The Martian Viking Read online

"From the moon?"

  "You're not leaving this minute, for Christ's sake," she said angrily. "Stop trying to make me pity you."

  "It won't be long before I'll be there, Ronnie. And I'm really not trying to make you pity me. It's just the way things are, that's all."

  Smitty had lost interest in the conversation, and was playing with the dinosaur again, his piping voice roaring away in the background.

  "Smitty!" his mother shouted. "Stop making so much goddamn noise!"

  The boy became silent and looked at her resentfully. He took the dinosaur into the bedroom with him.

  "Going in to join the repairman, huh, Smitty?" Johnsmith said to the boy.

  Smitty turned toward the screen to reply one last time, but his mother looked at him warningly. "Yeah, gonna play in there, Dad. See you."

  "You might at least let me hold a conversation with my own son," Johnsmith said, as Smitty closed the bedroom door. "I'll probably never see him again in the flesh."

  "Don't be so melodramatic." But Ronindella knew that what he said was true. Life would be a lot easier when Johnsmith was on the moon. Half of his wages would be sent to her automatically by the government, for child support. He'd be more useful to her up there than he ever was here on earth.

  "Goodbye, Johnsmith," Ronindella said, ending the phone conversation. "And good luck."

  "Goodbye, Ronnie," He watched her flick the connection off. Her face narrowed, shrank to a tiny rainbow point, and vanished. "And fuck you, too."

  Alderdice was wheezing badly by the time he got out of the sun. He used his passcard to get inside Biberkopf's building, slumping against a paint-peeling vestibule wall to wipe his dark face while he waited for it to clear. Full employment was a laudable goal, and he was certainly glad to have a job, but on days like this he almost wished that he were doing something else—anything else. The trouble with that wish was that it might come true, and he'd soon be doing something else, all right, but doing it in a lunar mine.

  The notion motivated him to start climbing the stairs. He comforted himself with the thought that the life of a public servant was never an easy one, as he labored up toward the fourteenth floor, where Biberkopf's effapt was located. He had discovered on his first visit to this building that the elevator didn't work, much to his dismay. He was usually glad that the Conglom didn't require biannual physicals anymore, but it occurred to him that he might be in better shape if they did. Wheezing, he took a break on the landing between the fifth and sixth floors.

  After a short rest, he pressed on, climbing one flight after another, deliberately and ponderously. At last he reached the fourteenth floor, stopping again to catch his breath. Doors were lined up on either side of the corridor, inches separating each occupant's effapt from his neighbor's. Biberkopf lived at N-39, about halfway down the hall on the left.

  Alderdice fumbled in his pocket until his fingers found the sound scoop. He pointed it at the door and it picked up a voice from the other side, channeling it to Alderdice subaudibly. Breathing a long sigh of relief at finding the suspect at home, he listened carefully.

  Biberkopf was talking. It didn't sound as if anybody else was with him, though. He must have been on the phone. Yes, he could hear a woman's tinny voice, definitely coming in over the phone. She was trying to end the conversation. After she cut the connection, Biberkopf uttered an obscenity. After that, the effapt was silent.

  TWO

  WELL, THAT WAS that. All Johnsmith had to look forward to now was the Triple-S and a short life in the airless void. The screen faded to a dull gray, which he fancied the perfect metaphor for his state of mind at that moment. He slumped into a chair and wondered how his life had ever come to this. He'd tried to be a good teacher, a good parent, a good husband. His intentions had come to little as far as Ronindella was concerned. They'd been married in the Video Church of God, just as Ronindella had wanted, though Johnsmith hadn't been brought up in any organized religion himself—his father had seen to that—and had always vaguely considered the wedding a compromise of his principles. In fact, it seemed that life with Ronindella had been mostly a series of such soul-killing compromises, when he thought about it. He couldn't remember her ever giving in on anything.

  He had become less compromising in his profession as his marriage had soured, though. Maybe that was why he had forced himself into an unyielding position at the University, secretly knowing that his rigidity would lead to his downfall, and ultimately to a divorce.

  But that was so irrational. Why exile himself to the dark side of the moon just to get rid of Ronindella?

