Transcendence (36 page)

“
Yes, sir.”

Pehr never again went on his Crusades, though he continued to be obsessed with newsfeed. He spent 100 hours cleaning Oberlicht Towers, his sentence for the misdemeanor offense of “participating in a public disturbance wherein a murder occurred,” which was expunged from his record after the public service. He was grateful to the police, both for letting him off lightly and for saving him from the situation in the alley. But he never sought the recommendation for the Police Academy.

When he turned 18—the soonest one can enlist—he applied for EConautics Service School, and was immediately accepted.

Five years later, after a Moon-to-Earth series entitled
Defenders of Earth
, he met Susahn. She appeared on the spaceport tarmac in a liquilight blouse and skirt, the shifting colors contrasting dramatically with the skin of her shapely legs and bare midsection. A faint, background music accompanied her.

She seemed so real that it wasn’t until hours later he realized Susahn had come to him as a 3VRD. Even so, he enjoyed her company. Susahn was the first woman—since Megan—he had met who was truly passionate about something. For her, it was music. On a Texas beach, alone with the tide and washed-up flotsam, she played a stunning variety of instruments for him. Even her singing was fantastic, like some super-enunciated oboe.

Pehr fell in love with her that night, though it took him months to admit. The music and the water and stars and Moon, the ocean vessels bleating their customary but obsolete foghorns across the sea, spaceships falling from the sky on pillars of maglev, Susahn’s emotive voice . . . all this combined to stir something in him.

He felt as if he had come awake, even though he had spent years performing full-throttle adventure shows. Once, his Stratofighter had been pounded fiercely in combat with two AMRCO L1 fighters. Obviously, his foes had been aces, while Pehr depended on his computer to do the flying for him. Laughing like a madman, he managed to destroy the two fighters, seemingly by force of will. Even his main rocket was destroyed, but he swam the night by retros alone. This is the sort of life he led. Full-speed, dangerous, throwing himself completely into each new drama while his opponents seemed merely to be doing their jobs. Down on Earth, between shows, he added more lovers to the train. And when each relationship ended for whatever reason, he wept, bought a bottle of whiskey, and went in search of a new woman. The endless succession of women kept him from watching the newsfeed, and soothed his loneliness.

And then came Susahn. She made no promises, never told him she loved him—not really, only in response when he said it—and spoke nothing of the future. But to Pehr she seemed alive, not merely a sleepwalker like the rest of them. She bragged about him to all her musician friends. She dragged him to parties to meet celebrities. She made him come out of the shell he hadn’t realized he had built around himself, and made his knees feel sturdier beneath him, though the world had grown to feel like one big prison. He tried not to let it bother him that Susahn went everywhere only in 3VRD.

Nine months later, upon consistent pressure, Susahn consented to marriage. She assembled a vast list of guests and downloaded a massive app of St. Paul’s Cathedral, complete down to worn edges on the ancient wood.

“
I don’t want a 3VRD wedding,” he said in her small apartment one afternoon as they made plans.

“
I’ll not get married intheflesh like some Retro,” she had responded fervently. “Most people don’t have weddings at all, anyway,” she added.

So they had a 3VRD wedding. Pehr felt foolish standing insubstantially in an insubstantial cathedral with an insubstantial bride, insubstantial guests thronging in the pews; but, hell, at least he’d be married. And, although she hadn’t declared that she’d stay with him forever or such crap, she did say that she didn’t believe in divorce: Apples and oranges, both are fruit.

For the first time in his life, Pehr felt secure in at least one thing: He would never again face the universe alone. Earth seemed less ominous, its streets less piled with dead and mutilated bodies of the unidentified and unloved. He was part of a family.

Years passed before Pehr realized that, under all the passions, Susahn was empty. She would never reveal to him why that was, and she would never be able to love him. Pehr realized he was merely an abstract construct in her life. But all that was acceptable, because she never neglected to contact him, no matter where he was. This way, he would always be bound to Earth, to something at least comfortable, if not comforting. Their marriage was like a good chair, beautiful and comfortable and secure. But like a chair, it too had no heart.

Slowly Pehr began to feel himself fade. Certainly he threw himself into his work with increasing fervor, accepting more and more dangerous and popular shows. The final blow to his stability came in their fourth year of marriage.

Susahn had told him up front that she never wanted a child. At that time, Pehr didn’t want one either. “I’d only screw the kid up,” he said once.

Four years almost to the day after they were married, when one of her birth-control pills failed and Susahn got pregnant, the issue arose again. By this time, Pehr’s attitude had changed.

“
As long as the gov’ment doesn’t find anything wrong with the baby,” Pehr said when she informed him of the unexpected pregnancy, “they won’t tell us to abort. I’m important to Feedcontrol’s ratings, and you’ve always been a good citizen. We’ll—”

“
I don’t want it!” Susahn shouted, her face twisted as if the idea were repulsive. Pehr had the impression that she had only waited so long to protest because of shock.

“
I didn’t think you would want it, either,” she added. “I only told you because you’re the father, that’s all. What kind of retro do you think I am?”

“
Susahn,” Pehr said, breathlessly. He realized that he had already begun to think of the future, of playing with a little boy or girl, giving him or her the kind of childhood he wished he had had. And, dammit, he would do it right. He wouldn’t take jobs that kept him away from Earth so long, he’d take long leaves, he’d be happy to move to an apartment. They didn’t need such a big place, just the two of them. He remembered vividly that, as a boy, he would have been more than happy to stay in the eighter than to live on the estate. On his salary, Pehr could afford a decent place for the three of them.

