AsteroidBeltTrans

“So I tell him, ‘stop wasting my time.’ You have seven rations until the next station or get the hell off on the next asteroid. What’s unclear about that?”

Inotraud raised all five limbs as if adding to his discontent. The gesture made his uniform crumple, so he reminded of a crappy landscape of one of the Earth’s midland reservations: a wrinkled sandy beach surrounded by pines that often suffered from the piss of those who were too shy to do it straight into the water.

The car jumped out of another air-less pocket. The other inotraud woke up, stretched out his dorsal claw, which resembled a worn-out money tree branch, and grabbed a mug in a holder, hopping on the table.

“Ugh, you fag. Today — some piss, tomorrow — a beer keg,” he said in a frustrated but a little casual way, looking at the splashed-out liquid. “They have technology only to peek deeper inside our butts. And they can’t even buy shit.”

Seeking support for this profound thought, he turned to me. Well, there weren’t really any eyes on his face, but he had a gaze: I had already learned to feel it either with my uvula or my coccyx. I only nodded affirmatively.

I should have thought twice before agreeing on a seat with the conductors, I thought.

These guys had already tired me out, but I had to stay here at least until I got some white in my hair. That is, you may say, the best years of life.

“And the seat was mine after all,” my resentful voice made itself heard unexpectedly.

Inotrauds took air into their lungs (each of them had only one) and wanted to respond somehow to my attack, but I interrupted them, adding, “Sorry. I like it here. It just came out.”

The one sitting by the window with a more piercing inner gaze guffawed, “Just came out. You hear that? Ha-ha-ha. You’re full of shit.”

“I’m not,” I disagreed.

“Full to the brim,” the other one confirmed. “You know why we don’t have eyes? Because we look straight into your soul. If you hadn’t wanted to say it, you wouldn’t have thought it.

It made me feel even more uncomfortable.

“Are you eavesdropping on my thoughts?”

“From the very first second,” Big-Eyed boasted — he was the one who goggled at me with a cup holder in his claw. “But don’t worry, we have heard worse.”

“I can imagine,” I tried to show understanding again just because I had such an upbringing. “But still, I’m sorry. I was just hoping to have a passenger seat.”

“You know, this is much better,” Big-Eyed exclaimed. “It’s much safer with the professional travel companions than with those fucking crooks. You’ll also be the first to get bedding.”

“And the first to get all the train news,” the other added.

How is that the news? Just gossip... or syrup? I thought and broke off, realizing that I wasn’t alone inside my head.

“I’ll go get some air. Need to get used to this feeling,” I said. And added some other excuse. I hadn’t ever talked to inotrauds before.

“Damned Neptunians. No wonder they always work in road services. And these ones are two numbnuts in a pod,” I blurted out angrily, slamming the compartment door. “Gave my seat to some bigwig from the Ministry of Half-bold Ancient Ass and mock me.”

On the horizon, if you could say so, the solar disc flickered, blinding, no, burning out with its whiteness. Following a habit, I felt like stretching and fluffing a pillow under my head to have a couple more hours of sleep. Hell, no, I couldn’t do that now. It was just my biorhythms glitch. Going to be like this for a long time. At least until we got to the belt, and that is approximately 150 million kilometers. A little more (ha-ha) than there is from Moscow to Miass — the only place, for some reason, where I had ever been in my 30-something years (not a long time, in UFOnatics opinion).

I looked around the corridor with a red carpet decorated with grey-goldish patterns that reminded me more of earwax smeared on the floor by an ingenious schoolboy than somebody’s aesthetic idea. All compartment doors were locked. The passengers knew the road would be long, so they weren’t in a hurry to socialize.

Deliberately shuffling on the carpet pile with my patent-leather shoes that I had bought before leaving, I got to the car vestibule. I felt like smoking. And going to the toilet. One after another.

The vestibule was shaking more than the car itself.

