The Silvers Read online

  He moved his hand to touch the pain, but couldn’t quite find it. It splintered from its source and fragments fell against other nerves until his whole face throbbed.

  “That’s what I mean.”

  He didn’t want to be near her anymore and turned to run. She hit him on the other side of the face. He fell.

  She held up her foot. “What’s this?” she asked.

  “Boot,” Roach replied automatically, because he knew now.

  “That’s right,” she said. The boot crashed into his heart’s hiding place, behind his ribs.

  When he woke, the female was gone and the ship rose above him, seeming almost friendly, watchful, two of its windows alight, like eyes. He didn’t want to stay here. The female might find him again, but it hurt too much to move. If he could get to the pile of nearby rocks, it would be harder for humans to see him.

  He used his arms to pull himself toward the rocks, sharp bits of the ground digging into his palms and stomach. He glanced behind him and saw he was leaving a trail of red on the bright ground. His skin was open and cold leaped right in. He reached the rocks and put his head against one of the stones. His head was the only part of him that felt warm. The rest of him shook.

  He tried to inspect his damaged places, but seeing made the pain worse. He closed his eyes. Now his clan would know that he’d had contact with humans.

  There is no Silver word for “alone.” Just words for “one” and “one at a time,” because Silvers are never alone. A Silver might be the only one in a particular area, but others are always nearby. Silvers’ names are numbers indicating birth order. When a Silver dies, the numbers shift down, and each subsequent Silver’s name changes.

  This shift happens also now when a Silver is forgotten.

  Roach would not have a name anymore. He would not be counted. He felt himself wanting to sleep again and hoped he was hidden. He couldn’t sleep. His teeth clattered against each other, and sharp pain poked him every few seconds. He heard footsteps, human voices. One voice was Grena’s. He wanted to get to her. But his body wouldn’t move. He drifted off, and when he woke the next time, footsteps were closer, approaching.

  Roach tears off his bandages and leaves them on the ground as he walks away from the Byzantine. He heads for the small lake where Lons lives. Lons—one hundred and thirteen. The last name he had before he was forgotten.

  Lons is still there.

  He lies on his back, unmoving, and his ribs look like the row of coat hangers in B’s closet. His skin is cracked in places where it has become too dry. When Roach leans over him, Lons’s eyes go right through Roach to find the sky.

  “Lons.” Roach watches closely until he sees Lons draw a small breath that barely fills his lungs. Roach shakes him. “Lons, get up.”

  Lons’s eyes find Roach’s and he grins, holding up a hand. His fingertips are yellow with pollen stains. Roach looks for the quilopea plant, but it is torn and sagging, its two weak blooms staring down in dismay at the scraps of their leaves the way Roach looked at his own torn body after Joele left him.

  “Lons, did you kill the plant?”

  Lons touches Roach’s cheek with one yellow-tipped finger.

  “You’re dry. You need to go into the lake.”

  But Lons won’t move.

  Roach goes to the water and scoops some in his hands.

  He brings it back and lets it fall on a cracked spot on Lons’s stomach. Lons groans. “I’m going to take care of you,” Roach says. “When you’re better, we’ll live here, just us two. Our own clan.”

  The water seems to help a little. Dried blood slides away, and the wet skin shines. Roach retrieves more water.

  “I was on the ship,” he tells Lons as he works. “Like you.”

  Lons murmurs, and Roach looks at him.

  “One of them hurt me, but another helped me get better.”

  Lons’s eyes wander again.

  Roach keeps talking, hoping the sound of his voice will help Lons focus. “The two of us, we could live on our own. We’ll have to move somewhere with more plants.” He realizes that he is speaking in English, and repeats the words in his own language.

  Lons sneezes and laughs. Ribs shake. Skin cracks and oozes. Roach looks away.

  “You’re losing blood.” Roach remembers something. “Stay right here.”

  He retraces his earlier steps and finds his bandages lying on the ground. He stares for a moment at the Byzantine in the distance. He picks the bandages up and hurries back to Lons.

