Beacon 23

by Hugh Howey

  It’s not just the vivid beauty of the object, caught in the lifeboat’s spotlights, nor the grain of wood—a sight for sore eyes. It’s the way the box has broken open that makes me think the sign of life picked up by the sensors might be leaking from the ruptured package.

  I pass through a haze of envelopes and bound packages. Reaching with the arm, I seize the box, and then I turn the lifeboat ninety degrees; the blip stays perfectly centered on the screen. This is the object that disrupted the reverie of my day. Its signal is faint and fading. I close my visor and pull the articulating arm back inside, bringing whatever I’ve found into the safety and comfort of my atmosphere.

  • 9 •

  I wait to inspect the box in the airlock, back at the beacon. If there’s any contamination, I can purge the airlock and decontaminate myself before entering the living space or removing my suit. I’m not hopeful though. The blip of life on my display was already fading fast when I brought the object inside. I’m starting to think someone’s order for a pet frog or worms to go fishing with was cracked open when that container took a tumble.

  I set the box down on the changing bench in the airlock and drop the medkit satchel on the floor. Rummaging through the medkit, I find the biogen scanner. There’s a massive red warning stamped on it: “DO NOT REMOVE HELMET BEFORE USE.” Which makes me think they should have the warning on the inside of our visor, not on the scanner. By the time you’re reading this warning, you’ve already acted responsibly. I fumble with the infuriatingly little power switch on the scanner, wondering how many space monkeys have removed their thick gloves before operating this thing and how bad a job NASA does at creating and placing warnings.

  It finally powers up. I wave the scanner over my suit, around my helmet, up and down my arms, then slowly bring it toward the box. I orbit the box twice. I can feel the scanner humming in my palm. An amber light flashes while it takes its readings, and then, finally, the light goes green.

  Green means everything is okay. At least, I’m pretty sure that’s what it means. Or does green mean, Yes, we found something hazardous? No, that wouldn’t make any sense. I’m just second-guessing because this is scary shit, and I remind myself that if there was anything in the air that would react with my body, it would’ve reacted with the scanner. What I really want right now is a second scanner to scan this scanner. And maybe a third.

  My hibernating little OCD self seems to be stirring. He only does this when he’s pretty sure I’m about to die a horrible, grisly death. I saw a lot of this guy in the war. But during the last week, he’s been that old college roommate who just drops in one day, crashes on the couch, and next thing you know he’s living with you and leaving the milk out on the counter.

  Ah, fuck it. I either die in the airlock breathing in some toxin being mailed to a politician, or I sit around until a large hunk of debris punches a hole in the wall, sucking out every bit of my atmosphere. I debate whether or not to hold my breath. Is the massive, wheezing inhalation that follows worse than all the small little puffing breaths I might take instead? (I often debated this when a squad mate would lay a fart with a howl of laughter. Breathe normal? Or put it off and then risk sucking that fart so deep into your lungs that it stays there forever, little fart cells melding way inside the core of you?)

  I go with the sipping breath technique, lips pursed, almost whistling as I breathe in little gasping bits of air. Trusting that damn scanner, I pop my visor. The breathing technique makes me a little dizzy. At least, I think it’s the breathing. My OCD roommate is screaming in my skull, yelling, “Told you so!” and assuring me we’re both about to die and that it’s all my fault for not listening to him.

  I pop my helmet and tug off my gloves. I breathe more normally, and the dizziness subsides. My roommate shrugs, munches on a cold slice of pizza, and turns back to the TV. I return my attention to the little box.

  There’s a pair of shears in the medkit for cutting gauze and snipping away walk suits. I use these to cut the cardboard box that’s still partially concealing the gleaming wood. I’m careful not to destroy the label, as I’m sure NASA will want to know who the package was going to and where it was coming from. Glancing at the name, I see that it was heading to a university on Oxford. The initials are SAU. Never heard of it. But there are only a few thousand universities on Oxford, and I could probably name two. The recipient is a Prof. Allard Bockman. The sender’s name was damaged by the impact, but I’m sure NASA will be able to track the barcode.

