Beacon 23

by Hugh Howey

  “The hell does that mean?” I ask.

  She looks down at Cricket, whose eyes are closed. She’s doing that deep growling thing that I’d call a purr if it wasn’t so goddamn unsettling.

  “You’re right,” she says. She pats Cricket, then unfolds her legs and stands to go. “Good luck with everything, soldier.”

  “Wait,” I say. I reach for her hand, even though I don’t know her, even though I’ve spent all of four hours with her, even though I haven’t thought of anything else for the last three days. “I’m sorry.” Two words that I used to choke on when I was younger, that I only now know the value of, the true worth, and how good they feel to say. “It’s just—”

  “What?” she asks. She’s standing there, my hand around her wrist, looking down at me. Cricket is watching us both.

  “It’s just that—”

  I shake my head.

  “You don’t want to have feelings for me because you’re scared I’m gonna leave?” she asks.

  I turn away, because the tears leap up in me so fast that my throat closes and I can’t swallow or see. I wipe at my eyes, full of shame.

  “Well fuck you, soldier. We all leave. Every one of us. You’ve been in the shit. You choose to keep yourself from people who might leave, you choose to keep yourself alone. We all go. Fucking open up to someone. For your own sake.”

  Cricket’s head is in my lap. She’s looking up at me. Claire is peering down at me. I’m the rock between two soft spots.

  “You think I don’t hurt?” Claire asks. She squeezes my hand. Somehow, her hand is now holding mine. “Look at me.”

  Reluctantly, with tears rolling down my cheeks, I gaze up at her. She’s holding up her shirt. A web of scars peeks out above the waistband of her sweatpants—a tangle of lace-like flesh that wraps clear around her hip. I glance from this up to her face and see that she’s looking at my own exposed stomach. I look back at her wound. I’m the asshole. I’m the guy who thinks he’s uniquely miserable, who thinks all the world’s woes are his, who sees the pure in everyone else and the dilapidated within. Only I have suffered. Only I know pain. How do you share what you think no one else can hold? Why do we all do this to ourselves and each other? Why can’t we just fucking cry like men?

  I do in that moment. Gone is the allure of having sex with this woman. Gone is the allure of loving her and spending the rest of my life with her. Gone are all the good things I dream about. All that’s left is the awful, the horrendous, the brutal, and the hurt.

  The last bit of egoism I have left in me is to think to myself—as I convulse with sobs and bawl like a child—that no one has ever cried like this. It’s the last time I’ll ever think I’m unique. The last time. Because as soon as I think that no one has ever cried like this, a woman is wrapping herself around me, a stranger, a sister, a fellow wounded, a lonely lover. And she shows me that I’m not alone. And we cry like the universe is about to end.

  • 25 •

  There’s something oddly familiar about the way she strokes my hair after, the way she looks at me, the way her hair is mussed and her cheeks are flushed. She must be thinking the same thing, because the first thing either of us says in what feels like forever is her asking:

  “Was it good for you?”

  We both laugh. It’s the best kind of laughter. “What the hell was that?” I ask. Because nothing happened other than the holding and crying.

  “That’s called feeling something, soldier. Good to see you can still do it.”

  There’s something scarily clinical about the way she says this. She tucks my hair behind my ear. Definitely not reg length. And I can’t stop myself from thinking that maybe she was sent here to tune more than that other beacon. That’s paranoia, though. That’s remnants of my ego. A billion stars staring at me from across the unfathomable distance, and it’s not the cosmos that teaches me how small I am. It’s this perfect person lifting her shirt and reminding me that no one’s perfect. We all have stories. And regrets. And weaknesses. She pulled off what astronomy couldn’t. Or maybe it was just about damn time for me.

  “I don’t want you to leave,” I say.

  She nods. “I know.”

  Cricket growls in her sleep. The warthen passed out as soon as we were done bawling, like it had exhausted her as well. I reckon that, if she’s really an empath, it did.

  “Are you glad you met me?” Claire asks.

  “Of course.” There’s no hesitation.

  “There you go,” she says.

