Across the Spectrum (36 page)

Not once did he offer an alternate picture. In many of the
replays, most of the squad had survived three-quarters of the way to the
LZ.
In others, Johnnie had
died a hero. And in just about all of them, DeWitt hadn’t been such a stupid
fuck, because repetition had taught him strategy and erased his personal
disorientation. Rudy heard none of that, because DeWitt told only the truth.

Finally, mouth cottony from the long talk, he picked up a
ladybug that had crawled onto the porch and pretended to be absorbed examining
its markings. “But all that was a long time ago.” He didn’t want to turn, for
fear he’d see the glazed look he’d seen so often on people back home whenever
anybody mentioned Vietnam.

“I’ve been wanting to hear about it,” Rudy said. The boy’s
voice was full of interest, not boredom.

DeWitt clapped his hand down on his son’s shoulder. “Then . . .
we’ll talk about it again. We ought to have lots of opportunity, now that
you’re here.”

Rudy nodded. “That’s for sure.”

DeWitt’s uncle, Hosea, limped onto the porch, aided by his
hickory cane. How DeWitt had respected that cane, once upon a time. “Rutherford,
your grandma wants to chat with you a spell before she leaves,” Hosea
announced.

Rudy went inside, waved on by DeWitt. Hosea lingered by the
doorway. The screen door clattered shut, muffling the babble of the family
dinner.

Hosea cocked an eyebrow, a knowing look on his grizzled,
former mechanic’s features. “He’s going to stay.”

DeWitt nodded. His glance rose to a cloud formation up near
the zenith, just visible under the eave.

Hosea chuckled. But then, instead of returning to the party,
he sat down on the edge of the porch with his nephew. “You know, if I don’t
miss my guess, I’d say your life’s doing about the best it’s ever done for you,
right here this summer.”

“That’s the truth,” DeWitt said.

“Then why ain’t you acting happy?”

DeWitt looked down, and saw that his uncle was making a
joke. The old man didn’t realize how startling the question had been.
Because
that cloud up there is turning purple,
he might have answered, had it been
a serious remark.

∞

The cloud waited for him all that night. He heard it
breathing up in the sky long after Wanda had fallen asleep beside him. He saw
it out the window as he, Rudy, and Wanda sat at the breakfast table the next
morning. Though the sun had long risen, the billows retained the hue of
earliest dawn.

“I’m going for a walk,” he said at noon, while Rudy was gone
to fetch a new headlight for the car.

The cloud descended as he ambled down the street, as DeWitt
knew it would. The mist slid into an alley and waited, reeking of ozone. When
DeWitt reached the alley’s mouth, it oozed forward. Two steps later, the cement
beneath him turned to hard-packed clay, red and wet and steaming in the heat.
He kept walking.

The path’s beginning was gone. He knew the spot only by the
surrounding landmarks. He stopped. The equatorial glare flashed from his
bayonet to the glossy green leaves and back. The jungle hummed with its
familiar, welcoming sounds. He did not attempt to move forward.

He searched for the lemonade girl, but she was gone. Near
the same spot, however, he saw a clearly defined trail, marked with whitewashed
cobblestones. A sign beside it read, “
R&R.
”

His stomach felt as if fire ants had taken up residence
within it. He sat down in the center of the road, drew a deep breath, and
waited. He nearly drained his canteen, enduring the open sun, before the
elephant grass swayed and parted. DeWitt’s best buddy emerged, deep shadows
under his helmet.

“Hey, DeWitt,” Johnnie said. “What’s keeping you, brother?”

The words formed a mass in DeWitt’s throat. He had to speak
them, or swallow them, one or the other. If he didn’t, they’d choke him.

“I got my papers. I’m going back to the World.”

Johnnie nodded. The shadows would not clear from under the
helmet. DeWitt could see only darkness—black skin against a fuliginous canvas.
His buddy had no eyes to make contact with. “We know,” Johnnie said, with the
voice of a man who has seen the bullet with his name on it. “We been feeling
this day coming for a while now. Congratulations, Sarge.”

DeWitt lost his grip on his rifle. It fell onto the rutted
mud of the road. “I’m sorry, Johnnie. I’ve got things to do now, other places
to be.”

