The Human Animal

by Julia Ecklar

Illustration by Peter Peebles

“I’m sorry, but animals are not allowed on board the Interface.”

Rahel Tovin looked at the cluster of robots blocking her path, wondering how many were programmed nobodies, and how many the sentient Newborns who ran Interface station. At least one sported a glossy brass plate riveted over its old Robot Identification Number: MECHANIC. Rahel couldn’t help feeling that if she’d had to fight in court to obtain even the most basic “human” rights, she would have picked a better name than her previous job.

“Interesting house rule.” On the ground beside Rahel, Toad hit the end of her lead and snuffled all over Mechanic’s treadmill, pretending not to be leash-broken. “Sounds kind of like an anti-carbon bias to me.”

“On the contrary.” Mechanic rolled straight backward and stranded Toad at the end of her line. The drones to either side didn’t move, but Toad still cocked her head attentively from side to side, as though sure they were about to do something fascinating. “The regulation was established at the request of several carbon-based lifeforms who frequently ply their trades on the Interface.”

“Animals restricting animals?” Rahel tucked one foot under Toad’s broad, brindled ribcage, and used it to slide the puppy back toward her. “That’s pretty funny.”

“Sentients restricting animals,” Mechanic countered smoothly.

A yellow playback light blinked into life on the shoulder of one of the drones, and a flat, overly-loud voice reeled forth from its chest speaker.-“Any self-motivating life-form judged incapable of making informed decisions regarding its own safety or the safety of others shall be defined an animal and restrained accordingly.”

Mechanic extended a manipulator arm, and Toad’s ears flicked forward with interest. “Visual reference identifies this as Canis familiaris, breed unknown, age approximately four and one half Standard months. You lead it about on a leash, indicating you fear its behavior should it pass outside your influence—”

“I fear she’ll piddle all over your space station, that’s what I fear.”

“It is the opinion of the Interface that the lifeform in your possession is an animal. We must ask that you remove it from the Interface, or it will be impounded.”

“The opinion of the Interface, or the opinion of your sentience bigots?” Rahel didn’t really expect an answer. Mechanic didn’t offer one. Its optics clicked focus between Rahel, the puppy, its drones, while the drones themselves waited with programmed patience for something decisive to happen.

Ten meters down the corridor, a tall, grey-brown creature sidled into sight from behind a structural support. Combing rear legs over its velvet-furred abdomen, it chewed at its uppermost appendages while the eyes in its thorax glittered attentively. It looked like a melding of centaur and mantis, minus the exoskeleton and plus an additional set of pincer arms around the area of its waist. When it saw Rahel studying it across the distance, a shiver of distress trembled through its multi-jointed limbs and it scurried forward to crouch behind the line of robots, weaving nervously.

“Worry. Pungent. Breathing. Worry.” The clean, Standard words—so expressionless and mechanical—obviously stuttered forth from the knobbed and fluted cylinder the spindly creature scraped erratically across its underside. Whatever concepts were supposed to be transmitted by the words was just as obviously alien in origin. “Animal. Yes? Animal. No?”

“This is a puppy,” Rahel said clearly, hoping the alien’s translator device had some means of sending language the other way. “A dog, domesticated by humans almost since day one.” Toad stretched her neck out as far as thick terrier muscles would allow, groaning at the prospect of never exploring those thorny alien legs. “You wouldn’t recognize her breed even if I told you what it was—it was extinct up until six months ago.”

A flutter of movement marked the passing of translator rod through two sets of appendages to some orifice at the top of the creature’s thorax, then back down to its belly again. “Inside-in-food-protect-living no. Answer. No.”

Mechanic translated simply, “Domestication is not an issue.”

Rahel scowled up at the alien and it skittered backward in apparent alarm. “What? You don’t domesticate animals?”

“Breathing. Not-think. Smelling frighten. Abomination.”

This time, Mechanic didn’t offer a clarification.

“Look,” Rahel sighed to the Newborn, “you guys set up this space station so various species could negotiate trade agreements, right? Well, I’m here to talk to some people about trade, just like you want.” Rahel gathered up a fistful of leash and pulled the puppy a few sliding steps closer when Toad cocked her head as though contemplating another approach on the alien. “She’s free of parasites and diseases, and I won’t let her off the leash. I’ll even put a diaper on her, if that’ll make you happy.” Toad would just love that. Still, the brass at Noah’s Ark would kill Rahel if she got kicked offstation all because of a puppy and some touchy alien.

If Mechanic could shake its head, it probably would have. Instead, it snaked out an arm and pinched Toad’s leash between two fingers. Rahel tightened her own grip on the bundle when drones closed in on either side, and Toad leapt to her feet, whip-like tail slicing the air into shreds of doggy delight at the very suggestion of play. The alien minced a half-meter closer to chew on its own hands.

“To avoid seizure of this animal, you must leave it on your transport,” Mechanic instructed Rahel. “Your transport must then remain disconnected from the Interface and parked no less than fifteen thousand kilometers away.”

“You’ve got to be kidding.” Rahel avoided picking up Toad as a rule—she’d be a thirteen-kilo terrier when she was full grown, and shouldn’t get used to being carried around—but she stooped now to tuck the puppy protectively under one arm. “There’s nobody to pilot my jump if I’m not there. I travel alone.”

“Perhaps that’s something you should rectify before you revisit the Interface.”

“Look…” She reached to twitch the leash out of Mechanic’s grip, but the alien behind the Newborn was faster. Pinching a roll of white-and-brindle skin in the longest of its thorax pincers, it dragged Toad forward by one jowl and one ear, frightening a piercing scream from the puppy. Rahel’s heart lunged for her throat. She hugged Toad like a mother bear and twisted her shoulder to the creature, striking out at the same time to grab the alien hand and thrust her thumb into the hinge of its largest joint. It felt like grabbing the mummified remains of a snake. But like a stubborn horse’s jaw, the grip popped almost reflexively open, and Rahel scrambled two long steps backward before either alien or robots could reach toward her again.

The creature’s legs bent into sharp peaks, and it sank almost supine behind the line of robots, its thorax curled down across its back. The translator beneath its belly groaned and stuttered, but didn’t offer forth any words. Just as well. Rahel wasn’t in the mood for its explanations, anyway.

“I came a couple hundred light-years to do business at your station,” she told Mechanic, still hugging Toad. The puppy had crammed herself as small as caninely possible, her head burrowed into Rahel’s armpit and her tail sleeked between her hind legs. “I’m willing to leave the dog on my ship if that’s what the Interface wants me to do, but if you think I’m going to let some chicken-shit extraterrestrial—”

“If you behave violently toward any other denizen of this station,” Mechanic said in a voice too artificially calm to ignore, “we will deport you and forbid your return for up to one hundred Standard years.”

Rahel wondered fleetingly if the Newborn meant her personally, or humans in general. She’d no doubt become very unpopular if she got her entire species banned from one of the Galaxy’s main mercantile stations. It wouldn’t do much toward helping her locate her poachers, either, since Noah’s Ark hadn’t been able to verify Terran animals being sold black-market anywhere but at the Newboms’s Interface. Curling the fingers of her right hand, she tried to hide the frustrated gesture by gathering up the rest of Toad’s leash in that fist.

“I’m sorry if I behaved violently.” Rahel aimed for that air of civility that made her teeth grate when she heard other people use it. Having to force the words out at all almost made her want to kick the cowering alien. “I was only trying to safeguard my property against what I thought was violence from…” she wasn’t sure if either “him” or “her” was applicable, so settled for, “…your companion. It hardly seemed reasonable to attack me that way, since I know for a fact that mine isn’t the only ship docked at the Interface with animals on board.”

The moaning hiss from the alien’s translator fell silent.

A link light flashed beneath Mechanic’s face-board, then went dark again. “That information is incorrect.”

“Like hell it is.” Or maybe that would be considered violent again. It was so hard to tell with inorganics. Rising up on tiptoe, Rahel scowled left and right across the river of Newborns and extraterrestrials pouring down the hallway to either side. She’d seen the string of elaborately decorated jumpships while she was parking her own ship, so knew a caravan was on station—it was just a matter of finding the scream of eye-aching color in the swarm of businessfolk around her.

As it was, Rahel heard the rhythmic jing-jing-jing-jing of a quadruped scratching a ring-spangled ear before she actually turned and caught sight of the alien felid. She aimed Mechanic’s attention at the bored duac who now sat pulling at the nails on its hind toes. “What do you call that?”

The alien lifted itself to full height again, and Mechanic’s primary optic extended to adjust its focus. “That is a duac,” the Newborn said.

As though recognizing the word, Toad squirmed in Rahel’s grip and sneaked a timid look. Just what Rahel needed—her puppy slobbering all over the mazhet’s dun cats, chewing on their tall, upswept ears and barking at their profusion of nose, toe, and ear rings. She tightened her elbow until the little dog grumbled with renewed disappointment. “That duac is here with the mazhet—not even on a leash, I might add, or at its mazhet’s side.” In fact, the mazhet in question was nearly out of sight beyond the door of some small, over-lit curio shop. Only the occasional flash of puce, violet and vermillion robes—overspread with meters and meters of gold chain—betrayed the mazhet’s position when it gestured. “How come the mazhet get to let their duacs wander free while you and your cringing arachnid give me grief about one domestic puppy on a leash?”

Mechanic turned its optics away from the duac in a dismissal that was clear even without expression or tone of voice. “The mazhet have a special arrangement with the Interface.”

Of course they did. The mazhet had a special arrangement with everybody.

Rahel rubbed at her eyes. “Then what about Comtes Nadder?”

“Interface registration lists Comtes Nadder’s ship Medve as a specialized class three transport.” Mechanic consulted the station’s database for another few blinks of its light. As though encouraged by Mechanic’s control of the situation, the alien behind the robots rose creakily to full height again. “Comtes Nadder is a licensed dealer in exotic goods.”

That much Rahel knew—she was supposed to have been at Nadder’s berth fifteen minutes ago to discuss a transfer of livestock.

“Exotic dealers are encouraged on the Interface, as they stimulate trade and interspecies goodwill.” Whatever moved Newborns to care about interspecies goodwill was a mystery to Rahel, not to mention half the rest of the Galaxy. Maybe the Newborns reacted to some sort of perceived social inequality that non-chip-driven sentients weren’t sensitive to. Or maybe goodwill just promoted good trade, thus guaranteeing the Newborns enough money to buy the parts, programs, and power they needed to stay running without selling themselves into slavery. Rahel didn’t care which.

“Nadder’s ‘exotic goods’ are animals,” Rahel pointed out to the Newborn and its alien eavesdropper. “She’s docked with this station in a ship twice as large as mine, and her whole cargo bay is stuffed full of live animals. Goodwill or not, you just told me that’s illegal.”

The alien rubbed at its eyes with all four arms, and its translator squealed. Mechanic was not so nonplussed. “Medve’s cargo is not prohibited under Interface regulation 4731 Section 2 Paragraph 7. As specified in this free trade statute, Medve’s cargo qualifies as merchandise, not animals.”

Rahel stared at the Newborn for almost half a minute. Behind it, the alien bobbed twice, silently. “You mean if I was here to sell this dog, then it would be OK for me to have her onstation?”

“This animal would then be classified as legal merchandise under the Interface statute referenced above.”

“Well, what do you know?” Rahel snorted a laugh, then brought her face under control. “It just so happens that I came here planning to sell her.”

The alien shuddered as though struck with a cold breeze, and one of the drones rolled away. Mechanic asked, “Do you have papers attesting to these plans?”

Rahel scowled, squatting to let Toad wriggle loose and hop back to the floor. The puppy oozed behind her to get out of the alien’s sight. “Not everybody needs papers to prove they do fair trade.” Rahel bobbed up on tiptoe to search the crowd around the mazhet’s multi-hued skirts. “I can give you references better than any set of papers.” Assuming mazhet memory worked at all the way rumor suggested it did.

Rahel found the dhaktu right where she’d expected—stone-still to the mazhet’s left, hands laced passively behind his back while he waited to translate the mazhet’s alien clicks and rattles. The shaven head and simple rose-orange-lavender tunic marked him as a mazhet employee; the remnants of an ash-blond topknot marked him as human, and still young enough to not have grey in his hair. Whatever discussion the mazhet conducted inside the little shop, the human didn’t seem to be involved, or even very interested. When the duac threaded its lazy way between patrons to rejoin the mazhet, the human dhaktu didn’t so much as glance at the cat. Rahel wondered how long dhaktu had to practice before perfecting the details of their self-imposed invisibility.

“Hey!” She whistled shrilly. The duac turned to swivel ears in Rahel’s direction and Toad barked a greeting, but neither human nor mazhet moved. “Invisible Voice!” This time, the dhaktu’s spine jerked even more stiffly straight than before. “I need to talk to your boss. It’s kind of important.”

“Ms. Tovin—” Mechanic poked at her kneecap with the end of one retractor arm. “Such shouting is considered socially unacceptable in many sentient cultures, including your own.” Toad stretched up to lick the Newborn’s gripper.

“Well, if we re lucky, I won’t have to do it again.” Rahel gathered up the slack in Toad’s leash when she saw the dhaktu’s hand creep forward to pluck the webwork of chains depending from his mazhet’s sleeve. Although nothing physical seemed to change in the alien’s stance or attitude, Rahel felt the mazhet’s shift in attention almost as clearly as the dhaktu must have. Tipping forward as though pushed delicately from behind, the dhaktu whispered into the back of his mazhet’s shoulder—as close as he could come to the tall alien’s head. Then they both turned in a neatly executed whirl of ribbons, bells, and clashing fabric, and the mazhet glided out into full view for the first time.

Except for the colors and patterns in their obstreperous robing, mazhet seemed truly indistinguishable from each other as far as Rahel could tell. They stood a nearly uniform two-and-a-half meters in height, their huge eyes an identical, whiteless ebony, their skin always the same shade of luscious burnt mahogany. If their humanoid faces had been constructed with a breath more subtlety, they wouldn’t have had faces at all; if their skin had kissed their bones more closely, they’d be nothing but a collection of brittle sticks, artfully arranged to resemble a man. And if any mazhet anywhere had ever displayed something reminiscent of a human emotion, Rahel had yet to hear about it.

She tucked the puppy between her ankles, holding Toad with the gentle pressure of her legs as the mazhet approached.

