by Linda Nagata
“Devi,” Zia said, “it’s two days to the top.”
“So? We brought enough nutrients to last twice that long. It’s a good move. Really. No one will ever check the cameras out there.”
“I don’t get it,” Buyu said. “How are we supposed to get outside? I mean, if we open an airlock, an alarm could sound.”
“I brought a bubble recipe.”
“A what?” Skye asked.
“A bubble recipe. I fabricated it, using information from city library.” Devi burrowed in his pack. Then he pulled out a small canister no bigger than his hand. “This is it. Inside this canister is a team of Makers. They’re dormant now, but when they’re sprayed on an inert mass, they’ll work together to reengineer its molecular structure.”
“Inert” meant that Devi’s recipe wouldn’t work on living things, but only on non-living objects—like the wall of the elevator car. It would rearrange the way atoms bonded to one another, but to produce what? “What’s it supposed to do?” Skye asked.
Devi grinned. “It’s a bubble recipe, Skye. We’ll use it to manufacture a human-sized bubble in the elevator wall.”
“A hole?” Zia asked. “That’ll cause a decompression emergency—”
She stopped in mid-sentence, when Devi gave her a look that clearly said she was talking like an idiot.
“It’s a movable bubble,” Skye guessed. “It’ll carry us from the inside of the elevator car to the outside, without ever creating an opening for air to escape.”
“Exactly,” Devi said, with a stern glance at Zia. “And of course it’ll repair the wall behind us, so no one will ever know we were here.”
“You planned this, didn’t you?” Skye added. “You expected to go out early.”
Devi shrugged. “This trip would be pretty pointless if we got caught sneaking around inside the elevator.”
“I guess so.” She looked at Zia and laughed at the tense expression on her face. “Don’t look so worried! This could be a lot like jumping. Only backwards, because the elevator is falling away from the planet. And besides, anything is better than cuddling with lydras.”
There were no windows on the warehouse floor, so it was impossible to know how thick the outside walls might be. Devi looked a little worried as he stood on a stack of containers at the end of an aisle, examining a featureless wall. Then he shrugged. “Oh well. The bubble won’t form if the wall is too thin.”
Oh well? Skye did not feel that casual.
“How do we even know this is an outside wall?” Zia demanded. “What if there’s a room on the other side?”
Devi glanced down the length of the warehouse. “This has got to be a full-size floor. Look at it. It’s the width of the elevator car. Right Buyu?”
Buyu looked a little doubtful, but he shrugged. “Looks like it.”
“This is an outside wall,” Devi said firmly.
Skye kept quiet. He was probably right.
She hoped he was right.
“Don’t blow it, Devi,” Zia growled. “That bottle looks like it holds only enough for a single use.”
“Sooth.” Devi was sweating now; his taut cheeks gleamed. “Okay. Stand back. And, well, close your hoods just in case.”
In case the recipe malfunctioned and punched a hole all the way through the wall. That would cause a decompression catastrophe, as the air on this floor rushed out into airless space.
Skye whispered to her suit to close the hood. Ord was sitting on her shoulder. She reached up to take a firm grip on one of its tentacles. Devi sealed his own hood. Then, without another word, he sprayed the recipe in a neat oval equal to his own height.
At first the wall only looked wet, but after several seconds it took on a bumpy texture. Then it started to stretch, sinking toward the middle, while erupting in a ridge all around the edge of the oval. “It’s working,” Devi said, his voice reaching Skye through the radio system. He waved at them. “Come over here. Come quickly.”
They gathered close around him.
“Okay. Let’s do it. Just push yourselves into the soft wall …” He touched the wall with his hand. Then he leaned against it. His shoulder sank into the lumpy matter.
Skye could not believe it. “Devi! This can’t be right. What if the wall hardens around us?” Then they would be trapped inside its structure. “You said it was going to be a bubble.”
Devi nodded, as he squeezed even deeper into the muck. “Sooth. It is a bubble. A bubble of softened matter. Come on. Push your way in. It’s a molecular reaction, and it won’t last forever.”
