Space Magic (28 page)

Babette gave me a look as hard and cold as the vacuum outside the door. “This is all your fault! You sent me on a wild goose chase!” She pulled the chip from her cleavage and threw it at me.

I let it bounce off of me and land on the floor. It clattered lightly across the tiles. “Guilty.”

Babette sat down on the floor and pushed back her hair with both hands, holding her head as though she were trying to keep it from exploding. “I
tried
to tell y’all... Why wouldn’t y’all just save yourselves?”

Gary and Mira looked at each other across Babette. Their shared history stretched between them like a strand of barbed wire wrapped around both their hearts. “Babette,” I said as gently as I could, “nothing you could have said would have kept either of them from trying to help someone in a vacuum emergency.”

“Janet’s faceplate blew off when
Chimera
’s hull gave way,” Gary said in a voice that echoed from a well ten years deep. “There was nothing we could do but watch her die.”

“If only I had taken as much care on her suit’s seals as I did on the paint job...” Mira whispered.

“It was my spaceframe design that failed,” said Gary. “The suit would have been fine if the hull breach hadn’t been so catastrophic.”

“The inquest held that it was faulty materials in both the frame and the suit,” I explained quietly to Babette. There was no point in repeating the fact to either Gary or Mira; I knew that facts alone could not open the locks of their personal hells.

Mira crumpled into a ball under the sinks. “I can’t believe how much it still hurts,” she muttered to her knees, then raised her head to Gary. “How could you bear to see me again, after the pain I’ve caused you?”

“I hoped that ten years might be enough time for you to learn to forgive me. Besides, I couldn’t pass up the twenty-fifth convention.” Gary’s throat worked, and two little wrinkles appeared between his eyebrows. I thought it meant he was about to cry, but then I swallowed too.

My ears popped.

“The pressure’s dropping,” I said.

It didn’t take us long to find the problem; the seal at the bottom of the door was hissing audibly. “Damn it,” I said, “when will people learn not to step on the floor seal!” We stopped the leak with wet paper towels, but it had obviously been going the whole time we’d been in here. Gary and I both knew what that might mean.

“Does either of you have a gavel?” he said.

TecoCon had been using the Black Lion Inn for almost twenty years now, and some of us had managed to wangle key cards with staff access privileges. For reasons unknown, the staff called them “gavels.” But neither Mira nor I had one on us.

“I do.” Babette dug in her little purse and handed the card to Gary.

Before I could ask her where she had gotten it, Gary slotted the card into the maintenance panel next to the light switch, which obediently popped open. “Damn.” He tapped the oxygen meter. “Empty.”

“How can we be out of air already?” said Mira. “We haven’t even been in here for an hour!”

“In an interior room like this,” Gary explained, “the emergency air system is only designed to maintain the balance of oxygen and carbon dioxide if the ventilation goes. With the overall pressure dropping, the stupid thing did its best to maintain the partial pressure of O2 by releasing more oxygen. That masked the larger problem until its little tank was empty.”

“So how long do we have?” I asked.

Gary eyeballed the room. “Call it 50 cubic meters, standard orbital pressure, four people... maybe five hours.”

“We can’t just wait for help,” said Mira. “I was stuck for more than five hours when we had that airlock problem back in ’51, and that wasn’t even a full-blown emergency.”

We explored the space, but there wasn’t a lot to work with—even the storage for paper products was outside the room. “Maybe there’s frost on the outside of the door,” Mira said. “We could warm it with our hands, thaw out a message.”

Gary brought a hand to within a centimeter of the door, then drew it back. “Our fingers would freeze first.”

“What if we poked a little hole in the door seal, sent out a streamer of cloth?”

The two of them batted ideas back and forth like Ping-Pong balls for the next couple of minutes, falling into an old familiar rhythm—Mira coming up with wild, offbeat ideas and Gary figuring out how they could be made practical. Or, unfortunately, determining that they couldn’t.

“If we all yelled together...” said Babette.

I looked around. “Not much point. There’s vacuum outside those two walls, and on that side is the women’s room—even if there’s anyone there, they’re in no position to help us. What’s back there?”

