by Jeff Edwards
The cushions of my seat immediately inflated, snugging me comfortably but securely against the harness.
Icon-man’s computer-generated egg-capsule powered over onto its back, so that he was facing the quilted insulation covering the ceiling of the passenger module. My seat followed suit, the hydraulic cradle lowering my egg onto its back until I faced the ceiling. I laid there in my cocoon, trembling against the straps of the safety harness until the shakes finally abated, leaving me feeling drained.
After a couple of minutes, the module’s internal life support system kicked in with an audible hiss. The increase in pressure caused my ears to pop.
Icon-man disappeared, replaced by a rear-looking camera shot from the runway tug attached to the wheeled sled that carried our passenger module.
The module lurched slightly as the access tunnels broke loose and retracted.
The view shifted to a forward-looking camera as the tug towed our sled across the runway toward the plump arrowhead shape of a shuttle. It might have been the same shuttle I’d seen through the windows before.
The shuttle grew in the data-shades until perspective began to transform it from a bloated cartoonish caricature of a spacecraft to a thing of awe. The tug continued to pull us closer, finally stopping between the shuttle’s vertical stabilizers, a camera angle that left us staring up the enormous rectangular exhausts of the shuttle’s aerospike engines.
The view returned to the rear-looking camera, and we watched as the sled’s hydraulics tilted the entire passenger module on to its end. The cradles of the acceleration capsules operated simultaneously, rolling the eggs to keep us lying on our backs the entire time. The synchronization was so perfect that I felt practically no sense of movement.
The tug nudged forward until our upended module slid into its form fitting recess in the shuttle’s cargo bay. The module seated itself with a metallic thump that I felt through my spine.
The image in the data-shades flipped to the view seen by one of the shuttle’s nose cameras, staring up past the runway lights into the blackened sky.
A channel selector was right next to the volume control. I started cycling through channels. Five more were reserved for external cameras: dorsal view, ventral, left-looking, right-looking, and tail camera—virtual views that made every seat a window-seat. I continued to surf through canned video, and local vid stations, until I came to a news broadcast.
Thirty seconds into a late-breaking story about rebel rocket attacks in Singapore, Icon-man reappeared, temporary overriding my dialed-down volume control. He smiled his best computer-generated smile. “It’s time for lift-off,” he said. “Captain Suryama extends her greetings, and hopes that you enjoy flying Japan Aerospace.” He winked and made the A-Okay sign with his thumb and forefinger.
The roar of the shuttle’s hydrogen-fed engines exploded into my ears, and three gravities of acceleration reached down like the hand of God and squeezed the breath from my lungs.
CHAPTER 19
The pneumatic cushions softened the shock considerably, but acceleration made every breath an effort.
The carefully-padded data-shades pushed against my face with nearly painful force. News stories continued to flicker in front of my eyes, ignored. I flexed my fingers, cycling through channels until the shuttle’s tail camera appeared. I found myself staring down a silver-white pillar of fire, the runway lights of LAX falling away into darkness. The domes of Los Angeles lay like a scattering of fat gumdrops, unevenly illuminated from within. I watched them recede until they dwindled out of sight.
I switched to the ventral cameras. The world was not the pretty beach-ball sized sphere that they show on orbital vacation commercials. From this altitude, it was a dark and dominating presence. The curvature of the surface was easily visible now, but the Earth was still quite clearly the ground. It looked like it could reach up and swat us anytime it wanted.
A couple of more clicks of the channel selector brought the dorsal camera up in my data-shades. We must have climbed above most of the atmosphere, because the stars were no longer pinpricks in the curtain of night. They were blue-white diamonds, burning with a fierce internal brilliance that nearly dazzled my eyes.
Something about them struck a chord inside me. Their clarity whispered to me of a universe that transcended the petty squabblings of Man. Of aspirations higher than greed, and lust, and anger.
