INFINITY HOLD3

by Longyear, Barry B.

  "Man, how can that thing clean out a sealed glass container?" The whine came from a powder-puff three or four seats down from Dick Irish. He had his shoe off and was looking with great woe upon an empty vial that protruded from the back of his heel.

  When the puffs began getting tense with the sweat-writhe-and-heave thing, the guards and even some of the sharks thought it was funny. At least the sharks that weren't sitting near them thought it was funny. A lap puddled in puke does terrible things to one's sense of humor.

  When the puffs started seeing tentacles and strangling their seat mates, prescription downs were issued. I didn't even want to think about what the puffs would be like after landing. After the downs had all done past.

  You got to brush your own teeth with a recycled toothbrush dipped in a paste that tasted like frog-fungus frappe'. Back in my seat, the metal mesh belt was locked in place, then it was back to staring at the insides of my eyelids.

  What can you do when you can't do anything? At first I tried sleeping. That constant rumbling vibration from the ship's engines helped to drown out the noises around me, but it's tough to sleep for weeks if you're still alive.

  I hummed songs, I thought of every piece of my past that I could remember, I tried figuring numbers in my head, which was a waste. I couldn't do much with numbers when I had a calc. Without a box, I was helpless.

  It got so that I would have given my left leg, and a good bit of my right, to get Big Dave's book out of my box in the cargo hold. There were a few paperback books that had been carried on board, but they never seemed to travel my way. I began having fantasies about the wonderful time I would have when I could plant my feet on solid ground, open Yesterday's Tomorrow, and read until I went blind.

  Finally Freddy got bored enough that he wanted to talk. What he wanted to talk about were the men, women and children, in and out of hotels, that he had tortured, maimed, and killed. With surprising gracefulness he would gesture with his hands as he talked, and the stories frightened me so that it took quite a bit of mental effort to remember to blink every now and then.

  Watching.

  There was a shark sitting in front of me who carried a long face on a slender body. The stains would call him out when it was his turn to visit the throne, which is how I knew his name was Clark Antess. I thought I had remembered him from the vids. He was a former member of Parliament, had been appointed by the First Minister to head the UTR Defense Force's Office of Procurement making him the number two man in the Ministry of Defense.

  Clark Antess had been caught with his manicured fingers in the till to the sound of three mills. What that long face had to have been pondering was this vaporous thing fools call justice. See, there was a bird in the Ministry of Defense who had done the very same thing Clark had done, except that he had done it two years earlier for eight times the change. That fellow had done eight months on a rehab farm and was on parole publishing his book by the time the nabs got Clark.

  It was all in the timing. An election came rolling around and it was again time to interview a couple of bums, drag out the drug addicts again, and just to show the folks that we're not just down on the little people, let's nail someone who wears a suit.

  So Clark found himself with a bag full of bad numbers and riding a rocket to Hell's hell thinking that if he had stolen thirty mill instead of three, he wouldn't be on his way to infinity hold. Instead he'd be in group therapy nodding his head and telling some counselor how he'd seen the light and was bent on mending his ways just as soon as the movie and vid-serial rights from his life story were negotiated.

  One time when he came back from the throne and was facing me before he sat down, I held up my right fist and said "Justice!"

  He looked at me with those sad eyes, turned around, and sat down without replying. Freddy jabbed me with his elbow and observed, "You're always lookin', Bando. Always lookin'."

  "I don't mean anything by it. Just killing the clock, same as everybody else."

  Freddy grinned and shook his head. "No, you watchin', but not like everybody else. See, when the other yard eagles look around, they're tryin' to find somethin' to laugh or shout at. They're tryin' to fill the moment. When you look you see things maybe you shouldn't."

  "I don't know what you're talking about."

  "Sure you do." He sat up, faced me and opened his big brown eyes. "I've seen you lookin' with all those gears turnin' in your head. Sometimes when I catch you lookin' at me or Irish or some other shark, sometimes I get the feelin' you're takin' somethin' that don't belong to you."

  "Like what?"

  "If I believed in vampires, I'd say you were soul-stealin'."

