When settlers first touched down on Therevatti, they did so with a pioneering spirit that is rarely seen in modern colonial efforts. In most projects, advance waves of drones are projected ahead of the human element. As a result, the effort of colonization has rapidly taken on the qualities of moving into a new apartment or dormitory. Attend the safety seminar, meet the neighbors, retire to a barren, robotically engineered room to hang your posters and sort your laundry.
But Therevatti was different. Its climate allowed for some level of experimentation. It featured a breathable atmosphere, inert water rains, temperatures that neither froze nor ignited human skin, and the star of the show, an edible biosphere.
When the first generation began to starve, it was like a dark joke. In some boardrooms or buffer feed news shows, it became a dark joke. Like a fish dying of thirst, or an orange succumbing to scurvy. The reports defied belief, but regardless of what anyone’s opinions were, people continued to waste away. The pictures, listeners, make me glad that this series is spoken word.
Detailed historical records remain sealed to the public, existing only in air gapped data servers belonging to Brightsail Colonial, or its many subsidiary companies, or through quarantined written and oral histories passed down from those settlers who survived the first wave. And these are stories of crop failure: plants drowning in endless rain, crowded out by native flora, microbiomes failed from aggressive local phages and mismanagement. I was shown a photo of an agricenter, its protective dome rent open by the tendrils of local flora, each as thick as a man’s torso. Pearlescent Jelly Pears had already began to grow in any gap available.
Way back in the second episode of our first season, I met with a Therevattin descendant, unnamed by request, who described Savorflame dumplings, that dish currently sweeping Sol’s frozen food market by storm, as starvation food. But now on Therevatti I can simply walk to a library and borrow scans of cookbooks from this world’s long and hungry era. And the thing is, even these cookbooks were redacted, marked with swathes of black ink where recipes and anecdotes once stood.
Where the desperate turned poison into food.
I’m Oscar Yasui, formerly a professional food critic, currently an independent food journalist, and you’re listening to Gastronaut.
Jelly Pears. Porcelain white fruits with creamy gold patches, lobed like a palm sized pumpkin, with an interior of bright emerald pulp. The body of the fruit is sheathed in a protective web of pale green membrane, and it dangles from a stalk, surrounded by this cage of dry, spring loaded spines. You can crush a Jelly Pear with nothing but enthusiasm, letting their custard soft interiors spill out from between your fingers. They are, at a glance, equally appetizing and alien in appearance. And despite all that, despite the defense mechanisms, the membrane, the sheer unfamiliarity of this fruit, the desire to eat one is overwhelming. It’s one part curiosity and two parts cuteness aggression.
You wouldn’t guess that each and every adorable fruit is significantly neurotoxic. Not the way Polity and I handled them.
We gathered heaps of Jelly Pears into plastic buckets. This was far outside the Pacheco outskirts, closer to one of Therevatti’s many independent subsistence communities out in the tangle. It was sticky, numbing work. A Jelly Pear’s juices would leave the skin tingling, like being splashed with champagne, but prolonged contact can leave the knuckles swollen, the hands dull and rubbery. Which means reduced dexterity. Which means crushed pears. Which means…
“Oh fucking goddamn it,” Polity laughed, as another bucket tumbled from their senseless fingers. Jelly Pears scattered in all directions, wobbling drunkenly as they rolled beneath ferns or into coils of vines.
“Butterfingers?” I asked,
“It’s like I don’t have fingers,” Polity said, holding their hands up for me to inspect. The extremities hung crooked on their wrists, fingers loosely curled towards their palms.
“Try making a fist,” I offered, “like, get a good grip going,”
“This is me making a fist,” they replied, squinting angrily as they bounced their hands back and forth. They couldn’t suppress a snort of laughter, “I look like a dinosaur coming out of anesthesia!”
The resulting miming left us both doubled over. Polity had tears in their eyes and I found myself holding a hand to a stitch in my side, gasping. Above us, dozens of other Jelly Pears hung in tangled nests of vines, wrapped around stems and the helix braids of other, taller plants. Each Jelly Pear bore tri-clusters of spindly thorns, facing inwards to maul a retreating wrist.
“Probably a sign we should stop for the day,” I said, once I’d recovered. I eyed my scratched up hands. I couldn’t feel any pain. The numbing juice had seeped into the wounds.
“We’ve barely gotten any,” Polity said, “I think we’re really bad at this.”
“No, that’s correct,” I agreed, “we’re terrible at this, but it’s more than we managed yesterday, so it’s something–come on.”
We left together, piled the Jelly Pears into the baskets of some loaned bicycles, where they rolled and bounced into soft, lacy piles. We pedaled back to the people who ordered the fruit, over ground too choked with vegetation to still be called footpaths. To Grac Au Mao. Our saviors, our patrons, our jailors.
Polity and I rode our bikes to the mouth of a stone cavern, cut into the surrounding hills by years of Therevatti rains. The space still bore the patchy ruts of hand tools, an expansion powered entirely by muscle. No heavy machinery that could make extra noise, or draw unwanted attention.
We left our bikes under a tarp spray painted to look like rough hewn ground. Lowered our shoulders to the cavern floor in near total darkness, and shimmied prone through a cramped gap in the wall, where calcified runoff caught at our clothes and skinned elbows and knees. The daily commute of this branch of the revolution. A slow, uncomfortable, and claustrophobic playground slide. A real joy of an experience.
“Do you think they’ll ever install stairs?” I asked, rising back to my feet. Polity coughed a few times, having gotten a mouthful of gravel dust.
“No, Oscar,” Polity said, “because that would make your life easier. You know the rule about making your life easier.”
“There’s a rule?” I asked, approaching the reinforced door set into the cavern wall.
“Yup, it’s in the colonial charter and everything, we’re all duty bound to make you, specifically, miserable,” Polity inclined their head near the door, letting its camera scan the subdermal chip the rebels had injected into their neck.
