by Jill Smith
When he’s not busy, B is in his room keeping an eye on Roach, who mostly sleeps. B’s had to change sleeping bags twice, because the damn creature pisses whenever it feels like it and doesn’t seem to notice. B finishes Tin Star and Thunder Sam. It’s a terrible book, trash from a century ago, but he pauses whenever he gets to lines Roach has used on him and smiles in spite of himself.
The story is about a young wannabe cowpoke called Tin Star who weasels his way into riding with Thunder Sam, the most famed cowpoke in the West. Tin Star is arrested following a false accusation of horse thievin’, thrown in prison, then busted out by a gang of outlaws called the Rough Rider Committee, who force him to help rustle cattle, kidnap women, and rob banks. Through it all, little Tin Star displays generic pipsqueak bravery, finding ways to thwart the outlaws’ plans while making it look like he’s one of them, until finally he’s rescued by Thunder Sam. The two of them shoot all the outlaws and ride off into the sunset.
Roach is awake when B enters the room that night. The sleeping bag is zipped up to his neck. His eyes—which B has just started to think aren’t so terrible—are glazed, and the cut in his lip has opened again.
“S’up?” B asks. It’s a phrase Roach likes. Earth slang.
“I can’t sleep.”
“Pain?”
“I need water.”
“I’ll get you some.”
“I want to go into the lake.”
“You’re not in any condition for swimming.”
“Look.” Roach pulls his arm out of the sleeping bag. His skin has become scaly. “I’m drying out. And I’m not clean.”
“I don’t know where the others are. I wouldn’t feel comfortable taking you through the ship.”
Roach says nothing. Tucks his arm back in the sleeping bag.
“You can shower.”
“Huh?” Roach says it just like Grena.
“You can go into the bathroom and use my shower to clean up. You know what a shower is? Like rain—” He stops. No rain on the Silver Planet. Water comes from the ground, like the light. “Maybe you don’t know.”
“Rain is in the book,” Roach says. “But I don‘t want to use human water.”
“That’s the best I can do right now.”
“Okay,” Roach says, unzipping the sleeping bag. He struggles to his feet. B puts out an arm, and Roach steadies himself on it. His back is scabbed and dark, but it’s healing.
B guides him into the bathroom, into the shower stall. “Better not try to stand,” B says, easing him down onto the smooth tile. He turns on the shower. Roach gasps as a spray of cold water hits him. “Sorry. It’ll warm up in a minute.”
Something Matty once said comes back to B. If B had kids, he’d end up stepping on them. He’s a good enough captain. He can organize, mobilize, instruct. As long as nobody on his crew needs to be spoon-fed or tucked in.
“I’ll give you some privacy.” B steps away. He’s surprised by how beautiful the silver skin looks as the water hits it. Droplets seem to thicken, harden as they find flesh. They glint like crystal. The creature shines.
“Stay?” Roach hugs his knees as the water runs pink into the drain.
“You want soap?”
Roach shakes his head, but he scrubs his arms absently with his palms, as though to satisfy B. “Can I see it?” he asks.
“See what?”
“Soap.”
B shows him the bar.
He’s not ugly, B thinks, and the thought swims beside him as he kicks toward something to say. Something lovely and mournful about that face. The sleek planes of the body, long legs smooth and curved. Even the bulbed ankles don’t bother B right now.
“It’s pretty.” Roach hands the bar of soap back to B.
B places it on the shelf. His sister used to love new bars of soap right out of the package, the carved letters of the brand still deep and dry. Once the name on a bar became unreadable, she opened a new one. It drove their mother crazy.
Roach closes his eyes. “Why are you here?” he asks. “On my planet? Grena said you’re studying the water.”
“We are.”
“Why?”
“Our planet is running out.”
“Your water’s not as good as ours.”
B senses no judgment in the statement, no sense of pride or disdain.
“Why not?” B asks.
“It doesn’t feel the same. My skin can’t hold it. It’s flat, and there’s no color.”
“You almost done?”
“Is Grena here?”
