Celia hadn’t known the experiments were illegal. There had to be some reason they went outside Echo, but she thought it had more to do with taxes or something like that.
Maynard said, “Wilson said you had a privilege. He was lying.”
“It’s challenging work. Maybe you just weren’t cut out for it.”
“People like us line up to take the job. There’s always more. But there’s nothing out in deep space but criminals and Elam Inn.”
Elam’s where they stored the worst scoring Shudders. Celia thought, let’s hope the Sorter really is wrong. She admitted that when she got close to the real thing, she wasn’t always so sure. Better steer clear, just in case. Like Wilson said.
Maynard’s head snapped up. He said, “Do you hear that?”
“No.” she said. But then she did. Someone was singing, the voice rattling through the air ducts. It was Trumbul.
* * * *
“He won’t remember any of this.” Said Maynard. “It’s just a dream to him.”
Celia didn’t like this at all. Trumbul snored in his bunk, full of the tranquilizers Maynard had shot into him. They’d found him wandering the decks, crooning about his lover bird wasting away in prison and about the tea parties they used to enjoy. The falsetto, semi-Australian accent was a little unnerving. When he saw them, he muttered something obscene and rushed at them. He hit Celia first, and wrapped his big hands around her neck. They were calloused and felt like rags that had hardened from too much grease mopping. It turned out it was good he went for Celia, because that left Maynard free to fire a tiny glass dart into Trumbul’s neck. All of sudden, Celia appreciated the boy’s concise state of mind. Somewhere deep down, he had to be as stark raving mad as the other space nuts – but at least he kept a cap on it, and that was good if he was the one carrying the weapon.
And yet, that didn’t really overcome Celia’s realization that they were in deep space now, in the hands of a captain who’d just lost an oar.
She said to Maynard, “You carry that tranq all the time?”
“Yeah.”
“So this happens a lot?”
It was a rhetorical question.
Celia watched Trumbul’s eyelids, which didn’t move. She said, “He isn’t dreaming now.”
“But his eyes were wide open when he attacked you. You must’ve seen him.”
Celia left the room, and Maynard followed her. She stopped and let him catch up. She leaned against a bulkhead and searched her pockets. She found another smoke and lit it up, the tiny flame illuminating the hall’s dark metal before it flickered out.
“He’s a goddam Shudder.” She said.
Maynard scowled and nodded.
“He’s a goddam Shudder.” She started to cough. Then she spit.
Maynard said, “Like you said, you’re a scientist. You know better.”
“Doesn’t make Trumbul any more sane.”
“He’s watched out for me.” Maynard fingered the tranq gun. “So I look out for him.”
“Very sweet.” She spat again. She was starting to feel sick. Then Maynard left her. She saw his form in the near total darkness, moving up a ladder. “Hey.” She said. “Where do you think you’re going?”
“Course correction.” His voice echoed. “We’ve got to answer a distress call.”
He disappeared in a bulkhead. Celia waited a moment, then crushed her smoke and went after him.
* * * *
Celia banged her head against the top of the access tube and rolled out onto the flight deck. She popped up, feeling her head wobble, bracing herself against a beam of cold metal. The two smoke sticks and the air she’d lost in her tussle with the captain had left her brains begging for mercy. She’d been trying to follow Maynard, but when her eyes focused, all she saw was an unbroken star field spreading out before her. Above and below, where the window stopped and the cabin began, there were soft blue and green lights. Then she looked far to one side, and saw Maynard’s silhouette blocking out the stars. Just to the left of that, out in the open vacuum, a round hole passed over the distant sun. Elam.
She stood next to Maynard and watched his hands fly over the controls. One of them came near to her, and she placed her own on it. He stopped, but his eyes were fixed on the firmament outside.
“Stop it.” She said. Her hands shook. Now the calm was passing, and she was feeling the adrenaline rush. For a moment, her head told her to light up again; she needed it to figure out how to get herself the hell out of this – but there was no time. She just had to close her eyes, breathe, and open them again.
