The Man from the Snowy Belt. Chapter 2: Into the Belt

This is the second segment of the story I began here. It is a retelling of the classic poem, "The Man from Snowy River" by Banjo Paterson.

           I pictured the flashbomb firing up on my right flank, getting ready for flight, and then I could feel the ship vibrating as it made my imagination come true. I wanted it to go off just a little way behind me so I wouldn't be blinded. It did. The ships, arrayed like a bowl in front of me, glittered in the light.

            One of Harrison's cat-infested Machines shot past me on my left, toward the bowl of waiting Machines. Inside the glass I could see a cat, sans gravity, sprawling and yowling through the air. I couldn't hear it, but based on its hissing and scratching motions, I could imagine what was going on. It wanted to get away from the flashbomb, and so the ship was headed straight for the net we'd made. The other cat-ships seemed to be doing the same thing.

            But then the cats saw what was coming: Between the ships were spreading large, flashing nets made for gathering space debris.

            Apparently that was worse than a flashbomb. They turned away from the nets and shot their tiny ships in exactly the opposite direction.

            Back toward the Snowy Belt.

            I couldn't do a thing to stop them. I watched all the little cat-ships slow, flip around and then hurry past me toward the stroids. Inside each ship floated a furry cat, all its fur standing on end in the lack of gravity. Of the cats I could see, some were scrambling desperately, and others were stiff-legged in free-fall, ready to hit the ground any second. But there wasn't any ground to hit.

            The ships were among the stroids now. The cats were searching for a place to hide.

            We all watched helplessly. The Snowy Belt is full of tiny stroids and huge ones, hiding behind each other and spinning around each other in unpredictable ways. They hang close together, and any mistaken turn is death.

            Harrison groaned. "We can say good-bye to my Machines, and my cats." The rest of us remained silent in sympathy as one by one we lost sight of the spots of color.

            Suddenly a Machine shot out from among us, a lumpy white-and-brown blur.

            Young Jim.

            Without a pause, he sailed straight ahead into the maelstrom.

            I held my breath and waited to see an explosion when he ran into an stroid. It didn't come.

            We couldn't tear our eyes away. One moment he disappeared behind a stroid, the next he showed up again, even smaller than before. It happened over and over. Then we waited a long, long moment without seeing him at all.

             "Jim?" I said into the group line. "You okay, buddy?"

            Silence.

            "If you're not, I don't know what we can do about it, but we're here for you. Several miles away."

            The silence made my ears ache.

            "What on earth," Harrison finally exclaimed. "Of all the dumb people. What is he even thinking?" Over the mic I could hear her banging her hands on her own glass ceiling. Now his death would be on her head.

            I'd made light of it when I spoke to him over the radio, but deep regret pressed on my chest as the others turned to head back to Harrison's.

            After a long time, I turned too.

 *   *   *

            Jim shot straight into the cloud of stroids - incredibly foolish, and his father would have been furious if he were still living, but Jim couldn't resist. That crowd of snobby old fogeys (besides Clancy, anyway) were waiting and watching, too scared to get into the thick of the mess; and meanwhile, those sneaky cats were squirreling themselves away who knows where.

            Dad would have been okay with Jim entering the field. It was the suddenness he wouldn't have liked. He had been working with Jim to design the stroid-navigation system when he died, and they both knew that eventually they would make it work and work well. But Dad was really big on caution, and he would always have insisted on approaching the Belt slowly, giving the nav system a chance to work things out and finish its calculations before diving in, as it were.

            Well, now the nav system was installed in Jim's Machine. In fact, he'd installed it that morning. It would have been wise to test it out before joining the hunt, but - well, this would just have to count for the test.

           

            Jim was several miles into the Snowy Belt before he saw a cat. He had figured out pretty quickly that he wouldn't do any good if he zoomed right by a cat hiding behind an asteroid, so he slowed down and did a lot of looking around. His stroid nav identified stroids and their trajectories and navigated routes around them toward a given destination. It also had the handy feature of highlighting anything that wasn't rock bright yellow on his screen.

            Unfortunately, it had already marked about fifteen tiny stroids as bright yellow. Which meant that Jim had some work to do when all of this was over. The good news was, so far the nav system had gotten the other stroids right: Every time it was white on his screen, it had always turned out to be a stroid.

            There's a good side to everything.

            But the down side. Jim had about four objects marked yellow on his screen at any given moment, and he had to check out each one to see if it was a baby stroid masquerading as a Machine, or if it was actually a Machine.

            Or a piece of trash. It could be a piece of trash.

            In fact, he wasn't sure the stroid-identification part of his system worked at all until he finally found his first cat.

            When chasing down some yellow, he found it was around the corner of a small stroid, only a tenth of a mile across. Its Machine was shaped like a streamlined teardrop from Jim's angle, and the metal parts were brilliant fuchsia with darker fuchsia edges.

