Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction (549 page)

“Still,” I said, “it seems odd.”

“‘Odd’ ain’t enough. Weird, now, that might carry some weight. Crazy. Run amok. They qualify for my attention. But ‘odd’ I can live with. You want to worry about this, I can’t stop you. Me, I got more important things to do. And so do you.”

“I’m doing my job, don’t you worry.”

“Okay. Tell me about it.”

Through the glaze of reflection on his faceplate, I could only make out his eyes and his forehead, and these gave no clue to his mood.

“There’s not very much to tell. As far as I can determine Samuelson’s pure through and through. There’s a curious lack of depth to the background material, a few dead ends in the investigative reports. Deceased informants. Vanished employers. That sort of thing. It doesn’t feel quite right to me, but it’s nothing I could bring to the corporation. And it does appear that his elder brother was murdered by the Magnificence, which establishes at least one of his
bona fides
.”

“If Samuelson’s part of the Magnificence, I…”

“‘If,’ my ass!” I said. “You know damned well he is.”

“I was going to say, his brother’s murder is just the kind of tactic they like to use in order to draw suspicion away from one of their own. Hell, he may have hated his brother.”

“Or he may have loved him and wanted the pain.”

Gerald grunted.

“I’ve isolated fourteen files that have a sketchiness reminiscent of Samuelson’s,” I said. “Of course that doesn’t prove anything. Most of them are administration and most are relatively new on Solitaire. But only a couple are his close associates.”

“That makes it more likely they’re all dirty. They don’t believe in bunching up. I’ll check into it.” I heard a burst of static over my earphones, which meant that he had let out a heavy sigh. “The damn thing is,” he went on, “Samuelson might not be the lead dog. Whoever’s running things might be keeping in the shadows for now.”

“No, not a chance,” I said. “Samuelson’s too lovely in the part.”

A construction sled, a boxy thing of silver struts powered by a man in a rocket pack, went arcing up from the zero physics lab and boosted toward one of the assembly platforms; all manner of objects were lashed to the struts, some of them—mostly tools, vacuum welders and such—trailing along in its wake, giving the sled a raggedy, gypsy look.

“Those explosives you got stashed,” Gerald said, staring after the sled.

“They’re safe.”

“I hope so. We didn’t have ’em, they might have moved on us by now. Done a hostage thing. Or maybe just blown something up. I’m pretty sure nothing else has been brought on station, so you can just keep a close watch on that shit. That’s our hole card.”

“I don’t like waiting for them to make the first move.”

“I know you don’t. Was up to you, we’d be stiffening citizens right and left, and figuring out later if they guilty or not. That’s how come you got the teeth, and I’m holding the leash.”

Though his face was hidden, I knew he was not smiling.

“Your way’s not always the right of it, Gerald,” I said. “Sometimes my way’s the most effective, the most secure.”

“Yeah, maybe. But not this time. This is too bullshit, this mess. Too many upper-level people involved. We scratch the wrong number off the page, we be down the tube in a fucking flash. You don’t want to be scuffling around back on Earth, do you? I sure as hell don’t.”

“I’d prefer it to having my lungs sucked out through my mouth like Thirwell.”

“Would you, now? Me, I’m not so sure. I want a life that’s more than just gnawing bones, John. I ain’t up to that kind of hustle no more. And I don’t believe you are, either.”

We stood without speaking for a minute or so. It was getting near time for a shift change, and everywhere bits of silver were lifting from the blotched surface of the station, flocking together in the brilliant beams of light shooting from the transport bays, their movements as quick and fitful as the play of dust in sunlight.

“You’re thinking too much these days, man,” Gerald said. “You’re not sniffing the air, you’re not feeling things here.” He made a slow, ungainly patting motion above his gut.

“That’s rot!”

“Is it? Listen to this. ‘Life has meaning but no theme. There is no truth we can assign to it that does not in some way lessen the bright flash of being that is its essential matter. There is no lesson learned that does not signal a
misapprehension of our stars. There is no moral to this darkness.’ That’s some nice shit. Extremely profound. But the man who wrote that, he’s not watching the water for sharks. He’s too busy thinking.”

