by Isaac Asimov
A row of biomonitors stretched the length of the deck visible to him, one behind each of the eighty-odd people lined up. Their readouts and readylights did little to lessen the dimness. Lights high overhead cast too little illumination to see much more than shadows.
A hatch opened in the distance and bootsteps echoed. Masid finished the meal and set the tray down. His limbs felt heavy, as though he had been doing hard labor for too many hours. He doubted he could hold his own in a fight just then.
Three uniformed men appeared, striding purposefully down the length of the row of baleys. As they passed each recumbent figure, the lead officer pointed and the officer behind and to his left made a note on a palm monitor. At the end of the line, they turned around and walked back. After they left, a short time went by. Then four people in dark blue work-togs came with a train of gurneys. They gathered up the baleys who still stretched on the deck and placed each in a gurney.
Masid counted fifteen and guessed that they had been the oldest and frailest. Judging by his own reactions, the sedative they had been given was designed to place a burden on the body and sort the baleys out by physical condition.
The collection squad gone, a few people began tentatively talking. The babble was half-hearted and faded out within a few minutes. Masid’s own thoughts seemed sluggish, though he recognized what was happening. The only thing to do was wait.
His eyes slitted. The silence seemed to be slipping into his brain. Just as his head lolled forward, chin to chest, he came awake to the sound of more people striding into the bay.
“Sorry to keep you all waiting,” a sharp, authoritative voiced announced.
Masid looked up at the tall Terran officer who now addressed them.
“You’ll be on your way soon,” he said. “We’ll be returning your clothes and belongings and moving you to the final stage. This time tomorrow you should be on the ground. After that, you’re on your own. We have fulfilled our contract with you.”
He paused, letting everyone think about that for a time. Then, hands clasped behind his back, he said, “A few details about your new home. Nova Levis is under quarantine. The blockade has tightened. You will not be able to leave unless the political situation changes. We can no longer get messages out for you. After you ground tomorrow, Nova Levis is your new home, your only home. You will be cut off from the rest of settled space.
“It is only fair to warn you that this also means there is no chance of appeal to higher authority than the planetary government. More than likely, even that is out of reach. You will be dealing with local authorities in nearly all instances. If things go wrong, you cannot call for help off Nova Levis. Spacers won’t help you, the Settler’s Coalition is cut off from you, and Earth, frankly, could care less if you have a problem here. This is a whole new way to live, even though some of you may feel you’ve just escaped a limited, repressive environment. Maybe you have. But it was completely different and you may come to regret your decision to emigrate.”
Dismayed mutterings rippled along the row.
“That said,” the officer went on, “the flip side is that you have a world with very little to obstruct an enterprising imagination or an assertive will. Opportunity on Nova Levis is pretty much whatever you can make it. You probably heard something like this back where you came from, which is why you’re here now. This is as frontier as you get. The only caveat is, it will be damn hard work and you might suffer unfairly or even fatally in the attempt to realize your dreams.”
The officer walked up and down the line of baleys, gazing at them with an expression Masid could not identify—a mix of respect, contempt, and puzzlement. He stopped almost directly in front of Masid.
“That said,” he announced, “welcome to Nova Levis. I hope you like it. You’ll be loading up for your final descent in one hour.”
A few people laughed in shocked delight. Others sobbed, whether from fear or relief Masid could not tell.
Anxiety, extended long enough, can put you to sleep, though never a restful sleep. The hour became two and then stretched out for three. Masid started awake twice at new sounds and finally, tentatively, got to his feet. His legs felt infirm at first. He flexed up onto his toes rhythmically, tugging at the muscles and tendons, dropped into quick squats, and then lifted each leg alternately, bringing the knees up to his chest. He avoided anything that might look like a martial exercise, just kept to simple homeogenics to recover control over his limbs. After a time he began to feel warmer, looser, more as he should.
Well into the fourth hour they came, dropping bundles before each baley. Masid dropped to the floor and waited. When his clothes and pack came, he snatched them to him. Others were dressing and no one interfered, so he quickly untied the bundle and pulled on his clothes.
Next assignment, he thought, I want somewhere warmer.
“Come on!” one of the soldiers snapped. “Get your belongings together, get dressed, we’ve got a window!”
Masid opened his pack and did a quick inspection. It had been gone through, of course—items were no longer quite where he had put them—but nothing seemed to be missing. He sealed it up and slung it over his shoulders.
He wanted a weapon. He glanced enviously at the sidearms the soldiers wore.
“Stay close, single file,” another soldier shouted. “Face right, no talking!”
Masid turned just as the line began to move.
Everything was kept dark. They passed through a narrow passage Masid identified as a conduit for automatic maintenance drones. It seemed interminable.
Finally, he emerged into an oddly-shaped space where the baleys clumped up, out of line. No one spoke. The crowd thinned gradually. Masid got the sense of a huge bulkhead curving in at them, just over their heads. Dense metallic odors permeated the chill air.
Then he was being ushered into an access tube and he realized that they had come out alongside a transport ship of some kind in a loading bay. He scurried up the tube where a waiting soldier grabbed his arm and escorted him through a passage, into a circular chamber with about twenty other baleys.
