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

We hadn’t gone into the site to raid it, just to explore it—as the earlier vids showed. Which confirmed my claim—I’m a wreck-diver, not a pirate, not a scavenger—and that allowed me to pick up the reward that Squishy abandoned.

I’d’ve left it too, except that I needed to fund the expedition, and I’m not going to be able to do it the way I’d initially planned—by taking tourists to the Dignity Vessel so far from home.

The wreck got moved to some storehouse or warehouse or way station where the government claims it’s safe. Turtle thinks we should’ve blown it up; Karl’s just glad it’s out of our way.

Me, I just wished I had more answers to all the puzzles.

That vessel’d been in service a while, that much was clear from how it had been refitted. When someone activated the stealth, something went wrong. I doubt even the government scientists would find out exactly what in that mess.

Then there’s the question of how it got to the place I found it. There’s no way to tell if it traveled in stealth mode or over those thousands of years, although that doesn’t explain how the ship avoided gravity wells and other perils that lie in wait in a cold and difficult universe. Or maybe it had been installed with an updated FTL. Again, I doubted I would ever know.

As for the crew—I have no idea, except that I suspect the cockpit crew died right off. We could see them in that pile of debris. But the rest—there were no bodies scattered throughout the ship, and there could’ve been, given that the vessel is still intact after all this time.

I’m wondering if they were running tests with minimal crew or if the real crew looked at that carnage in the cockpit and decided, like we did, that it wasn’t worth the risk to go in.

I never looked for escape pods, but such things existed on Dignity Vessels. Maybe the rest of the crew bailed, got rescued, and blended into cultures somewhere far from home.

Maybe that’s where Jypé’s legends come from.

Or so I like to believe.

Longbow Station has never seemed so much like home. It’ll be nice to shed the silent Turtle, and Karl, who claims his diving days are behind him.

Mine are too, only in not quite the same way. The Business and I’ll still ferry tourists to various wrecks, promising scary dives and providing none.

But I’ve had enough of undiscovered wrecks and danger for no real reason. Curiosity sent me all over this part of space, looking for hidden pockets, places where no one has been in a long time.

Now that I’ve found the ultimate hidden pocket—and I’ve seen what it can do—I’m not looking any more. I’m hanging up my suit and reclaiming my land legs.

Less danger there, on land, in normal gravity. Not that I’m afraid of wrecks now. I’m not, no more than the average spacer.

I’m more afraid of that feeling, the greed, which came on me hard and fast, and made me tone-deaf to my best diver’s concerns, my old friend’s fears, and my own giddy response to the deep.

I’m getting out before I turn pirate or scavenger, before my greed—which I thought I didn’t have—draws me as inexorably as the stealth tech drew Junior, pulling me in and holding me in place, before I even realize I’m in trouble.

Before I even know how impossible it’ll be to escape.

Gwyneth Jones is a writer and critic of science fiction and fantasy, who also writes for teenagers using the name Ann Halam. Among other honors, she’s won two World Fantasy awards, the British Science Fiction short story award, the Dracula Society’s Children of the Night award, the Philip K. Dick award, and shared the first Tiptree award, in 1992, with Eleanor Arnason. Bold As Love , the first novel of a near future fantasy sequence, won the Arthur C. Clarke award for 2001. She lives in Brighton, UK, with her husband and son, plus two cats: practices yoga, has done some extreme tourism in her time, likes old movies and cooking, and enjoys playing with her websites.

Do you want to dream?”

“No.”

The woman in uniform behind the desk looked at her screen and then looked at me, expressionless. I didn’t know if she was real and far away; or fake and here.

“Straight to orientation then.”

Iwalked. The Kuiper Belt Station—commonly known as the Panhandle—could afford the energy fake gravity requires. It wasn’t going anywhere; it was spinning on the moving spot of a minimum-collision orbit, close to six billion kilometres from the sun: a prison isle without a native population. From here I would be transported to my final exile from the United States of Earth, as an algorithm, a string of 0s and 1s. It’s illegal to create a code-version of a human being anywhere in the USE, including near-space habitats and planetary colonies. Protected against identity theft, the whole shipload of us, more than a hundred condemned criminals, had been brought to the edge: where we must now be coded individually before we could leave. The number-crunching would take a while, even with the most staggering computation power.

A reprieve, then. A stay of execution.

In my narrow cabin, or cell, I lay down on the bunk. Walls, floor, fittings: everything was made of the same, grey-green, dingy ceramic fibre. The ‘mattress’ felt like metal to the touch, but it yielded to the shape and weight of my body. The raised rim made me think of autopsies, crushed viscera. A panel by my head held the room controls: just like a hotel. I could check the status of my vacuum toilet, my dry shower, my air, my pressure, my own emissions, detailed in bright white.

Questions bubbled behind my lips, never to be answered. I was disoriented by weeks of being handled only by automation (sometimes with a human face); never allowed any contact with my fellow prisoners. When did I last speak to a human being? That must have been the orientation on earth, my baggage allowance session. You’re given a ‘weight limit’—actually a code limit—and advised when you’ve ‘duplicated’. Gray’s Anatomy , for old sake’s sake. A really good set of knives, a really good pair of boots, a field first-aid kit, vegetable and flower seeds. The Beethoven piano sonatas, played by Alfred Brendel; Mozart piano sonatas, likewise. The prison officer told me I couldn’t have the first aid. He advised me I must choose the data storage device for my minimalist choice of entertainments, and specify the lifetime power source. He made me handle the knives, the boots, the miniaturised hardware, even the seeds. What a palaver.

But the locker underneath the bunk was empty.

Do you want to dream?

The transit would happen, effectively, in no time at all. I had no idea how long the coding would take. An hour, a week, a month? I thought of the others, dreaming in fantasy boltholes. Some gorging their appetites, delicate or gross. Some exacting hideous revenge on the forces that brought them here: fathers, mothers, lovers; authority figures, SOCIETY. Some even trying to expiate their crimes in virtual torment; you get all sorts in the prison population. None of that for me. If you want to die have the courage to kill yourself, before you reach a finale like this one. If you don’t, then live to the last breath. Face the firing squad without a blindfold.

Scenes from my last trial went through my head. Me, bloody but unbowed of course, still trying to make speeches, thoroughly alienating the courtroom witnesses. My ex-husband making unconscious gestures in a small blank room, as he finally abandoned this faulty domestic appliance to her fate. He was horrified by that Death Row interview: I was not. I had given up on Dirk long ago. Did he ever believe in me? Or was he just humouring my unbalanced despair, as he says now—in the years when we were lovers and best friends? Did he really twist his hands around like that, and raise them high, palm outwards, as if he faced a terrorist with a gun?