by Kalina, Mark
From the roof of her building, Garnet C-9, Zandy could watch the high altitude stream of aircars flying a few kilometers overhead, too high for the sound to be more than an ambient hum. She could see the neighboring residence zones, with their different pre-fabs and different color patterns. She could even see the distant orbital elevator, just a faint silver line bisecting the sky; the elevator was three hundred kilometers away, at the heart of the vast New Ionia Surface Port, which dwarfed the older city of Neomiletus, the city where she lived, even though Neomiletus had 20 million people living in it.
Zandy had never been to the New Ionia Surface Port, but she had been to the Neomiletus City Center before, up in one of the towers, and had seen the city from above. From a kilometer up, the patchwork of residence zones spread out from the City Center in an odd checker pattern, as if the outer city was pixelated in one kilometer squares.
But it was the orbital elevator that had drawn her imagination. At school she had seen vids of the capsules that ran up and down the elevator, like huge vertical train cars, carrying cargo and passengers into space, bringing back people and goods from other worlds. And yet, for all that New Ionia was one of the core worlds of the Hegemony, for all the amazing things and people that came down the elevator or went up, Zandy lived in an apartment that would, she thought, have fit right in on one of the backwater colonies that had never regained space travel.
It wasn't that life was bad, for Zandy, for the Neel family. Her father had a decent job working as a clerk at the main food emporium which served the residence zone. She, her mother and her siblings were provided for. The apartment was cramped, but clean and warm and always full of the smells of good food and cooking.
But it was such a closed-in life, thought Zandy. When the fact that she and Gregr were lovers had reached the ears of building's rumor mill, the building's families had smiled and started wondering aloud about a marriage. It was good, the unofficial match-maker of the building, an old woman from floor four, had said. It was good that Zandy had found someone from her own building; that was how a community lived, she had said.
That was how Alekzandra Neel would rather die, Zandy had thought. To marry Gregr, good looking as he was, good in bed as he was (or so she thought then) would be a sort of death. She would have nothing, except a pre-fab apartment in the same building, to go with a pre-fab life. She was only just over fifteen tenkays, one hundred and fifty thousand hours old, (seventeen in Old-Earth years, her brother had told her, since he was avidly studying ancient history in school.) And she could already see how her life would be at the end: a seventy-tenkay-old matron, smiling at some young couple in the same building, watching them take the same path she had taken, once before.
Zandy had desperately wanted something else, anything else. It wasn't that Zandy had consciously wanted to become aristokratai. She had barely ever even seen one. Sometimes one could guess that they must be there, in the gleaming aircars overhead, and in the towers that loomed in the distance... and aboard the sleek passenger capsules that surged up and down along the orbital elevator. She had seen aristokratai when she had taken the class trip to the City Center. For the most part, they had not looked so very strange to her. Their biosim bodies had looked human, though their clothes, and their manners, had a look to them. It wasn't just opulence, though. There were rich demoi; some commoners were richer than some aristokratai. But there was an... edge to how the aristokratai looked. The aristokratai all looked beautiful, of course, and they dressed and moved with a confident, almost wanton grace, skin tight clothes showing off their perfect artificial bodies.
But it had not been that look that had been in her mind when she applied to take the Academy admission tests. It had been the orbital elevator, and tiny night-time lights of the orbiting stations and shuttles... sometimes she would catch a bright fast star streaking across the night; the drive of a starship. It had been those things, and the stars and the... not the hope, but at least the chance that Alekzandra Neel might somehow share in that bright, un-pre-fabricated life, that she could see every day from the roof of her pre-fabricated apartment building.
She had not entertained much hope. Every school offered the tests to any demos, any commoner, who was not barred by a punitive judgment. The odds of passing were known to be much worse than a thousand to one. A million to one, some said. Even passing the tests was no guarantee; the Academies were demanding enough that of the few who were allowed to enter, many did not finish.
