Whiskey Romeo

by James Welsh

  And perhaps it was the syphilitic dream, but Nash thought he saw memories of a past that he had tried to forget, as if the swirl was little more than a reel running through the projector. Nash saw a scarecrow’s face: the papery cheeks, the pinned eyes, and the wrestle of coal hair. It took a few seconds for him to realize that he was staring at his own reflection in a puddle of oily water.

  That was when the hand of light ripped away the snake, and Nash slipped once more under the blankets of darkness.

  ***

  “Nash? David Nash, can you hear me?”

  Nash blinked away the fog, trying to find who was talking to him. At first, he thought it was the light talking to him. But, as his world came into focus, he realized that there was an inkblot on that paper of light. His eyes drew the shape of a man. The shape looked familiar, but where did he know him from? He tried to sit up to meet the man, but the man pushed him back down with one finger.

  “Relax, Nash, I think you deserve it. You almost died, after all.”

  “What?” Nash rasped, not realizing until then just how dry his throat was.

  There was a pause, and the shadow fed a straw into Nash’s mouth. A spray of water irrigated his throat, and Nash coughed violently in instinct. The man laughed. “I remember the first time I ever drank water.”

  The man’s face was still veiled in shadows, but Nash now knew who he was. And when he realized who it was, he realized where he was. He was onboard one of the starling frigates, one of the monstrous starships that sailed on the wind of light from stars. They were flying towards the colony Volans, so far out into space it was as good as exiled. And the man was Marc Stratos, one of his fellow passengers. He had a chin strong enough to hold up his constant grin, and a dark chestnut beard to match his thick head of hair.

  “How long was I out, Stratos?”

  “About a day, but it could have been worse – a lot worse. The cryostasis system that’s been keeping us in a deep sleep all this time malfunctioned. It’s supposed to pump diluted hydrogen sulfide into our lungs to slow down our metabolism and keep us in hibernation. There must have been a bug in the code, because it suddenly hit us with pure gas, which is poisonous as you might have guessed.”

  “I guess that’s one way to wake someone up,” Nash mumbled, “is to kill them.”

  “Unlucky you, your safety backup didn’t stop the gas and surface you from your chamber. Lucky you, my backup did for me. I was able to pull you out of that well just in time.”

  As Stratos spoke, he launched himself and floated across the room. As Nash’s eyes followed, he realized that they were in the ship’s clinic. And while Stratos floated like a feather, Nash felt anchored. He looked down and realized that he was strapped down to a bed.

  “Afraid I’d sleepwalk?” Nash asked.

  Stratos, who was rummaging through a cabinet for something, turned. “Hmm? Oh, that. It’s for your own good – I can’t have you drift away when I try to give you medicine. Finding a damn vein is hard enough. Ah, here we go.”

  Stratos pulled a small vial from the cabinet and loaded it into a long syringe. Nash shifted uncomfortably beneath his straps. “Don’t you have a nanoneedle brush?”

  Stratos shook his head. “No, but I’ve never seen a point to those brushes. The needles are so small, you don’t even realize you’re injected. At least with this, you can actually feel the medicine getting shot into your arm.”

  “I think that’s the point.”

  With a laugh, Stratos made his way back to Nash and delivered the shot. Nash winced as the needle burrowed into his skin and delivered a round of enzymes to break down any of poisonous hydrogen sulfide still in his body. After Stratos injected the shot and moved away, Nash looked down at his arm and noticed a series of puncture marks on the inside of his elbow.

  Even with his back turned, Stratos was able to answer Nash’s question before he could ask it. “I’ve been giving you a shot every couple hours. And don’t worry, that’s going to be the last one I’m giving you – mostly because I used up the rest on the other passenger.”

