Beyond the Rim

Stace showed me the rest of the compound, racing through its labyrinths at breakneck speed. In and out doors, through atriums and museums and greenhouses, I could barely catch my breath let alone take in what I saw.

At noon, we took a picnic basket out on the grounds beneath the strange, twisty trees. She said they were “licorice trees”. “But don’t try tasting them. They’re poison.”

“Why do you have them then?”

“Because they look interesting.”

A large brown animal hopped past in a blur and disappeared among the trees.

“What was that?”

“It’s a wallaroo. Dad’s specialty. In fact—” she held up her sandwich— “that’s what you’re eating.”

“No!”

“Yeah! Wallaroo steak. They’re good hunting, and they taste good, don’t you think?”

“Um, yeah.” I swallowed, trying not to think about it. Most of the time, meat was synthetic. The idea of eating real animals—like the one that had hopped by a moment ago—made me feel sick.

“They’re actually a blend of five different Australian species. Dad’s ancestry is Australian, so he loves everything that has to do with it.”

“You mean it’s a pastiche? I thought those were banned.”

She smiled. “So are slaves.”

“Why do you have slaves?”

“One of the privileges of being elite—you get to make your own rules. That’s what Daddy says.”

I felt a queasy; it had nothing to do with the wallaroo steak. “How many senators have slaves?”

“Oh, maybe ten, I don’t know. But most of them know about it.”

My head reeled. They knew? They knew and pretended to be actively uprooting it on Rimworlds? It couldn’t be true, I decided. Senator Zodiak must be an anomaly.

“What about Kassia?”

“Oh, she’s my friend. Lives on Center, where I’d like to live.”

“She has slaves?”

“Just one. Her mom has lots of slaves. She’s a senator too. All of us elite, we have to stick together, or the worlds will fall apart….Hm, that’s another thing Daddy says. I gotta stop that. I love him and all, but I don’t want to be like him.”

“Why not?”

She laughed. “You don’t know him very well yet, do you?”

We left the remnants of our lunch for the birds and the wallaroos, the wrappings to dissolve into the ground, and went back in the house.

We met the senator in the entranceway.

“Anastasia,” he said.

“Yeah, Dad?”

“Larin disobeyed you this morning, didn’t she?”

“It was the second offense this week.”

The senator shook his head. “She knows what happens. If she does it again, she’ll have to have more than the routine punishment. A slave can’t be allowed to get out of line.

“Speaking of which, how is your new slave doing?”

“He’s perfect so far. Does everything I tell him to do.”

“Ranior is well known for her effective training methods. Still, you never can be too careful.” He stepped toward me. I tried to avoid looking directly at him; I had no wish to offend him. Out of the corner of my eye, though, I could see his patrician face adorned with a day’s growth of a beard.

“Look at me.” I obeyed. His sharp blue eyes, flecked with gold, pierced mine.

“Hm. Yes, he does have an interesting face. I’d like to talk with him at some point, see what he thinks of his life here. See whether he has any passions, ambitions. He may be trained, but he isn’t tamed; I’d know that even if I didn’t know his history. The fact that he was captured rather than created means we have to be even more cautious than normal; it’s not likely we can ever take him anywhere an ID-check would recognize him.”

“We can’t?”

“Not to a Core world.”

“Well it’s not like I’m much more than a slave anyway—stuck in the middle of nowhere, can’t even talk to anybody, just because of your stupid experiment.”

“Soon—we’re hoping—we’ll be able to reveal the results. But until then, you will have to make do with your new slave. You aren’t tired of him already, are you?”

“No, Daddy.”

“Good. Because if you were, it would have been a waste of all that good behavior. Perhaps I’d even have to take him away.”

She leaped at me, hugged me around the waist. “No! I love him. I’ll be good. I promise.”

“I hope so. I paid good money for him.”

She nodded, head against my chest. “Can you go with me to town later, Dad?”

“Maybe. Right now I have to head to a subcommittee meeting.” He gave her a nod and strode through a carved, ornate door on the right.

“Okay,” said Stace. “I have to go to school now. I hate school, except for music. And science, sometimes. Then I have to talk to Kassia. You can stay with me if you want, which might be boring because I don’t have any speeches today, or you can walk around. You won’t be able to go anywhere restricted anyway, so just go wherever you want. But don’t worry; we’ll have some fun later.” She winked at me. Then she dashed off to her quarters.

