Losers in Space

by John Barnes

  The gist of it is that her mother used to be a plain old talent-eenie, really about the plainest kind you can be—she was this really ultra-talented kindergarten teacher, like everybody wants their kids to have, one that every kid wishes was his or her real mommy. Then one of the nihilist-terrorist groups, the kind that want to ruin Perma-PaxPerity because they think people need to be scared and in pain, seized the school. Emerald’s mom talked them into letting all the kids go, and just keeping her as a hostage. And then got them to all sit down to tell her what the matter was, putting them all on one side of the room, and abruptly dived under a desk. She’d guessed right, that the rescue team was already in place by then; they knocked down the door and killed all the terrorists within a couple of seconds.

  “See, what Mom said was, if you’d asked her what she’d do in advance, she’d have predicted she’d panic. She thought that because she’d always been told that it was what people do, and besides she was scared of weapons and hated the idea of violence and thought that if she saw any of her kids scared and crying and couldn’t do something about it, it would just destroy her. Well, she just went all calm, took a deep breath, and was there. And much later on she made me read about what really happens in sudden crises. And you know, all the big accounts about whole cities panicking and people running around aimlessly screaming and all that? Mostly written by people who weren’t there. Sometimes criminals take over and do awful things, but even they do the awful things in a pretty calm, organized way. There’s more than two centuries of evidence; at least at first, right when things are going bad, people rise to the occasion.”

  Marioschke, looking down from the muddy branch where she’s sitting, starts to cry harder. “I could have,” she says. “I knew I could stop, and go find you all—”

  Fleeta flees from me, clambers awkwardly out to her, and holds her.

  I say, “I don’t think any of us has to apologize about anything right now,” not because I mean it—I’m actually pleased as all sheeyeffinit that Marioschke apologized. But now that she has, I want her to be a functioning member of the team, and it won’t help for her to feel perpetually guilty.

  Emerald nods, catching my eye, agreeing with me, and softly adds, “Anyway, we’re a better-evolved species than our meeds give us credit for. We’re usually okay during the worst; afterward we fall apart. Like we’re doing now.” She looks around, sniffling. “This place was so pretty yesterday.”

  The silence seems to stretch on forever until F.B. says, “If it’s not true, why do we make so many meeds with people screaming and panicking and all?”

  Glisters makes a strange little noise. “Visually more interesting. Ever notice that in all the panic scenes, there’s a hot girl right where your eye goes?”

  Stack snorts. “The panic act makes them scream and get intense expressions. And running makes skirts fly up and boobs bounce around.”

  There is a chorus of female raspberries. Abruptly, Glisters stands and walks along a tree trunk to the turf-covered hull. “Ha, they’ve built in a net that holds the sod in place. I guess they’d have to for thrusting. Okay, one avalanche hazard we don’t have to worry about.”

  “Hey,” Wychee says, from where she’s been exploring up toward the coretube, “the trunks up here don’t have much mud. And they’re still big enough to stretch out on.”

  We follow her up there; she’s right. We’re still dirty, but it feels good to stretch out on a clean surface, without mud spatting down on us, and near the coretube, the damage to the Forest is not so apparent.

  After a while, Glisters says. “Hey, Wychee, you’re not just right, you’re brilliant. I just did a search. All the farm sections are equipped with a suction system that we can configure to put all the mud into storage tanks. And every bulkhead and deck has suction drain inlets, and the ship has twenty robobarrows that can be told to just follow you around, take the dirt as you load it in, and go feed it into the nearest suction inlet. We’ll all have to shovel but we won’t have to haul.”

  “Attention, Engineer,” Emerald says. “This is your commander speaking. Rest your damned brain, so it will be ready for me to exploit again.”

  “Yes, ma’am. I was resting it by working on Wychee’s idea instead of on my own.”

  “All right, then, both of you stop thinking. This is some kind of conspiracy.”

  Everyone’s quiet; I like the way the trunk feels against my back. I wish I could nap, or maybe cry some more.

