Zero-G

by William Shatner

  On the way, in a deserted stretch of corridor, Adsila had shifted to her male nature. She had seen the male eyes, felt the heat when she had gone to the reception. With so many guests onboard, most of them men, she didn’t want the attention.

  As Adsila stepped into the unusually spacious lounge—the most Earth-like room on the Empyrean—his eyes scanned the place. It was something he had seen Lord do when they came here their first day aloft. Lord had taken a moment to look, not at his IC but at his surroundings. He’d let information flood in, stored in his mind and senses. Adsila knew he had done that because, later, he told his number two to get a warrant to search the cabin of one of Stanton’s security officers.

  “Yes, sir. Why, sir?” Adsila had asked.

  “Because he was having trouble moving his eyes through his IC,” Lord said.

  “And, sir?”

  “And he kept moving his head to focus when he did get what he wanted,” Lord said. “He has an eggbeater. That could be dangerous for us all.”

  That was FBI slang for an EEG-beater, an illegal device that interfered with the cortical electric field to circumvent alcohol and recreational narcotic limits. Its users also swore that the device enhanced the high it concealed. The warrant was obtained, the search was executed, the eggbeater was discovered in an earring, and the man was sent back to Earth. Adsila vividly recalled the conversation in the command center, where Stanton came in person to give Lord a dressing-down.

  He failed.

  “You will bring matters involving my staff, my personnel, to me personally,” Stanton had said, then reminded him who ran the station and that “senile judgments” would not be tolerated.

  Lord had listened politely, respectful of the man’s position, standing classically “at ease,” hands behind his back, chest out. When Stanton was finished, Lord dropped his arms to his sides, stepped closer to the brawny station commander, and replied, “My squadron fought a war in the skies over Mexico to stop problems like that and see that EEG law was enacted.” Then he’d stepped closer still and said sharply, firmly, “This ‘senile’ old man doesn’t make backroom deals for abusers.”

  Stanton left in silent rage and no one spoke—until Adsila had said, “I see, sir.”

  And Adsila did. As the Luddite Party on Earth put it, “More eyes, less IC.”

  Adsila wasn’t quite ready to go that far, but the EAD managed to find a balance.

  Entering the Scrub, he recognized half the people crowded at the bar and tables. They were regulars who pushed their limitations to the limit. They were the ones who had managed to pass the unforgiving psych tests to get up here but who couldn’t escape themselves no matter how far they traveled. In fairness, once the novelty wore off and the adventure wore thin, being up here broke a lot of good people physically, mentally, and emotionally. Without the distractions of terrestrial activity, space left them naked. Unable to look out, unwilling to look in, they came to the Scrub to anesthetize themselves.

  In the center of the Scrub was a small area called the Cockpit. It was a private room whose maximum of four occupants could choose to keep their party private by turning the walls opaque. Right now the walls were transparent, to show the room filled with Colonel Jack Franco, Sheik Kattan, Fraas Dircks, and General Arturo Hierra. Only Kattan and Dircks were using. Franco and Hierra were listening, though Franco was either bored or watching for someone since his eyes kept moving to the wall, toward the door, before skipping back to the table.

  Never really off-duty, Adsila thought again—not himself, not the crew, not the DIA, not anyone. Space wasn’t a harsh mistress; people were.

  Adsila caught Stephen motioning to him from a dark corner. The EAD walked over, weaving through the close-packed tables and stools bolted to the floor for stability.

  “I saw Grainger’s reservation for you, held your spot as soon as it opened,” Stephen said, though without his customary wink.

  Adsila nodded with appreciation. It was actually not his spot but the FBI’s preferred roost, a small table with two chairs in the farthest corner of the space. It allowed for a certain amount of privacy but also allowed Adsila to discreetly observe almost anyone else in the place.

  “Awful what happened in Japan,” Stephen said as they moved around the bar. “I can’t stop thinking about all those people. What the hell is going on?”

  “Still investigating,” Adsila said.

  “They don’t think it was natural,” he went on. “Most of the newtiaee say it was some kind of weapon.”

