by M M Buckner
“What’s that for?’ I asked, pointing to the irising hatch.
“That the cargo door, for bringing down the bales.”
“Bales?”
“Bales of that pro-glue, that trash they eat on Earth.”
Protein-glucose base, he meant. “Do you eat something different in Heaven?”
“Haven?” He mispronounced the word. “What’s haven?”
“This satellite,” I said, gesturing to the walls. “What do you call it?”
Juani reflected, curling his tongue through the gap in his teeth. Then he rolled his teenaged shoulders. “We just call it…here.”
With Juani pushing my butt from below, I was able to heave my good leg up the ladder, one rung at a time, while my broken leg dangled and throbbed like an overfull water balloon. That wasn’t the worst though. Much more evil was the ladder’s tendency to bend. Despite the evidence of my eyes that it was made of solid steel, my body told me it was bending.
“Move around to the other side,” Juani said. “Might be easier.”
The lurching in my stomach made me willing to try anything, but when I twisted around to the other side, the unruly ladder wanted to tumble over on top of me. Solid steel, mind you. I could feel the rigid metal with my hands. Yet I swear it writhed beneath me like a living creature. More Coriolis effect.
A couple of meters overhead, the ladder intercepted the ceiling, and Juani opened the hatch.
“This the safety lock,” he said. “Double doors between the decks, just in case.”
We climbed up through the hatch into a space so tiny and black that even squatting, our heads bumped the ceiling. After Juani closed and sealed the hatch beneath us, he opened an identical one above, and as I wrestled my way up through the opening, I remembered Verinnc’s schematic. These locks segmented A13’s ladder well at every level. What a hassle.
Then I noticed another peculiar sensation. I didn’t have to grunt so hard to move. My body was getting lighter. No, I should say the artificial gravity was getting weaker. By the time I’d climbed all the way out of the lock, I felt almost springy. Juani closed the floor hatch, and we found ourselves in another identical segment of the ladder well—with another hatch overhead.
‘This Two,” said Juani.
On Deck Two, another pair of oval-shaped doors faced each other across the well, marked with the same reflective U and D. Juani leaned his weight to twist the Up door’s wheel, and it opened onto scintillating whiteness. I’d been living in semidark so long, the brilliance dazzled me. Haloed figures moved toward us. One short. One tall. With Juani’s support, I took a tentative hop forward, and what happened next will forever remain unclear.
Did Juani and I both scream at once? We stared at each other and winced as, around and through us, terrible harmonies swelled. Imagine high-pitched sirens oscillating your skull. In unison, Juani and I sank to the floor and pressed our hands to our ears, while across the bright room, the other two figures staggered and fell. Agonizing strains of sound convulsed my vital organs. I curled like a fetus and covered my head. Yet the piercing torment went on and on.
I don’t know how long it lasted. I came to my senses, wrapped in an awful ringing silence. My jaw ached. In the blinding light, Juani rolled on his side and shook. I crawled toward him. His eyes were clenched shut.
“Juani?” My voice sounded cottony and distant even to me. “Juani, it’s over.”
I couldn’t mistake what had happened. Provendia had just used its sonic lathe. I’d seen the dog-and-pony presentation at a recent board meeting and voted to approve the funds. The sonic lathe was supposed to be a nonlethal crowd-control device. Visualize a diamond drill the size of a flagpole, rifling around at thirty thousand revolutions per minute. Now watch Provendia’s gunship glide in close enough to touch Heaven’s hull with this drill. Earsplitting sound waves were supposed to propagate at ludicrous frequencies, immobilizing agitators and quelling resistance. The lathe was meant to stop riots, but I had never imagined how it would feel. Juani’s glazed eyes beseeched me, and across the shining room, someone rose from the floor. A tall angular shadow with a hawk nose. Liam.
10
THIS IS A DISASTER
“The dead might as well try to speak to the living as the old to the young.”
