Carbide Tipped Pens

by Ben Bova

  If Jewel and Rudo were listening to anything outside themselves, they would hear the echo: reverberating, repeating, holding their cries and moans and murmurings, sending them out, out in waves, rippling through the saline slush and water and ice. How silver-sweet sound lovers’ tongues by night, like softest music to attending ears! All Europa trembles gently with their love.

  The sounds of their physical lust, breathing and voices and their bodies in motion, becomes a song the whole moon sings.

  Yup. They’re just that good.

  * * *

  Jewel doesn’t show up on shift the next day.

  Paris pulls up a screen. She’s not online and hasn’t been for about eight hours.

  Beyond suspicious.

  He strides down the hall to her room, bangs on the door.

  No answer.

  He goes to the technician room. The others are already plugged in, Velcro-strapped to their seats to ensure stability, their miners out. Montys are working too, the army of them out across the crater. No, one is missing.

  Rudo.

  Paris sits, folds his arms over his chest, and waits.

  Even when he’s not plugged in, now, he hears a song. The others hear it too, he can tell, even as they stare into their screens with deep concentration as their miners work, they are all beating a hand or twitching a foot in time.

  It’s the song Larry played last night at the bar. The pre-last-call song. He played it loud, because Prince made a rare appearance and told him to crank it. It made the ice walls of the subsurface establishment ring. Maybe, somehow, it got into the ice and the slush. Filled the whole ocean. Filled Paris’s brain, the control room, the whole base, the entire moon reverberating with some shitty top forty hit.

  And something else, something underneath it. Something like old recordings he’s heard of whale song. Soaring cries, moans, and almost something like words.

  If he didn’t know better Paris would say it sounds like the moon is making love to itself.

  Both Cap and Monty yields are down a bit that day. Several of the miners are late for their shifts, and seem distracted once they get there. And all the technicians, both sides, complain of sonic interference in their communications implants. Songs, and even sounds like … well, they’re pretty X-rated, let’s just say that. Montys accuse Caps of sabotage; Caps accuse Montys of hangovers. Everyone’s a bit off; everyone’s cranky.

  Must be something in the water.

  * * *

  That night at the bar, all hell breaks loose.

  Jewel isn’t there, and neither is Rudo—but everyone else is.

  Very, very suspicious, if Paris is any judge.

  Larry seems pleased about something and buys a round for everybody. “To peace between factions,” he toasts. Very strange indeed. And the Montys are getting rowdy. Paris senses Tybalt beginning to swell; the possibility of a fight always excites him.

  Little muscular Mercury lines up five shots and does them all.

  Paris nods to Tybalt. “Methinks we’d better drink up and get home. The mad blood is stirring.”

  “Home?” Tybalt responds. “Not until I can’t see straight.”

  “Mad, mad blood,” Paris repeats.

  Tybalt shrugs.

  Paris overhears Ben, in a mirror action, trying to get that Monty idiot Mercury out of the bar. Ben’s all right. If he wasn’t a Monty he’d probably be a friend.

  But Mercury will have none of it.

  “I go nowhere, you moody bitch. Larry!”

  And Mercury orders a round for the Montys.

  “Come on, Merc,” Paris hears Ben pleading.

  “You trying to start a fight?”

  “You know better.”

  Mercury points an unsteady finger at his friend. “You’re always trying to start fights.”

  “Me?”

  “You’d fight a man for cracking nuts, because you have hazel eyes. You’d fight a man for coughing, because he woke up a dog in the street. Your head is as full of fighting as this moon is full of salty slush, and yet you’d lecture me on fighting?”

  “All right, all right.”

  A song comes over the mix, a new one, a hit. Banal. A song about love. It seems loud, too loud. The walls ring with it.

  Mercury raises his voice. “Tybalt! Pretty man!”

  Tybalt glances with seeming laziness down the bar, waves his hand, and turns back to Paris. “Buzz buzz, is someone talking?”

  “Blow me,” Mercury slurs.

  “Indeed,” Tybalt says, “so you have asked before. And I have offered, and been spurned.”

  “Hey, hey, hey,” Paris says. There’s no mistaking the glint in Tybalt’s eye.

