Cosmic Powers

by John Joseph Adams

  I took a deep breath.

  I chose.

  * * * *

  I walked the streets of the Dyson sphere with my hands jammed into my pockets and my eyes turned toward the smooth metal walkway, not letting myself look up/down toward the gravity generator that spun at the center of the sky, sun and core all at the same time. If gravity had just been sugar, something I could borrow a cup of and get us back into space . . .

  “If wishes were horses, then beggars would ride,” I muttered, earning myself bewildered looks from several of the people who walked around me. I ignored them, checking my location on the tracker under the skin of my wrist. It glowed a steady white. I was nearing my destination.

  Finding a buyer for an antique video game console on a Dyson sphere isn’t hard. There are a lot of people in the galaxy with a thing for old Earth collectables, and working machines—even machines as simple as an arcade box, with its two-button and joystick interface—are rare. The hard part is making sure that the buyer gives a damn about what they’re getting and isn’t planning to, say, gut the console and turn it into an avant-garde terrarium for raising Martian lichen. (Something similar actually happened to a Sugar Rush box sold by one of the other circuit arcades. Full system, driving chairs and all, and some hipster star-fucker on a Dyson near Betelgeuse took the whole thing apart, filled it with live cockroaches, and called it an “art installation.” All the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put that box together again. It was really a shame when his gallery “accidentally” burnt down in the middle of the local sleep cycle. Yeah. A shame.)

  Those of us who still work the entertainment circuits pass the names of the collectors around like the rarest of secrets. These are the people who will keep our treasures alive after the rest of the galaxy has forgotten the word “arcade” completely, consigning it to the virtual graveyard where all outmoded technology is doomed to go.

  My wrist flashed white as my steps finally brought me to the address we had on file for the local collector, a Professor Whitman, who had a thing for the early VR RPGs. People used to plug in and believe that what they were experiencing was full-immersion, even though it was barely tactile, with no olfactory or empathic feedback. People were weird in the before. I may surround myself with antiques, but I know how lucky I am to live in the now.

  I reached for the bell. The door burst open, and a cloud of red hair came flying at me, resolving into a pale, freckled woman in an old-fashioned jacket and trousers. She grabbed my arm as she whipped past, shouting, “Rona! Run!”

  Six guards in the colors of the local constabulary were hot on her tail, each holding a stunner shiny enough to have been crafted from vat-gen diamond, and probably lethal enough to be worth it. Even though she wasn’t shouting my name, she didn’t have to tell me twice: I turned on my heel and let her pull me with her as she ran, using her momentum to accelerate my own. By the time I realized she was running for the nearest rail, it was too late for me to do anything but trust her and jump.

  My last thought before we tore through the gravity threshold and began plummeting toward the center of the sphere was Why did she call me by my sister’s name?

  * * * *

  Gravity is funny inside the Dyson spheres—or, as Doc likes to put it, gravity is indecisive. With a generator as big as the one that pulls all the metal plates and clever engineering tricks inward, it would be reasonable to expect everyone to walk in a planetary alignment, feet toward the core, heads toward the stars. But the spheres don’t work that way. People walk on the shell of the sphere, feet pressed against the thin metal walls that keep them safe from the vacuum, heads toward the gravity well that is their artificial sun. I don’t understand the science behind it all, and honestly, I don’t care. The science works, the science is kind enough not to mash us all into pudding or send us spiraling out to a gruesome, decompressed end, and that makes the science good enough for me.

  Once we had pushed through the outer edge of the gravity bubble, we fell for about a hundred feet before the gravity generator realized that it had made a mistake and was on the verge of consuming a resident. We were then shunted abruptly and violently aside, spinning hard in a direction that didn’t really have a name—not with us in freefall—until the bubble caught us again, and we fell, hard, onto another catwalk.

  The redhead was on her feet in an instant, her hand clamped down on mine until I could feel the bones bend. “Rona, come on! We need to get to your ship!”

