“That has nothing to do with me ... sir.” She realized that she had been forgetting to say it.
“One generation plants the tree, the next gets the shade.” His laugh was like a grunt. “I met her when she wasn’t much older than you.”
Mariska jacked her guess about his age way, way up.
He stuffed the rest of the tart into his mouth and took his time chewing. “I’d say that you remind me of her, but then you are her.” He held a finger to his lips, cutting off her objection. “What’s my name, young Volochkova? No, not Beep.”
“Lincoln Larrabee, sir.” This was the longest conversation they’d had in months. She wished she knew how to end it.
“Good of you to know that.” He considered the back of his hand for a moment. “So if we have to share the same sky, we should help each other. I’m worried about FiveFord.”
She hadn’t noticed anything odd about Richard, other than that he wouldn’t take no for an answer. “Why?”
“Space blues. Apathy. Burn out. Maybe you’ve missed the signs, but he won’t be worth a mushroom in another couple of weeks.”
“But he’s only nineteen.”
“Do us a favor, would you? I mean, for the good of the ship and all.” He poked his forefinger to her shoulder, as if she hadn’t been paying attention. “Give FiveFord that ride he’s been waiting for.”
“What?”
“Go knee to knee with him. You’re patched, aren’t you? You can’t get pregnant.”
She couldn’t believe he was saying this to her until she realized that he must have been sniffing. “Are you high?”
“Why?” When he winked at her, his eyelid fluttered. “Aren’t you?”
“No.”
“Then let’s fix that.” He fumbled at the breast pocket of his coverall, withdrew a sniffer and offered it to her.
She resisted the impulse to bat the thing out of his hand. “You’re crazy.” She wasn’t about to sir him when he was twisted.
“What? It’s just some harmless wizard. You get high. I’ve watched you.”
“That’s different.” His lopsided grin infuriated her. She had accepted his bullying because she thought he was in control of things. “You’re supposed to be responsible. You’re wearing the override.”
He peeled the card from his coverall and twirled it on its lanyard. “But I’m not on duty.” He tucked it into the pocket where the sniffer had been.
“You’re always on duty.” She could hear her voice tremble. “What if something goes wrong?”
He waved the sniffer absently under his nose but did not squeeze off a dose. “You know why they call us monkeys?”
She closed her eyes, wishing this was just a nightmare she was having.
“It comes from first days,” he said, “back in astronaut time. Everything was automatic then. The engineers didn’t trust the old guys to do anything, not even think. Test animals don’t make decisions and that’s all the astronauts were. They used to say they were men sent to do monkeys’ work.”
She snapped the bungee against her wrist to keep from screaming. Beep was always saying things like that. She didn’t know what he was talking about half the time.
“We’re just along for the ride. Look here.” He held up three fingers on his left hand. “Three wardrooms.” He showed her all five fingers of his right. “Five of us. Crews used to need all that bunk space, but there was nothing for them to do. So they cut back. Everything is automatic now.”
“But I’m shadowing you on the nav rack.” Her voice was so small that she almost couldn’t hear herself over Galley noise.
“Sure, so you can read it. But if we get a course wobble, can you calculate a new trajectory home?” He waited for her reply but there was nothing she could say. “You want Didit tweaking the magnetic containment field in the reactor?”
“I’d tell the computers to ...”
“The computers are automatic. They don’t need monkeys to override a busted routine.”
“Then why are we here?”
“Crud duty? Fix lights? Fetch the ice?” He scratched under his arm and shrieked hoo-hoo-hoo.
When Mariska motioned for the sniffer, Beep grinned. She brought it to her face, cupped hands over it, and squeezed off a dose, which sparkled up her nose. The wizard sank to her lungs and streamed into her blood. Seconds later her brain was twinkling.
“Feel better?” said Beep.
For the moment, the wizard was more important than her fear and confusion. “We’re not monkeys,” she said. “We’re remoras.”
He cupped the sniffer to his nose. “Say again?” He pressed the trigger.
“Remoras. The fish that stick onto sharks and clean parasites off them.”