Maynard’s other hand moved over a switch, and the stars swung until Elam reflected sunlight back at the Dominick. It lit up, a massive silver ball flashing into existence before them.
Maynard said, “As much as I owe him, the captain doesn’t get me. My experiments didn’t scare me. They were no accident. And I found what I needed to know.”
This changed things.
He turned to her, the lenses of his glasses reflecting Elam’s sphere. Celia’s mind lurched down a breezy corridor. She thought, try to get to the end before we get to Elam. Then what? Priorities – figure that out after you get the data.
Before she could say anything, he said, “You’re the type of girl who’s always thought she’d be great someday.”
“What girl isn’t?” Fine time to be coy.
“You wouldn’t mind getting an edge from a guy you think is too feeble minded to take the credit.”
“Maynard, I…” But she dropped it. It was true. But damn it, she needed this.
“Forget it. Even Newton stood on the shoulders of giants. And you’re no sweet Newton.”
She tossed her head without answering. Her eyes flipped to the circle growing larger in the window.
Maynard said, “As I said, there are no accidents.” He pulled his hand out from under hers and groped in his pockets until he produced a wad of folded papers. He pressed them into her hand saying, “I’m giving you this because you need to have it, not because you want it. If you ever confuse one with the other, that will just be the end of everything. So don’t do it.”
“I-I,” she tried to say. Now her voice was failing. Elam was rushing at them. “I also want to help the Shudders. I’m not a total jerk.”
“How did you get here?”
“The S-Sorter. Wha’ did you thunk? Now I’ve got a frocking chance. They irony hasn’t escooped me.” She heard her voice and knew something was wrong with her.
“At the moment when the administration was about to give up on you, you got a chance to prove that they were wrong about you. Maybe you should repay the favor.”
“To what? The Sthorter?”
“We’re both scientists. The human psyche, with all that nonsense about souls and karma and IQ, was the last victim of superstition. The Sorter represents the triumph of science.”
No. It’s just another superstition, she thought. But she couldn’t say it. Celia sighed and put her hand on her brow. Screw it; this wasn’t going to go anywhere. She glanced back at Elam, twice as big now as it was before.
Maynard said, “The moment the Sorter said something we didn’t like, we dropped it. But did we ever ask if we’d understood what it was trying to tell us in the first place?”
He stood up, leaving her hunched over the seat where he’d been. She couldn’t move. She’d had two smokes in a row before, and it hadn’t been like this. Maynard wrapped his hand around her own, the one with the folded papers. He guided it to her pocket, where she dropped the papers inside. Then he moved his fingers up her arm, where she felt them brush something that caused a sharp pain. She looked down and saw him plucking a tiny glass dart from the vein in her wrist. A teardrop of blood slid in the direction of her elbow. Then everything was black.
* * * *
Celia was born on Leo. She was ten when she went to Earth for the first time. All those years, the planet rolled beneath her bedroom window – blue, cloudy, graceful. When she set foot on t
he ground, it was to New York – bursting with people and their filth. It was awful, and she was holed up in the motel; paralyzed with dreams of the entire globe splitting down its middle and swallowing her. She was buried in a pit with thousands of naked and clammy zombies – all squirming and clawing at her and the dirt which entombed them together.
Some find the vacuum isolating and tin cans claustrophobic, but she’d dreaded going back to Terra for university training. She’d placed her hopes in climbing back into the fresh, clean nothingness. Damn the air, the trees and water – they all drew crowds.
* * * *
Before she opened her eyes, Celia heard the deafening sound of her own breathing and knew that things were very, very wrong. To her left was Elam, glistening like a giant silver Christmas ornament. Near one side of it extended a row of tubes with engines stuck on, the Dominick. The curved acrylic of her mask made a prism at the edges, where thin scimitars of multi-colored light cut across her peripheral vision. By habit, she pressed her gloved fingers together, to feel the comfort of the gemstone’s sharp tip – but it was gone. She thought, I can’t believe it – he shot me out like a cannon ball and took Helen’s ring just to screw with me. Glorious sonofabitch.