“I’m so pleased,” I said, “you’ve been able to access my computer once again. I know the childlike joy it brings you. And I’m quite sure Ernesto is absolutely thrilled at having a peek.”

“Practice makes perfect.”

“Any further conclusions you’ve drawn from poking around in my personal files?”

“You got one helluva fantasy life. Or else that Arlie, man, she’s about half some kind of beast. How come you write all that sex stuff down?”

“Prurience,” I said. “Damn! I don’t know why I put up with this shit from you.”

“Well, I do. I’m the luckiest Chief of Security in the system, see, “cause I’ve got me a big, bad dog who’s smart and loyal, and”—he lifted one finger of his gauntleted hand to signify that this was key—“who has no ambition to take my job.”

“Don’t be too sure.”

“No, man, you don’t want my job. I mean, you’d accept it if it was handed to you, but you like things the way they are. You always running wild and me trying to cover your ass.”

“I hope you’re not suggesting that I’m irresponsible.”

“You’re responsible, all right. You just wouldn’t want the kind of responsibility I’ve got. It’d interfere with your style. The way you move around the station, talking bullshit to the people, everything’s smooth, then all of a sudden you go Bam! Bam! and take somebody down, then the next second you’re talking about Degas or some shit, and then, Bam! somebody else on the floor, you say, Oops, shit, I guess I messed up, will you please forgive me, did I ever tell you ’bout Paris in the springtime when all the poets turn into cherryblossoms, Bam! It’s fucking beautiful, man. You got half the people so scared they crawl under the damn rug when they see you coming, and the other half loves you to death, and most all of ’em would swear you’re some kind of Robin Hood, you whip ’em ’cause you love ’em and it’s your duty, and you only use your powers for goodness and truth. They don’t understand you like I do. They don’t see you’re just a dangerous, amoral son of a bitch.”

“Is this the sort of babble that goes into your personnel reports?”

“Not hardly. I present you as a real citizen. A model of integrity and courage and resourcefulness.”

“Thanks for that,” I said coldly.

“Just don’t ever change, man. Don’t ever change.”

The sleds that had lifted from the station had all disappeared, but others were materializing from the blackness, tiny points of silver and light coming home from the assembly platforms, looking no more substantial than the clouds of barnacles. Finally Gerald said, “I got things to take care of.” He waved at the barnacles. “Leave this shit alone, will you? After everything else gets settled, maybe then we’ll look into it. Right now all you doing is wasting my fucking time.”

I watched him moving off along the curve of the module toward the airlock, feeling somewhat put off by his brusque reaction and his analysis. I respected him a great deal as a professional, and his clinical assessment of my abilities made me doubt that his respect for me was so unqualified.

There was a faint click against the side of my helmet. I reached up and plucked off a barnacle. Lying in the palm of my gauntlet, its plates closed, its olive surface threaded with gold and crimson, it seemed cryptic, magical, rare, like something one would find after a search lasting half a lifetime, a relic buried with a wizard king, lying in his ribcage in place of a heart. I had shifted my position so that the light from the port behind me cast my shadow over the surface, and, a neurological change having been triggered by the shift in light intensity, some of the barnacles in the shadow were opening their plates and probing the vacuum with stubby grey “tongues,” trying to feed. It was an uncanny sight, the way their “tongues” moved, stiffly, jerkily, like bad animation, like creatures in a grotesque garden hallucinated by Hawthorne or Baudelaire, and standing there among them, with the technological hodgepodge of the station stretching away in every direction, I felt as if I were stranded in a pool of primitive time, looking out onto the future. It was, I realized, a feeling akin to that I’d had in London whenever I thought about the space colonies, the outposts strung across the system.

Gnawing bones.

As my old Classics professor would have said, Gerald’s metaphor was “a happy choice.”

And now I had time to consider, I realized that Gerald was right: after all the years on Solitaire, I would be ill-suited for life in London, my instincts rusty, incapable of readjusting to the city’s rabid intensity. But I did not believe he was right to wait for Samuelson to move against us. Once the Magnificence set their sights on a goal, they were not inclined to use half-measures. I was too disciplined to break ranks with Gerald, but there was nothing to prevent me from preparing myself for the day of judgement. Samuelson might bring us down, I told myself, but I would see to it that he would not outlive us. I was not aware, however, that judgement day was almost at hand.

