Losers in Space Read online

  LOSER in SPACE

  BOOKS BY

  John Barnes

  The Man Who Pulled Down the Sky

  Sin of Origin ♦ Orbital Resonance

  Wartide ♦ Battlecry

  Union Fires ♦ A Million Open Doors

  Mother of Storms ♦ Kaleidoscope Century

  One for the Morning Glory ♦ Encounter with Tiber (with Buzz Aldrin)

  Patton’s Spaceship ♦ Washington’s Dirigible

  Caesar’s Bicycle ♦ Apostrophes and Apocalypses (stories)

  Earth Made of Glass ♦ Finity

  Candle ♦ The Return (with Buzz Aldrin)

  The Merchants of Souls ♦ The Duke of Uranium

  The Sky So Big and Black ♦ A Princess of the Aerie

  In the Hall of the Martian King ♦ Gaudeamus

  The Armies of Memory ♦ Tales of the Madman Underground

  Directive 51 ♦ Daybreak Zero

  The Last President ♦ Losers in Space

  VIKING

  Published by Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 345 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd)

  Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)

  Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi – 110 017, India

  Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, Auckland 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.)

  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published in 2012 by Viking, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Copyright © John Barnes, 2012

  All rights reserved

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA IS AVAILABLE

  ISBN: 978-1-101-56703-6

  Printed in U.S.A. Set in Melior Book design by Nancy Brennan

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book. The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  ALWAYS LEARNING

  PEARSON

  For Diane Talbot,

  because I’ve got some catching up to do,

  and because, with her around, I want to do it.

  CONTENTS

  Notes for the Interested, #0: Please skip this and every other Note for the Interested if you’re not interested

  FROM EARTH TO BEYOND THE MOON, MARCH 13–APRIL 23, 2129

  1 Eenie Meanie Miney Moe

  Notes for the interested, #1 : MOES: an extremely common nickname for the loser clique at the most expensive schools

  Notes for the Interested, #2: MEEDS: the only art form that matters in 2129

  Notes for the Interested, #3: ALDRIN CYCLERS: the bus line to Mars, but the bus can’t turn around

  2 Solid Gold Turd

  Notes for the Interested, #4: HAPPISTUF: the drug that keeps on giving, and the most popular execution of the century

  Notes for the Interested, #5: STYLING: performing everything you do because there’s always a camera

  Notes for the Interested, #6: CAP: short for capsule. An spacecraft shaped like a rounded cone. The easiest structure for going up or coming down in the atmosphere

  UP-LEG: EARTHPASS TO MARSPASS, APRIL 23, 2129–AUGUST 27, 2129

  Notes for the Interested, #7: The ride they’re planning to take

  3 Rendezvous with Destiny

  Notes for the Interested, #8: Getting around outside

  Notes for the Interested, #9: Virgo’s pod—the reason for the ship

  Notes for the Interested, #10: The language of spaceship architecture

  4 Breakfast with the Right Half

  Notes for the Interested, #11: MILLIGRAVITY: just enough but not too much

  5 Separation

  6 Nothing to Buy and Nowhere to Deliver

  Notes for the Interested, #12: REACTION MASS: the thing Glisters is worrying about that only Susan really understands right now

  7 All the Glory We Can Eat

  8 The Evil Issue, the Irreplaceable Issue, and the Squashed-Like-a-Bug Issue

  Notes for the Interested, #13: Over time, waves get shorter, and frequencies get higher

  9 The Dark Space Somewhere between Grounding and Flogging

  10 A Gweat Big Box of Fwuffy

  11 The Best Steward within Ten Million Miles

  12 The Only Difference Between Us

  13 Ultra Serious Girl Talk

  14 Dying Could Spoil the Whole Trip

  15 One Big Jump into the Dark, with Friends

  16 So Far from Anything

  17 “You’re the Commander, Commander”

  Notes for the Interested, #14: Recalculating after the accident

  18 I Guess You’ll Never Understand about Love

  19 560 Needles, 6,000,000,000 Pieces of Hay

  Notes for the Interested, #15: Universal encryption, PermaPaxPerity, and why making sure that everyone gets a chance to be seen means Virgo can’t be heard

  20 Being Dead Improves Our Social Standing

  UP-LEG: MARSPASS TO APHELION, AUGUST 27, 2129—MAY 25, 2130

  21 Pop Makes a Play for the Pirates

  Notes for the Interested, #16: MUNSHI VERSUS SLABILIS: guaranteed circuses to go with the guaranteed bread

  22 Christmas on the Way Out

  23 The Way Things Awe

  DOWN-LEG: APHELION TOWARD EARTHPASS, MAY 25, 2130-JANUARY 9, 2131

  24 Brilliant, with an 80% Chance of Dead

  25 The Second and Last Christmas on Virgo

  26 The Girl I Left behind Me

  EARTH, 12 YEARS LATER, APRIL 3, 2143

  27 The Princess Who Stands on the Shore

  Acknowledgments

  Notes for the Interested, #0

  Please skip this and every other Note for the Interested if you’re not interested

  Most science fiction fans nowadays come to SF from gaming, movies, television, and other media, rather than from reading. If you haven’t seen much written science fiction, you might not be familiar with “hard” science fiction (hard SF).

