Lightspeed: Year One
Page 52
His face never smiled, just tilted from one degree to another. “It’s a controlled organic.”
“But what do you want to do?”
“Live,” he said. “By myself, with a few friends,” he nodded towards me, “according to my own devices.”
“What about sex?” I blurted out.
He froze like a stuck strut’s shadow. “I beg your pardon?”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to intrude. It’s just that I was somewhat interested, but only if you were.”
He shook his head, mere centimeters of rejection. “I’m afraid not.”
Words I’d heard before. Including what he said next. “We can be friends, though.”
“He’s not interested,” I told Pippi.
“Screw him,” she said. “Let’s go play Sex Rangers.”
We climbed into the virtual suits and tapped in. I found someone interested in fooling around on a rocky shore, underneath fuzzy pines. The suit’s as good as sex, any day—releases all the tensions you need released, in my opinion—and a lot cleaner.
Afterwards we logged out and ate pizza and watched a deck about boxing. Pippi said the guy had an 87 percent chance of winning (he did), 54 percent chance by knock-out (he did not).
“I asked Star to come mining with us,” I said to her when we were getting ready for bed. I took the couch; she had a fold-down bunk.
“You did what?”
“He’ll be an extra pair of eyes. Not like he’ll take up oxygen.”
She paused. “Fair enough.”
He was good enough at spotting. He learned the difference between ice and metal fast enough to satisfy impatient Pippi, who hated explaining things. I focused on getting us close to the debris that swirled in and out of the Gate. You never knew what you might find. One guy picked up a device that fueled a company in food replication and yielded over forty patents. One pilot found a singing harp. Another the greasy lump that ended up becoming snipship fuel.
You never knew.
Pippi and I had a routine. Star didn’t intrude on it much, went to the secondary display and focused on looking for mineral spikes.
Usually we chatted back and forth. There, Star was an intrusive, if silent, presence. Pippi ended up thumbing on the usual newschat channel. Nothing much. An outbreak on Mars, but small and well-contained. An ambassador stricken but rallying in order to continue his mission through the Gate. How much he looked forward to being the fifth human through the interstellar passage that allowed us access to the wild and varied universe. How much he looked forward to opening new trade channels.
Who knew what he might find out there?
“What’s this?” Star said.
From afar just a glitter. Then, closer, a silver-sided chest, the size of a foot locker but covered with golden triangles. An odd, glittery powder encrusted the hinges and catch as it spun in space.
We brought it in.
Pippi’s gloved hand reached to undo the latch. I waited, holding my breath.
Nothing hissed out. A glass sphere inside, clouded with bubbles and occlusions. As Pippi slipped it out of the gray material surrounding it, we could see oily liquid filling it.
“Could be useless,” Pippi said, her voice unhappy. “Plenty of stories like that before.”
“Could be beaucoup bucks,” I pointed out.
“Of course,” Pippi said, her voice loud and angry, “it’s the time you bring someone along, to split it three ways, that we actually hit a lode.”
“I don’t want any claim,” Star said.
Flummoxed, I stared at him. What must it be like, to have enough to not need more, to have just that one extra layer against yourself and poverty? My parents had left me enough to buy my snipship, but all my capital was tied up in that rig.
“I just wanted the company,” he said. “I thought it would be interesting.”
“Fucking tourist,” Pippi said. “Want to watch the monkeys dance? We’ll kiss for another five grand.”
He backed up, raising his hands. His feet clattered on the deck. Before he had moved quietly. Did he choose to make that sound to remind us he was a machine?
“Thought we’d just love to take the walking vibrator on tour?” Pippi said. When he remained silent, she turned on me. “See, it doesn’t have anything to say to that.”
“He,” he said.
“He? What makes you a he, that you’ve got a sticky-out bit? I bet you’ve got a sticky-in bit or two as well.” She laughed. Meanness skewed her face.
“Enough,” I said. “Let’s tag the find, in our names, Pippi.”
She dropped back. I clung to the rigging, started to thumb in figures. She pushed forward, “Let me, it’s faster.” Fingers clicking, she muttered under her breath, “Get us all home faster that way.”
I took over after she’d tagged the spot and put the coordinates in. I was trying not to be angry. Hope mellowed out some of the harsh emotion. It could be a significant find. It was nice of Star to give up his claim.
Back in the ship bay, the lights laddered his face till he looked like a decoration. Pippi was strapping our find into a jitney.
“Why not a place where there’s rain?” I said.
“That could only be Earth,” he said. “Do you know the worst thing about rain there?”
“What?”
Pippi tied a rope into place, tested it with a quick tug, glanced over her shoulder at us.
“Rain there has gotten so acidic that if I stand out in it I have to come in and shower after a few minutes. It damages my outer skin.”
I tried to picture the cold, then acid burn. Luna was better.
“I’m sorry about Pippi.”
She honked the horn.
“Go ahead. I’m taking the tram over to the Cluster,” he said.
I hesitated. “Meet me later?”
“I’ll call you.”
He didn’t, of course. We cashed in the case—a lump sum from a company’s R&D division that doubled our incomes and then some.
