In the evenings, after Ferguson had enjoyed his dinner, he repaired to his quarters, with me in tow. “Come along, boy,” he’d say, “chop chop!” It was like something from an old vid. In his quarters I poured wine — only the finest cheap rotgut from some god-awful underground hydroponic “Chateau Test-Tube” vineyard on Mars. I also made his bed, and laid out his sleepwear, and fetched him cigars, and massaged his malodorous and sticky feet, and polished his boots long past the point where I could see my haggard face in them. I mended his uniform, replaced lost buttons and adjusted piping.
He even let me clean and polish his gleaming Service sidearm, a Proddi ten-millimeter bimodal pistol. Thirty caseless rounds in the magazine, divided into solid slugs and flechette rounds. He’d had the whole ceramocomp fiber frame chrome plated, with mother-of-pearl inlays on the huge grip. Ferguson kept hold of the gun’s keypin while I worked on it, just to make sure I got up to no mischief, while simultaneously letting me see how much raw power he could summon if he wanted to. It was a daunting thing to look into that square barrel, to think about the nanocoating in there, designed to render the barrel frictionless when firing.
Polishing, checking, counting, and reassembling, I wondered which option I would choose, if I were shooting at Ferguson: Solid slugs or flechettes? The flechette cartridges looked a little like old-fashioned shotgun shells, only square in cross-section, with a thin red plastic dome at the business end. When they launched, four hundred surgical ceramic darts shot out at supersonic velocity; they could shred a man to ribbons at close range. The solid slugs, on the other hand, were chunks of aerosmooth depleted uranium, subsonic, and reportedly felt like getting hit by a small moon. Ferguson kept a close watch on me, even as he sipped his Martian rotgut, puffed on his cheap cigars, and watched boylove vids on a large display sheet, chortling pointedly.
Those first three creepy nights, he let me head back to my quarters around 0200. Pain made me hobble; the trip from his quarters to mine seemed to take hours. It felt like I was getting into my bunk just in time to get up and resume the scrubbing — once I’d helped Ferguson with his morning ablutions: scrubbing his hairy back, washing his scarce bristling hair, toweling him off, trying to ignore his rigid member and the predator gleam in his grinning eyes. I knew what he was thinking, that he would have himself a piece of my ass if that’s what it took to make me talk about my visit with Admiral Greaves. He also looked like he might have his way with me regardless. The third night I didn’t sleep, and just lay in my bunk, wide awake, exhausted, shaking with fear, sure he was going to do me before Rudyard came back, before Eclipse left port, which only left him two days.
A man could get himself court-martialled and executed for killing a fellow officer, especially a senior officer.
In three days I had not come close to reaching Deck A; the ship was much bigger than I realized. Ferguson was threatening me with a thrashing unless I picked up my pace. But the harder I worked, the more I damaged my back and knees, and the slower I went.
Visiting the Infirmary, I could see the docs were increasingly angry at Ferguson and his explicit order not to help me beyond basic care. “Why is he doing this to you, son?” they asked me, again and again. I sensed they understood only too well, but needed me to say it.
“I don’t know. He’s just being a bastard,” I said.
And the docs would look at each other. “He is that,” they’d agree, nodding.
I got a letter from my sister, Trish, on Mars, in the city of Viking One in Chryse Planitia, sometime on Day Four. I forget where I was, other than somewhere in the vast black maze of Deck A, putting up with officers and enlisted men stomping back and forth on my freshly-scrubbed deck with their boots, some of them still carrying actual Ganymede soil. I was white-hot with anger by now — and fear, knowing it was either tonight or tomorrow night that I’d be “getting lucky” with Ferguson. Already I was thinking of how I could fight back and get away with it if he tried anything like that, remembering things Sorcha taught me.
