Chapter 12: Breaking the Law

 

Quinn smirked. “Wow, Doc, I had no idea that you had a spine in there. When can we start?”

“As soon as we’re sure that the Karuses are far enough away to not notice,” said  Dr. Erobosh.

“Wait, what?” said Miri, eyes looking like a surprised aye-aye. “We were just told that it’s dangerous out there!”

“By two women who had spent the last eighteen years withholding critical information from their own child, yes,” Dr. Erobosh said, scanning the spaceport like a sailor scanning the horizon. “You are adults, and have expressed interest in seeing the city. I can keep you safe as long as we’re together.”

Miri folded her arms. “We aren’t going to be together, because I’m not just going to disrespect Alex’s parents by just galavanting off without them.”

“Ugh, Miri, why do you always have to be like this?” said Quinn.

“Like what? Respecting people who know better?”

“‘People who know better’ is a strong description,” said Dr. Erobosh, even though nobody heard him.

“And you don’t respect the cool alien scientist who has clearly done this before?” Quinn said at the same time.

“I didn’t get this far by doing whatever thing that popped into my head that sounded fun!”

“Now, first of all, you got this far on a spaceship, so I guess you’re right,” said Quinn. “Second of all ‘I didn’t get this far’? Miri, you sound like old money when you talk like that, and if you are old money, you owe me way more friendship cash.”

Miri raised an eyebrow at Quinn. “Shut the fuck up. Alex, please tell him that he’s being ridiculous.”

I had been slowly fading into the back of the bench I was sitting on, hoping that nobody would notice me. “Um. Well. He does kind of have a point. I’m going to end up living out here, but neither of you are going to get an opportunity like this again, right? And neither of you have to listen to my parents. Or anyone’s parents for that matter.”

“I’m not just listening to them because they’re your parents or whatever,” said Miri, suddenly sounding much more timid. “They’re from out here, right? They spent most of their lives out here, so they must know what they’re saying when they say it’s too dangerous.”

“I am also ‘from out here’,” said Dr. Erobosh, “and I’m telling you that the Karuses are being ridiculous. As long as I am around in some capacity, you are more than capable of remaining safe on any world as long as you don’t act like idiots.”

“Could you stop calling my parents ‘The Karuses’? It’s not my last name.”

Dr. Erobosh adjusted his sleeves. “Of course. My apologies.”

“So… I guess that means you’re going with us, Alex?” asked Quinn.

“Umm… I mean…” I tapped against the bench, wishing I at least had my wings unbound. “Yeah! Of course I do. I want to see what’s out there!”

Miri sat down and opened up her Ariel. “It’s not going to be my fault when Amanda and Stephanie get back here and start a screaming match with you three.”

I stood up and moved over to join Dr. Erobosh and Quinn. “I guess we’ll just meet you back here at sundown?”

Miri shrugged. “Yeah. Sure.”

“I really doubt they’re going to be mad,” said Quinn. “You’ve been around Alex’s parents, right? They aren’t like ours.”

Miri tightened up at the mention of her parents, then slowly relaxed over the course of a few seconds. “Just go already. You aren’t going to change my mind.”

“The Ka— Alex’s parents should be far enough away to avoid running into them by now,” said Dr. Erobosh. “Stick close to me, we don’t want to get lost.”

We left Miri behind, navigating through the vast and alien crowds to the spaceport exit. There wasn’t anywhere near as much security on the way out as there had been exiting our ship. All I had to do was look sufficiently pious, quiet, and Ember-esque to not be noticed by a single lobster-crab guard.

Once we were past security, it was just a few steps before we were outside. It was, as the light through the windows had suggested, really hot and very dry. Most of the buildings around were small businesses and shops set up to cater to arriving space travelers. The multi-species chaos of the spaceport continued out here, though the proportion of the lobster-crab aliens was even greater. All in all, it still resembled things I was familiar with, at least on a rough viewing.

“Now, the first thing you’re going to want to do,” said Dr. Erobosh, “is to look up.”

Quinn and I both did, and our jaws both dropped at the same time. What I had initially mistaken for a hill or a cliff face was not. It was the rim of a pit, a pit at least a mile across and miles deep carved out of the red rock. The entire spaceport was on a single projection from the side of the pit, one of several gigantic metal platforms projecting out into the open space in the middle, most of which also seemed to be spaceports. Dug into comparatively tiny shelves were the buildings of the rest of the city, ringing the entire circumference of the pit and stacked dozens of ranks high. 

“Holy shit,” mumbled Quinn.

“Welcome to Asonazafal, the colonial capital of Nahoroth II!” Dr. Erobosh said, throwing his arms out wide. “Smell the magnetite dust in the air, pay homage to the Everlasting Emperor of a Thousand Colored Threads, and whatever you do, don’t fall off the edge.”

