Losers in Space

by John Barnes

  I ask, “Has she… uh, cracked up?”

  “I don’t know. After the intoning she went back to om-ing. Maybe I should have stuck around, but it was getting pretty om-y and I had work to do.”

  Stack grunts. “She’s not crazy.”

  Something about how sure he is, and how embarrassed he looks, makes me ask, “How do you know?”

  “We had a secret sex thing going for a while,” he admits.

  A freezing silence descends.

  Stack adds, defensively, “I gave it up. She liked it, it was fun, and she’s smarter than she acts, and nice to talk to, too, except I just couldn’t cope with all the be-doo-be-doo philospho-pillow talk; she’d go on forever about how everything is spirit and how in touch she felt with all those plants, and I’d get so bored.”

  He can see that Wychee, me, and Emerald are too angry to speak; if F.B. and Derlock have any common sense, they’re afraid to. His eyes not meeting any of ours, he explains, “So, like, I know her pretty well, I know how she thinks and what she dreams about and all that sheeyeffinit. She’d like to crack up, because it would mean everyone would worry about her feelings and what was going on inside her. That’s all she ever wants, really, to be the most time-consuming mental patient on the ward. But she’s . . well, really going all the way insane would take more effort than she ever makes. She just wants a lot of attention.” He’s looking at the stares with shame in his eyes, and then suddenly he squares his shoulders. “You’re right. That was a rotten way to treat her, because she’s just like all of us. She wants to be a genius and important and a star without having to know anything or be anything special.” More silence. “Can I stop now?”

  I finally think of something to say. “Stack, I might not be thrilled with you, but I’m glad someone understands what’s going on with her, and yeah, you’re right, it’s not that different from the way the rest of us are. So thanks, it helps to know it’s really just interpersonal botflog.” I guess I’m coming down with a bad case of pilot or something, because I ask Wychee, “Cargo Wall 28, right?”

  “Right. I don’t think she’ll have moved.”

  Stack adds, “Just keep reminding her that she’s hungry.”

  I consider baring my teeth at him, then realize my mouth is twitching trying not to laugh; bless her, Emerald does laugh, and then we all do. Finally Emerald says, “All right, bring her along, Susan. Try to be quick, because whether she needs to eat or not, you do.”

  “Right.” I just shoot up the coretube; I’d rather not be late for lunch and this might be difficult.

  Marioschke’s face is red, her eyes are swollen, and there’s a damp spot under her nose. She is still sitting on the edge of Cargo Wall 28, letting her feet dangle, and watching the much-slower rotation of the stars past the window. The wreckage of the crew bubble and the intact iceball are now lost in the stars; the two lost and shattered iceballs barely form disks, not much bigger, though a lot brighter, than the Andromeda Nebula. In a few hours they’ll be entirely invisible.

  She wipes her face. “The stars are all crazy. That has to be screwing up everything astrologically—”

  This doesn’t seem like the time to do any science educating, so I just say, “Come down to the cockpit area and eat. You must be hungry.”

  She drags one of her big flowy sleeves across her face and sighs; it must have been pretty tiring to play crazy to an empty cargo space for all this time. “How do we get there with the ship all wrecked, anyway?”

  “We bounce along the cargo wall, then climb the coretube. The gravity changes a lot along the way, but it’s all very low, you won’t weigh more than 2 kilos the whole way.” (Actually, I think, I won’t weigh more than two, you won’t weigh more than three. I add to myself, Meow.) “You’ll see. It takes practically no muscle, and your balance will get better if you try.” I stand up, and when she follows me, she almost falls over the edge. I pull her back. “This way.”

  If it were just me I’d take the cargo wall in three big bounces, but I try not to run ahead of her, so I sort of patter along, using my ankles to rock from heel to toe. She trails after me in slow, chaotic bounces, like a balloon being dragged behind a little kid.

  At the coretube, I open the hatch and say, “All right, just kneel on the edge, facing out like this, lean back a little bit, grab a handhold, pull up, and grab the next one after.” I demonstrate, pulling myself about 5 meters up inside.

