Cinnamon Sticks
by B. Morris Allen
THE SLIME HAD been a problem.
“It’s not slime. It’s a podal lubricant and message deposition vehicle.” With some saliva mixed in. When you ate with your feet, it was hard not to leave a bit of drool around. Even in these sterile metal corridors. Even when your heart was broken. Irredeemably broken.
The intake specialist had been unconvinced. “Looks like slime to me.” She (it? Who could tell with Humans?) eyed the trail of glistening ijva Keevor had left behind. “Stands to reason,” she said, “because—no offense—you look a lot like a slug.” It gestured in apparent reference to Keevor’s proudly turgid body, one foot segment high off the ground, all six tentacles bowed forward in deference to the specialist’s authority. “With parasites?” It seemed to mean the takis, which were not parasites at all, but commensal plaquelike creatures that warned of toxic gas concentrations in the deep swamp. Would it want an explanation? “I’m not sure that’s something Plexis needs. Customers slipping and falling all over the place . . .” Perhaps not.
“Not at all,” he had assured it. “The ijva–the slime–dries to a thin, hard coat very quickly.” Not technically true, but he could make it so. What was the point of being a top-class microbiologist if you couldn’t alter your own biochemistry? “Think of it as art.” The art of heartbreak. Though, in fact, his trail did make a very pleasing pattern, a silvery shimmer against the dull steel of the station, like the reflection of midnight clouds on a lake.
“It does have a certain quality,” the specialist mused. “Reminds me of spray paint on brick.”
“Your planet must be a very sad place indeed,” he muttered, keeping his reverberation orifice nearly closed.
“Nonetheless,” it went on as if it hadn’t heard, “I can’t let you in. No skills we need. This is a supermarket, not a research facility. Back you go.”
Back where? For the first time, Keevor felt the beginnings of panic setting in, his mucal glands releasing even more ijva, preparing for a quick escape. The specialist had made it clear that if not admitted, he’d have to go right back out the air lock he’d come in. The fact that the ship which had brought him was no longer waiting didn’t seem to trouble it at all, nor the fact that neither he nor his microbiome was spaceworthy.
“No, wait—” There must be something he could offer, some intersection of his skills and their needs. “I can. . . . I’m a cook! I can cook!” Cooking was a lot like chemistry, wasn’t it? Mix the right ingredients in the right way, and you could synthesize what you liked.
“Sorry. Got cooks up the wazoo here, and who wants that? Can’t let you in. Air supply is limited, see, and we’ve got none for visitors who don’t shop. You have a skill, you shop, or you’re out.”
“Drinks! Drugs! I can make them.” These aliens with their thick, impervious integuments—unable to relish the rich taste of the world through their feet, they looked for stimulants elsewhere. Or forgetfulness. Everyone had something to forget, some past they would rather not confront. Some dismal, failed romance.
The specialist arched the caterpillars on its head, which seemed to indicate thinking, but in the end it said no. “Tempting; we’re always looking for something new, but everyone promises drugs, and they never are. Tempting. Sorry.” It turned away, two big reptilian guards closing in to push him back to the air lock.
“Wait! Wait. I can—” What had she said? “The air situation! I can help. To . . . to keep track of visitors!” How, though? Some kind of marker in the lungs that gradually deteriorated? A simple breath test would indicate the time since application. But complex to administer. And that gray cube over there didn’t seem to have lungs at all.
The specialist had turned back, waving off the reptiles. “I’m listening. What’ve you got?”
Think! A dye, applied to the skin, that changed color with age or exposure. That could work. But how to make it indelible? And how to renew it?
The specialist had started tapping one of two feet, which couldn’t be good; its balance looked precarious to begin with. There must be something. Something simple, yet unique. Something that was easy to apply, hard to fake.
“Take him away,” the specialist said.
“Takis!” Keevor sputtered. “Takis.” They would work. Or could be made to work. “These little flat creatures you see on me. They’re unique. Can’t be faked. You could use them to tag visitors.” It was a good solution. He could see that the specialist was interested. One more thing, then, some little twist to catalyze the decision. “Colors! They could be different colors, for visitors and residents.” Probably he could make them different colors. The larval stage was already a slight blue. In the right light.
“Hmm.” It was interested, all right. “Not sure I’d want one of those on me. What did you call them? Taxis? Do they hurt?”
