The New Space Opera

by Gardner Dozois

  Physically, he had the perfection of the high-bred gene lines, with broad shoulders, mahogany skin, and an arched nose. It was only if you looked closely that you saw that the eyes were pouchy and vague, that his muscles were wasting away, and that his skin was as slack as his first-rate genetics would permit. He was giving away his body the same way he’d given away his collection.

  He was lonely too, because he would talk to Tonio and me, about history, and art, and poetry. He could recite whole volumes of poetry from memory, and it was beautiful even though most of it was in old languages, like Persian, that I’d never heard before and didn’t understand.

  I asked him about his gene line, his connections, what he did before he’d started his wandering.

  “It was prostitution,” he said, with a look at the painting on his stateroom wall. “I don’t want to talk about it, now I’m trying to regain my virtue.”

  These conversations took place in the morning, after breakfast. Then he’d put the first patch of the day on his arm and nod off, his head in Maud’s lap.

  Maud Rain was his girlfriend. She looked about seventeen, and maybe she was. She appeared as if her genetics had been intending to create a lily, or cornflower, or some other fragile blossom, and then been surprised to discover they’d produced a human being. She was blond and green-eyed and blushed easily, and she loved Aram completely. I was a little in love with her, myself.

  Life aboard the Olympe was pleasant, if somewhat pointless. We wandered around the multiverse without a schedule. We’d stop for a while, and Aram would leave the ship to visit old friends or see something new that he thought might interest him, and we wouldn’t hear from him for anywhere between three days and three months, then abruptly we’d be on our way again. Aram paid us well and gave us a good deal of time off, and once he bailed Tonio out of a scrape involving the wife of a Creel station superintendent.

  I don’t pretend to understand the chemistry between users and their consorts, and I don’t know whether Aram talked Maud into using, or whether it was her own idea. I do know that, like all users, Aram wanted to make everyone around him use too. He offered the stuff often enough to me and Tonio, though I never heard him make the same offer to Maud.

  Whoever made up Maud’s mind for her, she then went on to make a stupid, elementary mistake. She gave herself the same dose that Aram took, without his magic genes and all the immunity he’d built up over the decades, and she screamed and thrashed and went into convulsions. Tonio got his fingers savagely bitten trying to keep the vomit clear of her mouth while I madly shifted the ship through about eight Probabilities to get her to a hospital. By the time we got her there, she didn’t have much of a brain left. She still blushed easily, and looked at you with dreamy green eyes. She had the sweet-natured smile, but there was nothing behind it but a void.

  We left her in a place where they’d look after her, a stately white building on a pleasant green lawn, and Olympe resumed its wanderings. Aram deteriorated quickly. He no longer talked in the mornings. We’d find him alone and crying, the tears pouring down his face in silence, and then he’d put a new patch on his arm and drift away. One afternoon, we found him dead, with six patches on his arm.

  In his will, he left all his money to a trust for Maud, and he left Olympe and its contents to me. He left Tonio some money. I gave Tonio everything in the pharmacy, and he sold it to someone on Burnes Upside and we gave Aram a long, crazy wake with the profits. The rest of Tonio’s money went to lawyers to fix a misunderstanding that occurred during the course of the wake.

  When we sobered up, I realized that I had a yacht, but no money to support it.

  Tonio was the only crew I ever had, because he didn’t expect to be paid. He did the job of a crew, and when he had money, he paid me, as if he were a passenger. When I had money, I shared it with him.

  We kept moving, the same kind of random shifts we’d made with Aram.

  It was almost enough to keep us out of trouble.

  Tonio spent that first night in the stateroom with Katarina Pryor. I tried to console myself with the fact that this was all happening in a whole other Probability from the one Katarina normally lived in. I also tried to concentrate on how I was going to handle Eldridge when I saw him again.

  I checked some data sources and inquired about Katarina Pryor. She was about fifty years old, though she looked half that and would for the next millennium, if she so desired. She was one of the Council of Seven that ran Socorro on behalf of the Pryor gene line.

