by M. J. Locke
From there it was a dozen steps home. Jane pulled herself along the handrails set into the rocks, overbalanced in the featherlight gravity by her pack. She took great care not to launch herself into orbit with too much spring in her step. Then she jumped down to the airlock in their crevasse, and anchored herself there, one-handed, while her port tether detached from the asteroid’s mooring station and reeled in. She zipped the airlock closed. The vents opened up, air rushed in, and the walls and outer hatch, made of pillowed nylon, quivered with the eager energy of a puppy. A sigh escaped between her lips.
“Hello, House,” she said, and removed her helmet. The all-clear sounded; underfoot, the inner hatch opened. Xuan floated there, two fingers on the handle, a smile ghosting his lips and worry ghosting his outsized eyes. “Hello, yourself.”
She smiled back, and chinned herself down into the habitat. Xuan moved aside and closed the inner lock. As her ears crackled with the pressure change, she drew in the smells and sounds and sights of home. The burnt-almond-cookie smell of space mingled with the habitat’s cool, moist air, which carried to her nostrils the scents of incense, pot herbs and chilis, must and dust and cleaners, twisted-hemp netting and molded-plastic fixtures, machine lubricants, and twenty-four years’ living. Home.
* * *
From the instant he had heard her voice, Xuan knew the toll the past day and a half had taken. He opened the airlock and she sank inside before him. Her sweat-soaked hair was plastered to her head. He took her helmet and she climbed stiffly out of her suit. At eighty-nine, at the apex of middle age, Jane prided herself on keeping fit. She took her antiaging meds; she ate well; she worked out almost daily. Her motions were normally swift and self-assured. It was the disaster, he realized, that had caused this stiffness.
The toll was written also on her face. Her affect was as smooth and hard as a marble bust. Others would read nothing there. But Xuan saw the anguish and fear beneath her calm demeanor. He lifted his eyebrows at her in a subtle invitation to talk about it, but she did not respond. Well, there would be time later.
Xuan removed her commuter pack and put the batteries and air tanks in their rechargers, and did the shutdown checks. Meanwhile, Jane removed, cleaned, and checked the suit itself. As always, this process consumed a good ten to fifteen minutes, and as always, they performed it together in comfortable silence, bobbing like soap bubbles on air currents as they did so—wafting in various orientations across the room’s upper reaches, lofting themselves with a lazy toe- or hand-push back over to the equipment racks.
Now that Dominica and Hugh were gone, Jane and Xuan had what amounted to a mansion, by stroider standards: a four-room (not counting the head), one-hundred-fifteen-cubic-meter, mostly vertical habitat of nylon, plastic, and alloy that burrowed like a plantar wart into the side of their asteroid. Right now they were sharing their spare room with a surly miner who had drifted Down from Ilion. He and Jane were doing a favor for a mutual friend from Jane’s Vestan days. This guy was no trouble, really, other than the fact that he was using up their food, water, power, and air.
Upsiders’ social network was tight, for all that it was spread across vast differences. You could be an asocial recluse all you wanted, but when someone showed up at your airlock and asked for help, you gave it, no questions asked, cold equations notwithstanding. The Japanese First Wavers who had populated this asteroid cluster had called it giri. The Second and Third Wavers called it the sammy system, and built software to keep a tally. Selfish, hoarding pricks did not last long Upside.
Finally, with a stifled groan, Jane slipped off her boots and flexed her foothands, clinging to the wall netting with her fingers. She wrung her feet together, rubbing the arches with her thumb-toes, while Xuan checked her radiation levels. “Your numbers look good.”
Jane pulled his radiation monitor off his belt. “Yours are high.”
“I was out in the field for the past two days.”
“Take your shirt off,” she said.
“I bet you say that to all the gents.”
That brought a brief grin. “Only the cute ones.”
She pulled the bone density scanner out of its cupboard and charged it up. Xuan kicked back, and she ran the scanner over and under him, front and back, while he floated in midair. She gave him his regen booster, then kissed him on his belly with a hand under his back. Then, as he rolled over, she slapped him on the ass. Xuan yelped, and grabbed her.
They kissed. He ran his hands down her back. She wrapped arms and legs around him, releasing a breath, and he felt tension drain from her muscles.
“OK, your turn.”
