He put a good face on for the voyage. He volunteered for things. He spent most of his time in the holodeck’s training room, learning skills that might come in handy in the colony. Three months and five days of stale, re-circulated air later, they arrived at Splendid.
The Bon Chance shuddered its way down through the atmosphere to land, rather than remain in orbit. David’s heart lifted as they all watched the planet’s surface coming towards them on the screens. The Bon Chance would land and become something new. He could do the same, be transformed by their arrival, made into something useful and interesting. And lovable perhaps, because it seemed to him that Carlo had brought him not so much out of love as from habit. Here in this new place, he could become someone new. Together he and Carlo could become something else.
The ship landed with a shudder that made everyone sway, even as they cheered. It would never see space again. Instead, it began to unfold and fall apart, designed to disassemble into its own little frontier city, every part transforming, recycling into something of use.
2500 people altogether in the colony’s first wave. At first they clustered, familiar knots in this unfamiliar landscape where the trees grew twinned, and birdlike creatures breathed fire (or at least sprays of sparks), and where the rocks could speak.
Though they didn’t know about the last of those until David’s discovery.
*
Everyone had admired the phenomenon. Every once in a while, in this landscape, you found a boulder, a round of glassy stone, like an immense gem, colored red and violet and yellow, standing as high as David’s waist. Gupta, the colony geologist, argued with Tompkins, the chief biologist, over whether they were organic or inorganic. When they finally cracked one open and analyzed it, the mystery intensified.
The boulders were made of layers of some substance that resembled glass, but was hard as gemstone. The combined layers, varying in color and thickness, produced an effect like lacquer, but filled with an interior luminescence that Gupta attributed to the structure of the crystals, which trapped light. He named the substance nacre when he discovered what lay at the core.
Buried in the boulder’s center was one of the long-limbed simians that haunted the riverbanks, creatures with golden fur and deep violet eyes. They weren’t intelligent, the initial survey had already determined. Somehow these rocks grew around them, used them to form themselves, in an unfathomable process.
They were so beautiful that no one wanted to break them up, even when they were located in inconvenient places, like the middle of a nascent wheat field. They used precious fuel and lifting equipment to gather them in an area that would someday, or so the chief town planner assured them, be a rock garden to rival any on earth.
In his role as a doctor, Carlo was busy every day. Too busy to ever see the rock garden. David had more free time. His more nebulous role consisted primarily of keeping Carlo fed, clothed, and comfortably housed. He’d gone by once or twice to see who Carlo was working with, but it had been clear more important things than entertaining his husband occupied Carlo.
He could have done useful things. Every hand was appreciated, but he chose to spend free hours in the rock garden, leaning against a boulder, and thinking about his place here. He’d found no confidante for his frustrations and ambitions during the voyage. So he’d come here, to a great round filled with red and amber and yellow and somewhere deep below, a lambent green like new growth.
You’d expect a colony to feel busier, but there were moments when you could swear you were the only person on the whole world. No one around to hear him, so he spoke aloud, rehearsing what he’d say to someone else after he’d left Carlo.
“What he did broke us,” he told the boulder he leaned on. Sunlight played over its surface as it listened. “I couldn’t trust him anymore.”
He broke off to look down the hill towards the river. Three monkeys sat on the bank, the same sunlight touching their fur into a golden blaze. They cupped long-fingered hands to dip them into the water, drink from them, while they continued to stare back in his direction.
“I know he thought we’d start a family. But I believed this place would buy us time to pull away. Carlo could get used to not having me around. I could get used to not having him.”
Because Carlo did do a lot, David had to admit that. But he didn’t think they’d ever mend what had happened. It lay between them like a poisoned wound, too tender to look at, let alone touch or speak of.
Perhaps if he could have said this to Carlo. He didn’t know why he couldn’t, why every time he tried to broach the subject, anger choked him into speechlessness. Instead, here he was, alone and talking to a rock.
A voice in his head said, tell me more.
The surveyors had missed several things, but the talking rocks were the most important. Not that they affected the colony’s existence. It wasn’t the first colony to find itself dealing with intelligent species missed by the surveyors.
The reason the surveyors had missed the phenomenon was the fact that it was not until they had been clustered together that the rocks began to speak, although they failed to explain what lay behind the previous silence.
Talking rocks. Not that they talked, exactly. They spoke in your head, in whatever language you spoke best, so Carlo swore they spoke Parisian French, but David heard it as standard English. Although the many rocks seemed indistinguishable and seemed to share information, a fact which led some to think them a hive or group mind, so if you spoke to one you spoke to all of them.
But David, like some of the others, thought that he could detect the traces of personality. He returned to that first one each day.
Carlo praised him for his discovery, saying, “Someone needs to figure out what they are. No one thinks they’re dangerous, but how can we know that until we understand them? But don’t touch them, don’t go too close.”
