Tales from the Big Dark:Among Strangers

by Pat Cadigan

 

Six months after the Dacz.va abducted Gloria Muhammad, R.N., from the employee parking lot behind the TriCounty Hospital and Trauma Centre in Cincinnati, Ohio, they knocked her out, stripped her naked, wiped her memory, and left her in the intake pen for carbon-based oxygen breathers at the shelter. The Dacz.va are a whimsical race with poor impulse control, short attention spans, and no sense of responsibility. They drive me crazy.

“At least they remembered to leave her CV,” Charlie said as we stretchered her through the concourse to the new arrivals clinic. It was slow going – every carbon-based oxygen breather seemed to be out on a mission today. Traffic was dense and we got a lot of stares, as if no one had ever seen a dump-job before.

“Ought to be in a quarantine box,” said a traffic warden sniffily, ruffling all his feathers. Normally I would never endorse a stereotype but feathered bipeds really do think they’re a superior life form. The way he waved us past a group of tourists in pressure suits and into the services lane, you’d have thought he was directing traffic at the crossroads of the universe. The tourists seemed to be in awe but they were chlorine breathers from the other side of the Big Box two lightyears away and their weightless environment doesn’t have the heavy traffic that we do. Don’t ask me why –I’d have thought it would be more chaotic, not less. Go figure.

“Fully sterilized in the pen,” I said over my shoulder. “Everybody knows that.”

“I don’t believe it,” he called back.

“Step into the one we just left,” I said, turning to grin at him. “It’ll fix your mite problem for good.”

“I don’t have mites!” I could hear every feather on his body going up again. It sounded like a feathery drum roll.

“Stop it, Hannah.” Charlie glanced back at me and quickened his pace so that I had to hurry to keep up with him for a change. “You know how I feel about picking fights.”

“I wasn’t picking a fight,” I said, laughing a little. “I was correcting an error that could have serious repercussions. We don’t want anyone thinking we don’t observe the highest standards of public hygiene. That’s how hysterical outbreaks get started. You wouldn’t want to suffer through another one of those, would you?”

Immediately Charlie started scratching a psychosomatic itch on the back of his neck. I felt kind of mean, bringing that up – it had been so embarrassing – but I wanted him to get the point. Plus, he drives me crazy, too. Most everything does, out here in the Big Dark. I think the only reason I haven’t had a full-on psychotic break of no return is that there’s no way I could ever out-crazy the known universe. Not even the small part known to me personally.

“I’d have thought you’d just be happy that the Dacz.va remembered the CV,” Charlie said, somewhat reprovingly. He was referring to the band around Gloria Muhammad’s left wrist, which contained everything the Dacz.va knew about this human they had abducted. In true Dacz.va fashion, however, this would be a mish-mash of hard fact, anecdotes, unreliable observation and speculation – not totally useless but not what we’d have called a CV back in my day on Earth.

“The only reason they remembered,” I said, “is I told them the next crew to leave us a mystery guest would be abducted en masse, memory-wiped, and dumped in an intake pen so they could see what they were missing.”

“And they believed you?” Charlie was appalled.

“They did. Watch your step,” I added as we left the concourse for a narrower hallway. “The orientation here gets variable. I’ve talked to Maintenance about it several times. They claim they can’t find anything wrong.”

“That’s what they always say.” Charlie frowned at me. “You can convince a whole ship of Dacz.va that you can abduct them but you can’t get Maintenance to run down a gravity glitch. You are strange.”

My translator gave me a little buzz on the last word to indicate it was an approximation. This didn’t usually happen with Charlie, even if we were from different planets.

“It’s not me,” I said. “It’s them. Maintenance are a motley gang of techies and machineheads. They get unlimited renewal through their union, so they’re probably immortal too, or as good as. They know things that aren’t even true yet. The Dacz.va, on the other hand, are like gifted children – very naïve, gifted children. Their biggest trick is abduction. I’m surprised some older, cleverer race hasn’t conned them out of everything they own, including their planet, and left them standing in their underwear on some clapped-out moon.”

“I think that already happened,” Charlie said. “It would explain a lot of their theology. Seriously.” He started to tell me about it when there was a funny thump in the air and just like that, he was walking on the ceiling. Despite having to go up on tiptoe to reach the stretcher, he never broke stride. I had to admire him for that. “I’m going to request a copy of the surveillance for this locale,” he said chattily, “and then Maintenance can tell me how they can’t find anything wrong.” He gave a couple of little experimental hops in case there was a pocket of contrasting orientation; if he hit it just right, he’d be back on the floor with me. Unless it turned him sideways. Not ideal but at least it would be easier to reach the stretcher from the wall. “Could be that for Maintenance, this is normal.”

It probably was, too. They drove me crazy. They all drove me crazy. Maybe I really was in the midst of a full and final psychotic break after all, I thought. What if I only believed I worked at a rescue shelter out in the Big Dark with a lot of other human races? Maybe I was tripping merrily through the fun house of my own delusions oblivious to a less colourful and more unpleasant reality plodding on around me.

If so, I could have hallucinated a lot less paperwork.

 

...the rest of this story is available in the anthology disLOCATIONS. To read it order your copy here now!