by Rich Horton
Delighted, Derek leads me all the way to a dim cafeteria two levels in from the rim. I'm not sure what I was expecting, but certainly not this gloomy cave with the dark red walls and the low ceiling. Quiet, lilting string music plucked out by unseen hands drifts on the air, which smells gently dank and laden with minerals. Thick pillars and curtains of leafy plant life obscure the view from one end of the place to the other, though here and there I can see tables of two, three, or four, the sometimes asymmetrical faces of the patrons lit from below by flickering orange light. Perhaps it's the dimness, but I no longer find their deformities as hideous as I did at first.
A woman in a lumpy black cowled robe leads us through the compact maze of foliage to a table against a black-painted bulkhead studded with white pinpricks. It isn't until we take our seats in form-fitting smart-matter chairs that I realize the bulkhead isn't a bulkhead at all, but a viewport—a hole punched through fifteen centimeters of metal and plugged with glass or something like it.
"Wheel and Axle,” I murmur, stunned. I can't take my eyes from the bright, nail-hard stars.
"Netherheim and Freya should come into view before you're finished,” the cowled woman says. “That's a sight to behold.” She makes an arcane gesture in the air. “Now, let me call your attention to today's specials."
"Perhaps a ... hardcopy menu would be in order for my friend here?” Derek says, nodding toward me.
"Oh, certainly,” the woman says before receding like smoke into the shadows.
The surface of our table glows a dim, swirling orange, making Derek's skin look like polished stone and his eyes smolder with fire. “So what do you think?” he asks.
"It's not what I expected at all. I pictured something more, well, functional from a cafeteria."
"Cafeteria, eh?” Derek's eyes sparkle with amusement. “I suppose you could think of it that way."
The robed woman returns with a catalog of dishes listed on a single sheet of paper, and I'm shocked to discover, as Derek points out, that most of the items have been grown hydroponically. “This must be terribly expensive,” I say, mouth watering. “I can't afford this, I'm sure of it."
"Relax,” Derek says. “Everyone gets credit for a meal like this once a month. I've got a couple saved up, and you must have at least a dozen just sitting there, unused."
I cover my surprise and confusion by studying the menu. I have the sense of riding an iceberg in a limitless ocean, borne up by a vast bulk the composition of which I can't begin to fathom. Choosing more or less at random, I select an opener of fine pasta garnished with grated cheeses and truffle shavings, and a spiced squash tart as a main course. Derek places our orders, a process invisible to me, choosing a fruit assortment and a roulade of vegetables and nuts for himself.
He folds his hands and leans forward. “So, what's on your mind, Jude?"
"Oh, this and that,” I say, and shrug. “I was thinking today about what it would be like to live out in space."
Derek shakes his head, grinning. “We do live in space. Or hadn't you noticed?"
"No, I mean in space, like the exomorphs, just floating there in the middle of nothing."
"Well, it's not nothing. There is a structure, a lattice, to grow their colony in."
"But it's not much, and it's open to space.” I didn't know there were such creatures, such people, until today. I read it on the fishbowl during work. “Can you even imagine the mods you'd need for that?"
"Serious work indeed,” Derek says. “Not to be undertaken lightly."
"No one on our crew has work that serious. They all look pretty much normal, at least when they're dressed."
"The more radical mods are often specialization for particular types of work. We're unskilled labor, our crew, Jude."
I nod, having figured this out without really being able to articulate it. I take a deep breath. “Derek, can I ask you something personal?"
He laces his fingers together and rests his joined hands on the table. The green of his palms has crept halfway up his arms in the time since I met him, and his ears are now tinged green as well, though I can't make the hues out well in this light. His gaze upon me is very open and direct and unsettling, more so because every day I come to know better how little I understand of his world, layered as it is above and beneath and around mine. “I don't know, can you?” he says.
