"Mikhail, I am ready for the little stinky one. Pass him here. That's it. Come to me, Bobby. Here, stick your head through. Look around—see? Nothing to be afraid of. The only monsters up here are your brothers. Hold onto this railing, please. Mikhail—? Send up Mr. Dingillian, please."
Dad came next, and Mickey followed. Alexei sealed the hatch behind him. Now, we were all clutching handholds on the inside of the steepest curve yet. Three meters away, the curved wall of the core whispered by. We could hear the air whooshing as it passed. We watched a steady progression of warning signs and arrows and numbers and access panels. There were tracks in the opposite surface, matching tracks in the wall we clung to.
Alexei looked anti-spinward expectantly, so I followed his gaze. I was still uncomfortable, but watching the moving ceiling sort of helped. I don't know why.
"Ahh," said Alexei. "Here it comes."
It was a bright red platform sliding toward us on the tracks. It slowed to a stop directly next to the access panel we'd climbed through. It had handholds and equipment boxes mounted all over it. All its corners were rounded, and most of its flat surfaces had bumper pads. There was a funny angular contraption in the middle, like a collapsible tower. Alexei pulled us all aboard, and then pushed a green Go button, and turned a dial. "We want the One-Gamma-Three entrance," he explained as the platform began moving spin-ward. "One is the disk we're on. Gamma is the cable. Three is the access. Capisce?"
We passed similar cars mounted on other tracks, on our side as well as on the rotating surface above / next to us; most of them were stopped and waiting, but our car sped up until we had matched speed with the inner wall. There was a panel there marked one-gamma-three. Alexei unfolded the collapsed contraption in the middle of the car. It was an extensible ladder and it went all the way across. "Hokay, let's go."
Alexei grabbed Stinky in a bear hug and started scrambling across like a pregnant spider. I shook off Dad's help, but not Douglas's. When we were all safely across, Mickey hit the release on the top of the ladder and it folded back down. Now the ceiling felt motionless and the floor was rolling past. Except it wasn't a floor anymore. It was just a rotating wall-surface, with a car tracking along beside us. Then the car began to slow, and pretty soon it disappeared around the curve behind us.
Alexei was already opening the One-Gamma-Three panel and pulling us through. First Douglas, then me, then Mickey—they passed Stinky through—then finally Dad and Alexei. Inside the core, I levered myself around to look and nearly lost it—"Douglas!" I wailed. My brother caught me and held me tightly with his right arm. "It's okay, Charles. I'm right here. I'm not letting go. Just hang onto me—we'll be fine. Really."
I buried my face in Douglas's shoulder. I could sense that both Mickey and Dad were hovering close, but I didn't want to have anything to do with either of them. Only Douglas.
What I'd seen ... was the largest interior space I'd ever seen—well, maybe not the largest, maybe Terminus was larger—but definitely the deepest. It was like the inside of a giant pipe, filled with humongus wires, cables, tubes, conduits, vents, pass-throughs, catwalks, ladders, platforms, machinery, and stuff. And it all looked up and down and sideways—all at the same time!
"Are you okay, son—?" That was Dad. I didn't answer. Douglas pulled away just enough to look at my face. He tilted my chin upward so we were eye to eye and nose to nose. I couldn't remember the last time we'd ever been this close. Maybe we never had. "I'm not going to let anything bad happen to you, Charles. I promise."
"What's wrong with Charles?" I heard Stinky asking.
"Nothing. Please be quiet, Bobby. Charles has an upset stomach. He'll be okay in a minute. Go back to sleep." Douglas looked back to me. "Just tell me when you're ready."
I shook my head. I didn't want him to let go. I liked having his arm around me. I felt safe. I swallowed hard. "I don't want to lose you, Douglas," I whispered, so only he could hear. "Not to anybody—" I sort of nodded toward Mickey.
"You're not going to lose me. I'll always be your brother, no matter what."
"Is that a threat or a promise?" I half-joked.
He half-smiled. "Yes." He nudged me. "Come on, the others are waiting. And we don't have a lot of time. Are you ready?"
