The Silvers

by Jill Smith

  Bridique sits on the couch, Lady in her lap. The dog jumps off her and runs to Imms.

  “You’re better,” Brid says. She is staring straight ahead, eyes hollow and red, body rigid. “The miracle of drugs. Mom agonized over whether or not to dope you. I told her if your body can handle her chicken divan, it can handle Nyquil. Thanks for letting me borrow your dog.”

  “Are you okay?” Imms asks.

  “Fine,” she says. “Just having one of those completely lost moments.”

  “Oh.” Imms feels sure he knows what a completely lost moment is.

  “I never cry. This is my version of crying.”

  He sits next to her, almost afraid to move the cushion, to jostle that perfect pain.

  “Do you cry?” she asks.

  “I don’t think so.” Imms thinks guiltily of the ride home from the police station, after the incident in the park. He shouldn’t be able to cry. He is a Silver.

  Bridique takes a deep breath and pushes her hair behind her ears. “It only gets harder and harder,” she says, “to know if anything I’m doing is right. Either it used to be easier, or I used to not care as much.”

  “What don’t you know if you’re doing right?”

  “Everything. Every decision I make—where to live, where to work, who to love, what to fucking do with my hair…”

  “Your hair is nice,” Imms says.

  “I’m thirty-two years old, and I live with my mother. There’s nothing I do that fulfills me, no way that I contribute to society.”

  “You help the big cats.”

  “I clean pens. That’s what I do at Rose, Imms. Scoop shit.”

  “And teach Chess tricks.”

  She grumbles something Imms doesn’t catch.

  “You take care of Mary,” he says.

  “There is nothing worse than taking care of your own mother. You know why? Because I’ve been hoping for the last god knows fuck how many years that she’ll start taking care of me again. Like she did when I was a kid. That she’ll tell me what to do.”

  Imms says nothing.

  “It’s pathetic. It’s the most pathetic thing to wish for. Especially for a woman to wish for. I ought to take care of myself. I ought to make myself happy.” She wipes her nose on the back of her wrist. “Don Welbert would fucking love to come over here and take care of us. But we don‘t need him.”

  “Why does Don—?”

  “I feel like I’m trying to get in line at a checkout, and people keep coming up with their arms too full and they look like they’re about to lose their grip on all their shit, so I keep saying, ‘Oh, after you, after you.’ It’s like, when’s it my turn? When do I get what I need? And yes, I’m aware that I sound like a whiny loser.”

  “You don’t. You sound human.”

  “When I was a kid, I wanted to be out from under everybody’s thumb. To be a grown-up.” She runs her fingers up and down her throat. “It’s fucking humans. We over-nurture our young. If I were a lion, I’d have been fending for myself by age two.” She shifts so that she’s partly facing Imms. She shakes the hair out of her eyes. “What’s it like on your planet? How do Silvers raise children?”

  “Silver children stay underwater,” Imms says. “They can hold their breath much longer than adult Silvers. They only have to come up for air about once a month.” Bridique looks at him, quiet and expectant, and he continues, “The water on my planet, I’ve told you, is silver. Like the shiniest metal you can think of. The children go underwater after they’re born. Their parents don’t see them again until they resurface. In human time, that’s about eight years later.”

  Bridique’s mouth falls open. “What do they do underwater for eight years?”

  “No one knows. I don’t remember much from my own childhood. What I do remember is all silver. I just drifted. Sometimes the water was darker. Sometimes I could see light, and that meant I was near shore. I remember how welcome the black sky was when I came up for air. Just a moment of cold. A moment without the heaviness of water. I could see that the world was still there. Then I’d go back under.”

  Bridique wipes her eyes, though they are not wet. “I wish we could do that. I wish my little girl could go on her own underwater journey for eight years, without anyone to yell at her or tell her what to do. I wish she’d surface with eight years of mysteries locked away in her brain. That’s what I wish.” She shoots a quick, sharp glance at Imms. “Maybe I only wish that so I wouldn’t have had to try to be responsible for her. I fucked that up pretty good.”

