by Neil Clarke
“Oh, thank God!” She slumped in his arms. “I’ve been so afraid.”
“You’re all right now.”
“I thought you were an Invader at first, when I saw you coming up. I’m so hungry—I haven’t eaten since I don’t know when.” She clutched at the sleeve of Krishna’s suit. “You do know about the Invaders, don’t you?”
“Maybe you’d better bring me up to date.”
They began walking toward the stairs. Krishna gestured quickly to Gunther and then toward Chang’s worksuit harness. A cannister the size of a hip flask hung there. Gunther reached over and plucked it off. The messenger engines! He held them in his hand.
To the other side, Beth Hamilton plucked up the near-full cylinder of paranoia-inducing engines and made it disappear.
Sally Chang, deep in the explication of her reasonings, did not notice. “. . . obeyed my orders, of course. But they made no sense. I worried and worried about that until finally I realized what was really going on. A wolf caught in a trap will gnaw off its leg to get free. I began to look for the wolf. What kind of enemy justified such extreme actions? Certainly nothing human.”
“Sally,” Krishna said, “I want you to entertain the notion that the conspiracy—for want of a better word—may be more deeply rooted than you suspect. That the problem is not an external enemy, but the workings of our own brain. Specifically that the Invaders are an artifact of the psychotomimetics you injected into yourself back when this all began.”
“No. No, there’s too much evidence. It all fits together! The Invaders needed a way to disguise themselves both physically, which was accomplished by the vacuum suits, and psychologically, which was achieved by the general madness. Thus, they can move undetected among us. Would a human enemy have converted all of Bootstrap to slave labor? Unthinkable! They can read our minds like a book. If we hadn’t protected ourselves with the schizomimetics, they’d be able to extract all our knowledge, all our military research secrets . . .
Listening, Gunther couldn’t help imagining what Liza Nagenda would say to all of this wild talk. At the thought of her, his jaw clenched. Just like one of Chang’s machines, he realized, and couldn’t help being amused at his own expense.
Ekatarina was waiting at the bottom of the stairs. Her hands trembled noticeably, and there was a slight quaver in her voice when she said, “What’s all this the CMP tells me about messenger engines? Krishna’s supposed to have come up with a cure of some kind?”
“We’ve got them,” Gunther said quietly, happily. He held up the cannister. “It’s over now, we can heal our friends.”
“Let me see,” Ekatarina said. She took the cannister from his hand.
“No, wait!” Hamilton cried, too late. Behind her, Krishna was arguing with Sally Chang about her interpretations of recent happenings. Neither had noticed yet that those in front had stopped.
“Stand back.” Ekatarina took two quick steps backward. Edgily, she added, “I don’t mean to be difficult. But we’re going to sort this all out, and until we do, I don’t want anybody too close to me. That includes you too, Gunther.”
Flicks began gathering. By ones and twos they wandered up the lawn, and then by the dozen. By the time it was clear that Ekatarina had called them up via the CMP, Krishna, Chang, and Hamilton were separated from her and Gunther by a wall of people.
Chang stood very still. Somewhere behind her unseen face, she was revising her theories to include this new event. Suddenly, her hands slapped at her suit, grabbing for the missing cannisters. She looked at Krishna and with a trill of horror said, “You’re one of them!”
“Of course I’m not—” Krishna began. But she was turning, stumbling, fleeing back up the steps.
“Let her go,” Ekatarina ordered. “We’ve got more serious things to talk about.” Two flicks scurried up, lugging a small industrial kiln between them. They set it down, and a third plugged in an electric cable. The interior began to glow. “This cannister is all you’ve got, isn’t it? If I were to autoclave it, there wouldn’t be any hope of replacing its contents.”
“Izmailova, listen,” Krishna said.
“I am listening. Talk.”
Krishna explained, while Izmailova listened with arms folded and shoulders tilted skeptically. When he was done, she shook her head. “It’s a noble folly, but folly is all it is. You want to reshape our minds into something alien to the course of human evolution. To turn the seat of thought into a jet pilot’s couch. This is your idea of a solution? Forget it. Once this particular box is opened, there’ll be no putting its contents back in again. And you haven’t advanced any convincing arguments for opening it.”