  I rub her arm. I memorize how she feels for later. I take her free hand and pull it to my lips, kiss the back of her hand, feel her squeeze my hand in assent, then take a deep sniff, trying to memorize how she smells.

  “Have you ever done this before?” I ask.

  Claire laughs. “Would it matter?”

  I shrug.

  A moment passes.

  “No,” she says. “I probably needed this more than you did.”

  The old me would’ve privately doubted. The new me isn’t so sure. Maybe her path has been harder than mine. Maybe I can let go of the specialness of my suffering. Maybe the handholds I’ve been clinging to have been digging into my palm and cutting me rather than keeping me from falling.

  “If you ever want to share,” I say. “I’m here.” Because I can be the shoulder too. I can listen instead of not-talking. I can prop someone else up. Me. The broken one. No: a broken one.

  I think of Tex, a grizzled vet who served in my last squad, who died the day I won my medal. I always thought Tex was crazy. He was the happiest motherfucker you ever met. And not happy with the zeal of killing, which a few of the really off-kilter vets got, but happy with the joy of being alive that day and wanting to remain that way for one more day. Tex would introduce himself to every goo-green kid who joined the squad, every piece of farm-fresh. He’d put his arm around their shoulder, tell them his life story, his real name, ask them all about their hometowns, so that even those nearby had to learn shit we’d rather not. We’d get hit by these frag grenades of nicety. He took people in, Tex. Got close to them. Cried like a baby when the smoke cleared and the tags were tallied. And I thought he was fucking crazy, going about war like that. Not learning what the rest of us learned.

  But he may have been the only sane one. The human out there with all us aliens. Still living. Refusing to give up. Preferring to yo-yo up and down like grav panels on the fritz. Preferring that to the weightlessness. To the lack of gravity.

  I want to feel a little numb again. I smile at Claire. “You want to go sit up at the gwib with me? Just for a little bit?”

  A frown shatters her beautiful face. She looks sad again, but not the raw sadness of all those wounds in her life—this is sadness mixed with pity. This is her not wanting to tell me some awful truth.

  “You know it doesn’t do anything, right?” she says.

  No. I don’t know. I have no idea what she means.

  “The gwib. There’s no way it interacts with your brain.”

  “Fuck that,” I tell her. “Yes it does. It mellows me out. It’s the only thing that does—”

  She brushes her hand across my cheek, and I feel something else that mellows me. I was getting worked up just then, but her touch calms me down. I know I’m right, and she’s wrong, but I don’t need to get upset about it. Just accept.

  “You feel calm up there because it’s the only place you sit still,” she says. “It’s where you breathe. Where you let yourself relax. You can do that anywhere. You just have to choose. Just be.”

  I shake my head. I’m about to argue with her, when she runs her hand down my cheek, down my neck, and touches the rock hanging from its lanyard.

  “What’s this?”

  I place my hand on the back of hers. I think of Scarlett for a moment, how sex and love used to mean the same thing. But this is love, what I’m feeling right now. The surest I’ve ever felt it. Romantic or not. Just human to human. Real love.

  “A memento,” I say.<
br />
  “What does it remind you of?”

  I think about this. So many answers. I want to make sure I choose the honest one.

  “That I’m not always right,” I finally say. “It reminds me to question myself. Question everything. And never stop.”

  Claire smiles. She touches my lips with her finger, then leans in and kisses me. When she pulls back, much too soon, she says, “Well, you got that part right. Never question that. Hold on to it.”

  I pull her against me, not to make love to her, but just to love her. To hold something good and imperfect and fucked up, and to feel someone holding all of that in return.

  • 26 •

  It’s moving day. I watch on the zoomed-in vid screen as the supply shuttle makes its approach to beacon 1529, little puffs of uncertainty as the pilot tries to line up with the lock collar. On the HF, I hear him proclaim contact and good hold. They must give these back-sector routes to the greenest fliers. I shudder to think my precious Claire is entrusting her life to this noob.

