Space Eater (14 page)

FACTOTUM decided, or its computer decided, to make a move while I was still coming back from that first trip to the far end. Hanging at crazy angles from the axis rail, it spiraled from the bright end and the tanks to the dark end and the strange airlock, and back again. That was all; a routine inspection? I suddenly wanted it to take notice of me, though, and shouted after it as it whirred overhead. The metallic echoes traveled up and down the cylinder for whole seconds. They made the place seem even lonelier.

I carried on exploring: the tanks, an easy landmark; a couple of pressure suits which had to be a lousy fit for one of us since they were the same size; reserves of bagged food and water; a computer console that never stopped winking to itself; and away from all these, across the cylinder where it wouldn’t interfere with electronics, the original narrow “staff” holding the minigate’s guts. As I came closer to it, I felt the white-noise tickle of the jammer effect, and my vision acted like a TV screen tuned slightly off-channel.

The minigate’s tubular housing was clamped down, with couplings for pipes and such. Just now the aperture was sealed and of course the expensive gateway at the Earth end would be turned off. A and B

and C and D. Take the cork out of the minigate now, without Earth tuned in, and our air would whoosh into vacuum millions of kilometers away in this system—assuming I’d understood Ellan’s and Wui’s explanations. There was no way to switch it off: sealed, trapped, “eternal” battery—I guessed that was so you couldn’t cancel the jammer effect and use electronic probes on the secret innards.

Next I found a plastic case near the comp console: there was machine script stamped on it: KRAZ

PHASE II DEVICE SAMPLE & SPEC+++SECRET/MILIT/LEVEL9+++DESTROY IF NOT

REQUIRED. Inside was a microfiche that at some stage had been rolled up tight, and an odd little circuit board not quite right as an electronic board, more like the MT configurations in the book I shouldn’t have seen. (I got the idea that the actual physical pattern of signal carriers around the distortion tube is important in MT—electronics you can lay out any old how, usually.) This had to be the sample gadget we waved at Pallas colonists as a last resort—in which situation we were supposed to be up here while, down below, they tuned into our onboard minigate. That plan still didn’t make me feel too happy, computers or no. Still: one thing they do spell out in the Force is that if you get insufficient data there’s a reason, and rather than keep thinking of queries you should devote your time to morally rewarding activities such as picking your nose. You just have to hope that the reason you’re not told everything isn’t because part of the plan is to stuff you deep into the shit...

Also there was a finger-thick steel tube about twenty centimeters long: it was marked AMBASSADORIAL CREDENTIALS FOR DELIVERY TO PROPER AUTHORITIES. That I’d known about.

It was around my third bowel movement since leaving the tank—there wasn’t a clock here—that FACTOTUM came whirring along to adjust Rossa’s tank pipelines. Lenses peered down from it. The yellow goop drained away, probably jettisoned into vacuum, and the lid flipped back, and ... all the same things as when I came out. She ignored me until she’d cleaned up, pulled on the too-huge clothes and taken some water; I vaguely wanted to help but obviously I wasn’t needed. With her dungarees was a bulky armband or bracelet that hadn’t been with mine but must have had a mention in her briefing: Rossa made a face and put it on. Then she sat shakily on the edge of her tank and said, “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?”

“The name’s still Jacklin. You all right? How d’you feel?” She sighed. I’d missed another password. “I feel ... I feel as though I’ve been ground into small particles and reassembled with the wrong kind of glue.

Which is just about correct, isn’t it? Doesn’t it seem to you that you could come apart at the least violent motion -- ?” She shook her head with a quick jerk; it must have hurt her because it hurt me too.

“Take care of yourself,” I said as I grabbed my own head to stop it flying off the way it wanted to. “At least we made it pretty much in one piece.” That wasn’t quite the thing to say, either.

“Eventually. And
now
what do we do? When I volunteered for the next thing to a suicide mission, I never thought past ... the next thing to suicide.”

“What Ngabe did to us ... I wouldn’t call it suicide, no way.”

“I’m not going to think any more about that. It was obscene, yes, but if only it had been the
end
. Like a mountain ridge: you climb up and up toward the supreme moment when you reach the top, and instead there’s another ridge up ahead. And there’s nothing to do but go slogging on, however much it hurts.”

