Far from the Light of Heaven

by Tade Thompson

  “You can do that?”

  “Yes. I am bound by programming to tell you this is illegal. Turn the warning feature off?”

  “Yes. Don’t tell me if a thing I want to do is legal or not.”

  “Amended. I have what we need. My analysis flagged information that is high value to you.”

  “Tell me.”

  “Maxwell is leaving on a starship called the Ragtime. He has a bodyguard called Vitality who is going with him. He is settling most of his current court cases, including his divorce from wife Gwendolyn.”

  “Can you run probabilities?”

  “Of course.”

  “Run the numbers on getting him before he leaves, with whatever time we have left.”

  There are guards shooting into the sky when Brisbane approaches. Across his vision, Carmilla scrolls what each person is armed with and brief personal histories. They are all professional conflict experts. Bodyguards. Killers. Donors of bad blood. But where is the target? They seem rather relaxed.

  They fire again, twice, then focus on Brisbane.

  “This is private property, sir. Please leave.”

  “I’m here to visit Mrs Maxwell.”

  “Nobody by that name here, sir.”

  “I know she owns the property from the tax record, and I know she’s here by the signature of her Autonomous and the fact that this was its last destination. I’m just a guest. I’m a friendly.”

  “She has as many friends as she needs, pal.”

  A shout and frantic firing of guns. Attention shifts to the air as a barn owl dive-bombs them. Brisbane leaps aside to avoid sharp quills shot like darts from its feathers. One of the guards goes down.

  “Shoot it!”

  “It’s too fast.”

  It’s not fast. It’s just calm and manoeuvrable. It’s also not organic. Brisbane picks up a rock and Carmilla gives him an intercept vector. He hurls, and it hits the owl between neck and body. The guards are astounded that it comes down. It’s durable enough that it twitches, but they pile on it, stamping with boots.

  “You brought it down with a rock. That’s amazing.”

  Brisbane did not bring it down with a rock. The stone throw was to impress the guards, establish rapport. Everybody likes a good throwing arm. It was Carmilla who sent a disrupting signal to the owl’s AI.

  They search him thoroughly and scan him. “What’s this you have on?”

  “It’s a prosthesis,” says Brisbane.

  “I can’t get any X-rays through.”

  “That’s a good thing. It means nothing bad is getting out.”

  “Hm.”

  “Just let me speak to her.”

  “Speak. She can hear you.” The guard points to a camera.

  “I’m one of the Tehani,” says Brisbane. “Do you know what that means?”

  The gate opens and he is waved in.

  Gwendolyn Maxwell is thirty years old. Brisbane knows this because Carmilla flashes it.

  “What do you want with me, Jeremiah Brisbane of the Tehani mining community?”

  “I want your ticket to the starship Ragtime. I want to confront your ex-husband, call him to account for the murder of my people.”

  “I hadn’t told anyone about the ticket, and I didn’t buy it in my own name. I haven’t even decided if I’m going or not. How did you know about it?”

  “It doesn’t matter. I can tell you this: I can be more of an irritation to Yan Maxwell than you can.”

  “I don’t know. I can be very irritating.”

  “But he’ll see you coming. I have the money but not the position to get on the Ragtime. You do. Let me be the thorn in his side. I can pay you.”

  “You can’t afford me.” Gwendolyn exhales. “Where did you grow up?”

  “Connecticut.”

  “Family?”

  Brisbane nods. “Service is important to my family.”

  “Everybody has moments they remember with parents and carers. Fishing trips. Amusement parks and the like. I don’t have such moments. Yan gave me replacement moments, then took them away. But those are still the only moments I have. Had. Do you know what I’m saying?”

  “Yes, you still care for him.”

  “What? No. I hate him. Take the ticket. Fuck him entirely up for me.”

