Lights in the Deep (7 page)

When I finally opened my eyes—?!—I was greeted by several different faces, all of which appeared concerned. I sat up—?!—and looked at the Outbounders, each of whom was dressed in what I took for medical gowns, though the room in which they’d placed me was remarkably warm, and free from anything even approaching a scalpel or other menacingly surgical object.

“I’m Doctor Hastel. How do you feel?”

That was one of the women, who looked about forty.

“I’m not sure yet,” I said. “How did you…put me back?”

“It’s a long explanation,” said one of the men, a Chinese-ish fellow in his thirties who identified himself as Surgeon Chow. “Here, I’ll make it simple for you.”

He never moved, but there was a sudden mind jolt, like the ones I’d gotten from Howard’s memory array. In the space of a single second, I suddenly understood everything about the Outbounder procedure. They’d cloned me, using tissue from the frozen corpse they’d found in the observatory’s recording room. Inside my clone brain they’d installed a new organ: a direct-connect interface. They’d used it to slowly trickle my cerebral matrix into the clone brain while the clone body grew.

Now that I was awake, the direct-connect would allow me to access their public network—once they deemed it safe for me to do so. I still had a lot to learn before I could get out of the hospital.

All of this knowledge arrived in my consciousness with a cool surety, as if I’d always known such things. But I felt a tight thrill run down my spine while I looked down at my legs.

“Fully functional?” I asked.

“Yes,” Hastel said, with a small smile. “Were they not before?”

“No,” I said. “Paraplegic.”

“We’ve gotten a few of those,” she said. “Easily fixed.”

I dared to try to move my legs, which had been useless my entire life, and discovered I didn’t really know how. Though if I concentrated, I could feel the sensation of the air cycler’s gentle current across my thighs, such that it created tiny goose bumps.

I felt delirious with sudden joy, tears leaking from the corners of my eyes while I smiled broadly.

My mind began to burst with questions.

“All in good time, Mister Jaworski,” said Chow. “We’re sorry we had to keep you off-line for so long. Even with advanced gen, it takes years to grow a clone body to the decanting stage. You were put into the queue as soon as possible.”

One of the other women, a younger and freckly red-head, asked the next question.

“I’m Surgeon’s Assistant Keilor. What would you like to know first?”

“Can I…” I stopped to really think about it. Then I said, “Can I get something to eat, please?”

The entire group smiled widely.

I looked around. “Is that the right question?”

“You bet,” Keilor said, taking my hand.

Another mind jolt, directly from her.

I slid off the table, and discovered I knew how to walk.

• • •

The Outbound were far more numerous and sophisticated than I’d expected them to be. While the solar system had gone about its myopic, self-centered business, the Outbound had secured great whacks of the Kuiper Belt, both for mining and colonization. Eventually they’d erected a monitoring network that had, at first, been designed to keep an eye on the rest of humanity that lived “down in the hole”, as I’d learned they called everyone who lived inside the orbit of Neptune.

It was this grid which had first detected the Others, who had apparently erected a monitoring network of their own, dating back to the twentieth century.

Things sort of snowballed from there.

Exchanging information and technology with the other sentient species of nearby star systems, the Outbound rapidly outpaced those of us “down in the hole”, so that the Outbound were able to easily mask their gradual takeover of the Kuiper.

None of the Outbound had been surprised by the outbreak of war. They’d seen it coming for many years. The wedge-shaped ship that had intercepted the observatory had been one of numerous, automated picket craft designed to intercept anything sent from the solar system, and determine if it was friendly or hostile. Had I been one of the killsats, or any other hostile entity, I’d have been destroyed. But once they found my memory arrays and determined that I was benign, they pulled the arrays, sampled tissue for cloning, returned both the arrays and the sample to a safe harbor, and the rest was history.

The observatory, along with the bodies of Howard and Tabitha, was allowed to continue on its eternal journey towards the vastness of the far-away Oort.

