Spin the Sky (14 page)

Captain told me quickly, “Keep loading everyone up. If I’m not back by the time you are done, just go.”

Of course, I followed all his commands except that one. We waited. I tried to send the other shuttle on, but the people in there insisted on waiting too, much to the shuttle pilot’s discomfort.

After almost an hour, Captain came rushing back. His hair disheveled, his belt unbuckled and his shirt untucked. He looked very relieved to see me hanging out the shuttle door, tapping my foot impatiently.

“She sends us off with her many blessings and hopes we will return when they have made Temperance a shining beacon of austerity,” he laughed, tucking his shirt in. “My powers of persuasion finally changed her mind. Well, I’m sure they would have eventually. Only we are pressed for time and she was really pushy so I had to break my rule about punching women in the face. We need to get out of here before she regains consciousness.”

I replied, “You have a love bite on your neck.”

He rubbed his neck and looked tired. “Yes, well, we all have to do things we’d rather not. Let’s go.”

He left in the other shuttle. It was to go to Manny’s World. My shuttle dropped us off at New Siberia. I planned to meet Captain on Manny’s World, but when I got there he was gone.

That was the last I saw of him.

They said the shuttle never arrived. I have hoped that he found peace somewhere in the skies, but I suspect he found only death. Seek a better fate, young man.

CHAPTER NINE

C
esar watches from the door of the sick room as Penelope and her cowgirls flutter on the front porch in their party finery. They are still pink from washing up and their hair is still damp. Most of them literally let down their hair for the night. Cesar can see short curly caps and long flowing tresses, but Penelope shines like a star among these girls so much younger than herself.

Cesar admires the way Penelope pinned up some of her hair for the evening and let the rest flow down around her slim, pale shoulders. She wears a deep blue dress that flows down her body like a rippling river. She looks like an aloof Greek statue. He knows she worked hard all through the scorching day, yet now she looks cool and refreshed. Cesar feels lucky just to be looking at her.

As he leans on the doorway, he wonders what it would have been like if he had returned home right after the War. Cesar doesn’t wonder what would have happened if he never left. He knows they’d all be dead. But if he had come straight home afterwards?

She would have raged and screamed. His father would have been furious, but his mother might have still been alive. Cesar would have gotten to say goodbye to his mom.

But would Penelope have eventually forgiven him and let him back into her life? If he had come back before, would he now be standing up there on the porch in an elegant suit, gently helping her with the clasp of a necklace before brushing an errant lock of hair from the nape of her neck?

In his mind, Cesar imagines teaching Trevor to play Nullball and how to drive a skiff. He imagines fighting with his wife while they wash the dishes and making up later in the bedroom. What if he could have lived that life the last ten years? What an awful waste his life suddenly seems.

Cesar thinks about the last three years. They seem to be the most pointless waste of all, yet in his mind, they were oddly serene. It was his last adventure before coming home to Ithaca and his longest. Cesar hopes it was his last ever, but he doubts he is that lucky.

Cesar spent those three years marooned at the Spider House, a tiny little orbital floating just outside one of the Lagrange points. Because he is cursed, what should have been a short shuttle hop from that blighted New Hedonia disaster to Manny’s World turned into a desperate ride through a graveyard of ships from the Spacer War.

There was no real plan for when he got to Manny’s World, other than keep his head down and hope Manny didn’t sniff him out. There were rumors of a bounty offered by Manny for the head of Cesar the Scorcher. Cesar wasn’t seriously worried, but any situation that could go wrong inevitably did go as wrong as it possibly could whenever he was involved.

Cesar can still remember vividly the smell of ozone in the shuttle from New Hedonia, the sudden lurch when the shuttle hit some floating space junk and went careening off course. The flashing red emergency lights blinded him as the blaring horns screamed disaster.

He mostly remembers feeling very tired.

•

He’d been through all this before. Cesar saw death seeping in from under every sealed portal, trying to claw in through every microscopic crack. This wasn’t the first time he looked around to see the panic of the others around him as they hoped to survive against the cruel and unforgiving statistics of space travel.