  Her husband, Denys, was another one of the Seven.

  I let that settle in my brain for a while. Then I sent a message to Eldridge, telling him that I wanted to meet him as soon as Olympe docked Topside. He replied that it would be his pleasure to do so.

  We’d see how much fun he’d have.

  I told Tonio of this development as we were walking to the lounge. As he stepped into the room, he gave me the news. “Katarina has invited me to accompany her to Downside on completion of our returnment. I have accepted, yiss, pending of course my captain’s sanction.”

  Katarina’s secretary, a young Pryor named Andrew, happened to be sitting in the lounge as we entered, and he looked as if someone had hit him in the head with a brick.

  “It’s not as if people are going out of their way to hire us,” I said, “so the ship can spare you. But . . .” I hesitated, aware of the presence of Andrew. “Doesn’t this remind you of anything, Tonio?”

  He gave me a look of offended dignity. “The situation of which you speak was on an entirely different plane,” he said. “This, on the contrary, is real.”

  The conversation was taking place in a Probability where stars looked like spinning billiard balls on a felt-green sky, and he and Katarina were traveling to another place where oxygen burned in their blood like naphtha. Who knew how real anything could be under such circumstances?

  I asked Tonio if he could delay his departure with Katarina until Eldridge came aboard.

  “Oh yiss. Most assuredly.”

  He seemed perfectly confident.

  I wish I could have echoed his assurance.

  Eldridge was present when Olympe arrived at Upside, and he had brought a couple of thick-necked thugs with him. They were hanging back from the personnel lock because there were plainclothes Pryor security present, waiting to escort Katarina and her new beau on the first stage of their planetary honeymoon.

  I called Eldridge from the control room. “Come on in,” I said. “Leave your friends behind.”

  When he came on board, he looked as if he were fully capable of dismembering me all by himself, his small size notwithstanding. I escorted him through the lounge, where Katarina and Andrew waited for Tonio to finish his packing job, a job that would not be completed until I gave him the high sign.

  Eldridge’s eyes went wide as he saw Katarina. She wore a compromise between the local balloon-suits and the form-fitting outfit she’d worn when she came aboard, which amounted to a slinky suit with a puffy jacket on top. But I don’t think it was her looks that riveted his attention.

  He recognized her.

  “This is Miss Katarina Pryor,” I told him, redundantly I hoped, “and Mr. Andrew Pryor.”

  “Pryor,” Eldridge repeated, as if he wanted to confirm this striking fact for himself.

  Andrew gave him a barely civil nod. Katarina just gave him her stone-eyed stare, let him know he had been measured and found wanting.

  I went to the bar and poured myself a cup of coffee. You had to drink coffee quickly here, because in this Probability it cools very fast.

  “Eldridge,” I remarked. “I haven’t received my on-delivery fee.”

  He gave me a scarlet stare out of his white face. “The cargo did not arrive intact.”

  “One crate went missing,” I said. “It was probably the fault of the loaders, but since I signed for it, you should feel free to deduct its value from the delivery fee.” I made a show of looking at the manifest on my pocket adjutant. “
What was in that crate—? Ah, jugs of spray foam mix. Value three hundred—would you say that’s a correct value, Miss Pryor?”

  Katarina drummed her fingers on the arm of the sofa. “Sounds about right, Captain Crossbie,” she said, in a voice that said Don’t bother me with this crap.

  I called up my bank account. “Might as well do the transfer now,” I said.

  Eldridge’s eyes cut to Katarina, then cut back. His lips went even whiter than usual.

  If the Pryors decided to step on him, he wouldn’t leave so much as a grease spot on their shoes. He knew that, as did I.

  He got out his own adjutant and tapped in codes with his one long thumbnail. I saw my bank account jump by the anticipated amount, and I put away my adjutant and sipped my coffee. It was already lukewarm.

  “Want some coffee, by the way?” I asked.

  Eldridge gazed at me out of those flaming eyes. “No,” he said.

  “We have some other business, but there’s no reason to bother Miss Pryor with it,” I said.

