Joker Moon Page 5

  Yuri exits the posterior port of Almaz 6 and finds the other four cosmonauts have been busy. First they attached their spacecraft to the anterior docking ports of three of the station segments, 3, 5, and 6, fastening their umbilicals to the station connections, ready to recharge batteries and get scrubbed oxygen from the working station when the reactor goes live.

  Then they donned their space suits and began fastening the space tent together, cabling the struts that would keep the metallic fabric stiff to resist any aberrations that could collapse the tent. There is only a small gap in one flap of the tent that lets Yuri join them outside the station to manage the final tent raising.

  Everyone feels the exhaustion that accompanies any work in a space suit, including ducking into the station’s shadow every time it faces the Sun. The working chatter comprises about half the complexities of the task and half anticipation of going in through Almaz 4’s extra personnel lock, built to allow spacewalkers in and out, and cracking open the cognac bottles Nikolayev brought as his “personal cargo” for just that purpose. Despite their guarded language, Baikonur has already warned them to keep their attention on the job.

  “You guys go ahead,” Yuri tells them. “Georgy and I will make sure everything’s tight. Demerov says he will be activating the reactor any minute.” Grechko good-naturedly accepts his inevitable fate as the man with the most space-suit experience and willingly goes over what has been done for Yuri’s approval. Yuri finds a couple of iffy seals and a cable not tightened to spec. He notes that they are all in the section Olderov worked on, and makes a mental note for his report even as he and Georgy make temporary corrections that will have to be reinforced and protected later. Olderov and Demerov are slated to be the first crew of the station. Hopefully the pilot will learn to keep his own safety secure while in residence.

  As Yuri and Georgy climb hand over hand to the spacewalkers’ lock, they hear Demerov say, “The reactor’s running. All systems are operational.” Some outside work lights come on now that they don’t need them. Typical efficiency. They grin at each other and finish their journey, helping each other through the lock and stripping off helmets and oxygen gear. Yuri instinctively looks for the air hose installations that can be hooked to a suit at a moment’s notice, and points them out to Georgy. “I had the lectures, Flat Man, and I like to breathe,” the other returns, but he grins instead of grimacing, so maybe one fellow cosmonaut is willing to look past shape to comradeship.

  Nikolayev’s voice comes from the next compartment. “Leave off the lectures, Flat Man. Get in here before the cognac is all gone.”

  Having everyone in the compartment strains its capacity—it is normally meant for three, not six. Most of the others, including Demerov, have stripped off their suits and are in their Pingvin ship suits. Yuri accepts a bulb containing about 2 ml of the brown liquid. Everyone has a bulb, and no one has taken a drink. Nikolayev raises his bulb, holding on to a chunk of cabinet to keep from spinning away, and calls a toast. “To the two Yuris, whose technical expertise made the Almaz battle station possible.”

  Demerov toasts Yuri, who responds, and both sip from their bulbs, immediately joined by the others. The cognac is superb, though several hours of hard work in a space suit probably has something to do with their appreciation.

  They are on the second bottle when Georgy looks at Olderov’s chest and asks, “Is your dosimeter malfunctioning, Vladimir?” He pulls out the front of his space suit and twists his head to look at his own radiation meter. Its normal low glow intensifies as he looks at it. “Oh, Kristos!” he says.

  No one in this group of putative atheists seems shocked at his invocation of the Christian religion. They are too busy looking at one another’s detectors and yelling at Demerov. “What the fuck did you do, Yuri? Your reactor is killing us!”

  Demerov clambers toward the posterior air lock, too busy to respond. Serkov follows him immediately, yelling at the others to get back to their capsules, now attached to the non-spacewalk docks. Olderov and Demerov’s capsule docked at Almaz 6, the reactor module. The others are also in the modules connected via the tent. Yuri can feel the other crewmen scrambling to the Almaz 4’s spacewalk reception area to get their helmets and oxygen gear.

  Demerov and Yuri slam through the lock first, looking with horror at the radiation detector over the air lock to Almaz 6. “Crap, I forgot to engage the alarm system,” Demerov snarls. He fed power to the life-support system and maneuver jets and outside lights, but no one hooked up the alert system yet.

