A King of Infinite Space

by Allen Steele

  Strangely, I didn’t feel any great sadness over losing my family. At first I wondered if Mister Chicago was still spiking our food, perhaps with mild antidepressants to keep us from grieving over the people we had left behind. Yet there were many deadheads who were openly mourning deceased family, relatives, and friends, and I gradually realized that my lack of remorse was strictly my own problem.

  The more I thought about it, though, the more it made sense. My father and I had grown apart when I became an adult; my fondest memories of him were from childhood, and once I moved out of the house, I had seen him only on rare occasions. The birthday dinner at Tony’s, when Dad had given me my Immortality Partnership medallion, was the last time I laid eyes on him. That and the trust fund he had established for me on my twenty-first birthday had been the only tangible evidence that he still cared for his only son; if he loved me, he never let me know.

  As for my mother…well, it was much the same situation, only worse. When she divorced Dad, she effectively divorced me as well. The few times I visited her in LA, I saw a woman who was doing everything humanly possible to remain a thirty-something beach blonde despite the obvious fact that she was pushing fifty and beginning to look like Jim Carrey playing the Mask in drag. My memory of cuddling in her lap while she read Green Eggs and Ham was from when I was about five years old, and she divorced Dad only a year later. The last time she said she loved me was when she gave me a perfunctory kiss on the cheek at Los Angeles International, right after her limo driver had dropped me off at curbside check-in. Her lips felt like moist sandpaper and her breath smelled of Scotch, and I knew that she was only too glad to get rid of her inconvenient son.

  So Mom and Dad were dead and long gone. Well, so be it. That may sound cold to anyone who enjoyed the benefits of a happy childhood, but William and Sarah Tucker had effectively stopped being my father and mother a long time ago. Dad placed me in a succession of boarding schools and colleges until I couldn’t remain out of town any longer, then threw money at me so I would stay out of the house; Mom was simply embarrassed to have a son who was as young as she was trying to look. If I felt anything for either of them, it was profound regret that they hadn’t been better people…and relief that my father apparently hadn’t opted for neurosuspension himself, because if he had, I surely would have recognized him by now.

  This, of course, was yet another puzzle: why had Dad done this for me, and not for himself? And the same for Shemp’s parents, who had genuinely loved their eldest child? Shemp and I talked this over one evening, and reached the same conclusion: they had been following an old Ladue tradition. Laduvians, as the residents of one of the wealthiest suburbs in the country used to refer to themselves, often indulged in a shell game of buying the latest extravagance before the other guy did, or buying one just like it so they wouldn’t feel left out. If a harsh winter dropped five inches of snow on the ground, someone in Ladue was likely to buy an Eddie Bauer Ford Explorer, which meant that all his friends would soon be buying Eddie Bauer Ford Explorers. If one person bought a summer house on Fire Island, then soon there would be a rush of rich people from St. Louis trying to purchase property on Fire Island. And if Bill Tucker arranged to have his son’s head stored in liquid nitrogen, then his good friends Warren and Elsie Meyer just had to do the same for young Christopher. At least, this was the way we figured it.

  I missed a few of my friends, but not greatly; none had been so close that I lost much sleep thinking about them. My best friend was Shemp, and all I had to do was wander down the hall and pound on his door if I got lonely for his company. When we stayed up late—or at least as late as our associates would permit us before the warning buzz would sound in our ears, telling us that it was time for lights-out—reminiscing about bar gigs the Belly Bombers had played and stuff like that, more often than not one name in particular would come up…

  Erin.

  The only woman in the world to whom I had ever confessed my love—well, the only woman to whom I had ever said this while not just trying to get into her panties—and she was lost to me that very same night.

  Goddamn, that hurt.