  Hard SF is science fiction where the science is as true and correct as the writer can make it in the light of current science; George Scithers, a great editor (and one of the first ones I worked with), used to say it was hard science fiction if, when Superman leaped a tall building at a single bound, he kicked a hole in the sidewalk.

  Media SF is rarely hard SF. Film, television, games, and comics have always favored stories like Firefly, Doom, and Star Trek (where science is mostly invented by screenwriters), and Star Wars, Doctor Who, and Spider-Man (where the science is really old-fashioned magic, just given scientific-sounding names).

  Hard SF is found mostly in literature; it’s an elite club, where the elite geeks insis
t that writers respect facts, such as:

  explosions are silent in the vacuum of space

  there are fewer than 120 chemical elements and their properties are known; no one discovers new antigravity metals

  “force field” refers to gravity or magnetism, not to magic glass shields

  an invisible man would be blind because his invisible corneas would not focus light and his invisible retinas wouldn’t receive it

  a human being is more closely related to a clam than to any being from another planet, and would be less likely to have children with an extraterrestrial than to pollinate a rosebush.

  the physics of spaceflight requires so much energy to lift even a small object off Earth that a spaceship has to be a thin shell connected to a mountain of explosives.

  Hard SF fans like accuracy, they like to learn things, and they like to know what’s real and what isn’t. So written hard SF uses one form or another of what we called infodumps: lectures about the science, the imaginary world, and so on, either directly or by having characters explain things to each other. (How many characters does it take to change a lightbulb in a hard SF story? One to do it, and one to say, “As you know, Bob, a lightbulb consists of a tungsten filament in an inert-gas-filled glass enclosure…”)

  People who geek on just knowing stuff, either about the real science or the fictional future, love infodumps, but info-dumps are boring obstacles for readers who just want to get on with the story.

  I’m trying out a compromise: information that would go into infodumps is in short sections called Notes for the Interested. In the main text, I’ll explain only as much as a reader needs to follow the story; if it’s just more cool science upon which you may wish to geek, I’ll package it in a Note for the Interested. You can read the whole book and follow the story without reading a single Note for the Interested (if you’re not interested). On the other hand, if you are interested, they’re easy to find.

  FROM

  EARTH

  TO

  BEYOND

  THE

  MOON

  MARCH 13–APRIL 23, 2129

  POSITIONS OF MARS, EARTH, AND SPACESHIP VIRGO—MARCH 13-APRIL 23, 2129

  We’re looking down on the solar system from directly above the north pole of the sun. The solid dark lines show the movements of the planets and Virgo; dots show the position of the sun (at center) and some reference positions of where the planets and ship are during the rest of 2129. From this perspective, the planets and Virgo go around the sun counterclockwise.

  1

  EENIE MEANIE MINEY MOE

  March 13, 2129. Baker Lounge, Excellence Shop, District of Oregon/Idaho, Earth.

  “THIS COLLECTION OF losers and misfits will now come to order for a report from your activities chairman.” We look at the stairs and see Derlock’s descending feet. “Or in other words, shut up, all you moes, I got the stuff!”

  “What stuff?” Bari’s voice aches with hope that “the stuff” will be some new drug. Sheeyeffinit. My shortly-to-be-ex-boyfriend hasn’t even noticed how hard I’ve been ignoring him, but mention drugs and he’s awake. “What stuff?”

  “The stuff we are about to discuss.”

  Wychee whines, “Do we have to discuss anything? Can’t we just relax for once?”

  Derlock looks around Baker Lounge at the bodies draped over the crappy, gaudy, squishy hundred-year-old 2020s-style furniture. Just the usual Baker Lounge evening crowd, known to ourselves as “the moes.” My gaze follows his; he’s the only one in the room, I think, who is seeing people the way they really are. It’s like his eyes are the mirror of truth. They’re also gorgeous and I would enjoy drowning in them.

  We’re in two bunches and two singletons. The first bunch has most of the girls and my X2B Bari, who looks like a used-to-be-handsome version of his famous mother. He’s so blasted on all the drugs he takes that he doesn’t even notice that he’s sitting next to Fleeta, who is painfully gorgeous—her parents had her geneered for a perfect-for-media body and hair, eyes, and skin colors that were perfectly palette-balanced. They also bought her a genius level IQ, but that didn’t last: she took happistuf two years ago, and nobody caught her in time, so now she’s joyful and stupid. Bari likes morose smart girls, so I don’t worry about her poaching him, even though she’s still ultra beautiful and sitting very close to him.

  Fleeta used to be my best friend. I guess she still thinks I’m hers, with whatever she has left to think with. I just feel weird around her since she transformed herself from the friend who I most wanted to be into the friend who most resembles a golden retriever.