  I set the cardboard aside and study the box, which is gorgeous even in its damaged state. An ornate pattern carved around the perimeter looks like a chain of links, all intertwined. It’s imperfect enough for me to imagine it was done by hand, but it’s precise enough that I recognize the talent and care put into it. Or maybe a machine made it with just enough variation to fool me into thinking it was done by hand. You never know what’s real these days. How do cynics find joy in even the simplest of things anymore?

  The first thing I inspect is the damage. I probe the destroyed corner with my thumb; there are jagged splinters everywhere. It occurs to me, suddenly—my roommate drops his slice of pie and jumps from the couch in alarm—that the hole may have been created from within, rather than punched from without. Maybe something escaped!

  I set the box down and take a step back, nearly tripping over my helmet. For a moment, out of the corner of my eye, one of my gloves looks like a giant white spider. I shriek. I remember the fear I used to feel in the army from seeing a sword-leech in my bunk—and then the much greater fear from no longer seeing the sword-leech in my bunk—and electricity rushes up my spine.

  There’s an itch by my knee.

  And something moving along my hip and up my ribs.

  I claw at the suit I haven’t taken off for a week, trying to remember where the buckles and zippers and snaps are. Working my arms and legs free, I realize the itching is probably from having the damn thing on for a week, and that I’ve been itching constantly for days. And that the only thing likely to kill me in that suit is the damn stench.

  Naked and sweating, breathing hard, a hundred thousand dollars’ worth of NASA garb inside out and scattered like a tux on a wedding night, I try to remember a guy who used to pick up a rifle and run toward a legion of Ryph with balls of plasma blooming on either side of him, eruptions of dirt, dogfights in the atmo, and kinetic missiles zipping down from orbit.

  Who is this limp-dick, shell-shocked, mamby-wamby space monkey I’ve become?

  Was this me before boot camp?

  This was me back in high school. The real me. What the hell did the army do to me?

  That’s when I hear the scratching noise. Coming from the box sitting on the airlock bench.

  And a small voice that does not seem to be coming from inside my head.

  • 10 •

  Picking up the box, that mirror finish of wood with the hole blown out, I turn it to find the clasp, and again I hear something move inside. I feel the clunk of something heavy hitting one wall of the box. I feel it vibrate slightly in my hand.

  The clasp is really a series of four wood pegs, each bigger around than my finger. I push them in one at a time, and when I push the fourth, it causes the first three to slide back out flush with the box. I push the first three in again, but the lid won’t open. I reset them. Try the first two. Reset. The first and third. Reset. The middle two. Reset. Just the first. Reset. Just the second. And the lid pops open.

  The thing inside shifts again. And then I hear someone say:

  “Jesus Christ on a popsicle stick, took your goddamn time.”

  There is a rock inside the box.

  I look at the rock.

  I feel like the rock is looking at me.

  The rock shifts position ever so slightly.

  “What?” it asks.

  “Hello?” I say.

  “Yeah, hello, what the hell took you so long? I was dying in here.”

  “You’re . . . a rock,” I tell the r
ock.

  “The fuck I am.”

  I set the box back on the bench and rest on my heels, peering at the little thing. It’s gray with deep pockets of black, little fissures and cracks and pockmarks. One of the black spots is deep and might be an . . . eye? I’ve gone through countless flashcards of alien life for the army and NASA, and I’ve forgotten most of what I had to memorize to get through the tests, but I know there are shitloads of creatures that camouflage themselves either to not get stepped on or to kill the fuck out of those of us who step too close to them. Yet I’ve never seen a creature that looks so much like . . . a rock.

  “What are you?” I ask.

  “Well, since you’re obviously a human, you’d call me an Orvid. And since your accent places you from Earth, you’d obviously not give a fuck what I call myself in my own tongue, so why bother?”

  “You’re a foul-mouthed thing,” I say.

