The Silvers

by Jill Smith

  Synopsis

  B, captain of the first crewed mission to the Silver Planet, does not think of the planet’s native race as people. Silvers may look human, but their emotional spectrum is severely limited. B allows his team to capture, study, and even kill the creatures.

  When B bonds with a Silver called Imms, everything changes. B’s not sure if Imms’s feelings are genuine or imitation, but B’s growing friendship with Imms becomes his anchor in a strange world. Following a shipboard fire that kills most of B’s team, B takes Imms back to Earth. He sanitizes the story of the fire—for which Imms bears some responsibility—so that Imms is recast as its hero rather than its cause.

  Life on Earth threatens the fragile connection between the two men. As Imms seeks independence from a bureaucracy that treats him like a test subject, he begins to experience the gamut of emotions—including a love B is frightened to return. And as B and Imms’s story about the fire threatens to unravel, Imms must use all he’s learned about being human to protect B.

  The Silvers

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  The Silvers

  © 2014 By Jill Smith. All Rights Reserved.

  ISBN 13: 978-1-62639-157-4

  This Electronic Book is published by

  Bold Strokes Books, Inc.

  P.O. Box 249

  Valley Falls, New York 12185

  First Edition: February 2014

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

  Credits

  Editor: Jerry L. Wheeler

  Production Design: Bold Strokes Graphics

  Cover Design By Lee Ligon

  Acknowledgments

  Thank you to my mom, who let me read the whole first draft out loud to her while she was quilting. And to Erin, who helps with everything.

  Dedication

  For my family.

  Part One

  Chapter One

  They bleed the same as humans, but they are more satisfying to cut, thinks B. Something about the way the silver skin tears, like cloth, like the fat ribbon his mother used to wind around the Christmas tree back home.

  This place is called the Silver Planet because of them, and because the lakes are like soldering metal and colors look accidental, like stains on the land. And they are called Silvers, though they aren’t shiny, aren’t metallic. The hue of their skin is an all-over bruise that hasn’t yet settled into those deep, wounded colors—blacks, purples, yellows. They are bruised only on the surface, a cold, smoky gray.

  They are called Silvers because of that surface bruise and because of their quick, gleaming tongues. Because their eyes look like glass, the irises not round, but thin, jagged fissures around the pupils.

  B hates them, can’t say why. They are much like humans. They think, reason, laugh. Their language is complex, mathematical. They speak like an equation, factors on both sides. They derive each other’s meanings instantly, but the humans who have attempted to learn the Silver language struggle to find x.

  B thinks he hates the Silvers in part because they are indistinct. There are no warriors, no politicians, no professionals or criminals. Just efficient regulators of an uneventful society. Males and females are nearly indistinguishable. Females lack prominent breasts, and the male organs descend only when they breed, which one pair is selected to do each month to produce a single offspring. B knows all this. He reads the reports.

  Silvers don’t get angry. They feel affection, joy, even desire, but they don’t have that red spectrum of anger, hatred, jealousy. They don’t have it. They don’t grieve when something’s lost, but you can see the emptiness fill them, collapse them. They may wander into a lake and never resurface. They have no word for revenge, no concept of it. They want things like food, water, each other, but necessity, never greed, is what drives them to pursuit.

  They do not fight. They do not kill. They are faster than humans and can go into the lakes and hold their breath for a long time. B and his team have tried provoking them, taking things from them, turning them against each other. The Silvers simply run away or hide in the ground. They can do that. They press themselves to the earth and become part of it. B has ordered his team not to harm any more of them until the project begins, but it happens anyway.

  B rubs a hand across his chin. He stares across the pale plain but sees nothing unusual. The sky is always black and starless. The planet’s atmosphere is a shroud that blocks the rest of the universe from view. Light here comes from within the ground, and different sections of the planet are illuminated at different times of day. The plain he looks at is all bright earth. It’s cold.

  He hears a sound, like a clock ticking half-seconds, quarter-seconds. Grena finds him moments later. He starts to ask her if she knows what’s making the sound, if she hears it, but she interrupts to tell him the tranq guns are loaded. He asks her if the lab is ready. She says yes. He asks if Gumm has stopped puking. She says mostly. Gumm has trouble with the atmosphere here. Grena and Joele can both go outside without first dosing themselves with Atmoclere, a drug that helps them all breathe. Vir did all right, too, back when she used to go out. B is a captain in title only. He handles paperwork while the others explore.

  “Then prepare for Project HN,” he says, wishing he had the theatricality to imitate one of those barking commanders from old TV shows and movies. His order just comes out sounding tired.

  They’ve told NRCSE that HN stands for Humanoid Neurogenics. But to the team, it stands for Hard Nipples. It’s so cold on the Silver Planet their chests chafe raw against their shirts; Joele heats stones over the stove and puts them in her bra. Having this private joke lends color to their exile.

