“Lange can see it. He’ll know. And I bet we can pull some remnant of the machine back together, at least enough to measure what’s happening,” Jake said, glancing over his shoulder. “Failing that, your trick with the tennis balls was pretty effective.”
“It may come to that,” Dax said, but at least they were smiling.
15
Possible Future Outcomes
Solomon had ceased to notice the darkness and the flashlights by the time the power came back on, but Chávez whooped.
“Oh God, that’s a relief,” she said. “Not that I don’t believe in what we’re doing here—establishing that the alien is not hellbent on murdering us—but it’s a lot easier to believe when the lights are on, you know?”
“No,” said Solomon.
Chávez laughed. She did that often, and he hadn’t tired of it. Her laugh was a nice sound, joyful rather than malicious, like she found his company delightful even when he was brusque or strange. Her continuous enthusiasm for their experiments had an effervescent, slightly intoxicating effect on him. He hadn’t thought there was anyone in the world he could tolerate for hours, other than his family and Jake, but she was proving him wrong.
And her laugh was a welcome contrast to the few notes he’d been playing on the guitar over and over. The result of their experiments was that if Solomon played a C, the organism would gradually shift to producing an E flat, which maintained the sound of the chord.
If Chávez played the guitar, the organism responded similarly—if Solomon could hear it. With his ears blocked, he could still perceive the breach and the alien, but not the guitar. If Solomon couldn’t hear the guitar, there was no change in the organism’s behavior. The same was true if Chávez sang the note rather than playing it. (She’d been embarrassed about that set of tests. Solomon’s attempts at gentle encouragement had been so dismal that she’d eventually snorted and said, “I can’t be nearly as bad at singing as you are at this.” He was grateful she didn’t seem to be holding a grudge.)
They had done the tests over and over. The instrument didn’t matter. Solomon could affect the alien’s behavior simply by thinking of a pitch. The organism responded not to sound, but to him.
He had no idea how to apply this knowledge. In any other circumstance, with any other person beside him, he would have been pacing the room in frustration. Instead, Chávez wandered in circles around him, almost like a fluttering bird except for the tap of her mag boots, while Solomon stood, stewing.
She interrupted his thoughts to say, “Can I ask you something?”
“You’ve been asking me things all day,” Solomon said.
“No, I know, but… it’s delicate.”
He rolled his eyes. “Yes, Jake and I had sex.”
She laughed. “I know that. I want to know what brought you here. To Quint Services Facility 17.”
“This place doesn’t belong to Quint Services anymore.”
“But it did when we signed up to work here,” she said. She waved a hand. “I know the whole thing turned out to be corrupt and dangerous and awful, and I’m not looking for you to justify yourself. I signed up too. I’m asking because I came for this. Talking to aliens. I mean, the money was good and I got along with all the people Emil picked for the team and I definitely didn’t mind the idea of gaining superpowers or exploring the unknown, but the real draw was this, right here in this room. We communicated with an alien, Lange. No matter how rudimentary it was, I have wanted to do this my whole life.”
“I felt the same about opening up the Nowhere,” Lange said. “It didn’t go as planned.”
“Will you continue that research after we repair the breach?”
“You’re very confident in our success.”
“If we fuck it up, we die, so there’s no need to plan for an after,” she said. “If we live, I am absolutely going to keep looking for ways to talk to aliens.”
“You’re passionate about this.”
“Yeah. How could I not be?”
“But it doesn’t consume you,” he continued, and she nodded. “My research on the Nowhere was the only thing in my life. You’re not like that.”
She considered him for a moment, her brown eyes narrowing. “I don’t think you are, either.”
“I am,” he insisted. “Or I used to be. I didn’t care about having friends or a partner or children. I didn’t care about money or prestige or power—not for their own sake, at least. Just the research. Only ever the research. It, uh, caused a number of fights with my colleagues.”
“Why?”
“Why did my colleagues resent me?”
“No, why didn’t you let yourself have a life?” she asked. “I’m sorry your coworkers were shitty, though.”
“You’re assuming the fault lies with them.”
She gave him a crooked, sad smile. “It’s not that hard to be your friend, Lange.”
“It used to be.”
“Well,” she said brightly, stretching her arms above her head. “I don’t know how long we’ve been messing around in here, but it was long enough that Jake fixed all the wiring. Let’s take a walk to the kitchen.”
He nodded, put his guitar in its case, and left it in the lab as they exited.
Chávez said, “You think Jake’ll fix the gravity, too?”
“A gravity generator is a complex machine,” Solomon said. She made a face—she knew that already. He’d just spent hours working with her and she’d been both informed and perceptive. He cleared his throat and continued, “I’m sorry, what I meant to say was that ours was severely damaged and we may not have all the necessary replacement parts. If we do, it won’t be a problem. And even if we don’t—if anyone could engineer a solution, it would be Jake.”
“You think highly of him,” she said.
“It’s not what I think, it’s what I observe.”
“Sure,” she said, smiling at him. “Science.”
“You shouldn’t doubt me,” he said. “I’m right.”
“I’m not doubting you or your observations. I’ve made some of my own, that’s all. You admire him.”
