Across the Spectrum (5 page)

There. There was an empty form-line she could fill. She
manipulated the interface with absent ease.

Instantly, a woman’s face filled the hitherto blank square
in the upper left of the screen. “You had a terdog? A
real
terdog?”

A real terdog?

I didn’t want to be here in the first place. Not filling
out forms, not pretending it suited me, not remembering the sight of my friends
boarding the hydropon repair ship, buying passage with three weeks of shoveling
’cycle products and glad to do it. Not hiding my reaction to such a question. A
real terdog? Was there any other kind?

Politely, Shadia said, “A kennel of real terdogs, sir.
Belvian Blues, which we used to find subterr rootings for export—”

“Yes, yes,” the woman said, rude in her eagerness. “I have
just the position for you. It pays well and suits your unique skills.”

Her unique skills? She had a duster’s skills. A little of this,
a little of that, learn anything fast. Take what gets you off-planet or
off-station when you feel like going. Just like so much space dust.

Unless, of course, you fall on your ass in front of a
zipscoot and rack up such a medical debt that you’re stuck on-planet until you
repay. Stuck. In one place.

Stuck.

Most wary, Shadia said, “What’s the job?”

Her application screen rippled away, replaced by the
familiar format of a job listing. Almost familiar . . . except
for the header logo, which caught her eye before she had a chance to focus on
anything else.
Permtemp
. “There’s been a mistake, sir,” Shadia said. Her
recently healed thigh cramped with the sudden dread that it wasn’t actually a
mistake at all. She forced herself to relax. “I’m not a perm. Just a temp. I
put it on my application.”

“This is a priority position, young woman. In such cases we
extend our search parameters.”

“Apologies, sir, but temp is a preference, not a
restriction.”

The woman’s eyes flicked aside, to her own interact screen
where Shadia’s partially filled form would be displayed. Her demeanor cooled,
enough to give Shadia that same prickly unease she got any time she stepped out
of duster turf and into perm areas. “Shadia,” the woman said, pronouncing it
wrong,
shad-iya
instead of
shah-diya.

Shadia didn’t correct her.

“Shadia,” the woman said, wrong again. “Why are you applying
for work on Toklaat?”

I have the feeling you know.
No doubt the woman had
instantly called up all of Shadia’s Toklaat-based records. “Med-debt, sir,”
said Shadia.
Damn perm
. They thought themselves so superior, with their
airs about commitment and stability and dependability. Dusters thought them
staid and boring and knew better than to expect permanence from any part of
their lives.

“Then you won’t be allowed to leave the station until the
debt is paid?”

Shadia stopped herself from narrowing her eyes. Of course
the woman knew the terms of duster med-debt. “Yes, sir.”

“Filling this job is very important to us. Our permanent
residents, by definition, have little chance for exposure to pets of any kind.”

No, of course not. Only the affluent could afford a pet in a
station environment, even a station like Toklaat with copious gardens and play
spaces and other luxuries. And the affluent wouldn’t need to check station
listings for jobs, temp
or
perm.

The woman smiled a grim little smile. “I can’t say for sure,
but I suspect that with the priority placed on filling this job, it would be
very difficult to remove you as a candidate.”

And as long as she was listed as a candidate for one job,
she wouldn’t be considered for others.

Oh God. Stuck.

∞

Until this moment Shadia would have said all stations
smelled the same. A whiff of artificial scent meant to cover the disinfectant
that was ineffective in some places and astonishingly strong in others.

But no disinfectant would handle this smell. No artificial
scent stood a chance. Wildly exotic pet residue, abandoned and left to stew.

Blinking watering eyes, Shadia tried to evaluate her new
home.

Home
. How long had it been since—?

But no, this wasn’t a home. This was enforced labor, and as
soon as her med-debt was paid, she’d find some way out of this place. Off of
this station. Back to the habits to which she’d become accustomed these past
fifteen years, just over half her life. Her hip twinged, reminding her why she
was still here; old memories twinged to remind her why she wanted to leave.

