Voice of the Whirlwind

by Walter Jon Williams

  She looked at him without expression. “I won’t be bringing up this subject again. But now I can sign the chit that says I did and get some good-conduct points in my dossier at Taler.”

  “If you want, I’ll sign an affidavit that you did a great job.”

  Her face hardened. “Your contract also says you don’t have to be present during cargo loading. So that means I’ll be pulling a sixteen-hour shift. See you in two days.”

  “Maybe I’ll move my gear to the ship,” Steward said. He was trying hard not to yawn again. “I’m getting tired of my hotel.”

  Cairo shrugged. “If you like. But you’ll get a lot sicker of your ship quarters in the forty-three days before we dock at Vesta.”

  A cold rush of current poured through Steward’s body as neural floodgates slammed open. Any urge to yawn vanished. “Vesta?” he said.

  “Priority cargo of free-gravity crystals. General cargo, too, since there’ll be room. Ventures, if you want them. The orders came down in the last twenty-four hours. We’re changing our route out-system, and the company’s making a lot of money.” She laughed. “You really didn’t read your messages, did you, Steward?”

  “I got carried away testing on the power system.”

  She shook her head. “Usually people take a little longer. I don’t know what the hell you’re gonna do to occupy your time on the way to Vesta. Maybe you’ll have to read some of my literature.”

  “There’s always drugs.”

  Cairo stood, carefully adjusting her balance in the low gravity. “If I were you,” she said, “I’d throw myself a party before I leave.”

  “Maybe I will,” Steward said, but Cairo was maneuvering out of the lounge, aft toward the cargo door, and gave no sign that she had heard.

  *

  Steward’s party turned out to be a fourth-trimester college student named Torner, stuck on Charter on a forty-eight-hour layover before heading to the Seven Moons mining school on Luna. She’d seen what sights existed on Charter during her first twenty-four hours onstation, and for the remaining time she wanted company.

  She had braided dark hair, olive skin, a diamond stud in one nostril, a tattoo of a manticore coiling around one ankle. Steward met her just after leaving the Born, in a bar called the Mi Minor, where he’d gone for some combination of caffeine and alcohol. When he arrived, Torner was playing the slots in the front, dressed in dark corduroy pants, a blue pin-striped shirt, collarless jacket. As Steward ordered, he noticed her bouncing up and down to some internal rhythm as the machine spun and lights flickered on her profile. There was a clang and the machine delivered something to her. “Damn,” she said, in a disgusted tone. She had an accent that came down hard on the d. She looked around, saw Steward watching, held up a packet of Players.

  “The machine pays off in merchandise,” she said. “You smoke?”

  “I’m trying to give it up.”

  “Piss. What a cheap way to run a slot.” She stuffed the cigarette pack in her pocket, glanced at his drink. “What are you having?”

  “Irish coffee.”

  “I’ve been drinking growling tigers all afternoon. Maybe I’ll try an Irish coffee for a change.”

  She sat on the stool next to him and tapped a credit spike on the bar to attract the bartender’s attention. She and Steward drank slowly and exchanged life stories. She was from a former Mennonite habitat in the belt that had gone bust during the financial readjustment that followed the Artifact War and that had then voted to join Seven Moons. She’d never left home before college. Steward concluded that she was trying to do a lot of catching up.

  “Look,” she said. “You’re from Earth. I want to know something. When I ask someone else, I just get laughed at.”

  “Tell me,” Steward said.

  She frowned, concentrating. “I want to know about wind. I’ve never been in a place that had it. On Earth, do you have wind all the time?”

  “Just about. Sometimes the air is still, but usually not for long.”

  “What does it feel like? I mean, is it like what you feel standing in front of a ventilator?”

  “Sort of.” He’d never considered this before. “Except the velocity of wind is changing all the time. With a ventilator, you have the compressor at the same speed.”

  “Mmm.” She cocked her head and looked at him. “Does it—I don’t know—smell different, or anything? Or does the wind blow away smells so they never get to you?”

  “Wind smells of whatever there is to smell. Trees or flowers or soil or garbage or ocean.”

  “Organic stuff.” She wrinkled her nose.

