11. THALIA

“What do you mean I can’t leave?” I demanded.

“I did not say you can’t go out.” Ahane stood on a low stool and stirred the contents of the soup pot/bath tub. Whatever it was, it was soapy and boiling hot. “I said you can’t prowl around the complex.”

Same difference! I had things to do, like start figuring out the intricacies of getting back to Earth and the exception to the No Humans rule in the Gestalt. I wasn’t going to accomplish either locked up in this diner.

Ahane paused in his stirring. “You can’t walk around alone. This place is dangerous, and not just because you cannot walk outside like it is Earth.”

“Of course I know it’s not Earth! And I’m not going to go out an airlock! I’ll cover up.” Airlocks were clearly marked and obviously airlocks. The front door to the diner opened into a narrow hallway where the rest of the facility beckoned.

“You do not speak a word of 25XA and will be alone.” His tone had a sarcastic bite.

And he’d said that people wouldn’t ask me questions. I hadn’t planned on playing Stupid Gawking Tourist.

Ahane had gone back to his strong-smelling brew. I’d woken up late, and he’d already made progress on cleaning. “What are you doing?”

“The laundry. Take off your shirt.”

“Um... I don’t have anything else to put on. You have the towel.”

He pointed to the shelves. “I found that.”

I unfolded plain gray, battered-looking rough-woven fabric that seemed to be a combination of burlap and silver foil. “It’s a sack.”

“Yes.”

It was a sack. A very large sack that had some sort of faded print that the translator told me [ITEM IS USED IN PREPARATION OF FOOD. NO TRANSLATION AVAILABLE], but from the smell said “fish food”. The top seam had been cut and holes for arms and my head had been cut on the other end.

“Are you serious right now?” This dirty fish food sack was not an improvement over my dirty Grey-issued shirt.

“Yes.” Ahane didn’t miss a swish of the laundry-stick. He beckoned me with a claw. “I am not looking.”

“You won’t need to look. You’ll smell me from a mile away in this.”

“I already can smell you.”

“I know my shirt is filthy.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“What?” Did he mean my pussy? Was I ripe down there from all the Grey procedures? Because my puss had been right under his nose on the ship and maybe my situation had gotten all thrown off and I was nose blind to the funk.

“You do not smell bad.”

“I’m not sure that answered the question.” If he thought this sack smelled tolerable, 25XAs probably had a different idea about good smell and bad smell.

He did not miss a swish with the stick. “I’m certain I have a scent as well.”

I did not want to tell him he smelled like cranberries and holiday wine. That might be insulting. Or it might be the opposite. Although what kind of wrong idea could he get considering I’d draped myself over him, ridden on his back, been face-down/ass-up, ridden his front, and groped his chest. All he’d done was his tail getting a bit fresh.

Maybe all that was a normal day for a 25XA, and what really conveyed hey, baby, wanna play tailsies was keeping those ankles covered.

Maybe that’s why the Gestalt didn’t like Earth. We were really into clothing. Maybe we were an entire planet of shameless whores with our polo shirts and jeans and socks and boots and mittens and hats. And our filthy, filthy, filthy layered clothing. A bra and a tank top and a cardigan? Which begged the question… would dresses and skirts and kilts be more titillating or less titillating in a breeze?

He twitched his claws at me in his impatient just do it manner.

I yanked off my filthy shirt, pulled the sack over my head, and handed him the shirt. I tugged at my new, smelly sack-dress, which fell to about mid-thigh in a mod-retro Great Depression space-waif look. “This...is kind of similar to my shirt...”

Ahane offered no comment about my sudden realization the Greys had more or less sourced our meals and our wardrobes from the same aisle. He tossed my shirt into the wash. “Bring me the bed [no translation available].”

How did the translator not know sheets? It had to know sheets. I retrieved the linens (such as they were) and he tossed those in as well.

Ahane did not miss a stir. “If the Site Master inquires?—”

“We’re cleaning.”

“Exactly.”

“Looks to me like you’re scrubbing that pot.”

“Indeed.”

“I’ll go scrub something in the diner.” I might as well take my frustrations out on the grime. And that way, if the Site Master did ask me if I’d been cleaning, I could honestly tell him yes. The Greys probably weren’t the only mind readers in the galaxy.

He said, “You don’t need to.”

“Um, have you seen the diner? Someone needs to. Point me at the mops and buckets.”

“You have open wounds.”

“I’m not going to splash in the buckets.”

“You are not familiar with the process.” The translation translated process in that context to mean the tools and supplies used to clean.

“How sophisticated can a mop be?” This place’s ownership didn’t seem to take a big interest in infrastructure beyond won’t blast all of us unintentionally into the void so decent odds there wasn’t a do-it-all robot vacuum that someone had forgot to plug in.

I left Ahane to his laundry-soup and poked around the kitchen until I found a small broom closet crammed with cleaning supplies.

