Eden

by Louise Wise

  Bodie’s eyes flickered over to Fly, knowing the next move was his. And as he looked, Fly withdrew the long knife that he kept secure around his upper thigh, and began to clean his claws with the tip of the blade. This was a deliberate attempt to intimidate Matt, and Bodie looked over to see if it had been successful.

  Matt was staring hard at Fly, looking far from put off.

  “Your spaceship is, or rather was, some kind of flying penitentiary system. “

  A silence fell on the ground, broken only by the horned creature’s snorts as it sniffed hopefully for food while tethered to the ground by a wooden stake and Jenny’s soft intake of breath.

  Matt grinned, obviously pleased at the impact his words caused. “Your ship was no more than a flying prison, clearing your planet of undesirables. Am I getting closer still?”

  Fly returned his knife to his thigh belt. “What interest is it to you?”

  Matt looked smug, clearly knowing he had hit his target. “It was a ship designed for lengthy flights, wasn’t it? A magnificent ship really, and it wasn’t destroyed when it came down, and as I’ve said already, it was protected from asteroids. And I’m ninety-nine per cent certain it could’ve re-launched itself. So if the asteroid didn’t cause all the destruction, what did?”

  Fly was silent, and his passive stare was fixed on Matt. But if Bodie, or even Matt, had Jenny’s insight, they would have seen a brief flash of pain pass over his face. As it was, nobody noticed a change in his alien, expressionless, mask.

  “I found rows and rows of tiny cabins on the highest floors. Only they weren’t cabins, but stinking, filthy cells. Some we still occupied by lone bodies otherwise each cell was empty, apart from chains and shackles. And the dead I saw looked to have been victims of murder or of an assassination of some kind. Their deaths certainly hadn’t been natural, anyway.”

  Bodie glanced at Jenny, and followed her gaze resting on Fly’s ankle. Bodie added two and two together and came up with the correct answer.

  “Jesus,” he said.” He looked across at Matt. “God Matt, I wish you’d had kept this just between us.”

  Matt raised his eyebrows. “Why? Do you think Fly’s a danger to us?” He clapped a hand to his mouth with dramatic emphasis. “My, he might have been a prisoner!”

  Bodie pursed his lips angrily and said nothing. He looked at Fly who was staring at Matt without expression, or rather with an expression that was too strange for Bodie to decipher.

  Matt was grinning smugly, without fear, at Fly. And that’s what worried Bodie. He felt helpless and vulnerable without the use of his legs, and needed Matt to think rationally before they got themselves into deep trouble with the alien.

  Alien or not, Fly was a huge bison of a man. Matt on his own stood no chance against him.

  Matt belched loudly, and patted his stomach. “Pardon me,” he said. “Better out than in, rather like Fly in a plane at 40,000 feet.” He grinned around at everyone, clearly pleased with his own wit.

  The others ignored him, knowing his games.

  “What happened to everyone else?” Bodie asked Fly, trying to keep his voice as meek as possible. He was aware Matt would think him weak, but he didn’t care. It was survival.

  “I presume they are all dead,” Fly answered.

  Bodie stroked his newly grown beard, his blue eyes never leaving Fly’s face. The scientist in him was aroused. “Why?” he asked. “Why do you presume they are dead?”

  “We are an incredibly violent race,” Fly said after a moment’s pause. “Not aggressive, but violent in a way you could not comprehend. I used to read about Earth’s inhabitants and ever since, I have become intrigued by your “gentler” culture. The divide between us is great.”

  “So, what crime did you commit?” Matt demanded.

  “I don’t think any of that matters,” Jenny said, she glared at him before turning her angry gaze onto Bodie.

  Bodie felt like she had slapped him. He lowered his head, feeling ashamed as if he had done the snooping instead of Matt. “Murder,” Fly said in a low voice. “I murdered people.”

  The smug smile from Matt’s face slipped - for a moment. He slapped his thigh, and looked triumphantly across at Jenny. “There!” he said. “Doesn’t that prove you’d be wise to stay away from him?”

