Crysalis: Merrill's Tale

Bread and Oarfish

We took a much-needed sleep after our run-in with the grippymire. We had some rations and, a long march later, we were approaching one of the smaller freight transfer Circle stations, and it was as busy as they usually are, cluttered with folks getting ready to on-load their stuff and off-load whatever they were trading their stuff for.

A burly man in a kilt had a cart piled high with pumpkins, bright orange and still shiny-damp from the hydroponics solution. A pair of girls had a ragged old cart pulled by a stocky miner-alt, his hugely muscled arms and back crisscrossed with old scars; the cart was filled to the brim with strips of salted oarfish. I wondered if the salt hurt the bearings in the cartwheels. I knew it didn’t hurt the miner-alt; all pain receptors had been bred out of them, including most of their brains, and I’d often wondered what the point of whipping could possibly be. One woman had a smaller cart piled with round loaves of bread, still warm from the cooker. Darwin and Newton were already negotiating with her. My mouth began watering. Fungus will keep you going, but nothing beats real food.

The boys came back, both their mouths already full of bread.

“Next Circular to Delta Station…”

“…coming up soon,” they reported.

“Want some bread?”

I grabbed a hunk and stuffed it in my mouth. Sourdough. Good stuff.

The whistle-whoosh of an approaching Circle train rose above the bustle before I even had time to swallow. The first of the trail of magnetically-connected cars emerged from a perfectly round hole in the wall, braking already, and slid to a stop in a swirl of dust against the long, low platform.

There was the usual rush as the car doors irised opened up and the conveyors slid out with a crash.

“Come on, let’s see if we can find a good place to ride,” I said.

The boys were ahead of me, as usual. Darwin went left, Newton went right, each trying to find the best place to sneak a ride or, as a last resort, actually part with some hard-earned credits and buy two seats. We always bought just two; the twins would rotate using one seat, one there while the other wandered around. So far, no ticket taker had caught on.

“This way,” Darwin yelled.

I looked and saw him waving his arms, so I skirted a pair of conveyors full of bales of homespun and climbed onboard the next car. It was already crowded with riders and their paraphernalia. I slid into the last available seat and leaned back.

~~~~~~~

“Are you going to…”

“…sleep here forever…

“…or get off with us?”

I jerked awake and looked around, blinking my eyes.

A pair of grins topped by blazing red hair looked down at me.

“When you two are as old as I am, you’ll understand the necessity of taking a nap whenever the opportunity arises,” I said with as much dignity as I could manage. I gathered my bags and snapped them onto my belt.

“And exactly how old…”

“…is that? Old as rock?”

I reached out as if to slap Darwin. Not that I ever have. Not because I wouldn’t, or thought it wasn’t a good idea sometimes, because I would and it was. The boys were just too fast for me. By the time my hand connected to a cheek or a*s, said cheek or a*s would be somewhere else.

Still, that didn’t keep a portly man from shooting me a disapproving look. His companion, a woman with a child on her back and another in her belly, winked at me in understanding.

“Um, I’m not their…” I began.

Naturally, Newton interrupted me. “Come on, granny, let us help you up. Don’t want to take any chances with those old bones.”

I followed them out, muttering. “All three of my grey hairs are a direct result of you two, damn it,” as they solicitously and ostentatiously helped me down to the platform. “I’m going to get Granther to make you clean out the cesspit when we get to Muttville,” I promised.