“Standard-issue Earth mop.” The mop was made of a floppy material I didn’t recognize, and bigger than an Earth mop, but it was definitely a mop. There were also rags (filthy, but not oily), things that looked like scrub brushes and sponges, brooms, and several bucket-like options. The shelves were mostly bare except for some tubs with scrawled labels on them.

I’d survived childhood, so I knew that casually mixing common chemicals could create chemical weapons in the comfort of your own home (see: bleach and vinegar) and the translator couldn’t tell me what each item was beyond [USED FOR CLEANING, POTENTIALLY TOXIC, DO NOT INGEST] and I didn’t have the number of Intergalactic Poison Control.

I dragged out the smallest broom and got with the sweeping.

The inside of the diner, even with the lights on, was yellow-tinted and shadowy. The floor was so sticky that my feet reverse-creaked with each step. I sneezed half my brains out while crawling around and under the counter and into each crevice of the shelves, and it did not bear mentioning what the underside of everything looked like.

“How does that even happen?” I craned my neck around and peered at an oily stalactite formation under one of the tables. I touched it with a finger. It was still gooey despite having attracted a thick layer of dust that indicated it had been there for a good while.

Everything on this asteroid was dusty. Outside, the asteroid’s weak gravity kept a halo of all the dust kicked up off the surface in an eternal, don’t-breathe-me-fog. Too much gravity to let it go, too little to pull it back to the surface. And everyone who came through the door brought some in with them.

The door to the complex beckoned from beyond its grime with bright, yellow-orange lights that coalesced into a bokeh effect.

Beyond the door was a small hallway that led to another door, and beyond that, whatever the inside of this place looked like. There was movement and light, but beyond the bokeh, I couldn’t make anything out.

I set the broom against the wall and tip-toed over to the door. The swish swish in the back told me Ahane was still doing the laundry (or at least aggressively cleaning something).

The door had several assorted things attached to it: a handle, a chain that ran diagonally from upper to lower corner, and a lever-like knob. There was also a keypad with thirty or so assorted well-worn keys featuring various symbols and another blank pad below it.

“Is it a puzzle?” I ran my hands over the door to detect any other handles, knobs, pulleys, or booby traps.

Hehad given me assorted tests like this. There’d been a prize at the end. First, the promise of getting back to Earth.

The puzzle, the reward, and my failure had all been real.

The reward of Earth had never been offered again, but it’d always been in His mind, lurking, that perhaps. Rewards had been large and small. Some I remembered. Some I wasn’t allowed to until they’d been given to me. One reward had been the ability to reject a procedure. To say no. And another had been the possibility that the no prize would be offered again at some point.

Getting the wrong answer had sometimes come with punishment. But not always. Just like there’d not always been a reward.

He’d wanted to test Human “inclinations,” although I’d never been able to figure out what sort of inclination He’d been looking for.

He’d never let me forget I’d chosen Him.

My fingernails raked at the surface and pain coursed through the probe wounds on my forearms.

I shoved off the door and yanked the handle-like knob. It turned, latches threw, and the door released, swinging outward into the hallway.

My reward was a dark hallway two yards long, two Ahanes high, and Ahane-and-a-half wide. It had some grimy signs bolted to the sides. [NO TRANSLATION] but based on the stick figures—which were cockroach-shaped—they were warnings about what not to do. Including a sign where a roach was squatting over what looked like a pile of pellets. There was also a sign that looked like it may have involved a roach pissing, except it was heavily corroded, possibly from eons of defiant piss-streams.

“Seriously? You need to tell people not to take a dump in here?” I asked the battered sign. “Does this look like a toilet?”

The Greys did not require toilets. The Greys had super-extremely-efficient systems where they only needed to “expel” waste product periodically. Like Earth sloths crawled down out of the trees to shit once a week. They weren’t pleased that the Human engineered hybrids they were producing required indoor plumbing. Engineering that out was one of their top priorities.

The floor was sticky and dusty under my feet, and light was provided only by a single battered strip overhead, and that light had given up on hope and career advancement untold Earth generations earlier.

There were boot prints in Ahane’s size that broke through the layer of crud-crust. I used them to hopscotch my way to the door while admiring the signs that probably warned me not to stick my fingers in holes. There was also a weird sign with large print and assorted stick figures and it looked like the space equivalent of no shirt, no shoes, no service.

Or maybe it was shirt? Shoes? NO SERVICE.

A thick layer of dust caked the warped glass window in the second door. I wiped a teeny peephole in the lowest corner. The glass was wavy like hand-blown windows on Earth, so everything was vaguely distorted.

It appeared to be a large, indoor flea market with tables lining the length of an airplane-hangar shaped building, with lots of presumably-sentient individuals moving around. Some seemed to be conducting commerce, others perhaps were talking, others were going from Point A to Point B.

“Holy shit.” So far I’d only met the Greys and a 25XA, but the Gestalt was a damned variety pack. Most individuals seemed to have the general “taproot” shape of two legs, two arms, two hands, two feet, one head and upright and bipedal but there were also some that looked to be over grown slugs, blobs, insects, a sea-urchin (maybe that was just an encounter suit), fanciful birds, and animated kindergarten art projects.

