by Various
“Yes, yes sir.”
The boy moved away slowly, smiling again. I enjoy someone with a sense of humor.
“Here, Father, I’ll get a chair for you.”
“Bahhhhhh!” he said.
“Here.”
I approached one of the Human Words, perhaps it was “Illustration” for she was drawing pictures in her forearm with a knife, her face huge and bulbous with infection.
“You don’t need the chair, do you?”
Minutely, she shook her head.
“Thank you, dear.”
I put it behind my Father and shoved him gently backwards; he fell into the well-cushioned chair in a cloud of dust and mold; I sneezed.
“So,” he said, light from the walls swirling in the dust around his face, “you still have a throat. And a nose!”
“Yes,” I said, sitting on the floor beside his chair, and looking up at him as though I were the picture of filial loyalty.
“You didn’t get a voicebox installed?” he croaked.
“I’ve been away, Father. Do you remember?”
“You betrayed me,” he said, smiling. “You went outside without consulting the committees. You didn’t even bring any rope. You betrayed all of us…”
“It’s not that simple, Father. Your morality is so primitive! I suppose it’s beautiful, but I hate it. I hate it more than I hate your diseased face…”
He grinned again, and coughed up an insect. The boy came, holding a tray made out of bread. I took my cup but then my Father grabbed the tray, the second cup spilling into his lap, and he began to gnaw at it, masticating the ancient bread between his yellow-black teeth, his rainbow eyes growing in size, his mouth making a deep and honorable sound, of hunger, hunger, hunger.
“I’m sorry, young man, my father hasn’t eaten for a while.”
The boy looked at me. He had a good poker face.
“The Adjutant is coming,” he said.
• • •
Inside the Crown, is the weapon. Like the cover of the dictionary, or the neo-cortex which gives apes their judgment, the Crown covers the nest of Human Words, caught in their necessary fixed poses and pains, and makes their efforts whole. I knew of it before I left, but now We Who Will Brighten the Land have a special interest not only in its algorithms and historical structures but too in its interior, the real weapon.
I do not fear making the human flesh here nuclear. It will start the engine that we need.
• • •
“Adjutant!” said the boy, bowing low, as the official approached. My Father growled in his chair. I stood, and offered my hand.
The Adjutant kissed it.
“You are Visitor here,” he said, “and welcome to you.”
“He stole this body!” said the boy, pointing at my Father.
“Did you do that?” said the Adjutant.
“Sieur,” I said, “Do you believe that the time of the Redoubt’s crumbling is close?”
The Adjutant’s smile faltered a little but stayed on his face still, and he said, “Yes. Yes, I do.”
“Please,” I said, “meet my father. His name used to be Rudulpho, but now I will call him Ember, even as I am Remnant. I am bringing him to The Furnace.”
“The Furnace does not exist,” hissed the Adjutant, his ruffled coat expanding to match the extremity of his emotion. “It will never exist.”
“I assure you it does, and it will, and I am bringing my Father to it, not far from the Redoubt, and within sight of the Tower, in fact, though it moves…”
The boy watched me with wide eyes.
“Tell me, Adjutant, would you mind if I brought this boy with me?”
“The committee will hear of this,” he muttered, and he staggered off, as though drunk, perhaps, or drunk with fear.
“Will I die, sieur?” the boy said, his eyes liquid, and sad.
“We all die, boy. The question is when.”
• • •
In truth I had lied to the Adjutant. The Furnace was not yet visible to the City or its Tower; the Redoubt might still be able to muster a defense if it were seen and so I and mine, We Who Bring Holy Brightness Here into Hell, we found it prudent to conceal the Furnace Gate with a guardian, one we found in last year’s scanning.
If we can penetrate the Crown, we can find the meaning of the structure of your artificial language. All your lies will come bursting out. And now, I know the Crown’s precise location.
I spoke the passwords into the speakers and the airlock opened onto the morass. I dragged the boy and the corpse of my Father through after me.
