Dancing with Eternity

by John Patrick Lowrie

  [Where’s Alice? I need you back here now.]

  “She’s, uh ...” I started.

  “Why? What’s wrong?” Yuri cut in.

  Steel logged on. Yuri and I both stumbled a little as we were suddenly viewing the universe through Steel’s eyes, and Steel was looking at Krupp, all two hundred kilos of him. He was ranting, “Did you think I wouldn’t find you? You think you’re the only one with connections on Circe? That skag Lysistrata always knew when to cut a deal. She didn’t let me down.”

  Steel was playing for time: “But how did you find us here? Nobody knew we were coming here. We didn’t know we were coming here.” As she spoke she panned her vision around the room for our benefit. Krupp wasn’t alone. His tall friend Daimler was there as well, looking helpless and unhappy, and there were about a dozen SyndicEnts, each of them almost as big as Krupp.

  “Holy frickin Buddha,” I said.

  Krupp continued, “That’s what makes me so angry. You’re not just crazy, you’re stupid.”

  “Thank you,” Steel responded. “It’s nice talking to you, too.”

  “Is this helping us resolve—” Daimler started.

  “THERE’S NO INTERSTELLAR TRAFFIC GOING TO EDEN,” Krupp shouted. “GET IT? One neutron exhaust stream heading to Eden, yours. One stream heading away from Eden. YOURS. Aimed straight at New Moorea. YOU SEE? You don’t think things THROUGH.”

  “I think things through,” Steel answered.

  “Let’s try to stay on topic,” Daimler began, “We need to—”

  “She doesn’t CARE!” Krupp shouted. He turned back to Steel. “Do you even KNOW how much it costs per second to operate a starship?”

  “Okay, Captain,” I said, “we’re on our way.”

  [As fast as you can,] she replied and she logged off.

  Yuri hopped online, “Um, Alice?”

  [Yeah, yeah, I heard. I’ll be there in a sec.] She sounded a little flustered, a little frustrated, but mostly just tired of the whole thing.

  I said to Yuri, “It looked like they were in the warehouse where they were getting supplies.”

  “A warehouse, anyway,” he answered.

  “Well, she’ll feed us the location.”

  “Yeah. Jesus, how long did it take us to get over here?”

  “We’re gonna have to do better going back.”

  “Yes.”

  I hopped on, “Alice?”

  [Yeah, yeah, keep your pants on. I’m trying to get my pants on.]

  “Okay, we just need to get going,” I finished.

  [I know, I know.]

  I saw her hopping around the edge of the rocks adjusting clothing as she went. Then something else occurred to me: “Christ, Ham is with us.”

  “Yeah?” Yuri answered.

  “Krupp is with Steel.”

  “Yeah.”

  “We need to get back there.”

  “Yeah. C’mon, Alice!”

  “I’m coming.”

  We covered the distance back to the docks as fast as we could, hopped in the skiff and opened the throttle. We didn’t want to bother Steel—she had her hands full—but it was awful not knowing what was going on. The minutes dragged by as we raced across the strait back to New Papeete.

  As we pulled into the harbor two black needles towered over us: the Lightdancer and the much larger needle that had to be Krupp’s ship. It had been almost an hour since we’d last heard from Steel. I hopped on: “Captain, we’re here. Where are you?”

  [On the main road from the spaceport. We’re in the third warehouse down.]

  “What do you want us to do?”

  [Just get here.]

  The spaceport was built out over the water. The warehouse she was talking about was only a couple of blocks from the docks. We started running. Then I saw Archie sprinting toward us from the Lightdancer. She either didn’t see us or she was just in a hurry. She got to the door of the warehouse and disappeared inside.

  I started to say, “What was she carrying?” when Steel logged on again. We had to slow down. You can’t really keep your balance when you’re looking at two different realities at once. Superimposed on the street in front of us, the dingy interior of the warehouse invaded our vision. Steel glanced to each side. We could see through her eyes that she was flanked by Marcus, Tamika and Jemal. Krupp seemed to have calmed down, but we could tell Steel was very tense. Surrounded by all that muscle, who wouldn’t be?