  I knew that she survived the wreck. One of the items in my file that Chip was able to access from the Main Brain—as we referred to the colony’s central AI system—was a short two-paragraph piece that appeared in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch on July 12, 1995. Headlined “Car Crash Kills 2,” it related the tragic deaths of William Alec Tucker III, 24, of Euclid Avenue, St. Louis, and Christopher Chaim Meyer, 24, of Litzsinger Road, Ladue. The article also reported that a passenger in the car, one Erin Kay Westphall, 23, of Lake Forest, Chicago, had survived the accident. Suffering unspecified injuries, she had been taken to Barnes Hospital emergency room, where she was reported to be in “critical but stable condition,” whatever that meant.

  “I guess she made it through,” I say to Shemp, the night I finally sucked in my gut and asked Chip to open my file again. I really didn’t like reading this stuff, but I had to find out what happened to Erin.

  “She must have.” Shemp sits cross-legged on his bed, idly sketching me with a pen and a pad of bamboo paper that he has begged off John. “It says she’s from Lake Forest, doesn’t it?”

  The clip is still on my eyes-up; I check it again. “Yeah…so?”

  “Well, if she died, the paper would have reported the address on her driver’s license, right? And she was living with you when she got her Missouri license, right?”

  He’s right; I went with Erin to the state DMV the day she took her driving test, and the address she put on the application had been the apartment we shared in the Central West End. Shemp had moved out to make room for her only a few days earlier; this was something he had never really forgiven or forgotten. “But if her parents came down from Chicago when they heard about the accident,” he goes on, “then they would have made sure the reporter knew she was from Lake Forest, because they wouldn’t have wanted any of their friends to know that she was shacking up with you. And they wouldn’t have thought about doing that if they were messed up about her death. Am I right?”

  I go eyes-down. Shemp might be a dork sometimes, but a razor-sharp mind lurks behind that idiot façade. But he didn’t have to remind me that Erin’s folks thought that I was a loser. “Yeah, if you want to put it shitty like that.”

  “Sure.” He doesn’t look up from his pad. “Ergo, if she died in the crash, it would have said so. If she had died later, then there would have been a later article saying so…”

  “But maybe she died, but it isn’t in my file.”

  “So you’re saying you wish she had been killed?”

  “Hell, no!”

  “Then let it go.” Shemp shakes his head. “It was probably tough on her, too, y’know…getting in a savage wreck, having her boyfriend killed and all that.”

  “Yeah, but…”

  “Look, we’re here only because your dad and mine signed us onto the program. It doesn’t matter why they did it…they just did, okay? And we beat the odds, and now we’ve got a second chance. So…”

  “But when I asked Chip about Erin, he told me that her file was closed. Not ‘No Available Reference’…he said ‘File Closed.’ What does that mean?”

  “He said that? Really?” When I nod, Shemp goes eyes-up and works his way through the query procedure with Moe, his associate. He mutters under his breath for a few seconds, then he triple-blinks again. “Same thing for me,” he says when his eyes lose their filminess. “Jeez, I dunno…”

  “Then maybe she died right after we did, and her folks put her into neurosuspension…”

  He laughs out loud. “So she could be reunited with you? Fat chance. They hated your guts.”

  “But you don’t know! She might have…I mean, it’s possible that she could have…”

  “Alec…”

  “She could have…”

  “Alec, shut up. Just shut up, okay?” He sighs. “Look, man, she’s gone. That’s all there is to it. I know it’s tou
gh, I know how you felt about her, but…jeez, she’s a hundred and four years in the past. You’re here, now, and she’s…”

  “Dead.”

  He nods. “Sorry to say it, but yeah…she’s dead, Jim.”

  I can’t help it. I’m trying to come to grips with the fact that Erin is finally and irrevocably gone from my life—the only woman I’ve ever loved, and she’s in a grave more than three hundred million miles away—and the son of a bitch has the gall to crack a lame Star Trek joke.

  So I deck him.

  My fist connects solidly with his jaw. It knocks him right out of bed.

  An instant later, an ice pick slams into my brain; Chip has registered a hostile act on my part, and it’s putting a stop to it. It’s also a warning: if I don’t chill out right now, a major blood vessel in my head will rupture, and if I die a second time, there won’t be a third act. This is the hard lesson we’ve learned from seeing what happened to George and Veronica.

