Voyages: A Science Fiction Collection Page 2

  “Why do we do this?” Eli asked him.

  “Not now,” Ben said.

  And he dragged Eli out the door, into a relentless pool of sunlight.

  Two

  ____________

  It took talent, Eli supposed as he closed the unit door behind him, to take so few belongings and be able to litter the entire unit with them – to cover every surface with clothing, shoes, dirty dishes, food wrappers. Printed-out messages from Lida’s friends. (Why she felt a need to waste paper printing them when she could simply read them on-screen any time she chose was a mystery he was sure he would never solve; when he asked her, she would say only “I like to hold them” if she said anything at all.)

  Tidiness was a waste of time, she told him. No one ever came to the unit; Administration only held an inspection if there were reports of vermin in the building.

  Eli was reasonably sure that even vermin would want nothing to do with Lida’s litter.

  What truly was a waste of time was bothering to clean it up. He could have made the place spotless by the time she got home – though Cosmos only knew when that would be – but she’d have it messed up again by morning. He bent to pick up one of Lida’s tunics anyway, shook some of the wrinkles out and hung it in the closet. The fragrance she’d bought a few days ago drifted off the fabric, and for a moment he stood still and inhaled it. It was light, a little sweet. Unobtrusive.

  If only Lida could manage to be unobtrusive. Like her clutter – like a spreading cloud of gas – she managed to fill all the available space, and then some.

  “You don’t need to stay with her,” Ben had pointed out a while back.

  Eli hadn’t answered, and after a minute Ben had leaned in and raised an eyebrow, looking for a response. Not necessarily a good response, one that would make some sense, but any kind of a reaction at all.

  “Callie and I didn’t stick,” Ben had reminded him. “We found other partners. You can do the same thing. Nobody’s going to criticize you. People find new partners all the time. Garrett, from Sorting? He’s been paired with what, eight different women? Okay, numbers like that make people start to wonder. But nobody’s going to say anything about two or three. Sometimes it takes a little experimentation to find the right partner. Move on. Let somebody else deal with Lida.”

  “It’s–” Eli had begun, then stopped.

  I’m not a quitter was what he’d intended to say. But Lida wasn’t a job. She wasn’t a project he could eventually mark Completed.

  “She’s not happy either,” Ben had pointed out.

  No, Eli thought now, as he dumped dried food scraps into the disposer. Lida wasn’t happy either. She made that very plain. But she’d been content enough in the beginning. Curious, and a little intrigued.

  “Okay!” she’d chirped when he asked if she’d like to pair.

  Okay.

  He heard the particular sound of her footsteps coming down the corridor, not moving at anything approaching a rapid clip – it was more a shuffle, like someone was half-dragging her down the hall. The gathering with her friends had been a burnout, then. Something she’d bemoan until they went to sleep. Eli sighed at the thought and pushed the dish he was holding into the sterilizer rack. He could feel his shoulders tighten as her footsteps came closer. He was dreading her arrival… and it hadn’t been that long ago that he’d been thrilled by the idea of coming home to her at the end of his work shift.

  She’d seemed charming then. Sweet, enthusiastic, cheerful.

  He heard the door latch disengage, but he couldn’t bring himself to turn and look at the door. Instead, he pushed the sterilizer shut and stood looking at the control panel. There was dust on it, he realized, and on the countertop. That meant the air cleanser was clogged again. Maybe some article of Lida’s clothing, or one of her papers, was blocking a vent.

  You can’t block the damn VENTS, he thought furiously. Is that so hard to remember?

  Is it so hard to…

  He heard her come in, move around the room a little, kick her shoes off, and collapse onto the bed. When he finally turned around, she was sprawled across the entire matt, limbs akimbo, her hands in two of the corners, feet in the other two. Trying to occupy as much space as she could. She was looking at the ceiling.

  “I thought you’d be out till later,” Eli said.

  “I got bored.”