-WILLA CATHER
Wait. Slow down. Things are getting out of order. My recollections dissolve the instant I try to clarify them, and I begin to suspect the protein code in my brain is passing beyond its half-life of nuclear decay. But the last hour hasn’t come yet. Pacing here in this anxious fluorescent fog, I notice how time moves in compression waves like sound. Neuroscientists say each perceptual moment lasts one hundred milliseconds in the brain, but sometimes I believe the ticks of the clock are separated by wide troughs of infinity. Sheeba, where are you?
Have you gone dashing after another needy soul? Another seductive hero of a desperate cause? But those romances never last, Shee. Have you forgotten Father Daniel?
Daniel Monnahan. The thought of that smarmy young faith healer made me want to retch. Sheeba’s Father Daniel phase had ended three years ago, but I could still see him kneeling on his yoga mat, his robe parted to reveal his shaggy chest. In the basement clinic, he would hum a single note while his devotees poked little seeds down into a communal pot of fake loam—and dropped deutsch in his collection plate. The seeds were plastic. When I bit mine to make sure, Sheeba took offense. She said it was the symbolism that mattered. When I hired detectives to turn up the rascal’s string of legal problems, ex-girlfriends and chemical dependencies, Sheeba wept.
“I wanted to show you the light,” I said.
“Sometimes the light hurts,” she answered.
But she never grew wise, never let go of her dreamy trust in Father Daniel. Long after I’d exposed mat fraud and had him arrested, she still showed up at our therapy sessions with fake black loam under her fingernails.
And here on A13, as Provendia’s sonic lathe jarred our ears, the lean, lanky shadow of her next hopeless hero staggered up from the floor. Liam. Chieftain of lost juves. When his dark silhouette reeled, I knew at once that Sheeba would rush to his aid. Ah, passionate child. She wanted to believe a mystical force had appointed her path to this satellite and that some brave destiny awaited her. I won’t try to measure her passage through Heaven. She soared like a golden comet. And like a comet’s tail, I followed.
“Where is she?” I shouted through the tintinnabulations of the sonic lathe.
When the noise stopped, a startling quiet fell. White light shimmered across the floor where I lay blinking and rubbing my ears. Liam stumbled against some pipes. His stiff braid swung down his back like a rope, and his figure cut a silhouette against a light so blinding sharp, I had to look away at once. Was Sheeba with him? I shaded my eyes to see, but the light’s radiation eclipsed the room more thoroughly than darkness. I glimpsed its source and turned away quickly, a small globe half recessed in the wall.
Juani sat up and said something I couldn’t hear. My skull still echoed, and my eyes ached. A new IBiS alert vibrated my left thumbnail, but I couldn’t read it. Probably a bruised eardrum. A new set of tympanums waited for me back in Kat’s shuttle. I was thinking about that when a short chunky figure jerked my arm.
“What’re you doin’ here, commie? You come to spy on us?” Ah, the delightful Geraldine.
She yanked me to my feet—or foot rather, and when she backed away, I swung my arms urgently for support. But I could barely see. The wall was too far, and Juani was still sitting on the floor. So I bumped against a cylinder and squinted painfully at its label. Nitrogen.
Every noise sounded muffled and flat, but as my pupils contracted, details began to emerge from the light Machinery. Coiling tubes. Wires. The ever-present E, W and A’s. Then someone covered the light with an old rag.
Auburn brilliance boiled through the folds of the rag and gleamed on the clutter of machinery that was now much easier to see. Turbines, condensers and pump
s crowded the small room. Some were torn apart, and their insides glistened like metallic viscera. Others rumbled and shuddered. A bank of storage batteries filled one concave wall, and though the room was larger than my cell on Deck One, the ceiling hung just as low. This had to be the solar plant. The panels where I’d perched like a Buddha were probably mounted right outside the hull. The airlock might be nearby, too. I sharpened my survey.
This was an old-style hybrid plant that used both photovoltaic panels and solar-heated steam pipes lacing through the hull. The steam was used to drive three small turbines, which occupied most of the plant’s floor. The equipment looked battered and worn. Cracks in the metal housings had been patched with glue and solder, and the mountings that bolted the turbines to the floor were scarred and broken, as if the machines had been repeatedly ripped off their moorings. One turbine was out of service, and mere was a smell of ozone mixed with machine oil.
