Falling Free (barrayar)

by Lois McMaster Bujold

  Sickened himself, Leo glanced up the corridor to be sure he was still unobserved, swallowed the clot of impotent rage growing in his throat, and slipped inside.

  “Uh… hi, Silver,” Leo began with a weak smile. “How you doing?” He cursed himself silently for the inanity of his own words.

  Her smeary eyes found and focused on him uncomprehendingly. Then, “Oh. Leo. I think I was asleep for… for a while. Funny dreams… I still feel sick.”

  The drug must be wearing off. Her voice had lost the slurred, dreamy quality it had had during the interrogation earlier; now it was small and tight and self-aware. She added with a quaver of indignation, “That stuff made me throw up. And I’ve never thrown up before, not ever. It made me.”

  There were, Leo had learned, the most intense social inhibitions against vomiting in free fall, in Silver’s little world. She would probably have been far less embarrassed at being stripped naked in public.

  “It wasn’t your fault,” he hastened to reassure her.

  She shook her head, her hair waving in lank strands unlike its usual bright aureole, her mouth pinched. “I should have—I thought I could… the Red Ninja never told his enemies his secrets, and they drugged and tortured him both!”

  “Who?” asked Leo, startled.

  “Oh…!” Silver’s voice flattened to a wail. “They found out about our books, too! This time they’ll find them all…” Her lashes clotted with tears that could not fall, but only accumulate until blotted away.

  When her eyes widened to stare at Leo in a horrified realization, two or three droplets flew off in shimmering tangents. “And now Mr. Van Atta thinks Ti must have known Tony and Claire were on his shuttle—collusion—he says he’s going to get Ti fired! And he’ll find Tony and Claire down there—I don’t know what he’ll do to them. I’ve never seen Mr. Van Atta so angry.”

  Leo’s set jaw had ground his smile to a grimace. Still he tried to speak reasonably. “But you told them—under drugs—that Ti didn’t know, surely.”

  “He didn’t believe it. Said I was lying.”

  “But that would be logically inconsistent—” Leo began, cut himself short. “No, you’re right, that wouldn’t faze him. God, what an asshole.”

  Silver’s mouth opened in shock. “You mean—Mr. Van Atta?”

  “I mean Brucie-baby. You can’t tell me you’ve been around the man for what, eleven months, and not figured that out.”

  “I thought it was me—something wrong with me…” Silver’s voice was still small and teary, but her eyes began to brighten with a sort of pre-dawn light. She overcame her inner miseries enough to regard Leo with increased attention. “… Brucie-baby?”

  “Huh.” The memory of one of Dr. Yei’s lectures about maintaining unified and consistent authority gave Leo pause. It had seemed to make great sense at the time… “Never mind. But there’s nothing wrong with you, Silver.”

  Her regard was sharpening to something almost scientific. “You’re not afraid of him.” Her tone of wonder suggested she found this an unexpected and remarkable discovery.

  “Me? Afraid? Of Brace Van Atta?” Leo snorted. “Not likely.”

  “When he first came, and took over Dr. Cay’s position, I thought—thought he would be like Dr. Cay.”

  “Look, ah… there is a very ancient rule of thumb that states, people tend to get promoted to the level of their incompetence. So far I think I’ve managed to avoid that unenviable plateau. So, I gather, did your Dr. Cay.”Screw Yei’s scruples, Leo thought, and added bluntly, “Van Atta hasn’t.”

  ‘Tony and Claire would never have tried to run away if Dr. Cay were still here.” A straggling species of hope began in her eyes. “Are you saying you think this mess could be Mr. Van Atta’s fault?”

  Leo stirred uneasily, pronged by secret convictions he had not yet voiced even to himself. “Your s—, s—,” slavery “situation seems intrinsically, intrinsically,” wrong his mind supplied, while his mouth fishtailed, “susceptible to abuse, mishandling of all sorts. Because Dr. Cay was so passionately dedicated to your welfare—”

  “Like a father to us,” Silver confirmed sadly.

  “—this, er, susceptibility remained latent. But sooner or later it’s inevitable that someone begin to exploit it, and you. If not Van Atta, someone else down the line. Someone…”worse? Leo had read enough history. Yes. “Much worse.”

