We all knew each other; I’d fought against and alongside half the room in some galactic battle or another, back in the Golden Age. But there was no chatting. Camaraderie might return later, when we were all back in the Brandied Bracket swapping war stories, but here on the concourse, there were no friends. There was only competition.
As I was waiting for the action to start, my phone buzzed briefly in my back pocket. I fully inflated my lungs, closed my eyes, brought the device up to my face, exhaled, then looked.
Aaaand there it was. Court summons, first thing Friday morning. It was going to be civil action rather than criminal, but it hardly mattered. It was over. I was definitely going to have to sell the Neverdie, and that’d only cover legal fees. I made a mental note to look into options re: transvestite hooking.
I noticed faces all over the concourse looking in my direction, some sympathetic, mostly gloating. Even without open conversation, gossip had a way of getting around fast. I nonchalantly fixed my gaze upward, trying not to look like I was about ready to burst into tears. Now I merely looked like I was trying to look up Ritsuko’s marble miniskirt.
A ripple of excitement ran through the crowd, not because of the miniskirt thing (whose contents were frankly underwhelming) but because the red light had come on at the top of the grand archway. The star pilots wobbled into a pair of haphazard straight lines to either side of the main walkway, straightening signs and smoothing velour. Shortly there was a rustle of thin metal sheeting, and massive shutters came down over both sides of the archway, leaving a space of about six inches between them.
Someone had told me once that the shutters weren’t there for safety purposes, but rather because quantum tunneling refuses to work when anyone’s observing it, and no one really knows why. Which doesn’t sound to me like technology one should trust, least of all base an entire transport revolution around.
And for all that it was always rather underwhelming to witness. A science-fiction blue glow or some whooshy noises wouldn’t have gone amiss, but there was only about a minute of silence—save a few uneven clangs from the metal shutters being momentarily exposed to vacuum—before the nearer shutter noisily rolled back up.
But instead of the same six inches of empty space and backside of rear shutter that would be expected by a sensible person, the archway now led into the concourse of the main spaceport in New Dubai, the human colony on the desert moon Sigma 14-D. A destination that would have taken me and my ship an eight-day journey to reach, assuming nothing along the way tried to molest us, or eat us, or any combination of the two.
A semi-orderly queue of visitors, migrants, and tourists were belched into Ritsuko City, crossing the light years of distance in the thickness of a shadow. The seasoned travelers did so without thought, some holding phones to whatever they used for ears with whatever they used for hands. The newbies did things with a little more ceremony, pausing at the point where the ornate carpet met the shiny white tiles to take a big, nervous stride. I noticed a family of four Slignns close their eyes and interlock their tentacles as they did so.
“Ritsuko City Spaceport welcomes visitors to Luna, the cradle of human spacegoing,” droned a prerecorded announcement over a loudspeaker. “All visitors are reminded that they are under no obligation to charter unemployed star pilots.”
By then all the star pilots were fully animated and selling their services as loudly as they could to drown out the loudspeaker. I shook my sign and joined in. No reason I couldn’t get lucky and reel in two tourists in one day. I was aiming to make as much income as possible before Friday. I could at least cover the rickshaw fare to the courthouse.
“Luxury tours!” I called. I picked out a family in matching “I’m Luny For Luna” T-shirts and tried to catch the parents’ eyes. “Just fifty euroyen per hour! Stories from the Golden Age of star piloting! Space as it was meant to be seen! For a little extra I’ll do a little dance and then you can kick me in the doints! You’re not even paying attention to me, are you, you bunch of brackets. Oh, don’t go over to him! I’m much better looking!”
My attempt at banter died when I noticed that the pilot who had caught the family’s attention appeared to be pointing at me as he spoke. Looking around, I saw a few other pilots who’d reeled in clients doing the same thing. My arms fell listlessly by my sides as I realized what they were doing.
I was no lip reader, but I could get the gist. “Hello sirs or madams, you’re so lucky to have come to me. There are some very dishonest people around here. That shady character over there—this very morning he was hired by some tourists just like yourself and he sold them out to pirates! Of all the things to do! People like that just let us all down, don’t you think?” And I just knew they were planning to fly straight into the Black and into sniffing range of whatever pirate families they had loose arrangements with.
Plying, trac-eating divs, doints, and brackets.* I couldn’t stomach it anymore, rickshaw fare be damned. I hung my head and made for the food court, letting the edge of my cardboard sign scrape along the ground.
* The reader probably deserves an explanation at this point. Ritsuko City Spaceport, in an effort to mitigate the image problems caused by being infested with unemployed star pilots, had taken the step of banning all swearing. This led to pilots like our narrator taking up the practice of using mathematical terms as swear words, on the vague understanding that the hated quantum tunneling technology was in some way related to applied mathematics.
In “Pilot Math”, the word multiply (shortened to ply) replaces the most popular swear word, with subtraction (or trac) filling in as an all-purpose noun with scatological leanings. Bracket became a common insult, as did decimal point (or doint) and division (div), which also came to mean male and female genitalia, respectively.
