“They said an hour.”
“And how long before we would get crushed?”
The doctor shrugs. “Your programmed autopilot seems to be leveling us off,” she says.
Ah. So maybe we would live. Relieving. I walk forward, peering out of the windows. We’re in what looks like a red fog now, the light inside tinted with the color. Everyone looks angry in this kind of lighting, or at least out of breath. Nothing to do but wait for the Air Guard.
The prospect of being arrested doesn’t do much for me. I sit down in a funk and continue staring at the shifting hues outside.
“What are you even doing down here?” The doctor asks. “Spacers don’t even come down to the cities anymore.”
I turn back to look at her.
“I’m bankrupt.”
“I thought all spacers were rich,” one of the men says.
“Well I’m not,” I snap. “There are costs, right? You have to fuel the ship. Make repairs. Hire crew. Find cargo. And most importantly, invest intelligently.” I look around at them. “I left here sixty years ago with a couple thousand in a bank account and some various investments. It was everything I had left after paying for my ship’s needs.” I had taken the money from Suzy, planning to pay her back in spades when I returned. “The depression wiped it all out by the time I came back.” Though if I had come back twenty years earlier I would have been a multi-billionare.
“You’re not a very lucky spacer,” the doctor observes.
I shake my head.
“No, I’m not.” But at least the doctor sounds sympathetic, unlike Vince, who ridiculed me for days straight about it. “I left people behind when I skipped out because I was close to broke sixty of your years ago as well. Now I don’t even have them.” Vince led me down to the floating cities of Riley as last-ditch effort to save ourselves.
Floating ghost cities. He’d been nuts in the end.
“I’m really sorry for doing this to you guys,” I say. The men all nod. “It’s okay.”
The doctor stands up. “Don’t you dare sympathize with him like that. When the Air Guard rescues us we’re booking charges. All of us.”
“I . . .”
“Look, does he even know any of our names? Did he even bother to check our names before he took us all hostage on his crazy last spacer joyride?”
I try to recall if I checked their names. I don’t think I did.
“That’s right,” she says. “Didn’t even bother, did you?”
I have nothing to say to that.
The man closest to me speaks up. “Well, my name is . . .”
“Don’t do that,” she yells. “Don’t give him your name. You don’t want him showing up on your doorstep one day, do you? Don’t forget, he’s probably unstable. He’s got some sort of implant problem. Just wait until the Air Guard gets here. Don’t talk to him anymore.”
She sweeps past us all, hoop skirt bouncing, to go use the bathroom. The men look anywhere in the gondola but at me or at the door to the head.
I distract myself similarly by wondering if her waste will suffer the same fate as the keys to my handcuffs? I imagine the carbon-based remains will be compressed into the form of diamonds by the time they reach the core of Riley.
Back when Riley was colonized, scientists tried to study what the pressure did to things dropped in Riley’s lower atmospheres, but apparently the depression killed the more speculative kinds of exploration like that. And any diamond prospectors formed up during the first years of colonizing Riley had quickly turned to finding other ways to make a living.
Like making airships to trade between the great floating cities.
• • •
It’s a long, quiet hour before the Air Guard ship snares us. The gondola shakes a bit, and then a long snaking tube attaches itself to the airlock. My cuffs are still on, so I’m sure that will just make their job easier.
Someone knocks on the door to the airlock. The doctor opens it, and Suzie walks in. She’s frail, but wearing her old blue and red Air Guard uniform and projecting authority.
“Get up the chute,” she orders the colonists.
The men grab the pilot’s body and scramble up awkwardly through the tube with it. I watch as the doctor pulls off her hoopskirt.
She looks back at me.
I start to ask her name, but Suzie steps between us and the doctor starts scrambling away.
“Hi, Suzie.”
“You wouldn’t believe the strings I had to pull to get here this quick. I had to get back aboard one of my old ships just to come after you.” She shakes her head.
“But thank you so much,” I say. I reach out to hug her. She pulls out a stun gun, fires it at my chest, and I drop to the floor of the gondola, convulsing.
“You self-involved asshole.” She grabs the ball gag from the corner of the room and ties it back on me.
“Mfff?” “I’ve had sixty years to despise you. My secretary program, on the other hand, based on a younger version of me, is quite infatuated with you. Well, at least my memories of you.” Suzie is quite strong for a ninety year old. She’s hogtied me with a piece of rope around my ankles and the handcuffs, and dragged me to the back of the gondola. “But she came up with quite a compromise. We come get your Id, which is the real you that we always loved anyway. I always sensed he was in charge when we were together back then. And then I get to kill you.” She points the stun gun right at my temple. “I’ll turn you into a vegetable right now unless you boot your neural network up and give us Vince.”
I need little convincing. She can have him. I hold up my cuffed hands. Suzie grabs them. A data link opens, using the very conductivity of our skin to transmit all the necessary information, and I reboot my entire neural net. All those chips in my spine warm up.
Vince appears, looks around, and swears as I allow the data transmit. He dissolves, fading away in the air in front of my eyes. Suzie’s body network has him now.
