permanently turned on. She looked at Sara.
'Jack is very fucked up,' she whispered. 'He can't help it.' 'That's his problem. Will you take my hand, or what?' Anni reached out her scrawny, skinny virtual hand and flowed into the warrior girl; and they flew back, through the systems, to where Sara's generator was.
Draco had cut through the wall and encountered a massive resistance from the force field, but it wasn't deterring him. He was crawling, pushing on his hands and knees, toward that pain-wracked, agonized, hundred- pound lump of meat. The air of the cell shook wildly, virtual lightnings played. 'Draco, no!' howled Orlando, splayed against the wall in the robotics chamber, one arm shielding his face. 'Don't do it! Don't touch it!' In the four dimensions of the material plane nothing was happening; he had air to breathe, he had gravity. But he was being torn apart, hauled with Draco toward some weird event horizon, somehow contained in that little cell.
'The gateway to Eldorado,' croaked Draco Fujima.
There was a crack like a huge electrical discharge, a blinding flash. For a fleeting, imaginary instant, Orlando thought he saw the world ripped open, and two figures that were not human, that had never been human, walking away from him… into another world, into the opposite place.
He would never know what that vision had meant.
In the real world he blacked out and regained consciousness in the robotics cell. He couldn't move. He just lay there, barely breathing, until Eddie and Grace arrived. 'Oh my God,' gasped Eddie. 'Oh, you madcaps, what have you -done?' But there was no damage, apart from a hole in the wall that was going to need some explaining. No one had touched the container that Draco should have stolen; and the lump of agonized meat was where it should be. Perhaps a little bigger than before, but no one ever tried to get Orlando to explain why.
Eddie Supercargo forgave Orlando and Grace instantly. He was proud of them for their lawless behavior, and he'd never taken tea with such pleasure in his life. He hit on the brilliant solution that the penetration of the chamber had been a planned but secret security exercise. The AIs were easily convinced to go along with this. Few organizations like to admit they've been successfully hacked, and the International Government was no exception to this rule. If they ever suspected the truth, they didn't let on. The harvesting of exotic material continued without interuption. Draco Fujima was just gone… vanished. Which was more or less the fate the government had planned for him, so there would be no repercussions there. No one even wondered what had happened to Draco's bot or to Jack Solo's Anni-mah, who, it turned out, had terminally ceased to function on that same afternoon. The bots were contraband, and the government couldn't be responsible for strange collateral damage, aboard a station where Buonarotti transits regularly played hell with local point phase.
Jack was inconsolable, but perhaps he was better off that way.
Orlando and Grace got their bikes back, and some useful numbers, which they sold through sys-op for a reasonable return on their investment. They spent most of the rest of their stay in their cabin, watching movies, setting themselves mountain race targets and trying to keep from bouncing off the walls. They didn't visit the saloon much, and they never went near the transit lounge. Shortly before they left on the Slingshot, they made a last excursion to the observation deck. And there are the stars of Orion. Red Betelgeuse, brilliant blue Rigel, Bellatrix and Saiph; Mintaka, Alnilam and Alniak in the hunter's belt. At this exposure the jewel in the sword was not prominent, and it took a practiced eye to make out V380 Orionis… and the reflection nebula where you could find the birth-material called a Bok Globule, 'a jet black cloud resembling a T lying on its side,' that allegedly held stars so young they were barely the age of homo sapiens.
'We won't be that much further away from them,' said Orlando.
They heard limping steps behind them, and L'Hibou joined them at the guard rail. 'Not in entire nakedness,' he said. 'But trailing clouds of glory do we come. If stars are born, my young friends, do they have a life before birth, and after death?'
'I'm sorry it didn't work out,' said Orlando. 'I suppose you won't get your lightships. But I didn't know he would do that.'
Grace shook her head. 'I can't figure it,' she said. 'Light years, gravity equations, time and probability, non- location science… I can't think on that scale. I turn it into fantasies, the moment I start.'
'All of science can do no more. And here in deep space, we just live out the same soap operas as you in the world below.'
'Maybe it's for the best,' suggested Orlando. 'Maybe it's better if the gate stays closed, and the empires are contained on separate planets, in the old style.'
'Tuh. It won't last. The lightships will come -Hm.' The visor that hid L'Hibou's ruined eyes was fixed on the view; but they knew he was working up to one of those confessions that can only be made on the brink of a departure.
'When your partner gets killed,' he remarked at last, 'you're supposed to do something. Lana and I were together for a long time. In some ways I didn't like her much, but she was still my partner. Solo wasn't the murderer, not in my opinion. It was Draco who told Jack you were meeting Lana in the maintenance bay that night and that she was going to get you your bikes back. Draco knew that would make poor Jack crazy-Jack hated those damned bikes. And I knew Draco would try to go through the gate if he got the chance. I wanted the murderer to suffer. Well, that's all.'
The Deep Spacer turned, and limped back into the drab corridors.
Orlando and Grace spared a shudder for the fate of Draco Fujima. But if the rule is that there are no rules, then Drac had nothing to complain about.
'One day,' said Orlando, 'we'll make the transition nobody can avoid.'
'Yeah. And then maybe we'll walk where the stars are born.'
And who can tell?
Mayfly by Peter Watts amp; Derryl Murphy
From Gardner Dozois - The Year's Best Science Fiction 23rd Annual Collection (2006)
So here's one of my (very rare) collaborations, with Derryl Murphy. We must have done something right, because it's being reprinted in Dozois's Year's Best antho and is an alleged Aurora finalist to boot. Personally, I'm not sure what all the shouting's about; it's not that good (not that the Auroras are any kind of infallible index of literary merit, mind you). I mean, geez: it's about a cute kid…
'I hate you.'
A four-year-old girl. A room as barren as a fishbowl.
'I hate you.'
Little fists, clenching: one of the cameras, set to motion-cap, zoomed on them automatically. Two others watched the adults, mother, father on opposite sides of the room. The machines watched the players: half a world away, Stavros watched the machines.
' I hate you I hate you I HATE you!'
The girl was screaming now, her face contorted in anger and anguish. There were tears at the edge of her eyes but they stayed there, never falling. Her parents shifted like nervous animals, scared of the anger, used to the outbursts but far from comfortable with them.
At least this time she was using words. Usually she just howled.
She leaned against the blanked window, fists pounding. The window took her assault like hard white rubber, denting slightly, then rebounding. One of the few things in the room that bounced back when she struck out; one less thing to break.
'Jeannie, hush…' Her mother reached out a hand. Her father, as usual, stood back, a mixture of anger and resentment and confusion on his face.
Stavros frowned. A veritable pillar of paralysis, that man.
And then: They don't deserve her.
