The Mammoth Book of Mindblowing SF

by Mike Ashley

  I wiggled the joystick. Nothing. I started to get down to help push, but Wu stopped me. He had one more trick. He unhooked the batteries and reversed their order. It shouldn’t have made any difference but as I have often noticed, electrical matters are not logical, like law: things that shouldn’t work, often do.

  Sometimes, anyway. I jammed the joystick all the way forward again.

  The LRV groaned forward again, and groaned on. I pointed it into the slot and ducked. I saw a shimmering light, and I felt the machine shudder. The front of the LRV poked through the shower curtain into the sunlight, and I followed, the sudden heat making my plastic bag swell.

  The batteries groaned their last. I jumped down and began to pull on the front bumper. Through the plastic bag I could hear the kids screaming; or were they cheering? There was a loud crackling sound from behind the shower curtain. The LRV was only halfway through, and the front end was jumping up and down.

  I tore the bag off my head and spit out the cotton, then took a deep breath and yelled, “Wu!”

  I heard a hiss and a crackling; I could feel the ground shake under my feet. The pile of tyres was slowly collapsing behind me; kids were slipping and sliding, trying to get away. I could hear glass breaking somewhere. I yelled, “Wu!”

  The front of the LRV suddenly pulled free, throwing me (not to put too fine a point on it) flat on my ass.

  The ground stopped shaking. The kids cheered.

  Only the front of the LRV had come through. It was burned in half right behind the seat; cut through as if by a sloppy welder. The sour smell of electrical smoke was in the air. I took a deep breath and ducked toward the curtain, after Wu. But there was no curtain there, and no shed – only a pile of loose boards.

  “Wu!” I yelled. But there he was, lying on the ground among the boards. He sat up and tore the bag off his head. He spit out his cotton and took a deep breath – and looked around and groaned.

  The kids were all standing and cheering. (Kids love destruction.) Even Frankie looked pleased. But the old man wasn’t; he came around the corner of the garage, looking fierce. “What the Hell’s going on here?” he asked. “What happened to my shed?”

  “Good question,” said Wu. He stood up and started tossing aside the boards that had been the shed. The shower curtain was under them, melted into a stiff plastic rag. Under it was a pile of ash and cinders – and that was all. No cave, no hole; no rear end of the LRV. No moon.

  “The cave gets bigger and smaller every month,” said Frankie. “But it never did that, not since it first showed up.”

  “When was that?” asked Wu.

  “About six months ago.”

  “What about my jumper cables?” said the old man.

  We paid him for the jumper cables with the change from the pizza, and then called a wrecker to tow our half-LRV back to Park Slope. While we were waiting for the wrecker, I pulled Wu aside. “I hope we didn’t put them out of business,” I said. I’m no bleeding heart liberal, but I was concerned.

  “No, no,” he said. “The adjacency was about to drop into a lower neotopological orbit. We just helped it along a little. It’s hard to figure without an almanac, but according to the tide table for June (which I’m glad now I bothered to memorize) the adjacency won’t be here next month. Or the month after. It was just here for six months, like Frankie said. It was a temporary thing, cyclical as well as periodic.”

  “Sort of like the Ice Ages.”

  “Exactly. It always occurs somewhere in this hemisphere, but usually not in such a convenient location. It could be at the bottom of Lake Huron. Or in mid-air over the Great Plains, as one of those unexplained air bumps.”

  “What about the other side of it?” I asked. “Is it always a landing site? Or was that just a coincidence?”

  “Good question!” Wu picked up one of the paper plates left over from the pizza and started scrawling on it with a pencil stub. “If I take the mean lunar latitude of all six Apollo sites, and divide by the coefficient of . . .”

  “It was just curiosity,” I said. “Here’s the wrecker.”

  We got the half-LRV towed for half-price (I did the negotiating), but we never did make our million dollars. Boeing was in Chapter Eleven; NASA was under a procurement freeze; the Air & Space Museum wasn’t interested in anything that rolled.

  “Maybe I should take it on the road,” Wu told me after several weeks of trying. “I could be a shopping-centre attraction: ‘Half a Chinaman exhibits half a Lunar Roving Vehicle. Kids and adults half price.’”