“Ayr.” Mechanic spoke the single word as a name, pivoting on its treadmill to face the mazhet. The mazhet inclined its head toward one shoulder with a faint jingle of jewelry, but gave no other sign of greeting. It offered no acknowledgement at all to the shivering mantis-alien. “This woman wishes to bring an animal on board the Interface for purposes of barter. She claims you can serve as her reference.”

Rahel waited until Ayr turned its face toward her, then clenched her fist apprehensively in the tangle of leash. “Do you know who I am?”

Ayr blinked slowly, and the duac stretched itself into a C around Rahel’s legs to snuffle at Toad’s backside. If the mazhet even flicked a glance down at the felid, Rahel couldn’t tell—she hadn’t yet figured out how to judge when mazhet focus moved.

A short, startling burst of clicking prompted the dhaktu to take a step forward. “This human is known to the mazhet.” The dhaktu spoke as if the words were wholly his, but he never moved closer than his mazhet’s left elbow, and he never made eye contact with anyone. Even the mantis seemed to keep its attention locked frantically on the mazhet.

Rahel forced herself to stare directly at Ayr. The alien’s intricate bodice reflected like wine in its eyes. “Did I conduct barter with the mazhet on Reyson’s Planet for the exchange of exotic animals?”

Although she had never seen or heard of Ayr before a few moments ago, its barrage of hissing clicks passed on through the dhaktu’s mouth as, “Such barter with this human did occur.”

Mechanic watched the duac circle Rahel slowly, stubby white tail flicking in time to its toe rings against the floor. “Do the mazhet accept this woman as competent and capable of managing the animal in her possession?”

The duac finally snorted with boredom and wandered away. The mantis-alien jittered out of its way before the cat came close enough to touch it.

Toad craned her neck to watch the duac leave, although neither Ayr nor the dhaktu seemed particularly concerned about the big cat’s departure. “This is accepted by the mazhet.”

“Very well.” Mechanic squawked a blat of machine language, and its bevy of drones rolled off in separate directions, mindlessly intent on new places and new things. The mantis turned in a circle, watching them go. “The Interface hereby issues this temporary livestock merchandise transporting permit, valid until eighty hours from moment of issue.” A scrap of flimsy curled out of a slot in its stomach. The Newborn rolled a halfmeter forward, apparently offering the printout to Rahel. She tightened her grip on Toad before bending to take it.

“You must carry this permit with you at all times while on board the Interface with this animal. If at any time you cannot produce this permit on demand, the animal in question will be confiscated. Say yes if you understand.”

Rahel nodded and tucked the flimsy into her trouser pocket. “Yes.” She flicked a look at the alien still twirling in distress behind the remaining Newborn. It muttered into its translator without looking at her.

Mechanic’s ’link indicator twinkled briefly. “So logged. Enjoy your stay at the Interface.” It rotated and trundled off around the comer before it had even finished speaking to her. Rahel couldn’t help wondering if Comtes Nadder and her shipload of illegal animals had gotten as much hassle the first time Medve tried to set up shop on the station.

“Proctor Tovin…”

Rahel nearly collided with Ayr when she turned, finding herself for the first time close enough to a mazhet to smell the dusty perfume of its robes. Ayr angled its head to blink down at her, and Rahel took two unconscious steps backward under the pressure of those pupilless black eyes.

“Always has your employer censured mazhet trade in obsolete genotypes.” Rahel wasn’t sure how much of the innocent curiosity in the words came directly from Ayr, and how much was supplied by its dhaktu. “Does Noah’s Ark seek now to busy itself in the barter of such exotic animals?”

Rahel slid Toad down to the floor. The puppy immediately busied herself snuffling the mazhet’s feet and ringing its adornments with her tail. “I’m not here in my capacity as a Noah’s Ark proctor. This is more like a private business matter that I’d rather not discuss.” She twisted to look over her shoulder, but the insectoid alien had already backed halfway down the long corridor, its hands back in its mouth. “Do the mazhet know what that is?”

“That is Larry.”

If the mazhet weren’t naturally constructed to be so deadpan, Rahel might have taken that as a joke. “Larry?”

“He is tlict, and deals not often with human beings.” Ayr raised its head to make contact with the departing creature, closing both fists in front of its mouth in some sort of gesture of greeting or farewell. “Tlict identifications cannot be rendered audibly. All male tlict, therefore, respond in the human language to the identification, ‘Larry.’ ”

Rahel watched the tlict pick its way gingerly through the deepening crowd. “Then what am I supposed to call the females?”

The dhaktu laughed. Or maybe it was the mazhet after all. Who knew what they used as a natural expression of humor? “You will not ever see a female tlict,” the mazhet told her with a graceful wave of its hands. “And if you do, Proctor Tovin, you will not see a human again to talk about it, so what you do or do not call her hardly matters.”

Comtes Nadder’s docking berth smelled of ammonia and gamey animal breathing. Rahel assumed this was on purpose. After all, Medve itself must be as airtight as any other ship in the void, and Nadder certainly hadn’t allowed her stock to wander out where prospective buyers might catch a premature glimpse of the offerings. The black-marketeer no doubt wanted customers to be confident that her livestock ate, breathed, and shat just as much as the most legal reproductions. Conversely, Nadder probably would have had the berth smelling as pure as a Newborn’s bottom if she’d known Rahel was a Noah’s Ark proctor. So maybe the godawful stench was in truth a good sign after all.

Rahel stopped outside Medve’s airlock and palmed the signal. Toad made bored circles around her ankles, sighing at her predicament when the leash finally cinched too tight for her to move. “It’s called aversion therapy,” Rahel commented aloud.

As if in response to her voice, Medve’s hatch whisked open. “You’re late.”

Rahel had expected the accusation, but not the whippet-sparse figure who delivered it. Her hand braced impatiently against the airlock hatch, Comtes Nadder looked older and more sallow than Rahel had imagined in their comlink talks. The deep, rust-edged voice was the same, though, and the black leather jumpsuit and red headband seemed at least as carefully chosen as the smuggler’s waist-length black hair and garnet eyes. Not necessarily a flattering combination, but effective enough, considering Nadder’s occupation. Rahel suspected the other woman wasn’t much of a slave to current fashions.

Trying on an arrogant scowl, Rahel stepped free of Toad’s leash with the ease of much recent practice. “I tried to get here sooner, but the Newborns caught me coming onstation with the dog and gave me some no animals’ song and dance. It took a while to get past them.”

“Yeah, I hear you.” Nadder flashed a smile as thin as her face, and stepped away from the hatch to let Rahel past. The inside of Medve didn’t even smell like people, much less like wild animal feces. One more illusion shattered.

“Next time,” Nadder said, closing the lock behind them and leading the way into the rest of the ship, “tell the Newbies she’s cargo. They don’t care what you’re really carrying, so long as you give ’em the papers they want.”

As if that much weren’t apparent simply by Nadder’s presence here. “I told them she was merchandise.” Rahel tried very hard to sound cursory about the falsehood. Knowing the extent to which Nadder abused the same loophole in Newborn regulations, though, made her words come out disdainful and angry.

Which seemed to work just as well. “So is she?” Nadder brushed an intent glance across the puppy, shouldering open another door.

Rahel tightened her grip on Toad’s lead. “Is she what?”

“Merchandise. Did you bring her here to sell?”

Cold day in hell before I let any animal go with you. “No. She’s a pet project of mine—I only just got her myself.”

“Too bad.” Nadder paused outside the great double hatch of Medve’s cargo bay, punching some lengthy code into the lock while her body kept Rahel from seeing anything interesting. “I’d love to have a shot at her chromosomes. There’s not a lot of choice in extinct dogs on the open market, and she looks about as Terran as they come. Oh, well.” She pushed open the door with another nanosecond smile. “We can talk again after you see what I’ve got. Maybe we can cut us a deal.”

Or maybe not. Rahel followed her into the cargo bay, pausing only long enough to bounce Toad up into her arms.

Rows and stacks and walls of crates stretched a startling distance in all directions. No distinctive markings to separate one steel container from the other, though. Not even a manifest pad left hanging near an inventory port that Rahel could steal a peek at. Just a loader drone backed into its parking station and whatever webbing and antigravs were necessary to hold the cargo in place. Rahel swallowed a curl of annoyance. For all she knew, Nadder’s boxes could be filled with party condoms, on their way to the mazhet embassy.

“I thought you said you had animals.”

“Oh, I’ve got animals.” Nadder waved her toward a comp station along the starboard wall. “I’ve got whatever animals you want. Sit down.”

Rahel sank into the station’s only chair, lacing her arms across Toad’s back to encourage the puppy to lie down. What she’d taken from the doorway to be a smart loading system revealed itself instead as a gangling collection of I/O interfaces, headbands, and gloves. Rahel picked up the closest optic projector and let it dangle from her index linger. “I had something a little more concrete in mind.”

Nadder shrugged as she dug another set of VR equipment out of a drawer. “While you’re on my ship, you do my business, my way.” She wiggled her hand into one of the gloves. “I’ve been doing this longer than you’ve even been around, honey. Don’t try to teach me new tricks.”

Nadder’s VR simscape was built on cheap stock background coding. Nondescript trees of a deciduous nature rustled without moving, birds from various climates and planets twittered and sang without deigning to make an appearance. Rahel s feet and hands and torso manifested as little more than an idealized mannequin, and the VR channeled nothing back by way of sensory input except for the occasional sound. Just as well. Captured by the VR’s manufactured visual frame of reference, she already felt refracted from her physical body—she didn’t need the rest of her senses lying to her, as well.

“So what happens here?” Rahel felt Toad walk a circle in her lap. The weird division of her attention made her dizzy.

“Here, you get to look at anything available that strikes your fancy. For as long as you want, and as close as you want.” Another featureless mannequin appeared against the simscape. Rahel thought the effect a lot more gruesome now that she was confronted with the golem in its entirety. “What are you interested in?” Nadder asked through a lipless mouth.

Rahel shrugged, then realized such a subtle gesture wouldn’t be picked up by her simulacrum. “What have you got?”

“They’re listed by family down below.”

Sure enough, a multi-layered tap menu floated in an arc at her waist level. Rahel hesitated with her hand spread above the choices, like an uncertain god. The number of species represented in that color-coded strip would have filled the Breeding Compounds back at Noah’s Ark for generations. From there, they would go on to freedom on new homes throughout the Galaxy, new histories for their young. What kind of life did they have to look forward to from here? Illegal purchase by the Galaxy’s filthy rich, and a decidedly substandard existence in some private exhibition where they would never know the dignity of self-sufficiency, never know the company of their own kind.

Rahel tapped out a family at random, found only one genus underneath it, and only one species under that. She called up the choice without reading it. Whatever it was didn’t matter—it was the fact that Nadder had a copy of it when it didn’t exist anymore that made it significant.

The bad stock simscape flashed away, replaced by a more detailed reconstruction on an up-close-and-personal scale. Dark, serrated leaves dropped over a slip of muddied rock, and a transparent grey mass crept across at Rahel’s eye level, its creamy rust-and-white shell balanced as delicately as a teacup on its nonexistent shoulders.

“Partula exigua.” Nadder sounded very close, but didn’t appear in Ra-hel’s view of the scene. “Interesting choice. Go ahead—pick it up.”

Rahel lifted the chip of stone across which the little snail labored. It continued crawling with no knowledge of its relocation. That’s because it isn’t real, Rahel told herself. It’s just a little computer worm that’s supposed to look good and rake in buyers. She couldn’t feel the cool kiss of its flesh when it oozed onto her fingers, couldn’t feel the chalky smoothness of its shell when she traced its dextral swirl. She’d never before held an extinct animal in her hands and believed so keenly in its absence—like weaving with shadows, or fondling air.

“Partulas are a nice choice if you’ve got space limitations,” Nadder was saying, her voice moving around the sim even though she didn’t materialize. “They move maybe thirty centimeters a year—a half-meter, tops—and they even eat their own crap, so you don’t have to clean up after them. Feeding for this guy’s your biggest problem. He’s strictly carnivorous, and won’t eat anything except a particular family of snails that are about as easy to find as he is.” Her hand appeared for the first time, there only long enough to pluck the partulid from Rahel’s fingers, turn it, and replace it on her palm headed the opposite direction. “He’ll live off a specialized protein gel for a while, but partulas have a tendency to starve to death before they’ll eat anything new.” The spiel sounded well-rehearsed, Nadder’s voice slightly distracted as she recited it. “Your best bet would be to work out some kind of supply deal with me. I can send the same kind of snails he’s been eating here whenever you say you need ’em—in a non-breeding variety, of course.”

Of course. Rahel carefully tickled the snail off her palm and back onto the virtual mud. It bounced onto one side when it met the ground, cringing back into its shell until only the tips of its slow antennae floated ahead to feel for danger.

Rahel righted it gently with the side of her thumb. Even knowing it was virtual didn’t save her from feeling guilty for having startled the little snail. Rahel couldn’t force herself to be cavalier about any creature’s welfare, even when she knew the creature was only make believe. This particular virtual specimen, at least, presumably represented some live individual, hidden amongst Nadder’s extensive cargo. Keeping that in mind, Rahel tapped the snail’s spiral shell to see if that would give her additional information on the species.

A submenu exploded upward from the partulid’s location. A bright yellow rectangle, outlined in red, hung in front of her face long enough to blink access restricted four times, then diminished into a point again and vanished. Rahel twisted her mouth into a frustrated scowl, but resisted actually swearing out loud.

“What the hell was that for?”

She glanced up for Nadder’s simulacrum before remembering she was in this VR scape alone. “Just browsing. I was curious about things like the snail’s original climate, altitude, mineral requirements—”

“DNA spins?”

Rahel called up a sample of Alytes obstetricians in an effort to hide her surprise. “Whatever you might have had on tap,” she said with feigned nonchalance.

Light shattered across the sim-scape, dashing apart the pieces of unreality and leaving Rahel blinking at the sudden solidity of the cargo bay around her. Nadder pitched Rahel’s optic set at the VR station, then didn’t bother bending to catch it when it slid off the panel and onto the floor. She left that to the silent, white-haired man behind her.

“Chat over.” Nadder tugged the headset from the albino’s hands and threw it back onto the station. This time it stayed. “Vacate the ship like a good girl, proctor, and we’ll call this barter even.”

