Remains

by Mark W. Tiedemann

  She followed the pedistry out of the mall and down along a stream that paralleled the way to the shunt station. A long strip of dwarf conifers lined the walkway. She looked up, at the opposite side of Aea, hazed by over six kilometers’ distance, and felt secure, enveloped by the world.

  She bumped into someone and stepped back, instantly apologetic. The man gave her an odd look, but shrugged and said it was all right, and continued on. Nemily, embarrassed, watched him walk on in the direction from which she had come.

  As she was about to turn away, she saw something. For a moment she was not sure what had caught her attention. But then she noticed the man who had been looking at her through the shop window. He stood at the edge of the pedistry, hands in pockets, admiring the view down-shaft.

  Nemily resumed her path to the shunt station. After a dozen strides, she turned again, glancing over her shoulder. The man from the shop window was trailing after her. He turned his head a bit too sharply, then wandered toward the grassy border of the walkway. In a moment he looked as if he had been standing there like that all along.

  All sense of security left her. She tucked her package under her arm and walked directly to the station. As she reached the stairs she looked back and saw him coming toward the station entrance.

  Nemily joined a crowd on the platform waiting for the next car. A tingle cascaded over her shoulders and down her spine; she gave a start when the shunt slid up with a heavy rush of air. The doors opened and passengers shuffled on board, quietly finding seats. Nemily took one just inside the door and watched the rest file past. Her shadow was one of the last five to come aboard. He did not appear to even glance at her, but made his way toward a seat at the rear of the car.

  She considered getting off just as the doors closed. In Lunase, she knew, there might be two or three shadows, backups just in case she might try to slip one. Here she was not sure. Security on Aea was so much less obtrusive than in Lunase, so much so that until today she had forgotten about it. But to Nemily, now that she thought about it, that only meant that they were better.

  Perhaps she was mistaken. He might well be no more than a fellow Aean and she had taken his otherwise innocent movements as signs of intent.

  The doors closed and the shunt moved on.

  She did not get off in segment three. Passengers left, new ones came aboard, but her shadow remained in his seat, seeming to pay no attention to her. The shunt moved into segment four. He did not get off at the first stop.

  At the second stop she exited. Few people got off here. She hurried across the sparsely peopled platform toward the stairs.

  Mounds of dirt heaped around the station entrance gave the impression of ongoing construction. A small sign announced a new park under development, but Nemily saw no equipment. People sprawled against the piles of earth, talking, eating, treating the landscape with the evident familiarity of long use. The boundary of the proposed park separated it from clusters of prefab general housing units called assemblages. Nemily threaded her way along use-created paths and into the collection. People gathered in small groups near the entrances to several of the housing assemblages or sat on benches that lined the pedistries.

  She had lived in one of these units during her first months on Aea. They were little more than large boxes attached to smaller boxes containing the plumbing and service attachments connected to Aea’s general utility systems. Cheap housing, Aea exported them throughout the solar system. Ideal for orbitals. Nemily had even seen them in Lunase and had heard of them being used on Mars. On the moon they were called air holes; on Mars, shanties.

  She found a vacant bench and sat down. She looked back in the direction of the shunt station, half expecting to see her shadow strolling toward her. Distant laughter ruffled the stillness. She saw no one approaching. She decided to wait a bit, till she was calmer.

  The whir of approaching tractors drew her attention. From antispin-ward came a column of three machines, all painted in the blue and white of Structural Authority. Workers clung to them, riding on the running boards.

  “Shit!” someone shouted.

  Across the pedistry from her, Nemily saw a woman in a doorway, glaring at the tractors. After a moment she ducked inside. Nemily heard more shouting from within the assemblage.

  A group of people burst from the assemblage and headed toward the vehicles. It looked for a moment like neither would stop, but the vehicles slowed to a halt, the whine of the motors spinning down to a low hum. People in Structural Authority uniforms climbed from the lead cab and met the group of residents.

  Up and down the length of the pedistry, people came out to watch.

  The two groups spoke in quiet tones for a time. Then, suddenly, one of the residents threw his arms out in an exasperated gesture.

  “No! Damn it, those are people’s homes!”

  Nemily automatically looked up at the roof of the assemblage, suddenly understanding. Nesters.

  Abruptly, the SA people returned to their vehicles, leaving the resident group to watch as the tractors moved toward the nearest assemblage.

  The tractors extruded heavy arms that clamped onto the walls. Then, like improbable insects, they began to climb. When they reached the roofline, four stories up, they disappeared from sight. In a minute she heard more shouts and a few screams, mingled with the snap and metallic pop of destruction. People appeared at the edge of the roof. Some climbed down to the balconies around the lower level.

  Construction of new domiciles never kept up with need. Often people built their own living spaces on the roofs of the assemblages, against SA regulations. From time to time, Structural Authority was forced to clear away the substandard and dangerous structures.

  People converged on the lead SA vehicle. Nemily searched the crowd anxiously but could not see her shadow. She slid off the bench and hurried in the direction from which the SA column had come.