  He stared at the bare wall of his effapt, wondering if he really was that self-destructive. It was possible. After all, he never could have left Ronindella. She'd been forced to throw him out, or there wouldn't have been any end to their marriage. It had to end, though; there was no doubt about it.

  His gaze wandered to his jacket, slung across a chair by the door. He had tossed it there when he came in. The onees were in the inside pocket, weren't they?

  He got up and grabbed the jacket, bunching its synthetic weave in one hand while he felt for the film canister. There it was. He took the canister out and looked at it. To hell with using the onees tomorrow. He would take them now.

  Twisting the cap off the canister, he looked inside at three silver dots, almost like ball bearings, only slightly larger. So these were onees . . . .

  How did one go about this? He could get a pair of tweezers and pick one out. You had to be cautious with onees, they said. But why should he be careful? If anybody on earth had nothing to lose at that moment, it was Johnsmith Biberkopf. If he went insane or died, what would it matter? At least Smitty would get his insurance credit . . .maybe not, come to think of it . . .the Triple-S board might decide that it was intentional inducement of psychosis, or something else that would mean they had no legal obligation to pay up. If the onees totally short-circuited his nervous system, as rumor had it sometimes happened, he would be pronounced brain dead, legally a suicide. Then Smitty would get nothing at all.

  It would be Ronindella's problem then, wouldn't it? Maybe the "repairman" could help out with the bills . . . .

  Johnsmith tipped the canister so that the three tiny spheres rolled into his palm.

  He had imagined that the effect would start in his hand and work its way up his arm and through the rest of his body. That was probably what had actually happened, in picoseconds, but it didn't feel like that. It felt as if he had just stepped off the edge of something into nothing. He was swimming through a churning sea, each stroke changing the color of the water—blue, green, yellow, orange, red, purple, blue—right through the spectrum. The water was flowing coolly around him, its pressure constant against his naked skin. His ears were stopped up and bubbles tickled the insides of his nostrils. It was too goddamn much. Maybe if he just floated for a while, the shifting, synthetic dream world would change a little more gradually.

  But it didn't. Instead, it became a whirlpool, vertiginous tints dragging him down, colors swirling into a dark spiral that threatened to swallow him. He was scared, finding it hard to remind himself that this was just a sensory input illusion, triggered by his own electrical charge. The information passing into his nervous system couldn't be controlled, of course. That was what was dangerous about onees.

  The thing to do was relax and enjoy the sensations. Either that or drop the damn things. He looked down at his hand, opening his fingers to see the three minute spheres gleaming in the blackness.

  "You're the only things that are real," he said. "Just you and me, guys. We're real. The rest of this is just some sort of entertainment feeding in through the nerve endings, right?"

  As intense as the sensual bombardment was, he did not drop the onees. He clutched them so tightly that his nails dug painfully into his palm. He just had to remember that he could get out of this at any time. But everything was changing so fast that he had a hard time remembering that.

  He wasn't sinking anymore. N
ow he was bobbing on a fogbound surface, Odysseus washed onto shore to be discovered by Nausicaa. But there was no shore in sight. Nothing but the fog, impenetrable and curling above the nearly still sea. The smell of salt water was powerful, and his ears were still plugged up, but the water seemed warmer than a few moments ago.

  He floated on his back, at peace with the world. This was all right. This was very nice, in fact.

  And then he heard something splashing in the distance. It splashed again. Every few seconds, the sound repeated itself, and it was getting louder. Whatever it was, it was coming closer. Johnsmith was scared. He forgot about the onees. This was just too real. For all he knew, this was the real reality, and the other reality, the one he had left behind, was the fake.

  Which meant that he was at the mercy of this thing coming through the fog toward him.

  He was so scared that his bowels let loose. Heart pounding wildly, Johnsmith thought that he should be ashamed of his cowardice, but he wasn't. He only wanted to get away from here before the encroaching thing was on top of him.

  But it was too late.

  It burst through the fog, a serpent's head on a long, sinuous neck. A dinosaur? No, more like a dragon. The head was stylized, ornamented, inanimate—it was the prow of a ship.

