The Starry Rift Part 8

A girl walked by, dragging an iguana behind her on a homemade leash. Were they going to let her bring the iguana on the bus?

Naomi said, "The best part is he has dual citizens.h.i.+p. His father's from Costa Rica. And he likes smart, fat, big-mouthed chicks."

"Who doesn't?" I said.

"Don't be so sarcastic," Naomi said. "It's an unattractive quality in someone your size. Want a hand with the suitcases?"

"You take the one with all the books in it," I said.

People were still packing up their stuff. Some people were talking on their cell phones, transmitting good news, getting good news and bad news in return. Over by the big doors to the hangar, I ran into the guard. Olivas. I was beginning to think I recognized his name. He nodded and smiled and handed me a piece of paper with a number on it. He said something in Spanish.

Naomi said, "He says you ought to come see him practice next month, when he's back on his team again."

"Okay," I said. "Gracias. Thank you. Bueno. Bueno." I smiled at Olivas and tucked his phone number into my s.h.i.+rt pocket. I was thinking, One day, I'll be better than you are. You won't get a thing past me. I'll know Spanish, too. So I'll know exactly what you're saying, and not just stand here looking like an idiot. I'll be six inches taller. And when I get scouted, let's say I'm still living down here, and let's say I end up on the same team as you, I won't get kicked off, not for fighting. Fighting is for idiots.

Naomi and I went out onto the cracked tarmac and sat on our luggage. Costa Rican sunlight felt even more luxurious when you were out of quarantine, I decided. I could get used to this kind of sunlight. Lara was over with her mother and some other women, all of them speaking a mile a minute. Lara looked over at me and then looked away again. Her eyebrows were doing that thing. I was pretty sure we weren't going to end up sitting next to each other on the bus. Off in the distance, you could see somewhere that might have been San Jose, where we were going. The sky was blue, and there were still no planes in it. They were all lined up along the runways. Our transportation wasn't in sight yet, and so I went to use the latrines one last time. That's where I was when the aliens came. I was p.i.s.sing into a hole in the ground. And my father was still sitting inside the hangar, his arm around an inconsolable, enormously pregnant, somewhat gullible Swiss woman, hoping that she would eventually stop crying on his T-s.h.i.+rt.

It was kind of like the bats. They were there, and after a while you noticed them. Only it wasn't like the bats at all and I don't really mean to say that it was. The aliens' s.h.i.+ps were l.u.s.trous and dark and flexible; something like sharks, if sharks were a hundred feet long and hung in the air, moving just a little, as if breathing. There were three of the s.h.i.+ps, about 150 feet up. They were so very close. I yanked up my pants and pushed the latrine curtain aside, stumbled out. Naomi and that guy Philip were standing there on the tarmac, looking up, holding hands. The priest crossing himself. The kid with her iguana. Lara and her mother and the other pa.s.sengers all looking up, silently. n.o.body saying anything yet. When I turned toward San Jose, I could see more s.p.a.cecraft, lots more. Of course, you already know all this. Everyone saw them. You saw them. You saw the aliens hovering over the melting ice floes of Antarctica, too, and over New New York and Paris and Mexico City, and Angkor Wat and all those other places. Unless you were blind or dead or the kind of person who always manages to miss seeing what everybody else sees. Like aliens showing up. What I want to know is did they come back because they knew that Hans Bliss was dead?

People still argue about that, too. Poor Hans Bliss. That's what I was thinking: Poor, stupid, lucky, unlucky Hans Bliss.

I ran inside the hangar, past Olivas and the other guards and Dr. Menoz and Zuleta-Arango, and two kids spinning around in circles, making themselves dizzy on purpose.

"Dad," I said. "Dad! Everyone! The aliens! They're here. They're just outside! Lots of them!"

My father got up. The pregnant woman stopped crying. She stood up too. They were walking toward me and then they were running right past me.

