Shadia concentrated instead on her new environs. Two floors of space, an unimaginative floor plan that put living quarters above several rooms meant to simulate a home environment for pampered pets while offering a practical nod to the need for cleanup, food preparation, and isolation of cranky or antisocial animals. There was, of course, a tub.
Precious water, used on dirty pets.
There was even an old schedule tacked directly to the wall next to the tub. The hand-scrawled names were water-stained and worn, but Shadia got the gist of it. Once a week for most of them, twice for some of them. And not all of them were bathed with shampoo and water. There was one called Mokie; it seemed to be bathed with a special oil. And Tufru used a product she found in the storage bins over the tub… it reminded her of cat litter.
Cat litter. When was the last time I cleaned a litter box? Stinky old litter box, never could have the fancy self-cleaners because Ma and Dad said we needed to learn responsibility. As if working in the kennels wasn’t enough. Worked in that damn kennel from six years old to—
Old enough.
Shadia left the tub area behind. Hastily. By the time she reached the spartan little office, she was full of anger. The way she liked it. Good cleansing anger, snarling that the very part of her once-was that had sent her on duster ways now had her trapped on Toklaat.
Nothing’s permanent. See what you can see. Drift from station to planet to orbiter, grabbing catch-work rides and reveling in the newness of the next place until it got old, finding new friends when the old drifted away, your only true bond the very thing that would eventually drive you apart. Duster ways.
Still snarling, she found the paperwork that suggested she name the facility and directed her how to hire the assistants she was allowed—just enough help so she could sleep and acquire food and personal maintenance goods, for the pet care facility served all three shifts. There was a com-pin so she could be contacted by customers or assistants at any time, a cashchip for operating expenses, and an ID set. Her ID set.
Fast work.
Shadia picked it up, fumbling the slick bifold set. Employer information on one side, personal history on another, a large recent image of herself—source unknown to her—and a fourth side that sheened blankly but held all of the set’s information and more in digital. She looked at the image. It showed her from the head up but somehow managed to capture her scrawniness beneath the patched duster’s vest-over-coveralls she wore. Mementos covered the vest, from crew patches to a shiny bead made from a shell found only in a single place on a single planet. And they hung within her hair, an unimpressive dark blonde never given the opportunity to go sun-streaked, but long enough to hold beads and twists of woven goods. The tactile hair of a woman who encountered very few mirrors.
Her appearance clashed with the purple border around the image, the one that proclaimed her as a perm job worker. A purple border she’d never thought to see on her own ID set, not after being dragged into the duster’s life while she was still young enough that her original ID lived in the back of her underwear drawer.
Dragged into it, maybe. But I embraced it. The very involuntary nature of my introduction to the life was a blessing, an event that taught me a duster’s way is the only way. People think we’re crazy, bouncing infinitely from station to station to planetside to station. Space dust. But in reality we’re the wisest of them all. They count on their lives to continue as they know them. We admit up front that it’ll never happen that way, and make the best of it.
The duster bar was easy to find from her new location; she’d been there often enough before she was hit by the zip-scoot. Like most stations, Toklaat was a glorified cylinder with travel tubes down the open axis, from north to south and back again, with east and west split according to function. East housed station maintenance and services; west housed the residences and personal services. Dusters worked the eastern station-side jobs, clung to station-side corners, slept in station-side nooks.
Now Shadia worked and lived in the west.
The duster bar, considered both a personal service and a duster accommodation, balanced on the border between east and west. With the com-pin tucked away in her vest pocket, a duster’s ubiquitous utilities under the vest, and a small advance on her personal cashchip, Shadia stood at the edge of the bar nursing a featherdunk and considering her situation.
The pet-watching service came as a benefit to the elite on the station, so the station itself paid her salary, whether she had one pet on hand or twenty. Escalator clauses kicked in after ten of them, things like increased assistant hours, increased pay…
Increased pay meant a quick debt reduction. A quick departure from this, a quick return to her own way of life.
“Out ’tending, are you?” said a growly alto voice in her ear. “Duster rig, all right—you take it off someone, ’tender? You someone’s mag-bound little perm?”
Startled from her reverie, Shadia jerked around to discover herself flanked by two women whose musculature and vest pins marked them as cargo-loading dusters. Not a worry. Dusters left their own alone. “I’m no pretender.”
Quick as that, one of them grabbed her arms, spilling her drink, while the other fished around inside Shadia’s vest until a search of the many interior pockets offered success. The creditchip, the ID set. “Looks like your set to me“ said the growly one. “Didn’t anyone ever warn you that the only thing worse than a perm in a duster bar is a ’tender perm in a duster bar? Should’ve at least gotten a fake to proof your age.”
Shadia kicked the woman who held her, a pointy-toed kick just below the knee. When the woman’s grip fell away, Shadia snatched her ID set back, spitting a long string of blistering duster oaths. She didn’t fight, she didn’t get drunk, she didn’t join the ranks of the dusters’ practical jokers… but she had a vocabulary to make even a growly-voiced cargo loader blink. And while the one woman was blinking and the other was bent over her leg, Shadia snarled, “Med-debt. It’s paid, I’m gone. Got it?” She turned her back on them and went back to her drink. They would have muttered apologies except that her turned back was a sign to be respected. Not a rudeness as the perms would have thought, but simply a gesture requesting privacy in a society where complete strangers made up a constantly shifting population. So they went away.
No one else bothered her.
But I didn’t go back there. Because they were right. I might hate it, I might have been forced into it, but in the strictest sense, they were right. I was a perm in a duster bar… and elsewhere, a duster in perm ID. I just didn’t intend to stay that way.
The smell was incredible.
“You’re going to break down the ’fresher system again,” Shadia told Feef the akliat, resigned to it. Each day, Feef arrived clinging to Claire Rowpin like a baby, deep blue eyes squinting fiercely against the morning sun. He might have been a cross between a three-toed sloth and a Chinese Crested Earth dog for all his appearance indicated—hairless with suedelike skin except for a poof of white powderpuff hair on the top of his head and a deep affinity for dark corners and high places. In spite of his slow and essentially sweet nature, he emitted the most astonishing odors under stress.
Feef. His owners, a couple named the Rowpins, had confessed to her upon first visit their intention to name the akliat Fifi. They hadn’t—quite—gone through with it.