The New Space Opera

by Gardner Dozois

  “That’s . . . not the usual problem,” I said, stunned. I don’t know much about how the big corporate gene lines work, but this seemed extreme even for them.

  “Can you hire a surrogate?” I asked. “Use an artificial womb?”

  “It’s not the same.” He cast a glance over his shoulder. “Those individuals behind us—mayhap you can outspeed them?”

  “I’ll try.”

  I set the jets alight. My vision narrowed with acceleration, but oxygen still blazed in my blood. Alarms began to chirp. The vehicle trailing us fell back, but before long we came to a town and had to slow.

  It was a sad little mining town, covered with the dust of the huge magnesite reef that loomed over the town. Vast movers were in the process of disassembling the entire formation, while being careful not to ignite it and incinerate the entire county.

  Tonio pointed to a bar called the Reefside. “Pull in here, compeer. Mayhap we may discover refreshment.”

  The bar sat on its tracks, ready to move to another location when the last chunk of magnesite was finally carried away. I put the blazemobile in a side street so as not to attract attention to ourselves. We climbed up into the bar and blinked in its dark, musty-scented interior. We had arrived during an off-peak period and only a few faces stared back at us.

  We huffed some gas and shared a bag of crisps. After ten minutes, the security detail barged in, two broad-shouldered, clean-cut, thick-necked young men in city suits. After they saw us, one went back outside, and the other ordered fruit juice.

  The regulars stared at him.

  I asked the bartender if it was all right to play my aurora.

  “You can if you want,” he said, “but if the music’s shit, I’ll tell you to stop.”

  “That’s fair,” I said. I opened the case and adjusted the sonics for the room and put the aurora against my shoulder and touched the strings. A chord hung in the air, with just a touch of sourness. The bartender frowned. I tuned and began to play.

  The bartender turned away with a grudging smile. I made the aurora sound like chimes, like drums, like brass. Our fellow drinkers began to bob their heads and call for the bartender to refill their glasses. One gent bought us rounds of beer.

  The shifts changed at the diggings and miners spilled in, their clothes dusty, their respirators hanging loose around their necks. Some were highly specialized gene types, with sleek skin and implants for remote control of heavy equipment. Others were generalized humans, like us. One woman had lost an arm in an accident, and they were growing it back—it was a formless pink bud on the end of her shoulder.

  I played my aurora. I played fierce, then slow. The miners nodded and grinned and tapped their booted feet on the grainy plastic floor. The security man clung unhappily to his glass of fruit juice. I played angry, I played tender, I played the sound of birds in the air and bees in their hive. Tonio borrowed a cap from one of the diggers and passed it around. It came back full of money, which he stuffed in my pockets.

  My fingers and mind were numb, and I paused for a moment. There was a round of applause, and the diggers called for more refreshment. A few others asked who we were, and I told them we were off a ship and just traveling around the country.

  Tonio had a blazing white grin on his face. “It is spectacular!” he said. “This is the true joy!”

  “More than with Katarina?”

  He shrugged. “With Katarina it is sensational, but she is terribly occupied, and I don’t know anyone else in this coincidence of spacetime. People fear to be in my vicinity, and when I corner one, they only speak to me because they are afraid of Katarina. I have nothing in my day but to wait for Katarina to come home.”

  “Can’t she give you a job? Make you her secretary, maybe?”

  “She has Andrew.”

  “Her social secretary, then.” I couldn’t help but laugh at the idea.

  He gave a big grin. “She knows the social rules, yiss. I am signally lacking in that area of expertise.”

  “You could be a prospector. Travel around looking for minerals or whatever.”

  “For this task they have satellites and artificial intelligences.” He gazed for a long moment off into nowhere. “I am filled with gladness that you came to see me, Gaucho.”

  “I’m glad I came.” Though I’m not certain I was telling the truth.

  Tonio was getting bored with his life with Katarina. A bored Tonio was a dangerous Tonio.

