The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction: 23rd Annual Collection (84 page)

Then it was time to walk.

They put me out through the airlock, and I have to say that when push came to shove, I wasn’t scared – I was terrified. Once when I was a kid, vacationing with my family on the southern rim of the Great American Desert, we took a side trip down into an immense cave. The place was a tourist attraction, had been for centuries, and it was all nicely lighted and the chambers equipped with phony names like “Aladdin’s Castle” and the “Seas of Europa” and so on. Then, when we were really deep inside, the guide turned out the lights. That was the first time I’d ever experienced the totality of total darkness, and my throat got dry and my hands got clammy and I thought, Is this what death is like?

All that came back to me in the moment when my four mechanical feet clamped onto the hull and the airlock’s outer door closed behind me. This was it. Would I drift away from the ship? Was there such a thing as magnetism out here? Did gravitation exist out here? Did anything exist out here?

Well, I stayed attached to the ship, and after a few seconds the bad feelings lessened, if only because it was obviously too late for second thoughts. Then a row of external lights, loading lights I suppose, went on, and I remembered to switch on a spotlight I carried on one of my many limbs. At first I thought it wasn’t working because there was no ray, no beam, but then I saw the circle of light where the photons bounced off the ship. And off something else, too – a cylinder about twice the size of one of the internal missile silos. I couldn’t think of anything it might be, except an FTLM that had its own exterior housing, because it was too big to go inside the ship.

Like some ungainly mechanical spider I crawled along
Zhukov’s
curving frigid hull. Though my heater was whirring faster and faster, the air inside kept getting colder and colder. I picked up the percussion of my steel feet, uneasily aware that this was the only sound and the only heat and the only motion – I was moving relative to the ship – indeed the only anything in an entire goddamn vacant universe.

And then something else moved.

It was rising beyond the curved horizon of the hull with an infinitely slow yet observable movement, like the minute hand of an antique clock. Rising until it reflected a ghostly patch of light, just like the moon that Colonel Delatour had talked about. Only instead of a moon, it was a shapeless rigid bundle. It made me think of the fragile ash left by burned hardcopy that stays intact, even to the letters black against the brown pages, yet turns to powder at the first puff of wind. After maybe half a minute I realized that the bundle consisted of all the coats and blankets and whatnot the Stowaway had wrapped up in to survive the cold of the Arctic Circle. I turned my spot on it, and saw – set into the bundle, looking small and white – a rigid porcelain face.

For a little while I forgot the insidious cold creeping through my defenses of armor and artificial heat. Then made some kind of strangled sound, because the Stowaway had been a girl, a girl with a face that was thin and elegant. She’d frozen so deep so fast that her tissues had had no time to explode in the catastrophic loss of pressure that accompanied her ejection into the void. And I recognized her face.

I stretched out one of my mechanical arms and touched her, and her face turned to a fine crystalline dust. Then the whole bundle of what had been body and wrappings fell apart too, and the trail of debris very slowly passed like a thin comet of ice and ash out of my light and into the perfect darkness beyond.

Back inside the
Zhukov
, it took three people to extract me from the suit. I couldn’t move my legs, and I spent a week in the dispensary being treated for pale, waxy spots denoting frostbite had developed on my fingers and toes and thighs and buttocks during my space walk.

That was lucky in a way, because I really needed the down time, not only to heal some frozen appendages, but to put my nerves back together. Every once in a while would-be heroes overestimate their own toughness. I’d badly overestimated mine.

Colonel Delatour took to visiting me. She avoided the usual dumb how’re-you-feeling-soldier chat favored by superior officers for injured subordinates. We talked about a lot of things. At first I was inclined to look on her as a kind of female Methuselah because she was over forty. But exactly for that reason I could talk to her about matters I probably wouldn’t have discussed with a woman my own age. Especially my feelings of guilt about the death of the Stowaway. That porcelain face haunted my dreams.

“So you’d actually seen her before,” she marveled. “Quel miracle.”

