by Mike Ashley
That dive had revitalized the hotriding game, but this time it looked like the end was really here. He finished the scotch and cast around for some more. The same Tin Man and now they were dropping him in favour of the tourist trade. He’d never said if he had planned the trip to happen like that, if he’d planned to dive. R & G Publicity had made him up as some kind of hero, trying what nobody had ever even considered, but I couldn’t swallow it. “How did you get back to the surface?” I had once asked him.
“You should see it, Ray – not just the sims, but really see it. There’s all sorts of flows and currents down there. Some of them, it’s like a pattern to it, you latch on in the right place, ride the right bubble and it lifts you back up like it was always meant to be. It’s really fantastic, Ray, it’s a magic kingdom down there. It’s beautiful.”
Looking at Tin Man’s face, I could remember the light in his eye when it had all been new to him. Now it was gone. They were taking it all away from him.
“Tell you one thing,” he said, on one hand again, despite the tics. “I’m gonna have one more trip an’ ain’t nobody gonna stop me.” Then he tumbled, slowly, and didn’t wake for the next fourteen hours.
Full night on Io would only be dusk anywhere else. The sunlight, reflected red from Jupiter, casts the surface of Io in sepia tones, soft ochres as opposed to the harsh reds and oranges that full sunlight gives.
I left Tin Man asleep in my dom. For some reason I had the idea I could fix him up with something, something better than tour-guide, something better than the resort bum it looked like he was headed for.
On Observation G, like all the ob decks, an entire wall is view-panel. I found Shenet Ra’ath leaning on the hand-rail, staring up at the swirling aurora, our constant link with Jupiter. The flickers and the lightning were building up with the approaching dawn, the build-up that accompanied and fed the volcanic peaks of that time of day, the best for hotriding, the most dangerous for a carbon-based life-form such as myself or Tin Man.
Shenet looked good even if she was well into her fourteenth decade as the records claimed. She worked in Leisure for Ymporial, one of the lunar corporations that had been caught off guard by R & G’s sudden onslaught on the sim-trip market. She was a good contact in lots of ways but I could tell from her face that she wouldn’t be any help on this occasion.
Regardless, I ploughed in, told her what was happening to Tin Man. “I knew it would happen,” she said, when I had finished. She wouldn’t meet my eyes. “It’s down to Tin that the market’s stayed open for so long.”
“Will you take him on, Shenet? He deserves better than this.”
This time she looked at me. “No, we can’t.” I like that about Shenet, even when I don’t like it: she tells you straight. “There may have been some time left in hotriding but if Ruttgers and Gerome pull out then that’s a strong signal. I can’t persuade Finance to go against a trend like that. You can’t fight market forces, Siefert.”
That was the kind of line I’d expected but it still dented my shell. Tin Man was going down and there was nothing I could do to help him.
With a brief nod I turned away from Shenet and walked off down the ob deck, wondering if Tin Man was still asleep.
Then I heard the first blast, felt the shock waves under my feet.
I was on my knees when the second blast went off, closer this time. It doesn’t take much to take your feet from under you at point eighteen gees, even with grippa flooring.
Silence returned after the sixth blast and I crawled over to the wall, pulled myself up by the handrail, hurried back to confirm that Shenet was okay. Then I saw her eyes widen as she stared over my shoulder, out through the view-panel.
“Jesus,” she said, and for a moment I wondered why. Then I saw.
We were moving.
Malibu was edging slowly away from its foundations, sulphurous rock crumpling and crevassing all around. Malibu was an island of rock adrift on a river of liquid sulphur.
Tin Man was having his last ride and he was taking the whole town with him.
“You’re his friend: convince him.” Ruttgers didn’t have any implants to blame for his nervous spasms or his flushed, shining face. He was terrified, that was all.
When we’d realized exactly what Tin Man had done, Shenet and I had headed for Concourse. I guessed that would be where the action was. There were several routes we could have taken but I headed down through the ob decks just so I could see what was happening. Should be scared, I kept telling myself, but I stared at those panels and somehow couldn’t manage it.
