Dancing with Eternity

by John Patrick Lowrie

  I just had the feeling that I was going to say yes to anything Miss cat-eyes had in mind. I knew she wasn’t from around here, and there wasn’t a chance in hell that she was thinking of moving here, and that meant that whatever she had planned was going to happen somewhere else, which was fine by me. But I didn’t want to leave without my past.

  The accusation had been unjust. It was where I’d left it, after all. Sheila’d just hung some lingerie over it; the silk was full of her scent. Her perfume wasn’t expensive, but it was full of memories. It’s funny how a woman’s smell brings back just the good ones. The soft, fluid material was cool on my palm as I lifted her things off the hook on the wall. The scales on the backs of my hands were smooth and supple—I wasn’t worried about snagging the material. I got my pouch and hung her garments back where they were, which seemed deceptive, somehow, like I was trying to conceal that I was leaving, but it didn’t seem right to throw her stuff on the bed, either. I thought about leaving her a note, but I wasn’t absolutely positive that I wouldn’t be back.

  I’d bullet her when I got back on the net. If I got back on the net.

  Everything was in the pouch; I checked. Eighteen little fragments and talismans, one from each time I’d re-booted. Eighteen. Shiva, was I really that old? My fingers moved, almost involuntarily, to my shoulder to feel for the one not in the bag, the first one. I’d had it mounted in my left shoulder plate when I got my scales. The shiny, pitted texture was reassuring, a connection across the years and light years. It was just a little piece of chondritic meteorite that I’d found on Arcadia Planitia when I was a kid. Growing up on Mars. Back when the system was The System and Draco was just a constellation.

  I always get a little melancholy when I think about leaving someplace that I’ve lived in for a while, even a place as wasted as Spam-town. The known galaxy is just so vast these days. Even if you never get out of Draco, even if you never leave the home worlds. Hell, most of the people living on Vesper had never come to this hemisphere, let alone this town, and never would. The chances of my ever returning were microscopic.

  I decided to clean out the drain for Sheila. It wasn’t very romantic, but it was something.

  As I slipped back into the alley I heard her voice from the store, “Mo, is that you?” I closed the door as quietly as I could and headed toward the street. Just as I turned the corner into the Mall I heard it open again.

  “Mo?”

  I was on the main escalator to the surface taking the steps two at a time. God, I’m a heel sometimes.

  Chapter 2

  The storm had moved off to the east and the deep blue of the sky fought with the ocher, umber and brick of the ’works. Angel hair wisps of fog still clung to the cooling towers and the air was electric. Cat-eyes was waiting for me when I got to the monorail platform, her image dancing on wet metal. Her fur was slicked down and sleek from the rain; some of the things that had been more hidden when I’d seen her in the bar were less hidden now. It didn’t make it any easier for me to keep my guard up. Her muscle stood silently beside her: loyal, patient and ominous.

  My melancholia vanished when I saw her.

  She smiled. “I wasn’t sure you’d come,” she said, and I wondered if it was true. She looked like she believed that she meant it.

  “I had some things to take care of.”

  “Mm.” She looked me up and down. I couldn’t tell if it was an appreciative glance or merely archival. “Shall we?” She gestured to one of the white, lozenge-shaped cars waiting on the rail. She wasn’t wasting any time.

  “Yeah, let’s,” I said, trying to sound calmer than I was.

  The cars were spacious for four people—two seats facing forward, two facing back. She preceded me into the rear seat and I sat down beside her. The mountain sat in the two rear-facing seats and generally took up the rest of the cab. The thing was definitely a Primate 4—it must have weighed three hundred kilos. I’d never seen so much hairy meat propelled by two legs.

  Our weight triggered traffic control and the door slid closed. An unnecessary light and a very necessary air conditioner came on and we started down the rail; there was only one other destination.

  She started to speak and I cut her off, “This is a really nice system,” I said, “All the cars are mic’ed, so if you run into trouble halfway down the line all you have to do is yell for help and they come get you.”

  She smiled again and looked out the window. “That is nice,” she said.

