Jim Baens Universe-Vol 2 Num 5

by Eric Flint

  "You probably can't even understand it," he said. He threw the rest of his snack pack away. It bounced off the end of the log we sat on, into the dust. "Don't know that I do, but those people—"

  "Those people who stole your ship and cargo?" I asked.

  A muscle in Larkin's jaw leapt. "I fooled myself into thinking they were my friends, just in this to see if they could do it—you know? Get those books to Meg, across all those light-years, despite every person who laughed at us. When all along, it was for the money, wasn't it? They saw a profit to be made."

  "At least you had the courage to do it," I said. "You crossed stars no man had crossed before." I took Larkin's hand and rubbed the snack pack crumbs from his fingers. "You did it awake."

  Larkin's fingers closed over mine and he pulled, just enough to get me off balance. I fell to my knees, in between his legs.

  "There are things worth being awake for," he said and smoothed his fingers over my face. His kisses were feather light, over lips and cheeks and nose; heat rolled down my spine. "Have you ever ridden a horse? Ever walked barefoot through a field until you're so tired and your feet ache? But then you find a river and dip your feet in. Dig your toes in mud?"

  "Messy," I said, bracing my hands on Larkin's knees.

  "Definitely," he said and kissed my mouth hard. "Do you dream in stasis?"

  I shook my head. "No. At least I don't think so."

  I couldn't remember stasis dreams, only those I had in the waking world. I dreamed of my father pushing me on a swing—though he never had. I dreamed of my mother baking gravity-defying moon pies—but she didn't bake. I dreamed of my dog, running across dreamscape fields, but I'd never had a dog.

  "Come on," I said as my mouth broke from his. "Let's go get your books." We could wait here all night, or take the books by force. Given the choice, I'd take the latter every time. Larkin would, too.

  The wreck of Killian was still sputtering with smoke when we approached. Thin spirals of smoke vanished into the sunset sky, the heart of the ship shattered over the rocky ground.

  Rand sat near his fire, absently stroking the locked container which held the books. He glanced at us as we approached, but didn't seem alarmed. Larkin kept a gun trained on Rand, but Rand had eyes for me alone.

  "Do you dream?" he asked.

  Larkin had asked me the same. I rounded the campfire to crouch opposite Rand. "I don't think so," I said.

  "I can't take that emptiness any more," Rand said. He scrubbed a dirty hand over his jaw where golden whiskers had begun to show. "But I can't take dreams, either. There's no middle ground."

  "What are you saying?" Larkin asked. He stood by my side, not lowering the weapon he held on Rand.

  "My parents were sleepers, some four hundred years ago."

  Rand looked all of eighteen, unsure and timid, but—

  He laughed hollowly. "It's all an act, you know. Playing the apprentice, only to swipe the cargo farther down the line." His eyes flicked to Larkin and I thought I read an apology there.

  "God man, you have books." Rand shook the container and the books inside thumped. "Can't unlock them though, can I? Told myself this would be the last run." Rand sniffed and I realized he was crying. "Just can't take more of it. I'm tired, so tired."

  But sleeping outside of stasis meant dreams. What did a man that old dream of, I wondered. I wasn't sure I wanted to know.

  Rand abruptly stood and threw the container at Larkin. It struck Larkin's raised arm and threw him off balance, giving Rand enough time to leap on me and attack with his entire body. There was no shoving him off; Rand clung to me like he meant to crawl inside my skin. I jabbed and kicked and bit, but he held firm, until I finally fired my gun.

  Rand sank against me with a sigh akin to pleasure. He smiled at me while his life bled from him.

  "Thank you," he said and died in my arms.

  I forced myself not to turn away, to see the mess of this life. Rand was still warm in my arms, and heavy, so heavy, like water in an empty stomach. I thought his eyes might flicker open, but knew that for fancy, because life had fled this body and wouldn't return.

  I eased Rand to the rocky ground. Maybe there was a reason life expectancy wasn't so long; we could barely handle the waking world, escaping it each night to sleep, to dream, only to escape that with waking. Ultimately, there was no escape, not even in stasis. What were we running from?