  “That’s an okay reason to wish that. Maybe Silver parents don’t realize how lucky they are.”

  “Do you really think that? Do Silver moms not miss their babies?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I get to see my little girl this weekend.”

  “What’s her name?”

  “Cena.”

  “She’ll be glad to see you,” Imms says.

  “No.” Bridique shakes her head. “You know how Chess at the sanctuary came right up to greet us? And Tommy, the big tiger, didn’t budge? She’s Tommy. With me. She can hardly spare a glance.”

  “Oh,” Imms says. He wishes he knew more about humans, so he could tell her what Cena’s behavior really means.

  “She’s very grown up. You know? The way she acts. She’s one of those kids who makes you feel like…like she knows more than you. I hate it sometimes.”

  Imms doesn’t answer.

  “Can I see your heart?” she asks. “Please?”

  They’re both quiet a moment. Then he unbuttons his shirt. He’s not sure where his heart will be, but he is suddenly sure that he can will it to where she’s looking. Sure enough, it drifts up, settling just left of his breastbone, where a human heart is supposed to be. It’s glowing bright. He pulls his shirt away and lets her look.

  “It’s so fucking perfect.” She glances up. “Sorry. I’m always telling the kids who come to the sanctuary on field trips, ‘This is not a zoo. These cats are not here for you to gawk at. They are beautiful creatures who belong in faraway places.’”

  “I’m not a beautiful creature,” Imms says quietly. “I’m an ugly creature, from an ugly place.”

  “Modesty doesn’t suit you.”

  “I’m just saying gawk if you want.”

  She looks again at the glowing spot beneath his skin. “Does it give off heat?” she asks. She puts out a hand. “May I?”

  He smiles. “I’m a wild animal. Be careful.”

  She places her palm over the glowing spot. Her fingers are cool, small, smooth. They search the skin around the heart. “It’s not any warmer than the rest of you,” she says.

  Her touch is strange and makes him miss B

  “What happened here?” she asks, tapping his crossed scars.

  “I got burned.”

  She laughs. “Sorry.” She puts a hand over her mouth.

  “What?”

  “Humans use ‘burned’ as slang sometimes. Meaning, I don’t know, betrayed, usually.”

  “Betrayed?”

  “Like, when my first husband left me. I think I actually told the next guy I dated that I wanted to take things slow because I’d been burned before.”

  “Oh,” Imms says.

  “But that was awful of me to laugh. How’d you get burned?”

  “I don’t know,” he says honestly. “It was during the fire. But I don’t remember what happened.” He starts to button his shirt. Bridique puts her fingers on the scars again. Imms swallows. Her eyes meet his.

  She looks like she might say something else but doesn’t. Imms finishes buttoning his shirt. “Are you okay?” he asks her.

  She nods slowly. “Better. Thanks.”

  She gets up and goes upstairs. Imms doesn’t know whether he should follow her.

  *

  Mary is furious that he’s out of bed. “I don’t care how good you feel. Your body has not recovered, and you shouldn’t push it.” She changes the sheets while he’s up and lets him
have a bath. She insists on sitting with him, though, in case he passes out in the water.

  “I can hold my breath a long time,” he tells her.

  “Is that so?” she asks dryly.

  He hopes she’s forgiven him for the incident with Don. She hasn’t mentioned it again.

  He soaks in the warm water, and she stares out the window. He imagines she’s counting the things she has to do. Imms doesn’t count much anymore. He is growing lazy.

  “I’m done,” he says, once he’s rinsed the shampoo from his hair.

  “Don’t rush on my account. You stay in as long as you want.”

  Imms sinks back, watches the way his skin becomes shinier, more metallic, the longer it stays under water.

  “What was B like when he was young?” Imms asks.

  Mary glances at him. “Just how you’d imagine.”

  “I don’t know how I’d imagine,” Imms confesses.

