Carbide Tipped Pens Part 34

Over. And. Over.

One year later. Luna. A cryo chamber. Three transparent pods.

A young woman lies in one, unconscious, blood-transfusion tubes connected to her veins.

Another pod is empty, tubes trailing onto the floor.

The third is filled with an unholy mess.

On the floor there's a b.l.o.o.d.y trail, leading to the door, which is shut.

The woman wakes, rolls into a ball like a baby. It generally takes a bit longer for women to come out of cryo-the more muscle ma.s.s you have, the faster you come to.

Her body shudders and tries to vomit, muscles scream. She can't cry; ducts are dry.

Why does it hurt so much? It isn't the warming process-by the time you're conscious, body-temperature blood has flushed out the cryoprotectant. It's not ice crystals in your tissue-they've figured out how to stop that from happening, a combo of synthetic amphibious and plant glycols, and dimethyl sulphoxide.

It's a bit of a mystery. But then, most things are.

The woman manages to sit up. Blinking, slow painful drag across eyes. Tongue like a piece of dried meat moving over teeth. She rips out her tubes. When her legs start working she'll stand up.

Smiling is supposed to bring on painkilling endorphins. The woman tries to smile. Her lips stick to her teeth.

Cautiously she straightens one leg, the other, flexing muscles. Blinks again and it happens: wetness, a blessed film, the relief of it.

She manages to stand. Totters to the messy cryopod.

"Ew," Jewel-for it is she, of course-says.

She leans over, a bit sad. Tybs was on her team, after all. He was a nut, but she had time to create some fond feeling for him, back on Europa.

She freezes.

There, on what used to be this person's smallest finger of their left hand, is a ring.

A Cap ring, a name engraved on it. Jewel.

Her legs give out. She falls to the floor.

Obviously, something went horribly wrong and this inside-out cell-death mess is her love. It's Rudo.

Larry failed. Or lied to her. She remembers the look in Paris's eyes as she went under. A gleam.

She should have known.

Her limbs may be trembling, but it's amazing how quickly her mind works.

The empty pod: Tyb's body was in that one and they've taken it. Someone, then, will be back soon. For her.

She will not live, without Rudo. A year of deathly cryo-dreams ... what kept her going was the belief that she'd find Rudo on Luna and they'd be together, forever.

Well, that's not going to happen now.

She tears through the room and finds a blade.

A nice, long, pointy blade.

Jewel has never been so happy to see a dagger.

She thinks. Remembers her anatomy lessons. Best way to heart ... here.

"Let this be your sheath."

Jewel stabs herself.

It's hard to stab yourself in the heart. Almost impossible. You can't slash wildly. You have to-and Jewel does-press the point precisely against yourself, then push. Hard. There's a lot of resistance; you have to get through the breastplate. Every instinct is to flinch back, away from the pain.

Most people would inflict a couple of test wounds and then give up. There are lots of less painful ways to kill oneself.

But Jewel, she's something else. She goes all the way. She even manages some pretty top-cla.s.s last words.

"Rust there," she says to the blade, "and let me die."

It takes a bit of time, and about two pints of blood leak out of her twitching form, but die Jewel does.

And then, seriously, about five minutes later, Rudo comes pounding through the storeroom door.

He'd emerged from cryo quickly. And regretfully, out of necessity, killed the cryotechnician, dragged the body out of the room to hide it, and rushed back to be on hand when his love comes to consciousness.

He sees Jewel's body on the floor.

He screams.

Have you ever heard someone scream like this? Howl from the force of the kind of emotional pain that leaves part of your soul dead?

It's a terrible sound. It falls in the Luna cryo-room, trapped in the underground bunker. On some other level, though, some energetic or spiritual or whatever you want to call it level, the scream travels out and out, ripples through s.p.a.ce, to the edges of the Solar System and beyond.

Rudo falls on Jewel.

Ignoring all first-aid training, he pulls the dagger out of her breast.

He shakes her body.

He hides his face on her b.l.o.o.d.y chest.

He goes completely still.

Rudo takes the knife that he has pulled from Jewel's formerly perfect breast, and with it, just below the scar from where his online connection was removed, he slits his wrists. And bleeds all over the storeroom floor.

