Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 77

by Erzebet YellowBoy

  “My knees are fine,” Shepard lied.

  “Because you did before. It was a lot of complaining.” He watched a moment more before shaking his head. “You’re too old for this.”

  “Better than obsolete,” Shepard said. “Don’t these things fly themselves?”

  “That’s what all the graybeards say.”

  Under Caine’s observation, Shepard leaned first to one side, then the other.

  “Are you done now?” Caine asked. “Can you be done? Because there’s work to do. You’re reminding me of that thing your dad always said.”

  “‘Do your work?’”

  “No, the other one.”

  “‘Don’t be stupid?’“

  Caine tapped his nose. “A wise man, your father.”

  Although mostly engine, the tug crawled from her dock as though incapable of mustering speed. She was an ugly sight, her flanks blistered from high-temperature encounters with unstable artifacts. She was scored with heat discoloration and pitted with impact scars. She had been a shuttle in a past life, before being retrofitted with scavenged alien engines and put to work hauling junk. These bulbous additions had been bolted on aft, and accounted for two-thirds of her mass. She looked unimpressive, but she hauled wreckage.

  Eighty kilometers above Earth’s moon, Caine and Shepard abandoned the cockpit for the tug’s passenger cabin. All but two facing rows of seats had been removed to make room for the biology of the engines. Like the roots of a tree, piping and conduits ran from floor to ceiling and all along the bulkheads. From inside, it seemed the engines had not so much been bolted to the tug, as grown into it. When stoked, they would sweat something like a mucus-blood mixture, which stank like burning fat, and sizzled on the floor.

  Strapping in opposite one another, Caine and Shepard made themselves as comfortable as possible in the limited space. For a little while, the only sound was the heating.

  “What’s it like to be you?” Caine asked with a shudder. “So old.”

  Shepard craned his neck toward the cockpit. “Did you forget to press start?”

  “Patience,” Caine admonished. “They’re warming.”

  Relaxing into the headrest, Shepard gazed at the ceiling. “You should check.”

  Reaching back, Caine banged the conduits over his head with a fist.

  Shepard winced. “That’s not—”

  The engines came alive with a slow lurch. Turbines began to spin in lazy revolutions, ramping up with no apparent sense of urgency.

  Caine grinned. “That’s why you need me.”

  As the reactors warmed and the turbines gained speed, a vibration crept over the edges of everything, shivering hard lines to obscurity and numbing Shepard’s extremities. Then the banging began, and the violence of it threatened to shake the little tug apart. Across from Shepard, Caine leaned forward to vomit expertly into the bucket between his feet. He came up grinning, his teeth red, blood coursing from both nostrils.

  Shepard mimed wiping his mouth.

  The jockey touched his lips and blinked at his bloody fingers. Then he bent forward and vomited again.

  The engines disengaged with a sudden concussion, jarring Shepard to the bones. Immediately afterward, the banging ceased, and the turbines began their slow unwinding.

  Shepard pressed the heels of his hands to his throbbing eyes. He felt as though he’d been ripped open and stuffed with tar. He felt sewn up with bootlaces. Tasting blood, he wondered if his teeth were cracked. Across from him, Caine remained leaning over the bucket, his mirth beaten out of him.

  Shepard tilted his head back and closed his eyes against waves of nausea. Around him, the tug creaked and groaned, as though relaxing into unfamiliar pressures. Only when the engines had fallen silent did Shepard allow himself to breathe deeply. Across from him, Caine seemed engrossed in the act of drooling blood into his bucket.

  Shrugging off his harness, Shepard pushed to his feet and went to the jockey. “Hey,” he said, nudging Caine’s shoulder.

  “Fuuuuu,” the jockey complained.

  Shepard put a hand to Caine’s forehead and lifted. The jockey gaped up at him with a vacant, startled expression.

  “Sngkaaa,” Caine muttered. Seemingly surprised by his own voice, he blinked rapidly, then sprayed blood on Shepard with a violent sneeze.

  “Damn,” Shepard replied, and let Caine’s head drop.

