Life in the Compact

The Tev-Nor Compact is a union of about a thousand worlds, and it runs on treaties, trade and secrets. Everyone just calls it the Compact. It's got twenty-eight peoples we know well, each with a homeworld and a body that does one strange thing, and all of them talk through translators that are mostly reliable.

Humans joined forty years ago as junior members. We're the newest people in the union and the shortest-lived, and the others call us the Brief. Most humans still live on Earth, where the rest of the galaxy assumes nothing much is going on.

Six regions hold all the worlds on the board. Everybody out here has a job, a landlord, and something on the stove. We hold every new idea to a simple test, which is whether it could happen in Cleveland with the nouns swapped. If it could, we throw it out.

The Stack is the Compact's intelligence service, the CIA of the galaxy. It keeps a tower on the capital world called the Fourth Floor, three kilometers of gray glass with recycled air and a permanent smell of burnt coffee. Nobody can tell you why the whole thing's named after one floor.

Abigail works there as a Targeting Officer. On paper her crew are registered bounty hunters, listed on the guild rolls, with the Stack as a client. That arrangement suits the Stack beautifully. Any local badge can arrest the Apples, and the Stack bails them out when it feels like it.

Who gets the bounty money has never been established. Each Apple believes something different, and it comes up at dinner.

The Abyss is the prison on a platform at the edge of the Goom, a black hole out past the edge of the Compact. Its official name is Kreth-Ull, which means Term of Penalty in the tongue of the Krai who ran it. Inmates called it the Term.

Time crawls that close to the Goom, and the place was designed around that fact. A ten-year sentence out there is decades for everybody else, so your enemies get old and your children forget you. Every hour you spend inside costs the outside half a day, which means a rescue is always late.

Everyone who enters signs the Term Log, visitors included, and if you refuse you get entered anyway, in your own handwriting. There are rings of slowly turning cells, a glass gallery where the wardens stood, and one window ten meters wide that looks straight at the black hole. You feel a low ring in your teeth the whole time you're there.

It held one hundred of the worst beings alive. The first cell to open that night was Door Zero, and nobody will say whose it was.

Getting around is fast and casual. A ship hops between worlds in a day, sometimes an afternoon, along old gravity highways called the Sling Lanes. Everybody uses them and nobody can explain them, and we like it that way.

We play the clock loose. A trip takes exactly as long as the story needs, so when two people on the ship have to talk, the lane runs long. A flat tire in the Lanes is a perfectly good reason to sit in the galley for six hours. Tukkar likes the scenic route when somebody on the team needs to say something and can't, and Lio always claims it's a shortcut.

Everything coming to the capital goes through the Queue, a docks ring around First Drawer that sorts each ship by whose space it crosses. Twelve border beacons stand along it on tall stalks, each named for the complaint it earned. Nothing moves without a stamp, and once a ship's stamped, the Stack can't board it without a second stamp, which takes a day. Inspectors work the counters in three languages at once. Your ship will wait, and so will everyone else's.

The capital of the Compact is a thousand worlds' worth of paperwork stacked on one planet. It's loud, crowded and tired. The Apples hate it, and it's where they come back to.

The Fourth Floor

The Stack's tower, with humming lifts and a Targeting Floor where Abigail's desk still has her red pencils on it. Down in the canteen you can get beans. The lower levels go much further down than the visitor map admits.

The Queue

The docks themselves, where thousands of workers change shift to the sound of customs horns and rubber stamps. In the market there's a fence called the Poet's Wall, where anyone can pin up a verse.

Belo

The Queue's market district, full of noodle shops, pawn counters and steam, with a hundred languages arguing over prices. There's a poetry slam most nights. Vesk keeps a safehouse here and cheap repairs are around every corner.

The Brakkan Quarter

Heavy-gravity blocks with low ceilings and thick doors, built for people who weigh what Brakkans weigh. The floor hums under your feet. Tukkar's daughter lives here, and he knows every bench on her street.

The Quiet Wing

The hospital district, all antiseptic and soft chimes and visitors who whisper without being told to.

#

Public rooms run on House Standard, one gravity and one air mix and one temperature, picked by a committee. It annoys every body equally. A good dock bar has three door heights and a bench that can hold a Drum, who'll sleep on it for days. A Drum asleep in a corridor is, legally, freight.

Krai get fast when they're warm, so the thermostat at any meeting is a negotiating position. Polite company looks at an Ossari's shoulder, where her feelings show up last. It buys her a few seconds of privacy. Humans get asked to do their crying away from the armed inspectors, and there's a sign.

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Peace talks have stalled, and the only real negotiation left in the building is two aides fighting over a dial.

