by Neil Clarke
The narrator thinks Tony is crazy. He doesn’t want to bet. But when Tony threatens to tell the public he is a coward, he agrees.
In the next race, Tony and another rider are ahead of the narrator until the last turn, where Tony’s bike bumps the leader’s and they both crash. The narrator wins, but Tony is killed in the crash.
Then the narrator finds out that, before the race, Tony told a newspaper reporter that the narrator had decided to retire after the next fatal crash. Did Tony deliberately get himself killed in order to make him retire?
Yet, despite the news report, the winner doesn’t have to retire. He can say he changed his mind. Tony hasn’t won anything, has he? If so, what?
THIRTEEN
Erno had not left the apartment in days. In the aftermath of his police interview, his mother had hovered over him like a bad mood, and it was all he could do to avoid her reproachful stare. Aunt Sophie and Lena and even Aphra acted like he had some terminal disease that might be catching. They intended to heap him with shame until he was crushed. He holed up in his room listening to an ancient recording, “Black and Blue,” by Louis Armstrong. The long dead jazzman growled, “What did I do, to feel so black and blue?”
A real man would get back at them. Tyler would. And they would know that they were being gotten, and they would be gotten in the heart of their assumption of superiority. Something that would show women permanently that men were not to be disregarded.
Erno opened his notebook and tried writing a poem.
When you hit someone
It changes their face.
Your mother looks shocked and old.
Alicia looks younger.
Men named Cluny get even stupider than they are.
It hurts your fist.
It hurts your shoulder.
The biggest surprise: you can do it.
Your fist is there at the end of your arm
Waiting
At any and every moment
Whether you are aware of it or not.
Once you know this
The world changes.
He stared at the lines for some minutes, then erased them. In their place he tried writing a joke.
Q How many matrons does it take to screw in a light bulb?
A: Light bulbs don’t care to be screwed by matrons.
He turned off his screen and lay on his bed, his hands behind his head, and stared at the ceiling. He could engineer the GROSS virus. He would not even need access to the biotech facilities; he knew where he could obtain almost everything required from warehouses within the colony. But he would need a place secret enough that nobody would find him out.
Suddenly he knew the place. And with it, he knew where Tyler was hiding.
The northwest lava tube was fairly busy when Erno arrived at 2300. Swing shift cousins wandered into the open clubs, and the free enterprise shops were doing their heaviest business. The door to the Oxygen Warehouse was dark, and a public notice was posted on it. The door was locked, and Erno did not want to draw attention by trying to force it.
So he returned to the construction materials warehouse in North Six. Little traffic here, and Erno was able to slip inside without notice. He kept behind the farthest aisle until he reached the back wall and the deserted airlock that was being used for storage. It took him some minutes to move the building struts and slide through to the other end. The door opened and he was in the deserted lava tube.
It was completely dark. He used his flashlight to retrace their steps from weeks ago.
Before long, Erno heard a faint noise ahead. He extinguished the flash and saw, beyond several bends in the distance, a faint light. He crept along until he reached a section where light fell from a series of open doorways. He slid next to the first and listened.
The voices from inside stopped. After a moment one of them called, Come in.
Nervous, Erno stepped into the light from the open door. He squinted and saw Tyler and a couple of other men in a room cluttered with tables, cases of dried food, oxygen packs, scattered clothes, blankets, surface suits. On the table were book readers, half-filled juice bulbs, constables’ batons.
One of the younger men came up to Erno and slapped him on the back. “Erno. My man!” It was Sid.
The others watched Erno speculatively. Tyler leaned back against the table. He wore a surface skintight; beside him lay his utility belt. His hair had grown out into a centimeter of red bristle. He grinned. “I assume you’ve brought the goods, Erno.”
Erno pulled his notebook from his pocket. “Yes.”
Tyler took the notebook and, without moving his eyes from Erno’s, put it on the table. “You can do this, right?”
“Erno’s a wizard,” Sid said. “He can do it in his sleep.”
