by Nagle, Pati
She had, how long, a few months more at most? He wasn’t in records, he didn’t know the frequency of audit. Only the certainty. All the Upshot knew. And that woman had sent a downside innocent into this all unaware, purely for camouflage, a placeholder to distract attention for a while, until authority caught up. She would have known when the next audit was due; likely she timed all this to happen immediately after the last, to buy her the maximum time to slip away with her lover. Planets are large; even a cooperative government might struggle to locate two people who’ve had time and motivation to bury themselves in new identities far from the Upshot compound.
Meanwhile, this girl, authority would know exactly where to find her. And would come, detain and question. She would confess; she could do nothing else, and it didn’t matter anyway. Her body would speak against her.
And then—after how long, how many days of terror and despair?—they would put her in the ’Chute, and send her nowhere. The body would be a discard, recorded, preserved, as they all are; her self would be lost information, deleted, irrecoverable. She’d be dead.
People called them immortal, the downsiders did, but they were very wrong. Everyone dies, in the end. Accident, negligence, deliberate choice: their own, or someone else’s.
Everyone dies; everyone lies. He said, “Don’t worry, nothing terrible will happen. Just be careful, and don’t let it slip to anyone else. You’re with me now, I’ll look after you.” Ready to catch her, should she fall. “We’ll move on soon; if we just keep moving for a while, we can leave trouble behind, and give you enough real planets to talk about, you won’t even have to remember you’ve got anything to hide. I promise. We’ll ask about work tomorrow, register as willing to transit. Meantime—well, this is meant to be a rest day. Let’s do something wildly unrestful. . . “
So they did that, though she was tearful and needy, so little like the woman that he’d known these last months; and then he teased her, tempted her into showering and eating before he took her quietly back to bed and held her till she slept.
And lay awake all night, deliberately, standing vigil over his beloved; and in the morning, early, when she roused, he brought her coffee and bakies in bed.
When she rose, he had her flying-suit laid out and ready:
“Sun’s just coming up,” he said, “you could have an hour in that dawn wind you love so much, before we have to get serious. Could be your last chance; when a job comes up, they won’t hold it open if we don’t go stat.”
“Come with me?”
“Of course. When did I ever not?”
She purred at him, and wriggled into the suit’s cling. “Promise not to shout, if I go high?”
“Promise to be sensible, and I won’t shout. Of course, if the wind should happen suddenly to lift you higher than you were ready for, I’d have nothing to shout about, would I . . . ?”
“I might have to dive quite suddenly too, to correct for that.”
“So you might.”
∞
So they retraced their steps of last evening, through the clear shimmer of the dawn. When they reached the Tower of Souls he boosted her up to the ramp-platform, though she really didn’t need the help, and followed with a barely-graceless scramble.
They climbed the truncated spiral to the broad top, and he wondered aloud what the dirigibles would do when the logic of that spiralling ramp had brought the whole edifice to a point, to match the ’Chute it shadowed.
“Start another tower, of course,” she said. “Why not? They’ve made plenty for themselves.”
Which was true, of course, they had; dirigibles had few offspring and long lives, and there were nevertheless many towers. But none of those seemed to be finished, they were all works in progress, waiting on another death. This that they built for human discards had a necessary terminus, and he wasn’t sure how they would deal with that.
Still, at least he wouldn’t be here to learn.
He checked her impellers and webbing one last time, and kissed her, and let her go.
She leapt from the tower, arms and legs astretch and impellers hissing. She caught the air, or her suit did; seized it, climbed it, conquered it.
Went high and higher, and he said not a word.
Surmounted the spire tip of the ’Chute, and higher yet.
Was a glory, a shimmering speck in sunlight, a mote of something lovely.
Until the impellers failed, all four of them at once, all at the utmost of her flying height.
He had no magnification, but he knew. Her voice would have been in his ears, screaming the news of it, but he’d killed the sound long since.
