by R. Neube

On his new story for Asimov’s, R. Neube says, “The great American philosopher, Homer J. Simpson, clearly illustrates how the human condition turns us into knots of insecurity on two feet. I have great hopes that in the future humanity will put that behind us, despite what my story suggests.”

Hal Koenigson crawled from his sleeping bag, tunneling through the meter of snow that had drifted over it while he slept. Using his lame foot as a hook, he pulled his bag and knapsack to the surface.

Taking a deep breath and closing his eyes, Hal flipped open the visor of his helmet to taste the day. Cold lashed his flesh like a razor whip. It was going to be another day in paradise on the planet of New Tahiti.

He slammed the visor, waiting until the condensation thawed and was swept away by the dehumidifier of his envirsuit. Blind for the nonce, he exchanged his envirsuit’s battery belt by feel.

Thoughts of breakfast raced through his head, only to be lost as he dug up his specimen case. He judged the temperature optimal for the preservation of the ice cobras he had harvested over the last two days—no harm taking a peek. His visor cleared as he opened the case; his first sight of the day became stalks of slime lichen cradled inside foam pockets. Delicate blooms, pale as a corpse, smiled at him. Each twenty centimeter bloom represented forty thousand dollars. The single fifty centimeter bloom would fetch ten times that from the brokers in Tesla Valley.

“It’s never enough to prove my worth to the family,” he muttered to the ice, to his doubts.

Shouldering his gear, he limped into the vast whiteness of the plateau, seven hundred thousand square kilometers of icelands. His Freemont family held the smallest holding, owning the right to harvest from twenty-five thousand hectares.

Only a desperate family would recruit you, Dummy, said the voice of doubt.

Still, it was a cheap price to pay to live in this land of wonder, of miracles.

Dummy. Half his “family” called him that to his face. He might be a dummy, he thought, though still bright enough to remember when he was a respected criminal. Still bright enough to remember when his body and mind functioned, instead of being a shambling wreck courtesy of sundry overdoses.

At least his brain damage had gifted him with one priceless asset—unlike 99.998 percent of the planet’s population, Hal was immune to the Strumming, the electromagnetic season that drove humanity off the plateau for a fortnight each year. Normal humans, those who hadn’t spent months in a drug-induced coma, or hadn’t inherited the guanine riff on chromosome nine, went insane after a few days’ exposure.

Hal nearly limped over the horizon, one of those illusions of the ice. Perched on the rim, he eyed kilometers of wasteland in a shallow bowl stretched below him. A hovercraft was parked down there, where no hover should be. He lifted his binoculars, seeking the family flag that should be painted on the vehicle. Each year before the Strumming, the families of the plateau decided on new flags to distinguish their hovers from pirates.

No flag. It never ceased to amaze Hal Koenigson how often he forgot his rifle. Dummy.

The risk did not deter pirates invading the plateau when the natives fled to the lowlands to escape the Strumming. Criminals raced through the passes, gambling they could steal sufficient ice cobras to justify the danger. Often the thieves tarried, lost in their greed, or simply lost in the vastness once their instruments failed. Dummy would discover their hovercrafts years later, then imagine the stories the corpses within them might tell.

Dummy hiked to his hovercraft, cursing his negligence. It would have been so simple to snipe the rogues as they scrambled toward their vehicle. Pop, pop, pop.

It took Dummy six hours to reach his hover. Fifteen minutes later, he parked on the illusionary horizon, not ten meters from where he originally stood. That, too, was one of his talents. Folks with regular brains could not travel the arctic sameness without navigational aids; whereas a dummy could fly as straight as an arrow.

The pirate hover had vanished. The wind, a scant thirty klicks an hour, had covered its tracks—no concern to Dummy. Pirates didn’t know where the cobras bloomed. At best, they had a map from the orbital satellite that had been scrawled upon by a disgruntled employee or a shunned ex-member of one of the plateau’s corporate families. Most pirate data came from bars and alleys, from lies and legends.

Dummy guessed the pirates would be heading toward Mesa, Grandma Ravenson’s home. That she was the richest woman on the planet, maybe the galaxy, would draw them. Dummy had heard the bar room bullshit in his younger days, how hectares of ice cobras surrounded her mesa.

Forty minutes later, he found a hollow where a patch of ice cobras had been vandalized. His anger boiled. None of the maimed lichen had been within a decade of blooming. It would take a century for the lichen to recover.

