Buying Time

  Doris nodded. “You could go in alone. Bring the ship back later. We have six or eight years left before we have to go to the clinic. We could amuse ourselves here.”

  I was stunned. “You know you’ll probably lose it.” Say it. “They’ll probably kill me.”

  “We know,” Doris said. “We can buy another.”

  “One thing you can always get in Novy is a spaceship,” Bill said.

  Crimewatch Ceres

  26 apryél

  LIBEL ACCUSATION? (WHO’S CALLING WHO A WHAT?)

  0258 Michel Gulyaev, proprietor of Girls Girls Girls, says that Bonita Morris, who owns The Come & Get, has told her customers that he’s nothing but a greasy overcharging pimp and his girls never wash. He says that’s unfair restraint of trade and her girls are so ugly they have to do it in the dark. She says where do you think you are with this “restraint of trade,” Leningrad? and she’s willing to line up all her girls and boys one for one with his, high noon on Tsiolkovski, starkers, and let the public decide who needs a bag over whose head or, for that matter, body. This is the kind of duel we like to report on.

  SUSPICIOUS DEATH

  0940 Real estate agent Peter Quinn was found dead in his office this morning of an apparent “cerebrovascular accident,” a stroke. Clinic says no way that’s possible; he was in last month for a checkup and was fine. Visual inspection of the body by the medics revealed apparent electrical burns to the scrotum and penis, as they say in the medical world. Medic thinks he was tortured to death.

  This reporter and the other people at the inquest couldn’t think of anything Quinn would know that would be worth torturing him to find out, so the assumption is that the torturer did it for jollies.

  Quinn has been around for a long time, and everybody knows he was a straight man in a crooked profession. If this reporter finds the jacknik who did it, he will personally toss his scrotum and penis, as they say, out the air lock—one inch at a time—and will send out invitations for the ceremony.

  After about an hour—which is to say several months, subjective time—Maria had sorted things out and found a way to make the most of her situation. There was no way to tell how long she would be in this state, or whether she would survive it, but even without religious belief, she was still a person with a long habit of meditation: working out things in the solitude of her mind, yes, but also taking quiet pleasure in the thought that isn’t thought, the silent hum of the body and brain just existing. That might be what saved her.

  It’s not possible to describe in words exactly what she was doing, what she was, over the nearly twenty years that passed while the stealthed ship crawled past the orbit of Mars. One contraindication cited by Vitaslow’s manufacturer was that it could have an adverse effect on the patient’s mental health, if there was any prior evidence of instability, which was probably an understatement. Maria’s case was more complicated than the label-writer might have expected, though. It didn’t hurt her. Perhaps it drove her more sane, as she evolved from resisting her state, to accepting it, and finally to savoring it.

  The ugly little man moved through her universe as slowly as a planet through the Earth’s night sky. She ignored him for months at a time. On occasion, with the speed of a glacier, he put a towel between her and the acceleration couch and removed it, evidence that some kind of metabolism was creeping along within her body. She knew intellectually that she had gone many days without food or water and wondered how long that would take to kill her.

  After twelve days, or nineteen years, she slowly began to perceive new things. Smell came first, mostly the little man’s food and body. Then came the subtle body senses her memory identified as proprioceptive: equilibrium and the positions of her bones and muscles. That was good for weeks of sensuous imagining, as she discovered her body anew, cell by cell.

  The world began to speed up around her. One awakening, she could suddenly taste the staleness of her mouth and feel the damp rough fabric of the towel she was sitting on; the cold metal and plastic of the acceleration couch. Breathing in deeply, she could feel her chest expand, and hear the air rushing down her throat.

  “Coming out of it?”

  She looked at the ugly little man and remembered the thousand tortures she had devised for him. “Water.”

  Maria

  I hadn’t really thought about the man for a long time, ever since I forgave him and stopped using him as a focus for my anger. It was Briskin who was doing this to us. I assumed the little man just wanted a million pounds and immortality, for which a lot of people would kill, let alone kidnap. But that was not exactly it.

