In Thetti, the language of Therevatti, the word for “upside down” is Lah-tahp. Lah-tahp. My research shows it was Vietnamese once, but centuries of time and light years of distance will change anything.
Lah-tahp is a word you don’t hear much in the Pacheco interior. I only heard it maybe twice in my whole month there. You’ll never read it on the walls, or scratched into a bar top, or laboriously “keyed” into a security vehicle’s paint job. All that happens outside the security walls; more so the farther you get away from the city center.
If you want to find the word Lah-tahp out in the heat and humidity of Therevatti rather than during some climate controlled buffer search, bars and liquor stores are a good start. An inebriated someone might let the word slip, under the screen of an ethanol fog. Or you might find it tucked away in a bathroom stall or a circuit breaker box. But not on the bar counter. You never know who might be looking, after all.
But the liquor store is where the word was born. Stenciled in misty, silver script across a dark red bottle: “NLF.” It’s a kind of spiced liqueur, made from locally grown Soohoochu fruit. Real sweet stuff, clings to your tongue a bit like oil, with a rich umami punch that hits like lime glazed pork. NLF is alright, but I can’t get over that ruptured pipeline slickness it has in the mouth. In fact, I don’t think anybody would talk about it so much if it wasn’t for its more… exotic qualities.
After you take a mouthful, the sweetness dims, the umami recedes, the alcohol burn rises. It all becomes wincingly bitter, your face pulling back and away from the flavor in your mouth, your lips open reflexively, trying to make space. The sudden harshness on your tongue is all too much, so you reach again for your glass, trying to capture that initial flavor, that sweetness. Take a sip and it’s just another blast of acrid pungency.
What happened here?
Lah-tahp is a homonym, a word with multiple meanings, the darling of poets and songwriters and food journalists. NLF has a secret ingredient: the grated and mashed rhizome of a native plant, which also goes by the name Lah-tahp. It’s magical stuff, a kind of chemical flavor inverter. Sweetness becomes bitterness, bitterness becomes sweetness. Expose it to air and it loses its potency, what’s locally called “Losadi,” the panting one does after drinking NLF to reset the chemical so you can take another sip; flush that bitterness away.
But when the bottle runs out, you’re left with that sour taste. So, you either crack open a new one, or you leave with a writhing tongue.
NLF. Nothing Lasts Forever. So connected with the spice Lah-tahp that the phrases are synonymous. Lah-tahp. This too shall pass. Topsy turvey. Every darkness has its dawn. Every bottle has its bitters. In Thetti, it’s what you tell your wife when you learn she’s been fired. It’s what you tell your teenage son when you think he’s taking his freedom for granted. It’s what you whisper at Brightsail Colonial Security when you think they can’t hear.
It’s what I woke to one morning, Polity gathering their bags with one hand, shaking me with the other. The only light outside our hotel room was artificial.
“Time to go, now, now, now, right now,” they said.
“What’s happened,” I asked, “what’s going on?”
“Fraud protection’s finally awake. We have to find a new place to sleep for awhile,” Polity was slamming mostly yellow jackets into a suitcase, occasionally glancing towards the doorway.
“So soon? I thought you had everything under control?” I was still rubbing sleep out of my eyes when they threw my bags against my chest. That woke me up.
“Lah-tahp, Oscar,” they said, slipping a light pink hoodie on over their shoulders, “I’ll tell you what it means some other time. Socks and shoes, c’mon.”
Nothing Lasts Forever, listeners.
I’m Oscar Yasui, formerly a professional food critic, currently an independent food journalist, and you’re listening to Gastronaut.
As Polity has explained before, their technical expertise isn’t magic, it isn’t a secret code that can get those in the know anything they want. But it is arcane. As I traveled with them, I came to realize that they live their life with a little satchel of jigsaws in a world of puzzles. Sometimes they have the right piece on hand, and sometimes there isn’t anything they can do. When that happens, Polity can’t just code a new exploit from thin air.
That just means that when lack of access can mean imprisonment or death, Polity has developed a series of backup plans.
“So, where do we go from here,” I asked, after we hit the spotless streets of Pacheco. A fog had rolled in, and we both power walked into it, prior experience no doubt putting a fire to Polity’s heels.
“City checkpoint, past the perimeter wall,” Polity gestured at the rolling bank of cloud ahead of us, obscuring everything but the brightest of search and signal lights.
“And then?” I asked. Polity sighed in reply.
“And then I figure something else out,” for a moment they considered, slowed their pace.
“Sorry about the tone, Oscar, and the rush. I just don’t think we can manage a second brilliant escape from the cops. We got lucky on Lea te Suldan,” they trailed the sentence off, but I finished it in my head.
Pacheco was better secured, better equipped, better staffed, and at an alert level that went hand in hand with its proximity to areas of guerrilla fighting. There would be no third part to my galaxy wide escape act. The thought was heavy in my skull.
I told them I understood. I had a feeling that Polity wouldn’t abandon a cushy hotel unless something was throwing them out. Best to follow along, then.
We slipped into a crowd of night workers near the gates, a throng of locals, each rubbing their eyes, yawning, or rolling the stiffness from aching shoulders. A pass was flashed at an automated scanning booth, our bodies were briefly t-rayed, and we were waved on through.
