Year's Best Scifi 8 Part 29

Geisen smiled. "Why, wherever we wish, Mother dear."

"Rowr! A world with plenty of fish, then, for me!"

The Names of All the Spirits

BY J. R. DUNN.

J. R. Dunn lives in New Jersey, which he describes as "a small, barbarous region between New York and Pennsylvania." He's sold to most of the magazines, including a.n.a.log, Asimov's, Omni, Century, and Amazing. Most of his stories have been cited on best-of-year lists, with many selected for anthologies. His novels include This Side of Judgment (1994), Days of Cain (1997), and Full Tide of Night (1998). He is an accomplished writer with a clear, lucid style.

"The Names of all the Spirits" appeared online at SciFiction, and this is its first print appearance. It concerns the isolated s.p.a.ce miners who work in the outer solar system, in an era when powerful, threatening artificial intelligences are on the loose outside the sphere of human control. But Dunn's vision of the situation, seen through the investigation of a Mandate agent into the mystery of a miner who survived when he should not have, transforms this standard SF situation in a compelling way. It was a busier sky than I was used to. The stars were invisible, outshone by an apparently solid tower of light dominating the view out the window. It was about as wide as an outstretched hand, narrowing steadily to a point high enough to make me tilt my head before twisting into a curve and vanis.h.i.+ng from sight. Or perhaps not completely so: obscured by a fog of leakage, a thin filament that might be its distant tail extended into a darkness not quite the absolute black of s.p.a.ce. At eye level another stream flowed off at a right angle, pure white to the tower's mottled yellow, ending in a sunburst bright enough to make me squint.

It was all very impressive, an undertaking of a scale you don't often find inside the system, almost astronomical in both scope and imagery. And I was impressed, on the intellectual, so-many-megatons-per-second level. But nothing more. Similar operations were going on all across this lobe of the cometary halo. If you've seen one, you've seen 'em all. I've seen one.

Somebody Solward needed ice cubes. That's what it came down to. Those two streams were stripped comets, hydro-carbons separated from volatiles and each sent off in different directions, to freeze again in the cold of extrasolar s.p.a.ce. The ice would be s.h.i.+pped in while the hydrocarbons and solids remained. They wouldn't go far, not as we judge distances these days, and somebody, someday in the fullness of time, would find a use for them.

A rustle of impatience recalled me to the room. The window reflected the scene behind me: a dozen or so figures in a motley array of gear centered on a man perched on a small chair. One of them seemed to have grown a second head directly atop his first in the time my back had been turned. I realized it was a piece of scrim resting on a shelf behind him. Not even jacks are that weird.

I turned to the seated man. Through some means I couldn't detect (the place wasn't spinning, that much was certain), they'd created a one-gee field. If meant as a courtesy, it was misplaced-I'd been out in Kuiper-Oort as long as any of them. "Let's hear your side, Morgan. That's what I came for."

The only sound was a voice muttering, "...n't have a side."

Morgan himself simply stared, saying nothing, the same as he had the first two times I'd asked the question. He could well have been tranced, lost in a private world or daydream, though some small tremor of attention told me he was not.

I'd thought it was going to be easy. Open and shut, as the ancient phrase went. Get the story out of Morgan, lase it in, take him into custody and back to the System by the swiftest means possible, without even waiting for a reply. They'd given me the impression he'd talked, which was obviously not the case. I shouldn't have questioned him in front of them. A single glance at this crew-Morgan's workmates, the "Powder Monkeys," of all conceivable names-was enough to strike terror into a sponge.

But I didn't think it was fear holding Morgan back. It was something else. Something I was going to get at, however deep I had to go. Because this was no mere legal matter, and Rog Morgan was not simply a jack in trouble. This was an impi problem, and Morgan was my ticket home.

I saw no point in anymore questions. I turned to Witcove. "You've got a secure spot for him?"

"He ain't going noplace, Sandoval." Witcove snorted. "We got his processor and remotes."

I raised a hand. "Why don't you give me those."

Witcove frowned. He hadn't quite worked out how to handle me yet. Who was I, after all, but one man come out of the dark? What gave me the right to throw my ma.s.s around? Where did I get off giving orders to the foreman of the Powder Monkeys?

Mystique came to my rescue. Back on the Blue Rock, at a time when Texas was-in the mind's system of measurement, anyway-only marginally smaller than the Halo, there existed an organization with a mission not at all unlike the Mandate's and the motto, "One riot, one Ranger." A single Texas Ranger could be relied on to ride into any given bad town and straighten the place out with only his two hands and the sure knowledge that hundreds just like him were ready to saddle up. It seldom failed.