And flashing back to life as Dewey’s boy at the Academy, my first year there, and how I’d come so damn close to quitting so many times, so close, even to the point of rounding up the various signatures I needed for the withdrawal application, and needing only one more. So close to escaping. But I cancelled my application every time, despite the pressure, the pain, and the humiliation. And I did it because of Trish. To spite her. To not give her the bloody satisfaction of seeing me quit.
And now, for some reason, she needed to speak to me for the first time in months.
Her message file was subject-lined: “Helllooooo!” I opened it:
Hi Jamie. Um, long time, no see, I know. Sorry. Been pretty well pissed off at you, for being so bloody stubborn. You know I have to have this message screened by Service Security types before it gets to you? Can you believe it? Hell, I don’t even know where you are right now. The Service PR flacks won’t tell me where your ship is, other than some crap about “on assignment.”
So how is it being a rooly-trooly space guy? Huh? Has to be better than being stuck at that damned Academy, I guess. Everybody all professional and genteel and using silver tongs to put sugar in their tea and all that, right? I’m sure you’re having fun. Kind of I wish I was with you. I never told you I was a bit of a closet space geek, too. Used to get insanely jealous of you and Colin. You probably find that hard to believe, huh?
Speaking of Colin. Hmm, how do I say this? I’m writing, well, recording this message for you, ‘cause I just got a message from this woman, Anne, Dad’s current “special friend and colleague” (stupid ambitious tart that she is). Anyway, this Anne, she sent me a note from Europa a short while ago, earlier today. She said Dad’s, um, hmm. Jamie, Dad’s left.
Okay, I’m not handling this well.
I heard Trish’s voice starting to quaver.
He’s emptied his bank account, and sent an application for long-term leave from his current post. This is all news to Anne, who only said that yesterday morning Dad woke her up, shouting. She thought he was gonna hit her or something (interesting history of bottom-feeding prior boyfriends), but he was happy about something. He’d had a dream about Colin, for God’s sake. He’s never told Anne about Colin, of course, so she had no idea what he was talking about. But Dad went on about how Colin was trying to reach him, and that he, Dad, had to get somewhere in particular, so they could, um, “meet”. [Her recollection of what Dad said, therefore not reliable.] Anne said she didn’t understand, and she says Dad didn’t understand what he was saying, either. But he got his headware to take care of the bank thing and the application thing, and he just took off. Anne did some checking. Seems Dad was on a tube transport leaving Ganymede for the Outer System, Proxima, Barnard’s, and onto Sirius, and back. He’s got a Starpass ticket, so he can come and go as he likes out there for the next three months. Three months, Jamie!
What should I do? Should I go after him? Should I stay? Anne says she’s gonna go after him, for all the good that’ll do. Cory says I should do what I think is right. What do you think? You’re the one with the expertise about all this. Where’s he going? Is it possible Colin really did talk to him? I mean, is it like there’s some place out there like the old Greek underworld, where you can turn up and talk to the shades of the dead, ask ‘em how it’s hanging?
Anyway, I’m really worried. I’m sorry to bother you with this, and I’m sorry I haven’t talked to you before this. I’ll try and keep in better touch.
Cory and the spideys say hi!
Trish
I closed the file. Trish and I hadn’t parted on the best of terms. She had warned me against entering the Academy, and following my dream of the stars. She said I didn’t have what some people still called “the right stuff.” Besides, there was a good chance of some kind of hostilities breaking out and the Service getting involved. She said I was made of stuff too s
oft for Service life, and that I should follow Dad, and be an academic of some kind, and spend my days reading and doing a little teaching, tinkering with inventions. That, she said, was my kind of sinecure.
And she was almost certainly right. Trish was a good judge of character, and knew me well having spent most of her life, after Mom left, as surrogate mother for Colin and me.
While I endured the Academy, she was living at an artists’ colony in a hab in the CN Leonis system, learning to paint, hoping to work through feelings she could never articulate in speech. By the time I graduated, she’d moved to Mars, working in media. She could have gotten to Ganymede in one brief tube jump; an overnight trip, even given bad tube weather. But she had made her point a couple of months earlier. I’d come so close to quitting. I was in my final semester. The classes and study and practical sim work were killing me. I had resolved, because of the Dewey business, to opt out of keeping a “boy”, not realizing just how much the system was set up to make senior cadets depend on their services.