  "Freddy, do you believe in the big bats?"

  "No. I don't believe in vampires." Freddy closed his eyes and rested his head against the back of his couch. "That's why I figure you're some kind of ghoul livin' off the rest of us somehow—eatin' us with your eyes."

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  ▫

  Pussyface

  ▫

  Dick Irish wanted to talk about the new world we were going to, how it was a fresh start for all of us, and that he would go straight and make himself into a new man just as soon as he had finished butchering Freddy and settling a few other old scores he had in mind. Between trying to sleep sitting up, my legs hurting from sitting so much, being locked up with no windows, and listening to the yard monsters' horror stories, I was a long way from getting rested. Above the sink in the throne room was a mirror, and every time I looked at it, the fellow who looked back had aged a year.

  There was a game we played like twenty questions, except we only allowed eight questions. One of us would pick a shark and answer questions on the yard eagle's criminal record or crowbar history while the other two tried to guess the shark's name. Dick Irish was as thick as frog-foot fungus, but Freddy was sharp. Anyway, he knew a lot about the sharks.

  "Male?" asked Freddy.

  "Yes."

  "White?"

  "No."

  "Murderer?"

  "No."

  "Political?"

  "No."

  Freddy looked up at the air vent. "Arson?"

  "No."

  Freddy squinted his eyes at me and asked, "Does he pump iron?"

  I nodded and tried to keep a poker face. There were maybe two hundred yard monsters at Greeneville. "He pumps iron. You got one more question."

  "Swindler? Yirbe Vekk? Steel Jacket?"

  "Yeah. Now you pick one."

  Freddy closed his eyes and flexed his fingers as though he were strangling a rhino. "I got one."

  I blew my eight questions, and an additional eight questions that Freddy gave me out of the goodness of his heart.. I couldn't guess who it was, and Freddy expanded on the game. He gave me a five-minute description of the shark, and the only thing I managed to figure out was that, whoever the yard eagle was, he was a real asshole. Then I gave up and Freddy told me. The shark was Bando Nicos. I got tired of the game and Freddy didn't stop giggling for hours.

  ▫

  Watching. Maybe half-way through the trip the sharks stopped making like a trip to grandma's for the holidays. First quiet, then talk; pumping the stains for something on Tartaros. But none of them had been there either. One of the seventeen other planets using the big T had supplied the prison ships, but the UTR had supplied its own guards. The talk got angry, then the guards shuffled us around to different seats. I said goodbye to Irish and Freddy and let my guts unwind for the first time in days.

  I wound up with a pussyfaced filbert from Lewisburg Max on my right. He was a terrorist who looked like a daisy with a beard and sideburns. On my left was the aisle. In the aisle seat across from mine was Big Dom from Greenville. Him I knew. He was a big Greek with a brain the size of a pea who killed his clock by lifting weights ten hours a day. I had done Dom a few favors back in the Crotch.

  "Hey, Bando."

  "Dom. How goes it?"

 
; The giant grinned, half the teeth missing from his head. "Need my weights, Bando. Dom needs his weights."

  "Can't be too long, now."

  "All this energy in me's ready to explode. I can't find no way to work it off. You know this ship ain't got no windows?"

  "I noticed."

  "I want to look at the stars, Bando."

  "Just cruise, Dom. Can't be too long now. Just cruise."

  "What about my energy? How can I work it off?"

  "Try isometrics. Like you push and pull against things." I put my hands on the back of the seat in front of me. "Like this, and push. It'll work your arms, back and shoulders. Get your legs into it and you can even work those too."

  Dom placed his hands on the back of the seat in front of him and pushed. There was a hellishly loud cracking sound and Dom just about folded the shark in that seat in half. Those seats weren't supposed to move, and when they replaced the back on that one, I saw the steel back supports the big man had snapped in two. He looked at me, his hairless eyebrows raised, looking very guilty.

  "It's okay, Dom," I said to him. "It can't be too long now. Just cruise."

  Dom nodded. End of conversation. The hairy thing on my right opened his mouth for the first time and whispered. "That sweetmeat a friend of yours?"

