That was the only element Jonny Nadd’s life lacked, any hint of the exceptional. But his Meld would change that; had already changed it.
After a full day at home, acclimating himself, he ventured out. It already felt natural to him to have the Meld on his right shoulder. It didn’t quite perch there. Sometimes it even hovered a few centimeters above the shoulder.
When his interest’d been piqued by the xenozoologist on the news running her Meld through its fearsome paces, he’d naturally studied up on the life form. Even though he worked in bio assembly, he couldn’t pretend to understand the intricacies and peculiarities of the alien organism. He grasped the basic concept of the bond which could be effected between humans and the creatures. The Melds needed no feeding, no maintenance of any kind.
He felt a profound connectivity to his. It was more than the anthropomorphization of a pet. It was as if the flow of his consciousness now included a sharp turn up to his right shoulder. He felt his senses widening, his brain pumping with more vigor.
He felt empowered.
Outdoors finally, he walked the city streets. His district was clean and comfortable if not overtly affluent. He was more aware than ever of the attention his Meld drew. The fluttering silver ball on his shoulder caused passersby to instantly reassess him, to take his Meld into some kind of significant account. Some people nodded with appreciation, no doubt those who had hoped for a positive ruling from the Court on Meld rights.
Others who saw Jonny on the street flinched a bit, but no one confronted him and no one ran the other way. That was good. He hadn’t gotten himself Melded to upset or frighten anybody.
The day was warm, and having time off work felt luxurious, even a little decadent. He grew hungry and entered a cafe. It had a retro-industrial ambience, with metaplastic slabs for seats and tables.
Patrons stirred, aware of him, but now he was more interested in the meal he’d ordered rising up through a slot in his table. He took a sip of strong coffee, then bit into a falafel. Tastes and smells were rich. The pita was soft, the chickpeas with a slight delightful crunch.
The lunch absorbed him enough so that, even with his seemingly enhanced awareness, the balled up napkin that hit him square in the middle of his forehead caught him wholly off-guard. He blinked with surprise and looked around the cafe.
A man sat at the next table. Jonny wasn’t sure he’d been there a moment ago. A neutral response came to Jonny’s lips—something benign, even humorous—but the man was staring back. Glaring, even. He was perfectly positioned to have thrown that napkin.
“Wasn’t no accident,” the man said.
Jonny flashed back to a nearly forgotten cafeteria incident in grade school, something so like this it was comical. He thought it interesting that the memory didn’t stand out more, so rare it was that any bullying episode slipped through the careful cloak of protectiveness schools draped around students. But it made a little knot of distress in Jonny’s stomach nonetheless.
He batted the napkin ball away from his plate. He didn’t know how to react here. In the same neutral tone he’d meant to use before, he asked, “Why did you do it?”
“To provoke you, dummy. What’d you think?” The man even spoke like a clichéd bully.
And then it snapped into place for Jonny. You could always tell; it was funny. They exuded a distinctive ruggedness. This one didn’t have facial tattoos or a half-shaved head or any of the other obvious exotic cultural telltales they brought back with them. And he didn’t have a Meld on his shoulder. But he was an Outer.
“Why do you want to provoke me?” Jonny suddenly hated the weakness of the question. Was he just going to passively regurgitate this man’s words back at him?
The man had thick shoulders, and his flesh was purpled by strange suns. His eyes stayed fixed on Jonny. “I want to see if you’ll kill me. You godd-damn breath-waste.” Strong teeth appeared in a disagreeable grin.
As Jonny processed the insult, nearby tables vacated. It was extraordinary. He had done nothing to instigate this situation, yet he was certain it was his presence, and not this Outer’s, causing the retreat of the cafe’s patrons. They feared him. Or, more accurately, the Meld on his shoulder.
But this man from the Out wasn’t afraid.
The balled up napkin was still within reach. This time Jonny flicked it onto the floor, putting insolence into the gesture. “You have a problem with me?” Again it was a grade school dynamic, two kids pushing each other. He shouldn’t give in to this childishness, but it was difficult not to.
