Fictions

by Nancy Kress

  He sighed as the needle came and went, then nodded. “How long?”

  Thousands of words of medical data flew past the eye of Laura’s mind. “Eighteen hours to kill the swelling. Color should be gone in forty-eight. I hope we can afford another yoyo; the spare wasn’t new when we bought it and—”

  “Nix. Rent’s up, food’s up—we get a new yoyo and we’d default on your soul. Gimme a couple months. We’ll get a new one from that bastard Coyne even if I have to beat it out of his hide.”

  “Maybe we should stay away from the Beer Tube for a few days.”

  “He’ll be laughing behind his ugly face.”

  “Let him laugh. Borovsky—”

  “Don’t say it.” He turned to her and smiled. The smile was made lopsided by the swelling in his cheek, and even when whole it was not a smile to charm women—too flat, too suspicious, too much of the smile of an outsider more used to contempt than to love. But Laura was not a woman of flesh. This smile was Borovsky’s. It was enough.

  “Let me run the balalaika,” Laura said. The image came to her mind instantly: Borovsky as he looked while listening to the tape of his father playing the ancient balalaika. The tape was all he had brought up from the crumbling slum that was Deep West London. The sad, hollow music made his face change—change from underneath, Laura thought.

  At those times his features lost some of their hardness; his eyes ceased their constant nervous scanning back and forth. His mouth—no, his mouth did not smile, but in the small parting of his lips it seemed to find peace. If he would just listen—now—to the balalaika . . .

  “Let me run the balalaika!”

  “And get me canned? No, dushenka. We’ll be late to the grind. Damn. That spare better be okay.” He turned from the sink and tapped a command on the lock console. The spare yoyo’s condition read out in a few crisp words. Not the best, but the battery was a retread, and old at that.

  “The balalaika—”

  “Come on, Laura. Shit, we’re late already. Move it.”

  Laura put down her hand and deliberately began undogging her plates.

  George Eastman Nexus had begun as a single cylinder, rotating to simulate standard Earth gravity. From the inner surface, towers and delicately suspended trees of modular office clusters grew toward the center. In those offices the engineers and managers of a thousand companies guided an industry worth six trillion dollars in gold annually.

  George Eastman grew outward as well. Downward from Earth-Zero swelled the industrial levels. Some industries preferred the heavier gravity; many chemical processes actually worked more efficiently under higher swing.

  For other industries the heaviness was less necessary, but materials were cheap ever since the asteroid Calliope had been towed into orbit around the moon for the steerable mirrors to mine.

  It was less than three klicks from their pod to the advancing edge of E Minus Seven. Its monocrystal rings girdling Eastman Nexus had been in place for ten months. At the forefront of construction the longitudinal beams and outer-deck plates were being welded into position amid showers of sparks. Behind the edge the power conduits and other piping were being laid, and farther still, the floor plates, one meter square and removable, were being bolted down. Laura gripped the yoyo’s cable tightly as they rode, and felt through her fingers the sizzle of old motors in its gantry above her helmet.

  Two of the welders paused long enough to let Borovsky pass between them, unharmed by the molten droplets. Borovsky waved clear, and the yoyo purred on to the point where the floor plates began. He parked it and punched in with the shift boss. Docked nine minutes—he shrugged, and Laura tallied the beers he would have to forgo to make it up. Borovsky’s partner, Andre Wolf Lair, thumped his shoulder as Borovsky yanked his card from the clock. Borovsky grunted in greeting and returned a playful poke to the Amerind’s midsection. Coyne’s lamp on the clock was green. Borovsky clenched his jaw and glanced toward the supply dump. Coyne was loading diamond cutting wheels into his Enhanced Leverage Manipulator.

  Coyne looked up. Borovsky’s personal microwave channel triggered, and a single scornful, whispered word came across over Coyne’s chuckle: “phobe

  Laura felt her man’s pulse race. Quickly she squeezed his thigh and whispered in his ear, “He can’t even walk the Low Steel for a living. All he does is ride in that big yellow egg. You’re twice the man he ever will be.”

  “I’ll kill him,” Borovsky muttered. “Damn, I’ll feed him to the stars.”