  She didn’t say anything more. Didn’t look at anything but the ceiling. So Eli went back to straightening up, returning all the clothing to the closet, dumping food scraps, tucking wrappers into the reclaimer, lining dishes up in the sterilizer. The whole place was filmed with dust, which meant it had to have been accumulating for days.

  Days, and he hadn’t noticed.

  Lida sat up on the bed and hauled her tunic up over her head, then squirmed out of her pants. She was paler than anyone he knew; everyone made a point of staying out of the sun, but even so, her skin was unusually, remarkably light and unblemished. She was proud of it, and of her golden-red hair. Of the reaction she got when she stripped off her clothes so someone else could see how flawless she was.

  “I’m bored,” she said again.

  Eli leaned back against the lip of the countertop, letting his mind drift toward finding a reason to say no. To say I don’t want to. To say I wish you wouldn’t make such a constant fucking mess.

  But she was flawless and beautiful and sitting three long strides away from him, that golden-red hair drifting down over her shoulders, and – very deliberately, he understood – she shifted her expression toward what it had been the first time she’d been here with him. Sweet and welcoming.

  This, between them, was still good.

  Not fulfilling, exactly, but good.

  He kept his eyes on her as he shucked his own tunic and pants and dropped them to the dusty floor, then took the three big steps to the bed, climbed up onto the matt and collected her into his arms. That fragrance she’d bought was full and rich on her skin, and he was fully aroused within half a minute, dulled out of any further coherent thought by the taste of her skin and by her eager and very educated touch.

  ~~~~

  “Simmons isn’t here,” Ben said softly.

  Hands still moving automatically, Eli glanced in Ben’s direction. Ben was focused on his console, his movements a mirror of Eli’s, but that brief look told Eli that his friend was worried. Neither of them knew Simmons (whose console was on the far end of the line) very well, but an absence was always a cause for concern. Eli tried to tell himself that the man had just fallen sick, but Ben’s expression told him otherwise.

  “Did they–”

  “There’s a floater at his console,” Ben said.

  That was nothing unusual; all of the positions along the line needed to be filled at all times, and the company was well-staffed with floaters who’d work a console during meal breaks or when a worker needed to step away. They were present whenever a worker was out for the day due to sickness or injury, as well.

  But…

  “You heard something,” Eli said.

  Ben sucked in a long breath, one Eli could hear even over the hum of the machinery. “They’re bringing in someone from Facility Two. Two’s going through consolidation. They got the new bracer up and running, so they’re moving personnel to the satellites. Re-designating some as floaters. And some are…”

  “Permanent.”

  “That’s the word.”

  Eli forced himself not to shudder; even the slightest wrong movement would throw the production line out of balance. He could step away if need be, to collect himself, but stepping away meant points off his tally. Points off meant it would take longer to earn his next token – which meant more time would pass till he could go back to the theater. A token every tenth shift was the norm; a truly diligent worker could earn one in nine, even eight. He’d heard of someone in Reconstitution earning one in six shifts, but they’d done it partly by skipping meal breaks.

  “It’s happening more often, isn’t it?
” he asked Ben quietly.

  “Not that much.”

  Ben didn’t sound convinced, and Eli couldn’t bring himself to believe it either, in spite of what he’d told that young girl the day before. “Any isn’t good,” he told his friend quietly. “It used to happen only once in a while. Now it’s… God among us, Ben. It’s all the time.”

  The screaming.

  Coming back to awareness in the theater surrounded by the rustles and murmurs and groans of a crowd of people – to one small sound in that undercurrent of soft noise, a moan that would grow louder and more intense even as people tried to stifle it, to comfort it out of existence. They picked the wrong scenario: that was Administration’s explanation. Yes, you could build any scene you liked, could populate it with anyone (one other person, or half a dozen) you knew or could imagine. But common sense was critical. Build something you can easily step away from, they said. Make it simple. Relaxing. Don’t create drama. Don’t put yourself a few moves away from achieving some enormous goal that you’ll need to abandon before you succeed.

