Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction (488 page)

In the meantime this is my last will and testament. See, I have us doing all kinds of research on Orgasmic Crime, so that someday I’ll know enough to reach inside the system and unplug it. Unplug it all, and make those bastards lose everything, the way they took everything away from Dogwalker. Trouble is, some places there ain’t no way to look without leaving tracks. Goo is as goo do, I always say. I’ll find out I’m not as good as I think I am when somebody comes along and puts a hot steel putz in my face. Knock my brains out when it comes. But there’s this, lying in a few hundred places in the system. Three days after I don’t lay down my code in a certain program in a certain place, this story pops into view. The fact you’re reading this means I’m dead.

Or it means I paid them back, and so I quit suppressing this because I don’t care anymore. So maybe this is my swan song, and maybe this is my victory song. You’ll never know, will you, mate?

But you’ll wonder. I like that. You wondering about us, whoever you are, you thinking about old Goo Boy and Dogwalker, you guessing whether the fangs who scooped Doggy’s skull and turned him into self-propelled property paid for it down to the very last delicious little drop.

And in the meantime, I’ve got this goo machine to take care of. Only ten percent a man, he is, but then I’m only forty percent myself. All added up together we make only half a human. But that’s the half that counts. That’s the half that still wants things. The goo in me and the goo in him is all just light pipes and electricity. Data without desire. Lightspeed trash. But I have some desires left, just a few, and maybe so does Dogwalker, even fewer. And we’ll get what we want. Every speck. Every sparkle. Believe it.

* * * *

Copyright © 1989 by Davis Publications, Inc.

(1942– )

Although she’s written very little short fiction and is probably better known nowadays for her fantasy, I had to have Carolyn Cherryh in this anthology, because her too-gritty-to-call-them-space opera Merchanter novels, especially the Hugo Award–winning
Downbelow Station
(1982) were so startlingly good, and were hugely influential on me. Luckily, she did have a story available that was set in the same universe.

Carolyn was a high school Latin teacher in Oklahoma city writing fantasy part-time until the mid-1970s. After her first novel,
Gate of Ivrel
(1976) came out, she won the Campbell Award for best new writer. When she won a Hugo for “Cassandra” (1978), she left teaching to write full time, which she’s done ever since.

Carolyn’s last name was originally spelled Cherry, but editor Don Wollheim thought it looked too much like a romance writer and suggested adding the H. Her brother, David Cherry, is a well-known SF cover artist.

First published in
Science Fiction: DAW 30th Anniversary
, May 2002

CrazyCharlie
:
Got your message, Unicorn: Meet for lunch?

Dutchman
:
Charlie, what year?

CrazyCharlie:
Not you, Dutchman. Talking to the pretty lady.

T_Rex
:
Unicorn
’s not a lady.

CrazyCharlie
:
Shut up. Pay no attention to them, Unicorn. They’re all jealous.

T_Rex
:
Unicorn’s not answering. Must be asleep.

CrazyCharlie:
Beauty sleep.

Unicorn
:
Just watching you guys. Having lunch.

Lover18
:
What’s for lunch, pretty baby?

Unicorn
:
Chocolate. Loads of chocolate.

T_Rex
:
Don’t do that to us. You haven’t got chocolate.

Unicorn
:
I’m eating it now. Dark chocolate. Mmmm.

T_Rex
:
Cruel.

CrazyCharlie
:
Told you she’d show for lunch. Fudge icing, Unicorn…

CrazyCharlie
:
…
With ice cream.

Dutchman
:
I
remember ice cream.

T_Rex
:
Chocolate ice cream.

FrogPrince
:
Stuff like they’ve got on B-dock. There’s this little shop…

T_Rex
:
With poofy white stuff.

Dutchman
:
Strawberry ice cream.

FrogPrince
:
…
that serves five different flavors.

CrazyCharlie
:
Unicorn in chocolate syrup.

Unicorn:
You wish.

Hawk29
:
With poofy white stuff.

Unicorn
:
Shut up, you guys.

Lover18
:
Yeah, shut up, you guys. Unicorn and I are going to go off somewhere.

CrazyCharlie
:
In a thousand years, guy.

