Losers in Space

by John Barnes

  Wow. The crowd is bigger, all right. Ultra bigger. At least three thousand people, fifteen times the usual, singing “Happy Birthday to You.”

  Inside, I can kick off the ridiculous shoes, stretch out on the concentration sofa, and watch the screen on the ceiling while I talk my way through the business’s affairs for the day. Everything is running perfectly, and there’s fresh mail from Perdita, which is now only eight months away, almost home—sliding into the retrograde pass at Jupiter to gravity-break. I close my eyes, visualizing Glisters and Wychee, on watch together, just the big view screen with all its stars. In my imagination they’re holding hands, and I smile about that.

  Glisters’s note is characteristically brief, dedicated to the details of the ship’s operation and urging me to pass it on to the design teams now building Imogen. Wychee runs a little longer, asking about this and that bit of gossip, clearly eager for some home time when she gets here. And Pop’s note is more of that lyrical stuff he loves to do; he used to say there was nothing cornier than an actor writing his own material, so I really struggle not to quote that to him now.

  I check the clock. More showtime ahead; notorious carnivore that I am, and this being my birthday, tonight I am expected, no, required, to be seen to dine upon fresh hot meat.

  Wednesday, April 3, 2143. Club MockStop, Avignon, District of Provence, Earth.

  He’s twenty-one, an ultrazoomed star re-entry boarder, the first guy to manage a full hypersonic circumnavigation at the equator. His hair is what kids now call ultravery, which means something like stare-worthy, and his clothes must’ve been on a fashion meed ten minutes ago. Nothing wrong with the less trendy parts, either—his muscles and the big dark eyes are getting to me like they’d’ve gotten to Cleopatra.

  He is the most fashionable accessory I can possibly wear in public on my birthday, or the most fashionable bit of meat I can possibly devour.

  He’s telling me stories about being very drunk and having fans fawn on him, interspersed with extremely technical stories of re-entry board rides he’s taken. If it were possible to be literally bored out of my skull, my skull would still be here and I would be snuggled up in my apartment in Tunis, and grateful for it.

  Still, even in disposing of a mistake, one must always think of exposure. I treat myself to a yawn, and his talk becomes a bit fast and nervous. Under the table I let the slit in my skirt open to flash more thigh for the cameras; he won’t know about that till he sees the meeds, which I’m sure he’ll do the instant he’s away from me and in the PersKab by himself.

  I press the rescue button that is discreetly under my belt at the hip, and a moment later my phone zizzes. I look at it, look concerned, say, “Yeah” and “On my way,” and then to the beautiful doofus in front of me, I say, “Excuse me, have to go.”

  This has probably never happened around him before; he doesn’t manage to say more than a sort of feeble “Yomph?” before I’m gone. I stride through MockStop, letting the maître d’hôtel flap after me like a pursuing chicken, out through the open front gates, directly into the crowd of celeb worshippers, and straight into the PersKab that the rescue button summoned. I suppose it’s a chance for a very patient or very lucky terrorist to bag me, but the image of fearlessness it creates is worth something, too.

  I fear I’m losing my touch; I was bored for about six minutes before I dumped Mr. Re-Entry Boarder. Though that’s the wrong title for the man, he could not possibly have been bored-er than I.

  In the PersKab I kick off the ridiculous shoes, loosen clothing, get comfy, and queue up the night’s reading. The PersKab climbs onto a public line, and I hurtle through Italy, across the great bridge into Sicily, and down the trans-Med tunnel, writing a short friendly note to F.B. and Marioschke, and a longer letter to Fwuffy, who, I’m afraid, has definitely become the brains of that outfit.

  Perhaps one night out in ten I meet someone whose eyes light up when I talk about the reports coming in from Perdita, plunging into the lower solar system at the highest speed human beings have yet achieved. Now and then one of my dates is so excited he or she brings up Miranda or Rosalind, now both outbound. There’s a rumor that I bedded the captains of both; it’s only true about one of them.

