Aftertaste

by Kevin J. Anderson

  Instead of stocking up on the overflow of emotion rushing from people in line to rebook flights, I went gourmet and stopped taking everything in. I just went for the elegant emotions, the caviar, pickled cherries, and peppermints of the feast before me. A mother and daughter had just returned from Germany, a flight that had taken them hours and included several delays and missed connections. Now they were stalled out yet again, and their discouragement and fatigue tasted like rivers of bittersweet chocolate.

  A businessman had to get to Portland tonight or he’d miss tomorrow’s early morning meeting to decide the fate of—I wasn’t sure what it was, but it was monumental in his mind, and he knew he wasn’t going to make it, and they needed him. Fluffy lemon chiffon with dollops of dark cherry sauce.

  A mother heading home for her daughter’s wedding. She had booked a cheap flight with too short a layover in San Francisco, missed her connection, and now she would be too late. Remorse, anger, despair, and guilt. A cornucopia of delightful flavored syrups!

  I was in line with everybody else waiting for the ticket agents to make amends, which they were resolutely not doing. No admissions of guilt, no offers to give people extra miles. Smiling, they arranged other flights for everyone, some set for days later. Prospective passengers were twisting tighter in their resentment as they approached the desk. Salty seafood with Alfredo sauce. Mmm.

  Delectable, but if I collected any more of this, I was going to expand beyond the range of unnoticeable. I’d already acquired a bit of a belly and added padding to my arms and legs, plus letting my part-of-me clothes grow to accommodate my new size. I’d also added an inch or two of height, incrementally. I needed to stop now. I’d taken on basketball-player physiques in the past when the situation warranted it, but not right in front of people.

  Ducking behind a pillar could work if no one was noticing me beforehand. But just now, it would look pretty strange for me to abandon my prime place in line, about five people back from the information desk. No, I’d just stand there, shifting from foot to foot, quietly a bit larger than I had been.

  I had to watch it with the changes, because I needed to look like the picture on my driver’s license. All this extra security was a pain in the butt. I wished I was better at distance feeding, but I needed line of sight, at least, and for that, these days, I had to actually buy airplane tickets and go places. The guards got suspicious if you ranged around by the baggage claim, greeting area, and ticket counters for more than four hours.

  Airborne, I had a place to digest between meals, so it wasn’t too bad. Air travel mostly bored me, except for the occasional fear-of-flying person, whose terror could keep me in a heightened state of stimulation for hours. Smooth, creamy caramel with nuts, and occasional jalapeños.

  The man standing in front of me in line was strangely emotion-free and restful. He glanced at me. He was tall, with a neat Vandyke beard, round wire-rimmed glasses, short hair, and kind of an El Greco face and body—thin, stretched out, and a little blue. He had an uncreased suit, dark charcoal with a faint blue pin stripe; a black tie with three red diamonds on it; and a blue shirt. His carry-on was a brown leather briefcase. His hands were pale, with long fingers. He didn’t fidget at all. His mouth was set in a faint smile.

  Travelers ahead of us were being sent away with pink slips clutched in their fists. I collared someone and asked what the pink slip was.

  “It’s an eight-hundred number for booking hotel rooms at the distressed traveler’s rate,” he said. He growled and went off toward the exit.

  So. Hotel room. Hmm. I could sleep off an excess of emotion there as well as I could on a plane, and probably pick up a snack or two the next morning in the van on my way back to the airport. A night in a private room, where I could splurf adequately, let go of this pesky, restrictive human form to relax in a more undifferentiated way—yes. That would be nice.

  The stranger ahead of me noticed me looking at him, and his smile widened a notch. “Hi. I’m Stan.”

  “Tim,” I said. I liked the name Tim. It had three letters I could rearrange. Also, it was the name on my current ID.

  “Nice to meet you, Tim. We could cut costs by sharing one of these distressed hotel rooms.” He glanced at the ceiling as though lost in thought and not attached to my answer. There was a small spike in his affect, though, a slice of roaring red that intrigued me. It tasted like cinnamon and cigarettes. At first I wasn’t sure I liked it, but after most of it was gone, I changed my mind and wished he would have a stab of the same feeling again.