  She isn’t following, so I go back. She’s sniffling; rather than kicking her, I try gentleness again. “Come on,” I say, climbing to be at the side of the hatch. “Sit down on the sill. You can do that.”

  She sits, gripping the doorframe like she’s hanging her ass out of an airplane on Earth.

  “Give me your hand. Turn it so your palm faces you.” I reach down with my left and take a firm grip with my right.

  She does, and I say, “Now let me just lift you up, and your body will come around to face the right way.”

  Marioschke shuts her eyes, and gasps when I pull her off her perch, so that she’s just hanging by my grip on her wrist. Her elbow untwists the half turn, facing her the right way. “Reach out with your other hand,” I say, “The handhold is right in front of you.”

  She grabs it and hangs on for dear life.

  “Now just let go of my hand and feel how easy it is to hold yourself up.” That takes a few seconds. “Now reach for the handhold above you and grab that.” Awkwardly, slowly, making F.B. look like an Olympic gymnast, she begins to climb. By the time we’re at the center of mass, she looks no worse than terrified.

  She can’t make herself try to turn over with a handstand and has to do it like a little kid, walking her feet through her hands and turning around hand over hand. She’s almost there when she realizes that she can see half a kilometer in either direction, and could fall that far either way. She just freezes.

  Talking her through climbing down is worse than talking her through climbing up, until there’s enough gravity to keep her pulled against the wall; then it’s easier. When we’re at the level of the aux cockpit, I drag her in through the hatch; works, but t’ain’t elegant, like Pop says in Mighty Hard Row.

  By the time we’re there, Wychee is making that food sing and dance, and it all smells way too good. The little kitchen, off the same corridor as the cockpit, has its own independent stabilizer setup, “Which is good, because I’d rather not face the challenge of cooking on a sideways stove,” she explains.

  Among the many crates, with Glisters’s help, she located uncooked fresh fettuccine packed in helium, trout fillets pickled in white wine, a cubic-meter temptrol box embossed with Laiterie de la Provence, what appeared to be the stock of an entire spice store, and some self-heating mixed veg. Fleeta and F.B. are filling up the fridge and freezer with all the other food that was in the same crates; “We’ll get more systematic later, right now I just want to get some food into people.” She has just put the noodles into a boiling sphere, which is whirling up to speed in the stove’s receptacle.

  “Is it going to bother the sphere that there’s so much gravity?” F.B. asks—a surprisingly intelligent question. Everyone is surprising me lately.

  “I don’t think so,” Wychee says. “I used one on the moon where the gravity was five times this.” She puts cream, butter, and cheese into a stirring sphere to warm; after a while she has something going on in four of the eight receptacles. Somehow, it all comes out done at the same time, and we each get a squeezer, one of those heavy insulated plastic bags that you squeeze to put a bite-sized bit into a split bubble; when you bite down on the bubble, the slit opens, and the food pops into your mouth. It beats having it float all over.

  We all enjoy a real meal; I hadn’t thought about it, but the cargo rehooking was probably like four trips to the gym. A few more days of this and all of us will be begging Glisters to make some recordings of our butts in something tight, I think. Splycterable for sure. I might yet end up as one of those loser celeb-chickies whose buttocks
have a higher recognition index than her face.

  Strangely, I feel nothing about that thought. I’m already beginning to not care how I look. And to not care that I don’t care. Wonder if there’s anything in the infirmary’s database about recursive apathy?

  At the end of lunch, Emerald says, “Glisters, am I right that we have two hours till the next thruster fire, and then just two more after that, also about two hours apart?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Eight huge things to rehook in the vacuum cargo sections, and whatever shoveling we have to do in the one open farm section, right?”

  “Also right. I have a feeling this is going somewhere.”

  “Are we all likely to die if something happens and you’re away from the cockpit for a couple hours?”

  “Probably not. I haven’t actually done anything to operate the ship since I started the automated programs. Everything I’ve been doing is trying to get up on tutorials, and guiding you guys through rehooking the cargo.”

  “Perfect,” she says. “You’re coming with us.”