  "What's it to you?"

  The hair nodded at Dom. "We're going to need friends like that where we're going."

  I looked at the kid. "What do you know about where we're going, Pussyface?"

  The kid grinned. Nice dental work peeked out of all that hair. "I'm not like the rest of you yard eagles. I got ways of finding out. Tartaros is going to be my place."

  I laughed. "You?" Skinny little punk. I laughed again.

  The kid nodded. "Me."

  I shook my head. "Look, Pussyface—"

  "My name is Garoit. Darrell Garoit."

  "Okay, Darrell Garoit, you pussyface. For openers, it's sharks with think-goo, coin, and connections that run the pits. Next, you're a pussyfaced little punk. Punks don't run the crowbars; they get run by the powered up sharks. Last, just what is it that you know about Tartaros?"

  He sneered at me, leaned his head back against his seat, then closed his eyes. I wrapped the fingers of my right hand around his skinny wrist and squeezed. "Pussyface, I can bust this arm like a twig. Now, I asked a question."

  "All right!" Darrell Garoit rubbed his released wrist, then gave me a bad look. "There's no hotel on Tartaros. No crowbars, no stains. Nothing but cons. My group, the Freedom Front, we fought against the UTR joining the con dump on Tartaros, so I've studied all about it. See, there's no jail, no government, no guards. A guy with political savvy can go a long way there, if he can stay alive long enough. I plan to stay alive."

  "You're packed. What kind of system is that? How do they get any work done, or keep the sharks off each other's throats without hightowers keeping watch?"

  "No guards of any kind, Nicos. No stains, no front office. We'll be on our own."

  "That doesn't make any sense. What is it, then?"

  "It's a dump. But it's the raw stuff of political evolution. Anarchy of a kind waiting for Utopia."

  I looked around for a face, but couldn't find it. "Look, Garoit, my bunch from Greenville has a terrorist in it ten times riper'n you. He's an anarchist, too." I chuckled. "He's bigger'n you, too. You get a chance, you find Martin Stays and tell him how you're going to run the place. If it's like you say, he'll be thinking the same thing you are. Watch out for him when he starts foaming at the mouth, though. He's about due."

  The kid nodded and smiled. "It's true. You'll find out."

  ▫

  Tartaros makes sense, if you think about it. If you think about it like a budget-strapped prison system up to its high pockets in population, sharks, angry taxpayers, and anti-crime pressure groups. Dump the cons. It gets rid of them, no maintenance costs, no crowded prisons, and who cares what happens? The cons are being all set free, so why should they complain?

  Free. Why that word yellowed my guts confused more than just me. All cons want to be free, except for a few sickies who can't sleep without a pile of crowbars to hug. But most cons want to be free. If what the kid said was true, then I could go off in the mountains or forests, set up my own shack and be at peace with myself. Maybe I could find a woman. There had to be female exiles from Greenville on board the ship. Exile to Tartaros could be the best thing that ever happened to me.

  I thought about it, and thought about it some more. With each thought my cabin in the woods dream faded a bit more. Cons had been dumped on Tartaros for over forty years. We wouldn't be dropping into an uninhabited paradise. Forty years is a lot of cons, and the more that cons run a place, the more deadly and unpredictable that place becomes. What's more, if it was paradise, the man would have his own cabin put up there. No one ever turned paradise over to sharks. Tartaros would be something else.

  No walls, no bars, no guards—but what? The word spread, but that question "What?" kept things under control. We were all going to be free. But what is "free?" Take a shipload of dumb sharks and have them ponder their first philosophical question. A lot of frowns, a lot of head shaking, a lot of fear, but no trouble.

  By the time the ship entered Tartaros's atmosphere, I made certain of two things: Big Dom was going to stick to me like a second skin, and Darrell Garoit, former crazy bomber for the Freedom Front—whatever the hell that was—would be with us. Maybe he'd run things for a while. There was a new set of ropes to be learned, and he talked like he knew a few knots.

