Losers in Space

by John Barnes

  A pause, then, “Yes, Susan?”

  “If you can join Glisters and me in the cockpit, the officers need to hold a little meeting on the subject of how we’re all getting rescued for Christmas.”

  “That’s one of my favorite subjects. See you in one.” She clicks off.

  I turn back to Glisters. “All right, let’s see that options list, and the grimmer the better.”

  “You’re awfully cheerful. I suppose you’ll explain all this sooner or later?”

  “Oh, I thought I’d keep it all deeply secret. More melodramatic that way and we can all enjoy the confusion and accidents together. Of course I’m going to explain. Right away. I’m just waiting for Wychee—”

  “No you’re not, I’m here,” she says, airswimming in.

  “Here’s the short version of the news,” I say. “One, we’re back in touch with Earth—or rather we’re getting—how many channels from them, now, Glisters?”

  “Uh, forty-eight now.”

  “There’s a huge backlog of decryption but basically we’re getting them. They’re probably still pretending not to get us, due to that injunction, but I’ve figured out a way to make them quit pretending. So—details to be worked out, which is what you’re here for, but I know how we’re getting rescued.”

  They stare. For one instant, I think they’re about to sedate me and lock me up. Then they grin. If they have that much faith in me, I’d better be right.

  “It’s sort of an intersection of two ideas,” I explain. “And I could have had it anytime, but after a year of no communication and now all this mystery flood of it, somehow that made me think a little differently. My idea might end up very badly, so we need to think about how exactly to do this. But here’s the basics: Glisters, let’s put together a special episode of Life on Virgo to describe your aerobraking plan for getting into Earth orbit.”

  Wychee says, “You hadn’t told me about that yet,” with a hint of whiny jealousy, so I bail Glisters out. “He just told me right now. Let’s run through it.”

  Wychee is just as upset as I was, which tells me I’m on the right track.

  Glisters finishes with, “I have maybe ten variants on the basic plan, but every single one of them will kill Fwuffy, risk putting us in an even worse solar orbit for being rescued, and no matter what, expose us all to a fairly bad dose of radiation. And the most we’ll get out of it is that we’ll keep making a low pass at Earth every couple months, so the few people on Earth who still look up at night will see us shoot across the sky a few times a year, and we’ll be able to break into the pirate faces more often because of the long exposure and being constantly in range. But Fwuffy will be dead for sure and it’s an 80-some-percent chance that so will all of us.”

  “Beautiful.”

  Now they are staring. Maybe it’s my big smile.

  “That’s not the word that comes to my mind,” Wychee says.

  I explain, “We are going to do a special episode of Life on Virgo, in which we explain that we have no other choice, because no one will answer our hails, and as far as we can tell no one cares, and obviously we’re not important so we just have to save ourselves, even though poor old Fwuffy is going to die a horrible death—”

  “Will anyone care?” Wychee asks. “Does anyone even still watch our meed?”

  I shrug. “Well, until just now, I didn’t see it myself. Suppose Life on Virgo is a flop, no one is watching, and nobody cares. What would hooks from it be worth?”

  “Zip,” Glisters says. “About as splycterable as all those miney prayer and folk song meeds, I suppose.”

  “And how much effort would the Slabilis family be putting into keeping our meeds off the net and out of faces?”

  “Well, they still wouldn’t want us to screw up Derlock’s trial—”

  “That won’t be affected at all, no matter what we do. Derlock’s going to be convicted, because the autopsy undoubtedly showed that Emerald got one huge dose of happistuf and then one huge dose of Fendrisol, after going up to Virgo. Probably they’ll find bruises from where he forced the gasper over her face or tied her down to give her the dose. He’s going to be obviously guilty as all sheeyeffinit, and he’s certain to be convicted. He’ll even want that, because it will enhance his value.

  “Of course then he’ll be let go because of overriding media interest—that’s his father’s specialty. At which point the Slabilis family will make a huge pile by selling the rights because they’ll own everything connected with the story. That’s always been the plan, and they’re good at that; nothing is going to stop them. The reason we barely see anything splyctered out of Life on Virgo is because the Slabilis family owns all of it and they’re holding it back for later resale.

