by Joe Haldeman
The ship, Shadow, was parked in the high-security area, a fenced-in gravel field with servomech perimeter guards. The fence didn’t have much practical value in a conventional way, since in a thirtieth of a gee, anyone could hop over it. But anyone who tried would land in several places at once.
There was also an individual human guard living inside Shadow, a young man who was ecstatic at being able to take his accumulated wages on a misguided tour of Tsiolkovski. He traded places with Dallas and the Barons when they came out in the mating crawler, and took it back to Big Dick’s central tower.
“It’s not much, but it’s home,” Bill said.
“It’ll do the trick,” Dallas said. He knew too many wealthy people to be surprised at the shabbiness of the ship’s interior. Some millionaires become indifferent to luxury; some actively reject comfort and style in a reverse, or perverse, display of status.
Doris was rational about it: “We only live in it for a couple of months a decade. I’d feel silly prettying it up, especially after we spent so much to stealth it. Like gilding gold.”
Bill was checking the pantry. “Damn that walking appetite! We’ll have to restock before Dallas takes it in.”
“We should tighten up our contract with the boy,” Doris said. “Three meals a day, thus and so.”
“If you wouldn’t mind mating with my ship up in the SORF, I can offload meals from it.”
“Good idea,” Bill said. “The markup on Tsiolkovski is murderous.”
There were two acceleration couches forward. Bill and Doris climbed up and strapped themselves in and told Dallas to lie down on the aft bulkhead. “We’ll do one gee max,” Bill said. “Plenty to get us off this pebble.” He typed in a few lines; evidently his ship’s AI was not the garrulous kind. “Ready?”
“Fire away,” Dallas said.
He called the control tower and got clearance—“Go anywhere as long as it’s up”—and then typed one character. Gravity came on in a slow surge.
Odds and ends clattered around in the pantry and galley. “He never cleans up, either,” Doris said. “I’ll give him a good talking-to.”
They accelerated for about a minute, long enough for Dallas to feel some relief when it stopped. “Come on up,” Bill said. “Show you how to fly it.”
Dallas floated forward and hovered next to Bill. He typed AUTHORIZE and told Dallas to put his thumb on the print pad. He did and the machine asked back BY WHOM?, and Bill put his thumb there. OKAY.
“It’s pretty smart. Once authorized, an imbecile could take it anywhere within its range. Watch this.” He typed in
GO IN A RANDOM DIRECTION FOR TWO MINUTES, THEN TURN ON STEALTH AND TAKE US TO LUANNE DUNCAN’S ASTEROID IN THE SHORTEST TIME POSSIBLE WITH ACCELERATIONS NOT TO EXCEED ONE GEE FOR TEN MINUTES EACH WAY.
It responded with SECRET WORD?
“Luanne’s code. Turn around, please, Dallas.” He typed in an eight-letter word. “Okay.” The screen said HIT ANY KEY. “Better get settled again.”
Dallas rolled left, then right, as the ship yawed, then it accelerated briefly. After two minutes, it pitched and yawed again, and then blasted for exactly ten minutes. He went forward again and the screen was blank except for the top line: STEALTH … TIME TO DECELERATION 87 MIN 23 SEC, which was counting down.
“What happens if the computer breaks down?” Dallas asked.
“It won’t,” Doris said. “We’ve used it for twenty years with no problems.”
“No moving parts,” Bill said.
“Ours went loony on the way out. Gave us a hell of a time.”
“Guess it could happen,” Bill said. “You’d have to destealth and call Mayday.” He laughed. “Just tell them you’re Dallas Barr; you’ll get plenty of help.”
For the next hour and a half, the three of them prowled around the ship, making sure Dallas knew what to do in case this or that came up. They had to consult the manual for most of the emergency procedures, since the worst that had ever happened to them was an ullage problem in the drinking-water tanks that made the faucets hiss and spit in microgravity.
Luanne Duncan was a pleasantly batty Scotswoman who baked scones and made “proper tea” for them, no easy trick on an asteroid barely a kilometer wide. It would take an hour for a dropped sugar cube to hit the ground.
