Voice of the Whirlwind

by Walter Jon Williams

  Steward didn’t answer. A craving for tobacco was stirring in him. He ignored it and sipped his coffee.

  “See, my friends and I, we usually move information. Moving goods, like last week, is kind of a sideline.”

  Steward looked at him. “How big is this group anyway?”

  “Counting part-timers, a couple hundred. Mostly veterans of the Artifact War. I don’t deal with very many, not personally.”

  “If there are a couple hundred, people know about them. There are files. Probably lots of files in lots of places.”

  Griffith shrugged. “So maybe there are. Who cares? We don’t break any laws.”

  “Being on file somewhere can be bad for one’s career,” Steward said.

  “Being a drive rigger,” said Griffith, “is not a career. It is a dead-end job that people take because they want to get into space and can’t find real work.”

  “Exchanging information. That sounds like espionage, right?”

  “Hey. You’d be a mailman. Mailmen don’t know what’s in the letters they carry. They don’t end up in jail for carrying mail.”

  Steward looked at his coffee cup. The smell of tobacco was making his mouth water. “Tell me how it works,” he said.

  Griffith laughed. “Okay, buck. It’s actually very simple. You know chess people, they have online bulletin boards, right?”

  “It wouldn’t surprise me.”

  “Well, a lot of these people put chess problems up on the bulletin boards for other people to solve, okay? Or they play chess against one another on computers, or whatever.”

  “I follow.”

  Griffith smiled, sucked in tobacco smoke, exhaled. “Okay. So here’s how it works. You go into the station, find a terminal or a telephone, get onto their chess bulletin board, and look for a particular chess problem. You take a memory spike with you and plug it into the terminal. You punch in a certain incorrect answer that we’ll give you, then a password. The computer will feed your memory threads some data. You unjack and go back to your ship, you get some time on the ship’s transmitter, you aim the antenna, and you shoot the data to a certain address in Antarctica that I’ll give you. After that the information is put on the market and you get a cut, ten percent, wired to an account of your choice anywhere between here and Neptune.”

  “Why can’t the guy who steals the data in the first place send it off?”

  “Because he wouldn’t have unrestricted access to transmission equipment. A lot of these corporate habitats are worried about signal intelligence, and they monitor transmissions very carefully. They can’t do that with a ship halfway between Jupiter and the asteroid belt.” Griffith grinned. “Pretty good, huh?”

  Steward frowned, tried to think of a problem with it. “I don’t even have to see the guy I’m dealing with?” he asked. “Not at either end?”

  Griffith shook his head. “That’s the beauty of it. And if you access the chess problem over public lines from the station, and not through any commo hookup from your ship, they don’t know who’s doing it even if the whole system is compromised.”

  “I’ll have to think about it.”

  A smile creased Griffith’s face. “Let me know before you go up the well. I’ll give you the problem and the password, and we’ll set up your mode of payment. And some way I can contact you. The chess problem and password change from time to time.”

  “I’ll think about it.” Steward watched Griffith stub out his cigarette and knew that his delay, his insisting on thinking about it, was just a method of retaining a certain amount of his self-respect, that in the end he would agree to Griffith’s plan. He couldn’t find anything wrong with it. He wouldn’t have to meet any more of Griffith’s friends, not unless he wanted to go looking. And he’d make some money.

  But more important, it would keep him in touch with the way things moved in the real world. Keep some of his reflexes honed, keep him looking over his shoulder at least part of the time. So that when he wanted to do some things, up there in the vacuum, he wouldn’t have to worry about being entirely out of practice.

  He could look on it, he thought, as free training.

  *

  The night flight from LA arrived at six in the morning. Steward took a cab from the airport and tried to sleep in the back, but caffeine was still trickling across his nerves, keeping him awake.

