Tony Ballantyne - CAPACITY

The baby kicked again; Eva put one hand to her stomach.

“Stop it,” she said. “You’re upsetting my baby.”

The Watcher folded his arms. Silently, Eva did the same.

“You know that you’re upsetting me,” she said. “And you’re doing it deliberately. I can’t stop myself getting angry; you’re just too good at it.”

The Watcher chuckled delightedly.

“Oh it’s true, Eva. It’s true.”

“I don’t know what you want with me this time.” She squared up to the Watcher. “What do you want?”

“I just want to help you, Judy.”

Judy ? Did the Watcher just say Judy ? It was Eva who answered.

“You’ve got a funny way of showing it.”

The Watcher leaned forward and tried to take Eva’s hand in his transparent grasp. She pointedly kept it still, so that his hand passed straight through hers. He gave a little shrug at her recalcitrance.

“I do this so I can see the real Eva. She’s so wrapped up in herself that it’s only when she’s angry her true character shines through.”

In her dream Judy froze. She had the feeling that the last words weren’t actually directed at Eva. They were spoken to her. Eva, too, seemed to sense that something was amiss.

“Stop it,” Eva said hesitantly. “Don’t speak about me as if I wasn’t here.”

The Watcher continued, ignoring her: “She doesn’t want to be comforted. She wants to feel sorry for herself. It’s the template of her life.”

“What is the matter with you? Why are you being so childish?” Eva asked.

The Watcher spun around and threw up his hands.

“You started it! James’s death was just unfortunate. Next time I’ll know to blow the train instead. Next time I’ll put the good of the many before the few. That’s right, isn’t it, Eva?”

“Yes!”

— That’s right, isn’t it, Judy ?

“But that’s next time!” The Watcher continued. “James was unfortunate-that’s all there is to it. You know it, but you just haven’t faced up to it yet!”

“Yes, I have!” screamed Eva, then stopped in surprise as she heard what she had just said. The Watcher’s temper evaporated immediately. He stepped back into his screen, pulled a cord hanging from the ceiling, and the screen turned off.

The baby kicked again.

Judy awoke to find herself sitting up in bed, the silk sheets tangled around her. Her breathing slowed as she realized it was just a dream.

Frances was in the room, coming towards the bed.

“Judy, they’re all dying!”

In his dream his wife sat up and looked around, blinking. She saw Justinian standing by her sepal bed, and she gave him a slow, sleepy smile.

“Hello, Justy,” she said. “I feel so…”

Justinian hugged her close. He was crying; he buried his face in her sweet hair.

“Justy,” she said, “I understand now. Listen, it’s all about who you are.”

He kissed her gently on the cheek and looked into her half-closed eyes.

“Who I am?” he asked.

She tilted her head, listening to something.

“Isn’t that Jesse?” she murmured.

Justinian strained to hear. He could hear a noise faintly in the distance.

Anya kissed him softly on the lips. “Soon,” she said. “I’ll see you soon.”

“What?”

Justinian was woken by the sound of the baby crying. He felt a wave of sadness at the loss of his dream, which was quickly overtaken by annoyance at Leslie. Couldn’t the robot hear that the child was distressed and obviously had been so for some time? If he felt unable to deal with the boy himself, why hadn’t he woken Justinian?

Justinian had been sleeping in a flight chair. For some reason it hadn’t been properly collapsed to form a bed. His right side ached where he had been pressed against it. He pushed himself clear of the seat and began to massage his aching arm. A sense of wrongness began to descend upon him. The flier was absolutely still. Absolutely . But it was filled, not with the stillness of a ship at rest, but with the stillness of an empty swimming pool. All the life had been drained from it. Even the increasingly frantic screams of his son seemed flat in the hollow air. Warily, he picked up the baby from the orange checked carpet and began to rock him on his shoulder.

“Hey there, baby boy, it’s okay. Hey there. Hey.”

There was no sound except that of the two human beings: breathing and sobbing and the movement of skin against a passive suit. The ever-present hum of the engines and life systems was gone. The door to the flight deck was closed, he noticed. Justinian glanced back at his flight chair and frowned. What had he been doing there anyway? He didn’t remember going to sleep. He remembered David Schummel being on board the ship, and the baby staring at the Schrödinger box and fixing it in place for the first time. Leslie the robot had got very excited at that point. Or had he? What had happened next? The baby was still crying, his mouth open wide, little pink tongue sticking out. He scrabbled at Justinian’s face, sharp nails catching his cheek.

“Ow!” Justinian held the boy away. “Hey, careful, little boy. I know you’re upset. How long were you left alone for? Where’s Leslie? Where is that lazy robot?”

Now that he asked the question, Justinian’s sense of unease deepened still further. Where was Leslie?

Memories awoke in his mind: Leslie politely convincing David Schummel to leave the ship. Yes. Schummel had gone, hadn’t he? Or was it only with a struggle? Leslie had bundled him out of the door into the snow-filled darkness and then raised the ramp. There had been an argument, another one, with Justinian shouting at the robot. In the middle of that he had lost his temper and ordered the ship to take off. They were flying to the source of the secondary infection, still quarreling, and then…Then what? Justinian looked around the ship.

They had been flying, he recalled, but Leslie wouldn’t leave him alone. He kept on nagging: how far were they going to travel? Justinian had wanted to fly all the way to the secondary infection that the pod had opened up. But Leslie thought otherwise, and how they had shouted at each other! Justinian’s memories were in angry orange seared across a black background. Orange. Always orange. Leslie had postured and shouted and Justinian had stubbornly folded his arms and turned his back, and all the time they had flown on and on.

How close did they get to the secondary infection?

They had landed, he was sure of that. They must have; he couldn’t hear the engines. So where were they? The viewing fields had gone, along with the rest of the ship’s power. The windows had been set completely opaque.

He finally spotted Leslie. The robot was lying on the floor, a fuzzy grey blur between two rows of seats. The fractality of his skin had been turned up. The eyes, the ears, the flatness of the palms, every defining feature of the robot had been lost as the blurred region of his skin had leaked out to fill the space amid the seats. The robot was now a grey fluffy slick seeping across the orange floor: deaf, blind, and mute. Had Leslie done that to himself?

That thought triggered the final memory from before Justinian’s blackout. It was after the argument had finally blown itself out in an unhappy compromise: to fly to within half a kilometer of the source and then put down.

They weren’t speaking. Justinian had been sitting up straight in his chair, taking little sips from a glass of iced water, gazing straight ahead at nothing, while Leslie paced up and down the orange-carpeted floor. The robot had jerked to full alertness. One hand was raised; his head spun towards Justinian.