Greenies

Jackson had let us during the retreat?'

Matt said nothing, concentrating instead on the course on his screen and the calling out of course changes. After about ten minutes of flight they emerged into another flat valley — known as the Carcinas Valley on maps. Brian put them into a slow, lazy, fuel-efficient circle, six hundred meters above the ground.

They circled in silence for about ten minutes, Brian keeping an eye on his instruments and watching the terrain, Matt taking the opportunity to re-calibrate a few of his mapping software screens and update known enemy positions. Soon boredom began to set in.

'Hey, boss,' Matt asked a little timidly, checking to make sure the radio link was not being broadcast to their wing.

'Yeah?'

'How come you ain't never gotten married again?'

Haggerty tensed up a little. His personal life — especially when it related to what had happened to his pregnant wife at the hands of vermin — had always been something that had been silently yet mutually agreed to be a forbidden topic between them. 'Why do you ask?'

'Well... I'm not tryin' to offend you or no shit like that,' Matt said. 'I mean, I heard what happened to your wife and all. But I been with you for a couple months now and I know you get your share of bitches back at the Troop Club. You ever thought about... you know... making it official with one of 'em?'

'No,' Brian said tersely. 'I never have.'

This was a clear signal to Matt that he should drop the conversation. He wasn't quite ready to let it go just yet. In the time he'd been with Brian he'd come to respect him very much — almost worship him — which was remarkable considering the man was a cop. 'Like I said, boss, I ain't tryin' to offend you. I just wanted your advice on something. If you don't wanna talk about it, that's static.'

Brian sighed. Though he didn't often show it, he too had developed considerable respect for his crewmate, this despite the fact that he was — had been — vermin and a gang member — the very sort of person that had killed his wife. 'What kind of advice are you talking about?'

'It's like this,' Matt said. 'In the ghetto, when you're vermin, you're kind of conditioned to marry early, you know what I mean?'

'I know what you mean,' he said. 'I've been to a thousand domestic argument calls for eighteen year olds who just got married to someone they couldn't stand so they could get their own apartment. I think that was half of what was wrong with our fucking planet under the WestHems.'

'Exactly,' Matt said. 'And I know that you guys that were not vermin — you know, people with jobs and shit — you weren't quite as bad as us, but that you still seemed to get married pretty early too.'

'Yeah,' he agreed. 'Most of us do. Mandy and I were kind of the exception. I was twenty-nine and she was twenty-seven.'

'That's pretty fuckin' old all right,' Matt said. 'Was it because you waited until you found the one bitch you really loved?'

'No,' Brian said reluctantly. 'That's not really the reason at all.' He looked around, checking his instruments again and then making a minor adjustment to his circle. 'Look, kid,' he said. 'If you tell anyone else what I'm about to tell you, I'll personally twist your head off and shove it up your ass.'

'Hey, Thrusters honor,' Matt said, tapping the portion of the arm of his biosuit that covered his tattoo.

'Jesus Christ,' Brian said, shaking his head. 'Anyway, when Mandy and I met and started banging each other it was nothing but infatuation. I thought she was a pretentious little nerd — she'd been to college and was a fuckin' teacher. She thought I was a macho asshole who liked to beat up on vermin. There wasn't no click or anything with us but... well... she was... she was really hot, you know. She was the hottest bitch I'd ever been with. I'd never gotten married earlier because I used to just fuck anything I could get my dick into and then never call them the next day. That's the Martian way, isn't it?'

'Fuckin' aye,' Matt agreed.

'The problem was, I enjoyed the Martian way so much I never really wanted to settle down with anyone, I'd never felt the urge. But there's all this pressure on us to get married and pump out that kid. My parents were always nagging at me, my co-workers were always wondering if maybe I was just a rump-ranger trying to compensate who was afraid to admit it.'

'They thought that about you?' Matt asked. 'What the hell? Who gives a shit if someone likes to slide into some ass? This ain't fuckin' Earth.'

'I know,' Brian said. 'It sounds strange but there are some strange points of view in the police department. We're law enforcement officers, after all, and being a rump ranger is technically against the law — although I'm here to tell you there are a lot of rump rangers on the force.'

'No shit?'

'No shit,' Brian said. 'They keep low-pro but we all know who they are. My friends were starting to figure I was just in the closet because I was afraid of the ramifications.' He shook his head. 'I didn't really care about all that. To tell you the truth, I've actually tried the whole rump-ranging thing back in my high school and vocational training days. I've sucked a few schlongs, even let some hairy motherfucker stick his boner up my ass. I didn't care for it much so I never tried it again. I mean, that's the Martian way too, right?'

'Right,' Matt agreed. Although he'd never actually tried it himself he certainly didn't begrudge Brian for having given it a shot.

'So it wasn't the rump-ranger rumors that got to me,' Brian said. 'What was mostly bothering me was the fact that people were thinking that something was wrong with me because I wasn't married because everyone gets married before twenty-five unless there is something wrong with them, right? That's just the way people think.'

'Exactly,' Matt said. 'Except in the ghetto they start thinking that about you at around nineteen. That's what I wanted to talk to you about.'

'I see,' Brian said. 'Well, to make a long, probably best-untold story short, Mandy was kind of the same way. She liked diving into some muff every once in a while but mostly she just liked to get it on.' He smiled a little. 'She was really good at it too, better even than most Martians — and that's saying something. She'd never felt the urge to settle down with one person either. But her family and her co-workers and everyone else around her was starting to wonder the same things about her. So when we met and when we both figured out we were both as obsessed about sex as the other, that made us commiserate with each other in just the right way. So we stayed together.'

'Just because you liked to fuck each other?' Matt asked.

'That was virtually the only thing we had in common with each other,' Brian confirmed. 'After about three or four months of boffing each other in every way three times a day, people started to see us as a couple. After awhile, we started to feel like a couple. And before you know it... well, we were standing in the marriage chapel saying those vows.' He shrugged. 'It made our families very happy and stopped all the rumors.'

'So it wasn't a happy marriage?' Matt asked, surprised considering the hatred the man had of the vermin as a result of what happened.

'It was a marriage based on sex so, in a way, it wasn't all that bad. We learned to tolerate each other and we even became something like friends after a few months, although we still fought like EastHems and WestHems. But every time we fought, no matter what we fought about or how serious it was, we could always make it better with sex. It was that kind of a marriage.'

'And is that the kind of marriage you would recommend?' Matt asked.

'No,' he said immediately. 'We had our reproductive blocks turned off right away because that's another thing we're expected to do in this society. She got knocked up within two weeks. If she hadn't of been killed... well... I'm honest enough with myself to realize that we wouldn't have lasted five years. A marriage based on sexual infatuation can't last forever.'

'Wow,' Matt said, in awe, as if these were the wisest words ever muttered since Jesus Christ had spoken at the Temple on the Mount. 'That's fuckin' deep, boss.'

'It's common sense, kid,' Brian said. 'Common fucking sense. And that's what we're out here fighting for, isn't it? So I've told you my sad story. I've all but admitted that the hatred I feel for the people who did this to me is because they took away a static sex toy and put me back in the situation of people wondering why I'm not getting married again. So what's your question? You wondering if you should find some bitch you can tolerate just so you