The dog sat down on the bed and studied Benny for a long time.
“You abandoned me,” said the dog.
Benny was stunned. “You spoke.”
“Yes. My name is Zinx. I am also Rex now. I was damaged, but the dog was not. I have taken over his mind and body. I am speaking my thoughts to you, not words. But you hear them as words. You were going to kill me. Rex told me. I was dying, and you were going to hit me with a stick. Rex here, he licked my hand, all seven fingers. It was gummy, a little unpleasant, but I can read minds, and he meant well. I took over his body and I control his mind, mostly. We share this body and mind, actually. Rex and I both agree, you are a little scum.”
“So...you’re the one in the spaceship?”
“You’re also not very quick, are you, Benny? I just told you that. I sent the ship back into space. It would only go so far and disintegrate. It no longer had the power to go back home. Only to rise up high enough and break into many small pieces; a mechanism designed to keep our craft from being discovered. I was able to get it to float that high. That way the evidence is destroyed. But me, I had to stay behind. Inside Rex. And you know what, Benny? I meant it when I said Rex is in here with me still, and he has his own thoughts. I like him. I really do. There’s something fine and noble and loyal and simple about Rex. You know what he tells me?”
Benny shook his head.
“That he is a faithful dog and you are an unfaithful boy, and that you left him to me, not knowing what I would do to him, not caring, and it’s only a miracle that I’m not an evil alien. Thoughts to that effect.”
“Holy cow,” Benny said.
“Yep,” said Rex/Zinx. “And Benny, now that we are such good friends, don’t try and tell anyone I’m from outer space and inside the dog. They’ll just think you’re an idiot. Just live with your knowledge. But Benny...”
“What?”
“Watch your back, kid. Because Rex does not forget.”
About a week later, Benny got hit and killed by a car down on Main Street. A woman who saw the whole thing said Benny and the dog that was with him were crossing the street. There was a car coming, and she said the dog rose up on its hind legs and pushed Benny with its front paws. She said she figured the dog was smart, that the dog was trying to shove Benny out of the way of the car, but instead had pushed him right into it. She said she thought it was because dogs didn’t have good depth perception; she had read that somewhere. It was a terrible accident. Benny was knocked right out of his shoes and dragged under the car for a block before the car could stop.
The dog, called Rex by his family, ran away and was not seen by its owners again. But the same woman who saw the accident swore she saw the dog again, later that day, when she was coming out of the police department, after filing her report. She said the dog was driving away in a car. Her story was the dog, a big one, could easily reach the pedals on that foreign car, and it was driving with one paw on the steering wheel, the other front paw dangling out the window. It’s mouth was open and its tongue was dangling.
It was silly, but everyone liked the lady and tried to be as agreeable as possible. To make matters worse, and what made the woman adamant she knew what she was talking about, was a small foreign car got stolen that very same day. And to worsen matters even more, the car belonged to the family of the poor boy who got ran over and killed on Main Street.
The Atmosphere Man
Nicky Drayden
On an alien world, illegally packaged atmospheres come at price.
How far will someone go to please the one you love?
Nicky Draden questions the cost of nostalgia, honor, and romance.
Anise tells me things. Things she really shouldn’t. I’ve mentioned it to her, reminding her about doctor-patient confidentiality and all that. But over the past ten years, I’ve become more like a sounding board to her than a husband. She talks past me, with words flowing freely, like an O2 pipe with a blown pressure valve.
She apologizes profusely for being late to dinner, says her last appointment ran long. Kitpeh, her young Errtyllian patient, had a major setback. She’d shown up to their session with her tail bandaged, hints of blue and green bruises peeking from underneath. My wife doesn’t think it was an accident, but Kitpeh wouldn’t tell her what had happened. She suspects Kitpeh’s foster parents had a hand in it.
Anise is so caught up in the minutia of her day that she doesn’t notice how upset I am, as I place flanks of herbed otterboar upon our dinner plates. They’d been perfectly tender an hour and a half ago--such a delicious shade of pinkish brown, but now the skin is dried and buckling away from the meat. The tulip centerpiece that I’d bribed from the Station’s horticulturalist has already begun to wilt.
