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  Welcome to Heaven. Here’s a mop.

  It’s not that simple, of course. First you have to die. Grunge rock, the mosh pit, bad acid, and an eighteen-wheeler will take care of that.

  Then you have to survive. Not terribly complicated, toward the century’s end, for a neglected rich kid with guilt-ridden parents. Can you say cry-o-gen-ics?

  Then there’s the resurrection. That’s a more complex matter altogether, involving runaway nanotechnology, a neural interface in the brain, an asteroid named after Jerry Garcia, and a castle that needs cleaning. Which brings us back to the mop.

  Death comes to us all, but for William Alec Tucker III it is a gateway to the future, and a second chance to accomplish what he’s left undone: which is, well, just about everything. Life after death is almost pleasant. Until Alec finds out that he’s a pawn in a system-wide struggle for power, and embarks on an odyssey of discovery that takes him from the far reaches of the asteroid belt to the fleshpots of Clarke County, Space. And even further, to the beckoning stars.

  Allen Steele, one of SF’s brightest young stars, has pulled out all the stops in this fractally dense, fast-paced, richly comic, and deeply moving novel of a young man who risks everything for a once-in-a-lifetime love.

  That’s once in each lifetime.

  Books by Allen Steele

  Novels

  Orbital Decay

  Clarke County, Space

  Lunar Descent

  Labyrinth of Night

  The Weight

  The Jericho Iteration

  The Tranquillity Alternative

  A King of Infinite Space

  Collections

  Rude Astronauts

  All-American Alien Boy

  HarperPrism

  A Division of HarperCollinsPublishers

  10 East 53rd Street, New York, N.Y. 10022-5299

  * * *

  This is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogues are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1997 by Allen Steele

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information address HarperCollinsPublishers,

  10 East 53rd Street, New York, NY 10022.

  ISBN: 0-06-105286-8

  HarperCollins®, ®, and HarperPrism®

  are trademarks of HarperCollinsPublishers Inc.

  HarperPrism books may be purchased for educational, business, or sales promotional use. For information, please write:

  Special Markets Department, HarperCollinsPublishers,

  10 East 53rd Street, New York, N.Y. 10022-5299.

  Designed by Lisa Pifher

  First printing: September 1997

  Printed in the United States of America

  * * *

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Steele, Allen M.

  A king of infinite space : a novel / by Allen Steele

  p. cm.

  ISBN 0-06-105286-8

  I. Title

  PS3569.T338425K56 1997

  813'.54--dc2l

  97-17584

  CIP

  * * *

  Visit HarperPrism on the World Wide Web at

  http://www.harpercollins.com

  97 98 99 00 • 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  In memory of:

  Rick Dunning,

  Claude Gross,

  Paul “Tiny” Stacy

  Contents

  CHAPTER ONE

  LIVE THROUGH THIS

  CHAPTER TWO

  SIMPLE

  CHAPTER THREE

  THIS IS A CALL

  CHAPTER FOUR

  MISERY

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CAN’T GET THERE FROM HERE

  CHAPTER SIX

  IN THE SPRINGTIME OF HIS VOODOO

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  ARTIFICIAL SUNLIGHT

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  COME AS YOU ARE

  CHAPTER NINE

  BLUE SKY MINING

  CHAPTER TEN

  SOMEBODY TO SHOVE

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  TERRITORIAL PISSINGS

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  BITTERSWEET

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  A MURDER OF ONE

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  PRIVATE REVOLUTION

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAMPAGNE SUPERNOVA

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  I’M A LITTLE ROCKET SHIP

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  FEELING GRAVITY’S PULL

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  BETWEEN PLANETS

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  SUPERUNKNOWN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  SUPPORT YOUR LOCAL EMPEROR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  GUILTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  SOON, COMING CLOSER

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  SHE LIVES (IN A TIME OF HER OWN)

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  I GOT ID

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  BY STARLIGHT

  CHAPTER

  ONE

  * * *

  LIVE THROUGH THIS

  “Why? Why not?”

