Knife Fight and Other Struggles (24 page)

“So you got bored.”

“More than bored,” said Neil. “Do you remember what I told you about space, back on the shuttle? About love?”

“Like yesterday,” she answered wryly.

“Well, I was wrong,” he said. “Love didn’t keep us together. Not when it went sour. It divided us, started feuds. Simon LeFauvre nearly died—”

“The knife fight. I read about it.”

“It was scalpels—not knives. And it would have gotten a lot worse—someone
would
have died—if we hadn’t nipped it all in the bud.”

“With the help of Helen Rockholme’s research project.” Suki felt fingernails digging into her elbows. They were, she realized belatedly, her own. “What about
us
?” she demanded. “Didn’t you ever think about
us
? As something other than some kind of . . . of sickness?”

His shoulders slumped, and Neil turned away at that.

“It made us crazy,” he repeated. “You don’t know. You weren’t there.”

Suki felt something in herself soften at that. What if she had been there, she wondered? Would she have fallen into the same morass of promiscuity and licentiousness that overtook the medical crew of the
Gwendolyn
over the first two years of its voyage? Would her love for Neil have grown pale, the way so many of the others had for one another, and finally transformed into something darker, something like hate? Would she have volunteered, like the rest of the crew, to take Nurse Rockholme’s little machines into her bloodstream, and shed that part of her forever?

Suki’s love had been preserved, after all, a perfect flower pressed between the frozen pages of her hibernation. It had never thus far faced a true test.

Until now, that is.

“Do you love me?” she asked softly.

“They’ve found a habitable planet here,” said Neil. “Really that’s an understatement; it’s quite a paradise. Lots of free-standing water, an oxygen/nitrogen atmosphere, average mean temperature of fifteen degrees Celsius, even some native plant life. Just like Earth. Except. . . .” he paused.

“I asked you a question,” she said.

“Except,” he continued, “it’s a bit more massive. One and a half gees, I’m told. I’d never survive there.”

“Do you?”

“My place,” said Neil, “is going to be up here—I’m afraid for the rest of my life.”

“Love me?”

“You deserve better,” was all he would say.

Suki left then. She considered his face—how it had betrayed nothing, the entire time he had spoken.

She took the hypo out of her pocket, and turned it in her fingers as she thought:

Everything is so easy, every pathway is so clear—once you remove love from the equation.

By the time they were ready for the first drop, Nurse Suki Shannahan had overseen a grand total of seven hundred and sixty-two revivifications—two-hundred and twelve of them unsupervised. That was part of the job, after all, and Suki was good at it; even Nurse Rockholme, who had overruled the recommendations of the examinations board and denied Suki entry into the
Gwendolyn
’s nursing team, even she had to admit it. Nurse Rockholme had watched Suki’s progress from the day of her revivification, with perhaps an unusual and some would say unwarranted degree of interest.

Suki had been such a silly girl in the early days at Luna—a Barbie Doll, that had been Nurse Rockholme’s word for her. Pretty, too pretty for her own good, inside as well as out. Space, Nurse Rockholme had concluded, would kill that pretty girl if she ventured very far into it.

And yet. . . .

Nurse Rockholme turned in her vat in the forward core, watching and listening and tasting as Suki Shannahan finished her seven hundred and sixty-seventh revivification. Her hands caressed the pharmaceutical pallet like an artist’s—entirely confident, uncompromised by pity or anger. . . .

Or by love. Suki’s seven hundred and sixty-seventh colonist twitched as the electric current ran through his nerves, exciting his heart into what would have to become its regular rhythm and shocking his brain-stem out of its low-frequency funk, and as Suki worked those nerves, she smiled. It was a cool smile, thin and professional and entirely heartless.

She has come along
, Nurse Rockholme burbled to herself.
She has turned into a fine young nurse.

The night after Suki Shannahan’s last revivification, she joined Doctor Neil Webley for dinner at his apartment. He opened the cover over his porthole, affording them a slowly rotating view of the landers, which floated assembled and tethered and fuelled over the vast blue and white expanse of the new world below them.

“You could go,” said Neil. “There’s nothing more for you up here.”

Suki shook her head. “I’ve made my choice,” she said, her voice flat.

Neil said nothing more. The two seldom had words for each other these days, but that was fine with Suki. The nanotech in Nurse Rockholme’s serum brought a kind of quiet to her heart, a cool passionlessness that was best served by external silences as well.

Neil put his hand on top of Suki’s. She remembered how it had moved her before, when he touched her like this. It was that touch that had moved her to follow him—
to follow the man she loved to the bottom of the ocean, if that was where he wanted to go.

Now, as they sat together high above the new world’s ocean, where both of them would spend their remaining days together, she knew it was only a touch; only flesh.

He could keep his hand there forever, she knew. And it wouldn’t change a thing.

