see a penny, pick it up: part IV
PART I | PART II | PART III | PART IV | MIXES | ART
Spencer Smith. The Green Gentleman
Spencer was born on the desert planet Herteme. It has three suns, a vast underground aquifer, and an above-ground temperature so high at noon that no one can survive more than a half-hour of exposure.
The temperatures at the poles are milder, allowing for a few modest lakes and some foliage. "The Desert Oasis of Herteme," the north pole is called. The south pole has large, predatory creatures. Big, pointy teeth. Very scary. Nice trees, though.
He likes it better in space. It's cooler, for one thing. He's seen what happens to people on his planet when they get lost on the surface at the wrong time of day. Drunk people, mostly, who wander out at night and pass out in the sand. Their skin splits open, turns a mottled purple, sizzles and bubbles and blackens around the edges. Spencer would rather freeze.
From space, Spencer's home planet looks barren. Like a wasteland, an inhospitable deathscape of gently rippling beige sand dunes that resist even the sunset's attempt to beautify them.
Underneath, though; underneath there are vast networks of caves. Some stretch for hundreds of miles. Some chambers are so large they can hold thousands of people. Smaller chambers are often enlarged by carving out the thin rock walls that separate them. Superfluous entrances are closed up. It takes a year or more before new people can even find their way home, usually.
Spencer's family has been farming for generations. Four or five ago, they farmed the way everyone else farmed: small crops, planted on the cave floor in painstakingly imported soil, carefully placed in the path of the meager light that breaks in through rifts in the cave's ceiling. By Spencer's father's day, they had technology that let them plant in rows, in vast quantities, so that the less inclined could turn their focus to other pursuits.
So Spencer comes by his profession naturally. He comes by his ship almost as naturally; he and Ryan had been on it when its previous captain, who happened to be Ryan's dealer, died. Peacefully. Some sort of heart thing. Brendon had been with them, nervously shifting his weight from foot to foot and looking like he might start pushing buttons at any moment. Jon had been there, too, along with Shane, all five of them staring at the body on the floor.
Taking off had seemed the natural thing to do. The ship, after all, was running low on the special bulbs needed to grow plants in space. And they'd been almost out of fertilizer.
Years afterward, Spencer sits cross-legged at the head of the first row of plants, ruminating on the perpetual looming shortage of on-board fertilizer. Jon pokes his head in and says, "De Machina's shuttle is approaching."
"D.E.," Spencer corrects absently. "Like initials. Dee Eee Machina."
"Sure," Jon says easily. "But they seem all worked up about something."
Spencer doesn't doubt this, but he's not overly concerned. He tries not to get too worked up about things. The weed helps. "Crops look good," he says, propping his elbow up on his knee and cradling his chin in his palm. "Don't they? Ryan says they look happy."
Jon drops down next to Spencer, tipping his head onto Spencer's shoulder. "Prettiest yet," he says. "Another two weeks, they should be growing like, uh." He laughs, a little self-consciously. "Weeds."
"Okay," Spencer says, sighing. He props his hands up on his knees and turns his elbows out, pausing before he pushes up onto his feet. "Let's go see to Beckett."
William climbs off the shuttle first, followed by Travie, then Nick, and then a very short, stocky red-headed kid.
"Patrick," Ryan mutters under his breath. "Pete says he has secrets."
Ryan sounds intrigued. Spencer is less so. "Everyone has secrets," he whispers back, then plasters on a smile and steps forward to take William's hand and lean in for a one-armed, manly-type hug.
"Problems?" Spencer asks William.
"Ran into a little trouble in Carthine City," William says. His tone is easy enough, but there's a tension around the corners of his mouth that Spencer knows all too well from looking in the mirror when they're three days into a six day run with two days of fuel left, thanks to Ryan's haphazard record keeping. "Nothing we couldn't handle."
Spencer isn't fooled; with William, situations allowing that description could run the gamut from a lost dog to an army of trained ninja assassins.
"Still," William continues, pushing his hands into his pockets. "It might be best for everyone if we head off sooner rather than later." He nods towards the cockpit. "Scimeca's helping Shane scramble your signal. Just in case."
"You're not staying?" Brendon asks. "It's almost lunch. Travis hasn't seen the crops."
"Next time," William promises. He looks over Spencer's shoulder and nods when Scimeca steps back into the hold. "We want to put at least a dozen planets between ourselves and Carthine."
