Astounding! (11 page)

F
REDDY
DROVE
the rest of the way to Grants Pass, and Keith used his phone to guide him to the campground. When they arrived, three of them spent considerable time connecting the RV and getting it set up for the night, while John watched them in amusement.

“Hotels are a hell of a lot easier,” Keith complained when they were done. He wiped his forehead dramatically. “No sewage hookups.”

“And no great outdoors,” Freddy countered.

Keith scowled into the night. “There are probably bears. Or snakes. And there are definitely bugs. And it’s too dark for me to take decent photos.”

“Take photos in the morning, Dorothea Lange. For now, how about you help me cook those steaks you bought?”

“Hotels have restaurants too. And room service.” But Keith followed Freddy into the RV with a wide smile.

That left Carter and John outside, standing close together. John gazed up at the sky, where a million stars looked down at him. “It’s big, isn’t it?” he asked quietly.

“Yeah. Back home, it’s usually too cloudy to see much. And even when the night is clear, there’s too much light pollution, I guess.”

“Portland too.”

Carter briefly considered asking him which star was his. But that might come off as teasing, and he didn’t mean it that way. He remained silent. Then an idea struck him. “How about if we build a fire? We can eat around it and pretend we’re cowboys or something. Plus, didn’t you guys get supplies for s’mores?”

“What’s that?”

“You know. Graham crackers, marshmallows, chocolate.” When John looked at him blankly, Carter added, “Didn’t you ever go on a campout?”

“No,” John replied.

Right. No Boy Scouts on Mars or Alpha Centauri or wherever John thought he was from. Or maybe he had a really sad childhood—the kind that meant he never got to roast marshmallows and instead grew up more than a little messed up in the head.

Carter smiled at him. “I’ll show you. The secret to good s’mores is catching the marshmallows on fire but not letting them turn into cinders. Let’s go get some firewood, okay?”

They found a generous supply of logs stacked a few campsites away. John paid the fee before Carter could stop him, and then they each grabbed an armful to carry back.

“Don’t know if this is going to burn,” Carter said. “It’s pretty wet.” But they set the wood in the fire pit anyway, placing the extra logs off to the side.

“Now what?’ John asked.

“I’ll go see if we have a lighter. I think the RV rental guy said there was one somewhere. Hang on.”

When Carter went inside, the delicious scent of frying meat greeted him. Freddy stood at the stove with a pepper shaker in hand, while beside him, Keith stabbed potatoes with a fork. “That smells amazing. I hope you bought a lot of steak,” Carter said.

Keith leered at him cheerfully. “So you like big meat, huh?”

Carter snorted and then reached around him to open an upper cupboard, nearly bonking Freddy in the head. But he found a long butane lighter tucked among the dishes and grabbed it before shutting the door. “We’re eating outside, okay?”

“Sounds good,” Keith said, and Freddy nodded.

After pausing to pull on a fleece jacket—the evening had turned chilly—Carter went back outside.

Where John stood beside a roaring campfire.

Carter blinked at the flames and then at John, as if one of them might be a mirage. “I thought you were never a Boy Scout.”

“I wasn’t.”

“But….” Carter gestured at the fire.

John shrugged. “It’s just a simple exothermic chemical process.”

“Umm… yeah.” Carter tucked the unnecessary lighter into a pocket. “But how did you…?”

John simply looked at him, such inexplicable sadness in his eyes that Carter decided not to push. Instead, he sat on a large log close to the fire pit and patted the bark beside him. After a brief hesitation, John sat down.

There was no sound but the snapping of the flames until John cleared his throat. “Fires don’t burn long in space.”

“Yeah?”

“Once the source of oxygen is gone, the flames die out. Or even if there’s plenty of oxygen, it can’t get to the fire very well without gravity.” John sighed, as if there were something sorrowful about this state of affairs. “Electrochemical reactions are different here. They affect me in ways we didn’t…. We didn’t know as much about this planet as we thought we did.”

“Is that good or bad?” Carter asked gently, looking at him from the corner of his eye. Humoring John’s delusions no longer felt silly.

“I’m not sure. Sometimes I wish—”

Just then Keith burst out of the RV, laden with plates. Freddy was right behind him, as overburdened as his partner.