  Don’t bring back the absent.

  But people did what they would do. They ignored the rules; after all, the journeys were the one aspect of a worker’s life that Administration couldn’t entirely control. As much as they might like to, they couldn’t get into a worker’s head.

  So people made the wrong choices. Built scenarios they couldn’t leave.

  And they came back screaming.

  “It won’t happen,” Ben said, and Eli again glanced at his friend. “To you,” Ben elaborated. “You’re too good at it. You and your field of flowers and your bubbling stream. You’re always so relaxed it’s a wonder you wake up at all.”

  “I just–”

  “Yeah. I know. It’s still… upsetting. I didn’t know Simmons, but I talked to him a couple of times, on meal breaks and whatnot. He seemed like a good worker. A nice guy. He had a lot of friends, from what I hear.”

  “Had?”

  “Well,” Ben said.

  Eli groped for an image of Simmons and found a memory of someone about his own age, but a little taller, a little thinner. Wavy dark hair, intense eyes. Simmons had been paired, Eli was almost certain, though he had no idea who the woman was.

  Now Simmons was gone.

  He’d been dragged down the corridor (flailing and screaming, more than likely) to that strange black door. No one knew what lay beyond it; no one had ever gotten so much as a glimpse inside, because everyone other than the one being removed from the auditorium was kept in their seats until the removal had been completed. Only Security knew what was in that room, and what happened to the people who were hauled inside, and none of them had ever leaked a word. Without the testimony of people who’d been outside the theater at the right time, the ones who could look in through the glass doors to the lobby and see someone being dragged down the corridor out of sight, no one would have a clue where the ones who’d been removed had gone.

  All anyone knew was that they never came back.

  “Hey,” Ben said with enough of an edge to jerk Eli out of his thoughts. “Watch yourself, huh?”

  Eli looked at his hands. Did his best to hold them steady.

  “You need a floater?” Ben said.

  “No.”

  Ben didn’t seem to believe that, and apparently Eli didn’t either, because he found himself turning and stumbling toward the relief room. He found no one else inside, which seemed like a blessing; it allowed him to take a long drink of water, and splash a little on his face, without making any explanation to anyone. For what seemed to him like a long time he focused on the muffled sound seeping in through the door: the indication that production was going on as usual, that his console was there waiting for him, that Ben was there waiting for him. He’d finish his shift, he told himself – would finish it without difficulty, because nothing was wrong. He’d gotten out of bed this morning, had eaten, cleaned up and come to work, and none of it was any different from any other day.

  He’d go home in a couple of hours and Lida would be there and that too would be no different from any other day.

  After Eli had returned to his console, Ben let him work for a little while without saying anything. That helped quiet Eli’s thundering heart, let it settle back into a steady rhythm that almost matched the machinery’s. Little by little Eli convinced himself that nothing had changed. Yes, Simmons was gone. But he hadn’t really known Simmons.

  Maybe the man had simply been transferred.

  “I have an extra token,” Ben said.

  Eli’s neck twitched. This time, he didn’t look toward his friend. Extra…? The tokens weren’t normally transferrable – that would have helped create a black market for them, would have encouraged people to cheat and steal. No one stole, that Eli had ever heard of; no one had anything that was worth stealing.

  Somehow, though, Ben always seemed to have extra things.

  Slowly, Eli shook his head. “I told Lida I’d be home. She’ll be home too. We’re trying to… work on things.”

  “Really.”

  “It’s–” For a moment, Eli was annoyed. “No. I talked to her about the pills. She’s bored with them. They don’t provide enough of a relief. They’re expensive, and they’re not worth it. She’s going to stop going to those parties.”

  “Hmm,” Ben said.

  “We need to give it a chance. We should. After all, we made an agreement.”

  The best Eli could ever manage was a glance away from his console. Ben, somehow, could keep working while looking fully away, and in his peripheral vision Eli could see his friend watching him, studying him.

  “Sure,” Ben said finally. “You should do that.”

