Voice of the Whirlwind

by Walter Jon Williams

  *

  The next day Steward was scheduled to work two shifts, with an hour-long meal break in between. During the break, Colorado and his friend Navasky joined them in the cafeteria. Navasky was a tall girl of about sixteen, blond and pale, with the perfect features and delicate appearance of the genetically altered. She had painted her face yellow, with a red chevron over the bridge of her nose.

  The early Imagists had struck boldly into the realm of genetic engineering, hoping for vast leaps out of the human fleshly prison and into a grand, unseeable future, a period in which Imagist achievement curved upward into infinity, a “posthuman singularity” composed of “posthuman tropes.” They’d created marvels of increased intelligence and heightened cognition, and they’d bred as well for adaptability to nonterran environments, for second-stage humans who would live forever outside of gravity, true inhabitants of space. They’d moved too fast and underestimated the fragility of the human DNA they were dealing with. Their superintelligent, superintuitive creations proved susceptible to schizophrenia, epilepsy, bursts of paranoia. Immune systems proved vulnerable to even the most common bacteria. The Imagists hadn’t realized the limitations of the human genetic structure, that adding to one characteristic might detract from others. The second-stage humans lived well in their gravity-free environments and were useful in nongravity manufacturing, but their sturdier ancestors proved more durable during the high-g acceleration burns that powered human commerce, that moved the goods from the Belt to Earth to Saturn and beyond.

  The NeoImagists were more modest. Navasky’s delicacy showed that her mind had probably been altered in some minor way, but still she was sturdy enough to join Colorado and Steward in their task of unloading the Power ship. She had joined Starbright on scholarship, which meant she was in the top two percent of humanity and was starting at the bottom of the shipping business, but she planned on working her way up to starship captain.

  Before she ate she startled Steward by bowing over her plate and offering a prayer. Steward didn’t know to whom.

  “They boosted the wiring on my linguistic centers,” she said during the meal, discussing her genes as other people talked about their shoes, “and I’ve had special training in socialization theory. My genetics were intended to make me useful as a diplomat, but that’s what starship captains often have to be. They’re always months out of communication, and if they’re on discovery missions, they often have to negotiate with other policorporate ships. Or even aliens, if there are any more like the Powers around.”

  “Can you understand Power speech?” Steward asked.

  Navasky frowned, sipping at a bulb of tea while she considered her answer. “A lot of it,” she said. “But not in all its senses or contexts. Simple things only. Power idiom is full of references and patterns that humans haven’t been able to decipher yet, not even with Power cooperation.” Her frown turned to a confident smile. “But I’m just starting—I’d be in class right now if we didn’t have to unload all that cargo.” She rotated her shoulder and grimaced. “I’m not used to hauling stuff.”

  “Wrong genes.” Colorado grinned. Navasky laughed and put her arm around him.

  Steward smiled. They were relaxed now, and maybe his questions wouldn’t seem strange. “I remember,” he said, “a few months ago, I read about some kind of biological alert on Vesta. A contamination.”

  Colorado made a face. Navasky put down her bulb of tea. Her eyes were disturbed. Since the Orbital Soviet fell in a blizzard of biologic strikes, space habitants in general tended to be paranoid about contamination, and Navasky’s NeoImagist history, Steward thought, probably made her even more wary of bacteriological outbreaks. “I was on the other side at the time,” she said, “hadn’t got my clearance to come into the Legation.” She looked at Colorado. “Colorado was here, though.”

  He looked at his plate. “Bad time,” he said. “I wasn’t around the worst of it.”

  “Any people get hurt?” Steward said.

  Colorado shook his head. “Not many. The outbreak was mostly confined to the Power quarters. There are contamination drills here all the time—once the alarms went off, everyone knew to stay in their quarters or jump for the nearest hardened radiation shelter. The Power crews in the ships just sealed themselves inside once the alert was announced, but the rest, the ones living on Vesta, got hurt bad. They say the Power police were just shooting any Powers that were infected. There were a lot of dead ones anyway, someone told me. The whole Legation smelled like”—he shrugged—“like dead Powers, I guess. Bad. There must have been a lot of them.”

