by Yoss
The anti-Psi collar. The collar no living being could possibly remove once it had been snapped around his neck.
Okay, so Vasily had done it anyway. A good thing, too.
Now I understood what those flying ants were doing there (indeed, by now they were all gone), and most of all, what was behind our miraculous escape. Psi powers at play once more. Gaussical versus Gaussical. My friend hadn’t done anything wrong. How could I have thought otherwise? Analyzed objectively: without his ability to manipulate probabilities, a Chimera taking on a shuttle is a fight between a shark and a sardine. A canned sardine. All the odds were against our survival.
“How…?” I was about to ask him, pointing toward the collar, but he interrupted me.
“Old pickpocket’s trick. For all the good it did us. We’re still screwed. That Makrow is a lot more powerful than me; I know that now for sure.” He pointed at an insistently blinking light on the control panel. “Or he’s had more time to practice, especially over the past few days. We got away, but not undamaged.” He unfastened the belts on his safety harness and floated across the cabin to the pressure suit closet. Of course: the first system to fail is always the artificial gravity. He gave a long sigh. “If there’s one thing I learned when I got caught, it’s that sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, but most of the time you win and lose, both at once. Like now. I hope for our sake that whoever owned these suits kept the breathing devices in better shape than my Romani friends—because I think we’re going to spend a long, long time stuffed into them.”
“Alright, but if they were going to hit us, did it have to be right in our main power generator? Let’s see, we have to cut the power cycles or we’ll explode.” Talking to myself, another custom that I’ve noticed helps calm the humans at tense moments. I started punching the switches again, turning off the reactor and jettisoning the energy crystals in an attempt to get the damn red radioactive leak indicator light to turn off. At last I managed it—but the cabin lights abruptly went dim, and I cursed again.
Of course the primary electrical system would also have to be disconnected now, too. Luckily, my eyes work in much dimmer light than a human’s. The emergency circuit lights gave off a faint yellowish glow under which Vasily’s face took on a sickly hue.
“Oof, that was close. How come it hasn’t exploded already?” I breathed easier once the alarming red light disappeared from the control panel and a bit of power returned. Not all of it, though. It didn’t take a genius to figure out that trying to restart the main engine would leave us completely in the dark. “Well, good thing you noticed in time. We’re stuck here, but the life-support system will hold up. All we have to do now is send out a Mayday and they’ll find us—sooner or later. That is, if those guys ever turn off their interference curtain.”
“They won’t. But that isn’t why I don’t think you should try the radio again.” Vasily was already putting on his space suit, an older model but supersophisticated compared with what the Old Man’s people were using on the Estrella Rom. “It doesn’t matter if the support system holds up. We gotta get out of here. With all the energy you jettisoned just now, the Chimera’s detectors will find us in no time if they’re looking for us, and I guarantee you they are. So after letting them triangulate us with their radio direction finder, you might not even have time to get your suit on—especially if you keep moving so slow.” With a snort, he grabbed another suit from the storage space and with a push floated it my way through the darkened cabin. “Come on, Raymond, we don’t have time to waste. We’d better be well clear of this shuttle when that warship gets here or shrapnel from the explosion could get us. I know it would take the worst kind of bad luck, but when Gaussicals are involved you never know.”
I stared at him. Had he really forgotten that I’m not human? “Thanks for your concern, but I don’t need a suit, Vasily.” I took off my own safety harness. “Did you forget that pozzies don’t breathe?”
“Forget? No way, Dick Tracy,” he taunted me as he finished adjusting his suit and locking his helmet on. “How could I? Woulda been real nice for me not to need to breathe either right now. Thing is, we don’t know how many days we’ll have to float around in this dull asteroid soup before we get picked up, and I’m not planning to go crazy talking to myself the whole time. Big defect in the hyperrealistic android design: you don’t have a radio system built into your structure, do you?”