“... so I don’t want to accuse them, without sound evidence,” Anise says, taking a seat at the dining table. “Her foster parents don’t have any previous reports of abuse, and it’s tough to find someone who’s willing to take in an Errtyllian, even one who’s had her claws amputated.” Anise shakes her head and whips her cloth napkin into her lap. “I’m going to try to get her to open up to me tomorrow. We’ll get out of my office and walk around the Station, maybe all the way down to the Newtonian Arboretum for some fresh air. I bet seeing some of the trees from her home world would put her at ease.”
I press my lips together, hoping she’ll notice the lengths I’d gone through to recreate that special night--the meal that I’d scarcely been able to afford and the variegated tulips that I’d spent half of my water rations to raise from bulbs. It’d been worth it to see her eyes light up, and even now, all these years later, I still remember the way her smile made me feel--like we were the last two people in the universe.
Anise looks up at me, down at her plate, up at me.
“Oh, Harlan,” she says, smacking the side of her head. “Happy Anniversary. You must think I’m awful.”
“We’ve all got our priorities.” My words come out more spiteful than I’d intended. How can I hold a grudge against someone whose passion is piecing together the lives of broken children? I fondle the velvet box in my pocket, wondering how my wife and I had managed to lead such amazingly fulfilling lives, and yet still be drifting apart from each other.
Anise’s lips screw up into a sour pucker. “Don’t make this all about me. You’re the one who’s gone four nights a week, harassing innocent people, just because they have scales or blue skin or claws.”
“We don’t profile, Anise. We act on solid evidence. Same as you. Only instead of keeping children from destroying themselves, VACI keeps people from destroying the Station.” I want to keep going, to tell her about all of the Errtyllian terror plots that Vero Avalon Central Intelligence has foiled, but I bite my tongue. There’s no point in dredging up old arguments that I thought we’d put to rest years ago. I heave a sigh, then retrieve the velvet box from my pocket and slide it across the table towards her.
“Harlan, I can’t--”
“Let’s not fight. Not tonight.”
Anise takes the box. I can tell that she’s embarrassed about not having a gift in return. She looks up at me, but our eyes don’t quite meet. “It’s not Argonian pearls, is it? I won’t wear them. They use slave labor to harvest them, you know.”
I know. I’d made that mistake three anniversaries ago. She’d given me an earful about how, after all the years we’d been together, I didn’t know her at all. But this year’s gift will be different. It’ll show her how much she means to me and the lengths I’ll go through to keep us from drifting further apart.
Anise pops the top open and takes out the small aluminum canister. It’s heavier than she’d anticipated, and she nearly drops it. “Air? You got me air for our anniversary.”
“Not just any air. Twenty-two pounds of atmosphere. From Earth.”
The blood drains from Anise’s face. She puts the canister in
to the box and pushes it back. “Earth air is contraband,” she whispers to me.
I raise an eyebrow. As if I, of all people, wouldn’t know that. “I thought you’d like it. It’s a little piece of your old life.”
“It’s a little piece of a twenty-year prison sentence is what it is! How could you bring this into our home?” Anise glares at the box, so much longing behind her eyes. Her chest rises and falls, lips glistening ever so slightly. I’ll never understand the draw of reminiscing over a dead planet, but then again, I was born on Vero Avalon--a babe among the stars. I’d been to several dozen planets, but never found myself attached to any particular one. But Earth is a part of Anise. Always has been and always will be.
“Relax,” I say. “This can’t be traced to us. I’ve got a source, and I can promise you he won’t be talking.”
“You have a source?” She scoffs and rolls her eyes, but I notice that she hasn’t taken her hand from the box.
A smile creeps up onto my lips. I nod nonchalantly, pretending as if this little gift hadn’t cost me two months’ salary and possibly my career, if anyone with VACI ever finds out.
