Cease and Deceased

Illustration by Janet Aulisio

It wasn’t the most beautiful starship ever conceived, not with a budget of only half a billion dollars. It was mostly just an open framework atop an Orion class fusion rocket, but the Spook had one big advantage over anything else that had ever been built for interstellar travel: it could carry passengers.

Of course they had to be dead first, but that was no problem for Tilbey and me. We had plenty of experience at it by the time the ship was ready to fly. Liam, on the other hand, still hadn’t made the transition, and it was coming right down to the wire.

“So when are you going to snuff it?” Tilbey asked him one afternoon while we were working on the magnetic trap that would hold us in place while the ship was under thrust.

All three of us were outside, hovering around the payload section and getting in each other’s way while we replaced a blown coil in the magnetic restraint system. Liam was all thumbs in his pressure suit, but Tilbey and I were little better. We didn’t need suits anymore since we didn’t need air, but in our incorporeal state we still had a hard time holding onto anything. And when we slipped through normal matter, the magnetic fields that made up our “bodies” played hell with electrical circuits.

Tilbey had already blown a couple of expensive superconducting coils, which Liam had to replace since he was the only one of us substantial enough to twist a wrench, so Liam wasn’t exactly in the best of moods when Tilbey asked his question. Liam looked over at him, a man-shaped patch of thick fog—or maybe whipped cream—wearing a neck collar and a computer that interpreted his throat, tongue, and lip movements into a synthesized radio voice so he could speak even in vacuum, and said, “I’ll snuff it when I’m sure we don’t need a live hand to fix your mistakes anymore.”

Liam had joined our team not long after we’d started, after an unfortunate incident in which Tilbey had nearly scared him to death. After we’d revived him and told him we were trying to build an interstellar starship he had been eager to come along, but now that he knew more about the downside to being a ghost he wasn’t so hot to make the transition.

“Don’t go blaming me for your cowardice,” Tilbey said.

Liam might have been ninety years old and fragile as a butterfly, but he was still an ex-marine and didn’t take much sass. “Here, hold this,” he said, and he parked his counter-torque nut driver in Tilbey’s chest before Tilbey could reach for it with his hands.

Tilbey said, “Hey, watch it,” and pulled the nut driver free. His hand slipped through it just as it came out of his chest, though, and the nut driver tumbled off into space. It flashed bright silver as it caught the sunlight coming from off to our left, just above Freeport, the UN orbital space station we called home until we finished our ship.

I kicked off after it and caught up within a couple of seconds, but then I had to tuck it into my belt and flap my way to a stop. I still felt silly doing that, but it was the only way for a ghost to maneuver in space. Tethers wouldn’t hold me, and a reaction pistol would have blown right out of my hand, so we had to rely on interactions between the Earth’s magnetic field and our own. And since magnetic fields interact best when there’s movement, that meant flapping my arms.

I flew/swam back to the ship and handed Liam his nut driver. By the time I got back, he had removed the burned-out coil and replaced it with a new one, so he took the driver from me and tightened the clamps holding it into place. There,” he said, “Good as new. Now keep clear of it this time.”

“Yes, Mom,” Tilbey said, all hangdog. He had programmed his voice synthesizer for that nuance after the first month of working with Liam.

We couldn’t keep too clear of the coils; under the fifty gs of acceleration the ship was capable of we were going to have to tuck ourselves right in next to them in order for them to get enough of a hold on us to keep us from falling right through the deck. We had built three body-sized slots to stand in, and static tests had been promising, but we wouldn’t really know how well they would work under thrust until we tried it.

At least we didn’t have to worry about the propulsion system. The Spook was really just a modified Centauri probe without the instrument package, and the UN had already sent out five of the original article without a hitch. Two of them had gone toward Alpha and Beta Centauri, one to Epsilon Eridani, one to Barnard’s star, and one to Tau Ceti. Of course they would take decades to get to their targets because they didn’t have Tilbey’s mass eliminator to reduce the payload weight, and thus their top acceleration had been less than a g, but the engine design and navigational system had been proven in action so we weren’t worried about that. We just needed to make sure that our modifications would actually let us ride along.

