Wincing at Light

<– Chapter 4, pt. 2 / Chapter 6 –>

So now he’s puttering, which is the equivalent of some fallen angel, headlong skydive from Grace as far as Ray is concerned.  When he was recruited into the CIU, he was a battle weary, wide-eyed, five by five sort of combat veteran.  He stomped through his days like there were Russoturk necks underfoot.  Good times weren’t technically good times unless he was shooting at someone or getting uproariously drunk and pummeling someone else who happened to be on his side of the demilitarized zone.  His average after action report cost the Marine Corps twenty-four pencils, two typewriters and a terminal monitor, just because he required the violence to think clearly.

            The CIU spooks showed up in Wadi Wadi looking like bad imitations of Marines (i.e. they had the clothes; they had the gear; they had the righteous, honed killing edge, but when you looked at them, there was a vacuity to their gaze, a disconcerting detachment that suggested their righteous edge might have been gained in tasks less savory than gutting opposing combat forces in legitimate military exercises).  It was obvious from an even casual perusal that they were not pleasant guys.  They were the kind of folk you suspect are only being nice to you because they want something that you have, but taking it seems like too much effort, even though putting up with your whining and crying afterwards is the hard cap extent of your puerile resistance capabilities against them and whatever it is they want to do to you.  The were very slick, very badass.  Mucho cool and menacing.

            There were two of them, Minos and Thrash, made up to look like dapper Tac Sergeants and they buttonholed him in the PX where he was picking up some razor blades and scanning the magazine rack for this month’s girlie mags.  They tried the whole impressive we have a proposition for you from your government spiel, which he blew off with the argument that he’d already been propositioned by his government, and having been screwed more than his handful share of times, he was considering entertaining other offers at the moment.  Bad pay, poor working conditions, lousy scenery and he had to pay for his own head jobs, thank you very much.  Then they went to the life of excitement and adventure backup, sounding not unlike the recruitment videos the chubby draft sergeants paraded around Ray’s Indiana high school right before graduation.  (Pick your service before the service picks you!)  Ray preferred backgammon and had just taken up origami, and he told them so.  By the time the three of them had gotten themselves wedged into the narrow checkout aisle to watch Ray pay for his purchases, he suspected they were finally gearing up for the hard sell techniques.  He more than suspected they were about to divulge that they were, in fact, officers of distinguished rank masquerading as NCO’s for the singular purpose of screwing with him and/or testing his level of Marine dedication and/or they were actually about this close to ordering him to this devastatingly attractive new duty station whether he liked it or not.

            All the necessary papers, they seemed to suggest, had already been signed, copied and filed in his absence.

            Ray was not in the mood to take orders from spooks, officers or not, and he didn’t like the fact that they had followed him through the entire PX, so before they could tell him something that will put him in hock to the Uniform Code of Military Justice (like the fact that they are, in fact, officers and he’s required to listen respectfully and then obey their commands), he dropped his fresh packet of razor blades and his tit magazine and proceeded to stomp their asses from the candy aisle all the way back to Personal Hygiene Products.  Having successfully avoided their recruitment overtures, Ray picked up his personal items and returned to the temporary barracks…

            …where they caught up with him, and slipped a cold and nasty auto-injector against his arm and shot him full of a temporary nerve toxin that left him both queasy and paralyzed.  They stood over his bed by moonlight, their faces patchwork quilts of bruise and scratch and swelling welts, and said things like you’re an active guy; you like the hard life.  More important, you like kicking people around and stopping bad guys from doing the types of things that bad guys like to do. We’re offering you the opportunity to do exciting and interesting crap like that every day for the rest of your life, okay?  They gave him some examples of his past enjoyment of this type of activity, just enough to show that they were fluent with the language of his personnel file.  They said the pay was great, the working conditions top notch, the benefits outstandingly better than anything anyone else was offering, and even though you still had to pay for your own head jobs, at least you could comfortably afford them.

            Ray was impressed not at all by their arguments and incentives, but he was floored by their ability to sneak into a fully occupied NCO barracks in the middle of an armed camp and disable a squared away combat Marine before he’d even had a proper chance to rouse himself.  As a man who made his living by creatively and skillfully killing other men, this was a currency of the most fascinating sort.

By the time they said and it’s never dull, like that was supposed to be the big, clenching appeal (rather than what it was, to whit, an indication that someone should look into terminating their staff psychologist for incompetency), Ray was saying something unhiply emotive like you had me from hello.

