by Martin Tays
“Wanna go.” Ami replied. “Wanna go now.”
“You know, that’s what I like about you.” Moses looked up, smiling. “You’re both patient and articulate.” Ami nodded energetically, a disturbingly large grin on her face. Moses sighed and gave in to the inevitable. “Lights, three quarters. News and room service menu.”
The indirect lighting ramped up as two floating data windows appeared in a position where he could best see them ― in this case on either side of Ami’s head. As he stood and walked into the ‘fresher they maintained their respectful and dim-witted distance, settling in once he was there to allow him to peruse them as he relieved himself.
Or would have, had Ami not walked in halfway through, startling him and badly throwing off his aim. “You might as well give up,” she said, observing the effect, “… you can’t hit the data windows like that. I know. I’ve tried.”
“Jesus, girl, don’t you know better than to…” He paused. “Wait. You’ve tried?” Moses attempted to picture that, and was mildly disturbed that he could.
She nodded. “Long story. One involving several liters of homemade wine and a boyfriend with, um, unusual interests.”
“I don’t want to know. I really, really don’t. Now please do me a favor and ― you should pardon the phrase ― piss off.”
“Why?” Ami replied reasonably, looking down. “You’re done.”
“Because I like to shake in private — and once again, I cannot believe I am having this conversation.” He pointed imperiously at the door with his free hand.
“Sher’s right. You are funny.”
“OUT!”
☼
As they emerged onto the concourse in front of the Hotel, Moses was aware of two things: first, he was slightly less hung over than normal, and second, that he actually kind of liked it. Curious.
Ami reached out and took his hand. “You’re smiling, you know.”
He shook his head. “What?”
“I said you’re smiling.” She nudged him playfully. “I like that. You look nice when you smile.”
“Oh. Um, thanks.”
“No, really, I’m not ganking you. Hey…” Ami grabbed a passing flaxen haired pedestrian by the arm, startling her. “Tell me.” She asked, pointing over to Moses. “Don’t you think he’s cute when he smiles?” The woman looked at Ami as if she’d chosen to ignore a third eye out of politeness, then cocked an eyebrow at Moses. He shrugged with one of those uncertain half grins you tend to save for the new neighbor’s pit bull.
“Okay, sure, I guess.” She looked at Moses appraisingly. “Not a bad grin at all. Cute face. Desperately needs a shave, but nothing unsalvageable, really. All in all, you could do worse.” The pedestrian reached out and patted Ami on the arm. “And there’s the most important plus of all, dear.”
“What’s that?”
“Annoying obliviousness obviously turns him on.” She grinned a slow, lazy grin and walked on. Ami stared at her retreating back, open mouthed, while Moses whooped.
It was shaping up to be an interesting day.
☼
The shuttle port was packed, crowded with a colorful and very loud variety of people. Overhead, the Arrival and Departure signs floated serenely among the blaring and non-stop commercials for movies, groundcar rentals, nanotech clothing and everything in between. All in all it added up to a vaguely choreographed cacophony.
An image of a scantily clad girl appeared suddenly in front of Moses. “Good afternoon, Moses Dunn!” The girl said chirpily. “You have only recently arrived on Haven, and our records indicate that you have not yet secured a permanent domicile. If I could have only five minutes of your time, the Winkerman City Realty Company has many wonderful properties that would surely fit your budget…”
“Go away.” Moses growled. “No, wait. Take off all of your clothing. Thank you. That was pleasant. Now go away.” He turned to Ami, who was staring at him.
She waved vaguely in the direction of the ad. “You just made a computer generated ad… strip?”
“Yep.”
“Huh. I didn’t know you could do that.”
“There are dirty old men and women everywhere, sweets. You should try it, sometime. Makes the ads much easier to watch.” Ami rolled her eyes.
