Traffiked!

Cairo

The road was almost deserted, and Cairo was quietly soaking up the sun until a Beanpod roared overhead towards the big protest and started firing. Perhaps the exhilaration and despair from witnessing the one-sided battle was what kicked me into gear.

I was walking along the Nile Corniche that afternoon, northwards past the silent shell of the Kasr Al Aini hospital, with my two friends Hany and Sharlene. As usual, I was thinking hard of a way to pull myself out of penury. We were going to have lunch at Hany's house and talk about it. The trouble was, Hany was not much better off than me, and he had a family to support - his mother and siblings, that is. When the Beanpod flitted over us with a noise like a freight train, appearing between the treetops and high-rises, I had a hand in my pocket, and that helped quell the panic.

I have these seeds in my pocket, see, and I can't help plunging my hand in there now and again to check on them. They're apple seeds. Sometimes I take the sealed plastic packet out and look at them. I get a knot in my ribcage when I do. It's a puzzle how a tiny bit of smooth brown shell can hold so much. Still, that's what I want to do. One day.

My name's Rashad Stevens. I'm saying this so maybe someone will learn from what happened, stop from messing up like I did. Maybe we can't stop the invaders from coming, but this is for sure: if the truth is told, we can at least stop some people from going.

It was so hot that it felt like the sun was sitting on my shoulders, squeezing the life out of me. I was constantly wiping my brow. But then, I didn't grow up in Egypt. Hany, who did, seemed to be floating along, hardly touching the ground. To him, the climate was fine: an average spring in Cairo. He was wearing three layers and didn't appear to be sweating.

Hany Girgis had been my mentor and guide since I arrived in Cairo a few weeks before. He befriended me the moment I stepped off the Alexandria train at Ramses Station. Picture a pale blue shirt stuffed with beef, a chubby face with black eyebrows, and fleshy lips habitually turned up at the corners by some secret amusement. He was so extrovertly but quietly himself, so Coptic Egyptian: still proud of his ruined country, a cross tattooed on his wrist, toying with every conspiracy theory that came along, and compulsively hospitable. I don't know what kind of dam wall held his reservoir of despair in check, but whatever it was, I wanted one. So I often went to see him when I wasn't selling combs and cheap cologne and plastic toys in the street.

A foul breeze swept over us from the mud banks alongside the shriveled Nile. We all groaned in revulsion, even Sharlene. "You want I sell you good perfume, Mister?" said Hany with a grin. He was a great mimic, even in English.

I nodded. "I'll take five tons of your best," I replied, straight-faced. Just two days before, we'd wandered through the Khan El Khalili, the old market, and played permutations of this scene over and over, for real.

To me, the whole city stinks of human sweat and smog and those pungent ET spores that look like bloated squids under the microscope. So a little cologne or incense now and again is an imperative in the odor wars. But the mud along the shrunken river was the worst. I blame the Aswan Dam project, which was actually the prototype for the multi-gigabucks scheme Hany was trying to drag me into.

We crunched the winter's dead leaves underfoot: big, mottled orange and yellow, and possibly the last leaves that would ever fall on the Corniche because the tree trunks were slowly being eaten by what they were calling njuk moss. At least some of our people are claiming the moss is edible. I pointed out to Hany and Sharlene the variegated crimson, gray and daffodil shades of the moss: reasons to be cheerful.

Sharlene really was floating: my AR wasn't calibrated properly. She was a Bohemian aunt figure, hair dyed blonde, face tanned maple syrup and cracked in a thousand lines that told her life story. Her moods changed like the weather in the streets of Istanbul where I did a little of my growing up. I could still see the beautiful woman she'd been when I was a child; but the beauty that was still inside of her kept overflowing on an ungrateful world. She was sitting on the air, telling us she remembered trying to cross this street back when she studied at the American University. She said you had to be a daredevil to get across, and you'd better be thin, because the lanes of charging traffic were so close together.

I shook my head in disbelief and told her I bet she used to stop the traffic. She laughed and said something like, "I'm so glad I'm back here in Colorado in the RV. At least we have AC. When it works." She had a melodic laugh, not forced. In my AR contacts she looked all of her fifty-odd years, but the long, flickering, flame-like draperies she called clothes helped make her look young in spirit without pretension. She'd only just woken up and was still having breakfast, while Hany and I were looking forward to a legendarily late Egyptian lunch of mahshi and rice or whatever Hany's mother would manage to come up with in this age of famine and shortages. I never had the nerve to ask her how long she had to wait in line to buy her groceries. The smells and shy sounds of lunch were already breezing around us, teasing my empty stomach, overlaying a disturbing background roar that echoed through the streets. That area of Garden City was still inhabited back then: mainly by European refugees who'd renovated some of the old abandoned mansions. Some of them must have had local kitchen help by the smell of it.

At some point in our walk, I glanced across the road at a man limping along the other way. I only got a glimpse of his prow-like face, but it made me start, as if he'd called my name and walked off. Dad? Hany asked me what the matter was, but I said it was nothing. No. Couldn't be. He died years ago, stupid. My hand felt in my pocket for the packet of seeds, for a bit of reassurance. One day...

A sound, up high: I looked around. Overhead, just below the tops of the haggard high-rise apartment blocks, soared an alien bullet shape, the size of a coffin. The hum of its three pulsed EHD pods throbbed in our ears. You know how it hurts when a Beanpod gets too close. I glanced up. "Uh-oh," I muttered, and began walking a little faster. I was tired from walking most of the morning to meet up with Hany, but those things gave me the creeps. We still had a few minutes to walk to reach his family's house, and that took us towards the city center, not away from it.

Hany didn't appear to have noticed anything amiss, except that he strained to keep up with me. "Like I was saying..." he said to the back of my head, over the noise. His English was perfect, except that his intonation flickered from wild swings to monotone, and his word stress hopped all over the syllables. And, of course, there was that Egyptian admiration for the 'z' phoneme and the rolled 'r'. He'd been trying to recruit me into his latest scheme, and I wasn't having any of it. "Rashad! You must come in wiz me on zis, okay? The Sahara is the next big sing. You will easily make enough to take care of your mozzer, like a good son should. Zen you can bring her from Libya and live wiz us."

I grimaced and told him she wasn't my biological mother. His eyebrows shot up. Yes, she raised me, but actually she was the widow of my maternal uncle. Sharlene had studied with her in Paris. That was long before First Contact. Years later, when my parents succumbed to that - whatever it was, the black lung infection that the yleinki cooked up in an attempt to wipe out the njuk in '17 - I was seven or eight. Space bat scum. Claudia Durand traveled all the way across Europe and found me at a feeding station in the remains of Istanbul. Soon I was calling her "Mama". Most of what I knew about my father came from her lips. I was lucky that when my parents had fled from Athens, they found a room in Eyüp district, in a converted tomb actually, and not in the eastward districts across the Golden Horn where the Turkish Resistance made their last stand. That way, I just ended up with mild radiation burns and burst eardrums.

So I was forever indebted to her - Claudia - mother - but as an adult now, I had to find my own way to do the right thing.

We'd just reached the bridge leading to the old Hayat Hotel, and I could see the empty Sheraton across the river, when a sudden, sharp crackle like nearby thunder sounded across the water. I noticed another two Beanpods flashing by, low over the river's turbid flow, northward, towards the scene of the day's protests. A sputter of gunfire greeted them, like popping corn in comparison to the aliens' directed plasma weapons. They didn't even evade or slow down. I almost started running towards the Square. I had friends there.

Hany wouldn't give up. "Just invest however much you can. I told you my cousin tripled his money in a year. Okay? I guarantee you..."

I shook my head and told him there were no guarantees these days.

Sharlene looked around with wide eyes as the noise of fighting grew. "Oh my," she murmured. "I shouldn't be watching this. I'm seeing the CNN feed. Sorry. You know how they..."

I assured her that I understood.

"Get out of there, guys!" she said, standing up. The soles of her feet still hung an inch or so off the ground.

"Someone's got to do it," I said, not knowing what else to say.

"Rashad! Hany! I know what you're like, and I don't want you getting mixed up in it anymore. You know it's a hopeless cause." She had to say that sort of thing, since my mother wasn't around, but her tone had taken on a sharp edge.

"Look, we're still two or three klicks away from Tahrir," I protested.

She paused and looked to the side, puckering her brows. "Don't pull a fast one on me. It's barely a thousand meters. But I've got to go. Promise me you won't go any nearer." Without waiting for an answer, she vanished.

I shrugged and tapped a feed from the Underground's main site. I saw a swollen column of bodies moving down Kasr El Aini Street towards the Square, which was already half-full from the deluge of people coming down Kasr El Nil Street. I swallowed hard. They must have numbered in the hundreds of thousands. From where we stood I could hear them with my own ears, I realized. That background roar, echoing the feed's audio by a few seconds. Their banners stood tall over their heads. In the Square I saw patched marquees, makeshift defensive positions, men with RPGs.

Their cries were many, but through it all rang the chant of "Asha'b! Yureed! Suquut! Annithaam!"

The people. Demand. The Fall. Of the System.

Some banners said, "Remember 2011!" Some said, "Betrayers of the human race!" I saw flags from all the lost nations of Europe. It all started getting blurry. My eyes were wet and my breathing had accelerated. If Hany and I hadn't already succumbed to Protest Fatigue after the first fortnight of marches, I'd have been there too.

Then a hand shook my shoulder. "Are you listening to me?" Hany demanded. I clicked off. I'd almost walked into the trunks of one of those infected trees. I backed away, gagging. It smelled like rotten eggs and slimy green algae. There was a small swarm of shiny green insects buzzing around it, of a type that I didn't remember seeing before.

Hany grabbed my shoulders and tried to turn me to face him. "Look. I know your mozzer - whatever, your aunt - is sick. You say she dies. You need money for treatment. So I just helping you. Okay?"

I blinked and wiped my eyes, still looking back at the insects. They weren't aphids, but of a similar pinhead size, with the metallic glint of a green bottle fly. One drifted towards me, and I swatted at it distractedly. I told Hany that I needed to do it my own way, to work for it. The truth is, I still have no idea of economics and investment. My Community Degree is in Sociotech anyway, gained from a string of tutors and classes that Sharlene had found for me as I'd drifted around the Near East. Now I was just looking for the right way to earn that cash that would save my mother's life.

He wouldn't stop. "I thought you say she can die any day!" Concern wrinkled his brow.

He had a point, and I realized he wasn't really interested in the little money I had stashed away. I just told him that even his investment dream scenario wouldn't give a quick enough return.

I was startled by a quiet voice speaking in my ear. "Are you quite sure of this assertion?" It was the voice of a fluent second-language speaker, but androgynous. I detected some concern in its tone.

"Huh?" Whirling around, I must have looked a comical sight to Hany, for he burst out laughing, and I scowled. "Someone just - Wait a minute, was that you?" I accused him.

He shook his head and lifted his brows high in exaggerated innocence. "Was what me?"

The voice happened again. "My apologies. I am a foreign life-form of a pseudo-insectoid variety, possessed of what you cellular monocolonies would call a hive-mind. I was conducting an inspection of this extra-planetary infection from which your native flora is suffering. You may call me Kepri." This time, Hany heard it too, for he opened his eyes wider than I thought they could ever go, then some more. Our jaws dropped open in unison. Then I noticed that the cloud of tiny green flies had formed a columnar shape nearby, hovering in formation. Its voice continued, quite calmly, "I was most interested in your conversation concerning this investment opportunity of which I, too, have availed myself. It is now my studied concern that this financial decision may have been somewhat rash." The insect column bobbed forward slightly towards us, almost as if bowing its non-existent head introspectively.

Hany began babbling about dung beetles. I snapped my fingers. "The hyusis! That's who you are. Didn't know any of you had survived the pogroms." That was back in the day when a certain amount of xenophobia had erupted in the persecution of the more vulnerable species of aliens, such as the hyusis. To this day it seems their fate is ignored by the more powerful races.

Hany put a hand on my arm. "Dung beetles! Khepri! It names itself after the ancient Egyptian god Khepri, the scarab beetle. Zis is - uh - spooky. Do you sink-"

I snorted. "Doesn't mean anything. Our new acquaintance Kepri doesn't resemble a scarab whatsoever, neither in appearance nor, I'm sure..." I chose my words carefully "... toilet habits." Hany chuckled loudly.

I turned to the torso-shaped swarm. "Pleased to meet you, Kepri. Yes, my friend here was trying to convince me to join the Sahara investment scheme, but one thing's for sure: there won't be any profits for decades, until the trees get planted and grow up and bear fruit, and I just don't trust those yleinki, do you?"

There was a short pause. I signaled Hany to keep out of it. Finally, Kepri spoke again. "I have now divested myself of that particular portfolio, as a precaution." There was a sound rather like a sigh. "Unfortunately, I have little clear conceptual framework to deal with your financial system. It all seems so, so... "

"Confusing?" I supplied, candidly.

"Yes! That, too. In fact, unethical might also serve as a working descriptor expressing my distrust of your stock market, or what remains of it."

Just about then, the whole city shook to a series of ear-splitting blasts. Masonry toppled off the mansions and unkempt hotels by the river, and we both fell to the concrete by the riverside wall and stayed low. I flicked in and out of the protest channel and saw chaos through shaky hand-helds: people fleeing through dense smoke, men on rooftops manning heavy weaponry, shapes flitting through the air above them, blinding flashes and screams for help. They really thought that thousands of heroic deaths like that would turn our quisling leaders into allies. They'd refused to learn the lessons of Manhattan and Istanbul and the countless other disasters. They refused to accept the possibility that the ETs just didn't care.

"We'd better get to shelter," I shouted to Hany next to me. The swarm calling itself Kepri had vanished. The Beanpods were flooding the area with their sonic cannons, and our temples were split with a sharp screech that surrounded us on every side.

"Promise me you will sink about it," he shouted back as we turned into his road at a run. "I can always advance you some cash now." I shook my head at him in disbelief.

His mother, little sister and brother welcomed us in with many a worried glance up and down the street. We sat at their thick wooden dinner table decorated with a fancy cloth. They'd sold so many of their household goods just to survive, but eventually there was no one with spare money to buy their table and stove, and they had to barter. Also they'd clung to their paintings: Madonna and Child, and St George Slaying the Dragon, both of which surveyed the table from on high. Hany's mother, rotund and smiling as if it were Christmas already, brought in dishes of rice and pasta with a thin veneer of spicy sauce. I was constantly malnourished from a life on the streets. I think only Hany's family kept me alive. Hany's father had died five years before, so Hany, as the man of the house, gave thanks for the food. The chaos outside was forgotten, or ignored, and I basked in their smiles and attention. Then a goblin down in the dungeons of my mind cackled that I'd be back to square one as soon as I walked out the door. I swatted him and told him to shut up.

