Aubry approached the edge of the little stream. She bent down and put her finger in it. Her finger came away dripping and trailing an elastic slime. She backed up, and the cavern convulsed again, sending more slime on its way throughout the Met.
Leo jumped in and spread the sluice juice all over his body. He ducked his head under and came up looking like a baby kitten that had just been given a complete bath by its mother.
“Come on in,” said Leo. “The juice is fine.”
Aubry was afraid to think about it anymore—afraid she might throw up if she thought about it anymore. At least the stuff didn’t smell. Too bad, that is.
She closed her eyes and stepped into the snot. It came up to her waist, and was just as warm and gooey as she had suspected it would be.
“I know it’ll feel strange at first,” said Leo, “but you have to go under and take a deep breath. Fill your lungs full of the stuff. I promise you—you won’t drown.”
“But—”
“Give it a try, Aubry, I think you’ll—”
The cavern convulsed again, and Aubry was sucked under, down into the goo. She held her breath for a moment. She had gulped in a mouthful of the juice when she’d fallen, and it oozed around in her mouth. Could you swallow the stuff? Not and keep from vomiting it back up. She was pushed forward rapidly by the walls of the cataract—now becoming something like a blood vessel. Pushed and not let up, pushed . . . could she open her eyes in this stuff? Leo hadn’t said anything about that. But she had to see where she was going, what was happening.
She opened her eyes. The bioluminescence of the cavern was present there, too. In fact, the sluice juice itself seemed to have a faint green glow, like radioactive mucus.
But the act of opening her eyes somehow gave her new courage, or at least made her feel less repulsed by the juice. She felt as if she were swimming in the beautiful center of a wave in a green ocean. She was perfectly buoyant, and it felt so serene. Maybe it would be all right, maybe . . .
She took a breath. Just sucked in as hard as she could. The sluice juice filled her lungs.
And it was fine. Immediately, Aubry felt the oxygen rushing into her blood through her lungs. She could breathe this stuff! She really could. She breathed out, and in. The effort was greater than normal breathing—you had to consciously push and pull harder with your chest muscles. But she was breathing it, all right, and not drowning in it.
As abruptly as it came, the contraction relaxed. Aubry found herself next to Leo. Both of them were about halfway across the cavern from where they had started out before the contraction.
“Wow!” Aubry exclaimed. “I did it!”
“What did I tell you?” said Leo. “This is just kind of like a capillary. When we get into the main sluiceways, we can reach speed that you wouldn’t believe.”
“And we just swim the whole way? How do we stay together?”
Leo smiled mischievously. “There’s one other thing that I’m going to show you. I’m not exactly sure of the physics of it, but these giant bubbles form in the sluice passageways. You have to push pretty hard to get inside them, but once you do, you can actually stand on the bottom and it will orient itself like a ball with a weight on one side. After we get to the main passage, we ride in style. That is, unless we have to change bubbles. That can get a little tricky . . .”
“Let’s go!” said Aubry. “This is going to be fun!”
“Sure it is,” said Leo. “But you have to be careful at all times. This ain’t the regular Met, kid, with lots of built-in safety features. We’re in the Integument. It’s supposed to be no-man’s-land.”
“Okay, I’ll be careful,” said Aubry, a bit impatient to try the dunking again. “What’ll I do?”
“You start by holding on to my leg and letting me lead us to where we’re going. No need to swim. Let the juice do your work for you . . . ready? I think this cataract’s getting ready to pop again.”
Aubry knelt until the juice was up to her neck. She wrapped her arms around one of Leo’s legs. “Ready,” she said. They ducked under, and the walls of the cavern contracted.
It was incredibly fun, if a little bit scary at the same time. The juice rushed you so fast! Leo seemed to guide them effortlessly through the maze of passageways at breakneck speed.
There must be something he’s noticing, Aubry thought. She began to watch the tunnels that Leo took and the ones he avoided. There was a peculiar red rim at the top of the tunnels that they traveled down. But still, they were moving so fast, she wondered if Leo could possibly notice and react in time. He had obviously done this many times before.
The passageways got bigger and bigger, and soon they were in an artery that was as big around as a house. There, they encountered their first bubbles. But Leo waited until they were diverted into an even bigger passage before he pushed his way inside one.
He wriggled inside as if he were a snake, then turned around and pulled Aubry in after him. They both sat dripping on what was now the “floor” of the bubble. Outside, through the refracting sides of the bubble, Aubry could see many other similar bubbles, and chunks of something else floating around as well. Then there was a flash of light as a tribe of what looked like spinning prisms floated past.
“Those are kind of like vitamins,” Leo said. The bubble was an air bubble, with a regular e-mix, as far as Aubry could tell, and they could finally speak. “I saw that you figured out how I knew where to go,” Leo said. “Outbound passages have that faint red coloration.”
“Is that part of the design?” Aubry asked.
“Nobody knows. It isn’t mentioned in any of the historic specs. My own personal theory is that some early sluice runner who was also a bioengineer coded it into the structure so he could find his way around.”
“You mean, people have been doing this for a long time?”
“It used to be a hobby some people were into,” said Leo. “Now everybody does group activities and group sport. Hardly anyone remembers the glory days of the sluice runs anymore.”
