Losers in Space

by John Barnes

  “It’ll only be for a few hours,” Glisters warns us again, unnecessarily. “And it’s just going to be a really little red ball.”

  F.B. sighs. “I just want to see with my own eyes, even if we’re never going there.”

  Marioschke says, “It kind of makes it real to me.”

  Like Mars wouldn’t be real if she didn’t see it as a disk, I guess. We’re so far off the course that there will only be about eight hours when it looks like an orange circular dot instead of a bright red star.

  There are half a million people down there on that tiny dot, scattered in the clusters of air-sealed mansions that the Martians call “petits-villes.”

  “Around today, we’d’ve been landing on Mars if Stack had been able to get our antenna out there and set up,” Wychee says. “If Derlock hadn’t wrecked the antenna and murdered him, Gagarin could’ve reached us about a month ago. We’d’ve been landing on Mars right about now.” She hasn’t sounded that whiny in months, but I don’t feel like pointing that out to her.

  Fwuffy sighs. “I’d be meeting Wachel. I wonda if she’d wike me.”

  There’s a strange noise, a choked little keening sound, and I look sideways to see that Marioschke is crying, long wails that she’s trying to fight down, like her heart is going to rip apart. F.B. drapes an arm around her waist, and she says, “Poor Stack, poor Stack.”

  Fleeta starts to laugh, long and hard and in the crazy, unable-to-stop way that now happens several times a day, shoving her hand into her mouth. At last she gasps out, “And I’d still have my drugs. And I’d still be me. And I’d still…” I don’t know if it’s my imagination, but around the edges of her gleeful giggling and whooping, I think I see pure terror. I take her hand, tug her away from there, steer her toward another little open spot in the Forest so that she can catch her breath, and she holds on to me, whispering, “Everything feels so good. The only feelings I have are happy… happy… what am I happy about? Susan, I don’t remember what’s making me happy right now. I don’t remember what we just said.”

  I show her Mars through another window. She says it’s silly and she loves it, and asks me if I think she’s pretty. “I wish I could feel bad for making everyone cry.”

  “Heads up,” Glisters calls. “The cockpit AI just called. Something new just came in from Mars.”

  “Derlock?” That’s my first thought.

  “Might be. He was in range to land.”

  We all airswim after Glisters as fast as we can, carefully leaving a clear path for Fwuffy because, as the saying goes, mass times velocity equals right of way.

  In the cockpit, I notice that the ongoing face search is up on the big front screen that normally shows a visual range image from one of the ship cameras. Today, I guess, Glisters just wanted to fly the ship, and not watch Mars fade back from a tiny dot to a bright red star, as we crossed its orbit and kept going, higher and farther away from the sun and into the cold and dark.

  Glisters clicks to the face that the AI found, and I feel like asking him to just turn it all off forever.

  Derlock’s lifeboat cap is arriving on Mars. We gather in the cockpit because it has more big screens than anywhere else. Systemwide News, which has become the all-Derlock all-the-time face, has exclusive rights to the live coverage, which they remind us of every few seconds. After a while they get around to telling us that it will be about forty minutes till touchdown.

  Wychee snorts. “I’m going into the kitchen to make caramel popcorn, cotton candy, and saltwater taffy,” she says. “I assume you all want some.”

  “Sure,” I say, “but why that?”

  “What else do you serve for a circus? And besides, all the sugar will make us all feel better temporarily, then knock us out for a long nap, which is about the best we can hope for.”

  F.B. and Marioschke airswim after her to help. The rest of us hang out in the cockpit and wish Wychee needed more help.

  On the screen, animated reporters scream about how exciting this is, interrupted by live reporters screaming that no, it’s really, really exciting. Over and over, they reshow the last missilecam pictures of the cap’s approach, a few frames of a white bulb-shape scarred black around the broad end by its first aerobraking pass through the Martian atmosphere.

  At last Wychee returns with the snacks, just a couple of minutes before the big climax to the show.

  Some flying camera spots the drogue, finds a great angle, and zooms an icon-shot: you see the steeply curved, close Martian horizon, a swath of red desert at sunrise under a very thin layer of pink, dusty air, and the rainbow-reflective, diffraction-shimmering dome of the drogue against the black-velvet sky.

