Asimov's SF, Oct/Nov 2005

by Dell Magazine Authors

"Usually not,” she said.

  "And what do you need me for? Why haven't you just done it when he's over there with my body?"

  The ember of dope glowed bright, subsided. After a long while, she said, “Maybe there's a chance he won't be the only vegetable to come out of the deal."

  "And I'm a nice guy."

  "Yeah."

  "Okay,” I said. “I'm in."

  * * * *

  My night came around. I wanted to call it off, but didn't. I was nervous, and when I lay down, it was with little expectation of sleep. The next thing I knew, I was in a strange bedroom, tumbling backward, a bright ceiling light stabbing into my eyes, hearing somebody gasping for air. I fell through a long gap in cognitive reality before I hit the floor, cracking the back of my head a solid blow. But it was the button-locus of pain at the base of my skull that really hurt. I writhed on my back, eyes squeezed shut. A cool hand touched my cheek. Rhonda Reppo's voice, soothing: No, it's all right, it's all right...

  * * * *

  Bad memories haunted me, and not all of them were my own. Now, when I slept, a nasty residue of Franz Thixton fumed up, and ghosts of his perverted deeds and desires spooked through the night marshes of my dreams. More than once, I'd seen Cynthia on those marshes, and it was no longer memory-enhancers I craved, but a memory-suppressant.

  A month after we'd scrambled Thixton like “breakfast eggs,” in a lost hour past midnight, I turned to my terminal, its flat blue light the only illumination in my apartment. I buzzed Rhonda Reppo, and presently a box opened in the corner of the screen.

  "Okay,” I said. “Let's find out."

  "Find out what?” Rhonda said, after a moment.

  "Whether what's inside is what counts."

  Light streaked when she pulled the joint away from her mouth. She said, “I guess I'm ready for a ride, if you are."

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  Copyright © 2005 by Jack Skillingstead.

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  Betting on Eureka by Geoffrey A. Landis

  A Short Story

  Geoffrey Landis spent most of last year in Pasadena, working on the science team for the Mars Exploration Rover, where he shepherded the rovers around on Mars and took pictures of rocks, soil, and sunsets. His latest work has been a proposal for flying an aircraft in the atmosphere of Venus to search for microbial life. In his spare time, Geoff designs solar cells and sometimes writes science fiction.

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  Eureka.

  Across the big black sky, everybody knew about the Eureka asteroid. Eureka was a legend, a dream, a paradox; it was a fabled lost treasure hidden among a billion rocks in the sky.

  In the gossip of the rock-rats and fuel-stop jocks, many claimed that Eureka was a hoax. The ore sample had to be an elaborate fake, because it was well known that asteroids have no ore veins. An ore vein is deposited by water, and for four billion years, the asteroids had never been wet. But yet there it was, an angular chunk of rock the size of a suit-helmet. The sample had one flat surface, still showing the saw marks where it had been cut free of its parent rock. And embedded in that cutaway, like a rope of twisted metal, was a streak of quartz glistening with gold and copper and scandium, precious scandium, riches without price.

  But the parent body, ah, the parent body, the treasure load of man's greed and desire, where was it? Only two people had ever seen it, only two had ever mapped its eccentric orbit, and only one of them had come back, dying of radiation poisoning, delirious with the last stutterings of dying neurons. He had been dying, John Jason Goya, covered in filth and vomit that he had been too weak to clean up, riding in a broken spaceship from who-knew-where, clutching a stone and gibbering that it had been cut from a fifty million-ton rock, a rock threaded through and through with the same rich veins.

  But, in that last day, the one long bleak day after John Jason Goya had arrived at High Freehold in the dilapidated Queen of Spades and before he lapsed into the coma from which he would never recover, he refused to tell anyone where the rock had been found. A dozen prospectors searched the Queen of Spades from rockets to radiators and back again, tore apart the old Queen and searched her innards with microscopes, but all the navigation logs had been erased, the inertial navigation unit wiped, and every hint of its trajectory meticulously destroyed, lest the claim jumpers that John Jason knew were waiting might find and steal his precious rock. John Jason Goya alone had returned with the secret, and John Jason Goya had died with it.

