Space Inc (anthology)

Feef’s House by Doranna Durgin

The interact screen stared sternly at Shadia, showing her a form full of questions to which she had no answer. To which no duster would have an answer. Local personal reference. No chance of that. It’s why she’d chosen the temp form.

Commonly known as the “duster form,” but only if you said it with a sneer.

Local address. Wherever she landed on any given night.

Last posting. Three weeks Solward on Possita IV.

Shadia scanned the form with the contempt of a duster for the mag-footed perms and then, recalling that she sat in front of an interact screen connected to Toklaat Station’s temp job placement system, she hastily schooled her expression to something more neutral. Jobs no one wants, jobs with no guarantee of security. The first she was used to; the second suited her. She didn’t want still to be here in the first place and she certainly didn’t want to tie herself to work or community.

There. There was an empty form-line she could fill. She manipulated the interface with absent ease.

Instantly, a woman’s face filled the hitherto blank square in the upper left of the screen. “You had a terdog? A real terdog?”

A real terdog?

I didn’t want to be here in the first place. Not filling out forms, not pretending it suited me, not remembering the sight of my friends boarding the hydropon repair ship, buying passage with three weeks of shoveling ‘cycle products and glad to do it. Not hiding my reaction to such a question. A real terdog? Was there any other kind?

Politely, Shadia said, “A kennel of real terdogs, sir. Belvian Blues, which we used to find subterr rootings for export—”

“Yes, yes,” the woman said, rude in her eagerness. “I have just the position for you. It pays well and suits your unique skills.”

Her unique skills? She had a duster’s skills. A little of this, a little of that, learn anything fast. Take what gets you off-planet or off-station when you feel like going.

Unless, of course, you fall on your ass in front of a zipscoot and rack up such a medical debt that you’re stuck on-planet until you repay. Stuck. In one place.

Stuck.

Most wary, Shadia said, “What’s the job?”

Her application screen rippled away, replaced by the familiar format of a job listing. Almost familiar… except for the header logo, which caught her eye before she had a chance to focus on anything else. Permtemp. “There’s been a mistake, sir,” Shadia said. Her recently healed thigh cramped with her sudden dread that it wasn’t actually a mistake at all. She forced herself to relax. “I’m not a perm. Just a temp. I put it on my application.”

“This is a priority position, young woman. In such cases we extend our search parameters.”

“Apologies, sir, but temp is a preference, not a restriction.”

The woman’s eyes flicked aside to her own interact screen where Shadia’s partially filled form would be displayed. Her demeanor cooled, enough to give Shadia that same prickly unease she got any time she stepped out of duster turf and into perm areas. “Shadia,” the woman said, pronouncing it wrong, shad-iya instead of shah-diya.

Shadia didn’t correct her.

“Shadia,” the woman said, wrong again. “Why are you applying for work on Toklaat?”

I have the feeling you know. No doubt the woman had instantly called up all of the records Shadia had accumulated since disembarking here. “Med-debt, sir,” said Shadia. Damn perm. They thought themselves so superior, with their airs about commitment and stability and dependability. Dusters thought them staid and boring and knew better than to expect permanence from any part of their lives.

“Then you won’t be allowed to leave the station until the debt is paid?”

Shadia stopped herself from narrowing her eyes. Of course the woman knew the terms of duster med-debt. “Yes, sir.”

“Filling this job is very important to us. Our permanent residents, by definition, have little chance for exposure to pets of any kind.”

No, of course not. Only the affluent could afford a pet in a station environment, even a station like Toklaat with copious gardens and play spaces and other luxuries. And the affluent wouldn’t need to check station listings for jobs, temp or perm.

The woman smiled a grim little smile. “I can’t say for sure, but I suspect that with the priority placed on filling this job, it would be very difficult to remove you as a candidate.”

And as long as she was listed as a candidate for one job, she wouldn’t be considered for others.

Oh, God. Stuck.

Until this moment she would have said all stations smelled the same. A whiff of artificial scent meant to cover the disinfectant that was ineffective in some places and astonishingly strong in others. But no disinfectant would handle this smell. No artificial scent stood a chance. Wildly exotic pet residue, abandoned and left to stew.

Blinking watering eyes, Shadia tried to evaluate her new home.

Home. How long had it been since—?