“
I think it’ll be good for us,” he went on, “for our marriage. And good for our spirits—think how it would feel to put a person out into the world, someone who could make things better. And be the one responsible for the good he or she does. Think about it! We could help change the whole future of the race.”

“
Pehr, have I ever disagreed with you?” Susahn asked quietly.

“
Every day, my dear.”

“
I mean in some important way.”

Pehr had to admit she hadn’t, except for how she refused to spend time with him outside, intheflesh. In that respect, it was Pehr who was the oddball. On the other hand, he didn’t say anything about the fundamental difference between them. About how sad he felt daily when boredom or circumstance forced him to face his hidden feelings. About how being with her was sometimes worse than being alone.

“
Then this is the end of the conversation,” she declared. “I will not have a child, not now, not ever. We discussed this before, Pehr. You know I wouldn’t do anything against your wishes, but this is different—this is my body. I won’t have a child.”

Pehr agreed that, yes, her body was her business. And, yes, they would do much better not having to support another person; they would save a lot on taxes alone, by not having a child.

The day she got the abortion pill from the doctor, Pehr took an airbus to New Downtown Minneapolis and went for a long walk, trying to find something in himself by traveling the ground where his memories lived. He bought a child-sized bandanna from a street vendor he happened across near the Towers, on the streets of his Crusades.

The bandanna was woven from dozens of dyed fabrics; the longer he looked at the design, the more shapes he could see. He knew he had to buy it when he thought he saw the face of a young boy. The boy’s eyes were brown, cheeks red and orange, hair tan and black. He looked like a sad, lonely little boy. Pehr kept the bandanna in his pocket from that time onward.

It gave him more comfort than did his marriage—a simple piece of cloth. Sometimes he dreamed of a boy playing in prickly bushes, running along the grass beside a stream, catching ladybugs, laughing. As the years passed, the boy in Pehr’s dreams grew older; he had been about six when Pehr found him in the cloth. By the time the
Bounty
was destroyed, the dream-boy was eleven years old.

Through adventures and dangers, the nameless boy had never left Pehr’s side. And Pehr had never left him.

A shock shook the escape pod.

“
We’re about to land,” Janus said, her first words—except for the occasional sound of agreement—since she had asked Pehr who he was. She looked at him again, smiled an almost unbearably gentle smile.

“
That was the ground?” Pehr asked. The present situation seemed surreal after reliving the formative years of his life.

Janus nodded. Pehr flipped to an outside pov, but either the world was too dark to see in natural light or the pov camera was damaged.

Pehr wondered what had just happened to him.
I’ve just thrown away the last of my self
, he thought. Once, space meant the show, being at first a simple adventurer and later an actor and combatant. He was Captain Pehr Jackson. Worlds meant loss of that identity. And now he had pulled off his actor’s wardrobe, revealing the man within, and thereby pulled the sets from the stage. Nowhere belonged to him now. The props and costumes had become just that. What was left?

Another sharp thump, this time followed by pings and an uncomfortable grinding sound.

Yes
, he thought with a rueful smile,
there is Triton
.

“
Show yourself to us, oh alien artifact!” he said in his stage voice. Oddly enough, something had happened to him as he had narrated his life to Janus. No longer did he fear being planetside, but never again would he get excited about a show.

He turned to Janus; clearly, she was busy in her head, doing what she could to keep the pod from splitting open like an egg hurled at a stone. The pod struck ground again, and again, and soon they were sliding.

“
Not much I can do now,” Janus said, turning to him. “Just pray we don’t fall into a crevasse at our present velocity. We wouldn’t just stop when we hit the far side.”

The surface abraded the pod’s underbelly with a sound not unlike that of a rocket engine, only less consistent and more ominous. Pehr tried to imagine how much ship was being grated away how fast, and had a mental image of the skin melting like wax on a hotplate: skin gone, now fuel tanks torn open, now everything ripped open to the floorplates. . . .

The lights flickered and went out. The ventilation system ceased hissing. Pehr could hear only the sound of ice and skidding. At some point, the valves on his spacesuit closed and he began breathing tanked and recycled oxygen.

Hours seemed to pass. Finally, the pod went airborne for a moment—

“
Oh, shit,” Janus said, her voice muffled by her clear helmet and the rarefied cabin air—

And then they hit surface again, but not a wall. Now the ship seemed to slide more smoothly along a descending slope, and Pehr recognized a certain change.

“
We’re almost stopped,” he said, using his commcard rather than trying to send sound waves through near-nothingness. He did not use a 3VRD projection.

“
One-fifty kilometers an hour and decelerating,” Janus reported, her voice uneasy. “Approximately, based only on my card’s projection. We’ve lost all power, even the pod’s computers. We’re all alone now.” She sounded smaller, quieter.

The surface below them tilted less and less, flattened out, then began to rise in the opposite direction. Eventually, all sense of motion vanished.

“
We’ve stopped!” Pehr exclaimed. He began hastily unstrapping himself. “Clean and clear. Damn, Janus, I knew you could do it. Damn!”

In the sudden silence, he noticed an odd sound. The hull was clicking and pinging, as hot metals cooling on ice would be expected to do. But also Pehr heard a faint tapping and hissing, as if thousands of tiny aliens were drumming their fingers against the hull and speaking in their snakey voices.

Almost immediately, he identified the sound.

“
The ice is melting beneath us,” Pehr said, keeping his voice calm, instantly comforted in the role of Captain. He rose from his couch in the absolute darkness.