I bided my time as just another adolescent Outbounder: lounging around in the public spaces, getting used to my new body and its revelatory mobility, and playing on the direct-connect system. Hundreds of thousands of minds, most human, a few alien, all feeding into and interconnected by a vast, peer-based sharing system that was serverless and extended as far as communications equipment could make it go. Not quite a pooled mind, since everyone kept up their privacy barriers, but enough crossover so that we each could learn and access enough information that it was like digesting an entire college semester every day of the week.

I also managed to stay in touch with the freckly red-head from the clone center. Physically, Colleen Keilor was a good bit older than I was, but age didn’t seem to matter much to Outbounders.

Col and I got along quite well.

A couple of years after I awoke among the Outbound, their Quorum announced its intention to begin reclamation of the solar system. The Quorum asked for volunteers to spearhead the effort, which would involve not only cleaning out all the killsats that still prowled between the planets, but a partial terraforming of the wasted Earth.

It would be a protracted effort—the greatest challenge of the Outbound Age.

Col and I signed up immediately.

• • •

Irenka Elaine Jaworski-Keilor was born in the midst of the Inbound flight of the First Reclamation Flotilla. Bright-eyed, and with a face and smile that seems eerily familiar, she brings my wife Col and I a great deal of joy. Once, Irenka would have seemed an impossibility. But through the years of changing diapers and teaching her to read and write and do math and use direct-connect, I’ve gradually accepted the fact that impossibilities are routine in my new, expanded reality.

We’ve reached Jupiter, and found the scorched remains of the old settlements. The killsats were waiting too, but we made short work of them, radioing our progress back to the Second and Third Flotillas which were launched in our wake.

There’s work aplenty for the new inhabitants of the solar system.

I hope that some day I can take Irenka down to Earth and show her a world I once called home, and which, hopefully, with a lot of fixing, might be called home again.

▼ ▲ ▼ ▲ ▼

“Outbound” came together over the winter holiday season in 2008. It was the mixture of two different stories which I’d started and stopped earlier in the year, and which seemed to unconsciously complement each other so well, I decided to blend their components and draft an entirely new story from scratch.

Very often, when you’re a new writer just starting out, you don’t have a lot of faith in your craft: your ability to execute the story in your head—only this time on paper—such that readers will find it as engaging and enjoyable as you do in your mind.

Then, there are stories that just seem to click.

“Outbound” was one of these: I knew when I was done with it, that it was (at that point in time) the best thing I’d yet written. So strong was my surety, that I felt almost electrified as a result. “Outbound” was going to be the story—the one that would put me over the top. Having never sold fiction professionally before, and after many years of fruitless effort, I knew I’d finally (finally!) generated something above-the-standard.

So you’ll understand if I tell you I was significantly crushed when “Outbound” did not win for its quarter of the L. Ron Hubbard Presents Writers and Illustrators of the Future Contest; in which the story had been a Finalist.

How could this story have failed?

I’d written “Outbound” specifically with the Contest in mind. After studying past winning stories. And when I sent “Outbound” to the Contest, I’d already gotten three Honorable Mentions on all three of my previous entries. I knew therefore I was very close to winning, and that “Outbound” would be the story that would earn me a slot at the Contest workshop week, and in the Contest anthology.

So: what went wrong? Had I just been fooling myself? Was my desperation for publication—a long delayed dream—clouding my judgment to the extent that I’d lost perspective on my own work?

Such questions plagued me for weeks after getting the news that “Outbound” hadn’t won. It was definitely one of those long, dark nights of an aspiring writer’s soul: to have come so close—and felt so sure—and still not achieved the goal.

Flash forward half a year.

I sent “Outbound” to Stanley Schmidt, who was at that time editor for
Analog Science Fiction and Fact
magazine.

This was in the wake of my having finally won Writers of the Future—with a different story, “Exanastasis”, which is included later in this book.

I let Stan know that “Outbound” was a prior Contest Finalist, and that Contest judge Dave Wolverton had read it and liked it very much, despite its not having won, and that I hoped Stan would like “Outbound” too.