  “We’re not supposed to talk about this,” Navasky said. She gave a nervous glance over her shoulder.

  “A few people got hurt. Trampled to death by stampeding Powers, I suppose. They say the Powers just went mad once they found out they were infected. They did a lot of damage to their own quarters. When we got back to work, the docks were a mess, too.”

  “It didn’t last long, though,” said Navasky.

  “Just a few days. Apparently any Power infected got sick within hours, so the plague burned itself out. Now they don’t let any human into the Power quarters, just in case he might be carrying something.”

  Steward regretted he couldn’t record this. His brain was whirling, trying to remember it all. He wished he wasn’t so tired.

  “And then there’s the new Samuel,” said Navasky. There was the sense of an electric snap in Steward’s mind, like a switch closing—somehow he knew this was important. Colorado looked at Navasky in surprise. She turned her dark eyes to Steward and explained.

  “Samuel’s the Power Head of Legation,” she said. “See, Powers don’t have names in their own language—all they have are titles, like Second-Cousin-in-Charge-of-Waste-Disposal.” She laughed, and Steward laughed with her, trying to encourage her. “All the prominent Powers,” she went on, “have been given human names, because they’ve got human public-relations people working for them who are trying to give them a kind of human media personality, so that people will feel easier dealing with them. Now that I’ve been around the Powers for a while, studying them, I can tell one from another. I’ve seen tapes of the Samuel before the plague, and I’ve seen the current Samuel up close, and it’s not the same person—I mean Power.”

  Steward hunched toward her. “You think he died?” Navasky seemed startled by his intensity. He leaned back, took a breath and tried to relax, to ease the taut muscles in his shoulders and arms, act as if the answer didn’t mean anything.

  “It seems reasonable,” she said, a bit subdued.

  Navasky had all manner of training, as well as genetic adaptation, in reading people, in being able to persuade and manipulate them, and she’d seen something strange in Steward that had made her wonder. He had to get her to talk now, before she decided he was some kind of spy from her Starbright superiors who was trying to find out if she’d babble classified information. He grinned, trying to ease her suspicions. “I’d like to know,” Steward said, “a little about Power social organization. What happens when the Head of Legation dies?”

  “They’re completely hierarchical.” The expression in Navasky’s eyes was wondering and a little suspicious. Her wording was precise, as if she were censoring herself, trying not to give anything away. Steward cursed himself for being so obvious. “Only Samuel was authorized to make certain kinds of decisions. If anything major came up now, the current Samuel would have to refer it to their superiors back in Power space for a ruling.”

  “And their bosses are months out of contact,” Steward said.

  Navasky nodded. Steward had the intuition that he’d got as much out of her as she was ever likely to offer. He drank from his squeeze bulb of water and considered. The Alpha’s biological strike had decapitated the Power hierarchy, left them unable to deal with any major issue or crisis that might arise. It had also devastated the Power population, lowering the efficiency of the colony as a whole, slowing the rate of goods moving into the waiting
ships. Replacement personnel were probably on the way, and in the interim they were very likely drafting as many crew out of their ships as they dared for use as replacements. Steward wondered what issue had arisen that had made Curzon and Consolidated Systems so eager to make such an attack, and at that moment. They’d stunned Starbright for at least a year. Why, he thought, was this year so crucial?

  Colorado’s voice was wondering. “Does this stuff mean anything to you? Why are you asking?”

  Steward tried to shrug in an offhand way. “I know someone back on Earth who’s been around the Powers, who really loves them. And he can’t get into space because he’s got the disease, whatever it is.”

  Navasky was still watching him, trying to read his body language, his tone. But Colorado seemed to relax. “Yeah. We have those kind of Power lovers here, too.” He shook his head. “Strange people. It’s not even love, I think. It’s like the Powers are something they need.”

  Navasky quietly dropped her hand from the table and put it on Colorado’s thigh. He looked at her in surprise. She pursed her lips, gave him a quiet shake of the head. Colorado seemed startled, and then it seemed as if a shutter drew across his eyes, closing Steward out. He bent to his plate.

