How We Play the Game in Salt Lake and Other Stories

by M. Shayne Bell

  I looked up and saw a red light on Marcio’s battery. “Marcio, what’s that?” I asked.

  He looked up, paused. “The power is low light,” he said.

  His battery had lasted for little over an hour. It should have lasted twice that long, easy. I switched on my power and brought up my lever to match Marcio’s. “Power off, Marcio,” I said. “My wings’ll take over.”

  He turned off his power.

  At that moment, night caught us. Its dark line flowed fast across the tip of Brasil, rushed toward us, engulfed us in darkness, sped west up the Amazon toward the Andes.

  Lights gleamed in the black: Macapá, down; Belém, São Luis, south; Paramaribo, north; Manaus, west.

  We dropped, quiet, for an hour. I turned on my helmet light and looked at the odometer: 256 miles.

  “We’ve passed halfway,” I said. Halfway to what, I didn’t know.

  “Going to have enough power?” Sandra asked, quietly.

  We were too heavy. The power wasn’t holding up as it should, and now, without sunlight — “Open your toolboxes,” I said. “Throw out everything except the belts with magnetic clamps.” I didn’t need to explain why we might need those. And I kept one good wrench.

  My battery lasted for another hour and ten minutes — 119 miles, 375 down, 125 to go. “Power on, Marcio,” I said. “Let’s see if you can take it.”

  He was not at full power, but he could take it for a time — forty-five, thirty-five minutes?

  “We’re not going to make it with all this weight, are we?” Sandra said, more a statement than a question.

  “Doesn’t look like it.”

  “Let’s throw over my angel’s wings.”

  “What?” Marcio asked.

  “It’s deadweight — only good for the emergency brakes — and both of yours have those.”

  I didn’t tell her what I thought about my brakes.

  “I can climb down and stand with you, Nick.”

  I thought about it. “We could clamp on one of your feet,” I said.

  “And I can hook on to your pole. Take my belt, Marcio.”

  She handed down her belt with the magnetic clamp. Marcio put it in his toolbox. I handed Marcio the wrench so he could unscrew Sandra’s angel’s wings once Sandra was down.

  “I’ve unhooked my suit from the pole,” Sandra said. “I’m going to release the top magnetic clamp on my angel’s wings. Get ready to — hell, I don’t know. If I fall, I guess I’ve got this rope.”

  “It’s a good Brasilian rope,” Marcio said.

  “That’s all I needed to hear.” She crouched down. “I’m getting my feet out of the straps.”

  “I’ll help you over your foot clamps,” Marcio said.

  She started over. Marcio held her feet. “I’m releasing the bottom magnetic clamp,” she said.

  It snapped open. For some reason, the clamp holding Sandra’s angel’s wings to Marcio’s broke in two. Her wings fell away. Sandra tumbled back. Marcio kept hold of one of her feet and pulled her in. She clutched the top of my angel’s wings.

  “Grab the rope around her waist,” I shouted. Marcio grabbed it with one hand.

  “Let her swing down to me, slowly. I’ve got her arms.”

  He let go of her foot. She swung down sideways, hung on to me. I hooked her suit to the pole, put her hands on the pole. I released my suit, got my feet out of the clamps, put my right foot in the left clamp, her left in the right clamp, hooked my suit back to the pole. I put my arm around her — she still had her camera, tied into the rope around her waist. “Damned brave girl,” I said.

  She said nothing for seven miles. “I had a bad thought,” she said, finally. “How do we know our friends don’t control Ground Floor?”

  We didn’t. The terrorists had negotiated from Up Top — we assumed with Ground Floor. But it could have been with anywhere. “It’s night,” I said.

  “Helmet lights off,” Marcio suggested.

  Marcio’s battery lasted forty-four minutes — another seventy-five miles, which put us 450 miles down. Mine took over again, and though not at full power, we believed we could coax our way down going back and forth between units.