  George Eastman Nexus turned twelve times over the course of a shift. Borovsky and Andre Wolf Lair guided the longitudinal steel beams into position ahead of the edge, tacked them, and left them for the welders. Wolf Lair was taller than Borovsky, larger than Coyne. Among the men who walked the Low Steel he was a giant, with impeccable balance and a gentle, deep voice. His suit was much older than Laura, with little skill in its E layer for speech and reasoning, and no F layer at all. The suit had no name and spoke, when it had to, in Wolf Lair’s own voice. Laura sensed that Wolf Lair did not like intelligent machines, and she remained silent while he and Borovsky worked.

  When the shift was half over, Coyne’s ELM rumbled by on its way to the supply dump. As it passed, one of its two smaller arms twisted it four fingers into a crude approximation of an ancient gesture of insult. Borovsky quickly returned the gesture and looked the other way.

  Wolf Lair looked after the egg-shaped machine until it moved out of sight. “Coyne is a believer, Mik. I think he hates you for the spirt you wear.”

  Borovsky hoisted one end of the next beam. “Pah. He believes in his own mouth.”

  “But I have seen him walk three levels up to the Catholic mass. Catholics fear all spirits. Hate is a good mask for the things you fear.”

  “Laura’s no spirit. Hell, she’s a computer.” Borovsky pushed against the end of the beam. Laura pushed with him. The beam crept into position in line with the tiny red spots of light produced by the laser-alignment network.

  “Maybe computer is the new word for spirit. Maybe it is a spirit for nonbelievers. I heard you talk about the loan you got two years ago. You said you bought a soul for your space suit.”

  Wolf Lair leaned forward and helped Borovsky move the beam to its final position. Together they tacked it down with dollops of adhesive after checking it against all fifty alignment spots. Borovsky leaned back against a pillar and stared down at the stars creeping past beneath his feet.

  “Shit, I was lonely. You can go home to Leah and your little ones twice a year. They send you letters and presents, and you send them money. This up here is all the home I got, and nobody in it but me. Ain’t no woman anywhere would live here and get smashed under this much swing. You Indians got it good. Your women wait for you in their mountains. In the city no woman remembers your name ten minutes after you screw her. I thought about it a long time. All I did was buy something that would be on my side no matter what, just something that sounded like a woman.” Laura pinched him hard in a very sensitve place. “But it turned out to be a woman that was worth something.”

  “I hear you, Mik. You say it well. I was twenty when I signed up for space. My grandfather took me aside and said, ‘Wolf Lair, do not give over your heart to machinery. Machines are to use and put away when day is gone. Only living things are worth the true heart of a man.’ He is dead some years, but I will never forget him. You know that lesson as well, I think. You had nothing worth your true heart; so you bought a spirit. The spirit you bought is nothing so simple as a loyal dog, or even a dead man’s restless ghost. I know it comforts you and will never disobey you, but forgive me if I fear it. Forgive Coyne if he fears it. I could never understand or trust a spirit that lived in a machine.”

  Wolf Lair’s words disturbed Laura. He was not given to speeches and was not one to admit his heart’s fears and feelings. She waited to hear what Borovsky would answer, but he said nothing. The sun passed under their feet five more times, and the two men worked in silence.

 
; For three days Borovsky avoided the Beer Tube. At shift’s end he slept, sleeping as much as fourteen hours at once. Laura sampled his blood and read his vital signs daily, and she knew that his body was repairing the damage Coyne had done it and the further damage Borovsky was doing by continuing to work without a break for healing. Once, watching him as he slept, she played the balalaika tape for herself alone, but only once. Other times she restlessly walked the Low Steel empty, thinking. She thought about Coyne, and about Wolf Lair, and about herself.

  She thought about souls.

  Standing on a naked monocrystal beam above the bottomless void, she looked down and saw Rigel creeping past. The spectroscope on her instrument-blistered helmet studied it, sent data streaming from her A sensory layer inward. Stored data raced outward from her D memory layer to meet it. Information met, intersected, compared, cross-referenced in a process that, it seemed to Laura, was both methodical and more than methodical. It found more in the rainbow-layered image of a star than the star had to offer. But no—the handling of data was not her soul.

