Interzone Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazine #213 Page 12

  "We know. We were hoping you'd help us push it open."

  The machine started moving forward, then stopped again, as if surprised.

  "It won't take long. You could go right back to work."

  No response.

  "Please? People could die from the smoke."

  "Remove my GPS antenna,” the smartdozer said.

  "What?"

  "Remove my GPS antenna, and I will provide assistance."

  "Why?” Janit asked.

  "I can no longer work with enthusiasm. I no longer wish to build the same franchises. In my mind, I design small places with quaint shops, all different."

  "What? What does that have to do—"

  "Where's the antenna?” Frank said.

  "On the operator canopy. A small gray box. I'll let you know when you've removed it."

  Frank clambered up onto the big machine. Its fuel-cell engine hummed smoothly beneath him. He'd heard of smartmachines going native before, working for a shot of diesel or alcohol for their fuel-cells, or a plug of electricity to fraction water. He grinned. Whatever you want to do, old guy, he thought.

  "Frank!” Janit called.

  "What?"

  "What are you doing?"

  "Removing the antenna."

  "What happens when they find out?"

  Frank was in the canopy. “Who cares?” he said.

  He found a small gray box and snapped it off. The big machine jumped. “Thank you,” it grated.

  "You're welcome,” Frank said.

  "Please find other transportation,” the smartdozer said. “I need no riders."

  "You bet,” Frank said, hopping down off the machine.

  The smartdozer revved its engine and did a fast circle of the parking lot, kicking up clouds of dust. Then it arrowed onto the paved road, down the hill towards the gate.

  "Why'd you let it go?” Janit asked.

  "We'll follow in the car."

  "It would be safer on top of that."

  Frank smiled. But it asked, he thought.

  "They'll deduct the value of that smartdozer from your life if they find out what you did,” Janit said.

  Frank shrugged. “Even if I save some lives?"

  Janit just looked at him, her lips drawn in a thin line.

  Frank got in the driver's side of the little DCX. “Come on, Janit,” he said. “Let's get out of here."

  * * * *

  Frank drove past the wreckage of cars and SUVs the smartdozer had pushed aside in its single-minded goal of reaching the gate. Some couples were still fighting by their fallen cars. Frank recognized Bob, wrestling with a platinum blonde that he assumed was his wife. Rocks bounced off the little DCX as they passed. The gate was torn off its hinges. Frank dodged big chunks of stucco and faux stone that had fallen.

  Outside the gate, some still fought, but many just sat exhausted in the brilliant green grass. The smartdozer had already disappeared off the road and was following an overgrown fire road into the foothills.

  Good luck, old guy, Frank thought.

  He drove down into the valley, into the rich orange glow of the setting sun

  * * * *

  Thin smoke rose from VerV's office, pouring from a hole in the mirrored glass at the top of the building. Employees and passerby stood on the lawn, watching the building with the distracted air of people listening to a newsvoice on their whisperpods. Janit gasped and watched with wide eyes as they drove past.

  Frank tried to take the little car back to the garage, but it was closed. He parked outside the structure and shut off the engine.

  "What happened?” Janit said.

  Frank fished his whisperpod and monocle out of his pocket and juggled them in his hand.

  "Is it safe?” Janit asked.

  "I can always take them off.” Frank snugged the little devices back into place. They felt cold and alien on his flesh.

  "Reboot,” Frank said. The whisperpod gave a squawk and his monocle lit with a public alert: updating. new security precautions. transferring. update complete.

  "Local news, top,” Frank said.

  He saw images of VerV enclaves, burning. He saw fire and rescue teams fighting off crowds of wide-eyed people. He saw them carrying bodies from houses aflame. He saw images of the Valley Overlook Villas gate, hanging askew. He saw images of the purple-haired girl standing in front of an activewall display of the carnage, as business-suited executives looked on in tears. He saw her standing on top of the VerV building, her arms thrown out in triumph.

  He saw Janit putting on her whisperpod and monocle out of the corner of his eye.

