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

When Big Nurse’s amplified voice told us the session was over, and we must return to our cells, my tablet said that two hours had passed. It felt like a lot longer. I was trembling with fatigue. I went over to the booth while the others were filing out.

“Take the armband from me,” I muttered.

Annihilation, okay. Six billion kilometres from home, a charade set up around the lethal injection: whatever turns you on, O fascist state authority that ate my country, my world and its freedoms… But I refused to accept the role the bastards had dumped on me. I did not stand, I will not serve. I didn’t dare to resign, I knew the rest of them wouldn’t take that well. The system gives, the system better take away.

“I cannot,” said Big Nurse, reasonably. “I am a bot.”

“Of course you can. Make this vanish and appoint the next trustie on the list.”

Software in human form answered the question that I hadn’t asked. “All good government tends towards consensus,” she said. “But consensus operates through forms and structures. Leader is your position in this nexus. The system cannot change your relation to the whole.”

The girl with the braids was shuffling out, last. She walked as if she was struggling through treacle. Through the veil I saw a young, limber body, full of grace. I could not stop myself imagining the springy crease between her bottom and her thigh, and how it would move. I swallowed hard, and abruptly changed my mind.

Live to the last breath. Play the game, what does it matter?

In my cell, the ration tray that had been waiting for me in the ‘morning’, when I woke, had disappeared. Another prison meal had arrived. I ate it. I had a drinking fountain in a niche in my wall, and the water tasted sweet. My God, what luxuries!

Aside from the four people who never turned up, everyone attended the dayroom, including Drummer and the unresponsive woman. Most of us were playing the game to ward off madness and the abyss. Some of us genuinely got interested in setting up the ground rules for a new world. I couldn’t tell the difference; not even in myself.

Carpazian said we would need an established religion.

“Religion,” he reasoned, “is not all bad. It contains the incomprehensible in human life. People need deities, doorkeepers between the real and unreal. And the Buonarotti device has made the world stranger than people ever knew before.”

I don’t think he meant to do it, but he started something. Mike, the fourth man, said he’d heard that the Panhandle was haunted by murdered prospectors. Flick said she’d felt someone in her cell with her, invisible, watching her every move.

“They say the Buonarotti Transit broke something open,” offered Koffi. “They say it unleashed monsters. And here we are right next to the torus.”

We shouted him down, we rationalists (including Carpazian). We were all feeling vulnerable. It was hard not to get creeped out, with the ever-present hum of that annihilation wheel, Big Nurse our only company, and the knowledge that we had been utterly abandoned. We were little children, frightened in the dark.

I decided to go and see Hilde. We were all quartered on the same corridor, and the doors had nameplates. We were free to make visits, other people were doing it. I didn’t know how to make myself known, so I just knocked.

The door slid open. She stared at me, and began to back away.

“Do you mind if I come in?”

She gestured consent, zombie-slow, and embarked on the difficult task of clambering back onto her bunk. There was nowhere else so I sat there too, at the foot of her bed. She fumbled with the room controls, the door closed, we were alone together. It felt perilous, uncertain; but not in a nightmare way.

“I just wanted to say, the sessions are obviously a strain. Is there anything I can do? Nothing’s compulsory, you know.” Her braids were fuzzed all over, after days without any attention. I wanted to ask if she had a comb.

“I… am… Not like this… willingly… Captain.”

Beads of sweat stood on her brow, by the end of that momentous effort. Her eyes were dark, her lashes long and curling. Her mouth was very full, almost too much for her narrow face to bear. She would have been pretty, a misfit, awkward prettiness, if there had been any life in her expression.

“Oh no!” I cried, consternated by her struggle. “I’m not the boss, please. The system did that to me, I’m not checking up on you. I meant—”

What did I mean? I could not explain myself.

“Do you have a comb?”

“Ye’uh… Ma’am.”

She clambered slowly down again, groped inside the dry shower stall and brought out a dingy ceramic fibre comb, Panhandle issue. Her hand flailed piteously as she tried to hand it over; and yet the same thought flashed on me as had come when I first saw her. Somehow she was untouched . She was not only the youngest member of my ‘team’, she was nothing like the rest of us: weary criminals, outlaws fallen from high places. She had been cared for, loved and treasured; and become a zombie on Death Row without ever losing that bloom. It was a mystery. What the hell had she done? Was she a psycho? What had made this gentle nineteen-year-old so dangerous?

“Turn around.”

I loosened her braids, combed out her wilful mass of hair and set it in order again, as if I were her mother. It was the sweetest thing. I was glad she was turned away, so she couldn’t see the tears in my eyes.

“There. That’ll do for a while.”

She faced me again, another painful, laborious shift. “Th… an’… you.”

I had run out of excuses to touch her. “Shall I come again?”

She struggled fiercely. “Yes… I like… that.”

The fourth session was a practical. We had been warned on our room screens, but it came as a shock. The dayroom chairs and the booth where Big Nurse sat had gone: as soon as the fourteen of us had arrived, the doors closed and we were plunged into a simulation. A grassy plain, scattered trees, and a herd of large animals coming over the horizon… Disoriented, bewildered, we cooperated like castaways. The consensus decision was that we should treat these furred, pawed, sabre-toothed bison-things as potential transport. We tried to catch a young one, so we could tame it. My God, it was a disaster, but it was fun. I had to set a broken bone. Koffi, tough guy, got through it without any pain relief; we discussed bottom-up pharmacology and bull-riding.

Sista and Angie (who had announced that she no longer wanted to be called Servalan) started bunking together, and no retribution descended. Gee hustled me for a simulated childbirth drama: thankfully I had no control over what the system chose to throw at us. I found out I’d been wrong about Bimbam the addict. She was not addicted to any recreational drug. She was a former school teacher, amateur mule. Her problem was a little girl of seven, and a little boy of five, from whom she’d been separated for two years. In prison on earth she’d had visiting rights, on screen. Now she would never see them again. She crawled back towards life, carrying the wounds that would never heal. Drummer, too, crawled back to life. He asked us to call him Achmed, his real name. But he would never be easy company: a man who believed himself damned to all eternity, separated from GOD.

Once, I walked along the curving corridor and saw someone oddly familiar, oddly far in the distance, coming to meet me: a trick of perspective. I was mystified by a huge feeling of foreboding, then saw that it was myself. I was walking towards myself. I turned and ran; another figure ran ahead of me, always at vanishing point. I reached my own cabin, my nameplate. I clutched at the glassy surface of the door, sweating.