Authors: Christopher McKitterick
She sat silently for a moment. Then: “Who are you, Jack?” Again her amber eyes showed the splice-stare, directed toward the soft ring of light just before her.
He felt panicked, but fought it back. “Who am I? How do you mean that?”
“
Well, it’s just I realize I don’t really know a damned thing about you. I mean, I know what you do, that you’re strong enough to do the right things, and that you want to start a travel show, but why? Who are you? Suddenly it seems important that we get to know each other. It’s strange that we’ve spent practically a year together in close quarters and know so little. I guess it’s like that life-flashing-before-your-eyes-at-death thing; all the little, personal, things are suddenly important.”
“
Well, I’m who I seem to be,” Pehr replied. He winced at the defensive tone in his voice. “Though maybe not as strong as you believe.”
An unreadable look crossed her face. “Here’s a more directed question,” she said. “Why did you join EConautics?”
Pehr pondered that while listening to the wind. Its pitch had dropped noticeably during the past minutes. “That’s easy. I joined up to do my part for EarthCo. And being out here, in a ship, is where I belong. Out here, we two can do more to safeguard EarthCo’s citizens than a hundred soldiers back on Earth. Eyes just screwed it all up.”
“
You don’t like Earth, do you?”
“
Earth’s all right.”
Janus looked at him, then away again. “No, I think you’re like me. I think there’s something you left behind, something you’re maybe running from.”
Pehr felt himself growing more tense. Wasn’t it bad enough that they were facing a serious crash? Did she need to add this on top? But then he took a deep breath. She didn’t mean to cause him trouble. And what did it matter how much she knew about him now? They might be dead in half an hour. For once, he took pleasure and relief in splicing in, watching the 3VRD of Triton.
“
Maybe you’re right,” he said, and the words weighed heavily as they crossed his chest and throat and mouth. An energy began to build behind his ribs, pressing against lungs and heart and stomach. “Maybe I am running from something.
“
I joined EConautics because I’ve always loved the adventure shows set on other worlds, in spaceships. You know, like
Dreadnought
and
Keeper of the Flame
. There’s something so peaceful about alien worlds, something so . . . I don’t know, pure? Earth isn’t like that, hasn’t been since an ape first threw a sharpened stone at another ape.”
Pehr watched starless night sweep past beneath them. Occasionally, something bright flashed past, warning him that time was short.
“
Neptune, I thought—what a great place that must be. So far from Earth and its ugly, violent, hating masses. Sure, we’d have to do shows on Luna and Mars along the way, but our destination would be this farthest outpost. Even better than Neptune is cool, empty space itself. That’s where we’ll be most of the time, I thought, in empty space. Far and free from the hands of Man.”
He began to dream, a little, about those long expanses of time from one world to another. But even in retrospect, they weren’t so wonderful. Was boredom any better than fear? Was loneliness better in space than on Earth? Better not to dwell on introspection.
“
Ah, but pit one ship’s crew against another!” he said. Still he felt that pressure in his chest, but now it was more like the fire he felt during a show.
“
There’s something! Give me a ship and a crew to direct, give me a show and a script. No innocents will get hurt, and if we get hurt . . . well, what soldier can complain if he or she is injured in action? And what better way to die than in space, for a purpose, for a cause you believe in?” Then the fire faded, and it was pressure again.
“
But this time everything went wrong. I thought we’d be safe here, so far from Earth.”
“
Why?” Janus asked. “We are violence itself. The
Bounty
was a fighter/bomber, designed to destroy and kill.” Her voice cut with a sharp edge of anger, though Pehr sensed it wasn’t directed at him.
“
No, you don’t understand. It was just a show. The only people we hurt were NKK soldiers. I was prepared to get injured, even to die. But not like this. This is a disgrace. What I was trying to get away from kicked me in the head.” His mood began to grow more black. He began to feel like the angry kid, unable to focus the anger but finding outlets anyway.
“
You mean the cyborg’s bombing of the artifact,” Janus said into the silence.
“
Yeah, that. If it’s really what that man down there said. . .”
A spike of fear prodded Pehr to anger once more. “You know, we really don’t know there’s anything down there. Maybe this whole show is pure feed. Maybe every one of our sensors is only playing preprogrammed fluff at us, and we’re just reacting to 3VRDs. We’re just rats in a tank with millions of people watching because they’re curious to see how the specimens will react to different problems. ‘Let’s make them think they’re going to crash,’ one of the experimenters asked a handful of minutes ago. ‘Let’s see what they do when they think they’re going to die.’”
Pehr fell silent. He listened to the mounting roar of wind and watched the darkened landscape blur beneath them. He felt the rabid lurches of the pod as retros fired or random winds tipped it enough to set off gyros, which set off a retro again. All seemed as it should be. Which is exactly how the experimenters would have prepared the feed. It was enough to drive a man insane.
“
That’s pointless to wonder,” Janus said after a while. “So what? Wouldn’t that just mean our whole lives have been long dreams? What good is it to think like that? On the off chance that this is real, we’d better react to the stimuli properly, don’t you think? This is not the Pehr Jackson I thought I understood; he’s not a fatalist. He’s a doer, a take-control kind of guy.”
“
You were right when you said you didn’t know me,” Pehr said, “I’m not like that at all.” He felt unburdened more and more as the words rushed out. The unburdening started a flow of more words he couldn’t stop, as if Janus had pierced a balloon within him and now the flow was unstoppable.
“
It’s all right to say this now, the feed’s shut down,” he continued, consoling himself. “That’s what the subscribers pay for—the hunter of men, fearless hero, throwing himself headlong into danger, defying death. Doing the things they’d never dare to do or couldn’t do, but wish they would. Blast, that’s all the character, Jan, that’s all.” Suddenly he felt as if he were lying. But the lie had never been spoken before, so he had always believed it.