But no, this wasn’t a home. This was enforced labor, and as soon as her med-debt was paid, she’d find some way out of this place. Off of this station. Back to the habits to which she’d become accustomed these past fifteen years, just over half her life. Her hip twinged, reminding her why she was still here; old memories twinged to remind her why she wanted to leave.

Shadia concentrated instead on her new environs. Two floors of space, an unimaginative floor plan that put living quarters above several rooms meant to simulate a home environment for pampered pets while offering a practical nod to the need for cleanup, food preparation, and isolation of cranky or antisocial animals. There was, of course, a tub.

Precious water, used on dirty pets.

There was even an old schedule tacked directly to the wall next to the tub. The hand-scrawled names were water-stained and worn, but Shadia got the gist of it. Once a week for most of them, twice for some of them. And not all of them were bathed with shampoo and water. There was one called Mokie; it seemed to be bathed with a special oil. And Tufru used a product she found in the storage bins over the tub… it reminded her of cat litter.

Cat litter. When was the last time I cleaned a litter box? Stinky old litter box, never could have the fancy self-cleaners because Ma and Dad said we needed to learn responsibility. As if working in the kennels wasn’t enough. Worked in that damn kennel from six years old to—

Old enough.

Shadia left the tub area behind. Hastily. By the time she reached the spartan little office, she was full of anger. The way she liked it. Good cleansing anger, snarling that the very part of her once-was that had sent her on duster ways now had her trapped on Toklaat.

Nothing’s permanent. See what you can see. Drift from station to planet to orbiter, grabbing catch-work rides and reveling in the newness of the next place until it got old, finding new friends when the old drifted away, your only true bond the very thing that would eventually drive you apart. Duster ways.

Still snarling, she found the paperwork that suggested she name the facility and directed her how to hire the assistants she was allowed—just enough help so she could sleep and acquire food and personal maintenance goods, for the pet care facility served all three shifts. There was a com-pin so she could be contacted by customers or assistants at any time, a cashchip for operating expenses, and an ID set. Her ID set.

Fast work.

Shadia picked it up, fumbling the slick bifold set. Employer information on one side, personal history on another, a large recent image of herself—source unknown to her—and a fourth side that sheened blankly but held all of the set’s information and more in digital. She looked at the image. It showed her from the head up but somehow managed to capture her scrawniness beneath the patched duster’s vest-over-coveralls she wore. Mementos covered the vest, from crew patches to a shiny bead made from a shell found only in a single place on a single planet. And they hung within her hair, an unimpressive dark blonde never given the opportunity to go sun-streaked, but long enough to hold beads and twists of woven goods. The tactile hair of a woman who encountered very few mirrors.

Her appearance clashed with the purple border around the image, the one that proclaimed her as a perm job worker. A purple border she’d never thought to see on her own ID set, not after being dragged into the duster’s life while she was still young enough that her original ID lived in the back of her underwear drawer.

Dragged into it, maybe. But I embraced it. The very involuntary nature of my introduction to the life was a blessing, an event that taught me a duster’s way is the only way. People think we’re crazy, bouncing infinitely from station to station to planetside to station. Space dust. But in reality we’re the wisest of them all. They count on their lives to continue as they know them. We admit up front that it’ll never happen that way, and make the best of it.

The duster bar was easy to find from her new location; she’d been there often enough before she was hit by the zip-scoot. Like most stations, Toklaat was a glorified cylinder with travel tubes down the open axis, from north to south and back again, with east and west split according to function. East housed station maintenance and services; west housed the residences and personal services. Dusters worked the eastern station-side jobs, clung to station-side corners, slept in station-side nooks.

Now Shadia worked and lived in the west.

The duster bar, considered both a personal service and a duster accommodation, balanced on the border between east and west. With the com-pin tucked away in her vest pocket, a duster’s ubiquitous utilities under the vest, and a small advance on her personal cashchip, Shadia stood at the edge of the bar nursing a featherdunk and considering her situation.

The pet-watching service came as a benefit to the elite on the station, so the station itself paid her salary, whether she had one pet on hand or twenty. Escalator clauses kicked in after ten of them, things like increased assistant hours, increased pay…

Increased pay meant a quick debt reduction. A quick departure from this, a quick return to her own way of life.

“Out ’tending, are you?” said a growly alto voice in her ear. “Duster rig, all right—you take it off someone, ’tender? You someone’s mag-bound little perm?”

