No Small Bills Read online

  “The device you were using when you were picked up,” Señor String interrupted. “That was not your ship?”

  “It was something we cobbled together out of native technology,” Ned told him. “It was enough to get us out of the atmosphere but not much farther.” He tried a weak grin. “Lucky for us you picked us up when you did or we might’ve died.”

  “Hm. I see.” If it’d had a chin I’m sure the thing would’ve been scratching it by now. “And how did you acquire this native technology?”

  Ned shuffled his feet. “We encountered a hostile native and were forced to defend ourselves. It . . . blew itself up. We took its gun and used that to make the device.”

  “It blew itself up?”

  “Yes, sir. Shot at us but the shot rebounded and struck it instead.”

  I hadn’t noticed before this that the seal we were standing on was vibrating slightly. And the air around us seemed, I dunno, thicker than elsewhere in the room? But now that air thickened even more, so it was like we were staring at the officer and its platform through a haze, and the floor vibrations increased. Then they cleared and died down again.

  “You are telling the truth,” Mr. String-man confirmed. “The creature attacked you and you merely deflected its attack. This is good—you are not guilty of murder, only self-defense.” I swear it was frowning, though I couldn’t see any change except that maybe some of its strings shifted color from bright red to bright blue. “And your arrival on that planet was unplanned and undesired.” It sighed—yeah, actually sighed. “Very well. You did violate the Interdict, and must be punished for that. But you did so unintentionally, and departed the planet as quickly as possible and with as little native contact as possible.” I tried not to think of the Cowardly Purple Shark. “Thus I will grant you a reduced sentence.” Nice, I thought. Maybe it really would only take Burnt Umber! “You will perform hard labor for two hundred galactic years,” it declared.

  That got my attention. “Wait, what?”

  It ignored me. “This sentence will be carried out immediately,” it announced, and shadow-creatures flowed in from all sides, each one grabbing one of us by the arm and leading us away.

  “Wait, where’re you taking us?” I demanded. “You can’t do this! The universe is at stake! I have a medical condition that prohibits hard labor! I want a lawyer!”

  But the silly-string guy didn’t respond, and neither did my shadow-captor except to tighten its grip.

  “What the hell?” I demanded as they marched us back out of the room and down more long corridors. “Ned! Mary! What’d we do now?”

  “We serve our time,” Ned answered from somewhere in front of me. “There’s nothing else we can do. It’s a fair sentence, actually—he was pretty lenient.”

  “Lenient? Lenient? Two hundred years, Ned!” I shouted. “I probably won’t live that long!”

  “You will,” Mary assured me. “All criminal sentences are carried out in intraspace.”

  “Intraspace? Is that like ultraspace?”

  “Similar, yes,” she answered. “Only the time dilation is even greater between intraspace and here. Two hundred galactic years will be less than a month here, perhaps even as little as a day or two.”

  “Oh.” Well, that helped—it meant I could still get back home in time for my weekly poker game. “What about the whole aging thing, though? Won’t I still be two hundred years older?” Instant aging might actually be a good racket—I could see high school kids and college students shelling out big bucks to suddenly be legal drinking age.

  “Naw,” Ned replied. “There’s a sort of null barrier around intraspace. Information can be brought back and forth, but any physical changes there are reset somehow when you cross the barrier back to this plane. We’ll age there—though really slowly—but the minute our sentence ends and we’re brought back we’ll snap back to our current ages. We’ll remember the entire thing, though.”

  “Nice.” I thought about that a bit. “So why don’t they use intraspace to get around? You said they couldn’t use ultraspace because you pop back in the same place as you left—is intraspace the same way?”

  “Not exactly,” Ned admitted. “Intraspace has its own . . . peculiarities. It wouldn’t work for travel.”

  “Why not? What kind of peculiarities?” He didn’t answer. “Ned? Ned!” But by then the shadows were guiding us into a big room with some kind of glowing purple disk mounted on the far wall, and a circular platform below that. I had a feeling this was the entry to intraspace.