  Daimler was speaking: “—must understand, Estelle, that we can’t let you do this. It would harm the very people you are trying to—”

  Krupp cut him off: “We’re not GOING to let you do this.” He signaled to his drones. “If you can’t see reason then I swear to Krishna—”

  There was a crash to Steel’s left. She turned to look at the source and we had to stop moving completely as we saw Archie break through an interior door. She staggered a little as she waved her right hand and the room erupted in screams. Steel turned back to look at Krupp and his army. They fell apart. It was too strange to be horrifying. It was like someone had taken a scalpel and just sliced through them. Where there had been a line of behemoths moving toward our friends, there was now just a pile of legs and torsos and severed arteries pumping blood. Steel logged off and we were abruptly in the street again.

  We stared at each other dazedly, trying to take in what we had just seen. Yuri said, “The lasers. She had one of the lasers.” He started running toward the warehouse. “Oh, Shiva. Archie—” He opened the exterior door and went inside. Alice and I ran after him. Ham lumbered along behind.

  We ran down a corridor toward a broken door. Archie was yelling: “Damn it. SKAG! I lost my balance. I just meant to stop them. I didn’t want to ... I didn’t know this thing was so powerful.”

  Alice and I got to the door and walked into a charnel house. Yuri was holding his hands to his head and saying, “Oh, Shiva, oh, Shiva,” over and over again. Daimler had not been standing by Krupp and the SyndicEnts. He was not harmed, but the rest of them were screaming and losing blood fast. A wavy plane of daylight streamed in where the laser had cut through the wall behind them.

  Marcus recovered first. He hopped online. “Hello? Hello. We need nanodocs at warehouse number three. There’s been an accident ... Yes, um, thirteen men are down. We have arterial bleeding. Yes. Yes.” He hopped off and ran over to a pile of webbing and straps used to lift the crates that were stored there and started shouting orders. “We need tourniquets. Grab anything that ties and start tying off these wounds!”

  The laser had sliced through them like they were paper, rising unevenly as Archie had stumbled. The nearest drone had lost both his feet. Krupp, roughly in the middle of the line, had lost both legs at the upper thigh. The farthest from Archie had been cut in two from his right hip to the left side of his waist. Yuri worked feverishly, almost manically: grabbing straps and tying them off and moving to the next and doing the same again and again and again. We all worked as fast as we could, but there were fewer of us than there were of them. By the time the nanodocs arrived we’d lost five, Krupp included. I just couldn’t bring myself to work on him. I guess I was saving him for last. He would have to re-boot along with his four drones. I wondered how Steel was going to pay for it; it seemed like we were spending credits like entropy had caught up with us and it didn’t matter anymore.

  As we were finishing up and getting the survivors into the ’docs and the rest off to the hospital I had a chance to stop and look around. Everyone but Steel and Daimler were pretty gory. All of the crew had waded in kind of heroically, I thought, trying as hard as they could to save these people from having to ’boot. We were all in various levels of shock, but I noticed Tamika had collapsed in the corner shuddering and crying. Now that the crisis had passed and we had done what we could, she was faced with the full impact of what she had seen. We all were. Jemal was comforting her. I was too tired to even do that.

  Daimler was online with traffic control: “These were my drones and I’ll take
care of them.” Evidently traffic control didn’t take kindly to the news that thirteen of its parts had been damaged so flippantly. Daimler was getting quite heated, “Kristel is a member of the Bayernische Syndicate and what she does or does not do is no concern of yours!” He listened. “Of course we’ll pay for them. Who do you think you’re dealing with?”

  Who the heck was ‘Kristel’? Was Archie working under an alias too? That’s the only thing I could think of. I mean she was the one who fired the laser, but it didn’t seem possible: Archie a member of a Terran syndicate?

  Daimler went on, “Yes ... yes. I don’t care what account ... I don’t have the time or the patience to deal with this right now ... I DON’T CARE. Put it on the Valhalla account. Yes ... yes. Thank you.” He turned to Steel, “Incompetent bureaucrats!”

  I hadn’t heard the name ‘Valhalla’ refer to anything but the planet in over a millennium. Now I’d heard it from Steel and Daimler. I didn’t like it. And who the hell was Kristel?

