Trying on an arrogant scowl, Rahel stepped free of Toad’s leash with the ease of much recent practice. “I tried to get here sooner, but the Newborns caught me coming onstation with the dog and gave me some no animals’ song and dance. It took a while to get past them.”
“Yeah, I hear you.” Nadder flashed a smile as thin as her face, and stepped away from the hatch to let Rahel past. The inside of Medve didn’t even smell like people, much less like wild animal feces. One more illusion shattered.
“Next time,” Nadder said, closing the lock behind them and leading the way into the rest of the ship, “tell the Newbies she’s cargo. They don’t care what you’re really carrying, so long as you give ’em the papers they want.”
As if that much weren’t apparent simply by Nadder’s presence here. “I told them she was merchandise.” Rahel tried very hard to sound cursory about the falsehood. Knowing the extent to which Nadder abused the same loophole in Newborn regulations, though, made her words come out disdainful and angry.
Which seemed to work just as well. “So is she?” Nadder brushed an intent glance across the puppy, shouldering open another door.
Rahel tightened her grip on Toad’s lead. “Is she what?”
“Merchandise. Did you bring her here to sell?”
Cold day in hell before I let any animal go with you. “No. She’s a pet project of mine—I only just got her myself.”
“Too bad.” Nadder paused outside the great double hatch of Medve’s cargo bay, punching some lengthy code into the lock while her body kept Rahel from seeing anything interesting. “I’d love to have a shot at her chromosomes. There’s not a lot of choice in extinct dogs on the open market, and she looks about as Terran as they come. Oh, well.” She pushed open the door with another nanosecond smile. “We can talk again after you see what I’ve got. Maybe we can cut us a deal.”
Or maybe not. Rahel followed her into the cargo bay, pausing only long enough to bounce Toad up into her arms.
Rows and stacks and walls of crates stretched a startling distance in all directions. No distinctive markings to separate one steel container from the other, though. Not even a manifest pad left hanging near an inventory port that Rahel could steal a peek at. Just a loader drone backed into its parking station and whatever webbing and antigravs were necessary to hold the cargo in place. Rahel swallowed a curl of annoyance. For all she knew, Nadder’s boxes could be filled with party condoms, on their way to the mazhet embassy.
“I thought you said you had animals.”
“Oh, I’ve got animals.” Nadder waved her toward a comp station along the starboard wall. “I’ve got whatever animals you want. Sit down.”
Rahel sank into the station’s only chair, lacing her arms across Toad’s back to encourage the puppy to lie down. What she’d taken from the doorway to be a smart loading system revealed itself instead as a gangling collection of I/O interfaces, headbands, and gloves. Rahel picked up the closest optic projector and let it dangle from her index linger. “I had something a little more concrete in mind.”
Nadder shrugged as she dug another set of VR equipment out of a drawer. “While you’re on my ship, you do my business, my way.” She wiggled her hand into one of the gloves. “I’ve been doing this longer than you’ve even been around, honey. Don’t try to teach me new tricks.”
Nadder’s VR simscape was built on cheap stock background coding. Nondescript trees of a deciduous nature rustled without moving, birds from various climates and planets twittered and sang without deigning to make an appearance. Rahel s feet and hands and torso manifested as little more than an idealized mannequin, and the VR channeled nothing back by way of sensory input except for the occasional sound. Just as well. Captured by the VR’s manufactured visual frame of reference, she already felt refracted from her physical body—she didn’t need the rest of her senses lying to her, as well.
“So what happens here?” Rahel felt Toad walk a circle in her lap. The weird division of her attention made her dizzy.
“Here, you get to look at anything available that strikes your fancy. For as long as you want, and as close as you want.” Another featureless mannequin appeared against the simscape. Rahel thought the effect a lot more gruesome now that she was confronted with the golem in its entirety. “What are you interested in?” Nadder asked through a lipless mouth.
Rahel shrugged, then realized such a subtle gesture wouldn’t be picked up by her simulacrum. “What have you got?”
“They’re listed by family down below.”
Sure enough, a multi-layered tap menu floated in an arc at her waist level. Rahel hesitated with her hand spread above the choices, like an uncertain god. The number of species represented in that color-coded strip would have filled the Breeding Compounds back at Noah’s Ark for generations. From there, they would go on to freedom on new homes throughout the Galaxy, new histories for their young. What kind of life did they have to look forward to from here? Illegal purchase by the Galaxy’s filthy rich, and a decidedly substandard existence in some private exhibition where they would never know the dignity of self-sufficiency, never know the company of their own kind.
Rahel tapped out a family at random, found only one genus underneath it, and only one species under that. She called up the choice without reading it. Whatever it was didn’t matter—it was the fact that Nadder had a copy of it when it didn’t exist anymore that made it significant.
The bad stock simscape flashed away, replaced by a more detailed reconstruction on an up-close-and-personal scale. Dark, serrated leaves dropped over a slip of muddied rock, and a transparent grey mass crept across at Rahel’s eye level, its creamy rust-and-white shell balanced as delicately as a teacup on its nonexistent shoulders.
“Partula exigua.” Nadder sounded very close, but didn’t appear in Ra-hel’s view of the scene. “Interesting choice. Go ahead—pick it up.”
Rahel lifted the chip of stone across which the little snail labored. It continued crawling with no knowledge of its relocation. That’s because it isn’t real, Rahel told herself. It’s just a little computer worm that’s supposed to look good and rake in buyers. She couldn’t feel the cool kiss of its flesh when it oozed onto her fingers, couldn’t feel the chalky smoothness of its shell when she traced its dextral swirl. She’d never before held an extinct animal in her hands and believed so keenly in its absence—like weaving with shadows, or fondling air.
“Partulas are a nice choice if you’ve got space limitations,” Nadder was saying, her voice moving around the sim even though she didn’t materialize. “They move maybe thirty centimeters a year—a half-meter, tops—and they even eat their own crap, so you don’t have to clean up after them. Feeding for this guy’s your biggest problem. He’s strictly carnivorous, and won’t eat anything except a particular family of snails that are about as easy to find as he is.” Her hand appeared for the first time, there only long enough to pluck the partulid from Rahel’s fingers, turn it, and replace it on her palm headed the opposite direction. “He’ll live off a specialized protein gel for a while, but partulas have a tendency to starve to death before they’ll eat anything new.” The spiel sounded well-rehearsed, Nadder’s voice slightly distracted as she recited it. “Your best bet would be to work out some kind of supply deal with me. I can send the same kind of snails he’s been eating here whenever you say you need ’em—in a non-breeding variety, of course.”