by Jill Smith
The ship screams. One blaring, horrible sound repeated over and over. Roach claps his hands over his ears and steps inside. The door shuts behind him, and between the ship’s wails he hears footsteps coming up the stairs. He runs down the hall to B’s room, which is empty and dark. He enters and sits on the floor where he used to sleep. The noise stops, but he can still feel it in his body. He hears voices, B’s and another man’s, but he can’t tell what they’re saying. Eventually the voices get farther away.
He doesn’t know how long he sits in the dark before footsteps approach and stop outside the door. He wonders if he should hide, in case it’s not B. He climbs into the bed and buries himself under the blankets. The door opens, and B enters. Roach knows it’s him by his boots against the floor, by his smell. B turns on the light and tosses something onto the bed. It’s not heavy, but it hits Roach’s shoulder and Roach has to hold back a sound of surprise.
B sits at his desk, and for a while the only the sound is his breathing. He opens one of the desk drawers. Roach carefully moves a section of blanket so he can watch. B pulls out a bottle of brownish liquid and a small glass, pours some of the liquid into the glass and drinks it in two gulps. He leans back in his chair, stares at the ceiling.
Now might be a good time to let B know he’s here, but Roach can’t move. B has taken the floppy shell off—perhaps that’s what he threw on the bed—and his arms are bare. They’re pale, furrowed, thick, and Roach remembers them around him. He isn’t afraid. He wishes this quiet moment would last longer than moments are meant to.
B refills his glass and drinks. Roach lifts the blankets off his head. B is facing away and doesn’t see him. “B,” he whispers. B doesn’t hear and sets the glass on the desk, hard. “B,” he says, louder.
B is on his feet in an instant.
Roach sits up. “It’s me.”
“You.” B says it so loudly, Roach jumps. For just a second B doesn’t seem to know who he is, or knows but can’t believe it. “What the fuck are you doing here?”
“I came—”
“That was you? The emergency door?”
“I wanted—I need to ask you—”
“You can’t be here!” B’s voice is too loud.
“Joele might hear you,” Roach warns.
“You think I give a fuck what she hears, what she does?” B stops at the edge of the bed, leans forward. “You’re the one who’s fucked, if she hears.”
Roach winces at the strange, sweet smell on B’s breath. He thinks it might be the Devil’s brew, which Thunder Sam used to hit pretty hard before Tin Star emptied his bottles onto the dusty earth. “I need your help.”
B says nothing, so Roach clears his throat and continues. “My friend is hurt. Like I was.”
“So?”
“I thought maybe you could help him.”
“You thought wrong, pardner. I’m not running a fucking free clinic. I did you a favor, now I’ve moved on. I do not want to see you again. Got it?”
Roach has a feeling that is almost like being hit, except the pain is not in his body. He doesn’t want to tell B he’s “got it,” because that would be giving up. And something in B doesn’t mean what he’s saying. He feels hesitation in the way B holds his body, an uncertainty that roughens his voice.
“You don’t hate me,” Roach says. He wants B to know he knows this.
“Who said anything about hating you? I said I don’t want to see you again.”
“If you don’t hate me, then why won’t you help me?”
“Not hating you and jonesing to stitch up your friend aren’t the same thing.”
“He won’t be any trouble.”
“Yeah? He won’t piss in my sleeping bags or wander through my ship when I’ve told him to stay put? Or quote that abominable book?”
The worse B is, the less Roach feels the sting of it. B is all show, like Roach was when he spat at B that first night. Roach sits up straight and looks right at him. “No. And he won’t stay with you when you don’t want to be alone, or tell you about how Silvers shut off. And he won’t kiss you or have sex-for-fun. ‘He ain’t me—and a good thing, too, ’cause if there was more than one of me, you couldn’t rightly call me all you got.’ That’s a quote from that abdominal book.”
B leans forward. “First, it’s abominable. Second, stop calling it sex-for-fun. It’s called fucking. Third, no, he’s not you. And that’s why I don’t want him here.”