  Of his partner, Shania Montez, no trace was ever found.

  Yeah, everybody knew the story. Parts of it were most likely true, parts undoubtedly exaggerated. The rock itself was on display in a museum on Earth, we heard, or it had been processed for its precious elements and the slag discarded.

  The story of Eureka faded into myth, joining the many legends of the asteroid belts, the stories of ghost ships and lost lodes that had become the bait for a hundred scams. Every visitor fresh from Earth was approached by a dozen furtive con artists who, for a small price, could reveal the orbital parameters for the fabulous lode. Nobody paid attention.

  The belts had plenty of stories. I'd heard that one Corwin Teron was peddling stories that he had a guaranteed-true tip on a lost lode in the outer fringe, and I paid no attention.

  But now Corwin was acting rich.

  2101 Adonis was an asteroid in a nearly 5:2 elliptical resonance with Earth, an orbit that took it out to brush the main belt, then inward of Venus. High-Hades was the way station built onto the asteroid. It was the port where the miners and prospectors and ore-haulers stopped to refurbish and refuel, a hub with flophouses and fixit shops and suppliers. High-Hades featured establishments for drinks and adult entertainment to service every level of asteroid mining society, from the damn-near-broke prospector looking for a stake, right up to the swank private clubs for the owners and managers of billion-SAU enterprises.

  And now Corwin was drinking in the society bars.

  Corwin Teron was of an intermediate age, with the grace of movement that showed he'd been in low gee for a very long time. To pay his oxy bills he hired out as skilled labor to the repair shops, but you could see he'd been a prospector; the signs of it were all over him. I knew him slightly; I'd seen him around the bars and entertainment district.

  Now he was talking to financiers. And that was interesting enough for me to want to track him down.

  "Corwin Teron,” I said to him. He was in new clothes, with spider-silk gloves and iridescent knee-socks; not the latest new fashion, but high class enough.

  "Marcos,” he acknowledged, and smiled.

  "Looks as if life's been good to you?” I asked.

  "Pretty good,” he said airily, “pretty good. How's business?"

  "Not bad,” I lied. Or maybe not a lie, since tottering on the edge of insolvency was pretty normal business. “Got anything you could throw my way?"

  That made Corwin laugh, long and hard. “You and everyone else."

  "That so?” I said. “So, what's up?"

  He gave me a look, and I could see from his eyes that he was eager for an excuse to tell his story, if I gave him a chance.

  Now, in the asteroids, some people pay their oxygen by finding the ores—which is a pretty tough life, as any rock rat will tell you, yeah. And some pay theirs by selling stuff to the ones prospecting. That may not make you jackpot rich, but it's a good sight more likely to keep you in oxygen. And then there are some, like me, who make our oxygen from information. Find out who's coming in with a load of what, and trade your information to somebody with enough liquidity to short the commodity. Or, just as good, find out when a lode's played out, and a crew's not bringing in a load when they promised one—and sell the infor to somebody with a few standard accounting units so you don't short your own oxygen bills. So I was more than a little interested in what Corwin Teron's secret was, and why he seemed unexpectedly flush. Infor is my stock in trade.

  "Come on,” I said. “I'm b
uying."

  "You're on,” he told me.

  * * * *

  His turned out to be Irish coffee, which is pretty much the drink of capitalists and kings out in the belt, and put a notable hit into my expense fund. But it got him talking.

  The Tartaros bar swung on a tether, rotating serenely a quarter of a rev per minute, giving it enough gee to serve beer in glasses instead of squeezies, but not so much that the low-gee workers would be too weak to stand. And the waitresses, yeah, the waitresses were top class.

  "Eureka,” Corwin said, staring out over my head at the slowly rotating stars. “Heard of it?"

  "Yeah,” I said. “Who hasn't?"

  "I know where it is."

  Eureka. I dropped a bundle of piggies on an Irish coffee, and the guy turns out to be trolling a bait only fresh-up suckers would strike at. “Yeah, I bet you do,” I said, without any enthusiasm. I stirred my drink—a beer, at a fifth the cost of Corwin's Irish, but still by no means cheap—with my finger.