  Pushing off from the Almaz 4 lock to the reactor module opposite them, they collide at the lock and as they sort themselves out and start opening the lock, Olderov smashes into them, too panicked to control his free-fall flying. A hairball of the other three cosmonauts sorts itself out in the center of the tent, barely two meters away. Pilots Nikolayev and Sumaroyov struggle toward their capsules. Georgy stops to watch Yuri and the other two, shrugs ruefully when he realizes he would just be in the way, and follows after the mission commander to their capsule.

  As Yuri fends the pilot off, Demerov wrenches open the lock and pushes off toward the reactor. Yuri follows on his heels, Olderov behind him. As Yuri catches a stanchion to stop himself, the pilot flashes past him, his flight under better control now, and ducks through the doorway to the anterior compartment, where all the life support and auxiliary power controls reside.

  Demerov desperately swarms over the reactor, looking to Yuri like a snake trying to find some place to bite into a particularly large victim. “Nothing,” Demerov snarls. “Everything is to spec. The damn shielding just isn’t good enough.”

  “Can you shut it down?”

  “It will take a while to shut itself down once I flip the switch. The whole station will be a radioactive hot spot for centuries.”

  “Smash it?”

  “Radioactives everywhere. Same problem.”

  “Then flip the switch and let’s get out of here. Let the chief designer figure it out.”

  Demerov shrugs. “All right.” He pushes the red button. “Look at your dosimeter. It’s almost blinding.” Demerov already seems to be feeling the effects of the radiation slashing through his body and his dosimeter is a beacon.

  “I’m fine,” Yuri says, and realizes it’s the truth. “Get yourself into your capsule. I have to get to mine.”

  Demerov looks like he can barely move. Yuri sees his fellow engineer will never make it on his own, scoops him up, and pushes off for the anterior module. He flashes through the compartment and twists to take the impact as they slam into the lock. Olderov, inside the lock, enters the capsule.

  “That was quite a hit,” Demerov groans. “Are you okay?”

  “You call me Flat Man. The girls in Star City call me Mattress Man.” Yuri grins as he stuffs Demerov into the lock and Olderov grabs him. No one is bothering about air-lock protocol.

  Yuri pushes off again, agilely snaking through the compartments, past the slowly humming reactor, and into the tent. All the air locks hang open, which makes his trip up to where he had left his helmet and oxygen gear in Almaz 4 easy. Demerov’s and Olderov’s are still on their pegs. Hopefully they would not have an air breach on the way home.

  Yuri’s comm crackles with radiation. “Nikolayev here. We are detached from the station. Status?”

  “Detaching now,” comes Olderov’s weakened voice. The trip through the reactor room has done him no good.

  “Don’t wait for me,” Yuri says. “I can take this longer than you round people.” As he says it he knows that Leonid does not have his resilience.

  “I am on station,” comes Leonid’s status report. “About two kilometers off Almaz.”

  Putting on his gear as he goes, Yuri swoops back to the tent, then through the posterior lock to Almaz 5, which Sumaroyov had obligingly left open. The communication room is in this module, and Yuri can see the radio lights on. No doubt the engineers in Star City and Baikonur had detected the radiation expression and consequent dec
ompression of the station and want a report. The air loss has already made any sounds coming from the radio too attenuated to be heard. No time for that, now.

  But when he gets to the just-closed anterior lock, there is no capsule. Right, Leonid said he was two kilometers away.

  Finishing donning his helmet and oxygen pack, he cycles the lock and works his way out of the module. There is Soyuz 22, on station two kilometers away. Leonid did not want to get close to the radiation that was already filling space around the station, but Yuri is appreciative that he doesn’t want to leave Yuri behind. Even at that distance Leonid has to be watching the radiation meters inside the capsule climb their deadly ascent.

  There are no kilometers of line handy, and Yuri’s suit doesn’t have a propulsion unit. How is he going to reach Soyuz 22?

