In the Company of Others (49 page)

“How much more of a freak do you want me to be, Dr. Smith?” Aaron interrupted, getting to his feet. “Isn't this good enough for you?” He thrust out his hands—their gold veins pulsed and writhed under the skin.

Gail made herself calm, controlled, the antithesis of his passion. She had to. “There's been a piece missing from the equation—my instincts knew it. I was waiting for the truth about what you feel from other people.”

“Feel?” he almost shouted. “Pain. I feel pain. I feel sick. I feel nauseous. I feel my body exploding and about to die—”

“And what else?” Gail demanded, seeing his distress but refusing to react to it. “If you can't admit the truth to me, at least admit it to yourself.”

She was making him shake. “How can it help? Tell me that, Gail. How can it help anything to know what a freak I really am?”

“You have to trust me,” Gail said, coming to stand in front of the 'sider, where she could reach out and touch him, if she dared. “You do feel something else, something more. Tell me. You must.”

Aaron wasn't as tall as Malley, but he still looked down to meet her eyes. His were haunted and she saw sweat on his forehead. “Pain, like daggers plunging into me,” he said in a low, tortured voice. Hesitation. “But you're right. I can tell it's—theirs. It's what they feel when they touch me, when I hurt them. I feel anger at the pain. Their anger. Their fear. Fear's always part of it. Even from my friends. Even from you.” He paused, then asked almost pleadingly: “How can knowing this help?”

“I want you to understand yourself,” Gail said earnestly, desperately.
Believe me, Aaron
, she begged silently, knowing she had no proof, no way to convince him beyond her own belief. “I need you to understand. There has to be more than pain and fear involved. Those could simply be reactions to what they experience, what you experience.”

“No.”

There was a way.
Even as the thought crossed her mind, Gail stretched out her hand, palm up. “Touch me now.”

Pardell shied away, putting his hands back as if she'd tried to grab them. “No!”

She looked into his eyes, seeing and understanding the fear there. “Just for an instant. We've tried everything else—every tool, every device—and failed. This time, Aaron, I want you to test yourself. Touch my hand. Tell me what you feel. What
I
feel.”

He didn't want to—and he did. The conflict raged across Pardell's face, expressions flickering faster than she could recall seeing before. Gail held herself aloof from amazement or curiosity. She was afraid of the pain and even more afraid of failure, but these were emotions she'd battled before. What was at first difficult, then all at once easier than breathing, was summoning the complex mix of caring and desire that had tormented her these past days. A relief, to let go the guard she'd kept on her heart.

“Touch me, Aaron,” she urged softly.

He came closer, as if obeying in spite of himself, his hand rising to hover over hers. “Gail. This isn't necessary,” he said almost desperately.

“Yes, it is,” she said, lifting her hand to his before he could avoid it.

PAIN!

“Gail. Gail. Can you hear me? Please say you can hear me.”

It was Aaron's voice. “I hear you.” She rubbed a hand over her eyes, her left hand. The right still throbbed with remembered agony. It was an effort, but Gail looked up. She was sprawled on her office floor.
Most undignified.

Aaron was kneeling as close to her as he dared, his face white with strain, eyes deep holes of worry. “Are you all right?”

“Are you?” Gail countered, getting to her knees and, when that wasn't too difficult, rising to her feet. She stayed upright long enough to reach a chair and sit. Her legs were still unsteady. “Aaron?”

He had one hand pressed to his head as if to hold it together. “You are—I don't know what you are,” he said weakly, sitting down himself, but on the floor. “That was such a stupid idea, Gail.”

“Was it?” she asked, willing him to answer.

Aaron gazed at her, as if seeing her for the first time, as if the sight of her gave him strength. “No,” he said at last. A slow smile spread across his face, igniting something in his eyes that took her breath away. “No, it wasn't.”

