by J. A. Rock
He is in a white room, too bright. He has to close his eyes. It smells like humans—sharp, salty, blood-metal. He sees a sink, like the one in B’s bathroom, but bigger. A big tub sits beside the sink, lined in a shiny black material that rustles when Roach touches it. Inside are empty wrappers.
He lifts a couple of the wrappers to his nose, smells them. Their outsides are white, but inside they are silver, and the way they are torn makes Roach think of his own skin. They smell like they’ve never been outside, like they’ve been trapped a long time without air.
He opens one of the small doors above him and finds more packages. These are not torn, and they are heavy. He remembers how B ripped open the packages of quilopea. Perhaps quilopea is in these. He is hungry, now that he thinks about it, and he starts to tear open a package, then hesitates. Once he opens it, he will see the ripped silver underside of the package’s skin. Grena says humans use many materials that are not alive. He is almost certain that a package is not alive and cannot feel. But what if he’s wrong?
He pulls at the edges of the package, the way B did. It opens easily and no blood comes out. No quilopea either. Instead he exposes two hard, dry rectangles the color of B’s hair. Roach smooths the torn package and looks at the words. He’s not sure how to pronounce all of them, or what exactly they mean, but he reads, Hal’s Cosmic Granola Bars, and underneath, Orbitin’ Oats ’N Cinnamon.
Roach has never eaten anything but quilopea before. He sniffs Hal’s Cosmic Granola Bars. They smell sweet, but not the same way quilopea does. He sticks the end of one in his mouth. It breaks when he bites, and little pieces fall from his mouth, stick to his lips, scatter on the floor. He tries to chew, but the bar is tough and prickly, and he doesn’t want it in his mouth anymore. He could spit it out, but that will make a mess. As his mouth gets wetter, the bar grows softer, and finally he is able to swallow. The taste is not bad, but it’s different from anything he’s known, and he can’t get it off his tongue. He fears for a moment that he’ll have to taste Hal’s Cosmic Granola Bars forever.
He sets the package on the counter and pulls open the door to a big white box in the corner of the room. The top half opens, and a cloud of cold bursts out, startling Roach. Inside are shiny rectangular packages, different from Hal’s Cosmic Granola Bars. He takes one and stands for a moment, letting the cold touch his face, before he shuts the door. This food is called Spacedream Sandwich.
He opens it. It’s darker and softer than cosmic granola bars. He takes a bite and immediately drops the rest and puts a hand to his mouth. Cold floods the areas around and between his teeth, making his whole head hurt. He spits out the Spacedream Sandwich and sticks his fingers in his mouth, rubbing his gums, trying to erase the sensation.
He hears footsteps and quickly opens one of the small doors under the sink and crawls into the dark space. Someone enters the room. A female. But not Joele. This one is smaller, and she makes the air seem shaky when she comes in. Her footsteps are crooked, her breath juts like ribs. She stands in front of the sink. The shadow of her leg covers the thin strip of light between the small doors. She breaks open and cries. Roach knows about crying from the book and from Grena, who cried a little when she left Roach’s clan for good. It’s what humans do when they get too dry, instead of going into a lake.
It’s more than that. This human is sad, scared, maybe angry. She is collapsing under the weight of all that is piled inside of her. Roach understands now what is special about the kind of person who could rescue someone else. You have to not be afraid of being crushed by the weight of the other person’s troubles. This is what stops him from helping her. Her invisible enemy is stronger than both of them. He counts the seconds she cries. He gets to one hundred and forty seven when suddenly his stomach muscles contract. He does not want to think about Cosmic Granola Bars ever again, but the taste still lingers in his mouth. He shuts his eyes, trying to concentrate on something, anything other than food. He leans over and opens his mouth and the chewed-up bar slides up his throat and out of him. He feels much better once it’s gone.
The female is still crying. If she hears Roach, she gives no indication. She stops suddenly and whispers, “Snap out of it, Vir.” She turns on the water, and it trickles in the metal tube near Roach’s head. She opens the door above the sink, grabs a package of Hal’s Cosmic Granola Bars—he hears it crackle—and leaves.