“Takis. Not at all. It’s quite pleasant. Barely noticeable.” The specialist would hear what it wanted. People were like that. Certainly he had been. “And it will . . . ah . . . clean your skin.” That was true enough. The specialist, with little brown spots all over its face, looked like it could use a cleaning.
They’d overlooked the ijva, in the end. And he had done some judicious localized gene-modding to his mucal glands. The ijva did dry to a hard coat now, and he made it a point not to travel in straight lines. If visitors thought the silvery tracks were art, good for them. They couldn’t taste the despair and depression in the messages he’d secreted, willy-nilly, all over the station.
The takis had been a bigger success than he’d hoped for. With just a few modifications, he’d been able to preserve his life and theirs. He still looked in on the tag farm every now and then, but the Plexis administration had managed takis breeding and care better than he’d imagined. The takis were doing well; he need feel no guilt for manipulating their genetics.
He’d had to find additional work, of course. The takis-airtags had bought his entry into Plexis, but not his sustenance. The intake specialist had helped him out there. Her name was Mae, she’d told him, “You make some good drugs, and I’ll find a home for them.” She’d found enough homes that he’d been able to rent a little lab and retail outlet on a disregarded level. He even had his eye on permanent quarters—a long-term lease on a bar with a suitable “kitchen” area and a little living space above. He’d need to convert the stairs to a ramp, but it would work.
It had worked, so far, to keep him busy, to keep him from thinking. From remembering. But now the business largely ran itself. He had an assistant to run the easy syntheses—a lumbering, hard-shelled amphibian with clumsy grippers, but unfailing reliability and an uncanny sense of timing. And Mae to run the retail—a task she did so well that she’d given up her day job as intake specialist entirely, even preferring it to the takis-care position he could have gotten her.
“No offense, Keev, but I need excitement, you know? And feeding little slimebots just doesn’t do it for me.” He’d tried explaining that takis were neither slime nor bots, but Mae was impatient with science. Or maybe with facts. “Besides,” she’d said with a wink, “you smell good.”
“It’s the ijva,” he told her one day when the shop was quiet, and she’d fallen back to her favorite game of trying to describe his odor.
“It’s cinnamon,” she said, nose wrinkled up and sniffing. “With a touch of licorice.”
It was neither; he’d tried both, and they were repulsively crude, joltingly harsh. “It’s the pheromones. Not the licorice, that’s just the mucus.”
“And you use that to communicate, do you? Draw the little slug ladies along?”
“That’s what pheromones are,” he said for the tenth time. “Communication. Each Mocsla has a unique blend of ijva, and then, of course, we add pheromones, both voluntary and involuntary.”
“Like leaving a little trail of love notes behind you everywhere you go, hmm?”
How could a creature grow to adulthood and know so little of biology? “Yes,” he conceded, knowing from experience that explanation was futile. “A trail of notes.” And mostly discarded.
“So nobody read your notes?” For all her ignorance, the Human was sometimes frighteningly insightful.
“I don’t know what you mean.” He busied himself with an orbital shaker and its cargo of cell cultures. They’d be a good source of blestomerase, which could be used to make enska, a drug popular with—
“No Ms. Keevor. No little Keevettes. Keevites. Keevles.”
“No.” No Keevles. He didn’t care about that. But Lakna, now . . . Her ijva had tasted of spring days and swamp musk, of lacy clouds and moonshine, her little pheromone packets sealed with love and longing. Until . . .
“Didn’t work out, hey?” How could she know? With that tiny olfactory complex in its sad little housing on her face, Mae could hardly be expected to scent the flood of sadness his ijva was leaving across the floor. “I’ve known you a while now, Keeve. When you think about her, your tentacles get all googly. And there’s a smell of ocean.”
Never judge a nose by its size. The wisdom of Plexis. “It’s complicated. Go check on the dextrose delivery.” There was always a delivery. Plexis ran through drugs like a swamp bat through a vine tangle.
She laughed. “I’m going. But maybe it’s time to stop moping and do something, hmm? Think about it.”
He’d thought about it. Not for the first time, of course. When Lakna had first turned away from his trail, he’d thought of nothing else. He’d come up with new complexities of packaging, woven pheromones into clever bouquets. He’d invented whole new classes of messenger, hijacked viruses to carry and assemble tiny factories that made their own sensory apparatus, that delivered delicate impressions of admiration, beauty, desire. And still she’d turned away.