Rahel stood slowly, Toad kicking unhappily until she turned her to a more stable position in her arms. “I didn’t even get to see what I was looking for.”

“You’ve seen enough.”

Not nearly.

“Don’t you guys have better things to do?” Nadder asked as she gestured oh-so-politely toward the door they’d come in by. “I’d think you’d have enough problems with the animals you’ve already got.” The albino circled around to Rahel’s other elbow, just in case she entertained some silly plan to resist.

She didn’t. “Well, we re funny that way.” Rahel fell into step between them without bothering to put Toad on the floor. “People selling genotypes that we own all the legal rights to has a tendency to tick us off.”

“Moral superiority has a tendency to tick me off.” Nadder levered open the cargo door and ushered Rahel through. “You guys think your kind of purist conservation shit is the only right way to keep four-legs. Even if I was selling your genomes—’’ She slammed the door behind them, “—which I’m not—what makes it so wrong to give people a taste of what they can’t get anywhere else?”

“Don’t try to tell me you’re not selling Terran genotypes.” Rahel opted to stay with the strictly legal end of their discussion—the black-marketeer’s profession made the larger ethical question seem hardly worth pursuing. “You think I don’t know authentic gross structures when I see them?”

Nadder shrugged. “I’m glad you think so. But it’s not like you actually looked at any animals today.”

Rahel stopped just inside the final hatchway, bumping her elbow back against the albino when he would have shoved her forward to keep her moving. “What are you talking about? I saw the partulid and—”

“You saw a partulid simulacrum,” Nadder corrected her. The marketeer’s smile was as slick and artificial as her hair when she took Rahel’s arm and accompanied her the last few steps onto the dock. “That’s what I sell, after all—VR tours of an extinct zoo. If you came here thinking otherwise, proctor, I’m afraid you were misinformed.”

Noah’s Ark had spent nine months and a small jumpship’s worth of money tracing leads and rumors beyond the edge of human space to the Newborns s Interface. What had started as a search for the origins of a single boodeg Terran cargo had grown into one of the Ark’s primary projects. It was the strength of that history and her own long hours of clue-sniffing and travel that let Rahel scowl down into Nadder’s face and say with such grim certainty, “Bullshit.”

The marketeer’s smile stretched even more irritatingly serene. “I guess you’ll have to prove that.” She slapped the control that closed Medve’s airlock door.

“Wait a minute!” Dancing forward, Rahel caught the edge of the door with her palm to halt it in its track. “Aren’t you at least going to tell me how you found out where I was from?”

Nadder tipped her head as though considering, then smiled in what looked like honest amusement when Toad echoed the gesture with one brindled ear cocked higher than the other. Behind her shoulder, the albino actually laughed.

“Staffordshire bull terrier,” Nadder said suddenly. She wiggled her fingers at Toad, then turned her eyes more directly on Rahel while the puppy fidgeted delightedly at the attention. “Holds the domestic record for going from endangered to extinct in less than ten years back in the early twenty-first—one of many victims of the pre-Reform urban paranoia. I’ve never heard of anybody offering that kind of blueprint for open sale.” She hooked a thumb back toward the albino. “Took Styen nearly fifteen minutes just to match a visual to our records. That left only one place that little dog could’ve come from.”

Rahel nodded, already blushing with self-anger at her own shortsightedness. “Noah’s Ark.”

Smiling, Nadder tapped the end of her downtumed nose and poked at the door controls again. Rahel stepped grudgingly back to let the airlock hatch slide closed. Nine months and uncounted millions of credits, just so Rahel could put them right back where they’d started less than two hours after setting foot on the station.

She kicked at the now impassable airlock door. “Dammit.”

“I can’t believe I blew it!”

“Does that mean it’s too late for me to suggest you leave the dog behind next time you go onstation?”

Rahel aimed a withering glare at the comlink over her shoulder, and Paval’s image on-screen returned her scowl with eyebrows raised in his traditional expression of innocent query. She still hadn’t decided how much of her apprentice’s little-boy sincerity was for real, and how much he affected just for the sake of annoying her.

“Your next lesson when I get home will be all about giving advice before it’s needed, not after.’’ She pitched Toad’s ball over the puppy’s head, sending both ball and dog bouncing madly down the jumpship’s center aisle.

“Well, then here’s some advice for your next course of action: See what you can find out about Nadder around the rest of the station. Who knows what we’ll find useful next time—”

“There’s not going to be a next time.” Rahel sighed in frustration as Toad cavorted back to shove the warm, spit-slimed ball into her palm. “By the end of tonight, Nadder’s going to have memorized the face, name, and description of every proctor in Noah’s Ark.” She threw the ball again, wiping her hand on the leg of her pants. “Face it, Junior—we’re screwed.”

“We’re not screwed.” Ah, the certainty of youth. If she hadn’t been so angry with herself, Rahel might have laughed at his grim earnestness. “Nadder won’t bother arming herself against us, Proctor Tovin. It’s not like we re some sort of legal authority—were a private corporation that’s taken on an investigative task because nobody else cares about it. Even if you’d gotten past the contact today, we would still have had to prove wrong doing on Nadder’s part before the legal net would make a move.”

But now they couldn’t even do that. “She’s never going to let an Ark proctor on the same station with her again.” Rahel tugged the ball from between Toad’s teeth and slung it down the aisle somewhat harder than before.

“Then we’ll just send somebody else.”

The apprentice’s words poked her like an electric shock. Ignoring Toad’s happy snarlings when the dog returned with her fresh-killed ball, Rahel swung to face the comlink and Paval’s startled blink. “What did you say?”

He shrugged uncertainly, as though not trusting whatever verbal trap he’d unwittingly stumbled into. “Noah’s Ark has money. Surely we can hire someone not affiliated with the Ark to go in and make the purchase for us. Once we’ve got the merchandise and the manifest, we can press the cops to at least open up an investigation.” He brought one hand up to touch the edge of his screen when she jumped to her feet and Toad began barking with excitement. “This is a setback, Proctor Tovin, not the end of the world.”

Not even much of a setback, if she made good use of her options. She kicked Toad’s ball farther down the aisle, then snatched up a blue-and-green print jacket to shrug on over her khaki Noah’s Ark bush shirt. “I should have thought of this from the beginning!”

“Proctor Tovin?” Paval’s voice echoed slightly in the empty cockpit behind her. “You’re off visual. Are you going somewhere?”

She jumped back up the stairs to lean over the comlink and smile down into his anxious face. “Junior, I’m going out to buy some Terran animals.” She chuckled wickedly before punching off the channel. “I’ll give you a call when the setback’s over.”

“I want something Terran,” she told them. “Something big and Terran. Price isn’t an object, and size isn’t a problem. Just get me something living, and make sure it’s authentic.”

That was part of the brilliance of her plan. By sending her agents off with such a specific—yet broad—requisition, Rahel could almost certify they’d return with one of the high-demand “glamour animals”—a lion, or an orca, or maybe even a gorilla. Something of the romantic, frightening nature that appealed to people who fancied they could “own” animals, rather than just live with them. Nadder was certain to have a wide selection of such genomes available. Rahel, meanwhile, would be able to tell with a look if what she’d purchased was Terran without having to wade through the snails and toads and spiders who weren’t in her area of expertise.

“Arrange for payment through whatever third party makes you happy—I don’t want Noah’s Ark’s name showing up anywhere. And no matter what else happens, no matter who asks, don’t say anything to anyone about the details of this transaction. This has to be completely private. Do you understand?”

They’d just stared at her in unreadable silence, then turned and ghosted off toward center station in a cloud of brilliant ringing.

She’d expected them back within the hour.

Instead, morning crept into afternoon, she turned down two ’link calls from Noah’s Ark, and Toad went to the bathroom in the airlock. After that, Rahel took the puppy outside to chase her ball up and down among the maintenance sleds, then sat under the jumpship’s landing gear until Toad found gnawing on her ball too much effort to maintain. Groaning with contentment, the puppy fell asleep with her head hanging over Rahel’s knee and her tongue peeking out between her teeth.

Rahel followed Toad into sleep less than three hours later. Sitting up in her bunk with half-read downloads strewn across her lap and Toad draped over her ankles, she noticed when a simple figure reference made absolutely no sense to her conscious mind. So she sighed, closed her eyes, and tipped her head back against the bulkhead for just a moment’s respite.

Something jerked her back into wakefulness what seemed like only an instant later. “What?” She bolted upright in the bed, scattering downloads everywhere. “What is it?” Toad stretched with a grumble, but didn’t awaken.

“There are seven beings requesting entry at the main airlock,” the ship informed her. Rahel liked this jumpship’s voice—helpfully female without being obsequious. “Shall I admit them, or do you wish to escort them manually?”

Seven? Good God, please don’t let them have bought her an elephant! She squirmed hurriedly out from under Toad and the rest of the downloads. “Do they have any cargo with them?”

“They have a livestock shipping crate. I cannot see inside it.”

Good enough—and better than she thought she’d get after leaving Nadder’s berth this morning. Padding stocking-footed through the ship’s empty corridor, Rahel called up the lights as she went. She skidded to a stop at the airlock and slid aside first one, then the other hatch to face the small crowd and their shiny, steelsided shipping crate.

One of the duacs sneezed and leaned over to lick its neighbor’s ear.

For some reason, when the ship reported seven beings waiting outside her jumpship airlock, Rahel hadn’t expected four of them to be duacs. And she’d rather hoped at least one of them would be dhaktu. Glancing between the three mazhet ringing the crate, she raised eyebrows to the puce and violet figure she assumed to be Ayr. The mazhet looked back at her with emotionless patience.

“You got the Terran animal I commissioned?” Rahel nodded toward the crate without taking her eyes off the aliens. The crate didn’t seem as large as she’d hoped for—only about three meters deep, and not even as tall as her shoulder.

Ayr dipped its chin to touch its chest once, quite deliberately.

“And I don’t suppose any of you has a dhaktu up his sleeve?”

This time they all only stared at her, and Rahel had to scrub at her eyes to keep from laughing with weary frustration. “No, of course not. All right…” She stepped aside and waved them through the airlock. “Bring it in here.”

The green and aqua mazhet on the left flicked one spidery hand across the top of the crate, then Ayr and the mazhet in yellow, salmon, and pink applied gentle pressure along both sides to glide the metal box forward. Rahel couldn’t see that it rose above the decking, but it slid forward as easily as hot oil on ice, even clearing the hatchway without appearing to lift up over the edge. The duacs stirred themselves in no discernible order and followed the mazhet inside.

Toad sat blearily in the middle of the main compartment, watching Rahel and the mazhet maneuver the crate through the open hatchway. Even when the duacs clustered around to nudge at her with their blunt noses, all Toad did was lean against the nearest one and sigh sleepily. The duac twitched one ear flat to its skull and glared at the puppy. Its three companions sank to their haunches a respectful distance away.

“I want to have a look at this thing before we finalize our transaction.” Rahel trotted away from the mazhet long enough to retrieve the snooze pistol she’d left lying on the flight panel. “It’s not that I don’t trust you—it’s Nadder I expect to play some tricks. Now, if you’ll let me—”

Ayr stepped in front of her before she could approach the box. It closed long, dry fingers around her wrist, pushing the snooze pistol off to one side as it clicked and ticked and rattled in the longest run of untranslated mazhet Rahel had ever heard. She shook her head slowly, not sure if she should be watching the mazhet’s face or the quick, elaborate hand gestures it rang and sparkled in front of her.

“I’m not going to hurt it.” She tried to bring the pistol up between them again, wanting to explain how gentle and harmless it was. Ayr only pushed the weapon persistently aside. “This gun will only put it to sleep for a little while—just long enough for me to run a few tests, that’s all.”

Ayr patted her chest, hands fluttering like bird’s wings, then pressed a corpse-cool palm to her forehead.

“I don’t understand what you want from me.” Rahel ducked a look at the mazhet still waiting by the unopened crate. “Do you have a dhaktu you could send for? Anyone you could bring?”

They might have been deaf for all the reaction they gave her. Ayr pushed at her forehead again, touched her chest, and Rahel caught its hands between hers to keep the mazhet from flustering through the senseless pattern again. Its hands felt as though she could shatter them with a single intemperate squeeze.

“Just let me have a look at it.” She locked her eyes with the mazhet’s fathomless black ones, not at all sure if that gesture was socially correct. “I won’t hurt it, I won’t let it out. But I need to see what you’ve brought me before we can go any further.” The gentlest of pressure backed Ayr into its former position alongside the others. “You know, you could have brought one of your ‘invisible voices,’ and we wouldn’t be having this problem.”

The mazhet all rustled with the same ringing of bangles, but they said nothing to her or each other.

Rahel repositioned herself in front of the crate, and checked the charge on her snooze pistol. More than enough to lay low anything that could fit inside a container this size. “OK, then…” She nodded tightly to the green and aqua mazhet. “Open her up.”

A chime and brush of movement, and the mouth of the crate hissed open. Rahel crouched, steeling herself for an explosion of movement, a scream of animal anger, a howl of animal pain. Instead, still silence puffed out on the stench of sweat and feces, and the tiny, rapid sound of breathing echoed through the empty crate like thunder. Frowning, she knelt very slowly.

“Oh, good God…” She thumped down onto her bottom without meaning to, and the snooze pistol fell, unfired, across her lap. Hand tangled halfway through her sleep-tousled hair, she stared into the long, darkened crate without the ability to marshal enough thought to disbelieve.

From the back of the crate, the brown, frightened eyes of a very human boy stared back at her in silence.

“It’s all right, nobody’s gonna hurt you.… Do you have a name? Do you know what I’m saying?”

No, of course he didn’t. Rahel could tell by his eyes—those quick, intelligent eyes that followed her every gesture, her every shift in weight with the desperate intensity of a wild animal. She’d seen Toad look at her with more understanding whenever she said the words “out” or “play” or “good dog.” All this boy’s reactions proved was that he wasn’t deaf—and that he was nearly mindless with fright.

“You poor thing…” Rahel eased into the mouth of the crate and sat back on her heels. “I wish I knew where the hell she got you.” The boy only stared at her and hugged his knees ever tighter to his chest.

