by Wil McCarthy
Still, people in many of the worlds people simply didn't worry about it. There had been a few Lesser Worlds that had no spin-gee at all, just the whisper-soft gravitational pull of the rock itself, and those people either gobbled medicine to keep themselves strong, or else consigned themselves to those few worlds for life, too weak to survive in the more normal environments.
And then again, there had been some high-gravity worlds, with equatorial spin of two gees or more, whose citizens grew up strong and short and arrogant, carrying the invisible sack of potatoes with them every day, everywhere they went. A lot of crime in those worlds, at least by Sirian standards, and a lot of accidents as well, simple scrapes and falls turned deadly in the heavy gee. If Malye had to pick an optimal gravity, it would probably be somewhere around point seven five—enough to hold everything down (like the children, for example, who tended to bounce around maniacally in low gee), but light enough to let you feel free and alive. But here, at barely point three, she was comfortable enough for the moment, if a little giddy.
So, it seemed, was Plate—he had wedged himself into one of the octohedral chamber's many corners, his head at the intersection of two triangular walls, his sandaled feet flat on the deck, his back and legs entirely unsupported. In higher gravity he'd have broken his spine. Or perhaps not—he seemed so often to be made of rubber, of bean curd, a life-sized but boneless doll from some anatomy classroom somewhere.
He smiled at her in a very human way, though, and said, “We should be in Holders Fastness in about fifteen hours, I think.”
“You're much calmer now,” Malye said.
Viktor, who was sitting crosslegged beside her, nodded. “Yeah. You know, I've worked on emergency life support controllers that changed operating states slower than you people. Hot, cold, pressure up, pressure down... What exactly is your problem?”
“We are not in need of repair,” Plate said, with guarded amusement.
Malye cleared her throat, summoning her Investigator's voice, her I'm-on-your-side-so-why-don't-you-let-me-help-you voice. “Tell me about Holders Fastness.”
“It orbits close to Small White, the star you call Bee.”
“Holders Fastness is one of the Thousand Lesser Worlds?” Viktor asked.
Plate nodded. “Yes, almost certainly, although I couldn't tell you which one. I don't think any among us could; our knowledge of your time is very patchy and imprecise. Many of the old worlds have shattered, anyway; Holders Fastness may simply be one of the fragments. Its shape is very irregular.”
“Irregular like a hat? Like this?” Viktor said, sketching out a three-dimensional shape with his hands.
“No.”
“Like a bird's wing?” He made another shape. “Two hundred kilometers long? Tumbling end-over-end once every six minutes?”
Plate squinted his copper eyes for a moment, then nodded. “Yes, like that. You have familiarity with it?”
“It's called Artya. There's—there was—a lot of heavy industry there.”
“What I wanted to know—” Malye cut in... but immediately she had to turn away and shout: “Children, stop it!”
Vadim had invented some sort of game which involved hurling his sister up to bounce among the crazy planes and angles of the ceiling. She was attempting to sing a song Malye couldn't quite make out, her voice shrieking with delight. She held her robe down fastidiously against her knees as she flew, but she wasn't looking down, and Konstant sat by the two of them, speaking in low, urgent tones to Sasha and Nikolai, and Elle's second landing had very nearly been on top of their heads. Konstant glared now in Malye's direction, as did Vadim. How dare you interrupt me, mother, his eight-year-old eyes said.
Though she threatened punishment, in truth it warmed Malye to see the children behaving so outrageously. They clearly missed their father desperately, and were frightened and horrified by all that had happened to them since his death, but they simply couldn't sustain their grief for more than a few hours at a time. They still had childhood energy that needed burning, one way or another.
