Far from the Light of Heaven

by Tade Thompson

  Fin isn’t exactly sure how it becomes lovemaking, but it does. Fifteen minutes is not quite enough. The logistics and contortions required are considerable but overcome.

  Standing room only.

  “What do you do on Lagos?” asks Fin. He can’t stop looking at her.

  “Um, anything I want. My father’s the governor, don’t you know?” She laughs.

  “And so…?”

  “So I bless the ships being built in the dry dock. I play with the children. I flirt with the university students. I, uh, follow my father around when I’m not ignoring him. I read old and new books. I stare through telescopes at distant nebulae. I pose for the artists. I visit the markets when New Yam comes in. A bit of everything.” She sighs.

  “You’re like a space princess, then. Royalty. And you miss it.”

  “I do.” Joké kisses him. “You tell me something about yourself. Why repatriation? We don’t have that profession on Lagos.”

  “It’s a job.”

  “No, I mean why do it at all?”

  “It was before my time, but when things were still precarious and everybody thought Bloodroot would fail in a year or two, the Lambers used to make folks lazy and stuporous. Lambers were never content to just attach to one person. It would grow to six, sometimes all the way to sixty, and that’s a lot of people checked out of the workforce. The pioneers realised they had to neutralise them in some way, but on the other hand wanted to be in harmony with them, with nature in general. They managed to communicate, and repatriation was the result. It works for both sides.”

  Joké stands in the weightlessness, eyes out of focus and maybe her lines are not as distinct as they should be. Fin reaches out to touch her because he is not exactly sure she is there.

  But she’s back.

  “What are you doing?” asks Fin.

  “I tried to reach Bloodroot. I didn’t think it would work, but I had to try.”

  “And?”

  “I was right. It didn’t work.”

  “Why?”

  “I’ve never been to Bloodroot. I don’t know anybody there. I am not linked to places, Rasheed, I’m linked to people, to consciousnesses. I can find my father wherever he goes. But I can’t go to a place where I don’t know anyone.”

  “It was worth a try,” says Fin. “And you know me. I’m from Bloodroot.”

  “I suppose. I think I need to be alone, to try something else. Leave. You have places to be, thoughts to think, hmm?”

  “Okay.” He withdraws, reluctant, holding her hand until he can’t any more.

  Salvo is still in the bridge, floating on air. Fin emerges alone, although he has the sense that someone was outside. Not Salvo, but maybe Larry. Heresies, but that would be creepy. Larry looks like the kind of person to shoot anyone who even looks at his daughter. Maybe. Or maybe it was Shell outside, checking on the crew.

  “What have you come up with,” says Fin.

  “Not a lot,” says Salvo. “There’s hope, but we’re going to need a spacewalk. I need to know the specific damage, what’s left, what can be used as raw material for repair, what needs to be discarded.”

  “All right, but that’s going to be dangerous. The AI is still out of commission.”

  “Do you know how ship AIs are built?”

  “Let’s say I don’t.”

  “Conceptually, it’s built to resemble the human brain.”

  “Let’s say I don’t know anything about that either.”

  “You have two brains, conceptually. One is an automatic brain that deals with breathing, heartbeat, digestion, all the neural functions that you don’t think about. Then you have the new brain, the neocortex, which lies on the automatic brain like a blanket. Your humanity lies here – your morality, your refinement. Do you follow?”

  “Just about.”

  “If you have a bad accident and go into a coma, the neocortex is out of action and your automatic functions continue. Does that make sense?”

  “Yes.”

  “The Ragtime is similar. The innermost part of a Pentagram is the automatic functions. Layered onto that is the ‘personality’. What’s happening now is that all the functions that give the AI its personality are gone. The automatic AI, the last backup, is still working. It’s coded in Pentagram hardware. It is rudimentary and obeys instructions.”

  “Shell’s instructions.”

  “Yes.”

  “But what about the robots?” asks Fin.

  “The AI instructs the robots; so if it is out of commission, the robots will be too.”

  Fin is confused. “But they’re not. They’re trying to kill us.”