For a few minutes, I dreamed the dreams of a child. I was not a hairless primate, but some higher being, with a purpose beyond the comprehension of so-called humanity. I could continue my journey toward the stars forever. Soaring into infinity. Away from evil. Away from Nine-fingers and his murderous cronies. Away from a civilization that could not seem to stop eating itself alive.
After some unknown number of minutes, the engines cut out, their column of flame shortening as though sucked back into the rectangular exhaust ports. Deafening thunder fading to silence.
We continued to climb, riding the hand of inertia into the eternal night of space. The pressure of acceleration dropped off, trading places with the plunging-elevator sensation of zero-g.
My stomach rebelled, tumbling violently like a compass suddenly deprived of its magnetic reference. Saliva flooded my mouth, salty and metallic under my tongue.
I had forgotten my SAS patch. Icon-man’s unheard pre-launch spiel had undoubtedly warned me about Space Adaptation Syndrome, and reminded me to wear a patch.
I fumbled through one of the egg’s side pockets until I found a small stash of foil packets. I tore one of the packets open, peeled the backing off the patch, and pressed the adhesive surface against the right side of my neck.
The drug hit my brain almost instantly, clamping down on the nausea, and making me drowsy. That was probably an intentional side effect, to minimize the opportunities for mischief during the freefall leg of the flight. Sleepy passengers can’t get into much trouble.
That was fine by me. I’d had a long day, and my men’s room tango with Arm-twister had burned up most of my energy reserves.
“Hey,” Dancer said. “You losing steam on me?”
I yawned. “Yep.”
“What am I supposed to do while you’re snoring?”
“Plug your ears,” I said in a bleary voice.
I was still zonked out when the engines fired again. The roar and sudden onset of acceleration jolted me back to consciousness.
Inside the data-shades, the view from the nose camera showed only stars. I fumbled the selector until the tail camera came around, and found myself staring past the white-hot glare of the exhaust trail toward a circle of light in the dark fabric of space. The circle grew slowly larger, gradually resolving itself into the donut shape of the orbital colony.
“You’re awake,” Dancer said in my ear. “I was beginning to wonder if you were dead.”
I did the best job of stretching that the safety harness would allow. “Not yet.”
My attention was still on the looming shape of the colony. Like most of the major space habitats, Chiisai Teien was a Stanford Torus. The main body of the station was a fat tubular ring joined to a central hub by six cylindrical arms like the spokes of a wheel. The entire structure rotated slowly around its central axis.
The structure continued to expand as we approached. The size of a coin. The size of a dinner plate. The size of a cocktail table. The size of my living room. The size of a house. Swelling until it became a turning wall of metal that nearly filled the viewing area of the data-shades.
I knew from the digital brochures that the outer curve of the ring was 1.8 kilometers in diameter, and the rotational speed was one revolution per minute. Centrifugal force created about nine-tenths of a gravity for the people living inside the ring at that level. Not quite Earth normal, but more than enough to make dirt-huggers like me comfortable.
The docking ports were at the center of the hub, on the axis of rotation. To mate up with one of them, the shuttle would have to precisely match the spin rate of the station. I wat
ched as the main engines stopped firing and the shuttle initiated its spin maneuver. The stars were just beginning to show circular movement when the camera feed abruptly terminated, and the view inside the data-shades filled with a menu of entertainment options. Probably another wise decision on the part of Japan Aerospace. The sight of the stars wheeling past in dizzy circles would undoubtedly provoke the nausea reflex in many of the passengers, including me.
So I didn’t get to see the docking sequence, or the mechanical handoff when our passenger module was detached from the shuttle airframe and fed into the cargo elevator that lowered it through one of the tubular spokes toward the primary habitation ring. I felt a series of bumps and vibrations, and then a sense of returning weight as the passenger module moved farther from the axis of rotation and deeper into the well of centrifugally simulated gravity.
Dancer passed the time by humming some annoyingly tuneless pop song in my ear. I ignored her.