  We picked up speed and the ’works started to flash past us. Rust and plastic, towers, grids and arrays, the leviathan heat exchangers dwarfing everything else.

  “This is an interesting place.” That voice again, only now she was sitting right next to me, her thigh practically touching mine. “Do you like it here?”

  I looked out the window, too. It was easier than looking at her. “Yeah. Yeah, I like it fine.”

  “What do they do here?”

  Small talk. Good idea, we had a ways to go and nothing important to say until we got there. “Um, mostly magnetic field and earthquake management.”

  “Oh?”

  I tried to think of something that would be both impressive and unrevealing, but all I could come up with was “I never actually worked here—”

  “Yes.” Wrong subject. Don’t talk about me. Or her.

  “Uh, you see, Vesper’s tidally locked on Golgotha. That’s why all the resorts are on the other side of the planet.”

  “Hmm-m.” Honey flowed in my ears and soaked my brain. “I thought Vesper was a moon.”

  “Well, yeah, it revolves around a planet, so I suppose it is a moon. But it’s big enough to be a planet,” I was even boring myself. I wasn’t used to this. When I was on tour with Shaughnessy, I was the glamorous one. Ask Sheila. Sheila. “It seems like a planet. I suppose you could call it a manet, or a planoon.” I was babbling like an idiot, or a tour guide. But she laughed. Various intriguing things happened within and about her torso when she did. I figured the easiest way to remain polite was to look out the window again. Looking in her eyes was still a risky option if I wanted to pursue my own agenda.

  We had reached the edge of the city. I could see Paradise Alley poking drunkenly out into the bush. There was ’Burbs’ place, where I’d first seen her. Cat-eyes. I didn’t even know her name yet but I was hoping I’d never see ’Burbs place again.

  Her laugh had given me confidence; I forged ahead. “Anyway, being tidally locked means that its rotation period is about ninety-two hours, the same as the time it takes to revolve around Golgotha.”

  “Must make for long sunsets.” She was playing right along. I would’ve liked to act with her. She could improvise. I wondered what else she could do.

  “It makes for long everything,” I said. We gazed out the windows in silence for a moment.

  We were moving over the jungle now, an endless, variegated carpet of rosewood, banyan, fig, and who knows how many other kinds of deciduous trees, interrupted by sprays of royal palm, traveler’s palm and banana. All genetically engineered to thrive on a ninety-two hour day. The mid-afternoon thunderheads had cleared and you could see all the way to the mountains, a range of twelve-thousand meter peaks that were icy white even here in the tropics.

  She took a deep breath, almost a sigh, that came from somewhere lonely and painful. It made me look at her. Without looking at me she said, “So, what do they do with magnetic fields?”

  What was her game? “Ninety-two hours is too long,” I said. “I mean Vesper doesn’t spin fast enough to make one of its own. Magnetic fields. They had to plop these magma sinks down around the equator to spin up the core.”

  “Mm.” She still stared at the jungle gliding by. Our large, hairy companion just stared.

  “You need a—” I wasn’t sure she was even listening to me, “you need a magnetic field to have any kind of stable, thick atmosphere. And an ionosphere. To keep out radiation. Golgotha’s got a wicked radiation belt and we’re just on the outer e
dge of it. When the developers came in they needed the field or the biosphere wouldn’t take.”

  “You seem to know quite a bit about it.”

  She was good. I backpedaled, “Oh, just what you pick up hanging around the joint.”

  Her fur was drier now. She fluffed it with her hands, passing them over her arms and thighs, digging her fingers into her mane, rubbing her stomach. She seemed to rouse. She turned to me and the smile and charm turned back on again. “And how do you keep earthquakes from happening?”

  And I was caught by her eyes. “We don’t—I mean, I don’t do anything. I just happen to be here. They don’t keep them from happening; they make them happen.” She just kept looking at me. And I kept looking at her. “Lots of them.” She was slowly moving her hands up and down her arms, shoulder to wrist and back. “Little ones. All the time.” Little silver waves preceded them going up, didn’t coming down. “So the big ones never have a chance to—” She had musicians’ fingers, long and tapered.