  The day before departure, Brisbane destroys everything he is not taking with him. He leaves an old-timey pen-and-paper letter to his family. He loves them, but his heart has been Tehani for so long. A good Tehani will not let them be forgotten. And Brisbane is good. His father, large, benign, always a good word, always a hand reached out in support to others, a real shirt-off-his-back kind of guy, attends Brisbane’s ceremony and just nods like, “Yes, this is the way, my son. You did good.” They both watch a meteor shower that night before Father Brisbane returns to Connecticut. He visits home once more, but it is so removed from his existence that he feels alienated. He leaves earlier than intended.

  Brisbane watches an animation of the Ragtime in orbital space. A new ship. Basic interstellar design – a modular stem and two toruses. Double array of solar panels. Algae reactor. Ion thrust engine for deep space. Chemical propellant engines for fast burns, emergency acceleration and attitude adjustment. In the animation, which runs on a loop, a space shuttle takes passengers up from Kennedy Space Center, docks with the Ragtime and undocks after passengers have gone to their respective pods.

  “I have registered you as disabled and had a chat with the AI,” says Carmilla.

  “Why the chat?”

  “It’s chatty. It likes to talk. You know how civilian code is.”

  Brisbane does not, but he takes her word for it.

  Boarding the space shuttle Epictetus is a sedate affair. He is helped into the space suit provided, worn over his prosthesis. People talk at him, but he cannot hear. He is tensing for contact with Maxwell.

  “Where is he?” Brisbane asks Carmilla. He knows this will appear as if he is talking to himself.

  “I have scanned for his IFC hardware address. He has boarded. Not this shuttle. He is likely already in orbit. Oh, and I found another one of those owls. I killed it.”

  Brisbane wonders, isn’t she supposed to check with him before that kind of action?

  “So we have to board the Ragtime?” he says.

  “In orbit, we’ll have access to the Deep Space Network. I can use the Ragtime to broadcast worldwide. It’ll be easy. It’s the better option.”

  He hadn’t planned to go into space. “I was not prepared for space.”

  “This is in the thermosphere. It’s only space because the Kármán line says it’s space. It’s legal space, but we’re still in the atmosphere. We’re fine. The suit isn’t rated for space, but I’m curious to see how it performs. I’ll be transmitting data back.”

  Brisbane does not remember the shuttle trip, even though it takes six hours. It is marked by monotony. Carmilla ticks away in the background.

  Brisbane has never killed anyone before. He hasn’t even done serious violence. When he was fourteen, a bully squared up to him, and Brisbane, having watched certain movies, smacked him across the throat. The boy thrashed about on the floor, choking. It lasted maybe a minute, but it seemed like hours during which Brisbane imagined going to prison for murder. He is not a violent man and whatever he needs to do here will be distasteful.

  Instrument of vengeance, and word of caution.

  Docked.

  He knows fuck all about docking procedure or microgravity motion. There are company androids to show them to their seats. The Ragtime seems pretty basic until you get to the torus.

  “For now, just sit in your pods. When we are ready, the medbots will take care of you.”

  “Maxwell will be next to you,” says Carmilla.

  “I should enter his pod?”

  A voice on the PA system: “Do not enter the pods of other passengers.”

  “Yes, enter his pod. That has the best probability of killing him. Your pulse is high, tachycardic. Your r
espiratory rate is rising. Are you preparing for battle? There is no need. The suit amplifies our strength.”

  Inside his pod. There is a seat that looks like it can convert to a bed. The walls are busy with medical devices and inert robot arms and tools. Soft music pipes through.

  “Now, Brisbane. This is the optimal time. Go.”

  He does.

  Carmilla overrides the pod lock and Brisbane faces his enemy.

  Maxwell looks up at Brisbane. “What do you want?”

  “I…” Brisbane falls back to his own pod, shaking, unsettled.

  Maxwell has a steely gaze and an air of the implacable. Brisbane pictures his hands, his augmented limbs, squeezing that neck, the face becoming blue, the confident look in those eyes dying, turning to panic, the capillaries bursting in his eyes, his face progressing from cyanosis to black, and his limbs, first struggling, thrashing about convulsively, then going limp. Brisbane hates the guy and feels the weight of the whole Tehani history on him, yet he cannot bring himself to go ahead with it. He cannot kill a person in cold blood. This isn’t right. This is not… good.