  “Whatever’s there.”

  “Wow. Do you miss it?”

  He thought about this for a moment. “Yes. I do. Now that you mention it.”

  She finished her drink, wiped cream off her upper lip. Looked at him again. “Want to go dancing?”

  Steward didn’t have to think about this at all. “Why not?” he said.

  They went to another place, a low-gravity club on the end of the original Mitsubishi spindle. Torner paid for the drinks, took off her grip slippers, and danced in bare feet to todo music, the tattoo flashing as her trouser cuffs bounced free. Later in the afternoon they moved to Steward’s room, carrying skewers of beef with hot peanut butter sauce. Torner fell asleep on Steward’s rack, her bare feet hanging off the end, her jacket wrapped around her, slippers sticking out of the pockets.

  The caffeine kept Steward from drowsing. He sat in his desk chair and contemplated Torner as she slept, then saw the winking message light reflected red in her diamond and decided it was about time he listened to his mail.

  There were two messages from Reese, both about the priority cargo run to Vesta and the docking he’d done his best to miss. There was an automated voice from the hotel that informed him about his checkout time, and another note that wasn’t on audio. He punched it up on his terminal and saw that it was his chess problem and code word, along with a note from Griffith wishing him good luck.

  The problem was called Tsiolkovsky’s Demon.

  The solution Griffith provided, even to Steward’s inexperienced eyes, was clearly flawed. The password was “Marshal Stalin.” Whatever that meant. He wondered if “Marshal” was a title or an imperative.

  Steward asked his console for Charter’s directory index, looked up the chess bulletin board, and paged through the messages. There were a lot of chess problems.

  One of them was Tsiolkovsky’s Demon. Steward’s mouth went dry.

  He fumbled in his bag for a data spike and slotted it, then tapped in the erroneous solution. The computer told him he was wrong. He tapped in “Marshal Stalin.”

  The computer hesitated, then an LED next to the needle lit up, signifying it was being fed data. Steward watched numbly.

  Why on Charter? he wondered. Charter was an open free port: There was no need for espionage here; nothing was classified. Maybe, he thought, someone had been passing through on a ship and dropped off classified data while in transit. Maybe that person’s own communication was monitored and he couldn’t use his ship transmitter.

  But why couldn’t whoever sent the message use Charter’s antennas? There were dozens of them, many of them available to the public. Maybe whoever had the data didn’t have the Antarctica address. But if he didn’t, why didn’t he?

  But however the data got there, Steward’s spike was receiving it, and once received, it was worth something to him. The LED winked off, and the computer thanked him and asked if he wanted to try to solve the problem again. Steward told it no and logged off.

  He took out the spike and held it in his hand, feeling it balance in his palm. Wealth bound in variable-lattice thread, a potential for future profit. But to use the data would connect the spike, and Steward, to things he didn’t understand—connect him to Griffith’s schemes, to a whole network of people engaged in data theft and the movement of black market items, people outside of Steward’s purpose…and he didn’t know, if he should decid
e to, whether it would be entirely possible to sever the connection once he’d made it.

  Torner muttered in her sleep, rolled over on her back. Steward closed his hand on the spike, held it by his side. Torner passed the back of her hand over her forehead. She opened her dark eyes, blinked, focused on Steward. Smiled. “Hi. Guess I fell asleep.” She sat up, shook her head. Did up a button on her shirt. “I don’t suppose there’s room service in this place, is there?”

  Steward smiled. “It’s not that kind of hotel.”

  “I thought we could get a bottle. Maybe some food.” She looked at the monitor screen. “You working or something?”

  “Chess problems.” He shook his head. “I’ve had too much alcohol to work them properly.” He bent and dropped the spike in his bag, then switched off the monitor. Torner was reaching over her head, adjusting the flow of the air vent.

  “There,” she said. She looked at him. Hair riffled across her forehead. “Wind. Sort of.”

  Steward left his chair and lay next to Torner on the narrow bed. A strong breeze spilled across his face. Torner’s dark eyes were very near. “We can pretend we’re on a beach, huh,” she said. “Back on Earth. You figure we can do that?”