A faith out here stays with the body that can keep it. In the Long Applause you exist as long as someone's clapping, so paid mourners work your grave in four-hour shifts. A boss walks the row checking palms. Drum hold that death's a long sleep and everybody gets up hungry, so the pot stays on.

Krai read the terms every morning, since God's a counterparty who hasn't enforced yet. And once a shift, on an open band, every machine mind in range gives its name and says "Still here." When one stops answering, the ship in the next berth reads its name anyway and leaves a space.

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A Drum family says he's resting, a doctor says he's been dead a week, and a funeral artist has already taken a deposit.

Signal can't cross the Sling Lanes, the routes every ship rides between worlds, so new episodes travel in a ferry purser's locker. Two Ovens is the one everybody watches, two rival bakeries in their forty-first year. On Krail it's called Competing Thermal Leaseholds.

Hexil bolt a steel plate to the floor and feel the show. Mantle read bodies so well they can see the actor's knee hurts. Human shows sold abroad carry a small caption when someone cries: This person is fine. On slow nights there's translator karaoke, where you sing a Vesper aria off the screen and inform the room that your aunt is a soup.

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A purser knows how the finale ends, and a whole dock that's a ferry behind will do anything to shut him up.

Dock paste comes in a squeeze tube at every port, and the label says Meets the Minimum. The flavors are Regular, Sunday, Birthday, Beef Adjacent and Home. Home doesn't say whose. Dockhands buy it on bad nights, and two people will fight about what it tastes like.

Decent menus carry a cousin mark beside any dish that might resemble somebody at the next table. A Gelm tastes what she touches, so she knows how far along your dinner is, and you'll hear "You aren't full." The same bottle behind every bar does twenty-eight different things. A Vael gets drunk one lobe at a time while the other lobe watches. One Oru twin drinks and both get drunk.

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A Krai host sends the soup back to be heated, and everyone at the table understands the deal just changed.

Earth has managed exactly two exports, cats and dogs, and nobody planned either one. Lonely Auren keep a clap cricket in a wicker cage, since through a closed door it sounds a good deal like a small polite crowd. The Quiet Dominion, the gray empire on the border, bans the blush skink, a lizard that takes on the color of the nearest Ossari a beat behind.

Near the Goom, the black hole where time crawls, lag flies live a single day and have been living it for about a century. Scale larks go up four breaths before a sleeping kaiju rolls over. There's one plain apple tree on the crew's ship, and nobody admits to watering it.

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Hull bats only roost in wrecks that are still thinking, and a salvage crew has just found a colony in one certified dead.

A committee once invented Standard Ball, with every body handicapped until nobody had an edge. You've never met anyone who's watched it. What people love could only happen in one terrible place to one kind of body.

In the Door, Brakkans hold a troop carrier's hatch shut against vacuum, with two hundred lucky fans seated in the air they're holding in. In the Brights, Auren walk the dark side of a vast mirror and glow by the crowd's approval, and the other team's fans may stop clapping. In the Crawl you race down toward the Goom and turn when your nerve goes, and the betting slips get left in wills.

Try this
A very old woman cashes her grandfather's slip at a betting counter. The winning pilot's standing behind her. He's her grandfather, and he's thirty-one.

Nothing out here works as well as the people who sold it to you said it would. A cheap bead runs half a second behind the speaker, so a joke in a mixed bar gets laughed at in waves. There are about forty plugs in common use, since every world that joined was promised it could keep its own.

Locks that read your body failed on all twenty-eight peoples, so the best lock you can buy is still something with notches in it. Oru front doors take two keys, set too far apart for one person to reach. Ferry mail puts the date on top in big numbers, and you never send bad news without a second note saying you're all right.

Try this
The ferry finally reaches a dock near the Goom with years of mail, and a woman opens a birthday note from a son she buried.

The translator won't carry a curse. Say one and your listener hears a small polite chime, so people started swearing in what came out. "Chime off, Inspector." A Hexil with a crushed hand yells "Observance!" at a wall, because that's what the machine does to every holy word.

"My aunt is a soup" means you've got no idea what you just said. If you're out cold you're legally cargo, and every excuse for being late, ever, is a flat in the Lanes. In Pheli, the capital region, "regrettable" has started fights. Near the Goom, "Still here" is hello, goodbye and most of a prayer, and you always say it back.

Try this
A suspect confesses on the record, then adds, "That was karaoke, Officer." Now a very tired court has to decide whether that counts.

A dockhand makes 80 credits a shift, and that's what everybody out here measures with. A tube of paste is 1, a bowl of noodles 4, a forged passport 1,500. The deck plate under the counter weighs you, so a Drum pays triple for lunch on the same wage.