  —Timothy Leary; last words

  The night sky always looks the same, no matter where you go: look up, and the universe opens before you. The constellations may be different, the stars in new positions, but it’s always the same cosmos: a seemingly endless darkness, broken only by tiny lights that could be planets, suns, nebulae, even entire galaxies. No one really knows how large this universe is, where its true limits are, or how long it may last…

  But nothing lasts forever. Not even eternity.

  This is the story of the last day of my life, and everything that happened after that.

  To say that it’s hot is an understatement. St. Louis in mid-July is a perpetual sauna; the temperature only dips below eighty for a few hours between midnight and dawn, and by early afternoon you could probably get a good lunch by scooping the brains out of your skull, dropping them on the sidewalk, and cracking open an egg on top. Downtown, yuppies scurry from air-conditioned offices to air-conditioned bistros, their business suits and knee-length dresses clinging to their skin like fifty-percent cotton rags, while out in the ‘burbs their spouses sit in stalled traffic as they crawl to the shopping mall, there to seek respite from the heat and humidity by buying more stuff they really don’t need. At home, little kids stare at cartoons on the tube and chase each other with Super Soakers, while their teenage siblings hang out in the park and smoke the pot they stole from Dad’s secret bedroom stash.

  It’s July 11, 1995, and it’s hot all over. The Unabomber has mailed a deranged screed to the New York Times and the Washington Post, demanding that Western civilization grind to a halt; Western civilization yawns and flips to the funny pages. A NASA space shuttle has just returned to Cape Canaveral after docking with the Russian space station; most people are more interested in catching the new Tom Hanks movie about another space mission twenty-five years ago. Ten Republicans claim that they can do a better job of ruining the country than one Democrat, and no one really doubts their word. Right-wing militia nuts are saying that the United Nations is conspiring to take over the United States, which is a hoot because UN peacekeepers can’t prevent Serbs from wiping out Croats in a plot of European real estate little larger than Pennsylvania. The major-league baseball strike has been settled, which means that it’s okay to come back to the ballpark and watch your team get stomped
by the Cleveland Indians—pardon me, the Cleveland Native Americans. Richard Gere is in Camelot, Clint Eastwood is in Meryl Streep’s pants, and Denzel Washington is in a sub; Ben Kingsley battles aliens while Sylvester Stallone fights giant robots, and the best babes in the Cineplex are Batman’s new girlfriend and Disney’s idea of how Pocahontas might have looked if she had worked out on a Nautilus machine and shaved her pits. Calvin talks to Hobbes, Rush talks to Newt, O.J. talks to his lawyers, and every moron who has worn his wife’s clothes, screwed her son’s girlfriend, or been kidnapped by aliens is talking to Oprah, Sally, Geraldo, and/or Ricki. Just between you and me, I’d rather have my brains fried on the sidewalk and eaten with a poached egg.

  As it turned out, fate has other plans for my gray matter. Fate, my father, and a man named Mister Chicago who hasn’t even been born yet, and it begins with a trip out to Riverport for Lollapalooza.

  I leave early from my job at a second-hand record store and return to the Central West End apartment Erin and I share, a two-bedroom flat furnished with Pier One wicker stuff, cement-block-and-plank shelves filled with paperbacks and comic books, a queen-sized waterbed, and a life-sized cardboard figure of Captain Kirk adorned with cheap Mardi Gras beads and an earring in his left ear. We watch Animaniacs while we roll a few joints and fill our daypacks with bottles of Evian water, sunscreen, spare rolls of toilet paper (in case some kid throws all the asswipe in the toilets), Tylenol (for heat headaches), and extra packs of cigarettes. Shemp arrives around about four o’clock, and then we pile into my ’93 Saturn SC2 and head for the show. A long summer afternoon of rock ’n’ roll with my girl and my best friend.

  I need to tell you about Erin and Shemp.

  First, Erin. She’s been my girlfriend for the past two years, after we met at the recording studio where she worked as an office manager when the band Shemp and I belong to, the Belly Bombers, came in to record our first and only demo. The Bombers never got a label interested in signing us, but Erin came home with me the night we cut the final track. Shemp was splitting the rent with me at the time, but six months later he moved out and Erin moved in.

