part0010

She hurried out the ship’s airlock, across the vacuum of the dark bay, and a few minutes later pushed through the asteroid’s airlock and clambered along blue-black tunnels to the Rinneret’s lair. It waited for her, facing the open door.

“Now, listen, old Nine-Four,” she started, before the Rinneret could say a thing.

“I am now Eight-Zero-Rock-Cutter,” the Rinneret told her, writhing as it spoke.

“Yeah, that’s great. I expected something like that. Well, you’re welcome for that. That’s me that done that, and I don’t begrudge you it. But, now, here’s the thing. I’ve been thinking. It’s about time you called me up here, because I’ve got a lot of ideas. I’m way faster than any Rinneret out here, you see? I can get us a lot more stakes like that one. Only, now I want a bigger share, you see? Because I’ve only just got started. I need you to fix up my skiff, because it’s all banged up after that landing, but that’s just investment capital, right? Because I’m going to be the best miner out here, so I’m going—”

“Human,” the old Rinneret said.

“No, hear me out. You Rinneret are slow. You don’t like hard acceleration. You’re afraid to fail and so you won’t chance anything. But I can fly hard and fast and my skiff and ship aren’t all foil. Also, I’m not afraid to fail, like you Rinneret are, like I said. I’ll be the best miner out here. I’ll be a better Rinneret than any Rinneret. I aim to buy back my stake in myself, but I’ll make you rich in the process. And I’ll get a name for myself. Better than Eleven-Ten-Rock-Cutter. But first, like I said, I’ll buy my stakes back, and—”

“I have sold my stake in you,” the old Rinneret interrupted.

Margherita stared, her mouth open. She thought hard about what he just said, assuming she misheard. “What?”

“I have sold all my shares in you. Furthermore, all shares in you owned by others have been bought up. By a single buyer.”

Her face felt hot and suddenly the weak gravity seemed to disappear completely. She thought she might fall over. She had to remember to breathe, while her heart hammered. How could this be? Finally she managed to whisper, in English, “Who?” Her suit translated to Rinneret.

“A Rinneret called Six-Traveler has purchased all outstanding shares in you.”

“Look,” she said, her voice failing, “Nine-Four, I mean Eight-Zero, let me tell you how I can help you, alright? I’ve got it all planned out. I don’t think you understand what I’m offering you.”

“Let me explain. Here’s something no one else has even dreamed of doing. We go deep. We move this asteroid to a looser orbit—elliptical, say, a deep elliptical orbit. I can handle cold way better than your average Rinneret. Then, we, then we—”

“I have sold my share in you. I no longer have any interest in you.”

His words perished in the dark cave. Margherita’s headphones picked up the silence, turned it into soft hiss. She held her breath.

Finally she whispered, “Why?”

“I have sold my share in you. All of it. You and your ship will be moved to Six-Traveler’s asteroid.”

Tears welled in Margherita’s eyes. “No. Call the deal off. I’m going to make us rich. I’m full of ideas. Why would you sell me? Why?”

She was immediately furious with herself. She hated the old Rinneret. Why should she care if she never saw him again? But she knew how things worked here among the asteroid miners. She understood things now and she could be a miner herself. She had made plans: to buy back a majority share of herself, by finding more stakes like the one she found today….

Now those plans crashed down. Without a plan, she saw no path away from slavery. And who was Six-Traveler? The name suggested very high status, if being a Traveler was a respected profession. But was it? And what would he do with his share of her?

All this meant starting over. She would have to start all over, to figure things out all over again. She didn’t have the energy. She didn’t have the strength. She’d die. She’d die a slave. Before her mother and father could find her.

“Why?” she demanded of the old Rinneret. She was glad that the Rinneret understood nothing about human emotions, nor wanted to understand them. It could not interpret her tears. She would have died of shame if he understood her tears and thought they were for him.

The Rinneret only stared. Then it started to turn away.

“Why?” she demanded, her voice cracking. “I’ve helped you. I’ve made you money. You owe me.”

The Rinneret said, “I owe you nothing. Our accounts are settled. Why should I help you?”

“Why should I help you?” The Rinneret froze a moment. Then it said, “I will explain the obvious features of this Rinneret exchange for two credits.”

Margherita laughed bitterly. “One half.”

“Point six five.”

She transferred the fraction, using her suit’s interface. It came out of the last two credits she had saved.

“You think like a human,” the old Rinneret said. “I have studied your kind this year, in hopes to profit from their weakness, as I have profited from yours. You speak of friendship, and love. These are the names of subterfuges, of lies and tricks, used by the useless to take from the useful. They are words of takers, so they can demand of the makers. What does it mean to love? It means to offer for free what should be paid for. What does it mean to make a gift? It means to pretend something worthless has value, or it is to show weakness, and give what should be sold. You expect me to love you, or like you. I do not. Instead, I found you useful. If you want to succeed among the Rinneret, never expect to be loved or liked. Make yourself valuable. That is all that matters. That is all that we respect. It is the rational way to be. Among the humans, I would be no citizen. Here, among the Rinneret, you are treated as an equal, as long as you are useful. That is the rule of all living things: make yourself useful. The Rinneret know this. It is why we are greatest and most good of all intelligences.”