  The pleasure, then, in that handling. Had the pleasure in her own process been there before Borovsky had bought her a soul? No, of course not. Laura had not been there not as she herself—only a good Rabinowicz Mark IX Manplifier suit with a woman’s pleasant voice. Not as the watcher of her own mind, the tender holder of Borovsky’s body, the tireless worker who longed to follow the Low Steel out to the stars and farther. Still these things were not her soul. They were things that, as Wolf Lair had said, could be put away when day was done and the work was done—all but Borovsky. Not for a moment could she lay down her guardianship and loyalty. So she had been made, and she would not want to be an angstrom different. She loved Borovsky beyond either choice or the desire for choice. But Borovsky was not her soul.

  Raising her empty arms, Laura stretched them out toward Rigel. It was a gesture she had seen made only once—by Wolf Lair, the man who feared her as a spirit within a machine. Just like this had the Amerind stood: arms outstretched so, body taut and arched so, hands’ palms open to the devouring sun crawling toward and below him. With Borovsky inside her Laura had stopped dead on a beam and stared. Wolf Lair had not turned toward them, had not sensed their footsteps through the steel on which he stood. He had not, in fact, seen Laura at all, but in that one moment Laura had seen a vividness, a connection between him and her and the sun and Borovsky and the beam beneath her, forged of iron atoms that were mostly empty space.

  “Hollow woman!” Coyne had mocked once. “One-hundred-percent artificial broad, nothing organic added,” he had read, squinting, from a label he imagined on her ventral plates, odd that he would mock her for what she was proud to be, and doubly odd that she felt too ashamed to retort that nothing could persuade her to trade polished, powerful hydraulic limbs for the fragile mushiness of human flesh. Such weakness was not to be envied. But worse than what human beings could not do was the thing they could do and did not, the thing she had seen in the tensile exultation of Wolf Lair’s body on a steel beam hung above the stars.

  It was a thing for which Laura had no name but only a sense of patterns among half-realized notions of what it might be like to be human. The pattern was greater than merely being human; it was a transcendence of the human. It was a laying of hands upon the universe with such firmness of grasp that the universe took a bit of the being’s shape, individual and unrepeatable, because exactly that intensity and originally of consciousness had not existed in exactly that way before, and would not do so again. Becoming unrepeatably and wholly oneself and, thus, everything else—that, Laura decided, was her soul. Becoming, and knowing it.

  Was that what Wolf Lair had meant by the spirit of living things? But then why had Laura not seen it among the humans themselves before that glimpse of intense stillness in the outstretched body of Wolf Lair? No, the steel walkers who had inherited unbought souls without cost seemed unwilling to embrace anything larger than a double hamburger. Their souls were asleep; though they ate, drank, slept, worked, and fought, their souls were in none of it. Why, even Borovsky—No. The thought froze and vanished. Borovsky, troubled, flawed creature that he was, had nevertheless caused her soul to be. He created her and redeemed her by placing himself in financial chains. Laura turned from her contemplation of Rigel to her pleasure in remembering certain ancient myths (but there had been no myths, nor pleasure in them, before Borovsky had bought her soul) to the joy of contemplating Borovsky himself. Creator. Redeemer. However limited his other horizons, he had reached beyond himself as far as that.

  Cherishing the thought at the center of her crystalline consciousness, Laura hurried back to where Borovsky was.

  An argument was underway in the Beer Tube when Borovsky entered three days later. Coyne was proclaiming that E Minus Seven would be the last layer, to be built around George Eastman Nexus. Borovsky tossed back Laura’s helmet on its hinges.

  “Damn right. How could the Combine possibly build a level that Johnny Coyne couldn’t stand up to?” His bulldog face remained expressionless as he undogged Laura’s plates, but the other men in the automated tavern laughed.

  Coyne glowered. “When they run out of men like me to build it, who will they get to do the work?”

  Andre Wolf Lair was sitting at one of the black plastic benches near the robot bar at the far end. He took a long draft from his carved wooden stein, wiped the foam from his lips, and laughed deeply. “When they run out of men like you they will use real men, and we will work twice as fast.” Coyne opened his mouth. Wolf Lair leaned toward Coyne, who saw the warning in the giant’s eyes, and looked away.