  When Steward opened the door to Ardala’s apartment, he saw her across the living room, dressed for work, watching the silent video while holding the mastoid audio receiver to her skull. She looked up at him quickly and raised a finger to her lips. Steward moved into the room and saw Ardala’s niece, age five, lying on the couch under one of Ardala’s discarded jackets. Ardala put down the mastoid receiver and stood, walking into the hallway where they could talk.

  “Lisa’s picking her up before I leave for work,” she said. “She wanted a night out.”

  “I got the job,” Steward said.

  Her eyes narrowed. “Congratulations. It’s what you wanted, right?”

  “I still have to pass the corporate exam. But with an apprenticeship appointment all I have to do is pass, not get into the top two percent. I can do that easy enough.”

  “Space. Freedom. Destiny. Adventure. Vacuum.” Ardala waved her arms. “How can a place be free if you can’t even go out of doors and breathe?”

  “I’ve got a week before I have to take the test,” Steward said. Ardala looked at him. He gazed at the elaborate eye makeup, saw tension twitching the pale eyelids.

  “It could be a nice week,” Steward said.

  There was a moment of silence. Ardala looked away, back in the direction of the living room. “Yeah,” she said. “It could be.”

  He reached out, touched her arms. A grudging smile crossed her face. “Fine,” she said. “D’accord.”

  “D’accord,” he said. His mind already somewhere else, a shuttered place traveling across an endless darkness, a movement, a velocity, there in the center of a perfect emptiness.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Charter Station. Formerly the spindle-shaped Mitsubishi Permanent Orbital Complex at Lagrange Four, its silhouette was now enlarged and complicated by a century’s worth of technological barnacles—new habitats, dockyards, laboratories, solar collectors, floodlit ships awaiting docking, a giant second-stage habitat free of gravity. In an airless space of black velvet sown with diamonds, Charter hung surrounded by a gray floodlight glow, reflecting on its silver skin the blue and white of Earth, the gray of Earth’s moon.

  Charter existed as a complicated legal entity, its ownership and registration not so much obscure as complex beyond understanding. Parts of the station and its equipment were rented or leased for long periods to policorps or individuals; others were operated by the Charter company itself for its own inadvertently obscure purposes. For the most part, it was a way station, a place where people came on their way to someplace else. A place where business was done.

  There was a sense of discipline in the place, of purpose, and it belied the chaotic tangle of owners, leaseholders, inhabitants. There were serious people here, doing serious work; the sense of irrelevance that possessed affairs on Earth was absent. Steward remembered being caught up in such a life once, as a part of Coherent Light; having direction, discipline, a place…. There had been a satisfaction in that, in seeing himself as a part of an intricate mechanism whose purpose was the expansion of human possibilities, an evolution to the next step of existence. He stood outside it now, watched the bustle, heard the hum of business going on here, the complex network of transactions, movements, cooperation, competition… the web that was life outside Earth.

  Things that were affectation on Earth were part of business outside the gravity well. The artifacts of Urban Surgery, the implants, the sensors, the tools grafted onto flesh—here they weren’t merely fashion but had purpose, were a way of getting things done. There was style in the way they were flaunted, the way they were used, but it was a style with a basis in practicality.
Other styles that were not often seen on Earth were part of the background here. There were surgically evolved individuals with skulls greatly enlarged to encompass increased brain tissue, their presence always signified by the whine of the superchargers fitted around their necks to keep their brains supplied with oxygen. Computer interfaces—sometimes entire computers—were grafted onto skulls, living in complex interaction with the brain. Other individuals boasted extra arms or fingers, either implanted or the result of altered DNA, and there was an entire colony of second-stage humans, genetically altered to live entirely outside gravity, an extra pair of arms grafted to the shoulders and another where the feet should be, people who looked like boneless insects, stretching like frogs as they swam across the vacuum.

