"I'm surprised you didn't decide to try it anyway."
Silence.
"Quicksilver, what is your form? You were written from a human mind into some kind of code—?"
"Of course."
"Would the code match our machines? No, of course not. But can you write a version of yourself to upload into Joplee?"
"Joplee doesn't have the capacity."
"A simplified version?"
"I can't write that."
"Joplee's my guardian. I need him to work the ... Quicksilver, is there any way to register me as an adult?"
"Hack the Dome? Kath, if you make a mistake you'll be locked out."
"I think I have to try it. Let's see, the Joplee Base Program is a copy of Jerian. Base might accept its credentials..."
* * * *
It was like using a dead man's brainscan to run an insurance scam ... but it worked. The Base took Kath for Joplee, Joplee for Jerian, pending action from Jerian. She could lose it all in an instant.
That wasn't the hard part.
The hard part was running the digging machines.
Base didn't have software to run the machines itself. Kath puzzled out how to set them, the four that still worked, to converge on Mishinjer's Crater; but from then on she had to monitor them constantly.
One machine died early. Its fleck of antimatter was gone, and there was no way to refuel it. A second died of the heat, probably, while digging at the bottom of the cone. Molten iron flooded through the crater's floor and killed another while most of the floor of the cone was still in place. Then its antimatter protection failed. The machine disappeared in a blast that opened the hole wider.
Quicksilver finished the job by blasting iron up from underneath. Kath hid in the bottommost part of Midnight Dome while congealed iron droplets fell around Mercury. She'd managed to move the last machine to relative safety behind the Mishinjer Crater wall.
At Midnight Dome there was black only at the zenith: no stars. But Mercury began to move ... not that there was any easy way to notice.
This was Kath's suggestion: Mishinjer's Crater wasn't exactly at the eastern point of the terminator. It pointed a little sunward of that. Iron plasma blasted almost straight back from Mercury, but a little downward, into the outer envelope of the sun. The corona would absorb the blast before it circled the sun to impinge on Mercury. Otherwise the surface of the planet would erode away far too quickly.
But it meant that there wasn't a hope of seeing the blast from Midnight Dome. Kathlerian just had to take Quicksilver's word that it was all working.
By the end of a standard year, supplies were not so much low as strange. Trace elements built up or were lost with each cycle of use. Details of complex molecules were lost. Kathlerian had to count on the medical systems more and more, and all the food began to taste alike. She stopped noticing the smell, almost.
The rocks around Midnight Base were changing. She could see them glow; she could see them slump. The horizon was a red blaze.
Kathlerian rarely looked out. She looked often at a wall-sized monitor with a view of a vast conical pit and a violet glow.
The pit was growing. The true rocket nozzle was a magnetic field; it didn't touch the pit. But the glow from the plasma flow was evaporating the rock.
She couldn't feel the acceleration, the thrust was too low. Quicksilver kept her informed.
She suggested games. Quicksilver played excellent chess. Kath was better at poker. Quicksilver told her about the sun's roiling wild surface, then winked out for three days. When he returned he could only spout facts at her, an endless babbling lecture. It took three whole days before Quicksilver could beat her at chess again.
On the morning of the four hundred and fifth standard day, in the half-sleep just before dragging herself from bed, Kath remembered Quicksilver asking her if she'd go on talking to him in his last hours. He was lonely. Had Quicksilver seen how she might strand herself on the dying planet? And had he let her do it?
Maybe there wasn't any iron jet. Visuals could be hacked. Maybe her half-year with the digging machines had only been a virtual reality game. Maybe the sun was just waiting to eat Quicksilver and Kathlerian and Joplee, who hadn't moved in a long time.
* * * *
She was eating something like sweetened cereal, or trying to. Quicksilver was a three-dimensional image in the wall. Kathlerian had grown used to him: a squat, hairy creature clothed in a shapeless robe, with a blade of nose and funny ears that didn't fold up. He wasn't paying her any attention, but he was company.
He blurred. Cleared, and gasped. “Kath? I'm buzzing. I hope that isn't the sun g—"
Then Kathlerian was looking at someone else.
