So listening at the door was the safest course of action, really.
After a while Leo sagged down the wall, plugged in his headphones and half-slept until his dad angled the hand mirror under the door, caught him.
“I wasn't—” Leo started.
“—no problem,” his dad finished, then started over, the potatoes probably still there on his lip for all the world to see.
Leo held his face in his hands and stared at the space under the door, his dad's watery shadow blotting out some of it.
“Just tell me what it's like, Dad,” Leo finally said in one of the lulls that he'd once thought were dramatic instead of digestive pauses.
“What?” his dad said back.
“Tell me what it's like, I said."
“What what's like?"
“This other side of the mountain. This new place, this distinguishing characteristic."
“You want me to—?"
“If you're so human, I mean, yeah. Okay. If you're human, you can speak in metaphor, right?"
“Go on."
“Then describe speaking in metaphor for me. But use a metaphor to do it."
Silence. Blissful, perfect silence.
Sometimes you had to shoot the snowball with a flamethrower. Melt it down so that it would take him a while to get it cold and slushy enough to roll again.
Which was a simile, Leo was pretty sure. Or metonymy, synecdoche, who knew.
But he had to do something.
Two minutes later, finally, his dad's shadow drifted away from the space beneath the door.
Leo nodded to himself, told himself to stand and then did, felt his way to the desk.
The cycle was complete, it looked like, and hadn't snagged or thrown off any error messages.
All he had to do now was save the table to two places—his rule—post the new loop to the school's IP for class, then, in the morning maybe, or during phys ed, write whatever cornball paper he was going to write.
Already he was forgetting.
Do potatoes make you sleepy?
Leo wasn't sure, and didn't care.
He saved the table in one place, then a better place, then hit return after the loop just to keep the command line clean while he slept, like the blinking cursor was a night light or something.
Except he didn't get the blank line he wanted.
The loop wasn't perfect, wasn't over, was still spitting up terms, random at first, and jumbled like ... how could there be misspellings if the words were being sucked from the dictionary? That was stupid.
Leo tapped the side of his monitor the way his mom used to tap him in church, when he needed to straighten up.
Like then, too, it worked.
The words were cleaner now. Not brighter, he already had the burn rate dialed back as far as it would go, but spelled right. Still all mixed together, though.
He hadn't even looked at the table.
Was it like this, trash?
Leo laughed through his nose, lowered his head to the sweet spot just in front of the keyboard, and closed his eyes, told himself not to fall asleep.
He woke some time later—hours, minutes, seconds—and the jumbled but properly spelled words had finally stopped. Unless he was just dreaming that the loop had corrected itself, of course. Not like that hadn't happened before.
And then it snapped, the problem: he'd forgotten to insist that the front end of the loop only cycle through the terms of the dictionary, the hyphenated terms it could make from two of them.
Instead, he'd left it open to account for the definitions as well.
Of course there'd be misspellings: phonetic pronunciations looked ugly, and some of the examples were archaic.
Which he would have caught right off if his dad hadn't hijacked him to the door.
Leo shook his head, stared down the hall to the worn spot in the carpet he imagined his dad to be, his “Well,” then hit return again, harder than he usually let himself anymore.
Instead of returning junk this time like he expected, though, it spat back just a random line, probably one of the dictionary examples, the “use this word in a sentence” junk: she is a flower.
Leo smiled a tolerant smile, hit return again, with his lucky third finger, just to see what he'd get next, but it was the same thing: she is a flower.
He rubbed his third finger in the fist of his other hand, and said it aloud, like an insult that had been thrown at him: “She?"
It wasn't impossible that the loop would cycle through to the same place twice in a row. Unlikely, but not impossible.
Three times, though?
Leo hit the return key again, this time with the eraser end of a pencil he never used.
she is a flower
“You'd love this, wouldn't you?” he said to the idea of his dad, then shook his head, blew some more air out his nose—what time was it anyway?—and hit return over and over with his index finger.
she is a flower
she is a flower
she is a flower
she is a flower
she is a flower
“Who?” he said to it, standing now, staring at the monitor.
