Losers in Space

by John Barnes

  “We don’t know whether our pleas for our rights and privileges as citizens under PermaPaxPerity, and the best efforts of our families, are actually leading to any sort of rescue. We don’t know whether this is because the injunction prevents our receiving news of it, or prevents any rescue at all. But we have learned to rely on ourselves out here, and we do know that in six months we will make the last Earthpass close enough for us to perform our own rescue. To do that, we’ll have to take several extremely dangerous steps.”

  Then I hand off to Glisters, who explains about the plan to sacrifice nearly all of our operating water through the engines, allowing us to do a very dangerous triple aerobrake maneuver that will kill Fwuffy for sure, and is highly likely to kill the rest of us, and certain to expose us to immense doses of radiation, but will make it more convenient for people on Earth to come and get us.

  Among Fwuffy’s many latent talents, he’s not a bad actor. “Since I was cweated in an iwegal wabowatowy, the onwy otha people I have known have been the cwew of Vuhgo. They awe the best fwiends anyone could want. I cannot keep them away fwom theah homes and famiwies, stwanded in space foweva, just because I am onwy adapted to this habitat—”

  The delivery is ultra perfect and if I’m right that Life on Virgo fans are mostly Fwuffy fans, that will close the deal or nothing will.

  Then I’m back on camera for the finale. “This was obviously a very difficult and painful decision for me as commander, and I really did not want to make it. But it will be almost four months before we have to begin to carry it out, so perhaps something will turn up in that time. We would not even contemplate such a step, killing our beloved crewmate, risking all our lives, destroying the ship that is our home, and exposing ourselves to far more than a lifetime dose of deadly radiation, if we just knew that this is not our last chance. If we knew help was coming, we could and would be happy to take care of ourselves till it arrived, as we’ve been doing right along. And we realize that we can’t ask people to violate injunctions, no matter how unjust, when they carry such severe penalties and are written and enforced by one of the slickest lawyers the solar system has ever seen.”

  I turn it over to Glisters, who tells them that he’s uploaded information through thousands of pirate and hacker faces, and it will tell them how to make and use a simple AM radio. “And God bless the pirates, every one! Remember, all you have to do is download instructions and send them to wherever you have your technically illegal gear made—but if you want to let us know we’re getting through and that someone is working for us, and if you want to help us build our case against that injunction, the time to do it is now. And as a further incentive, so you can prove to all your friends that you really built that radio and talked to us, we’re reviving an old ham radio custom, the QSL card. Back when radio on Earth was a difficult thing for hobbyists to do, they used to mail each other cards that said, Your transmitter reached me. We have a nice-looking format for a QSL card that we will transmit through the first regular submillimeter-wave mail face we crack into, to anyone who asks for one via that AM radio. You can not only talk to us, and let us know not to give up, you can have that proof that you did. So don’t forget to ask us for a QSL card, because these are probably the first ones in a hundred years, and they might be the last ones forever.” He’s grinning, but then he fades his grin—styling Thoughtful Irony just like I taught him. “Of course, there are a lot of things about this that might be the last time, forever.”

  Per the script, Fwuffy says, “Awwight, now, that we have depwessed the whole sowar system, can I finawy heah my favowite Chwistmas songs?”

  He actually doesn’t have any favorite Christmas songs; he likes music, but finds most Christmas songs cloying, sentimental, and excessively cute. I guess if you’re an intelligent being condemned to be a five-year-old’s idea of cute for life, you just don’t need any extra cute in your life.

  So we had to work up a list of which songs would do the show the most good, and then Fwuffy memorized how he’d ask for each one. We figure if it works out that he survives, and for the rest of his life he has to be subjected to childish, silly songs once a year, it’s a price well worth paying. We all sing with deep enthusiasm, and Fwuffy, who wasn’t geneered to have much in the way of pitch control, shakes a tambourine and manages to look like he’s having the time of his life. He really is a natural actor.

