Transcendence (23 page)

You spin and rise, blind of the systems you’re familiar with, but to dump with them! You’re still a man, and your cards are still alive, and your muscles still work!

The subgun’s plastic barrel sweeps up and across the cabin. No one in sight. The ventilators hiss. The four halls leading out of the cabin are empty. Then you notice the glint of metal, out of place at the foot of Cap’n’s couch—Cap’n’s weapon; and there, just behind it, a clump of dark hair.

Hiding. You feel your face tighten into a smile. The big cock, his big plans, his big threat. Watch this—

And then you feel relaxed. Almost at once, the tip of Cap’n’s weapon brightens, a shaft of light penetrates the air between it and your biceps, thunder and lightning storm in your skull, your body warms, and you go numb.

You feel lazy and begin drifting away to the savory scent of baking meat.

The GE laser pistol buzzed for a moment in Pehr’s hand. He winced when a puff of smoke rose from Eyes’ arm . . . I had to do it, he told himself. His head still throbbed from the man’s mental attack.

Eyes fell limp against the wall. A great lesion opened and fused shut on his upper arm; the gun sailed away from his fingers, which spasmed open.

“
He’s out,” Janus stated, rising from the floor. “You tie him up. I’ll see if I can stop that missile and program a safe landing. We’ll have to take the escape pod and leave the rest of the
Bounty
behind.”

“
Land?” Pehr asked, stopped in mid-motion. He awkwardly tried to hold himself still as forces like those of a merry-go round tugged at his feet, trying to pull him toward the man he just wounded.

“
Of course,” Janus replied. “We can’t make it home in this condition; we can’t even leave the Neptunian system. The
Bounty
has become a liability. We’re stuck here, and I suggest we land before Neptunekaisha’s defense finishes us. Agreed?”

“
Right, right,” he answered. But he just couldn’t get out of his head the predicament they were in. He couldn’t yet get past the queasiness brought on by the violence he had just performed. He couldn’t quite comprehend that they were now completely isolated from the show. The craft was adrift in space, battered beyond repair, and they had to abandon ship.

My god, what has happened?

Pehr he drew a deep breath and exhaled slowly. This was a challenge. Hadn’t he always overcome every challenge thrown in his way? What was so different this time?

Violence. He could have killed the man, if his aim had been poor.

Pehr lifted a floorpanel, reached inside, and pulled out a spool of wire. The slide across the floor to the unconscious Eyes was clumsy, but he made it. Action, that’s what will save me. Keep moving forward.

The first thing Pehr did was kick the subgun away; it skittered along the fibrous tiles of the wall and came to a stop above him. Then he began to unwind the wire and tie Eyes’ limbs to his body, careful not to touch the angry red scorch.

When he completed the last knot, one of the cyborg’s eyelids flipped open; a mechanical eye stared up at Pehr.

Pehr stood, one leg on the wall, one on the floor, and shivered.

“
Do you have the landing program worked out yet, Pilot?” he asked, still looking down at the electronic eyeball.

“
We’re not doing the show anymore, Jack,” she said. “My name is Janus. And no, dammit, I’m having trouble with the missile. I’ve got to stop that first.” The words were sharp, yet she refrained from taking out her anger on him.

That was one of her qualities that made Pehr think he wanted to work with her on the tourist gig. She, more than anyone, including his wife, was compatible with him: She put up with him, and he admitted that was difficult. He envisioned a trail of shattered relationships stretched behind him like flotsam behind an ocean liner.

But now action was required. The past didn’t matter, not when their lives were perched precariously thousands of kilometers above an alien moon rushing toward them.

“
What can I do?” he asked, satisfied Eyes was secure. He didn’t, however, forget that the cyborg’s greatest weapon lay sheltered in his skull, unbindable.

“
Make sure the escape pod hatch opens.”

Grateful to be needed, he crawled across the spinning cabin as if over strange, new terrain, and set to work.

The lifting-body mining station rose and settled gently as the winds of Neptune rushed over it. Far below, dangerous storms roared and screamed. Safely far below. The tiny disc of the sun filtered down through the clouds, setting the hull of the station alight; microgrooves from years of atmospheric erosion caught the rays and diffracted them in all directions. A giant mass of dense cloud swept toward the station, momentarily swallowing it.

Inside, Clarisse Poinsettia Chang watched the incoming nuclear missile. The entire defense complex of this world was her extended nervous system. The missile rocketed many tens of thousands of kilometers per hour toward a power station only four kilometers from Mining Station Hachi. The mining station’s cannonmaster fired his particle cannon frantically at the missile, wasting energy, not allowing the weapon to properly recharge between shots. The power station’s automatic cannon fired measured blasts every second. An invisible envelope around the missile glowed with each rare hit, but the matter within the shield stayed intact.

She sensed the right moment. Her little hunter swung 70º off its trajectory into the path of the missile and accelerated toward it.

Like a ghost stepping through a door, a wad of hate and fear erupted within her. She became the hunter, its electronic eyes her vision, its sensors her fingertips. It came alive under her control, making her more alive. It developed a soul burdened with hate, and only destroying that missile would alleviate its terror and fury.

The sky was nearly purple ahead of the hunter, slowly melting to black scattered with stars that looked in the optics like four-pointed crosshairs. A faint web of lines and red numbers bisected the clouds. A circle-in-box appeared at the center of the pov.

She detonated the hunter.

