Beacon 23: The Complete Novel (5 page)

• 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 rock.

“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—

“Not a biologist,” Rocky says. “I’ve been studying under Professor Bockman for three years. He’s a philosopher.”

Something clicks.

Something funny.

“Wait,” I say.

“Don’t—” Rocky warns.

“Are you telling me—?”

“Ah, hell,” Rocky says.

“You’re a philosopher’s stone?”

•••

It takes a solid minute or two to stop laughing. Lying on my side, curled up in a ball, I finally get my breath back and just stay there, gazing out at the stars, feeling contentment for the first time in . . . possibly forever. I think about the passenger liner that skated through unharmed, probably safe by no more than a few seconds of desperate struggle on my part, and how no one has asked me about that. How not a single labcoat asked me how that felt. How I sat right here, exhausted and crying, but feeling something like elation, like whatever the highest form of relief in the world is, that feeling after a bomb misses its target and you’ve still got all your fingers and toes, but that feeling times five thousand.

“The army really fucked you up good, didn’t it?” Rocky asks.

I don’t answer. Instead the world goes blurry with tears.

“I’m sorry for that,” Rocky tells me, and I can hear that he’s sincere, and this starts the sobbing. I haven’t cried in front of anyone in the longest time. Not since that one session with that army shrink, which made me never want to sit in therapy again. But now I cry my fucking guts out, and it goes on forever, and Rocky doesn’t say anything, doesn’t judge me, just sits in his box where I can’t see him, and I know that he’s smarter than me, and wiser, and it’s not just the accent, but all that schooling, and that he somehow gets that I’m fucked up but that it isn’t my fault, and this feels really fucking amazing, to have someone think it’s not all my fault, and so I cry and cry while little pebbles and bits of steel bounce off my beacon and go tumbling like shed tears out into the cosmos.

When I finally pull it together, Rocky asks me a question, one that stuns me into a long and thoughtful silence:

“What hurt you?”

This causes me to suck in a big gulp of air. I’d cry more if I hadn’t just cried myself out.

“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 when you struck it, didn’t it?”

Rocky says nothing.

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

I think Rocky nods. I think he does. I wish he would say something. I wish he would talk to me. But he’s just a rock.

A rock with a dark line that I wish was a mouth.

A rock with spots that I wish were little blinking eyes.

My OCD roommate looks up from the sofa in my mind with this sad expression, like he knew all along, like he’s the sane one.

Yeah, he’s the sane one, who has to touch his tongue to one side of his mouth twenty times, and then the other side twenty times, and then the top twenty times, and this keeps the mortars away. This makes the mortars hit further down the trench. Kills someone else.

Yeah, he’s the sane one.

I’m the one talking to a rock.

This is the problem with illusions: They form easy enough, but once they fall apart, they’re impossible to put back together. They’re like humans in that way.

Hard enough to know if a thing is alive or dead. So hard sometimes.