Me, I couldn't make up my mind. It seemed as if I had a choice to make, which was stupid, I know. What choice? I wasn't sure. Outside the hangar were the aliens and the future. Inside the hangar it was just me, a couple hundred horrible bats sleeping up in the roof, the remains of a petting zoo, and all of the rest of the mess we were leaving behind. The cots. Our trash. All the squashed water bottles and crumpled foil blankets and the used surgical masks and no-longer-sterile wipes. The makes.h.i.+ft soccer field. I had this strange urge, like I ought to go over to the field and tidy it up. Stand in front of one of the cobbled-together goals. Guard it. Easier to guard it, of course, now that Olivas wasn't around. I know it sounds stupid, I know that you're wondering why aliens show up and I'm still in here, in the empty hangar, doing nothing. I can't explain it to you. Maybe you can explain it to me. But I stood there feeling empty and lost and ashamed and alone until I heard my father's voice. He was saying, "Dorn! Adorno, where are you? Adorno, get out here! They're beautiful, they're even more beautiful than that idiot said. Come on out, come and see!"

So I went to see.

KELLY LINK was born in Miami, Florida, and grew up on the East Coast. She attended Columbia University in New York and the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. She sold her first story, "Water Off a Black Dog's Back," just before attending Clarion in 1995. Her later stories have won or been nominated for the James Tiptree Jr., World Fantasy, Hugo, and Nebula awards.

Link's stories have been collected in Stranger Things Happen and Magic for Beginners. She has edited the anthology Trampoline; coedits The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror with her husband, Gavin J. Grant, and Ellen Datlow; and coedits the zine Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet with Grant. She is currently a.s.sembling a new collection of short fiction for teenagers and adults, to be published by Viking.

Visit her Web site at www.kellylink.net.

AUTHOR'S NOTE.

Like Dorn's father, when I travel I cram as many books as will fit into my suitcase. What follows is a very incomplete list of the science fiction and fantasy authors whose books I've lugged around with me over the years, and who I imagined Dorn would also be familiar with: Ursula K. Le Guin, Patricia McKillip, Alfred Bester, Kage Baker, M. T. Anderson, Octavia Butler, Ted Chiang, R. A. MacAvoy, Terry Pratchett, Sheri Tepper, Ray Bradbury, Fritz Leiber, and Margo Lanagan. Of course, since this story takes place in the future, Dorn and his father have read a number of excellent books that I've never heard of. Possibly some of them will be written by the readers of this anthology.

REPAIR KIT.

Stephen Baxter.

Paul Tielman, captain of the Flying Pig, stood rigidly at attention.

The face on the tridee screen was plump, sleek, and stern. "I suppose you're aware, Captain Tielman, of the importance of the successful operation of the new Prandtl Drive to Galactic Technologies, which happens to be your employer? Not to mention the expense of outfitting the Flying Pig with the prototype drive?"

"Of course, Chief Executive."

"And yet you are already ten days past your scheduled launch date."

"But, Chief Executive, we can't launch unless we're sure the drive is reliable. We're still missing one crucial component that-"

Tielman was silenced by an imperiously raised eyebrow. "Captain, overcaution is a failing. The s.h.i.+p will leave the yard in forty-eight hours' time, with or without you. Your choice."

"Very well, Chief Executive." The tridee blanked out. Tielman pushed his fingers through his thatch of stiff iron-gray hair. "I don't care if he is my boss, that man is a pompous, self-seeking, ambitious-"

Tielman's personal aide, John Burleigh, glanced across from his paper-cluttered desk on the other side of the captain's cabin. "Yes, sir," he said gently, his thickly freckled face creasing into a grin, "but, uh, don't you think he has a point? Galactic Tech's selling point is its innovative technologies. 'Tomorrow's Wonders Today!' But it's been a while since we had a significant breakthrough. The investors are getting twitchy."

Tielman growled, "Twitchy? Twitchy?"

