John Shirley - A Song Called Youth

He turned his head, saw him a stride or two behind, plugging on strong. It made him feel better to see Lester there. He was a good man, and knew what he was doing out here. He had a fair amount of EVA time.

Coming out of hull airlock 70 had been a thrill, despite his fears about Witcher. They were on the cold side, facing away from the sun, and there was no solar glare. The stars out there…

You saw the stars in the shuttle, and from inside the Colony. But the parallax here, the horizonless openness of it, made him feel that the Colony—millions of tons of crystallized alloy—was a single spore of pollen, and he was less than a dust mite clinging to it. The stars out here had a certain regal brittleness to their shine, sharp-edged as the tone of a synthesizer’s high-C. The Earth was a Christmas-tree bulb. The moon a night-light.

After that…

His pressure suit was ballooned-out in the pressureless void, the arms becoming stiff, almost rigid. It was one of the cheap, old-fashioned kind the Colony got surplus from the Korean moonbase. Would have been nice to have one of the more flexible gas-permeable suits. This one smelled like the inside of a tramp’s shoe, for one thing. The lining fibers were coming loose, prickling him, the rest of the interior feeling faintly vitreous from years of bodies in it. And there was no telling when it might decide it couldn’t maintain airtight integrity any longer. In which case, he’d be dead in seconds.

Russ kept plodding, clinking, on toward the distant abstract tree of Witcher’s antenna. His limbs fighting the restraint of the clumsy pressure suit, his own breathing rasping loud in the helmet. Rattles and tickings came from the clamps for the backpack control box against his chest, the electric cable angling across his rib cage, the communication and ventilation umbilical bumping his hip; the small cutting torch clacking against the zipper of his utility pocket. A crackle came in the headset: Lester’s voice, once, “We can stop if you need to, Russ. It’s…” Something more, fuzzed out by static.

“I ain’t that goddamn old yet.”

“This shit takes getting used to. I’m tired already, and I’m pretty used to it. You sure we can’t take the maneuverers? The guy’s probably bluffing about being able to detect anything flying over the hull.”

“I don’t want to take the chance he’s not bluffing.”

”I’m gonna make my oxymix a little richer, Russ. You might wanna try it. It helps when you get tired.”

“You think I don’t know you’re patronizing me, Lester? I ain’t that goddamn old yet, I’m telling you.” But he reached down and turned the knob on the backpack control, enriched his oxygen flow.

It made him feel a little light-headed; not particularly stronger.

Sweat itched between skin and suit lining. He had to hit the defogger switch on his helmet about every thirty seconds now.

Maybe there was a better way to do this. Maybe Lester was right and the guy had been bluffing. But they were committed now. And if he hadn’t made the right decision, fuck it, the decision couldn’t be unmade.

The chrome tree—though stark and clearly defined against a pocket of starless black—never seemed to get any closer.

Maybe they’d figured the air wrong. People didn’t normally walk very far across the outer hull. They used maneuverers or a repair module, usually. The amount of air they’d taken had been a function of guesswork. Maybe they’d run out before they got there. Or before they got back.

Just keep going.

His breath was rasping louder and louder in his ears. Sweat stung his eyes, blurred his vision. His heart pounded. His lungs heaved. This was no time for masculine pride. This was something like crossing a bad stretch of the Sahara on foot. Exhaustion out here could mean death.

He spoke into his headset, “Lester—wait a sec.”

Crackle. “Sure.”

They stopped. Empyrean jewelry wheeled around them. The occluded sun lit the stunted horizon.

Russ’s breathing quieted. The ache in his muscles subsided a little.

“Okay.” They plodded onward.

He wished he could talk to Claire. Damn, what a babe. Tough as nails, but when she wanted to be, pliant as a willow. Be nice to get a report from her, but she was afraid Witcher might have a way to monitor a long-range EVA transmission.

Hell. He had to pee.

The urine transfer collector was cinched onto his dick. It was supposed to work. But if it didn’t work right, he’d have piss floating around in his suit…

Maybe it was nerves, but he couldn’t wait. He pissed. It took an effort of will—bucking a lifetime of inhibition against pissing his pants. That’s what it felt like: infantile self-wetting. Except the collector got most of it.

Only a few drops of golden urine floated past his eyes, wobbling with surface tension.

Distances were playful out here, and suddenly the antenna was there, glazed by starlight so it looked like an ice-bound, leafless tree in the dead of winter. Bigger than he’d thought it was, forty feet high. Must have been a major conspiracy and a lot of payoffs to get it out here, planted right under his nose. But then, there was a lot of EVA work that went on, and the hull wasn’t security-monitored much.

He glanced at his chronograph. About twenty minutes left to deadline. Pretty soon now they’d be breaking through the door of Witcher’s apartment. This had to be done fast.

He and Lester set to work, one on either side, burning through the ten-inch metal trunk of the “tree.”

The cutting torch, spitting its own oxygen in defiance of the vacuum, eating slowly but steadily through the gray alloy.

Time eating steadily away at their margin of error…

“I just don’t like it, is all,” Marion was saying. “It’s fucked, that’s all. It sucks.”

“You’re so articulate, dear. How very charming that is.”

“You’re pissing me off, Dad.”

She’d never spoken to him like that before.

Witcher swallowed the hurt and leaned back against the wall, drawing his feet up onto the bed, knees against his chest. “It’s getting rather close in here.”

A renewed whi-ii-ine came from the door, a noise that set his teeth on edge: the moronic techies, boring into his privacy.

“I don’t think we should think about all this now,” Witcher went on. “We’re all rather claustrophobic and under pressure. Marion, why don’t you sit down, hmm?”

She was pacing past Jeanne and Aria, who were sitting on the edge of the bed, at Witcher’s feet. Guns in their hands. Their heads turned to watch her pace, as if they were at a slow-motion tennis match.

“I don’t want to sit down, I’m thinking, I’m deciding, I can’t do it sitting down. I just wish there was more room to walk in here, you can’t go but three steps without fucking having to turn around.” She reached into her pocket and, to his amazement, took out a cigarette, triggered the end with a thumb so it flared alight.

“What are you doing?” he asked in his most emotionless voice. A voice he rarely used with them.

“I’m smoking a fucking cigarette.”

“I don’t allow it and the Colony doesn’t allow it.”

“I don’t care what Mama don’t allow, I’m gonna smoke my cigarette anyhow.”

“What?”

“Forget it.” She stopped pacing with startling abruptness, and turned to squint past a curl of smoke at him. “Dad—you were really gonna let that shit go, the virus, or was that, like, a bluff. Or maybe a fantasy…”

He glared at her. If he pretended it weren’t true, she’d have won a challenge to his authority. He’d have backed down. And his authority must be absolute, because these girls were armed.

He hedged. “Marion, you’re a very lovely girl, and very talented, but it’s a big, complex world—too big and too complex, that’s it’s chief problem—and… and it’s just not something you’re going to understand.”