Free The Best of Michael Swanwick by Michael Swanwick

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    She touched the seal to her helmet. It felt grey—smooth and inviting. Her fingers moved absently, tracing the seal about her neck. With sudden horror, Abigail realized that she was thinking about undoing it, releasing her air, throwing away the little time she had left…
    She shuddered. With sudden resolve, she reached out and unsealed the shoulder seam of her captive arm.
    The seal clamped down, automatically cutting off air loss. The flesh of her damaged arm was exposed to the raw Martian atmosphere. Abigail took up the gaspack and cradled it in the pit of her good arm. Awkwardly, she opened the nozzle with the spanner.
    She sprayed the exposed arm with liquid oxygen for over a minute before she was certain it had frozen solid. Then she dropped the gaspack, picked up the spanner, and swung.
    Her arm shattered into a thousand fragments.
    She stood up.
    ***
    Abigail awoke, tense and sweaty. She blueshifted the walls up to normal light, and sat up. After a few minutes of clearing her head, she set the walls to cycle from red to blue in a rhythm matching her normal pulse. Eventually the womb-cycle lulled her back to sleep.
    ***
    “Not even close,” Paul said. He ran the tape backward, froze it on a still shot of the spider twisting two legs about each other. “That’s the morpheme for ‘extreme disgust,’ remember. It’s easy to pick out, and the language kids say any statement with this gesture should be reversed in meaning. Irony, see? So when the spider says that the strong should protect the weak, it means—”
    “How long have we been doing this?”
    “Practically forever,” Paul said cheerily. “You want to call it a day?”
    “Only if it won’t hurt my standing.”
    “Hah! Very good.” He switched off the keyout. “Nicely thought out. You’re absolutely right; it would have. However, as a reward for realizing this, you can take off early without it being noted on your record.”
    “Thank you,” Abigail said sourly.
    Like most large installations, the Clarke had a dozen or so smaller structures tagging along after it in minimum maintenance orbits. When Abigail discovered that these included a small wheel gymnasium, she had taken to putting in an hour’s exercise after each training shift. Today, she put in two.
    The first hour she spent shadow-boxing and practicing savate in heavy-gee to work up a sweat. The second hour she spent in the axis room, performing free-fall gymnastics. After the first workout, it made her feel light and nimble and good about her body.
    She returned from the wheel gym sweaty and cheerful to find Cheyney in her hammock again. “Cheyney,” she said, “this is not the first time I’ve had to kick you out of there. Or even the third, for that matter.”
    Cheyney held his palms up in mock protest. “Hey, no,” he said. “Nothing like that today. I just came by to watch the raft debate with you.”
    Abigail felt pleasantly weary, decided uncerebral. “Paul said something about it, but…”
    “Turn it on, then. You don’t want to miss it.” Cheyney touched her wall, and a cluster of images sprang to life at the far end of the room.
    “Just what is a raft debate, anyway?” Abigail asked, giving in gracefully. She hoisted herself onto the hammock, sat beside him. They rocked gently for a moment.
    “There’s this raft, see? It’s adrift and powerless, and there’s only enough oxygen on board to keep one person alive until rescue. Only there are three on board—two humans and a spider.”
    “Do spiders breathe oxygen?”
    “It doesn’t matter. This is a hypothetical situation.” Two-thirds of the image area were taken up by Dominguez and Paul, quietly waiting for the debate to begin. The remainder showed a flat spider image.
    “Okay, what then?”
    “They argue over who gets to survive. Dominguez argues that he should, since he’s human and human culture is superior to spider culture. The spider argues for himself and its culture.” He put an arm around