Into the New Millennium: Trailblazing Tales From Analog Science Fiction and Fact, 2000 - 2010 (5 page)

Another lengthy silence.

"Howard," I said.

"Yeah, boy?"

"Does it hurt?"

"Beg pardon?"

"When they recorded you. And moved you into the computer. Does it hurt?"

"Not really."

"What does it feel like?"

"Impossible to describe."

"You can't even try?"

"If I did, it would probably just confuse you. But for the sake of argument, imagine going to sleep one night, and when you wake up, your body is huge, has a hundred new arms, a hundred new eyes, a hundred new mouths . . . It really takes some getting used to. But no, it doesn't hurt."

"We'll have to record Tab soon, won't we?"

"No. Tabby made me swear to never do that. She's afraid it will interrupt her soul going to Jesus."

"But
you
were recorded."

"That was different. And believe me, Tab's only reason for allowing it was because she feared being alone more than she feared my soul getting lost in space between this world and the next. I think in the long run she's stopped worrying about me. Though she still insists that when it's her time, nothing will stop her."

"Does she really believe she'll go to Jesus?"

"You know she does, Mirek."

"How about you? Do you really believe it?"

Pause.

"I
want
to believe, Mirek. Whether or not that counts . . . I dunno."

Disaster came suddenly, almost fifteen years after leaving Jupiter.

A micrometeoroid storm, composed of dark carbons so black and so thinly diffused we never saw them on the telescope, or the radar. One moment I was helping Tab get dressed and get her room cleaned up, the next the observatory was trembling and a sound like hard rain echoed through the corridor outside.

"Howard, what's happening?" Tab shouted.

When no reply came, Tab and I both looked at one another in alarm and rushed to the door to look out. Sparks lit from the ceiling and tiny rays lanced down and into the floor. The cosmic dust—moving at several tens of thousands of kilometers a minute, relative to us—was penetrating through many centimeters of steel and polycarbonate plate. Tab gripped me as we stood in the doorway, not daring to move, while the eerie light show continued for several minutes, until finally it ended, and I was able to rush out to the nearest computer access panel and bring up a status report on the station.

It was grim. Half the observatory was either off-line or red-lined. Worse yet, the workstation was operating on local software only—cut off from Howard's direct control. We were also gradually losing air pressure, though the level had not yet dropped enough to be dangerous.

Tab and I floated frantically down several hundred meters of corridor until we reached the access hatch for the main computers buried down in the basement. I noted that the hatch had numerous almost-too-tiny-to-see holes in it, then dropped legs-first into the bowels of the main computer core, where Howard's mind—and perhaps his spirit—had dwelled for over two decades.

The databanks were a mess. Whole arrays were dead. The computer center had been hardened against cosmic radiation and solar flares, but never something like this. I worked frantically to trace the logic paths of the fail-safes while Tab gripped a handrail and sobbed uncontrollably, saying, "Howard . . . Oh, Howard . . ."

It was no good. Too many arrays were damaged or down. Even if I could load backups, the constant synergy between the databanks that was necessary for Howard Marshall to exist, as a person, had been disrupted. If we got something back, it probably wouldn't be Howard.

Tab needed no one to tell her the reality of what had happened.

She simply stared at the arrays, many of them blinking red warning lights, and kept repeating her husband's name.

She took to her bed later that day, not seeming to care about the thousands of microscopic punctures that were leaking our air away into space. Nor did she care about the other damaged equipment—repairs to which were now going to be near-impossible without Howard's help. I had not realized how totally dependent Tab and I were on the man until he was gone.

In a frenzy, I booted up as many of the dummy programs as I could, running them on local workstations or servers so that life support and other vitals didn't close down. Then I spent the next three days securing the hydroponics farms and the cycler machinery and the other life necessities, without which death was certain.

Not that it mattered much for Tab.

Every time I checked on her, she'd gotten worse.

The final time I looked in on her, she was curled—floating—near her bed. An old framed photo of her and Howard from when they were young was pressed tightly to her chest. The same hymn she'd once sung to me, when I was breaking down, drifted from her lips.

I almost had to shout at her to get her to pay attention to me.

"It doesn't matter anymore, Mirek. The Lord has taken Howard, and it's time for me to go now too."

"You can't just quit!" I screamed. "You told me once that God would judge us by how we bore our pain and burdens, right?"

These words seemed to bring her back to herself for a moment, enough that she replaced the photo in its holder and pushed off to drift down to me.

The slap that came was unexpected, and the first and last time she ever laid a hand on me in anger.

I was too shocked to be angry.

"Don't quote God at me, boy!" Tab said sourly. "I've spent my last years trying too hard to open a door into your heart, through which Christ might step through. But you've rejected Him, and a part of me too. Now go away and leave me be. I'm too old to help anyway."

There was nothing to say, so I left, and got a few hours of harried sleep before returning to Tab's room.

Her body was suspended in the zero-gee bed. She was dressed in her white smock, and her eyes were closed, though her mouth hung slackly open while her chest drew no breath. A little roll of paper was held in one cool hand.

I shakily reached for it, and when it unrolled, it said, in Tab's handwriting, "You are a good soul, Mirek. Thank you for letting me have you as my boy."

I couldn't think for the rest of the day. Only the seriousness of my predicament kept me moving. But my mind and heart were as empty and cold as the space through which the observatory now lamely traveled.

I eventually put Tabitha's body next to her husband's, in the tomb they had made for themselves on the far side of the observatory. There was no ceremony, no words of eulogy. There had been none for Papa, nor Mama, nor Irenka after them. There seemed none appropriate now, and I felt anything I said that even remotely touched on the spiritual would be almost profane. Tab had been right. My heart was deaf to God. If God even existed. I stared at the closed doors to the final resting place of my second set of parents, and doubted very much that Jesus, or any other saving deity, existed. There was only the harshness of life, followed by the silence of death, which came suddenly and without warning, and always took those who least deserved it.

