“I have an itch,” Marce Claremont said to his sister.
“Where?” Vrenna asked.
“My entire head,” Marce replied.
As required, Marce had shaved his entire head short of eyebrows and eyelashes, and had been fitted with cultivated hair and a beard, each embedded in an epidermis-thin substrate of actual skin, which had been secured to his own with the use of a glue made from, or so the person applying it to his face told him, real human collagens. Next came the thumb pad, which made Marce feel like he had tape on his hand, against which he had to mightily fight the urge to pick it off. Then the contacts which changed his eye color and iris pattern, and which included holographic fake corneas that would give the illusion of depth to the fake retinal pattern.
“I can barely see out of these contacts, either.”
“It’s not a bad eye color for you, though,” Vrenna observed. “Maybe keep those in after you get on the ship.”
“You’re funny.”
The two of them were waiting on the elevator that would take Marce down to the lobby. The newly hired crew for the Yes, Sir were told to collect there in order for their papers to be processed and then to be bussed to port, to head to the ship. That was convenient for Marce, who could blend in with the rest of the new crew.
But it also meant that these were literally the last moments he would spend with his sister, possibly in his entire life.
“Tell Dad I’m sorry I didn’t get to say good-bye,” he said, to Vrenna.
“I will. He’ll understand. He won’t be happy, but he’ll understand. He’ll be okay.”
“And how about you? Are you going to be okay?”
Vrenna smiled. “I’m pretty good at being okay. If nothing else, I’m good at keeping busy. And the thing is, rumor has it that no matter what, everyone on End is going to be really busy soon. I have an agenda, anyway.”
“What’s on the agenda?”
“The first thing is to dangle Ghreni Nohamapetan off a building for kidnapping my brother.”
Marce laughed at this, and then the elevator bell dinged and the door opened.
Vrenna grabbed her brother in a fierce hug, gave him a peck on the cheek, and then pushed him, gently, into the elevator. “Go on,” she said. “Go tell the emperox everything. Save everyone if you can. And then come back.”
“I’ll try.”
“Love you, Marce,” Vrenna said, as the door started to close.
“Love you, Vrenna,” Marce said, just before it did.
Marce had twenty floors to get his emotions in check.
The elevator opened up to a couple dozen people milling about and three people in official House of Lagos crew uniforms. One of them looked over to Marce as the elevator opened up. “What the hell are you doing in the elevator?” she asked.
“I was looking for a bathroom,” Marce said.
“Well, there’s not one in there. Get out of that.”
Marce got out. The crew member held out her hand for his papers; he handed them over.
“Kristian Jansen,” she said, looking at them.
“That’s me.”
“Any relation to Knud Jansen?”
“I don’t think so.”
“I shipped with him once. He was from End, too.”
“There’s a lot of Jansens.”
The crew member nodded, and then held up her tablet. “Thumb.” Marce pressed his fake thumb on the tablet, which scanned the print on it. The crew member then held up the tablet close to Marce’s eyes. “Don’t blink.” The camera on the back of the tablet scanned Marce’s contacts.
“Well, you really are Kristian Jansen, and you don’t have any outstanding warrants or debts, your guild union dues are paid up, and your personnel ratings are good,” the crew member said. “Welcome aboard.”
“Thank you, uh…”
“Ndan. Petty Officer Gtan Ndan.”
“Thank you, ma’am.”
“You’re welcome, crewman.” Ndan looked at Marce’s rucksack. “You’re traveling light.”
“My other bag got boosted.”
Ndan nodded. “Sucks. When you get squared away go to the quartermaster and get new kit. You’ll be charged extortionate rates but that’s your problem. You got marks?”
“A few.”
“If you’re short, come find me. I can lend.”
“That’s very kind.”
“No it’s not. It’s business. My interest rates are also extortionate.” Ndan pointed out of the lobby to a bus waiting outside. “Get on that. We leave in about five minutes. Do you still need a head?”
It took a second for it to register that Ndan was talking about a bathroom. “I’m fine.”
“Off you go, then.” She turned to see who else she needed to process.
It took five seconds for Marce to get from the lobby door to the bus and he felt exposed the entire way. But he managed to get on the bus without incident, find a seat, and wait. He looked up through the window at the House of Lagos building and wondered if Vrenna was looking down. He felt briefly sorry for Ghreni Nohamapetan, whom Vrenna was likely to thump the crap out of sometime soon. Then in the distance there was a brief thump that sounded like a shell hitting a building, and Marce remembered there were other things Vrenna and their father might still have to worry about first.
