But soon enough I myself would have to go. There was no way I would back myself into a stall, but I’d also never been good at peeing in public. I guess I’d have to get them all to turn their backs while I did it into a jar or something … if I could find a jar. Of course, it would be even worse when I eventually had to defecate, since that was an exceedingly vulnerable posture. If only I—
The videophone bleeped. I went over to answer it.
“We’ve established contact with the other you,” said Smythe, appearing on the small screen. “He’s in Detroit.”
“Detroit?” I said. I had the piton gun in my right hand, and gently swung it back and forth between Chloë, Akiko, and Hades … although Akiko was currently napping, so she probably didn’t pose much of a threat. “What the hell would he be doing in Detroit?” And then it hit me. The trial—he must have been curious enough, for some reason, to go watch it. “Anyway,” I said, before Smythe could reply, “what’s he say?”
“He says we have to call him back in thirty minutes.”
“Damn it, Smythe, if you’re stalling—”
“We’re not stalling. We should have an answer for you soon. So, please, please, for the love of God, don’t do anything desperate.”
Karen and I looked at each other. She was still holding her paper book aloft; it was effortless to do so, and unless she actually told her arm to drop down, it wouldn’t.
For my part, I was sitting on the La-Z-Boy, but with it upright, the mechanisms within it and the mechanisms within me both tense.
“You’ve got to go,” Karen said. “You’ve got to go to the moon.”
“They don’t need me. They need a professional. A hostage negotiator, or a …”
“Or a what? A sniper? Because that’s what they’ll send: not someone who can talk him out of it, but someone who can take him out.”
Damn. All I’d ever wanted was what everyone else gets: a normal life—just a normal fucking life. “All right,” I said at last. “I’ll go.”
“And I’m going, too,” said Karen.
“Where?” I replied. “To Florida?”
Karen shook her head. “To the moon.”
“I’m, ah, not sure they’d pay for that.”
“I can afford it.”
I was taken aback for a second—but she was right; she certainly could. Even if her bank accounts were never unfrozen, the advance from St. Martin’s would more than cover it. “Are you sure you want to go?”
“Absolutely. God knows how long the jury deliberations will go on, and, anyway, they don’t need me here just to read a verdict. So I have to wait an extra 1.5 seconds to find out what the verdict is up on the moon; I can live with that.”
Karen got up, turned, and faced me. She put out her hands and I took them, and she effortlessly pulled me to my feet. Placing her head against my shoulder, she continued: “And, bluntly, I’ve got too much at risk to stay here. I love—I love talking with you, Jake. I love the way you play with ideas. But you’re too quick to see the other person’s perspective. I don’t want you to be talked into shutting yourself off. The transfer was legal and binding: you are Jacob Sullivan. I don’t want whatever’s up there on the moon playing mind games with you. The people from Immortex only care about getting their hostages back. Your original, at least in his current medical state, apparently only cares about himself. There needs to be someone up there who cares about you.”
I drew her even closer, hugged her, feeling the soft exterior and the hardness beneath. “Thank you.”
“How long till they call you back?”
“I said thirty minutes, but I doubt they’ll be that patient, and—”
As if on cue, the phone rang. I glanced down at the call display, which said “Long Distance” again. I’ll say.
“Hello?” I said, after touching my cell’s speakerphone button.
Two seconds of digital silence, then: “Mr. Sullivan, thank you for picking up. Sorry to ring you back so soon, but we really—”
“No, that’s okay. I’ll come.”
“—need to have an answer from you. The situation up here is—you will? Brilliant! Brilliant! I’m delighted. We’ll—”
“There’s one condition. Karen Bessarian gets to come with me, too. Over.”
Silence, then: “You mean the Mindscan version of her? Why? Her—um, well …”
“We know her original has passed on. But she’s my friend, and I want her with me. Over.”
“Mr. Sullivan, I’m not authorized—”
“I’ll pay for it myself,” said Karen.
“—to make arrangements for anyone else. This is going to be—what’s that? Well, if you’ll cover the costs; I assume that’s Ms. Bessarian speaking. But I warn you, ma’am, we’re planning to use an express rocket; an extra fifty kilograms will cost … Anna? Give me a sec … approximately six million dollars. Over.”
I smiled at Karen. “The six million dollar woman.”
“No problem,” she said.
“Well … all right, then,” replied Smythe. “All right. But, again, we’re using an express cargo rocket—fastest way to get here. They’re uncrewed, and not designed for passengers. It won’t be a comfortable trip. Over.”
“What is comfort, anyway?” said Karen. “Neither of us need padded chairs. We’re aware of the temperature, but indifferent to it. How long will the trip take?”
“You have to say, ‘Over,’” I added helpfully.
“Um, over,” said Karen.
The time lag, then: “Twelve hours.”
Karen snorted—something I wasn’t aware we could still do. “I’ve spent longer on airplane flights.”
“Then it’s settled,” I said. “We’ll go. You said you’d send a car for us? Over.”
“Will do. What’s the address there?”
Karen told him.
“Great,” said Smythe. “We’ll get it all arranged. You’re on your way to the moon.”
On my way to the moon …
I shook my head.