            When Jim got closer he could see the cat inside the bubble of glass. It was fairly calm, slowly pedaling its feet. It - no, she, a calico - had been out here for several hours by now. Jim decided that she looked like she had settled down to endure the situation.

            As soon as he got close, she began to hurry around the next corner of the stroid.

            Jim frowned. He had a cat named Gypsy. Gypsy liked to hide in small, dark places. The closest small, dark place he could see here was the pitch-black shadow of a jutting piece of rock on this stroid. He hoped the cat knew that Machines can't snuggle with rock.

            Suddenly he remembered. The code! Harrison had sent each of them the code needed to nab the Machine and bring it in for her. In a moment Calico's Machine was connected to his brain and returning to him. He told it to follow thirty yards behind him and started to look for the next yellow splotch.

            Jim grinned a little at nobody in particular. This hunting reminded him of the days of looking for space trash for his dad to put in his junkyard on the edge of the Snowy Belt or to build into some off-hand Machine. Back then they still hadn't developed this nav system, so the hunting involved lots of flying in rings around stroids and hoping you weren't looking at the same stroid three times.

            That was a joke. Jim knew how to differentiate between stroids like he knew how to differentiate between the flexuation panel and the hypo-protectorate sheet on a Machine.

            He checked his screen. Several yellow splotches were on the other side of this stroid. Jim figured they were fragments from a recent stroid collision, but when he rounded the corner he was delighted to find that they were all ships in different shades of white and brown. A crowd would make this so much easier.

            That's when he realized two things.

            Calico and her Machine were nowhere to be seen.

            And Harrison's ships were never brown or white.

The Man from Snowy Belt. Chapter 1: Stolen Goods

I am in the midst of my third writing class at Hollins University, and loving it. We're focusing on retelling the classics in different ways. Below is Part 1 of the story I've been working on this week - "The Man from Snowy River" retold as a science fiction story.

We were all pretty excited about the roundup that morning.

Harrison had discovered that fifteen of her new Machines had been stolen at the break of day. She sent out a call immediately, and by ten AM, thirty or forty Machinists had gathered in her hangar. The giant room was full of men and women and Machines. Some of the humans leaned on one leg in that casual way they have and chatted it up, but the room was practically snapping with excitement. We love a good chase.

Clothes were every shade of the rainbow, favoring hot pink and electric blue and neon green. Most Machinists matched the personal Machines they'd brought with them. People are always trying to decorate the emptiness of space with color.

Even Harrison was wearing neon-green pants and an electric-blue long jacket, with her long hair darkening downward from fuchsia to deep purple. Her brown face really stood out against all that color. It looked nice. She had an eye for what would go together. Me, I go for the same-ole same-ole white and gray - and the gray used to be white, and my hair and mustache match too. By accident. To me, it's the person and the Machine that matters, not the color. But to each his own.

"Here's the deal," Harrison yelled over the voices, which quieted right down. "You know my Machines were stolen. Right now they're pretty much headed toward the Snowy Belt. I've never seen anyone who could give chase in the Snowy Belt, so let's go at them before they get there and see if we can cut 'em off and bring 'em in."

We'd all heard the story, although no one's sure whether it's true: A man leaves his Machine door open so the inside can dry after a nice shampooing. His cat climbs onto the pre-heated seat, falls asleep, and starts dreaming of floating - which is what cats apparently dream about these days, according to the scans. Machines are made to latch onto the brains that are allowed inside them and do whatever the brain wants it to do, so the Machine latches onto the cat's brain and begins to float.

Machines are only supposed to respond to registered brains, which are entered when you purchase the Machine. But smart as those scientists are, they still haven't figured out how to stop a Machine from latching onto a cat's brain, registered or not. Supposedly it could latch onto a cockroach's brain, too, except cockroaches don't have enough thoughts to latch onto. Good thing.

Anyway, the guy in this story finds his Machine bumping around at the top of his hangar, which he has fortunately kept closed. End of story.

But the story was probably true, because this time it really happened to Harrison.

Harrison's a cat lady. She has thirty-one cats, to be exact. And quite a few of them are partial to warm seats. Short Man, who doesn't work for Harrison anymore, complained later that she shouldn't let them live in the workshop, but he knows that he shouldn't have left ALL the Machine doors open. He claimed that they had to be open so the new decals inside could dry, and besides he only meant to be gone two minutes. He didn't mean to watch a whole futbol game in the break room. He just meant to grab a Yo-Lo.

Of course, it just so happened that Building Maintenance opened the inner set of airlock doors that afternoon to work on them, and without checking closed them and opened the outer set. Just like that, off wandered the cats in their Machines, floating in the direction their dreams took them: upward. Into the sky.

Except by now the cats probably weren't dreaming anymore. They were awake and terrified, and that meant escape.



As we finished getting our gear sorted and our Machines primed, one last little Machine popped out of the airlock and came to a rest. It was round in a lumpy way (when most of them are shaped for dramatic beauty, sleek and sharp), white and gray and brown in color - extremely old-fashioned, and a bit dinged up too. I knew it to be Young Jim's Machine. Unlike most of these guys, he built it himself, from old Machine parts, back when Machines were quiet colors.

