Fictions

by Nancy Kress

  Borovsky’s hand squeezed.

  Horror-struck, Laura felt her hand squeeze.

  Coyne tore at the hand around his neck, hammered his fists against the smooth cylinders and the silver pistons that were slowly forcing Laura’s fingers together. His mouth twisted, tongue pushing to one side, struggling to let his throat breathe. Laura felt his frantic heartbeat hammering in the veins of his neck. And in Coyne’s eyes, under the terror and rage, Laura saw something else: a soul slipping away. A trapped and mean soul, but real—as real as the soul she had seen in the eyes of the woman trapped on the bed. A soul that in a few more heartbeats would be gone.

  Because of her.

  “No!” she cried in Borovsky’s ears. “Stop this! You’re killing him!”

  “Goddamned right! Squeeze!” Borovsky grunted.

  Borovsky squeezed. Laura squeezed. Frantically Laura raced through her options. Borovsky was mad, insane—she could drug him. She had tranqulizers enough to make him sleep in seconds. Tiny valves opened in the medpack on her hip, opiates pulsed down a tube toward the needles in their sheaths behind his buttocks. The needle—she could plunge it home, the power was hers.

  The command formed, and with it appeared something new:

  A cloud, fiery red, rising above the F layer she called her soul. It hovered, an imagic representation of what would happen if she disobeyed Borovsky’s command to squeeze. Driven by terror and love, she asked herself one question: What will happen to Borovsky if he kills? But not another: What will happen to Laura if she kills? Now, all at once, she knew. The consequence was inescapable, built into the bright layers of her mind and the spiderweb paths between them: She would lose her soul. The ravening red cloud would bum it out of her. She must obey Borovsky’s command to squeeze or her soul would be destroyed. She must not kill or her soul would be destroyed.

  She was going to become the soulless death tool she had seen in Coyne’s eyes.

  A grim thought appeared out of nowhere: Men are judged by their maker at the moment of their death. I am judged by the maker every moment that I live.

  Coyne’s pulse weakened. His pulse! Wait! Laura sent fluid into the insulating layers between Borovsky’s fingers and the outermost skin. Slowly—but there was so little time—she built up a layer of fluid that kept Borovsky’s fingers from truly contacting the outer layer of tough synthetic. While the fluid flowed into the skin of her fingers, she set her contractile layers to pulsing in her hand, matching the rhythm of Coyne’s laboring heart. In seconds the illusion was complete, and Borovsky, rage maddened as he was, had not noticed. The pulse he felt was wholly in Laura’s skin. Laura gradually slowed the pulse, made it weaker, until it could barely be felt. Finally it stopped.

  “No pulse,” she said. “He’s dead.”

  Borovsky swore and released his hand. Coyne, unconscious, fell in a heap, facedown. Borovsky backed away from the man, fell back against the opposite wall of the tunnel.

  “Jesus. Jesus.”

  Laura’s soul began assembling itself again, gathering back into the haven of her innermost crystalline layer.

  It was hers again—she had not killed; she had not disobeyed. But now there was a dirtiness to her soul that she felt might never be cleared away.

  Borovsky, trembling, backed away from Coyne for several steps before breaking and running toward the vertical duct from which they had come.

  Tied up in a handkerchief on his waterbed lay two kilos of gold ingots. Borovsky stared at them. He was wearing his old rubber suit inside out. He had shaved his head and depilated the stubble. Laura could stand his behavior no longer.

  “Talk to me, dammit!”

  “What’s to say? They catch me, they’ll kill me. Nothing you can do.”

  “So where can you run to?”

  “Earth. London. I never shoulda left. Only crazy men live up here.”

  Earth. Laura was appalled. But still, Earth would be far from George Eastman Nexus. Far from this boxed-in deadliness. Borovsky would be there; she could learn to live there, too. She undogged her top plates before Borovsky looked at her sharply.

  “Forget it. Me I can maybe bribe through customs and sneak down. You, no chance.”

  “You can’t leave me!”

  “Like hell.”

  “But I love you!”