  “Very serious. Bright. Commanded an army of neighborhood boys. Only one who wouldn’t take orders from him was his sister.”

  “What was she like?”

  “She was…” Mary sighs. “She was very bright as well. And caring. She took good care of…people.”

  Imms swirls the bath water with his finger.

  “Never easy to tell what either one was thinking. They get that from their father.”

  “Is their father dead?”

  Mary shakes her head. “No. He isn’t. But he’s not coming back.”

  “You’re a good mother,” Imms says.

  Mary looks surprised. “How do you know?”

  “You take good care of people.”

  Mary looks, for a red and hollow-eyed instant, like Bridique did this morning. “That’s sweet of you. But you don’t really know. Maybe if I’d taken better care of my son, he wouldn’t have traveled light years to get away from home. If I’d taken better care of my daughter, maybe she wouldn’t look for men who’ll push her away once they get what they want. Maybe she wouldn’t need whatever she puts in her body to make herself feel better.” She pats her knees, stands up. “But that’s my burden. Not yours.”

  “I like to know,” Imms says. “Sometimes I don’t understand, B. I wish I did.”

  Mary gets a towel from the cabinet and places it on the counter. “Does my boy take good care of you?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m glad. You’ve been good for him. I can see the difference.”

  “He was sad on my planet. He’s glad to be home.”

  Mary nods. She looks as if she has wandered into the room and forgotten what she meant to do there.

  Imms pulls the plug from the drain and lets the warmth swirl away. Mary helps him out of the tub, puts him back to bed. Being human means a lot of different cages, Imms thinks. Caught beneath covers, between walls. Bounded by yards, towns, regions, countries. Even the human heart is shrouded in ribs. He supposes his Silver body was a sort of cage, too, until Joele opened it up, let the blood out. Now he knows what it’s like to be opened and to close again. To bleed and to heal.

  He lets himself be surrounded. Tries not to miss the black sky, flat bright land, a world without walls. That is a part of him that bled away when he opened. He has healed around the loss. He is home.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  “Have you seen these?” Hatch asks.

  Hatch has Vir’s journals, three of them that Vir kept during her time on the Silver Planet. Two are filled with field notes, and the third is a personal diary. Hatch lets B stay in her office, reading them while she goes to lunch. B keeps glancing over at the cactus, which seems like it’s watching him.

  The first few entries in Vir’s diary read like her field notes. She documents her surroundings. Her body’s reactions to the unfamiliar place. She tries to use neutral prose to mask some of her astonishment over the discovery of the Silvers but quickly loses the battle. For the first two months on the planet, Vir is in love. She writes about her interactions with the Silvers, teaching them English, showing them photographs, learning about their society.

  Then something happens. She doesn’t write directly about the violence her crewmates perpetrate on the Silvers, but she hints at it. The words “cruelty” and “unethical” come up. Gradually her writing stops making sense. Entries end midsentence. Words appear on the page with no apparent order or reason. Even her handwriting unravels, the neat, tight cursive becoming a loose, drifting scrawl. She draws pictures.

  She draws fire.

  B sees flames eating letters, eating people, eating a crude cartoon of the Byzantine. Comets with long, burning tails and walls of flame separating people.

  She writes that she is cold. At first B thinks she means physically. Then Vir writes that she is “just like the rest of them—I don’t feel.” B hopes that by the rest of them she means Silvers with their limited emotions. But he knows she means him. And Joele and Grena and Gumm.

  She visits the Silver in the lab during project HN. It speaks to her. She never learned the language well enough to know what it’s saying. She knows she could let it go, but she doesn’t. If she were truly human, she would. If she were human, she’d use any means necessary to put an end to this violence.

  Then, abruptly, the handwriting tightens again. The sentences aren’t hard to decipher. The entries become clinical descriptions of the way Silvers bleed, the way they die. Vir says someday the earth will get so hot, it will burst into flames. Then the Silvers will rule the universe.