When Beep burst out laughing, his sniffer shot across Galley and out into the spine. She chuckled too but it was only because she was seriously twisted.
“Yes, loosen your cheeks.” He patted the packet where he’d put the override, as if to make sure he hadn’t lost it too. “Why don’t you think I like you?”
This also struck her as funny. “Because you don’t.” She giggled. “Sir.”
“Look here.” He pointed and the screen next to her woke up. She saw a grainy vid, obviously transcribed from a feed. On it was Mariska, except not. She was wearing a dress that was black and shiny and barely covered the crotch. The shoulders were bare except for the two skinny ribbons which kept the dress from falling off. She was wearing black strappy shoes with heels six centimeters long. The eyeshadow was purple.
She would never wear such ridiculous shoes. Or eyeshadow. “What is this?”
The Mariska on the screen tugged the dress up so that black lace panties peeked from beneath the hem. One of the ribbons slipped. The face’s hungry expression stunned her.
“Stop it.”
The scene shifted and another Mariska was perched in a golden cage. She was nearly naked this time. The arms fitted into outspread white wings like the ones they used in aviariums on the Moon. Feathers dangled from a golden chain around the waist but didn’t conceal much. The chest horrified her. Although she was fifteen, she was still pathetically flat-chested—her mother’s fault. But the figure on the screen would have needed at least a C-cup bra to cover the bare breasts. Someone—something opened the door to the golden cage, but all she could see was a hand with long, pointed fingernails.
Beep froze the vid. “They go on from there,” he said. “Much further on.”
“They?” Mariska couldn’t find her voice. “Where ... who?”
“FiveFord has been making fake feeds where you do whatever he can imagine. It started on the outbound, but he wasn’t obsessing until a couple of weeks ago. He makes one of you almost every day now. Sometimes he’ll steal from his sleep time. I’ve seen this with shadows before.” He gestured at the screen. “They make all kinds of deranged dream feeds, design inventions that could never work, study eight languages and learn none. I’ve got nothing against it in general, but sometimes they turn inward and swallow themselves. Then we have a problem.”
Mariska was outraged. “You’re as bad as he is.” She reached past him and wiped the screen. “You’re snooping this?”
“Fifteen-year-olds aren’t exactly my favorite flavor, young Volochkova. I don’t like this any more than you do.” He fixed her with an accusing stare. “But tell me you’ve never created a fake feed before.”
Of course she had. Not a lot, but more than a couple. She and her friend Grieg used to fake Mr. Holmgren, their ag teacher. They had him diddling Librarian Jane, the star from Crosswhen and President Kwa and Godzilla. But that had been funny. Somehow she didn’t think Richard FiveForce was doing fakes of her for laughs.
“Make him stop. Right now.”
Beep showed her his hands, palms up. “Feeds are thought, young Volochkova. You can’t stop thoughts. And it’s not as if he’s sharing with anyone. He can’t know that I’ve snooped his kink. Or that I gave you a sneak preview.” Beep released the bungee f
rom his dining stand. “Anyway, I just thought you might be interested.” He pushed toward the spine. “You can make him stop any time you want to. Reality trumps fantasy.”
“I’m not sleeping with that pervert.”
He waved without looking back. “Your decision.” He flew through the hatch.
Her borscht was cold and she had lost her appetite. She shoved the cup into the disposal chute and flew back to Wardroom C. She hesitated at the hatch. Didit, Glint, and Richard were still linked into their common dream. Now she wondered exactly what they were sharing. After all, this was a feed that they had deliberately kept her from. What kinks might be happening under that imaginary striped tent? She shook her head. No, that was paranoid thinking. Glint had invited her to join them, after all. Still, she braced against the hatchway and then threw herself at her sleep closet before any of them noticed her.
She sealed herself in but didn’t turn on the lights. Her mind was churning as she floated in the darkness. Why had Natalya Volochkova contacted Beep? Did her mother know how he had been tormenting her? Would whatever she told him make any difference? Mariska doubted it. She decided to resent her mother’s interference, even if things did somehow get better. The whole point of signing on for an asteroid run was to escape the controlling bitch. Then Mariska got stuck thinking about what Beep had said. How could he ever have believed she’d let Richard touch her after she’d seen those fakes?