Naked and unwashed, he wasn’t recognizably from any particular culture, and his small, Caucasian features placed him squarely in the least remarkable phenotype. Even his filthy hair and build proved little help in guessing his origins; Rahel thought the matted snarl might be yellow (but wouldn’t put money on it until she had him washed), and his 150 centimeter height could be indicative of either a normal child or a smallish adult. His face and chest were hairless. The muscles of his legs and shoulders, though, were those of a post-pubescent who’d reached the wiry spareness of maturity. Yet he’d defecated in the opposite comer of his crate, which was something even a dog wouldn’t do. The debate over Nature vs. Nurture sat staring at her from the end of a mazhet-built shipping crate, and it looked like Nature was winning.

She leaned back into the open and met Ayr’s eyes across the top of the box. “Has anyone got the control for the collar?” From a crate-length away she could see how the boy’s collarbones were bruised and raw from the restraining band Nadder had bolted around his neck. She wondered how many times the black-marketeer had found it necessary to sting the boy with the restrainer’s neural pulse, and how many times she had jolted him completely unconscious. Getting rid of the damnable “training device” moved up to Rahel’s first priority.

“The collar,” she said again, a little louder and more slowly as she traced an arc on the front of her neck with one finger. “Did Nadder give you the control for the restraining collar?”

The mazhet stood as though unhearing. Rahel groaned and turned away from them with an angry wave. “Why do I bother to ask you anything?” It hadn’t occurred to her she’d need to insist the mazhet retrieve all the hardware associated with Nadder’s merchandise. But, then, it hadn’t occurred to her the merchandise would be human, either.

A melodic chime fell from the AI’s shipboard speakers. “There are two beings requesting entry at the main airlock,” the ship informed her.

Rahel craned a hopeful look toward the ceiling. “Is either of them human, by any chance?”

“One of them is human.”

“Hallelujah.” She shimmied the rest of the way out of the crate, then stood and placed her body in front of the exit with both hands on either comer of the roof to feel for any movement from inside. “Let them in.”

The dhaktu scurried through before the airlock door even finished sliding open. True to his job description, he slipped among the mazhet in timid silence, not sparing Rahel so much as a smile. Maybe he was afraid she’d humiliate him by offering a greeting. Rahel made an effort to contain herself. It wasn’t until Toad scrabbled to her feet with a scream of distress that it occurred to Rahel to look and see who followed the dhaktu inside.

The Larry tlict cringed away from Toad’s frantic barking, upper appendages flaring wide in what had to be a threatening display, medial appendages pulling close to cover its eyes. Remembering the barely controlled violence of the first tlict she had seen, Rahel dove to grab the puppy out of this one’s way. Toad’s only movement was to back away from the tlict in panicked hops every time she bayed. She wheeled with a startled shriek when Rahel’s hand closed on her collar, then hunched into a crouch and squirmed up into Rahel’s arms. From that position of safety, she took up her barking again while Rahel trotted down the corridor to lock her in the bedroom. She’d never felt the little dog tremble so violently.

By the time Rahel made it back to the central compartment, the tlict had crabbed its way halfway around the room so as not to lose sight of the dog. “Private abode. Restrictions. Restrained. Yes? Yes?” The translator pressed against the tlict’s abdomen muttered and hummed with untranslatable pheromones.

Rahel ducked a peek into the unattended shipping crate. Eyes bright like polished walnuts glinted back at her through the darkness. At least they hadn’t lost the boy.

“This ship is my private property,” she told the tlict, turning back to face it. Limbs wove between each other to pass the translator up to the alien’s tiny mouth. “My animal has the right to run free in here, and the Newborns promised me this.”

“Yes. Yes.”

“She’ll stay in another part of my ship now, so that she won’t bother you or the others.”

“Yes. Yes. Good air. Good breathing.”

Whatever the hell that meant. “Now will somebody please tell me why I have this Larry on my ship?”

Ayr drew her attention with a gentle ringing of golden chain. “The merchandise did not appear in a healthy state.” The dhaktu stood as still and servile as ever behind the row of mazhet, but Rahel had never heard an invisible voice sound sweeter. “It was determined a physical caretaker should be consulted as to its viability.”

Rahel nodded, then realized what exactly they’d just told her. “A doctor?” She jerked a startled look at the Larry. It stroked its eyes in nervous repetition. “The tlict have a doctor who can treat human beings?”

“Tlict. Not-tlict.” It shifted uneasily onto its hindmost limbs. “Medicine treatment of not-tlict.”

She shook her head in slow confusion. “I don’t understand.”

“This tlict is a veterinarian,” the dhaktu volunteered without benefit of a mazhet’s initiative.

A veterinarian? When its species apparently had no tolerance of animals, and very likely had none as pets? “I suppose that’s appropriate, at least.” She retreated an uncertain step, not sure if she should drive the tlict out or thank it for coming. Finally, she settled for sinking to her knees at the mouth of the crate and sighing at the boy still huddled at its rear. “Let me see if I can get him out for you.” She went down on all fours, slipping the fallen snooze pistol into her pocket as an afterthought.

The floor of the crate felt clammy and damp beneath her hands. Sour with human sweat, humid from urine and the boy’s labored breathing, the air in the crate nearly gagged her. She bit down hard against a cough, then stopped half-way down the box’s length to sink back on her heels and make eye contact with the boy. He crushed himself deeper into the corner he’d claimed as his own.

Rahel’s stomach tightened with regret. “I’m not gonna hurt you,” she whispered, just like she’d murmured to all the coyotes she’d tagged and sampled back home. “I know you’re scared, but it’s OK, everything’s gonna be OK.”

Just like the coyotes, his eyes reflected back a ghostly red that showed no signs of understanding.

But you’re not a coyote, are you? You’re a boy. Which means there’s something besides instinct going on in that oversized skull of yours.” Deliberately keeping her voice gentle anti soothing, her face serene despite her words, Rahel eased forward on hands-and-knees. The boy’s eyes flicked to follow her movements. “You know I’m a human, too. You know from the way I’m talking and moving that I’m not coming in here to rough you around, don’t you? We’re just gonna get a look at you and make sure everything’s OK.” She placed one hand feather-light against the side of his leg. His skin twitched away from her touch like a horse’s skin away from a fly.

She didn’t pull her hand back. “There’s no place else for you go to,” she said, sliding up his leg to where his arms were locked around his up-drawn knees. “You’re just gonna have to come out here with me.” And she closed her fingers around his wrist with a carefully calculated amalgam of tenderness and strength.

The boy exploded with a howl of rage. Rahel found herself jerked violently forward while he twisted and kicked and clawed to be rid of her. One wall of the crate banged into her shoulder; the boy’s back shoved awkwardly against her armpit as he planted bare feet on the opposite wall and clenched every muscle in his scrawny little frame to break away.

“Oh, no, you don’t!” Still gripping fiercely to his wrist, Rahel snaked her free arm across the boy’s chest to wedge him against her and break his leverage. He gave in to her pulling immediately, and they crashed sideways onto the bottom of the crate. Rahel was willing to count that as a preliminary victory right up to the moment he wrenched his captive hand up in front of his face and bit into her forearm with a gristly crunch.

“Ah, goddammit!” Anger took the short route straight into her bloodstream. She swung one leg over the boy and pinned him in retaliation. “You little—!”

“Proctor Tovin?”

He squirmed frantically beneath her, jabbing his elbow at her thigh, and bit down harder when she tried to use her free hand to grab his flailing arm. She shouted again in pain, and suddenly understood what it felt like to want to beat another human being senseless with your bare hands. Jamming her forearm more firmly into the little beast’s mouth, she rolled onto one hip and dug across her front for the snooze pistol in her opposite pocket. It jutted against the fabric of her trousers like some dissatisfied animal who wanted to escape.

“Proctor Tovin?” the dhaktu called again. “Is some assistance required?”

Surely some mazhet had initiated the request, but Rahel would be damned if she could guess which one. “No!” She squeezed the pistol’s trigger without bothering to work it free of her pocket. The boy jerked with a yelp, then collapsed into a loose sprawl beside her. If anything, the pain in her arm redoubled with a throb when the boy’s bite pressure lifted.

“Doings between you sound most violent,” the dhaktu pointed out in sync with someone’s rapid clicking. “The mazhet remain available to assist in the unpacking of this merchandise.”

“All right, then.” Trying to ignore the progressively sticky feel of her shirt sleeve, Rahel untangled herself from the boy and rolled him over. “Get me the medikit from under the pilot’s console in the cockpit.” He seemed so light and tiny now that she could drag him from the crate without fighting. It was almost like handling a toy.

The yellow and salmon mazhet shadowed her, medikit balanced on one hand, as she backed out of the crate with the boy in tow. “Spread the blanket there.” Rahel jerked her chin toward the floor to her left, then waited somewhat impatiently while Ayr helped the first mazhet unfurl the blanket from the lid of the kit. Blood gathered in the elbow of her sleeve, spattering against the floor one fat drop at a time with a brittle tick, tick, tick. Behind her, the tlict echoed the sound with its toenails in apparently unconscious mimicry.

The mazhet laid out the blanket at an angle to her, one corner near her ankle, the opposing comer aiming across the deck toward the cockpit door. She lowered the boy onto the square without commenting on its odd positioning. Tugging her sleeve into a lumpy wad near her elbow, she backed away from both mazhet and boy to give the tlict whatever room it thought necessary. “Get to work, Larry. He’s not gonna be snoozed-out forever.”

The tlict scrubbed fretful arms across its eyes, then scuttled forward to straddle the boy’s body and probe him with some abdominal appendage. Rahel hoped to hell the kid didn’t wake up to that view.

She accepted the sterile wipe yellow-and-salmon handed her, then hissed through her teeth half in pain, half in dread as she daubed away the blood obscuring the wound. More welled up to replace it, but not before she could see the ragged half-moons of actual damage. He may not have had well developed canines, but the little bastard had certainly got her good.

Yellow-and-salmon pressed another clean wipe into her hand, and Rahel cocked a glance at the alien as she took it. The mazhet had turned the rest of the medikit to face her, obviously expecting her to select whatever medicaments she needed from the array in the bottom of the box. Rahel plucked out a largish handful of dry gauze to pack against the wound.

“Now that I’ve got your undivided attention…” She aimed the comment at the other two mazhet as much as the one by her side. “Can one of you tell me who’s got the control for the merchandise’s restraining collar?”

Yellow-and-salmon’s huge black eyes studied the treatment of her wound without blinking. Ayr and its companion only stood complacently, as though she’d never spoken.

Rahel wasn’t surprised to discover she was in no mood for mazhet weirdness. “What?” She looked irritably among the three of them. “Is there some mazhet rule against answering simple questions?”

The boy’s rapid breathing and the creaking of tlict limbs were the only sounds in the central compartment. The duacs had wandered off to sniff at Toad’s door and annoy her.

“The rules of the barter.” The dhaktu said it suddenly, without any mazhet’s urging and as though he surprised himself with the sound of his own voice.

Rahel aimed a frown at him. “What barter? Ours?”

The dhaktu dipped a stilted nod, wringing his hands in the folds of his orange robe and speaking in a quick, breathless voice completely unlike the competent tones he used as a translator. “They’re bound by the conditions of your agreement, proctor. You instructed them never to speak of the transaction with anyone.”

She dropped her arm to her side in shock, and was rewarded with a thick pulse of pain. “I didn’t mean me!”

The dhaktu winced a shrug. “You said anyone.”

The concept of banging her head against a bulkhead suddenly seemed very appealing.

“Healthy scenting. Tasting strong.”

The tlict stepped over and away from the boy with the delicacy of a four-legged dancer. Rahel brought her arm back up to her chest with a sigh, just as glad to turn her attention on the Larry and away from her own stupid barter technique.

“Yes. Yes,” the Larry’s translator stated solemnly. Its smallest arms danced here and there across its thorax as though searching nonexistent pockets for something. “Small food. Dark air. Non-tlict merchandise. Large food. Wise air.”

Rahel nodded slowly. “The boy needs food and a better environment.” She was guessing at the tlict’s full meaning, and wondered if repeating what she thought it meant would just get her words translated back into the same near-nonsense the tlict had said before.

Whatever happened when her voice crossed the language barrier, the diet’s tiny mouth parts played across its translator and it waved its lower arms enthusiastically. “Large Food. Wise air. Yes. Yes.”

Well, at least that kind of help wouldn’t be too hard to administer. Just about anything would be better than wherever this poor kid had already been. “Thank you.” She touched her fists to her mouth the way she’d seen Ayr do with the first tlict this morning, hoping it was remotely appropriate to the situation. “Is there something I owe you for doing me this service?”

“Worry. Answer.” The tlict bobbed twice on its multijointed legs. “Answer. Worry.”

Rahel took another blind stab at the alien’s meaning. “I’ll answer your question if I can.”

“Not-tlict you. Not-tlict this.” It tickled at the boy’s midsection with one hind leg. “Difference. Yes? Difference. No?”

This was perhaps the clearest thought she’d heard come out of a tlict so far. “Difference no. The merchandise is a human being, just like me.” She angled a look at the prone figure beyond the tlict, and frowned beneath an unexpected stab of pity. “He’s just had a harder time than most of us up to now.” How to explain feral children to an alien? And was it even worth really trying?

Hard-bladed toes clattered on the decking as the tlict sidled toward the airlock door, chewing on its translator. “Worry. Worry. Larry touches. Gertrude breathes.” It poked a hind foot at the airlock controls without turning to see what it was doing. Or maybe it had spatial sensors beyond the obvious eyes. When the hatch slid open, the tlict scampered inside, still facing Rahel and the boy. “Good breathing. Wise air.” It opened the outside hatch the same way as before, then tumbled out into the docking bay at what for a tlict must have been a dead run. “Worry. Worry. Goodbye.”

Rahel brought her arm down to peek under the now-darkened gauze pad as the hatch hissed shut behind the larry. “Are tlict always this arbitrary?” she asked the mazhet.

Ayr’s skirts rang in what might have been a mazhet shrug. “Tlict are tlict.”

Both a definition and the question, but no doubt the best any of them could expect. Rahel sighed and went back to her first aid.

“Well, I’d say your delivery of this merchandise is accomplished.” Satisfied that the bite still oozed somewhat prodigiously, she slapped a clean wad of padding over the wound and raised her arm to chest-height again. “You can get the agreed upon fee from Noah’s Ark—they’re good for it. Just tell Saiah Innis that I—”

The dhaktu interrupted her with a delicate clearing of his throat.

