The New Space Opera 2

by Gardner Dozois

  The scale of the Indian aircraft carrier was completely absurd. The Indians had thrown a dead Arab skyscraper onto its side, hollowed it out, and transformed it into a heavily armed naval bazaar. There was a flat sun-baked tabletop where the drones landed, slow-moving war birds with lethal stings. Killer drones were keenly familiar to Kipps, but the rest of the craft was a crazy hive: watertight cargo-containers welded together, cardboard antimissile barriers. Cut and paste. Mix and match.

  Indian civilians swarmed all over this urban aircraft carrier. They had the Indian Navy personnel outnumbered three to one. Maybe the carrier was simply too big to leave to the military. The people had pulled political strings; they’d privatized the place, turned it into a floating suburb.

  Private helicopters arrived to greet his passengers. The helicopters were candy-colored Indian dragonflies, and they disgorged whole eager retinues of secretaries and escorts and girlfriends and masseurs and spiritual advisers. They fell on the heroic space tourists with glad cries of glee and flung flowered garlands over their necks.

  Kipps had to pose for ritual pictures with his tourists: alone, in small groups, as an entire group. In front of a green screen, without any green screen. With and without a huge, gardenia-reeking flower garland around his neck. Kipps recited his talking points, including memorized slogans in Hindi.

  An American consular official emerged from the chaos of cots, valises, crates, and power cables. She had a big satellite phone for Kipps, along with a broad-brimmed hat, a tube of sunscreen, and cold mineral water.

  This woman was a psy-ops creature, a civilian spook, but it was nice to see her thinking about his needs.

  “We’re going to Bombay,” she told him. “Your big show had a change of plans.”

  “Mumbai? But I was briefed for Dubai,” said Kipps. They’d scheduled him for another tour of Dubai, which was a very proper, ultra-futuristic, space-hero kind of town. Kipps had been to Dubai twice. Dubai always seemed like an interesting place, though he’d never once escaped its colossal hotels.

  “Please don’t call Bombay ‘Mumbai,’ Captain. They don’t do that here anymore.”

  “Okay. Sure.”

  State Department Girl told him that her name was Sarah something. “If they use the name ‘Bomb-Dub,’ that’s bad. It means they’re claiming Dubai as a suburb of Bombay. Those guys are the crazy, Hindu, culture-war, saffron-and-trident crowd. You don’t want to mess with them.”

  “I heard about them. Right.”

  “Do you think there’s any life on Titan?” said Sarah.

  “What?”

  “Life. Life on Titan. Do you think life evolved on there? Do you believe in evolution? You believe in dinosaurs.”

  “There might be some life inside Titan,” Kipps said with care. “There’s water in there, an ocean. But it’s eighty miles deep and it’s locked deep in solid ice. So there’s no danger. They can’t get out and hurt us.”

  “You hunt for geysers so you can find some fossils of life on Titan.”

  “I always look for fossils,” said Kipps. “I’ve been looking for fossils since I was a kid. Nothing special about that. North Dakota’s crawling with fossils.”

  “Despite your private convictions, I don’t think you ought to mention the prospect of life inside Titan,” said Sarah. “Too controversial. In Dubai, maybe, but Bombay’s got swamis, and gurus, and guys who talk to UFOs, and people who believe in life in outer space—and they’re all fun-dies. Okay? They’ll act real friendly to you, but you shouldn’t go there.”

  “I’m strictly secular,” said Kipps.

  Sarah squinted at a departing chopper. “We should never have gone to Bombay…” It looked like Sarah had had a long war. Some people had never gotten over Houston, and Washington, and Los Angeles. Something had turned into ice inside of them, after that. They were not going to loosen up again.

  “They’ve got a free press in India,” said Sarah. “So there’s a lot of things you can’t say.”

  Kipps said nothing.

  “So don’t ad-lib. Please stick to your talking points.”

  Kipps said more nothing.

  Another private helicopter lifted off, making a useful racket that would frustrate lurking microphones. Sarah put her sunburned nose next to his ear.