As we ate, the noise subsided. Hany told the others about our encounter with Kepri, and his mother tut-tutted in concern. "One day," she said, in Arabic, "we must all go and live in Deir Alanba Antonius together, with the holy fathers. Those strange creatures never dare to come near. It is a holy place." She was referring to St Anthony's Monastery, in the Red Sea mountains. Hany and his family, as true Copts, kept a special respect and love for the monks who maintained these isolated sanctuaries of rest through thick and thin. It's said to be the first Christian monastery ever built. My mother had found an equivalent in Libya: a new agricultural village a hundred kilometers from the nearest town of any size. These are the sorts of places where you could still get away with putting up a sign saying, "Aliens not welcome."

I checked the protest site and saw that the Beanpods had taken out the heavy weapons, along with the tops of some of the buildings where they'd been, but had refrained from striking the mass of civilians. The protesters continued to chant and had occupied the Square, seeking to repeat history, while tending to their wounded. But the opinion tweets varied between wildly euphoric to dismissive, with little in between. Some thought that the njuk had sent the Beanpods. Neither the Egyptian government nor the UN would dare support the protesters.

Hany, meanwhile, hadn't stopped talking. He was like a pop-up ad that wouldn't quit. The basis of it was that a yleinki, new to Earth, wanted to green the whole Sahara using ice-water from the asteroid belt, and a group of Egyptian businessmen had set up an investment scheme for him. The terms were such that almost anyone could invest, and could apparently withdraw dividends, or whatever it is you withdraw from these things, at an enticing profit, thanks to the yleinki's staggering wealth and his inexperience with the human financial culture. "I've invested most of our family savings," Hany enthused, over a bowl of the green, viscous molokhaya. I never got used to molokhaya, even though it's an ancient Egyptian delicacy, since it reminded me of what juarrabils are meant to eat when there's no meat around. I don't do lizard food.

I told him I'd pass on the scheme this time, though maybe later...

A rare frown passed across his face. "Do you know zat Botros Mishael Sarofim, the banker who proposed zis opportunity, spent two years living and traveling with the yleinki? In space?"

I told him no, I didn't know that the Bats allowed passengers. I had nothing to say to that.

"If you miss zis chance, you may end up like the beggars in the street, Rashad!" This was his final word, his direst warning. There was a look in his eyes - reproach? -and it worried me that perhaps now he'd give up on me: Rashad, the bone-headed mule who won't listen. I should feign interest. I thanked him for his advice, saying I'd think about it some more, but I don't think he was fooled. My little goblin peeped out of a trapdoor somewhere and squeaked, "You're pushing it! He'll unfriend you, you'll see!" Then he disappeared as I threw a mental boot at him.

Finally Hany smiled a little and we talked about soccer. The Africa Cup was in full swing at the far corner of the continent.

After several cups of weak, sugary tea and a visit from Sharlene in which she reassured herself that we were still alive and uninjured, I said goodbye. I started left along the street, back the way we'd come, but stopped, deep in thought. I could go back to Hany and go in with him on greening the Sahara. It wouldn't hurt. Perhaps it would even pay off, eventually. But in which decade? And what would that make me, now? And wouldn't that leave Hany in control? He had this latent control streak that he normally kept on a leash very well. I replayed our conversation again as I stood there. What he had to say about the banker was news to me.

I turned and went the other way, struck with what Hany had told me about Botros Sarofim. If he could do it, why couldn't I? In Al Azhar district I had a friend - well, perhaps friend would be too strong a word - far, far too strong a word - who could help me. He could help me on my way, then I'd save my mother. If I had to leave Hany behind, then so be it. By my own sweat and wit, I'd snatch her from the jaws of an ugly death. Besides, I reflected, I'd always wanted to travel.

The Great Escape

The old mosque still stood on the corner, caked in dust and dwarfed by the monstrous tower blocks all around, like a mushroom in a forest of pines. I was gazing up at it, the sky had grown dark, and I almost stepped out in front of a pod of Bloats as I crossed Bur Saiid Street. Five swollen sacs, mottled avocado green and ocher, taller than I was, each one the shape of an inverted pear, bounced gracefully across my path. "Whoa! Sorry!" I said, but their kind doesn't do sound. Each whipped out from their lower, narrow ends several translucent yellow tubes, fringed with long gossamer threads, each thread seemingly muscled and tactile. Each tube flicked out and feather-dusted my knees and my feet before passing on. I winced and hurried across the road, through the central reservation, and across again to the beginning of Al Qila'a Street which forked off Bur Sa'iid Street at that point and ran a straight kilometer to the splendid Sultan Hasan mosque and the tomb of the Shah of Iran, both sheltering in the shadow of the spiny-towered Mohammed Ali citadel on its rocky hill.

Then, taking a breath as if preparing for a dive, I plunged into the Darb Al Madbah district. The jungle of yleinki-built fifty-storey towers scowled down at me for a minute, then I was among them, beneath their gaze, dodging all manner of foot traffic. I passed people from every continent, every country, especially the European refugees like me. A group of six-foot-tall, pasty-white skinheads walked in line abreast, scowling at everything that moved. Everyone else dodged aside. I was too slow and dodged in between two of them, receiving a glancing kick.

Then I almost tripped over a cross-legged guitarist with hat placed on the ground, strumming "Blowin' In The Wind". Somehow his hat tipped up and dozens of coins in a dozen currencies bounced onto the cracked concrete. The busker shouted at me, and I spent a minute helping him pick up the coins, snatching them from under people's hurrying feet. Crunch! A heavy foot fell on the fingers of my left hand. I yelped and yanked the hand away. Looking up, I saw a thick, furry, orange body something like a gorilla, but with four arms splayed out in place of a head: a muohatuk. It had barely noticed me as it walked by, and that was good. It was scratching its back with the thin, triple-jointed arm that jutted out at the back. Since its sensory organs were located in its front pseudo-arm, I was beyond its notice and it passed on. I shivered with dread at the thought of what could have happened. Holding my wounded fingers in the other hand like newborn chicks, I pressed onwards. It felt like all the joints of all the fingers of my left hand had broken.

Someone just behind my shoulder said, "Zat looked painful. Let's go to a pharmacy, okay?" I whirled around. It was Hany.

I think I showed irritation for a moment, because his face fell. He didn't look too cheerful to start with, and I knew something had to be very wrong. It turned out that the investment opportunity he'd told me about had crashed. There'd been a sudden withdrawal, a huge wadge of investments pulled out. Then, in reaction, the yleinki had pocketed all the remaining cash and no human court could touch him. The news had come through just after I'd left his house. So most of his family's precious savings had vanished.

I cursed the Bats as amoeboid rays with souls of demons and -

"No," said Hany, firmly. "We don't do zat. Even to zem." He eyed me sharply.

I looked back at him. This was an attitude I could not entertain, but it was obviously integral to his way of life, from the way he was staring at me silently, weighing me in the scales. I scuffed my shoes in the dust. "Yeah, whatever," I muttered.

Hany had tracked me down on the net. After we found some first aid, we wandered the busy street and sat outside a café, sipping hot sahlab. You can still get real raisins and ground coconut if you ask nicely and pay handfuls of bills. Mmm. For once, I was buying. The evening had cooled off, and a few stars were coming out. The stars, oh yeah, the stars. My parents, Sharlene, that whole generation still had a wistful liking for the night sky.

We talked. Hany pointed out the various rare alien races passing by. I told him the xenopopulation of Earth was growing exponentially, and the human population was shrinking alarmingly, although from death by famine and genocide or from emigration, no one could tell. For centuries the poor of the Earth had migrated from country to country, and from continent to continent, in search of a livelihood. Now we're all poor, and the gold-paved galaxy beckons. "People are gone seeking their fortunes up there," I said. "Nothing left for them here. You know how Bono went off to negotiate with the njuk leaders, and even he never came back. So much for their final reunion gig."

Hany frowned, and said he didn't know about all that.

I asked Hany how I could help him, and he stared at me for a long time. I'd never seen him so pensive. Finally he said, "Take me wiz you."

"How do you know where I'm going?" I asked, caught by surprise. He claimed I was always talking about traveling away. I was caught between dragging him into my own uncertainty, and fearing to travel alone, with no one with me I knew. I protested that he'd be leaving his family to fend for themselves. He claimed they had relatives nearby. Underneath my protests, as I realized later, was a fear: I had come to see in Hany a solidity I needed, and now here he was, in need of my help...

In the end our friendship won. Even though I didn't want to see him get hurt, I'd be glad of his company. He followed me down a few narrow passageways, through a street market, through an ancient city gate, and through a doorway in a concrete wall plastered with graffiti. We climbed a dark stairwell that smelled of leaking toilets and rotted vegetables, and I knocked at a door.

"Who zis man, specially?" asked Hany in a tense whisper. His English seemed to let him down under stress. I shushed him.

The door cracked open wide enough for one eye of a woman's face to show. She examined us for a moment, and I mumbled the man's name. The door opened up and we went in.

The hallway was uncarpeted, and three of the four doors were closed. The woman had already entered one of them and shut herself in. We stepped through the fourth, into a room where five or six men lounged on mattresses and smoked shisha. I'd never got comfortable with the water pipe. It was still tobacco, however much you scented it.

Abdurahman Al Hanafi was a man I had met once at a friend's house. He looked like a figure from one of those folk tapestries or paintings you can buy in the Khan El Khalili market: a pale, patterned headscarf wound tightly on his head; long, coarse galabiya robe of pigeon-gray; an impressive mustache and dark, beady eyes fixed on my face as he puffed on the shisha mouthpiece. It's normal, you'll notice: the more the space invaders encroach on our territory, the more some people will retreat into their comfortable past and try to re-assert their identities. He greeted me loudly in Arabic and stumbled over my name until I reminded him. They made room for us next to him, and after he'd finished a conversation with his neighbor he turned to me.

"So, how is your health? And your parents? And how do you like our great city now?" His voice rasped, and he broke into a cough. I saw no warmth in his eyes.

I explained my goal, with Hany translating the abstract words. He nodded. "And this one too?" he asked, waving the mouthpiece at Hany. Everyone else in the room grew quiet and regarded us solemnly. I felt we'd committed some great sin in their eyes.

I said, "Yeah, he's coming too."

Abdurahman nodded again, and stood. "Come, come," he said. "I will take you to him." Hany and I looked at each other speculatively. Now I was just as much in the dark as he was.

As we followed Abdurahman's broad back down the stairs and out a back door, I thought I saw a speck of green shooting through the dark towards us. Then, the voice of Kepri came into my ear: "Mister Rashad Stevens, it is I, Kepri." I stopped dead, and Hany rear-ended me with a muffled exclamation. We almost fell down the stairs. I explained to him, under my breath, and we got moving again.

Kepri carried on as if nothing had happened. "Since your friend Hany Girgis is accompanying you, I am now addressing him also. I have a great deal of thanks to convey to you." Now Abdurahman was striding across a crowded market street, and we had to dodge and weave to keep him in sight. "Just as you said, friend Rashad, the Sahara investment scheme owned by that deceitful yleinki individual proved to be a dangerous proposition. It collapsed shortly after I withdrew my funds, and I have no way to express my gratitude for your most timely warning. My race is largely dependent on my management of these funds."

I caught my breath, but didn't dare to speak. Even I can grasp a little about how investors behave. We walked in silence for a minute. Finally I gathered a little courage. "How much, roughly, did you have in the scheme?" I asked, in as light a tone as I could manage.

"Well," came the thoughtful answer, "to be candid, I do not make a habit of divulging such details to others outside my immediate, shall we say, circle of hive-associates. But I can tell you that the amount would dwarf the budget of one of your nations. I am slowly building up a picture of your world's modus operandi, and to be quite candid again..."

While Kepri prattled busily on, I slowed and walked alongside Hany. I couldn't look at him. "Look, Hany," I finally stammered, "this alien creature obviously took my casual remarks the wrong way. I couldn't be expected to..."

Hany turned a tired smile on me that spoke a thousand words.

I looked away and blinked hard. "I'm sorry, Hany. I shouldn't have spoken so freely with that - with Kepri. Its withdrawal spooked the yleinki. Now you've lost your savings. Your family's savings." The world was getting blurry for some reason. "No hard feelings?"

Hany shook his head. "The Lord gives, the Lord takes away," he said, finally. Right then, I knew I had a friend I couldn't afford to lose.

After a further quarter of an hour of crowded streets, meandering alleyways and dark doorways, we found ourselves in a similar apartment, but furnished to maximum intensity with urns, embroidered hangings, purple and gold glassware, paintings of veiled women, white stallions and mosques, as if the owner had raided a dozen antique shops and crammed his prizes into the four small rooms. There were items in the style of the Ottoman and Abbasid periods, as well as some Twentieth-Century memorabilia: tourist trinkets from Luxor and the Pyramids were strewn liberally, and a First World War rifle hung on a wall. We gawped at everything.

I noticed that Kepri's swarm had remained in the shadows outside the doorway to the apartment, but I felt one tiny speck land on the lobe of an ear. I saw that Hany also had gained a green earring. "The occupant of this dwelling is a person with whom I would rather not meet, neither would I like to be mentioned in his presence," Kepri whispered to us. I nodded my head slightly.

Only one room appeared to be occupied. Curtains flapped sullenly in an open balcony doorway. Beyond the curtain lay the Cairo night, full of rustling and angry car horns, voices, shouts, laughter - somehow the Egyptians hadn't forgotten this ancient art - and arguments. On a vulgarly ornate chair sat a short, spindly figure. "A muraro," whispered Hany.

"They are what you humans would label a genetically-engineered breed," whispered Kepri, "grown in their thousands in a special facility."

I nodded, but I didn't get it. The First Ones had been uncovered as frauds long ago, slaves of the slimy, ugly njuk. How would this skinny alien with a swelled head get us to another planet? The muraros were known to be little more than drones. Abdurahman ushered us in after holding a short conversation of whispers with the alien. I'm pretty sure some money disappeared into the man's galabiya pocket.