  “Not exactly. They seem to be trying to impede us, which is not the same thing.”

  “Impede us from what?” More important, Fin thinks, why?

  Shell drifts in, kicks herself in the direction of the cupola and watches planetrise. Fin may have heard a sigh. She drops back down.

  She faces Salvo. “You said something about a spacewalk?”

  They all watch the feed from the external camera. There is still debris stuck to the hull, and the stump of the long-range antenna is present, but no dish.

  “This really isn’t the time for EVA,” says Shell. “The ship is too twitchy for my liking.”

  “I’ll do it,” says Lawrence. Does he sound cheerful?

  Shell looks to Joké with slightly raised eyebrows, as if to say, Are you cool with this? Joké doesn’t respond. To Fin she seems oddly unconcerned about her father’s welfare, but theirs isn’t a typical relationship.

  “It makes sense, Action Governor,” says Joké. She drops a head on his shoulder. “You’ve probably clocked more spacewalk hours than all of us combined.”

  “You can see some of the free panels are from the interstellar shielding. They had to have gone first before the section broke away,” says Salvo.

  “You want me to bring all that shit in?” asks Larry.

  “No, just tell me what’s out there.”

  The camera has limits, as does the Big Dumb Arm. Salvo is right.

  While the others work out the exact path of the EVA, Fin goes to the water dispenser. Larry is standing in front of it, arms crossed. As he gets closer, Fin hopes the man will move, but he does not. Fin wonders if the man knows what he was doing with Joké. Awkward.

  “I need to get some water,” says Fin.

  “Need,” says Larry. “Or want?”

  “Need.”

  Larry nods but doesn’t move. “You know water is essential… and precious.”

  “I agree.”

  Larry nods again and propels himself away. “I’m glad we had this talk.”

  Fin dry-swallows, no longer thirsty.

  Fin retreats to his pod and tries to put together what he knows, because he’s fine with Salvo doing all the space survival shit, and maybe they die in five days anyway, but he still has a case to solve, or at least a report to begin. If he dies, he wants something to survive, even if forensically. He has, in the pod, a foot clearance to his sides, less in front and back. Above, a lot more, but that’s because it’s the exit. Everything is close. And hot. The microgravity means there’s no cross vent. The spacesuit Shell mandated stands there like a bad conscience.

  He daydreams about Joké pressed against him and is surprised at the longing this produces. It is strangely easy to feel close to her. She’s fey and batshit, but maybe that’s a plus.

  He goes through the files that Salvo sent. The links of some passengers to Yan Maxwell are tenuous, and, to make matters worse, each one of them is still alive and in longsleep. It’s one thing to wake up and commit nefariousness; to get back to sleep is another matter. It’s impossible without external help.

  Dreamstate isn’t really sleep. Passengers are anaesthetised at hypothermic temperatures. Fed nutrients, blood and urine monitored, any illness swiftly treated. Theoretically, one could wake from this state, or be woken, because that’s just a matter of changing the balance of anaesthetics, removing ce
rtain tubes and physiotherapy. Fin personalises the murderer into a silhouette. This person wakes, commandeers the medbots to apply physio, is up in two weeks, finds Maxwell, kills him. But what about the twenty-nine-odd others? Why kill them? But say that happens – how does this person get back to sleep? We know he can programme the bots. They could put him back to sleep and the crew of the Ragtime are none the wiser.

  Nah, the person isn’t asleep; someone or something is causing the ship and its bots to malfunction, and those two phenomena are related. That is, unless these problems have been scheduled, programmed to happen at this time, in this place. Or unless the killer isn’t human and doesn’t require anaesthetics or Dreamstate. Is Ragtime itself the killer? If personhood can be contemplated, why not malfunctioning personhood? Humans have killed each other from the start. Uncomfortable thought, though. A murdership reduces the probability of survival considerably.

  They really need to find those missing bodies. Body parts.