That month, my work on the observatory was purely mechanical. And ultimately futile. Too much had been ruined in the micrometeoroid storm. Without the expanded capacities of Howard—his ability to be everywhere and see and feel and "think" the observatory all at once—there was no way for a single person to manage.

The local software kept things going for a time, but when three months had passed, it became clear that the hydroponics were failing, along with the waste cyclers. Even with the stores that had been kept safe down in the many cellars we'd dug into the rock, within a couple of years, I was going to be out of both air and food.

I went back to the main computer core and considered my options. There were enough good arrays to try and reassemble a new master program using the original factory defaults that were kept on disc, but since everything I knew about computers I'd learned piecemeal from helping Howard and Tab, I didn't have the expertise to make more than a half-assed attempt.

I tried anyway, and created a computerized retard whom I promptly erased.

I didn't even think of messing with what was left of Howard. Those arrays I kept isolated, in case there was still some chance of sieving data from them which might prove useful.

Days I spent wandering alone through the halls of the observatory, wondering just what in the universe I was even doing here, and why I should keep trying to extend a life that seemed to have amounted to futility.

Whether by luck or design, that was when the next beacon revealed itself.

Like the other, it was very faint, but it called softly from directly ahead, in the belly of the Kuiper Belt, like a siren beckoning a lonely sailor.

I went to it. Dumping more antimatter than I should have into the reaction, I thrust viciously, pushing the observatory up the relative velocity scale, not caring if I was risking more micrometeoroid storms. If there was going to be any point to this entire journey, any way at all of giving the deaths of Howard and Tabitha meaning, then I had to reach that beacon, which lay an indeterminate way off, but appeared to be growing just a little bit stronger, day by day.

Weeks later, I found the buoy.

It appeared to be the first piece of whole-cloth Outbounder technology I'd yet discovered. Incredibly small, and apparently operating on a store of antimatter—which the original Outbounders had never had—the device pinged happily at the observatory while I used the remaining functional thrusters of the station to pull alongside and match course and speed. My radio query sparked a message laser that shot towards the observatory. I had to fiddle for a few minutes to bring the correct receptor dish into place—something Howard could have done reflexively, with a mere thought—and then the main audio-video channel was alive with a recorded message.

It was a head shot of a young woman against a bluescreen. She was of Asian descent, and spoke TransCom with an accent I suspected to be Chinese.

"If you are seeing and hearing this message," she said, "then you are halfway to us. We know about the war, and we know that you would not have come this far unless you sought refuge. Be aware the Quorum has decided to grant asylum to all refugees from the governments of Earth, the independent satellite localities, and all colonies of the asteroids and the Jovian planets. Provided that you can reach us. We regret that we can offer no further assistance at this time. We also regret that we cannot offer you precise coordinates to follow, but if you have come this far, you already know the rest of the way. Good luck."

The message repeated, and I was both elated and crushed.

So far. I'd come so far. Tab and Howard had sacrificed so much. And this was only
halfway?

I went back to my calculations, regarding stores and the upkeep of the hydroponics. There was no way I'd squeeze out fifteen more years, even if I thought I could last that long alone without going insane as a result. Even if I dumped the entire antimatter reserve into one, long, drawn-out burn, I'd have nothing left to slow myself down with when I neared the endpoint.

I stayed near the buoy, and debated at length.

The girl in the message had obviously intended for refugees to keep following the last known trajectory of Pioneer 10. Following that jellybean trail was a snap. How I could do it and still be alive upon arrival was another matter entirely.

It took me three days of thinking and tinkering to come up with a plan.

It terrified me, because it seemed so much like suicide.

The room with the recording equipment hadn't been touched in a long, long time. Tab had sealed it in a low-density, pure nitrogen environment after she'd helped put Howard into the computer, so that all the machinery and the consoles remained pristine and in good working order. It was also one of the few rooms the micrometeoroid disaster had not touched, and this gave me a hint of comfort while I set about preparing to download myself into the observatory's database arrays.

I'd spent a few weeks carefully creating a new, hardened shelter for those arrays, then painstakingly moved each one of them from the old core down to the new location, finally powering them up and synchronizing them, with triple-redundant electricity I'd snaked down from the antimatter reactors.

If the observatory got hit again, I didn't want to suffer the same lobotomized fate as my old friend.

The instructions for recording were fairly simple. The device itself was like a compact PET scanner that lowered over the skull like a hair dryer.

The catch was that the process could not be aborted or re-tried. The recording process took days, and was so electromagnetically intensive it destroyed neural pathways as quickly as it stored them in the databanks. Once the recorder lowered itself over my skull and began scanning, I was on a one-way trip. And since I didn't have any help, and had never done anything like it before, there was a very good chance I'd wind up nothing more than a mindless piece of meat, my entire life hopelessly scrambled inside the computer.

I prepared carefully. In the event that I did not survive, I programmed an automatic course into the guidance system. Having come this far, it seemed worth it to make sure my remains had at least a chance of arriving at my destination. I also networked the life support servers and crossed them with the recording monitor, so that if the recording process completed and I did not awake and assume full control over the observatory, the contents of the observatory would be gradually deep-frozen.

My brain would be empty at that point anyway, and I didn't like the idea of leaving my body to slowly rot on the recording couch.

Once I was satisfied that I'd tended to the necessary details, I sat down and considered my final words. In my entire life, through everything I'd experienced, I'd never really thought about what I'd want to leave behind for the future. It had always been someone else leaving something behind for me. I had always been the one to have to pick up the pieces and carry on. It frustrated me to sit there in front of the computer, finger poised over the button that would begin audio-video storage, and not have a damned thing to say.