"Yeah. Just stay close, okay?"
"Hokay," he said. Just like Alexei.
THE OLD SWIMMING HOLE
It was like being on the inside of a giant pipe that kept changing its orientation. But as long as I kept focused on the wall and pretended that I was swimming and it was the floor, I was okay. If I had to look away from the wall, for any reason, I pretended that everything else was up. It sort of worked, but I still felt dizzy.
Alexei pointed around the curve of the wall toward a cluster of pipes and a vertical platform on which there were some storage lockers. We pulled ourselves along a line of handholds, and when we got to the platform, we anchored ourselves against its railings.
"Do you see this pipe?" Alexei pounded on one of the thicker pipes next to us. "Put your ear next to it. You can hear the water rushing through it. Very useful stuff. We use it for ballast. We use it to balance the rotation of the disks. Sometimes we even turn it into oxygen to breathe and hydrogen to burn. And of course, we also use it for drinking and bathing and growing our crops. It is our life-blood!
"Listen, you can hear it flowing—back and forth, up and down, in and out, all over the station—carrying sewage to the farms where it will be turned back into food, going to the distilleries where the sunlight will turn it into steam and the cold of space will turn it back into fresh water, three times over, and then it will rush back down here, flowing this way and that, nourishing the lives of all of us.
"Do you know what is one of the worst crimes you can commit here on the station? Interfering with the water. Because whatever else it is, water is first and foremost, the stuff of life—so you do not tamper with it. The flow of water—in fact, all of what we call the domestic ecology—is the property of the whole community here, and each and every one of us has a responsibility to the community. The way we keep the water flowing, that demonstrates how responsible we are to our people.
"But—" he interrupted himself "—these pipes are also very useful if you have to go somewhere and you don't want anyone to know that you are going or how you got there. And so, while we respect the water, sometimes we ride it too." Alexei opened one of the storage lockers. Inside was—scuba gear?!
"Huh? Are we going swimming?" Stinky asked.
"You? No," Alexei said. "Them. Yes." He pointed. We looked up—every direction was up—and saw four, no five, teenagers diving out of the center toward us. Three boys, two girls. They were wearing shorts and T-shirts and looked like they had fallen off a runaway picnic. They were laughing like they were diving into a party.
As they approached, they began waving and calling to us. They caught themselves easily on the platforms and ladders and railings around us, and they shouted things at Alexei in Russian that made him blush with embarrassment. They passed him a backpack and a pair of canteens. They had a third canteen of their own, which they passed around among themselves, each one taking deep swallows of whatever was in it. From the way they acted, I didn't think it was water.
Alexei took the flask when it came to him and took a deep swig of his own, then he pocketed it, much to their dismay. "You have all had enough," he said. Then he bawled them out in Russian. Or gave them instructions. Or told a dirty joke. Whatever. When he finished, they all laughed and started pulling on the various pieces of diving equipment.
Alexei explained, "These are my fellow students and colleagues. The swimming equipment is part of our service. Sometimes we have to inspect the pipes from the inside. Sometimes there are air bubbles. Sometimes we have to retrieve a broken robot or a piece of something that has caught somewhere. We do not have to do that very often. In fact ... I can't ever remember having to go into the pipes at all for anything a robot couldn't handle. But, nevertheless, we have our respons
ibilities. We have to keep ourselves ready and able to handle any possibility, any emergency at all. So we practice and drill and keep ourselves focused on our responsibilities to the water of the community. Today—ah, today we get to put into practice what we have practiced. They shall be ... the decoys."
"So this is how you do it," Mickey said. "I've always wondered about that."
"Wonder no longer," Alexei said. "Sooner or later, somebody was certain to figure it out anyway. No matter, I already have three other ways to move things from here to there—just not as exciting. I leave it to you to figure them out, Mikhail. I will bet you a day's interest that you cannot."
"I can't afford that bet." Mickey laughed.