I stood there in the main hall, not knowing what to do in the wake of her whirlwind. What did a slave do when he was by himself?

Then I decided I would go back outside.

I turned back to the iron door and pushed on it, half-expecting it not to open for me. But it yielded to my touch, and I walked down the long corridor, sunlight spilling through the windows to create alternating half-ovals of light on the floor.

I skirted the edge of the landing strip, then walked over the grass, my boots crushing it, the smell of it sending me back to when I was ten, and we’d just gotten out of the Facility on the iceworld I’d grown up on. Vega had worked on CoreWorld 33358, or Veritas, to support us.

Planet Veritas was green, lush, beautiful. We lived in a tenement house, but there was a large lawn outside, and I used to go play on it for hours. Then I would lie down and close my eyes, sunlight warm on my eyelids, birds whirling in the sky…

I sank to my knees, not caring if the uniform got dirty. Then I lay back, onto the grass, and soaked in the sun…

I closed my eyes, and sleep consumed me.

Blackness, clutching me, yanking me down so I couldn’t breathe—It clawed at me, threatening to pull me under. I was drowning—

I shot up, gasping for breath. A throat cleared behind me. I jumped to my feet. A woman stood there in the waning sunlight. Ginj, the guard.

“Are you all right?” she said.

“Yeah, yeah, I’m fine. Just didn’t know I’d fallen asleep.”

“Good. It wouldn’t do for them to lose their slave on the second day.”

Of course, that was the only reason for anyone to be concerned—they might lose their property.

“Anastasia wants you, by the way.”

“Oh. Okay.”

Ginj escorted me back inside and I met Stace in her room.

“Kas ditched me,” said Stace. “Probably out at a party or something. But we’ll have our own kind of fun tonight.”

She told me not to tell anyone I was a slave, and to go along with what she told me. Then she led me to the hangar on the landing strip. By now, the stars were emerging and just a thin strip of orange swept across the horizon.

Inside the hangar, a whole row of skimmers stood. Sleek, one-person crafts with black solarskin, good for overland transportation. They didn’t have backs or tops, just a windshield in front.

“These have weapons built in,” said Stace. “You never know what you’ll run into.” She smiled wryly, and hopped in the back of one, gesturing for me to do the same.

I jumped into the one on her left and grasped the controls. I hadn’t ridden one in a long time; it felt alien to me. I switched it on, and it hummed to life, hovering above the ground.

“Let’s go!” said Stace, and zoomed out of the hangar like a black bee. I raced after her, and she stopped and hovered at the edge of the landing strip. “Make sure you follow me,” she said. “You don’t want to run into the barrier. You can’t see it, but it’ll electrocute you. There’s a narrow path to the town.”

We headed north, toward the low hills. In a short time, we left the oasis, and on all sides of us was desert. I wondered where exactly the barrier was.

“Let’s go higher!” said Stace, pulling her skimmer up about 30 feet in the air.

She stopped, hovering, the low light from the skimmer’s console illuminating her face. She reached her hand up. “The barrier’s just about—Aaah!” she shrieked. Jerked her hand back, wringing it. “Dad must’ve— Ow, that hurts! Dad must’ve upped the voltage after I went through that one time.”

“You got out?”

“Yeah, just about killed me too. It was my ID that saved me. I was buried under sand.”

She lifted up her hand. “It hurts. A lot.” She clamped her mouth over it, then shook her head. “That doesn’t help either. Maybe they’ll have something in town.”

She zoomed her skimmer down, and I followed her until we neared the town, a splatter of glowing lights half-hidden by the hills.

A man appeared in the road in front of us, a silhouette against the soft glow of the domed houses. “Hey, watch out!” he said as Stace zipped past him. Her laugher rode back on the wind. She spun around and headed back, while I hovered, waiting.

“Hi,” she said, when she returned. “Which one are you?”

“I’m Grimm.”

“Oh. You’re out past the curfew.”

“It’s not enforced. Besides, I needed some fresh air.”

“So did I. Mr. Grimm, this is Devlin. He’s…going to be staying with us for a while.”

He stepped toward me, holding out his hand. “Hi, how are you?”

I hesitated; people didn’t shake hands much anymore, only in the old hols. But I extended my hand to his. He grasped it firmly.

“Um, good, how are you?”

“Very well on this beautiful night.”

“Hey, Grimm,” said Stace. “Why don’t we go back to your house?”

“Okay. Lead the way.”

