Memory's Exile

by Anna Gaffey

  —in a corridor outside an underground Dome lab, Con nearby, dressed in flight blues, his dark head in his hands. Broken glass, scattered across a lab table. Vials of yellow liquid, sharps, swabs, tablets, a scanner. Con’s face, close to Jake’s, Con’s eyes angry and fearful and loving, plaguing hells, that was love. A garble of voices:

  “No, I won’t.”

  “You have to.”

  “Listen, I have to tell you.”

  Glass breaking—

  Con pulled back, wild-eyed. “Well. So.” He cast about, saw the sack, picked it up with a shaking hand, and gave it to Jake for the third time.

  “This happened before,” Jake said.

  Con gave him a look of disbelief. “Not with me.”

  “No, it was you, there was broken glass—” But even as Jake reached for the memory, it sank away into nothing.

  Con stepped back, his face closing, but not before Jake saw something—desire? fear? —flit across. Something quick, something closed away. “You were right. You’re exhausted. Five minutes, and I probably should get back to the Harmon. Make sure everything’s ship-shape.”

  Jake grabbed his arm and then caught the door to his quarters as it began to creak its way shut again. “Shut up and get in here.”

  After all, the best way to monitor your friends and suspects was to keep them under proper surveillance at all times.

  CHAPTER TEN

  “Our last break before we reach Selas. Have discovered some discrepancies with data, test subjects. The project has acquired a risk heretofore unseen. I’d like to investigate before I record any further information, as the matter’s a sensitive one. But I expect I’ll have enough for a full report by the time we disembark.”

  Excerpt: personal ship’s log

  05 October 2242

  Dr. Alice Silverman

  Clinical pathologist

  Personnel Carrier Leah Harmon

  United Worlds DS 2150-1

  En route Selas Station, Satellite, Eos System

  [Data recovered 02 Dec 2242, Gunaji rights per salvage]

  1 November 2242 AEC

  05:02

  “No. Yes. No. Yes.”

  “Make up your mind,” Jake grumbled. He wavered on the edge of consciousness; the fuzzy borders of sleep slipping away even as he squinched his eyelids more tightly shut. “I’m not even doing anything to you anymore.”

  “Fine, yes yes.” Breathy and garbled in his ear, Con’s voice was eager, nothing like his normal drawl. “But not now. Shh. Okay?”

  “Whatever you say.” Jake opened his eyes. “Thanks for waking me up.”

  Judging from the virtual dawn spread in his quarters, there were probably a couple hours left till 06:00. And then he remembered all the previous night’s events, and he burrowed his head deeper into his pillow. It was a little cramped in the wall bunk, but that was an acceptable hardship.

  A warm breath puffed in Jake’s ear. “Not right now. They’re watching, and those eyes. They don’t shut.”

  That was a new one. Jake kicked the sheet around his ankles and rolled over on his side. “They don’t shut, huh?”

  Con licked his lips and nodded, his stubbled cheek rubbing vigorously against the pillowcase. His eyelids were slitted, his angular sleeping face taut with some emotion Jake didn’t recognize. “They don’t shut. They stare and stare and you can’t go to sleep because—”

  “Because what?” Jake was fully awake now, and this was kind of funny, because Con had always talked shit from here to Tau Ceti Two when he was conscious, but he never sounded so guileless. And he’d never said one word about any predilection for sleep talking. But then, why would he? A warm glow suffused him, and Jake found he was grinning. He pushed back the sheet and sat up. “Because what, Con?”

  Con huffed an impatient sigh and rubbed his temples.

  “Con? Griffin?”

  Jake waited, and after a long, long moment, a tiny snore issued from the still figure beside him.

  Jake thunked back down into his pillow. He was more awake now than if the entire cargo crew had decided to parade up and down the Control deck naked and coated in ricotta. He spent a few minutes imagining that, and then he watched the sharpening contours of things around his room while Con snored lightly in his ear, and he stroked a hand slowly over Con’s ribs. The guy gave off so much heat, it was like sleeping with a thermal pack. He realized he was looking for a memory flash, like the one he’d had out in the corridor when Con kissed him, and pulled his hand away. It had to have been a chip glitch. They’d touched plenty in the interim, with no similar surface of memories.

