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Fortunately for me, the ship seems to know what it is doing without him. The ship swings itself through space, around into orbit around an asteroid that is pulsing with glowing many colored lights. The closer we get, the brighter they become. I can see buildings bristling all over the planet, tall and pulsing with light and life. We descend among them and dock at a bay full of ships just like Cozza’s.
I am at a loss until someone comes to my rescue. The plastic lid of this ship box opens right up and a woman jumps in through the open cockpit. She has black hair, brown eyes, and a broad smile. She seems happy to see me, even though she doesn’t know me, which I find strange.
“Howzit!”
It takes me entirely too long to realize that she is asking me how I am.
She grabs Cozza by the hair and lifts his face from the dashboard, only to let him slump back down and look at me with an incredulous grin on her face.
“Crikey! Whaddave you done to him?” She smiles broadly.
“Nothing. He drank all his beersies.”
“Oh, roight. He’s supposed to stay off the beers,” she says. “I’m Shazza. Nice to meet you.”
“I’m…” I pause, and then use the name Isu gave me. “I’m Aspel.”
“Azza!” she exclaims, shortening my name and adding what seems to be a compulsive suffix to the end. “Hell yeah, Azza. Welcome to Erf.”
“Erf?”
“It’s the planet we’re terraforming here. You look straight off the farm. I’m surprised. Don’t usually pick up the meat sacks.”
I stare at her, trying to work out if I am supposed to be the meat sack in that sentence.
“Don’t look offended,” she laughs. “It’s just too dangerous, that’s all. The Vargons knock our ships out of the sky, so we can’t do rescues. Don’t worry though, we’ve got lots of your kind here among us freeborn.”
“Lots of my kind?”
“Farmies,” she says. “We’ve got all kindsa setups for looking after you farmies. Come on. Let’s go.”
“What about him?”
“He’ll wake up when he’s ready. Poor bastard, loves his beersies, but he’s a hell of a pilot. Come on. Come with me.”
I follow her, because there’s nothing else to do. I can’t return to the planet he took me from. I don’t know how to fly a ship, and I don’t know where it is. I am lost, so deep in space I fear I will never return.
But this place is solid. Shazza grabs my hand and helps me out of the cockpit, onto a platform that juts out high above a big fall.
“Yeah, don’t tip ova the edge,” Shazza says cheerfully. “It’s a long way down, and they only catch ya sometimes, yannow?”
She pulls me down the platform, through a doorway that leads into a tall cylindrical building. There are lights everywhere, bright colors slathering all the walls. It is as though happiness threw up decorations.
I am overwhelmed and confused. I have just come from the most desperate plight, a place where survival is impossible, death guaranteed, and misery likely. Now I find myself here, in this bright planet filled with life and apparent joy.
“You wanna beersie?”
Shazza is holding a can open under my nose. Again, I recoil from the smell. It smells like urine that died.
“No. Thank you.”
I want to scream and cry. I want to demand they take me back to Isu, but I can tell they think they’ve rescued me and they expect me to be grateful for it. Shazza leads me through a cacophonous, confusing world of levels and paths and colors and sounds and so very many smells. The farm had one smell, maybe two. There was the clean smell and the food smell.
“This is where ya can get ya food,” she says, leading me down a path between stalls of various descriptions that contain some things that look like food and some things that definitely do not. “We’ll set you up with some dollarydoos, so you can buy whaddeva ya want.”
She looks at me with a grin, as if that’s supposed to mean something to me. It doesn’t.
“I’ll show you,” she says. “I know it’s weird coming off the farm. They don’t teach ya anything besides how to be food. See, we swap these coins for goods, and then those coins can be swapped by the people we give them to for other goods or services. It’s a pretty sweet system. We call it capitalgasm.”
“Capitalgasm?”
“Yeah,” she beams. “Come on. I’ll show you where all the fresh meat lives.”
I recoil and she laughs. “Figure of speech. Nobody’s gonna eat ya here. This is one of the safest places in the universe.”
But I know it’s not, because I’ve been in the safest place in the universe, and I know that it is wrapped up in Isu’s arms.
What is wrong with me that I would rather be in a hole in the ground in a world that is being consumed by a flying earth-eating monster, than here among my own kind?
