by Peter David
Shuddering, helpless, Stiles writhed like an unlicked cub on the cold cement. His own moans rattled from his throat, but he had no connection to them nor any control, and was blinded by the lights popping behind his eyes, so familiar he’d started to name them. He was up to Louise when they began finally to fizzle and he blinked back to the apparition of Orsova’s left boot near his nose, as the big warden pulled the rabid soldier off and held him to one side.
“Let me finish him!” the soldier bellowed. “He’s an alien! There’s no other alien anywhere!”
“No,” Orsova flatly refused.
“Then let me kill the Romulan!”
“No.”
“You dumb drunken mule,” Stiles struggled. “You’re blowing a—chance to—save half the planet. We’ve found a way to—predict the Constrictor. Pound me all you want—but get a message to the—authorities. We’ve finally—done it!”
“Done it,” Orsova echoed. “You know we’re tired of keeping you. There’s talk of just executing you.”
“Fine,” Stiles grunted. “Execute me. But bury me deep. I don’t want to come heaving up when the big one hits.”
Orsova’s reddened eyes turned hard. “There hasn’t been a Constrictor in two years. Maybe it won’t come again. Why should we feed and keep aliens here, and give you a lab and let you work, after what you gave to us?”
“It wasn’t him,” Zevon said without turning. “It was—”
“Shut up, Romulan,” Stiles barked from the floor. “I don’t need your—pointy help.”
“And it will come again,” Zevon persisted, looking now at Orsova. “Like seismic activity, it doesn’t go away. It builds up to something worse. The two of us have used our time learning to read the spaceborne graviton pulses—”
“You two aren’t as much fun as you used to be.” Orsova cast a furious glance at Zevon and added, “I know the game. Pretending.”
Stiles wiped blood from his mouth with a shaking hand. “Not—pretending. We just don’t—give a damn anymore. You’ve had two—two years of good crops…that haven’t been squooshed…two years of—”
“I paid you!” the soldier roared, shoving at Orsova’s arm.
Orsova held him back. “Less and less reason to let enemies work on our equipment,” he said to Stiles. “We should put you on trial and execute you now. It isn’t enough that we stop taking care of you when you’re sick.”
Might as well talk to the wall.
“Take the message,” Stiles attempted one more time. “There’s another Constrictor coming. The planet…can get ready. Save the billion—”
The effort of speaking coiled Stiles into a knot and apparently gave Orsova the idea that this was the best satisfaction he would get today.
“I paid!” the soldier shouted.
“You paid to beat an alien,” Orsova said, “not to kill one. Go out now. Go.”
Orsova yanked the door open and shoved the soldier out, then left the lab and shut the door behind him.
That was the paradigm of their life—Orsova sold opportunities to beat up the human alien, while he got his own jollies from watching the effects on the Romulan alien.
Zevon watched the frosted glass door, saw something that held him in his place—Stiles couldn’t see the door from where he lay, but knew to simply lie gasping and wait. Ultimately a shuffle in the corridor spared him, and Zevon broke from the table and rushed to his side.
“Curses,” Stiles wheezed, “foiled again.”
“Eric…” Zevon sorrowfully turned him enough to raise him to a nearly sitting position and held him there. Stiles could never have held himself, but would simply have slumped back into a supine position and probably suffocated on the deck. “Look at you….”
“What a way to—live—aw, God—I hate that son of a bitch….”
“Orsova is a walking symptom. He lost his children in the last Constrictor. Now he tortures us to ease his bitterness. The soldiers he brings here…they’re the same.”
Zevon got to one knee, then hoisted Stiles up and deposited him on the only cot in the lab. The Romulan’s face was creased with misery, overlaid by a firm mask of bottled rage.
“Hey,” Stiles gasped. “Your emotions are showing.”
“I keep telling you—I am not Vulcan.” Zevon angrily snatched a beaker of purified water from a shelf, soaked a rag, and pressed the cool compress to Stiles’s bleeding lip.
