“Because everyone who really does have the skills is trying to sort out that mess at the Japanese station. Look on it as your lucky day. It won’t count as weightless work, but at least you’ll be able to say you’ve worked with timelag.”
It may not be weightless, I think sourly, but surely working under lunar gravity must count as something. “We’ll talk about it when I am done. Now I have to get this man to help.”
“You’ve done your bit. The people on the Moon would like you to turn ninety degrees to your right, parallel to the pipeline, and maintain that heading. Once that’s done, you can sign off. The vehicle will take care of itself. The hard part was helping get the body . . . the man . . . onto the truck. You’ve come through that with flying colours.”
As if I had done something altogether more demanding than simply scooping a man off the ground.
“Luttrell told me to follow his tracks.”
“And Luttrell is . . . ? Oh, I see. Luttrell spoke to you?”
“Yes, and he was very insistent.” I feel a prickle of foreboding. “What is going on, Prakash? Who is Luttrell? What was he doing out here?”
“How much do you know about Lunar geopolitics, Soya? Oh, wait. That’d be ‘nothing at all.’ Trust me, the best thing you can possibly do now is turn ninety degrees and bail out.”
I think about this. “Luttrell? Can you hear me?”
There is a very long silence before he replies. “Did you say something?”
“You were asleep.”
“It’s stuffy in here.”
“Luttrell, try to stay awake. Are you sure there are people at the end of this trail?”
The time it takes him to answer, I may as well have asked him to calculate the exact day on which he was born. “Yes. Shiga, the others. Our camp. It’s not more than two hundred kilometres from the pipeline.”
Three, four hours, then, exactly as he predicted. “Prakash, my broker, says I should head somewhere else. Along the pipeline, to our left.”
For once, Luttrell seems alert. “No. No, don’t do that. Just keep moving, this heading. Back the way I came.”
“If I went the other way, how long before we hit civilisation?”
Now Prakash cuts in again. “Less than a hundred kilometres away, there is a pressurised maintenance shack. That’s his best chance now.”
“And who is the expert now?”
“This is what they tell me. Luttrell won’t make it back to his camp. They are very insistent on this point.”
“Luttrell seems very insistent as well. Should we not listen to the man who actually lives here?”
“Just do as you are told, Soya.”
Do as I am told. How many times have I heard that in my life, I wonder? And how many times have I obeyed? When the Resource and Relocation people came, with their trucks, helicopters and airships, with their bold plans for human resettlement, I—along with many millions of others—did exactly as I was told. Gave up on the old world, embraced the diminished possibilities of the new.
And now I find myself squatting on a dirty mattress, under a creaking corrugated roof, while my body and mind are on the moon and I am again being told that someone else, someone I have never met, and who will never meet me, knows best.
“Don’t turn around,” Luttrell says.
“You had better be right about this camp of yours.”
Prakash cuts in again. “Soya, what are you doing? Luttrell has transgressed internationally recognised Lunar boundaries. He has attempted to take what does not belong to him. The man is a thief.”
As if I had not worked that out for myself.
I think of the fat full moon, daubed with the emblems of nations and companies. Only a few thousand people up there now, but they say it will soon be tens of thousands. Blink, and it will be millions.
And I have watched the news and tried to keep myself informed. I know that some of those territorial boundaries are disputed. There are claims and counter-claims. Even our little thumbnail of African soil has not been immune to these arguments.
So this man, Luttrell. What of him? He had driven to the pipeline, not along it but from somewhere else. Maybe he tried to tap into it. Something happened to him. An electrical shock, perhaps, damaging the systems of his suit. He had hoped that help would come from his own people, from Shiga. Instead what he got was me. And while my people—the people who know best—do not exactly want to kill Luttrell, it cannot be said that keeping him alive is their main consideration.
What they want, above all else, is for him not to get home.
“I am not turning, Prakash. I am taking this man back to his friends.”
“I wouldn’t do that, Soya. You’re only on the Moon under our sufferance. We can pull you out of the link at any moment, slot someone else in.”