They're bundled back onto the shuttle and disengaging before Jon even manages to make his way to the hold again. He looks around at the mostly-empty space and blinks. "Um," Jon says. "Where'd they go?"
"You probably have questions," Patrick says glumly.
"Not really," Ryan says. "I'm too hungry. Isn't Brendon supposed to be cooking?"
Spencer maybe does have some questions. A few, at least, like what Patrick's running from, how fast he needs to do said running, and where approximately they might be when they deem it safe to stop running. It's not like he doesn't take his ship past the border planets a few times a year, but that's a lot of ground to cover. A few more specifics might be nice.
"I am!" Brendon says, before Spencer can make any of these points. "Well, making, really. Sandwiches. I've been hiding bread."
"You suck," Ryan says. "I was looking for the bread."
"That's why I hid it," Brendon says cheerfully. "You're like a carb machine when you're high."
"Does that really work?" Jon asks. His brow furrows a little. "Wouldn't a carb machine produce carbs?"
"That sounds like a science question," Brendon says, waving a hand dismissively at the question and beaming at Patrick. "This is no time for science. Ryan's hungry."
"Is there cheese?" Ryan asks. "I thought I smelled cheese last night."
Spencer looks at Patrick. Patrick appears baffled, but that's to be expected. They can be a lot to handle at first. "It's okay," Spencer says reassuringly. "You get used to it."
Lunch bleeds into a late afternoon tour, and Spencer still hasn't been able to ask Patrick any questions. He's not too terribly fussed; if Patrick stays long enough, he's pretty sure they'll be able to find something for him to do. If his visit comes to an abrupt and unexpected end, well. They'll just cross that bridge when they come to it.
The tour takes an hour, then Brendon decides it wasn't a good enough tour, and his version takes another two hours. Spencer spends much of this time watching Ryan tend to the plants. Ryan's good with them; he croons to them, off-key, and coaxes leaves up to take the light.
Spencer has a black thumb. The best thing he can do for their crops is admire them from afar. Far afar.
Dinner's long past by the time they realize they don't have clean sheets for Patrick's bunk, and Spencer still doesn't know much more about Patrick than that he's very short, one of Pete's strays, and presumably more valuable to someone than he looks. He also seems to be about half a second from falling asleep on the floor of the storage closet, but search as they might, there does not appear to be a single bundle of clean bedding anywhere on the ship.
"Take my bunk," Brendon says. He turns Patrick around by the elbow and pushes him towards the bunks. "Second on the left. It's mostly clean, I promise. I'll just bed down with Spencer."
It's another hour before Spencer does his pre-bed rounds and manages to shut his bunk hatch behind him. "It might have been nice to ask him some questions," he observes mildly, setting his fingers to his buttons.
Brendon is on the bunk already, sprawled face-down. He rolls onto his side and grins. "Aw. You should have come on the tour, Spencer. We bonded. We know lots of things about each other."
"Anything important?" Spencer asks. He pushes his shirt off his shoulders and unbuttons his pants, pulling a vaguely, insincerely annoyed face at Brendon. "Like why he's on our ship and how likely he is to get us killed?"
"Well, no," Brendon says, making grabby hands once Spencer's pants hit the floor. "But his middle name is Martin, and he's more of a dog person than a cat person. And he's a Taurus."
"Very helpful," Spencer says dryly. He crawls into the bunk and tugs the blanket up around his ribs, draping an arm over Brendon and faking like he's going to bite Brendon's shoulder. "I'm so sorry I ever doubted you."
"S'okay," Brendon mumbles. "I forgive you." He pushes his hand down Spencer's boxers and wraps his fingers around Spencer's dick, squeezing but not stroking. "You want to hear about his home planet? He had some great stories about-"
"Maybe tomorrow." Spencer pushes up into the tight, calloused heat of Brendon's hand and sinks his teeth into skin for real this time.
"Like that?" Brendon mumbles, twisting his wrist and dragging his thumb over the head of Spencer's dick. "Yeah?"
"Yeah," Spencer mumbles back. He licks at the spot he just bit, dragging his tongue slowly over the little dents his teeth left, and whimpering when Brendon slides his hand back down and squeezes at the base.
"See?" Brendon presses his smile-teeth, obscene bottom lip, chapped top lip-against Spencer's neck. "I get some things right."
::
They work on a different kind of time frame than most other ships. The ship itself is huge, far too large for the five of them, large enough to accommodate three plant-growing rooms. She looks like a fat-bellied bird from a distance, but she's as fast as any ship out there, and more graceful than half. They have the space to stockpile enough materials to last them a full growing cycle and then some; if they had enough money all at once, they could stock themselves for five months and go orbit some uninhabitable planet until they ran out of fuel and food. They could hibernate, if they wanted.