            But here he is, a few short years removed, puttering around the shop, surrounded by terminals and computer equipment and assorted, disembodied drone components, looking to all the world like he is some sort of tech geek, like he is the type of guy who could code a complex DNA sequencer and database-match compiler meshed through a self-developed bitstream interpreter interface between the drones’ internal SQUAL metalanguage and Paraclete’s state of the art DLQ+ virtual sensing medical computing environment.  It’s a good thing he and Nomar have the shop to themselves, otherwise he’d probably have to maim someone just on general principle.  Nomar has gone into peeved mode from having a data output jack rammed up his anal port for the second time in as many days, and has retreated beneath a desk where he has something solid against his back and can, if Ray gets out the jack again, use his claws against assorted soft tissues in an effort to convey his displeasure.  The fact that he is not an actual rat and should not be disturbed by standard data transfer procedures does not seem to have occurred to his processing array, which Ray finds to be an issue of marginal interest from a programming standpoint.

            Ray is sitting at his workstation watching meaningless data analysis stream across his monitor while it searches for hits against the med and criminal databases stored in the ship’s datacore.  He’s refined the search parameters a dozen times already with unsatisfactory results after he has filtered for the kid’s recorded DNA profile (Parameter argument logic/response technique where unsatisfactory = zero records returned.  Alternately:  zilch, zip, nada, the dreaded empty set, no data, etc.  See alternate references under:  Waste of Time, Sleep Deprivation to No Ascertainable Purpose and Tasks Not Specified in Job Description).

            The cascade of digits in process is vaguely hypnotic, and Ray keeps flipping back to memories of Jack Holcomb, which is something he most definitely does not want to do.  Because he can’t help but think about the way Holcomb always kept one hand over his chest, right where his dog tags would dangle.  Only, it wasn’t his tags he was feeling for, but the meticulous stone ring he wore on a chain, the one he’d crafted from descriptions and hints in ancient manuscripts to be just like the ones hoary old King Solomon of Biblical fame had used in legend to subjugate demons and djinn and slave labor them out to various projects culminating in the construction of the Holy Temple.

            Exactly like the ones, Holcomb reveals to Ray beneath a starry New Mes night and in a breathless and trembling voice, precisely cognate to the ones he has had surgically fused to the bones of his skull, grafted around his femur and tibia, implanted into his pelvis.  He laughs, grim with knowledge, and says over and again:  the shed is wrong about that, my friend.  I won’t slip; I won’t make a mistake or let down my guard.  Im-fucking-possible.  He doesn’t know about modern medicine, does he?  He hasn’t kept up with time, with technology.  There’s no way to trip me up, to steal my talisman and turn me into some doddering Solomon with a shamir in my staff of power.  Bring your shiddah veshiddot!  You thought Solomon was an asshole?  You don’t know the first thing about me, but I know everything about you.

            What was the difference between paranoia and insanity?  That might be something he’d have to look up.

            You’re a good soldier, Marlowe.  You know everything there is to know about the currency of the physical world–violence.  There’s no fault in that.  We’ve trained you to be a ruthless killing machine, and you’ve taken to your lessons like a prodigy, plain and simple.  But you need to get this through your head, buddy.  You’re not just operating in a physical arena.  Not anymore.  You see the shed, you read the books I’ve read and seen the forces I’ve seen–forces beyond the ken of simpleminded man–and you’ve got one of two choices:  you ignore what you know to be the truth and wait for it to destroy you, or you dive in, you learn, you acquire the currency of the supernatural world–knowledge.  Once you take that step, once you accept what you’ve seen as truth rather than illusion or delusion or psychotic break, Marlowe, then the world becomes a totally different place.  The horizon takes on a depth you never imagined.  The universe is a far vaster and stunningly more nuanced place than you have heretofore cared to believe.  Once you know, you can’t ever go back to a place of not knowing, only forward, only better warned and better armed.  You’ll see.  One day you’ll say to yourself, “that Jack Holcomb with his stone rings inscribed in Sanskrit and Arabic and forgotten Hittite, that Jack Holcomb knew what he was talking about, didn’t he?  He had his shit together, yessir.  He had knowledge.  Magus Fucking Profundus”.  Then you’ll be calling me, asking me what to do to save your ass.  No shame in that, Marlowe.  When the student is ready, the teacher appears.

            He assiduously avoids thinking about Ba’dai again.  He’s all but purged that impulse for another five to seven years by spilling his guts to Becker.  But this doesn’t stop him from coming back to the shed with troubling frequency.  As he sees it, he is logically required to dismiss the argument that the boy was murdered in the fashion that he was out of coincidence.  Carving out a child’s organs is not standard homicidal technique.  It has been done, certainly, by individuals with interests that did not intersect with ancient Middle Eastern occult rites.  But he has a hard time believing that this type of child serial killer would randomly end up berthed on a starship with one of the few people in the world who might be tempted to mistake his psychosis for ritual.

             The same reasoning applies to bumbling, shed summoning acolytes who lacked the patience to wait until they reached the less monitored frontier environment of New Holyoke.

            As Becker had said, someone was trying to send him a message.  Someone in a position to know what he had seen.

            Someone who also knew about the shed.

            Well met, brother.  I think that we shall meet again.

            But it is a good idea to stop there, to not follow that thread to its conclusion.  Better not to dwell on other things, rumors, whispers from Wadi Wadi that reached him only as desiccated corpses of truth, sanitized of their vibrancy because he received them at a dozen degrees of separation.

