Fast Wedded to the Ground:
A Short Story

by Nina Kiriki Hoffman

Fast Wedded to the Ground:
A Short Story

by Nina Kiriki Hoffman

Kiriki Press, P.O. Box 10858, Eugene, Oregon 97440 U.S.A.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in whole or in part, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission of publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

This is a work of fiction. The characters have been created for the sake of this story and are products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

"Fast Wedded to the Ground" first appeared in Imagination Fully Dilated, edited by Alan M. Clark and Elizabeth Engstrom, published by Cemetery Dance Publications, 1998. The story was written to accompany the illustration. This version slightly revised in 2013.

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This eBook edition was produced by Kiriki Press

Originally Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

Fast Wedded to the Ground

About the Author

Connect with the Author

Other Nina Kiriki Hoffman Titles

Fast Wedded to the Ground

Nina Kiriki Hoffman

I spent the first part of my life knitted into our island and family on Ooliya so deeply there was almost no need for speech. We each had our tasks and needs, as each part of a plant knows what to do and how, and we moved across the seasons making, tending, feeding, aiding, harvesting, breathing, resting, being.

In the winter, when other living things on our island went to sleep, we woke up and played games with each other, and that was when I learned to talk.

It was late one summer in my fifteenth year when I lost everything I knew.

Kitchen Dad had sent me to the north end of our island to gather sandworms for supper in the evening light. I stood while the sea buried my feet in wet sand and watched the skitterlings running along the wave edges. Where they paused to drill, I followed with my hand-snatcher, pushing its sharp tip down into the sand and spearing worms. I had my hip-pouch half full and was thinking how good the worms would taste when Kitchen Dad finished with them, all buttery and rosemary and slightly crunchy.

I felt along my links to everything and everyone, how my sister plucked ripe totamas and my brother gathered besas in the orchard and my brother fed our flock of chitas and my sister pulled weeds in the ambysite and my brother checked incubator monitors in our womb cellar where the seeds of pigs grew to good-sized embryos big enough to release on their own, and how Growth Mother watered seedlings and Machine Father fed the arikas as they scattered around his feet, and how Land Grandfather worked fertilizer into soil in one of the southern plots, and how Animal Grandmother dosed the young sheep; all these images played against my mind in perfect harmony. Fainter behind them were the glows of each life in our care, the green shady thoughts of growing plants and hunger sparks of animals.

I sensed the dim sparks of the worms I speared, and soothed them a little before I killed them. All the sense map of our island lay around me, a network, a webwork, a perfect evening as all evenings were perfect, each different as one shell differs from another, and each wonderful —

Then the growl of a motor above the sound of waves.

We were not expecting any shipments, visitors, or mail that I knew of, and anyway, all hover traffic was supposed to approach along the west side of the island where we had a landing pad.

At first I thought the strangers were lost.

Their aircar paused above our beach, driving all the skitterlings off and flattening the water as it tried to make waves.

A dark-skinned, bald woman in bronze bodymods and green skintights stood on the aircar's running board a moment before she jumped down. Her heavy boots splashed through water and dug down into the sand. She smiled at me.

I did not smile back. I didn't want her setting her metal-cased feet on our land.

The aircar's engine was too noisy for talk. I waved toward the west. The biggest island in our chain, Trade Island, lay there, with its small spaceport. I had been to Trade at the yearly festivals when people from different islands came together to meet, select mates, gamble, trade, celebrate, and worship. I liked the Islander parts of Trade, our sacred grove of Caniya trees and the Green Temple and the festival grounds.

Machine Father had taken me to the foreign part of Trade once. It was ugly and dead and full of unlinked and too many machines. The air tasted strange and made me sick, and even the food smelled bad.

That was where such foreigners belonged.

The bald woman came toward me, still smiling. I gripped my hand-snatcher and told everyone I was linked to what was happening. I felt their alarm and their reactions. Kitchen Dad went for our gun cache, and most of the others abandoned their tasks and came toward me. But no one was close.