  It isn’t enough to say that Erin Westphall is a babe. She’s outright beautiful: twenty-three years old, very slim, small-breasted, with chestnut hair that flows down to the center of her back. Chicago’s her hometown, but she moved to St. Louis after graduating from Stephens College in Columbia and kicked around the city before landing a job at the studio. As with my part-time job at Dino Tracks, she really doesn’t need to work; like Shemp and me, Erin’s a trust-fund kid from a wealthy Lake Forest family who’s impatiently waiting for her to get over her dreams of becoming a novelist so she can return to Chicago, marry some dude with an MBA, and settle down in the ‘burbs to become a baby machine. That might happen once she gets tired of waterbeds, cinder-block furniture, and cold pizza for breakfast, but for the time being she’s cohabiting with a rich kid who works part-time at a record store while working on a novel about cohabiting with a rich kid who works part-time at a record store.

  And then there’s Shemp, whose seldom-used proper name is Christopher Meyer: twenty-four years old, six-feet-one, overweight by about fifty pounds, with buzz-cut dark hair and a soul patch under his lower lip. I’ve known Shemp ever since eighth grade at Country Day School; his German-American genes had been unkind to him, because when puberty hit us Shemp became a teenage reincarnation of one of the Three Stooges, and thus the nickname, which somebody gave him in the locker room after gym class. Our families both live in Ladue, and since the Meyers own the Big Bee Supermarket chain, his dad is constantly on his case about joining the family business.

  Shemp aspires to be a comic book artist, though, and after one summer of wearing an apron with a grinning bee on it and asking old ladies if they had any coupons, he decided that he’d rather work on his indie comics creation, The Slack, which he eventually hopes to sell to Dark Horse, while playing drums with the Bombers on the weekends. He’s a lot smarter than he looks; when Erin started staying over at our apartment every night, he realized that it was time for him to find his own place. Erin and Shemp never really hit it off, but after I made it clear to Erin that Shemp’s my best friend and to Shemp that I’d rather see Erin getting out of the shower every morning, they’ve learned to tolerate one another. Sort of. Getting reserved seat tickets for Lollapalooza for the three of us is one more attempt on my part to get them to be pals.

  And then there’s William Alec Tucker III…but we’ll get to him later.

  So now it’s quarter to five, the sun still high in the sky, and the thermometer standing at ninety-two in the shade. We park the Saturn in the back of the Riverport lot and join the line at the turnstiles as it shuffles through the usual daypack searches and metal detector sweeps by the rent-a-cops before we get our tickets ripped. No one finds the joints I’ve hidden in my cigarette pack, and Erin manages to get through the pat-down without being groped by some cop, and in another minute we’re through the gate and in the middle of thirty thousand other members of Gen-X and Gen-Y.

  Riverport Amphitheater is an artificial hill in front of an enormous open-sided shed, with long asphalt walkways circling the hill to plazas on either side of the stage. You’ve got your punks, your ravers, your frat boys, your stoners, your teeners, your slackers, your over-the-hill hippies looking for one more summer of love before they finally cut their hair and get a job. Up on the hill, they stand, sit, or sprawl on blankets trampled by countless sneakers and hiking boots, listening to Jesus Lizard thudding from distant speakers; down on the walkways, even more shuffle past tents set up by hucksters touring with the show. T-shirts, jewelry, window stickers, incense, dope paraphernalia, CDs by bands no one has ever heard of, sunglasses, cheap dresses and parachute pants, underground comic books, hemp hats: an open-air mall of the hip and hip-five-minutes-ago, mobbed by kids in search of something that won’t look stupid three months from now. It’s all loud and crowded and sweaty and hot, just the way I like it.

