by Chloe Garner
“Yeah. Except that he drives me crazy, he’s a good guy.”
Troy laughed, then shifted.
“It’s time.”
She fought back, pulling him back down into the pillows, and buried her head into his chest.
“Not yet,” she said. “I’m going back to sleep.”
“I’ve got a lab to run,” Troy said, rolling away. “You can stay as long as you want, but I’ve gotta go.”
She watched him get up and pull on a shirt.
“I miss you too,” she said. She’d never owned up to it before. He turned. “When I’m on jumps. I wish you could be there. Like nothing could stop us.”
He nodded.
“I’ve got to get to the lab. Send me a message before you leave.”
“Yeah.”
He poured himself a bowl of cereal and ate it standing up while he checked his phone, then disappeared into the bathroom for a few minutes. When he came back out, she was dressed.
“Those are your clothes from yesterday,” he said.
“I’m going home,” she answered. “No big deal. I didn’t want to go pawing through all your stuff to try to find my other clothes.”
He wiggled an eyebrow.
“You’re not that kind of girl.”
She sighed.
“Maybe someday.”
He grinned.
“Damn, I hope so. I’ll talk to you before you go. Be safe.”
She nodded.
“I’ll talk to you soon.”
She made herself a breakfast of fruit and coffee before leaving. Jesse was waiting at her car.
“How long have you been here?” she asked, unlocking it.
“Saw Troy leave. Figured you wouldn’t be too far behind.”
“I’m not going to the base first thing,” she said. “I can pick you up on my way back by.”
“You’re going to your house?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
“I’ve never seen it,” he said. “I’d like to come, if that’s okay.”
She hesitated, then shrugged.
“Whatever.”
She pulled into the neighborhood and Jesse sat up. She didn’t ask him what he thought; she didn’t want to know. His interest in the houses and her neighbors and what they were doing was unnerving.
“So these are civilians?” he asked.
“Yup.”
“They look the same as soldiers,” he commented.
“Fatter,” she said, forgetting herself. She backed up. “Most of us look about the same, off-duty.”
“I’m surprised you don’t have some kind of badge that you wear all the time. Like the cadets with their hair.”
She smiled. The buzzcuts and posture did give them away, anywhere. She still recognized soldiers by their builds, though.
She pulled into the driveway and after a moment’s hesitation, opened the garage and pulled in. She was wishing she’d left Jesse on base. She wasn’t emotionally attached to the place, but it was hers. He got out wordlessly and looked around the garage, then followed her into the house.
“It’s a long way out, isn’t it? From the base? Don’t you miss the activity on-base? Are you punishing yourself for something?”
“It’s a nice house in a nice neighborhood with good schools, and I could afford it,” she answered, going to the closet under the stairs. She pulled out her duffel bag and turned to face him.
“That’s it,” she said. “Do you want something to drink before we go?”
“Please,” he said. “What is that?”
“My kit.”
He blinked, looking at her for a moment.
“You are punishing yourself. For what?”
“What do you want to drink?”
“I’ve discovered I like coffee,” he said. She gave him a curt nod and went to make two cups of coffee. She handed him his and sat down at the kitchen table. The quiet in the house was nice, in the mornings. At night it drove her mad, but in the mornings, when she didn’t have to leave for the base before dawn, she could sit at her table and look out her windows and pretend that she was on another planet, again, observing the natives.
Troy sat across from her, blowing on his coffee. Like a human. Even the long fingers looked right, wrapped around a mug.
“You care about the schools?” he asked.
“Shut up.”
He smiled and looked out the window.
“This is an acquired taste, isn’t it?” he asked.
“What? Coffee?”
“Living this far from the core of the population. Having such a high distribution of the population.” He glanced at her. “This isn’t a human thing. You have city people and rural people everywhere. I never understood the country people.”
“This isn’t the country,” she said. “It’s a suburb. When you start seeing corn and chickens, you’ve hit country.”
He shrugged.
“Suburbs. It’s something you grow into.”
“I guess,” she said. “There’s a lot to be said for it.”
“I believe you,” he answered.
“No you don’t,” she said, standing. She put her mug on the counter, secretly pleased at the subversiveness of leaving a dish, unwashed, on the counter in the full knowledge that she wouldn’t be back for days or weeks. Jesse motioned at her with his mug.
“Can I bring it?”
“If you want.”
She picked up her bag and looked around the house. She was sure there were things she was supposed to do, like turn off the water or cancel the newspaper, but she would be back before the ground froze, and she didn’t take a paper. She didn’t have a cat to feed or neighbors whose names she knew to notify.
So she just left.
“We’ll be there a little early,” Jesse said.
“I’ve got a couple of things to finish up,” she answered. “I assume you can amuse yourself.”
“Always.”
She glanced at him.
“That’s the most true thing you’ve told me, isn’t it?”
“I don’t often lie,” he answered, watching the neighborhood go by again with deep interest. She let it pass.
