This is the story of how I got my secondname.
But it’s also the story of Vasily, of Old Man Slovoban, of Makrow 34 and Giorgio Weekman, of Zorro, Mao Castro, Achilles, and so many more. Humans, pozzies, aliens. And it’s the story of the Burroughs, of course.
I wish I could start it like this:
The desert wind was blowing that night, loaded up on red dust like a drunk on whiskey.
Then go on something like this:
It was one of those hot dry Santa Ana winds blasting down through the mountains, curling your hair and making your nerves jump and your skin itch. It was one of those nights that drive people crazy, making men throw punches in every bar and meek wives finger the edge of the butcher knife and study their sleeping husbands’ necks. One of those nights that somehow always end in blood and murder.
Suggestive, isn’t it? It’s my own take, not my own style. I pinched it. My gloss on Raymond Chandler. Twentieth century. Hard-boiled detective fiction. Unfairly forgotten today, but my favorite writer all the same. The guy I chose to honor when it was my turn to pick a keyname.
Would have made a nice opening for the story, don’t you think?
Except that’s not how it happened.
First off, there was no burning wind from the desert at night, blasting down through the mountains and driving people crazy.
Mainly because my bosses, the aliens who run the Galactic Trade Confederation, worship uniformity. It’s good for business. Almost as much as they despise unwelcome surprises. The aliens have a saying: Routine is the mother of efficiency and the grandmother of profit. When they designed this trading station, the William S. Burroughs, they left out all the fun geographic stuff. No deserts, no mountains. The onboard oxygenating gardens spread out over hundreds of square kilometers, all smooth as a tabletop. Not quite a tabletop—smooth as a high-gain parabolic radar-antenna. The inner surface of our little world is concave, you know, not flat. Let’s not get on the wrong side of Euclidean geometry.
The aliens who designed this station opted for the plan favored by the ink-slingers who illustrated those old mid-twentieth-century fantasy books, the ones about the conquest of outer space. A giant space wheel.
The aliens already had artificial gravity—they’re the ones who let humans in on the secret—so they didn’t need to spin the Burroughs like a top to make Earthlings feel at home. For them, the shape was nothing functional. Just a hat-tip. Or a sarcastic reminder. That’s their style, the big bosses.
There’s no real nighttime here, either. Other than the endless night of outer space, I mean. If you ever get so bored you start staring out one of the handful of portholes that the tightfisted designers were negligent enough to build into the structure, what’s there to see? Darkness. Maybe Titan, a dreary crescent moon, far off in the distance. Even farther, the enormous bulk of Saturn.
We’re parked in a Lagrange point of the Saturn system. If the lighting were any good, it would be a magnificent spectacle. But as far as we are from the sun there’s not much light. When the planet’s rings and its titanic moon don’t block the dim sun, the puny smidgen of daylight that breaks through isn’t bright enough to bother a bat.
We have artificial light twenty-four hours a day. Or thirty-six, if you count days like the Colossaurs. Whatever. Point is, the lights never go off. What a waste of energy. Some pozzies who go in for philosophizing, like my pal Zarathustra Heidelberg, say the aliens keep the lights on all the time because you never know when somebody will be awake and closing a deal. Plus, it’s good for the plants. But hard-nosed guys like me, we suspect they just do it because they know it bugs the humans. Throws them off their circadian sleep cycles. That alien sense of humor again.
If a Homo sapiens doesn’t like the light set-up—they could simply stay home.
As for me and my friends—we never sleep anyway.
But I’m getting ahead of my story.
Since we’re on the only station in the Solar System where humans can get a license to rub elbows with aliens and make intergalactic deals, from the human point of view not being here means getting cut out of a very lucrative business. That’s what brings Homo sapiens to the premises: trading raw materials from Earth for the sophisticated tech that the Galactic Trade Confederation doles out, sparingly. For all their grumbling and whining, for all the sedatives and painkillers they pop, every human who’s brave enough to do the job and anxious to get rich will come to the Burroughs, no questions asked. And come back. Again and again.
Here’s one more way my story doesn’t hold up to my pseudo Chandler: there are no real bars on the Burroughs. The bosses like to let the evolved primates of Earth know that they’re only guests here, even if there’s always at least a couple thousand of them around. No bars that serve drinks a human can stomach, I mean.
No dark rooms full of dames of questionable repute and tough guys whose reputations are not to be questioned, none of the watering holes my favorite writer so lovingly described.
No. Hangouts that sell the sweet sulfur crystals and methanated beverages that Cetians go for—those don’t count. No human in his right mind would eat or drink anything so nasty. You can’t twist the word bar far enough to use it for the cubicles lit like tanning booths where Colossaurs guzzle their thirty kilos of raw meat a day and get all weepy-eyed reminiscing about the bright blue glare of their giant sun. Or the tiny cells where Grodos go to suck their daily ration of vegetable juices, sticking their spiral tongues down into what they call “sophisticated artificial bionutrition systems.” To me they look more like big pumpkins with German measles.
If that’s not enough, all three alien species who come here prefer to repose in solitude. Must be some weird galactic kink. A bar isn’t a bar without a little socialization, is it?
As for meek wives, they’ve got to be a highly endangered species by now even on Earth itself. But if anybody were to waste their credits bringing one of those rare specimens here, she’d never get near anything so dangerous as a knife. Not by a long shot, at least not while me and my buddies are up and about.
Nobody but a pozzie ever gets past a docking module of the Burroughs bearing arms more dangerous than a pair of nail clippers. A small pair.
Yet even so, there is blood and murder. The first to go were my pals Zorro and Achilles, and the Grodo bounty hunter.
At the time we had no idea it was just the beginning.