“So when are you going to take it for a test flight?” Liam asked.

“Not ‘we’?” Tilbey asked him right back.

Liam slammed the meteor shield closed over the circuitry. “Don’t push me,” he said. “You prove it’s worth doing, then we’ll talk suicide.”

“Don’t think of it that way,” Tilbey told him. “Think of it as a transition. You trade your meat body for a magnetic one that will let you do a lot more.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Liam said, waving his arms in dismissal. “I’ve heard the pep talk before. But I’ve grown kind of fond of this old bag of bones, and frail as they are these days, I’m not quite ready to trade ’em in yet.”

“Look, we did—”

“Stow it, Tilbey,” I said. “We both bought it in accidents. That’s not the same thing as ending your life deliberately.”

“Exactly,” said Liam.

As I helped gather up the rest of our tools, I said, “We can test the system, just the two of us. Take it out to Pluto or somewhere and back. That’ll give Liam time to tie up all his loose ends and get his affairs in order, and it’ll give us a chance to figure out what we’ve forgotten before we take off on the big trip.”

Tilbey nodded. “All right, but 1 don’t want to wait around forever.”

Liam laughed. “You sound like my nephew. He can’t wait until I kick off and he inherits my condo in the hub. He’s still healthy as a horse, but he’s seventy-two so he thinks he needs a zero-g habitat.” He shook his head. “Kids.”

Tilbey didn’t respond to that, being almost sixty years younger than Liam. And I was younger than Tilbey by a few years myself. Young enough, in fact, to wonder if Liam might not know a few things I didn’t about life. Like maybe how to let the kids take all the risk while he kicked back and waited to see how it would turn out.

But I was already committed to the project, so it didn’t really matter even if that was the case.

So a few days later it was just Tilbey and me who slipped into the body cages and turned on the magnets. We had adjusted the standing wave generator that kept us alive so that we were nearly insubstantial, which meant we had practically no mass but at the same time we had very little natural interaction with matter. Without the magnets we would have slipped through the ship like light waves through glass the moment we lit the drive, but as it was 1 felt myself held in place so tightly I couldn’t even scratch an imaginary itch. Nor could I operate any of the manual controls built into the open framework just before me, which meant we were reduced to vocal control.

“Command, engage control voice,” I said. My speech synthesizer switched from my own digitized voice to a completely artificial “pure” voice that theoretically provided a cleaner signal for the off-the-shelf control circuitry we had robbed from a UN suborbital scramjet. “Command, visual display on,” I said, and through my mastoid speaker implants 1 heard what sounded to me like a Norwegian who’d spent time in the Middle East speak the words aloud. We were in vacuum so the synthesizer played straight into the computer’s microphone port, but 1 heard the echo in my ears and it sounded like speech.

The heads-up display winked on: a ghostly set of gauges superimposed on black space beyond. To the left of it, Earth made a curving blue-and-white wall. I was used to the sight after a year of living in orbit, but 1 still gave it a glance. It might be a while before I saw it again.

After a moment I looked at the gauges for anomalies, but everything looked go. “Tilbey, are you ready?” I asked.

“Ready,” he replied, his voice just as Norwegian as mine. “Mars first?”

“OK. Command, set heading for Mars, direct route, no correction for gravitation.” I got to give the orders, since the control system was my baby. The mass-eliminator was Tilbey’s responsibility.

“Warning,” the computer replied. “Direct course intersects geosynchronous satellite orbit. Emergency authorization required for transit.”

“Oh, hell. All right, take us around geosynch, then give us the most direct allowed route.”

Nothing happened.

Tilbey laughed. “You forgot to say, ‘Simon says!’ ”

“Go screw yourself,” I told him. “Command, take us around geosynch, then give us the most direct allowed route to Mars. Command, use one-half gravity acceleration. Command, execute.”

