Once Upon a Time: New Fairy Tales Paperback

She listens while another EOT sitter talks, and she pokes at her bowl of udon, snow peas, and tofu with a pair of blue plastic chopsticks.

“I prefer straight up freight runs,” Marshall Choudhury says around a mouthful of noodles. “But terras, they’re not as hinky as some of the caps make them out to be. You get redundant safeguards out the anus.”

“Far as I’m concerned,” she replies, “cargo is cargo. Jaunts are jaunts.”

? 172 ?

? Caitlín R. Kiernan ?

Marshall sets down his own bowl, lays his chopsticks on the counter beside it.

“Right,” he says. “You’ll get no kinda donnybrook here. None at all.

Just my pref, that’s it. Less hassle hauling hardware and whatnot, less coddling the payload. More free for dream-away.”

Nix shrugs and chews a pea pod, swallows, and tells him, “Fella, here on my end, the chips are chips, however I may earn them. I’m just happy to have the work.”

“Speaking of which . . . ” Marshall says, then trails off.

“That your concern now, Choudhury, my personal life?”

“Just one fella’s consideration for a comrade’s, all.”

“Well, as you’ve asked, Shiloh is still nagging me about hooking something in the yards.” She sets her bowl down and stares at the broth in the bottom. “Like she didn’t know when I married her, like she didn’t know before Maia, that I was EOT and had no intent or interest in ever working anything other than offworld.”

“Lost a wife over it,” he says, as if Nix doesn’t know already. “She gave me the final notice and all, right, but fuck it. Fuck it. She doesn’t know the void. Couldn’t know what she was asking a runner to give up. Gets wiggled into a fella’s blood, don’t ever get out again.”

Marshall has an ugly scar across the left side of his face, courtesy of a coolant blowout a few years back and the ensuing frostbite. Nix tries to look at him, without letting her eyes linger on the scar, but that’s always a challenge. A wonder he didn’t lose that eye. He would have, if his goggles had cracked.

“Don’t know if that’s the why with me.” She says. “Can’t say. Obviously, I do miss them when I’m out. Sometimes, miss ’em like hell.”

“But that doesn’t stop you flying, doesn’t turn you to the yards.”

“Sometimes, fuck, I wish it would.”

“She gonna walk?” he asks.

“I try not think about that, and I especially try not to think about that just before outbound. Jesus.”

Marshall picks up his bowl and chopsticks, then fishes for a morsel of tofu.

? 173 ?

? The Road of Needles ?

“One day not too far, the cooperatives gonna replace us with autos,” he sighs, and pops the white cube into his mouth. “So, gotta judge our sacrifices against the raw inevitabilities.”

“Union scare talk,” Nix scoffs, though she knows he’s probably right. Too many ways to save expenses by completely, finally, eliminating a human crew. A wonder it hasn’t happened before now, she thinks.

“Maybe you ought consider cutting your losses, that’s all.”

“Fella, you only just now told me how much choice we don’t have, once the life digs in and it’s all we know. Make up your damn mind.”

“You gonna finish that?” he asks and points at her bowl.

She shakes her head and slides it across the counter to him.

Thinking about Maia and Shiloh, her appetite has evaporated.

“Anyway, point is, no need to fret on a terra run, no more than anything else.”

“Never said I was fretting. It’s not even my first.”

“No, but that was not my point, fella,” Marshall slurps at the broth left in the bottom of her white bowl, which is the same unrelenting white as the counter, their seats, the ceiling and walls, the lighting.

When he’s done, he wipes his mouth on a sleeve and says, “Maybe it’s best EOTs stay lone. Avoid the entire mess, start to finish.”

She frowns and jabs a chopstick at him. “Isn’t it rough enough already without coming back from the black and lonely without anyone waiting to greet us?”

“There are other comforts,” he says.