  “Gotcha,” I hear her radio back. That voice. We spent hours the last few nights chatting via the HF, after having spent hours chatting in person, and saying we should really get back to our own beacons, and then saying we should really get off the radio and get some sleep, and then waking up and making up an excuse to see each other again.

  When Claire caught me unplugging the CO2 sensor alarm in her life support module—and I fessed up to three other things I’d broken over there that might be serious enough to keep her around, fixing stuff, but not so serious that anything would happen to her—she got a strange look on her face, like she knew this was going too far, and we were feeling too much, even though we still hadn’t had sex, like we were saving that for the people we didn’t love quite so truly. Well, it was after this that she QTed NASA and said the beacon was good to go. To send her an operator. At least, I think this was what decided it for her.

  Cricket mews and growls and nudges her head against me.

  “I know,” I say, scratching behind her ears. “I like her too.”

  The warthen clamps her jaw on my arm and squeezes, like she’ll bite me if I don’t stop lying.

  “Love,” I say quickly. “I love her. Okay? But I’m supposed to tell her that, not you. So leave me the hell alone about it.”

  Cricket pulls away and walks a big lap around the command module, whining.

  “I’m sorry,” I say, throwing my hands up. “Whaddya want from me? Huh? I don’t make the rules. I just break them. Can’t it be enough that we had a good week? Does it have to be all about today?”

  Cricket stares at me. I can hear that I’m asking myself these questions. That it’s me angry at the cosmos.

  “C’mere,” I say, patting my lap.

  Fifty kilos of alien jumps up in my lap and finds a way to curl into a dense, furry ball. Her tail swishes along the ground, back and forth.

  “Truth is, I’m scared,” I tell her. “What if sitting still stops working? Or breathing in and out doesn’t do anything anymore? If the gwib doesn’t do anything, what if everything else stops working too?”

  She licks my hand. And then I have a scary thought, one I shove away fast before Cricket can pick up on it—and the question is this: What if I were to lose her right now? This animal is the nearest thing I have to the GWB, or Rocky, or Claire, or all the things that have given me peace in the moment but never seem to last. Where’s the everlasting peace? Is there even such a thing? Or do we war like alien races war, eternally, against ourselves? I hope that’s not right. I hope that’s not how it all works.

  “Beacon 23, transport KYM731. Requesting permission to dock. Over.”

  I look back to my screen and see that the supply ship has left its collar. It’s just the lifeboat there. There are lights in the portholes and flashing lights along the solar panels. She’s all up and running.

  “Hop down,” I tell Cricket.

  She does, and I grab the HF’s mic.

  “Lock collar Charlie,” I say, reaching over to energize the magnetic latch.

  I go down the ladder ahead of Cricket and close the ladder’s top hatch behind me. I can hear her pacing and mewing, but she doesn’t put up a big fight. Maybe she can read my thoughts and knows that if she gets spotted here, I’ll lose her, and she’ll probably spend the rest of her life in a zoo. Or get bought up by another bounty hunter, who’ll use her with his dark thoughts.

  The pilot whaps the collar pretty damn good. A one out of ten on the pilot-o-meter. I key open the airlock, and we shake hands and exchange names and pleasantries. Then he passes me two dozen plastic crates full of supplies, spares, and food, and I pass him back two canisters of unrecyclable waste. He gives me two empties in exchange. The entire time, I keep expecting Claire to come give us a hand, or say one last goodbye, or at least wave. But the last time we saw each other, it was too perfect a final goodbye to replace. A lingering kiss that I can still feel on my lips. A warmness in my heart that liquor and grav wave broadcasters could never touch.

  “One last thing,” the pilot says. He disappears and comes back with a black plastic bag. The top is seized with a red wire. A tear rolls down my cheek, and I don’t turn aside, and I don’t wipe it away. I don’t even feel the pride of someone who does neither. Nor the pride of not feeling this. Instead, I just am. I feel the sweetness of the gift. I feel the sweetness of feeling the sweetness. There’s no shame, just a distant awareness that something in me has changed.

  “Can never have too much of this,” I say.

