Whiskey Romeo

by James Welsh

  But the colonists were bored and eager for a scandal, and so that story became contagious. A few of the colonists even went to the security chief with their concerns, asking that he investigate it further and possibly even arrest Bends. Chief Ragnar Armfelt listened and nodded politely to the concerned citizens, and he immediately forgot the request the moment they left. He didn’t know if Bends was a murderer or not, but he did know that he couldn’t arrest the only trained doctor in the colony. And so Bends was saved by the diploma that hung in his office – for now. But his freedom was an exile, as the entire colony now hated him and wanted nothing to do with him.

  Later that day, the funeral preparations were almost in place. The colonists had their memorial quick and the burial even quicker. They already spent enough of their days living in the shark’s jaws, and they didn’t need another reminder that they were each walking towards the cliffs in their lives. The sooner they could bury and forget a body, the better. This was against the charter’s policy: specifically, they were ordered to draw out the mourning as long as possible as a sign of respect. This was one of the rare times where the colony broke with her empire.

  All burials were held in the main lobby of the Connections. It was there where the charter’s holy men praised the good worker and punished his bad colleague. The doors to the Connections opened at the end of the day’s last shift, and all of the workers streamed through the doors. It was mandatory to attend a funeral at the Connections – none of the colonists had dared to find out the consequences of not attending. Only the miners aboard the distant Harbor were exempted, their work too important to abandon.

  As the colonists entered the lobby, they unfolded the mats courtesy of the charter and spread out the cloths on the floor. In order to accommodate all of the colonists comfortably, they could not squeeze enough chairs for everyone in the lobby, and so they had to make do with the mats. The mats were thin, and the smooth stone floor massaged their legs as they sat down.

  But no one complained – no one even said a word. Every soul that stepped into the lobby was masked in silence. It was true that humanity had lost much of her culture in the Decade of the Tide almost two centuries before. But the one idea the people had not forgotten since that time was how to mourn their dead. Those years spent running the gauntlet between the floodwaters and the glass lands back on Earth had taught them well.

  Bends was one of the last colonists to enter the Connections. In fact, he was just beginning to spread his mat out on the floor when he heard the heavy doors groan close behind him. Bends settled into his mat with a groan and rolled his neck, cracking the bones. He used this as an excuse to glance at the rolling sea of heads around him. He was disappointed that no one turned to hush him. He coughed loudly, and still no one turned. Bends wanted the little victory of breaking the vase of someone’s meditation. But no one looked, and Bends suddenly realized that he was the only one making noise in the packed lobby. Most people would have been embarrassed to be drawing attention to their selves, but Bends only chuckled. He was so desperate for someone to humiliate, he would just have to do.

  But Bends was illiterate when it came to minds. In prayer, their skin was rock, but their brains were a windstorm. Alaois Dart – the timid miner on leave from Harbor – wondered if the brute couldn’t resist the urge to kill. Dart was a victim of Bends’ laughing madness before: Dart had gone to Bends for a mole on his chest he wanted removed. Bends dug out the mole – along with a good chunk of the surrounding skin. Bends insisted that he had to do so, in case the mole was cancerous and beginning to infect the rest of his body. But Dart could see the lie in the doctor’s eyes. Since then, Dart never stepped foot again in Bends’ clinic, his fear of the doctor now more real than his health.

  The wise Wales Rego, another of the miners on leave, had already heard Bends’ story and discounted it even earlier. Rego didn’t know a lot about medicine, but he knew that it was impossible for Anzhela to have died from a reaction to the painkillers. The future of medicine couldn’t make mistakes – only the doctors who practiced it. And it wasn’t a stretch to think of the doctor as being a murderer. If he knew how to give life, then he surely knew how to take it as well. The one thing that Rego couldn’t understand was the doctor’s motivation. Perhaps the fuel for the murder was that bottomfeeder’s jealousy. For Bends, his downfall was his rise, and he couldn’t bow down to a world that seemed to rise above him like a garbage dump. When Bends saw how much the Khunraths loved each other, it must have ignited the oil in his heart. No other theory made sense to Rego.

