by Allen Steele
Yet when anyone tried to ask their associates, all inquiries were blocked by that indomitable two-word wall: “File Unavailable.” No amount of outrage, wheedling, or begging could force their MINNs into releasing so much as a simple bank statement. So far as anyone knew, their savings had simply vanished. Another mystery.
We didn’t know much about Anna Townshend, for she refused to discuss her past. She came out of the fugue with her long-term memory intact, that much was certain, yet when we sat around the mess table in the evenings, listening to Russell hold forth on high-energy physics, or Sam tell us what a punk Bob Dylan had been when he first showed up on the Lower East Side, she always held back, seldom adding anything to the conversation.
There was a certain sadness in her eyes, yet she wouldn’t allow us to know what was on her mind. Anna wouldn’t tell us how old (or young) she had been when she died or what she had been doing. It took a lot of nudging for us to even get her to divulge her last name. She wasn’t depressed, but neither was she particularly happy. She wouldn’t get close to anyone; although we were still friends, there was a new remoteness in our relationship. She seemed reluctant to talk to me, or anyone else. I figured that she’d eventually come around, once she was more comfortable with people. Right now, the only person she was interested in seemed to be Shemp…
And then there was Shemp.
In hindsight, it’s no wonder that I failed to recognize my best friend for so long. His new body had been cleansed of the genetic flaws that made him a compulsive overeater with bad eyes; he was no longer the fat, geeky kid that I’d known since junior high. Shemp was still no hunk, to be sure, but without the surplus fifty pounds and the glasses, neither did he look very much like a guy who would have trouble getting a date.
It turned out that he remembered who I was long before I did myself. In fact, he started coming out of his fugue a few weeks before I took my tumble down the Great Hall staircase. But he also recalled who had been driving the car that night when we were coming home from Lollapalooza, and this knowledge had haunted him so much that he was reluctant to speak to me.
It was probably just as well that he didn’t. When I returned to the servants’ quarters the night Mister Chicago and I had our little chat in the solarium, my first impulse was to go straight to Shemp’s room and…well, I didn’t know what I wanted to do. Either hug him and start blubbering about how wonderful it was to see him again, or pound the crap out of him for cutting off that goddamn eighteen-wheeler and getting both of us killed. I stood in the corridor outside his closed door for a long time, unsure of what to do next, until I decided that it had been a long day already and that I was too tired to deal with this shit right now.
So Shemp and I were guarded toward one another for a while. We spoke very seldom, and then only in passing; it took several days before we were able to even sit next to each other at the mess table. He was afraid that I was going to kill him, and I was afraid that I might want to. It also put me off a bit that Shemp no longer looked like Shemp, although I don’t think even his parents would have recognized him either. Mr. and Mrs. Meyer spent tons of money on exercise equipment, kosher diet food, and fat camps in their ongoing efforts to make Christopher shed his weight. Hell, they bought him his first car when he starved himself one summer and managed to drop eleven and a half pounds, which he regained almost as soon as he had the keys to that Volvo. He had drawn the line at liposuction and stomach staples, but neurosuspension turned out to be the ultimate weight-loss plan: keep the head, lose the body.
One morning I hit the showers, and Shemp’s there.
The women have long since stopped taking showers with the men. With the return of memory, there’s also been a revival of modesty. It doesn’t matter if we’ve already seen each other in the buff dozens of times; the drugs that inhibited our sex drives are gone from our food, and now it’s hard not to notice all that wet, naked flesh around us. There’s no soap for anyone to drop, but everyone is uncomfortable nonetheless, so a consensus agreement has been reached: males and females take turns in the shower room, with the guys going first on even days and the girls getting first dibs on odd days. We still share the anteroom where we leave our robes and towels, but there another new rule comes into place: look all you want, but no touching—unless, of course, you want to be touched by a certain individual, in which case you work it out yourselves, in private. Those who were married in former lifetimes understand this better than those who weren’t, but the rules are still the same…and everyone knows what can happen if you scream rape.
It’s a guys-first morning, but since it’s my turn to collect the laundry, I arrive late. The only vacant shower is the one next to Shemp. I take it without saying a word to him, and we try to ignore each other. Hot water, cold silence. After awhile, though, we can’t help but glance back and forth. This is something that’s all too familiar: all those afternoons in the Country Day School gym when we hit the showers after intermurals, and I can’t help flashing back to…
“Hey, Shemp?”
“Yeah?” He doesn’t look around.
“You remember…I dunno, that stupid kid from ninth grade…?”
“What kid?” He glances over his shoulder at me. “What are you talking about?”
“Y’know…the jock who used to rattail all the seventh and eighth grade kids when we were in the showers?”
“Mean at Country Day?” He mulls it over. “Jeff…Jeff Wienberg.” He’s quiet for a moment. “Yeah, I remember him. Why?”
“I dunno…just something I remembered.”
Shemp looks like he wants to say something, but doesn’t know how. Neither do I…but all of a sudden, I don’t give a shit who was driving the car that night.