  “Fear triggers IC searches and drops.”

  “Sir, if that’s true, my IC drop-down time is gonna be off the charts,” he said. “I can’t stop plugging into all the feeds.”

  It didn’t sound like Stephen was fishing for information, though Adsila had been trained to suspect everyone. It seemed as if he just wanted to talk. That was fairly common up here. Psychologists called it “flocking,” the need for people in space to find some kind of biological anchor, like birds in flight. The kinds of cliques that were frowned upon Earthside were actually encouraged up here.

  “It’s weird how I used to think we were so vulnerable up here and so safe down there,” he said. “Error! Error!”

  “That’s true,” Adsila said. There were more safeguards here, backups to backups, than there could ever be on Earth. When things failed, as they did with Kristine Cavanaugh or Stanton’s eggbeater, it was usually because of people.

  The EAD sat, his eyes settling on a small concave cup in the center of the table—the can. In it lay a coiled tube, a nasal prong, and what looked like a brown lozenge. Above it, hovering in his IC, was the EEG notice: two-lozenge limit. Adsila did not intend to go that high. He only wanted one . . . not an escape, just a whisper from the past.

  With skilled fingers, he unwound the tube, unwrapped the sanitized plugs, clipped them to both nostrils, and dropped the tablet into a slot in the can. The cannabis, in aerated form, began to flow and he inhaled deeply, holding it in his chest as if it were sweet desert air.

  At night, he thought, shutting his eyes for just a moment so he could picture the vista from his childhood. The stars brilliant above, twinkling brightly, winking, beckoning—not fierce and sharp as they were up here. Back then, at home, there was an atmosphere to spread the light, to turn a sterile mass of stars into a mass of wonder. He thought he could hear the sounds of coyotes rustling in the scrub, of an owl, his owl, hooting the story of Creation. Now there was a campfire, warm and friendly, crackling . . . or was that a cougar moving through dry underbrush?

  It was time to open his eyes.

  Adsila came back immediately, feeling refreshed. He realized how stiffly he was sitting in the chair and relaxed. He looked out into the darkness, eyes fully adjusted—more than adjusted, thanks to the can—seeking the body language of anyone like him, anyone who wanted to explore rather than to wallow.

  His eyes skirted the central private room, though he caught Franco’s head turned to the door for a moment, unmoving. Ziv Levy had just strode in, like a titan, though he didn’t bother to take in the room. He maneuvered his large frame through the lounge, past the Cockpit, toward the bar and past it.

  His straight-ahead shoulders and direct eyes said he was coming to Adsila’s table. He stopped briefly to ask, “May I,” then swung into the chair anyway.

  “It’s a free room,” Adsila replied flatly. The Cherokee continued to breathe through his nose, working at softening the sudden feeling of being stalked, trapped. He folded his arms on the table and leaned forward, his glossless eyes narrowing.

  “Well, but there are certain protocols about joining station regulars,” Ziv acknowledged. “Especially for us zareems.”

  “Hebrew for ‘outsider,’ ” Adsila said, reading the automatic translation.

  “That’s right,” Ziv said with practiced unconcern.

  The CHAI’s eyes t
ook a subtle turn through the rest of the club. His enhanced vision picked out the eyes that snuck distrusting or hateful looks at the table. “I wonder who that’s for?” he thought aloud.

  “Who what’s for?” Adsila asked.

  Ziv leaned forward too. “The prejudice. Can’t you feel it?”

  “I’ve learned to ignore it.”

  “I wonder if it’s for the tea bag or the panny. Probably both.”

  Adsila sat back slightly. “Don’t use those,” he said.

  “They’re stupid labels coined by frightened people,” he replied.

  “I said don’t.”

  “I’d be willing to bet something,” Ziv went on.

  Adsila didn’t respond.

  Undeterred, Ziv leaned even closer. “I’ll bet you that the first Homo sapiens had a disparaging term for the Neanderthals,” he said. “It was probably something like ‘browheads’ or ‘shaggies.’ Or whatever the grunting equivalent to that would be, maybe ‘oo-oos’ or some drooling sound.”