“That’s good for us, I guess,” said Aubry. She sat back and began to enjoy the view. This was not as exhilarating as the trip down the capillaries had been, but it was beautiful in its own right. “Where are we headed, anyway?”
“We are headed to see a man . . . sort of a man . . . who knows people who can help you get away.”
“A sort of a man? Is he a LAP?”
“Yes,” said Leo, “but that’s not the half of it. Have you ever heard of the time towers?”
“Some special kind of Large Array of Personalities. We haven’t covered that yet in identity class. It’s for ninth graders, I think.”
“You’re about to get a quick education, kid,” Leo said. “Looks like you’re going to be growing up a little faster than is maybe for the best, but there’s not much to be done about it.”
“I can handle it,” said Aubry. And floating along in a giant air bubble through the hidden integument of the Met, she almost thought she could.
“I’m a little worried, because this man—his name is Tod—it’s been a long time since he was a kid and he isn’t around kids that much. It’s a real adult place we’re going to.”
“I’ve been running from the secret police for the past six hours,” said Aubry. “I think I can handle some old fart time tower.”
Leo smiled his big, face-splitting smile at her again. “Yeah, I’m not too worried about you, to tell the truth.”
Leo settled back on the floor of their bubble and put his hands behind his head. “Relax while you can, I always say. I’d smoke a cig, but this bubble is already filling up with enough carbon dioxide to make the two of us loopy. It would, too, but there’s a bit of gas exchange with the sluice juice, and you know that the juice is full of oxygen.”
“My mother smokes,” Aubry said.
“A convert? You’re kidding?”
; “In virtual, I mean.”
“Well, it’s kind of a nasty habit, even though it won’t kill you anymore.”
“I wonder what’s going on with my mother.” For the first time in quite a while, Aubry thought of her family. She felt a little bit ashamed of herself for putting them out of her mind for so long. But then the shame turned to an overall sadness, and that would not leave her. She didn’t want to, but she thought about Sint getting his toy taken away back on Mercury, and it all seemed unfair and stupid. Why should a little kid have to hold in his frustration and take it like an adult? He was just a little boy, after all! Aubry tried to picture her father and Sint right then. Maybe they were on a cloudship and getting away from the stupid Met. And maybe her mother was on another ship, taking a more roundabout route. She hoped they were, but there was no way to know for sure, and Aubry was very afraid for them. She didn’t know what the Department of Immunity would do with them if it found a way to detain them, and not knowing was even more horrible, in a way. It was like staring down at a black abyss and being afraid of falling in yourself.
Thirty-seven
Fragment from the Fall of Titan
“Fremden, they call us,” said Vincenze Fleur. “Strangers, in German.” He lit a chemical torch and worked away a little more on the so-called snow.
“It ain’t no thing,” replied Pazachoff. He, too, was on the snow-melting detail that Gerardo Funk had put together out of guys in the neighborhood. Funk was a local grist engineer, and it was he who figured it out about the weird snow.
“But it’s our goddamn moon,” said Vincenze. “They’re the strangers.”
“Sure,” said Pazachoff. “Whatever you say.”
“I just wonder why the Broca grist doesn’t translate it over, you know? How come it leaves it as fremden when it overdubs?”
“How the hell would I know?” said Pazachoff. “Ask Funk next time you see him.”
They were quiet for a while, and they burned away at a mound of snow. Every once in a while Vincenze checked to see if the confinement grist that Funk had added to his pellicle was still in place. If any of that killing snow got through it, he was done for. But it seemed to be holding up pretty well, according to the indicator readouts that popped up in his peripheral vision.
“It’s not that I don’t like it,” said Vincenze.
“What?”
“Fremden.”
“Glad to hear it.”
“I mean, they could have called us shitheads or something.”
“They probably call us that, too,” said Pazachoff.
“What do you think we ought to call them?”
Pazachoff straightened up, rubbed his back. “How about shitheads,” he replied, then went back to melting.
“My brother’s dead,” said Vincenze. Pazachoff did not say anything. “This shit ate him up last week. Five e-days ago, I mean. He was a good kid. He was practically running this shoe store where he worked. Taking some night classes about law or something. He had a girl. He met her in the class. I haven’t seen her to tell her.”
Pazachoff grunted. He turned his back on Vincenze.
“I was kind of jealous of him,” said Vincenze. He thought Pazachoff might have turned off his communications reception, but he went on talking anyway. What else was there to do? “I mean, he worked his ass off, but I was always the better-looking of the two of us. Plus, I had tricked myself out in these fancy body mods. Got the muscles and everything, and for a good price. I know that guy at the store. But here was my toad of a brother bringing home this gorgeous chick. I mean, she ain’t Sandra Yen, but she was okay, right? And she was all over him: Georgie this, and Georgie that. That was my brother’s name—George. George Pascal Fleur. So I was jealous, but I was real nice to her. I mean, me and George respected each other generally. But he sort of noticed how I was feeling, and after she left he asked if did I think I could have flexed my arms a little more, or did I need more light to show off my rez coating. We sort of got into it, then and there, and George storms out, and I follow him out, yelling. He’s only got basic adaptation, so he can’t stay outside very long, so he’s hurrying away, but I pretend like he’s running from me, and I call him chicken and idiot and stuff. And then, about halfway down the street from the house, he stops.”
