The Hormone Jungle

by Robert Reed

  He doesn’t say anything.

  She sits on the edge of the bed. “So. How was work?”

  The big hands come up and pull away the shirt.

  “You aren’t so filthy. Did you go to work?”

  He says, “Sure.” His voice is dead. He says, “I sat punching buttons for ten hours.” He removes his pants and boots and throws everything in a pile, volunteering nothing else.

  “So,” she says, “aren’t you getting mad?”

  He says, “No.”

  She stands and thinks this isn’t how she pictured it and decides to do anything now but sit and wait him out. She dresses. She doesn’t pay attention to him while she pulls on her clothes and shoes, Gabbro sitting on the edge of the bed now, wearing underwear, running a hand over his big bald skull.

  She says, “What are you going to do?”

  “Sleep.”

  She doesn’t know him.

  He says, “I’m tired. I’ll sleep. Be gone when I’m done.” He isn’t talking loudly. His voice is nearly a whisper, and his breathing is slow and relaxed. He asks April, “It’s what you want, isn’t it?”

  “Something’s sick with you,” she assures him. “You know that?”

  “Thanks for the input.”

  Something is rising inside her now. “You come in on me and all you do is make some—some pronouncement before you sleep. In the very same bed, you stupid shit!”

  “Yeah?”

  “Asshole,” she says.

  “Oh yeah?”

  “I’m not leaving. You’re going to have to make me go.” She moves toward him and jabs him in the chest with a finger, jamming her finger into her hand and screaming straight at his face. “Fuck you, machine man! Fuck you!”

  He breathes. He says, “I’m tired.”

  “Ask me if I care!” She slaps him with the other hand, putting the palm into a cheek and hurting her wrist. The craziness, like some old dear friend, comes to her rescue. She’s incapable of fear or doubt. With the heel of one shoe she kicks Gabbro in the midsection. It’s like throwing her fury into a concrete pillar. He doesn’t blink, doesn’t change the cadence of his breathing, and April stepping away with her ankle burning and tender and shaky underneath her weight.

  He says her name once, flat and slow.

  She charges into the front room, into the kitchen-corner, and pulls a huge carving knife out of a drawer. Gabbro calls to her again. He’s still sitting on the edge of his bed when she rushes him, slashing at his neck. He patiently watches the blade descend and strike, hyperfiber dulling the cutting edge with a harsh quick scraping noise.

  She knows him. She knows his weaknesses, thrusting now at his eyes.

  Reflexes take hold. Gabbro can’t let anything near his eyes, his hand up and the fingers curl and squeeze, the blade bending and snapping and the knife’s hilt falling into his lap.

  She curses him in every fashion, no taboos.

  He gives April the gentlest of pushes.

  She flings a lamp at his face, its glass base exploding, and she wrestles the nightstand off the floor and uses its living wood as a club. The wood shatters, sap and splinters everywhere. Then she moves to the dresser, throwing the drawers, screaming, “Pack! Pack! I’m packing, asshole! Look at me!”

  She’s possessed.

  Gabbro won’t do anything. She knows it. So she throws clothes and a little chair into a pile around him. He ignores the brunt of it. He sits like a statue, watching her with his damning detached interest, going so far as blinking and even giving a little yawn. So she thunders into the front room. A big bottle of strong clear liquor waits on the countertop—the same stuff running in her veins all afternoon—and she takes it by the neck and opens a drawer and thinks this will get his attention. “You tub of shit! You hear me?” She charges back to the bedroom and finds him standing now, something about his face so very tired, so drawn, that she halfway believes he will topple with the faintest push. He sees the bottle too late. It comes out from behind her back, spinning heavily in the air, and the glass shatters and lets the liquor splatter, soaking him and the bed and all the piles of clothes.

  He says, “Lord.”

  She has the lighter out and lit, the bright red plasma flame dancing on the tip. He says, “April.” She comes at him. The strong stink of alcohol wells up in her face. There is a sudden audible poof and a wave of intense heat. April leaps backward, startled. The quick flame spreads across Gabbro’s chest and shoulders and eyes. It’s in his eyes. He can’t feel it as heat, she knows…it’s nothing like noon on Morning…but it’s in his eyes and it’s fire and his reflexes take hold, hands swatting at the bright hot fire and him screaming, his voice finally coming alive.

