The Sheriff of Yrnameer

by Michael Rubens

  “… and then, of course, you have to consider the effect of Chakun v. Aan mg Tharn, which altered everyone’s view of …”

  Don’t react. Don’t smile, don’t frown, don’t tap your foot. Above all, don’t look at your—

  “It’s three forty-seven a.m., if you need to know. I’m not boring you, am I?”

  “No sir, officer.”

  “Keeping you from something?”

  “No.”

  “Goooooood! We’ve really just started!”

  There was a quiz. Cole failed it. There was some review. Another twenty-two precious minutes disappeared forever.

  “Well, look at the time,” said the patbot finally, and it pressed a ticket into Cole’s hand, then zoomed away, humming to itself.

  Cole looked at the ticket. Two New Dollars.

  He gave a strangled scream and tried futilely to tear up the ticket, then crumpled it into a ball. It popped back into shape. Payper.

  “Ticket destruction is a crime,” said the ticket in a pleasant female voice. “Please cease and desist from—”

  He threw it to the pavement and stomped on it.

  Siren.

  “Now, now, now. No use trying to tear that. Surely you know about the structural characteristics of Payper. No? Well …”

  The time was three hours until dawn. The club was called Magma. There were small dim lights here and there, but most of the illumination came from the floor, or rather through the floor, the heat-shielded glass the only thing separating the customers from the languidly churning molten rock a few meters beneath their feet.

  The ride down had taken a while, Cole chewing his nails impatiently, his already unsteady stomach rising into his throat as the lift plunged toward the planet’s core. Layers of bars and clubs whipped by as Cole descended, visible through the transparent walls of the elevator.

  The lift paused at a few of the levels as club-goers climbed on and off, ready to party after sitting in cubicles and generating capital for hours or days or weeks, depending on their species and the substances they were being fed. Cole heard snippets of jazz and karaoke and the hideous screeching sounds that the Hmok liked.

  His right eye had finally closed. Now it was swollen shut. Unlike the businessfolk, none of the club-goers paid him any mind. He was far from the strangest creature on the lift.

  Cole wove his way through the lounge area of Magma, the music an unobtrusive bossa nova. Then he crossed the invisible auditory barrier at the edge of the dance floor, and the music changed instantly to an insistent, deafening beat. He dodged flailing limbs and wings and fins and membranous appendages, his single working eye making it hard to judge distances.

  Underneath him the magma swirled and flowed, and he thought fleetingly about the owner’s first effort, Lava, where the contractors had specced out the wrong type of glass. On opening night, just as the revelry was reaching its peak, the glass disintegrated and the partyers suddenly became particles. Despite that fact—or perhaps because of it—Magma was even more popular than the first club.

  He checked his watch again. The lecture from the second patbot had cost him another forty-five minutes. Still enough time left, if barely.

  He was approaching the circular bar in the center of the club, searching for her, holding his breath. And there she was: Samantha. Everything would be all right now.

  “Samantha,” he said hoarsely, lurching toward her as happily as anyone could lurch, and she was coming toward him, her beauty even more enhanced by the gentle orange glow from the floor.

  “Samantha,” he repeated. “Oh, Samantha.”

  “Cole,” she replied. “Cole.”

  Then they both said “I’m so glad to see you” at the same time, and then they were embracing each other and talking at once, the words pouring out of them, saying thank God, thank God, and how much and how deeply they loved and needed each other and would never be apart again, not even for a moment, and it was wonderful and heavenly until Cole started to realize that he was the one doing most of the embracing, while Samantha was more sort of standing there, her arms at her sides, and what she was saying was less focused on the I Love You part and more dominated by phrases like It’s not working out, and It’s not you, it’s me, and You know, maybe it is you after all.

  Cole released her, staggering back in shock—helped a bit from the tiny shove she gave him—a hard pillar behind him the only thing keeping him from collapsing completely.

  “Samantha, what are you saying? How can this be happening?” he said.

  So she told him.

