Slow Bullets Read online

  “Did you volunteer?” I asked.

  “I was selected for the mission. I was small and strong and clever. They taught me your way of speaking, your customs. I had trained for it since childhood. It has always been the biggest thing in my life.”

  I shivered at the magnitude of what Murash had been asked to do. It was clear to me that she had never had the slightest choice about her fate. She had been shaped for this one purpose, engineered like a tool to do one thing and do it properly.

  “What was the plan?”

  “To reach your ship, to board it, to explore and document its contents. Make contact with the crew, if possible. Recover medicines and supplies, and send them down to Tottori using your own re-entry vehicles. Fill the capsule with what I could, refuel it from your own stores, and then return.”

  “What went wrong?” Spry asked.

  Murash gave a dry, humourless laugh. “Easier to say what went right. The rocket worked. We launched from the equator. The rendezvous calculations were difficult. You were in a high orbit, and there was only just enough fuel to reach you. But I did it. I identified the design of your ship from our records, found a working airlock. The airlock adaptor functioned as we had hoped. I moved into your ship. It was cold, very cold, but the air was breathable. After that, nothing went well.”

  “I know that feeling,” Prad whispered.

  “You were all still in hibernation. Your ship was so damaged there were parts I could not enter. I tried to wake you, but the systems would not respond to me. I tried to find medical supplies, food and water. I tried to find fuel, so that I could make my return trip. I tried to find a lifeboat or escape pod. I found none of these things. I wondered what kind of ship I had found. Now I know.”

  “Small wonder you didn’t want to be found,” Yesli said.

  “You started trying to kill each other. I knew what you would do to me, if you learned.”

  “Did you kill someone to get into hibo?” Sacer asked.

  “There was no need. I found an empty hibo capsule and eventually made it accept me. I had been trained to recognise your technology, but it still took six weeks. I had used all my food and water by then. I was close to death.”

  “You look it,” Spry said.

  “So will you, eventually. Soon you will be down to your last drop of water as well.”

  “I think we will last a bit more than six weeks,” Yesli said. “The ship isn’t as dead as when you came aboard. Prad and the others have made a lot of the systems work again. There’s no reason why it can’t keep us alive for years, if we ration things carefully. And we do have medicine: you just didn’t get to it in time.”

  “Good for us that she didn’t,” I said. “She’d have sent it back down to Tottori, for all the good it would have done them. Have you seen your world, Murash? Do you know what’s come of it?”

  She nodded at a window. “I have eyes.”

  “What do you think happened to your culture?” I asked. “Did no one think to build a second rocket, to come after you?”

  “I told you that times were already hard. There was one rocket. That was all we could do. I signalled back down to the surface, during the weeks that I was aboard. I told them what I had found, and that I could not return. They said that I had been courageous, to have come this far. But I knew that I had failed my world in its most desperate hour.” Murash was looking at me directly now, daring me to break her gaze. “I knew they would not last long, after I went into hibo. It was bad enough when I left. Each winter worse than the last, until we had no other season but winter. Perhaps if I found the right things, it might have made a difference.”

  “I’m sorry that you failed,” I told her. “Sorry for your planet, as well. But your mission wasn’t worthless. You’ve already told us more than we could ever have learned for ourselves. That’s invaluable. And you’re one of us now. You won’t be punished for hiding from us—it was an understandable reaction.”

  “Very good of you, Scur, to presume to speak for the Trinity,” Sacer said.

  “You’re welcome,” I said, blunting her sarcasm.

  Spry coughed gently. “Scur has only stated the obvious. You’ll be treated the same as the rest of us, Murash. The same privileges, the same rations and duties. The same degree of protection—we don’t want you hurt, or intimidated, for what you are. You can’t go back to Tottori—that’s clear enough. But if you accept our terms, you can find a life here, on Caprice.”

  “They will return,” Murash said quietly.

  “They?” Yesli asked.

  “The Sickening. They have gone, but they have not forgotten us. We are nothing to them now—not even a nuisance. So our star warms up again, our world comes out of its freeze. It means nothing. They will return.”

  “Then we had better be ready the second time,” I said.

  Murash laughed again. I understood then that there was a kind of desolate hopelessness beyond anything we had experienced so far. Worse than this was the realisation that Murash had a much better perspective on things than the rest of us—that she was much better placed to judge our chances.

  “You don’t know us,” I said. “You think you do, but you don’t. We’ve come through a lot, all of us. The war you only read about in books. We lived through that. It burned us. But we came out the other side. Stronger, sometimes. Always changed. And this is just . . . something else to deal with. You think we’re doomed?” I did not wait for her answer. “Fine: put yourself on zero rations until you die. If you can’t take the slow way out, there are energy pistols and airlocks. But you won’t, will you? You’re a survivor like the rest of us. And you know deep down that there’s a chance. If you didn’t, you would have just killed yourself by now.”

  “Maybe I have not had the chance,” Murash said. But there was a little less spite in her voice than before. After a silence she added: “I want to see Tottori. Properly—not from one of these little windows.”

  “There’s nothing,” Spry said warningly. “Just ice.”

