The Acid Test of Naia Mills

Chapter One One cop. Two cops. Time to disappear. I holster my smelting g*n, slip my cashbox into my pack and my pack over my shoulder, stuff a few of my best showpieces into my coat pockets, and take a walk. Everything else in my little jewelry stall is replaceable. The two security officers, as they call themselves on Eris Station, are a good seventy or eighty paces away across the market dome. A few hundred bright-eyed tourists and determined vendors still stand between them and me, under and between the multicolored canopies that were designed to offer shade on a planet-bound market, but which serve the opposite purpose here. To preserve the sparkling view of the distant stars beyond the dome, no vendor on the market floor is allowed to display any light brighter than a guiding glow stick without trapping it under a heavy curtain. The result is a dim maze of neon colors and fleeting glimmers from between tent flaps, promising hidden worlds inside. I’ve been listening to the other vendors complain about the difficulty of attracting customers who can barely see their wares ever since I arrived on Eris. I might even have joined in now and then, but today I’m grateful for the black sky and my sharp, Human eyes, already adjusted to the dark. I pause in front of a booth selling spicy puffed chirrum kernels, which seems to be locked in an aromatic advertising war with the perfume booth next door, and chance a look behind me. I can’t even begin to make out what the officers are saying to each other over the hawking and haggling volume of daily business, but their body language, secretive and urgent, broadcasts their intent clearly enough. They’re not browsing or patrolling. They’re on the hunt. One of them is backlit by an open tent, and I can’t make out much more than a small, slender frame behind the gray uniform with its reflective blue stripes. The other is female, tall, and broad, and a glimpse of her short trunk in profile confirms that she’s Haptetheran, like most of the high-ranking staff and a good portion of the visitors on Eris. She might be able to follow a scent trail from my stall if she tries, even through all this. I’ll have to make sure it’s too late for that, as soon as possible. As casually as if I’m heading to the nearest Human-accessible restroom, I turn the corner onto the corridor that parallels the market, then break into a run. The corridors of Eris are more brightly lit than the market dome, but not bright enough to hurt the eyes with the transition. The carpeting that covers everything here on the public floors mutes my footsteps so that the clusters of chattering tourists stumbling from one amusement to the next don’t notice me sprinting toward them until I’m pushing my way past. I can’t smell any of the urine or spoiled food I know have touched that carpet in the past few days alone, although I can smell plenty of the sharp solvent and fruity air freshener the staff uses to disguise them. The sudden gulping pace of the chemical-treated air entering and exiting my lungs as I run feels how I imagine the first snowfall of the season must feel to rock-dwellers: unpleasant, natural, and faintly nostalgic. I’ve had a good, comfortable run on Eris, close to sixty days. A frantic run through its plush, crowded, and slightly stained corridors is overdue by now. Thankfully, the local standard oxygen saturation is higher than my compact Human physiology requires. Though my diaphragm spasms in confusion, I’m not out of breath yet when I take a turn into an adjacent casino, another dim maze of color. The paths through the flashing, dinging machines are designed to be disorienting, but if I hug the left wall for long enough, it’ll let me back out onto the station’s perimeter hallway, where I can make a final dash for the public shuttle dock. I stop at the first window to check if I’ve been followed this far. It’s tinted and tilted upward to give players a constant, timeless view of the stars above, without linking them to the traffic and rhythms of the rest of station life. The dome over the casino is much bigger than the one over the market, big enough to encase a huge stretch of Eris’s skyline, and it’s not subject to the same light pollution regulations, so those stars seem to swim in the reflected auras of a thousand colored lights. I pull my gaze away from the deliberately hypnotic view and stand on the chair of the nearest game machine, so I can see the heads of the people passing by. I spot the two officers almost instantly. My pulse accelerates in preparation for the next sprint. The larger, older officer is touching the shoulder of the smaller, younger one — very young — asking him a question. He looks at his feet as he answers her. I almost don’t recognize him in that crisp new uniform, with his feathers pinned back. I would never, ever have pegged him for a cop of any kind. His uncertain, deflated posture is jarringly out of place inside a meticulously pressed officer’s jumpsuit. Those blue, diagonal stripes across his chest and back catch every bit of light, promising assistance to the lucky, warning people like me to run and hide, while the pull of his neck deeper into the stiff, gray collar suggests that he’s the one who’d prefer to be hiding. I jump down from the chair and bolt deeper into the casino maze, abandoning my route to the closest shuttle station and hoping I can chart a quick enough shortcut to the second closest. If he’s looking for me, no matter how reluctantly, he’ll have no trouble picking me out of a crowd. *** When I first saw the boy who’s now wearing that unbecoming uniform, he was stepping onto the transparent floor of the market’s elevator landing yesterday morning, grinning down at it with the amusement of a rock-dweller who’s never