“Yeah. On a memory cube in the general’s quarters. And then I saw her again, out there in the middle of nothing, a few years older but perfectly recognizable, and I touched her and she turned to dust and ice crystals and drifted away. What’s left is still out there, orbiting around us.”

She shook her head, and kind of absentmindedly took my left hand, I suppose because it was shaking, and held it with both of hers.

“You know,” she said, speaking very quietly, “the Space Service keeps a lot of old naval traditions alive. We – oh, what’s the English for faire des sottises – we go through a lot of foolishness about dress uniforms and being piped aboard and whatnot. I’m surprised we aren’t issued cutlasses, just in case of pirates. We keep some of the old naval superstitions, too – for example, about lucky and unlucky ships. I’m beginning to think
Zhukov’s
unlucky, the things that have happened.”

I was lying on a bunk at the time, wearing one of those dumb paper outfits they put on you, plus slip-on elastoplast tubes over my frostbitten digits. At some point, I don’t remember exactly when, we’d agreed to be Robert (pronounced Robair) and Marie to each other, at least when we were alone.

Marie was sitting on a chair next to the bunk, close enough so I could detect a faint indefinable fragrance that I was pretty sure was not standard for Space Service officers. She was the first woman I’d been this close to in quite a while, except for my enlisted women, whom I was very properly forbidden to touch. Considering the automatic reactions taking place lower down my anatomy, I was glad a sheet covered me to the waist.

But I wasn’t ready just yet to try my luck with a superior officer. I really had to ask a question that had been waking me up at 02.30 every morning when, in the dim nightlight, my sterilized surroundings looked especially blank and uncommunicative. I asked Marie if she could explain why the Stowaway hadn’t answered when we were beating on her door, especially when she knew the silo was about to be opened and she was about to be blown into the void.

“Well, I can tell you what I think.”

“S’il vous plaît,” I said, using one of the three French phrases I knew.

“I think she’d done what she came aboard to do. Was she very young when you first saw her?”

I cleared my throat. “Terribly young.”

“Then I suppose she’d been a child prostitute. C’est abominable, but it happens. So she tracked the general, who might have been one of her customers, maybe even her first customer, the one who paid a premium for the thrill of breaking her in. When she’d killed him, her work was done and she wanted to die. That’s why you shouldn’t blame yourself You know, when somebody wants to die, it’s entirely personal. If their mind’s made up, nobody can stop them, and maybe nobody should try.”

I was still thinking that over when she said, “You need to get warm.”

She stood up and began to take off her uniform jacket. “We’ll have to be discreet, of course,” she added.

“Suppose somebody comes in?”

“Oh, I posted a bot as guard outside. There are advantages to being in command.” She smiled. She finished undressing and threw back the sheet and lay down beside me.

So began my first liaison with a mythical creature I’d often heard about but never experienced – an Older Woman.

It was kind of a shipboard romance, you know, where the impermanence provides half the joy and all the poignance. After doing our separate duties all day, we had quiet nights together. Good sex. For me, a learning experience, as they say. Learning to take things slower. Learning to play the mouth organ properly. Learning some neat tricks I’d heard about but never tried before. Ligotage – the French have a word for it.

“The bindings, dearest, must always leave a mark,” she instructed me.

But it wasn’t all fun and games. Your boss doesn’t cease to be your boss just because you’re in bed with her. I had to endure Mama-knows-best comments like, “Sometimes, my darling, you are just a tiny little boy.” (This was not a reference to my physical endowments, which have always been adequate. She was talking about my emotional immaturity, which in those days was a lot more than just adequate.)

I also heard a lot about the problems of a woman in what was still, after centuries of effort, mostly a man’s world. Things I’d never imagined until then.

“A woman in command,” she said, “has to be at least three times as tough as a man. Any hint of weakness is fatal. A male commander can be kind and forbearing, and everybody says, ‘An officer and a gentleman!’ A woman does the same thing, they think, ‘Just another cunt,’ and try to take advantage of her. A man can sleep around, or not; if he doesn’t, he’s got ethics, and if he does, he’s a hell of a guy. But if a woman officer sleeps around they call her a whore, and if she doesn’t they call her a lesbian.”