She shivered.

“Rossa ... keep hold of yourself. This isn’t the place to go sick—damned if I stuff you back in there when there’s no one else here to talk to.”

She looked up at me, quick and sudden like a bird, eyes bright. “Is that a promise? If I had an accident out there—“ She waved at the mechanical junk that stretched away into the half-dark.

By now I was starting to get the idea that Rossa had flipped a little, maybe was going death-happy in her own peculiar Comm way. I groped around for the right things to say—sometimes you could talk a man down before he went right over the brink. “Look. You signed up to get away from Comm and their little torture kits, right?”

Rossa nodded. I carried on, speaking quieter as I got more afraid of what I was saying. The computer might be taping all this. “Look then, you’ve got away. You’re 162 light-years away from them now. I can’t
order
you to stick a pin in yourself to signal back if you don’t want to. You needn’t take the rough road back home at all.” My own wobbly feelings about duty and how I’d been screwed up came into focus as I was talking. “That’s it. We do our best with the blasted plan, but whichever way it turns out, if that place out there is even halfway livable, you can
stay
there. Bloody hell, I’d stay there myself rather than trust being stripped down by a FACTOTUM program...”

Well, why not? Maybe I was trying to commit myself while I still remembered in full how bad it had been.

A sniff: “You’re a Forceman.
You
will end up following orders, whatever you say.”

“You know yourself what bloody Operation Kraz orders say, I mean what they don’t say. There’s no order says we have to go home, none at all.” I put on a sour grin there. “Suppose that means they don’t see us getting that far.”

Something like a smile, this time. “That still leaves them ahead of me, Ken. I never really thought about getting this far.”

“Ahead of me too. I’m a Forceman, remember? Never do any thinking at all. The hell with the operation for now. You’ll feel better if you eat.”

I went for some chunks of the super, vitaminized, mineralized, high protein, carbohydrate balanced and fairly disgusting food mix, and we ate more or less in silence. Except Rossa muttered something about “if anything could make me feel nostalgic for Tunnel—“

Afterward I told her how I’d explored, and found the things that had worried me didn’t make too much sense to her either. Which was encouraging—I’d had the thought that maybe it all made perfect sense but I was too stupid or trip-shocked to see it. Rossa frowned a little when I came to the too-big airlock, and said: “They must have ejected the satellites by that route. No ... they needn’t be at all big, need they?”

“Way I understood it, they hadn’t much more than a tape-loop, transmitter and compressed gas jet to take them around the moon. No hurry—they just fall into Pallas orbit after a few weeks. The one to warn them we’re coming might not have got there yet.”

Rossa looked even more thoughtful. “I have the
feeling
that we spent a long time dreaming in those terrible coffins. I had dreams...” But she didn’t offer to tell me about them, and I didn’t ask. My own playback of a cruiser run had been a lot worse than anything actually happening in the dream should have made me feel.

A week in the tank was big bad medicine. I’d only known one guy stay in longer, and he could never think straight afterward. But physically, I guessed, we’d been smashed up more than he had—perhaps we’d been in longer than a week, two weeks, three weeks? It was too late to ask how much of a rebuild job either of us was now, how much nonessential muscle and bone had been shoveled into disposal drums back at Tunnel—like the whiskery old Force gag about how to lose ten pounds of unsightly fat.

The fluid was a kind of liquid flesh matrix, it said in the manual, and it could replace one hell of a lot.

Rossa might have been thinking along those lines too. A little while afterward we were sitting together, aching together, keeping close for warmth in that echoing steel cave, waiting for something to happen; and she said, “Ken. We are not the same persons who went into that Tunnel laboratory however long it was ago. That Rossa Corman is dead now. What’s sitting here is nothing but an imitation, a zombie.”

“Come off that,” I said. “That makes me an imitation of an imitation to the fortysomethingth power—you’d think I’d have faded right out. And zombie is just another turd word the slummies throw at Forcemen when they want to know how it feels to have their teeth sticking out the back of their neck.”

“I hope you’ll let my teeth stay where they are if I say it’s almost fair comment. Ken, you
are
different.