But she hadn't thought of that. She had taken tests for all three Academies available on New Ionia: New Ionia Government Service, Central Throne Service, and Fleet. Not everyone who took the test bothered with all three, but Zandy figured that a few days of hard work were worth it, even for a tiny chance.
But after the long tests were over, she hadn't really given the whole business any more mind. She was just fifteen tenkays old, and there were things to do; family, school, friends, boys. Sometimes she wondered how long it would take for her to find out about the tests. Of course, she thought, she hadn't passed them. Almost no one did. But maybe... maybe.
Other times, when the idea of living out her life in Garnet C-9 seemed to be the worst of fates, she would borrow data-vids from the school library, reading about careers that might take her away from the residence zone. There were jobs like that, that would let a demos go places and do things. There were careers working in the City Center, or even as crew on FTL starships or space stations. But she couldn't see why they would take her, a girl from the residence zones, with nothing particular to recommend her.
But then, in her heart of hearts, she was not even sure, if a chance came, that she would want to leave. After all, staying meant staying with friends, with her brother and sisters, with her parents and neighbors who had know her from childhood. A pre-fab life, but not a bad one...
And then, seven hundred hours (more than thirty New Ionian days) after she finished the tests, came a call from her teacher. She had passed one of the tests, the only student in the entire tenkay academic cycle at the Garnet Residence Zone School to do so. There was a place for her at the Fleet Academy.
"You can't be serious," her mother had said. At first her mother had just looked annoyed, though maybe a little proud. Taking the tests had been silly; everyone knew that. It had used up more than a hundred hours of Zandy's free time, days and days. That was bad enough, her parents thought. Passing a test, though... well, that was something else. Certainly it was something to be proud of. It was something that might get Zandy noticed, when she finished school and applied for a job. With that on her record, and her father's help, she was almost certain to find a good job in the residence zone. Maybe, her father had said, perhaps sensing that Zandy might be aiming for something bigger, maybe she could even apply for some jobs in the City Center, on the strength of passing one of the Academy Tests.
"I'm going," Zandy had said, and after enough repetitions, her family had believed her.
Then the annoyance had turned to fear. Her siblings had been excited, but her parents were scared now.
"You can't be serious. You can't go, you can't. I'm not letting you go," her mother had said, wide eyed, in a hushed voice that Zandy had never heard before.
"I've already sent in my acceptance," said Zandy.
She had sent it in that morning at school, with her primary teacher standing next to her at the comm-terminal, looking proud and grave and a bit nervous. In fact, she had sent it in because of how she knew her parents would react. It was only after the message was gone that Zandy had really realized what she'd done.
"People die at the Academies!" her mother had whispered. "People don't come back from them." There were tears by then.
"The Fleet," her father had said. "Why not Government Service, at least?"
"The Fleet Academy Test is the one I passed," Zandy said. "I tried all three."
"People die there," her mother said again.
"The Fleet is dangerous," her father said, saying not qui
te the same thing as her mother. There were accidents at the Academies, but that was rare. On the other hand, no one pretended that the Fleet was safe.
"You can't do this," her mother said, crying.
"I can't take it back," Zandy had said, wondering if that was even true, and getting close to tears herself. "I sent in my acceptance."
"For the Kyrie's sake, why did you do that?" her mother asked.
"I... I want to go." Even as she said it, it was a realization to Zandy. "I don't want to stay here. I don't want to-- to live here, die here. I don't want to marry Gregr from floor eight! I don't want to work at the Food Emporium!" Zandy was crying now too. "I don't want to look at the towers and the aircars and the elevator every day and know that I'll never get to do anything except live in Garnet Residence Zone!"
"All right, let's calm down a bit," said her father in a brittle voice, but her mother interjected.
"You can still take it back. Send another message. Tell them you didn't mean it. It's a mistake!" Her mother was shouting now, demanding.
