The Green Leopard Plague and Other Stories (47 page)

"I understand," I said. "But I need to be by myself."

"Whatsoever thou desirest, my captain." Tonio rose, and loped away.

I went to the captain's station and sat on the goatskin chair and decided that I had better get my escape plan underway. I called Denys' office and asked for an appointment. His secretary told me to come early the next day.

Tonio had been in prison, I thought. In prison you learn how to handle people. You learn how to tell them what they wanted and how to please them.

I wondered if Tonio had been playing me all along. Telling me what I wanted in exchange for a place to stay and a tour of the multiverse and its attractions.

I had many hours before my appointment, but alcohol helped.

 

This reality's blazing oxygen had burned the hangover out of my blood by the time I stepped into Denys' office. The geometries of the room were even more curved than his place Downside, and there were even more windows. Outside the office the structures of Upside glittered, and beyond them was the ominous octahedron of the Chrysalis, glowing on the horizon of Socorro.

There were two chairs in the room this time, but neither of them were for me. Both were on the far side of Denys' desk. One held Denys, and the other the black-skinned, broad-shouldered form of Shawn Feeney.

Denys raised his brows. "Surprised, Captain Crossbie? Surely you don't imagine that you and Tonio are the only people who employ backchannel communications?"

He was enjoying himself far too much. Cuckolds, as I've stated elsewhere, are rarely models of deportment.

"I'd asked for a private meeting," I said, without hope.

"Shawn and I have decided," Denys said, "that it's time for you and your friend to leave this reality. We know that your ship is provisioned for a long journey, and we intend that you take it."

"How do I know," I said, "that there isn't a bomb hidden somewhere in my ship's pantry?"

The two looked at each other and smirked. Denys answered.

"Because if you and Tonio disappear, or die mysteriously, that makes
us
the villains," he said. "Whereas if you simply abandon this Probability, leaving the two ladies behind . . . " He couldn't resist a grin.

"Then
you
are the bad guys," Shawn finished in his deep voice.

I considered this. "I suppose that makes sense," I said.

"And in exchange for the free passage," Denys said, "I'll take the ring."

"
You?"
I said, and then looked at Shawn.

"Oh, I'll get it back eventually," Shawn said. "And I'll get the credit for it, too."

"The Storch line," Denys said, "will have at least a couple years to exploit the new Probability before we Pryors arrive in force. But even so we'll get there years ahead of the rest of the competition. . . and
I'll
get the credit for that."

Shawn smiled at me. "And
you'll
get the blame for selling our secret to our rivals. But by then I'm sure you'll have lots of practice at running."

"I could tell the truth," I said.

"I'm sure you can," Shawn said. He leaned closer to me. "And the very best of luck with that plan, by the way."

"The ring?" Denys reminded.

I thought about it for a moment, and could see no alternative.

"To get the ring," I said, "I have to take my pants off."

Shawn's smile broadened. "We'll watch," he said, "and enjoy your embarrassment."

Tonio was in
Olympe
by the time I returned. Delight danced in his blue eyes.

"I have received a missive from Adora!" he said. "We are to flee together, she and I—and you, of course, my compeer. She has bribed someone in Socorro Traffic Control, yiss, to let us leave the station without alerting the Pryors. We then fly to the coordinates she has provided, where she will join us. From this point on we exist in our own Probability of bliss and complete happiness!"

I let Tonio dance around the ship while I went to the captain's station and began the start-up sequence. Socorro Traffic Control let us go without a murmur. I maneuvered clear of the station and engaged the drive.

As we raced to the coordinates the message had provided, there was no pursuit. No ships came out of some alternate Probability to collide with us. No lasers lanced out of the Chrysalis to incinerate the ship. No bomb blew us to fragments.

As we neared the rendezvous point Tonio grew anxious. "Where is my darling?" he demanded. "Where is Adora?" His hands turned to fists. "I hope that something has not gone amiss with the plan."