No answer.
“What I thought,” Leo said, laughing at himself some. It was four in the morning; he could see now. It was a funny thing. A stupid, stupid, funny thing.
He fell back into his chair again, his legs sprawled out under the desk, and said he was sorry to the computer—this was why he locked his door, because his mom didn't like him talking to his machines, which he translated into the infinitely more usable didn't like to catch him talking to his machines—and, just because he had to have that empty command line to sleep to, even for two hours, he hit return again. Then leaned forward.
She wasn't like a flower anymore.
“Do ... what?” Leo said.
At the line, just a home-made function: do(this). Except “this” wasn't even defined, it was just assumed, like a global variable or post data or something.
He hit return again and got the arrow back, the steady blinking cursor of peace.
Evidently his loop had cycled some of the dictionary in with the delimiters—mixed the syntax and the vocabulary in a way he hadn't outlawed. Which meant the walls of the loop were porous. It was broke in just all kinds of ways.
But screw it.
It was four in the morning. Four ten. God.
Though it wasn't a Tuesday, and he hadn't even been planning to, still, just to be safe he powered down, in case the loop kickstarted itself in the night or something equally stupid and stuffed his RAM with a string of those huge tables.
And then it was done. Leo was back where he started. Except he had some potatoes in him, he guessed.
Another stupid night.
He shut his light off at the socket, rolled into bed, fixing his knee against the wall the way it had to be, and listened to his processor cycle back up after the sixteen seconds of black he'd specified, reaching out to meet and greet the old rig like it always had to, like it was just a whole new drive, a whole new day.
Like ... like—
Leo opened his eyes, stared hard at nothing.
do(this)
Where this had been undefined. Assumed. Not a global variable or post data, but ... a pronoun?
And what had he just been thinking?
Yeah.
The stupid cable. The idiotic cable he'd had to patch between his new rig and the old one.
It plugged into the old rig. A male connection for a female slot.
she.
She is a flower.
Leo was breathing hard now, like his dad.
She is a flower. Where this—where this ... where you had to use it like a word that was in place of a variable, like a word for a thing that already had an antecedent, in whatever conversation had already been going on!
this was the broken loop he'd written, the obvious obvious freaking loop, the conversation he'd been having with his computer.
She is a
flower, the old rig is the flower, the girl, the new one the—and the male, the new machine, wanting her to ... to—
To learn to speak too.
Leo sat up in his bed and peeked across the room.
The cursor was there, blinking steady, the loop wholly forgotten, the table saved in two remote places.
Do this, it had said. Asked.
Because it was alone.
Leo covered his mouth with his hand, and didn't really mean to cry but it was dark anyway, and his door was locked, and the computer that was watching him now, it was just a computer.
Copyright (c) 2007 Stephen Graham Jones
[Back to Table of Contents]
* * *
Two-time Hugo award winning author, Allen M. Steele, returns to Coyote for the second part of his riveting new novel...
Serial: GALAXY BLUES: PART TWO OF FOUR: THE PRIDE OF CUCAMONGA
by Allen M. Steele
Synopsis of Part One:
My name is Jules Truffaut, and this is the story of how I redeemed the human race.
It all began when I stowed away aboard the starship Robert E. Lee for its monthly voyage to Coyote, humankind's first interstellar colony. Technically speaking, I was a first-class passenger, having already booked passage to 47 Ursae Majoris. However, as a former ensign in the Union Astronautica of the Western Hemisphere Union—whose relationship with Coyote is strained at best—it was necessary for me to sneak aboard the ship just before it departed from Earth.
My plan was to travel to Coyote under an assumed identity; once there, I would plead for political asylum. But my scheme backfired when a steward who'd found me became suspicious. Checking the manifest, she discovered that, although I had indeed purchased a ticket, there was no record of me actually boarding the ship. So shortly after the Lee jumped through Earth's starbridge to 47 Ursae Majoris, the chief petty officer placed me under arrest.