The woman reached out and tapped my shoulder with a metal-cased finger, and all my links died without warning or struggle. My crippled and shrunken self collapsed inside the small space that was now me.

I did not come back to my eyes until we had left Ooliya's star system and the space reavers had refitted my body with modifications I did not know how to access or control.

The crew of the Goog had three members: Dicey, who had knocked me out, Malad, and Grecia. Dicey was the captain, Malad the first mate and navigator, and Grecia the dogsbody.

Dicey introduced them all to me and asked my name. For a little while I couldn't think what it was. We didn't use names much on the island. But then I remembered. "Visayana Tonia," I said. Visayana was our island's name, and the name of everyone on it. Tonia was the name Body Mother had given me.

"We hear you Ooliyans have a knack," Dicey told me.

The air smelled sweaty and dead, and it was too hot. I lay on my back on an extensor bed in a small windowless room. I was not tied down, but I couldn't move. Foreign metal and synth things pressed into my ears, curved around my head, rode my shoulders, saddled my chest, braced my legs, gripped my knees, and trapped my feet. I felt weighed down and pricked in a hundred places. Worst of all, I had no links to anything. I had never felt so cut off. I kept reaching for my parents and siblings, but nothing answered. I couldn't think.

"People do say," Malad said. He was small and hunched and muscular, with a bush of short reddish hair. He, too, sported bodymods, silver shiny metal machine bits grafted in squared mosaics here and there.

"A knack," echoed Grecia. She was skinny and old. Shaggy gray hair hung from her head. Her skin was yellowed and cracked with deep and shallow fissures, and her clothes consisted of a pale drape tucked around her torso and over her shoulders; it barely covered her to the tops of her legs. If she had any bodymods, they weren't visible.

Dicey poked me with a metal fingertip. "You better have a knack, after all we paid to have done to you."

Something on my chest whirred. My breathing deepened and I saw glowing blue spots scattered across everything. I reached for sisters and brothers and parents and grandparents and stubbed my mind on nothing.

Reached. Failed. Reached. Failed.

I looked at the three people in the cabin with me and hated them in all their foreign ugliness.

Struggled again with my utter aloneness, and felt like a plant whose roots had been hacked off. How could I get water?

How could I survive without it?

I reached then, and linked to the three of them.

Foreign, ugly, less-than-Ooliyan, and they had taken me from the soft, warm web of family that held my heart.

I tapped into them, and they gasped and staggered.

I accepted the strange, chunky, wrong-colored flow of connection with them — Dicey's metallic, acrid, strong; Malad's tangled, wide, loose, and pale; Grecia's like strings of amber, malachite, citrine beads.

I linked to them and finally felt less sick and stupid and small. I needed to be in more than one place at a time — without that, I felt dizzy and compacted, smeared flat, like something crushed by black hole gravity.

I took sense data, feelings, and memories from the three of them. It was only half a link, though; I didn't link enough for them to see through my eyes. I had half of my solution; I didn't trust these thieving strangers with the rest of it.

They didn't like it. They shuddered and tried to shrug me off.

"Please," I whispered. "Without this I'll die."

Dicey made a face. Grecia touched my shoulder, and Malad stared at the wall for a while. I felt them struggle inside and finally accept, even though they didn't know what it was I had done to them.

It was not at all like being home. But it was better than being alone.

Dicey had the masterkey to my bodymods.

Malad taught me how to use the bodymods. Some of them gave me enhanced strength, some gave me extra senses for various conditions — I could tell if air was breathable, and what particulates were in it; I could echolocate through walls to see if there were chambers beyond, and what size they were, and whether there were living things present; I could transmit and receive communications from the ship's computer and Dicey's and Malad's bodymods. The chest bodymod also acted as a spacesuit in hostile environments, setting up a shield all around me and producing breathable air and three days' worth of intravenous moisture and nutrition. The mod at my hip held a stunner and a knife, when Dicey felt it was safe to give me those things.

However, the main purpose of the bodymods was to act as a portable prison. Dicey had the masterkey and could shut me down with a thought.

