Losers in Space

by John Barnes

  “Right with you.” Glisters is up and airswimming out the door immediately.

  I say to Wychee, “Glisters’s been pretty amazing ever since the accident, but one way the guy hasn’t changed, he’s definitely better with antennas than with relationships, and right now we’ve got a relationship problem. So—girlfriend emergency meeting. How do we tell Emerald she has to stop this, especially without me looking like a jealous bitch?”

  “You probably are a jealous bitch,” Wychee points out. “Just one who happens to be completely right. Your passion is a little, um, engaged here, and that probably makes it hard for Em to listen to you. I’ll try later on.”

  “Thanks. You guys have been close for a long time, and probably I should just leave it to you.”

  “Yeah, except I don’t have any idea either, Susan. I mean, I understand, she’s going to be the star of the story this way—the commander, the prisoner, the good girl who blossoms, the bad guy she redeems, this will so ultra splycter. We’ll all be celebs, but Em will be a star. That’s what she’s wanted all her life.”

  “I just worry that he’s going to present her with just one more little thing they can do that will make the whole story just a tiny bit better,” I say. “Nothing that will do any harm, of course, or not any real harm, just a little thing they can do that will make the story so much better, kick their recognition scores up to stratospheric. He thinks about angles like that, all the time. And when he does… things happen.”

  “Yeah, I know, and I’m…” She stops; she’s wiping her eyes.

  “Emerald is still your best friend.”

  Wychee nods, miserably. “I’m scared. Derlock’s just plain—I mean, he’s…”

  “He’s a really good reason to be worried about your friend,” I say. “But if she’ll listen to anyone, it’ll be you. So talk to her—soon—and level her off. She’s still a great person, she’s just falling for a load of crap from what’s probably the most effective crap salesman in the universe.”

  “I just wish she had your experience, and poise, and a relationship to stabilize her like you have.”

  “Derlock can screw mummified goats as far as—”

  “I meant Glisters.” She sees that she’s startled me. “Sorry. You guys seem so close.”

  “Just friends. Stupid old line, but in this case it’s true.”

  “If I had a friend like that I wouldn’t care shit about not having a boyfriend.”

  “You know, maybe that’s why I don’t. One more thing I owe Glisters for. But no, I hadn’t even thought about that side of things with him.” The silence that hangs in the cockpit is ripped to shreds by one of Fwuffy’s great glorking, sputtering snores; something about that makes us both laugh, which feels good.

  Wychee sighs. “Gaw. I think more than anything else, I hate Derlock for owning every conversation you and I have.” She stares at the screens morosely. “We’re already doing everything we’ve thought of.”

  “Except kill him,” I say.

  It hangs in the air until Wychee says, “Seriously?”

  “Well… I mean, I told you what Stack told me. I’ve told you and Glisters what I think is going on inside Derlock. Or think about Clytie—”

  “She was a pretty sick little girl before he got his claws into her—”

  “Yeah, true. Derlock has an instinct for finding vulnerable people.” I realize a second too late it’s exactly the wrong thing to say, considering how much danger Emerald is flirting with.

  But Wychee’s way ahead of me. She says, “You said Stack thought he might even have had something to do with the big accident itself. Do you think so?”

  “I wish I thought Stack was crazy.”

  She keeps watching the screens; I imagine she’d have an expression like that if she were trying to conceal having been kicked in the stomach. “This is frightening.”

  “Yeah. My question is, though—that idea we just mentioned—what if it’s him or us?”

  “I don’t think I can exactly face that,” Wychee says. “I don’t think I can. I’m sorry, Susan.”

  “Don’t be. I happen to like that you’re not the murdering type.”

  “I don’t know that I exactly like it, but I do feel safer knowing you are.”

  We don’t talk for a while, and then Wychee remembers some silly, mean, nasty story about one of the miney girls at Excellence Shop—I think she wore something exactly wrong to exactly the wrong party—and we relish a few seconds of being our old rotten selves together.

