A Planet for Rent (25 page)

The third, the smallest, is for Jowe.

Their leader is the first to take her clothes off, climb into her nook, and put on her biosensors.

But she waits until the others follow her lead before injecting herself with the mixture of antifreeze and metabolism-inhibitor drugs.

Adam programs the automatic controls of the
Hope
to bring them out of their frozen sleep as soon as the shining lights of Tau Ceti are close enough.

And to steer them prudently away from any dangerous asteroids.

As soon as all three are in their “coffins,” cautious Friga watches to see that both men have stuck in their syringes before she does the same.

When Adam feels the drowsiness and the cold running through his veins, he activates the second phase.

The cryogel comes bubbling into their coffins.

The drowsiness of cold is overtaking them...

The conjunction of the low-temperature colloid, the antifreeze, and the metabolic inhibitors will reduce them to unconsciousness and keep their vital functions virtually suspended while the
Hope
slowly consumes light-minutes, light-days, and finally whole light-years.

Theoretically...

Friga is the first to realize that something’s gone wrong.

In spite of the drug in her veins, the cold stabs at her with icy needles that will not let her lapse into unconsciousness.

A few seconds later, the discomfort is turning into pain.

Pain, pain...

Her entire body is cold, but it burns.

And her still-active lungs need air.

Air that they can’t get, with her whole body submerged in cryogel.

Air, air...

Friga gasps desperately, and a huge gulp of the frozen substance enters her mouth, her stomach, and her lungs.

It’s as bitter as death...

The drug is jumbling her thoughts: death?

She’s drowning!

And she has to live!

Panic overcomes her: she twists, struggles, swallows more gulps of the repulsive, frozen mixture that envelops her in place of the life-saving air she needs.

Her lungs ache and terror commands her to flee.

Flee, out, into the air, whatever the cost.

Calm down, there’s a way out...

Her fingers feel around for the latch to open the lid.

The latch won’t open.

Adam outdid himself on the security system: cryogel is very expensive, and the coffins are designed so that they can’t be opened until the pumps have extracted the last drop of frozen colloid from them.

Not even from the inside...

And there’s no command for activating the pumps before the deadline set on the computer expires.

Friga, overwhelmed by claustrophobia, beats furiously against the coffin’s transparent steel-glass housing.

As if through a veil of terror, she feels the banging of the two dying men who are also struggling to escape.

The steel-glass in the lid is a very resistant material.

A coffin.

Buried alive, dead, dead...

No!

The huge muscles of the woman with a man’s strength strain until their fibers are at the breaking point.

And they produce a miracle.

The steel-glass in the lid is a very resistant material... much more resistant than the synplast joints around the rim of the freezer.

The entire lid comes off, cryogel goes flying, and Friga, half-suffocated, rolls onto the floor, her whole body aching and half-frozen.

But alive!

She coughs, expelling the bitter colloid from her lungs.

She
breathes
... and runs to help the others.

Swaying from the shock of her near asphyxiation, the drug-induced drowsiness clouding her mental processes, she only manages to pick up a hydraulic wrench... and break the two men’s freezer lids.

Adam is already still, his mouth and eyes open.

The expression of surprise on his face is like the look of a fish out of water.

Jowe is struggling, with the cold obstinacy of instinct, but with less and less strength.

When he gets out, he and Friga, half-fainting, try clumsily and desperately to revive their “super-handyman.”

They know that their lives depend on his skill...

Cardiac massage, electric defibrillator, the same neurostimulant that they both injected into themselves with trembling fingers to erase the stupefaction brought on by the metabolic inhibitors.

Nothing works.

Adam has drowned, and he stays dead.

Worn out by their futile struggle, naked, sticky with cryogel, covered with bruises, the surviving man and woman fall asleep, weeping and splashing over the lanky cadaver.

They have no strength for more.

Much less to face the crisis.

Six hours later, encased in his improvised shroud, what had been Adam goes tumbling off through the hatch.

Friga and Jowe watch it go, silently.

There’s nothing to be said...

Their provisions will last two weeks.

They scrape off the cryogel, already half solidified, clean the grubby deck, check the instruments.

For three days they try to repair the suspended animation system.

The broken lids on the freezer are the easy part...