  He rubbed away his grin, even though there was no one to see it, and looked idly around at nothing. There was his dark narrow desk a meter or two away, cluttered with spare tablets and yesterday’s—no, last week’s memory gems; the shelf over the desk where he kept his personal things (the seven crumbling real print books in their cases, the old-time dusty glass beakers and syringes, his mother’s chemistry set and satchel, still complete); the partition dividing the bed and desk from the tiny living area with his jury-rigged illegal hot plate and coffee beaker; the gleam from the bathroom door latch; the round capped mouth of the legacy emergency lockdown button on the wall.

  The satchel dragged his attention back. His mother had shipped it through normal lines. Anything marked Angelica Padula or Jake Jeong would’ve automatically been scanned to the very ends of its fibers. There were bright yellow chemicals, but all above board, all legal. Surely Con’s mystery thief wouldn’t suspect it. But Jake could check, just to be sure.

  A few more minutes. He put his arms around Con and let himself enjoy the radiating warmth. A guy like this was made for space. He closed his eyes to will himself back to sleep, and then the walls slammed down and the blinds scrolled closed and the nightmare—too soon, out of order—was upon him. Rebecca walked toward him and extended her arm, her eyes reproachful.

  She perches on a lab stool. She wears nonregulation trousers and a blue blouse under her white coat. She laughs at him, her dark eyes sparkling with derision, and says what she always says, something he can’t remember but will not forget now.

  “Easier, hah. I know what I’m doing. I’ve logged more lab hours than you, little brother. Give me the shot and we’ll call it a day.”

  She holds out her arm. Her arm port is prepped. Iodine, yellow smears. Blue sterile guinea pig seal over the entry point. And Jake does what he is supposed to do. Like a mouse guided on a lab maze path, he does what he did, he picks up the injector. He pushes it though the seal into the port. He depresses the plunger one-two-three. Just as he did it then.

  The serum takes root fast. It travels up her arm like a water worm. It thickens her veins until they stand up under her skin in thin blue cords. It leaves her flesh mottled and jaundiced in its wake. Speeding through her blood, it rushes through her heart and up over her neck and into her brain, and Rebecca collapses, convulsing, against the back of the stool. Her eyes bulge. Her neck jerks. She opens her mouth and slow yellow fluid pours out.

  He leans over her and holds her wrist, feeling for the stuttering fade of her pulse. She gasps something. He leans closer. She must want him to kill her faster. He strokes the side of her throat. He could do that. He should do that. He owes her that. And better that than watch this again, again, again. He wraps both hands around her neck. A hand snakes up to seize his wrist. Her eyelids snap open, and they’re green, not brown. Con’s eyes.

  In a blink, he registered it was not Rebecca’s rotting hand but Con’s grasping his wrist, Con’s throat in his hands. Jake flung himself up and across the room to huddle by his desk. He was fully awake. He was out of the nightmare for a second time. How?

  He flexed his fingers, and then jerked as Con squatted down—not too close—and covered him with one of the bed’s blankets. It didn’t do much good; everything was so cold. He’d clanged his foot against the end of the bunk, and it stung as numbness overtook it.

  “It’s not
supposed to happen,” he heard himself say. “It’s supposed to be scheduled. Every five days. Are you—I thought—”

  “Okay.” Con was pulling him up and leading him back to the bed, his hand burning hot against Jake’s shoulder. “Why don’t you sit down?”

  He didn’t shy away into efficiency, though. He put his arms around Jake and sat with him, and as Jake’s trembling wore down, he said, “Did I ever tell you about the first time I heard the name Jeong?”

  “You don’t have to distract me.”

  Con ignored him, as if they regularly had conversations like this. “It was when I was a kid. After the Saint Paul Dome cracked.”

  “All right.” Jake let his eyelids drift closed. Rebecca’s face loomed back, and he snapped them back open again.

  “My mom—before she died—was in good with a little bigwig in our local Defense squad, and he said we could watch it. The unveiling of the fix. Nobody knew whether it was the end of the Dome, or if we’d be okay. But nobody wanted to miss it, so people were lining up for a chance to get topside, gas mask in one hand and camera in the other. My mom’s friend said he could get us up to the surface.