  Corwin smiled, and it was a twisted smile, almost angry. “Sure,” he said. “You heard the story, sure thing, I guess everybody has. But you ever heard my side of the story?"

  I looked up. “Your side of the story?” Of course I knew the story—everybody did—and he wasn't part of it. “You don't have a side of the story."

  "The hell I don't."

  Well. I'd already laid out the piggies for the Irish. I'd let him tell his goddamned story.

  * * * *

  "You know we were partners?” Corwin said. “The three of us, Johnny, Montez, and me. We each owned a one-third share in the Bitch Queen—the Queen of Spades, sure, that's what we called her, the Bitch Queen, because she was the bitch who ruled our lives. We were looking for the big strike, sure thing we were, us and half a hundred other hungry prospectors working the fringe, and we weren't finding it. A couple of little strikes, enough to pay a little toward the mortgage, but we weren't breaking even, and every trip we were getting a little more in the hole.

  "But we had some good times together, you know how it is? Let me tell you, we were buddies, nothing more than that, can you believe it? Two guys, one gal, and we were the best friends in the world, sure, prospecting partners, one for all and all for one, all that, friends and partners and nothing more.

  "And, damn, I had to go blow it all by falling in love. Damn, that was stupid, but how could I help it? Seeing her every day, floating with her hair in all directions like dandelion fluff; breathing in her used oxygen, all saturated with her animal scent; feeling the radiation of her body heat when we're working the radar side by side, millimeters away from each other.

  "There was just no seeing straight; I was floating inverted, but I kept my com shut, knew that if I made a move, there in that cramped bubble of the Queen of Spades, it would never be nothing but trouble. And me? Hell, I was in debt to the eyeballs, the only thing I owned was my share of the Bitch Queen, and that was mortgaged so heavily that I couldn't really say I owned that, either. I couldn't put two liquid piggies together if I had to. We were looking for that big strike, and we needed it. By damn, we needed it.

  "We'd harpooned an E-six with our tether and used the momentum to swing the Queen around and whip us out of the ecliptic a bit, snooping around a cluster of E-five rocks that we thought just might be promising. Now, the little ant probes prospect by just scattering a handful of Doppler dummies past, and measuring the gravitational field. That's enough to give you average composition, and see if there are any big mascon anomalies, but to seriously prospect, well, that takes a rendezvous and a drill. That's what humans are for, that's how we can hope to have an edge over the ants, knowing which rocks to stop for and where to drill. It's an art, more intuition than science, and it's a dying art, too. Used to be a thousand prospectors, out in the main belt. Maybe ten thousand. Not so many now, and we work the fringe. Won't be too long now and the last of us will be gone, us human prospectors, and it will be nothing but robots, the ants and spiders and the worm-bots.

  "Anyway, there we were, way out on the high fringe. We'd scoped out this cluster, looked good—but hell, you know, they always look good. So we drilled the heck out of those rocks, and came up with—nothing. We would have settled for volatiles, nitrogen, a little methane; hell, we would have been happy even with nickel. We got crap: olivine, pyroxene—not a trace of hydration, nothing worth a SAU.

  "We were way out of plane, and out of fuel, and we were coming back broke.

  "It takes a lot of fat little piggies to recondition a ship, fuel it up and fix it up to take it out prospecting. When we got back to High-Hades, Johnny Goya and Shania Montez went out to find low-bid contractors to refurbish us, and I was supposed to find us a good deal on xenon for fuel. So, shit, I shouldn't have done what I did.

  "We keep our ears open, out there—what else is there to do, between rocks?—and I'd been listening in on some suit-to-ship chatter, prospectors running a ship named Lucky Lady Leela, registered out of Venezuela. From what I was hearing, sounded like the Lady had found an old cometary core, lots of nitrogen and carbon and phosphorus, and once they found it they shut up about it, which sure sounded like a sweet sweet lode to me. So, the moment we got back to High-Hades I went to the credit broker, and mortgaged what little equity I had left in the Bitch Queen on short-term demand notes. I got myself about twenty thousand standard accounting units from my share of the Bitch, and I took those twenty thousand SAUs and put those piggies into phosphorus, selling short, leveraged twenty to one. If I'd been right—ah, I could have paid my notes and bought the Bitch Queen outright; I would have gone right up to Montez and told her, you and me, we're rich, we can cut Johnny out—you and me, babe, we can tour the asteroids together.

