To the Stars -- And Beyond

by Robert Reginald

  She did not look in the direction of the bulging saddlebags, but she knew, as everyone else in the room knew, exactly where they were located. Then she turned away from the prospector’s sharp-planed face and went to put in his order, her precise mind clicking over T-bone steak and lemon chicken, over scrambled eggs and buttermilk biscuits, over strips of crisp bacon and long-link sausage, over blackberry cobbler and ice tea.

  ­Ice tea for Memory’s sake. When was the last time anyone ordered ice tea­?

  Of course, it was on the menu. All the foods were. Memory had kept them on because they were a link to a past that everyone needed to be reminded of occasionally. But no one ever ordered them. Or if they did, it was for a lark, a little late night fun after a few too many quantum bourbons and neuronal fizzes. The waitress had no ability to question the prospector’s choices, though. She wondered at them, but all she did about it was recite the list to the cook as she went past him into the kitchen and began laying out the ingredients from the store vault.

  While he waited for his order to be readied, the prospector reached into a pocket and pulled out a silver flask that bore the marks of long use. The flask’s cap acted as a shot glass for the thick liquid he poured into it, a liquid as amber and viscous as new oil. The drink was a reward, a repayment for years of deprivation. It went down far more smoothly than it looked.

  The food was another repayment the prospector wanted, and by the time he had savored his way through a second shot of liquor, the food began to come. It was just as he remembered, maybe better than he remembered, which surprised and frightened him a bit because of what it told him about his memory and the world it lived in.

  Still, the forgetting didn’t really matter, because he soon began to learn the tastes again. Reconstituted or not, the steak was thick and dripping with juices. The chicken was creamy soft on the outside, puffy and air-light on the inside, like foam packing miracled into something delicious by all the spices of heaven. Best, though, were the biscuits. He could have written odes to their golden layers, though he preferred popping them buttered and whole into his mouth where they could be chopped into crumbs and washed down by sweet draughts of tea.

  The prospector had thought that he remembered all his favorites among the old foods, but eating the bacon reminded him of fried ham, the sausage of jam-spread toast, the eggs of mushrooms and cheeses. He sent the waitress back for all the new/old things that came into his head, and he yelled after her for more tea, and for bread to sop up the juices.

  And then he moved into the rhythm of eating, knife-slicing with one hand and forking bites of food to his mouth with the other. When he was finished with the main courses, he used the fork to punch in the top of the blackberry cobbler and drag out thick rafts of crust and berries, the size of the bites limited only by the width of his fork and the width of his mouth.

  There came a moment, though, when the last berry went the way of the last scrap of bread, and the prospector sat back in his chair with an audible thump. He swallowed a belch, then looked around the eatery to see that no one was making even a pretense of not staring. They were watching him openly and with amazement, with what he knew to be a bit of disgust at his choice of foods and his table manners, but also a little bit of envy. And, of course, he knew why they were really watching him. They had to see how he was going to pay for his meal. They had to see what was in his bags. He made them wait just a moment longer.

  The waitress had come to clean the table and to stand by expectantly. The two lovers had fallen silent, and the father and son were leaning forward in their seats. The bartender had been polishing the same spot on the same glass over and over, and even the trucker looked up from his fourth cup of black.

  Inwardly, the prospector smiled, though it didn’t show on his face. He stood, and hefted his bags. The table had been cleaned but he took a preliminary swipe across it with his arm to wipe away imaginary crumbs, and to heighten the tension. Then he upended the bags, first one and then the other, and the riches spilled out in a glittering, clinking heap. The waitress gasped, and so did some of the others, and their eyes seemed held to that pile as if grabbed by the juice in an electric socket.

  The prospector rooted around in the imbroglio until he came up with half of a short rib-bone that he handed to the waitress for payment. Then he tossed her a smoothed white knuckle as a tip and watched as she caught at the precious thing with both hands and still almost dropped it.

