Crudrat, page 15
“The kitchen,” he corrected her. “And no. This one already did his test and his time.”
The plaster floor began to angle downwards and, after rounding a sharp corner, they were suddenly birthed into a wide gathering place.
“Welcome to Pikillacta's assembly plaza,” said Quy with a grand sweep of an arm.
Maura looked around, and quickly directed her gaze downwards as much as allowed. Once more there was no ceiling above – no apparent barrier to the stars.
The plaza was large and its floor white, a surface of all sparkling plaster. Like the stones of the walls, it seemed lit from within, only this time the whole surface glowed faintly. It was not as big as the docking area they’d sunk the whale down onto, but still large enough to impress. Two long sides were lined with stone benches upon which lay a spread of food so vast it hit Maura right upside the head and knocked her silly. Of all the strange things she’d glommed on so far – ships with disappearing walls, furry aliens, ceilings into the starry void, and rooms solely for sleeping – it was the food before her that surprised most.
“What’s it all doing a seated right out there like that?” She spoke hushed and serious-like, as though in the presence of something sacred.
“When we are hungry, we come here and eat. It is really a very simple premise.”
“You help yourself?” Maura’s silver eyes were so wide, they were as like to split her face open under the forehead.
Quy looked at her, head to one side. Troubled by her awe. “Well, yes actually.”
As though testing his truth, Maura skittered over to one of the stone platforms and grabbed at an interesting looking bit of some protein kind of thing. Could be real dead animal. She crammed it into her mouth afore anyone could stop her.
No one tried to. No one even blinked or spoke at her action. No one did nothing.
Maura reached for a round goby sort of putty object and tucked it away in a pocket of her knickerbockers, under cover of the fur pelt.
Quy shrugged at that. “Technically, you are not supposed to take the food away with you. It is provided communally in order to build community spirit — everyone eating together. Since there is always something here to snack on, even outside major meal times, there is no need to hoard. But I don’t see that anyone would mind you keeping a bread-roll about your person, if it makes you feel more comfortable.”
This was simply too much for Maura to believe.
So she didn’t.
Quy dragged her away from the mounds of food, for she would have gone on nibling and hiding bits inside her clothing forever, if allowed.
“Really,” he said in annoyance, when she darted after a piece of actual fresh fruit, “there is no need to take on so. It’s the only good thing about kitchen detail, you get to snack as you work.”
Maura thought that she might be in for the bestest job she’d ever heard talk of in all her spins. Who wanted to be a progenetor or a sequensor? Even they had to wait before they could get about eating. “This is going to be amazing,” she said fervently.
“Glad you think so,” said a gangly Kill’ki coming up behind them. Then she said to Fuzzy, “What you doing back on our ice, Quy? Thought we shook free of you a full three years ago.”
“There you go, have I not said before? Thinking is not your strong point,” replied Fuzzy, all mild and soft. Then he reached forward and pulled the other alien into a bone-crunching hug.
They drew apart, both grinning. It was a fearsome kind of sight – all those teeth at once.
Quy slapped the other Kill’ki’s shoulder. “Got yourself that whale yet, Korakay?”
“This one,” replied Korakay, “ain’t got herself a powerful gens with too much barter owed for certain people’s own good.”
“Ha, this one bartered for that beautiful little ship all alone, no gens needed, thank you very much!”
Korakay sniffed. “Well, you going to introduce me?”
“Crudrat,” said Quy, “this here genius is called Korakay. She is this one’s age mate. Korakay, this is Crudrat. New recruit, brought in for testing.”
“Ah, you will be this one’s drudge then.” The Kill’ki gave Maura a friendly nod. She wore the usually colorful cloth wrapped about her legs and waist, but over it she had on a robe-like striped garment covered in various stains.
“What did you do to get yourself grounded as kitchen supervisor?” Quy wanted to know.
Korakay cast her hands up to the void of space. “What else? Angered the Patrona.”
