“Fraccaro,” the man said, whisperingly.
My relief could not have been more obvious. “Good heaven, Ivarsen. I thought you’d gone to mush on us.”
“Can’t,” he said, then stopped. “Hard … to think.”
“Can you drink water?”
“ … Try … “
Lisa put her canteen to his lips and gave him a sip, which he kept down. Giving him too much would be worse than giving him none at all, so we waited and watched while he blinked randomly.
“Godfrey?” Ivarsen finally asked.
“Gone,” I said. “He took the dumper, your gun, and most of the food. And your satellite phone. I’ve got the mirrors in the crater waving around, hoping to attract some satellite attention. Like it will do us any good after dark.”
“Good … idea.”
He went silent again for several minutes.
Then, “Leandro … “
It was the only time he ever used my first name.
I leaned over him. “Yah, boss?”
“Not your fault … have to … tell them.”
“Just hang in there. You’re not dead yet.”
“Will be … soon.”
Lisa held Ivarsen’s hand. Her expression was agonized.
“Lisa,” Ivarsen said. “Find my … PDA.”
Lisa and I bugged our eyes out at each other. We never knew he had one!
Reading our surprise, Ivarsen said, “Access panel on the … solar power battery.”
Lisa and I both raced out into the gloaming light, finding the big battery for the camp. We pried off the service plate with our fingernails. The little PDA was perched out of sight, just inside and to the left.
Lisa grabbed it and we charged back to the hooch, freezing when we looked at Ivarsen’s face.
His eyes were still open, along with his mouth. But his chest no longer drew air.
• • •
We did what we could for Ivarsen’s body, then despondently trudged for our separate hooches, figuring there was nothing to be done but to sleep, and wait.
To my surprise, Lisa stopped me and motioned me towards her door.
“Last man that went in there came back without his cojones,” I joked.
“Last man who went in there did so without an invitation,” Lisa replied.
Raising an eyebrow, I went with her into the hooch. It was amazingly neat and orderly, right down to the dirt floor having been lined with used meal trays—as makeshift tiles.
She sat down on her cot and I took a seat next to her, the lights from EC5’s three small moons shining through the mesh walls around us.
“Months? That was all?” Lisa said.
“Yeah,” I replied. “Three. I was getting real short.”
“I can’t even think about parole yet.”
“Shoplifting?” I said, smiling at my own joke.
“Drugs,” Lisa replied, not smiling. “I used to be a pharmacist, back in the world. Got hooked on my own product, you might say. Started dealing. Stupid. Got caught. Wound up detoxing on The Island. Almost killed me. But at least I got clean.”
“That sucks,” I said, turning serious.
“You ever been addicted to anything, Lee?”
“Not really. I’m a teetotaler.” And that was the truth.
Lisa shuddered. “Don’t. Don’t ever.”
I’d never seen her more stone-cold serious.
“Yes ma’am,” I whispered.
And that was all I could say
Silence filled the dark. This was more personal information than Lisa had ever shared with me before. I felt we were both in particularly uncomfortable territory.
“Do you think we’ll be executed?” She asked.
“Yes,” I said. “Corrections doesn’t play around when it comes to one of their own going down in the line of duty. On my last brick site, I saw a guy actually try to take out the guard with a shiv. Guy was crazy to do it. The guard emptied a whole clip into the perp. Corrections never even did an investigation. The hurt guard left on a medevac, and we three prisoners who remained, all got split up. That was when they sent me here. To work for Ivarsen.”
Lisa’s head hung to her chest for an undetermined period of time, and when she looked back up at me I saw wetness on her cheeks. Which put a lump in my throat, for her sake. I suddenly felt stupid for telling her about the prisoner who got shot—like she really needed to hear that from me at this moment. Idiot.
I sighed and looked at the floor. It wasn’t fair. She was young. And, apparently at last, clean. As a pharmacist, she was educated too. She deserved a fresh start. But wouldn’t get it.
