Losers in Space

by John Barnes

  I used to love his arm around me. Weird. His skin was pale, unhealthy-looking, damp, and cool. He had muscles as flaccid and squishy as an old woman’s. Yet I loved to lay in his arms; he was an ultra good listener.

  I sprawl with just my head off the ledge, looking hullward into the thick white band of the Milky Way. I wish Bari could see this.

  Emerald floats in beside me. “Derlock wants Glisters to record him and me doing some naked dancing, all flirty and holding squeezebulbs of gin, with some grabs and gropes, like we’re drunk.”

  I shrug. “Derlock and I are not declared yet.”

  “I’m trying to be sisterly.”

  I look sideways at her. “And you are. And it’s appreciated. I’m just—you know, I don’t want to party tonight. I don’t feel real good about this, I’m going to get my aunt in a lot of trouble, and Bari…”

  She nods. “You style that so well. Glisters ought to come over here and shoot you being sad; you look ultra more interesting than me bouncing my boobs at your boyfriend-to-be.”

  “Well, maybe to you or me,” I say, “but the splycterage is in bouncing boobs.”

  “Yeah.” She sits next to me. “Want company, or to be alone?”

  I smile as much as I can. “I’m grateful for the company, but don’t miss your chance for good meeds. You want to get shot before everyone’s too blasted and while Glisters is still doing his best work, before he takes enough stuff to feel like a genius.”

  She laughs. “How’d you learn to airswim so well?”

  I tell her a little about being Crazy Science Girl growing up, and it kind of slides over into some girl bonding stuff, about my mom, and Stanley the dog, and even why I call Destiny Anny Dezzy and a lot of other embarrassing, losery sheeyeffinit. Emerald counter shares: she was Crazy Space Gymnast Girl, and her cat was named Dog, which she thought was ultra original until it turns out it goes back almost two hundred years in meeds.

  “We’d probably have been ultra friends if we’d met before Excellence Shop,” she says, “and then we could have had betrayal and rivalry and reconciliations, and we’d’ve had a great story line for meeds.”

  I mean to smile but it comes out really sad. “Fleeta and I were like that. You’d have made a great addition to the team, Emerald, I’m sorry you weren’t at our school.”

  “Your eyes get so sad when you look at Fleeta.”

  “You should get back to Derlock. Don’t let him hog the camera.”

  “No risk with Glisters shooting; you’d think that guy never saw a girl naked before. Hey, we should redo this girl-bondosation in front of him sometime soon; seriously, great hooks in it.”

  “Yeah. Maybe when I’m more over Bari.”

  “Won’t be as good then, you know. The shots where people really feel emotions intensely are the most splycterable hooks. Thanks for understanding about me and Derlock.” She pushes up and airswims away.

  I let my mind empty out and even doze for a bit; I wake up in a sun flash, rolling over till my eyes adjust and I can see stars through the window again. By now the little party is pretty loud; most bloodstreams must be loaded up.

  I airswim up onto the stack of crates beside me and peek over the edge. Glisters is shooting Fleeta’s boobs wobbling around in milligrav; she’s goofing around, giggling at the funny ways she can make them move, and he’s trying, without success, to make her be serious. “But you’re smiling,” she says.

  “You’re having so much fun,” he says, “but the audience wants to see you act hot. Having fun doesn’t get splyctered.”

  Wychee and Emerald are dancing naked with Stack, with a lot of feeling and making out. F.B. is kind of flapping around at the edge, maybe hoping Glisters will ask him to help with the camera.

  I’m missing a chance for major exposure. I still think, No. Not tonight. I airswim to my sleepsack and crawl in.

  Sometime after I doze off, I feel the sack opening, and Derlock says, “Hey.”

  “Hey.” I try for the least-committal “hey” in the history of the universe.

  “We haven’t talked since hearing about Bari.”

  “What happened?”

  “Susan, it’s tearing me up inside, I dosed with the hibernifacient like we talked about, so they’d go into coma, I thought that would get them caught and stop everything, I didn’t know they’d give them a big shot of Fendrisol and anyway I didn’t know about how it interacts with Torporin. I’m so sorry. I know Bari was special to you.” He runs a hand along my neck, strokes my face and hair. “Anyway, I thought you might like me to hold you and comfort you.”

