Swanwick, Michael - SS - Tin Marsh.pdf

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TIN MARSH by MICHAEL SWANWICK
Patang races through the blazing Venusian heat in a desperate flight for survival.
* * * *
It was hot coming down into the valley. The sun was high in the sky, a harsh white
dazzle in the eternal clouds, strong enough to melt the lead out of the hills. They
trudged down from the heights, carrying the drilling rig between them. A little trickle
of metal, spill from a tanker bringing tin out of the mountains, glinted at the verge of
the road.
A traveler coming the other way, ten feet tall and anonymous in a black muscle
suit, waved at them as they passed, but, even though it had been weeks since they’d
seen another human being, they didn’t wave back. The traveler passed them and
disappeared up the road. The heat had seared the ground here black and hard. They
could leave the road, if they wanted, and make almost as good time.
Patang and MacArthur had been walking for hours. They expected to walk for
hours more. But then the road twisted and down at the bottom of the long decline, in
the shadow of a basalt cliff, was an inn. Mostly their work kept them away from
roads and inns. For almost a month they’d been living in their suits, sleeping in
harness.
They looked warily at each other, mirrored visor to mirrored visor. Heat
glimmered from the engines of their muscle suits. Without a word, they agreed to
stop.
The inn radioed a fee schedule at their approach. They let their suits’
autonomic functions negotiate for them, and carefully set the drilling rig down
alongside the building.
“Put out the tarp,” MacArthur said. “So it won’t warp.”
He went inside.
Patang deployed the gold foil tarp, then followed him in.
MacArthur was already out of his suit and seated at a cast-iron table with two
cups of water in front of him when Patang cycled through the airlock. For an instant
she dared hope everything was going to be all right.
Then he looked up at her.
“Ten dollars a cup.” One cup was half empty. He drank the rest down in one
long gulp, and closed a hairy paw around the second cup. His beard had grown
 
since she had last seen it, and she could smell him from across the room.
Presumably he could smell her too. “The bastards get you coming and going.”
Patang climbed down out of her suit. She stretched out her arms as far as they
would go, luxuriating in the room’s openness. All that space! It was twenty feet
across and windowless. There was the one table, and six iron chairs to go with it.
Half a dozen cots folded up against the walls. A line of shelves offered Company
goods that neither of them could afford. There were also a pay toilet and a pay
shower. There was a free medical unit, but if you tried to con it out of something
recreational, the Company found out and fined you accordingly.
Patang’s skin prickled and itched from a month’s accumulation of dried
sweat. “I’m going to scratch,” she said. “Don’t look.”
But of course MacArthur did, the pig.
Ignoring him, Patang slowly and sensuously scratched under her blouse and
across her back. She took her time, digging in with her nails hard enough almost to
make the skin bleed. It felt glorious.
MacArthur stared at her all the while, a starving wolf faced with a plump
rabbit.
“You could have done that in your suit,” he said when she was done.
“It’s not the same.”
“You didn’t have to do that in front of—”
“ Hey! How’s about a little conversation?” Patang said loudly. So it cost a few
bucks. So what?
With a click, the innkeeper came on. “Wasn’t expecting any more visitors so
close to the noon season,” it said in a folksy synthetic voice. “What are you two
prospecting for?”
“Gold, tin, lead, just about anything that’ll gush up a test-hole.” Patang closed
her eyes, pretending she was back on Lakshmi Planum in a bar in Port Ishtar, talking
with a real, live human being. “We figured most people will be working tracts in the
morning and late afternoon. This way our databases are up-to-date—we won’t be
stepping on somebody’s month-old claim.”
“Very wise. The Company pays well for a strike.”
“I hate those fucking things.” MacArthur turned his back on the speaker and
Patang both, noisily scraping his chair against the floor. She knew how badly he’d
 