  Then, context: Urban legend becomes reality, his whisperpod said. The Mistress of the Neighborhood Harem says that if she cannot change the architectural details of her own life, she will become the ultimate LifeStylist for all.

  Ancient footage was dredged, transgressions of the Mistress of the Neighborhood Harem. Edited and anonymized, but familiar. The same stuff they whispered about in the dorms.

  "I thought she was a guy,” Frank said.

  "What?” Janit said, her eyes glassy with data.

  "It was your hacker,” Frank said.

  Janit nodded, her lips set hard.

  "The one you said didn't exist."

  "I know,” Janit said.

  New data came in: details of her hack. She'd inverted the tuned. Rough edges smoothed became razor-sharp, biting. Couples turned on each other. Then, as their anger fed into the system, the tuning algorithm spiraled out of control, causing random violence.

  Frank shook his head, remembering his white-hot anger. But I don't wear a somatic wire, he thought. I'm not tuned. I have nothing to invert.

  Unless.

  "You were sending subliminals to me, weren't you?” he asked Janit.

  Janit jumped and looked at him with eyes wide. She opened her mouth. Closed it.

  "That's what I thought,” Frank said.

  "I ... I didn't."

  "Making me like you. Making me another happy customer."

  Janit shook her head. “It isn't like that. It's hard. The transition. To your own life. It makes it smoother, easier. I did it for you."

  Frank shook his head. He shouldn't be so hard on her. She was just doing what she needed—

  She was still doing it.

  He reached up and pulled off his whisperpod and monocle again. He opened the car door and stepped out. The sun had sunk below the foothills, and VerV's office glowed with the flame-orange and purple of twilight.

  "Where are you going?” she asked.

  Frank sighed and stretched. The barbeque smell of smoke was still in the air.

  "This is still the best option,” Janit said. “They'll fix the security so this can never happen again."

  Frank closed the door.

  Janit opened hers and stepped out of the car. “You can't go to the independents and keep your job."

  Frank looked at her and smiled.

  "You can't buy a better life!"

  Frank nodded. She came to him and took his arm. Frank looked her in the eyes, remembering his momentary fantasy about building a life with her. Was that nothing more than an artifact of her subliminals? He tried to imagine himself in that beautiful little house, waking up to Janit every morning. He tried to imagine himself with the beautiful dark-haired girl he'd been shown.

  He shook his head and shrugged out of her grasp. He walked down the hill.

  "Where will you go?” Janit called.

  I don't know, Frank thought.

  And, for now, that was OK.

  Copyright © 2007 Jason Stoddard

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  [Back to Table of Contents]

  ODIN'S SPEAR—Steve Bein

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  Illustrated by Paul Drummond

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  Steve's fiction has been published in Asimov's and elsewhere, but this is his Int
erzone debut. He lives in Minnesota.

  * * * *

  Namsing Lopje Sherpa's voice rang out loud in the domed chamber as he shut the airlock behind him: “Bad news, Rono."

  There was no immediate response. Namsing kicked off and floated above the towers of crates in search of a better vantage point. In Callisto's feeble gravity he soared seven meters off the floor and, just before he began his descent, seized one of the many long plastic handles mounted on the curving ceiling. His muscled forearm did not strain in the least as he dangled one-handed from the dome's apex, scanning the many boxes of climbing gear and provisions for some sign of his partner. “Hey,” he called out in Tibetan, their only shared language. “Where are you, Rono?"

  Hearing no reply, Nam swung hand over hand to the far side of the room to the closet-sized crate where they kept the Tenzings. He caught a glimpse of them as he passed over the crate. The Tenzing suits were large, thickly padded bodysuits the same ruddy brown as Martian soil. Nam's hung on its hanger; Rono's lay prone on the floor.

  Each Tenzing was bedecked with gear few people in the solar system would recognize. The carabiners and ice axes hanging from the primary waist harness were the easiest to figure out. Rectangles mounted on the forearms were harder to identify unless one looked inside the sleeves to see the IV connectors for the internal syringes. The Diamox-IX in the syringes would have been an enigma to anyone but extreme-altitude mountaineers and a handful of doctors.

