“They fucked you. They fuck everyone.”
You watch him.
“At least you’re as fucked as me,” he says, eyes still closed. It’s almost a whisper now.
You don’t bother to tell him the truth.
Another long moment passes.
“They have what you did know on a recording. You had something stored. They have that.”
“And do you know what I was?” you ask.
He shakes his head.
Then shudders.
Passes out.
The actual dying will take a while more. You slowly shift, reach to his head, and snap his neck. After rummaging around you pull his wallet out. A picture of a redhead. Girlfriend? Must be, you think. No ring.
So what price are you willing to pay for your self?
Is it worth it?
Time heals all wounds.
In your case, it takes about three weeks before you recover fully.
Now you’re standing in front of that same booth, same alien in the pink gas, holding out your ticket. You have gotten your photo ID and background check (faked). It warbles behind the security glass.
“Name?”
“Pepper.”
“Secondary name?”
You pause.
“Smith.”
“The size of your luggage is unusual,” it protests.
“It is necessary,” you insist. The remains of the important bits of the gyro stand. And some extra devices to shield it from any ShinnCo attempts to make it call home and make your life miserable.
It looks at you.
“Human.” The word is unstressed through the speaker. But you know the meaning behind it.
You stare the creature down and wait.
The go-around takes several minutes, but the creature finally tacks on a massive surcharge and lets you through.
Settling into the capsule’s launch chair, the long lines of the launch tube visible through the tiny portholes ahead of you, you pull your new overcoat closely around you.
You wonder if Susan can find room for you on her mining ship.
It’s a wild non-world out there. One where humans are minorities, alien conglomerates ply the worlds and negotiate with primitives like your own people for their gas giants and extra unused planets. They trade them for space access, advanced technology. Beads and glass many suspect, but not to primitive planets like Earth.
This is your new environment.
ShinnCo you can leave behind.
You reach your hand up and caress the data amulet hanging from your neck. It is the memory of a sandy beach, your back relaxed against a palm tree. The gentle swish of the wind through leaves and water breaking against rocks at the end of the bay soothes you. That’s it. A single memory of a life you once wanted to remember back. ShinnCo put a lot of security around it. Your past is the past.
You are the person you are now.
You’re not going to look into the past and what you were.
It really isn’t important.
THE ZEPPELIN CONDUCTORS’ SOCIETY ANNUAL GENTLEMEN’S BALL
Genevieve Valentine
So hook yourself up to an airship Strap on your mask and your knife For the wide open skies are a-calling And oh, it’s a glorious life!
The balloon of a Phoenix-class airship is better than any view from its cabin windows; half a mile of silk pulled taut across three hundred metal ribs and a hundred gleaming spines is a beautiful thing. If your mask filter is dirty you get lightheaded and your sight goes reddish, so it looks as though the balloon is falling in love with you.
When that happens, though, you tap someone to let them know and you go to the back-cabin Underneath and fix your mask, if you’ve any brains at all. If you’re helium-drunk enough to see red, soon you’ll be hallucinating and too weak to move, and even if they get you out before you die you’ll still spend the rest of your life at a hospital with all the regulars staring at you. That’s no life for an airship man.
I remember back when the masks were metal and you’d freeze in the winter, end up with layers of skin that peeled off like wet socks when you went landside and took the mask off. The polymer rubbers are much cleverer.
I’ve been a conductor for ages; I was conducting on the Majesty in ’78 when it was still the biggest ship in the sky—you laugh, but back then people would show up by the hundreds just to watch it fly out of dock. She only had four gills, but she could cut through the air better than a lot of the six-fins, the Laconia too.
They put the Majesty in a museum already, I heard.
Strange to be so old and not feel it. At least the helium keeps us young, for all it turns us spindly and cold. God, when we realized what was happening to us! But they had warned us, I suppose, and it’s fathoms better now then it was. Back then the regulars called you a monster if they saw you on the street.
The coin’s not bad, either, compared to factory work. They say it’s terrible what you end up like, but if you work the air you get pulled like taffy, and if you work in the factory you go deaf as a post; it’s always something.
I’m saving a bit for myself for when I’m finished with this life, enough for a little house in the Alps. I need some altitude if I’m going to be landlocked; the air’s too heavy down here.
The very first ships were no better than hot-air balloons, and the conductors kept a tiny cabin and had to string themselves outside on cables if something happened. I can’t imagine it—useless.
I didn’t join up until after they moved conductors inside—it showed they had a lick of sense to put conductors where they could get to things that went wrong, and I’m not fond of looking down from heights.
The engine-shop shifted to airships as soon as they caught on, and I made two thousand ribs before I ever set foot inside a balloon. It makes for a certain confidence going in, which carried me through, thank goodness—I had a hard time with it at first.
You have to be careful how deeply you breathe so the oxygen filter doesn’t freeze up on you, and you have to make sure your air tube doesn’t get tangled on your tether, or your tether in someone else’s. You have to learn how to fling yourself along so that the tether ring slides with you along the spine, and how to hook your fingers quickly into the little holes in the ribs when you have to climb down. You have to learn to deal with the cold.
The sign language I picked up at once. We had that at the factory, too, signals for when we were too far apart or when it was too loud. I’m fond of it; you get used to talking through the masks, and they’re all good men in the air, but sometimes it’s nice just to keep the quiet.
Captain Carter was very kind those first few months; he was the only Captain I’ve ever had who would make
