"Oh, Max,” she said. “I told you to stay away."
"None of this is your fault, Miranda. There would've been no way for you to resist. You would've fallen instantly in love with the first person you saw."
"Max, I need for you to listen to me.” She put her hands on my forearms as if to both steady me and keep me at a distance. “I know I'm drugged.” She paused for a beat as if to let the message sink in. “Rossi confessed everything to me."
"What?” I felt as if the floor shifted under me. “I'll work on a treatment, Miranda—“
"No, you don't understand—“
"I'll find a way to counter the effects—“
"I want to stay here with Rossi."
Her words stunned me.
"I know I should be furious, I should feel victimized. But that's not how I feel! I'm an adult, I'm lucid, rational and...I'm in love with Rossi. Deeply, totally, unconditionally in love. I'm the happiest I've ever been in my life."
"You're not thinking straight."
She shook her head vigorously. “Look, the chemical simulates the processes in the brain when a person is in love, correct? In other words, if you compared my brain chemistry with that of a normal, happy newlywed there'd be no difference between the two, isn't that right?"
"Well, yes. But in your case it's been triggered by a foreign substance, a drug!"
"So what?"
"Miranda...!"
"So what? What difference does it make what the origin of these feelings are? The point is that they're real to me. I'm in love with Rossi."
I couldn't believe what I was hearing. “And what about me? What about what we had?"
A long pause followed. “I've behaved unforgivably. You have every reason to despise me for what I've done—“
"You're not at fault. Rossi is."
"No, I should've settled things with you before leaving, Max,” she said. “But I was too much of a coward. Maybe someday you'll find it in your heart to forgive me for what I've done, but right now you need to forget about me and get on with your life."
"I can't do that.” Not while she remained under the neuromone's spell.
"Please, don't make me hurt you any more than I already have.” She turned to leave. “Rossi will be here soon. You should go."
I hoped it wouldn't come to this, but I had no choice. I lunged and grabbed her from behind. Peeling off the synth-skin covering my thumb, I pressed the dermaplast-soaked digit against the back of her ear. She struggled for just an instant before letting out a sigh and falling back into my arms.
I cradled her as Joriander and Hexa approached.
"Maxwell! What did you do?” Joriander said.
Hexa grabbed Miranda's wrist. “Is she dead?"
"She's fine. Help me take her back to the ship. We're putting her into spacesleep for the trip back to Earth."
Joriander crossed his arms and wiggled his stubby fingers, a gesture I'd never seen before, but which I later came to associate with Wergen anxiety. Hexa mimicked him.
We walked half a block to the monorail line, passersby gaping at Miranda's limp body in my arms, and boarded a private railcar back to the Lassel Airstrip.
* * * *
Joriander stood watch over Miranda's body in the ship's medroom while Hexa prepared the ship for departure. I stared out of the plexi and saw the terminal's metal door whir open, two silhouettes emerging from the bright interior, one human, the other Wergen. Their appearance was inevitable, I supposed, given our implanted trackers.
I walked down the ramp onto the tarmac.
"What do you think you're doing, Max?” Rossi flashed an angry smile when he spoke. He looked thinner than I remembered, younger. Somehow he'd managed to find the time to maintain his tan on Triton. As he approached, he pulled an airpulser from his bomber jacket and pointed it at me.
"Don't do this!” the Wergen accompanying him pleaded. The alien looked at me with lovesick eyes as if marveling at a delicate flower about to be plucked.
"Don't worry, Olbodoh,” Rossi said to the Wergen. “I won't hurt him...unless he forces me to.” He moved closer, his Wergen companion shuffling right behind him. “Olbodoh,” Rossi said, “board that ship and retrieve Miranda."
"But are you sure you'll be—“
"Do it!"
The Wergen crossed his arms and wiggled his fingers while striding up the ramp, disappearing into the vessel.
"I trusted you, you son of a bitch,” I said.
I thought I saw regret flash in his eyes for a microsecond. “Don't play the victim here, Max. It doesn't suit you. Miranda's happy now. You didn't deserve her,” he said.
"You kidnapped my wife. Well, guess what? You're getting on this ship with us back to Earth. When you wake up in a few months it'll be to face charges. You'll be digging pits on Mars the rest of your miserable life."
"I don't think so, Max,” he said. “You're the kidnapper."
I moved closer to him and he jerked the gun upward, pointing it at my head.
"Rossi, do you think I'm so stupid I wouldn't have a contingency plan in case you had a gun?"
"Keep your distance,” he said. He pointed the airpulser at my feet and attempted a warning shot. Nothing happened.
I laughed. “My Wergen companions set up a dampening field—"
He lunged forward and knocked me hard across the mouth with the barrel of the pulser, dropping me to my knees. The force of the blow made my bodyfield blink off and on, then disappear.
The subzero temperatures assaulted me. I reached for the gun in my own jacket, the one immune to the dampening field, and fired. The shot went wide.
At that moment the ground rumbled and a geyser exploded in the distance.
I stumbled and dropped the gun.
It slid forward and Rossi dove for it ahead of me. I realized I had no chance of wresting the gun from him before he could fire it.