Sometimes I dreamed I was having the same dream as everyone else in my family, and then I thought I had come home. On the best of days, we would all wake at the same moment and know that in our dream we had all been the same person, that whatever we had done we had done together. Then our links stayed strong and active all day so that our island felt like one big organism. Nothing was better than that.

I dreamed that I dreamed together, and I woke alone.

The first proscribed planet we visited after Dicey captured me was called Erassum. A fierce small people lived on the landmasses, fighting among themselves, with no interest in passing the Allied Sentients' membership tests.

Beacons in orbit warned wandering ships away from this planet while it struggled with its internal strife.

Dicey landed the Goog on a coral atoll. "We've gotta do this quick, before the tide rises."

She took me outside while Malad and Grecia remained in the ship. The sky was wide as space, and deep lavender blue. Water spread to all horizons, a darker sky laced with chop and sundazzle.

The first breath of cool sea air I took transported me to Ooliya. For a moment I fooled myself with thoughts and longings. The second breath tasted metallic and strange, and sadness swamped me.

"There's clam-things here that make the biggest pearls in the Known Universe," Dicey told me. "Only a few ever been smuggled out. Gorgeous and strange and can't be duplicated. You shoulda seen the prices they fetched."

I saw one in her mind. Big as a fist, pale as the inside of an onion, with colors sheening across it, and the hues of avarice.

"Link with those clams," she said. "Find me some of those pearls."

On Ooliya I had not linked with sealife, though I knew some people in the southern archipelago did it, and farmed underwater. I sat on sea-smoothed coral and sent out link fingers, searching, the way I did when newborns came to our island.

It was not a way of thinking I understood immediately, slow and wet and hungry as it was, but presently I had linked to a whole colony of creatures. I sank down under the surfaces of their thoughts and, like them, with them, relished the feel and taste of water moving through us, bringing food and occasionally sand. Some of us shaped ourselves around small boulders made of self-stuff.

Pearls? I didn't care. I was spread out and thinking-together with many beings. This was the best link I'd had since leaving Ooliya. I wanted to stay here.

Dicey poked me and broke all my links again.

The Goog hid behind the moon while Dicey berated me. I felt sick and sore, ready to shrivel and die. I had lost all links, even the ones to shipfolk, and my link fingers felt burnt and senseless.

"We were there to do a job," Dicey yelled, "not to give you a chance to get all touchy-feely!"

"Leave her alone," Grecia said. "Give her a little recovery time. Maybe she didn't know."

"She knew, all right. She just wanted to stay there and get lost in those cold-fleshed sea-things. I saw her face," Dicey said.

I closed my eyes and wamped out.

Dicey made my chestmod shoot me with stimulants. I woke up and couldn't go back to sleep, or die, which was what I really wanted. Instead, I linked again to her and Malad and Grecia. It was easier this time. They had tapsites already. They only squirmed a little, and Grecia told me later that she'd missed me while I was unlinked.

"Listen to me," Dicey said, leaning down and putting her dark face close to mine. "You link. You find out where the pearls are. We get the pearls. We're outta here. Understand?"

I sniffled and nodded.

We scooted back in under the warning beacons and landed on the same atoll at low tide. This time I linked lightly, sought for specific information, and found for Dicey a pearl graveyard, a place where she wouldn't have to cut into anything living to get what she wanted.

The pearls were beautiful, each different: lavender, pale pink, sherbet orange, opalescent white, mid-sky blue, hematite black, glistening sunrise yellow, underwater green, each as big as a baby's head. We all held them, stared at them, cherished them on our way to Pjallesta, where Dicey knew the smugglers' underground and could sell the pearls for enough to keep us going a while.

Dicey wamped me before we docked and didn't wake me until we were well on our way to Skizmas. No shore leave for me on a civilized planet. She was afraid of what I might do.

She gave me the green pearl to keep, though.

On Skizmas I linked with carnivorous, sentient plants, and we came away with pure extract of some kind of hyperhallucinogen. On Clairmar I linked with tunnel-dwelling crustaceans and we came away with a hold full of some kind of white metal. After that we stopped over on Hitherto while the Goog had a complete overhaul and facelift and Malad, Dicey, and I got upgrades on our mods. I spent the whole time on Hitherto asleep.