Not a suitable place to relax and get distracted, I thought, but for the lack of a choice, I had to make my peace with that. After all, it was better to piss all over a part of everything than literally everything. However, I didn’t budge.

Near the next car door, sliding back and forth, a girl was sitting with her blue hair spread out and her froggy webbed hands hidden under them. Must be a Mithridatress. Her eyes were full of this biblical sadness, and only her vertically closing eyelids, which left a hardly visible film covering the entire whites, broke the canonicity of the moment.

To stare at her was awkward, but it was also impossible to look away. A peculiar combination of snow-white skin and a giant vocal sac swelling every few seconds provoked curiosity. Besides, she clearly had some kind of hypnosis skills.

Definitely a Mithridatress, I thought. A cross between a Martian and some Mercurian reptile.

I tried to put out the thought as if the conductors caught me smoking pot, but, fortunately, my attempts were no more than just paranoia. Mithridates weren’t able to live in the heads of the others. There wasn’t anything unique in them except their appearance, and they were called Mithridates more out of arrogance emanating from full-blood, monolith, as they called themselves, USS residents. The name was born in someone’s comment on the post about mixed races:

“Because of you, we can’t finish our Jerusalem the size of the World. Bloody Bishlami, Mithridates, and other Snufkins.”

Politburo of USS liked the phrase so much that it was immediately all over the media (though the part about Snufkins was cut out, of course. And about Bishlam too — it was the name of the Anti-Corruption Department head). After that, the phrase settled in everybody’s minds, including the minds of Mithridates themselves.

The girl turned to the exit airlock, and after a short moment of sickness in my lower abdomen, I came to my senses again. The numbness was replaced by already noticeable gut cramps and the two desires that followed. The one was to take a big dump, and the other — to engage in a conversation. The second one was the most urgent because the Mithridatress was leaning on the bathroom doorand blocking it. My craving for a cigarette stopped.

“And why are you sitting here?” I decided not to act head-on. Stereotypes influenced me after all, although I had fought them in an uneven heroic battle. Who the hell knows what they have in mind? What if she puts me on the tip of her forked tongue, and that’s it — I’m done.

Not taking her eyes off the porthole, she replied, “Do you have any suggestions?”

I didn’t.

“It’s not like we’re going to hunt whales here,” the Mithridatress added for some reason.

I tried to imagine her, a light-skinned Martian frog, hunting whales, and suddenly noticed that she was sitting on a huge slab, invisible under her hair up to this moment.

“Wow. “Does that thing have gills or something?” I asked with curiosity.

“It’s a tooth. Gills is when you blow someone,” she put her hand to her mouth and imitated. “Gill, gill, gill.”

“Doesn’t look like a whale’s,” I tried not to make a big deal of that awkward joke.

She looked at me with all the seriousness of a Science teacher. I froze again.

“Whales have baleens, not teeth. What are you, a fool? And this is a flashalodon tooth. From the depths of the Pacific.”

“What? You mean, like, a megalodon?” I doubted, feeling I could win it back after the unfortunate assumption about the gills.

The girl raised her eyebrows questioningly.

“I mean those big sharks. In fact, I thought they were long gone. Extinct.”

“They are extinct,” she confirmed. “But flashalodons aren’t. These aren’t even animals. We call so the boats of the Agriculture Control Service: there are big flashers on them. So this I pulled out from one sunken boat’s bow. They call it a tooth sometimes because of a stupid children’s drawing of a shark’s mouth.”

“Not like it’s too obvious,” I admitted. “It’s kind of a trophy, right?”

The Mithridatress nodded.

“I want them to stick it into the ground instead of my gravestone. And write: “Hel Vidiida. Caught whales and explained to a stranger what a ‘flashalodon’ is.”

She held out her suckered palm. I thought nobody had ever introduced themselves to me, announcing their death simultaneously, and shook the hand.

“Artaxerxes. Just call me Terry.

Hel smiled.

