Sex and Violence in Zero-G

by Allen Steele

  I looked at Saul. He was staring down the corridor, back toward the rec room. He glanced at me, meeting my questioning gaze with an unpitying expression.

  “Justice,” he whispered.

  At least until the bullets run out.

  7. THE WEIGHT

  October 6, 2061: the final day in the Jovian system before the Medici Explorer set out for its return to the Moon.

  The last hours were spent in preparation for the long journey home. The day before, workers from Valhalla Station had completed the load-in of helium-3 from barges to the three drone freighters. There had been little contact between the Callistians and the crew of the Explorer, save for the most perfunctory information exchanged over the comlink. Which was just as well; the Smiths wanted to leave Callisto as soon as possible and put the terrifying incident in the rec room behind them.

  Marianne Tillis reached Saul Montrose by radio and apologized profusely for the assault on his people, but offered no explanation for the gunshots we had heard before we had escaped the base, other than to say that the situation was now “under control.” She told the skipper that a report would be sent to ConSpace and the Pax which would fully disclose the circumstances surrounding B.F. LeRoy’s death, and assured Montrose that neither he nor his crew would be held responsible for the incident; she did not say, however, whether anyone else had been shot after we had left the scene. Yet she made a point of warning Montrose not to come back down to Valhalla Station, even when the captain asked if she wanted to send LeRoy’s body back to Earth aboard the explorer.

  “We have our own graveyard, Captain,” she said. “He’ll be buried there. Besides, you and your crew may not be very welcome down here right now.”

  “And the next mission?” Montrose asked.

  “I’ll leave that up to the Smiths’ good sense,” Tillis replied cryptically.

  To which Geoff Smith-Makepeace, usually the least opinionated of the family, offered a shorthand response that spoke for the feelings of the clan: “When hell freezes over.” Which was a fairly accurate description of Callisto itself.

  Two of Valhalla’s former station members, Casey Nimersheim and Jamie Van Sant, were only too glad to be going home, even though it meant that their contracts were being prematurely terminated. Before they were put into biostasis for the trip home, the women told Leslie that what had happened to her was not uncommon in Valhalla; both of them had been subjected to rape attempts by male crewmen, each escaping by only luck or happenstance. Leslie was not comforted by their stories; she swore to them that, once radio contact with Earth was possible, she would immediately file a report of her own and would demand that ConSpace send security personnel to Callisto to make sure that nothing like this ever happened again.

  Montrose agreed to second Leslie’s report, but warned her that ConSpace’s directors might not take immediate action. “The company’s primary interest is in keeping the pipeline open, Les,” he said, not unkindly. “So long as they get what they want, it really doesn’t care what happens to the people who work out here.”

  “Fuck you, sir,” Leslie said before she stormed off the bridge.

  And then there was the mystery of Jamie Van Sant herself. After all, she and Young Bill had disappeared from the rec room not long before the assault had taken place, and although Young Bill later admitted to the captain that the two of them had gone to her quarters, he insisted that “nothing” had happened. And, as Saul pointed out after he had received her records from Valhalla Station, Van Sant was almost eight years older than Young Bill; she was an adult while he was still a man-child. An infatuation, perhaps, but full-scale romance? Unlikely.

  Over the next couple of days before Yoshio sealed Jamie in a zombie tank, though, the two young people were nearly inseparable…and once, when Betsy visited the wardroom for a quick snack before reporting to duty, she discovered them in what she later described was “a true meeting of the minds,” although she refused to go into details.

  Were they or weren’t they? Old Bill and Lynn had better sense than to stick their noses where they didn’t belong, and although Saul grinned whenever the subject came up over the mess table and Young Bill was subjected to relentless teasing by Wendy and Kaneko, never once did the kid break silence. He grinned sheepishly and turned red when Geoff or Leslie made discrete inquiries, or glowered and stalked off when Uncle Yoshio tried to give him an obligatory lecture on sexual hygiene, but throughout he kept his own consul.

