“Shut up.”
“And ice cream!” she said fervently. “A thousand different flavors of ice cream. They’ve got it warehoused: sherbet, gellato, water ice… Oh, they know what a prospector likes, all right. Beer in big, frosty mugs. Vodka so cold it’s almost a slurry.”
“Shut the fuck up!”
“You’ve been straight with me. You gave me a half-hour head start, just like you promised, right? Not everybody would’ve done that. Now I’m gonna be straight with you. I’m going to lock my suit down.” She powered off the arms and legs. It would take a good minute to get them online again. “So you don’t have to worry about me getting away. I’m going to just stand here, motionless and helpless, while you think about it, all right?” Then, desperation forcing her all the way into honesty, “I was wrong, MacArthur. I mean it this time. I shouldn’t have done those things. Accept my apology. You can rise above it. You’re a rich man now.”
MacArthur roared with rage.
LASER HAZARD
LASER HAZARD
LASER HAZARD
LASER HAZARD
“Walk, damn you!” he screamed. “Walk!”
LASER HAZARD
LASER HAZARD
LASER HAZARD
He wasn’t coming any closer. And though he kept on firing, over and over, the bolts of lased light never hit her. It was baffling. She’d given up, she wasn’t running, it wasn’t even possible for her to run. So why didn’t he just kill her? What was stopping him?
Revelation flooded Patang then, like sudden sunlight after a long winter. So simple! So obvious! She couldn’t help laughing. “You can’t shoot me!” she cried. “The suit won’t let you!”
It was what the tech guys called “fossil software.” Before the Company acquired the ability to insert their programs into human beings, they’d programmed their tools so they couldn’t be used for sabotage. People, being inventive buggers, had found ways around that programming often enough to render it obsolete. But nobody had ever bothered to dig it out of the deep levels of the machinery’s code. What would be the point?
She whooped and screamed. Her suit staggered in a jittery little dance of joy. “You can’t kill me, MacArthur! You can’t! You can’t and you know it! I can just walk right past you, and all the way to the next station, and there’s nothing you can do about it.”
MacArthur began to cry.
The hopper came roaring down out of the white dazzle of the sky to burn a landing practically at their feet. They clambered wearily forward and let the pilot bolt their muscle suits to the hopper’s strutwork. There wasn’t cabin space for them and they didn’t need it.
The pilot reclaimed his seat. After his first attempts at conversation had fallen flat, he’d said no more. He had hauled out prospectors before. He knew that small talk was useless.
With a crush of acceleration their suits could only partially cushion, the hopper took off. Only three hours to Port Ishtar. The hopper twisted and Patang could see Venus rushing dizzyingly by below her. She blanked out her visor so she didn’t have to look at it.
Patang tested her suit. The multiplier motors had been powered down. She was immobile.
“Hey, Patang.”
“Yeah?”
“You think I’m going to go to jail? For all the shit I did to you?”
“No, MacArthur. Rich people don’t go to jail. They get therapy.”
“That’s good,” he said. “Thank you for telling me that.”
“De nada,” she said without thinking. The jets rumbled under her back, making the suit vibrate. Two, three hours from now, they’d come down in Port Ishtar, stake their claims, collect their money, and never see each other again.
On impulse, she said, “Hey, MacArthur!”
“What?”
And for an instant she came that close to playing the Game one last time. Deviling him, just to hear his teeth grind. But…
“Nothing. Just—enjoy being rich, okay? I hope you have a good life.”
“Yeah.” MacArthur took a deep breath, and then let it go, as if he were releasing something painful, and said, “Yeah… you too.”
And they soared.
Good Mountain
ROBERT REED
Robert Reed sold his first story in 1986 and quickly established himself as one of the most prolific of today’s writers, particularly at short fiction lengths, and has managed to keep up a very high standard of quality while being prolific, something that is not at all easy to do. Reed stories count as among some of the best short work produced by anyone in the last few decades; many of his best stories have been assembled in the collections The Dragons of Springplace and The Cuckoo’s Boys. He won the Hugo Award in 2007 for his novella “A Billion Eves.” Nor is he non-prolific as a novelist, having turned out eleven novels since the end of the eighties, including The Lee Shore, The Hormone Jungle, Black Milk, The Remarkables, Down the Bright Way, Beyond the Veil of Stars, An Exaltation of Larks, Beneath the Gated Sky, Marrow, Sister Alice, and The Well of Stars, as well as two chapbook novellas, Mere and Flavors of My Genius. Among his recent books are a chapbook novella, Eater-of-Bone, a novel, The Memory of Sky, and a collection, The Greatship. Reed lives with his family in Lincoln, Nebraska.
Reed has visited the far future in his Sister Alice stories and in his sequence of stories about the Great Ship, as well as in stories such as “Whiptail” and “Marrow,” but here he takes us deeper into the future than he ever has before, to a world whose origin is lost in the labyrinth of time, a world where, as a group of randomly thrown-together travelers is about to learn, everything is about to change—and not for the better.
“World’s Edge. Approaching now… World’s Edge!”
The worm’s caretaker was an elderly fellow named Brace. Standing in the middle of the long intestinal tract, he wore a dark gray uniform, patched but scrupulously clean, soft-soled boots and a breathing mask that rode on his hip. Strong hands held an angelwood bucket filled with a thick, sour-smelling white salve. His name was embossed above his shirt pocket, preceded by his rank, which was Master. Calling out with a deep voice, Master Brace explained to the several dozen passengers, “From this station, you may find your connecting trails to Hammer and Mister Low and Green Island. If World’s Edge happens to be your destination, good luck to you, and please, collect your belongings before following the signs to the security checkpoints. And if you intend to stay with this splendid worm, that means Left-of-Left will be our next stop. And Port of Krauss will be our last.” The caretaker had a convincing smile and a calm, steady manner. In his presence, the innocent observer might believe that nothing was seriously wrong in the world.
“But if you do plan to stay with me,” Brace continued, “you will still disembark at World’s Edge, if only for the time being. My baby needs her rest and a good dinner, and she’s got a few little sores that want cleaning.” Then he winked at the passengers and began to walk again, totting his heavy bucket toward the stomach—up where the mockmen were quartered. “Or perhaps we’ll linger here for two little whiles,” the old man joked. “But I don’t expect significant delays, and you shouldn’t let yourselves worry.”