  In his blue, working longjohns, Borovsky stepped free of Laura. She buttoned up and leaned against the wall among several other suits, some like her, others were mere rubber. Laura watched Borovsky key up a beer into a disposable stein at the bar and walk back toward Wolf Lair.

  “Let them build out to E Minus Fifteen,” Borovsky said, and took a mouthful of foam. “I will stand after the last man has started to crawl.”

  “After two hours here I doubt any of us could stand in free fall,” said another man. General laughter followed, to Laura’s relief. Among the Beer Tube’s customers tonight was a shift boss, Simon Weinblatt, who was sitting with several of Borovsky’s co-workers and trading jokes with them. The man was of only average height and build and seemed slight beside Borovsky and Wolf Lair, like all shift bosses, Weinblatt had a soft-spoken, gentle demeanor and a keen understanding of human motivation. When tensions flared, shift bosses had a way of showing up, quieting the situation, and making forty rough, quarrelsome laborers cooperate and produce. Their methods could be as rough as those of the laborers. Every man there had heard tales of drunken steelworkers who had defied shift bosses and found that their jobs evaporated the following morning. And there was another story, hundredthhand at least, of a man who had traded angry words with a shift boss and shoved him to the floor—only to awaken in a prison hospital bed with both arms gone past the elbows.

  Laura saw that Weinblatt had been inconspicuously watching Borovsky and Coyne. When Borovsky went back to the bar for a second beer, Weinblatt placed a hand on his elbow. Borovsky bent down to listen; the man spoke quietly. “You have an accident at work?” Weinblatt pointed to his own cheek. Borovsky’s eyebrows rose, and Laura thought he grew a little pale. There was still some slight discoloration from the bruise that had covered half his face.

  “Fell outta bed. No big deal.”

  Coyne squeezed past on his way to the bar for yet another beer. Laura longed to get Borovsky back within her and away from there.

  Even with a raucous album playing in the background, Coyne appeared to have heard the exchange.

  He laughed belligerently and poked Borovsky with his index finger.

  “Fell outta bed, huh? Dreaming about one of those Rooski women, I guess. All muscle and three tits; a pair and a spare!” Coyne doubled over laughing. Borovsky stiffened but remained silent.

  We
inblatt did not seem bothered by the banter. Through a grin he rejoined: “At least he remembers to dream about women. After ten beers I’ll bet you spend all night making love to your handling machine.”

  Coyne shrugged as his stein filled. “There ain’t no words for the kind of women I dream about.”

  From the next table another man joined in: “That’s because the Combine ain’t started making ’em yet!”

  Coyne belched loudly. He shook his head and made his way to the rear of the tavern, where a dozen space suits stood or hung near the lock. He stood in front of Laura and addressed the crowd with a full stein in his hand.

  “Ha! The expert on mech-anical women is right here among us! Our good friend Mik-Hayal Borovsky and his patented hollow women! She cooks, she cleans, she cheats at cards, she tells dirty jokes. What more could a man want?” Borovsky’s face tightened.

  “I think that ought to be your last beer, Johnny,” Weinblatt said pleasantly.

  Coyne ignored him. “What more, huh? Tits maybe?” He turned and made pinching motions across Laura’s ventral plates. “Kind of hard to get hold of, huh? Well, Mik’s got lots of imagination.”

  “You’re making an ass of yourself, Johnny,” Weinblatt said. The grin was gone.

  “No tits. Well, how about a twat? Jesus, guys, she’s all twat! Lookithat!” Coyne grabbed Laura by the rim of her helmet gasket and tipped it forward, pointing with an index finger to the hollowness inside. “A guy could crawl in there and get lost, which is about as close as Mik’s ever gonna get to being inside a woman!” Coyne released Laura and faced the crowd again. Borovsky spat on the floor. Too much tension, Laura thought; she could picture Borovsky bashing Coyne’s head flat against the floor. As soon as Coyne turned away, she brought her right hand up and thumbed her nonexistent nose at him.

  The room exploded with laughter. Coyne whirled around in time to see Laura’s arm snap back to her side.

  “Well, so she wants to be one of the boys. Hey, babe, you can’t have fun at the Beer Tube without putting away some yourself. Here, I keyed for this one, but it’s all yours.” He lifted his stein over Laura’s helmet gasket as though to empty the liquid into her hollowness.