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  ▫

  Free At Last, Free At Last

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  Before the hatch opened each of us was issued a heavy parka, five days worth of those little box chows and a plastic bottle of water in a sack, and a kit bag containing the personal belongings each of us had been allowed to bring along. I checked and my kit bag had only Big Dave's book in it, so I put my box chows and water in the bag, as well.

  The hatch opened, and there was nothing but blackness beyond the illuminated bay. An icy smell of sulfur and dust crept into the ship. As soon as I stood at the head of the ship's ramp, I slung my kit bag on my shoulder and that protomo feeling was on me like slime on slugs.

  Outside it was the kind of cold that sticks the insides of your nostrils together when you inhale. The area around the ship was lit up with a huge umbrella of yellow light. You could see that the ground was loose sand with little clumps of round-bladed grass sticking out here and there.

  The edge of the light umbrella seemed to steam the ground where it touched. "The ship puts out a force field to keep the old sharks on the planet from attacking it." I looked back and saw Garoit staring wide-eyed at the yellow lights. His eyes aimed at me and he gave one of those nervous grins.

  "No question about it, Nicos. This is a one-way trip."

  I looked around and saw the expressions on the faces of a few of the powder puffs. They were beginning to take in that whatever deals they might have made with the guards to obtain various valuable medicines were null and void. Once we stepped beyond the yellow umbrella, there would be no more contact with the stains. The expressions were of resignation and suppressed panic.

  A few of them, as always, put aside their panic to become predators. Each one began doing an inventory on the remaining puffs, making a mental list of who was probably holding what. This data was collated against each puff's physical strength and speed, as well as against each deadhead's place in the disembarkation order. Sworn lifetime friendships and blood brotherhoods were evaporating as everyone reassessed his priorities.

  I saw Freddy waving a finger at me as he shook his head and mouthed the words, "Watching, Bando? Still watching?"

  I shrugged and waved a hand in return as I faced the hatch. The names were called and checked off a screenboard as a body admitting to each name exited. The guard reading the names was the same stain who had ranked me on that f
irst day before I had even gotten to my seat. On the trip I had learned that his name was Crawford.

  "Nicos, Bando, 3340792."

  I held up my right hand and wiggled my fingers. "That's me."

  Crawford looked up from his board, his gray eyes laughing at me. "Well, this is it, tough guy." He nodded toward the hatch. "How's it look?"

  "At least it's got a big beach," I answered with my usual you-can't-touch-me grin. The grin melted as I looked upon one of the last persons I would see who would make it back to Earth. "Crawford, have a good trip back." What the hell, it didn't cost anything.

  The stain looked out of the hatch and back at me. "Good luck, Nicos." He held out his hand.

  I nodded and shook hands with him. "Thanks. It looks like I can use some."

  Before he let go of my hand he looked like he was trying to decide if I'd be worth the waste of a few words. I passed the test. He said, "Anytime before you arrive at the gates of Hell, Nicos, you can change your own luck."

  I gestured with my head toward the hatch. "Here?"

  He gave my hand a final shake, "Even here. Give it a try." He released my hand and called out the next shark's name and number.

  ▫

  After we were all out, the ship closed its hatches, turned off the lights, then gave us a two-minute warning to stand clear. We stumbled off in the dark, away from the ship, then watched as it rose into the night and fired off with a blinding white streak of light. I watched it until the light disappeared over the horizon. Big Dom stood next to me. He pointed up at the sky.

  "Bando, look. I don't see no stars."

  I looked up. "Your eyes haven't adjusted to the dark yet. Maybe it's just cloudy."

  My eyes were adjusted to the dark. I could make out a couple of faint stars, but the rest of the sky was blank. The sky wasn't overcast. It was just empty. I pointed the two stars out to Dom, but the big man was crying.

  "Them stars's all I could see from my window in Greenville. I knew them stars, Bando. The names, stories, and everything." He looked down and shook his head. Then that look came over him. It was the way the head hung and the shoulders slouched. It said, "It is the purpose of the universe to dump on me. So what's new?" That's how the shark makes it from one day to the next without taking it slam between the eyes. I squeezed Dom's shoulder and looked up at the sky.