Pacheco’s outskirt zone spills from its gates, a flow of squat buildings, rarely higher than two stories. Older construction, prefab and plastic towards the walls, weathered and always battling mold and corrosion. Push farther out and it’s local concrete, from quarried and crushed limestone. Polymers refined from local crude. An advantage of settling on a world with a six hundred million year biosphere. Alien rock still supports a roof. Alien oil cracks into the same petrochemicals.
Deep creeper forest on all sides, alive with the sound of calling insects, reptiles, and birds. The colonists have cut it back tens of yards around their strip of civilization; using poison and fire and construction equipment to force breathing room. The forest pulls in turn. At the edge of the vegetation, I saw a toppled shed, maybe a workshop or a garage. Coils of purple tangled through its roof plate, round its doorways and foundations, thick and wild as fallen power lines. Nobody has spared any effort to reclaim it. The jungle can have that one.
Bicycles are dominant here, and the streets are alive with the low whirr-chak of blurring spokes. The roads are unpaved stretches of utility surface, and as the rainy season begins, mud dominates the terrain. You find it on your eyebrows, you find it in your underwear, if you were to trip and fall into a ditch, it would swallow even the outline of you, leaving no sign of your passing. The brown gray tides of the mud have pushed the bikes onto any available raised surface, and there they become a parade of rattling.
Therevattins fight back against the weather with rain slickers, heavy boots, waterproof fabric, sealant varnish. A block away from the gates, shops crowd the spokes with claims that they can waterproof anything. Without these businesses battling the damp, I’d expect the entire region to sag and sulk into the ground, leaving nothing but mold and ruin.
All said, it’s easy to picture the Pacheco outskirts as a terrible place. Wet, muddy, downtrodden architecture, everything bordering on an alien ecosystem that has to be physically battled for dominance. An ecosystem hungry for entire buildings. That’s exactly what the town is when the soil first gulps up your boots, when the rain comes sluicing off a shanty roof and slaps you open palmed across the mouth.
It isn’t a town for tourists. Which is a gentle way of saying that it’s a place with an acquired taste. Which is a dickless way of saying that you will feel an immediate, bracing sense of panic as your comfort is swept away in the storm.
There is one touristy thing you can do on Therevatti. Get shelter from the precipitation, take a deep pull in through your nostrils, feel the smell of the planet rise up from the rain. If they wanted to, the colonists could have named this planet “Petrichor.” Sometimes I’ve caught Polity shaking their head at me as I take in the earthy perfume of their world. I think they, and all Therevattins, are over it.
But for a newcomer, it’s nice.
Couch surfing was Polity’s backup plan; free room and board for a time, with the added bonus of meals. Only three hours later, I was seated on a plastic wrapped couch eating protein slurry, foamed, fried, and diced, served over a bed of pink rice, beneath a smothering of thick sauce.
Protein slurry is the dregs of the dregs, scraps of unused or unwanted meats from labs or traditional husbandry blended together and reconstituted into something like tofu’s antithesis. It isn’t particularly healthy, it has high fat, plenty of sugar, and pretty good sodium content. It isn’t appetizing to look at, being a quavering gelatinous mass. But it is very, very inexpensive.
And it’s delicious when you make it just right. I wish I knew about protein slurry during my college years.
But if you want to serve a guest protein slurry there’s a way to do it. Polity Yellow’s host, a woman with graying hair in her mid-fifties, had a trick of her own. She slid about a pound of protein slurry, quivering, from its tray and mixed it with water to get it to a sludge-like consistency. We worked together, making apolitical smalltalk, chopping chilis and garlic for a marinade. A tumult of rice boiled beside emerald lobed Jelly Pears, themselves stewed and rinsed repeatedly to flush out their neurotoxic compounds. I watched the older woman pass the fluffed and syruped mixture to a buttered pan, where she tossed it again and again at a high heat to toast. Then came whitefish stock and garlic, each ingredient flying up over the fire in delicious looking waves. Until the whole mixture was fragrant.
Follow up to a conversation I had with a supposed Jelly Pear merchant in season 1, episode 2, listeners. Jelly Pears are green, no matter how much you expose them to air. So if you’re being sold pink Jelly Pear products back in Sol, know that someone is using dye at the very least.
Back in the kitchen, Polity and I pulled a gelatinous bag of marinated protein mixture from the fridge and warmed it over a stained hot plate. Whisks in hand, our arms worked furiously in bowls to whip the mass into stiff peaks. Our bodies jolted from the force of whisking, and both Polity and I were screaming from exertion after what was probably only four minutes of work. The older woman rolled her eyes, said something in Thetti I did not understand. She placed the slurry into a frosting tube, then piped it onto a blazing hot pan in fat rows. Proteins denatured in front of my eyes, and the room filled with the unmistakable smell of capsaicin, oil, and meat. Each blort of disgusting slurry puffed up into this… this springy tube that bent and bounced like an aerated sausage. This we sliced into discs, slid over the rice, and sauced heavily with a mix of brown sugar, garlic, mirin, and dried local algal fronds.
