Present day.
The walk from the market home took surprisingly little time. I cut like a whirlwind through the surging mass of city dwellers along the wide modern plastic boardwalk, then turned into a narrow side street between buildings, paved in perfectly ordinary sandstone. I'd been living on Orren'Tal in Sector N-63 for almost a year, and the juxtaposition still got me every time; high-tech materials sitting right next to village-level life that you'd only expect on the most underdeveloped planets in the Federation.
For a long time, I'd moved from planet to planet, never letting myself stay anywhere longer than a couple of months. Tur-Rin wasn't bad, but the density of people and the constantly rotating faces wore on me. It was a pleasure planet, and tourists poured in from every corner of the galaxy. Sooner or later, I was sure, some arriving Zwargian would recognize the widow Gyu-El.
After Tur-Rin I tried Zahran, the human planet. Educational, but not for me. Almost no vegetation, an overwhelming amount of dirty transport, a low standard of living. The decision to leave became final when I ran out of skin-masking cream and couldn't find anything remotely similar anywhere on the planet.
After Zahran came Tanorg, the second human planet. I liked it considerably more. It reminded me a little of Zwarg, actually—clean, fresh, well-kept, with a higher degree of automation than my actual homeworld. I even managed to withdraw money anonymously from special terminals a few times. I was seriously considering staying when an entire Space Fleet ship arrived, along with a dozen Zwargians in black suits. I knew exactly what Zwarg's emissaries were.
After that day the optimism evaporated, and I started what I privately called my sprint across the Federation. Mittaria, Zonnen, Pix. Wherever I went, sooner or later I'd hear about the men in black or almost walk straight into them. The final straw came in a cafeteria when I stepped away to the bathroom and came back to find three suspicious types moving slowly between the tables, scrutinizing faces. Maybe my imagination was getting the better of me. Maybe my nerves had finally given out. Either way, I grabbed my bag, slipped out through the service exit, collected my suitcase from the studio apartment I'd rented three months in advance, and went straight to the spaceport. I asked a startled operator for a ticket on the next available flight out of Federation space. Any flight.
That was how I ended up on Orren'Tal.
From the very first day, the planet struck me as fundamentally semi something. Semi-agrarian, semi-legal, semi-populated, semi-developed, semi-automated. Just semi; probably the single most accurate word for it. It managed to combine things that had no business existing side by side: near-manual labor that bordered on the medieval could sit right next to brand-new imported cleaning robots of the latest generation; solid, well-built homes with gardens stood mixed in with outright shacks made of clay and cheap plastic. Humanoids of every race and income level lived here, but most importantly, Orren'Tal positioned itself as an open-port planet, no entry visas required, friendly to its neighbors in Sector N-63 and to the Federation at large. That last detail was what had gotten me onto a charter flight in the first place.
At the information desk in the spaceport itself, I'd spotted a listing for an adorable little house being sold by its owner for what amounted to pocket change by Zwarg standards. By that point I was so exhausted from moving that I bought it on the spot, almost without thinking. For several months I'd half-expected the emissaries to show up here, too, but the weeks passed, and I never once encountered a pureblooded member of my own species on Orren'Tal. The iron claw squeezing my heart began, slowly, to loosen.
Then the wind season started. A gust ripped a section of old roof tiles loose; palm-sized ceramic pieces, a type of roofing I hadn't even known existed until one woke me up by shattering on the ground. While I was running around local markets looking for membrane rolls to patch the damage, the winds brought a cloud of desert locusts; harmless, but deeply unpleasant. After the locusts came freezing rains, which gradually turned acidic. By the time I'd dealt with the leaking roof and a flooded basement, the warm, comfortable summer had crept back in without my noticing. Orren'Tal wasn't exactly the planet of my dreams. Somehow, though, it had become home.