It all made him tired. Cesar badly wanted to lie down and die and get it over with, but they looked to him, waiting for him to save them. Why did they always do that?

Cesar wished Asia was there. She always seemed to accept these situations with effortless grace and that dry wit of hers.

But if wishes were horses, then Cesar would be up to his eyeballs in manure right now. So he barked some orders to keep the other passengers busy while he rerouted control of the ship from the charred remains of the pilot’s capsule. Then he charted a course through the graveyard of ships and tried to feel enthusiastic about their chances of survival.

Cesar just wasn’t in the survival game that day. He still needed to wash the smell of that Seersee woman off him.

The Spacer War ship graveyard they were careening through was the site of one of the most destructive battles during the War. It happened early in the War, before either side realized it wasn’t going to be over in a month or two.

Losses were horrific for both fleets. The sheer volume of ordinance expended has not been matched before or since. Most of the ships were destroyed in less than six hours. The rest ran out of munitions before the end of the battle. Both sides still argued they had won that battle, but it didn’t matter. Afterwards, neither the Earthers nor the Spacers had the stomach or the ammunition for another epic bloody battle.

After the war, the Spacers told the Earthers they were leaving the floating pile of destroyed ships as a memorial to the dead, but Cesar and every other Spacer knew they didn’t have the money to clean it up.

There were junkerships that made a living carting off bits of this war zone to be reused somewhere else. Parts of Cesar’s favorite tinker ships came from here. He liked that they had ended their military career here only to be welded together, cleaned up a little and sent off among the spheres again.

Spider House perched on the edge of all this decaying destruction like a child’s toy bobbing in a river at the edge of a waterfall. Cesar marveled that they had avoided annihilation in the battle and still never bothered to move. Most orbitals and ships stayed well away from the graveyard. Floating bits of junk were too easily lethal out here.

The Spider House orbital itself was oddly lumpy. Most orbitals were rigid and smooth, precisely geometric metal shapes standing like floating castles against the darkness, vast childish playthings flung into the sky. The outside of the Spider House looked like something organic, like a clump of spores or thick gray bubbles floating in the void. Shiny iridescent strands contrasted sharply with the dull matted modules they held together like twine around balls, like something you might see under a microscope.

If he were less exhausted by his experiences with adventure in space, Cesar might have felt foreboding. Long experience told him there would be something odd or strange or bad about this place and it would make his life more difficult if he miraculously survived long enough to dock at it. They did survive and it was strange.

Cesar didn’t care.

It takes all sorts to make a living in the Spacer worlds, but why he had to keep running into the weird sorts was beyond Cesar. Where were the normal people who went to work, came home, washed their dishes and went to bed? The people who did normal things? Did they all stay back on Earth? Was that the deal?

Because normal people don’t bioengineer anaerobic vacuum-hardened spiders to spin webs of steel. They used the spiders to construct a home in space. Who were these people? Cesar never found out.

When the current colonists arrived, there was no one left who knew what Spider House had been originally. Cesar suspected the original inhabitants were cocooned in a web somewhere disgusting.

When Cesar came skidding in on that shuttle, Spider House was a tiny world full of spiders that could spin silk, steel, plastic, medicine and even food. The cotton candy webs were said to be tasty, but Cesar never put one in his mouth the entire time he lived there. There were some things he didn’t want to experience.

It was actually quite beautiful to see the huge arachnids crawling across the ceiling, spinning cables of steel to shore up whatever flimsy stuff this orbital had originally been built with.

Or it would have been for anyone else, but Cesar was fundamentally done with sightseeing in this life. He didn’t want to see new places, experience new tastes and smells, meet new people or have his horizons broadened one tiny little bit. Cesar wanted to go home.

