Episode 8 - Symbiosis

  Chapter 73 - Eddies

  The cabbage soup is just about the blandest thing I have ever tasted. Barely seasoned with salt, and thickened with one of the long-life meal cakes, it has an unpleasant texture between slippery strands of boiled cabbage. It's all a little too close to vomit. The nausea, which is a familiar companion for me, rises as the first mouthful hits my tongue, and I push the bowl in front of me forward.

  “At least drink your water ration,” suggests Addie sitting next to me. “You bubblers underestimate how much you will dehydrate out here. Can I have your soup? Or are you not done?”

  “No, I’m done,” I say, pushing my bowl sideways to her. We’re packed in the trailer around the central table, a whole shift of us taking a chance to eat with our respirators off and environmental suits stripped to wear around our waists. I am still wearing the clothing underneath my suit that I came from Aquila in. The others wear matching grey underlayers in a fine cloth, with the occasional patch or modification to express their personalities.

  “Your loss,” says Addie.

  “Crew, announcement,” suddenly interrupts Wesley’s voice, emerging from deeper in the trailer behind the curtain to the bunks. He hangs from one hand that grips an I-beam running across the ceiling of the trailer habitat. “Quartermaster Cardoso has a re-vote for us - I’m taking it on her behalf for this shift. Avians have spotted a storm on the horizon. Common sense would dictate we abandon our previous vote to check out Baise for new pickings, but we’re thin currently because of some operational expenditures.” He oddly pauses to look at me as he finishes that sentence. “Safer bet might be to see if we can pick up some contract work at All-Markets that will give us partial pay up-front, but it's risky if we can’t find anything. Blue is abide by the old vote, red is play it safe.”

  “Quartermaster’s recommendation?” asks Carol, dabbing his chin with a scrap of cloth as he finishes his soup.

  “Blue. We’ve got repair needs beyond just water and electricity. Risk needs taking,” says Wesley, shaking his jaunty cap out with one hand and punching it with the other to shape it into a bowl.

  Everyone at the table lowers their hands to a waist or a pocket, drawing out the two strange beads I had noticed on Wesley when we first met. Hands hide their selections, and one after another each person at the table drops a bead in the hat. I watch silently.

  “Do I get a vote?” I ask Addie.

  She shakes her head. “Members only, sorry.”

  Wesley shakes his hat out and examines the contents. “Yeah, I don’t even need to count that. Blue it is. The other two shifts were the same. Take your beads back.”

  As Wesley turns back into the trailer, I watch Addie thread her blue bead back onto the charm she has them tied to. “Why’d he look at me when he announced that?” I ask her.

  “Oh. This is embarrassing. Uh… so we are all kind of paying for you right now. Lupine Cooperative is employee owned - we all have a share of the profits, although there usually aren’t many. Operational expenses come first.”

  I blink. “I’m an operational expense?”

  Addie beams. “Yeah!”

  “How do you become a member?”

  “Uh, usually you get born in and inherit a parent or siblings’ equity. Sometimes middle-management free-men buy or trade their way in. It technically splits the profits, so we gotta make something from their joining. We’ll trade in just about anything, but the niche currencies aren’t worth much to us.” Addie scratches her nose as she thinks. I can still see the red rim around her face from the respirator. Mine mustn't be so different.

  “Huh,” I mutter. An odd thought bubbles across my mind. “Do you know the Captain’s son?”

  “Which one?” asks Carol, then he frowns. “Oh, right, you’re from Aquila. Everett runs with Captain Rattakul, most of the younger cobs here don’t hold a high opinion of him.”

  “None of you like him much,” I mutter.

  “Do you?” asks Addie.

  I sniff, my lower lip tightening. “I guess I meant the other son then?”

  “The younger Wyatt Moreau is in All-Markets with his mother. He’d be getting close to old enough to begin joining us soon,” muses Carol.

  “Oi, Scout,” calls Wesley suddenly.

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  I rock back in my seat between the other members of the crew to spy him past the hanging curtain by the beds. “Here.”

  “‘Here, Bosun’,” he corrects. “Get over here. I got your bunk set up.”

  I push out from the lunch table to skirt around the wall behind a few folks sitting to join him at the back of the trailer. A corridor of double bunks lines the rest of the trailer, each with a curtain for privacy and a nook for belongings. Wesley pats one that already has my bag shoved into it, and a neat pile of the grey long-sleeved layers I see a lot of the other crew wearing under their environmental suits.

  “This is you. I picked out some new clothes for underlayers from our storage. These will get too hot soon -”

  “It gets hotter?” I interrupt.

  Wesley laughs. “Aye, cob. It gets much hotter. It’s only spring. As I was saying, we’ve got some shorter-sleeved layers we can swap you into. If you’re still here when the winter comes, we’ll deal with that then. Your shift will get a sleep next before we get to Baise. Try and rest, we’ll need you to prove you were worth what we’re paying for you once we get there.”

  I run my hand over the simple sheet of the bunk. I don’t think I will need many layers, if anything the trailer is slightly hot for sleeping. “What about showers?”