The other young men just watched Erno. They cared what he was going to say.
“I can do it.”
Tyler scratched the corner of his nose with his index finger. “Will you?”
“I don’t know.”
“Why don’t you know? Is this a hard decision?”
“Of course it is. A lot of children will die. Nothing will ever be the same.”
“We’re under the impression that’s the point, Erno. Come with me,” Tyler said, getting off the table. “We need to talk.”
Tyler directed the others to go back to work and took Erno into another room. This one had a cot, a pile of clothes, and bulbs of alcohol lying around. On a wall screen was a schematic of the colony’s substructure.
Tyler pushed a pile of clothes off a chair. “Sit down.”
Erno sat. “You knew about this place before we came here the night of the riot.”
Tyler said nothing.
“They asked me if there was a conspiracy,” Erno continued. “I told them no. Is there?”
“Sure there is. You’re part of it.”
“I’m not part of anything.”
“That’s the trouble with men among the cousins, Erno. We’re not part of anything. If a man isn’t part of something, then he’s of no use to anybody.”
“Help me out, Tyler. I don’t get it.”
“They say that men can’t live only with other men. I don’t believe that. Did you ever study the warrior culture?”
“No.”
“Men banding together—for duty, honor, clan. That’s what the warrior lived by throughout history. It was the definition of manhood.
“The matrons say men are extreme, that they’ll do anything. They’re right. A man will run into a collapsing building to rescue a complete stranger. That’s why, for most of human history, the warrior was necessary for the survival of the clan—later the nation.
“But the twentieth century drained all the meaning out of it. First the great industrial nations exploited the warrior ethic, destroying the best of their sons for money, for material gain, for political ideology. Then the feminist movement, which did not understand the warrior, and feared and ridiculed him, grew. They even persuaded some men to reject masculinity.
“All this eventually erased the purpose from what was left of the warrior culture. Now, if the warrior ethic can exist at all, it must be personal. ‘Duty, honor, self.”‘
“Self?”
“Self. In some way it was always like that. Sacrifice for others is not about the others, it’s the ultimate assertion of self. It’s the self, after all, that decides to place value in the other. What’s important is the self and the sacrifice, not the cause for which you sacrifice. In the final analysis, all sacrifices are in service of the self. The pure male assertion.”
“You’re not talking about running into a collapsing building, Tyler.”
Tyler laughed. “Don’t you get it yet, Erno? We’re living in a collapsing building!”
“If we produce this virus, people are going to die.”
“Living as a male among the cousins is death. They destroy certain things, things that are good—only this society defines them as bad. Fatherhood. Protection of the weak by th
e strong. There’s no force here, Erno. There’s no growth. The cousins are an evolutionary dead end. In time of peace it may look fine and dandy, but in time of war, it would be wiped out in a moment.”
Erno didn’t know what to say.
“This isn’t some scheme for power, Erno. You think I’m in this out of some abstract theory? This is life’s blood. This—”
Sid ran in from the hall. “Tyler,” he said. “The warehouse door has cycled again!”
Tyler was up instantly. He grabbed Erno by the shirt. “Who did you tell?”
“Tell? No one!”
“Get the others!” Tyler told Sid. But as soon as Sid left the room an explosion rocked the hall, and the lights went out. Tyler still had hold of Erno’s shirt, and dragged him to the floor. The air was full of stinging fumes.
“Follow me if you want to live!” Tyler whispered.
They crawled away from the hall door, toward the back of the room. In the light of the wall screen, Tyler upended the cot and yanked open a meter-square door set into the wall. When Erno hesitated, Tyler dragged him into the dark tunnel beyond.
They crawled on hands and knees for a long time. Erno’s eyes teared from the gas, and he coughed until he vomited. Tyler pulled him along in the blackness until they reached a chamber, dimly lit in red, where they could stand. On the other side of the chamber was a pressure door.
