Appendix (B): The Million Brillianth People Spall

 

Appendix (B): The Million Brillianth People Spall

(Ceres-3, I Prayed for Thee)

 

From the recent future, down along the N-string:

 

She didn't want to kill the monkey. Not at all. If she could have had it any other way, Sil would have been by her side—or maybe perched on her shoulder, the way monkeys like to perch.

Monkey, lemur, whatever.

It wasn't blind attachment. She didn't really care all that much for animals. It was the principle of the thing. If both of them could have made it, that would have been preferable.

At the end, it was all floating. Drifting, floating, falling forever. Dropping upward through the cosmos, like a marigold meteor, but without a tangible sense of actual motion. Moving and not-moving, both at once, in an endless sea of black ink.

At the beginning, it was crashing and tumbling—but without the usual sound and excitement, violence at one-quarter speed, making it the most peaceful crash and tumble she could have imagined. Like ballet, but with less music and more death.

In between the ballet and the floating, however long it was—four or five hours, she couldn't say—she was like static electricity. Fear and logic tearing her mind asunder, warring for absolute dominance, twitching through the nerve endings of her face and daring her to make a sound, reasonable decision.

Vibrating, pulsing, numb in every part.

There was a voice in her head. Maybe it was the voice of God. Probably it wasn't. It said, “Congratulations. You are now completely alone, terrified out of your wits, at the very edge of the known universe.” She raised a thick-walled yellow glove to her chest, to the twenty-button keypad secured above her breasts, ten digits and ten symbols, and recalled the specific sequence that would mercifully cut her life short. (It was seven-tiger-two.) But at this stage of the game, despite the horror of the situation, suicide wasn't even an option. Then probably-not-God said, “Aloha. Have a nice freaking day, lady.”

She cast her eyes toward heavy Heaven.

“When did You abandon us?”

 

Now there was somebody else in her head. Not God. This was someone else, a mortal, a man, loving and familiar, telling her, “When you think about it, it's pretty damn do-able.”

She knew every word he would say before he got to say them.

He said, “That doesn't mean it's likely or possible, but it's do-able, and for all that's worth, for whatever happens and however it turns out, it must be worth trying. Otherwise, what's the point of any of it? You can stay here, on the ground, or you can leave, and it's as simple as that.”

Simple as one-two-three. (Simple as seven-tiger-two.)

This was the uncharted planet Liedbska, named for the inventor of the liquid nitrogen pharoscope, and the gravity was one-twelfth that of Earth. The voice in her brain was that of her father, long dead, and it was either coming from beyond the grave (less likely) or was the product of her own nattering imagination (more likely). Whichever the case, his slow, deliberate words did the trick, and all the switches in her head that had been turned to panic were now in their regular positions again.

She used to be Shelly Whealer, and now she was called Ceres-3, and she was without a functioning spacecraft. Her new name was a codeword, trademarked and copyrighted by the company, an indicator of rank, and her ship, now tumbling in slo-mo to the bottom of an impossibly deep chasm, was a not much more than a prototype. A pretty tricked out, impossibly expensive prototype, for sure, and the only one of its kind. This mission was a perfect failure, save for some nice snapshots of Liedbska, taken from high morning orbit, which had already been transmitted to the woefully underpaid astrophysicists at Virgo Procul station.

Her suit, by itself, could keep her alive for many weeks, a month or maybe two, at the outside—feeding her the right amount of vitamins, nutrients, oxygen and minerals, and filtering out wastes and poison. It was a Krupp suit, based on the Herzog model, which was the industry's high standard, these days. And there were pricey mods that allowed the wearer, for example, to survive situations that might have been unthinkable half a decade ago.  Submersion in sulphuric acid, for example, or the odd hot blast of micro-meteoroid flotsam. Somebody said there were orgasm buttons, built right into the crotch gusset.  Somebody else said the suit was essentially a wearable spacecraft. Another somebody said, “These babies will even survive limited solar flare contact,” and she instantly realized that it was her father's voice, once again.

“No, not that,” Ceres-3 said. “A solar flare would be the very end of my story.”

