Dancing With Eternity
a novel
John Patrick Lowrie
Camel Press
Seattle, Washington
PO Box 70515
Seattle, WA 98127
For more information go to: www.camelpress.com
www.lowrie.camelpress.com
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Cover design by Sabrina Sun
Illustration by Phil Howe
Dancing With Eternity
Copyright © 2011 by John Patrick Lowrie
ISBN: 978-1-60381-810-0 (Trade Paper)
ISBN: 978-1-60381-811-7 (Cloth)
ISBN: 978-1-60381-812-4 (eBook)
Produced in the United States of America
This book is dedicated to everyone who has lost a child or a parent suddenly and senselessly.
And always, always to Shawnessy.
Acknowledgments
Thank you to all my tireless, infinitely patient friends: Jadd Davis, John & Celeste Deveney, Hugh Hastings, Eric Jensen, Jason Kappus, Ian Lindsay, Teresa Metzger-Howe, Terry Moore, Frank Simcoe and of course my beautiful and insightful wife, Ellen McLain, for all your feedback on the manuscript. And to my editor, Catherine Treadgold, whose hard work and belief in me made this book possible.
And a very, very special thanks to Chuck Pliske (NASA, ret.) and Dave Lang (NASA, ret.) for their help on the physics of the skyhook and wonderful conversations about things technical and futuristic.
This book would not be what it is without all of you.
Part I
Vesper
Chapter 1
Ignorance covers humanity like a thick wool blanket, with tiny pinpricks of knowledge peeking through here and there. Whenever we manage to connect a few of the dots to form a picture we think we’re pretty hot stuff, and I guess we are. I mean we’ve never met anyone who can do it better, but I can’t decide if that really means we’re good at it—or if it’s just a very slow track.
I’ve been around a long time; you’d think I would have learned something. I don’t know. A man starts acting funny when he’s run out of options. Thinking becomes a strangely bloated yet pointless exercise. I hadn’t worked in ten months. I hadn’t paid my rent in two. The woman I’d been shacked up with had gotten tired of my scales before I did and by the time I got tired of them I was too broke to have my genome reworked.
Actually, the scales were probably the start of this current decline. I’d tried to deduct them as a professional expense. I’m an actor, among other things, and I figured if full body scales didn’t constitute a costume, what does? The SRS disagreed and popped me for four thousand DCU, blocked my net access when I didn’t pay, and told Shaughnessy that if she tried to lift with me aboard they’d impound her ship and arrest her for cultural pollution.
I guess they didn’t like the show.
So Shaughnessy explained to me how much she liked my work and what a great asset to the production I was and how much she hated to lose me but these things happen and if I could get this straightened out and hop the next ship to Heaven (which was where the tour was going next) and by the way did I know any actors on Heaven? You know, just someone to fill in until I hooked back up with them. I told her I’d never been to Heaven. At that point it looked like I had as much chance of seeing Heaven as a 14th century heretic.
I went down to the port to see them off. I don’t know why. They punched a hole in the sky and kept on going and I stayed behind.
There is something about watching a starship lift off when you were supposed to be in it that is almost indescribable.
So there I was in New Spanaway, a city that is a textbook victim of imperial planetary economics: a pre-fab metal and plastic blister plopped down in the middle of the jungle on the wrong side of Vesper, which is actually a pretty nice globe. Vesper as a whole has a good balance of trade, big tourist business; you’ve probably heard of it if you’ve done any traveling in the home worlds. It’s the third moon of Golgotha, a huge super-Jovian gas giant that was one of the first extra-solar planets to be discovered, back around the end of the second millennium. Of course, everyone around here claims it was the first to be discovered, but who believes a bunch of hundred-and-fifty-kilo, bio-engineered SyndicEnts? I mean, you don’t disagree with them, but you don’t necessarily hang on their every word, either.
But we happy denizens of New Spanaway were far removed from the pleasure palaces and tourist traps; they’re all in the other hemisphere, where Golgotha’s cream and rust banded immensity fills half the sky. No, there’s only one place to go in your off-hours in Spam-town and I was in it, looking for a way out.
I saw her in the mirror over the bar when she came in from the verandah. She would have been hard to miss. She was over two meters tall, long limbed and slender, and covered from head to toe in sleek silver fur that lengthened into a thick mane on the top and back of her head. Her eyes were large, almond-shaped and the color of emeralds—no cornea visible, just these two liquid pools of green fire split by black cat-pupils. If she wasn’t rich, she must have been at one time. The fur job alone must have set her back a bundle, and I didn’t even want to think what the eyes cost her. She wasn’t wearing much more than I was, not a surprise in the tropics when a person’s spent that much on her skin, and I should know. But what the hell was she doing here?
The contrast between her relaxed, fluid grace and the utilitarian rust of ’Burbs place was one of those images that can throw into focus the ironies of an entire socio-economic power structure. She walked past the playpens on her way to the bar, passing through humid shafts of mid-afternoon sunlight that read her body contours like a laser scanner. I tried to look at the bottom of my glass and think about something else.
