by Lauren Esker
*Bathing, for one thing. I was also thinking we might be able to divert some of the water to the ship's tanks, once we start running low.*
Strong muscles rippled under his gleaming bronze skin as he picked up another rock. With her mind in contact with his, she could feel the satisfying stretch and pull of muscles that wanted to be worked, even as she was also seeing it from the outside in the images he sent her. Sweat glistened distractingly on his bare arms.
*I can feel you watching me,* he added in a teasing mental tone.
*You're showing me, so it's not like you have anything to complain about.* Meri ran her fingers through her hair, tucking in a few twists that had started to come undone. *Is that pool ready for its inaugural test yet? Because a bath sounds great.*
Amusement came back to her through the link. *The water's cold.*
*Yeah, but it's cold on the ship too, and I think I'd rather bathe in a sunlit pool than sponge-bathe in the dark.*
More amusement. Agreement. Assent.
She got up and went through the by-now-familiar routine of checking on Tamir. He showed no signs of waking up, though breath still whispered through his dry lips. Meri peeled off the IV cuff and wondered if it would be possible to rouse him with a stimulant enough to get him rehydrated by mouth. It probably wouldn't be good for him, but there were no good choices here. The longer he stayed comatose, the weaker he'd get and the less likely he'd come out of it at all.
But she wasn't giving up on him yet, and she hated to ruin the morning with dark thoughts. She cleaned him up, changed his blankets, and bundled the soiled ones to wash.
She found the supplies Lyr had mentioned in the bathroom, an alien toothbrush that was recognizable as such, and a couple packets that smelled like soap. She couldn't quite bring herself to find out if the soap was also meant as toothpaste, so she brushed her teeth with water, standing just outside the cargo door. The morning was fresh and bright and smelled like clean growing things.
The birdsong actually turned out to be coming from tiny lizards, sitting on tree branches and warbling their tiny, piping cries. Meri tried whistling one of their songs back at them, and was utterly charmed when they whistled it back to her.
The thought of taking a photo occurred to her, and she crept back into the cargo bay to get her phone, only to remember that the battery was dead.
*Lyr, do you think your cuffs can charge my phone?*
*Your what?*
*It's ... well, kind of what your cuffs are to you, I guess. I wanted to take some pictures.*
*Bring it with you. I can try.*
She tucked the phone into her pocket and gathered up the bundle of soiled blankets. When she ducked out from under the plastic shelter, the whistling lizards scattered, only to reconvene on a higher branch.
*Do any of these animals have names?* she asked Lyr.
*Not that I know of. I've never seen most of them before.*
*Can we name them?*
Amusement. *What do you want to name?*
She tried to send him a mental image of the whistling lizards. *We could call them whistlers. Or song-geckos.*
*What would you call last night's dinner, then?*
*Better than those ration things,* she sent, and felt his silent laughter in her head.
She expected to have to fight her way through the thicket, but discovered that Lyr had cleared a path down to the spring. Meri picked her way around hacked-off, finger-thick stumps oozing sap and ducked under low-hanging branches with strange, vivid leaves. Something dashed out from under her feet, making her jump.
*Meri! Is something wrong?*
*No, I just got surprised by some kind of animal.*
*Dangerous?*
*I don't think so.*
She caught sight of it again, a rabbit-sized creature, bright green and red, running on its back legs. It stopped at the base of a tree and looked back at her with sharp, beady eyes. It looked like a lizard, except—was that fur?
*Lyr, that lizard you killed last night wasn't furry, was it?*
*No.*
This one was covered in green fur, or maybe hairlike feathers. It had a bright red throat, standing out like the jeweled throat of a hummingbird and pulsing as it breathed. She sent a picture of it in Lyr's direction.
*I'm going to call this one a hummingbird gecko. Please don't eat it; it's too cute.*
Amusement came down the link. *There are plenty of other options. But you can't be too picky when you're in a survival situation. I take it your people aren't hunters.*
*I've certainly never hunted.*
*I can teach you.* He seemed to like that idea.
