Black Phoenix

by B. V. Larson

  Loid tensed and his eyes darted to the corners of the stage. This was too good to be true. He was overcome with suspicion.

  Scarn leaned over and said in his ear. “Settle down, Loid. They’ll dump you in an instant if you aren’t entertaining. Think of the food.”

  It took a moment, but Loid gradually managed a sickly grin and sat still.

  “Mr. Graff,” Scarn said politely, even raising his hand a little for recognition. “I have a question.”

  “Yes, sir!” Lance Graff said with explosive enthusiasm.

  “Do we have to do this?”

  “Have to do this?” said Lance Graff, feigning surprise. “Have to sleep in a warm bed and eat food without bugs in it? Do you have to join with our most elite and admired corps of explorers? Do you have to tell women, ‘No, please, send no more selfies.’ I can see the burdens, Mr. Scarn. But no sir, certainly you can continue your ten-k, ten-level walk upward, and the best of luck to you.”

  Graff grinned like a jackal. He leaned down to look directly into Loid’s face. “What do you think, Mr. Urman? Do you want to sleep in a ditch tonight, or sleep in a silken bed with a princess to keep you as warm as your heart desires? Hmm? It’s time to decide.”

  “Go for it,” Scarn muttered behind his hand.

  Loid finally threw his arms up. His remaining fingers waggled—he was going to play ball.

  The nonexistent crowd cheered madly.

  “Mr. Scarn?” Lance Graff asked imperiously when the ghosts had quieted. “You seem skeptical. What’ll it be for you, luxury... or lice?”

  Loid dipped his head and spoke to Scarn. “We’ll have cameras up our asses, but I guess we’ll get used to the humiliation. A person always does....”

  Scarn looked up and gave Lance Graff one tight nod.

  “He goes for it!” Graff exulted.

  The audience roared.

  Turtle began shifting in his seat. “I don’t know,” he grumbled under his breath to Scarn.

  “Let’s try it out. We can quit later when we get some of our weight back on us.”

  Turtle’s eyes narrowed. “Okay.”

  He turned up to Graff, who was hovering over them and watching closely.

  “We’re good with it,” Turtle said.

  Lance Graff performed a broad, relaxed grin, and held his arms wide as the pre-recorded audience continued to applaud. “Excellent, excellent,” he said when he could be heard.

  “I have a condition,” Turtle said.

  Graff waved a finger at Turtle and shook his head. “We don’t do conditions, Mr. Tuttle.”

  “Nobody calls me that. I’m Turtle.”

  Was there a slight roll of the eyes? Turtle thought there was.

  “Fine, fine,” Graff said, his smile firmly back in place. “What’s your condition?”

  “Just one thing. It’s somebody I want to see. There’s somebody I need to see before all this happens to us. A woman…”

  Lance Graff’s eyes went wide with surprise. “Really? Oh, that’s right—you were walking up a dozen levels to meet a lady… I’m impressed even more that you’d think of her in this glorious moment. And who is this lovely, special woman?”

  “Iris Soquel. She’s up on one-forty. I want to see her before... before whatever’s next.”

  “Iris Soquel…” Lance Graff said, as though mulling over the name. “Hmm. Hmm.”

  He stood up; a decision had been made. He swung both his arms to one side of the stage: “Iris Soquel, come on out!”

  Turtle lurched to his feet; Scarn grabbed a handful of his pants leg to hold him back.

  Out she came, tall, brunette, thin and muscular. She was perfectly fitted with new clothes—not at all like the sweaty gardener with weeds in her hair that Turtle and Scarn had once met and with whom Turtle had fallen into love.

  But this was, indeed, the same Iris Soquel who had occupied Turtle’s thoughts during the days of his long trek—only now she’d been washed and dressed in stylish clothing.

  In long strides, she crossed the stage to Turtle, wrapped her arms around his back and breathed his name in his ear. Her perfume enclosed him in the aroma of irises.

  Turtle’s heart swelled to its fullest. He loved the world.

  “I’m sorry…” she whispered into his ear. “I’m married.”