“The only problem I got is you being attached to that.” The glaring eyes flickered to the right of Jonny’s head.
Of course. What else could this be about? Jonny sat up straighter and took a measured sip of his coffee. “I am not going to explain the legality of this Meld to you. You’ve been Out. I can see that. Perhaps if, while you were away from the Earth, you yourself had gotten Melded, you might understand the bond humans can share with these–”
The man pounded a large square fist on the metaplastic table before him. In a booming furious voice he said, “You got nothing to tell me, slugslime! I was Melded by the tribal holies in the Alabaster Jungle on Shambrol. I was a prostrate-disciple for half a year before I earned—earned—the right to undergo the Six Agonies. Then I faced the Silken Caress, which kills about every tenth aspirant. And finally … I won my Meld.”
Mercury rippled in the corner of Jonny’s eye. He was still reacting to the Out man’s aggression with a smoldering aggression of his own. But what the Outer had just said was too shocking to ignore.
“Where is your Meld now?” Jonny couldn’t help the quaver in his voice.
The man let out a long breath, then said, “I had it removed when I returned to Earth.”
Jonny thought he heard a gasp from one of the patrons who had withdrawn from the vicinity of the two tables, but maybe he had made the noise. “Why?” Jonny asked. It was like cutting off a limb. That was what the Outers themselves said.
“Because I don’t need a fucking Meld on Earth. I’m not facing hostile alien conditions you can’t even imagine. What do you need one for, is the godd-damn question! Come on. Use it. You had some crooked doctor attach that thing to you. Use it on me!” With that the muscular rugged Outer man vaulted up from his seat.
Jonny recoiled. But he felt the strong current of aggressive response shoot through him at the same instant. The Meld spun in a full three-sixty on his shoulder, and shapes appeared on its surface, sharp outcroppings, edged ridges. With the snap of a thought it would detach from his shoulder.
But police officers entered the cafe before the Out man could make the leap toward Jonny’s table. Several of the patrons had called emergency services. The Outer was taken away. Jonny stayed for questioning. He did not return to his lunch. The cafe, meanwhile, emptied out.
“You don’t want to know,” Jonny said with a punch line inflection, and Inika laughed.
It was already their thing, that line, if they could possibly be said to have a thing partway through a first date. You don’t want to know. Say it wryly, solemnly, flirtatiously—it was a laugh-getter for both of them.
He was having a marvelous time. The soc-date service had really screwed up tonight and put him with someone he could click with. Inika wasn’t distractingly pretty, just like he wasn’t needlessly handsome. They seemed on an even intellectual level and, more importantly, tuned to similar social frequencies. She was obviously a veteran of these encounters, just as he was. They had delicately probed one another for areas of incompatibility, deal-breaking stuff. There wasn’t anything so far.
“Tell me something you like about your job, then,” Inika persisted. She’d told him about her work in finance. They sat at a table over drinks, strange saucers full of bluish milk. The club offered soaring views of the night-lit city.
“Well …” He felt teenage-y tonight, in the best ways—engaged, excited, eager to make a good impression. He was certainly attracted to thi
s woman. “I’ve gotten used to the smell at the plant.”
“Smell?”
“After the first few years you hardly notice it.”
“Smells like seaweed, does it?”
His bio assembly plant worked in hard algae construction materials. Really, though. it was the nutrient injections that stank.
Tonight’s was the first date he’d been on since getting Melded. His Meld wasn’t a surprise for Inika. It couldn’t be. The service updated his profile automatically. When he’d met her earlier, she’d made polite eye contact as they greeted each other, then she’d looked at his Meld. He’d seen nothing in her expression but frank acknowledgment of the alien life to which he was cellularly bonded.
But she had asked no questions about it.
Until now.
“Has anybody …” She had dark eyes, and they rolled languidly in their sockets toward his right shoulder. “Anybody given you a hard time? About your Meld?”
He’d felt a thickening intimacy between them, lush and potentially physical. This second look she gave his Meld told him she wasn’t repulsed by it. Not at all.