’Burbs didn’t stare at her; I’ll give him that. But then, I don’t think ’Burbs had hormonal or pheromonal reactions anymore. He hadn’t had them removed or anything; they’d just eroded away naturally. Her polychrome nails clicked on the teak counter top as she sat down like—like she owned the guy who paid the guy who paid the guy who made the stool.
“What’ll it be?” ’Burbs’ voice was like the town he inhabited, a victim of economics. Hers wasn’t.
“Give me what your scaly friend is having.” I looked at her reflection in the mirror. Not just because she’d referred to me. Her voice made me think of warm honey flowing over brass. It reminded me of a singer I’d been in love with. A long time ago.
“He’s no friend of mine.” Nice guy, ’Burbs. He turned away to fill a glass with the home brew I’d been living on for too long, turned back to set it down in front of her.
“He have a name?” More honey. It made the scales on my arms stand up slightly; I could feel air under them. ’Burbs looked at her like he was convincing himself that he was too old and too mated to care that she wanted me instead of him.
“I’ll ask him.” He glanced down the bar at me. “Hey, Lizard, you gotta name?” I actually look more like a pangolin than a reptile, but when one of the regulars started calling me Lizard a couple of months ago I let it stick. The number of phonemes it shared with “loser” resonated with my current bout of sardonic fatalism.
“You couldn’t pronounce it,” I said into the glass. I was playing for time. In my present state I couldn’t believe that a beautiful, rich, or even ex-rich, woman would care if I was breathi
ng, let alone want to know my name. I figured she was from the System Revenue Service, or worse yet, from Planetary Tectonics, here to kick me off the dole and into a job in the ’works, where ’Burbs lost his voice and his right arm and probably his pheromonal reactions.
“Not very friendly, is he?” She didn’t look at me as she said it, didn’t even look at my reflection, and I tried not to look at her. That voice was really getting to me. Take away the fur, the eyes, the body contours, even the possible wealth, and the voice alone would have been enough to make me curl up in her lap. I started to wonder if she had backup outside, if I could squeeze through the window in the can and sprint down the alley before she called her goons. And where the hell would I go then? “Better get him another one of these,” she said as she tapped her nails on the glass.
She was buying me a drink? Who was this femme? ’Burbs looked at her like she might be dangerous, then he looked at me like I was a slightly embarrassing skin condition, then back at her. We were the only ones in the place besides a couple of SyndicEnts wired into la-la land in the playpens. She was obviously ready to get down to business. She placed her palm on the softly glowing square inlaid in the teak in front of her. Whatever the readout was on ’Burbs monitor, it must have impressed him; he shrugged, filled another glass and sent it down the bar to me.
I stopped it with one hand, turned my head and looked squarely at her, checking out the verandah in my peripheral vision as I did so. There was the beef, all right, the size of a small mountain. Looked like a Primate 3, or maybe even a 4, I couldn’t really tell; it was backlit by the sun outside. Jesus, Allah and Vishnu, what had I wandered into?
It started to rain, one of those wonderful tropical afternoon cloudbursts where the sun shines right through the fat drops, turning them into millions of fire opals. It didn’t seem to bother her pal outside. He didn’t move. I hoped the drumming on the roof masked the pounding of my heart.
I looked back at her reflection and met her eyes. Her pupils had dilated in the semi-darkness of the bar and were almost round now. They were enormous. Looking into them gave me the strangest sensation—a kind of dynamic equilibrium, like I’d just stepped off a cliff and there was nothing left to do but enjoy the ride and hope for the best.
“Go ahead and drink it. It’s paid for.”
Which is more than could be said for the three I’d already had. I stared into those bottomless eyes for a moment, then dropped my gaze to the brew in front of me so I could think. You see, I was still entertaining the fantasy that I was a free agent, and I was already discovering that thinking was not something I did well while I was looking at her. I opened my mouth to say something like, “What’s your game …” or “How did I get so lucky …” but opening my mouth was as far as I got. She wasn’t from the SRS or any of the syndicates; those organizations for the advancement of human degradation might do a lot of things to you, but buying you a drink in the local dive wasn’t one of them. The theory that despite her dazzling appearance and apparent wealth she just couldn’t find a boyfriend and was irresistibly drawn to me was just as easy to discard. I knew that somewhere there was a devastatingly incisive verbal riposte that would unmask her and leave her utterly at my mercy, but I couldn’t come up with it.
“I understand you’ve been off the net,” she said, “for almost a year. How do you keep so healthy?”
I met her eyes in the mirror again. Bad choice. “Exercise,” I croaked without thinking, “and I watch what I eat.”
She smiled easily and slipped off her stool, leaving her brew untouched. Three steps brought her next to me. My nostrils filled with her and my pulse rate went up. “Innovative,” she said, then looked over her shoulder at ’Burbs. “Do you hide the good stuff in the back?”
’Burbs said, “Whadya need?” And she replied:
“How about a bottle of eighty year-old brandy?”
