More Tomorrow: And Other Stories

by Michael Marshall Smith

  ‘Any preferences on dinner?’

  ‘Whatever,’ Torrence smiled absently, heading off down the corridor towards the living quarters. Then he stopped. ‘No, hang on. Chicken. Something with chicken in it.’

  Cat took the short cut through the ventilation ducts to the kitchen area. There was no chicken on board, and never had been, but manipulation of Gastronomic ProtoMatter would provide an excellent facsimile. It was not an exact science, and fifteen years ago Mr Torrence had chipped a tooth on a Coq au Vin that for some reason had come out made of bronze, but the element of chance was one of the reasons the machine liked cooking.

  Cat was a VariTronique C7i—a compact rectangle only eighteen inches long, four inches across and eight inches high. He was nonetheless fully equipped to provide full technical, social and—if necessary—military backup for his human. By a quirk of a randomisation process popular in neurocircuitry at the time of their creation, the C7s had come out as amiable, capable and slightly unaccountable, good companions as well as excellent workers. It was this, coupled with a tendency to follow curved paths and to rest in apparently random positions on top of, or underneath, things, or sometimes just in the middle of the floor, that had earned the C7s the generic nickname ‘Cats’.

  They were also the qualities that had made the C7s particularly suitable for posting to Sentry Stations. Positioned in deep space in the run-up to The War, when it had finally become obvious that interstellar conflict was not only inevitable but likely to go on for some time, the Sentry Stations were small, totally independent modules whose sole function was to relay video, radar and electromagnetic information on what was happening in their environment. Because the maintenance of such a craft only justified one human crew member, and because that person would be stranded in deep space well beyond the shipping lanes for however long the War lasted, cats were felt to be the ideal companions. Once the Station was in position, there was no contact from Home, as any transmissions could just as easily be eavesdropped by enemy craft. There was merely the routine servicing and maintenance of a ship that relayed blind information, that cycled and recycled the closed system of the raw materials on board. Sentry Officers, chosen for their perceived ability to withstand such conditions of service, needed dependable backup, technical support, and someone to talk to. Cats fitted the bill perfectly. The series’ motto was ‘To serve, and to protect’. Cat had always felt that it would ring better the other way around, but apparently this had already been used.

  A small red light above the cooking area flashed briefly, a signal from the shower cubicle that Mr Torrence had finished. There was plenty of time, Cat knew: Dave liked to dress for dinner slowly, and to have a drink in the recreation area before eating. It had taken four years for the recreation area and Mr Torrence to reach a modus operandi on that one. At first the room had insisted on trying to pre-guess what drink Mr Torrence would want, and have it ready, when the man really did prefer to do that for himself. After a period of covert struggle in which the man had deliberately switched drinks at unpredictable intervals, and the recreation area had countered with a complex series of increasingly inaccurate predictive algorithms, a compromise had been reached. Now the room simply had a glass and a bowl of ice ready, though Cat knew that it was keeping an internal tally of how often its guesses would’ve been right.

  Torrence thought about it, and decided to have a simple scotch on the rocks. The basic material in each of the bottles was the same, albeit with carefully applied flavourings. Like everything else he ingested, it had probably passed through him more than once already, though he tried not to think too hard about that.

  There’d been a time, very many years ago, when he’d had to lay off any variant of alcohol, on Cat’s advice. Back before he’d got fully used to his life and his role, when the evenings had begun to seem too long, the tomorrows too similar to all the yesterdays. He couldn’t remember much about that period, and was glad. As a pleasure, drink was a fine one: as a problem it was the worst. It crept up on you, befriending you: knowing the routes to the hearts of the lonely, and making them believe they’d invited it in. You could have a good time with the stuff, but it wasn’t your friend. Torrence had kicked it back out of the house again, and now only shook hands with it twice a day.