“But the people in Bootstrap!” Gunther objected. “They—”
She cut him off. “Gunther, nobody likes what’s happened to them. But if the rest of us must give up our humanity to pay for a speculative and ethically dubious rehabilitation . . . well, the price is simply too high. Mad or not, they’re at least human now.”
“Am I inhuman?” Krishna asked. “If you tickle me, do I not laugh?”
“You’re in no position to judge. You’ve rewired your neurons and you’re stoned on the novelty. What tests have you run on yourself? How thoroughly have you mapped out your deviations from human norms? Where are your figures?” These were purely rhetorical questions; the kind of analyses she meant took weeks to run. “Even if you check out completely human—and I don’t concede you will!—who’s to say what the long-range consequences are? What’s to stop us from drifting, step by incremental step, into madness? Who decides what madness is? Who programs the programmers? No, this is impossible. I won’t gamble with our minds.” Defensively, almost angrily, she repeated, “I won’t gamble with our minds.”
“Ekatarina,” Gunther said gently, “how long have you been up? Listen to yourself. The wire is doing your thinking for you.”
She waved a hand dismissively, without responding.
“Just as a practical matter,” Hamilton said, “how do you expect to run Bootstrap without it? The setup is turning us all into baby fascists. You say you’re worried about madness—what will we be like a year from now?”
“The CMP assures me—”
“The CMP is only a program!” Hamilton cried. “No matter how much interactivity it has, it’s not flexible. It has no hope. It cannot judge a new thing. It can only enforce old decisions, old values, old habits, old fears.”
Abruptly Ekatarina snapped. “Get out of my face!” she screamed. “Stop it, stop it, stop it! I won’t listen to any more.”
“Ekatarina—” Gunther began.
But her hand had tightened on the cannister. Her knees bent as she began a slow genuflection to the kiln. Gunther could see that she had stopped listening. Drugs and responsibility had done this to her, speeding her up and bewildering her with conflicting demands, until she stood trembling on the brink of collapse. A good night’s sleep might have restored her, made her capable of being reasoned with. But there was no time. Words would not stop her now. And she was too far distant for him to reach before she destroyed the engines. In that instant he felt such a strong outwelling of emotion toward her as would be impossible to describe.
“Ekatarina,” he said. “I love you.”
She half-turned her head toward him and in a distracted, somewhat irritated tone said, “What are you—”
He lifted the bolt gun from his work harness, leveled it, and fired.
Ekatarina’s helmet shattered.
She fell.
“I should have shot to just breach the helmet. That would have stopped her. But I didn’t think I was a good enough shot. I aimed right for the center of her head.”
“Hush,” Hamilton said. “You did what you had to. Stop tormenting yourself. Talk about more practical things.”
He shook his head, still groggy. For the longest time, he had been kept on beta endorphins, unable to feel a thing, unable to care. It was like being swathed in cotton batting. Nothing could reach him. Nothing could hurt him. “Ho
w long have I been out of it?”
“A day.”
“A day!” He looked about the austere room. Bland rock walls and laboratory equipment with smooth, noncommital surfaces. To the far end, Krishna and Chang were hunched over a swipeboard, arguing happily and impatiently overwriting each other’s scrawls. A Swiss spacejack came in and spoke to their backs. Krishna nodded distractedly, not looking up. “I thought it was much longer.”
“Long enough. We’ve already salvaged everyone connected with Sally Chang’s group, and gotten a good start on the rest. Pretty soon it will be time to decide how you want yourself rewritten.”
He shook his head, feeling dead. “I don’t think I’ll bother, Beth. I just don’t have the stomach for it.”
“We’ll give you the stomach.”
“Naw, I don’t . . .” He felt a black nausea come welling up again. It was cyclic; it returned every time he was beginning to think he’d finally put it down. “I don’t want the fact that I killed Ekatarina washed away in a warm flood of self-satisfaction. The idea disgusts me.”
