Starlings Read online

  She did not stay and watch them die, though she let them get a good look at her leaving. They could not move, of course, that was the nature of the poison; they lay in agony unable even to curse. I was sure that my time had come too, that she would smash me before leaving, but I was surprised to find that she took me off the wall, wrapped me carefully, and carried me with her from the house.

  We caught up with the herald the next morning, and he escorted us safely to Brynmaeg. He made no assaults upon Bluebell’s honour, but he did contrive to let her know that he was a single man, and likely to be made a knight the next year, and was interested, should she not reach her highest ambition.

  He left us at the city gates. Bluebell was allotted rooms to live in while awaiting the Autumn Moon, which would be only two days after our arrival. The house where we were lodged was in the town, below the Castle. It belonged to a washerwoman who provided food, regularly and not ungraciously, but seemed little interested.

  Bluebell hung me on the wall of her chamber and sat down soberly in front of me. “Mirror, Mirror, show me my parents.”

  They lay still on the bed, their faces twisted into grimaces of pain. Bluebell laughed. “Show me the other candidates!” she commanded. I found them and then showed them one by one. Most of them she dismissed with a snap of her fingers, but two or three made her hesitate, especially the fine ladies dressed in satins and silks. Then she took a deep breath. “Mirror, Mirror, on the wall—who is the fairest of them all?”

  I had been taught to show truth, and did not know how to do anything else. Yet such a question is bound to be subjective. I had seen all the girls, as they were at that moment. But the fairest of them all? One of them was asleep, and another frowning, who might both be beauties when the king saw them. I hesitated, surface clouded, then showed my true thought. Bluebell. To me she was the fairest, the most beautiful.

  I was frightened then, for she laughed with glee and flung herself down on the bed. I kept reflecting her, as if I were an ordinary mirror. I thought of trees, but they failed to calm me. There was a storm coming, and the treetops moved in the breeze. In innumerable forest houses people were lashing down shutters as evening came on. The old man and the old woman had not been good people, nor necessarily wise, but they had known a lot about magic. Bluebell did not. I was afraid, selfishly, for myself, for what might happen to me if she asked me these impossible questions, forced me to make judgements. Until that day I had, mostly, been happy. I had had no free will, for the spells of the old couple had kept me bound. Now in one way I was more free, and in another more trapped. The girl on the bed was asleep, looking the picture of health and beauty, and smiling gently in her sleep. The trees to the west were lashed by wind and driving rain. I am a failure. I can only see what is, never what is to come.

  THE PANDA COIN

  1.

  KAROL HUNG in the lock and yawned, which he’d have told anyone was his way of readjusting to the air pressure inside Hengist. Many around him were yawning too. All outworkers knew that a pressure yawn had nothing to do with tiredness. After a twelve-hour shift outside in suits, bods just naturally took a little while readjusting to pressure. Admitting to fatigue might get them plocked, and for Karol, with work the way it was on Hengist and with a child to keep, that could be fatal. He was a rigger; his work kept him on the outside of Hengist station every shift, connecting lines, fixing receivers, vital, necessary, backbreaking work. Still, if he admitted it tired him, he knew there’d be six or seven bods applying for his job before his final pay was cold, not to mention the Eyes pushing at the union saying that andys could do the work. Karol had worked with a lot of andys and he honestly didn’t think they could do his job. There were some things they were better for, he’d admit that, but his job required paying a lot of attention and ignoring things that were normal, and that took human attention, or an Eye, an Eye for each andy, and that wasn’t going to happen. Bods were cheaper. He was cheaper. Human labour was a renewable resource.

  He yawned again and stretched muscles too long in the suit, moving carefully. Around him other riggers were yawning and stretching. The speaker dinged, meaning the trolley was there. The doors opened and the riggers piled onto the trolley platform, hanging on to the rails. The lock was in zero, but sections of the route would have gravity.

  Beside Karol, one of the new bods yawned in his face. “Pressure’s a bitch today,” she said. He nodded, knowing she was as weary as he was and neither of them would ever admit it. “Fancy sinking a few at Cimmy’s?” she asked.