Three hours later, he caught sight of the pirate hover. Hal triggered the forty millimeter cannon in the turret atop his hover, scoring a solid hit on the pirate. They skewed. He skewed. They both maxed their engines. Trouble was, the pirates rode a Mark IX hover with a hefty six pack of DeHaviland blowers. Two Mark IXs rusted inside the Freemont barn during the Strumming, but Hal’s family did not trust him with their new vehicles. Hal cruised in an ancient Mark VII, expendable, just like Dummy.

The pirates careened down a gentle slope into Kelly Rift, one of the major thoroughfares of the plateau. Hal ran south along its edge. The pirates slowed to dodge boulders. In normal times, a hover’s master computer used radar to evade the obstacles. However, the Strumming created false radar signals and shifted true ones.

The ice hated humans.

He imagined the thieves pointing at the map, bellowing how the rift looked like the best way to escape, only to be forced to slow again by yet another boulder forest.

Once he got ahead of them, Hal fired five shells into the opposite wall of the rift. It failed to trigger the avalanche he’d hoped for, but tumbling rocks inspired the crooks to sweep up a convenient arroyo to escape. After they vanished on the opposite side of the rift, Hal crossed the rift fifty klicks later via an ancient meteorite crater.

As the pirates fled across Tula Plain he idled near another illusionary horizon, hidden behind an ice ridge. ‘Twas simple to ram the thieves as they raced by. Pegged the sucker between the number five and six blowers; Hal’s two and a half ton steel plow penetrated the pirate’s hull.

The plow stuck inside the pirate. Both vehicles slipped over the rim of the basin. Blowers screamed. Metal screamed. Hal screamed. A basalt boulder studding the slope of the snowy depression exploded into gravel when the pirate smacked it. Sheared the pirate sideways, ripping off the plow blade of Hal’s vehicle, sending him spinning. Hal killed his blowers, skipped a few times, then opened the throttle to regain control.

Whereupon the aft of the pirate scooted up a boulder’s forgiving incline, momentarily defying gravity until the nose-heavy, forty-ton mass made a dive into a snow bank. That started the hovercraft flipping.

“I just meant to kill you. N-n-not rip you apart,” he muttered.

As he drove to the top of the basin, Hal watched the pirate flipping to the bottom. Two of the hovercraft’s blowers tore free, making their own paths down the slope.

He parked beyond the rim, consuming stale bread to soak up an ocean of stomach acid. Stepping outside, he scanned the depression. Scattered metal was already being covered by blown snow. Clouds the color of bloody moss scudded from the south.

Storm. Hal changed the battery belt of his envirsuit the instant he went inside. An alarm announced circuit breakers being thrown as the storm intensified the Strumming. He took the reactor offline.

Slipping into the pilot’s seat, he carefully entered the location of the wreck in his private log. The effort stressed him. His right arm dropped to his side, twitching. Drool drained down the trembling side of his mouth. His right leg went numb.

Drug-induced Parkinson’s was the diagnosis of the doctors. It wasn’t accurate, but close enough for the medical establishment to issue pills. The fit subsided as he rounded through relaxation exercise nine. His carcass seemed one painful tingle as his brain resumed picking up signals that he hoped came from his central nervous system and not the Strumming.

The atmosphere was snowing when he stepped outside. The oily feel—not that he could “feel” through his gloves—of the snow suggested it was a complex hydrocarbon, the first compounds to freeze out of the air, no doubt pollution from the industrial complexes of Tesla Valley far to the south. Soon, the carbon monoxide would rain. Relentless winds would howl from the south, replacing the air being made solid.

A glance at the damaged prow of his hovercraft chilled Hal through his protective garb. Sara and Kevin would detonate at the next family meeting. Again. The Freemont leaders would lecture him about wasting the resources of their family. Dummy.

It wasn’t his fault his hover always got banged up. He cruised a million klicks a year, of course his hover took damage.

Everybody thank Dummy, Kevin would say, for making us work harder.

“Thanks, Dummy,” he muttered before the voice of doubt did.

Motion caught his attention as the storm whimsically diminished. He seized his binoculars, focusing on the wreck. Two, three, no, five dots moved down there. He laughed in relief, so glad they hadn’t been pulverized in the wreck.

He went inside the hover to fetch his rifle and do the job humanely. Zeiss Corporation on Luna manufactured the finest optical systems ever to grace a 20mm Colt rifle. On other worlds, the rifles were used to splatter aliens weighing half a ton. Hal sighted the targets, a four klick shot according to the laser rangefinder.

