The Diamond Deep

by Brenda Cooper

  The woman appeared to be affected by Joel’s concern. She smiled softly at Joel and said, “She’s already in danger. You all are.”

  The man leaned forward and looked from Joel to SueAnne. “It will serve both of our causes if you can question Koren in the Court of the Deeping Rules. We will help you to the extent we can—we can’t get caught. But we will be working to weaken her in other ways. We can’t allow the Fire’s cargo to be a fortune machine for her. Why not help yourselves and attack the woman who stole from you?”

  SueAnne pursed her lips and looked at Joel, shifting the burden of choice to him.

  He simply said, “We’ll consider what you’ve shared with us.”

  The couple stood. “We can ask for nothing more. Good luck. Don’t underestimate Koren or anyone else currently in power.”

  Satyana gave Ruby’s outfit a doubtful look. “Can you belt that shirt? You really won’t want anything flowing.”

  Satyana wore a form-fitting green jumper. Her shoes appeared to blend into the outfit, although when Ruby looked closely they were separate. The tops closed perfectly around the base of Satyana’s calves and the tight-fitting pants slid over them. A small but bulging-full pack hung over one shoulder.

  “I don’t have anything like that,” Ruby said.

  “I’ll see that Naveen knows where to get you one. They’re great under pressure suits.”

  Ruby realized she’d missed the connection. “Hold on. Let me find a better outfit.”

  “Tell your people I’ll have you half the day. At least.”

  “Okay. Come in?”

  “I’ll wait.”

  Ruby went back into their rooms and dressed a second time. Jali, who shared a room with her, rolled over and opened her eyes. “Noisy girl.”

  “I need something tighter to wear. Come look at what Satyana’s wearing.”

  “Now?”

  “Well, maybe when we get back. It’s kind of like our old uniforms only so tight it’s like wearing skin.”

  “Is uniforms all you think about? Why do I keep dressing you up?”

  Ruby laughed. “I really do need that jumpsuit. The one for the stage. To go with the microphone gun.”

  “You brought that damned thing from the ship?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s not exactly in context here.”

  Ruby grinned. “I know.”

  Jali sat up and raked her fingers through her hair. In the mornings, she looked almost like a normal human being instead of a goddess of fashion. She narrowed her eyes and looked closely at Ruby. “Are you feeling better this morning?”

  “As long as I don’t think about it.”

  “You need a few days’ rest.”

  “I’ll sleep when we get back to Ash.”

  Jali looked more worried than she should. Ruby was tired, but she’d driven herself through it yesterday at the concert with no problem. She’d get herself through today just as well. “I’ll be all right. Whatever it is, it will get better.”

  Jali looked sour, but she said, “Bring us back tales.”

  Satyana looked at the tight gray pants and close-fitting purple shirt Ruby wore. “A little fancy for our trip, but much better.” She led Ruby back to the Star Bear.

  The pressure suits here were a dream. In the Fire, she’d needed to strip. Here, she needed bare feet and bare hands to slide into the boots and gloves, and to tuck everything else in. The material was as thin as underwear, and the helmets were clear and easy to see through, and so light she barely felt the weight. She understood Satyana’s outfit now—with no loose clothes or even seams to bunch up, she looked beautiful even in the pressure suit. There was no mirror, but Ruby suspected she looked rather lumpy. “So,” Ruby asked. “Where are we going?”

  “I wanted to give you a sense of the size and complexity of the Deep. Think of it as a trade for a good concert.” Satyana led her into an airlock. They stood together in the quiet moment of air escaping. The suit expanded and tickled her spine. Out the other side, they stepped into a cramped interior bay of the Star Bear.

  Ruby counted four little ships. “We had these on the Fire, or something like them. I was never in one. They were for when we landed at planets, and of course, the last time we did that was hundreds of years ago.” She remembered that Satyana could be hundreds of years old. “Generations ago.”