“We don’t want that either.” Posner led a delegation of seven into the lab. Krishna and Chang rose to face them, and the group broke into swirling halves. “There’s been enough of that. It’s time we all started taking responsibility for the consequences of—” Everyone was talking at once. Hamilton made a face.
“Started taking responsibility for—”
Voices rose.
“We can’t talk here,” she said. “Take me out on the surface.”
They drove with the cabin pressurized, due west on the Seething Bay road. Ahead, the sun was almost touching the weary walls of Sommering crater. Shadow crept down from the mountains and cratertops, yearning toward the radiantly lit Sinus Medii. Gunther found it achingly beautiful. He did not want to respond to it, but the harsh lines echoed the lonely hurt within him in a way that he found oddly comforting.
Hamilton touched her peecee. “Putting on the Ritz” filled their heads.
“What if Ekatarina was right?” he said sadly. “What if we’re giving up everything that makes us human? The prospect of being turned into some kind of big-domed emotionless superman doesn’t appeal to me much.”
Hamilton shook her head. “I asked Krishna about that, and he said No. He said it was like . . . were you ever nearsighted?”
“Sure, as a kid.”
“Then you’ll understand. He said it was like the first time you came out of the doctor’s office after being lased. How everything seemed clear and vivid and distinct. What had once been a blur that you called ‘tree’ resolved itself into a thousand individual and distinct leaves. The world was filled with unexpected detail. There were things on the horizon that you’d never seen before. Like that.”
“Oh.” He stared ahead. The disk of the sun was almost touching Sommering. “There’s no point in going any farther.”
He powered down the truck.
Beth Hamilton looked uncomfortable. She cleared her throat and with brusque energy said, “Gunther, look. I had you bring me out here for a reason. I want to propose a merger of resources.”
“A what?”
“Marriage.”
It took Gunther a second to absorb what she had said. “Aw, no . . . I don’t . . .”
“I’m serious. Gunther, I know you think I’ve been hard on you, but that’s only because I saw a lot of potential in you, and that you were doing nothing with it. Well, things have changed. Give me a say in your rewrite, and I’ll do the same for you.”
He shook his head. “This is just too weird for me.”
“It’s too late to use that as an excuse. Ekatarina was right—we’re sitting on top of something very dangerous, the most dangerous opportunity humanity faces today. It’s out of the bag, though. Word has gotten out. Earth is horrified and fascinated. They’ll be watching us. Briefly, very briefly, we can control this thing. We can help to shape it now, while it’s small. Five years from now, it will be out of our hands.
“You have a good mind, Gunther, and it’s about to get better. I think we agree on what kind of a world we want to make. I want you on my side.”
“I don’t know what to say.”
“You want true love? You got it. We can make the sex as sweet or nasty as you like. Nothing easier. You want me quieter, louder, gentler, more assured? We can negotiate. Let’s see if we can come to terms.”
He said nothing.
Hamilton eased back in the seat. After a time, she said, “You know? I’ve never watched a lunar sunset before. I don’t get out on the surface much.”
“We’ll have to change that,” Gunther said.
Hamilton stared hard into his face. Then she smiled. She wriggled closer to him. Clumsily, he put an arm over her shoulder. It seemed to be what was expected of him. He coughed into his hand, then pointed a finger. “There it goes.”
Lunar sunset was a simple thing. The crater wall touched the bottom of the solar disk. Shadows leaped from the slopes and raced across the lowlands. Soon half the sun was gone. Smoothly, without distortion, it dwindled. A last brilliant sliver of light burned atop the rock, then ceased to be. In the instant before the windshield adjusted and the stars appeared, the universe filled with darkness.
The air in the cab cooled. The panels snapped and popped with the sudden shift in temperature.
Now Hamilton was nuzzling the side of his neck. Her skin was slightly tacky to the touch, and exuded a faint but distinct odor. She ran her tongue up the line of his chin and poked it in his ear. Her hand fumbled with the latches of his suit.
Gunther experienced no arousal at all, only a mild distaste that bordered on disgust. This was horrible, a defilement of all he had felt for Ekatarina.