Or rather, if they could afford it. Which they can't.
Still, it takes them a full week to piece together all of Patrick's story.
"Okay, so," Ryan says. He has a bowl full of peanuts, which he's shucking methodically. "Maybe you should have just sold it to them."
"They didn't exactly offer," Patrick says, pushing his glasses further up his nose. "Which is, like. If they'd asked, I would've, probably. It's not like I didn't need the money."
"But it's good they didn't," Brendon says. He scoops up a small handful of peanuts from the bowl and pops a bunch of them into his mouth, garbling out his words around them. "I mean. Moral issues. And, uh. All that shit Bill said."
Patrick shrugs. "Pretty much. I mean, I don't think it matters now? They found me twice already. They're just going to keep coming. Eventually."
"You know what you should do?" Ryan asks. He cracks another peanut down the middle and throws the shell at Brendon's head. "Die."
Patrick says "Um."
"Well, not really," Ryan says. "But for them, you should."
Patrick blinks and stares. Sometimes, Spencer knows, Ryan forgets that not everyone speaks his language.
"I think he's saying appear to die," Spencer translates. He plucks a dropped peanut off the flap over Brendon's breast pocket and eats it. "So they give up."
"Exactly," Ryan says. He points an unshucked peanut at Patrick triumphantly. "Fake your own death."
"Ryan's very literary," Brendon says solemnly.
"Not that literary," Ryan says. He throws another peanut shell at Brendon's head; Brendon ducks, avoiding it, and scoops up another handful when he straightens. "Maybe a fiery shuttle crash. Something suitably bourgeois."
As far as Ryan's ideas go, it's not a bad one. "Could work," Spencer muses. "But convincingly?"
"Shane could help." Brendon dumps the last half of his handful of nuts back into the bowl and rubs his palms clean on his pants. "He's good with mechanical shit."
Shane is, actually, very good at fixing the mechanical disasters Brendon causes when he goes poking around the miles of network cables and electrical systems.
"Could work," Spencer says again. "Patrick?"
"I, um." Patrick pushes his hat up high enough to scratch at his forehead, sighing. "Worth a shot, right?"
::
Two weeks later, they have a workable plan. They also have a knee-high stack of rejected, unworkable plans, many of them elaborately diagrammed by Brendon, complete with little stick figures representing each of them.
"They'll be tracking your family for sure," Shane says. He's half underneath the spare shuttle they picked up floating around in space a couple of years ago. Shane and Jon have been trying to fix it since, on some sort of meandering, not-so-vigorous schedule of repairs, but they've had absolutely no luck. "So if you make a call, they should be able to trace you to this location. Make it a distress call, and they should jump to their own conclusions when they find this baby."
"Sucks to do that to your family," Spencer adds. "But probably it's worth it."
"They won't-" Patrick starts, waving off the point and then sighing. "I mean. Maybe Pete can get word to them."
Spencer can practically see Patrick adjusting to their way of life. He wakes up later, for one thing. For another, he caught Patrick and Brendon singing a duet to the crops in the second bay two days ago. Ryan said they looked greener afterwards-the plants, not the singers. He thinks Patrick might stay with them a while if this works; he thinks it might be good for Patrick, not looking over his shoulder constantly. Plus, Brendon likes having him around, and everyone else likes when Brendon has someone new to learn every detail of.
"Okay," Jon says, clasping his hands together and straightening from where he'd been crouching near Shane, watching him work. "Okay, we're good. All of our skilled mechanical efforts have been undone, and we are go for an unfortunate systems failure tragedy thing."
"Only a desperate man would have boarded that shuttle," Brendon says solemnly. "It's a disaster waiting to happen."
"I love it." Ryan pushes his hair out of his eyes-it's been too long since his last haircut and the ends are shaggy, if perfectly arranged-and smiles from Patrick to the shuttle. "It's fitting. Technology will be your downfall all the way around."
"You should write a poem about it," Brendon suggests, batting his eyelashes. "And then recite it while Jon pretends to be Patrick fake-dying. It could be totally special."
"Don't be ridiculous," Ryan says. "Good poetry takes time."