The muraro sat quietly on the chair, in the center of the room, without a desk or anything in front of him except a tapestry on the wall. It was as if he'd been staring at the wall hanging for the past few hours. The tapestry, silver thread on black, showed a scene on the banks of the Nile: a sail, a woman drawing water, an ibis wading in a flooded field, some houses. "Zat's nice," whispered Hany.

Kepri's voice peeped in my ear. "This room is decidedly over-endowed with electronic eavesdropping devices. I shall henceforth remain silent."

We stood to one side of the muraro and he - it, I decided - slowly turned its face towards us. They say that the njuk engineered the muraro for maximum innocence. It worked at first, of course, for the first two or three years after First Contact. It was more or less what we had been expecting. But now those big surprised-cat eyes and bulging baby-head and little, round mouth mean nothing to anyone except betrayal and the beginning of the nightmare. An image of Istanbul came back to me: ruins, thick smoke, and the last memories I had of my real mother and father, leaving the house that last day. I stared at the alien and swallowed hard, feeling a bitter wad of emotions welling up. I wondered if it could read minds, like in the movies. In that case I could be in trouble. I fought to keep my expression calm.

Its voice was rich and mellow, with a distinctly Oxford slant to its English, as I remembered it from the net clips. "So you want to travel, do you?" It blinked, ever so slowly, its fine eyelashes giving it a coquettish look. So we began talking, and the muraro introduced itself as Gary. Gary seemed to have a very dry sense of humor. "As in Newman. The great escape artist." I knew vaguely what it was referring to, and stared, but Hany had drawn a blank.

Gary said there was a wide-open opportunity for work on a habitable planet orbiting a certain star to be found in the constellation Hydra. After warning us in an offhand manner about the dangers of such travel and work, it said, "But I'm sure you are men and can face such dangers bravely." I said it was no problem. I asked what work we would be expected to do, and it attempted a shrug with its thin shoulders and replied that the nature of the work varied. I pressed, and it finally mentioned agricultural labor and household work as the main possibilities. Hany and I swapped skeptical glances.

Gary and I talked more, about guarantees, fees and wages, and I began to feel that this crazy idea was finally taking on flesh and bone. It might actually happen. I could soon be earning good money. I told Gary, "Right, I'm in. Count me in."

Meanwhile, Hany was quiet. When Gary stopped talking and looked back at the wall hanging, Hany took me aside. "Do you know what you're doing?" he hissed. "You're selling yourself. There are no guarantees, remember? You told me zat yourself." He was backing out. Perhaps he'd learned his lesson from the yleinki scheme.

I took him into the hallway and told him that of course he didn't have to go. But I was going to seize this chance to dig myself out of my hole. "But your mozzer, in the meantime..." he prompted.

I responded that I had no other way to help her. "This is what a man does," I told him quietly. "I have to do this. For my mother." Hany looked at me sharply, sifting my words, not replying. I could tell he was thinking, but I didn't know what.

My hand had stolen back into my pocket and I was fingering the plastic seed packet again. For my mother... and my mother's trees. I pictured her row of bonsai trees, set up on the rough wooden shelf I'd nailed up in her shack the last time I'd visited her. She'd been lying down, looking over at me. Her face was swollen with a greenish-blue bruise. The fungus had crept up on her like a malevolent lover, and now it wouldn't leave. Her eyes had become puffy until it was hard to recognize the soul inside them. "One day..." she'd say, "one day we'll grow an apple tree, too." That was when the journey had really started. I'd nodded to her and said nothing, just thinking about how I would do it, and where I might be able to buy some apple seeds. The next day I left for Cairo.

The door to Gary's apartment opened, and in came an Egyptian woman of middle years, wider and heavier than Hany's mother, swathed in several layers of dark dresses and scarves and towing a boy not yet in his teens as her chaperone. She was the type with whom you wouldn't want to fall into an argument: sharp tongue, sharper wit and a bullhorn of a voice. Still, she glanced around anxiously until she triangulated on the alien which called itself Gary.

"There you are!" she began at top bellow, in street Arabic. The boy managed to pull away from her hand and remained at the room's doorway, but she took up her battle position directly in front of Gary's slight form. "So now what is your excuse? How much longer you going to abuse the poor women of this city, eh? You got anything for me, or you going to let us all starve, me and my ten children?" The muraro, meanwhile, sat perfectly still and looked up at her with its big, reproachful cat's eyes. She went on for quite a while, producing as material evidence her long-suffering son Murad, dragging him into the room and baring his skeletal chest and negligible abdomen, and showing the scar from which one kidney had allegedly been extracted, to be sold for a pittance to keep the family alive. She berated Gary, she shamed him as if she spoke before a thousand-strong audience of his peers. We gathered that she was awaiting the earnings from her eldest son Mohamed, who'd traveled away on a yleinki vehicle more than a year before.

Even as she began her tirade, a man emerged from the shadows of the balcony and attempted to calm her, calling her "Om Mohamed", Mohamed's Mum, in a neighborly tone, though his voice was hoarse and wasted. This man was little taller than the boy Murad, and dressed in a suit jacket far too large for him. His frame was that of several wire coat hangers artfully twisted into human form; his clothes hung loose. The skin clung to his cheeks in a way that made me think of an aged drug addict, or someone who has seen too much of life. He spoke Arabic stiltedly, as though he was inventing the words moment by moment. His fingers, like twigs, sculpted and cut the air as he spoke about patience and about the vast distances involved, staring at Om Mohamed with sunken eyes.

The woman, distracted, divided her fury between the alien and the scarecrow-man.

We looked on for a while, then backed off further away from the noisy argument. I was having second thoughts. The question of trust loomed largest. Perhaps Hany was right: there could be no guarantees with people like this. When I told Hany this, he shook his head. "No! You were right!" he said. "We have to do zis, for our families. No problem zhe risk. We can keep our earnings wiz us. No problem zhe trust. Mish mushkilla. We are men, and we will do it - togezer." His eyes were wide, and I noticed that his forehead glistened with moisture. I chewed my lip.

Finally Om Mohamed subsided when Gary's minder passed her a small handful of cash with a promise of more within a week. Then he turned to us with a disturbingly piercing stare and asked us if we were ready to sign. I told him I'd come back the next day with the money. The man turned to Gary and began a dialog in a language I'd never heard before. At length he nodded, and turned back to us. "Actually, we can get you out into the pipeline later tonight. How's that sound? You up for that?"

His words brought me out in a sweat. I wanted to know exactly where this planet was, and how we'd get there, and everything, but Gary just shook its head. Suddenly it seemed more realistic to turn back to selling trinkets and plastic toys in the streets of Cairo.

Odor of Sheep

We were shooting upwards through the mesosphere at last. We two and maybe ten other unfortunates had been packed into an airtight carbonfiber crate previously used, it seemed, for exporting from Earth a large number of live sheep. It hadn't been washed since, so we were all gagging on the smell. I should mention that Kepri had fixated on us - well, on me, really - in a fervent expression of thanks. It had ways of secreting itself into the tiniest of cracks in the wall and could still communicate with us unobtrusively. I had finally asked it to refrain from a running commentary as we launched, although it was keen to fill us in on the technical aspects of the alien technology around us. It seemed that we were launching on board one of the shuttles that the juarrabils had commissioned the Chinese to build a decade before, complete with badly calibrated bias drive that caused all the knocks and bangs. So it wasn't that the spacecraft was shaking us around, but rather that the Gravitational Constant was fluctuating throughout the length of the vessel, like the beat frequency produced when two motors are running not quite at the same speed. So said Kepri, who was of the opinion that the Chinese had produced their own bias drive-powered vehicles in secret, but had never reached orbit with them. The yleinki, njuks and juarrabils are known to maintain a thorough detection network. We know it, and they know we know. But the moment we get our hands on their toys...

There was no light source save a tiny LED next to the locked hatch through which they'd pushed us. They'd told us to hold tight to the straps used for strapping down the terrified animals, but what with the crushing acceleration and violent shaking, I had lost hold of mine. At least between us there were a number of low partitions, forming cramped stalls, so we didn't smash into each other as we pitched and tossed in the filthy straw. Hany was three or four stalls along from me. There was a lot of howling noise too, all across the audible spectrum, which I associated with the shuttle forcing its way through the atmosphere.

Needless to say I was regretting my decision to travel, with a painful intensity. After what must have been half an hour of bruising at several gravities, the rattling gradually faded and I could hear other travelers moaning and crying out for help. The odor of vomit insisted itself into my air passages. I shouted out to Hany, but heard nothing from him. Heaving myself up so I could peer over the partition, I looked for him, but it was far too dark. What would I do if he didn't make it?

Gradually the roaring noise slackened off, I suppose as we flew through thinner air and out of the atmosphere altogether. The man in the next stall began chuckling to himself, like a man who can't stop coughing. "What's up with you?" I asked.

"You gotta laugh," came the reply in the darkness, some sort of British accent, maybe an exile from London. "You pay your whole life savings, then they say hurry up an' wait. So we wait in that friggin' shipping container for three days, just sweating, starving, then it's all rush and hurry, driving us like bleedin' animals, shaking us to bits... Whatever comes next, you gotta be glad we didn't take that half-price option that Mister Potatohead offered us."

I grunted in reply. Gary had agreed, after much haggling, to accept the little money Hany and I had, on condition that he receive half of our first five paychecks. I was curious about that strange creature sitting in its wildly furnished apartment: a species renowned for its complicity in deceit, yet willing to be bartered down. I asked the man next to me if he knew anything about the muraro. He replied that this muraro used to be a regular puppet - that's what the name means, apparently, puppet, a creature enslaved by some kind of unbreakable control - but when its njuk master had perished in a firefight with the second juarrabil landing party, Gary had escaped and learned to live independently, subsisting off the scrapings of human society. "I had a fag with 'is minder," my neighbor said. "That skinny little bloke. That's how I know."

"No more smokes up here, though," I remarked, and he gave a low grunt in response, which I interpreted as meaning that anything was possible.

When our world gave a few murderous jerks we all got a scare. The gravity had tailed off to a bit less than we were used to, and everything had gone quiet for a while, except the moans and complaints from people in the crate, so we had thought we were through the worst of things.

Then suddenly the hatch was wrenched open and a series of head-splitting screeches sent my hands to my ears.

The exact sequence of events of the following few minutes is a bit of a jumble in my head. Once we'd all crawled out, nursing serious bruises and flicking from our clothes pieces of sheep muck, and I'd made sure Hany was there - bleary and nauseous but offering me a weak smile that was like a sunburst to me - we realized that the continuing painful bursts of noise emanated from a mass of slim, sinuous arms that clung to the low ceiling. Its cheddar-colored body was small, and the arms were of a material that was halfway on a sliding scale between organic and mechanical. The pulsed shrieking it gave out gradually took on vague form: an approximation of a voice, made up of screeches as of a variety of metal blades drawn across sheet metal. For a long time it was impossible to tell if there were words.

Everyone backed off when it was plain that its tentacles could reach us. The Kepri-cloud's subtle shimmer diffused and migrated into the shadows. I grabbed Hany and got us against the far wall, banging my head on the low ceiling in the process. One fellow-traveler was too slow and the creature plucked him up by the ankle and dragged him to a large open floor hatch. When it dropped him, I think we all gasped or cried out. His form vanished without a sound. The creature scuttled closer across the ceiling, shrieking again. We scattered along the walls, into the shadows. Some kept going along the long, narrow room, stumbling towards a widely-spaced string of distant lights. No one seemed to have any idea what was happening.

The compartment where we'd emerged from the crate appeared to be a thin, indefinitely long hallway, barely five feet high, pitch dark apart from occasional splashes of dim light like the one in which we found ourselves. The walls, ceiling and floor were all a dun brown, and slightly elastic. Our crate was not alone: three more like it had been dropped nearby. The tentacled creature swiped an arm and opened them one at a time, and more human forms emerged. Several of them were grabbed straightaway and dropped through the hatch. Many of the people crawled or ran around in a blind panic. I realized I was clutching Hany's arm as if he could save me, and let go.

The man who'd been in the partition next to mine was trying to get everyone's attention. "If we all grab onto that thing at once, we can bring it down. Ain't nothing gonna throw me down into some mincer." He had the physique of a wrestler. Several other men nearby nodded. I hung back with Hany and watched. I said in his ear, "I think we should back out right now. Get our money back. This is insane."

He directed a disapproving frown my way. "Too late," he mouthed. An icy shiver ran down my backbone.

Kepri spoke up then. "In point of fact, your friend Mr Girgis is quite correct. We are already in low earth orbit, inside a secure juarrabil facility."

"What is that thing on the ceiling?" I asked Kepri.

"The nearest equivalent human concept is a cyborg, although perhaps a biological hybrid robot would be a more accurate description. Our hosts call it mrech. Unfortunately it was not designed to communicate with humans."

A woman who had just emerged from a crate waved her arms at the knot of men. She was yelling something.

Finally I realized that the squid-thing on the ceiling, the mrech, was speaking a kind of English constructed of metallic screeches. I could make out the words, "Transit" and "Cooperate". Then, in a miraculous moment of quiet, the woman was shouting, "I've been through this before! It's alright. It's just a transport system to the next place." So saying, she walked over to the hatch and hopped in.

A distant, growing rumble shook the floor under our feet. We looked around. "Something's up," said a man next to me. A breath of air wafted down the long corridor-like space.

The knot of belligerents refused to accept what the woman had said. They charged at the ceiling-squid, but it merely seized them three at a time and took them to the hatch. One of them, a well-muscled man, managed to break off the end of a tentacle. He threw it, and it landed at my feet in pieces. Without a definite thought, I grabbed the attachment that had been at the end. It looked obscurely like a tool.

Then the rumble became a roar, and the distant lights winked out one by one. "Water!" someone yelled.

I turned to Hany. "Down the hatch!" I shouted, over the chaos. He nodded. We ran, crouching the whole time, to the hatch. Others followed. Kepri zoomed ahead of us, straight into the hatch. I glanced in. A meter or two below floor level could be seen a dazzling flow of light, like quicksilver with flecks of darkness moving at unguessable speed. It gave no sound.

Hany shouted, "Ya Rab satrak!" - which I think was a prayer - then he leaped in and vanished without a splash. I looked up and saw a wall of water charging down the passageway, and maybe ten or fifteen people rushing over to the hatch.

I held my breath and jumped.