Startled from her reverie, Shadia jerked around to discover herself flanked by two women whose musculature and vest pins marked them as cargo-loading dusters. Not a worry. Dusters left their own alone. “I’m no pretender.”

Quick as that, one of them grabbed her arms, spilling her drink, while the other fished around inside Shadia’s vest until a search of the many interior pockets offered success. The creditchip, the ID set. “Looks like your set to me“ said the growly one. “Didn’t anyone ever warn you that the only thing worse than a perm in a duster bar is a ’tender perm in a duster bar? Should’ve at least gotten a fake to proof your age.”

Shadia kicked the woman who held her, a pointy-toed kick just below the knee. When the woman’s grip fell away, Shadia snatched her ID set back, spitting a long string of blistering duster oaths. She didn’t fight, she didn’t get drunk, she didn’t join the ranks of the dusters’ practical jokers… but she had a vocabulary to make even a growly-voiced cargo loader blink. And while the one woman was blinking and the other was bent over her leg, Shadia snarled, “Med-debt. It’s paid, I’m gone. Got it?” She turned her back on them and went back to her drink. They would have muttered apologies except that her turned back was a sign to be respected. Not a rudeness as the perms would have thought, but simply a gesture requesting privacy in a society where complete strangers made up a constantly shifting population. So they went away.

No one else bothered her.

But I didn’t go back there. Because they were right. I might hate it, I might have been forced into it, but in the strictest sense, they were right. I was a perm in a duster bar… and elsewhere, a duster in perm ID. I just didn’t intend to stay that way.

The smell was incredible.

“You’re going to break down the ’fresher system again,” Shadia told Feef the akliat, resigned to it. Each day, Feef arrived clinging to Claire Rowpin like a baby, deep blue eyes squinting fiercely against the morning sun. He might have been a cross between a three-toed sloth and a Chinese Crested Earth dog for all his appearance indicated—hairless with suedelike skin except for a poof of white powderpuff hair on the top of his head and a deep affinity for dark corners and high places. In spite of his slow and essentially sweet nature, he emitted the most astonishing odors under stress.

Feef. His owners, a couple named the Rowpins, had confessed to her upon first visit their intention to name the akliat Fifi. They hadn’t—quite—gone through with it.

But despite their moment of weakness with the akliat’s name, they clearly adored him. They gave her his favorite towel, hoping it would ease his stress, and they often called during the day to check on him. The other owners were much the same—loving their pets, checking on them, offering advice and expending worry.

As well they might. Of all the things that weren’t permanent, pets topped the list. Shadia had known that even before she turned duster. But she didn’t say anything, not to perms who would never understand anyway, people she would leave behind as soon as possible. She made the pets comfortable, read up on their various habits and habitats, and smiled at the owners who dropped them off each day. It brought her business; in some strange way the perms began to think of her as their duster.

Ugh.

Some of the animals gloried in their visits, with supervised playtime and more interaction than they’d get at home. Some were sullen and spent their time in hiding. They all had challenging habits that served them well enough in their own environments. Feef’s odors were part of his communication system, although in the pet care facility they earned him a quiet and solitary room with high perches. The Jarlsens’ skitzcat shed luxurious hair with mildly barbed tips intended to line its nest—Shadia made sure it had a private bedding area and invested in high-grade cleaning equipment. The roly-poly hamsterlike rrhy dripped scent-mucus wherever it went as a warning of its poisonous nature. And Gite the tasglana, who looked like nothing more than a flop-eared goat in extreme miniature, liked to sharpen its claws on everything and anything—or anyone—it could find. Shadia wore leather work chaps when Gite came to stay.

The work chaps belonged to the station-run business. But the plumy, feather-fronded houseplant in the entryway was hers. And along with her battered collapsible cup-bowl and pronged spoon, she also had a new plate and matte-finish steel mug.

As if I need those things. As if I need anything. How can I fit a plant into my duffel? Why did I even get it?

She’d liked it, that’s why. She’d seen its pale soft fronds and she’d felt a tingle of pleasure and she’d smiled. She’d had the funds, and she’d seen it and liked it and bought it.

They can’t make a perm of me. One set of coveralls on my back, one in the duffel, a toothcleaner and soap-pack and monthly supps. Whatever I can carry in the vest. That’s all I’ll ever need.