She taught me some useful things about courage. “I remember one ’orrible little pustule I knew in officer training. He used to say, ‘I’ll hold a pot for the commander to piss in, but the instant his foot slips I’ll empty it over his head.’ Well, that awful little man lasted until the first real emergency, and then he was out. A bit of conniving is essential in our line of work, but it’s no substitute for courage. After all, when you put on a uniform, you’re proposing to live with danger.”

“And then you need courage.”

“And logic. In times of danger, only courage is logical.”

I’d never looked at it that way before. Yet it’s true – losing your head is no way to save your hide. Neither, she reminded me, is forgetting your comrades. “Sauve qui peut – every man for himself – is the prelude to annihilation. When everyone’s trying to save himself, discipline collapses and everyone dies.”

So I learned from her, things I enjoyed, things I needed to know, things I didn’t especially want to know but learned anyway. There were also things I wanted to find out, but didn’t. Once I mentioned seeing the FTLM housing on the hull and asked why we were carrying such a stupendous weapon on such a banal mission. She just said there were things she couldn’t discuss, period. And that was that.

When she and I were a couple of months into our relationship, and the command suite had become as familiar to me as my cubicle had been, I asked her a question I’d been hesitating to voice ever since the night of our first coupling. It was a quiet, casual evening, when – as usual in the Bubble – nothing was going on. She was lacquering her fingernails at the time.

“Marie.”

“Yes? Oh, I see. You’ve something weighty on your mind.”

“I’ve been wondering, uh . . . for some time now, uh . . . how the Stowaway got herself into the
Zhukov.
Into the Arctic Circle. How she managed to move around the ship at night, with all the locked doors.”

“Well,” said Marie, “I assume she must have had an ally in the cadre.”

I waited. Her hands didn’t shake, didn’t even quiver. Since she obviously wasn’t going to elaborate, I had to stumble on.

“I’d like to know who her accomplice . . . her ally . . . was.”

“Perhaps you don’t want to know,” she said. The lacquer went on with perfect smoothness. The color was no color – standard issue transparent.

“I don’t?”

“No,” she said.

Being young, I was about to say something else, when she raised her eyes from the job she was doing and stabbed me with a look that resembled a long, chilly steel dagger.

“You’re right,” I said hastily. “I don’t.”

Despite our efforts to be discreet, Jesús was not fooled about what was going on. Neither, it turned out, was anybody else. I’m pretty sure the romance between Marie and me was known to every human being on board within, say, eight hours of our first lovemaking. Once I asked Jesús what people were saying.

“The enlisted guys think it’s great,” he said. “They figure you’ve got an inside track with the commander, and what benefits you benefits them all. The blue-suiters aren’t worried about you jumping over their heads for promotion or anything, because you’re not Space Service, you’re on a different totem pole. I’m delighted to have our stateroom all to myself, much as I used to enjoy listening to you snore and fart. So everybody’s happy, including, I hope, you.”

He grinned and punched me lightly on the shoulder. “Everybody likes you, Kohn, and they like her, and they like having the two of you to gossip about. Life in the Bubble is pretty dull, you know.”

Marie’s own attitude was cool and practical. When I mentioned the gossip mill to her, she said, “Bah, who cares? I’m the commander, and subject to regulations I do what I please. Still, it’s nice to know that our shipmates find us entertaining.”

She was right, of course. Life in the Bubble – your Papa’s phrase – did tend toward tedium. There we were, eighty-nine sailors marooned together on, or rather in, a metal island surrounded by absolutely nothing. For recreation the enlisted guys had gambling, sex, liquor, and a few legal drugs like kif For self-improvement they had classes on “Knowing Your Weapons,” “Security Forces – Front and Center!” and other such rubbish. For training they practiced marksmanship in a simulator – beep zap, beep zap, beep zap, bing! All of us took karate lessons from Chu to keep in practice – thump, thump, “Kick him! Kick him!”