given much thought to the fact that the stars exist on all sides of him, not just above. I watched him coming from across the dome. New clothes. Wandering gaze. Pretty. Clean. The thick plume of feathers running from his forehead down his back had been combed recently, but they were perked up just then, curling forward into his face and stretching the back of his thin, white shirt. Smooth, gray-brown scales strained to keep up with the exuberance of his smile. His wide, avian eyes, even more sensitive than my own, seemed to steer the rest of his head in their urgency to soak in every detail of the market before him. In spite of the low light, he was easy to trace. He drifted toward me on the predictable tide of the crowd, his attention bouncing obediently from one carefully laid out focal point to the next — up to the station’s iconic lighted spire, which dominated the view beyond the dome, down to the majestic entryway of the first casino on the market’s other side — the giddy awe never leaving his face. It wasn’t until the first merchant sprayed him with a cologne sample that he reeled his focus in to anything directly in front of him. He made pleasant conversation with the Signature Scents salesman but wandered onward without opening his wallet. When he passed the Sticky Nectar Bakery stall, his forked tongue snuck out from behind his smoothly scaled lips to test the air, ever so briefly. Budgeting the moments before he would reach me, I selected carefully from among my showpieces. He stopped in front of the stall next to mine to try a few Eris Station hats, but none of them fit comfortably over his purple-black plumage. “Souvenir of your stay?” I called to him, stepping out from under my portable canopy just as he reached the convenient chokepoint in front of it. I held one of my best filigree portraits in his way, just high enough to catch the pink light of a nearby candy booth and make it shine. In delicate, gold-tinted metallic lace, it depicted a handsome man in dark glasses standing in front of that famous station spire. “Only two chips!” He did a double-take at the price, tripped up more by skepticism than interest, but the important thing was that he hadn’t proceeded into the casino or taken a right toward the bars and restaurants yet. He reached out to touch the portrait and looked surprised to find it cool and hard, not the cleverly disguised plastic that two chips might be expected to buy. “You can bite it if you want to,” I offered. He pulled his hand away and smiled at me, embarrassed. “You make these?” he asked. “I immortalize adventures and the people who take them,” I said, opening one flap of my long coat to show off a sampler collection, ranging from more of the little two-chip brooches to five-chip belt buckles to fifteen-chip tablet covers. After taking a moment to examine my handiwork and imagine himself in the shoes of the model in the dark glasses, he shrugged. “Why not? I’m in no hurry. Just the little one, though.” I guided him into the pool of golden light under my canopy, directed him to the stool that would put him at the perfect angle for both portraiture and further perusal of my wares, and set a brooch frame in the stand at my work table. “First time on Eris?” I made the usual small talk as my smelting g*n warmed up. “Uh-huh,” he said. “Just got in last night.” “Thought so. I’d definitely remember if I’d seen you before.” He put a hand to the feathers at the back of his neck. They curled back up as soon as he smoothed them. “I guess you don’t get too many Optrix guys this far from Rossol?” “More than you’d think.” I smirked and maintained contact with his richly orange eyes. “And that’s not what I meant.” His feathers ruffled, and he smoothed them again. Pretty as he was, I could tell he wasn’t used to hearing it yet. I couldn’t put a number to his age, not without a conversion program to account for the slight differences in our lifecycles and the lengths of three different historical planet orbits, but I had about twenty Earth years as of the last time I’d done the math, and we were comparably developed. “Two chips?” I reminded him. “Oh, right.” He dug in his pocket for the two stamped nickel pieces and held them out to me in his taloned fingers. “One for me,” I said, dropping the first one into my cashbox. “One for you.” I dropped the second into the g*n’s reservoir and waited for it to melt. He watched the process, occasionally glancing at the finished pieces in front of him, quietly noting the difference between their golden sheen and the grayish silver of his melting coin. “Pass me the bottle on the right?” I nodded at the rack in front of him. He did, and I added a sparing sprinkle of the red powder inside. “What’s that?” he asked. “This? My mother just calls it ‘angel flower.’ She found it on one of her survey expeditions. Says it opens the metal up to new protons and electron shells.” I shrugged at the superstitions that ran in my Human blood, capped the bottle, and handed it back. “It certainly makes it look nice, anyway.” The Optrix boy nodded numbly as I closed the reservoir and pressed the button for the g*n’s mixer cycle. After a few moments, I stretched the first golden thread from its nozzle across the brooch frame, teasing it into the first line of the spire. “You can set that down,” I prompted him, nodding again at the rack. He tore his eyes away from the work in progress long enough to return the bottle to its place, and as he did, he couldn’t avoid noticing the row of full, unopened bottles on the rack, or the hundred chip price tag below them. After that, he couldn’t seem to decide where to look until I told him. “This way,” I pointed behind me, so I could capture the distinct curve of his cheek with another molten twist of thread. “Perfect. Now to your left.”