He flipped open the lid on top and stood up, head and shoulders sticking out.

"Hey," he said in greeting. "Where are we going and when?"

"Ha," Harrison snorted. "We're going now. But ain't no point in you coming, buddy boy. We got some tough flying to do and it don't look like your piece a work there is ready for it."

I could tell this bugged him. He looked away and his short black hair made a crazy, spiky silhouette against the sunlight.

"Aw, come on, Harrison," I butted in. I reached up to rub my white mustache. "This guy's good. He lives near the Snowy Belt, and he built his Machine himself. I bet he's not too bad at navigating them tricky asteroids, right, Jim?"

"That's right," he said, still not looking at Harrison.

"Well, it certainly wasn't built for speed," she snorted. A few people chuckled.

He looked at her now. "And apparently your Machines weren't built with cat protection."

The group howled and flicked their fingers with delight.

"Whatever, man," she said to Young Jim. "Come with us if you want, but I can't imagine how your Machine will even make it that far."

I looked at his Machine again. It really was a piece of work, asymmetrical with the joints coming together at weird places. I'd defended Jim because his dad and me went way back and I knew he was a good kid, but privately I was worried about him. What if his Machine stopped working in the heat of the moment? It could ruin the whole operation if we had to worry about saving him instead of them Machines.

Harrison turned away from him. "All right," she said to everybody, "don't hurt my Machines. I'm shooting you the passcode so you can bring one in if you find it. Don't hurt my cats. And I have a prize for whoever brings em back unharmed. Let's GO!"

The mob gave a cheer and began jumping into their own sleek little Machines. I climbed into mine, too - not so sleek, but she's stood by me through a lot, and is one of the best little Machines a guy could ask for. I sat down on the warm little seat and rested my hands on my knees. A cup-holder, a mini-cooler for a sandwich or two, and a touch screen that was useful for navigation, auto-pilot and movies - the inside of my Machine was simple. Above that, it was all glass till up behind my head.

Together, we rose like a disintegrating asteroid.

I moved myself to fly next to Young Jim as we began the journey between the asteroids and up to the Snowy Belt. We live in an asteroid field, but the Snowy Belt is where they really get happening.

"Glad you came," I told him on a private radio signal. We could see each other through our bubble shields. His suit was just as plain in color as his Machine. At least he matched, Harrison would say.

"Don't know if I'm glad or not," he replied with a grin. "Hey, does Harrison have a plan for snagging them Machines? I've never seen anyone have to chase down a whole fleet before. You can't exactly herd cats."

"I dunno," I replied. "If I have to help her with it, I'm gonna get between them and the Belt. I'll set off a flash bomb and hope it scares them into going back toward home. Then maybe everyone else can have their nets out and catch them and we can guide them back. Do you have a plan, smartypants?"

"Dunno. If I'm even needed I'll have to see what happens." He frowned thoughtfully and looked ahead. I figured he wanted to focus on his driving instead of talking. I put my ship on autopilot and leaned back to enjoy the view.

"Hey, Clancy," I heard Jim say. I looked over. He was frowning at something inside his Machine.

"Yo," I said.

"Something's going wonky here. I gotta pull over. You keep going, I'll catch up if I can."

"You sure you're okay, buddy? Need me to look at something?"

He shook his head. "Naw, I'll be fine. I'll be careful. It's just the telepetrometer acting up and I need to figure out why it's saying this."

"You sure?" I asked again.

"Yup. If I don't show up, stop by and see me on your way back if you want. Gonna land on that stroid right there." He made a two-finger salute and dipped away from the group. I decided he'd be okay (he'd built his own ship, after all) and checked my autopilot to make sure it was still on target.



We slipped smoothly through space, and drifted between the asteroids - with purpose. There was the Kosciusko Trio on the left, each stroid several miles across and orbiting each other; then on the right, the Timor cloud, several asteroids less than a quarter of a mile across. The snow-white rocks everywhere stood out real sharp against the pitch black sky, which was also sprinkled with millions of stars. Here and there was a bright spot of color. Machines. We weren't in the Snowy Belt yet, but we were close.

"Clancy," Harrison said on the group line.

"I'm on it," I replied. I had noticed what she had noticed: a serious thickening of the asteroids up ahead - the Snowy Belt - and a small scattering of Machines, not our crowd. Which meant the cats.

I love this kind of thing. The beauty of man meeting space, the thrill of racing to meet adventure before she comes to you, the satisfaction of a hard task done, and done well.

I turned off autopilot and mentally moved my Machine into zooming action, racing off to one side so as not to frighten the cats. Gradually I curved around and got in between them and the Belt, like I'd told Jim I'd do.

"Y'all be ready to catch em. I'm sending em your way," I said to everyone through my headpiece.


Read Chapter 2 here.