  “Build up?” she finished for me. Did she intend that as a double entendre? I thought about smiling at her. I almost did, maybe one corner of my mouth curled up a fraction.

  The rail suddenly curved and we were gliding along the edge of the cliffs, heading out to the point. We would be pulling into Nohili soon. Out her side of the car the ocean was a thousand dizzying meters below us. Out my side the jungle sloped gently up and up to Spam-town, which looked like the Emerald City left out in the rain for a couple of centuries.

  The view was spectacular. Even if you’d been to the Valles or the Ginger Islands on Shangri-La or Hawaii on Earth, it expanded you and diminished you at the same time. Her body reacted visibly in a manner that I was beginning to wish wasn’t so visible.

  “My, that’s quite something,” she said, leaning toward the sea. Lehua and Nihoa were ahead of us, thrusting out of the azure metallic water off the point like needle-sharp stepping-stones. For people with really long legs.

  “Yeah,” I said, looking, too, “The scenery on Vesper can be pretty overwhelming. The gravity’s low and the tidal strains from Golgotha have produced some amazing tectonic fracturing. It’s why they have to manage crustal movement. Everybody wants to look at the cliffs and mountains, but nobody wants to put up with the processes that form them.”

  She turned back to me with a wry smile, “You seem to know about a lot of things.” One eyebrow arched, “Or is that just something else you picked up hanging around the joint?”

  “Yeah, I— well, you know—” I kept trying to talk, but stuff like that came out instead. “Anyway, it makes sense,” I went on gamely, or lamely, “I mean, large-scale disasters put a pretty heavy strain on the net. You can only re-boot so many people at one time. It ends up being more economical this way.”

  “Yes, I’m sure it does.” She looked out at the sea again and then gasped as we were suddenly over nothing. The rail crosses a gap in the cliff. We could see the waterfall that cut it making the dive to the beach in three mind-altering plunges. I thought she’d be impressed. She was.

  Just as suddenly we were gliding just above the treetops again. She laughed. “Well, you certainly know how to show a girl a good time, don’t you?” I smiled as the car decelerated and glided into the slot in the plain metal platform that was Nohili station.

  The door slid open and we let the mountain lumber out first. It seemed the only reasonable solution. Then we stepped out onto the silver boilerplate and felt the sea breeze rising off the cliffs caress our faces. It filled me with salt air and made little dancing ripples in her fur. Every muscle in the universe seemed to relax.

  “This way,” I said, pointing to the stairs down into the jungle. We clanged off the final step (I was proud of them for not collapsing under King Kong) and onto a dirt path that had been worn through the greenery. We brushed by hibiscus, elephant ear and tree ferns as I led us out to the fork. I took the left trail that went out to the point.

  “Aren’t we going to the beach?” she asked.

  “No, I thought—” and I stopped. How did she know we weren’t? I started again, “I thought, just in case some Trades jafo was listening in on ’Burbs place this afternoon, we’d stay up here. Just to be safe.” Now I was really confused. She seemed genuinely surprised when we went over the falls. Could she fake that? And why would she?

  “Yes, of course. Good idea.”

  She wasn’t giving anything away. If she’d just slipped, she didn’t seem to be worried about it. I guessed I’d find out soon enough.

  We wove our way out to the very tip of Nohili Point. As we neared the end of the trail, the trees got shorter and finally gave way to billows of flowering bushes and scrub sheared off and shaped by the wind. The summit of Lehua was just a little lower than we were, sharp as a spike and dripping vegetation. It looked so close that you could jump over to it. It was actually almost half a klick away, with Nihoa peeking out behind it. And the ocean a long, long way down in between.

  “Well, if they can hear us out here, I guess we’re re-cyc anyway,” I said. “What’s the story?”

  And she told me, her hairy chum filling up a couple of meters of trail behind her.

  “I need a man who’s off the net. No ties here. Nobody that would miss him for a couple of years, maybe longer. I need someone who’s crewed before. I think you’re him.” The flirt was gone. She was all business now.

  “Crewed what, a starship?”

  “Yes.”

  This was getting intense. “What size?”