  Despite her heartbreaking words, she still hugged him. She leaned back to smile joyously into his face as though she might have just proclaimed her eternal love.

  Lance Graff may have guessed the reason for Turtle’s buckling knees or it may simply have been time to run the documentary.

  The featured hologram began to spin overhead. Turtle and Scarn saw familiar scenes as Lance Graff started his breathy narration of the events of the last ten days of their lives.

  Scarn watched, appalled that their every move had been recorded and edited down to an exciting fifteen minutes. They saw the woman who had recruited Loid and gave him the tracking radio—it was Iris Soquel herself—and then Lance pointed out the “specialness” of the arrangement.

  A fourth chair was placed on stage with them. Turtle sat next to Iris Soquel, feeling stunned. As she watched the video, he only glanced at her when she laughed or touched her lips with her fingertips when she feared for Turtle’s safety.

  Turtle heard nothing and saw nothing but the wedding ring on her beautiful finger. She had turned the stone under her fingers to hide it.

  When the documentary ended, Lance and Iris got Turtle, Scarn, and Loid to the front of the stage, facing into the lights.

  “When next you see our boys,” Lance Graff said grandly, “Mr. Urman will be bringing a little trashlife culture to the staterooms, sure to be fun for all! Misters Tuttle and Scarn will be training to explore the unknowns of the cosmos!”

  An image of the probe lab materialized in midair overhead.

  “They’ll be at their psychonaut workstations and we’ll be following them as they encounter aliens of unknown strangeness. So, till next week...! I am Lance Graff and you’d better believe... this is... Trashliiife Novaaa!”

  Someone made a snapping noise. “Cut!”

  Most of the lights went off. Lance Graff stopped talking and turned his attention to Iris Soquel, offered her his arm, and he walked her away. They moved off-stage and into the surrounding dark.

  Turtle turned to Scarn. He looked deeply troubled.

  “Yes,” Scarn said, “that did just happen.”

  The three little synths in short dresses and glitter-tops came to them and tugged at their arms. They were led off-stage and around to the back. There, a fully-equipped travel floater waited. While they were flown up to the higher levels, they were showered, barbered, and fed again.

  Once delivered to their temporary lodging, they had fittings for uniforms, a safe nights’ sleep... and a list of mandatory appearances.

  Chapter FIVE

  Lights. Excited applause began.

  “Turtle aaand Scarn!” the emcee said and waved them out to him. “Psychonauts of the common people!” Whistles and shrieks added to the growing applause.

  They came in from the side in their form-fitting grays, emblems and rank on their shoulders. This appearance had a live audience, which they saluted, waved, and bowed to, as instructed, before finally sitting across from the host.

  “Today, on PreCast, we’re greeting our new guests, our below-decks boys from the garbage dumps, Turtle and Scarn. They were given a chance by our sponsor, United Tarassis, and here we all are. Isn’t that something? Just how lucky do you consider yourselves? Mr. Scarn?”

  “I’ve put on five pounds instead of dying.”

  “And you, Mr. Tuttle—excuse me, Turtle? How lucky do you feel? It must be marvelous.”

  “I’ve put on nine pounds,” Turtle said, flexing his double-muscled arms. They moved weirdly under his new tunic. “I enjoy having clean food.”

  The host rechecked his cue screen. “About your training as psychonauts—”

  “You need to underst
and,” Scarn said, “we’re just a couple of breathers. Eating is more important to us than to most people, because we’ve done less of it.”

  “Yes, I see. I’m so sorry. Now, about your psychonaut training....”

  The rest of the interview and the two dozen others in the next weeks ran the same way. After fifteen seconds of anything technical, they would be asked to speculate on one of a hundred things they couldn’t possibly know, like: “What if the alien mind you enter is the equivalent of a human psychopath? What’ll you do then?”

  Or, “If the alien you were in was killed and went to its version of heaven, do you think you’d go too?”

  Or, “What if the alien were engaged in its version of sexual intercourse—how would you experience its orgasm?”

  Eventually, they began answering these questions with requests for something to eat. This was met with laughter.

