The Pure Cold Light

by Gregory Frost

  Lyell figured the one on the right could have as easily been a portrait of the Loch Ness Monster as of the late Andre Alcevar. She’d worked with bad imaging in a few missing persons hunts, but not that bad. She couldn’t see why Odie had gotten so revved up about it. His ratings must be down. Elections were only eight months away. Time for bread and circuses.

  Her attention drifted from the screen to the individual faces puffing away at crazy-quilt angles. In weightlessness faces tended to inflate, so that everybody in the room looked like they had Esquimo forebears. None of the faces, puffed up or not, belonged to the girl she was hunting. None she’d spoken to had been able to offer Lyell any help in locating Tamiami Trayle. Nonetheless, she touched her arm just above the elbow and, by turning her head smoothly from side to side, began recording them all.

  The girl had run away from home. Her parents—her father most aggressively—had hired Lyell to find her and bring her back. A credit trace had revealed that Tamiami had shuttled up to the Geosat, suggesting that she was dead serious about getting away from her family. But Geosats as salvation were a pipe-dreamt nightmare. Runaways of all demeanors, hungry for some kind of temporary security before their parents’ credit disks filled up or were turned off, jockeyed for jobs that hadn’t been there to begin with. Lyell had combed the docks, hunted through boutiques, food kiosks, and virtual-sex shops—most of them ScumberCorp franchises, finally narrowing her search to the station’s arms. The arms didn’t spin as the core of the Geosat did, and therefore they had no gravity. A handful of business ventures had figured out how to utilize zero-G profitably; mostly the arms represented storage space, and dutifully she inquired at every cargo office. When she’d eliminated every place else on the satellite, Stardance Weightless Weightloss remained. She checked herself in for the full treatment.

  Thomasina Lyell, private investigative journalist—pijin for short—had learned a wealth of information about SWW in two days. The main thing she’d discovered was that the Stardance staff had an obsession with group dynamic. They wanted the customers bound by a reductive identity, a collective impetus to burn off fat. It was this group dynamic that was skewing her quest. Clients associated strictly with their own group. Other groups—and there were at least three she knew of—had no contact with them at all. Tamiami, if she was here, was in some other group, watching some other bank of TVs.

  Odie’s two unfocused photos of the late Mr. Alcevar had now been incrementally and dramatically enhanced. They appeared to reveal the same face. Scornfully, Lyell shook her head, fanning droplets of perspiration into the air.

  Any video artist with a stylus could have executed the entire enhancement effect—including the odd lumps on the righthand face—in under half an hour. The time had long since passed where fraud looked any different than truth. Nevertheless, here was the President of the United States presenting the argument that a man had actually returned from the far side of death. Or what was supposed to be death, since no one truly knew what Orbitol decay was.

  She finished her slow pan of the room, then resignedly reached over and gripped her left arm again, pressing her fingertips against the switch that shut off the nose-ring cam on her right nostril. Its lens had the appearance of a perfect star sapphire. She could have produced a compilation disk of all the grotesquely distorted faces that had squashed up close to adore it.

  She leaned down and applied herself strenuously to an all-out sprint. The session was nearly over, not more than a few minutes left. She didn’t need the workout particularly but wanted the endorphin high. She’d always been large-boned and the slightest bit plump, and already in four days she’d worked off all her excess weight. Everyone lost weight at Stardance. Everyone.

  Lyell had one alternative remaining. Over the past two days, she’d struck up a tense association—it could hardly be called friendship—with the group trainer, whose name was Nance, in the hope of getting a look at the lists of the other squads. The whole business was requiring extraordinary finesse. As was the case with so many people on the Geosats, Nance had hired on with Stardance in the fervent hope of hitching a ride to the Moon or Mars colonies. She was not about to screw up her chances by allowing some Earth-bound investigator to take a peek at confidential data. What she was willing to do was meet Lyell away from the weightloss center—on the main ring of the spinning station—and to listen and, maybe, to talk.

  The bell chimed and the TV screens went dead, signaling the end of the exercise period. Lyell wondered how things had turned out for Akiko Alcevar and her ridiculously resurrected hubby. With a certain amount of self-reproach, she hoped that Nebergall was recording it so she could find out. Her whole life she’d had a weak spot for nonsense like that.