Alexei laughed with him and clapped him on the shoulder. "You are smarter than you act. This is a good trait." To the rest of us, he said, "We have to assume you are being watched. At the very least, monitored through station security. There are those damnable little cameras everywhere. They saw us coming up the service elevator. They know that an access hatch was opened. That was why I used my own card. So they could monitor our progress. Very shortly, they will be monitoring the progress of five divers through the pipes—and one of them will be carrying my locator. Five divers, not six, we will keep them wondering what happened, da? They will meet the divers on the topside of Disk Seven. But by then, we will be somewhere else, and they will have lost us. I am too clever for my own good." To his Russian comrades, Alexei shouted, "What is taking you so long? Do you think we have all night? Look at the time. We have less than an hour—"
"Alexei," said one of the men, a dark brooding fellow with eyebrows like furry caterpillars. "The deposits are made, da?"
"Da."
"This is good. We have made our own reservations, we will be on the one a.m. car. If what you say is true—"
"You have told no one else?"
Caterpillar-brow shook his head. "I think the word is already spreading. But no, we have told no one. Go now. Godspeed!" He glanced around. "Godspeed to all of you." Then he grabbed Alexei and the two of them exchanged kisses on each cheek, the way they do in Europe. I'd never seen men do that before, kiss each other—even friends. It sort of freaked me. I looked at Douglas and Mickey and tried to imagine them kissing. It didn't seem right, but it didn't seem as wrong anymore either. What the hell did I know?
THE CORE
We were going up the Line—by hand.
From an Earth perspective, we were going up. From the Geostationary perspective, we were going sideways—starside—outward toward Disk Seven.
From our perspective, we weren't going any direction at all. Just forward along a never ending pipe. There was water on the inside of the pipe; we could hear it. There were handholds running the length. We were climbing to forever. I wondered how long it would take to climb the whole Line—
"How come we can't take a maintenance car?" I asked. "Look, there are lots of tracks along these pipes. And there's a car over there."
"The maintenance cars are monitored." Mickey said. "We don't want to leave any evidence of where we started and where we got off. Most of all we don't want anyone showing up to meet us. Just keep pulling yourself along."
Alexei showed us how to do it. "Don't try to hurry," he said. "You'll tire yourself out. Slow and steady does the job. Do like I do, hand over hand, counting like this—like music ... and one ... and two ... and three ... and four ... like that. That's how to make the best time over a distance." He added, "If you did this all the time, you would know how to go faster, but I need you to conserve your strength. We have a long way to go. Almost two kilometers. We can do it, but you must concentrate. Mickey, do you know a good song? Something to give us a pace?"
"Alexei, you forget who you're talking to. I couldn't carry a tune in free fall." And then, after Douglas and I finished laughing, he said, "No, I mean it. I can't sing. Douglas?"
Douglas snorted. "Chigger is the one in our family who sings. Charles?" He was right behind me. "How about a song?"
Without hesitating an instant, I began, "It's a small world, after all—" Four voices shouted for me to stop before I finished the first line. Two of the voices contained serious hints of violence, Dad's and Doug's.
"Now, I'm going to have an earworm, all night," Douglas muttered. "Whose good idea was that?"
"I think we should all save our breath for a while," Dad said, "and just concentrate on the job at hand."
The job at hand was the next handhold—and the one after that—and the one after that—I could feel the slap of the plastic handholds against my palms like a steady beat; it echoed up through my wrists, my forearms, my elbows ... there was a rhythm to it. For some reason, I started thinking of a song that Mom used to sing to us when we were small. "Oh, Lord, won't you buy me a Mercedes Benz ... ?"
A Mercedes Benz was some kind of car they didn't make anymore, but it didn't matter. The song always had such a plaintive quality, it might have been about my life. I didn't even realize I was singing it aloud until Douglas joined me on the chorus. I stopped, embarrassed.
Dad was right behind Douglas. He called up to me, "Charles—I didn't know you liked Janice Joplin."
"I used to," I said. "Until about four seconds ago." That came out a little nastier than I intended. "Why didn't you tell me about John Coltrane?"
"Huh?"