Someone woke up in a good mood today, she thought, and the tangible sense of Lyr's good mood lifted her spirits even further. She started walking onward, and the lizard whisked about and vanished into the bushes.
Her practical nature told her sternly that she shouldn't be this cheerful while trapped on an alien planet with no idea how they were going to survive. But somehow she felt like things were going to work out. Lyr could take care of her. He'd hunted the lizard last night; he could do more of that. And someday they would find a way back to civilization. She knew before too long, she'd be missing things like Netflix and Starbucks and proper indoor plumbing.
But right now, she had no particular desire to go back at all, not to Columbus or Kansas City or anywhere else.
I'd rather be here than living in Cora and Dave's guest bedroom, that's for sure.
Seeing the spring in person gave her an odd sense of déjà vu after seeing it in Lyr's thoughts. It looked like something from a calendar picture, a twisting ribbon of fast-flowing water between rocky banks. Lyr stood knee-deep in the slowly expanding pool he was building, adding more rocks to his dam. As she'd seen in his mental image, he was naked to the waist and barefoot, with his pants rolled up above the knees.
"It's not very deep yet," he said over his shoulder.
Meri dropped the bundle of sheets and dipped her hands into the springwater to wash them. "You weren't kidding when you said it's cold!" she exclaimed. "How can you stand it?"
"I prefer 'refreshing.'" He hesitated, but she could sense the question he wasn't asking, hovering just below the surface.
"Tamir's the same," she said. "Not worse, but not better."
"Ah." He didn't ask more. She had a feeling her own pessimism about Tamir's prognosis came through the link.
But they were alive. And on this brilliant morning, for the first time in ten years, she had absolutely no regrets about that. She wanted to be alive. She was ...
She was ... happy?
Meri grinned. Yes. She was happy. She had almost forgotten what it felt like.
Lyr waded ashore to wrestle another rock out of the muddy bank. "I could give you privacy if you'd like to bathe."
"In a minute. First, can you see if you can charge my phone?"
"Oh, yes. Of course." He washed the mud off his hands and crouched beside her on the bank. "Show it to me."
"This is where the power cord normally plugs in." She showed him the plug. "But I don't have it with me. I left it on and it drained the battery."
Lyr stroked a thumb across his cuff and extruded a thin wire. Holding her phone in his palm, he slipped it into the power plug.
Surely that couldn't work, Meri thought. It would be like plugging a laptop charger into her phone only vastly more so. But like the auto-calibrating dosage on the injectors, the advanced tech of the cuffs seemed to be able to deal with it. When she powered on her phone, the screen brightened.
"What does your device do?"
"You use it to talk to people, or to look up things on the internet." Not that he'd know what the internet was, but maybe they had something similar. "Not that I can do any of that here, I bet." Indeed, there were no service bars, not that she'd expected any. "You can also take pictures. May I take a picture of you? If it's not against your culture or anything."
"No, go ahead."
With the phone still attached to his
wrist by the wire, she took a picture and then turned the phone to show it to him: Lyr, bronze and gorgeous, his dark blue hair gleaming in the morning sun and the alien forest behind him. It occurred to her that perhaps having photographic evidence of aliens wasn't the best idea if they ever got back to Earth, but if it did happen, it would be nice to have something to remember him by. It wasn't like she could take him back with her.
"You're sad," Lyr said. "What's wrong? You were happy a moment ago."
"It's nothing." How could she say she was thinking about the future for the first time, and already regretting their parting when they hadn't even got off this planet yet?
Besides, who says we have to say goodbye? We could be intergalactic pen pals. Or more ...
"If you have a picture of me, may I take a picture of you?"
"I'm probably a mess," she demurred.
"I can assure you, you are definitely not a 'mess.'" Lyr raised his arm and rotated his palm. "You are beautiful. And now I have your lovely smile frozen in time."
"Oh, you did it just now? I didn't know your cuffs could take pictures too."
