Year's Best Scifi 8 Part 30

"I was," the lead jack said.

"What happened?"

"Well, it was like this-"

"That thing came out of nowhere-" the second helmet said.

"Wait one..."I pointed at the lead jack. "How'd it start?"

"We were over the other side of the cracker, inspecting the MHD loops-"

"Cracker's what busts up the comets and separates the fluids, see." "Yeah, and loops are the things...well, they're not things, they're fields. They separate and contain the fluids, so they're important. Particularly down near the cracker mouth. Lot of pressure there. Loop starts oscillating, you get leakage-"

"Contaminate the product," second helmet said.

"Right. So-"

"So you keep an eye on it," I said, hoping to move him along.

"Inspect 'em once a day," first helmet nodded.

"And it ain't easy."

"Hard to see down there."

"That's right. Hydrocarbon-water fog. Sticky, wet, screws with your remote signals."

"You gotta look close," second helmet held up his hands to show me how close. "Loops are tight, down near the mouth. Just millimeters apart, vibrating to pump the fluids. And you're matter, right?

Solid matter. So you can slip right through the field-"

"And they find you froze down around Venus in sixty years."

I was getting the picture. Hazardous duty, not something you wanted to be interrupted doing. "So you were inspecting the...loops."

"Right, six of us. Working our way out from the mouth, one loop after the other, like a cone, see.

Almost out of the haze into open s.p.a.ce. And there she was."

"She? How'd you know it was a 'she'?"

The leader gaped at me. Hard as it is to read expression on a vacuum-adapted face, I knew puzzlement when I saw it. He glanced at his partner. The one with no helmet just stared.

"Don't worry about it," I told them. "She was there."

"Right. We might not of noticed except she grazed a remote-"

"Stash's."

"Yeah. Stash thinks its debris broke out of the processing stream-"

"Then he says, 'holy s.h.i.+t!' "

"Yeah, when he sees the readout. Modulated signals, s.h.i.+elded and enciphered, no ID-"

I crossed my arms. "So what'd you do?"

"We got the h.e.l.l outta there!"

"And she came right after 'em!"

Second helmet was, if anything, more excited than the one who had actually been there. I had a feeling I'd have gotten a nice, wild, blood-and-thunder yarn out of him, accuracy be d.a.m.ned. "Go ahead."

"We yell for help, and kinda spread out with the thing in the middle, see. Pasha-that's Rey Murat, the string chief, we call him Pasha-grabs our remotes to fill in the gaps. He can do that-he's got the codes. He says close in, throw an EMP at it. Knock it out or slow it down, at least."

"What did it look like?"

"Hard to say-it brought some fog with it, like a plasma? Couldn't make out the shape."

I nodded, picturing it in my mind: the surrounding haze aglare in the work lights, the rough sphere of s.p.a.cesuited jacks, that unknown and unknowable blob das.h.i.+ng around between them.

"So the rest of the s.h.i.+ft comes around the funnel-"

"I saw this part!"

"It went straight at Morg-"

"And he let it through."

I contemplated that for a moment. They watched me in something approaching anxiety. Finally I nodded.

"Then Pasha started yelling-"

"Yeah, and Wit, back in the hall. Wanting to know what was goin' on-"

"-thing just zipped off, jamming every possible freq-"

"It was fast-"

"Then you busted Morgan." They looked at each other. "Right."

"He say anything?"

They shook their heads. "No idea what the AI was doing?"

"It was up to something-"

"You can't tell. They get too strange. They need humans around to keep 'em straight-"

"None of you guys thought of making a recording?"

"Oh yeah!"

"Sure we did. The remotes copied. That's SOP in case of a mishap. Wit confiscated 'em all."

"Witcove did?"

"Right. Said he wanted to keep the evidence clean."

I was thinking of a reply when the helmetless one slipped off the railing and shot toward me. Halting himself with one foot, he glared at me from a yard away.

"You guys got remotes too?"

I touched the unit at my ear. "Uhh...yeah. Sometimes. Not everybody."

He frowned. "What make is that?"

"Ah, that's a Kiwi," the second jack said. "Remi's got one of them."

Mr. No-Helmet nodded. "Good unit. High-density, lotta options."

"Uh-huh," I told him. "They mentioned that at the outlet."

Satisfied, he resumed his silent perch.

"Tell me something..." I looked between them. "What if Morgan was guilty?"

Making a slicing noise, No-Helmet pulled a finger across his throat, with a smile I could have done without.

"Yeah," the leader agreed. "I hate to say it, but-"

"Once they touch a guy, he's no good anymore."

I was prepared to ask where they'd ever come across anyone who'd been "touched," but decided to pa.s.s. All I'd succeed in doing would be to release the entire corpus of impi campfire lore, and there was no point in that.

"So where you guys headed?"

"Oh, we just finished s.h.i.+ft," second helmet said.

"We're going to eat some real food."

"Just did three 24s in vac," second helmet said proudly.

