“I’ll have to sit to shower,” said Frederick. “I’d expected…”
The Station Director shrugged with almost Gallic eloquence. “Freshwater,” he said, “is cheap in space. Space isn’t.”
“What’s so cheap about water?” Renny cocked his head curiously. “Don’t you have to haul it up here?”
“But only once,” said Hannoken. “After that, we’ve got all the sun we need to distill it from any wastes we make. Even bodies. We make compost out of the residue.”
“Then you must grow plants,” said Donna Rose.
“Of course,” he said. “For oxygen and food.” He looked at her with much the appraising eye some men turned upon attractive women. “And psychicease,” he added.
“And the space?” asked Frederick. “It’s expensive because the larger a station is, the more it leaks and the more often it gets hit by flying rocks. The construction materials are cheap enough. They’re from the Moon. Our air is cheap too, and the energy to heat and cool the station. But every seam is a risk.”
The bed less portion of the room held more cupboards and drawers, a fold-down desk, and several fold-out seats. There was also a porthole before which a work crew had set a metal trough half full of compost diverted from the Station’s gardens. The trough itself might once have been a piece of rocket casing. The porthole, of course, did not look directly out on space. It was the room’s floor that, as the Station’s hull, faced vacuum; mirrors linked the porthole and its view, which changed constantly as the Station rotated. Periodically, light flashed blinding bright despite the filters that betrayed their presence in sudden dimming.
Renny lay on the thin carpet, his head on his paws, staring at Hannoken, who was standing in the room’s doorway, one hand on the frame, the other scratching at his scalp. The way the thick, grey hair resisted his fingers suggested the use of a stiffening agent. Hannoken was saying, “It’s yours while you’re here. It’s a little roomier than most, but our people have desks in their offices. They usually need only enough room for a bed.”
“I don’t need that much,” said Donna Rose. Stubby legs had been welded to the trough’s rounded bottom to keep it from rocking, but still she stepped carefully onto the surface of the rich soil. Her roots unfurled and sank into the dirt. She uncoiled her leaves and spread them unselfconsciously to the light coming from the overheads and through the porthole.
Frederick smiled when he realized that Hannoken was trying to pretend he did not notice the femininity of her form. Yet the Station Director’s sidelong glances were hardly subtle.
Donna Rose sighed contentedly. “Nice,” she said. “There wasn’t even sand on the way.”
“I’m okay too,” said Renny. “A patch of floor, a dish of water, a bone. That’s all I need.”
Hannoken seemed startled for a moment. “I’d take you into my own room, but it’s a standard. If you want one of your own…”
“Uh-uh.” The German Shepherd’s tail thumped the floor. “I’m used to Freddy now.” Hannoken looked faintly hurt as he handed Frederick an electronic keycard. He was, after all, the dog’s “father” in as real a sense as ever actual parenthood could provide. He had made Renny what he was, given him his intelligence, and Frederick thought he could not help but feel that the dog owed him some loyalty. And if anyone suggested that his unwillingness to come to Earth to help Renny had amounted to abandonment, had forfeited the loyalty he wished to see, he would have seemed surprised.
“You can lock up if you wish. Some do.” Hannoken dismissed his hurt and Renny’s lack of loyalty with a blithe wave of one hand. “I don’t bother. And now, let’s get you to the dining area. You can have a bite, meet a few people.”
Donna Rose reluctantly began to extricate herself from her trough. Renny sighed and got to his feet. Frederick nodded, and Hannoken opened the room’s door to reveal the unbroken pastels of the corridor walls. The dining hall and many of the Station’s offices, he said, were near the Station’s rim, where near-Earth-normal gees kept food on plates and papers on desks. The communications and control center was at one end of the Station, near the axis, where the lack of gees minimized fatigue and the equipment could be near the antennae.