She willed her heart to slow, willed her mind to reenter that moment in her childhood, back on Leo, when her father had demonstrated the use of an exo-suit. Sometimes, army brats broke into the air locks, suited up, and got their asses blown out into space. Celia’s dad knew she was too smart, and not quite boy enough, to pull stunts like that – but peer pressure’s a potent thing. He’d always taught her what to do, just in case.
She controlled the suit’s computers with her eyes. She tried to awaken the nearest positioning buoy on the comm, but all she got on the HUD was a line of text repeating, “initializing connection…” She was too far into deep space. She altered the comm’s device driver with a simple code patch Dad had taught her. The comm was like an electronic hand searching the vacuum, hoping that the buoy would respond in kind with a hand of its own, and that by shaking they could establish a connection. Using her code patch, Celia saw that the buoy was responding, but its signal was so faint that its fingers slipped and fell out of grasping range, over and over again. But now that she could at least see its dim spike over the cosmic noise, she could measure the time it took to reply. She breathed, counting the receding tick marks on the HUD.
The buoy was blue shifting.
Her heart shuddered. She was hurtling back into the treaty zone – and Maynard hadn’t just ejected her, he’d launched her. Celia found two other, more distant buoys, and got just enough from them to triangulate her trajectory. Maynard had pointed her at Echo Rim. It was a careful job, too. She’d pass close enough for them to pick her up, but not so close she risked smashing into it. And he’d gone to all this trouble even though her chances of surviving until she got that close to Echo were none at all.
She was a message in a bottle. It wasn’t quite the contribution to science she’d hoped to make.
Her choices were these. Die. Or, hope to make it to Echo alive so the university could turn her into soap. Or, get back to Dominick and hope she could find something there that would give her leverage.
Celia figured what kind of torque and vectors she needed to reverse direction, and applied little spurts of power to her thrusters to get her swung around. She aimed her head at the Dominick.
* * * *
She blasted the thrusters to slow herself, until they ran out of gas. She collided with the hull hard enough to send the stars spinning around her head. But when they settled, she still had two gloves wrapped around one of the Dominick’s exterior service handles. Celia dragged herself along a row of handles until she was on top of the cargo bay doors. There was an air lock rotator there, with grooves for a mechanical arm to fit into. Of course, there was no way to open it from the outside without unlocking it from the inside. So she shoved her feet into a pair of service handles, and she stuck her gloves into the grooves. The rotator turned just a little, until it banged against the locking arm inside the door, making a satisfying boom that traversed from the hull into her suit. Celia pulled the rotator counter clockwise, back to its starting position, and spun it again with more force. It made another, louder noise, and bounced her off the hull. She strained on her leg muscles, pulling herself back for another blow. She repeated this tedious experiment several more times, attempting to use the lock as a giant door knocker. She tried to make a pattern, first one knock then two close together and then three. If they were either random or evenly spaced, they could be mistaken for mechanical noises. She hoped that someone besides Maynard would figure them out and let her in. Chances were, he’d gone aboard Elam. That seemed to be what he was after.
To her astonishment, the locking arm clanked aside and the rotator spun on its own. Celia yanked her gloves from the groove to keep them from getting meshed inside the lock. The doors parted enough for her to climb inside, after which the doors shut, the grav took hold, and she fell hard against the floor. Her head throbbed and she gasped, and the rest was a blur. She passed in and out of awareness. There were many voices, or maybe just one, mediated as a rumble through the helmet. There was a knife cutting the suit off her.
* * * *
Maynard dragged the blade once more across the skin of his arm, slowly now, watching the last faint hairs break off and stick to the razor’s edge. Having shaved his entire body, he took the syringe from the dresser and pulled off its plastic wrapping. He evacuated the air and held the needle point above his blood vessel for a moment before pricking himself and pressing the plunger. He thought he heard a faint knocking somewhere in the far distance, traveling through Dominick’s decks and arterial passages, transmitted to his feet as a weak rumble. Then it grew stronger, and he thought for a single terrifying second that he’d done it all wrong and given himself an air embolism – is this what it felt like? But then the sensation was gone, and he was left standing in his room, still alone and naked and with just a few minutes to spare before his passing over began. He placed the ring he’d taken from Celia on his right hand. The moissanite gem was a deep black. It was made of the rarest form of silicon carbide, having traveled from the center of the Milky Way from the time of its very birth to the surface of the Earth. The Sorter had delivered it to him at last.