  An entire skeleton­, the young father who was watching thought to himself. ­An entire human skeleton­. And it seemed new and fresh, not as if it had been dug up out of some long overlooked cemetery. He had never scanned so much raw piled wealth, not up close anyway. Of course, they had all seen videos of the national treasury, with its neat and overwhelming stacks of bones. But that was not like having the real thing poured out in front of you while you sat nibbling at your cation salad.

  The other watchers seemed just as stunned, and all of them sat frozen while the prospector scooped up the remainder of his loot and left. Then they unfolded and reached for their things. The lovers were the first out the door, and the trucker took only as long as it required to drain the dregs of his polymer coffee before heading to his rig. The father watched them leave as he paid for his order with a few small bone coins. Then he walked over to where his son was standing beside the prospector’s empty chair. The young eyes were irised wide as if they could still see the jumbled tibias and femurs, the mandible and the ribs, the ilium, sacrum, radius, ulna, the carpals and metacarpals, the phalanges of the fingers.

  “Did you see it, father?” the youth asked. “Did you?”

  “Yes, son,” he said. “I saw it.

  “A real human skeleton, father. Just like on the viddisks. It was incredible.”

  “Yes it was.”

  “You know, 00101’s father says that there are still bio-humans out there. Is that possible?”

  “No, son. That rumor’s been around a long time, but we hunted down the last bio over twenty years ago now.” He reached out to pull his son close with steel-framed hands that could crush diamonds, but his touch was soft as a silkworm’s tongue. It seemed as if a nova of fizzing electrons had been loosed inside his co-processor, and a quick diagnostic could not tell him what was wrong. He wondered for a moment if it had been a mistake to kill the humans. He wondered….

  * * * *

  The prospector stopped for the night on a hill where he could watch the ribbon-shiny streets of the android town spread out before him.

  At this distance, the swiftly moving transports looked like flowing jewelry, or maybe like the chasing lights his wife used to put up on their Christmas tree every year. He took a chance and built a fire, though it would be dangerously easy to spot. No machine ever needed a campfire to keep itself warm on a cold night. But then, he wasn’t a machine.

  He unhinged the mask and breastplate that hid his identity and dropped them to the ground. His plastisteel boots were next, and he luxuriated in being able to stretch his bare feet out to the flames. The revealed face and revealed feet were both human, though it was strange that there were only three toes on each foot. Or maybe it wasn’t strange. In a world where human bones were the money that could keep a person alive, his toes had been easy to spare.

  ­But that was before­, he thought, as he reached into the saddlebags and drew out the crisp white skull that nestled there. ­Yes­. That was before his wife had died and left him a rich man.

  THE VOICE OF THE DOLPHIN IN AIR

  by Howard V. Hendrix

  Infant Jack, Mom, Dad, and me. Earliest memories. I can’t remember a time when Jack wasn’t. That would be like trying to remember my naveling, when the doctors holed my belly, unplugging me from Mom and holed my skull so they could plug me into the world. I’ve met people who say they remember even the instant of their own engendering. Close as I can come is a shuttle sliding into a docking bay at Habitat Orbital LaGrange.

  Between the sun and moon, between the t
wo masks of the one dream, I see with my naked face the man on the snohorse at sunset in the Martian Highlands, riding the range, tending the fences, bringing in strays, finding my brother Jack’s body decayed and desiccated, frozen to death to be found months later when I will remember dreaming this and putting it out of my mind.

  “Mommy, why’d we move to the ’borbs?” Jack asks.

  “Because Earth City’s too multicolored,” Mommy replies, soundwashing the dishes. “The yellows and browns started hi-teching and there went the neighborhood.”

  “Mother, don’t tell the boy that!” says Daddy in his docile way. “He’ll think we’ve got the white flight. Like we’re some of the Master Race in Outer Space types or something. Be sensible. Boys, we moved to the habitat orbitals because we think this is a better place for you to grow up. Old Mother Earth is just too overpopulated, corporate-dominated, and heatgas insulated.”

  “Your father should know,” Mom chimes in irritably. “He’s one small shot for the Global Atmospheric Information Administration—but one big shot in his mind.”

  Home, home on LaGrange, where the peers in their satellites reign. Where Jack and I grow up normally enough.

  “Jackhead! Jackhead! Jack is a Jackhead!”