  “The sun feels good on my feet,” Fleeta says. “Do you suppose it’s okay to take my slippers off?”

  Derlock makes a rude noise. “What, you think the Slipper Police might be hiding in the trees?”

  “She probably can’t remember whether there’s anything dangerous,” Emerald says in the quiet way that I am coming to realize means you are ultra dead. “Fleeta, you can take them off, but make sure you don’t drop them, because they’ll fall all the way down to the mud in the nose right now.”

  “Okay.”

  I notice that the warm flashes of sun do feel good on feet, and take my slippers off, too; I’m glad the crew bunk room has a shower and a Phreshor, because I’m going to need both pretty seriously when this long day is over.

  “Well, I’m too bored to sleep,” Derlock says. “Why don’t all you super-genius goody-boys and goody-girls amuse me and talk about your fucked-up childhoods.”

  “Actually, I had a great childhood.” Glisters stretches. He’s on the trunk next to mine. For the first time since the accident I notice how small and short and pink he is, and what an enormous head he has relative to his body. I used to notice that every minute or so when I was around him, but I guess when a guy becomes your main hope of survival, it’s not so important that he looks like something that would crawl out of a swamp in a fantasy meed (especially now that he’s splattered with mud). “I liked being a kid. I did a lot of fun stuff.”

  “So you played with your little computer and your little lab and went on little nature hikes—” Derlock begins.

  Crazy Science Girl inside me wakes up Psycho Ex-Girlfriend and they summon Pilot Susan. It’s like a whole convention of us Derlock-haters in here. “And all those little skills and all that little knowledge that Glisters picked up might keep us alive all the way to Mars,” I say. “Call me a sentimental chickie, but I don’t consider staying alive to be little, at all.” There’s an awkward silence.

  I re-break the ice that I just froze onto the conversation. “I had a zoomed childhood, too, I went a lot of places to see n-nillion things just ’cause I liked them.”

  “I remember,” Fleeta says, beaming at me. Maybe I will cry some more.

  Derlock grunts in exasperation. “I didn’t want to hear about your childhoods. I was being sarcastic.”

  “We didn’t feel like hearing your sarcasm, so we talked about our childhoods,” I say.

  Emerald is sitting up on one elbow; she raises an eyebrow, I shrug, and she says, “Derlock, if you have any ideas that are actually to our benefit—”

  “Will you at least have the grace to admit my plan is paying off a lot bigger than anyone could have imagined? When we land on Mars we’ll be celebs like nobody else! Our recognition numbers will break all records!”

  A long silence. No one quite knows what to say. Back in Baker Lounge, he’d have hypnotized us with that; here and now, it’s like trying to remember a foreign language you were never very good at.

  “Can you play chess in your head?” Glisters asks me.

  “No, and for the first time in my life I wish I could.”

  Wychee says, “D three.”

  Glisters replies with “E five.”

  “B D three.”

  “N F three.”

  In minutes, trying to follow their game sends me into deep slumber.

  April 26, 2129. On Virgo, upbound Earth to Mars. 149 million kilometers from the sun, 165 million kilometers from Mars, 3.9 million kilometers from Earth.

  Emerald decides that, since the
re are only a few huge containers in the vacuum holds, and Glisters says they don’t need to be moved, just tied down, most hands will be more valuable on shovels. She says, “Glisters located pressure suit storage. Why don’t you take Stack and Derlock up to the vacuum holds and dog the loose stuff down?” Our officer telepathy is getting pretty sharp; I hear that as: Take these two whiny boys off my hands and make them do something useful.

  Vacuum Cargo Section 1 has cargo walls with a handling deck, and Vacuum Cargo Section 2 has decks and freight elevators. Each of them looks like a warehouse impersonating a submarine. The cargo in them is stored in boxes, cylinders, pyramids, and spheres, some as small as PersKabs, some the size of two-bedroom houses. For the moment walls work like decks and decks work like walls; we have to keep reminding each other of where down will be when it’s all stabilized.