  “All right, where are we going?”

  “The Forest,” she says firmly. “This is mandatory. It gives us a chance to see how bad things are in Farm Section 1, but the main reason is I want everyone to unwind and take a nap. So far we’ve done a lot of hard work that could have caused some serious accidents, and nobody—knock on alclad—has been injured. Everyone is stressed and tired, even after this break, and probably a little sleepy with food coma as well. So let’s go give everyone nap time.”

  Wychee grins. “Commander Em, would you like milk and cookies with that?”

  “Some other time. I want you to rest and do nothing, too. Just like Glisters and Susan and everyone else. We’re going for a nap in the Forest, people. You are all going to get de-stressed and rested. That’s an order. Anyone that doesn’t come along and chill is going to be flogged around the fleet.”

  “‘Flogged around the fleet’?” I ask. “Have you been watching old meeds?”

  “All my life. I’d’ve threatened keelhauling but we don’t have the eva skills for that. Now, if all the squeezers have gone into the Phreshor for cleaning, let’s get going. No goofing off when your commander orders you to rest.”

  Grumbling, but kind of liking her for it nonetheless, we clean the eating area and form up, making sure F.B. and Marioschke are in the middle in case they need help. Yesterday, when we learned Bari and King were dead, there wasn’t one hand reached out to anyone; for better or worse, now we’re a team.

  8

  THE EVIL ISSUE, THE IRREPLACEABLE ISSUE, AND THE SQUASHED-LIKE-A-BUG ISSUE

  April 25, 2129. On Virgo, upbound Earth to Mars. 149 million kilometers from the sun, 166 million kilometers from Mars, 3.8 million kilometers from Earth.

  WE OPEN THE hatch into Farm Section 1 with a utility stick, not knowing much about what might have gone where. Nothing comes at us, so we pull ourselves down the ladder past the big piped-light ports to the first growing deck, almost 15 meters down. Instead of vertical coretube-to-hull walls, like the pressurized cargo section has, farm sections are divided into growing decks, with long narrow beds you walk between to do whatever it is you do with plants. (All I know about them is roots down, leaves up.) After the first big drop the growing decks are only about 4 meters apart; climbing down an enclosed ladder through several levels feels ultra confining.

  The piped sunlight ports in the ceilings make every deck warm and bright. It’s humid; wet soil and water have spilled from bins that didn’t close fast enough, or jammed open. Looking toward the nose, I see mud, where soil beds and water tanks have dumped against the bulkheads.

  There’s a bigger mess on the bulkhead at the next level. I point it out to Glisters.

  “Yeah, and that’s not good. Mud flows, and when we fire the engine for the course correction, ugh. The tail end mud pile will just flatten out on the bulkhead without changing the center of mass much—but all that mud up near the nose will drop 850 meters at a tenth of a g or so.”

  “Now that you put it that way, I don’t like it either,” I say. “Emerald, have you been getting this?”

  “Yeah. So the ship will boost at about a tenth of a g, and while that’s going on, the gravity inside will be a tenth of a g, right? So falling 850 meters at a tenth of a g means… uh—”

  “That mud will hit the tail-end bulkhead as hard as if it fell from 85 meters on Earth—like from the roof of a twenty-storey building. Of course some of it will hit stuff on the way down, but that’s not necessarily good either.”

  Emerald shakes her head. “But that mud is only maybe 10 centimeters deep—not much more than up to our ankles; sure, it’ll be going fast, but—”

  That doesn’t sound right to me. “But there’s a lot of bulkhead—and mud is heavy. What’s the total mass going to be like, that falls from there and hits the tail-end bulkhead?”

  Glisters stops and punches his wristcomp. “Okay, 10 cm deep by… hmm, that’s still 18 decks worth of it… okay, about 650 tonnes. If the density this thing is giving me for ‘loose soft mud’ is accurate. They don’t define either loose or soft but that stuff is definitely mud.”

  “We can agree on that,” Emerald says. Everyone has been gathering around us while we sorted it out. “Definitely mud. All mud, that mud. So 650 tonnes of it is going to come pile-driving down like it fell from a good-sized office building. I guess we have to get it someplace under control, then, before we can course correct.”