The cereal bowl rolled across the floor. Kath stared at a man similar to herself, with wrinkled nostrils and fanlike pink ears. Stupidly she asked, “Who are you?"
The man glared, not quite at her. “Whoever hears this message, you are drafted. Do you understand? I am Jerian Wale 9000—"
"Jerian!"
"—have the authority to commandeer property that is deemed to be abandoned. You are drafted into the service of the Community of Solar Worlds and assured adequate compensation. Whatever is causing motion of the planet Mercury, you are to stop it at once. If you do not cease at once, we will be forced to fire on you."
"Quicksilver!"
"I heard. He's going to fire on a planet?"
"But he's ordered us to stop!"
"We can't. Turning off the jet would take tens of hours, and I don't want to. Talk to him, Kath. He might be light-hours away. You'll never get anything said unless you talk across each other."
"Well—all right.” She didn't much like the man's face nor his expression. “Jerian Wale 9000, I'm Kathlerian Wale of the Bear Clade, born in Bear Three Bubble. I've been left behind at Midnight Base on Mercury. My own fault. There are only the two of us. We're trying to move the planet to where I can be rescued. After all, there's nobody to be risked! Nobody's around, we're too close to the Sun for any kind of mining or research or tourism, and nobody else here on Mercury—” She bit it off. It sounded like she was whining.
Jerian Wale was repeating himself, cycling.
He looped for half an hour. Then he blurred, listened, and spoke. “Kathlerian, you've claimed priority under emergency action. I doubt you have any concept of how expensive that is or what the penalties are. Who is your companion? Wait, I find a record—yes. Quicksilver, Widge Hordon of the Vance Clade as of the Second Deep Reworking Period. Quicksilver, please respond."
Kath asked, “Quicksilver?"
"I've got nothing to hide, Kath. I'm sending him everything I have. You look very twitchy. Do an exercise program while we wait."
* * * *
Waiting ran hour after hour. Quicksilver didn't answer queries. When Kath pressed him, his brute image disappeared. She tired of waiting, and slept.
He was there when she woke. “We have an agreement,” Quicksilver said.
"He didn't want to talk to me?"
"We're more similar, Kath. Jerian is nearly as old as I am and has more intelligence and wider experience. Of course he thinks faster, too, but that's nothing compared to the lightspeed delay."
Badly humiliated, Kath shut down Quicksilver's image.
Two days of that and she couldn't stand it any more. She booted up her link and asked, “So, are we going to live?"
"More or less."
"What's that mean?"
"You've seen a list of expenses, but they don't include possible damage claims. We've moved a huge mass without filing flight plans or waiting for responses. We've sprayed gigatons of iron vapor into the sun. I may have covered some of that, or all, by claiming Mercury as salvage. The planet was completely lost to human profiteers until you and I intervened. Now there's easy access to a source of iron and rare earths. Bidding has already started. Also, Jerian has arranged to store a recording of myself. It took me time to send it. I'm sorry if I've been ignoring you."
So he hadn't noticed her ignoring him! So be it. “And now there are two of you?"
"Not for long. We've arranged to settle Mercury in the L4 point of Venus. The mass should stay there long enough to be mined before the Sun expands to take both planets. But we're getting too far out from the Sun. The flux tube will cut off in about twenty days. You'll be offloaded, and Mercury will coast into place without further guidance."
Somehow she hadn't seen this coming. “You're still going to die?"
"Well. ‘Die’ is such a vague word. Jerian will hold me in storage, he says. I won't have anything like civil rights unless and until he finds some reason to revive me."
"I'll—"
"Don't promise anything, Kath. You might be a pauper before this is over. The bidding for Mercury isn't enthusiastic. If there's any profit, though, you'll get half and you'll be my executor for the rest."
"Me? I don't have any skills, Quicksilver."
"Kath, it can't be Jerian. I don't want to give him a motive not to revive me. We thrashed that out."
She was being entrusted with the very life of an ancient being. Her tongue thickened and her ears curled against her head. “Thank you."