  Bodie was dumbstruck. He stared from Fly to Jenny knowing his mouth was hanging open.

  “I - I knew all about it,” she stammered at Bodie’s unspoken question. “H-he told me everything.”

  Matt leaned over. “Liar,” he said in her face.

  Bodie watched her color up, and Matt sniggered.

  “So, murderer, what happened to the spaceship and its occupants?” Matt asked impatiently.

  After a pause, Fly relied, “Rebellion. There was a rebellion between the wardens and the prisoners.”

  Bodie felt some of his forbearance lifting. Fly seemed anxious, as if he were afraid Matt’s discovery would make Jenny turn against him, Bodie thought.

  “Tell us what happened,” said Jenny softly.

  Fly turned his head and looked at her. “The Itor justice system decided to stop executing its criminals and, instead, fly them into deep space where it could discard them on a suitable - though not necessarily hospitable - planet.” He turned towards Matt. “How did you phrase it? Clearing our planet of undesirables?”

  “That’s right, like yourself,” Matt replied with a smirk.

  Bodie bit his lip to suppress a grin. Matt certainly had balls! “How long has this punishment been going on?” he asked. He turned towards Fly, leaning as far forward in the chair as his crippled body would allow, so that he could hear every single piece of information. His earlier anxiety was gone, in its place was the abhorrence one might feel for a drunken vagrant.

  “Three prison ships have been sent to inhospitable planets. The first blew up before it left the atmosphere on Itor, the second made it, and we were the third, and ironically, the final batch. I suppose, while it lasted, it was a way of marking a planet with new blood.”

  “And was the ship’s misfortune down to the captives?” asked

  Jenny.

  “The ship smelled of mutiny long before it came down, and I knew the wardens were not going to abandon us alive.

  “When the asteroid struck the ship, many of us were able to escape in the confusion. I made several explosives, which I set around the ship, and then I deliberately allowed myself to be captured -”

  “You killed your fellow prisoners to save yourself?” Matt asked in obvious disgust. He began to say more, but Jenny interrupted him.

  “Matt, please!” said Jenny. “Go on, Fly.”

  “My capture meant I would be taken to the basement for punishment,” Fly continued. “But it would also mean that I would be safe when the explosives blew. It did mean many people would die, but we are not a social race… at least I never thought so.”

  “Basement?” said Matt, and everybody looked at him, expecting another caustic remark. “I went down there. I found more leg chains and other devices that reminded me of medieval torture appliances. Itor carcasses had been left to rot. Many were just piles of bones, others were on the point of decomposing, but some were hardly touched by decay at all. They looked almost human…”

  Bodie blew out in a whistle. “Wow,” he said. “A graveyard cellar.” He looked hard at Fly. “I suppose you were meant to be one of those bodies?”

  Fly seemed deep in thought. Bodie watched his face, trying to find away into his mind. If he could’ve seen inside he would have been horrified at the re-runs in Fly’s head.

  Jenny laid a hand on his arm. “If this is too hard for you to talk about.”

  “No.” He looked at her. “It isn’t. I was just wondering how I would react to the violence now. Everyone was desperate for survival that day, me included. Each of us reacted in the way we were accustomed.

  “I was taken to the basement and punished,” his face twisted into a smirk, and he said almost to himself: “alt
hough the punishment was a pleasure.”

  “What do you mean?” Bodie asked, not willing to let any information slip pass.

  “I killed my torturer, but not before I had been shackled.” He grimaced in memory. “I had to break my ankle to escape the restraints. But the fire was still raging, and I was forced back into the basement. I burst a water main and lived on nothing but water for a long time. When I got out, the bodies were numerous. Most had been killed in the blast and fire, others by their injuries and the rest just continued to fight amongst themselves until none was left.”

  Bodie watched Jenny lower her hand to Fly’s thigh. Slowly he picked it up and turned it over in his, as if overawed by its size.

  “I thought you had been in the fire,” she said. “What happened to your body and face?”

  “My lifestyle.”

