Analog SFF, March 2008

by Dell Magazine Authors

  * * * *

  Back in my cabin, I had my recorder print out a transcript of all the interviews. A quick scan confirmed my initial impression. I had nothing. Nobody liked Zhao, but nobody had a convincing motive for murder. If I were able to find one, I would still be faced with an impossible crime. Miyamoto would have been my choice, except that Piper said they were together when Zhao called in that he was being attacked. Singh was a suspect based on his general bloody-mindedness. Had he been trying to draw attention to himself? If so, why?

  An odd thought occurred to me. I detached my chair from its anchors and placed it against the door. The top of the backrest fit snugly against the bottom of the doorknob. From Miyamoto's description, I had assumed that the murderer had leaned the chair against the door to wedge it shut. I saw now that it had not been leaning at all. Did that make a difference? Maybe it had not been intended to block the door. But if that was so, what was it doing there?

  I realized suddenly that I was very, very tired. If I kept chasing my thoughts in circles, I would end up like Bachi, believing in energy life-forms that flew on magnetic fields and ate radiation.

  Tomorrow we would reach Laputa. The authorities there could grill everyone to their hearts’ content. Sphinx would be unhappy that I had not found the murderer. The hell with him. Let him fire me. Maybe it was time I got an honest job.

  * * * *

  Something brought me out of a sound sleep. I stared into the darkness, wondering what had disturbed me. It took a moment to realize that it was the absence of something too low to hear, a vibration that had been present since the Outward Bound began its four-hundred-mile-per-hour climb up the Beanstalk.

  The engines that powered the climbing wheels were off line.

  I sat up quickly, nearly throwing myself off the bed. The lights, sensing my movement, came on and slowly increased in brilliance.

  "Control room! This is Rassendyll. What's going on?"

  "We are stopped.” Miyamoto sounded disgusted. “I have been given orders to hold position until our legal status is clarified. I told them we don't have that much air."

  I was still fuzzy with sleep. “But we can't just block the Beanstalk. What about the other cargo shipments?"

  "There are two completed cables,” Miyamoto reminded me with exaggerated patience. “The only other shipment behind us is on the other cable."

  Right. I knew that. “What do we have for air?"

  "It could last indefinitely, as long as we can draw power from the cable. Food and water are another matter. You probably have a better idea of that than I do."

  I thought a moment. The kitchen had been locked since the murder. I had set up a sandwich bar with plastic utensils for the passengers to serve themselves. “Uh, three days. Six if we really stretch it."

  There was a click as he cut the connection. I stumbled back to my bed. I could imagine the confusion on Laputa. Fetterman and Ishikawa had placed their ground stations in international waters in order to be free of interference from nations who might seek to tax, control, or nationalize their creation. They might be regretting that decision now.

  The room took note of my lack of movement. The latticed pin lights dimmed and guttered out like—

  This time I jumped up so violently that I landed a yard from the bed. “Miyamoto. I know who killed Zhao."

  For the second time, I was just a few minutes too late.

  * * * *

  Miyamoto helped zip me into the remaining spacesuit. “She must have realized something was up when I called her to the control room. She climbed out the top hatch and jammed open the outer door of the air lock. The bottom hatch is the only other way out.

  "How did you know Zin was the one? For that matter, how could she kill Zhao? She entered the room after I did, when Zhao was already dying."

  I sealed the helmet. Air rushed in behind my head as I turned on the radio. “That is what she wanted you to think. She was in the room as you entered. She was betting on the sight of Zhao's body and the fact that we are conditioned to think in two dimensions. She was in the lights above your head."

  "That's—” Miyamoto cut off his own outburst as he thought through what I had been saying.

  I pressed a button on my left wrist. The suit shrank in and became skintight as it conformed itself to my body contours.