“Brandy? I don’t think I—”
“Why don’t you go check?” All without taking her eyes off me. ’Burbs stared dumbly at her back for a minute, then got the idea and disappeared. She put her arms around my neck, brought her lips to my ear and breathed, “Where can we talk?” I thought furiously as the chills went down my spine. She wanted privacy? This was a factory town. The Trades like to know what’s going on with their “employees.” I thought some more.
“You been to the beach?” I asked.
She smiled and my pulse went up again. “Sounds nice.”
“Meet me at the monorail in half an hour.”
“I can hardly wait.” She kissed my jaw line, smiled again, turned and swayed outside into the rain and sunshine. The mountain followed her up the Alley. I turned back to the bar and looked at myself in the mirror.
’Burbs came in after a minute carrying a bottle of something. He looked at me, looked around the place, and said, “Whadja do to her?”
I continued to look at my reflection as I drained the glass in my hand. Then I turned to him. “Why do they call you ’Burbs?” I asked.
“What?”
“Why do they call you ’Burbs?”
He looked at me for a moment. “I dunno, ’cause I grew up in the ’burbs, I guess.”
“What ’burbs?”
“Whaddya mean?”
“Which ’burbs did you grow up in?”
He put the bottle down. “You know, the ’burbs.”
I looked at my empty glass. “You don’t even remember what planet you started on, do you?”
He began to wipe down the bar. “What are you tryin’ to be cute?” he said.
And a spear of empathy touched my heart as I realized that he didn’t.
I walked out into the Alley, turned my face to the sky and let the rain beat on me for a while. I guess I was hoping it would clear my head. Paradise Alley was actually outside of New Spanaway proper, welded and glued and lashed together out of anything the “retired” could salvage from the ’works or the jungle. Gold light burnished the wet metal surfaces of the shops around me, the harsh, industrial lines softened by an occasional clump of bamboo or dumbcane or shefflera pushing through the cracks in the black plastic paving blocks.
I turned my head and looked down to the edge of town and beyond. Out from under the brooding, black base of the thunderstorm the sky was blue and the rainforest brilliant green, patched here and there by the lighter green of nutriCrop fields, sloping down and down to the thousand meter cliffs of Nohili Point. And beyond that to the sapphire sea and the twin, verdant fangs of Lehua and Nihoa, patiently defying the waves. Prime was low in the sky now; there were probably no more than six or eight hours until nightfall. Its nearly horizontal rays shone right under the thunderhead, illuminating the rusted, chaotic tangle of piping, catwalks and cooling towers downtown that reached clear up into the base of the storm. Paradise Alley opened onto the southwest thoroughfare right across from the seemingly endless reduction yards, row upon row of towering condensers and evaporators stretching all the way to the perimeter. I started walking toward them. Even with a rainbow forming in the distance, this place was a bad idea.
Right at the corner a traveler’s palm had managed to make a home for itself and somebody had carved something in the basket weave of fronds just above the trunk. It said, “Free the Spam-town 70,000.”
I was thinking I might be able to make it 69,999.
The first tube I came to dropped me out of the weather and into the corrosion-streaked labyrinth of the underground. I descended past the employee residential levels to the Mall: a fairly wide thoroughfare lined with various company stores. Spam-town was really just a huge tectonic management plant surrounded by a Gordian knot of auxiliary and support facilities. You were never very far from the ’works, but here on the Mall you were literally walking under a cannonade of colossal conduits, slanting up from the magma sink under the center of town heading for the huge heat exchangers that could be seen from anywhere on the surface.
I passed the dark entrance to the auditorium where I’d given my
last performance with Shaughnessy’s touring company. Ten months or an eon ago. I cursed her name one more time and slipped down the narrow alley between a Reality outlet and the nutrition dispensary that I was living behind. The woman who ran it had seen the show and taken pity on me when she heard about my tax trouble. It turned out that pity hadn’t been her only motivation. She’d offered me this place, at a very reasonable rate, or so it seemed at the time. I was hoping to slide in and out without seeing her.
My palm opened the lock on the steel door to the storage area. I’d jimmied it a few months back to allow myself an escape route without having to go in and out through the store. It was old and cheap, it hadn’t been hard to reprogram. When the bolts threw I stood there for a minute, listening. She was a nice old bird and I really didn’t want to see her right then.
Nothing. I slid the door back far enough to slip inside and padded between the racks of nutrients, supplements and pre-packaged meals to my digs in the back. Pulling back the sheet that served as a door, I stepped down into a couple of inches of water. Great. Living in the tropics, right next to something that dealt in thousands of degrees Kelvin in temperature differentials, you came to expect a little condensation, no matter how much insulation they used, but this was worse than usual. Something must have blocked the drain again. I didn’t have the time or inclination to deal with it right then; I just hoped the moaning and banging of the magma sink would mask any noise I made.
I knew what I was looking for and it wasn’t where I’d left it—a serious breach of etiquette on Sheila’s part. She’d evidently been digging around in here again. It was her place, after all, but you really don’t mess with another person’s medicine bag.
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