Dancing with Eternity

by John Patrick Lowrie

  “Your friend Yuri works like he’s got a hobby. Don’t you people ever stop to have sex?”

  This forced Marcus to laugh. I was afraid he’d hurt himself; it was good to see. “Well—” I think he was looking for a witty riposte, but witty ripostes were so far out of his conversational arsenal that he would have had to rent one. He gave up and switched to what he did best.

  “We’re really pressed for time right now. Is Yuri at the—?”

  “Pressed for time? You come back when my shift’s over and I’ll press you into a totally new frame of mind.”

  Marcus was back in alien territory, but he tried to dig his way out, “You seem even more ebullient than usual, Matessa. What’s the occasion?”

  Her metabolic state jumped up another couple of notches and she let out a whoop, “I just signed with Planetary Tectonics! Come Graveyard they start to re-boot me, and three months after that I’m headed for sixty years of hell! I plan to do nothing but drink and screw between now and then, so if you miss out it’s your own damn fault.”

  It kind of took me aback. I’d re-booted eighteen times, but I’d never had to go into the trades; it was disturbing to meet someone facing that prospect. I could see it shook Marcus, too.

  “Well, I ... um, I’m, uh, glad to hear—when did you say this was going to happen?”

  She laughed, “Graveyard, man, Graveyard! Appropriate, yes? Come the witching hour they’re gonna whisk me off to la-la-land and I’m not coming back for two-thirds of a century.”

  I could tell Marcus still didn’t understand. He must have been younger than me by a few centuries, and younger than the person who thought up the shift names on Vesper. With four waking periods per day, they’d had to come up with something to call them, and they weren’t really all that creative, just morning, afternoon, evening and Graveyard. But I doubt that one out of a thousand people, even among long-term residents, knew what a graveyard shift was, or had ever seen a graveyard, for that matter. I don’t think there were any graveyards outside the system. Were there even any left on Earth? I didn’t know.

  “Hey, Matessa!” one of the dock hands yelled, “I’ll treat you right, man!”

  “Oh, Bartos, I don’t want you,” she yelled back, “you’re no good.”

  “Oh, man, I been practicing!” All his mates laughed.

  “You don’t need practice, you need lessons.” They laughed again.

  “You could give me lessons!”

  “School’s out.” These guys were really cracking each other up.

  “Oh, you don’t know what you’re missing. I could take you to heaven, man.”

  “I’ve been to Heaven. It’s not all that great a planet. Get back to work.”

  Bartos clutched his heart and fell backwards into the water, to the cheers of his fellows. A woman and a man dove in after him, ostensibly to save him, but it was obvious they were just goofing around.

  “All right, all right.” Matessa was laughing, too. She turned back to us. “What a bunch of yahoos.” But I could see tears in her eyes. “I’m gonna miss this dump.” She looked at Marcus; “You look me up, later. We’ll all be at Teng’s. It’s gonna be a hell of a party.”

  Marcus climbed out onto the dock. He seemed really touched. It made him awkward. “I’ll—I’ll try to be there. I really will. But we really are pretty busy.”

  She punched him in the chest, hard. Then she grabbed him and hugged him even harder. “First things first,” she said, “First things first.”

  Marcus was really embarrassed, now. “But I— I mean, we hardly know each other—”

  “I want life around me. I’m going to be leaving it for a while.” She looked him in the eye. “You do this for me.”

  Marcus stared back at her for a minute. He looked naked, then veiled, then naked again. “Yes. Yes, I’ll be there. Teng’s place.”

  She grabbed his ears and kissed him. Then she was laughing again, “You won’t regret it! Bring your friends!” she said as she turned back to her crew. Bartos and his lifeguards were just climbing out of the water. “All right, you worthless clowns, let’s get this stuff loaded!”

  Steel climbed up behind Marcus. She looked rumpled and sleepy. “Looks like you found a friend,” she said.

  Marcus jumped. “Yes, Captain—I mean, I just—she was the one who got the boat for us. I don’t really—”

  “I trust you didn’t divulge anything in the heat of passion?” She cocked that eyebrow at him.

