Филип Керр - The Second Angel

As bright as the Moon appeared to Lenina and Cavor, sunlight was a half-million times brighter. The Moon was really a very dark object — one of the least reflective worlds in the entire solar system. And yet they both regarded it with such hope that it might have been the most luminous super-giant white star in the firmament.

Dallas opened his eyes and, wrapped inside his sleeping bag, floated in the darkness. He felt mildly disoriented by his own weightlessness and lack of sleep. Had he slept? It was hard to tell. All was still inside the Mariner with only the gently humming sound of the ship’s machinery and the breathing of his fellow conspirators to break the silence of space. The total silence. Dallas had been to the Moon before, but he had forgotten how silent the void really was. At least to human ears. Space was full of cosmic microwave radiation, traveling to Earth from most of the observable universe, and it was easily detectable on any crude horn antenna, sounding as noisy as a flock of starlings. This was one of the earliest proofs of an expanding universe. The sound was really light, so greatly red-shifted in its spectrum wavelength that it could only be read as microwave radiation — and only properly understood as the beginning of everything. Dallas had always been fascinated with that sound; even as a child he had understood that what he could hear was the moment when time itself began.

He glanced at his watch and saw that he had indeed been asleep for three to four hours. But he hardly felt refreshed. There was nothing fresh about the atmosphere aboard the Mariner. Not with the waste control and environmental control systems acting up. Just half a day in space and already there were small pieces of shit floating around the cabin, to say nothing of the amount of methane that had been generated by the crew of seven. Mostly this was the result of their first low-residue in-flight meal — a chicken-and-curry-flavored breedworm that Dallas reckoned might have benefited from a little less spice in its dehydrated preparation. As if in vindication of his belief, Dallas heard Prevezer fart loudly inside his sleeping bag. Prevezer was one of Kaplan’s people. He was a virtual reality model-maker, and when they got to their hotel at Tranquillity Base, it would be Prevezer’s job to fashion a silicon surrogate of the real blood bank from the bits and bytes that were stored in the memory of Dallas’s computer. Using this elaborate artificial world, Dallas would test the integrity of his plan — the kind of experiment, he hoped, that would highlight any unforeseen problems. So Prevezer was an important member of the team, even if he seemed to have more acid in his stomach than anyone else, even if Dallas could cheerfully have steered his sleeping body into the airlock of the cargo bay and dumped him in space.

Deciding that his rest period was over, Dallas unzipped his sleeping bag and floated free, steering himself toward the cabin window. They were out of orbit now, with the full Earth — everything from Africa and the Arabian peninsula to Antarctica — clearly visible. On a normal, scheduled flight to the Moon, every tourist aboard the astroliner would have been up on the camera deck taking photographs at this moment. Dallas remembered doing the same himself. He still had the shots in his portable memory — the little plastic card, endlessly copied, he carried with him everywhere, containing a digital record of his entire life’s photographic history, everything from his own birth to that of Caro. He sometimes wondered how people had managed to safe-keep their fondest memories before such mnemonic devices were invented. A few little plastic cards were all he had to remember Aria and Caro. All that stood between them and oblivion.

Prevezer farted again, and this time Ronica felt obliged to protest.

‘God’s blood,’ she shouted, climbing angrily out of her bag. ‘Who is doing that? It smells like a monkey house in here.’

Prevezer farted loudly, almost as if in answer to her question.

‘Damn it all, Prevezer,’ she groaned. ‘Can’t you control yourself?’

‘Don’t blame me,’ he said, from deep within his bag. ‘Blame space. Blame the fucking dinner. And then blame the fucking environmental control system. ’Sides, least I know how to use a zero g toilet, unlike some people I could mention. A fart ain’t the worst thing flying around this fucking rust bucket. Bad enough that the waste control system ain’t working right, without that some idiots can’t use the thing properly anyway.’

Prevezer was referring to Cavor’s poor performance with the solid collector. He had released one of the disposable adhesive plastic bags attached to the waste control system, or WCS, while defecating, with disastrous results.

‘That was an accident,’ Cavor protested. ‘It’s not easy using those things with only one good arm.’

‘Not so easy with two good arms,’ remarked Ronica. ‘But this stink is something else. This is a kind of body fascism.’

Prevezer farted for the fourth time in as many minutes.

‘Three whole days of this until we get to TB.’ From her personal bag, Ronica produced a small bottle of eau de cologne and proceeded to spray it liberally around her personal space. ‘Bloody hell, I don’t think my sense of smell can stand it.’

‘Wear a nose clip if it bothers you that much,’ Prevezer sneered. ‘And while you’re looking for one, see if you can’t find me a pair of earplugs, so I won’t have to listen to your bitch’s mouth busting my fucking balls. I ain’t the only one with an acid stomach around here.’

‘He’s right, Ronica,’ yawned Gates. ‘My pH is way off the scale. I reckon if I so much as breathed on a piece of litmus paper, it’d turn red.’ Unzipping his own bag he floated free in the cabin. ‘I’d better take a look at the environmental control system. And nobody light a match. There’s enough gas in here to blow us all to pieces.’

‘I wouldn’t worry about that,’ said Lenina. ‘This ship’s liable to fall apart before it blows up.’

‘Who made you cheerleader?’ jibed Ronica.

‘Keep it down, will you? By my reckoning, the sleep period doesn’t end for at least another hour.’ This was Simou, the team’s mechanical and electrical engineer, a permanently weary-looking man with platinum-blond hair and the kind of prominent lower jaw that would have given a Habsburg king a run for his kingdom.

Prevezer poked his head out of his bag. ‘Take more than a few z’s to improve the way you look, Simou,’ he said. ‘For most people, beauty sleep means being in bed before midnight. But for you it would mean going through a black hole and traveling back in time to make sure your mother was asleep before she met your father.’

‘Did your mother ever meet yours?’ Simou came out of the opposite end of his sleeping bag. He floated up alongside Prevezer, wearing a grin that was all bottom teeth and contempt, adding, ‘I heard she picked your old man using a pipette and a petri dish.’

‘So? Nothing so unusual about that. Lot of people have donor fathers. Gates, for instance.’

‘Yeah, but his mother got to the lab early Monday morning and made sure she had the pick of the crop. I mean, just look at the guy. He’s Zarathustra’s prologue, for Christ’s sake. You, on the other hand, are a typical Friday afternoon job. The frog spawn at the bottom of the jar. Face it, Prev. You’re not so much a dumb ugly fuck as an excuse not to have one.’

In fact there was nothing wrong with Prevezer to look at. By any standard he was better looking than Simou. But all the time he had spent inside silicon microworlds had given him an undernourished, skinny look. Appearances deceived, though. Prevezer was prone to violence and possessed a quick temper. He had killed people for saying less than Simou had said.