But that was the one thing he couldn’t do. Spider House had no ships. No ships came here. Cesar searched for an escape pod or a shuttle or anything remotely spaceworthy that he could use to get out of there, but there was absolutely nothing he could use to build a ship. They had all been disassembled long ago for their raw materials and then “eaten” by the spiders. Even Cesar, who could slap together a ship out of tin foil and bubble gum and who spent all his waking hours trying to find a way off this orbital and back to Ithaca, even he could find no way to put a ship together.

Nearby orbitals had made an agreement with Spider House. They wouldn’t blast the whole bug-infested place out of the sky and Spider House wouldn’t call them to ask for help for any reason whatsoever. Cesar didn’t blame them.

Cesar tried to get on the Ether and convince other tinkers to come pick him up, but as soon they got a look at a spider bigger than their ship crawling around the outside of the orbital, they spread the word and no one would answer his hail. He knew Asia would come, but he couldn’t find her anywhere.

So Cesar gave up.

He took over environmental engineering. There wasn’t much in the way of organization in the Spider House. Including the ship full of grunts Cesar arrived with, there were less than two hundred people all told. It was Cesar’s experience that there were never enough people who knew how to properly route sewage and clean pump filters so he volunteered for that. He knew life in the Spider House would be even more miserable with a disaster in that department.

Spider House was lousy with gene splicers, though. Somehow, the word had gotten out on whatever channel aspiring mad scientists watched on the Ether that this here was the one place in the system where they were just fine with genetic experiments running mad through the halls.

Spacers loved splicers, but even so, most regarded splicing as black magic. It meant there wasn’t exactly an Ether study program for gene splicers. So a place like Spider House attracted them in droves, if a couple every year can be thought of as droves. Most people are lucky to meet one splicer in their lives.

Spider House had at least forty. They were nominally led by Calypso. As far as Cesar was concerned it was a clear case of the bat-shit insane leading the bug-nuts crazy, but Calypso gave him a job and fed him regularly, so he kept that thought to himself.

Unfortunately for Cesar, the splicers never seemed to show up on a ship willing to take anyone or anything
off
the Spider House. Sometimes they showed up on wrecks that collapsed five seconds after they stepped off. Sometimes they showed up flying huge butterfly-winged suits sealed against hard vac.

Cesar learned to live with it.

He used the sealant Calypso gave him on all his clothes to protect himself from spider bites, experiments run amuck or random venomous saliva dripping from the ceiling. Cesar learned to plan for hypercolor mold covering the walkways, tentacular fish blocking the water pipes and hunter batrats in the air ducts.

“Nothing fazes you, Cesar,” commented Calypso to him one day.

Calypso was short and pudgy with a round, cheerful face. She had a magnificent mane of thick blue hair that she let flow freely down her back. One day, Cesar discovered that her hair also doubled as a great gas mask when one of her experiments went awry. He’d thought she was a goner for sure when that filter frog spat an arsenic cloud at her.

It wasn’t so much that Calypso was in charge as people tended to listen and agree with what she said since she was the defacto leader of the splicers, the one they all agreed was the best.

That day, they were both down in the Ag level of Spider House, a dense nightmare jungle of bizarre plants and animals, murky and dangerous. Cesar shrugged and continued pulling what looked like furry seaweed out of a water pump.

It squirmed, squeaked and shot something black and oily at him. Calypso was leaning on a pile of boxes nearby holding a big jar for him to scoop the seaweed thing into.

“I’ve never seen anybody so determined to be unhappy,” Calypso said, keeping her eyes on the creature as he wrestled it into the jar.

Cesar grunted, “Sometimes it’s better to just accept what you are. Mind the black stuff. It burns.”

Clamping the lid on the jar, Calypso sat back and watched Cesar. He wiped himself off and then went back to the water pump.

“You don’t like it here?”

Cesar rolled his eyes. “Oh, how could I not like it? Up to my elbows in slimy creatures with the smell of spiders in my nose all day. It’s a bloody paradise.”

She nodded while prodding the jar with a toe. The thing inside sloshed aggressively against the side. Calypso took a step back. Looking around, she took a whiff and then wrinkled her nose. “We could do something about the smell, I guess.”