Star Fall

by David Bischoff

  The hovercar was a Spitfire. Sporty and sleek: a pleasure car. Parked behind the controls was a thin-faced man with black sunglasses. A bright-blue cravat flowed crisply about his neck above an elaborately designed spacer’s jacket—the present high-class rage. “Not good, Amber,” the man said, fingering his light blond pencil mustache. “Not good at all.”

  Returning his gun to its place, Amber hopped around to the other side and slid into the bucket seat. The door closed automatically, with a clipped-off thump. The man drummed pink-painted fingernails against the steering wheel as he waited for Amber. “My God, man, you look a fright.” His sharp nose cringed at the smell; he then pulled out a gilt cigarette case from which he selected a particularly pungent brown dope-stick. This he struck alight on the edge of the case and then, breathing its fumes, engaged the motor of the car. The vehicle smoothed away quickly down the road, turning left where it climbed a steep ramp and slipped into the fast lane of a speedway. The man did not bother to offer Amber a smoke, which bothered Amber not at all. He was just enjoying unadorned breathing, an addiction he’d almost had to relinquish.

  The thin man lowered the bubble top closed, cutting out the rushing wind sounds. He stared straight ahead, even though he had switched the car onto a definitely plotted course. His delicate eyebrows feathered up into a soft blond flow, indicating a gentle man—but the tightly clamped jaw and the tense facial muscles canceled the effect, rendering an impact of chilly efficiency.

  The man said, finally, “It’s not over yet, Amber. Don’t think that I’m necessarily your saviour. We’re happy that Durtwood has been dealt with; but the manner of his disposal brings trouble for all, not only for you.”

  Amber sighed with heartfelt exasperation, half-open eyes deadly surveying the building traffic line; threading down the highway. A smoggy hale, like a murky transparent curtain, vehicle fumes, mind dust, illegal factory smoke—hung over all like an encompassing, rank curtain. The blotched, swollen sun was revealing what color existed in the city: streaks of cobalt through the sky, slashes and blobs of cadmium and emerald in the distance; all the rest was a salty and metallic achromatism. No loss to be color blind on this world.

  “Just get me out,” he said, feeling like a bit of flotsam washed up onto a garbage scow. “You can fix things up whichever way you want. I did my best. Event’s conspired against me. If I’d been provided funds for the proper equipment ...” Amber’s throat was raw; the words came up like chunks of jagged glass. “I did the job, Moorhead.” Damn the explanations. “You live with the consequences.”

  “I’m afraid you’ll have to deal with them as well,” Moorhead responded curtly, nodding down at a compact console radio-screen set in the dashboard between them. “You want to hear the all-points alarm the law has pinned on you now?” He shook his hair, which brushed his collar airily, fluffily. “Going to be a bitch to break through that.”

  “What have they got? An image of this face. They couldn’t have had the opportunity to read my holo-pattern.” Each word was a struggle. “You get me back before they find me, and they won’t be able to identify me ...”

  The thin man stubbed his dope-stick out in a cupped tray, his motion cold and abrupt. He seemed to consider the notion. “No,” he muttered finally. “You’re quite right, my friend. And, as you say, the end is accomplished, even though the means were drastic. We must deal with the present circumstances. I trust the address you wish to be deposited at is the same ...”

  “Yeah.” Amber let that suffice and leaned back in his seat. He kept his eyes somehow propped open, but he tried to relax. Difficult, that, with the adrenalin still buzzing in his bloodstream. His vision seemed matted with afterimages. He’d probably shot hell out of the retinas. Oh well, the whole body was a loss anyway ... a massive overhaul would be needed.

  This would be his last job. He assured himself that. Promised himself that. Maybe he was getting old. Careless. He was losing his touch, if not his curse ...

  But maybe, some future job, that curse would ricochet fully on him; the morning’s events seemed to portend that.

  Just rest, asshole. Just rest. Everything will be okay.

