Free alt.human by Keith Brooke Page B

that kept the day’s sun from her.
    The night in the dunes had been cold and full of strange noises: birds piping on the beach and in the air above; the occasional drone of a troopship, its lights dancing over the sea; the whistling and drumming of the wind in her ears. None of it was enough to smother the voices in her head.
    The road led to a larger highway, this one with traffic, and that scared her. Those who had attacked the hospital had departed in troopships, but what if there were others travelling by ground transport? Or road blocks to keep the curious away? In her institutional sleeveless shirt and bare feet, she must look like an escapee.
    She did not want to be caught by the beings who had burned the hospital to glass.
    On the highway, cars like translucent teardrops passed at great speed, while heavy goods transporters rumbled more slowly along the paired central tracks. In the near lane, occasional horse-drawn wagons passed. It was one of these that took her to the city, the old driver insisting that she ride with him because he was easily bored, and she had a nice voice for chatting and she would make the dull scenery so much more attractive.
    She didn’t say much, and in her tattered, grubby shirt she was hardly a pretty sight, but the man made her smile, and that was good, because she had not felt capable of smiling at all until he had stopped for her.
     
     
    T WEEN WAS NOT quite an Indigenous Peoples’ Preserve, but generally the aliens treated it like one, ignoring what went on there. It was a grey zone in the city of Angiere, a margin, a quarter where everyone turned a blind eye.
    This suited Hope perfectly.
    She slept in a little square of parkland that first night, one of the clanless, one of the unaffiliated. She was not the only one who slept there.
    She had a blanket now, given to her by the old man who had brought her to the city on his wagon. He had great heaps of them in the back, neatly folded and rolled and secured with string ties. That was his trade, blankets. During an evening of wandering aimlessly from street to street, she had worn hers as a shawl, but at night it was large enough to wrap herself in, like a scratchy cocoon.
    In the darkness, the voices were a constant murmur, the jostle and bustle of a crowd all trapped in her head.
    The sound was almost soothing, like ocean waves, but that was even worse. She didn’t like to be lulled by them.
    She roamed through Tween the next morning. Early, there were wagons pulled up to shops and bars, delivering fresh supplies and taking away debris from the night before. The buildings were tall and narrow here, made of tiny clay bricks, and many of them painted with flowers and the sun and moon and stars, birds and people and all manner of strange beings.
    She came to a bar, a corner-building with thick, distorting glass in its windows and a frontage of dark, varnished wood. As Hope passed, the door burst open and a woman staggered out, belching and giggling. She paused, straightened her almost non-existent wraparound skirt, gave Hope a big leery grin and staggered off along a side-street.
    The door had stuck, half-open, and Hope peered into the gloom. There was pipe music and laughter and the overpowering smells of beer and smoke and heady, woozy phreaks.
    She was not sure if these people had started drinking early today, or if they were still here from the night before.
    A man in a skimpy vest, skinny as a straw, had one arm draped around an alien, or maybe another man with add-on alien parts – grafts, body-mods, growths. The thing turned to face the first man and Hope saw that it was a man, too, after all, the face human with pale features and a wisp of a moustache. He blew smoke into his partner’s face, and then their mouths met, locked, ground together.
    A woman walked across Hope’s line of view. She wore only tiny black underwear, and her tattooed body was pierced so much that she jingled as she moved. Alien pods were attached down