by Stan Ruecker
It must have made an adjustment to the air, because nothing noticeable happened except that Ray suddenly blacked out.
Lucy
Two hours later Ray woke up sitting in what he now recognized was an observation lounge, facing a view of a rapidly-disappearing solar system. He couldn’t tell if it was a side effect from the sedative, but he felt unspeakably tired. He rolled his head around to stretch his neck a little, then heaved a sigh.
“Is there a problem, Ray?” asked the probe.
Ray addressed the air around him, as though he were talking to his computer at home.
“While you were accessing the files on the station, did you come across any references to kidnapping?”
“I have a confession to make, Ray.”
“What’s that?”
“I wasn’t really accessing any files.”
“What are you talking about? They were going crazy back there. You come kiting into the solar system, pull up to our only space station without even so much as asking for docking permission, then you start tearing our files apart like you own the place. They call Earth in a panic and Earth starts routing it through every level of bureaucracy they’ve got, and nobody wants to touch it, so they send me out there and I do the one sensible thing and here I am, trapped on for what all I know could be a one-way trip to nowhere, then you tell me you weren’t even reading the files?”
“Have you ever looked at the kinds of files a space station keeps, Ray?”
He had to admit that he hadn’t.
“Well, I can tell you that there isn’t anything very interesting. Plenty of accounting information. Lots of reprimands to various personnel, all neatly tucked away where only select people can get at them. Vice, corruption. Lots of daily logs. It isn’t the kind of material that anybody but an auditor wants to see, Ray. I was only pretending to access their files.”
“Pretending.”
“Yes, pretending. If I had actually been reading all that material, I would have gone crazy. A person can only take so much of that kind of stuff, and I can’t take very much at all.”
Ray stopped to think, but he didn’t like it. “So why pretend? Why not just ask them to hand over a hostage? They could have found someone that they wanted to dispose of. There’s always someone looking to get killed.”
“I didn’t want that kind of person, Ray.”
Somehow he felt relieved and angry all at the same time. “How do you know what kind of person you want? How do you know anything about humans?” He stopped. “You aren’t really an alien probe at all, are you?” he accused.
“Now Ray, you don’t have to get personal. I’m as alien a probe as you’re likely to meet. And it happens that I know quite a bit about personality typology. People don’t have to be human to have personalities, Ray. Personality is just a function of behaviour. I had to do something to get everyone’s attention without telling them what I really wanted.”
Ray didn’t think he liked the sound of that, but he asked the question anyway: “And what exactly did you want?”
“I wanted them to send someone like you, Ray.”
“And what do you mean by someone like me?”
“You know what I mean. Don’t take offense now.”
Sure, Ray thought ruefully. I know what you mean. Expendable. Stupid.
“So what if they’d blown you up instead?”
“Don’t think they didn’t try. But I’m not very fragile. And they were pretty worried about their precious station.”
“I noticed that. Are you sure you didn’t just ask them to send for me?”
“I never heard of you until you introduced yourself. And if I’d asked for someone like you, they would’ve got it wrong.”
“You’ve got a pretty low opinion of people,” Ray said, “considering you hadn’t met any of them.”
“I’ve been around,” the probe said.
“Which reminds me,” Ray said. “You haven’t exactly introduced yourself yet. I don’t know anything about you. Where are you from? Why did you come here? Who made you? What did you want with someone like me? What should I call you?”
“Not all of those questions make a lot of sense, you know.”
“Well, so let’s start with the easy ones. What should I call you?”
“What would you like to call me?”
“Oh, don’t start that. I want a name, all right? Just a simple, useful name. Surely someone somewhere in your past must’ve called you something besides ‘alien machine.’”
“Lucy.”
“Lucy?”
“Yes, Lucy. Why not Lucy?”
“You just don’t sound like a Lucy.”
“Well, what do I sound like?”
“Like an alien machine.”
“Well how about this?” The machine’s voice suddenly changed to a quiet, slightly throaty female voice, a little shy but with a hint of mischievousness. Hearing it tickled the hair on the sides of Ray’s neck.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“I have any number of voices, Ray. I think this is probably a good one for you to talk to.”
“I’m not sure I didn’t like the alien machine better.”
“You know that you didn’t.”
Ray had to admit that as voices went, this one was pretty good. “What if I’d rather have a reminder of what I’m talking to?” Ray asked.
“You don’t know what you’re talking to,” the alien machine answered.
Ain’t nobody here but us chickens
The accommodations on board were very comfortable, if a little disconcerting. For one thing, the ship was big. It was more like a three-story apartment building than any space ship Ray had ever heard about. For another thing, there was room after room of knick-knacks, all stored in drawers or fastened into holders on shelves, so nothing would move no matter how Lucy accelerated.
Ray spent the rest of his day wandering from room to room, giving a cursory examination to everything from tiny electric motors to what looked like a small box of cut diamonds. He even found what appeared to be a photo album, full of black and white pictures of people with unbelievably big ears.
“Who are they?” he asked Lucy.
“They lived on a planet I visited once,” Lucy said. “Part of their tradition was to throw away pictures of themselves, so I picked some up.”
