Beyond the Blue Event Horizon (2 page)

Wan spat again at the panel as he disconnected; the whole face of the wall was stained with the marks of his displeasure. He liked when Doc recited poetry, not so much when he talked about it. With the craziest of the Dead Men, like fourteen and fifty-seven, you didn’t have any choice about what happened. They rarely responded, and almost never in a way that seemed relevant, and you either listened to what they happened to be saying or you turned them off.

It was almost time for him to go, but he tried one more time: the only one with a three-digit number, his special friend, Tiny Jim. “Hello, Wan.” The voice was sad and sweet. It tingled in his mind, like the sudden frisson of fear that he felt near the Old Ones. “It is you, Wan, isn’t it?”

“That is a foolish question. Who else would it be?”

“One keeps on hoping, Wan.” There was a pause, then Tiny Jim suddenly cackled, “Have I told you the one about the priest, the rabbi and the dervish who ran out of food on the planet made of pork?”

“I think you have, Tiny Jim, and anyway I don’t want to hear any jokes now.”

The invisible loudspeaker clicked and buzzed for a moment, and then the Dead Man said, “Same old thing, Wan? You want to talk about sex again?”

The boy kept his countenance impassive, but that familiar tingle inside his lower abdomen responded. “We might as well, Tiny Jim.”

“You’re a raunchy stud for your age, Wan,” the Dead Man offered; and then, “Tell you about the time I almost got busted for a sex offense? It was hot as hell. I was going home on the late train to Roselle Park, and this girl came in, sat across the aisle from me, put her feet up, and began to fan herself with her skirt.

Well, what would you do? I looked, you know. And she kept on doing it, and I kept looking, and finally around Highlands she complained to the conductor and he threw me off the train. Do you know what the funny thing was?”

Wan was rapt. “No, Tiny Jim,” he breathed.

“The funny thing was I’d missed my regular train. I had time to kill in the city, so I went to a porn flick. Two hours of, my God, every combination you could think of. The only way I could’ve seen more was with a proctoscope, so why was I slouching out over the aisle to peek at her little white panties? But you know what was funnier than that?”

“No, Tiny Jim.”

“She was right! I was staring, all right. I’d just been watching acres of crotches and boobs, but I couldn’t take my eyes off hers! That wasn’t the funniest thing, though. Do you want me to tell you the funniest thing of all?”

“Yes, please, Tiny Jim. I do.”

“Why, she got off the train with me! And took me to her home, boy, and we just made out over and over, all night long. Never did catch her name. What do you say to that, Wan?”

“I say, is that true, Tiny Jim?”

Pause. “Aw. No. You take all the fun out of things.”

Wan said severely, “I don’t want a made-up story, Tiny Jim. I want to learn facts.” Wan was angry, and thought of turning the Dead Man off to punish him, but was not sure whom he would be punishing. “I wish you would be nice, Tiny Jim,” he coaxed.

“Well-“ The bodiless mind clicked and whispered to itself for a moment, sorting through its conversational gambits. Then it said, “Do you want to know why mallard drakes rape their mates?”

“No!”

“I think you really do, though, Wan. It’s interesting. You can’t understand primate behavior unless you comprehend the whole spectrum of reproductive strategies. Even strange ones. Even the Acanthocephalan worms. They practice rape, too, and do you know what Moniliformis dubius does? They not only rape their females, they even rape competing males. With like plaster of Paris! So the poor Other Worm can’t get it up!”

“I don’t want to hear all this, Tiny Jim.”

“But it’s funny, Wan! That must be why they call him ‘dubius’!” The Dead Man was chuckling mechanically, a-heh! A-heh!

“Stop it, Tiny Jim!” But Wan was not just angry any more. He was hooked. It was his favorite subject, as Tiny Jim’s willingness to talk about it, at length and in variety, was what made him Wan’s favorite among the Dead Men. Wan unwrapped a food packet and, munching, said, “What I really want to hear is how to make out, Tiny Jim, please?”