  Swirling the ice in his glass, he wandered over to the observation window, appreciating the smells of cooking that Cat was piping in from the kitchen area. The view outside the window remained fundamentally unedifying. The relative positions of the points of light changed slowly, but ultimately a star was a star was a star. Thirty years of looking out at Christmas lights, with no tree in sight. Thirty years without ever seeing a single other human being. Thirty years simply passing, one by one, like a drop of cold water running down a long sheet of glass. He just hoped that at least one interesting or useful piece of information had been relayed by the ship’s automatic sensors in all that time.

  He had never regretted the job, was proud of it and fulfilled by it. When he’d taken the tests and applied to be a Sentry Officer he’d been thirty and directionless, needing something to believe in, something to achieve, and the War had provided it. If, hundreds of millions of miles away, there were people looking out their windows onto a view more interesting, onto fields or streets, they were doing so because of the people like him. Men who’d been prepared to give those things up to help keep them safe. He’d never expected the conflict to go on this long—nobody had—but he intended to do his duty for as long as it took.

  He could remember what Home was like, of course, but it had become increasingly stylized to him, and the early years on the ship itself were blurred and indistinct. With very little to mark one day from the next, the past was simply what one remembered. It was an odd kind of life. But when they finally came to collect him, when it was all over, he’d be able to look at them down thirty years of service and know he’d done his bit.

  ‘Nearly ready, Dave,’ came Cat’s voice over the intercom. ‘I’ll just—shit, hang on.’ After a hectic pause Cat resumed: ‘Sorry, sauce got a bit out of control there. Be about five minutes.’

  ‘Fine,’ Torrence said. They hadn’t known how good a decision it was to send cats up with the Sentries. He couldn’t have lasted this long without his, and he was willing to bet that the other sentries dotted about the cosmos would say exactly the same thing. About twenty years ago the machine had sustained some internal damage, and had to turn itself off for a week while its auto-repair modules grew replacement chips. Torrence couldn’t remember how he’d whiled that time away, and didn’t want ever to have to relearn. He secretly hoped that he’d be allowed to keep Cat when he was eventually fetched back to Earth. He thought he might need him. For the same reasons, perhaps, that mankind had always sought the company of certain animals. Because they brought out the best in us, and protected us from our worst.

  The blue light in the middle of the recreation room’s circular table flashed, signalling Cat was on his way with the meal. Torrence seated himself, and within moments Cat scythed out of the ventilation duct, steaming plate clutched in a field.

  ‘Chicken à la King,’ he announced, ‘with rice and some other stuff that’s very nearly broccoli.’

  ‘A la King…’ mused Torrence, ‘…have I had that before?’

  ‘Mm, one hundred fifty-eight times,’ Cat said, settling himself not quite underneath the occasional table near the entertainment system’s plasma screen. ‘But not in the last two years.’

  As he ate the ‘chicken’, which was excellent, and the ‘a bit like mango’ ice cream that followed it, Torrence was surprised to find himself thinking further about his life. Introspection was something he rarely had time for. He was very busy keeping up with a largely self-imposed schedule of servicing and checking, and in the evening the ship’s immense store of film and book material helped him while away the hours without too much thought. But as his sixtieth birthday approached, he found himself thinking about the past more and more. Sixty was
pensionable age back home. Sixty was people opening doors for you, and giving up their seat. He wished he at least knew how the War was going, could trace who was doing what, have some feeling of direct involvement. Would he be a hero when he got home, or would he just be an old man?

  If. If he got home. As the years went by he was beginning to realise he might have to confront the idea that he might never get home, might die alone out here, still holding the fort.

  ‘It can’t last for ever, Dave,’ Cat said, quietly.

  Dave turned to stare at the machine, surprised into a smile.

  Later, when Torrence had finished filing the day’s report, Cat reappeared from wherever it was he went when he wasn’t around, bearing a glass of brandy. Perching to one side of the arms of the sofa, he clicked briskly for a while in a way Torrence had come to assume signified contentment, and asked him what movie he wanted to watch. Wandering over to the monitoring console as Cat and the recreation room silently liaised over providing the entertainment, Torrence reflected that, all in all, things could be a whole lot worse.

  Then he stopped very suddenly, his breath escaping him in a small grunt.

  ‘What is it?’ Cat asked.