  A migraine is enough for me. I sag to my knees and clutch my throbbing skull with both hands, and after a few moments the pain subsides to the point that I’m able to look up again. Shemp is still sprawled on the floor, massaging the bruise I’ve left on his face. He doesn’t say anything, but the look in his eyes reminds me of a dog who’s been whipped once too often.

  I don’t care that he’s hurt. Without another word, without looking back, I get up and stalk out of his room, slamming the door behind me.

  And then I go back to my own room and weep for the rest of the night.

  Shemp was right, though, just as Russell had been. The time had come for me to put the past behind and start trying to make some sense out of A.D. 2099. The first logical step, it seemed to me, was to find out everything that had happened since July 11, 1995.

  It wasn’t an easy task. When I sneaked into the castle library one afternoon and checked the shelves, I couldn’t find any books that covered the last century; perhaps there was a reason for this, but I couldn’t fathom it. Mister Chicago might have been able to tell me these things, but on those increasingly rare occasions when I spotted him outside the castle, he didn’t acknowledge my presence. It was as if I was little more than another ornament; he would walk right past me with no more than a quick glance in my direction.

  As always, that left Chip as my primary source of information. This was the most difficult road to enlightenment, for Chip was literal-minded: nonspecific questions would be answered in non-specific terms, and replies to oversimplified questions would be much the same way. He had all the answers, of course; the trick was posing the right questions. So learning history from him was like playing Trivial Pursuit when you can’t read your side of the card.

  Perhaps it was just as well. It took Shemp several days to get over my punching him out, so for a while I didn’t have him as company when we were working the fields. I had observed Russell constantly murmuring under his breath as he held lengthy discussions with Hal while he raked, ploughed, and picked. Before long I was doing the same, if only because quizzing Chip took my mind off work. We must have looked weird, like street people talking to themselves.

  It took a long time, but I finally managed to work out of Chip the most pertinent (if not the most important) events that happened during my absence. It went like this…

  The human race sort of muddled along through the remainder of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. Everyone partied down on New Year’s Eve 1999, and then it was back to business as usual: brush wars in Africa, terrorist bombings in Europe and South America, mindfuck politics and petty bickering in the USA. There was a really bad depression in America which led to a couple of states seceding from the union. A couple of nukes went off in the Middle East—one in Tel Aviv, the other in Tehran—but there was no global nuclear holocaust, and nuclear weapons were finally outlawed with the Treaty of Jerusalem. The last time anyone saw a live whale was in 2002. All the people who really irritated me—Newt Gingrich, Madonna, Louis Farrakhan, Roseanne, Michael Jackson, Pat Robertson, and the fucking Energizer Bunny—finally had the good grace to drop dead.

  During all this, the McGuinness Corporation launched the first manned expedition to the Moon since 1972, with assistance from NASA. This occurred in 2010, and although there was the usual “America Number One” bullshit from the media, no one seemed to notice or care that McGuinness had its own corporate agenda, which had little to do with showing the flag. Once it established a small base in the Descartes Highlands, the company announced the formation of a new subsidiary, Skycorp, which would build a system of solar power satellites in geosynchronous Earth orbit, using lunar resources for the main materials and a new GEO space station as its construction base.

  This was the beginning of what would eventually be called the Space Century. Despite technological snafus, threats of bankruptcy, and pronouncements of imminent failure by pessimists, Skycorp managed to keep its promises. By 2020, the first two powersats had become fully operational, the beam jacks of Olympus Station were ready and willing to build yet another one, and Descartes Station was on the verge of becoming a self-sufficient lunar colony. Meanwhile, a multinational Mars expedition had established a tentative foothold on the red planet, just in time to meet the almost-forgotten objectives George Bush had set way back in 1989.

  If anyone had been expecting instant gratification and paradise à la carte, though, they were living in a dreamland. This was a frontier, after all, and the hardest days were still ahead.

