Masked (2010) (24 page)

i grabbed his arm and twisted it and there was a loud pop sound and he stopped HA HA HA ing pretty quick and i liked that and i grabbed a leg and did the same thing and now it was more like BOO HOO HOO and tears rolling down his ugly ugly scarred face.

tears rolling out of those icy blue razberry slushy eyes. all the best SUPERVILLAINS are abot REVENGE stormy said. misery man said to me nice pecker becker with his ugly ruined mouth and got out one sort of HA but there was blood in his mouth so it didnt bother me so much this time some how.

i saw i could cover up the sound of his bad talk with the sound
of snapping so i made more snapping noises. i did not protect lynn miller wen i was a kid and that is why every thing went so rong but this time i would protect her. and make a LOT of snapping sounds.

like a carrot in a salad.

like a MILYUN carrots in a MILYUN salads.

Renowned science
fiction author Stephen Baxter has won the Philip K. Dick Award, the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, the British Science Fiction Association Award, the Kurd Lasswitz Award (Germany) and the Seiun Award (Japan), among others, and has been nominated for awards such as the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the Hugo Award, and
Locus
Awards. He is the author of the Destiny’s Children series of
Coalescent, Exultant, Transcendent,
and
Resplendent
; the Time’s Tapestry series of
Emperor, Conqueror, Navigator
, and
Weaver
, the a Time Odyssey series (written with the late Sir Arthur C. Clarke), and the environmental catastrophe duology of
Flood
and
Ark
. An absolute master of science fiction, here he brings a scientist’s eye to the superhero genre.

S
TEPHEN
B
AXTER

It was the
moment I first glimpsed my own secret origins, and, maybe, my true destiny.

I was sitting in a shuttle, en route to a swank L5 orbital hotel where I was due to start another three-month residency for another seven-figure-euro fee. Of course I was in uniform, my suit and mask black and threaded with silver, a design suggestive of space, the vacuum. The uniform is what people expect. At the moment it happened, I was signing autographs, modestly fending off questions about my heroics during the Hub blowout, and sipping champagne through a straw.

“It” was a scratch on the window. A scratch coming from
outside
a shuttle whizzing through the vacuum of space.

And a face. A human face beyond the window, no pressure suit,
nothing. A mumsy middle-aged woman. When I looked, she beckoned and smiled, and mouthed words.

Welcome home, Vacuum Lad.

The world knows me as Vacuum Lad, the name Professor Stix gave me.

The only other thing the world knows about me, aside from my singular power, is that I’m from Saudi Arabia. That was another suggestion of Professor Stix. She said I should keep my own identity secret, for the sake of my family. But I should reveal my nationality, since wretched Saudi, in these shambolic post-oil days, could use a hero of its own.

Professor Stix designed my costume and had it made up, and did a pretty good job, though it’s always chafed at the crotch. She even handles my business affairs. You could say Professor Stix created Vacuum Lad, the image, the commercial enterprise.

But she didn’t create me, the boy inside the costume, born Tusun ibn Thunayan in Dhahran twenty-one years ago, in the year 1557, or 2136 as the Christians record the date.

And she didn’t give me my power.

It was only an accident that my power was revealed to me, in fact, and an unlikely one. I mean, how many people do you know who’ve been exposed to space, to the hard vacuum and the invisible sleet of radiation?

When it happened I was just a kid, nineteen years old, on my way to study ecological salvaging in Ottawa, Canada, thanks to a European Union post-dieback Reconstruction scholarship. I think I would have been a poor student, and would pretty soon have been back home in Dhahran, working for my father’s struggling business—we turned abandoned oil wells into carbon sequestration sinks by filling them with algae-rich slurry. It would have been a living, but my older brother Muhammad would have gotten the lion’s share of the family fortune, such as it was. But I never got to Ottawa.

The shuttle was a Canadaspace suborbit hop from Riyadh to Ottawa. I wasn’t sipping champagne or signing autographs then, I can tell you. Crammed in a cattle-class tube with forty-nine other marginally poor, I was squeezed against the wall by the passenger next to me, a jolly lady from Burundi who spoke pleasantly. “You will study? Studying is beautiful. I myself am visiting a great-niece who is studying environmental ethics in Montreal. Do you know Montreal? Montreal is beautiful. . .”

I was polite, but I tuned her out, for I was enjoying my first taste of spaceflight.

From launch the ship sailed over the Gulf where, through the window to my left, I saw vapor feathers gleaming white, artificial cloud created by spray turbines to deflect a little more sunlight from an overheated Earth. The arid plains of the east were chrome-plated with solar-cell farms, and studded with silvered bubbles, lodes of frozen-out carbon dioxide. The Caspian Sea was green-blue, thick with plankton stimulated to grow and draw down carbon from the air. Asia was plunged in night, with little waste light seeping out of the brave new cities of southern Russia and China and India.

The Pacific was vast and darkened too, and it was a relief to reach morning, and to pass over North America. But all too soon we were already starting our descent, banking over the desiccated Midwest. Far below us, tracing a line through the air, I saw the white glint of a sulfur-sprayer plane, topping up faint yellow clouds of sun-shielding sulfur dioxide. And, given the position of the sun, if I had been able to see out to the right, toward space, I might have glimpsed the Stack, a cloud of smart mirrors a hundred thousand kilometers deep, forever poised between Earth and sun to scatter even more of the sunlight. But the right-hand window was eclipsed by the lady from Burundi.