Rahel glanced up at the three quiet mazhet, thought about what she’d just said, and smiled thinly. “Oh, yeah. Forgot about that. Here…” She trotted into the cockpit to fetch her notebook off the console. Keeping her left hand clamped firmly over her forearm, she scribbled, “Saiah—it’s a boy! Attached is quote of fee promised mazhet. Pay, but don’t ask questions. Will explain once I’m off-station.” She didn’t bother signing it. He’d know who it was from.

She popped the data chip and carried it back down to the mazhet. “Transmit this to the address at the front of the message.” Ayr tipped its head in acknowledgment when she passed across the chip. “The funds ought to show up in your accounts within twenty-four hours of the Ark receiving the transmission.”

All three mazhet swarmed into a knot to slip the chip from hand to hand. It finally vanished into the event horizon of green-and-aqua’s robes, and one of them announced with a clatter, “This is equitable.” They swept into the airlock in a single cloud of silks and bells and ribbons. The four errant duacs jogged after them a moment later, as though only just realizing their masters were leaving. From far off down the hall, Rahel heard Toad wail with grief at the loss of her alien playmates.

“I guess that means there’s just you and me.”

Small and fragile in his unnatural sleep, the boy curled up with a whimper and covered his face with his hands.

She didn’t really want to, but she snoozed him again before the first shot had a chance to wear off. A boy wasn’t like other animals, she reasoned. He had wants and imagination, not just thoughtless genetic imperatives—he would know her handling of him was indelicate, would recognize himself as powerless, would never forget the details of what she did to him, just as he would never understand the whys. Better to take care of as much as possible with his fears and emotions safely tucked away in slumber. Maybe then he’d view the indignities she wrought as mysterious acts of providence, and not specifically something Rahel had done.

Before touching him, though, she finished cleaning and sealing her bitten arm, adding a broad-base antibiotic and a rabies booster just to say she’d thought of everything. Then she ran to the lab and gathered enough tools, handling equipment, and sampling gear for everything she could possibly want to do. On the way back, she stopped by her quarters long enough to quick-step around Toad and dig a T-shirt out of her clothes locker. Once she’d filled a shallow laboratory bucket with water and rags, she headed back for the main compartment with Toad prancing behind her with a mouthful of extra towels.

Toad’s contributions to the proceedings only slowed things down a little. “Get away from there.” Rahel elbowed the puppy back from the boy’s face when Toad abandoned the towels so she could explore him. Complaining, Toad circled Rahel to find a less obstructed position, then resumed her cheerful licking. “He doesn’t want your kisses. Now get over here.” Rahel, however, hadn’t yet enjoyed much success convincing Toad that normal, conscious people didn’t exist just to be her undying friends. She didn’t sustain much hope of having any better luck with a snoozed-out feral boy.

Rahel didn’t know what sort of tools people used to fasten on a restraining collar, but a pair of industrial-strength power clippers sheared off the device with no particular effort. She slipped the hateful thing from underneath his neck, then tossed it into the bottom of the crate where it wouldn’t be in their way. He would probably still be looking at scars on his neck and shoulders from Nadder’s bondage. It was too soon yet to tell.

She took a blood sample from a vein in his neck, a tissue scraping from the sores left by the restraining collar, and a membrane swab from his sinuses. Bad enough that she had to knock him out instead of taking the time to win his trust—at least she could hide whatever discomfort the scrapings caused among the damage inflicted by Nadder. It didn’t make much difference how much he ended up hating the black-marketeer. Rahel, on the other hand, still had to get home with the boy.

Running back to the jumpship’s lab with her samples divided between both hands, she slapped together a quick set of slides and fed them into the testing station. “Check the blood and mucal smears for antibodies, antigens, parasite residue, and possible infectious agents. I’ll need a vaccination set for him, plus medication for any diseases or parasites you find in his system.”

“Species of sample donor?” the AI asked.

“Homo sapiens.” She snapped closed the last set of slides and sent them after the others. “These are dermal and subdermal tissue samples from the same specimen. Get me a DNA spin and cross-match against the entire Noah’s Ark database. I want to know what breeding population his genetics are from, and an estimate on his age, if you can give me one. Log all of this under Feral Aral, Interface Acquisition #1.”

“OK.” The AI shuffled the slides into queue somewhere deep in its works. “Blood and mucal analysis complete. Results dispatched to screen two. I can display the requested genetic results in approximately ten hours sixteen minutes.”

“Sounds good.” It wasn’t like she wouldn’t still have the boy tomorrow. “Let me know as soon as you’ve got them.”

Scientific curiosity taken care of for the time, she assembled the vaccination set recommended by the AI and took it out to the boy. Toad had already flopped to the floor full length in order to groom between his toes. Pausing to ruffle the puppy’s ears—“Thanks for the help,”—Rahel administered the injection, squirted parasite medication between the boy’s teeth, then pulled the bucket over to start on the unpleasant task still before her.

If this boy had ever been bathed, it was so long ago as to not count anymore. Water ran off his chest in scattered beads, repelled by the oil and filth before it could even dampen his skin. Rahel swallowed her disgust and soaped the rag into a dripping, frothy cream between both hands. Draping the cloth across the boy’s arm for a moment produced somewhat better results, a patch of stained, pinkish skin appeared in response to her gentle scrubbing, and a smelly crust of dead cells and rancid sweat came off on the rag and turned it blackish. She dunked it into the bucket to rinse out the worst of the grime, then attacked the soap again before slathering rag and water all over the rest of his arm.

Little by little, the details of his previous life exposed themselves—like brush strokes on an ancient painting, previously hidden behind a lifetime of neglect. Scars like fine, white lace-work on his hands, his knees, the fronts of both narrow shins. Palms as rough and hard as dried leather, feet even harder and thicker than that, and not as much as an intact nail among them. Worn but sturdy teeth with no sign of breakage, misalignment, or dental caries. Long, startlingly dark eyelashes. Eyebrows the same tarnished gold as ginger honey, and fine, brittle hair that would probably be the same color once it grew back without the filth and tangles. She had to tell herself over and over again that even a bad haircut didn’t last forever before she could bring herself to shave his skull down to a pale fuzz.

Once she’d bathed him, dried him, and swabbed him head to toe with a topical insecticide, she cleaned and dressed the wounds around his neck and wrestled him into the overlarge T-shirt. The teal-and-white shift hung down around his knees. Combined with his new haircut, it made him look like an underage krishna monk with no fashion sense.

“Well, Spud, what do we do now?”

Toad looked up from mauling the power clippers, just in case the comment meant she was about to be played with or fed.

Rahel leaned over to relieve her of the shears, exchanging them for the closest legitimate chew toy at hand. “The way I see it,” she said, bouncing the toy against Toad’s nose until the puppy snapped and snorted with joy, “I’ve got two choices—lock him up in the shipping crate again, or give him free run of the jumpship.” She finally let Toad wrench the toy from her hand and proudly trot a few meters away. “Both of which options suck.”

In her heart, Rahel never liked putting animals in crates, even when she knew in her head why she had to do it. But her cargo now was a human, not a basilisk, or an oryx, or even a high-functioning bonobo—and for all their biologic composition, humans just weren’t like other animals. Assuming that spending every leg of a seven-gate trip in almost total isolation didn’t irreparably damage his psyche, he was still sure to suffer from whatever distorted visions his imagination fed him about what waited at the end of his confinement. Most animals had a better time of it if you left them in the dark and quiet, not stressing them with your presence. Human animals, however, could supply plenty of stress just with their own thinking if there wasn’t enough input to keep their overevolved brains occupied.

Which brought them to running around the ship at will. Suddenly, the boy’s kinship with the rest of Terra’s fauna seemed a lot closer than it had moments before. He may or may not be housebroken; Rahel had a four-month-old-puppy, so bathroom habits were the least of her worries. Jumpships contained a great deal of equipment, though. There were places he shouldn’t get into, buttons he shouldn’t push, compounds and instruments he shouldn’t touch. If he’d been a chinchilla, she wouldn’t have cared where he scampered. But this animal was a human—worse yet, a human boy. There wasn’t a door on this ship he couldn’t learn how to open, not a button or panel or storage bin he wouldn’t be able to reach. If she let him run loose, he’d very likely kill himself before they made it to the first gate. Where would all her concern for his freedom and comfort have gotten them then?

In the end, she carried him back to the lounge and tethered him to a table. He’d be able to reach every part of the room except the door, and the lounge offered both a carpet for soft walking and a grotesquely colored couch. She tossed all the extra blankets and pillows into the room at random. Maybe he’d want to make a bedding pile for himself. Maybe he’d want to hide behind the sofa. Giving him such harmless options was the only freedom she could grant.

She fastened the EV tether to the leg of a built-in table, then attached a soft-cuff bracelet to the boy’s wrist. Toad supervised with her head under Rahel’s armpit. Rahel made sure the cuff was tight enough not to chafe but not so tight as to feel like a punishment. Then she burned off the latch so that nothing short of a surgical laser could get the restraint off again. She didn’t know the boy well enough to estimate his intellect, but she’d seen orangutans fiddle their way out of soft-cuffs just like this one. She wasn’t taking any chances.

The boy came awake while she was checking the last of the cable connections. Crawling out from under the table, Rahel stood to find the boy squatting at the other end of the room, heels flat to the floor, hands linked in front of his shins. He didn’t look up at her, instead fixing his attention on the soft-cuff encircling his wrist. He picked at the edges, followed the curve until reaching the ball joint that connected the tether. Then he closed his hand around his wrist and sat, eyes downcast, face obscenely still.

A splash of wetness darkened the teal stripe in his T-shirt, quickly overlaid by a second drop, then matched by a third. Still, Rahel didn’t recognize the uneven splatters for tears until the boy heaved a thin, stuttering sigh and began rocking silently.

She snatched at Toad’s collar when the puppy tried to toddle over and investigate. Leave him alone, Rahel told herself as she hefted a squirming Toad and soft-footed toward the door. He’s lost everything else—at least you can leave him his privacy. The boy sobbed with his arms around his knees and his eyes squeezed fiercely closed. Maybe he hoped that when he opened them again, he’d be back in whatever world from which he’d been stolen.

Toad’s groan of frustration stopped Rahel in the doorway, surprising her more than the puppy’s desperate struggles. Toad had never seen a human cry before. Maybe it was that utter strangeness that made her so alarmed at the boy’s behavior. “My fault for raising you to be such a good girl,” Rahel whispered. She rubbed her nose against the puppy’s skull, then let Toad clatter back down to the floor and jitter across the room. The stocky terrier slipped up to the boy with head and tail slung low, ears drooping as she waggled her rear end.

Rahel watched the puppy slide her head under the boy’s arm to nose at his chin. Just like dogs, humans had evolved within a pack structure. Status, discipline, and social intercourse were a part of both species’ most basic genetic wiring. It was why dogs made such good companions, and why humans so easily passed themselves off as naked, tool using, two-legged dogs.

But maybe the needs of canines and humans overlapped more than Rahel had realized. If Toad had been manhandled and ignored for as many days or weeks as this boy had been locked up on his own, she would have exhausted herself with happiness for anyone who would interact with her, especially if that someone let her run around and chew on things and in general act like a dog. Rahel wondered how long it had been since the boy had been allowed to act like a human, no matter how uncivilized that behavior might be.

Creeping only as far as the end of the sofa, Rahel lowered herself to the floor with her back against the armrest. She listened to Toad groan and whimper, and made sure that a shoulder-width of her back remained visible if the boy cared to look up from his weeping. She wouldn’t intrude on his grief by looking at him, but at least she could try to tell him that she was there in case he needed her. That he could retain whatever he recognized as the singularity of himself, but as long as Rahel cared for him, he wasn’t completely alone.

When the airlock buzzer jolted her awake some unknown stretch of time later, Rahel at least knew what ship’s function had startled the hell out of her this time. She pushed groggily up on one elbow and blinked around the lounge while Toad climbed to her feet and stumbled around the end of the couch in search of a less active sleeping place. “What is it?” Rahel croaked, scrubbing at her eyes and trying to remember why she’d curled up to sleep next to the lounge sofa.

“There are four beings requesting entrance at the main airlock.”

She rose up on her knees to look for Toad and found the puppy on the other end of the room, flopped onto her side among a pile of blankets, pillows, and boy. “Can you tell from visual who it is?” she asked the ship, somewhat more quietly.

“Yes. It is Larry.”

Rahel jerked a startled glance toward the invisible overhead realm from which the ship’s voice always came. “Larry?” Four of them? In the middle of the night? Or maybe it wasn’t the middle of the night anymore. She gripped the arm of the sofa to drag herself stiffly to her feet. “What time is it, anyway?”

“Station time is 1157 hours.”

Almost noon. She’d been asleep longer than she thought. “All right, let them in.” At least the tlict were unlikely to care about her rumpled clothing and disordered hair. Still, she finger-combed what hair she could away from her face while quietly closing the lounge door behind her.

The staccato chatter of alien feet on metal decking greeted Rahel when she reached the end of the corridor. The four tlict tick-tacked around the main compartment, skirting the fetid shipping crate, stooping to groom each other’s belly fur, and randomly scratching themselves with their tiny lower arms as if unable to catch a persistent flea. Walking far enough into the chamber to catch at least one Larry’s attention, Rahel clapped a hand over her mouth to hide a jaw-stretching yawn.

“Good morning.” Then, remembering the ship’s time quote, she amended, “Good afternoon,” and tried not to yawn again.

The tlict froze, spiders mesmerized by a pluck on their communal silk. From just inside the airlock, the smallest—a rusty cream-and-brown as opposed to his companion’s olive green—caressed its own back with its hindmost legs and juggled a translator into position.

“Good breathing,” the translator’s passionless voice proclaimed. A background buzz, like distant voices muttering, blurred the otherwise stilted diction. “Wise air. Good breathing.”

Rahel nodded. “Right.” It was too early in the morning to sort out tlict syntax. “Are you—” She gathered all the aliens up in a single gesture. “Is one of you the Larry I met earlier this morning?”

Two of the other tlict tiptoed over to join the translator, and the ambient mumbling faded. “Larry-this. Not-visit. No. No.” A touch from one Larry’s upper manipulator arms brought the third tlict over, as well. “Larry-that. Gertrude breathing. Larry-that. Not-current. Larry-this. Not-tlict you retrieve. Yes. Yes.”