Each bite is a new layer of texture. Thick and sweet, spicy, chewy, savory between, and finished with citrus. Cook the rice right, as our host had learned to do, and it’ll be like biting into a rich, sticky cloud, with little wheels of delightfully springy meats inside. It’s a dish that might take some practice to figure out. I could see mushy rice or too much sauce dooming a recipient to gluey suffocation, but do it right and you can have fantastic meals for very cheap. I gobbled my bowl down fast as I could, enough to make our host take special notice and speak something to Polity in Thetti, to which they replied in kind with the shadow of a smile. I looked between our host and Polity, gesturing for a self-sterilizing rag to clear fragments of rice from the corners of my lips. I liked our host’s taste for theirs. The steaming towel was bright red, and emerged from a housing shaped like a frog. Y’know, it’s like a tongue. It was cute.
Polity placed one into my groping hand, shaking their head at some joke. I asked what the two of them were saying, suddenly aware of all the observation.
Polity said, “She was asking me if I felt bad for starving a skinny man like you, that I could be a more considerate guide.” Polity wiggled their nose, “I’m honestly offended. I told her that I feed you plenty, just… You have terrible table manners.”
In reply I gave Polity a blank look, then made a show of stuffing the frog into my shirt collar, so its red tongue stuck out over my chest. I held my bowl further from my chin. Both Polity and our host were snickering. When I made a face like a caricature of mock nobility and grumbled haughty Duke-esque gibberish, they were laughing.
A lesson here, listeners; never be afraid to play the fool. Especially if you’re getting a supposedly “free” meal.
Because couch surfing is transactional, right? Like a hotel that comes with an employee contract. You don’t pay up front of course, you pay in housework, in favors, in incredibly awkward conversations with strangers who control whether you’ll spend the night sleeping or roaming.
You pay in space. It doesn’t matter how much a walk-in closet, or an attic, or a basement, or a kitchen floor, or a living room is used. A houseguest takes up space, takes up air, takes up room in the skull. A foreign object, no matter how benign in intent, can only be tolerated by an immune system for so long before it is ultimately and totally rejected. At least that is what Polity Yellow told me.
There was a rule they had, a rule that we followed as much as possible. “Never more than seven days.” I once asked them why, and their answer was short and simple.
“Because the questions always start on day eight. Will you be spending the weekend? Hey, do you need work? Because actually, I have an idea. Or How long will you be staying, if you know?“
I asked them why these questions were problems.
“Because,” Polity said, thoughts distracted by the past, “those questions are the softest ones you’re going to get. They get harder from there, and they get harder fast.”
It was liberating, traveling with someone with Polity Yellow’s connections, someone with enough to offer their community, who was able to get so much back in return. But Polity Yellow is also a career wheeler and dealer. A person with skills in high demand among the people we stayed with. While I wrote, edited, and recorded. While I washed dishes, watched children, peeled root vegetables, or ran to corner stores for little luxuries, Polity provided the real value. Every afternoon I’d see them hunched on that plastic sofa, eyebrows furrowed, guzzling sachets of fizz rocks or tapping a foot with the rhythm of a sewing machine. Acting as something between contractor and sorcerer.
“Polity, my son needs a GPA of 2.5 to enter university, could you go in the system and change his last trigonometry exam?”
“Polity, someone just stole my phone, could you track it down? It has the number of this guy I just met and I really don’t want to lose it.”
“Polity, the registers keep crashing and resetting the till for the day. Could you take a look?”
“Polity, I need a work visa for downtown Pacheco and I need it by tomorrow night at the latest.”
Polity says that this is how you treat crashing in someone’s living room like agriculture. Drop in, solve problems for your host, for your friends, for your host’s friend’s friends, leave before you draw down too much heat from the authorities or, worse, your bunkmates. Rotate through the same houses, build firmer connections, and never reap a promise from the same place twice. One evening, I asked them if this is how they had such a sizable library of security exploits. They smiled in response, asked me to explain.
“Well, the way I’m thinking, Polity, is that you aren’t just exploiting security vulnerabilities, you’re creating them.”
Polity exhaled, but there was a smile on their lips.
“You got me, Oscar. I’m not a smart person living in a dumb world. What I know wouldn’t get me half as far as who I know. I just trade skill for a roof, or dinner, or for someone to distract security for two dozen minutes.”
It goes like this: Polity does a job for a sanitation inspector, and someone hands them a workman’s uniform. Or a passcode. Polity does a job for an overworked programmer, and they might get a peek behind the curtain at a security firewall or two. The list goes on. The difference between their quote “local” end quote work is that they can afford to use their artist handle. Outside the home turf, they use intermediaries, false identities. Even blackmail.
“I am a criminal,” they once said to me as they held a ladder while I changed a lightbulb. “Playing fair doesn’t do shit when you’re up against museum kill teams and automated building management networks.”
“Museums have kill teams?” I asked.
“Oh, absolutely,” they replied with a laugh that was sharp with trauma. “Nations are built on art and music and culture, so when you try to fuck with all that they tend to ah… overreact.”
But the patience of a host disappears shortly after Polity has completed their work. Eventually, a red flag is put to the wind. I caught a whiff of that at the first place, with the older woman Polity was working with. I was sitting on the couch, organizing last season’s notes. Behind me, the older woman was dusting, singing a song to herself about love.
“Say, Oscar,” she turned to me, cutting off her song mid note, “Polity is such a nice young person. Have they ever expressed any interest in finding someone? Settling down?”
