White Lies and Alibis
Sweet Deception in Space
“Your knee is in my back,” she hissed in the dark and added “Jerk!” as an afterthought. Jesus! I almost slipped my skinsuit — and she sounded like we were on a bus or something. But I could excuse her temper: she’s stowed away in the one safe spot on the Norfolk B space shuttle, in total darkness and trying for absolute silence, and some joker — namely me — tries to get in too.
I had waited weeks for a project cancellation with a slot big enough to cram into, and this one was perfect. But not for two. She had to turn on her back so I could close the panel, and I had to lie down flat on top of her. Her breasts pushed against my chest. I wasn’t thinking of sex, but I could feel myself getting hard down there anyway.
“Listen Jocko,” she said, “I’ve got a knife. I don’t want to ride out this trip with some bloody carcass on me, but if you’re going to take advantage, that’s exactly what I’ll do.”
“Sorry Miss,” I said, “but he’s got a mind of his own sometimes. We might get you on top, but there’s liable to be people around. Best to wait.”
“It’s Missus. I was here first. Maybe you should just leave,” she said.
Now I may be a hit man, mostly self-educated, but I’m a professional, and in some circles known as a gentleman. The idea of being squeezed on top of a married woman made me uneasy — but the thought of leaving was downright funny.
“Miss,” I said, “…Missus, I’m sorry. I don’t mean to make trouble but” — and here I laughed once out loud — ”I could find a three-legged snake in snow sooner than I’d find another place to hide on a Norfolk shuttle.” I smiled in the dark and tried to turn sideways to let her breathe easier.
“Ow, you’re mashing me,” she said.
“Shhh. You’ve got to be quiet Missus. I’m awfully sorry.” I turned back so I was flat on top again. “Let me see if I can prop myself up.”
I put my left hand alongside her silky hair, and against my principles with married women, I thought about all the places we were touching. She jerked her head aside and let out a yelp — at the same time I’d felt a good size lump over her temple.
“Sorry again Missus,” I said. “How’d you wind up with that egg, if I may ask?”
She started to cry quietly. I felt her belly making little jerks under me and heard her sniffle.
“Don’t you worry,” I whispered in her ear, “you don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to.”
But she did want to. She told me how her hubby had hit her for nothing except she didn’t want to have sex right then. That made me mad! I could tell she’d been hurt more than just physically.
She smelled like lilacs, and I thought of spring when there’s honeysuckle and roses in the air too. Then we heard heavy dragging, and we froze solid. There was bumping and talking. I heard her heartbeat. I’ve never been close enough to hear that, except when I listened to see if someone was dead, but they always were. And with loose women, but I wasn’t really listening then.
“They’re ready to launch,” she said quietly, when the talking and the sounds had gone.
“How do you know that?”
“Those three clanks and that hissing. You hear it? That’s the oxygen bleed when it’s reached full pressure.”
“How do you know what that means Missus — ”
“Jennifer. Jen. No, he calls me that. Call me Jenny. Might as well be civil if we’re stuck with each other. What’s your name?”
“Damian,” I lied.
Then that bucket of bolts shook like a Frisco quake, and I got rammed down on Jenny. I apologized and did what I could to prop myself against the Gs. The shuttle shuddered something awful. If I’d been the kind to worry, I guess I’d have thought she was going to blow sky high.
“So Mr. Damian Stowaway,” Jenny said when the pressure finally eased some, “what in Heaven’s name are you doing here?”
Of course I couldn’t tell her I’d been hired to take out a topsider. I’d had an alibi all worked up nice and neat, but it wasn’t going to fit our present predicament.
I hesitated a bit long. “Well Missus — Jenny — I’m just joyriding. I’ve never been to the colony. Couldn’t afford a tour package, so I’m seeing it my way.”
“You’re lying,” she said in a teasing way, like a cat playing with a mouse. “So don’t tell me. But you’d better not call it a colony when you get there. They hate that.”
I knew that, but of course everybody calls it the colony anyway. That was what this job was all about. The shuttle shook again and the pressure eased more. I shifted only slightly, but it hurt her again. That clued me.
“Jesus, he hit you all over, didn’t he.”
I heard her swallow hard. I didn’t know if she was going to cry, or maybe she was mad. “Missus — Jenny — I’ll kill him if you want, that asshole.”
We were quiet for a long time. Then she said, “I believe you would.”