She wouldn’t stay a single pay period longer than it took to pay off the med-debt. She’d take her experience—one more thing for her listings—and she’d take her inexpressible relief and she’d move on.

Too damn bad that zipscoot was going so fast when it hit me.

“Until they’re clean,” Shadia told the youthful first-jobber who had deluded himself into believing the pet room maintenance was completed. With a glare at the cleaner machine, he gave the handle a jerk and sullenly dragged it back into Feef’s unoccupied area. He’d been on the job a week and she was about to give him notice.

Toklaat’s workers took so much for granted: that they could keep a job once they took it, no matter their performance; that they could find another. No matter their performance. Dusters knew to keep their records spotless for ease of transition from one situation to another. No one vouched for a careless worker, or digi-stamped their jobchips with the top rating that would draw that next good gig. Ever-imminent transitions kept them sharp.

Maybe she’d just start hiring dusters. If she could get the assistant’s job listed as temp…

And why not, when she wasn’t keeping most of the assistants beyond the time a duster would stay? Just one, a young woman named Amandajoy who loved the animals and applied herself to learning their routines with nearly Shadia’s vigor. A more honest vigor, since Shadia used the work as a means to an end and Amandajoy did it for the work itself, although she was often too timid to act when she knew she should. Shadia could have loved the work, but didn’t dare. She could have loved the memories it invoked, but didn’t dare that either.

Those memories couldn’t coexist with a duster’s life, not and be cherished.

I don’t have to think about that. Another few pay periods and I can turn this place over to Amandajoy, even if she doesn’t know it yet. By then she’ll have the confidence. She’ll have to, even if she doesn’t. That’ll be a duster lesson for her. Never let the doubt show.

More airfreshener ’zymes in the rrhy-tub, that would probably help. Amandajoy must have had the same thought, for she emerged from the storage pantry with ’zyme packets in hand—

Shadia’s world shifted. It looped in a strange manner her senses couldn’t seem to perceive. She would have thought it was some unfathomable result of the zipscoot if her first jobber hadn’t made a loud gurgle and dropped his cleaning equipment. As they all looked to one another for explanation, a series of hollow booming noises made the ground shake; the air fluttered in response. Shadia and Amandajoy clutched each other for the stability and ended up on the thickly carpeted floor anyway, gathering skitzcat hair.

For a moment there was silence. Then Gite bleated, leaping from the wire enclosure as the door slowly swung open on its own. He bounded out to land on them both, searching for a lap. Shadia winced as his claws dug in, automatically scooping his legs out from beneath him to place him on his back in his favored comfort position. Amandajoy looked like she wanted to climb right into Shadia’s lap with him. “What was that?” she said, her eyes wide.

Shadia searched her duster experiences, years of different stations and different failures and accidents and emergencies, and then she searched her ten whole years on Belvia, all the time she’d had before she’d been snatched away.

I don’t know. All those years, all those places… never anything like this. That’s a duster’s life, not knowing what’s next, ready for anything. But I knew I wasn’t ready for this.

Shadia shifted Gite from her arms to Amandajoy’s. “Wait here,” she said as the dwelling erupted into noisome protest—howls and chirps and screams and a few entirely new scents—though none as bad as the akliat’s would have been. “Try to calm them.” To the first jobber, she said, “Whatever Amandajoy says, you do.”

“You’re leaving?” Amandajoy’s fear-widened eyes opened even further with surprise.

“You want an answer? Someone’s got to go find it.” Shadia climbed to her feet, not bothering to remove the Gite-defense chaps as she headed for the clearsteel door, her matter-of-fact brusqueness hiding her breathless fears.

She half expected to find the entrance lockdown engaged. Like all structures, this one had its own emergency air cleaner, its own independent—if finite—power supply. But the door slid smoothly aside for her, ejecting her out on the inner-ring walkway. Clearsteel lined that, too, separating her from the open station core.

But not blocking her view.

At first, all she saw was the movement. Down a few levels, center west; she had to push against the clearsteel, craning her neck against the arc of the inner ring and leaving smudges the autos would clean as soon as she moved away. Center west, location of the finest residences and normally the quietest slice of the station. Too far away to make out anything but the activity, and a wrongness so unexpected that she literally couldn’t resolve what she was seeing into an image that made sense.