I was confused for a moment, because our host had used Polity's deadname, which I'd never heard before. I set my Twinnon Peregrine on my lap and cleared my throat.
“Well,” I said, “they have a pretty busy work life, they move around quite a bit. I don’t think they’re looking to settle down just yet.”
Our host smiled in a way that was not entirely unkind.
“Oh, but come now, do you think they want to be touring the stars with random men? Is that what would make them happiest?” She said,
“We’re not together,” I said, holding my hand up like a stop sign.
“Oh, well…” her forehead wrinkled, her eyes turned up, “If that’s the case, my grand nephew Carmicheal has an electronics store, he’s doing very well for himself.”
I sneezed in confusion. Like a small dog baffled by rain.
“Oh, is he?” was all I could manage.
“Yes, I actually have his profile right here,” she shoved an old tablet screen between me and my Twinnon. Beneath a spiderweb of cracks I saw an image of a man in his thirties, features a blur as he attempted to evade the lens of the camera. “I would consider it a favor if you could connect Polity and Carmicheal, maybe put in a good word for my nephew? He has such beautiful brown eyes. With their tech expertise and his business skill, I think they’d just be so compatible!”
“Right, I’ll think about it,” I said, perhaps too quickly. She clucked her tongue in response, a resigned sourness cast on her features.
“It’s not a big ask, I think. Nobody has to commit to anything, I just think that if you intend to stay as long as you are, then we should get to know eachother better. Polity helped me with those Brightsail collectors, but Polity isn’t the only one staying under my roof, and I feel as if we hardly speak. You’re a nice enough fellow, but they-”
I excused myself, making up a story about a coupon at the local grocer I was afraid would expire. The woman didn’t believe me for an instant, but blessedly, we were in that stage of a relationship where a lack of intimacy meant neither party could do much to extend their authority. I found Polity as they were returning home and relayed the story to them.
“Oh, ugh,” they said in reply, “spew.” Thanks for coming to me.”
I asked where we went from here.
“Out, obviously. We say our goodbyes at dinner, we grab our things, and I cross her off my list of locations forever.”
I nodded with vigor. Polity saw the furrow developing between my eyebrows and snapped their fingers in front of my face.
“Hey, hey! Don’t get so mad on my behalf,” when my expression didn’t change, they shook me by the shoulders, “seriously, cut it out. People bring the boot down all the time, quid pro quo and all that crap. If things get bad, just go somewhere better.”
I thought about Polity’s situation for a moment, and my anger fizzled. They made it sound so easy.
Just as Polity recommended, we left that night with excuses on our lips and garlic on our breath. The fried slurry didn’t taste right. It never tasted as great as that first night we had it. Lah-tahp. Nothing Lasts Forever.
Us houseguests really do have a shelf life. We’re a lot like fish that way. Celebrated fresh, tolerated after a day or two, treated like a biohazard shortly after that.
Polity worked hard to keep our feet clean and our heads dry. What we lost in stability, we gained in basic living conditions; assuming you took the average of the best and worst meals. But it is startling just how many homes a person can rotate through. I’d explain every location, but since this is still a podcast about food, I’ll stick to meals. Take the first meal you eat at someone’s home, compare it to the last, and you’ll have an illustrative description of exactly what happened.
Inside a laundromat’s reinforced cellar, Polity and I were welcomed with a bowl of steaming noodle soup, and departed after a meal of gristly synthetic chicken served on gray blocks of undifferentiated protein mass. Beneath the roof of a dripping garage we started with meal kits and ended with… with nothing! They just pointed to the door and sat down for their late night dinner. All we ate that night was the smell of mold and damp, like, even Polity was knocked on their back foot there. Usually they see that kind of bad faith coming a kilometer out. At a dilapidated guard house near the gates, our first meal was biscuits and fruit spread, and our last meal was… these fantastic false turkey melts with a little fish sauce on the side. I ended up really liking that host family. They were good people.
Polity and I were eating those melts together beneath an awning that fountained rainwater dense as a pane of glass. Polity sighed into their mouthful, lifted a sauce-covered finger to their lips. I noticed that every time we would eat, they would alway hunt for every last drop of sauce.
“This is a good one. You don’t usually get them this good when you pull homes at random, but this one’s really great.”
They looked out over the street at the homes opposite. The air smelled of rainwater and sodden earth. And sweet garlic fish sauce.
“When the rain dies down we can get going to the next one,” Polity took another bite of their melt. “I doubt it’ll be this good so… y’know,” they rolled their eyes, “don’t get used to it.” Their smile was limp.
I was silent, eating, taking in the rain and the warm yeast smell of the toasted bread. But… something about the conversation made me think. Polity seemed to always be in motion. Always hungry for something to take.
The thought was a tickle in my head, along my spine. Kept unspoken by the same membrane of trepidation that had caused so much miscommunication a month before.
“Polity, do you like Therevatti?”
Polity’s lips parted ever so slightly.
“No. Not really. Nobody likes a warzone, or being neighbor to a warzone in this case,” they rested their melt, still stained with dipping sauce, in their lap.
They looked to me, their eyes were sad. I remember this night so clearly, even after everything that happened afterwards. They looked and me and they said:
“Go ahead, ask.”
Part of me wanted to smile, out of shitty embarrassment that they had seen through me so easily.
“Why are you here, Polity? Why did you come back?”