It didn't fail now. With a grunt, Witcove reached into a thigh pouch and pulled out what appeared to be a handful of black geometrical solids of various sizes. Forgetting we were under gee, he made as if to toss them to me, curtailing the throw at the very last second as the thought occurred to him. He succeeded only in scattering components across the floor between us. That triggered the kind of laughter you'd expect, along with the first visible reaction from Morgan as he gazed at the components with an expression mixing frustration and annoyance. Somebody was living behind that vacuum-habituated mask after all.

At my feet the scattered remotes began to move, sliding together to form a little pile. Witcove swung on Morgan with a wordless roar.

The components went still. With a sigh of impatience Morgan looked away. "Once more, mister,"

Witcove told him. "You issue one more command and I will personally-"

"Foreman..." Witcove raised his eyebrows. Someone stepped forward to collect the remotes and hand them to me. I was absently thanking him when I felt a burst of heat in my palm. The jack kept his eyes lowered. "Foreman, can we break things up for the moment?"

"Sure, you...got enough for now."

"I do."

Behind him two crewmen hustled Morgan to his feet and out the exit. I moved off, pretending interest in the scrim collection. Scrim is the vacuum jack's one notable hobby, dignified as art by some. Small carvings comprised of asteroidal junk, sc.r.a.p, what have you, of a size easily carried in a suit pouch and worked on at odd moments with atelier remotes and occasionally heavier machinery. Scrim touches every subject matter conceivable: women, s.h.i.+ps, animals, vehicles, instruments, self-portraits, and items not easily catalogued. It wasn't crude. They worked on it too long for that, almost obsessively, often overshooting the baroque to land deep in the grotesque. I didn't care for scrim. It spoke to me only of loneliness and exile.

Witcove sidled up next to me. "You come to a decision, you'll..."

"I'll let you know."

That wasn't precisely what he wanted to hear. "Look..." he glanced behind him. Morgan had vanished. "He's not gonna tell you anything. It's locked up. Something wrong there. When the runaways grab a guy-"

"s.h.i.+ft change in five," somebody said. The room began clearing. I gestured at Witcove, half thanks, half dismissal.

"I'll let you know," I repeated.

Clearly dissatisfied, he walked off. A crewman intercepted him to talk operations. With a final glance in my direction, Witcove left.

The room empty at last, I reached into my pocket. The components made a handful. The big one, an inch and a half by two, had to be the processor, a lifetime of experience and training imbedded within it. I wondered what Witcove would do if somebody abused his. The other nine were remote sensors, appendages, actuators, the vacuum jack's tools of the trade. With these, a jack could see into the infrared and radio ranges, expand his sensory horizon a hundred or a thousand miles, control instruments and machinery that far away and more. I examined one resembling a length of thick wire. A jack would be able to tell exactly what make it was, its capabilities, its cost. Hard to believe that zero-gee work was once done with tools held in gloved hands....

Something in my palm emitted a flash. I looked down. Five seconds pa.s.sed before the flash repeated. Dropping the thin piece, I picked up a sphere that my thumb revealed to be flattened on one end. A glow appeared as I held it at eye level, a glow made up of words. I smiled. A tap and a shake failed to evoke anything further. I popped the remote into a pocket and stared off into s.p.a.ce, only to have my gaze arrested by a particularly odd piece of scrim. I picked it up. Close inspection failed to tell me what in Heaven, h.e.l.l, or the Halo it was supposed to represent. It fell over when I set it down.

Someone once told me that oceanic sailors had produced something like scrim. It seems unlikely. Hard to see what they'd have used for material.

Whoever cracks the impi problem can write his own ticket. They were out there. That much was known. Rogues, duppies, runaways...impis, in a word. Artificial Intelligences that had slipped away, one day here, overseeing a refinery, shepherding a comet, repairing a system, the next gone, with never a sign of where. Only five or six a year, but numbers build. Surely they existed in the hundreds by now, a group large enough to leave undeniable evidence of its presence: signals encoded so deeply that ages wouldn'tdecrypt them, resources diverted to open trajectories, hacking that revealed the signature of machine capabilities, along with missing vessels, inexplicable damage to isolated machinery, individuals vanished into night.

Discover a path into the impi's kingdom, learn the names of the spirits, find the hidden places where they slept, and you would be set. You'd be the man with the expert's badge, and everyone would have to come to you. Back amid civilization, operating from behind a screen at Charon or even Triton, with a sun in the sky and a society around you. No more years spent in the cold and dark, enduring the grinding boredom of Kuiper-Oort, no more confrontations with misfits suitable only for work on the edge of civilization.