  In soundless vacuum, we hear only the scrape of our own boots, and our pressure suit radios. Stack is uncharacteristically doing way more than his share of the work; Derlock predictably does much less. We only have to spin three crates around to match hooks with the floor. It goes fast.

  When Glisters confirms it’s all locked down in both vacuum cargo sections, we airlock out, strip out of the pressure suits, and go to share in the shoveling.

  Derlock bounds on ahead and pops through a door, leaving Stack and me to climb down the coretube together. The moment we’re alone, Stack says, “I know you won’t completely trust me, but I’m with you guys. 100%. Derlock is crazy.”

  “You sound worried.”

  “Worried? Sheeyeffinit. I’m scared. I always knew he was evil, but I’m starting to think he’s been crazy for a long time.” Stack’s face is usually flat and expressionless with an overlay of contempt, his attempt at styling Knowing Cynic, or maybe old-style Snotty Arrogant Punk, but this isn’t his usual suppressed sneer; he looks really afraid. “Derlock was not in the lounge where the Virgo crew caged most of us,” he says quietly. “Glisters, Emerald, and Fleeta went off to finish the tour, after Derlock steered the rest of us into being all rude and I-don’t-care and like that, so we were all bottled up watching meeds and eating snacks. Then Derlock talked to the guy watching us, real quiet, and bzzzp, Derlock was gone for three hours.” Stack works his way crosswise on the handholds toward the doors to the active farm section. “I’m sure he knew something was going to go wrong for Bari and King. I even think maybe he knew that something was going to go wrong for Virgo. Last night, before the accident, he talked privately to me about which girl I wanted to have, like he could just give one of you to me. Stuff like that.”

  “He thought he could do that?”

  “It’s so hard to know!” Frustration is choking him. “After being his bud for so long, I don’t know how much is real and how much is Derlock’s craziness. Sometimes he imagines having all this power, like it is just going to come to him. Mostly it’s internal botflog, stuff he tells himself so often he believes it, he just expects things to work the way he wants them to. But the weird thing is sometimes they do. Maybe he was just ready for the accident to happen because he expects to have everything he wants all the time, or maybe he knew the accident was going to happen.”

  “You are suggesting,” I point out, “that Derlock murdered a hundred and forty people.”

  “I’m saying I can’t convince myself that he didn’t. Maybe it’s just that crazy way he just imagines things will work, because he wants them to, and then, if they do, he thinks he made them happen.”

  “You think it’s just delusions?”

  Stack stops climbing for a moment, hanging lightly by the handholds. “I’m not Derlock. If I was evil and planning to cause that accident and then take over, I’d study the ship till I could do ten times what Glisters is doing. But it’s him, and not me, and the way he thinks, probably he knew there was a cockpit in the pod, and he just expected that whatever he did when he took it over would work. He really believes that once he wants a thing to happen, it happens. And, you know, well, the way things are now, with all of us caught here with him… that’s all I wanted to tell you.”

  Embarrassed, or maybe afraid, Stack jumps down the coretube in big bounces, grabbing handholds like a crazed monkey. I climb after.

  By the time we join shovel duty, they’ve finished with the mess on the Forest bulkhead and done about a quarter of the rest. Stack and I share a robobarrow; Derlock has partnered with Emerald, and I can hear his voice, constant, low, sounding reasonable, sounding affectionate, sounding sexy, sounding whatever he thinks will work. I remember it, of course—it’s only been a couple of days—and I’m glad I’m too far away to hear what he’s saying. I just hope she’s far enough away, physically or mentally, not to listen.

  When I come back to the cockpit after a fast run-over with my cleanstick, Derlock is sitting next to, and slathering the charm and admiration on, Glisters, who is reveling in having tech stuff to explain and a willing audience. “—the antenna is in the external storage bin just outside this tail-end airlock, not far from where we have to mount it. As soon as one of us is all the way up to speed in an evasuit, and has rehearsed the moves enough, we should be able to put the antenna up and yell for help. But we only get one shot with this antenna, and we can’t afford to lose it, so whoever is doing it—”

  “Dibs on that,” Stack says. “I’ll go. When do I start practice?”