  Closer to the shed, food vendors have set up their tents; our noses are assaulted by the odors of a dozen different kinds of ethnic cuisine. Shemp’s hungry, so he heads straight for a Thai concession, where he buys a paper plate of raman noodles and stir-fried yeti. Two places sell overpriced fruit juices—they can’t call them smart drinks anymore, because the FDA determined that you’ll still be just as stupid as you were before you had one—but Erin joins the line in front of the Budweiser stand, unhip as it may be. I wander around the plaza while I wait for them, catching a little of this and that. Under a large tent, a San Francisco theater troupe stages a performance in which a gray-wigged, business-suited Republican auctions off the Bill of Rights. Thirty feet away, teenagers impatiently wait their turn to try out the free videogames set up under the Sega pavilion. A fifteen-year-old kid climbs into a Spaceball; after a minute of spinning upside-down and inside-out, he’s spewing chunky green stuff all over the transparent plastic sphere. I spot Shemp watching the gastronomic fireworks from the other side of the crowd: he takes his plate of raman-and-yeti to the nearest garbage can.

  We find our seats under the shed just in time for Sinead O’Connor. She’s let her hair grow out a little since the time she tore up the pope’s picture on Saturday Night Live, and she’s got a four-piece band that backs her up as she does a rap version of the Beatles’ “All The Lonely People” (or whatever the hell it’s called) and a song about the Irish potato famine. It’s really very pretty and Erin is transfixed because she loves Sinead, but Shemp is talking to two dudes sitting behind us. I can’t hear what they are saying, but the three of them get up and leave before her performance is half over.

  Erin and I wander over to the Art Tent. It’s a little cooler in here, but no less humid. There’re strange sculptures—a spiked armchair raised on a nine-foot throne, an altar of jeweled skulls illuminated by automobile taillights—but the only thing I wish I had is a signed lithograph of Big Daddy Roth’s Rat Fink. We find Shemp staring fixedly at a Robert
Williams silk-screened tapestry of a bare-breasted angel wearing a space helmet floating above a junkyard filled with thirties-style spaceships. He babbles at us for several minutes about the obvious correlation between Stephen Hawking, Gene Roddenberry, Jack Kirby, and God-knows-what; his pupils have expanded into tiny planets. Shemp’s found some acid; we make sure that he still has his ticket stub and knows that he can’t return to his seat without it, then we go get some more beer.

  For dinner music, we get power-grunge by Pavement. The mosh pit on the hill, placid during Sinead, briefly comes alive with flailing arms and legs; everyone else is bowed by the oppressive burden of the sun. Erin and I smoke a joint—the ushers don’t give a shit, they’re on the lookout for people throwing junk at the stage—then go out for more beer. We find the mist tent and stand fully clothed under the sprayers. Several Deadheads are talking about what happened at a campground in St. Charles after a Grateful Dead show at Riverport last week. A hundred kids were taken to the hospital when a deck at the campground lodge collapsed during a thunderstorm. Everyone agrees that it was a bummer, but at least Jerry put on a good show. Doesn’t mean much to me; I’m not into the Dead. The cool spray plasters Erin’s shirt against her breasts; I’m beginning to look forward to going home after the show.

  I hit the men’s room on the way back to the shed. Guys in shorts and sticky T-shirts are lined up in front of the urinals, letting go of all the beer and fruit juice they’ve been sucking down. The tile floor is slippery with water jetting out from a sink faucet that’s been jammed open; an old black janitor in uniform tries to monkey-wrench the spigot shut. I can’t get to a urinal and I’ve got to take a major leak, so I piss in the next sink over. The janitor yells at me to cut it out, but I ignore him. This is what you’re paid to do, man: clean up after people like me. If you don’t like it, then go to college and become a rocket scientist.

  Cypress Hill comes on at seven o’clock with loud, aggressive rap about fucking and smoking pot. I’m all for both, but Erin isn’t into this stuff; she drags me over to the second stage near the front gate, where we catch Beck doing a solo acoustic show. Once again we see Shemp; completely zooed by now, he’s standing near the stage, screaming “Loser!” every time the guy takes a break. This may be a request for Beck’s big radio hit or an opinion of Beck himself; either way, Beck ignores him, and when Shemp spots us from across the crowd, we turn and hurry away before anyone sees us with him.