I scrambled backwards, then raced along the tarmac away from the ship, in the direction of Triton's towering glaciers.
* * * *
I rolled to my left and hugged the frozen soil above his line of sight, trying to control my ragged breathing.
The ground shook again and an explosion boomed. Above us, a plume of ice-slush shot into the air.
When I caught sight of him again, Rossi's distant form darted into another crevice in the far ice wall.
I leapt down the steppes, my spikes crunching in the snow. I could barely feel my feet. Mucus had frozen above my lip.
As I clambered down the final steppe, inhaling needles, I slipped and fell. My entire body slid sideways to the left and stopped just short of a crevasse two meters across that opened up into a black, bottomless pit. I crawled away from the edge and found my feet, bolting into another steep-sided passageway. Like the prior trail, sharp corners lay ahead, only this time the path forked into multiple arteries, a maze. I slowed down at each corner expecting Rossi to be lying in wait. I hit dead end after dead end, turning and veering back, looking upwards to see if I could climb out, but spotting only glassy scarps that stretched into infinity. When I made my way around a long curved bend, I saw him.
Rossi was up to his waist in an icy slush. He'd taken a misstep and found himself in quicksand-like slurry no doubt precipitated by the gushing geysers that surrounded us and filled up crevasses.
I strode towards him, careful to stay on solid footing.
"This isn't about you, Max. It's about me and Miranda.” He clutched my ankle; I kicked his wrist with my other foot until he let go. I kicked him again and again, his arm, his shoulder, the side of his head, until the blue aura around him faded and his bodyfield collapsed. He let out a gasp that turned into a howl as the subzero temperatures assaulted him and he sank further into the ice slurry. This was it. The moment I had waited for, ever since I came home to an empty house and a note in Miranda's familiar scrawl that simply said ‘It's over, Max. Please don't follow us.’ Us. And she had expected me not to do anything?
I picked up the air
pulser, which lay on the ground several feet beyond his reach. My arms shivered uncontrollably so I grasped it with both hands, pointing it at Rossi's head.
"I love her, Max.” He barely got the words out through chattering teeth.
I fingered the trigger.
"That's enough, Maxwell."
Joriander, Hexa and Olbodoh stood behind me. Scores of metal bots swarmed from behind them over the ridges of ice. One skittered over my legs and crawled onto my chest, another crawled over Rossi. The blue veneer of my bodyfield blinked back on, as did Rossi's.
"What are you doing?” I screamed. “This isn't your concern!"
"We've deactivated your weapon,” Joriander said. “We can't just stand by and allow you to kill each other. It would be blasphemous."
"Stay out of this!"
"Maxwell, we do what you ask, what your people ask, because we love you.” His every word oozed with compassion. “All of you. You're all precious. You're all beautiful. It would be immoral to stand by and let you hurt yourselves this way. We want to protect you, to nurture you."
"He deserves to pay for what he's done!” I trembled, but not from the cold, and my voice broke.
"You're both suffering from frostbite. You need to be tended to."
The carapace of one of the bots opened like a blooming flower and a syringe emerged, penetrating my thigh.
* * * *
I woke to the muted glow of the ceiling lights in the ship's medroom. Joriander sat by my bed, stroking my hair. I turned my head away from him. On the other side of the room, Miranda and Hexa stood next to a bare-chested Rossi who was buttoning his shirt.
I lurched off the table, but lost my footing as the room tilted. Joriander grabbed hold of me before I collapsed.
"You need to lay back down, Maxwell. The sedative the bots gave you won't lose its effect for another thirty minutes.” He helped me back onto the table.
"You alien bastard,” I muttered. Joriander turned away as if I'd slapped him.
Hexa and the other Wergen, Olbodoh, accompanied Miranda and Rossi to the door of the medroom.
Miranda stopped at the threshold and looked back at me. “Can I have a moment alone with him?” she asked the Wergens.
As they exited the room, Rossi placed his hand on her back and she gave him a nod, as if assuring him it would be all right. He smirked at me—a smile of triumph—and followed the Wergens.
Miranda sat on the chair next to my table, her red hair draping the side of her freckled face. She took a deep breath. “I remember when we first met, Max. I felt the same...giddiness, the same butterflies-in-my-stomach feelings that I have now for Rossi."
And, oh, how I had reciprocated those feelings. Beautiful women like Miranda had always been out of my reach and when she confessed her feelings for me it was if I'd been shunted out of my universe onto a parallel Earth with lower gravity.
"I found it so endearing at first when you'd wake up with your hair uncombed and sit on the balcony in your underwear retrieving your work messages.” She smiled sadly. “But those feelings are dead now. Gone for good."
"I can't accept that,” I said. “What we shared was...deeper than dopamine coursing through our brains."
"So says the man of science.” She laughed softly. “The man who studies the biology of love for a living."
"You've got it all wrong, Miranda. It's love that causes the chemical reactions in our bodies, not the other way around. I have to believe that."
She covered her mouth and shook her head.
"Don't go, Miranda. If you have second thoughts about Rossi, it'll be too late to—“
"I'm talking about us now, Max.” She pushed her hair out of her eyes. “What happened to that electricity we used to have?"
