Six Months, Three Days, Five Others

by Charlie Jane Anders

  Time to put on the best Palm Strike voice. Sounds throatier in the high-nitrogen air. “Where is Dark Shard?” he bellows. “Who sabotaged my cryo-unit?”

  “I don’t know.” The scrawny man weeps. “What are you talking about? I don’t even understand.” Broken Ankle is staining his pants, and Luc believes he has no idea what Luc is asking. At least Broken Ankle gives up the location of the lab where the drugs are manufactured: the basement of a red house upriver from the town where the water isn’t too polluted.

  Luc lets Broken Ankle fall next to his friends, then notices that the “tree” he was examining now has a hole in it, thanks to the bullet that went through Luc’s chest. And he catches a glimpse of something dark in motion. A lot of somethings, in fact.

  Luc puts a swab inside the hole, and pulls out a number of tiny mites, the biggest of them no more than a centimeter wide. They’re bright red with yellow stripes, and they have long proboscises and a dozen crooked legs each. If you happened to notice them, you’d think they were akin to termites. They’re not, though. They do eat the “trees” from the inside, but they also consume the surrounding soil and detoxify it, releasing nutrients in a form that the tree can use. Symbiosis. He puts one of the mites into a soil sample he collected earlier, from the barren fields near the colony, and dumps them into a continuous monitor tube. Pretty soon, the soil shows up as fertile.

  Luc analyzes a few of these mites using every test he can think of, then on a hunch he bends over Broken Ankle’s face with his swab full of bugs. “Open up,” he growls. Broken Ankle tries to clamp his mouth shut, but Luc threatens to smack him again, so he opens up and takes his medicine. And seems to suffer no ill effects, at least not during the time it takes Luc to haul him back to the thugs’ vehicle, an all-terrain buggy parked on a nearby rise, and drive him back to the colony.

  “That’s the nicest thing I’ve ever force-fed to someone like you,” Luc tells Broken Ankle, who has wiry gray hair, freckles and a habitual look of terror and alarm. Habitual the whole time Luc has known him, at least. Broken Ankle tells Luc again where they make the drugs, but not where they put the food they collect from the addicts.

  Luc leaves Broken Ankle in a ditch within crawling distance of Hopetown, then he goes back to Sasha’s house. When he gets there, there’s no sign of her anywhere. Clarissa is sleeping in a chair near the door, but she wakes up when Luc comes in. “Where’s Sasha?” Clarissa asks, before Luc can ask her the same thing. “I thought she must have gone off with you.”

  “No,” Luc says. “I’ve been gone all day, and half the night.”

  Luc searches the house and its surroundings for any sign of Sasha, convinced that the same assholes who tried to kill him must have sent someone to take care of her. He feels the familiar jagged rock in his stomach. If they harm her, he will forget his earlier mercy; he will rain permanent injury down on them.

  Just as Luc is about to run back to interrogate Broken Ankle one more time, Clarissa notices her oceanographer kit is gone, including the binoculars and the special shoes that keep you from getting yanked away by the dangerous waves. “She’s gone to the beach,” Clarissa says, as if this is something Sasha does a lot. Go to the beach, in the middle of the night. “It’s where her father is,” Clarissa adds. She shrugs and shakes her head when Luc asks if she wants to come along.

  Sure enough, Sasha is sitting on a giant rock, dangling her giant shoes in the froth kicked up by the giant waves. Luc comes and sits beside her, but he doesn’t say anything.

  “My dad went on one of those expeditions to the northern jungle,” Sasha says, staring at the rough surf. “He hated hot weather. We buried his body right over there.” She points at a rockpile that’s half underwater.

  “I was worried about you,” Luc says.

  “I thought you had decided to ditch us,” Sasha said. “Or something happened to you. You just took off, without any explanation. I figured we’d seen the last of you.”

  “I’m not used to having to explain myself to anyone.” The moons lace the angry water with silver lines. The air is brine-scented. “I had to do something on my own. And I’m not sure you want to be around for what I’m going to do next, either.”

  She turns and looks at him. “Why’s that?”

