“It isn’t an anaerobe,” Avernus said. She hadn’t moved. “It is a vacuum organism. A little oxygen won’t hurt it.”
Ben Lo found that he could speak. He said, “He wanted to cut off your head.”
“I wondered why you were carrying that flask of liquid nitrogen. You were going to take my head back with you—and what? Use a bush robot to strip my brain neuron by neuron and read my memories into a computer? How convenient to have a genius captive in a bottle!”
“It’s me, Barbara. I couldn’t let him do that to you.” His left arm was buried up the elbow.
“Then thank you, Ben. I’m in your debt.”
“I’d ask you to take me with you, but I think there’s only one hibernation pod in the transport. You won’t be able to take your friend, either.”
“Well, Ludmilla has her family here. She doesn’t want to leave. Or not yet.”
“I can’t remember that story about Picasso. Maybe you heard it after we—after the divorce.”
“You told it to me, Ben. When things were good between us, you used to tell stories like that.”
“Then I’ve forgotten.”
“It’s about an art dealer who buys a canvas in a private deal, that is signed ‘Picasso.’ This is in France, when Picasso was working in Cannes, and the dealer travels there to find if it is genuine. Picasso is working in his studio. He spares the painting a brief glance and dismisses it as a fake.”
“I had a Picasso, once. A bull’s head. I remember that, Barbara.”
“You thought it was a necessary sign of your wealth. You were photographed beside it several times. I always preferred Georges Braque myself. Do you want to hear the rest of the story?”
“I’m still here.”
“Of course you are, as long as I stay out of reach. Well, a few months later, the dealer buys another canvas signed by Picasso. Again he travels to the studio; again Picasso spares it no more than a glance, and announces that it is a fake. The dealer protests that this is the very painting he found Picasso working on the first time he visited but Picasso just shrugs and says, ‘I often paint fakes.’ ”
His breathing was becoming labored. Was there something wrong with the air system? The black stuff was climbing his chest. He could almost see it move a creeping wave of black devouring him centimeter by centimeter.
The star was very close to the horizon, now.
He said, “I know a story.”
“There’s no more time for stories, dear. I can release you, if you want. You only have your reserve air in any case.”
“No. I want to see you go.”
“I’ll remember you. I’ll tell your story far and wide.”
Ben Lo heard the echo of another voice across their link, and the woman in the transparent suit stood and lifted a hand in salute and bounded away.
The spy came back, then, but Ben Lo fought him down. There was nothing he could do, after all. The woman was gone. He said, as if to himself, “I know a story. About a man who lost himself, and found himself again, just in time. Listen. Once upon a time . . .”
Something bright rose above the horizon and dwindled away into the outer darkness.
THE WAR MEMORIAL
by Allen Steele
Here’s a visit to a curious memorial on a historic battlefield on a battle-torn moon, and the poignant and surprising story of how it came to be there . . .
Allen Steele made his first sale to Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine in 1988, soon following it up with a long string of other sales to Asimov’s, as well as to markets such as The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and Science Fiction Age. In 1990, he published his critically acclaimed first novel, Orbital Decay, which subsequently won the Locus Poll as Best First Novel of the year, and soon Steele was being compared to Golden Age Heinlein by no less an authority than Gregory Benford. His other books include the novels Clarke County, Space, Lunar Descent, Labyrinth of Night, The Weight, and The Tranquility Alternative; and a collection, Rude Astronauts. His most recent book is the novel, A King of Infinite Space. He won a Hugo Award in 1996 for his novella “The Death of Captain Future.” Another novella, “. . . Where Angels Fear to Tread,” is on the Hugo Ballot as I type these words. Born in Nashville, Tennessee, he has worked for a variety of newspapers and magazines, covering science and business assignments, and is now a full-time writer living in Massachusetts with his wife Linda.
* * *
The first-wave assault is jinxed from the very beginning. Even before the dropship touches down, its pilot shouts over the comlink that a Pax missile battery seven klicks away has locked in on their position, despite the ECM buffer set up by the lunarsats. So it’s going to be a dustoff; the pilot has done his job by getting the men down to the surface, and he doesn’t want to be splattered across Mare Tranquillitatis.