The ship spun around fast enough to be disorienting. We’d Tilbey-ized the mass out of practically everything but the fuel, so the ship was light. Even the smallest of the attitude jets really kicked it around. I hoped that the main engine could throttle down low enough to give us just half a g\ if not, we might get a sudden surprise.

When the nose of the ship pointed away from Earth, the computer started the fusion drive. Even though we’d done countless tests and calculations on the strength of the holding field required, 1 still half expected to fall through the deck, but the field held. I looked at the aft view in the heads-up display and saw Earth begin to slide away behind us.

“Command, increase thrust to one g,” I said. 1 hardly felt any change, but the Earth dwindled a bit faster now.

“Are you hanging on OK?” I asked Tilbey.

“Fine. Go ahead and run it on up a few more gs.”

So I gave the computer the commands, one g at a time, until we were accelerating toward Mars at thirty gs. I felt a bit of vibration, but no discomfort, and the holding field had no trouble keeping me in place.

Earth was about half-sized behind us by then and the Moon was just a small bright dot beside it, only fifteen minutes into the flight. I checked our velocity: 304,000 miles per hour. If we shut the drive down now we could coast to Mars in a week, which was about as good as the hottest courier ships could do it and they boosted all the way.

We didn’t stop. We didn’t even hold at thirty gs. After a couple of minutes to make sure nothing would shake loose, we ran it up to thirty-five, then forty, then finally all the way to fifty. That was full power from the engines, but they were tuned to run at full for weeks, so at that thrust everything settled down and the ship seemed steady as a rock.

Five hours later we flashed past Mars like a bullet past an apple. We got practically no gravity assist at that speed, but it hardly mattered; by then we were doing nearly 2 percent the speed of light and still gaining. Not much on the interstellar scale, but plenty fast to cruise through the Solar System. In fact we had already broken the speed record for a manned vehicle. I radioed that news back to Earth, then ordered the computer to loop us around toward Saturn, which, since Jupiter was on the other side of the Sun, was the next closest planet. Just to be safe we took the ship up above the plane of the ecliptic and skirted the asteroid belt, then dropped back down to roar past at 8 percent of light-speed.

That took another fifteen hours, after which we turned around and slowed down so we wouldn’t shoot on out into interstellar space. We didn’t want to do that yet, not until we could pick up Liam and load the ship with spare parts. And load the computer with a pocket World Library to help keep us sane throughout the long interstellar voyage. Even at fifty gs acceleration and accounting for time dilation, once we approached light-speed it would take us months of subjective time to get to Alpha Centauri. The Galaxy is a big place.

The Solar System isn’t all that small either. It took us just as long to get back as it did to reach Saturn, blasting away at fifty gs the whole distance. We beamed a news release home ahead of us to announce our great success, and prepared to face a gaggle of reporters when we got home.

So we were completely taken by surprise when we pulled into our old parking orbit next to Freeport and were met by a single UN peacekeeping ship. And when its captain, a French woman named Cluny, told us to stand down for boarding, we grew even more befuddled.

“What, did we break the speed limit or something?” Tilbey asked her.

She didn’t laugh. “You are charged with conspiracy to commit murder, and your ship is being impounded as evidence.”

“Murder?” I asked. “What are you talking about?” Then I realized what it had to be. “Wait a minute. Is this about Liam? Is he all right?”

“He is alive, yes,” she said. “No thanks to you. You’ll be read a list of charges at your arraignment. Now surrender your ship and come across to ours or we’ll be forced to remove you from it by force.”

1 would have liked to see her try that, but I learned when I was a kid not to harass the cops. Save your protest for the people who actually decided your fate: the lawyers and the judge.

We did do one thing in preparation for our trip through the legal system: before the cops boarded us Tilbey said, “Command, adjust coupling constant to 20 percent. Command, lock controls to my voice or Danbury’s voice only.”

The coupling constant determined the strength of our interface with normal matter. I felt myself grow less substantial as the computer complied with Tilbey’s order; I was able to swing my arm through the support beams around my body cage without hindrance, and my vision grew less distinct as my eyes intercepted less light. We had determined through experimentation that 20 percent was the lower limit of usefulness. It was even lower than what we’d used to fly with. Much below that and we could barely interact with the “real world” at all. But unless the cops had a magnetic confinement cell already set up for us, we could walk right out of any place they tried to lock us into.