  He followed me into the control room, where I closed the door and gestured him toward a chair.

  “Consider that a penalty,” I said, “for thinking I was new to the multiverse.”

  “The Pryors aren’t really protecting you,” he said. “They can’t be.”

  “They’re old family friends,” I said. I sat in the padded captain’s chair—genuine Tibetan goat hide, Aram had told me—and swiveled it toward him. He just stared at me, his busy fingers plucking at his knees.

  “I’m willing to sell you coordinates,” I said.

  He licked his lips, pink tongue on paper-white. “Coordinates to what?” he asked.

  “What do you think?”

  He didn’t answer.

  We had put the blue salt in orbit around an ice moon, one that circled the same gas giant as Vantage.

  “The coordinates go for the same price as the cargo.” I smiled. “Plus three hundred.”

  He just kept staring. Probably that agate gaze had frightened a lot of people, but I wasn’t scared at all.

  Five days around Katarina Pryor had given me immunity to lesser terrors.

  “If you don’t want the coordinates,” I said, “your competition will.”

  He sneered. “There is no competition.”

  “There will be if Katarina takes you and your tame police out of the equation,” I said.

  So, in the end, he paid. Once the money was in the account, I gave Eldridge the seven orbital elements that described the salt’s amble about its moon. Someone from Vantage could easily hop over and pick up the salt for him, and the strung-out miners would go on getting their daily nerve-searing dose of fate.

  I showed Eldridge out, and as he bustled away, he cast a look over his shoulder that promised payback.

  I sent a message to Tonio, telling him to solve his packing crisis, and as I returned to the lounge, he came loping out of his quarters, his belongings carried in a rucksack on one shoulder. Andrew raised an eyebrow at the tiny amount of baggage that had taken so long to pack.

  Katarina rose to embrace Tonio. I watched as she molded her body to his.

  “I am primed, lover mine,” Tonio said.

  “So am I.”

  I showed them to the door. “Thank you, Captain,” Andrew said, and with an expression like someone passing gas at a funeral, handed me a tip in an envelope.

  I looked at the envelope. This had never happened before.

  “See you later, compeer.” Tonio grinned.

  “You bet.”

  I watched them walk toward their waiting transport, arms around each other’s waists. People stared. Wary guards circled them. Eldridge and his people were long gone.

  I decided it was time to buy and stow a lot of rations. A year’s worth, at least.

  For two fools, running.

  But first I wanted to celebrate the fact that I now possessed more money than I’d ever had in my life, even if you didn’t count my tip—which was two thousand, by the way, an inept attempt to buy my silence. I couldn’t make up my mind whether Eldridge was going to be a problem or not—if I were him, Katarina would have scared the spleen right out of me, but I didn’t know Eldridge well enough to know how stubborn or stupid he was.

  While I considered this, it occurred to me to wonder how many years it had been since I’d had a planet under my feet.

  Too many, I thought.

  I opened my safe and put Tonio’s emerald ring in my pocket—no sense in leaving it behind for people like Eldridge to find—and then I followed in the footsteps of Tonio and Katarina and took the next ride down the grapevine to Downside. I looked for tourist resorts and exotic sights, and though I discovered there were none of the former, there were plenty of the latter. There were mountains, gorges, and colossal wildlife—the chemical bonding of the local Probability led to plants, even those with Earth genetics, running amok. I saw rose blossoms bigger than my head, and with a smell like vinegar—chemistry not quite right, you see. Little pine trees grew to the size of Douglas firs. Socorro’s internal workings had thrust huge reefs of nearly pure minerals right out of the ground, many of which the miners had not yet begun to disassemble and carry away. For a brief time, wearing a protective raincoat, breathing apparatus, and crinkly plastic overshoes, I walked on the Whitewashed Desert that surrounded Mount Cyanide. I bathed in the Red Sea. Then the Green Sea, the Yellow Sea, and the Winedark Sea. The Yellow Sea stained my skin for days. It looked as if I were dying of cirrhosis.

