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  “Do you love this kid, Cyril?” Jensen asked, so baldly and so gently that C.J. could only look away from the screen.

  “Yeah,” he confessed.

  “Then you’re going to have to, at some point, leave him alone and let him come to you. Do you understand me?”

  C.J. nodded. He’d had that thought about six billion times himself. “Yeah.”

  Jensen sighed. “Look, I’m not trying to break your heart, but….” He paused, and C.J. hated himself, because Jensen paused because C.J. was wiping his eyes on his sleeve, feeling like a total asshole. C.J. pulled himself together, and Jensen continued. “But you need to know it’s coming. His feelings for you could be very real, but he’s not going to be able to feel them, really feel them, and know that they’re true, unless he and I work out some shit, okay?”

  C.J. nodded. “I know. You know I’m good with it. I’m not normally such a pussy about my feelings, Jen, but….”

  “But you’ve been watching this kid get abused six ways and sideways in a really fucked up situation, and your heart is breaking for him. I hear you. That’s why I’m saying that you can’t wait much longer here. One of you is going to do or say something that’s going to trigger an emotional bomb here, and I don’t know if you’re ready for the fallout.”

  C.J. nodded again. “Can you give us a week, at least?” he asked, feeling pathetic. “We’re taking him out for his birthday, and he’s really looking forward to it.”

  Jensen nodded. “Of course. Of course. I’m not a total hard-case—give the guy a birthday with real candles, right?”

  C.J. grinned, trying very hard to lighten things up. “And a dance night at the hub. We are on the space station. We should do it up right!”

  Jensen groaned and went back to thunking his head on the table again, but C.J. managed to smile through the horrible oppression that had begun to dog his every hour since they’d reached the “abuse section of the Anderson program,” as Cassie had called it.

  “Come on, Jen, some dinner, some dancing, let Anderson have his fun. I’ll tell him tomorrow that we need to take him planetside. I’ll make arrangements with Marshall, spend a week or so there, and then come back at the break.”

  Jensen looked at him soberly. “You sure you want to commit to all of that? It’s going to be a long haul, CJ. It’s going to take more than one cycle.”

  C.J. looked away. “It’s not like… it’s not like I’ll even feel like seeing anyone else in the meantime, okay? I….” Suddenly, he had to be real. “You’re right,” he said softly, looking at Jensen through the computer. “My chest is shredded, I can’t sleep, and I’m crying all the fucking time, man. I’m too fucked up to get involved with anyone else, and I sure as shit am not going to blow off Anderson for a fuckbuddy just to prove that I’m all right, okay? But… we’re his home now. He needs to know we’re with him on this, and he needs to know he has a place to come back to when it’s over. You feel me?”

  Jensen popped his hands on the desk like he was pounding drums and nodded, sort of his characteristic way of saying, “So be it.”

  “You love him, man,” was what Jensen did say. “You love him so much, you’re making plans to go to hell for him.”

  C.J. grinned. “Just make sure you’ve got my return ticket booked, right, buddy?”

  “Yeah, baby. Don’t worry about it. I’ve got you when you fall.”

  C.J. AND Cassie could hardly look at the screen anymore. At this point, they recorded the painful, page-by-page pull up of the archival footage and scanned it into the station’s computers so it would never be lost, then made note of what Alpha’s triggers were. At night, when everyone on the shuttle went to bed, someone (usually Anderson) would program the next segment of media to play for the holo-recorders. Fortunately there were markers for that, because after Alpha and Anderson began their painful go-round—not every night, but did it have to be?—C.J. and Cassie would turn the sound down and look at their hands, or the power readouts, or at the blank wall of the house where the holograms hid, because they didn’t want to see it.

  “So,” Cassie said, very carefully not watching as Alpha strangled Anderson during sex. In the background, there was a folk singer from Anderson’s colony playing—her voice was hauntingly beautiful, and someday, C.J. wanted to hear this song, this lovely, playful, wailing song, played loudly and in its entirety. But not now.