Jon's role in this whole thing actually is a little dangerous. Maybe not quite on par with taking his cat into the shower after she manages to roll around in the (expensive, carefully rationed) dirt, but certainly not the safest possible course of action. Shane has managed to fray the door-locking mechanism to within an inch of its life; the plan is to take the shuttle out from the ship a little ways, open a line to Patrick's family-a traceable, government-trackable line-then kick at the cords until the door opens. Space will do the rest. Jon, as well as anything that's not securely bolted down, will be sucked out into the black. The distress signal will start flaring immediately.
The plan is that whoever is looking for Patrick will hone in on where the call to Patrick's family is coming from, hasten to the spot, pick up the distress signal, track it, find the decrepit shuttle spinning in the lazy, gut-twisting spiral of space junk, and assume Patrick's dead.
They don't need a body. No one would expect there to be a body.
"We should have lunch first," Jon says. He pushes his bangs off his face and smiles lopsidedly. "I hate fake-dying on an empty stomach."
::
Spencer's been on shuttles that have sprung a leak, so he knows it's not anywhere near as quiet as it looks from the outside.
They line up and watch as Jon takes the shuttle out. It glows a little; light from the controls, under-lights glowing just brightly enough to render the ship visible to the naked eye.
"Nothing's happening," Brendon whispers, after a minute. "Think something went wrong?"
He's just behind Spencer, so Spencer reaches back, gropes at Brendon's hip and wrist until he finds his hand and tangles up their fingers.
"Supposed to," Spencer reminds him. He keeps his tone hushed, too, though he's not sure exactly why. "It's only a problem if things went right."
When it does go wrong-wrong like they planned, wrong in the 'door ripping off its hinges and spinning away wildly in the rushing exchange of inside-to-outside air' way-it looks almost peaceful. The hatch opens. The bottom hinges give first, and then the top ones, and then the door careens gracefully off to the side.
A bunch of paper comes next, curling in the air currents. And then, Jon. He's in a space suit, of course, so he's fine in terms of air and pressurization, but he still comes out sideways, tossed around like a rag doll. He bounces off the hatch's frame on the way out, and Spencer winces.
There are no planets nearby, and no suns, so Spencer loses visual tracking of Jon once he's twenty, twenty-five feet away from the shuttle. Shane is standing by with another shuttle, though, and his voice comes over the comm less than a minute and a half later.
"Got him," Shane says, tinny and mechanical sounding. "He wants to know if he can go again."
"I could die," Ryan offers. "Fake-die."
"Didn't you already fake-die on Lojaldo?" Brendon asks. "In that brothel?"
"Well, yes," Ryan says. "But I was George then. I've never died as Ryan."
"Do you think it worked?" Patrick asks quietly. "I mean. Do you think it will work?"
"I think it looks like what it is," Spencer says. "Someone was in that shuttle when the door opened. No reason not to think it was you."
They're within shuttle distance of Carthine City. Spencer made sure of that, at least.
"Hungry work," Jon says, when he and Shane climb off their shuttle. He's favoring his shoulder a little, and there's the slightest pinch of pain in the crinkles around his eyes, but Spencer doubts he'll bring it up in front of everyone. "Tell me there's cake?"
"Chocolate," Brendon confirms cheerfully. Spencer squeezes his fingers. "And I think Ryan said the Bay One crops are ready for a test-smoke."
::
Another week goes by, then two, then a third, and no one comes looking for Patrick. Ryan talks to Pete, Spencer knows. Gabe talks to Pete, too, and William talks to Gabe, and no one has been boarded. No scary men in scary uniforms stop any of them at any port, and while Patrick isn't officially listed as deceased in the system, their plan seems to have worked. There are creepy ships everywhere everyone looks, but Spencer knows enough about expectations to know that after you see trouble the once, you keep looking for it.
Spencer still doesn't know how long they're going to have a Patrick, or where he's going to go after he leaves them, but he does know that Patrick is the quiet type. He knows that Patrick is good with his hands, that he can occupy Brendon relatively quietly for hours, and that every plant Patrick sings to grows greener and taller than it had been before.
He knows that Ryan likes him, too, and that they will sit at the kitchen and let dinner burn in favor of going over Ryan's words and putting them together in a way that makes Ryan's eyes shine.
Spencer holds out hope that maybe they'll get together; maybe Patrick and Ryan will fall in love and Patrick will stay and they'll be six. They don't, though. They just work on the words, and then Ryan copies a page or two of them into cleaner, more meticulous handwriting, and then he gives them to Jon.
They eat a lot of burned bread and over-cooked, too-soft spaghetti, but Spencer's not that much better of a cook himself, so it's not like he has any room to judge.
