Ten Directions

by Samuel Winburn

  Anything was preferable to the despair that had overtaken him that moment when the wormhole closed, and he had followed through the ring the sparks left by the vanishing ship, not homeward millions of kilometers to acclaim and immortality, but only a few millimetres to a lonely abandonment.

  That stupid, terrible woman. She had shown him the way to the wormhole. She had stirred hope of rescue when his hope was almost gone, and he might have easily faded into shock and depression. But, instead, she had done the cruellest thing - dangled the possibility of an easy escape before him and then slammed it in his face. And for good measure she had done so by breaking the wormhole, his greatest accomplishment. At that moment, August’s vague anger at Gudanko exploded at a new target. That bitch. He could still hear the echo of her encouragement.

  “Don’t stop Mr. Bridges. There’s no time. You have to trust me.”

  And he had. Her concern for him was so apparent, so urgent. As if she valued his life over her own. Her appeal had overcome his paranoia. She was his salvation. His Angel. And then he had run towards her with all his heart. She was willing to sacrifice herself for his deliverance. That came through in her voice. It seemed the closest thing to love he had felt in his life. She believed in him and his dream. She was his protector.

  And then that terrible moment when she had turned and ran, taking everything with her as she went. It was at that moment that August learned to hate. He could have died then, consumed with fury, if he hadn’t noticed familiar handwriting scrawled on the side of the box stating, “When all else fails set your sails.”

  Calvin30!

  August had torn the box from the wall and ripped it open. Inside had been a new neurovisor. August had carefully removed his neurovisor and held Calvin30’s gift up to his forehead, waiting impatiently for it to insert itself.

  The clone had appeared in space before him.

  “Hi Boss. If perchance you find this early, see it as advance precautions for a happenstance, which might yet happen. But if this moment finds you trapped on the other side of the rabbit hole, here is the key to save your soul.”

  An animation of the solar system had then appeared imagined in space between August and Calvin30. The picture of a ship, his ship, was floating near the orbit of Mercury. On Mercury, a flashing beacon attracted the ship to land in a crater near the top. As Mercury continued around the Sun, the ship stayed sheltered in the crater until it had rotated to the opposite side of the Sun near the orbit of Venus. Then the ship had launched up to the anti-matter station, refuelled, and then shot off towards Venus. Swinging around that planet, the little ship then whipped off towards Mars.

  “If you are stranded then that crater is the only place in the Mercury space that is nice to land. Not too cold and not too hot, just right and, moreover, there is ice.”

  Ice? August remembered this from some earlier briefing. Even though Mercury’s tilt was the smallest of all the planets, that tilt meant that the permanent shadow in this one crater near the North Pole could protect him from the Sun’s radiation. That shadow amazingly preserved ice left from ancient comets. Ice meant water, which besides radiation shielding, was the vital thing that was in short supply on his small capsule. Food had apparently been well stocked. When Mercury’s rotation caught up with Venus, he had enough shielding in his ship to make a quick dash into a swing by gravitational boost from Venus that would allow him to escape the radiation zone in time.

  Of course, why hadn’t he thought of it himself? It was perfect. The clone who had come through for him still stood there, frozen in the neuroview, as if waiting for August to thank him.

  August Bridges had never felt more gratitude towards anyone. Because of the clone he might live to win another day. He would rise from the ashes like the Phoenix and surprise them all. Even better, he now knew his enemy’s true colours. Gudanko was finished. August planned to publicly emasculate the man, to send the slug crawling on his belly forever in exile from the Coms. The thought brightened August’s mood and re-ignited his fantasy. The crowd began to roar again.

  August pulled out the vodka that he had saved to commemorate his victory. Pouring a thimble full, he toasted the frozen image of Calvin30 as he had every day since this ordeal began. When he left this hellish place, his bottle would be finished.

  One day the work of stockpiling enough water was over. Then the long wait began as the fires in the sky burned ever brighter. Then storing up hatred became August’s sole preoccupation. Each breath took him closer to the day of his revenge.

  Through a portal August could see molten metal glowing on the horizon of his small refuge, reminding him of how slight the margins of his survival were. If he died, as was likely, Gudanko would have stolen it all from him. There would be no brave new future with August’s steady hand upon the prow. No interstellar dynasties to bear his name. No legends bestowing immortality in his lifetime. No victorious return to the Earth. No parade.

  The passage through fire would soon be over August reassured himself. The universal heir would return from his long march, hardened and strengthened. Gudanko would be vanquished and all his ill-gotten gains returned to their rightful owner. August encouraged these fantasies, embellishing them with graphic visualisations of potential fates that would befall Gudanko and his ilk. The more claustrophobic August became, the more horrific the imaginary rough justice he meted out against the man he hated.

  He was not only going to depose Gudanko, he was going to murder him, disembowel him. He was going to torture him slowly, make that smug idiot feel the pain knowing that his life was slowing, inexorably, slipping away with August Bridges controlling the rate and the moment on his extinction. It was too bad that his enemy was too insensitive to feel real pain. Not the slow, deepening pain that August was facing. There would be no way of avenging that agony.