I was killing myself, hardly sleeping, keeping my brain stimulated and defatigued with zing — illegal headware boosters — even knowing that zing exposure was damaging my brain. It was only for two or three more months, I told myself.
Trish could see I was losing. “Don’t do what I did, Jamie,” she said, tears in her eyes, holding my hands. “It’s not worth it. Nothing’s worth what you’re doing to yourself.”
But I ignored her and kept going. In the depths of my mind, late at night, in the hour I left myself for rest, I saw Colin, the real space geek of the family. He had been older than I was, better looking than I was, full of promise, a brilliant child, well behaved, and of course loved by all. Dad told his friends what a special kid Colin was, how Colin was going to do great things one day, and how Colin was a natural for the Royal Interstellar Service: Command material, Dad said. Command material! I remember Dad telling his university buddies about his plans for “Captain Dunne.”
Let me back up a little for context.
Mom and Dad separated when we were kids. It was the Colin thing that did them in, I realized later. Mom, who had been a church historian working towards sponsored tenure at the same university as Dad, left the Home System for the fundamentalist districts of New Jerusalem, and the simple life of a good, well-behaved Muslim wife to a man she met in a library virtuum, doing research.
Dad delegated Trish to Mom’s job. She was the oldest, six years older than I, at fourteen. Dad depended on her to look after the home and her snotty little brothers Jamie and Colin while he busted his ass working. He was a Don at Callan College, Winter University, teaching systems theory. He always bitched that the uni didn’t have much of a program, and also lacked the funding to develop a better one. He got the second and third-rate students, and described them over miserable dinners as having “the brains of tubeworms! There were times I thought I should call the bloody paramedics to check for cerebral activity!” He dreamed of the day when he could call the media to announce, “Signs of intelligent life found in Lecture Hall Three!”
Dad also did commercial work, freelance consulting, on the side. One time he invented a cool algorithm for the processing of data in spacecraft navigation avionics, a revolutionary system for the time; the patent royalties kept us going for a few years until the technique was superseded by somebody else’s more commercial implementation, which went on to become an industry standard.
More recently, Dad worked with a team of scientists trying to tame synthetic minds, especially once it became apparent, about fifteen years earlier, that some of these synthetic minds, loose in the immensity of the HSC infosphere, had begun breeding. Some, like the notorious Otaru, had merged themselves into the Planck-scale quantum foam and had begun exploring space on their own, powered by space-time vacuum fluctuations. Dad used to say that talking to these artificial consciousness entities was unbearably frustrating — even more than the dunderheaded students at the university. It wasn’t that the entities were necessarily smarter than us, but that they thought about things so very differently. They were inventing an alien culture out there, where major events occurred over a blur of picoseconds, where dominant cultural paradigms lasted as long as a full second. And where, when Dad and the scientists had managed to coax these entities into spending a few eon-like minutes talking to glacier-paced humans, the minds spoke of searching for the “River.”
I was perhaps eleven or twelve years old at this time, and still thinking about the Kestrel Event. Unknowable, unthinkable forces could reach into our universe and fiddle with a planet-sized object. Dad was convinced those minds out there retained traces of humanity in their “souls.” He’d say, “We built their forebears, and we designed the code from which they sprang forth. They must have some sort of ‘racial memory’ of us deep in their guts.”
He and the other scientists continued trying to use that as a backdoor entrance to understanding those whirring minds. This attempt failed. Dad realized years later, consumed with bitterness, that the entities had long since rewritten themselves to their own designs. We had become as alien to them as they were to us.
