“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 one: God used the aliens and the humans to create us, as a living symbol that we’re all equal before Him. I’m not going to defend the idea, but doesn’t it seem perfectly possible? We pozzies would be the best of both cultures.”
“Hey, buratino, that ain’t bad if what you wanna do is pump up your ego. But let’s change the subject or I’ll start to believe that God created the universe for my own personal suffering. How old are you, Raymond? Did you have any sort of childhood?”
“You gotta stop with the dumb questions. You know perfectly well all pozzies are the same age, fifty-seven. We were all created when the aliens arrived, when the William S. Burroughs was built. And we were born—or rather, assembled—as adults. Who would have any respect for a child police officer, even if he was a robot? Better we talk about you, Vasily Fernández. How did you choose this life?”
“Sorry, Raymond, nobody chooses to be a crook. It’s what you do for survival when you got no other options. How many possibilities you think a kid like me—no parents, no family—had? Was I supposed to mortgage forty years of my life so a corporation would pay for my studies and let me become an engineer? Or maybe buy a ship, become a trader, and haggle with aliens on your station? Yeah, I could have done that, I guess—but it never occurred to me. I was too worried each morning might be my last. The life of a child alone in the world ain’t easy. It don’t get any better when you’re a teenager alone. So—look here, buddy, let’s quit gabbing for a while, before I say a couple of things you wouldn’t want to hear.”
“Okay, Vasily, as you wish.”
After a thorough search to be sure the shuttle was empty, the bad guys blew it up, of course. Good thing we were far away. Then the Chimera started hunting in the vicinity like a shark circling a shipwrecked sailor’s raft.
Five days had gone by since then. Not a minute more or less. It occurred to me that having a computer built into your brain can sometimes be a defect. I figured my pal must have already lost his sense of time, if not his mind altogether. In a way I envied him. He was beyond all responsibility. Not me. I had to keep talking to him, constantly, even when he refused to answer: if anything stood between him and madness, it was my being here, always trying to strike up conversations, which began to seem more and more incoherent to me.
“Raymond, where’d we screw up?”
“Huh?”
“You know. Those two novels by your guy Chandler you told me from memory—in the end, the good guys always win. Maybe they get beat up and arrested and worse along the way, but they win. So, what did we do wrong?”
“Well, it isn’t all over yet. Sometimes real life isn’t like a novel.”
“Hey, that was supposed to be my line! Look, I think our problem is, I ain’t one of your honest but unorthodox private eyes. I ain’t even a cop, just another crook. Fighting fire with fire don’t always work, looks like.”
“That’s not your fault, Vasily. You did your part, and you did it well. You went above and beyond. If you hadn’t put your powers to work, most likely we wouldn’t be here now, and I’m very grateful to you for it.”
“No problem. But for all the fun we’re having, they shoulda just gone ahead and fried us with the particle beam. At least it woulda been a quick death.”
“Don’t be silly. Where there’s life, there’s hope.”
“Raymond, do me a favor, spare me the clichés. At this point, if God himself don’t save us, you might be the only one with any hopes of… living, if that’s what you call it. Tell me: the gas exchange membranes in my tank are filling with toxins, right? How much longer do you think I can hold out?”
“No, Vasily, what are you saying? Everything’s fine. You have space paranoia, that’s all. Talk to me.”
“What if I don’t feel like talking?”
“Then I’ll talk. Look, let me tell you another Chandler novel you haven’t heard yet. It’s called Farewell, My Lovely.”
“What’s it about?”
“A big guy—huge, mammoth, very badly dressed, just got out of prison and he’s looking for his little girlfriend.”
“Hey, don’t sound bad. But no thanks, maybe some other time. Raymond, could I ask you a favor?”
“If it’s anything I can do, I’d be happy to, Vasily.”
“Shut up for a while. You talk so much I can’t hear myself thinking.”
