Sex and Violence in Zero-G

by Allen Steele

  “Later,” his father said impatiently, giving him a stern look. “Right now, I want you to take Mr. Cole’s bag to his compartment, then escort him up to the bridge. I’ll call Kaneko down here and have him put away his suit.” Young Bill solemnly nodded his head. Clearly there was no arguing with his old man…and judging from the expression on William Smith-Tate’s face, I would not have liked to be Kaneko, whoever he was, when he answered to the chief engineer’s wrath.

  The teenager silently reached around me to grab the strap of my duffle bag from my shoulder, then he executed a perfect midair somersault and, with youthful grace which looked almost effortless, swam back toward the compartment hatch, hauling my bag behind him. I looked around again to thank William Smith-Tate, but he had already turned away, pushing shut the airlock hatch and spinning the lockwheel to dog it shut. He bent to the round window next to the hatch and gave a short wave to the shuttle pilot, then he pressed his right hand against his jaw and murmured something unintelligible. For a moment I thought that he was grumbling to himself, until I realized that he was talking to someone elsewhere in the ship, using the nanomike surgically implanted beneath his skin.

  There was another soft thud as the shuttle disengaged from the ship’s docking collar; through the window, I could see the navigation beacons of the smaller vessel as it silently moved away. Now there was truly no turning back: for better or for worse, I was aboard the Medici Explorer for keeps.

  The distraction caused me to fall behind Young Bill, and he didn’t wait for me. I hastened to catch up with him, grabbing at rungs in the ceiling to haul myself through the adjacent compartment. The narrow bulkheads were lined with recessed lockers—each stenciled with the name of one of the ship’s ten crewmembers—and racks containing hardsuit helmets, utility belts, and miscellaneous spare suit parts. The EVA ready-room, like the airlock, is quite utilitarian, although very clean and dust-free; the discipline necessary for space travel mandates that nothing be left out of place.

  Almost nothing. The sole exception was one half-open locker, with the legs and one sleeve of an empty hardsuit sticking out. I was surprised to see that it is quite small.

  Young Bill had stopped to wait for me on the other side of the ready-room. He floated in an open vertical shaft, one hand gripping the top rung of a ladder, the other holding the strap of my duffel bag over his shoulder; he had taken the trouble to make himself right-side up. “I really mean it,” he began as he pushed himself down the shaft, “I loved Rain Forest Diary…it was really lollapalooza…I almost had a cardiac when the Captain told me that the dude who wrote it was coming with us…maybe you can tell me some more, y’know, about the Brazilian indians and the…”

  So on and so forth, barely pausing for breath, as we dropped down the hub’s access shaft to the carousel which connects the hub to the ship’s three arms. Since the arms were not presently rotating, we didn’t need to make the tricky maneuver of reorienting ourselves until the appropriate hatchway swung past us. The carousel’s hatches were aligned with their appropriate arms, so all we had to do was squirm through the upward-bending corridor—passing the sealed tiger-striped hatch which led to the reactor stack in Arm Three—until we reached the open hatch marked Arm 1.

  The arm’s central shaft resembled a deep well, fifteen meters straight down to the bottom. Although I consciously knew that I couldn’t fall into zero-gee, I instinctively rebelled at the thought of throwing myself into a neck-breaking plummet. While I paused at the edge of the hatch, still visually disoriented by the distance, Young Bill dove headfirst through the hatch, scarcely grabbing the rungs of the ladder which led down the blue-carpeted wall of the shaft. I shut my eyes for a moment, fighting a surge of nausea, then I eased myself feet-first into the shaft, carefully taking each rung a step at a time.

  There are six levels in Arm One, each accessed by the long ladder. Still babbling happily about rain forests and South American Indian tribes, Young Bill led me past Level 1-A (the infirmary and life sciences lab) Level 1-B (the Smith-Tate residence), Level 1-C (Smith-Makepeace) and Level 1-D (Smith-Tanaka). The hatches to each deck were shut, but as we glided past Level 1-D, its hatch opened and a preadolescent boy recklessly rushed out into the shaft and almost collided with Young Bill.

  “Whoa there!” Young Bill gently grabbed the child by his shoulders, braking him before he could slam into either one of us. “Watch yourself, okay?”

