Belt Three

by John Ayliff

  It wouldn’t be proper for a true-born to make eye contact with passing tank-borns, but Jonas watched the travellers enviously from the corner of his eye. He wished he could lose himself in the throng and set up a new life on Santesteban. With the last of Gabriel’s assets gone he’d have to drop the name in order to avoid contact with his family. He’d drop the true-born pretence; Gabriel’s Immolation would finally be complete. The idea felt like a betrayal, both of Gabriel’s memory and that of his crew, but it might be the only way to survive.

  But that was impossible, in any case. The implant sat at the top of his spine like a bomb waiting to go off if he didn’t get back to the Remembrance on time. There was a chance Keldra was bluffing, but he didn’t think it was likely.

  A free-floating attendant with a puffer belt spotted Jonas and moved over to meet him as he reached the end of the line. She was tall, with slender limbs and a bulbous, shaved cranium. It looked as though she had been raised in microgravity, part of a tank-born subculture that could never live in their own city’s high-grav areas or travel on a high-acceleration ship. She folded her long body briefly in a microgravity bow, and then extended a datapad towards him. ‘Your passport, sir?’ Her voice was politely apologetic, as if ashamed to submit a true-born to such a humiliating process.

  Jonas reined in his emotions to present a self-confident face, and touched his forged passport to the datapad then held it up for the attendant to inspect. She consulted the pad and nodded. ‘Gabriel Reinhardt, Remembrance of Clouds?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Reason for your visit?’

  ‘Business. I’m here to see Wendell Taylor Glass. He’s expecting me.’ Jonas had sent a message before they had docked, putting himself on Glass’s schedule.

  The attendant made a note on the pad. ‘There’s a taxi waiting for you, sir. Enjoy your stay in Santesteban. Is there anything I can do for you?’

  ‘Please have my servitors and cargo taken to a secure storage area.’

  The attendant glanced at the servitors that were lined up behind Jonas. ‘We can put them in a store room here in the spindle for 800 credits an hour. Is that…?’

  Jonas waved dismissively, as if the mere mention of such a small amount of money was distasteful to him.

  ‘Very good, sir.’ The attendant handed Jonas a wafer-pad storage ticket. He directed the servitors to follow her, and then skimmed her one-credit tip from the spending money he had convinced Keldra to give him. The attendant opened a door to let him through a rotation transfer hub and into the city proper. He saw her puffing away at the head of the line of servitors.

  On the other side of the rotation transfer hub was a slowly spinning cylindrical concourse with walls of bare iron. It was swarming with people, many of them spidery low-grav tank-borns, moving around elegantly using puffer belts, or swimming through the air with membranous wings built into their jumpsuits. There was a steady stream of travellers struggling against the inertia of their luggage, and loitering freighter crews hooked into crannies in the wall. Jonas didn’t make eye contact with anyone. When true-borns passed through places like this they did so quickly, on their way to somewhere more luxurious.

  He navigated the handholds to the rail-taxi rank and found the cab with Gabriel Reinhardt flashing across its side.

  ‘Diamond spindle,’ he said as he strapped himself in. The driver acknowledged and the cab set off into a tunnel.

  Wendell Taylor Glass didn’t live on Santesteban proper, Keldra had told him, but on a luxury ringship, the Haze of the Ecliptic, orbiting a few dozen kilometres from the city. The only way he allowed visitors to reach him was via the diamond spindle, a private shuttle dock on the opposite end of the city from the spaceport. Most city owners lived apart from their subjects, but few did so as thoroughly as Glass.

  The cab followed a tunnel that led away from the rock’s rotation axis, and after a few moments there was enough gravity for it to feel as if they were moving down a gentle slope. Once they had reached about one-third of a gee, they emerged into a habitation cavern, the cab running across a network of rails suspended beneath the ceiling. The floor was hundreds of metres down, and he could see it curving up on either side of him. From below, he knew, the taxis passing overhead looked like angels on a wire.