He’s gone, and Suzie has a big grin on her face as she lets go of my hands. She headbutts the wall, giving herself a bad bruise on the cheek. “I’m going to tell them you resisted my attempt to save you,” she says, walking over to the airship controls. She kills all the communications, then takes out her stun gun and fires it into the control panel. Sparks fly. I check. I’m unable to piggyback a signal out of the gondola. “That you were crazy right there at the end. They’ll believe me too. You’re suicidal, and dangerous, and there is no reason for anyone to attempt to come back in here.”
A trickle of blood runs down the side of her nose as she walks over to the airlock door.
“You should have told me you were going to leave, sixty years ago, Vincent. Or at least invited me aboard your damn ship.”
“Uhmfff mfffmfff,” I say, and meaning it.
“It’s too late for sorry,” Suzie says. “I’ve let some of your gas out on the airbag. You won’t be able to rise, but you might be able to float around on the level you’re until you starve or die of dehydration. Good bye, Vincent, it was so nice to see you again.” She gets in the airlock. The tube pulls away and she’s gone. The Air Guard is gone. They’re not coming back.
• • •
It takes the better part of an hour to free myself and stand up. Again I ripped off the gag.
I have my advanced senses though. I can see thermals outside. I can find out how to fly this airship. Each instrument has a tiny instruction manual icon floating over it.
As I sit in the pilot’s chair, trying not to freak myself out because he’d only been in it just an hour earlier, Vince appears next to me.
“Shit!” I scream.
“Relax, I’m not going to hijack you again,” he says.
“You didn’t get . . .”
“I really didn’t want to end up with those two psychos. Gave them a copy of myself that will self-destruct in a few hours. Wouldn’t want to miss out on all the fun here.”
“Me dying?”
“Well,” Vince says, “the airbag th
ing is a problem of course. But remember when I said you should trust me?”
“You always say that,” I sigh.
“Who decided to make a run for it sixty years ago when we realized we were almost bankrupt?”
“Me.”
“Right. Now what you should have done was listen to me then.” Vince walks around behind me. “I told you it was a bad idea. It felt wrong, didn’t it?”
“You wanted to buy an airship,” I say. “But wouldn’t tell me why.”
“I told you to research what happens at the heart of a gas giant,” Vince admonishes me from the other side of the chair.
“You moron,” I snap. “Most theories propose a giant diamond at the center of the giant, squashed into being by all those pressures at that depth. Which, if you’re thinking of trying to get at it, means we get crushed too. You know what else, diamonds really aren’t worth all that much these days.”
Vince pretends hurt. He claps a virtual hand over his chest.
“Why are you focused on one big diamond?”
I frown.
“Every day these aerostat cities are dumping carbon-based trash that falls downward,” Vince says. “Where it gets crushed. But look around you,” he points at the roiling cloud we’re in, and at the massive upwelling thermals.
Deep down at their hearts they’re strong enough to throw almost anything up. And no tourist ship has gone this near. Civilized cities and easy tourist jaunts avoid that kind of turbulence.
“No diamond prospector ever found anything when they first came to Riley, even in the upwells,” I say. “Yes,” Vince says. “But that was before almost seventy years of dumping trash into the atmosphere, right? It was virgin then. Humans hadn’t been dumping shit into the lower atmospheres yet.”
I’m dumbfounded. He’s got a point.
“Do you trust me?” he asks again.
This time it is from somewhere inside me. Looking down in the depths of Riley, I’ve managed to reclaim my Id.
“I want to see this,” I whisper, as we begin to slide downwards.
“Better buckle in, then,” Vince says in a last fading whisper.
• • •
There are journeys, and then there are rides, and this was a ride to hell and back. Or at least Riley’s version of hell. I slipped ever downward to the thermal my former Id had identified as the prime upwell spot, trusting my instincts to bring the airship as far down into the depths as had ever been done.
We floated through a sea of diamond specks before we smacked the heart of the upwell and rode the thermal. It was like straddling a rocket straight back up. It spit us out high enough that we coasted into the nearest aerostat city with several hundred feet of altitude to spare.
We landed covered in diamond dust.
• • •
Several weeks later I’m standing near the great foam pillars of the courthouse. Suzie spots me waiting for her to come out, stops, then walks over. A green and red police droid follows two steps behind her.
“Hello, Vincent.”
She doesn’t seem too surprised to see me. We’ve faced each other in court for the past week . But all that’s over. The best psychiatrists, lawyers, journalists, and judges have all pored over our plights. I’m acquitted of murder, but my implants have been torn from me so that there is no danger of my Id getting free again.
And I had to cover court costs. My starship was confiscated and auctioned off. The Riley government took its share of the court costs, Air Guard rescue fee, taxes, and handed me the rest.
“I never felt like I got to finish things,” I say. “Or properly apologize.”
She shakes her head sadly.
“And even if you do, so what? You’re going to leave on your spaceship for any number of years while I wither away here again? You’re wasting your time if you think there’s anything to rescue with us.”
“I sold it,” I tell her. “I don’t have a ship anymore.” She starts walking away from the courthouse. The droid and I follow her.
“I would like to give you the money back, with interest.” It’s almost everything I have left.