  I kept the ring in a special trouser pocket that would open only to a code from my personal adjutant. After a while, I got used to the feel of it, and days went by before I remembered it was there.

  I’d brought my aurora. Along the way there was music, bars, and happy moments. I met women named Meimei, Sally June, and Soda. We had good times together. None of them died, went crazy, or slit their wrists.

  Carried away by the sheer carefree joy of it all, I began to think of going back to the Olympe and sailing away on the sea of Probability. Tonio was probably still happy with Katarina, and I could leave with his blessing.

  I would be safe. Shawn wasn’t after me. And Tonio, provided he stayed put, would be as safe as he ever was, probably safer.

  I contemplated this possibility for a few too many days, because one morning I woke from a dense, velvety dream to the birdlike tones of my adjutant. I told it to answer.

  “Compeer,” said Tonio. “Wherewhich art thou?”

  “Shadows and fog,” I said, because the voice seemed to be coming from my dream.

  “There’s a party on the morrow. Come and share it with me. Katarina would be delighted to see you.”

  I’ll bet, I thought.

  The hotel looked like a hovership that had stranded itself on land, a series of swoops and terraces, surrounded by cypress trees the size of skyscrapers, with gardenias as long as my leg tumbling brightly down from the balconies. Katarina had installed Tonio and his rucksack in a five-room suite and given him an expense account that, so far, he’d been unable to dent.

  Tonio greeted me as I stepped into the suite. His blue eyes sparkled with joy. He looked well scrubbed and well tended, and his hair was sleek.

  “Did you bring your aurora, Gaucho?” he said. “Let us repair to a suitable location, with drinks and the like, and partake of heavenly music.”

  “I thought we were going to a party.”

  “That is later. Right now we’ve got to have you measured for clothes.”

  A tailor with a double chin and a ponytail stepped out of a side room, had me take off my jacket, and got my measurements with a laser scriber. He vanished. Tonio led me out of the apartment and down a confusing series of stairs and lifts to a subbasement garage. Empty space echoed around us, supported by fluted pillars with lotus-leaf capitals. Tonio whispered a code into his adjutant and turbines began their soft whine somewhere in the darkness. Spotlights flared. A blazemobile came whispering toward us on its cushion of air. I felt its br
eath on my face and hands. The colors were gray and silver, blending into each other as if they were somehow forged together. The lines were clean and sharp. It looked purposeful as a sword.

  “Nice,” I said. “Is this Katarina’s?” I had a hard time not calling her “Miss Pryor.”

  “It’s mine,” Tonio said. “Katarina purchased it for me after, ah, the incident.”

  I looked at him.

  “There was a misunderstanding about another vehicle,” Tonio said. “I thought I had the owner’s permission to take it.”

  Ah, I thought. One of those misunderstandings.

  “Are you driving?” I asked.

  “Why don’t you drive? You’re better than I am.”

  I settled into the machine gingerly. It folded around me like a piece of origami. Tonio settled into the passenger seat. I drove the car with care till I got out of town, then let the turbines off their leash, and we were soon zooming down a highway under the system’s fluorescing, shivering smear of a sun, huge jungle growth on either side of the road turning the highway into a tunnel beneath vines and wild, drooping blossoms.

  “There’s another car behind us,” I said, looking at the displays. I was surprised it could keep up.

  “That would be Katarina’s security,” Tonio said. “It is a mark of her love. They follow me everywhere, to render me safe.”

  And to prevent, I thought, any of those misunderstandings about who owns what.

  A blissful smile crossed Tonio’s face. “Katarina and I are so in love,” he said. “I sing her to sleep every night.”

  The thought of Tonio crooning made me smile. “That sounds great,” I said.

  “We wish to have many babies, but there are complicatories.”

  “Like her husband?”

  “He is obstacular, yiss, but the principal problem is legal.”

  It turned out that Katarina did not legally own her own womb, as well as other parts, which belonged to the Pryor family trust. She could not become pregnant without the permission of certain high-ranking members of her line, who alone knew the codes that would unlock her fertility.