  “Now, now, now,” Ben admonishes.

  But Tybalt and Mercury begin the long strut down the bar. Paris looks for Larry but he’s nowhere to be seen.

  And that fucking song, why is it so loud?

  One step, two, three, and the two bantams have closed.

  “My hands around your neck again,” Tybalt grinds out through clenched teeth.

  “And mine on yours,” says Mercury, looking up at his taller assailant, but in a surprise move he knees Tybalt in the groin.

  All the air goes out Tyb’s lungs, and his face turns white as paper, but he doesn’t let go of Merc’s neck.

  People are yelling, pumping the air with their fists.

  Rudo choses this moment to come in.

  He sees the two men grappling, takes in the yelling crowd. He lopes down the bar. Three soaring skips and he’s at the fight.

  “Be at peace!”

  “Fuck off, Monty,” Tyb spits out between his teeth.

  “You will kill each other,” and indeed, Mercury’s face is purple.

  But that doesn’t stop Merc from saying, “Rudo, I got this.”

  And Mercury wraps his hands around Tyb’s throat.

  “Let go, I beg you,” Rudo pleads.

  They aren’t letting go. The noise in the bar increases, amplifies, yelling and hooting. It echoes in the icy walls, the floor, throughout the base. The song is loud enough to deafen, now. To Paris it seems the whole moon is reverberating with brawling love, with loving hate.

  Cracks appear. A piece of the ceiling falls.

  Larry comes running in from the back freezer, bottles in hand. When he sees what is happening, he drops them. They fall, low-g slow onto the granite-hard ice floor. They shatter.

  “Peace, for the love of god, peace!”

  Tybalt snaps Mercury’s neck.

  He springs back.

  The song swells.

  Mercury falls, bounces gently, comes to rest. His eyes are half-open, his head rests at an angle.

  Blood trickles from the corner of his mouth.

  Some urine leaks down his leg, steaming in the chilly air.

  * * *

  No one could really say, afterward, what happened.

  The bar shook as if seismic forces gripped it.

  And then it was like all the sounds of the fight, the snapping of bones, well, it all came crashing in like an amplification tsunami.

  Screams, an alarm, evacuation. Everybody, out.

  A lot of hearing damage; that came out later. Some of the miners ended up deaf.

  And somehow in the chaos Tybalt, that hothead, he wound up dead.

  Broken neck, mirror of Mercury. Not because of the earthquake. No. Someone, a Cap, said they saw Rudo do it. And surveillance cameras showed Rudo embracing Merc’s body, then turning to Tybalt, grappling. Then the feed cut out; the seismic activity, perhaps.

  Two hours later, the Nurse was full of it. Everyone, Europa to Moon to Earth, knew something had happened.

  The mining base is put on lockdown.

  * * *

  The number one hit song skyrockets. Covers and remixes all over the Nurse. Dedications to Tybalt, dedications to Mercury.

  And Rudo? He disappears.

  Paris watches the footage, over and over. Rudo, embracing Mercury’s broken body. Then lungin
g for Tybalt.

  The swelling song. The sounds of shouting, hands on flesh, violent, almost sexual. The cut to the feed.

  Over. And. Over.

  It has a certain rhythm to it, and the rhythm matches the song in Paris’s head.

  * * *

  Jewel gets a message.

  She’s been sitting in her room, the number one hit love song running through her head, crying until her eyes hurt.

  It’s a high-priority message, on a sub-public frequency.

  It’s from Larry.

  I am with Rudo.

  I’m coming, she types, already standing, already stepping toward the door.

  No! High-priority ping.

  I have to see him. I’ll die.

  He is up for murder.

  She stares at the words.

  Up for murder. Of course he is. That video.

  Death is the penalty for murder. Eye for an eye in this bloody and fragile world.

  Jewel feels a prickling over her scalp, up her forearms, like electricity. Is this what people mean when they say their hair stands on end?

  The feeling inside is terror, rage, pain. Something else too.

  Love.

  She doesn’t care. She loves him. She can still feel his hands on her body, taste him on her lips. His name is love.