She leaned forward, and buzzed off into the darkness of the center street.

I climbed off my skimmer. “I’ll walk back with you.”

“Thanks,” he said.

We walked in silence for a few moments. Then I said, “How long have you lived here?”

“About five years. My wife and I used to live on a planet a lot like this one, and it didn’t have a barrier to keep out the wind. We agreed to come because our little girl has a disease, and we thought that zodium could help us.”

We stopped at the door of one of the identical white domed houses, midway down the broad avenue that separated one side of the town from the other.

A young woman sat at the round table in the middle of the room, reading words that scrolled at a leisurely pace across its dark surface. She looked up as we came in.

“Hi, Grimm. Who’s this?” She tucked a strand of short brown hair behind her ear.

“This is Devlin. Devlin, this is my wife, Summer.”

“Hi,” I said.

The door blew open. Stace zoomed in on her skimmer and almost crashed into the table. She jumped off the skimmer, and ruffled her hair back into its normal state. “I forgot which house it was,” she said, and sat down at the table. “What you reading, Autumn?”

“Summer.”

“Oh, yeah. Summer.”

“I’m reading the press releases for today.”

She made a face. “That’s not interesting. Is Saraya in bed?”

“Yeah, she is.”

“Too bad. I wanted her to meet Devlin.”

“Do you want anything, a snack, something to drink?” asked Grimm.

“Do you have Snatch?”

“Your dad wouldn’t like that.”

“So what?”

Grimm smiled. “He’s the boss around here. Besides, I don’t want you toppling off of your skimmer.” He nodded toward the vehicle, which hovered a foot away from the table.

“Well how about a lemonade then.”

“Coming right up.” He went over to the alcove and programmed something in. “Do you want anything?” he asked me.

“I’m fine.”

“Summ?”

His wife shook her head, already back to reading. I was getting the idea that that people on this planet tried to cram as much in a six-hour day as most did in a twelve-hour one.

Grimm handed me a cold bottle of lemonade. Stace asked if they had any FoamGro and Summer applied some to her injured hand.

As she was doing this, a side door opened a crack, and the cutest little girl peeked out. She had huge dark eyes in a perfect round face, framed by long curly dark hair. She swiped a curl from her face and sauntered into the low light of the room. Grimm lifted her onto his lap. “This is my beautiful Saraya. Say hi, Sari.”

“Hi,” she said. “Can I have something to drink too, Daddy?”

“Sure, sugarsweet.” He got up and brought back a small bottle of something orange.

She drank some, and then said to me, “I like orange best. Hey, your hair is kind of orange.”

“Yep,” I said.

She tipped her head. “I want orange hair too. Can I have it, Daddy?”

“Sure, when you’re old enough.”

“Okay.”

“What do you mean, when she’s old enough?” I said.

“She’s completely gen-natural like me, since we didn’t have any gen centers on our planet. I want genhancements to be her decision, but she’s not quite old enough to know what she’s doing yet.” He looked at his wife, who shared a meaning-laden glance with him.

“There is one thing we had to choose for her— she has a degenerative skin disease, called kosten, which causes the skin to peel away. We brought her here in hopes she could be cured—now look at her! She has to have treatments every week, but without it, we might have…lost her.”

“I’m glad you didn’t,” said Stace, who’d been reading her own corner of the table, sipping her bottle. She got up, kissed Sari’s face, then tossed her up in the air, kissing her again on the way down. Then Stace tucked Sari back in Grimm’s arms, and said, “Let’s go, Devlin. We’ve got other places to be!” She jumped onto her skimmer, and shot out the door.

I turned. “Thank you,” I said, lifting the lemonade.

“You’re welcome,” said Grimm. “Hope to see you again.”

I waved to Sari and Summer, and headed in search of my lost owner.

I wandered around the streets, looking in vain for an erratic skimmer with a capricious girl on it. Finally I found her at one of the few places with bright lights, on the outskirts of town. In the basement of a building, multicolored lights strobed onto the street, a steady beat thrumming up through the ground. She was talking to a teenage boy, one hand on her skimmer.

“Oh, hi,” she said. “You found me. This is—um—Taylor. Yeah, Taylor. This is my new friend, Devlin. Wanna go in?” She slung an arm around my shoulder, another around his, and we followed her inside.