  “Look, lady, that’s about enough.” There were no guards in sight. That didn’t mean much on a Dyson sphere—there were always guards close enough to reach us in under five minutes—but it meant I had enough time to wrench my hand out of the stranger’s grasp and give her my very best stink-eye. “I don’t know what your deal is, and I don’t know why you’re about to be massively under arrest, but I’m not Rona, and you just pulled me away from a very important business deal. So, why don’t you go ahead and run for your life, and let me trudge back across the sphere to meet with Professor Whitman?”

  “But I’m Professor Whitman,” said the redhead, sounding bewildered. Then she shook her head and stiffened, spine straightening. “And what do you mean, you’re not Rona? Of course you’re Rona. Don’t be silly; this isn’t the time. We need to move. We need to—”

  “Get to the ship, yeah, you already said that,” I said. “Problem: I do not have Rona’s ship. I have my ship. My ship is not designed for smuggling. My ship is a traveling arcade and funfair. So, unless whatever you’re running from can be solved with Skee-Ball, you’re screwed, all right, Professor?”

  Professor Whitman blinked slowly, staring at me. Then, in a faintly dazed tone, she said, “The freckle on your left eyelid is missing. You’re not Rona.”

  “Nope.”

  “You’re Nora.”

  “Right. Now you’re getting with the program.”

  “Oh, this is not good; this is not good at all.” Professor Whitman began pacing, burying her hands in that astonishing cloud of hair and tugging lightly, like the pain would somehow stimulate her brain into shifting functions. “You’re supposed to be Rona. All the biometric sensors on the Sphere triggered when you came into range, because—”

  “She’s my clone, which means we’re going to trigger the same biometric alerts.” Technically, she wasn’t my clone: technically, we were clone-sisters, generated from the same batch of tissue, along with eight others, all based on a late 2200s starlet with a fondness for licensing her genome. Nona Raquel Nanson, star of film, television, and several thousand spinoffs since her death had unlocked her will and granted full license of her DNA to the clone farms. If humanity ever hit a genetic bottleneck, it was going to be because there were too many little Nona-Rs running around, muddying up the gene pool.

  Professor Whitman stared at me in open-mouthed dismay. “She told me you were nowhere near this sector. She said none of her clones were anywhere near this sector.”

  “She lied. She’s a grifter. That’s what they do. They bend the truth until they can tie it in a pretty bow, and then they put it around the necks of their marks, as a warning to the rest of us. This is my loop. Now, I’m sorry, but I really need to get out of here before the guard catches up with you, and whatever the hell it is you’ve let my shiftless sister talk you into.”

  Professor Whitman’s mouth shut with a snap. She straightened. “You have a ship.”

  “Haven’t figured out how to pull off spaceflight without one.”

  “Excellent.” Her right hand moved, and she was suddenly holding a sleek, elegant pistol, the sort of thing that academics buy because they think it looks nonthreatening. Like that changes the part where it’s a weapon. Like that makes a damn bit of difference.

  I put my hands up, palms out. “Look, lady, I ain’t my sister. Whatever fancy dreams she’s planted in your head, I am not the girl to fulfill them. I run a funfair.” Cotton candy, popcorn, nostalgia, and a faulty gravity generator: that was my world. Not this
. . . whatever the hell it was.

  “Right now, I don’t care,” she said coolly. “You have a ship. I require a ship. The guards may not be willing to fling themselves into the void for the sake of apprehending one academic, but they’re coming, and we’re going.”

  “You can’t operate my ship without me.”

  “I have Rona’s genecode. I can operate anything that’s keyed to you.”

  I stopped myself before I could say anything else that I might regret later, and forced myself to look at her. There’s no faking that level of desperation. Her eyes were wild, and her hand was shaking as she held the pistol on me. She didn’t want to do this. Something—Rona—had convinced her that she didn’t have another option.

  I’ve been cleaning up my sister’s messes since we were decanted. Professor Whitman was right about one thing: Rona’s genecode would unlock my ship. But she was making an assumption that was going to bite her in the ass, and bite her hard. Rona always flew alone.

  And I am not my sister.