The sandstone crunched under my feet. I stopped at the crooked gate of my house and punched in the access code. The little electronic panel beeped red at me. I sighed. Of course, how had I forgotten? The last storm had taken out the external wiring. I dug through my pockets looking for the temporary iron key. While I was trying to remember where I'd put it, my eye caught the figure of my neighbor. A large, solidly built Orshan woman with olive skin was aggressively pulling up enormous kistas bushes as though they'd personally wronged her. She'd tucked the hem of her dress into her belt, exposing substantial calves and thighs; scandalously vulgar by Zwarg standards, perfectly ordinary for Orren'Tal.
"Hey, Lesta!" Gutrun bellowed, looking up from her battle with the shrubbery. "So where's the man, then?"
I rolled my eyes. Different planet, different mentality, different way of life, and still someone was trying to set me up. To be fair, Gutrun had no idea I'd been to the Maestro of Souls and Desires. This was just her standard ritual greeting.
"Same to you, Gutrun! Managing just fine without one," I smiled, having finally located the key.
"You're so tiny, so thin, such a fragile little human," my neighbor launched into her favorite song, shaking her curly head and clicking her tongue. "I still can't believe you made it through the acid rain season!"
I just shrugged and smiled. How? Well, if I'd actually been human, I probably would have stayed inside. Instead, I'd walked calmly to the market, bought an umbrella-sphere and a polymer rain cape, and carried on as before. I did end up with some burns, but they faded in three days. Zwargian regeneration had its uses. None of this I mentioned out loud.
"No, a woman needs a man around the house; especially a little thing like you, Lesta! That place of yours is enormous," the neighbor continued, easing into her favorite subject. "Look at my boys: Oden, Finnr. They're wonderful! Since Heavart wasn't to your taste… such good workers, and oh, the way they'd love you at night.” She began listing her sons' qualities with enthusiasm.
Orren'Tal was home to all kinds of species, given the open-port policy, but Orshans were the majority. Even though I was accustomed to the appearance of Zwargians, I had flinched the first time I saw an Orshan man: jaw too wide, lower canines jutting up over the lip, forehead a touch narrow relative to the overall proportions, neck massively built. Heavart, Gutrun's eldest, had in fact been my very first encounter with the species.
"Why not offer Heavart?" I asked, hiding a smile.
"Well… you did hit him with the rolling pin!" Gutrun threw her hands up, smearing both cheeks with dirt. "I thought that was it, skull split clean in two! Thank the stars the doctor said he'd be fine."
"He shouldn't have broken into my house."
"He came in because of the smell!" the woman shook her head mournfully. "And the place had been empty so long, so he just…"
"Walked in without an invitation," I finished, remembering how I'd mistaken her eldest for either a burglar or a semi-sentient creature of the wild. Heavart had stared at me with his little bead eyes, I'd panicked at the thought of being hit with a wave of beta-waves, and instinctively swung whatever happened to be in my hands directly at his head.
The gate creaked open, but the little light stayed red. I figured that if I could find the right replacement battery for the electronics, I could get the lock mechanism working faster. The problem was finding the right battery; beyond the external contact placement there were surely other specifications I'd overlooked. And replacing the whole mechanism was probably expensive.
"Want me to send Oden or Finnr over to fix the gate?" my extremely sociable and entrepreneurial neighbor said, as if reading my mind.
I nearly dropped the key imagining what those two would do to it. Orshans were strong, certainly, but electronics were definitively not their area.
"Thank you, I'll manage," I said, trying not to offend her, and, watching the woman yank a bush with thick orange roots clean out of the ground, changed the subject. "Can I take that kistas?"
"This weed?" the Orshan woman looked surprised. "Take as much as you want. I'll pile it over there with the rest. More of your cooking experiments? Oh, you're a brave one, Lesta, not afraid of poisoning yourself, and such a thin little thing too…"
To the soundtrack of Gutrun's enthusiastic commentary, I crossed the yard and went inside. If she only knew that the main ingredient in the pie she liked so much was kistas root. When I'd bought a universal translation device on Tanorg, I'd also picked up a food analyzer, a steel cylinder with a needle tip that vaguely resembled a medical syringe. I'd always loved cooking, and standing there looking at it, I'd thought it might come in handy. As it turned out, I wasn't wrong.