  “This is me shrugging like I give a shit,” the rock tells me.

  “This is weird,” I say out loud, mostly to myself, but I guess partly to the rock. “I mean, a lot of my life has been really freaking kooky and batshit crazy, but this is fascinatingly weird.”

  “Yeah, no shit. I’m on my way to a happy life in Oxford, and next thing I know I can’t breathe and some fruitloop is shrieking and shaking my happy little wooden home and giving me hell for my vocabulary. Jesus, man, I almost just died, and you’re thinking about yourself? What kind of special selfish are you?”

  This brings me up short. My brain is still whirling with the idea that this rock-looking alien is actually alive, so I haven’t considered the fact that a clearly sentient being very nearly just died, and here I am worried about my own feelings.

  “Damn,” I say. “Sorry. Totally. Are you okay? You need . . . like little pebbles to munch on or something?” I laugh.

  “Fuck you,” the rock says. “What I need is some water.”

  •••

  This is me, in a beacon, out on the edge of sector eight, so damn near the edge that I might as well be in sector nine, running the tap on my moisture reclamator, filling a plastic cup with water, then drizzling it on top of a rock in a smashed wooden box.

  “Not on my fucking head!” the rock says.

  I apologize but laugh. The rock has what sounds vaguely like a British accent, which makes everything it says funnier than it should.

  “Sorry,” I say.

  “Just a little puddle, man. And save me some time by putting me in it.”

  I do this. It occurs to me that I haven’t called this in or checked with NASA about what I found. I go over to the QT to see if there are any messages. Nothing. That’s pretty damn curious. So I fire off a quick “55” to Houston, which is beacon code for “Everything here is hunky-dory, in case you were wondering.”

  “Where are we?” the rock asks. And I realize that I need a name for the guy. And how really fucking cool it is to have some company other than my freaked-out OCD roommate.

  “Beacon 23,” I say. “Sector eight. On the outer edge of the Iain Banks asteroid field, between the ore rim and—”

  “Yeah, jeez, okay. The middle of nowhere, I get it. So when’s the next pickup?”

  “The next what?”

  “WHEN DO I GET HOME?” the rock shouts. It sounds like a little squeal more than a great roar, like a piece of chalk on a blackboard.

  “The, uh, next supply shuttle will be in . . . I think three months?”

  The rock stares at me.

  Did he just shrug?

  He looks exasperated.

  A bubble forms on the surface of his little puddle.

  I wonder if rocks can fart.

  “I need to name you,” I tell the rock.

  “The hell you do.”

  “I’m thinking . . .”

  “Already got a name,” the rock says.

  “. . . oh, but that’s too obvious.” I laugh. I laugh hard. It’s the first time I’ve laughed in so long that all my emotional triggers, which have only known sobbing, mix some tears in with the laughter.

  “Don’t you fucking dare,” the rock says.

  “I’m going to call you . . .”

  “I’VE GOT A NAME!”

  “. . . Rocky.”

  Rocky stares at me. It’s more of a glare, really. I start laughing again. Damn, it feels good.

  “You’re the worst human I’ve ever met,” Rocky says.

  I wipe the tears from my cheeks. “I think maybe when the supply shuttle comes, I’ll just keep you. Not tell the labcoats about you.”

  “That’s called kidnapping, you sadistic ape.”

  This makes me laugh some more. It’s the accent. It kills me.

  “Are you stoned?” Rocky asks.

  And this is too much. I double over and clutch my shins, there in the command pod, not a stitch of clothing on, laughing and crying and wheezing for breath, fearing I might not be able to stop, that I’ll die like this, die from so much joy and mirth, while debris from a destroyed cargo ship peppers the hull and cracks into the solar array, and ships full of people navigate through space at twenty times the speed of light, narrowly avoiding this great reef of drifting rocks, and all because I’m here, because I’m holding it together, this trained and hairless monkey in outer space.

