Pirates of the Universe

by Terry Bisson

Genres: Fantasy; Science Fiction

Synopsis

A New York Times Notable Book for 1996.

"It is the Bissons of the field ... upon whom the future of science fiction depends."
—Washington Post Book World

"What's not to like? Laconic, corrosive future satire with a real space hero and vacuum jellyfish aliens that embody the strong anthropic principle. America never had it so good!"
—John Kessel, Nebula winning author of, Good News from Outer Space

Here come the Peteys! Vacuum jellyfish the size of small moons, they drift through our solar system like messengers from another universe. Some worship them, others study them, and still others hunt them for their skins, which are more valuable than gold or even oil on the ruined, depleted Earth.

Gunther is a hunter. He knows the rules. He knows the risks. He knows the rewards. What he doesn't know, is that he's being hunted too.

About the Author: Best known for his short stories "They're Made out of Meat" and "Bears Discover Fire," Terry Bisson has won every major award in SF, including the Hugo, the Nebula, the Sturgeon and Locus awards, and France's Gran Prix de l'Imaginaire. He lives in California.

Release date: May 21, 2013

Publisher: JumperCable Books

Print pages: 288

Sample

ONE

It was the dream itself enchanted me.

—William Butler Yeats

You have seen pictures. Who on Earth hasn’t?

But no matter how many pictures you may have seen, they never prepare you for the real thing: in the flesh, so to speak; in the glory; swimming up out of the darkness in which the stars themselves swim.

Gun missed the approach, usually his favorite part, when the Peteys first appear as a blur of light, dimmer than the farthest star; then as the ship closes, glow brighter and brighter; until it is at last clear that what you are seeing is no faraway galaxy, or nebula, or gaseous cloud, but something altogether other, something entirely undreamed of until now, something new in the universe. …

Three of them. In formation.

Gun missed it but he had seen it before, for this was (with luck) his next to last hunt. This time he had drawn setup, and setup had to be done right. When you are about to pull eight hours on a rail, you don’t fool around. By the time Gun got to the Nittany Lounge, racing weightless through the long halls, the triad was already close, filling the big windows, its glow painting the dark room rose.

The door slid shut behind him as silently as a prayer.

The lounge was empty, as he knew it would be. The other Rangers were either suiting up, or sleeping, or eating, or checking their mail, or emptying their bowels for the long pull in high vac. The Sierras were already pulling away in their blunt yachts, or on the bridge of the Penn State, waiting for showtime.

Gun left the lights down. He had at most twenty minutes before he had to suit up, and he wanted to be alone; solitude is rare in space.

Every time he saw them was like the first time. Like an old lover, always new.

The Penn State was well inside the orbit of the Moon, but already, there they were: closer than usual to the Earth, swooping in like moths to a flame. The Peteys were “upright” to the ship’s plane like three mountains or towering clouds (even though a hundred times as big). The ship was on a long fall angling across the “front” of the triad, and as Gun watched, the Penn State and the Peteys seemed to be turning together, like dancers. Gun pushed off the doorway and drifted toward the window, holding his breath all the way, enjoying the complicated waltz made by his movement, the Peteys’, the ship’s, and the slow spin of the universe itself—all joined into one movement as wide and smooth as the foam on the turn of a river, moving and yet never going anywhere.

The Peteys’ molecule-thick skin shimmered like an oil slick, a faint rose rainbow. Occasionally a star glittered through it; or was it a reflection? a refraction? It was said that their inner atmosphere tied light in knots.

The lounge smelled like Chinese food. Every part of a spaceship has its own stink.

Reaching the high curved glass, Gun lodged with one knee under the bar that circled the window. The landing gave him a small but sweet pleasure: zero/g comes more naturally to some than to others, and his own easiness contrasted with the awkwardness he had felt on Earth since he was a child. His first week at Academy, when the others were throwing up, he had thought: This is more like it!

Suddenly, as if reproaching him for letting his thoughts wander, a star ignited in the near distance. That would be the Sierra yacht, the John James, Shorty’s new command, course-correcting with a bright blue benzine streak.

