Gravity Wells (Short Stories Collection)

by James Alan Gardner

  I won't tell you what it looked like. Suffice it to say, it was larger than Mars-Wheel and Venus-Wheel combined. It was virtually invisible on all spectral bands; if the informant hadn't told us exactly where to look, we wouldn't have found it. In comparison, the vessel your father commanded glowed like a beacon. The bogey must have perceived the frigate clearly, but took no hostile action.

  After tracking the bogey for several hours, your father attempted communication using everything from radio to signal flashers. There was no response of any kind.

  We consulted with higher authority. The very highest. Everyone was inclined to leave the bogey alone…or more accurately, to turn responsibility over to the scientific arm and let them investigate to their hearts' content. But we had that report saying the bogey had fired on a freighter; and trajectory calculations showed the thing was heading into the main shipping lanes on a near-collision course with Earth.

  Do you understand how it was, Jenny? It was heading for Earth and no one knew why. We didn't know if it was an invasion army, or a bomb, or just some harmless piece of junk. We didn't know.

  A decision was made to destroy it. I didn't make it, your father didn't make it, but we agreed one hundred percent.

  You say that as if we were all vicious killers. You knew your father; you know he wasn't like that. He was the man on the spot, that's all. He had to carry out the mission.

  Do you think no one considered the alternatives? Yes, the bogey might have been peaceful. Yes, it might have blessed humanity in unimaginable ways. Yes, it might simply have drifted past in total indifference. Believe me, our superiors didn't make the decision casually.

  But they had no choice. The bogey would pass through the space lanes. It would be seen. It would be a destabilizing influence. There would be panic, hysteria, people killed in riots…and that's if the bogey just flew by without taking action.. Maybe it would turn out to be hostile after all. We had to face that possibility. What would humanity think of the fleet if we let such a thing reach Earth without opposition?

  I want you to understand this, Jenny. Your father would want you to understand. No one could take that chance. We had to do the hard thing. The hard thing is not killing or dying, it's making the choice. Making the choice that is cruel and necessary and irrevocable.

  The worst part is knowing you'll never find out if you were right.

  The bogey drank up laser fire like water—your father drained his weapon batteries without burning a square inch of the thing's skin. Contrary to insinuations from the press, our forces are respecting the Selene treaty and your father had no nuclear weapons aboard. Therefore, after consultation with our superior officers and in full agreement with their decision, your father commanded his men to evacuate the vessel in life-pods, and then, alone at the helm, rammed the bogey at maximum velocity.

  We don't know if the bogey was destroyed. Perhaps it was only diverted from its course. Other ships searched the area, but space is large. They found less than a third of the remains from your father's ship. They found nothing at all of the bogey.

  To me, Jenny, your father died a hero. Not because he was willing to die—there are millions of fools who think dying somehow justifies their cause. Believe me, that's bullshit: your father knew dying doesn't prove anything. But he died anyway, eyes open, full of doubt but doing the job.

  They told you your father died in some kind of accident. I thought you should know the truth. Too many things happen by accident in the world. It's time people realized some things happen by human choice.

  VARIATION E: DAEMON

  (BRILLANTE)

  (SPARKLING, LIVELY)

  CONTACT: NOVEMBER 2038

  Sit down and quit whining.

  I don't care if you were going riding. I've decided it's time to pontificate.

  Honestly, Maria, didn't they teach you anything in that private school I sent you to? Pontificate. Look it up. Show a little initiative, for God's sake.

  That's what I want to talk about: initiative. There are two types of people in the world—the ones who are alive and the ones who aren't. The quick and the dead. The open and the closed.

  Here. Catch.

  Know what that is?

  A false fingernail? Did you say a false fingernail? Hell, that false fingernail is the Petrozowski Whole Spectrum Collector Cell. That's what pays for your wardrobe, your boyfriends, and your goddamned horse.

  Sometimes, Maria, I don't think you're really my daughter. Sometimes I think your mother, God rest her soul, had a fling with some pretty playboy while I was busy at the office. I know, she wasn't that kind of a woman. I'm just trying to dodge the blame.

