Losers in Space

by John Barnes

  Despite the size, I can pass the big mud-colored box of quilts to Derlock like a really awkward beach ball, and he hooks it down right away.

  The red crate bucks and turns at every shove, and walks itself across the floor whenever we let go of it; it’s too heavy to lift, almost too heavy to shove, and since it’s basically a huge gyroscope, whenever it finally settles down it wants to stay right where it is. With enough dragging and shoving, we wrestle it into place, only to find we have to turn it 90 degrees to get a hook where it needs to be. It kicks and shoves like a cat in a shoe box, and Derlock and I get a couple bruises and use some language Pop wouldn’t have wanted me to use at a Revive the Family! rally, but at last we hook it down.

  “Conservation of angular momentum is not our friend,” I say to Glisters over the phone.

  “It’s not anybody’s. We’re using up a tenth of our only iceball just to get pointed in the right direction. Speaking of that, you might as well go to the coretube and grab a handhold; we’re seven minutes from the next thruster burst. It’ll be quite a lurch but not nearly as bad as that first one.”

  In the coretube, we see Wychee’s group coming out above us, and Emerald and Stack below. I’m trying to think of some appropriate phrase to reassure everyone when the wall of the coretube jumps at us, then slides sideways. For one instant I’m trying to hold on to a wall with my body extending horizontally. Weight swings around noseward in the coretube again, tugging at my hands on the handholds, but with only maybe half the force it had before. “Keep your grips,” Glisters warns over the speakers. “We’re only halfway through.”

  Another swing and shake, and the handholds seem momentarily to pull in opposite directions; my body swings out from the wall and then slowly drifts back onto it. My head seems to float, as if I’d just gotten off a carnival ride. Glisters says, “That’s it for this time, but according to the database you may experience vertigo or dizziness, which it says you should recover from in about three minutes at most.”

  “Time that off for us,” Emerald says, from far below. “Nobody let go or try to move around till Glisters says we’ve had our three minutes.”

  While we hang there, I hear sliding and thumping noises. “Glisters,” I say, “I want you to tell me nothing more came loose during that lurch.”

  “I know you want me to tell you that, but it’s not true,” he says. “The bad news is that seven more things are all the way off the hook, and they’re sliding around. And nine more hooks loosened to yellow. But most of what you’re hearing moving was already off the hook, and you guys just hadn’t gotten to it to rehook it. And our three crews got fourteen crates re-hooked on that first—”

  “Fourteen?” Derlock demands, outraged. “But Susan and I only re-hooked three!”

  “You had the two most awkward objects this round,” Glisters points out, reasonably. “And Wychee’s crew got eight because they had several lightweight ones that had landed on empty stretches of wall; they just hooked them where they were and were done.”

  “But we did a damn good job!” Wychee shouts from overhead. “And we’ll hook the most this round, too!”

  “Is that a bet?” Derlock says.

  “It’s one with us, at least,” Emerald calls from down below. Stack is grinning, nodding, and socking one hand into the other; it’s easier to gesture with a floor to stand on, but I wonder what it was like being shaken around down there during the thruster lurch.

  “You’re on!” Wychee says. Seeing Derlock’s eager nod, I say, “Count us in, too!”

  “All right,” Glisters says, “and I’m your scorekeeper. Sounds like everyone is feeling basically okay? Your three minutes are up in fifteen seconds, so on my mark—texting your directions to you now… ready—go!”

  I clamber into the hatch for Cargo Wall 13 and Derlock follows me. Gravity is now much lighter than lunar but the precession is worse, and it’s just a touch harder to balance.

  Our first little lost package is a meter-diameter sphere that seems to weigh nothing; it’s a Renaissance painting packed in aerogel, and I just swing it onto the nearest hook and lock it. Meanwhile Derlock wrestles a big crate of preserved pizzas from some place called Mario’s; it doesn’t weigh much but it has the same inertia it would anywhere, so it’s big and awkward. It takes him a couple of swings to snug it in where he can fasten its hook. We relock eight yellow-marked hooks and we’re done with Cargo Wall 13. “Need more to do, Glisters,” I say, just before his text pops up, telling us to go back up to Cargo Wall 14.