I’d never been hotriding, myself. Sure, I’d done the sim-trips but I didn’t need Tin Man to tell me how superficial that was. I tried to think of the stresses on the structure of Malibu, tried to guess if they would be enough to break up the town’s MP screens. They weren’t built for anything like this. But still I couldn’t work up any fear.
By the time I reached Concourse Malibu had found the main drag, the fastest moving part of the channel. Leaving the last ob deck, I paused to look out. Soon we would be leaving the drag, drifting out onto the ochre ocean. Just then green lightning arced down from Jupiter, colours swirled in the sky and the sun lit the sea a sudden, bright yellow.
In the middle of Concourse was a cluster of Senior People, mainly R & G, but there were others too, Ymporial, CalCorp, Tranche. Shenet joined them and the only reason she stood out was because she wasn’t so scared.
The glass front of Drac’s Nite Klub was phasing to a general view of the brimstone ocean as Ruttgers turned to me, said, “You’re his friend: convince him.”
I studied his face. Fear flustered him, but it made him angry, too. He was a keyboard man, not a hands-on. He was quaking. I didn’t enjoy it, but I can’t say his attitude made things appear any worse at that particular moment.
“Well where in hell is he?” Until then I hadn’t even known for sure that it was Tin Man and I wanted to know more, but I could see that Ruttgers and his mob weren’t in any state to fill me in on the details. I followed his glance towards the R & G offices and ignored him after that.
I had to smile when I found Tin Man. Somehow he had found his way into Ruby Gerome’s office and jacked direct into Control, Malibu’s governing mainframe. More than that, he had protected himself.
No one could get into that office because he had shielded it with an MP screen.
He’d left a view-panel at the open doorway so we could see in and he out. Jacked in, he was only partly aware of my presence, but he knew who I was because he smiled and mouthed my name. Ray.
“Last ride, huh?” I said, not usually so stuck for words.
He nodded, then, after at least a minute, said, “No sim to this trip. Let ‘em see it for real. Ray, I tell you: go and jack in. You can’t really ride unless you’re jacked.”
He knew I had illegal access to Control from my dom. I nodded. I’d been planning to anyway, I had to take care of my affairs, hadn’t I?
“There’s bubbles, Ray, I can feel ‘em. I think we might – ” the floor lurched and I went down on my hands and knees “ – yes! We’re going down!” The floor jumped again and when I regained my senses I realized that it was at an angle, maybe ten degrees or more. Then I realized what Tin Man had meant and then I started to be scared.
I found my way back out to Concourse just as the sulphur was closing above us. The big screen on Drac’s showed the last tiny disc of Jupiter and then a ripple sealed it off and Malibu was cast in a dim golden glow from the molten sulphur. After a split-second gap, Control cut in with town lighting but that didn’t stop the screaming, didn’t stop the yells.
Berg Ruttgers had been running around when the lights came on, yelling for somebody to do something. Ruby Gerome had done something. She had hit him with a punch that had carried him metres into the air before he crumpled into a blubbering heap against the view-panel front of Drac’s.
I dashed through the crowd, hoping no one would try to stop me, lost my feet a few times
as the floor lurched away from under them. I tried not to hear the huge groans and metallic shrieks which I guessed came from the structure of Malibu. Up through the ob decks, I kept getting glimpses of the strangely illuminated world of sulphur. Twists of darker magma spiralling up and around, blobs, bubbles, drifting in an apparently random ballet. I suppose it could have been beautiful but all I could think of was how thin an MP screen really was, how I didn’t even know how the damned things worked.
Once in my dom I locked the door, out of habit, I guess. Nobody was likely to just happen by and notice that I had an illegal Inpoint to Control. Not when we were sinking through a sea of molten sulphur.
I went straight to my view-panel – showing streaming, writhing magma – and yanked it from the wall, reached behind and pulled the access set out into the open. Without another thought I slid the jack into the socket behind my right ear, my one augmentation, a requisite for modern life, the salesperson had told me.
And I was there with Tin Man. I could tell he was there, in Control, but he didn’t notice me for a few seconds. Long enough for me to take care of my own insurance.
