“Forget? No way, Dick Tracy,” he taunted me as he finished adjusting his suit and locking his helmet on. “How could I? Woulda been real nice for me not to need to breathe either right now. Thing is, we don’t know how many days we’ll have to float around in this dull asteroid soup before we get picked up, and I’m not planning to go crazy talking to myself the whole time. Big defect in the hyperrealistic android design: you don’t have a radio system built into your structure, do you?”
I nodded, understanding at last what he was getting at: maybe I don’t need air to exist (“live” wouldn’t be quite the right word), but without a hermetically sealed space suit my compressor couldn’t supply me with air to talk with, and we wouldn’t be able to exchange ideas and keep a grasp on sanity.
In silence I took off my fedora, carefully folded it, placed it in an inner pocket of my trench coat, and started climbing into the old pressure suit. I wondered how Vasily planned to hold a conversation without breaking radio silence. I decided it wouldn’t be long before I found out.
Eight
“Hey Raymond, you asleep?”
“What a question, Vasily—you know I’m not.”
“You should try it sometime. Zoning out might do you some good. Tell me something, pozzie: they say the aliens copied you guys’ personalities from real humans that got executed. Remember anything about what you were before? Cop or robber? You know I’m joking, but don’t you miss having dreams?”
“Cute idea. You think that makes us some sort of resuscitated zombies? No, sorry, those are just rumors floating around the System, Vasily. I was never alive, so I don’t miss what I never had. But if you really want to know, sometimes I dream while I’m awake.”
“About electric sheep?”
“Good one. I didn’t know you were a Blade Runner fan. But it so happens I have a friend on the Burroughs whose name is Deckard, would you believe it, and he loaned me the novel and the movie. They’re both good.”
“Wow, a well-educated cop and everything, I’m in luck. Anyways, what do positronic police robots dream about? Catching criminals, or pozzie women?”
“You know we don’t have sex, Vasily. But work isn’t everything for us, either. For example, right now I’m dreaming how sweet it would be if a micrometeorite cracked your helmet and shut you up, once and for all.”
“Ha. Nice. Piece of advice, robot: instead of dreaming, try praying. And you know what? I love you too, Raymond.”
We were floating through the infinite void, nothing above and nothing below, our helmets held tight against each other. With his extraordinary engineering skills, Vasily had figured out how to tie us together, harness to harness, so our helmets would be in contact and we could talk. There’s no sound in a vacuum, but it travels fine through solids. Vasily’s words resonated through my whole suit.
“I always thought there wouldn’t be any room to move around in the asteroid belt, but look how empty this is. A guy could die of boredom. I’d even take a comet passing by now and then, it’d make a nice show.”
“Vasily, at the speed we’re going, we could float for thousands of years even inside the rings of Saturn without running into a particle larger than an atom. Space is mainly a vacuum—didn’t they teach you that in school?”
“Yeah, and they also taught me not to squeeze my pimples, and that reality really exists and isn’t just an illusion of our senses. But I guess they didn’t teach me very well: I’ve always squeezed my pimples, and don’t you think the asteroid belt is maybe as crowded as I said, it’s just that we see it like this?”
“You’re starting to worry me, Afortunado. Maybe we’ve been floating here for too many hours. Look me in the eye. That’s the way to solipsism. You’re starting to deny reality, and you’ll end up saying you’re God.”
“….”
“Don’t you go quiet on me, for the love of—whatever it is you love. Talk to me. Dammit, talk to me!”
“Chill, Raymond. I’m not that far gone. Or did you forget I spent three years in the hole on your pretty little station and stayed sane? I was just joking. And I wanted to find out how positronic robots cursed.”
“Heh. I love you too, Vasily, you know?”
“Good thing, because as tight as we’re tied together, if we didn’t love each other—”
The damned destroyer had found our shuttle just five minutes after we abandoned ship. But they didn’t open fire and obliterate it, as we had hoped; Makrow was an old dog who knew all the tricks, and he must have known the shuttle would be empty and undefended. In any case, they checked to be sure. We hid behind a couple of frozen clouds and watched as a figure in a pressure suit, which from its enormous size could only have been the Colossaur ex-bagger, left the pirate ship and entered ours. I cursed myself for neglecting to rig up at least an explosive booby trap in the airlock or something. We could have been down one enemy. Like I said, after everything’s over it’s easy to see where you slipped up.
“Raymond, do you believe in God?”
“Good question. I guess not. It hasn’t been proved that such an entity is real. But I don’t have enough material to deny his existence either. Let’s say: I have no opinion. I’m a skeptic, waiting for evidence.”
“I understand. For us humans it’s easy: God was the one who created us in his image and likeness. You guys, on the other hand, knowing you’re the aliens’ creatures—I guess it’s better to deny God than to accept a god like that. If I had to pray to a Grodo I’d die of shame.”
“It isn’t that easy, Vasily. If byzantine arguments and theological muddles are your thing, try this