  This is what she wants.

  He is startled and furious and it all shows now. She has him crazy now. He curses and she picks up one of his shirts and balls it up and tosses it to him. The fabric burns in a lazy way.

  He asks, “Why why why do this?

  “You no good son-of-a-bitch,” she says.

  He says, “Damn,” and beats out the fire. “April, goddamn it.” She throws the soaked bedding on him and makes it explode into flames. The air is hot and smoky now. The carpet is smoldering. Gabbro is an enormous bonfire trying to kill itself, and she grabs at one of the swatting hands and feels her eyebrows burn and her hands burn and makes him stop for an instant, Gabbro saying:

  “Quit!”

  The motion is neither hard nor large.

  It could be an accident, though she wants to believe it’s intentional. Gabbro breaks a cheekbone and flattens her nose and two teeth are kicked out of her jaw and tumble to the floor as she jerks her head sideways and loses all sense of up and down. She falls. She is on the floor and looking up through one eye, the other one cut and closed and her face hot where it’s broken. She touches the broken cheek. She coughs and tries to stand, Gabbro asking, “See what you did? To yourself. You did it to yourself, you crazy bitch!”

  She can’t say anything, her jaw leaden and aching at its hinges.

  “Not me—!” he begins, kneeling now.

  She kicks at him.

  He ignores the heel in his neck. The fire is dying, smoke and foul air everywhere and him saying, “Why do it, you bitch?”

  “Get away.” Her voice is clumsy. Words hurt. She feels gaps where the teeth had been rooted and feels other teeth moving in the battered gums. “You did this!”

  “Bringing in that Cradler. Using him—”

  She is standing. The floor wheels and bucks and she is standing on its axis, staggering toward the door, and he says, “Where are you going? Don’t go. Get some ice,” and he makes a soft frustrated sound. “April? Where are you going?”

  She is in the front room now.

  Touching her sleeve to her face, she tries judging the damage by the amount and color of the blood.

  “April?” he calls, his voice small and faraway.

  She is out in the hallway, the door shutting automatically, and she looks both ways and decides that she’ll need something to mop up the blood. There’s no choice. But she won’t go inside, not with things this stacked against her. She won’t beg for help. So she uses her sleeves and her own long hair, plus her hands, and with the hands she paints a few choice obscenities on the walls up and down the long hallway.

  This isn’t enough.

  She’s never been with a man so long, through so much, and still and all this isn’t enough to call everything finished.

  13

  The residents of Chu’s World have a novel answer to the problem of age and the erosion of the mind. They’ve tailored themselves so that their brains have enormous redundancy—several-fold that of the norm—and while certain neurons can’t help but die after two centuries, or three, enough persist for the soul to remain whole for five hundred years or more. Yet there is a cost involved. A consequence. I like the people well enough. I do. But to speak with them, to share time with them, is to catch the aroma of a certain shallowness. A flat
grayness. It’s in their faces, in their words. They seem incapable of telling interesting stories. Or biting jokes. They are never subtle. Never intricate. And usually rather boring after a time, the poor folk…

  —excerpt from a traveler’s notebook, available through System-Net

  His second thought—the thought following on the heels of being shocked by the sight—is that he would have liked to have been home and heard the two of them fighting. He’s sorry to have missed the show. Seeing the girl in the hallway, hearing her sniffle as she touches her torn and bleeding face, Toby can almost sense the receding violence of the battle. It’s like standing at the scene of some ancient war and sensing the clashing armies between all the quiet. April is walking up the stairs, making for the floater pad. Toby is coming down. She makes a sniffing sound and totters for a moment. She might be crying. He can’t tell for all the blood.

  He is back from the Old Quarter. He was wandering himself into distraction.

  “Don’t look at me,” she warns, and she coughs once.