“It’s impressive, Keevor. I’ve never had a lover so talented, so skilled with his ijva. You do things I’ve never imagined, made me feel things I never dreamed of. But . . .” He’d known it was coming. How could it not? “It’s all so . . . earnest.” So honest. “So . . . boring. I’m sorry, but there it is. It’s beautiful, what you do. But it’s boring. You’re an artist, Keevor. You deserve someone who appreciates you.”
“‘It’s not you, it’s me,’” agreed Mae, when he tried to explain it to her at last. “Every species has a line like that. Sucks for all of them.” Her eyes took on a distant, sad look. “Us, I guess.” She shook her head. “But you’ve got to get past it.”
“With drugs?” That seemed to be her preference.
“If that works for you, yes. But you’re made of tougher stuff, Keeve. You need something more creative. It’s not as if there aren’t plenty of Mocsla Fems coming by all the time. Whatever’s in that trail of yours, they like it.”
He twitched his mantle in a shrug. “They’re—”
“Yeah, yeah, not Lakna. I’ve heard that sob story before, Keeve. Seems to me you’ve got two choices—love what you are, or learn to be that bad frat your lady wanted.” She reached out a hand and stroked his upper foot segment, with its trace of ijva. She’d never touched him before, couldn’t know what it meant. “I know what I’d choose.” She took her hand back, inhaled. “Cinnamon,” she said. “Maybe a touch of basil.”
He embarked on a process of experimentation, with himself as the subject. Lakna had wanted . . . what was the opposite of earnest? Frivolous? Dispassionate? Exciting?
He devised whole new metabolic cycles, and inserted genes for them not just in regions of his feet, but of his mantle, cells manufacturing messengers to be spread through the air as well as his ijva. His new pheromones were dark, jolting, vibrant.
“Oh!” said Mae one morning. “That stinks.” She turned her face and blinked her eyes wide. “Sorry, Keeve, but . . . wow. What did you eat last night? I laid out your dinner myself; same green stuff as always. Are you okay? Should I call a . . . someone?”
“I took your advice,” he said. “What do you think?”
“My advice? When did I say . . . Oh.” She swallowed, contorting her limited face. “So, this what a . . . um . . . Mocsla bad frat smells like? Like . . . creosote?”
“I don’t know,” he admitted. “The trail Lakna left me for was insipid, vapid . . . banal. It had no. . . . no subtlety.”
“So you thought, ‘Hey! Maybe if I smell really bad, she’ll be distracted? She won’t notice my uber subtlety in all the stink?’ That is not what I suggested.”
He shrugged. It was what he was doing.
“Look, maybe I didn’t say it well. You’ve got Mocsla Fems down here all the time, Keeve. They like you the way you are. Me, too.” She smiled. “And the old you smelled a whole lot better.”
“Let’s see,” he said, and triggered one of the new pheromone diffuser pits on his mantle. The pheromones diffused out, settling onto all sorts of surfaces he hadn’t even touched. He’d stolen the idea from moths. Of course, a Mocsla wouldn’t pick the taste up unless she happened to walk across it, but the approach was novel, even if the diffuser pits were a little unsightly. Even his takis avoided them.
“Oh, my—!” Mae coughed. “Got to— Check something. Later.” She sped out of the shop.
His new regime cut down on the visits to his shop. The proportions changed, with fewer smell-sensitive species, and more that relied on vision and sound. Even Mae, with her tiny nose, spent more time building her distribution network, and less time in the shop.
“I’m sorry, Keeve,” she said. “But now you smell like something dead. Really dead. Rotting. I love you, bebe, but it’s gross. And now it’s coming out your mantle and everything. You’re . . . you’re oozing.”
He missed her company, but the Mocsla who came by made up for it, in some ways. They were types he’d never have spent time with back home—artists, writers, outlaws.
“Criminals,” one admitted in an unguarded moment. “I’d love to go home again, you know. Ever go to the wetlands outside Parthratin? I swear, you could spend days there deciphering old messages. All the great ones have composed there, and the shrubs incorporate it all, through their roots. Bits and pieces of old poems all stuck together, so that when you eat one of the leaves, it’s like a whole course of Third Era literature all in one bite, but with a dark, menacing quality. That’s what brought me here. Your trail reminded me of that.”