You don’t seem to think or react quite as a human should. And you know what they say about Forcemen who’ve passed too long a while in Combat...”

Some kind of memory connection was trying to join up in my head, but couldn’t quite make it. I could almost feel the dud contacts sparking and smoking inside. “What do they say about us?” I asked her.

“I’m being irrational,” she said almost to herself. Her hands were locked around her knees as she sat by me on the hard floor; she tightened the grip a little more. “But I am so hollow; I left so much behind in the sewers underneath space. It’s cold inside my head now. If there were something warm enough to make me real again...”

“It’s not too cold really—there’s a sun out there somewhere, a giant G4 the briefing said.”

“Precisely,” she said, voice like an icicle with sawteeth. “That’s what they say about you. Here we sit all these unthinkable light-years from home, three-quarters wrecked by that terrible trip. I am seriously worrying whether I’m even still human, and you don’t seem able to understand. I go fishing for some hint of human contact, anything at all to make this bearable, and you respond with the celebrated Force impersonation of a dead fish. You said the right words a minute ago. I’m a zombie, perhaps, but you’re forty times a zombie.”

I spread out my hands in as much of a peace gesture as I could manage. “OK. I’m a bit slow on the uptake with new people. That’s because I’ve sweated through training with a lot of guys who’ve come to think much the same way as me. That’s all. Just spell out what you’re saying. You ... You want to screw or something?” I could feel her, warm against me even through a couple of layers of coarse FACTOTUM-made clothing.

“You sound
so
thrilled by the prospect. But that’s as basic a contact as you can achieve—can’t you wake up and feel that?” A pause; another tiny smile. “Try it then. After all, if only Einstein’s conclusions still stood, I can’t have done this for 162 years at the least ... and that’s a long time.”

“In the Force we’ve got this tradition of volunteering for ‘unusual and hazardous’ missions,” I told her and wondered whether I was joking. Somewhere there was a clack of metal on metal as the robot manipulator did its housework, which at the moment meant dismantling the classified Force tanks.

So we ended up trying it, lying on the wads of soft plastic sheet that were the nearest thing to bedding we could find in this dump. I tried as hard as I could, because it seemed to me Rossa needed help; she just lay there and wound her arms tight around me with an awful look of desperation in her face. We tended to jounce off into the air, still locked together. And nothing happened, nothing at all; I liked her all right in a sort of way, but I’d definitely moved past this kind of thing, this sort of distraction from getting ahead in the Force. But she was warm, and very small without the clothes, and holding her was, well, restful. I couldn’t help wondering...

Afterward things seemed to have changed between us. I felt a little bad because I hadn’t been able to give Rossa what she wanted. I expected her to feel bad in something like the same way because she hadn’t had it: instead she grew brighter and smiled more, and didn’t push me that way again. As time went trickling past, and the comp console lights winked faster and faster while FACTOTUM made more and more of its dangling trips about the station, I fumbled my way to the thought that maybe Rossa had got me pigeonholed now as someone unfortunate and feeble, and maybe she’d managed to boost her ego just with being able to think that. Or maybe not, of course; I still wasn’t too good at unraveling people.

Thirteen

“The next question,” she said, sitting cross-legged on the lumpy plastic, “is the question of how big Central’s big lie truly is. Everybody was all too ready to use that phrase, wouldn’t you say? Very well—what’s the most outrageous version of the truth you can think of?”

“Oh ... We aren’t really 162 light-years away after all, we’re just out in orbit, and they’re testing something that’s bad for people, something like an AP reactor they don’t dare try down below—hey, yes, that’s why we feel lousy, it’s not the trip, just the side effects of this AP thing. How’s that?”

She wrinkled up her nose in a way the old frozen Rossa of Tunnel wouldn’t have. “Terrible. It must be possible to attack the question with Occam’s razor and minimize the number of assumptions.”

“Maybe. It’s official bullshit you’re talking about now, remember. Admin’s minds just don’t work the logical way you want, and Command’s no better...”

Corvus Station shouted at us. It had taken to doing that: machine-made syllables put together by the computer in an unholy crackle. “ATTENTION. THREE HOURS TO ORBITAL SEPARATION, REPEAT, THREE HOURS. THANK YOU.” Sooner or later we were going places.