I remembered to close my mouth, continuing to trace out the rock above with all eight eyes. “I want to see the edge,” I said.

“Of course you do,” said Dr. Erobosh. “Follow me, then.”

We started moving perpendicular to the spaceport, sometimes having to shove our way through crowds or avoid a particularly aggressive salesman. The edge wasn’t very far away, no more than a city block from the exit to the spaceport. There also wasn’t any fanfare to it; the street just ended with a railing, and beyond that was open air. Merely seeing the edge wasn’t enough, of course; I also had to give myself vertigo.

I grabbed onto the railing with all four hands and leaned my head over the edge, looking down. The pit was impossibly deep, must have been three or four miles, deep enough that not even the high noonday sun could penetrate all the way to the bottom. Streaks of white split the red rock at regular intervals, eight in all, elevators the size of buses that dropped down into the darkness. I leaned further over the edge, straining to see what was at the bottom of it all. There was water, from the look of it, though whether it was an earthy swamp or a clear lake I couldn’t tell; there were also machines, gigantic mining machines the size of skyscrapers, the size of oil tankers, the size of hills, black and gold metal behemoths that gnawed away at the rock far below.

“Try not to jump off the edge,” said Dr. Erobosh. “I am still responsible for your safety, and this would be a terrible way to start.”

I pulled myself back, tearing my eyes away from the bottomless abyss. “It looks really cool down there.”

Quinn glanced down, then immediately stuck his head over the edge as well. 

Dr. Erobosh sighed, resting his face in his hand. “I am beginning to regret my decision.”

Once Quinn had had his fill of staring into the abyss, we started making our way away from the spaceport and into the main portion of the city, around the walls of the pit. We didn’t talk much, instead drinking in the scenery. The architecture of Asonazafal was pragmatic in the extreme, clearly built more for speed and efficiency in housing than it was for any kind of aesthetic or comfort. All of the buildings seemed to be made from one of five or six default molds, perfectly square white buildings, two or three stories high, made out of some kind of plastic. Of course, that didn’t mean that they had stayed in the same pristine condition as when they had been made; outside of the most important buildings, embassies and banks and the spaceport itself, every building had been given some kind of decoration. There were paintings of abstract scenery or of real vistas so strange that it hardly made a difference, exaggerated graffiti in half a dozen languages, small paper charms hung from windows and roofs, piles of stones besides the doorways in the Fibonacci sequence, and so much more.

The people had much more variety to them than the buildings, of course, to an almost overwhelming degree. About four in five were more of the lobster-crab people, but even there no two of them looked the same. They technically had the same range of sizes as humans, four to seven feet tall, but very tall and very short individuals seemed much more common than for humans. Their clothing tended towards the minimal, probably because of a combination of the heat and their shells, and seemed to come in three very different styles distinguished by color and the thickness and arrangement of straps. 

The variety of other species wasn’t quite as dazzling as it had been inside the spaceport, but I still caught at least three other main groups. There were the humans, or “Liberates” as people called them, mostly wearing clothes similar to mine with satchels and tool belts hanging off; there were the strange mechanical beings with bodies like shimmering shapeless chrome statues; and there were the tiny little crow people, three feet tall and not wearing much in the way of clothing at all, flying from level to level with packages and envelopes clutched in their claws. A few times I’d see a silhouette in the crowd that didn’t look like any alien I’d seen, only for it to vanish before I could get a good look at it.

If I haven’t already managed to convey it with my description, seeing an alien world for the first time, an alien city for that matter, was overwhelming. I would end up looking around so much to see the people and the places and the translated signs that I’d forget where I was going and trip, and get weird looks because I was staring at random pedestrians of species I hadn’t even known existed before then. It was taking me to the brink of sensory overload, and yet there was still so much more to see that I couldn’t stop myself.

After about half an hour of walking around, I had finally reached the point where I felt comfortable not spending every single instant taking in my surroundings, and decided to break the awkward silence with some conversation. With me being as awkward as I am, that took the form of observations about things that were right in front of my face.

“These… uh… Nahoroabs, I guess, are different from the people back home, right?”

Dr Erobosh looked at me like I was crazy. “Pioneers. The large arthropods are called Pioneers. The Nahoroab V Dominion is, as far as my research can tell me, just a small fragment of the dozens of worlds they settled.”

“Oh, cool,” I said, desperately searching for a way to continue the conversation. “So I guess the fact that this one country or whatever—“

“Empire,” Dr. Erobosh interrupted. “It has absorbed multiple tribute states into itself, therefore making it an empire.”

I nodded. “So the fact that this one empire has banned Emissaries might not mean much about the rest of the galaxy, because it’s so small?”

“Precisely. The Collective is twenty times larger at least, and they have made their open status very, very clear.”