Mira had been the convention’s liaison with the habitat for a couple of years and knew the floorplans by heart. “The bar. But it opens to the lobby, and I don’t think it had an emergency door.”

Gary pounded on the back wall and got the tinny thud of sound vanishing into a void. “Vacuum. How about above and below?”

“The whole lower level is air and water tanks. Above...” she pondered for a moment. “I think it’s the Mueller Ballroom.”

Gary looked up. “That explains why the ceiling is soundproofed.”

We all stared at it. Thick tiles of acoustic foam, and above that probably half a meter of ducts and lights. All of us shouting together wouldn’t be enough to be heard through that. But on the other side would be people who could help us.

We tried shouting, anyway. We tried standing on the toilets. We tried standing on the sinks. Gary tried lifting Mira up. Nothing got us through the foam. The closest we came was when Gary and I together lifted Babette, who scratched at the ceiling with her fingernails for a few moments before we all collapsed in a heap.

We lay gasping for a while, considering our options. They didn’t look good.

“I’m sorry about the Uncle Teco thing,” I said to Babette. “If I hadn’t sent you off on that snipe hunt none of us would be here now.”

“I just don’t understand it,” she said. “Y’all’re so smart—why’d y’all have to go and play a dumb prank like that?”

“Sending new kids to look for Uncle Teco is an old tradition,” Gary said. “It’s a way of making sure they meet everyone and visit every part of the convention. And helping to pull the same gag on the next one in line makes you feel like you’re part of a secret society.”

“But if there’s no Uncle Teco... why is the convention named after him?”

Mira sat next to Babette and put an arm around her shoulders. “The convention’s named after an old Internet mailing list,” she said. “Uncle Teco’s Homebrew Gravitics Club. Most of the people who started TecoCon met through the list. But there was never anyone named Uncle Teco. I don’t know why it was called that.”

“It was before your time,” Gary said. Though it was easy to assume Mira had been with us from the beginning, she hadn’t shown up until TecoCon 3. “Babette, do you know what a Yamaguchi coil is?”

“It’s the... whatsit that makes ships go Up. Gradient makes them.”

“Close enough. Back in the Twenties it wasn’t just Gradient—there were dozens of companies making coils. The technology was still fresh; every couple of months someone would bring out a new improved model and we’d all jump on it. And there was a period of about six months in ’23 when the best and hottest coil was a Shreveport Gravitics semi-super with part code NCATCO. We called it Unca’ Teco.”

“It was a bitch to stabilize,” I said, remembering the smell of hot solder and cheap beer. “I once stayed up until five in the morning ‘tickling Uncle Teco’s feet’ and even so the damn thing flipped right over the first time I took it Up.”

“Ken and I started the list in May of ’23, so the name was obvious. But by the time of the first TecoCon the hot coil was the Lift Systems GravBlazer and Uncle Teco was already forgotten. We kept the list name out of nostalgia, but I bet there aren’t five people at this convention who remember who he really was. Not even you, Mira.”

But Mira wasn’t listening to Gary. Ever since I’d told my last story her eyes had gone all distant. “We’ve been going about this all wrong,” she said. “We have to turn the problem on its head. Can you rewire it, Gary?”

I didn’t follow her at first, but Gary’s face lit up. “I think so, but it’ll be a heck of a drop.”

“Better a broken leg than asphyxiation. But what if we all stood on
our
heads first?”

A few minutes later Mira, Babette, and I were on our heads, with our backs against the walls and our feet in the air. Gary, having tried several ridiculous positions, had finally given up and was simply standing by the maintenance panel. “This is going to hurt,” he said, and reached in and twisted a control.

With a stomach-wrenching jerk, the room turned over—or rather, the gravity field provided by the room’s Yamaguchi coil did.

We fell two meters to the ceiling, crashing through the foam and winding up in a tangle of ductwork and electrical wiring. The two toilets flapped open, drenching me with water, but Mira and Babette were against the other wall and stayed dry. Gary landed on his side; he said he was “in a world of hurt” but nothing seemed broken.

We struggled to our feet, as disoriented by the sight of sinks and toilets above us as by the gravity shift. The few undamaged lights shining up from our feet gave the whole scene a surreal quality. But we soon cleared a square meter of ceiling and began stomping out an SOS.