"Every relationship settles into a...comfortable dynamic. You can't maintain that ‘giddiness’ forever,” I said. And as I spoke these words I couldn't help but think of it in biochemical terms, the dopamine replaced slowly over the course of time with oxytocin and vasopressin, intense passion replaced with feelings of companionship and bonding. I pushed the thought away.
Miranda's expression turned deadly serious. “There's something I need to tell you. Something I think you deserve to know.” Her eyes met mine and I could see a trace of fear in them. “Rossi and I became involved about a year ago."
As the meaning of her words sank in, I felt as if I'd been sucker-punched.
"Yes, that was long before you two discovered the neuromone.” She paused as if to make sure I fully grasped the ramifications of what she'd said. “Rossi would visit me whenever he knew you'd be working late at the lab. For him, you have to understand, it was all about the thrill of lying in his friend's bed and screwing his wife. The ‘wrongness’ of it excited him. I knew that; I'm not stupid. But for me, over time, it became something more. I started to feel like a lovesick schoolgirl. Rossi would actually talk to me. He'd tell me about your work, about your concerns. The truth is, I couldn't wait for you to email me that you'd be working late, so I could be with him."
I flinched. A stranger was talking to me.
"I'm sorry. I'm not saying these things to hurt you. Honestly. And I realize it was wrong of me to leave the way I did without explaining this to you. I see that now.” She took a deep breath and continued. “After a few months Rossi began to lose interest and moved on to his next conquest. I felt foolish, furious. By then he'd told me all about the neuromone you two had discovered. I went to the lab one morning to visit and...” She looked up at the ceiling. “Max, Rossi didn't drug me. I drugged him."
I heard the words but I couldn't believe them. She had to be lying. “You have the drug in your system,” I said. “I checked for it when you were unconscious."
She sighed, as if that bit of information now required her to reveal more than she intended. “You have to understand, Rossi loves me now, wildly, passionately. It's everything I'd dreamed of. But on the trip here from Earth, I started to have...doubts. My own feelings had started to wane and by then I had already left you, I'd quit my job, I'd traveled across the solar system to Triton. There was no turning back, so I took the last dose of the neuromone myself. So I could reciprocate his feelings."
I opened my mouth but no words came out.
She stood up to leave. “When you surprised me at the catacombs, I thought it would be kinder to let you think I was the victim. That my feelings for you hadn't died on their own, that they'd been erased by a drug. But that's not the truth, Max."
"So I did all this for nothing."
She bent down and gave me a light peck on the forehead, squeezed my hand. “Be honest. You didn't come here for me. Not really. Your friend stole something of yours, and you wanted to get revenge. That's what this has all been about."
"That's not true,” I said. But even as I denied it, I knew she was right, if only in part.
"I confessed everything to Rossi, and he forgave me."
Of course he would. “What about me, Miranda? What about what you've done to me?"
She remained silent for a long time. When she finally spoke, she said: “After everything I've done, you could never love me again."
I shrugged. “Yet I do."
She raised an eyebrow. “It's over, Max. It's been over for a long time now. You just didn't know it. Well, you know the truth now. Leave us alone. Don't come after me again."
With that, she turned and left the room, left my life.
If what she said was true, if what we shared had died a long time ago, why did her words cut so deep?
I staggered over to the porthole plexi and looked outside. Rossi waited at the end of the ramp. Miranda ran to him and he lifted her off her feet in a tight hug.
The door behind me slid open and Joriander entered. “You shouldn't be standing up, Maxwell,” he said, exuding concern as always.
"Where's Hexa?” I said. “I want to leave as quickly as possible."
"Hexa has decided to stay behind with Olbodoh, Miranda and Rossi. She and Olbodoh a
re much more compatible for mating than she and I would have been."
"Oh?” This was the first time I'd ever heard a Wergen talk about mating. I didn't know what to say. “I'm...sorry."
"Why?” Joriander looked truly perplexed. “They make a perfect genetic match. In fact, they've already tethered."
"Tethered?” I said.
Joriander looked at the ground and didn't respond.
But then I looked out the plexi and I caught sight of Hexa and Olbodoh. They no longer wore their leafy headdresses. Instead, a single rubbery cord extended out of Olbodoh's flat cranium into Hexa's skull, binding them together. Olbodoh carried much of the long, bunched-up tether in his hands to avoid tripping over it.
"So this is how members of your species commit to one another?"
Again, Joriander said nothing. The Wergen seemed embarrassed by my question.
Neptune had retreated all the way west and was now just a distant blue-green marble. A dark emerald hue filled the night sky.
"I'll never get used to the way that planet sets in the sky,” I said.
"Millennia ago,” Joriander finally said, “this world was an asteroid floating freely in what your people call the Kuiper Belt. Then it came too close to this beautiful planet, Great Neptune, too close to the harsh glow of its incandescent beauty, and got captured in its orbit. That's why it rotates in the opposite direction of the other moons."
Joriander recited more facts about Neptune and Triton, but I tuned him out. I was focused on Miranda, almost a speck now, walking hand in hand with Rossi toward the terminal, the two Wergens trailing close behind.
Copyright (C) 2010 Mercurio D. Rivera
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