AE in the Irish Theosophist | Page 3

where the bank of displays and switches gleam. The pilot is an elderly man with brown hair, slumped in the well-padded pilot's seat. A heads up display flickers green figures over the roiling red clouds of Riley on the windowscreen in front of him. This is how the colonists access the layers of information around them.
I shake his shoulders, but his head lolls. Other than that, he looks okay. I don't have the ability anymore to ping his health icon, but the lady colonist leans over and pulls her hoop skirt off. She's wearing an elaborate set of lacy knee-length pants underneath. She squeezes in between me and the captain to check his pulse.
"He's dead," she says.
Everyone is looking at me.
I've become a murderer, though I doubt even my Id was crazy enough to kill the pilot.
"Heart attack, probably," the lady says, pushing past me and pulling her hoop skirt back on.
"How can you tell?"
"I'm a doctor." She sits back down, smoothes the skirt out over her legs.
It's a small relief.
"Does anyone here know how to fly this thing?" I ask. They all shake their heads.
I slump to the floor.
I could fly it. But I'd have to reboot my neural network to get that kind of information. And then Vince would return.
The airship shakes, and several motors whirr.
"What's that?" I ask.
The doctor looks out the observation windows.
"The bag is venting," she says. "We're dropping."
"Do you know how to use these manual controls to call the Air Guard?" I ask, pointing at the scary rows of controls in front of the dead pilot. If the alternative is plummeting down into the depths of a gas giant, arrest is starting to look good.
The doctor looks at me as if I'm stupid. "Yes."
"Then do it!"

#

The doctor sits up front speaking into the arm of the seat near the dead pilot. She's talking to the Air Guard.
"How far do you think this ship can fall?" I ask the men around me, trying to keep myself from focusing on the sinking feeling in my stomach that tells me we are still descending.
"This particular ship," says the doctor from up front, "comes from a line of what used to be tourist ships. They would follow the generator cables of the cities way down into the clouds." She throws a paper brochure at us. It lands on the floor. "Didn't any of you read the booklets on each of your seats?"
I feel around in my pockets to find a crumpled up ball of paper.
"Spacers." She stares at me with menace. "They loved riding these things down into the clouds. Until the depression hit. Now they're used for more practical things. We don't get many spacers on vacation here on Riley anymore."
"How long before the Air Guard gets to us?" I ask, trying to deflect the cloud of animosity in the air. My stomach begins to settle.
"They said an hour."
"And how long before we would get crushed?"
The doctor shrugs. "Your programmed autopilot seems to be leveling us off," she says.
Ah. So maybe we would live. Relieving. I walk forward, peering out of the windows. We're in what looks like a red fog now, the light inside tinted with the color. Everyone looks angry in this kind of lighting, or at least out of breath. Nothing to do but wait for the Air Guard.
The prospect of being arrested doesn't do much for me. I sit down in a funk and continue staring at the shifting hues outside.
"What are you even doing down here?" The doctor asks. "Spacers don't even come down to the cities anymore."
I turn back to look at her.
"I'm bankrupt."
"I thought all spacers were rich," one of the men says.
"Well I'm not," I snap. "There are costs, right? You have to fuel the ship. Make repairs. Hire crew. Find cargo. And most importantly, invest intelligently." I look around at them. "I left here sixty years ago with a couple thousand in a bank account and some various investments. It was everything I had left after paying for my ship's needs." I had taken the money from Suzy, planning to pay her back in spades when I returned. "The depression wiped it all out by the time I came back." Though if I had come back twenty years earlier I would have been a multi-billionare.
"You're not a very lucky spacer," the doctor observes.
I shake my head.
"No, I'm not." But at least the doctor sounds sympathetic, unlike Vince, who ridiculed me for days straight about it. "I left people behind when I skipped out because I was close to broke sixty of your years ago as well. Now I don't even have them." Vince led me down to the floating cities of Riley as last-ditch effort to save ourselves.
Floating ghost cities. He'd been nuts in the end.
"I'm really sorry