  “We don’t have much time before they fly you there too,” she said, “so remember, Indian journalists always look for gaffes and slips from celebrities. So please, never use the name ‘Pakistan.’ ‘Ceylon, Burma, Tibet’—those don’t exist either. They will ask you leading questions about all their provinces, because they want to make news. So you just say: ‘Line of Control.’ That’s all you need to say to anybody. There’s the ‘Line of Control,’ which is everything that India occupies. Then there’s the ‘Humanitarian Relief Area,’ which is the parts they don’t occupy yet.”

  That seemed like a lot for Kipps to remember. “Can you send me a briefing file?”

  “They tap all our files.”

  “Can you give me a briefing book?”

  “They steal our books. They scan them and put them in scandal sites.”

  Kipps shook his head. “Look, can’t we just go over to Dubai? If that almighty Indian Government…”

  “The government’s not the problem. New Delhi loves Omaha, they kiss and make up every day. Bombay is weird, though, it’s huge, it’s the size of a country. Every last barefoot kid in that city, hell, every damn village in India, is on the Net…” Sarah dodged a violently slithering cable. “Don’t say ‘slum.’ The slums in India are the ‘Informal Urban Areas.’”

  “Is it okay if I talk some about ‘poor people’?”

  “The Indian poor are the ‘Newly Advantaged.’”

  Kipps was having trouble with his temper. He wasn’t pleased about Dubai. The war had been pretty severe in Dubai, but at least the shopping was great. “How about ‘poor kid from a Sioux reservation’? Can I tell them that about my own personal background? It’s the truth.”

  “You’re not ‘Sioux,’ Captain Kipps. You’re ‘Lakota.’ ‘Sioux’ is a slang word that your enemies made up.” Sarah stared into his eyes. Embassy people were very intelligent.

  “Sorry to trouble you, Sarah.”

  Sarah allowed herself a small, sour smile. “We tried so hard to stick to your schedule…but the Indians just have their own notions. Our embassy is here for you, Captain. We’re from Omaha and we want to help.”

  “Anything else in this major briefing?”

  “Never drink the water.”

  Kipps already knew that. “There must be something else.” He knew that from the kink in Sarah’s eyebrows. He could have drawn Sarah’s face from memory. Maybe he would do that for her, and make her a little gift of the portrait. Kipps was extremely good at drawing visual details. Sometimes that little parlor trick would mellow women out.

  Sarah didn’t want to broach the next issue to him. “Well…okay, there is one last thing. Your personal behavior. You’re a lonely sailor in Bombay on shore leave.”

  Kipps said nothing.

  “If you meet someone real friendly, she’s not a hooker. She’ll be somebody’s spy.”

  “I’m married,” said Kipps.

  Sarah was surprised. “I wasn’t briefed on that.”

  “I married Agnes last week. It’s peacetime. Time to get married again.”

  Sarah clapped her hat to her head as a wind gust hit them. “Why didn’t your wife fly over for a honeymoon inside your rocket? Wow, we could have promoted the hell out of that!”

  Kipps opened his mouth, and shut it again. Agnes was a planetary scientist. Agnes was a genuine explorer of new worlds. So Agnes naturally hated manned spaceflight. Agnes loved her robots, and Agnes dearly loved her screens, but Agnes loathed every Buck Rogers moron who had ever wasted her science funding.

  There was big trouble at the Bombay hotel. Apparently, the labor strike convulsing Dubai had some local echo in Bombay. The harried staff assured Kipps that he had a room, a nice
room, a palace fit for a cosmic hero: but it just wasn’t ready for him. Yet.

  Having flown to his hotel through outer space, Kipps naturally carried no luggage. The mishap left him standing empty-handed in his sweat-stained uniform in a potted-palm, marble-pillared lobby.

  Three goons in the lobby were staring at him.

  The goons could have been police spies, or journalists wanting a scoop about him, or maybe even some Bombay mafia gunsels carrying their cheap gats into nice hotels. Maybe the three men were one of each variety of goon. In any case, the goons weren’t the helpful American spooks that Kipps had expected from the local embassy. He didn’t like the way the locals sized him up.

  Kipps tried his satellite phone. Being a satellite phone, it couldn’t work indoors.

  So Kipps left the hotel and entered the awesome blazing heat, urban racket, and the incredible Indian smell. The goons hastily followed him.

