Half Way Home (7 page)

“Yeah, well, the gods have good aim. See if you can find some clean rags, Kelvin’s head nearly got split open.”

Oliver clapped his hands together and ran off. I watched him as I made my way back to my friends, but he didn’t go looking for a rag or anything practical. I saw him tugging on others, pointing toward the command module and up at the sky, spreading talk of gods and of our salvation.

For the rest of that day, the ground and my stomach remained thankfully quiet. The grumblings among the colonists, however, didn’t seem to abate. The calories from the bombfruit were worked off with complaining, rather than being focused on the tasks at hand. I heard more than one person question why they were wasting their time on a rocket when more important things needed doing, and I realized I needed to speak with Colony again.

Before I could work out how to get around Hickson to do just that, Kelvin came to me at dinner with another, far more serious problem. He plopped down on the ground across from me, his bandaged head hanging low. I was about to ask him how he was feeling when his hand slid across the table toward me.

Just as I looked down at it, the hand pulled away, leaving behind a single golden bullet.

“Where did you get this?” I asked. I knew immediately what it was—just as I knew an earthquake.

“I made it,” he said flatly.

“
Why
?” I looked up at him, wondering what procedures I’d missed in the concussion analysis tests I had him perform over lunch.

“Hickson pulled me off farm detail. All of us, in fact. The tractors are no longer allowed to be used for anything. Anyway, two other construction guys are in a room we converted in the tool module. I haven’t seen what they’re making, but I saw the pipes going in, and I had someone ask me about rifling barrels.”

“They’re making
guns
?” I asked, my voice as low as I could make it and still be heard.

Kelvin nodded.

Oliver and Tarsi walked up with two of the support people I recognized but didn’t know very well. My hand immediately covered the bullet. I slid it off the table and into my lap, reminding myself for the third or fourth time that day that I needed to sew a few pockets into my new garments.

“You boys look serious,” Tarsi said. She jerked her head my way. “If you’re thinking of changing your earlier diagnosis, I should warn you that he wasn’t too bright to begin with.”

She smiled at Kelvin, who smirked and scrunched up his face for effect. “Actually,” he said, “we were just arguing over who should have to sleep on the floor tonight.”

“It’s
our
night,” she said, scooping up some fresh fruitpaste with one of the bright yellow spoons.

“Yeah,” Oliver said. “My back can’t take two nights in a row on the floor.”

“No,” Kelvin said, his face still creased with sarcasm and false hurt. “I was just telling Porter that it’s no fair I’ve had to sleep with you every night, and that
he
should have to take a turn.”

Tarsi put down her spoon and turned to me.

“He’s just playing with you,” I told her. “I never said that.”

“I’ll take a turn,” Oliver said, digging into his paste and watching Tarsi out of the corner of his eye.

Tarsi glared at me, her eyes angry slits.

“What?” I asked. “I swear, he’s just getting you back for calling him dumb just now.”

“We’ll talk about this later,” she said, turning back to her bowl.

“Yeah.” I looked across at Kelvin and held up my closed fist, the cool cylinder of gold wrapped up inside it. “We’ll talk about this later,” I whispered.

That night, the three of us lounged on the hood of our tractor, recuperating from another day of impossible deadlines. For the first time, the metal surface was as cool as the night, as nothing had been done on the farms all day. It was also our first night without Oliver.

His absence made it feel like a wheel had been removed from our home, our little family now unbalanced and incomplete. He had come by earlier to get a few of his things and to explain his desire to sleep closer to the command module. It had been an awkward moment, none of us knowing what to say. It almost felt as if we would never see each other again, even though the lone window of the command module could be seen from our hood and he had promised to join us at every meal.

So the three of us lay in an unusual, cool, silence. Kelvin and Tarsi continued pretending to be mad at each other; a series of jabs and jokes earlier in the day had somehow turned into a spat of sorts. It designated me the third wheel, even as Tarsi forced me to scoot over and lie in the middle. She snuggled up to me, but I couldn’t help but sense it was an assault on Kelvin more than a true gesture of affection.