  Silver looked as if she were struggling to imagine something worse than Van Atta, and failing. She shook her head dolefully. She raised her face to Leo; eyes like morning glories, targeting the sun. The target, struck, jerked out an involuntary smile.

  “What’s going to happen now, to Tony and Claire? I tried not to give them away, but that stuff made me so woozy—it was dangerous for them before, and now it’s worse.…”

  Leo attempted a tone of bluff and hearty reassurance. “Nothing’s going to happen to them, Silver. Don’t let Bruce’s snit spook you. There’s not really much he can do to them, they’re much too valuable to GalacTech. He’ll yell at them, no doubt, and you can’t blame him for that; I’m ready to yell at them myself. Security will pick them up downside—they can’t have gone far—they’ll get the lecture of their young lives, and in a few weeks it’ll all blow over. Lessons learned,” Leo faltered. Just what lessons would they learn from this fiasco? “—all around.”

  “You act like—like getting yelled at—was nothing. “

  “It comes with age,” he offered. “Someday you’ll feel that way too.” Or was it power that this particular immunity came with? Leo was suddenly unsure. But he had no power to speak of, except the ability to build things. Knowledge as power. Yet who had power over him? The line of logic trailed off in confusion; he turned his thoughts impatiently from it. Mental wheel-spinning, as unproductive as philosophy class in college.

  “I don’t feel that way now,” said Silver practically.

  “Look, uh… tell you what. If it’ll make you feel better, I’ll go along downside when they locate those kids. Maybe I can kind of keep things under control.”

  “Oh, would you? Could you?” Silver asked with relief. “Like you were trying to help me?”

  Leo felt like biting his tongue off. “Uh, yeah. Something like that. “

  “You’re not afraid of Mr. Van Atta. You can stand up to him.” Her eyebrows quirked self-deprecatingly, and she waved her lower arms. “As you can see, I’m not equipped to stand up to anybody. Thank you, Leo.” There was even a little color in her face now.

  “Uh, right. I better hustle along now, if I’m to catch the shuttle going down to ‘Port Three. We’ll have ‘em back safe and sound by breakfast. Think of it this way; at least GalacTech can’t dock their pay for the extra shuttle trip.” This even won a brief smile from her.

  “Leo…” her voice sobered, and he paused on his way out the door. “What are we going to do if… if there’s ever anyone worse than Mr. Van Atta?”

  Cross that bridge when you come to it, he wanted to say, evading the question. But one more platitude and he’d gag. He smiled and shook his head, and fled.

  The warehouse made Claire think of a crystal lattice. It was all right angles, stretching away at ninety degrees in each dimension, huge slotted shelves reaching to the ceilings, endless rows, cross corridors. Blocking vision, blocking flight.

  But there was no flight here. She felt like a stray molecule caught in the interstices of a doped crystal wafer, out of place but trapped. In retrospect the cozy curves of the Habitat seemed like enclosing arms.

  They huddled now in one empty cell of a shelf stack, one of the few they had not found occupied by supplies, measuring some two meters on a side. Tony had insisted on climbing to the third tier, to be above the eye level of any chance downsider walking along the corridor upright on his long legs. The ladders set at intervals along the shelves had actually proved easier to manage then creeping along the floor, but getting the pack up had been a dreadful struggle, as its cord was too short to climb up and draw it
up after themselves.

  Claire was secretly unnerved. Andy was already finding an ability to push and grunt and wriggle against the gravity, still only a few centimeters at a time, but she had a nasty vision of him falling over the edge. Claire was developing a distaste for edges.

  A robotic forklift whirred past. Claire froze, cowering in the back of their recess, clutching Andy to her, grabbing one of Tony’s hands. The whirring trailed off into the distance. She breathed again.

  “Relax,” Tony squeaked. “Relax…” He breathed deeply in an apparent effort to follow his own advice.

  Claire peered doubtfully out of the cubicle at the forklift, which had stopped farther down the corridor and was engaged in retrieving a plastic carton from its coded cell.

  “Can we eat now?” She had been nursing Andy on and off for the last three hours in an effort to keep him quiet, and was drained in every sense. Her stomach growled, and her throat was dry.

