Her Smoke Rose Up Forever (S.F. MASTERWORKS)

by James Tiptree Jr.

  Now the message.

  She activated the high-gain transmitter, and plugged her suit mike in. And then Cold Pig undertook the first and last literary-dramatic exercise of her life. She was, after all, as noted, human.

  First she keyed in the call signals for Calgary’s four other scouts, plus a general alarm. Next, gasping realistically, “—All scouts, do not try to return to Calgary; repeat, do not . . . try return to Calgary . . . there’s nothing . . . there. . . . Head for . . . the . . . Churchill—-Wait, maybe Calhoun closer . . . repeat, Calgary . . . is not on station . . . do not try to return. . . . Wounded, will try to return log . . . so much blood. . . . Cause: Captain Robert Meich dead, self-inflicted . . . gunshot . . . Lieutenant . . . Donald Lamb also dead by gunshot . . . inflicted by Captain Meich. . . . Both bodies lost in space. . . . Captain Meich shot Don and . . . unsealed . . . main port. . . . He took Don’s body, and . . . shot himself in the abdomen before . . . going out. . . . Cause: Captain Meich said we were docked at invisible spy station, when Don tried to stop him . . . open port he said.” Here her words were coming in a soft fainting rush, but clearly, oh, clear: “He said Don might be an alien and shot him, he was carrying gun three days . . . sleeping with it. . . . Cold, blood . . . he made me strip and tied me to galley post but Don threw me . . . helmet and air tank but I-have . . . shot wounds in body . . . since yesterday . . . fear Calgary lost, Captain Meich fired escape course, broke computer . . . cold . . . trans . . . mission . . . ends . . . will try. . . .” And then very weakly, “Don’t repeat don’t return. . . .”

  After a few more deathly sounds, she unplugged, leaving the transmitter on. It was voice-activated, it wouldn’t waste power, but she must be careful about any sounds she made, especially when the air came back.

  Then she went carefully around the ship, sealing off everything but necessary living space, to conserve air, and turned the main air valves to pressurize.

  Finally she snapped out the log cassette in a realistically fumbling manner, carefully tearing the tape head off before where she knew her argument with Meich began. It would look as if she had simply torn, it clumsily loose. To add verisimilitude—they would test oh, yes—she reopened one of the cuts Meich’s blows had left on her face and dabbed her fresh blood on cassette and canister. The canister went into a wall slot, which would, when activated, encase it in its own small jato device with homing signal to Base. She fired it off.

  The data from Calgary’s exploratory mission would arrive, some day or year, near Base, beeping for pickup. That much, she thought, she owed the world of men. That much and no more.

  The air pressure was rising slowly. No leaks so far, but it was not yet safe to unsuit. She checked the scanners once, to make sure Uranus and Sol were dwindling straight astern, and set the burn to turn off in an hour. If the fuel lasted that long.

  Then she simply sat down in the copilot’s chair, leaned back in her filthy helmet in the comfortless suit, and let herself lose consciousness. When she awoke she would be far enough away to turn the transmitter off.

  She was headed for the Empire. Whose name, she knew quite rationally, was Death.

  When she came to, the main torch was off. Had it run out of fuel? No, turned off, she saw, checking the console; there was still some energy left. Her eyes, nose, and lips were crusted, almost closed. Air pressure was back to cabin-normal.

  Gratefully she opened her faceplate, unlatched and lifted off the heavy helmet assembly that had saved her life from Meich. Don’t think of all that, she told herself. Never again. Never ever again to suffer anything of man. Think of the fact that you’re dehydrated and ravenous and dirty.

  Gulping juice and water alternately, she checked position. She must have been unconscious a long, long time, they had passed Neptune’s orbit; still accelerating, slightly. She should have saved the main burn till she was freer of Sol’s gravity; she was glad she hadn’t.

  She got herself unsuited and minimally washed. There was a big cleanup to do. But first she’d better make herself count up her supplies, which was to say, her life.

  She had long ago made the rough calculation that it was somewhere in the range of a hundred to a hundred fifty Earth-days.

  Food—no problem. The dehydrated supplies were ample to take six men and herself another year.

