On Whetsday

Mark Sumner

Word Posse

Acknowledgements

My thanks to Tom Drennan, Laurell K. Hamilton, Rett Macpherson, Deborah Millitello, and Sharon Shinn for their help in putting this into shape. Special thanks to Marella Sands, who not only helped with the manuscript but did yeoman work in turning that manuscript into this book. Additional thanks to Susan Gardener, Barbara Morrill, Laura Clawson, Vicki Grove, and Markos Moulitsas Zuniga at Daily Kos, who surrendered space on the front page and got the Saturday evening installments of the serial up on time even when I was late. It's all an experiment. Now let's go check the results.

Interior artwork for
On Whetsday
was created by Amy Jones. The cover for this edition is from Brian Zick. Both Amy and Brian stepped forward with fantastic work even when the whole project looked rather shaky. I love all of it, would recommend either of them for anything, and no, I will not say which of them was more accurate in drawing a cithian.

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Copyright © 2016 by Mark Sumner. All rights reserved. This book, or portions thereof, may not be reproduced by any means without permission of the author. This book has been typeset in Fanwood. Titles and headers are in Alien League.

ISBN-10:1-944089-00-4

ISBN-13:978-1-944089-00-9

1

Whetsday

On Whetsday, Denny danced at the spaceport. It was a good place to dance, if you didn’t mind the heat that boiled off the acres of asphalt or the noise of the rising shuttles. You could meet a dozen races in single morning: lithe little skynx, scarlet klickiks, and sluggish chugs with their curtains of eyes brushing the ground. Most of the passing visitors had never seen a human, and fewer still understood what Denny was doing. Dancing was a rare thing among the races of the galaxy. But they understood enough to toss shiny credit chips or small bits of scrip into the box by his feet. They understood begging. Begging was universal.

Cousin Kettle had told everybody that Denny was not a very good dancer, but Denny didn't let that opinion slow his feet. Kettle had a job helping out at the port, a very responsible position for a human; though the truth was Kettle just cleaned food troughs, and scrubbed fouled pacer bays, and carried stuff. When Denny came to dance at the port, the door guards would sometimes come out to watch, but Kettle stayed away. Denny could tell that Kettle was embarrassed.

Most of the guards were lesser dasiks, and Denny thought that they liked his dancing. The speech badges clipped to the dasiks' uniforms were coded only with phrases like “do not cross the green line” and “present your identification,” so he could not be sure, and the dasiks never dropped a chip in Denny's box, but when they passed him, they would often pause and watch. The dasiks were very tall, and everything about them was long. Long feet. Long hands. Long faces. When they watched Denny dance, their long necks swung from side to side and their long mouths opened to reveal double rows of long needlely teeth. They never once pressed the button that said “leave this area immediately.”

Close to noon, when the dull red sun and the tiny blue-white sun were so tight together in the sky that everything at the port cast one set of deep violet-fringed shadows, a very old chug came out of the main terminal in a burst of cold ammonia-scented air. Denny could tell it was very old because, even though the eyes at the top of the chug were still rich shades of brown, and blue, and orange, those at the bottom had turned dead white. Some of the stalks were even missing their eyes altogether. Denny could see some of the chug's many limbs swaying and clicking though the gaps left by the missing eyes.

One of the dasiks put its long head through the terminal door after the chug and pressed the button that said, “Follow the blue dots to the air taxi.” The chug angled a dozen brown eyes at the pavement, and it shuffled forward as if it were going to comply with this advice. The guard clicked his long teeth together and went back inside. As soon as the door closed, a cluster of orange eyes tipped Denny's way, and the chug stopped.

Already there were a dozen chips gathered at the bottom of Denny's box, and the Whetsday heat was scorching. Normally, he would have been thinking about going home, but this was the first real audience of the day—the first person to truly stop for him instead of just tossing a chip—and he wanted to put on a good show. He raised the volume of his singing and the energy of his dance. He clapped his hands, which made the brown eyes jerk away, and stomped his feet, which made the blue eyes open wide, and sang “all alone, Old Poppa Stone, rolling home.” He rose up onto his toes and spun around.

A ripple went through all the eyes. “You a human?” said the chug. Its voice was soft and windy and it was hard to tell what part of the chug produced the sound, but it spoke Xetosh very well.

Denny stopped singing and tipped down from his toes. “Yes,” he said. “That's right.”

There was a skittering, clicking sound from somewhere beneath the eyes, as if a number of tiny metal switches were being thrown very quickly. Four blue eyes raised up and looked toward the distant city, six brown eyes directed themselves at the door to the terminal. The cluster of orange eyes kept their gaze on Denny. “I understood that humans were not allowed out of the containment facility.”

“The containment facility?” Denny had never heard anyone call part of Jukal Plex a “facility,” but after a moment's thought he smiled. “Do you mean the human quarter?” He glanced back over his shoulder. The tallest buildings of the plex were clear on the skyline, with the great pale spike of the Cataclysm standing above all the rest, but the buildings near the human quarter were shorter, and Denny could not make them out.

The quarter itself was far too small to spot. Despite the name, it wasn't a fourth of the great city, or even a four hundredth. It was just a few buildings, a few streets and a handful of compartment houses, most of them empty. Like everything else about humans, once it had been more important. “When there were lots of humans, we used to have to stay in the quarter—you know, so we didn't get in the way,” Denny explained. “Now that the cithians have consigned most of us on to other cities, they let us move around more.”

“How many?” asked the chug.

“What?”

“How many humans?”

“In Jukal?” Denny had to think for a moment. “Fifteen. No...thirteen. Auntie Jo and her baby went off last month.”

There was some rustling among the eyes, and more than a few of the stalks twined around each other as brown eyes turned to look into orange eyes and blue stared into blue. “So few?” There was more of that switchy clicking and clacking.

“That's just in Jukal,” Denny said with a shrug. “People get moved. Anyhow, there used to be more.”

“Yes,” said the chug. “There did.” It waved toward Denny's feet with a twitch of multicolored eyes. “What is this thing you do?”

“Dancing.”

“Is it a human thing?”

“Yes. I've heard that the skynx dance too, but not like humans.”

“Dance like a human,” said the chug. A hundred eyes tilted toward Denny. “I want to see a human thing.”

Denny grinned. He didn't think the chug was making fun of him. It was dangerous to read emotions into races you didn't know well, but he thought the old chug seemed sad. Perhaps if he danced well enough, the chug might toss a red chip, or even a blue.

He tilted back his head and sang, “Hey Judy, hey Judy, hey” to the hard white sky. He shook out his shoulders, and flung up his arms. He let a wave move through him that curved his neck, then his back, then his hips, then his knees, and then his feet. Left, right, left again. He sang the old music and tossed himself this way with a “hey” that way with a “Judy.” He shook his head at the part about being “sad,” and nodded when the song got to “better, better, better.” The two suns were straight overhead, red touching blue, and the heat made sweat roll down Denny's face. In the near distance, a shuttle shot upward with a rumble that shook the ground, crackling yellow lightning at its tail. There was a smell of ozone, like the air before a storm. Denny kept his head back and watched the shuttle all through the long “nah, nah, nah” part of the song.

When Denny lowered his head, he was very surprised to find that the old chug was gone. He looked down the line of blue dots, but did not see it moving toward the air taxis. He looked down the line of green dots, but there were only three cithians pulled in under their hard black shells as they waited for the ground transport. Denny thought the chug must have gone back inside the terminal, but the glass was tinted and he could not be sure.

The old chug, it seemed, did not care much for Denny's dancing. Maybe Cousin Kettle was right.