Perdigon

by Tom Caldwell

  Jacob held him close, cheek pressed to his hair. “You were gone a long time.”

  “There’s some food, come up with me to help carry it down.”

  Jacob nodded and went to tell Shruti: Ezra found stuff to eat for tomorrow, you’re in charge till we get back, it won’t be more than an hour. He touched wood as he said it, a parking barrier that they’d dragged into place to do the symbolic work of a wall. Everyone was uneasy with sleeping in the vast dark space of the parking garage, even though Ezra told them that there weren’t any monsters to worry about, human or otherwise. They were alone.

  Jacob and Ezra scrambled over the rubble pile of broken concrete in the north tunnel, grabbing onto the spikes of twisted rebar and trying not to gouge themselves with it. It was a high climb, eight feet at the peak, with perhaps eighteen inches of clearance between the top of the pile and the ceiling. Ezra squeezed through first and then pulled Jacob through, gripping his forearms, until his hips were over the top. Ezra lost his footing then, and they both tumbled down the north face of the pile to the concrete floor on the other side.

  “We gotta disassemble that thing somehow,” Ezra said, rolling back over onto his hands and knees as he got his breath back. He’d skinned both palms, his skin brimming with beads of blood. “The kids’d hurt themselves.”

  “When everyone’s awake,” Jacob agreed, because there was no morning or evening on Perdigon when the power was out. He felt bruised, but there was cold air blowing from somewhere nearby, and he got up with Ezra to find its source.

  Ahead of them was a staircase leading to a door propped open with a saltbox, and they could see a rectangle of shifting, coloured light at the top of the stairs. Ezra took Jacob’s hand to lead him up, and they emerged into something Jacob had never seen before.

  The sky was aglow. The dim red sun was in its accustomed place on the horizon, but the northern lights arced overhead, shimmering fields of pale jade green in the deep twilight blue. Their movement reminded Jacob of the sheer curtains on the sunroom doors at home, his mother’s house in California. He used to lie there on the carpet as a kid, half-asleep on a summer night, trying to catch the breeze. The curtains would blow inward, soft, and then billow out, snapping like a sail, hypnotic.

  “What is it?” Jacob whispered, not taking his eyes off the sky. Bonaventure’s climate was cold, but it was still halfway from the equator of Perdigon’s small strip of habitable land. There were no auroras here, or there should have been none.

  “The Handsome Lake’s engines exploded in orbit,” Ezra whispered back. Clouds scudded across the lights, mackerel scales, and the wind smelled like rain and swamp gas, fresh and foul by turns. “High-intensity gamma rays and X-rays. Charged particles interact with the magnetosphere, moving in the solar wind, and we get auroras. Bigger and brighter than the natural kind, we’ll be looking at these for days.”

  “But we felt the impact down here,” said Jacob. “Wouldn’t the ship just be vaporised by something like that?”

  Ezra shook his head, looking up at the display. “Warp core’s too high-density and it’s lead-shielded. There’s no shockwave in space, no fireball like you’d get planetside, hardly even any debris from the blast. Some of the ship did break apart and burn up in the atmosphere, but the piece that fell was still the size of the Apophis asteroid. Luckily the rest of the planet doesn’t have any human settlements, I guess.”

  Jacob’s foster parents had smacked all the profanity out of him over the years, and he often thought that to take it up now would sound affected. Which left him at a loss for words when he heard Ezra say things like that. “Then…then…well, people will know right away that something terrible happened. They’ll see, it’s literally visible from space.”

  “They’ll figure it out,” Ezra said tightly, moving to climb over one of the wrecked cars in the ground-level parking lot around them. “We can’t send a distress beacon or anything, all our tech is fried. Orbital nuclear explosions cause EMPs.”

  They’d been speculating about that since the first day, once everyone had discovered that their phones wouldn’t turn on. Life support systems were protected by generators and Faraday cages, but everything else was vulnerable.

  —What about your implant? Jacob asked Ezra, the first night.

  —It’s sealed in a metal casing under the plastic, remember? Surgical steel. That’s a Faraday cage.

  And God, Jacob had been so happy. So relieved. Maybe that was sick; the implant hurt Ezra every time it was activated. But for Ezra to lose it now…it would be a form of blindness for him. Jacob hated the visions sometimes, secretly, but he couldn’t begrudge Ezra his sight.