“Zeme dust,” Zia muttered, but she pressed in next to him. Skye could do nothing but follow. Ord was still on her shoulder. It wrapped a tentacle around the strap of her backpack and held on tight. Skye slipped an arm around Devi’s waist. As she did, her hand slid into the disturbed matter of the wall. It felt like heavy, wet sand.
Buyu pressed in next to her. She held him with her other arm. She was facing Zia. They stared at each other as the melting wall oozed over them, sliding across their shoulders, around their legs, over their visors …
After a few seconds, Skye could no longer see Zia’s terrified eyes.
She knew they were completely covered when she felt a pressure against the arm that encircled Buyu’s waist. Something on that side pressed against them. She imagined the wall hardening, returning to its former structure. Meanwhile, more goop flowed slowly past. It was like standing in a river of mud. She felt half crushed, squashed up against Devi while Buyu leaned against her. “I can hardly breathe,” she whispered.
“It won’t be long,” Devi said. His voice sounded strained. A moment later, he vanished.
He dropped out of Skye’s encircling arm as if a giant had yanked him away. “Devi!” She thought she heard him swear.
Then Zia was screaming. “I’m falling! I’m falling!” It was a cry of utter terror, like nothing Skye had ever heard before.
“Zia!”
“I’ve got her,” Devi shouted. Skye could hear his harsh breathing. “Skye, reach down. Give me a hand.”
“Where?”
She felt Buyu’s grip tighten on her waist. “Get ready to slap the outside wall with your hot zones,” he warned.
The softened wall abruptly gave way. Skye popped out into a sideways world, defined by the vast, lightless wall of the elevator car. She felt herself slip. The pull of Deception Well was far less than what it had been in Silk, but it was still real. Buyu caught her arm, slowing her fall. She twisted hard, and slapped her other hand against the wall of the elevator car. The hot zone of her glove bonded. A second later her boots connected. “Secure!” she shouted.
Buyu dropped her hand and swung sideways out of the closing bubble. His skin suit bonded at his shins and gloves, leaving him safely crouched against the vertical wall.
Only then did Skye look down.
They had emerged from the elevator car less than two meters above its base. Devi hung upside down, bonded to the wall by the hot zones on his shins. Zia dangled from his outstretched arms, with sixteen thousand kilometers of empty space beneath her. She didn’t move. She didn’t say a word. Skye wondered if she had fainted. Far beyond her, Deception Well had shrunk to a dark sphere only a little bigger than a soccer ball held at arm’s length.
“Help me,” Devi whispered, his voice trembling. “I can’t pull her up from this position.”
“Oh Zia.” Skye spoke to her suit DI, “I’m climbing.” The hot zones released their grip on the wall, one hand or one foot at a time so that she was able to scramble down the two meters to the bottom of the elevator car. Buyu climbed down on Devi’s other side. There was an awkward moment as they tried to decide how to hold on to the wall and reach for Zia. After a second, Skye decided it was a matter of hanging on sideways. Buyu agreed. When they were both locked in place, they leaned together over the edge.
They each took one of Zia’s arms.
It was too dark to see Zia’s eyes through the arc of her visor, but her voic
e whispered over the radio. “Don’t drop me.”
“Never ado,” Skye swore. “Not in a million years.”
“On two,” Devi said. “One, two—”
They yanked Zia up. They pulled too hard, forgetting about the reduced gravity. Zia shot up. Skye almost lost her grip, but Zia managed to slap her gloves against the elevator wall before she could bounce away forever. She landed on top of Devi. For several seconds no one moved. Skye’s hood filled with the sound of her own panicked breathing. Then Zia uttered a little cry. She crawled clear of Devi, her breath coming in wracking sobs. Then the transmission from her suit switched off.
Skye scrambled to her side. She put her arm around her. “Hey, we’re okay now.”
Zia’s shoulders heaved. Her whole body trembled. Skye huddled close to her, whispering nonsense, “It’s okay, Zia. Everything’s okay.”