Once more, Clarisse was the little girl floating on a pallet-raft along the Volga River, watching the sky through leaves, warm in the sun, alone, far from her hateful adopted siblings. She watched clouds drift past the branches, and sometimes saw her mother’s white hair. . . .

Clarisse shut down the dead channel and switched to another. She was in no hurry; if the hunter had failed to do its job, there was nothing left to do, anyway. She felt release, as after orgasm. She smiled, considering how long it had been since she had last even thought to satisfy herself. Still, this was better. This was real. This was substantial.

From the pov of one of Mining Station Hachi’s external cameras, she assessed the damage. A great, red streak of glowing matter and gases reached down from space and vanished into the denser clouds of the central atmosphere below. A map she overlaid told her that, somewhere in that streak, lay the power station. The artificial cloud began to twist and dance as winds began to wash it from the sky.

Clarisse flicked on a connection to the power station, careful not to let it overwhelm her pov; she would not allow herself to become a blazing wreck.

A little yellow light winked on at the corner of her splice, and below it a word: OPERATIONAL. Not green—undamaged—but not red, either. If it had been red, several mining stations would have had to shut down their main operations until the fusion reactor could be repaired or replaced. One of those stations might have even been lost if its lofting motors couldn’t compensate enough for gravity and losses to wind friction.

So her hunter had destroyed the missile, but its shattered mass had still battered the reactor. Perfect.

“
Victory!” she said aloud, and laughed. She felt as light as a little girl floating atop a gentle stretch of river.

Then the comm channels began to light up, dozens of them.

She composed herself, preparing the speech she would deliver to Neptunekaisha’s employees and government. But before she would bother herself with speeches to civilians, she transmitted these words on an unscrambled line to all units of the Sotoi Guntai, from Neptune to Mercury:

“
Limits pushed, break through.” They would understand immediately.

Even as she began to take questions and accept congratulations, she prepared to leave her little command room for the first time in years. For a moment, she was almost scared. For a moment, she doubted whether all she hoped for could possibly come true—could a single woman in all the universe really accomplish anything substantial? Could she truly burn her initials upon history?

Then the lovely, useful hate returned. She would need it now more than ever. The doubts and fear faded like snails retreating from the baking sun.

Janus deciphered the missile’s encryption codes that someone—
That bastard Eyes
, she thought—had placed to block entry. She was greeted by a penis the proportional size of a tall building.

“
Bastard, mannequin bastard,” she mumbled. She ignored Jackson’s response.

It moved; it bumped up against her consciousness; it engulfed her.

She was falling, falling back through the years as into quicksand, and there was nothing to grab and use to stop her fall.

Montgomery, Alabama, 21 years prior. She had tried to hide the blood—she had even gone to her friend, Bonette’s, mother for the appropriate insert shield—but she was only thirteen, and a thirteen-year-old is fallible.

Her father had found the red swirls in the toilet water of the rear bathroom, which Janus and her younger sister, Rachel, used. The man earned enough percents to own and maintain a four bedroom, three-bathroom unit on the green edge of the city.

“
Oh, unclean child!” she had heard him cry. “Oh, no longer a child but a woman. I am cursed!”

Between his words she heard tears. He was open with his emotions, dramatic about them. This theatric sense proved invaluable in his work as a certified Literalist minister; he broadcast three shows a day, each an hour long.

She trembled in her bedroom closet, hunched behind the stuffed animals and piled dirty clothes. Desperately, she fought to keep her weeping silent. Her heart battered her chest so loudly she was sure he could hear the thumping.

“
Where are you, woman?” he shouted, stomping from room to room. Janus had no idea where her sister was, or her mother. Why didn’t Mommy say anything? Where was she?

At the same time, Ms. Susie—Janus’ 3VRD spelling teacher—was saying, “‘E,’ Janus. The last letter is ‘e. D-i-s-e-a-s e.’ That’s an easy one. Why aren’t you helping me spell the words today, dear?” Ms. Susie was pretty, with short blonde bangs and cheeks the color of the peaches Father sometimes brought home after his long trips.

Janus was certain Father could hear Ms. Susie, but she dared not say anything. Why did he scare her so much? He was a very nice man: He gave them their daily bread, he provided shelter and clothing, and he even gave them frivolous things like toys and Mr. Henry, the plush walrus she held close to her cheek. Why should she be afraid? What was it Mommy had said about men?

Then Father’s voice got louder. She heard his shiny black shoes clunk on the real wooden threshold to Janus and Rachel’s room, just a body’s length away. His breathing was ragged, like Janus’ after she’d run as hard as she could. When he breathed out, his breath shuddered; he was still crying.

Janus tried to stop breathing. She tried to disappear by pushing herself as much as possible into Ms. Susie’s classroom. But when the closet door slid open and banged against its frame, she knew she was still in her Father’s house.

An hour or a lifetime later, as he lay atop her in his sweaty white showsuit, only the pants pulled down, he spoke:

“’
Let a woman learn in silence with all submissiveness. I permit no woman to teach or have authority over men; she is to keep silent. For Adam was formed first, then Eve; and Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor. Yet woman will be saved through bearing children, if she continues in faith and love and holiness, with modesty.’ First Timothy 11-15.

“
Remember that, woman Janus. The fires of hell are lapping at your loins. Be quiet in all things related to being a woman. The original sin is upon you like a scar, and the only way to rid yourself of that scar is by bearing children. Pay no heed to the law of man; the only salvation for woman is this—” and he pushed again inside her, a sharp burning pain that ranged all the way up to her throat.