Reclamation(84)

“Used to it.” Arla ran her thumb along the bottom of the monitor display to make sure she got the numbers right. I hope I get faster at this soon. Her hand dropped to her pouch again, and she stopped it midway. She stuck the pad into the feed-out slot on the edge of Myra Lar’s table so the two machines could talk to each other.

“Wouldn’t have thought so.” Zur-Allenden planted his stocking feet on the tile floor and folded his arms across his skinny chest.

Arla bent over the table and ran her finger down the line of glowing figures, slowly reading each one. Myra Lar had been overly diligent in explaining the importance of a manual check. “Be surprised, you would.”

Zur-Allenden sat silently for a moment and Arla tried not to wonder what was going on inside his head. She’d used every trick she knew to try to get him to drop his guard around her. She’d worked diligently. She’d volunteered to run extra errands. She’d been overflustered and profusely apologetic when she’d made mistakes. She’d occasionally “let slip” remarks about her children and her sisters. The performance had gained the confidence, even the friendship, of almost everyone else in the lab, but not Allenden, and Arla was beginning to wonder why.

Blasted Skymen. You all look alike but you all act differently. There’s no way to tell who’s going to do what. Why can’t you just mark your hands so a person can tell who you are by looking? Her hand twitched like it wanted to move to her pouch. She pressed it harder against the tabletop.

She had asked Iyal if there were other places where the people were marked so they could be told apart, and had received a strangely sad smile from her. “Almost everywhere has a social hierarchy, Arla. It seems to be part of being human. Some places use tattoos, or natural appearance to enforce it. Some places use family names or histories …” Her sentence had trailed off, and her face had turned thoughtful. “I’d be willing to speculate that maybe your world’s hierarchy came from genotype … family … but if that was it, what’re you doing on the bottom?”

“Oh, I forgot.” Allenden snapped his fingers, interrupting her reverie. “Zur-Iyal wanted me to remind you to make sure you’ve got the lab cleaned and locked down by hour six. Maintenance is running the building check tonight and we all have to clear out early.”

Blast, blast, blast. I had work I wanted to do tonight. Her eyes flickered involuntarily toward Allenden’s keyboard. Arla was glad she had her back to him so he couldn’t see. “Thank you, Zur-Allenden. I’ll have it done.”

“Good enough.” Boots under one arm, computer pad under the other, he shuffled out, trying to keep himself from sliding on the tiles.

When the door swung shut, Arla let her shoulders sag. She couldn’t have said who wore her out more, Allenden or Evran.

At least Allenden tries to keep a lock on it. She sighed and started on the next set of numbers. Why do they nag at me like this? The Nameless Powers have seen me deal with worse, most of my life, in fact. The Skymen just give me words.

Words and plenty of them. Iyal and her cohorts honked like geese sometimes about the contents of Arla’s blood and bones.

“You are saying that some person decided how I should be?” Arla had asked Iyal once.

Iyal had come into the lab just to stare at her. A recent analysis had just come out of the machines and Iyal was more confused than usual.

“Basically, yes. Not you, personally, of course, but at least one set of your ancestors. Probably more than one.”

And the Nameless Powers spoke the names of all the People that would be and in each name declared the soul and life that it would have …

“That’s not unheard of.” Iyal leaned against the wall. “I’ve met GE descendants before. What’s incredible about you is what your … engineers bred for.”

“What is that?”

“I don’t know.” She threw up her hands. “That’s the problem. Usually it’s obvious. Strength, speed, intelligence, creativity. You, though, you make no sense.”

Neither do you, but she didn’t say that.

Zur-Iyal spread her hands. “Let me try to explain this. We’ve talked about cells, right? Cells in a body communicate via a series of messengers. Chemicals emitted by one cell cause a reaction in second cell. That second cell might undergo an internal change, or it might send off its own messenger.

“That’s extremely simplified, of course.”

“Of course,” said Arla humbly.

Zur-Iyal’s eyebrows went up. Her puckered mouth twitched into a half smile. “Deserved that, I suppose.” Iyal was quicker than most of them to pick up on when Arla was acting. Around Iyal she had to be extremely careful how she played the Notouch.