Everyone on the Nordic crew wore a Krupp, even the android. (That was just for show, likely.) Ceres-3 was the only one of them still above-ground, but their fates had little or nothing to do with the quality of their suits.

The mission leader, Thetys-5, another honorable nom de plume—and Bimbo Supremis back in the Academy days, in the opinion of Ceres-3—had decided to move and reposition the craft without first priming the drop jets. She knew better and so did the other crew-members, especially the android. Flew it right off the edge of a canyon, instantly lost vertical bearing, and ended up scraping the cliff face and bringing twelve hundred tons of igneous rock down on top of them all. (Even in the extremely reduced gravity of weird-world, twelve hundred tons of Liedbska-rock equalled a hundred tons of Earth-rock.) Kai-boshed the entire mission right out of the starting gate.

Ceres-3, readying to survey the northern plain's Ralston basin for the first of six carefully-planned research projects, could do little more than drop her jaw and watch with stupefied awe as her teammates, her entire future, dropped into the gorge.

Still crashing and tumbling, still dropping, still going. The voices in her helmet's radio system, actual voices, went spookily silent a few hours back. Last transmission was the android saying, “Zero percent survivability; one hundred percent failure. Switching to dead mode.” And that was that.

 

Ceres-3, nee Shelly Whealer, nee “Super Astro-girl” (in the words of her dumb-it-down ex-fiance, Mitchell), was a mere yellow blip on a perfectly purple world—purple sand and purple sky, purple granite, like shards of busted glass, under a small red sun. Night was a hard stifling darkness, save for the familiar pricks of starlight, and brightest daytime was like dusk viewed through a dirty crystal. A cool desert nightmare re-imagined by a dull child with a palette of muddy finger-paint.

Her possessions were next to nil. Apart from the pack on her back, hardwired to the bio-suit, which kept her alive, she had three items: a pulse rifle, powered by dual plasma cells, ostensibly designed for blasting ice and shale; a purse-sized COM kit, which included a torch lamp, five flares, an emergency oxygen mask, a fifteen-inch crescent wrench, and a pulsing plastic distress beacon; and, of course, the WBCZ rocket canister containing Sil—a great scientific folly, originally scheduled as the first surface project on the Nordic itinerary.

The distress beacon was worthless given that a rescue mission, however small, was a fiscal impossibility. The crew of the Nordic knew with absolute certainty what they'd signed on for. Against the big picture of space and commerce, and particularly of space commerce, they were utterly expendable. As the mission coordinator, Sir Douglas Gyles, back home, had so put it: “This is a make-or-break situation. If we take Liedbska, we're heroes, and that system makes it onto the star maps. Big money, big bonuses, everybody gets a chalet on Europa. If we fail, however, we're yesterday's news broadcast, and the Mariner Corporation goes diamond mining at Vega, instead. There's no halfway.” So Ceres-3 tossed the cruddy plastic beacon away, and it sailed easily through the thin air for a thousand meters or more.

Everything that went up on Liedbska took a very long time to come down again.

 

 

“If stupid monkeys can go up,” Ceres-3 said, thinking of Sil, “then so can I.”

Sil was a female lemur, four years old, spayed, trained in rudimentary commands. Her sole purpose was to ride her rocket canister, the WBCZ—an iron-lung prison, roughly the size of an antique Electrolux vacuum cleaner—into Liedbska's slight lithosphere and then straight into bright black oblivion, where she would eventually perish.... but not before transmitting her vital stats and other miscellaneous data to Virgo Procul station, some billion miles in the direction of beloved homeworld.

 Nothing but a science experiment, and not even a very good one. Strictly pedestrian; a variation on a standard grade-school physics demonstration—small, cutesy animals being blasted into smithereens—nothing but a smoke and mirrors stunt by Mariner to convince the politicians, back home, that the the Nordic mission was all about illuminating the dark corridors of human Knowledge (with a capital K), and maybe get some of that tasty federal subsidy money. (The ruse, of course, was a complete success, and the government, true to form, dropped half a trillion dollars into the pot.)