  They knew Anderson woke up. They did. Anderson, the real Anderson, was walking the ship, looking healthier and happier by the hour. They didn’t need to see this again. They just needed to record the music feed that was playing over the holodeck’s intercom while it was happening so that this song was not lost forever with the death of the singer.

  “So what?” C.J. answered, very carefully not watching the same thing. He’d looked up Alpha’s program on the console. He knew that it would take two keystrokes to delete him—that was all. Two keystrokes, and that fucker would be dead, gone for good, cancelled forever. It did no good to tell himself that Alpha was just an extension of Anderson. At this point, that didn’t even feel real anymore. Yes, Anderson possessed some of those qualities, but then, didn’t everybody? Isolated, put under pressure, forced into action by Anderson’s reluctance to hurt the things he’d created, Alpha had become monstrous, barbaric, a thing apart.

  “So, you’ve put in for some leave when this is over?”

  C.J. nodded. “I told Marshall I’d take the job as second in command if I could spend some time planetside making sure Anderson’s okay before my next month off. I….” C.J. swallowed. “He’s a nice kid. He needs someone.”

  Cassie nodded and wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. “I, uhm, I think I’ll join you.”

  C.J. laughed, and it was an anemic, depressed sort of sound. “Jensen has a suite booked for us, I think.”

  “Good,” Cassie said, her eyes darting toward the screen. “Make sure I have flowers every day. If I’m going to the funny farm, I want some fucking flowers.”

  The horrible farce had played itself out, and Anderson was unconscious, naked, and vulnerable on the bed.

  C.J. looked, too, and watched as Alpha masturbated on the unconscious Anderson, coming in a clockwork spurt over his face. He turned away at the climax and closed his eyes. Once, and once only, he’d watched with sort of a clinical detachment to see which parts of Alpha lasted past this moment. Did the bruises he left fade immediately? No. The bite marks on Anderson’s skin? No. But the come? The spit? The other things? Yes. Those things faded almost immediately. And Anderson had already said there was no lingering smell.

  “Gonna share those flowers, Cass? I, uhm, kind of like those pink things that look like morning glories from old Earth, myself.”

  Cassie nodded. Without looking at the screen, she made some adjustments to the recording and turned up the audio. The first song playing on the intercom had ended, and the next one began, so she made note of that in the records and left the audio on. In the morning, the people on the ship would list the songs and the singers and musicians in big print on a tablet and hold it up to the one camera they knew existed, the one in the living room where they watched vids on screen in the evenings. By now, everyone knew all the vids word for word, but that didn’t keep them from watching, from trying very hard to share some fellowship in the intense, pressure-filled atmosphere of the tiny ship, running on emotional and physical fumes.

  “We can have adjoining rooms. You and Anderson can share.”

  C.J. looked at her and, without looking, managed to gesture to that still, pathetic figure, naked on the bed. “You really think he’s going to be up for sharing a room with anyone?”

  Cassie nodded somberly. “Count on it, C.J. You might be the only person in the world he could ever trust again.”

  SO ALL things considered, God, was C.J. looking forward to going out to dance.

  He and Cassie were down to the end of the recordings by now, and he watched compassionately as Marshall all but dragged Cassidy out of th
e shuttle every night. C.J. wished fruitlessly for someone, male, female, Artellian, human, or damned spider-kitten, who would come to the shuttle and grab his hand and walk him down the shuttle plank and tell him that it was all going to be okay.

  Instead, he went to his quarters, where Anderson waited for C.J. to tell Anderson that exact thing, and it got harder and harder every day.

  Near the end of Anderson’s journey, in the months before the shuttle had made contact with Hermes-Eight space station, Anderson had been begging for death, and Alpha had been sparing him from the ultimate beating out of spite. C.J. knew a little about what space did to people and a little about what space did to machines, and the one thing he knew for certain was that what space had done to Anderson was going to require more than a month of free-fall on the space station for Anderson to recover from ten and a half years of isolation and nearly six years of abuse. Anderson’s blank-faced acceptance of what had happened only served to send the chills deeper into C.J.’s bones.