  “Now, to keep a major news story off of all the legal faces and buy off or shut down all the pirates—well, start adding up the costs: Sir Penn Slabilis has to buy the injunctions, rent the judge, keep a research staff on payroll to show that there’s an overriding public interest in letting him own it, keep human lawyers standing by and AI monitors and enforcers watching all the time. Because this isn’t something the court system does for free, you know, I mean it’s way outside basic services. It’s ten times what it would cost to just pay off our families, and us, to keep our mouths shut, especially since to get a rescue, our families would have paid a lot, and agreed to all kinds of things. They could have either rescued us, shut us up, or both, for a lot cheaper—unless. You see the unless?”

  “Unless…” Wychee gets it. “Unless we own something they’re trying to steal in court—and the only thing we own is Life on Virgo. Which means it must have n-nillion watchers.” She gapes at me. “But how could it? I mean, we’re not really interesting. Except for being out in space and a slight risk of being killed, we just aren’t that different from The Wang Family Daily Life.”

  “I’ve never watched that,” Glisters says.

  “See?” Wychee winks at me.

  I take pity and say, “That’s Wychee’s point. The Wang Family Daily Life is not a real show—well, probably it is, probably there are a couple thousand of it, because Wang is the most common name on Earth. There are n-nillion families, businesses, relationships, hobbyists, name what you want out there in miney-land, who have lives about as eventful as ours. Or as uneventful, more to the point.

  “Yet back on Earth there are injunctions so tight, and bribes to law enforcement so extensive, that nobody is openly covering us. If our stuff wasn’t worth anything, they’d leak it for free advertising—I mean, sheeyeffinit, think of the publicity of having Derlock maintain his preposterous story while all the time the supposedly dead people are on the air every day! Nothing could get more attention than barefaced villainy, you know? So why wouldn’t they just use Life on Virgo for free publicity? Because it’s worth a fortune and they intend to steal the rights to it in the court settlement!”

  Glisters looks exasperated. “Okay, which side are you on? We either have the biggest meed in decades or we have The Wang Family Daily Life, in which Junior Wang learns the Pythagorean theorem and Papa Wang decides to plant marigolds this year. Which is it?”

  “That was the problem I figured out,” I said. “It comes back to something Pop pretty much taught me as soon as I could talk: faith in your material. It’s like a moral principle for him; once you’ve decided something is worth putting in front of the public, never apologize for it, never wish it was something else, just do it as well as you possibly can—if it was a mistake to choose it, commit to it enough to go down in flames and at least make a pretty crash. He blows up about it when he sees a singer who keeps doing schtick to signal I know this is corny, or an actor smirking through a serious role where the writing’s not up to standard, or a dancer who makes every step say this is beneath me. He always says, ask what the crowd came to see from you and make sure they get it—nobody comes to see you intone impressively, they want to see Hamlet; nobody cares whether this song was special to you and your boyfriend, they want to he
ar it the way you think it should sound. So what do people watch Life on Virgo for?”

  Wychee’s eyes roll back as she ticks off possibilities. “Not many explosions. No musical numbers. We’re brave and all that but most of the time we’re just doing our jobs. There’s danger but it’s not really about the danger, it’s about—well, at first it was probably Derlock plus the situation we were in, because betrayal and danger is a good mix for entertainment. But since then? We’re weightless or in milligravity but so are hundreds of people on the other ships; we’re a bunch of kids on our own, but there are n-nillion meeds about just that. I can’t think of one thing that’s individual enough or interesting enough—”

  I feel so clever and sneaky. “Oh? How about the fact that one-sixth of our crew is a flying, talking pink elephant?”

  Glisters looks like he just sat down on an open circuit; then he laughs. “Susan, do you think you could make Wychee the pilot so that I can just go back to being your poor dumb chief engineer, and not have to do all this hard human stuff?”