“We’ll never convince him to let us talk to the chief warden or anybody,” Stiles murmured. “How can we convince them that this is their chance?”
“We’re not that certain of our readings,” Zevon reminded. “The prediction might be off by months. Stop moving.”
“I’m not moving…I’m writhing in agony.”
“Exercise some self-control.”
“But you’re not a Vulcan.”
Obviously troubled, Zevon frowned. “All we know is that another Constrictor, a very strong one, has been building for two years and will certainly strike. The phenomenon hasn’t gone away at all.”
“But we know, Zevon, that’s something. Help me—”
With Zevon’s help, Stiles jerkily shifted onto his side as his aching ribs and stomach muscles cramped again. His eyes clutched shut as he bore through the spasm, feeling worse for Zevon than himself. Zevon could do nothing more than grasp him and wait until the torment worked its way out. Stiles paced himself, breathing chunkily, until he could finally count through ten long breaths and his face and hands stopped involuntarily flinching.
“Orsova and his kind,” he began when he could speak again, “they think we’re just stalling to avoid execution…we’ve got to convince them somehow. Or go over them to the consul general.”
“They will be convinced when the Constrictor comes.”
“And we can laugh in their faces, if Orsova or some other anti-alienite doesn’t find a way to kill us first.”
Zevon sat down on the cot beside him and gazed at the dirty floor. “I can hardly blame them. A billion people dead…what would we do to anyone who caused that on our planets?”
“If we can predict the Constrictors,” Stiles muttered, “then it’s only a matter of time before we can reduce the effects.”
“A thousand years of time, perhaps, between those two miracles.”
“But if we can just predict them, then planes can be landed, people can put on compression suits, get into reinforced buildings, put the babies and old people in antigrav chambers—you know how to build those. Why won’t they listen?”
“I don’t know.”
Stiles managed a sustaining sigh, let the lungful of oxygen flow through him and clear his head a little more. When he could relax a little more, he gazed at Zevon. “You think I can’t feel what’s happening to me? I know how sick I am. My muscles are deteriorating. I can feel my innards slowly dissolving. When Orsova’s customers kick me now, it doesn’t heal anymore. I won’t survive the Constrictor when it comes. You don’t have to pretend. Even without the Constrictor I don’t have that long. Orsova’ll have me beaten up once too often, or I’ll fall down and my heart’ll collapse…I can’t have more than a few more weeks.”
“If I hadn’t caused the Constrictor, you would be somewhere else today. Probably a lieutenant.” His sharp features creasing, Zevon pressed the heels of his hands into his thighs as if the mental torture caused him some physical pressure too. Several seconds passed before he could finally say, “Now my great mistake has killed my only friend.”
Stiles gazed at him, feeling supremely wise. The inner peace would’ve knocked him over like phaser stun if he’d been standing. He was completely content, as if lying in a hammock under a bower of autumn leaves. Zevon’s grief actually amused him, and he smiled.
“Jesus, do you do Irish tragedies too?” he chided. “Zevon of the Sorrows…Listen, clown, you gave me four extra years. My own mistake killed me that night, the night we met. I was in the hole. I died there. You crawled through the wall and gave me four years I
wasn’t gonna get.”
Irritated by the compliment, Zevon shook his head. “You wouldn’t have been here at all—”
“Yeah, well, flog yourself again. Gimme that broom over there to hit you with. If I could get up, I’d beat your ass blue.”
“It’s already green.”
Stiles laughed, despite the fact that his midsection had cramped again. He stiffened and moaned, but then he laughed again. Zevon smiled as he stuffed a rolled lab apron under Stiles’s head. For a moment they retired into peaceable silence. Over the years, they had learned to be silent together. In fact, they seldom talked like this anymore. Seldom needed to. They knew each other so well, and what a great feeling it was to be silent, silent together.
The lab seemed quiet, but now as they sat together Stiles focused on the chitter of the computer as it doggedly worked on the last problem fed into it, the burble of chemical processors trying to separate molecules for identification of spaceborne particles brought to them by the Pojjana Air Patrols, and the plink of the faucet in the sink dripping. Plink…plink…plink….