Rahel pulled back a careful step. “Retrieve?” She wasn’t sure she liked the sound of that.

“Yes. Yes.” How many of them were supplying the answers, she wondered? How many could hear and understand what she was saying? “Gertrude tastes this,” one or more of the Larries insisted. The translator blatted once with static, then cleared again. “Not-tlict you. Breathing strangeness. Answer. Worry. Answer. Strangeness.” The tlict all knotted together, lower arms striving to interlink. “Answer. Gertrude.”

Gertrude. Rahel scrubbed at her face, suddenly climbing toward full wakefulness as she analyzed the partial sentences collecting around her. “Who’s Gertrude? Another Larry?”

Only with an alien could that question come close to making sense.

“No. No.” Three bloated abdomens cringed close to the floor. “Not-Larry. Gertrude. Not-roaming. Gertrude. Not-simple. Gertrude.”

“Gertrude,” Rahel said, her stomach chill with understanding, “is a female.”

“Not-Larry. Yes. Gertrude. Yes.”

A female tlict. The creature the mazhet had said she would never live to see.

“She’s not planning to eat me, is she?” Rahel stuffed her hands into her trouser pockets, finding the snooze pistol still pushed into the folds of fabric. She closed her fist around it protectively. “I mean, I don’t usually visit people who are planning to eat me.”

“Gertrude. Worry. Answer.” The translator tlict pushed back between two of the others. “Not-tlict you. Answer. Not-ingest. Answer.”

She nodded slowly, but didn’t take her hand off the snooze pistol. “In that case, I can probably stop by long enough to talk with her.” Would the mazhet pay for details of the first human-tlict coffee klatch? She’d have to ask when she and Gertrude were done. “Just let me get my boy—”

“No!” “No!” “No!” “No!”

The objections cascaded one atop the other, underscored by an orgy of tlict writhing and stomping. As the long silver translator rolled free of the bundle, its metallic voice squealed, “No! Not-tlict merchandise. Not-follow. No. No! Gertrude worry. Not-tlict you. Answer. Worry. Not-tlict merchandise. No!”

“OK! OK!” She beat back an urge to retrieve the translator for them, unwillingly repulsed by the very alienness of their display. “I’ll leave the boy here. But you have to bring me back before too long. He can’t stay completely alone.”

“Yes. Yes. Not-tlict you. Follow.” One of the twitching green Larries plucked up the errant translator. It passed between all four of them on its way back to its original holder. “Answer. Worry. Answer. Strangeness. Yes. Yes. Gertrude breathes.”

“Let’s keep us both that way.” As they stepped into the airlock, Rahel wondered if a snooze pistol would even work on a tlict.

With luck, she wouldn’t have to find out.

Smells. Wet, frigid, alien smells. Smells that made her mouth taste like ginger, smells that clung like spider silk to her hair. Something hiding in the odors made her heart turn over with grief—but it wasn’t a smell Rahel could sense with her nose, just a feeling that swelled up inside her from nowhere as she followed the Larries through the unchanging corridor. In the cold, voiceless darkness of the tlict jumpship, she mistook the melancholy for reality. Then they passed out of whatever area produced the sad aroma, and she felt only confused and manipulated, and more than just a little afraid.

She should never have agreed to come here.

Frost flowers salted the walls where the corridor finally widened into a cathedral-sized chamber. A scaffolding of struts and steam smothered an unseen light source, throwing the cables and elaborate grillwork spanning the ceiling into a sparse, shadowed flatness that reminded Rahel more of wrought iron than jumpship design. She stopped when one of the Larries picked at her shoulder. A cloud of her own breath washed back in her face with clammy staleness, and she was startled by how different it smelled from the rest of the air.

“I hope you guys don’t expect me to go on without you.” The rush and roar of some gas pumping device deadened her voice even in her own ears. “I can’t see, and I don’t know where you want me.”

“Follow. No. Follow. Ending.” Words like whispered vapor drifted down from above, so soft as to be only in Rahel’s imagination. She craned her head upward in search of a speaker, but the Larry behind her pressed all four thorax arms against her back to keep her from moving away.

“Good breathing,” the fragile voice pronounced. A puff of curling steam blasted outward from either side of the room’s central strutting. “Wise air. Gertrude-this. Larries touching. Not-tlict you.” The grillwork high above tipped downward, and every cable and structure in the room rearranged itself as the massive creature shifted position. “Gertrude-this.”

Dizzy terror crammed a fist into Rahel’s chest. Gasping, she clapped both hands to her mouth and stumbled backward a step to keep from falling to her knees. All four Larries scampered forward to preen their mammoth consort. Rahel didn’t want to feel the prejudice—didn’t want to fear anybody just because they were huge, and hideous, and impossibly different. But her eyes kept flying between the multiple joints and grip-pers, the bony plates of ornamentation, the workings of the Larries’ mouths as they nursed at knobs along their Gertrude’s belly, and Rahel found hard to ignore the primal instinct that said she shouldn’t let this monstrosity exist in the same world with other people.

People in glass houses, her civilized brain reminded her sharply. After all, she was in the tlict jumpship—as the monster among them, she should probably exercise a little tolerance.

“Gertrude.” Rahel wasn’t sure if she’d actually found the breath to croak the single word, so cleared her throat and dropped her hands to call the greeting again. “Gertrude, my name is Rahel Tovin. I…” She tried to think how to best acknowledge her reason for being here, then decided that discussing anything beyond the perfectly obvious would just get garbled in translation anyway. “Larry said you wanted to talk to me.”

“Yes. Yes.” Gertrude scraped arms on head crest to produce a hollow humming. “Not-tlict merchandise. Larries breathing. Gertrude-this. Worry.”

“The merchandise.” Rahel slipped her hands into her pockets. For some reason, the warm outline of the snooze pistol didn’t feel as comforting as it once had. “The feral boy.”

“Yes. Yes.” The translator pressed to Gertrude’s thorax purred breathily. “Not-tlict merchandise. Not-tlict you. Same. Yes? Same. No!”

“Yes.” Rahel nodded. “The merchandise is human. He’s what my people call a feral child. Can you… taste what ‘feral’ means?” Gertrude prodded at her Larries, but none of them gave any sign of understanding. “He grew up without the help of other humans. Like an animal. He can’t function within human society, or even think like a human anymore.”

“Worry. Worry.” Gertrude’s armor clacked like rifle shots as she shivered. Two of the Larries disengaged from their nursing, clawing at their mouths as if to clear them of some vile flavor. “Wild-not-tlict-not-think-larva-thing-that. Not-tlict merchandise. Damaged. Yes? Animal. No.”

“No—not damaged.”

“Animal,” Gertrude persisted, shuddering her head crest. “Yes?”

Rahel sighed and scratched at her scalp. “No. I mean yes. I mean…” She groaned and knotted both hands in her hair. “The merchandise is human,” she finally said slowly, forcing herself to make eye contact with the gertrude. “The merchandise is also an animal. All humans are animals—”

“Not-tlict you. Tlict-think you. Yes? Yes?”

No. No. Big time no. “Humans are intelligent, yes. Very intelligent. But much of what we are is information that we learn—information that only happens if we keep in constant contact with other humans.” Rahel watched the Larries huddle back against the Gertrude’s legs to chew their pincers. “Except for that information and our ability to pass it on, we re just as much slaves to our instincts as the smallest paramecium.”

Gertrude tasted every surface on her translator, rubbed it between her armored plates, tasted it again. “Not-tlict you.” The translator buzzed. “Not-tlict you. Alone. Mature. Yes? Yes?”

Rahel tried to knit together the string of word concepts, but finally shook her head. “I don’t understand.”

“Larva-you. Adult-you. Not-alone. Change. Information. Change. Yes? Yes?” An expanse of bony arm stretched out above Rahel, then recoiled at the last moment as though unwilling to actually touch her. “Larva-you. Adult-you. Alone. Not-change. Not-information. Not-change.”

“Humans never…” Rahel spread her arms uncertainly. “We never change. We keep the same form all our lives.”

“No!” Front legs pumping, Gertrude’s barbed elbows scraped sparks against the metal walls. “Larva. Adult. Not-same. Can’t-same. Never-same.” Drops of light showered around her, singeing the Larries with a smell like burnt roses.

“There are differences as we become older,” Rahel admitted. Backing out through the open door was probably not a good idea, no matter how attractive it might seem. “The way humans think, the way we move. All of that is different by the time we’re finished growing. Brand new babies may share the same physical form as all other humans, but they aren’t as well-developed, and they aren’t nearly so large.”

The rust-and-cream Larry used its lower arms to wrench one primary limb up close to its mouth parts. Gertrude flicked the male away from her with a foot. “Not-tlict larva. Not-tlict grow.” Great crest tipped from side to side, testing the torpid air. “Big. Grow. Not-change.”

Rahel nodded. “That’s right.”

A splash of ammonia-bitter stench flared through the room. Rust-and-cream Larry jittered off in a circle, leaving his arm splashing in a pool of mustardy blood on the floor. Rahel jerked back into the doorway with her stomach riding a wave of acid up into her throat.

“Not-adult. Not-tlict.” Something in Gertrude cracked like breaking glass when she pushed upright. “Abomination.”

“It’s our nature!” Rahel shoved both hands into her pants pockets, suddenly wanting the snooze pistol even though she no longer believed it could help her. “It’s the way evolution made us—we didn’t get any choice!”

Gertrude snatched another Larry out from under her, swinging it above her body almost as high as the ceiling. “Abomination,” the translator whispered coolly. “Abomination. Not-tlict. You.”

Skating for purchase on the smooth deck, Rahel pushed off against the doorjamb and tumbled as much as ran into the open corridor. A tlict body shattered against the bulkhead behind her. She felt the splash of fluid from its ruptured organs, heard the crash when it slid down the wall, choked against a surge of bile when the stink of the Larry’s death chased her down the corridor. Horses panicked at the smell of blood; Savanna dogs could be whipped into a killing frenzy. Rahel didn’t wait to find out what the tlict would do when perfumed by the scent of their own deaths.

She bolted the dark corridor with snooze pistol in hand, alert for the clatter of tlict feet on metal, primed to shoot any spindly movement ahead of her. No one and nothing tried to stop her. While the route proved significantly shorter at a dead run, Rahel suspected she had the slow diffusion rate of smell through atmosphere to thank, and not some sudden clemency on the part of the tlict. She slid into the airlock without slowing, slapping at the controls several more times than necessary. Even so, she could see tlict wandering into the corridor she’d just fled while the airlock hatch banged closed.

Running all the way back to her docking bay was simply impossible. Rahel realized that even as she banged on the outside lock door to try and make it open faster. The Interface was larger than most planetary cities, webbed together by transit tubes and slideways, and spiraling outward from its central hub like an intricate crystal helix. So when the tlict jumpship disgorged her, she jumped from the hatch without waiting for the gangway and made a head-down run for the nearest tube portal. As long as Larry didn’t catch her before the next train screamed into station, she could be half a station away by the time her breathing slowed.

Plunging up the ramp to the transport level, Rahel caught the bulkhead to swing herself around the comer and into the tube train vestibule. An orange light throbbed above the row of open tube doors, and a sexless, species-less voice announced in conflicting languages, “This transport now departing for Docking Rings One, Four, and Nine, and for Central Hub Levels One through Seven. This transport now departing—”

“Wait!” Fear of failure—of being caught, of being killed by aliens who couldn’t even explain what she’d done wrong—shocked her muscles with adrenaline and kicked her heart so fiercely she nearly went to all fours trying to scrabble the last distance. “Wait-wait-wait-wait-wait!’’ Her final lunge jammed one shoulder between the closing doors, then a twist wrenched her torso into the narrow opening, and another half-second’s squirming squeezed the rest of her inside. Duacs scattered with yowls and jangles when she thumped to the train floor among them.

“Proctor Tovin.” The glottal rattle preceding the dkaktu’s greeting was nearly lost in the shower of ringing that marked the tube train’s slide into motion. “The mazhet welcome your barter.”

She levered up on her elbows and earned a wet duac nose in the eye. “I’m glad somebody does,” she grumbled, recoiling from cold snuffles at her nose and mouth. Pushing the duac’s head irritably aside only made room for another cat to nudge in and take its place. Rahel finally had to struggle over onto her bottom so she could sit up and use both hands to fend off the curious paws and tongues and whiskers. “You know, I don’t even let my dog give mouth kisses.”

The duacs didn’t seem impressed.

Climbing to her feet, she swiped half-heartedly at the sand and cream hairs clinging to her trousers, then glanced about at the slim statues crowding the silent train. The simple volume of mazhet pressed into the car was enough to drive a person colorblind. Rahel pinched the bridge of her nose, abruptly weary with a headache she hadn’t realized she was nursing. “Did I just bull my way into some kind of private mazhet dining car or something?”

“The mazhet do not eat in public,” the train’s single dhaktu informed her. Rahel couldn’t tell if one of the vibrant alien merchants had first clicked that little bit of data or not. “This vehicle is for transportation services only.” A ribboned and turbaned mazhet with the scarlet robe and chain-link veil of a caravan dohke drifted its hand through the dhaktu’s silky topknot. “Do you wish to initiate barter? The mazhet may construct such facilities as needed.”

“That depends.” She shivered at the thought of where she’d just been, and scrubbed at her arms to try and warm them. “I have need of information.”

The dohke blinked dark glass eyes lazily. “The mazhet possess all manner of information.”

Which didn’t surprise her in the least. “You even have the information I want, I suspect.” She flicked a finger through a string of duac earrings and cocked her head across the train car at the dohke. “Can you tell me how long the mazhet have conducted dealings with the tlict?”

“No.” The dohke’s only sound was the sparkling ring of its shaken hand. The dhaktu’s voice was ruthless.

Rahel resisted spitting a frustrated oath toward the floor. “How well do you know them, then?” she persisted. “I mean, if 1 had questions about how to handle my dealings with them, would the mazhet be able to supply me with answers?”

Another wave of ghostly chiming whispered through the car as it slowed to match up with another station. “Much about the tlict is not knowable.” Sparks of light danced off the spangled arm the dohke raised to the wall beside it, gold coins fluttering like candle flames in the leftovers of the car’s momentum. “Speaking to the color of your odor, it would seem your dealings with the tlict run quite deeply already.”

