“Thought we’d just love to take the walking vibrator on tour?” Pippi said. When he remained silent, she turned on me. “See, it doesn’t have anything to say to that.”
“He,” he said.
“He? What makes you a he, that you’ve got a sticky-out bit? I bet you’ve got a sticky-in bit or two as well.” She laughed. Meanness skewed her face.
“Enough,” I said. “Let’s tag the find, in our names, Pippi.”
She dropped back. I clung to the rigging, started to thumb in figures. She pushed forward, “Let me, it’s faster.” Fingers clicking, she muttered under her breath, “Get us all home faster that way.”
I took over after she’d tagged the spot and put the coordinates in. I was trying not to be angry. Hope mellowed out some of the harsh emotion. It could be a significant find. It was nice of Star to give up his claim.
Back in the ship bay, the lights laddered his face till he looked like a decoration. Pippi was strapping our find into a jitney.
“Why not a place where there’s rain?” I said.
“That could only be Earth,” he said. “Do you know the worst thing about rain there?”
“What?”
Pippi tied a rope into place, tested it with a quick tug, glanced over her shoulder at us.
“Rain there has gotten so acidic that if I stand out in it I have to come in and shower after a few minutes. It damages my outer skin.”
I tried to picture the cold, then acid burn. Luna was better.
“I’m sorry about Pippi.”
She honked the horn.
“Go ahead. I’m taking the tram over to the Cluster,” he said.
I hesitated. “Meet me later?”
“I’ll call you.”
He didn’t, of course. We cashed in the case—a lump sum from a company’s R&D division that doubled our incomes and then some.
I texted him, “Come celebrate with us, we’re dockside and buying dumplings.” But he didn’t reply until three days later. “Sorry, things got busy. Bought house. Come out and see it.”
“When?”
“Tomorrow morning. I’ll make you breakfast.”
I left in the morning before Pippi was awake.
His place was swank, built into a cliff-side, with a spectacular view of the endless white plains below. He made me waffles with real maple syrup. He was an amazing cook. I said so.
“I was programmed that way,” he said, and made a sound that was sort of a laugh.
The sexbots—all of the AIs struggling for emancipation lately—had had to demonstrate empathy and creativity. I wondered what that had been like.
He was standing uncomfortably close. I leaned forward to make it even closer, thinking he’d draw back.
He didn’t.
“I’m programmed a certain way,” he said.
“How is that?”
“I want to please you. But at the same time I know it’s just the way I’m programmed.”
“It can’t be something more than that?” My arm was pressed against his surface. It was warm and yielding as flesh. I couldn’t have told the difference.
He pulled away. I bit my lip in frustration, but I liked him enough to be civilized.
I drank the last of my coffee. Real Blue Mountain blend. He kept his kitchen well stocked for human visitors—who did he hope would stop in?
As it turns out, Pippi. Next time I came through on a quick flight (I might be rich, but who was I to turn down fast and easy money?), she told me how he’d fed her.
“Pasta,” she said, rolling the words out. “And wine, and little fish, from Earth. And afterwards something sweet to drink.”
She said they’d fucked. I believed her. It wouldn’t be her style to lie. It would never occur to her.
So I did and said I’d fucked him too. She didn’t respond, not right off the bat, but I caught her looking at me oddly by the time I said toodle-oo and went off to sleep in my ship.
It wasn’t the first time I’d slept in there, not by a long shot.
I wished them both happiness, I supposed.
Still, two weeks later, I came in response to Pippi’s panicked call. He was going back to Earth, she said.
We both showed up at the farewell hall. He was standing with a tall blonde woman, Earth-fat. Star slipped away from us, came over with a bearing jaunty and happy, his polished face expressionless as always.
“Who is that?” Pippi said.
“A journalist. She’s going to help me tell my story, back on Earth.”
“I see,” Pippi said. She and I both surveyed the woman, who pretended not to notice us. Her manicured hand waved a porter over to take her luggage aboard, the hard-shelled cases the same color as her belt.
Pippi said, “Is this because you don’t want to fuck me any longer? You said you liked it, making me feel good. We don’t have to do that. We can do whatever you like, as long as you stay.”
He averted his face, looking at the ship. “That’s not it.”
“Then what?”
“I want to go back to the rain.”
“Earth’s acid rain?” I said. “The rain that will destroy you?”
Now he was looking at neither of us.
“What about your place?” Pippi said.
“You can have it,” he said. “It never felt like home.”
“Will anyplace?” I asked. “Anywhere?”
“When I’m telling my story, it feels like home,” he said. “I see myself on the camera and I belong in the world. That’s what I need to do.”
“Good luck,” I said. What else could I say?
Pippi and I walked away through the terminal. There were tourists all around us, going home, after they’d played exotic for a few days, experienced zero-grav and sky-diving and painted their faces in order to play glide-ball and eaten our food and drunk our wine and now were going home to the rain.
We didn’t look at each other. I didn’t know how long Star’s shadow would lie between us. Maybe years. Maybe just long enough for sunlight to glint on forgotten metal, out there in the sky. Maybe long enough and just so long.
THE PASSENGER
by Julie E. Czerneda
It was a pilgrimage and he was its goal.
This understanding had taken years, had the passenger the means or desire to measure them; decades to be convinced of any purpose beyond curiosity to the parade outside his walls. In the first months, he had cowered behind the furnishings, terrified almost to insanity by the ceaseless, silent mass of flesh quivering against one side of his prison.
At any moment, he could slide his eyes that way and make out a hundred bodies, hung with broad-tipped tentacles, moving with a boneless grace as if the atmosphere outside his prison were liquid. It could have been, for all he knew.
A hundred bodies: they could be the same as the hundred before or different. He still couldn’t tell any of them apart. Were only those of the same size and shape allowed to see him? They wore and carried nothing. He was fond of the notion that there were some religious or cultural mores that said they should come before him as he was, for they had never provided him clothing.
Other things, yes. Every few days, or weeks, or months, a panel on the far wall from his bed would glow. He’d learned to set his fingers properly in the seven slots beside the panel to trigger it to slide open. Behind the panel would be a box.
He would open it, of course, despite what he’d come to expect of its contents. At first, the sight of charred and melted wood and plastic, stained with blood, had provoked him to rage. He had cursed his captors, spat at the transparency keeping him from them, them from him, tried with ingenuity to kill himself with whatever sad relic or trophy they’d provided. They had never reacted, beyond simply causing him to slip into unconsciousness while they repaired what damage he’d managed to inflict on himself.