“Saints that explains a lot,” I said, scanning my own, “I really wish somebody had told me ahead of time.”
The door unlocked, its deadbolt slamming aside. Both Polity and I had to work together to push it open. Polity grunted as they spoke.
“Would have… ruined… the surprise…”
“Can’t… have that…” I grunted back.
After all our thin armed effort, the door gave way. We were greeted by an interior decor of sullen stone, lit by lamps that swung from pinions hammered into the rock above, casting spiderweb shadows from the protective cages that surrounded them. Cables, power, data, optics, ran in channels in every direction. I hadn’t expected a hole in a hill to be so organized, and I assume Brightsail would’ve felt the same, if they ever found the place.
The main cavern was cool and dry. Here, a half dozen guerillas typed on computers, filling the air with the click-clack of their work. There, you’d see a few fighters looking over the shoulders of companions stripping weapons, offering tips on where each part mated to its sibling component. The cavern always roared with rushing water, with pathways that led over and around a river that cut beneath. At one end the guerillas drew fresh water in, and at the other we dumped sewage and waste. A pump rumbled and sighed. Judging by the ring of desiccated algae along the walls, without that pump we’d be wading instead of walking. A few faces turned to watch us as we joined. Even after being here a few weeks, there was still the narrowing of eyes and the grinding of teeth.
I ignored them in favor of taking in the sweet smell of fresh, eyeless fish--the salty waft of brined vegetables, stewing in a metal pot over a scrapped together hot plate. It reminded me of a stew I used to make before my writing career took off, nothing but preserved and “special offer” ingredients, mixed together with restaurant spice packets and simple broth. I didn’t like it at first, but it was cheap and easy to make, and the damndest thing was that the more I made it the better it got. Not because my tastebuds changed, I mean, I’ll be a picky eater until the day I die, but because I found an equilibrium in that shitty stew. Exactly what ingredients to add, how long to cook, what tasted best together.
As a side note, listeners, I stumbled into successfully locating a wholly authentic Therevattin stew. A goal I ‘ve had since… since before I left Earth. And guess what? It was fine. The stew was okay. The fish was sweet and dense, well muscled from a lifetime of sightless leaping. The herbs were sour, with a vascular crunch. Someone had added hot sauce because… Therevattin cooking uses the stuff like water. Yet for all the alien fish and unknown forage, what the dish desperately needed was less water in the pot. And maybe a less aggressive chili in the sauce. I tried to tell the cook as much, but he didn’t speak Standard. And again, everyone hated me.
Anyway, while the stew of rebellion that Grac au Mao was cooking was made of disparate parts, those parts had been together long enough to make something cohesive, and had been stewing for ages besides. I can’t think of a better way to describe the organization as a whole. A stew, long simmering.
“You set out together?” a voice echoed down the chamber. Further ahead was a familiar face, an older man, local, with graying hair and wrinkles that told of a life spent grappling with disappointment. A holster at his leg carried the lethal contours of a compact gauss-cycler. His dress carried no designation of rank.
“Yup,” Polity said, “You told me that I could use my free time however I wanted, right?” They put their shoulders back, lifted their chin. It made me conscious of where their chip was injected, just above the cord of muscle in their left shoulder.
“And I’m done with the work you gave me–all of it. So I decided to climb out of this hole and get some air.” Polity leaned in, “Thought the point of the chip was so you didn’t have to shackle me to the workstation. The more ‘humane’ of the options you had, right Dain?”
“Did you unlock those guns? Install the drivers for the new hardware? Get the fuzz out of the scopes?” Dain listed each task on his fingers as he spoke, his expression was a skeptical scowl. Polity spread their hands wide. Or tried to. Their fingers remained rubbery and immovable.
“Of course I did. Don’t look at me like any of it was a hard job. Whoever you had on tech before me apparently thought maintenance work was impressive.”
“Have a little respect, Polity,” Dain said without anger, as if he didn’t particularly care, “our old tech lost his hands. His name was Yao by the way.”
“Oh, great for Yao!” Polity sneered, “Having no hands means he didn’t have to work with you psycho fucks,” they leaned in, “I’m so jealous.”
“Well, I was just testing you with those first few tasks,” Dain rumbled, “Let’s have you do some automation coding.”
Polity lifted their numb, floppy hands with a defiant, ferocious grin.
“Whoops,” They said. I fought not to laugh, not to smile. The pressure was so great that glittering flecks of light danced at the corners of my vision. This tended to happen to me around Polity.
I saw the bulge of Dain’s tongue move slowly across the interior of his lips. A silent heat began to radiate from his features.
“From now on, you can add ‘banned from helping the spacer’ to your list of rules,” Dain said.
“Fuck you, you can’t make that kind of call,” Polity growled, with a swiftness that stunned me. Their playfulness had evaporated, but I could see their helplessness in the set of their shoulders. Dain saw it too.
“Oh, I very much can. Get over to the pool, they’ll tell you what you need,” He shook his head at the sight of their hands, “until your hands work again, you can kill time getting briefings and instruction.”
Polity’s eyes unfocused. I could hear them grumbling something under their breath.
“I don’t need you to love it, kid, just need you to do it,” Dain kept his voice level, “timetable isn’t getting any shorter. Go,” he leaned in, deepened his voice just a touch, “Now.”
Polity sighed a goodbye to me before they slinked off to join a group of rebels crowded round an estuary of cords, lit more by screen backwash then any overhead lightning. Dain turned his attention to me. His lips parted just a touch, his nose wrinkled.
“You. I have some crates for you to stack, then after that I’d like you to scrub out the pots and pans from the mess. And if you finish early, you can sweep the dirt off the floor.”
I lowered my gaze to the floor. It wasn’t paved, just the slope of boulders and cavern interspersed with clots and heaps of deep jungle soil.
“Sweep the dirt from…” I was confused, “from the dirt floor?” I asked.