  Ziv made the sound, drawing on the echo in his artificial larynx. In spite of himself, Adsila laughed.

  “There!” Ziv said triumphantly. “Colonel Franco is wrong.”

  “Often. What about this time?”

  “About Samuel Lord’s team,” he said. “The rest of you do have a sense of humor!”

  Adsila’s laugh became a knowing grin. This man was as transparent as the cockpit glass: he was trying to align himself with Adsila against the FBI’s natural rival, the Defense Intelligence Agency. The EAD didn’t bite.

  “The Cherokee have a word for people like Franco, for everyone like him,” he said with a dismissive cock of his head toward the room. “Ukshana.”

  “Critics?” Ziv wondered, unable to find a translation in his organic or data memory.

  “Close,” Adsila said. “Assholes.”

  Ziv tapped a finger on the table. It sounded like he was wearing a thimble. “Is that you talking or the can?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “Not really,” Ziv admitted.

  “How did you know about me anyway?” Adsila asked. “That I was here. No, scratch that,” he went on quickly. “Why did you know about me? Why did you come to this table?”

  Ziv continued tapping. “As I said, we’re fellow outsiders.”

  “You think we’re the same?” Adsila said, astonished but sounding almost offended.

  “No,” Ziv answered patiently. “My—unique situation, let us call it, was the result of a misfortune. Yours is the result of planning. Yet to the world and those off-world, whether they say it or not, we are freaks.”

  “Are you one of those? Not a freak, I mean—a self-hating freak?”

  “Not at all.”

  “I’m not sure,” Adsila said. “All that bravado.”

  “I was like that, always,” Ziv said quickly and apparently in earnest. “I can show you the recordings.”

  “No, thank you.”

  “And you know, my assessment of me wasn’t my judgment,” Ziv went on.

  “What are you even saying?” Adsila asked.

  “That everyone is unique in some way.” The tapping stopped and Ziv’s unshining, squidlike eyes pinned his companion. “The point I wanted to make was, we are the same in that people treat us differently. That has typically made bedfellows of different people, uniting them.”

  Adsila recoiled slightly at the word bedfellows, the implication, until he read the definition in his IC. It wasn’t a proposition, Ziv did not necessarily mean it to be taken literally. Adsila winked the word away.

  “That is a fine theory, not always practical,” Adsila replied. “I’m Cherokee. If we had united with the Apache, with the Cheyenne, with the Sioux, instead of fighting amongst one another—”

  “There would be thirteen or so United States and a mighty Native American confederacy,” Ziv replied. “You’ve made my point exactly. I said ‘typically,’ not ‘always.’ And you would agree that the benefits outweigh the negatives.”

  Adsila slumped a little. He had been manipulated—very, very skillfully. He continued to breathe in the cannabis vapors.

  And the eyes of the CHAI continued to stare in their oily way. “Tell me about you,” he said. “Your parents.”

  “You mean, why did they make me pan?” he asked.

  “It is not a casual choice,” he said.

  “No. It was something they considered strongly, in consultation with their own parents, grandparents, and tribal elders.”

  “And psychologists?” Ziv said. “I had to get their blessing before major body parts were replaced.”

  “Yes, but for guidance only,” Adsila said. “Thanks to the Sex and Gender Act of 2022, the wishes of a birth parent cannot be countermanded. My parents believed it would be a gift, the power of the medicine man to shift his shape expressed in spirit and flesh.”

  “Has it been that?” Ziv asked. “A gift?”

  “That’s a stupid question and a little too familiar,” Adsila replied flatly.

  “Again, I’m sorry—the truth is, I’m genuinely interested.”

  “I’m me,” Adsila said as if he hadn’t spoken. “One individual, just like every other holistic being on- or off-planet. You wouldn’t ask a person of color or some other kind of gen-en the same question.”

  “Maybe, maybe not, though genetic engineering to target hereditary diseases isn’t quite the same as pan-genderism,” Ziv remarked. “You have to admit that.”