All the grown-ups in her life were out of control.
The longer she spent in the dark, the lonelier she felt. She had no friends on the Shining Legend. The only friends she did have were back on the Moon, forty million kilometers away.
And Jak had left her.
She woke up the screen and drilled down through the menus until she came to her feed editor. She linked it to the encrypted partition where she kept her secret shrine to Jak. She didn’t give a damn if Beep was snooping. There was a specific feed she had created of things she remembered about the Muoi pool. She and Jak used to swim laps there together; she found a sequence where they were sitting on the edge, their feet dangling in the water. In real life she had been wearing her aquablade swimsuit but now she changed it to the two piece that she never liked because it made her look like a little girl. In real life, they had talked about sharing a closet on a starship, maybe even the famous Gorshkov, assuming that her mother wouldn’t be aboard. In her fake, there was no talk of the future. She scripted him to play with the waistband of her suit, which she had let him do sometimes. She brushed a kiss across his shoulder, licking the beads of water which clung to his bare skin. The shouts of kids playing in the shallow end bounced off the low ceiling of the pool’s cave. Jak slipped his three middle fingers slowly down the bumps of her spine and then just inside her suit, which she had never let him do. The fake Mariska closed her eyes. The real Mariska sucked in a ragged breath. She could see her imaginary Jak getting hard under his swimsuit. But suddenly she was sad. Too sad. She knew there would be tears if she pushed the fake any further. And none of them, not Jak or Beep or Richard or the Jingchus or her mother, was worth crying over.
The Shining Legend was possibly the ugliest spaceship in SinoStar’s fleet. At the back end of its long spine was a heavily shielded antimatter drive. Forward of the reactor was a skirt of battered cargo buckets. Outbound, these had carried agro and manufactured goods destined for Rising Dragon station. Inbound, they contained unprocessed nickel-iron ore and dirty chunks of ice from SinoStar’s asteroid mines. Next to the buckets were storage mods. Further upspine, a hodgepodge of crew mods had accreted over the years: Command, Galley, Service, Health, Rec, and Wardrooms A, B, and C. Three crawlerbots, nicknamed Apple, Banana, and Cherry, wandered the various hulls of the ship checking for micrometeor damage. A watchbot named Eye flew alongside, held by a magnetic tether. Their asteroid bucket looked to Mariska like a pile of junk that had fallen out of a closet.
The ship ran on antimatter and water. Electrolytic cells dissociated hydrogen and oxygen from ice that had been treated back on Sweetspot. The hydrogen was used by the positron reactor for thrust, the oxygen refreshed the atmosphere in the crew’s quarters. Unlike a starship like the Gorshkov, the Shining Legend was not a closed system. Scrubbers removed carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and vented it to space. The cells replaced the oxygen lost in this process and therefore required a constant supply of water. When reserves ran low, the crew fetched blocks of the treated ice, stored on loading porches outside the storage mods.
Qualifying in cargo was the last step before a shadow could advance to senior crew; it was the one job where the computers needed human help. Both Richard and Glint were shadowing cargo on this run. Glint had failed cargo once already but she’d been doing better this time. They used the crawlerbots to load, store, and offload material at either end of the run and bring in the ice while the ship was in transit. In the old days, cargo monkeys used to suit up and actually drive the bots, but now everything was handled remotely from Command.
Throughout the run, Richard, Glint, and Beep would gather at the cargo rack in Command to divert the bots from their normal rounds. But having people look over her shoulder made Glint nervous, especially after she had failed cargo. Back at Rising Dragon station she had put several new dents in the buckets while loading ore. Her problem was that when she got flustered, she lost track of where the edges of her bots were. She was fine as long as she didn’t actually see anyone, so Richard and Beep had taken to monitoring her from a distance when she took her turn on the rack.
So Mariska was surprised when Richard flew into the Rec mod.
“Isn’t Glint on ice duty today?” She was working out on the treadmill.