She told me he’d beaten her a lot, for almost any reason lately, and I called him more names. We were silent again, and I thought she felt better. But then she started making heaving sobs, and her chest and her tummy moved up and down, and her legs and arms went limp like she was giving up. I wanted to hug her to make her feel better, but I didn’t, because she might have gotten the wrong idea. I’m pretty shy when it comes to women, except loose women.
“Jenny,” I said.
She just sniffed and snuffed.
“Jenny, I promise I’ll kill him.” Somehow I knew she smiled in the dark — just a little life came back into her body, and I could feel that.
“Thank you, Damian. No, I don’t think that will be necessary. Ralph was an asshole. Ralph is an asshole. There, I’ve said it. You helped me say it.”
She laughed a good hearty laugh. It’s strange to have someone laugh like that with their belly up against your belly. And then I reminded her to be quiet.
“No,” she said out loud, “no one will come down here until the midpoint. Then they’ll do an inspection. We should be able to hear the vacuum in the elevator. But don’t open the hatch — there are motion sensors in case anything comes loose.”
“How do you know so much about the shuttle, Jenny?” I asked. I liked to say her name. I’ve never had much occasion to say women’s names out loud. I said “Jenny” again, just to say it.
“Ralph works there, coordinating the launches. I worked there too. That’s how we met. When I got the idea to stow away, I studied the whole setup. I’d watched asshole sign on to the network, and he didn’t even try to keep his password secret. The bastard treated me like he owned me — like I would never think of anything like this.”
Now here was a person who didn’t want to be owned, and me, I never even felt wanted. I would have liked to feel as if I was good enough that somebody would even want to own me. I couldn’t say all that to Jenny, so I just said, “Nobody can own anybody else. That’s not right at all.”
About then, the Gs dropped to almost nothing. What a feeling! I floated above Jenny, and we barely touched. We were coasting. It was like dreams I had as a kid, in a big clapboard house with spruce trees in front. I dreamt I was swooping in and out of the branches up where the birds were. And sometimes I’d sail up into the sky.
I told all that to Jenny.
I felt her chest rise against mine, and then smelled her sweet breath when she let it out. “That’s wonderful, Damian,” she said. “You can do anything in dreams, can’t you?”
I said she was right on that. Then she pushed me with a finger, and I bobbed up the inch or so clearance in that coffin. I smiled even if she couldn’t see it, and pushed back. She touched my shoulder and I tipped. I tickled her very carefully.
“Let’s switch places while we’ve got the chance,” she said.
We twisted around, helping each other. The sides were smooth, and it wasn’t easy. I must have nudged her funny-bone or something — she giggled like crazy and squirmed. But then it hurt, so she yelled, and I said I was sorry, and she said it didn’t hurt, but I knew it did.
“Now I can be on top,” Jenny said. “Asshole Ralph always had to be on top.”
“So, you’re running away from Ralph.”
She dug knuckles into my ribs hard enough to make me twitch, but soft enough that it was friendly. “I’m not running away. I’m leaving the son-of-a-bitch.”
“Have you ever been to the colony?” I wondered.
“Oh yeah,” she said, with more emphasis on the oh. “Our honeymoon. And we’d better stop calling it the colony. They really do hate that. It’s Gamma One, you know.” I knew that, of course. “The people just call it home, when they have to call it anything. Ralph didn’t like it. He said everybody had an attitude, which they do, but he has a worse one, and he just acted like an asshole tourist.”
Then she sang a song in another language. French, I think it was. We pushed each other back and forth while she sang, and felt our faces, and I guessed she was pretty.
I sang the only song I ever sing, one that my mother used to sing. When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie, that’s amore.
“Are you Italian?” she asked, when I’d finished.
“No,” I said, “my mother just sang that when I was little.”
“What, did she stop when you got older?”
I guess it was supposed to be funny.
“She and Pop died in an accident when I was five.”
I shouldn’t have told her that, but I’m not any good at lying, except little things like white lies and alibis. We were having a good time, and now she was just feeling sorry for me. She touched my cheek to see if I was crying, but I don’t cry.
“What happened after that?”
I knew this was going to spoil what was turning out to be a good thing. I tried to get out of it.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” I said.
“No, you’ve got to tell me. Please.”
She had told me about Ralph, so I went on.
“Well, I was put into a home for awhile.”
“Any brothers or sisters?”
“No, just me. It was ok though. I liked it. But then I got put with some foster people. You know how that works?”
