“Looks like another warm morning out there,” she told us, flashing everyone a smile. “I should warn you, the nursebots are out there in force. Looks like they might even chase us down with needles at the picnic tables.”
Captain Tumas grunted.
The figure in Pod Two was a kid. He never spoke, I don’t think his larynx had healed enough yet. But he listened to us closely and rolled his eyes around alertly to whoever was talking. I dreaded when he became Pod One’s occupant, the next up for discharge. He was only a kid with no voice, how was he supposed to keep everyone in the ward apprised of outside events?
“Aren’t there any visitors? There should be visitors,” came a call from way down the line, it was from Pod Seventeen, I think. I didn’t know the guy. It was too hard to have a shouted conversation with someone that far down in a crowded ward. Even further back down the line they relayed Ruth’s comments, I knew. The intercom system was out of course, as all communications had been since the battle, and the ship was running in full-auto mode.
“No visitors,” shouted Ruth down to the guy in Seventeen.
“We are at war, ya know, son,” said Captain Tumas. “Not everything is about our individual comfort.”
“No shit,” said someone from down in the direction of Pod Nine. Tumas’ brows beetled ferociously and he craned his neck to see who it was, but gave up after a while, fuming. Discipline was very hard to keep when you were all strapped into medical pods on full lock-down.
Since the battle, we had been without communications. Not even the nursebots responded to us, perhaps the ship’s whole network was down. The ship had gone into emergency mode and landed us here, somewhere in the Cygnus cluster. At least the klaxons had mercifully stopped after a few hours. We had all thought we were going to go mad with the wailing and flashing.
“Tell us something, Ruth,” I said quietly. Being in Pod Three, there was only the mute boy between us. The kid, I didn’t even know his name, swiveled his eyes from me to Ruth expectantly.
She looked at me and the kid, then gave a slow smile. She turned back to the viewport and gazed outside.
“It’s a warm day. I can see the lake out through the trees. There’s no haze,” she began.
I smiled and closed my eyes. The beeping equipment and the gurgling bodymats that took our waste away in tubes receded. I visualized the world outside. It was an alien world, but it wasn’t without beauty. There were pod-like creatures that looked like mushrooms or perhaps smooth rocks, but which occasionally picked themselves up and moved. There was the tent city, of course, where all the discharged people had set up camp. And there were the picnic tables set up right below the viewport so all our old friends could wave up at us. Well, at Ruth at least.
I opened my eyes as Ruth finished her story. Ten or twenty pods down, I could hear them relaying it to everyone. The whole ward fell silent, as it always did when Ruth described the outside world to us.
The next morning, Ruth was discharged. The nursebot came in and simply began disconnecting her, without preamble. She winced as the tubes and needles and glued-on monitor probes came out and off one at a time. Inside, I was saddened. I looked at the kid. It would be his turn next, I supposed, and we would get no reports from him. Everyone, in a way, had been dreading this day. I felt bad for the kid, because I think he knew we didn’t want him to be at the window.
The chute beneath Ruth opened and she held on for a second, chewing her lip and staring at us. I thought I saw a tear on her face.
“Don’t be sad, soldier! You’re getting out of this hell-hole!” I told her.
She nodded and gave me a smile. Then she was gone down the chute.
It came as a great surprise to me when my Pod came alive and started to move forward, instead of shunting down the line into the kid’s spot. Instead, my pod came out of line, slid sideways past the kid and then backed up and locked into place. I was now Pod One. I looked at the kid. He looked both disappointed, but also relieved. Obviously, the system had judged he was healing too slowly, and I had moved up in priority. Down the line, all the other pods were shifting on their rails, as the diagnostic computers sorted them out.
I turned my head then for my first look outside. Behind me, I could feel everyone’s eager eyes on my back.
“What’s it like?”
“Can you see Ruth out there?”
“Is my Johnny waiting out there for me? He’s tall and blond, at least he was before they shaved it all. He should have come for me by now.”
I stared. Outside there was no forest, no lake, no trees or tent city. There was only a desolate scene of reddish rocks and barren, volcanic-looking sands. Here and there were bubbling pools of a dark viscous substance. Liquid methane, most likely.
There were indeed people out there, nude, frozen, suffocated people in various poses of death. Their corpses showed that none of them had made it more than a dozen yards from the ship’s discharge port. I picked out Ruth’s frosted face. She had managed to make it out far enough to be in my range of vision and to lift a hand to whoever next took her station. Her fingers had twisted into a claw, but I recognized the gesture. It was a salute, such as one comrade might give another.
I wondered numbly how long I would be staring at her before it was my turn to be discharged.
“Well? Come on, tell us something!”
I didn’t look back at them. I knew I would not be able to keep the truth from my face.
After a few quiet moments, which I’m sure they chalked up to being overwhelmed, I began speaking. I recalled all the things Ruth had told us of, and I added in the things my mind had conjured up over the days.
There were a few playful children in my version from the local farming colony. And there were flowers. Flowers with swollen red petals and bright yellow balls of pollen in the center.
Teeth at Bedtime
Inside its soft red mouth the thing had teeth of real enamel.
I didn’t like the look of those teeth. They looked hard and sharp. They gleamed white as though freshly brushed.
“What do you think of it, Will?” Mara asked me. She was looking lovely. It was the day after my birthday and we were alone together in my apartment. Mara herself made a wonderful birthday present. She leaned forward on the couch, her face glowing with expectant happiness. Her whole face smiled, making me feel warm inside. I noticed that a few blonde strands of her hair had caught in her eyelashes and been stained black by her mascara. Even that looked good.
“Well?” she pressed impatiently. “What do you think?”
What can you do when your girlfriend spends a lot of money on something weird? I took the only logical course open to me… I lied.
“It’s…uh. I like it, Mara.” I said, giving her the gladdest smile I could muster. At least I didn’t need to fake being surprised.
My birthday present sat on my bed stand. The thing was a black plastic box with a lot of touch-sensitive buttons and chrome knobs. It was a clock and a radio and self-answering telephone, and it had a slot on top to connect a player.
The only unusual thing about the device was that it had a mouth. No eyes or nose or ears-just the cheeks, the jaws and the mouth. It had a human, wet, female mouth with full red lips and a bright red tongue. Because it was grinning (it had come out of the box that way) I could see its fine set of hard, white teeth.
I thought of the locked strongbox in my closet and I blinked several times, very quickly.
What sickened me most about the mouth was that I recognized it. I knew those exposed teeth and the curve of that jaw. I knew the dark flat spec of a mole that it had on its right cheek, just above the spot where the lips met. I had kissed that mouth before. It was my girlfriend’s mouth. It was Mara’s mouth.