My dreams were cacophonic, of swimming against an inexorable current, of falling through the stratosphere strapped to a dentist's chair, complete with Gary the slo-mo dentist, and the impression of being smothered head to toe in ice cream. The sensation of falling followed me into full consciousness, and I was floating in zero gravity, surrounded by silent gray statues tethered on gray cords to rails on a nearby wall, or perhaps a ceiling or floor, it was impossible to tell. I was encased in freezing bubble wrap, I thought, until I looked down at myself. I, too, was as gray as the statues, save for my face and hands. Horror fell upon me. Both of my hands were clenched in fists.

We were a group of thirty or more, floating under a bright sky... no, wait, at the edge of a great, limitless chamber flooded with light. Perhaps. Others were waking up.

I took a deep breath. My clothes had disappeared. Then I had lost... No. In my right fist I gripped a small plastic packet. Sure enough, in it were the apple seeds. Seeing them was as good as a miracle for me. I still had a future, despite the nightmarish present. Strangely enough, the gray suit had deep thigh pockets, and I pushed the packet in there.

I opened my left fist and saw the squid-thing's tool. I stuffed that in the other pocket a little guiltily.

I called out Hany's name. Others were stirring too. We talked a little. There was the face of the London man, whose name I learned was Eric, and there was the woman who'd been through this before. She was quietly talking to her neighbor. She told me her name was Christina, originally from Slovakia. I said I was Rashad, from nowhere in particular. She grinned at me, as if I'd made a joke, and I was smitten, though her face was a little puffy and snub-nosed.

I asked her about her first trip, and she wrinkled her nose. "It didn't go so well. Arrested the moment we stepped out of the lander. Shipped home. But if I can make enough on this job, I'll just take the money and run. I'm not going back to Earth if I can help it. There's nothing there for me." I tried not to frown. That wasn't what I'd expected. I felt a distaste for her plan, and at the same time a complicity with her feelings for wanting to escape.

Then she asked me about my reasons for doing this. I talked about earning money to pay for my mother's treatment, but it didn't sound very convincing to me.

"Rashad! Over here!" There was Hany, by the wall. He'd pulled himself hand over hand along his tether. I did the same. We found the gray material of the suit to be flexible, and managed to pull off our hoods. Others noticed and did the same. Christina's hair, shoulder-length golden silk, floated around her like a mane. Eric had sidled up to her somehow.

"What's happening to us?" I asked Hany. He shook his head, with wide eyes. We hadn't spotted Kepri yet. Pity - it had been useful as a guide.

Christina nodded to me, and took the role of guide instead. "We've just been detoxified, that's all - cleaned up - and dressed for work," she said. "We're in the people-smugglers' Underground. The flooding you told me about, where we were, that was most likely part of a cleaning routine. The smugglers use spaces like that secretly, I think, so the System doesn't know. Officially know."

"We're just cattle," said someone. Christina didn't reply.

"Sheep," said someone else. That got a quiet chuckle from several of us.

"Where is this?" asked Eric. We could see no far end to the chamber in which we found ourselves. The walls were interrupted by extruded shapes and indentations beyond our understanding. It was like swimming over the floor of a vast, sunny ocean floor made of cubes.

But Christina had no idea. "Either up in space or - or in some other dimension," was her hesitant answer. One of our number with a scientific mind was of the opinion that the aliens didn't use a propulsion system involving reaction mass to travel between stars, but could manipulate space-time itself. Others scoffed at that. Christina said, "I think this is where we-"

Just then there was movement at the wall. The tethers were grouped a few to a rail, and each rail was tugging its tethered captives away. We all began drifting along like so many helium balloons on a sunny day at the beach, with the tethers proving to possess a certain amount of rigidity along their five-meter lengths. My inner goblin began panicking. I followed the rails with my eyes, and saw that they diverged after about ten meters, each disappearing distantly in a separate tunnel. The tunnels were sized like aircraft hangars, and deep within them a flickering of silver lit them up like haunted houses at a funfair.

I looked down at my rail and Hany's, and saw that they were not the same. "Hey!" I shouted to him. "They're breaking us up in groups!" I quickly pulled myself down my tether. It was attached to a wheeled runner inside the track housing. "Gotta go to the same place," I gasped. He swung over to me, offering help. I looked up, checking who else was on the same tracks as us.

It was then that I noticed that I was on the same track as Christina. I froze. The point of divergence in the tracks approached rapidly. To understand my indecision, you need to know that I'd never found mutual love through my life of exile and wandering, nothing that lasted beyond half an hour of idle chatter. It was a lack that often kept me awake in the dark, massaging the ache in my chest, hoping, imagining. Christina could be the one. A pathetic, blind groping, it seems now, but at that point she was a gemstone uncovered by a beggar.

"What is it?" asked Hany, and that unfroze me quickly enough. Better the friend you know...

We pulled and twisted, bracing our feet on the white wall surface as we slid along, but the tethers were made of tougher stuff than that.

"What's zat in your pocket?" he asked me, purely out of curiosity. We laughed over that one, much later.

Soon the alien tool-thing was out, and I fumbled around with it, snarling, "Come off, you!" A glance showed me that the tracks diverged in just a couple of meters. One of the points of the tool might fit into that slit in the runner, I thought.

Click. As if in answer to my command, my tether came out of its runner. I felt myself beginning to float free, and reached over to grab hold of Hany's tether. I tried to repeat whatever operation I'd done, complete with the snarled command, to someone else's tether, intending to swap it with mine, even as the rails began diverging. As I struggled, the tool slipped from my grasp and spun away through the air. It had failed me. So there was nothing for it but to continue gripping Hany's tether. Hany let himself float away from the floor again, and I followed, holding tightly to his arm. My tether hung limp behind me.

"Oho, we've picked up a hitchhiker, have we?" Eric looked on, amused somehow, and I shrugged.

The tethers towed us apart. A few people called out to each other, but mostly we gave ourselves up to the journey. I didn't look at Christina. Hany and I were grouped with Eric and another of those who'd fought the squid-thing, as well as a short, dark woman who seemed to have retreated into herself. The hangar loomed before us and at its far end a great panel of the rushing silver we'd seen in that hatch beckoned us. I was beyond terror by that time: numb, resigned.

Just then, I felt a touch on my earlobe. "Ah, my friends Rashad and Hany," came Kepri's voice once more. "This inter-brane continuum is a most fascinating construction to explore. The manner in which the juarrabil have manipulated-"

I distantly heard Eric laugh and say, "Please keep your hands and feet inside the car at all times." His companion joined in his laughter, adding, "Potatohead Airlines would like to wish you a pleasant flight."

Honor

This time the dreams lingered: the same swimming against the current, endlessly, swept away into an ocean of silver and black. Kepri's monolog provided a surreal soundtrack.

Upon awakening, the first impression that hit me was a suffocating smell, like rotten eggs and sewage. I found myself on a waxy white palette the size of four double beds. Good, we have gravity again, I thought. The walls of the room were mostly taken up with drawers and instrument panels. Next to me, Hany, Eric and the other two in our group were stirring and sitting up.

We finally emerged from the room into a long, slightly curving corridor with an astounding view of the night sky. No, I realized, not night, for there, down low, shone two orange-red suns. And below, seeming close enough to touch, was the generous curve of a planet's surface filling the whole of the lower view, with the darkened quarter of the hemisphere studded with myriad patterns of lights. We decided we might be in orbit, but it seemed we were barely above the atmosphere. The dark-skinned woman, giving her name as Tarangini, turned out to be a physics graduate. She spoke out her guess that this might be a beanstalk habitat, tethered to the world's equator, with a counterweight reaching to geosynchronous orbit or beyond. She noted that we didn't appear to be moving relative to the cloudscape below. We shrugged and nodded at the appropriate points. Kepri said she was quite right. The hyusis had spread out its swarm around the corridor in order to remain unnoticed. Now and again a green dust-mote swam in my peripheral vision. It complained that this arrangement made it harder for it to think clearly.

A tall, legless, gracefully translucent ischa approached us. It was the first time any of us had met such an alien up close. Instead of a face, there was a blob reminiscent of a fringed jellyfish. Instead of legs, the ischa glided on a skirt of tiny pseudopods. The way its few internal organs were visible through its body gave my stomach a flip. But I'd heard often that ischi served as little more than household appliances to the so-called Greater Races, and none of us were more than nervous on its approach.

Its voice was calming and almost perfectly fluent, for an alien. It directed us through another door, where we were to sort through huge skips full of junk and garbage. The bad smell was obviously emanating from that room. We were reminded that the price of human labor was lower than the cost of automation only by a very small percentage, so we must work hard and not cause trouble.

Some others were already hard at work. I immediately recognized Christina, and my heart hip-hopped. We all compared notes as we worked. They'd arrived shortly before we had. I convinced myself that Christina was glad to see me as we laughed -quietly - about my fumbling effort to transplant myself onto Hany's rail, and here we all are anyway.

The variety of foul, slimy material in the skips was indescribable, but here and there we would dig out manufactured objects. These were sorted by two bald, silent humans we didn't recognize. We were required to wade into the toxic waste up to our hips, or deeper, and dig around with scoops. After a short time the skin of my hands was raw and irritated, despite the gloves provided, and the fumes from the skip burned down into my lungs. But I was glad of the clinging gray suit after all.

So it went on. Work was punctuated with infrequent breaks, which we took in a side room where a kind of tasteless gruel was provided, and with sleep periods, which we spent in cramped dormitories down a hallway. The suits seemed to sense when we needed to relieve ourselves, and the appropriate flap opened. Often I was beset with terrible itches which I could not scratch. Often I wanted to talk to Christina but she was not around, or refused to answer. When we did exchange a few words, it seemed that I'd sometimes bring a smile to her lips.

Meanwhile, Kepri disappeared for many hours at a time. When it came back, its familiar voice would again whisper in my ear. It said it was looking around and foraging for consumables - by which I suppose it meant food. It never stayed long enough for me to think of any useful questions to ask it; my mind was numbed by the labor .

Gradually, over the course of the first few shifts - it was impossible to think of days, since none of us had managed to keep a watch, and the local time periods were much longer than 24 hours - we succumbed to a listless stupor. Very few words passed between anyone anymore. I was lost in my own daydreams, replaying my favorite music in my head, re-imagining places I had been and people I had met. I constructed elaborate revenge fantasies in which I, Rashad Stevens, drove the aliens from our homeworld, perhaps returning to Earth at the head of the greatest space fleet the galaxy had ever seen.

Eric had lost his earlier sense of humor and spent his time muttering to himself or shirking his work, which most of us did at some point.

Hany was different, I think. He mostly worked in silence, but whenever I passed him he would smile at me, and often I'd hear him singing to himself in Arabic. I recognized the word "Allah", so they must have been hymns. Many of the tunes had a mournful swing to them, but others were quite jolly. Once, as I emerged from the skip, coated chest downwards in a clinging yellow mucus that smelled like industrial solvent with undertones of rotting meat, and weary to the bone, I muttered to him through clenched teeth, "How do you manage it?"

"Manage what?" he replied, surprised. He handed me a pair of nose plugs he'd fashioned from the edge of his sleeping mat. He was already wearing some, lending an air of clownishness to his appearance.

"Hey, thanks! I mean, to keep so cheerful."

Hany inclined his head to one side, considering. "I sink about my family, about sunshine, and good sings, and most of all I sink about my God."

I snorted as I made for the shower stand. "Your God? Where is he when you need him, eh? Don't you ever get angry? Or depressed?" I asked.

He nodded. "Yes, I do get. It is called the dark night of the soul. So I wait until the morning, and enjoy to look at the stars."

I gave up on that tack. We didn't have much in common when it came to religion. But mention of his family had reminded me of something. Once I'd hosed most of the muck off my suit, I asked him how he'd gathered enough ready cash, that evening, to pay Gary. Did his family still have enough to live on?

"I sold the paintings to Gary, and a few ozzer things." he admitted. "Yes, zey still have enough. Zey will stay wiz my uncle in Zagazig. Or go to the monasteries."

I recalled that Zagazig was a city in the Nile Delta, and nodded. "As for me," I admitted, "I have nothing left." I recalled those paintings: Madonna and Child, and St George and the Dragon. I knew that was a serious sacrifice for his family to make. Hany had to make good now. So did I.

It was about then that Gary's minder, the skinny scarecrow-man, showed up. We had learned from Eric that his name was Haviar Mendez. There were thirteen or fourteen of us working at the time. Instead of a gray suit, his was golden, with a cape and belt. He looked like a miniature superhero who had neglected his physique to the point of starvation, but he showed no sign of realizing this. He swaggered into our workroom, answering our stares with a "Get back to work!" and sneering at our efforts.

I recovered from the surprise of seeing him here, and remembered our conversation back in Cairo. I asked him where the agricultural work was that he'd promised us. It was probably a pretty dumb think to say.

He halted and stared at my feet a moment, as if at a cockroach. Without looking up, he spat out a few words: "This is agricultural work. This muck is what certain races grow their food in." I blanched at the thought, and recalled the molokhaya that Hany's mother had served us. At that moment I could probably have swallowed a whole bowl of that sticky stuff, without drawing breath.

He impressed upon us in a gloating fashion that a select few of us would stand a chance of promotion and bonus, those who worked the hardest, and that he would be judging the quality of our work. At that, he threw a scathing glance my way.

With that, Mendez minced up to Christina, who was almost a head taller than him, and led her away towards the dormitories with an oily smile. She began to protest and pull away, but he muttered something menacing to her, and she complied. They walked right past where I was standing. I could have blocked his way, but hesitated too long. I shouted, "Hey!" to their backs, but nobody seemed to notice. I gritted my teeth in an effort to stop my body trembling. It all happened so quickly.

Eric appeared to wake suddenly from a stupor. He said, "I'm not 'avin' that!" But even as he gathered together three of the men and whispered to them, I saw at the main doorway to the workroom a muohatuk sentry. "Uh-oh," muttered one of the men, "it's one of those headless gorillas." Its short front arm turned to and fro, watching us, while its left arm bore a thick, armored glove that might also have been a weapon. It stalked across the room and stood in the doorway leading to the dormitories, watching us the whole time.

Hany and I got busy with our work, hosing down and sorting metallic and non-metallic debris into bins. It was obvious that the muohatuk was more than capable of tearing each of us limb from limb, and I didn't feel like getting any further into the bad books of the golden scarecrow, however much I loathed what he might be doing to Christina.

Suddenly Eric's group acted. Two of them had scooped up some of the toxic gloop in buckets and now threw it over the muohatuk, while the other two set about the alien sentry with long metal tools. Its roar of outrage was deafening. It swung its two main arms and knocked Eric's tool out of his hands. He was thrown against a wall. A stream of projectiles shot from its armored glove and made a noisy mess of the ceiling just above Eric's head. Fragments hit my cheeks and nose, and I ducked down.