“Who will do as they are told?”
“Who knows what’s good for them.”
“Then that is not me.”
Prakash is right: I can be pulled from the link at any time. Or rather, he would be right, if I did not have so much experience at driving robots. Scraping barnacles off a supertanker, scudding across the moon: nothing much changes. And I know the tricks and dodges that will make it difficult or time-consuming for the link to be snapped. I have seldom had cause to use these things, but they are well remembered.
“Will you get into trouble for this?” Luttrell says.
“I think the damage is already done.”
“Thank you.” He is silent again. “I think I need to stay awake. Maybe if you told me something about yourself, that would help.”
“There is not much to tell. I was born in Dar es Salaam, around the turn of the century.”
“Before or after?”
“I don’t know. My mother never knew. There would have been records, I suppose. But I have never seen them.” I steer us around a boulder as large as the overlander itself. “It doesn’t matter. That’s all over now. Now tell me where you came from.”
He tells me his story. We drive.
In the morning the dust settles. My refusal to obey Prakash has not gone unpunished. Proficiency ratings have been set back to zero. Black marks have been set against my name, forbidding whole categories of employment. The credits I ought to have earned from the last task—I did, after all, save Luttrell—have failed to appear.
But I am resigned to my fate. It is not the end of the world, or at least not the end of mine. There are other types of work out here. Whatever is in store for me, I shall make the best of it. Just as long as it keeps my daughter from starvation.
On the way to the school, Eunice asks me what I did last night.
“Helped a man,” I say. “He did a bad thing, but I helped him anyway. That has made some people angry.”
“What did the man do?”
“It’s complicated. He took something that wasn’t his, or tried to. We’ll talk about it later.”
I think of Luttrell. When they finally broke me out of the link, we were still some way from his camp. I don’t know what happened after that. I hope his people were able to find him. I watch the news, but there’s nothing. It’s a border incident, that’s all. Not worth a mention.
While she is in school, I go to the community tent where the water thief awaits her verdict. The place is crowded, the atmosphere volatile. The mantises have withdrawn: they have done their work, the patient has been stabilised, she is mostly conscious. I study the fluid in the women’s drip and imagine that it is pure water. I think of gulping down its sweet clear contents.
I shoulder my way through the onlookers to the low trestle table, where the votes are being administered. I tell them who I am, although I think by now they know. A finger tracks down a list, a line is scratched through my name. I am invited to cast my vote. There are black balls and white balls, in open-topped cardboard medicine boxes.
I scoop up one ball from each box, both in one hand. For a moment the possibilities feel equally balanced. In the end, it is the white ball that I
let go, the black one that I return to its box. Someone else can have that pleasure.
Leaving the community tent, I try to gauge the public mood. My sense is that it will not go well for this women. But perhaps the nurses, doctors, and mantises have already done enough. Perhaps the water thief will be strong enough, with or without medicine.
I am thinking what to do next when something tugs at my hem. It is the little boy, the one who is always following me. I reach into my pocket and feel the fat round bulge of the eye. I think about the purple light, how pretty it is. The eye has been my vigil and my gateway, but I don’t have much use for it now.
I tell the boy to hold out his hand. He obeys.
NIGHTSIDE ON CALLISTO
Linda Nagata
Here’s a fast-paced adventure in which a group of old women (chosen because they’re expendable, being already near the end of their probable lifespans anyway) overseeing a very risky engineering project on one of Jupiter’s moons, Callisto, must fight off a robot revolt, an attack on the station by murderous construction machinery, with little more than their own courage and shrewdness to rely on in the battle. . ..