  Water was more serious. But the reclamation unit was new and worked well, all tanks were full. She would be drinking H2O that had passed through all their kidneys and bladders the rest of her life, she thought. But in the humans of her Earth such thoughts no longer could evoke revulsion. She had drunk unrecycled water only a few times in her whole life; it had been desalinated water from a far sea. The importation of water-ice asteroids to Earth had been one of Base’s routine jobs.

  Calgary even had a small potential supply of fresh water, if she could reach it without too much loss of air. They had encountered a clean ice-rock and lashed it to the substructure of the hull.

  She was gazing about, checking around the main console, at which she had never been allowed to sit before, deferring calculation of oxygen, when an odd glint above caught her eye. She stood up in the seat to peer at the thing embedded in the ceiling. A camouflaged lens.

  She had stumbled onto one of the secret spy-eyes and spy-ears placed in all ships. She put a screwdriver between its rim and her ear, and caught a faint whirring. Somewhere in the walls a tape deck reeled. It had of course recorded the true events on Calgary, and the fisheye lens was set so that her present course-and-position readings would be recorded.

  It was not, she was sure from former tales and trials at Base, transmitting now. People had confided that the eyes and ears sent off their main data in supercompressed blips, at rather long, random intervals. The detailed reading would wait until Calgary was back in human hands.

  For that, they would have to catch her first. She smiled grimly through cracked lips.

  But had it already sent off a data blip while she was unconscious? Or in the time before, for that matter? No way to tell. If so, her story would be only an addition to the catalog of her crimes. If not, good.

  How to deactivate it, without tearing out the walls, or causing it to transmit in terminal alarm? Others must have tried it before her. She would have to think hard, and discard her first impulses.

  Meanwhile she contented herself with taping over the lens. Then she thought for a moment, and continued searching. Sure enough, now that she knew what to look for, she found the backup—or perhaps the main one; it was much more skillfully hidden. She taped it, thinking too late that perhaps the blanking-out itself was a trigger to it to blip. Well, no help for that now. At least she was free of the feeling of being watched. This was actually a strange new sensation. People took the fact of being covertly observed almost for granted. Brash souls made jokes about what must be mountains of unread spy-eye data stored who knew where and how, perhaps an asteroid full.

  She sank back down in the comfortable pilot’s couch. If there was a third backup on her now, good luck to it.

  The oxygen.

  Even before she had dumped a shipful of air, the oxygen situation had not been very healthy. The regeneration system was old-style, dependent on at least some outside sunlight. The weak light at Uranus’s orbit hadn’t been enough for it; some of the bionic compounds had gone bad, and the regenerator was near the end of its life.

  This had been well understood before the . . . incident. It had been planned to cut short the time in total shadow by establishing a semipolar semiorbit—Uranus rotated almost “lying down” relative to the solar plane—so as to maximize light. And the Calhoun was headed to an emergency rendezvous with them as far out as possible, to pass over oxygen and regenerator equipment. The water ice-rock might have had to be used inefficiently for air; they were on the lookout for others. Not a crisis, as such things went, but a potentially uncomfortable prospect.

  Now she dreaded to think what a period of cold vacuum might have done to the system, and made herself
go check. Damage, all right—some trays that had been photosynthesizing showed brown edges. Not a total wipeout, though, as she had feared. It would take care of some of her CO2, more if she rigged emergency lights. She counted and recounted the suit tanks, and checked the high-compression ship supply of oxygen.

  The answer came out surprisingly near her rough guess—oxygen for 140 days max, ten weeks. Actually the CO2 buildup would probably sicken her seriously before that, unless she could contrive some help.

  First was to supply all possible light of the correct wavelengths to the regenerator trays. She sorted out filters, power cords, and robbed all the lights she could spare from the rest of the ship, until she had all trays as fully lit as possible. She even found a packet of presumably long-dead culture starter—“seeds”—and planted them in the hope of restarting two dead trays.