I wondered how long Tilbey’s precautions would keep the cops out of our computer. Long enough, I hoped, to straighten things out with the law and get Liam installed aboard the Spook so we could get on with our trip to Alpha Centauri, but I wasn’t making any bets.

When the UN forces arrived, we were as cooperative as we could be without turning up the coupling constant. That was a considerable relief to them, I’m sure, because handcuffs slipped right through our wrists unless we held completely still, and we couldn’t ride the shuttle back to the station because we fell right through it the moment the pilot fired the thrusters. So we wound up swimming across to the Freeport and joining our would-be jailers in the hub, where we were led to a holding cell that wouldn’t have held us for ten seconds if we wanted to leave. But we behaved; we wanted to get to the bottom of this with as little fuss as possible.

Apparently so did the UN cops. We were escorted to the judge’s chambers within an hour, where we learned the situation. It turned out Liam’s nephew had caught wind of Liam’s plans to join our crew, and he’d suddenly had a change of heart. He didn’t want dear old uncle to leave him all alone, even if he did get Liam’s zero-g condo, so he’d filed papers to prohibit euthanasia and had filed charges against us for exerting undue influence over an invalid.

Nothing makes a guy want to do something more than being told he can’t do it. When we had left him three days ago, Liam had been waffling worse than a newly elected president, but now he was all hot to jump out an airlock in his skivvies—provided Tilbey’s mass eliminator was ready to catch him when he did it.

And therein lay the problem. Despite the UN grant that had let us build the starship and despite Tilbey’s and my persistence for nearly a year as “artificially augmented post-vivo standing waves,” our procedure was still experimental as hell and UNMed wouldn’t OK it for Liam. Nor was he sick enough to qualify for the Kevorkian assisted suicide exemption, so he couldn’t use that route, either. And if he intentionally impaired his own health so he could qualify, we would be liable for undue influence over the elderly.

Never mind that Liam was still perfectly capable of deciding his own fate, or that his nephew was the one forcing his hand. The law had been set up to protect people’s lives, not help end them, and that’s what it was going to do in this case as well.

After the charges were read we had a chance to talk with Liam in one of the private meeting rooms off to the side of the courtroom. His lawyer had to be present, of course, and so did our court-appointed council, but that didn’t slow him down any. As soon as we sat down—Tilbey and I somewhat delicately in our wispy state—Liam woke us right up with an astute observation.

“Don’t you think it’s kind of convenient timing that this all happened right after you proved the technology works?” he asked us. He looked over at his lawyer, an East Indian woman named Indira who seemed kind of uncomfortable being in the same room with two ghosts, and said, “Find out who got to my nephew. That greedy bastard has been waiting for me to kick off for twenty years; I guarantee you he doesn’t give a damn about me now. He wants a piece of a bigger pie.”

“Oh, that much is obvious,” Indira said. “There are at least five different factions, starting with the UN peacekeeping force, who would love to get their hands on this technology. Since the UN are the ones who actually took possession after your nephew’s legal action, I’d suspect them first.”

“So how do we fight them?” I asked.

Our lawyer, a young kid fresh out of college by the looks of him, regarded me skeptically. “They’re the UN,” he said. “They do have to obey the laws, but unfortunately very little law applies to you, since you’re legally dead.”

Liam laughed. “Well, they can’t desecrate your grave, then. Can we call the Spook your tomb or something and at least keep them out of there until we get my nephew off my back?”

“It’s worth a try,” our lawyer admitted.

“What else can we do?” I asked. I didn’t like the idea of relying on legal maneuvering to get us out of this fix.

Neither did Liam. “How about if I challenge someone to a duel and lose?” he asked.

Indira laughed. “You wouldn’t even have to lose. Dueling is a capital crime, so the court would be compelled to execute you if you won. Of course the automatic appeals process would take at least five years to work through before they actually carried out the sentence, so you’d be better served to let your opponent win.”

