Year's Best SF 8

by David G. Hartwell

  But what had happened here was no legend, and I was already plotting the quickest, most energy-intensive, least-number-of-stops course back into the system.

  I stepped to the window. A v-jack passed about fifty yards away, turning to regard me as he went. I wondered if he was my contact. I eyed the remote. The one that didn’t belong to Rog Morgan.

  There was neither flash nor glimmer nor repeat of the message: “Meet in 1 hr.” Three-quarters of that hour remained. The Halo had taught me patience, but that was still forty-five minutes too many for the way I was feeling.

  My skin tautened as I stepped into vacuum and the striated tissue in my third dermal layer reacted. I paused while my airway valves adjusted themselves, squinted against the sudden pressure of the retinal membranes. My system was nowhere near as elaborate as those of the crew—I could remain in vacuum a few hours at most, and I lacked radiation protection—but neither situation was a factor here. Time was irrelevant, the only radiation the odd cosmic ray.

  The one-gee pull continued, giving me cause to wonder whether they’d been doing me a favor after all. Stepping to the platform’s edge, I took a look around.

  There’s no such thing as resupply in the Halo. You either bring it along, fabricate it, or do without, and the crews with the broadest capabilities get the best jobs. The Powder Monkeys were no slouches at capability, as any offhand examination of their work hall revealed. A structure of considerable size, several hundred yards in each dimension of a space that could be called a rough-to-the-extreme cube, the object within it having no particular relation to any actual shape whatsoever. A hall is part warehouse, part refinery, part industrial center, part barracks, and part vehicle, though no amount of study could separate one component from the other amid the mass of catapults, effectuators, nets, tankage, piping, cables, power sources, and mystery boxes.

  Beneath my feet the glare of the work area silhouetted the torpedo shape of my ride. As much as I shaded my eyes I could make out next to nothing; it was too hazy for details. I felt a rumbling which gave me a short spell of goosebumps: a jack had mentioned that vapor pressure sometimes got so high you could actually hear the cometary fluids being pumped. On second thought, I decided it was more likely some piece of machinery within the hall.

  Five minutes passed without anyone showing up. I was early, but I also suspected that time-honored motive common to all such situations: the urge not to be seen ratting to a cop. I took out the remote. I still had no idea what it was for, which was probably begging the question—most models were multifunctional.

  Without turning, I took a step back toward the lock. The remote flashed red, obligingly repeated when I moved to the left. A swing to the right resulted in a reassuring green. I looked around, fulfilling the age-old cop tradition of trying not to be spotted before a meet, then took another step. The remote blinked green once again.

  The gee-field’s disappearance at the edge of the platform didn’t quite take me unaware, though I was glad no one was around to criticize my form when I kicked off. I landed on a catwalk that swung 90° around a dark box with a man-sized “3” painted on the side before plunging into the fractal mess of the hall. Inside I passed a quivering set of tanks, ducked beneath some pipes, then went up a ramp and through a pressurized area (no oxygen—my skin remained taut) before again turning toward the hall’s exterior. Back in the open I endured a moment’s confusion while figuring out that the remote wanted me to go vertical, up the side of a huge tank open to space, its top invisible from where I stood. I was well past the curve before I caught sight of him, waiting at the crown of the tank in an enclosure containing pumping controls. He floated above the platform, legs crossed, helmetless head slightly bowed, eyes taking in endless night.

  I felt a flash of irritation. A monastic—wasn’t that fine. Not everyone out here is schizo. We get all kinds: the grand pioneers who can’t live without a frontier to push at, researchers trying to pin answers on various arcane questions (e.g., whether Kuiper-Oort is a strictly local phenomenon or simply the solar portion of a cometary field stretching across the whole wide Universe), the odd tourist aching to be able to say that he’d really been further out than anybody else, fugitives on the run from assorted cops or tongs, and these: the seekers, contemplatives in search of some kind of spirituality evidently unavailable inside the Heliopause, looking for the ultimate quiet place that might hold a door into the center of things.