  In his peripheral vision (what was left of it) he caught a blurry flash of something that looked like the reflective letters “North” on a hoversign beside the highway. He sat up a trifle, blinked, and tried to put his finger on the ominous feeling that trembled in his gut. He felt disoriented. Quickly he concentrated on the image of the Portown map he had studied prefatory to this job. No. No way that this could be the right way. His destination was west. He glanced out the window, got his bearings, and assured himself that his assessment was correct.

  There it was, behind—the Skyshafter, wearing a cloud of clotted smog on its top now like a dirty crown. King of Shit City ...

  Amber’s lips tremored with a smile that owned no element of humor.

  “That stump looks pretty bad,” Moorhead was saying casually. “Much pain?”

  “Puffed myself up with drugs. Wouldn’t be here if I hadn’t, I can tell you that,” Amber replied, letting the weariness hide the tension in his voice. He lifted the arm and waved it to distract Moorhead’s attention. “Had to leave the hand back there though, unfortunately.” Quickly he let his eyes roam. Where did Moorhead keep his gun? “I think it burned sufficiently in the blast of my car to prevent identification.”

  “Yeah,” said Moorhead. “That was real cute. Cost us a pretty cred, that car.”

  “I’m an expensive worker, my friend. You knew that when you hired me.” Nowhere in sight ... the gun must be tucked inside the elaborately tailored coat—yes, there it was, a telltale bulge. The trick would be to align his own weapon before Moorhead could go for it. Amber had no doubt he could outdraw the man—but he didn’t want to risk crashing this car. He slipped his hand through the rags his clothes had become even as he pointed with his stump. “Shit, man! Are those cops up ahead?”

  Moorhead swung his attention. When he looked back at Amber quizzically, he found himself staring into the bore of a gun.

  “Get off this road, my man,” Amber hissed angrily.

  A flicker of fright in coal-black eyes. Moorhead licked his lips slowly.

  “Don’t even think about it, buster,” cautioned Amber. “You get off this road and start going the right way, and you might live to regret that you hired me.”

  Moorhead’s eyes seemed to bulge. He nodded lamely, his air of self-confidence leaving him like a punctured pressure-field suit in a vacuum. He clicked the controls back into manual and negotiated the quick lane changes that would catch the next ramp off with nervous, jerking motions. At the end of the ramp, Amber directed him to park beneath it in its shadow.

  The car idled half a meter above the ground. Discarded empty bottles rattled away, spurred by the winds from the fans. It smelled of stale urine here.

  Amber said, “You figure you can’t risk the connection if they catch me, huh’?”

  “What the hell are you talking about? Your wounds must have rattled your head. We’re happy with you, man! We want to use you again, maybe. Got to keep you alive to do that ... What the hell are you talking about?” The man’s Adam’s apple bobbed above his disheveled cravat.

  “You don’t want the police or your rivals to get me. So you intend to. Now get out slowly.”

  “Amber, that’s absurd! I tell you ...”

  He had to admit the man was quick. The needier was halfway out before he had realized that Moorhead was even going for it.

  Amber had not bothered lowering the setting of his gun. A quick jab of finger on trigger, and the excess of energy lifted Moorhead’s head clear of his shoulder in a fountain of sparkling fire. The cindered skull crashed against an abutment; the body slumped back in the seat, smoking and smelling like charred barbecue. Amber flicked the door open, kicked the dead weight out onto a pile of rubbish. He assumed the controls and fe
lt a renewed sense of power. The sport craft wobbled as he yanked the wheel about, directing it for the nearest access ramp, trying to recall the map. If he could figure exactly where he was and how to get where he wanted to go without getting caught or killed by the remnant of Durtwood’s group, Moorhead’s lads, or the cops, he would be okay.

  Moorhead had been right.

  This whole business was absurd.

  But then, so was his whole life.

  * * *

  A disquieting fear was sinking in.

  Todd Spigot had known two distinct emotions in a life which had held little else than ennui. The emotions were fear and love. It was his curse that he could not distinguish between the two.

  The ponderous bulk that squatted before him, this brooding troll of a blinking, whirring machine that would scoop his essence out and slop it easily into another body, reminded him of his father.