  Satyana used a series of lines to lead Ruby through null-g to the smallest of the ships, a squat and ugly thing that stood on six legs and had other appendages folded against the hull. “This is a repair bee. In a fit of imagination, we named it Honey.”

  Ruby laughed, even though she didn’t understand the reference.

  Satyana managed a slow, stately jump up into the doorway of the Honey, and extended a hand to help Ruby into the craft.

  Inside, Honey barely had room for the two of them and Satyana’s pack in the front. Two more seats sat facing backwards, but they were full of tools and clothes. “Good thing I didn’t bring anything,” Ruby said.

  Satyana laughed. “She’s small, but she’s fun.”

  Once the hatches were all dogged down and everything appeared ready to go, Ruby asked, “Can I take my helmet off?”

  “Not yet. But strap in.”

  Ruby had to watch Satyana carefully to figure out how to get that done. The straps were wide and thick, and the buckles unfamiliar. A door irised open in front of them, and Satyana piloted the small craft through it so smoothly that Ruby barely felt the movement.

  Not that they were moving fast.

  Satyana spoke into her microphone, communicating with the ship. “Exit check, please.”

  She fell silent long enough for Ruby to wonder what an exit check was, when the ship responded, “Neutralized.”

  In response to Ruby’s quizzical look, Satyana said, “It clears the ship of listening devices. I special-ordered the Honey so that she has a shielded command and control system, and the ability to burn out unwanted tech.”

  “So someone was listening?”

  Satyana laughed. “Someone was hoping to.”

  “Like who?”

  Satyana shrugged. “Could have been a competitor.” She must have noticed Ruby’s blank face, since she added, “Someone who wanted to know more about my business so they could steal my customers. Maybe catch me saying something I shouldn’t and get me in trouble.”

  “Wow. I don’t understand the way you people think.”

  “Happens all the time. It’s not something you can be naïve about. In this case, maybe someone wanted a scoop on you. Naveen has given you value, and your concert last night added more value, so it could be one of his competitors instead of one of mine.”

  “Naveen told me to be careful who I talked to. He said you’re safe.”

  “Did he?” Satyana’s fingers danced over a panel of light in front of her, shifting bars one way and then another too fast for Ruby to follow. She stopped for a moment and glanced at Ruby. “It could have been one of your enemies.”

  Everything seemed like a fight on this station. The very thought of living like that wearied her. “But don’t you have security? How would someone get in here?”

  “Wouldn’t need to be a person.” Satyana relaxed back into her chair. “You can take your helmet off now. And loosen your seat-straps, but don’t take them all the way off.” Satyana took her helmet and her shoes off. “There are cameras too small to see; robots that would fit on the tip of your finger, and that separate into smaller robots and swarm back; there are pseudo-AIs that people have figured out how to trick. The less-competent robots around here are often hacked. It’s a high-stakes game for the bored.”

  The air smelled of grease and metal and the closeness of a recycled atmosphere. Kind of like the Fire, only without the added scents of growing things and food. It felt good to be off the Deep and away from crowds. “You’re right. This station is a wonder of confusing things.” Ruby watched Satyana’s profile. Could she take a risk? She took a deep breath. “What abo
ut human/machine hybrids? I heard a rumor those existed.”

  “They’re not allowed anywhere in the inside system. There are some at the Edge. I met one once.”

  “What happened? Why aren’t they allowed?”

  “In truth they are, at least in some ways. There are machine aids to the human brain. Mostly they’re legal for simple enhancements like better and clearer vision or hearing. Some more dramatic mods are illegal, but can still be obtained. There’s always a few want-to-be superheroes. But the process of going the other way—of putting a human brain into a machine? That’s illegal.”

  “Why?”

  “It destroys the human. And human brains in robot bodies go insane eventually. Almost always.”

  The Honey had an actual window. Ruby touched it. She had never seen a true window to space; everything on the Fire had been a picture created by Ix and displayed for them. The station receded in the window. “Are the hybrids who live at the Edge insane?”