  It was not a usual feeling. I analyzed what was left of it and decided it was spicy, smooth-as-butter desire. For me? How odd. I decided this was worth exploring. It would be a different journey from my usual, with new flavors. Stan had a different atmospheric color than most of the others in our little crowd of left-behinds. I had glimpsed others like Stan before, but always at a distance.

  A night of digestion and study, but no splurfing. Well, I could deal with discomfort in the interests of exploration.

  We ended up crammed into a hotel shuttle bus with ten other distressed travelers, on our way to a Blue Roof Inn some distance from the airport, but with a guaranteed shuttle back to the airport in time to catch our replacement flights the next morning.

  Stan didn’t have checked baggage, just his briefcase. I wondered what he had packed. My carry-on was mostly for show, since I could morph my own clothes, unmake and remake my teeth, and cleanse my insides with my own stomach acid. I had a couple of magazines and a book in my little duffel. GQ was always helpful when I was designing clothes and hairstyles. I carried shampoo and a hotel-size bar of soap, too.

  The Blue Roof Inn was a big rectangular building with its face toward the freeway. All the corridors were open walkways with iron railings to keep people from spilling onto the asphalt below. The building was pink adobe, with blue doors in pairs along the walkways and a bright blue roof.

  While we waited in line to check in, Stan said, “Would you like to put the room on your card or mine? I can pay you cash if you put it on your card.”

  I shrugged. Though I had no street address anywhere, I had a PO box just so I could maintain a few items like credit cards to buy plane tickets with. When the clerk invited us up to the desk to register, I pulled out my credit card. The distressed traveler’s rate was sixty dollars, which I guessed was better than the usual rate. Stan handed me thirty bucks as we headed out of the lobby.

  “So, Tim, what do you do?” Stan asked after we’d entered our room, which carried the heavy taint of previous tenants’ cigarette smoke and was otherwise unremarkable.

  “I’m a frequent flyer,” I said.

  Stan gave a short bark of laughter. “That’s a job description? If that’s the case, I’ve got that job, too.”

  “Oh. You were asking about jobs?” Belatedly, I knew that. I should have recognized this conversational ploy, but I was so interested in Stan’s flat affect that I had forgotten to pay attention to my own cover. How did Stan exist in a state where his emotions were so repressed? How was I going to find out? I smiled. I loved puzzles. “I do some travel writing,” I said. “What do you do, Stan?”

  “I’m an accountant,” said Stan. Again with the small smile that might or might not be a smirk, and no feeling behind it.

  “That involves a lot of traveling?” I asked.

  “I have jobs to go to,” he said, and here came a flicker of annoyance, which tasted a bit like pine and detergent. Other people’s tasted more like pine and maple syrup, so this was an interesting aberration.

  I shrugged and smiled. “No offense,” I said.

  “None taken.” He put his briefcase down on the plywood desk and threw his jacket across the bed nearest the door, so I set my carry-on on the bed by the bathroom and settled down to await developments or sleep, whichever seemed likely to please me more in the moment.

  “Hungry?” Stan asked.

  “Not really,” I said. I was so full of fascinating things I’d alre
ady eaten that I had the irritating impulse to bud, which I had to suppress. Buds! So much trouble! Years of upkeep, and you had to teach them how to feed without killing people. Some buds learn that lesson more easily than others. I had been a quick study, but my only bud to date had been very hard to restrain during his first few feedings.

  “Pity,” said Stan, fiddling with his briefcase. He unlocked it and pulled out a small black leather case. Again, he had a brief flash of emotion, a combination of pine-and-soap annoyance and the red, smoky taste of hunger.

  “Are you hungry?” I asked.

  “No,” he said, even as his hunger spiked, a roaring conflagration of red and golden heat around him, smoke and barbecue and charred meat. His pupils flared, wide spots of darkness. His hands unzipped the leather case while he stared at me. “Guess I’ll have to do this the other way. Did you want to shower tonight or tomorrow? My preference would be for morning.”