  Now here…take a look at this.

  No, it's not the same thing. That, my dear, is a scale from the hide of my personal daemon.

  Daemon, not demon! My guardian spirit. My source of inspiration.

  No, your old man isn't cracking up. Although people might think so, if they knew what I'm about to do.

  I'm going to give you total control over Petrozowski Energy. Have fun with it.

  Stop whining. Stop right now.

  The business world is losing its novelty for me. I foresee that in the not-too-distant future, I'll be bored to the edge of madness. So I'm taking a one-man yacht into space and I'm going to find the daemon again.

  I've thought about this a long time. I could go through the motions of running the company till the day I die, or I could say to hell with the rat race and pursue another dream.

  I hate the jaded way I feel some days, Maria. I want to be excited about something again. I want to feel the tingle of magic.

  You don't know what I'm talking about, do you?

  Thirty-five years ago, daughter dear, I was a lowly navy tech baby-sitting the solar energy cells of a frigate named the Coherent. It was a stupid job. I'd enlisted because I wanted to get off Earth. "Out of the cradle and into the rest of the universe," that's what the recruiters told me. I should have realized the purpose of the fleet wasn't to widen our horizons but to bring the cosmos down to our own size.

  One afternoon I was standing my watch when I felt the jolt of our guns firing and saw our battery levels dropping. Fifteen minutes later, the charge in the batteries red-lined dead bottom. An hour later, we were ordered to abandon ship. That was it. No one felt it necessary to explain what was going on. Need to know and all that.

  I ejected in the nearest escape pod and found myself shooting toward the biggest damned hulk I'd ever seen. I couldn't tell you what it was. I've thought about it most of my life.

  In my dreams, sometimes I get inside the thing, and it's always different. Sometimes I meet these glowing little men who sit me down and tell me things that make me understand myself and the universe. Sometimes it's filled with monsters and I find myself with pistol in one hand and saber in the other, shooting and slashing to save the human race. Sometimes I'm just walking through this huge cavity and I look up and there's this huge heart beating slowly overhead, booming like thunder.

  But I didn't get inside the daemon; I only smacked into its hide. A rough landing…the daemon had a gravity almost as strong as Earth's and it sucked me right down. I can't explain the gravity—artificial maybe. I managed to brake most of my speed with the retros, but the escape pod still slammed against the daemon with a clang like a great Chinese gong. CLLAAANNNGGGG!!!

  I did that to catch your attention. Here and now, girl! Keep your head in the here and now!

  The first thing I did after landing was put on a suit and go out—I wanted to know what I'd landed on. The surface was broad and black, very slightly rounded and pebbly with scales. Overhead floated the Coherent, bright and silver like the moon above dark autumn fields.

  I knelt and examined the daemon's hide. Blacker than black, each scale was angled toward the Coherent, an audience of a billion eyes watching.

  Then, slowly, the nearest eyes turned to look at me.

  If I hadn't been a solar cell technician, I might have run screaming
in terror back to the pod…but I'd worked among our own solar collectors and seen them slowly turn their gaze on me as the robot controllers picked up my body heat and swiveled to drink it in. Absorbing the IR my own flesh emitted.

  I pried loose as many of those little eyes as I could. They had to be energy collector cells and for some reason, I knew—knew!—they were orders of magnitude more efficient than anything we humans had developed. And indeed they were, my darling daughter, indeed they were.

  Perhaps if I'd had more time, I could have found some way to enter the daemon…but as I knelt there plucking up eyes, I saw some of them turn away from me and I glanced back to see what they'd noticed.

  The Coherent, engines streaming out a fiery cloud, was speeding through the night like a torpedo on a collision course with my daemon. I suppose in the back of my mind, I must have realized this would happen—why else would they have ordered us to abandon ship? But for a moment I was staggered and frozen by the utter stupidity of the military mind. It was the ultimate evil: trying to kill something wonderful and magic and new.