            Staff Sergeant So-and-so from F Company reporting that a night patrol did not return as scheduled, says he dispatched a recon team to locate them after several hours.  Recon team walks the grid and discovers a bundle of corpses stashed in a windblown arroyo.  Corpses with a distinctly chewed look to them. 

            Unsubstantiated rumors that pilots had stumbled across abandoned tent compounds that looked an awful lot like those of bedouin Sheik Loyal to the Allied Cause, their herds wandering listlessly, untended.

            Forward listening posts gone silent, the troops deserted–always at night.

            Filtered tales of Allied Kurd forces laying down their arms and vanishing into the remote mountain wilderness, leaving cryptic messages that they would only fight that which could be killed.  METOC sends investigators to look into the possibility of a newly formed, ultra secret branch of Russoturk special forces wreaking havoc on local support.

            New Mes became a very creepy place in the months before he shipped off to CIU, and on moonless nights out in the field, at odd hours when he was supposed to be setting up ambushments for tomorrow’s Russoturk convoys, Ray would think about Jack Holcomb and wonder what he made of all the bizarre rumors.  Was he running around Washington trying to convince senators and cabinet members to beware the shed?  Did he sometimes yearn for moonless nights, when there wasn’t the chance that he would see strange shadows against the argent limned sky?

            Push it away, Ray tells himself.  It’s a mind game, one he thought he had left behind.

            Or had he run away from it?  Had he embraced the CIU because it promised to put him on an interminable series of starship cruises, to eject him into the deepness of space as far from New Mes as human habitation ranged?

            Did Ialdabaoth create the entire universe, or just the earth?  That was a point Holcomb had never made quite clear enough.

            So he stops thinking about New Mes and sheds and metaphysics.  He can do that, except what’s left to him–the dead kid–is somehow worse. 

He’s been at it for about three hours, and despite all the events he has jammed into this day, it’s still early.  Just after midnight Greenwich according to the ship’s chron.  He’s been up since way too early, and he’s aware that he should be getting tired any time now, should probably just plan on falling over with his fatigue and considering himself lucky if he doesn’t fall so hard he breaks his face.  But in the quiet of the shop when his mind isn’t actively engaged, he’s developed an agitating tendency to get all shaky.  He has to concentrate on the keypad to keep his fingers from rattling off strings of incoherent letters and digits. 

            It’s something he’s been through before, too many times to count, in fact.  A minor case of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, acute in nature.  Good Marines measure their level of combat effectiveness by PTSD episode count more than by medals, commendations and field promotions.

            Little Micah Uytedehaage is not a combat fatality, but he registers the same way in Ray’s mind.  He flashes in and out of Ray’s forebrain with a music video’s stab and cut photographic intensity.  His eviscerated corpse.  His glassy and staring eyes.  His gangly, purple limbs.  Ray has the boy’s sweet corpse smell up his nostrils, a constant sensory companion, though he knows he’s just imagining it.  The subconscious picks at horror like it’s a scab.  Any decent military psychologist will tell you that this is a good thing; it’s an indicator that your coping mechanisms are on-line and humming feverishly over the task of putting the event behind you.

            Ray has had to rush to the head three times in the last two hours to vomit.  He supposes that this is a coping mechanism, too.

            He doesn’t feel like he’s coping.  He feels like he’s being eaten alive.

            The traditional Marine response to stress on this scale of magnitude is to round up some similarly stressed buddies, find a bar frequented by military types and spend several hours getting astoundingly drunk.  Additional therapy comes in the form of locating other military individuals attached to a different branch of the service (e.g., Air Force guys) who seem to have not encountered a combat level of stress induced psychological damage and thumping on them until they can begin to empathize. 

Ray suspects that Commander Sorensen would not appreciate his taking this self-actualization tack, so he forces himself to break down the ass-kicking impulse to its base elements in an attempt to find an adequate substitute.  It occurs to him that the whooping of USAF butts may be more an artifact of the drinking than of coping, which leads him to believe that drinking itself might also be incidental to the healing process.  What remains when he’s done filtering out unnecessary behavior patterns and general Marine tradition is the naked concept of identification.  Mutual understanding without words.

He needs to be close to someone who can share his pain.

This is, of course, a sufficiently profound psychological revelation to justify making an odd hours social call on Emma Whiston.

***

            Even with an underdeveloped sense of propriety (cultivated by years of hanging around with testosterone enhanced males, and followed by a few more years of elevating sneakiness and network footprint avoidance to the level of a fine art), Ray comprehends that it would be a bad idea to hack the ship’s passenger manifest for the unproferred address of the Whiston suite.  Civilized people would consider such behavior either unforgivably rude or stalkingly threatening. 

            And there are other, more socially conscionable ways of gathering that information.