I dreamed together with Grecia a few times, and that felt good. She didn't seem to mind. We visited her home planet, which she had left eighty years earlier. She grew up in a small desert community near a gas mine, one of three children in the whole community, and everything they played with seemed mummified by heat and sun, and somehow beautiful. Plant skeletons, vertebrate as snakes; animals that only emerged at night; the sounds of distance and a craving for shadow. Together we picked nuts from skillballs fallen from cootchertrees, and sought for gold flecks in dried streambeds.

The next three years followed the same pattern. Dicey made me link with beings on proscribed planets long enough to rob them, long enough for me to have a family sense about them, never long enough to satisfy me, but long enough to wound me when I had to leave.

We chased bar rumors of secrets and treasures, and found kernals of truth in them. We collected tiny precious cargoes and moved on. We never went back, even when what we had found was extremely lucrative. When I asked, thinking that relinking would feel good, Malad told me Dicey never revisited the scene of a crime.

Dicey constantly upgraded the Goog's speed, stealth, scanners, and armament. Allied Sentients Police noticed forbidden cargo coming into ports, and Dicey feared pursuit, even as she lusted after it. In her dreams, fear and pleasure linked tight, scratching each other's backs.

Malad dreamed of me. Of me and him, together without clothes. He dreamed of a me interested in him in ways that I didn't even understand at first.

I didn't like his dreams, but sometimes I couldn't escape them.

On Whishter, my life fell apart again.

On Whishter, I linked with rock beings.

Dicey had heard rumors that live volcanoes on Whishter really lived, forming fire jewels in their hot hearts more beautiful than the cold stones one found in calmer earths.

We had followed some of her rumors to their sources only to find no treasure and much trouble, and twice the Allied Sentients Police had almost caught us, as though they laid a trap for us. Malad sometimes mentioned retiring, and I knew that Grecia had a cache of credit wands she added to after every trade visit to a port.

Dicey saved almost nothing; she would rather take her earnings in ship fitments, bodymod upgrades, and supplies.

I, as a captive rather than a crew member, had no real cut in the take from our expeditions, but sometimes Dicey gave me souvenirs and trinkets. Once she even bought me a travel holo about Ooliya, but I could only watch about a minute of it before it sent me into deep, disabling melancholy. I stored it unwatched. Grecia borrowed it from me, and I never asked for it back.

We sneaked into Whishter's system, dropping out of skipmode on the opposite side of Whishter's sun from the planet and ducking behind planetoids and debris while Dicey scanned for anyone else in range. We only found the usual warning beacons around Whishter — by now Dicey considered them luck charms.

The Goog stealthed toward the planet.

"I wish you could link with whatever might be out there," Dicey said, not for the first time. "If you could only hook us up with other ships and tell us what was going on on their bridges…."

"I need visual contact," I lied again. This ability she wished I had would endanger me if she actually believed I had it. She already made me sleep through any contact we had with ships or people near and in ports, fearing I would link with other crews and seek rescue or at least try to get someone to listen to me.

I had grown gray to the possibility of ever escaping her. All I really cared about anymore was the next link with something bigger than the Goog, something I would cherish as long as I could, and visit in memory afterward. I had a stockpile of memories now, though the ones I took out most often carried me back to my family's island.

Besides, I didn't know my own range. Could I reach out and touch someone in another ship halfway across a solar system? Sometimes I tried seeking contact when the ship's proximity alarms let us know we weren't alone, but at times like that, Dicey was quick to lock me down and put me under.

I underplayed my abilities as much as I could. The less information Dicey had about me the better. She was too good at reading my face already.

On Whishter, we did our usual scan from orbit. Dicey's rumors had not told her the best place to contact the volcanoes. She and Malad surveyed infrared scans that showed heat activity beneath the surface, and picked a spot near a likely range of mountains for a touchdown point.