The smallest bounty we've printed would keep that dockhand working for twenty-five years. On Seri, opera country, a bid only stands if the hall claps for it, so you can't buy what you aren't liked for. A casino on the back of a sleeping kaiju caps its payouts, because anything bigger wakes the floor. And nobody's too poor for Two Ovens, which is on the back screen of every noodle shop.

Try this
A bounty only pays if the captive signs for it. Our fugitive's sitting in the brig with a pen, enjoying himself, and the bill's due.

Your cheap translator pack is called Mostly. Its slogan is You'll Get the Gist, and it stops for ads, in the middle of whatever your wife was about to say. Snack Empire wrappers are legally binding, so careful people pay extra for a bag that's guaranteed fake.

The Time-Share at the Goom has a jingle, "Welcome to Your Next Ten Years," which is also the contract, because a week there costs a decade outside. The gift shop on the museum world of Kellor sells bottled water called Last Of, While Supplies Last. One hull wax is made and sold by a ship. Skippers rent out their hulls for paint: IS THAT HILL MOVING?

Try this
A hostage taker running the free pack is about to say where the bomb is, and we get a soup commercial.

It started with a Drum's wake tag, the plate that says when to expect you and who to call. Dockers took to writing on the back of theirs, in three lines: Call, Handle and Don't. "Don't dye me," says an Ossari who got out of the Dominion.

The dead ride the Queue, the great ring of docks, as Long Freight, and wait out the same day's stamp as everything else. A Vael family files a little bell to the note of your last breath, so somebody has to have heard it. At a stranger's funeral you bring a paper cup of machine tea, which belongs to nobody. Then you say the one sentence that goes through a translator clean. "What can I hold?"

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A family sits in a tone-deaf Fenn courier's kitchen with a row of tuning bells, because he heard their mother's last breath.

Here's everything anybody knows about how a ship gets between worlds: it goes on the Sling Lanes, and then it's there. You feel it as the lean, and your tea sits in the cup at an angle for the whole trip. Gravity comes from a plate under each room, so halfway across a docking collar the other ship's floor grabs you.

A personal shield eats a shot from across the room and wakes too slowly for one at arm's length. War-frames have the same problem at fourteen meters, so giant robots end up grabbing each other. Near the Goom every wall has two clocks, Dock and Home, and parents come back to kids who've passed them.

Try this
A strike on a low platform near the Goom has run one afternoon. Up top it's been most of a year, and the fund's gone.

Every form has a box marked Minor (own people's sense), because the Compact has never agreed how long being a kid takes. Brakkan children lose all their armor in adolescence, often in class. A parent stands at their door for the year it takes to grow back, with no chair.

A Vesper's first molt comes in front of relatives, with feathers worth real money falling off a kid who'd like to die. Sitting alone in the corner is illegal for a Tessel. Dock kids got sick of beads that stop for ads, so they built their own language, called Recess. Vael children learn early that the friends in the Human row go away.

Try this
A Drum girl has waited two years for the day she gets her stamp book, and she oversleeps it by a day and a half.

You've got a stabbing pain under your second set of ribs, you aren't sure you're supposed to have a second set of ribs, and the only doctor on this deck trained on Krai. Clinics hang the Chart, twenty-eight body outlines that have never been corrected. Generations of doctors have marked it up in grease pencil: ASK FIRST. THEY LIE ABOUT THE LEFT SIDE.

Sorrel will treat anybody, won't take your money, and adopt you before discharge. The translator has one word for every trouble in the head, so the form reads Tired (specify). Vael run two pulses half a beat apart their whole lives. When pain makes them land together, send for somebody.

Try this
Someone's added one line to a dock clinic's Chart overnight, in a dead doctor's handwriting, and a Krai delegate's due in at noon.

The best shield money can buy does nothing about the person close enough to smell your lunch. So a galaxy full of ray guns is a galaxy where the dangerous people have to come over and stand next to you. Humans hug, and it's taken everybody years to get used to it.

Hexil sidearms have a third lever that doesn't do anything, so the other hand won't feel left out. A Pell pistol fires about as hard as a sneeze and is carried for the sermon. Out at a frontier town called Quits, you hang your holster on a hook, you get a warm sarsaparilla, and nobody can state their business until the glass is empty.

Try this
A fugitive's sitting in the saloon at Quits with an inch of sarsaparilla left, and the whole town's come to watch him not finish it.

Punch a Brakkan on a Krai ship tied up at a Human dock and you've committed three different crimes, broken your hand and signed something. The Floor Rule says you're under the law of whoever owns what you're standing on, and on a sleeping kaiju the county changes when it rolls.

