Fugitive From Asteron (19 page)

“So you had a girlfriend and you
saw her secretly. Then what happened?”

“She . . . became . . . pregnant.”

Grimly, I met her puzzled glance.
“Was that why she was punished?”

“Yes.”

“How was she punished? Did her
employer fire her?”

“We had no employers.”

“Did her friends shun her?”

“We had no friends.”

“Did her family abandon her?”

“We had no families.”

“Then how was she punished?”

My hands covered my face. I
grimaced against the lash of a whip burning on my back.

“How was she punished, Alex?”

The voice I hated screamed inside
me until I could feel my fingernails digging into my hair:
It is your
fault— It is your fault that she—

I felt Kristin’s arms around me,
her sweet breath blowing against my hair. “You’re shaking, Alex. Tell me . . . how
was she punished?”

“She . . . was . . . hanged.”

Somewhere on the edge of my mind, I
heard Kristin gasp. I saw her translucent eyes blacken in horror. At first she
was speechless. Then a look of clarity formed on her face, as if she was
understanding a matter that had puzzled her. “The rope . . . Jeff,
with the rope. . . . You thought . . . and
I laughed at you!”

Kristin’s presence was fading. I
could smell the rotting wood of a platform I leaped onto. I could feel the
vicious eyes of the guards around me. “I knew our acts were a crime against the
people, but she told me she had taken a tablet and she was safe. I believed
her. I was too quick to believe her. I wanted too much to believe her.”

My fists clenched against an enemy
I could not hit. “I tried to save her, but I could not. My hands were tied; my
mouth was gagged. I was being beaten.” I slammed my fist on the blanket with a
thump, but what I heard was the thump of a trapdoor giving way. “I could do
nothing . . . but . . . watch . . .”

My mind could no longer contain the
private torment of a coarse rope encircling a fragile neck with golden hair
flowing along it. The anguished cry that I had heard only in the secret vault
of my mind now exploded into the air. I bellowed it into the soft folds of
Kristin’s hair.
“I caused her to die! I caused her to die! I caused her
to—”
Suddenly I choked and my throat burned.

“Go ahead and cry, Alex.” I felt
the whisper of Kristin’s mouth just above my head as she held me.

“I never cry.”

“Go ahead.”

“I am not like the Earthlings. I
cannot laugh or cr—”

The burning liquid spilled from my
eyes just as I was denying its existence. I could feel the tiny sequins moisten
where my head lay against Kristin’s dress. I heard my own tortured cries as the
raw wounds still blistered my memory, until finally there were no cries left.
Then, feeling spent, I lay down on the blanket, astonished at my outburst and suddenly
feeling strangely calm.

For a long, quiet moment, Kristin
held my hand. Then she whispered, her voice deep with sorrow, “Nothing like
that can ever happen here.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean here we can have babies or
not, and it’s nobody’s business. It’s simple. You go to Quick Fix. If you don’t
want to have babies, you get a pill, and its effect lasts for years. If you
decide later that you want a baby, you go back to Quick Fix and ask for another
pill to reverse the previous one’s effects. There are pills for men and women.
So you never have to be afraid of this again.”

“How do you know about these pills?”

“Because I went to Quick Fix and
got one, so I . . . wouldn’t . . .”

“When did you do this, Kristin?”

She lowered her head shyly. I
lifted it so that her eyes were level with mine. “When I met you,” she
whispered. Her face reddened as I somehow had the life left in me to stare at
her . . . rudely. “But I don’t want you to believe me.” She
moved away. “Don’t believe any woman. Go to Quick Fix and get your own pill.”

“But does the state not regulate
baby production?”

“Of course not.”

 “But do you not have genetics?”

“Of course. We live until we’re 150
years old. Part of that’s due to our doctors, who can fix anything. They have techniques
to repair and replace body parts. And they can even fix those scars on your
neck because cosmetic surgery is incredibly advanced. But a lot of our long
lifespan is due to the diseases we can eliminate through gene research.”

“But who plans for the children
that are produced?”