But meticulous Jowe discovers, and shows to Friga, the real problem.

The patrol ship’s attack damaged the Freon tubing, and some of the refrigerant leaked.

The cryogel never cooled down to the temperature (near absolute zero) necessary for bringing about anabiosis.

They could fix the tubing, but they have no stores of Freon.

Or of cryogel.

Maybe Adam could have rigged something up...

Adam is dead.

Friga blasts her bad luck, curses God and the Virgin and all the saints, asks Satan and Moloch and Zeus, anybody, for help, breaks things.

Jowe, quiet, watches her with dead eyes.

When the woman lets her fury abate from sheer weariness, Jowe touches her on the shoulder and points to the controls of the one remaining hyperengine.

Friga looks at him furiously, as if she’d like to squash him, but gives an almost imperceptible nod.

They both know that they’re down to their last resort now.

Friga’s fingers tremble above the activation switch for the hyperengine.

Under her breath she chants a meaningless prayer in which she asks all the gods to watch over her, and glances at Jowe from the corner of her eye.

Jowe’s lips aren’t moving.

His eyes, as dead as ever.

She switches on the hyperengine.

This second time, the strange sensations of spatio-temporal contraction no longer surprise the two survivors of the
Hope
.

Now they can almost wallow in the vertigo and disorientation of the hyperspace transit.

After an indeterminate time, the second and last engine also quits, and three-dimensional space once more receives the
Hope
.

Friga and Jowe repress any possible rejoicing (after all, they’re still alive!) as they wait for the onboard computer to identify their new position.

As the data begin to form a holographic image, Friga breathes easier.

It looks like they’re in luck.

A star with several planets that look very promising... And the
Hope
is almost inside the system.

It will only take a few hours to reach any of these planets with the plasma reactors.

Friga doesn’t know much about astronomy.

Jowe, a little more.

That is why he grows pale as the data continue appearing and forming the map.

That G-type main-sequence star and the constellations surrounding it are familiar to him...

Too familiar.

Friga, who’s feeling safe now, can’t understand why her companion’s face keeps growing longer and longer.

Until the two dots appear on the radar, and the authoritarian voice rings in her headphones:

“Unidentified ship, Planetary Security patrol ship VV.98 here. Prepare for boarding. Offer no resistance or you will be destroyed.”

Then the strong woman understands, and she howls, punching the control panel.

“Nooo...! Not the rebound effect! It’s not fair!”

Friga has calmed down... seemingly.

She drums her fingers against the control panel, and now and then strokes the minimachine gun and the vibroblade she keeps hidden in her clothing.

Jowe stares into the infinite, saying nothing.

Why bother?

In her paroxysm of fury, Friga already said it all.

“We can’t possibly have such bad luck! As vast as the cosmos is, coming right back here! Adam only mentioned the rebound effect as a curiosity! Something that happens one time out of ten thousand!”

Jowe stares at the cosmos, and nobody could know what he’s thinking.

Probably laughing about the ironic fate that brought them so close to freedom, only to deal them this masterstroke now.

Or thinking about how frustrated his friend Moy will be, waiting for him in Ningando.

Or about the long years awaiting him and Friga in Body Spares when they’re sentenced for attempted unlawful departure from the planet.

But he doesn’t say anything.

Just like Friga, when the first patrol ship boards the
Hope
, he passively, meekly lets himself be led away by Planetary Security agents.

They don’t even handcuff them.

Why bother?

In space, there’s nowhere to run.

Like her, he stares out the porthole at the battered and abandoned homemade ship, watching it shrink as the patrol ship pulls away under the power of its inertial engine.

When the explosive charges that the agents placed on their ship before abandoning it blow the
Hope
to pieces, Jowe keeps on watching the bits, unspeaking.

From his right eye, a single tear falls.

Friga doesn’t waste her energy on tears.

She takes advantage of the moment of the explosion to whip out her weapons, then quickly and deftly elbows aside both agents restraining her.

Now she’s free.

Frida is the sort of woman who never surrenders.

She knew that the damaged
Hope
couldn’t escape, and it couldn’t fight two patrol ships at once while keeping her alive.

That’s the only reason she let them take her away.

Patrol ship versus patrol ship is a more even match.

And she’s already aboard one of them...