Dain stepped forward, into my personal bubble, where even the smallest motion left a tingle on my skin.
“Do you need me to repeat myself?” He said. His breath was stale and sour. I shook my head. “Do you need me to tell you what a broom is, spacer? He asked.
“Long handle,” I said, “bristles on the far end.”
He leaned back, then spit off to the side, onto the stones. “Then get to work,” he said, turning to help recruits with their weapons.
Even if I did work for them, the guerillas saw me as a parasite. A foreign invader that drained resources and, like any good houseguest, stole air and space.
Listeners, do you know what a hemiparasite is? It’s a kind of plant that feeds on other plants. It’s distinct from holoparasites, in that unlike holoparasites, it can still make its own food with photosynthesis, but its roots weave into other plants, through the bark, into the wet. Where flows the water and sugar and life of another creature.
Jelly Pears are a hemiparasite. They coil into surrounding foliage, nestling into places where they can siphon what they need to grow their thorny vines, and of course, their mouth tingling fruits. Jelly Pears despise being eaten, with some exception to local fauna that help them spread, but that doesn’t stop us from eating them. We’ve got a masochistic streak like that, or more specifically a kind of rabid desire for new sensation. On Earth, horticulturists bred ever more potent peppers until the Nigerian Bladeberry ended the arms race with a few scoville related fatalities.
No matter how good they looked, nobody wanted to eat Jelly Pears at first, but crop failure drove them to do it. They were good: the tangy-sweet notes balanced by the smoothness of the flesh and bitterness of the toxins, they had vitamin C and A, an impressive fat content, and you didn’t have to cook them. Research showed that you could eat a quite a few in one sitting before they gave you permanent brain damage or chronic palsy. If you processed them chemically, or stewed them while frequently changing the water, you could eat dozens of the things without paying the price. And that mouth tingle, that “zippy” quality your tongue gets as its nerve endings go haywire! The Jelly Pear fits into that thirst for new sensory experiences: it’s why you keep seeing ads for fairy wraps back on Sol, Jelly Pears are the number one ingredient.
But they are, again, parasitic. They need local resources to survive. They need to twine themselves into Therevattin plants. They aren’t some kind of supernatural plague precursor, their “plant brains” don’t really register any other kind of host. Which means you can’t grow them anywhere but Therevatti, or a massively expensive biodome complex filled with a pocket ecosystem.
You need to go to Therevatti. You need to enter the jungle. You need to extract each and every Jelly Pear by hand, through the lace and the thorns, on a world where humans have only walked for a few generations. Companies are always investigating mechanizing the process, but it hasn’t ever been considered more cost effective than human labor.
When I picked Jelly Pears for Grac Au Mao, I was participating in one of Therevatti’s strangest economies. Rebel forces across the planet harvest native flora considered valuable to colonial powers or distant solar markets. And so, in the midst of broiling revolution, guerilla forces sell
produce to colonial vendors, who in turn spike the prices and make a killing Upwell and Solside. Any funds the guerillas gain are spent on arms deals, worker compensation, explosives, whatever the movement needs. Follow the flow of Nu, and you can watch as Brightsail quite literally funds the people killing their mercenaries, threatening their regime. All this, just so Fairy Wraps can be purchased at 7 Nu a tray. Every year it gets harder to find Jelly Pears. All the picking forces laborers deeper into the jungle, into the territory of Therevattin fauna. And without that limiting effect that Jelly Pears impose on their hosts, the flora is growing faster and faster, larger and larger. Roads vanish under blooming walls of violet. Buildings are overwhelmed and dragged under. The forest climbs itself, thickening until it chokes.
For those guerillas that are unskilled, unmotivated, or just generally unliked, there is still a task that can generate revenue, and therefore armaments, for the cause: Go into the jungle and pick fruit. Simple as can be. Keeps the money flowing, and keeps malcontents far away from strategy meetings and equipment stockpiles, just in case they might consider flipping into intelligence assets for PriSec. The thirst for product is so great that both sides have been known to use slave labor. Prison labor details and flexible contract interpretations on the colonial side, naked threats made at gunpoint for the guerillas.
You don’t see any of this on the branding, on the website. The processes that give Sol its Jelly Pears have been alienated by astronomical units, to the point that packaging illustrations don’t show mushrooms or fruit. They show jaggy orange explosions or shimmering rosy jewels. Big eyed fairies with magic wands bless the sparkle right into your wraps. Long bearded dwarves with pickaxes smuggle explosives into your dumplings. You’ve all seen this, even if you haven’t wanted to. It’s inescapable. And fad or no, Fairy Wraps still have that tang, that tingle, that exhaustively calculated flavor profile that goes so well with bass or beans.
So Therevatti will remain connected by interest and commerce and debt, connected by an interstellar tendril from its star to ours through the Railgate of Lea te Suldan. A hemiparasite doesn’t entirely need its host. But if it wants to grow, if it wants to climb higher, if it wants to bear fruit, it needs to tap into some other. Something distant. Something new.
Grac au Mao, or at least our particular cell of the movement, hadn’t scaled their harvesting operations very much. The only pickers besides myself were an older woman missing an arm and a sleepy young man in his mid twenties. I saw the older woman in the caverns sometimes, but they never let the young man in. The whys of their status wasn’t made available to me, considering my own status as a barely tolerated pair of hands. The one time I asked, Dain himself said,
“You’re here to pick, not to squawk. Your language is vile to me. It makes my throat ache. Remain useful. Be lucky you even get to see the sun.”
But despite the lack of manpower, they needed crates and crates of Jelly Pears. They needed to be a certain maturity, white with yellow dappling as opposed to pearly. Custard soft instead of firm. We’d pick until we couldn’t pick. If we brought back too few, as in just a scant half crate as opposed to the three full crates that appeared to be the expectation, we’d be taken aside and spoken to.