  “Here. These will help.” He pulls a couple of battered leaves from the quilopea plant and puts them over the cracked place on Lons’s skin. Then he puts the bandages on top. Lons holds very still. The next time he laughs, it’s soft, mostly a smile. “You’re all right,” Roach says. It’s what B said to him, even though Roach didn’t feel all right.

  Roach hopes that taking care of Lons will help keep him from thinking about B, but it isn’t working. B is always in his mind. Roach didn’t do what B wanted, and B sent him away. Even if he’d said sorry, B might still have made him go. Sorry only works sometimes. You have to mean it. Maybe B doesn’t want him now at all. Maybe Roach had only one chance, and he ruined it.

  He thinks he knows now what sorry feels like.

  He keeps one hand on Lons’s bandages so they don’t slide off when Lons laughs, and he tries to think what to do. He could stay here with Lons. Lons needs help. Roach could finally rescue somebody, which he wants very much to do. But Roach also wants to go back to the ship and find B again. This time, he’ll be different. He’ll be what B wants.

  He smiles, remembering B’s look of surprise when Roach kissed him. B didn’t expect Roach to fight for what he wanted. You can be like humans without being human, he thinks. Roach can learn to be all the best things about a human and still be a Silver. He can make B want him without losing himself.

  Roach thinks the somebody he would most like to rescue is B. He wonders if B has ever been in danger. B is smart and very strong, but B can’t know everything. He can’t always know when something is dangerous right now. And some things even humans with large muscles can’t do.

  Maybe B doesn’t know how to swim. Humans can’t hold their breaths very long. If B fell into a lake, Roach could swim out and get him and pull him back to shore. If B was scared after that, Roach could say, “You’re all right.” B might want him then, because when B started helping Roach, Roach started wanting B.

  “I owe you a great debt,” Thunder Sam tells Tin Star, after Tin Star puts a bullet in the greedy saloon owner who’s about to stab Thunder Sam in the back. It is the first time Sam hasn’t seen danger coming, and if it weren’t for Tin Star, Sam would be dead. Later, when Sam rescues Tin Star from the outlaws, he says, “Now we’re square.” They are friends after they’re square. They stop bickering, and Thunder Sam no longer tells Tin Star to “Run on home, kid” because he doesn’t want him around.

  B saved Roach from losing too much blood, and now Roach owes him a great debt. The only way for them to be square is for Roach to rescue B.

  Lons coughs. His eyes roam, and he doesn’t laugh anymore. He struggles against Roach’s hand. Lons will not last long without eating or going into the lake. Roach pulls a single, shriveled fruit from the quilopea plant and brings it to Lons. “Eat this,” he instructs. Lons pinches it between his thumb and forefinger and keeps squeezing until the juicy center oozes out and falls with a plat-plat on the ground. Lons is left with the drooling skin, which he flings aside.

  “I’ll find you better food,” Roach promises. “Stay right here.”

  He leaves and gathers the best quilopea he can find. As he searches, he forms a plan that, if it works, would help both him and Lons.

  He sees a member of his clan by one of the lakes and calls a greeting, but she doesn’t answer. He senses nothing like human anger or judgment in the rejection, just that Roach doesn’t exist at all. He takes the quilopea back to Lons, who refuses to eat.

  “I
t’ll be okay,” Roach tells him. “I have a plan. I’ll help you get better.”

  Lons doesn’t seem to want to get better. Lons does not seem to want anything, except yellow fingers.

  B finds Grena in the kitchen. He tosses Tin Star and Thunder Sam onto the table. Some foolish part of him doesn’t want to let it go. “Thanks for letting me borrow that,” he says. “I wondered what kind of bedtime story aliens like.”

  “It was my nephew’s.” Grena picks up the book. “He’s convinced we’ll all be time-traveling soon, and he wants to go back to the Old West.”

  B grunts. “Don’t know where I’d go.” He nods at the book. “Did they like it?”

  “Most of them. Some were bored or hadn’t learned enough English to follow along. One really loved it.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Mm-hm. Younger male. Practically memorized it as I was reading. It’d take us an hour to get through a chapter, I spent so much time answering his questions. But he remembered everything I told him.”

  “That’s funny.”

  “Must be what it’s like to have kids. Always asking ‘why?’”