  It was a long walk to the next shunt station. She was sweating and exhausted as she slumped to her seat on an upshaft-bound car. She squeezed her package to her breast, as if it were an icon that proved somehow that she belonged here. She had not been so frightened in a long time.

  Nemily let herself into her apartment and locked the door. She dropped her case and the package on the bed and went to the kitchen. One last bottle of Aean merlot was in the refrigerator. She eased out of her shoes, loosened her collar, and sat on her small balcony, back against the door, ankles crossed and dangling over the edge. She was calmer now; fear never seemed to cling to her the way it did to the unmodified. She took a mouthful of wine and tried to find a way in which Linder Koeln’s interrogation and the man who had followed her had not been a threat.

  Her association with Glim Toler, as circumstantial and unwelcome as it had been, threatened her continued life on Aea. She believed that, could see no other way to interpret today’s events. Koeln was security— Lunessa as well—and all security dealt in threat and punishment. They were more polite about it here, but she could not see how they could really be different. The unwanted, the inconvenient, suffered here just as they did everywhere; watching the SA tractors tearing down the Nester assemblages confirmed that.

  She gazed up at the arch of the world and shuddered at the prospect of leaving it.

  She considered her options. There were many mining and manufacturing platforms that formed loose clusters around the L4 and L5 points, several near Aea itself, but almost none of them were independent. She would have to choose a corporation and pledge loyalty to it as if it were a state. She had had enough of that in Lunase. Compdon Orbital was independent, but resource-starved by virtue of being so far from the main traffic routes between the moon, the manufacturing orbitals, and the Belt. It offered too little to trade and had to accept what was left unabsorbed by the rest. It lay out beyond the L2 point, the moon directly between it and Earth. Compdon’s population of fifteen thousand lived under constant austerity measures, little more than a military enclave that from time to time stole drone shipments of
ore or partially processed material. They made loud noises against the megacorporations and generally shunned everyone else. Better to go back to Lunase than live like that.

  Elfor and Brasa both seemed like viable alternatives to Aea, both big orbitals, nearly as old as Aea, neither owned outright by any single corporation. Brasa was the larger of the two, but Elfor was closer, less than eight thousand kilometers from Aea, Brasa much further away, over near the L5 point on the opposite side of the moon. But she had met Brasans and Elfors—loud, brash, eccentric. Elfors constantly criticized Aea, which led her to think that Elfor was less than they claimed; Brasans were arrogant to the point of insufferability which seemed to have no basis in anything until she learned about the religious foundations of Brasa. Brasans felt they were special, Elfors wanted to feel that way; Brasans saw the universe as one great orbital constructed by even greater hands, Elfors wanted to be those hands; Brasans thought they could learn nothing from anyone else, Elfors seemed incapable of learning anything. The places themselves might be environmentally wonderful, but the thought of sharing them with their inhabitants stifled any desire to visit them, much less live in them.

  Mars-Earth Transit was in its first decade of construction at the midpoint between Earth and Mars, intended eventually to replace Midline, which still resisted the idea that it might either merge with the larger platform or become a secondary stop, a sideline, but was still just a glorified shipping transfer station, an immense frame with fuel cells, construction shacks, waldos and dollys, and the rough outline of what might one day be the largest artificial worldlet in the solar system. There would certainly be work for her there and good compensation, probably no more prejudice than she found on Aea. But it would be all struts, beams, environmental pods, and open space. No grass, no open water, no dirt paths, no—

  —no pretense of living on the surface of a world. Which left Mars. But Mars was little better than the moon. Sealed domes, underground warrens, containment, and the social conditions born of constant restraint. Burroughs, she heard, had a parkland, Helium a flowing stream. But she imagined it to be more or less like the green sections in Lunase, big rooms with rows of hydroponics troughs burgeoning with plants under bright sunlamps. In time the environment would change—was changing already, the atmosphere thickening from outgassing of factories and the growing human presence, and the expanding network of enclaves that could not help but alter any environment around them— and could one day be better than Aea. In time.

  The Belt was out of the question. They had sold her to Lunase in the first place. She knew almost nothing about them except as lists of available materials for cracking, synthesis, and recombination, the needs of the alchemists. Perhaps she misjudged them, but their one act on her behalf—sparing her life only to exile her—deterred any further interest.

  The only remaining option would be Ganymede, but that was no more than a toehold, a couple of pressure domes and a few hundred people just beginning to build a home. There was a certain romance to it, a frontier attraction; perhaps being in on it at the start would offer advantages, a sense of daring and accomplishment. But that was not the kind of life Nemily wanted. She like finished places, warm doms, open air, civilization. The seductiveness of frontiers fascinated her the way anything dangerous or horrible fascinates people, cathartic reification of past or future struggles, the details humbling reminders of the cost of safety. People who embraced the risk and pushed the boundaries frightened her just a little, as if were they denied new fields to walk and change they would turn on the things already whole, tear them apart so they could rebuild them once again, just so they might have purpose. She was glad they had somewhere else to go.

  Feasibility studies were still being conducted on Venus and exploratory drones buzzed about in Titan’s thick atmosphere, but both places were decades from any kind of development and Nemily personally thought Venus was an impossible hope.