I had been expecting a blinding laser. It seems that shooting sharp little lumps of metal at people at high speed is always going to be a cheap and nasty way to hurt people.

The strongest of the men grabbed the muohatuk's gloved arm and wrestled it; a chatter of gunfire, and one wall gained a pattern of ragged holes. The two other men tackled its torso and right arm; meanwhile, Eric dodged around it and ran into the dormitory. Hany and I watched from behind the cover of a skip, wide-eyed. Everyone else had similarly scattered. I murmured Kepri's name, wondering if it could have affected the outcome of this unequal struggle, if it had been present.

The muohatuk threw off all three of the men in one convulsive movement of rage and leveled its left fist at the nearest as he tried to get up off the floor. There came a sharp flurry of reports, but the man had already thrown himself sideways, behind a metal bin and away from the stream of bullets.

Amidst the shouting and noise, I heard a sharp buzzing. Around the alien's form could suddenly be seen a dim green nimbus, and its four upper limbs froze in place. It swayed on its feet. Its three human assailants recovered enough to retrieve their metal rods and advance on the muohatuk. Still the creature had not fired its glove-weapon again. It was like someone had pressed 'pause'.

Kepri's voice sounded distinctly in the workroom. "Do not damage this being any further. It will not harm you now."

The ten or so of the others looked around in wonder and incomprehension. One of the men with rods advanced, growling, "Well, I'm going to do it some harm."

I had to speak up. "Just think about it. They have armies of these monsters stacked up somewhere. The voice you hear, it's okay, it's a friend," I said. "Do what it says."

The man hesitated, glaring at me.

Just then, the gold-suited scarecrow staggered from the dormitory holding his nose, which oozed blood. He looked around, bewildered at the sight of his paralyzed sentry, then hastened out of the room into the passageway, muttering that we hadn't seen the last of him yet.

On Kepri's advice, we congregated in the dormitory while it unfroze the muohatuk: a burst of gunfire, a grunt or two, then heavy footsteps exiting the workroom. We all breathed sighs of relief. Christina was sitting on the edge of a bed and Eric stood nearby.

We all had a long debrief. They had some questions about Kepri, and Kepri remained hidden but spoke through Hany and I. It claimed that Haviar Mendez did not dare report the incident to his juarrabil masters, since what he'd been attempting to do with Christina was against their code of behavior, as was enlisting a muohatuk as bouncer. Further, Kepri could mess with the audio and video surveillance feeds in the workroom and dormitory to erase all record of the event. It seemed it was adept at such tasks, including fogging the muohatuk's memory with the use of a nasal spray the juarrabil often used on them.

One of Eric's little gang, Akram by name, slouched onto a bed nursing a cut lip and a badly bruised cheek. I'd heard him say he was from Alexandria. He sounded like he'd learned all his English from movies. "So this, your alien, you say we trust it?" he asked, scowling and cursing. "How we trust any of those devils?"

He had a point. Everyone wanted to know more about this enigmatic cloud of green motes. But Kepri had had enough for one day, and vanished through an air vent. So Hany and I had to vouch for the hyusis, while knowing little more than they did about it.

Imagine our surprise, therefore, when an ischa glided into our workroom during the next shift and called us together for an announcement. It said, in clear but stilted English, that Eric, Akram and the other two involved in assaulting the muohatuk were to be transferred to another work team. Akram bared his teeth and glared at the messenger. Eric took a step backwards, looking somewhat pale. We all began protesting at once, but the ischa motioned for calm in a distinctly human fashion.

"This transfer... not punishment, but promotion. The juarrabil noble of this tower knows about fight. Juarrabil noble commends four workers. They prevent a shame from happening." I stared at Eric. He and the other three stood with their mouths hanging open. "Juarrabil noble happy with not-shame workers. Come now." With that, the ischa turned and glided away.

Eric called after it, "Wait! What, we just take your word for it?" There was no reply. Eric shook his head in frustration. "We don't go unless she goes." He took Christina by the arm.

Akram shook his head and walked towards the entrance. "No way, man. I go outta here." The other two hesitated. The ischa had already left the room.

Christina began to speak, telling Eric he had to go. Instead of heeding her, he convinced her to go with him. He'd negotiate her transfer. Then they were all gone, and they never returned to the workroom.

Kepri later apologized for his failure, and explained that the juarrabil in question had been watching the live video feed, and was now tracking down the cause of the recording being deleted. Hany asked how a juarrabil could possibly commend what had almost been an insurrection amongst us menial humans. Kepri didn't quite understand the question at first, but said that some juarrabil kept more strictly to their honor code than others. "This species is diametrically opposite in nature from the devious njuk, for example, who cannot contemplate any action whatsoever unless it is saturated through and through with intrigue and deception. Mister Mendez shared much of their nature. They are the masters of conspiracy, while the juarrabil excel in bold action which inspires fear in their enemies. Thus the noble of this tower applauded the aggressive action of your colleagues, and looked with disdain on Mister Mendez's performance."

So we got back to work. We didn't see Mendez again. I stuck with Hany more than before. I needed someone to commiserate me. I was sick with chagrin for more work shifts than I could count.

Chance To Make Big Bucks

"Why do you think I didn't do anything?" I asked Hany again, in a hoarse whisper.

He was spooning up the porridge that tasted like sour sawdust but sustained us through our work. I'd shoved in as much as I could take. He looked over at me and swallowed hard with a pained look. Tarangini sat at the other end of the table from us, and two of the others with her. "I sink you worry too much," he said.

Ten or twenty shifts had passed since the fight. I missed the presence of Christina, but more than that, I was left wondering what use I was, and why I was even doing this. "I think..." I went on, "I think I don't care for people much. Do you think I care about people? Really care?"

With a little smile, Hany looked me over like a doctor would. "Confession is good for the soul," he chanted, like a little song, turning my head to peer into my ears, giving my skull a little knock. Then he sat back. "I sink you worry too much about yourself," he said. "You should sink more about what good you can do."

"Thanks, doc," I said, summoning a brief grin. "But I got no confidence in myself. I could've help save Christina, both of us could, and got promoted out of here." The others got up and wandered back to work. I shrugged at Hany. "But there I go - just thinking about myself, like you say. I wonder why I ever did this. I've deserted my mother, haven't I? And anyway, how long will it take to earn some useful money?" We'd ascertained that the net pay rate on this slime-picking job was hopelessly low. They were deducting for accommodation and life support and even for the monotonous sludge we ate. Without that elusive promotion we were stuck for a long, long time. Tarangini had calculated it: five to ten years to pay off our debts to Gary, then another five or ten to earn enough so that it would be worthwhile going home. That killed me. There was no way I could do that.

And we hadn't seen Kepri for days. I knew that juarrabil currency was good medicine back on Earth, however, so at least the few grains of it we were earning would translate into a modest heap of cash eventually, if we ever made it home. They drip-fed us with little wage chips which we were encouraged to spend in shower cubicles, extra gruel, and the like.

If we ever made it home: that was a moot point. We'd managed to extract from Kepri the following data: this planet orbited a star known to our astronomers as BD 82077, and it was 913 light-years from Earth. None of us could get our minds around that. None of us recognized the constellations, on the rare occasions we were able to peep out at the view, and we had no idea where Sol lay.

Hany wasn't much help, really. He seemed almost content to slave away for as long as necessary, trusting unseen aliens to do the right thing when the time came.

So I worked away, hating the juarrabils, space gecko scum, hating myself for walking into this of my own free will, hating the food and the dim light and the stench which seeped around the most determined nose plugs we could make. And I hated carrying around those apple seeds. They reminded me how fast I was traveling away from ever realizing my hopes of having my own life, or of saving my mother.

The next time Kepri showed up I was waist-deep in a green gel in which were apparently suspended diced body parts of a creature that was an intersection of a giant gray fungus and a rotting squid. Kepri's green specks rose to the surface of the reeking gel and sat just under the surface. One crawled up my gray suit and sat behind my ear.

"I am deeply ashamed at my long absence," it began. "I am in what you call stealth mode. Please communicate by sub-vocalization, without moving your lips."

Mm-hmm, I said, and carried on scooping up gray bits into a floating basket.

It babbled on. "I have learned many things about this place. So much, in fact, that I must make the return trip to Earth to contact my fellow-hives. I have come by in order to bid you farewell, and to ask if there is any favor I may perform for you when I arrive at your homeworld."

I thought about that. My first request was that he drive off the juarrabils, yleinki and njuk from Earth and rebuild what they'd destroyed.

Hearing this, Kepri simulated a low chuckle. "I have come to appreciate the double nature of your race's humor. You say some of your deepest sayings through this fantastic style. Our race, too, was driven from its homeworld by a similar scourge of unwanted visitors."

So then I asked Kepri if it could take the few wage chips I'd earned so far and give the equivalent in Earth-cash to my mother. It replied that it could not carry even so small a load: the chips were the size of pennies.

Then I asked about traveling from this place: how would a human like me go about finding passage to Earth? I admit that a wave of homesickness was washing over me just then. It answered my question in such detail that I had to ask for some recapitulation. I memorized what I could.

A second later all the green specks had vanished into the gel. A muohatuk had patrolled into the workroom.

Then, a few shifts later when I was just heaving my leaden body from my bunk, the little physicist Tarangini beckoned to me at the door to the men's dormitory. I grunted and stepped her way. Without speaking - we knew we were under constant surveillance - she tucked a folded paper into my palm and nodded, before hurrying off to work. I stuffed it into my pocket and went to find some sawdust porridge.

Upon finishing that shift and falling into bed, I pulled the sheet way over my head and unfolded the paper. I'd been wondering about it the whole time, glancing at Tarangini constantly. But she gave no sign, either of affection or of nervousness.

Now I smoothed out the paper and read the handwritten note:

Chance to make big bucks. Need 4 more crew. Travel involved. Yleinki boss leaving at 28:83. Be ready. Keep secret from gerbils.

It was signed by Eric and Christina.

On the dormitory wall was a juarrabil clock, showing 27:12. I did the conversion in my head and realized there was only about an hour until the deadline. I hoped the gerbils didn't have bio-scanners mounted, because my heart rate had leapt, and I felt sweat pricking up on my forehead and palms.

Pushing my rebellious body out of bed, I went to the door of the women's dormitory. Tarangini was sitting up, chatting quietly to another of the women, but she saw me and came over.

I nodded once. She pointed one finger at herself, then two at me, then three at her companion, who had walked up behind her, then raised an eyebrow with all four fingers waving. I shrugged. I would have to show the note to Hany.

The four of us hung around at the entrance to the workroom, trying to look like we were on a break from work. Suddenly the door opened and there was Eric, looking grim and dressed now in a dark brown suit almost identical in design to our gray ones. We hurried after him without a backwards glance. He didn't say a word until we reached another room rather like the one in which we'd arrived, minus the wide white palette. Christina and two others sat on the floor, looking as exhausted as we did. There had been five of them originally, I recalled.

"Where is...what's his name? Akram?" I asked her.

She shook her head. "He didn't make it," she replied. I asked no more questions.

Quickly Eric briefed us on their offer. There was a yleinki vessel leaving very shortly, with the offer of simple but demanding household work at the other end of the trip. The trip, though, appeared to use a different type of technology to that which had brought us all to BD 82077. Eric's hurried description gave me the idea of a chute between this star and another, along which the vessel would slide in almost no time, but due to latent relativity effects many years would pass in the outside universe during the journey.

As he was speaking, he hustled us out of the room, down a hatch, along a dark corridor and through an echoing warehouse-like space. We moved furtively, like rats.

I caught up with him and asked just how many years would pass. He shook his head. "I dunno. Maybe five. Maybe ten or more. It's a long way, you know. Thousands of light-years, he told us."

Hany and I looked at each other, thinking the same thought. We both had someone waiting for us back home. How would this work out? But then we seemed to have arrived at the boarding point. Out of a series of slitted windows could be seen a perfectly monstrous apparition, which I took to be the yleinki spacecraft. You know when a stick of celery is left too long and begins to turn to mush? Plant on it rows of colonies of moss or mold, and handfuls of bent needles and buttons, then inflate it to the size that would dwarf any skyscraper on Earth, and that's what Eric appeared to want us to board.

"It's just the transfer shuttle," he told us. "Look."

Further out we could just glimpse a glimmering of elusive crystalline planes against the starry backdrop. "It's stealthed, to stop the juarrabils taking any official notice," said Eric.

Hany put his hand on my arm. "Do you want to do zis?" he asked me. I saw he was worried about this new journey, but didn't want to stop me. I remembered him telling me I had to think about other people, not just myself.

"We shouldn't go," I told him, with much more assurance than I felt. "I should go back to my mother, even if I don't have a pot of gold for her." There; I had said it. It was like someone had released a belt that had constricted my chest for so long.

Eric motioned briskly. "Gotta go. Now." A narrow tubeway had opened in the wall. It appeared to lead into the celery-stick monster. The others hurried towards it. Christina lingered.

"No," I told them, "we're not going. I'm sorry. The time lag..."

Hany pointed out the dangers facing them if they were caught escaping the juarrabil.

Christina nodded. "True, but he who dares, wins. It's better than staying put." She moved to the tubeway, following Tarangini and her friend. Eric scowled at us and after another intense exchange, gave up on us and muttered about rounding up two more at a moment's notice. He sprinted off the way we had come. Hany and I followed as fast as we could, knowing we'd never find the way back otherwise.

I turned to wave to Christina, but she'd gone. It was like switching from color to black and white. I never saw her again. I had waited in line for years in the rationing queue, only to find there was nothing left for me when I got to the front.

We knew we'd better get back to our dormitory, or risk being docked pay for straying out of our allotted area. Finally, as we hurried along the corridor with the planet view, I muttered to Hany about the method of travel that Kepri had briefed me on. Afraid of hidden eavesdropping devices, we spent our next rest time in our beds exchanging scribbled notes. This was a habit we'd got into over the interminable time we'd been there. Any kind of writing material was traded like gold dust.

Hany didn’t like the sound of Kepri's scheme. But the alternative - laboring on as wage-slaves in this muck and squalor for years while our loved ones on Earth withered away and died - that was a bitter road, too bitter for either of us. Finally we were decided. Despite the fact that we hadn't made much in the way of money, and we were still heavily in debt to Gary, we would attempt to escape the juarrabil system and travel back to Earth. I finally knew I had to be at my mother's side, even if I couldn't save her. My apple seeds sat unused in my pocket, and there was only one planet on which they had any chance of growing.

