by Greg Bear
Expletive expletive expletive. No words bad enough to convey that rage. No such language for what I am, what I feel. Just conjure up a deep, noisy silence, red with flashes of… why red? Not rage! Just deep, holy, animal disappointment, like what every gazelle must feel that falls to a lion, like any dinosaur that heard its sinews snapping and bones crunching under the razor teeth of a T. rex. First you panic, and then you die, one way or another.
I am no better than dead meat, broken, rotting, carrion, but I’m still here, still ambulatory. I just can’t really tell the tale, not completely.
Not truthfully.
I died.
I did not die.
I keep trying to get back to the main current of our story, to the Drifter. But I’m going over history, technicalities, the kind of pop science deemed fit to stuff into a warrior’s skull. Alice with her stiff, sad, not very sympathetic look confirms I’m just churning, I’m not getting my point across; she doesn’t get it; she needs to change the subject.
“You were going to tell me about the caves,” she says, looking out the big window. “I assume that means the crystals, the silicon plague. The Church,” she adds.
She knows about the Church.
Okay. So that works. That knocks me loose. The beauty and strangeness and even those additional moments of horror, way down in the bowels of the Drifter. Sure. It’s that easy, isn’t it? Wonder trumps rage and panic.
Now my anger turns, quick as a bunny, into laughter. I laugh out loud, to her irritation, but it is funny. She wants the nougat center without the hard candy shell. Go straight to the point, skip all the spiky, nettle-wrapped stuff that makes us feel shitty and inadequate, that makes me feel and look and smell like a…
What? What am I now, other than a survivor, a lost Skyrine completely dead inside?
Something more.
Something quite different, thank you. Reliving the whole needle bit has reawakened snakes in my head. Snakes with broken glass for scales. But really, tell the truth, Vinnie old fellow—that isn’t actually it, is it?
Strong tea. That’s what DJ called it.
Green tea.
Ice moon tea.
Like Teal, only first gen, but nobody knows. There is redemption if I give in. But will it be me that survives?
My resolution sets up into concrete, but not the way either of us expected. “I’m done here,” I tell her. “You aren’t the one I need to talk to.”
Alice turns her head, frowning. “I’m sorry,” she says. “What can I do to—?”
“We’re done. I won’t explain.”
“We need to know what you know,” she says, angry roses on her cheeks.
“Get someone who’s been there,” I say. “Someone who doesn’t think I’m crazy or about to be. I’ll tell it to them, maybe.”
“I don’t think that,” Alice says. “Honestly, I don’t.”
“Why did they send just you? Why not the whole committee?”
“There’s a committee?” she asks.
“Yeah, there’s a committee, all ready to overturn the system, set it right, just get them the information, listen to me confess to what I saw out there. Sure, they’ll use us to overthrow the system—then shoot us in the back of the head and toss us aside. Like the Kronstadt sailors.” Fidge me, how did that get in there?
“I don’t understand,” Alice says slowly. “You know that Joe wanted me to come here and talk to you.”
“What’s his moniker? His tag?”
“Sanka,” Alice says. “Teal would say that was his nick.”
I very slowly deflate. Letting out the snakes, maybe. Sucking down to what’s actually going to happen, nothing I can do about it. I don’t know what to think or feel.
“You know where he is,” I say, but without conviction.
“I wish I did,” Alice says. “There was just a delayed message. And there is no committee, not yet anyway… Just a beginning, a suspicion, that maybe there’s something I can do, we can do.”
“No committee?”
“None. We’re too ignorant and stupid to be organized,” she says, and I see she means it, and her tell is the cold disappointment that she’s ineffective, that she’s as ignorant as she says.
“Sorry,” I say. But I still won’t look at her. I wish she would go away and leave me to the Eames chair and the night and the endless lines of ferries and freighters. What we fight for.
“I wish Joe were here,” Alice says softly. “Or another Skyrine, like you say, someone who can understand what you’ve been through, because I can’t. I won’t say I can. I never will. I don’t want to feel what you’re feeling, ever. All right?”
That’s honest. Still deflating. The snakes haven’t left, but they’ve settled down a little.
