Reclamation

Kiv glided up to the membrane. The kids slipped sideways to let their parent by.

"What are you doing, Perivar?"

He curled his hands into fists and leaned all his weight on his knuckles. "Trying to finish up the routing for packet 73-1511. What are you doing?"

Kiv closed and retracted all his eyes. "If I live a thousand lives, I will never understand your people."

"You've said that before."

"This time I mean it." Only two of Kiv's eyes opened and extended. "The packet can wait another few hours, Perivar. You have another responsibility that requires immediate attention." All of his hands waved toward Perivar's closed living rooms.

"She's not my responsibility," Perivar told the tabletop through clenched teeth. "I'm just moving her through."

There was a long pause.

"So, how did you deal with…the contraband before this? When they were your responsibility?"

Perivar kept his eyes toward the map, but he saw nothing at all.

"We kept them in life-support capsules in the cargo hold. I actually spoke to maybe two others besides Eric. I told myself what we were doing didn't matter. They're not human, not like me, just gods-blasted-and-damned barbarians…"A red haze filled his eyes. "Better off where we take them, or better off dead. Too stupid to understand what really matters…"

"Per-efar!"

Perivar's head jerked up. Kiv had shouted his name, the actual syllables, not the conglomeration of whistles and buzzes the translator straightened out.

"Perivar." Kiv slapped his silicate mask over his face and glided through the membrane, leaving the kids huddled in a complex knot behind him. He filled the workroom and had to bend his body to fit between the counters and the map table. Despite that, he got close enough that Perivar could see the gel glisten on his skin. Perivar fought the urge to back away.

"What happened to you?"

Perivar felt his mouth move, but no sound was coming out. He forced his voice to speak.

"There was a revolution in Eshina. I was a communications hack and a spy on the losing side. Eshina law deports revolutionaries by selling them as indentured servants. Tasa Ad bought me up cheap. He and his sister Kessa headed up a runner team. I was…bought to work the communications transfers for them."

Kiv's body rippled, sending rainbows glistening down his back where the light hit the membrane gel. "And you made a bond of some sort with Eric."

Perivar nodded. "We'd picked up Eric off his homeworld. Weird place. Crashing old world orbiting a binary star. Tasa Ad had seen him in action on the ground and decided this one we'd keep. Eric's not his real name, I just called him that because I couldn't get a handle on the real thing. It goes on even longer than yours does.

"He really is amazingly useful. He can…do things to machines…make them move. Make a computer run just by touching it. Tasa Ad used him as a kind of super—systems digger and we were able to expand our…activities from just contraband running.

"Eric and I got along. At least, I liked him better than I liked Tasa Ad and a lot better than I liked Kessa even though that didn't take much. I taught him a real language, showed him how to take care of himself on the ship, told him about things outside. Played big brother a little, you understand? We became friends, almost without me noticing it'd happened. I'm not…I wasn't used to having friends.

"Then we got a new job, a weird one. Aguy named D'Shane wanted us to steal an artificial intelligence called Dorias out of a planetary network. The money was…really good, so Tasa Ad took it on. We used Eric for most of the work, of course. He found the thing and got it loaded into the isolation box we'd built for it and we took off to hand it over to our client.

"We were two days in flight and Eric came into my cabin. He looked sick, shattered. He said 'Perivar, is it true that the people we transport are being taken without permission?'

"I hadn't stopped to think about it until then, but I realized Eric had no idea what was really going on. Tasa Ad kept him on a short tether when it came to network information, and I'd never spelled out anything to him. He was a volunteer and his people either have no concept of…involuntary servitude, or, it's so different from what we did that it never occurred to him that we were kidnapping and selling unwilling bodies. I mean, yes, when Tasa Ad and Kessa got them to the ship, they were drugged out and in capsules, but that was exactly how we got him on board.

"And I'd never told him about me.

"So I said something particularly insightful, like 'And?' And he looked at me like he didn't know whether to be sorry for me or kill me on the spot. After a long time he said 'Perivar, I don't think you understand what you're doing. Dorias does not want to go to D'Shane.'

" 'Dorias is a machine,' I said. 'It does what it's told.'