  Wu’s humour masked bitter disappointment. But he kept trying. The JPL (Jet Propulsion Laboratory) wouldn’t accept his calls. General Motors wouldn’t return them. Finally, the Huntsville Parks Department, which was considering putting together an Apollo Memorial, agreed to send their Assistant Administrator for Adult Recreation to have a look.

  She arrived on the day my divorce became final. Wu and I met her in the garage, where I had been living while Diane and I were waiting to sell the house. Her eyes were big and blue-green, like Frankie’s. She measured the LRV and shook her head. “It’s like a dollar bill,” she said.

  “How’s that?” Wu asked. He looked depressed. Or maybe sceptical. It was getting hard to tell the difference.

  “If you have over half, it’s worth a whole dollar. If you have less than half, it’s worth nothing. You have slightly less than half of the LRV here, which means that it is worthless. What’ll you take for that old P1800, though? Isn’t that the one that was assembled in England?”

  Which is how I met Candy. But that’s another story.

  We closed on the house two days later. Since the garage went with it, I helped Wu move the half-LRV to his back yard, where it sits to this day. It was lighter than any motorcycle. We moved the P1800 (which had plates) onto the street, and on Saturday morning, I went to get the interior for it. Just as Wu had predicted, the Hole was easy to find now that it was no longer linked with the adjacency. I didn’t even have to stop at Boulevard Imports. I just turned off Conduit onto a likely looking street, and there it was.

  The old man would hardly speak to me, but Frankie was understanding. “Your partner came out and gave me this,” he said. He showed me a yellow legal pad, on which was scrawled:

  “He told me this explains it all, I guess.”

  Frankie had stacked the boards of the shed against the garage. There was a cindery bare spot where the shed door had been; the cinders had that sour moon smell. “I was sick and tired of the tyre disposal business, anyway,” Frankie confided in a whisper.

  The old man came around the corner of the garage. “What happened to your buddy?” he asked.

  “He’s going to school on Saturday mornings,” I said. Wu was studying to be a meteorologist. I was never sure if that was weather or shooting stars. Anyway, he had quit the law.

  “Good riddance,” said the old man.

  The old man charged me sixty-five dollars for the interior panels, knobs, handles, and trim. I had no choice but to pay up. I had the money, since I had sold Diane my half of the furniture. I was ready to start my new life. I didn’t want to own anything that wouldn’t fit into the tiny, heart-shaped trunk of the P1800.

  That night, Wu helped me put in the seats, then the panels, knobs, and handles. We finished at midnight and it didn’t look bad, even though I knew the colours would look weird in the daylight – blue and white in a red car. Wu was grinning that mad grin again; it was the first time I had seen it since the Moon. He pointed over the rooftops to the east (towards Howard Beach, as a matter of fact). The Moon was rising. I was glad to see it looking so – far away.

  Wu’s wife brought us some leftover wedding cake. I gave him the keys to the 145 and he gave me the keys to the P1800. “Guess we’re about even,” I said. I put out my hand, but Wu slapped it aside and gave me a hug instead, lifting me off the ground. Everybody should have a friend like Wilson Wu.

  I followed the full Moon all the way to Alabama.

 
HOTRIDER

  Keith Brooke

  Keith Brooke (b. 1966), like Peter Crowther, wears a variety of hats as editor, writer and publisher. He runs the on-line webzine Infinity Plus, (www.infinityplus.co.uk) and has been writing science fiction and fantasy for twenty years, as well as horror fiction under the alias Nick Gifford. His novels include the cyber-thriller Keepers of the Peace (1990), and the story of a lost Earth colony, Expatria (1991) and its sequel Expatria Incorporated (1992). Some of his short stories, including this one, were collected in Head Shots (2001). This story considers the human desire for danger and thrills, especially in the case of extreme sports. I’m not quite sure you could get much more extreme than this and still see it as a sport.