B reaches over and turns off the water. “She’s on the ship, yes.”
“Why’d she stop living with us?” Roach casts an odd look at the towel B offers. “No, thanks.”
“Don’t you want to dry off?”
“I got in the shower because I was dry.”
“Right.” B helps Roach to his feet. “Water is supposed to be our main concern. Not studying your…people.” They’re not people, but it seems rude to say this to Roach.
“And you started killing my people, so we stopped wanting you.”
“Yes,” B admits.
Roach sits on the sleeping bag but doesn’t crawl in.
“How do you feel about that?” B asks. “Us killing your people?”
“They weren’t my clan. The ones you killed. But I miss them.”
“Do you ever wish you could kill us? To make things fair?”
Roach cocks his head. “You sound like Grena. No. That wouldn’t help anything. That would just make more death.”
“You should get covered up.” Roach is shivering again.
“Your water makes me cold. I don’t get cold when I come out of the lakes.”
B sighs. “If you’re feeling better tomorrow, you can go back to your clan. Family. Whatever.”
Roach crawls into the sleeping bag. He says, “They’ll run from me. I smell like this place.”
*
Someone knocks on the door. B sits up in the darkness.
“Who’s there?”
“The fucking reaper,” Joele replies.
“Hold on.” B slips out of bed. Roach is sitting up. B puts a hand on his shoulder as he passes, and Roach jumps. “Get in the bed,” B whispers to him. “Don’t move.”
Roach obeys, hiding himself under the heap of covers. B kicks the sleeping bag under the bed. He opens the door. Joele looks at him with tiger-sharp eyes. “What the hell?” he mutters.
“One of them died.”
“So?”
“So, the other one killed it.”
“Can we talk about it in the morning?”
“Maybe you didn’t hear me. One Silver killed another. Put my equipment bag over its face and smothered it.”
“That’s strange.”
“Strange? It’s unheard of.”
“Write up a report. We’ll talk in the morning.”
She stares at him. “What the fuck is wrong with you?”
“I’m tired. And I don’t know that it’s any great accomplishment to torture a creature to insanity. Good night.” He shuts the door.
“Fuck you, too.” Her voice is muffled. Her footsteps retreat.
The mound of covers doesn’t move. B sits on the edge of the bed. “She’s gone.”
He hears no answer. B lifts the blankets and catches the faint glow of Roach’s heart. The Silver’s head is tucked against his chest. He draws a sudden breath.
Because he’s wanted to since he saw the blue-gray skin glittering under the shower stream, B touches Roach’s shoulder. “It’s all right.”
When Roach doesn’t respond or move, B gets annoyed. “Come on. Back to bed.” He shakes the covers.
A low sound starts under the quilts, rising in pitch.
“Shhhh,” B warns.
The sound gets louder. B drops the quilts, holds them down to muffle the noise. Roach struggles. Finally, B slips under the covers and wraps himself around Roach, pinning him.
“Would you shhh, would you just sh
hh.”
Roach says something in his language. Says it again.
“I don’t understand,” B snaps.
“Who died?” Roach asks.
“A Silver. We brought two into the lab. We’ve brought others before, but they couldn’t breathe the air. So we fixed the air pressure, and now—”
Roach shakes his head. “They shut off,” he says.
“What?”
“Some of us, when we hurt too much, we stop breathing on purpose. It’s not the air.” He struggles, and B eases off him a little. “Not my clan,” Roach continues. “We don’t. Even if we hurt. Even if we’re almost dead. But we can shut others off, if they want us to.”
“You’re saying it was a mercy killing?”
“Huh?”
“Like in Tin Star, when they shoot the snake-bit horse.”
Roach’s eyes widen. The jagged loops of his irises seem for a moment to go smooth. He nods. “Did she hurt them bad?”
“I don’t know. I think she hurt one pretty bad. But the other was well enough to shut it off.”
“I miss them,” Roach whispers.
“Did you know them?”
“Maybe.” He rolls out from under B and settles against the wall.