“You bring this little back again,” Dain once said, rolling a few of my Jelly Pears around in their cheery yellow crate, “and I’ll stake you to a coil and tell Polity you abandoned them.”
I didn’t like Dain very much. But I didn’t have much in the way of kinship with my fellow pear pickers either. Whenever the older woman and I crossed paths, she’d grit her teeth, eyes shaking in their sockets. The moment she heard me speaking Standard, she rushed me, raising her damaged arm across her body like a club. Dain had to hold her back. From his arms she puckered her lips and managed to send a wad of spittle on a perfect trajectory, ending on the toes of my left boot.
She steered clear of me after that, and honestly I was thankful. For a time the young man and I worked together, but he’d only pick for a few dozen minutes before he’d exclaim, pound at his back, and give me a look of good humored helplessness. He’d spend the rest of the afternoon smoking these awful roll ups, who’s oiltar and dandelion stink shocked nearby birds into silence. He’d throw pebbles at my ears and look away, grinning whenever I’d turn to see him. He’d dig out a pair of earbuds and blast his skull with wheedling, nasally rock music, and the whole time he’d just be singing along atonally!
But I stopped working with him when, after a few hours of picking, I turned around and he was nowhere to be found. Nothing but a still smoldering roach where he once stood, and a damp spot in the grass where my own crates of produce once rested. I returned with hands that were as numb as they were empty. Dain slammed me against the wall for that. Afterwards, the little shit toasted me with his roll up, teeth sticky with tarred smoke. We didn’t speak each other's language, but I got the gist of his meaning.
So I tended to work alone, deeper in the jungle, where the Jelly Pears still grew and where the foliage wasn’t a nightmare to navigate. The sun here was obscured by dense springs of leaves and triple helixes of vine, some as tall as twelve Oscars. Where the insects raised a shimmering chorus that only the brassiest animal calls could echo through. It was nervous work, surrounded by slowly undulating arthropods with hundreds of legs, or being observed by languid, high legged birds that stalked the undergrowth for insects. I missed Polity, wondered what new task the guerillas had given them, hoped that they were safe. But I had few alternatives, and of those, this seemed like the safest way to get my harvest back intact.
Therevatti, as it delights in doing, proved me wrong.
One afternoon, I had worked my way up into the cords of a column of vines, navigating by flashlight and luminescent slime, trying to get at a cluster of Jelly Pears suspended in their nests of thorn and lace. Climbing Therevatti’s flora wasn’t anything like climbing a tree. Some vines stiffen into solid hand and footholds, but many times I had put my weight onto a limb and found it unspooling at my touch. So between putting my attention towards not getting tangled up or burying my arms in thorns, I didn’t notice that I wasn’t alone in the jungle.
And to be clear, you’re never alone this deep in the brush. Therevatti’s takes on birds and insects can be seen on every surface, in every tangle, singing and chirping on every arc. Swarming around a thousand different variations of flower, who’s sharpsweet scents crowd the air. But this wasn’t the same.
Some cord of muscle in my back stretched taught, and my thoughts of Jelly Pears and guerillas faded away. Nothing chased them off, no active transition in my head. It was as if I had been interrupted. Cut off. I pulled my arm away from the Jelly Pear, settled back. There wasn’t any birdsong anymore, or the calls of insects. I could hear the burble of spit as my tongue moved around in my mouth. My ears rang, ever so slightly.
I held my fingers in front of my face, touched my thumb to my middle finger. And I snapped.
There wasn’t any noise. I tried again. Nothing but silence. I leapt down from the braid, peered into the darkness of the jungle. Snapped silent fingers, right near my ears just to be sure. Called out with a voice that didn’t carry past my teeth. I could feel the vibration in my throat, feel the air leaving my lungs, but nothing but a gently ringing softness departed from my lips.
But there, ahead and above. Saints, it must have been …nine feet long? Head to tail? Mottled green and gray, the same color as the vegetation around it. A tail as thick as Ogata’s arm, with razor edged, diamond shaped scales. Its body bloomed into a chitinous torso, topped with a blunt arrowhead that glittered with eyes, like an onyx encrusted spade. It had shoulders, listeners, that ended in two long forelimbs with barbed serrations down either length, smooth tips digging into the vines, leaving pale gold sap to leak from fresh wounds in the canopy.
It had a halo around its shoulders. A halo of blurred air, like some part of it was moving too fast for my eyes to track. I gasped without sound, my limbs frozen where I stood.
“Make yourself look larger than you are,” some distant piece of buffer trivia screamed into my head, “make as much noise as you can, or you’re dead, critic boy.”
I didn’t try, listeners. Seeing this alien, blade serpent bug had left me in a state of complete muscular dysfunction. I felt like I was floating.
A flash of movement at my side sent me leaping in fear. Another person, a full head taller than me, built strong, pushed forward with their arms held high, waving slowly as if to signal a shuttlecraft.
Eldest Sister. Face so red as to be scarlet. Spittle flying from her lips as she howled silently, snarling at the creature where it lurked in the vines. The point of its head panned towards her, towards me, languidly indecisive. But the halo of vibration above its back intensified, pulsing violently in time with every new roar that Eldest Sister hurled its way.
A barrier in my head broke. Some forgotten part of my brain illuminated in my skull, as I stood shoulder to shoulder with Eldest Sister, facing the shadowed maw of the jungle. I screamed beside her, trying to mimic the movements of her arms. Both of us strained against the silence, shouting our throats raw. A pull of air, another flurry of muffled sonic violence.
Whatever it was up there pulled backwards with the grace of a perfect killer. It raised up, coiling its tail hard enough to leave indentations in the vine it perched on. Then the blur behind its back stopped, revealing six fragile looking wings, glittering dully in the sunbeams that managed to pierce the canopy. The sound of the jungle, and our voices, came rushing back, as if they had broken the surface of some suffocating sea.