“Fine. So who wants to fight a duel?” Liam asked.

Nobody spoke up.

“Chickens,” he said.

I shrugged. “I’d volunteer, but I’m already being held for conspiracy.”

“Maybe you could choke on a chicken bone,” Tilbey suggested.

Indira said, “The way I understand it, Liam has to be in close proximity to the, um, ghost generating device when he dies, or it may not lock onto his, um, his essential pattern of existence, isn’t that correct?”

“We don’t know for sure,” Tilbey said. “We’ve been parking the Spook two miles from Freeport so it won’t capture anyone who dies here, and it seems to have worked so far. On the other hand, I was nearly fifty feet away from the prototype when I was killed and it still picked me up, so you probably don’t have to be right on top of it the way Danbury was.”

“But what you’re saying is you really don’t know the range of this device of yours,” our lawyer said.

“Not really,” Tilbey said. “We know it can keep us stable for thousands of miles once we’ve been captured, but we haven’t exactly had a lot of opportunity to test the acquisition phase.”

Indira nodded. “So to be safe, my client would have to choke on his chicken bone in close proximity to your ship. I think we would have a hard time convincing anyone that it was an accident.”

Tilbey said, “How about if we crashed the ship into the station while he’s having lunch? The surprise scares him into swallowing wrong, and—”

“Stop,” our lawyer said. “I know you’re just being facetious, but these statements could be used against you to prove your intent to conspire against Liam’s life.”

“Well damn it, we’ve got to—” Tilbey began, but he stopped when our bodies suddenly grew more distinct.

“Somebody’s tinkering with the ship,” I said. I stood up and backed away from my chair so I wouldn’t be inside it if they turned the coupling constant all the way up. I’d accidentally materialized inside one of the engine parts once, and it had been painful as hell.

Or they could turn it the other way. I shivered at the thought. “We’ve got to get them out of there before they shut us off,” I said, heading for the door.

“Where are you going?” our court-appointed lawyer asked. “You can’t return to your ship until the injunction is lifted.”

“If I don’t get back there pretty soon,” I told him, “whoever’s fooling with the mass eliminator could flip the wrong switch and—”

“I give up,” Liam suddenly said. “My nephew wins. I won’t kill myself.”

“Huh?” I asked.

Liam nodded to the lawyers. “I say so in front of witnesses, and I’ll do it again in front of the judge if necessary. I won’t kill myself. My mind is made up, so there was no undue influence on Tilbey’s or Danbury’s part, which means there’s no case against them, which means no one but them has any right to be aboard the Spook. So call the judge in here and let’s get this cleared up once and for all.”

“Are you serious?” I asked. “Don’t you want to go to Alpha Centauri with us?”

He nodded his head. “Of course I do. But if I’ve learned one thing in ninety years, it’s how to be patient. So I’ll just stay here and keep my idiot nephew from living in my condo for another twenty years, and I’ll go with you on your next trip.”

It wasn’t that simple, of course. Convincing the judge to drop the charges against us took most of the afternoon, and only when I “accidentally” slipped through his records computer and blamed the resulting explosion on the people tinkering with our interface did he finally expedite the paperwork and order the UN investigative team off our ship.

Liam met us in the airlock on our way out. We had to go out the normal door since the investigators had left our coupling constant turned way up and we couldn’t slide through walls anymore.

“Are you sure you don’t want to come along?” I asked him. “We can fight this. Eventually you’ll die of natural causes, if nothing else, and then we can all three go to Alpha Centauri.”

“Hah,” he said. “And by then the damned UN will have beat us to it and stolen all our thunder. No, you’ve probably got a day, maybe two at the outside, before they impound your ship again on some other trumped-up charge and ground you for good. So get it refueled and ready to fly today. They won’t let me within a mile of the Spook, so I’ll just have to see you off here, and you’re going to have to make the trip on your own.”