  I let us drop at 102 for another twenty-three minutes — roughly forty miles. I figured that when we hit the upper troposphere we ought to start slowing down. We needed to compensate for being tired and hungry. Our reactions would be dulled. Handling angel’s wings inside the atmosphere would be something we weren’t used to. Sandra and I gathered the rope around us so it wouldn’t get caught or tangled in full G —

  When my battery went dead. No warning.

  “It’s sparking,” Sandra said. “There’s air out around us.”

  Ten miles to go.

  Marcio brought up his unit, but it hadn’t had time to recharge much at all.

  It wasn’t going to work.

  “Damned West Germans,” Sandra muttered.

  I had Marcio slow us down to 60 per. “Toss over your helmets,” I said. “Air tanks, too. We’ll breathe like Bolivians.”

  I had mine off. A bitter wind blew loudly. “I’ve never been on the Altiplano,” Sandra shouted after she tossed hers down.

  “I have,” Marcio yelled. “It’s cold, like here.”

  But we were falling into thicker, warmer air. We dropped for four minutes — four miles: six to go — when Marcio’s power’s low light came on.

  “Try your battery, Nick,” he said.

  I switched it on. My red power’s low light came on and stayed on.

  We could see individual streets in Macapá, the tiny lights of cars and trucks on the TransAmazonica. My no-power light blinked on. We were going on what was left in Marcio’s wings.

  “Hang on to your emergency brake lever, Marcio,” I yelled. “When this gives way …” I didn’t need to say we had to hang on tight after what we’d gone through half an hour out of Partway-1.

  Five miles, four miles —

  Marcio’s red no-power light flashed on. We dropped away.

  “Pull up!” I jerked up on my emergency brake.

  Nothing happened.

  “Pull up, Marcio!”

  “I am!”

  We slowed down, gradually, grinding to a halt at 498.1 miles: nearly two miles to go.

  I could see the lights of ships on the Amazon, individual buildings in Macapá.

  So close.

  A wind whipped around us, knocking the loops of the rope against my legs.

  “This is sparking bad,” Marcio said.

  I looked up. His battery was sparking, and all the lights on his angel’s wings were red.

  “Power off,” I said. We hung there, quiet.

  “Get on your belts,” I said. Marcio handed Sandra’s down. The magnetic clamps on the belts were big enough to go around the cable.

  Sandra had hers on. “I’m going over,” she said.

  She crouched down, unstrapped her foot, went over the foot clamps without a word.

  “There’s ice on the cable,” she said.

  That’s why we had taken so long to stop.

  “A lot?”

  “Thin film. Enough to make it slippery. Magnetic clamps can still hold us — I think.”

  It took ten minutes to get Marcio onto my angel’s wings, over the foot clamps, onto the cable above Sandra. Then I went. It was a sick feeling till you got yourself hooked to the slippery cable.

  We started down.

  Sandra would slide till she hit the bottom of her fifty-five-foot section of rope where she clamped on. Marcio would slide down above her. Then I would come. It was slow progress. With the length of rope we had, we’d have to slide down roughly 191 times to finish the 1.9 miles.

  “Will the magnetic clamps hold our angel’s wings up there?” Marcio asked.

  The burnt-out brakes wouldn’t be much help. The wings could start sliding.

  “With the ice between them and the cable?” Sandra added.

  “Hurry,” was all I could suggest.

&
nbsp; We slid past the ice. Our movements became automatic, hard. We were exhausted — physically and nervously — with two angel’s wings above our heads that might not hold.

  One hour downcable — probably eight hundred feet up — a floodlight was trained on us.

  “Ground Floor must have picked up our suit-com talk before we threw over the helmets,” I said.

  “And they must be friends,” Marcio said, “or they wouldn’t give us light.”

  “Why didn’t they talk?” Sandra asked.

  “Up Top could hear — cut the cable.”

  More lights were turned on. We could see crowds of people waiting at the bottom of the cable, people running into the compound from all the buildings of Ground Floor.

  They started putting foam on the ground, foam for us to fall into. We got low enough to hear the people, call to them. They cheered and clapped their hands.