It doesn’t matter anyway. Baker Company has been deployed for less than two minutes before the Pax heatseekers pummel the ground around them and take out the dropship even as it begins its ascent.
Giordano hears the pilot scream one last obscenity before his ugly spaceship is reduced to metal rain, then something slams against his back and everything within the suit goes black. For an instant he believes he’s dead, that he’s been nailed by one of the heatseekers, but it’s just debris from the dropship. The half-ton ceramic-polymer shell of the Mark III Valkyrie Combat Armor Suit has absorbed the brunt of the impact.
When the lights flicker back on within his soft cocoon and the flatscreen directly in front of his face stops fuzzing, he sees that not everyone has been so lucky. A few dozen meters away at three o’clock, there’s a new crater that used to be Robinson. The only thing left of Baker Company’s resident card cheat is the severed rifle arm of his CAS.
He doesn’t have time to contemplate Robinson’s fate. He’s in the midst of battle. Sergeant Boyle’s voice comes through the comlink, shouting orders. Traveling over watch, due west, head for Marker One-Eight-Five. Kemp, take Robinson’s position. Cortez, you’re point. Stop staring, Giordano (yes sir). Move, move, move . . .
So they move, seven soldiers in semi-robotic heavy armor, bounding across the flat silver-gray landscape. Tin men trying to outrun the missiles plummeting down around them, the soundless explosions the missiles make when they hit. For several kilometers around them, everywhere they look, there are scores of other tin men doing the same, each trying to survive a silent hell called the Sea of Tranquillity.
Giordano is sweating hard, his breath coming in ragged gasps. He tells himself that if he can just make Marker One-Eight-Five—crater Arago, or so the map overlay tells him—then everything will be okay. The crater walls will protect them. Once Baker Company sets up its guns and erects a new ECM buffer, they can dig in nice and tight and wait it out; the beachhead will have been established by then and the hard part of Operation Monkey Wrench will be over.
But the crater is five-and-a-half klicks away, across plains as flat and wide-open as Missouri pasture, and between here and there a lot of shitfire is coming down. The Pax Astra guns in the foothills of the lunar highlands due west of their position can see them coming; the enemy has the high ground, and they’re throwing everything they can at the invading force.
Sergeant Boyle knows his platoon is in trouble. He orders everyone to use their jumpjets. Screw formation; it’s time to run like hell.
Giordano couldn’t agree more whole-heartedly. He tells the Valkyrie to engage the twin miniature rockets mounted on the back of his carapace.
Nothing happens.
Once again, he tells the voice-activated computer mounted against the back of his neck to fire the jumpjets. When there’s still no response, he goes to manual, using the tiny controls nestled within the palm of his right hand inside the suit’s artificial arm. At that instant, everything goes dark again, just like it did when the shrapnel from the dropship hit the back of his suit.
This time, though, it stays dark.
A red LCD lights above his forehead, telling him
that there’s been a total system crash.
Cursing, he finds the manual override button and stabs it with his little finger. As anticipated, it causes the computer to completely reboot itself; he hears servomotors grind within the carapace as its limbs move into neutral position, until his boots are planted firmly on the ground and his arms are next to his sides, his rifle pointed uselessly at the ground.
There is a dull click from somewhere deep within the armor, then silence.
Except for the red LCD, everything remains dark.
He stabs frantically at the palm buttons, but there’s no power to any of the suit’s major subsystems. He tries to move his arms and legs, but finds them frozen in place.
Limbs, jumpjets, weapons, ECM, comlink . . . nothing works.
Now he’s sweating more than ever. The impact of that little bit of debris from the dropship must have been worse than he thought. Something must have shorted out, badly, within the Valkyrie’s onboard computer.
He twists his head to the left so he can gaze through the eyepiece of the optical periscope, the only instrument within the suit that isn’t dependent upon computer control. What he sees terrifies him: the rest of his platoon jumpjetting for the security of the distant crater, while missiles continue to explode all around him.
Abandoning him. Leaving him behind.
He screams at the top of his lungs, yelling for Boyle and Kemp and Cortez and the rest, calling them foul names, demanding that they wait or come back for him, knowing that it’s futile. They can’t hear him. For whatever reason, they’ve already determined that he’s out of action; they cannot afford to risk their lives by coming back to lug an inert CAS across a battlefield.