I don’t know what compels me to do what I do next, but while Shemp’s back is turned to me, I slip out of the shower and hurry into the anteroom. A few of the ladies have already arrived; some blush and quickly turn away, a couple yell in protest. Kate whistles her approval. I pay no attention as I snatch up the towel I left on a bench.
I carry the towel back into the showers and, while Shemp is still rinsing off, soak it under the spray from my hole, coil it into a tight wet rope…and snap him in the ass.
He yowls as he leaps a foot into the air, but manages to touch down without sprawling all over the tiles. He turns around and glares at me; for the first time I notice one more thing that’s different about the new Shemp.
“Better go see your rabbi,” I say. “I don’t think you’re a nice Jewish boy anymore.”
His face goes red, becomes a dark scowl…and then it’s replaced by a predatory grin. He nearly falls down in his haste to retrieve his own towel from the anteroom. Screams of feminine horror as a few other guys follow him, then the shower room is filled with the sound of snapping rattails.
It’s a guy thing.
A half-hour later, Shemp and I are sitting next to each other at the breakfast table—rather uncomfortably, considering the rosy bruises we had inflicted on each other’s butts—and roaring over things we’ve remembered: the seventies mellow-rock stuff they used to play on KSHE, the roach someone sucked into his lungs during some party, the girl who gave excellent head but wouldn’t screw because she was saving herself for marriage. The awful silence has been shattered. We’re pals again. Perhaps not quite the same friendship we had a century ago, but friends nonetheless.
Yet there are still many mysteries.
Every day, we go to work in the castle. It’s just as deserted as ever; we diligently change sheets on beds that have never been slept in (with the exception of the king-size in Mister Chicago’s suite), scrub a kitchen whose cookware remain spotless, mop floors no feet have touched save our own. From time to time, we catch an occasional glimpse of Mister Chicago—peering down at us from his solarium or from the gallery of the Great Hall—before he vanishes once more: a phantom in his own house.
It isn’t long, though, before the servants who’ve been working inside the castle are rotat
ed with those who were assigned to chores in the habitat. The former are taught the joys of waxing floors and folding linen, while my friends and I are reassigned to the gardens, groves, and vineyards surrounding the manse. It’s hard labor, to be sure, but we’re happy to get it; at least now we’re not scrubbing the same floors we scrubbed only yesterday. Yet I’ve never done anything like this before; for the first time in my life, I know what it’s like to have blisters on my hands and dirt under my nails. Dad always hired gardeners to do this stuff while I lazed in front of the tube; I never learned how to start a lawnmower, let alone get down on my knees and cut grass with a pair of scissors. Now it’s my turn to learn about cramps and calluses.
John—the brown-eyed real McCoy, not his pink-eyed lookalike—appears from time to time to give us pointers on grooming the topiary, or how to distinguish a ripe grape or orange from one that isn’t yet mature, yet his presence is more of a distraction than a necessity; his role as teacher is now redundant to what we can learn ourselves from our associates. Nor is he as holy as he once seemed; in fact, now that we know that he’s just another deadhead, he seems rather pathetic. Russell once tried to engage him in a science conversation—after all, they share that background in common—but John was plainly baffled by most of the terminology Russell used, and he quickly made an excuse to leave. We seldom saw him after that, or at least when Russ was around; he comes out to bring us a jug of water, make a few comments about what we’re doing, then goes away again, still smiling in that empty way of his.
Not having a shepherd gave us a few more opportunities to talk among ourselves. Most times, it was about things remembered—cities visited, good restaurants where we had once eaten, movies and concerts and TV shows we’ve seen, the reasons behind the 1994 baseball strike or why Reagan beat Carter back in 1980—but on occasion the subject shifts to matters of more immediate interest. One day, Shemp, Russell, and I are taking a midafternoon break from fertilizing a strawberry patch about a mile away from the castle when Russ looks up at the sky.
“Y’know,” he says, “none of this makes sense.”
“Tell me about it.” I’ve taken off my work gloves to inspect the latest additions to my callus collection. “Mister C has robots, so why does he need slaves for this?”
“We’re not slaves.” Shemp’s lying on the ground next to the water jug. “We’re guests. Remember?”
“Excuse me. Guests.” I snap my fingers at an imaginary waiter. “Garçon. Steak for three, please…”
“That’s not what I mean.” Russell shades his eyes as if trying to peer past the filaments in the artificial sky. “Have you ever looked at the schematics of the colony?”
“The what?” Shemp asks. “You mean there’s a diagram of this place?”
“Yup. Found it yesterday. Go eyes-up and ask your associate for it. Tell it you want to see a north polar projection of 4442 Garcia.”
I triple-blink and repeat what Russell just said. My second pair of eyelids close and a translucent blueprint of 4442 Garcia appears before my face. This time, it doesn’t resemble a spider crouched on top of a tiny moon; now it looks like a baby turtle trying to hatch a dinosaur egg. Four bologna sausages surround the turtle at right angles, connected to its broad shell by long slender threads. The sausages revolve clockwise around the turtle, while the asteroid itself rotates on its long axis.
“Cool! Where did you find this?”
“I asked for it.” Russell is apparently gazing at the same image. “If you want to understand what’s happened to you, son, you better start asking questions yourself…not just wait for the next time you stumble across something.”