  For about twenty minutes we enjoy our junk food and make silly jokes while the screen shows progressively better pictures of the cap under the drogue.

  At last the cap pops its main chutes—wafer-shaped inflated balloons to offer more resistance to the thin Martian air. Gently swinging under four city-block-sized bulging disks like giant pancakes made out of circus tents, the cap settles onto the red-grit desert, with Systemwide News chase aircraft landing all around it. The reception hopper, almost as large as the cap itself, lands on a pillar of jet fire, kicking up dust that momentarily blinds all the cameras; when that clears, we see it crawling the final hundred yards to the cap, where it attaches to the airlock.

  Systemwide News’s feed switches to the inside view. Four people are standing around the hatch: the mayor of Mars, crisp and sleek in her formal uniform; another woman in the light blue uniform of the UN Space Patrol, styling a taut lack of expression; Systemwide News’s senior anchor for Mars; and a tall, thin young man in the traditional three-piece suit. Unnecessarily the subtitler tells us he is the senior person on Mars for Slabilis Celebrity Law.

  In the foreground, there’s a swarm of heads and bodies; Systemwide owns the story, but they’re subletting permission to ask questions and record reactions back to the other news services.

  The door opens on Derlock, who is doing his best to style ragged and tragic, but he’s no thinner than he was, there are no lines on his face, and he doesn’t actually look as much like a guy who’s been through an ordeal as he looks like a teenage boy styling haggard-from-an-ordeal. Or maybe I’m just a really tough critic.

  The man from Slabilis steps up, catches Derlock’s elbow, introduces him to the other three dignitaries, and guides him to a rostrum.

  When the single camera focuses on Derlock, a generated backdrop appears—a small crowd of people standing behind Derlock, probably pre-recorded actors from Systemwide’s reaction file—and behind them there’s a Martian sky, two rows of buildings at right angles to each other, and the distant, shadowy shape of Olympica. Now it looks absolutely impossible: Derlock and a crowd in a town square, outdoors on Mars without pressure suits. (Aside from very little air, Mars has no towns—no petit-ville is big enough to make a half-decent village, and if it were, it wouldn’t have a square, and if it did, the square would be underground.)

  “For the Earth audience that never bothered to learn anything,” Glisters mutters.

  “And for the Mars audience that likes their Mars fake,” I add. “There’s a lot of them who don’t want to be reminded very often that they live in a big fancy basement under a near-vacuum desert—”

  “Quiet,” Wychee says, “the son of a bitch is about to start lying.”

  In one of those happy camera accidents, Derlock seems to look out of the screen right at her. “Let me begin,” he says, “by thanking everyone for welcoming me here. I suppose my turning up at like this must seem very strange to all of you. To me, of course, it seems perfectly normal; after all, I always knew where I was.”

  The crowd does little what-a-guy chortles. Aha. They must be supplied by Slabilis rather than Systemwide. His daddy already has the story locked up tight. Wonder if they had any way to coordinate with Derlock before this, or it’s all improv?

  “I guess people will say I’m too young to really know what this m
eans, so I’ll just say, you’re wrong, and to all the people who are as young as I am, I’ll add, we all know how wrong adults can be about something like this. What I mean to say is, the love of my life, now and I’m sure forever, was Emerald Azhan. Oh, we were very different, no doubt about that. I was, you know, used to the glitter and glamour; she was the daughter of a celeb-eenie, but I guess you just have to say, she never forgot where she came from. Intellectually she was way ahead of me; socially I was way ahead of her; I was all looks, she was all brains, but we found a way to forgive and cherish each other, and even though I’ve had some of the hottest matchups in the underage celeb market, I fell pretty hard for my wonderful, funny-looking smart girl—”

  “I wish she’d lived to kill him,” Wychee mutters. It’s not a joke.

  “Shh,” Marioschke says.

  “… we grew close, but there was a cloud over me because of some bad things I had done earlier in my life, and it just never seemed like time to declare; and then, truthfully, too, I was working pretty hard on getting my recognition score up, and there were other girls who could help me a lot more with that. Other girls that I didn’t love nearly as much as I loved Emerald.”

  Glisters makes a gagging noise and everyone joins in.