  The pilot is looking at me funny. I untwist the wire and pull out the can of WD-80, then make a show of appraising it. “It’s a good year.” It’s been a good week, at least.

  “Yeah, whatever,” the pilot says. “The operator just told me to give that to you. I swear you people are strange.”

  He turns and heads back through the airlock.

  “Tuner,” I shout after him. “She’s a tuner.”

  He looks back at me.

  “You think she looks like an operator?” I ask.

  He shrugs. And then, reaching to key his door shut, he says, “You all look the same to me.”

  “Wait!” I say. I peer past him into the supply ship, which brings us our food and our spares and the people who replace us, and which takes us home if we ever decide to go. I search for some sign of her, but there is none.

  “Yeah?”

  I show him the can of lubricant. One quick burst, and things just slide together. “Thank her for me,” I say. “Just tell her I appreciate it.”

  Another look like I’m the crazy one.

  “Tell her yourself,” he says. “She’s your neighbor. I’m outta here.”

  •••

  It takes me three or four stunned breaths to put it all together. And then I take the three ladders quicker than I ever have. If there were an Olympic event for beacon operators, I would’ve set the galactic record. It never would’ve been broken again. That is, until I hit the hatch that leads into the command module.

  I free the clamps holding the hatch and give it a shove, but the thing won’t budge.

  “Cricket!” I yell. “MOVE! Cricket! Off—!” I grunt with effort, climb another rung and put my shoulder to the hatch. I feel it rise a centimeter or two, but then it collapses back down as Cricket shifts her weight.

  “I swear, Cricket, get the hell off! I’m trying to get up there. Bad girl! Move!”

  Finally I get it lifted enough that she slides off. She jumps out of the way as the hatch falls into its recessed slot in the deck. Then Cricket’s all over me as I try to get up the last rungs of the ladder, licking me with her rough tongue.

  “For fuck’s sake,” I tell her. “Cricket. C’mon. Leave it. No licking. Never lick me again. I swear.”

  I’m grumbling at her as I get to the HF and pick up the mic. I squeeze the transmit button, then let go. I nearly said something. Switching to the lock bay’s external camera, I watch the supply ship pull away. No she didn�
��t, I tell myself. No she didn’t. No she didn’t. She wouldn’t. She wouldn’t.

  I try to talk myself down as I wait for the supply ship to get the hell into hyperspace. I try to picture some bald man with a beer gut over on that other beacon, scratching his neck, chewing on a protein pack. That’s the truth. Hold on to that. Don’t get your hopes up.

  The supply ship ramps up its drive and vanishes from my screen.

  I squeeze the mic.

  “Beacon 1529? This is beacon 23. You read me? Over.”

  I wait.

  There’s no response.

  I switch my scanner back to get a visual on the beacon.

  The lifeboat is still there. Still attached.

  “Go ahead.”

  The words are clipped. Came when I wasn’t paying attention. But it was her. I’m pretty sure it was her. Pretty sure.

  “Claire?” I ask.

  “Go ahead,” she answers.

  I take a deep breath. I steady myself with one hand on the dash. Cricket is there, leaning against me. She puts her mouth on my arm and squeezes, threatening to bite me if I make the wrong move.

  “I know,” I tell Cricket. “We both do.”

  And I can’t remember the last time I said the words and meant them like this. Can’t remember the last time.

  But I’ll always remember this one.

  Part 5: Visitor

  • 27 •

  I hated Sundays as a kid. From the moment I woke up, I could feel Monday looming, could feel another school week all piled up and ready to smother me. How was I supposed to enjoy a day of freedom while drowning in dread like that? It was impossible. A pit would form in my chest and gut—this indescribable emptiness that I knew should be filled with fun, but instead left me casting about for something to do.

  Knowing I should be having fun was a huge part of the problem. Knowing that this was a rare day off, a welcome reprieve, and here I was miserable and fighting against it. Maybe this was why Fridays at school were better than Sundays not in school. I was happier doing what I hated, knowing a Saturday was coming, than I was on a perfectly free Sunday with a Monday right around the corner.