  “I don’t.” Adsila pulled the clip from his nose. “And I’ve had enough of you. I’m not a disease—”

  “I didn’t say that—not at all.”

  “It sounded very much like that.”

  “It wasn’t,” Ziv said conclusively. He reached out and took the man’s hand. “It wasn’t that at all.”

  Adsila jerked his hand free but he didn’t leave. Ziv was no amateur. He had probably been counting on Adsila’s female center to respond to his touch, which was truly electric; to like it enough, to be intrigued enough to convince the heterosexual male side of him not to go.

  Adsila still couldn’t tell whether Ziv was being sincere or if he were after something else. But he was right about one thing. This was the first time in a long time he had had the opportunity to talk about gender with a truly interested and engaged party.

  He found himself agreeing with Ziv’s assessment: Because the CHAI and I are both outsiders.

  People around the Scrub were no longer just glancing at the pair of them, they were openly watching. Liberated by the can, Adsila’s voice had obviously been louder than he had imagined.

  “Let’s get out of here,” he said abruptly.

  “Where . . . and why?” Ziv asked. It wasn’t a refusal.

  Adsila stood and shifted. In just a few moments, an arrestingly attractive woman with owlish eyes and nails like talons was looking down at him.

  “Coming?” was all she said.

  With that, Adsila Waters left the lounge, followed by Ziv Levy as well as every eye in the Scrub, male and female alike. She did not ­notice—no one did—the look the CHAI exchanged with Colonel Franco as he departed.

  TEN

  THE COSMOS COULD be a kick in the head, Lord thought.

  He was sitting in his cabin with a beautiful scientist and two matters orbited turbulently in his head like binary stars: how elegant and desirable Dr. May was, and the absolutely unrelated matter of all the personal and professional unknowns and wonder represented by a trip to Armstrong Air Force Base.

  From the Earth to the moon, from Hell’s Kitchen to Heaven’s Keyhole, he thought, using the popular nickname for the base. That was more than a kick in the head. It was a miracle.

  At the moment, however, the mission was far more elusive than the woman. He reflected on the familiar territory.

&
nbsp; Sam Lord had been married, once. What he and Consuela had in common was a love of speed. They had met by chance on line for the Cyclone, the classic roller coaster at Coney Island, when he was eighteen and just about to start flight training and she was seventeen and about to leave the Bronx to attend Princeton, after skipping her junior year of high school.

  It was 1988, an innocent time before texting and viral videos, when people still communicated over landlines and drank cow’s milk, when smoking cigarettes was permitted in restaurants and bars, when artificial hearts couldn’t successfully replace real ones, when cancer still killed millions.

  They had loved hard and fast and married three months later, when Lord was briefly back in New York on leave from Randolph AFB, Texas. They spent their honeymoon on a speedboat in Long Island Sound. By the time Lord became an officer, Consuela Baez had become a mother, twice, and a meteorologist. She wrote the models for worldwide glacial retreat that became the basis for the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change initiative in the North Pole.

  She had also fallen in love with a coworker, an oceanographer from Canada and former Olympic bobsledder. If the Poly Law had been passed then, Lord might have agreed to what became euphemistically known as a “time share” among triads. But it was 1997 and the legislation was still nearly three decades away.

  The couple divorced, and Lord tried very hard thereafter not to hate the sight of ice. He was glad that he couldn’t hate Consuela, whose love remained the dearest he had ever known and which he still cherished. But it taught him a valuable lesson that had served him well for just over a half century: when it came to women, lovers, and coworkers alike—flyovers only, don’t cut the corn, don’t buzz the sunbathers.

  Don’t get in too deep.

  But depth came in many forms, wore different faces, and he knew when his safe cruising altitude was in danger of decay. Consuela had never been afraid of anything. His female pilots all had the right stuff—possibly “righter,” since they had to be better than their male colleagues. Up here, Janet Grainger was smart and alert and Adsila Waters was tougher as a woman than she was as a man. His last lover, General Erin Astoria—whom he had finally been able to date when he resigned his commission—not only knew it was just a fling, she preferred it. And in Isaiah’s saddle, no less.