  “I guess,” said Tony, and dug a couple of ration bars out of their hoard in the pack. “And then we’d better try and work our way back to the hangar.”

  “Can’t we rest here a little longer?”

  Tony shook his head. “The longer we wait, the more chance they’ll be looking for us. If we don’t get on a shuttle for the Transfer Station soon, they may start searching the outbound Jump ships, and there goes our chance of stowing away undiscovered until after they boost past the point of no return.”

  Andy squeaked and gurgled; a familiar aroma wafted from his vicinity.

  “Oh, dear. Would you please get out a diaper?” Claire asked Tony.

  “Again? That’s the fourth time since we left the Habitat.”

  “I don’t think I brought near enough diapers,” Claire worried, smoothing out the laminated paper and plastic form Tony handed her.

  “Half our pack is filled with diapers. Can’t you—make it last a little longer?”

  “I’m afraid he may be getting diarrhea. If you leave that stuff on his bottom too long, it eats right through his skin—gets all red—even bleeds—gets infected—and then he screams and cries every time you touch it to try and clean it. Real loud,” she emphasized.

  The fingers of Tony’s lower right hand drummed on the shelf floor, and he sighed, biting back frustration. Claire wrapped the used diaper tightly in itself and prepared to stash it back in their pack.

  “Do we have to cart those along?” Tony asked suddenly. “Everything in the pack is going to reek after a while. Besides, it’s heavy enough already.”

  “I haven’t seen a disposal unit anywhere,” said Claire. “What else can we do with them?”

  Tony’s face screwed up with inner struggle. “Just leave it,” he blurted. “On the floor. It’s not like it’s going to float off down the corridor and get into the air recirculation, here. Leave them all.”

  Claire gasped at this horrific, revolutionary idea. Tony, following up his own suggestion before his nerve failed, collected the four little wads and stuffed them into the far corner of the storage cubicle. He smiled shakily, in mixed guilt and elation. Claire eyed him in worry. Yes, the situation was extraordinary, but what if Tony was developing a habit of criminal behavior? Would he return to normal when they got—wherever they were going?

  If they got wherever they were going. Claire pictured their pursuers following the dirty diapers, like a trail of flower petals dropped by that heroine in one of Silver’s books, across half the galaxy…

  “If you’ve got him back together,” said Tony with a nod at his son, “maybe we better start back toward the hangar. That mob of downsiders may be cleared out by now.”

  “How are we going to pick a shuttle this time?” asked Claire. “How will we know that it’s not just going right back up to the Habitat—or taking up a cargo to be unloaded in the vacuum? If they vent the cargo bay into space while we’re in it…”

  Tony shook his head, lips tight. “I don’t know. But Leo says—to solve a big problem, or complete a big project, the secret is to break it down into little parts and tackle them one at a time, in order. Let’s—just get back to the hangar, first. And see if there’s any shuttles there at all.”

  Claire nodded, paused. Andy was not the only one of them plagued by biology, she reflected grimly. “Tony, do you think we can find a toilet on the way back? I need to go.”

  “Yeah, me too,” Tony admitted. “Did you see any on the way here?”

  “No.” Locating the facilities had not been uppermost on her mind then, on that nightmare journey, creeping over the floors, dodging hurrying downsiders, squeezing Andy tightly to her for fear that he might cry out. Claire wasn’t even sure she could reconstruct the route they’d taken, when they’d been driven out of their first hiding place by the busy work crew descending upon their machines and powering them up.

  “There’s got to be something,” Tony reasoned optimistically, “people work here.”

  “Not in this section,” Claire noted, gazing out at the wall of storage cells across the aisle. “It’s all robots.”

  “Back toward the hangar, then. Say…”his voice faltered, “uh… do you happen to know what a gravity-field toilet chamber looks like? How do they manage? Air suction couldn’t possibly fight the gee forces.”

  One of Silver’s smuggled historical vid dramas had involved a scene with an outhouse, but Claire was certain that was obsolete technology. “I think they use water, somehow.”

  Tony wrinkled his nose, shrugged away his bafflement. “We’ll figure it out.” His eye fell rather wistfully on the little wad of diapers in the corner. “It’s too bad…”

  “No!” said Claire, repelled. “Or at least—at least let’s try to find a toilet first.”