That was when it happened.

The hull failure was caused by a combination of metal fatigue and, it is thought, a ding in the shuttle wall from some particle of orbital debris, maybe a fleck of two-century-old frozen astronaut urine. Spacecraft are pretty safe. It took a compound failure
to break through that shuttle’s multiply-redundant safety features. And if not for that complicated accident I’d have quietly landed at Ottawa with the rest, and subsided back into anonymity and near poverty, and that would have been that.

But the astronaut piss hit.

A blowout is a bang, an explosive event. At first I thought some terrorist had struck. There are many on Earth who oppose spaceflight. But then I felt the gale, heard the howling wind, and saw the space in front of me filled with bits of paper and plastic cups, all whirling toward my right. I started to feel cold immediately, and a pearly fog formed in the air, misting cabin lights that flashed red with alarm.

Decompression. I had paid attention to the safety briefings. I opened my mouth wide, and let the air rush out of my lungs, and from the other end let it all go with the mother of all trumps.

I knew I had only seconds of consciousness. Almost calmly, I wondered what I should do.

But I was trapped in my seat by the lady from Burundi. Dying, she gripped my hand, and I squeezed back. She was trying to hold her breath. I imagined the air trapped in her lungs overexpanding and ripping open lung tissues and capillaries. The pain must have been agonizing. And she was looking at her hands in horror, her bare arms. They were swelling. Soon the hand that held mine was huge, twice its size, comical, monstrous. Yet my hand was normal, almost. I thought I could see a kind of mist venting from my pores, and my skin seemed to be hardening, shrinking back. Not swelling at all.

As her grip relaxed I pulled away.

In the vacuum silence, the passengers around me were convulsing or going limp. And then the stewardess, the solitary flight attendant in the cabin, came drifting over our heads, a drinks tray floating beside her, a broken air mask half-fitted over the swollen ruin of a pretty face. There would be no salvation from the crew.

Still I sat in my seat. I was cold. Frost on my lips. Glaze of ice on eyes. Acute pain in my ears, a dry tearing in my throat. All this in mere seconds since the blowout.

Nobody else was moving. Was I the last one conscious?

I broke out of my shock. I punched my seat clasp and wriggled out from behind the bulk of the lady from Burundi. Floating over the heads of the bloated, inert passengers, I saw the hole in the opposite wall for the first time. It was a neat rectangle, less than a half-meter wide, a slab of darkness. It was small.

Smaller, in fact, I saw, than the attendant’s drinks tray.

I moved fast. I pushed off from the wall and fielded the tray. It had handles underneath, and a Velcro top to hold the drinks. Dragging it behind me, I squirted my way out of the hole, out into space. Then I turned around and held the tray in the hole, bracing my feet against the soft insulation blanket of the shuttle’s outer hull, pulling at the tray’s handles with my hands to seal the hole. And through a window I saw mist, the reserve air supply at last having a chance to fill up the cabin.

It was only then that it occurred to me that I’d stranded myself outside the ship.

Well, there was nothing for it but to hang on as long as I could. I didn’t feel scared, oddly, of death. I just imagined Muhammad’s face when he learned how foolishly I’d met my end. It would have been fitting, given what followed, if at that moment I’d glanced up to see the Stack of Earth-protecting mirrors with my freezing eyes, but I did not. I just laughed, inside, thinking of Muhammad.

In a few minutes the cockpit crew were able to get through to the cabin and start delivering emergency medical aid. About half the passengers survived. Well, half is better than none. It took them fifteen more minutes to mount an operation to retrieve me from my impulsive spacewalk. I was unconscious by then. My flesh wasn’t swollen, but my skin was desiccated—the copilot said it was like handling a mummy. I was smiling. My eyes were closed.

And my heart was beating, after fifteen minutes in space.

My new life went through a series of phases.

First I was a patient. Once on the ground, along with the
other survivors I was whisked into an Ottawan hospital. I’d suffered much less than some of the others. Their tissue swelling went down quickly, but many had ruptured lungs from trying to hold their breaths, and air bubbles in the bloodstream, and brain damage from hypoxia, and so forth. With me it was mainly dehydration. After a couple of days of sleep and a drip in my arm, I was walking around. I appeared to suffer no lasting harm save for a mild blotchiness about my rehydrated skin.

Then I was a media hero, the boy who’d saved the spaceship. Even my shutting myself out of the ship was interpreted as bravery rather than crass stupidity. That was terrific, but it lasted mere hours. The world’s gaze moves on quickly. My brother Muhammad said that it would have lasted longer if I’d been better looking. (Later, Professor Stix sent out software agents to minimize search-engine links between my Vacuum Lad incarnation and this first amateur outing. It wasn’t hard, she said, which rather disappointed me.)

Then I was a hero at home in Dhahran. Even Muhammad was briefly impressed. But as I anticipated, he was soon tormenting me for my brilliant plan to seal myself outside the spaceship hull. My mother made a fuss of me, however, and we gave thanks to Allah together.

Then I became a medical curiosity. The doctors in Ottawa were unable to figure out how come I was still alive. So they called me back for tests, to which my family agreed after negotiation of a fee and some discussion of medical copyright.

And then I was referred to Professor Stix.