  Steward imitated Colorado. He was aware of another set of eyes on him: Reese who watched as he busied himself with his meal, who had been watching all along. And drawn, no doubt, her own conclusions.

  *

  There was a group of them, each in a uniform jacket cut like the standard Starbright collarless uniform but a dark purple instead of gray, and with a bright red bar sinister sewn across their chests and backs, like the ribbon of a knightly order. They were at the next loading dock down, clustered around one of the medium-sized alloy shipping containers. They had opened the container and some of them were clustered around it, scooping out packing foam, bringing out small plastic boxes.

  Steward saw them as he guided a six-tonne canister past them, his head swiveling as he alternated little bursts of his jets, blipping his horn to make certain the path was clear and that others saw him. The people in their deep purple jackets, held to the roof of the docking bay by grip pumps, hardly noticed him. One of them, a small, dark barrel-chested man, had taken one of the plastic boxes to the fringes of the group and had opened it. He was frowning at its contents.

  Suddenly Steward was awash in a flood of recognition, images flooding in his mind in swift repetition. Sereng. Icehawks. Outdoor training. Hanging on a rope ladder, twisting in a thirty-knot wind, with the crampon-equipped boots of the Nepalese planted on a flexible rung inches from his nose. Sereng almost buried beneath his pack, smiling, on his belt the big inward-curving knife that looked like the shoulder bone of some prehistoric animal sharpened and turned to steel. His eyes glittering as sharp as the knife.

  Heat rose in Steward’s skin. His weariness vanished. His glance flickering from Sereng to the alloy pallet; he halted the container’s motion, spun it, dropped it gently into place. He signaled another crewman to turn on the electromagnets that would hold it to the pallet, feeling the solid impact beneath him as the container slammed down on its ferrous strips. Then Steward detached his maneuvering pack and kicked off straight for where the Nepalese was gazing into his box. He tumbled in space, reversing himself, and landed boots-first on the Velcro strip directly in front of Sereng.

  The man looked up. His face was fuller than Steward remembered, his body softer. His eyes were distant, preoccupied, not at all surprised. He had grown a mustache. The voice was the same. “Captain,” he said.

  “Hello,” Steward said. “It’s been a long time. What are you doing way out here?”

  Sereng quietly closed his box. There was something that gleamed in it, with coils and a space for a tiny fuel cell, a little refrigeration unit smaller than a pack of cigarettes.

  “I’m a member of the Power Legation,” Sereng said. “A Power citizen. Couldn’t you tell by the uniform?”

  Surprise flickered through Steward. Sereng had been a soldier, not a trader or diplomat. He couldn’t see what use the Powers could have for the man.

  “I don’t know Brighter Suns uniforms yet. I’m Starbright. It’s just an accident that I’m here at all.”

  Sereng nodded. He didn’t seem to be surprised at all that Steward was here. “It’s a good job,” he said. “I’m with the Powers all the time. It’s where I want to be.”

  There was something wrong with Sereng’s eyes. They were clouded somehow, turned inward. They weren’t the eyes Steward remembered.

  A breathy voice sounded near Steward’s elbow. He jumped. There was an alien there, its lower voice box speaking precise, educated English, like a video announcer.

  “Violation,” it said. Its arms moved in rapid patterns. Steward flinched from the sourness of the thing’s smell. “You are not to speak to Legation personnel. This is a violation of your contract. Your policorp will be fined.”

  “My apologies. I know this man from years ago. I was not aware he was a Legation member.”

  “Were you not briefed on the significance of the uniform? This man is a quarantined Legation member. I will file a protest with the Starbright consul.”

  Wonderful, Steward thought. All he needed was to be the center of another incident crossing Lal’s desk.

  “I do apologize. A protest will not be necessary now that I have been warned.” He looked over his shoulder. “Sorry to bother you, Sereng,” he said, but the Nepalese had already turned away, heading back to the group around the container.