Nice sound.
He dared to draw a longer breath, which forced him to cough convulsively. When that cleared, he wiped spittle from his beard and tried to relax.
“I was pointless back in Starfleet,” he wandered on. Why did he feel like talking? Oh, well. “There were a thousand of me. Ensigns by the carton. Probably most of ’em officers by now. Wouldn’t have happened to me…botched the mission like I did…might as well be here, distracting somebody like Orsova. I mean, if he wasn’t hitting me he’d just be…hitting you.”
“Quiet.”
“After I die, you go on without me. Don’t you quit. You don’t need me. Don’t let Orsova slow you down. If you can predict the Constrictor within days, you can save thousands. Within hours, you can save millions. If you can get the Pojjana to listen, they can save ten million this time, maybe a half billion the next—”
“Without you, I have no wish to keep working.”
“You don’t need me.” Stiles raised his head and grasped Zevon’s arm with a ferocity of strength he didn’t think he still had. “I’ve never been anything much more than raw material anyway. Starfleet tried to whip me into something worth having, and I thought they’d succeeded, but twenty-one-year-olds never think they’re young. They’ll go out and hoe a row of stumps before they realize they forgot to bring seed. That was me…was it ever me.”
“Eric,” Zevon pointlessly admonished, but had nothing new to say about that.
“You think you can do it, right? Whether I’m here or not, you can do it, right?”
“I can improve the predictions…if this first one is accurate within days, I can learn to fine-tune it. Bring it to hours. After the first one, I’ll know how. If they let me continue—”
“They’ll let you. You’ll convince them. Don’t you stop trying, right? If you stop trying, I’ll be dead for nothing. I don’t mind being dead, but dead for nothing stinks.”
Inexpressibly disturbed, Zevon nodded. “I promise, Eric.”
Scarcely were the prophetic words out than the door suddenly rattled and both men flinched—they hadn’t even noticed the sound of footsteps in the hall. Abruptly aware of the great serviceability of silence and how much they sacrificed if they talked too long, Stiles willed himself to a sitting position and shifted until his legs hung over the end of the cot and Zevon was sitting almost beside him. They didn’t stand. That would’ve been taken as threatening. They’d learned that too, a long time ago, the hard way.
Orsova rolled in, a little less drunk than before, his bulky guard uniform somewhat askew and a bundle under his arm.
Desperate at the prospect of two beatings in a single day, Zevon bolted to his feet between the big Pojjana and Stiles, standing out of the way of Stiles’s grasping hand. “Leave him alone! If you want me to beg, Orsova, this time I will.”
But the big assistant warden skewed a glance at him, then said, “I didn’t come to beat him. I came to give him clean clothes.”
The astounding claim literally drove Zevon back a step, enough that Stiles could get a grip on his arm.
“Why?” Stiles asked.
Orsova dumped the bundle of clothing onto Stiles’s lap. “Because a deal’s been made. They’re coming to get you. You’re going home.”
“Starfleet’s coming?”
“Somebody is,” Orsova confirmed without commitment. “The orders to free you come all the way from Consul Bellinorn, and he hates everybody.”
At the name of the chief provincial judiciary consul, Stiles felt the air fly from his lungs. “We’re…we’re going home?”
Orsova shrugged. “Just you.”
“What? What about Zevon!”
“He’s Romulan.”
Stiles used his grip on Zevon to yank himself up despite the protests of his body and rage gave him the strength to be there. “You’re kidding! I’m not going without him!”
“Yes.”
“No! You’re doing this on purpose!”
“Stop, Eric.” Zevon pulled him back.
Orsova blinked his reddened eyes, peered with something like sentimental regret at the bundle of clothing, shrugged again, and simply left the room, bothering to clunk the door shut behind him, as if to give them a few final minutes alone. Courtesy? Since when?
Shuddering like an old man, Stiles stood beside Zevon, and the two of them stared at the door. They couldn’t look at each other. Not yet.