  When I was able to croak one word, he brought me a bulb of water, which I sucked dry in seconds, once I managed to get it to my lips; and a Coke, sweeter than sin. Two weeks of torpid peristalsis woke up; I managed to undo the straps and just made it to the toilet.

  The caffeine roared in my ears and brain, and I delighted in the swift rush of time, the real sounds and smells, even the annoying grind of the toilet’s macerator, even the fiery pain in all my joints muscles holes—must be lactic acid buildup from forced inaction—and I laughed out loud at my brain working in a linear, let’s-identify-and-solve-this-problem, way again. Though I did like the other way.

  Behind the mirror (a ghastly apparition, but who wouldn’t have been?) there was a medicine rack with chewable noraspirin; I shook out three and loved the crunching concussion in my jaws and ears, biting down; the astringent vinegariness going up inside smelling from inside my mouth and the chalky promise of swallowing it, glowing with pain I felt so good I could explode. I sucked on the water tube like a baby coming out of the womb and into the world’s hunger and thirst. I touched myself and had a hammering chain of orgasms that made me choke and cough on the water.

  “Are you all right in there?” All I could answer with was laughter and more coughing.

  Feeling almost human, I zipped up into the shower and rubbed the waterbrush all over my skin, fast and slow and soft and rough, body screaming STOP DON’T STOP! dangerous perverse giddiness as the difference between pain and pleasure dissolved and the man pushed the door open—

  “Are you all right? I heard you—”

  “I’m fine. Go away.” The words hurt my throat. Maybe I should have asked him to do my back first. The patch I couldn’t reach with the brush itched and crawled. Then I figured out how to hook the brush against the side of the shower bag and back up against it.

  I vacuumed myself dry—rubbery lips of the recycler, a weird ecstasy—and found a paper jumpsuit in the closet. It was a couple of sizes too large, and made me look like a little girl playing dress-up. I saw my stupid smile in the mirror and thought again of Dominica and Laraine, and stifled childish giggles in the paper sleeves that overhung my hands. Dominica and Laraine are dead of old age now; that thought helped calm me down. More or less composed, I went back into the cabin.

  He was looking at me with an expression difficult to read. He wasn’t an ephemeral. Interesting that I couldn’t tell until I saw him in real time. “I’m surprised an immortal would take such chances for a million pounds.”

  “I’m not a bounty hunter,” he said without inflection. “This is a favor for a friend.”

  “Charles Briskin.” He hesitated, and nodded once. “I don’t think much of your taste in friends.”

  “Obviously not. You blew one of them to bits.”

  I suppressed a wave of nausea at the memory. “Tell me what you would do if you had a price on your head and somebody came through the door, aiming a gun at you. You can’t blame me for that.”

  My feelings were more complicated than that rationalization, of course, but I didn’t want to give him my guilt for a weapon. I drifted toward the acceleration couch. “But I am sorry I killed him. Since it had no effect on the outcome.”

  “Oh, it had an effect. He was going to bring Mr. Barr along. I didn’t feel I could take care of both of you without help.”

  “You’d need help guarding two sacks
of potatoes?”

  “Didn’t want to leave you under all the way to Earth.” He took the dart pistol out of his waistband and inspected it. “We weren’t supposed to use this on you more than once. Staying in suspended animation for too long is supposed to be unhealthy.” He put it back. “If you give me any trouble, I will use it, though.”

  “Don’t worry.” Maybe I could take it from him while he slept. “What would I do if I overpowered you? I don’t know how to fly.”

  He smiled. “Not true. Sir Charles said you’re a better pilot than I am.”

  “So you’re going to tie me down while you sleep?”

  “Nothing that complicated. Lock you up in the head.” That gave me a strange image, having been locked up in my head for a long time, until I realized he was using the nautical term.