  Torrence stood staring at the console. A large screen, subdivided into many sections, constantly updated information on the performance of the essential functions of the ship. Torrence gave it a glance several times an hour whenever he was in the rec room, just to make sure everything was ticking over.

  In the bottom right-hand corner of the screen was an area that had remained unused in all the time he had been on the ship.

  The area was labeled ‘Communication’, and a word lit in red was now flashing in it.

  The word was INCOMING.

  It was impossible to get the ship to even register attempted contact unless the sender knew a sequence of codes. That one flashing word could only mean one thing.

  The War was over.

  Cat hovered by his side and watched the blinking lights with him, and not for the first time Torrence wished he could know what the machine was actually thinking.

  It was Cat who broke the silence. ‘Aren’t you going to answer it?’

  Shaking his head, and grinning like an idiot, Torrence reached out and tapped in the code which permitted contact, a code he’d practised many times in his head over the years.

  The word ‘Incoming’ continued to flash for a moment, and then was replaced by CONTACT ESTABLISHED.

  ‘Hello? Is that David Torrence? Hello? Am I through?’

  With difficulty, Torrence replied. ‘This is Sentry Officer David Torrence. I can hear you clearly.’

  He had to struggle to find the words, feeling tongue-tied and inarticulate. He’d spent hours every day talking to Cat, to the recreation room or the shower, but this was different. ‘It’s…it’s good to hear your voice. Who am I speaking to?’

  ‘Field Lieutenant Jack Pols, Retrieval Force. Good to hear you too, Dave. I’ve come a long way to pick you up. You’re going home.’

  Home. That word again. Torrence felt the ship, his ship, round him like an embrace. It would have taken the approaching ship several years to make the journey from Home System, and would take the same to return. By the time he set foot on Home Planet, the War would have been over the better part of a decade.

  ‘Where are you now?’

  ‘Still a few hours away, uh at co-ordinates 348.22/56.68, currently. I figured you might not exactly have your eye on the Comms channel every minute of the day, so I flashed ahead of time. I anticipate arrival circa 22:50. That okay?’

  ‘I’ll wait up’, said Torrence. ‘So it’s over.’

  ‘Yep—two years back. They finally caved.’

  ‘Two years? It only took you two years to get here?’

  ‘Ships have come on a little while you’ve been gone, Dave. One of the reasons we won. You want to make sure the defences are turned off before I get there?’

  ‘Your ship’s beacon coding will do it.’

  ‘Yeah I know, but that’s an old ship you’ve got there. Kind of a downer to come all this way to get fried by accident only an hour away, wouldn’t you say?’

  Laughing, Torrence started to key in the codes. Cat floated up from behind him and placed a freshened drink on the console.

  Pols’ voice crackled over the speakers. ‘Dave, I got something flashing at me here. Back with you in a moment.’

  The ESTABLISHED sign was replaced by a HOLD.

  Coding finished, and ship’s automatic defences disarmed, Torrence turned to Cat, and saw that the machine was holding a glass of its own. There was nothing in it, but Torrence knew what he meant, and felt absurdly touched.

  ‘You made it, Dave,’ Cat said, raising his glass.

  ‘We did.’ Torrence clinked the rim of his glass against Cat’s, and drank.

  For half an hour Torrence pummelled Pols with questions, how the War had finished, what things were like in Home System now. Eventually he ground to a halt, not empty of questions but already full of answers, filled with the new and barely expected.

  ‘I can still hardly believe it.’

  ‘Believe it, Dave. All round the outer fringes the same thing’s happening. There’s one hundred forty Sentry Stations, and right now someone’s on the way to every one of them.’

  Torrence shook his head. It was strange to think of so many other men coming to the end of the same road. Between them several thousand years of watching and waiting were over.

  Suddenly a loud siren crashed over the speakers, half deafening him. Startled, he ran his eyes quickly over the screen, trying to work out what the matter was. As far as he could see, most of the panel was flashing. Beneath the noise he heard Pols’ voice asking if there was a problem.

  He put the microphone on mute, scanning the screen more methodically.