“He’s lying,” Stiles rasped. “He’s tricking us for some reason…he wants something. That’s got to be it, Zevon. He’s telling lies. This is Red Sector. Starfleet wouldn’t come in here. It’s a lie.”
“Perhaps something has changed,” Zevon suggested reasonably. “If the sector has been declared green, how would we know it, here in prison?”
“We’d hear about it…somebody would say something. We’d hear rumors.”
Slowly shaking his head, Zevon stood with his arms at his sides and common sense on him like a cloak. “No, Eric. No.”
“We’d hear about it….”
“No.”
Barely aware of where his legs were, Stiles sank back onto the cot. The metal frame squawked under his weight and the sound nearly knocked him unconscious. His head drummed, hearing the squawk again and again. Before him, Zevon’s legs seemed to be surrounded by a slowly closing tunnel.
After a moment, Zevon came to sit beside him. Together they stared at the lab, still not looking at each other. Their world, this lab, this prison, this planet, turned inside out for them both in the next ten seconds. Suddenly everything was changed, heaving as if in some kind of earthquake, and for a ridiculous moment there seemed to be a Constrictor holding them both to this cot, to this floor, to the bedrock beneath the building.
Who was coming? If the Sector had turned green, they probably would’ve heard about it, and there hadn’t been a whisper. Not a thing had changed, not a flicker of instability—nothing. Who was strong enough to come through Red Sector after Eric Stiles?
“It must be the ambassador,” Zevon said, as if reading Stiles’s mind.
“He must finally have found a way to bring you out.”
“I don’t care if God Himself is coming,” Stiles uttered. The words gagged in his throat. “I don’t want to go.”
“You must go,” Zevon told him firmly.
“I don’t have to go. Nobody can make me…I won’t go. Not even for Ambassador Spock…no, not even for him. Everything I’ve done, I did so he’d be proud of me. If I go back, everything’ll fall apart. If I die here, he can be proud of me. I’ll be lost in the line of duty. If I’m alive, I’m headed back to disgrace. Court-martial. Home to humiliation. Zero purpose…complete uselessness. I cheated my dopey destiny for four years. Now I’m twenty-five and dying, about to be crushed in name as well as in body…and you and I…Zevon…we’ll never see each other again. I don’t want to go. I’m not going.”
Without really turning
to face him, Zevon glanced down at his side, at his own arm pressing against Stiles’s, and he moved enough to clasp Stiles’s hand. Still, they did not look at each other.
“You must go,” Zevon told him firmly. “They can save you. The Federation will cure you. You will go.”
Despite the physical abuse, the sickness, the deterioration, the pain, Stiles found himself looking fondly back upon the years of working side by side with Zevon, at first concentrating on keeping each other alive, later on the goal of deciphering the erratic Constrictor pattern. Their discoveries—that there was no pattern, but that waves did build before a Constrictor and could be measured…the possibility of predicting the disasters before they hit…
“Y’know, I didn’t mind the pain or the beatings, or anything,” he said. “I didn’t mind the chance to stay here and do what I perceived as my duty. It’s better for me to die here than go back and die humiliated. You understand, you’re Romulan—it’s better for my family to believe that I died in battle.”
“That is often best,” Zevon conditionally agreed, “but not always. Not this time.”
He squeezed Stiles’s hand, careful of his own strength and the possibility of actually crushing the weakened muscles and the thready bones.
Stiles gazed at their clasped hands, and sucked each breath as if it were his last.
“You’re the only friend I’ve got,” he uttered. “I’m dying and they’re taking me away from my only friend.”
“They’ll cure you. You’ll live.”
“I don’t want to live humiliated. I want to die here. At least I died trying, instead of going back disgraced and a failure, court-martialed—”
“No, Eric. You must go.”
“Why? Why do I have to go? I’d rather die here.”
“You must go for the billion.”
“Huh?”
“You forget, as usual, that others are involved who are not looking at you or judging you.”