  Larkin looked at me, his gray eyes steady. "I've got a shovel on board."

  "A—" I shook my head, not understanding right away. And then I did. The dead are buried. This was the way of life, and I set myself to it with Larkin along side.

  The evening passed above us as we worked, sunset colors washing to gray and black to reveal the stars that looked so different from this angle, through this atmosphere. We buried Rand with those killed in the crash, and Larkin salvaged what he could from Killian before we returned to the shuttle, and then to Luna.

  There, Bel told me the stasis beds were damaged beyond repair. It came as no surprise; Rand's shot had taken out the very sections of Luna that might have been used to repair the complex stasis systems.

  I sought the solitude of the infirmary, knowing I had no choice but to continue on toward Sedgwick. The cargo was undamaged and necessary.

  It was only five years, I told myself. Surely I could do five years. What of the stories, of the early pilots who traveled without benefit of stasis-sleep? The idea that people had done such a thing still chilled me. How brave they were; how cowardly I was. I stared at my face in the mirror and thought that at last, I would see that face age.

  I closed my eyes, to forestall tears, and when I opened them, found Larkin behind me. I turned to face him and didn't feel the need to force a smile. I let him see my doubt and my fright.

  He didn't say a word, just kissed me. I kissed him back, losing myself in the feel of his hands against my skin. Larkin was heat made solid, restless and awake under my touch. I divested him of his shirt and his worn leathers, to know every inch of his skin as he shortly knew mine. I pressed him onto the infirmary's one bed and covered his body with my own, knowing with each motion that I was placing myself on a path I'd never before walked. Larkin's hands on my hips, easing me over him, him into me, were a silent invitation—to not walk alone.

  There would be no running this time, I thought, and I was grateful, feeling perhaps the same thing Rand had felt at the end of his journey. You have to stop running sooner or later. It was time for both of us to stop.

  And to begin. Larkin afforded a thousand beginnings for me, not the least of which was a bedtime story.

  That first evening, he perched on the edge of my stasis bed, a book in hand. My breath caught at the sight of the man and the book alike. I didn't see the pouch until he tossed it. I caught it against my chest.

  "I owed you," he said.

  "Terran or Vegan?" I asked, but by the weight of the pouch, I knew the answer.

  "I was feeling generous."

  Terran credits then. They would be more than welcome as we crossed the stars toward Sedgwick. I nodded and shifted from foot to foot, uncertain what Larkin wanted from this moment.

  He and Bel had modified the stasis beds, but his was farther down the corridor, in another undamaged section. The lids had been removed; my bed would not seal around me tonight with a sibilant hiss.

  "I don't know about this," I said. "Sleeping and dreaming. I keep feeling Rand in my arms." Dead weight, awash in the warmth of his blood.

  "Bad dreams are part of the deal," Larkin said. "As a kid, my parents took turns tucking me in, usually kept the bad dreams away."

  "Tucking in?" It was an unfamiliar phrase to me.

  Larkin smiled. "Sure, fluffing the pillows, making sure I was snug in the blankets. Reading me a bedtime story." He lifted the book he held. "Let me tuck you in."

  I climbed into the bed and Larkin fluffed my pillow, though there wasn't much to fluff. He pulled the blankets up around me—I could hardly fathom
this, being that it was Bel who would prep me for stasis sleep. But this wasn't stasis, I reminded myself.

  "Here." Larkin eased the credit pouch from my grip and tucked it under my pillow.

  Larkin smoothed his hand over my hair, my hair that would grow these next five years and change as my body would change. Larkin, too, would change; I wondered how long he would let his whiskers grow, if the smile lines around his eyes would deepen.

  I closed my eyes and the book pages rustled under Larkin's hand. His voice rumbled as he read to me of disappearances, of frightening tunnels, and hope-bright landscapes that no one had laid eyes on before.

  Against my closed lids, I saw it all, easing into peaceful dreams with Larkin at my side.