  “But,” Derlock says, and pauses to make the but more significant. Pop always says when an actor throws his big But in, he’s planning to sit down and stay a while. “I didn’t understand how being my don’t-tell lover was affecting Emerald until it was too late—when she started to be so accepting, and so easy to get along with… so… happy.”

  The crowd behind him styles the Classic Meed version of Dawning Wince so uniformly that I know at once they were all pulled out of the same acting school class.

  Derlock looks down, composes himself, looks up, loses it, has to compose himself again. Virgo erupts with rude noises; it’s a pity we’re 14.4 million kilometers from Mars and our distance is increasing, so they can’t hear us. “Emerald had become addicted to happistuf,” he says. “She was planning to take the laughing dive with Bari and King, two guys in our little group we called the moes, at Excellence Shop. I talked her into coming along with some of us on a field trip to Virgo, because I knew she wouldn’t be able to get any more happistuf on the trip.

  “But as everyone knows, you don’t quit happistuf; you just stop it and control it with Fendrisol. At least Emerald had only taken it for a few weeks. I had to get her onto Fendrisol, and keep her away from happistuf. I had heard from the news meeds, especially the excellent ones produced by Systemwide News—” Everyone applauds. He must’ve had a chance to review the contract with some Slabilis Celebrity Law flacks during the approach and descent. “—that Mars had been kept very clean by the customs and immigration people, and so I persuaded her to stow away with me in the cargo pod, and though I knew it was wrong, I also broke into the infirmary in the pod’s auxiliary living and control center, which had a supply of Fendrisol. It was honestly a struggle to get it into her—she had become so devoted to happistuf in the short time she had been gasping—but it had to be done.

  “I had planned to come out of hiding and let the Virgo crew know I was there on the fifth day after the cap with my classmates went back to Earth; I calculated that that would put us forty-eight hours beyond when they would be able to safely send us back. I thought if I just took the blame for everything, perhaps they would let me take Emerald to Mars, where she’d be safer from happistuf, and where there’d be a chance for the Fendrisol to keep her from deteriorating further.

  “But we awoke one morning to the sound of a terrible explosion. The pod was tumbling helplessly. It wasn’t easy, and I’ll explain a great deal more about it later, for the technical nerds out there—”

  Again the crowd behind him styles What-a-Guy slightly too uniformly and simultaneously, but probably not enough for any but a suspicious pro to notice. We all make more rude noises.

  “—almost all the rest of the story. We stabilized and flew the pod till we were within cap range of Mars, got on the lifeboat cap, and set out for Mars.

  “I honestly don’t know what happened. Forty-one days ago, on a morning just like every other morning of the trip, when we should have both awakened, Emerald was dead beside me. I had been keeping her doses of Fendrisol up, and watching her to see that she didn’t get confused and take more of it on her own, and she was at a safe dosage, the ship’s computer will clearly show that. But she… she was…”

  I see Glisters’s mouth form a wow and realize I’m doing the same thing. It’s awe-inspiring, in a horrible kind of way. “Probably he held her down and forced doses of happistuf into her right after they left, then built up Fendrisol in her blood till one dose too many would kill her,” Glisters says. “And those little computer systems on something like the cap aren’t very well defended. He’ll have hidden his tracks deep.”

  A Systemwide News reporter says, “That’s astonishing.”

  “Meed talk for botflog,” Wychee says.

  “Let me just ask because I know a lot of people will—why didn’t you contact us between the initial distress call and now?”

  Derlock nods. “I knew you would ask that. The truth is, I recorded that distress call the day that Emerald died; I didn’t know what to do, and I felt so awful, and I just screamed for help. Then, well, I’d taken a supply of painkillers and sleeping pills from the infirmary, as well, because they were the only drugs I thought we might need beside Fendrisol, and… so I set the distress call to call twice a day till it got a reply, and then shut down once it did. I know this sounds dumb but I didn’t want it to be a nuisance, and I didn’t want to have to answer myself because—well, there I was, stranded in the cap, which was flying its own way to Mars, with… with the girl I really, truly, ultra loved—in a freezer compartment—I mean, I didn’t know what else to do—”