He knew the moment when it happened, and he knew what she did to save herself; how she spread her arms and legs to use the webbing as much as she could, to drag what little speed she could from her disaster. How she tried to spiral down towards the tower, where he waited, ready to catch her if she fell. He was her solution; surely he would save her now.
How the webbing ripped loose in a second and final calamity, and then she had nothing that mattered: no hope, no steerage, nowhere to turn.
∞
He stood on the Tower of Souls, and watched her fall.
Suraki
Dave Trowbridge
It’s my only published short story; my education in that form was interrupted by the glamour of Silicon Valley.
∞ ∞ ∞
Taj was soaring. Free of the chains of gravity inside a bubble of stone high above the planet Sundara, he had just reached the peak of his climb when a small voice spoke in his ear.
“Time’s up.”
Taj groaned. He’d almost forgotten that the only real things he was experiencing were his sport-flying wings and the effort of using them. The rest was a cleverly programmed fiction in a firmly planet-bound simulator.
The color slowly began to fade out of the vine-tangled cliffs around him as the shutdown sequence began. Taj wheeled about and began a steep dive toward a grassy sphere far below, at the center of the orbital flight resort being reproduced by the simulator. At the last possible moment he opened his wings and, with a final burst of energy that he felt deep in his chest, swooped upward and firmly planted his feet. Then he ran his thumbs across his fingertips, flexing the control gloves in the shutdown sequence, and relaxed as his wings began to pull away from his arms and legs and fold into a compact bundle.
A mild dizziness washed through Taj as the gravity slowly increased back to normal. Suddenly the scene around him wavered, as though seen through running water, and dissolved into the gray dyplast interior of the simulator, leaving him standing on a small platform a bare meter off the scuffed deck of the sim. He could hear the dull whine of the wind generators subsiding. Behind him, the door clanked open.
“So, Taj, you ready for WingWorld?”
Taj twisted around, his collapsing wings still an awkward bundle on his back and legs, as Mari’s silvery voice echoed in the huge room. She smiled at him, her dark eyes sparkling.
“Huh?” Taj felt his face burn; Mari had replaced the dour old man who used to run the sim only a week ago, and he still felt tongue-tangled at the sight of her. It didn’t help that she treated him like a kid brother. “No, I’m going to Talajara. Didn’t Flugel tell you? Gee-Em invited me.”
Mari’s eyes widened. “The Talajara nuller? You know her?”
“Gee-Em was my name-day sponsor.” He waved an arm around at the sim. “And she’s the one who pays for this.” Emboldened by the sudden respect in Mari’s face, he added, “My dad says she may even sponsor me to the Academy on Minerva.”
“You’re very fortunate,” Mari said. Then she frowned. “But Talajara’s a highdwelling.”
Struck by the sudden doubt in her voice, Taj suddenly remembered that Mari herself was a highdweller, born in one of the huge cylindrical constructs in orbit around Sundara.
He shrugged, trying to project a confidence he didn’t feel. “So? It’s just bigger, and it rotates to make gees, instead of using a
big gravitor at the center. But up at the spin axis it’s low gees, just like WingWorld. Besides, the sim doesn’t have any highdwelling chips; Flugel said this would teach me what I needed to know.”
He swung the collapsed wing pack to the floor. “And I’ve been flying for five years now—this was just to get a feel for doing it in a real place, instead of a fantasy landscape.”
“I can tell,” she said. “Your shoulders and chest are as big as any of the fledgies’ in Aramapriya, where I grew up.” Mari shook her head. “But you’re a downsider, and so is Flugel. He—” She broke off politely as Taj’s boswell beeped. He looked down at the little datalink on his wrist and gasped.
“Gonna be late; my S’lift pod climbs in thirty minutes.” He picked up his wings and ran out. Mari called out after him, but the echoes from the interior of the sim muffled her voice, and all he heard was a single word.
It sounded like “Suraki.”