  “I don’t care,” I said. “It’s not like the hotel is going to run out of hot water, right? But I’ve got to get back to the airport by around seven, so I guess I’ll shower tonight.” If I had been able to splurf, I wouldn’t have needed a shower; I could absorb any grime attached to me and process it into whatever I liked. But now that I was stuck in my current shape for a while, I might as well do the external washing thing. I didn’t excrete the same kinds of waste products humans did, but I did collect some unpleasant scents in the course of maintaining a shape.

  “Good,” said Stan.

  While I stood under the stream of hot water, I thought about the puzzle that was Stan. Often people’s emotional landscapes didn’t match their words or acts, but Stan was kind of extreme in his dissonance. If I had that kind of hunger in me, I’d be gnawing on anything nearby. Maybe he was snacking while I was showering. It would be fun to check his hunger levels when I left the bathroom.

  After I finished my ablutions and swiped the mirror with a towel, I checked my form. Still bulgy here and there. I rearranged some of my bulk to look more muscular and less bumpy, then grew a gray T-shirt and white boxers. I couldn’t remember what color of either I’d been wearing when I came in. Why didn’t I standardize these things so I didn’t have to think about it? Sometimes I went with pale green, blue, or purple. Once or twice I’d even crafted logos on my T’s. I hoped Stan wouldn’t notice.

  When I left the bathroom, I noticed that my little duffel had moved slightly on my bed, and the zipper didn’t have the inch-long gap I always left open. Huh. Stan was one of those. I wished him joy of it. My wallet held an ID, a credit card, and about three dollars and change. I had other cards and IDs sewn into the seam of the duffel in case I had to change shape quickly. Other than that, the reading material, and the plastic bag of minimal toiletries, I had a Clif Bar. Joy to any curious snooper.

  Stan had the TV on, tuned to a late-night talk show with the sound turned up pretty loud. He was wearing some weird kind of slick-looking pajamas and sitting on the edge of his bed, his hands dangling between his legs. The little black case sat on the bed beside him. He stared at me. There was a low-level glow around him, red with growlers, and the flavor wafting from him was roasted coffee beans and, again, charred beef.

  “Don’t mind me,” I said, waving at the television. “I can sleep through anything.” I set my duffel on the floor and turned back the covers of my bed.

  “I’m counting on it,” Stan muttered. He jabbed something into my left buttock, and his flare of hunger was so strong I could warm myself on its flames.

  I looked back over my shoulder in time to see Stan pull a syringe out of me, the plunger depressed. Uh-oh, drugs. What kind of reaction was I supposed to have? The jabbing part was supposed to give me pain, I knew, but it didn’t; I had parted to accommodate it. He had left some kind of fluid in me, but my mass created a capsule around it. I could analyze it at will, but I couldn’t tell what it was supposed to do to a human.

  “So, Stan,” I said. “What do you call that?”

  He was staring at me, his pupils wide. He shook his head like a dog shaking off water when I spoke.

  “What is it, and what’s it supposed to do?” I could hardly fake a normal reaction if I didn’t know what was expected.

  “A paralytic,” he said, his voice low and grating. His breathing had sped up, and his face was flushed. The hunger had spread out around him as though he were a stuntman on fire, or maybe a miniature sun, flames flaring out to the walls of the room.

  “Oh.” I collapsed forward onto my bed and lay sprawled.

  “Yes,” Stan muttered, “yessss.” He rolled me over onto my back, leaned over my prone form, and stared into my eyes. Then he arranged my limbs: drew my arms to my sides, straightened my legs, gently, as though I were the corpse of someone he cared about. I noticed something: his fingers were covered in some slick surface. Latex gloves, I figured. The garment he wore was all one piece, like a hazmat suit, except it didn’t have a helmet.

  “You’re mine,” he said, and smiled. The flames danced around him. He started riffing on various deep purple versions of joy, and I couldn’t help it. Full as I was, I had to taste that. I sucked some in—oh bliss, several varieties of sweet, succulent grapes, a burst on the tongue and a wash of transcendent sweetness!—and then Stan brandished a shiny, shiny scalpel in front of my face.

  “You’re mine,” he whispered again, while the talk show host nattered loudly in the background about the latest celebrity scandals.