  "You can't just hang lights in an environment that varies between one gravity and free fall. They have to be fixed in place. That is why they are placed on decorative metal tubing, tubing which forms a surprisingly strong metal framework. Not strong enough to support a hundred pound girl, you would say. I would agree. But plenty strong enough to support a fifty-pound girl for a few minutes, if she spread her weight carefully among the supports. As we have climbed the Beanstalk, our weight has been decreasing due to the combination of gravitational attenuation caused by distance and the centrifugal force from the Earth's rotation.

  "She stabbed Zhao, then placed the chair against the door. Not to block the door, as we both assumed, but to give her the extra height she needed to jump to the lights and pull herself into position before you forced your way in. As soon as you did, she dropped to the floor, making that thump you heard."

  "Then running to Zhao was just to make a pretense of caring for him?” Miyamoto asked.

  "More likely, it was to have an excuse for having his blood on her clothing."

  "Why? Why did she kill him?"

  "I have no idea."

  We did the final safety checks of the suit. I kept waiting for Miyamoto to stop me and say something like “I can't let an untrained civilian go outside under these conditions. You will just get yourself killed. It's my responsibility.” We would argue back and forth, but finally he would beat me down with his insistence that he had the special training necessary to operate in the vacuum outside the Outward Bound.

  Instead, he clipped the tether reel to my belt. “Snap this onto the eyebolt just inside the outer hatch. And we don't want to forget this.” He handed me my gun belt. We had to expand it to its fullest extent to make it fit around the spacesuit.

  I stepped into the air lock. Miyamoto sealed the door behind me. Rungs slanted down about eight feet to the outer hatch. I found the eyebolt and fastened the tether. Then I pressed the button to open the outer hatch.

  * * * *

  Blackness, complete and unrelieved. I could pretend I was back in high school, working no more than twenty feet above the stage, where the worst that could happen would be to fall and break a leg. All my friends would sign my cast when they visited and my big brother would joke that I should have played it safe by going out for football with him.

  * * * *

  Grasping the tether tightly, I let my body swing down until my head was outside the hatch. The soles of my boots braced against the bottom of a rung. Then the Earth swam into view beneath me, so small, so far away, and I felt how high up I was. Vertigo reached out for me and tried to loosen my grip on the tether, to pull me into the unending void.

  What I had to do now was let go of the tether with one hand and reach around the outside of the hull to find the exterior rungs. Forcing my right hand to release the tether was extremely difficult. My body weight may have been reduced to seventy pounds, but the suit had to bring the total up to one fifty. I did not want to support all that weight with one arm.

  I relaxed my right hand. My feet slipped free of the rung with the decreased pressure. My whole body pivoted around my left hand, which was still grasping the tether. I flailed with my right hand. Fingers hit a protrusion, grasped, held, as my legs swung into space. I pulled myself up, got my left hand next to my right, then reached for the next rung. I was at the fifth outside rung before my boots found purchase on the first one. I paused for a few seconds, panting. Sweat stung both eyes. Then I resumed my climb up the hull.

  Near the top, the hull began to curve in from the vertical. I wondered what sort of welcome I would receive. I considered drawing my gun but decided against it. I wanted to keep bot
h hands on the rungs for as long as possible.

  Two more steps and I was jerked to a halt. I could not believe I had run out of line. Somehow the spool must have jammed. Briefly, I considered backing down the rungs and either unjamming the spool or getting an extension. Instead, I detached the spool and let it fall slowly away. I was even more afraid of what Zin was doing atop the Outward Bound than I was of falling.

  Six more steps and I could see the Beanstalk rising up over the hull's horizon and vanishing into star strewn blackness. One of those dots, a day's travel above, was Laputa.

  Two more steps and I could see Zin wrapping something like a plastic raincoat around the cable. My radio had been off so she would not be aware of my approach. Now I thumbed it on.

  "Mind telling me what you're trying to do, Zin?"

  She did not bother to look around. “I am about to cut the Beanstalk and send the Outward Bound hurtling to the Earth."

