The interior projection vanished along with the attendant, and we were once again surrounded by rather bland walls of gleaming off-white plastic. I felt a slight, sharp stab of claustrophobia—I didn’t like not being able to see out.
Acceleration ceased.
We were continuing to move upward at a now steady speed of twenty-three kilometers per second. We weren’t in zero-gravity, however. Lots of people don’t get that, assuming that if you’re in space you must be weightless. Though we’d be in orbit once we reached Midway, at the moment we were attached to the elevator tower 18,000 kilometers above Cayambe, and our lateral motion was the same as Earth’s rotational velocity, which was considerably less than the orbital velocity required at that altitude. Had I cared to step through an airlock into space, I would have immediately fallen, dropping toward Earth at something less than the ten meters per second squared which is Earth’s gravity at sea level, but dropping nonetheless.
After a long fall, I would have burned up in the atmosphere, a brief shooting star descending toward the planet.
I felt the pod rotating.
Still drifting upward but no longer accelerating, the pod now slowly turned end for end, rotating on the railguide mounted at the pod’s center of mass. Now Earth would be above our heads rather than beneath our feet.
For a moment we were all hanging upside down, with a definite feeling of down up toward the top of the compartment. The kid squalled…and then was abruptly and noisily sick. The soldier and one of the businessmen looked a bit green, though I didn’t know if it was the sensation of turning upside down or the smell from the kid’s vomit. God, he’d had a big breakfast! I wondered what his mother had been thinking, feeding him before going up the Beanstalk.
They had problems like this on the Beanstalk all the time, of course, and were ready to deal with it. Something like a vacuum cleaner was already purring across the ceiling below our heads, cleaning up the mess, and a strong breeze of fresh air was washing out the smell.
“Commencing deceleration,” the attendant said, “in three…two…one…and we are initiating deceleration.”
I glanced down…uh…up to see if the vacuum robot was going to fall, but it had already left the ceiling spotless and vanished into a cubby in the wall. The feeling of a gentle tug toward the ceiling slowly and quite smoothly decreased, until we were truly weightless, our up-Stalk acceleration perfectly balanced by Earth’s weakened but still significant gravitational tug.
After that, the sensation of weight toward the floor re-established itself, growing stronger. The attendant appeared to tell us we could walk around again, with care.
This time I only had the weight of a small child in my lap. We were now decelerating at 1.5Gs, but the pull of Earth was now working with the mag-lev braking, not fighting against it. The woman took her kid into the restroom to sluice him down.
I wanted to continue my conversation with Jones, but he was sitting in his seat across the cabin now, staring at his clasped hands in his lap and not making eye contact. I’d touched something there with my last question, and the investigative detective in me wanted to know what the hell it was.
The walls seemed to turn transparent once more, and I breathed a little easier, surrounded not by white walls, but by spectacularly deep, black emptiness, the sun a dazzling disk low and to my left, almost at the edge of the floor.
Then they switched on the projection over our heads and my breath caught in my throat.
At an altitude of 18,000 kilometers, Earth spanned almost forty degrees of the sky, almost full, with an achingly beautiful ragged edge of sunrise stretched across the Pacific, close to the disk’s western rim. It was spectacular—deep blue seas and long, swirls, loops, and streaks of blindingly white clouds, filling much of the ceiling.
From my perspective, the planet appeared upside down, with the fiercely bright gleam off the Antarctic ice cap at the top. The Beanstalk ran past the side of the pod and sliced into the planet’s heart, dwindling to a sharply foreshortened point at the center, at the patch of gray and brown I knew was Ecuador. New Angeles was big enough that you could see it easily from space.
“My God in heaven,” one of the businessmen said—the one who hadn’t looked like he was going to lose breakfast. That one wasn’t looking. He had his eyes shut. So did Kaminsky…and Jones wasn’t looking up either. That was more like the clone stereotype with which I was familiar.