"I don't know. I'll try.” I've learned some things about him from the fishbowl at work without really trying—for instance, the distressing fact that he has three biological mothers—but nothing that doesn't just whet my curiosity. I look down at the glowing table and take a deep breath. “I'm just wondering if there's some, I don't know, some practical reason for your mods, something functional. You know, what the blue skin turning green is all about."
"There's a time for love, and a time to hate,” Derek says with a rakish smile. “A time for blue, and a time for green."
I puff out an exasperated breath. “Do you spend all your time looking up things in the Manual you can make fun of?"
He shakes his head. “You do understand, don't you, Jude,” he says animatedly, “that a book called the Bible existed long before Titus Grant slapped his own generic title on it, and that it's not exactly an obscure work in the human literary canon?"
"High Foreman Titus didn't just change the title. Under the Builder's inspiration, he clarified and corrected—"
Derek extends a finger until it almost touches my lips, waving his other hand preemptively. “Yes, fine. But you understand he didn't write the Manual from scratch."
"All right, fine, I understand,” I say. “So what about the color change?"
He leans back in his chair. “Right, that. It's not really anything practical. There's nothing I can point to and say my skin color accomplishes. In fact, it's mostly a random aesthetic process. I'm never sure what color's coming up next."
"Then why did you do it? I mean, what's the purpose?"
"It keeps me interested,” Derek says, and his smile cracks momentarily. “I see me and not-me in the mirror at the same time, and there's always the mystery of what's coming next. It's as good a reason to stick around as any.” He leans forward again, and to my ears his heartiness now sounds forced. “What makes you curious, friend?"
I shake my head. “I don't know. Nothing."
"You're thinking about the job, aren't you? The vacuum job this Fourday."
I look out the viewport at the stars, but the view seems to tilt and wheel beneath me, spinning my sense of balance away. “Maybe,” I admit.
"You know,” Derek says with a trace of his vigorous smile, “if you do it, a lot of folks on the crew are going to be disappointed. People are starting to get protective of you, and you may make them feel like they've corrupted you."
"It's not their decision,” I say.
"Agreed."
A different woman brings us our opening course. A thick tail moving in counterpoint to the balanced trays in her hands protrudes from beneath her black robe. Attention to the food spares Derek and me from the burden of conversation. I'm not sure I enjoy all the lush, strange flavors on my plate, but I know I've never tasted anything so vivid. I swallow every last crumb.
Derek seems uncharacteristically fidgety between courses, but it's not until our main courses have arrived and I'm halfway through my tart—excellent—that he says, “Jude, can I ask you something?"
"Um, sure,” I say between bites.
He swallows. “What is it that happened to your mother?"
The bite I've just taken feels too big going down my throat. “How do you know about my mother?"
"I'm sorry, I'm not trying to pry.” He wipes his mouth with a cloth serviette that actually shows slight stains of use. “It's hard sometimes to look at you and not make the easy jumps back through your genealogy."
"My mother died when I was small, four or five,” I say, setting down my fork and holding my gaze steady with great effort. “I'm not clear exactly how. My father doesn't like to talk
about it, and I don't like to press him."
Derek opens his mouth, looking confused, and for a moment I have the strangest feeling he's going to tell me how it happened. I feel the sting beginning behind my eyes at the thought that he might know more about it than I do.
But what he says is: “Do you think about her much?"
I nod. “All the time."
He looks so stricken at this that I feel I could be looking at a reflection of my own expression in a blue-tinted mirror—or, so I believe for a giddy, wildly hopeful moment, at my mother. The illusion shatters as Derek rises suddenly in his chair, takes my face in both his green hands, and leans in to kiss me on the mouth. He stares at me a second or two, an eternity, and sits back down.
Breathless, I turn to the window. Netherheim has swung into view, a giant ball of spun sugar swirled with red and yellow stripes, a fruit as sweet and bursting and sick-making as my heart inside me. I sit very still, not looking at him. My pulse is racing about a hundred klicks a second.