  August turned in his webbing, trying to sleep, to find even a few minutes of release, only he couldn’t. Each breath was a reminder that he would not relax until his revenge was achieved.

  Enough.

  Enough.

  Enough.

  August reluctantly realised that his anger was wearing him out. He did not realise this all at once, but in increments of desperation. There had to be a better way.

  The search for escape led him in many, iterative directions, which seemed to wind tighter and tighter circles as time went on. He tried to apply himself to a regimen of self-improvement, but his attempts were pathetic. The heat and discomfort quickly derailed any such pretensions. An inexhaustible library of neurovids and music were a temporary oasis for the mind, until they began to rerun in his subconscious. And above all he drank huge volumes of water, so much that he had to accelerate the filtration cycle and began to taste his own urine. He tracked the passage of weeks by the length of his hair, which by now had regrown past his shoulders. His depression advanced like an army.

  Who was August Bridges anyway?

  A spoiled only-child of the Portland suburbs. No noble lineage and no significant childhood trauma to impel him towards greatness. Even with effort August found it hard to evoke much feeling for his parents, or for the split-level townhouse he had been raised in. August had reinvented himself so thoroughly, in such spectacular fashion, that his true heritage had seemed incidental.

  Mom died in an accident, flattened by an unbalanced SkyTran container flipping off its rail. It happened on one of the few times Dad had managed to coax her out from the house. August had not been able to attend her funeral as by then his exile to the Moon had begun. Not that it mattered. Mom had effectively left them almost from the beginning. It was painful to remember her just sitting there, and by doing nothing demanding everything. Not taking her medication because she preferred the vacuity to the responsibilities of love. It made him furious imagining himself doing the same thing.

  Sitting, just sitting.

  Mom.

  So what if he had to reinvent her in order to fall in love with her? He had publicly romanticised her and her Sib
erian immigrant pedigree into a picture of stoic dignity. So what if her only life achievement after immigrating was to marry her high school boyfriend, a latter-day dentist. She had no dignity to bestow, but he had inherited it from her nevertheless. And of course, it was this conceit that had led him to Russia to discover his ‘true’ heritage and his destiny.

  August thought long, trying to recover anything in his upbringing that would prepare him to survive his current predicament? The only advice he remembered from Dad, delivered with any passion, was not to lend out his tools. Dad's approach with anything complex was to, in his benignly bland manner, let it go its own way. August reflected on the irony that it was precisely his own inability to let time pass without elaboration that was now driving him crazy. Dad might have handled this.

  A month later, August dragged himself through a stupor to disengage the ice excavation gear and dislodge the ship from its footings in preparation for his rapid escape to the shadow of Venus. The heat hit his ship like a punch as he flew out of Mercury’s protective shadow. The air rippled, and the walls became hot to the touch. August had to put on his spacesuit and turn on the internal refrigeration to stop from cooking. It was unendurable, but, hour by hour, he felt it recede as he rocketed away from Hell.

  By the time his small ship limped its way to the anti-matter factory, August almost lacked the energy to maneuver the ship up to the maintenance entry, angling it so the factory’s shadow would shield him during his foray.

  August fidgeted nervously. This was it. The smallest wrong move and the most explosive substance in the cosmos would evaporate him instantly. The blast might even put a dent in Mercury. Sweat collected in his spacesuit gloves. As he stepped out of the Icarus he was already panting.

  The gantry leading from his ship to the refinery as a long thin straw, which looked as thin as a needle sticking out of the factory. August could barely fit down it. The claustrophobia was overwhelming. Steadily he crawled, hand over hand, controlling his panic. Exiting the other side of the needle, he pulled himself into a larger cylinder with the walls all around him covered with canisters labelled with bright warning stickers.

  Warning. Do not handle manually.

  August selected one of these bombs surrounding him. He wrapped webbing around it. He pushed the release on its bracket. He tugged. He tugged again, and again harder.

  The canister popped out towards him. He pulled himself quickly out of the way. With light tugs he slowed the canister. It stopped, centimeters from another tank, and slowly rebounded. Moving into the gantry needle the cannister bumped the entrance, and a red light flashed on. It turned off. August started breathing again. Hand over hand he pushed the bomb up the needle. Sweat covered his eyes.

  The canister was safely bracketed in the Icarus fuel mount. A display in his mind told him this was so.

  All was well.

  Edging away to a safe distance from the anti-matter factory, August aimed himself towards the calm clear light of Venus and fired the engines. He blacked out as the g-forces kicked in.

  When he awoke, Mercury was a small circle behind him. He had escaped. To be on the move again made him giddy, and he was in high spirits for the first time since the disaster.

  For a while everything seemed possible, but the heat continued to work on him. With each passing day, the mirror of his life reflected more harshly upon him. Recalcitrant ghosts began to dance within his mind.

  August scowled at Gregori, lounging in the corner of their cramped shared space. Such a fool the man had been, to choose someone like August to be his closest friend. Such a fool for the clown to entrust his tears with anyone, least of all someone as selfish and driven as August. To have offered up his wife in whom he could see no fault. What kind of idiot would trust so much.

  “It’s okay August. That’s what men do.”