  Perhaps three, perhaps four times a year, I find that one of my companions for the evening—it’s always a celeb, I cannot afford obscurity—is not just a well-dressed ninny or a cunning and focused performer, but someone who really understands. When I do, there’s at least enough of an affair to do us both some good, and he or she goes away with some enhanced recognition and fashion standing—along with some chances to play around with the great toys in the labs at Tervaille Interstellar, and it’s from that, not from the affair, that a friendship usually blossoms.

  I’m so disappointed that didn’t happen tonight, especially on my thirtieth birthday. Mr. Re-entry Boarder had written me a couple of great letters and talked with me on net voice about things, and I thought he’d be fun; instead he was the classic handsome jock just waiting to be dragged off and used as a convenience, only able to talk about his jockly subjects. And it’s been lonely lately. I didn’t particularly want to use a partner but I could have used some company.

  April 3, 2143. Tervaille Estate, Tunis, District of Sahara, Earth.

  As my PersKab approaches my home, my phone zizzes. I pick it up even though I’ve checked and know it’s my date; perhaps I want to take my disappointment out on him. “Hi,” he says. “I happened to be in the neighborhood and wondered if the crisis was over yet. Ms. Courtland suggested I should see. I’m right by your front gate.”

  “You might as well come in, then,” I say. “I’ll meet you in my visitor’s foyer in ten minutes; the gates will be authorized to guide your PersKab there.”

  Ms. Courtland suggested I should see. With no you. Code phrase. Suddenly my heart is pounding and I’m trying not to grin; someone was setting me up for a very happy birthday after all.

  There’s something different about his expression in the foyer; I realize he either took an alcohol-removing shot in his PersKab on the way here, or he was playing blurry-and-out on me before. He gets to the point. “Ms. Courtland told me to go out with you, bore you till you got rid of me, turn up like this, and then work that phrase into the first thing I said.”

  “Well, so far, you’re following instructions, and I’m sure she gave you some others. What did you do at the café after you bored me?”

  “Oh, just ultra threw a tantrum. Also two wine bottles, more glasses than I can remember, and one chair, which hit the bottles behind the bar. I screamed that no bitch treats me that way. I think it is now clearly established that we are enemies.”

  “Very clearly.”

  “And next week I’m going to be doing a pro-am re-entry boarding event with Sir Penn Slabilis as my partner.”

  “Isn’t he a little old—”

  “He’s old, but if you’re strapped onto a hapless—you don’t know boarding at all, do you?”

  “Not a thing. And I’m afraid I wasn’t paying attention before.”

  “Courtland said if I just kept talking about the dullest things I could think of about re-entry boarding, you’d be the rudest date I was ever dumped by.”

  “Was I?”

  “Naw, Xera was worse. She’s a lot dumber and more vulgar than you could ever be.”

  “I hate coming in second at anything,” I say, and now I’m smiling, because I see where Courtland is going with this, and it’s about as perfect as a thing can be. “So it is now well established that you and I hate each other. Penn Slabilis, only recently emerged from grieving for his son who died in that mysterious accident, is doing charity re-entry boarding—”

  “Mainly because his fifth wife-to-be, who is nineteen, thinks boarding is hot,” he says. “Which it will be for him. While we are flying in tandem, at the beginning of the run, 180 kilometers up, his detector will be curiously defective, which means it won’t pick up the sudden, brief motion when I kick up the tail
of my board, lifting his tail, and putting him into a roll. He will be on a hapless, which of course is designed to bring a mannequin down unharmed and to override anything stupid the rider might do. His hapless, like all of them, will have a built-in restabilizer, but this one will not have a built-in restabilizer that works. So he’ll go into the atmosphere slowly rolling rather than board-to-the-air.”

  “And that’s bad?”

  “Bad sounds ultra judgmental. Bad in whose opinion?”

  “Good point. What will happen?”

  “In a roll, without a stabilizer, first the body leans backward—too much force to resist—and then the nose pitches the other way. You get lift in opposite directions, and the rotation gets faster and faster. Known as pinwheeling. Some of us do that as a stunt, on purpose. But we’re young and strong enough to crouch down and stabilize before it goes through the point of no return. If, say, an older guy with weaker abs and back had that happen, he’d spin till his rotation became fast enough to black him out, or till his arms got away from him and extended above his head. Either way, a little further into the atmosphere, the force will be great enough to start plucking off extended parts of the body, such as hands and forearms. Then the plasma starts to form, only instead of a nice comfy envelope of it surrounding you, if you’re rolling, you keep dipping into it. Eventually you get an effect rather like a match head.”