  “I don’t see why not,” he said. She leaned forward and kissed him. She didn’t close her eyes. Neither did Steward. She wasn’t at all like Natalie, and Steward didn’t know whether to be grateful or not. But memories came anyway, like butterfly kisses…sand, ocean, breeze, Earth, a pair of green eyes very close to his own. He closed his eyes and let the memories take him.

  For a brief while, Steward became the wind.

  *

  In the end, he hadn’t been able to think of a good reason not to.

  The address in Marie Byrd Land was not presently visible to the Born’s antenna, so Steward decided to bounce the signal off a Pink Blossom satellite in GEO over the South Atlantic. He put the spike into slot one, aimed the antenna, pressed the transmit button. His eyes rose to a picture of Everest’s summit bulking above curling wisps of cloud, a photo the absent commo officer had stuck on the wall.

  Before Steward’s finger had entirely retracted from the button, the transmission was completed.

  Connections that had existed in potential were now coming into being. Whatever they were. Whatever they meant.

  A folding door screen slammed open behind him. “What are you doing with my equipment?” demanded a voice. Steward looked over his shoulder and suppressed a reflex to snatch his needle from the slot.

  Blue eyes gazed at him out of a sunburned face. A green tropical shirt seemed to fill half the Born’s radio room.

  “I’m sending my mail,” Steward said.

  “That’s what I thought.” A large hand appeared. It was covered with freckles. Steward shook it. “I’m Fischer. Commo.” There was a light Middle European accent.

  “Steward. Assistant rigger.”

  “I figured.” Fischer bent over the console and looked at the readouts. Steward could see an interface implant on the base of his skull. Fischer could probably talk to his radios in his head.

  “I used antenna two,” Steward said.

  “It’s all right, then. Mind you do it in the future.” He bared his teeth at the console, a wolf’s warning grin. “We might miss a transmission from our bosses,” Fischer growled. “An important command to study the next Freconomicist Weekly for the changing line. Is Seven Moons’ placing a tariff on variable-lattice alloy ideologically defensible, or a sign of creeping deviationism? Galaxy-shattering news, buck, if you know what I mean.”

  Steward pulled the spike and put it in his pocket. Fischer was gazing at the readings and appeared not to notice. Steward looked at Fischer’s peeling forehead. “Been at the beach?”

  Fischer shook his head. “Alaska. Climbing glaciers. You know someone in Asunción?”

  “Antarctica.”

  “Ah.” He tapped his head. “Got confused about transmission prefixes, there.” Fischer gave Steward a glance. “Who’s in Antarctica, then?”

  “It’s just a forwarding box. I’ve got a friend who travels. Like us.”

  Fischer’s eyes flickered slightly, looking at the length-of-transmission counter. “Forty-four nanoseconds. That’s a long transmission for a letter.”

  A cool warning signal, quiet but clear, was spreading through Steward’s mind. He was going to destroy whatever was on the spike as soon as he got back to his cabin. “I’m sending my friend a copy of a video I got off the station net.”

  “Hope it’s ideologically correct, whatever it is. Pink Blossom is a NeoImagist concern. They don’t like freaky stuff bouncing off their satellites.”

  “I find NeoImagery pretty freaky all by itself.”

  Fischer grinned. “You know it, buck.”

  He jabbed at the console over Steward’s shoulders, bringing the antenna back into its sheath. “SuTopo’s on board. You might go knock on his cabin door in a little while. Give him a chance to unpack first.”

  “I’ll do that.” The warning signal still vibrating low and clear.

  The Captain’s cabin was filled with the mingled fragrances of the five bonsai trees that stood on shelves against the far wall, their ceramic bases secured against changes in gravity. Gro-lamps clung to the ceiling on suction cups.

  The Born’s Captain was a short, middle-aged Javan, his body knotted with muscle. Complex dark tattoos wound about his wrists. He wore a formal round-collared jacket of some dark material and a black pitji hat with his badge of rank pinned to it, a constellation of three four-pointed stars on the red Taler triangle. The middle fingernail of his left hand had been replaced with a liquid-crystal computer readout. Presumably his eyes had been altered so as to magnify the minuscule type. Steward wondered where the keyboard was: In SuTopo’s head, threaded into his brain? In someone else’s head, so SuTopo could receive messages from elsewhere? Steward decided he was becoming more paranoid than strictly necessary. No need to put a receiver in a fingernail when it could be spliced right to the auditory nerve.

