Uranus Is a Lonely Place

"Well? Want a hand to get the day going?" She made a rude gesture and then yawned and started masturbating.

"Calliope, what do you think of Ysabel's theory about you?"

Calliope smiled. "The shrink? What does she think about me, then? Should I go see her, too?"

"You know, already," he said, feeling off balance.

She laughed. "I don't eavesdrop all the time. And you told me to stay away from her, so I've been good."

If she was fucking with him, or his own mind was fucking with him, it was a pretty subtle way to do it. And Ysabel had told him it was all right. He groaned, kicking the chemicals to max, and Calliope chuckled at his sudden erection. She jumped on his back, just like Xyxxta, and started her typical hand job. Frustrating, unexpected, and effective. She was more creative than Xyxxta was, even if she didn't have the same skills.

Calliope was masturbating against his back, and just before he came, he twitched his eyes. Her legs grasped him harder, and she grunted with pleasure right through his own orgasm.

"That was good, Calliope," he said. "Let's do it again."

"Sooner the better," she agreed, smirking. "Be seeing you, Al."

But his mind had been wandering. He watched the video again, watching her face, listening. She hadn't made that moan.

* * *

He hadn't even noticed that he'd gone past his station. The work schedule was starting to beep at him, so he turned that off. His feet were taking him somewhere, and he wasn't going to think too hard about it, because maybe this was his alter ego driving. But he wasn't so sure of that. Alvar wasn't sure of anything, anymore.

As he moved, he watched all the video segments again, moving them around carefully on his screen. There was a pattern emerging, one that neither he nor Ysabel had seen. It was simpler than they'd realized, in a way.

There was a Calliope shell, one with a pretty consistent personality, and it appeared across many of the interruptions as well. Call it Calliope One. Provocative, risk-encouraging, easily bored, insatiable. This Calliope was extremely smart, though probably not as smart as Ysabel. But One sucked at impersonating other shells, and Alvar could catch her nearly immediately.

Then there was another class of Calliope behavior, which was far more confusing. Calliope Two was the one that sometimes seemed to fake other shells very well, and occasionally asked him odd, almost existential questions. And Two was the one who made that moan when they were having sex, either in Calliope's shell or another.

So far, so good for Ysabel's theory. One was the real shell, the one he'd added to. Two was the collected fragments he'd trained, combined with his own inner voice. It all fit. Except it didn't, really.

Set aside the mystery of One's origin. Maybe he'd somehow blocked her from the feeds, to hide his tracks. It was Two that really didn't make sense. Ysabel said that Two was needling him about his secret wants, fears, the stuff he was supposed to be so good at ignoring. But one of the peculiarities about Two was the way she got selfish around orgasms. Deliah, Xyxxtah, a dozen other times that were obvious in retrospect. Two wanted to get real pleasure for herself. That wasn't a secret want or need of Alvar's. Maybe it was just three orgasms in a day, maybe a dozen, but he got that pleasure all the fucking time, as much as he felt like, and it certainly wasn't something he hid from himself. So where had it come from? Was it guilt, that he was being selfish in some bizarre way? It didn't feel right, and it didn't give him that shitty feeling in his stomach like the stuff Ysabel had tried to make him face.

And then of course Jamila's crying. That had definitely been Two, and One hadn't shown up until he confronted her about it. The crying matched other things: a physical neediness that was unfamiliar to Alvar, and a bleak outlook that was all too familiar. And it reminded him that Ysabel really was more logical than he was, a more careful thinker.

* * *

The scheduler was really pissed at Alvar now, and he didn't give a shit. If all this was a delusion, maybe he'd call in sick. Not show up tomorrow, or the next day. Let them disable his suit from afar, kill him fast or slow. It was a freeing thought. Just being done with the pointlessness.

His feet had taken him to the crater, around to the far side of the rim and then onward. It was the direction Two had looked a lot while they'd had sex on the rim, though he hadn't noticed that until watching the video several times. He was already as far north as he'd ever been, and there were no Corporate facilities this direction.

He had to face Calliope again, but he couldn't work up the nerve. He felt as if he rode along on his own body, slightly behind his own head. Too much depending on what was real, or wasn't. Maybe he was dreaming, or maybe he'd never come to Titania at all. This was probably what it felt like, when you truly went space-mad. Brain cracked open, hissing off into the blank vacuum.

But the chemicals still coursed through him, his dick pointing him wherever he was going. So he called up Xyxxta. He was moving slowly, anyway.

"Just keep me company," he mumbled at her. "I don't know. Let's fuck."

"Tough day," Xyxxta said, voice sympathetic, kissing him on the chest. She climbed up and held him tight, and on his next jump she let him drive into her tight, front hole. Slow strokes, the pulse of Titania, synchronized with his unending strides. Frozen ice and dead rock, the ground drawing him back eternally. He could run forever, and only Xyxxta would know when he finally faltered.