  I was paralyzed only for a moment, but it was almost a moment too long. I barely had time to get back inside my pod and slam the outer hatch before the Coherent hit and exploded. The daemon pitched wildly; my pod was bucked off, rolling end over end and tossing me around inside like a man going over Niagara Falls in a barrel.

  Through the pod's viewport, I caught one last glimpse of the daemon before it vanished into the blackness. It was on a new heading…I don't know if it had simply been knocked off course by the collision or if it had changed direction on its own. I couldn't tell if it'd been damaged; it vanished as quickly as a coin in the hands of a magician.

  Well, you can fill in the rest of the story. I kept the scales to myself till I got out of the navy, then analyzed them and reproduced them as well as I could. The reproduction wasn't perfect, but it was generations ahead of anything else on the market; and as the money flowed in, I could afford to hire a team of the best eggheads, and patent by patent, they came closer to a full duplication of…well, a flake of my daemon's skin.

  I could also afford to hire scouts to search for the daemon. They never found it. I think…I think daemons only appear to a certain kind of person. You have to be ready for them. You have to be open. You have to be goddamned alive.

  So. I'm going out solo.

  I want to know if I'm still the sort of person who's worthy of wonder.

  Don't cry. If you don't want to run the company, let the board of directors do it. You'll still receive dividend payments and the company will stay healthy. My people know what they're doing. I just thought you might enjoy honest work.

  If you prefer, you can sell your share in the company and use the money to pursue whatever dreams you want. Really. I wholeheartedly approve of people who pursue their dreams.

  If you have any dreams.

  Do you have any dreams, Maria?

  VARIATION F: BOOJUM

  (MENO MOSSO)

  (SLOWER, LESS MOTION)

  CONTACT: JULY 2070-APRIL 2071

  So, Yorgi. You got caught.

  You're an idiot, boy.

  Your mother, she wants me to make a big fuss. She wants me to smack you around. I should spit in your face and say your ancestors will haunt you.

  Maybe they will.

  Me, if I get to heaven, and some great-great-grandchild of mine gets caught breaking into a store, I got better things to do than sneak up on the kid and go boo. I'll just say to myself, the boy's an idiot, and go back to the houris.

  But your mother says, Emil, talk to the boy. Okay, Yorgi, I'm talking to you.

  The priests, they'll threaten you with hell. They're good at it; it's their job. But you're like me—you can't listen to a sermon without falling asleep.

  So no sermons. Here's all I'm going to say: there are lots of things you can do in your life, but they break into two classes. Some things make you smarter. Some things make you stupider. No other possibilities.

  Stealing makes you stupider. Every time you steal, you get a little stupider. It doesn't matter if you get caught, and it doesn't matter what you steal.

  I know.

  A few years back—you aren't going to tell your mother this story—I was working for Petrozowski Energy. Cook on a freighter. But it wasn't really a freighter, it was a hunter. We'd load up with cargo and fuel as if we were making the Red Run, but then we'd prowl space, looking for a boojum Mr. Petrozowski saw once. Crazy, eh? And the craziest thing was, our third time out we found it.

  Big thing. Huge. And black, with a kind of shimmer, like the northern lights. First time we saw it, we nearly pissed ourselves. Whole crew went up to the bridge, looked at the thing. None of us had a clue what it was. Didn't look dangerous. Just kind of spooky.

  Instructions were to track it, plot its course. No radio reports…Mr. Petrozowski didn't want anyone finding out where we were or what we were doing. Once we got the thing charted, we were supposed to fire back full thrust and report in person.

  Well. We all got to thinking. Petrozowski was paying big money for all this secrecy. Triple what we'd get on a normal run. And if we reported home right away, maybe we'd get a bonus if we were lucky, but then we'd go back to the usual grind. We thought, if we put off reporting it till the next run…well, Mr. Petrozowski would still find his boojum, we'd still get the bonus, and we'd get triple pay for an extra run.

  So that's how we all started getting stupider. It was stealing, you see. Easy stealing. Didn't have to hit someone over the head, didn't have to get past an alarm. Just waited out our time and headed home empty-handed.

