Six Months, Three Days, Five Others

by Charlie Jane Anders

  A Temporary Embarrassment in Spacetime

  1.

  Sharon’s head itched from all the fake brain implants, and the massive cybernetic headdress was giving her a cramp in her neck. But the worst discomfort of all was having to pretend to be the loyal servant of a giant space blob. Pretending to be a thing instead of a person. This was bringing back all sorts of ugly memories from her childhood.

  The Vastness was a ball of flesh in space, half the size of a regular solar system, peering out into the void with its billions of slimy eyemouths. It orbited a blue giant sun, Naxos, which used to have a dozen planets before The Vastness ate them all. That ring around The Vastness wasn’t actually a ring of ice or dust, like you’d see around a regular planet. Nope—it was tens of thousands of spaceships that were all docked together by scuzzy umbilicals, and they swarmed with humans and other people, who all lived to serve The Vastness.

  The Vastness didn’t really talk much, except to bellow “I am everything!” into every listening device for a few light-years in any direction, and also directly into the minds of its human acolytes.

  After five days, Sharon was getting mighty sick of hearing that voice yelling in her ear. “I am everything!” The Vastness roared. “You are everything!” Sharon shouted back, which was the standard response. Sharon really needed a shower—bathing wasn’t a big priority among the devotees of The Vastness—and she was getting creeped out from staring into the eyes of people who hadn’t slept in forever. (The Vastness didn’t sleep, so why should its servants?)

  “We’re finally good to go,” said Kango’s voice in Sharon’s earpiece, under the knobby black cone she was wearing over her cranium.

  “Thank Hall and Oates,” Sharon subvocalized back.

  She was standing in a big orange antechamber aboard one of the large tributary vessels in the ring around The Vastness, and she was surrounded by other people wearing the same kind of headgear. Except that their headgear was real, and they really were getting messages from The Vastness, and they would probably not be thrilled to know that her fake headgear actually contained the ship’s hypernautic synchrotrix, which she’d stolen hours earlier.

  Sharon and Kango had a client back on Earthhub Seven who would pay enough chits for that synchrotrix to cover six months’ worth of supplies. Plus some badly needed upgrades to their ship, the Spicy Meatball. If she could only smuggle it out of here without the rest of these yo-yos noticing.

  Kango had finally spoofed The Vastness’s embarkation catechism, so the Meatball could separate from the ring without being instantly blown up. Sharon started edging toward the door.

  “I am everything!” The Vastness shouted through every speaker and every telepathic implant on the tributary ship, including Sharon’s earpiece.

  “You are everything!” Sharon shouted . . . just a split second later than everyone else in the room.

  She was halfway to the door, which led to an airlock, which led to a long interstitial passageway, which led to a junction, which led to a set of other ships’ antechambers, beyond which was the airlock to the Meatball, which they’d disguised to look just like another one of these tributary ships.

  Sharon tried to look as though she was just checking the readings on one of the control panels closer to the exit to this tributary ship. The synchrotrix was rattling around inside her big headdress, and she had to be careful not to damage it, since it was some incredibly advanced design that nobody else in the galaxy had. Sharon was so close to the exit. If she could just . . .

  “Sister,” a voice behind her said. “What are you doing over there? How do your actions serve The Vastness?”

  She turned to see a man with pale skin and a square face that looked ridiculous under his big cybernetic Pope hat, staring at her. Behind him, two other acolytes were also staring.

  “Brother, I . . .” Sharon groped around on the control table behind her. Her hand landed on a cup of the nutritious gruel that the servants of The Vastness lived on. “I, uh, I was just making sure these neutron actuator readings were aligned with, uh, the—”

  “That screen you are looking at is the latrine maintenance schedule,” the man said.

  “Right. Right! I was concerned that The Vastness wouldn’t want us to have a faulty latrine, because, um . . .”

  “I am everything!” The Vastness shouted.

  “Because, I mean, if we had to wear diapers—you are everything!—then I mean, we wouldn’t be able to walk as quickly if The Vastness might require when it summons . . .”