  Wesley shakes his head. “No showers out here. You already saw the shit trailer earlier. Organics are too valuable to leave around. Water is too valuable for anything but drinking. Every day you get a ration for cleaning and a clean rag. I recommend you focus on pits and crotch. I’m not joking, you get skin-rot out here, we ain't got much in the way of medical care beyond the basics. You’ll hate yourself when you itch ‘til we get back to town. Safety first.” He mimes scrubbing his armpits with a sarcastic whistle.

  “Great.”

  “You’ll get used to it, bubbler. Let me know if you need anything, but I’d rather you didn’t. And try and eat some cabbage soup. You’ll crave a fresh vegetable soon enough.”

  I gallop alongside the rolling human homes, blind symbionts at the fore of each. They run, not free like me, but with great weights tied to them as each metal box rattles along behind. The human convoy tries to be a landslide at their tails, rumbling and surging across the landscape. Instead it is nothing more to me than unwelcome chaos.

  I suspect so many of my brothers and sisters are content with their labor because they know no different now. They may even believe they are alone, dreaming of the hollow again where they subsume into the black with our collective. Or maybe this pale freedom is a life well lived when they know no other. It is freedom I might take from them when I kill humans, and maybe when I kill them too.

  Once I dreamed of only freedom through death for myself. But I am not satisfied with such an existence. I dream of more now. I do not know what my brothers dream of. They were never meant to dream. Here was not for them.

  My memories of blood and battle grow distant, the raw edge of betrayal for my old loves passes with the seasons. Memories always slip by me eventually, like water between the rocks. I remember my youth when I was playful, splashing waves. I remember my first love, who loved me and grew old and freed me with her own hand. I remember when the mother was rich and giving, she gave to me and I channeled her for the humans. Then I remember betrayal and stink and smoke and black metal. I remember sweet blood. I became surf and abrasive salt. I became lightning.

  I woke as I died, blooming with hot rage and the strength of typhoons. But as the snow melts, and new boughs spring verdant, the scars from past seasons on cut trunks crust with fresh bark.

  I dreamed of showing Conrada falling leaves. She dreams of showing me something new.

  And here… is something new. I have not walked in the mother’s embrace in a very long time. I did not expect to find her so sickly. It has been a long time since humans retreated behind the domes, the details happening between my sleeps or hazy in my memories. Conrada has made it further with me than any of my hosts since the great betrayal. The cost she has paid diffuses to me. I am not unaware of the toll our symbiosis extracts upon her. Mutual parasitism was the phrase the humans used. I have not heard it before.

  A cool wind blows in the night, ruffling my fur. I am Hyaenid again. I dislike the form I consider my truest when it is subjected to labor, bound in human materials and contained when there are open spaces to roam. This form is free, this form can slip between their odd moving metal boxes and disappear into the night. Conrada thinks of me, she took the disgusting saddle they forced me to wear off my back before she retired to sleep.

  When I sniff the air, I smell only dry dust and the faint hint of dead vegetation. I smell no moisture, I smell no rich humus nor organic musk. I smell no death. I smell only what the mother has become, empty bones. The rest is human stink: sweat, waste, rot. As I look into the dark, searching for any hint of the greenery I remembered galloping between, I find nothing. Perhaps here is no longer much different from the hollow.

  I keep my connection with Conrada faint and quiet so I do not quicken her from sleep. Her complexity and contradictions are tiresome. As much as she feels our hatred, she feels regret, fear, guilt, curiosity. It is a tumble, I will let the humans have their messy thoughts. I am only one thing at a time - rage or joy or boredom. Just as I am one shape or the next. In the spaces in between, when I am fog and rolling mist, I am nothing more than my fading memories. She fills me in where I grow faint, she tethers me where I would be lost.

  And she fills me with what I forgot for so long with no real love - a longing for connection. Hands on my hide, fingers in my fur. Love. With Conrada’s eyes, I see myself as she tucks my mane over one ear.

  In a memory, it would have been her birthright to the greatness due to those who could invite, the birthright her blood mother’s that I have followed were due. Her connection with me has grown strong, stronger than almost any host I remember, even hampered as it is with her half-formed blood-bond. Now they have perverted that greatness and shared it too greedily. If she were born in another era, they would have recognized her power. I was right to wake one last time for this invite.

  I pad upon a rock that still strives upwards towards the sky. As I climb it, I slip like mist and drifting wind rather than containing myself to solid form. At the top I sit, and look out upon an empty world blanketed in white. My tail tucks close to my feet. Ahead of me now is the human convoy, above them there is one brother who is unmistakable. He labors as I do, a prince of the hollow reduced to petty human burdens. His neck is stretched straight, his golden crest lowered as he flies with great wing beats. I could not be so vast, my form does not stretch that far.

  I watch the storm clouds roll in. It has been a long time since I felt rain.

  I slip into mist, and emerge gliding on the wing. Perhaps I will fly in my brother's eddies and remember joy instead of rage for today.