Just like me.
For no particular reason that I can recall, I slowly leaned down and pressed my lips to hers. It was a crazy move, given her history.
But for the second time that night, she surprised me.
My kiss was returned warmly.
“Thank you,” Lisa said.
“No, thank you,” I said.
We held hands as we sat on her cot. The most intimate contact I’d had with any person in years.
Then, she asked, “What about you, Lee?”
“Huh?”
“You now know why I’m in. But what about you?”
My hesitation must have been palpable.
“Sorry,” she said. “I didn’t want to pry. I just figured—”
“It’s okay,” I said. “I suppose you oughta know.”
I breathed in and collected my thoughts.
The younger me had had a problem with his temper. I’d kept it under wraps when I was in school, but after I got out, I’d gone through a few different jobs because I couldn’t keep my lip zipped in front of the boss. Then came the day on the work site when one little jerk of an engineer had decided to get up in my face. He’d been smaller and smarter than me, and he’d let me know exactly what kind of loser he thought I was. Insults turned to screams, and before I knew it I’d knocked the man onto his back, and was beating him with my wrench. Hard, vicious strokes. The kind of blows a man doesn’t just get up and walk away from.
They told me later that the other workers had to pry me off the engineer, who was pronounced dead at the scene before the constabulary cuffed me and took me away to Corrections. I can still remember sitting in the back of the wagon, bawling my eyes out. What had I done?
Dad had tried to keep me from doing time. He’d spent what he could for legal help. But it didn’t matter. I’d killed another human being. Eta Cassiopeiae Five might have been frontier territory, but you didn’t just murder a man—in hot blood or cold—and walk away from it unscathed.
Back on Earth they had people to spare. On EC5? No way. Especially not when the victim had been educated. There weren’t any levels or degrees of punishment with Corrections. Once the government deemed you a threat to society, it was The Island. Goodbye. Civilization officially washed its hands of you. I still remembered the look on Dad’s face when they loaded me onto the transport. He’d been sure he was never going to see me again.
He’d almost been right.
I’d spent every day since, regretting what I’d done. And learning to be a different person as a result.
The whole time I told my story, Lisa listened intently. Then she said softly, “I’m sorry, Lee.”
“I’m sorry too,” I said. “But not for this.”
I bent my head down and kissed her again.
• • •
“Wake up, Prisoner Fraccaro.”
I didn’t move. I felt like last night’s cold fish.
“Prisoner Fraccaro, on your feet!”
A gloved fist slugged my shoulder, and suddenly I was tumbling out of my cot, shaking. Morning light streamed into the tent, and I found myself face-to-face with four armed Corrections SWAT officers in mottled fatigues.
Lisa was nowhere in sight. Had they hit her first?
“Chip worked, huh?” I said, realizing the time had finally come.
“Yes,” said the tall, black-skinned SWAT who h
ad sergeant’s stripes on his arm. “But we were already on our way when officer Ivarsen expired. That idea you had, about the mirrors … pretty ingenious. Nobody remembers Morse Code anymore. Except for the computers. When the satellites started picking up your S.O.S. flashing over and over again, it was obvious something had gone wrong.”
I looked down at my nude self, and the back at the sergeant.
“Do I need to get dressed, or can we finish it here?”
“Excuse me?”
“Come on. Bullet to the head. It’ll be quick. Justice will be done.”
The sergeant’s white teeth grinned like the Cheshire cat’s.
He held up Ivarsen’s PDA.
“Don’t worry. I think your alibi is good. Officer Ivarsen apparently thought well of you, and Prisoner Phaan too. He had a feeling Godfrey was bad news. Ivarsen’s last few logs pretty much state that Godfrey was going to pull something. Too bad we can’t put Godfrey up against a wall. He definitely deserved it.”
“You found him?”
“Idiot rolled the dumper. Doing ninety kay over broken terrain. No safety harness. Thrown from the cab, and crushed. Not much else to do but toe-tag the remains.”