They were past base security by the time he spoke again.
“I like you. You know that, right?”
It startled her, and she didn’t answer right away.
“Yeah,” she said finally. “You may be a pain, but… Yeah. I know that.”
He nodded.
“I want to see what happened with the test from last night,” he said as they got out of the car.
“I’ll meet you at the portal at eleven-fifteen.”
“You’ll meet me at my desk,” she said. “You still aren’t authorized to access the portal on your own.”
He made a dismissive noise that she took for agreement, and they parted ways.
She tried to put her focus into her work, but the ticking at the back of her head was inescapable. She ended up playing with a pen on her desktop, thinking about previous jumps. She startled when Jesse nudged her.
“It’s time,” he said. She looked up to see Troy standing in the doorway.
“Wanted to see you off,” he called, turning. Cassie grabbed her jump kit from under her desk and followed, glancing back once at the room. Most of the room was working, but enough of them knew what was going on to make it seem still, compared to normal. They were watching.
She waved.
Jesse snorted.
“This isn’t exactly a giant leap for mankind,” he said.
“Seriously,” she said, turning to look at him as she walked backwards. “Do you know every story?”
“No better way to understand a people,” he said. “You think you have stories… you should meet some of the species I have.”
“You’ve met other species?” she wondered aloud, then scolded herself. Of course he had. He’d been through the portal. She heard him laugh.
Troy led the way to the portal room, badging through door after door. Cass
ie swiped her badge out of a sense of duty at each one of them, despite the guards knowing her and the door already being unlocked.
And then they were there.
The room bustled as it always did, private jump guards getting cargo on and off the portal floor. The color was a consistent gray-brown of normal packaging, with occasional riots of odd hues. Today, it was a collector who had commissioned a taxidermied animal from another planet. It had green fur, like a macaw’s wings. Cassie absently cringed at the amount of paperwork that would go into importing it.
She paused at the edge of the floor and Troy hugged her.
“Give me a call when you get back. You have to tell me everything.”
“Actually, she doesn’t,” Jesse said. “It’s in her contract.”
“I read it,” Troy said. “She doesn’t have to tell the air force anything, but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t have to tell me.”
Jesse gave him an odd look, something between evaluating and patronizing, then passed Cassie, wandering out onto the floor. Troy shook his head.
“He’s going to get himself killed.”
“I think he knows what he’s doing,” Cassie said, not able to voice a lot of confidence. She hugged Troy again. “I’m going, now. I’ll see you soon.”
He held up a hand as she traced a careful path around the cargo, equally avoiding the large empty spaces where something would be scheduled to land.
“What do you need me to do?” she asked Jesse when she caught up to him. He put his hand out to her, off to the side, palm flat. She took a moment, making sure he knew she was skeptical, then took his hand. He put his wrist out in front of him, using the hand that held hers to trace patterns on the back of his other wrist.
“What’s that?” she asked, leaning over, noticing for the first time that he had silvery patterns from mid-arm down to the back of his hand.
“Too much explanation,” he said, dropping his hands. “You ready?”
She hefted her duffel higher on her shoulder and nodded. The world surged and vanished.
The sky was gold.
They stood between a pair of tall buildings, three or four stories, depending on how tall the planet’s occupants were, that were built out of tan bricks the size of cinder blocks. The road they stood on was a horse-cart wide and composed of dust the same color tan as the building. And the sky was gold.
She shivered.
“Where are we?” she asked, pulling out her phone. Jesse gently pushed the device back into her pocket.
“Geometrically, it doesn’t matter,” he said, then took her hand again. “Come on.” She tried to pull her hand away, but his fingers wrapped tighter. “Stay close. If I lose you, there’s no known tactic for finding a stray human around here.”
The reached the point where the narrow street intersected with a much larger one paved in well-shaped gray stones. She knelt to touch the stones, wanting to get an idea of their composition.
“Slate,” Jesse said, “near as matters. Quasi-magnetic.”
“Magnetic?” she asked. He nodded. She stood, watching a bullet-shaped vehicle glide past over it. The street was quiet, but there were people out, walking, going about their lives. She checked for a sun. It shone blue through the gold atmosphere, low over the horizon.
“Early or late?”
“Early.”
She nodded, taking in the people. Suddenly it dawned on her.
“Jesse, how many sentient species emerged here?”
He laughed.
“Just one.”
She started looking for trait language, the things that would explain to her how the species were interrelated, but she couldn’t find them. They walked in matching sets, two, three, four of them at a time, but none of them matched each other.
“Jesse…”
He gave her a tug.
“Come on.”
