inquiry. It’s probably xenobiology or something, but it might be fertile ground for new discoveries. Then you could be the colony’s expert on the Vosth. Interspecies relations are an important part of this colony. That’s why I’m writing a paper on them for my civics certification.”
“I’m not getting this titration done, am I?”
Endria smiled, and said the words most feared by common citizens interacting with civil law. “This will only take a minute.”
It wasn’t against the law to go outside the compound, and some people liked the sunlight. Some people— daredevils and risk-takers—even enjoyed the fresh air. As for me, I passed the front door every time I got off work and always felt like I was walking along the edge of a cliff. I’d tried taking different routes but that made it worse somehow, like if I didn’t keep my eye on it, the airlock would blow out and let these seething waves of silver flow in and I wouldn’t know until I got back to my shower or had to switch out my suit for cleaning. Or I’d be opening my faceplate for dinner and feel something else on my lips, and there would be the Vosth, crawling inside. I had trouble eating if I didn’t walk past the airlock to make sure it was closed.
Yeah, Menley made that worse.
I started staring at the airlock, expecting to see his face squashed up against it. Maybe he was just outside, seconds away from getting some idiot like Endria to let him in. People walked past me, and I could hear them talking in low tones while I watched the airlock, like maybe I’d gone into an absence seizure and they should get someone to haul me away. And then they could have me investigated for colonist’s dementia despite the fact that I’d been born here. And they could take me out to the Ocean of Starve . . .
After two nights I realized if I didn’t step outside to make sure the Vosth weren’t coming with a swarm, I was heading for a paranoid fugue.
Actually walking out took two more nights because I couldn’t stand to open the airlock myself. I finally saw a couple strolling out as I passed, e-suited hand in e-suited hand, and I fell in behind them.
The airlock and the outside were the only places I could be anonymous in my e-suit. The couple didn’t even cross to the other side of the enclosure as it cycled the air and opened the outer door.
The grass was teal-green. I hear it’s less blue on Earth, and the sky is less green, but I was just glad neither one was silver. The sunlight was strong and golden, the clouds were mercifully white, and there wasn’t a trace of fog to be seen. So that was good. For the moment.
The Ocean of Starve was a good ten-minute hike away, and I didn’t want to get near it. I walked around the habitat instead, eyeing the horizon in the Ocean’s direction. I’d made it about a half-kilometer around the periphery when I caught a flash of silver out of the corner of my eye and jumped, ready for it to be a trick of the light or a metal component on the eggshell exterior of the dome.
No. It was Menley.
I screamed.
The scream instinct isn’t one of evolution’s better moves. Actually, it’s a terrible idea. The instant sound left my mouth Menley turned and dragged himself toward me. I considered running, but I had this image of tripping, and either losing a boot or ripping a hole in my e-suit.