Vincenze’s torch went out. He cast aside the handle, and reached into his backpack and got out another. Pazachoff still wasn’t looking at him, but he could tell, sort of by the way the guy was holding himself, that he was listening. Vincenze shook the other torch hard, and it lit up. He turned back to melting the so-called snow.
“George stops, and I figure that he’s had about as much as he’s going to take of my lip, and he’s deciding what to do next. I figure I’ll save him the trouble, and I come after him, giving him hell the whole way. And when I get to him, I give him a big shove. Boy, I was mad. I give him a big shove. And he topples over. Falls right over, like I had pushed a statue. Damnedest thing. And when he hits the ground, he just shatters. Like he was made of glass. Shatters into about a thousand pieces. It was the damnedest thing.”
“Did you sweep him up or anything?” Pazachoff asked. Still he did not turn to face Vincenze.
“I sort of . . . look, I was mad,” said Vincenze. “I guess I tore into that pile of him, of George, I mean. I guess I sort of kicked him all apart . . . that pile of my brother on the ground there.”
“Jesus,” said Pazachoff. “Your own brother.”
“Well, I talked to Funk about it,” Vincenze said. “He told me it wouldn’t have mattered if I had like swept him all up or anything. There was nothing to be done. There was nothing I could do.”
“Still,” Pazachoff said. “Your own brother.”
“You don’t think I haven’t thought about that?” asked Vincenze. “It was like . . . it wasn’t real, or something. Like it was something I had dreamed up because I was so mad. I thought it was just my imagination or . . . hell, I don’t know what I thought. I wished it hadn’t gone like that, though. The last thing he probably heard was me screaming at him like a lunatic. What must he have thought?”
“He don’t think nothing now,” said Pazachoff.
“Do you think it’s true?” Vincenze said. “That we just die? And that’s it?”
“How the fuck would I know?” Pazachoff said.
“I mean, a guy needs closure, you know? I didn’t get any closure. It’s still all open.”
They felt the pressure wave from an explosion, and then two rockets streaked by overhead. A few seconds later, there were more explosions.
“Shit,” said Pazachoff, “here they come.”
“We’d better get out of here,” Vincenze said.
“Where the hell was you planning on going?” said Pazachoff. “We’re surrounded.”
“Shit,” said Vincenze.
“Keep your torch lit,” Pazachoff said, “until the last minute.”
“Then what do we do?” asked Vincenze.
Pazachoff finally looked his way. And he was smiling. The light from the torch reflected off the teeth in his big grin.
“We get closure,” he said. “That’s what we do.”
Thirty-eight
Leo watched Aubry softly crying. Probably thinking of her mother, since she just mentioned her, Leo thought. You don’t have to make an A with me, kid. You already passed with flying colors. He reached over and gave Aubry’s shoulder a squeeze.
“Settle in, kid,” he said. “We’re a good twenty hours away from where we’re going. If you want, I’ll show you how to take a pee in these bubbles.”
“My pellicle can take care of that,” Aubry said, sniffing up her tears. “It’s good for three days reprocessing all my body waste. After that—”
“After that, you’d better take a really good dump, huh? I’ve got basically the same setup.”
“I thought
Earthlings didn’t use waste management,” Aubry said.
“It’s been a long time since I lived on Earth,” Leo replied. “I was younger than you when we left.”
“Can I ask you a personal question?” said Aubry, her voice getting stronger.
“Sure.”
“How come you’re so short?”
She looked up at Leo, probably to make sure she hadn’t offended him. Leo smiled back at her. “This is on purpose,” he said. “I’m Integument-adapted. Being smaller lets me get into a lot of places a bigger person can’t, as you’ve seen. But I am also adapted for some of the higher-spin-rate bolsas. I can go anywhere on the Met—with complete freedom.”
“You’re high-gravity-adapted?”
“It ain’t gravity, kid, it’s centrifugal force. And I can take about twenty gees without passing out.”
“There’s places in the Met where things weight twenty times normal?”
“Sure. Special processing plants and the like. And garbage compactors.”
“Have you been there?”
“I’m like a rat, kid,” Leo replied. “I go everywhere in the Met.”
“You’re not a rat,” Aubry said. He could tell she was drifting off again. “More like a leprechaun. Did you ever go to the outer system?”
“Kid,” said Leo, “I haven’t left the Met in twelve e-years, and that’s a fact. I like it here.”
“But before that?”
“Yeah, I lived on Europa for a while,” Leo replied. “But I don’t belong out there. I belong here, in the Met. I’m not going to let the bad guys take this away from me.”
He gestured out at the sluice, and the luminescent air bubbles that surrounded theirs—all headed at breakneck speed to maintain the ecological balance.
“It’s rip as all hell,” Leo said. “Wouldn’t you agree?”
“It’s . . . rip,” said Aubry. She settled into his arm crook again, and this time she really did fall asleep soundly.
Rip or not, he had to get her out of there.
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