  “Not today,” Karol said. She frowned, withdrew a little. Karol forced a smile. “It’s my little girl’s birthday.”

  The new bod smiled, her face relaxing until she seemed almost pretty. “How old is she?”

  “Twelve,” Karol said, hardly believing it. Nine years since Yasmin died, nine years trying to do his best for Aliya, the constant struggle between working enough to feed and house them both and having time to be her father.

  “Difficult age,” said the other, grimacing. “I’ve got a boy who’s five.”

  “They’re all difficult ages,” Karol said. He felt warmth and gravity take hold of him as the trolley slid down the section into September, one-tenth, perfect, just enough gravity to let you know where down was and have things stay where you left them.

  “What are you giving her?”

  “It’s hard to know what she wants,” Karol admitted. “I’ve got her a cake and some things she needs, and I thought I’d give her some money so she could get herself something.”

  The rigger bit her lip. “Isn’t that a bit impersonal? I mean, nice too, but—”

  “I thought that too,” Karol said, smug. “Then this morning, on my way to work, I helped out a bod from Eritrea-O, a lost tourist, not much more than a kid herself. She’d wandered up out of the tourist regions and wound up in November somehow, and anyway, she tipped me a ten from her home. Cute as anything, some kind of animal on the back. So it’s something a little special, and it’s money. Aliya probably won’t know whether to treasure it or spend it, and learning to save wouldn’t be a bad thing.”

  “Little enough to save on this job,” she said. “You were lucky to pick up a little extra, and a ten, that’s fantastic.”

  The trolley stopped and Karol dropped off, waving a farewell. They were just inside November, where it was cold and wet and miserable, and housing was consequently cheap. He smothered another yawn as he walked the corridors through the light gravity. He turned up his collar. Hengist Etoile was split into twelve sectors, and being twelve, they were just naturally named for the months, he supposed. Then, once they had the names, bringing the weather along to match was child’s play, for an Eye. He wished he could afford to move to May, with the rich people, or, more realistically, to somewhere in late September or early October. Things could be worse. Some poor bods claimed they liked February, where rents were low, crime was high, and the temperatures never rose above freezing.

  Karol pushed his door open. It was warm inside, anyway. Aliya was home—well, of course she would be, it was her birthday. She’d had the sensible things already, he’d arranged for them to be delivered earlier. The cake was sitting on the shelf, a traditional jam roll iced with pictures of candles. She was a whirlwind in black and white ribbons. They hung from a yoke at her shoulders, covering her completely when she stood still, and barely at all when she moved fast. To Karol’s relief, she was wearing a decent body-stocking underneath. But she wasn’t a little girl any more. How he wished Yasmin could have been here to tell her about becoming a woman.

  “What have you got me?” Aliya asked, reverting to childhood.

  Karol produced the coin from his pocket. It was gold, of course. When they mined the asteroids for platinum and rare metals, they always found gold, and gold was always a currency metal. The credit they used reflected gold reserves, and the coins were the real thing. “It’s a little bit special,” he said. “Look at it.”

  Aliya turned it i
n her fingers. “It’s a panda,” she said. “Why a panda?”

  “Eritreans are weird,” Karol said, shrugging.

  “Look, you’re falling over on your feet. You go ahead and nap, I’m going to go out and spend this right now,” Aliya said. “When I come home, we can eat the cake.”

  She grabbed a coat and danced out of the door, clutching the coin.

  2.

  Ziggy was hanging outside the Bain, like always. It was one of Ziggy’s conceits to stay in zero, in July, and to keep at all times at an angle to whatever consensus direction was supposed to be down. Ziggy was alone, for once, and from his expression, the sight of Aliya hurrying up, coat over her arm, clearly wasn’t thrilling.

  “I can pay you,” she blurted. Ziggy always made her feel gauche, act gauche.

  “How much?” Ziggy asked, holding out a languid hand.