She stretched out. He did the scans. All normal. He prepped a booster shot anyway. She saw it, and grimaced. “That’s not really necessary today, is it? My numbers are fine.”
“It’s better to stay on a regular schedule.”
“But why waste supplies when it’s not strictly necessary?”
Xuan sighed, exasperated. She always resisted taking her meds. Without fail. “So I guess we’re going to do our little pharmacophobia tango once again.”
Jane glared at him, and then crossed her arms with notably poor grace. “Fine. Go ahead.”
He compressed the ampoule against her thigh. She kicked off into the habitat to shake off her sulks, while Xuan put the supplies away, shaking his own head over this irritable island of irrationality she nurtured. He bounded past her, ricocheting off the ceiling into his office, a nook nestled in the rock above the kitchen, to put some of his tools away.
He noticed her checking their “Stroiders” numbers in her office nook.
“Your numbers are up,” she said. She seemed mildly amused. “Stroiders” fans back on Earth ranked Phocaeans on a daily basis. You had two sets of “Stroiders” numbers: eyes (how many people watched you), and thumbs (what they thought of you on a scale of one to ten, plus a set of keywords and viewer reviews that told why you got the ratings you did). His current popularity resulted from a big new mining research contract that he had helped his university snag. The negotiations, and his handling of them, had caught the attention of “Stroiders” fans, to his bemusement. His viewer ratings had, at least briefly—before the disaster struck—rivaled Jane’s.
“Yes,” he said. “Bizarre.”
Her expression didn’t change as she continued to scroll through the reports, but he could tell she was viewing her own numbers. Her thumbs were in the crapper: her popularity had dropped through the floor—though, not surprisingly, her eyes were thicker than ever. Clearly, “Stroiders” viewers were blaming her. She switched off the console.
“Good thing they can’t dole out bad-sammies.”
“True.” Sammies were the counts that mattered: the confidence of the people of Phocaea. Xuan had viewed her sammy cache earlier on the “Stroiders” wavesite. To his relief, she had plenty of good-sammies, and the numbers were holding steady. Phocaeans, at least, were not jumping to conclusions about her performance. Yet.
“I don’t give a damn about the ratings,” she told him. “I’m all right.”
He put his arms around her from behind, and she laid her head against him. “Sorry I was cranky about the meds.”
“You’re forgiven.” He planted a kiss on her neck. She turned and put her arms around him, and they kissed. The moment lasted.
“Foot rub?” she said hopefully.
“I’ll go you one better. Full-body treatment.”
“Oooh.”
“Food first, though. I’ll wager you haven’t eaten all day.” Even as he said it, Jane’s stomach growled noisily.
“You’re on. Er, is Ferdy around?” Ferdy was the miner they were putting up. Xuan shook his head. “Gone for several days, he said. Maybe for good this time.”
“Oh ree-e-a-lly?”
“Reee-e-a-lly.” Xuan leered.
“Mmmm.” Jane gripped his hips with her foothands and pulled him close, massaging his sore back muscles with her nimble toes. Xuan loved her foothands. The couple drifted to the floor in
a meandering tumble for some prehensile snuggling.
A timer went off in the kitchen. “Damn.” She nuzzled his neck.
“You won’t regret the wait.” He disentangled himself. “Dinner in ten.”
“Thanks,” she said. “I’ll make some calls.”
* * *
Whatever Xuan was cooking, it smelled fantastic. The aroma made it hard for Jane to concentrate. She worked virtually—met with her managers and peers, reviewed emergency measures to get the storage hangars and tanks up again and the distribution schedules back in order, and probed the life-support systems to see whether they had recovered. Then she left messages for her political allies: shoring up her support and fending off the predators.
A call came in. It was her old mentor, Chikuma Funaki. Jane pulled on her favorite pair of sweats and then activated her waveface.
Funaki was tiny, not much more than a meter and a half tall, and thin, with skin soft and wrinkled as crumpled tissue. Her eyes were the color of hot chocolate, and her hair was space-black, run through with streaks of white, which she piled atop her head and pinned there with jeweled sticks. She wore the basic stroider tunic and leggings. An attendant stood beside her, whom she dismissed with a nod.
Jane smiled. “Sensei! I’m so glad you called.”