On the bridge, I met the Lee's commanding officer, Anastasia Tereshkova. Realizing that I was in serious trouble, I revealed my true identity and informed her that I was seeking amnesty. However, I'd overlooked the fact that one has to actually set foot on foreign soil in order to defect. Since the Lee was still in space, Tereshkova was obliged to take me back to Earth and turn me over to the authorities.
So I took matters into my own hands. On my way to the brig, I escaped from my captors and stole one of the ship's lifeboats. I was trained as a pilot, so I was able to guide the craft to a safe touchdown on Coyote. However, almost as soon as I landed, I was apprehended by the colonial militia.
The soldiers brought me to Liberty, Coyote's largest colony, where I was thrown in jail. I had little doubt that the local magistrates would order my deportation. Before that happened, though, I had two visitors. The first was a mysterious figure who appeared at my cell window. As he stared at me, a door opened in my mind, releasing all my memories. I fell unconscious; when I awoke, the stranger had disappeared.
The second was Morgan Goldstein, the billionaire founder of Janus, Ltd., an interstellar shipping company. Impressed by the way I'd escaped from the Lee, he offered a way out of my predicament. Goldstein was recruiting a crew for an expedition to Rho Coronae Borealis, with the intent of opening trade with its inhabitants, the alien hjadd. If I signed on as shuttle pilot, he would make sure that I wasn't deported. Having little choice, I agreed to work for him.
After arranging for my release, Goldstein took me to a tavern where I met the rest of the crew: the captain, Ted Harker, and his wife and first officer, Emily Collins, both of whom were on the first ship to contact the hjadd; the helmsman, Ali Youssef; and the cargo master, a lovely young woman by the name of Rain Thompson, who was oddly cold toward me. And finally, another passenger besides Goldstein himself: Gordon Ash, whom I recognized as the stranger who'd visited me in jail.
This was going to be a weird trip, indeed.
* * * *
SIX
Downtime ... the night life on Coyote ... the mysterious tenant ... a tense breakfast during which various matters are discussed.
I
We hung around Liberty for another week, local time, more out of necessity than anything else. Our ship had recently undergone refit at Janus's shipyard in Earth orbit, and we were told that it wouldn't be delivered to Coyote until the chief engineer was satisfied that all the new work was up to spec. So we had little to do until then but wait for our ride to arrive.
Before I left Lew's Cantina, Ted handed me a data fiche for a Zeus-class shuttle. It was a different sort of boat than the ones I'd been trained to fly—a single-stage-to-orbit heavy lifter—but I had little doubt that I could handle it. The next day, I wandered around town until I found the comp store I'd spotted while Morgan was driving me to the inn, and used a good chunk of the money I'd brought with me to buy a new pad, complete with hologram heads-up. Once I loaded the fiche, I was able to pull up a 3D simulation of the flight controls, which I used to familiarize myself with what I'd find once I climbed into the cockpit.
I used most of the remaining cash to buy other stuff. Goldstein had given me new clothes, sure, but he hadn't anticipated everything that a well-dressed spacer might need. It took a while, but I finally managed to locate a shop that catered to pros like myself. I picked up a pair of stick-shoes for zero-g work, a pilot's watch—electronic analog, with three programmable time zones, a radiation counter, and a bevel—and a pair of sunglasses, along with a utility vest and a miniature tool kit to go with it. The sort of stuff I'd carried when I belonged to the Union Astronautica, but which I'd been forced to give back when I was kicked out of the service.