  “I just . . . You know all of these people, right? You grew up with them. This is a small town, I keep forgetting how small. I just hurt some people and I’m about to hurt some more people. I figure that could be hard for you to watch.”

  “I want to watch.” She looks fierce. “I want to help. My dad died for this place.”

  “Okay. Did you find me a second glove?”

  “Yeah,” she says. “I have a complete outfit, in a crate under my bed. It’s even sort of black, sort of.”

  “Okay. One more question,” Luc says. “Do you know anything about setting explosives?”

  She shakes her head.

  “Would you like to learn?”

  Sasha nods, slowly.

  10.

  WHo was Dark Shard? Was Dark Shard even a person? Did different people take turns wearing that costume? Luc spent all this time thinking of Dark Shard as his nemesis, but he knew nothing about him. Luc is slowly letting go of the idea that Dark Shard might have made the trip to Newfoundland, because the more he sees of the local drug dealers, the less they resemble Dark Shard’s crew. He’s never going to get perfect closure, no matter what happens. This isn’t even about him.

  Somehow, realizing this makes Luc feel lighter, even as his improvised Palm Strike uniform is weighing him down. He has a tough time conjuring the menace of Palm Strike with a tween girl on his heels chattering loudly about righting the colony’s wrongs.

  “Listen,” Palm Strike tells Sasha. “When we get to the drug lab, I’m going to need you to hang back, okay? You to see what happens next, that’s fine—but don’t get in harm’s way. I can’t be hurt, not really, but you can.”

  “I’m going to get hurt, one way or the other, if we don’t fix this. I chose to come along and help. We’re in this together.”

  “Yeah. Just, I don’t know, be careful. Your mom would kill me.”

  Upriver from town, where the water is still relatively clean, a red building houses an industrial laundry facility. A dozen people with guns and machetes are guarding it in the middle of the night.

  Palm Strike signals for Sasha to take cover, and uses the river to mask his footsteps, sloshing only slightly as he wades upstream. Then he climbs a jagged rock, leaps, and catches the edge of the building’s roof with one hand. Moments later, he drops off the other side and lands on top of the man with the biggest gun. After that, it’s one big knife fight in close quarters, with Palm Strike using the high gravity to his advantage for a change, staying low and letting his opponents overbalance. He brings his forearm down onto one man’s neck, while headbutting the woman who’s trying to choke him. Gently. No life-threatening injuries. He executes one move straight out of Rene’s high-gravity dance routine, but there’s no time to dwell on the past.

  In the midst of the fracas, Palm Strike keeps moving, heading for the door they were guarding, which leads to a basement.

  In the basement, there’s a giant vat of ochre sludge, surrounded by people wearing masks and smocks. They’re all shooting at him. He’s finally starting to like this planet.

  11.

  Becky Hoffman is still asleep when Palm Strike comes through her bedroom window. The tableau is so reminiscent of Dark Shard visiting Luc’s bedroom that he has to shudder. He gets out of the way long enough to let Sasha slip in behind him. Hoffman sits up in bed and stifles a gasp when she sees his dark shape looming over her bed. “Deveaux?” she says. “What the hell are you—”

  “I solved the food problem,” he growls. “There are billions of tiny mites that live in the soil around those trees, the ones you destroyed with your terraforming procedures. They eliminate the toxins and acidity from the soil. They’ll have to be reintroduced to your growing areas, which
will be a slow painful process. In the mean time, though, the bugs themselves are high in protein, renewable, and easy to transport.”

  “That’s great news.” She blinks. “Why didn’t you just come to my office in a few hours to tell me?”

  “Because three people tried to kill me tonight. I couldn’t figure out what secret was so important they’d be willing to kill to protect it. Everybody knew they were trading drugs for food, so that couldn’t be it. And meanwhile, I still couldn’t work out where they were putting the food they collected from the addicts. Until I finally realized: there was only one place on the drug dealers’ route at the end of the night that they could be leaving the food. The colony’s food dispensary. Where it came from in the first place. And that led me to you.”

  “It’s a perfect system.” Misery displaces Hoffman’s last traces of sleepiness. “We hand out the same food rations, over and over.”