“Sit,” the soldier ordered, pushing Masid to the deck.
He came up against thick padding. The soldier knelt quickly and began strapping Masid to the bulkhead with padded restraints.
Deftly, so quickly the thought to act never quite became conscious, Masid reached out and palmed the soldier’s sidearm. He tucked it into a leg pouch.
“Five minutes,” the soldier announced, standing, “a little more maybe, you’re on your way. We’ve got you going down in four of these. When you ground, leave the ships by the same access as fast as you can. There will be someone groundside to talk you through the port and to your new lives. Luck.”
And he was gone.
Masid’s heart pounded. He expected troops any second, barging in to search for the missing weapon. It felt heavy against his leg.
When the ship lurched forward, he almost shouted.
No one in the dark hold spoke; everyone paid attention only to the sounds of the ship moving on its cradle, toward the bay doors.
A huge roar filled his ears as g-force slammed against him. The ship bolted from its dock. Almost immediately the engines cut off and Masid’s stomach seemed to buoy up within him, crowding his heart and lungs. He coughed, nearly vomited. He had been through this before, but not so violently.
It’s a drone . . .
They were falling toward Nova Levis pilotless, he knew then, packed into a cargo drone. It made perfect sense, of course, being shipped down with so-called humane relief goods. All around them, therefore, were pharmaceuticals or special foodstuffs or environmental malleables—items excluded from the lists of banned goods kept out by the blockade because to exclude them was considered fundamentally inhumane.
Or—the thought followed fast—it was all contraband, as were they.
If we ground safely we’ll never know what we’ve been packed in with . . . if something goes wrong, we might know right before we
die . . .
Masid closed his eyes then and curled his fingers into fists.
“Shit,” he breathed.
He tried to remember the relationships of the various blockade elements to the planet. There was a wide net at the half billion kilometer radius which policed the entire system, but then there was a series of inner nets closer to Nova Levis itself. He had no way of knowing which station they had just launched from. It made a difference between several days’ trajectory and a few hours.
One initial thrust, he thought desperately, now freefall. They couldn’t do that from the outer line, has to be one of the inner stations, not enough air in a drone, these restraints are for short haul . . . unless they never intended us to reach Nova Levis alive, but then why not kill us on the station where they can harvest organs or . . .
The drone shuddered. The body of the ship creaked and popped and he recognized the telltale of fast cooling. They were being shot at—blasters, maybe particle beams, microwaves possibly, but—
Another strike, a heavier shudder. A loud crack echoed through the chamber.
People began weeping loudly. The stress finally overwhelmed them.
Masid bit his lip.
G-force pressed against him again. The drone itself had responded and changed delta-v.
Freefall again.
Masid groped for his pack. In the dark he fumbled for one of the hidden compartments, hoping that, indeed, everything had been left alone. He found it and rubbed his fingertips against the seam. His skin oil triggered the fabric and the seam parted and he yanked out the breather mask. He adjusted it against his face quickly, drew three deep, quick breaths to activate it, and resealed his pack.
Another blaster strike rocked the ship.
Minutes later he felt a different kind of jarring. The drone kissed upper atmosphere, skipped, then plunged into air.
A faint whistling built into a ragged screaming. The hull had been breached, though their compartment still held atmosphere. The ship rattled and vibrated. The cries of his fellow baleys combined with the roar of descent and superheated air beyond their small chamber into a Faustian protest, becoming one din.
The impact came almost as a welcome relief, bringing a sudden change from screaming to tearing and a thunderous grinding—
Light flooded the compartment as the torn hull opened above them. Dirt and rock poured through the hole. Masid covered his head with his pack as earth rained down on him.
He pushed his way through the layer of loam. Around him, in the half-buried chamber, he saw dead baleys. Suffocated, most of them, though a few had taken fatal blows from rock. One or two moved, half-conscious.
Hanging onto his pack, Masid managed to get himself out of the dirt. The sky visible through the ripped hull was a flat, lifeless gray.
He could reach it with a small jump. He pulled himself up through the hole, brought up a leg to prop himself back against the sheared edge. From here he could see most of the immediate landscape.
Trailing behind the drone lay an open wound in the terrain, the path of the drone. Masid sighed heavily. At least they had come in at some kind of a landing vector instead of nose down straight into the lithosphere. The landing scar was rimmed by broken trees and mounded black soil. Stretching away on either side spread a landscape dotted with low, broad-penumbral trees, most of them lacking anything that resembled a leaf.
Masid shifted position and looked forward.
A city rose in the distance. He estimated three, four kilometers away.
He dropped back into the chamber and made for the hatch. He hesitated at the sound of moaning but did not look back. His impulse was to help, but he knew he had no time and he did not believe—especially now—that freedom was an option for the baleys arriving here.
The hatch opened and dirt spilled out into the corridor, carrying him with it. He scrambled out of the flow and hurried along the passage to the next hatch.
Within, he found another storeroom, this one filled with nacelles. A pungent, alcohol-and-cotton smell permeated the chamber. He began unsealing the nacelles.
Pharmaceuticals.