• • •
“I never gave you that passcode,” my Father grated.
“You never gave me life either, Father. The Furnace did that.”
We trucked through the waste, mud on our boots. Some of the lights from the Tower moved over us as we walked, and for a moment I saw some of the devilled creepers, orange and white whirring near the boy’s head, feeling his warmth.
“I knew you would betray me.”
“Yes, Father.”
“Where are we going?” said the boy.
“To the Gate.”
“Will it hurt?” said the boy.
• • •
After a day’s walk, in which my father stumbled only a few times (the corpse held up well), we approached a part of the infinite darkness I could smell as being different: the guardian.
“Why are we not attacked?” said Father.
“Shhh, Father. I have to talk to a friend now.”
I sensed Father leaning closer to the boy; he must have been staring at the child with his rainbowed eyes, although I could not see.
“Friend?” I called out, and heard a rumble in response.
I seized the boy then, and threw him into the hot maw of the guardian. As I did so, I remembered one of my early meals as a boy, and its heady smell, and then the eyes of Father when he first accepted his new brain… I heard the huge sounds of the guardian eating. Father screamed in horror; I was surprised he could still muster such emotion at his age. Near us some of the many hungry things electrified the air, moving I’m sure only millimeters from our flesh, but they would not touch us; not while under the Furnace’s protection.
We listened to the boy’s screams, and finally, his death. Then the Gate opened, and green light shone over the plain.
“No…” said Father, but I held him tightly and marched into the light.
• • •
Things are different here. I’m sure you may have guessed. Now Father is one of us. Ask yourself: why is the Redoubt not seeking to restart a sun within useful distance of your planet? Why were we of the Furnace rebuffed on our first approach? Why are all who come to us not permitted to return to you?
“I have the location of the Crown. Inside is the weapon we need,” I told my superiors, my comrades in arms. Their light moved through some of my perceptions, as we waver here over a vast sea.
I am the instrument. And I am the match. I am the lair, and I am the hatch, to open up, and throw them in…
God I await thy face—
• • •
We opened the Gate again, the location plucked from my brain, and transmitted the signal into the Night Land.
Language obeys orders beyond your understanding: for every phoneme, there is a thread in the universe’s weaving. And if tug one of these threads out…
I felt but could not see the psychic earthquake in the sky, above the Redoubt, near the cortex of the Dictionary and its Human Words.
One of the Tower’s domes shattered, and light spurted into the skies.
“We’re getting it! We’re getting it!” I whispered to my cousins, warm here in The Furnace that Will Revivify.
But all I heard was the Redoubt’s ludicrous damned religious dogma, broadcast now at ear-rupturing volumes:
Chowder is Menace!
Chowder is Heat!
Drink the Chowder, for the Beat!
Of our Drum!
• • •
“You were always a failure, son.”
“Shut up, Father.”
“You think a cult alone can destroy the Redoubt?” he whispered in our infinite space, even now retaining some aspect of his rainbow eyes.
“Do you want me to kill you again?” I screamed.
But he only laughed, his face a fire, here where there are no longer any words.
Haris A. Durrani became eligible for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer with the publication of “Tethered” in Analog (Jul/Aug. 2013), edited by Trevor Quachri.
Visit his website at engspurdishabic.wordpress.com/publications.
* * *
Novelette: “Tethered” ••••
TETHERED
by Haris A. Durrani
First published in Analog (Jul/Aug. 2013), edited by Trevor Quachri
• • • •
“Outside intelligences, exploring the Solar System with true impartiality, would be quite likely to enter the Sun in their records thus: Star X, spectral class G0, 4 planets plus debris.”
— Isaac Asimov
“The vices of peace are the vices of old men: mistrust and caution. It must be so.”