“Yes,” Jennifer said. She had placed her hands alongside my neck, on my shoulders, and every now and then she’d pet me like it was going to make my childhood better.
“They got a hundred dollars a month for me. But you know how Ralph thinks he owns you? They didn’t own me.”
“You didn’t like them.”
I’m not good at explaining things, so I put my left hand across my chest and moved her hand to touch where the tips are missing from the first three fingers of my right hand. If not for a fraction of a G from a mid-course correction, the hot tears would never have fallen on my face as she figured it out. Part of it, anyway.
“They did that?” she said.
“Yeah, the old man did that. I had found a gun under his mattress, and I was just looking at it. He dragged me into the kitchen and cut ’em off square with a big cleaver on the butcher block. Feel that? Just about all the same as the pinky.”
She didn’t need to get so upset. Of course, I’d had years of thinking about it, to get over it, and she hadn’t.
After awhile, she asked what happened after that.
“Nothing,” I said. “They hadn’t put me in school, and they never did. But they still got paid somehow. Then it got worse. Fortunately, I’m left handed.”
It went on like that. She petted me and tried to make me feel better, but I didn’t feel so bad. I just wanted her to sing more and be happy. I’m glad she didn’t ask too many questions, or I would have had to tell her how I killed that old man with his own gun when I was ten.
She put a hand over my mouth to make me be quiet all of a sudden. She’d heard the elevator, but I just felt my lips in the dark, the places where they touched her palm.
Muffled steps came near us, making a metallic ring. I could feel her palm get cold and hot as my breath came and went. Then she slid her hand slowly down over my chin, and her fingers ended up resting on my chest. I didn’t move, because what I was feeling then was beautiful, and so fragile it could break into a thousand pieces.
Nothing lasts forever. It sounded like two people just outside, and somebody coughed and there was talking. I had the strangest urge then, to push open the access flap and stand up, and the lights would be on, and I’d say, Look what I found in this black little hole.
After awhile, everything was quiet and she spoke again. “You’re going to like Gamma. The people there are… different. That’s why I’m going. I made friends, which is rare for a downsider I understand.”
I was glad to talk about shallow things. “It would be strange,” I said. “There’s only about ten thousand people, right? Living in a mile-wide doughnut. I don’t think I’d want that for long.”
“Hmh. I can see the appeal.” She paused, and I felt her shift above me. We were touching lightly all the way down. “Everything is together. You don’t have to deal with the random uncertainties of Earth. Did you know, everybody has three or four jobs? No slackers. You fit like puzzle pieces — you’ve got a place, you do your job, you’re all part of the same thing. I think it would be wonderful.”
Her words filled my dark with pictures — the colony’s beehive housing, fields and waterfalls around the ring, the sky and the ground curving up, and the zero G pool at the hub, which I’d heard about but not first hand. The whole thing spins for gravity, and your head points in to the center. For me, Gamma had always been a tiny, boring thing up there — why would I ever want to go, except for a job like this one? But I thought of being there with Jenny, and I guessed if we could get along this well in a sardine-can hideaway, then a doughnut space colony would be fine.
“It’s social selection,” she said. “The ones that don’t fit in, they leave. I talked with a coordinator who said the idea of going back to Earth was abhorrent to her. Abhorrent!”
“Yeah,” I said, “that’s weird.”
“She said, since they became independent, there’s no crime except by visitors. There’s only one thing they’re afraid of.”
I was thinking meteors. “What’s that?”
“That our governments might try to take control again, turn them back into a corporation. She said she’d rather die than rotate to Earth. Her ten-year-old daughter had been born there, and she already had three full jobs. She didn’t want to even visit Earth.” She paused for a moment. “She thought she might be scared by the sky. Can you imagine that?”
I could. “The Grand Canyon is so big you can see the air. The river is about a mile down. It’s scary.”
“A hole as big as their world,” she said thoughtfully. “We pulled off at a turnout in the Smokey Mountains once, and we looked down on blue-gray hills all the way to the horizon.”
We had been in the dark so long, I saw that valley clearly. Jenny breathed in slowly and put her hands on my shoulders and squeezed a little, “What if we decide we’re topsiders and never go back? We’d never see things like that again.”
I had not planned to stay longer than necessary for my job, but now…. I wasn’t good enough, of course, to even kiss Jenny’s feet, but if she stayed in the colony, shit, Earth would be the same old cesspool when I got back.