  “What if…no, Ezra, come on. The hospital will have all its transmitters shielded from something like this. They have to make interplanetary calls all the time, they’d be prepared for disasters. We can go break in there—”

  “We should probably try there anyway,” Ezra said. He was clambering over the wrecks and Jacob was following. “If it even still exists. But a transmitter won’t help, when the satellites are—they’re not all dead, but all the comm satellites are either bricked or they’ll be dead in a few days from power loss.”

  “The abbey has an ansible.”

  “Seriously?”

  Jacob heard a note of hope in Ezra’s voice for the first time, which made his heart beat faster. “They do! It’s paired with a device in Rome,” he said, following Ezra through the parking lot to what had to be their destination, a food-delivery truck. “Officially, it’s not for public use, it’s a museum piece. When the colony was founded in the ’70s, people would send everything to Earth through the abbey’s ansible—news, memes, personal messages for family members, purchase requests, intentions for the Pope, all kinds of things. My teacher in sixth grade used to let me copy-edit our class’s requests, if I’d been good that week.”

  Ezra was standing on top of a crumpled sedan, his crowbar hanging forgotten from one hand, staring down at Jacob. “Are you fucking kidding me right now with—”

  He lost his footing again, clumsy as always, skidding off the rain-spattered hood of the car, and Jacob barely caught him in time. “Sorry, I’m sorry, I picked a bad moment,” Jacob said, helping him upright again. “We don’t even know if the abbey’s still standing.”

  Ezra wouldn’t let him go without a kiss, his hands in Jacob’s collar. His elation from before had returned. “No! We do! Come up with me, come up, look…”

  They both got up on top of a utility vehicle whose surface was a little steadier, and Ezra pointed to something on the horizon. Jacob had to squint, because the skyline of Bonaventure was unrecognisable now, shrouded in dirty fog on the horizon, all the landmarks gone. But… “The bell tower—”

  “Right?”

  “That’s the bell tower, that’s St. Columban’s.” Jacob was laughing with relief, his arms around Ezra. The steeple was limned against the shifting green light of the sky. “If we get there, if we can make the ansible work, someone will come for us—won’t they? You’re smiling, we must be okay—”

  “No, no, don’t…assume,” Ezra said, resting his forehead on Jacob’s chest for a moment. “I haven’t seen that far, don’t go by me. And—and someone would notice that the Handsome Lake’s not meeting up at its rendezvous point, right?”

  That was a business question rather than a science question, so now it was Jacob’s turn to hesitate. “The ship was just departing Bonaventure, though, wasn’t it? Not arriving? If it crashed near the West End, where the landing base is…”

  “Yeah.”

  “Then I don’t think anyone would have expected a communication from the crew for a month or so. Long-haul cargoliners only check in when they’re at a refueling point. The nearest one’s on Nephele.”

  “Okay. Okay, well, that’s fine, that’s…whatever, because we’ll be talking to Rome in a couple of days,” Ezra said, reassuring himself, dismounting from the utility vehicle’s rear bumper to head for the delivery truck. “Say
ing…fuckin’…arrivederci to this dumb rock…”

  “Maybe it’ll even be sooner. Some people must have survived in the town, maybe even the monks—one of them would have gone to use the ansible right away.”

  Ezra was jimmying the doors of the delivery truck with the crowbar, trying to find purchase for the thin chisel end. “Jacob…we gotta…I don’t like having to say this stuff, okay? But we have to prepare the kids for finding bodies. I sure as fuck don’t know how, but we do. Or we could leave them here while we check the abbey alone and come back to them, one or the other.”

  “I think I need to know what you saw and what you didn’t see.”

  “It won’t help.”

  “Tell me anyway.”

  Ezra’s hands fell still, though he didn’t look up from his work. “There was a fireball spanning half the town. There’s a crater the depth of the Burj Khalifa and it’s taken out most of the human habitation on this planet. We got very, very lucky. The fact that the abbey tower is still there at all…it’s unbelievable. I would’ve thought the earthquake…but the East End’s further away from the impact site. Bonaventure’s life support functions are all—”

  “They were controlled by the power plant,” Jacob finished, because he saw it too, now. “Which would’ve been…”

  “Flattened.”