He paused where two open doors faced each other across the corridor. The rooms beyond both held tables, comfortable looking chairs, computer screens and keyboards; one held as well a pool table and a rack of cues. “The game room,” said Hannoken, gesturing. “We have over three hundred people here. It gets used a lot.” He pointed at the other door. “So does the library.” No one was in sight in either room at the moment, although creaks and clicks suggested that if they were to enter and turn a corner or go around a rack of shelves, they would find…
The sounds of moving air and distant people, of quiet machineries and flexing metal, kept them company as they moved. They passed doorways and cross-corridors that Hannoken said led to laboratories, workshops, storerooms, and maintenance areas. They nodded at those members of the Station’s complement they happened to see at work or in the corridor. They passed by the elevators that offered access to the smaller interior decks. What equipment was visible, much as Frederick had expected, was almost all mechanical. There were very few bioform devices in sight.
“We can’t have them,” said Hannoken. “If we get hit by something—and that’s always a possibility—a mechanical or electronic gadget will keep right on working. At worst, it will work again as soon as we plug the hole, restore the power, and replace the air. A bioform would be dead. If we depended on bioforms, so would we. We have enough food and oxygen in storage to last us, if necessary, until new crops can grow.”
The Station’s corridors had been arranged to strike the eye as level. Only those that paralleled the Station’s axis ran long and straight. Those that circled the axis, following the curve of the Station’s skin, jigged and jogged and bent, never offering a view so long as to reveal the skin-curve. The result was an illusion, a sense that one was in a building much like any building on Earth, even though, Frederick knew, here one could lose weight simply by riding an elevator closer to the Station’s axis.
The illusion shattered when they entered the dining hall. This room was so large that its floor, the inner surface of the Station’s hull, showed a disconcertingly visible curve, rising in the distance. The tables and chairs and people in it seemed, for just an instant, distorted as in a fun-house mirror. But the familiar odors of food and bodies, the sounds of voices and cutlery on china, the vision of long rows of snackbushes and conventional crop plants, of tomato, lettuce, onion, pepper, carrot, cabbage, and broccoli plants, of herbs and flowers—even a gengineered amaryllis or two with their face-like blossoms—all growing in knee-high planters stretched along the walls and extended through the room as dividers, all quickly restored the sense of the familiar.
“Go on,” said Hannoken. “You can find your own way around here. We can talk some more later on. I’ve got to get back to…” As if to underline his words, a soft chime issued from a communicator grill set in the wall beside the door to the dining hall, and then a feminine voice: “Doctor Hannoken?”
“On the way,” he said, and he was gone.
Faces turned their way. Conversation and clatter halted. Someone said, “A bot!” There were scattered frowns, more smiles, a “Haven’t seen one of them since I came up here,” a “Visitors? Or refugees?” And a watchful silence, until Renny walked up to the nearest occupied table, stood on his hind legs to put his forepaws on the table edge, sniffed, and said, “How do we get something to eat around here?”
The table’s occupants were an older man and two young women, his skin as dark as their hair, his hair a spring-coiled cap, tight and grizzled. One woman was a little taller than the other, whose Mediterranean heritage showed in larger bosom and darker, honeyed skin. All three were wearing patterned coveralls. When Frederick looked around the room, he realized that people here seemed to wear whatever they liked. There was no suggestion of Station or job uniform
, other than the white labcoats worn by a few. Certainly there were no blue coveralls or gear emblems.
The women at the table Renny had addressed smiled at the dog. The man laughed and said, “I will be damned. Corlynn? Show them where the food is? And then bring them back here.” Then he held out one hand, accepted the paw Renny offered in exchange, shook, and said, “I’m Walt Massaba. Security.”
Frederick was sipping at a cup of tea and watching the room. The word had spread. More people had come into the dining hall while they were eating, and food did not seem to be more than an excuse. Hands held small snacks and beverages, yes, but the eyes kept converging on the table that held the security chief, his companions, and the Station’s newest visitors. The room was not silent, but softly abuzz with conversation and speculation.