Max first spied the two fanboys through the mosquito netting surrounding the bed in his nearly submerged Brazilian apartment. He was sure he had them pegged: just another couple of bottom-feeders churned up from the silt by Atlantica, who’d tracked down their hero, Jim, to his dank retirement here at Serra Do Mar Bay. They’d kicked in the door, true. But Jim fans had done far weirder things in Max’s experience.

One fanboy had an acoustic-guitar case slung over his shoulder. “Either of you know ‘Girl from Ipanema’?” Max asked. Although it wasn’t what he was going for, they both laughed appreciatively.

The two introduced themselves as Dan and James and, as James pointed out,
James
was another name for
Jim
. James was the one carrying the guitar case, and he set it down on the floor and opened it while Dan explained in detail just how much Max’s work as Jim on
Wylde’s Kingdom
had meant to him. Trying to be polite, Max noted he had put on a little weight since then and didn’t think he could do the stuff Jim had done anymore. Just as politely, James pointed out that was one of the reasons they were here.

“You have put on a few pounds there, Jim,” agreed Dan.

Then Max heard a click, followed by a whine that sounded like a vacuum cleaner cycling up. James raised his head. He was holding a narrow plastic hose that ended in a gleaming steel needle. A hissing whistle came from its tip, and Max realized what his dormant survival instinct had been trying to tell him since they showed: these guys weren’t fanboys at all—or, at least, not just fanboys. They were professionals: barrio cosmetic surgeons, the very worst kind.

Max stirred, trembling toward thoughts of escape.

Years ago, back when he was a regular on
Wylde’s Kingdom
, and his day consisted of garrotting gorillas and chainsawing rampaging elephants, that instinct would have seen him clear. It would have thrown Max out of bed and had him halfway to the door before the fanboy-surgeons had a chance to react. If one of them had managed to grab him, he probably could have wrestled the needle of the AbSucker 2020 away from him and jammed it into one fannish orifice or another to break the hold and made it to the door and dived off the balcony into the bay in the span of a dozen heartbeats.

But not these days. Max
had
put on a lot of weight—two-fifty sounded about right, and three hundred wouldn’t really have surprised him—and he hadn’t exactly been physically active during his voluntary convalescence here. So when he grabbed at the needle, the fan pulled it out of the way easily, and speckles of dizziness darkened Max’s vision before he could do anything about it.

“Don’t stress yourself,” said Dan, who was holding the second hose-and-needle assembly from the AbSucker in one hand. It was hissing too. Before Max could do anything more, he felt a sharp pain on his left side, and he realized James had managed to skewer him in the love handle. Max felt another prick on his right handle. The AbSucker’s motor whined as it worked on both sides of him, siphoning off eight months of accumulated lipids like they were a milkshake.

James tried to be apologetic. He explained that, usually, they’d have him onto their boat in Rio, and if he wanted he could even have had a general anaesthetic and in just under an hour woken up eight months younger, with none of this painful and clearly disturbing fuss. They would have given him a mint.

“But we were under instructions,” said Dan.

“Just doing what our boss tells us,” said James.

“Your boss?” gasped Max.

James looked down at his own T-shirt, which was emblazoned with a scan of Jerry Wylde, ubiquitous pith helmet covering his hairless scalp and his antique Sharps hunting rifle slung over one narrow shoulder. Dan looked over at it, too, then back at Max. Dan nodded, his open-mouthed grin an eerie parody of the one Wylde sported on the shirt.

“Our boss and yours,” said Dan.

The AbSucker made an ugly
whup!
sound as something thick passed through the orifice. The way Max was feeling, he thought it might be a testicle.

“Mr. Wylde wanted everything to be just right,” explained James. “He wanted you to ‘recontextualize.’”

“And he said you needed to have an ‘adequate sense of danger,’” said Dan.

“Yeah,” agreed James. “Those were his exact words. ‘Recontextualize.’ ‘An adequate sense of danger.’ Mr. Wylde says that’s when you’re at your best.”

The three of them were quiet for a moment—James and Dan contemplating the words of the master, Max contemplating the sagging flesh below his ribcage. The noise from the guitar case shifted from suck to slurp, like the milkshake was finished, and James snapped out of it.

“Shit!” he yelled, and reached down and flipped off the machine. “Almost got your liver,” he said as the sucker cycled down. When Max didn’t laugh, Dan patted him on the shoulder.

“Joke, Jim,” he said.

The wind picked up then, and the broken door swung open. Dan hurried to close the door against the returning rage of Atlantica, and Max shut his eyes.

“I’m not Jim,” he whispered.

But that wasn’t entirely true. Max was Jim—and Jerry Wylde had made him that way.

Jerry Wylde and Max had hooked up the year the first hurricane cluster of Atlantica had been tracked. Jerry Wylde was still with Disney, exec-producing a now-defunct celebrity arena show called
Let the Games Begin
. Max had been working in a string of middling-successful Bollywood sitcoms, the latest of which was an extended-family urban musical actioner called
Look Out for Shoorsen!