"Certainly. I'll show you."
An image manifested above his wrist, floating in midair. It was her, all right, caught in the act of nervously half-smiling and looking like a total dork.
"Oh, Lyr, please take a better one. Give me a chance to smile properly, at least."
A smile tilted his mouth and crinkled his silver eyes. "You tell me when."
"Now," she said, through her best weddings-and-graduations smile.
"Hmm." Lyr manifested a new image beside the other. "I like the first better." His eyes sparkled.
"They're both terrible," she protested, swiping a hand through them. The images wavered and stabilized. "Here, I'll do it. Do your people take selfies?"
"What's a selfie?"
"How can you have wrist cameras and not take selfies?" She held up her phone at arm's length, brushed back her twists and smiled at the camera. "Selfie," she said, showing him. "Here, let's do a proper one with both of us."
Before she could let herself get shy about it, she put her arm around him and pressed her cheek to his. Being this close was very nice indeed. "Smile," she told him, and snapped a couple pictures of them.
The result, when she paged back to the gallery, was startlingly weird: Meri with her arm around a silver-eyed, blue-haired alien wearing the nervous grin of a senior on prom night. Meri laughed out loud. "What do you think?"
"I think I am not terribly fond of how I look in pictures." But his voice was playful.
"Oh hush, you're gorgeous." Lyr still had his arm around her; she snuggled against him and paged back. "Do you want to see my world? What it looks like when it's not being attacked by aliens, I mean."
"I would love to."
What exactly did she have pictures of in here, anyway? Hopefully nothing embarrassing. "Uh, this first part is touristy stuff, it looks like. I did some sightseeing with my friend Cora. So this is the world's largest basket, and this is the famous Dublin, Ohio field of giant cement corn cobs, which I'm sure you care a lot about. And here's me with Cora and her baby at my apartment, former apartment, I mean. Cora is the friend I was going to live with, if I hadn't gotten, well, you know."
"Is that who you were protecting on your planet? In the vehicle?"
She turned against his shoulder to give him a surprised look. "I didn't know you saw that much."
"I saw you used your chemical weapon against the Hnee pirate. I was very impressed with your courage."
"My—oh, the pepper spray? Yeah, for all the good that did." But his praise made her glow. She looked back at the picture, the baby in Cora's arms and Meri with her arm snugged around her friend. Was the dissatisfaction and unhappiness on her face always that obvious to other people? She looked, in the picture, like she didn't want to be there—like she didn't want to be much of anywhere.
It made her uncomfortable to look at. She paged back.
"Oh, this is my going-away party at the hospital." Balloons, a cake, presents. No selfies here, thankfully. She didn't want to look at that miserable attempt at a smile anymore. "And this is ... why the heck did I take a picture of a hamburger? I guess I must have been posting it to Facebook." She wished she had a hamburger right now. She paged past that one quickly.
"What is F—"
"Oh no. I am not explaining Facebook to an alien. Anyway, I bet you have your own version. I bet there's something like Facebook anywhere people have the technology for it, complete with an alien Mark Zuckerberg and everything." She had to laugh at herself, then. "I'm probably confusing the heck out of you. Sorry."
"I might not understand everything you say, but I like to listen to you talk about your world." He reached a fingertip to flick past a few pictures of autumn leaves and a neighbor's cat and then— "Who is this?"
"Oh," she said softly. "That's Aaron. My, uh. My late husband."
It was a photo of Aaron in his dress uniform. She was going to speed past it, flip on to something else, anything else. But she hesitated, her fingertip resting just below the smile she missed so badly.
"There is no shame in loving one who is gone," Lyr said quietly. "Your love does you credit. I know he was dear to you. He will always be dear to you. He looks like he was a fine man."
"He was," she whispered. Tears threatened again, but didn't fall. She was so goddamn tired of crying, and that made her angry—angry at herself, angry at Aaron for leaving her, angry at the world. She brushed her finger across the screen to banish the photo gallery. "Maybe that's enough pictures for now."