Dallas let the Barons visit while he unloaded the silver. It was a tedious process since he had to use an EVA chair in the virtual absence of gravity: fill your lap up with rocks, then give it a little burst to move out of the hold, wait two seconds, then a counterbalancing burst, then a slow rotation; when you reach 180 degrees, gently throw the rocks downward; come back around, stop the rotation, small burst to go back to the hold. That was the pattern when everything went perfectly, which happened about two trips out of a hundred.
The bright chunks of silver were rather conspicuous against the dark magnetic hoarfrost of iron-nickel particles that clung to the asteroid’s surface like fur. Dallas draped the black Kevlar blanket over the pile, battened down the hatches, and collected his hosts.
Bill rode the floor on the way back while Dallas “piloted,” though piloting was nothing more than being careful in explaining to the spaceship what you wanted it to do.
GO BACK TOWARD CERES, ACCELERATION NOT TO EXCEED ONE GEE, MATCH ORBIT WITH SORF, UNSTEALTH 500 KILOMETERS FROM SORF.
If the stealthing was still turned on too near the Synchronous Orbit Repair Facility or any other place with guidance and communication equipment, it could interfere in dozens of frequencies. Not especially stealthy at close range.
Dallas put the Barons on the shuttle along with all of the expensive leftover wine from Fireball. It would be a long month back to Earth, he said, but he wanted to arrive sober and mean.
He didn’t know what a long month was.
Maria
We kept rotating and bouncing off the walls. Once each six months or so I would come close enough to the console to read the numbers, which I assumed were estimated time to deceleration. That gave me an objective measure of the time stretch: it took about a minute for each tenth-of-a-second number to change, so we were slowed by a factor of about six hundred. It took me several rotations to figure that out; arithmetic was just plain not there for me; I had to go through a tortuous chain of logical inference to come up with that number. We’d gone halfway to Earth this second time I’d been zombied; two weeks divided by six hundred comes to what? Or was it times six hundred, or plus or minus, or to the six-hundredth power? I knew the words but couldn’t make them produce any new numbers.
It was frustrating, but only frustrating. I got through the last long wait and I would get through this one.
It occurred to me that given as much time as I had, perhaps I could reinvent arithmetic. I could remember from college that a fellow Italian had done that, making up arithmetic from scratch, and I could even remember that his name sounded like a musical instrument in English—and even how the room smelled the day we learned about him—and that the girl in front of me was named Helena and she’d let her boyfriend touch her breasts in the dark, but not look at them—and that the boyfriend was the matricola Paco, who was small but handsome and wore bluejeans that were so tight he seemed to walk on his toes, and you could see enough to tell he wasn’t circumcised—but for the life of me I couldn’t remember what that man’s name was or how he reinvented arithmetic, or why, actually. Was his arithmetic better than the kind we learned in school? Did it come up with the same numbers? It seemed to me that it would have to, though I wasn’t sure why.
This time around I was more comfortable in my ignorance, my stupidity, knowing that it was temporary. Some circuits were disconnected, but the brain, or the mind, probably knew what it was doing. If all of your cognition worked the way it normally did, you might find a couple of decades of deaf-and-dumb-and-paralyzed confinement rather terrifying.
For about a couple of days, the little man and I converged on each other, coming together in the middle of the cabin, close to w
here we were when this started. I could see his head bump my knee, but couldn’t feel it.
He looks very strange, as I must. But at least my mouth isn’t open. His eyes are wide and his mouth is stretched open as if in a voiceless scream. Not smart. Losing water fast, mouth drying out.
For the brief time I was out of this state, I wasn’t able to think about it enough. Integrate the experience into my life, as they say. Figure out what’s good and bad about it. In a way it’s like being handed an extra twenty years, free. Two twenties for me. Will that make me older than Dallas?
It does something to your relationship with time, other than just slowing it down. Afterwards. The intensity of memory, like erasing the time between then and now.
More than that. I “remembered” Dallas’s Antarctica retreat as if I had been there myself.