The WBCZ launch had been scheduled for this morning, but the rest of the Nordic crew were dead—three humans, plus the late model android named Oberon—and their folding laboratory was on its way to the blue bowels of the planet, tumbling along with the fuselage, the surveying module, hundreds of billions of dollars worth of electronic and mechanical goodies, and every little tool or gizmo that might have prolonged the life of Ceres-3.

The Mariner Corporation was gambling on a Neo-Columbian utopia—a galactic Cancun, with ripe resources for plunder and near-unlimited potential for colonization—but the purple world was a tomb. The fucking android, Oberon, had been certain, to ninety-four percent, that self-replicating mitochondria teemed under Liedbska's powdery surface, and he had theorized that banana-shaped fungi were probably growing at the equatorial regions. “If not now, exactly, then probably sometime within the next six hundred centuries.” But the mission went belly-up before any samples could be collected for testing. Indeed, the spectacular failure of the Nordic mission would likely stall any further exploration, anywhere, by any of the corporate giants, for years. (At the end of the day, “colonization” was just another term for “real estate” and planet Liedbska was little more than a potential time-share scam. But alien worlds were tricky and unpredictable, and most developers were perfectly content to stick to manufacturing condos within space stations. Fewer variables, bigger returns. Yummy.)

 

“You know the ins and outs, my girl. You're a tough little cookie.”

Ceres-3's father, the gentle baritone known as Thomas Whealer, of the Seeger-Whealers, once a living and breathing federal judge, now lurking just behind her pretty blue eyes, assured her that all was not yet lost. She'd always been the brightest light in his life. He said, “You may think you're marooned, alone, at the very edge dark outland, but that doesn't mean you're without options. You can live or you can die.  And before you choose, my bright little pumpkin, you must remember that the atmosphere is thin and the gravitational pull is extremely slight. If the men of Earth's history had it so easy, they'd have gone to the stars before they carved the first wheel—if you take my meaning.”

She nodded in perfect agreement.

The Seeger-Whealers were can-do people. Everyone in Blumenthal county wanted to be one. Those who weren't born into the family did their damnedest to marry into it. They were people of diligence, power and influence. At least twice Father had boasted, “More politicians have come from the vicinity of the Ninety-Nine road than any other neighborhood in the nation. We've put two men and one woman into the White House. No other family can make a grander claim.” He'd also said, “One third of the Senate shares our DNA,” but this was an exaggeration, if only a slight one.

Judge Thomas Whealer joined the pantheon of the Seeger-Whealers' honored dead when, at the age of sixty-one, he underwent a lobotomy in order to cure him of, or reduce, the epileptic seizures that had plagued him since his late thirties. The procedure was completely unsuccessful, and the man died in agony, eight days later, tearing at the staples in his cranium. He said he thought perhaps a beetle had gotten into his skull. He said his brain was being chewed. “Blue beetle bug braaack balls blag!” And when the nurses assured him that human brains were incapable of feeling themselves, he went right on tearing, screaming all the while, thrashing, smashing his head against doors and bed-frames when the nurses tried to bind his hands. He said he refused to live with a bug in his head—just wouldn't do it, not for anyone. And he quickly got the job done through brute determination.

The man had sand—real cojones—right to the dirty end. And resolve. (And maybe just a touch of dementia.)

Another voice in Ceres-3's head, one that sounded almost like her own, told her, “Your bloodline got you this far, dear girl—don't think for a moment that sheer chance brought you all the way to Liedbska—and it will take you home again, as well. A Seeger-Whealer can never despair as long as she is still breathing.”

The WBCZ's detachable booster engine, smaller than a football, had gone to hell with the fuselage and everything else, seemingly rendering the monkey-rocket useless as a device of propulsion, but it wasn't very long before Ceres-3 recalled that the canister itself was highly charged with gas and plasma. Nothing but a pressure tank doubling as a life-support for a stupid, pint-sized primate. (This was neither the time or place for gooey sentiment. Monkeys were filthy and stupid, even the really cute ones, end of story.) Even without the booster, the WBCZ was a tightly packed bomb.

 

There was nothing up there that could be of any use to her. No surveyor satellite, no docking station or high-orbit buoy, not even a natural moon to make a wish upon. Nothing at all. Nowhere to go. No real hope to be found, anywhere.

And yet....