  Satyana shrugged. “I’ve only been there twice. In general, it’s frowned on to go to the Edge. One can only come up with thin excuses so often.”

  “Why would you go to the Edge?”

  “Adventure. Curiosity. Kindness. A patron paid me to go there and bring a whole barge of food once. I suspect she was also smuggling other stuff to them, but I was as naïve as you then.”

  “In the Star Bear?”

  “Oh no, this was three hundred years ago. I was young and stupid then.”

  “So are all the people on the Edge hybrids?”

  “No.” Satyana smiled. “You should worry more about the challenges you have here. There are even more than you think.” She grinned. “And I plan to present you with a proposition.”

  Ruby waited.

  Satyana fiddled with the controls, slowing the craft so it drifted above the station. The Star Bear filled most of the window, a large rounded oblong of a ship with nothing svelte about it. Satyana stared at it, as if she seldom saw her own ship from this viewpoint. “There is opportunity here. A lot of it.” She goosed the little ship so it drove backward, making the Star Bear look a little smaller. “You’re new. You have the freshest eyes that have seen our society. Maybe in forever. What do you think?”

  “I love how varied everything is. The birds are amazing, and the food. But some things here are wrong.”

  “Tell me.”

  “Well, it’s hard to live here. Everyone has to earn air and food somehow. We just made them for everyone.”

  Satyana drove the Honey forward, toward the outside center of the station. “The Creative Fire was a ship. This is a society. Think of the Deep as more like a planet than a ship.”

  “People on planets don’t take care of their own? Just people on starships?”

  Satyana frowned. “That’s not what I mean.”

  “Then can you explain the Brawl?”

  Satyana focused very intently on the controls for the Honey.

  “Can you?” Ruby whispered.

  “In any society, there are winners and losers.”

  “So you hide the losers?”

  Satyana still wasn’t looking at Ruby. “It’s not hard to earn air and food. Three days or so a week of work.”

  Ruby stayed quiet to force Satyana to think or talk, a trick she’d learned from Joel.

  They flew slowly over and around structures. Once the Honey came too close and a small warning beep filled the cabin. Ruby didn’t comment on it.

  Time stretched, only slightly awkward since there was so much to see.

  Satyana broke first, laughing, her face relaxing. “People tell me I’m single-focused. Are all revolutionaries so fucking irritating?”

  “Do you believe that if you don’t talk about the Brawl it isn’t there? “

  “No.”

  “Have you ever gone there?”

  “No.”

  “Even just to see it?”

  “No.”

  The Honey crept up over a pile of arms and booms and other structures and opened onto a field of bubbles open to the sun. Each of them looked mostly clear on the outside, full of greens and golds on the inside, and in a few places, dots of orange. “One of our agricultural fields. There are five, and every time the station grows by a certain amount of new people, another agrifield is created and planted. The sixth one is being designed now. See the dark lines at the edges?”

  Each bubble had a dark top, all of them oriented the same, although a few looked darker that the others. “Yes.”

  “Those will flow down the bubbles at a certain time, like a sunset. Agribubbles keep the station’s day and night cycles, which are synced to Lym’s. It’s gives the plants a cycle they understand, with built-in day and night.”

  “I’ve never seen a sunset.” The Honey floated above the bubbles. The smallest of them was ten times the size of the little ship, the largest ten times that again. “Is it all food?”

  “We plant a bubble of flowers or greenfield plants in every field—like the ones that you see in pots around most habs. It’s something this station is proud of, one of the reasons the Deep grew in the beginning. Beauty for the sake of it—beauty because the human soul needs it. The others all do this now, of course.”

  Ruby knew Satyana was trying to change the subject, but she couldn’t help herself. “Is that enough food for everyone?”

  “Of course. We also sell food to ships that come through here to dock.”

  “So we pay to grow it and we make the poor pay to eat it?”