  Some of the colonists, like Dart, thought that Bends killed out of sadism. Some of the colonists, like Rego, thought that Bends killed out of envy. And if the eccentric Edmund Liber was at the funeral instead of Harbor, he would have proposed that the charter had ordered Bends through a dream to kill Anzhela, that it was all a conspiracy fleshed out on different planes of existence. But no matter the theory, not a single soul in the room thought that Bends was innocent – the only thing that stopped them from lynching the doctor was a lack of proof. And while they were there to mourn their Anzhela, they knew that Bends was only there because it was demanded he attend.

  But the silent rumors slipped away as the funeral began. As the colonists knelt in silence, some chose to stand and walk to the center of the lobby. There, they stood and cured the mourners with eulogy. Just a few feet away, Anzhela’s corpse was laid out on a simple platform, the body wrapped in curves of fabric that were gray and airtight. The gray symbolized her body’s return to the fogs of time, and the wrapping’s tight fibers would perfectly preserve her for centuries to come.

  As the train of eulogies pushed through, a few of the colonists noticed something. The speakers were from all corners of the colony, but Khunrath was not among them. While Khunrath was awkward and shy, they expected a husband to deliver a sermon for his gone wife. But it wasn’t until the funeral was almost over that they realized why Khunrath did not stand up: it was because he wasn’t in the lobby. This was unheard of among the colonists – they had never heard of someone missing one of the mandatory rites at the Connections, let alone a widower missing his wife’s memorial.

  Once the ceremony was completed, a group of men carried Anzhela’s wrapped body through the cave and towards the docks, where a ship was waiting. Once there, they attached the body to the ship’s hull by means of a harness. They would dive deeper into the pit and guide the body into one of the countless cracks in the wall. It felt wrong to dump a body on the pit’s floor, and it felt just as wrong to launch a body into the cold of space. Their dead could not expect any more respect from the brutal world.

  Meanwhile, a few of the colonists – curious as to why Khunrath wasn’t at the funeral – visited his longhouse, which he shared with the other technological workers and their families. Like all of the other longhouses, this one was mostly submerged into the rock, with only the roof visible. They opened up the door on the roof and clambered down the stairs into the illuminated hallway. They walked down the corridor to the Khunraths’ apartment and knocked on the door, but no one answered.

  Since the colonists did not have the magnetic card needed to slide open the door’s locks, they went to the guard barracks with their worries. They did this, their curiosity stoked and the locked door silent to their questions. They did this, not understanding that they weren’t going to like what they would find in the apartment.

  ***

  When the charter first planted Volans in 2172 AD, one of the first decrees passed down was a prohibition on alcoholic beverages. The charter justified this by saying that the charter’s resources were limited, and that they had to prioritize food and tools over everything else. But some of the cynical in the colony had a different interpretation: the charter didn’t ship people halfway across the galaxy just for them to drink on the job. In the two decades since, the charter was still stubborn in their philosophy, believing that the best way to improve employee morale was by crushing it.

&nbs
p; But the charter never learned that the best way to make something popular was by banning it. The colonial mechanics had access to a distillery, which they used for breaking down air into argon for arc welding. It was a simple process to convert the distillery so that it could secretly harvest whiskey from the colony’s rye supplies. The mechanics were far better at maintaining spaceships than making alcohol, but oddly none of their customers complained. The whiskey had hardly been aged for two years before the black market sprang like mousetraps. And although food was never guaranteed in the depths of space, with famine being always a possibility, the colonists’ instinct was to make whiskey out of the rye instead of bread.

  And that was why, on the night of the funeral, Bends found himself walking to the mechanics’ longhouse. He never had a drop of the drink in his life, and he thought that he never would. But then he had heard the sound of laughter just an hour before – someone was laughing, just after having gone to Anzhela’s funeral. He was hoping that the colony would be swimming in a black cloud of grief for longer, but people were already moving on with their lives. For the second time that day, Bends needed someone to mock, and he was the only one to raise his hand and volunteer.