  That took hours, perhaps days; she kept no track, only stopping to eat and drink when the need was strong. The trays were huge and heavy, and she was sore. But she felt nothing but joy—joy in her perfect freedom. For the first time in years she was alone and unsupervised. But more: for the first time in her life she was truly free for good, accountable to no one but herself. Alone and free among her beloved stars.

  The job completed, too tired to clean up herself and Calgary, she staggered back to the pilot’s couch with a cold meal, and alternately ate and gazed out at those star fields straight ahead that could be seen through the gyrostabilized scope.

  It wasn’t enough. She wanted it all. What did she have to fear from the physical deterioration of zero gee?

  She sank into sleep in the big pilot’s chair, planning.

  Over the next two Earth-days she cleaned ship intermittently, between work on her main task: to stop the rotation that gave Calgary its “gravity.” She was careful to use as little energy as possible, letting every tiny burst take fullest possible effect before thrusting more.

  Outside, the stars changed from a rushing gray tapestry to a whirl of streaks, shorter and shorter, steadying and condensing to blazing stubs against perpetual night.

  Her touch was very accurate. At the end she scarcely had to brake. The bright blurs and stubs shrank and brightened—until, with a perceptible jolt, there they were! Stars of all colors and brilliances, clouds dark and light, galaxies—tier beyond tier, a universe of glory.

  CP toured the ship, unscreening every viewport. Calgary had many; she was an old belly-lander built originally to shuttle from the Mars sling, in the days when seeing outside with the living eyes was still important to men. Calgary even had a retracted delta wing, unused for who knew how long.

  There were more cleanup chores to do as all gravity faded out and objects began to float. But always CP would pause as she passed a port, and revel silently in the wonders and beauties on every side. Her own wretched reflection in the vitrex bothered her; soon she turned off even the last lights, so that Calgary’s interior became a dark starlit pocket of space-night.

  Ahead of Calgary lay, relatively, nothing. She was flying to Galactic North, toward a region where the stars were relatively few and very far, without even a dust drift or any object closer than many human lifetimes. This didn’t trouble her. She turned off most of the forward scanners and sensors, wanting to spend her last days studying and dwelling mentally in the richer, wondrous star fields on all sides.

  The condition of weightlessness didn’t bother her at all. She was one of those rare ones who found sustained pleasure in the odd life of free-fall. The exasperations of toolboxes squirmily unpacking themselves when opened merely amused her. And Calgary had many ingenious old zero-gee life and work aids. While CP’s body healed, she was happy to be free of anything pressing her.

  She was indeed grateful for all the comforts of the big mother ship. She’d never intended to steal it. A scout, the scout Meich had denied her, would have sufficed. This trans-Uranus trip was the farthest out she could ever have expected to be allowed to go. When Don broke his hip it was simply luck: she had been debating how most humanely to incapacitate the last pilot, so that she could take his scout as her Articles promised. The small capsules weren’t comfortable, little more than flying torches, but their ample power would have served to carry her out, and not been worth pursuit.

  Out was all she craved. Out, outward forever, past Oort’s cloud—would she be alive and lucky enough to detect a “sleeping comet”?—outward at greatest acceleration from Sol and all the world of men—out free, in freedom dying, all too soon dead—but her body still flying free. Never to be pursued, touched, known of, by man or humanity.

  Out to end among the stars. It was all she had dreamed of, worked and endured for, rationally.

  No, not quite.

  CP was not always rational, or rather, never “rational” at the core. There was always the thing she called for short the Empire.

  It was noted before that CP had one total secret. The fact that she planned to steal a ship and fly out to her death she of course kept secret. But it was not her Secret, and it wasn’t even unique. Others before her had now and then gone berserk under the strains of man’s world, and taken off on death-flights to nowhere. Such loss of valuable equipment was spoken of rarely but very disparagingly, and accounted for much of the Managers’ endless stringent screening, testing, and rechecking practices in space. But this plan was not her Secret.

  “The Empire” was. The Empire of the Pigs.

  The Empire was everything and nothing. It was basically only a story, a voice unreeling endlessly in her head. It had started before she could remember, and gone on ever since. It accounted for the inhuman sanity of her behavior, for her unshakable endurance under intolerable stress. It was an insanity that kept her functioning with superior competence and rationality, and it was known or suspected by nobody at all.