Gun watched with

a special, almost proprietary interest. Shorty had been a Ranger until only a few months before—one of the old-timers who had trained both Gun and Hadj, Gun’s partner. Now Shorty was wearing the blue and gold of the Sierras.

Under the interim Protocols, the Sierras got the first look at every triad: for the communication attempt (a formality), for scientific research (ostensibly) and of course, for the pictures—on old-fashioned chemical film, since Peteys did funny things with light and their images were impossible to digitize. It was chemical photographs that presented the images seen around the world, the magnificent spreads in National Geographic and the four-color trading cards that started boys dreaming of becoming Rangers.

There were no girl Rangers; just as there were no pictures of what Rangers actually did.

There was a bright, brief scratch, as if someone had struck a match on the side of the universe. The John James was turning. The Sierra yacht’s brief burn trail provided perspective, and the Peteys that had seemed, to Gun, almost nearby, once again seemed as large as three continents and as far away. Gun watched as the John James, now a blinking light, dropped into the rose-lit canyon between two Peteys and disappeared.

A few minutes later, the blinking light reappeared, behind but higher, and seemingly brighter: the curious optical effect of the Peteys’ atmosphere. Then the John James disappeared again in a crackling of silvery light as a storm broke inside the sunward Petey. It left a silver blue haze, a cloud within a cloud. The other two were flashing now, shoulder to shoulder, “top” to bottom. The Sierras insisted they were involuntary electrical discharges, but Gun preferred to imagine that the Peteys, awakened, were giving the alarm. Shouting in colors.

“Hard to believe, ain’t it?”

Gun turned, startled and a little irritated, though he tried not to show it. It was Hadj, come to fetch him for suit-up.

Gun made room on the rail at the window, but Hadj remained floating, stationary, with the perfect zero/g ease of the eight-year veteran. His short hair was black, his eyes bright blue, and his moustache was gray, as if he had been assembled from parts of different men.

“Hard to believe what?” Gun asked.

Hadj, who had learned English from movies, spoke with a Texas/Germanic drawl:

“Hard to believe we’re going to kill one of those mothers.”

Hadj was from Syria, or from that part of the Quarter that used to be Syria, and

he once told Gun that he actually saw the Peteys when he was a kid. From Earth. The atmosphere was clearer in those days, especially in the desert where it almost never rained; and one October night when Hadj was nine, his uncle, a tanker driver on the Assad-Baghdad run, pulled over to the side of the highway and sat with him on the warm, ticking turbine cover of the Ossian-Peugeot and helped him pick out what he called “the visitors” from the forest of stars and satellites.

Gun was from K-T, cloud-locked even then, and he saw his first Petey in one of the stacks of National Geographics his father and uncle, Ham and Hump, kept in the attic of the house portion of the Ryder family compound (“Stately Visitors from the Depths” NG:539:89:9). Gun was only five but Gordon had already taught him to read before disappearing underground.

The first Peteys (or PDs—Psioraimen Directicii) were picked up in 538 by the optical early warning array at Houbolt Moon Base. Three 1820-kilometer-long, faintly luminous, elongated “soap bubbles” were clocked entering the inner solar system across the orbit of Mars, at an inclination of 13 degrees to the plane of the ecliptic, traveling at a velocity relative to the Sun of 118 kps, or twice the speed of a comet.

The information was received and logged by PanAsia, the insurance consortium that had financed and then operated the unmanned array to track irregular asteroids after the near miss of “Big John” in 521 had run insurance projections off the scale.

The problem was, the series of wars later known as the Three was then raging, and Houbolt had been unmanned for almost twenty years. PanAsia was well into Chapter Twenty and no one was reading the files. An alarm went off unnoticed, then another. It was left to another electronic array, the orbiting oral history project known as Biogens Historicum to notice the incursion and gain the interest of astronomers; or, at least, of those astronomers who, through political disloyalty or disinterest or ill-health, were uninvolved in the fighting, which was then confined to Southern Europe, the American Northwest, Indonesia, and Low Earth Orbit.

Within a week, over a hundred astronomers had picked up the intruders on telescopes on mountaintops and in the backyards of the war-darkened cities. It was hard to clock the course of the PDs, as they were then called, since it kept changing. Defying

scientists’ predictions (and apparently the laws of special relativity as well) the three giant shapes slowed as they penetrated deeper into our Sun’s gravity well. They stayed in the same formation, a line, even as their trajectory changed. They grew either more luminous or more reflective as they approached the Sun.