Moses grinned and took her hand, then spoke out loud. “Directory information, please. Haven Air, Orbital, Flight B-137.”With a faint chiming sound, a garish blue arrow obligingly appeared in front of them, rotating to point off toward the right. The numbers embedded in the arrow showed their flight would be departing in about an hour. Moses and Ami eeled their way through the throng.
Her friends were waiting for them in one of the Departure lounges at the eastern end of the complex. They walked into the middle of what was obviously a long running debate.
“They’re not safe!” Doug was standing in front of an artfully recumbent No, gesticulating frantically.
The chalk white boy waved his hand dismissively, looking up at his friend. “Yeah. In the long run, probably. So?”
“So!? If they’re not safe they shouldn’t be built!”
“What is safe?” He addressed the question to both Doug and Moses, who had just walked up.
“Shuttles!” Doug replied. “It’s proven technology. Beanstalks are not. Period. And you shouldn’t take risks with unproven tech. Right?” He looked over at Moses on the last, questioningly. Moses shrugged.
No replied languidly from his languid pose. “A shuttle crashed last year on Ragnarok, as I recall.”
“It was a test ship! And when it failed it didn’t take out several thousand square kilometers of populated land, like a ground to orbit elevator would. I don’t trust ‘em.” He nodded decisively to emphasize his point.
No waved his hand dismissively. “Feh.”
“I’m sorry.” Moses held his hand up, interrupting. “But did you just say ‘feh’?”
“Um… yes?” No looked at him uncertainly.
“My Grandmother used to say ‘feh’. I always wondered what it meant.”
“It means… um…” No paused to consider the matter, then shrugged, himself. “Well, it means ‘feh’, I think.”
“Oh.” Moses nodded solemnly. “Okay, thank you for clearing that up. I shall sleep tonight.”
“… ‘kay…”
Moses turned to the rest of the crowd. “Alright, then. Are we all here?” He did a quick head count. “Good. Since some of us wanted breakfast…” He looked over meaningfully at Ami, who stuck her tongue out at him. “Well, I wanted breakfast, anyway…”
“What you wanted was a bloody mary.”
“Feh. Hey! That works.” He turned to No. “Thanks. I’ll use that more often!”
“You’re welcome?”
Mattie spoke up for the first time from beside the confused No. “You like doing that, don’t you?”
Moses smiled. “I also poke badgers with spoons.”
The dark skinned girl looked at him levelly. “I have no idea what that means.”
“I’ve been getting that a lot, lately.”
Mattie cocked an eyebrow at him. In lieu of answering, though, she stood and levered No to his feet. “But you’re right. We should get going. I think they’ve just called our shuttle.”
“Damn it, I want breakfast.”
Ami patted his arm. “I’m sure we can get them to pour you some breakfast on the shuttle.”
“Now you’re just humoring me.”
She nodded, matter of factly. “Of course I am.”
“Ah. Okay, then.” He offered her his arm. “Shall we?”
She smiled. “Indeed.”
The conversation resumed once they had found their seats. The shuttle was an older model, one of the Hughes-Daimler Passagemakers, and
Ami had been vocally annoyed that she had to actually physically plug her pcomp into the datanet.
“Welcome to the sticks, sis.” Leo said from across the aisle.
“Sticks!” Ami fumed. “This is the most heavily populated planet in existence, next to Earth. I’m going to ignore you, now, because you are ignorant and you smell funny.”
Leo grinned and went back to reading.
Doug, sitting in the row behind Moses and Ami, leaned forward. “So, Noah, what do you think about building a beanstalk?”
Faintly, from the row behind him, came “Feh.”
Moses glanced behind him. “It’s Moses. Not Noah. Moses.”
“Meshach?”
“Moses.”
“Buddha?”
“All right, now you’re just doing it on purpose.” He gave in and answered the question. “Beanstalks. Okay. They’re a good idea, in principle. But I’ve got to go with the whole ‘painful if they fall down’ thing. A few hundred thousand kilometers of carbon-carbon nanofiber falling on your head could downright ruin your whole day.”