  Spiderweb

  Written by David Gerold

  Illustrated by Jonathan Robbins

  All right, let's talk about the Oort Cloud. It's big. It's not flat. It's round. It's a sphere. It's 7500 trillion kilometers thick and it starts about 7500 trillion kilometers away. The denser, inner part of the Oort is called the Hills Cloud. That's a little closer in. Only 750 million kilometers; but it extends nearly 10 billion klicks out, give or take a cosmic smidge. The Hills Cloud is nearly 100 times denser than the rest of the Oort. So that's where the prospectors go.

  You start at Luna, and you boost at 1.3 gee for 2-3 months, flipover, and decelerate for almost as long, leaving enough delta-vee to coast. When you get there, wherever you are, you will be as far from home as any human being has ever gotten. At least until the Long Voyage boosts, if it ever does.

  Some people think space is a poetic adventure. Cold. Dark. Silent. Those are the people who have never been in space.

  Out here, it is not cold and dark and silent.

  Inside a ship, inside a suit, it's hot and bright and loud. Especially loud. Every little creak, clank, or clunk, the vibration rattles its way down the hull, across the decks, even into the carbon-fiber bolts that hold the whole damn ship together. There's no place else for the sound to go. Every ventilator fan whirrs, every pump throbs, every valve bumps, every pipe whistles, every moving part makes a sound. Hatches open and close, panels unfold, sensors uncover themselves, cameras swivel. It's a torrent of noises, a cacophony of chirps and buzzes, whooshes and bumps. Space might be silent, but the machineries that keep you alive are loud and incessant. And no, it doesn't matter what kind of ceramics and polymers and fibers and insulation you use for building the ship, there will always be sound. Even safe inside a suit, the noise never ends; your blood throbs in your veins, your heart thumps in your chest and your breath roars in your ears.

  Yes, I know there are some people who say they can tell the health of a ship simply by listening to the sound of it. I say they're deluding themselves. There are just too many sounds, too much to hear, assimilate, impossible to know. The point is, it's not silent.

  And it's not cold either. Just like the sound, the heat has nowhere to go. A spaceship is an oven. You can shield it, you can rotate it, you can insulate it with reflectors. You can add radiator fins and heat sinks. You can paint the ship with micro-dots and nano-demons. But the heat still builds up. You have to hide behind a wall of shielding. Two walls. One wall in front, facing the direction you're going, and the other facing the sun. It works. Well enough.

  The shield in front is called the cow-catcher. Back in the days of railroads, the cow-catcher was an iron apron at the front of the locomotive, designed to knock unwitting cows or deer or moose or buffalo off the tracks. The cow-catcher on a spaceship is there to protect the ship against micro-dust. Figure it out. Constant acceleration means a steadily increasing velocity. Space isn't empty. That's another one. It only looks empty. Actually, it's full of stuff, mostly little stuff, all different size pieces. You can stop looking for dark matter, there isn't any. What there is, is dust. All the leftover flakes of cosmic dandruff. The faster you go, the faster they hit you. One particle per cubic kilometer isn't a problem—until you're traveling through a couple hundred million kilometers or more, like getting to Mars when it's coming around the far side of the sun. Then it's like driving through very fine sandpaper. It adds up. So you put a shield in front. And every so often, you replace the camera mirrors that are peeking out from behind it.

  Now, about the dark. Space isn't dark. It only looks dark because the human eye doesn't gather enough light to see how full of radiation space really is. All kinds of radiation. A lot of radio, yes, but all up and down the spectrum there are blares and flares and glares of heat and color. Space is really dazzling. We just can't see it.

  So, if space isn't dark and it isn't cold and it isn't empty and it isn't silent, what is it?

  It's boring.

  There's nothing for kilometers in any direction except kilometers. And micro-dust—and not much of that, just enough to be an expensive nuisance. And even at 1.3 gees, 5 giga-klicks is still a month-long ride. Except there aren't many who want to take that ride. Most ships are bot-driven. There's not a lot of need for a human aboard. Take the human out of the ship and you can carry a lot more payload. It's not the weight of the human, it's the weight of all the oxygen and water and food and life support gear and additional fuel to push that weight. Do the math. But sometimes, you need a human onboard anyway. Because there are some decisions bots can't make, and it isn't always practical for a ship to phone home for advice, when that advice won't come back for a year or more. So that's when you load up the meatware and send it out.