Back home, B had a shelf covered in awards: plaques, certificates, two medals, and an engraved pen. It didn’t matter what he’d done to get them, only that he could display these shining, empty ideas of who he was. One of NRCSE’s luminaries. A pioneer of the future.
The NRCSE—nurk-see to everyone—is the National Research Center for Space Exploration. B’s employer for the last six years.
He wasn’t Shepard or Aldrin famous when his supervisor, Kelly Hatchell, approached him about captaining the first crewed mission to the Silver Planet. He’d signed the occasional autograph, visited schools, and appeared on a panel on a late-night talk show, where he was happy to let a D-list comedian and the famously hard-nosed judge of some reality show play wishbone with the spotlight. He even gave a commencement speech at a private college, his throat so dry he asked a graduate in the front row if he could swig from her water bottle—the only joke to garner laughs, and it hadn’t been a joke.
Still, NRCSE encouraged him to stay in the public eye. “God knows you’re about as much fun as rush-hour traffic,” Kelly Hatchell said. “But there’s something about you. Your jawline, maybe. People like a handsome hero.”
B wasn’t sure what Hatch meant by hero until three months before B’s team was set to depart. Time magazine put B on its cover with the headline: The Great Wet Hope: How the Silver Planet’s Lakes Could Save the Human Race. The day the issue hit stands, B’s mother called to ask if it would have killed him to smile. “They didn’t want me to,” he told her. Saving the human race was serious business. But then, what wasn’t serious business to B? He felt so hopelessly caged wherever he was on Earth—home, college, the air force, NRCSE—that he’d eventually turned to infinity for help.
At the time, six months away from Earth sounded like paradise. Matty had just left, tired of playing second fiddle to B’s work. B’s mother and sister made it clear their sympathies lay with Matty. Any direction B turned, he met accusation. But he didn’t turn often. Mostly, he looked at whatever was directly in front of him.
Now he misses everything from his mother’s laugh to the crust on his stove burners. He misses humans who act like people, not scientists. More than anything, he misses a sky that changes color. He misses stars. Most of the “comforts” NRCSE sent with them, Grena and Vir have given to the Silvers. The Silvers have a deck of cards and a little sand Zen garden. They have construction paper and markers. Last week B went walking and found a four of spades on the ground.
NRCSE exhausted its funds sending B’s team here, and now its flag is planted in one of the most incredible, and fundable, opportunities in human history. The government has showered NRCSE with money, and NRCSE in turn is assembling expert teams, prepared teams of pedigreed -ologists to study Silvers. B’s team will keep telling bad jokes until they’re yanked offstage with a cane. Their research on Silvers is haphazard, inconclusive. They’ve behaved, by turns, professionally and barbarically. They have fucked up.
“Stay off the lower deck,” B tells the others. “I’m turning on the filters.”
“Don’t need to do that till Sunday,” Gumm says.
“Air smells funky down there.”
“If you’re bored, you can help Vir and me mix anesthetic,” Joele says. She has refused to talk to B about the Silver killing last night. Says he can read her report. “Or you can help us brainstorm about fire.”
“Fire?” B says.
Joele leans back in her chair. “We want to introduce our Silver friends to fire. But we’re not sure how, since we can’t sustain a flame outside, and fire in the lab is—”
“Not happenin
g,” B says.
“So what about a controlled fire in, say, the kitchen?”
“Not on the ship. We can’t risk it.”
Joele looks at Gumm. “Where’s Grena? She could help us do it safely.”
“I’m serious,” B says. “If anything happened to the Byzantine—”
“We’d have to spend our days group-bathing with Silvers until we were rescued,” Joele says. “Believe me, no one hates the idea more than me. But can you imagine? Fire. A chance to vicariously experience the birth of human civilization.”
“It’d be pretty fucking cool,” Gumm agrees. “Seeing what they’d do with it. They might show their true colors then.”
“The answer is no.”
“You’re just buckets of fun, boss.” Joele shares a secret smile with Gumm.