“
Then again, maybe not. I guess I’ve always been like that, but it wasn’t me. We all make up who we seem to be for other people, like with comm 3VRDs. Who chooses a 3VRD that really is who we are? Who’d want to expose himself to the world that way? Just puts you at the mercy of others. Well, the character a guy shows the world doesn’t have to be a 3VRD, it can be a little more real.”
He began to tell his story. The catharsis was a reward in itself; he felt a desperate need to unburden himself after years of containment, and the desperation came from the immediacy of death. He exposed himself for the first time—even to himself—since he was a boy.
Twenty-one years prior, eleven-year-old Pehr Jackson climbed down the steps of his mother’s house. It was one section of an eighter, an eight-apartment mini-tower. Anoka, a subdivision of the Minneapolis/St. Paul sprawl, stood all around, high and unapproachable. Pehr had only met three girls and a boy in the eighter, and of them, only Gosh and Teresa played with him regularly.
A stranger-woman held his hand, something the edufeed had told him was bad: “Touch is wrong. People shouldn’t touch each other. Especially grown-ups should never touch children, except for parents.” The teacher, a kind-looking young man with hair down the sides of his face, played examples. Pehr didn’t like to see the old man touch the little boy that way; he knew that was wrong. “If I was that boy,” he answered when the teacher returned with questions, “I’d punch that old man in the face!” The teacher had laughed and said he was a good boy.
But this woman was holding his hand, and Mom hadn’t said she couldn’t. Mom had cried, but she always cried; Pehr could never understand why. All the shows she subscribed to were happy love ones, so she shouldn’t cry. Pehr had been as gentlemanly as he could, always. He even fixed her hair the morning after she had a bad night, or washed her face when a new Dad had made blood there. This newest Dad, Jerry was his name, wasn’t like that. He had never made blood on Mom or Pehr. Mom hadn’t had a bad night for weeks, though she had come home with that whiskey she liked, which smelled like the stuff Pehr used to clean the blood off her face. He just couldn’t understand why Mom should be crying now.
The sun was warm and cold, flashing young Pehr secret signals as clouds passed beneath it.
He couldn’t decipher the signals, even though he should have been able: The newest live-in Dad had gotten him a Captain Hughes Downward game program. Captain Downward was the hero of
Dreadnought
, Pehr’s favorite show, and the program let him play old shows as if he was one of the characters. Pehr liked to play Captain Downward. He was always able to find out what the evil Mr. Hitogoroshi was scheming to do to Earth’s cities or Luna’s warrens. Downward always brought the invisible
Dreadnought
—EarthCo’s greatest cruiser, with every conceivable weapon and seven fighter ships on board—to bear just in time, thwarting Hitogoroshi’s plans for death and destruction.
Pehr, with Gosh and Teresa as his officers, had saved Anoka twice using the new Dad’s gift. But he also liked doing things Teresa liked: swimming in the eighter’s pool on hot summer days, even though the water smelled like mud and made his skin all bumpy red afterward; catching ladybugs in the spiky shrubs that lined the small yard; making snow-forts in the winter right away after a blizzard before the snow turned black; playing “buzz”: Whoever first heard the buzz of a heavy spaceship coming down the spaceport magshaft a few kilometers away got to be Captain for the day and tell the other two what games they would play.
He stood on the bottom step and stopped moving. He would go no farther, no one could make him. This woman wouldn’t take him now, not when Mom was so sad. He tried to comm his mother, but he couldn’t reach her. That was strange because he was so close.
“
Your mommy and daddy can’t afford to keep custody of you, Perry,” the nice woman said.
Pehr began to wonder if maybe she wasn’t so nice, because her real face didn’t say a thing; it was her game-face that talked, and game-faces don’t always tell the truth.
“
My name’s Pehr,” he said. “And talk with your mouth like a lady.”
“
I’m sorry, Pehr,” she spoke. Her voice was thinner now, quieter. “Didn’t your mommy tell you that we’d be finding you a nice new place to stay?”
“
She said she and Jerry are getting married,” Pehr answered. He wasn’t going to say any more. “She’s sad. She needs me.” He tried to pull out of the woman’s grip, and that made her frown; her hand got nervous-sweaty.
“
Please, Pehr, don’t make this difficult. They can’t afford to keep you. Grownups need to have other grownups, and sometimes they choose to get married so the other grownup will be more likely to stay with them. Your mom loves Jerry, so they’re going to get married. But no citizen can get married until he or she is fully franchised. Do you know what that means?”
“‘
Citizen-shareholder,’” he recited. He listened during school, even if the words didn’t mean anything.
“
Right.” The woman smiled.
Pehr realized she was wearing one of those dresses that looked like the color of the sun, all yellow and so bright it was hard to look at. He couldn’t tell what her body looked like, really, only that she was bigger than Mom.
“
A citizen-shareholder is very important to EarthCo, Pehr. Your mommy and Jerry will become citizen-shareholders tomorrow, after they go to the hospital and get their cards upgraded. But that is very expensive. It would take them many years to pay off the operation. They just couldn’t give you a good life if they had such big debts. They care about you too much to make you live in a poor house with only liquimeal to eat. I helped them find a nice married couple to adopt you. The nice couple is giving your mommy and Jerry a lot of credit to pay for their operations. Today you will meet the nice couple. Do you understand all I’m telling you?”
“
You’re really taking me away?” he asked. He hadn’t understood why Mom had been talking like that, like he was going away. Now another person was saying the same thing. He grew very mad and very sad.
“
Teresa!” he commed as loudly as he could. He noticed the comm line was quiet. He couldn’t find his server; even though it was the littlest one he had ever used, he could always find it, even if he was down by the brickstacks. Even Teresa’s game self didn’t appear.