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  Fast Wedded to the Ground:

  A Short Story

  by Nina Kiriki Hoffman

  Fast Wedded to the Ground:

  A Short Story

  by Nina Kiriki Hoffman

  Kiriki Press, P.O. Box 10858, Eugene, Oregon 97440 U.S.A.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in whole or in part, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission of publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

  This is a work of fiction. The characters have been created for the sake of this story and are products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright 1998-2013 by Nina Kiriki Hoffman

  "Fast Wedded to the Ground" first appeared in Imagination Fully Dilated, edited by Alan M. Clark and Elizabeth Engstrom, published by Cemetery Dance Publications, 1998. The story was written to accompany the illustration. This version slightly revised in 2013.

  Cover illustration, "Numbfish," © 1996 by Alan M. Clark. Used by permission.

  eBook Design, Kiriki Press

  This eBook edition was produced by Kiriki Press

  Originally Printed in the United States of America

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Table of Contents

  Fast Wedded to the Ground

  About the Author

  Connect with the Author

  Other Nina Kiriki Hoffman Titles

  Fast Wedded to the Ground

  Nina Kiriki Hoffman

  I spent the first part of my life knitted into our island and family on Ooliya so deeply there was almost no need for speech. We each had our tasks and needs, as each part of a plant knows what to do and how, and we moved across the seasons making, tending, feeding, aiding, harvesting, breathing, resting, being.

  In the winter, when other living things on our island went to sleep, we woke up and played games with each other, and that was when I learned to talk.

  It was late one summer in my fifteenth year when I lost everything I knew.

  Kitchen Dad had sent me to the north end of our island to gather sandworms for supper in the evening light. I stood while the sea buried my feet in wet sand and watched the skitterlings running along the wave edges. Where they paused to drill, I followed with my hand-snatcher, pushing its sharp tip down into the sand and spearing worms. I had my hip-pouch half full and was thinking how good the worms would taste when Kitchen Dad finished with them, all buttery and rosemary and slightly crunchy.

  I felt along my links to everything and everyone, how my sister plucked ripe totamas and my brother gathered besas in the orchard and my brother fed our flock of chitas and my sister pulled weeds in the ambysite and my brother checked incubator monitors in our womb cellar where the seeds of pigs grew to good-sized embryos big enough to release on their own, and how Growth Mother watered seedlings and Machine Father fed the arikas as they scattered around his feet, and how Land Grandfather worked fertilizer into soil in one of the southern plots, and how Animal Grandmother dosed the young sheep; all these images played against my mind in perfect harmony. Fainter behind them were the glows of each life in our care, the green shady thoughts of growing plants and hunger sparks of animals.

  I sensed the dim sparks of the worms I speared, and soothed them a little before I killed them. All the sense map of our island lay around me, a network, a webwork, a perfect evening as all evenings were perfect, each different as one shell differs from another, and each wonderful —

  Then the growl of a motor above the sound of waves.

  We were not expecting any shipments, visitors, or mail that I knew of, and anyway, all hover traffic was supposed to approach along the west side of the island where we had a landing pad.

  At first I thought the strangers were lost.

  Their aircar paused above our beach, driving all the skitterlings off and flattening the water as it tried to make waves.

  A dark-skinned, bald woman in bronze bodymods and green skintights stood on the aircar's running board a moment before she jumped down. Her heavy boots splashed through water and dug down into the sand. She smiled at me.

  I did not smile back. I didn't want her setting her metal-cased feet on our land.

  The aircar's engine was too noisy for talk. I waved toward the west. The biggest island in our chain, Trade Island, lay there, with its small spaceport. I had been to Trade at the yearly festivals when people from different islands came together to meet, select mates, gamble, trade, celebrate, and worship. I liked the Islander parts of Trade, our sacred grove of Caniya trees and the Green Temple and the festival grounds.

  Machine Father had taken me to the foreign part of Trade once. It was ugly and dead and full of unlinked and too many machines. The air tasted strange and made me sick, and even the food smelled bad.

  That was where such foreigners belonged.

  The bald woman came toward me, still smiling. I gripped my hand-snatcher and told everyone I was linked to what was happening. I felt their alarm and their reactions. Kitchen Dad went for our gun cache, and most of the others abandoned their tasks and came toward me. But no one was close.

  The woman reached out and tapped my shoulder with a metal-cased finger, and all my links died without warning or struggle. My crippled and shrunken self collapsed inside the small space that was now me.

  I did not come back to my eyes until we had left Ooliya's star system and the space reavers had refitted my body with modifications I did not know how to access or control.

  The crew of the Goog had three members: Dicey, who had knocked me out, Malad, and Grecia. Dicey was the captain, Malad the first mate and navigator, and Grecia the dogsbody.

  Dicey introduced them all to me and asked my name. For a little while I couldn't think what it was. We didn't use names much on the island. But then I remembered. "Visayana Tonia," I said. Visayana was our island's name, and the name of everyone on it. Tonia was the name Body Mother had given me.

  "We hear you Ooliyans have a knack," Dicey told me.