  “All right.…”

  A distant rhythmic tapping was growing louder. Tony, about to swing out on the ladder, muttered “Oops,” and recoiled back into the cubicle. He held a finger to his lips, panic in his face, and they all scuttled to the back of the cell.

  “Aaah?” said Andy. Claire snatched him up and stuffed the tip on one breast into his mouth. Full and bored, he declined to nurse, turning his head away. Claire let her T-shirt fall back down and tried to distract him by silently counting all his busy fingers. He too had become smudged with dirt, as she had; no big surprise, planets were made of dirt. Dirt looked better from a distance. Say, a couple of hundred kilometers.…

  The tapping grew louder, passed under their cell, faded.

  “Company Security man,” Tony whispered in Claire’s ear.

  She nodded, hardly daring to breathe. The tapping was from those hard downsider foot coverings striking the cement floor. A few minutes passed, and the tapping did not return. Andy made only small cooing noises.

  Tony stuck his head cautiously out the chamber, looked right and left, up and down. “All right. Get ready to help me lower the pack as soon as this next forklift goes by. It’ll have to fall the last meter, but maybe the sound of the forklift will cover that some.”

  Together they shoved the pack toward the edge of the cell, and waited. The whirring robolift was approaching down the corridor, an enormous plastic storage crate almost as large as a cubicle positioned on its lift.

  The forklift stopped below them, beeped to itself, and turned ninety degrees. With a whine, its lift began to rise.

  At this point, Claire recalled that theirs was the only empty cell in this stack.

  “It’s coming here! We’re going to get squashed!”

  “Get out! Get out on the ladder!” Tony yelped.

  Instead she scuttled back to grab Andy, whom she’d laid at the rear of the chamber as far as possible from the frightening edge while she’d helped Tony shove the pack forward. The chamber darkened as the rising crate eclipsed the opening. Tony barely squeezed past it onto the ladder as it began to grind inward.

  “Claire!” Tony screamed. He pounded uselessly on the side of the huge plastic crate. “Claire! No, no! Stupid robot! Stop, stop!”

  But the forklift,
clearly, was not voice-activated. It kept coming, bulldozing their pack before it. There were only a few centimeters’ clearance on the sides and top of the crate. Claire retreated, so terrified her screams clotted in her throat like cotton, and she emitted only a smeary squeak. Back, back; the cold metal wall behind froze her. She flattened against it as best she could, standing on her lower hands, holding Andy with her uppers. He was howling now, infected by her terror, earsplitting shrieks.

  “Claire!” Tony cried from the ladder, a horrified bellow laced with tears. “ANDY!”

  The pack, beside them, compressed. Little crunching noises came from it. At the last moment, Claire transferred Andy to her lower arms, below her torso, bracing against the crate, against gravity, with her uppers. Perhaps her crushed body would hold the crate off just far enough to save him—the robolift’s servos skreeled with overload…

  And began to withdraw. Claire sent a silent apology to their oversized pack for all the curses she and Tony had heaped upon it in the past hours. Nothing in it would ever be the same, but it had saved them. The robolift hiccoughed, gears grinding bewilderedly. The crate shifted on its pallet, out of sync now. As the lift withdrew, the crate skidded with it, dragged by friction and gravity, skewing farther and farther from true.

  Claire watched open-mouthed as it tilted and fell from the opening. She rushed forward. The crash shook the warehouse as the crate hit the concrete, followed by a booming shattered echo, the loudest sound Claire had ever heard. The crate took the forklift with it, its wheels whirring helplessly in air as it banged onto its side.

  The power of gravity was stunning. The crate split, its contents spilling. Hundreds of round metal wheelcovers of some kind burst forth, ringing like a stampede of cymbals. A dozen or so rolled down the aisle in either direction as if bent on escape, wobbling into the corridor walls and falling onto their sides, still spinning, in ever-diminishing whanging pulses of sound. The echoes rang on in Claire’s ears for a moment in the stupendous silence that followed. “Oh, Claire!” Tony swarmed back into the cell and wrapped all his arms around her, Andy between them, as if he might never let go again. “Oh, Claire…” His voice cracked as he rubbed his face against her soft short hair.