“Well, there was this incident a couple weeks ago ….”
“Tell me about it,” she said quickly.
You don’t want to know. But he couldn’t make the words come this time. Plainly she did want to know. The tenor of their encounter changed in that moment. The intimacy remained, perhaps even deepened; but the lushness became a sinister humidity, closing around Jonny’s flesh.
He told her about the Out man at the cafe. The police had followed up with him about it. A patient, well-mannered officer came to Jonny’s home. With the warm confidentiality Jonny always expected from the police, he was told that the Outer was undergoing mental evaluation.
“Where did he get his Meld done?” Inika asked.
“He said Shambrol.” Jonny wasn’t especially knowledgeable of Out worlds.
She, evidently, was. “Ah. Alabaster Jungle. Supplications. Ordeals. And he had his removed?” Her dark eyes flashed with indignation. Maybe with fury.
He drank from his saucer. His hand shook slightly. There were other people at the club, but the layout offered dim privacies for those at the tables.
She was flushed with passion now, but it wasn’t an orthodox lust. Her gaze settled on his Meld, a very deliberate look this time. She bit her lip. He felt the creature ripple on his shoulder, and she made a soft moan.
“What kind of man would mutilate himself so?” She was still talking about the Out man at the cafe, her fury growing visibly.
Distinctly uncomfortable now, he started thinking about a graceful exit.
“No wonder he went crazy when he saw yours.” She was speaking directly to his Meld now, leaning half over the high square of table between them.
Jonny felt a fierce stab of disappointment. Moments ago he’d been delighted by this woman, her conversation, her comradeship, her appearance. He’d been thinking beyond the possibility of sex with her to the credible beginnings of a relationship. Now he understood the true focus of her conspicuous attraction to him: he was merely the adjunct to his Meld; he was the appendage.
If she wanted a Meld of her own, she could have one. The World Supreme Court said so. But Inika desired instead the human meat attached to the Meld. What would she want him to do if they went home together? Demonstrate his Meld’s abilities? Detach it from his shoulder and send it spinning around the bedroom? The idea curdled him. He considered now any exit from this club, graceful or otherwise.
He edged off his chair as she reached toward his shoulder. The mercurial ball surfaced a fast series of disquieting patterns, squid-armed things that Jonny felt more than glimpsed.
“I think we’re at the end of our evening, Inika.” He was on his feet.
“You can’t go,” she said, coming off her stool, reaching again. “Where would you go?”
“You don’t want to know,” he said, and turned and bolted.
He thought Melding would become more commonplace, but after several months no one else at the bio plant had one. His coworkers seemed okay with his. At least, nobody grimaced or avoided him. But he also wasn’t invited to social events as often as before, as if the calculation of whether his Meld would be disruptive or not at a given affair was too much trouble.
He hadn’t dated since the incident with Inika. A spot of celibacy would probably do him good, he’d decided. Still, in hindsight he thought of the dark-eyed woman as a missed opportunity. Perhaps he should have stayed in and seen what she was really like, her obsession with his Meld aside. So much else between them had felt so right.
Jonny Nadd started to experience a real loneliness.
So when he heard about the Meld clubs, he recognized them as another opportunity, one he wouldn’t miss.
Societal discourse about Melds had died down considerably. It was almost passé to have a strong opinion about the issue now. Jonny saw other Melds out in public from time to time but didn’t interact with any of these strangers. The sight of a person with a living silver sphere on his or her shoulder was no longer cause for media interest.
He looked into the Meld associations and chose one nearby his home which met at a sensible hour. He arrived at the public rec center, intrigued and a bit apprehensive, and walked through the door.
The familiarity, even banality, of the scene struck him immediately. This could be a PTA or AA meeting. There were folding chairs, folding tables, and the place smelled ever so faintly of chocolate chip cookies. Jonny wasn’t left to stand and gawk for long. Someone came over to welcome him, but no extravagant fuss was made over his arrival.