"The situation has changed since then, and you're not going to like it," said the man. He spoke in a rasping whisper and didn't meet our eyes even once.

We met with Kepri's contact in an in-between space, a disused level in the orbital tower, vertically compacted for efficiency. What might have once been a grand ceiling hanging far overhead with faux-crystals or stalactites was now so close to the floor that Hany and I had to pick our way between the smooth, dull growths that glowed just faintly enough for us to see. We didn't have flashlights. We could hear small, startled creatures scuttling away from our feet. In several places we had to duck or crawl to find our way through, finally, to a central space where we could stand upright and wait for our anonymous contact.

He was tall, and thin to the point of skeletal. He was dressed, or encased, in a suit of translucent jelly-like material that made him appear oddly like an ischa. Perhaps he had lived among aliens for so long that he'd forgotten what it is to be human, for he never smiled, frowned or showed the slightest emotion. He explained that in order to reach Earth we'd have to take passage on a juarrabil vessel - but he gave it a name or descriptor we didn't recognize - and we would have to accept very humble, cramped quarters. He was quite frank in explaining the illegality and danger of this means of travel, but stated that there was no other reliable way to reach Earth at that time. When I asked about the flowing silvery portals through which we'd come, he shook his head, saying in his husky drone, "That route is operated by a very devious group of traffickers. They never arrange for return passage, whatever they may have told you."

We didn't know whether or not to believe him, but we had no other way to travel. We had to take him at his word.

The payment he demanded, though, was little short of extortion. He said that if we did not pay up front, he would turn us in to the juarrabil authorities. Despite our sincere and bitter protests, we both ended up handing over almost half the wage chips we'd earned by the sweat of our brows.

The worst aspect of our accommodation aboard the juarrabil vessel was, predictably, the overpowering smell. Even our best nose plugs could do little to shield us. We could barely breathe at first, because opening our mouths would make us gag.

If you've ever been lucky enough to visit a zoo or a farm and gone up close to the mucking-out department, then you have the foundation for the stench we faced every moment, for many days. The sweet stink twisted into itself strands of ammonia or vinegar. At different times I could smell rotting fruit, rancid meat and that awful old cheese the Egyptians adore. Indeed, Hany seemed to manage a little better than me.

Our contact had never specified exactly why we would find our quarters so cramped. Understandably, he didn't want to scare off his customers.

We shared a space with a large number of alien beasts.

All of them were confined behind barred gates most of the time, but we soon learned that there was an automated system of exercise for them. At irregular intervals one or another of the gates would shoot up with a clang and the beast or beasts inside would be let out for perhaps an hour into the central small paddock where we had been dumped. Sometimes they were fed via a chute in the ceiling.

I lowered myself through the access hatch and dropped lightly to the floor, retching with the smell. The paddock was barely lighted at all, but I could make out the barred gates and sensed that living things crouched behind them. As Hany followed me and the ceiling hatch was quickly locked behind us, we glanced around nervously with our hands over our mouths and noses. This was where we were expected to spend a week or two on the way back home.

After a minute had passed, one of the gates rattled upwards and a clatter of what sounded like hooves announced the rapid approach of a horse-sized creature. In the dim light I could hardly make out that it was not at all a horse, but rather more like a scorpion with fur. Instead of pincers it sported whips like long monkey tails.

Hany screamed as one of the whip-tails shot out and grabbed at his leg. I pulled him in the other direction, yelling at him to move.

We very quickly climbed one of the other barred gates and squeezed ourselves into the opening of a large air vent, high enough above the floor that the exercising beast could not reach us. Some of the creatures were obviously carnivorous and were kept teetering on the brink of ravenous hunger. The furry scorpion-like beast, after its first charge at us, lost interest and just cantered to and fro across the paddock. We just stared at each other, wild-eyed and dismayed.

The one bright feature of that journey was our discovery that we were not alone as sentient, reasonable beings. We finally stumbled upon a crevice-like passageway into which most of the menagerie could not follow us, and from that passage we could climb up onto a wide shelf-space, barely high enough to squeeze into. But lying there long before we had come was Jim.

Jim was a species of alien we had never seen before. His coal-black carapace or skin almost hid him from us, but he greeted us with a Hnn? of startled amazement. "You're people!" he proclaimed in passable English. "Real people! Spent too long down here, too long. Tongue gone forgetful." Coming from a human, I would have guessed the speaker was recovering from the numb lips and tongue brought on by a dental operation. But he was quite understandable.

In the eternal twilight he looked like a twitching heap of charcoal left behind from a long-ago barbecue. As we cautiously approached on our bellies we saw that his back was composed of fist-sized castles of stuff like coral or barnacles, and from an opening underneath Jim's pseudo-foot extruded. Overall he had the size and form of a turtle, but instead of flippers his soft, utterly flexible single limb enabled movement and held his sensory organs.

We talked, and as we unloaded all our questions on him, we quickly became friends. Rather than resenting our intrusion into his limited space, he welcomed us and shared all his survivor's knowledge of the grim underworld in which we found ourselves.

One extruded lump flexed and wavered until we realized he had fashioned a humanoid head to face us. It had the features of a rubbery elf, hairless and earless, but its lips moved when Jim spoke. We were tempted to laugh at Jim's puppet show, but instead I complemented him on the face's realism.

"Jim's off on a great tour of this galaxy, see? I'm the last of the noble tourists. You come along, guys, why not? Shwoo! Shwee!" The explosive wheezing, we guessed, signified whatever passed for laughter among his kind, and in that little space it shook us out of the numb, half-dead mode of existence that had crept up on us during our months of labor. He claimed to belong to a long-lived species from near the Galactic Core, and to have mastered dozens of languages during his extensive travels. At first I didn't believe his manic assertions. He seemed to have lost touch with reality, but gradually I saw that he was enormously self-aware, ironic and possessed of a great determination to stay cheerful. "That zoo down there? You don't know why it is? I tell you. It's food store for lizard-men. Their sport when they eat. Those lizard-men, they most strange. Most strange."

The Dark Night

We realized that we were starving as we lay there, sandwiched tightly between floor and ceiling. We hadn't eaten for a day or two while waiting to sneak aboard this juarrabil ship. On the subject of food, Jim took a confidential tone. "Now, we can get you food. There is food to be had. And not just any food for my new friends, but real Earth food. Do you know how?" We shook our heads in astonishment. "These lizard-men catched a tiger, a real, honest Earth-tiger. Jim went to Bombay Zoo one time, saw the real thing. And in one cage down here the lizard-men have one. Every day comes some tiger-food, before Old Stripey goes walking around. You jump out with me, grab some steak, jump back real fast. Fast! Or else we end up as tiger food! Ha ha!"

So that's what we did. We had to wait several strained and hungerful hours, but finally Jim alerted us. "Horn-head snake gone in. Now Old Stripey 's turn. Let's go!" We scrambled down, noticing that Jim could slip and slide on his pseudo-foot as fast as we could move, crept along the passageway, and reached the paddock just in time to see a cascade of raw meat joints tumbling from a small hatch in the ceiling. We both grabbed an armful and scampered back, giggling like school children as we heard a gate clanging open. Jim grabbed up a couple of joints in an extruded paw, bellowing, "Fwee! Shwoo!" The tiger growled and padded out, but not fast enough to catch us. He was a huge, noble creature, completely out of place there. It was far beneath his dignity to harass lesser beings such as us.

Jim even showed us a way to scorch the meat so it tasted half-cooked. He slid to the very back of the shelf-space with us in tow, and slapped his first steak up on a hot pipe that ran along the ceiling of the shelf. We each copied him, and found the results to be little short of delicious. The agonizingly attractive aroma of the slowly cooking meat even helped to dispel the animal stench for a few minutes. Jim seemed to be omnivorous, and joined us in our cookout. He'd even managed to bore a pinhole in a water pipe, and had some hollowed-out bones in which to store the precious liquid. We sipped gratefully. It was lukewarm, but we didn't care.

We were chewing in silence when Jim's rubbery puppet suddenly grinned and said, "All that other meat, and the strange food, and the green stuff: it's not for human and not for Jim. Don't touch it. Make you sick." From the hilarious grimace he pulled, he seemed to speak from experience of a recent gastronomic experiment.

When we were sated and sighing with contentment, Jim showed us his bone collection. Some were long enough for use as weapons, and some were curiosities. Some were not truly bones, but pieces of carapace and other alien oddments. He'd made an arrangement like a free-form chess set in a corner of the shelf space. We made appreciative noises, amazed at how he'd been able to snatch these bones from under the noses of the beasts.

He explained how the juarrabils on board were extraordinarily wealthy and refined. They spent much of each voyage dining in style, which to their species, as predators, meant watching or participating in the death of a creature that they would then eat, raw. Cooking was a foreign concept to them. They employed a gamekeeper to ensure that the beasts remained alive and well, and strong enough to put up a fight. It was the gamekeeper who took the beast of the day from its cage to the juarrabils' gaming pit.

Jim spoke of the gamekeeper very seriously, even with a tinge of fear. We did not want to meet that gamekeeper, he assured us, because if we did, it would be the end of us. Any stowaways were considered fair game for the juarrabils' revels. I tried not to dwell on that.

The juarrabil ship traveled between the stars through what Jim called otherway. Whatever it was, it hurt. It came on suddenly: one moment I was trying to catch a nap, curled up on the shelf next to Hany, and before I knew it a string of firecrackers exploded in my head, sending me into convulsions. I vomited over the edge of the shelf, crying out in pain. Hany reacted in much the same way. My whole nervous system spasmed for about a minute - at least, Jim later told us it was about a minute, but I'm sure it was closer to an hour - then the agony released us from its grip and flung us down, moaning.

"Sorry, sorry," came Jim's concerned voice. "You vertebrates have a tough time with otherway. Me, I just get headache."

So there were some advantages to being a sentient snail, after all, apart from being able to put on fantastic puppet shows. We two vertebrates became concerned that we had suffered permanent neurological damage. We could hardly move or think for hours after without sparking echoes of that terrible minute. It felt to me like a handful of neurons snapped every time I turned my head.

Jim seemed apologetic. "Those lizard-men. They have a great otherway shield-system for their apartments up there. But for their pets down here? No. Nothing."

"So, Jim," I asked, "what takes you to Earth? You want to visit the zoo again?" We were, as ever, spread out on the shelf, possibly about a day into our journey.

Jim was silent, and I thought he had fallen asleep.

Hany spoke up. "Maybe he-"

"Earth?" wheezed Jim. "Been there. Done it. Got locked in a zoo for a week. Then I learned the language and they realized I was a thinking mollusc and released me. No, not going to Earth. Why?"

I was puzzled. "But that's where we're going. We're going home." We'd already described our ordeal working for the lizard-men.

"No," replied Jim, slowly "You are not going that way." We stared at him, holding our breath. "This ship goes to a busy place which is run by -" Then he said a word we didn't recognize. "Their hub. A mighty and awesome and greatly-to-be-avoided race. Very far from your Earth. Did you not know this when you came aboard?"

We spluttered and complained, but Jim calmly insisted on what he had said. "Maybe your friend who put you aboard made a mistake," he suggested when I began cursing my contact who'd taken so much of our money.

I sunk into a dark mood then, all alone in a deep pit from which there was no escape. Hany lay nearby, muttering quietly in Arabic. It didn't sound like his usual singing and praying. When I asked him, he refused to speak. Then he carried on muttering. If even Hany had lost his composure, what hope was there for me?

More than anything, I longed with every bone and muscle to see Earth again. Seeing it would be enough for me. Then I could die contented. No, I decided, that wouldn't be enough. What I was desperate for was to stand on its solid surface and feel the air on my face and see the sky overhead. No more wandering lost in the unfeeling vastness of space, no more slavery to these utterly foreign creatures.

But as I lay there in silence, hearing the beasts shift and moan and chitter nearby, breathing only when absolutely necessary in order to keep the stink at bay, I could feel Earth getting further away, dwindling to a point and vanishing, less than a speck of dust in the inky whirlpool. The thought hurt. I mean I felt a physical pain in my chest that made me writhe. So I pushed Earth out of my mind for a time. I faced a future living as a human rat in an alien sewer.

Hany's mutterings grew louder. I summoned every fiber of humanity in me and asked, "What?"

Silence. Then, finally, he said, "God forgets us. I tell him why I will not pray. I cannot."

That almost made me chuckle. "So you're praying about not praying. Funny."

Half an hour later, I added, "So what makes you think he's listening, if he's forgotten you?"

The answer was long in coming. "Zhe angels and zhe saints will tell him my message. If God wills."

"Oh."

Once I half-awoke to the sound of screeching from the paddock. A cage door opened, and I felt air moving on my cheek. The screeching moved away into the distance and the cage door clanged shut. A beast was being dragged to its fate. The gamekeeper was out there, and I held my breath for as long as I could. Then it was all still again, and I drifted off to a troubled sleep. The worst of my dreams was one in which I relived my failure to help Christina, but in a dozen cruel permutations. A gold-caped demon mocked me, my feet were welded to the floor, I was naked, or else my tongue had been extracted. The horror of it woke me. I was sweating and trembling.

Our mental distress weakened our bodies. I felt feverish. Hany couldn't sleep and hovered in an in-between state of zombie-like fog. If only we could get out of this hell-hole, any planet would do! But still there was the awful routine of scrambling out for food when Jim gave us the word. And I won't describe the process of relieving our bowels and bladders, except to say that my digestion protested in the strongest terms to the current regime.

Once, Hany was slow in grabbing his steaks from under the tiger's nose. I had returned to the shelf and had piled the meat onto it, ready to haul myself up, when I realized that Hany was not behind me. I whispered his name. There was no answer.

Jim appeared to be sleeping. Gingerly I crept back to the paddock, only to see Hany's unmoving form slumped against one wall. He seemed to have fallen asleep. The tiger paced out towards him, sniffed him and shoved at him with its snout. He slid down the wall until he lay on the floor. The cage next to him contained a ray-like beast with many sharp feelers, and it reached out to him and seemed to caress his face.

This was not good at all. After a moment's horrified indecision, I rushed back and pulled myself up on the shelf. Crawling over at Formula One speed, I grabbed the largest bone in Jim's collection and reverse-thrusted back to the edge. In my haste I knocked one of my steaks off the shelf. When I reached the paddock again the tiger appeared to be nibbling at Hany's trousers and the caged beast had wrapped its feelers around his neck. Hany still wasn't moving. He'd finally found a deep sleep, but if I didn't do something he would never awake.