  Steel was speaking to Daimler, “I’m sorry this turned into such a ... but you saw what he did! He was going to physically restrain me. ME!”

  “Estelle, you have to know that what you’re doing is affecting all of us. I have to agree with Kr— with— with—” He glanced at the rest of us. We were standing around looking like butchers badly in need of a bath. “You’re going about this with absolutely no regard for what it’s costing, for what it’s going to cost.”

  “What it’s going to COST? You DARE talk to me about what it’s—”

  “All right, all right. Perhaps we shouldn’t be discussing this in front of your—”

  “I need to get to my ship,” Steel stated. “Unless you have any more thugs you’re planning to throw at me?”

  “Estelle, please,” Daimler hung his head, shook it. “Kristel’s methods—”

  “He prefers to be called ‘Krupp.’ ”

  “Yes.” He glanced at us again and tried to sigh away an ancient pain. “Yes, of course. Krupp. Her methods—his, his methods are not always—”

  “I see no possible purpose this conversation could have. If you want to continue it I suggest we meet again after I get back.”

  “After—” he sighed again. “Where are you going? At least tell me that.”

  Steel turned to her pilot. “Marcus, how many more loads do we have to transfer to the Lightdancer?”

  “Two, maybe three, Captain,” Marcus replied.

  “Get it done,” she said and started to leave.

  Daimler put his hand on Steel’s arm and spoke quietly, desperately, “We KNOW you’re interested in longevity. We KNOW you want to extend the time between ’boots. We—”

  “Let go of my arm,” Steel said. He did. She turned and strode out of the room.

  Daimler stood there for a moment, angry maybe, or maybe just lost. Then he saw us all staring at him and the anger won out. He spat at us, “I believe you’ve been given an order!” and followed her out.

  Chapter 31

  Even Marcus couldn’t think of anything to say for a moment. We stood there on blood-soaked concrete, arms crimson, faces and chests bespattered.

  “Krupp is a woman?” Archie asked.

  “He’s my aunt,” Alice replied.

  “I mean he was a ... He’s a trans—” Then Alice’s statement registered with her, as it did with me. “What did you say?”

  “He’s Mom’s identical twin. Well, he’s not so identical anymore, I guess.”

  This news, as alien to reason as it was, seemed inconsequential after what we’d just been through. Even though no one had been in any real danger, we’d still reacted physically to the sight of so much agony and carnage. Our adrenaline had spiked, we’d gone into overdrive. It was a real emergency. It wasn’t just the money. They were wounded, in horrible pain. Our memories were filled with the echoes of screams. At that moment we had no emotional energy left to process Alice’s simple announcement. Then I looked at the faces of the crew and realized that Archie and I were the only ones who’d even understood what she had said.

  I could tell when Marcus decided that, whatever Alice had said, it wasn’t his problem. He was the exec. His job was to fly the Lightdancer and lead its crew and he had an order to follow. In the midst of the spilled fluids of human beings, this gave him comfort, purpose, a sense of direction. He watched the last of the nanodocs leave with its wounded cargo as he said, “Let’s get these supplies on board. Tamika, are you all right?” Jemal helped her stand up. She nodded and wiped her nose on the back of her arm, which just smeared the blood around. “Belay that last,” Marcus amended. “We need to get cleaned up.” He saw the long gash in the wall behind him. “And we’ll need to repair that. Yuri?” He looked around. “Where’s Yuri?”

  He wasn’t in the room with us. We called out to him but there was no response. Marcus hung his head and mumbled, “Goddamn it.” He ratcheted himself back up and said, “Let’s get back to the ship. Shower, change and be back here in an hour.”

  I was walking down the passageway to my cabin, clean, renewed and looking forward to putting on a fresh coverall, when Archie came up to me. Her hair was wet and she was wearing a robe but she did not look renewed. Her eyes were red-rimmed seas of angst and fear. I couldn’t tell if she was more afraid of the future or the past, but it was overwhelming her. Even for a surgeon, cutting people down like they were corn had to have been a shock for her.

  “Mo, I’m—I’m ...” She folded herself into me, her arms, one flesh, one metal, across her breasts, her head leaning into my chest. “I’m—I’m—I’m—”

  I put my arms around her. “Archie, what is it? Slow down, breathe. All those guys are going to be okay. They’ll be fine. What’s wrong?”