like to hurt her.
She knew that it wasn’t going to happen.
* * * *
The Company had three rules. The first was No Violence. The second was
Protect Company Equipment. The third was Protect Yourself. All three were
enforced by neural implant.
From long experience with its prospectors, the Company had prioritized these
rules, so that the first overruled the second, the second overruled the third, and the
third could only be obeyed insofar as it didn’t conflict with the first two. That was
so a prospector couldn’t decide—as had happened—that his survival depended on
the death of his partner. Or, more subtly, that the other wasn’t taking proper care of
Company equipment, and should be eliminated.
It had taken time and experience, but the Company had finally come up with a
foolproof set of algorithms. The outback was a functioning anarchy. Nobody could
hurt anybody else there.
No matter how badly they needed to.
The ‘plants had sounded like a good idea when Patang and MacArthur first
went under contract. They’d signed up for a full sidereal day—two hundred
fifty-five Earth days. Slightly longer than a Venusian year. Now, with fifty-nine days
still to go, she was no longer certain that two people who hated each other as much
as they did should be kept from each other’s throats. Sooner or later, one of them
would have to crack.
Every day she prayed that it would be MacArthur who finally yanked the
escape cord, calling down upon himself the charges for a rescue ship to pull them
out ahead of contract. MacArthur who went bust while she took her partial creds
and skipped.
Every day he didn’t. It was inhuman how much abuse he could absorb
without giving in.
Only hatred could keep a man going like that.
* * * *
Patang drank her water down slowly, with little slurps and sighs and
lip-smackings. Knowing MacArthur loathed that, but unable to keep herself from
doing it anyway. She was almost done when he slammed his hands down on the
tabletop, to either side of hers, and said, “Patang, there are some things I want to get
 
straight between us.”
“Please. Don’t.”
“Goddamnit, you know how I feel about that shit.”
“I don’t like it when you talk like that. Stop.”
MacArthur ground his teeth. “No. We are going to have this out right here and
now. I want you to— what was that? ”
Patang stared blankly at her partner. Then she felt it—an uneasy vertiginous
queasiness, a sense of imbalance just at the edge of perception, as if all of Venus
were with infinitesimal gentleness shifting underfoot.
Then the planet roared and the floor came up to smash her in the face.
* * * *
When Patang came to, everything was a jumble. The floor was canted. The
shelves had collapsed, dumping silk shirts, lemon cookies, and bars of beauty soap
everywhere. Their muscle suits had tumbled together, the metal arm of one caught
between the legs of the other. The life support systems were still operational, thank
God. The Company built them strong.
In the middle of it all, MacArthur stood motionless, grinning. A trickle of
blood ran down his neck. He slowly rubbed the side of his face.
“MacArthur? Are you okay?”
A strange look was in his eyes. “By God,” he said softly. “By damn.”
“Innkeeper! What happened here?”
The device didn’t respond. “I busted it up,” MacArthur said. “It was easy.”
“What?”
MacArthur walked clumsily across the floor toward her, like a sailor on an
uncertain deck. “There was a cliff slump.” He had a Ph.D. in extraterrestrial geology.
He knew things like that. “A vein of soft basalt weakened and gave way. The inn
caught a glancing blow. We’re lucky to be alive.”
He knelt beside her and made the OK sign with thumb and forefinger. Then he
flicked the side of her nose with the forefinger.
 
“Ouch!” she said. Then, shocked, “Hey, you can’t ... !”
“Like hell I can’t.” He slapped her in the face. Hard. “Chip don’t seem to
work anymore.”
Rage filled her. “You son of a bitch!” Patang drew back her arm to slug him.
Blankness.
* * * *
She came to seconds later. But it was like opening a book in the middle or
stepping into an interactive an hour after it began. She had no idea what had
happened or how it affected her.
MacArthur was strapping her into her muscle suit.
“Is everything okay?” she murmured. “Is something wrong?”
“I was going to kill you, Patang. But killing you isn’t enough. You have to
suffer first.”
“What are you talking about?”
Then she remembered.
MacArthur had hit her. His chip had malfunctioned. There were no controls
on him now. And he hated her. Bad enough to kill her? Oh, yes. Easily.
MacArthur snapped something off her helmet. Then he slapped the power
button and the suit began to close around her. He chuckled and said, “I’ll meet you
outside.”
* * * *
Patang cycled out the lock and then didn’t know what to do. She fearfully
went a distance up the road, and then hovered anxiously. She didn’t exactly wait and
she didn’t exactly go away. She had to know what MacArthur was up to.
The lock opened, and MacArthur went around to the side of the tavern, where
the drilling rig lay under its tarp. He bent down to separate the laser drill from the
support struts, data boxes, and alignment devices. Then he delicately tugged the
gold foil blanket back over the equipment.
He straightened, and turned toward Patang, the drill in his arms. He pointed it
at her.
 

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