Losers in Space

by John Barnes

  I must have drifted off from tiredness, because I seemed to hear Derlock saying, till she got caught, her world was a paradise, and she’ll still never be sad again, and I say, “That makes me so sad and angry.”

  “I know,” Glisters says, “when I read about real-time analysis software for submillimeter communication I’m constantly in tears of rage, myself.”

  I wake with a start. “How long was I out?”

  “About half an hour. Marioschke and I were playing Go. We both thought you should sleep. I was going to wake you up for the end of boost, anyway, and that’s coming up… now.”

  The distant rumble, the vibration of the engines passing through the ship, stops at once, and the chair is no longer pushing upward at me.

  10

  A GWEAT BIG BOX OF FWUFFY

  MARIOSCHKE SAYS, “WELL, um, guys, can I apologize for making myself such a pain? I mean, I still think we don’t need all this hierarchy and bureaucracy, but I accept that you’re just trying to get home, and if it makes you feel better to be all officers and things that’s fine. I’ll just try to be helpful and someone you can depend on.”

  I say, diplomatically I hope, “Well, we’ll be glad to have your help.”

  “That’s fair,” she says. “Can I ask you for one very big favor, Susan?”

  “You can always ask,” I point out, “and I can always say no if I don’t think it’s something I should do.”

  “I—um—well, now that I can at least sort of fly, and I’m not nearly as scared, could you take me out to the windows? And be with me while I look out?” She looks away from me before miserably admitting, “I’m so tired of being so afraid of that.”

  My heart melts. “Sure. Glisters, you don’t need us for anything?”

  “As far as I can tell, the ship probably doesn’t need any of us right now,” Glisters says. “Run along and have fun, kids.”

  On the way to the Pressurized Cargo Section, Marioschke flails, tumbles, loses grips, bumps into things, and rages at herself for being so awkward, but she mostly goes where she intends to; I can tell, another day and she’ll be like anyone else.

  At the window, she says, “Is it safe to stretch out on the window to look outside?”

  “As safe as anything in space is,” I say. “You’re looking at space through 2 meters of water, which is enough to stop the radiation. Micrometeorites usually just bounce off the outer window—it’s single-piece sapphire—you could jump on the windows all day in ice skates and never make a scratch. But even if there’s a rare meteorite so big and fast it gets through, it loses so much speed going through the water that it can’t penetrate the inner hull. Then the ice forming in the hole self-seals it, and one of the little crawlers comes by eventually and builds a patch. So the windows are not dangerous. Never, never, never.”

  “Okay,” she says. “And thanks for over-doing the reassurance. I promise I’ll try not to always need it.”

  She lays down on the window, putting her hands around her face to see better. I join her. We sit out one flash of bright sunlight, and then we’ve rotated into the shadow and stars.

  She asks, “So the little blue ball is the Earth?”

  “Yep, that’s it. And that bright little white dot way over to the left of it? The moon.”

  “And can we see Mars ahead of us?”

  “Actually it’s more to the side than ahead. You know how when you’re in a PersKab and it’s going up to join express traffic, the way that the traffic you’re going to join runs parallel to you while you’re in the approach lane, till eventually you match speeds with it? It’s more like that than like going to a place on the map.”

  “And it’s—”

  “Right over that way,” I say. “Shut your eyes and roll.” We roll onto our backs to escape the blast of brilliant sunlight. “When the stars come back, I’ll show you. Mars is in Capricorn right now.”

  “I just looked it up and the almanac said it was in Aquarius.”

  “I mean Mars is in the same part of the sky as the constellation,” I said. “Astrology is different. They haven’t corrected their charts in two thousand years. Here, the sun’s setting again, I’ll show you.”

  I discover she’s never actually learned any of the night sky, and didn’t really know what a constellation was. She’s surprised that Capricorn looks a lot more like bunched panties than a goat; Sagittarius looks at least as much like an open suitcase as a centaur shooting a bow; and Leo looks like a sick dog with a tiny head, not like a lion. I guess her world is rapidly becoming a wider place.

  My phone zizzes. “Hey, Glisters. What’s up?”