Standing orders stated that suspect human-renegade interaction took precedence over all other activities-criminal investigation, medical evacuation, mercy mission, what have you. We had no idea where they were, what they were doing, what motivated them. The stories were legion-they were evolving into something alien and malevolent. They were duplicating themselves, running off copies like cheap commercial ware, pus.h.i.+ng their numbers into the millions or even higher. They were out to take over the Halo or sweep back into the system and brush humanity right off the board. All no more than rumor, urban legend on the grand scale.

But what had happened here was no legend, and I was already plotting the quickest, most energy-intensive, least-number-of-stops course back into the system.

I stepped to the window. A v-jack pa.s.sed about fifty yards away, turning to regard me as he went. I wondered if he was my contact. I eyed the remote. The one that didn't belong to Rog Morgan.

There was neither flash nor glimmer nor repeat of the message: "Meet in 1 hr." Three-quarters of that hour remained. The Halo had taught me patience, but that was still forty-five minutes too many for the way I was feeling.

My skin tautened as I stepped into vacuum and the striated tissue in my third dermal layer reacted. I paused while my airway valves adjusted themselves, squinted against the sudden pressure of the retinal membranes. My system was nowhere near as elaborate as those of the crew-I could remain in vacuum a few hours at most, and I lacked radiation protection-but neither situation was a factor here. Time was irrelevant, the only radiation the odd cosmic ray.

The one-gee pull continued, giving me cause to wonder whether they'd been doing me a favor after all. Stepping to the platform's edge, I took a look around.

There's no such thing as resupply in the Halo. You either bring it along, fabricate it, or do without, and the crews with the broadest capabilities get the best jobs. The Powder Monkeys were no slouches at capability, as any offhand examination of their work hall revealed. A structure of considerable size, several hundred yards in each dimension of a s.p.a.ce that could be called a rough-to-the-extreme cube, the object within it having no particular relation to any actual shape whatsoever. A hall is part warehouse, part refinery, part industrial center, part barracks, and part vehicle, though no amount of study could separate one component from the other amid the ma.s.s of catapults, effectuators, nets, tankage, piping, cables, power sources, and mystery boxes.

Beneath my feet the glare of the work area silhouetted the torpedo shape of my ride. As much as I shaded my eyes I could make out next to nothing; it was too hazy for details. I felt a rumbling which gave me a short spell of gooseb.u.mps: a jack had mentioned that vapor pressure sometimes got so high you could actually hear the cometary fluids being pumped. On second thought, I decided it was more likely some piece of machinery within the hall.

Five minutes pa.s.sed without anyone showing up. I was early, but I also suspected that time-honored motive common to all such situations: the urge not to be seen ratting to a cop. I took out the remote. I still had no idea what it was for, which was probably begging the question-most models were multifunctional.

Without turning, I took a step back toward the lock. The remote flashed red, obligingly repeated when I moved to the left. A swing to the right resulted in a rea.s.suring green. I looked around, fulfilling the age-old cop tradition of trying not to be spotted before a meet, then took another step. The remoteblinked green once again.

The gee-field's disappearance at the edge of the platform didn't quite take me unaware, though I was glad no one was around to criticize my form when I kicked off. I landed on a catwalk that swung 90 around a dark box with a man-sized "3" painted on the side before plunging into the fractal mess of the hall. Inside I pa.s.sed a quivering set of tanks, ducked beneath some pipes, then went up a ramp and through a pressurized area (no oxygen-my skin remained taut) before again turning toward the hall's exterior. Back in the open I endured a moment's confusion while figuring out that the remote wanted me to go vertical, up the side of a huge tank open to s.p.a.ce, its top invisible from where I stood. I was well past the curve before I caught sight of him, waiting at the crown of the tank in an enclosure containing pumping controls. He floated above the platform, legs crossed, helmetless head slightly bowed, eyes taking in endless night.

I felt a flash of irritation. A monastic-wasn't that fine. Not everyone out here is schizo. We get all kinds: the grand pioneers who can't live without a frontier to push at, researchers trying to pin answers on various arcane questions (e.g., whether Kuiper-Oort is a strictly local phenomenon or simply the solar portion of a cometary field stretching across the whole wide Universe), the odd tourist aching to be able to say that he'd really been further out than anybody else, fugitives on the run from a.s.sorted cops or tongs, and these: the seekers, contemplatives in search of some kind of spirituality evidently unavailable inside the Heliopause, looking for the ultimate quiet place that might hold a door into the center of things.