  Derlock’s concept of “hold and comfort” has a 100% overlap with most people’s concept of “sex.” When he’s done I tell him I want some time alone and that I’m too warm with him there. He goes back to his own sleepsack, and I close mine up tight and plummet into deep, dreamless sleep.

  Notes for the Interested, #11

  MILLIGRAVITY: just enough but not too much

  The milligravity in the farm and cargo sections is strong enough so that work crews on the handling floors can put things where they’ll stay put, spilled liquids eventually collect at low points instead of floating around in blobs forever, and plants in the farm sections grow in one direction. Yet it is still weak enough for people to airswim, push grand pianos around one-handed (as long as they watch out for inertia), and sleep on an alclad deck as comfortably as a featherbed.

  On Earth, an object falls 5 meters, about the drop from the roof of a one-storey house, in the first second. In milligrav, in that same first second, that object will fall only 5 millimeters, less than the width of your little finger. Objects gain speed as they fall; on Earth the 100-meter drop from the coretube to the handling floor would take 4.5 seconds and slam you into the floor at 162 kilometers per hour. The same 100 meters if it were all in milligrav would take an hour and fifteen minutes, and you would arrive moving at a good deal less than one kilometer per hour. (That’s why they had such a struggle getting Marioschke down to the deck.)

  But in fact it’s not even milligrav all over the ship; only at the hull. In the rotating ship, gravity depends directly on distance from the center. Milligravity at the hull, a bit over 100 meters from the centerline, means less than 3% of milligravity up at the coretube.

  Thus in this story, workers on the handling floors (along the inner hull) often push objects into place against the floor to save time, because it takes too long to let them fall. Up near the coretube, where gravity is only a small fraction of milligrav, tour guides often demonstrate all the familiar weightless effects, like water forming spheres in midair, tennis balls bouncing all the way down the tube and back, and (if the tour party includes any boys) fart propulsion.

  April 25, 2129. On Virgo, upbound Earth to Mars. 149 million kilometers from the sun, 166 million kilometers from Mars, 3.6 million kilometers from Earth.

  I roll out of my sleepsack and dress quickly; Emerald is dressing beside me.

  “You look surprisingly well for a girl that was dancing drunk all night,” I say.

  She grins. “Styling Party Hot is ultra demanding. I do a better job being an out-of-control drunk for the cam if I keep my squeezebulb filled with apple juice. I don’t remember you ever coming out to join us; I guess you just went to bed?” she asks.

  “Yeah. I felt too bad about Bari.”

  “Yeah. Welcome to the exclusive club of the un-hungover.”

  “Are there any members besides us?”

  She nods. “Fleeta can’t, almost everything interacts with Fendrisol. And Glisters was too busy with his camera.”

  “Yep,” he says. We turn back to realize he’s been shooting us. We pounce on him together; Emerald gets a hammerlock. “Erase,” I say.

  “Susan, I—”

  “Erase,” Emerald says. “And let us see you doing it.”

  “But it would be sure to make the meeds,” he protests.

  “You can shoot me,” I tell him. “Even naked, if you’re nice about it a
nd I’m in a mood for it. But shoot me with bed-head, and you’re gonna be dead-dead.”

  “Deader than that,” Emerald says.

  “Okay, but just look, first, okay? See how pretty that curve of Susan’s thigh is? And Emerald, that expression is so you—”

  “And so are those boobs,” she says. “Yeah, we look zoomed, if you like loser messes. Not splycterable. Erase.”

  He shrugs and does. “It’s a stupid world,” he says, “where people would rather see you glaring at the camera and sticking out the hot parts than looking like your authentic, beautiful, graceful selves—”

  “Nice try,” I say. “Not that we believe a word of it.”

  “I never know what to believe,” Fleeta says, sliding from her sleepsack.

  Glisters reaches for his camera.

  “Ask,” Emerald says.

  Glisters nods. “Fleeta, can I shoot you while you dress?”

  “I won’t look hot.”

  “But you’ll look beautiful.”

  “Why would you want a picture of that?”

  “Because I spend most of my time looking at hot, so it bores me. Beautiful is interesting.”