It’s a wonder to me that the people like Claudia Fine, constantly taking different drugs to alter their perception of reality, don’t take this one for their peculiar pleasure. It’s not new; someone must have taken it for fun by now.
Maybe some ephemerals do take it this way, as a kind of artificial immortality. Of course it would be different with an ephemeral; most drugs were. Maybe it would drive you mad.
It might not mix with other drugs, either. Twenty years of grief and you would be tearing your eyes out. Twenty years being drunk would be no pleasure. And it might be maddening to a person like Claudia, not being able to do anything, month after month.
As if we weren’t all locked up in the head anyhow.
Get me to earth as soon as possible bought Dallas almost an hour of 3.8 gees. The machine pointed out that if it were to take him literally, it could accelerate at top thrust until it ran out of fuel, which would be forty-two minutes at about eight gees. That would probably kill Dallas, and his corpse would fly by Earth at about two hundred kilometers per second. The machine assumed he would rather slow down and actually land on Earth and be alive at the time. It also left a reserve of fuel for mid-course maneuvering. WOULD YOU RATHER ARRIVE DEAD IN 18.2 DAYS OR ALIVE IN 31?
Dallas was not sure whether the machine knew what a rhetorical question was, so he answered it straight.
He read a book a day, as much to calm himself as anything, and played a lot of chess with Eric, and they hashed over plans. Eric suggested that they land in Anchorage, the only spaceport in anarchistic Alaska, destealthing as soon as they were out of Pacifica airspace. Dallas agreed that that was better than his own nonplan, which was to land it in the middle of the most desolate place he could find. Some government would surely confiscate the ship, and they wouldn’t be able to get away fast. In Anchorage they could just bond it for either Dallas or the Barons to pick up later. Then begin Step Two.
The problem was figuring out what Step Two was going to be.
Dallas
Even if I knew where Briskin was, it wouldn’t be smart to charge in on him, confront him directly, give-me-back-my-woman-or-else. What woman? Or else what, loony? I had to assume he’d be ready for me.
The revised, refined plan was to arrange a local “media event,” buying time on a number of Alaskan stations, presenting my story in a venue that Briskin presumably would not be able to control. Even assuming that the foundation dominated the mainstream stateside newsnet—and so could edit anything I said or did before it went out to the consumers—they couldn’t control all the maverick little Klondike stations. That was one reason they were popular in California and the West; independent from network control, their programming was wildly uneven but not often dull.
So I could reach a couple of million people for a few minutes. That was enough to ensure that Briskin couldn’t air his own version of my little homecoming speech, later.
Money was going to be a problem. I had a gold bar worth maybe a quarter of a million dollars, American. (Alaska prints its own bills and mints coins, but its currency is strictly tied to the American economy.) I’d need a platoon of bodyguards, all of them professional enough to disregard the million-dollar price on my head, once they found out who they were in fact protecting. Eric suggested that I hire people from the actual States, since they at least had to belong to a union.
Then I had to buy a few minutes of live airtime, and not in a cheap, unwatched period. That would cost ten times as much as the guards. And there had to be some left over, since after the broadcast I would want to either jump into a hole and pull the hole in after me, watching the fireworks from safety, or else make an immediate and public move toward Briskin. It would depend on his reaction.
I’ve been reading about paranoia, trying to understand, to second-guess, the man. Something inside me fights the approach, though. The psychologists write about delusional fixity and displacement of responsibility, psychotic decompensation, and so forth. But they don’t mention evil. I have to believe that his actions are evil. It’s absurd to call something a medical problem when its symptoms are a desire for world domination and the casual employment, enjoyment, of homicide.
With Eric’s help I searched my recollections of the two contacts with Briskin over and over. One advantage of being a machine is that you don’t get bored. I was going out of my skull saying the same things repeatedly, in slightly different ways. But it was potentially invaluable, especially if we could pin down something Briskin said that might give us a clue to the actual size of the Steering Committee. Or the thing’s actual existence: it had belatedly occurred to me that his might be a committee of one. The killers and the kidnapper were probably just hirelings, no matter how big the outfit was. Had he actually done anything that couldn’t have been done alone, given enough money and madness?