Gail collected her wits. “Then I was right—somehow emotions pass into you from others,” she said, trying, and failing abysmally, to achieve a professional tone while he kept looking at her like that. “They affect you. And maybe,” the flare of ideas cleared her mind, “maybe what you send back out is a result, a reflection. Only other people can't process that reflection and feel just the pain. But why . . . what function could it serve . . . ?”

“You're trying to find something useful in what I am—something to make sense of it.” Aaron shook his head. “You're wrong. I'm a freak of nature.”

“Anything Nature does is worthwhile—in the right place, at the right time, to the right organism.”

“Organism?” His eyes widened with dismay. “What do you think I am?”

Gail made herself relentless. “Can you remember feeling any other emotions?” She watched him think, his pupils dilating, and scarcely dared breathe.

“Yes,” he admitted, coming back to her a long moment later, his expression startled. “Malley's mother. She pushed us out of the way of weapons fire—saved us both. There was pain and fear—hers and mine. But there was something else.”

“What?”

Pardell's eyes warmed, the unhappy line of his lips softened. “She loved us. I'd never thought about it until then—kids don't—but I felt it as she touched me. Before I felt her die.” This last so quietly Gail barely heard the words.

Then, forcefully, demanding her answer as his right: “So what possible use is this? What am I? Why am I?”

No more secrets.
Gail clenched her hands into fists, but was proud her voice was steady as she began the explanation she knew might destroy the man she loved.

“First, Aaron, I have to tell you about the Quill Effect—”

Pardell swung, watching the ball shatter as it hit. He reached into the pail, picked out another one, and methodically swung again.
Smash.

Like everyone in or on Thromberg Station, he'd used the Quill to explain the way things were, to excuse or comprehend their banishment from the rest of humanity, to make sense of why families consisted of those alive now, and those already dead.

But now, it seemed, the Quill were also responsible for his existence.

She'd known.
Gail.
Her name flooded his mind with unwelcome, irresistible thoughts. He understood everything, thanks to her. He now understood—better than anyone—how dangerous he was to those he—

Cared about.
Admit it
, Pardell told himself ruthlessly.
It wasn't a secret, not after the way he'd stared at her.
Not after he'd had to fight the urge to ignore the silly grapes and explore the smoothness of her skin, even knowing the complete impossibility of it. Instead, he'd done everything he could during that wonder-filled breakfast to touch what she touched, where she'd touched, as if it were the same. Had she noticed? Did she know how the warmth lingering on a plate from her hand had made his heart pound?

Had the blood in her cheeks and the dark, drowning heat in her eyes really been meant for him? Had what he'd felt from her touch, beneath the pain, that intense warmth and longing—had it been real?

Or had his own feelings played a cruel trick on him?

And now, he wasn't even fully human.

“How many of those things do you think they have?”

For all the sound Malley had made entering the dark gym and walking to stand beside him, they could have been Outside. Pardell didn't look around.
Smash.
“Go away,” he said.

“That's not exactly easy, if you hadn't noticed.”

“Did they send you from the lab?”
Did she?
“Am I holding up some great and necessary test? Do they need their resident—”
Smash.
This time the paddle. “—murdering—”
Smash.
The pail. “—Quill?”

“Well, isn't this productive?”

“Productive?” Pardell turned at last, glaring up at Malley. “If you want productive, then tell them to practice destroying the Quill—they have one now, don't they? Isn't that the whole point of this? To save us all from things like me?”

The stationer ignored Pardell's outburst, hiking himself up to sit on the Ping-Pong table—which creaked—and pulling out two cups and a flask. “Civilized man, Grant,” he said. “Knows the value of a good fermented beverage. Mind you,” Malley cautioned, sniffing the top of the flask—having opened it and tossed the lid over one shoulder. “Mind you, I've no idea what was fermented to make this fine . . . whatever it is.”