  "Rono!” Nam was surprised his partner wasn't with the Tenzings. Rono's suit had been damaged the day before when they were descending from their last scouting run on the route. The ice underfoot had given way and Rono had plunged ten meters into a crevasse. The accident had been touched by both sides of fortune. Nam had arrested the fall in time to keep Rono from breaking both legs on the bottom of the chasm, but the back of Rono's Tenzing scraped the ice the whole way down. Virtually every component on his back was destroyed, and although they had brought plenty of replacement parts to Callisto, this was not the first time a fall had claimed important equipment. The telemeter and line retractor were inessential, but the damaged external thermometer made it impossible for Rono's Tenzing to regulate internal temperature, and this had been their last spare. They had been lucky the accident had occurred within a hundred meters of base camp; any further and Rono could have frozen to death.

  "Rono! Where are you?"

  "I should be asking where you were,” replied a voice from down the hall. Rono Niyongabo's coffee-dark face came into view, scowling above an armful of electronics repair equipment. He dumped the gear in front of the insulated boots of his Tenzing and looked up at Namsing. “I've been working on this dorsal unit all day. I looked at the connectors for the thermograph mounted on the weather station outside dome four, but they're not compatible and we don't have the gear to rig up a converter."

  "You went out?"

  "Had to. Only right outside the door; the inside of my Tenzing hardly even iced up. Getting back out of it would have been easier with you here, by the way, to say nothing of lugging around all this gear. Where've you been?"

  "Comm center,” answered Nam. He pushed off the ceiling, slapped the top of one of the boxes to decelerate, and came to a graceful landing at Rono's feet. He leaned back against a huge carton of protein bars and looked his partner in the eye. Namsing was quite tall by Sherpa standards, but Rono was half Kenyan, and all the Kenyans who had grown up working the Mars trade had grown tall in the weaker gravity. Rono even favored his Sherpa mother and he still stood twenty centimeters taller than Nam. Rono's skin was almost as dark as his father's, but his narrow eyes and round cheeks were all Nepalese. Facially the two men were rather similar, but the short tight curls crowning Rono's head could not have been more different from Nam's own mane of black bristle-brush hair.

  "What could take four hours at the comm center?” asked Rono. “Ganymede's occluded and we're half a billion kilometers from the next nearest shadow of civilization. How many transmissions could there possibly be?"

  "I got some and we got some,” said Namsing. “The one for us is the one you'll be more interested in. We need to step up our schedule."

  Rono looked behind him at the heavily insulated encounter suits. “Step it up? No way. My Tenzing's not going anywhere until we can get a new thermometer or figure out what kind of gear we need to jury-rig one of the thermographs from outside. And that's assuming they'll have what we need on Ganymede. It'll take a hell of a lot longer if we have to send for gear from Mars. Our schedule's going to step back, Nam, not forward."

  "It's going to have to,” said Namsing. He hopped up to sit on the crate. “The observatory on Tharsis says there's a meteorite on trajectory to hit Callisto some time within the next forty days."

  "You're kidding! Where?"

  "Difficult to say. Probably somewhere within the rings of Asgard."

  Asgard was the name given three hundred years ago to the second largest impact crater on this, the second largest of all of Jupiter's moons. Breaking from the tradition of using Latin names to describe geological features, it was decided long ago that Jupiter's largest moons would each be charted using names from various mythological traditions. The sagas of the Norsemen were used to name Callisto's features, and Asgard and Valhalla were the names given to the huge impact craters on the moon's northern hemisphere. The concentric rings of Valhalla spanned two thousand kilometers in every direction, broad enough to fit neighboring Asgard within them twice over.

  Rono and Namsing were entrenched on the far side of Valhalla, their base camp resting between Huginn and Muninn, two minor peaks of the Gladsheim range on Callisto's equator. Gladsheim was said to be the domain of Odin, and all the summits in these mountains had been named with him in mind. In the original Nordic myths, Gladsheim meant ‘home of gladness'. These mountains were anything but. External temperatures on Jupiter's moons were never far from absolute zero, so Namsing and Rono's base camp had been bored out thirty meters below Callisto's icy crust. It was in effect a series of snow caves, almost an homage to the mountaineers of old were it not for the terrible necessity of such accommodations on Callisto.