She only has to get rid of three crewmembers.

Her against three: child’s play.

She’s fought against worst odds.

Onboard a patrol ship, there’s even artificial gravity, like being on Earth.

That makes things easier.

Friga has never been beaten in hand-to-hand combat.

She machine-guns the farthest one in the belly.

Sticks the vibroblade into another one’s chest before he can finish drawing his gun.

Struck by the third, she grips his neck in a stranglehold with her powerful arm, and squeezes, and squeezes, at the same time smashing his face with her knee.

Three seconds later, the Planetary Security guy is still struggling, though he should be strangled already and his neck should be broken.

Friga wonders why his blood isn’t spilling out and staining the floor like it should.

This agent has a strong neck...

And where’s Jowe?

Why isn’t he helping out?

That’s when she feels the blow to the back of her head.

Surprised and hurting, she turns around just in time to catch the next pistol-whip right in the face.

She falls, letting go of her captive, unable to understand how someone with a vibroblade plunged hilt-deep in his chest can strike with such force.

She’s about to get up, but the agent with his belly blasted open by machine-gun fire steps on her fingers and then kicks her.

Friga comprehends two things before fainting.

The first comes from the gleam of metal under the pseudoguts of the supposed Planetary Security agent.

That he isn’t a human being, but a huborg.

Just like the other two.

At least she wasn’t defeated by humans...

The second thing, as she wanders into the fog of unconsciousness, comes to her when she looks out through a porthole and identifies what she sees floating off into the vastness of space.

If she weren’t so tired... if the darkness weren’t so welcoming... she’d laugh uproariously.

Because now she knows where Jowe is.

Because, in spite of it all, in a way he’s made it.

He’ll never be sent back to Body Spares.

Now his destination is the infinite.

No spacesuit, frozen, a corpse.

But free.

At last, once and for all, completely
free
.

October 3, 1998

Once, Earth was brimming with futurologists.

Once, when Contact was just a nightmare to be found in the books of a few pessimistic science fiction writers...

Back then, futurologists seemed to have a monopoly on optimism. It wasn’t a fact that any point in the past was always better. The future would always be brighter, more human, richer, more ecological, more...

Or, otherwise, it would simply not be.

The most pessimistic of these latter-day augurs only went so far as to imagine the possibility that Homo sapiens, with their nuclear weapons (or their biological weapons, or their waste—there were several apocalypses to choose from), would destroy their civilization and their race. And maybe the planet as a whole, while they were at it, but how many actors care what happens on stage after they exit the scene?

In any case, the decision about the future depended entirely on man. The choices seemed very limited: either rational development at a dizzying pace, or suicide.

But the xenoids showed up, and apparently they didn’t know about futurology and didn’t care. At least, not human futurology.

Following the xenoids’ Ultimatum, the augurs lost their monopoly on the future. So did the rest of the human race.

All that Homo sapiens had left was the present, like a bone thrown to a dog to gnaw on after its master has gorged on all the meat.

No more “predictions of the world fifty years from now.” Or ten years... or even tomorrow.

Every morning, every human wakes up in fear and hope, to discover, to his dismay but also relief, that he is still there. It was no nightmare. The xenoids exist, and they’re the masters. And nobody knows what they’ll decide tomorrow.

Social workers, Body Spares, erasing the memories of humans who travel off Earth, the Auyar huborgs taking the place of fallible humans in Planetary Security, mass-produced mestizos, Earth’s history and ecology sold wholesale...

Nobody could have imagined it before.

Nobody knows what will come next.

Even the descendants of those pessimistic science fiction writers have stopped imagining and writing, overwhelmed by the dizzying madness of reality.

But just as a man condemned to death knows that no pardon will come, everybody knows that this situation is just a strange interregnum, that it can’t last long.

And everybody is scared; if it’s hard now, what will it be like later?

Better the frying pan you know than the fire you don’t...

Some visionaries try desperately to find a way out.

Earth discovering some new form of superultralight propulsion and abandoning the solar system and the galaxy, getting far away from the xenoid vultures who gnaw our livers every night, only for us to have them grow back the next day.

Earth discovering the ultimate weapon and threatening the galaxy with annihilation if they don’t let us emerge from underdevelopment once and for all.