  Whatever those peculiarities were, I was about to find them out for myself.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Working on the chain (letter), gang

  “Okay, in what world is this considered hard labor?”

  “Shhh!”

  “What, you afraid they’ll revoke our lounging privileges if they catch us talking?”

  “No, I’m afraid they’ll hear you and give us something worse!”

  “Worse? What, you mean like last month?”

  “That was worse!”

  “For you, maybe. I worked at a call center back in college, to earn extra money during the holidays. That was nothing.”

  “It was horrible! All those calls! And all those angry people!”

  “Well, what’d you expect? We were calling them during dinner. Or sex. Or their favorite movie. Actually, that part was pretty impressive. Back at the call center we used to just guess when the worst time to call would be. They actually have monitors for it here! Talk about pinpoint targeting!”

  “Just shut up.”

  “What? I’m not doing anything wrong. I’m just making conversation to keep things moving. You know, make time fly by more quickly and all that.”

  “Shut up.”

  “Fine.”

  “Fine.”

  “Good.”

  “Great!”

  “—”

  “Um . . .”

  “What?”

  “Can you—?”

  “Say something? Anything? To fill this terrible conversational void?”

  “No! Can you . . . pass the stamps?”

  “Oh. Here.”

  “Thanks.”

  “—”

  “—”

  “So what do you think of these stamps, anyway? I really like this one, the one that looks like a cat’s head and tries to bite you every time you hold it. Feisty little bugger! But I’ve got its number now—you grab it by the top, like its the scruff, and it can’t reach your fingers or wrist. See?”

  “Shut up. Just shut up.”

  We’d been in prison for, as near as I could tell, eleven months. At least we’d changed work details eleven times, and if they really were feeding us three squares a day—literally squares, these flat things like Jell-O sheets but flavored and somehow textured like all sorts of other foods—and letting us sleep each night we were at each job for thirty days. Time flies.

  Tall and I were still arguing about how this counted as “heavy labor.” Our last job, for example, had been making calls for some universal credit card. I hadn’t minded too much—like I said, I’ve done this work before, and they were actually a lot more lenient about it here than they were back at my old job. They gave us wireless earpieces and throat-mikes, a free-floating monitor to show who we were calling, where they were, their occupation, their annual income, all manner of personal preferences, and what they were doing when we called. A second window showed the duration of the call, the listener’s stress level (we got extra points if it hit the red zone, and a bonus cookie if it actually made it to the black circle at top), and the call result. We weren’t limited to how long we could stay on any one call, either—I spent a solid five hours on the phone with this beam-miner from Arcturus V one day, comparing baseball and some sport he called “chasing the portable centrifuge.” The most important thing was to sell them on the card, using any means necessary. I had a really good sales rating at that. I’d always been good at talking, and knowing so much a
bout each person beforehand made it easy—with a monitoring system like that I’d probably never lack for dates back home. Of course, it didn’t hurt that I figured out at one point during a really boring call (dung librarian on Syncopade 429) that I could approve the card but change the recipient’s name and address.

  I’d have about twenty of those things waiting for me when I got back home.

  Anyway, our current job was folding, sealing, addressing, and stamping chain letters. Something about “if you pass this along to four to the tenth power people within the next thirty-nine galactic hours, your luck will take a dramatic turn for the better.” We were assembling maybe a thousand of those things every hour.

  I figured my luck was about to become phenomenal.

  They’d divided us up once we’d arrived at the prison, been registered, been searched, and been issued prison garb (a weird paisley poncho and a pair of baggy drawstring pants. Oh, and fuzzy bunny slippers. I wasn’t sure if we were in an interstellar prison or some sort of cosmic children’s hospital.). Mary’d been taken away, apparently to a women’s wing, and Ned had been placed with another guy already here. Tall and I were paired together. Lucky us.