  Satyana looked frustrated with her. “You’ve got to pay the people who work here.” She pointed. “There’s a forest bubble in the middle—see the big one? There’s only three on the whole station. It’s part of why we flew this way.” She nudged the Honey closer. “They make nothing. They’re there to be beautiful, and to keep a complex ecosystem to grow certain medicines in. I think they’re also there because people love them. There are even fake rocks, so it’s almost like being on a planet. Some of the richer people here who started on Lym like to vacation there. It’s expensive to go to them, but I can take you some day.”

  If Ruby understood perspective and size and distance in this situation, the trees inside were enormous. There were trees in the aviary, and those had astounded her. These would dwarf them. “Are there birds?”

  “Some. Smaller ones. No mammals though.”

  Ruby frowned. “Meaning no animals?”

  “Insects and birds.”

  “I want to go to Lym sometime. None of us have ever even seen a planet.” She had trouble looking away from the forest bubble. “I appreciate the things you’ve done for me. Setting up the concert. Taking me out here. It would be even more credit for you to take me inside of the forest bubble, right?”

  “You made me a lot of credit last night. I’d like for that to happen again, for you to come back to the Star Bear and perform.”

  “I enjoyed that.”

  “I also want you to understand some things about the Deep. I think you may be able to help me some day. Many things happen on the station because people can help each other.”

  Ruby tried not to react badly to the slightly condescending tone Satyana was using. Maybe it meant the woman would underestimate her. “What do you need help with?”

  “There are a lot of powerful people on the Deep. Factions, if you will. People who have resources.”

  “Like you?”

  Satyana laughed. “No. Well, yes. But like me with many, many more credits. Koren is one of them. The woman who bought the right to greet you.”

  Ruby swallowed. Bought the ability to greet them? “She didn’t present it that way.”

  “Of course not. You wouldn’t have understood that anyway.”

  Ruby’s cheeks warmed. Maybe she wasn’t being underestimated. Maybe she was stupid, after all. “Not much is as simple as it appears here, is it?”

  “Of course not.” Satyana pointed at a series of bubbles with yellow-golds and soft greens in them. “Those are grain fields
. We grow many kinds of grains.”

  She couldn’t focus on grain. Her head whirled at the idea of people bidding to take advantage of her and her people. “How many people offered on the ability to greet us?”

  Satyana shrugged. “At least a few. It made the news—or more accurately, Naveen reported on it. That’s what made me notice at all. The Deep is huge, and a lot happens here that very few people notice.”

  “Did you bid?”

  Satyana laughed. “I couldn’t. I’m not in a discipline, and even after all these years, I’m not exactly in the middle of the power structure here.”

  “Is Koren really a historian?”

  “Yes. She’s the station’s main historian. But any of a number of heads of disciplines could have won. Engineering. Social Engineering. Medical.”

  “So it wasn’t really a complete free-for-all?”

  “The disciplines are backed by credit. Koren had backers.”

  “Who?”

  “We don’t know yet.”

  “We?”

  “Me or Naveen.”

  Ruby’s stomach felt sour. “They weren’t bidding to greet us. They were bidding to steal the Fire.”

  Satyana reached for the small pack. “That’s not quite accurate. They were bidding for your cargo, and for your information. New information can give people who want to craft new products an edge.” She dug out a blue square and held it out toward Ruby.

  “I don’t really like those.”

  “This one is good.”

  “Okay.” She touched her tongue to the square, let the sweet flavor sit in her mouth. “It is good. So people competed to steal from us. They compete for everything here, though. Right? What’s so different?”

  “Nothing. I’m trying to make sure you understand that there are people with a lot of power.” She drove the Honey to the edge of the field of agribubbles, and pointed past it. “See the habitats on the edge there, the big ones?”

  “Sure.”

  “That’s one of the places that some of our most influential people live. I can’t take you there. All of the ways into them are keyed and hidden, and the prox alarms go off before you get a ship like this close enough to see anything. Special trains connect those places to the other habitats.”