We talked some more about Earth and this planet. I could tell Whiskers was uncomfortable, and I knew this was the woman. Finally I said, “I need to go. Nice to meet you.”
We shook again, her hand hard and cold. Whiskers collected more Goldfish and pushed them into her check pouches, making them bulge way out. Marin laughed. It did look silly.
“That’s dessert,” I said.
The rat hopped onto my shoulder. Sick,” she told me mind-to-mind.
Yeah.
I called another cab, this one automatic, and rode home over the rutted streets. The rain had picked up. The rain bugs were out, forced from their burrows by the water and climbing the building walls. Their shells were iridescent in the streetlights. Funny how much of this planet seemed to shine and gleam.
Once we were home I pulled a beer out of the fridge and asked, What kind of sick?
Whiskers pulled the Goldfish out of her cheek pouches and put them in her food bowl. A snack for later. Not an infection, she said. I can smell those. Something wrong in her body or mind.
Out-of-whack neurotransmitters and hormones. Those would give off a smell.
I finished the beer, then went to bed.
A lot of the war was feints and skirmishes, as I said before. The plan for both sides was the same: wear the enemy down slowly, risking as little as possible: a typical Fifth Generation War, carefully limited and held at a distance. No one wanted it to spread back to the Solar System. No one wanted to blow up the handful of FTL ships that came into the system, bringing new supplies and soldiers and scientists.
Now and then, the war on New Earth got hot. I dreamed I was in one of the hot spots, wading through a marsh. No moon, of course. The planet had nothing except a few captured asteroids, visible as moving points of light. Low clouds hid these and the stars. No problem for me. I had my night vision on. I could see the robots ahead of me, tall and spidery, picking their way through the reeds. Drones flew overhead, tilting back and forth to avoid branches. My unit was on either side. I noticed that Singh was alive, which he hadn’t been the last time I’d seen him. Lopez, too. I’d seen her sprayed across the landscape. A nice guy, not looking good at the end.
Something was pulling my rifle barrel down. I looked and saw Whiskers clinging to the barrel with all four feet. A voice said, Dream. Not good. Wake.
I was going to argue, but one of the robots stepped on a land mine, and everything blew up.
That woke me. Whiskers was on my chest, her nose poking at my face. Bad dream.
Yeah. I was covered with sweat. I got up and took a shower. It was close enough to morning so I made coffee, another import from Earth. Funny the things the army thought were worth shipping. Of course, we might not fight without coffee. But why the damn Goldfish?
Good, Whiskers said.
Well, yes.
The day went as usual. Whiskers found four mines in a harmless-looking bean field. In the evening I went back to the bar, Whiskers on my shoulder. Marin was there. I got a beer and sat down next to her. Whiskers sat on the bar top and chewed on a stalk of celery.
I can’t repeat what we said. Mostly I’ve forgotten the conversation, except for a feeling of discomfort from Whiskers. I was going to have to file a report on the woman. She needed more help than she was getting, and her modifications meant she was valuable to the army.
I do remember one bit of conversation. She’d been somewhere in the robot, wading across a wide, brown river. Deep in places, but not too deep for her robot. In the middle, where the main current ran, disks floated on the surface, going downstream with the current. They were a meter or more across with raised edges, bronze brown with streaks and spots of green. I knew these plants, though I had never seen them. The green was chlorophyll, and the disks photosynthesized. But tendrils hung down below them. These captured aquatic bugs and ate them. So the disks were carnivorous plants or photosynthetic animals. Take your pick.
The river reminded Marin of the Mississippi. I didn’t remember any carnivorous floating disks in Huck Finn.
I liked the woman. She was young and good-looking and less crazy than a lot of people I had met. She had a sense of humor, though I don’t remember any of her jokes. While she drank, she wasn’t getting seriously drunk. The only problem was the sense of unease coming from Whiskers.
I was lonely. Most of the people in the town were civilians: scientists and farmers, the people who ran the 3-D printing plant, the people who did maintenance and repair. They were good folk who had gotten good educations back home on Earth. They had a good abstract understanding of war. They knew about PTSD. They sympathized. But I was still an outsider, though they were grateful for my work and for Whiskers.
I liked talking to Marin, so I stalled on sending a report. Maybe I should trust the docs treating her. They would intervene if her condition looked serious. Was it my business that war made people strange?
I was in the habit of going to that particular bar. For one thing, they let Whiskers in. And Marin kept coming. I learned more about her family and the farming co-op. Turned out she could not stand her brother, the one who bought into the co-op, and she was angry that her parents had favored him. Why should he get the safe life on Earth? Why did she have to come here?
What bothered me about her was her anger. What I liked was her youth, her warm skin, almond eyes and lips that would have been lovely if they hadn’t been so often pressed together.
Of course, we ended at my apartment in my narrow, one-person bed, though it took a number of weeks, during which the barkeep kept looking at me funny. I ignored them.
I had never made love to someone covered with mesh before. Weird. The area between her legs was open and available, which made sense. She needed to pee and defecate. The rest was covered with mesh, except her head. The mesh kept changing when I touched it, sometimes soft like silk, then suddenly rigid. Imagine sex with a person whose surface is never the same. Though it stayed rigid along her back, support for her damaged spine. Even her breasts were mesh-covered, the nipples often squashed. I made do with what I could reach.
She came. I came. We lay together, her mesh—soft and cool, at the moment—against my bare skin. I could sense Whiskers, huddled in a corner and deeply upset.
Bad. Bad. Crazy.
Shut up, I told the rat.
Bad, Whiskers repeated.
It became regular: meeting at the bar, coming back to my place and making love while Whiskers sulked. Marin never stayed the night. Instead she went home to her apartment by the hospital. She didn’t like the rat, she told me.
The war must have heated up, because I was finding more mines. Correction, Whiskers was finding them, light footing over the soil between the rows of human plants in the fields outside Leestown, stopping and sniffing and saying. Yes.
Marin began coming out to the fields with me, standing with me at a field’s edge or walking along the edge. She recognized the maize, a plant that needed a lot of water, but was—she said—in many ways the best of all the grains. Native Americans in Mexico had made it a god, way back when. A young god, she told me. A beautiful young man. Of course, they sacrificed people to their gods. We only a sacrificed to our god of war.
I made a polite sound, since I had no opinion about the gods of ancient Mexico. Though I did check online and found images of the Mexican maize god. Lovely, and the ancient Mexicans did sacrifice to him.
It takes some sort of jerk to make love with someone who should be reported to armed forces medical. I was pretty sure Marin’s problem was mental. Anger and depression would be my diagnosis. Whiskers agreed. She knew the smell.