  He doesn’t know what to say. She stands facing him, her eyes fixed on his toes, one eye closed and the other blinking as if fighting to keep its focus. “Hey,” he starts. “What…happened?”

  She wobbles where she stands.

  “Why don’t you…I don’t know, why don’t you sit. Huh?”

  She seems to have trouble understanding him. She takes a couple of slow breaths and leans against a wall and looks faint for a moment. She takes a deeper breath. He doesn’t want to touch her. She kneels, or she’s fainting with a measure of control, and now she is down and her head is between her knees and Toby wants to get a better look, not getting too close. So he sits on the step above.

  “Look at me.” She says, “The fucker did it.”

  “Yeah?”

  “You know what I…I don’t…God!”

  Bones are broken. The bleeding won’t stop. Toby studies the marks of individual fingers, huge and slightly spread, and he remembers the crow and thinks to tell the girl that she’s been lucky today. He’s intrigued. A gruesome piece of work, but she will heal.

  “Anyway,” she says, “can you help me?”

  “Like how?”

  “Signal a floater, and get me…to a hospital or something. I’m not…tracking true…”

  “Okay,” he hears himself say.

  “You’re the one, right? The Gardener?”

  “Sure.”

  She starts to stand. “Can you help me?” She presses both hands against the wall, leaving blood on the whiteness, and she manages to lift herself partway when her legs give away and she drops again. She begins to laugh. “Me asking you for help,” she says. “Imagine.”

  “What…should I do?”

  “Try lifting. Come on!”

  She has the heavy muscled arm of a native Terran. The bone beneath is thick and dense, repulsive to him, but he manages to help her find her feet and he stays at her side as she climbs upstairs. The sky is perfectly blue. The wind is out of the northwest today, the heat not so bad. It was pleasant in the Old Quarter. He knows places where a person can sit and lose himself, thinking and napping. But if he had known what was happening here, he laments…

  “Thanks,” she offers.

  He says, “Sure.”

  He hits the floater button and from above, out of the perfect blue, comes a single floater. Toby stays and waits. He continues to study her face, fascinated and eager to ask questions. What caused the fight? He’s never actually struck her before, has he? Was he involved in this somehow? He hopes he was a factor. He can’t imagine any reason, but he likes to picture himself as the catalyst.

  The floater lands. An AI voice asks for her destination, surveying the damage with its single shiny eye on the end of a pedicle. She tells it what she needs. “Can you climb aboard yourself?” Then, not waiting for an answer, it says to Toby, “Sir? Can you help this poor girl?” as if he is a stranger off to one side. “I’m sure she would appreciate the gesture.”

  He does it, holding her closer arm and lifting, steadying her, and she leans to him and whispers, “Stay with me? I need someone.”

  He tries to think.

  “I need someone. Please?” And she smiles. He is startled to see the smile, and for a long moment he doesn’t understand. “You and me,” she says. “Think what it means, us meeting. A sign, huh? Me and the Gardener together at last,” and she stops to look at her toes.

  Only she doesn’t mean her toes. She means Gabbro. He sees the hard kernel of truth between her words. And now they’re side by side inside the floater, the canopy secured and the world beneath them dropping away without any noise louder than a soft smooth hissing. She sits as though she is nearly asleep. She breathes like a runner after a long race. She says, “Thank you,” several times. She says, “I never did anything to hurt you, you know,” her memory terribly selective.

  It’s funny, he thinks.

  Here he is and she is and through the blood and gore she’s hinting at doing something, culturing him for a purpose, and he thinks he can guess the purpose while she sits willingly beside him, both of them comfortable with one another. It’s like they’ve always been together. They have become fast old friends. And Toby thinks, Sure. Sure we have. He’s done it to both of us. Gabbro’s done it. We’re a team, all right! He’s made us into a team!

  One of the few exportables from Garden is produced by a shellfish that can only grow wild in the open sea, only on Garden, the pearls secreted judged to be more lovely than any others, wild or not, and commanding a price worthy of the time they take and the trouble they cause and the intangibles that hinge on the stuff of fashion.