Somebody’s name?
Taj barely made it to the transtube in time: the doors squawked a warning at him as he flung himself into the transport. As it accelerated toward the S’lift, the immense cable that reached all the way from Sundara’s surface to the ring of highdwellings in orbit forty thousand kilometers above, Taj mulled over Mari’s reaction, struggling with an odd knot of emotions.
Your shoulders and chest are as big as any of the fledgies’ in Aramapriya . . . She’d said “fledgie”—a real flyer—instead of “eyaz”—someone yet to make their first flight. And the admiration in her voice had been a welcome change from his schoolmates’ teasing. It was bad enough that he was from a family newly raised to the Douloi aristocracy. What really set him apart were the wide shoulders and deep chest that the intense effort of flying had given him: the very opposite of the slender physique considered fashionable. But Mari didn’t mind that at all.
Then he remembered her next words.
But you’re a downsider . . . Her tone then had definitely not been admiring. His stomach twisted—how would people treat him up on Talajara? One reason he was looking forward to his visit to one of the highdwellings was that there a flyer was not a freak. But was being a downsider up there even worse than being a flyer down below?
When he got to the terminal, Taj grabbed his wing pack and ran to the waiting lift, which deposited him outside the towering S’lift pod just before its doors hissed shut. The steward’s voice was already droning through the usual emergency procedures as he found his seat.
“. . . accelerating at one-tenth gee for approximately forty minutes, during which time you will feel a bit heavier than normal . . .”
The pod lifted with an almost imperceptible shudder, climbing so slowly that it was almost a minute before the roof of the terminal finally cut off the sight of the crowded concourse.
But he hardly noticed. Would Gee-Em, his mysterious benefactor, really sponsor him to the Naval Academy on far-off Minerva, halfway across the Thousand Suns?
He’d never met Gee-Em, or not that he could remember, but he knew that her attendance at his name-day ritual a month after his birth had caused a sensation. Nullers—those rare humans able to adapt to permanent life in the weightlessness of null-gee—almost never descended to the surface of a planet. The centuries-long lifespan bestowed by null-gee—Gee-Em herself was over 350 years old—was too precious to risk: if the geebubble that kept them weightless failed, it would mean a swift and agonizing death in the crushing grip of planetary gravity.
Taj had no idea why she’d picked him out, alone of all her descendants in his generation. Her trust fund had financed his education and his flying, and now she had summoned him without explanation to her home up in Talajara.
The thought reminded him of her invitation, written in spidery handwriting on stiff, creamy paper, after the fashion favored by the Douloi for intimate communications.
. . . and I suggest that you view the orientation vid with great care on the way up, for life on a highdwelling is far different from what you have known.
At his touch a viewscreen extruded from the seat back in front of him. He selected the orientation and settled back to watch. At first the images of the highdwelling held his attention. It was a vast cylinder spinning about its long axis to create gravity. People lived on the inner surface in elegant buildings set amongst trees and greenery, and Taj found the idea of an inside-out world both beautiful and strange. But soon he was distracted by the breathtaking panorama out the viewport. The horizon curved off below a deep violet sky as the cloud-swirled surface of Sundara fell swiftly away.
“. . . The fact that gravity on a highdwelling is furnished by rotation rather than mass or a gravitor has some interesting consequences. For instance, ‘light’ objects actually fall faster than ‘heavy’ ones.”
Startled, Taj looked back at the screen, where a cartoon figure tossed a huge lump of orange foam off a platform with a flick of its wrists, then labored mightily to roll a small metal sphere off the edge after it.
“If you push equal masses of dyplast foam and lead away from the spin axis, where they are both weightless, the foam falls faster—that is, it falls along a shorter path and thus reaches the inner surface far sooner than the lead.” On the screen, the foam fell faster and faster as it descended, while the lead ball seemed to float lazily through the air.