After a few minutes, Zia calmed down. She switched her suit radio back on. When she spoke, her voice trembled. “Skye, I’ve never been so scared before.”
Skye squeezed her shoulder. “Me neither.”
Zia leaned away from the wall, to look down past her feet. Skye followed her gaze. Dawn light glowed on the rim of the planet, sixteen thousand kilometers below them.
Chapter 19
It was, Skye decided, a lot like going nowhere.
They had climbed to the top of the elevator car, the hot zones on their suits bonding and releasing as they moved hand and foot, hand and foot. Low gravity made the ascent easy. As Skye climbed, she felt like a fly crawling up a wall.
Skye and Zia stayed close together … just in case one of them needed comfort on the way. Skye’s belly still felt hollow with fear. She couldn’t imagine how Zia was feeling. They climbed in silence, until suddenly Skye gasped, as a new worry hit her. Zia turned at the sound.
“What?”
“Ord,” Skye squeaked. “Where’s Ord?” She hadn’t seen it since they spilled out of Devi’s badly designed bubble.
Zia squinted through her visor. “It’s on your shoulder.”
Skye turned to look. She could just see a flash of gold out of the corner of her eye. She reached up to touch the little robot, to assure herself it was all right. She waited for a tentacle to wrap affectionately around her hand. But Ord did not stir. Through her gloved fingers, its body felt oddly stiff. Almost frozen.
Zia’s frown deepened to a scowl. She poked at it, but still Ord did not move. “Is it dead?”
“Don’t say that.”
Devi climbed up on her other side. He touched Ord too, tugging at one of the long tentacles wrapped around Skye’s pack strap. “It’s sure not active. I guess it wasn’t made to work in vacuum. You know, without our suits, we’d fail out here too.”
“No kidding!” She felt the hot sting of tears in her eyes. Whenever she and Zia had jumped, she’d been careful to leave Ord behind, locked up somewhere. This time though, she hadn’t thought about its safety at all.
“Hey,” Devi said gently. “All I meant was, it’s probably gone dormant.”
She blinked hard, searching for his eyes behind the shadowed curve of his visor. “You think so?”
“Well, why not? It doesn’t look damaged. It just looks …”
“Cold,” Zia suggested.
“Sooth. Cold.”
Skye fingered one of Ord’s tentacles. It was stiff, and harder than usual, but otherwise it looked normal… . “I guess we’ll find out when we reach the lifeboat.”
They started climbing again. It was only a few minutes later when they reached the top. Buyu and Zia tramped away from the edge, but Skye could not resist the allure of the abyss. She rolled out on top of the elevator car. Then she sat up.
Her legs dangled over the side. Her gloved hands clenched the lip as she leaned forward, looking down, swinging her feet over … sixteen thousand kilometers of nothing.
Morning spilled over the horizon of the little world far, far below them. So very far, yet she could still feel the insistent presence of that world in the weak gravity that let her sit, instead of floating away. How could Deception Well reach out so far, through so much empty space, to affect her? Gravity. Invisible and ever present. This was surely the craziest moment of her life.
She leaned back, looking over her shoulder now at the elevator column. Kheth’s light had not yet reached this far. It was still night here. They were in the planet’s shadow, so the column looked like a vast, featureless, black wall. Skye squinted, but she could not make out the track the elevator followed. She could see no sign at all that they were moving.
For a moment she felt disoriented, wondering if the car had stopped.
Then she looked up. A few kilometers overhead, the black column blazed brilliant silver. Sunlight! Of course. The end of the elevator column would swing out of the planet’s shadow first, catching the light long before sunrise chased away the night in the rainforest at the elevator’s base.
The boundary of darkness and brilliant light raced toward them, banishing all her doubts about the elevator car’s speed. They were shooting toward that silvery light. She held her breath, and within a handful of seconds they slid from starlit night to blinding day. Devi whooped.
Skye turned to look for him, and found him only a few steps away, standing on the edge of the car, his arms outstretched as if were ready to take the whole of that magnificent vista in his embrace.
