Big Trouble Upstairs

By Eric Brown

I’m on the Barrier Reef pleasure ‘plex, looking for a year-wife. Someone small and dark this time—Oriental maybe. The jacuzzi lagoon is foaming around me and my lover, a cute Kampuchean fluxer, when my handset goes ber-leep. I wade into the shallows, the kid big-eyed on my hip, and take the call.

“Sorry to come between you and your fun, Isabella.” Massingberd stares up from the back of my hand, playing the chaperone. “But you’re on.”

The spacer senses the goodbye and lays a soft cheek against my breast. I enter her head, tone down the love I’ve been promoting thus far, damp her synaptic fires.

“Give it me, Mass,” I sigh.

“You’re gonna love this one,” he begins, and gives me a big wink.

There’s a laser-slayer loose on the Carnival Sat, wasting innocents like mad-crazy. The bastard zero’d the security team first, along with the mechanical defences—and he has a dozen workers imprisoned on the satellite, to pick off at his leisure.

“It’s your kind of job, Is. You’re going in there alone.”

“Say, thanks...”

“A shuttle’s on its way,” he says, and signs off.

Soo-Lee clutches me. “Isabella...”

“There’ll be other times,” I say. But not with me... Why do I do it—why? It was love at first sight. I felt that yearning, gut pang the second I set eyes on Soo-Lee a week back. She was picking scabs from her new hand-jack on the beach outside my villa. Of course, she wouldn’t have given me a second glance, but I have ability.

Ten years ago I tested psi-positive and had the cut—but the operation went wrong. It was too successful. Instead of coming out plain telepathic, I emerged mega-telepathic. Which meant that, as well as being able to read minds, I had the power to control a subject’s thoughts, make them do just whatever the hell I wanted. Pretty neat, okay.

I was the first of a new line.

We’re a dozen now, closely supervised.

And I have this thing about kids. Whenever I see one I like I get in there and tamper, fix, and soon they’re all gooey-eyed, eager.

This past week on the ‘plex we made a striking couple: an anorexic, slit-eyed Enginegirl and a six-six eighteen-year-old Rwandan Watusi with scarified cheeks and dreads. That’s me.

The love I promote is doomed, of course. I can’t sustain that degree of adoration in a subject for long. The past few years I’ve instilled ersatz-love for the period of a six-month or one-year marriage contract—then withdrawn. It’s kinder that way, to both parties. A year is long enough to live a lie, even when you’re in love.

I dump Soo-Lee on the golden sand and sluice apathy around her frontal lobe, and by the time I step into my villa she’s beginning to wonder what she ever saw in me. Soon Isabella Manchester will be nothing more than a pleasant event in the memory of her youth, and then not even that.

Massingberd knows. He was the only person I could bring myself to tell. He once asked me why I didn’t turn my ability on myself. “Why don’t you cure yourself, Is? Fix your head so you don’t lust after these kids...”

It’s no longer illegal, but oldsters like Mass have throwback morality.

“‘Cos if it wasn’t kids it’d be women or men. I’d be no better off, just the same. I need love, okay? I guess I’m insecure. I can’t change what I am because of why I am-” And stopped there.

I didn’t even know Massingberd well enough to tell him why I am.

“I need love and it’s so easy for me to get it,” I’d often say. “But how can that be love?”

* * * *

Skip six hours and I’m aboard the shutt on autopilot, heading away from the plane of the ecliptic towards the Carnival Sat. And mine’s the only vessel going thisaway: all the other traffic is streaming Earthwards, sunlit specks corkscrewing down the gravity-well like gene-data on a DNA helix.

From this far out the satellite is an oblate spheroid, a yuletide bauble set against the Pleiades. The lower hemisphere is in darkness—the maintenance section that keeps the whole show ticking. Above, the working end of the Sat is a fuzzy golden blur. Closer proximity provides resolution: I see avenues and arcades, rides and sideshows. One big fun city down there.

Massingberd’s saying: “... carved up two hundred Japanese and American tourists before the emergency shuttles could get the rest out. There’s around a dozen workers still in there, plus the killer.”

“You sure he didn’t sneak out on a shuttle?”

“I had a ‘head screening every ship that left, Is.” He looks up at me solicitously. “Hey, you be careful, okay?”

The sentimental old bastard. “I’ll be fine, Mass.”