David could have predicted Carlo’s attitude towards the planet, but it didn’t prove the detriment he’d thought it would be. Carlo wouldn’t touch or taste anything untested. He kept the planet away from him. But as a result, he didn’t get the Pomegranate fever (called that for the redness it brought to the skin) that many caught from the stick insects nesting in the long grass’s roots, and he nursed David tenderly when he shared the fruit that intoxicated for a few hours, then brought a two day long hangover.
Still, Carlo wouldn’t come talk to the rock as David had. David thought perhaps this was a way to deal with his feelings, talking to the rock, as though it were confessor or therapist. But talking about his situation only made it all seem worse, let him go back to those old resentments and refer to them over and over until they were as fresh as the day he’d first gathered them.
He tried to gather information. But the rock didn’t want to talk about itself. It answered questions with other questions. It wanted details of the colony life, details sometimes so personal David wouldn’t have confided them to any human. He kept trying.
He did learn a little, although it was muddled and cloaked in semimystical terms. The rock claimed that they existed not just in this dimension but another, another that the humans were unequipped to sense, called Elsewhere. It referred to storing its mind and personality there, as though it was only a protrusion from that dimension.
He kept returning to their origin, asking questions. Questions that the rock would not answer, although he kept trying, rephrasing the question as though some new combination of words might unlock the secret.
But the rock kept asking him questions in turn. Asking him about his feelings.
He said one day, “Sometimes I feel as though I’m made of anger. If you took away that, there would be nothing left.”
The rock was silent for so long that he wondered if it’d heard him. Finally its words seeped into his head. We can show you what to do with it, it said. We can show you how to put it outside yourself. Is that what you want?
He answered immediately, no question as to whether or not this was what he wanted. He wa
nted to put the anger outside himself, no longer have to deal with it. “Yes,” he said.
You would need to learn to access Elsewhere, it said. I could teach you.
David thought this would excite Carlo, the thought that his lover would learn what the rocks could teach, would become an authority on this strange new technology. No other human would know how to do this thing.
But Carlo said, “That’s going too far. You’re exposing yourself to alien forces. It could hurt you.”
David thought, would it really matter to you? I would be out of your hair then anyway. Two days ago, after yet another strained argument laden with unspoken resentment, David had made a bed for himself in one room, one for Carlo in another. Neither of them knew what to do with what they’d become. Perhaps this would be a solution to all that.
Carlo said, “I can’t forbid you, of course. But I can ask you not to do this, surely.” He stared at David, his eyes pleading.
David looked away, thought for a moment, as he mustered words, then let his gaze snap back to meet Carlo’s. He said, “What you can’t stand is the thought that I might actually become my own person. You’re worried I might become more important than you to the colony.”
“That’s not fair at all,” Carlo said.
It wasn’t. But David ignored that. “I’m going to do this,” he said. “I’m going to be the first human to do this.”
*
You think we are wise, the rock told him, half statement, half question.
“You sit and think all day,” he joked. “Surely that is the very definition of wise?”
We are trapped by emotion, the rock said. You are to be envied, for your traps still allow you to move.
This confused him, but he didn’t dare ask any of the experts about it. They were angry that he’d gotten as far as he had, that the rock spoke to him when he was, he heard Gupta mutter, “a hobbyist.” He’d seen it happen to the other spouses. They were pressured to start childbearing, begin the population process. Most of them had, resulting in a large number of pregnancies across the tiny city. Wherever he looked, David seemed to see someone waddling by.
David could have started a child at any point. He’d had the necessary augmentation, he could carry it after drawing on both his sperm and Carlo’s as he’d been taught. The fact that he hadn’t decided to do so yet, despite those silent expectations, set him apart as much as anything else.
But he and Carlo hadn’t discussed it. Sometimes he caught a sad, patient look in Carlo’s eyes but it only infuriated him, as though Carlo had said, “It’s just a phase.” David felt maneuvered and trapped. He hadn’t agreed to bear children, hadn’t expected the insistence that beat beneath the colony’s expectations like a pulse, not heard but felt like a reverberation throughout it.
He laid his hands against the boulder. It was so beautiful, that rock. The layers of nacre covering it showed light in their inner depths, colored crimson and purple, shot through with threads of gold.
“What will you teach me to do?” he asked.
I will teach you what was taught to me.
“Who taught it to you?”
An Elder, the rock said, but the mind-picture that accompanied that word was not of an immobile lump like the boulder he crouched beside, but rather a flickering creature made of light and electromagnetic sinew.
“Is that what you will become in time?” he asked, heart beating quick with excitement. Why had he been so much more successful in coaxing answers from the rocks than anyone else? It wasn’t so much that they refused to answer questions as that they diverted them. They’d answer a question with another question. You’d find yourself telling them things, things you’d never told another soul—how you lost your virginity, or that time in the drainpipe, or what you’d done to your sister’s favorite toy.