I texted him, “Come celebrate with us, we’re dockside and buying dumplings.” But he didn’t reply until three days later. “Sorry, things got busy. Bought house. Come out and see it.”
“When?”
“Tomorrow morning. I’ll make you breakfast.”
I left in the morning before Pippi was awake.
His place was swank, built into a cliff-side, with a spectacular view of the endless white plains below. He made me waffles with real maple syrup. He was an amazing cook. I said so.
“I was programmed that way,” he said, and made a sound that was sort of a laugh.
The sexbots—all of the AIs struggling for emancipation lately—had had to demonstrate empathy and creativity. I wondered what that had been like.
He was standing uncomfortably close. I leaned forward to make it even closer, thinking he’d draw back.
He didn’t.
“I’m programmed a certain way,” he said.
“How is that?”
“I want to please you. But at the same time I know it’s just the way I’m programmed.”
“It can’t be something more than that?” My arm was pressed against his surface. It was warm and yielding as flesh. I couldn’t have told the difference.
He pulled away. I bit my lip in frustration, but I liked him enough to be civilized.
I drank the last of my coffee. Real Blue Mountain blend. He kept his kitchen well stocked for human visitors—who did he hope would stop in?
As it turns out, Pippi. Next time I came through on a quick flight (I might be rich, but who was I to turn down fast and easy money?), she told me how he’d fed her.
“Pasta,” she said, rolling the words out. “And wine, and little fish, from Earth. And afterwards something sweet to drink.”
She said they’d fucked. I believed her. It wouldn’t be her style to lie. It would never occur to her.
So I did and said I’d fucked him too. She didn’t respond, not right off the b
at, but I caught her looking at me oddly by the time I said toodle-oo and went off to sleep in my ship.
It wasn’t the first time I’d slept in there, not by a long shot.
I wished them both happiness, I supposed.
Still, two weeks later, I came in response to Pippi’s panicked call. He was going back to Earth, she said.
We both showed up at the farewell hall. He was standing with a tall blonde woman, Earth-fat. Star slipped away from us, came over with a bearing jaunty and happy, his polished face expressionless as always.
“Who is that?” Pippi said.
“A journalist. She’s going to help me tell my story, back on Earth.”
“I see,” Pippi said. She and I both surveyed the woman, who pretended not to notice us. Her manicured hand waved a porter over to take her luggage aboard, the hard-shelled cases the same color as her belt.
Pippi said, “Is this because you don’t want to fuck me any longer? You said you liked it, making me feel good. We don’t have to do that. We can do whatever you like, as long as you stay.”
He averted his face, looking at the ship. “That’s not it.”
“Then what?”
“I want to go back to the rain.”
“Earth’s acid rain?” I said. “The rain that will destroy you?”
Now he was looking at neither of us.
“What about your place?” Pippi said.
“You can have it,” he said. “It never felt like home.”
“Will anyplace?” I asked. “Anywhere?”
“When I’m telling my story, it feels like home,” he said. “I see myself on the camera and I belong in the world. That’s what I need to do.”
“Good luck,” I said. What else could I say?
Pippi and I walked away through the terminal. There were tourists all around us, going home, after they’d played exotic for a few days, experienced zero-grav and sky-diving and painted their faces in order to play glide-ball and eaten our food and drunk our wine and now were going home to the rain.
We didn’t look at each other. I didn’t know how long Star’s shadow would lie between us. Maybe years. Maybe just long enough for sunlight to glint on forgotten metal, out there in the sky. Maybe long enough and just so long.
THE PASSENGER
Julie E. Czerneda
It was a pilgrimage and he was its goal.
This understanding had taken years, had the passenger the means or desire to measure them; decades to be convinced of any purpose beyond curiosity to the parade outside his walls. In the first months, he had cowered behind the furnishings, terrified almost to insanity by the ceaseless, silent mass of flesh quivering against one side of his prison.
At any moment, he could slide his eyes that way and make out a hundred bodies, hung with broad-tipped tentacles, moving with a boneless grace as if the atmosphere outside his prison were liquid. It could have been, for all he knew.
A hundred bodies: they could be the same as the hundred before or different. He still couldn’t tell any of them apart. Were only those of the same size and shape allowed to see him? They wore and carried nothing. He was fond of the notion that there were some religious or cultural mores that said they should come before him as he was, for they had never provided him clothing.
Other things, yes. Every few days, or weeks, or months, a panel on the far wall from his bed would glow. He’d learned to set his fingers properly in the seven slots beside the panel to trigger it to slide open. Behind the panel would be a box.
He would open it, of course, despite what he’d come to expect of its contents. At first, the sight of charred and melted wood and plastic, stained with blood, had provoked him to rage. He had cursed his captors, spat at the transparency keeping him from them, them from him, tried with ingenuity to kill himself with whatever sad relic or trophy they’d provided. They had never reacted, beyond simply causing him to slip into unconsciousness while they repaired what damage he’d managed to inflict on himself.