  One by one the group unbelted from their cycle harnesses and grabbed the rungs of zero-G ladders to pull themselves toward the open door. To Lyell it was like watching the migration of mutant Galapagos tortoises, their bodies marked with almost identical rings and swatches of sweat. A pond of sweat had developed just above her breasts; none on her legs, another oddity of weightlessness.

  The door slid open on cue. Lyell caught hold of an overhead rung and swung behind the pack to the exit. Nance stood braced outside the doorway, a “drop-dead” look on her freckled face as the bodies bobbed past. She acted as if she didn’t notice Lyell.

  Sound trilled through the green corridor beyond—a peaceful susurration of waterfalls, a soothing twitter of jungle birds. The group thinned out as exhausted individuals returned to their cubicles to strip down and rinse off in a shower bag before gathering for the small noon meal. Lyell figured she’d savored enough nasty diet pastes for the rest of her life.

  She continued past her cubicle, moving hand-over-hand into the reception area of Stardance. The pop–eyed male secretary strapped in behind the desk realized her intentions when she didn’t slow down. “You know, that’s very ill-advised,” he called after her. “Have you consulted your trainer? You only hurt yourself when you stray.”

  “If I can’t hurt myself, who can I hurt?” she called back. The clear doors with the red SWW logo slapped across them opened, and she swung on into the main tube.

  Even as Lyell stuck her feet into two foot cups on the automatic beltway down the center of the tube, she broke out in a new sweat. Anticipation of the return to gravity settled upon her like a batwinged phobia.

  The belt moved her along past mostly blank doorways, empty compartments. Flotation Dreams, a gel-sleep therapy center, was the only other thriving weightless business on this arm.

  The belt deposited her in front of a rotating airlock chamber. Grasping the rails to either side, she bobbed inside and then dangled as the inner door performed a countdown. When it slid back, a wide second doorway dropped into place and Lyell stepped through onto the spinning hub of the platform wheel. Instantly, the pressure of half an atmosphere clutched at her like an invisible slime. She clung to two more rails while vertigo threatened her. It passed in a moment, leaving her to other ailments.

  Her feet seemed to be melting into the floor and in response, her legs knotted up hard as stone. Her breasts tugged heavily at her rib cage. She tottered along like a sailor trying to adjust her sea-legs to land after years upon the waves. Instinct propelled her. Signs guided her to the elevators.

  She wiped the salty sting of sweat from her eyes; she was unused to its tickle running down her face. Probably, she now realized, she should have taken a shower first and changed into dry clothes; but she could never have run the gauntlet from weightlessness to this demoralizing shuffle a second time.

  Her left calf cramped up. She hopped into a waiting elevator car, clumsily pressed “D” to the debarkation deck, then doubled over and grabbed hold of her leg. Groaning, she dug her thumbs into the agonizing clutch of muscle. The elevator car rumbled unsteadily up the shaft.

  D-deck consisted of little more than shops along a tubeway—movie libraries, bookwalls, spicy take-away foods—the sorts of places that could fit into confi
ned niches. Lyell had hit them all on her hunt.

  She bought a taco on her way to the lounge. The extruded meat had undoubtedly never been alive, but that didn’t matter. The beans were real, the green sauce tangy and hot. After days of bland paste, the big flour taco was pure manna.

  People glanced curiously at her as she limped past. Escapees from the weight-loss academy would be few. Most of the layover clientele wouldn’t know or care that it even existed.

  She finished the taco, licked her fingers, then wiped them on her sweatsuit. The spice made her sniffle. On Earth it would have been enough to send her clawing for a liter of water.

  The deck echoed with the sound of piped-in gentle rain. She lingered for a moment at a windowall. The view, effected by mirror and fiber systems, was of the Earth below. She identified clouds delineating the southern trade winds off the tip of Brazil. She smiled, and wondered how, after seeing a view like this, the likes of Nance could elect to flee that world forever. There would always be a percentage of humanity who didn’t mind letting everybody else clean up after them. In fact, she decided as she looked over the crowd in the corridor, a large percentage.