“This is because the air within the highdwelling, which is, of course, rotating along with everything else, easily accelerates the lighter foam up to the rate of rotation so that it is immediately subject to spin-gravity. The heavier lead, on the other hand, is almost unaffected by the rotational wind, so it isn’t subject to the highdwelling’s spin-gravity. It falls in a long spiral and hits the surface long after the lighter foam.
“The difference is further exaggerated by the fact that the farther an object is from the spin axis—the lower it is—the heavier it gets, and the change with altitude is much greater than on a planet or in a gravitor-equipped habitat. This explains why the myth of Icarus, so familiar to downsiders, is—”
Taj grimaced and tabbed the vid off. That was the nickname the other students had stuck him with—Icky. It was a stupid story, anyway—a boy flying on wings made of wax and feathers that melted from the sun’s heat when he flew too high. Everyone knew you couldn’t fly like that on a planet—people were too heavy.
“This mudfoot vid is boring,” said a boy behind him.
“It’s eight hours to the Node,” replied a girl, whose voice sent a shiver of delight through Taj and pulled him out of his thoughts. “What do you want to do?”
“Let’s go up to the salon and see what kind of games they’ve got.”
As they passed, she glanced at Taj and smiled briefly, and he saw that she was, if possible, even prettier than her voice: long, straight dark hair, high cheekbones, and a perfect dark olive high-caste complexion.
Taj hesitated. They were obviously highdwellers—the reference to the vid as “mudfoot” in origin proved that. Even more daunting, their singsong voices identified them as High Douloi. Social convention was strict: they would have to make the first move toward acquaintance. Any overture on his part would doubtless be greeted with the freezing formality he’d encountered all too often from his schoolmates.
But the boy with her seemed to have a flyer’s build, so evidently downsider Douloi fashions didn’t hold in orbit. And Taj remembered how she’d smiled at him—with more than just her mouth, he thought.
The sound of laughter drifting down from the salon, mixed with the faint blaring of a simgame, decided him. He stood up, hesitated a moment, then took his wing pack with him.
His heart pounding, Taj climbed the stairs, emerging into a luxuriously carpeted cabin crowded with young people. An especially animated knot of them was gathered around a low console, across which a tall boy and a girl with a stiff shock of bright blue hair faced each other, tapping frantically at the keypads to a mixture of musical and explosive noises. It sounded comfortably familiar.
Taj awkwardly pushed
his way to the front of the crowd, impeded by his wing pack, and verified his suspicion: they were playing Acheront, a vidgame based on the famous space battle that had ended the war with Dol’jhar. He’d trained many times in the official Academy sim of that battle.
He watched with growing impatience as the boy conning the frigate Tirane maneuvered it timidly from asteroid to asteroid, creeping up on the crippled Dol’jharian flagship. In the real battle, Ensign Margot O’Reilly Ng had boldly charged the Blood of Dol and captured the avatar while the ship’s ruptors were off line.
But the boy’s cautious play earned him a very different reward: The other player crowed with triumph as her battlecruiser’s ruptors suddenly powered up and discharged. Vicious pulses of gravitational energy tore into the little frigate, disintegrating it in a blare of light.
Taj groaned in disgust. The loser looked up; he was the pretty girl’s companion. In fact, she was standing right behind him.
“You think you could do better?” he asked, his singsong accent diminished by the anger in his voice.
Taj thought he saw a glimmer of encouragement in the girl’s eyes. Emboldened, he stepped up to the console.
“Sure,” he replied.
The blue-haired girl yielded her seat with a sidelong glance.
Across the simgame console the loser eyed Taj’s wing pack. “Where are you from?” he asked as he reset the game, his High Douloi accent returning.
“Vishnara.”
“A downsider. What’re you doing with a wing pack?”
“I’m going up to Talajara to fly.”
“We’re from Talajara,” said the girl. “I’m Amavira.” She touched the shoulder of the boy in front of her. “This is my brother, Naramutro.”