Nor did the alarms. The ones that had been going off for some time now. Not the screeching you might die breach alarms, but the swell-and-fade tones of the alarm that merely admitted something had happened, and if you paid attention the station techheads would eventually tell you what it was.

Except… in the distance, Shadia thought she heard shriller sounds. Harsher vicinity alarms, the ones that meant no breach, but if you were there to hear them, you might die anyway.

Or already be dead.

Duster reflexes kicked in, urging her to move off. The dusters knew all the safest nooks and crannies of a station— the structural strengths, the environmental neutral areas. She’d take the time to shout back into the shop and release Amandajoy and the first jobber from their duties here so they might secure the animals and follow if they wanted, but then she’d shed her shallowperm facade and take back the duster ways that had served her so well. Back to the east side.

At least until she understood what had happened. Until the skitter of fear along her spine eased and she trusted the disaster—whatever it was—wouldn’t spread.

Wait a moment. Center west. The finest residences. The luxury residences. Half my clients live there. Gite’s people. The Rowpins. They’re perms… but they’re nice perms. Kind perms.

Kind people.

Shadia’s hand brushed over her vest, on which she’d recently sewn an exotic bit of weaving. Meant to be a small spot of wall decor, and acquired by Claire Rowpin on her latest off-station jaunt. She fingered the newest bead in her hair, something the rrhy’s owner—a shy young man—had hesitantly offered, noticing her fondness for such things. Just something he’d had around the house, he’d said.

She’d doubted it.

She stuck her head back into the pet care facility, a building unidentifiable from the outside by anything other than a utilitarian number. “Something’s happened in center west,” she told Amandajoy, who’d succeeded in calming Gite enough to secure him in his den-cage. The starkly normal sounds of the cleaning machine emanated from Feef’s room; Shadia nodded at it. “Let the ’jobber go home. You can go, too, if you want.”

“Don’t you want me to stay with the animals?” Amanda-joy asked, torturing the corner of her work apron into a twisted knot.

Shadia couldn’t answer right away; it wasn’t the response she’d expected. After a moment she said, “Yes, I do. But it’s up to you.”

“I’ll stay, then,” Amandajoy said, not hesitating. “I don’t want to leave them alone, and people might call in and get worried. But I want to turn on the gridnews. I know you think it bothers the animals sometimes, but—”

“Turn it on,” Shadia said, and left. Heading for center west and not even sure why. All her instincts told her to run the other way, and all her habits warred with every step she took. Within moments—still true to duster ways in this, at least—she’d slipped down the maintenance poles few perms even knew existed and reentered the inner ring several levels below her own. New territory.

Chaos prevailed. Perms running away from the alarms, other perms running toward them. Perms crying and stark-faced and grim. Uniformed station personnel muttering into their inner wrist complants, one of whom she caught on the way by and said, “What’s going on?”

“It’s contained,” she said, not even looking at Shadia, her eyes on some invisible goal… or maybe still seeing that from which she’d just come.

Shadia wouldn’t be invisible. “What?”

Now the woman looked at her, swept her gaze up and down and took in Shadia’s coveralls and vest. “Gravity generator surge,” she said, clearly impatient. “The offending system is off-line—no more danger there. As if a duster would care. Just stay out of the way and you’ll be fine.”

As if—

Shadia jerked, stung, and then didn’t know why she should be. By then the woman had moved on, pulling a flat PIM from her pocket to enter notations on the run. Shadia shouted after her, “Hey! I’m the one going in this direction.”

Then again, why is that?

Shadia stopped short at the edge of the damaged area. She would have stopped short had the station uni not stood in front of his hastily erected low-tech barrier. She’d never imagined—

She couldn’t have imagined—

Gravity generator surge.

Random lashings of unfathomable gravity, crumpling away the residences. Level after level, collapsed and twisted; she couldn’t tell how deep it went, if it reached the next ring-hall or even went beyond. Narrow ribbons of damage spared some residences entirely, and destroyed others just as surely. Sullen, acrid smoke eased out of the wreckage, and Shadia pulled her loosely fitting coverall cuff past her hand and covered her mouth and nose.

There were other smells. Oils and coolants and hot metals, compressed beyond all tolerance. And a cacophony of sound—shouting and crying and orders and creaking, groaning structures. Someone jostled her; she barely noticed. She was too busy trying to orient herself, to find the residence ID numbers—but the chaos distracted her eyes, and she found nothing upon which to focus.

