The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction: 23rd Annual Collection (70 page)

You go figure. I can’t.

My only injury from the experience was a nosebleed. Blood ran down both sides of my face, responding to the ship’s pseudograv. But the grav must have shut off for a second, because some drops that had drifted away as perfect crimson spherules suddenly got distorted and spattered down on the deck.

I heard Jesús groan and sit up. I made him aware of my injury, and he got me some ice and packed it in a towel that I held to my nose. While waiting for the bleeding to stop, I started reviewing evidence in my mind, and at some point quacked, “Y’ know, Haythooth, Uh been thinkin’.”

“That is unusual. So?”

I waited a bit longer, then put aside the bloody towel and said, “About the Stowaway. There are only two places on the Zhukov we haven’t searched.”

He meditated for a bit, and said, “The General’s quarters and what?”

See, great minds do think alike. What better place for Big S to hide away than the General’s quarters, now vacant? He could easily have slipped in while Cos was hiding in his own closet.

“Let’s start there. If we don’t find anything, we’ll try the other place.”

Just in case the Stowaway might be under the old bastard’s bed, 3.8-mm in hand, Morales called in Chulalongkorn – known to both of us by this time as Chu – a short, bowlegged guy with obsidian eyes and death in both feet and karate-hardened hands. We selected sidearms from the armory and began going through the General’s quarters, cubic centimeter by cubic centimeter.

We learned a lot about our former boss, certainly more than I’d ever wanted to know. Besides the brandy, of which we all partook quite abundantly, we found a collection of memory cubes. Most were official stuff stored dustily away in boxes, but one was dustless and inserted in the general’s big cabinet omni. It was labeled Military Exercises, and for no special reason I turned it on.

Well, I wouldn’t call it porn. Not good old porn – friend of the friendless, comforter of the aged, delight of the afflicted. Calling the general’s pleasures porn was like calling a night with the Inquisition due process. This stuff was something I’d heard about but never seen – scenes of actual torture, real rape, including the rape of children. All, of course, in living color and four glorious dimensions, including time. And this had been Schlacht’s relaxation.

We stared at it goggle-eyed for maybe ten minutes; until one particularly unpleasant sequence involving a girl of maybe thirteen seemed to be heading for a climactic snuff scene. Then we shut it off by unanimous consent. Chu said, “I always knew he was a shit, but – ” He took the cube into the bath and flushed it down the vacuum toilet.

Continuing to search, we made another totally unexpected find. An antique printed book tucked under the General’s pillow (and showing signs of heavy use) contained the poems of a Christian mystic called John of the Cross. In one poem marked with a star, the stigmatized saint yearned for union with Christ and lamented his own inability to die. “I’m dying that I cannot die” – I remember those words.

Well, it was hard to miss the implications. The most improbable person aboard had yearned to escape his own vileness by climbing the ladder of love – without, in my opinion, ever reaching the first rung. No wonder he lived in a drunken rage. He was his own prison, and couldn’t get out.

That made two disciples that we knew about. How many more did we have on the
Zhukov?
I was brooding over this unanswerable query when Morales pointed out that we’d completed the search.

“No Stowaway here,” Jesús said. “Where’s the second place we haven’t looked?”

I said, “We’ll have to get what’s-his-name, the fire control officer, up again. If we can’t sleep, neither can he. We’ll ask him politely to bring his keys, including the ones that unlock the elevator to the Arctic Circle. Then—”

“You do occasionally have a useful idea, Kohn,” Morales admitted. “I see your point. We never checked inside those empty missile silos, did we?”

The fire-control officer was a wrinkled gray man named Major Janesco. (The J in his name, unlike the one in yours and your Papa’s, was pronounced like Y.)

We found him wearing baggy gray pajamas, and most unhappy to be awakened just as he’d gotten back to sleep after the double upheaval caused by the murder and going into the Bubble. He grumbled his way back into his clothes while we waited.

“Who says there’s a goddamn Stowaway?”

“Schlacht made a big issue of it.”

“Schlacht’s dead.”

“That,” I pointed out, “may be one good reason for thinking he was right.”

“It was the dwarf,” Janesco said. “Had to be. He’s the only one who wasn’t asleep. Why the hell don’t you arrest him, instead of waking me up?”