Vocal music was playing in the background—something from Rossini’s Otello, I think it was. It was a bit astonishing to realize we were still moving at twenty kilometers per second, but the Earth didn’t seem to be moving at all. Only by staring at vast expanse of blue and white for several long minutes did you begin the realize that it was, truly, shrinking, still falling away beneath us as we, in our upside-down pod, hurtled upward.
It’s a shame, I thought, that they weren’t able to display the Earth for the first leg of the ascent, when it was beneath us… But too many people panicked when the deck seemed to vanish beneath their feet. They’d taken an electronic poll before the ascent; if everyone on the deck requested window-floor seating, I knew, you could see the Earth beneath you all the way up to flip-over, but the numbers hadn’t worked for this flight. Kaminsky, most likely, had down-checked it.
Earth viewed from 18,000 kilometers up was mesmerizing in her spectacular beauty.
I leaned back in my seat, adjusting it so I didn’t have to crane my neck, and watched her fall slowly away as we continued our ascent.
Chapter Four
Day 1
We arrived at Midway twenty-five minutes later, dropping down the Beanstalk—or so it seemed from our inverted perspective and acceleration—and entering Midway Station. By that time, Earth had dwindled to cover just about twenty degrees of the ceiling directly overhead. From our vantage point, we seemed to be dropping down, floor-first, into an open well. A moment later, they switched off the external cameras and our magnetic acceleration dwindled away to nothing.
In the pit of my stomach, it felt like we were falling.
“Please note,” our smiling attendant told us, “that conditions of microgravity exist within Midway Station. Please do not leave your seats until attendants arrive to help convey you to the station terminal, even if you have experience with working in zero-G. Your seatbelts have been locked as a precaution, and for your safety.”
Sure enough, the seatbelt clasps wouldn’t open. They didn’t want us bouncing around the pod’s interior and possibly hurting ourselves. An eighty-kilo person might not weigh anything, but he still has eighty kilos of mass, and that mass has inertia that an ill-considered push could slam into a ceiling hard enough to break his neck if he’s not careful.
After a few moments, the door in the again opaque wall slid open, and two men in white jumpsuits floated in. They helped the woman and the damp child out first, securing both with straps clipped around their waists before unlocking their seat harnesses. One of the men put their carry-ons into a kind of backpack slung over his shoulder, and the four of them vanished out the open door, the kid—his sickness now forgotten—squealing with ear-piercing delight.
A few minutes later, the two returned, this time one helping one of the businessmen, the second one the other.
“How you doing, soldier?” I asked Kaminsky.
He swallowed, then gave a jerky nod of his head. “Doing okay, sir.” He hesitated. “Uh…thanks. I appreciate your helping me back there.”
“Not a problem. But I recommend you check in with your base doctor. If you have problems with heights, they might not want you riding skyhoppers, y’know?”
“I will, sir. Thanks.”
After helping him out, they came for the young couple, probably on their honeymoon. I suppressed a smirk. Those noir set kids looked like they’d stepped straight out of the 1920s—him with a jacket and a tie aglow with neon animations, and her with a short, tight dress. Hadn’t anyone Earthside explained to the idiots that their retro-look fad-fa
shions were going to get them into trouble in zero-G?
Once they were gone, I was next. They were leaving Jones for last, apparently. The luck of the draw? Or did they always leave the clones for last?
My guide waited as I retrieved my evidence kit from the wall locker and helped me strap it to my back. Cinched to his waist by a bungee strap, he hauled me down the boarding corridor and into the main terminal.
“Are you okay from here, sir?” the attendant asked.
“I used to fly Strikers for a living,” I told him. “I’ll manage.”
“Yes, sir!” I caught a flash of respect in his eyes, and wondered if he was ex-military as well. “You’re continuing up-Stalk?” he asked.
“Yes, I am.”
He pointed. “You want the green line, sir. Takes you straight to Midway Station Up.”
I thanked him as he uncinched himself from me and hand-over-handed away, heading back toward the pod. There were hand lines everywhere in a can-shaped interior thirty meters across, organized in pairs so that if you met someone coming along a line in the opposite direction, one of you could shift to the rope alongside so the two of you could pass. The rope-pairs were color-coded so that you could find your way through the weightless maze. With no up or down, navigation could be a bit confusing.