  Does Grena think about kids? B has never asked.

  “What was its name?” B asks, surprising himself with the question. He’s already decided it doesn’t matter. Roach is gone, so what does it matter what his real name is?

  “Imms,” Grena says. “When I knew him. Four Hundred and Seventy-Two.”

  “Huh?”

  “Their names are numbers. Their birth order. You remember? It was in one of my early reports.”

  “I forgot.”

  “When a Silver dies, the numbers shift down, and the names change. That Silver was called Imms—four hundred and seventy-two. I guess that’s changed since I was there.” Her voice is steady, but B sees an old pain nudge her. “And there’s more to the name. It’s longer. He just went by Imms, though.”

  Imms. That’s his name. A number. How depressing.

  B clears his throat. “Do you ever miss them?”

  Grena looks at him as though his expression might influence how she answers. He wonders if she’s remembering his pissing match with Joele, if she thinks less of him or is wary of provoking him. “Sometimes.”

  “Do they still talk to you?”

  She shakes her head. “I haven’t been out there much. Mostly working inside.”

  “Right.” The Silver in the lab is still alive. Joele’s been withholding water from it, watching its skin parch and crack. B keeps hoping it will die and absolve him of the decision to either let it go or let Vir cut it open while it’s still breathing.

  He grabs a can of soda and sits at the table. If there’s anyone he can talk to about this, it’s Grena. She’s kind when she can afford to be, brutal when necessary. “Do you ever worry about what we’re doing?” He curses himself silently. He sounds weak, uncertain, and not at all like a leader.

  She’s quiet for a moment. “You’ve always said, ‘They’re not us.’”

  “They’re not.”

  “No,” she agrees. “But I don’t think you ever really meant for us to harm them. Did you?”

  “How should I know? One day you and Vir are living with them, the next, Joele’s got one aboard the ship, saying it’s half-dead already so why don’t we finish the job.” He sounds like he wants absolution, validation. He sounds like the self-styled victim of others’ incompetence. He takes a deep breath. He wants to tell Grena the truth.

  I hated them. From the moment we saw them. Their eyes gave me nightmares, and they just seemed so stupid to trust us like they did. They don’t even understand how empty their lives are, their world is. So yeah, I’ll hit them if there’s a chance it’ll open their eyes. I’ll cut into them and search for what’s missing. I’ll let one worm its way into my idiot heart until I start to wonder if maybe it has more, feels more, understands more than I do.

  Maybe there’s nothing missing at all.

  “Do you think of them as human?” he asks. The all-important question. One they asked each other during the early days. What are they? Are they human? Do they have rights? Are they ours—our treasure, our subjects, our friends or enemies . . . Or are they us?

  “I think they’re similar to us in many ways. Not just in appearance.”

  “How do we know if what we’re doing hurts or frightens them if they don’t protest? If they don’t fight back?”

  “Do you feel guilty?”

  B doesn’t let himself hesitate. “No. But it’s an interesting ethical dilemma.”

  Grena nods. “But remember, NRCSE approved Project HN. You’re not the only one who thinks it might be worth sacrificing ethics for knowledge.”

  “Who says that’s what I think?”

  B sees the hard edge to Grena’s kindness. Her words have desire beneath them, longing. Until now, B thought the Silver Planet had brought out the scientist in each of them, the cool, rational, impartial researcher who had no use for desire, doubt, or fantasy. But it is just the opposite. This place brings out what is truly human in each of them: a craving for violence, for the unexpected. A need to trespass inside strange bodies and on new terrain.

  Nothing about respecting boundaries is human, even boundaries as elemental as skin. It is human to take, to need, and to desire. To form alliances when necessary and to break those unions as soon as they cease to be of use. A word as small and easily blown apart as don’t shouldn’t be a puzzle or a barrier.

  “Don’t,” Roach had said, rolling out from under B. And B hadn’t.

  Suddenly, B cannot look at Grena.

  He stands up, pushes his chair in. “I don’t know how you do it. Go from reading to them to watching them writhe on the table without batting an eye. At least I never pretended to like them.”

  “I follow orders.”