  The air smelled sweaty and dead, and it was too hot. I lay on my back on an extensor bed in a small windowless room. I was not tied down, but I couldn't move. Foreign metal and synth things pressed into my ears, curved around my head, rode my shoulders, saddled my chest, braced my legs, gripped my knees, and trapped my feet. I felt weighed down and pricked in a hundred places. Worst of all, I had no links to anything. I had never felt so cut off. I kept reaching for my parents and siblings, but nothing answered. I couldn't think.

  "People do say," Malad said. He was small and hunched and muscular, with a bush of short reddish hair. He, too, sported bodymods, silver shiny metal machine bits grafted in squared mosaics here and there.

  "A knack," echoed Grecia. She was skinny and old. Shaggy gray hair hung from her head. Her skin was yellowed and cracked with deep and shallow fissures, and her clothes consisted of a pale drape tucked around her torso and over her shoulders; it barely covered her to the tops of her legs. If she had any bodymods, they weren't visible.

  Dicey poked me with a metal fingertip. "You better have a knack, after all we paid to have done to you."

  Something on my chest whirred. My breathing deepened and I saw glowing blue spots scattered across everything. I reached for sisters and brothers and parents and grandparents and stubbed my mind on nothing.

  Reached. Failed. Reached. Failed.

  I looked at the three people in the cabin with me and hated them in all their foreign ugliness.

  Struggled again wi
th my utter aloneness, and felt like a plant whose roots had been hacked off. How could I get water?

  How could I survive without it?

  I reached then, and linked to the three of them.

  Foreign, ugly, less-than-Ooliyan, and they had taken me from the soft, warm web of family that held my heart.

  I tapped into them, and they gasped and staggered.

  I accepted the strange, chunky, wrong-colored flow of connection with them — Dicey's metallic, acrid, strong; Malad's tangled, wide, loose, and pale; Grecia's like strings of amber, malachite, citrine beads.

  I linked to them and finally felt less sick and stupid and small. I needed to be in more than one place at a time — without that, I felt dizzy and compacted, smeared flat, like something crushed by black hole gravity.

  I took sense data, feelings, and memories from the three of them. It was only half a link, though; I didn't link enough for them to see through my eyes. I had half of my solution; I didn't trust these thieving strangers with the rest of it.

  They didn't like it. They shuddered and tried to shrug me off.

  "Please," I whispered. "Without this I'll die."

  Dicey made a face. Grecia touched my shoulder, and Malad stared at the wall for a while. I felt them struggle inside and finally accept, even though they didn't know what it was I had done to them.

  It was not at all like being home. But it was better than being alone.

  Dicey had the masterkey to my bodymods.

  Malad taught me how to use the bodymods. Some of them gave me enhanced strength, some gave me extra senses for various conditions — I could tell if air was breathable, and what particulates were in it; I could echolocate through walls to see if there were chambers beyond, and what size they were, and whether there were living things present; I could transmit and receive communications from the ship's computer and Dicey's and Malad's bodymods. The chest bodymod also acted as a spacesuit in hostile environments, setting up a shield all around me and producing breathable air and three days' worth of intravenous moisture and nutrition. The mod at my hip held a stunner and a knife, when Dicey felt it was safe to give me those things.

  However, the main purpose of the bodymods was to act as a portable prison. Dicey had the masterkey and could shut me down with a thought.

  Sometimes I dreamed I was having the same dream as everyone else in my family, and then I thought I had come home. On the best of days, we would all wake at the same moment and know that in our dream we had all been the same person, that whatever we had done we had done together. Then our links stayed strong and active all day so that our island felt like one big organism. Nothing was better than that.

  I dreamed that I dreamed together, and I woke alone.

  The first proscribed planet we visited after Dicey captured me was called Erassum. A fierce small people lived on the landmasses, fighting among themselves, with no interest in passing the Allied Sentients' membership tests.

  Beacons in orbit warned wandering ships away from this planet while it struggled with its internal strife.

  Dicey landed the Goog on a coral atoll. "We've gotta do this quick, before the tide rises."

  She took me outside while Malad and Grecia remained in the ship. The sky was wide as space, and deep lavender blue. Water spread to all horizons, a darker sky laced with chop and sundazzle.

  The first breath of cool sea air I took transported me to Ooliya. For a moment I fooled myself with thoughts and longings. The second breath tasted metallic and strange, and sadness swamped me.

  "There's clam-things here that make the biggest pearls in the Known Universe," Dicey told me. "Only a few ever been smuggled out. Gorgeous and strange and can't be duplicated. You shoulda seen the prices they fetched."

  I saw one in her mind. Big as a fist, pale as the inside of an onion, with colors sheening across it, and the hues of avarice.

  "Link with those clams," she said. "Find me some of those pearls."

  On Ooliya I had not linked with sealife, though I knew some people in the southern archipelago did it, and farmed underwater. I sat on sea-smoothed coral and sent out link fingers, searching, the way I did when newborns came to our island.

  It was not a way of thinking I understood immediately, slow and wet and hungry as it was, but presently I had linked to a whole colony of creatures. I sank down under the surfaces of their thoughts and, like them, with them, relished the feel and taste of water moving through us, bringing food and occasionally sand. Some of us shaped ourselves around small boulders made of self-stuff.