  * * * *

  The guard caught up with us as Professor Whitman was dragging me down an alley toward a ladder that would take us to the next layer of the Dyson. They shouted; we ran. They pursued; we ran faster. It was exactly the sort of adventure that I had gone into the traveling-arcade business to avoid, blowing my share of the family seed money on a funfair long past its “best by” date. Let Rona have the dizzying escapes and exhilarating chases. I’d take the joys of percussive maintenance and spending my nights beating the high score on ancient shoot-’em-up consoles.

  Wait. That was the answer. “Give me your gun.”

  “I’m pursued, not suicidal!”

  “You’re a professor on a Dyson sphere who bought a recoilless pistol for self-defense, and I—I am the reigning Duck Hunt champion of this solar system!” I snatched the gun from her hand while the echoes of my triumphant decree were still rolling down the alley, spun, and opened fire.

  Most modern personal weapons don’t have a “kill” setting. They have “stun,” they have “sting,” and they have “slow the jerk who’s chasing you down,” but they don’t kill. Killing people is bad for business and gets the justice system involved. The justice system has better things to worry about. Professor Whitman might be the kind of person who’d pull a gun on a stranger, but she didn’t strike me as the kind of person who would have modified her weapon for fun.

  My first shot took out the lead guard, who fell twitching and bucking to the alley floor. Score one for the unmodified weapon. I kept firing, pretending they were pixelated ducks flying across an impossibly blue sky, and that that damn cartoon dog would pop up and laugh if I missed. Technically true, assuming I substituted the words “jail sentence” for “cartoon dog.” Professor Whitman was screaming. I ignored her, shooting until the last guard was down, and then turning to whack her gun repeatedly against the nearest wall, hitting it again and again, until I heard the thin glassy tinkle of the limiter in the barrel shattering. I turned back to Professor Whitman, keeping the muzzle aimed at the center of her chest, and keeping my finger well away from the trigger.

  “Guns are fun,” I said. “Break the little switch that says ‘please don’t kill people’ and guess what? You’ve got a deadly weapon on your hands. That’s why you’re not supposed to treat them like toys. They’re not toys.”

  The professor had gone even paler beneath her freckles. “Perhaps we got off on the wrong foot before . . .”

  “There’s no ‘perhaps’ about it. Now move. We’ll continue this on my ship.” My smile was humorless and cold. “Congrats. You’ve turned another Nanson into a criminal. My genemother would be so proud.”

  * * * *

  Climbing through the layers of the shell, one by one, with a gun in my hand and a reluctant professor leading the way, was not the most fun way I had ever spent an afternoon. When we reached the docking level, I swiped my genecode through, trusting on the relative interchangeability of the Nona-Rs—and my sister’s obvious visits to the place—to get me through security. Rona hates being tied down. Even places that have warrants out for her arrest will usually let her pass unhindered, thanks to the backdoors and malware she installs in their systems. We both love machines. It’s just that I enjoy fixing them, while she’s more about breaking them in beneficial ways.

  The gun I’d taken from Professor Whitman still rattled every time I moved it. Maybe Rona and I were more alike than I wanted to consider.

  The guards either didn’t know about my ship or hadn’t considered that we might crawl through the sphere to get to the docking level. Once I swiped my code, we were able to walk—not saunter, not run, as both would attract attention we didn’t want right now—past the checkpoints and all the way to the waiting door of my salvation.

  “I’m glad you’ve decided to help me,” whispered Professor Whitman. “I’m sorry we got off on the wrong foot, but I’m sure once you understand—”

  “Less talking, more walking,” I said, pushing her toward the steps. “Up until you came along, I’d managed to make it as a mostly honest citizen. All I want to understand is why you decided to jank up my life and not somebody else’s.”

  “Because I thought you were Rona,” she said. “When I got that query about selling me a Star Catcher IV box, I just knew that you were her, because that was part of our code. Star Catcher meant ‘I’m coming,’ and even numbers meant ‘move now, we’re going to be running hard.’ ”

  It took everything I had not to groan. “You’re telling me all this is because my stupid sister decided to base a code on something she didn’t give a damn about? That’s it. She’s not getting a decanting day present from me this year.” I slapped my hand against the keypad, letting it read my biometrics. The door slid open. I pulled Professor Whitman inside, and the door slid closed again behind us.