“Just me?” Roach’s lips are close to B’s.
“We can try this again, as long as you understand that you’re not ‘all I got,’ not by a longshot. You’re not going to stay on the ship, and we’re not riding off into the sunset together. Okay?”
“Okay,” Roach says.
B squeezes Roach’s face between his hands. “Is this what you want?” B asks. “Tell me the truth.”
“Yes,” Roach says.
“You afraid?”
“No.”
B tightens his grip. “Liar. Are you afraid?”
“A little.”
“Good.” B leans forward and kisses Roach, more gently than Roach expects. “Me, too.”
Roach was never sure if B was afraid of anything. But when B kisses him again, he feels uncertainty, even in those hard muscles. Fear that—what? That what they do will change them? Or that they’ll still be the same at the end of it?
Their fear meets in the scuffling of bones and gets shuffled with other feelings, surfacing only occasionally. Roach tastes unfamiliar feelings on B, and welcomes them inside himself, but they never truly become part of him. B takes them back when their bodies separate, and lies with them curled in his arms, falls asleep with them tucked under his chin. Roach is left alone to look at the ceiling and feel a channel of coldness between himself and B. He puts his hand in the channel. B’s heat is so close. He catches it on his fingertips. He is awake all night, catching it and letting it go.
*
“What about your friend?” B asks the next morning as he pulls on his sweatjack.
“Hm?”
“The one who’s hurt. Or did you make that up?”
“Lons.”
“Shouldn’t you go help him?”
“I can’t,” Roach says. It’s true. He can do nothing for Lons if Lons won’t eat, won’t go into the water. Roach cannot rescue him.
“But you thought I could?”
“I put bandages on him.”
B finishes lacing his boot and lets his foot drop to the floor. “You’re breaking my heart.”
“Why?” asks Roach, alarmed. He’s heard this phrase before. Grena explained it doesn’t really mean that the heart isn’t whole. But Roach still doesn’t want that image.
“I don’t know,” B shakes his head. “You’re…something different, that’s for sure.” He ties his other boot. “Did he seem any better with the bandages?”
“I don’t think so. I don’t think he can get better.”
“So you’re just going to let him die?”
B is not angry. But not happy, either. He sounds almost like he’s making a joke, but his voice is too rough for joking. “He might die,” Roach says, wondering why the thought makes him uncomfortable. All Silvers die. No need to want them not to, no need to try to stop them.
“Then what? You bury him?”
“Put him in the water.”
B stands. “I’ll give you some medicine and some clean bandages. See if it helps. But I don’t want any Silvers on the ship.”
“What about me? Can I come back?”
“No.”
Roach feels emptiness rushing toward him. “But—”
“I’ll meet you outside by those rocks where I found you.” B grabs the white box from under the desk, opens it and pulls out a roll of clean bandages and a tube of the greasy stuff that made Roach’s torn places hurt less. “Flush out any open wounds with water. Apply the ointment. Then bandage. All right?”
Roach takes the tube and the bandages.
“How’
d he get hurt?” B asks.
“He did it to himself, mostly.” The words stick for a second then tumble out. “He was on your ship. He came back, but now he won’t talk or eat, and he’s drying out.”
B looks for a moment as though something has left him, as though his mind has gone somewhere without his body. “I’ll make sure the coast is clear.” At the door, he turns suddenly. “Don’t go anywhere.”
“I won’t.”
“I mean it, pardner.”
“I’ll stay right here.”
B doesn’t leave. He stands with his back to the door. “Your name’s Imms. Or it was when you met Grena. Right?”
“A long time ago.”
“What is it now?”
“I don’t have a name. I’m not counted anymore.”
B hesitates. “May I call you Imms?”
Roach isn’t sure what to say. It’s not his name, was not even his most recent name. But he thinks of Lons, and how Lons will always be Lons to Roach, even though Lons is not counted by the other Silvers. Imms is who Roach was when he was happiest, when humans weren’t dangerous, when Grena read to them, when the idea of Earth was so wonderful he couldn’t sleep night after night thinking about it. What is the harm in using the name now?