  Another step and I felt secure enough to unholster the pistol. “It's tougher than it looks. I'm pretty sure you don't have the sort of explosives that could make a dent in it.” I had gone through everything that came on board with the most advanced explosives sniffers before we launched.

  Her laugh was half a sob. “This serves as my oxygen tent. I don't intend to explode anything. The Beanstalk is made of buckytubes. Carbon molecules. Like diamond. Like coal. I'm going to burn it."

  "Why?” I was not sure of the chemistry, but that sounded horribly plausible. An extra oxygen canister was visible. I crawled up another step and lined up the sights with her center of mass.

  "For justice. To protest the rape of my country, Tibet, by the Chinese. To protest what Zhao ... did to me. Rape was not enough. When I was pregnant with his child, with his child, he forced me to have an abortion. So I could compete again."

  The image sprang into my mind of Zhao grabbing Zin in an embrace, drawing her face up to his, unaware of the knife in her right hand that she would bury in the back of his neck. “Is that any reason to kill the rest of us?"

  "It's not just Zhao. It's his whole country, the whole society. He dies, but China still becomes a partner in this glorious future of Laputa even if it has to sign by video. None of you care about justice, about the boots that stamp us down day after day after day."

  I sighed. I sympathized with all my heart, but not enough to let myself and all the rest of the passengers and crew be killed. Time to end this.

  That is when I discovered that my gloved index finger could not fit inside the .32's small trigger guard.

  * * * *

  Here is what I think. Zin never intended to die, never seriously intended to kill all the rest of us. She'd had half an hour to work on the cable before I climbed up to her. She did nothing further while I talked to her. With Zhao's death, her main goal had been accomplished. I think she was waiting for me to come up and disarm her. That way she could live and become a cause célebre at her trial. Her fans would rally to her cause, sympathizers would hear with horror about the security goon who had brutally prevented her martyrdom.

  * * * *

  Neither one of us had remembered about the other cable. Even though less than fifty yards away, it was effectively invisible.

  Far Horizon, the car climbing it at four hundred miles an hour, was not invisible. There was no vibration in our cable, no buffeting wind as it flashed by. Just an image that in an instant appeared, seemed on a collision course, and disappeared above us.

  In that same second, a million years of evolution took hold. Zin let go of the cable and flinched. She began to fall slowly down the upper surface of the car.

  She might have been able to grab on to something. She was a trained athlete with excellent reflexes.

  Miyamoto had been listening to our conversation. Despite his orders, he started the climbing engines. As the car began to move, it hit Zin and bounced her sideways, out into space.

  She had no tether. In a little more than a minute, she was lost to sight. Long afterwards, though, I could still hear her.

  * * * *

  The world was upside down. Looking up through the transparent ceiling of Laputa Station's great hall, I could see the Earth, a blazing sickle carving the night. Laputa's minuscule gravity, even combined with the small amount of centrifugal force that came with being just beyond geosynchronous orbit, barely kept my feet on the polished rock floor. Fetterman's and Ishakawa's people were laughing and congratulating themselves: Ishikawa's people wearing the long, loose suit coats thought to resemble samurai robes, Fetterman's with the string ties, silver and turquoise favored by their boss.

  I pulled myself along the guide ropes to my room. Then I called Sphinx to make a full report.

  "Our clients are pleased with the way you disposed of the issue. A trial would have been inconvenient and embarrassing for all. Even a nonclient has communicated his government's gratitude. Not only is their representative avenged, but they have a recording almost ninety minutes long with sobbing, then gasping as the air begins to run out, and finally screams as friction incinerates the murderer. They have sent it all over the internet, pour encourager les autres. Well done, Angelo."

  "Except,” I said carefully, “that I did nothing. Zin's fall was accidental."

  "Of course, Angelo.” Sphinx was almost purring. “I did not mean to impugn your professionalism. Around you, only accidents."