  She walked on. The Way-Station Lounge, where she was to meet Nance, lay at the far end of the tube, near the docking stems. It was no bigger than the other shops, but, with the liquors concealed in their containers behind the wall, most of the space was given over to small tables and chairs, enough for fifteen or so people if nobody farted—for which reason alone there wouldn’t be any carbonated drinks on hand.

  She ordered up a glass of cold pertsovka. It was touted as the most popular drink among the platform crews, and Lyell understood why immediately—she could taste it even over the afterburn of taco sauce. Vodka and hot peppers. “The spice of life,” she said to the Oriental bartender after she took her first tentative drink. He wore a red name tag: Skip. She wondered if he thought he was on his way to Mars, too. Sure, they would need bartenders on Mars.

  She moved over to one of the small tables and sat down to wait for Nance. For a while she continued massaging the last of the charley horse out of her leg.

  If the lounge had been much larger or busier, she might have missed the three who arrived after her: two men, with a third man pressed between them. She could size up the relationship that way from the contrasting attitudes of the three. In the mirror behind the bar, the two on the end—one pale, freckled redhead and one dark-skinned black—wore the expressions of men looking forward to their drinks. The man between them was another matter.

  What he was thinking could not be judged easily. The right side of his face—over the bridge of the nose and down the cheek—couldn’t be seen beneath a metal headpiece and lens. Hospitals used such electronic calottes, she knew, in cases where brain circuitry needed rerouting around damaged tissue. Accident victims, for instance. The impression hardened when he failed to respond to the bartender’s query. The redhead nudged him. He shook his head. He’d been listening after all but wanted nothing.

  Lyell’s glance fell to his hands, but he wore no manacles. Nevertheless, she took him for a prisoner. Having served three months in the penal colony of Corson’s Island, she recognized the unmistakable look—a face that had used up its defensive expressions of self–esteem and denial; body language of a captive overwhelmed by the machinery of justice. The man was darkly handsome—or would have been without the headgear. His blue jumpsuit looked as though he’d slept in it for days—and all at once Lyell realized that she was looking at a Moon colony uniform, and she idly pretended to scratch her elbow, switching on the nose-cam. Maybe the weight-loss gig wouldn’t be a complete failure after all.

  The man in the middle caught her staring at him. He glanced back at her indifferently, then past her, out the lounge doorway, at nothing. He hadn’t killed anyone or he would have been shackled, and probably not allowed to enter inhabited platform areas during layover no matter how much his officers wanted a short one. Something else, then. A mystery…

  Lyell downed the rest of her vodka. The pepper burned lovingly in her throat. She got up and went to the bar. “I’ll have another,” she told Skip.

  The black man beside her made the next step easier. He looked at her and said wryly, “What did you do, jog through the park?”

  Thomasina stared smilingly into his eyes, to tell him how attractive she found him. She let her gaze slide to the one in the middle as if by accident. “You’re out of the Moon colony, aren’t you?” she asked. Peripherally, she saw Skip hesitate and glance up from the drink nozzle.

  The black man nodded, but with a vaguely disquieted look as if he wished now that he’d kept his mouth shut.

  “SC miners, I’ll bet.”

  “Well.” He sipped his drink, caught between the desire to leave and the desire to enjoy what he was paying Geoplatform prices to savor. He tried to ease out of it. “Isn’t everybody?”

  She laughed lightly, which was what he’d wanted. “I just wondered what it was like up there, you know, as compared to down here.” He started to answer but she continued, “I mean, you talk to anybody on the platform here, there isn’t anybody can imagine why colonists would go back to Earth.”

  “Who said we were?” sneered the redhead.

  “Oh, come on. You didn’t come all this way to drink on a company platform.”

  “You’re awfully nosy, lady.”

  She gave a coquettish pout to her expression—it felt so good being able to use her face again—to keep the nearer man in sympathy with her. She would get good sharp closeups of all three of these men. “It’s just that we don’t see many workers on their way down from the Moon to the Earth.”

  “So what are you, the welcome wagon? We’re dropping our friend off. He’s cycled down. People do that.”

  She pretended to study the man in the middle for the first time. “You look like you had an accident.”