“Because I’m running, Oscar,” their mouth was a twist. “Because I’m done.”
A pair of cyclists pedaled hard in the mud. Not gliding, but grunting, working their calves hard to slowly grind their way forward. I shifted uncomfortably, Polity kneaded their melt, still wrapped in foil.
“Was it the museum?” Me, swinging blind now.
I guess, maybe. You don’t get a card in the mail when you cross the wrong person,” they lifted a sticky hand and ran it through their hair.
“It might have been the museum. Or the account books I stole. Or the Singular Devotion. Or that entire banana fiasco,” they barked a single laugh, “I bet you think that last one’s stupid, but…”
I cut in, gently as I could, “No Polity. Even odds, it was whatever you did to the banana people.” I thought back to some particularly chilling emails I had received as a food critic. “Those people are really dangerous.”
Polity laughed again, this time a bit more harried, frantic, “They’re so unbelievably homicidal.”
“So you came here?”
Polity punched me in the shoulder, I winced. They had a good arm.
“You’re in journalist mode, asshole. You’re just trying to keep the rhythm going.”
“Old habits,” I said.
“Yeah, yeah, it seemed far enough. Less extreme than stripping off my face or joining a transhumanism commune. People I knew and… could half tolerate, half manipulate. I still speak Thetti alright, and I’m hoping the people I’m chasing are the kind of jackals that don’t want to hack through a jungle infested with guerillas to chase me down. To um, I think the word they use is collect. To collect me.”
They held their dinner, shoes in the mud. They were squeezing their melt, and I noticed a sticky stain spreading across their lap. When I noticed the sauce, I did not change my expression, I did not change my expression, even a twitch.
“Oh come the fuck on,” Polity breathed, “now I have sauce all over my pants.”
It’s in your hair too,” I said, with the countenance of a marble statue.
Polity rubbed sauce into my glasses and I screamed.
Sometimes when you crash on a couch, there isn’t any time for goodbyes, for the goodwill to grow stale and brittle. Sometimes the problem comes roaring right up to you. Think about it, listeners. Consider that every time you have someone over, there is a scramble of preparation. Get the octopoid body of the cleaner drone out of the closet, where it’s been collecting dust. Do the dishes, all the dishes, for once. Punch in a few more warm bodies into your shopping calculator. How much hand soap do you need for four people compared to one? How much wine? What coupon chits to use?
Guests are disruptive at the best of times, and that’s exactly what Polity and I were. But disruption takes many shapes.
It was the end of the first month when we arrived at a small bicycle repair shop in the middle of Pacheco’s Outskirts. A single story, but with a high three story tower on the roof. Polity explained it as a kind of lookout position, back when this structure snuggled up to the jungle’s edge.
A lookout position for what? Weather conditions before prediction systems arrived. Spotting for traffic and shipments. Signaling. Wildlife. Therevatti’s ecosystem is very special in that its proteins are compatible with our digestion. An exciting culinary prospect that absolutely cleaves in either direction. We can eat them. They can eat us. Common ground with alien life.
But the jungle was rolled back a few kilometers, the stems blasted and fumigated. It didn’t take, so they were buried in permeable concrete. Even now, shoots and climbers still wind their way up cellar floors, burst up through foundations, peek up through the base of streetlamps and utility poles. The moisture breeds fungus of all kinds. Slime molds will quite literally walk into your pantry, beautiful iridescent lichens that slowly digest metals and ruin cars. One day, we saw a plume of smoke towards the jungle treeline, saw a few fire suppression drones copter in from over the Pacheco walls. I asked Polity what was happening.
“Um,” they squinted at the roiling pillar, lit with dancing embers. “Somebody got careless, probably? Chemical fire? Hell, it could be Savorflames. You blew a lock open with one, right? They grow in clusters of like, fifteen.”
The drones were circling now, dispensing thick bursts of suppressant foam. We could smell it too, charring polymer, hot glass dust, black soot. I idly scratched behind my ear. Ernest was right; he really wasn’t an arbiter of morality.
At the bicycle shop, Polity and I slept in that old watchtower, which smelled of mineral oil and rust. Polity had made one of their deals with a family, husband and wife in their mid forties, four children, the youngest no older than eight. They lived in a house a few buildings towards the jungle, but the most we saw of them was when they would come in to work, power tools screaming, machine stations blaring. The husband and wife were nice enough people, but their eldest daughter and son would always give me hard looks. Glance at Polity and I and whisper when they thought we were too engrossed in our work to notice. I swear they’d run machines just to cover the sound of their own voices.
But they were a nice enough family. Still, this was a hard one for us couch crashers, during this supposed stay with friends. Polity had this raggedness about them, their fingers met their keyboard with hateful intent. I’d hear a short curse and then a flurry of hammered backspaces. Eventually, I had to ask them. I wasn’t expecting a straightforward reply, but that’s exactly what I got.
“They’re friends of my parents. I won’t bore you with the details, but this job has connections I’m not really thrilled about. But…”
They looked out the windowpane. Rain drove downwards from massive clouds with violet edges. The wind caught them and hurled them against our little windowpane with enough force to shake it. The mud outside flowed like a lahar, splashed like the world had gone liquid. Polity gave me a shrug of indifferent helplessness.