  Ever seen that movie with the futuristic prison, where they pair prisoners up and stick collars on their necks? And if you ever get more than a certain distance from your partner both your collars explode, killing you instantly?

  Yeah, they didn’t do that here.

  Which is too bad, really. I think they were missing a golden opportunity. Not to mention some sleek silvery collars would have helped offset the rest of our wardrobe.

  No, when we got here they just stuck ankle cuffs on each of us. Mine and Tall’s were linked together, as were Ned’s and his new buddy Gwarmesh, by a stream of glittering emerald dust. “Ionized pharmeons,” Ned informed me as they were marching us to our new digs. He actually looked excited about it, bless his geeky little hearts (apparently he has six). “They’re stretchable, indestructible, and can pass through almost any solid matter. The Galactic military developed them in the hopes of building warships out of the stuff.” Yeah, I could see that—a ship that can’t be broken and can ghost its way through any obstacle.

  “What went wrong?” I could tell by the way he’d said it that something had gone wrong.

  “They’re stretchable,” Ned repeated. He reached down, grabbed the glowing strand connecting Tall and I, held it in both hands—and shoved it over his head. It stretched around him, so it looked like his head and shoulders had suddenly been molded in bright green plastic. “Not rigid enough to support anything,” he explained as he lifted it back off and let the energy-rope fall again. “They couldn’t walk on it or rest any weight on it, which meant they’d need other materials for a frame and floors, walls, etc. And those wouldn’t be immaterial.”

  “So whatever it’s coating is still solid?”

  “Yep.”

  Darn. So much for the idea of wrapping it around us and just passing through the walls to get out of this place.

  Of course, that’d be hard anyway, seeing as how there weren’t many walls.

  “They don’t need them,” Ned said when I asked him about that at dinner that first day. “We’re in intraspace, remember? Where’re we gonna go?”

  “Couldn’t we just run off in any direction, and eventually get far enough away that they can’t come after us?” I was poking experimentally at my dinner square.

  Ned had already rolled his up and popped the whole thing in his mouth—he was still chewing it as he shook his head. “Nope. Remember I said intraspace has some peculiarities?”

  “Sure.” I peeled a corner off my square and stuck it in my mouth, then chewed tentatively. Hey! It tasted just like a roast beef hoagie! I gobbled up the rest happily, gesturing at him with the plastic fork and knife they’d given me to show I was still listening.

  “Well, the biggest problem with intraspace in terms of travel is that it’s both spatially isolated and geographically locked.” I’m sure Ned could see from my expression that he’d just given me gobbedly-gook, and to his credit he didn’t even sigh. Clearly I was wearing him down. It’s a specialty of mine. “In the base reality, space extends in all directions,” he explained. “It’s all connected, all one big piece.” I nodded to show I was getting this. Tall was listening too, and I could feel him nodding behind me. “Okay. Intraspace works differently. When anything is inserted into intraspace from our plane, it draws some of the local spatial material to it like metal to magnet. Space coalesces around the object.”

  “So space isn’t continuous here,” Tall asked over my shoulder. Show-off.

  “Exactly. It forms in bits and pieces, wherever it’s needed.” Ned laughed. “There’re whole schools of thought dedicated to the question of what this place would look like with no one and nothing from our plane in it, but of course we’ll never know because the minute we enter to observe it we change the dynamic. Even energy does that, so scanning won’t do the trick either.”

  “Okay.” I was struggling to grasp what he was saying. “So we can’t run off into the sunset because there is no sunset—we’re basically on an island of intraspace, and around us is a big sea of nothingness.”

  Ned looked surprised. “That’s right on the money,” he admitted.

  “Gotcha. But then,” I scratched at my bill, “why wouldn’t it work for space travel? Sounds perfect—you pop a ship in here, some intraspace gathers around it, and you fly to the equivalent location of wherever you wanted to go back in our reality.” I could feel Tall staring at me in disbelief. “What?” I demanded over my shoulder. “I’m a little slow, but I’m not completely stupid!”

