Oo, look. Content!

First, an older, unpublished story that I've trunked. Then, an explanation of why I've trunked it. Wheee!

High Iron

Copyright 2004 Elizabeth Bear

 

 

 

 

 

There had always been jobs that paid hardworking men well: men of scant social grace, men with histories, men of mahogany or copper or freckled skin unacceptable to their era. Paid well, that is, if you didn't mind losing a few fingers, catching a red-hot rivet in a tin funnel--the way Clardy's great-grandfather did--and didn't mind the risk of dying, a stain like a burst mosquito, on the pavement 86 stories down.

Pete Clardy's family were ironworkers from way back. Buildings didn't go up that way anymore, boots on steel. Which is why Clardy found himself hanging in microgravity in a bar called Mike's on an unhappy excuse for a planetesimal.

Clardy drank a beer, which was skunked, but he didn't complain. It was all skunked; it was still beer. He had his spotless boot propped on a spotless bench and his back wedged into the corner where the yellow plastic wall met the grey one. He missed dirt sometimes, dammit.

"Damn Finnegan anyway," he muttered.

Yurcic looked up from her own beer, polishing the sweat off the side onto her cheek before the droplets got big enough to drift. She cocked her head at him, shaved strip of artificially copper hair drifting across her forehead. "What?"

"I said, 'Damn Finnegan.' For not putting up the cash for a wake." Clardy drained his beer, punched another one--also skunked--and sipped more slowly.

Yurcic shook her head. "Had a wife."

"I gotta kid. I still left you guys a little something, if...." Clardy knocked his own narrow grease-black crest of hair out of his eyes. It was the same way his more-times-great grandfather might have worn it. Clardy didn't know the source of the tradition, but it was practical enough.

"Yeah. If." Yurcic took her beer a little more slowly. Wise, he thought, given that the compact stocky little body under her coverall couldn't have pushed fifty-five kilos, Downside. Like Clardy, she kept one foot on the floor, white-clean magnetic boot holding her down. "You've got a kid?"

"Girl." He smiled, paternal pride wrinkling the corners of sharp black eyes. "Sixteen. Smart. Mother won't talk to me since I got out of the joint, but takes my money just fine. Katy--she's gonna go to college."

"I've got a kid too," she said. "Wish my old man had thought so highly of me." Yurcic finished her beer. "You're right. This ain't much of a wake. Hel-lo...."

He followed her gaze. "Fresh meat." Spine stiffening just a little as he noticed the attenuated body in the white coveralls.

She nodded. "That was quick."

"Spacer," he said. "Look at the scrawny muscles. He's from Outside, not even Upside."

"Must be off the Eagle." The Bombay Eagle, a nonCompany ship, had made station the day before. "What's he doing in miner whites?"

Clardy sucked his lip. "Floater got kicked off," he said at last, with satisfaction, nipple of the beer clinking against his teeth. "Had to take an honest job. Screwed up aboard ship somehow, and they terminated his contract."

"Huh. How can you tell?"

Clardy motioned with an index finger. A thick wad of synthetic covered the back of the spider-man's hand. "They ripped his service chip. He can't go home."

The spacer caught the line of his gaze and gave him a hesitant smile. Clardy glanced away.

Yurcic laughed and killed her beer. "So either of us can go home, Clardy?"

Clardy grunted. "Hope he's not on my crew, that's all."

#

He was.

He offered to rope Clardy in, even, though the senior miner mocked him for his caution. "Booster pack," Clardy said. "I drift, I come back."

The spacer--O'Shaughnessy, still wearing a thick head of red hair to go with the freckles--nodded. "Anybody come after me if I Fall?"

"Got your pack on?"

O'Shaughnessy nodded again. Clardy coughed in his hand before he pulled his own helmet on, sealing the zipstrip with a touch. He reached out, slammed and sealed the spacer's faceplate, leaned their heads together. "Keep it on. It's a long way Down. Outsider."