The people engaged in casual sociability were as ordinary as ordinary got, with only a single distinguishing characteristic: each person present was Melded. But even that ceased to seem extraordinary after a few minutes, Jonny found. No one peered or prodded at anybody else’s Meld. The organisms were evidently accepted as the components they were. He eased into the setting. There were apps relevant to Meld issues for sale and even some deadtree pamphlets on one of the tables. He took a doughnut instead, chatting with this person and that as he waited for the meeting to get underway.
But the evening never quite organized into an actual meeting. Even so, he found himself engaged in interesting topics. Anti-Meld sentiment was still quite strong, Jonny was assured by several of the club’s members. Secret political deals were being cut, dirty tricks right out of the blood-soaked twentieth century playbook. If misguided fearmongers couldn’t get rid of Melds the legal way, they would try to subvert the Court’s wise conclusive decision favoring Meld rights.
Jonny wasn’t entirely convinced, but he liked the camaraderie here and had to admit that the “them-against-us” factor added to the group’s proud solidarity. It felt like he was making friends tonight, real friends. A few people invited him to a practice facility where he could safely deploy his Meld. Test it out. See what it could really do. He liked that idea too.
It took him a while to realize that no Outers at all belonged to this organization. All these people had gotten their Melds through the same simple medical procedure he had undergone.
He left the rec center very upbeat that night. Two days later the first instance of a homicide committed by way of a Meld captured the media’s attention the world over. The debate over Meld safety reignited at a furious heat.
The Earth was a safe place, and the Out was not. The explorers and scientific personnel who ventured off-world faced fantastically hazardous conditions. The creatures called Melds were widespread throughout that general environment, existing on many worlds. Working with those alien apparatus, rather than bringing in human-made weaponry, was considered the preferable approach to survival.
But Earth wasn’t in fact safe, not entirely. Jonny had come around to this thinking, reinforced as it was by his friends in the Meld rights community who he’d known for months now. Of the several confirmed incidents of murder involving a Meld, the majority had occurred
because a Melded individual was being harassed or threatened. And in most of those incidents the harassment was because of the Meld itself.
“They hate us because we’ve got the Meld and they don’t,” Agustín said.
“Hate’s right!” Claire put in. “You think I like that? Walking around, knowing complete strangers are thinking hate at me.”
Ivan shuddered. The Meld on his shoulder bristled with thorny protrusions. “At this point I wouldn’t feel safe without mine.”
Jonny nodded along with everyone else, even though he recognized the dichotomy in Ivan’s attitude. If a person wasn’t Melded in the first place, he or she wouldn’t be subjected to any general hostility and wouldn’t need protection. But Jonny also saw the disconnect inherent in that fact. It was akin to blaming the victim for the rape. So went the Meld rights party line, which only grew stronger with every incident in which a Melded person struck back against the threat of violence. People should simply know better than to mess with a Melded.
Their group now met at private residences. Protesters had started showing up at the rec center. It was hard not to get caught up in a siege mentality.
“I never knew it would be like this,” Jonny said quietly when the emphatic conversation paused. They were gathered in Agustín’s home, a stately spread with lots of designer furniture.
Two dozen sets of eyes turned to him. Despite the strengthening zeal of the group, they had lost a few members recently. Scuttlebutt even had it that one of those who’d withdrawn had had her Meld removed. It was a disquieting notion. Jonny knew what Inika had thought of such a thing.
He had the group’s attention, and so continued. “I was undecided about Melds when I first heard about them.” He felt uncomfortable admitting this, and a few of the watching faces turned sour. “But then I saw a Meld demonstrated. Saw its incredible power. I had to have one. I cannot accept the view that this makes me a dangerous person, a destructive one. I’m not maladjusted like those protesters at the rec hall were saying to us. I’m a whole, responsible human being. I’m educated. I work. I contribute to society. I just never knew, when I got Melded, that I would have to fear for my personal safety.” And if I’d known, he did not add, I might not have done it. It was hard to admit that even to himself.
Dark Horizons Page 5