With
Shoorsen!
, Max had managed to achieve just the level of celebrity
Let the Games Begin
liked best: sufficiently known to pull in a few ratings points, but not so famous their agent could alter even a semicolon on the standard Disney contract.

Legend had it Jerry had been the one to pick Max, over the objections of some of the execs who were worried about how Max’s recent, well-publicized bout in rehab would play. But that was crap—Jerry didn’t have anything to do with the decision to make Max a centre-forward in the East-versus-West Five-Ball Sudden-Death Australian-Rules Soccer match. In those days, Jerry Wylde didn’t soil his hands with booking decisions. When the two met in the dressing room, Jerry mistook Max for a member of the camera crew, then once corrected, faked his way through an embarrassingly inaccurate appreciation of this season’s
Shoorsen!
and got Max’s name wrong.

Even in those early days, the one thing Jerry Wylde was not was a detail man: he spent his days pushing the envelope, articulating vision, and that day he had such immense envelope-pushing, vision-articulating plans that he was more preoccupied than usual.

In his ghostwritten autobiography, Jerry would take an entire chapter to carefully explain how Disney was poised to drop the metaphorical ball on
Games
, that after just three years in circulation, it was headed for a ratings nosedive, and that what would later become known as the Five-Ball Bloodbath was his honest attempt to inject some life into the ailing property.

From Jerry’s ghostwritten autobiography,
I, Jerry
:

Disney’s problem with
Games
was the same problem they’d been having since “Steamboat Willie.” They settled into a safe spot that only
seemed
dangerous, and their Five-Ball Sudden-Death Australian-Rules Soccer spot was a perfect example: divide a pack of mid-level television actors into teams, throw down five balls instead of one, and tell them they can do anything they want to get as many of those balls between the goalposts as they can before the commercial. Ooh, they do sound extreme, those rules:
Do anything you want
.

Well I tell you something: to an actor, doing anything he wants means driving his convertible to his beach house where he’ll screw his actor girlfriend while his agent is signing him for a movie deal that’ll let him take a different actor girlfriend to the Oscars and screw her in a different way when he wins, all of which he regards as nothing more than his God-given
due
. Kicking a ball into a net in Five-Ball Sudden-Death Australian-Rules Soccer? I don’t care how good actors these guys are; there’s no motivation, and the audience can smell that.

I could sure smell it—and that’s why I made sure their uniforms were scented a little differently: with what I like to call
Eau de Jerry
.

Eau de Jerry
was Wylde’s affectionate name for a pheromone soup tailored to drive the five African rhinos Jerry had managed to hide on-set into a mating frenzy.

None of the actors, of course, had any idea. Billy Kaye, the surgically stunted twenty-six-year-old who’d been playing the same precocious eight-year-old on
Ungrateful Bastard
for the past eighteen years, did complain in the dressing room that the uniforms had a funny smell to them. But the rest of the team wrote the observation off as more of the overpaid dwarf’s well-documented backstage whining. It was ironic: when the balls dropped and the rhinos charged out, Kaye was one of the first to go down—or up, rather, gored on one of the great beasts’ horns and tossed into the air like a discarded action figure. The Man-Boy Who Cried Rhino, Jerry later dubbed him.

Seven other celebrities died in the televised bloodbath that followed. Another eleven were maimed, and the rest suffered more minor injuries. Or most of the rest did.

Live on television, Max Fiddler—and only Max Fiddler—came through the ordeal unscathed.

Emerging from his Serra Do Mar Bay apartment and struggling through the rain toward his psychopathic fans’ limousine, Max still wasn’t sure how he’d survived that bloodbath. He’d seen the tapes enough times: watched himself leap out of the path of a charging rhino, bolt across the pitch to the opposing team’s goalposts, and shimmy up to the top, then jump again when a couple of smitten rhinos rammed into the posts hard enough to knock them down. He saw himself grab onto the bottom of the camera crane that was even then pulling in for the close-up on what could have, should have been his death scene. Max watched as he swung overtop and wrestled the camera operator like he was the last Nazi guard on the truck with the Ark of the Covenant in the back. Max did remember that fight, or at least the feelings it had brought out in him—a strange mix of terror, elation, and vestigial guilt as he finally managed to unstrap the operator from his seat and knock him twenty-five feet down to the Astroturf below. The feelings were there, but the particulars were lost forever. Something within him had taken over and guided him to safety. Max chose to simply call it his survival instinct, but in Wylde’s autobiography, the ghostwriter found a better name: “Max Fiddler’s Inner Jim.”

The ghostwriter hadn’t needed to embellish the events that followed. Jerry had indeed been the first one onto the pitch, before the rhinos were subdued, and he had stood directly underneath the crane smoking a locally banned cigarette, gazing wordlessly up at Max for almost a minute before the floor director, surrounded by three terrified PAs brandishing cattle prods and cellphones, came out to take Wylde off-set and bundle up the camera operator.