Quicksilver did not answer, so she asked, “Play another game of chess?"
A board appeared on her monitor, with green and blue pawns that looked like planetesimals. The knights were iron crabs. The kings and queens were domes.
* * * *
The sun shrank. Even so, the Base refrigeration system howled. Mercury was turning now, if very slowly. The sun was a vast, stormy red half-globe. It covered a quarter of the sky, as if the world was falling into it. Realistically, everything was. Venus wouldn't last forever.
The flux tube ruptured in a tremendous lightning bolt that stretched all the way into the sun. The whole planet shuddered. When it was over, part of Midnight Base was open to space. Kathlerian was caught in the dining area. Her nose, ears, throat, and other sphincters all snapped shut. She felt internal pressure trying to rip out of her, and she ran for the nearest double doors, her mind howling that it wasn't fair!
And she made it, but from that moment she had no food source. She had water: spigots that had fed the Vivarium.
Venus was only a pink pinprick, changing little as Mercury approached its fourth Lagrange point. And Quicksilver was—but dead is such a vague word. Dead as Joplee, anyway.
* * * *
She didn't hear anything at first. Kath had grown used to the refrigeration pumps. She found the Base unnervingly silent. She spent more and more time sleeping.
She dreamed of bones rattling together, and someone calling her name. “Kathlerian Wale 771, I'm Joplee. You are to come with me."
But Joplee was dead.
She thrashed and rolled to her feet. Something was coming toward her, a spiky humanoid shape. She shook her head. “You're not Joplee."
"Jerian Wale 9000 has upgraded me. I am a simplified version of Jerian, with a new set of restrictions. Kath, dear, you are to be upgraded as a young adult. Jerian says that you have certainly been behaving as one, and you might as well accept the obligations that go with the job. We'll leave your current Joplee version here."
"Jerian still won't talk to me? Is he angry?"
"No, Jerian is pleased with the way matters have worked out. He just doesn't have time to talk to you at this time. Kath, I have a ship. I'm to take you directly to Mars."
"What's on Mars?"
"A subset of the Bear Clade has assembled. Medical facilities are on hand. You'll be treated to mature into an adult. Jerian is there too. What would you like to take from Mercury?"
Nothing. Memories. “Video imagery. I've stored a lot of memory in the Base."
"I'll store the Base mind in the ship. Anything else?"
Joplee, the real Joplee. She set her hand on him, the old Joplee. It felt as if she was leaving her childhood behind, and a crime she would never repeat.
"Nothing."
[Back to Table of Contents]
Copyright © 2005 by Larry Niven & Brenda Cooper.
[Back to Table of Contents]
He Woke in Darkness by Harry Turtledove
A Short Story
Early on a cold and dark December morning—a day after I bought this tale from Harry Turtledove, and long after he'd written it—I was startled by the morning news. The synchronicity of the story on the radio about an arrest stemming from an event of decades past and the unsettling story in this magazine seems to prove that some historical incidents will haunt us for years to come. Harry's newest book, Settling Accounts: Drive to the East will be out in August from Del Rey. He recently edited The Enchanter Completed, a tribute anthology to L. Sprague de Camp that has just been published by Baen Books.
[Back to Table of Contents]
He woke in darkness, not knowing who he was. The taste of earth filled his mouth.
It shouldn't have ended this way. He knew that, though he couldn't say how or why. He couldn't even say what this way was, not for sure. He just knew it was wrong. He'd always understood about right and wrong, as far back as he could remember.
How far back was that? Why, it was ... as far as it was. He didn't know exactly how far. That seemed wrong, too, but he couldn't say why.
Darkness lay heavily on him, unpierced, unpierceable. It wasn't the dark of night, nor even the dark of a closed and shuttered room at midnight. No light had ever come here. No light ever would, or could. Not the darkness of a mineshaft. The darkness of ... the tomb?
Realizing he must be dead made a lot of things fall together. A lot, but not enough. As far back as he could remember ... He couldn't remember dying, dammit. Absurdly, that made him angry. Something so important in a man's life, you'd think he would remember it. But he didn't, and he didn't know what he could do about it.