The ground danced as we set down, crumpling one landing spar and tilting the ship. "Damn!" Dicey said. She checked the air for breathability, then loaded Grecia up with a welder and some other repair equipment and sent her out.

"Malad, you keep watch. Keep one finger on the dealer-with and both eyes on the scanner," Dicey said. Her scalp shivered. She didn't like it here.

Then Dicey and I went out to look for life I could link with.

The air tasted fiery and smoky, and the sky was darker than most sky blues, though it was midday. A thin green mist cloaked the ground. I felt strange walking across the broken-stone ground, all sharp-edged blocks with fissures between them, veiled and dangerous. My smartmetal boots tried to compensate for the variations of the ground, but I could not help stumbling, no more could Dicey. A feeling of frightening excitement spun in my stomach, amplifying with each step.

"Where?" Dicey muttered when we had walked a ways in the thickening mist. "Where's the damned life? What's wrong with this spot, Tonia?"

I quickened my step. Something unfamiliar but sweet built inside me. I wanted more of it.

"Hey! Don't you dare run away or I'll drop you where you stand!"

I stopped. I waited for her to catch up without looking back at her.

"Don't get spooky on me, Tonia, or I'll scrub this whole mission. I hate this planet already."

I could taste this feeling in my throat. Besa wine aged seven years, finer than any I had ever tasted before. "Just a little farther," I said. My voice sounded too high.

"Shit," said Dicey. "I don't need this. For sure I don't. Come on. We're going back." She gripped my arm, her head swiveling back and forth. I felt her fear, but it didn't infect me, and I didn't understand it. It was different from the kinds of fears she liked.

There was no reason for her to pull me along. I had resisted her enough times to know it did no good; I would have followed her without touch. She held onto my arm anyway and dragged me back toward the ship.

Something glowing blue and swifter than sight whipped up out of the rocks before us, looped around Dicey's chest and tightened. She screamed and dropped to the rocks, spasming. The blue thing vanished like a ghost.

I squatted beside Dicey. She twitched and tremored uncontrollably, her eyes blinking open and shut, her jaw clenching and relaxing, arms and legs flopping. The lights on her chestplate blinked and sizzled, all their configurations wrong. I held out a hand, thinking maybe I could hit an emergency reset switch, but her chestplate didn't have one where mine did. I realized I didn't know any of Dicey's settings; Malad had taught me something about my mods, and a few things about the mods he had that I didn't, but he had never told me anything about Dicey's.

Slowly I stood up, feeling a queer lightness in my head. I didn't know what was wrong with Dicey, but I knew she couldn't threaten or hurt me, not the way she was now. For however long that lasted.

I turned and walked away into the fog.

I came to the standing stones as the sky darkened toward twilight. I had climbed the lower slope of a mountain, and still I hadn't seen anything like vegetation. It was all rocks and green mist, and here the ground was hot, even through smartmetal soles built to resist the vacuum of space.

Jagged shapes loomed up through the mist, like upraised arms ending in clenched fists. The spinning excitement inside me stopped dead. I stood and stared at the stones.

Then I went to the nearest one and leaned against it.

I had never linked with rocks before. Slime, birds, plants, lizards, animals large and small, even eternally embryonic creatures in a womb matrix, those I had linked with. But not stone.

The rock was warm against my arms and upper legs, the only places where bodymods didn't come between us. I pressed my face to the rock, and my mind fell into a pool of magma. Heat flared through me, and a mind deep and broad and ancient wrapped around me and swallowed me whole.

If no sea had separated Ooliya's islands from each other, the link might have been like this, or perhaps not: it had never occurred to me to drop to the ground and try to link with it. Here was a planet united; no matter what terrains it wore on its upper crust, beneath them all lay the worldmind, hot and red and friendly and strong, ready to engulf anything that touched it.

The best besa wine, the best link, the best death I had ever embraced. I wanted to never leave. I felt like a baby in a sea of motherlink, home at last.

Dicey shocked me out of it.