  The morning of the launch, when Yoshio put Jamie into biostasis, Young Bill escorted her down to the hibernation deck. He held her hand as Yoshio administered the drugs which would put her into an artificial coma, then stood beside the zombie tank until she was sound asleep, leaving only after his first-father summoned him by comlink for EVA duty.

  I was standing next to the hibernation bay hatch, waiting for Yoshio to give me a final physical, so I witnessed this scene as it took place. I was scheduled to be put into my own tank shortly after the Medici Explorer left Jupiter. When Young Bill finally turned away from Jamie’s tank and left the bay, he paused at the hatchway.

  “She’s going to Scotland with me,” he whispered, as a loopy, lovesick grin spread across his face.

  I smiled and slapped him on the shoulder. The teenager exited the compartment, heading up the arm toward the main airlock. Yoshio had me on the examination table and was breaking out his instruments when I heard a war-whoop from the access shaft.

  Yoshio raised an eyebrow. I tried to contain my smile. Neither of us dreamed that this was the last time either of us would see Young Bill alive.

  In space, death is quick and merciless. It often comes without warning; even the simplest mistake can snuff out a life in the time it takes for you to read these words. A thousand things can go wrong, and all it takes is a moment of carelessness. The hubris of the soul is no match for the relentless nature of the cosmos.

  One of the Explorer’s maneuvering engines had developed problems during the outbound leg of the voyage. In hindsight, I remembered that Saul had mentioned this to me after I had been revived from biostasis five days earlier. The engine wasn’t gimballing correctly; a secondary servomotor kept freezing up. Old Bill had corrected the glitch once before, but during pre-launch checkout he and Saul found that the problem had reappeared.

  Normally, this was something a ’bot would have been sent to fix, yet because Tiger had been left on Amalthea and none of the other robots were designed for this sort of task, a crewmember had to do the dirty work. Old Bill couldn’t do the job, though; his overexposure to radiation during the rescue mission had confined him to the interior of the vessel. This meant that Young Bill had to go EVA.

  He went out in the ship’s service bug, a tiny gumdrop-shaped vehicle with double-jointed RWS arms, used for in-flight repair operations. Bill had been thoroughly trained and checked out for the bug; indeed, this was the third time he had piloted it during a flight. While Betsy, his dad and Saul monitored from the bridge, he took the bug out from its socket on the hub, jetted around the ship’s rotating arms, and gently maneuvered the little one-person craft until he reached the maneuvering engines behind the radiation shield.

  The operation took less than an hour. A thermocouple had come loose again, just as his first-father suspected; following his instructions, Young Bill replaced it with a new unit. Saul and Old Bill ran a systems test, bringing the engine to pre-ignition status. The replacement held up, and Old Bill told his son to come home.

  Later, after the accident, I listened to the flight recorder tape.

  Old Bill: “Okay, that’s it…come on home. Over.”

  Young Bill: “Right. Be there in a minute. Over.”

  There was a brief pause, lasting a couple of minutes as the kid uncoupled the bug’s magnetic grapple from the fuselage, then: “Hey, I wanna try something neat…”

  Saul: “What’s that? Over.”

  Young Bill: “Wait. Watch the screen. You’ll see.”

  Old Bill: “Son, do
n’t go messing around out there…”

  Young Bill: “Don’t worry, you’ll love it. It’s a surprise. Over.”

  By now the bug had cleared the engine array and the shield. Young Bill should have taken the bug back the way he came, past the fuel tanks and around the rotating arms until he reached the hub. Everyone on the bridge was watching what he was doing…right up until the moment he impulsively decided to make a short-cut.

  Young Bill: “Here we go. Straight through the arms.”

  Saul: “Bill, don’t do it!”

  A half-second lapsed as the bug’s engine flared and the little vehicle raced for a momentary gap between the rotating arms. It was like making a dash between the twirling vanes of a windmill; it could be done, if your timing was right. Had Bill’s calculations been a little better, his wild stunt would have been just that, a reckless wager between life and death.

  He lost the bet.

  Arm Two slammed into the bug at two RPMs, squashing the tiny vehicle like a chestnut beneath a jackhammer. On the tape, his last cry was cut short by the implosion of the bug’s fuselage, and both noises are all but lost beneath the sound of his father’s anguished howl.