The bad guys hadn’t called off their search. Makrow and company were patient and meticulous, and they knew what was at stake if they didn’t find us. They passed within thirty or forty yards of us a couple of times. Good thing our suits contained hardly any metal and we maintained strict radio silence. Good thing, too, that Vasily’s powers seemed to work even when he wasn’t fully conscious of our situation.
Just two things worried me. If they couldn’t find us, neither could our theoretical rescuers—at least not any time soon. And, though I persisted in telling Vasily otherwise, I thought the biomembranes that were supposed to purify and recycle the air in his suit really might be too old to last until we were picked up—not before poisoning him with the waste from his own metabolism. I took the only precaution at hand, improvising a connection between his suit and mine. Since I don’t breathe, my suit’s membranes might give him a few more hours of life. But they were probably pretty old too, so unless a miracle materialized soon, my friend was doomed, like he said. As for me—it would be ironic for a pozzie like me to work his ass off to save a human criminal and then end up alone and forced to choose between Chacumbele’s inelegant suicide escape and sinking into boredom for the rest of time.
“You know, the more I analyze every move we made, I can’t see where we made a mistake, Raymond. It ain’t fair. We done everything right, but we never had a chance of winning. All ’cause of that damn Chimera. It oughta be against the law for bad guys to have better weapons than the good guys, don’t you think?”
“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 to humans, outside of here—”
“But that poor bastard Giorgio must still believe they’re going to take him. I almost feel sorry for him. I would have treated him nicer. A fast, merciful death, no fooling around. But his palsies are likely to jettison him far from nowhere, in some binary system’s Oort cloud. Well, at least he’ll get to see other suns in the end. I’d like to visit them. Raymond, you ever left the Solar System?”
“No, Vasily. All of us, all the pozzies, are on board the Burroughs. In fact, this is the first time I’ve ever left the station in all my fifty-seven years. And I’d gladly have skipped the trip, now that I think of it.”
“Good thing at least one of us still has a sense of humor. But know what, pozzie? I can’t say I’m going to die happy. Not if I’ve never seen the stars, never flown across the galaxy. The aliens always say we’re not ready yet, but I say: who are they to decide for us? Who told them they could set themselves up as our lords and gods, with the right to rule over life and death for humanity?”
“Technology.”
“Fuck technology. Don’t you think we’d be better off now if they’d left us alone? We have heaps of wonderful little gadgets and they might as well’ve told us they work by magic. Not like they ever taught us how they work or what theories they’re based on. We let them turn us into a race of customers. We don’t invent anything—what’s the point? The aliens already invented more than we could dream up in a thousand years. Get me? I don’t think they really even want our raw materials. All they want is to keep us down, keep us like this, neuter our initiative.”
“Vasily, that’s an interesting intergalactic version of an old conspiracy theory, and I hate to contradict you and tear your theory down—but I know the merchants, and I know that they aren’t faking their greed for raw materials, not in the least.”
“Raymond, enough shitting around. It’s time. Open my fucking valve before I change my mind. Been nice knowing you, really. If I had another life to live I might even think about becoming a cop, if I could have you for a partner.”
“Wow, sounds like a declaration of true love.”
“Go to hell, bag of bolts.”
“We’re here already. But changing the subject—you haven’t told me about your parents.”
“Fuck my parents and my whole family. I want you to open my valve, I’m telling you.”
“You’re sure?”
“Sure as I’ll ever be. Okay, I still remember I’m an orphan, but my mind is going, I can tell. Over your shoulder, I see three stars moving toward us, and stars don’t move.”
But his mind was perfectly clear. The fact was (thank God—any God, to be on the safe side), those weren’t stars.
The three ships from the Milano 5 asteroid prospecting fleet found us on day seventeen of our ordeal, nearly a million miles from the orbit of what had once been Asteroid G 7834 XC. Their hypersensitive instruments succeeded where the Chimera’s sensors had failed. Was it once more due to Vasily’s strange power, or dumb luck?