  “Sorry.” The youngster reached out and took hold of a rung of the ladder, righting himself in midair. Judging from his apparent age, he was Kaneko Smith-Tanaka, the youngest member of the crew: four years old, going on five. Like Young Bill, he was taller and more slender than other children his age: the elfin physiology of the space-born.

  His oriental face was very determined. “I need to get up to 2-H ’cause Uncle Bill is mad at me because I…”

  “Didn’t put your suit away like you were supposed to.” Young Bill, still holding onto Kaneko’s shoulders, stared straight into the boy’s eyes. “And I’m the one who noticed, not Uncle Bill. Aren’t you a little too old to be doing this sort of thing?”

  Kaneko looked embarrassed; his gaze moved down toward his moccasined toes, dangling five meters above the bottom of the access shaft. Like his older “brother,” Kaneko thought no more of freefall than a child on Earth considers a flight of stairs; zero-gee was simply a fact of life, nothing more nor less. “And if you don’t put your suit away,” Young Bill added, “who will, hmm? Me? Somebody else?”

  “Maybe…” Kaneko began haltingly, then his face suddenly brightened. “Maybe Ditz can do it!”

  “Ditz…?” Young Bill glanced away from Kaneko, peering through the open hatch of the Smith-Tanaka quarters. “Aw, jeez…Ditz, are you in there?”

  There was a mechanical scuttling sound from within the hatch, then a tinny electronic voice announced itself: “Ditz here! Ditz here!”

  A small robot, resembling a hermit crab but slightly larger than a housecat, scurried into sight, secured to the deck by the stick pads at the ends of its six tiny legs. A discarded plastic squeezebulb was held between its pincers. “Look what Ditz found!” it said proudly. “Good trash! See? See?”

  Kaneko giggled with childish delight. Young Bill sighed. “That’s very good, Ditz,” he told the ’bot. “Now go put it in the recycle chute and continue cleaning this arm, please.”

  Ditz went chattering away, proudly clutching the prized squeezebulb, and Young Bill looked again at his clan-brother. “Kaneko, Ditz isn’t a pet. It’s an AI…you can’t keep it in your room all the time. And it’s too small to put away your hardsuit for you. That’s your responsibility. Understand?”

  The child solemnly nodded his head, looking down at his feet again. “Okay then,” Young Bill said. “Now go up there and put away your suit before Uncle Bill gets mad, then get yourself to the bridge. We’re getting close to launch.”

  Kaneko Smith-Tanaka silently pushed off from the ladder, gliding past Young Bill and me; he barely glanced in my direction, apparently incurious about who I was or why I was in his home. Young Bill was about to shut the hatch to the Tanaka deck when Ditz reappeared.

  “Kaneko, wait for Ditz!” it squealed as it hastily clambered around the hatchway and began crawling up the ladder. Kaneko stopped, his smile appearing as the tiny robot raced to catch up with hint; together, the boy and his adopted playmate headed up the shaft.

  “Wouldn’t a cat be more appropriate?” I whispered as we watched them leave the arm through the carousel hatch.

  Young Bill shook his head. “Naw…cats can’t handle freefall. We used to have one when we lived on the Moon, but Dad wouldn’t let us bring it aboard the ship. He says the fur gets into everything.” Young Bill shut the hatch, then led me down one more level to Deck 1-E, the passenger quarters. “At least he isn’t playing with Swamp anymore. That’s the galley AI…things used to get messy when they’d play in the sink together.”

  He opened the hatch to Deck 1-E and pulled himse
lf inside, hauling my duffel bag behind him. The deck is divided into four passenger staterooms, along with a common bathroom; not surprisingly, it was marked Head, retaining the old nautical term. The small compartment Bill led me to had its own foldaway bed, desk, data terminal and screen, along with a wide square window through which I could see the Moon.

  “Don’t bother making yourself at home,” he said as he stowed my duffel bag in a closet. “After we launch, you won’t see this place again for nine months.”

  I nodded. “The other passengers…they’re already in hibernation?”

  “Yep. I helped Uncle Yoshi dope ’em up a few hours ago. They zombified already. You’ll be joining them after we…”

  He stopped abruptly in mid-sentence, listening to something through his comlink, then he pressed the right side of his jaw. “I’ve got him here with me, Uncle Geoff. We’re coming right now…yeah, okay. Be there in a minute.”