  I felt an odd closeness to him, not from having spent almost twenty years naked in his presence. It was the well-documented irrational bond between prisoner and jailer, terrorist and hostage. Maybe that’s a symmetry weakness in neural connections. When we love someone we allow ourselves to be imprisoned by him, solid bars of shared life, and this person who brings actual bars insinuates himself, by association, backwards into our heart. What a strange thought. Yet I did feel this closeness to someone about whom I knew absolutely nothing except that he abducted me for Charles Briskin, eats right-handed and masturbates left-handed.

  “What is your name?”

  “You don’t have to know that.”

  “I don’t know what to call you.”

  “Don’t call me anything.” He turned away, looking resentful or petulant, and switched on the cube. He did feel some guilt, I realized.

  “Why me, rather than Dallas?” I asked, and braced myself for the answer. Dallas wasn’t worth anything dead.

  “Like I say, I wasn’t after the million pounds. Sir Charles said if we could only take one alive, it was to be you.”

  That was bad: he must know about Baird Ulric. They would want to examine me, compare his methods with the clinics’. After all this, was I going to die anyhow, and on a dissecting table?

  “He wouldn’t say why. He called us on the way out and changed the primary target from him to you. Murray—the man you killed—thought that he figured Mr. Barr would come charging after you anyhow. I think it’s simpler than that. For some reason, you are more important than him.”

  He looked at me quizzically and I shrugged. “Who knows why a crazy man wants what he wants?”

  “He is not crazy. He’s a visionary.”

  “Whatever you say. You have the gun.”

  “I do indeed. You might give that some thought.” He thumbed the cube input button. “News: abduction, Ceres.”

  “No references since 6 March 2078. Continue?”

  “No.” He turned to me. “They never have acknowledged that you disappeared. That’s very interesting.”

  “We lived a completely hermetic existence,” I said, “being afraid of people like you. If Dallas was knocked out the way I was, nobody yet knows we’re gone.”

  “Possible.”

  Then a memory came like a blow. “No. There was that other man. The one who met you at the air lock. Did he—”

  “He was just a lowlife we recruited up in SORF, a fairly competent pilot. Never knew who you were. All he knew was that there were two dead people downstairs, and he’d better not be found with them.”

  “But Dallas wasn’t dead.”

  “No; he got the same dosage as you. I suppose it would wear off sooner, since he’s bigger. So he’s probably looking for you by now.”

  “If he has any sanity left. Lying helpless for twenty years watching a body decompose.”

  He raised his eyebrows. “It really did feel like twenty years?”

  “At least.” Dallas had practiced Zen, though, when he was younger. He spent a year in Antarctica just watching the wind blow the snow around. I hoped he could still find that, to help him through.

  “What did you think about? A million ways to kill me?”

  It took me a minute to come back to him. I was with Dallas, the way the granular snow rattled against the ice floes, the sudden smell of the penguins that day the hairs in his nose freezing when he stepped outside the tent and breathed the midnight sun the aching slow cra-a-a-ack of the iceberg calving food freezing solid while he ate.

  “What? Excuse me.” I shivered with the Antarctic cold. How did that happen?

  “Did you think about a million ways to kill me?”

  “No. That’s not my nature.” A little truth. “I thought of many ways to hurt you, to embarrass you. Usually involving the dart gun.”

  “You can disabuse yourself of that. I’ve been immunized against the zombi drug.” That was a quick lie, an obvious bluff. He wasn’t a good improviser. “At least I didn’t take advantage of you. That would have been easy.”

  “You thought about it.” Pretty obviously, at the time.

  “Of course. Not violent rape, but, uh …” He waved a hand at his lack of romantic vocabulary.

  “I would have killed you. If I survived the experience, I would have killed you.”

  “I understand.”

  “I don’t think you do. Several days of helpless agony, for your minutes of satisfaction. I thought about the possibility quite often.”

  “No … what I mean is … I was raped once myself.” His voice broke. “Eighty-two years ago. Sometimes it bothers me that he must be dead by now. So I’ll never be able to … punish him. To kill him. That’s all I meant by saying I understand.”