“Everyone. People decide for
themselves.”

“But if people are left to decide
for themselves, what if their children are undesirable to the public?”

“We don’t produce children for the
public. In fact, somebody’s kids are none of anybody else’s business.”

“But if this matter is important,
then it has to be controlled, no?”

“Do you want the important things
in your life decided by somebody else? Alex, don’t you see, it’s not any one
thing? It’s not as if I’m free only to fly my plane, or to disagree with my
instructor, or to contradict the mayor, or to choose my own boyfriend. You
don’t have to keep asking the same question every time a new issue comes up.
You don’t have to worry about me. I’m free, period. And so are you. Alex, you’re
free of Cosmona forever.”

I looked away, suddenly feeling . . . guilty.

“I never imagined what a . . . horrible . . . place
that is!” She reached over to me, her long, silky fingers stroking my face.
“Now I understand why you keep wanting to rescue me. And I like being rescued
by you, but Alex, there’s no real danger. You don’t have to torture yourself.”

I was beginning to understand, I
thought, as I placed my arms around Kristin. I listened for the terrible voice
inside me, but, incredibly, it was gone. It seemed to have been washed away
with my tears, because I felt somehow free of it. I felt somehow . . . free.
I kissed Kristin’s mouth, her eyes, her hair. She flung her head back loosely, her
neck losing its tension, her body moving with only the pressure of my mouth,
inviting me to do more.

Then she pushed away. “No.” Her
voice was weak, but her arms were strong as they resisted me. “Go to Quick Fix
and find out for yourself. Then you won’t have to depend on anybody’s word.”

“But Quick Fix is not here. And you
are.”

“Alex, you’re smiling.”

I felt somehow lighter, as if a
heavy weight had been lifted from my life. “I will go to Quick Fix later,
Kristin. Now, I will be what is called your boyfriend.”

I drew her close to me and wrapped
the blanket around us. With a tiny tug on the scant supports of the dress,
which I had studied over dinner, there were no more sparkling sequins, but only
soft, warm skin in the darkness. Then, for the first time since I came to
Earth, it was I who taught Kristin about a matter she did not yet know, and
this fact seemed strangely exciting to both of us.

I raised myself to gaze at her
face, to caress it, to kiss it softly. “Kristin, what is it called when you
savor wine, when you drink it slowly to feel all the pleasing sensations that
warm you, except it is not wine you want to savor, but a person you want to
drink slowly?”

“Tenderness. It’s called
tenderness
.”

“And what is it called when every
feature about another becomes something you want to prize, like a voice so pleasing
it makes you want to dance to it, or laughter so sweet it makes you want to
taste the mouth that made its sound?”

“Caring. It’s called
caring
.”

“And what is it called when your
thoughts fix obsessively on little things that make you ache inside, like a
sweater you want to slide your hands under, or a zipper you want to tug at?”

“Desire. It’s called
desire
.”

“And did you call this
making
love
?”

“Oh yes, honey, yes.”

Then there were no more words, only
two bodies wrapped together on a mountain, with the lights of the world below
as the backdrop for an act that was, to use my new word, joyful.

After leaving Kristin that evening,
I stopped at a Quick Fix booth to find, unsurprisingly, that everything she had
told me was true. Here on Earth, I thought, Kristin and I could move about in
the open because our goal was to fulfill our lives and all roads were paved to
take us there. But what if we lived in a place where we found only roadblocks on
our path? I tried to understand what drove Reevah to lie to me, causing her to
skid off a cliff—and what drove me to believe her.

As I swallowed a tiny pill with the
power to kill a monstrous voice that paralyzed me, I read the paper that Quick
Fix emitted when it scanned me. The report said that the pill would be effective
in my body and I would function normally, but it did not mention my species. I
apparently belonged to a humanoid group capable of crying. Babies cried on
Asteron, but only until they reached the state of mental numbness that marked
maturity. That was true, I thought, except in Reevah’s case. I wondered if she
had been an alien, because Reevah could laugh and cry easily like the
Earthlings.