Eldest Sister advanced, and listeners, her roar was great and terrible. My ears ached at the volume she reached. It wasn’t just a single held note, either, she was hurling a thousand unknown oaths at it. Challenges. Threats.
In a flash of blade and wing and chitin, the creature whirled around and slid away from us, vanishing into the deeper jungle, writhing tail a black whip through the vines.
Eldest Sister took a few steps past me and howled at the creature as it fled. She pulled us away from the jungle, making sure to keep the canopy in view. She managed to eye me up and down with her usual stony faced expression, now pink and a bit sweaty from the exertion.
And to my surprise, Eldest Sister began to speak. And to my greater surprise, I actually understood what she was saying.
“Are you okay?”
“Yeah,” I said. Frightened as I was, I couldn’t wait to tell Polity about this, “I think so, just… just a little unnerved. What was that?” I gestured behind her. Eldest Sister’s mouth became a thin line.
“A Baiheytu. It wanted to eat you. I wasn’t sure I’d…” She swallowed and wiped her brow with the back of her wrist, “I wasn’t sure I could stop it. Thank you for helping.”
“Hey, thank you! I think you might have just saved my life,” I craned my neck, tried to peer through the foliage. Some of the leaves were still bouncing on coiled sprigs of tender vine, fluttering. Drops of sap crept from talon-made gashes, glistening cones of luminescent gelatin.
“I’m fully edible,” I said, reveling in the restoration of my senses.
“What?” Eldest said.
“I’m fully edible,” I repeated, Eldest Sister’s face did not change. I offered her a tight smile and a shrug in return. Her shoulders relaxed. Her nose had the slight new bend to it. As if it had been broken and reset just short of perfectly.
“I should not have tried to kill such a very stupid man,” Eldest Sister said, “I am… sorry I tried so hard.”
“Hey, it’s okay,” I smiled, “It was your first time trying to murder someone. I’m sure you’ll get better-” I clapped a hand over my mouth. Nausea unfurled in my stomach, as the near-death experience sank in, my knees shook under my own weight.
Eldest Sister’s eyes were blazing. Her hands curled until the knuckles went white, then popped
“Don’t say those things,” Eldest Sister said, not quite patting me on the back, “and don’t throw up.”
“Okay,” I said, lifting my hands. “I’m sorry, it’s…” I searched for the right word. “It’s a really bad habit.”
Eldest Sister ground the back of her hand against her eye, as if trying to clear it. She muttered something in Thetti under her breath. I found myself a rock to sit on, then gave up when my weight sent it sinking into a patch of mud.
“You should not be sitting,” Eldest Sister said, motioning to the jungle. “Other things here want to eat you or make you sick. You should go back.”
I rose from my rock and crossed to pick more Jelly Pears. Eldest Sister loomed in front of me, blocking my path with a look of restrained defiance. The insects called around us, and a high, tropical stink floated down from where the creature once rested.
“Okay,” I said, “I understand you think what I’m doing is a bad idea, but it isn’t my choice. If I don’t get enough pears back, I’m going to get into trouble with some not great people. Let me by. Please.”
Eldest Sister dropped her gaze. She stepped to the side. I gave her a nod and carefully wove my hands through another nest of thorns, fingers brushing the skin of a Jelly Pear.
“This is stupid,” Eldest Sister grunted behind me.
“You aren’t wrong,” I called, inching my fingers closer, retreating at the touch of a dozen spines, “But I need to fill more than one bucket, or…” I inhaled, and the tingly sweet notes of the fruit wafted from it’s prison of brambles, “well, I don’t know what will happen to me.”
“Then you should run away,” Eldest said.
“Since when are you so chatty?” I asked over my shoulder, muscles burning from craning my neck. “Or… able to speak Sol Standard?”
“I don’t just listen to the radio,” Eldest Sister said. There was a hitch in her voice, and she continued, idly winding her finger round a sprig of alien plant, “I do other things too.”
“Like learn a language in ten months?” I said. The Jelly Pear came away in my hands, barely bruised. I withdrew it with the precision of a bomb defuser. Eldest Sister only snorted in reply. She reached down beside me, boots squelching, then lifted one of my empty buckets and began grappling with the thorns.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“If you are going to be stubborn,” she said, “then I can either help you, or drag you out by the neck. And I’d rather-”
“No,” I interrupted, eyeing the coils, as the thorns scratched against her knuckles, as the knot twisted beneath her fingers. It was the same mistake Polity and I had made on our first day of picking, “If you just blindly yank on them, then-”
The Jelly Pear’s barbed protective layer contracted, snaring around the fruit inside. Fully ripe, it’s rind shredded in a moment, the pulp dripping from the bottom in seed choked drops.
“Look,” I didn’t know what to call her. Eldest Sister wasn’t her name. I left my outstretched hand waving in the humid air.
“Shah,” She said, with a grimness so severe, it was if she had wrecked a car rather than a small fruit, “my name is Shah.” She moved her finger and thumb apart, watching a string of seed encrusted pulp stretch between the gap.
“Shah, thank you,” I gave her a tired smile, “I appreciate you trying to help, believe me I ruined a few when I started, but there’s a trick to this. It’s all in the fingers, if you use your wrist then you’ll just numb and shred your hands.” I considered what I was saying, for a moment. “Wait,” I said, “Haven’t you harvested these?”
Shah raised her eyebrows, idly pulled on her wrist to pop it, “I have not. My family shops at the corner stores.” I choked on some swallowed spit.
Hey, look, this isn’t your problem. If it makes you feel better, then-”
“Teach me how then,” She said, “Teach me how to help you, or I really will drag you out of this place.”
I couldn’t help but laugh at that. Shah did not join in. I waved her over and she approached with a glum sureness.
