“Which sort are you?” Jared asked.
“I can’t stand them,” the vendor said. “But my husband can’t get enough. And he’ll breathe on me while he’s eating them, just to annoy me. I kicked him right off the bed, once, for doing that. You’ve never had a black jellybean?”
“No,” Jared said. His mouth was watering slightly. “But I think I’ll try some.”
“Brave man,” the vendor said, and filled a small clear plastic bag with the candies to hand to Jared. Jared took it and fished out two jellybeans while the vendor rang up the order; being in the CDF, Jared didn’t pay for the jellybeans (they, like everything else, were gratis on what CDF soldiers lovingly referred to as their all-inclusive package tour of hell), but vendors kept track of what they sold to soldiers and billed the CDF accordingly. Capitalism had made it to space and was doing reasonably well.
Jared took the pair of jellybeans and popped them into his mouth, crushed them with his molars and then held them there as his saliva suffused the licorice flavor over his tongue, vapors of its scent moving beyond his palate and expanding in his sinus cavity. His eyes closed, and he realized that they were just as he remembered. He took a handful and crammed them into his mouth.
“How are they?” the vendor said, watching the enthusiastic consumption.
“They’re good,” Jared said, between jellybeans. “Really good.”
“I’ll tell my husband there’s another on his team,” the vendor said.
Jared nodded. “Two,” he said. “My little girl loves them too.”
“Even better,” the vendor said, but by this time Jared had stepped away, lost in thought, heading back toward his office. Jared took ten steps, completely swallowed the mass of jellybeans in his mouth, reached to get more and stopped.
My little girl, he thought, and was hit with a thick knot of grief and memory that made him convulse, gag and vomit his jellybeans on the level walkway. As he coughed the last fragment of the candies from his throat, a name formed in his head.
Zo?, Jared thought. My daughter. My daughter who is dead.
A hand touched his shoulder. Jared recoiled, almost slipping on the vomit as he twisted away, bag of jellybeans flying from his hand. He looked at the woman who had touched him, a CDF soldier of some sort. She looked at him strangely and then there was a short, sharp buzz in his head like a human voice accelerated to ten times speed. It happened again and once more, like two slaps on the inside of his head.
“What?” Jared yelled at the woman.
“Dirac,” she said. “Calm down. Tell me what’s wrong.”
Jared felt disoriented fear and quickly stepped away from the solider, clipping other pedestrians as he heaved away.
Jane Sagan watched Dirac stumble away and then looked down at the dark splash of vomit and the splay of jellybeans on the floor. She looked back toward the candy stand and stalked over.
“You,” she said, pointing to the vendor. “Tell me what happened.”
“The guy came over and bought some black jellybeans,” the vendor said. “Said he loved them and shoved a bunch into his mouth. Then he takes a couple of steps and throws up.”
“That’s it,” Sagan said.
“That’s it,” the vendor said. “I made small talk about how my husband likes black jellybeans, he said his kid likes them too, he took the jellybeans and he walked off.”
“He talked about his kid,” Sagan said.
“Yeah,” the vendor said. “He said he had a little girl.”
Sagan looked down the walkway. There was no sign of Dirac. She starting running in the direction she last saw him going and tried to open a channel to General Szilard.
Jared reached a station lift as others were exiting, jabbed the button for his lab’s level and suddenly realized his arm was green. He retracted it with such violence that it smacked hard against the lift wall, bringing into sharp, painful focus that it was, in fact, his arm, and that he wasn’t going to get away from it. The other people in the lift looked at him strangely, and in one case with actual venom; he’d almost hit a woman when he drew back his arm.
“Sorry,” he said. The woman snorted and performed the forward-looking elevator stare. Jared did the same and saw a smeary reflection of his green self in the brushed metal walls of the lift. Jared’s confused anxiety by this point was peaking toward terror, but one thing he did know was that he didn’t want to lose his shit in an elevator filled with strangers. Social conditioning was, for the moment, stronger than panic over confused identity.