The origin of Pilot Math lay in a televised interview between Dr. Terence Dawkins, inventor of quantum tunneling, and David Blanche, noted star pilot and interplanetary war veteran. Dr. Dawkins expressed wonderment that such a massive technological and cultural leap had been achieved with “just a little addition and subtraction.” A surly Blanche replied, “I’ll give you subtraction in a minute.”
Chapter 3
I was in the food court, waiting in line for a sushi sandwich, and I found myself staring at the wall, which was decorated with a collage illustrating the history of Ritsuko City. Great prominence had been given to one of the famous photos from around the time of independence. It showed a Japanese soldier in an environment suit, standing on the lunar surface just outside Ritsuko’s containment bubble, staring in stunned disbelief at a huge pile of nearby shipping crates.
The moment requires context. Ritsuko City, humanity’s first permanent off-world colony, had been established on the moon by the Japanese government. Overcrowding on Earth had been widespread, and the Japanese had plans to establish a haven to which a selected slice of their populace could move. But the man they put in charge of the project, Kaito Ayakama, believed that the new colony should be a free state, without obligations to any Earth nation and open to refugees from all countries.
When he made the now-famous broadcast declaring autonomy to the world, his superiors in Tokyo were not pleased. They immediately ceased all supply drops and sent a platoon of soldiers to retake the colony. They were expecting to deal with a bunch of half-starved settlers in a flimsy huddle of inflatable habitats.
What they didn’t know was that Kaito had secretly been corresponding with a wide range of like-minded associates on Earth. Mainly independently wealthy visionary types who had seen the same writing on the wall. Between them, they had bankrolled a lengthy series of “scientific” rocket launches, all of which had been secretly dropping crates onto the dark side of Luna where Japan couldn’t see. Kaito had been bringing up food, people, and building supplies behind his government’s collective back for almost as long as he’d been on the moon.
So what those soldiers found when they landed was a plexiglass bubble the size of Manhattan, strong e
nough to withstand a meteorite strike and populated by a thriving, self-sufficient community. And when he saw that pile of crates, the soldier in the photograph knew exactly what they were and what message they were intended to send.
They were the full and complete inventory of every single supply drop Japan had sent to the moon over the previous three years. Unused. Unopened.
We don’t need you anymore, Kaito was saying. You are obsolete. Join us or get out of the way. I stared at the expression on the soldier’s face and felt a gloomy kinship for the poor dumbfounded bracket.
“Are you a star pilot?”
One of the new arrivals was in the queue behind me. He was young and pudgy, with overgrown, greasy hair and thick spectacles, like a car with massive headlights wrapped around a weeping willow.
I turned away for a moment to flick the little imaginary switch I have, and the transformation washed over me. Warm smile. Interested eyes. Hands open and welcoming without making motions that could be interpreted as grasping. Then I turned back. “Certainly am!” I announced. “Fifteen years in the Black. I’ve got stories that’ll make your pube stand on end. And you’ll be hard pressed to find more reasonable rates—”
“Do you know Jacques McKeown?”
I noticed the paperback book he was fidgeting with, and my internal switch snapped back like a kick to the doints. Jacques Mc-plying-Keown. Every single time he had a new book out, the spaceport was full of his plying fans. And then the media speculation on Jacques McKeown’s true identity would flare up again, because he was almost certainly a pilot or an ex-pilot, and half the plying potential clients in the spaceport would turn out to be journalist doints with no intention of hiring anyone.
It was the newest book this kid was holding, and the cover was a typical one. A square-jawed pilot, his flight jacket barely containing chest muscles like those of a sweaty horse, was fighting off a horde of insectival monsters with a gun in each hand. And there was the usual beautiful woman in a torn kimono clinging to the hero’s leg. Classy as ever.
“Was it really like he says it was?” asked the kid.
I was still too far back in the queue to pretend I had better things to do than talk to this doint. “Oh, yeah. Twenty-four-seven. Non-stop excitement up there. Tell your parents, and maybe they could charter my ship and learn all about—”
“Have you ever had to fight off aliens with a gun in each hand?” he pressed.
I pointed to the cover art. “Yeah. That was an average Monday morning. The only thing he forgot is that usually everything would be on fire at that point.”
He looked furtively left and right, as if we were exchanging classified information in a darkened car park, then leaned closer. “Is it true about Jacques McKeown?”
I leaned in too. “It is. He really does rape dogs. He can’t help it; it’s an impulse. I’ve never seen one get away from him in time.”
He shook his head earnestly. “I mean, is it true that all the pilots secretly know who he is but they’ve made a pact not to tell?”
I was bored with this. I blew out my cheeks. “Kid, if that was true, Jacques McKeown wouldn’t be writing books. Because I and all my colleagues would be shoving them all up his arse with the rest of his trac. Now do me a favor: go forth and multiply.”
He did so, scampering off to the nearby bookshop to join a small huddle of scene kids in designer distressed flight jackets. Above them, a large poster depicted the cover art for some other, equally traccy McKeown book.
Every star pilot had stories from the Golden Age. You couldn’t have avoided it even if you tried; you could attempt to stick to transporting cargo or passengers across the Black, but the Black was the new wild frontier, and adventure would find you nevertheless. If you hadn’t saved at least one planet by the end of your first year, then you weren’t considered to be taking it seriously. We all had stories, but only one of us had had the idea to take everyone’s stories, rewrite them to be about himself, and sell millions of copies.