  “We’ll need suits to explore the abbey, then.” It was faint; Jacob’s mind was elsewhere. Stuck on the thought that there might have been survivors in the ruins of Bonaventure who just slowly suffocated as their clean air ran out over the first two days of the disaster. Perdigon did have an atmosphere, but outside of controlled environments like the compound or Bonaventure town, the marsh gases were frequently toxic. Constant recirculation and filtering of the air was necessary. On Perdigon, even when life support was functioning as intended, you got nosebleeds in your sleep from the parched and over-filtered air. “We’ll need…no, we shouldn’t bring the kids, but…”

  “Maybe they should see it,” said Ezra, prying at the doors again. “Closure. Or something.”

  “It doesn’t work like that, Ezra.”

  “They won’t believe it if I just tell them. Not really. It won’t sink in.”

  “No. But seeing it is worse,” said Jacob, sitting down for a moment on the bumper of the car next to the delivery truck, watching the auroras in the sky. “An expected death, a normal death with a coffin and a funeral, yes. It’s good for a kid to look and see that it’s really happened. That something’s really gone from the body, that the body’s only a shell. But that’s not what the kids will see in Bonaventure, if they go. It won’t be…orderly.”

  Ezra nodded, not answering right away, and finally the lock split and the doors cracked open.

  It was beautiful. Flats of water bottles, lab-grown beef in pristine sealed packages, crates of ship-grown potatoes, huge bales of dry pasta and oats and flour, the Brand X cereal that the Taltos cafeteria always had in bulk, powdered milk, freeze-dried vegetable packets.

  “I think it’d be worse to make them wait for us,” Ezra said finally, climbing into the truck to find something he could eat without prep. The dry puffed rice would do, so he pulled open the plastic to make a mouse-hole and took one of the smaller bags out. “Letting them wonder all that time. And it’s so much pressure on Shruti. She wanted to be a coder, not a babysitter.”

  “That’s true.” Jacob climbed in after him. The enormous bag of cheap pasta felt soft to sit on, luxurious. “Maybe we should sleep in here,” he said, half-serious. “It’s so comfy. No, you’re right, I don’t want anyone to feel abandoned. Or risk getting separated. It’s a long way from here to St. Columban’s. I don’t even think we could do it in a day. On foot. But just…remember that we’re asking a lot from them.”

  “I know,” said Ezra. “We can sleep in here if you want. If we close the door again to keep the swamp gas out.”

  “Are we worried about fallout?”

  “No. Most of the radiation is dispersed in space, and some’s gonna settle into a belt around the planet, in the magnetosphere. Like when dirt gets trapped behind the fridge, it’s still there but it doesn’t really make the rest of the house gross.”

  “I’m not sure I agree. But okay, that’s good.” Jacob felt guilty about eating when the kids hadn’t had theirs yet, but he was so hungry that he ploughed through some handfuls of the cereal first. He could feel his salivary glands tingling at the corners of his jaw. They’d need all this food if they were going to walk to St. Columban's. “We couldn’t actually drive this truck, could we?”

  “Roads are a mess.”

  Doubtful that they could even escape the scrambled labyrinth of the parking lot in a four-wheeled vehicle, frankly, but Jacob believed in hope. “What about the Green Bikes?”

  This was a program that Taltos had put in place at Jacob’s request: free bikes for employees to use around the compound in order to minimise car usage, exhaust, and carbon footprints. Ezra looked up sharply. “They'd—wait, you're right, they have those baskets and child seats on them. That could work. It's still a long ride but—can the tires handle broken glass?”

  “They’re thick-walled Kevlar mountain bike tires," said Jacob, who knew his program. "Because we determined that maintenance costs for road bike tires and inner tubes would be prohibitive, due to their fragility.”

  Ezra let out a sound of pure relief that sounded like a sob, and when Jacob heard it, he knew that they were saved. “Prohibitive. God. I love you.”

  “I love you too.”

  They were kissing again, and suddenly—

  Ezra was always sudden.

  He never made eyes over the dinner table, the way Jacob did. Ezra needed little entertainment, other than music, and the music he liked was cerebral, best enjoyed with noise-cancelling headphones, and impossible to dance to. There were no wandering hands when they sat together on the couch at night. Jacob read on his tablet or watched movies, but Ezra would only be present physically, staring at nothing…even before the surgery, he’d always been someone who took long journeys in his head.