  They have the raw data from all the IFCs, which is just a file dump right now since Salvo has to work on survival. Usually, like Shell insisted, nobody alive has to reveal IFC data, but the deceased data can be mined under certain circumstances. Murder is one such circumstance – or, it should be. Fin is not sure.

  He muses that they haven’t even thought about jurisdiction. Convention dictates that crimes committed in space be judged by the laws of the place of origin of the criminal. It’ll be a nightmare, but luckily one that does not concern Fin. He dictates out a preliminary progress report in his IFC, sets it to send as soon as a transmission pathway is available. It’s full of conjecture, but they’ll see what he was thinking and follow the threads.

  That done, he pulls out of the pod and into the bridge, pulls down a flat velcroed surface as a table, and lays out collected fragments from the destroyed robots. Explosive bullets seemed to do the trick. The robots in question were not hardened for combat. He checks the stash of rounds and sends a note and a CAD file dump to Salvo to get the printer working on more.

  Don’t we need all the power and materials for survival?

  What he means, of course, is the humans do, not him.

  It doesn’t help us to breathe and eat if robots are going to slit our throats while we sleep.

  All right.

  One other thing: I need to do an IFC dive.

  Now?

  After the antenna thing.

  I’ll keep it in mind.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Ragtime: Shell

  In the spartan cosiness of her sleeping bag, Shell wakes from a dream about blood-drenched fairies and Fred, her fiancé, her previous fiancé, asking her, “Why go to space?” “Because it is there.” Shell quoting Kennedy quoting Mallory. She has had that speech memorised since she was twelve, to the delight of her father. It was her party trick to deliver it in JFK’s exact cadence and diction.

  Shell remembers a conversation about Bloodroot, about the efficiency of ferrying new colonists and the practicality of having a geostationary space station with space elevator. She distinctly remembers being told this was on the cards.

  But the present remains the present. Sparse satellite density compared to Earth’s Sat Constellations, and no global transmitter coverage or Deep Space Network like Earth. Just some provincial colony bullshit.

  “Ragtime,” she says.

  “Captain.”

  “Status?”

  “Nominal, Captain.”

  Yeah, but it said that before parts of the ship broke off.

  She undoes her sleeping bag and rises from her pod. She has missed two exercise slots and feels apprehensive. Not that she can develop osteoporosis in four days and some hours.

  Fucking ship. Fucking Ragtime.

  “Captain?” It’s Salvo.

  “Go ahead.”

  “I have proposals to show you.”

  “Stand by. I’m coming.”

  In the bridge, Salvo floats in front of Shell. He tracks her approach and looks inhuman in the gloom. His bald head is too symmetrical, his skin too perfect. His makers were not concerned with him passing.

  The light is not as bright as usual. The Ragtime is power saving, and the temperature is half a Celsius lower than normal, though that would cause humans to expend more energy upping their body temp. While hunger won’t send the ship crashing into Bloodroot, energy loss might.

  In his left hand, Salvo holds the comms orb.

  “I’ve modified this into a minisat. It’s not going to extend radio range but it’ll broadcast a distress call for us. We can deploy it through the equipment lock or during a spacewalk by hand.”

  “And Bloodroot will pick this up?” Shell asks.

  “Maybe, but it’s unlikely. But someone else might. It’s not a solution; it’s a probability raiser.”

  “But we lose comms in Ragtime?”

  “We won’t have uninterrupted communication, yes, but there are other comm orbs. Does that matter?”

  Shell doesn’t know, but she goes along. “Tell me what else you got.”

  “May I link to your IFC?”

  No. “Yes.”

  A hologram: a long-range, high-gain antenna. “Your EVA will have to build this outside. We can make the parts with what we have on board and outside, but it’ll have to be cold-welded to the existing stump.”

  Shell goes on the comm. “Uncle Larry, come back.”

  “Here, over.”

  “Can you use an ion beam welder?”

  “Sure can.”

  “On an EVA?”

  “Never done it before, but I’d like to try.”

  “Okay. Out.” She looks at Salvo. “We’re building it.”

  Takes too long.