  Bends opened the roof door to the longhouse and lowered himself down the ladder. Bends strode through the dim and deserted hallway to a door at the far end. He looked at the nameplate on the door and, satisfied, knocked. There was a long pause, and at first Bends wondered if he was working an extra shift. But then Bends heard a low voice on the other side of the door ask cautiously, “Who’s there?”

  “It’s me, Dr. Bends. I’m making a house call.”

  “Go away.”

  “Come on, Berko. You know what could happen if you don’t let me in. It wouldn’t take much for me to spread rumors about your health.”

  The voice hardened. “I’m healthy.”

  “Yes, but the others wouldn’t know that. Now let me in.”

  The voice sighed and the lock clicked open. As the door opened, Bends saw Berko Volver standing in front of him. An elderly man full of life – whose hair was white with electricity – Volver stood frowning at the doctor, his arms folded. His skin was as sienna and strong as oak, and he towered over the already-tall Bends.

  “What do you want, Kevin?” Volver demanded.

  “Let me in, and we’ll talk.”

  “I would, but I would never look at my home the same again if I let you in,” Volver said dryly.

  “Well, if you want to talk about whiskey out here, where someone could hear, that’s fine by me too,” Bends offered.

  A spasm of fear sparked across Volver’s wrinkled face. He waved Bends inside. “Come in – we’ll talk.”

  “Excellent!” Bends said, walking past Volver and into the apartment. Volver closed the door behind him, far from thrilled to be playing host. Volver’s apartment was squeezed, barely large enough to fit two beds and a countertop in the single room. In spite of the gasp of space, Volver managed to keep an entire library, with hundreds of books stowed under his bed. Bends sat down at the countertop and spun around in his chair to face Volver. Then, with a smile and his hands folded innocently in front of him, Bends asked, “So, Berko, where do you keep it? Where do you keep the whiskey?”

  “Now who would go and spread such an awful lie around?” Volver mused.

  “I forget the name, but that’s not important,” Bends said, waving off the question. Actually, he did remember the name, as bright as colors, but it was too much fun to see Volver guess. Bends could already see it in his eyes, as the mechanic silently struggled with who could have betrayed his secret. “I will tell you that they came to my office with symptoms of alcohol poisoning. I didn’t so much force the secret out of him as much as I made him share it. You know, you shouldn’t be so selfish…”

  “What would it take,” Volver interrupted harshly, “for you to go away, like right now?”

  “A bottle of whiskey,” Bends smiled. He then added, “Like right now.”

  “It doesn’t quite work that way,” Volver said shortly. He grunted as he leaned down and pulled a book out of the sagging bookshelf beneath his bed. It was an outdated manual on the cooling system for the starling frigate. He then trudged across the room and handed the book to Bends.

  “I think something got lost in translation here,” Bends said, not understanding what the book meant.

  Volver rolled his eyes. “Here, I’ll show you.”

  There was a slight tear in the spine of the book. The mechanic pulled back the tear a bit and extended a flat straw from the book. The straw connected to a tube that ran beneath the surface of the entire book, and every inch of the tube was filled with the drink. He handed it to Bends, saying, “You better hope no one catches you drinking out of this. I didn’t go through all of the trouble of making these damn books for you to ruin my secret the first chance you get.”

  But Bends wasn’t paying attention. Instead, he was turning the book over in his hands, with a look of disappointment. “I was expecting there to be more.”

  “What, this isn’t good enough for you?” Volver snapped. “There’s over two liters of whiskey hidden in that book.”

  “That’s not possible,” Bends said, shaking his head.

  “If you were to unwind a single strand of your DNA, it would be almost as tall as you are. This is no different. Now, let’s talk payment – you are holding thirty credits in your hand, after all.”