"The Coltrane Suite. You never sent me a copy."
"Yes, I did."
"I never got it."
"It came back refused."
"I didn't do that."
"It must have been your mom—" He stopped himself. "I'm sorry, Charles, I promised myself I'd never say anything bad about your mom, but there were times when she acted badly. I sent you a lot of stuff, a lot of music. She sent most of it back; she told me not to send you any more. She didn't think it was good for you to spend all that time locked up by yourself with your headphones on. I liked it that you were always so interested in my recordings. I think that's why she did it—to keep us apart, to keep me from using the music as a way to stay close to you. I'll get you another copy. I promise."
"Never mind. I don't want to hear it."
"Have it your own way." Dad sounded hurt. I didn't care. John Coltrane was just mine. Not his. Couldn't he let me have one thing that was just mine alone? Couldn't he let any of us have our own lives? He was always using us—like Stinky's monkey—without asking permission or telling us what was going on. He didn't trust us. So why should we trust him?
I felt Doug pulling himself up closer to me, alongside me. He looked at me oddly. "Chigger, we've gotta talk."
"There's been enough talk already," I said. "I don't need any more. Thanks."
Doug looked annoyed. "What's with you anyway?"
I indicated Stinky's chimpanzee with a backward nod; it was clinging happily to my neck. "I got a monkey on my back."
"In more ways than one," Douglas said. "I'm not going to talk to you when you're like this." He let me pull ahead so he could follow me again. Dad came after him. And we kept going.
We were in free fall. Or the next best thing to it. We were inside a giant cylinder filled with ladders and tubes and wires and stuff.
We were at the geosynchronous point of the space elevator. We were pulling ourselves more than two kilometers along the handholds on the outside of a water pipe big enough to push a Volkswagen through. We were here because our parents hated each other, both of them certifiably neurotic, and because Dad had kidnapped us with the intention of taking us off-planet somewhere. To finance the trip, he was acting as a courier, and had hidden some illicit memory inside Stinky's monkey.
So of course there were people after us. Mom had sent lawyers, other folks were sending security agents, and still others might send some thugs to hurt or kill us. We'd been served with a subpoena, and we were running away from a court action. We were in a restricted access zone with a Russian smuggler—and we had no idea what he usually smuggled. And meanwhile, there were folks getting ready to break the Line
free of the Earth, which would probably kill thousands of people and collapse the economies of a hundred different nations and at least a thousand different industries.
Dr. Hidalgo's sacred money would stop flowing just like a stopped-up toilet. Maybe it would back up and overflow and seek out new channels, and a lot of fortunes would be lost and new ones would be made, and all the ordinary people caught up in it would suddenly have their own set of problems. Who knew just how many millions of people might end up losing their jobs and their homes and their belongings. In some places people might even starve to death. There would certainly be riots and civil unrest and refugees and plagues and probably even a war or two. And that would trigger even more problems; and everything would just keep on going. On and on.
I guess this was what some people would call an adventure.
Thanks, but no thanks. I didn't ask for this adventure, and nobody had asked me how I felt about it. Just like the divorce. It made my stomach hurt and my chest felt like I had a knot in it. I don't know why people think adventures are so wonderful. Mostly they hurt, they're boring, and they're dangerous.
I concentrated on watching the handholds passing in front of me. I pulled myself steadily forward, left hand over right, right hand over left, and went back to wondering. If Judge Griffith were to take away the words right and left, how I would be able to explain the difference between one and the other.
MONEY-SURFING
Everybody uses e-money.
You slide your card through a reader and you're paid. The money travels from your card into the store. It's a stream of numbers representing a sum of money, and wherever it goes, it's still the same amount of money. E-money carries its own verification codes, so anyplace you can send a block of data you can send e-money. You can send it across a wire, or you can pipe it into a card, or you can put it on a beam of light and send it off to Betelgeuse—like that crazy artist did last year. Or you can stuff it in the back of a toy monkey. But however e-money gets sent, as long as it decodes authentically when it arrives, it's money.
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