  His radio, hitherto filled with radiation-produced static, suddenly allows a voice to punch through. Or is he hearing something else? “Captain Serkov, Captain Serkov, are you receiving?” It’s Baikonur.

  “Serkov,” he responds.

  “Captain, our suit telemetry shows that you have received a more-than-fatal dose of radiation. Can you still operate?”

  “I feel fine.” Not exactly the truth. He feels no pain or nausea, but has a particular lightness of head. Also, he is seeing auras around warm objects like he might if he was wearing infrared goggles. Moreover, he feels like he is in a warm bath. One in which the water is moving through him—cleansing but still penetrating. What is going on?

  Yuri swings his arm toward his chest to read his dosimeter, but his suit arm is not moving, just an image of his naked arm, glowing with warmth and fuzzily outlined with a heat aura. Moreover, it certainly feels like it is his actual arm out there. He yanks it back into his suit—for whatever safety that gives.

  “Captain Serkov?” Yuri realizes the radio voice is not coming from the suit’s speakers. He is receiving directly to his ears. He thinks about switching the voice off, and it fades away. Wish I could do that to anyone trying to give me orders, Yuri thinks. Now what the hell is going on here?

  Yuri starts a breathing exercise he calls “zen breathing.” He stops. “I’m not breathing at all,” he mutters. The mutter comes over the radio like an echo. His physical ears, if he still has physical ears, catch nothing. Taking a deep breath, which does nothing physically but makes him feel better, he steps out of his space suit, as if stepping out of a localized mist. There is a faint tugging, and then he is free of the suit. He turns around to look inside the tinted faceplate, half expecting to see his radiation-desiccated body. No body. Apparently he is still alive, whatever alive is in this condition.

  Yuri has heard of experiments in creating three-dimensional visual images. In the West they call them holograms. As far as he can tell, he is a living hologram. A naked hologram. Even stranger, his dimensions are those of a normal man, rather than the flat body he has lived with since his Gift manifested when he was a thirteen-year-old Young Pioneer. He still doesn’t have any body hair, but he notices that he is missing dead fingernails, too.

  Well, I guess Comrade Einstein was right, all of my matter has turned into energy. He leaves the question of why he doesn’t just explode hanging. Just another manifestation of the psionic effects of the Takisian virus.

  As he stands in the air lock, he sees Soyuz 23 ignite its retro-rockets and start the reentry back to Mother Russia. The station shakes as Olderov and Demerov’s Soyuz disconnects from the station. Angling his head, he can see the flare that has to be Nikolayev and Grechko’s capsule. They must have assumed the radiation had killed him and decided to get out of the radiation zone.

  And why isn’t he dead? His suit dosimeter glows a bright red. At the least, he should be puking his guts out. Not to mention blowing up with explosive decompression since he’s outside his suit and at least one of his fellow cosmonauts apparently didn’t close any air locks before abandoning the station.

  Yuri turns to reenter the station and finds it like swimming upstream. Something is pushing his immaterial body away. Thinking about it, he realizes it’s the escaping radiation from the overcharged reactor pushing against the resistance of his still-visible body. If only he can change his energy signature to something that the escaping radiation does not affect. He can feel his body shift and flow, maintaining its outside structure but altering itself on a molecular level. Suddenly there is no more pressure. He’s light-headed and a bit nauseous, but the radiation no longer has an effect on him. His body has converted itself to pure visual spectrum energy—the radiation is passing through him as if he isn’t there. Just how much control over this energy form does he have?

  Within That House Secure

  by Christopher Rowe

  I

  THE GRID-LINED PAPER BROWNED along one edge and began curling over neat lines of script and formulae. The little girl leaning over the notebook, pen in hand, drew in a sharp breath and forced calm on herself. The page did not burst into flame. This time.

  Mathilde set down the pen and pushed the notebook away. A clumsy jumble of English and French curse words sounded in the quiet room, her piping eleven-year-old voice in no way matching her crude language. Malachi, had he been present to hear, would have chided her, probably reciting some obscure line of poetry about keeping one’s temper in check. Not that she hadn’t heard him losing his own temper more than once through the thick oak door to his library, usually while talking to someone on the phone.