One of the features of the system terminals on the Garden Level is a public database of ship schematics searchable by deck and passenger name which will, if properly instructed, produce a hardcopy map where you are signified by an X and the recommended route of travel to the specified destination is a dotted red line.  Built into this nifty little program is a courteous bit of code that pings the private in-room network of the individual for whom you have just searched to alert them to the possibility of visitors in their immediate future (and/or give them the opportunity to alert security that so-and-so with this shipsys id, who I happen to find personally offensive, is on his way to my rooms and I’d like to have him intercepted before he arrives).  This code goes by the name of Distant Doorbell and is one of those innocuous bits of programming that took its creator all of about ten minutes from idea to debugging and rewarded his ingenuity with something on the order of ten billion dollars within six months of the product’s release.

            It has since become the minimum standard of decent manners on starships throughout human space.

            By the time he reaches the Garden Level to place his obligatory ping, Ray has showered off the corpse smell that probably didn’t exist for anyone but himself, changed into corpse-free khaki and passed several agonizing minutes in front of a mirror trying on facial expressions that conveyed an approximation of human warmth and concern, tinged with a sort of Oh-my-God-I-just-heard consternation.  (Somewhat disconcertingly, this looks almost exactly like his I’ll give you three dollars American if you’ll have dirty sex with me face, only with less eyebrow and a touch more goggle.  He alternates between the two several times until he’s certain the compassionate one will hold its form with the rigidity of cement.)  The map generated by the kiosk terminal bears the title THIS IS HOW YOU GET TO EMMA across the top in perkily obese green letters.  The fact that it is six pages long, involves three separate elevators, four staircases and traverses roughly the entire lateral distance of the ship would have been intimidating for anyone not a member of the crew, and Ray suspects that this is might be intentional.  It is a “Visitors NOT Welcome” sign hung out by individuals having just enough celebrity to be casually gawk-worthy or notorious enough to want to be left alone.

            The Whiston suites are tucked six decks below the Garden Level in a bulbous protrusion grafted onto the original superstructure by design engineers specializing in aesthetics.  It is a compound of twelve sprawling rooms with four public entrances, two private egresses with their own personal lift and an entry corridor that dead ends at the hatch to an exclusive emergency jettison pod.  The failed illusion that Paraclete is something other than a military craft converted to passenger transport does not exist here in the space officially designated Iota Deck-D, where the D more than likely stood for decadence.  Iota-D is a place of vibrant color and understated elegance, of rare wood panels and walls papered with textured earth tones, of crimson carpet, fresh flowers and dewdrop chandeliers.  It is, in short, everything the Officers Lounge tries to be except for the niggling absence of about a trillion dollars to burn.

            And that’s just the farking hallway.

            Ray steps out of the lift feeling a bit breathless.  He examines his watch for the tenth time in the last few minutes, but not until this moment has he bothered to consider that it really is almost one in the morning.  That maybe whatever it is that brought him down here could wait until the morning, or next week or the day that falls right after “never” on the calendar.  But this is a normal sort of freaking out for him, so he plunges ahead, just beginning to sweat and lifting his knees high with each step so the morass of the carpet won’t establish a suction lock on his boots and strand him, paralyzed, out in the open.

            Then there’s the knottier problem of which door to hammer at.  The map directs him only to the primary entrance, which appears dramatically too public upon actual inspection.  It’s a thing of chrome and technological gadgetry, with a secure lock keypad entry system.  There’s a high-res flatscreen embedded in wall to the left.  At the moment it’s projecting a vid image of the system messenger in kako-daimon mode–meaning that the door is locked and the messaging software routed to a recording device.  There’s either nobody home, or whoever happens to be inside isn’t interested in talking to anyone not already on their side of the security.

            Ray doesn’t find this surprising given the circumstances, nor did he imagine that given the encounter with the Mr. Whiston of the household this morning that he’d have much luck getting at Emma via the front door in the first place.  But with three other doors to choose from, knocking on the wrong one would be a tactical error.

            Thus, the Distant Doorbell ping.  And the follow-up ping the lift would have transmitted to the security system when it stopped on Iota-D.

            But the rest relies on Emma being present and/or paying attention and/or astute enough to realize she should be waiting by the door in the middle of the (chronological) night to meet a man who still technically falls somewhere in the murky acquaintance range between cordial and complete stranger.  It is a complex array of variables, none of which reflect positively on his foresight and mission planning skills.  Of course, most of his traditional mission planning skills would have dictated kicking in all the doors he found closed, doing a lot of shouting and gun pointing and eventually bayoneting anyone who was not Emma so they couldn’t raise a general alarm. 

            So this way is probably best.

            Though he reserves the right to keep the shouting and stabbing as a viable Plan B.

