No Life But This (7 page)

‘Be sure your head and genital shields are adjusted correctly,’ said the disembodied mechanical voice. I checked my lead-lined shorts one more time, blindly. I couldn’t see anything. My entire head was encased in an opaque helmet, and I was deeply glad of it. I had no desire to arrive on Europa bald, or sans eyelashes. Then I took the spread-eagle position the helmet directed me to
take.

There was a hum and a blast of air. The helmet flashed a sign telling me to lift first my left and then my right foot. Finally, the disembodied voice politely told me that the irradiation process was complete, and asked me to step out of the irradiation chamber to the next stage in the systematic disinfection process.

So far in the last hour I’d been scrubbed, spritzed, sprayed, flayed
and even had my eyelashes combed. Apparently they were removing from my body every single microscopic bacteria they could. My body must have been a site of micro-carnage. My eyelash mites had been eradicated and the bacteria on my elbows had been the victims of genocide. They had disinfected parts of my body that I couldn’t even reach. The disinfection process required to board the moonliner to Europa
was the crowning culmination of the flurry of activity I’d had to suffer through the last week.

I had spent a great deal of the last week just trying to hold my head together – literally. First they’d started me on an intense antibiotic and inoculation regime, to ensure that I wouldn’t carry any undesirable diseases up to Luna. The medicines made me ill. (Of course they would have to, with my
luck.) I had an allergic reaction to the first set, and they had to change the formula to work with my weird biology. The inoculations made my headaches worse – I think. My headaches were worse, anyway, and growing worse by the day. It might have been the stress. I underwent a lot of stress.

Bren came to see me the day after the trip was confirmed. ‘I hear you’re going to see my Uncle Ted,’ he
said. ‘Congratulations, Otto. I know you’ve always wanted to go.’ He reached forward and took my hand. He was optimistic, but worried.

Rose came in behind him then – they’d come to see me together. ‘The paperwork came through, we’re on. We’ll give Ted your love, Bren,’ she said.

Bren, who was still touching me, was suddenly horrified. ‘We?’ he asked. ‘You’re not seriously telling me you’re going
too.’

Rose looked taken aback. ‘Of course, we,’ she said. ‘You didn’t think I was going to send Otto halfway across the solar system on his own, did you?’

Bren let go of me abruptly, so I couldn’t read his thoughts as he said, ‘I didn’t think you were going. Whose idea was that?’

‘Mine,’ Rose said indignantly. ‘It’s my company, my moonliner, my patent – sorry Otto – and frankly Europa is pretty
much my colony. It’s high time I started exploring the different aspects of UniCorp, if only so I can know who to delegate to.’ She smiled. ‘Xavier agreed. He said since he had to go, it was only right that I get to come, too.’

‘Has to go?’
I signed.

Rose glanced back at me. ‘What was that?’

‘Why does Granddad have to go?’ Bren asked for me.

‘Colony protocol,’ Rose said. ‘Otto’s under eighteen,
he needs a legal guardian with him on Europa. That means someone from UniCorp, and ultimately it means me. And Xavier’s
my
guardian, so that means both of us.’

Bren stared at her. ‘You’re going willingly back into stasis. Again.’

I looked down. This was something I’d been worrying about too. Rose shook her head at him. ‘Xavier and I are both going,’ she said. ‘It’s not stasis, it’s interplanet
travel.’

‘But all interplanet travel has to be done in stass,’ Bren said. ‘You know that, right?’

Rose sighed, annoyed. ‘Of course I know that,’ she said. ‘The shipping weights would be impractical otherwise. Food, oxygen—’

‘But you’re going back into stasis,’ Bren said. ‘Can your body take it?’

That thought hadn’t occurred to me, though it should have. I’d been worried about the psychological
implications, and I had decided that since Xavier and I were both going it wouldn’t be such a strain on her. But physically, Rose had only barely recovered from the worst of her stass fatigue.

‘Of course it can,’ Rose snapped. ‘They wake the passengers up every month to prevent stass fatigue.’

‘But compounded with your history—’

‘Shut up!’ Rose said. ‘Can’t you see you’re ruining this? Otto
finally gets to go to Europa, and he gets to take a friend with him. Isn’t that what’s important here?’

She was talking over me, of course, but I’m used to that. I kept my hands still. I didn’t want to get in the middle of this conversation. Bren was right, but then, so was Rose.

‘It’s going to be great,’ Rose reassured both Bren and me. ‘Otto will get to see Europa, Xavier will get to see your
Uncle Ted and his kids, and I’ll get to see how the colonies operate. It’s a win-win-win.’