  She will not live without him. It will be easy enough, here. Just walk outside. If the minus-one-hundred-and-sixty Celsius temperatures don’t do it, the radiation will.

  Rudo and I have a plan, Larry types.

  The longing in her body threatens to overwhelm. Let me talk to him.

  He is in cryo.

  What the fuck?

  The corporations want the two bodies—Mercury and Tybalt—sent to Luna base. And they want Rudo extradited to Luna for trial.

  She’ll do anything to see him again.

  You and Rudo have to disappear.

  YES. How?

  A pause.

  You and Mercury have more or less the same mass.

  So?

  We cut out the online connections. Mercury’s, Rudo’s, Tybalt’s, yours. We dispose of Mercury’s body here on Europa, and exchange him …

  For me.

  Yes.

  So we destroy my connection permanently?

  Yes.

  The connections are inserted shortly after birth. To be permanently offline …

  I’ll do it.

  Slow down! She can almost sense Larry’s laughter at her tempestuousness. Here’s how it works. We fake an accident with Tybalt’s corpse, and put Rudo’s connection in that cryopod.

  She forces her brain to work. A cryo-accident turns the cells inside out; no one will be able to tell whose body it is, not without a DNA analysis …

  And Mercury’s connection is in my pod so when they scan on arrival they will think I’m him, and Rudo is Tybalt, and Tybalt is Rudo. Right?

  Right.

  But when the pods arrive on Luna, the sensors will tell them that two of us are in living cryo. They’ll revive us, it’s the law …

  Yes, they’ll see who you are. You will have to subdue the technician on the Luna end. Buy time, Larry types.

  Why are you helping? He could be in the pay of one of the corporations—after all, he works for the mysterious Prince. There could be some kind of agenda …

  I’m sick of the bullshit, Jewel.

  Sick enough to risk your life?

  Because if Rudo is up for murder, then abetting him also carries the death penalty.

  I’m here for a good time, not a long time. Remember?

  His cancer. She sits, cannot type.

  Jewel?

  I’m here.

  I have contacts on Luna. They can forge new identities for you.

  Hiding out on Luna is vaguely possible. There’s an underworld there that swallows people whole.

  $$$$????? she types.

  I have savings. Enough.

  She reads the message, and reads again. Why is he helping? Even if he’s dying, it’s implausible.

  But it’s her only hope.

  Paris will put you in cryo.

  I don’t trust that jealous worm.

  He’s your technician, remember? He’s responsible for your safety. Don’t worry. I’ve worked it all out with him. He trusts me.

  Jewel, uncharacteristically, submits.

  Everyone trusts you.

  * * *

  Jewel’s gazing down at Rudo in his cryopod like she is a dying man in a desert, leaning over a pool of water.

  How she loves him. It curdles Paris, makes his hands shake and his stomach knot.

  Rudo’s face has the pallid, faintly green tinge of cryo. There’s a bloody line on his forearm where his connection was cut out and Tybalt’s inserted.

  Tybalt lies dead, flooded with cryofluid, in another pod, Rudo’s connection in the pod with him. No one’s gazing down at him. Paris and Larry have fixed it so that the pod will leak in transit and his body will turn itself into a cryogenic mess.

  “Where’s Larry.”

  Her flat voice, her abrupt questions, why is it all so arousing? “He had to go. Prince called him.” There had been some emergency, something to do with the songs.

  “Really.” She looks suspicious. Paris sighs.

  “Let’s do this. I’ll get an anesthetic for your arm…”

  “Fuck that.”

  Jewel grabs a pair of chopsticks and places them between her teeth. Then, as Paris watches, she slides the blade of a scalpel under the skin of her forearm, and carefully, bloodily, cuts her online connection out from under her skin.

  Untraceable, now.

  The chopsticks fall from her mouth to the floor with a clatter. “Give me Merc’s connection,” she says through gritted teeth.

  Paris hands her the small piece of metal and she slides it through the bloody flux, applies pressure.

  “What did you do with his body.”

  “Never you mind.” Larry took care of that. Stashed him in some unused ice cave. All hell will break loose when he’s discovered. But that’s not likely to happen, not for a long, long time.