The house was waiting for me with a full to-do list. Load the dishwasher, start the laundry, update the shopping list on the freezer unit so the nightly sync with the main farm depot would set aside fresh milk and a good round of cheese. Change the sheets for crisp ones that smelled of meadow grass.
If Martin had been alive and seen what his wife spent her time doing, he probably would have dropped dead of a heart attack. My late husband had maintained that domestic life killed aristocrats, and washed his hands with visible disgust if he ever had to personally put a plate in the dishwasher. Pulling a clean sheet over a perfectly ordinary non-orthopedic mattress, I smiled to myself at Gutrun's words: That place of yours is enormous. The house I'd bought was considerably smaller than not just the capital penthouse, but even the estate by the Clear Sea. With a basic set of appliances ordered from the iron traders who stopped at Orren'Tal once a month, I managed domestic life perfectly well on my own.
The household chores pulled my mind away from the failed visit to the Maestro of Souls and Desires, and somewhere between the laundry and the fresh sheets, my mood quietly lifted. I was humming a cheerful little tune to myself when I realized I'd finished everything and it was time for bed. The windows had gone full dark without my noticing.
Falling asleep was another matter entirely.
Before bed I checked in to my Intergalactic Bank account, something I did occasionally, just to see how Michel was managing things, and found myself staring again at the message that had sent me to the market that morning.
"I will find you, Celesta, whatever it takes. And the longer you hide from me, the angrier I become."
A chill moved across my skin. Something cold and slippery uncoiled along my spine.
Before leaving Zwarg, I'd bought a new communicator and a new infonet card, then replaced both again on Tur-Rin. I'd done everything I could think of to make myself untraceable, and yet somehow Yudes had figured out that his runaway bride had been using the accounts. How many programmers had he hired to get that message into my personal banking portal? Or had he simply bribed bank employees? Did this mean that even anonymous cash withdrawals were no longer safe? Or was this all empty threats, a way to rattle me into making a mistake?
So many questions. Not a single answer.
Despite the exhaustion and the ache in my muscles, the threat kept surfacing, and with it, my idea of getting a bodyguard. Someone who might not be able to stop Lacoste, but could at least slow him down long enough for me to disappear again. And tangled up with all of it, fragments of today's conversation with the Maestro kept replaying. Two voices in my head had apparently decided to have a full argument.
The humanoid is suffering. He's a slave. And you're just going to walk away, you heartless thing?
If I take him, his life won't necessarily get better.
What if it does? What if he's being treated terribly? Do you think humanoids just decide to die for fun?
Maybe he has some kind of mental health issue.
And maybe he doesn't.
And if he dies while in my care?
Then I'll have to call local law enforcement, my name will end up in the news as the cruel slave owner who worked her semi-contractor to death. Lacoste has serious resources, a wide network of Zwargians working for him. Something like that, even outside the Federation, wouldn't escape his notice. After that it's just a matter of running facial recognition across everyone appearing in the news and cross-referencing with everyone who left Zwarg. Skin color, hair, face shape; it's something, but it's not a real disguise. The right thing would have been to find a surgeon on a planet with decent medicine, except I didn't know a single person outside of Zwarg.
But you've been genuinely happy these two years. You've visited more planets than any Zwargian woman ever has, learned several languages, met different races and cultures, seen the northern lights with your own eyes, kilometer-high waterfalls, mysterious underwater cities…
So what?! Does that mean I'm supposed to risk my life for some random humanoid?
Celesta, have some decency. You escaped the weight of Zwarg's laws and now you have a chance to free a slave. You've always hated any restriction on freedom, and here you are pretending a semi-contractor's fate has nothing to do with you. That's called hypocrisy.
I tossed and turned for half the night. I hadn't even asked his race or his name, and still I couldn't sleep. Only when the comfortable pillow had turned into something resembling a hot plate, and I'd made myself a firm promise to go back for the semi-contractor in the morning, only then did sleep finally take me, deep and dreamless.