I couldn’t believe that he would voluntarily stay behind, not even considering what it would cost him to go. But he sounded sincere, and I remembered his earlier reluctance to take that final, irrevocable step.

“Good luck,” he said, holding out his hand.

“Well,” I said, reaching out with my own, “what can I say? We’ll miss you.”

We shook, and his grip was strong enough to press into my hand a ways. When he withdrew, I felt something left behind inside my palm.

He winked. “See you later,” he said. He shook Tilbey’s hand, too, but if he left anything there, Tilbey didn’t let on.

Later, back on board the Spook, I fished his note out of my palm. It wasn’t much, just a line scrawled quickly on the torn-off corner of a napkin: “8:15, my place. Bring the ship.”

“What the hell does that mean?” I asked Tilbey, showing him the note. “We can’t dock the Spook with Freeport.”

He rubbed his chin in thought—an old habit from the days when he’d had a chin substantial enough to rub. “No,” he said, at last, “but we can do something almost as good.”

We had the tritium tanks topped off by 6:00, and had downloaded all the library and video information our computer could hold by 7:00. At 8:00 we warmed up the engines and slotted ourselves into our body cages. And at 8:10 the radio beeped for attention.

It was Liam. “Thought I’d call and wish you guys a good trip,” he said. “You about ready to go?”

“Pretty close,” I answered. “Are you, uh…”

“Open channel,” he reminded me. “But yeah, I’m watching from my window. I expect to see a pretty impressive flash when you light the drive.”

“Well, we’re ready any time you are,” I said.

I could hear him breathing hard. “Give me a minute.”

“Roger.”

But a moment later another voice said, “This is Freeport traffic control. You are not cleared for departure. Power down your engines immediately.

“Under what authority?” I asked.

“United Nations Security Council,” he replied.

“Roger,” I said, putting as much reluctance into my voice as I could muster. “Powering down.” And I even said, “Computer, take engines off-line.”

The command phrase wasn’t “Computer,” but only Tilbey and Liam and I knew that.

“Go,” Liam said.

“Command, execute,” I said, and the course I’d already programmed into it engaged. Fifty gs for six seconds, a hellishly fast spin-around under high-power attitude thrusters, and fifty gs for another six seconds brought us to a stop twenty feet from Freeport’s central hub—just outside Liam’s bubble-shaped condo that stuck out from its central stalk like one grape in a bunch of them.

“Good-bye, cruel world,” Liam said. He laughed maniacally, there was a loud bang over the radio, and big curved glass shards flew past the ship. He’d blown up his entire condo.

And a few seconds later a manshaped patch of fog swept past. It made a grab for the open framework of the ship, but missed.

“There he is,” I said. “Command, track and match velocity with object in screen sector—” I read the edges of the grid in the heads-up display “—beta-seven.”

The ship surged away from Freeport and caught up with the ghost, and this time he was able to grab hold and pull himself aboard. “Watch out for the coils!” I said as he positioned himself inside the third body cage, but he couldn’t hear me until he pulled on the throat collar and stuck the mastoid phone into his jaw. He’d replaced enough coils to know to stay clear, though.

He reached forward and punched the manual control that turned on his restraint field, and said aloud his first words since the explosion: “Step on it.”

“Command, full speed straight ahead,” I said, and Freeport dwindled to a speck behind us within seconds.

“Welcome aboard,” Tilbey said.

“Thanks,” said Liam. “Man, this feels strange.”

“Are you OK?” I asked, suddenly concerned that something had gone wrong with the interface.

“I’m fine,” he said. “This is the first time in thirty years that I haven’t hurt somewhere, that’s all.” Then he laughed, a long, throaty laugh that went on and on.

“What’s so funny?” Tilbey finally asked when he’d settled down a bit.

“Everything is,” Liam said. “But my nephew in particular. He inherits my condo. Every blessed shard of it. I’d love to see his face when he learns that he’s got to clean up the debris.”

Editor’s Note: This story is a sequel to “Unfinished Business” (October 1996), “The Spectral Stardrive” (November 1996), and “Holiday Spirits” (January 1997).