  A Viking ship!

  Johnsmith swallowed a mouthful of water as the graceful long ship glided by. He could clearly see the men in the bow, their long hair and beards matted from the salt air, their tarnished helmets dented, their round shields strapped to the hull as they pulled at the oars. Their king, a huge man standing on the deck, peered over the side, hearing Johnsmith cough.

  The king shouted something incomprehensible at his men, and the oars on the starboard side were shipped en masse. The long ship swung back toward Johnsmith, who screamed, taking more salt water into his lungs and coughing. He flailed wildly, trying to swim away from the long ship. An oar was extended toward him by one of the Vikings.

  It was at that moment that Johnsmith dropped the onees.

  Light blossomed out of the foggy night. He was still sitting in his living room, his breath ragged, his heart pounding.

  "Jesus," he breathed. For several minutes, he couldn't quite believe that he was back in his apartment, dry and alone. He'd read enough about the Vikings to know what would have happened if they had gotten their hands on him . . . .

  But how could they get their hands on him? They were nothing more than neural impulses, figures in a synthetic dream. They couldn't really hurt him.

  It was then that he smelled his own shit. That part of the dream had been real enough, it seemed. Shame-faced, Johnsmith carefully got to his feet with the intention of changing his clothes.

  After using a full day's allotment of water in the shower, he put on his green kimono and returned to the living room, grateful to be clean once again. He was certain that there was plenty of life left in the onees, if he could find them among the debris. He hadn't cleaned this effapt since he'd moved in six weeks ago.

  One of the onees lay gleaming on the rug. Using a matchbook cover, Johnsmith knelt and guided the tiny sphere into the film canister. Next time, he would use only one, at least at the beginning. The intensity of the oneiric images had made him forget where he really was.

  Still, he thought as he crawled on his hands and knees, he had enjoyed the onees until he got scared. If he only took one at a time, there would still be some anchor in reality, most likely. A more gradual descent into the subconscious would be wise. But what the hell, he'd rarely acted so spontaneously. He was proud of himself, in a perverse way. He was okay now; quite relaxed, in fact. The experience had done him good, shocked him out of his depressed state.

  He spied another onee, under his chair. On hands and knees, he used the matchbook again, scooping it up. His heart was beating at a normal rate now, and he felt pretty good. It had been exciting, meeting up with a shipful of Vikings.

  They probably hadn't been Vikings at all. With his Beowulf fixation, he must have imagined Geats. That could have been King Hygelac's long ship. Indeed, the height of the man on the deck suggested a giant, which, by all accounts, Hygelac had been. Or maybe it was Hygelac's nephew, Beowulf himself. Johnsmith figured that all that stuff was rattling around inside his brain, so it was probably what the onees had brought out and made real to him.

  He finally gave up without finding the third onee. Maybe it had fallen between the louvers of the floor vent. If so, it would go to one of the trash bins downstairs, and would be as hard to find as the proverbial needle in the haystack. It would be compacted and added to one of the trash islands in the harbor, where some derelict might stumble on it and have an experience that wine could never provide. At least, he hoped so. It was more likely, of course, that the onee would be buried so deeply that it would lie dormant until its potential was gone.

  Well, at least he had two of them left. Now that he knew first hand what they were like, he was actually considering taking them tomorrow when he appeared before the Triple-S inquisitors. Maybe he really could get out of going to the moon.

  Or maybe they'd put him in cold storage for a while. After all, he'd be breaking the law, wouldn't he? Come to think of it, even though it was against the law to buy or sell onees, was it illegal to have them in your possession? It didn't seem possible that you could have them if you hadn't bought them . . .unless, of course, somebody had given them to you. And that was exactly what had happened, wasn't it? Ryan Effner had given them to him, without solicitation of any kind.

  So maybe he could get away with it. And even if he didn't, wasn't a few years in stasis better than spending the rest of his life completely off the planet?

  It was something to think about. And since he had to be at Triple-S at nine in the morning, the time to think about it was now. But he didn't want to just hang around here brooding. Without even putting on his jacket, he went impulsively to the door.