The spacer flinched away from the disdain in his voice. Clardy had reason to think of that later.

#

"Pocahae," Clardy muttered as he seated the last of ten charges, setting the detcord and sealing the net around the little rock they'd picked out of the swarm of others. He fired his pack and backed away. It wasn't his tribe, but what the hell: the sentiment applied. Today is a good day to die.

The rock read rich in ferrous compounds, a good strike. A lot of them were water and hydrogen ice, useful, but the real money was in the high iron. More in the bank. If he lived long enough to put his kid through school, Clardy was going home with money to retire on not too long after it.

High iron. A whole different meaning now than when his great-great-grandfather had worked the Empire State, his great-grandfather the World Trade Center. His People had been prized in the trades even then.

Clardy's forefathers weren't afraid of heights. Clardy laughed at the thought and turned his head to regard the sprawl and wonder of the great seething sulphurous arch of the planet, ringed in a dirty white wedding band, covering half his horizon. The other way the view was cold and limitless, stars like floating phosphorescence in a bottomless sea.

He looked over at O'Shaughnessy, clumsily tying off his side of the net that would hold the ore fragments together after the blast. The tow line was set. Clardy backed away. He didn't bother to tell the new kid to find cover before they blasted.

He'd learn or he wouldn't last. Not like anybody would notice one less floater, Upside. God-damned floaters. The old joke: would you want your sister to marry one?

Hell no. His sister had, and he'd never see her again. She'd signed aboard the Montreal, and the Montreal almost never came home. She wouldn't be back insystem from her first three legs, to Byhand and out to Yonder, until Clardy was ready to retire for real. Not that he expected to live that long.

When he was being honest.

The net wasn't tight on O'Shaughnessy's side, but Clardy didn't mention that either. O'Shaughnessy'd learn. Or he wouldn't last.

Some old sense of honor might have twinged in Clardy, but he shook it off. Some people just didn't belong up in the iron.

He powered up his pack, and, streaming blue light like a toy model of a spaceman, took cover before the blast.

#

It was a rock as big as his fist, and it blew through the too-loose net and ricocheted twice before it smacked Clardy square in the middle of his pack. Transferred momentum knocked him tumbling, but the rock chipped off enough velocity on the ricochets so the suit's rigid shielding soaked up most of the impact. It didn't hole him, and it didn't break his back, but it knocked him in all the wrong directions.

Spinning, Clardy fell Down.

He cursed and keyed his pack. Nothing. Twisting his head in the helmet, he saw a thin nauseating spiral of propellant tracing his somersault.

"Clardy. Clardy!" A woman's voice. Yurcic.

"Yeah."

"Any control?"

"Nothing. I'm not holed. Can you come and get me?"

"Hell. Clardy...." Her hesitation was full of white-silver agony. The distant yellow sun was slipping around the curve of the big agate-hued planet, flaring the rings and the atmosphere into incandescent silhouette.

Clardy took the second-coldest breath of his life. The coldest one, he thought, was yet to come. "Fuck it, Yurcic. You've got a kid."

She almost spat in her determination. "Clardy. I'll come. For your girl's sake--"

"You try it, Liz Yurcic, and I'll open my damn faceplate. You've got a kid." Nobody came Upside unless they needed the money, unless they had nothing to lose.

A third voice. "I'll go."

O'Shaughnessy.

"Don't you come Down here, floater," Clardy said.

"Hah. I've got a window. Hang tough, Clardy, you’re not Falling that fast." Yet. "Kick your beacon on."

That used up power. "Die faster," Clardy answered.

"Freeze or Fall, dirt-foot," the spacer said.

Hell. Clardy keyed his beacon and watched the planet turn.

It was a pretty thing: swirls of sulfur and water ice banding the surface of the atmosphere. The pressure got so intense at the bottom, Clardy had heard, that the gasses took on the qualities of metals. Whatever the hell that meant.

Guess that would be some low iron, then, he thought with detached humor, watching the damn thing come to kill him.