  Then we all troop down to the tail airlock to be there rooting for F.B. when he takes the wire AM antenna out to deploy. He doesn’t have to go off belay at all, and he only has to go about 3 meters from the airlock hatch to the utility socket we’re using. All he has to do is plug in one end of the big, coiled cable, check the connection, remove the clip from the coil, and throw the coil tailward into space. Still, it’s an eva, and those are never without danger.

  Of course he does it perfectly. As soon as he’s back inside, with the hatch closed, Glisters fires a three-second burst from the thrusters, to stretch the cable out behind us.

  In the kitchen, Wychee’s hot chocolate is all the tastier because she warns us that she’s starting to run low; we don’t have any way to grow cacao on board. It’s my watch, and everyone else turns in early, probably due to some half-remembered little-kid rule that Santa can’t come till you’re asleep.

  Glisters’s AM scanner remains silent. Fwuffy curls up in the back of the cockpit, and soon he is snoring gently. I read some tech specs and review some records; though it’s dull, I don’t worry about falling asleep on watch—that’s just not something I do after more than a year as commander.

  December 25, 2130. On board Virgo, downbound from aphelion to perihelion. 271 million kilometers from the sun, 444 million kilometers from Mars, 124 million kilometers from Earth.

  My watch is almost over when a voice emerges from the scanner. “Um, hey, I don’t know if this thing is working, but I think I followed the directions and it should be, and I just wanted to say I’ve been following you ever since Marspass and please don’t kill Fwuffy”

  I am airswimming to the specialty screen, strapped in before the first sentence ends. I check the corner of the screen: radio lag to Earth is six minutes, fifty-six seconds, so the time between their speaking and my answering, for them, is going to be about fourteen minutes.

  “Earth station, this is Virgo, go ahead. Glad to see the directions worked. This is Susan Tervaille, acting commander, Virgo. Please identify who you are and please broadcast, on the regular net, that you were able to reach Virgo via the AM transmission protocols. You know we don’t want to kill Fwuffy, but we’ve got to get home, and without action from the UN and help from the Space Patrol, this is our last chance. If we can get Earth to listen to us, Fwuffy will be just fine. We love him, too, you know. This is Susan Tervaille, acting commander, again, sorry about the delay but we have a seven-minute time lag due to the distance. Please acknowledge; I’m keeping the channel open.”

  I click over to the speaker in the bunk room and say, “All right, everyone, showtime in the cockpit. Get here as soon as you can, we’ve got at least one live one. I’ll need—”

  There’s a hiss and pop and a different voice says, “Virgo, Virgo, hello, this is Dr. Mamadou N’diaye, director, calling from the Mascon Deep Drilling Project at the University of Selenopolis, Mare Smythii, Moon. The scientific staff here at MDDP took a vote and we have decided unanimously that the whole Slabilis family are assholes, that you should have a merry Christmas, and that you should not hurt that horton!” He sounds a wee bit drunk, which I suppose might be expected of a scientist at a frontier research post on a holiday; I went to Selenopolis during my Crazy Science Girl days, and it’s really just a research station with an engineering school and a few stores and bars, located where there are a bunch of cool rocks but nothing much else.

  I start to read our message to Dr. N’diaye, acknowledging that we’ve heard him, agree with him, and need him to pass word along, when the radio crackles again; he has one more thing to say. “Also, we’re formall
y requesting a QSL card, which we intend to display on our face and in all the faces that relay our work.”

  I’m about to answer the QSL request when I hear, in the first voice, “Me, too, I mean, I meant to ask before, I want to get a QSL, this is Lee Chul Ho, I’m fourteen years old, in a corporate recreation apartment on Guam with nothing to do for the holidays. My parents are going to kill me when they found out I did this, it was all over the meeds how there’s an injunction against it, and I bet the QSL is illegal too, but I want one anyway, and I’ll put one up on my personal face, I swear I will. Please don’t kill Fwuffy. He’s my favorite. I always watch all the meeds he’s in, and I use a hook of him for my personal logo!”