Until she glanced at the barrier, realized it was part of a residence. Her eyes widened at the number.

Not so very different from the Rowpins’.

The uni seemed to notice her then. The expression on her face, maybe. He swept his gaze over her much as the woman had done… and then it softened. “You know someone here?”

Behind him, there was a sudden flurry of alarm, shouted warnings; a chunk of a residence broke away and tipped off into the exposed core, falling in what seemed like slow motion. Shadia flinched at the hollow boom of its landing; they both did. And then she whispered, “I think so.”

It wasn’t loud enough to be heard over the noise, not even though the alarm cut off in the middle of her words. He seemed to understand anyway. “I can’t let you through. Only unis.”

Official hover scooters flashed through the core, strobing ident lights. Already starting to clear the debris. Towing things.

Stretchers, mainly.

Shadia puzzled in blank lack of understanding, knowing that any victims were more likely to come out in a bucket than on a stretcher. The long-coated uni saw that, too, and edged a little closer to her, like a confidant. “The edge zones,” he said, gesturing. “The parts damaged by the damage, and not the gravity. You see?”

She saw. Unable to go forward, unable to leave, she waited and watched, an anomalous quiet spot in a brownian motion of perms and destruction. Trying to discern just where the Rowpins had lived, and to figure out if they’d had enough time after picking up Feef to make it back home. Listening to people around her recount the moments of the disaster—what they’d seen and what they’d heard and how they thought it might have been. Watching them pitch in as the rare survivor stumbled out of the edges of the damage, and as they pushed past the barriers, climbing into the wreckage and joining the unis as they tossed bits and pieces of what had been homes into the core net now strung below them for just that purpose.

Go back to the facility, Shadia Duster. You don’t belong here. This is just one more story to take with you along the way. Walk away, finish out what little time you have left before the med-debt’s gone, and then board the first ship you come to.

Except she didn’t. She couldn’t ease around the uni; her coveralls were far too conspicuous. But she couldn’t go. She asked perm after perm if they knew where the Rowpins’ address would have put their home, and she asked if anyone had seen them—or rather, she asked if they’d seen Feef, who would have made more of an impression than just another person in the bustle. She made herself useful on this side of the barrier, distracting the uni when another perm needed to slip by. When a handful of people came with warm drinks and what must have been their entire month’s ration of treat bars, she knew who’d been working the longest and most needed the boost.

And when someone spotted the dangling pale tan arm amidst the edge wreckage, several levels up and with the inner ring destroyed between here and there, she knew how to get there. She glanced at the uni, who quite deliberately looked the other way, and then she slipped past the barrier to the half-height tech access door recessed invisibly into the slightly skewed wall, the seams not evident until released with the right touch in the right spot.

She led them into the tight darkness.

They murmured uneasily behind her, following at a slower pace so when she emerged into the maintenance shaft and flicked the control to release the stepholds folded into the pole for upward transit, she still had a moment to wait. They’d never been in such tunnels; their uneasy voices rang louder than they’d ever guess. They worried about the obvious warping in the walls, they murmured about the motionless arm they’d seen… and they wondered about her.

It’s only fair. I’m wondering about them.

Who were these people, following her into the unknown for the sake of someone equally unknown? Who were any of them, defying unis to work among the wreckage of the neighborhood? Clustering around the dangers instead of running away as any duster would do? Take nothing for granted and take what you can get, one of the common duster phrases. One would say it, and all others within earshot would finish with the chorus of And then move on!

It’s only fair. I’m wondering about me.

Shadia moved on, all right. She waited for the first tentative head to poke out of the half-height tunnel and she started climbing the pole. She took them up two levels and stepped off onto the platform… and then, remembering the layout of the wreckage they’d seen, took them farther into the structure, through an even smaller access hatch until they were just about to balk—and then she clambered out into the wreckage itself. So close to the edge, where it tumbled straight out into the core. The floor beneath her feet seemed to give a little quiver when the second person came out, and when the third appeared, there was no doubt.

The third was the uni. He gave her a guileless smile—and he bent down to instruct the others to wait. “It’s not secure,” he told them. “You shouldn’t be here.”

None of them should be here-And yet here they were.