  There’s a lot of them, following every conceivable religion, system, or cult, even a few original to themselves, and while I don’t disrespect them, they’re not the first I’d go to for any given set of facts.

  So it was with a sense of wasted time that I finally reached the platform. As I’d expected, it was the small man who’d handed me the remotes. He displayed no reaction as I slipped a foot through the railing to steady myself, simply continued gazing off into the abyss, face as blank as the sky itself. It would be just my luck to show up seconds after this guy had at last made contact with the infinite ground of being.

  We were on the far side of the hall, shielded from the work site. The sky was darker here, though not as dark as open space—about the same as a moonlit night on Earth. Knowing we were facing home, I tried to find Sol. I could have used one of the crew’s processors to tell me if it was that particularly bright one there…

  I glanced over to find the man’s eyes on me. He took me by surprise, and it was a moment before I showed him the remote, mouthed “Yours, I suppose,” and flicked it in his direction.

  He tossed it right back, with the quick precise movement of a trained v-jack. I was clumsier in catching it. As I did he touched his ear. I imitated him. The remote stuck thanks to some force of its own.

  “Right there.” He pointed at the bright dot I’d been watching a moment before. “So it is,” I replied, not bothering to move my lips.

  “Don’t look like much, eh?”

  “You come out here a lot?”

  “Enough.” He could have been meditating again, for all the animation he revealed. “Morg ain’t workin’ with no duppies.”

  “I didn’t think he was,” I told him. “What was he doing?”

  “What happens with him?”

  “I get him out of here, one way or another.”

  He raised a finger. “Now…I tell you once. No testify, no repeat, nothing.”

  “Just for the record, why not?”

  He faced me again. “I don’t stand with cops, I don’t stand with courts.”

  “Fair enough.”

  “OK. All this happen last year, before Morg join up with the Monkeys…You know what stridin’ is, right?” I nodded. You don’t have to spend much time in the Halo to grasp the nature of striding. Space travel is expensive. In Kuiper-Oort, the cost is multiplied by distance, rarity, and demand. Like workers everywhere, vacuum jacks have methods of cutting corners. One is to fit their suits out with extra oxy, power, and supplies, get somebody to launch them by catapult in the precise direction of their destination, then trance down for the weeks or months required to get there. Somebody else will snag them with a probe when at last they arrive.

  Dangerous, you say? Yeah, it’s dangerous, as the Mandate, most companies, and every active authority in the Halo never cease repeating. It does no good. Jacks are proud of striding, as they are of every other aspect of living like rodents in the outer dark. There’s betting over length, speed, and duration of trip, same as with any other insanely stupid activity Sapiens comes up with. I met the current record holder once. Eighteen months in a trajectory of ten AUs. He’s a little hard to understand due to slight, untreatable brain damage, but quite pleased with himself all the same. Cats will bask in the street, kids will tag rides on trucks, and jacks will stride. A certain inevitable percentage will get run over, flung onto the pavement, or miss their rendezvous.

  Which was what happened to Rog Morgan. Few stride alone, in case of emergencies. There were five jacks, bored with the job or after a better offer or j
ust hankering to move, who set out on a month-long, quarter-AU journey to the second-nearest site. The other four were picked up. Not Morgan. Somebody erred, and even as the others awoke from their weeks-long trance, he kept going.

  Days passed before he became aware of his situation. He responded as a jack, and jacks take things in order. He checked the time. He checked the charts. He tried the radio. Then he went through it all again, step by step, before allowing himself to stare the thing in the face.

  It’s impossible to say what he felt. There’s nothing to compare it to. No man in a lifeboat, or stranded in a desert, or broken and freezing on any pole was ever as alone as Rog Morgan was at that moment. No fear is so great, no regret so deep, as can grow in that place that is no place, where space and time are as close to bare as we are ever likely to know them. We can’t grasp what Morgan felt, any more than he could afterward; it was simply too vast for memory to hold. But consider this: out of the handful of lost striders recovered (a half-dozen out of hundreds, who happened to be aimed Solward, toward the more populous sections of the Halo), five shut down their systems and blew their helmets in preference to enduring another second of what Morgan faced.

