Free Hellflower (v1.1) by Eluki bes Shahar Page A

looking like nothing I’d ever seen.
    The scene jumped, like slicing the middle out of a talkingbook, and then I was looking at the first planet I’d ever seen from space. Home. But not home anymore-I was leaving and I wasn’t ever coming back.
    You’re thick when you’re kinchin-bai; fifty fellow-citizens on ice in his hold and I never stopped to think what the captain’s being a slaver meant to me. Didn’t even know the word.
    I wanted to wake up before I got to the part where I did know, but all that happened was I jumped about three years, to Pandora.
    At least I missed Market Garden. Those dreams are bad ones.
    Pandora is a planet in the never-never, where the Hamati Confederacy bumps up against the Empire. I was downfall stranded without a numbercruncher or hope of one, with people after me because I’d run away from Market Garden and people soon to be after me wanting payoff for their kick, their goforth, and the numbercruncher that was slagged plastic and broken dreams in my cockpit.
    Real poetic. Real dumb. So what’s so bad about being contract warmgoods, anyway? On Market Garden I was a marketable commodity-for use, when finished, somewhere tronics wouldn’t do. No reason for them to waste time telling me things I’d never need to know-like what a Library was, and not to go buy one if I got the chance.
    I dreamed I was back in the shop on Pandora, holding a box of broken glass that someone swore was a navicomp, and then it started to change. . . .
    "Butterfly? Butterfly, wake up."
    I staggered up out of dreams and heard someone else breathing inboard Firecat.
    "Butterfly? We need to talk." My teeth crawled. Paladin. He didn’t breathe but he talked real good. Tiggy Stardust was the one breathing. I nodded. Paladin’d see that. I put my hands over my face, trying to lock up the ghosts again. I don’t dream mostly. No percentage in it.
    My head was slugging along with my heartbeat but I didn’t bump the burn on my arm and nothing else hurt too much. I looked over to where I’d stowed Tiggy in my second-best sleepsling. He looked soft and sweet and anyone that took a step toward him was taking her life in hand. So I crawled out of my rack the other way, past the cockpit well and up into the nose.
    It was ungodly quiet in Firecat. The air scrubbers and everything else that used up power and oxy were off. I was starting us as we’d have to go on, with life-support down near marginal. Angeltown shed weird gray light through the hullports and I wrapped my quilt tighter around me and shivered. Later it was going to be as too hot as it was too cold now, and sometime after that we’d be to Kiffit or dead.
    "Can you hear me?"
    Damnfool question. "Je, che-bai, I hear." Granola was still ringing xylophone ghosts down all the years between me and fourteen. It was crazy to even think about going back. Even if I could find the place, I couldn’t land. Our Fifty Patriarchs had spun good plastic for them and their descendants to be left lonealone for ever and ever, world without end.
    "You should have let Valijon Starbringer put himself out the airlock. You can still do it," Paladin started up, and went into a taradiddle all about xenophobic alMayne, heat-death of the Universe, and how Tiggy was son of Very Important TwiceBorn, all which I knew. Already knew he was trouble, and now Pally wanted to tell me about cultural fragmentation through linguistic evolution, whatever t’hell that was. Nothing I could see mattered, but he thought it was important, so I listened.
    The song and dance kept coming back to "lose the glitterborn." Paladin was full with mights and maybes tonight and I was tired of my life. It was no time to be arguing ethics.
    "Not going to frag the kinchin-bai just because it’s convenient," I snapped at him finally. Tiggy stirred but didn’t wake up, and I waited until he settled again. "Be reasonable. Think you Tiggy — che-bai’s da’s not going to want to know where’s his lost