  In two seconds, Young Bill was dead.

  In the end, there was a shrouded corpse, sealed inside an airtight bag and wrapped within layers of white plastic and reflective silver foil, strapped to the outer hull of Arm One. It wasn’t the first time Medici Explorer returned from space with a body bag, but it was the saddest occasion; this time, the body was that of one of its own crewmembers.

  William Smith-Tate, Jr. would not to make his last voyage back to the Moon alone. The body of Marlon Bellafonte had already been lashed to the outside of Arm One. There was simply no way that could be kept within the vessel for the duration of the return voyage, and—contrary to the cliché fostered by dozens of films and novels—bodies of deceased spacers were not commonly jettisoned from airlocks. There would be no “burial in space” for Young Bill or Bellafonte, nor would they occupy graves in the harsh rocky ground of Callisto. From distant Earth they had come, and to Earth they would return.

  Captain Montrose and Yoshio Smith-Tanaka were the only crewmembers who were up to the grim chore; everyone else was in shock. They watched from the bridge as the two men, wearing hardsuits and magnetic overshoes, removed the shrouded body from the main airlock and gently hauled it to Arm One, whose rotation had been stopped after the accident.

  Save for the omnipresent background sound of purring, chattering electronics, the compartment was dead silent as the body was tied to the arm with nylon cords. Even the comlink had been turned down low so that Saul’s and Yoshio’s voices were only a faint whisper. Geoff gazed at the screen, his hands folded together in his lap, seemingly emotionless except for the trembling of his lower lip. Betsy’s face was turned away, watching the orbital patterns on her console’s holos; every now and then she raised a hand to daub away the tears which seeped from her eyes. Leslie held Wendy and Kaneko in her arms, trying to console the crying children even though she herself was on the verge of breaking down.

  As for William and Lynn Smith-Tate, they stood apart from the others near the back of the compartment, stoical as they watched their son being tied to the vessel’s outer hull. Lynn was groggy from the sedatives Yoshio had administered her after the accident, yet she clung to her first-husband’s shoulder, occasionally murmuring something under her breath, while Old Bill stared stolidly at the screen, never saying a word, his face rarely showing any emotion. His left hand was on his first-wife’s shoulder; tucked beneath his right arm was a leather-bound copy of The Book of Mormon.

  When Saul and Yoshio were finished, they stepped back from Young Bill, walking slowly across the hull on the magnetic soles of their boots. They said nothing, but Old Bill didn’t need a cue. He opened the holy book and, in an unnaturally soft and trembling voice, began to read from Alma, Chapter 40, Verses 11 and 12:

  “‘Now, concerning the state of the soul between death and the resurrection—Behold, it has been made known unto me by an angel, that the spirits of all men, as soon as they are departed from this mortal body, yea, the spirits of all men, whether they be good or evil, are taken home to that God who gave them life.’”

  He paused, swallowed hard, and went on. “‘And then shall it come to pass that the spirits of those who are righteous are received into a state of happiness, which is called paradise, a state of rest, a state of peace, where they shall rest from all their troubles and from all care, and sorrow.’”

  He closed the book, shut his eyes and lowered his head. “In the name of Jesus Christ, amen.”

  Young Bill’s funeral was still many months away. For the time being, this was the best anyone could do.

  “Amen,” Saul said at last over the comlink. His voice was hoarse. “Let’s secure for launch and get the…let’s get out of this place.”

  When I opened my eyes and raised my head again, the first thing I happened to see was the open hatch of the observation blister where Young Bill had spent so much of his time. The wingback chair within the tiny sphere was empty, the telescope eyepiece untouched since when he had last used it.

  As the Smiths quietly went to work, preparing the imminent departure of the Medici Explorer, for the first time since his death, I felt the sting of tears at the corners of my eyes.