  Now everybody was staring at Sharon. She was so damn close to the door.

  “Why did you not make your response to the Call of The Vastness immediately?”

  “I was just, uh, so overcome with love for The Vastness, I was momentarily speechless.” Sharon kept looking at the man while groping her way to the door.

  The man pulled out a gun—a Peacebreaker 5000, a nice model, which would have been worth some chits back on Earthhub Seven—and aimed it at her. “Sister,” he said. “I must restrain you and deliver you to the Head Acolyte for this sector, who will determine whether you—”

  Sharon did the only thing she could think of. She shouted, “I am everything!”

  The man blinked as she spoke the words reserved only for The Vastness. For a second, his mind couldn’t even process what he had just heard—and then the cupful of cold gruel hit him in the face.

  The man lowered his gun just long enough for Sharon to make a lunge for it. Her headdress cracked, and the synchrotrix fell out. She caught it with her left hand while she grabbed for the gun with her right hand. The man was trying to aim the gun at her again, and she head-butted him. The gun went off, hitting one of the walls of the ship and causing a tiny crack to appear.

  Both of the women had jumped on Sharon and the man, and now there were three acolytes trying to restrain her and pry the gun and synchrotrix from her hands. She bit one of the women, but the other one had a chokehold on her.

  “I am everything!” shouted The Vastness.

  “You are everything!” responded everyone except Sharon.

  By the time they’d finished giving the ritual response, Sharon had a firm grip on the gun, and it was aimed at the head of the shorter of the two women. “I’m leaving here,” Sharon said. “Don’t try to stop me.”

  “My life means nothing,” the woman said, with the gun right against her cone-head. “Only The Vastness has meaning.”

  “I’ll shoot the other two after I shoot you,” said Sharon. She had reached the door. She shoved the woman into the antechamber, leapt through the doorway, and pushed the button to close the door behind her. The door didn’t close.

  “Crap,” Sharon said.

  “The overrides are on already. You won’t escape,” the woman Sharon had threatened at gunpoint gloated. “Praise The Vastness!”

  “Screw The Vastness,” said Sharon, aiming at the crack in the ship’s hull and pulling the trigger on the Peacebreaker 5000. Then she took off running.

  2.

  “You took your time.” Kango was already removing his own fake headdress and all the other ugly adornments that had disguised him as one of The Vastness’s followers. “Did anybody see you slip away?”

  “You could say that.” Sharon ran into the Spicy Meatball’s control area and strapped herself into the copilot seat. “We have to leave. Now.” She felt the usual pang of gladness at seeing Kango again—even if they got blown up, they were going to get blown up together.

  Just then, The Vastness howled, “I have been robbed! I am everything, and someone has stolen from Me!”

  “I thought you were the stealthy one.” Kango punched the ship’s thrusters and they pushed away from The Vastness’s ring at two times escape velocity. “You’re always telling me that I make too much noise, I’m too prone to spontaneous dance numbers, I’m too—what’s the word—irrepressible, and you’re the one who knows how to just get in and get out. Or did I misinterpret your whole ‘I’m a master of
stealth, I live in the shadows’ speech the other day?”

  “Just drive,” Sharon hissed.

  “You just think you’re better than me because I’m a single-celled organism, and you’re all multicellular,” said Kango, who looked to all outside appearances like an incredibly beautiful young human male with golden skin and a wicked smile. “You’re a cellist. Wait, is that the word? What do you call someone who discriminates against other people based on the number of cells in their body?”

  They were already point three light-years away from The Vastness, and there was no sign of pursuit. Sharon let out a breath. She looked at the big ugly blob of scar tissue, with all of its eyemouths winking at her one by one, and at the huge metallic ring around its middle. The whole thing looked kind of beautiful in the light of Naxos, especially when you were heading in the opposite direction at top speed.

  “You know perfectly well that I don’t hold your monocellularity against you,” Sharon told Kango in a soothing tone. “And next time, I will be happy to let you be the one to go into the heart of the monster and pull out its tooth, and yes, I know that’s a mixed metaphor, but . . .”