“Huh. Can’t say he didn’t have it coming. So what happens now?”
“Let’s go outside.”
I was humming happily to myself when I left the hooch.
• • •
Ivarsen’s logs made all the difference. It was like having a character witness speaking from the grave. That, combined with circumstantial evidence, put Phaan and I in the clear.
They split us up, of course, and sent us to separate sites to finish our original sentences.
Parole came, and I was released back into civilization.
I stayed at my sister’s house while I looked for work. It was as discouraging as I expected. Even the asteroid miners didn’t want me. But I had to do something—I didn’t like the idea of hanging around sis’s place, endlessly mooching.
Dad finally came to visit one weekend. He hugged me harder and longer than he ever had in my whole life. Then he listened to the whole story, about my time on The Island, about the brick sites, about Ivarsen’s death. Then he looked me in the eye from across the living room coffee table and suggested I apply to Corrections.
“You’ve got to be kidding,” I said.
“Not at all,” Dad said. “This Ivarsen guy, you said he seemed at ease around your crew? Ran the place like it was just another job? The man was obviously an ex con.”
I hadn’t thought of that before. Ivarsen had seemed too decent to be a criminal.
But then, so were Phaan and I.
The next day, I did what Dad suggested. To my surprise, they picked me up without question. And after twelve weeks at the Corrections Academy they sent me out to run one of the brick sites.
It was interesting, being on the flip side of things. I found I actually liked being back in the desert, with its blinding sun and fresh air and shimmering desolation. I’d missed it.
As always, I had to watch my temper. Some of the prisoners were just as stupid as Godfrey had been, and twice as mean. On several occasions I was sorely temped to use my gun.
But I’d sworn to myself I’d do everything I could to never have to kill again.
Planetary months rolled into a planetary year. Then two. Paycheck after paycheck. With no out-of-pocket cost for room or food, my savings began to pile up. I began to seriously think about my future. There was retirement out there on my horizon. Could I save enough to buy a little plot of land on the polar seaside? Maybe join in the effort to transform the planet from barely-living desert to thriving ecosphere? It would be hard work, just like the brick sites were hard work. And lonely …
Using my PDA, I got on the Corrections network one night. Within a few minutes I found Lisa Phaan’s file.
She’d been telling the truth about the drug stuff.
But every record since her incarceration, showed her clean. To include continued reports of good behavior.
I remembered the pleasant sensation of her lips on mine.
Could we have something? Or was I just fooling myself?
Snapping my PDA off, I determined that I’d find out.
Meanwhile, there was always more clay. And there were always more bricks.
Nominally a jail tale, “Bricks” is both a story of redemption, and a look at the less glamorous side of potential interstellar colonization. Any people who manage to arrive on another world circling another star, are going to be starting from scratch. And there won’t necessarily be any virgin forests to tame, as in the case of the Earth’s ancient humans who crossed oceans to settle new lands. Odds are, if there’s any life at all, it’ll be primitive. Perhaps, too primitive to be useful. So what will our hypothetical colonists use for building materials, if there’s no wood?
Once upon a time, I was handy with a potter’s wheel. I know enough about clay—and the processes for turning clay into variously useful things—that it occurred to me that bricks would be an essential component of any interstellar colony’s industrial economy. Assuming said colonists landed with only the land and some water to work with. No major plant life, nor developed mining and smelting of the sort we’re used to in the 21st century. All of that stuff will come later. In the meantime, they’ll have to have something to build with.
So I conjured images of millions of earthen bricks baking in the sun. But wait, earthen bricks aren’t as dependable as actual clay bricks, formed and fired. How do you fire bricks if you don’t have wood, coal, or a natural gas supply available?