“Found someone!” the second person, a woman in an expensive work suit from which she’d already ripped the frills so they wouldn’t get in her way. Her voice held a vibration of excitement that made her next words seem lifeless. “No. Never mind. We’re too late.”

The uni joined her as Shadia inched around the wreckage; a fourth person eased out into the open and began to cast around, hunting the owner of the elusively dangling arm. What had seemed so obvious from below was hardly that from amidst the tangle of walls and upholstery and crushed electronics.

“Good Lord, what’s that smell?“ exclaimed the man who’d just joined them; his hand covered his nose and mouth, but from what remained of his expression, it had done no good. The woman caught a whiff of the odor as well, and was the first to spot the source.

“There!” she said, flinging up a hand to point. “That.”

That. Cowering into the smallest possible bundle in the only dark, intact corner left in the residence—the upper tier of a closet, it looked like—was a mostly hairless slothlike creature. The crumpled remains of a den-cage, barely recognizable, were not far away.

Aw, ties and chains. The Rowpins. And Feef, their survivor.

She must have said some part of it out loud; the others glanced at her. Then the uni said, “I found a second one,” and the tone of his voice was clear enough. Too late. Both dead.

“That’s all there is,” Shadia said, her voice very small as it fought to get out of her throat. Nothing’s permanent.

The uni looked at her, somber. “These are the people you were asking about when you first came.”

Shadia nodded.

He gave a little nod back at her, a small gesture that shouldn’t have made her feel as it did… as though she were part of something. Something bigger than she was or he was… bigger than all of them. She frowned, caught in the moment.

“Go on back down,” the uni told those people still waiting in the tunnel. Waiting to help… except no one here needed it. “There’ll be crews here to deal with… what we’ve found.” The flooring gave a decisive tremble beneath them, and his voice grew crisp. “Go on, then. We’ll get their animal and be right after you.”

They meant well.

They cooed and they called, unable to reach the akliat through the rubble, wanting badly to preserve this creature belonging to those people they hadn’t been able to save. But the flooring gave a wicked shudder and Feef’s odor-signals only grew more intensely offensive. A gridnews hovercam floated past, stopped short, and wandered into the destruction, wavering slightly in midair as it soaked up the scene for its operators. Shadia, retreated to familiar duster ways— nothing’s permanent—eased back toward her escape. It was all too much, this joining in, this caring… she’d learned the lesson once as a child and learned it well. She hadn’t thought she’d be learning it again, that she’d been foolish enough to let herself care about these people who loved their akliat.

He was a disturbed old ex-duster. I didn’t do anything besides bring him a few meals, sneak out some of the family’s old clothing and once a pillow. An old ex-duster who wanted to return the kindness, to save me from the misleading perm ways of my family. I understood that later. And in a way I suppose he did. When he took me away from all I knew, it was the strongest lesson I ever could have learned. Nothing is forever. Things change, whenever and wherever. So embrace the change. No ties, no extended responsibilities to others, nothing to lose. Dive into the change and ride it like a wave.

The uni shouted a warning; a huge chunk of flooring broke away and tumbled down the levels, leaving the others scrambling for safety while Shadia clutched the edge of the maintenance shaft. Time to leave.

“That’s it, people,” the uni said. “He’s not coming to us. I wish there were something we could do, but—”

“Give me your uni coat,” Shadia said abruptly.

He gave her a baffled, resistant look, one arm raised to usher the other two back toward the shaft.

Shadia stepped away from it. “Your coat,” she insisted. The man and woman hesitated by the exit, watching them. “You want to save the akliat? Hand it over!”

Still baffled, less resistant, he peeled it off and passed it to her, a long, dark tailored thing that smelled of sweat and stress and physical labor. Shadia tented the collar over her head, put her hands halfway up the sleeves that were way too long for her anyway, and turned the coat into a draping cloak, turned her upraised arms into caveenclosed branches. She didn’t have to warn the others to hush; they’d done so on their own, letting their hopes burst through to their faces.

Shadia raised her arms a little higher within her self-imposed cave and gave one of the casual little chirrups she’d often heard from Feef. A long trill with a few clucks at the end, a soft repetition…

He sprang from his corner, scuttled across the rubble, and climbed her like the nighttime tree she pretended to be. Fast enough to make them all gasp. And then she steeled herself for the stench of him… but the stench had transformed to perfume, a crisp pervading caress of a scent; his soft, suede-skin arms clung to her not with fierce intent, but gentle trust. Slowly, filled with a sweetness she could just barely remember, she let the coat slide down to her shoulders and closed it around the two of them.