From the bus to the port he went, through another paper check and thumb scan at imperial customs, then up the beanstalk, which was disappointing to Marce because there were no windows and the video screen in the cramped passenger cabin showed nothing but informational customs videos and ads.
At a certain point in the trip up the beanstalk, Marce was aware that his (fake) hair felt like it was being pressed down onto his scalp. He mentioned this to his seatmate, who nodded but didn’t look up from whatever he was reading on his tablet. “Push field,” he said, then went back to his reading.
Marce nodded to himself. Push fields were humanity’s best approximation for artificial gravity, in which objects were pushed on from “above”—whatever “above” was in any particular scenario—rather than pulled on from below, as gravity was generally understood to work. The physics of push fields were discovered accidentally. Researchers back on Earth had tried to work out the problem of shaping a small bubble of local space-time around a starship in order to take advantage of the then newly discovered Flow, and ended up taking a lot of side detours in the math. Most of these detours offered nothing of any benefit, but one of them did, and it was pressing on Marce’s hair.
Marce looked up and found the push field generator tubes, running down the length of the passenger compartment like fluorescent lighting. He of course understood the physics of the push field, since it was a consonant subset of the Flow physics. But he’d never been off End. He’d never experienced one. As he was experiencing it now, he found it slightly unsettling. He didn’t like what basically felt like a giant hand pressing down on his head and shoulders, and he didn’t like how it made his fake hair lay on his scalp. He looked around the compartment and noted there was a reason why most of the experienced crew kept their hair either very short or in tightly wrapped braids and queues.
From the beanstalk now to Imperial Station, which featured a rotating ring section for the marines and imperial staff who stayed at the station long term, and a separate merchant section managed by push fields, where visiting ships unloaded and managed their cargo. Marce and the other crew got out in the merchant area, and he immediately understood why long-term residents would prefer to live in the ring. The push fields here, set to a standard G, were almost intolerably pushy.
As Marce and the rest of the crew were led to the crew muster area for the Yes, Sir, he saw a collection of people in the cargo hold, waiting. Those would be the Yes, Sir’s passengers, he knew, with whom he would have been, if Ghreni Nohamapetan hadn’t kidnapped him and marked him. The passengers certainly didn’t look like refugees. They looked like what they were—wealthy people. They were milling with their children and their stacks of cargo at a thousand marks a kilo as if they were about to have an adventure, rather than flee a planet forever.
Despite the fact that he fully intended to be one of them, Marce managed to feel resentment toward them, toward the people who could, in fact, leave their problems behind through the simple application of money.
Well, you’re a hypocrite, his brain told him. Well, maybe he was. But then again he wasn’t leaving to escape. He was leaving because someone needed to tell the emperox, and then explain to the parliament and everyone else, how the end was coming. That person just happened to be Marce.
Nope, still a hypocrite, his brain said. Then they were out of the cargo area and into a tunnel, funneling them toward the muster area and a shuttle.
A final check of papers and thumbprint and the shuttle detached from Imperial Station to the Yes, Sir. Again there were no windows—windows were a positive hazard in the blank vacuum of space—but this time Marce could access a camera feed from his tablet. He did so and saw the Yes, Sir hone into view, a long tube with two rotating rings, an ungainly but strangely beautiful object. His home for the next nine months.
“What a fucking hole,” his seatmate said, looking at Marce’s tablet screen.
“I think it’s beautiful,” Marce said.
“Looks pretty from a distance. But I’ve friends who have crewed Lagos ships before. They all have problems. House of Lagos is cheap. They run their ships until they fall apart and only repair them when the alternative is exploding. They scare me.”
“And yet you’re here, about to crew a Lagos ship.”
“I was going to crew on the Tell Me Another One, but it’s been impounded. Captain let pirates take her cargo, I heard. Switched over. Last-minute add. Worth it. Things are going to hell on End.”
“The rebels.”
The man nodded. “That and the other thing. About the Flow streams.”
“What?” Marce said. He set down the tablet and gave his full attention to his seatmate.