  Kipps pointed his American-secured satellite telephone at the blazing smog-yellow sky. He attempted to call the local American embassy. The rugged phone seemed functional, but it wanted to synchronize with the chip inside his State Department passport. That interaction wasn’t working. Some fault with the phone, or with the passport, or with some federal interface that just didn’t hook up to another federal interface.

  Whatever the glitch, his secure phone was useless.

  So Kipps stepped inside a big, rattling, rust-eaten trolley. The goons also hustled into the trolley, jamming their way deep into the crowd.

  Kipps muscled through the crowd and stepped off the far side of the trolley at the last second. The trolley thundered off with his pursuers trapped inside.

  Then Kipps went for a walk. He chose directions that offered the fewest video cameras.

  As every schoolchild knew, Bombay had been hit by a nuclear weapon. Bombay had been nuked, and Calcutta had been nuked. Due to the muja-hideen unpleasantries, there had been three more nukes beating the daylights out of hapless Kashmir.

  The Bombay nuke had been a much heavier nuke than the dirty-suitcase versions smuggled into Houston and LA and Washington.

  In Houston and LA and Washington, six years later, there were still big cigarette-butt blast zones where the feds wandered around with their Geiger counters and moaned about obscure isotopes that gathered in the thyroids of children.

  Nothing like that visible around here. There had to be some similar atomic blast locale in Bombay, but, for the life of him, Kipps couldn’t find it. Bombay was absolutely packed with humanity. Bombay was seething with life and insanely huge. Bombay was a true twenty-first-century megacity, which meant that Bombay wasn’t so much a town as a province-eating brick-and-metal dinosaur.

  There were sections of smoggy Bombay where mirror-glass spires blasted up tall enough to mock Chicago, but those spires were right next to barnacled checkerboard places—“informal urban areas”—made from scraps. From debris. Anything and everything, jigsawed and glued. Cut and paste. Mix and match.

  Informal cities made from dirt. The Bombay buildings made out of dirt looked especially ingenious. They weren’t pretty, but they were battle-tested war technology. The frontline bunker stuff.

  The Indian troops didn’t use the rebar and the Jersey barriers that American ground troops used. The Indians had plenty of manpower. So the Indians shoveled up loose dirt or rubble, and just a little cement, into big canvas bags.

  Then they made a big round loop of the bags, on the ground.

  That was their first barricade, a place to kneel and shoot, but they wouldn’t stop with that. The jawan troopers would lay barbed-wire on top of the bagged dirt. Then they piled a second loop of fat sandbags on top of that first one. The steely barbed-wire hooked the bags together and kept the layers solid.

  Then the Indians just kept at the work, shoveling and piling, round after round, like a potter coiling up clay.

  When they were done, they had a big solid canvas-dirt dome. Shrapnel would bounce off it like confetti. They would cut doors into it. Maybe pipe some daylight in with plastic sewer-pipe.

  The domes were cool in the day and warm at night. They were as cheap as dirt.

  Somebody in Bombay, maybe some thousands of guys, had come back from the war with a whole lot of hands-on experience in how to dig and pile such things. Now these dome-slums were all-civilian. They had a little paint and plaster, sometimes: flowers, geometric patterns…Some domes were completely plastered with street posters, gaudy fly bills of paper and glue, big thick barky layers of propaganda that built up and peeled off in rinds.

  Since the domes were immensely solid, there were urban barnacles piled up and squatting all over them. Tiny little workshops. Zigzag laundry lines. Water tanks. Pissoirs. Rabbit cages. Grimy, dewy, makeshift plastic greenhouses where leftover video cell phones watched somebody’s crops growing. It was like a slum volcano had erupted. Like somebody had taken a foaming fire hose and sprayed the place with handmade shelters.

  It was hot, humble, and dirty, and the unnamed alleys were crammed with tattered bits of urban crap, plastic wrap, pop tops, packing debris, stuff so entirely devoid of value that no amount of ingenuity could squeeze another nickel out of it.

  But the massive crowds here were busy people. They were poor, but they were big-city people. The local poor had goals and ambitions. They were big-city people and they weren’t ashamed of themselves.

  They’d seen their share of foreigners. They didn’t mind him and his retro-futuristic Space Navy uniform. Kipps felt much safer among them than he’d felt inside the posh and chilly hotel.