* * * *

Perhaps it was the trouble of those days that brought Arlie and me closer together, that reawakened us to the sweetness of our bodies and the sharp mesh of our souls, to all those things we had come to take for granted. And perhaps Bill had something to do with it. As dismal an item as he was, it may be his presence served—as Arlie had suggested—to supply us with some missing essential of warmth or heart. But whatever the cause, it was a great good time for us, and I came once again to perceive her not merely as someone who could cure a hurt or make me stop thinking for a while, but as the embodiment of my hopes. After everything I had witnessed, all the shabby, bloody evidence I had been presented of our kind’s pettiness and greed, that I could feel anything so pure for another human being…Christ, it astounded me! And if that much could happen, then why not the fulfilment of other, more improbable hopes? For instance, suppose a ship were to return with news of a habitable world. I pictured the two of us boarding, flying away, landing, being washed clean in the struggle of a stern and simple life. Foolishness, I told myself. Wild ignorance. Yet each time I fell into bed with Arlie, though the darkness that covered us seemed always imbued with a touch of black satin, with the sticky patina of the Strange Magnificence, I would sense in the back of my mind that in touching her I was flying away again, and in entering her I was making landfall on some perfect blue-green sphere. There came a night, however, when to entertain such thoughts seemed not mere folly but the height of indulgence.

It was close upon half-eleven, and the three of us, Bill, Arlie, and I, were sitting in the living room, the walls playing a holographic scenario of a white-capped sea and Alps of towering cumulus, with whales breeching and a three-masted schooner coasting on the wind, vanishing whenever it reached the corner, then reappearing on the adjoining wall. Bill and Arlie were on the sofa, and she was telling him stories about Earth, lies about the wonderful animals that lived there, trying to distract him from his obsessive nattering about the barnacles. I had just brought out several of the packet charges that Gerald and I had hidden away, and I was working at reshaping them into smaller units, a project that had occupied me for several nights. Bill had previously seemed frightened by them and had never mentioned them. That night, however, he pointed at the charges and said, “ ’Splosives?”

“Very good,” I said. “The ones we found, you and I. The ones I was working with yesterday. Remember?”

“Uh-huh.” He watched me re-insert a timer into one of the charges and then asked what I was doing.

“Making some presents,” I told him.

“Birthday presents?”

“More like Guy Fawkes Day presents.”

He had no clue as to the identity of Guy Fawkes, but he nodded sagely as though he had. “Is one for Gerald?”

“You might say they’re all for Gerald.”

He watched me a while longer, then said, “Why is it presents? Don’t ’splosives hurt?”

“ ’E’s just havin’ a joke,” Arlie said.

Bill sat quietly for a minute or so, his eyes tracking my fingers, and at last he said, “Why won’t you talk to Gerald about the barnacles? You should tell him it’s important.”

“Give it a rest, Billy,” Arlie said, patting his arm.

“What do you expect Gerald to do?” I said. “Even if he agreed with you, there’s nothing to be done.”

“Leave,” he said. “Like the barnacles.”

“What a marvellous idea! We’ll just pick up and abandon the place.”

“No, no!” he shrilled. “CPC! CPC!”

“Listen ’ere,” said Arlie. “There’s not a chance in ’ell the corporation’s goin’ to authorize usin’ the CPC for somethin’ loike that. So put it from mind, dear, won’t you?”

“Don’t need the corporation,” Bill said in a whiny tone.

“He’s got the CPC on the brain,” I said. “Every night I come in here and find him running the file.”

Arlie shushed me and asked, “What’s that you said, Bill?”

He clamped his lips together, leaned back against the wall, his head making a dark, ominous-looking interruption in the path of the schooner; a wave of bright water appeared to crash over him, sending up a white spray.

“You ’ave somethin’ to tell us, dear?”

“Be grateful for the silence,” I said.

A few seconds later Bill began to weep, to wail that it wasn’t fair, that everyone hated him.