  Nash was still lingering with delirium and didn’t understand at first. It wasn’t until Stratos pointed to the left and Nash looked that he realized what he meant. Of course they weren’t the only ones aboard the ship. A sleeping passenger was strapped to a nearby bed as well. The man had the pastor’s stern look, with high cheekbones and glossy blond hair that stayed matted down in spite of the zero-gravity. It was a shame that the man’s eyes were closed – if they were open, Nash would have been treated to stunning splashes of cobalt blue in each eye. But for the life of him, Nash couldn’t remember the man’s name.

  “How he is?” Nash asked.

  “He’s doing well, surprisingly. He was awake earlier, but a lot of good that did. He didn’t say a word the entire time,” Stratos said, as he cleaned the syringe and put it back in the cabinet.

  “What about the other man?” Nash asked. “Weren’t there four of us? What happened to him?”

  For a few moments, Nash thought that Stratos hadn’t heard him. But then Stratos sighed. “Galway Vita didn’t make it. He breathed too much of the gas before I could pull him out of cryostasis.”

  Nash breathed in sharply. “Did he suffer?”

  “I’d say. He was still alive, but just barely, when I brought him up. He coughed himself to death after a few minutes. It was like he was drowning in air.”

  “Where is he?”

  “I already wrapped him up and put him in the cargo hold. He’ll stay put until we get to Volans – they’ll give him a proper funeral there.” Stratos paused and looked at Nash curiously. “It looks like you’re taking the news worse than Vita did.”

  It was true, in a sense – Nash was wearing a mask of pain, as if he was acting out the death of Vita. Nash wasn’t sure why he was grieving – after all, the two men had only spoken a few words to each other before they stepped into the cryostasis chambers. Perhaps it was because Nash knew that he could have easily been the one wrapped in the cargo hold. Or perhaps it was because Vita had died a death that no one deserved, being strangled by a single flaw in a computer program. Whatever the reason was, it shook Nash down to the foundation of his feet. And whatever the reason was, it was not contagious, because Stratos clearly wasn’t mourning.

  “You can’t torture yourself over every little tragedy in the universe,” Stratos offered condescendingly. “If I did that in my line of business, I’d worn myself out years ago.”

  “And what is it that you do, exactly?” Nash asked curtly.

  Stratos laughed. “You really think I’m a miner like you? I thought you knew I’m an auditor for the charter – I was assigned to evaluate the colony and its mining operation after those miners died a few years back. I’ve been in this business for years, and this assignment is just another job to me. And so, whenever you think of Vita’s death as being some damn sadness, I just see it as being another round of paperwork.”

  “I’m sorry – I forgot what you were,” Nash said, feeling the sway of nausea inside of him. He shouldn’t have been talking back to a charter official like that. He had already gotten into enough trouble in his life for thinking he was more than he was. “I guess I’m still waking up.”

  “It was a long nap for all of us,” Stratos shrugged. “We’ve been in cryostasis for almost two years now. Good thing for you, we’ve got a lot of time to wake up. When the cryostasis malfunctioned, we were nowhere close to the colony. And unless you want to tempt fate with the chambers again, I calculated that we still have another month before we reach Volans.”

  Whatever math that Stratos used to arrive at that answer, Nash knew that it was going to feel much longer than a month.

  ***

  No matter what Stratos said, Nash felt like he had to say something. That was why a few nights later – even in the dark of space, they still kept to Earth time with the ship’s clock – Nash found himself in the cargo hold. He floated down every aisle in the hold, glancing t
hrough each of the shelves, expecting to see Vita’s wrapped body. However, he didn’t find any sign of the body at all – Nash supposed this could be a good thing. When his father was still alive, Nash could remember him refusing to go to funerals, no matter who the services were for. His father’s logic was that he would rather remember someone as living than as dead.

  Nash was in the last aisle, pushing aside some containers on the shelf after thinking he saw something towards the back, when he heard Stratos’ baritone voice behind him. “What are you looking for?”

  Startled, Nash cracked his head on the shelf above him. Rubbing the back of his head as he turned around, Nash said, “I was looking for Vita.” He wasn’t sure why he felt so guilty saying this.