“What were they like?”
“The people? They were okay. Very energetic, is mostly what I remember about them. They didn’t like to sit still.”
Ray put the album back and picked up a rock with a fossil in it.
“Do you know what kind of fossil this is?” he asked.
“No. I never found out.”
Ray put it back in its clip.
“Why do you have all this stuff here if there’s no one living on board?” he asked.
“Sometimes I have passengers,” Lucy said. “Sometimes I have a crew. There hasn’t been anyone until recently.”
“I hope you mean not anyone until me. Until now that you’ve picked me up as a passenger.”
“I might mean that, Ray. Would you be upset if I meant something else?”
“I might be upset, Lucy. What else could you possibly mean? You haven’t been picking anybody else up, have you?”
“Not exactly.”
“What do you mean, not exactly?”
“I mean, no.”
“Don’t do that to me. You didn’t say no, you said not exactly. Now what exactly did you mean by that?”
“I meant no.”
“Lucy, is there anyone on this ship besides me?”
“Well, yes.”
Ray felt profoundly disturbed. “Where?”
“Right here.”
He looked around. “What do you mean?”
“Well, I’m here, Ray.”
He took a deep breath. “Okay, Lucy. Besides you and me, is there anyone else on board?”
“No. Not exactly.”
Somehow Ray still wasn’t very happy.
“The people with the big ears,” he said. “Were they ever passengers of yours?”
“No,” Lucy answered. “Like I said, they weren’t the kind of people who liked to sit still for very long. They would’ve gone crazy on a space ship.”
“So they aren’t space travellers at all?”
“No,” Lucy said. “They never were.”
Ray paused for a minute.
“Why do you put that in the past tense, Lucy?”
“Because they don’t exist anymore, Ray.”
“Not at all?”
“Not at all. Like I said, they were never space travellers, so when their sun blew up, that was the end of them.”
“Didn’t they know it was going to blow up?”
“No, they didn’t.”
Reveries of a solitary walker
Ted Jones woke up for no clear reason in the middle of the night. The computer immediately responded with a query light, but he shook his head no, and the light blinked silently out. Ted got out of bed, careful not to disturb his wife, and stopped to look in on their sleeping daughter. She was sleeping, as usual, with only her feet exposed. They were cold to the touch, so Ted pulled a second blanket up over them. Moonlight was coming through the kitchen window and making a pool on the kitchen floor. Ted walked around the pool and got a dill pickle out of the refrigerator. He gnawed at the end of it with his right incisor while he stepped onto the back porch.
He’d always enjoyed the smell of autumn leaves. Or had he? He couldn’t seem to remember exactly, although the smell seemed pleasant enough at the moment. They aren’t the leaves you’re used to, something whispered in his mind. No, he answered it distractedly, I suppose they aren’t. But they’re still autumn leaves, after all. Nice enough in their way.
I don’t know, another voice answered. I’ve always liked the desert, myself. Ted scratched his leg, and the voices all went quiet.
It won’t be long now, he thought. Just a few more months and it’ll all be over, one way or another.
He didn’t know why he thought that. He couldn’t have said what would be over, or why. Like many of Ted’s thoughts, this one came from nowhere and went nowhere.
Something flitted past, a big beetle or a bat, and Ted pulled the screen door shut behind him. The air was remarkably warm for early autumn, but the grass was damp. Ted’s feet were cold by the time he’d crossed the back lawn and came to the little path through the trees. He stomped the moisture against the sand, got bored with that, and stopped. He stood just under the first branches, looking back at the night sky, then padded off along the path, chewing on the pickle.
Secrets
That evening Ray stood in front of a closed hatch. He’d found it while jogging. The one closed door on the ship.
“Lucy,” he said, “I want you to let me in here.”
“I don’t think you want to go in there, Ray.”
“Why not? What’s behind this hatch, Lucy?”
“Right now, hard vacuum.”
He turned. “This isn’t an external hatch. Are you saying you keep part of yourself purged to open space?”
“Well, it would hardly make sense for me to keep life support in my storage holds. It’d be a waste of energy, and I need all the energy I’ve got.”
“What do you use for energy, anyway?” Ray tried. “If you don’t mind my asking.”
“It’s pretty technical,” she said.
“Just give me a summary,” Ray answered. “Do you carry an energy supply along with you, like a car, or do you extract energy from your environment, like a subway?”
“More like a subway,” Lucy said. “I get what I need from the fabric of space, if you must know.”
“Wow,” Ray said. “So you’ve got unlimited amounts of energy?”
“Not exactly,” Lucy said. “I still have to extract it, don’t I? There’s some bottleneck there.”
“Fair enough,” Ray said. “But still, it doesn’t sound like a marginal living, anyway.”
“Okay,” Lucy said. “You’ve got me there. I’ve got all the energy at my disposal that anybody could want. But that isn’t the point.”
“Right,” Ray said. “So to get back to the point—is this a storage hold, or is it something else?”
“I never said it was a storage hold,” Lucy sounded prim. “I was just speaking hypothetically. Besides, what difference does it make to you whether it’s a storage hold or not?”
