John Adams - Federations

I would have liked to tell him that, as we headed down the winding corridors to the dropdock. But I couldn’t, because telling Fazio meant telling Fazio’s symbiont also; and what was good news for Fazio was bad news for the symbiont. To catch the filthy thing by surprise: that was essential.

How much did Fazio suspect? God knows. In his place, I think I might have had an inkling. But maybe he was striving with all his strength to turn his mind away from any kind of speculation about the voyage he was about to take.

“You can’t possibly imagine what it’s like,” I said. “It’s unique. There’s just no way to simulate it. And the view of Betelgeuse that you get from the Station isn’t even remotely comparable.”

“The sled glides through the corona on a film of vaporized carbon,” said Elisandra. “The heat just rolls right off its surface.” We were chattering compulsively, trying to fill every moment with talk. “You’re completely shielded so that you can actually pass through the atmosphere of the star—”

“Of course,” I said, “Betelgeuse is so big and so violent that you’re more or less inside its atmosphere no matter where you are in its system—”

“And then there are the planets,” Elisandra said. “The way things are lined up this week, you may be able to see as many as a dozen of them—”

“—Otello, Falstaff, Siegfried, maybe Wotan—”

“—You’ll find a map on the ceiling of your cabin—”

“—Five gas giants twice the mass of Jupiter—keep your eye out for Wotan, that’s the one with rings—”

“—and Isolde, you can’t miss Isolde, she’s even redder than Betelgeuse, the damndest bloodshot planet imaginable—”

“—with eleven red moons, too, but you won’t be able to see them without filters—”

“—Otello and Falstaff for sure, and I think this week’s chart shows Aida out of occultation now, too—”

“—and then there’s the band of comets—”

“—the asteroids, that’s where we think a couple of the planets collided after gravitational perturbation of—”

“—and the Einsteinian curvature, it’s unmistakable—”

“—the big solar flares—”

“Here we are,” Elisandra said.

We had reached the dropdock. Before us rose a gleaming metal wall. Elisandra activated the hatch and it swung back to reveal the little sled, a sleek tapering frog-nosed thing with a low hump in the middle. It sat on tracks; above it arched the coils of the repeller-launcher, radiating at the moment the blue-green glow that indicated a neutral charge. Everything was automatic. We had only to put Fazio on board and give the Station the signal for launch; the rest would be taken care of by the orbital-polarity program Elisandra had previously keyed in.

“It’s going to be the trip of your life, man!” I said.

Fazio nodded. His eyes looked a little glazed, and his nostrils were flaring.

Elisandra hit the prelaunch control. The sled’s roof opened and a recorded voice out of a speaker in the dropdock ceiling began to explain to Fazio how to get inside and make himself secure for launching. My hands were cold, my throat was dry. Yet I was very calm, all things considered. This was murder, wasn’t it? Maybe so, technically speaking. But I was finding other names for it. A mercy killing; a balancing of the karmic accounts; a way of atoning for an ancient sin of omission. For him, release from hell after ten years; for me, release from a lesser but still acute kind of pain.

Fazio approached the sled’s narrow entry slot.

“Wait a second,” I said. I caught him by the arm. The account wasn’t quite in balance yet.

“Chollie—” Elisandra said.

I shook her off. To Fazio I said, “There’s one thing I need to tell you before you go.”

He gave me a peculiar look, but didn’t say anything.

I went on, “I’ve been claiming all along that I didn’t shoot you when the synsym got you because there wasn’t time, the medics landed too fast. That’s sort of true, but mainly it’s bullshit. I had time. What I didn’t have was the guts.”

“Chollie—” Elisandra said again. There was an edge on her voice.

“Just one more second,” I told her. I turned to Fazio again. “I looked at you, I looked at the heat gun, I thought about the synsym. But I just couldn’t do it. I stood there with the gun in my hand and I didn’t do a thing. And then the medics landed and it was too late—I felt like such a shit, Fazio, such a cowardly shit—”

Fazio’s face was turning blotchy. The red synsym lines blazed weirdly in his eyes.

“Get him into the sled!” Elisandra yelled. “It’s taking control of him, Chollie!”

“Oligabongaboo!” Fazio said. “Ungabanoo! Flizz! Thrapp!”

And he came at me like a wild man.

I had him by thirty kilos, at least, but he damned near knocked me over. Somehow I managed to stay upright. He bounced off me and went reeling around, and Elisandra grabbed his arm. He kicked her hard and sent her flying, but then I wrapped my forearm around the throat from behind, and Elisandra, crawling across the floor, got him around his legs so we could lift him and stuff him into the sled. Even then we had trouble holding him. Two of us against one skinny burned-out ruined man, and he writhed and twisted and wriggled about like something diabolical. He scratched, he kicked, he elbowed, he spat. His eyes were fiery. Every time we forced him close to the entryway of the sled he dragged us back away from it. Elisandra and I were grunting and winded, and I didn’t think we could hang on much longer. This wasn’t Fazio we were doing battle with, it was a synthetic symbiont out of the Ovoid labs, furiously trying to save itself from a fiery death. God knows what alien hormones it was pumping into Fazio’s bloodstream. God knows how it had rebuilt his bones and heart and lungs for greater efficiency. If he ever managed to break free of my grip, I wondered which of us would get out of the dropdock alive.

But all the same, Fazio still needed to breathe. I tightened my hold on his throat and felt cartilage yielding. I didn’t care. I just wanted to get him on that sled, dead or alive, give him some peace at all. Him and me both. Tighter—tighter—

Fazio made rough sputtering noises, and then a thick nasty gargling sound.

“You’ve got him,” Elisandra said.

“Yeah. Yeah.”

I clamped down one notch tighter yet, and Fazio began to go limp, though his muscles still spasmed and jerked frantically. The creature within him was still full of fight; but there wasn’t much air getting into Fazio’s lungs now and his brain was starving for oxygen. Slowly Elisandra and I shoved him the last five meters toward the sled—lifted him, pushed him up to the edge of the slot, started to jam him into it—

A convulsion wilder than anything that had gone before ripped through Fazio’s body. He twisted half around in my grasp until he was face-to-face with Elisandra, and a bubble of something gray and shiny appeared on his lips. For an instant everything seemed frozen. It was like a slice across time, for just that instant. Then things began to move again. The bubble burst; some fragment of tissue leaped the short gap from Fazio’s lips to Elisandra’s. The symbiont, facing death, had cast forth a piece of its own life-stuff to find another host. “ Chollie!” Elisandra wailed, and let go of Fazio and went reeling away as if someone had thrown acid in her eyes. She was clawing at her face. At the little flat gray slippery thing that had plastered itself over her mouth and was rapidly poking a couple of glistening pseudopods up into her nostrils. I hadn’t known it was possible for a symbiont to send out offshoots like that. I guess no one did, or people like Fazio wouldn’t be allowed to walk around loose.