  “That’s insane,” Sasha says, from the foot of Hoffman’s bed, where she’s standing. Hoffman startles, noticing the girl for the first time.

  “We would have run out of food by now,” Becky Hoffman says to Luc. “We would all have starved.”

  “Don’t explain to me,” Palm Strike snarls. “Explain to her.” He jerks a gloved hand in Sasha’s direction. “She’s one of your people. She was born here. This colony is all she’s ever known. You have to explain to her.”

  “You’re too young to understand,” Hoffman pleads with Sasha. “We—I—had to make impossible choices. There wasn’t enough food. And it was a mercy. The people who use our drug don’t feel any hunger pains, and they don’t even notice their bodies shutting down. It gives people like you and Clarissa, good people, a chance to survive.”

  Sasha stares at the colony’s leader, her mom’s boss, with tears streaming down her face. Luc has to remind himself she wanted to see this. “I don’t . . .” she gropes for an unaccustomed formality. “I don’t recognize your authority any longer.”

  “I didn’t set up the drug operation,” Becky Hoffman says. She’s sweating, and inching her hand toward something under her pillow. A silent alarm? Her guards are already taken care of. “I found out about it. I told them they could work for me, or be executed. I turned it into a way to save the colony. This was the only way to ration the food that wouldn’t lead to riots.”

  Becky Hoffman makes her move, pulling out a power-welder of the sort that you’d use to repair hull damage on a starship in flight. It’s the size and shape of a big fork, like you’d use on a pot roast. At close range, it would tear a hole in Palm Strike that even his healing mojo couldn’t begin to fix. He’s already on her, trying to pin her wrist, but she slips under his guard. She brings the power welder up and activates it, bringing it within a few centimeters of Palm Strike’s chest.

  “Now,” he tells Sasha.

  Sasha squeezes the remote she rigged up, and an explosion in the distance rattles the survival module so violently the emergency impact alarms go off, like a dozen electronic goats bleating. Hoffman’s grip loosens on the power-welder long enough for Palm Strike to knock it out of her grasp.

  Palm Strike looks into Hoffman’s tear-soaked face and unleashes The Voice. “That was your drug lab. Next time, it’ll be your office. Your days of choosing who gets to live are over. You are going to help me fix this mess.” And then Palm Strike gestures for Sasha to go back out the window they came in. He takes the power-welder with him.

  12.

  Luc digs until his arms are throbbing, and he’s waist deep in the hard, unyielding earth. Probably deep enough—he doesn’t want to hit one of those underground hot springs. Then he clambers back out, and tosses the helmet, safety vest, gloves and leggings into the hole. It’s not like burying the actual Palm Strike costume, but close enough. And if he needs safety gear later, he’ll know where some’s buried.

  “Do you want to say some words?” Sasha asks. She’s hit a growth spurt, and her wrists and ankles are miles long. Even in the higher gravity, you get human beanpoles. Amazing.

  “Don’t be stupid,” Luc grunts.

  “We are gathered here today to remember Palm Strike,” Sasha intones.

  “Cut it out,” Luc says. “Seriously.”

  “He was a good man, even though we never knew who he really was. Some said he was a sea slug that oozed inside some old safety gear and pretended to be a man. But he fought for justice.”

  Luc tunes out her terrible funeral oration, starts filling in the hole. He pauses just long enough to turn and look out at the farmland, where they’ve managed to transplant a handful of the “trees” from the other side of the geyser, and a few acres of sorghum are being planted. Too close together. You’ll want at least a couple feet between plants, or the mites will shred the roots. He’ll need to talk to McGregor about that. He’s almost done filling the hole, and Sasha is still nattering.

  “—and he dedicated himself to helping people, unless they had really gross teeth or bad breath, in which case they were on their own.”

  Luc slings the shovel over his shoulder, and wrestles with the temptation to tell her to shut the hell up for once. Instead, he just shrugs and says, “I knew this was a bad idea.”