  Two hours later, the Medici Explorer fired its main engines and began the long trip back to the inner solar system. Behind it followed its three freighters, each fully laden with helium-3; on the bridge screens, we could see the convoy as it moved out of parking orbit above Callisto, their engine-thrusts appearing as bright pinpricks against the starry sky.

  The mission had been completed. We were going home. There was no sense of accomplishment, though, only a hollowness within everyone aboard the vessel. The launch was carried out in a subdued manner, Saul listlessly murmuring the countdown to primary ignition, the rest of the crew performing their duties as if they were only going through the motions. The bridge was much more quiet this time. No one yelled with teenage excitement as we left Jupiter behind and began our long march through space.

  Shortly after launch, once all stations had been secured and everything had been put on automatic, the Smiths quietly excused themselves from duty and went below to the wardroom. What they said or did down there, I do not know, for neither the skipper nor I were invited to join them. Saul and I understood; it was time for the family to come together and share their grief in private.

  We remained on the bridge instead, standing third watch. Indeed, it would be my last watch on the Medici Explorer; in a few hours, I was scheduled to go down to the hibernation deck myself, where Yoshio would help me in a zombie tank and inject me with the drugs that would put me in suspended animation for the duration of the voyage. We sat together in the command center, the captain and I, sipping coffee, quietly watching the screens as Jupiter and its moons gradually receded behind us. There seemed to be little left for either of us to say to one another. Young Bill was gone; a hole had been punched in our hearts.

  After a time, though, the captain unbuckled his seat belt and rose from his chair. “Watch the deck for a minute, will you?” he said. “I’ll be right back.”

  I nodded, expecting him to visit the head, but instead he pushed himself over to the access hatch. In another moment he was through the hatch and down the ladder, leaving the command center in my care.

  I was now alone on the ship, for the first time since I had begun the long journey to Jupiter. All around me were holos and computer screens, randomly blinking lights and whispering instruments. The ship was alive, yet at the same time it was dead, as empty as the chairs around me.

  For the moment, I was captain of the Medici Explorer.

  I stood up and slowly walked around the bridge, stopping at the duty stations, touching the back of each chair. Here was where Betsy sat; here was Geoff s post. This was where Leslie monitored the life-support systems, and Old Bill sat here a
t the engineering console. Their places were vacant now, but the vessel seemed to function perfectly in their absence…

  Maybe it’s a little too much to ask of humans, to go out here, the cold depths of space where life is so fragile and madness lurks beneath the crusts of desolate worlds. Perhaps robots could do this work just as easily, if not better. No one mourned when Tiger was sacrificed on Amalthea; a ’bot has no family, no friends. No one will miss it save for the slight inconvenience its sudden absence poses. A robot can be replaced.

  People aren’t like that.

  So why are we out here?

  I was still standing in the center of the bridge, looking at nothing in particular, thinking about all I had seen, when Saul climbed back up the ladder. Lost in reflection, I didn’t notice his return until he tapped my shoulder.

  “He would have wanted you to have this,” he said softly as I turned around, then he placed something in my hand. Young Bill’s tennis ball, taken from its hiding place in the storage locker where I had found him playing handball.

  Gazing at the frayed yellow ball, I could still hear the relentless pounding it made against the walls and ceiling of the compartment. “You knew it was there?”

  He nodded. “Yeah, I knew about it…like I knew you would find him down there went I sent you to look for him.” He paused. “He liked you, Elliot. He had a family and a captain, but for a little while he had you for a friend. I’m glad you were here for him.”

  Even as I write these words, the events I’ve described millions of miles distant and nearly a year in the past, the ball is on a shelf above my desk. I have looked up at it often as I’ve composed this chronicle. Sometimes I take it down from the shelf and bounce it off the wall of my office. Yet this wasn’t Young Bill’s final gift.

  “Come here,” Saul said. “You need to see this.”

  He took me to the observation blister where Bill often sat, helped me into the bubble and strapped me into the chair, adjusted the periscope-like mount and showed me how to work the telescope. When I was ready, he backed out of the little sphere and sealed the hatch. I settled back in the wingbacked chair, pulled the binocular eyepiece against my face, and touched the stud on its handle which opened the shutter.