If he had remembered how to smile, he might have. The eyes kept sliding past him to settle on Donna Rose and Renny. There were twitches as if people wished to come to them, introduce themselves, ask questions, but did not quite dare as long as they were with Massaba. The security chief was, after all, the Station’s voice of discipline and control, and while Frederick detected no hint of official repression, the Station’s people did show a definite reserve.
Frederick was telling Massaba about the antipathies that had prompted him to send Renny and Donna Rose to space, and Massaba was listening intently, when two men approached the table. Their manner was diffident, tentative, though both had the muscles of manual workers. One had a face plentifully adorned with scars, the pocks of ancient acne, the lines of fights, the broken blood vessels of too many drinking bouts. The other’s face was almost childishly smooth. Side by side, they hovered, staring in turn at Donna Rose, Renny, and Frederick.
Walt Massaba’s female companions, Corlynn and the shorter Tobe, pushed their coffee cups toward the center of the table and looked watchful. Frederick realized then that they were not just friends but members of the man’s staff, security agents, keepers of the peace, protectors of the Station. The thought that they presumably carried weapons somewhere on their persons relieved him. Finally, the smooth-faced stranger spoke: “You gonna send ‘em back where they come from, Walt? We got enough trouble with the mechin’ plants, we don’t need ‘em walking around.”
“Cool it, Chuck,” said the scar-faced one.
“Right,” said the Security chief. “There’s nothing wrong with bots. They’re smart, and they’re good workers. And if they make it up here, we’ll take all we can manage.”
The scar-faced man nodded. “You saw the news, Chuck,” he said. “‘Snot fair to kill ‘em, is it?”
Chuck grunted and turned away, propelled by his friend’s hand toward the door to the room. Massaba said, “We don’t have too many like that up here.”
“I’m surprised you have any,” said Renny.
“Someone has to do the muscle work.”
Frederick looked at Donna Rose. “And he’s afraid the bots would push him aside.”
“We don’t,” said Massaba. “As long as there’s work to do, he’ll stay busy. We’ve never believed in unemployment. We can’t afford to feed deadwood.” He made a face as if to say that, of course, there were exceptions. “It’s only when someone can’t work. An injury, say. If he’s permanently disabled, we send him down again. We’d do the same if anyone refused to work.”
“Then I’d better find something to do,” said Donna Rose. “But not cleaning, not just muscle work. I’ve done that, and we do have brains. You’d be surprised how well we’re taught.”
Walt Massaba showed his teeth in a smile as he shook his head. “You have a while before we get huffy. And we may not. I think we’re going to have to find a way to fit refugees into our world up here.”
“Then tell Chuck,” said Frederick. “Refugees are unemployed, and any unemployed who hate the thought of Earth…”
Renny snorted. “There shouldn’t be any employment problem,” he said. “You’ll need to build new quarters, Q-ships….”
Massaba suddenly leaned forward, his eyes intent first on the gengineered German shepherd, then on Frederick and Donna Rose. His companions pushed their seats back and moved their hands off the table, nearer perhaps to whatever weapons they had. The room around them hushed as others registered the sudden tension. “What do you know about Q-ships?”
“Is it a secret?” asked Frederick. “Dr. Hannoken told us a little, just enough to justify shipping him”—he nodded toward the dog—“up as a test passenger. He also told us there’s no real need for an animal test; you already have a human volunteer.”
Massaba and the women relaxed. Hands returned to view.
“How does it work?” asked Donna Rose.
Walt Massaba simply shrugged. He did not know or he would not tell, no matter what his boss had already revealed.
Frederick had noticed that communicator grilles seemed to be everywhere. There was one in his quarters. They marked the corridor walls at regular intervals and were mounted by every doorway. In the dining hall, he could see them on both the walls and the ceiling. The idea seemed to be to have at least one always within hearing range of everyone on the Station. Now the nearest chimed and the same voice that had summoned Hannoken said, “Chief Massaba? The Director is ready to see the visitors again now.”