By the time they had crossed Earth’s orbit, and were passing within .007 AU or a million kilometers of the Earth, they had slowed to a speed of 55 kps and were visible with a three inch refractor and had revived the dead science of optical astronomy. Invisible to radio, they were beautiful on film and in the lens. The Peteys’ special and strange luminosity was a mystery, defying spectroanalysis at first and later showing that they were empty, more than empty (or, rather, less than empty), crammed full of emptiness, as it were; so empty as to make space itself seem a rain forest of particles and semi-particles, leptons and quarks. They were filled with an altogether new kind of nothingness.

Because of their mysterious reversal of speed and their at least quasi-phototropic behavior, the questions on the mind of every astronomer (and boy) were: Where are they coming from? What do they want from us? These were the questions that decorated the fronts of the Petey trading cards of Gun’s youth.

The first three Peteys passed within .2 AU (half the orbit of Mercury) of the Sun and with a 35 percent change of direction, were off again, picking up speed and losing luminosity as they left the solar system. By the time they again crossed the orbits of the Outer Planets, their magnitude had dropped until they were visible only to deep sky telescopes, and was red-shifted to show an incredible speed of .2c, the fastest velocity known for any nearby heavenly body. Then they were gone.

For weeks this data was digested and discussed in the tabs and on the Net; then as the Three raged on, and the tabs went under and the Net shattered, it was forgotten. Almost. Then, two years after their first appearance, the Peteys were back.

This second triad was first sighted just outside the asteroid belt, and passed within half a million miles of the Earth. They were visible with binoculars from blacked-out London, Melbourne, and even, in a grainy newspaper photo, from Bloomington, Indiana. For a solid week they stopped the Three (and some say they slowed the wars and began their long decline).

The third triad of Peteys, eighteen months later, snuck up on the Earth. They

apparently never crossed the Outer Planets at all but appeared on the far side of the Moon as if they had come up from a hole. They were found lurking in the Moon’s stone shadow like the nesting bats that were even then in K-T being called “wing meat” by people who were war-hungry but not ready to eat anything. These were the Peteys Hadj saw, or thought he saw (Gun always suspected it was in fact the league-long orbiting teardrop of Overworld). They drifted out of hiding, toward the Earth—and then suddenly red-shifted away—apparently without ever leaving the vicinity of the Moon.

Gun was a boy that summer. Just learning to read and shoot.

Another three came the next year, and the following year. They came in threes, appearing and then disappearing between Earth and the Moon, blue-shifting in and red-shifting out of existence, as though coming and going through a new hole in the Universe. They came and went without crossing space as we knew it. They came and went like weavers working a shuttle that was our world, weaving several new religions, and unraveling a war.

Their approaches were seen only by scientists, but their departures were watched by more millions than any other natural phenomenon since the last of the elephants.

It was obvious that the Peteys were attracted to the Earth. Was it the water? The nitrogen? Since they now appeared and disappeared within the orbiting shadow of the Moon, there were those who speculated that it was the Moon and not the Earth that attracted them.

The Sierras wanted to protect them. Disney-Windows wanted to exploit them. The Fundamentals wanted to worship them (with fire, of course). But with space travel impossible because of the war, there was no way to reach them.

The Peteys were as inaccessible as the stars.

Some even credited the Peteys with ending the Three, though in fact the Three had been slowing down for several years. Just as it had been noticed some thirty years earlier, that there was war raging on every continent, without anyone actually knowing why or when it had begun; so it was noticed by the mid-540s that in almost every part of the world some kind of rough order, if not justice, was in place; and that except for the robot bombs and leftover mines, there was little actual killing going on.

On the surface, that is. Automated war in orbit went on, as if death had taken

on a life of its own. The self-replicating defense and maintenance systems built into the orbital war platforms had learned to defend themselves against their makers, and were unapproachable. Overworld, Disney-Windows’ 80K-long orbiting theme park, had been abandoned, though it was still there, shining like a smeared star every morning and evening. Someone or something was keeping the lights burning.

