Freefall

by Joshua David Bellin

  Actually, now that I look at the place, it’s hard to believe large-scale predators could exist here at all. Hard to believe such a thing could have evolved in so harsh an environment, with nothing to feed on and nowhere to hide from the onslaught of the sun. Unless evolution has been supercharged by the UV barrage, you’d think anything that tried to live would have melted back into the soup before it had a chance to grow up. Tau Ceti e was supposed to be a young planet, an unfinished planet—a planet that could go either way, depending on fate and corponational ingenuity. But as I study this place in the light of a star that for the moment can’t kill me, it looks less like a planet in embryo than one on the verge of extinction. Not clay ready for the sculptor’s hands, but ash awaiting the gust of wind that’ll blow it back into the universal dust.

  I can’t be the first person aboard the Executor to notice this. If it’s occurred to me, a guy who squeaked past the Worlds of Wonder module of the OCP only thanks to some very dedicated cheating, it must have occurred to Conroy and his geek squad. It must have occurred to half the other passengers as well—including Griff. They must be asking the same questions I’m asking right now.

  Where do the night creatures come from? What are they doing on this barren world? How have they managed to survive?

  And with our ship so completely incapacitated, how long can we last against them?

  My breath escapes in a rush as something launches itself out of the mist right at me, as if it’s the answer to my question. It moves so fast, and I’m so busy jerking away, I don’t get a good look at it, seeing nothing but spidery limbs and a maw erupting with teeth like nails. It glances off the window, but it can’t break through an alloy designed to withstand the impact of asteroids. It returns for another assault before spinning and vanishing into the fog. Dimly, I see other shapes moving below, shapes that seem little more than mist. And I hear the sound of them hammering the ship, percussion after percussion making the hull groan.

  They’ve never attacked the ship before. And they’ve always waited for full dark to appear. But both of those things have changed.

  They’re out there right now.

  And they’re obviously trying to find a way to get in.

  Earth, 2150

  Upperworld

  When the first pictures of Tau Ceti e appeared on the worldlink, everyone said it looked just like Earth.

  That’s what the banners said, too: Earth in the Making! Our Home Away from Home! Personally, I didn’t think it looked like much of anything, only a tiny, faint bluish dot in the middle of empty space. But I could understand why people would say that. People always see what they want to see.

  And so I wondered what people said when they saw me. Did they say, He looks just like Cam?

  Maybe I did. Maybe, to the rest of the Upperworld, I looked the same.

  But I wasn’t the same.

  The girl’s face was burned into my consciousness. Her golden eyes stared at me in my dreams. The red dot on her forehead glowed like a heart. And the daytime was no better. Her face showed up in the faces of everyone I saw, as if she’d stepped off the screen and become a video overlay of my entire waking life. I didn’t know her name—I always thought of her as Sumati’s little sister, or daughter, or secretary—but whenever I thought of her, I knew I had to find her.

  I also knew that the whole idea was crazy. I didn’t need my two best friends to tell me that—and, after that day with Griff in his room, I vowed never to talk to either of them about her again. I knew there was no chance for me to meet a girl from halfway around the world, one single girl who lived in the midst of one Lowerworld city or another, who probably didn’t speak my language and certainly didn’t share my history or my future. The colonization was only seven months away, and travel between Upperworld and Lowerworld, which had never been easy except for corponational officials, had become practically unthinkable as CanAm and the other Upperworld corponations tightened security measures. The next trip I was taking was off-planet—and when I took that trip, I wouldn’t be coming back. I knew it was crazy to dream about meeting a girl who was supported by Terrarist networks, even if I didn’t believe, couldn’t believe, that she was a Terrarist herself. But whether she was or wasn’t, I’d never find her, and the only chance I’d have of seeing her again was if she showed up on the weekly tally of Lowerworld radicals who’d been earmarked by INTERCOLPA for execution.