  “Uh, Sharon?”

  “. . . but I don’t care, because I need a shower lasting a week, not to mention some postindustrial-strength solvent to get all this gunk off my head.”

  “Sharon. I think we have a bit of an issue.”

  Sharon stopped monologuing and looked at the screen, where she’d just been admiring the beauty of The Vastness and its ring of ships a moment earlier. The ring of ships was peeling ever so slowly away from The Vastness and forming itself into a variation of a standard pursuit formation—the variation was necessary because the usual pursuit formation didn’t include several thousand Joykiller-class ships and many assorted others.

  “Uh, how many ships is that?”

  “That is all of the ships. That’s how many.”

  “We’re going to be cut into a million pieces and fed to every one of The Vastness’s mouths,” Sharon said. “And they’re going to keep us alive and conscious while they do it.”

  “Can they do that?” Kango jabbed at the Meatball’s controls, desperately trying to get a little more speed out of the ship.

  “Guys, I’m going as fast as I can,” said Noreen, the ship’s computer, in a petulant tone. “Poking my buttons won’t make me go any faster.”

  “Sorry, Noreen,” said Sharon.

  “Wait, I have a thought,” said Kango. “The device you stole, the hypernautic synchrotrix. It functions by creating a Temporary Embarrassment in spacetime, which lets The Vastness and all its tributary ships transport themselves instantaneously across the universe in search of prey. Right? But what makes it so valuable is the way that it neutralizes all gravity effects. An object the size of The Vastness should throw planets out of their orbits and disrupt entire solar systems whenever it appears, but it doesn’t.”

  “Sure. Yeah.” Sharon handed the synchrotrix to Kango, who studied it frantically. “So what?”

  “Well, so,” Kango said. “If I can hook it into Noreen’s drive systems . . .” He was making connections to the device as fast as he could. “I might be able to turn Noreen into a localized spatial Embarrassment generator. And that, in turn, means that we can do something super super clever.”

  Kango pressed five buttons at once, triumphantly, and . . . nothing happened.

  Kango stared at the tiny viewscreen. “Which means,” he said again, “we can do something super super SUPER clever.” He jabbed all the buttons again (causing Noreen to go “ow”), and then something did happen: a great purple-and-yellow splotch opened up directly behind the Spicy Meatball, and all of the ships chasing them were stopped dead. A large number of the pursuit ships even crashed into each other because they had been flying in too tight a formation.

  “So long, cultists!” Kango shouted. He turned to Sharon, still grinning. “I created a Local Embarrassment, which collided with the Temporary Embarrassment fields that those ships were already generating, and set up a chain reaction in which this region of spacetime became Incredibly Embarrassed. Which means . . .”

  “. . . none of those ships will be going anywhere for a while,” Sharon said.

  “See what I mean? I may only have one cell, but it’s a brain cell.” He whooped and did an impromptu dance in his seat. “Like I said: You’re the stealthy one, I’m the flashy one.”

  “I’m the one who needs an epic shower.” Sharon pulled at all the crap glued to her head while also putting the stolen synchrotrix safely into a padded strongbox. She was still tugging at the remains of her headgear when she moved toward the rear of the ship in search of its one bathroom, and she noticed something moving in the laundry compartment.

  “Hey, Kango?” Sharon whispered as she came back into the flight deck. “I think we have another problem.”

  She put her finger to her lips, then led him back to the laundry area, where she pulled the compartment open with a sudden tug to reveal a slender young woman curled up in a pile of dirty flight suits, wearing the full headgear of an acolyte of The Vastness. The girl looked up at them.

  “Praise The Vastness,” she said. “Have we left the ring yet? I yearn to help you spread the good word about The Vastness to the rest of the galaxy! All hail The Vastness!”

  Sharon and Kango just looked at each other, as if each trying to figure out how they could make this the other one’s fault.

  3.

