Short Trips

There were two men in the cabin. One of them had thinning brown hair and a hooked nose. He lay peacefully on the lower bunk, wearing pajamas, covers pulled up to his chest. It was hard to tell what the other man looked like: he lay crumpled by the shower door, naked, and there was a lot of dried blood on him. I moved slowly to the man in the bunk. His right temple was a blackened crater, and there was blood on his pillow. I crouched over the man on the floor. His left eye was a deep, crisped hole. I went through the cabin. In the breast pocket of a jacket was an I.D. card that projected the image of the man on the bed. The image said: “My name is Yusef I. Gradenko, InterPol System Detail three – “ I wandered among the crowds on the entertainment deck until my processors said there was no one shadowing me. Then I took a circuitous route back to my cabin. The woman was crouched in the shower cubicle, and didn't come out until I had the door shut. “What did they say?” she asked anxiously. “Why did it take you so long?” “Your friends are dead,” I said. She searched my eyes. Then she sat on the bunk. “I'm sorry,” I said. “How?” Her voice was ashen. “Spark-cut. Expert work.” She nodded slowly. After a while she looked at me. “You'll let me stay here?” “Yes.” She nodded again. I argued with the cabin vendor, then finally got a bottle of liquor and a set of cheap unisex clothes. The woman took the clothes into the shower cubicle, slid the door shut. Atomized water hissed. I filled two glasses with medicinal-smelling green liquid. When she came out I was on my second glass. The cheap jumpsuit made her look beautiful somehow. She picked up her glass, smelled it, drank it suddenly. I filled it again. She sat down. We looked at nothing and drank. After a while I asked: “How did you happen into Off-Planet Intelligence? That's rough work.” “I was born on Callisto. It's my home. Earth is off-planet to me.” “That's a little unorthodox for an InterPol agent, isn't it? I thought Earth was supposed to be Home Planet.” She shrugged. “Everybody on Callisto is a little bit Zaghreb. The difference is that we know we need Earth to survive. The Zaghrebs think Callisto could be independent.” “And they worship something that's not from Earth. Something they found on Callisto.” “They worship the Void. The infinite nothingness. The emptiness that goes on forever. Something we on Callisto are born looking at.” Her voice sank. “Earth people are like hothouse plants. You can't see out and you don't want to see out. I spent a year on the Neptune Orbiter, a tiny lighted space in the infinite night. The sun there is a bright star, no more. Daylight there is darker than the darkest night on Earth. With the cabin lights out I could look through the port and see Neptune, huge and green and white, rolling through the night, secret, frozen, gigantic; and looking away from the planet, there was nothing—blackness, emptiness, silence—me floating in it—never ending – “ “People aren't made to see such things.” She looked at me as if surprised I was still there. “People are made to see all sights, all visions.” -- From “Not Even Ashes”