It wouldn't be as long as all that. There were crevices ahead, larger and larger, and eventually the great Messina Chasma. Xyxxta wasn't the right companion for any of this.

"Now, Xyxxta," he whispered, and she understood, her asshole or whatever it was working on him like a hand, vibrating almost, pushing him over the edge just after he pushed off.

He came down drained, and he lowered his chemicals.

"Goodbye, Xyxx."

She smiled, kissing him on the cheek before he dismissed her.

Calliope hung at his side. He didn't even know if he'd summoned her. Maybe she was always there, just outside his vision. She was silent, watching the shattered plain ahead, bobbing up and down with his steady steps.

"You like underground spaces," he said, watching the shell, or whatever it was. Two, certainly.

Calliope sighed. "You've got that backwards, Alvar. Want to do it right here? For old times' sake?"

"I didn't realize we had old times," he said.

"God, you're maudlin. How about we fuck, and then I'll provoke you into something stupid, and then we'll laugh and fuck some more? Bring Xyxx and Jamila both. We've never done a foursome."

"Yes we did," he said. "There are at least two of you, after all."

She didn't respond to that.

"How about I chase you," Alvar said.

Calliope disappeared without replying, but he saw movement ahead, and so he followed. Nowhere to go but forward.

* * *

The great chasm yawned ahead, a segment of the chained fractures that cut across a fifth of the moon. Far too wide to leap, kilometers across even in this narrow spot. Calliope had stopped at the lip, looking down. Wondering what it'd be like to jump, maybe. Alvar had wondered that a few times. It was one reason he'd never come here on his occasional explorations.

He slowed himself gradually, and Calliope reappeared at his side.

"Alvar, where would you go? If you could go anywhere."

He thought about that. He'd been to more odd corners of the solar system than most. He hadn't set out to be a tourist, or an explorer. It just happened when you had the kind of instincts Alvar did, always running from something. Ysabel would say he was running from himself, and probably she was right. It explained why he never got far enough.

Alvar looked up at the sky, considering. "Maybe I'd start with Sycorax," he said. "Named after some old witch on an island. Twenty times as far from Uranus, and it's out of the plane. Uranus would be a little marble, and you could see the rings from that angle, if the sun was right. Escape velocity's only sixty meters a second, but that's still safe for a grunt in a suit. I could jump and stay up what, three minutes, maybe longer." He sighed, imagining it. A perfect fantasy, here on the brink. "Our own island in the vacuum. We could fuck like there was no one else in the universe, black space and stars, but the witch would be there, pulling us down, keeping us from flying so far we lost ourselves."

Calliope didn't say anything to that. They reached the edge, and she floated over it, as though intending to let gravity finally take its due. But she didn't fall.

Alvar dropped slowly onto his chest, creeping forward, holding to rocks. He rarely moved like this, and he didn't know how stable the lip was.

His visor cleared the rim, and he peered down. The low sun only lit the upper kilometer of the opposite cliff, and the glare hid everything below. He turned up the gain and magnified, looking down, until something finally caught his eye. A muddy red, at odds with the uniform gray rock and ice. There was something like black lettering on it, and for the first time in years, Alvar started to cry.

* * *

It took him three hours to reach the bottom, even though he'd been totally reckless about it. The canyon was near five kilometers deep, and he should've had climbing ropes, something to secure himself. But the wall wasn't absolutely sheer, and the few times he'd missed a foothold, he'd caught himself soon after. As long as he didn't panic, this gravity was forgiving.

Calliope hadn't said a word on the descent, but she'd stayed close, her expression blank. It wasn't until Alvar reached the bottom and started across that he realized someone was missing.

Ysabel appeared in her usual chair, the same bathrobe, the same hair. And for a strange, beautiful moment, her expression was absolutely frozen, unreadable. Alvar liked to think it was shock, or joy, or sorrow. The way he'd felt when he first saw the wreck.

He continued towards the dark, ruined spaceship. It would be invisible from most orbital sensors, half buried and tucked under an overhanging section of cliff. Ysabel reached his side quickly, her movements closer to floating than hopping.

"Alvar," she said. "Alvar, are you all right?"

"I don't know," he replied numbly. "I don't know anything anymore."

"Alvar, listen to me. You aren't imagining this, or faking it. There are too many consistent details in the chasm's physical geology. Is Calliope here?"

He looked, but she'd disappeared somewhere. "Calliope?"

There was nothing, and suddenly Alvar's fragile certainty was crumbling. But Ysabel was a steady comfort at his side, and the ship was closer every minute. The exterior was utterly destroyed, many of the panels blackened from a fire or explosion. There were intact cargo containers, though, and he recognized the logo on some of them. It must be the wreck from the first colony effort all those years ago. But it was in the wrong place, a quarter of the way around the moon from the pictures he'd seen. And that'd been an unmanned supply drop.

