Echopraxia by Peter Watts Page B

helmet.
    â€œLet’s get out of here,” Brüks said.
    Moore held his arm out, watched it drop. “Not quite yet. Another minute or two.”
    Out beyond Brüks’s helmet, the air—the lack of it, maybe—grew somehow hard . Through that impoverished atmosphere and two layers of convex crystal, Jim Moore’s face was calm and cryptic.
    â€œWhat about yours?” Brüks asked after a moment.
    â€œMy what?”
    â€œYour wife. What was she—in for?”
    â€œYes. Helen.” A frown may have flickered across Moore’s face then, but it was gone in an instant and he was answering before Brüks had a chance to regret the question. “She just got—tired, I suppose. Or maybe scared.” His gaze dropped for a moment. “Twenty-first century’s not for everyone.”
    â€œWhen did she ascend?”
    â€œAlmost fourteen years ago now.”
    â€œFirefall.” A lot of people had fled into Heaven after that. A lot of the Ascended had even come back.
    But Moore was shaking his head. “Just before, actually. Literally minutes before. We all said good-bye, and then we went outside and I looked up…”
    â€œMaybe she knew something.”
    Moore smiled faintly, held out his arm. Brüks watched it drift back to his side, slow as a feather. “Almost—”
    The hab lurched. Cubes and cartons teetered and wobbled against their mutual attraction; rogue containers lifted from the deck and bumped against the walls in a ponderous ballet. Brüks and Moore, tethered to their cargo straps, drifted like seaweed.
    â€œâ€”time to go.” Moore dialed open the inner hatch. Brüks pulled himself along in the other man’s wake.
    â€œJim.”
    â€œRight here.” Moore pulled a spring-loaded clasp from a little disk at his waist. A bright thread unspooled behind it.
    â€œWhy were you here? When things went south ?”
    â€œI was on patrol.” Fastening the clasp to a cleat on Brüks’s own suit. “Walking the perimeter.”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œYou heard me.” The inner hatch squeezed down behind them.
    Brüks tugged on the thread while Moore went through the motions of depressurizing the ’lock: impossibly fine, impossibly strong. A leash of engineered spider silk.
    â€œYou’ve got a ConSensus feed in your head,” Brüks pointed out. “You can see anyplace on the network without getting off the toilet and you walk the perimeter ?”
    â€œTwice a day. Going on thirty years. You should be thankful I’ve never seen any reason to stop.” One gauntleted hand made a small flourish toward the outer hatch. “Shall we go?”
    Moore, you old warhorse.
    I’m alive thanks to you . I pass out inside a tornado, I wake up with a smashed ankle on a space station with a broken back. You get me into this suit. You get me to natter on about my wife so I barely even notice the air bleeding away around us.
    I bet you’ll never tell me how close we came, will you? Not your style. You were too busy distracting me from making a complete panicking ass of myself while you saved my life.
    â€œThank you,” he said softly, but if Moore—tapping out some incantation on the bulkhead interface—even heard him, he gave no sign.
    The outer airlock irised open. The great wide universe waited beyond.
    And the magnitude of all Jim Moore’s well-intentioned lies spread naked across the heavens for anyone to see.
    *   *   *
    â€œWelcome to the Crown of Thorns, ” Moore said from the other end of the universe.
    The sun was too large, too blinding: Brüks saw that as soon as the outer hatch opened, in the instant before a polarizing disk bloomed on his faceplate—perfectly line of sight—to cut the glare. Of course, he thought at first, no atmosphere . Things were bound to be brighter in orbit.
    And then he stumbled out in Moore’s wake,