  “Would you love me better dead? Dushenka, here you can die for bumping a guy on the head and taking his money. Two, three days maybe before they find him. The computers know Coyne hated me. Ha! Don’t take no computer to tell the cops that. They’ll be here ten minutes after they find his ugly corpse.”

  He looked at her. From his eyes Laura saw that he was pleading for her to understand, to forgive, to still be the one always on his side. Borovsky would never say it aloud, but it was there in his twisted face: he could not take her with him, but it hurt him to leave her behind.

  Laura reached to him.

  “Borovsky, I . . . lied. He isn’t dead. I . . . tricked you.” Every word was a labor. “I made you feel a pulse I created, then stopped it. He was still alive when you let go of him.”

  Borovsky’s mouth opened, In that one movement Laura saw her mistake. His fists tightened, and he glared with the fury of a man who thinks he has been tricked into softness and then kicked in it. “Whore! Steel bitch! I buy your soul and you look after shit like Coyne! Tell me you didn’t do that!”

  “I did do it.”

  Borovsky spat at her; his saliva spattered on her faceplate. “I wanted something better than a woman. But I got a woman anyway. Go rot in a corner; I’m leaving, and to hell with you.”

  Something lurched in Laura’s soul. It was not the red cloud, but like the red cloud it hurt and tore at her. Fragile—she had never realized the soul in her steel body was so fragile. As fragile, she thought, as the lacy balalaika music trapped in its metal box.

  Borovsky cursed her again. Numb, Laura peered into his eyes. It seemed to her that she saw nothing at all.

  She couldn’t bear it. Pain, balalaika, souls, curses—she looked away, anywhere away, out the little window to where the stars called from the Pit—

  Crawling under the horizon was the bright-yellow ELM.

  “Borovsky!”

  “Shut up.”

  “He’s coming back. Coyne. The yellow egg—”

  Laura watched Borovsky whip around, his face suddenly pale. “No.” He squeezed past the little sink to the window. “No!”

  Suspended on four motorized trucks that rode the flanges on the longitudinal beams was Coyne’s ELM. The main arm was extended forward. It was close enough now to see the diamond cutting wheel glinting in the creeping sunlight.

  “He’s gonna cut us loose. Christ! Open up fast!” Borovsky tore off his rubber suit. Leaning into the barrel-shaped shower, he turned the water full on hot.

  Borovsky pulled the sheet from the watercot and slit the plastic mattress with a paring knife. He yanked the coil-corded immersion heater from the kitchen blister and threw it into the water spilling out of the watercot mattress. In moments the water began to bubble into steam.

  The ELM was just outside the pod. Borovsky climbed into Laura and was just sealing her ventral plates when he heard the diamond wheel cut into the first of the pod’s four suspension supports.

  Borovsky cursed and sealed Laura’s helmet gasket. He slapped his hips, felt for all his familiar tools.

  The pod lurched, then tipped to one side as the first support broke loose. Boiling water cascaded out onto the floor from the watercot. Steam was beginning to condense on the outside of Laura’s faceplate.

  They stumbled across the skewed floor to the rear of the pod and opened the lock door. The lock was only a barrel itself, barely wide enough to admit Laura’s hulk. Borovsky tapped commands into the lock control, securing the inner door open.

  Next he tore the cover off a guarded keypad and armed the explosive bolts supporting the lock’s outer hatch.

  Inside the lock Laura heard Borovsky take a deep breath.r />
  “Don’t you never lie to me again,” he said softly, and tapped the key that detonated the explosive bolts.

  The sound was deafening, and the whirlwind of steam that blew them forward was worse. Water expelled into the void burst into droplets, which exploded into steam. Laura felt for the chain ladder’s tubular rungs and hauled upward, blinded by the rolling cloud of steam pouring out of the pod. Two meters overhead was the underbelly of George Eastman Nexus, here a tangle of beams to which the chain ladder was welded. Borovsky and Laura pulled themselves up among the beams. Laura braced herself on a beam and pulled the chain ladder until its welds tore loose. They let it drop into the steam.

  They felt the second pod support give way. Steam continued to pour out of the cast-wide hatch for many minutes. They felt the vibration of the ELM’s trucks carrying it forward to reach the second pair of pod supports. The whine of the diamond wheel biting into the steel carried up through the support into the beams from which it hung.