  “You didn’t deserve it,” C.J. said again over fruit juice and dinner after talking to Jensen and then enduring a particularly bad day of watching Anderson’s life unspool. “I know you’re thinking that, but you didn’t.”

  “You sound like Kate,” Anderson said blankly. “Kate used to tell me that.”

  C.J. knew this. He’d watched the videos, but he didn’t remind Anderson of that. “Kate’s smart,” C.J. said, and then Anderson blew all of his comfort out of the water by stating the truth as he saw it.

  “Kate’s the part of me that wanted me to forgive myself,” Anderson said. “She’s not particularly trustworthy.”

  They were sitting at the little counter at the kitchenette after a simple dinner, and C.J. grabbed Anderson’s hand then and squeezed. “That’s real,” C.J. said softly. “And I’ve never been so serious about anything in my entire life.”

  Anderson squeezed his hand, closing those thick-lashed, well-dark eyes. “I trust you,” he whispered. “But I don’t believe you. I’m sorry.”

  His silent screams that night had been particularly bad.

  That hadn’t been the first or the worst of Anderson’s breaks from reality or fugues through what was real and what had been going on in the depths of the shuttle and the labyrinth of his own mind for years. Even before C.J. told Anderson that he didn’t deserve it, hell, even before he’d talked to Jensen, the disintegration of Anderson’s personal reality matrix had finally began to show. The week before that conversation, as they were falling asleep with their bodies touching in the breathing dark, Anderson had sat up suddenly, looking at C.J. with wide, frightened eyes.

  “Tell me your name!”

  “Cyril John Poulson!” C.J. had barked, alarmed, and Anderson blinked.

  “C.J.?”

  “Well, yeah!” Maybe it had been a dream, one of those scary moments when sleep was about to take over and the body just jumped out of itself.

  “You live at the space station,” Anderson said, almost like he was checking off a list.

  “Yeah. You’ve been, uhm, staying with me, Anderson, remember?”

  Anderson had looked at him in the dark and seized his hand, then brought it up to his mouth. Slowly, as though he was afraid of what would happen, he popped C.J.’s thumb into his mouth and suckled, nibbling with his teeth.

  C.J. whined and tried to pull his hand back, but Anderson kept suckling, tasting, rubbing his tongue along the webbing, clasping C.J.’s hand in his own. C.J.’s breath quickened, and his next words were choppy and uneven. “Uhm, Anderson? What are you doing?”

  Anderson moaned and put his head on the pillow, facing C.J. and wiping his wet thumb against Anderson’s cheek and jaw and neck. C.J. could feel the tremble in his hands.

  “You have taste,” Anderson whispered. “Alpha didn’t taste like anything. Not even his come. Your skin is salty. I never figured out how to program that.”

  He’d clutched C.J.’s hand until he slept. When his breathing finally evened out, C.J. stood, shaking out his arm because it had fallen asleep, and went into the bathroom to work very hard at pulling himself together for Anderson’s nightmares. He only partially succeeded, but Anderson didn’t comment that C.J. was a mess—he was too busy doing what he always did in the middle of the night, screaming without making a sound.

  That moment was bad—so bad. C.J. didn’t delude himself that it was as bad as it would get, but it was one of the reasons he’d forced himself to be honest with Jensen. C.J. couldn’t help Anderson if he was a dire mess, could he? Still, he might have put up more of a fight about taking their boy planetside and committing him to a stay in Jensen’s facility if he’d thought that Anderson’s reality breaks were limited to moments of doubt about the most intimate of details.

  But other things had happened, moments that proved that Anderson had come to doubt every moment of his existence, and C.J. didn’t know how a man could live believing that every moment, every taste, sight, sound, story playing out around him actually had its origins in his own mind.

  The man who ran their favorite food kiosk called C.J. on his monitor. “Your young space-farer isn’t doing too well, C.J.—Doctor Michelle’s busy. Maybe you want to come get him?”

  C.J. had torn out of the shuttle, leaving his sister alone to turn off the screen and say goodbye to the holograms (they both did this, every night, because it only felt polite) while he sprinted across the space station to the kiosk in the spoke nearest their quarters.

