Elizabeth Bear: This Chance Planet

Christ what am I doing with my life ?

Ten hours cocktail waitressing in those shoes, getting my ass pinched, and explaining drink specials to assholes when they could have picked the information off the intranet with a flick of their attention, didn’t make my feet hurt any less or do much to improve my attitude. I rode home on a nearly-empty train, wishing I had the money to skin out the two other passengers and the ongoing yammer of the ads.

It’s not safe to filter out too much reality when you’re traveling alone at night. But the desire is still there.

No dogs this time.

The elevator to our flat was out of order again. I finally pulled those shoes off and walked up five flights of gritty piss-smelling stairs barefoot, swearing to myself with every step that if Ilya was passed out drunk on the couch, I was carrying every pair of skinny black jeans and his beloved harness boots out into the courtyard and setting it all on fire. And then I was going to dance around the blaze barefoot, shaking my tangled hair like a maenad. Like a witch.

This is how women sometimes turn into witches. We come home from work one day too many to discover our partners curled up on the couch like leeches in a nice warm tank, and we decide it’s better to take up with a hut with chicken legs.

A good chicken-legged hut will never disappoint you.

But when I got home, there was hot food on the stove, plates on the coffee table, and a foot massage.

I bet a chicken-legged hut doesn’t give a very good foot massage. And they sure as hell don’t cook. Even lentils and kasha. Still it was good lentils and kasha, with garlic in it. And onions. And I hadn’t been the one to cook it.

You need to get a magic cauldron for doing the cooking. Maybe a mortar and pestle that flies.

Ilya washed my foot. Then his fingers dug and rolled in the arch. I whimpered and stretched against him, but when he would have stopped I demanded persistence. He set my heel on the cushion and stood.

“Where are you going?”

“You’re crabby for somebody whose man is making such an effort.” He walked into the kitchen. A moment later he was back, bearing icy vodka in a tiny glass. He handed it to me. “Na zdravie.”

“You’re trying to butter me up,” I complained, but I didn’t refuse the vodka. It was cold and hot at once, icy in the mouth, burning in the throat, warm in the belly.

“What is it that you really want?”

He seated himself again and pressed his thumbs into my arch until I groaned. Patently disinterested, he asked, “Any foreigners tonight?”

It was not a totally idle question. Foreigners tip better. Also, as anyone could guess from the evidence of his wardrobe, Ilya was obsessed with twentieth-century punk rock, and twentieth-century punk rock flourished in England and America. And there aren’t as many foreigners as there used to be, before the carbon crunch.

“You’re always playing some game,” I said.

He kissed the sole of my foot.

I said, “You never just tell me the truth. You could just tell me the truth.”

“Bah,” he said, pressing too hard. “Truth is unscientific. The very idea of Truth is unscientific.”

“You’re a cynic.” I almost said nihilist , which probably would have been true also, but that word had too much history behind it to just sling around at random.

“If we accept Truth,” he intoned, “then we believe we know answers. And if we believe we know answers, we stop asking questions. And if we stop asking questions, then all we’re doing is operating on blind faith. And that’s the end of science.”

“Isn’t love a kind a faith?” I asked.

“Then why do you keep asking me so many questions?” He laughed, though, to take the sting out.

I knew he was right. But I still pulled the pillow out from under my head and put it over my face anyway. What did he know about science? He couldn’t even really play guitar.

Two days later, Ilya and I saw the dog again, and I realized she was female. Perhaps we commuted on the same schedule. Perhaps she just rode the train back and forth, and we happened to be in the same car that day.

I don’t think so.

She looked like she had a job. She looked like she was going somewhere.

Maybe her job was begging for food. When I walked past her to get off, she whined at me again, and again I had nothing.

One more creature for me to disappoint.

When I got off work that night, I bought some hard sausage from the street vendor. I didn’t see the dog on the way home, though, so I wrapped the sausage in tissue and stuffed it into the bottom of my sometimes bag where Ilya wouldn’t get into it. Maybe I’d run into her the next day.

Dinner was waiting for me again, sausages and peppers and some good bread. Ilya had even found wine somewhere, which was almost too good to be true. Wine is hard to come by: the old vineyards are dying in the heat, and the new ones aren’t yet well-established. That’s what I heard, anyway.

Ilya seemed nervous. Hovering. When he finally settled, I was eating pepper slices one by one, savoring them. They were rich with the sausage grease, spicy and delicious. He chased his food around the plate for a little with his fork, then leaned on his elbows and looked at me.

I knew I was about to lose my appetite, so I ate another bite of sausage before I met his gaze.

“Have you thought about the liver graft?” he asked.

I swallowed. I reached for my wine, and deliberately drank two sips. “No.”

“I think—”

“No,” I said. “By which I mean, I have thought about it. And the answer is no. If you want to license out somebody’s body to grow stem-cell organs, use your own. I work for a living. I take classes when I can. What the hell do you do?”

“You don’t understand,” he said. “We need this money to pay for the tour. For the band .”

“Wait,” I said. “Isn’t a tour supposed to be something you do to make money?”

“We’ll make it all back on merchandise sales, and more. It will be our big launch!”

“What about me?” I asked. “I only need another year and a half to get my engineering degree. What do I get out of it?”

He reached out and took my hand. “I’ll buy you a house. Two houses!”

I think he even believed it.

“Petra…” he stroked a thumb across the back of my hand. “You know we can change the world if we just get a chance. We can be another Black Flag, another Distemper.”

I caught myself scowling and glanced away. He rose, refilled my wine, kissed my neck.

“Help me change our lives,” he whispered. “You know I’m doing everything I can. I just need you to believe in me.”

His breath shivered on the fine hairs behind my ear. He found my shoulders with his hands and massaged.

I was too tired to be angry, and anyway, he smelled good. I leaned back against his warm, hard belly. I let him smooth my hair and lead me to bed.

Ilya was already gone when I woke up for work the next day. That was unlike him, being out of the house before three. He’d left me an indecipherable note. And I honestly did try to decipher it!

What were the odds that he had work? Would he brag it up in advance, or would he want to surprise me with his unprecedented productivity? I got up, cleaned off, dressed, and walked outside.

It was a beautiful day. The sky was a crisp sweet color that would have looked like a ripe fruit, if fruit came in blue. I walked to the Metro down the long blocks with their cement pavements, hemmed in by giant cubes of buildings on each side. Dogs and humans trotted this way and that with city-dweller focus: I’m going somewhere and it matters. Nobody looked around. I lived in a plain area, where the tourists don’t come.