  Even with all hands and Salvo’s crisp, precise and unaffected instructions, with Joké scavenging, Larry’s experience, Shell’s determination and Fin’s… well, and Fin. Larry works in his spacesuit gloves – he’s going to need the dexterity practice. They all sweat, and they’re all using more oxygen than Shell would like. It takes up what is left of the first day.

  Larry wants to don his suit and jump right out, but Shell stops him. Two-hour mandatory rest. Fucking cowboy.

  Shell has a constant, low-grade headache. Not enough to need a painkiller, but it’s there. Niggling. Will it go away, will it get worse?

  She leaves the bridge for the main truss. She works her way to the first torus and inspects the passenger pods herself. Most are fine. She doesn’t look at the empty ones, the ones for the dead. One door bothers her. It looks different from a distance, but not radically so. It’s got a dot, which, close up, looks like a smudge.

  “Ragtime, lighting increase, fifteen per cent.”

  The corridor becomes brighter. It’s not a smudge. It’s a hole.

  The hell is that?

  Shell pushes closer and holds a handrail, inches nearer. Paint layer peeled away, no flecks on the floor, but they would have floated away in the microgravity and collected at air vents. No hesitation marks – maybe not a tooled hole? But how could anything get through the alloys without tools? The hole is an inch across, the walls corrugated. As much as she wants to, Shell resists sticking a finger in there. She looks through and can see the pod interior but not much else. Maybe a wall.

  “Ragtime, status of pod 308.”

  “Status nominal.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “Repeat command, please.”

  “Seal integrity on pod 308.”

  “Seal integrity nominal.”

  “Ragtime, is there a hole in the door of pod 308?”

  Silence. This is nonsense. The ship can’t just decide not to respond. Shell feels disquiet starting at the edges of her being, like something pulling at a loose thread of sanity. She will not unravel, though. Or, she will unravel on her own time.

  Rest on your own time, Mission Specialist.

  Yes, Commander.

  “Ragtime, is the passenger in 308 still alive?”

  “Affirmative.”

>   Yeah, right. I’m going to need more than that.

  “Respiratory rate?”

  “Twelve per minute.”

  “Blood pressure?”

  “110/72.”

  “Pulse?”

  “Sixty.”

  She looks at the hole. Was it there before? Is it machine-drilled? She rolls her phantom beads.

  “Ragtime, replay video, last twenty-four hours.” She gives the code and a video file shows the spot she is examining. “Speed up. Times sixteen. Double. Double.”

  It isn’t clear enough to see if the hole was already there, but no person came through the corridor in the entire runtime.

  “Ragtime, open pod 308.”

  “Cannot comply. Action forbidden.”

  “What?”

  Silence.

  “Ragtime, this is Captain Michelle Campion. Acknowledge.”

  “Acknowledged.”

  “Open pod 308.”

  “Cannot comply. Action forbidden.”

  “Open pod 309.”

  “Cannot comply. Action forbidden.”

  “What is—”

  She is interrupted by the shrill tones of an alarm.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Ragtime: Lawrence

  An alarm, flashing lights.

  Lawrence rises to investigate.

  Twenty minutes earlier, silence, tranquillity and stale warm air – the complements of enforced rest. It’s not truly silent, of course, but you learn to cancel out the hum. True silence would be alarming. Lawrence knows of an experimental engine used in a spaceship once that was utterly without sound. The crew didn’t go crazy, not exactly, but the anxiety levels were through the roof. The engineers had to pipe a low-volume engine vibration through speakers.

  Lawrence thinks of his time at Goldsmith Bridge, twenty Earth-years back, drifting in space close to that failed colony – TransAx? TramsNack? – ion drive dead due to faulty power cells from Goldsmith, the cheap bastards. Lawrence is alone in a dead ship, the deep-space skiff Shuttlebug. Life support is working. This isn’t the worst situation he has ever been in, so while he is afraid, he isn’t panicked. He looks at the darkness and the stars penetrating it. Haldene Campion is somewhere bullying technicians into sending replacement power cells. This was to have been Hal’s mission, but he developed a viral infection.