There are already experimental solar power fields on Earth designed to collect and focus sunlight. When in use, these solar fields can generate a tremendous amount of heat in a very small, focused area. Aim enough rays at a stone kiln—and imagine that the sun’s light is even brighter, more intense, and longer-lasting than it is on Earth—and you have your firing solution. But who among colonists—or their descendants—is going to agree to do such work? It’s not glamorous, it doesn’t take a lot of education, it’s difficult and dirty, and it’s going to potentially take you far from civilization; if said civilization has decided to build far from the equator.
“Bricks” first saw print in Bryan Thomas Schmidt’s anthology Beyond The Sun, albeit in a shortened and somewhat modified form. It got some nice mentions in several reviews. I hope nobody who read the story in that book, minds me re-rendering the story here, in this book. I always did like my protagonist in this story. In my time in the military I’ve known some solid people who, for whatever reasons, ran into trouble with the law while young. Not everybody who goes to prison is the kind of person who should stay there. And especially on a colony world, where human life is rare and valuable in ways it might not necessarily be otherwise, how would the colonists decide to deal with criminals? And how might a criminal convicted of a major crime find his or her way back into society?
Such questions pretty much drove the plot of this story.
***
Guard Dog
(with Mike Resnick)
A passive sensor pinged hesitantly, and Chang came alert. He felt his way through the familiar diagnostic routine, verifying the status of thousands of different shipboard components. As expected, everything was functioning. The sole minimal change was that his available fuel had decreased.
Chang had never been told exactly how long his fuel would last. In fact, there had never been any mention of refueling, nor rearming. This would have bothered him, prior to being crippled in combat. But now it was simply a fact of life. He knew he was disposable; had known it when he’d blinked twice for yes during the Watchfleet accessions interview in the hospital ward. It was still better than the alternative.
Another ping, this time a bit stronger.
Adrenaline began to surge.
The threat. Where was the threat?
Chang’s head and spine were plugged into the core of an armored, spherical spacecraft hovering at a nam
eless set of coordinates that rode directly on the invisible wall between Human Space and Everywhere Else. He’d been on that spot for who knew how long? His cyborg life was composed of a series of long, dream-filled sleeps in between frenetic, life-or-death battles.
At the time Chang had elected to undergo surgical implant and machine integration, the Watchfleet had been mankind’s best defense against the Sortu: a mysteriously aggressive species of xenophobes actively exterminating all “competitor” races in Earth’s particular region of the known galaxy. Where it took years to build, arm, and crew an ordinary warship, a Watchfleet monitor took mere weeks, and required only its cyborg pilot. Chang—and thousands of other wounded veterans just like him—had all signed up to establish an interstellar line in the sand: this far, no father.
At the time, humanity had been overwhelmed, and the Sortu had almost won.
Chang and his comrades had put a stop to it, but the toll had been high. The Watchfleet had grown thin, to the point that Chang seldom heard the comforting murmur of his fellows—their mental signals broadcast instantaneously through the gravtrans buried deep in Chang’s armored shell. Once they had formed an intelligent skein, acting and reacting in concert to surround and crush all opponents. Now they were few and far between, like lonely whales hooting forlornly through the ocean’s inky depths.
When his sensors did not alert him a third time, Chang set up an automated diagnostic routine and allowed himself to slip back into his dreams.
• • •
Lucy’s skin was so pale and freckled that she burned at the merest mention of sunlight. Chang ran a hand appreciatively along his new wife’s bare hip as they lay together in their bed, the hum of the ship’s engines and air cycler filling their tiny compartment—one of hundreds aboard the emigration liner now docked in Earth orbit.
“We should get up soon,” Lucy murmured.
“What for?” replied Chang. “I’m on leave until Monday, then we both depart for deep space. There’s nothing to see on this tub anyway.”
“Yeah, but I feel like a slug just hanging out in bed. We should get some exercise.”
Chang sighed deeply. “They work the crap out of us in Advanced Crew Training. I get more exercise in a day than you get in a week.”
Racers of the Night: Science Fiction Stories by Brad R. Torgersen Page 6