When the Peteys started lurking around the Moon, it was agreed (by Disney-Windows and the Sierras at least) that someone needed to get a closer look. What were they? What did they want? The problem was, the few spaceships that had not been destroyed in the Three, or “cracked” in the one of the many ceasefires, were orbiting. And without some kind of peace agreement there was no way to get into orbit.

Soon competing dispensations were being scripted and cobbled together in Rome, Orlando, Belig and Singapore. The Protocols allowed liftoff and Disney-Windows was the first to successfully retrofit a shuttle. Reclaiming Overworld (which no one else wanted, or could reach) D-W spent the winter sealing off the sections still controlled by the renegade nanobots and their progeny, and refitting the Penn State, the cislunar space ship left over from the abortive attempt earlier in the century to mine the Moon for helium-three.

The twin purposes of D-W’s first mission the next year were video (unsuccessful, of course, since something that is not quantum cannot be digitized) and communication (unsuccessful). The Peteys were gone before the Penn State even left earth-orbit. The next two years were spent making the deal with the Sierras that resulted in the Ranger Corps, and retrofitting the two yachts that were to become the Sierra fleet. Perhaps because they were smaller, perhaps because they were prettier, the Peteys let the yachts approach, and a new era in history began.

Gun was a teenager that summer, just learning to unhook Donna’s bra with two fingers of one hand.

D-W claimed that the first kill was an accident, the result of a misguided spectroanalytic probe attempt. Two Rangers were lost but much was gained. In addition to the pictures that graced the cover of the National Geographic, the Penn State brought back something Earth didn’t even know it needed—a gift from beyond (or so we then thought) the stars; a fabulous (literally) item of exchange that created a new banking system, and reanimated a weary world’s ravaged economy.

Not to mention providing jobs in space for those lucky enough to draw a Disney-Windows ticket; for, as the old timers might have said, a happy, happy few.

TWO

Learn to hold loosely all that is not eternal.

—A. Maude Royden

Bring us down a little,” said Hadj.

“Down a little,” said Gun. Jiggling the benzeners.

Space this close to anything this big had an “up” and a “down.” In toward the Petey was down. Steadying the roll with delicate puffs, Gun let the rail drift down. The almost-planet-sized creature below looked dark, solid (even though Gun knew it wasn’t) and strangely inviting.

“This is close enough,” said Hadj.

“Close enough.” Gun drifted down a little closer.

“Hold her steady here,” said Hadj. “Guess what I saw today?”

“Steady,” said Gun: unnecessary words in answer to unnecessary words, but he knew that Hadj liked to hear the sound of voices, especially when he was on a rail, in a coffin suit, a speck in the emptiness. Hadj claimed it was his Bedouin background, the genetic answer to the emptiness of the Quarter; and he pointed out from his reading (he had an Associate’s Degree in English from Harvard Riyadh) that Melville’s sailors talked a lot. Gun was, historically, the exception, though he didn’t mind listening. He also felt the need for a little chatter especially when they were alone, the two of them, in high vac on a benzene-powered rail.

The Ranger boats were called “rails,” after the drag racers of a previous century. Take a single, twenty-meter beam, and place on the front a two-man open pod, and in the back a benzene/operzine engine. No environmentals—only an electrical connection for the coffin suits. That was it, but it was enough; for some people at least. Disney-Windows was a lottery job, but Rangering was self-selective, since only one person in three could tolerate zero/g for long periods of time, and only one in ten (one regular person™ in five) could last eleven hours in a coffin suit.

The coffin suits were a cross between space suits and small ships. There were no legs, just arms. They came with a bathroom (of sorts) and the arms could be pulled in to scratch an itch or pick a nose. Still, eleven hours was a long time, even though men had been known to live in them for twenty-two hours while awaiting rescue after the foundering of the first helium-three mining boat, the Bradford Angier, back in 519.

At least that was how long it was assumed they had lived, when the bodies were found.

“This is close enough,” said Hadj. “Guess what I saw today?”

“Roger. Close enough. What?”

Gun held the rail steady at a thousand meters. That’s as close to a Petey as you wanted to go. As solid as the mass below looked, Gun knew that it wasn’t. Objects that got too close got “winked” and disappeared. It had happened to two Rangers on the first encounter.