  Young Bill shut the closet door and pushed past me toward the compartment door. “That was my uncle. We’re wanted on the bridge. Captain’s initiated the final countdown…we’re out of here in thirty minutes.”

  I took one last look at my quarters, then turned around to exit the compartment. Bill had already left the passenger deck and was climbing the ladder up the shaft toward the hub, leaving me to close the deck hatch myself. One fact was already being made abundantly clear to me; aboard the Medici Explorer, everyone was expected to pull their own weight. No excuses were accepted—not for youth, nor for unfamiliarity with the ship.

  The Medici Explorer’s command center is shaped like the inside of a Chinese wok. Located on the top deck of the hub, Deck H-1 is the largest single compartment in the vessel: about fifteen meters in diameter, the bridge has a sloping, dome-shaped ceiling above a shallow, tiered pit. Two observation blisters, each containing an optical telescope, are mounted in the ceiling at opposite ends of the pit; between them are myriad computer flatscreens and holographic displays, positioned above the duty stations arranged around the circumference of the pit. In the center of the bridge, at the bottom of the pit between and slightly below the duty stations, is the captain’s station, a wingback chair surrounded by wraparound consoles. On one side of the bridge is the hatch leading to the hub’s access tunnel; on the opposite side is a small alcove, a rest area furnished with three chairs and a small galley.

  It may sound claustrophobic and technocratic, but the bridge is actually quite spacious and comfortable. The floors are carpeted, allowing one to comfortably walk on them provided that you’re wearing stikshoes, and the holoscreens provide a variety of scenes from outboard cameras as well as the main telescope, giving the illusion of cathedral windows looking out upon the grand cosmos.

  But now, in the last few minutes before departure from near-Earth space, the command center was indeed crowded; the entire Smith clan, along with the captain, was gathered in the bridge, making ready to commence the journey. After Young Bill and I paused in the foyer to slip on stikshoes, he led me into the bridge and quickly introduced me to his family. No one had a chance to do much more than smile and give me a polite, hurried greeting; everyone was absorbed in their last-minute tasks.

  Seated at the navigation console was Elizabeth Smith-Makepeace, a thin young woman in her mid-thirties; she barely glanced away from her console, not distracting herself from entering triaxial coordinates into her computer terminal as she intently watched several flatscreens which showed the ship’s outbound trajectory. At the communications station next to her was her first-husband, Geoffrey Smith-Makepeace, a tall, gaunt man with a lantern jaw; he, too, was concentrating wholly upon his job, talking to traffic controllers on Earth and the Moon while relaying pertinent information to the captain.

  On the opposite side of the bridge, seated on either side of the passenger alcove, were William Smith-Tate—he gave me a brief stare before returning his attention to his checklist of the engineering station—and Leslie Smith-Tanaka, a very attractive woman with grey-streaked brown hair. The life-support chief flashed me a dazzling smile as I walk past; her troublesome son Kaneko stood next to her, watching over her shoulder as his mother ran through her own checklist.

  Seated next to Leslie was Lynn Smith-Tate, a muscular woman with a perpetual scowl which almost matched her first-husband’s; as hydroponics chief, she was also absorbed with making sure that the life-support systems are functioning properly, particularly the hydroponics decks in Arm Two. It was difficult to imagine that such an easy-going teenager as Young Bill could be the offspring of such stoical parents. The only relaxed crewmember seemed to be Yoshio Smith-Tanaka, the ship’s physician, a short, rotund Japanese man with gray hair and an eternally calm disposition. He stood next to the captain’s chair while silently watching everything going on around him.

  And then there was Saul Montrose, the captain himself. The only crewmember who wasn’t part of the Smith extended family, he was tall and rail-thin, a trim black beard easing the taut jaw line of his dark face. Not much else of his face could be seen; his head was incased in a VR helmet, his data-gloved hands moving in midair as he manipulated invisible controls in cyberspace.

  Young Bill guided me to the rest alcove, where I met the last member of the Smith clan: Wendy Smith-Makepeace, eight years old, a little replica of her mother Betsy (although, like Bill and Kaneko, taller and thinner than most of her contemporaries on Earth). She watched me with silent appraisal as I took a seat next to her, as seemingly indifferent to my presence as her half-brother Taneko before her—then, as I fumbled with the seat belt, she reached over and, in one fluid motion, expertly tightened the strap and snapped shut the buckle.