"No! No! No, it's not a mistake! I accepted. I made it in. I'm the only student in the whole school to make it this tenkay. The only one in Garnet. And I'm going."
"But you... you won't be..." Her mother's voice had gone back to a scared whisper. "You won't be the same... after."
"I don't want to be the same. I'll be aristokratai, if I make it. I'll be a daemon. That's what's scaring you, isn't it?"
It had scared Zandy too. It was a one-way change, if she made it. There was no way to go back to being a biological human with a biological brain, once you were a daemon. The word "daemon," Zandy had learned, meant "spirit," in Old-Earth Hellenic, which was the primary foundational language of Translang. Perhaps unfortunately, the word "daemon" had evolved into "demon" in Old-Earth English, which was another of the languages that modern Translang was based on. Zandy thought that maybe that linguistic drift was one reason why everyone seemed to be so scared. But not the only reason.
Some people said it was death; daemons weren't alive anymore, weren't people any more. They taught otherwise at school, but...
It had scared her enough that she might have backed out, if not for her parents pushing her to back out.
It had been, she had to admit later, a silly reason to go through with it, but she couldn't back down. If she had, it would have been the same as embracing the pre-fab life that she loathed the thought of.
The last few hundred hours at home, after she had told her parents about passing the test, and her decision to go... the last few weeks, the last few days, had been quiet. After the fight, her family had reacted to her upcoming departure by not speaking of it, though her mother had not, at first, given up trying to stop Zandy.
Her mother was talking to a priest when Zandy came home from school the next day. The priest was a tall, rotund man with a bushy gray beard and a carbon-black robe patterned with inlayed gold crosses. A large gold disk projecting a holographic crucifix hung over his belly on a gold-alloy chain of angular links. Though his eyes seemed alert, a data cable ran from under his robes into a jeweled data port at his temple. Zandy had no idea what the man might be feeding into his brain; recorded prayers maybe, or possibly euphorics.
Zandy knew her mother had summoned the priest because of her, to speak to her. Maybe her mother thought that having a priest add the weight of his disapproval would win the argument, though Zandy had never been particularly religious, despite her mother's desires.
Zandy had hidden instead, climbing a flight of stairs to the second floor and huddling at the end of the corridor, next to the open corridor window, while her mother and the priest had conversed beneath her.
The sound of the conversation wafted upwards along with the smell of frying onions, her mother's cooking.
"The doctrine of the Holy Church is that a daemon is still a soul," the priest was saying. "The fact that a daemon is unique, cannot be duplicated, and that it comes into being at the same moment as the biological brain of the person ceases to function..."
These were not the words to reassure Mother, Zandy thought.
"But the person dies," mother's voice was saying, shrill, but not in tears, not yet.
"The body dies. The Holy Church teaches that the person, the soul, lives, and infuses the daemon. That is the doctrine of the Church."
"But can't you say anything to her?"
"I will speak to her, of course, but the reasons are more to do with honoring her mother than with saving her life. I cannot argue counter to the Church's teachings," the priest said.
Zandy had missed dinner that day, waiting out of sight for the priest to leave. Her mother never mentioned the priest to Zandy directly.
After the failure of the priest to talk to Zandy, her mother had tried to stop the acceptance, talking to friends she thought would have the pull to save her daughter from a terrible mistake. But the Assistant Residence Zone Manager had explained that no one, no demoi anyway, had the power to stop Zandy now. Once her acceptance had been sent (and received, high in New Ionia orbit a few seconds later), Alekzandra Neel was part of the Hegemonic Fleet. So her mother had decided that the way to deal with it was to pretend that nothing was going to happen.