  I stepped back into the hallway. At an elevated table at the far end of the hall, the signing ceremony had been completed. As Zin had foreseen, China had signed by video from Beijing. Now the various dignitaries, basking in the attention of reporters’ cameras, were making their speeches. The words bounced off the stone walls.

  "...a new age,” the speaker said, “starting with a blank slate, free from the shadows of a dead past..."

  Singh was suddenly beside me. “You knew,” I said.

  "I suspected. When they were leaving the dining area, his hand dropped to the base of her back and then slid lower. She stiffened, almost flinched away, but then pressed closer to his side. That told me all I needed to know about the relationship. When I heard how he was murdered, I was almost sure she had done it. Even as my own daughter would have, were I not there to protect her."

  Applause echoed through the hall as the speaker finished. “Always the future,” Singh said. “Always the promise of a completely fresh start, as if we do not carry our sins with us. Faulkner knew better. The past is not dead. It is not even the past."

  Copyright (c) 2007 Robert R. Chase

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  Short Story: The Bookseller of Bastet by John G. Hemry

  Some heroes are not what people usually imagine, but face no less danger.

  The bookshop of Aaron D'abu filled to overflowing a ground level store space in the oldest building in Fraternity, the oldest city on the continent of Libertus on the world of Bastet. The bookshop had been there as long as the building and the city, its narrow street frontage only hinting at the deep space within, lined on both sides with shelves packed with every kind of book and magazine. E-readers and e-books in a hundred formats ranging from obsolete to not-quite-new cluttered one side, stacks of printed books filled the other, and in the very back against a wall covered with handbills announcing author readings and book signings rested an ancient Print On Demand console.

  "When they founded this city,” Aaron D'abu told me, “my grandfather, may his spirit be ever at peace, was told that the new land here needed hands to build and farm, not shops that sold words. He told them they were wrong, that it was words that had built all which humanity knew, and words which had brought us to this world far from the Earth our ancestors called home."

  He waved toward the back of the store. “Look. Inside these walls we have the thoughts formed on Earth two or three thousand years ago and the latest imaginings of the newest generation here on Bastet. They rest side by side, for all books are companions to each other. So said my mother, may she also be at peace."

  I'd com
e to Bastet on a diplomatic mission. Earth's children occupy many worlds now, but the mother feels responsibility for her offspring. There are still things the old mother can offer her children, perhaps the latest technology or new techniques for farming or even grants of devices that new worlds find prohibitively expensive to manufacture. It's all only a drop in the bucket, for even Earth can't do much measured against the needs of other worlds, but it grants the home world a bit of influence it might otherwise lack. Too little influence, it often seems, as we watch the new worlds make the same mistakes the old world once did.

  How was business? I wondered, noticing that only a few locals were browsing among the many offerings in the bookstore.

  "Not what it should be. Enough, but no more. Too many say they don't need these books,” Aaron told me. “I tell them everything they want to know, someone else has thought or dreamed of, and it's all here for them to see. Would it kill them to learn of such thoughts? But, no, they claim to honor the past but don't care to learn from it because they say the future will be different.” He waved a hand again, this time to encompass all around us. “Does this city look different? See here, the thoughts of the old religions, may all honor be to them. Next to them, the new beliefs. Here the words of those who claim no god, and here the words of those whose gods are philosophy or money or power."

  I asked him if he had any texts for the Anubans, who had declared themselves the only true children of the religion all Bastet had once shared. “Of course. You see? There with the others. Many say that the words of the Anubans as well as their people should be suppressed, but truth does not fear argument!"

  In the cities to the north, I pointed out, bombs were going off as some Anubans fought for an independent state. “I live near Anubans! A nice family who believe themselves chosen, but do not demand that everyone else submit to the same belief. I respect them.” Aaron D'abu rummaged among his shelves. “See here. History. Wars and hatred, and for what? We're building a nice world here, for our children."