Beacon 23: Part Two: Pet Rocks (4 page)

“I don’t know,” I say.

“Maybe you do,” Rocky suggests, “but you’re scared to give it life.”

I laugh. “You sound like my shrink.”

“Yeah, well, fuck me, maybe I’m starting to care about you a little bit, and maybe he cared about you. I mean, I’m relying on you to water me, right? And I’m really hoping to hell you tell the supply ship about me and get me home, so it behooves me to be nice to you.”

“You said behooves,” I say.

“Is this how you avoid thinking about it? Whatever it was?”

I sit up. I move across the space between the GWB and the outer wall of the pod and sit with my back to the porthole, looking at the dome and the smaller panes of glass that ring the small space.

“I used to be a pilot,” I say.

I take a deep breath, wondering where the hell I’m going with this.

“I saw a lot of action in the Void War. We were . . . a bunch of people dying out in the middle of nowhere, you know? Not even a rock to claim. Nothing but lines on a star chart. Just pointless. Only made sense if you were drunk, you know? Like . . . how the deck of a ship seems to come to rest with a few rums, like it all balances out if you get the mixture just right, if the world is as tilted as you are.”

Rocky listens. Is really listening.

“Anyway, I lost my wings and got moved to the front. I was there for the Blitz, when we were going to end the war, be home by Christmas, all that bullshit. I was in my third tour with the army. Was a lieutenant in an A-squad, which is the people you call when no one else will pick up the goddamn phone, and really, I just kept getting promoted through attrition. Everyone above me got blown to bits, and they kept slotting me up, and no one cared that my breath could strip the camo paint from a field blaster, they just cared that we killed more than we lost, which we did in spades.”

My mind drifts back to that last day. My last day fighting. The day I refused to fight anymore. And my hand settles on the wound across my belly.

“I could’ve killed a shitload of ’em that day,” I say. “I guess I already had, but I could’ve taken out a hive, an entire nest of hives, and turned the tide. Would’ve meant wiping out three of our own platoons, and I’d already lost every man in my squad, but taking the whole place out was the right thing to do. And yet I didn’t. Then it turned out for the best. The Ryph pulled back because of my squad’s push right up into the swarm—and yeah, it was my squad that did all the hero-ing that day, and because I’m the one who woke up in a hospital, who didn’t die out there, my guts sewn back into my belly, they pinned a medal on me, and there were a bunch of parades that I saw from my hospital bed, and I still don’t know why the hell anyone cared that two armies decided they’d kill each other tomorrow instead of that afternoon, and I never asked.

“My CO’s CO’s CO came to me with all his gold stars on his collar and asked me what I wanted to do with the rest of my career, to name my posting.”

I pause and think back to that day. To that old man. His beaming face. The pride he had in the injured soldier his army had made.

“And what did you ask for?” Rocky said.

“I told him I wanted to be alone.”

I remember the old man’s smile fading, how the scars across his lips came back together, which let me know that he hadn’t been smiling when whatever caused those scars happened to him. He walked away, but he granted me my wish.

“NASA is where the best of the best pilots end up,” I tell Rocky. “The very best fliers, with all their shit together, they end up in NASA. It’s always been like that. Until me.”

We sit in silence a while.

“I think you’re doing just fine,” Rocky says. “You rescued me, right?”

I lean forward and put my face in my palms. I don’t say it, but I’m thinking it, wondering who rescued whom.

It feels good, talking about this stuff. Not for the first time, I regret that I didn’t continue on with the shrink. I just wasn’t ready. Was too scared to face myself. It was too early to be seen.

“Hey, Rocky?”

I lift my head from my palms. Scoot over toward the box. Rocky is sitting in his little puddle, which looks about the same size as when I first made it.

“Rock?”

He looks up at me, I guess wondering what I’m about to say.

I toy with one of the splinters from his box, bending it back and forth until it comes free. Bringing it up to my nose, I breathe in the scent of wood, admire how moist and green and fresh the wood is, like it just came out of the forest, this thing that was so recently alive. It smells like my childhood on Earth. It smells like the outdoors. Like crisp air and atmosphere.

Rocky has fallen silent. I think I know why.

“You made this hole, didn’t you?” I ask him.

He stares at me guiltily.

“You’re like . . . like a bullet in an abdomen.”

Rocky looks slightly away.

“You hurt this box, and it was still a little bit alive out there, and it was going to Professor Bockman at SAU on Oxford, and it was empty, just a box, and the wood died the rest of the way out there, didn’t it?”

Rocky says nothing.

“I’m losing my fucking mind, aren’t I?”

I think Rocky nods. I wish he would say something. I wish he would talk to me. Illusions are easy to form, but they’re impossible to put back together. They’re like humans in that way. It’s so hard to know if a thing is alive or dead. So hard. I smell that splinter of wood again, which still smells vaguely of the living, and I don’t know why, but my mind drifts to Alice Waters, whom I loved in high school, and who I used to write in the army because I didn’t know who else to write, and I wonder what she thought of all those batshit letters I sent, and if those letters smelled of someone who was alive and breathing and scared out of his fucking mind, or if maybe they just smelled of crazy and desperate and blood and thermite. Or if, like me, those old love letters just reeked to her of war.