“A friend of mine who crews on the Tell Me—the one who was getting me the gig on it—said they dropped out of the goddamn Flow stream halfway here and only barely made back in before they were stranded forever. He’s got another friend who told him this wasn’t the first time. Flow streams are getting spotty all over the goddamn place. It’s only a matter of time before the shit really drops. I sure as hell don’t want to be on End when it does. I’m from Kealakekua. I’m going home.”
“This is the first I’ve heard about this,” Marce said.
“You haven’t shipped in the last few years, then. Everyone who crews has heard the rumors.”
“Just rumors.”
“Sure, just rumors, but what the hell else are they going to be?” the man said, irritably. “It can take five years for a piece of news to go from one end of space to the other, and the story’s going to change in the telling. So you don’t listen to the story. You listen to the pattern. And right now, the pattern is, weird fucking shit going on with the Flow.”
“The guilds know about this, then.”
The man looked at Marce like he was an idiot. “They don’t want to know. A ship goes in the Flow and doesn’t come out and they say, oh, pirates got them before they could report in. Or there was some problem shaping the bubble inside the Flow and they just disappeared in it. There’s always an explanation that doesn’t mean the Flow is the problem. They don’t want to believe it. And if they don’t believe it, then who is going to tell the Interdependency? You? Me? Like they’re fucking going to believe us.”
“They might.”
“Well, you try it and let me know. What I’m going to do is go home. I got kids. I want to see them again.”
There was a thump and the shuttle landed in the Yes, Sir’s bay.
“You’re not worried that something might happen to this ship on the way out,” Marce said, while they waited for the air to be pumped back into the bay.
“I figure this ship is safe. I didn’t want to hang around after that.”
“Why not?”
“My friend on the Tell Me’s heard that this stream—the one out of End—is getting shaky.”
“How so?”
“How do I know? It’s a rumor, man. They don’t come up with a science report. But my friend is anxious about it. He even considered jumping ship and coming with us. But the Tell Me’s whole crew is grounded for legal depositions and he didn’t know where to get reliable forged IDs. It’s hard to fool the biometrics.”
“I’ve heard.”
The man nodded. “So he’s stuck. And he’s worried he’s going to be stuck here forever.”
“There are worse places to be stuck than End,” Marce said.
The man snorted at this. “An open planet is no place for humans. Give me a decent ring habitat any day.”
“Earth was an open planet.”
“And we left it.” The door to the shuttle opened and the new crew began to file out.
“What’s your friend’s name?” Marce asked the man. “The one on the Tell Me.”
“Why? You going to send him a condolence note?”
“I might.”
The man shrugged. “Sjo Tinnuin. And I’m Yared Brenn, in case you’re at all curious.”
“Kristian.”
“No, I’m with the Interdependent Church. Mostly.” Brenn shuffled off before Marce could correct the confusion.
An hour later Marce had what passed for an orientation and was assigned his quarters, a tiny, sealable bunk in a room with fifteen other crew members. Each crew member had their own bunk and locker, with a common lavatory and living space, the latter of which couldn’t possibly fit all sixteen of them at the same time. As the newest crew member, he got the worst bunk, the highest of four nearest the lavatory, at the same altitude where the lavatory fumes gathered.
Marce slipped into his bunk area, which had barely enough room to sit up, and connected his tablet to the ship’s system. There was already a message waiting for him, informing him where to report to his new superior, and when, the latter being a half hour from then.
Marce opened up an app that would allow him to text anonymously and securely and pinged Vrenna. This is your friend Kristian, he texted.
I already said good-bye to you. Now you’re ruining the moment, Vrenna responded.
Marce smiled at that. I need you to look up someone. A man named Sjo Tinnuin. He crews on the Tell Me Another One. I need you to do it before the Yes, Sir hits the Flow shoal.
All right. Why?
Because he’s heard a rumor about that thing that I’m interested in.
I love it when you’re vague.
Particularly the thing I’m about to deal with. Vague enough?
Perfectly.
Good. It would be helpful to know where he heard the rumor. It’s a very weirdly specific thing to have a rumor about.
I’m on it. How is the ship?
I’m in a bunk the size of a dresser drawer.
Jealous. All I have is my massive bed back at the palace, in a room the size of a small village.
I hate you.
Hate you too, Kristian. Be safe. I’ll ping the ship with a message when I get news.
Thanks— and here Marce almost typed “sis” but stopped and just added a period instead. Then he turned off his tablet, sealed up his bunk, and spent a few minutes in the uncomfortably close dark, having the first twinges of homesickness.