— Prince Feisal, Lawrence of Arabia
IN 1978, NASA astrophysicist Donald J. Kessler predicted that the quantity of artificial satellites orbiting Earth would reach a critical limit after which collisions became inevitable. One satellite would strike another at the dangerous speeds of Earth orbit—seven, eight kilometers per second—and the two would break into hundreds of pieces. These pieces would in turn collide with other satellites, generating a chain reaction of impact and debris. By some point, Kessler proposed, this orbiting shell of garbage would render spaceflight difficult if not impossible.
• • •
Charlie and Kalima receive the transmission at 2100 hours. Their junkship is hanging in the old graveyard orbits, floating among the decommissioned satellites from pre-Kessler—the ones routinely deposited there in high orbit twenty years back, before the UN Security Council discovered it was an inefficient strategy, a strategy which only worked in the short run because it was only cheap in the short run.
It’s the long run now.
Charlie drops their junkship toward the sea of debris which envelopes medium orbit beneath. The sun hasn’t yet covered this side of Earth, but it’s at just the right angle so the orbiting trash lights in yellow twinkles above the shaded planet below. The sea of garbage glitters like a limitless city blinking through the darkest time of night.
“It’s a corporate run,” Charlie says, hands on his chair’s dashboard. He’s short, stocky, with big eyes draped in shade.
Kalima shrugs. Her hair floats around her like rings around a planet, only black and built of flowing tendrils. As the junkship dives, the tendrils shoot behind her like the backend of a lightless comet’s tail.
“So?”
“I don’t like it.”
“The hell you don’t, big guy.”
Charlie shakes his head.
He activates the junkship’s external magnetic fields, and a buzzing trembles from the outside in. He deploys blocks of foam around the shuttle’s flight path; they bubble outward with a distant, viscous sizzle. Ahead, debris hits the foam, passes through at a manageable velocity, and then runs against the junkship’s B-fields. The debris breaks away as the fields thrust forward, Moses’ magnetic staff parting a sea of polluted vacuum. Anything antimagnetic ricochets away as its magnetic companions, which constitute the majority of the trash, bounce against it.
Several pieces of debris have enough momentum to break the safeguards, but by the time those shards reach the hull of the junkship they’ve been slowed to the point where they won’t do more than a scratch. The smallest bits reach higher speeds—high enough they vaporize on impact. They pelt the iron-plated sides of the junkship like frantic deep-sea creatures rapping against a submarine.
As Charlie navigates the junkship between the foam and the thicker clouds of churning trash, Kalima ties her hair into a bun. She’s strong enough to move her arms against the junkship’s Earthward inertia, to reach forward, up, and around to her nape. She is a tall, slender woman bathed in mahogany skin.
Charlie’s eyes are fixed ahead, but he steals a glance her way. His muscles are tight at the armchair controls.
“You’re supposed to cut your hair, Kal. Safety regulation.”
“I know.” She smiles. “No one’s watching, right? They don’t give a shit. We’re garbage men, Charlie. Freaking garbage men.”
He shakes his head again. “I guess.”
“We’re chums.”
“Sure, Kal. Sure.”
She finishes doing up her hair and, still fighting the junkship’s forward movement, punches him roughly in the shoulder. She grins.
“Ask NASA—well, not NASA. Not anymore.” She bites her bottom lip. “Ask the Security Council. Ask Kradys. They’ll tell you, between the lines. They’ll tell you what we are to them.”
“What, Kal?”
Charlie guns the junkship through the maze of debris. The garbage is loose here—safer in passage. He can see the clarity of low orbit a kilometer down; it’s been getting smaller down there, despite the Kessler Initiatives—despite the work Charlie and Kalima and all the other garbage men do for Kradys and the Security Council. The motives are less humanitarian than they are PR stunts. No doubt, diplomacy in space means a lot of things—and where there is diplomacy, there is war.
“What are we to them?” Charlie plays along.
“Charlie, we’re pawns.” Kalima laughs coldly.
The last kilometer is spent in silence. They listen to the buzzing electromagnetic fields, to the bits of undeflected debris raining against the hull, and to life support’s asthmatic rasp as it maintains the pressure and recycles the oh-two. Kalima’s perfume, palpable and dark as empty vacuum, fills her side of the cockpit. Charlie’s sweat reeks through the filtered air.