The other, though…
My new memories, the oldest memories of all. Maybe I like it. Maybe this great, expanding volume of memories makes me more than what I am, provides a bigger refuge for my broken soul.
Alice’s eyes are targeting me, holding me there in the chair, and suddenly, I like it, I like being targeted and pinned by this zaftig female in our clean steel and blue apartment, earned by all that money, all that comp. She’s got some strength and she’s not as arrogant as I thought.
Best of all, she doesn’t want to understand.
Good. Fine.
But still silent. Frozen.
“I can leave you here and come back later,” she says after a minute, “maybe when Joe gets here. Or I can just leave for good. Let you be.”
I have no idea what expression suddenly comes to my face, but it makes her jump, startled. I lean forward, my voice a little high. “There’s something very strange happening to us, to Earth, isn’t there?” I ask. “With the Gurus and the Antags and going out to the Red.”
“Hell, yes,” she says, eyes flashing. “You’re just starting to realize that?”
“Some things are coming together, maybe. I’m almost there now.”
Another pause. We’re watching each other, hawk and mouse, mouse and hawk.
“Then take me along, please, if you can, take me there with you,” Alice says. “Maybe then we can start unwinding all the threads and figure out what we’ve got ourselves into. Maybe then there can be a committee, and you’ll be on it.”
I grit my teeth and shake my head. “No committees. We got a get out a here. I need a walk somewheres.”
She narrows one eye at the accent. “Okay.” She gets up, ready to go, but I’m still sitting.
“Yesterday, a grandma in a blue electric car gave me a ride and told me her son became a hero on Titan,” I say. “Know anything about that?”
Alice shakes her head. But the merest shift in her frown says, maybe that wasn’t good, maybe that shouldn’t have happened.
“Why would she know that, why would anybody tell her?” I ask. Then my thoughts focus. “She said she was a colonel’s secretary. At SBLM. Maybe that’s how she knew. The brass told her. A security slip, too much sympathy, but they tell her.”
Alice lifts her hand a few inches, noncommittal.
“Titan!” I say. “That’s out around Saturn. That’s out by the rings and shit, one and a half billion klicks across the vac. That’s out where a lot of the moons are covered with ice, isn’t it? Deep ice, with liquid oceans underneath—some of them?”
Alice takes a deep breath. “We both need a break,” she says, standing. “I’ll buy groceries, if you’ll let me fix something to eat.”
“There’s not much here that isn’t spoiled,” I admit. The room feels lighter. The air is sweeter. Maybe I’m okay.
Maybe we’re just putting off the rough shit for another couple of hours. But that’s good, isn’t it?
“Can I buy the groceries, Master Sergeant Venn?” she asks very softly.
“Yeah. I’ll stay here.”
She’s firm. She insists. “I’d like you to accompany me to the market. I’d like you to go shopping with me, Vinnie.”
I pretend to think that over. I’m
acting like a child. To tell this story, to live as a whole man after this moment, I have to go back to being a child. Feels funny and right at the same time. All us Skyrines are children, before, during, and even inside the end. So the experienced ones tell us. The DIs and veterans.
“I went to the market soon as I got back,” I say.
“What did you buy?”
“Celery.”
“And obviously, nothing else. So… shall we go?”
I do like it at the market. There’re other children, and the old bronze pig, and toys. Doughnuts. Pastries. Jerky. Fruit and candy. I need to stand up and walk around and maybe eat more celery.
Why celery? I think I know. Ritual. As a kid, I loved celery. My mother would hand me a stalk filled with bright orange Cheez Whiz, whenever she made a salad. She’d smile at me, perfect love, tree to apple, simple, no judgment. I was just a kid and she was my mom.
Welcome home.
I don’t want to cry now or get lost in myself.
I get up. Alice takes gentle hold of my elbow.
“Let’s go to the market,” she says. “Let’s walk there and then walk back. It’s only a couple of miles. If you have the legs for it.”
MOVING FORWARD AGAIN
I have the legs.