“I am useful. So why am I being moved?”

“I calculated the expected discounted utility of my thirty-six percent stake in you, and sold it at a profit. Six-traveler has paid well to buy the stakes in you that are held by your other investors. I’m pleased to say I held out the longest, and got the highest price. Six-Traveler will own ninety-seven percent of you. Make yourself useful to Six-Traveler if you want to survive.”

Margherita turned off her suit microphone. Then she said, “Someday, I just might come back here and give you a piece of my mind, you old monster. If I have my way, I just might come back with a tiger, or a bear, and feed you to it. That’s what you’re useful for, you nasty old horrible alien. Tiger food. Earth animal food.”

She turned, and went back to her wreck of a ship, not sorry that she would never see Eight-Zero-Rock-Cutter again.

Several hours later, four autonomous engines came to the asteroid, seeming to drift into the bay on puffs of air. They attached themselves to the hull of her ship, locking down with strong electromagnets. Margherita strapped into the acceleration couch. The engines guided the ship out of the open bay, and then blasted a two e-gee acceleration that eased, after a few hours, down to a single e-gee. Whoever was controlling the engines knew something about Earth, she figured, to use such a high rate of acceleration, but ease it back to Earth normal.

Still, after many months at weak gravity, she found even the single gee hard to take. She mostly laid on her bed and watched movies from the ship’s library, ignoring the plots and hungrily gaping at the background behind the actors for any sights of Earth’s landscape, for little hints of normal Earth life.

After a day, the ship fell into zero gee and flipped. She took that to mean she had another day to go. She slept, and watched the view, until she caught sight of Six-Traveler’s asteroid.

It was big, like the one where Eight-Zero-Rock-Cutter lived, but it had a long elliptical shape, not irregular like Eight-Zero’s rock. It shone, as if polished. It indeed might have been polished. Windows all over the surface glowed, forming long bands of blinking blue lights. It appeared like a city, in comparison to the desolate black of the asteroid she’d just left.

“Oh my god,” she whispered. “That asteroid has probability field flanges.”

“The asteroid that we approach has probability field flanges,” the ship said.

“It can travel,” Margherita said. “It can travel faster than light.”

She peered out as her small, broken ship matched speed, then spin, with the asteroid. Finally, they slipped down toward a dock where a huge door parted open. They seemed to just drift inside, and then the engines settled her broken ship on a gray ledge. The spin gravity was greater than at the last asteroid, about a quarter of an e-gee. She got out of her seat and walked to the ship’s window, to see the bay with her own eyes.

The great steel doors of bay closed behind her broken ship, squeezing a narrow band of dizzying, whirling stars. The ship shuddered when the doors met and sealed. Then, slowly, sounds outside the hull began to grow in volume: the hum of machines, the shriek of some kinds of gears or cutters. She realized that this meant the bay was pressurizing.

“There’s air out there, ship?” she asked.

“Eight hundred millibars of standard Rinneret atmosphere are present outside the ship.”

“Cool,” she whispered. “This Six-Traveler is rich. If this is his asteroid. And we get a pressurized bay. Maybe this is good. What do you think?”

“I better get suited up, I think. He must be in a rush, this Rinneret, if he spent all that fuel to get me here so fast, don’t you think?”

She watched out of the small portal on the side of the ship while the one personal airlock in the bay slid open. A robot shaped like a tall, narrow pole, bent halfway down its length, stepped out, moving strangely on six legs. It approached the ship.

“I am receiving a radio and audio message,” the ship said. “In Rinneret.”

“The robot says, ‘Please follow me.’”

She hurried into her suit. A few minutes later, she cycled through the airlock and then followed the strange robot as it turned and led her back through the bay’s airlock and into a hallway beyond. Unlike the crude caves of Eight-Zero’s asteroid, this hallway had walls, floor, and a ceiling that met at square angles. The lights along the ceiling shone not only in dark blues but with a hint also of green and yellow, making it possible for her to see a short way down the tunnel. The robot moved smoothly on its thin legs, leading the way for a hundred meters to a stairway. Rinneret stairs were hard to ascend: they had hundreds of tiny steps, about ten centimeters deep and tall. She had to carefully get her boot tip placed on one, before stepping over four of them to find another foothold.

They passed no one. They ascended, the robot leaning strangely as it flowed up the low steps. On the first landing, Margherita thought she saw some Rinneret in the gloom of the hall there, but the robot continued up another flight. Finally, it stopped before a white door.

The panel slipped aside. Margherita stepped through into a large, brightly lit room, circular, with one wall of glass opening onto a narrow room. Screens covered the other walls. Some kind of projector rose in the center of the floor. And beside the projector, two Rinneret stood, facing her with their huge eyes.