  “No, no. I’m—I’m worried about Yuri. He hasn’t come back. He’s not picking up for anyone. We don’t know where he is. Nobody knows where he is.”

  “Well,” I thought, “where could he have gone? It’s a small island. We’ll find him—”

  “That—that’s not it. It’s ... it’s something he said to me while we were working on the ... on the victims. He said, he said—”

  “What, Arch? What did he say?”

  She shuddered. “He said, he said he never meant for them to be used on people.”

  I knew what she meant. The lasers. Yuri had seemed pretty distressed. “Oh, okay. Okay, well I’m sure he didn’t—”

  “That’s not all. It was what I said.” She looked up at me, “I said I lost my balance.” This seemed like it was a much bigger admission to her than it was to me.

  I thought back. “Yeah, okay, I remember you saying that. What—?”

  “Don’t you remember? On the shuttle. I told him his arm threw me off balance.” She held up the prosthetic he had made her. “But it wasn’t his arm. It was Steel logging on right when I was breaking through the door that made me stumble. I’m afraid— I’m afraid—”

  “It’s okay, Arch. It’ll be okay.”

  “No, I’m afraid he’ll blame himself, or— or— or blame me. I’m afraid—” I hugged her. “We have to find him, Mo. You know he’s been upset lately. He’s— he’s— he’s been ... We can’t do this without him. We have to— we have to— He knows how everything works— I mean, I mean I don’t want him to— to—”

  “Okay, Arch. Let me talk to Marcus.” I hopped online. “Hey, Marcus?”

  [Yes.]

  “Um, can you get the rest of the stuff loaded without me?”

  [Why?]

  “Well, Archie tells me Yuri’s still missing, that he’s not picking up for anyone.”

  There was a silence. [Do you think you know where he is?]

  “Well, if he’s anything like me, yeah, I think I might have a pretty good idea.”

  There was another silence as Marcus considered my proposal. Then, [All right. Let us know if you need any help. Steel wants to lift at dawn.]

  When I got out of the Lightdancer, the sun had already set, but it was a small island and
a small town. I didn’t have any trouble finding the section I was looking for. It was lit up under the tropical night. The joints got cheaper, but no quieter, as you got farther from the waterfront. Every once in a while someone would remember a man fitting Yuri’s description. I kept working my way uphill.

  I finally found the street I’d probably been looking for all along. A handwritten sign said, “Paradise Alley.” It took me back to Spam-town and ’Burbs place, Vesper and Sheila. I wandered up the street going from joint to joint.

  I found him in the last dive in the alley. It was late, but this was a mining town; the place was still hopping. A band pulsed on a small stage in the corner. People danced, or just weaved back and forth. Lights, blue and red, spun and flashed on sweating bodies. I saw Yuri sitting at the far end of the bar, right next to where the wait staff picked up their orders. He seemed to have washed himself up a little, but under the colored lights it was hard to tell. I called to him and he lifted his head and looked at me through heavy-lidded eyes. He looked pretty stoked.

  “MO!” he said, “Hey, man! Have a seat! Have a drink!” His speech was slurred. He turned to the bartender, “Hey, Jac, this is my friend, Mo.” He patted me on the back. “He’s named after Mahatma Gandhi, did you know that? Mahatma FREAKIN’ Gandhi!”

  Jac said, “Is that right?”

  I nodded to him and said to Yuri, “Listen, Steel wants to get going—”

  Yuri wrapped his arm around my neck, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, wants to get going. Wants to get going. Hey, Jac, do you know who Mahatma Gandhi is?”

  “Can’t say that I do.”

  “No. No.” Yuri shook his head loosely. “You don’t. That wasn’t his name. His name was Mo, like my friend here. Mo-o-o Gandhi. Mogandhi, Mohandhi, Mohandhigandhi, but they called him Mahatma, you know? Out of respect.”

  “Okay, Yuri.” I tried to get him off of his stool, but it was like trying to pick up mercury with a pair of tweezers. “That’s enough history. We need to—”

  “Yeah, yeah,” he slipped away from me again. “Hey, Jac, what was I saying just now?”