It hurt worse than the first time she had cut all my links. I folded in on myself. I could feel my skin shriveling, my bones poking out through all my crumbling edges. Too much. I couldn't do this anymore.

"Get over it!" she yelled, and shot me full of stims. "We're leaving this stinking planet!" She twitched, her head bobbing. She shuddered. "Right now, Tonia!"

Sure that my skin was paper-fragile and my bones brittle as stretched glass, I tottered after her for a few steps, then collapsed.

"Don't do this. Don't do this, you klotz. You will get up and follow me." Her hand closed around my arm.

The ghost-blue glow whipped up and tapped her chest, and she thudded to the ground.

Released, I staggered back to the standing stone.

It flowed. It flowed into a shape that cradled me as I sat down on it, and this time, a link came to me instead of me sending one out. The magma nudged me open and embraced me again.

For a comfortable age I basked in the link, building back all the strength Dicey had shocked out of me.

Then I noticed something tapping on my outer edge.

"Hey. Hey, solid. Hey."

Still linked, I opened my eyes and stared at a glowing blue snake, translucent as glass, less solid than the green mist around my rock throne.

"Hey," said the big-headed snake. It was not a species I had ever seen before.

"Hey," I said. I raised my hand to touch its chin and felt nothing solid, just a surprising isle of warmth in the cooling air of evening. Through my eyes the planet watched and studied too.

"Hey," said the snake. "What are you doing?"

"Not much," I said. "Sitting here not thinking. Why?"

"This is a forbidden planet. Why are you here?"

"I go where I'm taken," I murmured, wondering what kind of trouble I was in now. Though I had never seen or heard of a thing like this blue snake, it must be part of Allied Sentients if it cared that this planet was forbidden.

And it had paralyzed Dicey twice.

"So rumors were true," said the snake. "Are you from Ooliya?"

"Who are you?" I asked.

"Oh. Sorry. Suessa, Allied Sentients Police."

I glanced to where Dicey lay, her arms and legs spread wide. She no longer twitched. Nothing about her moved except her eyes, which glared at me.

"Yes. I am Ooliyan," I said.

"Huh," said Suessa. "This explains multitudes. Sort of."

"Will you take me home?" I asked in a small voice. Remnants of my squashed dream still whispered in my head.

Rock flowed across my lap, binding me to my throne.

"Uh," the snake said.

You are home, thought the worldmind.

I closed my eyes and opened to the warm sea of worldmind. Not my sisters, brothers, fathers, mothers, grandparents — no one I had known before. But big enough to be all the link I needed. For the first time since Dicey stole me, I felt entire, and not crippled.

"Hey. Hey, solid. Hey."

I opened my eyes and smiled at Suessa. The ground jumped as I shook my shoulders. Oops.

"So I'm going to arrest the sentient on the ground," Suessa said, "for invasion of a forbidden place, and I'll be taking custody of the ship and its other sentients as well. I get the feeling you are not considered an invader?"

Worldmind sent an extra jolt of heat. It had accepted the arrival of several beings like Suessa, who flowed through atmosphere but did not touch ground or disturb anything. It wanted me, and I wanted to belong here. "I'm staying here," I said.

"So, well, then, there are choices to consider." The blue glass snake flickered away, flashed back. "Can you translate for us to the local solids, or whatever lives here? We would like to discover whether they want to join the Allied Sentients. No one has been able to make contact before."

Worldmind sent glow. "Yes," I said.

"I will return." It flickered out.

Have you ever considered oceans? I asked Worldmind.

Tell me more.

=End=

About the Author

Over the past thirty years, Nina Kiriki Hoffman has sold adult and YA novels and more than 250 short stories. Her works have been finalists for the World Fantasy, Mythopoeic, Sturgeon, Philip K. Dick, and Endeavour awards. Her fiction has won a Stoker and a Nebula Award.

A collection of her short stories, Permeable Borders, was published in 2012 by Fairwood Press.

Nina does production work for the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. She teaches through Lane Community College. She lives in Eugene, Oregon.

For a list of Nina's publications, go to: http://ofearna.us/books/hoffman.html.