And it’s time I re-established the DCS, feeling the beast standing behind me, sour breath on my neck. It fades as the system shields me from myself. I know it’s still there, but its teeth cannot pierce my armour.
Lynesse Fourth Daughter sleeps by their fire while Esha Free Mark keeps watch. I adjust the temperature settings of my underclothes and lie down over here on my own, feeling simultaneously noble and foolish for being so.
*
After another day coming down from the mountain, stepping up our pace to make the walls before nightfall, there is a town. Progress has been brisk, and I have had to step up my metabolic augments and mute some pain and fatigue tells to keep up with the two women. However, reaching the walls of the town with some remaining spring in my step prompted a spike of positive emotion that I was able to tap off and experience. Thus avoiding my dissociative system from becoming overwhelmed.
I have seen satellite images of this place, and sent unobtrusive drones to record the goings-on here, in the name of scholarly study. When I worked out where we were going, I thought the place would seem familiar. It’s very different when you’re actually there, stepping through the gates scarce moments before they’re closed for the night. Meeting the stares of the locals.
When I had the outpost facilities fabricate these clothes for me I fondly imagined passing incognito amongst the locals, to keep contamination to a minimum. They were made to replicate the colours and styles of the local dress, but now I see that everything is somehow wrong. I feel like an actor in a poor historical reproduction, or some tourist who has bought cheap tourist trash from the tourist shops, and now imagines themselves very cosmopolitan and multicultural. The cut is wrong, and the way the garments hang off me is more wrong, and everything is sealed where it should fasten and vice versa. And I am a full thirty centimetres taller than anyone else here. And I have horns. I’d thought the hood would help, but my roving camera drone shows me that the very way the cowl sits shouts out their presence. In the end I just accept that anthropological training, second class, does not make me a master of disguise. I pull down the hood with something like disgust, and just let them stare. The DCS keeps my embarrassment and awkwardness at bay, and I pass through them with a neutral demeanour, as befits an academic.
Lynesse Fourth Daughter and Esha Free Mark seem to take the attention I’m getting as only right and proper. There are people they will talk to in the town, they say, or at least Esha will, and Lynesse will stay with me at some sort of hostelry. In the Landing Site territory, lodgings are not solely to be had by money or exchange of goods, or so I understand. One must have a right to sleep the night beneath a roof in this country and most neighbouring states, which right is granted vicariously by the hereditary government. I’d assumed that her royal pedigree would suffice for that, but instead it was Esha showing papers to the proprietor, a thin-faced, hollowed-out-looking man. Esha’s status is interesting, and I should take the time to compile some notes, to satisfy . . . some notional future visit by anyone who cares. But with the DCS up, I care, or at least feel that it is something that should be done. Except the judgment calls the DCS is supporting are themselves fundamentally irrational, holdovers from a time when there was a wider academic institution I could report to. I think about this, and my readouts say my emotional state drops immediately, my cheer gone. By then I have put the shield back up, and so the whole business just loops about in my head like a bee trying to escape, and then we are at the hostelry.
The host, some manner of minor civil servant within the highly complex hierarchy of the Landing Site state, stares at me more than anyone, and at my horns especially. He is frightened, but also wants to touch me, or at least his hands make little clutching motions when he looks at me. This is, frankly, a poor and filthy place, and I’m glad I have been thoroughly inoculated to the cocktail of microorganisms that make Sophos 4 their home—the native forms and the Earth forms and the runaway hybrids resulting from incautious engineering by the initial colonists. People on this world get sick so often that I was amazed any of them survived to their majority, during my first observations, and while they have basic procedures regarding washing and handling food, their reasons for so doing owe little to microbiology. This hostelry, which Esha calls the Armoury Gate, seems even filthier than it has any need to be, but I am doubtless imposing the standards of a higher technology unfairly. After all, Lynesse is a child of queens. This is presumably the most luxurious accommodation this town grants.