With the great sense of relief that
the little pill gave me, I walked toward my apartment complex, a group of detached
units set along a courtyard off a main street. I felt an unusual calm as I
passed the Earthlings’ well-kept houses with fragrant gardens, lighted windows
with tidy furnishings inside, children’s toys stowed on the porches, and colorful
and varied vehicles on the road. Every sight was one of contentment. At that
moment, I was held by the serenity of Earthling life. I felt oddly unconcerned with
danger and ready to believe Kristin’s assurance that the vast territory of
freedom also reached the ground where I stood.

Tired of fearing people, I thought
that maybe, just this one special night, I might return home through the front
entrance of the complex, instead of sneaking around the back as I normally did.
Perhaps I would even wave to the person I always avoided, the clerk in the
management office. His small building, which stood on the street in front of
the courtyard of dwellings, was open all hours to rent furnished units. I
reminded myself to give him another month’s rent on payday. When I had first
arrived, the possibility of staying alive longer than one month had not
occurred to me. But this evening, especially, made me feel hopeful. The
activity called making love seemed to agree with me, and with Kristin too, I
thought, remembering our exciting moments and already aching for her again.
Somehow, I was not surprised that the Earthlings had given the most beastlike
of activities the most spiritual of names when performed by humans.

Suddenly, all thoughts of relaxing
my guard vanished. In the lamplight forty feet ahead, I saw two police officers
heading toward the rental office. These men did not have the same kind face
with smiling eyes as Officer Hodges at Big Eats. I knew these two, and they
knew me. Dressed as Earthling officials with their badges flashing on their
shirts, the men opening the office door were Feran’s spies!

I ducked into the bushes that
surrounded the apartment complex and moved silently in the night toward the
small office building. I crouched down to hide in the shrubbery underneath the
side window of the office. It was opened a few inches, sufficient for me to
hear. The men who had barked orders and shoved me around when I delivered
supplies to their quarters on Asteron had different voices now, friendly tones that
I had never heard from their vicious mouths, and they abundantly used Earthling
contractions and expressions. They had learned their lessons well! They
introduced themselves with phony names and asked the clerk’s name. They engaged
briefly in what the Earthlings called small talk, a striking change from the big
fists that spoke for them in their homeland.

“Say, Joe, we’re looking for a
young man for questioning, and we think he might be staying in this area,” said
one of the spies.

“Oh? Do you think he might be
here
?”
I got a look at the clerk. He was the one who had rented me my apartment.

“It’s possible,” said the other
spy. “We’re questioning everyone in the area. He’s twenty-one years old,
six-foot-two, black hair, blue eyes. He’s slim and athletic-looking.”

“Gee, I’ve got twenty-five units. A
lot of guys come and go all the time, officer.”

“This kid’s an alien, but he looks
like one of us. His name’s Arial, although he probably changed it. He arrived
here just three weeks ago. Did you happen to see a spacecraft in the sky about
that time, one that looked like it was disoriented?”

“I see crafts all the time, but I
don’t remember anything out of the ordinary, no.”

“Do you know of any abandoned
spacecraft, or any crashes that maybe weren’t reported to us?”

“No.”

“The kid’s a pilot, but he could be
working in any job. Here’s a picture of him.”

The spies no doubt had my photo
identification from Asteron. I wondered if the desperate creature I had been
back then resembled me today, with my new hair styling, wardrobe, and ample
diet.

“Wow, this straggly kid looks like
he’s starving. I haven’t seen anyone like that here,” said the clerk.

I felt relieved that Kristin had
insisted I get a new look. This also gave me hope that the spies would be
unable to match my photo via face-recognition programs to that of any new hires
at MAS, should they suspect I might be there. The spies would give up now, at
least with the clerk, I hoped. But that was not to be.

One of them was persistent. “He
speaks English. But in a stilted way, without contractions. And he’s got
markings around his neck—scars.”

“Oh,
yes
. I did rent to
someone like that. A few weeks ago, yes. He’s still here.”

I closed my eyes and missed a
breath.