  Marcus’ mouth worked fruitlessly for a moment, “Captain, I—I didn’t—”

  Steel laughed and clapped him on the shoulder, “Allah and Rama be praised that I have you, Marcus. You keep me sane.” She laughed again.

  Marcus wasn’t sure how to take it. He looked for language, found none, then said with a smile, “I’m glad, Captain.”

  Steel looked around. “I feel like I’ve been online for a million years. I need to get some real sleep. Where’s Alice? Didn’t she meet us?”

  Marcus replied, “She needed to try out the dirigible, and she wanted to get the solar panels, electrolysis plant and extra bag up to Manlung La, so she’s on her way up there now.”

  Steel tensed up, inappropriately, I thought. It was strange; I couldn’t figure it out. “In the dark?” she asked, and went on her I.S.:

  “Alice, where are you? Alice?” She listened for a moment. “Why? You didn’t need to—Yes, I know.” She paused. “How are they?” Her face darkened. “I see—yes. Yes, of course.” She listened for a time. “When will you be back down here?” She looked into the village. “All right. I’m going to have Marcus and Jemal go help Yuri—” she looked at me, “And Mohandas. I’m going to the inn and log off. I don’t even know how long I was awake, but it was too long.” She looked at me again. “Yes—yes, I’ll see you then.”

  She turned back to Marcus. “Yuri’s at the hangar?”

  “I guess. He hasn’t been picking up. He must be inspired.”

  Steel sighed. “Well, I suppose that’s good. Alice says there’s plenty of moonlight to fly by. She’s almost at the pass.” Then she looked hard at Marcus. “Drake is much worse.”

  Marcus said simply, “Yes.”

  Steel looked at the river, the boats, the dockhands, the jungle, up the main drag of Kindu, but there were no answers anywhere. I wondered what the questions were.

  “I’m glad we brought him down.” Her voice was as steely as I’d ever heard it. “He shouldn’t be in weightlessness now.”

  Marcus looked for something to say to her. I think he wanted to comfort her, but there were other things, too. Anger? Frustration? Fatigue, certainly. He finally chose, “Yes, Captain.”

  “Alice is taking some things up to them, things they make here out of plants in the forest. She thinks they might help.” I could tell Steel didn’t think so, but she wanted to.

  “Let’s get to the inn.” She started up the street.

  Chapter 6

  The walk to the inn was a very strange one for me. My future was clouded with tension and mystery, but my present was as pleasant and relaxed a time as I could remember. I’d never been to anyplace like Kindu. It looked entirely handmade. Hewn and carved and woven and pegged, it was a purely organic expression of the people who built it and lived in it. All the construction materials had obviously come from the forest, except for the hydrogen and electrical systems, but even those were utterly integrated into the flow and thatch of the place. Buildings were placed capriciously, but not randomly. The sweeping curves of the thatched roofs, the carvings on the poles and door frames, the style of the verandahs and balconies, while not uniform in any way, seemed to spring from an artistic consensus, incorporating aesthetics from many planets and centuries into a vibrant improvisation on a single theme. We walked through an open-air market that evidently served not only Kindu but the people in the surrounding bush as well. Business seemed to be good.

  The inn was on the far side of the market. Steel booked two rooms adjacent to the one Ali
ce and Yuri had been sharing and had us follow her up the stairs to hers. It seemed like Ham should have been carrying the luggage, only we didn’t have any.

  We passed through the sleeping room out onto a lanai that overlooked thatched roofs and jungle lit by torch light, flickering and shadowed. All except for Ham; I don’t think the lanai would have held him. It was on the back side of the inn, away from the market and fairly quiet. The weather was still clear; I could see swaths of stars through clearings in the forest. We sat down around a small teak table; Steel lit an oil lamp.

  “All right,” she said to Marcus, “since Yuri is in the midst of a creative fervor, why don’t you tell me what he’s got planned.”

  Marcus drew himself up and tented his fingers on the polished wood. “Well, he’s having to make it up as he goes along. The dirigible was the best we could do out here, given the security parameters—”

  “Which have to be maintained,” Steel interjected.

  “Of course. But the system was designed to work with aircraft that were much smaller, quicker, and very much more maneuverable. When we lost the ultra-lights—”

  “I know we’d be much better off with our original equipment, but we don’t have it. Does he think he can make this work?”