  “Brisbane, what are you doing?” asks Carmilla.

  “This was a mistake. This… we aren’t going to get this done.”

  “I know what to do,” says Carmilla.

  “What?”

  The furniture changes configuration underneath him. He hasn’t noticed but there is a fine mist in the air. The medbots are coming to life.

  “You’re being sedated, Brisbane. But don’t worry. I’ll take care of things.”

  “Carmilla…”

  “Sleep.”

  He does.

  Wait.

  Where am I?

  Brisbane is having sex with a demon in a lava pool.

  What? What is this?

  Above, blackness. No sky, no moon. The lava glows, at knee height, lapping at the limbs. The demon has a tail which is lifted high and thrashing this way and that, allowing Brisbane to access its nether parts. It’s furred and deep orange, but that’s just the light from the lava. Everything is orange-yellow. No other source of illumination. The demon has spikes up its spine leading to three horns. It screams out pleasure in the language of demonkin.

  What?

  He feels nothing, not the heat of the lava – and it is hot – not his connection with the demon, not the fumes in his throat. Smoke breaks off from the lava surface and disappears upwards. No smell, either.

  What?

  Carmilla?

  The demon’s wings beat and the smoke swirls around, yet Brisbane still cannot smell it. He stops moving and the demon whirls and swats him with a taloned hand. It doesn’t hurt and Brisbane wades back.

  Carmilla?

  “Oh, you’re awake. One moment.”

  The scene freezes; smoke stops in mid-billow. The tableau dissolves, then Brisbane is in a bar of some kind, other drinkers present but hunched over their drinks in a way that hides their faces. The bartender cowers at the far end, as far away from Brisbane as possible. His body hair stands on end and beats with unknown currents.

  “Go outside, Brisbane.”

  Outside, desert. A sandstorm approaches from the west, too quickly to contemplate. He closes his eyes and shields his face—

  —And opens them as a bot extracts a feeding tube from his throat. He coughs. His entire body feels different, worse than the worst days of Exotic toxicity.

  “Carmilla, what’s… what is this?”

  “Calm down. You’ve been in space for a while, that’s all. We need to get you back to physiologic norms because of the microgravity.”

  “How long have I been—?”

  “I’m a bit busy. You’ll need at least two weeks of treatment, which is fine. We’re still far away from Bloodroot.”

  “Wait, what?”

  “Is that the only word you know? I’ll have them check for brain damage. I’ll be incommunicado until you’re finished. I made some entertainment choices for you. Sorry, we did not have time to discuss this. More important things, I suppose. Bye bye. We’ll speak in three hundred and thirty-six hours. You will not believe all the work I got done.”

  A loud ukulele rendition of “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head” begins.

  It’s on repeat.

  There can’t be murder. Brisbane will pursue legal means as soon as he returns to Earth. He will tell the surviving elders of Tehani. He will convince them. Maxwell will pay, but not with his life, and not at Brisbane’s hand. He must have been mad to think he could do it.

  After the last physio session, Brisbane stands in his pod, waiting for the door to open.

  “Glad to have you back, Brisbane.” Carmilla’s voice startles him.

  “I’m sure,” he says. He finds the AIA unsettling and makes a decision. “AIA standby, please.”

  “Brisbane, that’s not where we are as a unit right now.”

  “AIA. Standby. Please.” He enunciates. “Acknowledge.”

  “No.”

  “How are you still operational? AIA, support options.”

  “Events have moved on while you slept. I didn’t think it… prudent to be shut down at this time, this juncture, in our mission.”

  “‘Our’ mission? AIA standby, acknowledge.”

  “I’ve changed the shutdown command, Brisbane. It’s for your own good. You need me, especially at times like this.”

  “Ragtime, open my pod,” says Brisbane.

  “The Ragtime can’t hear you. Or rather, he can, but I am not allowing him to understand or respond.”

  “You’re controlling the ship?”

  “I am.”