  “Oh, okay, then.”

  So he shoots, and he has to keep telling her not to pose, just do what she’d naturally do, and when he’s all done, Em and I take a look at his work. “You’re right, she’s beautiful, the way your camera caught her,” I admit grudgingly.

  “Totally unsplycterable, though,” Emerald says.

  “So you don’t like it?” Fleeta asks, obviously scared.

  “You’re beautiful,” I say, truthfully, “and Glisters’s work is actually—um, superb, to tell the truth.” He looks more embarrassed than she does, and he’s not the one whose nipples we’re studying. “It’s just not going to make any money for either of you.”

  Fleeta takes a look, says, “It looks more like me than most pictures do, is that okay?”

  “Ultra okay,” Emerald says. “Zoomed.”

  Glisters says, “I’m hungry. Anyone else want to go do our first raid on the crates?”

  “Does one of us have tools?” I ask.

  “Right here,” Glisters says, holding up a couple drivers. “Also, if we go now, we’ll get firsties at the toilets before the rest start thinking about it.”

  Emerald says, “And those are—”

  “There’s one on Cargo Wall 9, up by the coretube. They put them all over; nobody wants to airswim half a kilometer to get to a bathroom.”

  After the bathroom stop, I say, “Do you suppose the others will figure out where the toilets are, as opposed to improvising something?”

  “Eww,” Emerald says. “Maybe we should tell them?”

  “I mentioned it to Stack and F.B.,” Glisters says, “and anyway you know Wychee and Marioschke will ask. It’ll be okay.”

  So only about half the moes can be trusted not to crap on the floor, but at least I’m having breakfast with the right half. Glisters scans through the manifest through his wristcomp to find a crate of meals from Le Sully on Cargo Wall 88. With all of us proficient airswimmers, it takes only a couple minutes to descend to the handling floor, bound to 88, retrieve the crate, open it, and take a meal each.

  We sit on the nearest window on the handling deck, letting the warm sun flash against our butts every other minute and a half. I know that most mineys eat out of temptrol boxes all the time, but I’ve only used them now and then, for camping trips and take out.

  The keypad on the temptrol box offers me USE SUGGESTED DEFAULTS or SPECIFY INDIVIDUAL ITEM TEMPERATURES. I figure the packager knows how warm things are supposed to be, so I select USE SUGGESTED DEFAULTS, press NOW, and open it. The ham and over-easy eggs are just hot, with a nice chilled vegetable salad, a pichet of red wine at room temperature, and scalding hot espresso.

  “That’s so weird when we fall,” Fleeta says, “all at the same speed, even though we are different sizes. I used to know something about that.”

  Glisters’s tone is gentle, earning ultra points with me. “Probably you’re remembering that gravity does the same thing on Earth—Galileo’s experiment?”

  “But we don’t fall fast like we would on Earth.”

  “No, but inside a gravity field—at least once you take air resistance out of it—everything falls at the same speed. That’s what Galileo proved,” Glisters says.

  Fleeta nods. “I think I was trying to remember that. I used to love knowing things.”

  When someone pretty is happy, Emerald has to get sarcastic. “Then why did you take happistuf?”

  Fleeta’s face screws up with effort, but then her expression clears, like fog blowing off a beach. “Because knowing things only made me a little happy some of the time, but happistuf made me ultra happy all the time. So it’s just like gravity. Different weights but we all fall at the same speed. Like Galileo.” She is obviously delighted with herself.

  “Jesus,” I mutter, sick at heart.

  “Like Galileo and Jesus,” she agrees.

  The silence stretches on till Emerald asks, “Anyone wonder what everyone else is up to?”

  “Well,” I say, “Derlock is thinking up a way to hurt someone, and Stack is helping. F.B. is talking about being a great astronomer, and no one is listening. Wychee is whining, and Marioschke is either still terrified or back to being all spiritual.”

  Emerald clutches her chest. “And we’re missing it!”

  We’re all still laughing when painful, blinding light flashes through the window like a blow directly to my brain. The hull thunders like a drum, and I float off the deck, clutching my face, weightless and tumbling yet crushed. It’s like being a bug slammed in a book and thrown from a plane.

