The Pure Cold Light (2 page)

At the entrance to the cargo bay, his helmet radio abruptly clicked and hissed. He paused, leaning on the stack of eight canisters while he glanced around, expecting that someone was about to say something to him. Idly, he considered the labeling on the canisters: hydrazine. Nothing surprising in that. Hydrazine abounded on the Moon—a very useful form for storing nitrogen gas.

Like everyone else in the SC lunar facility, Heffernan had routinely been instructed in first aid regarding hydrazine’s many noxious properties. Inhaled, it caused pulmonary edemas; spilled on the skin, it created unspeakable chemical burns while being rapidly absorbed as a poison into the body. Since he didn’t work directly with the stuff, he’d never much thought about it, and paid hardly any attention to that part of his first air training. Not that there was much he could have done in any case.
 

He pushed away from them, taking a bounce down the ramp, when his radio clicked again. Now, for all his fear, he was getting annoyed at being jerked around.

He skidded to a stop and turned back angrily just as the canisters detonated.

In the first instant, the explosion was silent, like something witnessed through the window of the lunar shack. Then the blast caught him in a fist as big as creation. His helmet roared, the faceplate shattered into him. He flew, punched like a nail through the side of the skimmer, and burst, ruptured in freeze-dried agony against the eighty-two netted cannonballs.

Chapter One: Fat Farm in Space

Much later, after the fallout resulting from her exposé had settled, Thomasina Lyell would tell interviewers that the journalist in her had recognized unerringly, the first time they met, that she would encounter the man called Angel again.

The meeting itself was sheer accident; no one could have predicted it. Her presence on the orbiting Geosat station that day had nothing to do with him.

Lyell was exercising for a fifteen-year-old girl.

***

She pumped away at a good clip on her assigned stationary bicycle, rightside up or maybe upside down or sideways, she couldn’t say for sure. TV screens, pressed together like the quoins of an enormous vacuum-grown gem, hung in the center of the workout room, dozens of them, at every angle, to accommodate viewers on all the cycle machines in the gravityless environment no matter what surface they might be bolted to. There were no windows, and the single exit door sealed snugly and invisibly in the left wall. The only constant point of reference was
toward the screens
, where every TV at whatever angle displayed the loud opening credits of “The President Odie Show.”

Over two dozen floating lipoid athletes—Lyell nestled in among them—pedaled and heaved upon their machinery. They stared slackly at the screens to forget themselves, to escape the excruciation of weightless workout by shutting off their brains and acquiescing in scripted idiocy. Odie and Vice President Schnepfe felicitously dished up a story as lurid as a plate of intestines.

“Normally, you know,” chimed the President, “we just have on board your and my favorite celebrities. And we do have with us the juggling Prime Minister of Lithuania later, so don’t switch satnets on me yet, folks. But our
first
guest—I gotta tell you, this woman’s story really moved me. I think Schnepfe had a movement, too.” Laughter, spattered applause, a brief cut to Schnepfe, making hyper–thyroid fish eyes over the joke. “This is Mrs. Akiko Alcevar, a widow
and
a registered voter,” said the President of the tiny oriental woman at his side. His digitized voice emerged again, out of the ensuing applause, beguiling, insidious, a snake in sharkskin. “Or is Akiko a widow? What you’re about to hear may sound like—well, like the kind of headline you’d expect to get from Alien News Network or some other overproduced smegma—but it’s staggering, honest-to-
gawd
reality time. For you certainly, hey, Akiko?” She nodded somewhere between Odie and the camera, her lack of resolution injecting just the right amount of believability into the performance. Lyell pedaled hell-bent, trying hard to ignore it but trapped by the program’s contrivance of mystery. Usually, Odie and Schnepfe just bored her to the point of self-immolation. This was not their characteristic show.

The screen filled with the President’s face, which glistened, his pores brimming like rain-fed puddles. “Maybe for
you
, too…because Mr. Andre Alcevar, Akiko’s ex and a former Orbitol junkie—who went all the way to Orbitol decay—has reappeared
from-the-beyond
! Don’t believe me? See for yourself, yeah, yeah.” The background exterior washed away like topsoil; beneath it lay Odie’s documentation—two enormous photos side by side that the President and Mrs. Alcevar now appeared to be walking across, studying intently beneath their feet. Both pictures were, invariably, out of focus.