“Be good,” she warned, though, for propriety's sake, and after a moment Vadim dropped his eyes. One such warning should suffice; Malye's punishments tended toward the severe, sudden twists and holds that, while not immediately painful, could become so without effort and therefore encouraged instant obedience. And Vadim would especially hate to be so treated in front of strangers—there was a lot of dignity bound up in that small body. Indeed, he seemed prouder and more defiant with each passing year, so that it was not difficult to imagine the day when he would simply stare his mother down and go on about his business, when he would slip away from her punishing hands, when he would begin to conceive revenges and punishments of his own...
It was Grigory's chin he thrust out at those moments, but the eyes were purely Andrei Brakanov's. Do you hear the colors, Vadim? Oh Ialah. But for the moment, thankfully, he was still very much in her power.
She turned back to Plate once more. “I wanted to know why you were so anxious before, when you rounded us up. This Holders ring, it's a group that holds power over you, over Finders ring and over Wende herself, correct?”
“Not power, no. Influence, obligation; the word is 'giri' in Teigo, the language of the Suzerainty. Please understand, madam, that without the efforts of Holders ring, there would be no Gate colony at all. By contrast, we have done very little for the common good, and so we are deeply in their debt. Everyone is deeply in their debt.”
“Including us,” Malye said. “So when they call, we must come running.”
Wedged in the corner as he was, Plate couldn't nod, but he grunted his acknowledgment instead. “That is essentially correct. They expressed a concern that we were withholding information, or that you were. They feared knowledge existed which was not being shared. The accusation, which probably came originally from Talkers ring, is untrue and unfair. By presenting you and your fellows in person for a full accounting, Wende hopes to demonstrate our contributive nature and to allay any further suspicion.”
“And with all possible haste,” Malye observed. “Why is that, Plate? What exactly will they do?”
Plate shrugged, which caused him to slide a few centimeters down the wall. “I don't know what to tell you. Talkers ring is spreading rumors, to draw attention away from their unauthorized communications with the Suzerainty. The Waisters will be here in ninety hours, and everyone is working to secret agendas. Everyone but us.”
“How very noble.” Viktor said, sniffing with amusement.
It struck Malye, how very un-doomed everyone was acting—even she herself. Could it be that on some level, they all really did have some kind of backhanded faith in the Gateans? Or were they simply weary of their fear, simply taking a rest from it while stuck on this ferry?
Even as she thought this, she saw Konstant getting angrily to his feet, leveling a finger at Plate.
“You,” he said. “Get your Queen, please. I need to speak with her right away.”
Plate stiffened, sliding another several centimeters down the crease between the walls. “Concerning?”
“Concerning our treatment,” Konstant flared. He turned his pointing finger toward Malye. “This woman negotiated in bad faith, without consulting the rest of us, and I must insist that Wende hear our demands.”
“Your demands,” the elderly Nikolai corrected, from over where he was sitting with Sasha. In another corner, the three women looked up.
Sighing, Plate snapped forward into a cross-legged position and settled to the floor. “Wende is occupied, and could well remain so throughout our voyage. What is your concern?”
“My concern is that we are free citizens, entitled to come and go as we please, and this woman, Malyene Andreivne, has no business dictating our fates. And neither do you, and neither does your beloved Queen.”
Before Konstant had even finished saying the words, Plate was up and moving, his feet seeming to skate in the low gravity without ever quite touching the floor. He skidded
into Konstant and stood in front of him with arms spread and waving in a fierce display.
“Do you confront?” he asked with hot clarity. “Are you a new thing, untested? Is it your desire that I call down the Drones and watch them crush you? This woman, Malyene Andreivne Kurosov'e, has made peace with Wende. If that peace does not include you, tell me now.”
To his credit, Konstant flinched only slightly and then held his ground. But his face was crimson with rage.
“Are you and the woman at peace?” Plate demanded to know, and though his build was slight and rubbery, he held himself with full confidence, as if nothing could harm him, as if he could crush Konstant with a thought.
And this, Malye reminded herself, was the peaceful member of the family.
Konstant's anger blazed out from him in crackling red waves, but after a moment's thought he turned to Malye and said, “You have them well trained, Colonel. It seems we are at your disposal.”