  ~~~~

  “You’re upset,” Lida said.

  Eli shifted a little, slid his leg out from underneath hers. Her weight was cutting off his circulation, and he could feel the beginnings of the pins-and-needles sensation. The moment he’d disentangled himself, though, he missed her warmth. Missed the security of touching another human being. Shaking his head, he rolled onto his back and looked up at the ceiling. Logically, there couldn’t be any dust up there, but it seemed like there was.

  “We need to check the vents,” he muttered.

  “For–?”

  “Dust. This place is full of dust.”

  She made a small noise that seemed to be halfway between a chuckle and a groan. “The whole world is full of dust, Eli – except for inside Production. It’s hot and dusty almost all the time, and it makes my eyes hurt.”

  “If we clean the vents–”

  “Stop talking about vents.”

  It was a command, not a request. Before she’d even finished speaking, she reached down to grasp him, and the touch made him jump.

  “Simmons is gone,” he said.

  “Who?”

  “Someone from my section. He – they said he–”

  Lida sat up crosslegged on the bed and peered down at him, frowning, her hand still wrapped around him though her grip had loosened a little. “He’s not you,” she pointed out in a gentler tone than he had expected. “I mean… you know what the solution is. Don’t go. Just don’t go to the theater, and you don’t run any risk.”

  “I can’t… not go.”

  “Of course you can.”

  “Then what do I have? How do I get away from all this?”

  Her expression clouded, and finally, she took her hand away. “That’s nice. That’s really nice, Eli.”

  “I didn’t mean you.”

  “Of course you meant me. I’m not what you want. You make that abundantly clear.”

  “I’ve asked you to go with me. I could conjure you, but I didn’t think that was fair. To manufacture a real person and make you do what I want. That’s not right – I’ve told you I believe that. So I go alone. I go somewhere clean, where the sun is mild. Where there’s water, and flowers. Green grass. Everything’s pleasant there, Lida. Comfortable. It’s relaxing. Soothing. You could go.
I wish you’d go.”

  “It’s just a hallucination.”

  She’d never been to the theater; she’d told him that the day they met. No matter how much he’d coaxed, she’d never been swayed. To her mind, the pills were better. Rather than stirring her imagination, they stilled it – and that was what she wanted, to avoid imagining a better place, one they’d never really have access to. A place no one they knew had ever been to, or would ever be able to go.

  “A dream,” Eli said. “Better than a dream.”

  “Is it better than this?”

  She leaned down. Brought her face close to his and hovered there for a moment, then closed the little distance between them and kissed him, sweetly and deeply. Part of her body curled against his chest, and her hand moved into his hair, fingertips probing at his scalp just behind his ear.

  When his breath began to rattle she straddled him and took him up inside her.

  “It’s not better than this,” she whispered close to his ear. “You can’t tell me it’s better than this.”

  ~~~~

  Leaving her in the morning was difficult – harder than it had been in weeks, in spite of the mound of clothing on the floor and the breakfast dishes she seemed to want to ignore. He’d put his in the sterilizer; hers remained on the table.

  He’d never persuade her to change, he supposed.

  Outside, the heat was a little less terrible than it had been the day before, so his journey to work was a little less debilitating. He moved into the cleansed, slightly cooled air of Production with a small shudder and changed quickly into his coveralls, grateful for the suction of the cleansers that removed the coating of dust from his skin and hair.

  We’re still working on it, he imagined saying to Ben when he reached his console. Me and Lida. It’s… it’s good. So far.

  But when he got to his console, Ben wasn’t there.

  What…? Eli’s mind fumbled.

  In Ben’s place stood a woman Eli didn’t recognize. Her badge identified her as a floater, and said her name was Elma. Her hands were small, he noticed, with long fingers. That said she’d be good at this job, if she could move those fingers quickly, and keep time with the machine.