  I realize that they can hear each other almost immediately—they’re only about a second and a half apart by radio lag—so Lee Chul Ho was answering me when she heard Dr. N’diaye, but now they’ll both be waiting fifteen minutes for the response. I’m about to ask for her address to send the QSL when she gives it, so I put her and MDDP onto the QSL list, and broadcast that I’ve done that. By the time I finish talking to them, there’s a lineup of calls from Kuala Lumpur, Dubai, Honolulu, and Tashkent; cruise ships and yachts in the Andaman Sea, Bay of Bengal, South China Sea, Java Sea, and Weddell Sea; organizations that include the Natal Polyamory Intentional Community, Beijing School for the Extremely Talented, University of Asmara, Durban Extreme Surf Club, United Baha’i of Auckland, and the Maidan Hazzards Rugby Club. They all want us to save Fwuffy, they all announce they are going to defy the injunctions, and they all want a QSL, so that I’m hard put to record them all. Very luckily for me, the desk staff at the Sheraton on the island of Diego Garcia have been sitting out a hurricane that has left them with no guests and nothing to do. They go on the air and urge everyone to queue up and talk one at a time. They get most people listening in on their new, suddenly busy AM radios to contact the Sheraton’s front desk via regular net and get a number, and to write out a message to read aloud, pointing out that we can’t hold real conversations because of the time lag.

  Once it settles into a rhythm of the Sheraton Diego Garcia saying, “All right, Number… your turn,” with Fwuffy handling about half the calls, I can almost keep up, but still, I’m very grateful when the other four tumble in from the bunk room, all looking like rumpled shit on a crumpled napkin. Fwuffy is definitely the most popular, despite having some trouble making himself understood and needing to have Marioschke take down the QSL addresses for him; the Sheraton desk clerks start a separate queue for him.

  Meanwhile the rest of my crew takes a screen each and gets to work at Glisters’s direction. There are now separate queues for all of us; I think F.B. is probably the most flabbergasted I’ve ever seen a human being be when the fourth young girl in a row tells him he’s her favorite and she thinks he’s cute. Probably it would bother Marioschke if she weren’t so busy answering calls from passionate gardeners, would-be poets, and creepy old guys who say they “like a girl with meat on her bones.”

  I have a moment to reflect that we’re lucky that we got up and running when we did, so that the first radios were delivered and plugged in when we were facing the Pacific Ocean; there are going to be many more calls within a few hours as Earth’s biggest cities, in West Africa and Central America, come over the horizon.

  There’s a little bit of a problem with jerks jumping the queue and calling each other names just to be rude, and some of the wealthy tech jocks on the moon are ungracious about waiting their turns, but still, with the help of the Sheraton, we’re handling most of the traffic, and Sheraton corporate management, sensing that we’re popular and the Slabilises are not, announces that several more Sheraton desks around the planet will help handle the traffic, and that the corporation is throwing its legal team in to fight the injunctions, filing in every UN district at once. Glisters shoots us giving a short group cheer for Sheraton; we figure they’ll be able to use that in commercials for at least twenty years to come.

  The lag deters most people from doing more than radioing in the basic message in their own words: they support us, they defy the Slabilis injunction, they beg us not to kill Fwuffy, and please send a QSL. But there are so many in total that the small minority who don’t mind attempting actual conversation with fifteen-minute lags keep us busy; three-quarters of those want to talk to Fwuffy.

  I’m still a bit surprised that we all have fan clubs, I guess you could call them, and quite a few people are willing to wait long enough to hear their favorite respond to them and directly say that we’ll send a QSL.

  “You seem to be the most popular human,” Glisters says, while he and I take a fast water break.

  “Yeah, and they all want to address me as ‘Commander.’ I can’t believe how much it doesn’t matter now; a couple of years ago all those fans would have been my biggest fantasy, and now they’re just a job. But I admit, it’s feeding my ego; the only thing keeping me humble is that all of us combined are not half as popular as Fwuffy. It’s a good thing he was geneered to love attention and be polite to everyone. Did you hear that bratty kid ask what horton steak would taste like?”

  “He handled it. You could hear the queued-up people laughing with Fwuffy, and at the jerk. Well, break’s over.”