  14

  DYING COULD SPOIL THE WHOLE TRIP

  May 13, 2129. On Virgo, upbound Earth to Mars. 150 million kilometers from the sun, 137 million kilometers from Mars, 24 million kilometers from Earth.

  GLISTERS AND STACK have finally finished all the tutorials about the antenna, outside space-rigging, and microgravity tools, and built the mock antenna. Next session, they’re going to hang mock mountings in Vacuum Cargo Section 1. They’re both incredibly proud as they show me all their work.

  I make myself pay attention and ask questions. I extract three important points:

  almost nothing about putting the antenna on is intuitive

  almost everything about it is dangerous

  the same thing Glisters didn’t want to say when we first talked about it is still true: if we screw it up, we’ll be ultra screwed.

  A couple of hours later, after Glisters and I go on watch, he re-babbles the whole thing to me, again, with even more enthusiasm. Everyone has their own idea of fun, I guess, and it’s good to see Glisters so happy. Maybe his real problem, all along, has been that he’s a natural workaholic in a world with almost no work.

  When I delicately raise the question of what to do about Derlock if the situation gets worse, I find that after years of being bullied, tormented, and exploited by Derlock, Glisters doesn’t really care whether there’s a legal rationale, a just cause, or anything else—he’d be up for chucking Derlock out an airlock right now. “We could always tell them afterward that we got mixed up and we thought being an asshole in the first degree was a capital crime in the General Spacefaring Code,” he says cheerfully. “Just let me know when you want to do it.”

  “You’re thinking like an engineer,” I tease him. “If it’s dangerous and unnecessary, jettison it before it can hurt anything.”

  “I wish I was that rational. No, I just like the idea of pushing Derlock out the airlock in his underpants and standing at the window, watching what happens.”

  I realize I didn’t half enjoy the antenna convo as much as Glisters relishes the assassination convo.

  By now everyone else is asleep; I settle in to study through the list of tutorials that Glisters has set up for Em, me, and Wychee. Crazy Science Girl has now not only come back, she’s taken over; I find I’m running down all the digressions and supplementary material just because I like knowing it, pretending it’s because I’ll want to know it sooner or later.

  I’ve been at it for hours when Glisters says, “Dinnertime.” To me it seems instantaneous when he returns with four temptrol boxes. “Wychee left us ready-to-activate meals: burgers, fries, and shakes, with pie and coffee in a second container. If you can tear yourself away from your studies, I think this deserves appreciation.”

  “Agreed.” Wow, when did my back get so stiff? I stretch, strap in, accept the main and dessert containers, and lock them down in front of me. I answer the questions on the main container, wait 30 seconds, and lift off the top. The burger is juicy and medium-rare; the fries are thick, soft in the middle and crisp outside; and the shake is almond-coffee and frothy, all exactly as I ordered. I dive in and enjoy every second of it; beside me, Glisters is making it disappear even faster.

  The pie requires similar concentration, but once we’re each into our second squeezebulb of coffee, it seems like a good time to talk. “What do you think is going to happen with Emerald and Derlock?” he asks.

  “Nothing good. But I’m hoping he’ll do or say something to pis
s her off soon. Then once F.B. and Marioschke are up to speed at watch-standing, we can just keep him locked up and under guard.”

  “Yeah.” Glisters stares into space, thinking. “How does Derlock do that to girls?”

  I shrug. “That dangerous-smart-boy thing. For some reason slick, smart, mean bastards cause some hearts to flip over and knock all the available brains onto the floor.” Like mine. Change the subject. “So suppose the worst—we break the antenna or it floats off into space. What do we do?”

  “Try to make another one. I’m pretty sure it could be done in the shop, but it would take me some weeks, at least, to learn how.”

  “What happens if we lose the antenna and can’t make another one?”