One Rinneret was unusually large, and had the most red and shiny carapace Margherita had seen on any of their species. The other Rinneret was much smaller, the top of its eyes just reaching to the mouth of the red Rinneret. Its dull black shell did not shine, and it looked indistinguishable, except for its small size, from old Eight-Zero.

She stopped, just inside the doorway, and stared.

“You claim this thing speaks our language,” the black Rinneret said.

“That is in my contract,” said the red one.

The black one squeaked at her, barely at the edge of human hearing. Her suit translated. “Speak, human.”

“I am called One-Human,” she said in Rinneret.

“Its suit translated,” the black Rinneret said.

“No,” Margherita told it. “You speak outside my hearing range sometimes. I must use the suit to hear your highest tones. But I can understand your language.”

“A loathsome sound, these deep growlings,” the black Rinneret said. “You should sell it to me for testing.”

“I need this human,” the red Rinneret said.

“Well, can’t we arrange to share it?” the black one said.

“For your weapons testing? How can we share the human if you destroy it with your human-tailored diseases?”

The black Rinneret slithered toward her, a pulse of motion writhing along its body. Seen closer, its shell looked dull gray. It bobbed its head, inspecting her.

“I believe I have developed means to destroy it slowly,” it said, “a piece at a time. We could both use it. You for your schemes, and me to test my weapons to use against Earth.”

“No, Two-Five-Weapon-Maker,” the red Rinneret said. “If it is useful I will not destroy it.”

Margherita began to shake. Tears filled her eyes and, indifferent because she knew the Rinneret could not understand her emotions, she wept openly. The black Rinneret wanted to kill her! And kill Earth! And the red one might let it.

“One-human,” the red Rinneret said to her. She noted that it seemed to strive to speak in low tones, so that she could hear it. No Rinneret had ever done that before. “I am Six-Traveler. I have need of your services. I need you to translate complex and confusing human messages. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” she said, sniffling back her tears and her running nose. Margherita wished she could wipe the tears from her face, but the helmet made it impossible. And, eager not to be given to the black Rinneret, she added, “I can do that. I can translate anything from Earth, anything human.” That was a lie, of course. What if something came through in a language her suit or ship couldn’t translate? But she was desperate. To be killed a little at a time! “What kind of message?” she asked.

The black Rinneret turned aside angrily, and began to slink around the room, as if stalking her from different angles. She imagined it just waited for her to fail, and then would seize her immediately.

“I have a message from a human,” the Rinneret said. “We have arrangements concerning biological valuables.”

Her heart sunk. She knew nothing about advanced biology. She was going to mess up! Still, she had to hold out hope. Maybe she could fake it. She said, “I can do that.”

“It concerns contractual obligations we have with regard to various other organisms from your planet. It also concerns a visitor and co-contractor on your planet. You must be familiar with human contractual arrangements.”

She would have thought it impossible to feel worse, but she did. She remembered nothing of Earth. She didn’t know its laws. And what did it mean to say there were “co-contractors” on Earth?

The black Rinneret pulsed as it watched her, waving its black arms.

She lied. “Yes,” she said. “I can do that. I know all about contracts.”

But her tears flowed freely again. She was staving off her doom only for minutes. She considered running for the door. Or fighting. What would the fierce human women in the adventure movies she had watched do? They would find a weapon, and use it. They would leap around the room, and kill these Rinneret, and then escape. But she didn’t know how to fight. And she had nowhere to escape to. And she saw no weapon in the room. She stood there, trembling.

“If she fails, may I have her now?” the black Rinneret asked.

Six-Traveler ignored the black Rinneret. It turned toward the center of the room. “Are you ready?” it asked Margherita.

“Yes,” she whispered. Then she spoke up louder. “Yes.”

An image sputtered to life in the center of the room. It was a human man, balding, with gray hair. He looked straight at her. She felt a thrill. This was a real person, not an actor. Of course, an actor was a real person, but not like this, not speaking just a while ago, in a normal voice, saying normal things. She felt loneliness wash over her terror.

“Yeah, there’s a fucking emergency,” the man said. He stood in a room, an office she supposed, although the walls did not enter into the hologram—only the corner of a desk by his hip, with a sculpture on it. A horse, she thought. The man leaned forward. “Two Predators, one of them a Sussuratian all fangs and claws and tongue and appetite and bad attitude, just paid me a visit. Because you put some of those waterbears, those tardigrades, in that weapon you aimed at Neelee-ornor. Our deal was, first, that I supply you with some choice organisms. Second, I act as your secret liaison into Terrestrial commerce. And, three, I hide your big ugly dangerous friends here on Earth. You, in turn, get the Galactic Empire the hell off Earth. We had no agreement for me to supply weapons and no agreement for me to help you attack the oldest race in the Galaxy.”