Interzone Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazine #226 (14 page)

"You're going to pay,” he howled over the comm. “I'm dumping you into the deep dark."

"Why?” Lappet shouted, distracted from her moment of reluctant good will by his anger. She tried to shove the artifact at him, but only succeeded in adding to her spin. “So you can go home with this thing and die without ever getting rich!?"

"Blow that piece of crap out the airlock,” he said. “You owe me a life, sweetie."

Alain swung the long-arm wrench again. The torque expended twisted his body, loosening his grip on Lappet.

She tried to duck. She wasn't going to kill again, even if he was trying to kill her first. Her helmet drifted downward, close to Alain's return swing. Lappet caught him with her free hand and tucked herself under the flailing wrench.

That was when she realized they were thirty meters above the surface and moving away from the asteroid somewhat faster than local escape velocity. Neither one of them had their line guns any more. Their suits’ attitude jets weren't going to do it. Malibu had shown them that.

Alain thrashed against Lappet as she tried to think.
They had spin.
She could kick free of him at the right section of their rotation and use the imparted angular momentum to return to the surface. She might well bounce, but at least she'd have a chance.

Or I can release the artifact
, she thought.

She'd lose a billion tai kong yuan that way. Pushing Alain into the deep dark would let her be worth half a billion, instead of a third.

Half a billion she'd never live to cash in.

Alain thumped on her helmet, scrabbling for the purge valve on her oxygen supply.

"Damn you to the hells of Mercury, you stupid bastard,” she screamed. Lappet let go of the most significant piece of history ever to be held in human hands.

Lappet hugged Alain close as the two of them spun toward the surface of (217496) 2078 hj3. She was afraid of letting go of him too soon.

They slammed into the rock hard enough to crack her teeth together. Lappet was mortally afraid of the bounce. Suit jets firing, she threw out her hands and scrabbled for purchase. There were knobs and cracks and crevices all over this asteroid.

Alain grunted something incoherent. He tugged on her boot, pulling her away even as Lappet's fingers snagged on a rounded lip of rock. Her body pulled upward, the strain of both their masses stretching at her shoulders. “Stop fighting me, you damned fool!” she screamed.

The tension shifted, and for a moment she thought he'd let go. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Alain's wrench spinning away. She hit the surface again, rolling over fast to try to catch a look at him.

He was floating above her, moving much more slowly now. Still, he was leaving, just like the billion tai kong yuan had done.

"No!” Lappet launched herself after him, slowly so as not to overshoot or drag them both into solar orbit, and caught Alain's arms. His faceplate was fogged—the bastard was crying. Counting the degrees of their rotation, she reached past his helmet and cracked his oxygen purge valve.

He was a little rocket carrying them back down slowly enough to land in one piece.

As Lappet and Alain landed, their team's rockhopper passed overhead. The ship trailed the safety lines and stakes which had held it in place. That bastard Tanielu must have had the thing warming through pre-launch cycle since she'd first found the artifact.

"A rescue,” she yelled over comm, but Tanielu didn't bother to answer.

Lappet already knew where he was heading—after one billion tai kong yuan she'd just launched into solar orbit. Without the rockhopper's power supply, the habitat's fuel cells would be good for ten days, maybe two weeks max, before they froze to death while breathing their own carbon dioxide. All their comm transmission capability was gone too, except for the short range rescue screamers built into the skinsuits.

She rolled over, her elbows and shoulders aching as if the joints had separated. “Well,” she told the rapidly-fading Alain. “Looks like it's just you, me and Malibu out here."

Twelve days later a pair of hardsuits made their way through the lock into the foetid interior of the habitat. Lappet looked down from her hammock near the upper wall. The oxygen was mildly better up there, and it kept her away from the mold which had taken over the floor.

Alain hung inert next to her. He hadn't spoken in four days. Of course, neither had she.

A suit speaker crackled in the thick, hard air. “You kids alive?"

"I am,” Lappet croaked.

One of them raised a nozzle.
Ah
, she thought.
Tanielu made it to somewhere useful, and now he's cleaning up the competition.
Her death would be worth 333 million tai kong yuan to him, after all.

A pale cloud hissed out. Moments later she could taste sweet, sweet air.

Alain moaned. “Malibu?"

"He's righ’ here,” Lappet lied. “Waiting for you."

The other hardsuit jetted up to her and offered a breathing mask. “Where's your rockhopper?"

"You ha'n’ hear’ from Ta'ielu?” The words were hard, so very hard.

"Followed your suit screamers in after we lost signal from your team. That's all we know. What the hell happened here?"

She collapsed back in her hammock. Who knew anything now? What story to tell? Her head wasn't straight, and Alain wasn't good for anything.

Lappet struggled to speak again. “Human error,” she said. “Tha's wha’ happen'. Human error."

Copyright (C) 2010 Jay Lake

[Back to Table of Contents]

It started with Lionel Caldwell, born in 1900 to strict Mennonites who believed drinking, dancing, and wearing jewelry were sins against God. As soon as Lionel was old enough, he fled to the decadent city where he drank hard liquor from speakeasies, cursed using the Lord's name, and danced with women who wore bobbie socks and chin-length hair.

Lionel made a fortune selling jewelry. Rubies and sapphires even kept him flush during the Great Depression. He believed his riches could see him through any trouble—and then Art was born.