  Anderson was sitting at one of the small tables, staring at the passersby with the most terrible, lost expression on his face.

  “Uh, Anderson?”

  Anderson snapped his head up, and a look of the most profound relief crossed his face. “Oh God. C.J.—it’s you. It’s you, and you have a taste, and you’re here.”

  C.J. nodded, feeling his stomach congeal. “Yeah, and so are you. I guess you’ve been here for about two hours, and, uhm, you’re sort of creeping the hell out of people.”

  Anderson grimaced then, his apple cheeks bunching up, a truly sheepish look crossing his face. “Yeah. I’m sorry. I forgot for a moment that we docked, you know? I couldn’t figure out how I’d made this place when I don’t remember ever seeing anything like it when I was a kid.”

  C.J.’s eyes widened in horror, but Anderson just gave that sunny, beaming grin.

  “You see, I saw this couple. I’ll have to tell Cassie about them, because I think the man is probably beating the hell out of the woman—they just had that vibe, you know, and I thought, ‘They’re just like me and Alpha’, and then, suddenly, I couldn’t remember how I got here.” Anderson shook his head, looking a little embarrassed, like he’d spilled a drink or something. “Thank God you showed up. I couldn’t remember where in the hologram I put the bridge.”

  The night after C.J.’s little talk with Jensen, he sat Anderson down and told him that they would probably be going planetside together. Anderson had looked excited, fascinated, and not at all dismayed that he was going to go have his head shrunk by the best guy on the planet.

  The next day he’d spoken to the thin air as he and C.J. had walked down the corridor toward the physical therapy pool, because C.J. wanted to work out as well.

  “Anderson, who are you talking to?”

  Anderson looked at him, puzzled. “Bobby. Can’t you see him? He just said….” Anderson made that now-familiar grimace again. “Shit. I keep forgetting. This isn’t the shuttle. It’s real, and Bobby’s not here.”

  C.J. had strained the muscles in his back swimming that day and needed a pain reliever, an ice pack, and a sonic wand to put them back to rights. As Michelle had passed the sonic wand over his strained muscles, she’d asked him what he thought he was swimming from.

  “The shit in Anderson’s head.”

  “Oh holy Christmas, C.J.—I’d strain something too getting away from that crap.”

  She hadn’t asked him any more questions after that.

  SO C.J. needed a night like tonight�
�a night when it was all about dancing and playing and having fun. A night when he could watch Anderson laugh and not worry about wanting him or not wanting him or about letting him down.

  Every night, they lay down in the same bed, and C.J. held that strengthening body next to his own and yearned. He wanted… he wanted to kiss that full mouth whenever Anderson looked at him with all of that aggressive flirtation. He wanted to walk behind Anderson as he was dressing and run his hand slowly from his neck to the base of his spine, feeling the texture of his skin, hearing the sounds he’d make when his body was touched, from top to bottom, with C.J.’s hands and lips. He wanted to sink to his knees in front of Anderson and pull that impressive cock into his mouth and suck on it roughly, not perfectly, and show Anderson what making love, true making love, felt like. The kind where you didn’t look away at climax because you knew that you were faking it, and you didn’t want your partner to see.

  C.J. wanted to hear the noises Anderson would make when C.J. was inside his body, and he wanted Anderson to feel C.J.’s come, hot, slippery, salty/creamy/bitter, sliding between their stomachs when Anderson was inside C.J.

  God, C.J. was desperately horny and so terribly afraid of any way he could take his release without Anderson knowing. Even masturbating in the shower had become a sort of concession to Anderson’s unhealthy desire, but that didn’t stop C.J. from doing it.

  He would emerge, skin soft and smelling of the sharp, pine-brine-musk scent that Anderson had bought for him, and Anderson would wait for him to walk into the bedroom before coming up behind him. Anderson wouldn’t touch him—because, C.J. thought bitterly, that would probably be cheating—but he was so good at standing just behind C.J., rubbing his hands just outside of C.J.’s skin, scenting the hollow behind his shoulders, and whispering.