She shared his exhilaration. Throwing back her head, she howled—a tiny spark of radio noise—the voice of life—in a vast and beautiful galaxy. When her lungs were empty, she refilled them again with a deep breath of manufactured air that tasted better than any air she had ever breathed before.
It didn’t get boring after that.
Not exactly.
She felt a little discouraged though, when Zia commented dryly, “You know Skye, we’re going to be out here two days.”
Two days.
An awfully long time in a skin suit.
Now that they were in full sunlight, Skye once again experienced the odd sensation that they were not moving. “Sooth,” Devi said, when she mentioned it to him. “Moving at a constant speed is almost the same thing as standing still. If you’re not speeding up or slowing down, if you’re not turning, if there’s no wind in your face, or landmarks sliding past, then there’s no way to tell whether you’re moving or not. It’s not motion that the body senses. It’s change in motion. Here on the elevator car, everything is constant, including our speed.”
Sooth. Deception Well was so far away now that Skye could not perceive it getting smaller from moment to moment. Only when she looked again after several minutes did she notice a difference. The only possible reference was the elevator column itself, but their speed blurred any landmarks that might be there.
It was, she decided after awhile, a lot like going nowhere.
There might be no sensation of moving, but progress could be measured in other ways. The pull of gravity continued to decline the further they rose above the planet. Deception Well continued to shrink in size, until it seemed impossible that such a tiny sphere could anchor a structure as immense as the elevator column. Most embarrassing, Skye’s bladder continued to swell, until the pressure became unbearable.
She switched off her suit radio. Then she closed her eyes and whispered to the DI, “I have to pee.” Her cheeks grew hot as she said it. She knew a skin suit could be used for days and days without a break so long as it was supplied with liquid nutrients. A skin suit was almost a living thing. It consumed the same liquid nutrient diet that she sucked from a feeding tube that would emerge by her mouth whenever she asked for it.
So obviously her skin suit must be able to handle the other end of the digestive cycle—but despite all the time Skye had spent jumping off the elevator column, and even during her trip to Deception Well, she had never investigated its humble functions.
Her suit DI did not answer for several seconds. Finally, it spoke in its soft, female voice, sounding puzzled. “Is this a quer
y?”
“Yes,” Skye said, her voice low, as if someone might hear her. “Is there some special procedure … something I’m … supposed to do … when I pee?”
“Urination requires the contraction of the smooth muscles surrounding the bladder. Do you require assistance with this?”
Skye covered her face with her hands. Her cheeks felt so hot she thought they might melt. “No! I just … I mean … I should just pee, right? And the skin suit will handle the … the waste?”
“That’s correct. All bodily wastes are broken down and recycled into nutritional components.”
“Okay then.” She stared out at the abyss for several seconds. Then she gave in, feeling like a little kid who had waited too long.
To her surprise, there was no sensation of liquid flooding her legs. The suit absorbed it all, so that she experienced only a rush of intense warmth that remained steady as she emptied her bladder, then faded gradually when she was through.
Quite convenient, really.
Heat was a problem. They were far above any sheltering atmosphere. Kheth’s light poured over them, undiluted by layers of air, or by a protective canopy like the one that covered Silk. The heat was intense, so after awhile they climbed a few meters down the shady side of the elevator car. They moved again as the light advanced, so that they stayed always in shadow. As the hours passed, they eventually climbed all the way down the side of the car, then across the bottom, and up again on the other side.
“It’s not just the light we can see that could hurt us,” Devi said. “There’s a lot of hard radiation up here. Our suits can screen out some of it, but most of our protection comes from the medical Makers in our bodies. They’re always working hard to repair any damage to our cells.”
“Cell damage is repairable … right?” Zia asked.
“Oh sure. So long as our nutrients hold out.”
Just as dawn had touched the end of the elevator column first, so day lingered there the longest. Night flowed up from the planet, a sharply defined shadow that silently engulfed the elevator car. Skye turned, to watch the shadow-line climb beyond them, higher and higher along the column until, just before the last of the light disappeared, she was able to make out a silver parasol, gleaming in the distance.