I nodded, understanding at last what he was getting at: maybe I don’t need air to exist (“live” wouldn’t be quite the right word), but without a hermetically sealed space suit my compressor couldn’t supply me with air to talk with, and we wouldn’t be able to exchange ideas and keep a grasp on sanity.
In silence I took off my fedora, carefully folded it, placed it in an inner pocket of my trench coat, and started climbing into the old pressure suit. I wondered how Vasily planned to hold a conversation without breaking radio silence. I decided it wouldn’t be long before I found out.
Eight
“Hey Raymond, you asleep?”
“What a question, Vasily—you know I’m not.”
“You should try it sometime. Zoning out might do you some good. Tell me something, pozzie: they say the aliens copied you guys’ personalities from real humans that got executed. Remember anything about what you were before? Cop or robber? You know I’m joking, but don’t you miss having dreams?”
“Cute idea. You think that makes us some sort of resuscitated zombies? No, sorry, those are just rumors floating around the System, Vasily. I was never alive, so I don’t miss what I never had. But if you really want to know, sometimes I dream while I’m awake.”
“About electric sheep?”
“Good one. I didn’t know you were a Blade Runner fan. But it so happens I have a friend on the Burroughs whose name is Deckard, would you believe it, and he loaned me the novel and the movie. They’re both good.”
“Wow, a well-educated cop and everything, I’m in luck. Anyways, what do positronic police robots dream about? Catching criminals, or pozzie women?”
“You know we don’t have sex, Vasily. But work isn’t everything for us, either. For example, right now I’m dreaming how sweet it would be if a micrometeorite cracked your helmet and shut you up, once and for all.”
“Ha. Nice. Piece of advice, robot: instead of dreaming, try praying. And you know what? I love you too, Raymond.”
We were floating through the infinite void, nothing above and nothing below, our helmets held tight against each other. With his extraordinary engineering skills, Vasily had figured out how to tie us together, harness to harness, so our helmets would be in contact and we could talk. There’s no sound in a vacuum, but it travels fine through solids. Vasily’s words resonated through my whole suit.
“I always thought there wouldn’t be any room to move around in the asteroid belt, but look how empty this is. A guy could die of boredom. I’d even take a comet passing by now and then, it’d make a nice show.”
“Vasily, at the speed we’re going, we could float for thousands of years even inside the rings of Saturn without running into a particle larger than an atom. Space is mainly a vacuum—didn’t they teach you that in school?”
“Yeah, and they also taught me not to squeeze my pimples, and that reality really exists and isn’t just an illusion of our senses. But I guess they didn’t teach me very well: I’ve always squeezed my pimples, and don’t you think the asteroid belt is maybe as crowded as I said, it’s just that we see it like this?”
“You’re starting to worry me, Afortunado. Maybe we’ve been floating here for too many hours. Look me in the eye. That’s the way to solipsism. You’re starting to deny reality, and you’ll end up saying you’re God.”
“….”
“Don’t you go quiet on me, for the love of—whatever it is you love. Talk to me. Dammit, talk to me!”
“Chill, Raymond. I’m not that far gone. Or did you forget I spent three years in the hole on your pretty little station and st
ayed sane? I was just joking. And I wanted to find out how positronic robots cursed.”
“Heh. I love you too, Vasily, you know?”
“Good thing, because as tight as we’re tied together, if we didn’t love each other—”
The damned destroyer had found our shuttle just five minutes after we abandoned ship. But they didn’t open fire and obliterate it, as we had hoped; Makrow was an old dog who knew all the tricks, and he must have known the shuttle would be empty and undefended. In any case, they checked to be sure. We hid behind a couple of frozen clouds and watched as a figure in a pressure suit, which from its enormous size could only have been the Colossaur ex-bagger, left the pirate ship and entered ours. I cursed myself for neglecting to rig up at least an explosive booby trap in the airlock or something. We could have been down one enemy. Like I said, after everything’s over it’s easy to see where you slipped up.