  I nod. “And you and I are known to be bitter enemies.”

  “We are.”

  I like his cockiness, his muscle… let’s face it, there’s something about the cold-blooded killer thing I like, too. I suppose some tastes are just incurable, even if we can learn to be more careful about them. Maybe I can ask him to spend the night. Someday.

  I ask, “When someone does me a big favor, isn’t there usually some reciprocal favor that comes with it?”

  “Two,” he says. “One’s purely for satisfaction, something it would make me happy to know. Years ago, it happens, an older cousin of mine, who you might remember—a fellow named Stack—”

  “Oh, my god. That’s who you look like.”

  He nods. “Sometime—and it doesn’t need to be now—you could tell me how Derlock Slabilis died. The meeds just said something about an out-of-control hopper?”

  “Hmm. An athlete who works partly in space would find the details interesting,” I say. “Well, Derlock was out on the moon in an open hopper, just taking the fast way to the other side of Armstrongia, up above the city dome. The engine fired a hot shot, sending him straight up at much more than escape velocity, and then the computer realized the mistake and brought the hopper back. Unfortunately, it was an open hopper, so when the restrain system failed, he flew out the top of the hopper at greater than escape velocity. So he left the moon and went into a very long, slow orbit around the Earth. Not that its being slow mattered much to Derlock; he wouldn’t have finished one one-thousandth of his first orbit before his suit ran out of air. He’s now an artificial satellite of Earth. Eventually he might impact the moon or Earth, or he might stabilize in a long-term orbit, but anyway, once he ran out of air and stopped shrieking, I would say the interesting part of the story was over.”

  And then he kisses me, and the boy can kiss. It’s definite. I’ll never lose the taste for cold-blooded killers. “We really shouldn’t,” I say, much as I am enjoying it. “We’ll get tempted to get together on the sly, and that could be evidence, after Sir Penn’s accident.”

  “Of course. Maybe we could think about resuming things when we’re on our way.”

  “On our way where?”

  “Can you figure out a way I can go on Imogen to Pandemonium? If it really does have a helium-II ocean, which means a superconducting ocean, then surfing on a magnetic board—since a magnet will levitate over a superconductor—”

  “Might be fatal, if anything goes wrong.”

  “Then I have to make sure nothing goes wrong.” He shows me that grin again.

  Maybe I will go on Imogen. I know I won’t be able to, I have to keep things going here, but maybe I’ll just decide I’ve been responsible long enough, by then. After all, Imogen is just being built now; it will be six years before she departs.

  He looks into my eyes and I see the expression that, nowadays, I seek constantly and find frequently. He’s another one of us. He says, “An adventure no one else has ever had.”

  “I hope I can be there to watch you try it,” I say.

  Just before midnight. April 3, 2143. Tervaille Estate, Tunis, District of Sahara, Earth.

  That evening, as I’m getting ready for bed, I’m considering. The Slabilises had to go, anyway; for what I’ll be doing in the next few years, no one who has done me so much damage so publicly can be allowed to appear to have escaped. The fact that their fate makes me smile is charming but irrelevant, like enjoying the expensive lifestyle that is needed to maintain my aura of power; the power is crucial, and the aura is essential, but the clothes, girls, boys, and toys are merely fun.

  Besides, I’ve played just as rough with people I didn’t even know, if they didn’t or couldn’t understand what I needed them to do. That silly pop singer that recorded “Glad I Iz a Gurl & Glad Gurlz Iz Dumm” actually was too dumb, even after what happened to Derlock, to realize that she needed to take our money, and our orders, and find some new themes. And she could hardly have mattered less in and of herself, but pop stars have been cheap since her shocking accident, which could have been prevented if she’d ever paid attention in science class, as certain meeds immediately pointed out.