Something flashed, and he moved closer. A status light on a half-buried object. Oblong, jet-black. It looked undamaged, but he could hardly believe it.

"You were right, after all," he mumbled to Ysabel. "Just didn't have enough information. I think I need to do this last bit by myself."

"I'll be right here."

Ysabel's hand on his shoulder. The first time she'd ever touched him.

He dismissed her, and hopped cautiously into the rubble. There were other glowing lights buried here and there. Active power, a handful of surviving ship mechanisms.

Calliope had appeared again, and he turned to her.

"You're the pirate, aren't you?"

She stared ahead at the sleek escape module, which looked far more advanced than any Alvar had seen. Like something from the science fiction entertainments.

He could barely fit, but he squeezed through the rock and ice chunks. Calliope didn't follow him. There was a seam near one end of the pod, like a sliding panel. The dust hardly even stuck to this thing, whatever it was made of.

"Is this safe to open?" he asked.

"Yes," she said, voice distant. "Ten centimeters of plastic underneath. Integrity's held all this time."

He found a pair of indentations, and pulled. It stuck, and then it slid.

Her face was bloated, oddly mottled. She was bald, her skull covered with a mesh of probes and medical machinery he didn't understand. But it was Calliope's face, and she was looking at him, eyes blinking quickly. Nothing else moved.

Calliope's virtual joined him, half inside the rocks, looking back at herself.

"I fucked it up completely," she said. "Got cocky. These supplies weren't worth jacking, with everything else I had, but it was a challenging burn to get here, and I always did love a challenge."

"Eleven years," he whispered. "Calliope, I'm so sorry."

"Shit happens. Live like a pirate, die like one, alone and unremembered. Except the fucking pod won't let me die. This scenario didn't exactly occur to me when I installed it. I got to the pod, but the launch tube was damaged. Even in here, the crash nearly killed me, and my body can't survive out of this thing. But I'd just jacked a shitload of cheap supplies, and this goddamned coffin sent some microbots out to connect up feeding hoses and backup power. I've outlasted the bots, but the best I've been able to do with the coffin is convince it to sedate me sometimes. That and playing with the two shells I scraped off a backup. Plus my own shell, of course. I'd been so proud of her, but it turns out I'm a complete shit to be around."

He lifted his hand to her virtual's face, but she didn't react to the touch.

"And then finally you came," she sighed. "You and that ship. Pretty good security, especially the one in orbit, but it gave me something to do. And the last couple months have been pretty good, I guess. But I knew where this was headed, sooner or later. Ysabel's right. Eventually I'd take you down with me."

He had to keep her talking, because his mind was working too slowly for all this, and Calliope's bleak tone scared him. That rock, he was sure he could lift it. He felt stupid. Exhaustion, and withdrawal from the chemicals. Grimacing, he started them again, and Calliope immediately noticed.

"What, you want one last fuck? I guess there's a kind of closure to that. We could do it right here, while my body watches. If you don't mind fucking a ghost half inside a rock. If that's too much, well, the power's in back. Just the one cord. It'll be quick, Alvar."

He shook his head, trying to think. A block and tackle, the long spool of chain behind Drill Three. Maybe there were tools down here.

"Calliope, what kind of shit did you steal beforehand? Any of it still scattered around here?"

She sighed. "Oh, you name it. Helium-three. Fresh Earth fruit, which might need some rehydration now. And the real prize, a whole fucking container of rhodium, two tonnes. You probably remember that one—"

She stopped, because Alvar was laughing, the kind of laugh he'd almost forgotten about. Calliope stared at him like he'd gone mad, and maybe he had.

"Rhodium," he managed. "That's what Corporate hoped was here. Those idiots are digging in the wrong place."

It took a few seconds, but Calliope started to laugh with him, and it reminded him of that giddy moment after the crater jump.

Suddenly, everything fit. The rhodium, the woman who'd already hacked Corporate's ship for him. His brilliant suit, and her neural interface. He'd need Ysabel and Calliope to help fill in the details, so they could get it all done before Corporate caught on. It looked like the pod would be a tight fit inside the shuttle cabin, but hell, he could ride his shuttle up like a cowboy. That sounded like his style.

"Calliope," he said, voice shaking. "I think I might be a pretty good pirate's mate, if you'd take me. But maybe we could ease into it. Steal Corporate's ship and take a maiden voyage out to Sycorax."

Both Calliopes looked at him. One blinking her eyes quickly, the other floating still as stone. He couldn't decide which to look at.

"I suppose," she said slowly. "One more trip before you pull the plug. I wouldn't mind seeing it all, just one more time."

"But I don't know shit about pirating, Calliope. You've got to start teaching me, if we're going to steal every goddamned thing Corporate owns. I thought maybe we could start by downloading their entire library of shells. You know, just in case we get bored."

He looked back at Calliope's virtual, and he realized there were tears in her eyes.

"Okay, Alvar. Okay. I guess it's time we start fucking the universe back."