  “It’s a seven-seater.”

  “Hmm. Lucky seven.”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re the Captain?”

  “Yes.”

  “Got a Pilot?”

  “Yes.”

  “Astrogator?”

  “I just need a crewman.”

  Meat for the engine. “Where are we going?”

  “We’ll make several stops before we head for our final destination.”

  Well, she didn’t answer that one. “Wait a minute. Why does it matter that I’m off the net? I’ll be back on as soon as you plug me into the engine.”

  “I’m on an eye-ess.”

  Eye-ess? What the hell was an eye-ess? Eye-ess? I. S. An Independent—“You’re on an Independent System?”

  “That’s right.”

  Okay. Not rich. Not mega-rich. Mega-giga-filthy-howling rich. “What’s your name?”

  “Let’s call me Steel.”

  Let’s, I thought. You didn’t answer that one either. I wondered if she got the historical allusion. I doubted it. A twentieth-century dictator who wiped out large parts of his own people through weird farming practices was most likely outside her ken. Probably a company name. Or maybe she was just poetic.

  “You want to know mine?” I said.

  “Mohandas. People call you Mo.” Oh. Like that.

  “How about that?” I gestured at her friend. “Does it have a name?”

  Her face broke into a smile again and life seemed worth living. “Ham? Don’t worry about Ham; he’s not for you. He just takes care of me.”

  “I’ll bet he does a good job.” She scratched Ham behind the ears and got nuzzled in return. Okay, he was a big cupcake. He still made me nervous. One thing still bothered me. “So, you came to Spam-town to look for a starship crewman? Why? I mean, I’m a fluke. Everybody else around here is indentured to the Trades.”

  “I was lucky to find you. As to how we came to be here, that really doesn’t affect this transaction.”

  Well, that cleared that up. “What do you pay?”

  “I’ll double standard crew scale, pay off your back taxes, and at the end of the trip I’ll re-boot you.”

  Wow. “Nice benefit package.”

  “What do you say?”

  Good question. Run off with some femme I’d just met; fall through infinity to someplace she won’t name, for a whole lot of money and a great health plan. Or I could go back to my hole in the back of Sheila’s store, until she kic
ked me out, and run up a tab at ’Burbs’ place.

  Like I said before, a man starts to act funny when he’s run out of options. “Let’s go take a look at your ship.”

  “I know crewmen like to look over a ship before they sign on. I’m sorry, but I can’t offer you that option.”

  “Why not?”

  “The ship is not available.”

  “What do you mean? Why can’t we—I mean I just want to—”

  “The ship is in orbit.”

  “In orbit? Around Vesper?”

  “Yes.”

  Curiouser and curiouser. A woman rich enough to have an independent system leaves her ship floating around in space. Why? All the re-fit facilities were on the surface. Spam-town had a nice port complex; it needed one for all the trade it did. “Well, won’t it have to land to pick us up?”

  “No.”

  No? How the hell were we going to get up to it? Walk? Take a cab? Jump real hard? Surface to orbit shuttles had been obsolete for centuries.

  “I’m sorry I can’t tell you anymore. I’ll have to have your answer now. I know it’s a bit of a squeeze play, but I’m afraid it can’t be helped.”

  ‘A bit of a squeeze play.’ Holy mother of Lao-Tse.

  She suddenly looked a bit unsure of herself. Then she said, “If it makes any difference, it would mean we would be together.”

  Nice gambit. I didn’t feel like biting right then. I said, “Together? How together?”

  And she looked away from me. Out at the sea and Lehua and Prime and the sky and the endless, bottomless universe. “You know, on the ship.”

  I felt like a heel for the second time in an hour, a fairly heavy dose of self-loathing even for me. She didn’t need this from me. She was offering me a job. I needed a job. Granted, it sounded like a job that would probably get me imprisoned, enslaved, or permanently eradicated from the space-time continuum, but what the hell.

  “You don’t need to promise me anything like that,” I said. She looked back at me. “I usually don’t have too much trouble finding company when I want it.” I don’t know why I said that, and I regretted it right away, but there it was.