She followed, catching snatches of conversation from group to group as they went by. None of them were languages that her implant recognized, and she didn’t get enough of any one conversation to start recognizing words. Just strange sounds, vocalization patterns that were completely foreign to her brain. Jesse pulled her into one of the buildings and approached a woman sitting with four legs coiled underneath her. Cassie blinked, realizing her predisposition and inspecting it. Woman: smaller, finer features, sometimes with brighter coloring, sometimes with duller coloring, often with more socially-outing tendencies. It was the curvy shape and refined features that concluded female in her human-normative mind, but she didn’t have any comparisons to work with. The other individuals visible in the front area of this floor of the building were all as unique as the people outside had been.
Jesse spoke to the woman for a moment in yet another language, then accepted what looked like a glass rod from her and put it in his mouth.
“Did you just do a cheek swab?” Cassie asked. Jesse handed the rod back to the woman and glanced at Cassie, shrugging. There was a brief pause, then the woman spoke to Jesse again and he answered her. The pitch of the language was beginning to change, conforming to English norms as the implant in her brain began to catch up with the language, but she still couldn’t get words. The woman handed Jesse a clear sheet the size of a stick of gum and he thanked her - by pitch, not by words, still - and they turned. He lay the sheet over his arm, where it liquefied and vanished.
“What was that?” she asked.
“A financial identity,” he told her, taking her hand again.
“You know I’m not going to wander off, right?”
“The first pretty thing that goes by and triggers your curiosity, you’re gone,” he said. She glowered at him, but couldn’t say for sure if he was serious.
“A financial identity,” she said, trying to pull more information out of him as they darted across the street. The area was livening even as they stood there, with more vehicles and more pedestrians everywhere around them.
“Yes. And now we’re going into town,” he said.
“This isn’t town?”
It wasn’t a city, certainly, but it looked like a respectable town, from what she’d seen. He laughed and pushed another door open.
“Why isn’t it dusty?” Cassie asked, mind working on multiple problems at once.
“What?”
“The side streets aren’t paved nor do they bear vegetation. The atmosphere should be dusty, and so should most surfaces.”
He snorted.
“Bear vegetation,” he said. “Stop writing the report. It’s because of the humidity. They don’t have the same issues with parasitic plants here, like your mold, because they got rid of them, and the humidity keeps the dust down. It’s actually a climate a lot of the universe is jealous of.”
“The rest of the universe,” she said. Jesse nodded absently, pulling her onto one of dozens of platforms around the room.
“Gonna be a little snug here, until you learn how to use these,” he said, reaching out to touch a metal post and pulling her within inches of himself. She started to argue, then snapped her head back, looking around the room. She opened her mouth to speak, blinking fast, when the pieces snapped into place.
“That was a portal.”
“Indeed,” he answered, letting her step back. “Makes your little contraption look pretty rude by comparison. What a kick that thing has got.”
“They just let anyone use them?” she asked.
“There’s a nominal cost for the energy they use to sustain it, but most offices and apartments have them.”
“Do they have limited destinations?” she asked. He shook his head.
“Anywhere in the universe, just like yours.”
“Completely uncontrolled like that.”
He gave her a little smile and took her hand again, leading to a small screen on a wall. He put his palm on it, and it expanded, displaying text that Cassie had no mechanism to read. The implant only worked on verbal language. Newer ones were expanding to written language, but you had what you had. Jesse
ran his fingers over the screen for a moment, then walked back over to the platform, pulling Cassie next to him again, and touched something on his wrist. The world changed again, like a blink, and they were in a large room. Jesse let go of her hand.
“You’re safe to wander here, as long as you don’t leave.”
“Leave?” she asked. He pointed at a wide, smooth gray surface on a nearby wall.
“That’s the front door. It will open if you touch it. Don’t go out.”
“Where are we?”
He licked his lips, then walked across the room and put his palms on two sections of glass that slid apart noiselessly before him. He looked over his shoulder at her and gave her a little head jerk, summoning her forward. She followed, trying to take in details of everything. Construction, features, sizes, potential utility. She couldn’t make it tell her anything.
She found herself standing on a balcony dozens of stories above a blue-green-gold city in the midst of a forest of sky-scrapers. The air that greeted her was cool and moist and fresh. Jesse leaned on the railing.
“Welcome to civilization.”
She breathed.
“What do I smell?” she asked, letting her eyes rove over the cityscape around and far below her.
“Low-nitrogen atmosphere, mostly. Slight carbonization to the dust that is here. You might think it smells a little like baked goods.”
She nodded.
“That’s it.”
There was a stirring, cool breeze and she shivered. She had the sudden impulse to jump off the balcony, to just fly. It was one she knew with great familiarity, but it had never felt so close.
“It’s beautiful,” she said.
“It’s considered one of the gem cities of the universe,” Jesse said. “One of the oldest civilizations in existence. Most of them are dead.”
She glanced at him with concern, and he shook his head.
“It happens. They get more and more prosperous, life gets easier and easier, and their birthrate declines. They’ve been in population decline for millenia, now. To make up for it, they live a good long time, and their cities are populated by scads of other species. The civilization won’t die, really. Just the people that founded it.”