  At last his panic and grief receded enough to allow him to resume control. He made a hopeless survey of known work sites, outposts, and Mandate stations to confirm what he already knew. Settled points are few and far between in the Halo, and he would pass none of them.

  He composed a mayday and set his comm system to repeat it on the most power-stingy schedule that made sense. He noted that he was headed in the direction of Sagittarius, a section of sky that he would grow to hate as much as he’d ever hated anything. He turned his head slightly to take in Sol. He patted a side pocket holding a piece of scrim he’d been working on for years. He ate a cracker. And then, jacks being stolid types and Morgan more so than most, he tranced down.

  He traveled a measurable percentage of the width of the solar system before he again awoke. Nothing had changed. He had not expected that anything would. The stars remained frozen. The radio wavelengths were quiet. The world was doing just fine without Rog Morgan. He contemplated the fact, sipped a little glucose, some water, threw a curse or two at Sagittarius, and went back to sleep.

  He didn’t know how many times he awoke after that. More than twice, fewer than ten. They were all the same, and he recalled little more than that sameness. The only thing that varied was difficulty. His power cells began to give out. Then his small store of food. (He put aside some dried fruit, some protein, a few ounces of glucose in case he should need it, but somewhere along the line, without ever remembering, he ate it all.) Jacks use very little water, being enhanced to recycle most of that amount, but even a little gains in importance when you can’t find it. It seemed that between the cold, the hunger, and the thirst (all of which he could control but not evade), Rog Morgan was going to become a member of that elite among men who are killed by more things than one.

  Ketosis set in a short time later. The only sign that his body was cannibalizing his own muscular mass was an abiding and growing sense of weakness far more complete than any he had ever felt before.

  If he dreamed he never spoke of it, and as for prayer, well, a priest once told me that all men pray when things get bad enough. Morgan didn’t say if he did. But I think what Father Danziger meant was that they often pray without knowing it. Maybe hanging on as long as he did, far longer than most could, was Morgan’s form of prayer.

  After a while the dreams turned concrete. His metabolism was breaking down, slowly but inevitably poisoning itself with byproducts it was unable to shed. His dreams began to speak, and he began to answer back. He found himself explaining things to whatever was listening, to Sagittarius, to his past, to something closer than both that he shortly became convinced was contemplating him from out in the dark. He told it how ravaged he was, how lost, how little he had done with his time, how many mistakes he’d made before this last, fatal one. What he might have done had he not been so sure of himself. What he would do if he were given another lifetime to do it in.

  At last he ran down. No answer had come, but he had expected none. A sense of clarity had returned to him, the clarity of approaching night. His mind was as focused as it was ever going to be again. He checked his systems, the way a jack does. Everything, every last element capable of measurement, was deep into the red. It would have horri-fied him a few weeks ago. Now it didn’t bother him at all.

  He unsnapped a battery pouch and with fingers scarcely able to feel put in his ID and a few other personal items. At the last minute he paused to take out the piece of scrim. He held it a moment before slipping it back. He sealed the pouch. With as much strength as he could gather he threw it in the direction of Sol. He watched for a second or two, telling himself he could see it dwindle toward home.

  He listened to the silence, the silence he would be part of within minutes. He looked out at Sagittarius, considering whether there were any words to match what he now knew. He found none. He licked cracked lips with a dry, swollen tongue. “So that’s it…”

  Later he would have sworn that he heard it before actually hearing it, that somehow he’d gotten some echo of it as it surged across the shrunken space his universe had become: “No it’s not.”