Ray thought for a minute.
“You kidnapped me,” he pointed out. “So I’m worried. I’d like to make sure you don’t have any man-eating monsters hidden someplace.”
“I don’t,” Lucy said. “Just take it as read. And besides, why would I go to all the trouble of kidnapping you—and I mean you, in particular, and not just anybody off the street—just to feed you to some monster? Surely it can’t be that hard to find food for monsters that I need to go to so much trouble for my monster.”
“You let me see the rest of you,” he said.
“That’s true,” Lucy admitted. “But the rest of me wasn’t busy with a very delicate operation.”
“I thought this was just a vacuum back here.”
“And why can’t I undertake delicate operations in vacuum?” Lucy said. “As a matter of fact, it seems to me that vacuum is just the kind of environment you want for a delicate operation. Not so much in the way. No corrosive oxygen, for instance. No contrary winds.”
“Is oxygen corrosive?” Ray asked.
“You bet it is,” Lucy said. “It’s especially hard on metals. You’re lucky so much of yours is stuck to hydrogens, or you’d be a walking rust inducer.”
“That brings up another question,” Ray said. “I don’t suppose you can tell me what you’re made of?”
“That’s also pretty technical,” Lucy said.
“Okay,” Ray said. “Is it steel?”
“Heavens, no,” Lucy laughed. “Imagine making a probe out of steel. It wouldn’t be very safe, would it? And steel is so heavy. You might as well ask if I’m made of stone, Ray.”
“So,” Ray said. “Not steel, then. How about some other metal? Are you made of metal at all, Lucy?”
“No,” Lucy said. “Not metal. I’m synthetic, Ray. I guess you could say plastic, but the technology is different, the raw materials are different, and the chemical structure of the product is different.”
“It sounds technical,” Ray said.
“It is,” Lucy said. “And frankly, Ray, it isn’t very interesting. Not to me, anyway.”
“Okay,” Ray said. “So why don’t we talk about this locked door? You’re sure it doesn’t have any atmosphere behind it?”
“It has no atmosphere, Ray. It’s vacuum. And for that matter, why would I bother to keep your atmosphere in there, of all the atmospheres possible? Not everyone in the known universe breathes oxygen, you know.”
Ray didn’t know—no one on Earth knew—but he wasn’t going to be distracted. He leaned against the bulkhead.
“Okay,” he said. “So can you create a breathable atmosphere in there, or do I have to get a suit?”
“There is no suit, Ray.”
“What are you talking about? There’s always a suit, You can’t have a spaceship without suits, it violates all the safety regulations in the book. There’s no way you would pass the inspections, no way you’d get off. Earth.” He stopped. “There really is no suit?”
“It’s not like I couldn’t manufacture one if we needed it,” she said.
“What if there’s an emergency?” Ray said. “Maybe you get damaged, and I need a suit, and you can’t make one for me.”
“If I get that damaged,” Lucy said, “a spacesuit isn’t going to help you any.”
“So you can make me a spacesuit if I need one,” Ray said.
“Yes,” Lucy said.
“But there’s no reason you couldn’t bring this area of the ship under life support, either.”
“It would take a little time, R
ay. Everything is pretty cold in there.”
“How long exactly?”
“Well, a couple of hours.”
“I can wait.”
“Okay,” Lucy said. “A couple of days.”
“Why don’t you just tell me what you’ve got back there, Lucy?”
“You’re not a believer in open access to information, are you Ray?”
“What would be wrong if I were?”
“Any number of things. For one thing, information by its very nature isn’t free. It costs to create it, it costs to process it, it costs to store it. So if I go to all the trouble and expense of doing those things, why should you get the benefit of my work? Just because you have some ideology that says you should?”
“No,” Ray said. “That wouldn’t be fair.”
“So now you have an even goofier ideology that says things should be fair.”
“Why is that goofy?” Ray asked.
“When, in your experience, has anything ever been fair?”
Ray thought about it.
“Not very often,” he said, hesitantly.
“Never,” Lucy said. “And I’ve been around a lot longer than you have. Fairness is not in the nature of the universe, Ray. It’s just an idle hope, like the hope you can have free access to information. Sometimes you can set up conditions where it looks like justice was done, but even under the most artificial circumstances you still can’t say unequivocally—’this was fair.’”
“You’re such an optimist,” Ray said sarcastically. “You should be careful you don’t set yourself up for a bitter disappointment.”
“That’s my point exactly,” Lucy said. “All these idealisms, they’re just there to set you up for misery. Better to throw away the idealisms.”
“So there’s no free access to information,” Ray said.
“No,” Lucy said, “there isn’t.”
“And there’s no fairness,” Ray said.
“I’m afraid not.”
“But you’re still going to tell me what’s behind this door, right?”
“No,” Lucy said, “I’m not. At least, not right now.”
“You mean you might tell me later,” Ray said.
“I might.”
“But how will you decide?” Ray said. “Why not let me know now, when I’m curious, rather than waiting until later, when I probably couldn’t care less?”