Several minutes later, a final jolt announced that we had reached the bottom of the elevator. There was a chuff of equalizing air pressure, and the lenses of the data-shades went transparent. A translucent image of Icon-man went through the motions of returning the shades to their assigned pocket. I followed his directions.
A minute or so later, the latches of the safety harness released themselves, and the entire rig retracted into the overhead of my passenger egg. A perky feminine voice came over the intercom, announcing something in Japanese, and then repeating the message in English and four other languages. The usual stuff—thank you for choosing Japan Aerospace; watch your step while disembarking; etcetera, etcetera…
I followed a shuffling line of travelers out of the passenger module and down a narrow concourse to the baggage claim. Most of us walked cautiously, our bodies not accustomed to the lower subjective gravity of this new environment.
For me, the sensation was an oddly-euphoric mix of increased muscle energy, offset by a low grade uneasiness that my feet weren’t getting proper traction. The combination was disquieting to my body’s neuromuscular feedback circuits. My brain couldn’t decide whether I was about to soar like a bird, or fall flat on my ass.
I could see from the expressions of my fellow passengers that I wasn’t the only one feeling it. One woman leaned close to her traveling companion and whispered something about walking with someone else’s feet.
That was a better description than anything I could come up with.
My borrowed feet took me to the baggage area, where I walked past the milling travelers waiting for their luggage to appear.
I wondered if Jackal’s shit-bird tracker software would work here. Probably not. It was tapped into Earth-side video surveillance aggregators. The colony’s camera systems wouldn’t be on the same data feed. As long as I was up here, I couldn’t count on handy little pings to tell me where the bad guys were.
Dancer spoke in my ear. “You expecting the welcoming committee?”
I looked up quickly, scanning the scrum of passengers for Nine-fingers or Messenger-boy. I hadn’t expected them to come after me in such a public setting. I didn’t see either of them. Only a few of the passengers looked Asian, so at least I wasn’t going to be the only gaijin walking around. “Why? What do you see?”
“Sushi-girl over there is carrying a sign with your name on it.”
I stopped searching the crowd for thugs, and spotted a young Asian woman holding an unfurled rice paper scroll. ‘D. Stalin’ was printed in letters that were clearly intended to suggest brush-stroked kanji.
Dressed in a red silk kimono decorated with white and gold embroidered flower petals, she could have been a character in an old samurai vid.
I could tell from her expression that she had recognized me, but she made no move in my direction. In LA, that might have signaled attitude, or even plain old apathy. Here, the cultural subtext was different. Probably, it was a gesture of respect. She was making it my decision to either acknowledge her, or ignore her.
She bowed deeply as I approached. Her voice was soft, and almost musical. “Welcome to Chiisai Teien, Stalin-san. Your luggage will be delivered directly to the hotel.”
I didn’t know enough about bowing etiquette to return the gesture. I don’t have any luggage, other than my carryon bag, but I decided not to mention that. “Uh… I think there’s been some mistake. I haven’t booked a hotel yet.”
She bowed again. “My apologies. You have a suite at the Shogun.”
I nodded, and motioned for her to lead the way. Someone was either lying in wait for me, or rolling out the red carpet. Either way, we might as well get it over with.
I followed the unnamed woman out of the concourse and into the station proper. The transition was profound and immediate. We went from bright artificial lighting into the pleasant gloom of a fairly convincing twilight.
The louvered shutters in the overhead curve of the torus were closed, blocking out the rays of the sun. The arch of the ceiling was only a few hundred meters above our heads, but the entire surface was a photoactive matrix. It was currently showing a realistic simulation of an evening sky—complete with fading pink-tinged clouds and a handful of emerging stars.
The change in architectural style was just as profound and immediate. When we left behind the steel and molded plastic of the passenger area, we stepped into a world of sloping tiled roofs, greenery-lined flagstone walks, and buildings of black-lacquered wood, bamboo, and rice paper.
This was the Edo district, modeled loosely on the feudal Japan of the nineteenth-century. Or more accurately, a corporate marketing team’s romanticized idea of that period and place.