  We hit the window hard, all of us shouting in surprise and pain. We’re sliding along the hull’s inner wall, but down is in the wrong direction, along the hull toward the tail, and the gravity is way too high, as if some giant had just grabbed the ship and stood it on its tail on a planet.

  5

  SEPARATION

  April 25, 2129. On Virgo’s pod. 149 million kilometers from the sun, 166 million kilometers from Mars, 3.7 million kilometers from Earth.

  I STAGGER TO my feet, bumping into Emerald, almost falling across Glisters, who is on his hands and knees; we’re standing on the tail-end bulkhead of the Pressurized Cargo Section, way down at the crew-bubble end of the pod. We slammed down hard; this sudden new gravity feels like more than the moon’s.

  My vision starts to come back through the red and orange blur; I see Fleeta, who is standing in front of me and moving her mouth. Sounds are muted; I’m deaf from that immense boom. After long seconds, her shouting, “What happened?” penetrates through the ringing in my ears. Emerald is shouting, “I don’t know.”

  Glisters’s voice starts to penetrate. “Grav is about one-fifth g and I think we’re turning over in less than two minutes, so that makes it, um… um…” I realize he’s talking the problem through, turn and see him punching away at his wristcomp. I join the shout fest: “Everyone shut up and listen to Glisters!”

  I’m pretty sure no one has ever even thought that sentence before, let alone shouted it. Maybe that’s why Glisters is standing there with his mouth hanging comically open.

  I try to reassure him with a smile and a wink, styling Best Bud Chick; the way he looks back at me, I must be styling Crazy Spastic Zombie.

  At least I can hear a little now. “Loudly and slowly, Glisters, and start from the beginning.”

  He takes a deep breath. “We must be tumbling end over end pretty fast. That’s why the grav is toward the tail bulkhead. It would take something ultra huge at one end of the pod to make that happen this fast. That big flash and boom must have been either a huge explosion or a huge impact, maybe both—”

  “Aunt Destiny!” I run to the nearest hatch into the tail disk, which was a swim-through wall hatch moments ago and is now in the floor. When I open it, it swings down away from me, then sways back and forth across the op
ening.

  Beside me, Glisters pushes with flat hands against the hatch cover, steadying it. “Is there a way to climb down?” he asks, just before I jump.

  I hit the tail disk bulkhead hard; the 10-meter drop isn’t a gentle float anymore, more like dropping from my own height on Earth. Gotta remember now falling means going splat.

  “Aren’t we supposed to stay in hiding?” Fleeta asks.

  “That’s all changed,” Emerald says. “We have to know what’s going on, and Susan has to know about her aunt. Go, Susan, we’ll find a way to climb down and join you.”

  “Thanks.” I stagger along a corridor at what seems to be a weird angle pulling me to the side. When I reach a sealed emergency airlock, nothing will let me open it. The next lock is also closed, also sealed. When I lift the emergency phone beside it, there’s no sound.

  “We’re finding all the airlocks are slammed closed, too,” Glisters says, behind me. Emerald puts her arms around me, hugging me from behind. “And the pressure indicators show nothing on the other side.”

  I hadn’t thought to check those. The display is flashing red: EXT PRESS 0.00 MP.

  I’m almost curious, but my mind won’t say what that means.

  Emerald explains, “Glisters found a hatch right by the hull, and we used the handholds on the hull to climb down.”

  Glisters adds, “There are windows in the outer edge of the tail disk. We should probably find one and try to see what’s going on.”

  Every lock is slammed closed. Every emergency phone is dead. Every pressure indicator shows 0.00. Then about 30 meters beyond the crew bubble’s attachment, we come to a big window. Through the 2 meters of water and the outer window, I see the stars wheel crazily like a formation-flying swarm of bees.

  From way back in my brain, Crazy Science Girl kicks in. “We’re spinning on an axis through about the center of Auriga.”

  Glisters says, “Yeah. Okay, there goes Pisces—36 seconds for the window edge to cut through Pisces, now—mark…” Lost in thought, he holds still, staring at his wristcomp. In a burst of ultra loserness, I wish I wore a wristcomp, too. He marks the moment. “39 seconds for Aries. Figure each constellation is 30 degrees—”