Actually, the shipment arrived hours behind schedule. It was fully night by the time it showed. They didn’t contact the island in any way to let them know that they’d be late. Amy’s calm grew increasingly brittle as the hours wore on and the shadows lengthened. In that regard, she was not much different from the islanders she’d pulsed. It didn’t take sophisticated affect detection algorithms to understand that the other vN were worried and suspicious. It just took eyes. The others didn’t seem to want to meet his.
By nightfall, Javier had gathered his produce, and gotten himself into a new white shirt and trousers. They were one hundred percent organic plant material, no synthetics. Even the buttons were some sort of pressed cork or balsa or somesuch. He liked the outfit a great deal. He had a thing for cotton.
“You always wear such tight pants when the humans come visit.”
He turned to Amy. She’d changed, too: she wore a pure black skinsuit. It moved sluggishly across her figure, twinkling occasionally. The twinkles had nothing to do with ambient light, and everything to do with where Javier’s gaze alighted on Amy’s body. The suit’s eyes followed his own. He wondered vaguely if he could start selling lengths of the island’s pelt for humans to wear, too. It fit her like a glove.
“Sex sells,” he said.
Amy opened her mouth to say something more, but the high hum of the steaders’ boat cut her off. It was a little solar foil that hopped and bounced on the waves. Its fan sounded like a whole forest of cicadas. It towed a Zodiac bearing a precarious load of boxes tied down with twine. Javier spotted three humans on the foil: two men and one woman. He recognized only two of them. The group of vN rode behind them. All were huge. All were iterating.
“What kept you?” he asked, when the foil pulled up at the island.
The humans’ gaze shifted from him to Amy. The colour of their boxes they carried was hard to tell in the violet light she’d rigged up. She had copied the design of sunflowers that lit up a playground where she and Javier once played in a sandbox. He pretended not to notice this little detail, but he liked that she remembered all the same. Then as now, the light made it easier to see movement and affect rather than pigment.
“We caught your little show,” Tyler said.
Tyler was the one they usually dealt with. He was what other humans occasionally called a “trustafarian,” whatever that meant. His parents were American diplomats. He’d lost them in some revolution in some country where the native population thought of vN as some kind of unnatural evil and refused to let them past the border. No vN, no vN security forces, no peaceful transition. Tyler had some issues with mainland governments, after that. He’d gotten drunk and told Javier all this, a few months ago, when he discovered how good Javier’s peppers were for homemade gochujang. Amy made sure to hustle him off before it became a come-on. It was cute, how jealous she got.
“Oh, you mean the worm,” Amy said. “We’re still not sure where it came from.”
“Yeah, that’s the problem,” Tyler said. “Apparently you riled up whoever’s watching those botflies.”
“The fucking Coast Guard showed up,” Simone said.
Simone was Tyler’s partner on these missions. Menopause was not treating her very kindly, and it manifested in a constant scowl that Javier nonetheless found endearingly steely.
“They wouldn’t let us complete the shipment without sending a representative,” she continued. “We had to take on ballast.” She jerked her head back behind her.
From the shadows emerged a black man in his forties. He was about six feet tall with ankles too slim for the broad span of his shoulders. He’d shaved his head. He wore a priest’s collar. When his hand touched Javier’s, every Turing process in him fired at once.
“I’m Pastor Mitch Powell,” he said. “New Eden Ministries.”
4: Mr Self-Destruct
That night, Amy sealed off their room entirely before undressing. She did so completely, letting the skinsuit drip down her legs and settle into the floor before joining him on the bed. She stretched out beside him and pressed herself against his back.
“I’m sorry.”
“For what?”
“Everything.”
“That’s a bit much.” He took her hand. “Be more specific.”
“I’m sorry…” She dug her forehead between his shoulder blades. “I’m sorry that we have to live with stuff like this. I’m sorry that things like the sub show up. I’m sorry you have to deal with that. You wouldn’t have to if you didn’t live here.”
“I doubt I’d be any better off anywhere else.”
“Sure you would be. You’re great at being by yourself.”
He rolled over and found her eyes in the dark. “I don’t want to be by myself.”