  “Well, out of four iceballs we needed, we lost two, never got another one, and used up some of the last one stopping our tumbling and had to reserve some of it to supplement life support. All that meant we didn’t have nearly the reaction mass we needed to do a full course correction; instead of having a three-day-long window when we could all take our lifeboat cap down to Mars and get there in about eight days, at our closest approach, we’ll have only about ten hours of a window for a sixty-five-day trip down to Mars. The caps aren’t designed to go longer than forty-five days with a full crew, and at that point the recycling will be run out.”

  “I always thought recycling, plus the fusion power source, meant everything could go forever.”

  “Me, too. I was never into life support systems—that’s like managing a tank of tropical fish except with people. Bo-ring.”

  “Yeah,” I agreed. “Rockets and ballistics, that’s sexy.”

  “Unh hunh. But, unfortunately, recycling has a lot to do with breathing, so sexy or not, I’ve been crash-studying it. Here’s the deal. Because they never planned on having a cap last for much beyond the forty-day flight time that’s already pushing your luck with radiation, they don’t worry about efficient recycling. With a full load of ten people on a cap, they do a complete recycle every forty hours, and on every recycle they lose a couple percent of accessible oxygen from the combined tanks and living space.”

  “All right, I know I could set that up as a differential equation and solve it myself, but I also know you already did it. What’s it come to?”

  “Oxygen gets below breathable at fifty days, with all of us on board.”

  “Where’s it go, though? Does it leak away or does it go somewhere it could be recovered from?”

  “Neither. It’s still there on board but it’s all tied up in the big waste molecules that the system can’t break down. So it’s part of the sludge in the recycling tanks, and there’s no gear on the cap to take it back out of the sludge. Only a little bit of it turns to permanent sludge each time, but it’s like having a tiny hole in a water tank that never adds more, or a little bitty fee in a bank account you never put cash in; after enough time, it’s gone.”

  I push up and bounce against the opposite bulkhead, causing Fwuffy to roll over and whine. One problem with the cockpit, you can’t pace. I’m trying to think of a way around this. He’s right, ballistics was way more fun. “What if we take along spare oxygen?”

  “I did the numbers on that, too, and I want you to check me, but it looks like you’d need a few tonnes of liquid oxygen. There’s not any regular way to handle that on the cap, so we’d have to hand-move temp storage tanks that aren’t meant to be used for such a long period of time, then improvise the tie downs, the venting, everything, and if we had an oopsie—and caps aerobrake hard and land really hard out at the operating limits like this would be—you’d incinerate everything in the cap.”

  “Why don’t the pod or the crew bubble run out of oxygen? What do they do that a cap doesn’t?”

  “The farms. Bacteria break down those complex organics out of the air into plant food and put oxygen back into the air, and heat-sterilizing all the soil every few months recovers the oxygen that’s really locked up tight. We replace the leakage loss by electolyzing water from the iceball. There isn’t room enough to farm on the cap—the farm volume is like three hundred times the volume of the crew bubble, and it has to be, and you couldn’t make a cap like that. No, I don’t see any way around it; you run out of breathing at fifty days, if you have ten people, and if you die on the way, it spoils the whole trip.

  “Now, theoretically, we could send two people down with a message that the rest of us’re here and alive.”

  “How does reducing the crew by seven-ninths only expand the range by 40%?”

  “It’s not linear,” he says. “I’d have to show you the differential equations.”

  “Maybe later in the bunk room, when we can enjoy them all alone, you sly devil.”

  He grins. “I know a woman who falls for a partial derivative when I see one. Look, it’s just, if the two people in the cap are the first notice that the authorities on Mars get about survivors on Virgo, the rescue for the people back here on the ship will be a long time coming. The cap will only arrive about the same time we’re passing Mars, and a Space Patrol cruiser doesn’t move much faster than we do or Mars does. They won’t be able to chase us down before we’ll already be back on a close approach to Earth. So if that’s how we get rescued, we’ll be stuck riding around to Earthpass, twenty-two months later.

  “But that’s all worst-case thinking, Susan. Stack’s going to put that antenna in place, I’ll power it up and make it work, and we’ll call Mars with plenty of time for them to send out a real rescue.”