There's a lot of them, following every conceivable religion, system, or cult, even a few original to themselves, and while I don't disrespect them, they're not the first I'd go to for any given set of facts.

So it was with a sense of wasted time that I finally reached the platform. As I'd expected, it was the small man who'd handed me the remotes. He displayed no reaction as I slipped a foot through the railing to steady myself, simply continued gazing off into the abyss, face as blank as the sky itself. It would be just my luck to show up seconds after this guy had at last made contact with the infinite ground of being.

We were on the far side of the hall, s.h.i.+elded from the work site. The sky was darker here, though not as dark as open s.p.a.ce-about the same as a moonlit night on Earth. Knowing we were facing home, I tried to find Sol. I could have used one of the crew's processors to tell me if it was that particularly bright one there...

I glanced over to find the man's eyes on me. He took me by surprise, and it was a moment before I showed him the remote, mouthed "Yours, I suppose," and flicked it in his direction.

He tossed it right back, with the quick precise movement of a trained v-jack. I was clumsier in catching it. As I did he touched his ear. I imitated him. The remote stuck thanks to some force of its own.

"Right there." He pointed at the bright dot I'd been watching a moment before. "So it is," I replied, not bothering to move my lips.

"Don't look like much, eh?"

"You come out here a lot?"

"Enough." He could have been meditating again, for all the animation he revealed. "Morg ain't workin' with no duppies."

"I didn't think he was," I told him. "What was he doing?"

"What happens with him?"

"I get him out of here, one way or another."

He raised a finger. "Now...I tell you once. No testify, no repeat, nothing."

"Just for the record, why not?"

He faced me again. "I don't stand with cops, I don't stand with courts."

"Fair enough."

"OK. All this happen last year, before Morg join up with the Monkeys...You know what stridin' is, right?" I nodded. You don't have to spend much time in the Halo to grasp the nature of striding. s.p.a.ce travel is expensive. In Kuiper-Oort, the cost is multiplied by distance, rarity, and demand. Like workers everywhere, vacuum jacks have methods of cutting corners. One is to fit their suits out with extra oxy, power, and supplies, get somebody to launch them by catapult in the precise direction of theirdestination, then trance down for the weeks or months required to get there. Somebody else will snag them with a probe when at last they arrive.

Dangerous, you say? Yeah, it's dangerous, as the Mandate, most companies, and every active authority in the Halo never cease repeating. It does no good. Jacks are proud of striding, as they are of every other aspect of living like rodents in the outer dark. There's betting over length, speed, and duration of trip, same as with any other insanely stupid activity Sapiens comes up with. I met the current record holder once. Eighteen months in a trajectory of ten AUs. He's a little hard to understand due to slight, untreatable brain damage, but quite pleased with himself all the same. Cats will bask in the street, kids will tag rides on trucks, and jacks will stride. A certain inevitable percentage will get run over, flung onto the pavement, or miss their rendezvous.

Which was what happened to Rog Morgan. Few stride alone, in case of emergencies. There were five jacks, bored with the job or after a better offer or just hankering to move, who set out on a month-long, quarter-AU journey to the second-nearest site. The other four were picked up. Not Morgan. Somebody erred, and even as the others awoke from their weeks-long trance, he kept going.

Days pa.s.sed before he became aware of his situation. He responded as a jack, and jacks take things in order. He checked the time. He checked the charts. He tried the radio. Then he went through it all again, step by step, before allowing himself to stare the thing in the face.

It's impossible to say what he felt. There's nothing to compare it to. No man in a lifeboat, or stranded in a desert, or broken and freezing on any pole was ever as alone as Rog Morgan was at that moment. No fear is so great, no regret so deep, as can grow in that place that is no place, where s.p.a.ce and time are as close to bare as we are ever likely to know them. We can't grasp what Morgan felt, any more than he could afterward; it was simply too vast for memory to hold. But consider this: out of the handful of lost striders recovered (a half-dozen out of hundreds, who happened to be aimed Solward, toward the more populous sections of the Halo), five shut down their systems and blew their helmets in preference to enduring another second of what Morgan faced.

At last his panic and grief receded enough to allow him to resume control. He made a hopeless survey of known work sites, outposts, and Mandate stations to confirm what he already knew. Settled points are few and far between in the Halo, and he would pa.s.s none of them.