  Given that the bots drive the ship, crawl around the outside monitoring and repairing, and handle most of the chores inside as well, there's not a lot for a human to do. Except inhale and exhale. And answer the mail. There's always the mail. So you're not even alone. So you can't even say that space is lonely. It's hot and loud and bright and busy.

  But you can turn off the mail, you can put on the isolation-hearmuffs, and you can run around naked as long as you want. If you don't mind your tits or your balls flopping around, whichever you have at the time, either or neither or both. This trip, neither. Myself, I prefer wearing micro-fiber skivvies, if for no other reason than they catch skinflakes, the little crud that turns into dust and eventually clogs up things like filters and fans. If I need to, I'll wear a bra or a jock while pounding around the centrifuge, an hour a day while I listen to music, but most of the time I prefer to let things float instead of pulling at the musculature.

  What I do like about space is that it gives me long uninterrupted hours to work on my book. Every so often, something beeps politely; a double-tone with a half-step up; then I'll look up at the status board to see if everything is still green, it is, and then I'll go back to work constructing the webs of connections and matrices, all the specific velocities and dynamic interrelationships, and how they carve their separate channels into the non-linear environment, and which collisions will produce transformations and which will result in emotional implosions. It isn't easy being a writer. Most people think you just sit and type. That's only what it looks like. The real job is sitting and thinking, which is something most people don't like to do. That's why they buy books—so they don't have to be alone inside their own heads.

  Except this time, the beep was a triple-tone, with a half-step down and a half-step up. A question mark. Boss, you wanna take a look at this?

  The status screen showed a yellow question mark.

  The Baked Bean—that's my ship—was supposed to spiral outward for a long while, then spiral back inward for an equally long while. I didn't know what I was looking for, but I'd know when I found it. And it looked like I'd just found it. According to the IRMA, we were experiencing a slight—but measurable—course and velocity deviation. A tenth of a tenth of a tenth of a tenth. Not small enough to be an artifact of the hash at the bottom. When we dithered the noise and weighted the curves and sharpened the data-points and correlated and corrected the neural assessments, it was still there.

  It wasn't unexpected. This was what I'd come looking for. Low-level delta-perturbation.
We had more theories than answers. Some of the questions dated all the way back to the first Voyager missions. Those two spacecraft experienced just enough slowdown to have folks at Mission Control scratching their heads about Newton's second law for a long time. But the V'gers weren't the only ships to hit the solar shelf. After a century or two, it was a predictable phenomenon. One theory, easily discounted, was that the buildup of dust on the surface of the probe added just enough mass to affect the efficiency of the engines; but any grade-schooler with a calculator could easily demonstrate that the amount of dust collected, even on a thirty year voyage, would be statistically insignificant.

  Nevertheless, according to the instruments, The Baked Bean was no longer moving as fast as she had been a week ago. The drives were off and the ship had been coasting for ten days. I had lasers pointed at two dozen different retro-reflector sites: positioning satellites stationed all over the system, and another thirty satellites we had dropped on the way out. Based on the time-corrected, correlated bounce-back, I could locate this ship within 15 meters, anywhere out to a light year. According to IRMA, The Baked Bean was a few kilometers short of a happy meal—26.4 kilometers, to be exact, plus or minus 7.5 meters.

  Either the Bean had gained mass or space was a lot thicker here.

  Interesting problem.

  The first thing to do was triple-check all the readings, then re-calibrate all the instruments and triple-check the readings again. 48 hours and three sleep shifts later, the numbers came up the same. Almost the same. We were now 27.2 klicks short of where the software said we should be.

  Hmm. Hardware glitch? Highly unlikely. The IRMA unit had nine separate cores, three each of three different architectures. A glitch on one architecture would not be repeated on the other two. Software error? Equally unlikely. IRMA ran multiple instances of seven different astrogation programs. 7 different programming teams would not all make the same coding error. The astrogation systems were triple-linked with Mission Control Ganymede. They were parallel processing everything. 15 months from now, I would receive their confirmation that all systems were green and confidence remained high.