  “He sneaked us through this mildewed old tunnel. You know the kind. Green sodium lights, scum on the walls, cracks so wide you can stick your head in them. My mom was nervous as hell. It was hard to hold on to her hand, she was so clammy. But she didn’t make us go back. At the end of the tunnel, they argued a little, and the guy handed us pressure suits. That was when I figured out we weren’t just going topside, we were going outside. First time I’d ever been. No wonder Mom was so tense.

  “We climbed up a secure egress chute, and then we were out in this dark field. Lots of rubble and grass. I wanted to look around for animals, but Mom held me in place and so we just looked at the Dome. All pale and big and half-sunk into the ground, like the moon had crashed. We looked at it a long time, and at the sky beyond it, and I saw the stars clearly for the first time.

  “And then there was a crackle, and this wave of blue sparks just rushed over the Dome.” It sounded as though Con were smiling. “Containment. Protective covering that recognized people, my mom called it. She said it saved us. And that the man who had fixed it, our Doctor Jeong, he had a son, too, younger than me, and his son had helped. We were so lucky, she said.”

  In spite of himself, Jake smiled, too. “I didn’t do much. It was Dad’s.”

  “Sure.” Con sat still for a few moments, and then he said, “I haven’t thought about that in a long time. Funny the way the mind works.”

  Jake waited, but Con didn’t say anything more. The revelation had calmed him, though, as it was probably meant to. Although his legs were still jittery. “I gotta get up, sorry.” Jake gently extricated himself from Con and stood up. “Are you—?”

  “I’m fine,” Con interrupted. “I’ll be here.”

  Jake nodded and backed into the bathroom. He felt a gratitude so strong and cloying and confusing it almost sickened him. The sweetness of Con’s memory was touching and yet stained by the echoes of the aborted nightmare.

  He let the virtual dawn continue its sunrise simulation thing. He undressed mechanically and showered in the vacillating glow of the nightlight. As he toweled off, he caught a glimpse in the slab mirror of his hair sticking up on one side—the side Con had pushed his fingers through, pressed his lips to, groaned against—and Jake slapped off the light, let his stupid obvious face sink back to a blank murky blur, imprecise, without character or strength or weakness. He no longer felt like grinning.

  He’d go to Lindy. The implant was broken, or off-kilter. He’d go to Lindy. He should’ve said something yesterday. If he had, he wouldn’t have hurt Con.

  Almost hurt, his brain corrected. It was an attempt. Hardly successful. Don’t sentence yourself yet. Fine distinctions, very appropriate, very natural for a man living by the scientific method. Description was everything. What was the best and most impartial way to describe hiding in the head or unconscious assault? Jake throttled his towel around his waist and opened the door.

  Con sat on the edge of the bed, fully dressed, his elbows on his knees. Clearly the memory lane cruise was docked for the day.

  “You can shower,” Jake said. “If you want. Probably don’t get a lot of private bathrooms while on pilot duty, right?”

  “Oh. Thanks.” Con gestured vaguely at Jake. “You’re all right?”

  “Fine. I’m fine, finer than fine. Go ahead, I’ll just be out here.”

  Jake reached down for his black trousers, but his fingers brushed only cool metal flooring. Odd. He could have sworn he’d seen a swath of black cloth muddled just next to the bed. He looked around and saw the pants lying against the desk chair, and immediately he remembered throwing them there. Right. He looked down again, and this time the floor was clean of shadows.

  Look how it comes, Mei had said. But that wasn’t the same, not at all. He felt a creeping sensation and fought the urge to look over his shoulder.

  The shower started up.

  Jake scrubbed at his face and pulled on his trousers.

  His station message center was filled with a thick column of commtexts regarding Mei’s condition, none marked urgent. He poked through them anyway. Mei was stable at 01:30. Stable at 02:30. A separate one from 03:04, also from Dr. Lindy:

  Autopsy results for Alice Silverman support visual prelim exam.

  That was terse, even for Lindy. Jake shrugged and went on to the next Mei update. At 03:10, Mei Chen showing little response to stimulus but no longer purely catatonic, and would Jake please swing by the infirmary that morning for a reassess of lab results?

  There was also something from Carmichael: the summary report, nothing else. Jake double-checked the battery in his commbud and was disconcerted to find his hands still trembling. Hells.