Eventually, he’d stopped. What was the point? The pilgrimage of watchers never ended. The boxes with their pitiful cargo continued to come. He began to sort their contents carefully. When he slept, anything he hadn’t touched or handled would be removed from his prison. He made sure to touch it all. When a new box was due, anything he had left on the floor would also disappear like a dream, so he began to sort out what mattered to him.
There was nothing useful. Bits of fabric—never enough for clothing, even when he tried to hoard some. The smell of burned flesh usually clung to it. Metal and plastic, usually bent or damaged beyond recognition. Once in a while, a package that seemed intact. Another passenger’s personal possessions, he assumed, better protected than other things.
While these were the most distressing gifts from his captors, he treated them with care. The opaque walls of his prison were uneven, with plentiful ledges. He filled these with trinkets from the dead. He slept watched over by the images of other men’s mothers and wives, and spent hours contemplating the fates of children whose faces were not reflections of his own.
If he slid his eyes that way, to watch his watchers, he knew it would be the same sight as every other minute since he came to be here, but the thought brought the involuntary glance. Tentacles, overlapping either because they wanted to or there was no room to avoid touching, made the same corrugated pattern as always. Each body was topped with seven small red eyes, pupilled in black, rolling in unison to face him, to track him as their owner moved along from one side of the wall to the other.
He looked away. There had been a time when he tried to communicate or at least learn by watching the watchers. After that had been a time of anger and depression, of attempts at self-destruction when nothing in the room could be defaced—attempts that availed him only intimate memories of futility.
Then he had stopped caring. He had remained motionless, waiting to die. They wouldn’t allow his body to fail. He would wake to find himself nourished, no matter how hard he resisted sleep. But he could allow his brain to die. And he tried.
And had almost succeeded. But that was when his captors, though they seemed incapable of communicating with him or understanding him, began giving him the boxes of belongings. Every item tore his heart; every one reconnected his humanity.
At last, one gave him a purpose to match the unknown one sending the aliens sliding past his prison day in, day out. It was a child’s box of markers. He held them against his cheek when he found them, breathing in a faint scent of corruption as well as the clean promise of colour. He cried for the child who had lost them, then, with painful care—he’d never been an artist—used the markers to draw a stick figure child on the floor.
He expected the vivid lines to be gone when he awoke, fingers cramped around the markers. But his captors had left them. So he added a dog, a ball, a tree, a house, a rabbit, a book! The markers failed him, dry halfway through the shining red of a bicycle. He flung them away, and cried, turning his back to the wall of watchers.
Sleeping, he dreamed for the first time in years of home, a dream that for once didn’t spiral into the nightmare of chase, burning, struggle, and capture, a dream that gave him up peacefully to reality.
There he found his captors had left him something of their own. On the floor was a seven-sided sheet of white. There was a tray containing greasy sticks, each about the length of his hand, in a variety of colors. They were awkward to hold, but he grabbed them eagerly and waved them happily at his watchers as if they’d respond. Or as if he’d recognize a response if they did.
Another hundred beings slid past. It took each exactly fifteen heartbeats to glide from one end of his wall to the other. Always.
Sixty-three years had passed since. He knew precisely, because that sheet of white had marked the beginning of his purpose. There were a few years lost in the beforetime. Ten years ago, the sad packages from other passengers had stopped appearing behind the panel. It didn’t matter. He no longer remembered his age when he arrived
in this place, but he could rely on nature ending his imprisonment in the not-too-distant future, regardless of the devoted attention of his captors.
He surveyed this day’s work. The colors were subtle, layered in explanations of light and shadow, refinements he’d begun several pieces ago. The centerpiece, a bridge, swept upwards, its luminous archways of stone almost hanging in air. The Legion marching across moved in trained synchrony, save for the eyes of one man looking out as if wary of surprise attack. There were storm clouds on the horizon, and dewdrops on the moss in the foreground.
There were probably errors throughout the scene, he worried, as he always did. But the errors were irrelevant; he’d done his best. This one was ready to go. He rolled it up, the motion inflaming the soreness in his joints, and leaned it against the panel. Like all the others, it would be gone when he awoke.
Boneless grace studded with eyes; could any even see the colors he intended?
He’d learned his art. It was, after all, a way to communicate, and he’d hoped until hope died this medium would be the breakthrough allowing him to reach the intelligence that held him here, that marched in unending ranks just to look at him. But there had been no response beyond the disappearance of only finished works, those he rolled up and placed near the panel. He didn’t bother wondering anymore if they valued his art or washed off his colors to return the paper to him in some frenzied economy. It was enough he completed each image.
It took three sets of hands to open the roll safely. When it was spread on the seven-sided table specially built for this purpose, they ever-so-gently slid the holding bars over each edge, each bar locking in place with a light snick of contact. Only then did they release their careful grip.
The lights around the table dimmed, isolating the brightness glowing down on colors and shapes. The encircling six didn’t speak for a long moment, their faces lost in shadows, their thoughts in reverence. They were a close group, drawn together years before by common interests and goals, held together by a responsibility none could escape. These rooms, the automated equipment, and, most importantly, the wonderful artwork such as the latest supine before them, had been their discovery.