On my way to the fucking moon.
CHAPTER 37
The videophone in the moonbus bleeped again. “All right,” said Gabriel Smythe, as soon as I’d answered. “All right. He’s on his way. Jacob Sullivan is on his way here.”
“By cargo rocket?” I asked.
“He will be, yes. He’s en route to Florida now.”
“When will he be here?”
“In fourteen hours.”
“Well, then, there’s not much for us to do until he gets here, is there?” I said.
“You can see that we’re cooperating,” said Smythe. “We’re doing everything we can to help you. But fourteen hours is a long time. You’ll have to sleep.”
“I don’t think so. I can still pull an all-nighter when need be. And I’ve taken some pills. Ask Dr. Ng. I told her I was suffering from extreme drowsiness; she gave me some uppers.”
“Still,” said Smythe, “things can only get more complex in fourteen hours. And three detainees is a lot to manage. Do you think you could see yourself clear to letting one of them go? A show of good faith, perhaps?”
I thought about this. Strictly speaking, I perhaps didn’t need any hostages—after all, I could take out the whole of High Eden just by blowing up the moonbus. And Smythe was right: three was a lot of people to control. But I didn’t want to change any parameters. “I don’t think so,” I said.
“Come now, Jake. It’s going to be a lot easier for you if you only have to worry about two other people. Or one …”
“Don’t press your luck, Gabe,” I said.
“All right, all right. But surely you can let one hostage go?”
Damn it, three was a lot to look after. Plus, soon enough, I’d have to feed them …
“You probably want Brian Hades,” I said. “You can’t have him.”
“We’ll gratefully accept anyone you care to send out, Jake. Your choice.”
I looked around at my crew. Hades had a defiant expre
ssion on his round face. Chloë Hansen looked terrified; I wanted to say some soothing words to her. I shut off the phone.
“What about you?” I said to Akiko Uchiyama. “You want to go?”
“You want me to beg?” she said. “Fuck you.”
I was taken aback. “I—I’m not trying to be mean here.”
“You’re fucking us over, you son of a bitch. Not to mention everyone who cares about us.”
“I was going to let you go.”
“Was. The benevolent tyrant.”
“No, I mean if you—”
“Let me go. Or don’t let me go. But don’t expect me to fucking thank you for it.”
“All right,” I said. “You can go. Cycle through the airlock.”
Akiko looked at me for a second, no change in her facial expression.
“But when you get back home,” I added, “wash your mouth out with soap.”
She got up from the chair she’d been sitting in and headed for the airlock. I watched her cycle through, then went back to the videophone. “Smythe,” I said.
There was a pause. “Smythe’s not here just now,” said the voice of the female traffic controller.
“Where the hell is he?”
“The washroom.”
Lucky bastard—although I wondered if that was really true, or if they were playing more mind games with me. “Well, tell him I’ve just sent him a present.”
The rocket’s cargo hold was cylindrical, about three meters long, and a meter in diameter. It made steerage look elegant
“How, um, how do you want to be arranged?” asked Jesus Martinez, the muscular, bald man who was overseeing the loading of cargo.
I looked at Karen. She raised her eyebrows, leaving it to me. “Face to face,” I said. “There’s no window, so it’s not like there’ll be anything to look at.”
“There’s no light, either,” said Jesus. “Not once the hatches are sealed.”
“Can’t you throw in some glowsticks?” I said. “Luciferin, something like that?”
“I suppose,” said Jesus. “But every gram costs money.”
“Put it on my tab,” said Karen.
Jesus nodded. “Whatever you say, Mrs. Bessarian.” He told a man standing near him to go get the glowsticks, then, turning back to us: “You realize we’ll have to strap you in for the first hour, while you’re undergoing steady acceleration—although you can undo the straps later if you like. As you can see, we’ve already lined the chamber with padding. Your bodies are durable, but the launch will be rough.”
“That’s okay,” I said.
“All right,” said the man. “We’re at T-minus sixteen minutes. Let’s get you in there.”
I entered the vertical cylinder of the hold, and positioned myself against the far curving wall. I then opened my arms, inviting Karen to step into them. She did so, and she slipped her arms around me. Why shouldn’t we travel hugging each other? It wasn’t as if our limbs were going to get tired.
Jesus and two assistants worked on positioning us just right, and then they strapped us in. “Guys like you—artificial bodies—might be the future of manned spaceflight,” Jesus said as he worked. “No life support, no need to worry about prolonged exposure to high gees.”
The person Jesus had dispatched appeared a few minutes later, clutching some glowsticks. “These are good for four hours a piece,” he said, breaking one open now, shaking it up, and letting the—green, I guess that was also a shade of green—light fill the chamber. “You guys have normal night vision?”
“Better than normal,” I said.
“Then one stick should be plenty to have going at a time, but here are the others.” He put them in a webbed storage pouch attached to the inner curving wall, where Karen could easily reach them.
“Oh, and one more thing,” said Jesus. He handed me something I hadn’t seen in a long time.
“A newspaper?” I said.