  “Alice seems to think so. If we can be at the right place, altitude and latitude, at the right time, the hook should be able to grapple us. If we miss, it just means laying over for another rotation.”

  “I really want to avoid any delay.”

  “I understand. But that’s not the biggest worry.”

  “Which is?”

  Marcus traced a circle on the tabletop. “As I said, if we’re just in the wrong place, the hook simply misses us. If we’re too low, the hook misses us. But,” he looked at Steel, “if we’re at the right place but too high, we could get tangled in the tether. And ...”

  “And?” Steel prompted.

  “If we’re just a little too high, the hook could puncture the gas bag.”

  “Well, if that happens, I assume we’ll be grappled, right?”

  “The way Yuri’s got it figured, the momentum of the hook would tear right through the bag and catch on the handle.”

  “So we wouldn’t need the bag any longer, anyway.”

  “If the hook catches, that is correct. However, the locals haven’t the capability to manufacture helium. They use hydrogen.”

  “Yes?”

  “Which is highly flammable.”

  Steel thought for a moment. “I see.” Then, “We’d be under the fire, which would tend to rise.”

  “That’s the way Yuri figures.”

  “I don’t see a problem.”

  “Well, the hook will pull us right up through it.”

  Steel looked out at the night sky. “We should be out of the atmosphere quickly enough that it won’t be a problem.” She looked back at Marcus. “Why does he want the extra bag?”

  “Just in case the primary bag is destroyed and the hook doesn’t catch. Aside from the possibility of grave injury to all of us in a remote area, which would require complete abrogation of security to attend to, there is—” Marcus glanced at me and then back at Steel.

  “Mohandas has not been briefed as yet,” she said, without looking at me.

  Marcus nodded, then continued, “There is Drake’s condition to be considered.”

  “How so? I can’t see that this would affect it.”

  Marcus chose his words, “The impact incurred in a fall from altitude could cause his—” He paused. “His environmental containment could be compromised.”

  Steel looked somber. “Yes. How did Yuri explain the extra bag to the locals?”

  “We’re sticking to the accident story. As Alice and Yuri became acquainted with local conditions, they filled in the details to fit. At this point I believe the story is that our dirigible failed in the mountains and its bag is beyond repair.”

  “So we’re replacing it.”

  “Correct.”

  “And Yuri has a way to assemble this contraption at Manlung La?”

  Marcus smiled, “You know Yuri.”

  I was thinking I wanted to get to know Yuri as well. The conversation had fascinated me up to this point. My only concern, besides the question of Drake’s ‘condition’—whatever that was—was that I might know something about what they were discussing. I said, “Excuse me, but are you talking about using a skyhook?”

  Steel and Marcus looked at me, then each other. Steel asked, “What do you know about skyhooks?”

  I tried to look innocent. “Besides the fact that the technology is almost two millennia old? Nothing much.”

  The tension rose appreciably. Steel asked me, “Are you an aficionado of the history of space flight?”

  So she didn’t know how old I was. Maybe. “Just a hobby,” I said. “You’re going to use one to hook a blimp into orbit?”

  Marcus answered, “That’s the plan.”

  “Hmm,” I said in a sort of neutral, nonchalant, ‘sure, why not? Beats watching holos,’ sort of a way. Skyhooks had been used for launching cargo starting back in the mid-twenty-first century, when interplanetary commerce was in its incipient stages between Earth, Luna, and Mars. They had never been man-rated, and had faded out of use after graviton impellers made surface launches cheap and clean. A skyhook was basically just a hub with two spokes several hundred kilometers long. It was placed in a low orbit and spun up until it was rotating as fast as it was revolving around the planet, so it behaved like a wheel on a road. As the spoke descended into the atmosphere, the end of the spoke was traveling backwards in relation to the hub at the same speed the hub was moving forward, so its velocity relative to the planetary surface was zero, and it could pick up things. If they had been lifted above the more turbulent parts of the atmosphere. Then, as the spoke continued to revolve around the hub, it would pick up speed until, at the top of the wheel, it was moving twice as fast as the hub, or twice orbital velocity, and you could launch your cargo into an interplanetary trajectory simply by letting go of it. It was an ingenious technology. For cargo.