It was simple food—meat, nuked potatoes swimming in butter and bacon, grocery store cornbread that wasn’t half-bad. Carter didn’t often eat steak—it wasn’t really in his budget—and everything always tasted better eaten outdoors, even when you had to balance the plate on your lap and a bottle of beer against your foot. The company was good too. Freddy told funny stories about some of the actors he’d met, Keith did an impression of his sister nearly fangirling herself to death the first time she met Freddy, and John teased stories out of Carter about some of his editorial nightmares. Everyone ate and laughed, and then Carter taught John how to make s’mores, which made everyone laugh even more.

Freddy stood, stretched, and yawned. “God. How can I be tired? I haven’t done anything all day but sit and nap. But I’m gonna turn in.”

“Me too,” Keith said. “After I clean up.”

But John waved dismissively at him. “Go ahead. I’ll wash the dishes. I haven’t done a thing all day.”

That settled, John and Carter remained alone by the fire. They sat on the ground, their backs against the log, their shoulders not quite touching, and they listened to the firewood crackle and snap. The air smelled good, like smoke and green things. Trees screened the nearby campsites from view, so it was easy to imagine there was nobody else for miles. A moth courted the flames, and Carter was relieved when it fluttered away before it could be consumed.

“I like your friends,” John said quietly. “I mean, not just because Freddy’s famous. It’s nice of them to let me tag along.”

“They like you too.”

“They’re funny. I wonder if Keith’s sister really acted like that.”

“Probably. Freddy once told me that when Keith first met him, Keith was so starstruck he could hardly speak. Freddy thought he was adorable. Um, you don’t necessarily have to let Keith know that we’re aware of this.”

John chuckled. “It’ll be our secret.” He was silent for a moment or two, and when he spoke again, his tone was more serious. “What’s your family like, Carter?”

Carter pressed his lips together before he answered. “I don’t have one.”

Although Carter continued to look straight ahead, he could tell that John swiveled his neck to stare at him. “You’re… an orphan?”

Although it wasn’t an amusing topic, Carter barked a laugh. “No. No workhouses and gruel for me. Although my dad did take off not too long after I was born. Oliver Twist and I have that much in common.”

John shifted slightly on the ground, his shoulder brushing against Carter’s. “He just left you?”

“Well, he left my mom. I think I was an afterthought. I guess he paid child support for a while, but then he remarried and had a new family and disappeared. I haven’t seen him since I was a baby. Dunno where he lives. Don’t care.” And that was true. When he was in his teens, he’d harbored a fair amount of anger and resentment toward the son of a bitch, but he outgrew that. Now he seldom thought about the man and didn’t have any feelings about him one way or the other.

“What about your mother?”

That was more complicated, and Carter mulled over his answer for a while, feeling the familiar bitter burn in his chest. “She was a single parent for a while. It was tough on her. Her parents didn’t want anything to do with her and she didn’t have any money. Then she met this man. Vic. I don’t think he ever liked me all that much, but then, maybe I was a brat and deserved it. I don’t know. Anyway, Mom married Vic and pretty soon I had a half sister, and then a half brother too. Peachy keen, right?”

Instead of answering, John gently squeezed Carter’s leg—and then kept his hand there, warm and steady.

“Vic was heavy into religion—the fire and brimstone, repent-oh-ye-sinners kind. Mom followed him into it. Not the friendliest atmosphere for me to realize I liked boys. I didn’t come out to them until I was nineteen and in college.” He remembered the pain he’d felt during those years of secrecy, the acid weight in his stomach since he first realized he was gay. And the shame he’d felt when he finally opened up to his family, even though he’d known he had nothing to be ashamed of.

“What happened?” John asked. Softly, barely more than a whisper.

“Vic said I was going to hell. Said he didn’t want me anywhere near his children. And Mom chose Vic over me.” That sounded simple, didn’t it? Didn’t sound at all like having your still-beating heart ripped from your chest.

John made a sound like a groan and scooted a bit closer, his hand still atop Carter’s leg. “I’m sorry. That’s not right.”

“No, it’s not. But I survived. Hell, maybe the whole mess even helped me. Because every time I was tempted to slack off in school, or when starting a magazine seemed like too huge a project, I’d think of my mother and Vic and their self-righteous spawn. And I’d say to myself,
I’ll show them!
”

“So, have you?”

Carter turned his head slightly. “Have I what?”