I enjoy the air, the streets, the hill down to the market, the climb back, though it makes my knees wobble. I enjoy walking beside Alice Harper, who takes it all without breaking a sweat or one little huff, Earth girl that she is; she looks zaftig, but it’s muscle and no small determination all bundled up and concentrated.
I enjoy walking. I enjoy walking with her.
Nobody pays us much attention.
I’m starting to smell like a human being again.
At the old fish stall, where the guys and the ladies still flash naked biceps and fling salmon to each other, Alice buys whole cooked crab and clams and cod and snapper, and after, we walk down a hallway to a smaller indoor shop lined with dark wooden shelves, where she picks out herbs and spices and the clerk scoops them out of glass jars into little plastic bags; Alice is sure we don’t have such back at the apartment—we don’t—and she says she’s going to make a good fish stew, cioppino, if that’s okay, if I like fish stew. I probably do, I don’t know. It’s been so long since I’ve been served a home-cooked meal.
The walk back is easier. I carry the groceries.
This is nice.
But I still refuse to trust her. I just can’t. It’s far too dangerous, with what I have bottled up inside me.
I SIT ON a bar stool at the kitchen counter while Alice works. “This is a great kitchen,” she says. “You guys should use it to do more than microwave pizza.”
“We never spend a lot of time here,” I say. “After a few days, after we stop stinking and get our land legs back, we go out.”
“Hunting?” she asks with a wry face.
“Yeah,” I say. “Or just looking. Cosmoline—takes the edge off for a while, you know. One of the downsides of transvac. Or the benefits, if you’re a monk.”
“Pushes you back from the responsibility of acting human?” she asks, with a quiet tone I can’t read, and a side look as she chops the celery and tomatoes and begins to simmer a fish stock of scraps she bought at the market. I can smell again, it’s mostly back. Being able to smell is half the job of coming home. I can smell Alice beneath the rose perfume. It’s not like she smells sexy, not yet, but smelling her is a treat, a revelation.
“It’s okay,” I say. “We’re not very good company for a few days. You’ll vouch for that.”
“I will,” she says, terse but not judgmental. She puts a lid on the simmering pot, after adding more onions and celery. She snaps off a stalk and passes it across the counter to me. I hold it, look it over. Nothing like it on the Red. Nothing so crisp and fresh, nothing this crisp and alive, even after it’s been pulled from the bunch and trimmed. Likely Teal has never bitten into a stalk of celery. Nothing like this for decades to come, probably. If ever. How brave was that, for the Muskies to fly out to the Red, knowing what they’d leave behind, just to see something new, something few humans had ever seen?
“When company was coming,” Alice says, apropos of nothing, “my mother used to lay out a tray of celery stuffed with Cheez Whiz.”
That makes nice sparks burst in my head, lovely bits of glow, soft and gentle, like a thousand little night-lights following me around in the dark. “Really?”
“True salt of the Earth. Emphasis on the salt.” Alice smiles and keeps adding to the pot. Onions, olive oil, garlic, saffron, so many fresh herbs I can’t count, black pepper, white pepper… bewildering.
She turns down the heat, watching me with a light, open-lipped grin.
I lift the celery, fence the air.
“Yeah,” she says, and taps the pot with a wooden spoon, also purchased at the market, and fences back. Celery crosses spoon. Spoon wins. I finish off my losing weapon.
“This will take a while,” she says, putting down the spoon, “but I guarantee, it’ll be the best you ever tasted.” She reaches into the last canvas bag and lifts out a bottle of white wine, natural grapes, no GM stuff—not cheap. She pours a good splash into the pot.
Then, she asks, lifting the bottle, “Ready?”
My body does not cringe.
“We have juice glasses,” I say.
“Poor boys.”
It’s getting dark outside. Another sol is passing—I mean, another day. So unreal. The apartment smells wonderful. I’m not sweating, I’m not shaking, my legs are almost back to normal, memories a little less jagged.
Not that the worst part is over. I was hoping that was the worst part, but I know it isn’t. In jerks and starts, I try to continue. My voice is steady—for a while.