  In the cockpit, he switched on the external cameras. The array of monitors came alive with a dozen murky viewpoints of local space, all of them the same. Drifting through the exterior floods were thick flakes of what appeared to be snow, but which Shepard knew to be hydrogen. By this, he knew they had indeed traveled distances that he failed to understand. He flipped on the closed-circuit intercom while watching the hydrogen snow obscure his monitors. “Hello,” he said into the microphone. He heard his own voice ringing from the speakers throughout the tug. “We’ve arrived.”

  He paused to listen for a response. Thinking he might have heard a voice in the static, he raised the volume and leaned closer. “Hello,” he repeated into the microphone. “Hello?”

  He searched the whole tug. Everywhere he went felt as though someone had stepped out the moment before. He checked the stateroom, in which there were two bunks. He flipped the lights on and off rapidly, as though to wake a late sleeper. “Hello?” he said. “We’re here.”

  He stood in front of the mirror in the head, and through it peered into the corners. While doing this, the power flickered, and a tiny burst of static emerged from the overhead speaker. He looked up, and his own voice came through dim and crackling.

  “Hello?” it said. “We’re here.”

  Shepard passed Caine on his return to the cockpit. Still trapped in his harness, the jockey made a pathetic grab for him. “Nnga!” he said.

  “Patience,” Shepard soothed him.

  When he got to the cockpit, no one was there.

  Shepard sat with Caine in the passenger cabin, which reeked of vomit and auto-release disinfectant. The jockey reminded him of a newborn, baffled by its own flailing. Nothing worked like it was supposed to; everything had a mind of its own. His head rolled, and his eyes widened at every new thing in perpetual astonishment.

  Leaning forward, Shepard patted Caine’s knee. “You’re going to be fine,” he said.

  In fact, Shepard believed Caine would die. Such misfortunes were an accepted occupational hazard. They’d all watched the videos, all signed the papers.

  In a little while Caine stopped fighting with his harness, and took on a look of stern concentration. A dark smell pervaded the room, bold and foul.

  “You’ve shit yourself, haven’t you?” Shepard said.

  “Sssmmn,” Caine said dreamily. “Mmnaaaah.”

  Shepard braced his hands on his thighs as though to rise. “Here’s what we do,” he decided. “I’m going to leave you as you are, because you seem mostly comfortable. Are you comfortable?”

  Caine arched his back and rolled his head. He threw his free arm up in a grand, incomprehensible gesture.

  “Good,” Shepard said. “I’m going to go ahead and find the derelict and start the procedures without you. I’ll be—”

  Caine kicked out his legs and gave a wordless shout. It was clear to Shepard that he disapproved, but his arms and legs weren’t cooperating. The jockey slammed his head against the headrest, mouth gaping.

  “Hey now,” Shepard said. “Go easy.”

  When the fit subsided, Shepard continued. “I’ll be careful with the tug, I promise. After the derelict’s secure we’ll see about getting home. Okay?”

  “Mmfaugh!”

  “I know,” Shepard sympathized. “But I can’t do it. You’d only hurt yourself.”

  Caine banged his head again, straining against the confining harness.

  “It really is for the best,” Shepard said.

  Minutes later, Shepard had settled into the cockpit and was nosing the tug through the windless blizzard. He couldn’t see the der
elict, but he knew it was close. Then it loomed in one of the monitors like the peak of a black mountain. The tug reported it as roughly wedge shaped, one hundred and thirty-seven meters long by twenty-two wide. Impressive, but not too much for the tug to manhandle.

  Having found his target, Shepard initiated a sequence of activities that, for the next twelve hours, involved him hardly at all. A swarm of softball-sized drones poured from the tug to descend on the derelict, intent on inspecting every square centimeter of her hull. Any evidence of life within—or breach without—and it was a hard abort. Either required teams with military-grade skills.

  Shepard relaxed into his chair to monitor the continuous feeds from the drones. A dozen angles of the derelict drifted by on the bank of screens, a landscape of sweeping features, protrusions, and the sudden, irregular angles of alien armaments. The husk showed no signs of life. Things so deep seldom did.

