by Barnes, John
I shut off the roaring vacuum urinal so it wouldn’t draw an attendant, and searched my pigeon’s corpse. Sure enough, he had a boarding pass and an i.d. that I could use. Better still, nobody traveling with him. I floated the corpse into the stall I’d been in and locked him in.
That would sure be a surprise for whoever cleaned this place later. Well, Supra Tokyo had always been kind of dull. This would liven it up some.
Only took a few minutes. Nervous about it anyway. If anyone had walked in I’d’ve been in deep shit.
Instead of a thin mist of piss, I thought to myself, and giggled. This was going so well.
His i.d. showed this was Dr. David Stroup, M.D. Most people just went to medical AIs but there were still a few M.D.‘s who did research, and to do research they had to treat patients. I suppose the idea was that his skills shouldn’t be lost to the human race. Well, they were. On the other hand the human race would be keeping my skills. Win some, lose some.
Stroup’s i.d. showed he was traveling alone. Nobody would come looking for him, which meant I could use this pass and wouldn’t have to wait and try for another one.
I checked his boarding-pass time. Thirty-eight minutes away.
Forty-one minutes later, precisely, having established by watching that three minutes was really close, I raced up to the gate, looking like I was panicking, jammed the i.d. and boarding pass under their noses, said I’d been caught short in the bathroom. I figured if they smelled piss on me so much the better. It would seem more like a guy who’d been in a panicked hurry in a zero-g bathroom.
They waved me aboard.
I wasn’t going to go to Stroup’s berth — for sure they’d find and i.d. that body within hours. So I looked around for one that had a “still vacant” light on, and found one for George Pillbrenner. I put Pillbrenner’s name plate on Stroup’s berth — no passenger would ever check the number against the name — and wedged Stroup’s name plate, and the urinal hose I had used to strangle him, down between the bunk and the wall. Maybe I’d get lucky, and when they found Stroup’s body, they’d check the berth number he was supposed to be in, search this berth, find this stuff, and waste a couple days interrogating George Pillbrenner.
Next step: find somewhere to be during acceleration, and ideally for two days afterwards. I could steal water and food, or since it was just two days manage without them. Save the problem of getting off the shuttle and onto the Flying Dutchman for later. Right now, get somewhere to not get caught.
Every acceleration couch in every berth would be full, one way or another. The shuttles didn’t boost hard — nothing like taking off from Earth’s surface — but they still pulled a good two gee for the first twenty minutes, and you could crack an ankle or get a hernia in that. I wanted somewhere soft to lie down.
I ended up sacked out on top of a pile of wrapped meal packets in a storage bin — they were all being held to the wall by a piece of cargo net. I wasn’t sure but figured that probably they’d put them on the engine-side wall, which would be “down” whenever the engine was on. I tucked my feet under strands of the netting, grabbed two more, and held on.
I waited a long time. It got to be an hour past departure time. Nervous, breathing slow to calm myself, more nervous. Always possible they’d found Stroup, put together the timing of the riot and Stroup’s death and maybe some evidence I hadn’t been careful enough about, were searching for me, were just about to open the door … right now …
The catapult shoved us and I lurched into the pile of meals. Then the engines cut in. It felt a little weird as I sank into the slippery pile of wrapped meals, but it beat being dead or back on Earth.
When I slipped out of the storage bin, I had half a dozen meals tucked into my werpsack, along with my werp and my space allocation box. That, the clothes I was wearing — and maybe thirty million in platinum coins — was all I owned. It would do, if I could get anywhere with it.
It was easy enough to fix those meals. You just had to get some water from a bathroom, put it in the vent on the meal, and microwave the meal a few seconds. This shuttle had been a luxury liner — there were a lot of little lounges with microwaves. No problem that way, if I could avoid getting caught.
Mostly I just circulated around, looking like I had somewhere to be, talked to no one. Lots of people still in shock. Easy to avoid conversation.
Late that first day I overheard some of the passengers talking about a stowaway. Some poor bozo had killed George Pillbrenner for his boarding pass and then tried to take his cabin. He’d disposed of the evidence of Pillbrenner’s murder, and he had Pillbrenner’s i.d., but for some mysterious reason he hadn’t gotten rid of the urinal hose he used to kill Dr. Stroup, as well.
The shuttle captain gave him a two-minute trial and then tossed him out the airlock. The shuttle was moving at above Earth escape velocity, so the stowaway’s freeze-dried body was on its way into solar orbit. He’d be out there a good long while.
Anyway, with him gone, they stopped looking. The second day they weren’t checking i.d.‘s in the mess, so I got regular meals. I still tried to stay out of sight a lot.
Poor stupid bastard. Going to sleep in the berth of the i.d. he’d stolen. Obvious amateur. They’d have had him for murdering Pillbrenner, anyway, eventually. No skin off mine if they threw him out the lock for Stroup, instead.
5.
Revival is kind of fun. If you’ve led an active life imagine literally having six months to catch up on sleep. After that, with my new twenty-year-old body to play with, Sadi and I settle down to a “honeymoon” in a big private house she has way out in the Martian desert.