"Three straight?" I understood that a lot of jacks actually like spending time in vacuum. "That's pretty good."

The leader swung around without using his hands, the way jacks do. Second helmet followed him with a pleased-to-meet-ya thrown in my direction. But no-helmet remained where he was. I waited a moment, and was about to ask what his immediate plans were when he bent forward.

"Whatcha gotta do to become a cop?"

Act sane, for starters. "Fill out an ap, send it in. They'll get in touch."

"Where I get an ap?"

I had him give me his address and ordered my s.h.i.+p to send him one. "You can put my name on it," I told him.

"Deep," he said. His head swung toward a spot over my right shoulder. "He's right up there," he said. "Ha."

Behind what appeared to be an open-vacuum junk drawer two levels up rose a small boxlike shape with a single lit window. When I turned back no-helmet too had kicked off. I watched him go, thinking about scapegoats, the pressures of living in this kind of truncated society, and what happened to people who break the unwritten but unbendable rules. But mostly I thought about the possible reasons why Witcove had kept the recordings from me.

"Hey, mandy." I touched the remote. "Yeah, Remi." He chuckled. "Mind I stay down, eh?" "Suit yourself. Lot of traffic. Now...Morgan had just pa.s.sed out."

"You sharp. He did pa.s.s out." It doesn't take much in the way of sharpness to grasp how a man dying of starvation and cold would react on hearing a voice where no voice was possible.

When he awoke, he was in a room that was comfortable for all its unfamiliarity. He was lying on a cot of some sort, and for reasons he didn't bother to examine, he felt no urge to get up. It wasn't that he was too weak, he simply wasn't inclined, and that was all. He heard music, melodies of Earth, almost recognizable though he couldn't quite place them. He had a memory-an impression-that one had been playing while he was being brought there.

It occurred to him to look around. He took in the sight of the medical drip with no surprise. Even after centuries of advances, there's no better method of getting a lot of material into the bloodstream fast than a tube in a vein. He clenched his fist, smiled at the wave of tiredness that overcame him and closed his eyes. When he opened them again she was standing there.

You can imagine what she looked like to him, after all the way he'd come, after what he'd been through. Women aren't common in the Halo. They're not rare either, but time often pa.s.ses before a jack encounters one. And to put it gently, many of them are the female equivalents of the type of male yoyo that calls Kuio home. But nothing ever destroys the deep, instinctive connection of the human female with safety and security. That's the way she appeared to him, symbol made flesh, a saint in stained gla.s.s.

With later developments in mind, it's easy to speculate that she molded the image to match Morgan's own expectations, working from cues he was unaware of and wouldn't have been able to change if he had been. The room was dark, and though he could clearly see the silver bracelets on her wrists, the necklace, the pair of roses growing from her scalp and intertwined with her hair in that old style that often fades but always returns, her face was clouded, her features hazy.

"How you feeling?" was the first thing she said. Morgan didn't remember what he replied, but it pleased her; her wide smile made that clear. He made an attempt at the usual questions, but she just lay a hand on the blanket, and told him, "You rest."

He reached for that hand but wasn't quick enough to grasp it before she turned and walked away.

She looked back only once, when he asked her name.

He lay down in pain, in disorientation, in discomfort, but beneath it all with that indescribable sensation that a.s.sured him he was going to live.

She returned the next day, and he saw that she looked exactly as he might have guessed. When he answered her questions about how he felt, she c.o.c.ked her head in a way that he almost recognized. He didn't remain awake very long that day, or the next either, just long enough for her to tell him a story about where he was and what had happened that isn't worth repeating because it wasn't true. But that didn't matter to him at the time, nor did he suspect it. Because he was in no concrete place at all, really.

He was in that safe place we leave behind in childhood, and revisit only in memory.

He remained there two weeks. He slept most of the next few days-he a.s.sumed there was a sedative in the feed coming down that tube. Whenever he awoke she was there, or arrived momentarily.

Never anyone but her, though he had the impression-gained he didn't know how-that others were around. But it was she who examined him, who checked the medical machinery, who talked to him, who read to him, who helped him pa.s.s the time required for him to regain his strength.

It was the better part of a week before he could eat. She let him feed himself-a bowl of clear broth.

He kept it down, and there was solid food to come, small portions so he wouldn't be tempted to stuff.

She didn't eat anything.

At last, the time came for him to get up and exercise the muscles wasted by the weeks of his scarcely-remembered ordeal. She encouraged him to get up by himself, stepping back to give him room.

He did well, taking five full steps to a chair and then back to the bed after resting a bit. She was pleased with him, enough so that he wanted to try it again right away. She told him it was better to wait.

He must have been a touch overconfident the next day. That or wanting to please her or maybe a mix of both. He went a step further than he should have, a little faster than was necessary. She was living out her own fantasy too, in whatever way an AI does, because when he lost his balance, she moved to catch him, and her hand went straight through his outstretched arm.