Lyell figured the one on the right could have as easily been a portrait of the Loch Ness Monster as of the late Andre Alcevar. She’d worked with bad imaging in a few missing persons hunts, but not
that
bad. She couldn’t see why Odie had gotten so revved up about it. His ratings must be down. Elections
were
only eight months away. Time for bread and circuses.

Her attention drifted from the screen to the individual faces puffing away at crazy-quilt angles. In weightlessness faces tended to inflate, so that everybody in the room looked like they had Esquimo forebears. None of the faces, puffed up or not, belonged to the girl she was hunting. None she’d spoken to had been able to offer Lyell any help in locating Tamiami Trayle. Nonetheless, she touched her arm just above the elbow and, by turning her head smoothly from side to side, began recording them all.

The girl had run away from home. Her parents—her father most aggressively—had hired Lyell to find her and bring her back. A credit trace had revealed that Tamiami had shuttled up to the Geosat, suggesting that she was dead serious about getting away from her family. But Geosats as salvation were a pipe-dreamt nightmare. Runaways of all demeanors, hungry for some kind of temporary security before their parents’ credit disks filled up or were turned off, jockeyed for jobs that hadn’t been there to begin with. Lyell had combed the docks, hunted through boutiques, food kiosks, and virtual-sex shops—most of them ScumberCorp franchises, finally narrowing her search to the station’s arms. The arms didn’t spin as the core of the Geosat did, and therefore they had no gravity. A handful of business ventures had figured out how to utilize zero-G profitably; mostly the arms represented storage space, and dutifully she inquired at every cargo office. When she’d eliminated every place else on the satellite, Stardance Weightless Weightloss remained. She checked herself in for the full treatment.

Thomasina Lyell, private investigative journalist—
pijin
for short—had learned a wealth of information about SWW in two days. The main thing she’d discovered was that the Stardance staff had an obsession with group dynamic. They wanted the customers bound by a reductive identity, a collective impetus to burn off fat. It was this group dynamic that was skewing her quest. Clients associated strictly with their own group. Other groups—and there were at least three she knew of—had no contact with them at all. Tamiami, if she was here, was in some other group, watching some other bank of TVs.
 

Odie’s two unfocused photos of the late Mr. Alcevar had now been incrementally and dramatically enhanced. They appeared to reveal the same face. Scornfully, Lyell shook her head, fanning droplets of perspiration into the air.

Any video artist with a stylus could have executed the entire enhancement effect—including the odd lumps on the righthand face—in under half an hour. The time had long since passed where fraud looked any different than truth. Nevertheless, here was the President of the United States presenting the argument that a man had actually returned from the far side of death. Or what was supposed to be death, since no one truly knew what Orbitol decay was.

She finished her slow pan of the room, then resignedly reached over and gripped her left arm again, pressing her fingertips against the switch that shut off the nose-ring cam on her right nostril. Its lens had the appearance of a perfect star sapphire. She could have produced a compilation disk of all the grotesquely distorted faces that had squashed up close to adore it.

She leaned down and applied herself strenuously to an all-out sprint. The session was nearly over, not more than a few minutes left. She didn’t need the workout particularly but wanted the endorphin high. She’d always been large-boned and the slightest bit plump, and already in four days she’d worked off all her excess weight. Everyone lost weight at Stardance. Everyone.
 

Lyell had one alternative remaining. Over the past two days, she’d struck up a tense association—it could hardly be called friendship—with the group trainer, whose name was Nance, in the hope of getting a look at the lists of the other squads. The whole business was requiring extraordinary finesse. As was the case with so many people on the Geosats, Nance had hired on with Stardance in the fervent hope of hitching a ride to the Moon or Mars colonies. She was not about to screw up her chances by allowing some Earth-bound investigator to take a peek at confidential data. What she was willing to do was meet Lyell away from the weightloss center—on the main ring of the spinning station—and to listen and, maybe, to talk.