  “Oh.” It must have been terrible, against your will. Dallas and I had used that channel, exploring, but gently, slowly. My body was overcome with the sweetness of the memory of it, and trying to imagine what it felt like to Dallas, and I had to concentrate on listening:

  “It hasn’t been easy, watching you for two weeks, thinking about you. Even for a Stileman, your body is remarkably flawless.”

  Brand-new, I almost said.

  He blushed. “I don’t suppose there’s any possibility …”

  The man really was a born romantic. “None. Nobody but Dallas.”

  “That’s what I thought.” Was there a note of relief in his voice? “But I’m afraid we will be forced into some intimacy. I don’t have anything like handcuffs or rope. I can’t leave you here alone while I use the head. You’ll have to come with me.”

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  “I assure you I don’t care for the idea myself. But if you were to take control of the ship while I was indisposed, you could kill me with a six-gee burst of acceleration, or kill us both by opening the air lock.”

  “I wouldn’t do either. You may have my word.”

  “Those are my orders. If Murray were still alive, he could watch you.”

  “You’ll have to carry me.”

  “That’s all right. You’re weightless.” He snatched my wrist and I tried to pry his fingers away; but it was impossible; I was still weak as a child. “Don’t resist. I’ll have to shoot you.”

  He let go, satisfied. But it occurred to me that I was a lot less weak than I should have been, after two weeks of total flaccidity. When I first woke up, I could hardly raise my hands to hold a drink, even without fighting gravity.

  The Coke, of course. I was burning all that sugar. It’s as simple as C6H1206 + 602 → 6C02 + 6H20 + energy; now where did that come from? Biology class in ginnasio, I guess, but I must have forgotten that long before the turn of the century.

  But no, it’s not that simple, I recalled from somewhere, nowhere; it’s not as if your stomach were a furnace that burned glucose and turned it into energy. The Coke goes down into the small intestine, is converted into monosaccharides, wanders to the liver, goes through glycogenesis.…

  I could pin that down. It was 1997, eighty-four years ago, when I first found out I had cancer and read about the body compulsively for months.

  It didn’t really matter where it was coming from; how it was being p
rocessed. I could feel strength growing in me like a vessel filling. “Could I have something to eat?”

  “In a minute. First we have to go to the head.”

  He grabbed my wrist lightly and we started floating aft. He wasn’t looking at me. Now or never. I saw an opening and, with a speed that surprised me, grabbed the pistol from his waistband, then pushed it against his abdomen and pulled the trigger!

  Nothing happened.

  He casually twisted the gun out of my hand and pushed me away. Smiling, he took a dart out of his jacket pocket. “Safety first.” He loaded it and I closed my eyes.

  I heard the gun fire, a quiet snap, but didn’t feel anything. When I heard the door to the head, I cautiously opened my eyes. The dart was caught in the loose folds of paper between my breasts.

  I stifled the impulse to rush to the controls and injure or kill him with a burst of acceleration, as he’d said. Morality aside, I might not be able to figure out the unfamiliar panel before he came out. Instead, I tore the orange string off the dart and pressed it into the paper fabric; it held. I grasped the dart carefully hidden in my right hand, point out, and floated with my eyes closed except for a slit. Just come within arm’s reach.

  The toilet cycled and he returned, unfortunately with the gun out. Had he reloaded it?

  He floated in front of me for most of a minute, not saying anything, just staring. Then with no warning he slapped my cheek hard.

  In one instant I cried out, he fired, and I poked his hand with the dart. The pain from the slap sparkled away as the zombi took effect. We drifted away from each other, slowly rotating.

  Another twenty years. I wondered if he would stay sane. Which one of us would come out of it first?

  I retreated into a familiar place, pulling the calendar in after me.

  The Barons decided that the best place to stash their load of silver, while Dallas was borrowing the ship, would be with a friend who owned, or at least sat on, a small rock not far from Ceres. It would also give them a chance to show Dallas where the brake and accelerator were, and make sure he knew enough to change lanes before making a left-hand turn.