Shadia concentrated instead on her new environs. Two floors
of space, an unimaginative floor plan that put living quarters above several
rooms meant to simulate a home environment for pampered pets while offering a
practical nod to the need for clean-up, food preparation, and isolation of
cranky or antisocial animals. There was, of course, a tub.

Precious water, used
on dirty pets.

There was even an old schedule tacked directly to the wall
next to the tub. The hand-scrawled names were water-stained and worn, but
Shadia got the gist of it. Once a week for most of them, twice for some of
them. And not all of them were bathed with shampoo and water. There was one
called Mokie; it seemed to be bathed with a special oil. And Tufru used a
product she found in the storage bins over the tub . . . it
reminded her of cat litter.

Cat litter. When was the last time I cleaned a litter
box? Stinky old litter box, never could have the fancy self-cleaners because Ma
and Dad said we needed to learn responsibility. As if working in the kennels
wasn’t enough. Worked in that damn kennel from six years old to—

Old enough.

Shadia left the tub area behind. Hastily. By the time she
reached the spartan little office, she was full of anger. The way she liked it.
Good cleansing anger, snarling that the very part of her once-was that she’d
tried so hard to forget now had her trapped on Toklaat.

Nothing’s permanent. See what you can see. Drift from
station to planet to orbiter, grabbing catch-work rides and reveling in the
newness of the next place until it gets old, finding new friends when the old
drift away, your only true bond the very thing that will eventually drive you apart.
Duster ways.

Still snarling, she found the paperwork that suggested she
name the renewed facility and directed her how to hire the assistants she was
allowed—just enough help so she could sleep and acquire food and personal
maintenance goods, for the petcare facility served all three shifts. There was
a com-pin so she could be contacted by customers or assistants at any time, a
cashchip for operating expenses, and an ID set.
Her
ID set.

Fast work.

She picked it up, fumbling the slick bifold set. Employer
information on one side, personal history on another, a large recent image of
herself—source unknown to her—and a fourth side that sheened blankly but held
all of the set’s information and more in digital. She looked at the image. It
showed her from the head up but somehow managed to capture her scrawniness
beneath the patched duster’s vest-over-coveralls she wore. Mementos covered
that vest, from crew patches to a tiny shell found only in a single place on a
single planet. Mementos hung within her hair, an unimpressive dark brunette
never given the opportunity to go sunstreaked, but long enough to hold beads
and twists of woven goods. The tactile hair of a woman who encountered very few
mirrors.

Her appearance clashed with the purple border around her likeness,
the one that proclaimed her as a perm job worker. A purple border she’d never
thought to see on her own ID set, not after being dragged into the duster’s
life while she was still young enough that her first minor’s ID lived in the
back of her underwear drawer.

Dragged into it, maybe. But I embraced it. The very
involuntary nature of my introduction to the life taught me a duster’s way is
the only way. People think we’re crazy, bouncing infinitely from station to
station to planetside to station. Space dust. But in reality we’re the wisest
of them all. They count on their lives to continue as they know them. We admit
up front that it’ll never happen that way, and make the best of it.

The duster bar was easy to find from her new location; she’d
been there often enough before she was hit by the zipscoot. Like most stations,
Toklaat was a glorified cylinder with travel tubes down the open axis, from
north to south and back again, with east and west split according to function.
East-side housed station maintenance and services; west-side housed the
residences and personal services. Dusters worked the eastern station-side jobs,
clung to station corners, slept in station nooks.

Now Shadia worked and lived in the west.

The duster bar, considered both a personal service and a
duster accommodation, balanced on the border between east and west. With the
com-pin tucked away in her vest pocket, a duster’s ubiquitous utilities under
the vest, and a small advance on her personal cashchip, Shadia stood at the
edge of the bar nursing a featherdunk and considering her situation.
Calculating how long it might take. . .

“Out ’tending, are you?” said a growly alto voice in her
ear. “You take that duster rig off someone, ’tender? You someone’s mag-bound
little perm?”