“I saw a gen,” said Hadj. “Hold it steady here.”

“Steady,” said Gun. “I thought gens weren’t allowed off Overworld.”

“This one was. I saw her on the Penn State, and guess who she was with?”

“Shorty,” Gun said.

“How’d you know?”

“Because he’s a Sierra now, and they’re not allowed to speak to Rangers, and he’s the only Sierra you know.”

“I wonder if she’s with him on the John James,” said Hadj. “Why are you getting so low?”

“I’m not,” said Gun. “I’m holding at three hundred meters. They’re not allowed on the yachts.”

“Well, pull up a little,” said Hadj with a yawn. “We have to be high enough to

see them come over the horizon. You keep talking about what’s allowed. She’s already off Overworld, on the Penn State. So what’s to keep her off the John James?”

Gun pulled up a little. He didn’t like these kinds of conversations. Hadj was always wanting to talk about something new.

“Funny how they whisper,” Hadj said. “Just watch and ask questions.”

It’s not funny, Gun thought. It’s just what they do.

“Funny how they look like girls. Speaking of which, why are we shimmying?”

“There’s a wiggle in the jets.” Gun could feel an oscillation in number four’s directional. It was the directionals (electrically operated) that were the weak point in the rails. By comping he was able to keep the wiggle down. It was an easy adjustment, like driving a boat against the current back home on the Ohio.

“Hold there,” Hadj said, yawning. “Speaking of girls, how’s it going with what’s-her-name?”

“Who?” But Gun knew who.

“Timpany?”

“Tiffany,” said Gun. “I don’t know. OK, I guess.”

“Has she taken you to her Upper Room?”

“I don’t know. She’s copy-protected. I don’t remember.”

“You would remember,” Hadj said. “This is our spot! Can you hold us right here?”

Gun nodded. The trick was to keep a comfortable distance from that mysterious, not-quite-real surface, and yet stay close enough so that when the hard-light equipped Yankee came over the horizon and started its cut, Hadj would be able to pick up the skin along with the other rails. Even though they were not visible, Gun knew the other three rails were just over the horizon, one behind and two to the “east.” As soon as the Yankee started its cut, all four would lock on with their gather lights and begin the pull. Meanwhile, the word was wait.

At this point they were out of radio contact; they would have to guess where and when the Yankee and the Henry David (its escort) 

 would show. There was no radio communication near the Petey’s surface. Signals were unpredictable; they might show up an hour or even a week later. They had even been known to show up before they had been sent.

“We can hold here for a while,” said Hadj, who was in command. He checked his fauxrolex analog, the only kind of watch that worked near the Petey’s surface, where Time seemed to flutter in sheets. It had been his uncle’s, or so he claimed.

“Maybe I’ll catch a little shut-eye.”

“Go ahead. I’ll watch for the dawn.”

The Yankee’s approach would show up in the Petey, as faint as the first hints of dawn—reversed so they came in the “ground” instead of the sky.

Gun knew dawns. As a kid he had spent hours in the Ryder compound attic looking through Ham’s and Hump’s piles of National Geographics. That old magazine, heavy enough to be carried as ballast, like china in clipper ships, was as much about sky as Earth, and Gun knew what dawn looked like in every part of the world. Dawn was the great equalizer. In her rosy hands central Massachusetts was as grand as the Monument Valley; Indiana as wild as the northern reaches of Labrador; New Jersey as awesome as the Tien Shan.

The Petey has its own dawn: the dawn of death. While Hadj snored on, Gun watched and waited for it. It was hours since he had peed. The pain in his bladder reminded him and he knelt in the suit to relieve himself. The Petey below was as dark from three hundred meters as a universe without stars.

Somewhere above, lost in the swarming stars, was the Henry David with its Sierra observers. The John James would be long gone now, heading back for Overworld with its photos—and maybe even a gen, if Hadj’s guess was right. Who knew, these days? Gun didn’t like to think about it. Everything was always changing. He emptied his mind and fell into the Ranger’s watch that looked, to those not in the know, like sleep. Or like thought.