  “Shut up!” Jack cries. “I’ll tell Mom!”

  “Go ahead!” I taunt. I don’t know what he’s so upset about. Everybody has a headplug, a jack in his head—I’m just saying Jack is one, is all. “You always ‘tell Mom’.”

  I’m two years older and better than Jack is at most things. Except drowning. “Watch!” he says. At the edge of the deep end in the one-gee Sunlite Pool, I watch, prepared to be unimpressed. He slides beneath the water’s surface, face down and arms outstretched like Superman in flight. He begins to exhale bubbles then streams of air from his mouth and nostrils—and he starts to sink. Faster and faster the air floods out of him, faster and faster he sinks. When the last burst of bubbles has belched surfaceward, he lies dead flat against the pool’s blue-painted mooncrete bottom, motionless. Second after lengthening second slides slowly by, and still he doesn’t move.

  “A weatherman who had to get above the weather!” Mom yells at Dad. “Moved us all up the gravity well so now we’ll be in the hole until we’re a hundred and fifty!”

  Ten motionless seconds tick by and I begin to get worried. The water lifts Jack’s thick brown hair. Fifteen. Sways it back and forth like seaweed. Twenty.

  “It’s not good for me to be around people right now,” Jack tells his supervisor at Nix Olympica before quitting. According to the police reports.

  Dad is looking at an infrared satscan of a hurricane over the Atlantic and chanting “Coriolis rose / blossoms over night ocean / petals shatter lives” again and again when the psych techs come for him.

  “It’s stress,” Mom says nervously. “Job-related stress from working so hard for that damn GAIA. Your father will be all right again. He’s under the weather.” A short sad bitter laugh.

  Twenty-five seconds. Anxiously, I look for a life guard. Thirty. I begin to wade toward Jack. Thirty-five seconds.

  DRIVE A RAKUGO

  AND YOU’LL NEVER STOP SMILING!

  SAFE NONMUTAGENIC

  ZERO-GEE PHARMACEU­TICALS!

  Yeah, right. Jack studies, meditates, scuba dives. I date, aikido, skycycle. Like everyone else in our age cohort we get our licenses and speed around in our aircars—nothing fancy, just used Rakugos and Kusuguri 7s. Mostly we party and fight off boredom in the ordered world of the haborb. One day we sit on a hillock, staring up at the other side of the toroid, meditatively high on KL 235.

  “I’m getting real tired of the curve of the sky here.”

  “Yeah,” Jack says. “The vault of heaven—and we’re locked into it.”

  “Got to crack this safe open to a little danger. At least a change of seen and unseen.”

  The investigators suspect possible suicide. The case remains open: accident or suicide remains unresolved.

  “Stop the ’borb,” Jack says. “I want to get off!”

  “Urbe et orbe, sed semper haborbe.”

  At forty seconds Jack pushes himself off the bottom and surges towards the surface, breaking out of the water with a great insuck of breath, almost knocking me down where I stand over him. My fear and brief anger turn perversely to elation.

  “Hey! How’d you do that?”

  “Just blow out all the air,” he says with a shrug, “and you drop like a rock down the well.”

  Mom is enraged, irrational. Dad watches quietly from his usual evening tranquilizer funk.

  “What do you mean you’re moving out of the haborb?”

  I put down my rucksack and face the blonde fury of my mother moving to physically block my path.

  “Just what I said, Mom. I’m going down the well. I’ve transferred from LaGrange University to the University of Hawai’i. Earthside.”

  “Well you can just ‘untransfer’ yourself right now!” she spits. “You’re always thinking of yourself—what you want to do. Think of your parents and what we want you to do, for once!”

  “I never stop thinking of that,” I say with a weary sigh. “At LU I’ve been double-majoring in Bioengineering and World Literatures—Bioengineering for you, Mom, because you think it’s a good preparation for a career in micro-medicine, and World Literatures for you, Dad, because you think it’s the right precursor for a career in interorbital law. No more. I’m going to live my own life now. You can’t live it for me, and I won’t let you.”