No matter. The point is, there they were.
It took the miners ten minutes to decide whether to rescue us after they detected our image. It’s easy to imagine the “humanitarian” discussion they had after discovering us: a tranquil, disinterested debate about rewards for rescues, criminal responsibility, and the odds of going to prison, about what would happen if they decided to play dumb and keep going while hushing it all up….
Luckily you can still find a hint of ethics even among asteroid prospectors, that mutant subspecies of space rat. They helped me pull Vasily aboard (his legs, like the rest of his muscles, were no longer responsive after floating in total weightlessness without any exercise for more than two weeks). They grumbled about how he was draining their reserves of blood plasma and fresh food, but they also did their minimal bit to help El Afortunado’s debilitated body get back to more or less working order by repeatedly administering general dialysis and intravenous metabolic treatments.
But their protests grew louder and angrier, almost spilling over into mutiny, when I pulled my extraordinary police authorization on them by asking them (by which I mean ordering them) to send us off in one of their three ships to the nearest base where we might catch a rapid spacecraft to the Burroughs.
There was shouting, cursing, wailing, and exclamations of “that’s what we get for rescuing a damn pozzie alien-hugger” from a couple of crew members. But when one of the prospectors, who evidently invested all his profits in anabolic steroids and nutritional supplements (he wasn’t very tall, but his arms were thicker than my thighs and his back was so broad he would only look small next to a Colossaur—so broad that it would be easier to jump over him than to walk around him—and also covered with hair) decided to resort to stronger measures, putting an electric stiletto to my throat when he thought I wasn’t looking, I had to show him that the extraordinary powers of the Burroughs Space Station Positronic Police Force aren’t based solely on rational persuasion and an assumption of good behavior. I’d left all my weapons on the shuttle, but a positronic robot’s synthetic muscles don’t grow weak after three or even three hundred weeks without exercise and in zero gravity.
After I reduced the rash gorilla’s stiletto to a spark-spewing knot and rearranged his overdeveloped right arm into an anatomically dubious angle dangling from his shoulder, his shipmates suddenly became a lot more collaborative.
A lot quieter, too.
That’s why I didn’t hear until the third day, just a few hours before we landed at the zero-g cubbyhole that the zero-prospect miners called a base, that Vasily had guessed right.
An unidentified ship, coming from an undetermined direction, had attacked the Estrella Rom three days earlier, hitting it with so much firepower that all the Romanis’ combined defenses were unable to resist after the first volley.
The Chimera destroyer (it could only have been Makrow and his sidekicks, though the bit about the “unidentified ship from an undetermined direction” showed that the aliens were being as hard-nosed about censorship as ever—perhaps for good reason this time; if the human police knew what was orbiting their Earth, they might have refused en masse to man their ships) didn’t stop at blasting the whole flimsy structure of the wheel to smithereens. With sadistic thoroughness, they hunted down every wretch, one by one, who hadn’t been lucky enough to die in the explosive decompression that blew the shabby station apart when its seals failed. Escape pods and space suits alike became target practice for their sick game of shipwreck hunting. And by all accounts their aim was excellent. The thuggish miner I had beaten described to me, vindictively and with every gory detail, how Earth police were still finding punctured pressure suits and pulverized pods all over the orbit.
Needless to say, no survivors were found.
Vasily was still sleeping and hooked up to at least fifteen tubes when I heard the news. I didn’t have the stomach to wake him up and tell him. Old Man Slovoban wasn’t Vasily’s father, but he was the closest thing to a father the poor guy ever had. Besides, he wasn’t going to like it when he found out I had saved him from death in space only to send him back to his cell.
It’s true. My superiors had decided that my “Gaussical vs. Gaussical” initiative was a failure. They’d ordered me to return immediately to the Burroughs and account for my mistakes.
And, they explicitly added, if I didn’t want my situation to get even worse, I’d better come back with Vasily.