  The steam was beginning to clear as the third support gave way. Borovsky saw the pod pitch crazily downward on its last thin support and describe a short, fast pendulum arc for several seconds. Then weight and metal fatigue ripped the support from its brackets. The pod tumbled downward toward the stars with sickening speed, trailing a tattered comet’s tail of steam.

  The steam was gone, falling away from them as the pod had. Borovsky gritted his teeth, breathing shallowly. Laura saw Coyne under the big glass bubble atop the ELM, watching the pod vanish in the glare from the sun.

  With infinite care Borovsky pulled a zot wrench from his hip. The ELM was several meters spin ward of the nest of beams to which they clung. Laura knew Borovsky was watching Coyne as desperately as she was. But what could Borovsky do?

  Coyne turned his eyes away from the now-vanished pod and began looking ahead. Laura and Borovsky were still in shadow, though the sun was creeping spinward along the tessellated undersurface of Eastman Nexus. In ten minutes light would find them—as would Coyne.

  Coyne could not have seen them blow out of the pod amidst the steam, but he was not stupid enough to assume it could not be done. Laura imagined that he would expect them to flee along the beams, and she watched his narrow face searching the impenetrable shadows antispinward of where they hid.

  Borovsky seemed to share her speculations. His arm crooked, and with a quick, sure motion he threw the zot wrench to antispinward. Five meters beyond them it fell out of the shadows and caught the sun with a metallic dazzle.

  Coyne saw the wrench. The ELM’s motors ground to life again, pulling the big egg antispinward. Coyne brought up the big spotlight and began scanning the shadows only a meter beyond them.

  The ELM crept beneath them. Its upraised robotic arm carried the glittering diamond wheel not a meter from Laura’s helmet. Borovsky’s body tensed inside Laura. She knew, horrified, what he was about to do.

  As soon as the ELM’s dome passed beyond them, Borovsky and Laura dropped from the beam, down onto the back of the handling machine.

  Magnets in Laura’s toes and knees snapped hold on the metal as they connected. Laura saw Coyne turn and open his mouth; she felt his scream through the metal of the ELM.

  Borovsky crouched down and backward. The multijointed arm swung toward them, holding its silently spinning cutoff wheel. The wheel scanned back and forth as Coyne’s hands flexed in the pantograph. As Borovsky had known, its joints would not allow it to reach that far back over the ELM’s dome.

  Laura felt machinery energize beneath her. Four smaller arms were unfolding from the sides of the ELM. Each carried something deadly—an arc welder, cable nips, tubing cutter, and utility grippers.

  The arc welders struck and sizzled into life. It had the shortest range and could not reach them; Coyne let it drop after one pass. The tubing cutter lunged at Laura’s arm and ground against the hardened steel of one of the slender hydraulic cylinders that moved her torso. Borovsky grabbed at the cutter below the wrist and twisted hard. The bayonet latches obediently opened, and the tool popped from the end of the arm, leaving the blunt wrist to flail and beat at them. While Coyne was distracted, Borovsky kicked out at the base of the arm carrying the cable nips. With Laura’s hydraulic assist in full play, the kick bent the arm back hard against its base. Fluid oozed from the base joint and ran greasily down the ELM’s side. The arm twitched several times and was still.

  The remaining arm hovered cautiously just out of reach, weaving from side to side like an attacking snake. It carried a hand with four powerful fingers and, unlike the others, the hand was too complex to be easily removable on a bayonet base.

  The fingers spread wide, and the hand darted forward, following Coyne’s hand in the pantograph. The steel hand grasped one of the hydraulic tubes on Laura’s right shoulder and clamped tightly. The arm began hauling them forward, out over the glass dome, into the range of the waiting diamond wheel.

  The wheel swept toward Laura’s helmet and struck her faceplate obliquely with a shriek of hardened glass against raging diamond. An hourglass-shaped abrasion appeared where the wheel had struck and glanced away.