“Sleeping outside in the rainy season is a total no-go. We just need to bear with it, and this tower isn’t so bad. This work is gonna gray my hair, Yasui, but we’re low on friendly roofs at the moment.”
And a roof is what we got. A thimble loft perched above a family owned machine shop. It’s hard enough to record Gastronaut with heavy traffic outside a hall closet. Power tools echoing up into a tower? Ringing it like a goddamned bell deep into a Therevatti night? That’s real misery. Audio processing technology is a beautiful thing, but my Twinnon Peregrine can only handle so much. Propping up the mattress does nothing when a young woman is using an angle grinder for bicycle trauma surgery.
Oh gosh, and what a bicycle it was too. A ‘35 Veranda, had that sexy liquid fit battery, the kind distributed around the chassis in a way that evenly places weight across the frame; like cropped ivy on an aluminum trellis. I tried not to be too nosy as I watched a brother duo work on its motor, my legs dangling from the workshop rafters. The spokes of the wheels were a blur as they tested it, the electric motor emitting just a musical tone when in use. The tires shined like ivory piano keys, the handlebars were shape-memory technology. They had reconfigured after purchase to match the hands of their unknown rider, and no one else.
I say all of this about the Veranda because I know a thing or two about bicycles, though I’m something of a bicycle neophyte myself. Certainly not an expert, of course. But it’s important to make the distinction, because the repair shop we were staying at also built guns.
It’s not the thing you’d notice just strolling through the garage. One pile of pipes and springs looks the same as any other kind. An electric motor for some models of bikes looks about the same as an electro-kinetic thermal ignition module for an 8mm rifle.
I only realized that they manufactured weapons when I found myself looking at a bundle of what I assumed were seat tubes and thought to myself,
“Why, those are far too thick! It’ll slow the whole cycle down and strain the motor!”
And, y’know, they were fucking rifled on the inside, which seat tubes aren’t.
And that wasn’t the only clue I’d pick up on as to what was happening in this repair shop. Sometimes I’d see a crate appear, ready to be shipping out to an illegible Thetti address. Then the mother of the house would pass me some chore or invite Polity and I to talk about radio repair, and the crate would be gone when we returned. Sometimes observing the family’s work was fine, but on some days the brothers and the massive eldest sister would put their tools down and lean against the nearest surface. They’d just stare at me until the hum of the overhead lights became oppressive and I’d excuse myself. Once I found the words “Lah-tahp” stenciled on a doorframe.
But the single most obvious clue that something was off with this family came after we sat down to dinner one night–and the eldest sister decided to kill me.
Hold on, I probably need a citation on this one.
It’s possible she thought I needed to get skraked the moment she saw me looking too long at the alleged bicycle parts. Or maybe she just didn’t like my face, or that I was an offworlder. Maybe it came to her in a dream or something. I dunno, she seemed like a woman with both feet on the ground to me.
We had left the garage and were packed into the family’s small prefab home a few blocks away. The exact sort of building that are stamped out for disaster relief. All old-style composite and metal stakes, hard edges, below average insulation. Polity and I were seated side by side, crowded close to a high table that accommodated our entire host family. We were eating these dumplings, each the size of a baseball and packed full of generously spiced meat. The smell of those dumplings made me feel drunk. Everyone would grab a dumpling with hands, chopsticks, or a fork, and dunk them into a plastic Kenneman’s brand tupperware container full of salted yogurt and garlic sauce. I’d call it a Turkish dish, but it’s manti. Manti dates back to most of mainland Asia. It’s as much a Turkish dish as wicker is a French weaving technique, it’s ancient. Plenty of cultures had the same idea.
It was delicious, filling, the sauce would hit the tongue first with that subtle sourness of the yogurt, which would be balanced out by the smooth neutrals of the dough, then the garlic savor of the meat. I never did find out what the meat actually was. It tasted lower on the tongue, possessed that earthy quality of wild game. I had only known this flavor three times while working at Palladium, when I was sent on assignment to the few restaurants that could hunt for their dishes. Not many venues can afford that kind of license. I asked Polity to pass on a question about the source of the meat, but they told me not to bother. Hunting was restricted on Therevatti to only certain professions, and licenses were kept almost entirely to the scientific and tourism industries.
“It’s probably not human, though,” they winked, “Probably.”
I told Polity that it certainly wasn’t human meat: I would know if it was. I only got a raise of the eyebrows and a sighed “Yeah, okay, Yasui.” in response.
Never publish a book, listeners. The greatest hell is being told that it’s excellent and relevant, and then realizing that nobody in the galaxy has actually read the damn thing.
I hissed, trying and failing to keep my voice down, “Saints askance, Polity, it wasn’t free range, I didn’t go around the city looking for people to shoot and eat.” When I realized I was being too loud, it was already too late.
The daughter, with her wide shoulders and hard looks, was staring right at me. Eyes dark and narrowed, like she was working on a particularly challenging math problem. I turned to Polity in concern, but they were already in a conversation with the wife. When I looked back, the daughter had left the table. By the time she came back a few minutes later, I was already stuffed with dumplings, and I brushed the moment away. If I fell into corner scuttling paranoia at every hard look I’d received, I wouldn’t have become a food critic, much less traveled all the way to the colonies.