  In 2024, Skycorp made the mistake of trying to sell its lunar base to a Japanese space corporation. This resulted in a labor strike by the long-suffering moondogs which, despite attempted military intervention by the newly formed U.S. Space Infantry, was successful. Descartes Station founded its own employee-owned company; the following year, Lunar Associates set out to explore near-Earth asteroids in search of raw material which could be sold to the multinational companies that had formed a consortium to build an orbital colony in a Lagrange point in cislunar space.

  The consortium didn’t appreciate being put over the proverbial barrel by the moondogs, but neither did they have much choice if they wanted to get any returns from all the billions they had invested in the Lagrange colony. Nonetheless, it tried to keep the leash as tight as possible; once Clarke County was completed in 2047, a puppet government was installed which, although elected by the colonists, was in fact micromanaged by the consortium. It didn’t take long before the colonists wised up; after its New Ark Party formed a secret alliance with Descartes Station, they formally declared political independence in 2049.

  At about this same time, a small biotech research team on the Moon, working out of a secret laboratory in the western rim of the Sea of Tranquillity, succeeded in gestating the first test-tube embryos specifically bioengineered for living in low-gee space environments. In a moment of hubris, the research team called this new offshoot of the human race Homo superior; they kept their accomplishment a closely guarded secret, known only to a handful of selenians.

  The consortium tolerated the independence movement, believing that it would be short-lived and would soon crumble on its own. Instead, the lunar and orbital colonies formalized their alliance by declaring themselves to be the Pax Astra. The United Nations, invoking the 1967 Space Treaty, refused to recognize the Pax Astra as a separate nation. When the Pax reacted by raising trade tariffs on Earth-based companies doing business in Clarke Country, the United States, Japan, and the European Commonwealth nations declared war.

  The Moon War lasted for three months during 2052, and culminated in a second attempt by the U.S. Space Infantry to take control of Descartes Station. The Battle of Mare Tranquillitatis was quick, bloody, and largely one-sided; most of the hundred-man invasion force was massacred, with the few survivors sent scurrying back to the staging base on Olympus Station. A simultaneous effort to invade Clarke County was even more futile; Japanese and European shuttles were either destroyed or warded off by a phalanx of particle-beam weapons deployed ar
ound the station. The Moon War ended with the signing of the Treaty of Mare Tranquillitatis, when the UN formally recognized the Pax Astra. The consortium collapsed shortly thereafter, with the individual companies, including Skycorp, either going bankrupt or forming trade alliances with the Pax. It wasn’t long before the Mars colonies joined the Pax; when the Pax had issued its own currency, the lox—one lox being equal to one liter of liquid oxygen—it made sense for the aresians to use that standard, since they had better ability to manufacture liquid oxygen than either Clarke County or the selenians.

  Shortly after the war, a handful of deep-space explorers from the Mars colonies who had settled the asteroid belt formed their own cartel, the Transient Body Shipping Association. Although not a formal government like the Pax, it often acted as such, regulating trade among the extended families working the belt and with the Pax. Since the Pax didn’t perceive the TBSA as a potential threat, it allowed the miners to do pretty much as they wished, so long as they paid their tariffs. Unfortunately, the Pax made the mistake of constantly raising the tariffs, which did little to keep it in good graces with the TBSA.

  At the end of the fifties, the Pax sent the first expedition to the moons of Jupiter and established a small outpost on Callisto. Callisto Station began harvesting helium-3 from Jupiter’s upper atmosphere for export to Earth as fuel for fusion reactors. It wasn’t long before the Callisto miners realized that they held an important edge: helium-3 was a vital resource without which the tokamaks on Earth and the Moon would soon sputter to a halt, and Jupiter was so distant from the inner solar system that they could arbitrarily impose their own demands without fear of reprisal. The Jovians formed their own secret alliance with the TBSA, and the Pax soon learned that what’s good for the goose is also good for the gander: taxes and tariffs on Pax vessels working the outer system. Since the Jovians could manufacture their own liquid oxygen, which they were able to supply in large quantities to the TBSA, the lox became nearly worthless so far as they were concerned.