A line from my mother’s song was in my head, When you walk in a dream, and you know you’re not dreaming, signore…
Then I did a strange thing. I reached up and put my fingers, my good fingers, on her cheek. When you’re in the dark so long and you hardly move, little things mean a lot. She turned her head ever so slightly toward my hand, and that little pressure was better than the times I’ve had with loose women.
“I was on a train once,” I said. “I saw a thunderstorm a hundred miles away, a big puffy cloud all dark at the bottom, dragging sheets of rain across the desert.”
She said, “Remember the smell of an asphalt road when it first starts raining?” We played a game then, trading memories in the dark and touching each other, and there was nobody else in the universe.
“The smell of fresh ground coffee,” I said.
“Dandelion puffs in the wind.”
“The lumps when you suck an icicle.”
“The water line creeping up your body when you go skinny dipping and it’s too cold to jump in.”
Our hands met on both sides, and we were quiet as she explored my short fingers. “I’m sorry,” she whispered.
After a minute she went on. “The people on Gamma are very independent. You know the history? Formed their own government, broke away. There was a lot of nasty political stuff. But you’ll like it there now. They’re honest and they work hard and they’re not superficial. I love them. It felt like home to me.”
She had to go and say that. How could I tell her I’d been hired by a corporation to do the first murder on Gamma since the breakaway? Or that it was supposed to look like a local job, like they had a problem up there, even though there really was almost no crime at all? The downsiders wanted ammunition to start taking back control, to make Gamma a colony again, a corporation instead of a country. I wasn’t supposed to know why I was doing it, but I’m not stupid.
How could I tell her that she was the first woman, the first person I’d felt close to since my parents? How could I tell her I hated myself and my life — and I hadn’t known that, really, until just then? I was slime, not fit for her to walk on. How could I tell her the ghosts of the people I’d hit were in that little compartment — and I hadn’t seen them until she had treated me like I wasn’t slime? How could I tell her I loved her? — I would never do that, never try to make her love me, a cold-blooded killer.
I couldn’t tell her there were tears in my eyes for the first time in a long time.
I guess I wasn’t listening very well.
“Are you ok Damian?” she asked.
“Yeah, fine.”
“So do you?”
I had missed the question, but I didn’t want to get into what I had been thinking. I’m not much of a liar, and she would have had me talking about it if she’d had any idea. So I said, “Yeah, definitely.”
Funny, isn’t it. I’ve regretted that more than anything else in my life, that I’d missed what she said that one time, and could never get it back. It was a piece of our life together, and I’d lost it. Funny, odd I mean, that just a moment can be worth more than a diamond, and even more, probably, than a life. In that dark little hole I saved everything else, every touch, every word, every breath.
I remember everything Jennifer ever said, except for that time I didn’t listen, but I only remember two things anybody else said. One is “Man, thou pendulum betwixt a smile and tear.” I used to think that was silly, but now it’s just about right. The other was the song my mother used to sing before she died. When you dance down the street with a cloud at your feet, you’re in love. I sang it again, and then the engines started up.
She wanted me to live with her on Gamma. She thought she knew me well enough from that compartment to take a chance, which was pretty risky after Ralph. But she didn’t know me. Even I didn’t know me. When we came in to dock, the artificial gravity was light, and it pushed her down with a bounce. She put her lips on mine, just barely. Her knees were against mine, and our feet touched.
We parted in darkness to make our getaways as we had planned them. For once I think my lies were convincing, my promises. To be with me, a murderer, would ruin her life. I’ve never felt like this about anyone before — that I will do anything to make her life happy even if my own insides are ripped up.
She was right about jobs. I’ve forged new ID chips and I’m a cook and a machinist and a recycling assistant. Plus another one off the record. I laugh when I think of downside CEOs at big desks, wondering how their plan got screwed up. When they try again, I’ll be ready. I won’t kill unless I have to, to protect Jennifer’s new home — but I know a trick or two, and I’ve found four new ways to dispose of bodies on Gamma.
I can find people even when they’re hiding from me, so Jenny was a piece of cake. There’s a viewport that looks out past the radiation barrier, and I go there when she does, but only when it’s crowded. I can never talk to her because she would recognize my voice. We see Earth, clouds at our feet, a blue and green and white and brown little ball. It’s far away like the ground was when I flew past the spruce trees — almost far enough from the bodies and the graves and the Dispose-All where my fingertips went.
Jenny looks so lonely sometimes.
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