Гарднер Дозуа - The Good Old Stuff

The man in the patrolboat looked uglier. His name was Space Safety Inspector Gollem and his stomach hurt.

The news that a Company inspector was in pain would have delighted every mollysquatter from Deimos to the Rings. The only surprise would be the notion that Inspector Gollem had a stomach instead of a Company contract tape. Gollem? All the friends Gollem had could colonize a meson and he knew it.

His stomach was used to that, though. His stomach was even getting used to working for Coronis Mutual, and he still hoped it might manage to survive his boss, Quine.

What was murdering him by inches was the thing he had hidden out beyond Franchise Fourteen on the edge of Coronis sector.

He scowled at the screen where Quine’s girl was logging in the grief for his next patrol. Having a live girl-girl for commo was supposed to be good for morale. It wasn’t doing one thing for Gollem. He knew what he looked like and his stomach knew what the flash from Twelve could be.

When she threw it on the screen he saw it was a bogy complaint, all right. Ghost signals on their lines.

Oh, no. Not again.

Not when he had it all fixed.

Franchise Twelve was West Hem Chemicals, an itchy outfit with a jill-abuck of cyborgs. They would send out a tracker if he didn’t get over there soon. But how? He had just come that way, he was due upstream at Franchise One.

“Reverse patrol,” he grunted. “Starting Franchise Fourteen. Purpose, uh, unscheduled recheck of aggregation shots in Eleven plus expedited service to West Hem. Allocate two units additional power.”

She logged it in; it was all right with her if Gollem started with spacerot. He cut channel and coded in the new course, trying not to think about the extra power he would have to justify to Quine. If anyone ever got into his console and found the bugger bypass on his log he would be loading ore with electrodes in his ears.

He keyed his stomach a shot of Vageez and caught an error in his code which he corrected with no joy. Most Belters took naturally to the new cheap gee-cumulator drive. Gollem loathed it. Sidling around arsy-versy instead of driving the can where you wanted to go. The old way, the real way. I’m the last machine freak, he thought. A godlost dinosaur in space ...

But a dinosaur would have had more sense than to get messed up with a dead girl.

And Ragnarok.

His gee-sum index was wobbling up the scale, squeezing him retrograde in a field stress-node—he hoped. He slapped away a pod of the new bio-monitor they had put in his boat and took a scan outside before his screens mushed. Always something to see in the Belts. This time it was a storm of little crescents trailing him, winking as the gravel tumbled.

In the sky with diamonds ..

From Ragnarok’s big ports you could see into naked space. That was the way they liked it, once. His Iron Butterfly. He rubbed his beard, figuring: five hours to Ragnarok, after he checked the squatter nest in Fourteen.

The weathersignal showed new data since he’d coded in the current field vortices and fronts. He tuned up, wondering what it must be like to live under weather made of gales of gas and liquid water. He had been raised on Luna.

The flash turned out to be a couple of rogue males coming in from Big J’s orbit. Jup stirred up a rock now and then. This pair read like escaped Trojans, estimated to node downstream in Sector Themis.

Nothing in that volume except some new medbase. His opposite number there was a gigglehead named Hara who was probably too busy peddling mutant phage to notice them go by. A pity, Trojans were gas-rich.

Feeding time. He opened a pack of Ovipuff and tuned up his music. His music. Old human power music from the frontier time. Not for Gollem, the new subliminal biomoans. He dug it hard, the righteous electronic decibels.

Chomping the paste with big useless teeth, the cabin pounding.

I can’t get no—satisFACTION.

The biomonitor was shrinking in its pods. Good. Nobody asked you into Gollem’s ship, you sucking symbiote.

The beat helped. He started through his exercises. Not to let himself go null-gee like Hara. Like them all now. Spacegrace? Shit. His unfashionable body bucked and strained.

A gorilla, no wonder his own mother had taken one look and split. Two thousand light-years from home.

What home for Gollem? Ask Quine, ask the Company. The Companies owned space now.

It was time to brake into Fourteen.

Fourteen was its usual disorderly self, a giant spawn of molly-bubbles hiding an aggregate of rock that had been warped into synch long before his time. The first colonists had done it with reaction engines.

Tough. Now a kid with a gee-cumulator could true an orbit.

Fourteen had more bubbles every time he passed—and more kids. The tissue tanks that paid the franchise were still clear but elsewhere the bubbles were layers deep, the last ones tethered loose. Running out of rock for their metabolite to work on. Gollem hassled them about that every time he passed.

“Where are your rock nudgers?” he asked now when the squatterchief came on his screen.

“Soon, soon, ‘Spector Gollem.” The squatterchief was a slender skinhead with a biotuner glued to one ear.

“The Company will cancel, Juki. Coronis Mutual won’t carry you on policyholder status if you don’t maintain insurable life-support.”

Juki smiled, manipulated the green blob. They were abandoning the rocks all right, drifting off into symbiotic spacelife. Behind Juki he saw a couple of the older chiefs.

“You can’t afford to cut the services the Company provides,” he told them angrily. Nobody knew better than Gollem how minimal those services were, but without them, what? “Get some rock.”

He couldn’t use any more time here.

As he pulled away he noticed one of the loose bubbles was a sick purple.

Not his concern and not enough time.

Cursing, he eased alongside and cautiously slid his lock probes into the monomolecular bubbleskin. When the lock opened a stink came in.

He grabbed his breather and kicked into the foul bubble. Six or seven bodies were floating together in the middle like a tangle of yellow wires.

He jerked one out, squirted oxy at its face. It was a gutbag kid, a born null-gee. When his eyes fanned open Gollem pushed him at the rotting metabolite core.

“You were feeding it phage.” He slapped the boy. “Thought it would replicate, didn’t you? You poisoned it.”

The boy’s eyes crossed, then straightened. Probably didn’t get a word, the dialect of Fourteen was drifting fast. Maybe some of them truly were starting to communicate symbiotically. Vegetable ESP.

He pushed the boy back into the raft and knocked the dead metabolite through the waster. The starved molly-bubble wall was pitted with necrosis, barely holding. He flushed his CO2 tank over it and crawled back to his boat for a spare metabolite core. When he got back the quasi-living cytoplasm of the bubbleskin was already starting to clear.

It would regenerate itself if they didn’t poison it again with a CO2-binding mutant. That was the way men built their spacehomes now, soft heterocatalytic films that ran on starlight, breathed human wastes.

Gollem rummaged through the stirring bodies until he found a bag of phage between a woman and her baby. She whimpered when he jerked it loose. He carried it back to his boat and pulled carefully away, releasing a flow of nutrient gel to seal his probe-hole. The mollybubble would heal itself.

At last he was clear for Ragnarok.

He punched course for Twelve and then deftly patched in the log bypass and set his true trajectory. The log would feed from his cache of duplicates, another item nobody had better find. Then he logged in the expendables he’d just used, padding it a piece as always.