  “I put him in one of the refrigerators,” Stratos said, pointing past Nash. Nash turned and saw the giant sliding doors that crowded the far wall of the hold. Past those doors, produce was kept at temperatures almost as cold as outer space itself. “Even with him wrapped up, I didn’t want him stinking up the hold by the time we got to Volans. Why do you want to see him? Have you never seen a dead body before?”

  “I have,” Nash said stiffly. “I just feel like we should do something more for him. Don’t you feel that?”

  “You think he’d notice if we did?” Stratos shrugged. “If you’re looking to give the poor bastard a eulogy, wait until the funeral. At least that way, you’ll have an audience. Come on, though, let’s get back to the cabin. I need your help with something anyway.”

  “What do you need my help with?” Nash asked, reluctantly trailing Stratos as the two made their way through the hold.

  “I lost Pere again,” Stratos said, a bit embarrassed to admit it. “When he wants to hide, he can really hide.”

  The man whose name Nash couldn’t remember after being awakened was Alexander Pere. Even though the three men had been out of cryostasis for a few days now, Nash had not heard Pere speak once. For the most part, Pere was wrapped up in his sleeping bag, which was anchored on the cabin wall. Every time Nash made his way past him, Pere’s eyes were open, staring at the wall ahead – Nash couldn’t recall Pere ever sleeping. And the man’s silence screamed until Nash thought he was going deaf.

  But once every few hours, Nash would turn and see an empty sleeping bag. The first time it happened, Nash was paranoid and he had every right to be. They had already lost one of their crewmembers, and another loss would have made the spaceship even more claustrophobic than before. Nash and Stratos searched the ship for the missing Pere but didn’t find a trace of him. It wasn’t until they returned to the cabin that they found him, staring at them from him sleeping bag. Pere never offered a reason for his disappearances, and this only made the other two men all the more desperate for an answer.

  As they made their way down the main corridor of the frigate, Nash found himself floating over the cryostasis chambers. He shuddered a little as he saw the hatches carved into the floor. Every night since waking up from cryostasis, Nash had nightmares of those cramped, flooded wells, with the snake that pumped the poisonous air into your lungs. He was so hypnotized by what was almost his death, Nash didn’t notice Stratos wincing suddenly and gripping his right hand, massaging a pain beneath the surface of his glove.

  As the men hunted down their missing crewmember, Stratos tried to chisel the ice between them. “So, where do you think Pere goes whenever he vanishes?”

  Nash wasn’t sure what sort of answer Stratos was looking for. “I don’t know – he might just go to some forgotten corner of the ship to be alone.” This made sense to Nash – he learned long before that you have to be by yourself first in order to appreciate others.

  “You know what I think? I think he goes outside for a smoke break,” Stratos deadpanned.

  Nash snorted, suddenly realizing that Stratos was just joking. “If he’s doing that, he might as well have stayed in cryostasis. I don’t know what goes into smokes these days, but hydrogen sulfide is probably one of the ingredients.” He paused, as he realized it was his turn to play. “I think he’s the first human in history to be able to teleport. He goes back to Earth, where he works as a successful guest lecturer at a college.”

  “Surely that can’t be the reason for him leaving,” Stratos said with mock surprise. “I didn’t think there was anything more exciting than sitting on a spaceship with nothing to do.” He grunted as he struggled to push open a door leading into a side room. However, the door would only open a few inches. Stratos gave up trying to swing the door open and instead peeked through the crack in the door. Satisfied there was no one in the room, he glanced back at Nash. “Or maybe he’s a ghost sent to haunt us.”

  “What’s he haunting us for? What did we do?” Nash asked.

  “Who knows – maybe it’s for something we didn’t even do yet. Come on, let’s go back. He’s probably back at the cabin by now. We’re going to have to catch him some other time.”

  And so they returned to the cabin, and Stratos was right – Pere was cocooned in his sleeping bag, staring into the depths of the wall. Stratos was about to say something to Pere, but realized what a waste of breath it would be. But while Stratos forgot about him, Nash simply picked up the slack until he was holding a tightrope in his hands.

