Scott Cleveland - Pale Boundaries

Virene pressed her palms together under her chin and bowed. “Yes, O Great Purveyor of Superfluous Bullshit.”

“Submissiveness, at last,” Terson sighed. She stuck her tongue out at him and sat down, dangling her legs over the edge of the roof. Her eyes rested on the rifle barrel behind his shoulder briefly, then moved to his face without comment. By now she accepted his proclivity to keep the weapon close at hand. It was a remnant of his past that she could not influence any more than the scars crisscrossing his body.

“What’s for dinner?” she asked.

“Grab whatever you want. Freezer’s full.”

“There is no romance in pre-packaged frozen dinners.”

“I suppose you want me to kill something,” he sighed.

“Mm-hm. Then I want to drag you to my cave and use you.”

Terson pinched her cheek. “My horny little poacher.”

Virene reddened uncomfortably. “I wish you wouldn’t say that. It sounds dirty.”

“Pre-packaged frozen dinners, then?” he asked hopefully.

Virene pinched him back. “You’re trying to get out of cooking. I’ll get the beer.”

They let the faux pas pass, as they’d done before. The concept of poaching simply did not exist on Terson’s homeworld. On Nivia, it ranked somewhere between murder and incest. The locals invested a lot of emotional energy in guilt over filched berries and pilfered fish.

Terson loaded their gear into an over-sized backpack and they set off up an overgrown path that crossed the saddle between the island’s peaks. A comforting sense of menace settled over Terson’s mind as the trees closed in on them. He struck to and fro with the machete rebelliously, lopping off more foliage than he needed to, burning away unconscious frustration. The civilized veneer his new home demanded chaffed. The island gave him the opportunity to throw it off without the immediate danger of incarceration.

The trail emerged on a wide, sandy beach protected by the reef thirty meters off shore.

Terson had never imagined any part of a planet could be so flat. Algran Asta lacked open water, per se, and he’d never learned to swim. It was a necessary skill on Nivia but his first attempts in Saint Anatone’s tropical waters made him feel like he was floating in blood. He didn’t learn to enjoy it until he met Virene.

Virene set up the cooking pot and gathered wood for the fire while Terson searched the bushes for a pair of forked sticks with the necessary angle and flexibility to hunt with. She made a face when he handed one to her. “Can’t I just make moon eyes and fawn over the mighty hunter and his catch?”

“You could,” Terson smiled as he dug out their snorkeling gear, “but what would you eat?”

She stuck her fork in the sand at his feet and headed for the water with her mask and flippers. “I’ll make it worth your while.”

Terson hurriedly unpacked his gear and waded in after her. The reef protected the tiny inlet from the open ocean, but twice Terson had found deep-water predators trapped inside the reef by storms. Most Nivians were oblivious to the sophisticated system of sonic emitters and physical barriers around their cities and roads that kept the wildlife at bay.

He checked the safety pins on the pair of bang sticks slung across his back in place of his rifle and dove into the murky shoreline waters. Visibility improved dramatically ten or fifteen meters out, where the bottom angled down and the first mounds of coral appeared.

The world beneath the surface was as noisy as any jungle, filled with chirps, grunts and cracking as fish circled within the inlet grazing on coral and seaweed or sifting smaller creatures from the sand.

Virene’s hair rippled along her back as she swam, her aquatic grace blending naturally with the reef’s inhabitants. A school of tiny fish briefly encapsulated her like a mist of jewels. They darted away in terror at Terson’s clumsy approach. Virene pointed downward where a troupe of crustaceans caught in the open sand had massed together. The creatures waved their claws overhead menacingly as they retreated toward the nearest crevice.

Terson plunged his stick into the chitinous mass, wedging one of the creatures between the forks. He transferred it to the mesh sack at his side and repeated the procedure until the troupe reached cover and the survivors vanished. He probed the holes and crevices with his stick while Virene plucked hapless, slow-moving shellfish from their nests beneath the seaweed. The humans returned to the beach with Terson’s sack filled to capacity.

The shellfish only needed a few seconds in hot water to emerge from their armor. Terson skewered the naked mollusks and dropped them in a pan to fry while the water came to a full boil. The crustaceans did not surrender as willingly, pinching at Terson’s fingers as he transferred them to the pot.

Virene flicked pebbles into the sand while they waited, unusually introspective. Terson pulled out a beer for each of them and offered one to her. “Are you disappointed your folks didn’t come to the wedding?”

Virene took a swallow and smacked her lips. “No. Should I be?”

Terson shrugged. “They’re your parents.”

“Only by an accident of nature. But… I thought Vern might come.”

Her elder brother’s signature was the only one missing from the letter Virene received from her mother after announcing her engagement to a phig . The handwriting began with precise lettering, expressing strong disapproval. By the closing the woman’s sentences swayed erratically across the margins, barely legible, but the word whore appeared frequently. Beside her vicious scrawl lay the father’s signature, little more than a feeble first initial trailing into a few arbitrary loops. Terson had wondered at the time if the man’s personality was as weak. The rest of Virene’s brothers and sisters added their names in two neat rows.

“I’m sorry they felt that way,” Terson said.

“I’m not.”

Terson picked up a piece of shell and threw it into the water. “Maybe we should have waited.”

Virene rubbed his shoulder. “It wouldn’t have made any difference. Besides, I was starting to wonder if this was going anywhere. I think you would have waited forever if I hadn’t been the one to ask. I wasn’t ever sure if you’d say yes.”

“I did, though.”

“I’m not sure why.”

“Maybe because I love you?” Terson replied, exasperated.

“That isn’t always enough,” she said. “I could always tell you’re not completely happy here; that you might want to leave some day.”

Terson slipped his arm around her. “Not if you didn’t go with me. I’d stay for you.”

“You love me that much?”

“More.”

Virene leaned over and kissed him, long and deeply. “Good answer,” she whispered in his ear.

They cracked shells between rocks to get at the sweet white meat inside, spitting fragments of grit into the sand between their feet, and washed it down with beer until their bellies bulged. Afterward they lay in a sated drowse while the shade crept slowly toward the jungle. Eventually the burn of sunlight on their bare legs roused them again. They sat up, stretching for a few moments before starting to break camp.

Virene reached into the frying pan and held up the remains of a mollusk daintily. “Eat up,” she called. “Can’t let it go to waste!”

Terson opened his mouth obediently. The meat was cold but still tender until his teeth came down on something hard. He separated it with his tongue and spat a light blue sphere almost a centimeter in diameter into his hand.

“What’s that?” Virene asked, leaning in for a closer look.

“Some kind of pearl, I guess,” Terson said. He held it up where motes in its surface sparkled in the failing sunlight.