“Shown them.”

That made Carter snort. “Not really. I haven’t talked to any of them in over fifteen years. For all they know, I’m dead and burning in homo hell. Anyway, seeing as I’m nearly unemployed and destitute, I don’t really have much to brag about.”

“You do too!” John banged his shoulder against Carter’s, hard. “Do you have any idea what your magazine means to me? What it means to a
lot
of people! And it’ll still carry meaning, even now that it’s out of print. But not only that. Remember what I told you before. I can see things humans can’t, and you’re a good person, Carter. You have friends who care about you. And you’ve been so kind to me, even though you think I’m crazy.”

Carter let that final comment pass. Discussing his mother and stepfather was never a good idea. Not too long ago, Carter would have ended up downing a lot of booze. Now, he poked morosely at his empty beer bottle for a minute or two, then rolled it away. “How about you?” he asked. “What’s your family like?”

“I don’t have one. Not… not like you. I never had one. My people are created asexually.” He sounded wistful, although Carter didn’t know what made him feel that way—John’s faux memories of his alien race or a longing for human-like parents. Carter wondered what really happened to John’s family. Maybe they cut him off for being nuts, or maybe his insanity was a way of dealing with an absence of family ties.

“Didn’t you write about that in one of your stories?” Carter asked. He rubbed his head as he tried to recall the details. “Something about computer programs, wasn’t it?”

“You remember!” John exclaimed, sounding delighted.

“Well, uh, your stories are… memorable.”

John laughed and snaked an arm around his shoulders. “Memorably terrible. I know. But yes, I wrote a story about a race of sentient computer programs that inhabit insentient bodies. That’s… not quite like me. We don’t possess physical bodies at all, actually. We are electrical entities.”

“Um… okay.” Nobody said a delusion was supposed to be rational.

“Is that so hard for you to accept? After all, computer programs on your planet think in very complex ways, even if they’re not self-aware. And you! Your nervous system works by sending electrical impulses down cells. Your thoughts, your memories, your sensations—the things that make you
you
—they’re nothing but little bursts of electricity.”

Well, that was true in a sense, Carter supposed. But he reached over and patted John’s muscular thigh. “You feel pretty solid for electricity.”

Seemingly enjoying the contact, John snuggled a little closer. “I needed a human body if I was going to learn about humans. So I made one. I didn’t know at the time what features humans find attractive or repulsive, so I modeled my body on an actor. People seemed to like him.”

Carter had given up arguing with John about the issue, and trying to make sense of the whole thing probably wasn’t worth the effort. So he only nodded slightly and leaned his head sideways, enjoying the tickle of John’s hair against his face. The flames were dying down. Soon they should douse the fire and hit the sack. But he didn’t want to move just yet. He’d had a really nice evening—the best in years. He wasn’t quite ready for it to be over.

“The problem with the plan was that I was supposed to observe,” John said, his voice barely above a whisper. “But the longer I wore this body, the more time I spent among you, the more… I changed. I want things I never dreamed of before I came to this planet. And I’m afraid I’ll keep on wanting them when I leave.”

He sounded so sad that Carter attempted to console him a little. “Maybe once you’ve, uh, shed your human body, you won’t want those things anymore. You’ll go back to being your old self.”

“I’m afraid of that too.”

Fuck.

A soft rain began to fall, rousing them from their contemplative stupor. While John gathered their dishes and empty bottles, Carter found a shovel in one of the RV’s exterior storage bins and used it to scoop damp soil over the glowing coals. After putting the shovel away, he joined John inside.

The door to the bedroom was shut, but given the sounds of female conversation and laughter audible through the thin partition, Carter guessed that Freddy and Keith were watching TV. John smiled at him from the tiny kitchen area, where he was diligently scrubbing a frying pan. “You look cute when your hair gets wet,” John said.

“Yeah, frizzy is such a good look on a guy.”

“It is on you.”

Carter huffed. Then he dug in his suitcase for the ratty leather bag where he kept his toiletries. He squeezed himself into the minuscule bathroom for his nighttime ablutions. By the time he was through, John had finished the dishes and stripped down to a pair of pale blue boxers. He waited near the front of the vehicle, his posture a little stiff. But then he looked up at Carter—who wore boxer briefs—and grinned. “Hello.”