Jerith would say something, anything to ease the tension.
And he did.
“You still haven’t talked about Alex and the Singer,” Jerith said, sounding like the words came awkwardly to him, but clearly doing his best to break the silence.
“Oh, that,” said Roland. “Do you believe in possession?”
“No,” I answered, though the question was directed at Jerith.
Roland laughed without humor. “I don’t believe in it either. But I’ll tell you, when Alex and I first started performing, we stank. I have no idea why — he had a decent voice, and I knew the songs were brilliant...” He laughed again. “We just didn’t have the chemistry, that’s all. Then one night in this ratty blow-bar called Juicy’s... one night this woman came to see us backstage between sets. An older woman, maybe as old as thirty. Hey, I was eighteen, she was ancient. I thought she was a hooker and I was prime self-righteous the way only teenagers can be, so I made some cutting remarks and stomped out for some air. What you’d call a very pointed exit.
“By the time I got back, she was nose-to-nose with Alex, talking about ways to improve the act. That pissed me off, this woman telling us our jobs. I grabbed Alex by the arm and dragged him off toward the stage, but she called to Alex’s back, ’And undo your shirt. Strut the flesh, for Christ’s sake. Put some groin into it. When people watch the stage, they don’t want the boy next door. They want a goddamned
“Well. We hit the stage for the next set, and Alex started trying stuff. Rolling his eyes, swiveling his hips... completely forced, and embarrassing. He wasn’t that kind of guy — not a drop of sleaze in him. When he tried it, I’m telling you, he just had no clue! I told him to smarten up, but that woman was watching from a front row table, and Alex must have figured he could get lucky if he played up to her.
“The mood of the bar shifted from bored to hostile; we’d been mediocre before, but now the act positively turned your stomach. Even Alex sensed how ugly the crowd was getting. One guy, built like a tank, dressed in leather from head to toe, this guy pulled out a switchblade and started clicking it in, out, click, click, making sure we saw him. I broke into a cold sweat, and Alex, he panicked completely. Panic was the only thing that could have made him unbutton his shirt, because believe it or not, he was shy about his body, showing it in public.
“He started unbuttoning in the middle of this long instrumental break, after the chorus of ’A Short Spell of Rain’ — first cut on our first album, you should know it. And with every button he undid, it was like something rewiring itself in his head. Like a puppy changing into a wolf. When the instrumental break was over and he started singing the next verse... God, my hands were shaking so bad I could hardly play. The room fell absolutely still — not a whisper, not a glass tinkling. The bouncer outside the front door came running in, pulling on his brass knuckles like he expected real trouble; but he stopped in the entranceway, just froze there, with the brass knucks dangling on his fingertips, and he listened to the rest of the song. And the next song. And the next. Until we’d run through our whole repertoire. We left the stage, we went to the dressing room, and I buttoned up Alex’s shirt without looking into his eyes. Then we both had terror-fits for a few hours.”
Silence. Nothing but the swish of our three brushes sweeping old grit and dirt.
“I take it the woman in the audience was Helena Howe?” Jerith asked at last.
“You got it,” Roland nodded, setting down his brush. “Our very own manager, director, and ballbreaker. And yes, Alex did get lucky that night. Or unlucky, depending on your point of view. He says they’re in love.” Roland wiped his dusty hands fiercely on a rag he picked up from the workbench. “I’ve never found out whether Helena makes him unbutton his shirt in bed. Interesting question, don’t you think? Alex is easier to control, but the Singer would be more... volcanic.”
He threw the rag down on the workbench and strode out into the gathering twilight. He didn’t look back at either of us as he let the door click shut behind him.
Jerith let his breath out slowly. “I think I need a walk,” he said. “How about you?”
My first reflex was to say no — too much potential for complications. Jerith had lived alone so long, he was ripe to get soppy about the first woman to happen by. Me, I have a policy against getting soppy. Walking with Jerith, giving him hope, would only be cruel. On the other hand, I still felt bad for making him self-conscious about his beard, and he was so desperate for company... what harm could there be in a friendly stroll, if I didn’t lead him on?
“Sure,” I said, “let’s get some air. You can show me the sights.”
The dusk was already full of stars, thousands more than you see on New Earth — Caproche is a lot closer to galactic center. A few ribbons of purpling cloud streaked the sky, but all were scudding off rapidly toward the horizon. It would soon be a clear, cool evening, with plenty of starlight to see by.
“It might turn cold,” Jerith said, looking at the sky too. “I can get you a sweater if you like.”
“I’m fine,” I said.
Jerith led me around the base of a small hill and immediately the sounds of the camp were cut off, leaving only empty stillness — the stillness of starlit hills decorated with nothing but ruined bunkers and the scars of energy blasts. A desolate silence. “Don’t you ever worry about being out here?” I asked Jerith. “All alone on a planet like this?”
“What would I worry about?” He sounded surprised at my question. “Alien ghosts?”
“Not ghosts,” I answered, trying to sound like a woman who never gets the creeps. “But with so much junk left over from the war... what if you stumbled onto an old minefield? Or some robot weapon that’s still active?”
He shook his head. “By the time humans arrived on Caproche, every battle site had been picked through a dozen times. The Myriapods surveyed the planet only two hundred years after the war, and you know how thorough they are. Even with their best sensing equipment, they didn’t find a single functional weapon, nor a working vehicle, not even a battery pack that still held its charge. No bodies either... well, nothing they recognized as bodies. Other groups came after the Myriapods — the Cashlings, the Fasskisters, five or six others — but they didn’t find anything either. The races who fought here stripped the place clean when they pulled out. Nothing left but trash.” He smiled. “That’s why Caproche only has one loony archeologist instead of a horde of prospectors looking for alien tech.”