  We talked and drank with the miners till Tonio said it was time to leave. Our guard was relieved to follow us out of the bar. His partner had been guarding our blazemobile all this time.

  We were both too drunk to drive, so we got in the car and told the autopilot to take us home. Once we arrived, I had a fitting with the tailor, who had run up my suit while we were off enjoying ourselves. I had this deep blue outfit, all spider silk, with lots of gold braid on my cuffs.

  “What’s this?” I asked Tonio.

  “You are my captain,” he said, “and now you are dressed like one.”

  “I feel ridiculous,” I said.

  “Wait till you see what I am compelled to wear.”

  The tailor adjusted the suit, then gave me the codes so that I could alter the suit’s fit if I wanted to, or add a pocket here or there. In the meantime, Tonio changed. His suit was the latest mode, with ruffles and fringes that seemed to triple the volume of his thin body. He looked unusual, but he carried himself with his usual jaunty style, as if he wanted it made clear to everyone that he was only pretending to be the person in the suit.

  Katarina arrived and wrapped herself around Tonio without caring if I was there or not. I was reminded of my little limpet-girl, Étoile.

  Katarina began tearing at Tonio’s ruffles and fringes. They went off to the bedroom for a lust break. I went out onto the balcony and watched the sun set over the jade forest. The sweet smell of flowers rose on the twilight air.

  Tonio and Katarina returned. She wore a dark lacy sheath that was as simple as Tonio’s suit was elaborate. Gemstones glittered sunset-red about her neck, and a languid postcoital glow seemed to float around her like a halo. I could feel sweat prickling my forehead at her very presence.

  “You’re looking very well, Captain Crossbie,” she said.

  “You’re looking well yourself,” I said. There was a bit more regard in her glance than I usually got. I wondered if Tonio had been telling her stories that made me seem, well, interesting.

  We went to the party, which was in the same building. It celebrated the fact that some production quota or other had been exceeded, and the room was full of Pryors and their minions. Katarina took Tonio’s arm and pressed herself to him all night, making it clear that they were a couple.

  The place was filled with people who were perfectly perfect, perfect everywhere from their dress to their genetics. All the talk I heard was of business, and complex business at that. If I’d been a spy sent by the competition, I would have heard a lot, but it would have been opaque to me.

  Don’t let anyone tell you that people like the Pryors don’t work for their riches and power. They do nothing else.

  I was introduced as Captain Crossbie, and people took me for a yachtsman, which technically I suppose I was. People asked me about regattas and famous captains, and I admitted that I only used my yacht for travel. I was then asked where I’d been, and I managed to tell a few stories.

  I was talking about yachts to an engineer named Bond—his dream was to buy a ship when he retired, and travel—when a blond man came up to talk to him. I thought the newcomer looked familiar, but didn’t place him right away.

  He talked to Bond about some kind of bottleneck on the Downside grapevine station that was threatening to interfere with shipments to Upside, and Bond assured him that the problem would be engineered out of existence in a couple weeks. He asked after Bond’s family. Bond told him that his son had won some kind of prize from the Pryor School of Economics. It was then that the blond man turned to me.
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  He had the chiseled perfection that came with his flawless genes, and violet eyes, and around his mouth was a tight-lipped tension that nature—or his designers—had not quite intended for him.

  “This is Mister Denys Pryor,” Bond said. “Denys, this is Captain Crossbie.”

  He realized who I was about the same instant that I finally recognized him as Katarina’s husband. The violet eyes narrowed.

  “Ah,” he said. “The accomplice.”

  “I don’t have any response to that,” I said, “that I’d expect you to believe.”

  He gave me a contemptuous look and stalked away. Bond looked after him in surprise, then looked at me. Then the light dawned. Panic flashed across his face.

  “If you’ll excuse me,” he said, and was gone before I could even reply.

  That was the last conversation I had at the party. Word about my connection to Tonio flashed through the room faster than lightning, and soon I was alone. I got tired of standing around by myself, so I went out onto the terrace, where a group of women in immaculate white balloon-suits were grilling meats. I was considering chatting up one of them when Tonio came up, carrying a pair of drinks. He handed me one.