B adjusts his position on the narrow mattress, trying not to touch Roach. “I’m sorry,” he says finally.
“Why?”
“We’re hurting you because we know you won’t stop us.”
“Do you like doing it?” A question, but not an accusation.
“We want to know how you can be so much like us in so many ways, but not feel anger or jealousy, or hate.”
“Why should we?”
“Because that’s how we get what we want on Earth. We fight. We decide we need what others have, and we take it. Not just humans, all animals.” B is suddenly irritated at having to explain. “There are billions of species on our planet. It’s not some scraggly garden we can pollinate ourselves.”
Roach laughs.
“Is that funny?”
Roach shakes his head, still laughing.
“What’s the matter with you? That might be your family we’ve got in the lab.”
Roach neither cowers from nor flares at the words. He watches B with interest, his heart sailing back and forth across his chest.
“Fucking cowards is what you are, all of you.” B turns away, adjusts his pillow and thrusts his shoulder up like a wall between them. He waits for Roach to move or speak, but the Silver doesn’t. It takes B a long time to fall asleep. Sometime in the night, Roach bridges the cold space between them. B rolls over and fits the silver body to his, tucks the dark head under his chin, winds his arms around the slender shoulders.
Chapter Four
They asked the same questions, B and the female: What’s wrong with you? Why don’t you fight back? The female asked more questions. She asked, “Which feels worse?” And kicked him in the side, then in the head. She asked, “How many do you think you can take before you die?” as she hit him with her belt.
But B doesn’t hit Roach, just turns away when he’s done yelling. He breathes three hundred and forty regular breaths before he moves to sleep breaths. One hundred and twenty-three of those before Roach moves nearer and lets B’s warmth become his. They take thirty-four breaths together, then B puts his arms around him, and Roach feels, for the first time in days, a pause in the ache of his wounds, an end to his fear of four walls.
Morning comes and B rolls away. Roach is colder now than when he was losing blood.
“If you’re well enough today, I’ll get you out of here,” B says.
“Why don’t you study me?”
B pulls on his—Roach can’t think of what it’s called—the floppy shell Grena used to wear that blasted her with heat. “What do you mean?”
“In the lab.”
“That what you want?”
“No.”
“Well, then. That’s why.”
Humans’ lies float through them, glowing like Silvers’ hearts.
“The others don’t want it, either.”
Roach can tell B doesn’t like this comment by the way B yanks on the zipper of his shell. “You’re smarter than them,” B says. “That’s why I like you. When I let you go, stay away from the ship. Joele’s a loose cannon.”
“A what?”
“She’s a nutcase. Like one of the Rough Riders.”
“I know that.”
“So don’t let her find you again.”
“Doesn’t she have to listen to what you say?”
“She ought to. But she doesn’t.”
“That’s like me,” Roach says. “I was a king in my clan. Everyone had to listen to me.” He tries not to grin as he watches B’s face.
“Silvers don’t have social hierarchies. You’re all equal.”
“Not my clan. I’m in charge. Someday, I’ll be in charge of the whole planet.”
It is very easy to lie to someone who thinks you’re stupid.
B only says, “I’m sure the planet will be happy to get its king back.” He grabs some papers from his desk. “I’m going to work for a while. Rest, eat, shower, whatever. I’ll be back when the coast is clear, and I’ll take you outside.”
“Can I see Grena?”
“No.”
B leaves, and Roach counts his footsteps until he can’t hear any more.
He eats a package of dried quilopea, thinks how good it will be to eat it fresh again. He wonders if it’s worth it to try to find his clan. When humans started harming Silvers, his clan made a decision that any Silver who aided the humans, spoke to them, or touched them would be forgotten by the rest of the clan. Roach has done everything he shouldn’t. When he saw the large female, he went to her. He spoke to her. She touched him. She took his blood. Then he allowed himself to be taken onto the human ship. He spoke to B They touched.
He tries being angry. He looks at the empty package of quilopea. “You’re a damned coward,” he says to it. “What’s wrong with you?”