  The other two became noticeably more edgy but they needn’t have worried, because the one in the middle said nothing, just stared somewhere out the door.

  “What’s your friend’s name?”

  “Do you mind if we finish our fucking drinks without being bothered by you?” asked the redhead.

  “Hey, lighten up, now,” the man beside her warned him. “Lady, don’t get me wrong, but we’ve got a twenty-minute layover and we’d prefer to relax one little last time before we have to deal with the stink of Philly air again. You see what I’m saying?”

  “But you can’t mean you’re going to my hometown, to Philadelphia? Well, of course you are, you’re with ScumberCorp. You and Mr.—”

  “Rueda, his name’s Angel Rueda,” the redhead blurted out, “and he’s not being talkative today, which is his prerogative. Why don’t you try it yourself?”

  She stiffened indignantly, took her drink, and walked back to her small table. She took her time with the second drink, letting the camera do all the work while she ignored the trio altogether.

  Nance arrived, gave the trio a cautious look, then sat beside Lyell. “All right,” she said immediately, “who the fuck are you, lady, and what do you want with Tami?”

  Lyell pretended to have been aware of this from the start. “You know where she is,” she said.

  Nance said something else but Lyell didn’t get it. Her attention had been snagged by the trio, leaving.

  She glanced their way casually, as if she’d already forgotten them, to find Angel Rueda staring at her with the strangest look in his one dark eye. It stayed with her long after he and his escort had disappeared down the tubeway.

  It was a look of something like forlorn hope.

  Chapter Two: Life In The Pit

  Amerind Shikker arrived in the subterranean world of the disused subway Concourse against her will, trussed up naked in scraps of her clothing and thrown down the steps into the darkness. Her neighbors—her “friends”—were the culprits. They thought she’d gone crazy, and maybe they were half right. She’d killed a man, cut his dick off. He’d shown her who
he was, was why.

  He was an Orbiter for sure. He had the burn marks on his temples where he fired the injector gun, so she would have known anyway. But the fucker’s right leg had vanished from the knee down, which became apparent when he crouched next to her and his pant-leg, too short to begin with, pulled halfway up his calves.

  He didn’t have any socks, and he didn’t have any right leg, either.

  His left leg was raw with flea bites. The right just wasn’t there. She wondered if the fleas had been erased, too. His shoe looked to be empty; she could see straight through to the rip in the sole.

  He hadn’t liked her seeing that, and that was when he’d begun his singsong ditty about “not bein’ a kid, and not bein’ a skipper”. She supposed, with that leg, he likely couldn’t skip if he wanted to.

  Amerind knew something of Orbitol and its long-term effects—enough to stay away from it.

  “What the hell you muttering?” she had asked the john.

  “I’m your fun-loving man,” came his reply. He was grinning by then, an off-kilter smile, and she ought to have known better; but she needed the business.

  “’course you are, sweetie.”

  “Jack the Ripper,” he’d announced with pride.

  Amerind had never heard of him but didn’t say so. He’d paid, and she needed the money. She didn’t care if he was fresh off a prison isle in the Atlantic. A lot of her clients were.

  He’d settled over her face and sunk in as far as he could go. He wasn’t very big. His dirty fingers grabbed up her tits, began kneading. He was rough, but she’d known rougher. She didn’t understand his true intention until she felt the cold shock of his blade against her rib. He was trying to slice her tit off. Without hesitation, she dug furiously under her pillow and pulled out her flick-knife. He was cackling and trying to saw up under her tit; his dull blade carved a fire in her side, at once icy and hot. His butt and legs squashed her movement, trapped her other arm; she wrestled but couldn’t get past them. She bent her wrist till she thought it would break, slid her blade up under his pants, right across her nose, and stabbed hard. Blood, hot and black, jetted all over her face. Jack fell to shrieking and clawing at himself, but she couldn’t budge the bastard. His blood poured out in a torrent and she was drowning. The Ripper twisted one way and Amerind, still holding onto the slick knife, twisted the other. He toppled head-first onto the cardboard floor beside her blankets. His blood sprayed feathery across the trembling wall of her little box. Coughing, choking, she spat out blood and his excised member. It bounced off his skull and rolled along the floor beside him like a little gray sausage link.