            But at the last, it doesn’t matter.  Before he can go digging through his pockets for makeshift edged weapons, there comes a hydraulic wheeze down the corridor to his left.  A snooty kako-daimon avatar begins to express his displeasure in a tinny, offended voice at having the seal broken, but is cut off in mid-reprimand.  From the farthest door, what would have been the door to the corner room if Iota-D hadn’t been vaguely circular in its construction, Emma peers out, her round face and wide eyes emerging from the flat plane of the wall as though it is disembodied.  A pale arm follows and she beckons to him without words.  Ray strikes out toward her at an unmanly trot.

            His hands are empty.  He should have brought flowers or something.  It would have been easy enough, since he has connections in the hydroponics section.  He could have arranged something if he’d been thinking clearly–which he seems to be not doing now.  Though it could also just be a lack of practice at this sort of thing.  The last time he brought any woman flowers, he was eight years old carrying a bundle of discriminatingly selected wildflowers to his mother in the hospital right after she’d disgorged Robert Junior (a.k.a. “bobbin”, “bobbo”, “L’il B’, “Roberta Jean”, “punk-ass bee-yatch”, depending on the speaker and the circumstances).

            And he thinks:  Is this a tryst?  Is that what it is?  He’s never been involved in a tryst, so he can’t say for certain, but the possibility is both thrilling and alarming at once.

            What am I doing?

            A moment later he’s inside; the door hisses closed behind him.  The much abused kako-daimon announces in a hurt tone that portal integrity has been restored and tacks on a purely malicious notation that the security breach has been documented in the system log.  There is a subtle tsk! in its voice which leads Ray to believe that software developers spend entirely too much time generating pseudo-human skins for their avatars when they should have been focusing on the fact that an average skilled hardware hacker could pop the security kernel in just under thirty seconds.

            At this point, he decides it would be a good idea to stop the dervish whirling through his neural net before it makes him dizzy.  He takes a deep breath, tries to concentrate.

            He is such a giddy assclown.

            But here’s Emma, small and pale, luminous in blue silk capri pants and a short oriental robe wrapped about her.  She hugs her arms against her chest, steps back to create some distance between them.  Her lips are drawn together in a thoughtful pout and her eyes dart toward him, then away, considering the door.  She seems to be straining forward, as though filtering the ether for voices Ray cannot hear.

            Finally, she allows her shoulders to slump and offers him a relaxed and weary frown.  Not unhappy, just bland, almost an absence of expression.  “It seems I’ve been a bad influence, Mr. Marlowe.  You’ve known me for two days, and here you are already behaving audaciously.”

            “I know.  It’s late, but you didn’t strike me as the type of girl who put to bed early.”

            “I don’t believe you know enough about me or my sleeping habits to make such a bold statement.  How quickly I jump into bed might just surprise you.”

            She speaks without mischief, an innocent absence of intent.  There’s no play in her at all.

            And Ray remembers that Micah Uytedehaage was not just victim to her, not just a carcass already cooling the first time she saw him.  He winces at the thought, at its ugliness.

            “Did I wake you?”  Ray asks, a form of apology. 

            Emma shakes her head.  “I was–No, not at all.  It’s dreadfully early for the young socialite, as you suggest.”

            “No, it’s late.  I should have been more considerate, waited until tomorrow.”

            This was a mistake.  What had he been thinking?

            “It’s fine, really.  I don’t object to visitors.  Not you, especially.  But you didn’t bring your rat with you, I see.  I had conceived a notion that the two of you were inseparable.”

            “He’s angry with me at the moment.  I’m giving him space to brood.”

            She obviously doesn’t know what to make of this, and stares at him with her lower lip caught in her teeth.  He’s being nonsensical, of course.  Everything is nonsensical.  He hasn’t had a clear and focused thought since he walked in the door.

            “Why are you here, Ray?”

            “I should have just called.  Would you like me to go?”

            “I knew it was you when the ping came through.  I wouldn’t have opened the door if I didn’t want to see you.”

            Ray doesn’t know what that means, not in this context.  Just polite?  Is this what good manners looks like?

Beyond Emma’s shoulder is a short hallway.  At the end is a door, slightly ajar, which he assumes must be her bedroom.  It’s a space that suits her, this room.  Cream colored walls, abstract pastel prints, pale rugs over a white carpet.  The furniture is soft, delicately constructed.  Where there are flowers, the vases are clear, eggshell thin crystal and the petals pale.  Mostly lilies and orchids with their green stalks trimmed by a practiced hand.  There’s a simplicity here, an uncluttered grace that is appealing not because it is spartan, but because it conveys a sense of subtle vibrancy–an inchoate potential for definition.  Against the far wall is a suede sofa candlesticked by a pair of standing lamps which cast pools of warm yellow light.

            Ray reaches out and catches Emma’s hand.  He draws her across the room, and eases her down onto one end of the sofa.  Ray sits on the far side, a field of neutral cushions between them.  She watches him the entire time, and he wonders if she is as confused by his behavior as he is.  He has never acted this way around a woman before.  Never.  And what it means, what it might mean, fills him with a curious mixture of exhilaration and aching, electric terror.