  Sharon and Kango had known each other all their lives, and they were sort of married and sort of united by a shared dream. If a single-celled organism could have a sexual relationship with anybody, Kango would have made it happen with Sharon. And yet, a lot of the time, they kind of hated each other. Cooped up with Noreen on the Spicy Meatball, when they weren’t being chased by literal-minded cyborgs or sprayed with brainjuice from the brainbeasts of Noth, they started going a little crazy. Kango would start trying to osmose the seat cushions and Sharon would invent terrible games. They were all they had, but they were kind of bad for each other all the same. Space was lonely, and surprisingly smelly, at least if you were inside a ship with artificial life support.

  They’d made a lot of terrible mistakes in their years together, but they’d never picked up a stowaway from a giant-space-testicle cult before. This was a new low. They immediately started doing what they did best: bicker.

  “I like my beer lukewarm and my equations ice-cold,” Kango said. “Just sayin’.”

  “Hey, don’t look at me,” Sharon said.

  The teenage girl, whose name was TheVastnessIsAllWonderfulJaramellaLovesTheVastness, or Jara for short, was tied to the spare seat in the flight deck with thick steelsilk cords. Since Jara had figured out that she’d stowed away on the wrong ship and these people weren’t actually fellow servants of The Vastness, she’d stopped talking to them. Because why bother to speak to someone who doesn’t share the all-encompassing love of The Vastness?

  “We don’t have enough food, or life support, or fuel, to carry her where we’re going,” Kango said.

  “We can ration food or stop off somewhere and sell your Rainbow Cow doll collection to buy more. We can make oxygen by grabbing some ice chunks from the nearest comet and breaking up the water molecules. We can save on fuel by going half-speed or, again, sell your Rainbow Cow dolls to buy fuel.”

  “Nobody is selling my Rainbow Cow dolls,” Kango said. “Those are my legacy. My descendants will treasure them, if I ever manage to reproduce somehow.” He made a big show of trying to divide into two cells, which looked like he was just having a hissy fit.

  “Point is, we’re stuck with her now. Praise The Vastness,” Sharon sighed.

  “Praise The Vastness!” Jara said automatically, not noticing the sarcasm in Sharon’s voice.

  “There’s also the fact that they can probably track her via the headgear she’s wearing. Not to mention she may still be in telepathic contact with The Vastness itself, and we have no way of knowing when she
’ll be out of range of The Vastness’s mental influence.”

  “Oh, that’s easy,” Sharon said. “We’ll know she’s out of range of mental communication with The Vastness when—”

  “You are everything!” Jara shouted in response to a message from The Vastness.

  “—when she stops doing that. Listen, I’m going to work on disabling, and maybe dismantling, her headgear. You work on rationing food and fuel, and figuring out a way to get more without sacrificing the Rainbow Cows.”

  “Do not touch my sacred headpiece,” the girl said at the exact same moment that Kango said, “Stay away from my Rainbow Cows.”

  “Guys,” said Noreen. “I have an incoming transmission from Earthhub Seven.”

  “Can you take a message?” Kango said. “We’re a smidge busy here.”

  “It’s from Senior Earthgov Administrator Mandre Lewis. Marked urgent.”

  “You are everything!” Jara cried while struggling harder against her bonds.

  “Okay, fine.” Kango turned to Sharon. “Please keep her quiet. Noreen, put Mandre on.”

  “You can’t silence me!” Jara struggled harder. “I will escape and aid in your recapture. All ten million eyemouths of The Vastness will feast on your still-living flesh! You will—”

  Sharon managed to put a sound-dampening field up around Jara’s head, cutting off the sound of her voice, just as Mandre appeared on the cruddy low-res screen in the middle of the flight console. Getting a state-of-the-art communications system had not been a priority for Kango and Sharon, since that would only encourage people to try and communicate with them more often, and who wanted that?

  “Kango, Sharon,” Mandre Lewis said, wearing her full ceremonial uniform—even the animated sash that scrolled with all of her many awards and titles. “I can’t believe I’m saying this, but we need your assistance.”