It was picturesque, but a tad overdone. The grass and fir trees too artfully groomed. The carp-filled reflecting pools a shade too serene, and too quaint. As though visitors couldn’t quite be trusted to recognize beauty without the decibel level cranked up.
My escort led me over an arched wooden footbridge that was a little too elegant for anyone’s good.
“She’s quite the little bijin,” Dancer said.
“The little what?” I kept my voice low, hoping that my kimono-clad escort would assume that I was talking on the phone. Which—come to think of it—was exactly what I was doing.
“Bijin,” Dancer said. “That’s Nip slang for a hottie. You know… a glam. Hot babe.”
“Since when do you speak Japanese?”
“I looked it up on the web.”
“How?”
“I’m plugged into your phone, shithead. You have net access.”
“I didn’t know you could do that.”
“Neither did I,” said Dancer. “I’m new to this whole brain-in-a-can thing. Still discovering the possibilities.”
“Let me know if you spontaneously develop any more superpowers,” I said.
She laughed. “I just found a couple of smoking hot girl-on-girl porn feeds. Does that count?”
“No,” I said. “That definitely doesn’t count.”
Dancer said something else, but I tuned her out.
The landscaping was designed to draw attention away from the manmade geometry of the habitat ring. The walkway wound through gently hilly terrain, with periodic hollows that sheltered tea gardens or tiny bamboo groves. I remembered reading somewhere that the colony’s “dirt” was mostly regolith shipped over from the moon. The upper half-meter or so was topsoil brought up from Earth, to support the grasses and other plant life.
The “ground” was banked up to either side of the tubular enclosure, creating higher hills, and making the Edo district feel more like a naturally occurring valley than a tube. Most of the buildings were concentrated on and around the hilltops, numerous rice paper doors and windows backlit with the flickering yellow glow of firelight or lanterns.
More design trickery, of course. The rice paper was undoubtedly some translucent polymer that resembled paper, but could take the continual abuse of tourist fingers, elbows, and luggage. The narrow slats of lacquered wood that framed the faux rice paper
panes were probably foam steel, or one of the Kevlar analogs. Something with plenty of structural strength, that could be skinned to emulate natural wood.
All fake, but convincingly so. As I breathed in the subtle aroma of cherry blossoms that floated on the stimulated breeze, I found myself wanting to let go of my disbelief and lose myself in the beauty of my surroundings. But I wasn’t here to enjoy myself. I had come in search of answers, and a couple of nasty specimens of humanity who had attracted my personal attention.
We occasionally passed other people out for evening strolls, a few dressed in Japanese period garb, but most wearing ordinary street clothes like me. I assumed that the former were Chiisai Teien staff, and the latter were paying guests. Although some of the tourist trade would probably costume themselves for a more immersive experience, so perhaps dress and appearance weren’t a reliable way to sort out the customers from the employees.
Nine-fingers and Messenger-boy didn’t spring out of the shadows, so I decided that my escort might actually be leading me to a hotel, instead of an ambush involving my favorite muscle gang.
The Shogun turned out to be a magnificent stone and timber edifice dominating the top of a low hill. It looked more like a pre-industrial Japanese palace than a hotel, which was probably the intent.
I followed my escort up broad stone steps, through a gabled archway and past a pair of faux rice paper doors that politely slid out of our way.
The Japanese girl paused at the entrance to slip out of her wooden sandals, leaving her feet clad in ankle high white socks with a separation between the first and second toes. I shucked my shoes. My own socks weren’t as quaintly stylish, and my unsegregated toes were forced to make due with sharing the same envelope of fabric.
If there was a front desk, I never saw it. We padded across woven reed mats in our stocking feet, down a longish lantern-lit hallway to a heavy teak door studded with fist-sized bronze rosettes. At my escort’s urging, I held my right palm against the rosette in the center of the door. This was apparently some kind of lock scanner, as the door whispered obligingly out of my way.