I’m still troubled by all the memories. Now that I know what happened, I feel it, it doesn’t seem so bad to me, but it doesn’t seem so good either. I don’t want to take anti-depressants to get rid of the feeling. Sadi’s very patient. For some reason this bug or blues or whatever it is makes me horny all the time, and she’s willing to have sex with me as often as I want.
Many nights I put the heated suit on, go out, lie in the rust red sand, look up at the stars, and ringer the emergency venting valve. Hit that one twice, speak the fight codes each time, and I’d be fresh out of air instantly. The transponder would summon Sadi but I’d be dead before she could suit up and come out to me.
The thought’s not exciting or comforting or anything. Just a thought.
I’ve searched the records more completely in the last couple of months. Alice died of old age a while back. Her transfer ship officer son, the one she had with Joe Schwartz, paid for her to come as his permanent guest on the Flying Dutchman. The odd thing is, I came to Mars on that ship, though they kept us in the cargo hold and wouldn’t let us talk to the crew for fear of memes. I was maybe three hundred feet from Alice and neither of us ever knew.
The report that she was dead came from the Dutchman, en route to Epsilon Indi, a few years ago. They were fourteen years out from Earth, then — around 63,600 AU, almost a light-year away. That’s a long way from anywhere.
She was a hundred two years old, not bad for an old bim that never took care of herself, when she died
With my memories back I realize Alice and Sadi were the only people that ever counted worth shit to me
Alice has been dead, now, for twelve years. Thirteen, I keep forgetting about radio lag. That is, dead in this time line I am living in. There were many other times when I believed she was dead, when I have vivid memories of having seen her dead. Sadi says those are false memories, like the way I remember her killing me and me killing her, or that I remember so many different Boy Scout knives or two different times decades apart when I learned magic. Sometimes I just lie out there in the desert night, staring up at the stars through that thin atmosphere, and try to sort out all those memories.
There’s a small river named for Alice, most of the way around the world from here, where I found a good artesian vein while prospecting, during my years as Kindness O’Hart, just before I transited, time before last. M
ars Development Inc. paid me to open it up and let it flow.
The Alice River winds south from the equator, across the highlands, before plunging down a two-kilometer fall into the Mariner Sea. There are Marsform frogs and otters and trout in it. She always liked animals, so I guess she’d have liked that. And since I did that about twenty years ago, if she ever looked at maps of Mars, she might have seen it. She wouldn’t know that she was the Alice, of course. I’m really sorry she didn’t.
I named it during the time I was Kindness O’Hart; right after I did that, I started to work really hard to make the James Norren i.d. full legit. When I woke up as Norren I spent fifteen years wandering around in the desert by myself, just thinking things through. Didn’t like what I thought. Never saw any way to think different. After a while I was just kind of “present,” not really thinking at all. So I didn’t write much down.
I liked that a lot. I wish Alice could have seen as many Martian dawns and sunsets, as many great plains thinly dotted with green and brand new seas and rivers rolling, as I’ve seen.
I wish, instead of Quito, we could have shared my years as an ecoprospector in the Martian back country. They were good years. They were miserable years of loneliness. Both.
I wriggle to get a bit more comfortable. The iron sands crunch under my butt and shoulder blades. The stars are as bright as ever — a clear night on Mars is like the Arizona mountains, squared and cubed. I sigh, think about it all. More trips through will mean a chance to meet more people, but am I going to care about any more of them?
I never had any friends.
There have been times I’ve been so tired of Sadi I’ve wanted to kill him. Her. I guess it’ll be her from now on. We’ve got a million years together. I can see what she likes about me: I listen. I do what she says. I’m all a god needs, an audience.
And she’s a god. Every trip through she gets to fix more things and try more experiments. The world’s getting to look like what she likes it to. Lucky me that I’m part of it. I mean part of what she likes. Because the parts she doesn’t like are going away, and she’s really enjoying getting rid of them.
The valve’s right there under my finger. I’m very tired. I lie there and finger the button. I feel the words rehearse on my tongue, I know what it would be like to press twice. Then I wouldn’t be able to breathe and I’d be panicky and thrashing, and then the lights would go out.
“Josh?” Her voice in my headphones.
“Yeah.”
“Just wanted to see how you were doing. Want to come in?”
“I guess. Anything up?”
“Not really. I just kind of missed you. It’s been a lot of years without you and now I want to see you all the time. But if you need time to yourself, say so.”
“Guess I’ll come in.”
We get into a fight over something stupid, and we end up sleeping separately that night. It’s always the same question — why I don’t want to jump back to 1988 together and start it all over again. I point out that if she knew me before, she must know when we will. She won’t say a thing about that.
She gets into her Doctor Science mode of lecturing me about the jump for the hundredth time. Never did know when to shut up. Like the problem’s that I don’t understand the deal. I mean, I understand it just fine. What I haven’t decided is whether I want to take it.
“You’re just impossible,” she screams. She’s dressed the way she likes to dress around the house — like something out of a porno movie. Looks uncomfortable to me and I don’t see how you can get horny from what you’re wearing — I mean, if you’re inside, how can you tell? — but she says it makes her feel good to do that in front of me. Don’t get me wrong, I like to look, but I wish I knew why she does that.