“Okay, fine, you broke me down. I’ve only been doing this for a month but…” I lifted an intact Jelly Pear, dimpled the fruit with a delicate squeeze. “Let me show you how it was taught to me…”
Eldest Sister, Shah, would appear every few days after that, usually on the gloomiest days of that week. She brought her own bucket, her own gloves, and that constant, unflinching level of intensity. She’d work beside me, never complaining, even when her hands numbed, or the thorns scratched where she lacked protection, or even when she fell from a coil and splattered her clothes with mud. Shah would rise, twist her chin until her spine sang, and pick up where she left off. Her bones spoke more than she did. She hated asking for help more than she hated bleeding.
We picked until the clusters of Jelly Pears looked like constellations of mobiles, empty save for stems and thorns. Casting honeycomb shadows over our faces and shoes. When I returned to Grac Au Mao… well I didn’t return a hero, I think they wouldn’t ever allow me that satisfaction. I brought back enough produce to justify my existence. And while existing isn’t particularly satisfying, I find it preferable to the alternative.
“Do you still have it?” Shah asked one day as she passed the contents of her bucket into mine. Shah always waited for my signal to end the day, and she never took anything back with her.
“Uh, have what?” I asked, assessing our harvest. Jelly Pears, slipped from their cages, blobbed against each other in bright piles. I poked one with my finger and it dimpled like a water balloon.
“Do you have the knife I gave you?” Shah asked, staring at the space between my eyes.
“I do,” I said. My grip had remained tight on the knife even as Mr. Ogata threw me through a door.
“Do you like it at all?” Shah asked, “the knife?”
I had no idea what she was trying to communicate. I answered as best I could.
“I use it to cut vegetables and bandages,” I said, “it’s a good knife.”
Shah’s gaze moved just a touch, and then… then she was making eye contact.
“Thank you,” She said, and began to pack up her belongings, to secure our harvest.
A few weeks passed like that, and eventually Grac Au Mao’s cavern was piled high with the little fruits. They spilled from crates around desks, they mounded between the generators and the gun racks. I once saw a guerilla on the run, carrying a bundle of rifles from the bike shop, pratfall from a slippery smear of pear beneath her boot.
And yet, nobody did anything with them. They weren’t packaged, we had more than any standing fridge could sensibly contain. Some were already rotting, and the smell in the cave was becoming unpalatably fetid–stomach churning. Nobody wanted to buy rotting fruit. I couldn’t figure out what was happening here.
Yet Grac Au Mao seemed energized. Dain would talk in a hushed voice, say things like “We’re about 15 kilos off still, well in deficit of the warehouse fire,” and “distillation will make up the difference in quantity.” Distillation. Into what?
I asked Polity the next time I was able to find them between tasks.
“I have no idea,” Polity said. They were haggard. Blown out like a rimtrawler’s thruster, but we always tried to make time where we could. “They’ve been making me look at compilers so long I think if I started crying, code will run down my face.”
“What code are you working with?” I asked, trying to massage some feeling back into my left hand. It was still sticky with Jelly Pear juice.
“Ah, you wouldn’t… agh,” Polity pressed their face into their hands, across the cavern, I saw a guerilla giving us a look as she passed. Polity continued. “It isn’t like the code is labeled any way or another. It’s terribly commented, the notes barely hint at what anything does, much less what it’s all for. I’m not entirely flying blind but…” Polity cast a withering glare at the tech pool, “I’m basically a very dextrous talented finger on a hand. I don’t know what the thumb’s doing, much less the foot or the mouth. It’s fucking infuriating.”
“But do you know anything?” I pressed.
“Oscar it… Look, this might not make sense to you, but I’m putting together a little automatic calculator. It looks for some variables, once they go in it changes them. And the entire thing has to pretend to be a music player.”
“It plays music?” I asked, agog. Polity snorted.
“No, it doesn’t actually play music, it just needs to have driver compatibility with something that plays music in an access port, Like a Taisho or a Rainbar or a Jingle,” They grunted, “but also none of those things because they are all completely in-fucking-compatible. I checked, believe me.”
“Spacer!” Dain stomped over, wrinkles of displeasure around his eyes. He was flanked by that same guerilla woman who had passed us earlier, “grab a broom and sweep the floors, Polity is on break, not you, get moving!”
Polity threw me a glance of helplessness. There wasn’t anything they could do for me. Not since they saved my life eleven months ago.
“Yeah, sure,” I said.
I took the broom and swept. Dain pulled Polity aside, dragged them by the shoulder until they knocked his arm away, forearm to forearm. That yielded a snort, but he didn’t manhandle them again.
Twenty minutes later, as I was forming a little pile of dirt that I found indistinguishable from all the other dirt that made up the floor, someone started screaming.
It was Polity.
“That’s fucking suicide!” Polity said. There was rage in their voice, but I had spent enough time with them to catch the thread of fear. “No, I’m not doing that for you!”
“As if you have any kind of choice, fainéante. Do you think you can pay for your surgery? For Fent’s time?”
“Oh, Saints-be-lost I don’t have owe you my goddamn life! Because that’s what you’re asking for!”
“But you do!” Dain roared, “You owe Therevatti your life, and these spacer pricks are despoiling her! You abandoned your home so you could prance around as some renegade artist, so you could play make believe! Child! Ingrate!”
They lowered their voices. I moved from my sad little pile, pretending to sweep some refuse a bit closer to the cavern where they were arguing. Between that and the cave walls, I got the whole story.
“Send someone else!” Polity said, the thread of fear having woven firm enough to strangle their passion, “You know- you know I can’t do this, you’re gonna kill me!”
Dain’s voice was hard, “No, you can do this, you’ve just never pushed yourself enough to try. How many places have you snuck into for your little acts? I know you have the skill, the only thing holding you back… is cowardice.”
“It’s a military base, Dain,” Polity said, “not a gallery, or a food court, or a passenger ship, it’s a mercenary position with automated turrets and T-ray checkpoints and a hundred stimmed up twenty year olds that want to bag at least one rebel before they go home to a career of patrolling server farms. Dain, I’m gonna to die there! You’ll lose the best tech Grac Au Mao has ever seen. This is a mistake.”