  “This is thirty credits?” Bends scoffed, holding up the book. “How about this: you let me take this book, and I won’t tell the guards about your little operation you have going on.” Bends paused, and a wide smile blossomed on his face. “What would your daughter, Crysta, do if she came home tonight to find her father was arrested? She’d finally have to work, just like the rest of us. What would she do for money? Oh, I know what she could do…”

  The monster didn’t have a chance to end the sentence, as Volver ended it for him. In just one second, the old man had grabbed the doctor by the throat and slammed him against the stone wall. Bends tried to break free, but Volver was too strong. The mechanic looked him calmly in the eye. “You barge into my home and blackmail me into giving up my product. You threaten me and my family…you must want to be afraid of something, Doctor.”

  Volver released his grip and Bends collapsed to the floor. As Bends rubbed his throat and gasped, Volver tossed the book to the floor between them. “The first book’s free, but anything more will cost you. Now, get the hell out of my home.”

  Bends grabbed the book and got up on wobbly feet, having to hold onto the wall with one hand to keep steady. As the doctor stumbled out of the apartment, Volver called out after him, “And bring the book back when you’re done reading it. I’m trying to keep a library here!”

  Bends had let the front door ajar – the world beyond the door was venomous with dark, the hallway lights turned off for the Volans’ night. But Volver didn’t bother to close the door. Instead, he got another book from the shelf, sat down at the counter, and pulled out the book’s straw. As he sipped on his whiskey, he called out, “Cailean, how much did you hear?”

  At first, there was no response. But then, a body began to materialize out of the dark of the door, like a swimmer stepping out of the water. Cailean Maxwell was lean and pale, with hair that was wavy and rusty. He was still wearing his uniform from an earlier shift, the green jumpsuit of the colonial mechanic.

  “I heard all of it, sir,” Maxwell replied in a rocky voice. “Do you want me to follow him?”

  Volver nodded. “Make sure you keep your distance this time.”

  “I’ll make sure to do so, sir.”

  Volver continued, “But if you see him go to the guards, you let him know you’re there – you got that?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Then go.”

  His loyal Cailean slipped back into the dark, closing the door behind him. Volver sighed and turned around his chair, still sipping on his whiskey. Everyone in the
colony had wanted to kill Bends at some point, but no one ever had to. All he could hope for was that Cailean would have to kill Bends that night. He wasn’t going to let the man who threatened his daughter get away free.

  ***

  As Bends walked through the colony in its artificial dusk, he couldn’t help but take a quick drink of the bootlegged whiskey. He couldn’t wait to get back to his home dug into the cliffs – he had to feel warm right then. And so he held the book up to his face, until the spine was rubbing against his nose. He closed his eyes and pretended to take a long smell of the book, as if he was trying to remember his deep past. Nobody who walked past paid any attention to the drinking straw that stuck out of the book like an arrow. Bends took one sip because that was all he could afford. He made a sour face – the medicine tasted foul. But then he took another quick sip – it was still medicine.

  As he held the book vertically, he paid no attention to the loose pages rippling like the leaves on trees he had never seen. But he did see the scrap of paper that tumbled out of the opened book and fall down to the floor as beautifully as any dancer could. Looking around, confident that no one was paying any attention, Bends discreetly capped the book and knelt down to pick up the paper. Bends noticed there was scrawling on the paper, and he held it up to the glow of the colony to read it.

  You were right, Kevin – it’s all about waiting. You watched my pain like it was a play. Now it’s my turn.

  Bends gasped before glancing around wildly, as if expecting Khunrath to be standing behind him. The identity of the writer made sense: Bends hadn’t forgotten Khunrath’s observation about patience back at the physical exam. But the publication didn’t make sense: how could Khunrath had known that Bends would be paying a visit to Volver? How could Khunrath guess when a man was going to take his first drink?

  The compass in his brain spun wildly, and it took Bends a few moments to reorient himself. Then, aroused out of his daze, he turned and began walking quickly in the direction of Canal White Clay. It was there, on the banks of that canal, that the colony had built two longhouses. The longhouse on the right bank was reserved for the farmers, while the longhouse on the left was for the technological soul of the colony, where the software programmers and computer technicians lived. And for Bends, it was also where his answers lived. He had questions he had to ask of Khunrath, questions he thought he would never say out loud.