  As he threw it open, he saw a fat, black man standing in the hall, holding something that looked like a fountain pen.

  "Can I help you?" Johnsmith asked.

  "I'm looking for someone . . . ."

  "What's the name?"

  "Uh, Judy . . .Judy Takahashi."

  "Well, I don't know anybody by that name," Johnsmith said, staring at the thing in the guy's hand. "But there are a lot of people moving in and out of these apts all the time."

  "Well, she just moved in, and I'm not too sure of the apt number."

  "I see." At that moment, Johnsmith recognized the gleaming, black object as the guy shoved it into his pocket. It was a sound scoop; he'd seen a dimensional picture of one in Pixine a few weeks ago.

  "If I meet Judy Takahashi, I'll tell her you're looking for her," Johnsmith said. "Of course, it isn't likely I'll meet her, since there are over a hundred and fifty apartments on this floor, but who knows?"

  "Yeah, right. Who knows?"

  "What's your name?" Johnsmith asked.

  "Uh, Sonny. My name's Sonny."

  Johnsmith waited for the expected follow-up question, but it didn't come. He offered the usual information anyway. "My name is Johnsmith Biberkopf."

  "Glad to meet you, sir." Sonny stuck out his hand.

  As Johnsmith shook it, he noticed that it was slippery with sweat. It made sense that Sonny would be perspiring heavily after walking up fourteen flights. And yet, the guy didn't seem winded, overweight as he was. Johnsmith began to suspect that Sonny had been listening at his door for quite a while. Maybe he was a P.A. Of course, the official government line was that there was no such thing as a P.A. P.A.s were unconstitutional, but since when did the administration give a shit about that? Everybody knew that they existed, both to provide full employment and to make sure people didn't get out of space service.

  "Would you like to come inside?" Johnsmith said, figuring what the hell? If they wanted to keep an eye on him, why not? He wasn't going anywhere. Except to the moon. "We can call the directory and find out which effapt is your friend's."
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  The P.A.—if that's what he really was—looked around uncertainly, and then said, "Thanks. I think I will."

  "Cup of coffee?" Johnsmith asked as he shut the door behind Sonny. "I was just about to make some."

  "Sounds good," Sonny replied, looking around at the tiny, sparsely furnished cubicle.

  "Have a seat," Johnsmith said, gesturing at the meter-wide, plastic table where he ate his meals.

  "Coffee's one of my few luxuries nowadays," Johnsmith said, measuring out spoonfuls into the coffee maker. "This is a real antique. My grandmother owned it. It's all I kept after the divorce."

  Sonny didn't say anything.

  "I moved here after my wife and I split up," Johnsmith said, and then, thinking what the hell, said: "To tell you the truth, my wife threw me out."

  "Oh," said Johnsmith's guest, "I'm sorry."

  Sonny didn't seem very surprised, though, which made Johnsmith's suspicion deepen. A P.A. would surely already know that he was divorced, would know all about him, in fact, and would doubtless perceive his newfound bachelorhood symptomatic of the nonproductivity that had led to his present dilemma. A Pre-Emptive Agent would also be certain that somebody like Johnsmith deserved to be drafted.

  "I'm going to appear before the Triple-S tomorrow," Johnsmith said.

  "Really?" Sonny did seem surprised by that, but perhaps only at the manner in which Johnsmith had blurted it out. Most people didn't talk about their bad luck that much. Now that Johnsmith had the P.A. off balance, though, he might as well keep at it. "A few minutes ago, I used onees for the first time in my life," he said.

  Sonny didn't say anything at all. Johnsmith supposed that his own candor wouldn't inspire his unexpected guest to tell him the truth, but maybe it would make the bastard think twice about what he was doing here, if he was in fact a P.A. Johnsmith wondered how somebody who did what Sonny did for a living could sleep at night.

  "A friend gave them to me, thinking that if I held them in my hand at the Triple-S hearing, I might be judged unfit for service. I doubt that it would work, and I don't think I'd have the nerve to do that, anyway, so I took them as a sort of farewell to civilian life. Does that make any sense to you?"