  TIN MAN HAD LIVED in Malibu for over six years when they told him he’d been for his last ride. I was up on Observation G when he found me. Towering over me, sheened with sweat, his squared-off head hung to one side and his one real eye twitched to some irregular beat. To most people he would have been a scary sight but to me he was Tin Man and he was upset and that was screwing with his neurons where they interfaced with his prosthetic enhancements. It always affected him like that. Tics, couldn’t stand still, perspiration. He was my best friend.

  “What is it, Tin?” I wiped my part of the view-panel with a sleeve. I don’t like to be caught doing nothing, it gives the wrong impression. I’m Ray Siefert, I’m Malibu’s fixer, I know all the right people, do all the right things, I’ve always got myself something on flick-forward, if you follow my drag.

  He gripped the hand-rail and pressed his forehead and the bulb of his prosthetic eye against the panel. He was trying to stop the twitching. “It’s over,” he muttered. “They’ve dumped me after all I’ve done for them.”

  “Who said? What were the terms they used?”

  “R & G.” He turned to face me. “‘No further need of your services’ was how they put it – ”

  “‘They’?”

  “Ruttgers himself. And Gerome’s PA. It’s final, Ray, the show’s over.” He couldn’t control his twitching any longer so he gave up trying.

  It certainly sounded final. I stared past him, up at the streaks of Jupiter, wondering what we could do. Ruttgers and Gerome were part-owners of Malibu. They’d grown from a two-person trip agency into a major force with controlling interests in most of the Jovian system in less than the four years I had lived here on Io.

  There was only one answer. We went up to my dom on K and broke out the scotch. Real scotch. The crate had cost me most of the proceeds of a bootleg sim-trip. It was my last bottle – I’d been saving it.

  It got to him quickly. Tin Man always said he had a teflon liver, said he could out-drink anybody, but then Tin Man was all talk. My guess is he gets intoxicated so quickly because of how much of his body isn’t flesh and juice: the alcohol doesn’t have so far to go around. Pretty soon he was doing his party trick of standing on one hand in the middle of my small room. With such big hands and less than a fifth of a gee that’s not so great, but you don’t tell that to Tin Man when he’s had a few slugs of real scotch. I watched him through my alcohol haze. This guy had been the hero of countless hotriding sims, he was looked up to by billions around the solar system, this guy had made the fortunes of Ruttgers and Gerome and now they were dropping him like that.

  “No market, they told me,” said Tin Man, crumpling slow-mo to the floor, the neurotic twitches finally upsetting his balance. He took another slug. “There’s only so much you can do with a sim-trip and then the market’s saturated. They say they’re winding down the sim side and pumping up on the hands-on, they’re going to open Malibu up for the riches, build others like it.”

  “So they’re not closing down altogether,” I said. My mind was working in parallel, trying to guess how the changes would affect my own position on Io. “Hands-on means people, it means they need guides, stewards – they’ll still need hotriders: couldn’t you be a guide? You know what the riches are like.”

  That hurt Tin Man. How could he drop from trip star to tour guide?

  “Didn’t even offer me any pay-off. Just finished, that’s all. All I have is enough for a fare to Callisto. Callisto. Might as well take a walk out here on Io.” Callisto is a stop-over, all caves and transit bars and moving under cover every four days when the place crosses the plane of Jupiter’s mag fields – they haven’t even installed MP screens to cut out the radiation, it’s that run-down a place.

  “What’s wrong with Callisto?” I said. Tin Man didn’t even smile.

  “Riding days are over, they say, and I have to accept it!” His tics were pulling his whole head around; he sometimes got like this with drink and stress and raw deals and the like. I skidded the bottle across the floor to him. A pay-off would have been fair, because at least it would have meant he could stay on in Malibu, maybe even buy a share in a buggy. That was all the money would have been to him: a way to carry on hotriding. Riding was more than a way of life to Tin Man, it was his life. Without it . . . well, without it I couldn’t even imagine him. Tin Man was a rider, that was all.

  Maybe I should explain a little about Malibu, about how it all came about. They always said Io was the least hospitable place in the solar system. I can think of worse, but it is true that the inner Jovians were uninhabitable until some Earthbound tecky came up with the MP screen. Mesoproteic. Something about mesons and positron moods and the strong nuclear force. I don’t know, it’s fifty-seven years since my doctorate. A six-year-old could probably explain it better than me now. What it does is it cuts out everything you want, solids, radiation, whatever. MPs let us live on Io, a big one encases all of Malibu. It keeps our air in, keeps the charged particles and the stink of sulphur out where they belong.