Ping. Ping-ping. Ping.

Sandwich was done. Sandman snagged it out of the cooker, everted the bag, and put it in for a clean. Tuna san and a coffee
fizz,
ersatz. He couldn’t afford the true stuff, which, by the time the freight ran clear out here, ran a guy clean out of profit—which Sandman still hoped to make but it wasn’t the be-all and end-all. Being out here was.

He had a name. It was on the records of his little two-man op, which was down to one, since Alfie’d had enough and gone in for food. Which was the first time little
BettyB
had ever made a profit. No mining. Just running the buoy. Took a damn long time running in, a damn long time running out, alternate with
PennyGirl.
Which was how the unmanned buoys that told everybody in the solar system where they were kept themselves going. Dozens of buoys, dozens of little tenders making lonely runs out and back, endless cycle. The buoy was a robot. For all practical purposes BettyB was a robot, too, but the tenders needed a human eye, a human brain, and Sandman was that. Half a year running out and back, half a year in the robot-tended, drop-a-credit pleasures of Beta Station, half the guys promising themselves they’d quit the job in a couple more runs, occasionally somebody doing the deed and going in. But most didn’t. Most grew old doing it. Sandman wasn’t old yet, but he wasn’t young. He’d done all there was to do at Beta, and did his favorites and didn’t think about going in permanently, because when he was going in and had Beta in BettyB’s sights, he’d always swear he was going to stay, and by the time six months rolled around and he’d seen every vid and drunk himself stupid and broke, hell, he was ready to go back to the solitude and the quiet.

He was up on three months now, two days out from Buoy 17, and the sound of a human voice—his own—had gotten odder and more welcome to him. He’d memorized all the verses to
Matty Groves
and sang them to himself at odd moments. He was working on St. Mark and the complete works of Jeffrey Farnol. He’d downloaded Tennyson and Kipling and decided to learn French on the return trip—not that any of the Outsiders ever did a damn thing with what they learned and he didn’t know why French and not Italian, except he thought his last name, Ives, was French, and that was reason enough in a spacescape void of reasons and a spacetime hours remote from actual civilization.

He settled in with his sandwich and his coffee fizz and watched the screen go.

He lurked, today. He usually lurked. The cyber-voices came and went. He hadn’t heard a thing from BigAl or Tinman, who’d been in the local neighborhood the last several years. He’d asked around, but nobody knew, and nobody’d seen them at Beta. Which was depressing. He supposed BigAl might have gone off to another route. He’d been a hauler, and sometimes they got switched without notice, but there’d been nothing on the boards. Tinman might’ve changed handles. He was a spooky sort, and some guys did, or had three or four. He wasn’t sure Tinman was sane—some weren’t, that plied the system fringes. And some ran afoul of the law, and weren’t anxious to be tracked. Debts, maybe. You could get new ID on Beta, if you knew where to look, and the old hands knew better than the young ones, who sometimes fell into bodacious difficulties. Station hounds had broken up a big ring a few months back, forging bank creds as well as ID—just never trust an operation without bald old guys in it, that was what Sandman said, and the Lenny Wick ring hadn’t, just all young blood and big promises.

Which meant coffee fizz was now pricey and scarce, since the Lenny Wick bunch had padded the imports and siphoned off the credits, which was how they got caught.

Sandman took personal exception to that situation: anything that got between an Outsider and his caffeine ought to get the long, cold walk in the big dark, so far as that went. So Lenny Wick hadn’t got a bit of sympathy, but meanwhile Sandman wasn’t too surprised if a few handles out in the deep dark changed for good and all.

Nasty trick, though, if Tinman was Unicorn. No notion why anybody ever assumed Unicorn was a she. They just always had.

FrogPrince
:
So what are you doing today, Sandman? I see you
…

Sandman ate a bite of sandwich. Input:

Sandman
:
Just thinking about Tinman. Miss him.

FrogPrince
:
…
lurking out there.

Sandman
:
Wonder if he got hot ID. If he’s lurking, he can leave me word.

T_Rex
:
Haven’t heard, Sandman, sorry.

Unicorn
:
Won’t I do, Sandman?

Sandman
:
Sorry, Unicorn. Your voice is too high.