  My space cadet, Jacob always said, when Ezra emerged from these trances and came to bed. My Yuri Gagarin, so handsome, he landed in the potato field and the village girls found him...

  Ezra didn’t flirt, in short, and instead would simply begin it all at once in some moment that seemed to him like the right one. If he wanted you at all, he wanted you all at once. Like the sudden bright plummet of a kingfisher.

  So in a moment something shifted, and Ezra’s hand was searching Jacob’s fly for his zipper. Quick, urgent, clumsy. “Keep talking to me,” Jacob whispered to him, because sometimes he felt alone when people were touching him. “Keep talking to me.”

  “I hate your zipper, I hate your belt,” Ezra murmured, kneeling down in front of him, uncomfortably cramped between some pallets of water bottles. As he pulled Jacob’s trousers down over his hips, he rubbed Jacob through his underwear, flashing a grin. “You like the dirty talk,” he chanted in the universal taunting melody, like a kid on the playground. “You like the dirty talk…”

  “I just like to hear you talk, because it’s intimate, I did not say dirty talk—”

  “Jacob Roth likes dirty talk. That’s going in the papers tomorrow, you know that? You like dirty talk so much, I’m just gonna tell everyone what kind of shit you’re into,” Ezra told him, widening his eyes, faux-salacious. “You know what I can’t do with my mouth if I’m busy talking to you…”

  This Ezra, glimpsed rarely, was a pearl that Jacob found early on inside the oyster shell of his boyfriend—an oyster was itself a delicacy, of course, but an acquired taste. Pearls were easier to love than oysters, even when strangely shaped, irregular, or unfit for lapidary. It was Ezra’s sheer ungovernable weirdness that Jacob loved, a strange foxfire in an otherwise murky personality. Something that could lead even the cautious Jacob Roth off his normal path.

  “I didn’t tell you to do anything with your mouth,” he told
Ezra, pretending starchy disapproval. “Other than talk. You’re the one who’s jumping to conclusions—”

  “Yeah, yeah. You’re gonna tell me to do it in a minute, liar.”

  “This is what you use your God-given talent for.” Jacob was laughing, his hands winding through Ezra’s curly hair. They had safe words so that Jacob could do this, playfully pretending to turn Ezra down, something they both knew he’d otherwise never do. With his other partners, Jacob had always felt like he was lucky to have anyone’s attention at all, and he wouldn’t have dared to refuse them. “A legendary gift. Ezra, I think this is beneath you.”

  And Ezra, for his part, liked to pretend to be cocky instead of what he really was, which was ruinously self-conscious and shy. “I don’t have to predict anything, I know you. You’ve got like, three minutes tops and you’ll be begging.”

  “Uh-huh. You’re very sure of yourself.”

  Ezra was trying not to laugh, barely keeping a lid on it and only succeeding because he was horny. He started to pull down Jacob’s boxers, with elaborate slowness. Acting like this was a bad seduction when really it was a foregone conclusion.

  “The last girl I ever tried to date, you know, it didn’t work out, but she was the queen of dirty talk, all right?” said Ezra. “She lived in Warsaw. Long, long distance. She didn’t have to be good at dirty talk at all, because when I heard her voice in my ear speaking Polish, I’d lose it anyway. Something about that just drove me insane. The sound. Like that little…rub in your voice. Almost a creak, almost throaty, like you’re trying to be so quiet but—mmmm. Yup.” Ezra got Jacob’s waistband down, fingertips brushing over the skin. “Right there.”

  “Ezra…”

  “That sound. That one. When you lean over and murmur in my ear, in a business meeting, you just…you’ve got no idea what forces you’re meddling with.” Ezra paused to give some attention to Jacob’s member. “Anyway. We did dirty talk on the phone once, me and the Polish girl, Kasia. She did it, I mean. I couldn’t, because I had no idea about anything. What I wanted, what other people wanted, what sounds good on the phone. It was all a mystery to me. But it’s sexy to get that kind of attention from someone, you know? Someone who’d never met me in person, even, but she liked me enough to want to make me feel good. Even when she was talking to me, though…I couldn’t admit that she wasn’t what I wanted.”