  As a child, Nash remembered walking through one of the rare forests and finding a fallen tree. Even then, he realized that he was looking at a tree that had been chopped down – the cut was too clean and perfect. Everything in nature, from the shape of the planet down to the curve of a grain of sand, is rounded, one way or the other. Nature had only seen her first straight line when primitive man sculpted a blade out of obsidian. And everything man had done since then was to make that straight line straighter. A circle is life while a line is death.

  And now, as Nash looked at the sad Pere, he thought of that tree chopped down in the woods. And he wondered who could have possibly knocked a proud man down to his knees.

  ***

  While Nash was initially intimidated by Stratos and the charter that he symbolized, it did not take long for the two to become decent friends. Neither man had much of a choice – Volans was still days away, and the only other passenger they could talk to didn’t talk back. But even with those excuses, there was no reason they couldn’t become friends. Even across the gulf of their differences – where one shore drank power while the other shore thirsted for it – the two men felt the same wind against their sails.

  Nash discovered this connection one night as the two men ate an adequate dinner. Suddenly overwhelmed by curiosity, Nash asked, “So what is it that you’re leaving behind on Earth?”

  Stratos looked up from his meal. “What do you mean?”

  “Well, I mean we’re all leaving behind something, one way or the other. It’s the only way you can find your way back home.”

  Stratos went back to picking at his food. “There’s nothing on Earth waiting for me.”

  “Oh,” Nash said, suddenly realizing that he was stepping on a wound. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean…”

  “No, no, you’re fine. It’s just that anyone waiting for me died a long time ago,” Stratos shrugged. “When I was a kid, my mother was a devil, always fighting and stealing. She always tried to rope me into her schemes, but I always refused. One time, she gave me this.”

  He made a fist with his hand, all of the fingers curling except for the pinky finger. That digit was bent and gnarled like a tree branch and couldn’t bend. While Nash was horrified, Stratos looked at the ruined finger with idle disappointment. “The good thing about scar tissue is it’s hard. It’s just not very pretty to look at. Every time she beat me, I understood the world a little better. But one day the beatings stopped. She made the mistake of robbing a local guard’s house one night, and the guard knocked her down with bullets.”

  “What happened then?”

  “Well, I became an orphan – for about a year, give or take. I picked through the trash and begged for food, and I was fine with it, because that was the
only life I knew. But then the guard who shot my mother found out about me, and his conscience got the better of him. And so he adopted me.”

  “He adopted you? Could you ever forgive him for what he did to your mother?” Nash asked, surprised.

  Stratos laughed. “I think he took my mother’s death worse than I did. He didn’t know her like I knew her. But that old man did so much good for me – he gave me shelter and food, and taught me the charter. That’s the first and last family I’ll ever have. The charter knows what needs to be done, and order is a virtue in a world of anarchy. I’ll be the charter’s son before I’m ever my mother’s son again. I’d be nothing without them.”

  Nash took a deep breath. “I guess that makes us brothers in a way – I mean, how you were an orphan. I was too – in many ways, I still am. My mother was one of the good souls. She would fish in the Dauphin city harbor and eat only after everyone else had a bite of fish. She fished up to the day she died. The doctor said she died of cancer, that the sickness had chewed away her body and that she should have died a long time before. I like to think that she loved life so much, she didn’t realize that it had left her months before.”

  “And so what did you do after that?”

  “I took odd jobs around Dauphin. Things were alright, but it got to the point where I couldn’t take being on Earth any more. I wanted to try something different,” Nash said. “And that’s when I signed up to become a quantum miner – you can’t be any more different than that.”

  As Nash said that, the lie tumbled his insides. He hated lying, especially to a charter official, but he had looked for a choice and found none. Nash couldn’t bring himself to admit the truth, not to Stratos and certainly not to himself. It was true that his mother was good, and that her death led Nash to wonder if what was still decent in the world had died with her. But the night of her death was not the bottom of the pit – it was simply a slide into the darkness.