  That thought made me crazier than almost anything else. The thought that I would never meet her, never get a chance to learn what she was trying to tell me—and then she’d be gone, dangling from a rope in some SubCon square, her sightless eyes bulging and her black braid lopped off to be flung spitefully to the crowd. And I’d be expected to nod approvingly and get on with my life now that she was gone and her people—I always thought of them as her people, even though Sumati’s name was the one she herself used—couldn’t interfere with the Otherworld colonization anymore. We were enemies, and once she was gone, I would never discover whether we might have been anything else.

  That thought made me even crazier.

  I scoured the worldlink, hoping to find out where she was, though I knew that wherever she was, it was too far away. Maybe I wasn’t trying to find her so much as I was trying to find proof that a guy like me and a girl like her could live in the same world. But every place I looked, all I found was the same Two Worlds propaganda, hammering home endlessly that the Lowerworld was the source of all the planet’s problems and we’d be living in a paradise as soon as we left them behind for good. Without teachers—the Upperworld had gotten rid of them right from the start, along with classrooms and libraries and textbooks, all of which were unnecessary drains on prosperity—there was no one I could ask for an alternate version of events, nowhere I could turn with my questions and doubts. Classification had been about soaking up Two Worlds History and securing a lower-echelon corponational station by age twenty-one. ColPrep was about following orders—or getting an extra-heavy boot in your face when you didn’t. My parents I saw three seconds a week if I was lucky, when I happened to pass them in the hallway going in and out of our apartment. But it wouldn’t have been any different if we’d sat around the dinner table every night like we used to. My dad’s access code had gotten me nothing but more JIPOC banners and slogans. If he didn’t believe everything they said, then nobody did.

  And from what I could tell, everybody did.

  I’d take the moving walkway through the Two Worlds Center on my way to ColPrep, see everyone glued to their controllers and headsets, involved in their worldlink sessions or chats, and I’d get the strangest sense of distance, like I wasn’t seeing actual people but simulations, holographic images on the link. Nobody was real to me. My oldest friend had become a risk to avoid, part of the chatter that played constantly over the lines and screens of the Upperworld, telling me to ignore, deny, revel in my own good fortune and forget about everything else. My second-oldest friend had never said anything like that to me, but he was just as much a danger as Adrian—in fact, he was even more, since it was entirely possible he knew what I was really looking for that day in his room. I felt rootless, like I didn’t belong anywhere. I wasn’t part of the Lowerworld—I couldn’t imagine that, or at least, when I tried to, all I saw was her—but I wasn’t part of the Upperworld, either. The only person who I felt would understand what was happening to me was the girl. She, I was sure, would see who I really was.

  She already had. And I desperately needed her to tell me what she’d seen.

  So I kept searching. I watched the link night and day. I blew off training sessions, and I suffered the trainers’ wrath and my own body’s rebellion the few times I did bother to show up. I slept—when I slept—with her image before my eyes, always there to remind me she existed, always there to remind me she was lost to me. In my dreams, I stood face-to-face with her, listening to the words she spoke—and though I couldn’t understand what she said, I’d wake up believing she’d told me something too impo
rtant to forget. I’d start the new day exactly where I’d finished the old, desperate to crack the riddle, praying the truth would be revealed the next time I brought up the feed.

  But I found nothing.

  And then, one day, she found me.

  • • •

  I woke up with my face plastered to the controller, an urgent call jangling in my ear. I realized I’d fallen asleep at the link. My mouth tasted stale and gummy from the night, and my head pounded. I reached blindly for my selfone and discovered it was Griff. We hadn’t talked in weeks.

  “Earth to Cam.” His voice came through the ether. “You watching this, Cam?”

  “Mm,” I mumbled.

  “Dude, you’re a wreck,” he said with a laugh. “Check this out.” He sent me the link he was so eager for me to see. I blinked, clearing sleep from my eyes, and then I gasped.

  “Historic, huh?” Griff said.