As he waited for the scope’s computer to figure the variables, his right eye twitched. His numb arm dropped away. Still, he couldn’t stop looking as a trio of. . . . No, no, no, he thought. Three children dragged bags and boxes from the wreck. A lanky figure worked on the shroud of the aft reactor. Hal knew what the person was doing, an old ice trick—the shroud made a corking sled in an emergency.

“It’s a family,” he said, though the words came out wrong courtesy of his dead right side.

Two adults, plus three children, a real family, not a corporate mockery like his Freemonts.

“The idiots are going to try to hike out of here, fifteen hundred klicks through the worst Strumming of the decade.”

Clenching his eyes shut, he avoided a seizure by running through his relaxation exercises. When his eyes opened, the snow had returned.

The plucky family now dragged the shroud across the waste. It was piled high with gear.

Be humane, Dummy, said Doubt.

The rifle called to him. The scope declared it would now be a six klick shot. Still easy.

A real family. Hal had been raised on the streets of Tesla. A foul-tempered drunk who chased him with a knife was the first parental memory he could access from that dim past.

The kids helped push the ersatz sled.

When his hover suffered a fire last year, his Freemont family dallied nine days before coming to tow him home. No one apologized for the delay. Instead, he got the lecture. Did they thank him for tripling the harvest? No, they thought letting him join Freemont sufficed as a reward.

Dummy blinked the tears clear. The family moved quite well. Usually pirates flailed in the snow. One of them must hail from the plateau. The mother, he guessed, from the way she shuffled effortlessly through the snow.

Ball lightning rolled on either side of Dummy. The scope went dark. The opposite rim of the depression fluoresced. Clouds charged over him, so low he could touch them. Wind battered. Dragging the rifle, he crawled to his hovercraft. Even inside, he could feel the Strumming, described by some as the same monotonous note roaring from a giant guitar, a hundred times a minute.

Hal tried to eat some crackers. Tried to sleep. The wind shook the hovercraft, nearly lifted its thirty-two tons. Visibility plunged to zero.

Did the family have enough time to race back to the shelter of their wreck before the storm?

The wind scooted the hover backward a few meters, nearly knocking him off his feet.

“Maybe it’d be better if the storm wasted ‘em. It’s one thing to blow away lowlifes, another thing to wipe out a real family.”

The storm raged for an eternity of playing solitaire. The barometer informed him when the storm waned. He changed his battery pack, then plugged used belts into the recharger before cleaning his rifle.

As soon as visibility eked to half a klick, he left. Snow boots expanded as his foot dropped, shrank as his foot rose, allowing him to move with deceptive speed to the wreck.

“Where are they?” shrieked the child huddled inside the wreck.

Hard to judge, given the baggy envirsuit, but Hal guessed the kid was ten. Maybe a she.

“I am Hal Koenigson of the Freemont clan.”

“Where are they?” shrieked the child, so loud the staticky radio carried the words like feedback.

“If you promise to stay here, I will find them,” he said.

The child screamed, “NO!” and started to run. Hal tripped her, sat on her back. Fishing through his necessary bag, he found a roll of duct tape to cocoon the prisoner. He changed the child’s battery belt, wired it to a second belt in case he was gone longer than expected.

Leaving the wreck, Hal was cheered by the crystal clear air. It was one of those rare hours when the wind ceased. In the distance, the ersatz sled stood on end like a tombstone where the wind had harpooned it into the ice.

The first corpse was a child, larger than the one inside the wreck. The kid had been running toward the hover, right into the wind. The blowing ice had torn him apart. His helmet appeared sandblasted; his envirsuit’s kevlar skin shredded.

Further on, Hal encountered a massive gouge in the ice. A trail of boxes, bags, and tins sprayed six hundred meters to the ersatz sled. The first major gust had frisbeed the sled across the bowl, where it landed and made the gouge. Its next skip speared it into the ground, lengthwise to part the winds. Otherwise, gusts would have knocked it down.

As Hal approached the sled, one of the dangling lumps resolved into the father, still shrouded in the ropes he used to tow the sled. When the wind had taken the sled airborne, he hadn’t been able to escape the bonds.

Hal turned around, reasoning the mother was the veteran of the plateau. She would have burrowed into the snow as disaster overtook them.