  Tin Man was one of the first people to set up on Io. Employed by one of the old lunar corporations, he and some others discovered just how useful an MP screen was. Malibu was little more than a small prospectors’ dome when a keyboard man called Berg Ruttgers came down and saw Tin Man and his friends skidding around on MP-screened buggies, skimming down a slow-moving channel of molten sulphur, riding the golden surf. Ruttgers had gone back to Callisto to make a deal with Ruby Gerome and raise finance and then, as a newly formed leisure agency, they bought into Malibu and started building.

  There were other hotriding stars but Tin Man was always the favourite. With all his alterations and implants he could jack directly into his buggy, link directly with the sim-recorder. The trip technicians could access the raw data from his prosthetic eye, they could trace his tensions through the body-machine interfaces. Others followed, other agencies competed, but Tin Man was the first and best. Tin Man and Malibu had made the fortunes of Ruttgers and Gerome and now they were dropping him.

  One time, when the market had apparently peaked, there had been rumours that the sim-trip line would be pared back but Tin Man had managed to revive the interest. Until then hotriding had consisted of skidding around in MP-screened buggies near to Malibu, riding crests of molten sulphur, using low-gee surface effects to go as fast as possible. This time had been like any ordinary trip. R & G hadn’t even wanted to bother recording – even then they were shifting their plans towards the tourist trade, the little groups of riches that gathered by the view-panels to watch that square-headed trip-star heading out to ride his stick on the liquid brimstone. But R & G had a contract going for a Nutragena ad-operetta and Tin Man had convinced them they needed to re-sim some of the chase sequences. He had headed out on the main drag, not hurrying, just letting the currents take him out onto the sea of golden sulphur, apparently unaware of the two black-shielded buggies closing on him from behind. He had caught the turbulence where his channel joined the sea and ridden it out to where a whirlpool chopped up some real waves, one of his standard moves.

  I’m telling all this second hand, up until this point. I wasn’t watching, I was too busy cutting a deal with a courier, I think it was one of the lots of trip out-takes I used to sell: she would take them out to
a studio where they could be cosmeticized and animated until even Ruttgers would have trouble telling who had originated them. Then a nearby gaggle of riches all stopped talking and a man made a bubbly sound in his throat.

  I realized something was wrong so I made for a panel, suddenly scared for Tin Man. I knew he had been angry and I didn’t like to think what he might have tried.

  I looked out and there were the two black chase-buggies, circling slowly, no sign of Tin Man.

  Even a magniview only showed whirlpool turbulence where my friend had last been seen. No buggy. I picked up what had happened from the tourists. Tin Man had gone down. The chasers had closed on him, drifting in behind a three metre crest of sulphur. Tin Man had spotted them, hesitated too long and the wave had folded over him, carrying the chasers on past. When the surface had levelled his buggy had vanished. In over sixty years off-Earth I had lost a few friends, some very close, but there was something too terrible to comprehend about going the way I believed then that Tin Man had gone. The MP shielding would protect him from the heat and the pressure, but there would be no way to dissipate his own heat from the buggy or, failing that, he would eventually run out of power or air. I couldn’t bear to think about it, but then I couldn’t fix my mind on anything else. Maybe he would sink so far that even the MPs would fail, maybe that would be best.

  Eventually, the chasers came back in. I saw their faces as they left their buggies. They were creased, shaken. Then a tecky came out and –

  “Mega, mega!” said a whining riche voice and I looked up and saw Tin Man’s buggy skimming back up the drag towards Malibu and, pretty soon, MP screens merging and he was in and home and alive.

  He must have been under the brimstone sea for near to forty-five minutes yet he came out of the crowd smiling. People were yelling at him, asking what had happened and all he would do was grin and tap his bulbous plastic eye and say, “It’s all in here. Property of R & G. Sorry, you’ll have to buy the sim.”