Burleigh hurried on bravely, "We need the Prandtl Drive to work. If this test flight is m.u.f.fed, Galactic will become a laughingstock-"

"And a sure way to m.u.f.f it is to rush the Pig into s.p.a.ce before she's ready. You know me, John, and you know my philosophy. The Pig is a test bed for new technology. We've flown a lot of missions, and the reason we've always made it home is because we follow my rules. What's rule number one?"

"Never fly without a backup for every single component," Bur-leigh intoned.

"Correct. We still don't have a backup for that quantum fuse, do we? No backup, no fly."

Burleigh said carefully, "But sir, don't you think you are being a little overcautious? After all, all that's involved is one single component-"

Tielman said solemnly, "There's no such thing as overcaution in s.p.a.ce. Why, I remember once on a jaunt past the Trifid Nebula-"

"Yes, sir." Burleigh had heard all his anecdotes before. He leafed through the papers on his desk. "Incidentally, I had a memo from Last Resort a couple of hours ago. . . . Here it is. I quote: 'Tell that b.u.t.ton-pusher Tielman to get this s.h.i.+p into s.p.a.ce and to forget the spare quantum fuse we haven't got. Tell him the All-Purpose Repair Kit I recently swindled from a Sirian will take care of everything- and that's a personal a.s.surance. Jordan Stolz.'" Burleigh glanced up. "What do you think?"

"I think," Tielman said, "that the reason I call Stolz's one-man shop the Department of Last Resort is because that's what it is, and we aren't reduced to that just yet." But he felt trapped. "Oh, to no-s.p.a.ce with it. Let's go down to Engineering and chew out Breen. If I have to suffer, so can the rest of the crew."

"That's the spirit, Captain," said Burleigh, standing.

Breen, chief engineer of the Flying Pig, was a tall, spa.r.s.e man who had never been seen to grow angry. His calm, fatalistic nature was apparently immune to the vicissitudes of bureaucrats and balky machinery alike. He met Tielman and Burleigh in a large, instrument-encrusted room that had once been a part of the Pig's rear hold and was now the central control room for the prototype Prandtl Drive.

On Tielman's request, Breen produced the ten-centimeter-long cylinder of gray metal that was the villain of the piece: the drive's quantum fuse. "It's just like an electrical fuse, in principle. It's basically a fail-safe device. If the drive begins to overload, this thing burns out and the drive closes down. Then we find the fault in the drive, repair it, install the spare fuse, and away we go."

"The trouble is we don't have a spare fuse."

"Quite," said Breen. "You need the superheavy metal cauchium to manufacture the fuses. Cauchium is very rare, and the stock of this s.h.i.+pyard has been used up. A fresh supply was on its way from the Fourth Sector, but the s.h.i.+p carrying it was waylaid by pirates on the other side of the Coal Sack Nebula. The pirates are demanding a ransom that the chief executive sees as too high, so . . ."

Burleigh tutted. "That's advanced technology for you."

Tielman said, "Then we can't fly."

Breen and Burleigh exchanged glances.

Breen said, "Look, Captain, all that's lacking is the spare for this one fuse. Right? And the fuse isn't part of the drive's actual operation. It's just a fail-safe."

Tielman snorted. "I have never before flown the Pig without the knowledge that she was free from all possible failure-no matter how 'harmless' or 'improbable' that failure may be. And I don't propose to start now. So unless you can devise a backup for that fuse, Breen-"

"Not without cauchium."

"Then the Pig doesn't fly, and that's that." And with that, he stalked from the room.

But as the hours pa.s.sed, and the deadline drew closer, and the pirates beyond the Coal Sack gave no indication of a willingness to lower their price, the pressures on Tielman nibbled at his resolve, his orders conflicting with instincts built up over fifteen years in s.p.a.ce.

At last he summoned Burleigh. They had been in similar situations before, and understood each other.

"Here we go again, sir," Burleigh said.

"Yes."

"Last resort time?"

"Last resort."