  I don’t know what alerted me to the fact that the jack had vanished. I didn’t see him go. The remote went silent, and when I looked up, he’d disappeared. I wasted no time searching—there were too many places he could have gone. What had sent him away was another question, answered the minute I bent over the railing to see three jacks approaching from below. I switched to open freq.

  “…it’s him.”

  “It’s the mandy.” The two wearing helmets waved.

  “Yeah, it’s me,” I told them, trying to keep any trace of annoyance out of my voice. The third was as bareheaded as my contact. Once you’re fitted with vacuum mods, helmets are unnecessary, really. People wear them for the same reason they do at construction sites on Earth, that and the fact that a helmet carries a lot of instrumentation and apps. “A jack’s office,” you often hear them called.

  I backed away as the one in the lead shot a line and reeled them all in, the other two hanging on to various suit projections. “Taking a look at home?” the leader bawled as he hooked a foot under the top rail.

  “That’s Sol right there.” Second helmet indicated a star totally separate and discrete from the one my contact had pointed out.

  “Thanks,” I said. I must have sounded more stiff than I intended—the lead jack raised a hand and said, “We feel a whole lot better now you’re here.”

  “How’s that?”

  “That duppie, man—”

  “Ever see an impi close up…?”

  “Wait—” glanced between them. The one lacking a helmet said nothing, simply continued staring. I wondered if he was out of the loop. “You guys actually saw it? You were there?”

  “I was,” the lead jack said.

  “What happened?”

  “Well, it was like this—”

  “That thing came out of nowhere—” the second helmet said.

  “Wait one…”I pointed at the lead jack. “How’d it start?”

  “We were over the other side of the cracker, inspecting the MHD loops—”

  “Cracker’s what busts up the comets and separates the fluids, see.”

  “Yeah, and loops are the things…well, they’re not things, they’re fields. They separate and contain the fluids, so they’re important. Particularly down near the cracker mouth. Lot of pressure there. Loop starts oscillating, you get leakage—”

  “Contaminate the product,” second helmet said.

  “Right. So—”

  “So you keep an eye on it,” I said, hoping to move him along.

  “Inspect ’em once a day,” first helmet nodded.

  “And it ain’t easy.”

  “Hard to see down there.”

  “That’s right. Hydrocarbon-water f
og. Sticky, wet, screws with your remote signals.”

  “You gotta look close,” second helmet held up his hands to show me how close. “Loops are tight, down near the mouth. Just millimeters apart, vibrating to pump the fluids. And you’re matter, right? Solid matter. So you can slip right through the field—”

  “And they find you froze down around Venus in sixty years.”

  I was getting the picture. Hazardous duty, not something you wanted to be interrupted doing. “So you were inspecting the…loops.”

  “Right, six of us. Working our way out from the mouth, one loop after the other, like a cone, see. Almost out of the haze into open space. And there she was.”

  “She? How’d you know it was a ‘she’?”

  The leader gaped at me. Hard as it is to read expression on a vacuum-adapted face, I knew puzzlement when I saw it. He glanced at his partner. The one with no helmet just stared.

  “Don’t worry about it,” I told them. “She was there.”

  “Right. We might not of noticed except she grazed a remote—”

  “Stash’s.”

  “Yeah. Stash thinks its debris broke out of the processing stream—”

  “Then he says, ‘holy shit!’ ”

  “Yeah, when he sees the readout. Modulated signals, shielded and enciphered, no ID—”

  I crossed my arms. “So what’d you do?”

  “We got the hell outta there!”

  “And she came right after ’em!”

  Second helmet was, if anything, more excited than the one who had actually been there. I had a feeling I’d have gotten a nice, wild, blood-and-thunder yarn out of him, accuracy be damned. “Go ahead.”

  “We yell for help, and kinda spread out with the thing in the middle, see. Pasha—that’s Rey Murat, the string chief, we call him Pasha—grabs our remotes to fill in the gaps. He can do that—he’s got the codes. He says close in, throw an EMP at it. Knock it out or slow it down, at least.”