  B takes the journals to a nearby office and makes copies of certain pages. He sits in Hatch’s office and tries not to think how unlikely it is that Silvers will ever rule the universe. The best Silvers can hope for is that humans will leave them alone. But that won’t happen.

  That won’t happen because of B.

  B has cut into Silvers and, in doing so, has invited everyone else to do the same.

  He doubts drinking beer with Dave Welbert is what made Imms sick. More likely the illness was the result of whatever leaped into Imms’s body when Dr. Hwong made an incision in Imms’s chest and put a small tracker on his heart, so that the doctor can monitor the journey the heart goes on. Imms goes to Biomed once a week so the tracker can beam his heart’s trajectory right to Dr. Hwong’s computer. B imagines the doctor analyzing the organ’s path, sticking pushpins into a map on his wall like a military strategist.

  Hatch is gone nearly an hour. When she comes back, she smells like onions.

  “Well?” she asks.

  B hasn’t really thought about what to say. “It was hard for her there,” is what he finally goes with. Stupid, empty words.

  Hatch accidentally knocks her rubber band ball off the desk, and B sees her decide it would be undignified to try to retrieve it. “Did you know she was slipping?”

  “Not like that.”

  “You think she could have set the fire?”

  “What?” B is genuinely surprised.

  Hatch sits at her desk. “The wire that sparked—don’t ask me for details; I don’t know anything about this stuff—but apparently the way the insulation was worn away didn’t look like an accident.”

  “Of course it was an accident.”

  Hatch picks up the notebook. “Vir was crazy. You read this. She’d lost her damn mind.”

  B doesn’t answer.

  “I’ve known you a long time, captain. I’m not your lawyer. You don’t have to tell me anything. But it might help if you did.” Hatch leans forward. “Are you covering for her?”

  This time B can’t answer. He stands. “Vir didn’t sabotage the ship.”

  “No one’s saying she did.” Hatch pushes her glasses up. “Yet. The investigators want to talk to Imms again.”

  “He’s told them everything he saw.”

  “He’s the only witness. They want to make sure they haven’t missed anything.”

  “Christ. Fucking hell, Hatch.”

  “You trust Imms, I take it?”

  B stares at Hatch. “Imms saved my life.”


  Hatch looks at her cactus as though for guidance, or maybe to share a moment of pity for B. She turns back to him. “Do you have a lawyer?”

  “Do I need one?”

  She shrugs. “Even if you were covering for Vir, I’d understand, to some degree. But—”

  “I’m not covering for Vir.” This, at least, is true. “If Vir wanted to set a fire, how could she guarantee it by—what, messing with a wire?”

  “She could have messed with it before setting the fire. To make the fire appear accidental.”

  “She died in the fire.” B’s temper is rising. “What did it matter to her if the fire looked like an accident or not?”

  “Let the investigators talk to the Silver.”

  “Does he need a lawyer?”

  “All I want is to keep this as quiet as possible, captain. I was happy to give you and Grena medals and call the whole thing a tragic accident. Now I’ve got this.” She motions to the journals.

  B didn’t go into Vir’s room after the fire. Couldn’t. He didn’t go into Gumm’s, either. Just Joele’s, in case she’d left anything incriminating—matches, bloody clothing, pickled Silver livers. He wishes now he’d gone into Vir’s room and found these journals, destroyed them.

  B doesn’t know what exactly he tells Hatch. He needs a walk. Fresh air. He goes out the exercise compound and walks along the fence, dragging his hand along the chain link, making it rattle.

  *

  Imms is about to go into the conference room where members of the Breakthough II mission are waiting to ask him questions about the Silver Planet, when Grena arrives with two NRCSuckers. Imms is too surprised at first to speak. Grena is talking to the NRCSuckers and doesn’t notice him right away.

  “Grena!” he says, when he finds his voice.

  She looks at him. Her expression changes too quickly for Imms to read it well. He recognizes only the smile she ends on.

  “Imms.” She walks over and hugs him.