“Names of Ialah,” Viktor said disdainfully, “will you people just follow Malyene's lead? The Gateans respect her, and if you thought about it for a moment, you might wonder if maybe you should, too. I shudder to think where we'd all be right now if not for her. If she hadn't bullied her way into that cryo ward when—”
“Viktor,” Malyene interrupted. “shut up. Konstant is quite right; I have no authority to run your lives, nor any desire to. Plate, if you've been regarding me as some sort of leader, then stop it now. I won't stand for it. Really, I refuse to be responsible.”
Plate turned his head almost all the way around to face her, and shrugged with deep fluidity. “Madam, I'm afraid that choice has already been made. Such as you are, such as you've done, it is in our nature to accept you as a known and tested quantity. These others... if they are not yours, then they're new, and we will break them. I thought this was understood.”
“We are hers,” Viktor declared, bowing slightly to Malye. “We are definitely, definitely hers. No breaking necessary, thanks very much.”
“Damn you,” Malye said to Viktor, tasting white fear on her tongue. “You don't know me at all. You don't have any idea what you're doing.”
“On the contrary,” Viktor said, staring back at her with calm, serious eyes.
I could kill you for this, she thought fiercely, and indeed, that was the whole problem. In this time and place, all the monster's careful routines were shattered, her balancing mechanisms jammed. She wanted the power, and that frightened her more than anything else, because she had no idea what she wanted it for.
“The authorities can take your property, your freedom, your life,” her father had told her once with a laugh, “under circumstances they themselves dictate. What a fine thing it must be, eh?”
~~~
The palm chronometer was a kind of animated tattoo, ticking off the seconds and minutes of the day, or else presenting a date when tapped twice in the proper way. The refugees' dates were hopelessly confused—they'd all been frozen at different times, and clearly some of the chronometers had continued counting for a while afterward, while others had simply been randomized by the process, or by the long years that followed. Malye figured it would just be too depressing to figure out what the date actually was, but she did suggest they synchronize to a particular time of day, which activity consumed everyone's attention for the next several hours as they tried to deduce and/or remember how this rare feat was accomplished. Normally, the chronometers would synchronize automatically to broadcast standard time. Normally.
Surprisingly, it was little Elle who knew the most about the subject, having learned about it in one of her nursery classes, before the Bad Teacher had entered her life. She'd gotten a lot more practical-type instruction than Malye ever had at that age, which would have been wonderful had not the society it was practical for been so promptly destroyed.
When all the chronometers had been set, though, Plate produced food for them from somewhere in the transport's upper spaces, and they talked and ate and talked some more, until their self-declared “night” began to draw near. Moods crashed at this point, arguments flaring up with little provocation, most of them ending in tears, and Malye finally asked Plate to turn the lights down for them, declaring an early bedtime.
Surprisingly, Plate did not go back up to join his family, his “six,” but elected to remain here with the refugees, claiming he needed just as much rest as they did, and preferred to take it in their company.
“I have been charged with your care,” he explained.
~~~
Viktor found the lighting controls and reduced the three ghostly light-globes down to bright stars, nightlights for the ten of them, who lay sprawled on the floor in the easy gravity. First night here for some of them, though for him it was the second. And tomorrow the third, and the night after that, the fourth. How long would it be before he lost count? Would he live that long?
Conversation died with the lights, though the weeping and moaning grew louder. Oh, we poor refugees! They had not yet realized that the way to deal with their various tragedies was not to deal with them at all. It was a difficult concept, he supposed, and even he had broken down a time or two the night before, surging awake with screams of horror trapped in his throat. In his dreams, it was not so easy to be flip, nor was it while lying around in the dark with nine miserable people, two of them children.
Still, he was pretty damn tired, and sleep found him quickly in spite of it all. And dreams, oh yes.
~~~
“Can I look out the window?” Elle asked Plate brightly. Morning again, a time for the hurt to retreat a little.