He knew his friendship with this one was unusual, but this unusual? He spun a fantasy in which the colony acknowledged his contributions, his groundbreaking success, Carlo looking on with love and a trace of envy.
That would be satisfying. Vindicatory.
The rock said, It is what I might have become if I had understood then. Now it is too late. I will teach you to make ___ of ___.
He didn’t know what either of those words were. The accompanying mental pictures only confused him. He pressed on.
It was difficult, of course it was. Anything easy wasn’t worth it. Only the hard things were worthwhile. It meant trying to see colors that he’d never seen before, trying to imagine shapes that were inside out and right side up and inverted all at once, like watching a tesseract, a cube cubed. But as he worked at it, he began to glimpse the dimension the rocks spoke of.
He saw flickers there. He asked the rock about them. The rock gave him a picture of the golden apes that capered by the riverbank. That is where they keep themselves, the rock said.
When the lesson was over, a bit of nacre rolled in his palm. He’d made it himself, using the odd mental twists and turns dictated to him.
Made it out of emotion, by summoning the memory of joy. It shone like sapphire, but a sapphire filled with light, beautiful and amazing. He’d give it to Carlo, now that he knew the secret of the boulder.
But he wouldn’t tell Carlo just yet. He’d perfect the art before he showed it to his husband.
*
Every day he came back to the boulder and practiced. His pockets were heavy with bits of nacre, but it wasn’t enough, was never enough.
Finally the boulder said, Remember what you asked me?
“How to let go.”
Now you begin, it said. In his mind it showed him certain other steps. He saw how to look down into his very roots and understand them in a way few other humans had.
So many resentments hidden away, some from early days, long nursed. Others more recent, piled high and deep and fresh. That sludge, accumulated from mulling over slights and insults.
It surged around him like a wave, pulling him under. Panic gripped him. He reached out, trying to transform the emotions. They were different than channeling joy or happiness or love. They pulled at him with inescapable hands. He could feel the rock regarding him. He could sense a cluster of the golden apes, watching sorrowfully, and he could feel intelligence in their gaze.
That surprised him, but the rock said, They store part of themselves in Elsewhere, as we do. That is why your scientists never thought their minds complex enough to prove intelligent.
So not just one intelligent species, but two? The surveyors would be upset by how far off they’d been.
He would have to tell someone.
But he could feel the emotions all around him, making it hard to think. He opened his eyes, or tried to. Something trapped them, lay over them. He could feel the nacre creeping over him, encasing him. Anger made solid. A prison of his emotion.
Suffocating him. Was this what the rocks were? Gupta had thought they somehow preyed on the apes, but in reality they were what the apes became when they did this.
The rock said, its mental voice tinged with sorrow, You do not understand. As I did not understand.
Understand what? David thought, but his lips could not move to speak.
Making it manifest is only the first step. After that you must let go, or become like me.
He felt a touch on his surface, on the part of him that was not completely covered. He heard Carlo’s voice.
“Stop it! You’ve got to stop whatever’s happening to him!”
And Gupta and Tompkins, arguing, the words indistinguishable.
Why did Carlo sound so frantic? This was for the best. David had never been able to let go of the anger. It had kept them apart, as surely as the layers of nacre would.
But there was warmth where Carlo’s palm was pressed against his skin.
“I won’t let this happen,” Carlo said. “I love you, David. Don’t leave me. Fight it!”
I love you, too, he wanted to say. That’s why this is for the best. I’ll clear the way for someone who’
ll treat you better.
Somehow Carlo was reaching into Elsewhere, touching him. And where he touched, the hard nacre melted, gave way.
But deep in its core was something unmeltable. Anger at the thing he tried to never think about. Carlo, telling him of the affair he’d had with a nurse. Ben. He’d told David it meant nothing, had been a mistaken impulse. Swore he’d never see the other man again.
Every resentment, he thought, had started there. That was the core of it all. Unless that was gone, nothing could slow the flow, to melt the layers of anger and resentment and frustration around him.
He could feel Carlo overcoming his fear and loathing, reaching out to his lover.
How brave of Carlo to try. How futile.
He felt an answering wash of love at the thought of his husband, reaching into an alien substance, to try to save him. Carlo believed in him. He didn’t know why, but Carlo wanted him here. He hadn’t brought David along out of spite or to rub his nose in his own uselessness. He was here because Carlo wanted him in his life.
Could he forgive him? Could he love Carlo as much as he deserved?
With the thought, the nacre softened further. Wherever their love touched each other’s it was melting, somehow. And with that, he pushed harder, trying to batter through the wall, flinging his love against it. He found the core of hurt and anger and jealousy and pain. He didn’t want to be one of the rocks. Didn’t want to live immobilized by his emotions. He thought of the things he loved about Carlo, even the things that irritated him and made him fond all at once.
He was too full of anger. It wouldn’t be enough.
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