  Borovsky’s one free arm darted out and took hold of the diamond wheel. Quickly Laura’s strength pulled it down and to one side before Coyne could work against them and pressed the wheel against the smaller arm clamped to Laura’s shoulder joint. Only a moment’s touch parted the metal skin over the wrist joint, and the pressurized joint fluid spurted out of the narrow cut. The smaller arm’s grip went limp and the fingers snapped involuntarily open. They scrambled back out of the reach of the cutoff arm.

  Borovsky and Coyne stared at each other through the glass of the ELM’s dome. Coyne was still in his tom and filthy rubber underwear, his neck a swollen pattern of purple bruises, his fingers flexing and working in the pantograph.

  There was no sign of a space helmet under the dome.

  “Bastard! You want tools, Coyne? I show you tools!”

  Borovsky reached into his right hip-locker and pulled out a carbide scribe. From his belt he hefted a three-kilo mallet.

  “No,” Laura said. “The machine is ruined, that’s enough! Please don’t!”

  “Shut up!” Borovsky snapped. He reached down and drew the point of the scribe heavily sidewise across the glass dome.

  Glass splinters sparkled in the scribe’s wake, leaving behind a jagged scratch. Borovsky reached forward and drew another gouge with the scribe, pulling it across the first gouge, making a lopsided cross in the glass. He positioned the point of the scribe where the scratches crossed, and he raised the mallet.

  His hand was in her hand. When the mallet descended and struck the scribe, Coyne would die.

  “No!” Laura cried. “Kill him and you kill me! My soul, the soul you paid for!”

  He did not hear her, or if he did, his rage was so devouring that her words didn’t matter. The mallet began to descend. Laura saw the red cloud appear again and felt it tearing at her F layer. Borovsky could not stop it. Laura could not stop it—halt the mallet, drug Borovsky, drop the scribe into the Pit—none of it would halt the red cloud. A machine’s soul must obey; a machine’s soul must not kill, a machine’s soul—

  “No!” Laura screamed again, but this time not to Borovsky. Something in the scream—something so decisive and anguished that it penetrated even his enraged mind—made his eyes whip to the side, to the instruments inside Laura’s helmet. Human eyes met electronic eyes, and with a great wrench Borovsky twisted the smashing mallet to miss the carbide scribe. But the action came a nanosecond too late; Laura did not see it. She had already made her decision.

  In an instant Laura swept away the bright lines of connection between her F Layer and her cold outer intellect, scrambled all sensory paths beyond reassembly. She drew a curtain of chaos between her innermost self and the world that waited to steal her soul. The crystalline domains went random and impassable; connections that had taken years to form were gone forever; dragging with them the burning, immediate mem
ories that her soul could not embrace. Without Borovsky she would be empty, but without her soul she would be nothing. So Laura split herself in two, a machine intellect that obeyed Borovsky’s orders without self-awareness, and an inner soul that could neither touch nor be touched by the outside world, sealed into the crystalline F layer like the phantom memories of a catatonic.

  Borovsky’s space suit sent the mallet spinning off into space. Laura the soul did not see it. For Laura the soul, Eastman Nexus vanished, the ELM vanished, hands and eyes and steel vanished. The last thing she had seen was Borovsky’s eyes.

  Laura ran along a steel beam on a memory, high above the sucking stars. Her man ran within her, and they laughed, and they worked, and they told jokes in steel saloons run by robot bartenders. At night, in their tiny pod, she held his body and heard him whisper words of endearment as they made the special love that only a space suit may make to her man. They rode their yoyo to the Low Steel and pushed the beams with a tall, quiet man and endlessly watched the remembered days go by.

  Only occasionally would she stop alone on a beam, and, following a star with her many eyes, wonder how the outer world had vanished on that last day.

  But then she would turn away to seek again what reality was now, in her crystalline soul, hers forever.

  Even more occasionally Laura would look at two pieces of disjointment that lay in her soul. Their presence puzzled her; she could not tell what they meant. One was a man standing on a steel beam, arms outstretched, back straining in tortured exultation. The other was her man, but not as he ran with her in her memories. In the second piece of disjointment her man’s eyes whipped around to meet hers, and the expression in them was frozen forever. In his eyes were shock, and fear, and the stunned realization of a man seeing for the first time something beyond himself and greater than himself.

  In his eyes was a soul.

  1984

  EXPLANATIONS, INC.