  He sliced neatly through the apparent material of my fake T-shirt and spread it wide; I let it behave as I imagined T-shirt material would. Then Stan carved into my chest. I worried about whether I’d populated it with the right mat of hairs and whether my nipples were well enough defined to mimic reality. I guess Stan didn’t really care about that stuff, but his lovely, tasty joy vanished when I didn’t produce blood in the wake of his slicing. It happened so fast. I always thought I was pretty good under pressure, but I was too surprised to whip up the requisite red stuff.

  I looked down at my chest. He had carved some letters there, cutting through the minimal tan I maintained when I wasn’t being someone whose skin was dark into the almost translucent white that was my natural color. He’d gotten as far as A WORK OF GE and stopped.

  Oh. So he was That Guy. “WORK OF GENIUS” KILLER STRIKES AGAIN! the headlines sometimes read when I logged in to my e-mail. He had struck in different areas around the country, leaving multiple carved-up bodies with at least one message on them but no trace evidence. He always killed near a major airport.

  All the wine of joy had vanished from Stan’s emotion-form, and his hunger had tamped down as well, leaving a thin layer of shuttered alarm. I wondered how he did that.

  “What are you?” he whispered, poking me with the scalpel. I let it slide into me. There was nothing too solid near the surface for it to encounter. I had formed some of myself into a semi-skeleton, six times denser than my normal flesh, to support the weight of my form, but it wasn’t a permanent state; I could will it away. Most of my neural connections were intangible, not necessarily in sync with the fleshy part of me. It squicked me to move the neural/emotional-vacuum part of me away from the solid parts, though, so usually I stayed integrated.

  “What are you?” I asked, and Stan jerked back, the blade jerking too, slicing a gully across my stomach.

  “You shouldn’t be able to talk!” he said.

  “Because of that stuff you squirted into me?” I shifted the encapsulated liquid from my back to my front, holding it just under the skin of my left hip. I densified some of myself into a hollow needle near the liquid. I had tried to analyze it, but it hadn’t turned into anything I recognized. I could always stick it into Stan and see what it did. “Ever get the feeling that didn’t work on me?” I asked.

  “Shut up,” Stan said. He aimed the scalpel at my face, then lowered it toward my throat.

  Now, there was a lot of me that was pretty sloppy, since I didn’t expect people to look under my skin. I got ene
rgetic when preparing to be scanned by the new security measures, but so far I’d managed not to set off alarms, since none of me qualified as metal. Once I got through security and went hither and yon in airports, I relaxed.

  The structures I established to handle speech, though, and fake breathing, that was complicated stuff, and I didn’t feel like having to re-create it. Before Stan could slice for a jugular that wasn’t there, I grabbed his hand.

  “You can’t move,” he said, staring into my eyes with a fixed gaze that spooked me.

  “Come on, Stan,” I said. “You’re ignoring the evidence of your eyes.”

  He didn’t blink, nor did his gaze waver. His entire affect was compressed into a thin halo of silver-blue concentration surrounding him, only a millimeter from his skin, with about as much flavor as an ice cube. Fascinating. I’d never encountered anyone who could nearly disappear that way.

  He tried to jerk his arm out of my grasp. I flowed more flesh around it, immobilizing him, then pressed on some nerves until his fingers opened and the scalpel fell. Meanwhile, I went ahead and closed the wounds he’d made on my front. Viri society in general frowns on our revealing ourselves to our fellow Earth inhabitants, but hey, that horse had left the barn.

  I wasn’t sure how to get out of this gracefully.

  “How long is that stuff you shot me with supposed to last?” I asked.

  “Half an hour. An hour. Depends on your metabolism. What is your metabolism?”

  “Nothing you’d know about,” I said. I sat up, keeping Stan’s arm encased in me, and considered my options.

  This guy was killing people. There were a lot of people alive, so many that I and my kind had no trouble finding sustenance. Still, the guy was theoretically cutting into our food supply, and I liked some of the people I knew, and would probably like others if I got to know them.

  I could suck him dry. At the moment, there wasn’t much to him, so it wouldn’t be that far a trip. But because of Stan’s weird emotional physiology, I wasn’t sure that would incapacitate or kill him. The death-suck usually only worked on people who were completely agitated already.