Chikuma was a hundred sixty, perhaps older. A First Waver, she had moved to Phocaea at the age of sixteen. Jane had heard she was a mail-order bride back in the days when Phocaeans were a few thousand Japanese and North American miners, clinging to the asteroid’s surface in their rickety domes, awash in radiation. After her husband had been killed in a mining accident, Funaki had taken over her husband’s small business, and had fought, finessed, and extorted her way to success. Among the bankers of Sky Street, a network of mostly Japanese investment houses and securities and commodities traders, Chikuma was now supreme matriarch. She could be rather awful, if you got between her and something important that she wanted. But she and Jane had always gotten along, particularly since Chikuma had supported Jane’s appointment, fifteen years ago, as Phocaea’s resource czar.
Chikuma never saw anyone these days. She had grown rather frail. Jane was of course a member of Chikuma’s inner circle, but her own reluctance to disturb Chikuma’s peace caused Jane to maintain a certain reserve. (Also, alerting Funaki-sensei to local political events was akin to releasing the whirlwind.) But nobody knew better than Chikuma Funaki the threat that Ogilvie & Sons posed to Phocaea. If Jane could choose a single ally to back her in a fight against the mob, it would be Chikuma Funaki.
Jane said, “I apologize for not calling. Matters have been hectic.”
“You have been dealing with a terrible crisis. I want to offer my support in whatever way we can help.” By “we” she meant not just her family, but 25 Phocaea’s entire business community.
“Thank you.”
“Perhaps we could meet to discuss the situation in more detail, sometime soon.” Jane wondered if she knew something more specific than she was saying. Though Chikuma was one of the six Phocaeans whom Upside-Down Productions wasn’t permitted to record, and she used the best encryption money could buy, she and Jane never got too specific online.
“I would be delighted.”
“Will you come for tea tomorrow afternoon, then?”
Jane bowed deeply. “I’d be delighted, Sensei. Thank you.”
She started to make another call, but Xuan floated over with a bowl and waved it under her nose. Her stomach complained.
“Come. Eat. Trust your people and let them do their jobs.”
So she signed off. They ate a green Vietnamese curry with nonspecific vat-grown protein, fresh veggies, and enough chili to take the lining off her sinuses. She wiped her eyes and nose. “Just what I needed.” She carried the dishes into the kitchen to wash. “Thank you, dear.”
“Kieu and Pham and their families are packing up and heading into town tomorrow.” His siblings. “I’ll be helping them move.”
“Good. We’ll have a space set aside.”
The kids both called after dinner. Lag from Earthspace was a good forty-four minutes, so it wasn’t a conversation, merely an exchange of messages. Dominica called first, from Indonesia. “Checking in again,” she said. “Tell the Agres … I’m very, very sorry.”
And then Hugh, from Jovespace, anguished, distraught. “How could this have happened? It doesn’t feel real. I wish I weren’t so far away.” A long, heavy pause. “There’s a rock I left on my shelf. It was a gift from Carl. I want you to give it to Geoff. He’ll know why.”
Jane and Xuan shared a glance. “Can you come tomorrow?” she asked. The look on Xuan’s face told her just how big a crisis the disaster had created in his own professional life. But he nodded. “I’ll be there, if at all possible.”
He did not know the Agres well; he was going for her sake.
Jane shook her head. “On second thought, never mind. But I will take you up on dinner in town tomorrow night, if you can swing it.”
* * *
After his evening meditations, Xuan made good on his promise for a full-body massage. The knots in Jane’s shoulders and back released their grip under his hands; she hissed with mingled pleasure and pain. Other pleasant activities ensued.
You have to really want sex to achieve it in low gee; Newton’s three laws play havoc with bodies in motion. Fortunately, Xuan had jury-rigged all manner of pulleys, slings, and other gear, enabling them to achieve a pleasing degree of mutual, sweaty satisfaction. Afterward they snuggled in each others’ arms in their bed webbing—drowsy, skin touching skin.
Xuan had optic upgrades, and he loved looking at her, naked, in the dark. It was the one time she truly relaxed. Her skin glowed like liquid jewel; the muscles of her face relaxed, lips slightly parted in a smile; the warmth from where his own flesh had pressed against hers was slowly fading from her breasts, belly, and thighs. Xuan kissed her open palm and folded her hand in his.