  Sandra dropped down again. “I’m only ten feet from the ground,” she shouted as she clamped on. Marcio slid down to her. After I slid down to him, we felt a slight tremor in the cable.

  “The angel’s wings!” Marcio shouted.

  “Jump!” Sandra yelled.

  We unhooked and jumped.

  The angel’s wings slammed down the cable, hit the ground, broke apart.

  I struggled up out of the foam. People hugged me, held me up, got the ropes off from around me, talked to me in a babble of languages.

  “Mi hijo!” one old woman shouted.

  But I was not her son.

  She looked away and turned to run, but too many people crowded around us. All she could do was stand there, sobbing. Another old woman took hold of her arm, pulled her off through the crowd. A dark-haired, pretty girl stepped up, spoke to me in English. “My mother — she think you were my brother,” she said. “We come from Uruguay when we hear what happened. My brother is reporter for paper in Montevideo. Do you know him? He speaks good English. He is your age, black hair —”

  I thought of the Montevideans they had shot the first day.

  She saw my face. She stepped back. “Did you see him die, then?”

  I nodded.

  “How?”

  “First day. They shot him. He wasn’t thrown over — till he was dead.”

  “But how did he die?”

  I understood what she was asking. “He was very brave,” I said. “You would have been proud.”

  She turned away, held herself straight, walked back to her mother, to tell her. To come all the way from Uruguay to hear news like that —

  Sandra put her arms around me. I held on to her. “Let’s go call home,” she said.

  And then Marcio was there, with his mother, fiancée, and ten or fifteen relatives and friends, all smiles and tears.

  “They come stay with my aunt,” he said proudly. “You come stay in my aunt’s house, too — not in bad Macapá hotel, not after this.”

  “Oh, no,” Sandra murmured, looking up at me.

  A woman who must have been the aunt took hold of our hands. “Food good, my house,” she said in halting English. “Bed, soft. You very welcome stay my house.” Marcio’s mother hugged us and talked and talked to us in Portuguese. Marcio translated. “‘You saved my life,’ she says. She knows I am afraid of heights.‘ Come stay with us,’ she says.”

  Government doctors took the three of us away. When they finished poking and probing, American and Brasilian military men questioned us until I, at least, couldn’t stay awake any longer. So they let us go till morning. One of them told us that since the bodies thrown from Partway-1 couldn’t be identified as individuals, they would be buried together east of Jacob’s Ladder, in a memorial garden.

  “Already planned,” Sandra murmured.

  “The price of the stars,” one official said.

  I thought of the Uruguayan mother and figured it was a high price.

  Marcio’s family was waiting for us. We went with them.

  The food was good.

  | Go to Contents |

  BALANCE DUE

  There were no windows. That was what bothered Jameson most about the time they had brought him to. He could not understand why they didn’t use windows anymore. He wanted to see the world again — to see if it was still green, if the sky was still blue, if flowers still bloomed — but none of the rooms he’d been taken to had had windows.

  The robot lifted him gently forward and put a pillow behind his head. Its fingers felt cool, even through the warm gown he wore.

  “Take me to a window,” Jameson said. “We have time. We’re early.”

  “Are you comfortable sitting now?” it asked.

  Jameson looked into the robot’s ruby eyes. “Yes, I’m comfortable — but I want to see the world.”

  “All that you see around you is part of the world.”

  “I want to see outside, beyond this building.”

  It paused. “I am not programmed to respond to that request,” it said. It wheeled him to a gray stone desk and left the room. That startled him. It had left before he’d realized it was leaving. Since Jameson had first opened his new eyes, the robot had been the one thing that had never left him. It had always been there to help him. He knew it was just metal and sophisticated programming, but he felt very alone in that room after it had gone.