  “My apologies, compeer,” he said. “They are stuck-up here, yiss.”

  “I’ve been treated worse.”

  He looked up at the strangely infirm stars. “I have Katarina by way of compensation,” he said. “You have nothing.”

  “I have Olympe,” I said. “I’ve been thinking maybe it’s time she and I flew away to the next Probability.”

  He looked at me somberly. “I will miss your companionhood,” he said.

  “You’ll have Katarina.” I looked at the sky, where Upside glittered on its invisible tether. “I hope Eldridge isn’t still looking for me,” I said.

  “You don’t have to worry about Eldridge,” Tonio said. “I told Katarina all about him.”

  Hot terror flashed through my nerves.

  “What did you tell her?” I asked.

  “I told her that Eldridge tried to use us to smuggle his salt, and that we found the stuff and spaced it.”

  I relaxed a little. The scene that Eldridge and I had played in front of Katarina might not seem that suspicious, if, of course, she believed her lover.

  “You didn’t hear the news?” Tonio said. “About that police officer that was found in the vacuum, over on Vantage.”

  My mouth was dry. “That griff lieutenant?” I asked.

  “Her captain. The lieutenant is learning a new job, floating in zero gravity and sucking up industrial wastes with a big vacuum cleaner.” He rubbed his chin. “The Pryors don’t like people fucking up their workers with drugs.”

  “They don’t seem to mind all those enhanced production quotas, though,” I said. “Do you think those come from workers who aren’t spiked up?” There was a moment of silence. The scent of sizzling meat gusted past. “What happened to Eldridge?” I asked.

  “Don’t know. Didn’t bother to ask.”

  If anything was going to harden my determination to leave Socorro as quickly as I could, it was this.

  I turned to Tonio. “I’ll miss you,” I said. I raised a glass. “To happy endings.”

  Before Tonio could respond, there was a sudden brilliant radiance in the sky, and we looked up. An enormous structure had appeared in the sky above Socorro, a vast black octahedron covered with thousands of brilliant lights, windows enabling the 1.4 million people aboard to gaze out at the passing Probabilities. To gaze down at us.

  “It’s the Chrysalis,” I said aloud.

  Surrounding the structure were half a dozen birds, each larger than the habitat, long necks outstretched. The storks that were the emblem of the Storch gene line, each with ghostly white wings flapping in utter silence, holograms projected into space by enormous lasers.

  Suddenly, I remembered Tonio’s emerald ring, in its special pocket on the old trousers I’d left back at Tonio’s flat.

  Too late, I thought. Shawn had come for us.

  “We can’t keep them out,” Katarina said. “This Probability isn’t a secret any longer, and anyone can exploit it now that it’s registered.”

  I doubted the Pryors could keep the Chrysalis out even if they wanted to. The Pryors maintained a police force here, not an army, and I knew that the Chrysalis had weapons for self-defense. They had those huge lasers they’d used to project their flying stork blazons, for one thing, and those could be turned to military use at any time.

  We sat on Tonio’s terrace the morning following the Storches’ arrival, soaking in the scent of blossoms. The Chrysalis was still visible in daylight, its edges rimmed with silver.

  Breakfast was curdling on our plates. Nobody was very hungry.

  “The Chrysalis is a state-of-the-art industrial colony,” I said. “They can park it here and start exporting materials in just weeks.”

  Katarina gave me a tell-me-something-I-don’t-know look.

  “They have also made an official request,” she said. “They want the two of you arrested on charges of theft and turned over to them.”

  I felt myself turn pale, a chill touching my lips and cheeks. “What are we supposed to have stolen?” I asked.

  Katarina permitted herself a thin smile. “They haven’t said. We have requested clarification.” She turned her black eyes to me. “They have also asked that your ship be impounded, until it can be determined whether you obtained it by forging Aram Maheu’s will.”