“No one on the lower deck. See you later.”
He heads to his room, a war mounting inside him. He hates Joele and black skies. He hates that Gumm puts his feet up on furniture. He hates that he’s not strong enough to inspire fear or allegiance or anything other than secret smiles. And he wishes that when he held Roach in his arms last night, he’d traced the Silver’s wounds, let the scabs scrape his palms, listened to the catch of breath when he pressed too hard on a bruise. He wishes he had breathed in the scent of Roach’s hair and bitten his ear and made him understand how much there is to hate in this world, how many reasons to be angry.
He doesn’t want to let his captive go. He wants to take him apart, but not the way his team would take a Silver apart. He wants to flay the layers of impassivity, the innocence, the adoration of a trashy paperback. He wants to reach into that Silver body, grab the floating heart, and hold it in place. He wants to find what’s buried. You can’t be alive and never heave with rage or loathing, never be stung a thousand places by jealousy. Roach is an impossibility. B wants to make him possible.
He opens his bedroom door and is almost unsurprised to find Roach gone. This is what he’s been waiting for: a mission, a reason, a disaster. He searches the room, and when he finds no Silver hiding in it, he tears through the ship, cutting the air like a storm.
The ship is not big, but it is blocky and confusing, and Roach can find neither a way outside nor the route back to B’s room. He doesn’t want to open doors, in case he stumbles onto Joele’s territory. He can’t stay long in the wide center space, because there is too much light. He crouches in the ship’s dark corners, but every time he is still, he’s sure he hears footsteps coming toward him. It’s an exciting game, but tiring, especially since his body is still healing.
He finally opens a door and enters a small room with a flat black box in one wall. When he presses a button on the box, a picture comes up. Silvers don’t make many pictures, just with their fingers in the dust on the ground now and then. But Grena explained that humans make pictures many different ways, including with cameras, which capture moments of real life exactly. This image shows white ground. The sky is blue, and a tall, skinny tree with wide leaves stands next to a very blue lake. The colors are more vivid than any Roach has seen before, even more than the colors in the small pictures Grena brought to show his clan.
He presses the button again, and a flat path cuts the green ground, and he sees machines with wheels. Blocky structures cover most of the sky. In the next picture, the sky is black and speckled with little silver things. The sight of the silver things makes Roach smile. Stars. They are visible from Earth, Grena says, but not from the Silver Planet. The Silver Planet’s atmosphere hides them, makes the rest of the universe seem absent.
He thinks that if these pictures are accurate, he would never want to live on Earth. Too many colors, and too many unalive things in the way. Then he thinks maybe this isn’t true. Maybe what he fears is the emptiness of his own planet, the gulf between what he knows and what B knows. If he lived among these colors, if he knew the names for the structures, B would think he was smarter. B would like him better, too, if he could make himself angry. If he could want something enough to draw blood to get it. If he went to Earth, he could learn. He’d never have to be alone.
He is suddenly too tired to look at more pictures, and he is cold again. He looks down. For a second he can’t find his heart. His eyes are still swimming in those colors, Earth’s colors.
In the hall, he fights the urge to sink to the floor. If he wants to sleep, he needs to find B’s room. Better yet, he needs to find a way off the ship so he can go into a lake. He arrives at the stairs. He doesn’t want to use them, but he is too tired to climb the bars. He starts to circle the open space, and suddenly he does hear footsteps.
Something slams into him and shoves him into the darkness of the hallway. His back hits the wall, startling old pain awake. “What the hell are you doing?” demands B.
“Who’s askin’?” Roach says, though B’s arm across his throat makes it hard to speak.
“You cut that shit out. What did I tell you? Huh?” B grabs his shoulders and shakes him. “I said as long as you’re on the ship, you stay in my room. I said I’d take you outside once I’d made sure it was safe. You deaf and stupid?”
This is different from anything Roach has experienced before, even the female’s attacks. Her anger was broader, less intimate. Roach understands that B’s anger is directed at him specifically. B would not behave the same way if Roach were, say, the Silver from the lab who had escaped.
