by F P Adriani
The panel beeped an incoming communication from Earth, and I hit what I thought was the right lever—but I wound up disconnecting the transmission.
Groaning now, I eyed the manual again. The second beep came. And I hit another lever, saw James’s face before me, saw his mouth moving, but I wasn’t getting any sound.
I threw up my hands at the image, but then I couldn’t tell if he was even getting a video-feed from me.
“Oh goddammit,” I said, cutting off the communication. That lever seemed to be the easiest one to identify and use on this panel. I got the feeling that the ship’s owners didn’t want people to linger too long on the line because then the calls would cost the ship more than the flat Communications-fee passengers paid….
The third someone-is-calling beeping sounded. I hit the same levers in a different order; then I hit a few more—and I finally got both audio and video on James.
“What the fuck’s going on?” he asked through a heavy frown. “You appear then disappear.”
“I’ve been having trouble operating this old panel on this old ship.”
“I hope this is secure, Thirteen.”
“It says so on my end. Though I admit my observations right now might not be too reliable because I’ve taken a relaxant. Lotta difficulty with cranium-ache on this flight.”
“Well, you need to get over it.”
I was about to say, “Fuck off,” but he kept on talking: “I want to put you on something and it isn’t a relaxant. It’s a job. That 1090 ring—there have been signs of something, including a few unexplained disappearances.”
My anger flared, but it was through a red-with-worry face. “You said there was nothing from my past going on!”
“I only just got this info in.”
“Yeah, right, I believe that.”
A pause; his blue eyes stared my way. “If you’re not going to trust anything I say now that you’re reinstated, I don’t see how we can go very far here.”
“I’m not interested in going very far—I’m interested in surviving, and that’s it! When I’m done with my issue, I’m done.”
“But there’s a courier job I need you for—”
“Find someone else.”
“But, it’s on the Moon. And seeing as you’ll be near there….” He let his voice fade away meaningfully.
I ground my teeth together behind my lips. “I’m not getting involved around that sick ring again.”
“But it may be related to your killer.”
“My maybe killer. I’m not dead yet.”
I felt angry at him still. But, assuming he was telling the truth, he had a point: the timing of the slavery ring rearing its sick head and my getting death-threats seemed too coincidental. There was a chance that working on the former might help me solve the latter.
I was sighing as I began speaking again: “Tell me more about the job….”
*
It turned out that he didn’t have much to tell me right then; I was still worried about saying even what we already had over the “airwaves,” and he said he had a lot of paperwork to give me in person, that we should just wait till then to discuss the job in detail. He also said he’d so far come up with nothing on the info I’d given him.
I told him to not contact me on the ship again unless he had something new to report. Then we ended the call.
I went back to the dining room and found Tan sitting by himself eating a slice of pie—apple, it looked like.
“Where’s Eleanor?” I asked him.
“She said she was tired. She’s a nice woman. You should keep in contact with her when we get back.”
“Get back”—we hadn’t even gotten to Earth yet, and I really hoped we’d “get back” to Diamond eventually. At that moment, I experienced an intensely uncertain feeling that made my shoulders automatically hunch.
Tan must have noticed. “What is it?”
“I’m just tired. And the pills don’t seem to have worked too well.”
“Let’s go back to the room.” His plate still contained some pie—for a second; his quick fingers shoved the last bit in his mouth before we walked away from the table.
When we got to our room, I asked him if he’d enjoyed the comet show.
He grinned his big beautiful Tan-grin. “You know it. That was incredible. You missed the best real-time images.”
“Oh well. Maybe I’ll watch them as recordings tomorrow.” My fingers rubbed at my forehead; thanks to the relaxant finally starting to kick in, I felt only a tingling pain there now. Yet pain was still pain. “Oh…” I moaned. “Think I’m going to need something stronger for this damn space-sickness.”
“But I wanted to have space-sex.”
“What?” I said on a laugh.
“You know: zero-gravity sex.”
I was still laughing, even though it made me feel a little queasier. “We’ve got gravity on the ship, silly.”
“Of course. But not out there.” He flipped a hand at the deep black through the porthole viewer-window beside him. “I’ll just fantasize during the sex that it’s zero-gravity.”
“You’re insane,” I said.
“That may be. But the more important thing is: I’m horny. Are you?”
…I must have been because we got to it pretty quickly then, and I was pretty wet. And other than the headachiness and queasiness intensifying right before I orgasmed, I didn’t feel any difference, nor did I visualize it as happening anywhere other than where it had happened.
“I tried,” I said to Tan afterward when we were both lying naked on the bed and staring up at the ceiling. “But I just didn’t want to imagine the zero-g; it was bad enough at normal-g.”
He pouted at me, and then his pout turned into a deeper frown. “So it was bad for you?”
“Just my upper insides, not the actual humping in my lower insides.”
His dark eyes slid upward and around fast. “Well, that’s good to know.” He flipped onto his side toward me, and his fingers gently closed around my forearm, making me turn my head to him all the way. His voice was softer now. “I’m sorry. I was selfish.”