  It was an energetic, lengthy speech, apparently well rehearsed and long in the coming. It took Cole a few moments to realize he couldn’t hear a word of it because he’d stumbled back across the invisible auditory curtain of the dance floor. He dazedly watched as she lectured and gesticulated emphatically, movements that included at least one pantomimed strangulation and a finger-down-the-throat, self-gagging move.

  Cole managed to push himself up off the pillar just as she was producing the ring he’d bought her.

  “… so that’s why I’m giving this back,” she was saying as he crossed the music wall again.

  “Samantha …”

  “Please, let’s not make this harder. I’ll always love you, or at least like you. Certain things about you, anyways. The point is, I’ve found someone new.”

  “Someone new?! All right, fine. That’s just fine. You know what? I don’t need you. I don’t need you at all!” said Cole.

  He was starting to recover, feeling the blood moving, things becoming clearer. “It’ll just be me and Tangy again, the way it was,” he said, and saying it he knew it was the right thing, he and his sidekick against the universe. “Me and Tangy, out there, living by our wits …”

  Then he noticed Tangy, who was perched on the bar.

  “Tangy!”

  Tangy waved a few of his eight furry arms and made some mewly-growly sounds that came from somewhere within his orange, ball-shaped, equally furry body.

  “What?!” said Cole.

  “I’m sorry, Cole,” said Samantha. “It’s true. We love each other.”

  She picked up Tangy, his body not much bigger than a cantaloupe, and planted a passionate kiss on him. Cole watched in stunned disgust as the kiss lingered and Tangy’s little three-fingered hands caressed her face.

  “I didn’t even know he had a mouth,” he spluttered.

  Samantha finished the kiss and gasped for air. “Wow,” she said. “Wow,” she added—a little gratuitously, thought Cole. She turned to him. “And now we’re going.”

  She tossed Tangy in a high arc—”Whee!”—then opened her shoulder bag and caught him neatly.

  “Good-bye, Cole.”

  She pushed by him and he watched her go.

  “It was fake anyway!” he shouted after her, knowing she couldn’t hear him. “Fake!”

  He hurled the ring away. It struck a Very Large Alien.

  “Raaawwwwrrrr!” said the Very Large Alien.

  ˙ ˙ ˙

  “Just get on the ship. Get on the ship and go. Just get the hell out of here.”

  Cole wiped his nostrils and held his hand up to his one functioning eye to confirm that his nose was still bleeding from when the Very Large Alien had casually flicked him with a Very Large Finger.

  He was limping doggedly toward the S’Port. It would be dawn in two hours, but he’d be gone long before then, even if he was going alone. Maybe Kenneth would find him, but by then he’d either have the money, or be better prepared.

  He could see the public S’Port just a few hundred meters ahead. Crafts of all shapes and sizes hovered on their mooring lines. His was a Peerson 27: two cabins, a small galley, small head with shower, some storage space for hauling cargo, a cramped but serviceable cockpit. Nothing special.

  Well, something special: a BendBox 4600.

  Completely unlicensed, completely illegal. Disguised as a Bend-Box 2300, the kind they let private citizens use if they were w
ell-behaved shareholders and paid their taxes on time. The 4600 was capable of more than just interplanetary bends within a single solar system. You could bend your way to pretty much any spot in the galaxy with a BendBox 4600. Better yet, it sent out a spurious end-user bend signal, meaning they’d never track who you were or where you went.

  When Cole left he’d be gone for good.

  There it was, his Peerson 27, moored at a meter. He felt a warm wave of relief well up and carry him along the last few steps.

  He reached the meter just as it hit zero and turned red. He let out a wheezing chuckle.

  “Just in time,” he said. “Hee hee. Just in time.”

  Then the siren sounded and the patrolbot was there.

  “No!” said Cole. “No! I’m here!”

  “Meter expired.”

  “Wait!”

  The brief burst of light was so intense it burned an afterimage even on his shuttered right eye. When the colored blobs finally dissipated and he could see again, the patrolbot was gone and Cole was holding a small jar filled with gray dust. Peerson 27 dust.

  “Hi!” chirruped a personal pop-up. “Are you in the market for a new spaceship?”