“I’m putting you through to the Director who’s still in there-”

But he’s cut off by a screenful of static. I shake my hand impatiently and the screen clears. Now another mugshot regards me—the big cartoon head, all ribbons and grin, of Minnie Mouse.

“I’m fouled up with an entertainment channel, Mass!” I yell. I’m approaching the Satellite fast and I need the Director’s talk-down. I can’t hit destination cold. I’d be easy meat for the laser-slayer.

“Massingberd!” I cry again.

“Manchester?” Minnie Mouse asks.

“Huh?” I goggle.

“Are you reading, Manchester?” Minnie’s fatuous grin belies the impatient tone.

“Reading,” I say. “Who the hell...?”

“Director Maria Da Cruz,” Minnie says, a girl’s voice muffled by latex.

“Why the fancy dress, Director?”

“You’ll find out when you get here. Frankly, your surprise cannot equal mine. I was expecting a combat squad, at least. We have a maniac rampant up here, and they send me a...” She subvocalizes the rest, not for my ears, but I make out what might be, “... a witchdoctor.”

I smile. “What’s the score, Minnie?”

“I’ll meet you at rim-lock twelve. The killer’s somewhere on the far side of the complex. Could be anywhere within an area of twenty square kilometres. My workers are in the central plaza, in the dorms. They fled there when the shooting began.” As Minnie prattles I have the weird sensation of watching a kids’ video crossed with the soundtrack of a cop show. “They’re pinned down and can’t get out.”

“Have they tried?”

“You’re joking, of course. The fire came from the far rim, and the dorms open onto the central concourse. It’d be an automatic death sentence for the first person who shows their face. You’ve got to get these people out.”

“My job is to get the killer,” I tell her. “Then they’re safe.”

“In that case I hope you’re well armed,” Minnie says condescendingly.

I have the last laugh. “As a matter of fact I don’t believe in the things.”

The Minnie head deprives me the satisfaction of seeing her face drop. She grins idiotically until I cut the link.

The shutt makes one hi-altitude orbit of the satellite and glides towards the docking rig in the underbelly, blindside of the killer. We contact with the delicacy of balloons kissing.

Seconds later I float out, cycle myself through the airlock and peer cautiously into the long, curving corridor. I scan for the killer’s manic brainvibes, but the coast is clear. I move inside.

Minnie stands arms akimbo, awaiting me.

Maria Da Cruz is tense and afraid, of course, but beneath this I access her identity. She’s an intelligent, lonely kid, twenty-one in a week, and in any other circumstances I’d like to get to know her better.

As it is-

“So here you are at last!” She kicks something towards me, a black rubber puddle sprouting ears.

“What the hell?”

“Get into it. Don’t argue.” She looks me up and down, appraising. “You’re tall, but you’ll fit at a stretch.”

I pick it up. A Mickey suit. I step into the booties and pull up the clinging rubber leggings over those of my onepiece. “Now, if you don’t mind telling me what all this is about?” I could take time off scanning for the killer and read her, but I’m jumpy at the thought of being fried alive.

“This allows us greater freedom,” Da Cruz says. “The killer isn’t potting cartoon characters—they’re all robots. I was in the storeroom when the killing began. I saw what was going on and dug these out. They’re the last we have in stock, from the days before actors were superseded by ‘bots.”

I stretch the torso over each shoulder and let go with a snap. Then I pull on the zippered head; my own bulges between the ears like a big egg. Mickey’s never been so tall.

“You weren’t kidding, were you?”

“Eh?” I’m having difficulty with the zipper.

“You aren’t armed.”

“Told you so.”

“Then how the hell do you hope to kill the killer?”

I give her a big smile before fastening the zipper. “An old African custom,” I say. “I’ll think him dead.” Which isn’t that far off the mark, minus the ethnic bit.

“Okay, just one more thing,” she says. “You gotta walk like the real Mickey. Like this.”

I stare at her through the gauze where Mickey’s tonsils should be. She’s strutting up and down the corridor, waving her arms, twitching her ass. If only Massingberd could see us now.

“Your turn, Manchester.”

So I strut my stuff before her, elbows working invisible bellows. “Point your boots! Swing your tail! This has to be perfect, Manchester. If this bastard so much as suspects...”

She doesn’t have to finish that line.

“Fine. You got it. Now where you want to go first?”

The thought of parading myself out there like a sitting duck—or rather mouse—gives me the heebies.

I quit wriggling and squat on my heels. The suit is tight and uncomfortable, squashing me short. “First, before I start risking my life—‘cos I don’t want to be found dead in this fucking thing—first I want to know more about the killer. Like how he managed to waste an entire security team and blow the defence system?”