“Raymond, do you believe in God?”
“Good question. I guess not. It hasn’t been proved that such an entity is real. But I don’t have enough material to deny his existence either. Let’s say: I have no opinion. I’m a skeptic, waiting for evidence.”
“I understand. For us humans it’s easy: God was the one who created us in his image and likeness. You guys, on the other hand, knowing you’re the aliens’ creatures—I guess it’s better to deny God than to accept a god like that. If I had to pray to a Grodo I’d die of shame.”
“It isn’t that easy, Vasily. If byzantine arguments and theological muddles are your thing, try this one: God used the aliens and the humans to create us, as a living symbol that we’re all equal before Him. I’m not going to defend the idea, but doesn’t it seem perfectly possible? We pozzies would be the best of both cultures.”
“Hey, buratino, that ain’t bad if what you wanna do is pump up your ego. But let’s change the subject or I’ll start to believe that God created the universe for my own personal suffering. How old are you, Raymond? Did you have any sort of childhood?”
“You gotta stop with the dumb questions. You know perfectly well all pozzies are the same age, fifty-seven. We were all created when the aliens arrived, when the William S. Burroughs was built. And we were born—or rather, assembled—as adults. Who would have any respect for a child police officer, even if he was a robot? Better we talk about you, Vasily Fernández. How did you choose this life?”
“Sorry, Raymond, nobody chooses to be a crook. It’s what you do for survival when you got no other options. How many possibilities you think a kid like me—no parents, no family—had? Was I supposed to mortgage forty years of my life so a corporation would pay for my studies and let me become an engineer? Or maybe buy a ship, become a trader, and haggle with aliens on your station? Yeah, I could have done that, I guess—but it never occurred to me. I was too worried each morning might be my last. The life of a child alone in the world ain’t easy. It don’t get any better when you’re a teenager alone. So—look here, buddy, let’s quit gabbing for a while, before I say a couple of things you wouldn’t want to hear.”
“Okay, Vasily, as you wish.”
After a thorough search to be sure the shuttle was empty, the bad guys blew it up, of course. Good thing we were far away. Then the Chimera started hunting in the vicinity like a shark circling a shipwrecked sailor’s raft.
Five days had gone by since then. Not a minute more or less. It occurred to me that having a computer built into your brain can sometimes be a defect. I figured my pal must have already lost his sense of time, if not his mind altogether. In a way I envied him. He was beyond all responsibility. Not me. I had to keep talking to him, constantly, even when he refused to answer: if anything stood between him and madness, it was my being here, always trying to strike up conversations, which began to seem more and more incoherent to me.
“Raymond, where’d we screw up?”
“Huh?”
“You know. Those two novels by your guy Chandler you told me from memory—in the end, the good guys always win. Maybe they get beat up and arrested and worse along the way, but they win. So, what did we do wrong?”
“Well, it isn’t all over yet. Sometimes real life isn’t like a novel.”
“Hey, that was supposed to be my line! Look, I think our problem is, I ain’t one of your honest but unorthodox private eyes. I ain’t even a cop, just another crook. Fighting fire with fire don’t always work, looks like.”
“That’s not your fault, Vasily. You did your part, and you did it well. You went above and beyond. If you hadn’t put your powers to work, most likely we wouldn’t be here now, and I’m very grateful to you for it.”
“No problem. But for all the fun we’re having, they shoulda just gone ahead and fried us with the particle beam. At least it woulda been a quick death.”
“Don’t be silly. Where there’s life, there’s hope.”
“Raymond, do me a favor, spare me the clichés. At this point, if God himself don’t save us, you might be the only one with any hopes of… living, if that’s what you call it. Tell me: the gas exchange membranes in my tank are filling with toxins, right? How much longer do you think I can hold out?”
“No, Vasily, what are you saying? Everything’s fine. You have space paranoia, that’s all. Talk to me.”
“What if I don’t feel like talking?”