Lionel had left his breeding late, so Art grew up in the sixties. He rejected his father's conservative values in favor of peace, love, and lack of hygiene. He dated Negroes and Jewesses shamelessly, and grew out his dark hair until it fell to his waist.

"What the hell have you done?” demanded Lionel when Art came home from college, ponytail trailing down his back. Before Art could defend himself, Lionel slammed down his whiskey glass. “You make me sick,” he said, and stormed out of the den.

Eventually Art annoyed his father further by marrying a Jewess whose father was a Hollywood producer. Reluctantly, Lionel attended the wedding. Drunk on the generous bar provided by Art's new father-in-law, Lionel became open-hearted. “You all are the good kind of Jews,” he explained to Jack Fieldstone nee Goldman over the champagne toast. For the sake of family harmony, Jack held his tongue.

Art's wife Esther was a career woman with a professorship in Art History at San Francisco State College. She made it clear that children were not happening until she had tenure and so their two daughters weren't born until the mid-eighties.

Sage was the elder, round with baby-fat, and gruff instead of sweet. She wore her hair in a rainbow-dyed Mohawk, thrust a ring through her nose, and stomped around in chains and combat boots. She earned cash fixing the neighbors’ computers, and spent her profits on acid tabs and E.

The younger daughter, Rue, appeared more demure—but only until she took off her loose sweatshirts and jeans to reveal her extensive tattoos and DIY brands. Tribal tattoos patterned her arms down to the wrists, making her own pale skin look like a pair of gloves. Cartoon characters and brand names formed a sarcastic billboard on her back. Japanese kanji spelled out ‘Abandon all hope ye who enter here’ on her inner thighs—which had on multiple occasions helped her sift wheat from chaff. She explained that she was saving up for something called lacing, which made even Sage retch a little when she heard what it was.

"I feel sorry for you two,” Art told Sage and Rue. “All my generation had to do to aggravate our parents was grow out our hair. What's going to happen to your children?"

Sage turned out to be the breeder, so she got to find out. Her eldest son, Paolo, joined an experimental product trial to replace his eyes, nose, and ears with a sensitive optic strip. Lucia crossed her DNA with an ant's and grew an exoskeleton that came in handy when she renounced her parents’ conscientious objector status and enlisted in the army. Javier quit college to join a colony of experimental diseasists and was generous enough to include photographs of his most recent maladies every year in his holiday cards.

Things got worse, too. By the time Paolo had kids, limb regeneration was the fashion. Teens competed to shock each other with extreme mutilations. Paolo's youngest, Gyptia, won a duel with her high school rival by cutting off her own legs, arms, breasts, and sensory organs.

When he saw what she'd done, Paolo stifled his urge to scream. “'Pie,” he said, carefully, “Isn't this going a bit far?"

Gyptia waited until she regrew her eyes, and then she rolled them.

By the time Gyptia reached adulthood, life spans had passed the half-millennia mark. Her generation delayed family life. Why go through all the fuss of raising babies now when they could stay fancy-free for another few decades?

At three hundred and fifty, Gyptia's biological clock proclaimed itself noisily. She backed out of the lease on her stratoflat and joined a child-friendly cooperative in historical Wyoming that produced wind energy. Current and former residents raved about its diversity. The co-op even included a few nuclear families bonded by ancient religious rituals.

Gyptia's daughter, Xyr, grew up surrounded by fields of sage brush dotted with windmills. She and her friends scrambled up the sandstone bluffs and pretended to live in stratoflats like the ones their parents had left behind.

Every option was open to Xyr: a vast range of territory for her to explore, monthly trips to see the technological and artistic wonders of the modern world, educational and entertainment databases linked in by speed pulse. Her neighbors included: polyamorists, monogamists, asexuals, traditionalists, futurists, historics, misanthropists, genetic hybrids, biomechanical biblends, purists, anarchists, exortates, xenophiles, menthrads, ovites, alvores and ilps.

Xyr grew her hair long and straight. She had no interest in recreational drugs beyond a sip of wine at holidays. She rejected a mix of eagle and bat genes to improve her hearing and eyesight, and she kept her skin its natural multiracial brown instead of transfusing to a fashionable scarlet.

When all the adults got nostalgic and gathered to inject themselves with Lyme's disease and rubella and chicken pox, Xyr and her friends held dances on the sage brush fields, draping streamers from the windmills.

Gyptia pleaded with her daughter to do something normal. “One hand,” she begged. “Just the right one. Clean off at the wrist. It won't take hardly any time to grow back."

Xyr flipped her sleek blonde ponytail. She pulled a cardigan over her jumper and clasped the top button modestly at her throat, leaving the rest to drape her shoulders like a shawl. “Mom,” she said, with a teenage groan that hadn't changed over centuries. “At least
try
not to be so crink."

Gyptia fretted as she stood by the door watching Xyr stride out to meet her friends on the windy fields, her rose sweater fluttering behind her.

It hurt so much every time Gyptia realized anew that there was really nothing she could do, no way she could protect Xyr from anything that mattered, up to and including herself. That was one of the ultimate difficulties of parenting, she supposed, trying to impose an older generation's thought patterns upon emerging ways of thinking. There would always be chasms between them, mother and daughter. Gyptia had to try to protect Xyr anyway. Gyptia let the door iris close and went up to her room to cut off a finger or two and do her best not to worry.

Copyright (C) 2010 Rachel Swirsky

[Back to Table of Contents]