Linda Nagata grew up in a rented beach house on the north shore of Oahu. She graduated from the University of Hawaii with a degree in zoology and worked for a time at Haleakala National Park on the island of Maui. She has been a writer, a mom, a programmer of database-driven websites, and lately a publisher and book designer. She is the author of multiple novels and short stories including The Bohr Maker, winner of the Locus Award for Best First Novel, and the novella “Goddesses,” the first online publication to receive a Nebula award. She lives with her husband in their longtime home on the island of Maui. Find her online at:
MythicIsland.com, twitter.com/LindaNagata, and facebook.com/Linda.Nagata.author
AFAINT, STEADY VIBRATION carried through the igloo’s massive ice walls—a vibration that shouldn’t have been there. Jayne heard it in her sleep. Age had not dulled her soldier’s reflexes, honed by decades spent on watch against incursions of the Red. Her eyes snapped open. She held her breath. The vibration hummed in the walls, in the bed frame, in the mattress, perceivable even over Carly’s raspy breathing.
Jayne reminded herself that the Red was far, far away, its existence bound to Earth, where it bled through every aspect of life—a relentless tide of information and influence shepherding the thoughts and actions of billions along paths determined by its unknowable goals. Whether the Red was alive, or aware, Jayne couldn’t say, and she had no opinion either on its virtue. She only wanted to keep it out of the Shell Cities. Most of her life had gone to the long defense of their growing union, an association of scattered orbital habitats determined to stay free of the Red. But in retirement, Jayne had found new opportunities.
Less than twenty-four hours ago, her team of four had touched down on Callisto, Jupiter’s outermost Galilean moon and the only one that lay beyond the gas giant’s killing radiation belts. A raft of construction equipment had preceded them, including a gang of ten small mechs that had assembled a sprawling igloo in time for them to move in. It was the team’s task to establish a prototype ice-mining station to supply the expansion of the Shell Cities.
Maybe the vibration was generated by some new construction activity at the launch rail? Probably that was it. But “probably” never was a sufficient explanation. Jayne slipped out from under the shared blanket, careful not to wake Carly, who’d crawled into bed just an hour ago. Each team member worked a staggered, twelve-hour shift. Jayne had taken the first rotation, and her night was almost through.
The air-skin membrane lining the walls and the ceiling sensed her movement and responded with a glimmer of vague gray illumination. Jayne stood up slowly on sleep-stiffened limbs. A century of existence had left her thin and tough and inclined to feel cold, so over a foundation of thermal underwear she added insulated slacks, a pullover of the same material, thin gloves for her hands, and cozy house boots for her feet—one more layer in the cocoon that protected them from the cold and vacuum beyond the igloo’s walls.
Jayne knew with utter certainty that they were alone in Jupiter system. The Red could not be here—the light speed lag in information flow kept it confined near Earth—and no other expedition had ventured so far in years. So their team was on its own, with no back up if something went wrong—which was why the four of them had been awarded this project: they were each experienced, competent, and expendable.
The bed chamber was sealed off from the rest of the igloo by an air-skin lock. Jayne touched the membrane. It felt smooth and hard beneath her gloved hand, but when she swept her fingers across it, the skin lock responded, pulling aside in neat, glassy ripples.
Massive blocks of ancient ice made up the igloo’s walls and ceiling, insulating the interior spaces from background radiation, but it was the air skin that made the igloo habitable. A semi-intelligent, quasi-living tissue, the skin lined every chamber, locking in pressure, and providing heat and fresh air. If perforated it would self-seal, and its motility allowed it to repair even major tears.
Jayne stepped past the plastic-panel door into a central alcove with toilets and shower on either side. Two steps ahead, a lock on the right stood open to the easy room with its cushy inflatable furnishings, food stores, and oven, while on the left, another open lock hooked up to HQ, where the work was done. Jayne heard Berit speaking. She couldn’t make out the words, but Berit’s sharp, angry tone confirmed Jayne’s first suspicion: something had gone wrong.
Jayne resisted the impulse to sprint into HQ. Age and experience had taught her to always attend to basics, so she slipped into the toilet first, and only when that necessity was out of the way did she trot around the corner.