  This first cavern appeared to be an entertainment district. Steel buildings were arrayed across the rust-coloured floor; any pattern to their layout had been lost by years of ad hoc modifications and repairs. The permanent structures were encrusted with a shanty town made from discarded building materials and cargo containers. Garish neon signs rose up out of the mass, advertising various entertainments to spaceship crews just docked after long voyages. A thin film of rock dust covered everything, standing out starkly in the glare of the cavern’s ceiling lights.

  The car passed through a gap in the thin wall of iron that separated the cavern from the next one. This cavern was centred around a marketplace thronging with people. Most looked like natives to this low gravity area, tall and gangly and walking with long bounding strides, but there was a healthy presence of squat full-gravity figures as well, and even a few of the microgravity people lolling in wheelchairs. Every so often the crowd would part to make way for the rickshaw or palanquin of a visiting true-born.

  Along one side of the market was a Scriber kitchen, where a long line of tank-borns shuffled forward to receive bowls of soup from white-robed monks. Some of the people in the queue wore white themselves, or had shaved their heads, signs of the first stages of initiation into the Scriber religion. A pair of Arkite preachers stood half way along the line. From the way they were gesticulating, Jonas guessed that their sermon must include vivid descriptions of hell, but they didn’t seem to be dissuading anyone from coming forward.

  The next cavern was a birthing village. Jonas didn’t want to look down, but he couldn’t help it. He’d spent the first twelve years of his life in a village like this. The villages in Athens had been orderly, all rectangles and right angles, with cool steel walls that were kept meticulously clean. This one was more chaotic, the steel partitions seemingly placed randomly, and the pervasive red dust covering everything. The principles were the same, though, as they were on every city in the belts.

  The wide spaces between the partitions were filled with groups of children. Some sat in circles around teachers, each squatting on the ground with a school-pad on his or her knee. Others were on breaks, chasing one another through corridors and dormitories. They all wore identical grey coveralls, distinguished only by the patterns of the red dust stains.

  The children took their studies seriously. The classes were quiet, orderly, and a lot of the older children were using their break time to study further, sitting alone, with spare pads. Jonas remembered the sense of fear and urgency that overcame each age group as the final aptitude tests grew closer. Based on your final assessment score, you would be assigned your specialization and your initial role in the city. If you didn’t make at least the Worker-grade, if there was nothing in your free-willed mind that the city deemed useful, it was a spike to the back of the head and servitordom.

  Rising above the maze of partitions were the rows of cloning towers, the machines that fed this human production line. Each unit was self-contained, a few dozen tanks around a central pillar. They were all identical, as were the ones in every city in the belts. Another forgotten technology, like the solar sails. They had been designed on Earth, by the last generation before the Worldbreakers, and they were largely self-replicating, each one able to produce the parts for another unit, and instructions to help semi-skilled workers assemble it. Each tower contained the genetic codes of around two billion human beings, a large fraction of the doomed final population of the Earth. You fed them power and organic material, and they would produce new human beings, each baby a genetic duplicate of someone who had lived in that last generation.

  Gabriel had explained the history of the cloning towers to Jonas. The idea had been to preserve g
enetic diversity and rebuild population numbers faster than the remnant of humanity could. But in their haste the designers had made a mistake. The clones suffered from genetic abnormalities, most of them harmless, but one of them devastating. Clones were sterile: without expensive genetic modification, they could never reproduce. But the towers kept working, churning out generation after generation of genetic duplicates.

  At least, that was the official story, the one that Jonas had been taught in his birthing village and had never had reason to doubt. Gabriel had told him another version, one that some true-borns believed but that most tank-borns never got a chance to hear. The mistake that had led to clone sterility might have been deliberate, and even if it wasn’t, the later failure to correct it certainly was. The original, official plan was for the cloning towers to function for a few generations, until there was enough genetic diversity for a strong population, and then for natural reproduction to take over. But the first generations of true-borns living after the disaster, those who might have had the power to correct the mistake, had not seen it in their interest to do so. With a population of naturally reproducing humans they would have had competitors for wealth and power. With the sterile clones they had a slave class, each of whom began life in debt to their creator and who could not pass wealth on to the next generation.