I expected him to make one of the classic moves at that moment: casually bumping against me, or touching my shoulder to direct my attention toward something, or taking my hand to lead me across a rough patch of ground... but he kept both hands thrust firmly into the deep pockets of his work pants, and as we started walking again, he scrupulously avoided accidental contact.
That irked me.
I mean, he’d been alone and celibate on Caproche for several years. In many circles, I’m considered sexy; when I sang with the Mootikki Spiders on
He touched my shoulder.
I turned to look at him, relieved and preparing my “thanks but no thanks” speech.
He looked away. A moment later, he mumbled, “Over here. There’s something you might like.”
I followed him to a low wall built from fat bricks. Once upon a time those bricks might have been sandbags, but the bags had rotted and the sand left behind had hardened like concrete.
Splayed over the wall grew a mat of snarled threads, each thread porcelain-white under the stars. I could see more patches of the stuff beyond the wall, on rocks, on the grass, even streaked up the trunks of trees.
“I call it the Silk,” Jerith said.
“Some sort of fungus?” I asked.
“No, it photosynthesizes,” he answered. “It lives on UV light — I had it analyzed. Now watch this.”
He poked at a strand with his finger. A moment later, the Silk made a sharp <SPLINK> sound and shattered with a forceful eruption that sent a cloud of powder into the air. I’d been watching so closely, the dust sprayed all over my face. It had a grimy feel, a little moist and gluey. I rubbed at it vigorously, trying to wipe it off.
“Oh, God, Lyra, I’m sorry,” Jerith said. “Let me....” He reached out to help.
I ducked back from his outstretched hand. “Is this some gag?” I asked. “Like a squirting flower? Get me all gooey?” I gave my nose another rub.
“No, I just wasn’t thinking,” Jerith said. “I’m sorry. It’s, uhh... I wanted to show you the Silk because it’s my big discovery.”
“Oh, yes?” I’d got most of the gunk off my face, but now my hands were sticky. I looked around for some Silkless terrain where I could wipe them off.
“Yes, the Silk,” Jerith said. “My theory is it’s a biological weapon. From the war.”
I looked at my hands, covered with powder. Very quickly, I wiped them on my dungarees.
“You don’t have to worry,” Jerith went on hurriedly. “It’s harmless to humans. The best labs on New Earth have checked it out. Biological weapons are usually species-specific, especially in a war like this, between different alien races. This dust probably shriveled one side but left the other side untouched.” He poked another strand, <SPLINK> “It’s funny when you think about it. This is probably lethal to some mysterious aliens, but to us little old humans...” He poked again, <SPLINK>
It didn’t seem so funny to me, and I didn’t like biological weapons going off in my face even if I was the wrong species; but Jerith looked so forlorn there, going <SPLINK>, <SPLINK>, <SPLINK> with his big discovery, that I didn’t have the heart to stay mad at him. He smiled at me, I grudgingly smiled back, and in a few moments, we were both <SPLINK>ing away. You could get different pitches depending how hard you struck each thread, and I started trying to <SPLINK> out “Betray Me Not,” the song we’d recorded that afternoon. Jerith was using both hands to <SPLINK> out a background rhythm and we were having a great time until a Caprochian parrot climbed out of Jerith’s pants pocket.
I didn’t shriek, just made a choked “ungh” sound as I jumped back. When I’d watched Alex try to feed the same kind of animal at the recording session, I hadn’t been close enough to see how ugly the little beasts were. This one was small and flat, like a mouse-size Gila monster, but with a topknot of three antennae, each undulating like weeds in water. The animal didn’t scare me — it wasn’t even repulsive after I’d got over my initial shock — but it definitely wasn’t the sort of thing I’d keep in my pocket.
Jerith saw my reaction, looked down at the brightly colored creature crawling up his clothing, and immediately detached it from his waistband. He winced slightly when he touched it, but held it gently, caressing it. “It’s only my pet,” he said. “It’s very tame.”
“Why did you have it in your pocket?”
“They like warm, dark places. They just curl up and go to sleep. When it heard us popping the Silk, it must have woken up and felt hungry.”
“Hungry?” I said, uneasy with the way Jerith fondled the little beast.
“They eat the Silk,” Jerith answered, holding the animal close to a patch of strands on the wall. The parrot pushed its snout forward; gingerly it tugged loose the end of a thread and sucked up the Silk like spaghetti. “Very delicate mouths,” Jerith added. “They can gobble the stuff without popping it.”
For a while, I watched the tiny animal eat. I wouldn’t say it was cute, but its determined slurping did have an endearing quality. I put out my hand to rub its nose, but Jerith immediately jerked the parrot out of reach.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“They don’t like to be touched by strangers,” he said, backing away from me.
“Do you know how suspicious you’re acting?” I wasn’t one for melodrama, but who hasn’t seen a dozen shows where an archaeologist on some isolated planet fixates on an alien species? And nine times out of ten in those shows, someone gets her brains eaten before the closing credits.
“It’s not what you’re thinking,” Jerith blurted out.
“How do you know what I’m thinking?”
His face blanched. Turning away from me, he hurriedly slid the parrot back into his pocket. The animal didn’t put up any fight at all. When he turned back to face me, Jerith kept his hand in that pocket.