  She still looks suspicious.

  “Time for you to go under, princess.”

  She doesn’t trust him, he can tell. But she lies back, sighs.

  God, she’s beautiful.

  Larry’d had a stroke of genius just before being called away. He put not only Rudo’s connection in Tybalt’s pod, but also Jewel’s ring. The affair between Jewel and Rudo was quite the thing on Earth, and everyone will have analyzed every inch of footage. Jewel’s ring has been spotted by followers on Rudo’s finger. There’s even a top-ten song already called, yeah, Jewel’s Ring. Finding it in the cryo-mess, it’ll be natural to assume the mess is Rudo. The Luna technicians might pass over the DNA test for the ruined flesh altogether.

  Paris means to mention this finishing touch to Jewel. As he checks her vitals, he means to tell her about her ring. As he inserts the tubes in her veins that will drain her blood and replace it with cryofluid, he means to tell her. As he gradually brings her temperature down, he means to tell her. Just before he sedates her, he almost tells her.

  Well, it doesn’t matter really, right? I mean, a little thing like that.

  It skitters across the surface of Paris’s consciousness, paired with a slightly nauseous, resentful, excited feeling, almost—if he were to let himself admit it—a vengeful feeling. And Jewel sinks into sleep, and is gone.

  He watches over her, brooding, almost tender, as her face drains of color. He disconnects her, seals her pod. He ferries the three pods to the transport ship.

  “Here you are. Mercury and Tybalt, bodies cryo-preserved. And Rudo, safely in cryo. That murdering bastard.”

  The transport technicians take over.

  Paris watches as the ship is propelled from the base. Its light sail erect; a beautiful sight. It hurtles toward Luna.

  Good-bye, Jewel.

  Strange. He’s still hearing that song.

 
* * *

  Paris is not alone. Isolated in lockdown, every human on Europa hears that song. This is why Larry was called away by Prince: the sonic structures have become undeniable, dominant. Every human on Europa begins singing the last song to be played at the Only. It’s not a particularly good song. But for whatever reason, that’s the song they sing, as if that final blast at the bar has infected the entire moonscape. And not only humans sing. Underneath, above, all around them in the ice in which the base is nestled, the song is amplified. There are groans, and whalelike sonar blasts. Deep, almost too deep for the human ear to hear. Like the horns of heaven, if you believe in heaven, when the gates open at the end of time.

  * * *

  The ship hurtles through the Solar System. A reflective outer sail refocuses and reflects a beam from great Fresnel lenses of the Mercury Array back onto the mainsail, enabling the ship to travel back toward Luna.

  Jewel lies unmoving, mind wandering through a year of cryo dreams.

  Rudo finds her and thinks she is dead. “Why are you so beautiful? Why are you yet so beautiful?” he cries. “Shall I believe that insubstantial death is amorous, and that the lean abhorred monster keeps you here in the dark to be his paramour?”

  This is followed by some horrible images: a death-figure riddled with worms, pressing down hard on Jewel’s chest, shoving cold fingers inside her mouth, between her legs. She cannot move or breathe.

  Then Rudo comes, takes her in his arms. He thinks she is dead. “Yet so beautiful? Why are you yet so beautiful?”

  Over. And. Over.

  * * *

  One year later. Luna. A cryo chamber. Three transparent pods.

  A young woman lies in one, unconscious, blood-transfusion tubes connected to her veins.

  Another pod is empty, tubes trailing onto the floor.

  The third is filled with an unholy mess.

  On the floor there’s a bloody trail, leading to the door, which is shut.

  The woman wakes, rolls into a ball like a baby. It generally takes a bit longer for women to come out of cryo—the more muscle mass you have, the faster you come to.

  Her body shudders and tries to vomit, muscles scream. She can’t cry; ducts are dry.

  Why does it hurt so much? It isn’t the warming process—by the time you’re conscious, body-temperature blood has flushed out the cryoprotectant. It’s not ice crystals in your tissue—they’ve figured out how to stop that from happening, a combo of synthetic amphibious and plant glycols, and dimethyl sulphoxide.