I’d arranged a meeting with The Atmosphere Man a few months ago, at a little thatched-hut bar in Whennyho City. The resort had been terraformed from a barren moon--a sloppy rush-job with a fuck-ton of cheap, fast-growing obich palms boasting broad, waxy leaves. Minimal biodiversity. The whole place would be dead again in fifty years, probably less. But the beaches were plentiful and the drinks cheap, as were the women. And its proximity to Gamma Port made it the ideal getaway for the typical middle-class schlep that I’d been posing as.
He was taller than I’d expected--taller than his VACI file listed him as, at least. He leaned against the rattan bar, swatting at the green and silver bloatflies buzzing about his drink--a nauseatingly pink concoction with a matching toothpick umbrella. He made contact with one of the flies, and it careened past my ear like a drunken zitherball, its swollen body rupturing on impact with the wall. I tried to hold my breath, but too late, the stench of partially digested fruit infiltrated my lungs. I coughed.
The Atmosphere Man saw me and waved me over. “Jedd? Good to meet you!” He shook my hand in both of his. He was older, in his sixties, with tan discoloration along his face and chest that most would think were age spots, not pseudo-recessive Jorahn genes. It also explained the height.
“Wolosalai!” I said to him, the fabricated Whennyhoan greeting that pretty much meant “I’m here to get shit-faced…How ‘bout you?”
“Wolosalai, brother.” His eyes narrowed. I don’t know what it was--my walk, my smell, the way I parted my hair--but I could tell he’d made me. Still, he smiled wide and offered me a seat on the barstool next to him.
“You’re here to talk atmosphere,” he said.
“You are The Atmosphere Man.”
“I did this dump, you know. Not some of my better work. Seems like everyone with an investor and a big enough rock is throwing together these porta-planets.” A breeze blew in through the open-air bar. The Atmosphere Man lifted his nose, parted his lips, and breathed in his creation. “Smell that? Twelve parts Sea Breeze, three parts Lush Tropical Vegetation, one part Fishing Boat, one part Passion Fruit, and just a smidge of Venereal Disease, to keep people honest.”
I eyed the silhouettes of fishing boats off the coast. All a part of the illusion. There wasn’t a single fish in the Whennyhoan Ocean--an “ocean” that was fifteen meters at its deepest.
I took a sniff for myself. “Impressive. Hard to imagine this whole atmosphere coming out of a little canister.”
“Several thousand little canisters, for a rock this size, but yes. You starting a porta-planet of your own, or are you just looking for a souvenir? I can get you a thousand pounds of Whennyho City, for a couple hundred kalax. Plus local and Eastern Cascade taxes, of course. Just pop it into your air intake, and it’ll smell like you’re on vacation all year ‘round!” The Atmosphere Man was teasing me. A man of his sort wouldn’t dabble with souvenir canisters.
“Actually, I had something quite different in mind.” I leaned in close to his ear. “I’m looking to get my hands on some Earth air.”
The Atmosphere Man feigned shock. “That’d be illegal, Jedd!”
“And very profitable.” I handed him a flimsy duffle bag with “Whennyho City Resorts” screen-printed on both sides. The zipper was cheaply made, as well, and barely functional. But nevertheless, The Atmosphere Man forced it open and peeked inside at the stacks of kalax. It wasn’t a fortune, maybe half as much as he’d gotten to air up this place, but I was betting that the paper I clutched in my hand would be much more valuable to him. I laid it out on the bar and dropped my charade. “Before you make any decisions, I want you to know that this is a personal matter, not a professional one. Still, if you’re agreeable to this trade, I can make these VACI files disappear.”
The Atmosphere Man swiped his finger across the sheet, looking at the twenty years worth of dirt VACI had accumulated on him. Admittedly, it wasn’t much. Not even a real name to go with the blurred surveillance photos. He was quite the illusive criminal, always managing to stay just to the right of VACI’s radar. But I’d invested more than a healthy amount of man-hours strategically digging through the details of his exploits--pole skimming on environmentally sensitive planets, bribing and blackmailing members of the Open-Air Alliance, and, of course, dealing in contraband atmosphere.
“Why are you doing this?” The Atmosphere Man asked.