It turned out the Space Guard was setting up their command post right there in the ballroom. They cut through the floor and had us out of there in less than an hour.

-o0o-

I brought Babette a cup of Red Cross coffee, with cream and sugar, and we sat side by side on a folding cot. All around us people bustled, pointing at charts and yammering into communicators, while on another cot nearby a medic was splinting Gary’s sprained wrist. Mira was sitting with him.

“So,” I said to Babette, “when did you figure out that Uncle Teco was a wild goose?”

“As soon as I saw the look Mira gave you when I asked about him.”

That took me aback. “You knew all along? So why did you go around looking for him anyway? And why did you tell Mira you thought he was in the bathroom?”

“Well... getting the two of them together at dinner didn’t work because Gary just ran away again, but I figured if I could lock them into an enclosed space for a while they might work things out. And a ‘dumb blonde’ on a snipe hunt can learn an awful lot about a habitat, like which bathrooms have only one entrance and which of the staff can be sweet-talked out of a gavel card.” She glanced over at Mira, who was talking quietly with Gary. “It worked, too, though not at all the way I’d planned.”

“Why?” I asked at last.

“The only way she and I could ever have a future together was to lay Janet’s ghost to rest, and the only way to do that was to reconcile her and Gary.”

I thought about that for a long while. “My hat’s off to you.” I raised my paper coffee cup. “To forgiveness.”

She tapped her cup against mine. “To the future.”

-o0o-

Mira came back the next year with a ship called
Uncle Teco
, a huge Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade balloon of a ship in the shape of a roly-poly man with big feet. Gary helped her out with the engineering, though he admitted to me she didn’t really need his help any more. That was a good thing, because he was so busy helping to put together the convention’s technical program he didn’t have a lot of time to work on art ships.

Babette came back with her. Many people were surprised, but a few of us knew just how much steel there was in that magnolia. And Mira was happier and more creative than she’d been in years.

And me? I fixed up
Michelangelo’s Dream
and came to the convention under my own power.

The view from the pilot’s seat was spectacular. But, as Gary said, it was mostly the people that made the trip worthwhile.

Theophile Nundaemon closed the book, shaking his head over the images he’d found therein. So sad, so mad... He closed his eyes and set the book aside, a few maroon particles of the decaying cover dusting the ormolu surface of the table.

Unobserved, a cleaner descended silently and snuffled the debris away. It sniffed at the book as well, but Theo’s scent on the cover indicated this was no discard. The little creature puffed itself up to grapefruit size and drifted off to its nest in the corner of the room. Immature cleaners peeped supersonically and opened wide their jaws.

Theo opened his eyes and stared out the window. Beyond the glass loomed the fog of endless night, and bulbous shapes drifting. Here and there a spotlight picked out the sigil of one or another House on a pennant or tail fin. The red bat of the Unknown Regalia... the silver spoon-and-circle of Theo’s own Guided Musings... and there, the gilded fish of the Pulp Revenants. Angrily Theo twisted the brass and crystal handle beneath the worn sill, and wooden slats snapped shut over the view.

How
dare
Kyrie summon the zombies again—on this day of all days, and upon the Musings of all Houses? How
dare
she?

Theo picked up the book and shoved it back on the shelf. That compendium of ancient lore and legends was nearly as useless as the endless mutterings of the House Fathers. He paced before the shuttered window, heedless of the books’ shuffling and muttering as they rearranged themselves alphabetically, and lit his pipe. Then a low familiar foghorn sounded outside the window, and Theo sighed and opened the shutters.

Looming from the dark and fog came the nose of the
Grand Edison III
—the personal airship of Kyrie Strommond, the flagship of the Revenants, and the long-estranged lover of Theophile Nundaemon.

Theo still felt fondly toward the
Edison
, and he knew that, despite everything, she still held some warmth in her engines for him. But those cooling ashes of love would be no protection at all from the zombie warriors the
Edison
now bore within her gravid silver hull. For fluttering from the foremast was Kyrie’s own sigil—Capricorn on a field of stars.

That damnable goat.

A tear gathered in the corner of Theo’s eye. “Zenobia,” he called to his personal servant. “Prepare my zeppelin gun.”