“Thank you,” he said, his tentacles stiffening with pride.
“So complicated, so . . . malevolent, I guess. But now that I’m here, it’s not . . .”
Keevor sighed, a trick that he’d learned from Mae. “Not what?” he asked heavily, firing off a diffuser pit.
The other slithered around a bit, tasting the new mix. “Mmm. Different. But not . . . sincere, you know? I mean, it’s complicated and unique, and I can see you put a lot of work in it. But it’s . . . artificial, I guess. It feels like you worked at it. All it tells me is that you’re talented.”
“Sure it’s a good thing,” Mae said, when she stopped in briefly. “Not that smell. That’s as foul as week-old sewage. Can’t you smell it?” He couldn’t, of course. But it tasted interesting. “Talent is good. But what do you use it for? Look, where I grew up there was a huge gallery for this guy, Unaetum, they called him. Very famous. Very talented. And what did he do? He went around making drawings that looked like a four-year-old did them. Talented, sure, but not good.”
“Someone must have liked them, if he was famous.” Mae operated more on emotion than on logic. All Humans seemed to.
“Sure, some people did. A lot, maybe. But I think they look like garbage. Just the way you smell, now. And that’s a friend telling you. Ease up on the smells, Keeve. Mix in a little spice from time to time.”
The business grew. They did well enough that he bought a long-term lease on a larger space, with a bar area to accommodate the customers that did come by. Well enough that he could afford to eat out on occasion. There was a nice place called the Claws & Jaws, run by some sort of arthropod with too many eyes. They’d encouraged him to order out, though, even waiving the delivery fee eventually.
“Not everyone loves an artist,” Mae said. “I don’t care for them myself.” She’d grown colder over the months, as his experiments grew more extreme, and his mantle and tail grew crowded with diffuser pits, secreters, and what even he could only call oozers. His ijva was thick now, and golden, like a river of sunlight across Plexis’ steel floors.
His Mocsla visitors grew ever more outre, as word spread, and Plexis ventured back into systems closer to home. Art critics came and wrote reviews both stunned and devastating. “Brilliant!” they said. “Innovative!” “Genius!” but also “Soulless.” “Contrived.” and “Complex to the point of falsity.”
And, in the end, she came, as he had hoped she would.
“Hello, Keevor,” she said, as if they had had just happened across each other at a garden party. “How have you been?”
They circled each other, tasting and leaving pheromone packets, messages, poems. Their ijva mixed, his golden trail layered on her silver one until they annealed into an amalgam of brass and yearning.
Missed you, his said, and swamp grass at midnight, and years like centuries and seconds.
Heard of you, hers said, and the other guy didn’t work out, and so impressed.
For you, he signaled, and love letters like grains of sand underfoot, sharp and hard and true, and trails that cross and cross and finally meet. Though her trail seemed plainer and shallower than he recalled.
Sand in the trail, and I’m a company manager now, and so dark.
She left after less than an hour. You’re so talented, she’d signaled at the end. I always knew you’d be something big. I have trouble with just the sales reports I write. I can’t imagine how you manage this. And the cost to you! I’d never be that brave. You’ve changed so. I just wish . . .
They both knew what she’d wished, and he’d been hard put to keep the anger from his ijva. He’d slithered over her trail until the words were gone, and she was back on her ship.
I wish it were more you.
“This is me!” he cried to the only person that would listen. “This is the me I made.”
“Is it?” asked Mae from behind her mask. She wore a paper coverall now, when she came to pick up the drugs. She shrugged. “Maybe it is. Now. I . . . whatever. Got to go.”
“Wait!” he cried. “Wait,” for all the world just like the day of his arrival, when he’d pleaded with her to let him stay.
She turned back, eyes like steel. “Wait for what? You have some new stink you want to try on me? Sorry, Keevor. I’m no critic. I can tell you now I won’t like it.”
How had it gone? There had been some alcohols, some aldehydes designed to react with oxygen on exposure. He slid forward, one cautious, uncertain step, and reared up to present his front foot.
She looked him over, her eyes doing the water trick they sometimes did, and reached a tentative, paper-gloved finger toward him. She touched his foot gingerly, and drew her hand back swiftly. She held it trembling before her nose.
“Now that’s some cinnamon,” she said haltingly, as the eye-water dripped into her mask. “It’s not good,” she said. “But it’s real.”