  • 11 •

  Rocky and I sit up in the business end of the beacon, past the weightless tube that extends off to the side for a dozen meters, up where the GWB broadcasts all the local gravitational disturbances to ships traveling through hyperspace. My head rests against the broadcasting dome, which makes me feel like a warm hand is cradling my skull, soothing me down to my toes.

  “Tell me about your homeworld,” I say to Rocky. His box is positioned so he can gaze out the main porthole with me, at the stars and the wreck of debris he miraculously survived.

  There’s a pause. A wistful pause.

  “It’s beautiful,” he says. And then: “You’re from Earth, right?”

  “Yeah,” I tell him. “Until I was ten. Then moved to Orion with my dad. Then Ajax for a few months. Then New India. I was an army brat.”

  “Okay, okay, I didn’t ask for your entire life history,” Rocky says. “Well, imagine Earth, but nothing like that.”

  I laugh. “Gotcha.”

  We sit in silence for a long while. It feels good up here. Even better with the company. I could do another four years. I could re-up. I remember feeling this way in the army, the days that were really good, when you’d survived the bad shit and felt kinda invincible and actually, deeply happy, but maybe in an unhealthy and manic kinda way, and how those were the days when you went to your CO and saluted and shouted, in your best boot camp voice, “Sign me up for another tour, SUR!” And how later, when the high wore off, and you came down from the survivor’s rush, and your mood went back to normal, you were like, “What the fuck did I just do?”

  I felt that kind of good right then.

  After a while, Rocky starts telling me about his home planet. I listen while I gaze out at the stars and the twinkle of aluminum tinsel.

  “Your race named my planet Orvo when you found it. After the name of a physician on one of the scout ships. I think he’d died the week before or something. Anyway, you probably assume that my planet and my name sound like some gibberish series of clicks and scratchy noises, and while that’s really fucking xenophobic, you’d be right.”

  Rocky makes a series of clicks and scratchy noises. I smile. Life is really good.

  “We don’t have a moon, and our sun is a very long way away. What heat we have comes from a radioactive core, and there’s very little tectonic activity, which makes for an incredibly still planet, covered with a few meters of water in most places, except for these really shallow ledges and flat islands where most of the cool stuff takes place. That was home.”

  “So, not space-faring, I assume?” I say.

  “Yeah, asshole, not space-faring.”

  “But sentient.”

  “Smarter than
you.”

  I smile. “And your anatomy? I assume something like neurons?”

  “Not quite as simple as neurons, but similar. And yeah, we’re very social. So we developed sentience. Theory of mind and all that.”

  “What’s theory of mind?” I ask.

  Rocky pauses. Like he’s wondering if teaching a monkey is within his boundaries of patience.

  “It’s me being able to guess what you’re thinking,” he says.

  My brain is already drifting to a different topic. “What do you call a small group of your kind?” I ask.

  “Say what?”

  “Well, a group of cows is a herd. What’s a group of rocks. A bag?”

  “A bag of rocks?” Rocky asks.

  I laugh.

  “Fuck you.”

  “Rocky, you’re the best friend I’ve ever had.”

  “That settles it. I used to argue with the professor that there was no such thing as hell. I was wrong. I relent. I give up. I’ve found the joint.”

  “Where did you learn English?” I ask. “And who did you used to argue about heaven and hell with? This professor?”

  “We didn’t argue. We debated. We discussed. It’s what civilized people do. You should try it sometime.”

  “Okay.” I feel a little more sober. And for some reason, I don’t mind. I sit up, away from the GWB for a moment. “Tell me about your owner—”

  “I own me,” Rocky says.

  “Yeah, sorry.” I shake my head. “About this professor you were being sent to. On Oxford.”

  “I’m his research assistant,” Rocky says. “I just finished my internship on Delphi, was heading home. I work with Professor Bockman on human studies and consciousness.”

  “So you’re a biologist?” I ask, and a new level of stunned hits me, followed by a wave of obviousness. Of course this thing has a job. This being, not thing. So many layers of biases and assumptions to peel away. Just when I think I’m almost there—