“Forget us, motherfucker,” Johnnie said with conviction.
“You should have erased us from your brain a long time ago. You think it’s
easy, dyin’ a thousand times?”

A thousand times, a thousand times.
“Shit,” DeWitt
said, his tongue tasting as if it had been dusted with iron filings. “Johnnie,
I never—”

“Don’t sweat it, man. We all wanted you to try. At first.
But there’s only so much tryin’ a man can do.”

Johnnie stepped back, and with the grace of a well-trained
soldier, faded into the elephant grass as if he’d never been—a ghost in its
element. He left behind only a cloud of gnats and the dank odor of the rice paddy.
And a cool draft of something very much like forgiveness.

DeWitt turned, kicked the clay from the soles of his boots,
and took the new path—the only path left visible. Around the first stand of
trees, he came to a ville. Around the first bamboo hut, he entered a city of
stucco, wood-frame houses, and lawns. In a few more steps he was once more
striding along a sidewalk of his neighborhood.

He stopped and looked back. A last wisp of Purple Haze
climbed toward the sun and evaporated.

Wanda met him on the steps. They went inside, and talked
about where to send Rudy to school. That night, DeWitt Langdon slept deeply.
Fourteen years behind schedule, his tour had ended.

This was an award nominee, shortlisted for the British Science
Fiction Association award for best short story in 2007. It’s a favourite
because it’s my first genuine SF story, and the seed that led to my novel(la)
Rotten Row, newly out from BVC and set in the same universe.

Dunno what else to tell you about it, except that it was held
up for eighteen months by my utter conviction that I needed to know about plate
tectonics on other Earth-like worlds—would they be inherent? essential? likely?
rare?—and I couldn’t find the answers. Eventually it dawned on me that I could abandon
that line of enquiry and seek another solution; this story wouldn’t be the same
without it. And now, of course, I live a short walk from SETI and NASA, and
planetary geologists are my friends, and I know all that we know about plate
tectonics on other worlds. . . (Exceeding rare, at least in this solar system.)

∞ ∞ ∞

unspeakable
journeys
into and out of the light

He stood on the Tower of Souls, and watched her fly.

∞

Say it another way, he stood on the high-stacked bodies of
his Upshot kind, but that was nothing: filing. Bureaucracy. Paranoia.

It was the locals, the natives, the dirigibles—she called
them
dirigistes
, but that was ironic—who had built and named this
height, who gave a value to these discards. Black discs, each one identical,
each one uniquely coded: each one the residue of a human passing through. A
carbon footprint, she liked to say.

At other terminals, other ’Chutes, the discards were racked
in vaults, in coded order, physical back-ups of what the record said: never
needed, simply because they were there and known to be there. What greater
security could there be? Here, they stood in another kind of order. As soon as
the dirigibles understood what the discards were, what they meant—in so far as
they did understand, in so far as free-floating bags of gas could understand
the motives and intentions, the physics and biology of meat and bone, of
mammals—they had taken possession, demanded it. They saw humans walk into the
’Chute, they saw them gone, and only these discs remaining; they claimed the
discs, and built—well, this. A tower. Tower of Souls, just as they built for
themselves, their own waymarkers, their almost-holy statements,
we were here
.

It made sense, he supposed. It was the same message, even.
And there was no risk, however much the bureaucracy disliked it: dirigibles
were as careful of every discard as the most paranoid could wish. Just, they
layered them into a tower, high and broad and solid, mute testament to how much
traffic this terminal had seen in its century of standing. The Upshot might not
be many, reckoned against downside populations, but they did like to keep
moving; every stopover, every staging-post meant another discard, another disc.

This tower was tall enough by now to be a feature of the
landscape, standing higher than the terminal roof, though the spire of the
’Chute still dwarfed it. The landscape could use a few features, he thought,
weary of endless wind-blown plains; which was surely why the dirigibles built
their towers, and just as surely why she flew from here, and why he clambered
up behind to watch her.

It was only by grace that the dirigibles allowed it.
Hard-earned
grace
he liked to say, but she wouldn’t have it so. She said that grace
could never be deserved; it came as a gift, the soul of generosity. Like
flight, she said, to earthbound creatures; like transit to the Upshot,
immeasurable grace.

