We panicked, all of us, in the embrace of that drowning giant’s thick lava arm: those under cover, those out in the open, didn’t matter. We would have killed each other rather than face the goddamned needles, and now that stokes my rage, the rage that eats me inside, that makes me less than a human being forever after, not just because I’ve seen my fellow Skyrines die horribly, but because I was forced to want them to die instead of me. I felt that little exultation that no needle was going to hit me, that I’d live to fuck again, maybe fuck their girlfriends, sympathy call, howdy, reporting to duty, sorry, ma’am, he’s not coming back, but I’m here…
Fuck it! Fuck it all. I have so much rage at myself, at the Antags, at everything that made me grow up to be a Skyrine, a fighter across the stars, a heroic asshole coward who gave up being a sappy, naïve kid to fight in so many battles, only to finally panic on the Red, and then, like God is wagging His stony white finger at me, shit, that needle on my arm, just waiting to plunge in, you did not escape, you piss-scared little fuckwad, it’s still here, and it’s going to get you and eat you and you’ll bloat up and burst, but only after you go crazy and somebody has to shoot you to keep you from hurting everyone.
Inside the dark, stone-walled garage…
Expletive expletive expletive. No words bad enough to convey that rage. No such language for what I am, what I feel. Just conjure up a deep, noisy silence, red with flashes of… why red? Not rage! Just deep, holy, animal disappointment, like what every gazelle must feel that falls to a lion, like any dinosaur that heard its sinews snapping and bones crunching under the razor teeth of a T. rex. First you panic, and then you die, one way or another.
I am no better than dead meat, broken, rotting, carrion, but I’m still here, still ambulatory. I just can’t really tell the tale, not completely.
Not truthfully.
I died.
I did not die.
I keep trying to get back to the main current of our story, to the Drifter. But I’m going over history, technicalities, the kind of pop science deemed fit to stuff into a warrior’s skull. Alice with her stiff, sad, not very sympathetic look confirms I’m just churning, I’m not getting my point across; she doesn’t get it; she needs to change the subject.
“You were going to tell me about the caves,” she says, looking out the big window. “I assume that means the crystals, the silicon plague. The Church,” she adds.
She knows about the Church.
Okay. So that works. That knocks me loose. The beauty and strangeness and even those additional moments of horror, way down in the bowels of the Drifter. Sure. It’s that easy, isn’t it? Wonder trumps rage and panic.
Now my anger turns, quick as a bunny, into laughter. I laugh out loud, to her irritation, but it is funny. She wants the nougat center without the hard candy shell. Go straight to the point, skip all the spiky, nettle-wrapped stuff that makes us feel shitty and inadequate, that makes me feel and look and smell like a…
What? What am I now, other than a survivor, a lost Skyrine completely dead inside?
Something more.
Something quite different, thank you. Reliving the whole needle bit has reawakened snakes in my head. Snakes with broken glass for scales. But really, tell the truth, Vinnie old fellow—that isn’t actually it, is it?
Strong tea. That’s what DJ called it.
Green tea.
Ice moon tea.
Like Teal, only first gen, but nobody knows. There is redemption if I give in. But will it be me that survives?
My resolution sets up into concrete, but not the way either of us expected. “I’m done here,” I tell her. “You aren’t the one I need to talk to.”
Alice turns her head, frowning. “I’m sorry,” she says. “What can I do to—?”
“We’re done. I won’t explain.”
“We need to know what you know,” she says, angry roses on her cheeks.
“Get someone who’s been there,” I say. “Someone who doesn’t think I’m crazy or about to be. I’ll tell it to them, maybe.”
“I don’t think that,” Alice says. “Honestly, I don’t.”
“Why did they send just you? Why not the whole committee?”
“There’s a committee?” she asks.
“Yeah, there’s a committee, all ready to overturn the system, set it right, just get them the information, listen to me confess to what I saw out there. Sure, they’ll use us to overthrow the system—then shoot us in the back of the head and toss us aside. Like the Kronstadt sailors.” Fidge me, how did that get in there?
“I don’t understand,” Alice says slowly. “You know that Joe wanted me to come here and talk to you.”
“What’s his moniker? His tag?”
“Sanka,” Alice says. “Teal would say that was his nick.”
I very slowly deflate. Letting out the snakes, maybe. Sucking down to what’s actually going to happen, nothing I can do about it. I don’t know what to think or feel.
“You know where he is,” I say, but without conviction.
“I wish I did,” Alice says. “There was just a delayed message. And there is no committee, not yet anyway… Just a beginning, a suspicion, that maybe there’s something I can do, we can do.”
“No committee?”
“None. We’re too ignorant and stupid to be organized,” she says, and I see she means it, and her tell is the cold disappointment that she’s ineffective, that she’s as ignorant as she says.
“Sorry,” I say. But I still won’t look at her. I wish she would go away and leave me to the Eames chair and the night and the endless lines of ferries and freighters. What we fight for.
“I wish Joe were here,” Alice says softly. “Or another Skyrine, like you say, someone who can understand what you’ve been through, because I can’t. I won’t say I can. I never will. I don’t want to feel what you’re feeling, ever. All right?”
That’s honest. Still deflating. The snakes haven’t left, but they’ve settled down a little.
The other, though…
My new memories, the oldest memories of all. Maybe I like it. Maybe this great, expanding volume of memories makes me more than what I am, provides a bigger refuge for my broken soul.
Alice’s eyes are targeting me, holding me there in the chair, and suddenly, I like it, I like being targeted and pinned by this zaftig female in our clean steel and blue apartment, earned by all that money, all that comp. She’s got some strength and she’s not as arrogant as I thought.
Best of all, she doesn’t want to understand.
Good. Fine.
But still silent. Frozen.
“I can leave you here and come back later,” she says after a minute, “maybe when Joe gets here. Or I can just leave for good. Let you be.”
I have no idea what expression suddenly comes to my face, but it makes her jump, startled. I lean forward, my voice a little high. “There’s something very strange happening to us, to Earth, isn’t there?” I ask. “With the Gurus and the Antags and going out to the Red.”
“Hell, yes,” she says, eyes flashing. “You’re just starting to realize that?”
“Some things are coming together, maybe. I’m almost there now.”