For a second, he feels his blood jump. Maybe B is right. If you want something enough, you can make others listen to you. He stands. He’s still sore when he moves, and he has a sense that important pieces of his body are jangling inside him, like coins in the money bags Tin Star and the Rough Riders take from the bank. But he does not feel weak.
He’d like to go to the lab, find the captured Silver, see if he can help. After all, Thunder Sam rescues Tin Star from the Rough Rider Committee. Rescuing somebody is heroic. Most times, if a Silver swims too far out in a lake and can’t get back to shore, or accidentally loses blood, nobody comes to the rescue. That’s because death is just something that happens, like the light in the ground, like a flower growing from a seed. But in the human world, people are always being captured, rescued, murdered, and loved.
That’s something Roach doesn’t understand about humans: It makes sense to love your clan. It makes sense to care about your people. But why choose one person to love more than any other? Roach knows six hundred and seventy-three Silvers. He loves them all. He will miss all of them when they die. He has seen that breeding pairs show each other special attention for a short time. He hopes one day he will be selected to breed, so he can find out if something makes his mate especially wonderful.
Tin Star falls in love with a girl he meets in Arizona named Jenny Feathers. She is called a “girl,” in the book, not a “female.” The thing Tin Star likes most about her is the way she looks, and also the fact that she is “spunky.” He isn’t supposed to love her, because she’s an Indian, which means her skin is a different color than his. But he likes her anyway. When they breed, he puts his mouth all over hers. She tastes like desert air.
Roach walks to the door. He listens very closely to make sure nobody is behind it. Then he opens it and leaves the room. He is in a long, narrow space and moves very fast because he doesn’t like the two walls so close together. This whole ship is a mess of walls and doors and odd smells. He doesn’t p
ay attention to where he’s going, and soon he is running in a circle around a wide open space, with the ceiling far above him. There are stairs, but he doesn’t want to use them. There are bars along the floor, so he swings from one and ends up on a lower level—the old floor is now his ceiling. He runs to another place where the walls are too close. He opens a door.
He is in a white room, too bright. He has to close his eyes. It smells like humans—sharp, salty, blood-metal. He sees a sink, like the one in B’s bathroom, but bigger. A big tub sits beside the sink, lined in a shiny black material that rustles when Roach touches it. Inside are empty wrappers.
He lifts a couple of the wrappers to his nose, smells them. Their outsides are white, but inside they are silver, and the way they are torn makes Roach think of his own skin. They smell like they’ve never been outside, like they’ve been trapped a long time without air.
He opens one of the small doors above him and finds more packages. These are not torn, and they are heavy. He remembers how B ripped open the packages of quilopea. Perhaps quilopea is in these. He is hungry, now that he thinks about it, and he starts to tear open a package, then hesitates. Once he opens it, he will see the ripped silver underside of the package’s skin. Grena says humans use many materials that are not alive. He is almost certain that a package is not alive and cannot feel. But what if he’s wrong?
He pulls at the edges of the package, the way B did. It opens easily and no blood comes out. No quilopea either. Instead he exposes two hard, dry rectangles the color of B’s hair. Roach smooths the torn package and looks at the words. He’s not sure how to pronounce all of them, or what exactly they mean, but he reads: HAL’S COSMIC GRANOLA BARS, and underneath, Orbitin’ Oats ’N Cinnamon.
Roach has never eaten anything but quilopea before. He sniffs Hal’s Cosmic Granola Bars. They smell sweet, but not the same way quilopea does. He sticks the end of one in his mouth. It breaks when he bites, and little pieces fall from his mouth, stick to his lips, scatter on the floor. He tries to chew, but the bar is tough and prickly, and he doesn’t want it in his mouth anymore. He could spit it out, but that will make a mess. As his mouth gets wetter, the bar grows softer, and finally he is able to swallow. The taste is not bad, but it’s different from anything he’s known, and he can’t get it off his tongue. He fears for a moment that he’ll have to taste Hal’s Cosmic Granola Bars forever.