“He’s admirable,” Solomon said shortly.
“Well, yeah, of course he is. He’s smart and kind and a damn good person to have on your team”—by team, she might have meant the crew of people remaining at the facility, or she might have meant the silly made-up sport they used to play in the gym every Sunday afternoon, a ridiculous social ritual Solomon had never participated in—“but I don’t think you often feel that way about other people, do you?”
“Is there a point to this?” Solomon demanded, unsettled. They barely knew each other and she’d seen so much of him. She’d zeroed in on the thing that made him most uncomfortable: what he felt for Jake was different from any set of feelings he’d ever had for another person.
“Okay,” she said, raising her hands in surrender. “We don’t have to talk about it.”
“Correct.”
“But you know not talking about it doesn’t make it go away. It’s science.” She tapped her temple. “True whether or not you want it to be.”
He rolled his eyes.
“Also,” she said, her whole face alight with mischief, “it’s cute whether or not you want it to be.”
She walked into the kitchen ahead of him, her boots clicking loudly against the floor. Solomon followed, perplexed. He ought to be scowling, but he couldn’t make his facial muscles obey him. He didn’t like that his troublesome feelings were so easily divined by others, but nobody had implied that he was cute since childhood. People usually described him as brilliant and strange and intimidating. They’d mutter asshole if they thought he couldn’t hear—or sometimes they said it to his face. Cute did not fit into that set. He was unsure what to make of it.
It was bright inside the kitchen—and crowded. The whole team was there, standing shoulder to shoulder, raising their bagged beverages like they were clinking beer bottles together. By now, he knew all their names: Emil, Kit, L
enny, Chávez, Miriam, Dax, and Jake. This was an accomplishment that no one else would remark on, but he was secretly proud of himself. He’d remembered them, and he’d learned things about them, and some of them even tolerated him. Jake did a lot more than tolerate him, but Jake was an outlier.
Solomon supposed they were celebrating the return of the electricity, but as he’d never joined them for dinner before, perhaps they were always this cheerful.
Without gravity, and with all the food in individually foil-wrapped handheld servings, the long metal table bolted to the floor was unnecessary, but everyone gathered around it out of habit. Chávez had chosen to stand next to Lenny, and she called to Lange so loudly that no one could miss it, “Get in here.”
And then Dax, next to Jake, moved aside to make space for him. Solomon stood next to Jake, curious and jittery like there was a current running through him. Everyone in the kitchen acknowledged his presence with a nod or a greeting like they’d always done this together. Like he could have joined them at any time during the lonely, angry months he’d lived here, and they would have made room. He hadn’t believed that then. He wasn’t sure he believed it now.
“Hey.” Jake nudged Solomon with his shoulder. “You okay?”
Solomon considered his answer. This type of social interaction—everyone squashed together, all talking over each other—didn’t suit him. He’d never feel at ease here. Still, it was moving to be invited, and that made the atmosphere almost tolerable. Standing next to Jake, close enough to touch, ought to be a pleasure regardless of where they were. Perhaps he could narrow his focus to that sensation and only that sensation. It could carry him through.
“I can do ten minutes of this,” Solomon said.
“Okay.”
Solomon had braced for mild disappointment, or bargaining, or mockery—well, Jake was unlikely to mock him, but someone else might. Or maybe there wouldn’t be mockery, but they’d all be hurt that after extending an invitation at last, Solomon had snubbed them by leaving after ten minutes. Solomon tapped his fingers against his thigh in rhythm.
He closed his eyes. It was loud in the kitchen, almost loud enough that he couldn’t hear the breach, though no true sound could drown that out. Not even the loud and laughing back-and-forth conversation as the crew traded flavors of emergency ration bars. Surely it had been ten minutes by now.
Jake’s voice cut through it all, low and close to his ear. “Hey, you know you don’t have to, right? Ten minutes is great if that’s what you want to do. But if this is too much, I get it.”
“They’re your friends,” Solomon said. It was only a fragment of the argument he wanted to make, but the whole thing felt too complicated to articulate right now. They were Jake’s friends and they’d asked Solomon to join and he didn’t want to upset them by rejecting their invitation. If you wrecked the first one, there was never a second. That always hurt. The only way to avoid the whole fiasco was to be the type of person who never got invited to anything, which Solomon had perfected before Jake came along.
Damn it.
He could be here for another few minutes. He wasn’t enjoying himself, but dinner wasn’t going to ruin him. No, ruin would come later, when these people no longer needed him to solve a problem. He couldn’t allow himself to like them. Either he’d fail and they’d die, or he’d succeed and they wouldn’t want to put up with him any longer.
Even Jake.
It wasn’t a personal failing on Jake’s part. It was a law of the universe. The entropically favored state of a relationship was broken. Just as there were more ways for a pair of dice to roll a seven than to roll a two, there were more ways for a relationship to end than for one to remain whole. All relationships ended. People died or they left.
One more minute of standing here was one more minute of deluding himself. Solomon extracted himself from the crowd and quit the room.
He strode right back to the lab, shifting the balance of sound from real and chaotic to unreal and constant. There was no peace here, and he didn’t understand this noise, but at least neither did anyone else.