"Jewel." He strokes her face. Gets blood on it. Tries to wipe it off. "Why are you yet so fair?"

He has more time than Jewel did, and comes up with some truly top-notch last words, maybe even unbeatable last words. "I will stay with you, and never from this palace of dim night depart again. Here we will set up our everlasting rest, and shake the yoke of inauspicious stars from this world-wearied flesh."

He kisses her.

"With a kiss, I die."

And Rudo slumps onto Jewel's body, and slowly, peacefully, dies.

Thus end our lovers. Parting is such sweet sorrow.

Nurse's newsfeed registers the discovery, on Luna, of the bodies of two miners, dead, apparently in a suicide pact. Some people remember that these two were Jewel and Rudo, superstar secret lovers back on Europa a year or so ago. But in terms of hits, you really have to go a long way down the feed to find the story and its a.s.sociated comments.

The top of the news is the weather. That's all anybody wants to talk about, that day.

That, and the latest from Europa. Since we left that moon a year ago, Prince has become a sort of intermediary between the sonic ... what to call it? Civilization? on Europa, and the Jiang-Conti corporate alliance.

Yes, in a typical human-species move, an encounter with aliens has prompted a real fellow-feeling between former rivals. Montys and Caps. Friends forever.

So far they can't seem to find any real use for the Europaeans. It's disappointing.

All "they" want to do is sing.

Barkeep Larry, promoted to Prince's right-hand research man, dies on Europa of his cancer. He tells no one of his role in the tragedy of Rudo and Jewel, and goes quietly, surrounded by friends and tearful former bar customers.

Paris, in case anyone is wondering, becomes a deejay on Europa, which is now a top party destination for the very rich and very bored.

As for the mining, Jiang-Conti profits soar.

The weather? Oh, yes, the weather. The day Jewel and Rudo are found dead on Luna, the sky is overcast, all over Earth. No one can remember anything like it happening before. Sun wors.h.i.+ppers complain. Meteorologists are puzzled. Conspiracy theorists posit corporate climate engineering.

But we know what it is. Love's end.

"The Sun for sorrow will not show his head." Isn't that something someone said, once, many years ago, before we understood our uncentral place in the universe?

The Sun for sorrow will not show his head.

AMBIGUOUS NATURE.

Carl Frederick

For more than half a century a dedicated band of radio astronomers have searched the stars for signals from an intelligent civilization.

SETI-the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence-has produced little more than frustration. No clearly discernible signals have been detected, and SETI has been denigrated and ridiculed by know-nothing politicians.

But the universe is vast, and the chance of actually finding another intelligent species is a powerful lure. The chances of making contact with an extraterrestrial intelligence may be small, but the consequences of such a contact would be Earth-shattering.

Carl Frederick captures the loneliness and frustration involved in such research, as well as the excitement of making, just possibly, the discovery of the ages.

One note to remember: if the universe is truly infinite, then almost anything is possible.

Looking like the compound eye of a gigantic bug, the two hundred dishes of the Kata Tjuta Large Radio Array observatory probed deep into the cosmos. The twelve-meter-diameter dishes, all listening hard, scanning the sky at a billion frequencies for signs of intelligence.

Oblivious they were to the sounds of the desert: the soft calls of the crested pigeons, the noisy chattering of the galahs, and the near-silent susurrus of a Pilbara cobra slithering through the porcupine gra.s.s.

The low humidity and absence of radio frequency interference in the desolate, red center of the Australian continent made for good observing, but for lonely living.

As the Sun touched the horizon, the cliffs in the distance reflected a glowing copper-red against the rare gathering storm clouds above them.

Closer, a blur of motion broke the desolation. On a dirt road bounded by the occasional mulga and bloodwood tree, a solitary automobile threw up an orange mist of dust as it pressed onward toward the observatory.

At the astronomy console of the observatory's control center, astronomer Albert Griffin stared morosely at the monitor. "I'd hoped," he said to the only other person in the center, "that with this big, snazzy new array, we'd have found something by now."

Ralph (Dingo) Kunmanara laughed. "We've only been at it for a couple of months."