  It was her.

  I stared, speechless, as the screen on my bedroom wall filled with her face. She sat at a long wooden table, hands folded neatly on the top. They had a mike on her, and beside her sat Sumati, with her own mike. Both of them wore their purple robes, braided with gold. Her eyes flashed, and her teeth were sheer white when she spoke.

  “It is a great honor,” she said in perfect English but with an appealing lilt. “We wish to thank the Upperworld corponations who have offered us this chance to participate in the discourse of Otherworld colonization.”

  She talked like that, formal, as if she was reading from a script. But though she was speaking my language at last, her words didn’t make sense in my half-conscious state. Discourse of Otherworld colonization? Great honor? Chance to participate? In what?

  “Is this a secure channel?” I asked Griff.

  “We wouldn’t be watching if it wasn’t,” he shot back. “I learned my lesson the last time, bro.”

  I mumbled something, half apology, half nonsense. “Then how did Sumati . . . ?”

  “They’ve opened up all the channels to the Lowerworlders. To announce the symposium.”

  Now it was Griff’s words that didn’t make sense.

  “We have been disappointed by the response to our petitions thus far,” the girl was saying on the screen. She spoke with a smile in her voice that barely touched her lips. “But we had faith that, with patience and persistence, the whole world would come to appreciate the justice of our cause.”

  “What do you want from this symposium?” a voice shouted from off screen.

  “A seat at the table,” she responded immediately. Sumati, I noticed, sat mutely behind her own microphone, heavy hands resting on the tabletop like two wooden weights. “An opportunity to discuss the grievances of the Lowerworld, and the prospects for an equitable, collaborative colonization. One that benefits all of humankind, not the select few.”

  I stared, the words beginning to make sense. But I could hardly believe I was hearing them. Mostly I watched her, and my heart soared.

  “There was a demonstration,” Griff said. “A major one. With, like, millions of protestors. There’ve been smaller demonstrations across the Lowerworld for weeks. All about colonization. Some of the speakers have been from the Upperworld, worldlink stars and stuff. Criticizing how exclusive the colonization protocol has been. Lots of arrests. But it’s kind of tough to arrest twenty million people.”

  I said nothing, just watched her face. I couldn’t believe I’d been searching the link for weeks and I’d missed all of this. Probably none of it had made the licensed channels. But it didn’t matter, I told myself. All that mattered was that she was here now.

  “Cons Piracy has been supporting the Lowerworld protests,” Griff went on. “They hacked some key systems, threatened to go public with what they found, and that made the Upperworld corponations antsy. So CanAm and the others finally decided it was time to sit down with representatives from the Lowerworld. It was getting, I don’t know, politically difficult for them? If there’s still anything like politics. It was an embarrassment, at least. Bad for business. This whole symposium is probably some big PR move.”

  “Where’s it going to be?”

  “That’s the thing,” Griff’s voice came. “Right here. In New York CITI. At the old UN building. They’re bringing representatives from all the Lowerworld corponations, plus Sumati and her people. It’s gonna be huge.”

  Heart pounding, I asked, “Is it open to the public?”

  “Is anything?”

  “I’m going,” I said.

  “Yeah, sure, me too. Want to book the next bullet?”

  “I’m serious, Griff. I’m going.”

  Griff was quiet for a long time. The feed had frozen, and I studied the eyes of the girl on the link. She stared straight back at me, the way she always did, the way she had of reaching out through the screen to enter my world. Now that I was finally watching her on a crystal clear Upperworld channel, I saw that her eyes were even more striking than I’d imagined: eyes of pure gold, reflecting every color I could think of.

  She was coming to the Upperworld. Against all odds, she was coming to me. New York CITI was the closest she’d be to my home by thousands of kilometers. I could do this. I had to.

  As if reading my mind, Griff came back on. “Sounds like a blast. When do we leave?”