  Pearls? I didn't care. I was spread out and thinking-together with many beings. This was the best link I'd had since leaving Ooliya. I wanted to stay here.

  Dicey poked me and broke all my links again.

  The Goog hid behind the moon while Dicey berated me. I felt sick and sore, ready to shrivel and die. I had lost all links, even the ones to shipfolk, and my link fingers felt burnt and senseless.

  "We were there to do a job," Dicey yelled, "not to give you a chance to get all touchy-feely!"

  "Leave her alone," Grecia said. "Give her a little recovery time. Maybe she didn't know."

  "She knew, all right. She just wanted to stay there and get lost in those cold-fleshed sea-things. I saw her face," Dicey said.

  I closed my eyes and wamped out.

  Dicey made my chestmod shoot me with stimulants. I woke up and couldn't go back to sleep, or die, which was what I really wanted. Instead, I linked again to her and Malad and Grecia. It was easier this time. They had tapsites already. They only squirmed a little, and Grecia told me later that she'd missed me while I was unlinked.

  "Listen to me," Dicey said, leaning down and putting her dark face close to mine. "You link. You find out where the pearls are. We get the pearls. We're outta here. Understand?"

  I sniffled and nodded.

  We scooted back in under the warning beacons and landed on the same atoll at low tide. This time I linked lightly, sought for specific information, and found for Dicey a pearl graveyard, a place where she wouldn't have to cut into anything living to get what she wanted.

  The pearls were beautiful, each different: lavender, pale pink, sherbet orange, opalescent white, mid-sky blue, hematite black, glistening sunrise yellow, underwater green, each as big as a baby's head. We all held them, stared at them, cherished them on our way to Pjallesta, where Dicey knew the smugglers' underground and could sell the pearls for enough to keep us going a while.

  Dicey wamped me before we docked and didn't wake me until we were well on our way to Skizmas. No shore leave for me on a civilized planet. She was afraid of what I might do.

  She gave me the green pearl to keep, though.

  On Skizmas I linked with carnivorous, sentient plants, and we came away with pure extract of some kind of hyperhallucinogen. On Clairmar I linked with tunnel-dwelling crustaceans and we came away with a hold full of some kind of white metal. After that we stopped over on Hitherto while the Goog had a complete overhaul and facelift and Malad, Dicey, and I got upgrades on our mods. I spent the whole time on Hitherto asleep.

  I dreamed together with Grecia a few times, and that felt good. She didn't seem to mind. We visited her home planet, which she had left eighty years earlier. She grew up in a small desert community near a gas mine, one of three children in the whole community, and everything they played with seemed mummified by heat and sun, and somehow beautiful. Plant skeletons, vertebrate as snakes; animals that only emerged at night; the sounds of distance and a craving for shadow. Together we picked nuts from skillballs fallen from cootchertrees, and sought for gold flecks in dried streambeds.

  The next three years followed the same pattern. Dicey made me link with beings on proscribed planets long enough to rob them, long enough for me to have a family sense about them, never long enough to satisfy me, but long enough to wound me when I had to leave.

  We chased bar rumors of secrets and treasures, and found kernals of truth in them. We collected tiny precious cargoe
s and moved on. We never went back, even when what we had found was extremely lucrative. When I asked, thinking that relinking would feel good, Malad told me Dicey never revisited the scene of a crime.

  Dicey constantly upgraded the Goog's speed, stealth, scanners, and armament. Allied Sentients Police noticed forbidden cargo coming into ports, and Dicey feared pursuit, even as she lusted after it. In her dreams, fear and pleasure linked tight, scratching each other's backs.

  Malad dreamed of me. Of me and him, together without clothes. He dreamed of a me interested in him in ways that I didn't even understand at first.

  I didn't like his dreams, but sometimes I couldn't escape them.

  On Whishter, my life fell apart again.

  On Whishter, I linked with rock beings.

  Dicey had heard rumors that live volcanoes on Whishter really lived, forming fire jewels in their hot hearts more beautiful than the cold stones one found in calmer earths.

  We had followed some of her rumors to their sources only to find no treasure and much trouble, and twice the Allied Sentients Police had almost caught us, as though they laid a trap for us. Malad sometimes mentioned retiring, and I knew that Grecia had a cache of credit wands she added to after every trade visit to a port.

  Dicey saved almost nothing; she would rather take her earnings in ship fitments, bodymod upgrades, and supplies.

  I, as a captive rather than a crew member, had no real cut in the take from our expeditions, but sometimes Dicey gave me souvenirs and trinkets. Once she even bought me a travel holo about Ooliya, but I could only watch about a minute of it before it sent me into deep, disabling melancholy. I stored it unwatched. Grecia borrowed it from me, and I never asked for it back.

  We sneaked into Whishter's system, dropping out of skipmode on the opposite side of Whishter's sun from the planet and ducking behind planetoids and debris while Dicey scanned for anyone else in range. We only found the usual warning beacons around Whishter — by now Dicey considered them luck charms.