  “No, you’re not,” Ned agreed. “And that’s exactly what they hoped when they first found this plane. But it doesn’t work that way. Once enough intraspace gathers in any one spot, it becomes fixed in that location. So you can’t move and take it with you—if you tried to move you wouldn’t get anywhere because there’s nowhere else to get. You’d just keep bumping up against the edge of this particular location.”

  “Ah.” I swallowed the last of my square. “Got it. Well, that sucks.”

  “Perfect for a prison, though,” Tall pointed out quietly. “They can make it as big as they need it, because the more people they add the bigger it gets. And as long as at least one person or object remains it’s permanently fixed in one location. Plus you never have to worry about anyone escaping.”

  That didn’t exactly sound encouraging.

  We’d quickly gotten into the routine here, which wasn’t hard considering they treated us like we were on some intergalactic cruise. Every morning they woke us up around nine, local time, and we showered, got dressed, and gathered in the mess hall for breakfast. Then we worked until one, when it was time for lunch. After lunch we went back to work until six, then quit for the day. We had dinner and then we were allowed “light recreational time.” We could read, play cards, take a walk, build something in the crafts room, exercise, watch a video, or just talk. We weren’t allowed to nap, since that could throw off our sleep schedule, but that was fine because they sent us to bed at eleven anyway. Ten hours of sleep a night, three solid meals a day, plenty of leisure time in the evening, and work that I personally didn’t find particularly taxing. It was like a holiday. Complete with bunny slippers.

  We saw Mary at meals and in the evening—women and men (and “other”) were housed separately and worked separately but ate and relaxed together. She’d been paired with another newbie, a cute little gal named Tansy. Tansy was from Yaha’tan E-59, and she’d been sentenced to fifty years after she’d gotten into an argument with some guy over a traffic signal and had reduced him to a wet noodle. Literally. She’d changed him into a big pile of Ramen. Soy sauce-flavored, she assured me—the sentence would’ve been higher if it’d been shrimp, and nearly double if she’d gone for mushroom. Apparently she could have but she hadn’t felt it was worth it. She was tiny, maybe three feet tall, and built like a cart
oon pixie, with a cute triangular face and big eyes and blond hair and golden skin and a bright smile. She also had butterfly wings on her back, antennae on her head, and row upon row of sharp, triangular ivory teeth. But she was cool, and we hit it off right away.

  Ned’s ankle-mate Gwarmesh was another story. He was a furball—he said Feharb’lanek—from some place called O59-cubed. He looked like a walking shag carpet from the 70s. Smelled like one too, all stale beer and stale Cheetos and old bubble gum. He was taller than Tall by a good foot, broader than Ned by as much or more, and his hands were big enough to engulf Tansy’s entire head. He had beady black eyes buried in that fur, and a cute little pink nose like you’d find on a kitten, and when he opened his mouth—which wasn’t often—there were a lot of big barbed teeth bent at all sorts of angles. He wasn’t very friendly, and he almost never talked. Most of the time he just grunted. We had no idea what he was in for—all he said was “mayhem” and we didn’t want to push it—or for how long, but at least he’d come here on his own so he didn’t have any pals to hang out with. He grudgingly sat with us so Ned could.

  “So what exactly’re we gonna do?” I asked after the third week. We were still on “pack marshmallows into bags” detail, which would have been a lot easier if they didn’t insist we fit the squares against each other perfectly and would have been a lot worse if I didn’t keep eating all the marshmallows. I kept hoping they’d give us chocolate-covered ones at some point, but no such luck.

  “What do you mean?” Ned replied. We’d finished our meal—lasagna and garlic bread! Those little squares were amazing!—and were playing cards at one of the little card tables spaced around the recreation area.

  “Well, it’s been three weeks already,” I pointed out. “We can’t just sit here much longer, right?”

  “Only another one hundred and ninety-nine years, eleven months, and one week to go,” Tall answered. “Gin!” He laid down his cards.