Berit heard her coming and greeted her with a scowl. She was ninety-nine, an age that could be seen in the translucence of her brown skin, in the drape of tissue around her stern eyes, and in the thinning of her bright white hair. Like Jayne, Berit had lived most of her life as a soldier in the defense force and like Jayne, she’d been lucky, surviving to tell the tale. The two women had partnered on more assignments than either cared to remember. “What woke you up?” Berit snapped.
“The smell of trouble. Why am I hearing tones of displeasure in your voice?”
“Because I am not pleased.”
Lorelei was their civilian engineer, a petite, soft-spoken woman who, at a hundred-and-three, was older even than Jayne. She provided more details without turning away from a 3D model of the station. “Our mechs are tainted. Something’s gotten into them and they aren’t accepting commands.”
“The Red followed us here,” Berit added, with fatalistic certainty.
When Jayne joined them, they made a circle around the model. “How?”
Lorelei looked up, her deep blue eyes nestled in the folds and rough texture of her dark skin. Her hair was brilliant white and still thick despite the years, confined in a heavy braid at her shoulder. She opened her mouth to speak—and a high-pitched whistle screamed through the igloo. Jayne’s ears popped. The air-skin lock rustled shut, sealing HQ from the rest of the station and muting the whistle, but Jayne could still hear a distant wail of escaping air.
“Pressure suits!” she barked. “Now! Go!”
The suits hung ready on the wall beside the external lock. Jayne had taken only two steps toward them when a faint pop! put an end to the whistle. The igloo shuddered as massive ice blocks groaned against each other. Goddamnit, Jayne thought, grabbing two suits and tossing them to Berit and Lorelei. Goddamnit, if the roof comes down . . .
They’d celebrated when they’d won this mission, knowing they’d gotten it because it was risky and because they were old. Medical technologists in the Shell Cities had learned to minimize the deterioration of old age so that hale and healthy lifespans stretched past a century, but inevitable, catastrophic failure still loomed: a blood vessel bursting in the brain, a heart chamber undergoing sudden collapse, a lung growing irreparably brittle. The col
d fact was, none of them had much time left. If they didn’t survive this mission, well, only a handful of unlived years would be lost. But in the meantime they were privileged to set foot on one of Jupiter’s moons and to have the chance of leaving the Shell Cities just a little more secure.
And the goddamned roof was not going to come down. Not if Jayne could help it.
She grabbed a third pressure suit and stepped into it, pulling the edges together to let it seal.
A pressure suit was just another form of air skin, made to wrap around the body. An inch thick in most places, it was powered by slender, flexible fuel cells embedded across the back. Robotic carbon-fiber hands at the sleeve ends exactly mimicked every twitch of Jayne’s own fingers, which remained safe and warm within the sleeves.
Using an artificial hand, Jayne reached up and grabbed her hood, preventing it from sealing. Lorelei and Berit were still wrapping their suits on. “Lorelei, stay here and get those mechs in order. Berit, get outside and figure out what the hell just happened. I’m going after Carly.”
She released her hood, not waiting for an answer. It rolled across her face, where it sealed, shaped, and hardened.
The air-skin lock to the central alcove had sealed, but the color-coded indicator glowed green, confirming full pressure beyond. Jayne passed through, carrying Carly’s suit with her. The lock sealed again behind her.
A glance around the alcove confirmed all the locks had closed. Those to HQ, the easy room, and the toilets, showed green, but the indicator beside the bedchamber flashed in calamitous red.
Jayne bit down on the inside of her lip, remembering Carly’s warmth and her good humor. “Berit?”
“I’m heading out now,” she answered over the suit radio. Then, “Oh.” A single word, the pain in it as sharp as shattered ice. “I see what you’re looking at.”
“I’m going in.” Jayne brushed her fingers across the skin lock. Her suit stiffened as air was evacuated from the alcove, and for a moment she couldn’t move. Then the suit’s crosslinked cells adapted to the pressure change, and once again sensors picked up the motion of her body and echoed it, moving as she moved, tripling her strength—though if the power unit ever ran down, the pressure suit would become her diamond coffin.
The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 26 (Mammoth Books) Page 76