  Wychee says, “Em—I mean, Commander—”

  “Wychee, we’re on break. You have best buddy privileges—”

  “Well, whatever. I have an idea. You don’t need to put all the mud back in the right bins. You just need to keep it from moving around, right? So I was thinking, in normal operation—they must have to rearrange beds and move soil? Which means they must have power equipment for moving mud around and storage spaces to put it into. So shouldn’t we look—”

  Glisters is nodding. “Yeah. Yeah, you’re right. All we really have to do is get the nose-end mud pile under control, and for sure they have gear to do it with. Thanks for thinking of that; I was drowning in the complications and you saw the real issue.”

  “What issue?” Fleeta asks, obviously having some trouble following this.

  “Either the squashed-like-a-bug issue,” I say, “or the giant-hole-knocked-in-the-tail issue.”

  She’s scared but enthusiastically joyful, like she’s about to go on a really great roller coaster. “Are we gonna—”

  “No, because Wychee’s idea has taken care of it,” I tell her.

  She smiles the way a little kid will when something was scary but Mom says it’s okay, and unselfconsciously takes my hand. I look into her eyes, and think about what she’d have thought of this adventure when we were ten or eleven, and how much we’d have wanted to be here together. Her expression is blankly ecstatic; she thinks nothing but she feels great. I’m afraid of crying, and I look away, but I don’t let go of her hand.

  There are no windows in the hull-level deck except in the Forest—the light is all piped to come down at the plants from above. It seems like a room with a warm skylight.

  As we move farther noseward, we are careful to come to a full stop and take a grip every 3 or 4 meters. Gravity shifts from hullward to noseward very quickly, and we don’t want anyone to abruptly fly away and slug into one of those tree trunks.

  Though most of it must have been trapped when the beds slammed shut, mud still oozes down the walkways, headed for the nose. Now and then a blob breaks off and flies on ahead of us, past the closed beds, spattering on the tree trunks down in the Forest.

  “You know,” I say, “I bet the Forest isn’t as pretty as it was. Maybe we should give this up.”

  “Let’s at least look,” Emerald says.

  By the time we’re there, we’re climbing, albeit easily, down the hull wall, and the mud drops on us in a constant drizzle that hits with enough force to
sting an upturned face. The grass between the trees is all smeared with mud and water slowly dribbling toward the nose, and the lower trunks are a muddy mess. All but the least ripe fruit has shaken loose and plunged into the mud below.

  It’s nothing like it was when I was here with Destiny. And Destiny—

  I’m crying. Hard. Really hard, as in, I sit down on a muddy trunk and just sob. Fleeta hangs on to me and keeps saying she’s so sorry, she’s so sorry, even though I can feel that she’s stifling giggles. Then everyone’s crying, and the place sounds like a big echoey funeral. The light from the windows flashes off and on, turning the green twilight white and highlighting the tear streaks in the dirty faces and the filthy misery of our clothes.

  Fleeta does not cry, because she can’t. Maybe that’s why Derlock doesn’t cry either; he sits staring, waiting for one of us to do something that matters to him.

  After a while, Emerald says, “I guess that needed to come out.”

  Stack says, “I’m surprised we weren’t all like that right after it happened.”

  Emerald shakes her head. “I’m just being reminded about something my mother said, and she’s right. Meeds always show people running and screaming and freaking out when something big happens, everybody always acts like panic is the most common thing that happens, but you know… if you look at natural disasters, big accidents, terrorist attacks, any of that… mostly people get real calm and do what needs to be done. Everybody who ever planned to turn bombs loose on civilians was planning to start a panic, but that’s exactly what doesn’t happen. When my mom—Do you guys all know?”

  It takes me a moment to realize that she means, do you all know how my mother became a celeb-eenie? and our real answer is yes, but you’re so embarrassed about it we never bring it up. By then, slightly too quickly, Glisters has said, “Why don’t you tell us, Emerald? I don’t think all of us know, or know the whole story.”