"I don't know if I can finish this,” I say and push the rest of my tart away.
"Jude, I'm sorry,” Derek says, his eyes very steady and direct.
"Why did you do that?” I ask. Asking a question is better than yelling or crying or hitting the table.
Derek spreads his green palms. They look black with blood in the cafeteria's hellish light. “I forgot for a minute what a kiss signifies to your people. Let myself forget, to be honest. To us—the groups I identify with, at least—it can be a greeting between friends, a show of camaraderie or comfort, even the equivalent of a slap. It doesn't have to have a sexual connotation."
"But why did you do it?"
Derek sighs. “Jude, you just seemed so sad. I couldn't stand it. Lonely and sad.” He shakes his head. “You reminded me of me when I was your age. Sometimes I wish someone had just done that for me."
Do I believe him? I'm not sure. I look out the viewport. Netherheim is just beginning to slide out of view. A cauldron of emotion, like the multicolored atmosphere of the planet below, seethes inside me. I want to storm out of the room. I want to turn a somersault in the air. I want to shake Derek by the shoulders until his head flops like a scrap doll's.
I think about Nicodemus, wondering what I ever saw in him.
"I'm sorry,” I say. “Can you help me find an elevator to Level Six?"
"Of course, Jude."
The compassion and concern in Derek's voice are unbearable. So is the heartbreak.
* * * *
At home, safe from the sea of wild bodies and leering faces that populate the station, I fall to my knees. I should pray to the Builder for forgiveness, for putting myself in such a compromised position, but instead I thumb the combination on the wooden chest in the middle of the deck. Thomas is still out, and with luck will be for at least another hour. He doesn't know that I long ago surfed the combination over his shoulder. The lid swings back on stiff, creaky, decidedly low-tech hinges, revealing the layered treasures within.
Reverently, I lift out the first folded garment, hearing in my mind a surreal ghost of Kaiya's voice telling Thomas to keep this, she'll have no use for it where she's going. I unfold and smooth out the soft gray dress with the Inclined Plane on the bosom—then, hands trembling, pull it over my head and slip my arms through the sleeves, as I've done maybe half a dozen times before in my life.
The fabric is tight across my shoulders and under my arms—much tighter than it was the time before. There's no hope of closing the buttons at the back. This may be the last time I can manage to fit into it at all.
Sobs rise up inside me as I yearn for angel wings to bear me away.
* * * *
The sensation of walking spinward inside a great turning wheel like Netherview Station is a little like walking up an endless inclined plane. Because your feet are borne forward by the rotation a tiny bit faster than your head, you might feel if you're attentive enough as if you're leaning slightly backward, or walking up the slightest of slopes.
By the same token, a counterspinward stroll might feel a bit like a walk downhill. But compare your slight forward angle to a tangent of the circle your feet are touching and you'll see that the attitude of your body is more like that of a person walking uphill. Thus, walk either direction inside the rim of a rolling wheel and you partake of one aspect or another of ascending an incline.
I haven't found much scriptural support for my position, and the members of Wheel and Axle in particular would call it blasphemy, but at some crossroads it strikes me that any path you follow can lead you upward, and closer to the Builder.
* * * *
I sleep badly, unaccustomed to the richness of the food in my belly. Upon rising I prepare Thomas what seems a meager and bland breakfast, all the while fearing that he will somehow sense that the chest and its contents have been disturbed. But he eats with all his attention on his Manual, and he barely bats an eye when I tell him I may end up working overtime today.
I arrive early at the hub, in time to catch Renny in her spherical office well before the start of our Twoday shift. “I want to learn more about this vacuum-hardening procedure,” I tell her without preamble. “Uh, how can I do that?"
Renny vaults out of her chair like a charged particle expelled from an atom. “If you weren't crippled you could ask from anywhere,” she says, clinging to the frame of the hatch and shoving her ugly face into mine. “As it is, you'll have to use a Geoffroom. There's one not far from here."