  “Sorry,” he says, “some fresh stuff came loose up there. I’m keeping stats on relocking the hooks, too, by the way, and you’re ahead on that.”

  “Just so we get our full score,” I say. Derlock and I rehook seventeen objects and make it down to Cargo Wall 8 before Glisters asks us to go to the coretube for the next thruster burst.

  As we work back to the coretube, Derlock says, “If we do starve to death out here, at least we can dress beautifully for our last world-class meal on gorgeous furniture. Somehow this doesn’t seem like my idea of ‘pioneer supplies.’”

  “Yeah,” I say. “Like Pop says, even the real stuff is fake now. The Martians are supposed to be adventurous pioneers on a frontier world, but robots do everything hard or dangerous. Mostly Martians just drive between sites to watch the robots work, type messages to decide what the robots should do next, and change clothes and sex partners, and throw parties and snits, same as they would in California.”

  “And no beach.” He opens the coretube hatch.

  “Actually, they even have that. Great big wave tank under glass, where one-third g makes a great surfer out of anyone, the water’s always just comfortable temperature, and there aren’t any sharks or much of any other way to get hurt.” We hang face-to-face in the coretube. “Aunt Destiny surfed there once and her note to Pop was hilarious. I’m really going to miss her.” I say it quietly, styling dignified brave grief, watching for his reaction. Derlock watches me with all the emotional involvement of a python watching a rat.

  A month ago that would have been so zoomed; a week ago it would have been so infuriating; now it’s so irrelevant.

  7

  ALL THE GLORY WE CAN EAT

  April 25, 2129. On Virgo, upbound Earth to Mars. 149 million kilometers from the sun, 166 million kilometers from Mars, 3.8 million kilometers from Earth.

  THE WORLD WHIRLS wildly, spins differently, arrests and restarts, in a flurry of thruster shots. With only a little difficulty, I hang on to the wall and my breakfast. In the next round, Derlock and I, working our way down, meet Emerald and Stack, working their way up, halfway through Cargo Wall 2.

  They’re contemplating a blue-gray suspended-animation container the size of a vacation cabin. Even with the wrong-way gravity now down to 7% of Earth’s, we can only budge the monstrous box slightly once Wychee’s crew finishes and joins us.

  “According to the manifest,” Glisters says over a local speaker station, “this is Category Y, Type 4. If they have to abandon ship, Category Y is the next thing they save after the passengers, crew, and ship’s pets. According to the steward’s notes, this is ‘Pets in Suspended Animation.’ With one footnote: ‘Fwuffy.’”

  “Fluffy?” Emerald asks.

  “Fwuffy. With a w. And that’s all I have. So it’s someone’s pet or pets—”

  “Pets?” Emerald says. “Even if half the space in there is suspended animation machinery, that box still has room for a four-horse team, half a dozen bears, or a whole pack of Great Danes. A fwuffy must be some geneered pet species. Anyway, on the side I’m looking at, it says, upside down, THIS END UP, NO TOLERANCE, DO NOT SHAKE OR TEMPORARILY OR PARTLY INVERT right next to an arrow that is pointing straight down. N-nillion red lights are flashing, on two different panels on different sides; there’s a few green, but it’s mostly flashing red, and most what’s not flashing red is yellow. One corner is smashed in.”

  “Okay,” Glisters says. “I can’t get very much info at th
is end, either. It looks like it fell from the cargo wall overhead and slid around; it’s a miracle it didn’t smash on the nose bulkhead. Too many required fields overwritten with blanks and N/A; a pro hacked this one into the system, I’d say, so for sure it’s semi-contraband—not an atom bomb or a load of happistuf, but not quite in bounds legally.”

  “Great,” Emerald says. “So it’s criminal, undocumented, upside down, heavy, broken, showing flashing red lights,… can anything else be wrong with it?”

  “Well, if it dies,” Glisters points out, “with suspended animation failing, we will have tonnes of rotting fwuffies in the part of the ship where we mainly live.”

  “My next engineer is going to be an incurable optimist.”

  “And your ship is going to stink, Commander. I don’t make the news, I just report it.”