  "But I was wrong about that other crew. They'd found what they thought was a cometary core, sure thing, and the spectrum looked good, but when they drilled, there was nothing there—they'd been fooled by a patina, and Lucky Lady Leela came back broke as we were. The rocks are cruel, and when the margin call came, I was broke.

  "I made it worse, I reckon, by going to Shania and—without two piggies to my name, mind—telling her that I was hopelessly in love with her, oh, and by the way I'd lost all my money and sold my share of the ship. She kicked me in the stomach and threw my stuff out after me.

  "She and Johnny put together enough capital to refurbish the ship, and I'll be damned if I can figure out where they scraped up the SAUs from, but somehow they did. Although the bank now owned more than half of it, they didn't call in the mortgage, figuring the old ship wasn't worth what they had invested in it; the best move for them was to let the ship go out prospecting and hope they'd recoup their piggies on a big strike. Shania Montez and that son-of-a-bitch John Jason Goya, who used to be my best friend, went out on that last voyage as a two-man crew, and that was the last time I saw either one of them.

  "Last time anybody saw them, for that matter, until Johnny came back, dying, with the mother rock of gold and scandium in his hands. They'd found their big strike, and I had nothing to do with it. Motherfucker."

  Corwin shut up for a moment.

  "Tough luck,” I said.

  Well, that was a story worth the price of a drink, and some of the details could be checked. I linked in (I'd picked the Tartaros knowing it had a good node) and queried some key details, tapping one-handed with my pad held under the table, while Corwin was staring into his drink. First thing I did was check registration data for Queen of Spades. It had no current registration, but I searched backward until I found it. It had been registered out of Zimbabwe, although I very much doubted that any of the owners had ever even been to Africa. Zimbabwe had favorable laws for ship registration, most particularly favorable in that they required little in the way of inspection and nothing in the way of fees, and assessed no tax on ships that made no profit. They did keep ownership records, though, and scrolling through, I saw that Corwin Teron had indeed once been a part-owner of the Queen of Spades; he'd sold his share to the Second Pr
oserpine Credit Union & Oxygen Bank, the mortgage holder on the ship, a week and a day before she went out on her last voyage.

  "Shit,” I said.

  Gold, copper, and scandium, I thought. Time to do some research on Eureka.

  The story, when I looked into it, wasn't so simple. A lot of the rock rats had dissected the evidence—what else did they have to do, coasting through the long dark, waiting for a lucky rock to pass by? They picked apart a thousand cryptic clues in the fragmented records of Johnny Montez's delirious ravings. There were a hundred versions of the details, but the flow of the story that they finally put together was more or less like this.

  Montez and Goya had gone out prospecting. Their outward trajectory was known, but then they took a tether-slingshot and used it to rebound off a passing rock, one too small to have a name, and from there the trajectory was only guesswork.

  They were tricky pilots, Montez and Goya. Successful prospecting required being able to rendezvous rocks that nobody else was looking at. Goya knew the trick to harpoon a rock with a tether, and use it to swing the Queen of Spades around like a whip, vectoring into odd, eccentric orbits. It was a delicate task, and put uncomfortable stress on a ship, but when they did it, they could reach rocks on the wide fringe, eccentric rocks too costly in delta-V for the automated ant swarms to find worthwhile.

  They had been out for almost a year, approximately, when they'd hit Eureka. A year's a long time to be locked up in a cabin with somebody. Before that voyage, it had always been three of them, always a third person to break the pattern of one on one in the ship. Were they sleeping together? Probably, I decided. Almost certainly they were; two of them together, it would have been hard to believe that they weren't. But after a year they were maybe getting to be mighty sick of each other.

  And then the big strike.

  They found the rock, that gold-laced hit they'd been dreaming of during long decades of prospecting. An asteroid embedded with a crystal of quartz, and in the quartz, the glimmer of metals, glimmers the color of an asteroid prospector's dreams. Did they celebrate? No, they did not. They were too focussed on the task. They prospected. They measured. They took a sample. And John Goya left Shania Montez behind on the asteroid.