“So,” he said.
Jane’s face contorted in pain. She pressed her face against his chest, stiff with anguish. Xuan took her into a hug. He stroked her hair, and felt the warm stain of her tears turn cold against his chest. He held her, silent.
“Any clues yet as to the cause?” he asked.
She drew back, shaking her head, and wiped at her eyes. “Sean has been tied up getting repairs done. I haven’t been able to get with him about his root cause analysis. Tomorrow is the memorial service, and I have a debriefing on Friday with Benavidez. Parliament is threatening to launch an independent investigation. I don’t see how he can hold out against all this pressure to offer me up.”
“The cluster needs you. Everybody knows it.”
“If not me, then they’ll pressure me to finger someone in my organization. Someone has to go. They need their scapegoat.” After a pause, she said, “There’s something more. The eight who died in the second warehouse…”
“Yes?”
“They didn’t die right away. Sean had a rescue team trying to free them. I told him to divert the team to save the ice.” She settled against him again. The skin of her cheek heated his chest. He could feel her heartbeat, solid and strong, against the muscles of his belly. “If I hadn’t, we’d only have a few days of ice stores left, and I don’t know how we’re going to make it through, even now. But Xuan”—her voice broke again—“I condemned eight people to die.”
He stroked her hair. “Tough call.”
He felt her head nodding. “Toughest yet.” Then she drew a deep breath, and shifted in the netting to face him. “You need to know this also. I just called Okuyama-sensei at the university this evening. We have to shut Kukuyoshi down.”
He was not surprised. Everyone at the university had been speculating. It was unavoidable. Still. He felt himself flinch.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
Phocaea was the largest asteroid community after Ceres, and the reason was their fabulous, multigee arboretum, Kukuyoshi. If they couldn’t save Kukuyo
shi, all his colleagues’ decades of scientific research, all the biotics and natural beauty they had somehow managed to build in the teeth of harsh vacuum, would be lost forever. Phocaea would be reduced to a place of chemicals, steel, hard corners, and bulkheads.
He pulled her close once more. She sighed, and he recognized it as relief. Had she truly expected anger?
“How many days till you shut it down?”
“Three more days at full power. Then five at gradually declining temperatures. We’ll stabilize temps at Hollow ambient—minus ten C. Some creatures and plants may be able to hibernate or use other strategies to survive. It’s not an optimistic scenario, but it’s the best we can do.”
* * *
Xuan’s breathing told Jane he had fallen asleep. She climbed out of the webbing, turned on a night-light, and floated up into the main living area. A corner near the equipment racks was dedicated to family holograms and sentimental knickknacks. It also housed a small gong, a smiling golden Buddha, and an incense burner, in which a stick of incense still burned from Xuan’s earlier meditations.
Jane pulled out a blank holoframe, and filled it with pictures of those killed. She hesitated over Ivan Kovak, and in the end left him off—to honor him alongside his victims seemed an abomination. What could have driven him to such an act?
She mounted the frame on the wall, lit a stick of Xuan’s jasmine incense, and looked at the images of the dead for a while. Smoke spiraled out on the room’s air currents. Carl’s face floated into the center of the montage. They were her dead now. She owned, not them, but their ends.
I won’t forget you. Not for a day; not for a minute. Somehow, I’ll make your sacrifice mean something. Somehow. She laid her hands on Buddha’s cool metal belly, and mourned.
Finally, exhausted to the point of stupor, she returned to the bedroom and fumbled back into the hammock next to Xuan. He stirred and mumbled, wrapping his arms around her, but didn’t fully wake. Jane stroked Xuan’s creased face, ran her fingers along his naked flank.
He had started the antiaging treatments later than many, and consequently he was deeply creased. He was so ugly he was cute. His eyes and orbital sockets had been enlarged, so he looked a bit silly, like those overly cute toy sapients all the kids played with these days. His stature was small—lean and short, a couple of inches shorter than she; his skin rock brown; his hair silky black (those and his eyes were his two truly gorgeous features), and big, splayed feet. And he was brilliant, loving, and great in bed; at seventy-two his libido still ran high and they had not yet had to resort to other marital methods than her very favorite, except when they felt like it, for variety. Jane adored every pug-ugly centimeter of him.