Her brother and sisters were more excited. To them, the scary thing, the frightening process of becoming a daemon, would only happen if she passed the Academy general courses. Before that, though, there were so many exciting things. Zandy would get to travel to the Surface Port. She would get to see the orbital elevator up close. She would get to go up the elevator to the New Ionia Geosynchronous Station, the space port where FTL ships from all over the Hegemony, even from beyond the Hegemony, made a port of call. There were things to see there, that never came down to the Garnet Residence Zone. She was going to get to go to space! Maybe, they speculated, she would see one of the dreaded void-runner pirates, or some of the exotic Modifieds, people who altered their bodies with inhuman colors or shapes. Maybe she would get to see starships, her brother said, and Zandy said that yes, she was sure she would get to see those, at the Fleet Academy.
The acknowledgments and authorizations had come to the apartment a couple of days after she had sent her acceptance, brought by a delivery courier who had confirmed Zandy's thumb print and retinal pattern before giving her the package. There were hard-copy ticket codes for a mag-lev train to the New Ionia Surface Port, the biggest city on the planet, and a ticket up the orbital elevator. The Fleet Academy's staff would collect her there, taking their new cadet to the distant high-orbital station that held New Ionia's Fleet Academy Campus.
Five hundred hours later, Zandy was sitting in a passenger lounge, waiting to board an orbital elevator passenger capsule that would take her up into space.
Finally, abruptly, here she was, in the huge port city, and she was nervous enough, scared enough, that she could take no pleasure in having a chance to see a place that she had only dreamed of getting to see, just a thousand hours ago. But that didn't matter, she had told herself; in just a few hours she would get to see the whole planet, all of New Ionia, from the rising elevator capsule.
An orbital elevator was the most spectacular and the cheapest way to get into space, but not the fastest. The vast spaceport also had outlying terminals for laser-boosted cargo shuttles and plasma-drive hypersonic orbital planes. The first was a rough way to get up, fast but high gees and high vibration. The latter was for the elite among the elite; expensive, but smooth and quick. But the elevator saw ten times more traffic up into orbit than both other ways put together.
At its base, the orbital elevator was a huge tower, taller and more massive than any of the other towers of the city. She could see the rest of the city from the waiting lounge on the 300th floor of the elevator tower; most of them were not as high as she was already. Unlike the other towers, the elevator had no visible end. The tip of the elevator tower sent up a silver ribbon into the sky. The ribbon was deceptively thin looking, though actually it was big. It was a set of v
ertical tracks, with multiple lines up and down, all the way to geosynchronous orbit, more than 35,000 kilometers above her.
Just approaching the tower had been nearly overwhelming. The mag-lev train had run underground for the last ten kilometers, but when she got off at the train station, which was inside the base of the elevator tower, Zandy had made her way outside. There was a wide plaza and a park around the tower, with hundreds of meters of manicured green lawns, decorative hedges and flowering trees between the elevator tower and its neighboring buildings. None of the huge towers were spaced close, so the city had a bright, sunlit, airy feel, despite the equatorial heat. But the sight of the elevator tower, looming up, megatons of mass soaring up endlessly above her head, was enough to cause vertigo. Nor was she the only one that had to sit down after looking up.
The interior of the elevator tower was almost alien to Zandy. The broad, mall-like corridors were filled with stores and displays. Holographic advertisements flashed out in front of groups of people who thronged the wide walk-ways. The holographs pulsed with bright colors and eye catching motions, giving sometimes surreal sales pitches for refreshments, clothes, electronics and other goods and services that Zandy could only guess at. She had seen something a little like this when her school class had taken a trip to Neomiletus City Center, but this was far more intense. Zandy felt almost overwhelmed by the time she reached the passenger lounge on the 300th floor.
The ride up came soon enough. She waited for a hour at the 300th floor passenger lounge, using some of the hoarded money her parents had given her to buy a stimulant drink. She had never had one before.
The lounge was... elegant, Zandy thought. It was all silvery metal and subdued colored glass, shaped in asymmetric curved panels and decorated here and there with inlays of smooth glossy wood. Vast, tinted bubble windows around the perimeter of the lounge showed the other towers and the streams of sleek aircars, gleaming and glinting as they flew past in the low afternoon sun.