            “Emma, you’ll have to forgive me.  I’m not thinking very clearly.  I know I’m not acting with much coherence.  I’m–I mean to say, I think I came because I needed to see that you were all right.”

            “Why wouldn’t I be fine?”  By syntax, it’s a question, but she speaks it without curiosity.         “Because of Micah,” Ray says simply.  “The boy from the Trust.”

The name strikes her like a punch.  She does not so much wilt as unhinge, her joints and muscles collapsing.  She drops her chin until it rests against her breast, and all Ray can see is the top of her head.

            But just for a moment. 

With a jerk, she stiffens, lifts her head and sets her mouth in a firm, thin line.  “News of a Whiston tragedy has always travels quickly.  There must be morbid delight in our suffering.”

            “No, not at all.”  She doesn’t understand, he realizes.  She doesn’t see any way he could know about Micah so soon, except as a recipient of a firestorm of gossip.  Ugh.  “It’s not like you think.  I was dragged into the investigation by Security Chief Becker this afternoon–to coordinate the drones, you understand.  We use them to gather physical evidence to keep from contaminating the crime scene.  Sometimes, it puts me in a position to hear privileged information.”  He gives her a grim, understanding expression to hide the lie he has just told.  It feels oily to him, like cheap theatrical makeup poorly applied.  “Chief Becker is going to play this one close.  Murder reflects poorly on security’s reputation.”

            “Murder,” she echoes woodenly.

            “I’m sorry, Emma.”

She gazes away from him, an alabaster statue of grief.  “I tucked him into bed last night, after coming home from the theatre.  You probably didn’t know that.  He had sneaked into the sitting room to read a picture book after the other children had fallen off.  Amah had made it a special task of hers to teach him how to read before we reached New Holyoke, because it was a skill he would need, she said.  Even frontiersmen should have an education.  The development of human culture depends on it.”

About what time, Ray almost asks, but stops the question before he asks.  It’s too obvious.

            Treading gently.  “Was that the last time you saw him?”

            “Yes.”

            “And your brother?  Did he see him after that, maybe some time this morning?”

            “Not that he mentioned, but I haven’t really spoken with Frederick since–”  She pauses.  “I mean, I’ve only spoken with Amah.  She’s the one who told me.”

            “Amah?”

            “Our domestic.  She’s been with our family for years.  She raised Frederick and me practically from the moment I was born, after mother became ill the first time.  She has a special way with children.”

            It’s enough.  Even taking this much advantage of her is disgusting.

            Ray reaches out to her, taking one of the hands she has folded into her lap.  He squeezes it gently.  “Are you all right?”

            “I don’t think that I am.  Not at all.”

            “I’d worry if you thought you were.”

            “It was bad, wasn’t it?  I mean, they didn’t just kill him, not accidentally or even gently.  Amah wouldn’t give me any details, any of the truth, except to say that he was dead.  But I know it must have been terrible, because she would have said so otherwise.  And when I tried to ask her more about it, to give me something to comfort the other children with, she sent me to my room like a little girl.  She doesn’t want me to know.  She thinks she’s protecting me.  But I don’t need protection; I need to know.”

            “Becker will catch whoever did this, I can promise you that.” 

            Emma scowls, her eyes turn hard.  “You’re just like Amah.”

            “Maybe she’s right.  Not that you need protection, of course, but just that there are some things it’s better not to know.  You always hear people say that imagining is worse than the reality, no matter how horrible the truth might be.  It’s been my experience that the only people who say that are folks who have never seen anything truly horrible.”

            This concession seems to be enough.  Emma blinks the anger out of her gaze.  “You’ve seen terrible things before, haven’t you?  You’ve been a soldier.”

            “What makes you say that?”

            “You talk like a Marine.”

            Without thinking, Ray winks.  “You’ve known many Marines, Miss Whiston?”

            “I have a Terran cousin with whom I’m very close who happens to be a career Marine, Mr. Marlowe,” she replies archly.

            Ray smiles softly.  “I guess that’s better than saying I remind you of your crusty old uncle or something.  Yes, Emma, I was a Marine.  Or I am a Marine.  They don’t actually let us retire, you know.  They just put us on indefinite hiatus.”

            “And you served bravely in the desert, yes?  Like all the other good Midwestern boys?”

            “I did.”

            “You were no doubt very brave.”

            “No.  The brave are the ones who come back in bags.  I’m just feisty and clever and stubborn.  Like a camel.  The best way to survive in a hostile environment is always to emulate the natives.”

            “I’d rather imagine you as brave and lucky than camelish.  A Lawrence of Arabia romance.”  She tilts her head toward him.  “Does it bother you to talk about the desert?”

            “Not in generalities.”  Which is true enough.  “Generalities are better, in fact, if you want to keep your illusions of romance.”

            “But it was exciting, wasn’t it?”

            He laughs without humor.  “In the military, excitement is a dirty word.  We avoid all things exciting if possible.”