“No—it’s me. You’re so excited this trip, and it’s like my physical state is such a killjoy.”
“It’s not killing anything,” he said. Then he abruptly changed the subject. He must have realized what I’d just realized: talking about killing in bed post-sex when someone wanted to kill either you or your lover wasn’t exactly a mood booster—or a stomach booster.
“I was rushing around so much,” Tan said fast now, “that I forgot to buy a new camera before we left Diamond—so I bought one earlier in the store here. I can’t wait to take videos tomorrow, and then watch them!”
“I can’t wait to watch them too,” I said, putting a brighter smile on my face than I felt like putting.
But I did put it there—for Tan’s sake.
*
Tan wound up spending the next day with his new camera attached to the end of his hands: he filmed me, he filmed the ship, he filmed the other people on the ship, he filmed all the food on the ship, he filmed the images through the portholes and view-screens on the ship. Then he watched all this in playback, and then he made me watch all this in playback.
That night as we dressed for dinner, I told him I had no idea he loved cameras so much.
“I didn’t either—until this trip,” he said, pointing the camera at my ass in my black bikini underwear.
“Watch where you point that thing, or you might wind up with a broken lens.”
“Come on. Let me film your ass and you can film my prick.”
I looked at him, my mouth tilting up at one end. “Not on the ship. Later.”
He clicked off the camera. “You feeling any better yet?”
I nodded. That morning, I’d gotten something stronger from the doctor, and so far, it was working better.
I felt pretty human again. And that felt good.
*
About an hour later, I was fee
ling even better: I got a message that Nell had contacted the ship and was waiting for a reply from me.
I rushed to the Communications room and soon saw her face—and little Annie’s too; the brown jumper on her little body was covered in even littler red and pink balloon images, and the balloons looked as round as her face. She giggled as Nell gently shifted her back-and-forth on her knee. “Say hello to Aunt Pia!” she said.
But, of course, Annie just kept making baby noises behind her smile.
Nell pointed at me. “You see—she said, ‘Pia’!”
I laughed. “Nell, I think she said, ‘Ma, I see a crazy woman there’!”
“No. She said crazy lady.”
I laughed harder.
“So how are you doing on the trip?”
“I’m okay, except for a bout of space-sickness. But the doctor here’s taking care of it.”
“You poor thing. I’ve been so busy—finally got around to making a set of necklaces for some rich woman. Wow, is she picky when it’s just necklaces—I keep wanting to tell her to just lighten up already.”
I smiled at her; then I smiled at Annie. Both of them made me feel happy: even though I was far away physically, they now reminded me that the people that mattered were never really that far away because you knew them and they knew you in ways no one else did. No matter what might happen someday, I felt like my life on Diamond wouldn’t end, simply because I had friends there who would remember me….
Nell was still talking; one of her hands broke away from Annie to reach for something—a piece of paper, which she glanced at now. “Earlier we got a call for a new guard job for next month for Turquoise Treats. It’s a chain of jewelry stores selling imported jewelry from Earth. This sounds like a really good job, Pia! I wanted to ask you what to do—”
“What do you think we should do?”
“I think we should take it. But I also think we should discuss it first.”
“It’s not necessary. You take care of it. You can handle it.”
There was a pause and Nell’s mouth twisted at me. “You think so?”
“I know so,” I said.
*
The rest of that night was a pleasant one; Tan and I ate dinner in the dining room again, and this time Eleanor joined us. We bantered, we cracked jokes, and it helped shift my mind away from things I was tired of thinking about.
Fortunately, James didn’t contact me that night. Unfortunately, he did contact me the next day, quite early in the day to tell me he’d come up with something.
“What?” I asked, my heart suddenly thumping up into my ears.
“It took some work,” James said, “because at first I was searching in the wrong place—too recently. But then I did a back-search on Old-Earth mythology for the dish and spoon in your threats and finally got confirmation back—it sounds like an old rhyme from here. And two lines before the dish-and-spoon part, the Moon’s in the rhyme.”
I swallowed and my forehead began sweating. Beneath the sweat, my mind was moving rapidly. “Then I’m going directly to there.”
His head shook fast and he raised a square-ish palm at me. “No. You’ve got to come here first. The courier work’s from here to there. Do you still have your case—with the mirage?”
“What do you think?”
“You need to check in here as soon as possible when you get on-planet.”
I sighed hard. “I never said I’d do the job.”
The right edge of the view-screen suddenly began flashing the UPG logo. My eyes fell on the colorful ring of planets on the steely silver background; then my eyes moved to the ring’s center, where two strong-looking hands clasped each other from opposite ends.
Instinctively I scowled: I hated the bullshit logo. But, fortunately, it did mean that this time we had the most secure communication possible; James was in a UPG Communications room.