  Riding one in a burning blimp seemed to be an unusual way to spend one’s leisure time, but then I wasn’t ready to hop the next boat back to Spam-town, so it looked like I was signed up for the duration. The question ‘Why’? seemed to keep popping into my head. Why, when you have a perfectly good starship, would you use an ancient, obsolete, dangerous, and in this case, half-improvised technology to get up to it? Security considerations. I could always ask what these security considerations were, but, given the nature of security considerations in general, I didn’t figure I’d get an answer. I certainly wasn’t feeling very secure, but it wasn’t my show.

  “The encyclopedic nature of your knowledge continues to surprise me,” Steel said to me, somewhat guardedly.

  “I guess I get around.” I tried to look bland.

  Steel examined me for a moment. “Well, I’m glad you’re on our side,” she said with a wry smile.

  “Me, too,” I replied, wondering who was on the other side.

  “All right,” Steel yawned suddenly, “I’m going to get some sleep.” She looked from Marcus to Jemal. “How are you two doing?”

  “No problem, Captain,” Jemal answered. “We had a nice nap on the beach.”

  Marcus nodded, “We’re fine for a while.”

  “Good.” Steel looked at me. “How about you, Mo?”

  I thought, ‘Bed sounds awfully good; why don’t we share one?’ But I didn’t want to test the dream, so I said, “I’m all right.”

  Steel nodded. “I want the three of you to head up to the hangar and see if Yuri needs any help. Marcus, how long did I sleep on the boat?”

  “About five hours, Captain.”

  “I feel like I could use another twelve, but call me in three. All right?”

  We all stood up.

  “Yes, Captain, three hours.” Steel walked us to the door. Marcus stopped in the hall and turned back, “Captain?�
�

  “Yes?”

  “I feel obligated about Matessa’s re-boot party.”

  “Matessa?”

  “The woman on the dock.”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “It won’t be starting for a few hours, but I’d like to put in an appearance. I told her I would.”

  Steel thought for a moment. “Go see how Yuri is doing. If everything is proceeding apace, we’ll all go. We could use a little shore leave, eh?” She smiled wearily.

  Marcus smiled back. “Thank you, Captain.”

  “Three hours,” Steel said, and closed the door.

  Ham stayed with Steel. Marcus, Jemal and I exited the inn and turned away from the market to weave our way farther into the streets of Kindu, a maze-like web that could be defined, basically, as wherever someone had refrained from putting a dwelling, business or hut. Many of the dwellings had been added to and connected over the years; some were two or three stories tall. A broad thoroughfare would open into an irregular square with a moss-covered stone fountain in the middle of it, then suddenly squeeze between two ornately carved structures and become barely wide enough for two people to walk abreast. Often buildings would be connected from the second floor up and we’d find ourselves in a narrow tunnel lit with the soft blue glow of hydrogen lamps. Then, just as suddenly, it would open out into a wide, earth-packed boulevard again.

  The whole aesthetic stimulated parts of my mind long dormant. It made me long for my earliest lives, when I’d been an architect in the System, fervent, driven, teamed with and married to the most beautiful woman in the world.

  We reached the edge of town and started up a wide trail through the jungle. It climbed to the top of a plateau that had been cleared and turned into an airship field. But I didn’t even notice the two aging blimps and corrugated metal hangar.

  As we emerged from the forest I was overpowered by the sight of the mountains. We’d come a long way up the river; the stratospheric escarpment was right in front of us. Bathed in pearly double moonlight from Sperry and Alta (triple, if you count Ruby), the range climbed in dark, jungle-clad shoulders, steepened to crystalline granite cliffs surmounted by soaring, icy parapets, pinnacles and crags that seemed to reach up and touch the stars. Forested canyons in the piedmont became deep, glacial valleys at higher elevations, snaking back between hulking goliaths, inviting the imagination to question what was around the next bend. The broken, crevassed faces of hanging glaciers glinted blue in the frosty light, dissonant and removed from the balmy, tropical night air that surrounded us.