  “Hello?” said a crackling voice from the bank of monitors. The image of drifting hydrogen overlaid a version of his own face peering through at him. “Are you speaking now? Where have you been?”

  “Here the whole time,” Shepard said. “Is Caine with you?”

  “Somewhere,” his image said.

  “Something happened to him,” Shepard said.

  “Something?”

  “It looks bad.”

  The image twisted and rolled, giving way to static before solidifying again. “ . . . here,” it said.

  Shepard squinted at the screen. “What?”

  “He’s fine. He says to tell you that you look fatter. Older, too.”

  “Tell him something happened to him here. Tell him—”

  “You tell him.”

  The screen rolled, struggling with waves of persistent static. But when it stopped, there were only hydrogen flakes drifting over alien architecture. Shepard waited. Though he heard echoes of echoes and incomprehensible whispers through the air ducts and the intercom, no one reemerged.

  Hearing a voice in the cabin, Shepard went back to find Caine standing over himself. The jockey had fallen asleep leaning forward in the harness. The Caine that stood over him looked more disappointed than anything. Shepard kept his distance until Caine noticed him.

  The jockey pointed at the limp form in the harness. “This is terrible,” he said. His voice emerged from the ship’s speakers rather than his mouth. It was out of sync with the rest of him, which broke apart when looked at sideways.

  Shepard agreed: terrible.

  Caine gestured at himself in disgust. “Would you just look at this shit? What now? I can’t go back like this. Without a body. . . ” He gestured again, this time kicking his own foot. “Such shit,” he said.

  When Shepard didn’t reply, Caine looked in his direction, but not directly at him. “Are you still in here?”

  “Here,” Shepard said. But even after he waved a hand the jockey couldn’t seem to find him.

  Caine raised his voice, as though addressing someone in another room. “You could’ve at least moved me to a bunk.”

  “You shit yourself, Caine.”

  The jockey looked sharply in a direction that was not quite Shepard’s. “What?”

  “You’re fine in the harness.”

  Caine adjusted his gaze, but came no closer to finding Shepard. “What did you call me?”

  Shepard sighed and left the jockey alone with himself. It was easier to watch the slow progress of the derelict’s inspection than to argue with ghosts. When he returned forty-five minutes later, there was only one Caine, snoring contentedly and smelling like an open latrine. Shepard left him in his harness and retired to the stateroom. He locked the door behind him, though he knew it wouldn’t keep anything out, not this far from home.

  Because there was little else to do, Shepard slept. He hadn’t been at it long when he woke to someone sitting on the edge of his bed. The speaker in the ceiling hissed gently, and his own voice came through garbled and indistinct, as though filtered through a fathom of water.

  “I have a theory,” his voice said.

  Shepard threw an arm over his forehead and stared at the ceiling. “It’s my theory, too,” he reminded himself.

  “We have a theory then. It’s a decent theory.”

  Shepard didn’t feel he needed to vocalize his agreement.

  “It’s a matter of pressure,” his ghost continued. “Not physical pressure, like air or water. A different kind. Out here there’s not enough pressure to keep a body and soul together. It’s like bringing one of those crustaceans up from a deep-sea trench.”

  “Except they die,” Shepard said.

  “They die,” Shepard nodded in agreement. “But we don’t die. We get . . . this.” He opened his arms as though presenting himself for exhibition.

  “It makes sense,” Shepard said.

  “It does. But it also makes you wonder. If I can live without you, and you can live without me. . . . ” The ghost looked at Shepard over his shoulder.

  “But we don’t really know that,” Shepard said. “Long term, we don’t know. I might just be a soulless bag of meat remembering how humans are supposed to act. I might forget after a while. And you: you might just be a collection of memories too afraid to let go of the idea of being real. You’ll lose shape after a while.”

  “So we need one another.”

  Shepard shrugged. “It’s just a theory.”

  The Shepard sitting on the edge of the bed continued to stare down at the Shepard lying on his back. He said, “Caine’s right: you do look old.”