  Murash shook her head. “I saw something. Maybe you were not looking closely enough.”

  ______________

  We had seen an ice-locked world where there ought to have been a bright hub of civilisation and commerce. No stations, no cities, no spaceports—no sign of any industrial activity at all.

  But Murash was correct. With our other preoccupations, we had not looked closely enough.

  And it turned out that there was still life on Tottori. The ice age had changed the world almost beyond recognition, made our old maps useless, but Murash had known this planet as the great winter closed in, and she knew where her people had moved to, in their last retreat to the equator.

  “There,” she said, directing our attention to a stretch of coastline as yet uncovered by ice. “In that bay was Skilmer, one of our largest cities. We made parts for the rocket there—the alloys and guidance system.”

  “There’s nothing,” Sacer said.

  But Yesli’s eyes were sharper. “No—Murash is right. There’s definitely something there. A community, settlement of some sort. I can see a bridge across that inlet, and those look like smoke trails.”

  “Why didn’t we see it before?” I asked.

  “Cloud cover, I suppose,” Spry said. “That, and we hadn’t lowered our expectations far enough. It’s barely a town, let alone a city.”

  Murash directed our attention a little to the north and a little to the east. “That would be Uskeram. It was always smaller than Skilmer. But I think there are people there. That curving line that projects into the bay—it can only be a harbour wall.”

  “Then those must be boats,” Yesli said.

  Needless to say, even with the damaged condition of Caprice, it was not hard to turn magnifying instruments onto these putative communities. We had nothing good enough to look at them in detail, but it was sufficient to vindicate Murash. There were indeed towns down on the surface of Tottori—albeit at a level of technological development far bel
ow that necessary to make a rocket, let alone a skipship. We saw winding streets, buildings of stone and wood and thatch, many fires and plumes of smoke. We saw animals harnessed for work, drawing loads along icy, rutted roads. We saw sailing vessels in the shelter of the harbour, while the sea seethed grey and cold beyond. No machines, no electricity, no power beyond the energy provided by the burning of wood. There were still forests at the equator, but even from orbit they looked thin and depleted.

  In our orbits we mapped other communities. Some of these Murash was able to name, but not all were known to her. Much time had obviously passed since her departure. This world, in its way, was as strange to her as Tottori had been to us when we arrived.

  We estimated a total planetary population of around fifty million people.

  “Do you want to return to them?” Spry asked.

  She looked at him sharply, as if the question might be a trap. “Could I?”

  Spry continued: “We don’t have a shuttle—nothing that can land on Tottori and then get back to us. The best we could offer would be a one-way trip in one of our pods. We could drop you back down there.”

  “In Skilmer, or one of the other towns?”

  “It couldn’t be guaranteed,” Prad said. “There’s no manual flight control once you hit the atmosphere. The pod would home in on a NavNet transponder, given the choice, but since there aren’t any . . .” He bit his lip. “There’d be a large margin of error. That’s not really the point, though, is it? For all we know, it’s been another thousand years since you docked with us! You had to learn our language from books. What good will you be down on Tottori, after all this time? You’ll be as unfamiliar to them as any of us.”

  “It is still Tottori,” Murash answered. “It is still my world, my home.”

  “They’re dying down there,” I said. “It’s obvious, isn’t it? Either dying, or they’ve been on the brink of extinction and now they’re trying to claw something back. But it’s still fragile. How long do you think those forests will last?”

  “It’s not our concern,” Sacer said. “If they had something we could use, I’d say we send down Murash as our negotiator. But they’re in the stone age. There’s nothing we can do for them, and nothing they can do for us.”

  I squared off against her. “Leave them to their fate—that’s what you’re saying?”

  “Their fate is none of our business. Look, they’ve managed without us so far. Isn’t that enough?”

  “They wouldn’t have sent Murash if they didn’t need help,” Yesli said.

  “But even Murash would be ancient history to these people. Do you think they even remember sending her? We drop Murash back onto Tottori, what do you think they’ll make of her? Even Murash can’t say if they speak the same languages she knows.”

  “I would take that chance,” Murash said.

  “Right now,” I answered, “you’re much more valuable to us than you could ever be to those people. I’m not saying we wouldn’t help them if it was within our means, but we have to be realistic.”

  “Now you sound like Sacer,” Prad said.

  “I’m not. Sacer says we do nothing because these people can’t give us anything in return. I say we have nothing to offer them anyway—at least not now, while we’re still coming to terms with the condition of the ship. You’ve said it yourself, Prad: In a thousand days, who knows what we’ll have left?”

  “Actually, I meant to have a word with you all about the thousand days. It’s possible I may be able to buy us quite some more time.”

  But Prad’s face had none of the jubilation I might have expected from this turn of events. Quite the opposite—as if he well knew that the cost he was about to demand of us would be too high.

  “You’ve found a way to stop the memory leak?” I asked, hardly daring to speculate.

  “No. Not stop it, or even slow it. The process, as I have said, is mostly random, and I can’t get deep enough into the architecture to have much say over that.”

  “Then I don’t see what you can bring us,” Spry said.