I keep a probe out for the killer. I have a range of just over a kilometre, though it’s getting weak by then. We’re quite alone at present.

“The security unit? The killer sprayed them with Procyon animalcules. They reduced the unit to slush one hour before the fireworks began.”

“Yech! And the mechanical defences? The ‘bots?”

“Deactivated beforehand. That should have set off an alarm in computer control, but that’d been fixed too.”

“Whoever the killer is, he sure knows his stuff. Could it be someone who works here?”

She shrugs. “Why not? We employ nearly twenty thousand permanent staff.”

“Most of them evacuated with the trippers? So that leaves only the dozen workers holed up in the dorms.”

“Plus the killer.”

I think about it. “Has there been any shooting since the dozen staff made it to safety?”

“No...” Da Cruz is getting my drift.

“So perhaps, just perhaps, the killer is a worker. He or she hides with the others after the firing’s through -providing an alibi.”

“You think that likely?”

“At the moment anything’s possible,” I say.

Da Cruz pushes herself from the wall with a practised rubber bounce. “Any more questions?”

“Yeah... how come a girl as young as you gets to be the Director of an outfit as big as this?”

That stops her in her tracks.

“How do you know how old I am?”

“I’m well informed,” I tell her. “Well?”

She shrugs. “I work hard.”

“You must be very talented.”

She’s suddenly uncomfortable, under the Minnie suit. I read that she was a solitary kid, bullied at school, whose only way of showing them was to succeed. But there’s still something lacking, I read. Success isn’t all.

I have the almost irresistible urge to go in there and help her out, ever so gently. But I restrain myself. This is neither the time nor the place—and there’s work to be done. Besides, I’m getting to the stage where I need real love, love that isn’t forced.

“Lead the way,” I say.

“Where to?”

“The workers’ dorm, or thereabouts. I can do my stuff at long range.”

She regards me. “Okay. You ready?”

We cake-walk into the open, beneath the arching crystal dome, along with a hundred other cartoon characters. They’re operating with an attention to duty that could be mistaken for macabre celebration of the surrounding carnage.

The fear I feel at our vulnerability is soon replaced by horror. Gobbets of human flesh occupy parks and gardens, tree-lined boulevards and exhibitions and fun-rides. Families lie in messily quartered sections, each chunk still grotesquely parcelled in the appropriate portion of clothing. Lower halves of once human beings sit in the seats of whirlers and spinners, still whirling and spinning in mechanical ignorance of their dead cargo.

And—this somehow makes the slaughter all the more tragic—robotic Mickeys and Minnies, Donalds and Plutos move from body to lasered body, patting dismembered heads, shaking lifeless hands, posing for pictures never to be taken beside the lacerated remains of Junior and Sis.

Da Cruz continues galumphing along. She’s seen it all before. I slow and stare aghast until I hear a, “Psst!” and see a tiny gesture from Minnie up ahead. I quicken up and join her, strutting like a fool.

We leave the boulevard, cross a facsimile Wonderland and come to the croquet lawn. The Queen of Hearts strides around and calls imperiously, “Off with their heads!” And by some ghastly coincidence the Alice ‘bot stands, hands on hips, her head removed by a freak sweep of this killer’s laser.

Da Cruz ducks behind a hillock and points. “There,” she says, indicating the entrance of a large rabbit burrow.

I close my eyes and concentrate on the workers’ dorm beneath this make-believe world.

“What are you doing?” Da Cruz asks in a whisper.

“Just casting dem ol’ black spells,” I jape.

I make out eleven minds down there. I go through them one by one, discarding each in turn as innocent. All I read is fear and apprehension and, in a couple of cases, even hysteria. I’m looking for the bright brainvibes of a maniac. This bunch is clean.

“You a telepath?” Da Cruz asks in a small voice as I open my eyes and clear my head with a shake.

“Something like that,” I tell her. “I thought you said there were a dozen workers? I scan only eleven.”

“Over there.” She points a white-gloved hand beyond the burrow to a hulking structure moored in a white, simulacrum river, part of another facsimile. I recognize it. The steamboat from Huck Finn. “He didn’t make it to the dorm,” she says.

I concentrate, get nothing. There’s a blank where the person should be. The boat’s within range, and there’s nothing wrong with my ability as I can still sense the eleven down the rabbit hole.