Unicorn
:
You female, Sandman?

T_Rex
:
LMAO.

FrogPrince:
LL&L.

Sandman:
No.

Dutchman
:
Sandman is a guy.

Unicorn
:
You don’t like women, Sandman?

T_Rex
:
Shut up, Unicorn.

Sandman
:
Going back to my sandwich now.

Unicorn
:
What are you having, Sandman?

Sandman
:
Steak and eggs with coffee. Byebye.

He ate his tuna san and lurked, sipped the over-budget coffee fizz. They were mostly young. Well, FrogPrince wasn’t. But mostly young and on the hots for money. They were all going to get rich out here at the far side of the useful planets and go back to the easy life at Pell. The cyberchat mostly bored him, obsessive food and sex. Occasionally he and FrogPrince got on and talked mechanics or, well-coded, what the news was out of Beta, what miners had made a find, what contracts were going ahead or falling through.

Tame, nowadays. Way tame. Unicorn played her games. Dutchman laid his big plans on the stock market. They were all going to eat steak and eggs every meal, in the fanciest restaurant on Pell.

Same as when the war ended, the War to end all wars, well, ended at least for the next year or so, before the peace heated up. Everybody was going to live high and wide and business was just going to take off like the proverbial bat out of the hot place.

Well, it might take off for some, and it had, but Dutchman’s guesses were dependably wrong, and what mattered to them out here was the politics that occasionally flared through Beta, this or that company deciding to private-enterprise the old guys out of business. They’d privatized mining. That was no big surprise.

But—Sandman finished the coffee fizz and cycled the container—they didn’t privatize the buoys. Every time they tried, the big haulers threatened no-show at Pell, because they knew the rates would go sky-high. More, the privatizers also knew they’d come under work-and-safety rules, which meant they’d actually have to provide quality services to the tenders, and bring a tender-ship like BettyB up to standard—or replace her with a robot, which hadn’t worked the last time they’d tried it, and which, to do the job a human could, cost way more than the privatizers wanted to hear about.

So Sandman and
BettyB
had their job, hell and away more secure than, say, Unicorn, who was probably a kid, probably signed on with one of the private companies, probably going to lose her shirt and her job the next time a sector didn’t pan out as rich with floating junk as the company hoped.

But the Unicorns of the great deep were replaceable. There were always more. They’d assign them out where the pickings were supposed to be rich and the kids, after doing the mapping, would get out of the job with just about enough to keep them fed and bunked until the next big shiny deal…the next time the companies found themselves a field of war junk.

Just last year the companies had had a damn shooting war, for God’s sake, over the back end of a wrecked warship. They’d had Allied and Paris Metals hiring on young fools who’d go in there armed and stupid, each with a district court order that had somehow, between Beta and Gamma sectors, ended up in the Supreme Court way back on Pell—but not before several young fools had shot each other. Then Hazards had ruled the whole thing was too hot to work.

Another bubble burst. Another of Dutchman’s hot stock tips gone to hell.

And a raft of young idiots got themselves stranded at Beta willing to work cheap, no safety questions asked.

So the system rolled on.

T_Rex
:
Gotta go now. Hot date.

FrogPrince
:
Yeah. In your dreams, T_Rex.

You made the long run out from Beta, you passed through several cyberworlds—well, transited. Blended through them. You traveled, and the cyberflow from various members of the net just got slower and slower in certain threads of the converse. He could key up the full list of participants and get some conversations that would play out over hours. He’d rather not. Murphy’s law said the really vital, really interesting conversations were always on the edges, and they mutated faster than your input could reach them. It just made you crazy, wishing you could say something timely and knowing you’d be preempted by some dim-brain smartass a little closer. So you held cyberchats of the mind, imagining all the clever things you could have said to all the threads you could have maintained, and then you got to thinking how far out and lonely you really were.

He’d rather not. Even if the local chat all swirled about silly Unicorn. Even if he didn’t know most of them: space was bigger, out here. Like dots on an inflated balloon, the available number of people was just stretched thin, and the ones willing to do survey and mine out here weren’t necessarily the sanest.

Like buoy-tenders, who played chess with ghost-threads out of the dark and read antique books.