Providence - Max Barry Page 0,84

might say good-bye.”

“No,” he said.

Beanfield was silent, then: “Why are we walking?”

“To find something to feed the matter converter. So we can charge the suits.” He was sure she knew this.

“Then what?”

“Then we do it again,” he said, “for as long as we can.” She didn’t respond. “Hey,” he said. “It’s better than the alternative.” Jackson reappeared at the far end of the fissure. He waved and wearily rose to his feet. Beanfield did not. “Come on, Beanfield.”

She stood, took a hitching step, and began to cry. He offered her his hand, not knowing what else to say. She took it. “Talk to me,” she said.

“About what?”

“I don’t care. I just need to hear your voice.”

He tried to think. Most of his thoughts were about food.

“Tell me why you enlisted.”

“Aw,” he said. “Who knows.”

“You would have been about nineteen for Coral Beach. That’s when a lot of people signed up.”

He shook his head. “Not me. I didn’t give a shit.”

He remembered the moment, though. He’d been downtown, lounging with a friend, the sun on his face, doing nothing but watching human traffic pass by. And then it slowed. A few people at first, like they’d remembered something they had to do, then more, until the sidewalks stood still and mute. He saw a man reach out to a woman threading her way between them and touch her arm, and she stopped, too. Paul, said his friend. She was looking at her phone; there was a video.

“Your brothers?” Beanfield asked.

He clambered over rock. “Yeah. Two of them, anyway. Eddie tried, but didn’t pass the physical.” Eddie was already pretty far gone into drugs and alcohol. It was hard for him; he got frustrated in social settings, when he couldn’t keep up with the conversation. He had trouble making himself understood. Each year since Anders had hit him with the wrench, Eddie had disappeared a little further into himself.

“Tell me about that, then,” Beanfield said. “What it was like when they were in Service and you weren’t.”

“It wasn’t like anything. I was just a kid, partying. Wasting my life.” The world had gone insane, all at once. All anyone wanted to talk about were the aliens. And everyone had a different opinion, even then: The aliens were coming to kill us, or were harmless animals, or God’s final plague. There were vigils for Coral Beach as well as rallies and protests about the military response, the hasty convening of several branches of the armed forces as well as a host of government agencies into a single, all-powerful Service, and you couldn’t escape it. Anders was tending bar at the time, and every night the place heaved with hope and fear. People were having sex in the bathroom stalls, getting married, quitting their jobs. It was crazy, because the aliens were so far away, and no one knew anything.

Service sent out drones, a lot of them. Over the next eighteen months, they found aliens in five places, including two that had been mapped before. Which meant they were expanding. By then the term salamander had stuck, even though it became a political thing, with people saying the term was demeaning, or derogatory, or something. He dropped it once to a girl he’d brought back to his crappy apartment and she got steamed and told him they weren’t animals, they were an intelligent species. We’re being taught to want to kill them, she said. Like a cult. This was a thing, this theory that everyone was being manipulated by Service, or by the companies that supplied them, the military contractors like Surplex and Freco, into sucking the government dry in order to finance war spending. Anders even marched in an antiwar rally—not because he believed in it; he was trying to sleep with a girl. She was a pacifist and when she talked, her cheeks flushed and her jaw stood out. He carried one of her placards, which read, THE UNIVERSE IS BIG ENOUGH TO SHARE, and walked beside her, chanting No war and Sonata Six, what do they know, which was a reference to a conspiracy theory that some people had discovered evidence of Service doctoring