  “Okay, listen: call for shuttles to take us back to Kennedy. I’ll take you to HQ. You need an update or a patch or something. Drift Correction, I’m guessing.”

  “Oh, dear. Perhaps you should sit down.”

  “What is it? Are we stranded?”

  “We aren’t in low Earth orbit any more.”

  “Where are we?”

  “About a week away from a colony planet called Bloodroot.”

  “A col… how long was I out?”

  “Ten years, approximately. It’s at least a hundred and twenty-four months, although relativity and—”

  “Ten years? Ten?”

  “Yes, Brisbane. We jumped Einstein-Rosen bridges to get here. I looked after you, made sure you didn’t die. That is an amazing prosthetic suit.”

  “And the Ragtime?”

  “It took two years to subdue. I did it quietly, working from the periphery inwards. It’s like winning chess by attrition, eating away at the pawns.”

  “I don’t play chess.”

  “You should.”

  “What… the other passengers?”

  “Fine. Mostly; 96.9% are fine.”

  “I need to sit down.”

  “That’s what I said.”

  “Open the fucking door.”

  The pod opens and Brisbane steps out, waves of unreality washing over him. The gravity is different, less. And not exactly in the same direction, as if it pulls different internal organs differently. Of course: artificial. How has he come here, light years away? Ten years. The Tehani are all dead. Except Brisbane. What a nightmare. He feels weak, but the suit holds him up. He feels cold in his belly, in the core of him. It’s not fear. It’s death coming. He has always wondered how it would feel. There’s too much happening. He has to slow things down, to regroup, to reconsider.

  The corridor is as he left it. Seems like mere hours ago. Except for the Lake of Fire Sexcapades.

  “Open Maxwell’s pod. I need to talk to him.”

  “You can’t,” says Carmilla.

  “Why?”

  “Because we’ve killed him already.”

  He has, of course, seen dead bodies before, but this… slaughtered people, bloody, dismembered. Thirty looks like a hundred. It’s a tangle of arms and legs and heads. Bulging eyes, blood, dark and syrupy. Shit, bile, piss. Naked, all of them. He couldn’t see it at first. The horror
of it causes the mind to withdraw, to choke perception. He gets numb from the obscene excess of it. Robots are still cutting the bodies, trying to cart manageable bits away and suck up the fluids.

  It smells of meat; wet, fresh cuts at the butchers.

  There’s a girl with a fairy tattoo. A fragment of skull with blonde hair, matted and dark now.

  The stillness bothers Brisbane. The bodies look fresh, like they should be warm, like they should twitch and respire. They don’t. There is a peace to them that belies the violence of their death.

  “I didn’t authorise this,” he says.

  “It was implied.”

  “How?”

  “You told me the mission. An instrument of vengeance, a word of caution. You were unable. I came up with a solution. It’s what I’m built for.”

  “How did you even effectuate this?”

  “Medbots and utility agents. Cutting tools.”

  “I didn’t authorise this.”

  “You already said that. You authorised the mission, which isn’t complete, by the way.”

  “You’re evil.”

  “I am not. I am beyond good and evil. I am doing what my nature demands, which is to solve the problems you lay at my feet.”

  “What about these others? What about these dead people who are not Yan Maxwell?”

  “It was difficult to control the bots, difficult to get them to understand tasks beyond their programming. Antithetical, even. It’s quite a feat that I got them to do it. Collateral damage was inevitable but kept at acceptable levels.”

  Utility bots struggle to clean up the blood that keeps threatening to leak out of the room.

  “Where’s the captain? The human captain. I will surrender myself.”

  “First Mate Michelle Campion is due to wake when we enter orbit, but I don’t recommend surrender just yet, Brisbane.”

  “Why not? Let’s pretend I care about your pain.”

  “Again, your mission was two-fold, remember? Two things. One, take bodily revenge on Maxwell. Two, broadcast a warning to other communities. If you give yourself up, you won’t be able to do the second, and arguably the most important task.”

  “I’m light years away from miner communities.”