If the Dead Man had had a face it would have shown the strain of trying to keep from laughing, but he said kindly, “‘Kay, sonny. I know you keep hoping. Let’s see, did I tell you to watch their eyes?”

“Yes, Tiny Jim. You said if their pupils dilate it means they are sexually aroused.”

“Right. And I mentioned the existence of the sexually dimorphic structures in the brain?”

“I don’t think I know what that means, exactly.”

“Well, I don’t, either, but it’s anatomically so. They’re different, Wan, inside and out.”

“Please, Tiny Jim, keep telling me about the differences!” The Dead Man did, and Wan listened absorbedly. There was always time to go to the ship, and Tiny Jim was unusually coherent. All of the Dead Men had their own special subjects that they zeroed in to talk about, as though each had been frozen with one big thought in his mind. But even on the favored topics you could not always expect them to make sense. Wan pushed the mobile unit that they used to catch him-when it was working-out of the way and sprawled on the floor, chin in hands, while the Dead Man chattered and reminisced and explained courtship, and gifting, and making your move.

It was fascinating, even though he had heard it before. He listened until the Dead Man slowed down, hesitated, and stopped. Then the boy said, to confirm a theory:

“Teach me, Tiny Jim. I read a book in which a male and a female copulated. He hit her on the head and copulated her while she was unconscious. That appears to me an efficient way to ‘love’, Tiny Jim, but in other stories it takes much longer. Why is this?”

“That was not love, sonny. That was what I was telling you about. Rape. Rape is a bad idea for people, even if it works for mallard ducks.”

Wan nodded and urged him on: “Why, Tiny Jim?”

Pause. “I will demonstrate it for you mathematically, Wan,” the Dead Man said at last. “Attractive sex objects may be defined as female, no more than five years younger than you are, no more than fifteen years older. These figures are normalized to your present age, and are also only approximate. Attractive sex objects may further be characterized by visual, olfactory, tactile, and aural qualities stimulating to you, in descending weighted order of significance plotted against probability of access. Do you understand me so far?”

“Not really.”

Pause. “Well, that’s all right for now. Now pay attention. On the basis of those four preliminary traits, some females will attract you. Up to the point of contact you will not know about other traits which may repel, harm or detumesce you. 5/28 of subjects will be menstruating. 3/87 will have gonorrhea, 2/95 syphilis. 1/17 will have excessive bodily hair, skin blemishes or other physical deformities concealed by clothing. Finally, 2/71 will conduct themselves offensively during intercourse, i/i6 will emit an unpleasant odor, 3/7 will resist rape so extensively as to diminish your enjoyment; these are subjective values quantified to match your known psychological profile. Cumulating these fractions, the odds are better than six to one that you will not receive maximum pleasure from rape.”

“Then I must not copulate a woman without wooing?”

“That’s right, boy. Not counting it’s against the law.”

Wan was thoughtfully silent for a moment, then remembered to ask, “Is all this true, Tiny Jim?”

Cackle of glee. “Got you that time, kid! Every word.”

Wan pouted like a frog-jaw. “That was not very exciting, Tiny Jim. In fact, you have detumesced me.”

“What do you expect, kid?” Tiny Jim said sullenly. “You told me not to make up any stories. Why are you being so unpleasant?”

“I am getting ready to leave. I do not have much time.”

“You don’t have anything else!” cackled Tiny Jim.

“And you have nothing to say that I want to hear,” said Wan cruelly. He disconnected them all, and angrily he went to the ship and squeezed the launch control. It did not occur to him that he was being rude to the only friends he had in the universe. It had never occurred to him that their feelings mattered.

On the twelve hundred and eighty-second day of our all-expense-paid joyride on the way to the Oort Cloud, the big excitement was the mail. Vera tinkled joyously and we all came to collect it. There were six letters for my horny little half-sister-inlaw from famous movie stars-well, they’re not all movie stars. They’re just famous and good-looking jocks that she writes to, because she’s only fourteen years old and needs some kind of male to dream about, and that write back to her, I think, because their press agents tell them it’s going to be good publicity. A letter from the old country for Payter, my father-in-law. A long one, in German. They want him to come back to Dortmund and run for mayor or Blirgermeister or something. Assuming, of course, that he is still alive when he gets back, which is only an assumption for any of the four of us. But they don’t give up. Two private letters to my wife, Lurvy, I assume from ex-boyfriends. And a letter to all of us from poor Trish Bover’s widower, or maybe husband, depending on whether you considered Trish alive or dead:

Have you seen any trace of Trish’s ship?