“Sir, I’m prepared to arrest Cos five minutes after we satisfy ourselves that there’s no Stowaway aboard.”

He combed his sparse hair with maddening deliberation, gargled mouthwash, and finally led us, still grumbling, down the corridor to one of the locked tubes containing an elevator. He shoved two fingers into the recognition port and a flicker of intense light read the pattern of capillaries in his fingertips. Then he inserted the usual flat strip of an electronic key, and the curved door retracted and the three of us jammed into a small cylinder that quickly filled with the aroma of mouthwash.

Dim lights flicked on in the Arctic Circle as we stepped out. Arctic was a good name – the temp was, I would guess, about twenty degrees of frost. Our breath turned to cirrus clouds, and then to tiny ice crystals that settled to the deck as we went to work. Except for one service door, the particle-beam generator was solidly enclosed in its own cylindrical steel housing, and Janesco unlocked the door for me. It was even colder inside, but I made a quick circuit of the weapon, which looked like the projector in a planetarium. Nobody hiding there.

Then the missile silos. You may recall there were twenty, but only four in use. They were big nuke-steel cylinders more than two meters in diameter. We started to walk, clumping around the Arctic Circle on feet that were turning or had already turned to lumps of ice. Like the generator, each silo had a service port, and Janesco – who’d stopped cursing because, I suppose, even the warmest language froze in that icebox – opened them one by one. All but number twenty. One of the empties. Of course the suspicious silo couldn’t have been number one, could it?

“Some moisture must’ve gotten in and sealed the gaskets,” Janesco muttered.

That was the common-sense view, but common sense had never worked yet aboard the Zhukov, so I told Morales, “Lock and load.”

When we had two impact weapons trained on the service port, I whispered, “One, two, three!” and together we roared, “OPEN UP! OPEN UP!”

No answer. I was getting colder and colder, and by now wanted to find out if we had the Stowaway cornered as quick as possible, just so we could get the hell out of the Arctic Circle. That was possibly why I made a truly lousy decision.

“Sir, I presume the silos are capped on the outside?”

“Obviously.”

“Then,” I yelled, “open the cap on number twenty!”

I really thought that threat would bring the Stowaway out, assuming there was a Stowaway, and not just some hoarfrost sealing the door. But nothing happened; the silence was total.

Janesco clumped to the command console and said the scientific-age equivalent of “Open, sesame.” The console had a heating element inside; and after the cover lifted he stood there warming his hands like a guy in front of a stove on a chilly night. Then he leaned over and started muttering code, while the little round monitor screen flickered back at him.

“Open?” he asked me.

“Please, sir.”

I wasn’t prepared for the scream. In fact, I’d about decided Janesco had been right, that the silo was empty, that the Stowaway was a figment dreamed up by Cos to give him a scapegoat for whenever he decided to kill Schlacht. And then from inside the silo came suddenly this unearthly howl that went tailing off into a thin attenuated shriek. And then to nothing.

We all looked at each other. For a moment no smoke came out of our mouths, so I assume we’d all stopped breathing. In the silence the realization dawned that I’d just cracked my first case, at the price of killing the one and only person who could have told us why the murder happened – the Stowaway himself.

“Well,” I muttered as we jammed ourselves back into the elevator, “I guess I won’t arrest Cos after all.”

After that we all went back to bed.

Ridiculous end to the most exciting night of my life up to that time, but I was tired, Jesús was tired, Janesco was tired. Schlacht was silent, permanently, and the Stowaway would be taking no more pot shots with his little gun. So what else was there to do?

I think we all slept a long, long time – I know I did.

Late next morning I reported to Colonel Delatour regarding the events of the night, then joined the remaining cadre at brunch. The enlisted people had already eaten, so we gave them the rest of the day off, since there really wasn’t a damn thing for them to do anyway, and soon dice were rattling merrily on the deck of their quarters.

About the fifth cup of coffee, my brain finally began to function, and I asked Colonel Delatour, “Ma’am, how cold is it outside? I mean, is the Bubble’s absolute zero absoluter than ours?”

She said no. Some things appeared to be common to both our universe and this one – Newton’s third law, for one thing, much abused by the general. The absoluteness of zero Kelvin, for another.