  We airswim back into the cockpit, which looks like an air defense center in one of Pop’s silly old historical meeds, or maybe like the phone switchboard room in one hook I remember.

  Before I can strap back in, Wychee says, “Top priority for you over here.” She leans way back in her seat, reaches over her head, grabs my pant cuff, and literally drags me to her screen by the feet.

  I say, “This is Acting Commander Susan Tervaille, Virgo—”

  “Susan, it’s me, your father, and I just wanted you to know I’ve been kicking desks and shaking bureaucrats all year—”

  My eyes tear up and I think my chest is going to burst. “I know you have, Pop, I knew you must be—”

  “—and the lawyers sitting here with me tell me you have just given us a brilliant opportunity. I’ve got word that all over Earth judges and lawyers are being called away from Christmas celebrations to sign off on counter injunctions against enforcing the Slabilis one; we’re filing, Sheraton’s filing, Ed Teach is filing, hundreds of faces are filing, and we’re all winning. You’ve won, Susan, you’ve won! I’m so proud of you!”

  “Oh, Pop, I don’t know what to—wait a minute. What happened to the radio lag?”

  Aunt Destiny’s voice cuts in, and I notice for the first time that we’re not on an AM channel—we’re on ship-to-ship voice. “Kid, there’s no radio lag you can hear across fourteen kilometers, which is currently our distance and closing. We’re going to be there for lunch.”

  “How did you—I mean, but—so those accelerator bursts last night were your radar locking onto us!… what ship are you on?”

  “Why, the good ship Perdita. And if you don’t get the allusion, kid, your dad is going to turn around and disown you!” (I hear Pop, in the background, say “Damn straight!”) “Bought with the pooled funds of a dozen celebs, built practically overnight, and the first crewed ship in history to be designed for missions far above solar orbital velocities. The technology has been around for sixty years and more, but you and your friends finally made us move it off the shelf. So I came out of the tank right about as Perdita moved into Martian orbit, on her shakedown cruise—imagine, this thing does Earth to Mars in just two months, right after an opposition—and, long story short, I found myself as the captain, with half a dozen celebs that are your friends’ families as passengers, and the best crew money could buy, which turns out to be a very good crew indeed. We got you on radar last night, from about 20,000 kilometers out, and we’ve been maneuvering in ever since. If you weren’t all busy answering the AM radio, and you’d looked at a screen or out a window, you might’ve seen the flare of our exhaust.”

  Then I realize that while I’ve been lost in the conversation with Pop and Destiny, the room has fallen silent,
except for the blessed desk clerks of Diego Garcia, telling everyone to queue up quietly and wait to see what happens, and everyone else talking to someone on regular channel; Glisters’s face is streaked with tears as he babbles with his mom, Wychee and Marioschke are lost in confused, excited talk with their parents and steps, and even poor old F.B. is talking to his old nanny and his miney mother; I’m so relieved they found someone to bring along for him.

  Just like that, I realize, we’re rescued. I never thought about what it would be like, but one minute we’re running Virgo and the next we’re going to be picked up and taken care of.

  I’m absorbing this when the AM channel crackles to life, as the news about the rendezvous with Perdita filters through the radio lag, and the response crawls at mere light-speed back to us: a huge, awesome roar of a couple of million people cheering into their radios.

  Glisters catches my eye and whispers, “We did it, Commander.” Wychee’s hand touches my shoulder: “We’re going home, Susan.” And over it all, there’s the joyful squeal of “Mewwy Chwistmas, I’m going to wive!”

  26

  THE GIRL I LEFT BEHIND ME

  January 9, 2131. On board Perdita, downbound to Earth. 240 million kilometers from the sun, 94 million kilometers from Earth.

  THEY DELAY THE big meeting while we all catch up on sleep and on our family connections. I’m a little shocked when Pop tells me I’m his hero, but not as shocked as Glisters is when his mother says, “I suppose it’s been so silly of me, I’ve been putting you in the same snuggly little boy PJ’s since you were four. How about some nice silk ones, suitable for a man of style and substance?”