  Malachi, though, was not present. Mathilde was alone in her room in his house—in her father’s house, though she had never called him that in French or English—with only the housekeeper somewhere on the premises. Her last tutor for the day had left an hour before, following a few hours’ work on history and literature and art. Malachi felt that afternoons were a more civilized time to study the humanities.

  Mathilde didn’t mind the afternoons, but she liked the mornings better. Mathematics and the catch all hours spent on “the sciences” kept her attention in a way that battles and poems never did, even if rhyme schemes were at least passably interesting.

  A soft knock at the door meant that the housekeeper, Ms. Lott, had come to tell her it was time to get dressed. Mathilde had, as usual, carefully recorded her day’s schedule in her notebook just before turning out the light the night before, and needed no reminder. Ms. Lott knew that, too, but answered to Malachi, not Mathilde.

  “Come in,” Mathilde called. “I know it is time to pick a dress.”

  Ms. Lott, it turned out, was holding a dress already, one Mathilde had not seen before. “Delivered just after lunch,” she said, hanging it from a hook next to Mathilde’s dressing table. “From that same woman up in New York who made your Easter dress.”

  All of Mathilde’s clothes were custom made. When she was still living in France, before her mother had died, that had meant rugged, functional jumpers made by Mathilde and Maman herself. Maman had been a transportation engineer, and probably could have afforded to find someone in La Rochelle to accommodate Mathilde’s needs, but had taken to the problem of providing her daughter’s clothing the same way she took to problems involving high-speed passenger trains. She had taught herself—and Mathilde—to measure and cut and sew and mend.

  A few of those jumpers, all too small now, were carefully folded and stored in boxes in Mathilde’s ridiculously oversized closet. So many things in America were ridiculously oversized.

  Malachi did not make Mathilde’s clothes. Instead, the two of them flew to New York twice a year and visited various specialized ateliers staffed by courteous people who were happy to provide every kind of clothing imaginable, cut specially for Mathilde’s squarish, broad-shouldered frame.

  This dress was a brilliant green. Malachi often chose green shades for Mathilde because, he said, they set nicely against the coppery red of her skin and eyes. Mathilde thought the frocks the colors of emeralds or the forest or the sea made her look like a Christmas decoration, but had resigned herself to Malachi’s taste in th
is instance.

  “What’s she done about my neck?” Mathilde asked, hopping down from her desk chair and marching over to the dressing table.

  Ms. Lott, who had lasted the longest in the string of caregivers Malachi had hired in the two years since Mathilde had come to South Carolina, winced, but only said, “It zips up the back, dear, nothing to worry about there.”

  Mathilde had asked because she didn’t really have much of a neck at all. Her head and face were more or less normal, for all her crimson skin and hairless pate, and her delicate features were, according to Maman, “elfin,” but her head set squarely between her shoulders with nothing in the way of a neck at all. This was of little consequence when it came to jumpers, but the makers of haute couture, even joker haute couture, found it challenging.

  Mathilde spared the dress a moment’s study. “I can put it on myself,” she said.

  Ms. Lott started to object, but then thought better of it. “Mr. Schwartz will be home in half an hour and said the two of you will be leaving for the Witherspoons, immediately,” she said. She paused at the door on her way out and added, “I’ll be downstairs if you need anything.”

  This was something Ms. Lott said often. Mathilde knew it didn’t mean everything it promised—Ms. Lott couldn’t answer all her questions, assuage all her doubts, satisfy all her curiosities. Nobody, not Ms. Lott, not even Malachi, could give Mathilde everything she needed.

  For that to ever happen, Mathilde would have to know what she needed herself.

  Malachi was not given to affectations, but his employers were. The car he and Mathilde rode in to the party at the Witherspoon estate had been a gift from Mr. Witherspoon, a reward for some bit of financial wizardry Malachi had performed—savings on taxes, expanded revenue, Mathilde didn’t really pay much attention to those things. They involved numbers, true, but Mathilde liked numbers that measured things like distance and mass and energy, not money.