And every single one of those warm bodies was a potential ride back to Earth.

Where had all these people come from? Was there another dock on the far side we hadn’t seen? A parking garage on the bottom of the asteroid? There seemed to be a lot more people here than ships outside, and none of those ships had been an intergalactic tour bus full of Gestalt retirees.

A face shoved itself against the glass with a dull thud. The door handles jiggled, and the door shuddered in its frame.

I scrambled back from the shadowy face with a row of three dark, spider-like eyes. It yanked on the door and banged.

Fuck!

I spun and yanked on the door back into the diner.

It was locked.

Behind me, another face had joined the first face. The little hallway shook with the pounding on the door and the door shuddered as they yanked and kicked it.

I tried the other handles to the door and not a single one budged.

A fist hit the wavy glass. It made a shattering sound.

…failure. Today that means punishment…

I screamed. The glass held, but the banging increased and the old door wasn’t going to hold. The sound echoed through the small hallway and pounded into my eardrums. I fought to get back to my feet under the pounding and LET US IN LET US IN.

Moresentients began to crowd and pound the door.

“Stop it!” I screamed at them. “We’re closed! We’re closed!”

The diner-side door yanked open. I fell through, Ahane grabbed me and scooped me up in one swoop, and slammed the door shut again.

“What were you doing?!” Ahane hauled me to my feet. My knees noodled. “I told you not to leave!”

I hiccuped. “I didn’t go outside!”

“I just found you out there!”

“Not outside-outside!”

Ahane’s scales washed the color of exquisite Earth roses: pale gold-pink at the tips, deep red at the base, the edges extending into delicate, deadly ridges. The tip of his tail unfurled into a rose as well, only in reverse, deep gold at the throat and bloody red along the barbed ridges.

“Get out of sight.” He hooked me by one arm and tossed/slid me across the floor into the shadows of the wall by the door. He grabbed the broom, opened the diner door, then kicked out the secondary door. It booted the angry mob back.

I peered around the edge of the door.

“Can I help you?” he bellowed at the mob, brandishing the broom handle. He shoved the broom at the feet of one who was still close and smashed the broom into its ankles.

“Who the fuck are you?!” A voice demanded in a language that sounded like a combination of chirps and hisses.

Ahane greeted this inquiry with a smash from his tail and a matching upper cut from the broom. His scales hardened and extended further until it looked like he was covered in metallic rose petals. He stomped into the doorway, tail poised over his shoulder in a gold and red thorn.

“I,” he growled, “am the new cook.”

He swung his tail and smashed the thorn into one guy trying to sneak by him.

“Who’s in there with you?” someone growled. “I saw someone!”

“My assistant. Now go away unless one of you is volunteering to be the next lunch special.” Ahane poked one chunky-looking guy with his thorn-tail in the manner one evaluates a watermelon for ripeness.

The angry mob made noises the translator needlessly clarified as [angry grumbling]. Ahane gave one of them a poke with the broom and when that one turned around for a fight, Ahane shoved him with one claw. With assorted broom-smacks and growls and a few bashes with the tail, the mob dispersed.

Ahane slammed the door, then stomped back into the diner.

I rocked back against the wall and covered my face with my hands. The shaking hit me in a great gush.

“If there is trouble, Humans will find it and invoke it.” Ahane slammed the broom into the floor and glared at me, still covered in metallic rose petals.

I did my best to not sob into my hands.

“What were you doing?” He just wanted me to answer with I’m an idiot sandwich, Cook.

“Just looking!” I shouted. “I was just fucking looking!”

“I told you Humans are forbidden! I told you they’d kill you if they even suspected you’re Human! You cannot be seen, and shoving your face against the window means they can see you! Do Humans not have windows on Earth?”

I got to my feet. “If it wasn’t for me, you’d be dead back on that asteroid! I didn’t ask to come here! I don’t want to be here! I never wanted to leave Earth!”

“If you wanted to die,” he growled, “you should have stayed back on that asteroid. The Greys might choose you for your survival instincts, but they clearly do not know those instincts are situational!”

“It’s not like I went out into the main room and spun around and said ‘hey, guys!’”

“And they saw you. We’re lucky that they only cared about getting fed.” With visible effort, he retracted his scales from their murder-rose shape but the rose coloration remained, while his tail flipped between a blurry fiery rose shape, a thorn, and a barbed cudgel. The blurry fiery rose shape seemed like it was only half there, the tips throwing small sparks in a heat-like haze.

“I’m not going to live in this damn diner for the rest of my life.”

He looped his tail under my chin and made me look up at him. “The rest of your life will be very short if you don’t stay in this diner.”

“I won’t be safe in here either.” His tail felt silky and velvety under my chin and along my soft throat. “They’re going to see me.”

I shoved his tail away. It hurt to do so. “It would have been fine if I could have gotten back inside the diner!”

“The door locked behind you,” he said flatly. “I suppose it did not occur to you that this was how we keep them out.”