  The Max Born was not connected to the station and lay some distance away, undergoing routine maintenance of its seals by the station work gang. It was an elderly boat, its control panels and equipment a strange mix of old and new, from stuff installed before Steward was born to state-of-the-art rigs jacked in during the last refit. Born never carried passengers and had no reason to keep itself pretty for the benefit of outsiders; it didn’t bother to hide its age. Bundles of fiber-optic cable laced the riggers’ control spaces. The ancient quilted padding that covered most of the hard surfaces was held together with duct tape, and Steward’s cabin featured several layers of pornographic photos and holos left behind by earlier occupants.

  While seal maintenance was under way, the living quarters were subject to occasional decompression, so Steward and Reese were barracked in inexpensive station accommodations, coffin-quarters, hexagonal in cross section and stacked eighteen high, surrounded by catwalks and scaffolding and each containing a rack, folding desk, toilet, video, and computer access. There was one other member of the Born’s crew onstation, a woman named Cairo, who was the chief engineer. Steward had been introduced on his arrival but hadn’t seen her since.

  Even off the ship, he had little in the way of leisure. He had passed the tests necessary to get into Starbright, but he had yet to learn the details of the engines he would be maintaining. He had given Reese the impression he knew more than he did and he didn’t want to disappoint her. He spent most of his time in the bed, tanked up on drugs that aided his long-term memory in absorbing the details about the Born, its systems, its way of doing things. Starbright was a nonideological policorp, almost solely into transportation and drive systems, its organization as streamlined and purposeful as one of its atmosphere cutters. Survival was its business, and it survived by producing state-of-the-art systems, ships, and personnel.

  Even when Steward had free time he didn’t venture out much. The drugs never seemed to entirely wear off, and they affected his perceptions in odd, unpleasant ways: He found himself remembering small things that otherwise he would have forgotten, and the insignificant memories were somehow disturbing—the way Reese’s tongue moved behind her glistening smile; his own reflection, distorted in a piece of curved alloy; a disturbing harmonic in the whine of a nearby brain supercharger; the profile of a dark-haired woman he had been admiring in the hi-grav gym, and who turned suddenly to regard him from eyes that were surrounded by yellowing bruises and filled with inexplicable hatred….

  So he worked hard, fifteen hours at least, out of every twenty-four, and passed his tests in record time. The drugs made sleep uneasy, parts of his mind churning the entire time, and he slept little—he spent the rest of his time learning chess, filing away past games in his mind, wondering about the game’s structure, the closed nature of its system, the way it seemed invulnerable to entropy and the breakdown of order. Each piece, in its place, meant something, was a packet of specific potentialities existing in a unique relationship with the other pieces, a relationship that altered when the piece moved. Contemplating the game, he began to feel himself in his own hexagonal space, the hotel room, locked in a transforming relationship with the others around him, and he seemed strangely close to his Alpha, who was a piece in another, perhaps a similar, game….

  The drugs finally wore off, and he slept for two days. He woke with information locked in his mind, but the sensation of himself amid a complex of relationships was gone, replaced only by the hum of the station, of business, all so complex and baffling as to amount to little more than white noise, the hiss of meaningless background information. His sense of the meaning of it all, its relationship to him, had gone; it was as if he’d lost his ability to discriminate between signal and noise.

  He wandered around the station for a while, trying to regain a sense of what he’d lost. The place seemed strange to him, the personnel bizarre. Communication seemed impossible; words had become noise. He stopped in a bar and ordered coffee, chicken mole, corn tortillas, and he was surprised that the bartender understood what he was saying. He spilled half the coffee carrying it to his table. He tried to catch it on his food plate, but the liquid spilled off to the side—he wasn’t yet used to living in a centrifuge. As he ate, he watched himself in a chromium-alloy wall, unable to watch anything else. The green lights in his mind started to wink on again, slowly. He began to feel himself moving toward a sense of normality, a slow interface with the rest of reality; the noise was fading into the background. He had more coffee, managed to avoid spilling any of it. He began to feel more at ease. Maybe he’d take a shower, then go exploring. He went back to his berth and found Reese waiting for him, sitting on his rack. She wore a battered gray coverall and grip boots.