            “I don’t believe that.  I think your life must have been very exciting, but you don’t want to tell me.”

            “Do you really want to know?”

            “I do.  I want to know all your secrets.  Even the terrible ones.”

            “Are you always this blunt?”

            She narrows her eyes at him.  “You’re avoiding the issue.  Tell me what it was like.”

“What it was like?”  He doesn’t know why this is so important to her, why she wants to know so badly.  But he tells her–for no other reason than that she wants it.  “Imagine what it would feel like to shiver constantly for a whole year if you can.  Every second, every hour, every day, just shivering.  That’s what the New Mes combat zone is like.”

            Her brow furrows, as if she can’t decide if he’s teasing her.  “I don’t understand.”

            “That’s why you should keep your illusions, your romance.  They’re much better.”

            Quietly.  “Like with Micah.”

            “Exactly like that.”

            She sighs then, a deep and cleansing exhalation that seems to lift some of the weight bearing down on her.  “I’m glad you came, even if the circumstances are awful.  After this morning, I thought…well, I thought that you might not want to see me again.  Frederick has a troubling tendency to alienate the men who interest me.  He’s very jealous of my virtue, I think.  Or he feels like he has to protect the family reputation from unsavory individuals who might be less interested in me than in the Whiston assets.”

            Nah, he’s just an asshole, Ray thinks, but does not say.

            He has a number of things he wants to say now that His Man Freddy has been brought into the mix, most prominently, he wants to ask her does he hit you or less baldly does he always get off by hurting you, but this isn’t the time.  There might never be a right time, but he’s slowly drawing near to an awareness that he wants there to be opportunities, at least.  He would very much like to know her more intimately.

            “I’m not after your money,” he says, because it’s obligatory at this point.  “Not that you know me well enough to have any faith in that.”

            With a saucy curl of her lips, Emma returns, “Then it’s my body you’re after.”

            “Too honest for this stage of our–”  What?  Flirtation?  Acquaintance?  Relationship?

            She spares him the necessity of a descriptor.  “I see, you want to get to know me better, to deconstruct my behavior and determine what sort of woman I really am before you let your lust get carried away.  Is that it?”

            “Too mercenary.”

            “Then what?  Oh, something Midwestern, I suppose.  You just like my company and would like to see if it develops into a more permanent structure.  You want to fall in love with me.”

            He smiles in spite of his discomfort.  “Now you sound like my mother.  She was a wrecking ball on my dating life.”

            “Aren’t mothers supposed to be?  She doesn’t want some tramp turning your head with jiggling parts and voluptuous curves and ruining you for the nice, decent girls.”

            Ray can’t help but wince.  “What?  Do they give you guys some kind of manual with this crap in it?  Because if they do, it’s grossly unfair.  Boys don’t get manuals for comprehending women, or if we did, I was absent that day.”

            `”It’s all right, Ray.  I like that reason.  It’s very romantic, very chivalrous.  People who discount solid Midwestern values make a grave mistake.  They set themselves up for lifetimes of misery.”

            He’s getting dizzy again, as though he’s watching her spin a web around him.  “I don’t even know what I’m doing here, let alone what I want.”

            “You want me.  That much should be obvious.”

“I’m not in your league, Emma.  Never have been.  This isn’t one of those clever sensibilities the Marines hacked out of me, either.  It’s not a class thing or an experience thing.  It’s something I never had to begin with.  You’re–I don’t know–you’re so far beyond me that I can’t even put it into words.  Half the time I want to strangle you because I think you’re just playing with me, teasing me the way a kid squeezes a strange puppy.  The other half I want to grab you and hold you at arms length and just look at you, marvel at you.  You’re incomprehensible to me.”

            She laughs gaily and springs across the couch.  Beside him, onto him, with her legs folded across his and one arm thrown around his shoulders and her chin pressed in the ticklish space on his neck.  She whispers into his ear, “You’ve only known me for two days.  Of course I’m mysterious to you.  I hope I’m a complete and overwhelming mystery for a lot longer than that, because if you figure out all my secrets too quickly, I’ll be forced to think I’m as shallow as people believe I am.”

            Ray shakes his head, but not too vigorously.  He doesn’t want to dislodge her.  “How old are you?”

            Giggling.  “How old are you?”

            “Old enough that I should know better.”

            “Then I’m young enough not to, which makes us a perfect match until you come to your senses.  By then, I should be old enough that you don’t have to worry about it.”

            Because he can’t look at her, can’t see her expression, only feel her lips against his ear and her hip touching his, he says, “You’re the most beautiful thing I have ever seen, Emma.  And the fact that I feel that way scares me.”

            “You’ve been lonely for a very long time.”  Her voice is husky, wet with implication.

            “Have I?”

            “Would you have come tonight if you weren’t?”