“Same as me! Hey, we agree. Farb! I think I’ll call you Moses from now on.”
“You will, or I’ll call you Pookie.” Fiona, sitting by Dougie, laughed and repeated the name with an evil grin. Doug looked at her hesitantly.
Moses leaned over to Ami, who was half-listening to the conversation, and whispered “Farb?”
“Farb.”
“Farb. Huh.” He pointed to himself. “Am I farb?”
She looked at him appraisingly and waggled her hand. “Farb-ish.”
“Cool.”
“You shouldn’t use it, though.”
“Why not?”
“You’re not that farb.” She returned to her reading.
Leo put his pcomp down and spoke. “What do you think we’ll find when we get there?”
Moses looked over. “I’m curious.” He asked in lieu of answering. “What do you want to do, Leo? I mean, what do you want to be when you grow up?”
“Grow up? That’s an interesting question.” He paused, considering, before going on. “I’m not sure what that means… I mean, are you grown up?”
Moses blinked. “Huh. Now that you mention it, no… I wouldn’t think so.”
“So I obviously have a couple of years before I have to decide, right?” He grinned.
“Fine. Okay. Um, Farb.”
He looked back at Ami, who just glanced up, shook her head at him, and went back to reading.
“Damn. She’s right.” He looked back to Ami’s brother. “So. What will we find? You mean the yard in general, or the ship?”
“What shape is she going to be in?”
Moses shook his head. “She’s over three hundred years old, Leo. I honestly think that smelting her’ll be the humane thing to do, anthropomorphically speaking. She’s old. She’s broken. She’s tired.” He paused, then smiled ruefully. “I can understand that, a little.” He glanced back over at the boy. “You know that there can’t be anything on board, anymore, that works.”
Leo shut his eyes and looked away. Moses barely heard his answer to his earlier question. “An engineer.”
“Huh. Okay, that’s one I didn’t expect. Why?”
“I… I like machines.” He gestured vaguely with his pcomp, then looked down at it. “Machines make sense. I understand them. I know why they do what they do, and when they don’t, I know why they don’t.”
“You’ve obviously never owned a Ferrari.”
Ami looked up from her reading. “Leo’s always been that way. His best friend back when we were kids was a bear. A little, goofy, automated bear… one of those things that gullible parents think’ll keep their kids safe.”
“Freddy.” Leo interjected.
“Freddy the bear.” She nodded. “Japanese. Had this weird little high pitched sing-song voice… like a cantor on helium. It was kind of creepy, really. He kept taking it apart. You’d walk in and there’d be these, these… bear parts, all over the rug.”
“You were just jealous of our special relationship.”
Ami snorted. “Oh, yeah. You just keep telling yourself that.”
Moses looked back over to the red headed boy, questioningly. “Freddy?”
“Our Mom named him, actually.” He grinned in spite of himself. “I wanted to call him Gornox, Master Of The Infinite Multiverse.”
“O… kay. This is the point where I ask why. Why?”
“It was from a 3V show. It was real big for a while there. Gornox was the hero.”
“I guess it’s official, then. They’ve run out of good ideas.”
“Hey. I liked Gornox. ‘Join Gornox ― there’s a multiverse just waiting to be saved!’” Beside Moses, Ami repeated the words along with Leo, but with a somewhat more derisive tone of voice.
Moses put a hand over Ami’s, then turned back to her brother. “Gornox. Fair enough. I once ate twenty boxes of Quisp so I could send off for a Speed Racer toy, so I have no room to argue. The sugar rush lasted for a month, solid, if I recall correctly.” He looked down at Leo’s pcomp, then back up to his face. “So. Machines.”
“Yeah. Machines. They just make so much more sense than people.”
“Okay, yeah, guess you got a point. Possibly even a good one.” He paused, then smiled to himself. “But there’s one thing you’ve got to admit about them.”
“What’s that?”
Moses looked over at Ami, immersed in her reading, and looked back at Leo.