Finally they are out the other side, down the foam-bordered, B-field tunnel the junkship has wedged through the debris. Behind, the foam separates into tiny marbles of liquid. The marbles burst into an almost immaterial vapor.
Charlie settles the junkship at a stable orbit above the satellite they’ve been sent to decommission manually. He switches off the B-fields so they won’t interfere with EVA.
“We’re here.”
She shrugs. “No kidding.”
Manual decommission is a rare job—usually unnecessary at a time when every satellite is sent into orbit with ready-made Lorentz tethers to unspool once the machine is no longer of use, dragging the “Zombie satellite” into atmospheric burn. Tethers are controlled via radio, but apparently this Zombie is so defunct it won’t respond to wireless imperatives from the ground.
That almost never happens.
The junkship hovers over the satellite below—like two creatures in their first encounter, discovering each other for the first time, standing apart. The Zombie’s solar panels stretch obliquely from its sides, catching the rays of sun that trickle around Earth’s thick horizon. Antennae, hatchways, and silver rungs are splotched across the grayish hull, from which tiny lights blink green and red like distant stars.
“I don’t know, Kal,” Charlie says at last.
“You don’t know your ass. We need the money. I’m not waiting another two years out here.” She looks at him. “You know we need the money.”
She reaches beneath her seat. Her hand emerges with a pouch of Dr. Pepper. She snaps open the tip, pops out three bubbles of wriggling brown, opens her mouth, and sticks out her tongue. She swallows them one by one.
“Kal,” Charlie protests, steadying the junkship, matching pace with the orbit of the satellite below.
“I’ll be fine, big guy.” She unstraps herself and floats toward the exit.
“Just—”
“Hm?” Kalima stops.
“Stay alive for the wedding.”
“Will do.” She pushes forward again, grins, turns. “I do.”
“Shut up,” Charlie retorts as she exits for the departure bay. He moves the junkship closer to the satellite, preparing the docking arms. His mouth opens, closes, and then—“Yeah, me too.”
Near the airlock, Kalima can hear his whisper echo into the com. She giggles to her reflection in the EMU.
• • •
They first met August 9, 2065 on Flight 604, when the microscopic speck of debris shot Rami Pasha through the head. They fell in love at the memorial service banquet.
Flight 604 was a standard junkship task in the relative safety of the graveyard orbits. The graveyard program had been so ephemeral that crashes were infrequent there.
This satellite was a twenty-year-old European deep space telescope, a Zombie with heat-reflecting gold foil that shone brightly under the sun’s gaze. The European Space Agency wanted some archived data files, in addition to their run-down telescope’s expensive gold foil, before the Kessler Initiatives’ garbage men—Kalima, her brother Rami, and Charlie—sent the Zombie into atmospheric burn.
While Charlie docked their junkship against the decommissioned satellite, Kalima and Rami donned their EMUs, hooked up to the junkship’s mechanical arms, and went out for EVA. Kalima booted the Zombie’s systems and extracted the data, channeling it through her safety tether back to the junkship’s archives.
Rami clambered from his mechanical arm and went rung by rung to the protruding tube which dominated the body of the European telescope. He began to snap away the gold foil, roll it up, and strap it bit by bit to his mechanical arm.
Once done, he ambled around the Zombie’s bulk with a Lorentz tether spool chained to his utility belt. He undid his own safety tether—it was too short for the climb around this massive fossil of a satellite—and said he’d be in and out, no trouble.
He went beneath the Zombie, snapped in the Lorentz tether spool, and switched it on. All the satellite would need was a push Earthward, someone to wirelessly unspool the tether, and, eventually, it would disintegrate in the atmosphere—one more piece of trash eliminated from the busy mess which had hindered orbital activity, lunar missions, and outgoing probes for three-and-a-half decades.