That was a little reassuring at least. If nothing else, that meant that I didn’t have to rely entirely on my parents’ words about there being a safe place for me. Thinking about how much danger I was in just being on this planet suddenly gave me an idea. I took my Ariel out of its clasp at my belt and started searching through various functions. 

“So, what’s the plan Doc?” Quinn asked. “We just going to do some sightseeing, pick up some lunch, have a day on the town?”

“Assuming that there is any place which can serve lunch for a mammal, an arthropod, and a chlorine-breather, then perhaps.”

“Well that’s a little boring,” said Quinn, rolling his eyes. “I thought we were going to have some adventure. Get the local flavor.”

“We are getting the local flavor…” Dr. Erobosh said, somewhat hesitantly. “You are aware this is a mining colony, yes? Not a resort. Unless you would like to get a tour of the various forms of advanced duranite-plated ore loaders, in which case I am sure I can provide.”

Quinn winked. “Well, that’s just what you think. I grew up in Los Angeles, so I know how to find the interesting stuff if you give me a few minutes.”

Dr. Erobosh narrowed his eyes at him. “Just because I believe in you to be able to survive in this city does not mean that I am no longer responsible for your safety.”

“Excuse me?” said Quinn. “I can keep myself safe! That’s the whole point, isn’t it?”

“No. It isn’t. I can trust you to keep yourselves out of trouble, but there are very few people whom I would trust to stay safe alone on a new planet.” Dr. Erobosh made a click in the back of his throat. “Besides, the difference between you and I is that I am armed.”

Quinn was about to say something angry when he was interrupted by a little mechanical voice emanating from my Ariel. “Testing testing. Can you hear me?”

Both of the others turned to me with confused expressions. “What are you doing?” asked Dr. Erobosh. 

I spent a moment typing, then the Ariel said, “Text-to-speech function. I figure it would help keep my cover of not talking. Make sense?”

“Interesting,” said Dr. Erobosh.

“And just when I’d gotten used to your new voice…” chuckled Quinn. “It’s a bit feminine for you, though, isn’t it?”

I shrank away into the heavy Ember robes. “The only voice available.”

“Oh well,” said Quinn with a shrug. “Kinda weird how they all have different voices, though. Or is that just me.”

I started typing something long, and the other two patiently waited for me to finish. “We could find something cool and unique to this planet and hang around there. There has to be at least one tavern built on the edge of the pit.”

Quinn raised an eyebrow at the suggestion, glancing at Dr. Erobosh. He looked around, scanning the street like he had practiced it. “Fine. You two stay in that alcove so you don’t get lost,” he said while pointing to said doorway, “and I’ll ask the citizens around for anything matching the description.”

We slipped through the crowd to where Dr. Erobosh had told us to wait, me having a considerably easier time doing that than Quinn did. The alcove was an odd little bit of architecture, serving no clear purpose besides existence as an indent in one of the walls of a larger building, one which apparently served as a multi-level grocery store.

“This is totally insane, isn’t it?” muttered Quinn. “It doesn’t feel real. It can’t be real, because alien cities on alien planets are just… fiction, right?”

“Feels real to me,” I said.

“I guess so. But you’ve… changed,” said Quinn, gazing off into the distance. “I still feel like me, except that what my senses are telling me is something that couldn’t possibly exist. It feels like a weird, nonsensical dream where my best friend turned into a beetle and we’re sending him away with a big road trip. Does that make sense? I’m not making sense. I’m sorry.”

“Talk slower,” I said. “Typing is hard.”

Quinn burst out laughing. I chittered along with him, glad that there was some amount of levity to be found out here. “Sorry,” he said. “I’ll give you time.”

Quinn stayed silent while I clicked away at what I wanted to say. He didn’t seem to be looking at anything in particular, or anything at all, so much as he was pointing his eyes in a direction so that he wouldn’t have to care. I went over what I’d written a few times to be sure, then pressed send. 

“This all feels fairly bizarre, yes, but so has everything since I woke up like this. My entire life feels like it’s been divided in two, chopped apart, like Alex the human died and had his memories transferred to Alex the insect. Everything that’s happening is strange and unusual, but it feels less like what you were talking about and more like I’ve changed than the rest of the world has. But you could probably guess that.”

“Well that’s pretty goddamn profound,” said Quinn. “Feels like you should be the one getting a philosophy degree instead of me.”

“Then you could go into pharmacology like you were always meant to,” I said.

Before Quinn had the chance to do more than look vaguely offended, Dr. Erobosh showed up, emerging from the urban jungle like an ambush predator. “Follow me and try not to get lost,” he said.

We followed, and now that Dr. Erobosh was actually moving with purpose, it became rather difficult to keep up. We circled around the pit, went down a level, doubled back for a minute, took a huge elevator down two or three levels, then circled around the rim of the pit some more. Before long I’d completely lost track of where we’d started, and I think Quinn and I both wondered how Erobosh knew which way to go.