  Gabriel had hated the system, both for condemning most of the population to lives of drudgery and for imposing on his own class the sacred duty of continuing the family line. They had dreamed together of better, more equal worlds. But, 300 years later, the system was too entrenched for any individual to change it.

  The car entered another tunnel, and emerged at another rail-taxi rank at the floor of a smaller cavern. It looked as though this was the entrance to Mr Glass’s diamond spindle. It was square and neatly carved, and the opposite wall was a complex façade of blue glass and chrome-steel columns, brightly illuminated by hidden lights. Beyond a double layer of glass doors, a staircase wound up and out of sight. No doubt the tank-born citizens from the habitation caverns would be turned away if they tried to enter the spindle, but they would come away with the engineered impression of the entrance to some exotic dream-world.

  A valet in powder-blue livery opened the taxi door. The guards’ smiles were polite but less deferential than that of the docking attendant had been, and they held large crowd-control nerve rifles. Jonas brushed a bit of imaginary dust from his shoulder and tried to inject confidence into his stride. Projecting a sense that he belonged in true-born gatherings had become second nature to him, but requesting a meeting with a city owner was still daunting, and the unfelt presence of Keldra’s implant added an extra layer of nervousness.

  ‘Gabriel Reinhardt of Reinhardt Industries. Mr Glass is expecting me.’

  The guard gave a respectful nod that was not quite a bow, and held out another datapad to read his passport. ‘Yes, sir, your arrival was noted,’ he said, once the pad had confirmed Jonas’s forged identity. ‘Mr Glass will be able to see you today. There is a shuttle waiting.’

  The guard summoned an attendant, who ushered Jonas up the steps and through a lavish waiting area centred around an ornamental fountain. He showed him through an airlock to a waiting shuttle, and strapped him in to one of half a dozen acceleration couches before leaving him alone.

  The shuttle tipped back and trundled up the sloping tunnel to the city’s rotation axis. Jonas felt the gravity ebb away, and then he was pushed back into his seat as the shuttle accelerated down the launch tube and out into space. The walls vanished, replaced by the dizzying three-dimensional vista of ships and minor rocks that surrounded the city. The shuttle’s passenger cabin was a transparent bubble protruding above the cockpit, so Jonas could see all around the ship. Looking back, the diamond spindle was a tiny white spike on the face of the asteroid, just a set of shuttle launch tubes and mooring lines for a pair of private yachts.

  Ahead was Wendell Taylor Glass’s private luxury ringship, the Haze of the Ecliptic. Apart from a small hub containing the ion drive and other essential systems, the entire ship was a single grav-ring, angled so that sunlight would shine through the translucent panels that made up the ring’s inner surface. It looked like some kind of jewel; even the exterior surface was polished to a shine, and the panels glinted one by one as the ring rotated in the light.

  The shuttle docked, and another liveried attendant helped Jonas into a transit module that took him down to the ring floor. The interior was a single chamber filling the whole width of the ring and stretching around as far as he could see. It was made up as an ornamental garden. The transparent ceiling was tinted a dark purple, turning the sun into a washed-out disc and rendering the bulk of Santesteban almost invisible. The floor was a spongy lawn, with a tiled path weaving through the centre of it and disappearing under the ceiling horizon in both directions. Plants were arranged around in neat beds, lit by varicoloured spotlights. Most of them were engineered into unnatural shapes, twisted bonsai-like trees, or abstract topiary carvings. Among the plants, on spotlighted pedestals, female dancers in blue body-paint gyrated to the soft music that played in the background.

  Dotted around the twilit garden were ornate little buildings of white and pink stone, in a garish array of architectural styles. Stepping out of the transit module, Jonas saw that the transit hub was disguised as a marble pagoda, its stepped roof rising up to touch the ring’s ceiling.

  Another attendant led Jonas around the path towards one of the architectural follies. The dancers ignored them, expressionlessly repeating the same movements, precise but devoid of emotion. Jonas tried not to do more than glance at them. They were as much ornaments as the plants and the architectural follies, and it would be uncouth to pay them too much attention. He hoped that they were servitors rather than free-willed dancers with muscle-override implants; he didn’t like to imagine that there was human intelligence behind those blank eyes.