“They’ll never surprise you.”
☼
They transshipped at the main orbital station for Romulus, the larger of Haven’s three moons ― the other two being Remus and, for some unknown reason, Bob. Romulus ran about half the size and a third the mass of Earth’s moon, Luna, and was almost totally industrialized. It provided much of the processed goods for Haven’s populace.
Moses led his troupe at a gliding lope down the central corridor of the moon’s main settlement, the unremarkably named Station City.
“Wait up!” Moses grabbed a conveniently placed rail and skidded to a halt. He looked back just in time to not be able to duck out of Sher’s way. She collided with him full force, rebounded up to the top of the corridor and bounced. Moses lost his grip and tumbled off ass over teakettle down the hallway.
“Tourists.” A passing tech snorted, expertly avoiding the flailing pair on his way through.
“Oh, yeah?” Doug shouted at the retreating worker. “Well… well, bite on me!”
Mattie pushed off and fielded Sherry as she passed, using the transferred momentum to bring them both back down to the floor. She handed Sher to Leo with a wry “Here… I think you dropped this.”
“Hey!” Said ‘this’, a bit huffily. She patted her boyfriend absently on the chest and stretched her legs down to let her grippies get hold of the floor. She regarded it uneasily. “I hate low gravity.”
Moses, who had rejoined them by this time, said “Are you okay?” After she nodded, he continued. “Next time, do you mind if we just mail you?”
“Do you promise to poke air holes in the box?” She asked ruefully.
“Of course. We’re not inhumane, you know.”
“Well.” Sher nodded. “Fine, then.”
Moses turned to Doug, smacking him on the arm. “And it’s ‘bite me’. No ‘on’. Adding 'on' makes it... disturbing. But nice comeback, anyway.”
“Ow.” Doug replied, rubbing his arm.
Ignoring him, Moses looked around at the group that had more or less stopped bobbing like fishing corks. “Alright. Obviously, we’re here. Is it even worth my time to ask you all to be on your best behavior?”
Doug was already shaking his head. “Bad news, guy.”
Moses sighed. “I was afraid of that.”
They spoke together. “This is our best behavior.”
Ami grinned. “What if we just promise to try to avoid acting any more like ourselves than we reasonably can?”
“Pardon me for a moment while I attempt to parse that remarkable question.” Moses looked off for a moment, then nodded. “Okay. All I can reasonably ask for, I suppose.”
☼
Technologies Prioritization’s center on Romulus was the Department’s only permanently manned facility. The complex stretched across a trapezoidal area constituting thousands of acres of desolate airless moon. The control room sat at the point of the skewed square closest to Station City.
Inside was notable for the distinct lack of hive-like activity.
There was assorted… stuff, piled on every available surface. Most of it hadn’t seen a functioning starship in years. Or a cleaning rag, for that matter.
Moses motioned for the group to stay, then worked his way through the piles to a door on the far end. He vanished through it. There was a moment of silence, then a huge crashing metallic roar that seemed to go on forever, followed by the obligatory hubcap-skittery sound of one last piece of metal slowing down to a halt.
Another, pregnant, moment of silence followed. Then everyone bolted for the door. Ami beat them all by a good length and a half and jerked it open.
“I’m oh-kay.” The voice of Moses, muffled, came from under a pile of assorted spaceship detritus. An arm and one leg was visible, the hand making a ‘thumbs up’ gesture. There was an o-ring and what appeared to be a pair of emergency underwear around the thumb.
As Ami bounced over to try to extricate him she noticed a small and scrawny looking man perched on a stool in the far corner. He was sitting frozen, a sandwich halfway to his open mouth. She decided to ignore him, for the moment, and went to work on digging out Moses.
By now the rest of the group had come into the room. They pitched in and started flinging the assorted debris in every direction. In the 12% standard gravity this was probably a tactical mistake, as the parts, bags and boxes began bouncing around the room, starting cascading reactions that soon had everybody fleeing for cover.