  Wychee says, “Nothing doing—if she promotes me over you, your fragile masculine ego is going to collapse into a pile of rubble, and you’ll be useless.” She’s nodding to me. “All right, I see the logic, Susan, people must be watching to see Fwuffy, so if we threaten to kill him, that’ll rile up our side, but how are they going to do anything about it once they’re riled? Sure, popular demand could save us, if the authorities are forced to pay attention to it, but how do we force them from here?”

  “Well, it’s an idea Glisters mentioned ages ago—way, way back when we first had the antenna problem. Submillimeter-wave cellular is complex and difficult to work with, and way out here it’s all tight beams. That’s why it took Glisters so long to figure out a working antenna. In fact, it’s not even an antenna in the sense that the people who invented radio would have recognized it, is it?”

  “Not really. It’s a detector array. All the little detectors in all the dimples are the actual antennas.”

  “So here’s the idea. Right up front, because the pirates and the hackers will just love it, we explain that we haven’t heard anything back, and we say we don’t know if it’s because of the injunctions Sir Penn Slabilis is getting out of corrupt judges, or because no one is listening. If no one is listening then using up our water in the engines is the only way we can ever get home. But we won’t do the aerobrake maneuver if we just know someone is listening and trying to get us home. So all they have to do is call us up and tell us—and then we tell them how to make an old-fashioned AM transmitter, what frequencies we’re going to broadcast on and listen on—”

  Glisters sits back, stares into space. After a moment he’s nodding, like he’s trying to pump his head off. “Yeah. Yeah.”

  “Would people do that?” Wychee asks. “I mean other than terminal nerds like Glisters?”

  “Automated manufacturing—the same way everyone gets pirate meed gear or drug paraphenalia,” Glisters says. “Send the instructions on another face simultaneous with the episode. As soon as they have the instructions, they can order their Call-Virgo-AM-Radio-Set from a hundred thousand no-questions-asked sources for delivery the next day. Then they just plug it in; I’ll design it to use the neutral side of the power supply as an antenna. The cops would never be able to stop it if they tried—and the person asking them to try would be Sir Penn Slabilis, Friend to Crooks Everywhere. They wouldn’t try. All of a sudden you’ll have thousands or millions of people able to call Virgo directly, the pirates will argue that the security and rights management has been hopelessly cracked, and the whole story will be open access. At which point the judges lift all the injunctions—on grounds of overriding media interest, don’t you love it?—and the Patrol is allowed to come and get us. It might be February before the rendezvous, but we’ll be comfortable enough till they come.”

  “Is an AM radio hard to make?” Wychee asks.

  “Well, I could make one in the shop in probably an hour,” he says, “but to come up with something people can just hand to an automatic manufacturing company might take a couple weeks. That would give us time to test it and make sure it’s perfect, if you’d like to make the whole thing the finale on the Christmas show.”

  “And Gliss says he’s got no human skills.” Wychee hugs him tight enough to make him squirm. I guess she, at least, is over this “discreet” thing.

  25

  THE SECOND AND LAST CHRISTMAS ON VIRGO

  December 24, 2130. On board Virgo, downbound from aphelion to perihelion. 272 million kilometers from the sun, 444 million kilometers from Mars, 125 million kilometers from Earth.

  “THAT’S AS READY as it’s redding, people, everyone to places,” Glisters says.

  “We’re in places, Gliss,” Wychee points out. “We have been for fifteen minutes. You’re the only one that’s not.”

  “All right, all right, it’s running,” Glisters says, moving away from the small screen he’s assigned to run his array of tracking cameras. He’s moved those here to the Forest from all over Virgo, insisting since one way or another this is his last Christmas Extravaganza with us, it’s going to be his best work to date.

  He airswims to his place by Wychee, and says, “And… here I am, here we are… all the cam lights are green. Your show, Commander!”

  This is no time for innovation. I style my smile warm-but-tired, in Classic Meed. “Hello, solar system, merry Christmas from all of us on Virgo, and I hope you’re having a comfortable, joyful Christmas Eve with family.”

  We decided on Christmas Eve because it’s when all the big events in the Christmas story happen—the Grinch’s visit, Marley and the Three Ghosts, and so forth. Also this will leverage the media coverage payoff by making it happen early on Christmas Day—if there’s any payoff.