“There’s no-one there,” I say. “You sure-?”

Then I glimpse movement.

Between balustrades I see a guy sitting on the steps of the upper deck. He’s garbed in ancient costume: cloak, frilled shirt, tight breeches and big-buckled shoes. He’s there, okay.

Fact remains—I scan nothing.

“I don’t get this one bit,” I murmur. “You see a guy over there? Or am I hallucinating ghosties?”

“Sure. That’s him. He’s an Andy, an A-grader. He plays the part of Dr Frankenstein in our latest spectacular.”

“Thanks for telling me,” I say. “You think I can scan cyber-junkboxes just like living minds?”

She gets the message and stays mute.

So our Dr Frankenstein’s an Android? A tank-nurtured artificial human, playing the lead in the Gothic classic. I reckon Mary would just love that.

As for me, I’m suspicious. I have this aversion to Andys. Okay, so this guy’s a citizen-grade Android from a reputable clinic, a fellow sentient with all the civil rights of you and me. But he still doesn’t scan. I can’t read Androids.

Prejudice, I know. And me of all people...

Nevertheless, I avoid them at parties.

“What do you know about this guy?” I ask. And I read her to ensure she’s telling me all she knows.

“Well, he’s an exceptionally talented actor. He applied for the role of the Doctor in the Frankenstein show. He auditioned well and got the part.”

“You think he might be the killer?”

“Him?” She’s surprised. “No... I don’t think so. When we met he seemed very-”

“Okay, okay. I don’t want a character reference. They say the Boston Strangler was a charmer.”

“But what makes you think-?”

I shrug. “A hunch, that’s all. The eleven workers are clean, and here we have an unscannable Andy.”

“The laser fire did come from the other direction.”

“Has it occurred to you that he might have got where he is now after he quit firing?” I say in a tone that suggests she shut up.

But why would an Andy go berserk like this, I ask myself.

I’m about to suggest we get the hell out in case the Andy is our man, when he sees us. He stands and stares across the river at the two cartoon mice no longer in role.

I take Da Cruz by the hand and put the Duchess’s cottage between us and the Android. “The best way to prove your Andy innocent is if I grill him,” I say, pulling off my left glove.

Most Androids are equipped with handsets, and Dr Frankenstein is no exception. I get through to him and stare at his face on the back of my hand: it’s heavily made-up, with age-lines and dark smudges beneath his eyes to suggest overwork.

“Worry not, good Doctor. Your circuits have not fused.” I unzip the Mickey head and tip it back. “Isabella Manchester. Tactical Telescan Unit. I’m here to save you people like a regular superhero.”

The Android inclines his head, not taken with my humour. “I wondered when help might arrive.” His tone is measured, cultivated. I almost understand why citizen-graders are so sought after at all the big social events.

“A few questions, if you please.”

He inclines his noble head again.

So I ask him where he was when the firing began, what he saw of the slaughter, where does he suspect the killer is now? I try every trick in the book to make him incriminate himself, but he’s not that dumb. He answers the questions with a slight Germanic accent, and I get the impression he’s mocking me, as if he knows what I’m doing and wants me to know that he knows. He’s pointedly civil in his acceptance of suspicion.

I thank him, assure him that I’ll get the killer and quick, and cut the link. “Well?” Da Cruz asks.

“What do you expect?” I say, frustrated. “That he admits he’s the bad guy?”

“What did he say?”

“He was rehearsing when the killing began and made it as far as the showboat. He saw nothing of the massacre after that. He kept his tin-pot head down.”

“You still think he did it?”

“I never said I did... But anything’s possible.”

“And now?” she asks. She’s far from impressed by my uncertainty.

“Where did you say the last fire came from? Across the complex? Okay, so I’ll make my way around the perimeter until I come within range. If I were you I’d remain here. I don’t want your death on my conscience.”

“I feel it my duty to accompany you,” she says.

I nod. “Very well, then. Okay.” I grab her hand and look for a route out of the Andy’s possible line of fire.

She restrains me. “Remember the walk!”

So we be-bop into the open again, heading towards the multiple amphitheatres, that scallop the perimeter of the complex. Our only comfort is the knowledge that we’re indistinguishable from hundreds of other strutting cartoon characters.

At least, I thought we were.

The killer knows better.

The first bolt amputates Minnie’s tail at the rump with a quick hiss and a coil of oily smoke. The second bolt—misses me by a whisker and roasts a passing Donald Duck at short order.