When they entered his catastrophically untidy laboratory, Jordan Stolz lifted his head from an anonymous, ugly-looking tangle of metal and crystal. He creased his wrinkled face into a grin and shoved back his unruly, straggling blond hair. "Well, Captain Tielman," he said with heavy sarcasm, "this is an honor! And to what do I owe the pleasure of a visit by your ill.u.s.trious self so early in the mission? Surely you can't have messed things up even before leaving the s.h.i.+pyard. . . ."

"Can it, Stolz," snapped Tielman. "You know the situation."

Burleigh explained, "The s.h.i.+pment of cauchium still hasn't got through. You sent a memo saying you had something to take care of our backup fuse problem."

"Ah, yes." Stolz scratched an unshaven cheek with a bony forefinger. "My All-Purpose Repair Kit! Now, where . . . ?" He rummaged through a pile of complicated junk in the corner of the laboratory. "I'm getting forgetful in my old age. I picked it up for a song on Sirius IV. Strange people, the Sirians . . . such great ancestry, and yet so decadent now, not to mention less than fragrant in their personal habits . . . ah!" Triumphantly, he picked a cubical device out of the heap. About half a meter to a side and made of some anonymous gray metal, it was featureless save for a cl.u.s.ter of b.u.t.tons along one edge and two wide inlets, one in the upper face and one in a side of the cube. Stolz placed the device on a bench that he cleared of clutter with a brusque sweep of his arm. "Ingenious contraption. It took me a while to figure out the principles behind it. You see-"

Tielman interrupted, "Just tell us what it does."

Stolz blinked. "It's called a repair kit. What do you think it does? It repairs things. Anything small enough to fit into the inlet here, and to come out of the outlet there. I just need something that needs fixing-aha!" He grabbed a stylus from Burleigh's breast pocket and snapped it in two.

"Hey!" protested Burleigh.

"Don't worry," said Stolz, "the kit hasn't failed me yet." He dropped the two halves of the stylus into the kit's upper hopper and pressed the b.u.t.tons along one edge of the cube. After a moment the kit began to emit a soft whine and seemed to flicker oddly, as if seen through a haze of swirling smoke. Then it returned to normal, and with a clatter an object tumbled from the outlet in its side to the bench.

Burleigh picked it up and examined it. It was his stylus. "Why," he said, "this is as good as new." He took a piece of paper from the bench and tested the stylus. "I'm impressed, Stolz."

"Don't encourage him," Tielman growled.

"Watch this." Stolz grabbed the paper from Burleigh's hands and, with a conjurer's flourish, tore it into a dozen pieces and dropped them into the All-Purpose Repair Kit. After a moment, out slid the piece of paper, whole and unblemished once more. Stolz said, "It's worked on everything I've tried. There's a size limitation, and it takes longer over objects that are more complicated or have greater ma.s.s, but that's not a serious problem."

In silence, Tielman examined the stylus and the flawless paper. "There has to be a catch."

Burleigh asked, "Why?"

"Because there always is." Especially, Tielman thought, if Jordan Stolz was involved.

Burleigh asked Stolz, "How does it work?"

"It's quite ingenious," said Stolz. "But simple in principle. As you know, every object in the universe extends in four dimensions.

There are the three spatial directions-up-down, front-back, left-right-and also the temporal direction-future-past."

Tielman said, "So an object exists in s.p.a.ce and in time. So what?"

"So the repair kit has the ability to reach back along an object's temporal extension-to reach into its past-and to snip out a spatial cross-section, and bring it forward to the present." Burleigh looked as baffled as Tielman felt. Stolz said, "Look-you put a damaged object into the kit. The kit reaches into the past and brings forward an earlier, undamaged copy of the object in place of the present, damaged version. Actually, the repair kit doesn't really repair things. It replaces a damaged object with an undamaged copy of itself from the past."

Burleigh still looked confused. "But what happens to the original damaged copy?"