Startled from her reverie, Shadia jerked around to discover
herself flanked by two women whose musculature and vest pins marked them as
cargo-loading dusters. Not a worry. Dusters left their own alone. “I’m no
pretender.”

Quick as that, one of them grabbed her arms, spilling her
drink, while the other fished around inside Shadia’s vest until a search of the
many interior pockets offered success. The creditchip, the ID set. “Looks like
your ’set to
me,
” said the growly one. “Didn’t anyone ever warn you that
the only thing worse than a perm in a duster bar is a ’tender perm in a duster
bar?”

Shadia kicked the woman who held her, a pointy-toed kick
just below the knee, snatching her ID set back as she spat a long string of
blistering duster oaths. She didn’t fight, she didn’t get drunk, she didn’t
join the ranks of the dusters’ practical jokers . . . but she
had a vocabulary to make even a growly-voiced cargo loader blink. And while the
one woman was blinking and the other was bent over her leg, Shadia snarled,
“Med-debt. It’s paid, I’m gone. Got it?” She turned her back on them and went
back to her drink. They would have muttered apologies except that her turned
back was a sign to be respected. Not a rudeness as the perms would have
thought, but simply a gesture requesting privacy in a society where complete
strangers made up a constantly shifting population. So they went away.

But I didn’t go back there. Because they were right. I
might hate it, I might have been forced into it, but in the strictest sense,
they were right. I was a perm in a duster bar. . . and elsewhere, a duster in
perm ID. I just didn’t intend to stay that way.

∞

The smell was incredible.

“You’re going to break down the ’fresher system again,”
Shadia told Feef the akliat, resigned to it. Each day, Feef arrived clinging to
Claire Rowpin like a baby, deep blue eyes squinting fiercely against the
morning sun. He might have been a cross between a three-toed sloth and a
Chinese Crested earth dog for all his appearance indicated—his hairless,
suede-like skin, a poof of white powderpuff hair on the top of his head, and a
deep affinity for dark corners and high places. In spite of his slow and
essentially sweet nature, he emitted the most astonishing odors under stress.

Feef.
His owners, a couple named the Rowpins, had
confessed to her upon first visit their intention to name the akliat
Fifi
.
They hadn’t—quite—gone through with it.

But despite their moment of weakness with the akliat’s name,
they clearly adored him. They gave her his favorite towel, hoping it would ease
his stress, and they often called during the day to check on him. The other
owners were much the same—loving their pets, checking on them, offering advice
and expending worry.

As well they might. Of all the things that weren’t
permanent, pets topped the list. Shadia had known that even before she turned
duster. But she didn’t say anything, not to perms who would never understand
anyway, people she would leave behind as soon as possible. She made the pets
comfortable, read up on their various habits and habitats, and smiled at the
owners who dropped them off each day. It brought her business; in some strange way
the perms began to think of her as
their
duster.

Ugh.

Some of the animals gloried in their visits, with supervised
play time and more interaction than they’d get at home. Some were sullen and
spent their time in hiding. They all had challenging habits that served them
well enough in their own environments. Feef’s odors were part of his
communication system, although in the pet care facility they earned him a quiet
and solitary room with high perches. The Jarlsens’ skitzcat shed luxurious hair
with mildly barbed tips intended to line its nest—Shadia made sure it had a
private bedding area and invested in high-grade cleaning equipment. The roly
poly hamster-like rrhy dripped scent-mucus wherever it went as a warning of its
poisonous nature. And Gite the tasglana, who looked like nothing more than a
flop-eared goat in extreme miniature, liked to sharpen its claws on everything
and anything—or anyone—it could find. Shadia wore leather work chaps when Gite
came to stay.

The work chaps belonged to the station-run business. But the
plumy, feather-fronded houseplant in the entry way was hers. And along with her
battered collapsible cup-bowl and pronged spoon, she also had a new plate and
matte-finish steel mug.

As if I need those things. As if I need anything. How can
I fit a plant into my duffel? Why did I even get it?