Nobody's guilty of what their body does on its own, provided they filed. A Gelm handshake counts as a search. A Drum's sentence counts waking hours only, so a short stretch can take most of a life. A Pell's cell needs sealing, since a breeze is a jailbreak. One fire marshal can't douse a blaze until the policy's stamped. He waits. It's burning.

Try this
A Cultivar, a lab-grown person who's legally property, is the only witness to a murder. The court's form can list her as a dented crate.

Somebody's always in love with the wrong kind of body, and we wouldn't change that for anything. The most romantic thing on Krail is letting somebody see you at full speed. Sorrel close up at dusk unless they've married an Auren, who glows, and those two keep the street up.

A Drum proposes by writing your name on the Call line of the wake tag. A Vael asks to be in the room for your last breath. Most dockhands are three regions from their kin, so they pick bunk kin, who know what you eat. Then there's the last page of the stamp book, the Say-So, one line naming who can sign for you when you can't.

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A Drum wakes and somebody's crossed out her husband's name on the tag. For four days, a stranger's been legally running her life.

Most of the people wearing clothes out here showed up already dressed, so clothes have a strange job. On Seri a feather's worth more than a coin, and people wear their money on the hat. In the Gasket, junkyard country, a new jacket means nothing's ever happened to you, and what you want is a patch so good it shows.

Sorrel healers wear coats of living moss that have to be fed. A Marl paints eyes on her eyelids, an aunt does your first set, and you look surprised for a month. In the Belo market a Gelm on a stool will hold your secondhand collar and tell you who had it last. Whatever you wear, don't outshine an Auren. They'll review it.

Try this
A Belo cutter taking up an old Dominion coat finds a forbidden thumbnail mirror in the hem, and somebody wants that coat back.

Ask what day it is on a dock and you'll get four answers. On the Queue the date's whatever an inspector has turned the stamp wheel to. Ask "What's your Ovens?" and whatever episode they've got is exactly how far behind the rest of us they are. The Remainder is the 365th day, and it belongs to no week at all.

On Same Morning, a Drum town spends a month shifting its sleep so everyone gets up together for once. Skarn can't whisper, so on Sorry Day they go door to door apologizing at full volume for specific things you heard. Families near the Goom lay out Back Birthdays, one small cake for each one you missed.

Try this
A Krai swears he signed nothing, and it turns out he signed on the day that doesn't exist. Find the clerk who came in anyway.

Somewhere on the Queue right now, somebody's getting paid to stand in line for a person who died before she was born. She's got a blanket and a flask, and she's pretty good at it. Form Doctors fit your whole defense into a box the width of a thumbnail. On Seri you can hire someone to throw a drink at you so everybody can admire your dress shield.

Ports keep dock cats on the books. Getting fired depends on who's doing it. A Mantle moves your file one drawer over. A Pell mentions you in the sermon. A Noetic forgets you were there, and if you keep coming in, you're still employed.

Try this
A Place-Holder has stood forty years for a family who've never shown up, and today her number's about to be called.

Ask a dockhand where she lives and she'll give you a rack number, a shift, and the name of whoever's asleep in it right now. Gelm sleep in a shallow bowl, or they wake up partly under the door. Krai keep a heat stone on a timer so they can get up in the morning and hate you at full speed.

A lot of ports have a retired ship tied up behind the market, renting out her cabins, and tenants hang a sock over the bedroom speaker to be polite. Every home has a drawer of adapters for the adapters. On the third night, a guest washes a cup.

Try this
A ship who rents out cabins heard a killing through the sock on her speaker. To testify, she'd have to admit the sock doesn't work.

The best card room in the Compact is on the back of a sleeping kaiju, and every few breaths the floor comes up three degrees and your chips go for a walk. Hold the Lean only works in the Lanes, where nothing falls, so you stack cups into a tower that has no right to stand. Whoever's still up when the ship comes out takes the pot.

In Scared or Lying, a Quill sits on a high stool with her arms bare, her quills go up for both, and you bet on which. Kids trade WANTED cards of all ninety-nine fugitives, and most albums stop one short.

Try this
The only copy of a stolen list is folded under the bottom cup of the tallest tower aboard, and the Lane's about to end.

Everybody gets old out here at different speeds, in the same corridor. Marry a Vael at thirty and he's your husband for a while, then the waiter takes him for your younger man, then your son. One afternoon a nice young Gelm at the clinic tells him how good it is that he visits.

Quill spend their lives unable to lie, then the quills go brittle, and they take to it. Every old Brakkan gets a last softening, and the kid you stood guard for is out in the hall now with boots on. A Drum wakes up and asks where his wife is, and the person by the bed has to decide.

Try this
The only witness to a thirty-year-old killing just got back from the Time-Share. For her, it happened last Tuesday.