Our hosts had brought NLF, that Soohoochu liqueur. And suddenly, yogurt became something mellow-sweet, meat became something light, dough became something salty, garlic metamorphized into this incredible smoky candy thing. It’s hard to be worried when everyone is engaging in Losadi, tongues lolling out of the mouth, cheeks flushed with an embarrassment that never quite fades. Bursts of air to bring flavors back to what our tongues consider normal, then another pull of NLF to send them skating back to an unknown realm of sense, getting drunker all the while. Polity was laughing at the father, who looked like a hound dog when he panted. The second brother was eating yogurt by the spoonful, the youngest was pouting for a few drops of that very adult, very magical beverage. Even the eldest sister was loosening up. To my surprise and joy she passed me the last bottle, which was lovely.
But nothing lasts forever, right? In this case, the alcohol ran out, the plates were cleared, the yogurt was dipped and swirled again and again until it was just like old paint on an artist’s palette. Shot through with bands of golden fat, lumps of pearly dough. Chores were passed out among all assembled, Eldest Sister on trash duty, youngest kids clearing away food, Polity cleaning dishes, they loved that. And me on a beer run. Household rule: last one to drink gets the next pack.
The rain poured down, as it had for a week, barely parting to make way for my ankles as I walked out to the local grocery. The Pacheco Outskirts don’t have a drone network like the city interior does. The Nu hasn’t arrived yet for one, and extreme weather makes smaller drones worthless and larger VTOLs inefficient for tasks beyond emergency response. And automated trucks? Leg units? Those get turned into technicals by the guerrillas, so Brightsail pulled them off the roads entirely. In this ecosystem, it seems that the Therevatti corner store has a chance to survive. Which means I got to half walk, half swim, dragging my limbs up and out of the mud with all the lanky force they could muster. The sky was swaddled in roiling inky blacks, the wind whipping the rain into snapping, billowing carpets of droplets. Breathing without gulping down lukewarm water, snorting it up my nostrils in burning columns, that was a challenge that consumed my attention. Seeing? Seeing was out of the question: I just kept the hem of my rainjacket against the nearest building face and walked forward.
The wind was so terribly strong, bending the tendril jungle into this thrushing mass of serpents. It was so strong that when I fell, I thought the wind had caught itself up in my clothing and dervished me down into the mud. But after I toppled, after I sprawled out, shoulders and hips wreathed in glop, I got a look at who had actually pushed me.
She stood square in the mouth of the alleyway, broad and lean, with the ease in her limbs contrasted against the agitation of her breathing. Blue raincoat billowing in the wind. It was an old restored brand, the patches of new hydrophobic material nearly obscured the Kenneman’s logo stenciled near the hip. Kenneman’s used to carry these jackets as a marketing ploy before my time, where they would flex their sheer power of industry by handing them out to customers on rainy days, before the drone network finally emptied every major store in Sol.
I don’t know much about knives, so I can’t really do much to identify the one she gripped with loose sureness in her right hand. I knew it only in the sense a possum might know the talon of a hawk. All light and length and sharpness. A white hot gleam of threat in a world rendered suddenly unimportant. I wonder if she made it herself out of bike parts and a lathe.
The eldest sister. She hadn’t paused for very long. I suppose she wasn’t the type for trials or speeches, unlike some people I could name. She stepped forward, flipping the blade between two grips. Uncertainty there. Classic, or ice pick? Maybe she hadn’t done much knife murder. Maybe she had mostly daydreamed about it.
My body moving like a mudskipper, ineffectively slipping backwards away from the eldest sister’s advance. The rest of my brain wasn’t really afraid. It registered a knife and a person like it registered the mud and the rain, though with the crystal sharpness of shock.
Finally she settled on that ice pick grip. She said something that was swallowed up by the winds of Therevatti. I said something back that I, for once, don’t remember well enough to commit to this script. There was a tension in her knees and her shoulders, and then she surged forward with her blade at the ready.
The eldest sister charged and I slung mud in her face. Dead on, right between her surprisingly unworried eyes. She grunted, blind, forearm lifted to scrub away the muck, but her footing had slid out beneath her. Mud’s a traitorous terrain that way. Thick when you need speed, slick when you need purchase. I was scrabbling up, she was rising to a kneel, one foot still slipping, one foot firm. She had cleared enough of her face for me to see anger in those deep brown eyes.
But I was staring over her, at a new figure in the mouth of the alley. Shoulders rising and falling from exertion, soundless in the wind that flattened their yellow rainjacket.
Polity.
They walked slowly, one slender arm outstretched, screaming something that the wind chewed to pieces, leaving scraps of Thetti, just threadbare consonants and vowels, tumbling.
Eldest sister backed up between the two of us, trying and failing to keep everyone present in sight. I don’t know why she even bothered. What was I going to do, take a flying leap and put her into some kind of complicated sleeperhold? I was flopping around in the mud like a fish and she was a very gunned up young woman. Polity got closer, and her words got clearer, less frayed, from a melange to a song.
Polity spoke a lot. Eldest sister only spoke a little, but even through the language barrier I could catch that Polity was shouting softly, if such a thing was possible. As Polity spoke, the knife crept down and down until its point faced the mud. Eldest sister’s face crossed from anger, to scalpel-like suspicion, to confusion, then finally…
Her jaw locked hard enough that I was sure it was hurting her. Her lips were shaking, like a child about to throw a tantrum. Under the water that streamed down her cheeks, I saw she was turning red.