Da Cruz drags me into the cover of a stage set and we crouch behind a chunk of lichened stone. I trace the bolts back to their source: across the complex beneath the far arch of the dome. I concentrate, but the distance defeats me.

“So the Android can’t be the killer,” Da Cruz claims.

I laugh. “No? You sure about that? Think again, girl. In our disguises we were safe among all the other characters—then we’re seen by the Andy. He’s the only person who knows we’re in this get-up.”

“But the fire came from the opposite direction,” she complains, reasonably.

“So the Andy has an accomplice, yes?”

That silences her.

Belatedly I realize that we’re on the set of Frankenstein. The scientist’s lab is caught in flickers of electric blue, revealing eerie contraptions, improbable machines. The monster is on the slab, awaiting reanimation.

“And I don’t know why we’re wearing these stupid things,” I say, unzipping the head and flinging it back. Out there, the killer is busy frying every Mickey and Minnie in sight.

Da Cruz says: “But why should he want to...?”

“Slipped cog?” I suggest facetiously. I kick my suit away and it shivers against the wall like an animated jelly. “Take yours off,” I tell her. “You’re a marked mouse if you don’t ditch that suit.”

I waste no time and get through to Massingberd.

“Is! You okay?” ’

“I’m fine, Mass. Look, I need some info. You ready?”

I look at Da Cruz. She gives me the. Andy’s tag and classification, and I relay this to Mass with the rider, “Not that he’s filed under that. Check wide. You know where to find me.” I cut the link.

“You not out of that thing yet?” I stare at her. “Hey, you got something to hide?” Which, considering I have access to her head, is cruel.

I peep over masonry. I can’t see the Andy or his boat from here, but his accomplice is still junking robot rodents. Bolts hail continuously from the far side of the complex.

“Come on!” I say.

She’s out of the suit and staring defiantly at me.

The right side of her face is disfigured by a long scar more suited to Frankenstein’s monster. Even in the flickering light I can see that it was once far worse, before plastic surgery. And it’s still ugly. She’s a nice kid, too—a small, dark Peruvian with skin like Aztec gold.

The scar’s much deeper, of course. The surface damage is superficial; it’s the scar inside her head that causes all the pain.

I give her my hand. “There must be a service hatch somewhere,” I say. “We can approach the killer from below without being seen.”

She leads me to a concealed swing door and we hit the underside. Less attention has been paid to illumination and glitz down here. Glo-tubes rationed to every ten metres stitch the gloom. The thunder of machinery is deafening. We jog along a vast, curving gallery, mirror image of the corridor top-side where I met Da Cruz.

And I’m scanning all the time for the killer.

My hand bleeps and we stop to take the call.

“You’re right, Is,” Massingberd rapps. “The ‘droid isn’t on our files—under that tag. I came up with a likely candidate, though. A B-grade Andy manufactured in the Carnival clinic twenty-five years ago. It was employed for the first ten years as an extra in kids’ films. It applied for up-grading several times but got nowhere. It was transferred to Disneyworld Shanghai, where it worked for another decade. Then—get this, Is—five years ago this ‘droid was reported rogue. It dropped out and disappeared. We have a few reports on file as to its alleged activities during the next five years. Apparently it joined the outlawed Supremacy League, that crackpot band of ‘droids who demand the rule over humanity. It was involved in the bombings of ‘65, but was never apprehended. We have a number of reports that it underwent a programme of training as a cyber-surgeon so that the League could expand its up-grading of all the ‘droids who joined them. We lost trace of it earlier this year, Is—around the time that your ‘droid joined the Carnival outfit. It’s quite feasible that it gave itself new retina-, finger- and voice-prints, doctored certificates and became the actor who played Dr Frankenstein. The ‘droid returned home, Is-”

“To do a little counter publicity for the largest manufacturers of B-grade Androids,” I finish.

“You got it.”

“I’ll keep you posted, Mass.”

We set off again.

Da Cruz is murmuring to herself. “And he seemed so genuine at the audition...”

I ignore her and concentrate on the sudden flare of sentience that’s just appeared a kilometre up-front. I’ve never before scanned anything like it. As we draw closer I realise that I’m not dealing with a normal human being. The thing up there overwhelms me with fear and pain and regret and guilt.

I go for the killer’s identity, but I’m either too far away or the signal is weakening. I get the impression, then, that the killer is losing his strength, dying...