But it was a chore he had to get through. Hamilton was right. All his life his hindbrain had been in control, driving him with emotions chemically derived and randomly applied. He had been lashed to the steed of consciousness and forced to ride it wherever it went, and that nightmare gallop had brought him only pain and confusion. Now that he had control of the reins, he could make this horse go where he wanted.
He was not sure what he would demand from his reprogramming. Contentment, perhaps. Sex and passion, almost certainly. But not love. He was done with the romantic illusion. It was time to grow up.
He squeezed Beth’s shoulder. One more day, he thought, and it won’t matter. I’ll feel whatever is best for me to feel. Beth raised her mouth to his. Her lips parted. He could smell her breath.
They kissed.
1991
Geoffrey A. Landis is a science-fiction writer and a scientist. As a scientist, he works for NASA on developing advanced technologies for spaceflight. He is a member of the Mars Exploration Rovers Science team, and a fellow of the NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts. As an SF writer, he has won the Hugo and Nebula awards for science fiction. He is the author of the novel Mars Crossing and the short-story collection Impact Parameter (and Other Quantum Realities), and has written over eighty published science fiction stories. He was the 2014 recipient of the Robert A. Heinlein Award “for outstanding published works in science fiction and technical writings that inspire the human exploration of space.” In his spare time, he goes to fencing tournaments so he can stab perfect strangers with a sword.
More information can be found at his web page, www.geoffreylandis.com.
A WALK IN THE SUN
Geoffrey A. Landis
The pilots have a saying: a good landing is any landing you can walk away from. Perhaps Sanjiv might have done better, if he’d been alive. Trish had done the best she could. All things considered, it was a far better landing than she had any right to expect.
Titanium struts, pencil-slender, had never been designed to take the force of a landing. Paper-thin pressure walls had buckled and shattered, spreading wreckage out into the vacuum and across a square kilometer of lunar surface. An instant before impact she remembered to blow the tanks. There was no explosion, but no landing could h
ave been gentle enough to keep Moonshadow together. In eerie silence, the fragile ship had crumpled and ripped apart like a discarded aluminum can.
The piloting module had torn open and broken loose from the main part of the ship. The fragment settled against a crater wall. When it stopped moving, Trish unbuckled the straps that held her in the pilot’s seat and fell slowly to the ceiling. She oriented herself to the unaccustomed gravity, found an undamaged EVA pack and plugged it into her suit, then crawled out into the sunlight through the jagged hole where the living module had been attached.
She stood on the gray lunar surface and stared. Her shadow reached out ahead of her, a pool of inky black in the shape of a fantastically stretched man. The landscape was rugged and utterly barren, painted in stark shades of grey and black. “Magnificent desolation,” she whispered. Behind her, the sun
hovered just over the mountains, glinting off shards of titanium and steel scattered across the cratered plain.
Patricia Jay Mulligan looked out across the desolate moonscape and tried not to weep.
First things first. She took the radio out from the shattered crew compartment and tried it. Nothing. That was no surprise; Earth was over the horizon, and there were no other ships in cislunar space.
After a little searching she found Sanjiv and Theresa. In the low gravity they were absurdly easy to carry. There was no use in burying them. She sat them in a niche between two boulders, facing the sun, facing west, toward where the Earth was hidden behind a range of black mountains. She tried to think of the right words to say, and failed. Perhaps as well; she wouldn’t know the proper service for Sanjiv anyway. “Goodbye, Sanjiv. Goodbye, Theresa. I wish—I wish things would have been different. I’m sorry.” Her voice was barely more than a whisper. “Go with God.”
She tried not to think of how soon she was likely to be joining them.
She forced herself to think. What would her sister have done? Survive. Karen would survive. First: inventory your assets. She was alive, miraculously unhurt. Her vacuum suit was in serviceable condition. Life-support was powered by the suit’s solar arrays; she had air and water for as long as the sun continued to shine. Scavenging the wreckage yielded plenty of unbroken food packs; she wasn’t about to starve.
