“Certainly, my love.”
Then my jaw dropped open as I watched the bastard pat his silk clad knees and help ease Pandi down into his lap.
My heart pounded in my throat, he was taking gross liberties! No wonder he had been so desperate, he almost had her.
Having seen enough, I turned back to my tangle of dripping, optic-liquid cables and connectors and rigged up the security camera. Ten minutes later, I interrupted Rahashi’s little fantasy with my own looming face, drowning out his terminal’s output. I imagined him wincing under his skullcap and smiled wider.
“Hi Rashi!” I beamed. “I was just about to purge our little girl from the disk, and I thought that you would like to know about it.” So saying, I nudged the camera so that it would focus on the laptop that I had spliced up to his machine across the network. “Here goes those files! I’m going to type in these confirmation letters real slow now, so that you don’t miss anything. E — R — A — S-”
I got no further than this before the manhole chimed again and the bolt retracted. Out popped a furious Rahashi, his little fists balled up and ready to swing. His pupils were fully dilated and his eyes slid around in his head, the side-effects of too much blur. He staggered to the laptop, while I chuckled, side-stepping to the manhole behind him.
“I thought that might get you out of your hole,” I told him, then shimmied down the steel ladder into the lower deck.
Again the manhole chimed, and now I was locked below. All alone with Beth.
I slid the skullcap on, but ignored the open bottle of blue capsules next to it. Two hours later I had managed to get Beth into a kissing mood. I had taken her to the Busch stadium in St. Louis, eating hot dogs and drinking squeeze bottles of beer while we participated in one human wave after another, each rise and fall of her body, arms uplifted, making my heart jump as her bust rose and heaved. The park wasn’t like that anymore, it was really a scene from my childhood, but Beth always seemed to like going there. After the ballpark, we had headed down to an Irish pub I knew of in the old cobble-stoned section of town, and there we kissed.
It was a long, lingering kiss of true love.
The only sound was the click of a relay, followed by the clittering of the drive as the files were purged. Inside my skull, the mental image vanished, to be replaced by the miserable form of Rahashi coming from the security camera I had rigged up. He was weeping with his head resting on the laptop’s keyboard.
He had really done it. I had not thought that he would. He had erased everything. He had killed Beth and Pandi both.
For a moment a fantastic rage shook me. I felt a lust for murder that I had never known before. I charged up the ladder and popped open the hatch. I stood over Rahashi’s weeping form, shaking with anger. My breath rushed in and out, my heart slammed against my chest. A single bead of sweat ran down my nose and hung there, clinging to the tip until I wiped it roughly away.
“I had to do it,” Rahashi blubbered. “She would not stay faithful to me.”
I blinked at this. Suddenly, I felt foolish. I was ready to kill over a program, a game, a fantasy. My anger deflated like a ruptured vacc-suit. I felt numb. Rahashi had lost everything: his love, his sanity, perhaps even his life. We both knew that we would probably not get out of this alive. The air, water and food would only recycle so many times before turning toxic. I hunkered down beside him, and clapped him on the back, awkwardly.
He was real, Beth and Pandi were not. It was time that we put our energies into escaping this damned tubetrain physically, rather than mentally.
Rahashi ignored me, his sobs changing to Hindi mutterings after a time. I hung my head beside him, thinking hard.
“What does that light mean?” he asked finally. My head whipped up and a glad smile split my face. “It’s the transmitter. Someone has heard our broadcast!” I rushed to my makeshift equipment and gingerly adjusted the resistance on the lines going to the speakers.
“Repeat: do you read me, Weaver? Come to Ohio Crater for pick-up-”
Excitedly, I keyed in a response and sent it. They acknowledged and I whooped for joy, then made my way to the control cubicle by swinging from the loops of plastic that hung from the roof of the tubetrain. I jerked up the power rods and the tubetrain lurched into to motion, accelerating rapidly. We were saved. Rahashi looked at me as if I had lost my mind, and perhaps I had.
Twenty minutes later we donned our vacc-suits and headed out onto the floor of Ohio Crater. The majestic walls of the crater towered above us, ringing the blazing stars overhead. Still our largest star, Earth’s sun shone bright, just over a light-year behind us.
I smiled to myself in the darkness of my helmet as Rahashi and I signaled a group of men on the upper decks of the automated mining plant. I was fully ready to sing the rebel anthem, or dance a hornpipe jig for the captain and his officers, whatever would make our rescuers happy. Whichever side had won, the Kamadeva would have officers. And we would serve them, happy just to be among humanity again.
Idly, I patted my right breast pocket, which had tightly self-sealed its own flap. Inside the pocket was my backup copy of Beth, safely stowed away on a coin-sized molecular disk.
Starplay
1
“Twiddle it to the left,” suggested Jason.
I did as he suggested. The wavering image shimmered, brightened, then flew apart into a liquid rainbow splash of a million colors. The picture went dead, fading to black as if the commercials were finally over with and the show was coming back. But it didn’t.
“No, no, dumb-ass!” moaned Jason. “I said left, LEFT. You know what I’m talking about, moron?”
“I did turn it left,” I protested remotely, too interested in the Space-television to get annoyed by Jason. I pressed the reset button-at least, that’s what it seemed to do-and started twiddling again. The dusty workshop around us was quiet except for the humming of the machine’s transformers.
Jason made a move to shove me out of the way and get his butt into the folding chair we had set up in front of the console. But I weigh more and have two inches on him, so I managed to elbow him back.
“Knock it off, Jason.”
“Well, I found it!”
“No, you didn’t. We both did. And besides, it was my crazy dead uncle Chet that invented the thing.” My uncle had been totally bananas according to my dad. Mom said he was disturbed, but a gifted inventor, which should tip you off to which side of the family he was on. All I remember was that he lived in a plaid bath-robe, never brushed his teeth and screamed a lot at night. Eight years ago they had put him in a nuthouse and he died shortly after. It was when they committed him that they closed up his workshop. My folks were always kind of funny about the subject and never wanted to discuss it.
Curiosity has always been one of my weak points, so when they left the ranch this year for a vacation in Wisconsin, the time seemed ripe for an investigation. It had been no mean feat to cut that padlock, let me tell you.
“So?” Jason retorted, refuting my entire argument with one syllable. He flopped back into his folding chair, which was to my left. His chair squeaked because one of the legs didn’t sit right on the floor anymore. I turned back to the Space-television. We had decided to call it that when we first found it because it worked kind of like a television, and it showed mostly pictures of space, nebulas and stars and stuff. When it showed anything at all, that is.
“Lookit, I want to try for a while,” Jason said with a touch of wheedling in his voice that I detected and enjoyed. He put one elbow on the console beside me and leaned into my view. One finger went to his forehead, which was covered up by overly-long brown-blonde hair. He started poking at the zits he kept under there.