Hanson Bover

Short and sweet, because that’s all he could afford, I guess. I told Vera to send him the same reply as always-“Sorry, no.” I had plenty of time to take care of that correspondence, because there was nothing for Paul C. Hall, who is me.

There is usually not much for me, which is one of the reasons I play chess a lot. Payter tells me I’m lucky to be on the mission at all, and I suppose I wouldn’t be if he hadn’t put his own money into it, financing his whole family. Also his skills, but we’ve all done that. Payter is a food chemist. I’m a structural engineer. My wife, Dorema-it’s better not to call her that, and we mostly call her “Lurvy”-is a pilot. Damn good one, too. Lurvy is younger than I am, but she was on Gateway for six years. Never scored, came back next to broke, but she learned a lot. Not just about piloting. Sometimes I look at Lurvy’s arms with the five Out bangles, one for each of her Gateway missions; and her hands, hard and sure on the ship controls, warm and warming when we touch. . . I don’t know much about what happened to her on Gateway. Perhaps I shouldn’t.

And the other one is her little jailbait half-sister, Janine. Ak, Janine! Sometimes she was fourteen years old, and sometimes forty. When she was fourteen she wrote her gushy letters to her movie stars and played with her toys-a ragged, stuffed armadillo, a Heechee prayer fan (real) and a fire-pearl (fake) which her father had bought her to tempt her onto the trip. When she was forty what she mostly wanted to play with was me. And there we are. In each other’s pockets for three and a half years. Trying not to need to commit murder.

We were not the only ones in space. Once in a great while we would get a message from our nearest neighbors, the Triton base or the exploring ship that had got itself lost. But Triton, with Neptune, was well ahead of us in its orbit-round-trip message time, three weeks. And the explorer had no power to waste on us, though they were now only fifty light-hours away. It was not like a friendly natter over the garden hedge.

So what I did, I played a lot of chess with our shipboard computer.

There’s not an awful lot to do on the way to the Oort except play games, and besides it was a good way to stay noncombatant in The War Between Two Women that continually raged in our little ship. I can stand my father-in-law, if I have to. Mostly he keeps to himself, as much as he can in four hundred cubic meters. I can’t always stand his two crazy daughters, even though I love them both.

All this would have been easier to take if we had had more room-I told myself that-but there is no way to go for a cooling-down walk around the block when you are in a spaceship. Once In a while a quick EVA to check the side-cargos, yes, and then I could look around-the sun still the brightest star in its constellation, but only just; Sirius ahead of us was brighter, and so was Alpha Centauri, off below the ecliptic and to the side. But that was only an hour at a time, and then back inside the ship. Not a luxury ship. A human-made antique of a spaceship that was never planned for more than a six-month mission and that we had to stay cooped up in for three and a half years. My God! We must have been crazy to sign up. What good is a couple million dollars when getting it drives you out of your head?

Our shipboard brain was a lot easier to get along with. When I played chess with her, hunched over the console with the big headset over my ears, I could shut out Lurvy and Janine. The brain’s name was Vera, which was just my own conceit and had nothing to do with her, I mean its, gender. Or with her truthfulness, either, because I had instructed her she could joke with me sometimes. When Vera was downlinked with the big computers that were in orbit or back on Earth, she was very, very smart. But she couldn’t carry on a conversation that way, because of the 25-day round-trip communications time, and so when she wasn’t in link she was very, very dumb- “Pawn to king’s rook four, Vera.”

“Thank you. . .” Long pause, while she checked my parameters to make sure who she was talking to and what she was supposed to be doing. “Paul. Bishop takes knight.”