“Sure thing, Dad.” Russell might have been sixty-seven when he died, but now he doesn’t look any older than Shemp or me. He’s still not used to that.
“Sorry. Point taken…now, pay attention.” Once again, Russell slips into college professor mode. “4442 Garcia is a carbonaceous chondrite asteroid about a hundred miles in diameter, located in the main belt. Its orbit is elliptical, with a five-year period, but at present it’s near perihelion, which will bring it within three hundred and thirty-five million miles from Earth by the end of the year.”
“Proper,” Shemp murmurs.
Russ ignores him. “That little round thing on top is a mining platform…it has a shaft leading from its center down into Garcia’s core, and our friends have been mining the asteroid from the inside out, going up from the center and through the mantle toward the crust. The raw material they’ve extracted from the core has been refined and processed for use as the building materials for this colony. Follow me so far?”
“Yeah, okay.” This is all news to me. “So I guess…I dunno, what do you mean?”
“Just listen.” Russell isn’t used to dealing with kids who aren’t post-grad students; I can tell from his tone of voice that he’s baby-talking us through this stuff. “I haven’t figured out all the conversion factors yet…our friend Pasquale is less than forthcoming in allowing me full access to the Main Brain, so there’s a lot my associate isn’t telling me…but as a rough guesstimate, I figure that less than half of Garcia’s mass has been consumed so far in order to build this colony.”
“How did they do it?” Shemp sounds a little confused. “I mean, how did they make all that stuff into this?”
“Same way they cloned your body, son…I’m sorry, Christopher. Or Shemp. Whichever you prefer…”
“He’s Shemp,” I say. “Don’t worry, everyone calls him that.”
“Yeah, right,” Shemp says. “I’m stuck with it.”
“So they used nanites, right?”
“Correct. Ask your associate to give you a tutorial on the exact process later. The essential fact is they’re able to break down the raw ore to its most elemental level, then reconstruct it as building materials for this colony, along with the three others like it. We’ve got some mighty powerful technology at work here, gentlemen.”
“No kidding.” I stare at the eyes-up image. “One hell of a program they’ve got going here.”
“Right. That’s what I’m getting at. See those three other habitats? They’re the same size as our own…three miles long, one and a quarter in width…and even though Hal won’t tell me what’s inside them, I think we can safely assume that they contain biospheres just like this one, either completely terraformed or still under construction. Eyes-down, Hal, thank you.”
I tell Chip to go eyes-down as well. Shemp is sitting up now, his back propped against the water jug. Russell stands before us, holding his sod rake like a classroom pointer. “Now, look around you,” he continues, sweeping the flat horizon around us with its handle. “Most of the usable land in here has been given over to farming, right? And unless Pasquale has built three more palaces like that one, we can surmise that even more of the acreage in the other habitats has been or will be devoted to crop cultivation. Still following me?”
“Hmm…sure.”
Russell isn’t fooled. “Think, son! What do you think the population of this colony is? How many people do you think are living here right now?”
“Well, how many has Hal told you are living here?”
“I don’t know.” Russell lowers the rake. “He won’t divulge that info…which means it must be vital.”
He’s got a point. Whenever our associates refuse to answer a question, it usually means that we were probing the edges of something important. I take a moment to mull it over. There’re forty-three “guests” in the servants’ quarters, not counting the ones we’ve lost to insanity or suicide. From what I can tell, there’re probably twice that number living in the lower levels beneath the habitat: people like Big Nurse, John, and all those others I’ve glimpsed in the corridors during my occasional errands down there. The castle contains enough rooms to hold another thirty to forty people, depending whether they were sleeping alone or in pairs. Some quick mental addition…
“A hundred and fifty, two hundred…something like that.”
�
��Good guess.” Russell nods. “That’s the figure I arrived at…between a hundred and fifty and two hundred, tops.”
“So?” Shemp shrugs. “What does he need all this land for?”
“Exactly! Go to the head of the class, Christopher!” Russell beams at Shemp in a way that makes him look like he’s sixty-seven again; he must have enjoyed being a teacher. “The way I figure it, there’s enough cropland in this single habitat to provide food and photosynthesized oxygen for a population this size, including the first-class suites that are still vacant. But since there’re three other habitats which could do the same, this colony could support almost a thousand people. So…”
He stops, waiting for one of us to pose the next question. He’s playing the university prof, and we’re his students. Large and very profound questions await us; together, we’ll explore them until we reach mutual enlightenment.
“So…” Shemp begins.
Russell looks at him expectantly.
“So…do you think Anna wants sex, or what?” Shemp scratches the back of his neck. “I mean, I’d like to give it a shot.”
Russell’s mouth drops open. The rake falls from his hands. He stares at Shemp for a long time before he silently bends down to pick it up again. Now he knows why we used to call him Shemp.
I pick up my own rake and go back to work. Coffee break’s over; everyone back on their heads. Yet the question still remains.
Where is everyone?
CHAPTER
NINE
* * *
BLUE SKY MINING
…We were all going direct to Heaven,
we were all going direct the other way…
—Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities
And then there’s the day I punched out Shemp.