  The rest of that clump, who have all been chattering about celeb news and flipping around on a screen to see which meeds are trending, is the pair of friends I usually think of as the Dissatisfied Duo. Emerald’s mom just barely qualified to get her into this place, and she doesn’t fit in; she’s awkward at parties, loud, sulky, whiny, and opinionated, but she could get away with that if she didn’t look like a fire hydrant wearing a frog mask. She was born before her mother’s big break, so she didn’t get geneered, and she’s a spineless coward about the surgery she needs to lengthen her thick legs, round off her wide flat ass, and add definition to her squidgy face. All the expensive smartcomb- and coswand-styling in the world just can’t help. Her best friend, Wychee, sits beside her; she’s got ten times the looks and twenty times the attitude: deep-brown skin and bright green eyes and strawberry blonde hair (very like mine, that look was ultra fashionable the year we were born), and she could probably draw some camera time and gossip, but puts her life into outwhining Emerald.

  I know Derlock and I are thinking the same thing about the girl-clump of moes: nobody we need to take into account, ever.

  The boy-clump would be even more moe and even more no-account if that were possible. King is Bari’s drug buddy, another geneered guy with all the genes to be gorgeous and all the habits to be haggard, only interested in what he can put in his bloodstream. (At least he hasn’t done happistuf, though, I think, looking away from Fleeta.) F.B. should have been gorgeous, with the look of an actor or model who gets cast as the “short but tough” sidekick. He has nice muscles, a cute slightly crooked nose, and perfect black curls. His dad geneered him super-sexy retroLatin, except he’s so out of it socially that his security blanket wouldn’t want to be seen with him, and he could be outwitted by a young brick. He has this obsession with astronomy and has memorized reams and reams of names of asteroids and stars, astronomers who discovered things, all kinds of sheeyeffinit, but I can tell he doesn’t understand much of it. Whenever he’s nervous he’ll start spouting all these astronomical non sequiturs, and even though it makes no sense, he tells everyone he wants to be a famous astronomer. Nowadays that’s like being a famous stamp collector or a famous knitter; all the astronomers are mineys who just do it for fun. Nobody seems to be able to reason with him about it; if you bring it up he just lays the memorized facts on thicker.

  Stack is gorgeous—muscles like a Renaissance statue, classic East Afro features. Those were ultra out of fashion when he was born, but a tradition in his family, which includes more pro athletes than most people have relatives. But Stack is a waste of all those jock genes: he’s been cut from every team because he won’t practice or do what the coach asks, so he’s never competed in anything. The athletes won’t let him hang out with them, because they hate constant critiques from a guy who never plays. His major physical skill is bullying.

  The fourth guy is Glisters, Stack’s favorite victim. Glisters is a pulpy white-skinned stringy-haired throwback Caucasian (I’d throw him back, anyway, if anyone knew what sewer he was caught in) with a giant head and a scrawny little body. He’s really brainy and all that sheeyeffinit, and he uses all those brains to splycter porn meeds into tiny little segments and reassemble them into porn that goes by too fast for anyone to follow. I would regard him as the creepiest person here at the school except he seems to have a huge crush on me, so I regard him as the creepi
est person in the solar system.

  Glisters, F.B., Stack, and King are gathered around four-handed chess, like little boys playing their little gamey-game. I don’t know why they play when the outcome is guaranteed: King, who is too drugged to follow the game, will be eliminated, quickly followed by F.B., who is stupid. Then Stack will fix that I’m gonna kill you glare on Glisters, who will let Stack win out of pure terror. Besides, Glisters isn’t thinking about the game nearly as much as he’s staring at me.

  Yuck, by the way.

  Then there are two of us sitting by ourselves. Marioschke is sitting cross-legged, hands resting on her knees, palms up, styling Mysterious Profound Mystic—not convincingly. She’s fat, even though you can cure that with a shot, and pretentious, because apparently you can’t cure that even with constant mockery. Her room is this ultra weird jungle of mats on the floor and plants in pots; every so often she starts crying and says everyone is hurting her feelings, and goes into her room for a few days. Maybe we’ll be lucky and she’ll get her feelings hurt soon, by someone.

  Maybe me.

  I’ve been sitting by myself re-brushing my face with the coswand and my hair with the smartcomb, getting perfect, waiting for Derlock. Now that he’s here, he’s the only thing that is. He eclipses Baker Lounge, and the school, and the whole planet—and when he arrives, for me, the other moes in Baker Lounge just cease to exist.

  Notes for the Interested, #1

  MOES: an extremely common nickname for the loser clique at the most expensive schools

  In 2057 the global economy, environment, and society were in complete, irrecoverable collapse, even though with fully robotic production, the entire global population could have lived like the millionaires of a few generations before. No physical reason existed for the fighting, starvation, random destruction, and shortages of every necessity all over the planet, and yet that misery had persisted for more than a decade.

  The United Nations, pushed to the brink by the Rich Man’s Famine in 2056, decreed Permanent Peace and Prosperity—commonly known as PermaPaxPerity—in which everyone on the planet would receive a “social minimum” for which they would do no work, and robots would produce nearly all goods and provide nearly all services.