  “The box of fwuffies just messaged the main life support computer that it’s going to dump out the fwuffies in three hours if we don’t do it first. I was going to go open the box, and see what comes out, just to have something to do. You guys want to come along?”

  I glance at Marioschke. She gives me a thumbs-up; I detect some possible spirit of adventure, and grin back at her.

  “We’re on our way,” I tell Glisters. “Wait to open it till we get there; let’s all be surprised together.”

  “What’s a fwuffy?” Marioschke asks as we bounce along the handling deck.

  I explain about the huge suspended animation container, and that as far as we could figure it out, we had the choice of telling it to kill the fwuffies, or bringing the fwuffies out of suspended animation. “And Commander Em doesn’t like to kill anyone’s pet.”

  “I wouldn’t want to either. Hey, this bouncing-along thing is fun.”

  “Yeah, watch your head—”

  “Yike!” She barely catches herself before slamming into a cargo wall. “Yeah, I see what you mean.” She bounces forward, manages to get her feet above her as she passes a cargo wall, and shoots back down onto the handling deck, catching herself with her hands and rolling forward into a rise, and bouncing between the bottom edges of the walls and the cargo decks the rest of the way to the nose, like an awkward, obese porpoise who has just discovered fun.

  At Cargo Wall 2, we leap and airswim up to the suspended animation crate. Glisters is just arriving from above, having come through the coretube. He pulls the control panel open. “All the lights are green. I wish I knew what a fwuffy is.”

  “Me, too,” I say. “I’d just as soon not turn a hundred intelligence-enhanced baby crocodiles loose in here.”

  “Hah,” Glisters says, clicking through the info screens. “Here we are. Care notes. Feed a mixture of whole fruits and vegetables with hay or other fiber-rich plant matter. Plenty of exercise in large spaces is essential and should be combined with free, vigorous play for optimal bonding with the child. So whatever a fwuffy is, it’s not carnivorous, and you can leave it in an open space with a little kid.”

  “Still doesn’t say anything about how many of them there are,” I point out, “and that’s an awfully big box, so I supposed at worst there might be a lot of fwuffies. Well, here goes, I guess as officer of the watch, it’s my job to be responsible.” I reach forward and press the button that says RELEASE.

  For a moment, nothing happens. Then the front half of that immense blue-gray cube shudders and shakes. The sides slide toward the gravity, then fall away. We’re looking at its back end, so it takes a moment to perceive that it is something besides a wall of bright pink leather.

  It’s massive.

  There’s just one of it, perched on top of the lower part of the crate, which holds the suspended animation machinery. It would fit, maybe, into two big walk-in closets. My mind starts to get hold of it; that’s a ropy pink tail longer than my arm, switching back and forth between two huge legs. I can’t help noticing, too, that it’s a male.

  I’m about to say, oh my god it’s—when he turns around and looks at us with big, pink, huge-eyelashed eyes, batting them at us. “Hewwo,” he says, with a cartoon-character speech defect. “My name is Fwuffy. What’s yaws?”

  Yours, I translate mentally.

  “Uh, I’m Susan, this i
s Marioschke—”

  “It’s a horton,” Glisters says, “Ultra illegal –”

  “I am pweezed to meet you, too, Hawton Iwegall.”

  “Um, no, my name is Glisters. I meant that you are a horton.”

  “Awwight, pweezed to meet you, Gwistas. But I am Fwuffy.” He seems very offended.

  “Of course you are,” Marioschke says. “Of course you are.” She airswims around him, lands in front of him, and rubs his face.

  He rubs back, and she flies up against Cargo Wall 3. “Sowwy,” he says. “Didn’t huht?”

  “Didn’t hurt,” Marioschke confirms. She bumps the wall, pushes off, and airswims back to him; now that she’s not thinking about it, she’s only a little awkward. “We just have to get used to each other.”

  Then he looks down. They design them to have such expressive faces that all three of us, seeing his sheer terror, fly to him, grabbing his feet and making sure he stays on his precarious perch.

  His face goes blank. “Your horton unit,” he says, in a completely different voice, a much deeper one with no speech problems, “is intensely afraid of falling, and must be safeguarded against it. If the fear has been triggered in a situation that is other than dangerous, the issue should be clarified to the horton.”