“She is.” Richard maneuvered himself into the weight machine and buckled in.
“Aren’t you supposed to be watching her?”
“I am.”
“But you’re not.”
“No.” He smiled at no one in particular as he adjusted the arms of the machine. “I’d rather be here with you.” He set the resistance to four kilograms for curls.
“Richard.”
He laughed. “Beep told me to take a break. He’s watching her but she hasn’t messed up since Dragon. Ninety-seven days and counting. She’s so good now that she’s boring.”
Mariska had logged just three kilometers and had seven more to go. At least a half hour before she finished her workout and could escape him. She pulled her towel from its clip and wiped her face. Sweat was another thing she hated about space. She missed swimming.
How was she supposed to act around Richard anyway? She couldn’t help but wonder what was going on behind those wide brown eyes when he looked at her. Probably imagining new kinks. But with more than a hundred days left in the run, she couldn’t afford to confront him. Feuds in space tended to take up a lot of room. On a ship the size of the Shining Legend, that would be trouble. But she wasn’t about to pretend that she was comfortable being alone with him.
After he finished the curls, he did shoulder squats. The weight machine clanked and wheezed and its gyros hummed. The more reps he did, the more the veins stood out at his temples. Richard was proud of his foolish muscles and worked hard to keep them. Now he was grunting from the effort. It was kind of disgusting. He told her once when they were high on wizard that he’d be like some kind of superhero if he ever visited the Moon. She’d tried not to laugh at his ignorance. There was hardly any crime at Haworth. The Moon had no need of another Lord Danger.
“You haven’t been very nice to me lately.” He was smiling, his cheeks flushed from his workout. “What did I do wrong?”
“Nothing.” She wasn’t going to think feathers and golden chains.
“Somehow you make nothing sound an awful lot like something.” He waited for her to answer; she let him wait. “Okay.” He reconfigured the weight machine for squat thrusts. “One. Two.” The count exploded out of him when he kicked his legs back. “Three. Four. Five.” He was so strong that he overpowered the gyro. When t
he apparatus banged against the wall, she could feel the entire mod shake. It was a point of pride with Richard that he could do this. “Thirteen. Foufteen. Fifteen.” No one else aboard could. Sometimes she could feel him working out as far away as Galley.
Richard stopped at twenty, sucking air in huge gulps. Mariska felt a familiar tingle; since he was out of breath and couldn’t speak, he was offering her his feed.
“No thanks,” she said. She woke up the screen in front of them, picked a 3D channel at random. It was old sci-fi from the previous century: a space captain in a ridiculously tight uniform was sitting on a shiny chair on the bridge of some fairy tale spaceship. The camera pulled back. Everyone on the screen was sitting on chairs.
There were no chairs on the Shining Legend.
“Artificial gravity.” Richard climbed on the stationary bike and started peddling. “I could use some of that just now.”
Mariska ignored him and pretended interest in the 3D.
Now the people on the bridge were staring at a viewscreen showing another silly spaceship. In an external shot, one ship veered sharply away from the other, narrowly avoiding a collision. Back on the bridge, the crew were all leaning to their left.
“Sorry,” said Richard, “but they’d all be puddles of jelly on the wall.” He shook his head. “People on Earth still watch this stuff.”
The counter on the treadmill clicked over to ten kilometers. “Really?” Mariska slowed her pace to a walk. Her legs felt pleasantly heavy.
“People on Earth are stupid. They don’t know anything about living in space. That’s why I left.”
“There are stupid people everywhere.” She unbungeed herself. “The trick is not to let them do anything stupid to you.”
Richard shot her a quizzical look. “Meaning?
“Meaning have a nice workout, Richard.” She said, and kicked out of Rec.
Mariska had never had a feed from her mother before. At first she wasn’t sure that she should accept it. Natalya Volochkova was a fossil like Beep. Her generation used feeds only for the most intimate sort of contact, which was the last thing Mariska wanted. But this feed had been the only message from her mother for several days now. Mariska was curious to know why she had stopped.
Asimov's Science Fiction 12/01/10 Page 4