Enter Trish: a brainy, dreamy, thoughtful, quiet girl, with secretive brown eyes and an interest in spiders that Dad thought quite unhealthy in a girl. Trish never accepted any of the then-prevailing ideas about what girls should or ought to do. She protested a god-awful lot when Dad pressed her into the surrogate-mother role, until she realized Dad wasn’t listening, that he was too absorbed in his endless mind, where I often suspected he was really searching for Colin to ask him, “Why?”
Trish found other means of protest. Each day she got out of bed, prepared breakfast for Dad and me without a word of complaint, tended to our every want and need, smiling happily throughout, and was the “perfect” daughter. She ran the fab systems, managed the money, got the bills paid, took care of clothing for Dad and me, visited Colin’s slot in the Memorial Garden, made sure I studied, and that Dad ate enough — all while starving herself. It went on for years, until about five years ago, when she was twenty-two, and was hospitalized for the third time. She weighed 34 kilograms, and looked like those people you sometimes see, who have died but are still sort of conscious.
When the doctors explained to my father that Trish’s heart was failing and that she could die, he emerged for the first time in many years, as if from a cocoon that was far too comfortable. Losing one child had been hard enough. So hard he never spoke of it. Trish and I knew it must have been devastating.
Dad and I used to go running in the mornings, even when I was a little kid. He said it was good for me, to stop me getting fat like so many other kids. This particular morning, a cold Tuesday, our breath pluming, we went for our usual run through nearby Holworth Park, at sunrise. I remember being very grumpy and wishing I was still in bed, and bitching that Colin and Trish should have to do this, too. Dad said that Colin was old enough to do his own thing, and besides he already had a good workout program. Trish was different: she was a girl. Which, to my mind, was horribly unfair.
Every day we passed this one struggling jacaranda tree. That morning, we found, hanging from a low branch, a loop of optical cable garroted around the broken neck of his eldest and best-loved son, my older brother, Colin.
So Dad woke up, and found Trish dying, slowly, by her own hand. Like Colin, she was protesting against him, his expectations and impossible demands. Dad changed; it was his way of adjusting and dealing with things. He now expected Trish to start eating, and stop being so stupid and selfish. But there was the unspoken subtext: And get back to looking after your brother and me!
Trish went through a lot of therapy, and eventually escaped to her artists’ colony. She thrived, regained her weight, and worked through her problems. She sent me pix of her paintings. Where Dad had tried to capture something deep inside him of the unknowable alienness out in space, Trish explored her sense of her father�
��s alienness, that to her he was as unknowable and mysterious as any genuine extraterrestrial life form might be. She saw herself as having spent years trying to make him happy, to look after him, but in the end the only way to get his attention had been to do what Colin did, to walk that forbidden path to self-destruction. She and Colin had been close; they were closer together in age than Trish was to me. Colin told Trish how he felt; living under the weight of Dad’s overpowering expectations, that Colin would be the son who would achieve so much. All he wanted was just to be a regular dumb kid with a lust for starships and fabbed junk food. Dad had been blinded by all the psychosocial profiles he and Mom ordered for Colin when he was still a toddler, profiles that said this was a kid among kids, a future leader. They tested me too: a future regular person. Maybe a writer, with my well-developed imagination.
They never tested Trish. She hated them for that omission.
Now Trish lived on Mars, had a good job in media and was building her own company. She had a partner, Cory, whom she said loved her, and she had two pet tarantulas, Abelard and Heloise, who had free run of her home. I imagined the two giant hairy spiders scuttling about the house, scaring to death any stray, unwary bugs. In my headware I carried pix of Trish with Abelard and Heloise perched on her shoulders, on her brown curly hair, on large sheets of Paper, the spiders freaking out as the Paper’s animated surface pixons seethed under their hairy legs.
Fourteen
I was holding my brush so tightly it broke. I threw the pieces across the corridor. They clattered against a Service gray emergency system access panel, and dropped to the deck. I looked around. Officers went about their business in the distance. They looked tiny, irrelevant, nothing to do with me.
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