  “Don’t you forgive me. It was your fault anyway. You never had the balls to stand up for yourself. You were weak.”

  “Give it up August. You think it was about you? That’s a laugh. She wanted to hurt me. Me. You could have been anyone.”

  August hurled his rage at Gregori, who simply evaporated in response.

  “She loved me. She needed a man not a clown,” he shouted and pounded the wall where his friend had sat.

  Condescending laughter bounced around the cabin.

  “Whatever you want to think man.”

  “She loved me.”

  The light from Venus now filled the ship from the forward portal like a minor Sun. August pressed his cheek against the pane, wishing himself to move faster towards the light. He was sure he could not endure one more moment of the torment in his mind. Then that moment had passed, and he was sure he could not endure another. He was gripped by the urge to leave and found himself already dressed in his space suit and waiting in the airlock to prepare to jump. Before the airlock door opened, the radiation alarm went off, requiring a manual override that August reluctantly declined to trigger.

  The light grew stronger as Venus approached, a soft reflected light. The planet was so close in size to the Earth that August almost felt as if he were staring down from his bedroom skylight on Luna City.

  They were laying together on the best bed they had ever shared in the luxury suite that his new wealth had purchased. Anya had her back to him. August’s eyes traced the length of her spine to the point where the small of her naked back converged with the beginning of the solid anchor of her hips where his fingers liked to rest as he held her when they made love. The line of the sheet covered just enough to provoke his desire to unveil his lover.

  “I told myself that you might learn to love.”

  The tone told him of the finality of her decision.

  “Nyusha. I don’t understand. We will be great together. There is nothing we won’t accomplish. All of our dreams.”

  “It is all your dream August. It is only yours.”

  He could bear no more. His hand pulled back the sheet and he embraced her. She did not retreat from him, but there was little passion in her response. Instead she held his arms, watching him carefully until he had finished.

  Her eyes were painful to meet, and August rolled away, allowing her to climb from their bed to the shower. When she had cleaned and dressed, she poured some tea for them from the samovar and they drank without saying much.

  “It was a mistake August. I am going back to Gregori. He is a kind man and does not deserve this.”

  “Fine. Go then, but you are leaving everything.”

  “Ah, my dear, you once looked like that to me, like everything, like a great man. But August, you are only a man trying to be a great man. I am sad for you because I know you will achieve everything that you say you will do and more. In the end, in the end I am afraid you will not be missed.”

  That hotel room door had continued to close on his soul ever since.

  August was sobbing, and he couldn’t remember why. Why hadn’t Mom come out of her room all day? He’d just come back from his friend’s house, a friend whose parents spoke to one another. The absence of Mom, so familiar to him that it had seemed almost comforting, now seemed unbearably shameful. August knocked hard on her door and didn’t stop kicking it until he heard her cry out.

  His fists left blood on the ships’ wall, and his knuckles had a metallic taste when he licked them.

  Suddenly the ship began to shake violently as the gravity of Venus gripped it. August had enough sense to climb into his webbing and buckle himself down.

  The ship’s walls blazed as it fell into the upper atmosphere and the air inside began to boil. As he dipped beneath the fathomless clouds, the frail walls began to buckle, and August realised that his ship, designed for interplanetary travel, could not possibly survive such a path. His faith in Calvin30 had been so unquestioning. Why would the clone, who was so meticulous in his planning, fail to account for such an obvious detail?

  Again, what did he really know about the clone? Why had he had taken it for granted that his hench
man would always be there for him? Was it just his desperation to prove Anya wrong? Because the bitter truth was that the clone, like everyone else, had his own mysterious agenda and how pathetic was it for August, with all his glory, to only have his lackey to depend on? The truth was Anya could not have been more painfully prophetic. It was the clarity of her insights that had drawn him to her so why could he discount her final word on him?

  No one would miss him, after all he had done for them. The acids of Venus would consume him, August Bridges, liberator of the world, and leave no trace. He would not be mourned.

  August’s fury shook him harder than Venus shook his fragile lifeboat. It was all he had left. It continued to crush him even after the ship emerged from beneath the ocean of clouds and shot back out into the stillness of space. His anger left him no room to rejoice his unlikely escape. What was there to rejoice in a life wasted?

  “August, August.”

  August twisted his neck as he sat up, as if jolted awake from a dream. Had he fallen asleep? It was Illya's voice.

  “August.”

  There it was again. August could feel his blood pounding in his neck. He wasn't dreaming.

  “Who do you love August?”

  Again, another shadow, darting across the floor before melting into the wall. And more laughter. August squinted to make out a face near the head of the shadow. Deep eyes, his father’s eyes, looked back at him with pity.

  Hatred welled up in him. The eyes of Illya, his true father. They were supposed to nurture and protect him, not abandon him, not block the path to his destiny. With murder in his mind August began to stalk the shade, lashing out and hitting the walls and floor as it faded out of reach at the last moment. He chased it though the hours, waging constant war. Nothing else was clear in his mind, only the cold intent to rid the world of this demon. He would kill it before it killed him. The air slowly cooled as August fought, until the effort overcame him, and he fell into despair.