"The plan is working fine," I said, "and Adora isn't coming"

I told him about my meeting with Denys and Shawn, and what I had been ordered to do. Tonio raged and shouted. He demanded I turn
Olympe
around and take him back to his beloved Adora at once.

I refused. I fed coordinates into the Probability drive and an instant later the stars turned to hard little pebbles and we were racing away from Socorro, leaving its quirky electromagnetic structure in our wake.

Tonio and I were on the run. Again. Trapped with one another in Reality, whether we liked it or not.

I had let Tonio play me, just as he had played Adora and Katarina and Maud and the others. Now we were in a place where we had no choice but to play each other.

Tonio was in despair. "Adora and Katarina will think I deserted them!" he said. "Their rage will know no bounds! They may send assassins—fleets—armies! What can I do?"

"Start," I said, "by sending them flowers."

 

"Send Them Flowers" was written in response to a request from Gardner Dozois, for his (and Jonathan Strahan's) anthology
The New Space Opera.
Space opera is a subgenre that usually involves high adventure in space, featuring highly advanced technology and (very often) interaction with aliens. (In my case, I substituted "really weird humans" for aliens.)
I figured the anthology's other contributors would handle the large-scale adventure stories, military epics, and tales of derring-do, which would allow me to do a smaller, more personal story that was nevertheless set against a large-scale space opera background.
I realized that I had never written a story of male friendship, so I decided to do that. Because friendship is boring unless it is tested in some way, I created a lot of conflict between the two protagonists. The usual way to put a strain on friendships is to create a romantic triangle, and this I did, but in an unusual way, with the romance lying outside the two principals, not between them. I was also unable to resist complicating the story by creating two triangles.
I also decided that, since we don't see very many working-class people in science fiction, that Tonio and Gaucho would hail from the proletariat.
The story of a couple pals on the run, with trouble ahead and trouble behind, is not a new one. It is not a coincidence that the main characters are named Hope and Crossbie, and that the story was originally filed under the name "roadpicture." But Hope and Crosby are just milestones on one very long road, and the characters' names might equally as well have been Jack and Neal, or for that matter Bill and Ted.
I was sorry, however, that I couldn't make room in the story for Dorothy Lamour in a sarong.

 

Errol has the kind of eagerness that you only see when someone can't wait to tell you the bad news. I can see this even though his hologram, appearing in the corner of my room, is a quarter real size.

"Have you seen Kimmie's flash?" he asks. "It's all about you. And it's, uh—well, you should look at it."

I'm changing clothes and sort of distracted.

"What does she say?" I ask. Because I figure it's going to be, Oh, Sanson didn't pay enough attention to me at the dance, or something.

"She says that you took money for wearing the Silverback body," Errol says. "She says you're a sellout."

Which stops me dead, right in the middle of putting on my new shorts.

"Well," I say as I hop on one foot. "That's interesting."

I can tell that Errol is very eager to know if Kimmie's little factoid is true.

"Should I get the pack together?" he asks.

I stop hopping and put my foot on the floor. My shorts hang abandoned around one ankle.

"Maybe," I said, and then decide against it. "No. We're meeting tomorrow anyway."

"You sure?"

"Yeah." Because right now I want a little time to myself.

I've got to think.

 

Things to do if you're a gorilla

• • Make a drum out of a hollow log.
  
• • Look under the log for tasty grubs and eat them.
  
• • Pound the drum while your friends do a joyful thumping dance.
  
• • Play poker.
  
• • Make a hut out of branches and native grasses. Demolish it. Repeat.
  
• • Groom your steady.
  
• • Learn sign language. (It's traditional)
  
• • Do exhibition ballroom dancing.
  
• • Go to the woods with your friends. Lie in a pile in the sun. Repeat.
  
• • Intimidate your friends who are gibbons or chimps.
  
• • Attend a costume party wearing 18
  ^th
  Century French Court dress.
  
• • Race up and down the exteriors of tall buildings. Extra points for carrying an attractive blonde on your shoulder, but in that case beware of biplanes.
  