“My odor?” She lifted her shirt front to sniff at it, then realized what the dobke must be saying just as the train doors sighed open on either of her. “You mean I smell?”

“Larry tasting.” A dull tlict translator voice joined the clatter of multiple feet on the train car’s floor. “Not-tlict you. Abomination.”

Panic shot through her like lightning. Darting aside, she stumbled over scattering duacs and fetched up hard against a wall of mazhet in her effort to distance herself from the tlict. The Larry, his upper thorax already pushed through the open doors, struggled to cram his forward legs in as he flashed both primary arms with gripping spines extended. Rahel ducked down and back, into the silk aurora of brilliant mazhet finery—

And both tlict appendages snapped off above the elbow. Gripping spines, melted into a row of blackish knobs, splattered like chocolate where the arms hit the floor. Rahel didn’t have time to recoil, nor did she even think to, before the tlict jerked back out the doors as if kicked. When the doors whisked shut to hide it, Larry had already thumped his abdomen flat to the floor, legs and arms and thorax curling into an awkward fist, like a spider left to dangle in the heart of the web where it had died.

Rahel crept forward on all fours. Beneath her hands, the narcotic thrumming of the train’s drive engines felt as reassuring as her own heartbeat. “I… I’m…” This time, the duacs made no effort to pad over and investigate.

A twinkle of movement picked out both the dohke and its attendant dhaktu as the translator helped slip some alien firearm back into the mazhet’s sleeve. Rahel hadn’t heard the gun fire, hadn’t seen the muzzle flash, hadn’t even felt the kiss of its thunderbolt passage. She took a deep breath and blinked away the image of the diet’s melted appendages and the gaudy ribbons of blood that strewed the floor around it. Doing barter with the mazhet no longer seemed the safe, trustworthy business it once had.

The dohke clicked in rhythm with its quiet ringing. “You have spoken with Gertrude.” It wasn’t a question, and neither the dohke nor its brightly dressed dhaktu bothered to look at her.

Rahel nodded stiffly, then crawled unsteadily to her feet, careful not to reach out toward any of the mazhet for assistance. “I—well, yes,” she finally stammered. “Gertrude sent for me.”

“Irrelevant.” Tapping the heads of three duacs in turn, the dohke touched its eyes one by one, then rang its veils by brushing hastily at its mouth. “That was unwise.”

Rahel couldn’t keep herself from snorting. “Tell me about it.”

“What information did you convey?”

“I… I’m not sure…” She scoured her hands against the legs of her trousers, then dragged her sleeves across her shirt as if that could help dislodge whatever smell the tlict had basted her with. “I’m not even sure what we were talking about. She had a lot of questions about the feral boy the mazhet bought for me last evening, and about how humans tell the difference between children and adults.” She looked up at the dohke, shrugging helplessly. “At least, that’s what I think she was asking. And what I think I told her.”

The dohke laced elegant fingers into a single filigreed ball. “Did you reveal to her that humans may not necessarily be bom self-aware?”

“What ‘may not’?” Rahel judged from the dhaktu’s wrinkled forehead that her answer told them more than she’d meant it to. “I think we touched on the basics of society and observational learning. Why?”

Mazhet closed around her in a dervish of maddeningly color. Thin, cool hands grazed fleeting patterns on her cheeks. “You must leave the Interface.” The dhaktu’s voice rose from somewhere out of sight behind the dohke’s left shoulder.

Rahel twisted side-to-side, only to find herself frowning up into the same impassive features wherever she turned. “Why do you think I was in such a hurry to squeeze myself into this transport?” It occurred to her that mazhet body odor reminded her faintly of cinnamon.

“Your ship will require a departure code to cast moorings from the station. You may use the mazhet code 3572019 and apply for immediate departure.”

The numbers ricocheted into and out of her memory as she tried to split her attention between the wall of mazhet and any mnemonic that might help her remember the sequence. “The Newborns said I’d have to apply for a departure code twelve hours before I planned to ship out. Do they let you guys just keep a list of departure codes on hand or what?”

“The mazhet have a special arrangement,” the dohke informed her with a lift of its chin. “Code 3572019 is valid for immediate departure. The mazhet extend it to you as an equitable service.” Another of the mazhet clapped its hands twice, smartly. The dohke added with a bow, “Your employer will be invoiced for the execution of this contract.”

At the moment, she didn’t even care what kind of expenses that invoicing might entail.

“Aren’t you guys gonna tell me what I did to flip the tlict out before I go?”

They stared back at her, even their bells and jewelry silent. Their infuriating calmness made her want to scream. “I’ll pay you for it!”

A dozen voices rose up like a chorus of manic rad-counters, and Rahel found herself uncertain of who to talk to or where to look.

“What the tlict think of, how the tlict feel—much of this cannot be translated to creatures outside the web of tlict genetics.” Human words reeled out of the racketing chaos almost too quickly for Rahel to follow. She wondered if the dhaktu spoke for one of the many mazhet, or all of them, or if it really mattered. “This the mazhet can say: Tlict at birth possess no minds. They possess only hunger, and a need for air and sunlight. In the first days of their lives, tlict children consume more than 70,000 times their own mass, and excrete only once. So rapid is their growth, they achieve adult proportions within seventeen days of birth. At this time, they exhibit the Change.”

Larva-you. Adult-you… Change. Yes? “They turn into adults.”

The dohke and thirteen other mazhet nodded gravely. “Tlict children who do not Change continue to eat, and grow, and reproduce themselves, but they never inherit the intelligence—the sentience—”

Rahel suspected the dhaktu inserted that clarification on his own.

“—Which the tlict judge holds them separate from all senseless, unaware animals. Including their own mindless young.”

Every shudder, scuttle, and tortured half-sentence ground together in her memory like slabs of crushing stone. Caught beneath the weight of her redefined knowledge, Rahel poked through the rubble of what had come before. “I told her we grew up, looking just the same from baby to adulthood. I told her…” she scrubbed her eyes with the heels of her hands and groaned, “…that we were animals, every last human in existence. Just like paramecia.”

“You told her worse than that.” The dhaktu said it, but it sounded like most of the mazhet actually uttered the response. “You told her that humans are unchanged children, abominations who would feed themselves to the destruction of everything else around them. You told her that humans cannot be lived with or trusted.”

Rahel glanced up into the nearest mazhet countenance. “What do the tlict do with the children who never make the Change?”

The dohke alone gave her the answer. “On the eighteenth day, the adults kill them.”

“I’ve got to get off this station.” She made a desperate circle within the knot of mazhet. “Everybody’s got to get offstation.” Everybody human, at least. “Is there some way to get word out to the other human visitors? Through the Newborn administrators, maybe?”

The dohke inclined its head. “Shall this be accepted as an addendum to your contract with the mazhet?”

Rahel was horrified to think how much her blunder was costing. “Yes!”

“This is equitable.” The dohke flicked its hands in a double chime. “It shall be done.” Then it proffered one palm with a delicate mazhet flourish, and waited.

“What?” Not sure what else to do, Rahel slowly slipped her own hand on top of the alien’s. The dohke curled its fingers around her wrist to turn her hand palm upright. “What?” she asked again. One involuntary tug as the dohke accepted some small, narrow tool from another mazhet proved she couldn’t pull herself free, so she didn’t try again. “If you don’t mind, I’m kind of in a hurry.”

“The departure code.” Mazhet tool touched skin, and pain cut through her palm deep enough to sear the bones. Rahel barked a short scream and this time tried to yank herself free in earnest. Even throwing the whole weight of her body into the pull didn’t break the dohke’s grip, and mazhet hands at shoulders and elbows discouraged her from fighting further. She clenched her eyes and her jaw, barely noticing the tears that stung her cheeks while the dohke etched seven numbers into her palm so precisely she could see their shapes carved in fire at the back of her brain.

“Now,” the mazhet said at last, releasing her with chill indifference. “You will remember.”

I’ll never forget. Rahel hugged her fist under her chin until she choked up enough courage to crack her eyes and peel her fingers away. Seven shiny, black figures marched with ruler-like alignment across her unburnt palm. Like a freshly printed flimsy, or calligraphied ink. Except these numbers didn’t rub off when she smudged at them with her thumb.

“After all that…” She closed her fist with a shaky sigh. “This number had better be a good one.”

The train doors shushed open onto the corridor tracing the foot of her docking bay. “The mazhet do not lie. Nor do the mazhet dishonor a barter.” Mazhet and duacs moved gracefully aside to open a kaleidoscopic path toward the exit. “But move quickly. The tlict may do both, and do both with equal facility.”

Her hand still throbbed while she waited for the airlock on her jumpship to admit her. First thing after casting moorings, she’d poke and prod whatever she could reach in her palm with the ship’s smartdoc. Maybe she could find out how she could have no cuts or bruises and still hurt so damn bad. But not before I’m moving, she advised herself when the door finally slid open and let her inside. Odds were nobody complained much about pain from inside a tlict Gertrude’s belly, so it really wouldn’t matter if she didn’t first make good her getaway.

The clitter-skitter-scatter of toenails all over decking announced the approach of Toad’s greeting dance. Rahel laughed as the puppy galloped over in an ever contracting sequence of spirals and bounds. She finally snugged herself up against Rahel s legs tight enough to blow wet snorts into Rahel’s hands at the same time as she thumped her butt and wagged her tail in alternating rhythms of worshipful joy. Puppy hair and breath smelled strongly of dog food grease, and Toad’s belly looked round enough to hide a casaba melon.

Rahel shook the dog’s big, ugly head and drummed her hands against Toad’s ribcage. Toad raised her nose with a grunt, then belched indelicately. “Someone’s been a piggy with the dog food.” Rahel grapped a double handful of loose skin and moved it back and forth across Toad’s shoulders. “What’re you doing in the storeroom, anyway? I thought I left you—”

In the lounge. With the feral boy.

Swinging around the doorway to find the soft-cuff and tether intact but empty didn’t surprise Rahel nearly as much as finding out the boy had opened the lounge door with nobody to help him but Toad. Her own damn fault, she admitted with a curse. Feral or no, he was still one of the brightest species to ever grace the Galaxy, and this jumpship had been designed to accommodate people with a lot less motivation than he had. She should never have made the mistake of expecting him to accept his captivity so readily.

“Boy!” Stumbling over Toad to get back into the hallway, she trotted with the puppy on her heels into the passenger sleeping area, Toad’s playroom, and the lab. “Come on, boy, don’t do this to me! Where are you?” Because she couldn’t leave unless she knew he was on board. The thought of ruining humanity’s relationship with the tlict, running up a lifelong debt with the mazhet, and getting Noah’s Ark kicked off the Interface without at least going home with the one thing she’d legitimately paid for was a little too crazy-making, even for her. “Boy!” Please, God, let him still be on board.

“I have the results of the gene spin and cross-match you requested for Feral Aral #1,” the testing station AI informed her when she darted through the lab to glance into the back sampling area. “Would you like a visual display or an audio summation?” Both. Neither. She didn’t have time to pore over the genetics of a specimen she wasn’t even sure she still possessed. Still, she couldn’t make herself run off without getting at least the most basic of answers. Pausing to fidget guiltily in the doorway, she called, “Give me the short version. Where’s he from?”

“Unknown. Feral Aral #1 displays no genetic affinity with any Homo sapiens population currently cataloged by Noah’s Ark.”

Shock jerked her back into the room when she would have dashed away after only half-listening. “But that’s impossible.” As if the AI would lie. As if genetics could lie. “He is Homo sapiens, isn’t he?”

“Yes.”

“Then he’s got to have a closest ancestor in the database.”

“Feral Aral #l’s closest ancestor falls outside my genotype modeling parameters by greater than 25,000 generations.”

“Oh, my God…” This little boy, with his childish stature and narrow build, came from a bloodline that hadn’t crossbred with Terran humans for better than 750,000 years. When Nadder said she didn’t carry genuine animals, she was lying—this boy was more genuine than anything else Nadder could have sold her.

Rahel knew with sudden, bitter certainty that there was no way she could leave the station without the rest of Nadder’s cargo.

“Come on, Toad. I—Toad?” She looked up and down the empty corridor with a growl of frustration. It must be an annoying feral thing to wander away when no one was watching you. “C’mere, Spud! Toad?” She clapped her hands and whistled. “C’mere, you replaceable little tub of trouble!”

Echoing adolescent yaps rang out from the rearmost storage compartment. Where the dog food was kept, of course. A four-month-old terrier was nothing if not self-indulgent. Rahel jogged to the end of the hallway, already planning how she would explain to Saiah Innis that she’d somehow misplaced the greatest biological discovery of this century.

Too gorged to feed herself, Toad sat atop a spill of crunchy dog kibble and contentedly watched her friend chew on a handful with cautious uncertainty. Not the most nutritious fare, even given this boy’s past history. Maybe dog food smelled good when you’d been raised by wolves. Stepping over the boy, Rahel grabbed a few seal-meals at random, then bent to take hold of his arm. “You can eat all the dog food you want once we’re off of this station, but right now we’ve got to haul ass.”

The boy lunged away from her grip, barking with surprise. Rahel dropped hard onto one knee to keep from having to loosen her hold. “Listen to me…” She balanced the stack of meals across her thigh and reached out to gently stroke his arm. Toad wiggled in between them to pursue her hand with sloppy licks. “I wish I could explain to you why everything that’s happening is important, but I can’t. I wish you could explain to me how you and a bunch of extinct Terran animals ended up out here before mankind had even invented the wheel, but you can’t. You’re just gonna have to listen to my voice the way Toad does and understand that I’m not gonna hurt you. Look—she trusts me.” Rahel fondled a hand across the puppy’s face and folded-down ears. “Can’t you?”

Eyes the same dark chocolate as Toad’s watched while the puppy squirmed and wiggled in response to Rahel’s petting. A little of the angry hardness seeped out of the boy’s tense muscles. When he cocked his head to aim a suspicious glare up at her, though, the naked intellect reflected in his eyes slapped Rahel’s face with embarrassment.

“I don’t know if you being stupid would make this easier or harder.” Standing slowly, she let him pull himself to his feet without guiding him the way she would some recalcitrant child.

“Well, that takes care of at least one of our little problems.” She backed into the corridor, then smiled when he followed with only the most requisite amount of wariness. “Now—let’s see how fast you can run.”