Massaba nodded and looked at the shorter of his companions. “Tobe? Show them the way?”
The first thing that struck the eye in Director Alvar Hannoken’s office was the broad picture window in the wall, the view of the distant radio telescope that did not change as the Station rotated, and the steady flood of sunlight that struck the plant in the pot upon the floor. The plant was a severely trimmed kudzu vine, its stub-cut branches covered with rich green leaves and purple blossoms.
“Mirrors,” Hannoken said when he noticed Donna Rose’s stare. “Just like in your room.”
“But it doesn’t…” she said.
“There’s a sun tracker outside.” He opened one hand to reveal a small, silvery implement that resembled a short, fat syringe. “Do you remember when I said I’d like to study your genetic structure?” When she nodded, he went on. “I meant it. I’d like a tissue sample, if…”
“Of course.” She took a step in his direction. “What do you need?”
“Anything,” he said, holding up the tool in his hand. “This will punch out a bit of skin and underlying tissue. A few thousand cells. Hardly noticeable.”
Donna Rose held still while he applied the tool to her side. When he was done, she stepped closer to Frederick and asked, “Could I have a suntracker too? I need the light, just like…” She pointed one hand toward the kudzu.
For a long moment, Hannoken’s eyes measured the distance between the bot and Frederick. He was clearly considering whether he had any chance of attracting Donna Rose and as clearly deciding that her own attraction lay elsewhere. When he finally nodded, Frederick let his attention move to the room’s other features. A slab-like desk occupied the side of the room across from the picture window. Its surface bore several slots that suggested the availability of thin screens for computer and com displays. There was also an inset keyboard and a slender stalk, a microphone that indicated the Director’s computer could be activated by voice alone and that it must therefore be a fairly powerful AI system. He wondered just how powerful it was. Could it, for instance, keep track of precisely where everyone was and use the nearest communicator to speak to one person alone?
The room was large enough to express the Director’s status. Its carpet was noticeably thicker than that in the dining hall. However, the walls, as elsewhere, were a patchwork of colored panels set in brushed aluminum. One panel, on the wall to the right of Hannoken’s desk, was entirely obscured by a large flatscreen veedo. A few other panels bore photographs. There was one of a brick and glass building that might have been the research institute at which Hannoken had done his gengineering work. Another showed a puppy that might have been Renny. A third showed a woman’s pale white head sittin
g on bare dirt. Behind it was a gravestone.
“What is that?” asked Frederick.
Hannoken laughed. “A bomb,” he said. “One of our researchers developed a fungus. You put a spore in someone’s mouth just before you buried them. It sprouted, developed a mass of tendrils—mycelium—all through the brain, and extracted the strongest memory, the last to go, the one that presumably was most basic to the dead person’s personality or identity. Then it shaped itself to match that memory.”
He turned toward the desk. “I still have one of the brochures we made up when we tried to market it. Here.”
The picture on the brochure’s cover was the same as that on the wall, with the addition of a woman, her face a sorrowful duplicate of the one on the ground, gazing at the grave. Across its top was the legend, “Give your loved ones the Last Word!”
“It didn’t work,” said Hannoken. “The ‘Last Word’ was hardly ever what the loved ones expected.”
“But…” He took the brochure from Frederick’s hands and tossed it onto his desk. “I understand you met Walt Massada.”
“You set that up,” said Renny.
A shrug. “I had to. He’s not terribly officious, but he does insist on vetting all new arrivals.”
“He seemed a bit alarmed that we’d heard of the Q-drive,” said Frederick.
“Hmmph. We are trying to keep that quiet, but it can’t last. The test flight is too close, and then…”
The Director sighed. “We’re looking at constant acceleration at one gee, or more. Your trip from Nexus Station would take only an hour or so. We’ll have colonies on Mars, not just research bases, stations among the asteroids and looking down on Saturn’s rings, and the furthest of them only days from Earth. Given more time for acceleration, we should even be able to come near light-speed.”
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