            Lonely?  He hasn’t thought about it in those terms, and it troubles him immediately.  Loneliness is a step away from desperation.  Lonely men make stupid mistakes, fall into logical traps that convince them those stupidities were warranted. 

What was the last thing he always made his men do before a major tactical engagement? 

            Run into the nearest town and get laid or sucked or jerked off.  If a soldier didn’t have the money to buy it himself, Ray gave it to him.  Because there was something essential in the release, something necessary and clarifying in having someone else do it for you.  Someone soft and receptive, someone who maybe just pretended to care, but if you bought it, if you contributed to the illusion, that gave it enough weight to make it real.  And when they came back to camp late in the night or early the next morning, their eyes were brighter, their steps more firm, their hands less prone to trembling.  Scared, yes.  They were still scared, but they weren’t desperately scared anymore.  Getting laid wasn’t going to save their lives on the battlefield, but it gave them a perspective that kept them from making the mistakes by which they might kill themselves.

            “I’m not lonely,” he says.

            “You are.  You just haven’t realized it yet.  You’re lonely for me.  Lonely and hungry.”

            If he was lonely–if his loneliness was obvious to someone like Emma, someone he’d just met–what did that mean?  What mistakes was he making or essential facts was he missing?  How was he not thinking clearly about the tasks at hand?

            “Ray?” 

            Emma’s voice in his ear, gone from pleasantly libidinous to questioning, bordering on concerned, because he’s been screwing around in his own head when he was supposed to be answering her flirtation.

            He draws himself back to the surface, to a place where he’s in even remote contact with reality.  “I’ve never said anything like that to a woman.”

            She purrs at him, delighted.  “Never?”

            “I haven’t been in the types of places where there are women you’d want to say them to.  And I imagine those types of women wouldn’t have wanted to hear a G.I. actually say it and mean it, anyway.”

            Was that a stupid admission to make?  He thinks it might have been.

            “Then you must be falling in love with me.”

            “It’s too early.”

            “I thought you said you hadn’t been given a manual?”

            “I did–no, that’s not what I mean.  Hell, I mean that it just doesn’t work that way.  Not where I come from.  You don’t fall in love with somebody after two freaking days!  You fall into lust, or into deep desire, or into some really gripping kind of titillation.”

            “Or maybe,” she says wickedly, “you’ve just never met anyone like me.”

            “I don’t even know you!”  And you don’t know me, he adds silently.  Which was really the whole issue now, wasn’t it?  Whatever the relationship between them was or might be, it was already wrong.  It was a deception founded on his allowing her to believe that he was just a member of the crew, just a systems vet, a rat guy.  It was the same vague, troubling, impossible relationship he had with Commander Sorensen.

            Impossible because she was completely right.  He was lonely for her, for Emma.  Something within her cried out to him, troubled him, lured him in ways he didn’t have the faculties or the experience to recognize.  Everything he knew about her, had sensed, had touched, was lightning he tried to catch in a bell jar.

            And he was ruining it.  Every moment he spent with her like this was a step on the path to destruction because he couldn’t tell her the truth.  He wants her so badly he’s risking everything.

            Ray surges up from the couch, sheds her like a comforting blanket on a winter night.  “I’ve got to go.”

            “What?  Ray–but I thought–”

            He waves her off, stomps to the door.  “I know, I thought so to.  But I can’t, Emma.  I just can’t.  Not now anyway.  It wouldn’t be right.”

            He keys the door, gets to listen to the kako-daimon start it’s outraged blather.  He turns back to Emma, still seated on the sofa.  She grips the cushion fabric in between her fingers and she’s poised on the edge as though she’s gathering the strength or the resolve to spring after him.  There are fat tears gathering in the corners of her eyes because she imagines that he’s rejecting her.  Or imagines that he’s angry with himself for taking advantage of her distraught emotional state.  He watches this idea dawn upon her, that he’s excoriating himself because of Micah, because just a few hours after the boy was ravaged here he is, the jaunty stranger, trying to dig into the boy’s surrogate mother’s pants.

            And because she wanted him to do this, to be here, to make love to her, he’s made her culpable in a condemnation that doesn’t even exist.  In her mind, he’s painted himself as honorable, stepping back from the precipice of temptation so that he does not hurt her while she is vulnerable.  But because she wants him, because she wasn’t the first to resist, the honor is all his.  All that remains for her is shame.  He watches this dawn on her too, crumbling her quiet resolve, reducing her to tears.

            It’s all deception, has been from the start.

            And the thing that kills him is that it’s better this way.  It has to be this way.  He’s required to make it be this way and encourage her to believe it, that it’s partially her fault.  Because the job demands of him that he not tell her the truth, that he not tell her that her brother is a legitimate suspect until further notice, that he’s in the middle of all this tragedy trying to put the pieces together.

            He just wants to scream.

            “I’ll see you again,” he promises, hoping that she believes him. 

It’s all he can do.

<– Chapter 4, pt. 2 / Chapter 6 –>

Filed under: A Vessel for Offering