Beacon 23: Part Two: Pet Rocks

by Hugh Howey

  Rocky makes a series of clicks and scratchy noises. I smile. Life is really good.

  “We don’t have a moon, and our sun is a very long way away. What heat we have comes from a radioactive core, and there’s very little tectonic activity, which makes for an incredibly still planet, covered with a few meters of water in most places, except for these really shallow ledges and flat islands where most of the cool stuff takes place. That was home.”

  “So, not space-faring, I assume?” I say.

  “Yeah, asshole, not space-faring.”

  “But sentient.”

  “Smarter than you.”

  I smile. “And your anatomy? I assume something like neurons?”

  “Not quite as simple as neurons, but similar. And yeah, we’re very social. So we developed sentience. Theory of mind and all that.”

  “What’s theory of mind?” I ask.

  Rocky pauses. Like he’s wondering if teaching a monkey is within his boundaries of patience.

  “It’s me being able to guess what you’re thinking,” he says.

  My brain is already drifting off to a different topic. “What do you call a small group of your kind?” I ask.

  “Say what?”

  “Well, a group of cows is a herd. What’s a group of rocks. A bag?”

  “A bag of rocks?” Rocky asks.

  I laugh.

  “Fuck you.”

  “Rocky, you’re the best friend I’ve ever had.”

  “That settles it. I used to argue with the professor that there was no such thing as hell. I was wrong. I relent. I give up. I’ve found the joint.”

  “Where did you learn English?” I ask. “And who did you used to argue about heaven and hell with? This professor?”

  “We didn’t argue. We debated. We discussed. It’s what civilized people do. You should try it sometime.”

  “Okay.” I feel a little more sober. And for some reason, I don’t mind. I sit up, away from the GWB for a moment. “Tell me about your owner—”

  “I own me,” Rocky says.

  “Yeah, sorry.” I shake my head. “About this professor you were being sent to. On Oxford.”

  “I’m his research assistant,” Rocky says. “I just finished my internship on Delphi, was heading home. I work with Professor Bockman on human studies and consciousness.”

  “So you’re a biologist?” I ask, and a new level of stunned hits me, followed by a wave of obviousness. Of course this thing has a job. This being, not thing. So many layers of biases and assumptions to peel away. Just when I think I’m almost there—

  “Not a biologist,” Rocky says. “I’ve been studying under Professor Bockman for three years. He’s a philosopher.”

  Something clicks.

  Something funny.

  “Wait,” I say.

  “Don’t—” Rocky warns.

  “Are you telling me—?”

  “Ah, hell,” Rocky says.

  “You’re a philosopher’s stone?”

  •••

  It takes a solid minute or two to stop laughing. Lying on my side, curled up in a ball, I finally get my breath back and just stay there, gazing out at the stars, feeling contentment for the first time in . . . possibly forever. I think about the passenger liner that skated through unharmed, probably safe by no more than a few seconds of desperate struggle on my part, and how no one has asked me about that. How not a single labcoat asked me how that felt. How I sat right here, exhausted and crying, but feeling something like elation, like whatever the highest form of relief in the world is, that feeling after a bomb misses its target and you’ve still got all your fingers and toes, but that feeling times five thousand.

  “The army really fucked you up good, didn’t it?” Rocky asks.

  I don’t answer. Instead the world goes blurry with tears.

  “I’m sorry for that,” Rocky tells me, and I can hear that he’s sincere, and this starts the sobbing. I haven’t cried in front of anyone in the longest time. Not since that one session with that army shrink, which made me never want to sit in therapy again. But now I cry my fucking guts out, and it goes on forever, and Rocky doesn’t say anything, doesn’t judge me, just sits in his box where I can’t see him, and I know that he’s smarter than me, and wiser, and it’s not just the accent, but all that schooling, and that he somehow gets that I’m fucked up but that it isn’t my fault, and this feels really fucking amazing, to have someone think it’s not all my fault, and so I cry and cry while little pebbles and bits of steel bounce off my beacon and go tumbling like shed tears out into the cosmos.

  When I finally pull it together, Rocky asks me a question, one that stuns me into a long and thoughtful silence:

  “What hurt you?”

  This causes me to suck in a big gulp of air. I’d cry more if I hadn’t just cried myself out.

  “I don’t know,” I say.

  “Maybe you do,” Rocky suggests, “but you’re scared to give it life.”

  I laugh. “You sound like my shrink.”

  “Yeah, well, fuck me, maybe I’m starting to care about you a little bit, and maybe he cared about you. I mean, I’m relying on you to water me, right? And I’m really hoping to hell you tell the supply ship about me and get me home, so it behooves me to be nice to you.”

  “You said behooves,” I say.

  “Is this how you avoid thinking about it? Whatever it was?”