He tries again to move his legs, but it’s pointless. Without direct interface from the main computer, the limbs of his suit are immobile. He might as well be wearing a concrete block.
The suit contains three hours of oxygen, fed through pumps controlled by another computer tucked against his belly, along with the rest of its life-support systems. So at least he won’t suffocate or fry . . .
For the next three hours, at any rate.
Probably less. The digital chronometer and life-support gauges are dead, so there’s no way of knowing for sure.
As he watches, even the red coal of the LCD warning lamp grows dim until it finally goes cold, leaving him in the dark.
He has become a living statue. Fully erect, boots firmly placed upon the dusty regolith, arms held rigid at his sides, he is in absolute stasis.
For three hours. Certainly less.
For all intents and purposes, he is dead.
In the smothering darkness of his suit, Giordano prays to a god in which he has never really believed. Then, for lack of anything else to do, he raises his eyes to the periscope eyepiece and watches as the battle rages on around him.
He fully expects—and, after a time, even hopes—for a Pax missile to relieve him of his ordeal, but this small mercy never occurs. Without an active infrared or electromagnetic target to lock in upon, the heatseekers miss the small spot of ground he occupies, instead decimating everything around him.
Giordano becomes a mute witness to the horror of the worst conflict of the Moon War, what historians will later call the Battle of Mare Tranquillitatis. Loyalty, duty, honor, patriotism . . . all the things in which he once believed are soon rendered null and void as he watches countless lives being lost.
Dropships touch down near and distant, depositing soldiers in suits similar to his own. Some don’t even make it to the ground before they become miniature supernovas.
Men and women like himself are torn apart even as they charge across the wasteland for the deceptive security of distant craters and rills.
An assault rover bearing three lightsuited soldiers rushes past him, only to be hit by fire from the hills. It is thrown upside down, crushing two of the soldiers beneath it. The third man, his legs broken and his suit punctured, manages to crawl from the wreckage. He dies at Giordano’s feet, his arms reach out to him.
He has no idea whether Baker Company has survived, but he suspects it hasn’t, since he soon sees a bright flash from the general direction of the crater it was supposed to occupy and hold.
In the confines of his suit, he weeps and screams and howls against the madness erupting around him. In the end, he goes mad himself, cursing the same god to whom he’d prayed earlier for the role to which he has been damned.
If God cares, it doesn’t matter. By then, the last of Giordano’s oxygen reserves have been exhausted; he asphyxiates long before his three hours are up, his body still held upright by the Mark III Valkyrie Combat Armor Suit.
When he is finally found, sixty-eight hours later, by a patrol from the victorious Pax Astra Free Militia, they are astonished that anything was left standing on the killing ground. This sole combat suit, damaged only by a small steel pipe wedged into its CPU housing, with a dead man inexplicably sealed inside, is the one thing left intact. All else has been reduced to scorched dust and shredded metal.
So they leave him standing.
They do not remove the CAS from its place, nor do they attempt to prise the man from his armor. Instead, they erect a circle of stones around the Valkyrie. Later, when peace has been negotiated and lunar independence has been achieved, a small plaque is placed at his feet.
The marker bears no name. Because so many lives were lost during the battle, nobody can be precisely certain of who was wearing this particular CAS on that particular day.
An eternal flame might have been placed at his feet, but it can’t, because nothing burns on the Moon.
A SPECIAL KIND OF MORNING
by Gardner Dozois
Gardner Dozois has won two Nebula Awards for his own short fiction, as well as ten Hugo Awards as the year’s best editor. He is the editor of Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine, and also of the annual anthology series The Year’s Best Science Fiction, now up to its Fifteenth Annual Collection. He is the author or editor of over seventy books, including a long string of Ace anthologies co-edited with Jack Dann. His own short fiction was most recently collected in Geodesic Dreams: The Best Short Fiction of Gardner Dozois.
Here, in one of the earliest stories to deal with the implications of the then-oncoming Biological Revolution, he takes us to a distant future world that has forgotten about War—but which, alas, has not outgrown its capacity to learn . . .
* * *
The Doomsday Machine is the human race.
—Graffito in New York subway,
Seventy-ninth Street Station
Did y’ever hear the one about the old man and the sea?