Shrugging the rifle off his back, he slowly zigzagged back. Seemed weird to see his tracks, so rarely did the wind allow them to exist for more than a few seconds. Reaching the original gouge, he crouched, staring with the infinite patience of a consummate cobra harvester.

Time meant little to Hal. Hours could vanish with ease. However, the four hour increments marking the useful span of the battery belt were the church bell knells of his day. His helmet’s warning lights blinked, he unwrapped a spare battery belt from the strap of his necessary bag. The exchange took seconds.

The exercise made him miss the heads popping free of the snow. The duo were already standing when he looked up. His rifle snapped to his shoulder. He flipped the scope aside. At eighty meters, it was unnecessary.

His finger trembled as his chest tightened. He exhaled slowly.

A real family.

Without lowering his rifle, he reached to the neck of his helmet, activating the external speaker. With the Strumming, however, subsided, the suit radio would never reach that far.

“Hands in the air,” he yelled.

The two figures spun to face him.

“No, no, no,” he screamed as the smaller one pulled a pistol. Hal shifted his aim from the mother.

“No!”

The kid fired. A chunk of ice scant centimeters from Hal’s foot exploded.

“Stop!”

Dummy, screamed Doubt.

The second bullet smacked his necessary bag.

His finger did not tremble this time. The Colt rifle slammed into his shoulder. Thirty grams of lead flew. When the bullet struck the kevlar outer layer of the kid’s envirsuit, it shattered. A few fragments were stopped by the suit, but the majority tore into the body. The petite figure kicked at the sky before smacking into the snow. The gun in the kid’s hand blew a hole in the snow.

The wind began to blow as the mother threw herself onto the corpse.

“No,” he repeated.

A keening sound filled his earphones.

“I found another child in the wreck. She’s okay.”

Mother Pirate grabbed the handgun. Hal aimed. She aimed. His trembling finger rested on the trigger. They stared at one another.

“The other child didn’t make it back to the hover. I think it was a him, about halfway back. I don’t think he suffered.”

Came the keening once again.

Dummy, said Doubt.

“Please,” Hal sobbed. “Hasn’t there been enough killing?”

She fired. He knew the bullet was going high. The mother fired again. A plume of ice rose ten meters in front of Hal.

“Please,” he screamed.

A blast of wind screamed into the bowl. Instinct threw Dummy down before it hit. The mother fired until the baleful breeze skittered her head over heels.

Hal never lost his aim. The mother had lost her weapon. She clawed her belt, producing a screwdriver, waving it at Hal.

He toggled. “Please. Think about your daughter.”

She leapt to her feet and charged. Running on the plateau was an iffy prospect. Snow boots simply could not compensate so quickly. She crunched about ten meters before plunging into the snow up to her neck when the boots failed.

“I will be at the wreck. If you must die, I’ll kill you there.” Hal casually strolled to the wreck, sprinkled with the occasional leap onto the surface as the wind bellowed.

Perhaps the ice felt sorry for him.

Dummy, said Doubt.

After exchanging the captive’s battery belts, Hal took a long drink from his suit’s reservoir, though it tasted like the recycled sweat it was. Thoughts of eating vanished as he glimpsed the vault in the back of the wreck. He worked a little hammer magic on its lock. Inside was a single cobra, immature, barely eight centimeters. Pathetic. A real harvester would have left it, noting its location so he/she could return ten years later for a proper bloom.

Maybe two thousand bucks worth. To have the ice slaughter your family for such a pathetic cobra. . . .

He sorted through the debris, finding a pillowcase filled with pictures. Some showed the family with infant twins. Digging deeper, he found a ream of legal paperwork. The family had sold their twins to make the down payment on the hover.

“There are no perfect families,” he whispered.

Hal sat down hard, disappointed, feeling that familiar clawing at his spine. Closing his eyes, he slipped into his calming exercises. Only needed two before the threat of a seizure subsided.

He opened his eyes in time to see the mother rise from her daughter’s side and shoot him twice. At the range of four meters, she could not miss.

“Ouch,” he said, rubbing his chest. The envirsuit’s kevlar had stopped the handgun’s small bullets, but their energy had not been fully dissipated. “Ouch,” he repeated as the woman fiddled with the weapon. The tsunami from his adrenal glands made his brain ache. She cleared the jam.

He grabbed a crumpled steel bracket and threw it. Bounced off her helmet, ricocheted off a wall to smack her shoulder. “Ouch,” she said.

“I ought to kill you for selling the twins.”