  They’ve spent three months observing the Silvers, interacting with them, cataloguing the terrain of the planet, the few and scattered life forms. It’s not so much an ecosystem here as it is a barren garden tended by the Silvers. One species of flower is a blue, bulbous thing that looks like dead, swollen lips. The Silvers pollinate the flowers, pinching pollen from the centers and depositing the grains in the carpels of others to produce a flat, gray fruit called quilopea, the only thing Silvers eat. Moon chips, Joele calls it. The rest of the plants are menacing, brittle weeds. The only other creatures look like snakes, but they are blind and harmless.

  The team has dug into the cold, gleaming earth and filtered the liquid-star lakes. The Silvers have let Grena and Vir study their clans, but they have fared better learning English than Grena and Vir have trying to master the Silver language.

  Now the team wants answers the Silvers can’t give. Why the empty space where blazing emotions should be? Why don’t they fight? They are certainly intelligent enough to see that if you hit hard enough, you get what you want. Project HN involves tranquilizing three Silvers and bringing them into the ship’s lab. The team will study three things: the ability to rouse Silvers’ emotions through physical stimuli, solidarity among the captives, and the Silver brain itself. They are targeting three Silvers Vir and Grena don’t know. Vir’s request.

  Grena boards the Byzantine to collect materials. After a moment—still that damned ticking noise—B follows her. He goes to the kitchen for a soda. Joele is there, and she’s got blood on her suit.

  “What happened?” he asks, nodding
at the spatters.

  “Nosebleed,” she says.

  He knows she’s lying. He pops open a soda. Hal’s AstroFizz in Lunar Lemon-Lime. Joele started calling it AstroGlide, and now B always feels a little funny drinking it. “We’ll collect them tonight,” he says.

  “You still say ‘tonight.’”

  “Force of habit.” B tells his team “good morning,” too.

  The sky never changes. Sometimes B could swear time isn’t passing at all. Yet he wears a watch. He lives his life by the hours of his old existence.

  “You seen my flashlight?” he asks. “I wanna check something out.”

  “What are you, ninety? You asked me last week if I’d seen your reading glasses, and you were wearing them. You sure it’s not tucked down your pants?”

  “A lot on my mind.”

  “Worried about Hard Nipples?”

  I want to go home. I’m worried about the things I left. I’m worried about what this place is taking from me. Aloud, he says, “You ought to be, too.”

  “Yeah, yeah. This fails, it’s back to Earth for Team Fuck-Up. Think we’ll spend the rest of our lives behind desks.”

  “That doesn’t bother you?”

  She shrugs, stands. She towers over him. She towers over everybody on the team. “I’d like to make a name for myself, sure. But I wouldn’t say no to getting the hell off this planet.” She unclips her flashlight, hands it to him. “Don’t lose it.” She leaves.

  B finishes his soda and crumples the can. They’ve tried to bring Silvers on board the ship before, but the creatures died within the first hour. B assumed they were unable to tolerate the ship’s circulating supply of Atmoclere. Now Gumm has found a way to shut off the flow of Atmoclere to the lab. They’ve picked and stored enough quilopea to feed three Silvers for a week. They have drilled holes in the steel table, looping belts and rope through. .

  Three. One will be Joele’s. She is going to test her Silver’s reactions to physical stimuli. One is Grena’s. She will offer her Silver the chance to influence and abate the suffering of the first. The third Silver belongs to Vir. She will perform a vivisection. She will examine the creature’s brain and try to learn something about its heart.

  A Silver’s heart drifts through its body, bumping softly against walls and other organs. Sometimes it’s illuminated, and you can see it beneath the bruised skin, floating along like a lantern underwater. In the past, when they’ve had access to dead Silvers, the team has cut the bodies open and examined the hearts, but they’ve learned very little. When a Silver dies, the light of the heart dies, too, and the heart no longer drifts. It returns to the center left of the body and rests there like a cold stone. What they want to do now is study the heart while the Silver is still alive.

  Privately, B worries Vir will have a hard time. She has always hated to kill Silvers or cut them still alive to watch how that delicate skin tears and the blood sneaks out. The Silvers stay away from humans now.

  They look like sea creatures, and in a way they are. They flee to the lakes when they hear humans approaching. They can hide in the liquid metal of the water, grabbing a breath every ten minutes or so. B has watched them. They are fast but not terribly graceful. They have lumps on the backs of their ankles, like pasterns on horses.

  He leaves the kitchen and goes to the lab to make sure everything’s in order. They’ve dragged the kitchen table down there and fixed restraints to it, so they’ll have more than one workspace. The third Silver can be kept in the narrow closet Joele has cleared out. There is no danger of the Silvers becoming violent, but they may try to run.

  Vir is in the corner of the lab, writing in a notebook.

  “Hey,” B says.

  She doesn’t answer.

  “You all right?”

  She snaps her pen down, rubs her eyes. The lab is dark, except for a ring of light from the lamp next to her notebook. “I lived with them,” she says.

  “I know.”

  “They’re smart. Smarter than us, probably.”

  “All the more reason we should—”

  “It’s okay to hurt them because they don’t fight back? Because they won’t get angry? It’s like chopping up a fucking manatee.”