  “How’s that going?”

  “All right, I think. Now that we’ve got a mock antenna for Stack to play with, it’s just a matter of his putting in the practice time.”

  He’s nodding like he’s just finished an argument, and he’s looking at the screen, not at me. “There’s something you’re not saying.”

  “He was great while we were building the mock antenna and he’s only had one practice round so far. I think he was tired when we started the practice runs today, though.”

  “Glisters, what’s happening with Stack? There is something on your mind and I want to hear it. Isn’t Stack practicing?”

  “Well, he thinks he is. He put on the pressure suit and pushed the mockup antenna around, and sort of worked through it, but he skipped things, he doesn’t pay attention, he thinks if he saw it once, he’ll remember it. Kind of like F.B. used to be about being an astronomer—mostly he’s watching himself in a movie inside his head.”

  “You’re sure it’s not like visualization or anything?”

  “No. More like he’s imagining himself at the victory party, and what he’s going to brag about and how people will talk to him, before he ever plays the game.”

  “Are you guys going to practice tomorrow?”

  “We’re planning to.”

  “Why don’t I drop in and see for myself? Maybe I’ll come up with an idea.”

  “If you do, that’ll be one more than I’ve got,” Glisters says.

  I could voice my guess that he’s really worried about his friend, but most guys would rather let me extract a tooth than answer a question about something like that. I could change the subject but—

  “Hey,” he says, “since Fwuffy seems to be pretty solidly asleep”—he waits a second, and all we hear is a long, soft snore—“and Marioschke is off doing her tutorial, I wanted to tell you, I did check out that story about hortons ‘turning violent at adolescence.’ It has all the marks of a planted story. The original report was obviously designed to confuse the reporting system, and by the time it had been out on the net for a few iterations, it had turned into the crazy killer horton story. But the reality is a lot less scary and—kind of sad, really. The one tiny grain of fact under it all is that a male like Fwuffy, when he goes through puberty in a few years, often becomes sexually fixated on some human woman, because the hortons’ designers designed them to like human pheromones.” Glisters makes a face. “It’s distantly related to the condition they call musth in his elephant ancestors, but
it has at least as much in common with that withdrawn, moony phase in human puberty.”

  “Ugh. So he’s going to suffer impossible depression, longing, loneliness, and frustration?”

  “Yeah, like anyone else in puberty, but more extreme.” Glisters grimaces. “Hortons feel only marginal attraction to other hortons and none at all to elephants. So the impossible romantic longings really are impossible. It’s pretty hard to find a pachysexual human girl.”

  “You just liked making up the word pachysexual.”

  “You’re jealous because you didn’t think of it first.”

  “Guilty,” I admit. “On the other hand, if there is such a thing as a pachysexual, I suspect we have one on board. So the good news, if I’m understanding you, is that we can probably stop worrying about Fwuffy?”

  “No, it’s that we can stop worrying about us. He’s not going to hurt us, because he’s engineered not to be dangerous. We still have to worry about him, because he doesn’t have any more engineering than the rest of us against being miserable.”

  “I guess if they come up with a shot for that, we’ll all get in line.”

  He shudders. “What do you think happistuf is?”

  “Any more cheerful thoughts?” I ask.

  15

  ONE BIG JUMP INTO THE DARK, WITH FRIENDS

  May 22, 2129. On Virgo, upbound Earth to Mars. 153 million kilometers from the sun, 122 million kilometers from Mars, 29 million kilometers from Earth.

  WHEN I GET up, I find that Emerald has been yelling at everyone, mostly about their not giving her enough deference, with responses ranging from cowering (F.B.) to raging (Stack). I let Wychee know I’ll have to be a little late for our usual breakfast together, and track everyone down to make sure they’re okay; the last one on my rounds is Marioschke, who I find in Farm Section 1 with Fwuffy, showing him how to check tomato plants for some weird space blight. The tip of his trunk is as delicate and flexible as her hand, and she frankly admits he has more patience about running the scanner over every surface of every leaf.