Maynard dressed in pristine linen clothes and walked barefoot to the cargo hold. He paused at the entrance to the chamber, which was lit only by the illuminators in the bottoms of the cryo chambers. When he’d brought the prisoners from Elam aboard, he’d had to destroy the fetuses. This was unfortunate, but he was almost sure they weren’t formed enough to matter. Now the tubes encased every adult Shudder he’d rescued from that place. They were about to meet their peace. They were shaved and dressed as he was. He had given them the same time-released tranquilizer he’d just administered to himself, and he’d suspended them in the goo. They were still alive, waiting for him and for that final moment. And at the end of one row there was an empty tube for himself. He was exhausted and ready to go.
He stopped at one of the chambers and put his hand on the glass. With his finger, he traced the numbers tattooed down the side of the woman’s arm. He’d never known her name; only this.
“Number 242601.” He whispered. “Six zero one. Six zero one.” He tapped the finger on the glass; the tiny little click of the rock echoed off the walls.
Maynard turned back to the path between two rows of tubes, and looked down at the floor and stopped. The floor was dented and scratched. Given that this was the cargo hold, such things weren’t uncommon. But Maynard had become familiar with them over his years on board the Dominick. This was new. He raised his head and saw that the scrapes made a trail leading back to the air lock doors.
He hung his head. He half thought he might let it be, but all these people whom he’d taken such pains to help weren’t ready yet. He wasn’t ready yet. It wasn’t time to go. He couldn’t risk that bitch ruining all of thi
s, and so he looked for whatever weapon he could find. A length of steel twine would have to do. Counting down the minutes before the drugs he’d injected into himself took their effect, Maynard began following the trail back to wherever Celia was hiding.
* * * *
Celia drifted in and out. The dreams revisited her. Earth. The cities. Burial and chaotic scratching at the soil.
She was underneath that claustrophobia again – the kind of terror brought on by the unseemly bigness of it all. Only this time it was the Sorter. Ticking, ticking. The Sorter, that six square inches of quantum entanglement, was itself a million billion human minds squirming in a kind of virtual pit. It had been fine when she saw it from a distance, looking unified and whole and reassuring in its benign uselessness. Every time it was wrong, it bolstered her faith that it was a sham, astonishing only full idiots. But goddamit if it wasn’t right about the Shudders. Killers. Only not in the way true believers imagined. So that blew the story open. What was it really? Maynard was right about one thing, she hadn’t understood what it was trying to say, had she? Only he didn’t have any more of a clue than she or anyone. He couldn’t. She was sure of that. So we dance to its little tune and we see where it takes us.
* * * *
Celia regained her senses in total silence. She lay on a table. She was in the infirmary, the last place she wanted to be. The room was dark and pungent. It was more like a handyman’s workshop than a hospital, with dented metal tables, unsanitary tools on hooks, and a pile of bloody cloths swept into a corner. Freddy was slumped with them, looking dead or comatose. He had a copy of “Leaves of Grass” splayed open on his chest, neat block letters spelling “Freddy Kidding” across the cover.
On another side was another table, this one occupied by the captain, who was also less than wholly aware. He was just close enough that Celia could reach out a hand and touch his own. Then she snatched it back. Cold. Dead. There’s your answer.
Celia’s walk in the great outdoors had left her stiff and sore, but she managed to shuffle off the edge and land on all fours. The pain was terrific. She eased herself up, glanced over the hanging tools, found something that looked sharp and battery powered, and then hobbled over to Freddy to check his pulse. She almost got close enough to touch the side of his neck, but then he snapped up and tossed a fist in her jaw that sent her spinning back to the ground. The implement clattered down near her head.