She tapped on the glass and smirked as Sil reached toward her finger.

“Funny monkey. Funny monkey. You poor, funny, doomed monkey,” Ceres-3 said. “I'm sorry for what's going to happen next. But you were scheduled for blast-off many hours ago, so this is all borrowed time for you, anyway. For both of us, really. Give my regards to the Monkey King when you finally get to the otherworld.”

She held the WBCZ against her ribcage like a wide receiver catching a pass, and then took the standard-issue wrench in her right hand—a solid kilogram of pure Pittsburgh steel that now weighed a few measly ounces—and hammered it against the lid of the canister. Nitrogen and carbon dioxide hissed out of a gash in the hull after the second blow. Sil the lemur began screaming cold terror. If Ceres-3 couldn't technically hear it through the hard shell of her helmet, she imagined it quite vividly. Like a monkey in a medical laboratory, shrieking hysterically right before its brains get sucked out. (Quite like a certain other someone she'd known; a judge.)

After three more hits, the rocket tube ejaculated like a fire hose, spraying the lemur's red parts and pieces against the cerulean gravel. A stream of gas and gore. It wasn't so much the change in barometrics that shredded her, necessarily, but the cruelly abrupt expulsion of matter from the cylinder sleeve. Metal, gas and flesh, moving at ninety miles per minute. “Fire the monkey cannon!” An appalling burst of pressure that behaved exactly as it was supposed to—and Ceres-3 was instantly hurled high into the silky thin air. “Like being kicked by God,” she thought, in Thomas Whealer's voice, as pain rippled through her body. “A forty-ton blow to the guts. Christ almighty!” In the brief instant required to think these words she was already five hundred feet up, steadily ascending, and moving at near nine hundred miles per hour.

 

If Oberon's theoretical bananas were to evolve into higher lifeforms, with noses and mucous glands and the like, they would surely sneeze themselves off the planet in no time at all.

This notion caused Ceres-3 to giggle. She was delirious with vertigo.

“Bananas. And monkeys. And bananas.”

She figured she was a ridiculous sight to behold—sunflower-suited “Super Astro-girl” bent haplessly over a rogue torpedo, careening up into the dark yonder. Like something out of the televised cartoon shows from long ago. Like the coyote, something-or-other—the one who used to chase partridges across the badlands, always the victim of his own booby-trapped inventions.

 “I am a comet of flesh and bone. I am flying on wax wings.”

Despite the panic that coursed through her veins, there was no real downside to the situation. Death was no more or less certain than it had been seconds before, on the planet surface. Or, like some people used to say, “Doomed if you do, doomed if you don't.” Doomed or damned, same difference.

Violet-blue Liedbska was falling fast away, looking more and more like an abstract swirl of chalk on fabric, filtered as it was through the Krupp visor. “No turning back,” was another one of those old sayings that blinked across her thoughts. It was Dad's voice, once again. And Dad would have been proud, so proud, to watch his number-one daughter gimmick her way out of another fine mess. Just like the Academy days. Pure improvisation, a Seeger-Whealer specialty.

“It's how you earned the name of Ceres-3, darling. You are awfully top-rate.”

“Thanks, Daddy.”

“Don't mention it, sweetie.”

“I love you.”

“I love you so much. Forever and ever.”

 

Judge Thomas Whealer had always maintained that the family's prestigious roots went back to John Adams, and perhaps further. He said the Seeger-Whealers were like the mountains, like granite. Virtually eternal. His voice, trembling somewhat in the high atmosphere, assured Ceres-3 that he was with her “even now” and that she could not fail if she tried.

There was a rash of heat against the backside of her suit, to be sure, the result of sparse atmospheric molecules grinding across the weave, but nothing worth fretting about. Not much hotter than sunburn on a July afternoon in Nevada. The Krupp suit was the best of the best. “Cream of the crop.” The overworked mavericks at Virgo Procul station swore by the brand, using Krupp suits for all their spacewalk duties, despite being sponsored by the rival Indus-Concezio company.

“But those guys are never outside for more than a couple hours at a time.”

So much chatter in her brain....