  Kipps maneuvered through unnamed alleys, ducking under signs, dodging puddles and careening bicycles.

  There was no end to it. It was a maze on the scale of the North Dakota badlands, yet packed with human beings. This had to be one of the biggest slums on the planet.

  Yet it was better than the place where he’d grown up.

  He’d grown up inside a battered aluminum camper, with a teenage mom with an abiding fondness for Cherry Ripple. It was difficult to explain to people that the twenty-first-century Sioux were not guys wearing feathered war-bonnets while riding palomino ponies. The Sioux were not the urban poor, they were the rural poor. The rural poor was where the urban poor came from.

  Until he’d joined the Navy at eighteen, the most exciting thing that had ever happened to Kipps was going out to the badlands to scour the barren soil for chips of bone. All the white kids on these paleontology school trips had it figured that they were off to bag a tyrannosaur. It took a guy like the young, dead-end, dirt-ignorant Joe Kipps to realize that a chip of bone was significant.

  So he was superb at that work.

  All the rest of it—the awe and wonder of dinosaurs, sixty-five-million-year time-spans, Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary events, asteroids and earthshaking thunder lizards—that was all time opera. It was time opera in the same way that spaceflight was space opera.

  In other words, it was all romantic crap predicated on the work of roughnecks who were willing to do the hard stuff.

  Kipps had had a pretty good war. Wars had a way of upsetting things, of changing the balance of peacetime’s winners and losers. Things had changed on the reservation when Omaha became the capital. Not so much that Omaha helped—Omaha was broke. But Omaha didn’t have the energy left to break the little people. That part seemed to help a lot.

  The war made India a superpower. Some people wondered why a country that had suffered so much had come out so much stronger. Kipps was starting to get that now, because although Bombay was alien to him, he was good at seeing details.

  A super-India wasn’t so much the swaggering triumph of India as the abject collapse of everything that wasn’t India.

  They weren’t trying to live impossible lies here, and then tearing their own flesh about it. They weren’t strapping bombs to themselves for their payoffs in Heaven. They were living people.

  The heat was killing him. Kipps was pretty used to heat—he had a house in Florida,
where a veteran could get a house for nothing—but this heat was mad-dog heat. And now jet lag hit him—rocket lag.

  Kipps stopped at an overcrowded plastic shack that clung to a curving wall. Kipps took the shack for a grocery store, for it held a fantastic array of off-the-wall crap: eight kinds of beans, weird condiments, soap, toothpaste, scratch-off cards, flyswatters, clothespins, diapers, razors, antiseptics, everything in teensy little morsel-sized packets.

  A teenager was minding the joint. He had a rumpled cotton skirt tucked through his legs and a dirt-stained wife-beater shirt. He was playing a handheld military adventure game and deftly blowing terrorists into bloody pixelated pieces.

  “You speak English?” said Kipps.

  The kid froze his shoot-’em-up and loaded a fresh application. His console spoke up on his behalf. “What’s your problem, Yankee?”

  “You guys got Coca-Cola?”

  “Probiotic? Mango-scented? Usury-free?”

  “You got any Coke with real cane sugar instead of that corn-fructose stuff in the States?”

  The kid did. Then came the problem of paying him. Being a sensible merchant, the kid was keenly reluctant to take American dollars. They bargained for a payoff in cell-phone minutes. This involved Kipps buying a cell phone. The cell phone cost half as much as the cold can of Coke.

  Kipps had to show his passport in order to do this. Four minutes later, Kipps received a phone call. The program attempted to sell him a city map, and a pizza, and a massage, and bangles and shawls and toys, all in starchy, freeze-dried mid-Atlantic English.

  The slum was so packed with humanity that every action in it was accompanied by a crowd. However, a new crowd had arrived, and it marked its special character by staring at him in awe.

  An older man tenderly touched Kipps’s epaulet. He had clearly studied English, so he could almost pronounce it. “That was my boy.”

  “That was your boy,” Kipps repeated.

  “My boy sold a can of Coke to Captain Joe Kipps,” said the older man.

  “Yeah, I’m him.”

  “You are the hero who killed ibn Timur.”