Like the dawn in the Hindu Kush, or in southern Indiana, the first light of the Petey, or the “wake up” as the Rangers call it, is the most beautiful part of the job. What had been as dark as the ocean at night becomes, gradually, lighted. Flashes of rose, cracklings of reds and violets and oranges … all the Peteys’ colors were from the same end of the spectrum, but it was Gun’s favorite end.

“A quaker,” said Hadj, alert. The surface was rolling below them in great half-kilometer waves, lit from below. The quakers were the Peteys with the brightest show; the ones that hated dying the most. We are watching the beginnings of death, Hadj once said, and who knows, maybe the birth of consciousness.

There was a flash just over the horizon that seemed to rock the rail. Another

flash, this one just underneath, bleeding off on three sides, all crackling spines like lightning. Right behind the quake, which moved down the hemisphere like a school of waves, was a slow light, reds and roses impossible to imagine back on Earth where all the light was flung from one paltry sun.

“There she blows!” Hadj.

First the Henry David came over the horizon. The escort. Like its twin, the John James, it was streamlined for visual effect. Disney-Windows had built the two yachts in the golden days of Overworld, to ferry passengers around the Moon, those who could afford the trip. Below and in front was the Yankee, an angular workhorse riding ahead of its cut, so it was always over pure idaho (the dark, unmarked Petey, or potato, as the older Rangers called it), the hard-light beam dragging along behind like a stinger.

First Gun saw the Petey’s flashes, then the Henry David, then the Yankee and the hard-light. He didn’t have to look back to see what Hadj was doing. Hadj was twirling his gather-light beam, fishing for skin.

“Back up,” said Hadj, suddenly in command again.

“Back,” said Gun. He comped straight back a thousand meters, then several hundred to the “east” without being told. This was the easy part, where he didn’t have to think. The ship felt like part of his suit, and his suit like part of his body, his body like part of the universe.

“Got it!” said Hadj. Now for the first time the other rails were visible, two of them at least, flashing faraway lights, anonymous and indistinguishable in the electrical storm of light and dark. A third was far behind, pulling the seam open before it closed in on itself. They were dark spots, less than dots, visible only because Gun knew where/when they should be.

Hopefully, they were all latched on.

“Now close in,” said Hadj.

Without a word, for the talking was over, Gun dropped the rail to within a hundred meters of the glowing, flashing surface and flew skimming like a crop duster behind and to the left (or “west”) of the Yankee almost a kilometer ahead. Even at this distance the hard-light hurt his eyes; and even seen indirectly, the glow from the Petey pulled at him. They were catching up to the Sierra yacht and its great, grand, glorious, light-giving wound. The light from inside seemed to pull at Gun’s eyeballs, as if to call them out of his head, as if to set them, like

jewels, in some as-yet-undreamed-of glorious …

“Closer,” said Hadj.

Gun touched a lever and the rail drifted to the left, pulling the skin away from the opening seam. Technically, according to some physicists, the radicals who believed the Peteys were other universes, the Petey’s skin did not “exist” until it had been peeled from the Petey’s great sailing-onward soul.

Whatever it was that Hadj’s gather-light had seized, they held onto it. The Yankee was straight ahead of them now, a little to the west or right, its hard-light laser like a buzz saw; and moving behind it, just after the cut, was the seam, opening like a door into—well, Gun looked away. There was nothing, less than nothing in there. He felt a fear that predated even life, the fear of matter for unbeing that predates existence itself.

“Closer,” said Hadj.

It was the end of the pretty part of the kill and the beginning of the work. The job now was to follow the seam and find a way to pick up the skin. The Yankee was in the safest spot, ahead of the cut. The Henry David was above and behind. The only danger was down here, close to the seam. Too close, and you could get winked, Gun knew.

“Closer.”

The Henry David headed down while the rails followed, two of them visible by now, although it was hard to tell in the strange Time distortions near the Petey’s surface. Light signals, like radio, were unreliable.

The cut continued. Below, to the rear, the colors were gone. The strange light of the seam still spilled straight up to heaven but Gun knew not to look. Beyond it and behind were the other three rails.

“Back off,” Hadj said.

The trick was to pick up the two sides at once and pull the skin back lest it curl down into the seam and disappear. Eat itself. It had been known to happen.