Bren was looking at her strangely.

‘What?’ Rose finally asked.

‘You realize I’ll be older than you when you get back, right?’

Rose kept her expression neutral, but her face went white.

‘The world will have kept on turning without you,’ Bren pressed. ‘Me, Mom, Kayin and Hilary, the school year, your
counsellor, Otto’s sisters, Quin. We’ll just keep going on without you. You’re okay with that.’

I reached over and took Bren’s arm.
‘Enough,’
I told him.
‘Stop torturing her. She doesn’t let herself think that way.
’

‘She’s an idiot!’
Bren thought at me, and snatched his arm away. ‘She
needs
to think that way.’

‘Look at her!’
I signed.

Rose was crying.

Bren immediately looked chagrined. ‘Oh,
coit, I’m sorry.’ He went up to her and hugged her. ‘Hey. Don’t cry, I’m sorry.’

‘The travel time is only five months,’ Rose said against his shoulder. ‘The rest of the time I’ll be awake on Europa. It’s not the same!’

‘No,’ Bren said gently. ‘I guess it’s not.’

She pulled away from him. ‘I don’t understand you. You want to send Otto out there alone?’

Bren looked at me. ‘No,’ he said quietly.

Rose held her head for a moment, then brushed her tears away brusquely. ‘I’m going to tell Quin and the others,’ she said. ‘The good news.’

Bren nodded as she went.

I shook my head at Bren in disapproval.

‘What?’ he asked.

I raised an eyebrow.

‘Oh, come on. You know she won’t stand up for herself. Someone has to think about what’s best for her. She sure as squitch won’t.’

I looked away,
down at the corner. Bren touched my arm.
‘That’s how her parents used to think,’
I told him.

‘That’s not fair,’ Bren said. ‘I’m actually worried about
her
, not her standing or her appearance. She never thinks about herself.’

‘I always liked how Rose thinks about others first,’
I told him.

‘That’s ’cause you’re crazy about her.’

I rolled my eyes. Noid, did everyone know?

‘Yes,’ Bren said.

I covered my purple blush with my hand. Bren quietly sent me another thought. ‘
Bit late now, isn’t it?’

He didn’t think I was going to make it.

‘No. I don’t,’ he said quietly. He pulled his hand away and looked down at the floor. ‘I think it’s worth the shot, though. For you. But I’m not sure this is what’s best for her. It might be what she thinks she wants, but Granddad … I mean, he’ll give
her anything. He won’t argue with her. It’s a good thing she’s obedient and docile, ’cause she could be throwing wild parties every night and maxing out half of UniCorp’s credits if she wanted. He wouldn’t stop her.’

‘You don’t approve,’
I signed.

‘Granddad hasn’t been himself since she came,’ Bren said. ‘He’s moody. Mom worries about him.’

‘Rose isn’t a problem, is she?’

‘No, she’s sweet.
Everyone loves her. Mom, Hilary, everyone.’ He looked down and rubbed his temples. ‘But she causes problems. Without ever meaning to. Legal problems, social problems. If she wasn’t going to be the most powerful woman in the world in about four years it wouldn’t be such a trouble, but it is. It’s hard being her friend.’ He looked at me. ‘I don’t know how you can stand it. Looking every day at all
that pain she won’t let herself see. It’s exhausting.’

‘Only if you care,’
I signed.

‘I do care. I wish I didn’t. It’s like she
made
me care about her, without ever saying a word.’ I looked confused, and Bren shook his head. ‘You weren’t there. You have no idea how she looked coming out of stasis.’

I knew how it had felt. Rose had shown me. I squeezed Bren’s hand.
‘Show me.’

Bren blinked,
and then let himself remember. The dim, abandoned smell of the sub-basement he had found her stass tube in; the horror as he discovered there was a body in the tube; the fear that he’d done something wrong and killed the occupant. Then Rose – impossibly thin, inhuman, almost insectoid, her skin pale as a grub, her hair brittle as spun glass, her eyes darting around, unable to focus. Her skull, so
clear beneath the fleshless skin, her eyes bulging from sunken sockets. Then the weak, pitiful sound of her scream after Bren had told her how long she’d been asleep. The horror of her collapse, as he again thought he’d killed her. The moment of indecision, which was no choice in the end, as he picked her up in his arms to take her away from that dank hole. The thick chemical floral scent of her,
her hair, her clothes, saturated with the dizzying perfume of stasis. The bone-thin weight of her as he carried her unconscious body up to his mother. At the time he had done it all with detached efficiency, no conscious emotion, but Rose’s skeletal form still haunted his dreams sometimes. He pulled his hand away – he hadn’t meant to tell me that.