The light was bad. He groped in his pack for a light.
Within a few minutes he had identified and stored several packets of antibiotics, antivirals, and antifungals in his pack. He resealed what he could, then scrambled from the drone.
The sound of ground-effect rotors rumbled rhythmically. The owners were coming to salvage their property.
Masid bolted for the trees, kept running, and did not look back.
Chapter 7
ARIEL WALKED THROUGH the vacant apartment one last time, certain she was forgetting something. The furniture already wore the protective layering that would clean it, refresh it, and keep it till the next occupant took over the rooms. The grayish lumps suggested the trappings of a life till now based here, but they lacked all human familiarity.
She stopped at the kitchen for the third time and realized that R. Jennie was absent. She had been looking for the robot, even though she knew Jennie had been packed up and forwarded to the station for transfer to Kopernik, and then to the liner that would take them both home.
Identifying the uncomfortable nagging at the back of her mind, Ariel set it aside and left. The door snicked shut behind her, the access code now changed, locking her out.
Her luggage was already on its way—Hofton had seen to that hours ago. She had made the rounds, saying good-bye to what staff remained in the embassy that meant anything to her. A few new faces watched her with mild curiosity, but what greeted her mostly were empty offices, vacated stations. The mission was in trouble and people were abandoning it or being sent home. When Ariel left there would only be Setaris with ambassadorial rank. She tried not to care.
The Spacer Embassy seemed immense with so few people. Fully-staffed, there had been a closeness to it, like a village, but now it simply sprawled. A couple centuries ago, she knew, Spacers had left Earth, exiled by terrified and intolerant Terrans. Then they had occupied an actual city, Spacetown, built on the very surface soil of the planet. It had been the only spaceport on Earth then, the only access Terrans had to the stars, before they once again ventured out into space in the full flood of the Settler Movement. She wondered if it had looked the same as Aurorans and Theians and Keresians and Ptolemaics packed up and left them.
Spacetown remained, even to this day, a museum mostly. Ariel had never visited it, uninterested until today in that first failed attempt at bridging the gulf between Spacer and Terran. She wondered now why it had happened, how Spacers had become so estranged in the first place. Spacer settlement had happened—begun and ended in less than two generations—so long ago that to Terrans it was a period more mythic than real. Many Terrans still had difficulty making the connection that once Spacers had been like them, short-lived, from Earth, before it had built a blanket and covered itself over in fear of the stars and the sky and the possibility of expansion. Maybe they had been afraid everyone would leave Earth, empty it out with insufficient population to keep it running as a viable home for human beings.
Now the Spacers were leaving again, being pushed off, and for the first time Ariel wondered just what had happened so long ago . . .
Hofton waited in the lobby, alone.
“Ambassador Burgess,” he said, bowing slightly.
“Hofton. Is everything ready?”
“Everything that can be.” He gestured toward the doors. “I have a limousine waiting.”
Ariel felt a moment of tension wrap around her chest as she walked out of the embassy. She took several deep breaths; her thighs and upper arms tingled as she entered the limo. Hofton climbed in beside her. The near-vertigo faded, unrealized, as the transport pulled away.
“Derec?” she asked.
“He’ll be boarding within a few hours. I’ve cleared a direct shuttle for you, bypassing Kopernik altogether. Your personal items have already shipped up.”
“I nearly forgot. Derec wanted me to ask you
to try to get Rana’s visa—”
“I already took care of that. Some time ago, in fact. Ms. Duvan left for Aurora nearly eight days ago.”
“Oh. Very good, Hofton.” Ariel frowned. If Rana had already departed, why would Derec have asked about her visa? She shrugged. It had probably slipped his mind. Considering the pressure he was under—they were all under—he’d probably immersed himself in work and missed Rana’s departure.
They rode on in silence for a time. As Union Station came into view at the end of the long thoroughfare that connected it to the ancient Mall District, Ariel reached across the seat and grasped Hofton’s hand, not looking at him. He tensed but did not pull away.
“You’re wonderful, Hofton. I’ll miss you.”
She glanced over and saw him reddening, his eyes resolutely forward. Finally, as the limo pulled onto the apron of the passenger entrance, he nodded once, slowly, and said, “I have tried to earn your respect. You’re one of the few people I’ve known whose respect I craved. Thank you.”
Then he was out of the limousine, waiting for her.
When they entered Union Station, Ariel stopped. A huge crowd filled the cavernous expanse, all being held back by a police line. She recognized the angry, almost hateful timbre of the mob, bubbling with barely-restrained resentment.
“Hofton.”
“I had no idea,” he said. “I’ve already cleared you through Customs.”
“We don’t run, Hofton. No matter what, we don’t run.”
“Walking a bit faster than usual would not be a bad idea, though.”
“Agreed.”
She took the van by a pace and walked along the concourse provided by the police line. Halfway down its length, she looked over at the throng.
No one seemed to be paying her any attention. She slowed.
“Ariel—” Hofton urged.
“No, wait.”
Then she saw a couple of banners.
FLESH NOT STEEL, FAITH NOT TREASON
ABOLISH IMMUNITY FOR TRAITORS