  F.B. takes his turn. For his minute or so, he really is the most-listened-to guy talking about astronomy in the solar system. He sits by the window with a camera floating over him; Glisters will intercut the hooks of F.B.’s narrating with outside cameras, to give a clearer view of the sun, still not even two-thirds of its size from Earth. He points out the Earth-moon system, now just to the right of Virgo’s nose, a bright blue and a dim white star almost touching—“the big sapphire and the little diamond,” F.B. calls them, staying right on script. He shows them far distant Mars, a dim red star just coming around the sun behind us.

  The next part is memorials. I talk about watching Fleeta slip away, as much as I can stand to because it will always be a raw subject. Glisters tells how, after years of bullying, Stack became his friend, and how he lost him so painfully, so soon afterward. Wychee has a whole montage from her personal files of images about her friendship with Emerald, and nobody has to fake tears for the reaction shots to that. We have Fwuffy go last, telling people that “out heah, in so much emptiness, we wearn how awe wife is pwecious,” and some other conventional sentiments that Marioschke spent days drafting up, working harder at that than at anything else I’ve ever seen her do, including the farming. If anything will make him seem wise, human—deserving to live—that should do it.

  Fwuffy’s concluding uplift is just enough to let us move on to the gifts. They’re just token things for each other, and I suppose I’d been thinking of them as sentimental props, but all our reactions surprise me by being so genuine. When Marioschke unwraps the farming coverall I’d had the fabricating machine make for her (heavy-duty waterproof with numerous extra pockets) and hugs me hard enough to take my breath away; or when I see the cool, elegant pendant Glisters designed for me out of ultra-high-temperature steel and ruby drill tips; or how much F.B. is touched by the carefully worked out evalist undersuit Marioschke figured out for him, I realize that it wasn’t just me—everyone was working on these things for months—and that we’re all giving and getting the best gifts of our lives.

  I improvise a little speech about that. Everyone’s smiling, and I’m just about to wrap that up when the ship jerks hard, three times, then does sustain
ed fire three more times, and then three more hard jerks; we all scrabble for grips and drift out of the view of the cameras we’re facing.

  “Sorry!” F.B. says, looking excruciatingly embarrassed. “That was my radar detection program. I’m sorry I screwed up, it shouldn’t have fired—”

  “It did everything right,” I point out, “except it happened to have a false positive, since we know there’s no radar within a hundred million kilometers. One little oopsie does not make it bad work.”

  “Yeah,” Marioschke adds, hugging him.

  Wychee asks, “Do you have it locked out now?”

  F.B. nods, looking up from his wristcomp. “Yeah. It actually fired because it thought someone had lit us up with radar. So after making its one mistake it worked perfectly. I’m still kind of embarrassed.”

  “Don’t be,” Wychee tells him. “On with the show! And Gliss, don’t even think of cutting this bit; we want people to know we’re human, and see us reacting to the kind of surprises that are just part of life.”

  We talk of what we have learned about faith and courage on the journey. We remind them that we’re 20% farther from the sun than Mars is, still out in the far cold and dark, and try to guide them to see us as an image of a tiny candle of love, faith, and hope flickering in the darkness so far away. I know all that sheeyeffinit would sell a lot of deodorant or beer; I just hope it’s selling us.

  The big moment arrives and I airswim into my place, lining up so that half the screen behind me is Christmas tree, and the other half is the group, including some of Fwuffy’s face. Glisters, I know, will put a background of starry sky against that before we send it over. It’s just as real as all the botflog from Mars and a whole lot prettier.

  Strangely, I have no stage fright at all, not even the normal little twinge of this-will-be-good; I just begin to speak. “We’ll go to the Christmas songs from the Forest, looking out into space, in just a couple of minutes, but I have to explain why this is going to be our last Christmas in space. As you all know, due to injunctions filed by the boy who murdered Stack, murdered Emerald, and arranged for Fleeta’s horrible death—and may have killed many others—we’ve lived out here without rescue and without any news about any upcoming rescue. I want to thank the many pirates and hackers who have helped us get occasional bits of news, so that we at least knew that some of our signal was making it to Earth.