‘I should have left her there and gone to get
help,’ he said instead. ‘The doctors should have been the ones to get her out of the tube. She was so frail I might have hurt her, carrying her. But I couldn’t. She was so small and so alone, all alone in the dark … I couldn’t leave her alone again. I just couldn’t.’ His eyes were unfocused, deep inside the memory.

I stared at Bren. This was something I hadn’t really taken into account. He truly
had rescued her that day, more than anyone could ever know but him and Rose. He might not admit it, but her very existence had changed his life, his whole view of himself and the world in which he lived. I wasn’t at all surprised she had fallen in love with him.

‘It was awful,’ Bren said unnecessarily. ‘And to top it all off, she won’t blame them. Her …
parents.
’ I could tell he thought using
that word for them was insulting to parenthood. ‘I mean, I hate them, and I never even met them. Anyone who would do that to their daughter … All three of their kids. Did you know, she thinks there’s two more Fitzroy kids out there, slowly dying in stass tubes?’ I did know this. ‘But she won’t let anyone say anything bad about them. It doesn’t matter that they neglected her and kept her ignorant
and sentenced her to a slow death by stass fatigue and sent a Plastine to assassinate her. She keeps coming up with reasons why they might have done all that. She insists they weren’t malicious.’

‘I know,’
I signed. It was quite a trying trait of hers. She’d written me long treatises on how nice her mom really was, and that her dad wasn’t that bad, really, and how they probably meant to let her
out of stasis, they just … That was where her rationalizations always fell down. It was easier in person. I could move her rationalizations out of the way and remind her how she really thought of them in a way she couldn’t deny. But Bren didn’t have that outlet, so he had to hear it all and just keep his mouth shut.

‘Granddad says you have to just let her do it. It’s what abuse victims do. They
waver back and forth between love and hate like tennis balls, long after you think they should know better. He says she loved them, and she misses them. Then his face twists, and he says he knows how hard it is, and you
know
he does. You can just see that he grew up with it. It’s like she’s torturing him. And she’s not doing anything wrong, she just
is
.’ He shook his head. ‘And then she looks
at me, with those old eyes of hers, and it feels so weird …’

‘She loves you.’

‘Yeah, how?’ Bren asked, annoyed.

‘She doesn’t know.
’

He held up a hand, exasperated. ‘I know. And I
don’t
love her, not like you do. But she needs looking after. And I don’t know if she’ll get it on Europa, not with you sick and Granddad like he is.’

I reached out and took Bren’s arm.
‘She’s stronger than she looks,’
I told him.
‘Have faith in her.’

‘I do,’ Bren said. ‘That’s what worries me.’

And the history of UniCorp came pouring through his head, a thousand callous takeovers and economic assassinations and corporate slaughters and everything that had made UniCorp the most powerful, and most dangerous, corporation in history. ‘Her father did all that. I’ve seen the holovids. And there are times she’s
just like him. I don’t know if you’ve seen it, ’cause she tends to be gentle around you. If there’s something she doesn’t like, something she thinks needs to be set right, her eyes get hard and she’ll say something – something so cold. She lived through everything they did to her, and she denies it. If she can deny that, what else could she be deluded over?’ He stared at me. ‘She was actually considering
stassing you without your permission. Did you know that?’

‘
Yeah, I guessed. She doesn’t see it the same way we do.’

‘Well, that’s her all over. If she doesn’t want to see something, she won’t let herself. In five years … she has the power to do anything. And she could. She could be the best thing that ever happened to this world. Or she could be corrupted and become a total despot.’

‘
I wouldn’t
worry about her.’

Bren shook his head. ‘You’re as much an innocent as she is. It’s a whole different
world
, Otto, literally. You say you only like people who are willing to expand their minds, well expand this. The colonies … are not nice places. I know you’ve been dreaming about going to Europa forever, but I also know you don’t know what that means. No one down here ever looks at it, but it’s
all still pre-Dark-Time mentality out there. Major class segregation, absolute dictatorship, utterly unregulated scientific experimentation, oxygen taxes and Plastines and genetic manipulation and terrorists and … all those things no one likes to talk about.’ His eyes were dark. Clearly he thought about it a lot, whether he spoke about it or no.