  Jenny continued to gaze up at him from eyes that held only anxiety and confusion. Bodie felt sorry for her, Fly’s story hadn’t been nice, but hopefully it would put a distance between them.

  “I suppose that explains why you don’t want to return home.” She shook her head. “It’s horrific. I really had no idea your world was like that. Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “That is my past, and has nothing to do with my future.”

  “Why haven’t your people come for the crew? They don’t know they are all dead, or do they?” asked Bodie with a frown.

  “They know. Everybody is fitted with a logging device and only in death does it cease to work. It is probably believed as I am living on an unpopulated planet my punishment is justified. It is what they intended, after all. “

  “Where’s the device?”

  “Injected inside my body. I could not remove it even if I had the means. It is designed to move around and is undetectable.”

  Bodie looked at him as if he could see inside his mind. “I think I understand,” he nodded in Jenny’s direction. “You’re enchanted by her lack of aggression, and that’s why you wanted to take care of her.”

  Fly paused, as though thinking of his reply. “In the beginning I could not understand her gentleness, but it appealed, and her lack of aggression humbled me. While I have known Jenny, her only concern has been for you two; concern for herself was secondary. And that is what I find hard to understand, even now. Her, your, human emotions are vast and very complicated.

  “You find the fact that I saved myself, while others died, horrific. But maybe now you can understand why I let that happen, and not judge me too harshly,” Fly continued. “Your race is pitted with kindness, and if you find no humanity in your people, the human will try to find a purpose towards it.”

  It was one of the longest speeches Bodie had ever heard him make, the voice even more clipped and robotic than usual, as if Fly had been forced to consider each word before he could speak it.

  Bodie glanced at Matt. The alien had actually sounded humble! Perhaps he believed he and Matt were beginning to like him. “Like” was far down on the list of adjectives Bodie had for describing his emotions. His looked into the alien’s eyes. They had lost their dry look, and glistened like black diamonds.

  “If you don’t use body language, how come our expressions are easy to read?”

  “There is a speech lost to you, which you would probably recognize as primitive. Your body language is the same primitive language we used to have, it is a mere voice that has been dropped by us over the advancing years.”

  “How can we be so alike when we’re from different planets?” “Different planets, but the same atoms.”

  “Why have you never made yourselves known to us?”

  “You have nothing we want.”

  Bodie felt something cold crawl up his spine, but before he could answer, Matt chortled loudly.

  “You’ve got us wrong, murderer, we aren’t gentle or kind. We’ve had war after war since time began, and could certainly defend ourselves against a bunch of clawed aliens. “

  “Without Jenny you are dead,” said Fly. “But with her we are forever enemies because you are jealous of our relationship.”

  “Not jealous, sickened.”

  Bodie glared hard at Matt. If he could have moved, he would’ve kicked him. If the alien believed them to be friendly, then so be it. It would make the job of killing him far easier. He looked at the alien’s eyes again, and was unsurprised, although disheartened, to see they had become the familiar dry, black stones.

  “Surely you can understand our worry when we realized the significance of your, er, relationship,” Bodie said in appeasement.

  “I understand more than you realize.”

  Bodie felt he was being warned. He glanced at Jenny and knew by her expression that Fly’s story hadn’t put her off. It seemed to have the opposite effect as she sat serenely by his side, sipping a cup of melon juice. She hadn’t appeared to hear any of the all-too- familiar underlying threat in the alien’s voice.

  “You admit your race is violent, yet you haven’t harmed Jenny because she humbled you?” he wrinkled his nose. “Even I’m not that gullible.”

  Matt made a loud noise in the back of his throat. “He fancied a piece, that’s the only reason he let her live - I doubt screwing a corpse is the same.”

  The silence was overpowering.

  Hot colour flooded Jenny’s face, and Bodie watched as she and Fly exchanged glances. He frowned hard, wondering what they were remembering, and finally his loathing was justified because he read the humiliation that flashed over her face.

  His hands curled into fists. Oh, Jen! Jenny, what have you got

  yourself into?