  Otherworld

  Earth Year 3151

  Night

  It’s weeks before I’m sent out on my first patrol. I’m not sure if that’s a precaution—to protect me, to protect the mission—or your typical bureaucratic red tape. Whatever, one evening I’m hanging out in the weight room, rebuilding muscle in my injured arm, when one of the nameless gray-suited minions of Chairman Conroy comes up to me and tags me for the night’s patrol. No training, no instructions. Just grab a breathing mask, a helmet, and a flashlight from the commissary, meet my partner by Airlock Alpha 11 at shift change, and go. No weapon. I ask the girl at the window for a gun, but all I get is a frown. I guess they’re playing it safe about that.

  For a solid week after their first assault on the Executor, the creatures pounded away at the hull the moment the sun fell, moving too quickly to blast with the ion pistols we tried to use in place of our (nonfunctional) plasma cannons. Eventually, though, they must have realized they weren’t getting in that way, and since then there’s been no sign of them. No one thinks that means they’ve gone away for good, though. But Adrian’s dad is using the breathing room to put a new plan into effect, one that involves planting what amounts to an electric fence around the ship. With a vessel the size of the Executor, that’s going to take forever, even with the crews going out around the clock. Still, the chairman has a plan, and when the chairman has a plan, your best bet is to stick your head up your ass and not ask questions.

  My partner for tonight’s patrol, I discover when I arrive at the airlock, is Adrian. I don’t ask questions about that, either.

  I haven’t seen him since the first night. Seen him to talk to, I mean. I’ve seen him around, but I’m not about to interrupt him in the middle of some drill or routine or whatever he does. I’m not sure what he does. Like everyone who’s out of their pods and assigned to Conroy’s patrols, he seems to move around a lot. With most people, that just looks like nervous energy. But maybe the commander’s son has more of a purpose than the rest of us.

  He throws me a look. I nod back. I’m excited to get out of the tin can—that’s what everyone around the ship calls it—even if it means spending time with two of my least favorite organisms in the universe. You have no idea how stir-crazy you get when you’re trapped with tens of thousands of other people who are suffering from the same toxic blend of boredom and anxiety as you are. My arm feels good, better than ever in fact thanks to my self-designed rehab. For a long time, longer than you’d think from an injury that didn’t damage nerve or bone, the arm felt weak, uncoordinated. The PMP who was assigned to my case—or spying on me, depending—wondered at our first follow-up session if that had anything to do with the creat
ure’s venom, but obviously he didn’t care that much, because he never ordered labs or anything. Not that I showed up for any of my other appointments after he wasted my time on the first one. But after a month or so, the numbness in my arm went away on its own, and after that the PMP vanished from my life the way you can aboard a ship that’s as cold and anonymous as the rest of the Upperworld always was.

  Adrian’s been out on patrol multiple times since he and Griff found me. Griff tells me Chairman Conroy wants his son to set a good example, to prove no one’s above doing the grunt work. All part of the chairman’s attempt to spin the colossal blunder of landing a nonfunctional starship on this prime piece of space estate. But Adrian’s as much a rookie as me when it comes to planting the perimeter fence. He’s got about fifty of the fence posts, meter-long aluminum poles topped by silver-and-black flags, stacked on a little nonmotorized cart, and the look in his baby blues belies the sleepy arrogance on his face.

  He’s scared. And I don’t blame him. But I can’t begin to think of a way to say that to him.

  Adrian clears the airlock. “Let’s move.” I hear his voice inside my headset, distorted by the microphone in his breathing mask. He rolls the cart down the ramp, with me following right behind.

  We step out onto the planet surface. Shadows swirl around us. I can’t tell if something’s moving in the dark, or if our flashlights are rearranging the mist. Now that I’ve seen the planet by day, I’m not sure if it’s completely solid or partly gaseous. If the latter, it won’t make much difference what we do about the night creatures. It’ll only be a matter of time before the ship is pulled all the way under.