  “Your own life! Your own life!” Mom mocks, suddenly brandishing a quarter-meter kitchen laser before her. “I’ve given my whole life for you boys! Waited on you hand and foot! And this is the kind of gratitude you show me? Oh no—no son of mine is going to move out until he finishes college or gets married!”

  She jabs towards me with the kitchen laser.

  “Honey!” Dad cries, startled, but I’m already moving, deflecting and taking her cutting hand, using her own momentum against her the way the aikido sensei at school showed us, then bringing my fist up and slugging my own mother hard on the jaw. She crumbles against one wall, bursts into tears. The laser skitters across the floor, automatically dead. Dad puts a restraining hand on my shoulder. I shrug it off, bend down to pick up my rucksack, and leave. Behind me Jack is witness to it all: one big unhappy dysfunctional family, like the rest of humanity.

  “Let me see it again,” I say.

  “Okay.”

  When Jack slides under this time I submerge too, eyes open, watching him. Air like a stream of molten silver flows up out of his face, past his floating hair, as he sinks. A final burst of bubbles rises through the blue water, ripples the silver underside of the sky—and he lies again at full length, flat as his own shadow against the bottom. He seems almost to embrace the mooncrete, his face learning to love that drowned pavement, to breathe no more than it does.

  “I have these violent thoughts sometimes,” Jack says tearfully. He’s been doing too many nonmutagenic zero-gee pharmaceuticals—too fast. “But I don’t want to hurt anybody. I’d rather die than hurt someone.”

  I stay under as long as I can until the dead air in my chest begins screaming to get out, but still I break surface a full ten seconds before Jack does.

  “Let me try,” I say when Jack’s surfaced.

  In the soft Martian soil I find the corner of a box. Ardently we dig it out of the dirt. On the side of it is a label, on which is neatly typed my brother’s name.

  “Go ahead.”

  I try. I blow out air, but by the time I get to a forty-five degree angle the emptying of my chest underwater has become a tangible claustrophobia. Panicking, I inhale water and bolt to the surface, spluttering and gasping.

  “What’s it like, catching the shuttle down the well?” Jack asks from thousands of miles away over downlink.

  “More disturbing than I thought it would be.”

  “The vertigo?”

  “Yeah, I guess. But it wa
sn’t the long fall to Earth that got to me. It was the sudden openness once the shuttle got out of the haborb.”

  Panic, a contributory cause in almost all water accidents, is a sudden, unreasoning, and overwhelming terror that destroys a person’s capacity for self-help.

  “What do you mean?” he asks.

  “I don’t know—like the world had turned inside out. Like the sky had unfolded and disappeared, you know?”

  Examination shows no evidence of foul play. Coroner listing cause of death as immersion hypothermia. Victim possibly caught in freak late snowstorm.

  “How about Earth?” he asks.

  “Whew! Earth’s even worse: an everted world. You’re walking around on the outside of a body in space. Think about it.”

  “That’s the situation we evolved in, though. It’s perfectly natural for human beings.”

  “Yeah? You should try it sometime. It still strikes me as crazy. I don’t know if I’ll ever get used to it.”

  I give drowning my best shot again and again, but it’s frustrating! I’m the older brother, I’m supposed to lead the way, to take the risks, to teach—but here’s Jack teaching me how to drown, and I’m not even proving a good student.

  “Your body tells you to breathe, even when you know you’re underwater,” Jack says. “It’s stupid. Don’t pay attention to it.”

  Eventually I can sink fully to the bottom—just barely—but I never do manage to let go that last burst of air, to breathe it all out so my face might sink fully forward, to kiss the unyielding pavement in that perfect passionate stillness my brother achieves so effortlessly.

  “You changed your major to what?” my mother asks, over video downlink.

  “Nihonglish, Ma. It’s the lingua franca down here, the global commerce language.”

  “I know what it is,” Mom says, disgusted. “Slang and pidgin—how can you waste your time studying such nonsense?”

  “It’s not nonsense, Mom,” I say, trying to remain calm and patient with her. “The University of Hawai’i’s the acknowledged center for the study of it. I’m almost guaranteed a job when I get out.”