  “If you don’t know how to do it,” she lectured me sternly, “ask someone.”

  Then she primly folded her hands in her lap and stoically looked straight ahead, watching her first-parents across the compartment.

  “I’ll leave you to Wendy’s tender mercy,” Young Bill said as he gave me a slap on the shoulder. He then pushed off the floor, floating upward to grab a ceiling rung. “Captain, may I watch the launch from the blister, please?”

  It didn’t seem as if Montrose could hear anything from within his thick VR helmet, but the captain circled a thumb and index finger, giving him the OK sign. “Thank you, sir,” Young Bill said, then worked his way along the ceiling rungs, hand over hand, until he reached the observation blister between the engineering and communications stations. With one free hand he tapped the control panel next to the hemispherical bulge; the blister’s hatch slid open, briefly revealing a tiny compartment with a single armchair mounted in front of a binocular eyepiece. Young Bill glided feet-first into the blister, then the hatch shut behind him.

  It was now very calm within the command center, almost silent except for the low murmur of voices. Since everyone has the benefit of communicating through their subcutaneous comlink, there was none of the melodramatic shouting across the bridge that is usually depicted in net space dramas. I found a headset stowed in a basket beneath my seat; after fiddling with it for a few moments, I was able to monitor the overlapping crosstalk.

  “T-minus twenty minutes and counting…”

  “Tank pressurization check complete, all levels stable…”

  “Cycle primary guidance system on my mark to delta three-three-two…”

  “Copy, delta three-three-two…”

  “Telemetry check clear. Tycho DSR says we are green, repeat, green for go…”

  “Mark for primary guidance sequence initiation…”

  “Roger that. Stand by for main engine reactor sequence. Ten percent fuel feed on my mark at T-minus fifteen, counting…”

  A new voice came over the comlink: “Ah, one-twelve Whiskey Bravo Nebraska, this is Descartes Traffic, we’ve got a vessel three hundred klicks downrange from your trajectory. Nine-nine-one Nebraska Foxtrot Omega bearing X-ray fifteen, Yankee eleven-point-six, Zulu minus oh-one, please hold until we can move it from your lane. Over.”

  “We copy, Desc
artes Traffic,” Captain Montrose said, “but we’re not holding on the burn till we confirm, over. Betsy, you want to hop on that, please?”

  Elizabeth Smith-Makepeace consulted her navigational screens and discovered that 991-NFO was a cargo carrier out of Clarke County, the LaGrange colony. The barge was close to 112-WBN’s flight path, but not so much as to directly endanger any of the convoy’s ships with direct collision.

  Montrose sighed, barely nodding his head; it was a momentary nuisance, not a crisis. “Descartes Traffic, this is one-twelve Whiskey Bravo Nebraska, please be advised that we are initiating reactor warm-up and preparing for JOI burn. If we go into hold now, we’re gonna miss our window, so please inform the pilot…”

  “One-twelve Whiskey Bravo Nebraska, this is Descartes Traffic. Don’t worry, we’ve taken care of it. Nine-nine-one Nebraska Foxtrot Omega is adjusting its course to take itself out of your lane and its pilot renders his apologies. Over.”

  “Thank you, Descartes Traffic. One-twelve Whisky Bravo Nebraska green for launch. Over.” The voice of Descartes Traffic vanished from the comlink.

  “Ready for primary engine ignition sequence on your mark…”

  “Mark on three…one, two, and three…”

  There was a faint surge through the mammoth ship as the gas-core reactor rumbled to life, its hydrogen fuel passing through conduits into the giant main engine at the far end of the ship. Digital readouts on Bill Smith-Tate’s console flashed from red to green; he hardly seemed to notice as his hands moved quickly from one touchpad to the next. “Standing by to initiate pressurization of secondary engines.”

  “Go for secondary engine pressurization,” Montrose said, and Old Bill complied. The liquid-fuel engines which comprised the ship’s maneuvering thrusters are made ready for launch. “Okay, prepare for arm rotation initiation, on my mark at one…”