Quy nodded sympathetically. “This one entirely understands.”
“Thought you might. You be helping here as well?”
“Not as such. But trust my aunt, this one will pay up somewhere.” Quy rolled his eyes to the stars.
“Ouch. Well, good luck with that. Speaking of, we had better get back to it. Drudge, come this way.”
With that, Quy wandered off towards the docks of food and Maura was left to follow Korakay the rest of the way across the plaza, through a huge doorway, and into the kitchen.
Maura had thought she was getting accustomed to things like stone rooms and places that didn’t look much like anything else she’d ever seen in her life. But the kitchen put all abnormalities trotted out before it to shame.
The whole area, and it was a big one, seemed solely and entirely committed to the cultivation, storage, and preparation of foodstuffs. Korakay pointed and explained about the banks of heating devices, sanitation machines, dehydration and rehydration units, walls of growing things with sunlamps, and the two super-cooling boxes. Though, those last weren’t likely to be overly used, given that the whole city was freezing. There were stone blocks high enough for cutting and preparing, huge bowls for mixing, and, at one end near the grow walls, rows of cages with small fuzzy animals locked inside. The beasties made a strange watery warbling sound, punctuated by occasional squeaks. They were furry, brown and cream colored, and scuttled about without much apparent smarts in the noggin to draw upon. They also lent an odor to that end of the kitchen that was rather unpleasant. Maura wrinkled her nose.
“Those are animals!” She was impressed despite the smell.
“Do you not have them around your part of space?” Korakay looked at Maura, confused by her surprise.
"We have murmels but they don't much count. They're part of the machinery. They're used for, you know, work-type action."
Korakay raised her furry white eyebrows in her furry white face – or at least Maura thought that was what she was doing, hard to tell in all that furry whiteness.
"Well, elsewhere we farm chickens for eggs and to eat. And there are goats for milk and meat. They’re both too big to keep in a kitchen. But those are quy, and they are used mainly for eating, and small enough to keep on hand.”
Maura swallowed. “Eating live?”
Korakay grinned. “And still wriggling, so when you bite in the blood goes trickling down your chin.”
Maura gagged slightly.
“Whoah there Cruds, you are going a bit green under that blue tinge. Sure you feeling quite the thing?”
Maura took a deep breath and reminded herself these were aliens, things were bound to be mighty deferent all ‘round – food, smell, sound. The little caged beasties warbled sympathetically.
Another Kill’ki made his way through the busy activity of the kitchen towards them. “Whatcha got there, Korakay?”
“New drudge.”
“And she is all kinds of useful just standing around like that?”
“You object so much to her doing so, you just got yourself a partner.” With that Korakay abruptly turned away, yelling, to someone off to the side, “No, Tambo, not in there!”
The new Kill’ki seemed on the younger end of things, more Maura’s age, and on the smaller side, which Maura was beginning to realize usually meant male.
He glared at her, clearly annoyed at being stuck with a newbie. “Very well, come on.”
Shifts seemed to run about the same time span for Kill’ki as they did Wheelside, so Maura spent the next two trotting about, doing anything she was told, and learning fast as she could given the utter strangeness of that crazy place. One of the things she learned was that both Korakay and her new partner, she never did figure on what to call him, were as liberal with their slaps as foreman had been. If she messed up, she got a right walloping upside the head. She tried not to mess up, but mostly she didn’t know the right path, so she couldn’t help doing things wrong. She’d no idea prepping food was such a chore. She was strong enough, and able and willing, but didn’t have the know-how, and everyone seemed frustrated that she needed every tiny thing explained.
“I don’t think I did so well,” she admitted to Quy when she was finally free to go back to their room.
“Saying ‘I’ all the time can’t have helped.”
Maura sighed, lying back on her floor mat and staring up at the stone ceiling. “They whacked me every time I missed the littlest thing.”
“Did you hit them back?”
“Don’t they both outrank me?”