  Shepard turned to the wall.

  “We have a problem,” his ghost said a little later.

  “What problem?”

  “Caine’s dead.”

  Shepard looked over his shoulder. “You’re sure?”

  The ghost gave him a pointed stare.

  “Okay,” Shepard conceded. “How bad is it?”

  “He doesn’t want to go back. I wouldn’t either.”

  “He’s going to cause problems?”

  Shepard shrugged. “He’s just scared.”

  “He’s had a bad day. He’s allowed that.”

  “We need to talk to him.”

  Shepard got out of bed and stepped through the narrow door to the head. “You need to talk to him.” When he came back, still zipping up, the stateroom was empty.

  In the cabin he found Caine slumped in his harness, gaping at the ceiling while the little auto-injectors farted disinfectant from the corners.

  “Caine,” he said, as though to wake him. “Hey Caine.”

  He listened for any sound from the internal coms, then decided the wisest thing was to leave the corpse alone. Stepping into the cockpit to check the monitors, he saw an estimated nine hours remaining before completion of the integrity check. Had no one died, it would have fallen to Caine to set the course for home. Not that Shepard couldn’t—he’d been trained. It was just that the jockey had adopted a sense of ownership over the physics, and didn’t like to see anyone else handling them. The physics, he’d enjoyed saying, belonged to him. Now that the jockey was dead, Shepard hoped he would be willing to relax his possessiveness.

  Shepard sat at the bank of monitors and began to work out the details of the return trip. After a little while, a hazy image struggled to clarify on one the screens.

  “What are you doing?” it asked.

  “Hello, Caine. It’s good to see you.”

  “Is that my physics you’re doing?”

  “Someone’s got to.”

  The image rolled fretfully. When it steadied, Caine’s tone had turned scornful. “—cking longtooth,” it said, completing an insult Shepard hadn’t heard the start of. “What do you know about anything?”

  “I’m just doing my job, Caine.”

  “No. You’re doing my job.”

  “It’s easier than I thought,” Shepard said, and was immediately sorry.

  Caine’s livid response was lost in a burst of static. When the jockey perceived he wasn’t being underst
ood, the intercom crackled, and his voice blared through the tug. “You’re a prick,” it said. “You were always a prick.”

  “I’m sorry, Caine. That was unfair of me.”

  “Unfair? No one says unfair.”

  “Okay, Caine.”

  “Taking us home will kill me.”

  “You’re already dead, Caine.”

  “I’m not fucking dead!” the jockey shrieked.

  “Try to relax,” Shepard advised. “We’re going home, and I know that upsets you. I understand that. But I can’t—”

  “You don’t understand.”

  “I can’t do anything about that now.”

  “You have no idea what this is like,” Caine said.

  “You’re right,” Shepard admitted readily.

  A long silence followed, during which they stared at one another through the monitor. It seemed there was nothing more to say. Then Caine gave a curt nod, as though a decision had been made.

  “Okay,” the jockey said. “If that’s the way you want it.”

  “That’s just the way it is, Caine.”

  “You’re right,” the jockey replied. “You’re always right.”

  Then his screens went dark, and Shepard was left eye to eye with a dim image of himself in the monitor. They had been right, he saw. He did look old. After a moment, he attended to the physics and tried not to dwell on the underhand tactics of slighted ghosts.

  Caine wasn’t gone long. The screens came alive while Shepard was still working, and he only glanced up before continuing. The jockey’s sullen image slid from one screen to the next, looking for the best vantage point from which to judge.

  “You’re doing it wrong,” Caine said.

  Shepard switched off that monitor, only to have Caine leak into another. “Let me help.”

  But Shepard knew better. Covering his work with an arm, he feigned deep concentration and pretended not to have heard. When he looked up at long last, Caine was gone, and the bank of monitors showed only obscure angles of fat snow and alien engineering.

  Shepard had fallen asleep in the jockey’s chair when a gentle chime sounded, and the calming female voice of the tug informed him that the derelict’s integrity was one hundred percent. More importantly: lifeless.