My own exploits on Cantrabargid had “inspired” the bulk of book 12: Jacques McKeown and the Malmind Menace. And every time a tourist accused me of ripping it off, I envisioned another six-inch nail being shoved down Jacques McKeown’s organ of generation. In my mind’s eye, it was starting to look like some kind of S & M wedding bouquet. You’d be hard pressed to find a star pilot who didn’t have similar fantasies. All in all, keeping his true identity secret was a surprisingly smart move, for a man apparently incapable of original ideas.
I couldn’t enjoy my unagi sandwich after that, sitting in a booth intended for nine, bitterly picking off bits of bread and rice. I wondered if it had been like this for cowboys: lionized by popular culture, while at the same time, everyone was buying cars instead of horses and tutting about the death of the Old West.
There’d been a lot of that sort of talk when quantum tunnels first came about. A lot of people had gone on about how it would kill the adventurous soul of space travel. Which would have been gratifying, but very few of those people continued paying for arduous passage through untamed star systems when the journey could be made instantaneously, for a fraction of the cost and with no risk of being eaten by crystal crabs.
“Excuse me. Are you a star pilot?”
I slammed my hands onto the tabletop, flipping my sandwich messily, and was prepared to yell another thing relating to Jacques McKeown’s arse before I took in the person addressing me. The words died in my throat.
This was new. At first I thought she was one of the newly-arrived business travelers, going by her outfit: dark gray pant suit, severely straightened hair. But then I noticed the understated gold cufflinks and leather-bound, top-of-the-range datapad inserted under one arm. There was serious money here. The kind that normally travels first class. Quantum tunneling being what it is, first class is basically the same as economy class, except star pilots aren’t allowed on the concourse and they put a red carpet down.
Both of us were staring and things were starting to get weird, so I felt moved to respond. “Yes, I am.” I adjusted my flight jacket to give a better view of the words “Star Pilot” emblazoned across my T-shirt.
Her eyes shifted around, and she hugged her datapad. “Are you . . . available for hire?” she said, her mouth curled slightly in distaste at her own words.
My mind’s hand was hovering over the little switch, but something felt off. I momentarily went against all my instincts and nodded toward the concourse behind her, still rumbling with full-volume sales pitches. “That’s the usual hiring place over there,” I said. I prodded my distressed sandwich. “This is the lunch place.”
She looked around again. Bits of her were vibrating nervously. Her cufflinks were tapping a little drum-beat on her datapad. “I need to make an arrangement as discreetly as possible.”
“Ohhhh,” I said, nodding slowly. I was starting to feel like a school counselor attempting to extract information from a crying child. “Would you like to go somewhere private?”
“Yes,” she said quickly. “Yes, that would probably be for the best.”
I stood up, leaving the tormented remains of my sushi sandwich to brighten up the day of one of my peers. “Right,” I said. “We can go and talk in my ship.”
“Er, no,” she said, wrinkling her nose. “I don’t think I would be comfortable actually going onto a . . . onto your . . . thing. Is there somewhere private that’s . . . not as private?”
I came to the decision that this was one of the many tests life presents us with to separate the fast of thought from the roadkill. I glanced searchingly around, and my gaze fell upon the bright pink photo booth beside the pharmacist. “All right then,” I said, gesturing toward it with an open palm. “Step into my office.”
Once the two of us had squeezed around the stool, our shoulders rubbing up against the ceiling of the booth and the tops of our heads pressed together, the little door could finally be persuaded to close.
“Okay,” I whispered, after ensuring secre
cy by hanging my jacket over the camera screen. “You were saying?”
She looked at me uncertainly over her brow. “I need absolute assurance that you are a star pilot and that you are available for immediate hire before this goes any further. I cannot risk any spread of sensitive information.”
I attempted to nod, but our scalps scraping together felt very unpleasant. I drew her attention to my hanging flight jacket so I could show her the parking permit I kept clipped to the inside pocket. “I guarantee absolute confidentiality for all clients. I completely understand your situation. Can I start by asking what, exactly, you did, and which organizations are hunting you for it?”
“You . . . what?”
I displayed my palms. “It’s fine if you don’t want to say, but I do have to charge extra for the no-questions-asked package. It’s just a risk assessment th—”
“I am not a fugitive!” snapped the woman, stopping just short of straightening up with offended dignity and consequently knocking herself unconscious on the ceiling. “I just require someone who can pilot a ship.”
“Oh. Right. Good.” I bit my lip. “That’s good, because . . . if you were a fugitive . . . I would of course have immediately notified . . . Actually, could you just forget this entire conversation up to now?”
“I’m sorry, this was a bad idea,” she muttered, groping for the door handle behind her back.
“No, no, no, it’s fine,” I was about to grab her arm, but stopped myself, as any violent movement in these close quarters might have led to me being the one on the run from the law. “You’ve obviously got a problem, and I want to help you with it. Really. I’m basically as trustworthy as any other pilot you’ll find here, and my hygiene is better than average. Just tell me what you need.”