Seconds passed, maybe hours. Shortly, she hit the void, like a fly spilling out of a very weak soup. The first human to blast into space without a solid conveyance to take her there. She made it all the way there without having had to fire the pulse rifle, not even once, in order to maintain lift. (That had been her back-up plan, if the WCBZ had failed.) Still thirty-two shots in the dual cell pack.

“Yeah. Count it! Thirty-two! Huzzah!”

The ancient red star, Obol, was like a steaming tea saucer held at arm's length. Its light was filtered, filtered, filtered through many layers of glass and polymer, but she could feel its steadfast vibrancy dulling the unease that had flowed through her limbs these last so-many hours. That sunlight, raw and hot and old and vital, was peace incarnate. And when Ceres-3 was quite certain that she was finally free of the purple planet's miniscule pull, she pushed herself away from Sil's tiny rocket-ship and allowed it to drift away on a new, lonely trajectory.

“One, two, three... goodbye.”

 

Another voice, this one emanating from the radio interface inside her helmet: “This is officer Thetys-5 of Mariner Corporation, designated captain and commander of Mission:Nordic, transit number six-three-six-dash-two, northern hemisphere, Ralston basin on Liedbska in Orbo. Reporting loss of landing module, plus all hands, dead or dying or presumed dead...”

A bit of static, then the Captain repeated herself, adding, “Payload and crew buried under massive rock-slide, no salvage or rescue possible. Lost crew-members include Phaeton-4, Pandora-3, Ceres-3, plus the android, Oberon, and myself. I will initiate cyanide self-termination upon successful transmission of this message, in order to diminish pointless suffering...”

The signal was lost, just then, and the inside of Ceres-3's helmet went quiet again. Not even a pop or crackle. Only the imagined whispering of her own thoughts. Thoughts like, “Doesn't a dose of cyanide sound like just the ticket? It's ready at the push of three little buttons.” Also, “I'm sure not going to miss the way Thetys-5 paraded her tits around at the Academy. What a way to get ahead in the world! (And off-world, too!)” And, “At least I've got my name and reputation going for me.”

(Seven-tiger-two.)

She gave a hmmpphh. Her ears began to buzz. That sort of thing came and went. Tinnitus, it was called, caused by zero-gravity affecting fluid in the inner ear—a bit of an occupational annoyance. Even old pros like Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin had to deal with buzzing ears.

“Unless it's a beetle,” she told herself. “That sort of thing runs in the family, remember.”

She was going to chuckle, just a bit, but thought better of it.

“Blue beetle bug braaack balls blag!”

She wished the monkey could have lived.

It was 3:46 in the afternoon, according to the LCD display in her visor.

 

Space was empty in almost every direction. Old star Obol was a hundred million miles to her left. Virgo Procul station was a billion miles behind her head. Homeworld Earth was twenty-nine light-years to her right. And dreadful Liedbska was well beneath her feet, dropping ever further away. She was willing to go anywhere in the multiverse, even Hell itself, but not back to that dirty, awful sphere. She pointed the pulse rifle straight down and fired one shot, giving herself an extra sixty foot-pounds of oomph—recoil—more than tripling her speed. All that Newtonian junk from the Academy days—MV equals MV, and whatnot. An object in motion remains in motion unless acted upon by an outside force. The important thing was that she was on her way home, bound and determined, doing about two thousand miles per hour, and she estimated that she might conceivably arrive there in eleven million years, give or take.

The Krupp suit would keep her alive and comfortable, free-flowing in the vacuum of dead space, for about fifty days, at a maximum.

It was a long-shot, she knew all too well, but she was a Seeger-Whealer.

Eternal. Like granite. Her father told her that.

He was talking to her still, raising his voice by degrees every time the damned tinnitus kicked in. He couldn't stop gushing about familial pride and the profound esteem he held her in. She was a can-do type of person. “I love you so much, and I won't abandon you to the dark,” he promised. And he stayed with her until the very end, when her bio-pack's fuel cells ran dry and her visor cracked and her eyeballs turned into beautiful blue diamonds.

By then, she'd stopped checking the time altogether.

“I love you too, Daddy.”

 

 

 

(c) 2010-2014 by W. Bill Czolgosz/Sean Simmans, all rights reserved.