There were some hundred or so people in the arrival concourse at the moment, most of them pulling their way along with slow and steady movements. A poorly judged quick movement in zero-G could set you spinning, or leave you helplessly adrift just out of reach of your lifeline. I chuckled when I saw that noirie couple—him with his jacket and tie billowing up around his shoulders and face, her with that short skirt bunched around her waist as her bare legs thrashed. Live and learn, kids…
I noticed there were also quite a few hocas about.
Homo caelum fabricata was the Latin name, meaning something like “manufactured space man.” They were clones out of Jinteki, quite new on the market, with the basic human genome altered considerably from the original. Each was smaller than a normal human, with a large, bald head, deep-set eyes, dark skin, large hands, and—the most startling change—an extra set of arms instead of legs and feet, and extra shoulders instead of hips. They reminded me a bit of tailless monkeys as they hauled passenger baggage or other massive loads with one hand, and used the other three to zip along non-color-coded lines at careening, stomach-twisting speeds.
There were other, more human-looking clones as well, many in 2M gray. I looked around for John Jones, hoping to continue our conversation, but if he’d emerged from the pod he was either nowhere to be seen now, or he was any one of five clones who looked exactly like him: his identical brothers—the “Jones model,” as it were.
I wondered if any of them were as intelligent and as socially accomplished as Jones 937.
No matter. I started hauling myself to the next compartment, to catch the pod for the Challenger Planetoid.
At Midway we had to change pods. When they grew the first buckyweave straps, the Beanstalk was manufactured in two sections; one growing from Midway down, the other, in perfect step and perfect balance, growing from Midway up. After the structure was complete, you couldn’t ride a beanpod non-stop all the way from the Root to the Ferry, because the two cables were anchored separately to Midway Station.
Travel was a bit different, too. For the first leg of the trip, Earth to Midway, we’d been accelerating against Earth’s gravity along the portion of the elevator not going fast enough to stay in orbit. Leave the pod and there was that very long step down with a messy splat at the end. Once at Midway, you were at synchronous orbit, and moving laterally fast enough to circle Earth once in precisely twenty-four hours. That meant you were in free fall, a.k.a. zero-gravity, though microgravity was the more precise term. We weren’t beyond Earth’s gravity, as Hollywood sometimes claimed. We were falling, falling, and missing, falling in an eternal circle around the planet.
But above Midway Station, another factor entered the picture. The upper Beanstalk, all of it making one orbit in one day, was spinning around the Earth too fast to stay in orbit, but was being held down by the Beanstalk itself. With the Challenger Planetoid anchored to the up-end, the whole structure was like a rock tied to the end of a string and whirled about the head; centrifugal force pulled the whole thing taut, and it created an out-is-down spin gravity that steadily increased as you rose above Midway. It wasn’t much—only .04G at the planetoid, but it was enough to give you the feeling of a little weight. Beanpods made use of that sliding up-Stalk, though they also used mag-lev, of course, to maintain a steady 1.5G. It would take another hour to reach the Challenger Planetoid’s Nearside.
I would have liked to explore Midway a bit. The place is huge, and they’ve continued to add new modules over the years. There are shops and boutiques, several restaurants, and a couple of large hotels, including the notorious Honeymoon Hilton for adventurous couples who want to try out the joys of sex in zero-G. Several megacorps have their home offices there for tax purposes, and NBN is headquartered there, as well, right under their primary transmission dishes.
I wondered if Lily was at Midway yet…or if she’d come up at all.
The last time I’d been here as a tourist had been during a stretch of leave during the War. I’d been heading for Mars; we knew things were going to get rough, and we’d hired some joy girls for a hell of a party at the Hilton. Ten years later, I’d tried to take Lily there, but work had interfered, as usual, and we’d had to give it a rain check.
Someday I wanted to cash that rain check, and take Lily flying.
But according to my ticket, my beanpod was leaving in twenty minutes, and the next one wasn’t due out until late in the afternoon.