“I ought to fucking let her find you. Let her cut you up, rip your heart out and photograph it.”
Roach can’t stop watching B’s lips move. They are the edges of a tear in flesh that was meant to be, the outline of a wound that is permanent and necessary. Roach puts his own lips on them to see if he can taste some of B’s words, capture the flavor of the feelings behind them.
B is still only for a second. Then his lips move again, but quietly, covering Roach’s. B’s lips do what his hands do, pull Roach close one second, push him away the next. They cannot figure out how to hold on, so they attack, over and over again. Roach is aware of how many layers there are to B: his rubber shell, his clothes, skin hidden under all this. Roach wears only the rips and bruises Joele put on him. Even his heart can’t hide. It glows brighter than the colors in those pictures. B puts his hand over the glow, follows it as it moves through Roach’s body, his palm dry and hot.
“Come on.” B takes Roach’s hand. Together they move to the middle of the ship and up the stairs. Roach has never used stairs before, and every step he’s sure his feet will get confused and he’ll fall. But he has no choice, because B is pulling him, and if he doesn’t think about it, he’s fine. The old ceiling becomes their floor. They run down the hall, to the familiar door, the door to B’s room.
Grena once asked Roach’s clan if Silvers had sex-for-fun. Not to produce children, but simply for the pleasure of contact, of connection. She’d tried to ask the question in the Silver language, but the way she worded it was funny and a few Silvers laughed. Grena waited patiently for an answer. Roach wanted to speak, but he wasn’t sure what to say. Only one pair of Silvers is supposed to breed per month, a male and a female, to produce an offspring. Limiting the number of breeding pairs ensures that the population stays low, and that everyone has enough quilopea. Since only a male and a female can produce offspring, sometimes two males or two females breed, knowing they can do so without the risk of offspring.
There is a scene in Tin Star and Thunder Sam where Thunder Sam purchases the services of a whore, which is a human female who breeds with lots of males. When Thunder Sam gets the whore in bed with him, he puts his organ inside her. Grena explained Thunder Sam doesn’t want to produce offspring with the whore. He is having sex-for-fun. To Roach, it doesn’t sound very enjoyable for either party. Thunder Sam sweats a lot, and the whore looks bored, and the bed is dirty and makes their skin itch. Still, Thunder Sam leaves “whistling, with an extra spring in his step.”
Humans know awful ways to touch each other, to touch Silvers. Maybe their pleasure-breeding i
s fun for them because they are used to roughness and pain. But it would not be fun for a Silver.
Roach does not think of this right away, because his body feels like it is still running even when they’re in B’s room and the door is shut. He accepts B’s hands, his lips, lets B push him onto the bed, draws out B’s hunger and uses it to create his own.
“You know what we’re doing?” B asks him as his lips find Roach’s neck, his shoulder. “You know how to do this?”
“Yes.” Roach feels a flash of fear at his own lie. It is not a dark fear, but a sharp, blazing thrill that leaves behind a smile he can’t explain or stop. He now knows what it is to seek adventure. Even if his adventure is not shooting outlaws or rescuing anyone, it is new, and no other Silver has done it. He thinks of lying next to B in the bed last night, B’s arms around him, and how it felt safe even though B is unknown and too strong and a little dangerous.
B moves too fast, presses too hard on his injuries, not leaving Roach room to breathe. But Roach knows that without B’s force driving them, he would never make it to this unfamiliar place he’s going. He would remain a Silver always, something B cannot desire, because a Silver is too stupid, too quiet, too slow for a human’s fevered energy.
B holds himself over Roach, his hands on the bed. “You all right?”
Roach reaches up to touch B through his clothes, where he knows B’s organ is. On human males, the organ is out all the time; it is never hidden. He likes the sound B makes when he touches him. B moves to undo his pants, and Roach takes his hand away. The clothes don’t just hide B, they protect Roach, and Roach balks at losing this last barrier between them. He closes his eyes and feels B’s knuckles graze his skin as B pulls the clothing down.