Ray. His voice was all around me. He’d been thorough, embedded himself deeply in Control. There was no way anyone could corrupt him through the mainframe. If R & G tried anything on they would be attacking Control itself, not a wise option when the only thing that could run Malibu’s MP screens was Control.
Here, he said, and my senses were flooded with inputs from all around Malibu’s shielded dome. It was overwhelming, the different densities, the magnetic fluxes of the magma, but it did give me a kind of blast-image of where we were.
And that was deep. Deeper than I could remember any hotrider daring to go before.
Tin Man was really doing his best to give the execs a hands-on, as they liked to call the real thing. If he was in control at all.
Bubble’s taken us down, chuckled Tin Man in my head. Readings of electrostatic potential scanned through my brain. Slowly, I was getting used to being jacked into a system that was so overwhelmed by another person. There seemed to be some kind of pattern to the readings, some kind of order.
You see it?
Wave patterns, I told myself. Order imposed by universal physical laws.
We’re riding the bubbles, said Tin Man. I told you you had to be jacked before you could see what it’s like. Do you see the patterns?
Tin Man wasn’t the only one to talk about patterns in the magma, all the hotriders did it. You catch a good pattern of bubbles and it’ll take you back to the surface, it’ll jockey you along like you’re riding with a mermaid. But Tin Man was the only one to get mystical about it. He talked about bubbles as if they were more than that, as if they weren’t just blobs of magma that clung together because of differing densities, differing compositions to the local norm. Sure, I saw the patterns, saw the order to it all, but I’m not one to go mystical like Tin Man.
He flashed me the stresses in Malibu’s structure and I wished he hadn’t. Didn’t intend to go this far down, he said. I only wanted to . . .
Only I stopped listening at that point because I had noticed something else. I guess that, being closer to the surface than Tin Man, I was more aware of things at that level. That’s why he hadn’t noticed me as soon as I jacked in. And that’s why he didn’t notice Magya 38.
Magya 38. That was the handle she was logged under. She was down in the R & G offices, jacked into Control, feeling her way around.
I checked with Tin Man, but he was all taken up by then, part of him off with the bubbles, trying to find a conflux that would get us back to the surface, the rest of him running through with Control, trying to keep Malibu and the MPs from collapsing under the stresses of being in excess of a kilometre under the surface of Io.
Fools. Already Magya was testing Control. Clumsily. Even as I tugged the jack from my skull a power spike made the lights dim and I dived foolishly, reflexively, for the floor.
Down through the ob decks, I could see the magma swirling its golden currents around us, the blobs now scattered evenly, conforming to a strange pattern. Or to my imagination. As I leapt in slow-mo down the steps I kept sensing fluctuations in the electrical energy buzzing around me, kept expecting the MPs to go down. At least it would be a speedy end.
As I hurried across Concourse the big view-panel showed an unmistakable pattern to the blobs and I realized what that meant: Tin Man had found his good flow, we were rising with the bubbles of magma towards the surface.
The lights dimmed again and I cursed the ineptitude of this Magya 38. The execs were by the door of Ruby Gerome’s office, craning to look in through the clear panel in Tin Man’s defences. They were talking to him – negotiating, they said. And their diversion appeared to have fooled him as he nodded absently in his jacked-in haze.
I passed the end of their corridor, continued to an access corridor and so found my way past them and to the office of Berg Ruttgers. That had to be where Magya 38 was tampering with Control – had to be.
I was right. She was there, jack-leads attached through a suboccipital lobe, all glittery and awkward-looking. I vaguely recognized her: a teck from Ymporial, one of Shenet’s favourites. Why couldn’t she see the risk she was taking?
As I crossed the room I wondered how I could stop her, how I could prevent her messing with Tin Man and so with Control and so with the screens that had so far kept us distinct from the sulphurous magma all around.
I knocked her on the head a little. Enough to break some skull, enough to keep her out of Control for a while, but not enough to do anything that couldn’t be repaired. Sometimes the simple ways are best. I pulled the jack from her lobe, checked her vitals and then jacked myself back in just in time to get full visuals of us breaking the surface of the sulphur ocean. I tell you: I’ve never been all that impressed by your everyday scenic beauty but Jupiter sure looked good to me right then. Even Io looked okay.