  Despite their status of obvious misfits, they remained popular throughout their training. United Tarassis considered them a good investment even though they admitted they did not entirely understand the import of the more cryptic statements from those who interviewed them. Their very cluelessness seemed to delight the upper-deck viewers.

  Turtle had noticed that Iris Soquel was not spoken of, but news about her was hard to avoid. Glamorous and earthy, she was celebrated as another fabulous find for the networks.

  “How many Iris Soquels,” they wondered, “are tending their mushroom gardens in some pit of offal below us when they could be sitting right here, exciting and amusing our guests and crew? Mm?”

  Her earlier romantic affairs before she met Turtle became well known and her failed marriage was portrayed in the media as traumatic enough to send her into months of isolation. Neither Turtle nor Scarn mentioned these things—although during her early notoriety Turtle was sometimes seen staring at his inactive probe board for long periods without moving.

  One day, during a break in a United Tarassis presentation on ship’s resources, Scarn turned to the morose Turtle. “There’s a formula you need to know. I saw it on the relationship streams.”

  Turtle said nothing, expressed nothing.

  “The formula is this,” Scarn continued. “You take the length of time you were infatuated with whoever, and you know the whoever I mean, then you multiply that by point six-five. That’s if you saw the end-time coming, otherwise you multiply by point eight if you were blindsided. In this case, you were blindsided. Multiply and the formula gives you how long you’ll feel grief. I did the math and guess what? You’re scheduled to get over her tomorrow. Just look.”

  Scarn held aloft his handpad, screen extended, in front of Turtle’s face. There were numbers and equal signs all over it.

  “Tomorrow,” he said. “Put that on your calendar. We’re going to celebrate the end of your dreary obsession at the Neutrino Lounge. I ordered us two synth dates. Yours is named Lonna.”

  Turtle shook his head. “Forget it, Scarn. This.... You’re never.... Look, I know this broken heart thing isn’t something you can understand, so... just let me bleed on my own schedule, okay?”

  “Got it,” Scarn sighed, lowering his handpad. “Bleed away, man. Neutrino Lounge, eight o’clock tomorrow night. Her name is Lonna. Her friend told me she was good at sympathy.”

  “It’s not happening, Scarn.”

  By 9:30 the next night, Lonna had her soft hand slid between Turtle’s thighs and rested her chin on his shoulder. Her breath along his cheek was like emotional acetylene. He wondered if there were artificial pheromones in it, because he was having trouble sitting still and had to keep adjusting his pants.

  When Scarn saw Turtle’s grin go sloppy, he raised his glass for a toast. Lonna and her friend raised theirs as well.

  Turtle was slow, but he finally got there, glass up.

  “History is a foreign country,” Scarn said, “I heard that on the Earther nostalgia channel. So Turtle, that means you need to burn your passport.”

  They raised their glasses again and drank.

  Lonna’s friend spoke in a soft voice. “Yeah. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof. Right?”

  It was weird how synth girls would drink with you, but never seemed to get drunk. They just became even friendlier, responding to the changing moods of the humans around them. With this in mind, Scarn ordered another round.

  “This is working, isn’t it?” Scarn asked Turtle when they were both drunk. “You happy now?”

  Turtle smiled at him with his bloodless lips, but his eyes were still smoldering. “I still think she might have been the one, Scarn. Now, everybody loves her. The upper levels are all at her feet.” He paused and his eyes went dull. “Out of everybody, why would she pick a Turtle?” The music in the club surged, making it hard to hear anything spoken. Scarn put a hand on Turtle’s bulging arm. “You can’t talk like that in front of synths. It sours their attitude. Iris is gone. You should just drop it. Let it go.”

  “I’d rather bleed.”

  Scarn nodded. He knew.

  They both turned their attention to the synth girls then. They were watching the two humans with big eyes.

  Were they recording? Were they lip-reading and transmitting whatever they picked up?

  It was hard to tell, but Turtle and Scarn played it as coolly as they could the rest of the night.

  * * *

  Work was a thing apart from play. The final psychonaut tests were actual explorations into planets that probe units had reported to Earth about a century ago.

