Майкл Бишоп - The Final Frontier - Stories of Exploring Space, Colonizing the Universe, and First Contact

The woman began to speak but he couldn’t understand her. He leaned forward.

“What, what did you say?”

The thing beside him tightened its grip, so tight the fingers of his right hand ached in its grasp, the small bones grinding in their sleeves of flesh. He tried to stand but it held him down and squeezed harder and harder until his entire awareness was occupied by the pain.

Several of the jungle shapes interposed themselves between Michael and the woman who had spoken to him. The air became clogged, humid, stifling. Rain began to fall inside the theater. He struggled to pull free. The numbing pain traveled up his arm. The theater seat held him, shifted around him. Knobby protuberances poked and dug into him, like sitting in a tangle of roots. He couldn’t breath.

Then it stopped.

He sat in a movie theater with a young mahogany-haired woman, who held his hand sweetly in the dark. She leaned over and whispered, “You fell asleep!” Her warm breath touched his ear.

“I did?” He sat up, groggy.

“Yes, darling.”

He blinked at the screen, where dim pulses of light moved in meaningless patterns. That was so wrong.

The one that liked to make love pulled him to his feet in the hotel room and kissed him roughly. He tried to push it away but it was too strong. After a while it held him at arm’s length and said something he couldn’t understand. The jungle effluvium infiltrated his brain, and he saw a woman he used to know, or a rudimentary version of her. The eyes were still wrong—plugs of dull amber. Michael staggered back, caught his heel on the carpet, and fell. His lips were bruised, sticky and sweet with sap.

It stalked over and stood above him.

“Mike, we have to get out of here.”

This new voice didn’t belong to the thing straddling his legs.

Michael craned his head around. A women stood in a flight suit similar to his own. She was there and then she wasn’t there, as the scenery shifted around him, from his old bedroom on Earth to the hotel room on Mars.

“Natalie—?” he said.

The one that liked to make love lowered itself on top of him. Michael tried to roll away but couldn’t. It mounted him and he screamed.

That time in New San Francisco, in the mock Victorian hotel room, in the bed of clean linen sheets, the following morning, when Natalie woke early and started to get out of bed, he had reached out and touched her naked hip and said, “Stay.” A costly word .

He was alone again, half asleep in and out of dream. Then something was shaking him.

“Mike, come on. There isn’t time. They’ll be back.”

He struggled against this new assault. Something wrestling with him, pinning him down on the bed with its knobby knees. Then a mask fitted over his mouth and nose, and a clean wind blew into his lungs, filling him, clearing his head. He opened his eyes, closed them, opened them wide.

“Hello, Nat,” he said, his voice muffled through the breathing mask

She flipped the little mahogany curl of hair out of her eye.

“Hello yourself, you idiot,” Natalie said.

“How’d you get here?” he asked, meaning how did she get into his hotel room. But even as he asked the question the last vestiges of the illusion blew away in the fresh revivifying oxygen.

A pink puzzle piece sky shone above the jungle canopy.

Twisted trees crowded them, shaggy with moss, hung with thick vines braided like chains.

“I dropped in, just like you,” Natalie said.

Michael looked around “I have a feeling we’re not on Mars, Dorothy.”

“Who’s Dorothy?”

Something hulking, hunched and redolent of mold and jungle rot came shambling towards them.

“Nat, look out!”

She turned swiftly, yanking a blaster from her utility belt. Reality stuttered. As if in a fading memory he saw the tree-thing knock the weapon from Natalie’s hand. At the same moment, superimposed, he saw her fire. A bright red flash of plasma energy seared into the thing. It lurched back, yowling, punky smoke flowing from the fresh wound.

Nat grabbed Michael’s hand and pulled him up. He felt dizzy and weak, still drugged.

“What are you doing?” he said.

“Rescuing your ass.” She gave him a little push. “That way to the ship.”

“No,” he said, pointing, “it’s that way.”

“My ship is this way. Your ship sank.”

He scrambled drunkenly ahead of her, stumbling over roots, getting hung up in vines. Though the illusions were displaced he could still hear the Siren wail in his mind and had to fight an impulse to rip the mask from his face. There was movement all around them. More of the things shambled out of the shadows. Natalie blasted away with her weapon, clearing a path.

They broke into the open. The ship gleamed in weak sunlight.

“Get in! I’ll hold them off.”

Michael clambered up the ladder to the cockpit. At the top of the ladder he turned and saw Natalie about to be overwhelmed.

“Nat, come on!”

She dropped her depleted blaster, swung onto the ladder—but it was too late. They had her.

Michael slumped in his theater seat, withdrawn from the Deep Enhancement movie experience he had created. Warm rain fell out of the darkness. The One Who Liked Rain sat beside him with a bowl of soggy popcorn.

It turned to him.

“That was so good, Mike.”

Its lips glistened with butter. Its eyes were dull amber wads. A breathing mask with a torn strap dangled from it’s fingers.

Michael groaned.

Like an insect buzz in his ear: Michael wake up, for God’s sake .

Michael closed his eyes.

On Mars Natalie had said, “I think I’m falling in love with you,” and his defenses had rattled down like iron gates .

“Mike?”

“Not a good idea. In the first place we’ll both soon be Outbound. It might be years before we see each other again. In the second place, my modifications inhibit my ability to achieve human intimacy. I’m a lost cause, Nat.”

Natalie shook her head. “You don’t have to drag out your excuses. I know you. I’m just saying how I feel, not asking for anything. And by the way, your mods have nothing to do with intimacy. I’ve known plenty of Womb Hole pilots and I don’t buy the myth that you’re all emotional cripples.”

Michael smiled. He hadn’t been thinking about the mods he’d volunteered to undergo, the ones necessary for Ship State, the ones that at least allowed him a semblance of intimacy, even if it was with a machine consciousness. He had meant the more visceral mods of his psyche, where blackened timbers had risen like pickets in Hell to form the first rudimentary fence around his heart .

“You don’t really know me,” he said .

“Not at this rate, I don’t .

Then the biological crisis on Meropa IV occurred. Vital vaccines needed. Michael’s Ship Tender came up with Kobory Fever, and Natalie, loose on Mars, got the duty. Like some kind of Fate. Michael experienced a burst of pure joy—which he quickly stomped on .

“I don’t see why I had to die,” Natalie said. Was she the real Natalie?

He was back in the hotel, lying flat on the bed. Natalie, having fitted another breathing mask to his face, sat in a chair near the window. Except it appeared she wasn’t sitting in a chair at all, but on a tangle of thick roots growing out of the floor. He had just told her about the movie.

“You were saving me,” he said.

“I’m saving you now,” she said. “Or trying to. You’ve got to get off your ass and participate.”

Michael felt heavy.

“And in this version I don’t die,” Natalie said.

She led him out of the hotel room, which quickly became something other than an hotel room. As his head cleared the vine-tangle wallpaper popped out in three dimensions, the floor became soft, spongy. The light shifted to heavily screened pink/green. Flying insects buzzed his sweaty face. A locus of pain began rhythmically stabbing behind his right eye.