Much as he disliked it, there were moments when even he felt this world deserved a poet. It had, in instants, a kind of unspoiled beauty that Carter imagined Earth once might’ve before the earth became home to humans and all their clutter. In the light, Iaxo was occasionally fantastical, something out of a fairy tale. In the night, it was intermittently magic.
Still, it was an easier place to hate than to love. Hating was more useful, too. And for all Carter knew, Iaxo might’ve already had a poet. Might’ve had scores of them. And he felt that if he and his friends or others like his friends didn’t kill them all, perhaps someday some indig would say something lovely about this place. It was their home, after all. Carter and his kind were just visiting.
Billy called in, saying Morris had gotten him lost.
“How would you know?” asked Carter.
“It’s all Zen, son,” Billy said. “The maps, the flying. The whole deal. Your problem is you are under the illusion that you actually exist.” His laughter grated like iron filings in Carter’s teeth.
Billy Stitches was called Billy Stitches because his face looked like a medical school cadaver’s face—a practice face on which young and untalented knife artists had attempted to hone their skills. Billy’s scars were burn scars, surgery scars, the fleshy archaeological record of meatball reconstruction in a field hospital somewhere back when he was a colonial pilot flying supersonic fighter-bombers and killing for the cause. Alternate version: Billy Stitches was called Billy Stitches because his scars were his pride, earned during a crash-and-burn on some distant hell where everything ate everything and the only safe place for those made of meat was high aloft—dropping jellied fire and chemical defoliant onto alien landscapes that looked like something out of a deep pharmaceutical nightmare.
He’d been flying for a different company at the time, trying to tame this frontier backwater for the pioneer families already on their way. And when he’d gone in, he’d shattered the face shield of his helmet and been force-fed some of the bigger, more jagged pieces.
Eight days he’d survived in the jungle, waiting for rescue. His wounds had rotted, become home to bugs and flies and centipedes, and his hot, sweet blood had driven even the trees into a starving frenzy. Billy was eaten, a little bit at a time, by every living thing in the jungle and would often say that what he was left with when the recovery team finally found him were only those parts that even nature had found undigestible.
Carter said, “So long as the payroll department is under that same illusion, I think I’ll be okay, Billy. Meanwhile, I now have considerably less faith in your maps, knowing you do them blind in the middle of the night.”
“Got to trust me, boy. I do this all the damn time. For kicks. Go out in the day with Morris blindfolded for practice!”
“You’re going to get yourself dead,” Carter told him. Billy laughed again.
“No one pretty as me is going to die in a place as nasty as this, friend.”
“You know what they call that, Billy?” Carter asked. “They call that irony.”
Billy’d left his radio open and was yelling at Morris. “Morris! Morris! Where the hell are we?” Static. “Like hell! If that’s where we are, then what’s that mountain doing there?” Static. “You’re lost, Morris. Admit it, bud. Climb out to fourteen thou and get yourself found again ’fore I slap your head.” Static. “Carter? It’ll only be irony if I actually end up dead. Till that happens, it’s just boyish enthusiasm.” Static. “West, Morris! That’s a left turn. Where the hell are you going?” Static. “Carter? I’m out, son. If I don’t come home, tell the boys it was all Morris’s fault and tell your friend Teague to kiss my ragged ass…” Laughter, high and giggling, distorted by interference and distance into a manic cackle.
Laughter, then static.
Then just static and nothing else.
The third version of the story was that Billy’d done it all to himself one night with a trench knife or a piece of broken glass. He’d made eleven tours with the company, seen eleven different worlds. He’d been a Ted before Ted was Ted.
And then he’d just cracked one day. Gone around the bend. The company had retired him, demoted him, sent him to therapy, to a rest home, for some miraculous psychological cure or to take the waters. He’d come back a different man—an artist and an armchair philosopher and happy in some deeply incorruptible way. When he smiled, it looked like he was dying.
“So which story is it, Billy?” the pilots would occasionally ask.