For a brief moment, I imagined Kelvin sidling up against my other side to return the blow, and the visual imagery excited me. Sexually. Then it filled me with shame. I concentrated on my arousal going away, which just made it throb all the stronger. Looking down my body, I could see the swelling in my pants illuminated from the glow of the tractor’s cab. I felt like my two friends could see it as well but I worried that covering it would just draw more attention. The more I thought about it, the more my erection grew, until I felt like I was going to die from the humiliation.

“Is there something you want to talk about?” Kelvin asked me.

“What?” I felt my cheeks flush. “I—what would I want to talk about?”

“You know,” he said, elbowing me.

“No.” I could feel myself turning bright red, but at least the rush of blood put an end to the source of my embarrassment. “I have no idea what you’re referring to,” I said.

“The bullet,” he whispered.

Oh. I exhaled. “Yeah,” I said.

“What bullet?” Tarsi asked loudly. She rolled on her side and draped one of her knees across my legs, resting her chin on my chest.

“Shhh,” Kelvin hissed. “Voices carry out here.”

He wasn’t kidding. A few nights earlier we’d spent our entire time on the hood giggling, the four of us wrapped together in fits of hysteria while two other colonists sat on top of the power module and told each other how madly in love they were.

In at least a thousand different ways.

And not all of them verbal.

Tarsi scooted up my body, her knee pressing into my thigh, her lips hovering just a few inches from my cheek.

“What bullet?” she breathed, the air from her lungs tickling the tiny hairs deep inside my ear.

I pushed her away, giggling and digging a finger in after her question, trying to stop it from itching. “Tell her,” I told Kelvin.

He quietly related his day’s activities, telling us both what the rest of his group had been up to. I sat up, crossed my legs, and turned to face him. By the time he was done, we were all three sitting close together, our heads bent down over our laps. Tarsi looked back and forth between us, her eyebrows low in worry.

“Aren’t you two being a little paranoid?” she whispered.

“Paranoid?” Kelvin asked. “They’re making
guns
,” he hissed.

“Maybe to go hunting. Or for defense,” Tarsi said.

“Then why make them in secret?” I asked her.

“They aren’t.
We’re
the ones making them.”

Kelvin shook his head. “I don’t know. You had to see how it was being done. Everyone was kept apart, and nobody is talking about it.”

“
We’re
talking about it,” Tarsi said. “And everything is being done that way. Building the rocket, waking us up, preparing for the future. I think you guys are reading too much into this.” She pointed to Kelvin. “You, I understand,” she said with a smile. She jabbed a finger at me. “When did
you
get bonked on the head?”

“I think he’s right,” I told her. “And I think maybe it’s all my fault.”

“
Your
fault? How is that?” Tarsi asked.

Kelvin looked to me as well. I tried to sort out how to put it, but the theory had just begun to form while listening to Tarsi’s doubts.

“I think it might have something to do with the conversation I had with Colony this morning.”

Kelvin frowned. “I thought you said that went well.”

“Yeah,” Tarsi said. “According to Oliver it was a ‘miracle.’”

I frowned at her. “Colony said it was going to change some things. I thought it meant we would get back to planning for the future and chill out on the rocket schedule, maybe give morale a boost.”

“How does making guns help that?” Tarsi asked.

“It doesn’t,” I said. I glanced back and forth between them. “Unless you decide you don’t give a fuck about morale.”

We stared at each other in silence, unbroken until the whistle of a bombfruit descended from the canopy, causing us to tense up, fearful of the impact. It had become our normal reaction to the sound ever since the tremors. A sign, perhaps, of our growing learned sense of helplessness.

I had more nightmares that night—the worst ones yet. In one, it wasn’t bombfruit falling from the trees, but the heads of the four-hundred-plus colonists who hadn’t made it out of the vat module. They rained down on us, streaming fire, and landed charred and black but still screaming. We gathered them up from the ground and ate them raw, lapping at the stuff spilling from the cracked skulls, caring more about our survival than the foul taste. And in the dream, I knew it wouldn’t be long before we ran out of heads and those of us left alive would turn on each other.

A few days later, shadows of these dreams leaked out into the real world as a new group formed. The first person I saw with a gun on his side wasn’t Hickson, as I expected it to be—it was Oliver. Not that he got his weapon first, I just wasn’t actively avoiding him the way I was Hickson and some others.