• • Join a league and play
  Gorillaball
  . (Rules follow)
  

 

I pull on my shorts and knuckle-walk over to my comm corner. My rig is an eight-year-old San Simeon, assembled during the fortnight or so when Peru was the place to go for things electronic—it's old, but it's all I need considering that I hardly ever flashcast from my room anyway. I mostly use it for school, and sometimes for editing flashcast material when I'm tired of wearing my headset.

I squat down on a little stool—being gorilloid, I don't sit like normal people—and then turn on the cameras so I can record myself watching Kimmie's broadcast.

I don't think about the cameras much. I'm used to them. I scratch myself as I tell the San Simeon to find Kimmie's flash and show it to me.

Kimmie looks good. She's traded in the gorilloid form for an appealing human body, all big eyes and freckles and sunbleached hair. She's never been blonde before. The hair is in braids.

She seems completely wholesome, like someone in a milk ad. You'd never know that some time in the last ten days she came out of a vat.

I watch and listen while my former girlfriend tells the world I'm slime. Vacant, useless, greedy slime.

"He's a lot angrier than people think," Kimmie says. "He always hides that."

Unlike someone, I think, who isn't hiding her anger
at all
.

For a while this doesn't much bother me. Kimmie's body is new and it's like being attacked by a clueless stranger. But then I start seeing things I recognize—the expressions on her face, the way she phrases her words, the body language—and the horror begins to sink in.

It's Kimmie. It's the girl I love. And she hates me now, and she'll telling the whole world why.

Kimmie lists several more of my deficiencies, then gets to the issue I've been dreading.

"There was a point where I realized I couldn't trust him anymore. He was taking money for the things he used to do for fun. That's when I stopped being in love."

No, I think, you've got the sequence wrong. Because it was when you started pulling away that I got insecure, and in order to restore the kind of intimacy we'd had, I started telling you the things I should have kept to myself.

 

Things to do when you've just been dumped.

• • Lie in bed and stare at the ceiling.
  
• • Feel as if your heart has been ripped out of your chest by a giant claw.
  
• • Find the big picture of her you kept by your bed and rip it into bits.
  
• • Wonder why she hates you now.
  
• • Beat your chest.
  
• • Try to put the picture back together with tape. Fail.
  
• • Cry.
  
• • Beat your chest.
  
• • Run up into the hills and demolish a tree with your bare hands.
  
• • Watch her flashcast again and again.
  

 

When I watch Kimmie's flashcast for the third or fourth time I notice her braids.

Braids
. She's never worn braids before. So I watch the image carefully and I see that the braids are woven with some kind of fluorescent thread, that glows very subtly through the cooler colors, violet, blue, and green.

And then I notice that there's something going on with her eyes. I thought they were blue at first, but now I realize that the borders of her irises are shifting, and they're shifting through the same spectrum as the threads in her hair.

I had been paying so much attention to what she was saying that I hadn't been looking at the
image.

Image,
I think. Now I understand what she's trying to do.

I was wrong about her all along.

 

I call my parents. My mom is a hundred and forty years old, and my dad is eighty-seven, so even though they don't look much older than me, they have a hard time remembering what it was like to be young. But they're smart—Mom is a professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at the College of Mystery, and Dad is vice-president of marketing for Hanan—and they're both good at strategy.

My dad advises me not to try responding to Kimmie directly. "You're a lot more famous than she is," he points out. "If you get involved in a he-said-she-said situation, you're both legitimizing her arguments and putting her on an equal plane with yourself. It's what she wants, so don't play her game."

"I never liked Kimmie," my mom begins.

Hearing my mom speak of Kimmie in that tone makes me want to jump to Kimmie's defense. But that would be idiotic so I don't say anything.

Mom thinks for a moment. "What you should do is be nice to her," she said. "Saint Paul said that doing good for your enemy is like pouring hot coals on her head."

"A
saint
said that?"