  A couple of dozen other small stations peppered space between Mars and here, most of them research facilities or shipping transfers that rotated staff. Those seemed less safe after the unexplained destruction of two of them in the past year and a half. Cassidy and Five-Eight, each with populations over a thousand, had broken apart for no apparent reason. The panic and outrage had died down, but their loss had created an undercurrent of fear.

  Earth, of course, was utterly out of the question, but for no reason Nemily fully understood. The Exclusion seemed ancient to her, perhaps to most citizens of Signatory Space, but its impact still dominated life. Early in the twenty-first century, the orbital habitats that eventually became Aea, Brasa and the rest declared political independence from Earth. As it was told in Temple, the offworlders turned their backs on the mother world, rejecting the demands Gaia made on them. What little actual history Nemily knew suggested that trade talks broke down and what amounted to a strike was called throughout the offworld habitats. The details were vague, even in the few Aean texts she had read. Not that it mattered—knowing precisely what happened and why changed nothing—but she got the impression that a growing isolationist movement on Earth itself coincided with the rupture, culminating in a global boycott of space. Over a period of several years, the Exclusion shut down all traffic to and from the surface of Earth. For a short time Earth shipped transports full of undesirables offworld to let the overburdened habitats try to cope, but then even that ended. Temple lore blamed the arrogance of the orbitals. This then became Gaia’s punishment. Once again, humans were shut out of the garden. Some interaction continued, mostly illegal, and a large black market had developed dealing in contraband—vacuum—purportedly of Earth origin, but the practical result was that the orbitals, including the infant colonies on Mars and the moon, suffered years of hard struggle to secure their long-term survivability Now people largely ignored Earth—publicly, at least.

  No. Out of all the places she could live, Aea and its half million people offered what she wanted. She needed to stay here.

  Her eyes stung and she wiped at them. Tears. “That bastard,” she murmured, unsure who she meant, Koeln or Toler.

  PolyCarb was not Aea. Or maybe it was. Tower, BioSim and Inder-soll-Mech owned Lunase and said so and ran it through SetNetComb. Four million people, all working for the company store. “Don’t like the rules,” the joke ran, “there’s the airlock, and leave the pressure suit on your way out, it belongs to the Combine.” Aea seemed different. Structural Authority was an independent body, partly elected, partly appointed; perhaps not representative in the mythic sense, but at least something that stood between the megas and the citizenry. But most of the appointed seats were PolyCarb people. PolyCarb was the largest single employer, so the votes tended to reflect company loyalties.

  She drained her glass and shuddered.

  Her comm chimed. She went inside and slapped the accept.

  “Nem? Reese.”

  The screen remained blank and she saw that she had left on her vid block. She left it on. “Reese, hi.”

  “Is this a bad time?”

  “Depends. What do you want?”

  “Oh, I thought you might be interested in attending a party tonight at 5555. But you sound grumpy.”

  “I am. Is there a special reason you’re asking me?”

  “Yes. I have a small favor to ask. But mainly I just wanted to invite you. There’s a special event I’m hosting and I thought you might like to be one of the chosen few to see it.”

  “What sort of favor? I don’t ghost anymore, Reese.”

  “I know, but—well, it’s up to you, but you might want to hear the details before you say no.”

  Nemily sighed. She had worked for Reese briefly after she had first arrived on Aea. He owned legitimate businesses, but occasionally he skirted the edge of legality. She hesitated to tell him no, though. Reese had been useful to her—he had helped her get a better apartment and a better job and had given her good advice on getting along in Aea—and he could be a necessary resource in coming days. But the cos
t of his help might be steeper than the problem.

  “I already have plans.”

  “Maybe you could add this to them.”

  “What time?”

  She could hear the smile in his voice. “Around twenty-four.”

  “Some of us have to work, Reese.”

  “I’ve got some stims you can take home with you if you need them. This really is something you would hate to miss.”

  “I’ll think about it. What’s the event?”

  “You have to come to find out.”

  “And the favor?”

  “Not over the comm, Nem.”

  “Ah.”

  “Is everything all right?”

  “Everything’s eccentric, Reese.”

  “Well. Anything I can do to help...”

  “Thanks, Reese. I just might take you up on that.”

  She broke the connection and went to refill her glass.

  She checked the time—seventeen-forty—and tried to think about something else, anything other than Koeln and PolyCarb and the possibility of asking Reese for help.

  Dinner at nineteen.

  She wondered if she should tell Mace Preston what had happened and ask what could he do to help her should it come to expulsion and immediately felt ashamed of the thought. It was a survival response, looking for options, a process that seemed automatic and ungoverned, but she did not want to use Mace.

  She stripped out of her clothes and went to the shower.

  Of course, if he offered...

  Nine – AEA, 2118

  “LINDER KOELN IS RETURNING YOUR CALL.”

  “Ask him to wait, please,” Mace told Helen. “Do you have that search protocol ready for me, Helen?”

  “Of course. Toler, Glim. Encoding complete, the program is running. Initial results negative.”

  “Hmm. I didn’t expect his name to just pop up on an admission document.”

  “Of course you didn’t.”