They harvest and sell the plants in Bay One, and Spencer splits the profit into six parts and sets one of them aside for Patrick. He knows-they all know-that Patrick boarded Pete's ship with nothing but the clothes on his back, and none of them are willing to drop him off on some strange planet with no money and no contacts. They harvest and sell Bay Two, and Patrick never asks for any part of it, even though he spends just as much time tending the plants as the rest of them do.
"You could stay, you know," Spencer says. He and Patrick are at the table, watching Brendon serenade the stew. "It's not like we don't have the room."
Patrick tilts his head. He doesn't wear a hat at all times anymore, though it took a month for them to get there. "It's not-" he starts, then shrugs and bites his lip. "I'm just not cut out for space, I don't think."
They have maps spread out over most of Patrick's floor, Spencer knows; Patrick and Brendon spend a lot of time searching each of them, then looking up the planets, trying to find the exact right place for Patrick to start another life.
"It's not for everyone," Spencer says. Brendon gives one of the pots an enthusiastic spin on its burner, lifting his voice to falsetto and stirring the contents with a flourish. "Any time, though," Spencer says. He looks at the table and presses the pad of his thumb down hard. "Just call us, you know?"
He figures Pete said the same thing. Gabe, too. Maybe not William.
"Any time," Patrick says. He smiles a little, lifting his hand to his head like he's going to fix his hat and detouring to rub at one of his sideburns when he finds himself hatless. "Same goes. Wherever I end up, I mean. If you guys ever want to, uh. Grow on solid ground."
"Maybe someday," Spencer says, smiling back. "But Ryan doesn't do well in a schedule-based lifestyle."
Epilogue.
A year to the day from the scary staccato of footsteps down the hallway outside of Patrick's office, a battered, haphazardly, though enthusiastically, taped package arrives on his doorstep. It's a small box, with the corners worn down from impact and squashing, like it had to come a long, long distance to get to him. There's no return address, but it's been months since anyone's tried to kill him, so he just kicks it inside his apartment and locks the door.
He's late; he has piano students all day and then a shift at the bar until midnight, and the package is going to have to wait.
He is somehow less poor than he was back home-he knows this has a lot to do with Spencer's insistence that Patrick take a share of the profit from the three harvests they managed to sell while Patrick was still on board picking a planet-and he likes the world they chose. It's very green. The skies are very blue, the water is very clean, and it's self-governed. It's not a paradise, but nobody seems to want him dead, so. Patrick considers himself a happy citizen.
The chip is taped to the underside of a loose floorboard in his little house. Patrick's not sure it even still works; he did drag it around space for many months, the last half of which it spent shoved into the toe of a shoe with holes in the sole. It just seems wrong, somehow, to get rid of it.
These days his life is more about the music being external, anyway. He spends his afternoons teaching piano to kids who press the keys with clumsy, sticky fingers, and then he goes to the bar and serves drinks until he can't take the musical selections anymore and is helplessly compelled to hack the holobox and tamper with the patrons' song choices. Sometimes he improves them. Sometimes he makes them worse and undercharges the people who groan and roll their eyes.
What he does not do, not ever, is look over his shoulder and wonder if someone's following. At first, it was a concentrated effort. These days, these many months later, he sees flashes of black out of the corner of his eye and his heart doesn't skip even one beat.
He nearly trips over the box when he gets home; it's one in the morning, and all of his lights are off, so the only illumination comes from the weak orange glow of the moon. He catches himself on the door frame and curses, bending to pick it up. It's addressed to his new name, Vaughn Martin, in unfamiliar, careless handwriting.
It's late, and he almost leaves the package for the morning, but thinks better of it and grabs some scissors, ripping it open. Something falls out with a soft thud, and he doesn't think to turn on the light before he crawls around under his kitchen table trying to find it. It's late, and he's tired; he finds it, crawls out from under the table on the other side, and holds the damn thing up to the moonlight.
Someone, it seems, has sent him a stuffed orange petrush. He can only think of one person who might have done that, so when he notices the ribbon tied around its neck with a comm number on it, he goes right to his computer and types it in.
It buzzes once, twice, a third time, and then Pete's face fills the screen. He grins, brightly, and leans too close, so Patrick can see all of the little flecks of gold in his eyes. "Patrick Vaughn Martin Stumph," Pete says loudly, too loudly, so the speakers short out a little at the peak of it. "You're alive."
PART I | PART II | PART III | PART IV | MIXES | ART