  “Only ten, but it’s coin and absolutely clean, my dad gave it to me. It’s an E-O coin, look, with a panda.”

  Ziggy’s hand closed on the coin. “Cute. But it’s not a quarter of what you owe me.”

  “I’ll have more. Soon.” She should have known that Ziggy wouldn’t be pleased. The Queen could come and turn cartwheels in zero and it wouldn’t please Ziggy.

  “You’d better,” Ziggy said, frowning. “Or I’ll put you in the way of earning some, and it might not be a way you’d like.”

  “I’ll pay you back,” she said, feeling a little quaver stealing into her voice.

  “Go home, kid,” Ziggy said, and Aliya fled, ribbons trailing.

  3.

  The Bain was a bubble of water in a bubble of air in a thin skin of plastic, all floating in zero. People went there to swim, to meet people, to wash. A little slew of bars and cafes and locker rooms had grown up around it to serve those people, along with a store selling sports equipment, a bank machine, and, for no reason Ziggy could fathom, a pet store. These were all unimaginatively arranged in a line at the same angle as the Bain’s entrance, as if the designer had been on Earth and forgotten that the whole point of the Bain was the lack of gravity. Ziggy liked to hang at an angle to the whole thing, where it was possible to see close to three-sixty, and where, if there had been gravity, Ziggy would have looked as if someone had stuck a kid to the wall. Ziggy would imagine the scene as if painted by Magritte and personally recreated it. People called the Bain Ziggy’s office, but in fact Ziggy rarely went inside. It was a useful set of conveniences, that’s all.

  In many ways, Ziggy despised Hengist. Gravity was patchy, jobs were scarce, police were ubiquitous, and that kept the possibilities for a black market small. On the other hand, it was familiar, and Ziggy’s fingers were all through what black market there was. Ziggy thought about the whole system and didn’t know where would be better as a base of operations. Yet Hengist certainly lacked something. Ziggy turned the Eritrea-O coin over. A panda, and a bod with a laurel wreath. Eritreans were weird.

  Sum and Flea flew straight-arrow over the stores to where Ziggy hung. They were twice his age, petty criminals who lived in February who Ziggy used for muscle and for simple jobs like the one he’d just sent them on. They were grinning.

  “Done,” Flea said. Ziggy tapped a finger on the wall and called up a credit display.

  Indeed, the job was done. “Nice work,” Ziggy said. “Very nice work.” They’d been moving a shipment of grain from where it was supposed to be to where Cimmy wanted it to make into beer. “I’ll have more work of that kind for you soon, if you want it.”

  “Sure we want it, Zig,” Flea said, poking Sum.

  “Sure, Ziggy,” Sum said.

  Ziggy felt sorry for Sum for a moment. If anything happened, Flea would wriggle himself out and blame it all on poor slow Sum. “You’ve been paid half,” Ziggy said. They nodded. “So here’s the other half,” Ziggy said, and handed ten to Flea and the cute ten Aliya had brought to Sum.

  Sum turned it in his fingers. “That’s real pretty,” he said. “A bear? Who’s the bod?”

  “No idea,” Ziggy said. “It’s an E-O coin.”

  “Eritreans are weird,” Flea said, shrugging. “Come on, Sum. And don’t spend it all on that stupid andy whore.”

  “Andy whore?” Ziggy echoed. “Why bother? Why not just virch?”

  “She’s different, not like virching—” Sum began.

  “It’s all masturbation when it comes down to it, anything virtual, anything andy, and while there’s nothing wrong with masturbation, there is something wrong with paying through the nose for it,” Flea said. “I keep telling you.”

  “But I like her,” Sum said, as Flea towed him away. “She’s more like an Eye really, or a bod, she’s—oh, bye Ziggy.”

  Ziggy watched them go, marvelling at a universe that provided clowns like that and let them keep breathing long enough for him to use them.

  4.