  My privately commissioned studies of the mediasphere show that there’s a definite trend for smart to be zoomed, ambitious to be zoomed, and dedicated to be zoomed, in the songs and meeds the kids like best.

  It’s a mildly dirty business and therefore an intensely exciting one.

  Well. Glisters, Wychee, and F.B. will want to know. Marioschke and Fwuffy elected, long ago, to know nothing. For the three who choose to know I put, at the beginning of my enciphered letter, LUCIFER SHALL FALL. Then I tap out the usual, quick daily note about my life and how things are going; I try to say hi to them most nights.

  There’s another message from Glisters, one of the good ones he sends sometimes, with lots of pictures and recordings; this one is almost a half hour of life on Perdita. Pop looks great, younger than when he left; he and Glisters’s mom have become an item, and we joke often about being brother and sister. They’re doing the grav-brake trick across this week, a close pass at Jupiter in retrograde, bending around it and spilling speed; the pictures are awe inspiring, even if they’re just the ones that probes have been showing for 150 years, and though it’s corny, Wychee and Glisters posing, arms around each other, with Jupiter behind them, makes my heart leap up.

  Perdita is returning to a world where deep space exploration hasn’t been out of the news for three weeks at a time since they left; that took some doing. Along the way, though, I’ve reveled in luxury that Louis XIV couldn’t have had, had experiences that Jezebel and Nero couldn’t have dreamed of, and set an unbreakable record for recognition score.

  I don’t think that the forces I’m nurturing in the culture will sustain themselves, yet. If I go out on the next voyage of Perdita, or on Imogen after it—Glisters’s first command and I won’t be there—or the second voyage of Miranda… I keep thinking of later and later voyages. Truthfully I don’t think the cultural changes I’m forcing will ever self-sustain, without constant celebrity leadership, and right now there’s no other celebrity that can or will take the lead.

  I wonder how many times captains said to Prince Henry the Navigator, You ought to come with us, and whether he ever said, Maybe next time.

  I think about Perdita herself, a sweet, powerful, swift ship, and her even finer daughters; I think about what it would be like to welcome my new re-entry boarder friend back to the ship after he surfs Pandemonium’s ocean of half-a-kelvin helium. I think of the long watches with no one else in the cockpit, just the instruments reachi
ng far into the void, the stars on the screen, the sleeping ship around me.

  And my heart aches.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  SOMETIME LONG AGO, just after the rocks stopped falling and the seas of magma began to skin over, I proposed this idea to Sharyn November, via Ashley Grayson, and pointed out that I really didn’t know how it would end. This became one of the most accurate prophecies of my life.

  I am grateful to both of them for their patience while I found my way to the ending, and deeply grateful at having been told, repeatedly, Good is more important than soon. Saying that to me was probably the height of commercial irresponsibility, but it was very much what the book needed.

  Shelly Perron, the copy editor, greatly reduced the number of errors in this text (the remainder are all my fault, for those of you keeping track), and also asked a very large number of very smart questions that caused me to be much clearer about many different things.

  Obviously this book would not exist without ideas that I learned about from Buzz Aldrin; the chance to work with him was one of the reasons why I wouldn’t have wanted any other profession.

  This book had a very large number of titles before someone realized that Losers in Space was what the title should be; none of us can remember who first said, “Why don’t we just call it that?” So thanks and a shout-out to the Unknown Marketer.

  Howard Davidson, lifetime promoter of the hard in hard SF, nitpicked, which was invaluable. I got more things right because of Howard; I’m quite sure I didn’t get everything right, and that was because of me.

  About the very ending: the last two paragraphs were inspired by and are deliberate hommage to the conclusion of John Steele Gordon’s wonderful book Overlanding, a book which, when I was in my early twenties, held more romance than Mutiny on the Bounty, The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood, and The Prisoner of Zenda, combined, and which was indirectly responsible for some of the most treasured memories in my life. Sadly, much of the practical information in Overlanding is now hopelessly dated, most copies are long out of circulation, and it reflects a world that no longer exists. But since I myself am hopelessly dated, almost entirely out of circulation, and reflective of a world that no longer exists, I do hope someone, someday, will bring out a new edition. Meanwhile, if you see it, grab it.