Гарднер Дозуа - The Good Old Stuff

Embezzlement. His stomach groaned.

He tuned up a rock storm to soothe it. There was an old poem about a man with a dead bird tied around his neck. Truly he had his dead bird.

All the good things were dead, the free wild human things. He felt like a specter, believe it. A dead one hanging in from the days when men rode machines to the stars and the algae stayed in pans. Before they cooked up all the metabolizing Martian macromolecules that quote, tamed space, unquote.

Tame men, women and kids breathing through ’em, feeding off ’em, navigating and computing and making music with ’em—mating with them, maybe!

Steppenwolf growled, worried the biomonitor. His metal-finder squealed.

Ragnarok!

Time shivered and the past blazed on his screens. He let himself have one quick look.

The great gold-skinned hull floated in the starlight, edged with diamonds against the tiny sun. The last Argo, the lonesomest Conestoga of them all. Ragnarok. Huge, proud, ungainly star machine, blazoned with the symbols of the crude technology that had blasted man to space.

Ragnarok that opened the way to Saturn and beyond. A human fist to the gods. Drifting now a dead hulk, lost in the sea she’d conquered.

Lost and forgotten to all but Gollem the specter.

No time now to suit up and prowl over and around her, to pry and tinker with her archaic fitments. The pile inside her was long dead and cold.

He dared not even try to start it, a thing like that would set off every field-sounder in the zone. Quine’s stolen power in her batteries was all that warmed her now.

Inside her also was his dead bird.

He coasted into the main lock, which he had adapted to his probe. Just as he hit he thought he glimpsed a new bubble firming up in the storage cluster he had hung on Ragnarok freightlock. What had Topanga been up to?

The locks meshed with a soul-satisfying clang of metal and he cycled through, eye to eye with the two old monster suits that hung in Ragnarok lock. Unbelievable, so cumbersome. How ever had they done it? He kicked up through dimness to the bridge.

For one moment his girl was there.

The wide ports were a wheeling maze of starlight and fire-studded shadows. She sat in the command couch, gazing out. He saw her pure, fierce profile, the hint of girl-body in the shadows. Star-hungry eyes.

Then the eyes slid around and the lights came up. His star girl vanished into the thing that had killed her.

Time.

Topanga was an old, sick, silly woman in a derelict driveship.

She smiled at him from the wreckage of her face.

“Golly? I was remembering—” What an instrument it was still, that husky voice in the star haze. The tales it had spun for him over the years. She had not always been like this. When he had first found her, adrift and ill—she had still been Topanga then . The last one left.

“You were using the caller. Topanga, I warned you they were too close.

Now they’ve picked you up.”

“I wasn’t sending, Golly.” Eerie blue, the wide old eyes reminded him of a place he had never seen.

He began to check the telltales he had hung on her console leads. Hard to believe those antiques were still operational. Completely inorganic, a ton of solid-state circuitry. Topanga claimed she couldn’t activate it, but when she had had her first crazy fit he had found out otherwise. He’d had her parked in Four then, in a clutch of spacejunk. She started blasting the bands with docking signals to men twenty years dead. Company salvage had nearly blown her out of space before he got there—he’d had to fake a collision to satisfy Quine.

A telltale was hot.

“Topanga. Listen to me. West Hem Chemicals are sending a hunter out to find you. You were jamming their miners. Don’t you know what they’ll do to you? The best—the very best you’ll get is a geriatric ward. Needles. Tubes. Doctors ordering you around, treating you like a thing. They’ll grab Ragnarok for a space trophy. Unless they blast you first.”

Her face crumpled crazily.

“I can take care of myself. I’ll turn the lasers on ’em.”

“You’d never see them.” He glared at the defiant ghost. He could do anything he wanted here, what was stopping him? “Topanga, I’m going to kill that caller. It’s for your own good.”

She stuck up her ruined chin, the wattles waving.

“I’m not afraid of them.”

“You have to be afraid of a jerry ward. You want to end as a mess of tubing, under the gees? I’m going to dismantle it.”

“No, Golly, no!” Her stick arms drummed in panic, trailing skin. “I won’t touch it, I’ll remember. Don’t leave me helpless. Oh, please don’t.”

Her voice broke and so did his stomach. He couldn’t look at it, this creature that had eaten his girl. Topanga inside there somewhere, begging for freedom, for danger. Safe, helpless, gagged? No.

“If I nudge you out of West Hem’s range you’ll be in three others.

Topanga, baby, I can’t save you one more time.”

She had gone limp now, shrouded in the Martian oxy-blanket he had brought her. He caught a blue gleam under the shadows and his stomach squirted bile. Let go, witch. Die before you kill me too.

He began to code in the gee-sum unit he had set up here. It was totally inadequate for Ragnarok¢mass but he could overload it for a nudge. He would stabilize her on his next pass-by, if only he could find her without wasting too much power.

From behind him came a husky whisper. “Strange to be old—” Ghost of a rich girl’s laugh. “Did I ever tell you about the time the field shifted, on Tethys?”

“You told me.”

Ragnarok was stirring.

“Stars,” she said dreamily. “Hart Crane was the first space poet.

Listen. Stars scribble on our eyes the frosty sagas, the gleaming cantos of unvanquished space. 0 silver sinewy—” Gollem heard the hull clang.

Someone was trying to sneak out of Ragnarok.

He launched himself down-shaft to the freightlock, found it cycling and jacknifed back to get out through his boat at the main lock. Too late.

As he sprang into his cabin the screens showed a strange pod taking off from behind that new bubble.

Dummy, dummy-He suited up and scrambled out across Ragnarok hull. The new bubble was still soft, mostly nutri-gel. Pushing his face into it he cracked his breather.

He came back to Topanga in a blue rage.

“You are letting a phage-runner park on Ragnarok.”

“Oh, was that Leo?” She laughed vaguely. “He’s a courier from the next zone—Themis, isn’t it? He calls by sometimes. He’s been beautiful to me, Golly.”

“He is a stinking phage-runner and you know it. You were covering for him.” Gollem was sick. The old Topanga would have put “Leo” out the trash hole. “Not phage. Not phage on top of everything, Topanga.”

Her ancient eyelids fell. “Let it be, Golly. I’m alone so long,” she whispered. “You leave me for so long.”

Her withered paw groped out, seeking him. Brown-spotted, crisscrossed with reedy pulses. Knobs, strings. Where were the hands of the girl who had held the camp on Tethys?

He looked up at the array of holographs over the port and saw her. The camera had caught her grinning up at black immensity, the wild light of Saturn’s rings reflected in her red-gold hair ....

“Topanga, old mother,” he said painfully.

“Don’t call me mother, you plastic spacepig!” she blazed. Her carcass jerked out of the pilot couch and he had to web her back, hating to touch her. A quarter-gee would break these sticks. “I should be dead,” she mumbled.

“It won’t be long, you’ll be rid of me.”

Ragnarok was set now, he could go.

“Maintain, spacer, maintain,” he told her heartily. His stomach knew what lay ahead. None of it was any good. As he left he heard her saying brightly, “Gimbals, check,” to her dead computer.