“Today’s New York Times,” he replied. “Well, the front section, anyway. They do a thousand hardcopies every day, still on paper, for deposit at the Library of Congress, and for a few eccentric old subscribers who are willing to pay over a thousand bucks for a printed copy.”
“Yes,” I said. “I’ve heard about that. But what’s it for?”
“Instructions came through from the folks up on the moon. This’ll help prove that you came from Earth today; there’s no other way, except by express rocket, that a copy of this could get to the moon in the next twelve hours.”
“Ah,” I said.
Jesus wedged the newspaper into another storage pouch. “All set?” he asked.
I nodded.
“Yes,” said Karen.
He smiled. “My advice: don’t talk about politics, religion, or sex. No point having an argument when neither of you can get away from the other.” And with that, he swung the curved door shut, sealing us in.
“Are you okay?” I said to Karen. My artificial eyes adjusted to semi-darkness faster than my biological ones had; another difference, I suppose, between an electronic and a chemical reaction.
“I’m fine,” she said, and she sounded sincere.
“Say, have you been to space before?”
“No, although I always wanted to go. But by the time they started having significant space tourism, I was already in my sixties, and my doctor advised against it.” A pause. “It’s nice not to have to worry about such things anymore.”
“Twelve hours,” I said. “It’s going to seem like forever, not being able to sleep. And I can’t even relax emotionally. I mean, what the hell is going on up there, on the moon?”
“They’ve cured the other you’s condition. If you hadn’t had that condition, that …”
I moved my head slightly. “That birth defect. Might as well call a spade a spade.”
“Well, if you hadn’t had that, you wouldn’t have uploaded this early in life.”
“I—forgive me, Karen, I’m not criticizing your choice, but, well, if I hadn’t had that birth defect, I don’t know that I would have ever uploaded. I wasn’t looking to cheat death. I just didn’t want to be cheated out of a normal life.”
“I didn’t much think about living forever when I was your age,” said Karen. And then her body shifted slightly, as if squirming a bit. “I’m sorry; I shouldn’t use that phrase, should I? I mean, I don’t want to make you feel uncomfortable about our age gap. But it’s true. When you’ve got decades ahead of you, that seems like a long time. It’s all relative. Have you ever read Ray Bradbury?”
“Who?”
“Sigh.” She said the word, rather than made the sound. “He was one of my favorite writers when I was growing up. One of his stories begins with him—or his character; as a writer I should know better than to conflate author and character—reflecting on being a school kid. He says, ‘Imagine a summer that would never end.’ A kid’s summer off school! Just two short months, but it does seem like forever when you’re young. But when you get into your eighties, and the doctor tells you that you’ve got only a few years left, then years, and even decades, don’t seem like enough time to do all the things you want to do.”
“Well, I—Kee-ryst!”
The engines were firing. Karen and I were pressed down hard, toward the floor of the cargo chamber. The roar of the rocket was too great to speak over, so we simply listened. Our artificial ears had cutoffs built in; the noise wasn’t going to harm us. Still, the volume of it was incredible, and the shaking of the ship was brutal. After a short time, there was a great clanking as, I presumed, the rocket was released from its restraining bolts and allowed to start its upward journey. Karen and I were now ascending into orbit faster than any human beings ever had before.
I held tightly onto her, and she grasped me equally firmly. I became aware of those parts of my artificial anatomy that were missing sensors. I was sure I should be feeling my teeth rattle, but they weren’t. And doubtless my back should have hurt as the nylon rings separating my titanium vertebra
e were compressed, but there was no sensation associated with that, either.
But the roaring noise was inescapable, and there was a sense of great weight and pressure on me from above. It was getting warm, although not unduly so; the chamber was well-insulated. And everything was still bathed in the glowstick’s greenish light.
The roar of the engine continued for a full hour; massive amounts of fuel were being burned to put us on a fast-track to the moon. But finally the engine cut off, and everything was quiet and, for the first time, I understood what was meant by the phrase “deafening silence.” The contrast was absolute—between the loudest sound my ears could register and nothing.
I could see Karen’s face, centimeters from my own. It was in focus; artificial optics have more flexibility than do natural ones. She nodded, as if to indicate that she was okay, and we both enjoyed the silence a while longer.
But there was more to enjoy than just freedom from noise. Perhaps if I were still biological, I would have been immediately aware of it: food trying to come up my esophagus, an imbalance in my inner ear. I could well imagine that biological people often got sick under such circumstances. But for me, it was simply a matter of no longer registering the downward push from above. There wasn’t much room to move around—but, then, I’m sure it had seemed to Apollo astronauts that they’d had hardly any room until the gravity disappeared. I undid the buckles on the restraining straps, pushed off the floor, and floated slowly the meter toward the ceiling.
Karen laughed with delight, moving effortlessly within the small space. “It’s wonderful!”
“My God, it is!” I said, managing to get an arm up to stop my head from hitting the padded ceiling—although, I quickly realized, the terms ceiling and floor no longer had any meaning.
Karen managed to turn herself around—her synthetic body was shorter than mine, and, after all, she’d once upon a time been a ballet dancer: she knew how to execute complex moves. For my part, I managed to curl around the curving inner wall of the tube, becoming essentially perpendicular to my position at liftoff.