  Then Fwuffy seems to crumple. “I’m so afwaid.” It’s his little kid voice again.

  Glisters and I are looking at each other, with no idea what to do, but Marioschke says, “Listen closely, Fwuffy. We are in space. It feels like you’re going to fall but it is not falling. It only feels like falling. It’s actually flying, and flying is very nice.”

  “Fwying?”

  “Flying. Yes, you can fly here in space. When we get to Mars, then you can’t, but right here and now, you can fly, and it’s not like falling as long as you are careful and fly the way we teach you to fly.”

  “I didn’t know I could fwy.”

  “Only in space. Not on Mars.”

  “Okay.”

  “Now let us teach you how to fly.”

  “Awwight.”

  Glisters and I share a glance, reaching an instant decision that Marioschke is now the Technical Specialist for Pink Pachydermic Issues.

  One big part of me is thinking here’s a really massive problem, but another part is ultra glad we didn’t kill him; if nothing else, he’s definitely gotten Marioschke’s mind off herself.

  Fwuffy delivers a little canned speech that is probably the equivalent of a lost-and-found tag, explaining that he is supposed to go to Mars to be the best friend of “Wachel Webecca Wodwiguez, and she named me Fwuffy. Yi!” He has drifted a few centimeters above his narrow perch; in less than a thousandth of a g, he only has to shuffle his feet a little to do that. “Am I fwying?”

  “You are,” Marioschke says. “Let us teach you how to control it.” She, Glisters, and I gently push his feet back down. “Now don’t move your feet till we tell you to. We will be in space a long time before we get to Mars.”

  “That’s sad. Wachel will be waiting for me.”

  I don’t say anything to Fwuffy, of course, but I wonder. It takes a couple years to grow something like Fwuffy in a tank, and twice as long to load the personality. If Rachel named him, and her parents had to go through all the illegal back channels to get her a pink horton with a speech defect like her own, it might easily have taken most of a decade, and since kids who talk like that are maybe four to eight years old, usually, there’s a good chance Rachel is now older than I am. More likely, she’s barely aware he’s coming.

  I’m glad he and Marioschke found each other; everybody in the world, even pink elephants from test tubes, deserves to fall in love with something that will love them back.

  For the second time today I feel like I might cry about poor old Stanley. Stupid old dog had such a big heart he didn’t realize he was using it to love a celeb-to-be. “Fwuffy, we will get you to Rachel, I promise. But for right now you need to learn to fly.”

  “Absofuckinglutely,” Glisters says.

  In the same voice that explained the horton’s fear of falling, Fwuffy says, “This horton unit is required to discourage the use of foul language. A record is being maintained.” Then back in his little kid voice, “Gwistas, pwease don’t talk that way.”

  It takes no time to teach Fwuffy to fly, or fwy, or really sort of paddle. He’s hardwired so that when anyone with authority tells him he has nothing to be afraid of, he just stops being afraid, totally, completely, and right away.

  We tell him to jump off and paddle down to the handling deck below, and that we’ll straighten him out if he tumbles. We lift him and walk him forward, so that all he has to do is push once with his back legs; he spirals, in his aerial elephant-paddle, gently to the deck as we airswim around him, helping him stay upright and coaching him. It takes ten minutes or so, but we’re not in a hurry.

  Down on the deck, we lift him up, carrying him forward, to let him get the feel of flying forward. On the next bound he learns to take off; two more slow, gentle, elephant-paddling-in-air bounds, and he’s most of the way to the tail-end bulkhead, and he has figured out flying about as well as any pink elephant ever has, saying “Whee!” and plainly having fun.

  I swear, if I ever have kids, I’m buying them that fear-switch-off gene, even if it turns them pink and makes their ears grow as big as their heads. They can all date Glisters’s kids, if necessary.

  Aerodynamically, Fwuffy’s sort of a canard design; the ears and the trunk have more possibilities than his ass and tail, so he’s always steering with a bow rudder, and therefore at risk of going into a flat spin, but that seems to be part of the fun. We go back and forth a few times; as his “graduation” into flying without help or spotting, he flies the length of the cargo handling deck in a single soaring triple roll, coming down as lightly as dandelion fluff.