  I sit up. I move across the space between the GWB and the outer wall of the pod and sit with my back to the porthole, looking at the dome and the smaller panes of glass that ring the small space.

  “I used to be a pilot,” I say.

  I take a deep breath, wondering where the hell I’m going with this.

  “I saw a lot of action in the Void War. We were . . . a bunch of people dying out in the middle of nowhere, you know? Not even a rock to claim. Nothing but lines on a star chart. Just pointless. Only made sense if you were drunk, you know? Like . . . how the deck of a ship seems to come to rest with a few rums, like it all balances out if you get the mixture just right, if the world is as tilted as you are.”

  Rocky listens. Is really listening.

  “Anyway, I lost my wings and got moved to the front. I was there for the Blitz, when we were going to end the war, be home by Christmas, all that bullshit. I was in my third tour with the army. Was a lieutenant in an A-squad, which is the people you call when no one else will pick up the goddamn phone, and really, I just kept getting promoted through attrition. Everyone above me got blown to bits, and they kept slotting me up, and no one cared that my breath could strip the camo paint from a field blaster, they just cared that we killed more than we lost, which we did in spades.”

  My mind drifts back to that last day. My last day fighting. The day I refused to fight anymore. And my hand settles on the wound across my belly.

  “I could’ve killed a shitload of ’em that day,” I say. “I guess I already had, but I could’ve taken out a hive, an entire nest of hives, and turned the tide. Would’ve meant wiping out three of our own platoons, and I’d already lost every man in my squad, but taking the whole place out was the right thing to do. And yet I didn’t. Then it turned out for the best. The Ryph pulled back because of my squad’s push right up into the swarm—and yeah, it was my squad that did all the hero-ing that day, and because I’m the one who woke up in a hospital, who didn’t die out there, my guts sewn back into my belly, they pinned a medal on me, and there were a bunch of parades that I saw from my hospital bed, and I still don’t know why the hell anyone cared that two armies decided they’d kill each other tomorrow instead of that afternoon, and I never asked.

  “My CO’s CO’s CO came to me with all his gold stars on his collar and asked me what I wanted to do with the rest of my career, to name my posting.”

  I pause and think back to that day. To that old man. His beaming face. The pride he had in the injured soldier his army had made.

  “And what did you ask for?” Rocky said.


  “I told him I wanted to be alone.”

  I remember the old man’s smile fading, how the scars across his lips came back together, which let me know that he hadn’t been smiling when whatever caused those scars happened to him. He walked away, but he granted me my wish.

  “NASA is where the best of the best pilots end up,” I tell Rocky. “The very best fliers, with all their shit together, they end up in NASA. It’s always been like that. Until me.”

  We sit in silence a while.

  “I think you’re doing just fine,” Rocky says. “You rescued me, right?”

  I lean forward and put my face in my palms. I don’t say it, but I’m thinking it, wondering who rescued whom.

  It feels good, talking about this stuff. Not for the first time, I regret that I didn’t continue on with the shrink. I just wasn’t ready. Was too scared to face myself. It was too early to be seen.

  “Hey, Rocky?”

  I lift my head from my palms. Scoot over toward the box. Rocky is sitting in his little puddle, which looks about the same size as when I first made it.

  “Rock?”

  He looks up at me, I guess wondering what I’m about to say.

  I toy with one of the splinters from his box, bending it back and forth until it comes free. Bringing it up to my nose, I breathe in the scent of wood, admire how moist and green and fresh the wood is, like it just came out of the forest, this thing that was so recently alive. It smells like my childhood on Earth. It smells like the outdoors. Like crisp air and atmosphere.

  Rocky has fallen silent. I think I know why.

  “You made this hole, didn’t you?” I ask him.

  He stares at me guiltily.

  “You’re like . . . like a bullet in an abdomen.”

  Rocky looks slightly away.

  “You hurt this box, and it was still a little bit alive out there, and it was going to Professor Bockman at SAU on Oxford, and it was empty, just a box, and the wood died the rest of the way out there, didn’t it?”

  Rocky says nothing.

  “I’m losing my fucking mind, aren’t I?”

  I think Rocky nods. I wish he would say something. I wish he would talk to me. Illusions are easy to form, but they’re impossible to put back together. They’re like humans in that way. It’s so hard to know if a thing is alive or dead. So hard. I smell that splinter of wood again, which still smells vaguely of the living, and I don’t know why, but my mind drifts to Alice Waters, whom I loved in high school, and who I used to write in the army because I didn’t know who else to write, and I wonder what she thought of all those batshit letters I sent, and if those letters smelled of someone who was alive and breathing and scared out of his fucking mind, or if maybe they just smelled of crazy and desperate and blood and thermite. Or if, like me, those old love letters just reeked to her of war.