“That’s on Freud.”

I’d been suffering because of my stupid name for my whole childhood, so I physically couldn’t share the joy. Obviously, the Mithridatress, like the others, referred me to the Bible and our, so to say, interaction in it: the letter about Jerusalem and such.

“So, you have to think about the grave already?” I changed the subject to strangle this pause that had already started to spread out. “You seem to be pretty young... Well... For a half-Mercurian.”

“I’m half-Venusian,” she got offended. “But for you, earthlings, and especially white men, it’s probably all the same: all Asians are Chinese, all Mercurians — crocodiles.”

Once I felt like explaining myself again, she blinked with her elongated pupils and silenced my speech.

“The grave — yeah, it’s time. And no jokes about the name. So, you know where the train is headed?”

She loosened the invisible string for me to react somehow. The string had squeezed my throat so much that I coughed, feeling like one of those webcam models who went too hard on shibari at another lonely moneybags’ request.

“Well, yes, and are they adjusting the route?” I said in a hoarse voice, having firmly decided that I would ask her not to put me into a trance anymore. After the next time. Who knows, maybe this time she did it by accident.

“No, I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about the real destination point,” she emphasized the word real in an incredibly juicy way.

“The same destination as on the ticket,” I shrugged.

“They are not taking us to Jupiter for no reason. We are the chosen excess of the USS. A preventive measure aimed at eliminating overpopulation. This train is a timer counting down the hours left until the euthanasia of every passenger.”

Everything had become clearer. Hel supported the idea of overpopulation developed by Fenrir Belkin. The theory was cheesy and clung hard to any living creature. It consisted of three paragraphs, a couple of smartish incoherent words, and the fact that this popularizer of pseudo-scientific knowledge often appeared on the media with his right hand constantly fiddling with the top of his undercut, smeared in gel, and sometimes casually stretching out into a sharp Nazi salute. The success of such characters made my nose itch.

“Isn’t euthanasia something voluntary?” I asked snidely to bug the Mithridatress.

This is where I crack you.

“It can be different: voluntary and involuntary. They’ll just drive tubes under our nails, and that’s it. One more train. With a coffin instead of a locomotive.

I realized that she didn’t have nails, but didn’t dare to tell her something about her appearance.

“So, isn’t it possible to deal with us somehow cheaper?”

An argument like this was perfect: immortal and pragmatic.

“Cheaper is possible. But more humane isn’t. Jupiter has almost zero population: only jails and hospitals. Well, and hot springs. Who is going to search these lands? They’ll just tell that we’ve suffocated in helium — that’s it.

My morale had instantly diminished. I’d never come across reasonable argumentation of Belkin’s theory.

In helium, I repeated to myself. In Fenrir Belkin’s tedium.

“Well, okay,” I said out loud. “And wouldn’t it be suspicious that something has happened to the passengers of this particular train?” I made a less confident attempt this time.

“You know, no one lives there. No natives. Everyone is a visitor anyways. Who cares which train is that? Besides, would you believe in such a story if you hadn’t been on the same train?”

The question sounded unfairly disarming. I felt very much like sticking my tongue out and mocking the half-blood: “you know, no one lives there.”

“You could’ve just given up on me. And say that I’m some freak hatching up conspiracy theories,” she continued. “But hell no, there’s no one else here — everyone is poisoned by acclimatization. So it had you thinking. This means it’s not so much of a nonsense.”

“It’s all bullshit, really. And about nails also. You don’t even have any,” words came out of my mouth, dissecting the rarefied air of the car vestibule. I hadn’t managed to contain this suddenly rushing childish feeling of resentment for already a second time in half an hour.

“But it’s not a big deal. I don’t have suckers, for one,” I tried to save the situation but realized that my already terracotta blushing pan had become brightly red.

Hel bloated her vocal sac and hid her face behind the hair. It was obvious that I shouldn’t expect any further conversation. As well as the possibility of getting to the toilet.