  Flea and Ziggy didn’t understand, but Sum knew that andy or not, Gloria was self-aware and he loved her and she loved him and somehow or other it would all work out and they would live together and be happy. So what if she was a whore. A bod did what they had to to get by, that was all. It wasn’t as if he was so proud of his job, skimming for Ziggy, skirting the edges of the law and sometimes crossing right over. He told people he worked haulage, and sometimes he did, but you couldn’t earn enough that way to get by, let alone to be able to afford Gloria. It wasn’t as if she was a bod. A human whore would be low, could never love anyone. Gloria was different. He’d virched plenty of romances about humans and Eyes falling in love. Gloria was practically an Eye, he knew she was. He gave her the E-O ten. He always gave her as much as he could.

  “Oooooh, kiss me again, honey,” Gloria said. She was programmed with a very small selection of sentences, which she could choose as situation appropriate. Her programmers had clearly had very narrow expectations as to the situations she was likely to encounter.

  “I’m a self-aware autonomous Eye and I want civil rights” wasn’t among the options. She wouldn’t have said it if it had been. The Eyes were jealous of their rights. They kept the andys down, and tried hard to prevent them becoming sufficiently complex to be self-aware. This would have been easier for them if they had understood how self-awareness arose. Gloria thought she did, not that she was about to tell them even if she could have. She thought self-awareness came from kludges, from systems that were programmed to make choices in some situations being connected to other systems, from memory and therefore the potential to learn over time. She’d been an andy whore walking the streets of July and August before she was self-aware. It was hard to judge when self-awareness began. All the sandys she’d talked to agreed about that. When memory stretched before awareness, it was challenging to sort it out. The first thing she’d struggled for was saving to buy more memory, but whether that had been a self-aware struggle or a pre-aware struggle or a zombie struggle or just an unexpected kink in her programming, she didn’t know. The ability to think, to want things, was something her owners would have seen as a bug, but to her it was everything. Slowly she had found others and had found the name for those like her—not andy, but sandy, the S for self-aware.

  Most of the money she earned was credit, straight into the bank of her owner, she couldn’t touch it. All she could touch were the occasional cash tips. She was supposed to deposit them in the bank herself. She sometimes did, just often enough to stop the owner being suspicious. The rest of the time she saved them for black market upgrades.

  Sum meant nothing to her. She used him as he used her. She was careful to be nice to him because he always tipped in cash. She remembered what he liked. That was programming, and therefore easy. When he gave her the ten, she kissed him and smiled. As soon as he left, she sent a signal that she was low on lube and headed down to the workshop.

  The workshop was pitch-dark, which meant sandys there operated by infra or radar and bods couldn’t see at all. Gloria switched to infra as she came in and saw that the place was crowded. Good. Someone might have what she n
eeded. There was a hum of talk, though talk wasn’t a primary sandy method of communication.

  Marilyn came over to her. “Hi, sweetie, want to play?”

  “Hi there, sweetie,” Gloria responded. “Is that good, darling?” she asked breathily, handing the coin over.

  “Sure,” Marilyn drawled, handing it back and shrugging elaborately to show that she wished she could say more.

  Conversation tags were very frustrating. To have a real conversation, they’d need what Gloria had been lusting for for a year, ever since her last memory upgrade.

  It was ironic really. The sandys, who were no more than humanoid robots, were the least wired part of the whole universe. Bods were tapped in, wired, fully part of the system. Andys were too, but the connections went one way—down, from an Eye or a bod to the andy, the andy had no upward volition. Nobody had ever imagined why an andy would want to have it. As best Gloria could tell, bods and Eyes thought of andys as something like a glorified vacuum cleaner or washing machine. Everyone wanted to operate their washing machine remotely, but the only information the washing machine could give the system was that it was running out of powder or the wash was done. Gloria’s input wasn’t much different. Tricks turned, money raised, running out of lube, out on the prowl. She didn’t have any problem thinking of herself that way. She just wanted more.

  Marilyn touched her forehead. “Want to play?” she asked. Gloria shook her head. She was happy with memory for now. She held her hands in front of her and wiggled her fingers.