“What the hell’s that?” Gun asked. He saw a light where a light shouldn’t be, sailing toward them, over the cut.

“Hold steady!”

“Somebody has lost it. A rail …”

But it wasn’t a rail. It was the John James. The sleek Sierra yacht that should have been already tied up at the Penn State’s exitway was dropping, eerily lit by the dark-light spilling out of the 10K long wound. “What the hell is Shorty trying to do?”

“He’s trying to go to Heaven,” Hadj said, alarmingly 

matter-of-factly.

“Heaven?”

How can they get so close to the seam? Gun wondered. Were they trying to take a photograph of the inside? The strange light spilled straight up bathing the John James in a weird glow.

“He’s going too low!” said Gun.

Suddenly the controls kicked in Gun’s hand, as if a load had been let off the rail, and he saw with horror that Hadj had dropped his corner of the skin. It was the Ranger’s one unpardonable sin.

A shadow flew out and up, like a cloak falling across the Universe. “You lost it!” cried Gun. The John James sailed on. The skin peeled up and flapped in the starlight and started to waft inward, on itself.

“Shorty, pull up!”

Hadj didn’t say anything. Gun realized he hadn’t said anything since the disaster had started to unfold. There was nothing to say. The skin snapped in on itself, and the John James went with it, turning downward in a stately, deliberate arc, flipped sideways as if hit—then dove straight into the shimmering un-light of the cut.

And disappeared.

THREE

Death never knocks. Death just walks through the door.

—Tennessee Williams

It was like waking from a dream. Except it hadn’t been a dream.

Gun could feel the Penn State shudder as it went into a braking burn. Soon they would be docking at Overworld. He closed his eyes and tried to sleep again, listening to his own internal booms. Rangers carried an aural-crystal block in the carotid to give the heart something to push against in zero/g. But the booming that usually put Gun to sleep wouldn’t work tonight, because every time he fell asleep he saw the John James falling into the blazing light of the Petey’s opened seam, over and over. …

Waking brought no comfort, either. Gun’s eyes opened wide, and still in his mind he saw Shorty’s first command turn sideways and then over and then dive—

The two remaining Peteys, the rest of the triad, had red-shifted away, as always, disappearing into whatever it was they disappeared into. As always, when one was killed, all three were gone.

They had left behind no wreckage, no bodies, no John James, no Shorty. … All that was left was the skin, what remained of it, being shepherded hurriedly into the Penn State’s open hold by the rest of the Rangers. It would continue shrinking until it got into oxygen, which meant that the four-hour return to Overworld had to begin immediately.

Hadj had stayed behind with the Henry David for the search. The space they were searching wasn’t really space; it was less than vacuum, at least for the first hour or so until the electron-rich vacuum of “normal” space rushed in; it was just a dark spot against the dark.

Gun had left with the Penn State, the skin and the rest of the Rangers, none of whom were friends. “It wasn’t your fault,” Gun called to Hadj in parting. It hadn’t sounded convincing even to himself.

Another short burn—and the light leaking into the hallways meant they were sliding into high earth-orbit. Gun gave up trying to sleep and went to the Nittany Lounge to watch. The first sight of Overworld was almost exciting as first sight of the Peteys. It was a kind of dawn, too.

Overworld in darkside was just more stars: stars in rows and stars in arcs; stars that slid and stars that rotated; near stars and far stars. Bright and dim, white and colored stars. Approached from sunside, Overworld was more dramatic: coming into view suddenly out of the terminator, like a city leaping into light: not sketched in slowly, as are cities in Earth’s leisurely dawns, but bursting instead into existence, fully formed: first the Muir Geophysical Observatory, closed down for years; then the wobbling torus of the High Hilton, once a luxury hotel and then a military base; then the Academy campus (Gun’s year), a subassembly of Harvard Orbital and now a ruin, lighted and heated only to keep it from being claimed by the Tangle, the self-repairing labyrinth that had sealed itself off during the Three.

After Academy came the lit sections of the shuttle shops (cheaper to fix up here, where old parts could be cannibalized off the station itself); and then the sunlit, outer arc of abandoned parts, modules, sections, and half-burned ships with bodies still inside of them. ...