Even on a low-grav world, flying was still a matter of faith
as well as engineering. He always said he had faith too much; he believed very
firmly in the solidity of things, and the susceptibility of air. She seemed to
believe what people told her, and the evidence of her eyes. Therefore she flew,
while he kept himself grounded. He watched her soar, and checked her equipment
scrupulously, before and after. And talked to her, mid-flight—

“How’s the wind?”

“Easy; always easy,
this late. Fresh at dawn, but that’s fun too. You should try it.”

“What can you see?
Tell me what you see.”

“Nothing new. The
sun’s so low, the spire’s shadow goes all the way to the horizon like a road,
so straight—but you know that, you can see it from down there. . . “

“Not so far. My
horizon’s a lot closer. And for me it is a road, I could walk it if the sun
stayed still.”

“You do that, then.
I’ll hold the sun steady, I can almost reach her from here. . . “

“Not so high! Don’t
fly so high. I told you before, keep the tip of the spire in your eyeline and
stay below it. That suit’s not rated for heights above a thousand metres.”

“Well, it should be.
I’m fine. Anyway, I can too see the spire. . . “

“Only by looking down.
Don’t lie to me, I need magnification just to find you. Come back.”

“Coming! Whee—!”

“—Not like that, not
all at once! Woman, do you want to see me die here?”

“Sole purpose of dive.
Ready to catch you when you fall. I thought it would be ironic.”

—because he thought he was her anchor, her tether to the
fixities of life. He really thought she needed one.

∞

He thought they all did. So too did the downsiders,
legislating for the Upshot community. Set free to roam as far as any ’Chute
could fling, essentially rendered into information, they must necessarily be
tethered by that same information: a backstory that led all the way, traceable
through every separate body, every discard, to the one that they were born
with, however long ago. Identity was absolute, and paranoia was the key. If one
mind, one personality could migrate from one body to another—and have that body
grown specifically for them, to a DNA-weave of their devising—then how could
anyone be sure that the person they spoke to today was the same person they
were speaking to yesterday? The body might match entirely, but that meant
nothing any more. Questions of identity had to be cut entirely away from the
physical; which meant by definition that no Upshot could be allowed two
matching discards. They called them discards, even while the bodies were still
growing in the vats, to emphasise the temporary; and every DNA profile was
one-use-only, and whenever someone went through a ’Chute they were fitted into
a discard not quite entirely at random. They might emerge as any racial mix and
any gender, any body type; the only certainty they had, they would not be the
person that they had been going in. If no one looked to recognise an Upshot
from one trip to the next, if identity was carried in the mind and not the
body, then no one stood in danger of deception. Paranoia was a virtue; people’s
private codes and passwords were intimate, intense, not to be stolen or given
away.

Like all the Upshot, his life was an open book, a matter of
public record: how he had been flung out of school, out of the army, out of any
discipline he’d tried; how in the end, almost in desperation, he had been flung
into orbit to work on terminal construction. His home world wouldn’t tolerate
it downside, but they had the schematics and the skills for an orbital
platform, and chemical rockets to get there, and the benefits of a Upchute were
too great to ignore. So it was built, and in the building of it he found a life
he could cherish. The intimate spaceside disciplines that his and his
co-workers’ lives depended on; the extraordinary physicality of working
roustabout in a suit, in a vacuum, in nul-g; the extraordinary physicality of
his co-workers in the dorm-ships, inter-shift, where rules and limits seemed
all to have been left behind, downside; the constant call, no, suck of the
stars, that were not a background to his new life so much as the vessel that
contained it.

And then, then, the ’Chute was finished, and he was eager in
the queue to be away. His original body was abandoned, crushed and dried,
compacted and coded by the process that his people had signed up to, compulsory
paranoia; he’d been flung far and far, to another planet and another job,
building mineworks for a new colony. He might have stayed, he might have found
himself a family and another life again. In fact, though, he had been she in
that new incarnation, and after so long as a male the shock of change was
enough to be dealing with; pregnancy was something else again, and not to be
considered. Besides, it was a wild ride, this being flung from one body to
another. Why, whyever would he only taste it once . . . ?