“And then what are you going to do here, on Riley?”
“Buy an airship, offer some very hair-raising tours of this world. Famous tours that spacers will come to try from all over.” It feels like something I’ll be good at, the pit of my stomach agrees with this. Deep down, I’ve always liked airships.
We walk together a little further before she stops. “You don’t just get forgiveness like that,” she says. “It just doesn’t happen like that.”
Her sentence involved guided therapy and personality adjustment. That and a twenty-four hour police droid for a year until the therapy kicked in fully.
I reach over and grab her hand, softly, and place a diamond in it.
“A memento,” I explain. “It was lodged in one of the spars when I got back.”
She pockets it and suddenly laughs. It is a symbolic thing for me. Important. I want to try and undo some of the damage. I’m not sure how to take the laughter.
“Okay Vincent. I’m drugged up out of my mind right now, and it makes some sort of warped sense. At the very least,” she smiles, “I’m no longer interested in killing you.”
“Thank you,” I say. It’s a start.
We part.
I walk down a plastic city street, looking up at the great city guywires that lead to the superstructures of pressurized gas that hold us up.
I wonder how hard it would be to get an entire city down to the diamond sea far below my feet?
The Shackles of Freedom
with Mike Resnick
A year after going to the Clarion workshop in Lansing I’d published a few stories. Mike Resnick emailed me just after they came out and asked if I’d want to collaborate with him on a story for a Baen anthology about freedom called Visions of Liberty.
The first collaboration I’d ever done, it ended up being a lot of fun because I got to see Mike take my errors and fix them.
I came to New Pennsylvania because I was looking for a world with no government, no laws, nothing to hinder me from doing what I pleased.
What I never bargained for was having to live with the consequences of that freedom.
• • •
Mark Suderman was dying on my operating table. His plain blue clothing, stained dark with blood, lay crumpled on the floor. I tried to avoid his brothers’ frightened glances. There was nothing more I could tell them, except to pray.
They couldn’t know it, but he was a dead man before I ever got a chance to examine him. I simply didn’t have the tools to save his life.
I sighed deeply. So much for freedom. This was the 23rd time I had the freedom to watch a man die that I could have saved.
Hooves clip-clopped in the distance and then echoed their way up the driveway. The rest of the Suderman family had arrived.
“Stay here,“ I told the brothers, then walked out through the dining room to my porch. A plank squeaked as I stopped next to the swing. Mr. Suderman, his hat in hand, stared straight up at me from the bottom of my tiny set of bleached stairs.
I looked down at him, sighed, and gestured to the door. He climbed the three steps and passed by me, but his rough callused hand grabbed my shoulder for a brief instant before he went inside. His wife sat stoically in the buggy, her seat rocking on its suspension slightly as she shifted her weight from side to side. The wind tugged at the strings of her bonnet, and the light from our three moons cast shadows across her face.
I had a sudden impulse to walk over to the buggy—but what could I say? That I might have cured him on some world they couldn’t even see, let alone pronounce?
I had come here because I knew they needed a doctor. So what if they were Amish? There was no constitution, there were no laws prohibiting me from practicing my trade. There were no restrictions at all.
Except for the Amish themselves.
• • •
The sun set by the time the e
lders left with the Sudermans. I began cleaning the table to the flickering light of kerosene lamps. In the brown light it cast the blood wasn’t so noticeable, and not nearly as accusatory.
I could smell manure on the floor, tramped in by Mark’s brothers. The men’s sweat also filled the room, reminding me how unsterile the area was. Finally I left the house and walked down to the far edge of my small, neglected garden with the mop bucket. The misshapen weeds seemed to erupt in fierce protest when I emptied the bucket. Tiny weasel-shaped creatures with scaly skin chittered at me and scampered off.
My house lay close inside a cluster of farms and roads. Just beyond them lay an unfamiliar forest full of alien species creeping in and mixing with our own. I knew the weeds in my own garden. But behind the scraggly dandelions and patchy grass, spirals of unearthly flowers moved in and out of the shadows to the rhythm of the wind.
Instead of going back inside, I sat on the porch swing and shivered. The fourth moon—the largest of the quartet—edged over the hills and made silhouettes of the neighbor’s barn.
I’d never lost so many lives in such a short time, and I was getting sick of funerals.
It didn’t make any sense. I was free to try to convince them to let me save them. They were free to die unnecessarily. And there was no one, no higher authority I could appeal to. Except God.
And unlike me, they talked to Him every day, welcomed Him into their houses and their lives. They knew He was on their side.
I sighed and went back into the house.
Mark hadn’t died doing anything glamorous like beating back the wild forest of a new planet. He’d been milling grain, and had fallen between the giant wheels. The hardwood cogs chewed him up, spit him out, and left him for me and God—and God washed His hands of the matter.
• • •
At the Yoders I pulled on Zeke’s reins. He snorted and plodded to a nonchalant stop just short of the weathered post I usually tied him to. One of the little Yoders, Joshua, walked down to greet me.
“Guten morning,” he said, mixing his German and English with a smile.
Tides From the New Worlds Page 7