I squeezed out some awkward apologies and, resembling from afar a deflating balloon flying around the car corridor, went back to the compartment where the inotrauds were. They were having tea time and laughing their heads off.

“And here’s our loud-thinker,” the closest one to the window said. “So, have you got your head straight?”

“Only got some shit all over it.”

“That’s how it is,” the other one reassured me. “Why go somewhere to think if the thoughts are always with you anyways?”

“It wasn’t himself that he escaped from, though.”

“And what is there to hide from us?”

“That’s the whole point,” the Big-Eyed took out a spoon with some sugar stuck to it from his mug, licked it, and tapped his colleague’s wrinkled forehead with it.

“Listen,” I meddled with their idyll before they could completely melt my brain. “Where is the train heading?”

Both stared at me. And busted out horse-laughing.

“It’s about time you decided to ask. Aren’t you Mimir, by any chance? Far too genius-s-s!

“No, no, our companion is a Mars rover. Look,” a little more wrinkled inotraud clumsily squirming with his limbs. “Beep-beep! I’m a robot-fuckwit. Where am I?”

I condescendingly withstood the mockery. After all, the question really was exotic. Frankly speaking, not like the comparison with Mimir, but also exotic.

After waiting for inotrauds to shake out all the mossy jokes they must have told each other year after year (they seemed so artistically honed), I shared the conversation with them that I had with Hel earlier, not forgetting to mention the dubiousness of Fenrir Belkin’s theory.

“Man, this bitch. Snuck on board, after all.”

“Yeah, I’ve seen her ticket. It’s real, though.”

“So what? She’ll just open the airlock in the vestibule to flick the ash, and we’ll be stuck to the walls like a burn to the pan’s bottom. Or something even worse.”

“Why are you bringing something worse into it?”

Friends, I concentrated and mentally distracted them not to strain my voice yet again. It worked. I could see it in the inotrauds’ faces that they liked getting into my skull.

“What do you think about the theory? Can they be taking us to euthanasia?”

“Us — no,” Big-Eyed answered. “We work for AsteroidBeltTrans; why do we care? But the passengers — dunno. Could be anything. What’s written on your ticket?”

“Birmingham,” I uttered confidently, albeit soundlessly. “Birmingham, Jupiter.”

“You sure? You memorized?”

A chill of the first doubts went up my back. I gave my ticker to the conductors while boarding. Even then, it seemed strange to me.

“Stop, but how am I not sure? Or did you reprint the tickets?”

“We didn’t reprint anything. We put the stamp, change the bedding, bring tea — and that’s it. We don’t even know how many cars there are: have you even seen this humongous thing? Our jurisdiction is this compartment and a shitter. We are not responsible for the direction of the train.”

“Well, who is then?”

“The one who drives it. Haven’t you ever driven a car at least?” Wrinkled asked with genuine surprise. “The one who turns the steering wheel, you can say, holds your fate in their hands. They are the ones to ask.”

“Isn’t it AsteroidBelt who is responsible for the direction?”

“The company is responsible for compensation payments if something happens. And for the service. And for the train driver’s training. But if something comes into the driver’s head, can they be stopped?”

I shook my head, getting the inotrauds out of it.

“Screw you,” I said out loud, thinking of it all as a joke from some bizarre boot camp, or rather “choo camp.” But conductors had no intention to laugh.

“Brother, we don’t care where to go, even if it’s into the unshaven armpits of the English Queen,” the one closer to me put a stump of his on my shoulder. “We have lifelong contracts. In our business,we are no wizards. We are just spineless and run for miles. The driver is responsible for reprogramming the route.”

I never understood if it was another introduction of my “professional” travel companions or a hint for something more than that.

In a minute, they forgot about our conversation at all: that was kind of a professional deformation they had.

I glanced at a porthole covered in dust and started thinking. This time my thoughts were too serious for those who liked brewing the same tea three thousand times.