Nah. Floater's right. You'll freeze before you Fall.

He wondered if it was already getting a bit chilly.

Sorry, Katy. Wanted to come to your graduation, when your ma couldn't keep us apart anymore. I've never been a good man. But I did want to come to your graduation.

The big old planet spun, or maybe it was Clardy spinning; it was so hard to tell. Falling ain't so bad. Wish I could have kept that stupid floater from coming after me, though, Clardy thought, and his radio buzzed.

"I've got a visual on you," O'Shaughnessy said in his ear. "Looks like you've got a little atmosphere leak after all. Just a trace though, I'll patch it."

Clardy mumbled something, feeling sleepy. Something tugged at his suit, and he swatted at it, worsening the tumble. A hard jerk of inertia, and the spinning stopped.

A lungful of fresh air, and his head stopped spinning, too. "How the hell did you catch up to me?"

O'Shaughnessy laughed at him, face to face behind the helmet, hooking him under the armpits with both forearms. "Dead reckoning, dirtfoot. I grew up playing tag in this shit." He jerked his head back over his shoulder at the infinitesimally receding planet. "Spacers aren't afraid of Falling. Besides, it was my side of the net that tore. I owed it to you."

Clardy shook his head, swallowed blood from a bitten lip so the blobs wouldn't smear his mask. "Damnfool floater." He stopped. "No, damnfool me. I saw the net was rigged wrong. I figured it would teach you a lesson."

"You were right," O'Shaughnessy said. "Think maybe you learned one too."

And here's the fucking moral of the fucking story, Clardy thought. "Yeah?"

"Yeah. Next time, you'll let me clip your safety line before you try to kill me, you stupid son of a bitch."

"I still don't like you," he said, when they had been silent too long.

O'Shaughnessy laughed and punched him on the shoulder through his suit. "And I still don't give a shit whether you like me or not." He paused. "What's your kid's name? Yurcic said you had a kid."

She had. "Katy," Clardy said, reluctantly. Not wanting to share her. "I've never met her. Her mom keeps me away."

"Pretty name," O'Shaughnessy said. "Figure she deserves to meet her old man some day?"

"Figure if her old man deserves to meet her." The seasick yellow planet spun under the floater's boots, but that wasn't where Clardy's dizzyness came from. "Figure if she'll want to when it's time. Her mom's got the right of it, O'Shaughnessy. I ain't no good father. I ain't no good man."

Clardy felt O'Shaughnessy's shoulders rise and fall inside his suit, knew it for a shrug and a dismissal. Moving on. "Figure a man learns something new every day."

I actually still quite like "High Iron" on a number of levels. I like the protagonist--not because he's a likable person, because he's not, but because I can find sympathy with him, and understand him, in spite of his flaws, which are, to my eye, pretty deep-rooted.

I also think the story works--Clardy's arc is pretty solid, if mostly implicit rather than expressed, and I like the way his realization of exactly why his ex-wife doesn't want him near their kid works. I also get the feeling he may be able to grow, in the wake of this particular incident--although that lies outside the scope of the story. So I don't think there's anything *wrong* with this piece of fiction, and I think it does what it sets out to do.

Now, as to the reason why it's trunked. The problem with this story is not that it does anything wrong, but that it doesn't do enough right. It's not ambitious enough, in other words. There's no cool SFnal concept here--no reason why this story *has* to be a science fiction story. These guys could be any two roughnecks in any dangerous job, coming to terms despite still not actually likeing one another. It doesn't break any new ground. It doesn't reach for anything big.

This is typical, I think, of the sort of story of which editors tend to say "nice writing but" or "this story just didn't stand out." And I think it's indicative of a phase that most writers need to move through, and a place where a *lot* of writers get stalled, in terms of craft.

It's also an example of what I mean when I say "good enough isn't good enough." In other words, sure, there's nothing about this story that needs to be fixed.

But it's not a pro-publishable science fiction short, because there's nothing new going on in it.