She pours a couple of juice glasses. We hoist, toast Earth, the Red, all of it: the dead, the living, the irrational and unfinished. Silent but comprehensive. The wine tastes good. Crisp, green, like rain over spring hills. Alice pours the fish stock through a spaghetti basket, puts aside the bones and shriveled fish heads—stuff that brings back bad memories. Could be like what fills the skintight of a Skyrine stuck with a germ needle…
Then she whisks the scraps aside and returns the stock to the pot, adds more vegetables, sluices in a little more wine.
“Never enough wine,” she murmurs. “Fish and crabs come next, in a few minutes. Clams at the very last. They’re still alive…”
She pulls back, regretting that bit of information, but it’s not life and death per se, or going into the pot, that gets to me.
“Tender morsels,” I say.
We return to couch and chair.
“How are the legs?” she asks. “Sore?”
“Steady.”
Alice crosses her legs, holds up the last of her wine in the twilight, suspended in her fingers, city lights twinkling in the juice glass. I manage to say some things. Then more things. It doesn’t hurt as much.
She gets up to add the fish and crab. In a few minutes, she adds the clams, and a few minutes later, serves it up. Oh my God. It is good. I eat four bowls. Airplanes pass in the night sky. A double-egg and hawksbill crosses the Sound, heading for SBLM. More Skyrines returning from the vac. I put down my bowl and stifle a tremendous belch. First time I’ve done that in modern memory.
“I’m ready,” I say.
And she listens.
WHAT THE BIG BOYS WANT YOU TO KNOW
There are thirty-two of us in the garage, including DJ, still up in the high booth, and Tak, who’s standing clear of the new arrivals, the survivors, and standing clear of me; we might have more darts. Before they had to close up for good, before the shower of germ needles, they managed to bring in twenty-three of Joe’s troops, three Skell-Jeeps, and two medium-sized Tonkas. Teal’s buggy and a few of the smaller vehicles are still outside, some in the shelter of the giant’s arm, but they all might as well be gone.
We don’t know if any of the other vehicles and big weapons made it around to t
he southern gate.
Joe tells Tak to check us over and don’t touch anyone.
One of the new Skyrines, the one with the needle pouch, fishes a handful of fresh pouches out of his leggings and gets ready to receive more. Tak does a thorough job of checking us over, telling us to spin, lift our arms and then our legs, show the soles of our boots. All our skintights are clean, no rips, no poke marks.
DJ descends from the booth.
“Got water? New filters?” Joe asks.
“I’ll look,” DJ says. He sounds sad, guilty to walk among the strung-out newbies, who are still shivering and wild-eyed. He climbs up into a Skell-Jeep and rummages through the bins, manages to retrieve a clutch of filter pads, then climbs onto a Tonka, accesses the heating system, drains clean water into a can, and passes it around.
One of the newbies—Corporal Vita Beringer, young, baby-faced, and almost completely zoned, is slowly, methodically trying to peel out of her skintight. Joe slaps her hand down, reseals a loose seam, tells her she’s better off for now keeping it on. We don’t know whether the Voors can selectively flush air in the Drifter—suffocate us. I know he’s thinking that, but he doesn’t say it out loud. He just knows when’s the right time to be blunt, and when it’s better to be quiet and soft. Gently persistent. Joe is good that way.
DJ tells me, in an aside, that he doubts the outer gate can withstand much of an assault. No news there. “They’re pretty rusty,” he says. “I wonder the Antags aren’t already knocking.”
“They’re patient,” I say. “No need to rush in.”
Or is it some other reason? They can skip around the Drifter, leave it alone, leave us here, if they want. Island hopping. I suppose the Drifter is the closest thing to an island there is on the Red.
Joe approaches us, waves Tak over, tells us to gather behind a Tonka, away from the others. He and Tak served together three or four times, shared a few weeks of OCS prep at McGill. We huddle behind the Tonka like boys getting ready to play marbles and brief Joe on what little we know about the Drifter, transfer what little knowledge we have managed to collect.
“Thanks for the reception,” he says. “Our drop was a shitty blender. Sisters and brothers, different frames, broken platoons. All mixed up.”