  “Away, away,” said the Power. Its long ropy arms were making scissoring motions at Steward’s knees, as if offering to slice at his hamstrings. Steward saw Colorado moving toward him, gliding with deliberate haste along the Velcro strip.

  “Yes, yes. My apologies,” Steward said, and let the Power chivvy him away.

  Colorado’s big hand reached out and slammed down on his shoulder. “What’s the matter with you?” he asked. He was almost dragging Steward away. “Don’t you know about the goddamn redstripes?”

  “No. I don’t. What’s the matter?”

  Colorado was furious. “Somebody fucked up, that’s the matter. You were supposed to get a lecture about not talking to Power personnel.”

  “One of them was an old friend. Are they really Power citizens?”

  Colorado looked over his shoulder at the group, his fingers tightening on Steward’s shoulder. “Damn right they are. They’re the only humans allowed into the Power section of the centrifuge. They’re the crazy ones.”

  “The ones who love them.”

  Colorado spat. The globe of saliva traveled out into the room and vanished into the distance. “The ones who have cheese for brains,” he said.

  Steward looked up as a shadow passed between him and the big bank of floodlights that illuminated this part of the dock. It was Reese, the straps of her maneuvering jets wrapped around her body, hovering over him with quick bursts of peroxide.

  “Trouble, Steward?”

  Steward looked up at her. “I knew one of those guys from before. I was in the Icehawks with him. But now they’re taboo or something.”

  “The ones in the purple jackets with the stripe,” Colorado said. “Stay the hell away.” His eyes narrowed. “Icehawks?” he said.

  “I’m older than I look.”

  Reese had tumbled slightly in space, was craned over looking at the Power citizens through her wide-spaced legs. “I know one of those people, too,” she said in surprise. “The tall redhead. She was in a recce unit on Archangel.” She was silent for a moment. When she looked at Steward her eyes were questioning. “Can they all be ex-military?” she wondered. “What do the Powers need them for?”

  “They work for Samuel,” Colorado said. “They build his media image, arrange for release of information from Power space, negotiate trade agreements.”

  “Why does he need former military?” Reese demanded.

  “I dunno,” Colorado said. “They never leave the Legation, s
o far as I know.”

  Steward said nothing. He was thinking about Sereng’s eyes.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Steward had something new in his cabin. Like SuTopo with his bonsai, Fischer with his mountain, and the former occupant of Steward’s cabin with the labia of anonymous women, Steward had refined his aspirations to a single image. He’d cut it from a magazine the day Born left Vesta behind.

  It was a picture of a video set in a blue plastic case. The picture was a jagged haze of interference lines. Behind the interference, a vague image could be seen, or perhaps imagined.

  The object of Steward’s desire.

  The picture was in his mind, mingled with the patterns of the engine analogs that still pulsed in Steward’s brain, the images that lingered even after a six-hour sleep. The high-g engine burn out of the Belt was over, and Born was on its fifty-two-day return trip to Charter Station—Earth and Vesta were farther apart than they had been during the outward leg, and the return journey would be longer. To give everyone a break after the long three days of one point five g, the flora’s centrifuge was locked in place, and Steward floated weightlessly in webbing, his arms drifting out in front of him like the forelegs of a dead animal.

  He was thirsty. His body was a collection of aches. The engine analogs wouldn’t leave his mind.

  But Steward was alive. The assassin hadn’t come, and Steward rejoiced in the intensity of the aches, the thirst, the cold fire of the mental afterimage. He’d got in and out of Vesta, he had a dozen spikes of bootleg data, and he felt the touch of the Alpha on his shoulder, saw his image behind the interference pattern thrown in front of his eyes by the enemy, by their security. He was getting close to things.

  Time to get closer. Time to see what was on the spikes.

  *

  He closed his cabin door and locked it, then disconnected his cabin comp from the ship’s central computer just in case Taler had some kind of surveillance program running on the Starbright employees who lived on their ships. Then he’d put in the first spike and scanned it till he found filesecur:stew ard.1 . He could feel the nerves in his fingers tingling. This was what he came to Vesta to find.