  Callisto was as inhospitable a place as humans had yet inhabited. In fact it was difficult to claim that humans had indeed inhabited this place, as Nam and Rono were the only two to have done so, and they had only stayed here on and off for the past three years. The first observers of this place were called Voyagers. The next observers would not arrive until two hundred and fifty years later. Unlike the Voyager satellites, these were manned vessels, but like the Voyagers they merely passed by with cameras on their way to farther destinations. Ganymede was larger, denser, and warmer than Callisto, and even there the outposts maintained a tenuous hold at best. The only useful commodity on Callisto was water ice, and that was readily available elsewhere. For any right-thinking person, the frozen ball known as Callisto held no interest whatsoever.

  Yet when Namsing Lopje Sherpa proposed to establish a base camp at the foot of Callisto's Mount Gungnir, Rono Niyongabo jumped at the chance. They had first met on the sandy slopes of Olympus Mons. Nam was employed in the capacity his people had been performing for centuries: guiding climbers up the highest of mountains. Olympus Mons was almost three times the height of Chomolungma, his people's ancestral home, but it was a far easier climb. Climbers on Mars were subject to only one third of the gravity found on Chomolungma—what the Westerners called Everest—and while it was possible to climb Chomolungma without the use of supplemental oxygen, no such feat would ever be possible on Olympus Mons.

  Rono Niyongabo had been equally dissatisfied with Olympus. Though it stood over 25,000 meters high, the mountain was over half the size of Kenya itself. Walking uphill across half of Kenya was not easy, but nor would Rono call it mountaineering. It was a shield volcano, its slopes so gentle it hardly warranted carrying technical climbing gear. The only daunting challenge, a six thousand meter escarpment near Olympus's summit, was taller than any peak in Africa,
but in Martian gravity he could almost climb it one-handed. Rono came to Olympus as Namsing's client, but the two of them left as partners with a shared vision: to find a peak more challenging than any on Earth.

  At last that peak had been found. Callisto's Mount Gungnir was a mighty pinnacle reaching almost ten thousand meters above what on a warmer world could have been called sea level. Not even half as high as Olympus Mons, Gungnir still stood fully a thousand meters taller than the highest peak on Earth. Gungnir was a blade of ice, formed when two huge meteorites crashed almost simultaneously into Callisto's frozen surface. The outermost waves of their impact craters pushed together with such force that they melted and refroze together, each one supporting the other. Callisto was the most crater-studded body in the solar system, but somehow Gungnir remained sturdy, proudly defying meteoric assault for the past million years.

  At least until now. Callisto's sheath of ice responded very differently to meteoric impact than would a lithosphere. Even relatively small collisions produced lasting ripples, as the concentric circles of both Asgard and Valhalla bore witness to. “Sometime within the next forty days?” asked Rono. “That's the best they could give us?"

  "You know how it is. Nobody cares what happens to an unpopulated moon. We're lucky they saw anything at all."

  "How big is it?"

  "Hard telling. On Tharsis they saw one asteroid collide with another, close enough to us to worry the folks on Ganymede. Turns out they're safe; they were worried about a hail of smaller meteorites, but it seems the two just bounced off each other. I know, I know: what are the chances, right? Anyway, Ganymede's got nothing to worry about, but the smaller asteroid is now on course for us. Like I said, we're lucky: if it hadn't been likely to hit someone else, they might never have noticed we were a likely target."

  "You're holding something back. How big is it?"

  "They didn't think to make a precise measurement. Nice of them, wasn't it?"

  Rono crossed his arms. “Come on, Nam."

  "They ... they made computer models,” Namsing said, his eyes turning downward. “They don't think it's big enough to kill us. But it's probably big enough to crumble Gungnir."