  “How about after I’ve had some sleep and some time to think through it all?” Glisters says. “So I don’t overlook something or have you learn something wrong? A day or two won’t matter at all, and like I said, we’ve got to get this right.”

  “Why does Stack get to do it?” Derlock says, like it’s a trip to the ice cream store.

  “He’s strong, he volunteered first, and we know he can do it,” I say, “Glisters, what’s so precious about this antenna? I thought an antenna was just a long wire.”

  “You’re about a hundred years out-of-date. This isn’t even really an antenna; it’s a submillimeter-wave detector array.”

  “Do we have to waste time fussing about how we say it?” Derlock is fishing for a way for me to quarrel with Glisters.

  Glisters and I exchange one glance and just bomb Derlock flat with tech talk for the next half hour.

  Notes for the Interested, #13

  Over time, waves get shorter, and frequencies get higher

  Every form of communication that will work in space is some form of what physicists call electromagnetic radiation: radio, microwaves, light, X-rays, and other things. The wavelength is the distance between peaks of the electromagnetic waves that it is made of; the frequency is the number of waves that pass by in a second.

  Small wavelengths mean big frequencies and vice versa. In 1906, Einstein figured out that in the vacuum of space, all electromagnetic radiation moves at one speed, c, the “speed of light” you’ve heard about. For any electromagnetic radiation, then, the wavelength times the frequency will be equal to c. (To see why this is so, think of it this way: the electromagnetic waves are like a train passing by. The wavelength is the length of the cars, and the frequency is the number of cars that go by in a given time. If all the trains move at the same speed, just as all electromagnetic waves do, then if a lot of cars go by, it’s because they’re all short; if the cars are long, fewer cars will go by in the same time.)

  Ever since the first radios, people have been using shorter and shorter wavelengths (which means higher and higher frequencies):

  Why do engineers keep moving toward short wavelengths/high frequencies? Because of two things they explain in more detail in college physics:

  The shorter the wavelength, the tighter the beam can be. The aperture—the hole the beam comes out of—determines the beam width, and no working aperture can be any smaller than half a wavelength. The tighter the beam, the farther it can reach for the same energy—think about how far a flashlight throws its big circular pool of light compared to how far a laser-pointer throws its tiny dot. At the huge distances between plane
ts, when you’re trying to put enough energy to be detected onto an antenna, this makes a huge difference in how much power you need to contact a ship from a station on Earth.

  Signal-to-noise ratio. Signals are easier to pick out from background noise (or “static”) when they have more energy. The energy carried by a photon (particle of electromagnetic radiation) is directly proportionate to its frequency. (This was actually the very first thing discovered in the field of quantum physics). So higher frequencies are “louder” and easier to pick out of background noise, in exactly the same way a police whistle cuts through crowd noise.

  In the 2060s of this future, as humans began to venture away from the Earth/moon system, higher frequencies and shorter wavelengths meant you could communicate with spaceships via a tight beam that could be more easily picked out from background noise.

  This also meant a different kind of “antenna”—the word is in quote marks because it’s not really an antenna at all as we use the term today. Technically an antenna is a conductor that resonates with some frequency of electronic radiation; when it resonates, an electric current forms in the antenna that we can detect and process into a signal.

  Any big piece of metal will resonate with radio waves. But submillimeter waves need submillimeter antennae—tiny dots of semiconductor that resonate with their very short waves. Furthermore, to answer a tight-beam signal, it’s necessary to know the exact direction it came from (the whole point is not to broadcast to the whole universe, as you did with radio).

  So what you really need is two of those detector dots: When a signal shows up strongly in both dots, the line between them is pointing at the source. If you put one dot on the center of the glass covering of a dimple, and scatter dots all over the inside surface of the dimple, then when the center dot detects a submillimeter wave, one other dot will also detect it, and a computer can immediately calculate the direction from which dot on the dimple fired. In fact it can immediately return a signal and establish two-way communication just by going through those two dots.