  “It is very simple,” Prad answered. “I have been searching the ship for some other substrate that we could use in place of the long-term memory. It has not been easy! The slates are useless—they were designed for pursers and janitors on a luxury starliner! The spacesuits, lifeboats and shuttles are scarcely any better, although they all have a little capacity that we can use. Nonetheless, I have already begun to copy memory sectors into them. It won’t make a huge difference to our problem—at best, we may copy between three and four percent of the memory sectors not already overwritten.”

  I closed my eyes. “That’s it? That’s the best we’ve got? Three to four percent?”

  “There is something else.”

  Yesli said: “What?”

  “Another form of memory storage, but of a very fragile and highly distributed kind.”

  I nodded. “Go on.”

  “The slow bullets. Those of you . . . those of us who have them . . .”

  “It’s all right, Prad. We know you’re crew—you don’t have to remind us of it every five minutes.”

  “My point is simply that a majority of the survivors do carry slow bullets. They are not designed for bulk memory storage, but they do have rather a lot of useful capacity. Presently, quite a bit of it is taken up with military-biographical data. You’d be surprised how much.”

  “So what are you proposing?” Spry asked, while Murash looked on. I wondered how much of the conversation she was following—how clearly she understood our difficulties.

  “What I have in mind is rather simple,” Prad said. “We replace the data in the bullets with parts of the ship’s memory. It wouldn’t be difficult. After our search for our friend Murash here, I already know how to talk to the bullets with one of our slates. I can display the information in the bullet, but I can also alter it—erase and replace it. The bullets can be addressed and updated painlessly, without surgery.”

  I shook my head, thinking of the pictures of my mother and father, tangible links to my old life.

  “No. You can’t do it this way. The bullets are all we have.”

  “We must consider this, Scur. While the ship’s own memory falls to pieces, we can each of us preserve a part of it inside our own bodies.”

  “Those of us with slow bullets, you mean.”

  “There are more slow bullets in the bodies of the frozen dead—enough to go around. We have injectors—you saw one of them when the mob had that man pinned down. There are plenty to go around. The old bullets can be extracted, cleaned of their data and re-implanted in the living.” He made an expansive gesture. “I will gladly accept one into myself, for the purposes of solidarity.”

  “That’s very noble of you, Prad.”

  “Thank you, Scur.”

  “But you can take your nobility and fuck yourself sideways. What does a bullet mean to you? I’ll tell you what it means. Nothing at all. We know what you are, what you were—a fucking crewmember.”

  Something in me had snapped. I could not stop myself.

  “I did not mean to trivialise your experience, Scur. I know that you have been in the war . . .”

  “You still don’t get it, Prad. You never had to fight, never had to take a questionable order, never had to see a friend blown up or wonder if you exceeded your mandate when you met the enemy. You’re not a traitor or a war criminal or a civilian black-marketeer. You’re a fucking coward of a ship’s technician, who was running away from danger when I met him. You were nothing, you are nothing.”

  Prad was looking at me with something between horror and confusion, as if there was a chance this still might prove to be a joke. I knew I had gone too far, been unfair to him. He had not been a coward, just a man trying to survive. What had any of us been trying to do, but that?

  Murash looked on with bewilderment and disappointment, as if she expected better of us than this.

  But now that I had started, some part of me had to keep g
oing.

  “My bullet is all I have, Prad. I wouldn’t expect a civilian like you to understand that. You haven’t had my life. I should never have been in this fucking war. I was an innocent victim of political corruption. But even then, even after I was conscripted, I did nothing wrong. I followed orders, I gave them, but I never crossed the line. I was a good soldier—and I should not be on this fucking hellhole of a prison ship.”

  “That’s enough, Scur,” Yesli said. “Prad was just giving us the options, that’s all.”

  “There aren’t any. We don’t touch the bullets.” And I placed my hand over my chest, as if they might try to take my bullet out of me there and then. “Not now. Not ever.”

  Prad nodded slowly, raising his hands and backing away from me as if in surrender. I knew that what I had said could not be easily undone, if it could be undone at all. Perhaps I had done too much damage for that. Prad was the closest person I had found to a friend since the wakening, and I had burned that friendship in a moment’s reckless rage.

  But I still meant what I had said. My bullet was all that held me to my past. I could not surrender it.

  ______________

  “We’ve found him,” Yesli said, rousing me from a shallow, troubled sleep.

  “Orvin?”

  “Who else?” Yesli smiled, and I tried to find the energy to respond. This was how it was going to be from now on, I thought. We would have to take our pleasure in small, petty things, like the capture of a fugitive. The measure of our lives now would not be in how things improved, but in how quickly or slowly they worsened.

  “I’m glad.”

  Yesli added: “He’s pretty weak, after all this time on his own, with no food or water. You should see him—make sure he really is the man you say he is.”

  “There’s no doubt.”

  “All the same, you should be involved in this. We’ll have to set an example, of course—do things properly. You’ve reason to hate him, and so do the rest of us after what happened to Crowl. But we’ve got to rise above our need for revenge. We’ll have to do things with due process, give him a chance to state his side of things . . .” Yesli trailed off, as if she recognised how ridiculous this all sounded.