They clapped for her. The man, the woman, the uni… the people several levels below on the first intact inner ring, watching it broadcast on their PIM gridviews. She met the grin of the uni with a surprised gaze, and he nodded at the maintenance shaft. “Go.”

The others went. And Shadia turned to follow, awkward under the burden of coat and akliat, in wavering midstep when the uni shouted and the grid-watching crowd gave a collective gasp of horror. She saw it from the corner of her eye, the bulk of falling debris, its screech of metal against metal as it bounced once on the way down.

She’d never get out of the way. Not in time. Dusterlike, she was ready for that… except within her whispered a long-forgotten child’s voice, something that treasured the newly rediscovered sweetness in life and didn’t want to give it up again so soon…

Something hit her hard. She twisted, trying to cushion the akliat even as she protected him, and all the while he exuded his scent of trust. A horrible crash buffeted her with sound and everything went dark, dark with a great heavy weight upon her.

She waited for the pain.

“Close one, eh?” said the uni’s voice in her ear. “Come on, then. You’re the one that knows the way, I think. Let’s get you and your new friend out of here.”

I don’t understand. He could have been killed. He doesn’t even know me, doesn’t have any of a perm’s affection for those they keep around them.

I don’t understand.

She led him through the darkness and back to the dimly lit pole shaft. She did it in silence, moving carefully to protect Feef, moving slowly to accommodate the tremble in her limbs. When they reached the level they’d come from, he put a hand on his own coat and stopped her before she remembered that dusters didn’t like to be touched by strangers, and everyone was a stranger.

“I work the duster turf, mainly,” he said, and his voice held an understanding she’d never heard before. “Never yet met one who hadn’t already lost too much to listen, but you…”

She looked at him, going wary. Feef snuggled against her and before she could stop herself, she stroked the absurd fluff of his topknot where it poked out at her neck.

The uni gave the smallest of smiles. “It’s worth a try,” he said. “This is it: we’re not so dim as you dusters think, perms aren’t. Most of us aren’t fooled into thinking what we have is forever, whether what we have is a little or a lot. Things come and go… we just… we take ‘em in as we can instead of skipping across the surface of life like so much space dust. Sure, we lose things, and then it hurts. It’s just…” He shrugged, coming to the end of his little speech and apparently not quite sure what to do with it. “It’s just that—it gives us—”

She thought of people rushing to help strangers and other strangers cheering her success with Feef and yet other strangers who mourned. Perm strangers, who somehow weren’t really strangers at all, not as dusters defined them. Perms left themselves open and vulnerable to the hurt and disillusion that dusters scorned, but…

“You could have been killed,” she said. Killed, tackling her to take them both flying into their only safety instead of diving there himself, a certain save.

“Yes,” he admitted.

“A duster wouldn’t have done it.”

“No. A duster wouldn’t.”

“You leave yourself open to lose things,” she said, and looked down at her hand a moment. Then, gently, more naturally than she’d have thought possible, she offered it to him. A perm gesture. “But it gives you this.”

His uncertain expression made way for a smile. It cracked the dust on his face and crinkled the corners of his reddened, irritated eyes. He looked terrible, and he looked wonderful. “Yes,” he said, taking her hand. Only for the briefest moment. Then he coughed and said rather brusquely, “Let’s get you and your new friend home, then.”

Feef’s House. Sounds like a good name for a pet care center.

After obtaining a degree in wildlife illustration and environmental education, Doranna Durgin spent a number of years deep in the Appalachian Mountains, riding the trails and writing SF and fantasy books (Dun Lady’s Jess, Wolverine’s Daughter, Seer’s Blood, A Feral Darkness), ten of which have hit the shelves so far. She’s moved on to the northern Arizona mountains, where she still writes and rides. There’s a Lipizzan in her backyard, a mountain looming outside her office window, a pack of dogs romping in the house, and a laptop sitting on her desk—and that’s just the way she likes it. You can find a complete list of her books at ‹http://www.doranna.net/›, along with scoops on new projects (and of course, tidbits about the four-legged kids).