  It was all a simulation, of course, but it felt real enough. Both Turtle and Scarn drew the same assignment, but with different animals. Inside the consciousness of barely intelligent reptiles, they were to direct the animal to climb to a high perch where it could see a lumpy alien structure. It looked like a beehive, and its purpose was unknown.

  In the next part of the exercise, against all its native instincts, they forced the reptiles to enter the beehive complex through various openings. Whatever the reptiles saw, they could see, and United Tarassis could see.

  The technology of mentally manipulating aliens was new. A cabal of ingenious scientists among the surviving guest-rated colonists had invented it after the colony’s civil war. They’d been out of their minds with boredom after decades of gliding through nothingness, and everyone aboard needed hope. Desperation is an excellent motivator.

  By controlling creatures on nearby planets, the Tarassis crew hoped to improve their odds of finding a new home at last. Unfortunately, the colonists weren’t easily able to exploit the knowledge. They were traveling in a preordained direction at tremendous speeds, making it difficult to turn and land someplace new. Still, the things the psychonauts learned had been deemed worth knowing. Vids from distant planets made for good entertainment for the restless populace, if nothing else.

  Turtle and Scarn manipulated their host animals to survey the exterior of the beehive thing and got out again. Neither animal had been killed or injured during the exercise—this added graduation points to their scores and moved them closer to the end of their training.

  The graduation gala itself was streamed to every area, public and private, on thirty decks. These were the two upright young men who had once eaten garbage to survive, but they were smart enough to move up with the brightest of the youth born to the guests and crew. It was never mentioned that they’d both been born on the upper-decks and then thrown out. That didn’t fit the narrative.

  In any case, they were now full-fledged psychonauts.

  Iris Soquel waltzed through the graduation party with an unfamiliar man clamped onto her arm. Who was this guy? A boyfriend or a prison guard? Turtle wasn’t sure.

  She briefly shook Scarn’s hand and air-kissed Turtle on both cheeks.

  “Ad astra,” she toasted them, as she had been coached to do—and she was gone.

  Through the rest of the evening, music played, food was served, and even though Scarn was seen smiling, Turtle could only be seen glowering at the floor. On
his arm he had the radiant Lonna in her lavender dress, and nestled deep in her cleavage she wore an immense orchid that looked like a bird. Many commented on it.

  “Turtle?” Scarn said to his friend in a moment alone together. “Isn’t this something? We’re not breathers anymore.” Scarn was nodding yes in time with the music, but Turtle wasn’t in the mood. His eyes continued to burn into the deck at his feet.

  “Turtle—” Scarn repeated, trying again. Then, he lowered his voice. “Seriously, you’ve got to forget about that girl. For the last few days, I’ve stopped wondering what kind of shit’s going to hit the fan next. How we’re going to be screwed out of everything. I don’t think it’s going to happen now. Please don’t fuck this up.”

  Turtle lifted his big head at last. “Sorry. I just keep thinking she coulda been the one, and now—.”

  “Jesus… lighten up, Turtle. If she was the one, she wouldn’t be parading other men in front of you, would she?”

  Lonna watched them both with her big, artificial eyes. Those eyes were tank-grown, the expensive kind. You could tell.

  Turtle forced himself to smile down at her.

  “Sorry,” he repeated. “I felt ungrounded for a moment.”

  He glanced at Scarn who was gazing across the crowd, still nodding Yes in time with the music.

  Turtle looked directly down at Lonna again.

  “But I feel normal now,” he lied.

  Chapter SIX

  Two days later, the slip-space lift brought them to United Tarassis Probe Lab Alpha. It was a pod on the surface of Tarassis, a tiny bump on a log of stone.

  They were told that as freshmen psychonauts they would be on the front lines of human expansion across the galaxy.

  The slip-space lift emptied them into the probe lab receiving lounge that was purposely designed to awe the newcomers. Every exterior wall was transparent cryoplast, and against the blackest void, an untwinkling smear of stars, billions of stars, curved around the glowing hub of the galaxy.