Things were a mess for some time after that. We drifted a while but eventually we came to rest on a newly formed island of black sulphur. They moved Malibu to somewhere more secure a few months later, somewhere more attractive to the touring riches. But Tin Man and I had got out of it all by then. He kept his screens up until tempers had cooled and the negotiations were through. You see, when I was jacked in, back in my dom, first thing I did was take out some insurance. Hell, it was almost a reflex action to divert all the sim-data to my own private account within Control. It’s how I used to make my living. The way I figured it at the time was that if we ever got out it would all be pretty exciting stuff: we could make a good sim out of it. It turned out that several of the big agencies joined the bidding but in the end we sold it all back to Ruttgers and Gerome. They payed us a lot of money for it and I don’t think it was the action sequences that any of them wanted. I think they wanted the crowd scenes, the human interest shots, like the one where Ruby hits Berg, or the one where Berg is running around and screaming like some maniac. A company like Ymporial or CalCorp would have had a great time with a sequence like that. According to Control, Berg and Ruby destroyed all the records as soon as they had paid us for them.
Me and Tin Man are partners now. We have a hotel complex on Io, near to the old site of Malibu. Tin Man takes the guests hot-riding, sometimes in a buggy, sometimes the entire hotel. He shows them the bubbles, shows them the patterns.
I guess that’s the end of our story: the two of us on equal footing. I think that’s pretty generous of me, seeing as all the trading was done in my name, he had no legal rights or anything. But is he grateful? Tin Man? All he can talk about is his bubbles. He gets this stupid grin, tells me it’s like swimming with the whales. What’s a whale? I say, but he just smiles and goes about his business.
MOTHER GRASSHOPPER
Michael Swanwick
There will be those of you who may feel this story is a fantasy rather than science fiction. Okay. Maybe it’s in the eye of the beholder. Certainly the idea of a planet in the shape of a grass
hopper does seem a bit unusual. But then, don’t forget Arthur C. Clarke’s third law that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. What this story has in megaloads, is that sense of wonder. It’s the kind of story one might have expected from Ray Bradbury years ago – a sort of Martian Chronicles for the new age. Michael Swanwick (b. 1950) is no stranger to the bizarre in science fiction and fantasy. He has often blended the two forms, as you’ll find in his novels Stations of the Tide (1991) and The Iron Dragon’s Daughter (1993). Some of his short fiction will be found in Gravity’s Angels (1991), Tales of Old Earth (2000) and A Geography of Unknown Lands (1997), from which this story comes.
IN THE YEAR ONE, we came in an armada of a million spacecraft to settle upon, colonize, and claim for our homeland this giant grasshopper on which we now dwell.
We dared not land upon the wings for, though the cube-square rule held true and their most rapid motions would be imperceptible on a historic scale, random nerve firings resulted in pre-movement tremors measured at Richter 11. So we opted to build in the eyes, in the faceted mirrorlands that reflected infinities of flatness, a shimmering Iowa, the architecture of home.
It was an impossible project and one, perhaps, that was doomed from the start. But such things are obvious only in retrospect. We were a young and vigorous race then. Everything seemed possible.
Using shaped temporal fields, we force-grew trees which we cut down to build our cabins. We planted sod and wheat and buffalo. In one vivid and unforgettable night of technology we created a layer of limestone bedrock half a mile deep upon which to build our towns. And when our work was done, we held hoe-downs in a thousand county seats all across the eye-lands.
We created new seasons, including Snow, after the patterns of those we had known in antiquity, but the night sky we left unaltered, for this was to be our home . . . now and forever. The unfamiliar constellations would grow their own legends over the ages; there would be time. Generations passed, and cities grew with whorls of suburbs like the arms of spiral galaxies around them, for we were lonely, as were the thousands and millions we decanted who grew like the trees of the cisocellar plains that were as thick as the ancient Black Forest.