So I’m looking at this bim screaming at me in a little leather swimsuit and a pair of thigh-high boots, and I’m thinking that maybe I should’ve just opened that valve.
“One more time,” she says. “There’s nothing irreversible about this. You can just do it once and then decide not to. You can just be a timeline that only went around once. But just try it. Get on the ship with me, and with relativity it will only be about a year subjective, and then we arrive more than a hundred years back. And then we can do whatever we want for a hundred years, or come back forward if we get bored. I swear to god, Josh, I don’t know why you won’t try it at least once.”
I won’t try it for the same reason I won’t suck cocks — I’m afraid I might like it, I think. I don’t want to be locked in a tin can with Einstein the Psycho-Slut, I think. Neither of those is the real reason. I don’t know the real reason. But it has something to do with remembering too much.
She’s shown me holos and everything else about this. I understand it completely, I understand everything except why I would want to do this. You get on the little very fast ship with some dingus on it. As soon as you’re far enough from large masses, the dingus goes “bing” and then you’re moving backwards in time — or you’d be seen as such to anyone outside your ship. Since there’s nothing close to you out in space, from your standpoint it just seems like a hundred-year spaceship ride — at relativistic velocity so it only seems to be a year — while the planets go backwards and broadcasts from Earth are time-reversed.
When you re-enter the inner solar system and pass through the singularity, there you are, back in whatever year you aimed for.
She repeats it all twice, screaming. Her makeup runs all over her face from tears. It’s like being reamed out with a physics lecture by a hysterical streetwalker. When she’s all done, I just say I haven’t made up my mind and maybe she’s in the wrong timeline.
6.
The big night, half of the population of Mars gathered on the slopes of Olympus Mons, in our pressure suits, to watch. Of course there were better views on the vid, but so what? We wanted to see the actual flash.
It took a big bomb for a singularity that size, and a lot of matter got sent through some very strange changes. Even out beyond Pluto’s orbit, the bomb that could make a big enough singularity — forty gigatons — would be more than visible from Mars. So we all sat and watched, knowing that near that flash would be the five transfer ships, now star-ships, bound outward.
They would have to get to where they were going on their own, at their miserable crawling acceleration of about one percent of a gee. That meant it would be centuries to reach the star systems, and even with life extension it would be the current generation’s grandchildren that would get there.
But if this technique worked, they’d have a way back. A singularity opened up a big loop in time, a “closed timelike curve” so that there would be a backward path in time available from the moment of the singularity until the loop’s farthest reach, a thousand years in the future. They could go out, settle the new systems, build a civilization, and then send a ship backwards in time, back to our solar system, to enter the past. The resources and knowledge of the future would be available to civilization back here — and with those, perhaps Earth could be taken back from Resuna, or at least the colonies could be better defended against One True.
Some people were watching because it was going to be an important event in human history. Most of us were watching because it was the last naked-eye-visible sign of the transfer ships, where so many of us had friends and relatives. Alice was on one of those ships. Lots of people had such reasons. I read later that there were four hundred thousand of us on the side of Olympus Mons that night.
True, the flash would not be exactly where our friends and relations were. They were firing off the singularity ten million miles from the ships — but ten million miles was nothing at all compared to nine billion miles from us to the ships. That flash would be as much of a wave goodbye as we would get.
Strange to think, too, that the die was already cast — when the light at last reached us, it would be fourteen hours since it had already happened.
Even after this flash, I could theoretically write to Alice, of course �
� the ships and the home system would still be in communication for decades to come. But I had had to scramble a lot to establish an i.d. The only thing that had saved me was that so many of the refugees had decided to give themselves new names for Mars, it was like a fad, and that made a lot of noise and confusion in the records, giving me somewhere to hide. It had been tough enough getting onto and off of the Dutchman, and creating the i.d. of Kindness O’Hart (the kind of silly name that went with my previous forged i.d. being from Frisco). Because I’d had to improvise I hadn’t done it at all well. My i.d. as “Kindness O’Hart” was already shaky enough, all too apt to connect me to Stroup’s murder and god knew what else, without giving any possible listener a clue to who I really was.
But god, I wanted to write to Alice.
The flash startled me because it was over so quickly; the bright light burned for an instant, like a star that had been turned on and off with a switch, a dot underlining Cassiopeia’s W. That was all.
Everyone had been told it would be like that. I was glad that we had only digital com, I didn’t have to listen to people who had missed it by looking away at the wrong time, or kids griping, or anything.
I had two years to go before I would transit again, and the i.d. I was building for that transit would be a good, tight, solid, clean one. Not good enough to allow me to write to Alice, never good enough for that, sorry Alice, sorry. I’d have had to explain being alive at my age, especially since she thought she knew when and how I had died.
Well, the choice would be out of my hands soon enough. She was old, she’d die. They figured it was hopeless for the ships to communicate with the Solar System after about a light-year or so anyway — though that distance kept getting rolled back as the technology improved. The old Deepstar probes had had to come all the way back, but the new series were good out to a light-year.