He would have laughed, there in the darkness, if only he could. He hadn't expected Afterwards to be like this. He didn't know how he'd expected it to be, but not like this. Again, though, what could he do about it?
I can remember. I can try to remember, anyways. Again, he would have laughed if he could. Why the hell not? I've got all the time in the world.
* * * *
Light. An explosion of light. Afternoon sunshine blasting through the dirty, streaky windshield of the beat-up old Ford station wagon bouncing west down Highway 16 toward Philadelphia.
A bigger explosion of light inside his mind. A name! He had a name! He was Cecil, Cecil Price, Cecil Ray Price. He knew it like ... like a man knows his name, that's how. That time without light, without self? A dream, he told himself. Must have been a dream.
Those were his hands on the wheel, pink and square and hard from years of labor in the fields. He was only twenty-seven, but he'd already done a lifetime's worth of hard work. It felt like a long lifetime's worth, too.
He took one hand off the wheel for a second to run it through his brown hair, already falling back at the temples. Had he dozed for a second while he was driving? He didn't think so, but what else could it have been? Lucky he didn't drive the wagon off the road into the cotton fields, into the red dirt.
They would love that. They would laugh their asses off. Well, they weren't going to get the chance.
Sweat ran down his face. His clothes felt welded to him. The air was thick with water, damn near thick enough to slice. The start of summer in Mississippi. It would stay like this for months.
He had the window open to give himself a breeze. It didn't help much. When it got this hot and sticky, nothing helped much. He ran his hand through his hair again, to try to keep it out of his eyes.
"You all right, Cecil?” That was Muhammad Shabazz. Along with Tariq Abdul-Rashid, he crouched down in the back seat. The two young Black Muslims didn't want the law, or what passed for the law in Mississippi in 1964, spotting them. They'd come down from the North to give the oppressed and disenfranchised whites in the state a helping hand, and the powers that be hated them worse than anybody.
"I'm okay,”
Cecil Price answered. I'm okay now, he thought. I know who I am. Hell, I know that I am. He shook his head. That moment of lightless namelessness was fading, and a good thing, too.
"We get to Meridian, everything'll be fine,” Muhammad Shabazz said.
"Sure,” Cecil said. “Sure.” The night before, the locals had torched a white church over by Longdale. He'd taken the Northern blacks over there to do what they could for the congregation. Now...
Now they had to get through Neshoba County. They had to get past Philadelphia. They had to run the gauntlet of lawmen who hated white people and Black Knights of Voodoo who hated whites even more—and of lawmen who were Black Knights of Voodoo and hated whites most of all. And they had to do it in the Racial Alliance for Complete Equality's beat-up station wagon. If RACE's old blue Ford wasn't the best-known car in eastern Mississippi, Price was damned if he knew another one that would be.
Of course, he might be damned any which way. So might the two idealistic young Negroes who'd come down from New York and Ohio to give his downtrodden race a hand. If the law spotted this much too spottable car...
Cecil Price wished he hadn't had that thought right then, in the instant before he saw the flashing red light in his rear-view mirror, in the instant before he heard the siren's scream. Panic stabbed at him. “What do I do?” he said hoarsely. He wanted to floor the gas pedal. He wanted to, but he didn't. The main thing that held him back was the certain knowledge that the old wagon couldn't break sixty unless you flung it off a cliff.
"Pull over.” Muhammad Shabazz's voice was calm. “Don't let ‘em get us for evading arrest or any real charge. We haven't done anything wrong, so they can't do anything to us."
"You sure of that, man?” Tariq Abdul-Rashid sounded nervous.
"This is all about the rule of law,” Muhammad Shabazz said patiently. “For us, for them, for everybody."
He respected the rule of law. It meant more to him than anything else. Cecil Price could only hope it meant something to the man in the car with the light and the siren. He could hope so, yeah. Could he believe it? That was a different story.
Asimov's SF, August 2005 Page 12