“Rank? That is what the fighting is for. You must stand up for yourself, little blue, or no one will respect you.” Quy spread his white paws expansively. He was sitting cross-legged on his own floor mat next to her.
“Ah,” Maura understood, “like with other crudrats?”
Quy grinned. “Exactly like. You know, you will never have any public standing at all if you don’t get into a full on fight.”
“It’s a lot to get brain-in, all sudden and sharp-like.” Maura rubbed her blue head with both hands as though testing her skull for leak-holes. “You people are very strange.”
Quy shrugged.
“Do you really eat those little brown squeaky beasties alive?”
“Korakay tell you that?”
Maura nodded.
“And you believed her?”
Maura nodded again.
“Her kind of humor. Of course we don’t. Kill’ki are perfectly civilized. Up to a point. Cooking is a fine way to handle meat. Especially quy. Did you end up encountering any Jakaa Nova?”
Maura shook her head.
“Well, that’s something to be grateful for.”
The murmel, who seemed to have adapted fine and dandy to both the ever-present cold and his new surroundings, now that he’d been given food, shuffled over to worm himself under Maura’s head in his customary pillow placement. Maura fluffed him slightly into a better position.
“I can straight up to do the work asked of me, easier than blade running,” said Maura after a short silence. “But I’m not sure about the rest of it.”
“This one suspects: that would the point of you being there.”
“I just don’t know anything!” Maura wailed, frustrated. Her murmel pillow, disturbed, chittered and she softened her tone. “If I’m this bad off already, what about these tests thingies that are coming down the tunnel next?”
“This one has seen you in action,” reassured Quy. “You’ll be fine.”
But Maura was beginning to learn all about reading the truths in her fuzzy alien’s words. The Patrona was right. Quy is a terrible liar.
She drifted off into sleep. Her dreams were troubled by the quiet of the floating city with no murmels screaming in the background and no whistle of air in ducts. Somewhere though, far away, the quy warbled softly.
14
Galactic Common is the amoeba of languages, subsuming the useful bits of all others it encounters. It hasn’t a unique bone in its body. To be fair, it hasn’t any bones or any body to contain them, either.
~ On the Civilizing of Worlds by J. Kilsen Slliurp
It turned out, however, that Quy had given Maura some decent advice. For the very next early shift, when Korakay went in to whack at her, Maura dodged the hit and kicked the Kill’ki hard in the shin. This yielded some surprisingly good results.
Rather than being upset, Korakay smiled appreciatively, all the while rubbing at her leg. “Well, someone picked up a little pluck last night.”
“In my part of space,” said Maura, annoyed, “we only hit when strictly necessary.”
“So do we. Speaking of which: use of personal,” said Korakay, hitting her again.
Maura blocked the strike and kicked the Kill’ki higher up this time in the side. Rejects may be chipless but they weren’t stupid — kicking would always be Maura’s best option. Kill’ki had reach on her, but turns running bladeside and scrapping regular with the other ‘rats and Maura may not have much technique but she sure had some serious leg muscles.
Korakay let out a woof noise and issued up a much less approving expression. “No need to get tetchy.”
“You just said…”
Korakay waved a large paw about her head dismissively, as though Maura were an annoying speck of crud dust afloat in the air.
After that, matters improved. The work was dull and hard, lots of heavy lifting onto surfaces all slightly too tall, but manageable. Maura was paired with a different partner that shift and every shift thereafter. Seemed kitchen detail was usually a punishment in Pikillacta, with a core set of personnel taking on the important, and fun, work, and drudges eating up the slack and the scraps. Drudges mostly carried things about, mixed things with other things, and cleaned. A punishment rotation clearly didn’t last long, for Maura had to learn new faces most every spin.
Seemed that even if the alien wasn’t Kill’ki to look at, Kill’ki types of behavior were the standard. Maura learned to answer insult with violence no matter what, and those about her learned she had a mean right kick. Everyone but Maura seemed eminently pleased with this arrangement.