  “Don’t you ever read your fucking messages, Steward?” she demanded. “We’re docking the Born in forty minutes.”

  He looked for a long moment at the blinking LED on his commo unit. “Sorry,” he said.

  Reese stood, crouching beneath the low ceiling. “We’re taking our taxi from Dock Sixty-one,” she said. “And by the way, you are not making a good first impression.”

  *

  During Born’s docking Steward tried hard to stop himself from yawning and never succeeded. Sitting in the rigger’s area in the central part of the ship, he wore a headset that fed an analog of the power system readouts into the visual centers of his brain, and which monitored the internal power system as he brought it up and readied it for the maneuver. It was an undemanding task and one without surprises. The main generators and engines were not needed, and only enough of the fuel cells to support the radars, maneuvering computer, and life-support systems. Reese, strapped in behind him and wearing another headset, monitored the maneuvering engines and verniers, a task that scarcely required any more attention. They were only present, Steward suspected, because Starbright’s contract required their presence any time the Born did anything that might endanger the precious engines.

  “Grapplers engaged,” reported Cairo, the chief engineer. In the absence of the captain, who was still on leave, she was handling the ship during docking. “Airlock pressurizing. Prepare for low station gravity. Airlock pressurized. Docking cone removed. Station power coupling engaged.” There was a moment of silence. Gravity was tugging at Steward’s inner ear. The room swayed slightly, then settled.

  “Everything’s green,” Cairo said. “Let’s shut the bitch down.”

  “Leave four-A and seven up,” Reese said.

  “Four-A and seven up,” Steward repeated, just like in the manual. He knew perfectly well which of the cells were used for backup power on the life-support system. Lights in his mind and on the board in front of him began flickering from green to amber standby. “Shifting to station power.” The room lights brightened slightly.

  “Shutdown complete. Four-A and seven on backup status,” Steward reported. He plucked at his safety harness, let it fall free. Looked above his head at a bundle of fiber-optic cable that had come loose from its rubber clamp and pushed the cable back into place.

  “I’m clearing the docking cockpit,” Cairo said. “Cargo loading begins in thirty minutes. Before then I’d like to see Steward in the lounge.”

  Cairo was a small woman who had been born in space a
nd was proud of the fact that she’d never set foot on anything bigger than a planetoid. She was rail-thin and sharp-faced, and her dark hair, worn short in the style of most people who worked in space, was shot with gray. Martian diamonds had been implanted in the flesh of her cheekbones, and impact rubies studded sunburst patterns on the backs of her hands—people who lived in free-fall often had implants and thought jewelry dangerous because it could snag on something. When Steward entered, Cairo was sitting on the tape-scarred surface of one of the lounge chairs, drinking coffee from a bulb. Steward bobbed in the low gravity, checked his momentum, moved into a slow, controlled fall into another chair.

  “You wanted to see me?” he said.

  Cairo looked at him with dark, intent eyes. “Steward,” she asked, “are you troubled in spirit?”

  Surprise trickled slowly beneath Steward’s skin. For a moment he wondered if the background noise here had grown significantly, if there was some context to this question that he’d missed. “No,” he said.

  “Taler made me morale officer here,” Cairo said. “That translates to political commissar. I’m responsible for ideological indoctrination and self-criticism sessions.”

  “I’m a Starbright employee, not Taler,” Steward said. “Our contract says I don’t have to listen to your lectures.”

  Annoyance flickered in Cairo’s eyes. “I can read contracts,” she said.

  “Just thought I should point it out.”

  “I wasn’t asking you to show up for the sessions. But I am required to point out they exist. Just in case you’re troubled in spirit and need guidance and understanding.”

  “Right,” Steward said. “Thanks.”

  Cairo pointed at a document pouch near Steward’s head. It was filled with papers restrained by Velcro straps. “That’s Freconomicist literature,” she said. “It’s available. No one says you have to read it, but it’s there if you want.”

  “I assume I have a choice of recordings from the video library as well.”