Roughly sixty days after putting the manuscript in the mail—to Stan’s address at Dell Magazines in New York City—I got my self-addressed stamped envelope back.

This was in the days when most short fiction was still going out on paper, so you had to include some kind of pre-stamped envelope in the package, so that the editors could send you their reply—usually a form rejection. Of which I’d already seen dozens from the
Analog
desk.

Receiving my sad little SASE that particular January evening was almost as crushing as learning the story had not made the cut at Writers of the Future.

Again: was I just fooling myself?

I reluctantly tore my SASE open, observing the half-page form header paper that fell out—and which Stan normally reserved for personalized rejections. I knew what those looked like because I’d gotten a couple from Stan before.

I read the top line of the top paragraph:

“Dear Mr. Torgersen, I like OUTBOUND too, and a contract is coming.”

Wait, what?

I had to read it twice to be sure I wasn’t imagining things.

Vindication was mine!

My daughter can truthfully testify that I was simultaneously whooping, yelling, and jumping up and down (in the seated position!) right there on our living room couch.

You see,
Analog
is where the big kids get to play. It is—as of this writing—the most-circulated and venerable professional science fiction digest in the English-speaking world. Scores of Big Name people got their start in
Analog
. Some of my writing heroes still publish in
Analog
. Getting to have a story in print in
Analog
felt a bit like stepping up to the plate—having previously done time in the minor leagues—and getting a solid base hit in the majors.

Or was it a home run?

The following year, after “Outbound” was published, I got another piece of mail from Stanley Schmidt. This time informing me that “Outbound” took first place in the
Analog
Analytical Laboratory readers’ choice poll, for best novelette in 2010.

The story has since been reprinted in several languages in several prestigious overseas publications, as well as being bundled into an
Analog
best-of-the-decade electronic anthology. It was even hunted up by a Hollywood person who paid me a hunk of change; for him to have the right to shop it around Tinsel Town.

I still get nice fan letters about this story.

I like to think it’s because “Outbound” has heart.

I also want to thank Carolyn Ives Gilman for providing a somewhat spiritual roadmap, with her wonderful story “Arkfall.” If I’d not read and enjoyed “Arkfall” so much, in 2008, I’d not have written “Outbound” the way I did, and the story thus would not have gone on to do as much good for me as it’s done. Because in addition to the substantial paydays and notoriety this story has given me, it also established me with both the
Analog
staff and the
Analog
readers—as the kind of writer who could be trusted to provide people with an uplifting, worthwhile experience. A guy who wouldn’t waste the readers’ time—one of Larry Niven’s stated authorial sins.

Thanks, Stan Schmidt. I owe you for trusting me enough to run this story.

And thank you
Analog
readers, for providing me with such terrific feedback, voter support, and fan mail. On this story, and on so many stories since.

Gemini 17

Vic was outside for twenty minutes when his maneu-vering pack burst.

No warning. The damned thing just blew.

With the clamshell doors on the Gemini capsule hanging wide open, I saw it all: Vic floating against the gorgeous backdrop of the Indian Ocean, clutching the drum-shaped pack to his chest—like an oversized accordion, his gloved fingers and thumbs occasionally touching the jet triggers on the opposed handles—then poof. The unit went up. I’m not sure if Vic ever knew what happened. There was an instant where I thought I saw a surprised expression on his face through the remains of his visor and pressure helmet, then the entire Gemini-Chiron assembly got physically yanked as Vic’s suit reached the limit of its umbilical, which snapped taught.

I instinctively reached for the stick.

By the time I got things stabilized, Houston was screaming at me for a status report. All I could do was reel Vic back to the spacecraft, his body now limp in his deflated pressure suit. Getting him into his seat without his assistance was impossible, so I stood up in the hatch and turned him over. The explosion had shredded him. His exposed tissue was puffy and shot through with darkly-engorged veins and arteries. The flight surgeon had always wondered what space-vacuum death would look like. I got lots of pictures, then sat back down in the capsule and spent several minutes trying very hard not to cry.