“You people are weird,” she finally mustered the courage to complain to Korakay, during shift break about six spins into her kitchen workings. They were sitting together outside the entrance, watching the endless array of alien life that wandered into the plaza for the fetching of food. The murmel, now a regular fixture around the plaza, shuffled about exploring. Biskweet had learned that if he was actually in the kitchen, more than a few of the cooks really did think he might make a good snack. So while Maura worked, he stayed in the plaza. The direct result of this was that most the of aliens in the city were getting pretty familiar with his blue fuzzy self, even if they’d no idea who Maura was. He caused far more of a stir than she ever could anyway.
“Weird, says who?”
Maura munched on a bit of fried starchy vegetable, which she’d learned was called a poe-tay-toe. This particular starch was popular in the floating city, and there seemed to be about a thousand different kinds. The Kill’ki collected tribute from a number of their allied worlds in shipments of the round multi-colored things. Maura thought they tasted a mite like dirt, which she’d tried once around the bioponics end of portside. Still, they weren’t bad as such. She nibbled on a fat bean. She liked beans better, a food with a bit more personality. She was finding herself with quite the palate now that her diet wasn’t solely gel cubes and ration bars. Quy was right, the best thing about kitchen life was all the sample scraps.
“All that hitting and kicking all the time, just to get a grip on rank. My side of space we assign rank, then you don’t have to waste ticks during a shift trying to sort it all out for yourself.”
“That sounds boring,” replied Korakay. “Fighting is what Kill’ki do best, so we do it a lot.”
Maura looked her up and down. “You sure of that?”
“Is that a challenge, little furless one?”
Quy had said Maura needed a public fight. In fact, he’d been getting more and more insistent on the subject. As though he had a vested interest in her getting beaten up for all to see. Which he might — difficult to tell with aliens. Maura looked around, wondering if this was public enough. The plaza was packed with mid shift visitors, some come down for the food, some for the company. They called the break between first and second shift lunchtime this end of space. The assembled made up a raucous bunch, the Kill’ki in particular, but other aliens of their Coalition took to the talking and jostling as well. It was odd to Maura to see them joshing about, like a great pack of multicolored murmels, all chittering and grumbling – less screaming, though.
Maura stood up, brushing off the seat of her knickerbockers. They’d never given her local dress, nor directions on how she might make or get some for herself, nor any indication that she ought. Which, given that local dress seemed to consist of long strips of fabric wrapped around the body according to some mysterious method, Maura was cautiously pleased to ignore. Still, as she’d been in Pikillacta a number of spins so her brushing off the knickerbockers didn’t do much for their general state of cleanliness. Not, of course, that she’d had opportunity to clean them much in her past life but, even without ambient crud dust, Pikillacta was proving itself a much dirtier place than the Wheel spaceport.
“I could do with a little light exercise.” Korakay stood as well.
They faced each other, taking measure. Korakay had height on Maura and much longer reach. But Maura was willing to bet good ration bars that her reflexes were better and faster.
“Now what?” All Maura’s past fights had been started by Ger-type repulsives. There’d been insult and nastiness to spawn the occurrence. Korakay was nowhere near as bad as Ger. This left Maura with a strong inclination not to hurt her.
Korakay had no such compunction. As was the apparent rule with Kill’ki, she dove in with a fist to Maura's head right to start. No warning.
Maura ducked the strike easy and kicked out.
Prepared for that response, now, Korakay blocked Maura’s leg with one forearm and kicked back.
Maura used a blade dodging back flip to get out the way. She leaped right out of her flip and forwards into a wall hop, using Korakay as the wall to run up.
The Kill’ki seemed confused by this. Clearly she’d never had to fight against Maura’s kind of moving before. She grabbed at Maura’s foot as she ran up her body but missed. Maura, merely for the sake of amusement finished the run, and then leaped up high and used the Kill’ki’s head to vault over landing behind her opponent.