We’re almost underneath the place where the maniac made his stand. To our right is a viewscreen, showing space and the quiet Earth. On our left we pass a pair of green swing doors, marked with heiroglyphs: the representation of a man and what might be an icicle.

It doesn’t hit me for another five paces.

There’s something in the head of the killer above us that has no right to be there... something that’s keeping Him alive.

I retrace my steps and regard the swing doors.

“Isabella?” Da Cruz says.

“Christ,” I murmur. “Jesus Christ...”

I push through the doors at a run.

“Isabella!” Da Cruz rushes in after me.

We’re in an operating theatre, and the only way it differs from the one in Dr Frankenstein’s castle is in the modern fittings; the overhead halogens and the angle-poise operating table. They’ve both seen the same deed accomplished, one in fiction and one in fact.

I move towards a green, vertical tank as if in a trance.

“Isabella?” Da Cruz is staring at me. “Didn’t you know? We brought him up here years ago, equipped this place for when the time is right to bring him back to-”

I open the tank and it’s empty.

“Where is he?” she screams at me as I run from the theatre and through the nearest hatch to the upper hemisphere.

I’ve never really credited Androids with any of the more complex human emotions, like love or hate...

Or even irony.

By playing his role of Dr Frankenstein to the full, this Andy has proved me wrong.

Back in the twentieth century, the king of the greatest entertainment industry on Earth was corpsicled. Put on ice and stacked away until such time as his cancer could be fixed. And now...

Now Walt stands on the balcony of a fairytale castle. Ten metres separate him from where I crouch on the gallery that circles the complex. He rests his weight on a laser-rifle, crutchlike, and sways. His shaven head bulges at the left temple with a dark mass like some morbid extra-cranial tumour: it’s a cyber-auxiliary, wired in there by the Android. It’s this that is powering him, that motivated him to commit the slaying of the innocents. He’s so feeble now, so near death a second time, that it has little control over his body or his mind. For the first time since his resurrection, he is himself.

He sees me and smiles sadly.

His skin, blanched with more than a hundred years of death, is puckered and loose, maggotlike. He is barely conscious, yet a flicker of tragic awareness moves within him. The chemical that is keeping him alive is almost spent.

“Is this a nightmare?” he asks in a voice so frail it barely reaches me.

“A dream,” I say.

“Where am I?” I read his lips. “In Hell?”

I almost reply: “In your Heaven, Walt,” but stop myself.

I follow his gaze to the deck, as he surveys the carnage of his own doing.

“Watch out!” Da Cruz appears beside me and drags me to the ground. Walt is making one last feeble attempt to lift and aim the laser; it wavers in our direction. I can read in his eyes that he has no desire to kill us, but the choice is not his. The Frankenstein Android controls the cyber-auxiliary.

I close my eyes.

In the nightmare of Walt’s failing brain I open the floodgates of anger. I motivate him into action, give him the will to revenge himself.

And while I’m doing this I realise something. How can I ever again use my ability to induce love after using it to promote so much hate?

Da Cruz clutches my arm. “What—?”

I concentrate. “Just call it black magic, Maria.” And as I speak, Walt swings his laser-rifle, the desire for revenge overcoming the Android’s final command.

He cries out and fires.

The showboat disintegrates in a million shards of synthi-timber, and Dr Frankenstein explodes like a grenade in a brilliant white starburst.

Walt lets the laser fall and slips quietly into his second death, smiling with induced euphoria all the way.

* * * *

Three hours later and we’re surfing down the helix of the gravity-well. Back on the Sat, Walt is being returned to ice, the slaughter mopped up. Maria is taking time off, dirtside.

I break the silence. “Were you orphaned, Maria?” Gently.

She looks at me, suspicious. “How do you know?”

I reach out and touch her head. “Big trouble upstairs,” I say. Then: “We’re very much alike, you and me.”

She gives me the story that I know already, but it helps for her to talk about it. Her mother died when she was ten, and she was taken from her father following the attack that left her scarred.

“And you?” she asks. “Were you orphaned?”

“Something like that-” And stop. .

My parents’ tribe was hungry and poor. I was their third and youngest daughter, and I checked out psi-positive. A hundred thousand credits bought a lot of cattle, back then.

So the Telescan Unit wasn’t exactly slave labour...

But try telling that to a lonely nine year-old.

“Perhaps you’d like to tell me about it?” Maria asks, with affection.

Get that-

Genuine Affection.

I smile. “I think perhaps I might,” I say.