  Emerald looks around at the group. “Well,” she says, “sooner or later, as Glisters gets the ship stabilized—”

  “The ship is doing that automatically,” Derlock points out.

  “Sooner or later, as Glisters does the things that make the ship stabilize itself, which most of us couldn’t do in n-nillion years and some of us insist on sniping at,” Emerald says, “the gravity will be along the cargo wall and out toward the hull again, and a few tonnes of dying fwuffies will smash into the window. Anyone care to bet that that will make things better? So at the least we need to stabilize it, somehow, before we’re back to regular milligrav.”

  No one argues with her. I’m beginning to think that Glisters and I have great taste in commanders.

  “All right, then.” She looks around at all of us, then back at the speaker. “Glisters, before we go any further, can we just dog it down in place?”

  “That will keep it from smashing anything else but otherwise it won’t solve the problem. It’s already had ultra too much acceleration in ultra too many bad directions. Besides, the control panel you need to fix the thing—if it can be fixed—is on the top, right where that arrow is pointing, so you need to turn it over. I think you’ll have to turn it at least enough to access the top, unblock the front, and aim the bottom at the windows. Sorry, I realize that sucks.”

  “I hate not wringing your neck just because you’re right.” Emerald turns to me. “Okay, you took all that high-end math and topology and stuff. What’s the minimum number of turns to get it upright?”

  I’ve been standing here thinking about just that. “Two. First we rotate it about 90 degrees to get FRONT pointed that way”—I point—“so there’s empty space to tip it into. That won’t be so bad. Then we do the real bastard, tip it 90 toward the hull. That will get TOP pointed toward the coretube and the bottom toward the windows.”

  With all of us pushing on corners, we just manage the first move.

  Tipping requires much more effort. Glisters finds us a tool locker along the outside of the coretube where there are crowbars, pulleys, hooks, cable, and lengths of pipe. With Stack, Fleeta, and me on one corner pushing down on a crowbar, and Emerald, F.B., and Derlock at the other, we lift one side of the crate enough for Wychee to roll the pipe lengthwise under the gap. We sink hooks into the raised edge and run lines to them through two triple-advantage block and tackle rigs, attached to a bracket on the handling floor. Stack has a couple of scary moments getting that rigged, and then has to go down to the nose and climb back around to rejoin us.

  With all of us pulling like two crazed tug-of-war teams next to each other, the crate slowly tips up, up, and over, crashing down on its side. TOP and FRONT are pointed the right way. Two cargo hooks are close enough to reach, and then we run cable from two of its attachment rings to two more cargo hooks. Nobody wants to have to do this job over.

  Another two red lights are flashing when we’re done.

  On the now-exposed control screen, I touch AUTOCHECK.

  A clear, pleasant female voice says, “Severe damage to nine support systems. Specimen harmed on four fatal and eighteen non-fatal identifiables. Death delay system will prevent permanent death for two to six hours. Press AUTOCHECK for options.”

  I push AUTOCHECK again.

  “Currently workable options are, option 1, painless euthanasia”—a red button labeled PAINLESS EUTHANASIA NOT REVERSIBLE appears on the touch screen—“with three days of follow-on refrigeration to allow time for disposing of remains. Option 2, release specimen from suspended animation without restoration.” The next button that appears is also red, and is more prosaic than the voice; it says IMMEDIATE DUMP. “Unrestored specimen cannot survive if released,” the voice goes on to explain. “Option 3, commence restoration with full repair.” The third button to appear on the screen is blue, not red, and it says RESTORE & REPAIR.

  Em reaches past me and pushes it. Her even gaze meets my startled reaction. “Susan, that’s the only one that doesn’t kill it, and I won’t kill someone’s pet.” I must still look dubious, because she says, “Just thinking about how I felt when I lost my cat named Dog. You told me last night you had a dog, too. I don’t know about you, but…” She shrugs in a mute plea for understanding.

  I do understand; I understand so well I’m having trouble putting the words together to tell her. Back when Pop started dragging me out on all the Revive the Family! tours, we started putting poor old Stanley into suspended animation all the time. He was afraid of it—I don’t know why, it doesn’t hurt—but every time, as soon as he saw that tank, he whined and yelped and tried to hide behind me. And then he always came out of it pathetically begging for attention, and just wasn’t the same dog for weeks; sometimes he’d have to go back in before he was recovered from the last time.