  The sun is going down. The parade of moons begins. Luc turns and walks back the way they came. Sasha doesn’t quit blabbing the whole way back to the colony, which is still filled with the susurration of a thousand people moaning in the grasp of drug withdrawal, like souls crawling out of hell. Part of Luc feels compassion at the sound, but another part of him finds the din weirdly comforting. It sounds like home.

  I’ve Got The Music In Me

  “Have you ever gotten a song stuck in your head, and couldn’t get it out?” The woman asking the question wore one of those new frogskin one-pieces, with false eyelashes that looked fiberoptic. She leaned on the bar in my direction.

  I shrugged and drank. “Maybe, I don’t know.” I was busy obsessing about my sick dog. Moxie was my best friend, but they’d said the tests alone would cost hundreds, with no guarantee.

  The woman, Mia I think, kept talking about brains that wouldn’t let go of songs. “You know how a song loops around and drowns out everything else in your skull?” I nodded, and she smiled. “Sometimes it’s like a message from your subconscious. Your brain blasts sad lyrics to wake you to a submerged depression.”

  “I guess.”

  “Or you could be overworked. Or sexually frustrated. It’s like an early warning system.” She beckoned another drink. The mention of sex jumped out of her wordflow like a spawning salmon. I forgot all about my dog, turned to face her.

  “I see what you mean,” I said.

  “They’re funny, songs. They drill into your head and form associations.” She batted those shiny lashes. “They trigger memories, just the way smells do.”

  “You’re absolutely right.” I was thinking, do I have condoms?

  She asked me about my past loves, and whether there were pieces of music that came unbidden to mind when I thought of them. I struggled to dredge up a memory to please this woman, her taut body so close to mine I could feel the coolness of the tiny frogs whose hides she wore.

  “Yeah, now that I think about it, there was this one song...”

  From Section 1923, Mental copyright enforcement field manual.

  Subsection 1, Probable Cause:

  Do not bring in suspects without an ironclad case, and avoid any appearance of entrapment. Do not apprehend someone merely because he/she whistles under his/her breath or bobs his/her head to music nobody else can hear. To demonstrate that someone has stored copyrighted music in his/her brain in violation of the Cranial Millenium Copyright Act, you must obtain a definitive statement, such as:

  1) “Whenever I see the object of my smothered desire I hear “Sunshine of Your Love” by Cream in my head. This is the full album version, complete with trademark guitar solo and clearly articulated rhythm track.”

  2) “I always tune out my boss when he talks to me, and instead con
jure up a near-digital-quality playback of “Bring Tha Bling Bling” by Pimpstyle in my mind. The remix with that Madonna sample.”

  3) “Following the death of my loved one, I listened to the Parade album by Prince so many times I know the whole thing by heart now.”

  Note: the above examples are illustrative and not all-encompassing. Other utterances also could prove the suspect is guilty of keeping protected music in Cranial Audio File format, as prohibited by law.

  Subsection 2, Apprehending the suspect:

  As soon as I admitted that yeah, that “Pimp Your Bubba” song wouldn’t stop infesting my mind no matter how much good music I fed my ears, the woman went violent. She pulled out a badge and twisted my arm behind me. Steel cinched my wrists, turned me into a perp. “You have the right,” she said.

  In her car, she talked to me through a rusty mesh cordoning the back seat. “I’d put on the radio, but you might steal again.”

  “What have I done?”

  “Don’t pretend. Your mental piracy is blatantly illegal.”

  “But everyone said that law was unenforceable—”

  “I got your confession right here on tape. And we’ll get more out of you. The brain’s a computer, and yours is jam-packed with stolen goods.”

  I was terrified. I could be held for days. What would happen to Moxie?

  “Take my advice, kid.” We turned onto a driveway with a guard post and tilting arm. The woman showed a card and the arm rose. “Just relax and tell them everything. It’ll be fun, like a personal tour through your musical memories. Like getting stoned with a friend and digging some tunes. Then you just plea bargain and skip outta here.”

  Subsection 3, Questioning the suspect:

  Ask questions like:

  What sort of music did you listen to in high school?

  Here is a piece of your clothing which we confiscated. We’ll give it back if you tell us what song it brings to mind.