There were some familiar faces in the Midway-out pod. The soldier, Private Kaminsky was on-board, as was the woman with the six-year-old…and thank God for self-cleaning clothes that shed water, dirt, and nasty digestive juices. The couple was missing, and I wondered if their destination had been the Honeymoon Hilton. The businessmen were gone as well. Possibly they’d had meetings at one of the Midway corporate offices. In their places were three other business people, two men and an attractive woman in a conservative purple skinsuit with a Melange Mining logo on her left breast.
And there was no sign of John Jones. He’d said he was heading up to Heinlein.
Perhaps that was true, and he’d simply not mentioned the need to stop off at Midway for a while to complete some errand…or perhaps he was on this pod, but riding in one of the other two compartments.
But I’m a suspicious type by nature—good detectives don’t come any other way—and Mr. Jones was gnawing at me. There was something not right about him, and it had nothing to do with the creeps I usually felt when dealing with a clone.
I sat in my seat and tapped a code into my PAD. Police officers are authorized to use access codes for local seccams, and I was tuning in to the security cameras that I knew were invisibly present on-board my pod. A moment later, I had the pick-up for Deck One…and then for Deck Three. Both had the usual mix of passengers.
But all were full-human. No clones. John Jones was not on-board.
The attendant was giving her canned spiel again about staying strapped in, but I was continuing to link in with the local extension of the Net. I did a search on Jones 937, accessing both police and Heinlein Authority files.
There he was.
JONES 937, JOHN.
SERIAL NUMBER: 937-777-894-236(C)
RESIDENCE: HEINLEIN, FREETOWN, BLOCK 1280, CUBE 354 BLUE.
OWNER: JINTEKI.
EMPLOYER: MELANGE MINING CORPORATION. (*)
OCCUPATION: D9Y SURFACE CONVEYER OPERATOR, CLASS 1(C).
HEIGHT: 155 CM.
WEIGHT: 69 KG.
HAIR: BROWN.
EYES: BROWN
SEX: MALE (C).
AGE: 10.
PREVIOUS ARRESTS: NONE.
THREAT: LOW.
The file included a holographic photo a
nd both a set of fingerprints and a pair of mapped retinal images.
Nothing. I didn’t have fingerprints or retinal images to compare with his file, and I hadn’t scanned his bar code to verify the data, but at a first glance it looked like I’d been talking to Jones, and that he’d been telling the truth.
I was curious, though, about the (*) notation after the employer, and followed that link. That piqued my interest. It seemed that John Jones 937 had been seconded to another client…and the identity of that client was classified at level Green-zero. Not a problem. My security classification clears me to Blue-one. I entered my NAPD pass code and e-ID number, and a moment later I had the answer.
Humanity Labor.
The clone Jones worked for an organization devoted to ridding the world of clones. Very interesting.
The seconding of clones to other employers was not uncommon. Clones are valuable assets essentially leased by Jinteki to corporate clients, and those clients, in turn, might sublet clones to other “employers”—one means of getting a profit out of the initial investment. What was interesting was the political paradox. Melange Mining used clones for those jobs so dangerous or unpleasant that they would have had to pay very high wages to human workers, not to mention health and retirement bennies. 2M used clones because it was profitable to do so; otherwise, why bother?
Humanity Labor, on the other hand, saw clones as cheap labor taking jobs away from decent, God-fearing humans. They wanted to abolish the use of clones altogether.
Now, if that ever happened in the real word, what would you do with several hundred thousand suddenly unemployed clones? If you’re a member of SAM, the Simulant Abolitionist Movement, you give them full civil rights and let them compete with full-human workers for the same jobs at identical wages—equal pay for equal work.
But most Humanity Labor types saw the abolitionists as somewhere out there on the wacko far-left. Even at the same wages, freed clones would still mean competition, and possibly very serious competition because they’d been conditioned to be very good—and very happy—at their specific jobs. Many of them had advantages, in fact, that full-humans lacked, like increased resistance to radiation.
Android: Free Fall Page 5