  B has to go, or he’ll shake her until he hears the satisfying clatter of her teeth. But go where? Back to his room, where a sleeping bag is still crammed under his bed and the first aid kit sits beside his desk? Outside, where he can scream and curse and nothing will change?

  “The Silver in the lab,” he says. “Does it know English?”

  “No.”

  “I want to ask it some questions.”

  “I can try to translate your questions, if you want. But I don’t think it can say much anyway. It’s gone.”

  “I don’t want anyone there. Not you. Not Joele. I want everyone to stay out of the lab. I want to see it alone. You hear me?”

  “I hear you, Captain,” Grena says.

  “Except Vir. I want Vir there.”

  Vir doesn’t want to do it. B sees in her eyes, in her hand as she picks up the scalpel how much she hates it, hates him. But she doesn’t refuse. She anesthetizes the Silver, then opens the chest cavity.

  The heart is off. Blue-gray like the creature’s skin, the organ hides behind the liver, its sides moving softly in and out like a frightened animal. B asks if there’s a way to make the heart expose itself. Vir touches the creature’s skin, just above the liver, flushing the heart from its cover. It drifts down toward the Silver’s stomach. As it travels, B sees it attach briefly to a mass of unanchored blood vessels, pumping them full, then releasing them. It slips under the intestines and disappears. He asks Vir to make another cut.

  They follow the heart together—Vir dividing the skin in different places, drawing it away from each incision like curtains. The creature dies quickly, and the heart floats up to its final resting spot just left of the sternum. Dead, the organ is black and heavy-looking. As B stares at it, he reminds himself that this is not what loves. Only the mind can assign value to another person, can create the illusion that something besides alone exists. If that illusion is shared, it becomes love.

  If a brain is incomplete, if it cannot experience the full spectrum of emotion and desire, then it cannot maintain its share of the illusion. Therefore it is impossible to love something subhuman.

  Unless you are subhuman yourself.

  He doe
sn’t want to look at that more dangerous organ, the brain. He concentrates on the limp pile of dark blood vessels draped over the stomach. He imagines that when the body is alive, these vessels wave like the tentacles of an anemone, grab the heart as it floats by, and let go once the heart has filled them.

  Latching on, holding fast, letting go. This is how the heart moves.

  Roach can get Lons to eat a little quilopea by mashing it up and putting it in his mouth, though Lons often spits it back up. Roach drags him down to the lake and makes him lie in the shallow water until the splits in his skin smooth out. What Lons really needs to do is go underwater and stay there for a long time. But he won’t.

  Roach is ready to put his plan in motion. The idea seemed wonderful at first, though Roach worries now that it is not such a good idea. He thought maybe B could heal Lons. B has dried quilopea, medicine that goes on torn skin, and a shower. B knows how to help Silvers. But asking B to help Lons will not make Roach and B square. In fact, it will probably mean Roach owes B another great debt.

  If B rescues Lons, maybe Roach can help with that. They’ll rescue Lons together. At the very least, he’ll be close to B and can watch for danger B doesn’t see.

  “I have to go for a little while,” Roach tells Lons. “But I’ll come back. I promise.”

  No answer.

  “I’m going to get you help.” He starts to walk away, but Lons grabs his wrist. Lons’s eyes no longer wander but focus on Roach’s. They are anxious and do more to pull Roach back than the hand around his wrist.

  “I’ll be back,” Roach repeats. Lons shakes his head.

  Roach sits beside him. “They have a Silver. In the lab.” Lons looks at him, waits.

  “They had another one, too, but she shut off. You’re the only one they ever let go. Besides me.”

  Lons nods.

  “Tell me why,” Roach says. Lons doesn’t.

  “I’m going to find the one who helped me. He’ll help you.”

  Lons’s eyes are so different from B’s, almost colorless, just a thin wire of dark creating a fragmented band around the pupils. B’s eyes have circles of color around black centers—greenish-blue, like quilopea leaves. Lons gives no indication that he disapproves of Roach’s plan. But then, Lons is a Silver, and Silvers don’t disapprove. Only humans do that. But Lons is waiting for something. Roach thinks he knows what it is.