  We waited out our time on the boojum. Didn't have anywhere else to go.

  Went down, looked around. It was scaly. No mouth or any other opening. Something had dented its side a bit…a meteor, I guess. We tried to cut a hole in it with laser torches, but the light just got sucked up. We pried away scales, and underneath were more scales. We dug down a long way, but the scales went down farther. They grew back too, eventually. Took a few days. They sort of pushed up from below.

  That first time, we amused ourselves watching the Boojum grow scales. Some of the technicians tried to figure out where its gravity came from, but they soon lost interest.

  The second time, we found it again, no problem. Went straight to it. Then we had nothing to do but spend three months sitting around. As cook, I was the busiest hand on board.

  To pass the time, the crew played with the Environment. Sure, Yorgi, our ship carried an Environment, like any other Mars freighter—Mr. Petrozowski didn't want to arouse suspicions when the ship was in port. The Environment held a little stone temple surrounded by a lot of nice green plants. Very pretty. Buddhist, maybe. Mr. Petrozowski didn't care about it; it'd been built by the previous owners. We could use it for anything we wanted.

  We installed it on the boojum.

  For some reason, we laughed and laughed at the idea. It seemed so funny. This boojum, this strange alien thing, this giant—we'd attach our Environment to it like a flea on the back of a dog, and we'd ride and grow fat. The ship would hover in space, but the crew would pass the time in the Environment pod on the boojum's back, sitting in easy chairs under a simulated sun, sipping lemonade and playing cards. Like we were all wealthy landlords who'd found some private jungle retreat away from the stupid peasants.

  That time, we had to feed the Environment power from the ship's storage cells. And we had to reattach the Environment to our ship when we left for home.

  The next time, we sold our extra fuel on the black market. We didn't need fuel to go out into space and sit around for three months. We used the money to buy good Petrozowski Whole Spectrum Collector Cells, which we installed on the hull of the Environment pod so it could gather its own energy from the sun. That way we didn't have to go back to the ship to recharge the life support systems; we could live in the Environment all the time. And we did. We lived what we thought were the lives of the rich.

  T
hey were stupid lives.

  The time came to head for Earth. And we found the boojum had grown too fond of the Environment pod.

  Somehow, the scales of the boojum had attached themselves to the collector cells we'd installed on the pod. The scales and cells had grown together into a single skin, like the edges of a wound healing shut. The Environment was bonded fast, held tight; we couldn't cut it free, couldn't pull it loose with the ship's engines. In the end, we had to go home without it.

  Stupid, see? We thought we could do what we wanted. We thought were smarter than other people, and what did we get?

  When we got back to Earth, we still thought we might get away with it. We tried to buy a new pod; we thought we could make do with a substitute, pick up better cutting tools and go back to slice the Environment free. No. Mr. Petrozowski heard we were missing a pod; he investigated and found we'd been selling our fuel; and he fired us. He thought we'd been cheating him all along. The only reason he didn't call the cops was he didn't want us telling anyone about the boojum hunt. We told him we'd found his boojum, but he laughed in our faces.

  So. Your father is no saint. We both knew that, yes? But I've learned.

  We were stupid. There were hundreds of ways we could have got caught. If one of Petrozowski's other hunters had found us on the boojum. If the police nabbed us selling fuel on the black market. If any member of the crew had loose lips. Hundreds of ways. But we ignored the risks. We thought we were being smart when we were being stupid.

  I tell you, Yorgi, if you decided to be the best thief in the world, and learn, and work hard at it, maybe you could get smarter. Maybe that would be possible. But such thieves, I don't think they exist. When I was a thief, I was lazy. I sat on easy chairs and drank lemonade. I told myself Mr. Petrozowski was stupid, not me. I thought I was one of the smartest men in the world, and I laughed, laughed, laughed. But what was I? A flea riding the back of a dog. That's all.

  Who thinks fleas are smart?

  VARIATION G: TITAN

  (DOLCE CON AMORE)

  (SWEETLY, WITH LOVE)