  “It was not a question, but I will answer it anyway,” Fly was saying. “I wanted more than sex. I wanted companionship.”

  “Oh, you wanted more all right!” Matt snickered. “You wanted a soft, willing body, not one petrified with rigor mortis.”

  Fly launched to his feet, his eyes dancing with electricity. He hauled Matt to his feet by the front of his soiled suit, and shook him as a dog might a rabbit. His throat muscles expanded, and began to bulge. But it happened so fast that Bodie, locked in his anger and disgust, blinked and missed it.

  Then Jenny was on her feet, squeezing herself between them.

  “No, Fly,” she cried. “Don’t!”

  Fly pivoted on the balls of his feet, and began to walk away. His tread was heavy, as if he was trying to stamp out the anger that had threatened Matt.

  “Fly, wait,” she called, but whether he heard her or not, he continued to walk until he disappeared over the brow of the hill.

  TWENTY-THREE

  Fly stood with his arms folded. Above him the twin suns had set, and the remaining moons had risen. His affection for Jenny was finally acknowledged, and now he could understand how the emotion hurt. In a way it was more powerful than the violence he had inherited from his world.

  A long moment later the natives began to call, but he failed to respond to their singing. His thoughts were deep. They went against everything he’d been brought up to believe, and if it weren’t for this strange, almost erotic, emotion that Jenny labeled “love”, he would kill Matt, and probably Bodie, too.

  While they had talked during dinner Fly believed he was finally winning their trust; their emotions had seemed so easy to read, but he had read them wrong. They despised and mistrusted his intentions as much, if not more, than ever.

  He collected a handmade spade and axe, the one and only saw from the barn, and secured several knives around his waist with twine. He came to a decision, and would stand by it, even if he wasn’t entirely sure it would work.

  This is for Jenny, he told himself.

  “You may be larger than life, Matt, but he’s physically hardened. If you take him on and get yourself killed, where will that leave us?”

  “I’ll wait until you’re better.”

  “Thanks,” Bodie replied with dry humor. He knew Matt was intelligent, he wouldn’t have got where he was if he wasn’t, but he had an uneven temper, and often ac
ted on impulse: it was one of the reasons why Bodie had failed his appraisal.

  He shifted down on the mattress where Matt had put him only a moment ago, and cried out when pain ricocheted up his legs. He waited for the pain to pass, eyes tightly closed, before gingerly lowering himself backwards. At this small achievement he felt elated and lay back panting but satisfied.

  Matt tutted. “Let me help you next time.”

  “Have to do something for myself. Christ, it’s bad enough when I want a piss.”

  Matt grinned. “It’s not so nice helping you piss, either!”

  Bodie grunted, closing his eyes, and tried to force sleep to claim him. But all that filled his mind were the images of Jenny and the alien. He couldn’t blame her for not wanting to stay with them tonight; listening to Matt’s demented speeches would have driven Bodie away had he been able to walk. She had stormed off to her cabin only minutes ago, after telling them both to, “Go to hell!”

  He worried about her. She hadn’t been merely subdued after the alien left them, she’d brooded. And when Fly’s absence stretched towards dusk, she’d not spoken at all.

  Bodie felt stuck. He loved Jenny to bits, but couldn’t share her perspective. The thoughts of her and Fly together made him uneasy, as though he were watching an innocent kitten playing with a crocodile.

  Fly wasn’t at the house, and walking through the hand-ploughed field, she saw he wasn’t there, either. Jenny stopped and, shading her eyes, she peered over the river. She dropped her hand, disappointed.

  Turning, she noticed him over the far side of the meadow, near a cliff-face coated with brown, abrasive vine. Her heart flip-flopped when she saw him. Naked from the chest up, his hard muscular body, sleek with sweat, was a beacon to her eyes.

  She stopped to drink in the sight of him as he chopped into a felled tree; cutting it into smaller, manageable sizes. She knew then that, for Fly, she’d leave Matt and Bodie.

  He must have sensed her for he looked up. They stood watching one another for a moment; both understanding that Jenny had saved Matt’s life last night.