“Yes,” he says finally. “But I like Roach.”
“Roach sometimes. As a nickname.”
B is taking this name, Imms, and deciding it is what he wants Roach to be. He has no real understanding of how important the counting is. You cannot alter numbers the way you can words, or opinions. If you are zero, you cannot make yourself count again.
Imms nods slowly. “Roach is ours,” he says. “But Imms is mine.”
“Huh?”
He repeats what he’s said in the Silver language, a surefire way to lose B’s interest.
Sure enough, B shakes his head. “Whatever you say.” He opens the door.
Chapter Eleven
Imms spends days with Lons, using the supplies B gave him to try to heal the old Silver. Lons holds still as Imms fills the cracks in his skin with ointment, lets Imms wind bandages around him. A bit of a smile is always on his face, and Imms wonders if Lons has secrets, which is impossible. Secrets are only for humans.
But this isn’t true. Imms has secrets. He has the secret of what he did with B, and he has a secret he’s been keeping since before the humans arrived. Something he wants to show B soon.
He meets B each night by the rocks where B first discovered Imms. The rocks are good cover. Some nights B is distracted and starts at every sound. He touches Imms quickly, frantically, or hardly at all. Other nights B is flooded with feeling Imms can’t access. He seems like he wants to draw blood, and Imms goes quiet and still under the weight of that urge. On the best nights, B is relaxed, gentle. His strength is sheltering, not violent. He laughs. Talks to Imms, holds him afterward.
“I saw the pictures,” Imms says one night. “In the black box, on the ship.”
B props himself on one elbow. “Yeah?”
“Too many colors.”
“You’d like Earth.”
“Why?”
“Well, it’s bigger than the Silver Planet, for one thing.”
“I know.”
“And there’s lots of variety to the land. So if you like sand, you can live where there’s sand. If you like mud, there’s mud. If you like to be warm, you can live where the sun shines all the time. If you like cold—”
“I like cold.”
Imms is lying. He doesn’t like cold, not anymore. He used to not even know that he was cold. Then he lost blood. Now, being with B each night, it’s worse. He’s so warm when he’s lying beside B that when B is gone, the cold grows sharp teeth. This sort of contrast has led him to begin to understand anger, simply by lying next to B and feeling the difference between B angry and B not.
“There’s a lot to do, too. More stuff than you can imagine. You’d never get bored.”
“You don’t like it here.”
B looks at the sky. “I don’t mind it.”
“You’re lying.”
“I wanted to get away from Earth.”
“Why?”
“I wasn’t having much fun there.”
“You said it’s never boring.”
“That doesn’t mean it’s always fun.”
Imms shifts, turning his face closer to B. “There’s lots to do here, too. Grena says on Earth everything takes care of itself. But here, we help the plants fuck.”
B laughs so hard he coughs. “Plants don’t fuck.”
“You said to stop calling it sex-for-fun. And breeding.”
“Let’s get this straight. Breeding is what animals do. With humans, it’s just called sex, not sex for fun. Or it’s fucking. Or making love.”
“Making love?”
“Yeah. That’s the nice thing to call it.”
“Why don’t you call it the nice thing?”
“I’m not much of a romantic.”
“Not like George Michael.”
“Beg your pardon?”
“Grena sang us the song ‘Careless Whisper.’ She says it’s very romantic.”
B snorts. “With all due respect to Grena, she wouldn’t know romance if it smacked her upside the head with a box of chocolates and shoved a dozen roses up her ass.”
Imms can’t imagine why either of these things would ever happen. “Why not?”
“Grena’s relationship is with her work. I don’t think she leaves herself a lot of time for romance.”
“What about Joele?”
“Joele, believe it or not, has been engaged for something like eight years. Gumm was married, but he’s divorced. I don’t know about Vir.”