  “Just be careful whenever you’re coming a long way in the direction of gravity,” Glisters says. “Like coming down from the coretube up over our heads, or anything like that. Because if you’re going too fast, you won’t be able to control it.”

  “Okay, I’ll watch out. Thanks, Gwistas.” Fwuffy looks uncomfortable.

  Marioschke asks, “Are you hungry? Thirsty? Need the bathroom?”

  “I don’t fit in a bathwoom but I’m housebwoken, so I need a pwace you say is okay to make poop.”

  There’s a big washing cubicle on the cargo handling deck, one that seals on all sides, and we route the drain flow to the composting tanks in the farm.

  While Fwuffy is in there, I ask Glisters, “Why are hortons so illegal, anyway?”

  “Same reason there are no more upgrapes, at least not legal ones.”

  “Upgrapes—oh, the enhanced chimps. That’s right, they were all over the news when we were little. What happened to them?” I ask.

  Glisters shudders. “They were supposed to be like permanent affectionate five-year-olds.”

  “And they turned dangerous?”

  “Not the way you mean. Something about the brain upgrades worked too well. They didn’t stop at the five-year-old level, or even close; they were like fairly brainy people.”

  “Where did they go?”

  He drops his voice to a murmur. “Hey, no reason for Fwuffy to hear this on his first day out. Some upgrapes were sterilized and sold to collectors, locked up away from the public somewhere. Some are in research labs, where they’re trying to understand what went wrong. Jimbo, the one they were calling the spokesape, who applied to take the PotEvals? He’s just gone, and the PermaPaxPerity authority is notified if you try too hard to search for news stories about him. Anyway, hortons turned out to be the same kind of smart, so now they’re the same kind of illegal.”

  “What’s so bad about being smart?”

  “PermaPaxPerity authorities don’t usually explain anything to anybody, it’s part of avoiding having any kind of politics people could fight about. If you want my guess, it’s two things: upgraded animals would set off some of the religious an
d political nuts among the mineys, and also, if there were enough technicians out there with access to the process, someone would be applying it to people. You want to compete for an eenie slot with somebody who has as big an advantage at language and math over you, as you have over an elephant or a chimp? We already have too many mineys who could’ve been talent-eenies, and the world can only consume so much work at the eenie, professional level. Smart, bored mineys already riot, sabotage, hack, prank, form cults, start weird movements, and rebel lots of ways the PermaPaxPerity Authority doesn’t like. What if they were all twice as smart and therefore twice as bored?”

  “I thought I remembered meeds that said that hortons turn killer at puberty.”

  “Susan, how much truth is there in meeds? Come on, you’re a pro. Isn’t that story too convenient to be—”

  Fwuffy emerges from the cargo washing area, and Glisters nods and holds up a finger—Later.

  After a moment of looking around, and perhaps trying to estimate how we feel about taking care of him, our new, big pink friend says, “I’m hungwy.”

  Through his wristcomp, Glisters finds several tonnes of argon-packed, enzyme-arrested Guatemalan bananas, which solves the problem for the moment. Fwuffy turns out to prefer them peels-on.

  Once he has eaten his fill, he flies with us back to the cockpit. Since we don’t need the back rows of seats, we fold them into the floor, which makes plenty of room for him to float; for convenience we give him a cargo net he can weave around through the handholds, so he won’t drift into where we’re working while he’s asleep. Two minutes after we pull the net over him, which Marioschke tells Fwuffy is “like us tucking you in,” he’s sound asleep and snoring. I guess he’s had a big day.

  “There’s Prime Bitterroot Valley Hay in a big crate on Cargo Wall 19 in Vacuum Cargo Section 2—some Martians were bringing it in for their horses, god knows why—which should be enough to feed him for at least three months,” Glisters says. “And if he’s anything like his elephant ancestors, he shouldn’t have fruit all the time, hay should be the main thing he eats, at least till we get some fresh grass and bamboo growing in the farm sections. Emerald can put F.B. on hay-fetching duty when their watch comes on.”