And when he spoke now, his normally tight, all-business voice had more feeling. He sat forward in his seat, which automatically pulled my eyes back to his face. His voice came fast: “What are you going to do for the rest of your life—your petty small business with petty small jobs?”
Anger shot into my mouth, moving it as fast as his. “It ain’t fucking petty. If you’ve been reading the news, you know what I’ve been involved in recently—something extremely important to Diamond.”
“And this is extremely important to a bunch of kids.”
I didn’t know how to respond to that. Resisting doing something to help fight any disgraceful mistreatment of kids wasn’t easy for me….
I suddenly had so much I wanted to say to him, but, no matter how secure the communication was supposed to be, I still didn’t want to transmit anymore specifics till we were in person, as we’d agreed the night before. But now I wished I could be more specific, especially because I’d been wanting to name-names and ask him if he could find out anything about Vervais and Keron. I could have sent James a text-only communication on this, but that really wasn’t much safer than an audio-video one.
I sighed again, longer and softer this time. My eyes shot to his. “Look: I’ll see you in two days and we’ll deal with this then. Don’t contact me again before then unless you have something important to say that I need to hear before I arrive. Goodbye.”
*
My booted feet heavily pounded the ship’s carpeting as I walked along the deck toward my cabin.
Along the way, I ran into Eleanor, who smiled a hello at me and said, “Off to lunch in the dining room?”
“No, I need room-time right now.”
Her eyes probed my face in a concerned way. “Is something wrong?”
Now my voice sounded as heavy as my pounding feet from before: “I’ve got…I’ve got worries. A lot of worries. Bad ones.”
That hand of hers that tended to go to her chest went right there once again. “Oh—I’m—I’m sorry for your t-troubles!” she said, her voice kind of tripping over itself, apparently in both embarrassment and nervousness. Maybe she was also sorry she’d asked me what was wrong.
But if she was sorry, there was nothing I could do about that; if anyone could undo her question, it certainly wasn’t me. I had no control over this fucking Universe—that same-old existential situation I perpetually fucking hated….
Eleanor was speaking again. “Will I see you later at dinner at least?”
“Yeah, probably. I should be okay by then. I’m going to take more of the new relaxant. It worked last night—I slept right through the space flume and didn’t feel a damn thing!”
“Good for you,” Eleanor said, and she was smiling now.
*
I did take more of the drug, and the rest of the ship-trip passed by faster. I had more things to do, more stuff to prepare, including my mind, for not only seeing and being on Earth again, but for seeing and being around all the things I still wished I had left for forever. But now here they were again: this fucking Moon crap.
I kept thinking of my list, including one other incident on the Moon that my enemy could be coming from. But then the more I thought about that incident, the more it just seemed too minor to be the cause of my current, under-threat situation.
When the ship was just about to depart from the Earth-Mars Space Station after the requisite decontamination-scanning there, I was thinking of my situation when I ran into Eleanor again in one of the deck hallways.
She held her suitcases in her hands, but then she dropped them onto the floor as her skinny body quickly pulled me into a hug, which really surprised me. I would have never thought someone so…wholesome like her would take to me in the slightest. But, apparently, she had taken to me.
“I hope we can see each other some time on Diamond!” she said now as she pulled back.
“Sure,” I said. “Of course.”
Quickly she handed me a slip of paper containing her address and phone number. I didn’t have a pen with me to write down my info for her, but I said she could just look me and MSA up in the business reco
rds when she got back from Earth.
Now her narrow face kind of fell. “How come we’re getting into Earth on this ship? Usually they shift you to a smaller one, and then you get into a planet’s atmosphere like that. This seems too big to fit into a ship-port!”
I laughed a little. “I know what you mean. But, trust me, New York Port is enormous, the size of a city because it is practically. Much of it used to be the city of New York before it got too flooded to below sea level. The Port covers the old city below. There’s a physical and chemical barrier between the port and the ocean to prevent pollution from the buried city polluting the ocean even more. I bunch of scientists sort of live there and keep that barrier working…. Did you get one of the passenger handbooks? It explains all that and a lot more.”
“Yes, I do remember reading that. It’s interesting but it also seems so counter-intuitive.”
“I think that applies to life in general,” I said on a sigh.
*
Tan and I were in our cabin when the ship finally began approaching Earth.
He, of course, filmed our approach by pointing his camera at one of the telescopic porthole view-screens, while I lay on the bed squeezing my head in my hands. It didn’t hurt there yet, but I had this sinking feeling that landing would hurt….
My feeling turned out to be correct.
As the ship finally descended through the Earth’s atmosphere, Tan and I were locked into the room’s wall straps. And at one point the ship must have been more horizontal than it should have been because I felt the atmosphere repeatedly buck hard at the ship’s bottom—I felt the whole goddamn process shoot from my booted feet on the floor, up through my thighs, then into my stomach, then finally into my sinuses. It felt like someone was breaking my nose with a crowbar.
There were loud, persistent mechanical noises as the crowbar moved down to my gut.