“Were you in love with someone back home?”
“For a long time. But not anymore.”
“Why did you stop?”
“I didn’t stop. I mean, not just me. We stopped.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. There’s not just one reason.”
“Oh.” Imms tries to count heartbeats for a while, but he can’t concentrate. “When do you go home?”
“A week.”
“Will you ever come back?”
“Nope.” B is trying to sound like he doesn’t feel anything, but his muscles get stiff the way they do when he’s angry.
“Will Joele come back?”
“I don’t know. More humans’ll come, that’s for sure.”
“Nice humans?”
“They’ll probably be a little nice, and a little mean.”
“Like you?”
B moves his arm and looks down at Imms, as though Imms is something he’s just stumbled upon. “You think I’m both?”
“Uh-huh.”
B sits up and rests his back against a tall rock. He’s silent for a long while. Imms thinks he’ll leave. It’s past the time he usually goes back to the ship. “You ever afraid of me?”
“No.”
“I don’t want you to be afraid of me.” B slings an arm around Imms’s shoulders, like Thunder Sam sometimes does with Tin Star. Pals, pardners.
Imms leans into him. “I’m not.”
“I’ve done some shitty things to your people.”
Imms doesn’t answer. It’s true.
“But I’m not ever going to hurt you,” B says. “Okay?”
“Okay.”
“I’m not gonna let anyone else hurt you, either.”
“Not Joele?”
B looks at him. Gives his neck a brief squeeze. “Tell me exactly what she did to you.”
“It doesn’t matter.” Imms is suddenly uneasy. He wants that look out of B’s eyes.
“It does. She’s under my command. I told my team they weren’t to harm any more Silvers. She didn’t listen.”
“I didn’t listen either. To my clan. I came too close to the ship. I saw her, and she asked what I was doing. I said walking. She thought it was funny that I spoke English. She said I must be one of Grena’s. I asked if she
knew Grena. She said yes, and she grabbed my wrist. She asked if I was afraid. I said no.”
B nods.
“She said I should be. She said humans were monsters. I asked her what that meant. Then she hit me here.” He touches his cheek. “I tried to run away, but she was holding me. She hit me again, and I fell. She used her shoe, until I stopped trying to get up. She asked if I hated her, because she was hurting me. I couldn’t talk. She hit me with her belt until I—slept?” That doesn’t seem right. Sleep is a good thing.
“Passed out,” B says.
“I didn’t care, though,” Imms says, trying to sound like Tin Star after his horse gets snakebit, and they have to shoot it. When he tells Thunder Sam it was just a dumb old horse, anyway. “I didn’t cry, not like humans do when they get hurt. She kept saying ‘why don’t you yell?’ But I didn’t yell.”
B still doesn’t speak.
“B? Could I come in with you tonight? I’ll sleep on the floor. I thought I wouldn’t miss the ship, but I do.”
B shakes his head, stands up. “No. You’ve got your world, I’ve got mine. A big metal hunk of it, anyway. You sleep well.”
Imms knows he won’t. Isn’t sure why.
“Can I show you something?” he asks, desperate to delay B.
“What sort of something?”
“I can’t tell. You have to see.”
B looks automatically at the hulking shadow of the Byzantine, checking to make sure none of his team is outside. “How far away is it?”
“Not far.”
Twenty minutes later, B is grumbling. “What the hell could I want to see all the way out here?” he demands. “What if they need me for something on the ship? It’ll take us another goddamn half hour to get back.”
Imms is slightly anxious, but decides B doesn’t really sound angry. “It’s a good surprise. I think.”
“You think.”
They come to a shallow basin, and Imms leads B down into it, toward a cluster of rocks along one wall. Part of the basin is filled with water, stagnant and tarnished-looking. When they reach the rock cluster, Imms goes to work, moving one, then another. B steps in to help. As they move the fourth stone, a slab of dirty steel is exposed, the letters hroug visible through the grime.
“Jesus,” B says.