I first grabbed one of the tiger's remaining steaks and threw it down near the king cat's feet. Its stripes rippled with harnessed power as it turned to sniff the meat and look up at me with a gaze that might have been starving, calculating or lonely, or a bit of each.

I froze. I knew I had to get that alien feeler-beast off Hany too, but the tiger's gaze was hypnotic. It said: I can tear you limb from limb if I so choose. Perhaps I had lost so much weight that I wasn't so appetizing, for I sensed hesitation.

At last it grabbed the steak in its mighty jaws and moved off a short way. I scuttled around the wall, as far away from it as I could, then began hitting the beast's feelers with Jim's bone-club. Once, three feelers reached out for me, and only with frantic swinging and side-stepping could I remain out of their grasp. Soon it released Hany's neck, and I heaved on his armpits. I had become weaker than I had realized, and it was some time before I could haul him into the narrow passageway. I feared that soon the next beast would be released. There was no way I could lift him, though, so I crouched next to him until he finally awoke. A fanged lizard was pacing the paddock.

I could see some lacerations on Hany's neck, but the blood was merely oozing, rather than gushing. He would live, as long as there was no infection. We had no first aid supplies whatsoever.

With a detonating crash, a large hatch in the paddock ceiling flew open. I could see something descending into the paddock, a large amorphous mass. The lizard scampered back to its cage.

The gamekeeper had come to investigate the disturbance.

I held my breath and lay down as flat as I could, halfway on top of Hany's legs. An odd lump protruded into my stomach as I lay there. It was one of the steaks I had stolen.

Peering back, I saw a pale yellow form questing towards the narrow passage in which we lay. The way it shaped itself around corners, elongating and pulsing with its own liquid life, it had me thinking of Jim's flexible pseudo-foot. Its skin was roughened and coarse.

The gamekeeper was stretching out its shapeless body towards me. If it found me it would seize me - and Hany too, perhaps - and throw us into the juarrabils' sporting arena.

The steak under my stomach became an irritation. No - a distraction! I brought it out as silently as I could and placed it in the path of the yellow, questing mass.

The gamekeeper's skin held no discernible sense organs, but by the way its pseudo-limb paused and flexed it seemed to be sniffing the air. Could it see clearly? Could it hear? Then it darted forwards.

I froze.

It seized the steak, sucking all around it, feeling, weighing, then pulled it away.

A few moments later the whole bulk of the gamekeeper rose into its hatch and disappeared. Had it truly been fooled by my ruse?

I sighed deeply, trembling with the relief of the moment.

Hany chose this moment to awake. He sat up and held one hand to the cuts on his neck. On seeing the scarlet stain on his palm, he pushed me into explaining what had happened. First, I insisted we climb up. We lay there panting on the shelf. Before I'd finished explaining, he began sobbing. "You give your life for me," he finally said. "You risk yourself for zis nobody. I am nussing." He wouldn't listen to my protestations to the contrary, but echoed back my final words, nodding, with tears in his eyes: "Zat's what friends are for."

After we'd halfheartedly chewed our half-cooked tiger food and washed it down with lukewarm water, we both fell asleep. When I awoke, Christina's hesitantly smiling face flickered in my memory. But Hany was still sobbing. He would only tell me that this was the "dark night".

All nightmares must yield at last to the dawn. Jim lifted his puppet head and said, "This craft is arriving at its place. We can exit. But first wait." So we waited. I felt nothing different; no thuddings of a docking maneuver, no turning or rocking indicating deceleration or atmospheric entry, no different sounds dripping through the ceiling.

Out of nowhere the otherway agony swept over us, pushed us to the gates of death, and receded again. Hany lay groaning, and I lay groaning and cursing, for a long and dismal time.

A day later, or so it seemed, we were still waiting. We managed not to badger Jim with useless questions.

Finally Jim rose up on his pseudo-foot, stretched, and led us to the paddock and pointed at the access hatch through which we'd dropped, seemingly a year before. It fell open, and a ladder extended halfway down to the floor. Jim went first, then Hany, then me. None of the beasts were loose; it was an anticlimax. I didn't miss the place.

Hany and I squatted in a crate that, mercifully, smelled of nothing worse than industrial solvent. This meant that the air seemed to be laden with the freshness of spring flowers in comparison with the stink of the paddock. By moving the heavy lid a fraction, we could see the dazzling sight of a floor, like polished porcelain, perhaps ten or twenty kilometers wide, dotted with groups and lines of animated figures, and dominated by mountainous ziggurats that ringed the artificial plateau like mesas. Our crate had been lifted onto a high stack or platform that gave us a reasonable view. Whether there was a sky or a ceiling, or something else entirely, we never found out. Overhead the view faded into total darkness and distance. Occasional flocks of small winged machines would swoop down in formation out of the darkness, land, then later take off, each one in a different direction. They reminded me of pigeons haunting the ruins of Istanbul's great monuments.

Our ears were battered with amplified chirps, bellowings and grunts from all directions. In particular, a chanted monotone grated on my nerves. I imagined a gelatinous alien reading through a galactic phone book.

The ziggurats were faced in a metallic marble-like material that reflected back the artificial lights spaced around the plateau. The nearest ziggurat showed a gaping gateway as high and slender as a cathedral spire. Out of it, columns of aliens walked onto the plateau, or rode devices like scooters. Into a farther ziggurat's gateway moved crowds of juarrabils and metallic, multi-limbed forms that dwarfed the aliens. These were perhaps robotic servants, for they carried many burdens and seemed to walk behind the juarrabils. The whole crowd gradually vanished into the gateway, whose blank face gave no hint as to where they might have gone. Perhaps they were our recent hosts. When the whole crowd had disappeared, rows of red lights winked at us from the sides of the gateway.

We watched for an hour, fascinated, utterly ignorant. Jim had gone off elsewhere, on a fact-finding mission he said, leaving us with a grave warning not to leave our hiding place. Our presence there was very much illegal.

Jim returned with pasty tubes of something white and barely edible. We thanked him. "Not bad, not bad," he wheezed. "Good change from tiger food, yes?" We nodded, devouring the white paste. "Now let me explain this busy place," he went on.

It seemed that we'd reached a major interstellar travel junction. The ziggurat gateways linked innumerable star systems across the spiral arm, each one connecting to its distant counterpart for a certain time before closing again in order to link to a different destination. I asked who operated the gigantic facility, but didn't understand his answer, and he gave up trying to explain. The little that I did understand filled me with an ignorant dread.

"Now I must go," he suddenly said. "Next place on my tour. That gateway across the floor is opening. But you will find your Earth, if you keep watching. And you will need this." He handed Hany a small glassy plate on which blue alien symbols flickered and scrolled. "Schedule, navigator and ticket, all in one package. My parting gift." And with that, he slithered out of the crate and hurried down the vertical sides of the stack of crates. Our farewells were lost in the noise. A minute later we spotted his tiny, black, turtle-like form speeding smoothly across the wide, white floor. We soon lost sight of him in the pressing crowds of creatures.

I looked at Hany and at the plate in his hand. "Let's get busy!" I said, suddenly filling with hope that we might yet see our home again.

The plate was hard to operate. First, its numerous side-buttons would not respond to us at all. Finally, after we'd given up several times over, Hany found that if he licked his finger first, the buttons would grudgingly fulfill their functions. Perhaps the plate was designed for moister bodies such as Jim's. After another hour's finger-licking experimentation and head-scratching, we discovered a language option and to our enormous relief found English near the bottom of a list containing thousands of entries. Then we could work much faster.

The next connection to Earth was due to open in about one and a half time-periods. How long was that? We had no idea, until we saw the time count down by one-hundredth every minute or so. Then we had to puzzle out which gate we must reach within that time. Each ziggurat, we suddenly noticed, was marked at its peak with a different skyscraper-sized symbol combining spirals and intersecting needles. Hany pointed at the symbol on the glassy plate next to the listing of our Earth connection.

We looked around the plateau. "There!" called Hany, pointing. Far in the distance we could make out the same symbol atop a shining ziggurat. I guessed the distance at about ten kilometers, but with minimal atmospheric haze and very little to give a sense of scale, distances were hard to judge.

Hany jabbed his finger down twice on the plate where it read, "Reserve a ticket."

"Come on!" I cried, pushing aside the crate's lid and bracing myself for the steep climb down the stack of crates, from one horizontal surface to another, hopping and scrambling like squirrels. We didn't have long.

Continual running was finally out of the question. More than an hour into our marathon, we had trotted about halfway across the cruelly wide plateau, often sliding on the smooth ceramic surface, dodging groups of haughty aliens, the most of which we had never seen before and never wanted to see again. Many of them rolled or hovered or walked inside suits, tanks or vehicles that presumably provided them with their life-support needs. There weren't a lot of squids, though. I thought I'd see more squid-like aliens, or at least a few with tentacles. And there were none with one eye in the middle of their foreheads.

Every so often we had to dodge around circles of service buildings or sunken pits filled with milling crowds renting scooters. We tried to rent one, but our wage chips were refused with scorn. Once we inadvertently offended a large group of persons the size and shape of six-legged coffee tables. They wore jumpsuits and boots like hockey pucks, and their flesh had the pudgy look of cold porridge. We had perhaps entered their personal space, and were surrounded by their yapping shapes for almost a minute before another similar creature came over and intervened. We hurried off, apologizing profusely, but unable to communicate with them at all, in fact.

Our legs became leaden, and our breathing came in painful gasps. We had been malnourished and inactive for too long on our voyage with Jim. It was much further than I'd guessed. We'd stumble a few steps in vain imitation of a trot, then walk a few. Our ziggurat seemed to get no closer, and the time was ticking down to zero. "Do you think they'll hold the door for us if I press something on this?" I asked Hany, waving the glassy plate. He merely grimaced. I could hear him mumbling, "Ya Rab, ya Rab," and it grew louder as we hurried. It was the simplest of prayers.

I had clicked the display to show time remaining until our connection closed. We were down to the last few minutes. I just managed to pant, "Gotta get outta here, gotta…" I had eaten my fill of space and the incomprehensible alienness of everything around us. Oh, to return to a simple diet of human company, air that didn't nauseate the nostrils, and a horizon dotted with familiar concrete sprawl or some dying trees that I could at least name.

Once I glanced up. I felt we were two dust mites approaching a crack in the base of one of those long-lost Cairoean spires.

When at last we found ourselves close enough to see the gateway at ground level, with the ziggurat towering into the maybe-sky, rows of red lights began flashing down the sides of the gate. That seemed to indicate trouble. Only a few figures, human and otherwise, were entering the gateway, and they moved in haste. We yelled and pushed our sullen bodies into a run, and I pulled ahead of Hany. But we had to stay together, and I slowed my pace to let him catch up. We only had the one device that apparently functioned as a ticket for us both.

Nearing the threshold of the gateway came as a shock. We were faced with a wall of blackness, like a curtain through which we must step, with no sign of where we would place our next step. Now the gateway was honking a klaxon at us, and the plate had counted down to precisely zero. I grabbed Hany's wrist and pulled him towards the black.

Abruptly, the blackness snapped to gray, and the klaxons and lights clicked off. I rushed forwards, but the gray curtain turned out to be a solid barrier, and my nose and knees suffered a collision. We had missed the connection.

Justice

I collapsed onto the floor with the weight of despair. "Noooo!" I wailed. Hany panted hard and made as if to hold himself up by grabbing at my shoulder, but I was no longer there, and he fell all over me.

We crawled away and sat near the gateway, prodding at our glass plate. My legs burned like a smoldering fire. "When is zhe next one?" asked Hany.

I grunted, and licked my finger again. Finally: "Uhh... Two hundred and eighteen."

"Zat is how long?"

"Mmm... Two days? No, sorry two weeks, give or take. Ohhh, no! Can't be!"

"What will we do?"

We lay in silence for a long and miserable time.

When at last I stood up, the noise around us had slackened off. I looked around. "I'm starving," I muttered.

We were seated across a table from each other next to a wide picture window. I could hardly keep my eyes away from the view.

"I sink you only know zhe full value of face when you have lost it," Hany told me earnestly. "But zis time zhe God gave me back my face."

I struggled to penetrate his wavering accent. "Face?" I queried, at last.

"Yes. Believing."

"Oh, faith! Right." He was talking about his faith again. That was a good sign.

"Sorry wiz my poor English language."

I chuckled. "It's a whole lot better than my Arabic." I looked away again to the window.

Earth is such a beautiful planet. I feasted my eyes. For the first hour or two we had both wept uncontrollably.

We had made it. We'd almost perished from starvation several times over, almost been run over and killed by a huge roller-blading cyborg, almost been arrested for sleeping rough by a lumbering juarrabil on a military-grade scooter, almost been thrown into the waste incinerator by a janitor drone, and almost missed our next connection by falling fast asleep next to the gateway, but we'd made it.

Arrival in this orbital port had been another anticlimax. I'd come to my senses in a badly-lit space like the stage of a tiny theater set up for a low-budget play about interior designers. Hany was beside me. Out in the corridor no one had noticed us except a uniformed human who'd muttered, "Oh, more of your sort. Well, you're so lucky that it's me on duty today." He'd shooed us into the crowd with a disgusted grunt.

We'd booked fifth-class shuttle seats to Paris - or Eyu-Riaa as the njuks now call it - and sat down in the human-ghetto café. I hadn't been able to resist ordering a mug of hot cocoa, which Hany refused to share, in addition to our grand spaghetti meal. Our wage chips had now become a little more valuable, what with the exchange rate.

Sharlene had appeared out of thin air at one side of the table. She'd keep saying things like, "I'm so glad you boys are safe and sound." She told us that the moon was full over the campsite where she and her family had pitched their RV for the night. We gave her a pained So-what? glance. The cities or termite mounds or whatever the unnamed race up there were constructing had recently reached such a size that they were visible to the naked eye from Earth. The moon was just becoming a taboo topic. Before then, people thought it was romantic or pretty to look up at.

She yawned. "I'm going back to bed," she murmured, and vanished.

At the next table sat a man and a woman with the grave, wrinkled features of elderly Asians. The tables were so close that I rubbed elbows with the man.

"And you?" asked my friend. "Do you have face?" The earnest gaze on his haggard features drew me to ponder my answer. I sensed the old man to my left listening in.