It was usually difficult to get Elle to eat anything but fruit and soya mash, but she had eaten the Gatean food willingly enough this morning. She'd complained several times about wearing the same robe two days in a row—at some point while Malye was away on business, Elle had become fanatic on the subject of clean clothing—but even this mood was short-lived, quickly overcome by her curiosity.
“Of course,” Plate replied, imitating her tone. The better to understand her, Malye wondered?
The chamber's floor was triangular, met by six triangular walls in a confusion of right angles, three of them joining the floor at their points, the other three at their edges. Of these three walls, one held the sink and shitter, another the hatch through which they had entered. Plate walked up to the third wall, which was blank and purple and shiny-looking, and rapped on it sharply with his knuckles. This produced a muted, solid sound, as if he were rapping on stone, but an opening formed where he touched, and in a moment it had expanded to a circular hole.
Malye felt a stab of fear when she saw stars, and her heart hammered even when she realized that the transport was not decompressing, that the hole was not really a hole at all. The other refugees startled similarly, except for Elle herself, who seemed not to realize the potential danger. Perhaps her education had not been so practical after all.
But the window was secure, Malye saw: a thick, transparent plate, held firmly in place by the even thicker metal of the transport's hull. One edge of the window frame outside caught blue-white sunlight and reflected it fiercely, brightening the transport's interior.
“Where is Holders Fastness?” Elle asked, hopping excitedly to the window in the low gravity. “Can we see it?”
“I don't know,” Plate said, craning his neck inhumanly as he peered through the transparent material. “I think... well yes, there it is.” He pointed in a generally downward direction.
Elle clapped. “I see it! Momma, Vad, I see it!”
Never one to miss out on a good view, Vadim moved to join his sister at the window. And so did everyone else, crowding forward with a distinct lack of composure, their veneer of adult calm stripped away by the promise of actually seeing something. Something other than blank white chambers, or purple ones, something other than green-haired, gray-skinned people who looked like nothing human. And Holders Fastness, formerly known as the world of Artya, was something they might actually recogni
ze, something that had come forward through the years from a much earlier time, just as they themselves had done.
Malye couldn't see it clearly, didn't want to force her way through the crowd for a better view, but Viktor shoved right up to the window scanned for a moment, and then... froze.
“Wait, no,” he said. “That isn't Artya.”
“It is,” said Vere Sergeivne, craning her thick, muscled neck. “Look, you can see the Promontory Ridge running, um, down the spine of it. At least, I think it's the Promontory Ridge. The shape is not quite...”
“This planetoid had been partially melted and then re-solidified,” Plate said carefully, “at the time of the Waister infarct. We surveyed the body when Holders ring first occupied it—and by “we” I mean Finders ring, including myself—and we found no definitive signs of human habitation. This is typical of the entire system, though, and by itself means nothing.”
“Oh, Ialah,” someone groaned. It seemed the only possible comment.
And finally, Malye did push forward to the window to peer down at the object herself.
She didn't know what to look for, wasn't really sure how Artya was supposed appear, but the small world that lay at her feet was a dual-lobed body like a cucumber that had been stepped on, and notched deeply in the middle with some not-too-sharp implement. The harsh light reflecting off its day side revealed a surface that was smooth, almost shiny, and quite free of the pitting and scarring you would normally expect to see. It looked bad, not at all like any world Malye had ever heard about. It looked exactly like factory slag, like something that had been partially melted and then re-solidified.
As for signs of human habitation, the night side of the world had been striped with dotted rings of light, unwinking, the individual light sources looking alien and unnatural somehow. Too big maybe, and too dim for their size, and looking as if they did not quite touch the world's surface, but hovered motionless a slight distance above it. And they were all one color and one brightness, and they were spaced so evenly that the whole thing might pass for some quick-and-easy computer enhancement, a grid wrapped around an irregular object to highlight its features more precisely.