The city was so confusing and winding that we didn’t even realize where we were going until we turned the corner and it was suddenly upon us. Suddenly, we stopped in an intersection and found ourselves looking at something that I could have sworn was the broken wreckage of a crashed spacecraft. Dr. Erobosh had never had much in the way of emotional range, but even he looked rather proud of himself.

“Well, what do you think?”

“Is that the broken wreckage of a crashed spacecraft?” I asked.

“Yes,” said Dr. Erobosh. “It is also a marketplace. It was a Traveler star-wagon until it crashed here about thirty years ago. The entire area was devastated, but someone decided to use the debris as a foundation.”

Quinn folded his arms, scanning the area. “Huh. Thrifty.”

“And they even remembered to remove all of the toxic fuel components,” Dr. Erobosh said with a nod. 

I suppressed a smile, typing as quickly as possible. “Wow, I didn’t know that you were capable of jokes.”

“That was not a joke,” said Dr. Erobosh.

“So it’s sort of like a farmer’s market?” asked Quinn. “I haven’t had a chance to go to one of those in a while, hah. Do we plan on paying?”

“Don’t need to,” said Dr. Erobosh, moving toward the nearest entrance of the market. “It’s all grown in government-subsidized hydroponics labs carved into the bedrock and handed out for free.”

“Ooh, that sounds nice. Space socialism for the win,” Quinn said with a wink.

“Of course. After banning all political dissent on pain of death and annihilating multiple major religious sites, it was the least they could do.”

“Nobody’s perfect,” I said.

Quinn muttered something under his breath that included the word “smartass”, and we entered the market. Finding food for all three different species was still difficult, but surprisingly not quite as difficult as it had been in the spaceport. Dr. Erobosh found a stall selling what looked like roasted crickets, run by a squat, froglike woman wearing a nearly identical mask to his. Not only were my smaller, chlorine-based relatives edible for him, but they came with a tiny and specialized airlock allowing him to eat them in public without suffocating. 

Once I had gotten over the philosophical question of whether my new state meant that seeing insects being eaten was horrifying or not (the answer being “or not”),  Quinn and I got around to the business of deciding what to eat. I had already partially filled up on goo, but Quinn had not, which of course meant that he was on the brink of resorting to eating me out of sheer hunger, or so he claimed.

It took a shockingly long time to find food that was edible for the both of us, but we managed it in the end. We sat down across from each other at a table three feet from the railing, a basket of oil-fried something between us. Dr. Erobosh was sitting there as well, engrossed in his Ariel. 

“I am not regretting leaving the spaceport,” my Ariel said while my mouth was crammed full of something that might have been a plant or might have been an animal.

“Yeah,” Quinn admitted. “I mean, it’s still nothing I couldn’t have done in, like, Albuquerque.”

“Is Albuquerque a giant pit full of behemoth mining machines, inhabited by dozens of alien species? I wasn’t aware.” I said, glaring at my Ariel for not putting nearly enough sarcasm into that sentence.

Quinn chuckled. “I guess you’re right. But still, this feels like it isn’t enough. If this is going to be our last hurrah, the last time we get to see each other before you move off to space or whatever, we should be doing something crazy, y’know?”

“And what would you suggest?” I asked.

Quinn scooted his chair back. “I dunno. Something. I do remember seeing a weird alleyway on the way over here, we could explore that.”

“Exploring a weird alleyway is not my definition of fun,” I said.

“Then you’ve clearly been doing different things in your spare time than I have,” Quinn said, standing up. “There could be an entirely different world back there, full of magic and wonder.”

“Quinn, what are you doing?”

Quinn winked at me, then he bolted. I nearly fell backwards out of my chair, while Dr. Erobosh jumped to his feet with incredible agility. Of course, Quinn had us both beaten. Not only did he have the advantage of surprise, but he was also more athletic than both of us put together, and had pushed into the crowd in a matter of moments.

Dr. Erobosh sprinted ahead, nearly as fast as Quinn, leaving me to trail behind. I wasn’t a very fast runner to begin with, and the disguise proved to be exceptionally awkward. In a panic over my best friend’s safety, I ran after him anyway. It wasn’t long before Dr. Erobosh and Quinn were both out of my sight, but I knew which alleyway Quinn was talking about, so I only had to get there and intercept him. I slipped through crowds, shoved past Pioneers and humans, and narrowly avoided being run over by carts and autonomous vehicles. I was barely even focusing on what was in front of me, instead looking around for some sign of either of the others.

I stopped in front of the alleyway that I remembered, panting for breath. For a few seconds, I had almost forgotten why I was there, as I rested my hands on my knees and caught my breath. When I did remember, my head snapped up, looking around for Quinn. He wasn’t there. Neither was Dr. Erobosh. In fact, the more I looked around, the more I realized that I didn’t even know where I was.