Halt a minute, lordling; stop and listen. It’s a fine story, full of balance and point and social pith; short and direct. It’s not mine. Mine are long and rambling and parenthetical and they corrode the moral fiber right out of a man. Come to think, I won’t tell you that one after all. A man of my age has a right to prefer his own material, and let the critics be damned. I’ve a prejudice now for webs of my own weaving.
Sit down, sit down: butt against pavement, yes; it’s been done before. Everything has, near about. Now that’s not an expression of your black pessimism, or your futility, or what have you. Pessimism’s just the commonsense knowledge that there’s more ways for something to go wrong than for it to go right, from our point of view anyway—which is not necessarily that of the management, or of the mechanism, if you prefer your cosmos depersonalized. As for futility, everybody dies the true death eventually; even though executives may dodge it for a few hundred years, the hole gets them all in the end, and I imagine that’s futility enough for a start. The philosophical man accepts both as constants and then doesn’t let them bother him any. Sit down, damn it; don’t pretend you’ve important business to be about. Young devil, you are in the enviable position of having absolutely nothing to do because it’s going to take you a while to recover from what you’ve just done.
There. That’s better. Comfortable? You don’
t look it; you look like you’ve just sat in a puddle of piss and you’re wondering what the socially appropriate reaction is. Hypocrisy’s an art, boy; you’ll improve with age. Now you’re bemused, lordling, that you let an old soak chivy you around, and now he’s making fun of you. Well, the expression on your face is worth a chuckle; if you could see it you’d laugh yourself. You will see it years from now too, on some other young man’s face—that’s the only kind of mirror that ever shows it clear. And you’ll be an old soak by that time, and you’ll laugh and insult the young buck’s dignity, but you’ll be laughing more at the reflection of the man you used to be than at that particular stud himself. And you’ll probably have to tell the buck just what I’ve told you to cool him down, and there’s a laugh in that too; listen for the echo of a million and one laughs behind you. I hear a million now.
How do I get away with such insolence? What’ve I got to lose, for one thing. That gives you a certain perspective. And I’m socially instructive in spite of myself—I’m valuable as an object lesson. For that matter, why is an arrogant young aristo like you sitting there and putting up with my guff? Don’t even bother to answer; I knew the minute you came whistling down the street, full of steam and strut. Nobody gets up this early in the morning anymore, unless they’re old as I am and begrudge sleep’s dry-run of death—or unless they’ve never been to bed in the first place.
The world’s your friend this morning, a toy for you to play with and examine and stuff in your mouth to taste, and you’re letting your benevolence slop over onto the old degenerate you’ve met on the street. You’re even happy enough to listen, though you’re being quizzical about it, and you’re sitting over there feeling benignly superior. And I’m sitting over here feeling benignly superior. A nice arrangement, and everyone content. Well, then, mornings make you feel that way. Especially if you’re fresh from a night at the Towers, the musk of Lady Nil still warm on your flesh.
A blush—my buck, you are new-hatched. How did I know? Boy, you’d be surprised what I know; I’m occasionally startled myself, and I’ve been working longer to get it catalogued. Besides, hindsight is a comfortable substitute for omnipotence. And I’m not blind yet. You have the unmistakable look of a cub who’s just found out he can do something else with it besides piss. An incredible revelation, as I recall. The blazing significance of it will wear a little with the years, though not all that much, I suppose; until you get down to the brink of the Ultimate Cold, when you stop worrying about the identity of warmth, or demanding that it pay toll in pleasure. Any hand of clay, long’s the blood still runs the tiny degree that’s just enough for difference. Warmth’s the only definition between you and graveyard dirt. But morning’s not for graveyards, though it works the other way. Did y’know they also used to use that to make babies? ’S’fact; though few know it now. It’s a versatile beast. Oh come—buck, cub, young cocksman—stop being so damn surprised. People ate, slept, and fornicated before you were born, some of them anyway, and a few will probably even find the courage to keep on at it after you die. You don’t have to keep it secret; the thing’s been circulated in this region once or twice before. You weren’t the first to learn how to make the beast do its trick, though I know you don’t believe that. I don’t believe it concerning myself, and I’ve had a long time to learn.
Future War Page 25