  Not even the prespace test psychologists with all their truth serums and hypnotic techniques and secret, ceaseless spy records over every private, drug-relaxed hour of her test month, not even their most artfully sympathetic human-to-human congratulatory wind-downs, which had in the end brought so many secrets to so many hard-guarded lips; none of it had unsealed CP’s. Her Secret lived unsuspected, unhinted-at to any other human soul.

  Somewhere in her early years she had seized a chance to study the disapproved findings of psychology. What she really wanted was to know if the voice in her head meant she was truly crazy, although she didn’t admit that to herself. It probably did, she decided subliminally, and buried her Secret deeper. As usual, she also studied hard and efficiently in the brief time allowed, and this knowledge helped her later to fend off assaults on her mind and to gratify those who controlled her fate.

  The story had started very early.

  She’d always been told she looked like a pig. One day the honors children were given a great treat—a visit to the city zoo. Here she saw a real pig; in fact, a great boar and sow. She lingered to read every word on the cage card. It told her how intelligent pigs were—and by nature cleanly, too. And somehow there started in her small head the story of the Empire of the Pigs.

  The Empire was very far away on Earth, perhaps beyond the Chicago Pits. At first everyone in the Empire looked just like her, and life was simply very good. Every night, no matter how exhausted she was, Snotface would live there for a few instants. It took months of such instants to develop each satisfying aspect or event.

  In the tale she always referred to herself as the Pig Person. At some early point things changed a little: she had volunteered to be surgically altered for temporary exile among Yumans.

  And then one day she was taught about the stars. Right in the classroom her world gave a sort of silent snap, and the Empire moved off Earth, forever. Perhaps the Voice started too, she never troubled to make sure. She couldn’t think then; she feared being inattentive.

  But that night excitement fought off fatigue as she thought of the Empire in the stars. It was relatively quiet in the dormitory; she remembered that a star or something said ve
ry, very faintly but clearly, “Yes.”

  She fell asleep.

  This starward move gave whole new dimensions to the physical Empire. She busied herself with adjustments and composing new, delicious stories of life there and the joys she would later return to.

  Another quiet night the Voice said, stronger, “Come.”

  Such events she accepted tranquilly but happily. She would certainly come. Although even then a tiny part of her mind knew too that her return would also mean her end. This didn’t disturb her; dying wasn’t uncommon in Snotface’s world.

  The story soon grew very complicated, developed and abandoned subbranches, and changed greatly over the years.

  Quite early the Empire people changed from being literal pigs to a somewhat shadowy physical form—though always entirely real. In one phase they ceased to be of two sexes. About that time her unexplained exile also changed, first to an exciting spy mission. Real, Earthly pigs were sometimes failed spies, or persons being punished by some power. In one episode the Pig Person rescued them and helped them resume their real forms. “Pig” also took on an acronymic meaning, which she didn’t use much: “Persons in Greatness.” One of the main branches of the story, which tended to take over as she grew older, also had a title: “The Adventures (or Reports) of the Pig Person on Terra.”

  All this complex activity kept the deep inside of CP’s head very busy, without in the least interfering with all her learning and work.

  By the time she went to space, a typical entry might transcribe thus (in this branch she wasn’t primarily a spy but a stranded, shipwrecked traveler trying—successfully—to work out her way home):

  Today the Pig Person judged best to open her legs twice to accommodate the hard, fleshy protuberances characterizing two male Yumans. One Yuman requested her to conceal her face during the procedure, so she improvised a mask from her underwear (see note on male-female Yuman attire). The Yuman appeared gratified. This is important because on return from this flight he will be promoted to Personnel Assignment, where he could help the Pig Person acquire more skills on some of these Yuman-type spacecraft. The Pig Person also made a mental note to improve this technique by making a real mask—better, masks of several types—as soon as materials can be procured. How her friends in the Empire will enjoy the notion that some poor Yumans cannot look at her fine Pig face without losing the ability to erect their absurd organs! But however amusing this is, the Pig Person must positively bend all efforts to returning to the Empire before all her information becomes obsolete.