  He begins to cry. “After I recorded the distress call and put Em-Em-Emerald’s b-body into… I mean, put her… I—well, I had drugs to make me sleep and drugs to make me feel better and I didn’t want to-to-to… I just started cleaning up yesterday, just before the first aerobrake. I’m kind of going into withdrawal even now, I was cutting back, trying to get ready for the landing, and uh, uh, um, I guess I’ll be pretty sick for a few days. But Emerald is in Freezer Compartment G inside, and I guess if anyone doubts what happened, they’ll be able to analyze her body, they’ll find a tonne of happistuf and Fendrisol. Or you can just ask any of the moes back on Earth, I mean, we were all close friends and they all knew—”

  For the first time the camera goes all the way around Derlock to focus on the media people. A guy dressed as a reporter, looking just a little more like a reporter than any real life reporter I have ever seen, elbows rudely past the Systemwide guy, who doesn’t put up any fight.

  “Plant!” I say. Everyone nods; it’s obvious.

  Taking advantage of his moment of exposure, the plant straightens his tie and pushes his hat back on his head. “Uh, Mr. Slabilis, uh, Derlock, um, I think we have to tell you that the cap carrying your friends burned up on re-entry—”

  And another guy shouts, “They’re alive and they have contacted BOOOP—”

  The screen is a very pretty cyan plunged into deep silence.

  UP-LEG:

  MARSPASS

  TO

  APHELION

  AUGUST 27, 2129–MAY 25, 2130

  POSITIONS OF THE EARTH, MARS, AND VIRGO—AUGUST 27, 2129 TO MAY 25, 2130

  For reference, dots extend the curves to show one full Earth year of motion, from June 28, 2129 to June 27, 2130. (Why June 27/28? Because it’s exactly half a year before or after January 1.) The dark solid lines show the movement of Earth, Mars, and Virgo.

  Ap- and apo- are Greek prefixes that mean “far from”; peri- is the Greek prefix for “near to.” The Greek roots in English for sun, Mars, and Earth are -helion, -areon, and –ge(o) respectively, so in Part III, Virgo is moving from its periareon (closest approach to Mars) to aphelion (farth
est separation from the sun).

  21

  POP MAKES A PLAY FOR THE PIRATES

  August 27, 2129. On Virgo, at periareon (closest approach to Mars), 226 million kilometers from the sun, 14.4 million kilometers from Mars, 80 million kilometers from Earth.

  AFTER ABOUT A minute and a half, the face starts again, a few seconds back, except the shouted interruption isn’t there, and neither is the BOOOP. Instead it cuts straight from the burned-up-on-re-entry line to Derlock fainting.

  “That fainting is much more real than he’d been up till now,” I say as we watch them try to revive him.

  Glisters adds, “Most convincing thing he’s done.”

  “He had more to work with,” Wychee says, and we’re grinning at each other.

  “You guys look like you know what’s happening. What does all of that mean?” Marioschke asks.

  “It means Pop is on the job,” I say, blinking back tears and hugging myself. “And I’m sure some of your parents are in it with him, too, but that was my dad’s sense of humor and the way he handled things. He found a way to let us know our distress calls are coming through and he’s trying to break the censorship injunction. A surprise guy speaking up at Derlock’s presentation—that’s pure Pop. Something you’d see in a meed.”

  “Having a father like that must be…” F.B. looks for words, and Marioschke hugs him so hard that it’s a miracle the boy doesn’t pop.

  “When I don’t want to strangle him or he doesn’t want to strangle me, yeah,” I say. “Ultra yeah. It can be pretty zoomed.”

  “It’ll probably give my mom a chance to try to cover it, too, and break the injunction another way,” Glisters says.

  “What injunction?” Wychee asks.

  “I don’t even pay enough attention in school to know what an injunction is,” Marioschke adds.

  “It’s an order from a judge not to do or say something,” I say, “and breaking it is a crime, called contempt of court, and the UN courts, especially the entertainment courts, get real serious about PermaPaxPerity issues, especially the ones about intellectual property,” I explain. “Which you can bet anything are involved all over the place here. Here we have the son of one of the solar system’s most important intellectual property lawyers, the guy who founded the whole field of media-interest defense. And that kid comes into Mars on a lifeboat, with his frozen tragic happistuf-victim girlfriend, the miraculous sole survivor et cetera and blah blah and all that crap. Right?”