He’d said there were about a hundred members, with another fifty being considered for the privilege. But he didn’t mention any names; didn’t really provide any details. Maybe it was all fantasy, part of what a psychologist would call his delusional system, a made-up family. Eric pointed out, though, that actually paranoid people are observed to do exactly the opposite as the illness progresses: they organize all the people who are out to get them into a “paranoid pseudocommunity” united for the sole purpose of harming them.
Which, he noted, was exactly what I would sound like, telling the world about this sinister underground that had made attempts on my life all over the Earth and as far out as Novysibirsk. I had no more objective evidence for my version of it than Briskin would have for his. All you could say for sure was that an unusual amount of homicide had crystallized around me.
For a moment the universe slipped on its axis and I was the actual insane one, killing people left and right and constructing a fantastic elaborate delusional system to blame my crimes on an innocent person. From this viewpoint, inside my own delusions, would I ever be able to tell the difference?
At least I did have news stories to verify my recollections. It was unlikely that a professional killer could have wandered into my bathroom by mistake. Coincidentally hired by the Stileman Foundation, according to its spokesman, Charles Briskin.
Shadow was the roomiest spaceship I’d ever traveled in. The hold that would normally be full of silver on the return trip was rigged out as an interesting gym. Besides the Stiktite exercising treadmill that almost all small ships had, so you wouldn’t be too tired out when you returned to Earth’s gravity, there were trampolines mounted on the forward and aft walls. Tumbling in three dimensions was more interesting than endless miles of rip, rip, rip on the treadmill, and it let me work off the anxiety about Maria and the hostility that I was brewing up toward Briskin.
One of us, at least, was going to be sane when I confronted him.
Maria
I spent about a year looking forward to a slow and agonizing, if technically painless, death. I assumed that when the clock ran down to all zeros, the ship would rotate 180 degrees and begin deceleration. The little man and I would descend gracefully to the aft bulkhead and be crushed and smothered by our own body weight, at four to six lazy gees. If there was no reason, such as delicate
or loose cargo, to decelerate slowly, you strapped in and did it quickly, to save fuel. We were both delicate and loose, but I didn’t expect the ship to divine that.
It would be like falling off a roof onto the sidewalk and then having a grand piano lowered onto you.
A red light came on when the clock read 00:10:00.00; ten-minute warning. For a hundred hours I watched it blink stroboscopically, off and on for twenty seconds at a time. A buzzer growled. Then the ship rotated, the little man and I both slid over to the port side. I struck facefirst, and for a long minute heard the cartilage in my nose crackle. When a few days went by with no sign of blood, I decided it hadn’t broken.
I couldn’t see the clock, but supposed it was just as well. Neither could I calculate how long it would take us to fall. Would we know when it started? Probably not.
I slept as much as possible. Perhaps I would have the luck to be asleep when acceleration began, and drop headfirst, unknowing, to the release of a crushed skull or broken neck.
Awake, I tried to find the quiet place where I had been so many decades ago, ready to let myself die and join God. It wasn’t there anymore, no more than he was. Neither, for that matter, was the rage that I’d felt as a young girl, the heretical rage at the insult of death that overwhelmed me after the earthquake had taken everybody but Madre, the rage that the sisters cured with loving patience. What I felt was almost petty, like being annoyed: yes, I’m going to die someday, and it will be about as profound as turning off a light switch, or the Universe, but I would rather take a stab at a thousand years or so before I run out of brain cells or luck. If we were bargaining over this thing, I would grudgingly take death now, but just as soon not have it happen in slow motion, an hour-by-hour catalog of bones snapping, muscles tearing, and organs rupturing until the lights faded out. But after the lights went out there would be no memory, nothing, so as Dallas was occasionally moved to say, fuck it, the hell with it, fuck it the hell with it fuck it the hell with it fuck it hell fuck hell fuck … what’s that smell?