  “Welcome aboard,” SuTopo said.

  “Thank you. Happy to be here.”

  SuTopo stood flat-footed, his hands cocked at his sides. His eyes were half closed, his tone mild. “Cairo says you’ve been working hard.”

  “It’s something I’m used to.”

  SuTopo frowned. “Useful. But the best ability, on a ship like this, is to be able comfortably to do nothing.”

  That, Steward concluded, is where the bonsai came in. “I can do nothing, too,” he said. “It’ll be a relief, really.”

  The Captain’s eyes opened slightly. “You have military skills.” A flat declarative. “Specialized skills of a high order.” Steward couldn’t tell how SuTopo felt about this, if indeed he felt anything at all, if this was something other than an awkward conversation.

  “Yes,” Steward said. “But I don’t want to do that anymore.”

  “Ah,” SuTopo said. “You are taking a new path entirely.”

  “Yes.” He wondered if SuTopo was trying to recruit him for something.

  SuTopo nodded, as if confirming something to himself. “Good,” he said. He turned slightly and reached above his head to adjust one of the gro-lights. It was as if he wanted it to be clear he was speaking only in the abstract, without direct reference to anyone in the room. “It has been known for one policorp to plant agents in other policorps. Transportation companies like Starbright and Taler are particular favorites—they grant agents mobility. It would be a great shame were the Max Born to be involved in any difficulty over one of its personnel going on board a station and doing something he shouldn’t.”

  “It won’t happen,” said Steward.

  “I am pleased to hear it.” He turned to look at his wall of bonsai. “Do you know bonsai?” he asked. “It is a passion with me.”

  “I don’t know any details,” Steward said. “I admire the results.”

  SuTopo stepped close to one of the pots, bent to look at the tree i
t contained. “This is graybark elm,” he said. “It was planted by my grandfather. It is almost a century old. The style is called chokkan. The straight, dignified trunk is intended to inspire restfulness.”

  “It’s quite lovely. Restful, as you say.”

  SuTopo turned to another bonsai. His eyes softened. “Arizona cypress,” he said. “A gift from my wife. She lives on the Apollo habitat in the Moskva Complex. Every time I see her, I bring her a tree. We exchange them, so that we can look at the trees and think of each other.”

  Steward looked at the little trees, the simple pots with their glazed exteriors. “Do you have any other family?” he asked.

  “Two daughters. They grew up in Taler habitats, have good positions with the company now. A son, who died on Archangel.” SuTopo fell silent for a moment.

  “I’m sorry, sir. I didn’t know Taler was involved.”

  “It wasn’t.” The voice was gentle. “My son went his own way.” He reached out a hand, as if to touch another of his dwarfs, but the hand stopped a centimeter short. “I keep this Yeddo spruce in his memory,” he said. “Something will live in his name.”

  SuTopo, Steward thought, was another casualty of the war, and he hadn’t even been involved. Living on a memory, like Steward, of something he hadn’t been a part of. “That’s a lovely thought,” Steward said. SuTopo glanced over his shoulder at Steward, and his eyes were hard. Resentful, perhaps, of what might have sounded like Steward’s judgment of his memorial.

  The Captain turned to him, all business again, his hands brushing the front of his jacket, smoothing it into place. “You will excuse me, I hope. I must take a look at Cairo’s reports. And examine the stowage in the cargo holds.”

  “Certainly. Pleased to meet you, sir,” Steward said.

  He wondered, as he bounded down the corridor toward his own quarters, about the existence of certain files, and how widespread they were. Griffith’s friends probably had hundreds of dossiers between them, scattered throughout the security bureaus of every policorp in space, and quite probably the chess problem code was not as much a secret as Griffith thought. Was there a little warning indicator in Steward’s file, a code that meant, Known associate of Griffith, possible courier?