  “That was all settled in the chancery court on Burnes Upside,” I said. “Besides, if I was going to forge a will to give myself a yacht, I’d give myself the money to keep it going.”

  “The request is a delaying tactic,” Katarina said. “It’s to tie up your vessel for an indeterminate period and prevent you from escaping.”

  “Is it going to work?” I asked. Katarina didn’t bother to answer.

  The previous night’s party had ended with the appearance of the Chrysalis, as the Council of Seven went into executive session and their employees scattered to duty stations to do research on the Chrysalis and the implication of its arrival.

  Apparently at some point in the night, Tonio had told Katarina about Adora and Shawn, and Katarina must have believed him, because neither of us was being tied to a chair and tortured by Pryor security armed with shock wands.

  Katarina rose and gave Tonio a kiss. “I’ve got a lot of meetings,” she said.

  “See you tonight, lover mine,” Tonio said.

  We sat in silence for a while as Socorro’s strange sun climbed above the horizon. I turned to Tonio.

  “Are you certain,” I asked, “that Adora gave you that ring?”

  He gave me a wounded look. “Surely I am not hearing what I am hearing, my compeer.”

  “It wasn’t one of those misunderstandings?” I pressed. “Where you’re certain she gave it to you, but she doesn’t remember doing it?”

  “I am certain she told Shawn it was stolen,” Tonio said with dignity, “but this is what happened in sooth. He presented her with the ring at their wedding, a sentimental token, I imagine. But later she was angry at Shawn for a scene he’d made, where he was complaining about how she had behaved with me at a certain social function, and out of anger she bestowed the ring upon me.”

  “And when you left and she went back to Shawn,” I said, “she couldn’t admit it, so she told him it was stolen.”

  “That is my postulation.”

  Or that was the postulation that Tonio wanted me to believe.

  Tonio had been to prison, and in prison you learn to manipulate people. You learn to tell them what they want to hear. Is it lying if there is no harm intended? If it’s just saying the thing that’s most convenient for everyone?

  I didn’t steal anything. How often in prison do you hear that?

  I think Tonio was sincere in everything he said and did. But what he was sincere about could change from one minute to the next.

  In any case, this had t
o be about more than just the ring. The ring was valuable, but it didn’t justify moving over a million Storch employees to this Probability and opening mining operations.

  “Why did Shawn and Adora marry in the first place?” I asked.

  “Their families told them to. They hadn’t met until a few days before the ceremony.”

  “But why? Usually line members marry each other, like Katarina and Denys. It keeps the money in the family. When they merge or take another outfit over, they do it by adoption. But Shawn and Adora were different—each was ordered to marry out. The Storches do heavy industry. The Feeneys specialize in biotech and research. What did they have in common?”

  Tonio waved a hand in dismissal. “There was a special project. I did not ask for details, no. Why would I? It was connected to Shawn, and when I was with Adora, I had no wish to talk about Shawn. Why spoil a bliss that was so perfect with such a subject?”

  “If it was so perfect, why did you leave Adora?” I asked. “When I last saw you together, you seemed so . . . connected.”

  “She grew too onerous,” Tonio said. “Once we began to live together, she began giving orders. Go here. Do this. Put on these clothes. What do you want to name the children? Under the oppression my spirit began to chafe, yiss. She loved me, but only as a pet.”

  “Still,” I said, “you had good times.”

  “Oh yiss.” There was a soft light in his eyes. “They were magical, so many of our times. When we were sneaking away together, to make love in an isolated corner of the Chrysalis . . . that was bliss, my compeer.”

  I looked up at the Chrysalis, hovering over our heads like the Big Heavy Shiny Object of Damocles.

  “Do you think she’s up there?” I asked. “It was Adora who was the member of the Storch line. Shawn was the Feeney half of the alliance. He could only command the Chrysalis with the permission of his in-laws.”

  Tonio looked at the sky in wonder. His face screwed up as he tried to think.

  I rose and left him to his thoughts. I needed to do a lot of thinking myself.