“Put this on,” Tyler said, shoving a surface suit into Erno’s arms. “Quickly!” Erno struggled to pull on the skintight, still gasping for breath. “I swear I had nothing to do with this,” he said.
“I know,” Tyler said. He sealed up his own suit and locked down his tiger-striped helmet.
“Brace yourself. This isn’t an airlock,” Tyler said, and hit the control on the exterior door.
The moment the door showed a gap, the air blew out of the chamber, almost knocking Erno off his feet. When it opened wide enough, they staggered through into a crevasse. The moisture in the escaping air froze and fell as frost in the vacuum around them. Erno wondered if their pursuers would be able to seal the tube or get back behind a pressure door before they passed out.
Tyler and Erno emerged from the crevasse into a sloping pit, half of which was lit by the glare of hard sunlight. They scrambled up the slope through six centimeters of dust and reached the surface.
“Now what?” Erno said.
Tyler shook his head and put his hand against Erno’s faceplate. He leaned over and touched his helmet to Erno’s. “Private six, encrypted.”
Erno switched his suit radio.
“They won’t be out after us for some time,” Tyler said. “Since we left that Judas-book of yours behind, they may not even know where we are.”
“Judas book?”
“Your notebook—you must have had it with you when the constables questioned you.”
“Yes. But they didn’t know what the download meant or they wouldn’t have returned it to me.”
“Returned it to you? Dumbass. They put a tracer in it.”
Erno could see Tyler’s dark eyes dimly through the faceplate, inches from his own, yet separated by more than glass and vacuum. “I’m sorry.”
“Forget it.”
“When we go back, we’ll be arrested. We might be banished.”
“We’re not going back just yet. Follow me.”
“Where can we go?”
“There’s a construction shack at an abandoned ilemenite mine south of here. It’s a bit of a hike—two to three hours—but what else are we going to do on such a fine morning?”
Tyler turned and hopped off across the surface. Erno stood dumbly for a moment, then followed.
They headed south along the western side of the crater. The ground was much rockier, full of huge boulders and pits where ancient lava tubes had collapsed millennia ago. The suit Erno wore was too tight, and pinched him in the armpits and crotch. His thermoregulators struggled against the open sunlight, and he felt his body inside the skintight slick with sweat. The bind in his crotch became a stabbing pain with every stride.
Around to the south side of Fowler, they struck off to the south. Tyler followed a line of boot prints and tractor treads in the dust. The land rose to Adil’s Ridge after a couple of kilometers, from which Erno looked back and saw, for the first time, all of the domed crater where he had spent his entire life.
“Is this construction shack habitable?” he asked.
“I’ve got it outfitted.”
“What are we going to do? We can’t stay out here forever.”
“We won’t. They’ll calm down. You forget that we haven’t done anything but spray a prank message on the dome. I’m a comedian. What do they expect from a comedian?”
Erno did not remind Tyler of the possible decompression injuries their escape might have caused. He tucked his head down and focused on keeping up with the big man’s steady pace. He drew deep breaths. They skipped along without speaking for an hour or more. Off to their left, Erno noticed a line of distant pylons, with threads of cable strung between them. It was the cable train route from Fowler to Tsander several hundred kilometers south.
Tyler began to speak. “I’m working on some new material. For my comeback performance. It’s about the difference between love and sex.”
“Okay. So what’s the difference?”
“Sex is like a fresh steak. It smells great, you salivate, you consume it in a couple of minutes, you’re satisfied, you feel great, and you fall asleep.”
“And love?”
“Love is completely different. Love is like flash-frozen food—it lasts forever. Cold as liquid hydrogen. You take it out when you need it, warm it up. You persuade yourself it’s just as good as sex. People who promote love say it’s even better, but that’s a lie constructed out of necessity. The only thing it’s better than is starving to death.”
“Needs a little work,” Erno said. After a moment he added. “There’s a story in Stories for Men about love.”
“I’d think the stories for men would be about sex.”