  The machine was big, yet compact. Again like his father who had been raised in a 1.6 gee environment on a planet in the Formalhaut system. Duncan Spigot’s eyes had a metallic sheen, a glassy resolution to them, and they were gun-metal gray. Just like this Surgery Unit. In his muscle-hewed arms—like the lengths of tubing that bracketed this giant mechanism here—his father had held life and death, joy and sorrow. From that intense presence had issued his existence by way of his mother. Through this machine, this metal and plastic and electric doppelganger of his sire, he would pass to take on a manhood that his father had always wanted in him. He would become his father’s ideal.

  As he stood before the behemoth, naked before its coldness, he felt as though he stood at the throne of some angry god, a trembling request for death and resurrection on his tongue. It recalled the manner in which he would be presented before his lounging father, Newsfax in lap, to be judged for deeds good and deeds bad. And while there was an unspeakable sensation of fear threatening his neurotic soul, so there was also a heartfelt love.

  Fear the Lord!

  Honor thy mother and thy father.

  After years of church, Todd eventually had learned the meaning of monotheism. It was difficult, for in the prediluvian ages before his coming to adulthood, his god wore two faces, Janus-like. One was his father’s, the other his mother’s.

  And they were jealous gods.

  “Buffed off, eh, Spigot? Super.” Halpine peeked around the side of the Surgery machine, and the effect was as if the metal had suddenly sprouted a human head. “Just gearing up old Headsman here.”

  “”Excuse me?” Todd wrapped his arms around himself. Getting a mite chilly here, this helped his emotional state not at all. “What did you call it?”

  “Headsman. That’s what the Doc calls it.” Halpine jerked back out of sight. Clicks, taps, and hollow clunks commenced from the keyboard before him. “You know, like the old times, the executioners were called headsmen if they used an axe to hack off the criminals’ ...” He stopped abruptly, realizing perhaps that the joke would not sound so funny to a prospective client about to go under the scalpel. “Er ... but we’d best get onto business, eh, Mr. Spigot? How about propping your soon-to-be discarded shell upon the slab that will soon enter your field of vision!”

  Doors of a hatchway appeared in the dull metal, sliding open.

  A tongue two meters long issued from this impromptu mouth. From other apertures, rods and elaborate mechanical odds and ends protruded suddenly. The side metal of the computer surgeon slid back farther, making an opening about the size of a door. The entire interior, previously a solid back, winked on eerie lights lending a peculiar sense of great depth. The machine sat open like an iron womb, beckoning.

  The sterile breath of ethyl alcohol issued from the maw, and Todd remembered his doctor’s office trauma and he again felt fear. His parents had seldom taken him to the doctors, calling on God to heal childhood diseases—or letting the MedHealth cabinet see to the legally required inoculations.

  His parents belonged to a branch of conservative Christianity that had openly rejected much of what current technology and science had to offer ... accepting only as much as necessary to live comfortably in a society it generally ignored. To holders of a religious persuasion intent on passing over to a promised spiritual existence after this bothersome material one, the prospect of longevity was not a welcomed consideration. Neither were any of the common devices of medical practice. Cloning was a tool of the devil ... and accelerated cloning even worse. The notion of exchanging bodies was an absolute outrage.

  And thus it was that Todd could never let his mother know about what he was about to do.

  On the brink of his conscience, he too believed all this, and thought it some form of nebulous sin. But the immediacy of his need to escape his terrible form, to flee this frightful world, escape his terrible form into a taste of life, drowned out any squawking recriminations of his subconscious. Even now he seemed to hear the squeaking voice of his mother deep within him, sobbing and squealing, jerking and squeezing the tender strands that held his being together in the effort to turn him about ... or at least to punish.

  How strange was that thought; his mother, living inside him indeed!

  He hoisted himself onto the protruding slab and lay down upon it, head closest to the interior of the mechanism. The metal was dully cool on his bare skin ... not unpleasant, but not comfortable by any means.