Medve’s docking bay stank of alien pheromones and burning polycarbons. The scream of working lasers somewhere out of sight made the boy jerk to a startled stop, and Rahel had to tug at the tail of his T-shirt to drag him along when she started down the access ramp. He trotted up even with her hip, seal-meals clutched possessively to his chest with both hands, and frowned at the broken splashes of light erupting from beyond Medve’s landing pylons. Rahel wondered if he just didn’t like the noise, or if he knew something she didn’t about what Nadder played with while hiding out behind her jumpship. Toad was no help—she bumped happily along behind them, growling, her leash clamped between her teeth. She wouldn’t have noticed a problem if it bit her on the behind.

The laser light extinguished before they’d made it half-way across the bay, throwing the dock into startling darkness and clearing the air for whispered curses and the scrape of metal against something more yielding. Rahel half-expected to find Nadder and her assistant dismantling animal crates in an attempt to do away with evidence of their crimes. But when the albino backed into view around the jumpship’s nose, his welding gloves were sticky with rotten-mustard blood instead of welding flux, and the long, jointed segment he dragged across the deck behind him looked distinctly organic in nature. Rahel stopped where she was and squeezed her hand just above the boy’s elbow to hold him from running.

Nadder, another length of tlict leg balanced over each shoulder, planted both feet when she rounded the jumpship in turn. Her opaque face-guard pointed at Rahel in what could only be a glare. “Why, you sneaky little eco-wench! Where the hell did you get him?”

The sliding slap of seal-meals hitting the deck was Rahel’s only warning. She dropped Toad’s leash and spun to grab the boy with both hands, closing her right fist on nothing but T-shirt when he twisted himself almost completely behind her. With one hand still locked on his elbow, though, that was leverage enough. Hauling back on the fistful of T-shirt, she leapt forward and swept her arms around him as his bare feet lost purchase on the decking. He shouted in anger, nearly crawling up her front in his effort to get away, but she managed to crook one arm around his neck just before he cracked her chin with the top of his head. He answered her with a stamp of his feet and the warm snap of teeth on her wrist.

“Don’t even think it!”

The boy rolled an angry lower lip at her, but, surprisingly, didn’t bite down.

“You so much as give me a love nip, you little throwback, and I’ll have the vet yank all your teeth while he’s got you in for neutering. You understand me?”

Before words were invented, there was tone of voice. Even 750,000 years of evolution couldn’t erase that common heritage. Rahel waited until he eased his jaw open and backed his head away, then slowly loosened her own grip around his throat.

“Good boy,” she said sweetly, in just the right tone to make Toad look up from the floor and wag her tail. Later, when he knew enough words to make explanations worthwhile, she’d worry about constructing a better reinforcement for good behavior. Right now, though, she settled for rubbing his shoulder and plastering on an artificial smile. “That’s a good boy.”

“That’s better progress than I ever made with him. I was just about ready to wire his jaw.” Nadder knocked the face guard up over her forehead, stalking forward to peer at the boy with professional interest. He backed closer against Rahel, but didn’t try to run. “So—did you actually send the mazhet out here to get him, or did their dohke cut a deal with you after the mazhet knew what they were buying?”

Rahel kept her hands on the boy as she guided him around behind her, just as happy to keep him touching her and out of Nadder’s reach. “How I got him doesn’t matter. We’ve got bigger problems, you and me.” She nodded toward the Larry parts Nadder’s albino was so diligently stuffing down the matter reclamater in the docking bay’s wall. “There’s gonna be a lot more of them, you know. One tlict more or less won’t help a lot in the great big scheme of things.”

Nadder picked up one end of a leg when the albino scurried back to her, shoving it into his arms without taking her eyes off Rahel. “You don’t have the faintest idea what’s going on here.”

“Then I’ll take a wild guess. You were doing some kind of business with Larry here when he started getting psycho. Maybe you killed him—maybe he killed himself. What matters is that you ended up with a dead tlict and no good explanation for how he got that way.” Rahel watched the albino force another length of leg down the wall with a tooth-grinding buzz. “Now you’re disposing of the body.”

Nadder pursed thin lips into a pensive frown, tugging on the cuffs of her welding gloves, picking at the seams. Somewhere behind Rahel, the boy started gathering up the dropped seal-meals in furtive grabs. “What is it you want from me?” Nadder asked her coldly.

Rahel stooped to sweep a few outlying meals in the boy’s direction. “I want the same thing you do—to get offstation before the tlict come to find us.”

“Well, then help us clean up the rest of this mess.” Nadder jerked her thumb at the rest of the tlict on the other side of the jumpship. “ ’Cause I put in for a departure code when Larry first tried to take Styen’s head off. Traffic Control said we’d be on queue at least six hours.” She spread her hands and took a few steps backwards toward the hidden work area. “Or are you in too much of a hurry to wait around while we chop-chop?”

Rahel shook her head, winding Toad’s leash up around one hand. “I don’t have to wait around. I can go back to my jumpship and be gone in fifteen minutes.” She smiled thinly when Nadder slammed to a stop and grimaced suspiciously. “I don’t have to take you with me, Nadder, but you’ve got what I want, and I’ve got what you need. I thought we might find some happy middle ground before we all ended up as Larry food.”

“Sonofabitch.” The word burst out of Nadder on a short, soft puff of laughter. “You’ve got a mazhet departure code!” She dropped her fists to her hips in belligerent awe.

Rahel wondered how impressed Nadder would be if she knew what Rahel had done to necessitate getting the number. “And you’ve got Terran-descendant genotypes that haven’t seen a common Earth ancestor in 750,000 years.” She reached around behind her to hook a finger in the boy’s T-shirt collar. Nadder lifted one eyebrow at first Rahel, then the boy. “I want your cargo,” Rahel told her flatly. “All of it. And I want to be on board with it when you pull out.”

“Bullshit.” Nadder slapped the face guard back down into place. “You can’t just take all my merchandise without paying me for it. That’s piracy!”

“I’m paying you with your life.”

“Which won’t be worth shit if I have to welsh on certain financial obligations.” Nadder tossed the albino the cutting torch off her belt and pushed him in the direction of where they’d left the rest of the body. He ducked under the jumpship’s nose and disappeared from sight. “At least give me two-thirds the going rate for anything you decide to keep.”

As if Rahel or anyone else she knew could quote the going rate for black-market genotypes. “One-third going price,” Rahel countered. “And that’s generous for illegal merchandise.”

Nadder shook her head, the slow, knowing gesture of someone much older and wiser in the ways of the evil world. “Half-price.” The arc light of more tlict dismantling illuminated the bay behind Nadder. “And I won’t tell the authorities you arranged for a slave trade using the mazhet as your agents.”

My problem, Rahel thought as she glowered at her own reflection in Nadder’s anodized mask, is that I’m just not slimy enough to make good use of my options.

“Half-price or nothing.” Nadder’s voice rose to a surprising sharpness as she took two rapid steps backward and brought her hands off her hips. “Decide fast!”

Toad slammed the end of her leash hard enough to jerk Rahel half-way around toward the entrance, punctuating her barking with a cataract of wild snarls. The Larries at the docking bay doors cringed into a tangle of legs, arms, and flailing mouths. For an instant, that writhing mass looked too much like Gertrude in her too-small cathedral. Rahel jerked Toad up into her arms and ran toward Medve with the puppy howling dire threats over her shoulder. “Interface! Traffic Control!”

“Interface Traffic Control.” The Newborn’s voice echoed over the bay’s invisible intercom far too calmly to have any idea what was going on. “Online.”

“Departure code—” She shrugged Toad further up on her shoulder to squint at her palm between the puppy’s hind legs. “-3752019. Seal off our bay and queue Medve for immediate departure!”

Rahel snagged the boy’s hem when he dashed across in front of her, trying to aim him for the airlock and not the deceptive safety of the gap beneath the ship. “This way! This way!” He hitched up short, nearly tripping her, then ducked away from Nadder and her albino when they clambered into the airlock with their welding gear in tow. The main bay doors thundered closed, but Rahel didn’t dare turn to see whether any of the Larries had made it through.

“Query, Medve,” the Newborn interjected politely.

“Dammit, not now!” Rahel dropped Toad without releasing her lead and swerved to intercept the boy with her shoulder. He squealed once as she lurched upright and hauled him off the ground, then grabbed frantically for her belt to keep from pitching off her back completely. To his credit, he didn’t try to bite her.

“Traffic Control recognizes 3572019 as a mazhet departure code. Please clarify the nature of your possession.”

Nadder planted her hand on the edge of the airlock to hold it open while Rahel pitched the boy inside. “We bought it from them!”

The Newborn hesitated long enough for Rahel to jump in on top of the boy and Nadder to reel up Toad’s leash and bring the puppy aboard. “Transaction noted,” the robot finally stated flatly. “Class three transport Medve, you are cleared for immediate departure. Cast off moorings at will.”

The inside lock door sprang aside, and Nadder shoved both hands against her albino’s back even though he was already up and running for the pilot’s station. “You heard the Newbie—were clear! Get us moving!” He wasn’t even in sight by the time she added, “Go, goddam you! Go!”

The soundless thrum of maneuvering thrusters rumbled through the jumpship s deck like a dragon’s purr. Sinking back against the airlock bulkhead, Rahel let the boy skitter out from under her and all-four it into the central chamber, where he crammed himself into the comer by a maintenance locker. Not that it mattered where he went now—there wasn’t a ship in existence that would let him open an outside door without a suit on. He could hide under the furniture all the way home for all Rahel cared. It would certainly simplify keeping tabs on him.

Fending off Toad’s curiosity with her elbows, Rahel peeled the seals off three of the dinners and skated them across the deck at the boy while he watched the food travel with dubious longing. Toad scrambled in place with excitement before bolting off after the dishes. Rahel met the boy’s gaze and shrugged while Toad attacked the first plate. “So get up and fight with her. But don’t come crying to me if your sister hogs it all.”

Nadder laughed softly, wandering aimlessly back and forth through the airlock as she picked up welder pieces. “What’re you going to do with him once you get him back to Noah’s Ark?” she asked, stepping over Rahel’s legs to fish out some part from behind the small of her back. “I mean, how long can he keep the lot of you busy, being just the one little guy and all?”

One little guy with a lot of big mysteries. Rahel sighed, watching him creep out of hiding to play tug-of-war with Toad over one of the plates. “If we re lucky, he’ll be another step on the way to finding out how Terran-original genotypes found their way to this end of the Galaxy, and why. He’ll also provide the first real chance we’ve ever had to look at what kind of genetic drift occurs in a truly isolated human population. Between him and the rest of your cargo, we’re not going to be at a loss for things to do.” She pried up the comer on another of the meal packets and sniffed at the contents to see if her stomach was hungry.

“Aw, hell…” Nadder hoisted the bits of bloody equipment and dragged them toward the locker the boy had just deserted. “Haven’t you figured it out yet? You’re not gonna take my cargo.” She dumped the load unceremoniously into the locker. “You’re not gonna want it.”

Rahel lowered the food tray back to her lap. “What are you talking about?”

To her surprise, Nadder only laughed again and settled contentedly back against the locker door. “I’ve got a storehold full of animals, all right,” she said, smiling. “Fifteen hundred suspension coffins, and none of ’em carrying anything more exotic than a legal-bought budgerigar tailored to look like a Carolina parakeet. They’re fakes!” The marketeer tossed her arms wide with hapless delight. “Every last one of ’em! And I sell ’em to fashionconscious idiots who don’t know how to tell the difference. I’ll even let you examine ’em, if you want to, ’cause I know what you’re gonna find.”

“But…” Rahel blinked a flustered look at where the boy crouched with Toad, picking green beans out of his ramen and dropping them down for the puppy to gobble. She couldn’t remember if she’d noticed that he used his hands to eat before. She wasn’t even sure if that was significant. “I ran his gene spins. He’s Homo sapiens, and he’s not from Earth. You can’t fake raw data like that!”

Nadder shrugged and folded her arms. “I’m sure you can’t. But I never had to. The couple times I stumbled across anything Terran-original, it was just ’cause I could pick it up cheap. It’s not like they’d sell for any more than my dress-ups do. Naw, I got your boy from the same place I got the couple other Terran genotypes that probably lured you here, proctor.” She sighed at the boy with a certain touch of ironic fondness, and smiled. “I bought him from the tlict.”

“What do you mean you lost the jumpship?”

Frustrated, exhausted, Rahel couldn’t be bothered to lift her head from her hands and see what expression accompanied Paval’s disbelieving squeak across the comlink. “I left it at the Interface. It wasn’t like I had a lot of time to consider better options.”

“Taking the jumpship wasn’t an option?”

Rahel cocked a glare at the comlink screen, and Paval returned her look with a scowl of equal annoyance. “Considering everything leading up to my decision,” she told him, “no, I didn’t think it was.”

Paval sat back in his chair and rubbed his hands across his face as if he’d been waiting all night just to hear this depressing news. “Well, what am I supposed to tell Proctor Innis?” he asked, a little peevishly. “He’s already angry about this bill from the mazhet, and everyone else is angry about whatever happened with the tlict.” He sighed the deep, soulful sigh of the young. “Proctor Tovin, you’re supposed to be setting me a good example, but all I end up getting is confused.”

“And sarcastic.” She turned half away from the comlink to check on the passenger tucked comfortably under her bed. He’d taken the blankets and all the extra pillows, and now all she could see of him was one elbow and the top of his shaven head from somewhere inside the fluffy bundle. Even Toad had been chased out of the boy’s makeshift habitat when she’d tried to cuddle up with him for softness. “At least I’m not coming back empty-handed. Tell Saiah I’m bringing home an animal more valuable than anything we ever thought he sent me for.”

“A Terran animal? Really?” Paval sat up attentively from more than a hundred light-years away. “How many? What kind?”

“One. The most successful, complicated, and misunderstood animal on Interface station. And a kind Noah’s Ark has never really worked with before.” Rahel watched the boy roll over in his sleep, hugging himself into a ball as small as a baby and as complicated as the world. “I just hope we’re up to the challenge.”

EDITOR’S NOTE: This story is part of the author’s “Noah’s Ark” series, which also includes “Blood Relations” (June 1992), “Ice Nights” (October 1992), and “Tide of Stars” (January 1995).

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The Human Animal
by Julia Ecklar