“Then I’ll talk. Look, let me tell you another Chandler novel you haven’t heard yet. It’s called Farewell, My Lovely.”
“What’s it about?”
“A big guy—huge, mammoth, very badly dressed, just got out of prison and he’s looking for his little girlfriend.”
“Hey, don’t sound bad. But no thanks, maybe some other time. Raymond, could I ask you a favor?”
“If it’s anything I can do, I’d be happy to, Vasily.”
“Shut up for a while. You talk so much I can’t hear myself thinking.”
The bad guys hadn’t called off their search. Makrow and company were patient and meticulous, and they knew what was at stake if they didn’t find us. They passed within thirty or forty yards of us a couple of times. Good thing our suits contained hardly any metal and we maintained strict radio silence. Good thing, too, that Vasily’s powers seemed to work even when he wasn’t fully conscious of our situation.
Just two things worried me. If they couldn’t find us, neither could our theoretical rescuers—at least not any time soon. And, though I persisted in telling Vasily otherwise, I thought the biomembranes that were supposed to purify and recycle the air in his suit really might be too old to last until we were picked up—not before poisoning him with the waste from his own metabolism. I took the only precaution at hand, improvising a connection between his suit and mine. Since I don’t breathe, my suit’s membranes might give him a few more hours of life. But they were probably pretty old too, so unless a miracle materialized soon, my friend was doomed, like he said. As for me—it would be ironic for a pozzie like me to work his ass off to save a human criminal and then end up alone and forced to choose between Chacumbele’s inelegant suicide escape and sinking into boredom for the rest of time.
“You know, the more I analyze every move we made, I can’t see where we made a mistake, Raymond. It ain’t fair. We done everything right, but we never had a chance of winning. All ’cause of that damn Chimera. It oughta be against the law for bad guys to have better weapons than the good guys, don’t you think?”
“Whatever you say, Vasily.”
“Come on, robot boy. You think I’m such a goner, you gonna say yes to every stupid thing comes outta my mouth? How about you untie me and let me take a walk around that asteroid? Just to take a leak. You know what taking a leak is, I figure, even if you don’t have to waste time on such details.”
“Sorry, Vasily, I can’t. The straps must have gotten damp, nothing perceptible, maybe just a few water molecules per square inch, but that’s all it took. The harness knots are frozen solid, and I don’t have an anchor point to stand on so I can cut them. If I tried, we’d
both spin out of control.”
“Hmm. You’re sharp, henchman. Sounds logical, almost possible, but I ain’t convinced. Raymond, you think I’ll make it out of this?”
“As much as I will, Vasily, for sure.”
“Not much consolation, but whatever, something’s something. Know what? In the holovideos, when the hero’s about to die, he always tells the other guy to give his mother this or that, or put flowers on some dude’s grave, or tell some girl he wasn’t a coward in the face of danger. I got nothing like that to ask you to do for me, and frankly I don’t care. When I’m gone—the hell with the world.”
“I could always go tell Old Man Slovoban that you gave everything you had trying to avenge him. And give him another suit for his collection. I could tell him that your final thought was for him.”
“Ha, that I’d love to see. I doubt they’d let you inside the Estrella Rom without me, much less let you get near the Old Man. But I bet you could shoot your way in and give him the suit, if you really wanted to. You’d do that for me, Raymond? Knowing I’d never find out, never thank you for it?”
“You could thank me now, in advance—what do you think? And yes, I’d do it in your memory, if you’d like.”
“I don’t think you’ll get the chance, but thanks all the same.”
“Oh, so you don’t think they’ll find me either, at least not before the Old Man dies of old age?”
“They’ll find you, they’ll find you. You can sit tight for a thousand years, if that’s what it takes. But by then there probably won’t be much left of the Estrella Rom—see what I mean?”
“Oh. Makrow and Weekman will put two and two together and get Slovoban. But don’t you think the Romani defenses can take on the Chimera?”