  Cat, oddly silent, drifted over to the observation window.

  Most of the flashing, he realised, was in subsidiary areas of the screen, signifying readiness of response. Thin red tracks of light linked these areas to a central zone, in which the main message was contained.

  ‘Warning’, it said, in red, ‘Approaching Craft Fails Hull Coding Test.’

  Torrence stepped back from the console. Tiny micro-beacons the size of pinheads were spread randomly through the ship’s hull, each broadcasting part of a coding matrix. This matrix, through a process of cumulative self-reference, produced a code both greater and different to the sum of its parts, and was further mutated by interaction with the hull coding of any Home ship it approached. If the result was acceptable, contact was allowed. If it wasn’t, the security system went bananas.

  If he hadn’t disarmed the ship’s auto-defence mechanisms, Pols’ ship would by now be dispersed over most of the surrounding parsec, in pieces little bigger than molecular size.

  ‘Weird’ he muttered. He switched the alarm off and turned to face Cat, who was still floating facing the window. ‘What’s that about?’

  ‘Well,’ said Cat, ‘The Station doesn’t accept Pols’ ship’s coding matrix.’

  ‘Yes, but what does that mean?’

  ‘As he said, this is an old ship, and his is very recent. But it seems unlikely they’d change the system. So it’s down to a glitch in the security system on the Station.’

  ‘How likely is that?’

  ‘It’s possible. The Securicore module is the only mode of the distributed system I can’t access. It’s too heavily encrypted. Even if I could, I can’t test anything. Essential functions are controlled by organic neurocircuitry. It may have lost its grip. I don’t know.’

  Torrence noticed that the INCOMING light was flashing in the Communication panel. Pols, doubtless wondering what was going on. ‘You don’t sound very convinced.’

  Cat paused. ‘Well, how convinced are you, Dave?’

  He wanted to assume that was the problem—Pols had known the right communication codes, after all—and it made sense. Thirty years of War just made that assumption diffi
cult to make.

  He tapped in the Contact code.

  Pols’ voice came back on immediately. ‘Problem there, Dave?’

  ‘Just as well the defence system was off, Pols. The Station doesn’t like your ship’s coding very much.’

  Pols sounded utterly unconcerned. ‘Right. It’s happened before. That’s why I warned you. And make it Jack, yeah?’

  Torrence paused for a moment, chewing his lip. Right from the start Pols had called him Dave. He realised belatedly that this had rankled, despite the good news he brought: Torrence was an officer still on active war duty. Perhaps Pols was just being friendly, and after two years’ journey to collect someone you felt you’d earned the right to use their Christian name. Maybe they did things differently now. Or maybe David had just become too used to everyone except Cat calling him Mr Torrence.

  ‘Why does it happen?’

  ‘You think I understand those boxes any more than you do? All I know is they’ve found that senior active ships get a bit picky. I heard of two examples just before I left. Luckily they both got worked out before the nukes went off, but who wants to take the risk? Show me a perfect machine and I’ll show you figures on the annual turnover of the repair business. Nothing lasts forever.’

  ‘No. I guess that’s true.’

  Torrence leaned forward on the console, head hanging, eyes closed. He felt stupid, and pedantic, and he wanted so much to simply believe. Though what the man said made sense, Torrence had done things by the book too long to be able to immediately accept a discrepancy. It was unbelievable, but it looked like he was going to have problems letting Pols through.

  ‘I know it looks odd,’ said Cat, quietly, so not as to be picked up by the mike, ‘but he did know the codings.’

  Torrence nodded. ‘But why,’ he said, loud enough to be overheard, ‘haven’t we heard anything about this? If the War has been over for two years, why didn’t Home broadcast the news?’

  ‘Because it was two years ago,’ Pols said. ‘It was all worked out. Say they beam you the War’s over. Then you’ve got two years to wait, knowing you’re not serving any purpose any longer, just waiting for the ship to arrive. That’s a long fucking Sunday afternoon, man. Isn’t it better for me to just arrive, and then it’s over and you’re going home both at the same time?’