In all my vacations at orbiting resorts, never once had I wondered where the power came from. I took for granted the elegant service, the views, the gourmet food. Now, gazing at this rickety old equipment that circulated Heaven’s air, water and heat, it struck me how tenuous life on a satellite could be.
I made a mental note: Upgrade the power equipment. It should have been replaced years ago. And why had the engineers set that blinding light at eye level in the wall? Even covered with the rag, it gave me a headache.
“What drives that freaking light globe?” I asked.
Juani got up off the floor. “That a porthole, man. Sunlight coining through.”
I lurched backward. “Pure sunlight? That’s lethal!”
Juani patted my back. “Be calm. It’s filtered.”
I turned away from the globe, pulled my longjohn collar up around my ears and hid my bare hands in my armpits. On Earth, people fled from sunlight. It burned worse than acid rain. Here in space, it had to be worse.
I kept looking for the airlock. The usual letters marked the four cardinal directions, and more of that childish graffiti marred the walls. There was no airlock in sight.
“Liam, he a spy,” said Geraldine. “You want me to blindfold him?”
The chief of mugs moved away from the light, and I saw his face. Same surly expression. Hooded blue eyes. Sunken cheek. Graceful hard-set mouth. Copper beard. And despite the worried creases in his forehead, his skin had the undeniable smoothness of youth. “We got no secrets, Gee.”
His rich baritone carried an edginess. Whimsical young girls might find that attractive, but to me, he sounded brutish. I drew myself up with dignity.
“You feeling better?” He nodded at my broken leg.
“Where’ve you taken Sheeba?” I said.
Liam circled around me. At first, I thought he was trying to intimidate me, but then I realized he was just reaching for his toolbox. He and Geraldine had tom down one of their cumbersome machines for repair.
“Where are you holding her?” I repeated. The artificial gravity felt weaker on Deck Two, and it was easier to put weight on my injured leg. But the Coriolis still made me dizzy.
He knelt beside his oily apparatus and started prying a bolt loose. “She helping Doc in sick-ward.”
“Sick-ward. You’ve exposed her to the disease!”
Liam stopped what he was doing. “What do you know about our disease?”
Too late, I tried to cover my tracks. “Well, influenza, fungal itch. Whatever filthy ailments you people have.”
The word “disease” didn’t begin to describe the obscure constellation of forces affecting Heaven. I feared some airborne chemical, but Provendia’s scientists had ruled that out. It wasn’t infectious or viral. They hadn’t found contaminants in the air, food or water. No one knew what caused Heaven’s malady, but I couldn’t get over my dread that it might be contagious. And Sheeba had gone to sick-ward, the very epicenter of pestilence.
Liam was still drilling me with his ice-blue eyes. I watched the tendons moving in his forearms.
“She has no resistance,” I said. “You’re putting her in harm’s way.”
“What are you, her nursemaid?” Geraldine’s sneer wrinkled the scar on her temple. Her heavy bun had come loose in a black halo of corkscrew curls. “Doll-face asked to go help. She always inviting herself into places.”
Sweat trickled down my chest inside my longjohn. I kept watching Liam’s forearms, hoping Shee hadn’t fallen into his clutches again. “Take me to Sheeba at once.”
Geraldine cackled. “If doll-face wanted to stay with you, she woulda stayed.”
Gullible Shee held extreme ideas about healing. It was easy to imagine her rushing into Heaven’s sick-ward. Hideous combination of words. Sick—a churlish sound. And ward—a caution against evil. I pictured a catacomb of foul, dying bodies.
Let me confess, pangs of guilt shivered through me. I should have warned Shee about Heaven’s affliction. I only meant to shelter her from the Reel. No, that wasn’t all. I was afraid to tell her the truth—afraid of how she might judge me. But my concealment had put her at risk. I had to find her.
Juani idly knocked some fungus loose from a switch-box. “He ask for a tour, chief. I thought it be okay.”