  Toby used to own a little sailboat with a sturdy hull made from prophet oak and a foam-metal mast and a hyperfiber sail so sheer that it was nearly invisible against any light. He use to wander the open sea for days at a time, one or two or three passengers sharing his cabin and one another until boredom threatened. He liked to take friends over the beds where the Gardener merchants hunted for their pearls. Sometimes he would stop during the brief Garden night, drifting if it was still enough, and one or two of them would roll into the water and dive and select a shellfish to cut loose from the buoyant masses of porous coral. Some shellfish yielded pearls. Most had nothing but the pulpy gray lumps of matter that were uncured, immature pearls. It was the latter they wanted. Raw or slightly cooked, the grey lumps had a delicate flavor that lingered for days, cool on the back of the tongue and not a little intoxicating. The finished pearls, more often than not, were thrown overboard. Except sometimes Toby’s friends would resist common sense, knowing what prices they would find on the black market. One friend went so far as to bring pebbles aboard to mimic discarding the pearls, fooling her companions and insuring the profits for herself, but in the end the legal network on Garden discovered her scheme and the appropriate hands were slapped, Toby’s father—an important figure in all political circles—having to come and help his son out of the silly scandal.

  It wasn’t the first time such things had happened.

  Older friends, or simply older people with a misapplied interest in Toby’s life, speculated that he pressed his father’s good will because he was starved for attention. It was an old story, they assured him and themselves. A child born to busy parents, important parents, late in their lives would do many things to be noticed. He might seem wild, or worse, but the truth was as simple as it was harmless and it would surely be temporary too. A phase, they would declare. We understand you, so don’t worry.

  He didn’t worry.

  Toby felt no need to explain himself to anyone. He understood his mind and goals all of the time, in every circumstance, and what he did to his father, for example, was because he took pleasure from watching the old Gardener sweat. Nothing could be simpler. At an early age Toby came to see the differences between himself and others. He had a control, a sense of purpose and place that others lacked. His feelings for his father had no role in how he acted. He had power
over the man, and he knew it, and he simply enjoyed exercising that power whenever and however he had the chance.

  The trouble with pearls got the sailboat taken from him.

  For a little while.

  Punishment was something his father dispensed without skill or real conviction. He was a weak man in many respects. He had strong beliefs when it came to being a good and loyal Permissive, but the beliefs translated into little more than noise and cautious posturing. He coped with the entrenched Conservatives, for instance, by moaning to himself. In public debates, time and again, he was beaten by foes with half the arguments and a third the mental acuity. Toby had to watch the drubbings when he was young. It was a family duty, holy and hellish and soon a sheer waste. His first minor rebellion was to avoid the debates by stealth. His second rebellion was to do so openly and often, making no secret of how he felt.

  Toby’s mother worshipped his father.

  They’d had a close relationship forever, it seemed. Ancient people spoke of the two of them being childhood lovers, and the less tolerant Gardeners would whisper cruel things about the two of them and how they missed the Necklaces, preferring one another in place of everyone, and how when they did attend they were simply going through the expected motions.

  His parents always were a strange couple.

  He never understood his mother’s patience and endless support for his father’s lost causes. They didn’t embarrass him any longer, but he had no doubts that their common sense was gone. Spent. Some days he would plot their mutual downfalls, making it a game played out in his head. He would help the Conservatives here, mislead the Permissives here, and stand back to watch them tumble from grace.

  Naturally it never happened.

  Fate seemed geared to Toby’s own long fall instead.

  After years and years of sharing a home, so very late in life, his father packed and left his mother and vanished aboard a little shuttle that couldn’t have taken him out of the Jovian system. No, they hadn’t fought. Yes, his mother knew his destination. But she wouldn’t tell Toby, or even hint at it, in spite of his threats and pleadings and his frustrated persistence. What’s Father doing? he wondered. What’s his plan now? He had lately been arguing for strong, lasting binds with the sister moons. Was that Permissive idea involved in this nonsense? Or what? Whatever was happening, it was different than anything before. Ominous. Toby felt it, and when his father returned he made certain that he was at the little pad when the shuttle set down, its canopy opening to reveal two people sitting side by side.