I passed him on my way to the power module, where I was helping build the mission package. The bright golden object gleamed from his hip and captured my attention. He greeted me, but I couldn’t hear what he said, so distracted was I by the sight of him carrying something I knew, even if only from training modules, to be very dangerous.

“I said good afternoon,” Oliver repeated.

I nodded, looked up, and tried my best to return his smile. “Missed you at lunch,” I said. “And the floor of the tractor gets pretty cold without you there.”

Oliver frowned. “Yeah, weird how I miss sleeping like that. But I’ve moved into the command module full-time. Hickson made me an enforcer. No more bombfruit duty for me, scraping up all that green mess.”

“An enforcer?” I asked. “What’s that?”

“We’ve been falling more and more off schedule. The enforcers make sure we get back on.” He raised a finger and twirled it in a large circle above his head. “We’ve got flood lights going up today so we can work later into the evening. And with the gift we received the other day, nobody should go hungry as we wrap this project up.”

“Wrap it up?” I asked. “Don’t we need to be thinking about the long haul? Where’s the power for these floodlights gonna come from? We’re rationing energy here in the very module that’s suppose to make it.”

“We’re cutting juice back from the security perimeter. There hasn’t been any sign of predators—” Oliver stopped and looked me up and down. “Jeez, Porter, you sound pretty tense. Is everything alright? Do you need some spiritual guidance to get you through these dark times?”

I laughed, then felt bad for doing so as I saw a spasm of pain in Oliver’s cheeks. “No,” I said. “I’m fine. I just—I guess some of us are finding it hard to sacrifice so much for a project we aren’t really being told anything about.”

Oliver nodded. “I understand,” he said. “You scientists are always the first to become doubters.”

“It isn’t that, it’s just—”

Oliver raised his hand. “I’m here to talk, to help you, but not to listen. I don’t want you filling my head with any . . .
whatever
—” He turned to go.

“Oliver, wait. I didn’t mean to—”

He turned, his face twisted up in an expression of pure rage that brought me to a halt. “Colony gave you
life
,” he spat. “Don’t you understand that? It taught you everything you know. None of us would even be here without it. If everything had gone perfect, if there were a half thousand of us clearing these lands and breeding like animals, would you question your existence then? Would you curse the person who made you and taught you how to live your life? Or would you carry on building yourself a better world in the service of Colony and country?”

“I don’t see—”

“I know you don’t, Porter. You don’t see what’s going on. No matter what happens here, some of us have it in our hearts to obey and some have the compulsion to rebel. I bet if I were telling you to farm these lands, you would be out building yourself a rocket. We should probably be using some of that—oh, what do you call it?”

“Reverse psychology?” I asked.

“Yeah, some of that.” Oliver jabbed his finger at me. “You know, you’ve been miserable since the day we were born, and that’s probably your lot in life, but not me. I know the glory of the gods, and I will work in their service. I’ve been an enforcer of
that
since day one, with or without this,” he said, slapping at the gun on his waist.

“You need to search your heart,” Oliver told me. “Figure out what you’re working toward. Get right with the gods.”

He turned and stormed off.

I just watched him go, feeling sorry for him. Then damning him for assaulting me the way he had. For planting a seed of doubt—

That night provided the first glimpse of our new life, in all the harshness of ten-thousand watt bulbs. After dinner, we were ordered back to our stations to work until we met the day’s quota. For our group, that meant finishing the three firing rocket phases attached to the end of the payload body. In order to get the package wherever it was going, three separate canisters full of two-part propellant would need to fire before dropping away. Those of us not really qualified to consider ourselves “scientists” worked on that, while another group soldered together the circuits that made up the navigation array.

While we worked, one of the guys that used to be with construction—a big lad I’d seen Kelvin speak to during meals—stood by the door, one hand resting on his gun. It was strange how readily we just went along with his presence, most of us publicly accepting the new rules with a shrug, only to bitch and moan once nobody could hear. Muriel, the girl helping me plumb the mixing valves for each of the three tanks, slept in the same module as the guy enforcing us. Several times, she tried to strike up a conversation, asking him how he was enjoying his new job, but he never replied. What little joy there was in our payload group—the jokes and gossip that gave us a tune to work by—had been sucked right out of the power module. Sapped like the energy being diverted from the defense grid to feed the demanding lights.