Inside, the sickly-sweet smell of slake mixed with alcohol and smoke hit me. People were dancing, screaming, swaying, eating, making out. A holoband was playing on the sparkling stage, and some people were dancing inside the holograms, pantomiming their movements, laughing, drinks spilling. I didn’t know the name of the band; it was Psycho or Pyro—something more toward the teen end of things than the college. It made me feel old. I already felt out of place, the slave of the teenage Stace, daughter of the senator, owner of this world. What in all the worlds was I doing here?

Stace led us over to a table, dropped us off. I found myself looking across the sparkly, sand-and-beer-worn table at a boy with shredded blond hair and a purple goatee, who already looked a little slaked. His eyes tried to focus on mine.

“Who’re you?” he said.

“I’m Devlin.”

“Oh! Nice ’a meet you. Want some?” He sprinkled some iridescent dust from thumb and forefinger onto the table in front of me, looking at me expectantly. When I didn’t move, he pounced on it, dabbing it up with his fingertips, sucking it into his mouth. He closed his eyes in pleasure.

I sat back, scanning for Stace in the seething crowd. It looked like a nightclub anywhere, a little on the shady side, but you’d never guess this was on a wasteland of a planet on the edge of nowhere.

Stace came back with a few friends and a few drinks. “Here,” she said. “On me.” She laughed and sat down, the foam dripping off the drink, whatever it was. I sipped it; it was a pleasant light honey beer. She introduced me to her friends, two guys and a girl. “This is Reck, Tako, and Felin. Guys, this is Devlin. He’s here to have some fun.”

The girl, Felin, took my left arm, and smiled up at me. “Wanna dance, slice?”

Without waiting for an answer, she pulled me toward the stage. I hesitated. “Come on, baby boy! I’ll show you how to have a good time!” I looked around for Stace. She was already on stage, dancing and laughing, as if she’d forgotten about me.

The two boys came up behind me, picked me up by the arms, and tossed me onto the stage. Felin helped me to my feet. She leaned close to my ear, hand still grasping my hand. “You’re craze. I like you.”

“Um, thanks.”

“Let’s dance!” She swayed around me, and spiraled through one of the holograms, then spun back to me. “Why don’t you dance with me? Or do you like that other girl better?”

“I think I’d rather just sit and have a few drinks. If you don’t mind.” I looked for Stace, but she’d disappeared again.

“You looking for her? I can show you a better time than she can.” She danced close to me, swinging her arm around my neck, nuzzling my cheek. “After this, let’s go upstairs,” she whispered. “We’ll get totally slaked, and then—”

A heavy hand came down on my shoulder. Its owner spun me around and I found myself face to face with one of those boys, Reck, the one with bronze, spiked hair. He pulled Felin away from me, and said, “You’re new in town. We gotta show you how we play around here.” Then, without warning, he picked me up by the shoulders and threw me down onto the stage. He drew a gun from his belt, and aimed it at me.

I froze, then recognized it as a laserfoam gun. I’d used one on Rock once in college, and I felt a twinge of guilt for that as rays of liquid light poured over me, cold wet bands zigzagging across my torso, my legs, and hardening in an instant. I tried to move, but couldn’t get off of the stage.

I struggled, and kept struggling, especially when Felin came with some slake glittering in a glass of wine and poured it into my mouth, the boy pinching my nose so I had to swallow.

It was then that I saw Stace, running toward me. “Guys, guys—what I tell you? He’s not supposed to have any!”

“You didn’t tell us that,” pouted Felin.

By that time, it was too late. I’d had too much.

They danced over me while the drug took hold and shook me and flung me and ripped me inside out with horrible ecstasy. It was worse since I was unable to move. It shredded me, pulverized me until I was a shake, a whipped up concoction of my former self.

Lights and shadows, colors, danced through my head. Shapes globbed toward me, flitted away. Sounds fluted at my ears, then screamed bloody murder till my throat was raw. I was raw. A raw piece of cooked meat. Screaming. Thrashing. Dead. Undead a zombie of epic proportions a holo I’d once seen writhing on the floor laughing like an inside out clown

Out. Inside out like a spoon, like a thread, threading a needle through the mirror of my own flesh. Soul. Sole.

Alone.

Nothing.

Shapeless.

Then, light, gradual.

I sat up.

I looked around, shook myself out of the last shiver of it.

I was in an unfamiliar room. A white room, like I’d been in before. Just an equally white mat on the floor.

Was I back at the Blue M base?

I leaped to my feet, pounded on the blank white door.

But no one came.