He only had time to pace the width of the room once before Jake appeared in the doorway.
His lips pressed together with worry. “Can I come in?”
“Why are you here?” Solomon asked. He could make Jake go away. He could make Jake angry. He knew how. It wouldn’t be difficult—except with Jake’s eyebrows creased like that, Solomon found that it would, in fact, be difficult. Instead of an insult, he managed only a curt question. “I was rude. Aren’t you angry with me?”
“No?”
Scaring someone off used to be so simple. All the time he’d spent with Jake had caused him to develop reflexive remorse. Solomon exhaled through his nostrils. “I suppose you might as well come in.”
Jake advanced cautiously, coming to stand within arm’s reach of Solomon, but not reaching out an arm. “Are you okay?”
“I don’t like large groups of people,” Solomon said, which was true, but inaccurate. It was one reason he’d left the kitchen, but it wasn’t the only reason or even the most important. As much as he valued accuracy, he couldn’t bring himself to say the others, though he could feel the fear beating against his ribcage.
“I know. That’s why I told you that you didn’t have to stay,” Jake said.
It was absurd how ideal he was, how understanding. It was absurd how much Sol wanted to believe in him. If only Jake would be disappointed in him for leaving, or angry, then Solomon could drive him away easily.
Solomon reiterated, with more force, “I don’t like large groups of people and I’m never going to change.”
“Okay.”
Solomon shook his head and began again. “We’re too different. I’m good at being alone—I used to be good at being alone—”
“Lange. Did it ever occur to you that maybe I knew you weren’t having a good time in there because I wasn’t having a good time?”
“No,” Solomon said, so stunned that this brief true statement comprised his only available answer. Jake was good at people.
Jake’s shy, slightly embarrassed smile should be classified as a weapon. It had cut Solomon off at the knees. “Well, I don’t like large groups of people either.”
“Oh.”
“I like all those people a lot,” Jake said. “Individually.”
“But you put up with them as a group quite often,” Solomon said, and then added in further protest, “And you play sports.”
“Sports have rules, that’s different. As for dinner and all that, I tolerate it, I guess. Doesn’t mean you have to,” Jake said, infuriatingly reasonable. “You know I don’t want you to be somebody else, right?”
Here, at last, was the hard crux of the matter, something to hold onto, a problem Jake could not simply shrug off or melt away with his smile.
“Yes, you do,” Solomon said, his conviction carrying him several paces away from Jake. He turned back so they were face to face, but with new distance making a gulf between them. “You want me to be your boyfriend. And I can’t.”
“Whoa, okay. Slow down. I don’t recall saying that, so maybe walk me through your logic here.”
Solomon took to pacing again, stopping every so often to count on his fingers. “You don’t have sex with people you don’t have feelings for, you said that already. We had sex and it was good, so you must want more, and if we keep having sex, you’ll want a relationship. There are three possible future outcomes: one, we both die in the very near future, thus ending the relationship. Two, one of us dies, thus ending the relationship. Three, improbably, we both live through the immediate future and once the looming threat of death is gone, you come to your senses and realize I’m more trouble than I’m worth, and then you leave me, thus ending the relationship.”
Solomon had crossed the room four or five times and Jake was still standing there, a fixed point, his mouth drawn to one side, unimpressed by Solomon’s reasoning.
Jake said, “So you don’t want
to do anything that might make you feel good in the present because there’s a chance you’ll feel bad in the future?”
“Yes,” Solomon snapped. “And it’s not ‘a chance.’ It’s a certainty.”
“Wouldn’t go that far,” Jake said, remarkably unagitated. “How come you leaving me isn’t one of the options?”
“It’s not probable.”
“It feels pretty goddamn probable,” Jake said. “Since that’s what you’re trying to do right now.”
At last, in that goddamn, a reaction. Only a small one, and that disappointed Solomon in a way he couldn’t articulate. Did he want a fight? No, of course not. He was right and he wanted Jake to agree with him. Solomon said, “I am preventing a disaster.”
“Uh huh,” Jake said. He crossed his arms. “You’re jumping to a lot of conclusions.”
“I’m being rational.”
Jake laughed. “You’re being dumb as hell and kind of a dick. You think I’m not scared shitless too? Come on.”
“Why would you be afraid?”
Jake uncrossed his arms, walked over to where Solomon was standing, draped one arm across his shoulders and used the other to make an expansive gesture that encompassed the rest of the lab.
“Right,” Solomon said. Chávez had been wrong; the lights being on didn’t reduce how threatening it felt. Now he could see the maze of black tracks on the floor and the walls, marking places of great danger. The static of each distortion rippled in the air.
“Are you so afraid of a future where we both survive that you have to stop what’s between us before it even starts?” Jake asked.
“Jake,” Solomon said with urgency.
“Yeah?”
“The distortions have changed. They don’t align with the marks you made anymore.” Solomon went breathless with excitement. It was the first time he’d looked at the shimmering sweep of the room with anything but dread. “I think they’re smaller.”
“So it’s working, whatever you and Chávez were doing? You communicated with the alien and now it’s fixing things?”
Nowhere Else Page 18