She staggered backward, tripped over the kid, and made a sitcom pratfall. The gun went off. A hiss of gas erupted from the child’s life support pack where the bullet struck. They both scrambled.

Hal clawed the protective layer off the child’s pack, noting the material had already been torn, doubtlessly by the initial wreck. The bullet had penetrated the pump responsible for inhaling the Everest-thin atmosphere of the plateau for concentration to a breathable level.

She elbowed Hal out of the way. He started to dash to the aft of the hover, to grab a new pump. Easy fix. Except it wasn’t his hover. He spun, went to the airlock, hoping to find a spare pack. Most of the airlock had been ripped away, but the storage locker was there. Prying it open, he found it empty. The family hadn’t been able to afford spare parts.

“We have to get her to my ride. NOW!” he screamed.

She tapped a dial. “Too late. There’s only two minutes of air in her reservoir.”

His fingers dug through his necessary bag before his mind caught up with them. The emergency tent was the size of a book. Unfurling it, he attached a parasite line to his own pack, inflating the tent.

“Get inside with her, attach your parasite—”

“We don’t have—”

He grunted in dismay before detaching his own line to give to her. “Get inside. I’ll bring my hover down here.”

She glanced at the rifle, belatedly noticing it leaned against one of the seats, centimeters from her hand. Her eyes locked on Hal.

“Go ahead, maybe you can kill me. Win or lose, your daughter dies. Get her into the tent.” He sidled to the rifle, shouldered it.

He marched across the ice, allowing the wind to catch his back during gusts to ski him a few effortless meters. It made for a long hour before he could return to the wreck. After parking beside the wreck, he locked up everything that resembled a weapon, including his toolbox.

Bringing his shivering guests aboard, he decided they were too pathetic to be treated as prisoners. He prepared soup after insisting they shower. Gave them clean jumpsuits. The kid had to roll up the sleeves and legs. He ignored the silence as long as he could.

“I am Hal Koenigson,” he said.

“I’m Misiha Laurel Crane,” said the kid, fingers raking soggy hair.

The mother glowered as she had been since he had forced her to abandon her pistol and tools outside the airlock.

“What? Am I the villain here? Am I the pirate?” he asked.

“Crystal Tomani-Crane,” said the mother.

“Tomani? I once knew a Bentam Tomani.”

“You knew Uncle Bent?”

Hal was taken aback. The woman looked older than him, yet he recalled Bentam as a kid who lost his ear in a drunken brawl and peacocked around like a gangster.

“Good ole One Ear,” said Hal.

“He’s dead. TB-3 broke out last winter, real bad. It took out half the people who lived in the north slope.” She exhaled long and hard, deflating. “We sold the twins, robbed cemeteries, my Clark murdered five losers for hire, all to get the money to come to this icy hell.”

“You’ve been here before. I saw you on the ice,” said Hal.

“Me?” she shrieked with laughter. “First time in my life, but I was raised on stories of the Mesa. My parents worked the plateau for twenty years, wage slaves of the Ravensons. They lost toes and fingers to ice. For what? To make the old witch richer than God?”

“Why become pirates? Y’all had a good contract murder business. Honest work. Yet you came here to get killed. Why?”

“We had to do something for our children. Earn enough to have a decent life for them.”

“My God,” he groaned. “Just making a down payment on the hover costs a fortune. You could have lived well without it.”

“My children deserved better.”

Hal choked on the woman’s words, his mind’s eye showing the dead kid buried waist-deep in the snow. Showed the kid he had shot. Showed him the scarecrow dangling from the tombstone of a sled.

He said, “I know a biologist who estimated there were less than a hundred hectares of cobras on the whole plateau. The biggest field I ever saw was fifteen square meters. You expected to find wealth in seven hundred thousand square kilometers of ice? You expected—” He choked back the tears.

Hal went to the cockpit, buckling in as he activated the reactors and blowers. The woman paced behind him.

“What are you going to do?” she asked.

“I’ll give you a lift off the plateau. The Rileys have a little homestead at the base of Kuller Pass. That’s where y’all were hiking toward, whether you knew it or not. Of course, the Strumming would have killed you long before you reached it. The Rileys are farmers, nice folks. They supply the plateau clans with meat and vegetables. They always need extra workers. It ain’t much, but it’s better than burying the two of you up here.”

She didn’t ask why.

Hal was grateful. Dummy didn’t have an answer.

It just felt right.