“It’s far from a mistake,” Dain grunted, “it’s your chance at redemption. Hell, at revenge. The spacers shot you. Have you no pride? Now you can put your knife in their ribs and twist. I…” Dain’s voice choked, “if we had this kind of option, if they didn’t already know our faces… Polity the things I would do for this chance.”
Polity did not respond.
“Oh come the fuck on,” Dain urged. When Polity spoke up again, their voice was a whisper.
“I do. I want to give Brightsail a bloody nose, maybe even break some bones,” their voice rose, Polity hardened it with steel, “but you’re just going to get me killed.“
“Then don’t get killed,” Dain said, “succeed! If not for us or the world where you were born, then for the one person you care about most: do it for you.”
“I won’t,” Polity said, “I can’t.” Dain sighed, there was the scrape of a chair as he sat down. The two of them were quiet.
“I’ll give you some time,” Dain said, “To get your head on straight. Maybe… hm, maybe see the bigger picture. The opportunity this represents,” his voice lowered further, and I had to strain to make it out, “look at me. Look at me, Polity. Neither of us has any other option. This isn’t something you can run from. Not without losing something you care about,” Dain rose from his chair with a scraping sound, and I began to hurry away from the door.
“That’s just what war is,” Dain said as he came out of the side chamber. Polity did not respond, and I was sent out for more Jelly Pears before I saw them return.
A few days later, Shah bought me dinner. To be clear to my listeners, it wasn’t a play at romance. There were about fourteen years between the two of us in age, and frankly, I’m terrified of any speculation to the contrary. No, when we went together, Shah had this to say.
“I get really hungry when we pick Jelly Pears. Really hungry,” she scratched behind an ear, withdrew a small fly and crushed it with a twitch of her thumb, “and… I feel bad about not giving you more food last year.”
“Oh, you don’t have to feel bad,” I said, “you did everything you could.” My understanding only won me a mighty glower.
“Shut up,” She said, “I still feel bad. You saying I don’t have to feel bad doesn’t help. Getting you dinner is what I want to do, so we’re getting you dinner.” I nodded, and she turned away, muttering something in Thetti, pounding a large fist against her thigh.
“We can get dinner…If you want,” she finished, I saw a slump in her shoulders, a huff in her voice. This was difficult for her.
She nodded, and we left on our bicycles, the jungle a blur of greens and purples besides the footpath.
We went out for cha gio, little fried rolls filled with noodles and mushrooms and an unknown, secret meat. Wavy strips of bacon stood out on the stand, but this wasn’t bacon. It was springy, smoky, like an astringent lobster. I knew from experience that it was some kind of insect, but large enough that it didn’t register. It was different from anything I’d had before, and with the fish sauce, it was absolutely delicious. Cool flavors juxtaposed against warm flavors, always something new pulling to the surface while we ate. All wrapped in this beautiful rice paper, crisped golden by immersion in hot oil.
Damn good street food. Illegal, maybe, but damn good regardless. Shah squinted at the interior as she ate, then shrugged.
“I think it’s bug,” Shah said, having another bite.
“Hey, works for me,” I said, following suit.
“I thought spacers didn’t eat bug,” Shah said, more to her roll than anyone else.
“Uh, we eat synth lobster,” I said, “the real thing is, was, kind of like a bug.”
“Huh,” Shah said, “what did it look like?”
I opened my mouth and closed it, trying to find the best comparison.
“It’s like ah… a tiny Tarranq? But instead of big blade arms it has like… crab claws. And… instead of an eel’s tail it has a segmented… flipper. And these long antenna.”
“Weird bug,” Shah said through a mouthful of roll. “Can it flip?”
“Can it… do a… flip? Shah, they’re all dead.”
“Oh. That’s not very cool,” she took another bite, “Tarranqs flip.”
We shared cool bug facts for about twenty minutes before Shah passed me her chit and sent me back to the stand for more rolls. I had just reached the cart when I heard a commotion out by the street. Shah stood, hands half up, as a pair of Brightsail mercenaries approached her. The barrels of their carbines were pointed squarely at her chest, and they were advancing at a tactical glide. White armor gleamed, rounded like insect carapaces, optics aligned with the sights of their weapons.
Shah took a step back. One of the mercenaries called out.
“Aert. Don’t fucking move, lady, stay where you are,” the mercenary said, in the now familiar crackle of their anonymizers.
Before I had done much thinking, I was already stepping backwards. My legs carried me away from Shah, from the mercenaries that were accosting her. One had already drawn out a pair of zip ties and was moving to grab her wrist. Fury and fear burned in Shah’s eyes, but she didn’t resist. I heard a rush of falling metal beside me as the food truck’s cook slid the security shutter down the customer port.
The sound of it landing home snapped me out of my stupor, made me jump. I think that’s when I saw the patch on one of the mercenary’s shoulders. A crying eye with a green iris. Green Eyes had brought Shah down, one knee over her back, keeping her pinned as he secured her.
I took a deep pull of the spiced air. The food truck spurred its aging engine to life, the motor drawing from fouled batteries with a few harsh clicks. I stepped forward, arms raised.
“Back the fuck up, [BLEEP],” the mercenary covering Green Eyes said. I took a few more steps and he swiveled his carbine to face me, “[BLEEP], Saint’s as my witness I will shoot you, aunuck!”
Green Eyes looked up from where he was kneeling on Shah. His array of cameras focused in on my face. “Hey, whoa, whoa, Viking, chill! He’s cool, he’s cool!”
Viking kept his gun on me, “What?”
“Toggle your channel,” Green Eyes said. Viking removed a hand from his weapon and passed a finger near the side of his helmet. The two mercenaries went silent. I couldn’t even hear the distorted hiss of their breath through their speakers. They looked at me, armored helms unreadable, impervious to the rain.