  Carmichael had probably reviewed station security tapes while eating his morning bowl of Muscle Mush. He’d note that Con hadn’t returned to the Harmon, get curious, and investigate until he learned exactly where Con had gone, which wouldn’t take very long. Would he then dig out Jake’s dossier again? Anything could look incriminating given the proper slant, and Carmichael wouldn’t even have to hold Jake’s record at an angle. He already knew everything in it, like everyone else on Earth. Would Carmichael suspect Jake of whatever he suspected Con?

  No. Jake hadn’t compromised himself. Sleeping together could be just sleeping together. Gods knew he’d fucked his share of men and women from plenty of freighters on one-way transport stopovers, and the willing or happily scandalized partners outweighed the disinterested and the scornful. If there were any truth universally acknowledged about space life, it was that it seemed to make everyone hornier than normal. So there was no pressing need to sleep with old pen pals, especially ones whose motives were suspect, no matter how attractive they were. But even if one did, it was just sex. Of course it was! Not compromised, not at all.

  Yes, he was an idiot.

  Did Carmichael know anything about the mysterious Marathon? Jake could have told Carmichael about the planet and the suspicious behavior of the Gunaji, about Con’s non-story of supposed influential parties interested in Restore, but technically it was all hearsay based on an unattributed encrypted message. And comm chatter. And the asshole secretive pilot on his asshole undisclosable mission to Marathon. Perhaps Jake could somehow work it into conversation, get Toby to speak first. Right. He was hesitant to do that. The very mention of the Restore serum usually brought out the worst in people, especially Defense people, so bringing it up without any substantiated story might confirm any stale or fresh suspicions Carmichael had about Jake. Which would crush all their mutual goodwill, and for nothing, if this Marathon business turned out to be a baseless spook story.

  The shower quieted. The room lights were nearly at half-strength, so Jake KO’d the tablet and set about getting breakfast. He had trouble opening the can of beans—he was more exhausted than ever, surprise of the century—but he managed it, a
nd then he toasted bread and brewed the small beaker of coffee without any fumbling. He found the slightly squashed winnings sack with the black cherries, and he plopped them in a clean cup. Delicious decadence. He’d have to remember to thank Santos.

  Cherries, his father used to say, were the first fruit grown in the Dome botany labs. They were trying for apples, you know, for that old symbolism, but the cherries popped up first. Impatient little bastards.

  Rebecca had always loved them despite, or perhaps because of, the way they stained her fingertips and mouth. Bossy, grabby, dear Rebecca.

  Con’s voice echoed in his head. “Who? I’m always here.”

  “What do you mean, who? Rebecca. And no. No, you’re really not.”

  Again he saw Dr. Silverman flat on the autopsy table, neck bare and vulnerable above the emergency blanket, white sneakers peeking out the other end, mouth leaking red as if she’d been poisoned with cherries, eyelids, cold and waxen, fluttering open.

  Hot liquid scalded his lip and tongue.

  Jake twitched and spattered the hot plate and its narrow shelf with coffee. He didn’t remember raising the mug to drink. What had he been doing? Coffee. Cherries. The faintly scorched-sweet smell of beans as they heated in their can. Breakfast. He was eating breakfast.

  Implant malfunction manifests in various mental aberrations, his brain quoted at him from page 399 of the ERPIC manual. Fine, okay, he could take a thousand and one hints. He’d eat with Con, he’d swing by the labs, and then he’d see Lindy.

  He set his food and tablet on the living area’s small table, and was halfway through a second steaming mug of coffee and the pile of neglected memory gems when Con came out of the tiny bathroom, fully dressed with his wrinkled blue shirt buttoned up to his chin. He looked as if he’d spent half of his shower trying—unsuccessfully—to comb down his hair.

  “You’ve got your own shower,” Con said, stuffing his hands in his pockets. He sounded louder than usual. “Uh, obviously. Nice.”

  “It is a station.” Jake was pleased at how calm he sounded. Breakfast caffeine and starch: the uncomplicated sidekicks of composure. “Those of us who stay put instead of jetting around the galaxy get a few basic amenities. Though I think this place in particular was designed by a bunch of hedonists.”