“No. There’s no sex in any of them. There’s hardly any women at all. Most of them are about men competing with other men. But there’s one about a rich man who bets a poor young man that hunger is stronger than love. He locks the poor man and his lover in separate rooms with a window between them, for seven days, without food. At the end of the seven days they’re starving. Then he puts them together in a room with a single piece of bread.”
“Who eats it?”
“The man grabs it, and is at the point of eating it when he looks over at the woman, almost unconscious from hunger. He gives it to her. She refuses it, says he should have it because he’s more hungry than she is. So they win the bet.”
Tyler laughed. “If it had been a steak, they would have lost.” They continued hiking for a while. “That story isn’t about love. It’s about the poor man beating the rich man.”
Erno considered it. “Maybe.”
“So what have you learned from that book? Anything?”
“Well, there’s a lot of killing—it’s like the writers are obsessed with killing. The characters kill for fun, or sport, or money, or freedom, or to get respect. Or women.”
“That’s the way it was back then, Erno. Men—”
Tyler’s voice was blotted out by a tone blaring over their earphones. After fifteen seconds an AI voice came on:
“SATELLITES REPORT A MAJOR SOLAR CORONAL MASS EJECTION. PARTICLE FLUX WILL BEGIN TO RISE IN TWENTY MINUTES, REACHING LETHAL LEVELS WITHIN THIRTY. ALL PERSONS ON THE SURFACE SHOULD IMMEDIATELY SEEK SHELTER. REFRAIN FROM EXPOSURE UNTIL THE ALL CLEAR SOUNDS.
“REPEAT: A MAJOR SOLAR RADIATION EVENT HAS OCCURRED. ALL PERSONS SHOULD IMMEDIATELY TAKE SHELTER.”
Both of them stopped. Erno scanned the sky, frantic. Of course there was no difference. The sun threw the same harsh glare it always threw. His heart thudded in his ears. He heard Tyler’s deep breaths in his earphones.
“How insulated is this shack?�
� he asked Tyler. “Can it stand a solar storm?”
Tyler didn’t answer for a moment. “I doubt it.”
“How about the mine? Is there a radiation shelter? Or a tunnel?”
“It was a strip mine. Besides,” Tyler said calmly, “we couldn’t get there in twenty minutes.”
They were more than an hour south of the colony.
Erno scanned the horizon, looking for some sign of shelter. A crevasse, a lava tube—maybe they’d run out of air, but at least they would not fry. He saw, again, the threads of the cable towers to the east.
“The cable line!” Erno said. “It has radiation shelters for the cable cars all along it.”
“If we can reach one in time.”
Erno checked his clock readout. 0237. Figure they had until 0300. He leapt off due east, toward the cable towers. Tyler followed.
The next fifteen minutes passed in a trance, a surreal slow motion broken field race through the dust and boulders toward the pylons to the east. Erno pushed himself to the edge of his strength, until a haze of spots rose before his eyes. They seemed to move with agonizing slowness.
They were 500 meters from the cable pylon. 300 meters. 100 meters. They were beneath it.
When they reached the pylon, Erno scanned in both directions for a shelter. The cable line was designed to dip underground for radiation protection periodically all along the length of its route. The distance between the tunnels was determined by the top speed of the cable car and the amount of advance warning the passengers were likely to get of a solar event. There was no way of telling how far they were from a shelter, or in which direction the closest lay.
“South,” Tyler said. “The colony is the next shelter north, and it’s too far for us to run, so our only shot should be south.”
It was 0251. They ran south, their leaps no longer strong and low, but with a weary desperation to them now. Erno kept his eyes fixed on the horizon. The twin cables stretched above them like strands of spider’s web, silver in the sunlight, disappearing far ahead where the next T pylon stood like the finish line in a race.
The T grew, and suddenly they were on it. Beyond, in its next arc, the cable swooped down to the horizon. They kept running, and as they drew closer, Erno saw that a tunnel opened in the distance, and the cable ran into it. He gasped out a moan that was all the shout he could make.