  The air inside my ship was slightly stale in that way that became normal after spending a certain amount of time in deep space, scented with cotton candy and popcorn. Not that either confection was actually available onboard—safety reasons—but the smells are traditional, and they helped to put people into the funfair mood. The entry hall was dim, the lights lowered to conserve power while we were docked. I shoved the Professor’s gun into my belt and started toward the main room at the center of the ship. “Doc? We’ve got company, and we’ve got a problem.”

  “I believe I am aware of both those things,” he called back.

  Maybe the slight quaver in his voice should have been enough of a warning, but I was distracted by the academic beside me, and by the pressing question of how the hell we were going to get out of here when we still didn’t have a working gravity generator. I reached the end of the hall. I stopped.

  Rona, who was holding a gun against my seated partner’s temple, offered me a sunny smile. “Howdy, sis,” she said, as blithe as if this had been a chance meeting on a populous street, and not her breaking into my ship and holding Doc at gunpoint. “Long time no see.”

  I froze. Crime was Rona’s thing, not mine: I didn’t have the heart for it. “Rona.”

  “Violet, can you take the gun from my sister, please? I wouldn’t want her to get any fancy ideas that might get her hurt.” Rona kept smiling. “We did firearms training together for our sixteenth decanting day, and I know how good a shot she is.”

  “I’ve gotten better,” I said, through gritted teeth, trying not to focus on the feeling of Professor Whitman—Violet—fumbling with my belt. “What the hell are you doing here, Rona? I told you I didn’t want you anywhere near the arcade.”

  “Still mad about your high score?”

  “No, still mad about you using my Whac-A-Mole machine to smuggle memory crystals across prohibited lines,” I snapped. “The high score was insult to injury.”

  “It’s not my fault I’m naturally talented.” Rona shifted her attention to Violet. “Did you bring it?”

  “I—I did,” said the professor, sounding uncertain. “Did you send the message af
ter all? Were you coming to save me?”

  “No, that was all Nora; your reputation apparently precedes you in some of the wrong circles. Why in the world was my sister selling one of her beloved games?”

  “Not that it’s any of your business, but we need a new gravity generator,” I said. “What are you buying from this woman, Rona? Why does she think you’d save anyone but yourself?”

  “Nothing you need to concern yourself with,” said Rona. “We’ll fix the gennie and be on our way. I’m assuming all your licenses and clearances are still in order? You were always the good one when it came to that sort of stuff.”

  “I’m the good one when it comes to everything.”

  Rona’s face went cold, and so did I. It was always easy to tell when I had gone too far with her: she had very little space between “calm” and “furious.” And a furious Rona was capable of doing terrible things. “You asked what she had for me, Nora? She has the schematics for this sphere. All of them. The deep engineering, the things no one is supposed to know. The things that we can use to take out the entire security system.”

  Violet’s eyes widened. “Wait, what? You said you needed those schematics so that you could loosen the communication locks. The people are being oppressed. They need to be able to reach their families without fear of government censorship.”

  Rona snorted. “Please. There’s always someone watching over your shoulder. All that matters to me is whether they’re the highest bidder.”

  “But you promised me,” whispered Violet, her eyes widening still further, until it looked like they were in danger of falling right out of her head and rolling across the deck. “You said that if I got you the schematics, you would unlock the world.”

  “I never lied to you,” said Rona.

  “She probably didn’t,” I said. That old, weary feeling was washing over me. Rona had always been like this, even when we were little girls, freshly decanted and waiting for our loving adoptive parents to come and carry us home. There was still a surprisingly good market for Nona-Rs, in part because several of us had gone on to become famous in our own right, and some planetary governments allowed clones to claim familial benefits. Adopt the right clone-kid and your family could wind up set for life, if things went your way. “She said it would ‘unlock the world’? Then she told you the exact truth. She just surrounded it with pretty words that would make you think she was giving you what you wanted.”