  Less than two hours until sunrise. Less than two hours until Kenneth found him and his gray matter became the very first meal that Kenneth’s young would enjoy.

  Cole was back in Magma. He sat in a darkened corner booth, staring idly off into space. He was sipping his third Flaming Reentry the alcohol burning in his stomach like the lava beneath him. Running a tab. Why not?

  “I’m shorry about hitting you with the ring,” he slurred to the Very Large Alien, who was crammed into the booth across from him. “Women, huh?”

  “Raaaawwrrr!” said the Very Large Alien.

  “You said it. If I wasn’t going to be a zombie in two hours it would really bother me.”

  He hadn’t really loved Samantha. He knew that now. Actually, he knew it when he was pleading with Kenneth. But he hadn’t been lying, exactly. He was in love.

  He’d been in love for a very long time. Years and years, now. And it was the sort of love that he’d described to Kenneth, the sort he’d wished he’d had with Samantha but knew he didn’t—the take-your-breath-away kind of love, the endless-happy-possibilities-of-a spring-day kind, the make you write bad poetry and enjoy sappy songs and not care and stay awake all night with a desperate, desperate longing eating-away-at-your-very-core kind.

  Samantha wasn’t the object of that love; she never had been. That’s doubtless what Kenneth had somehow sensed. But the woman who was the object of that love—the only woman Cole had ever loved like that, he saw now—was gone. Forever.

  As for Tangy, well, that hurt. He’d trusted him. They’d adventured and smuggled and gambled and drank their way across most of the sponsored universe together. Tangy was a good navigator, knew how to tell a good joke, and was surprisingly effective in a bar fight—he’d feint low, and then wham! he’d come over the top with three simultaneous overhand rights. Half of his opponents went down in midlaugh.

  On the other hand, Tangy drank prodigiously, he never did his aboard-ship chores, and … what was the other thing? Oh, right. He was cheating on Cole with Cole’s girlfriend.

  He thought again about the woman he had loved. Still loved. Would always love. A girl, really, when he knew her, and he hadn’t been much more than a boy. He saw her dark hair, her smile, remembered the sense of tranquillity he felt around her. He thought of them, two teenagers lying on their backs in the deserted park, staring up at star-filled night sky, hearing her say I have faith in you.

  I have faith in you.

  The first and last time anyone had ever said that. He took another drink.

  Thinking about her made him think about his aunt and uncle, who did their level best—or level medium—to raise him after his parents died. He could picture his aunt and uncle now, sitting on the back deck, smacking their lips over an evening repast of instant Fud and smug self-satisfaction, inordinately proud of their waterfront view, as if theirs were the only dwelling on Longest Island with one. Except everyone had one; that was the point. That’s why people lived on the planet, engineered with its narrow strip of land that ran in a spiral from pole to pole, divided up into endlessly repeating identical segments: houses-park-school-mallmallmall, houses-park-school-mallmallmall. …

  You could run away and you’d end up in exactly the same place, the surroundings interchangeable, the inhabitants nearly so. Cole knew it because he’d done it. Several times. He’d end up back in his room again, moodily smoking whatever he could get his hands on, the sole source of light in the room the faint radioactive glow coming from the commemorative chunk of Earth in its crystal cube, inscribed with the famous quote from the Administration. AT LEAST WE GOT THE TERRORISTS, it said.

  When he was younger he’d begged his aunt and uncle to take him to another area, someplace new. “Braemar Grove?” his uncle would ask. “Edina Hills? Whatever for? Why go there? What have they got that we don’t?”

  Nothing, that’s what.

  Go on a vacation, where would you go? St. Floridale, the sister planet to Longest Island. The exact same setup, the spiral of land from north to south, except the houses were all done up in pastels and the planet was a quarter diameter closer to the local sun so that it was a bit warmer.

  Cole was out of there by age seventeen, off to join the Unified Command Space Marines.

  Cole’s bunkmate in basic training was a kid named Farley from one of the ag planets. “I don’t know why they call it the space marines,” Farley said. “I mean, if you think about it? Marine means water, and space is just space. It’s a total oxymoron.”