She leads me on a brisk walk. “You know,” I say as I hurry to keep up with her, “my father's pretty upset with you."
Renny looks over her shoulder and grins. “What, for telling you about the job? Oh, I heard from him. Nothing he could do about it, though. It's regs and Thomas knows it. Like he has room to complain, the way he called in so many favors to get a barefooter like you onto the team in the first place. But he's your father and he's just following the script, same as me."
She stops before a row of three hatches, each emblazoned with the old-fashioned schematic symbol for an activated light fixture. I've passed hatches like these at many times since starting my job, but never known what they were.
Renny rears up on her hind arms and pats the gleaming surface of the first hatch. “Now here's the next part of my script,” she says. “This is a Geoffroom, where Geoff can tell you anything you care to ask about. He'll answer all your questions and then some. The light bulb is glowing, which means the room's unoccupied and you can walk right in. Take all the time you need, but if you're going to be here longer than than the first hour of shift, have the big lug message me so I know."
She touches a panel in the center of the hatch, and it opens with a slight hiss.
"Keep your eyes and ears open, kid,” she says, and I step inside.
* * * *
"Don't be afraid. I won't bite."
The voice is a warm tenor and originates from no location I can see in this small, very white room. The ceiling is high enough to let me stand comfortably; my outstretched arms would nearly span the room in both dimensions. A body-enfolding chair like you might find at the medic's rests at the center of the deck. Panicked, I turn—to find the hatch has sealed noiselessly behind me. I can barely see its outline.
"Have a seat, Jude,” the voice says. “We've got a lot to talk about."
The air is warm, but my skin prickles cold and hard. “Where are you?” I say. “How do you know my name?"
"I've known you since you were born, Jude. I'm glad we're finally getting a chance to talk. This happens so rarely with members of your Guild. But we'll talk more comfortably if you sit. Please."
Blasphemy! my mind cries. False gods! But I ease myself down into the chair, letting the cushions take hold of me. I feel the chair adjust to my size, and carefully I lay my head back in the niche that fits it.
A man appears before me. A pot-bellied man with flowing white hair and a bushy white mustache, dressed in a billowy white coverall. A man carrying a wooden ca
rpenter's square. “Selah,” he says.
I start in alarm, but the man makes calming motions as he bends over me. “The Builder,” I gasp.
He shakes his head. “If you see me in the likeness of the Builder, it's only because that's your strongest conception of a figure of benevolent wisdom. Not to aggrandize myself at all.” He looks down at the carpenter's square in his hand. “This probably doesn't help matters.” He tosses the square over his shoulder, and it vanishes.
"Who are you?” I say, struggling to sit up.
The man crackles and flashes transparent. “This'll be less disorienting if you stay down in the chair,” he says. “For both of us."
Suspiciously I lie back, and the image solidifies. In fact, I can feel the man as he presses a comforting hand to my chest and pushes me down.
"I'm Geoff,” he says. “No last name, but I can give you a version number if you're really interested."
He smells faintly of sweat, smoke, and some kind of musky perfume. “I don't know what you mean,” I say.
"I know,” he says with a smirk. He pulls up a chair from nowhere, seats himself near my knees, and crosses his legs. “But you came here because you wanted to ask me something. So go ahead. Ask me anything you like. Ask me as much as you like. That's what I'm here for."
"What are you?” I ask.
"A very sophisticated information retrieval system. Once upon a time, you might have called me a search engine, but I'm much more than that. I'm something of a diagnostician as well, and a physician, and a surgeon, and a teacher and a tutor. A diplomat, a translator, an ombudsman. A legal advisor, and an advocate too. And I play a mean hand of gin."
"Where did you get the name Geoff?” I'm thinking of Derek and his name change. “What does it mean?"
Geoff strokes his mustache. “Nothing, really. I just liked the sound of it. It seemed to me to suit me somehow. Where did you get your name?"