“Only,” she added, “it’s easier to reach in the Bubble, because you don’t have subatomic particles obstinately maintaining their harmonic oscillations, no matter how chilly they get. The exterior hull of the ship is considerably warmer, of course, maybe 20 Kelvin. Why?”

“With your permission. I have a great urge to get a look at what ever’s left of the Stowaway.”

Why? I wasn’t sure. I doubted whether the corpse could tell me anything. Forensic studies would obviously be impossible. And yet . . . I just had to see. You know curiosity killed the cat, and in this case it came quite close to killing the Lieutenant as well. Colonel Delatour eyed me with what might have been concern, or maybe even compassion.

“Dying won’t bring the fellow back, you know,” she said quietly. “You didn’t murder him. He could have surrendered.”

“I don’t intend to die,” I assured her. “To take a risk, yeah.” She nodded, even smiled a little. Maybe she liked risk takers.

“Since Zhukov’s the only gravitating mass around, he’ll presumably be following us,” she said thoughtfully. “Maybe rotating around us, like our own little dead moon.”

Morales seemed to get really twitchy when I reported this dialogue to him. “This is so *#%& weird!” he groused.

Nevertheless, he bravely volunteered to take the first spacewalk in the Bubble. Of course I said no. It was my show and my adventure. I knew that if the heater in my suit froze up, I’d be one more piece of debris circling the
Zhukov
, but I was young enough not to believe anything like that could actually happen to me. A lot of heroism, you know, is basically stupidity.

So a couple of hours later, I found myself being clamped into a device for which the term “space suit” was absolutely inadequate. It was actually a sort of steel keg where I sat cross legged, watching the world outside on a semi-cylindrical monitor screen and operating the limbs (you could have up to four legs and four arms attached) by fiddling with joysticks mounted on what looked like a miniature organ keyboard. I spent three, maybe four days practicing with the thing, up in the Arctic Circle, banging off walls and the particle-gun housing and turning myself every way but loose.

Then it was time to walk.

They put me out through the airlock, and I have to say that when push came to shove, I wasn’t scared – I was terrified. Once when I was a kid, vacationing with my family on the southern rim of the Great American Desert, we took a side trip down into an immense cave. The place was a tourist attraction, had been for centuries, and it was all nicely lighted and the chambers equipped with phony names like “Aladdin’s Castle” and the “Seas of Europa” and so on. Then, when we were really deep inside, the guide turned out the lights. That was the first time I’d ever experienced the totality of total darkness, and my throat got dry and my hands got clammy and I thought, Is this what death is like?

All that came back to me in the moment when my four mechanical feet clamped onto the hull and the airlock’s outer door closed behind me. This was it. Would I drift away from the ship? Was there such a thing as magnetism out here? Did gravitation exist out here? Did anything exist out here?

Well, I stayed attached to the ship, and after a few seconds the bad feelings lessened, if only because it was obviously too late for second thoughts. Then a row of external lights, loading lights I suppose, went on, and I remembered to switch on a spotlight I carried on one of my many limbs. At first I thought it wasn’t working because there was no ray, no beam, but then I saw the circle of light where the photons bounced off the ship. And off something else, too – a cylinder about twice the size of one of the internal missile silos. I couldn’t think of anything it might be, except an FTLM that had its own exterior housing, because it was too big to go inside the ship.

Like some ungainly mechanical spider I crawled along
Zhukov’s
curving frigid hull. Though my heater was whirring faster and faster, the air inside kept getting colder and colder. I picked up the percussion of my steel feet, uneasily aware that this was the only sound and the only heat and the only motion – I was moving relative to the ship – indeed the only anything in an entire goddamn vacant universe.

And then something else moved.

It was rising beyond the curved horizon of the hull with an infinitely slow yet observable movement, like the minute hand of an antique clock. Rising until it reflected a ghostly patch of light, just like the moon that Colonel Delatour had talked about. Only instead of a moon, it was a shapeless rigid bundle. It made me think of the fragile ash left by burned hardcopy that stays intact, even to the letters black against the brown pages, yet turns to powder at the first puff of wind. After maybe half a minute I realized that the bundle consisted of all the coats and blankets and whatnot the Stowaway had wrapped up in to survive the cold of the Arctic Circle. I turned my spot on it, and saw – set into the bundle, looking small and white – a rigid porcelain face.