Maybe a minute passed. Shah and I shared a glance, me with my hands up, her with her face pressed against a muddy bank of moss. I saw her wiggle her head slightly, trying to keep her mouth above the puddle it was in. Green Eyes leaned into her ever so slightly more, and I tried not to let the resulting surge of hatred in my heart reach my face. The two mercenaries jittered in their silence, fingers twitching against their weapons, quads pulsing involuntarily.
Finally, Viking lowered his carbine into a resting position. There was a warble as Green Eyes flicked his comms back on, “Hoo! Sorry about all that, Oscar, I know you’re from upwell, but Viking here… fitting in with the locals is great if it gets you better notes, but man, be careful, alright?”
I gestured to Shah. The zip ties were digging into her wrists, leaving a mottled purple crease. “Why are you doing this?” I asked. Viking gave a short glance to Green Eyes.
“Operational details aren’t something I can disclose to the public,” Green Eyes said, his voice stilted like he was reciting for a presentation, “This kind of thing is SoP, that’s all I can really say.”
Shah twisted her lips, puckered them out to get a better passageway for airflow. The muddy water rippled around her mouth as she sucked in air. I thought fast.
“Well uh, Green Eyes, I understand that this is SoP,” I said, and Green Eyes nodded along, “but that woman is my…” I paused, searching for the right word. Viking cast another glance over at Green Eyes, who raised his hand in a “wait, wait” gesture.
“Guide,” I said. Green Eyes was quiet, “and friend.” I finished.
“Ohhhh!” He exclaimed, “Oh, hey, I’m sorry Oscar, this whole business isn’t getting in the way of Season 2, is it?” He stood from her back, then squeezed his right hand into a fist. A slender blade of white metal pushed out from his gauntlet with a soft sigh, and he flicked it upwards, severing the ties pinning Shah’s hands together. Another flex and the blade disappeared. He tried to help Shah to her feet, but she shook his hand away with a wordless snarl.
“Green Eyes,” Viking said, “man, what the fuck is-” Green Eyes raised his hand in that same gesture and Viking went quiet. “I’ll break it down for you later, it’s actually pretty awesome, just let this one slide, alright man?”
Viking gave a shrug, but didn’t otherwise respond. His fist contracted repeatedly against his weapon’s grip.
“Sorry about that, lady, Viking flubbed the ID,” Green Eyes said to Shah as she walked to tower beside me. Viking’s back straightened with what I swear was righteous indignation. Green Eyes continued, “you really should get her a press badge or something, would make traveling in the skirts a lot easier.” He looked around, “Or the… Tangle? Whatever,” He turned to Shah and gave a friendly wave, “no hard feelings?”
Shah spit a fleck of mud from her mouth, her face as unreadable as their masks. Viking muttered something derogatory.
“Yeah, that works,” Green Eyes rattled, uncaring. He watched over our shoulders as the food truck peeled out in the mud and sped off “ah damn, we scared them off, Viking. Looks like more mealkits today.”
“And no tag to show for it,” Viking said sullenly.
“Hey, drop it, man,” Green Eyes said, and Viking rolled his shoulders.
“Tired of mealkits?” I asked, but I kept my eyes on Shah. She hadn’t taken her eyes off the mercenaries once.
“Yeah, you guessed it Oscar,” Green Eyes said, all in a rush, “it’s just military rations all the time, and corporate policy makes it a huge pain in the dick to get takeout in the Skirts. A bunch of us are going to get together and have a cookoff back at base, at the Cross. Was hoping I didn’t have to wait until then but ugh, InfoSec is going to be dogging me too much on the next patrol to try.”
“Green Eyes,” Viking scoffed, “why are you telling him this?”
Green Eyes turned his free palm to the sky, spread his arm wide, “Dude, this is Oscar Yasui! He’s a food journalist that used to write for Palladium! He hosts a podcast and everything, like, he made pasta out of weeds, man, he used a Savorflame to blow a door down once, totally cool.”
Viking was quiet for a while, before he turned to me, “huh. No shit. What’s your podcast called?”
“Gastronaut?” I said. Viking’s helmet lifted its gaze to the jungle, then he snapped his fingers in recognition.
“I’ve… never heard of it,” he said.
“I’ll send you a link when we get back to the Cross,” Green Eyes chimed in, “we should probably be getting back on the circuit. Always great seeing you Oscar, you’re looking a lot better than before.”
Shah was already turning, moving away. I felt the sting of the cuts on my hands, cuts formed by a few weeks of picking Pears. I thought of the little fruits, hanging in their webs of membrane, their cages of thorns. And my brain wriggled in my skull. I thought of Polity screaming when I scrubbed out their bullet wounds with abrading foam. I thought of Polity, terrified of being sent out to die.
“Wait, wait, hold on a moment, Green Eyes, you said a cook off at your military base, right?
“Yeah?” Green Eyes said, turning back, to the visible frustration of his companion.
“Do you think I could join you? I have a few dishes I’ve been meaning to cook, but I don’t have access to a… to a good kitchen. I’d be happy to do it free of charge, might be a lucky break for both of us.”
“Hell yeah!” Green Eyes cheered, carbine dangling on its cord, rattling off his chest plate. Viking was staring at his fellow mercenary in what I can only assume was open bewilderment.
“Gimme your code and I’ll send you the details, oh this is so, so solar,”
And that, dear listeners, is how I got an invite directly into the heart of Henry’s Crossing. How I got Shah to, for a moment, think I was a boot kisser. She didn’t look at me once the entire bike ride home.
That’s how I negotiated myself into cooking for an entire base of mercs, and thankfully, how I pulled Polity’s ass out of the fire and back into the frying pan.
That’s how I, little hemiparasite that I am, grew somewhere new.
For Gastronaut, I’m Oscar Yasui, signing off.