“Twenty years ago, my parents died so I could be born a citizen of a world I didn't know existed,” Pardell said, the words pouring out so fast he could hardly breathe. “Oh, excuse me. That's not accurate, is it? My mother died. My father somehow resisted the mysterious Quill Effect long enough to crawl to their shuttle and put me inside. Did you see that recording, too? Did you see how my father set the emergency lift on a timer, then went back for my mother? Only he didn't make the return trip.”

“Grant showed me—Gail's orders,” Malley told him, his eyes paired glints in the dim light. “Have some. I hate drinking alone.”

Some people want to be alone
, Pardell thought, but took the glass and swallowed hastily. Then he choked as something aromatic and bitter burned its way down the back of his throat, etched his esophagus, and landed with a minor explosion in his stomach. “You're sure this is safe to drink?” he sputtered.

“Grant said it was single-something Scotch. Claimed it was expensive on Earth,” Malley's voice was dubious. “I don't think you're supposed to gulp it like that.”

“Makes Sammie's stuff taste good.”

Malley shook the flask gently. “Should be enough in here to get used to it.”

“You could leave me alone,” Pardell wished out loud, coming to sit on the table beside his friend. The thing held—gave a little, maybe. He held up his glass.

“We've a day and a half before we reach your planet,” Malley said blithely, pouring into both. “By then, we need to be ready for the bad guys.”

“Like me,” Pardell muttered, taking his next dose of fermentation with a little more caution. Once he knew what was coming, it wasn't quite as bad. There was a welcome kick to it anyway.

“You don't look like a thin, iridescent filament with no pretensions of life. Well, you are scrawny.” Malley gave a huge sigh, challenging the table again. “I was so hoping for something we could strangle or shoot. Like a three-meter googly-eyed monster. You ever talk to Grant or his folks about monsters?”

“Can't say the subject came up,” Pardell admitted, holding his glass out again.

“They have an entirely different viewpoint than you or I.”

“Different how?”

Malley's voice deepened, as though this was serious. “The First Defense thing? Aisha's told me it's not one-way. Sure, they protect people, no doubts there, but what's their definition of people? That's another thing altogether. In fact, the whole point of the FD is to prove it is.”

“And how much of Grant's Scotch did you try before coming?” Pardell inquired politely.

“No, no. None. Hear me out on this, Aaron.” Malley poured again. “We're alone in the universe. Just people, dirt, balls of burning gases, and the odd alien rodent. Right? Well, so far.”

“So far.” Pardell repeated.

“Right. Remember reading about how things were before the Quill? Earth had an entire arm of its military devoted to First Contact, stuffed full of dreamers who wanted to be the first to shake a tentacle or hug a blob. Where are all those dreamers now?”

Pardell sighed.
Malley on a roll was impossible to deflect.
“I'm sure you're going to tell me.”

“Think about it. Highly trained, motivated people seeing their budgets threatened when Earth begins pulling out of deep-space exploration to focus on terraforming. People out of jobs, unless they find something else, something socially palatable to offer the taxpaying public. So the military quietly scraps First Contact and loudly unveils its First Defense Units to protect humanity against the unknown, which became so much easier to justify when along comes a bona fide unknown menace—the Quill.”

“Which is why Grant's unit is on the
Seeker
. This isn't news, Malley.”

“No. Well, yes. But that's not the only reason. Remember, the FDs are people who've kept some older ideas and goals. The FD mandate isn't just to protect humanity from the alien. Oh, no. It's also to protect any alien intelligence we might encounter
from
humanity. Grant and his people are experts in communication and weapon tech—they don't mention training in negotiation psychology and xenobiology, do they?

“What we have with us, Aaron, my friend, are a bunch of diplomats with two chamber pulse cannons, ready to make sure we all behave at that inaugural meeting and play nice. Or whatever we're supposed to do with whatever we meet. Whenever we meet, whomever they are.” Malley seemed fascinated by his own eloquence.

Pardell no longer doubted that flask had been full before his friend offered to share its contents. “And you are telling me this because . . . ?”