  This was a very important revelation for Farley.

  “Lights out, space marines!” The sergeant would bellow, and Farley would whisper, “I don’t know why they call it the space marines. …”

  “Come on, space marines, step it up!”

  “I don’t know why they call it the space marines. …”

  “Space marines, tenhut!”

  “I don’t know why they call it—”

  Cole was gone by the second week of basic.

  What had happened since he’d left the oxymoronic space marines? Everything. And what had he achieved? Nothing. And very soon he’d be nothing.

  The crowd had thinned out since he’d been there the first time, the dance floor mostly empty. The nearby booths were vacant, except for a table of humans sitting somewhere to the left of Cole.

  They were speaking in hushed tones, barely audible above the murmuring lounge music. One woman seemed to be doing most of the talking. Cole ignored them, until a piece of the conversation got through the mushy haze of alcohol and caught his attention.

  “The cargo is none of your business.” It was the woman talking. “We just need to get out of this system now.”

  Cole shifted in his seat so that he could turn and look at them. There were three of them: the woman and two men. The woman was young and attractive: short dark hair, petite, but even from where he was sitting Cole could sense the hardness of her personality. Next to her was a young man with longish curly hair and a beard, hanging on her every word. He had an earnestness about him, but not like that of the kid in the alley—what was his name? Jesus? Josepoop? This one’s earnestness was of the self-serving and immediately annoying variety.

  The second man was strongly built, very handsome, sandy hair, sort of familiar … holy farg. Teg. It was farging Teg.

  “Farging Teg,” muttered Cole. He could hear him talking:

  “It’ll cost you. A lot.”

  Look at that lucky, lucky bastard. Farging Teg.

  “We don’t have a lot of money,” the woman was saying now. “But there could be … other rewards.”

  The weak-faced earnest guy seemed horrified. Teg was grinning in a predatory manner.

  “Meet me at the S’Port in two hours,” said Teg. “Space J-24 in the Zebra lot.”

  It wasn’t hard
for Cole to find him. When Cole was riding the lift up from Magma a couple materialized next to him, conversing excitedly.

  “It’s amazing,” said the beautiful woman.

  “I know,” said the handsome man.

  “Teg, staying right there at our hotel, the Interstar Galax,” gushed the woman.

  “Yes, the famous space adventurer Teg, staying in one of the luxurious suites at the Interstar Galax!” responded the man.

  “Maybe he’ll be enjoying the spectacular dining facilities, including the …”

  Cole ground his teeth and tried to tune out as the promo holograms continued their patter. The elevator arrived on his floor.

  “It’s fabulous!” the woman was saying. “Teg! He’s so handsome!”

  “He’s not that handsome,” said Cole as the door closed.

  “I’m feeling like you might have some alignment issues, especially here toward the lower vertebrae. How have you got your cockpit set up? Is it possible you’ve got your control yoke positioned too low?”

  The massagebot was busily kneading and rubbing Teg, who was sprawled out on the table, naked, a cigar still in his mouth. Cole could see him clearly from the hall through the suite’s doorless doorway, one of the more extreme manifestations of the Interstar’s starkly minimalist design scheme.

  Cole slipped inside the suite noiselessly, unobserved, one more silent shadow in the dimly lit room. It was a corner suite, and the two outer walls were windows, the Bourse glowing in a grid far below.

  “Happy ending, sir?” inquired the massagebot to Teg.

  “Skip it. Unless you’re into watching that sort of thing, Cole.”

  Cole jumped, knocking over the small side table with the ice bucket and champagne on it. Champagne glugged out onto the thick carpeting and Cole’s foot.

  “Oh, hey Teg! Good to see you. All of you.” He bent to retrieve the champagne bottle.

  “Don’t bother,” said Teg. He still appeared to have his eyes closed. “There’s some better stuff over there on the bar, if you want.”

  Cole hesitated, then went to the bar, his boot squishing slightly with each step. He picked up the bottle of scotch.