Stolz smiled. "It's put into the past, in the place of its earlier undamaged self. Conservation of ma.s.s and energy, you see. The present and past copies are neatly swapped."

"Hang on, there's something wrong with that." Burleigh looked dizzy. "Do you mean to say that somewhere in the past I was carrying about a damaged copy of that stylus?"

Stolz's smile broadened. "It is confusing, isn't it? You see, you're thinking in terms of nai've, old-fas.h.i.+oned causality, which doesn't really apply. For a short time the stylus in your pocket became broken-as the copy from the present appeared-and then, as the limit of the excised cross-section was reached, it became whole once more. Well, obviously it couldn't stay broken, since it was perfect before I snapped it in two, wasn't it?"

"Yes. I mean, no. It's impossible!" cried Burleigh, outraged.

"Impossible or not, it happened," replied Stolz, just as heatedly.

"Look," interposed Tielman, exasperated, "I don't particularly care how the thing works-as long as it does work. Stolz, can you guarantee me that that device will not fail?"

"Absolutely," replied Stolz with confidence. "I've made a thorough study of its workings. Those Sirian ancients were excellent engineers, even if their descendants do have personal hygiene problems. You see, you can forget the missing spare fuse. With the repair kit, we can fly without it. We can fix anything!"

Burleigh said, "Well, what do you think, Captain? Does the Pig fly?"

Tielman pressed his lips together. It was wholly against his nature to entrust himself to any machine whose workings he could not a.n.a.lyze and understand-which was why Stolz was Tielman's last resort, rather than his chief engineer. "We wait the full forty-eight hours the chief executive gave us. Then I'll make my decision."

As Tielman and Burleigh took their leave, the unkempt head of the sole member of the Flying Pig's Department of Last Resort bent once more over his latest project, oblivious to the world.

The hours trickled away, and the hope that the vital cauchium might arrive in time to make up the spare quantum fuse dwindled. The pressure built up on the captain, a pressure made worse by knowing that Stolz had offered him an option. Tielman kept a place for Stolz onboard the Pig, and had relied on his gadgets in the past, but only as last-resort options when the Pig had got itself into trouble in deep s.p.a.ce. He had never left Earth already reliant on Stolz's unreliable contraptions. And he had certainly never taken a s.h.i.+p into s.p.a.ce without being sure he could bring it home.

But at last the deadline arrived, and Tielman realized he had no choice: if he didn't take the s.h.i.+p out, the chief executive would replace him with somebody who would, and he couldn't put his crew through that. So, with a heavy heart, he ordered the crew to their launch stations.

The Flying Pig eased her way out of the s.h.i.+pyard, and the Prandtl Drive powered her into s.p.a.ce.

Tielman took his seat on the bridge of the Pig. The bridge was a large dome-shaped chamber centered on the main display tank, now glowing a uniform, comforting green. A dozen crewmen with control consoles clambered around the tank, endlessly checking on every aspect of the s.h.i.+p's performance.

"Well, no problems so far." Burleigh grinned up at his captain.

Tielman said nothing.

A display at his elbow warned him to prepare for the hop through no-s.p.a.ce, for the speed of the Pig had risen to just below the velocity of light. You could travel slower or faster than light, but of course nothing could travel at lightspeed itself-so the Pig cheated. In a maneuver similar to electron tunneling, the s.h.i.+p stepped sideways through the other-universe of "no-s.p.a.ce," and so avoided the light-speed barrier and surged on into greater "tachy-speeds," the realm of the tachyons, particles that traveled forever faster than light.

With a brief, disconcerting jolt, no-s.p.a.ce was crossed, and the Pig's speed rose instantaneously to just above lightspeed. Tielman watched the velocity indicator resume its steady upward motion. "Any problems over the hop?"

"None, sir." Burleigh consulted a readout. "Breen in Engineering reports the Prandtl Drive behaved better than the standard drive generally does. Uh-we've got another memo from Last Resort."