The bell chimed and the TV screens went dead, signaling the end of the exercise period. Lyell wondered how things had turned out for Akiko Alcevar and her ridiculously resurrected hubby. With a certain amount of self-reproach, she hoped that Nebergall was recording it so she could find out. Her whole life she’d had a weak spot for nonsense like that.

One by one the group unbelted from their cycle harnesses and grabbed the rungs of zero-G ladders to pull themselves toward the open door. To Lyell it was like watching the migration of mutant Galapagos tortoises, their bodies marked with almost identical rings and swatches of sweat. A pond of sweat had developed just above her breasts; none on her legs, another oddity of weightlessness.

The door slid open on cue. Lyell caught hold of an overhead rung and swung behind the pack to the exit. Nance stood braced outside the doorway, a “drop-dead” look on her freckled face as the bodies bobbed past. She acted as if she didn’t notice Lyell.

Sound trilled through the green corridor beyond—a peaceful susurration of waterfalls, a soothing twitter of jungle birds. The group thinned out as exhausted individuals returned to their cubicles to strip down and rinse off in a shower bag before gathering for the small noon meal. Lyell figured she’d savored enough nasty diet pastes for the rest of her life.

She continued past her cubicle, moving hand-over-hand into the reception area of Stardance. The pop–eyed male secretary strapped in behind the desk realized her intentions when she didn’t slow down. “You know, that’s very ill-advised,” he called after her. “Have you consulted your trainer? You only hurt yourself when you stray.”

“If I can’t hurt myself, who can I hurt?” she called back. The clear doors with the red SWW logo slapped across them opened, and she swung on into the main tube.

Even as Lyell stuck her feet into two foot cups on the automatic beltway down the center of the tube, she broke out in a new sweat. Anticipation of the return to gravity settled upon her like a batwinged phobia.

The belt moved her along past mostly blank doorways, empty compartments.
Flotation Dreams
, a gel-sleep therapy center, was the only other thriving weightless business on this arm.

The belt deposited her in front of a rotating airlock chamber. Grasping the rails to either side, she bobbed inside and then dangled as the inner door performed a countdown. When it slid back, a wide second doorway dropped into place and Lyell stepped through onto the spinning hub of the platform wheel. Instantly, the pressure of half an atmosphere clutched at her like an invisible slime. She clung to two more rails while vertigo threatened her. It passed in a moment, leaving her to other ailments.

Her feet seemed to be melting into the floor and in response, her legs knotted up hard as stone. Her breasts tugged heavily at her rib cage. She tottered along like a sailor trying to adjust her sea-legs to land after years upon the waves. Instinct propelled her. Signs guided her to the elevators.

She wiped the salty sting of sweat from her eyes; she was unused to its tickle running down her face. Probably, she now realized, she should have taken a shower first and changed into dry clothes; but she could never have run the gauntlet from weightlessness to this demoralizing shuffle a second time.

Her left calf cramped up. She hopped into a waiting elevator car, clumsily pressed “D” to the debarkation deck, then doubled over and grabbed hold of her leg. Groaning, she dug her thumbs into the agonizing clutch of muscle. The elevator car rumbled unsteadily up the shaft.

D-deck consisted of little more than shops along a tubeway—movie libraries, bookwalls, spicy take-away foods—the sorts of places that could fit into confined niches. Lyell had hit them all on her hunt.

She bought a taco on her way to the lounge. The extruded meat had undoubtedly never been alive, but that didn’t matter. The beans were real, the green sauce tangy and hot. After days of bland paste, the big flour taco was pure manna.

People glanced curiously at her as she limped past. Escapees from the weight-loss academy would be few. Most of the layover clientele wouldn’t know or care that it even existed.

She finished the taco, licked her fingers, then wiped them on her sweatsuit. The spice made her sniffle. On Earth it would have been enough to send her clawing for a liter of water.

The deck echoed with the sound of piped-in gentle rain. She lingered for a moment at a windowall. The view, effected by mirror and fiber systems, was of the Earth below. She identified clouds delineating the southern trade winds off the tip of Brazil. She smiled, and wondered how, after seeing a view like this, the likes of Nance could elect to flee that world forever. There would always be a percentage of humanity who didn’t mind letting everybody else clean up after them. In fact, she decided as she looked over the crowd in the corridor, a large percentage.