He composed a mayday and set his comm system to repeat it on the most power-stingy schedule that made sense. He noted that he was headed in the direction of Sagittarius, a section of sky that he would grow to hate as much as he'd ever hated anything. He turned his head slightly to take in Sol. He patted a side pocket holding a piece of scrim he'd been working on for years. He ate a cracker. And then, jacks being stolid types and Morgan more so than most, he tranced down.

He traveled a measurable percentage of the width of the solar system before he again awoke.

Nothing had changed. He had not expected that anything would. The stars remained frozen. The radio wavelengths were quiet. The world was doing just fine without Rog Morgan. He contemplated the fact, sipped a little glucose, some water, threw a curse or two at Sagittarius, and went back to sleep.

He didn't know how many times he awoke after that. More than twice, fewer than ten. They were all the same, and he recalled little more than that sameness. The only thing that varied was difficulty. His power cells began to give out. Then his small store of food. (He put aside some dried fruit, some protein, a few ounces of glucose in case he should need it, but somewhere along the line, without ever remembering, he ate it all.) Jacks use very little water, being enhanced to recycle most of that amount, but even a little gains in importance when you can't find it. It seemed that between the cold, the hunger, and the thirst (all of which he could control but not evade), Rog Morgan was going to become a member of that elite among men who are killed by more things than one.

Ketosis set in a short time later. The only sign that his body was cannibalizing his own muscular ma.s.s was an abiding and growing sense of weakness far more complete than any he had ever felt before.

If he dreamed he never spoke of it, and as for prayer, well, a priest once told me that all men pray when things get bad enough. Morgan didn't say if he did. But I think what Father Danziger meant was that they often pray without knowing it. Maybe hanging on as long as he did, far longer than most could, was Morgan's form of prayer. After a while the dreams turned concrete. His metabolism was breaking down, slowly but inevitably poisoning itself with byproducts it was unable to shed. His dreams began to speak, and he began to answer back. He found himself explaining things to whatever was listening, to Sagittarius, to his past, to something closer than both that he shortly became convinced was contemplating him from out in the dark.

He told it how ravaged he was, how lost, how little he had done with his time, how many mistakes he'd made before this last, fatal one. What he might have done had he not been so sure of himself. What he would do if he were given another lifetime to do it in.

At last he ran down. No answer had come, but he had expected none. A sense of clarity had returned to him, the clarity of approaching night. His mind was as focused as it was ever going to be again. He checked his systems, the way a jack does. Everything, every last element capable of measurement, was deep into the red. It would have horri-fied him a few weeks ago. Now it didn't bother him at all.

He unsnapped a battery pouch and with fingers scarcely able to feel put in his ID and a few other personal items. At the last minute he paused to take out the piece of scrim. He held it a moment before slipping it back. He sealed the pouch. With as much strength as he could gather he threw it in the direction of Sol. He watched for a second or two, telling himself he could see it dwindle toward home.

He listened to the silence, the silence he would be part of within minutes. He looked out at Sagittarius, considering whether there were any words to match what he now knew. He found none. He licked cracked lips with a dry, swollen tongue. "So that's it..."

Later he would have sworn that he heard it before actually hearing it, that somehow he'd gotten some echo of it as it surged across the shrunken s.p.a.ce his universe had become: "No it's not."

I don't know what alerted me to the fact that the jack had vanished. I didn't see him go. The remote went silent, and when I looked up, he'd disappeared. I wasted no time searching-there were too many places he could have gone. What had sent him away was another question, answered the minute I bent over the railing to see three jacks approaching from below. I switched to open freq.

"...it's him."

"It's the mandy." The two wearing helmets waved.

"Yeah, it's me," I told them, trying to keep any trace of annoyance out of my voice. The third was as bareheaded as my contact. Once you're fitted with vacuum mods, helmets are unnecessary, really.

People wear them for the same reason they do at construction sites on Earth, that and the fact that a helmet carries a lot of instrumentation and apps. "A jack's office," you often hear them called.

I backed away as the one in the lead shot a line and reeled them all in, the other two hanging on to various suit projections. "Taking a look at home?" the leader bawled as he hooked a foot under the top rail.

"That's Sol right there." Second helmet indicated a star totally separate and discrete from the one my contact had pointed out.

"Thanks," I said. I must have sounded more stiff than I intended-the lead jack raised a hand and said, "We feel a whole lot better now you're here."

"How's that?"

"That duppie, man-"

"Ever see an impi close up...?"

"Wait-" glanced between them. The one lacking a helmet said nothing, simply continued staring. I wondered if he was out of the loop. "You guys actually saw it? You were there?"