“For my wife. She’s Earthborne.” Despite myself, I flinched at the word. It was a mild slur, used for those who’d stayed behind after the Major Exodus, and the next dozen or so of the minor ones. The stubborn people who refused to admit that the Earth was dying.
“You don’t say. Not many of them made it off.”
“She was lucky.” I was lucky. I couldn’t imagine not having her in my life. And there I was, in the presence of a known criminal, begging him to help me keep her.
“There’s no shame in thinking you can change the inevitable,” The Atmosphere Man said, sucking the boifruit off the pointed tip of his toothpick umbrella. “They fought a good fight. Repopulated a couple seas, found a vaccination to combat the dais blight, decontaminated the runoff from dozens of thermonuclear bombsites. Who knows, if they’d started a few years earlier, maybe they would have succeeded.”
“Perhaps.”
The Atmosphere Man leaned back, his elbow propped casually against the bar. “What you’re asking could get you into a fair amount of trouble, if you’re caught.”
“I won’t get caught.”
“So sure of yourself, are you? This wife of yours… “ The Atmosphere Man shifted forward on his stool, fingers steepled at his lips. Flecks of gold rimmed his irises, and in the span of milliseconds, the thin membrane of secondary lids blinked across his eyes. I wondered if any other VACI agents had ever gotten so close to him.
“What about her?” I said, gravel in my voice.
“You’re sure she’s worth it? I mean, one slip of my tongue, and your whole world could come crashing down, faster than one of these porta-planets.”
A threat. But I too could play that game. “Oh, she’s worth it, Yoris.”
The Atmosphere Man’s eyes bulged at hearing his name. His spots darkened, then faded again. He nodded, and then shoved the VACI sheet inside his duffle bag, struggling with the zipper before finally giving up. “Ah, well. Send Anise my best, then, will you?”
I tensed. He’d known my identity before I’d walked into this humid pit-stain of a bar. The Atmosphere Man swatted another bloatfly to the ground, stomped its juicy carcass, and then left without another word.
The next morning, I woke to the smell of Whennyho City blowing through an open window that had been shut and locked when I’d gone to sleep. On my nightstand sat a small aluminum caniste
r with a bloatfly buzzing futilely next to it, wings pinned to the cheap wood veneer with a pink toothpick umbrella.
I couldn’t go back on my word. Not if I didn’t want to end up like that fly. I quickly dressed and shoved the canister into my pocket. I nearly dropped it. It was a lot heavier than I’d expected. My VACI badge got me through Gamma Port customs without any problem, and yet I kept checking over my shoulder to make sure that no one was onto me. The concourse was filled with harried vacationers in gaudy flower-print shirts, with dewy-eyed newlyweds--some tentacled, some scaled, some blue, some with tails, all with that same sappy-assed look, like they could plunge face-first into a gravity well and everything would be all right because they still had each other. God, I missed that feeling. Back in my office on Vero Avalon Station, I ran a recursion program to erase all traces of The Atmosphere Man from the rimNet. The guilt wrung from my heart as I realized that, after a decade of sapping the life from my marriage, VACI owed me this one indiscretion.
“I can’t believe you actually did this,” Anise says, opening the velvet box once again. Her words feel heavy, teeming with an awkward mix of emotions.
I don’t say anything, because there is nothing left for me to say. She holds the canister for a long moment, then goes over to the atmos unit, dials the particle filter to low, the pathogen filter to max, and plugs the Earth air into the manual intake.
Anise pours herself a glass of twenty-year-old Tungsian wine and settles into the sofa. She breathes in deeply as the air begins to circulate. I do the opposite, shallow breaths through parted lips, but it doesn’t do much to dull the sting in my nostrils, the stench at the back of my throat, the fire in my lungs.
I stifle a cough.
“I’d almost forgotten acid rain,” Anise sighs, her eyes suddenly far, far away. “Towards the end, it could eat through steel. We had to replace our roofs every eight weeks. Fran--I’ve told you about Fran--she got caught out in it once. Not long, just half a minute. Poor thing spent the next six months getting skin grafts and reconstructive surgery.” She says all this with longing, not a hint of bitterness.