  He was so crazy and miserable, and besides they told me he was really old anyway, so I agreed to let them turn the suspended animation off and let him just die in his sleep in the tank. They did that while I was on the moon getting felt up on camera, and Fleeta was destroying her brain.

  Emerald is looking at me expectantly, and repeats, “I just don’t want to be the kind of people who kill other people’s pets.”

  I think, Yeah, we don’t kill people’s pets, and that just feels right, down in my bones. I can feel my smile escaping onto my face. “Well, I sure hope it doesn’t turn out that a fwuffy is a shark with wings.”

  The female voice from the container says, “Anticipated complete restoration in about thirty-five hours.” The screen displays a countdown that starts down from 35:00:00, and a single button that says REVIEW SPECIMEN STATUS. When I push it, it puts up a screenful of tiny graphs, not one of which means anything to me.

  Glisters’s voice breaks in, “If you all are ready, I think I’ve been able to plan out rehooking the loose stuff in the tail end to go a lot faster,” he says. “And it’s still about forty minutes till the next thruster lurch. Emerald and Stack are ahead with twenty-eight hookups, then the other two teams are tied at twenty. Derlock and Susan are ahead for fixing yellows, with forty-four; then Wychee’s team with thirty-eight, and Emerald and Stack at twenty-four. Shall we continue the race?”

  It’s unanimous, and soon we’re all scrambling down to our start points on the tail side of the pod. He’s given Derlock and me the tail bulkhead, sent Emerald and Stack to Cargo Wall 58, and put the others at Cargo Wall 88. Derlock and I drop swiftly down the coretube, slowing ourselves on the grips as we go, because at 7% of a g, falling 500 meters in one plunge still means you’re going almost 100 kilometers an hour when you hit the floor.

  “We’re going to win this thing, Susan. No sense playing if you don’t play to win.”

  We’re done by the next thruster lurch, partly because Glisters has done a better job of planning and mostly because we’ve now all had enough practice to do things quickly. Even poor, awkward F.B. seems to have the hang of it, and the routine repositioning and rehooking that took me or Derlock a couple minutes is now something we do literally one-handed in seconds before bounding to the next container. Derlock and I come out the winners—we rehooked forty-one reds and reset fifty-two yellow
s. “All the glory we can eat,” I say, smugly, as the group stands around waiting for Glisters to figure out what’s next.

  Fleeta says, “Uh, not to be all complainy or anything, but could we eat sometime?”

  I’m hungry the moment she says it. Looking around, it looks like so is everyone else. Emerald says, “Okay, let’s eat somewhere near the cockpit so we can make sure Glisters does, too, because I’m betting he’ll be just as obsessed by running the ship as he was with splyctering porn, and we can’t afford to have him forget to take care of himself. Do we have a volunteer for figuring out lunch or do we just all go looting?”

  “I cook,” Wychee says.

  “Actually you’re really good at it,” Emerald says, “but I was hoping I wouldn’t be forced to use my inside information to get you to do it.”

  “Well, I’d rather eat my own cooking than most other people’s. I need two helpers—”

  “I don’t know anything,” F.B. says, “but I’d like to learn, so I’ll help, Wychee.”

  “Me, too,” Fleeta says. “Besides you’re nice to work for.”

  I make the note to myself that Wychee obviously has a gift for getting work out of the awkward squad, and raise her a couple more points on my usefulness scale.

  Emerald nods with satisfaction. “All right, kitchen crew created and I didn’t have to do anything. Everybody be sure to remember my brilliant leadership when Ed Teach is putting together the meed about us.” Then a thought wipes the smile off her face. “Before I forget again, did anyone find Marioschke while we were rehooking?”

  “About an hour ago she was sitting on the end of Cargo Wall 28, looking out at the stars and om-ing like a hive of hornets,” Wychee says. “I got her to say about five sentences. She intoned like she was trying out for First Chair Oracle. She’s trying to peacefully accept her oneness with the universe so she can actuate her potential and do whatever it is that a person with an actuated potential does on a wrecked spaceship.”