  The attendant led him to a circular arena, like a miniature Coliseum, its stone walls artistically crumbled. He went up the steps to the viewing area. A man and a woman sat on a cushioned bench, a little way apart, watching as a pair of gladiators circled one another in the ring, crackling raised shock-knives. The watchers didn’t appear to have noticed Jonas arrive.

  He stepped forward. ‘Excuse me, I’m looking for Mr Glass.’

  The man looked around. He wore a dark suit and had neat blond hair that looked silver in the purple light. ‘It seems our host likes to keep his guests waiting, I’m afraid. Captain Lance Hussein Cooper, Solar Authority.’ He handed Jonas a business card. It was a fancy Earth-tech communicator card, featureless, except for the captain’s name and the five concentric circles of the Solar Authority flag.

  Jonas took the card, shook the man’s hand, and sat down. Close to, he saw that the man’s suit was a Solar Authority dress uniform, with captain’s stripes on its wide sleeves and the Authority’s five concentric circles picked out in gold thread on the shoulders.

  ‘Gabriel Reinhardt, Reinhardt Industries. It’s a pleasure to meet you. You don’t often see Solar Authority officers this far from Fides.’

  ‘Perhaps not. But the Solar Authority has jurisdiction over all of the belts.’

  Jonas smiled disarmingly. ‘Of course.’

  The woman had glanced briefly at Jonas when he arrived, but now turned back to the gladiators. Studying her face, Jonas felt a surge of second-hand recognition. She was eight years older, but this was Emily Taylor Glass, Olzan’s true-born lover. She was staring at the gladiators, not taking her eyes off them as she took a colourful sweet from a bowl beside her and raised it slowly to her mouth. She had the silver mesh of a memduction helmet over her dark hair. Her face was gaunt and expressionless, her eyes sunken. Something about her suggested to Jonas that she had neither laughed nor cried for a long time.

  ‘Reinhardt,’ Cooper said, rolling the word over his tongue as if tasting a fine wine. ‘That used to be a Belt Four family, didn’t it?’

  �
�It mostly still is,’ Jonas said. ‘I moved down here for business.’

  ‘Ah, like our host. It seems we’re all gradually drifting down to Belt Three. Returning home, you might say.’ He took a sip of his drink. His eyes were defocused slightly, but beneath that Jonas could sense a controlled alertness, as if he was letting himself relax for now but would spring back into action in a moment. He wasn’t wearing a memduction helmet, although there was a row of helmets on stands in front of the spectator bench.

  Cooper noticed Jonas looking at the helmet. ‘We have sensation laid on,’ he said. ‘Either gladiator, or even both, which I believe our lady Emily is experiencing. I don’t, myself, but I have no objection if you want to partake.’

  ‘I think I’ll pass,’ Jonas said. ‘It’s a little intense for my tastes.’

  One of the gladiators lunged at the other, swinging her shock-knife in a desperate arc. The other gladiator danced back, but not quickly enough. The shock-knife scored a bright red line across his chest. He retaliated, but he was overweight and slower. They resumed their cautious circling, two roughly equal combat servitors facing off. The combat programmes in their implants would be examining every muscle movement, seething with possible outcomes. Emily Taylor Glass stared at them, unblinking.

  Cooper looked thoughtfully at Jonas for a moment. ‘Tell me, are you related to a Sophia Reinhardt Cooper?’

  Jonas tried to recall his assumed family tree. He had memorized it, all the way back to the last generation on Earth, but he hadn’t needed to use the information for years. ‘She was my great-aunt,’ he said at last.

  Cooper smiled with the look of someone who could bring his entire family tree into his mind at any time, and was now drawing mental lines on it to link him to Jonas. ‘Then we are related by marriage,’ he said, apparently satisfied by the new picture.

  Jonas returned the smile. ‘It’s a small universe.’

  ‘And smaller all the time. Ah, it looks like our host is here.’