Liam nodded and went back to tinkering with his machine. Geraldine handed him a different wrench, and Juani simply waited, balancing first on one foot, then the other. The arrogance of this twentysomething foreman incensed me. Who was he to keep me waiting? I hadn’t had to deal with such a swellheaded junior in over a hundred years.
“Blade didn’t come from that gunship,” Juani said. “He don’t have anything to do with them.”
“Bloody liar,” said Geraldine.
Juani scratched his neck. “He sightseeing.”
Liam shot me a glance, and Geraldine said, “What’s that?”
“It antidotes for parties”—Juani rubbed his pimply nose—“something they do on Earth.”
“We oughtta chain him up and throw him out the airlock,” Geraldine said.
Evil-eyed wench. I fantasized grabbing handfuls of her wiry black hair. But that would gain me nothing. Dealing with these juves required diplomacy. “My people will pay. Return my sat phone, and let me call them.”
Liam slotted a new bolt and tightened it. I thought he smiled, but I may have been mistaken.
Juani said, “We can’t call the Net from here. We might try flashing our signal mirrors again.”
Geraldine rummaged through her toolbox. “Waste of time. They never answer.”
I said, “Then give us our EVA suits, and let us leave. We’ll carry whatever message you want to send.” Brazen lies. Geraldine was correct about that much. “We appreciate the first aid, but we’re not part of this war. You have no legitimate reason to hold us.”
Liam’s blue eyes darted my way, but he continued working at his infernal bolt.
That white-hot globe was making me sweat like a fountain. I slapped the top of Liam’s machine. “She’s innocent. Anyone can see that. You’re taking advantage of her kindness.”
The punk’s jaw quivered, but he still wouldn’t answer.
Furious, I limped toward the door. “Juani, take me to Sheeba.”
Juani said, “Wanna see our veggies first? They beautiful, man.”
Geraldine’s snicker grated my nerves. “The commie’s too bothered about his wandering girlfriend to look at cabbages.”
Blood rushed to my head, and I yelled, “Sheeba’s too good for you vermin.”
A heavy iron tool clattered to the floor behind me. I turned to see Liam standing in the midst of his broken-down machinery, clenching his fists at his sides. “It was her that offered to help. Her. She said. And then you—you—” The brute couldn’t form a complete sentence.
“You’ve exposed her to the malady!” I railed.
Liam’s face turned a dull brick color, and I bit my tongue. I’d said too much.
“Why you come?” he said. “The ‘xecs don’t need a spy. They could watch us if they cared to, but they cut
off their cameras.”
“I don’t know anything about that,” I lied.
Geraldine snorted. “Chief, he a commie ‘xec same as them others.”
“We’re tourists. We got lost,” I said. “Geraldine gave me a shove that sent me staggering.”
“Gee,” said Liam.
That one Word, murmured softly under his breath, snapped her to a standstill. Just as quietly, Liam spoke to me. “Have you come to euth’ us?”
“What a question,” I said. “No.”
He looked me square in the eye. “Save yourself the trouble. We won’t last much longer.”
“Then why make Sheeba die with you?”
His expression changed. I won’t say his eyes softened, but his scowl grew less severe. “Sheeba Zee not afraid of our trouble. She crave to help. I never heard anyone talk like her—” He made a fist in front of his chest, then opened his hand as if the right word might fly out.
I knew what he meant. Sheeba had that effect on people. “She’s impulsive. You can see she’s had very little experience of the world.”
His expression hinted the possibility of agreement, so I continued, “Let me take her back home where she’ll be safe.”
He tugged at his copper beard, and with unexpected mildness, he asked, “Is she your wife?”
Wife. What an old-fashioned word. No one married anymore—except for protes. With their short, miserable lives, they could afford to. The quaint nostalgia of that word “wife” temporarily derailed my anger. I pictured peaceful domestic evenings, slippers by the fire, quiet dinners, images of a custom long erased from the executive scene. With our ever-increasing life spans, who in his right mind would promise “till death do us part”? Perhaps, though, I would promise that to Sheeba. What a sweet thought.
“Nobody forced her,” Liam was saying. “She wanted to help Doc in sick-ward.”