  “There! Sequence completed!” announced the intern. “Now, let’s see if we can hook you up.” He bounced around the side of the machine, rubbing his palms briskly. “I’ve got Mr. Universe all set inside, his analog brain popped out. The cavity is waiting to be filled.” Quickly, the intern selected the necessary oddments of anesthetic apparatus clustered over Todd’s head, tubings and needles and instruments like inorganic plants growing in a metal garden.

  Halpine grabbed hold of a pipe like thing split in the middle to reveal odd interior paneling. He yanked this down and clamped it over Todd’s right forearm. “Doctor Chiro tell you how all this works?” the intern asked absently as he adjusted the proper chemical mixture that would spray Spigot’s body asleep.

  “Yes. Separation of the spinal cord on a molecular level—and subsequent rebinding in the other body.”

  “Quite. Then we’ll stick the brain and spinal cord analog into your body to keep your vital life functions going—hook up a life support network, then salt away your present body in one of the tanks and voila! Meanwhile you’ll be tucked away in your eight-month body for your cruise. What could be simpler? A lark of an operation, Mr. Spigot. Takes maybe ten, fifteen minutes with the bio comp doing the work. You know, a couple hundred years ago, this was a two-day operation. Now it’s easier than plucking out a malignant tumor.”

  A broad smile spread over Halpine’s bright and amiable features as though a knife slashed from inside. Todd felt himself relax suddenly; giving himself over to whatever fate lay in store for him. Faith. That’s what you had to have. He felt like he did when he went for a ride in the shuttle rocket—at first, extreme doubt that the monstrous pile of metal and energy could safely reach up into space ... and subsequent surrender to the possibility that it might just not make it. That’s what we all are, thought Todd, as Halpine made the final adjustments. Products of conditioning and faith. A well-lived life was a passing over from one extreme to the other.

  He could do nothing but wait, and as he waited a pleasant apathy waved over him like a gentle, relaxing sea breeze.

  “Right, Mr. Spigot. Steady on.” Todd noted fingers tapping buttons. He felt total relaxation sweep; total surrender to the monolith bulking over him.

  With a rush, he felt as though he was slowly melting into the metal itself.

  The god-machine sucked him in on its slab-tongue.

  Surgical lasers delicately licked his scalp, his skull. His cap of bone and hair was neatly removed. A null-grav field kicked in to prevent pressure on the cerebrum and cerebellum. The cerebrospinal fl
uid was drained. Soft waldo hands with odd-shaped instruments danced about Todd Spigot’s body like mad robot pixies at a picnic.

  Todd dreamed.

  “The body is the temple of the soul,” said the church schoolteacher. “It is the vessel of our transport in this existence from birth to death to bodily resurrection in the House of God. It is blasphemy to betray your body. It is adultery.”

  Todd’s arm shot up. He leaned forward on the hard wood chair, waving his hand so that Mr. Evans would notice him. He was thirteen years old.

  “Yes, Mr. Spigot?”

  “I thought adultery was—you know, between a man and a woman.” The other pubescent kids opened their drowsing eyes, suddenly interested. Marina Mergan, the Sunday School Sexpot, giggled. Her blond curls bounced on her shoulders like happy sunshine. Todd found it hard keeping his attention away from her legs and on the theological discussion.

  Mr. Evans was piqued. The deacon of Holston Organized Christian Separatist Church did not care for this sort of discussion in his class. Lectures were more his cup of tea. “Yes. Of course it is, Mr. Spigot. I am only making a comparison. The ungodly doings of Body Parlours are like adultery. God intended to keep us in one body during the course of lives. The relationship between soul and body is like the vows between man and wife. To change your body is tantamount to adultery. It is adultery. We must not tamper with the will of God.”

  Todd said, “But we learned in biology that one’s mind is essentially the brain, the spinal cord, and maybe the rest of the nervous system.”

  Mr. Evans smiled with self-satisfaction. “Are you going to listen to the word of God, young man, or to the word of Man?”

  “The word of God, I guess. But I’m confused. I mean, what is my soul? Where is my soul? Is it all of me? Every cell, every bit of skin? Or is it confined to one part of me, like my mind?”

  “The word of God says that one’s body is sacred. The soul must occupy all of it, Mr. Spigot.” He gave Todd a hard look.