Lyr played gently with her hair, light strokes of his fingers that helped to ground her. "What else can your phone do?"
"Well, it can't make laser shields, that's for sure." She dashed at her eyes and was a little surprised to find them dry. "Let's see. You can play games on it." She brought up a chess game to demonstrate, noting in passing that the battery, in defiance of everything she knew about phone battery chargers, was nearly at full charge already. "You can play music. Oh, do you want to hear the original recording of the song I was singing last night?"
She put on "Me and Bobby McGee," and Janis Joplin's husky voice rolled out of the phone's small speaker.
At first Meri wished she'd picked another song; the wistful tale of lost love and regrets hit a little too close to home. But the song's regretful tone suited her mood. She leaned against Lyr and listened to the music of another world, here in an alien glade with lizard-songs for accompaniment in the background.
And gradually she became aware that Lyr was humming along, a low vibration that thrummed through his chest, picking up the harmonics of the music and carrying them to her, skin to skin.
When the song ended, she tapped the phone to pause it and looked up at Lyr. "I didn't know you could sing."
"The city-ships of my people are filled with music. The corridors are designed for their acoustics as well as their aesthetic beauty." He sounded wistful.
"Will you sing one of your people's songs for me?"
"Most of our songs don't have words. Will that bother you?"
"Of course not," she said, snuggling against him. "We have music without words, too."
After a moment, he began to hum. The sound developed subtle resonances, high and low tones. Meri didn't think a human throat could have reproduced it. The melody was utterly alien, but its beauty entranced her. When the final notes shivered into stillness, she found tears in her eyes for a new reason.
"Lyr, that's lovely. You're incredibly talented."
"Me?" he said, surprised. "I was never more than ordinary. Those of my people who are trained for music are truly sublime. It's like hearing the music of the stars themselves."
"I would love to hear it someday. I used to sing in choir when I was a girl, but I haven't sung in a long time."
"But you were just singing last night. Your voice was very pleasing."
"... oh," she said musingly. "I ... I didn't really think
about it. I always used to sing when I'd do housework or go on drives, back when—back when Aaron was alive. I stopped, after."
Had last night really been the first time she'd sung anything in ten years? It seemed impossible. And yet she couldn't remember another time.
"Will you teach me how to sing one of your songs? I would like to learn it."
"After hearing what your music is like, I don't see how ours can possibly compare."
"But I would like to sing with you," he said. "Among my people, to sing with another is an expression of ... emotion, and partnership, and unity. One sings with one's family, and one courts a lover by singing with her. I would like to sing with you, Meri."
She had been aware of what was growing between them, but hearing it voiced was still—almost too much. Music was better than words. She reset the song to the beginning. Lyr hummed along with the acoustic guitar intro. Meri was expecting him to sing the lyrics as she began to sing, but instead he continued to hum. The deep resonance of his voice, the harmonic overtones, made it seem like the accompaniment of a whole orchestra, or the youth choir she used to sing with. She had almost forgotten the soaring delight of singing along with other voices, feeling the vibration of meshing harmonies through her entire soul.
The music segued into a different song, one that was outside her comfortable vocal range, but Lyr kept humming. The music was like a balm, soothing the wounded places in her soul.
She could have stayed here forever ... except she was itchy in the clothes she'd been wearing for days, and starting to get hungry.
"Lyr," she murmured, nudging him. He was still humming, now in melodious (if slightly incongruous) accompaniment to Madonna. "How about we get clean?"
Lyr sat up and detached her phone from his cuff to hand it back to her. She set it on a rock and left it playing. It was probably a little inappropriate to be listening to Prince and David Bowie and Lenny Kravitz instead of the rustling of wind in the trees and the rushing spring, but the little taste of something familiar among all the strangeness was making her happy.
"Do you want privacy?" Lyr asked. "I can go back to the ship if you'd like to bathe alone."
"No." She smiled at him. "I don't mind if you stay."