  “Vir, they’re not us. They don’t think like us. They don’t feel betrayal. They may not even feel fear.”

  “They understand danger.”

  “They may understand it, but they don’t feel it.”

  Vir draws a shaky breath. “You remember the one Joele—”

  “Joele was out of line.”

  “It didn’t make a sound.”

  “Precisely. Can we even be sure they feel pain?”

  “Of course they can.” Vir rarely raises her voice. It’s a horrible sound, Vir amplified. “I’ve asked them.”

  “We’re not going to kill them,” B says.

  “Mine will die,” says Vir. “We’ll be lucky to get a few minutes looking at the heart. We don’t have the right space, the right equipment. We were supposed to come here for water.”

  The uncrewed mission sent to the Silver Planet last year picked up only the most basic life forms—the flowers, the fruit, the snakes. The Silvers must have used their ability to become part of the planet’s surface when the rover came through. It didn’t pick up a single one.

  Why hadn’t the Silvers hidden from humans when they’d arrived? The creatures had been as dumb and trusting as dodos. They’d approached the Byzantine, babbling in that strange tongue. One tried to put its arms around Joele, and she shoved it so hard it fell.

  “What we found is much better,” B says. “When we’re gone, they’ll send other teams better equipped to study these creatures. But we’re the first. People will remember us.”

  Vir shakes her head. “I’m doing this. But I want you to know that I have lived with them. They’ve told me stories. Many of them picked up our language very quickly. They are not robots. They’re not insects. They’re people.”

  B feels a little sick. “They’re not us,” he repeats.

  “Grena read to them. I don’t know how she can—”

  “Vir,” he says, “pull it together.”

  *

  Outside, B listens again for the ticking sound and doesn’t hear it at first. He switches on the flashlight and walks to where he stood earlier, about a hundred yards from the main port. Just when he starts to think it was his imagination, he hears it again—a rattle, like dice. He follows the sound to a pile of low, flat rocks and is startled when one of the rocks moves at his approach. It is not a rock at all. It’s a Silver.

  A male. Dark hair, slight build. It drags itself on its belly, using its elbows. Its back bleeds from a dozen lacerations. Blood steams on the cold, bruised flesh. Its heart is lit up. B can see the pale gold fist of it ghosting along the creature’s spine. The Silver stops and lies perfectly still on the ground, and as B gets closer, he realizes that the noise is the thing’s teeth chattering. B looks again at the blood. It’s red, like human blood, but this is a race adapted for extreme cold. Their bodies are naked, hairless. That blood is all that keeps them warm. And losing so much of it...

  The creature whispers something.

  “What’s that?” B asks.

  “S-h-h-it,” the Silver says. It curls into itself, shaking so hard the ground beneath it seems to move. B can see part of its face. Its lip is split, a clump of dried blood under its nose.

  B nudges it with the toe of his boot. The creature goes so still, B could swear it’s died. Then it shivers again.

  “What’s your name?” B crouches.

  “Wh-who’s askin’?”

  He starts at the unexpected response. It must be one of Grena’s, if it knows English. “I am.”

  “I d-don’t have to t-tell you a b-blasted thing.”

  B wonders where the creature learned to talk like this. He remembers that Grena once read her clan a novel, some awful paperback Western.

  “What’re you doing here?”

  The Silver
stares at him. The look in the creature’s eyes doesn’t match its brazen tone, and the tone doesn’t fit with what B knows about Silvers. The Silver’s rebellion is stagy, as though the creature is imitating audacity. B knows that Grena is a good storyteller and wonders if the Silver is mimicking her reading of lines from the novel.

  “You speak good English,” he says.

  The Silver closes its eyes. Its heart bumps the bottom of its ribs, drifts down its leg. B watches, fascinated.

  “You know Grena?” he asks.

  “You b-better h-h-hightail it outta here, m-mister.”

  “Who did this to you?”

  The Silver doesn’t answer. It rolls its eyes up to the black sky.

  B runs a hand over his mouth. He needs to make a decision. He can leave the creature to die out here, or he can bring it aboard the ship as another test subject for Project HN. It’s half dead anyway. Maybe Vir can put it under and cut it up without feeling too bad. “Look,” he says, “we’ve got some medical supplies on the ship. Let’s get you inside. You’re not gonna make it out here.” He reaches out, and the creature instantly sinks partway into the ground.

  It doesn’t go any farther. It gasps, slapping the ground with its palm. “Shit,” it whispers. “Shit, shit, shit.”

  “Come on,” B says. “I’m trying to help you.”

  The creature stares at him for a moment. B can’t read those cracked eyes. “Pardners?” it asks finally.

  “Yeah, if you want.” B reaches out again and just brushes the chilly skin. The Silver draws back and sinks the rest of the way into the ground. B can see it just below the surface, as if it’s encased in ice. Blossoms of red adorn the tightly curled body.

  B sighs, stands. “All right. Have it your way.”