At least I understood what Hany believed. We'd spent many hours talking since leaving Cairo. My main question, which had probably prompted his crisis of faith as I'd asked it over and over, was: How can you still believe all that stuff about eternal love and power when we're under the jackboot like this? Hany's only way of replying to that was to point to his heroes of the faith who'd suffered similar tragedies, though on a national or personal scale rather than a global one. He would mention St George, Mar Girgis, pensively.

"I don't know," I finally replied. I could see that Hany possessed a viable, self-consistent framework for understanding most or all of his life. Did I really have an alternative? "It's coming slowly into focus. My question still nags me, though: If your God is so great, where is he now in all this? How can I ever trust him, with all this misery going on?"

The old man on the next table cleared his throat and spoke. The way his gravelly voice handled English told me I'd been slightly wrong, on a continental scale: he was of Native American origin, or possibly an Inuit. "Yes, this question my people ask the Great Spirit for long, long time," he said. From his lisp and the inward turn of his lips, he appeared to have lost most of his teeth.

I stared at him. "I'm sorry?" was all I could say.

He gave me the condescending look of wise grandfathers everywhere, and gestured at the whole planet below our window. "You see all this alien mess? All this occupation?" I nodded. My beautiful planet suddenly looked tarnished. She had been violated. "That is very much how our people feel for long, long time. But still some of us believe."

A month or so later, I stood with Hany at the door of his family's house in Cairo. He had knocked on the locked door a dozen times. "Maybe they're out visiting," I said. "Or at a different uncle's house." We'd already tried two of Hany's many uncles, and my legs were protesting the accumulated wear and tear. In addition, I'd become sick and tired of walking scared, looking behind us, thinking about Gary and the debts we owed.

Nobody knew where Hany's mother and brother and sister were. Apparently they hadn't gone to the monastery or to Zagazig as planned, either.

He turned anxious eyes on me. "No, zey never go visiting on a Saturday."

Kepri had turned up once or twice on our trek back from Paris. At least, I assumed it was Kepri, for it recognized us well enough. It would not say what it had been doing since we'd last met, only that "Great things are afoot for my scattered race." Now the emerald swarm hovering beside us shot a handful of its members through the cracks around the front door: reconnaissance, no doubt.

We stood, staring up at the cracked and neglected façade. There appeared to be nobody living in the whole street. What had been happening here while we'd been away? Our absence, we'd found, had measured almost a year of Earth time.

"There are some of your people inside this dwelling," Kepri reported.

"Helloooo?" I called.

We were just turning away when the door made a sound. Hany spun around, and the door opened a crack. There was his little sister, peeping out.

"Selwa!" cried Hany. The door flew wide open, and his frantic mother rushed along the passageway to greet him in a fervent embrace.

I said farewell to Hany the next day. Kepri departed first. The hyusis had let slip in an otherwise-innocuous conversation about our travels that our prospects were certainly improving a little. I thought he meant that Hany and I had done the right thing in coming home. But when Hany asked for an explanation, the answer concerned us humans. It appeared that there were certain species such as the hyusis, and individuals such as Kepri, who did not approve of the occupation and despoliation of Earth and were willing to intervene in some way. We pushed for more detail, suddenly breathless, but that's when Kepri departed. "I have already divulged far too much material of a confidential nature," were its last words, as the last few green beads fled through the doorway and up into the bright, dust-laden sky. Hany and I looked at each other, utterly baffled.

I left with a full stomach, as ever, despite the tightening shortages. Then, on the doorstep, he tried to give me an English-language Bible that he'd found in a cupboard. "Face is from hearing and understanding," he said. "You must read zis."

"No thank you, but I hope to come back with my mother," I told him. "If she'll come, that is. Then we'll have plenty of time." I grinned at him "And the next time I talk about going to work for those foul-smelling alien scum, you chain me up, you hear?"

But he frowned at my levity. "No scum. We do not do zat. Not even to zem."

I shrugged and nodded. "I know, I know," I muttered. I didn't feel like arguing. Everything was shifting under my feet, shaken by the vague suggestion that there might really be a few aliens out there who recognized the human race and, who knows, might even be willing to take risks for us. Perhaps, so the new paradigm was tempting me to think, the universe isn't simply us-against-them, but was rather one huge we, a mixed assortment of good, bad, ugly, beautiful and so-so. Maybe the borders and barricades were not drawn on street maps but on hearts.

It wasn't until I was walking on a rocky desert road a week or so later that Hany's words took root in me, vying for light with the old, determined hatred of all things alien. I was still about two hours out from my mother's village. A speck on the horizon grew to a maybe-boulder and some figures wavering around it in the heat haze. That grew to a broken-down hovercar and a swarm of four kids throwing rocks at it. Kraff! Krik! The hovercar's shell was molded from an off-world material based on monofilament carbonfiber, and it wasn't about to crack.

The hovercar had slid off the track and down an incline before striking a mess of gritty, cornbread-colored boulders. It must have had a power failure, or a broken steering link. I didn't venture off the track at first, since the wild village kids were almost as tall as me and threw menacing glares in my direction. But then I noticed the thick, silver-veined, black hide of a yleinki beneath the hovercar's transparent canopy.

My first thought was, Good: at least one of their kind will get the treatment it deserves.

I could see that the yleinki was in distress, flapping its wide wing-like body against the canopy, thrashing its feelers or antennae around in pain. Perhaps it had opened the canopy at some point and the boys had ambushed it. I could see a purple-blue oil leaking from a wound. Sooner or later one of the boys would summon the nerve to get closer and lever open the canopy. Then it would all be over. So maybe there was a kind of justice in the world, I mused.

Then, lagging reluctantly behind my first thought, I heard: We do not do zat. Not even to zem.

Just for a moment I hated Hany. Why did he have to say things like that? On the other hand, why did I ever want to go and make friends with someone like him?

I considered charging at them, driving them off, but they could have whipped me, and if not, they'd only have returned to the yleinki later and finished the job. So I walked down the slope, hoping they'd understand my poor Arabic.

I told them there was a better way to punish this pathetic creature.

Two of them paused with rocks in their hands and stared. The other two ignored me and carried on stoning the hovercar.

I explained to the two who were paying attention. The only reason a yleinki would come this way in a hovercar, alone, was because of the illicit trade in either human children or off-world drugs. Probably this one was scouting out the villages, seeking innocent prey, or gullible customers. I didn't mention the possibility that it had come from the other side, to track down the criminal yleinkis and others who committed these offenses. Such an alien would not have been trapped by four stone-throwing boys, in any case.

By this time I had the attention of all four village boys. Their first response was the equivalent of, "Yeah? So what?"

So they could call the yleinki authorities. Look, there's the number on a card. The tallest one snatched it from me. If this creature really was a smuggler or kidnapper, they'd get some sort of reward and strike a blow against our real enemies. Plus, with the yleinkis' tastes in capital punishment, this one would suffer a much worse death than stoning.

They talked it over, argued, traded a few blows with each other, then finally ran off to their village to beg, steal or borrow a mobile phone. They were already competing for their imagined reward.

As they scurried away, I looked around me. Far ahead, along the track, near the horizon, a clump of dark shapes like buildings shimmered in the heat haze. I needed to walk quickly on towards my mother's village to arrive before dark.

When the boys were out of sight I got out my own mobile to call the yleinki contact man in the orbital station. I'd filled him in on our sad little story before we boarded our Paris-bound shuttle, and he seemed grateful for some first-hand intel on human smuggling aboard yleinki vessels. So I could call in the favor, or maybe double it, depending on how he took it. If he sent a shuttle right away he could save the skin of one of his overlords. The call connected and began softly to ring. By this time I found that I'd wandered down to the hovercar.

I chuckled, pleased with myself for the imaginative improvisation that had sent the boys on their way. The contact number I'd given them would only connect them to a mixed-species smoking parlor in Paris. I still knew next to nothing about justice among the yleinki and their involvement in organized crime on Earth, but I had a sinking feeling that what I'd told those boys had not been far from the truth. Whatever this creature was doing here, on the edge of the Sahara, it wasn't likely to be a charitable act. It had come to corrupt, to steal, to destroy.

I peered in, through the canopy, and the yleinki pointed its silver eye-lumps at me and thrashed a little more at the canopy, pathetically. It was dying. I hated it.

"They're all gone," I whispered. "Just you and me now."

My mobile was still purring. The man picked up. "Yeah?"

I shut it off.

I could finish off this ugly trespasser without any help. The blood of my parents cried out, from ever so far away, like the rumor of a distant wind, for satisfaction. Mingled with those voices came more, the victims of the past decades, nameless now and little more than motes of restless dust endlessly circling the globe on the jet stream, and the urgent cries of the friends I'd known in Cairo who had been cut down in their prime by fighting machines from the stars. The need to answer their pleas burned in my breast.

Hany's face popped up before me, and I shook my head to clear the dizziness. That snarling goblin in my head made a desperate effort to chase my friend away.

I looked around for something with which to lever open the canopy: something pointed and heavy.

My mother's village was dustier than when I'd left it. The row of water pumps lay idle, the sun had just set, and the single street was almost deserted. The small package of flowers from the city weighed in my hand. My wage chips had all grown wings and flown away.

I was exhausted. After being flung hundreds of light-years away, and back again, a weight of mental shock was settling onto my mind, squeezing out attempts at coherent thought. I certainly didn't want to think about what I had just done. Perhaps it was that dislocation that made the three robed villagers appear to me as crows fresh from the carrion. Their knowing, mournful glances in my direction shied away from direct eye contact. One shook his head and muttered to his neighbor.

But I ignored them. I could finally stay with my mother and keep her company through how ever long she had left. We could plant those apple seeds together. Maybe we'd find a cure for her sickness. At any rate, I knew I was doing the right thing, instead of shooting off among the stars, grasping at mirages, leaving her to die. We would flourish and grow in whatever sunlight we were given. The last rays of the sun beat across the village, horizontal, tireless, warming us for free, undeserved.

The door of her little house was no more than a sheet of corrugated iron, with frayed ropes where normally the hinges would be. I had tied those ropes the last time I'd been here, securing the door to the wooden door frame. The frame was coarse and dried out, and the wall of flaky mud bricks had grown concave, as though beaten back by the sun. Hmm, that will need some work. Maybe the apple trees will go down there, a meter or so from the wall.

I called out a greeting, knocked, and went in.

At first the single room appeared utterly dark, but then a low oblong swam out of the shadows as my eyes adjusted: her bed, with her still form laying on it. She had fallen asleep while turned to the wall. I would wake her.

"Mother? It's me. Rashad." I laid my hand on her shoulder. It felt cool, and quite still. A sudden suspicion chilled me. Was she even breathing? Could I have come too late? I had been away for so long. She had no real friends in the village, just one contact who'd helped her get set up with a house and a job that would not tax her health too much. Had anyone looked in on her, had anybody noticed her decline? How long had she lay like this?

I realized that the room did not hold the stench of death. Had she passed away in the last day or two? Perhaps I could have saved her if I'd hurried out of Cairo, instead of frittering away my time searching for the five tiny red pills that had rattled in my pocket all the way along the track.

But she couldn't really be dead, could she? I seized her shoulder more firmly and shook. "Mother! Wake up!" I called.

I almost cried out in terror as she rolled over slowly.

She opened her eyes.

"Is... is that you, Rashad?" she asked, her throat roughened by the dusty desert air. The hesitancy in her tone kind of filtered through to me: she thought she was imagining me.

Her features still showed through the mask of fungoid growth that had by now started to burst through the skin of one cheek. Her eyes were dim, as if she were still asleep, but she was certainly alive.

I sighed, and smiled. "Yes, it's really me. I'm back." My lower lip trembled for a moment.

I watched her eyes widen. The perforated skin stretched as if about to rip. She sat up, and I sat on the bed beside her. She liked the flowers, I think, even though they'd wilted and died, and seemed encouraged by the pills I'd found in Cairo. When she'd washed the first pill down, she stretched her mouth in a way that I knew was a child-like smirk, even though the hateful alien growth tried to make it look hideous. "Mmm... cherry!" she said.

I showed her the apple seeds too, but she waved them away. "Who needs apples, now that I have you back?" she said. "Every night I prayed that you'd come home to me, and that those ugly creatures up there would be slain in slow agony by some terrible plague."

The scene at the crashed hovercar came vividly back to my mind's eye. So much had changed now. Could I live with who I was becoming?

From far overhead in the sky came the faint whistling of a yleinki shuttle shedding speed and circling for a landing. Then it faded into the distance, far back down the track where I'd come from.

"No, Mother," I said softly. "We don't do that. Not even to them."

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This story is dedicated to those who rescue trafficked people.

About this story:

When I began writing this story I had something in mind. Then Rashad came along and messed it up. I have tried to salvage what I can from his lunatic rampage.

Anyway, when I started, I had recently enjoyed a dinner talk by Andy Matheson of Oasis Global who work on community-based projects around the world, including in the sad field of human trafficking. Here is a link to one such project. There's an online petition to sign, and a little support will change lives for the better. Women and children in particular are being exploited mercilessly.

Here's a blog I wrote about Andy's talk. It was pretty shocking to listen to, but a brave few people are working hard to rescue whoever they can. Talk about fact being stranger than fiction. Uh-oh, I feel a sequel coming on.

After reading the web pages above, perhaps you'll thank me for not smothering it on too thickly in this story! In fact there's a distinction to be made: Rashad and Hany get caught up in human smuggling, since they went of their own free will. But when it turns out that they're wage-slaves, they find they're crossing the gray area into human trafficking.

Finally, two more links for your information, out of the many available:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People_smuggling

http://www.evangelicalfellowship.ca/humantrafficking

The personality of Hany is based on an Egyptian friend of mine from Zagazig, and the personality of Cairo is taken from my experience of living there in the late '90s. And as for the aliens, well, any resemblance to real humans, whether living or dead, is purely coincidental. Right?

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About the author:

Originally an engineering graduate from the UK keen to become an astronaut, somehow John Peace ended up working in community development in the Middle East for some years. He recently settled with his Canadian wife and their two sons in Ontario, where they enjoy the great outdoors, Finnish pancakes and blueberries, preferably all three at once. He confesses to a lifelong fascination with science and science fiction, ever since watching Dr. Who and Blake's Seven on the BBC as a boy. He's even old enough to have fuzzy memories of watching the Apollo 11 landing on TV. Whew! That's hard to believe.

Discover other titles by John Peace at Smashwords.com

John Peace drip-feeds a couple of blogs at: http://johnmpeace.blogspot.ca/

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