Further: Beyond the Threshold (13 page)

The chimpanzee turned and headed toward the door, pausing before exiting to glance back over his shoulder.

“Oh, Captain Stone, I almost forgot…The salvage team was able to recover some of your effects from the wreckage of your craft.”

The chimpanzee pointed to the silver box that lay beside the chair in which he’d sat.

As I went to pick up the box, Maruti waved from the door. “I trust I’ll see you tonight on Ouroborous? I expect you’ll enjoy the surprise you’ve got in store.”

I scarcely noticed what the chimpanzee was saying as the silver box slid open in my hands.

There’d been mass restrictions on what we could bring on board
Wayfarer One
, of course, but nothing like those I’d known from my days in the Orbital Patrol. But that’s only to be expected. After all, a buoy tender on a six-month tour has considerably less in the way of amenities than an interstellar vessel intended for a century-long voyage. So where I was lucky to squeeze forty kilograms of personal items when I served on board
Cutter 972
, on
Wayfarer One
I’d been able to bring along close to two hundred kilos.

All that was left of that allowance were the three items on the bed.

In the millennia I slumbered, anything metal, ceramic, and plastic had fared much better than those items that included organic elements, all of which had long since disintegrated, but even the strictly nonorganic had become badly pitted and decayed with age. Only these three objects had been sufficiently intact that they could be restored to pristine condition by nanoscopic repair robots.

A lifetime of memories and all that remained were three items—an action figure, a cap gun, and a handheld.

The action figure I’d had since I was six years old. At that age, I don’t think anything in the world was more important to me than
The Adventures of Space Man
. Produced in Australia but broadcast throughout the United Nations and elsewhere, it was the most popular children’s animated program of its day, and arguably one of the best ever. Or at least that’s the position I’ve been arguing since I was six. Other kids might have told you that
Battlesnakes
was better, but that was just a weekly series of half-hour commercials for a line of collectible robots, and anyone who preferred
Maniax
was just an idiot. Amelia Apatari always said that
Taimi Taitto, Girl Reporter
was a better program, but I know for a fact that she hardly ever watched the show as a child, preferring the original graphic albums, and that she only claimed to like the show out of a misguided sense of solidarity with the titular heroine and her faithful dog, Lumi.

No, for me, it was Space Man, always and forever. Assisted by Space Monkey, his simian sidekick, Space Man journeyed through interplanetary space on board their ship the
Space Racer
in a hazily defined near future, fighting the forces of Dark Star, a multinational terrorist organization. I can still sing the full theme song word for word, both the original version and the variant used in season three, after Dark Star had been defeated and Space Man concentrated his efforts on fighting natural disasters—though, admittedly, no one else has ever seemed to be as impressed with my rendition of “Down These Space Lanes” as I’ve always been, not the least of which everyone I’ve ever crewed with.

The action figure was manufactured in Seoul in 2142, if the maker’s mark on the sole of his left boot were any indication. It was a constant companion throughout long, hot summers and rainy springs and trips to visit relatives in distant states. It was one of the few things I took with me from my parents’ house when I moved to Ethiopia to start college, and was in my meager mass allowance when I first boarded
Orbital Patrol Cutter 972
. That little lump of vacuum-formed, colored plastic has survived the cold of space and the heat of explosions, firefights and fist fights, near drowning and borderline fatal dehydration, and still, I’ve never lost it. There was never a question that it wouldn’t be included in my mass allowance on board
Wayfarer One
, and I was glad to see him lying there on the bed, as crisp and clean as the day I bought him, ready for new adventures.

The cap gun I’d acquired in my early years with the Orbital Patrol.

Setting down the Space Man action figure, I picked the cap gun up off the bed and checked the action, gratified to see that it appeared to be in perfect working order.

An energetic personal handgun, the Merrill 4KJ Capacitor Gun was equipped with a revolving cylinder containing ten capacitors, each about the length and diameter of my little finger. In the stock was a miniature generator with the ability to recharge the capacitors once used, but recharging took time. In pressing circumstances, the capacitors could be ejected from the chambers and already charged caps slotted into place.

The Merrill 4KJ had two modes—beamer and needler. In beamer mode, it fired pulsed laser beams of variable intensity and duration. In needler mode, it acted as a gauss gun, accelerating slivers of metal to high speeds in the barrel. It also contained a small number of explosive flechettes that could be fired as alternative needler rounds.

Each capacitor packed four thousand joules, roughly the amount of solar energy received from the sun at 1AU by one square meter in three seconds. Emptying a capacitor all at once in beamer mode produced roughly the same kinetic energy as a 9.33g 7.62mm NATO round, but while it had more than enough stopping power to halt a full-grown man or a feral corvid miner in its tracks, it wasn’t likely to puncture a ship’s hull and cause an explosive decompression, and so cap guns were the weapon of choice for Orbital Patrolmen and space-side Peacekeepers.

Everyone serving in the Orbital Patrol was issued a Merrill 4KJ or an equivalent handgun from another manufacturer, but this one was
mine
, and had saved my life more times than I could count. Once I’d even had to rig a charged capacitor as a stand-alone explosive, but my ears still rang a month later, and it was an experience I was in no hurry to repeat. I wasn’t about to leave it behind when I was seconded to UNSA.

I slid a cartridge out of the cylinder, checked the power gauge, saw that it was at full charge, and slotted it back into place, careful to ensure that the safety was engaged. I put the cap gun back on the bed and picked up the handheld.

The handheld I’d bought in Vienna, just weeks before the launch of
Wayfarer One
. A portable computer and communications device, it fit in the palm of my hand, lightweight and durable, with more processing capacity and memory than any other handheld on the market—which meant that it was probably obsolete by the time I went down in my sleeper coffin. It had a touch-sensitive display, speakers, and audio pickup, though in those days I typically transmitted its video and audio output to a pair of glasses with a heads-up display.

Keyed to the unique identifying number in the RFID universal chip imbedded under my right thumbnail, the handheld ideally could only be accessed by me, though clearly the Human Entelechy had moved far beyond any encryption technology available to us in the 22C, as the AIs of the Plenum had been able to get in and restore the data when they refurbished the hardware, extrapolating any lost clusters from context.

Following is a partial list of the contents of my handheld:

• A full run of the Japanese manga
  Earth Force Z
  , vols. 1–125
  
• The first three seasons of the Australian adventure cartoon
  The Adventures of Space Man
  
• Sardar Pilot: A Life in Service
  , the biography of my maternal grandfather
  
• The complete works of Jeremy Stone, my paternal grandfather
  

  Termination Shock
  (Anders SF, 2081)
  

  Escape Velocity
  (Anders SF, 2083)
  

  Event Horizon
  (Anders SF, 2087)
  

  In the Country of the Blind
  (Anders SF, 2090)—winner, Hugo for Best Novel, 2091
  

  Freedom from Religion
  (Kalki Books, 2101)
  

• The Barat Scout Handbook, 2145 edition
  
• Student Yearbook, class of 2153, Explorers House, National Public School, Indiranagar, Bangalore
  
• United Nations Orbital Patrol Personnel Manual (GENIST GIM 1000.9Q)
  
• Audio recording of Jo Kendall’s valedictorian address, Addis Ababa University, Ethiopia, 2156
  
• Family stills and video
  

And that was it. All that remained of thirty-one years of life, the only physical evidence of my existence in the 22C—a child’s toy, a weapon, and a library. I think I could have done much worse.