Earth discovering the ultimate drug to stop death and aging, and giving it to the galaxy in exchange for being allowed to have our own, self-determined future.

But the scientist-serfs toiling away in their laboratory-slave barracks know all too well that science won’t be the solution. No matter what gets invented, there aren’t enough resources to deploy it on a large enough scale to compete with the xenoids.

Others speak of human dignity and propose mass suicide for Earth. Better not to be than to be slaves.

But psychologists know all too well that life and the instinct for self-preservation are too strong. Much stronger than pride and despair... The entire Earth will not become a new Numantia or a new Sagunto. Better slaves of the xenoid Romans than dead...

Others, even more divorced from reality, dream of the galactic act of altruism that will at some future date give this terrestrial colony its freedom to develop. As England so graciously did for India at the end of World War II.

They forget that Queen Elizabeth II only sent her last viceroy, Lord Louis Mountbatten, to give the subcontinent its independence when she could no longer control it. When neither the Englishmen nor their sepoys could continue to lord over millions of people.

So long as the xenoid Englishmen and their Planetary Tourism Agency sepoys continue to control Earth, there will be no independence. Nobody gives away the goose that lays the golden eggs until he’s forced to.

Some put their faith in time, which can wear away stone, so that decadence may capture the exhausted old xenoid races and make their empire fall, much as Rome collapsed.

Historians disagree: no empire falls on its own, if it has no shrieking barbarians hammering on the doors of its city walls. Spartacus’ rebellion was heroic, but it failed...

Others believe in even more illogical and unlikely things. In the Second Coming of Christ (or of Muhammad, or of Buddha, or of Joseph Smith...) as a Lion, not a Lamb, to drive out the demonic non-human races from the world of His children.

Or that God, or Something Cosmic and Indefinable called (for lack of a better name) “homeostatic justice,” will inevitably punish the xenoids’ wickedness and highhandedness with stellar cataclysms and devastating plagues, compared with which the magenta illness of Colossa will seem like a minor rash.

But even the most orthodox believers are starting to believe that God, if He does exist, might not be on the humans’ side...

Other trust that a mighty and overpowering race will appear from beyond the galaxy, enslaving all the Milky Way and putting the masters and servants of today at the same level...

Many sects hold and secret ideas and theories and indulge in endless debates about the possible futures of Earth and the galaxy. Nobody lifts a finger to bring about the futures they say they believe in.

Of course, it’s not all talk and no action...

The famously irredentist Xenophobe Union for Earthling Liberation does act. Though their motto, “It matters not if a hundred humans die, so long as one single xenoid dies or leaves,” seemingly ignores the fact that there are many more xenoids than there are humans, their bombs and attacks at least annoy the planet’s extraterrestrial masters.

The bad part is that the Union, like many pre-Contact terrorist organizations, has nothing resembling a liberation strategy. Just tactics, and not very brilliant ones at that. Nearly a hundred humans do die for every xenoid... Planetary Security is much more efficient.

They have no plan for taking the power now held by the Planetary Tourism Agency, nor would they know how to keep it... Following the ideas of Bakunin and Nechayev, they just keep trying over and over again to jab their bee stings into the monstrous oppressor’s tough hide. And, like bees, they often die trying. And the monster scratches at the stings, smiles, and keeps on going.

The Xenophobe Union for Earthling Liberation has even been accused many times of playing into the xenoids’ hands, serving only as an outlet for human aggression and frustration. Draining to death the forces that should be organizing to struggle for life...

The unidentified leaders of the Union haven’t even gone to the trouble of refuting these charges.

Many think they wouldn’t be able to...

Life goes on, the years go by, the present seems like it will last forever and always be the same in spite of all the changes that give the impression that Earth is moving into the future.

Ordinary humans, the famous “moral majority,” are tired of impossible futures even before they get here.

The question remains: What fate awaits a race that has lost faith in the future, idolizes the past, and puts up with the present?

It seems the futurologists were wrong, and in reality, for Earth, everything before Contact was better.

Homo sapiens, forever trapped in a present that doesn’t belong to them and they don’t determine, can only aspire to one thing: that the hypothetical and frightful future will never arrive. That the present will last forever.

Fearing that, as things stand, any change can only be for the worse...