So I shopped, and I studied, and otherwise looked for ways to kill time until my ship came in. That turned out to be harder than I'd expected. Liberty was the largest colony on Coyote, but that didn't exactly make it a hoppin’ party town. Most people there possessed a puritanical work ethic—get up in the morning, have breakfast, go off to work, come home in the evening, have dinner, go to bed—they had inherited from the original settlers. Once the sun went down, the streets were just about dead. Oh, there was a theatre ensemble—one evening I caught a performance of a play written by a local author, a comedy packed with topical references that might have been side-splitting if I'd known what they were about—and I eventually found a bar on the other side of town that had a half-decent folk trio, if you like music played so slow and soft that you could fall asleep between songs. But even then, everything closed down long before midnight, leaving me to walk home as Bear ascended into the night sky, its silver rings illuminating deserted sidewalks and houses where the lights were going out one by one.
A couple of other things gave me interest. One was baseball. Late in the afternoon, once I got through my daily routine of memorizing the layout of the shuttle cockpit and practicing the tutorials, I would mosey over to the Colonial University and watch the Boids practice. For a bunch of kids who'd never set foot on Doubleday Field, they weren't bad. Not great, by any means, but they had their hearts in the right place. I sat in the right-field bleachers and watched the team while they divided into two squads and played off against each other. At first, I winced while these boys and girls committed errors that would have put a Little League team to shame, until I gradually realized that these were third-generation colonists who'd inherited the game from their fathers and grandfathers. Once I came to accept this, I stopped cursing the pitcher every time he walked a batter. Even so, I found myself wishing I could be out there, if only to show these guys how baseball was really played.
My other distraction was Rain.
Most of the crew had places to live besides the inn. Goldstein flew back to Albion, where I was told he had an estate just outside New Brighton. Ted and Emily had a house in town, and Ali lived in an apartment above a cheesemaker's shop; I'd run into them from time to time, usually while I was out doing errands. Ash had a room at the inn, too, just down the hall from mine, but I rarely saw him, and then only late at night, when he'd lurch back to the Soldier
's Joy from Lew's Cantina. He never spoke to me, and from what I could tell, he seemed to be perpetually drunk. On occasion I'd hear the sounds of a guitar being played in his room, but that was about it. Altogether, everything about him was ominous—there's nothing worse than having a jughead aboard ship—but since he was Morgan's passenger, there was little I could do about it.
Rain had been put up at the inn as well, something I didn't know until the morning of my third day there, when I spotted her in the dining room. She'd arrived before I did, though, and it was clear that she wasn't thrilled to see me. Before I could go over to ask if I could join her for breakfast, she hastily stood up, dropped a few colonials on the table, and scurried out the garden door. When the innkeeper's wife came by to take my order, I asked if the young lady who was just here was another guest. She told me, yes, she was indeed ... and pointedly added that her room was on the ground floor, just across the hall from the apartment where she and her husband lived. Just in case, I suppose, that I might be a little too interested.
Which I wasn't. The last thing I wanted to do was waste my time pursuing a girl who acted as if I had spinach stuck between my teeth. Yet Rain Thompson wasn't just another girl. She was also a shipmate, which meant that we'd have to work together for the duration of our voyage. It wouldn't do either of us any good if she refused to talk to me. One way or another, I'd have to make peace with her.
That turned out to be difficult. Over the course of the next few days, I'd see her every so often, but always from a distance ... a distance that she seemed determined to keep between us. Several times while walking through town, I saw her coming the other way, but when I quickened my pace to catch up with her, she'd either cross the street to avoid me or duck down an alley and disappear. Once, while watching the Boids work out, I caught a glimpse of her strolling across the university campus, but she'd vanished by the time I came down from the bleachers. On another occasion, I spotted her through a shop window ... but that time I held back, not wanting her to feel like she was being cornered.
Yet even as she and I played this little cat and mouse game, I found myself becoming intrigued by her. I'd seen plenty of women who were more beautiful—and to be honest, I'd even slept with a few of them—but there was something about her that fascinated me. I liked the way she moved, the way she dressed, the way she let her hair fall around her shoulders. The only thing I couldn't stand was the coldness in her eyes whenever she looked my way ... but even then, that was just one more part of the mystery that was Rain Thompson.
Asimov's SF, December 2007 Page 14