She pushed something into Polity’s hands and walked away. She didn’t even give me a second glance. I thought that maybe Eldest Sister screamed, but… it could have just been the wind.
I asked Polity what in the sacred fuck that was all about. The fear still hadn’t hit, though I could feel it stalking somewhere between my lungs and my vertebrae.
“Misunderstanding,” Polity said.
For a moment I didn’t say anything.
“About what?” I asked, “I thought she was taking out the trash?”
“She sort of was,” Polity responded, partly laughing, partly terrified. “She thought you were one of those tourists that come to Therevatti to hunt colonists and eat their flesh.”
I asked Polity to repeat what they had just said. They did. Stunned, I asked, “Is that even real?”
“It feels real if you’ve listened to guerilla radio every night for five years. Oscar, I’m so sorry this happened,” Polity swallowed, the whites of their eyes showing, “Oscar, are you alright?”
I felt okay. I wasn’t hurt, just muddy. Neurons in my brain were firing, but not in sequence, just against each other. It felt like a fucking emotional seizure.
“I’m fine,” I said, and it wouldn’t be a lie until later.
“Okay,” Polity said back. “She said she was sorry. Sort of. She didn’t really use the word. I told her that you’re an idiot to maybe calm her down or something, I don’t know. She said, Idiots don’t live long on Therevatti.”
I gave a raw hiccup of lurching fear in response. Polity pressed something into my hand. I didn’t look at it.
“She said she wanted you to have this, Oscar. We should just go back to the garage and pack our things. We need to find somewhere else to stay.”
I shook my head. Now Polity looked very concerned.
“What? Oscar, no, we can just-”
“Let me get the bottles first,” I said, all in a rush. “I just want to get the bottles.”
Polity looked like they wanted to say something, like they wanted to do something.
“Oscar,” they said.
“Go,” I told them, “I’ll be right there just go. I’m okay. I don’t,” I didn’t finish. I just repeated myself instead.
“Okay, Oscar,” they said. “Okay.”
And then they left; though they were slow to let my arm go. They turned down the alleyway, trying to keep me in view all the way, and they left. Maybe to go get packed. Maybe to go get Eldest sister. I waited until I couldn’t see them before I threw up. The NLF was still in my stomach when dinner came up. The vomit tasted like candied plums and salted mackerel. It tasted great.
What I was trying to tell Polity, that I didn’t get a chance to then, was that I hadn’t done what they said. I hadn’t stopped feeling guilty. I hadn’t stopped holding on to it. I didn’t want to go back to the garage damp and angry and terrified. I wanted to go back with all of that and a six pack of NLF in my hands. I wanted to smooth this over. Even if this was an attempt on my life. I wanted to understand and be understood. I didn’t want to be a passing burden, I wanted to do something.
It wasn’t much farther to the grocer. I could see the bright flash of the LED set above the door, desperately attempting to cut through the spray. I made for that light, almost collapsing against the front door. It slid aside and I stepped through, me and what felt like a trillion raindrops.
The grocer was compact, shelves heaped with local goods and labels in recognizable Sol dialects, followed by smaller Thetti script. Chips, sanitary wipes, rain jackets heaped up in a bin. A wall of fridges hummed as I approached. It was quite a bit like shopping in a time capsule.
The air of the fridges blasted my soaked and muddy body as I opened it. The NLF clinked merrily against each other as I pulled them free. I knocked a few more items into my arms as I passed, preserved vegetables, some soup stock, shelf stable cream. None of them were my first choice, but I had an idea brewing in my head. Maybe I could cook our hosts dinner? Eldest could sit with me and share some local cuisine tips, make sure I wasn’t trying to poison everyone. So incredibly naive. Such an obvious scatterbrained trauma response. But there I was, already thinking up how I’d present this dinner to all of you, listeners. When I placed my items on the counter and watched the scanner lazily crawl up the entire pile. The man behind the desk idly rolled his thumb up a battered touchscreen, more security than cashier. Behind me, a few more patrons entered, boots squelching against the tile floor.
I ran the cost through my head, considered what this might do to my remaining funds. My hand reached out for the chit nook to complete the purchase, but bounced off a solid wall of chromed metal. I turned. A massive cybernetic hand blocked the scanner. A voice called out, over my shoulder. My nose caught a whiff of something expensive and synthetic. Both present and scentless, that sent my heart drumming against my chest. Pheromones. High corporate’s cologne.
“Oscar, your money’s no good here, let me pick this one up for you. You kinda look like you could use some generosity, man.”
I knew that voice. Behind me, a man who was all angles slowly slid a card from his wallet, a card that gleamed with the refractive qualities of a fire opal. He grinned a predator’s grin. At my left, too close for comfort, stood the ever imposing form of Mr. Ogata, whose face held his customary expression of stony disinterest.
Mr. Ungerson strode forward and swiped his card near the nook. A tinny arrangement of musical notes blurted in reply. In my pocket, I became acutely aware of the slim knife that Polity had passed me. The would-be murder weapon of Eldest Sister.
“Small universe, huh?” Mr. Ungerson said.
Lah-tap, listeners. Nothing Lasts Forever.
For Gastronaut, I’m Oscar Yasui signing off.