  He waited. Burroughs Cryogenics had called a meeting to discuss his “balance due,” which Jameson insisted was impossible. He had paid for the entire procedure four centuries before: the preservation of his brain after his body had finally died, the cloning of a new body, a cure for the cancer that had killed him. They had performed other procedures on his behalf, they insisted, procedures that hadn’t existed — hadn’t even been dreamed of — when he’d first lived, but which were now considered necessary, were required, even, by law. He was grateful to have had his DNA cleaned of all disease, certainly, to have had every part of him rendered perfect, to have had his immune system enhanced to nearly godlike ability, but they had drained his bank accounts to pay for all that.

  And he had nothing left to pay them what they claimed was due.

  And there were all the others still to come.

  The door opened. A small man and a robot walked to the desk. The man sat down. The robot set a long, narrow safety-deposit box in front of Jameson and asked him to sign real papers declaring that he had authorized the bank to bring the safety-deposit box here. Jameson’s hand was shaky, but he signed and the robot left. The robot had been real. Jameson didn’t know if the man was real or a projection. He’d stopped touching people to find out.

  The man never said hello. No one did anymore. He spoke a command, and a balance sheet shimmered in the air in front of Jameson. Jameson could still read balance sheets. Some things hadn’t changed, he thought. It explained how his assets had been used to pay for the various procedures above and beyond what he had originally agreed to.

  Jameson tried to ignore it. “I paid in full to be brought back,” Jameson said.

  “In twenty-first-century dollars,” the man said.

  “A lot of twenty-first-century dollars.”

  “It seemed so at the time, I’m sure, but —”

  “What has your company found out about Rose?”

  The man looked exasperated.

  “And what about Ann, and Clayton, and Alice — where are they?” Jameson asked.

  “We will talk about the money, but if you want this first I will tell you what I know.” He spoke slowly. All the people Jameson had met here spoke slowly, as if he were a child or as if they were having trouble with the words. Only robots spoke at a normal pace. “We have no record of any of the people you have mentioned,” the man said. “They were not clients of Burroughs Cryogenics.”

  “But I set up a trust to buy them the procedure.” Them and all the others. When he’d found out he was dying, he’d sold stock and companies and left the people he loved the money they’d need to meet him in the future. He hadn’t wanted to arrive there alone. He hadn’t bought them the pr
ocedures — he’d imagined the technology would improve, that they would be able to buy plans better than his own. “What happened to them?”

  “I don’t know. The company does not know. There are research services available, but they cost, Mr. Jameson, and you have no money.”

  Jameson closed his eyes. He had been rich in his first life. Being destitute in this was beyond bearing. “I will be able to walk soon,” he said. “I will enroll in the retraining programs and find work. If your claims for payment hold up after I obtain legal counsel, we will be forced to establish a payment plan. I have nothing else to offer.”

  “On the contrary, apparently you do have assets — at least, we hope you do.” The man turned the safety-deposit box toward Jameson. “Do you remember what you stored here?”

  Jameson thought for a moment, then remembered. He wanted to laugh. The man was hoping for bonds, perhaps, or many, many jewels.

  “Do you remember the access code?” the man asked.“If not, the bank is prepared to open it for you.”

  “I remember.”

  Jameson leaned forward and spoke one word: “Rose.”The box clicked. Jameson reached forward and fumbled with the top. The steel of it was cold, real to the touch.

  And they were there. “237 photographs,” Jameson said. He looked at the man’s face, expecting disappointment. Instead the man smiled. Jameson did not understand why.

  He looked back at the photographs. He had wanted these remembrances of the life he was leaving. They hadn’t recommended disks with thousands of photographs stored digitally — no one knew if the technology to read disks would still exist in the future — so he’d stored actual photographs in a temperature-controlled bank vault. The top photo was a picture of Rose smiling at him just after she’d opened her gifts on her thirty-third birthday. Wrapping paper and bows covered the floor around her. Below that photo were pictures of their son and daughter, his parents, her parents, friends, aunts, uncles, partners, professors.

  “We need to have these appraised,” the man said.

  “They aren’t for sale,” Jameson said.

  The man ignored him. He looked away into space, and after a moment a woman stood beside the desk. She never introduced herself. She never smiled. She was a projection, Jameson knew. She leaned over the desk and looked at the photographs Jameson had set out.