“Whatever you say, Vasily.”
“Come on, robot boy. You think I’m such a goner, you gonna say yes to every stupid thing comes outta my mouth? How about you untie me and let me take a walk around that asteroid? Just to take a leak. You know what taking a leak is, I figure, even if you don’t have to waste time on such details.”
“Sorry, Vasily, I can’t. The straps must have gotten damp, nothing perceptible, maybe just a few water molecules per square inch, but that’s all it took. The harness knots are frozen solid, and I don’t have an anchor point to stand on so I can cut them. If I tried, we’d both spin out of control.”
“Hmm. You’re sharp, henchman. Sounds logical, almost possible, but I ain’t convinced. Raymond, you think I’ll make it out of this?”
“As much as I will, Vasily, for sure.”
“Not much consolation, but whatever, something’s something. Know what? In the holovideos, when the hero’s about to die, he always tells the other guy to give his mother this or that, or put flowers on some dude’s grave, or tell some girl he wasn’t a coward in the face of danger. I got nothing like that to ask you to do for me, and frankly I don’t care. When I’m gone—the hell with the world.”
“I could always go tell Old Man Slovoban that you gave everything you had trying to avenge him. And give him another suit for his collection. I could tell him that your final thought was for him.”
“Ha, that I’d love to see. I doubt they’d let you inside the Estrella Rom without me, much less let you get near the Old Man. But I bet you could shoot your way in and give him the suit, if you really wanted to. You’d do that for me, Raymond? Knowing I’d never find out, never thank you for it?”
“You could thank me now, in advance—what do you think? And yes, I’d do it in your memory, if you’d like.”
“I don’t think you’ll get the chance, but thanks all the same.”
“Oh, so you don’t think they’ll find me either, at least not before the Old Man dies of old age?”
“They’ll find you, they’ll find you. You can sit tight for a thousand years, if that’s what it takes. But by then there probably won’t be much left of the Estrella Rom—see what I mean?”
“Oh. Makrow and Weekman will put two and two together and get Slovoban. But don’t you think the Romani defenses can take on the Chimera?”
“Seriously? You think they could?”
“No.”
“Good. I was starting to think too many days in space were messing with your judgment.”
“Not that many days. It’s only been—”
“No! Don’t tell me. If you tell me it’s been two or three, I’ll get depressed. Let me think. We’ve been out here for a month, or a month and a half, that I’m a hero and our odds of being rescued are going up by the second.”
“As you wish, Vasily.”
“Raymond, how long has it been since we left the shuttle?”
“Forty-six days.”
“An exact number and everything, thanks. How’ve I done?”
“Great, Vasily. I don’t know many people who could have held up for so long without going crazy.”
“If I ask you for one more favor, will you do it?”
“Depends.”
“Good answer. Raymond. If I start going downhill—not like now, but really downhill, all the time—will you open my air valve?”
“….”
“Please. Or are you guys really bound by Asimov’s stupid three laws, so as you can’t sit back and let a human die under any circumstances, or what?”
“No. I’ll do it, Vasily. But how—”
“Don’t worry, you’ll know. When I start talking about my mother, my father, and my brothers, that’ll be the time. Because I’m an orphan, remember? Promise me?”
“Whatever you say.”
“That’s what I like, you know, robot? Too bad I hadn’t met up with you yet when I was pulling scams on the orbitals. We would have made a good team, don’t you think? The human rat and the buratino.”
“If you say so, Vasily.”
Gaussical or not, he was visibly deteriorating. He was tougher than he looked, but by the end of day ten he was only speaking in incoherent bursts, and only in response to the fragments of Chandler novels I told him. He began getting me mixed up with the characters from The Big Sleep, and though I kind of liked being called Philip, it was clear he wasn’t going to hold on much longer. The recycling membranes built into the suits were seriously contaminated by his bacterial flora. But at least they were still working, and since we were barely active he wasn’t consuming much in the way of nutritional concentrates either.
The worst parts were the silence, the unvarying temperature, the darkness. A human brain needs constant external stimulus or it starts to malfunction. And the time was fast approaching when the sound of my voice inside his helmet would no longer be enough to preserve his mental health—though he still hadn’t started talking to his unknown parents. I would have done what I promised, I swear. But I wouldn’t have enjoyed it. And he still had moments of lucidity now and then that made me think about things I’d never considered before.
“Raymond, you think Makrow will end up getting rid of Giorgio Weekman himself? He’s not worth anything to Makrow outside of this system, and Makrow doesn’t seem like the sort of person—the sort of Cetian, I mean—that travels with excess baggage.”
“If it’s any consolation to you, I think that’s exactly what he’ll do. I’d been thinking the same thing, Vasily. There’s Cetians and Colossaurs all over the galaxy, they say, but as
