Seventeen hours later. April 24, 2129. On Virgo, upbound Earth to Mars. 149 million kilometers from the sun, 169 million kilometers from Mars, 2.9 million kilometers from Earth.
DURING THAT WHOLE day of lies, the most uncomfortable lie I tell Aunt Destiny is that I’m afraid I’ll burst into tears in front of my friends if she sees me off at the cap dock, so could we please just hug good-bye here in her cabin?
At the cap dock, all our carefully planned ruses are unnecessary—there are no crew there, only the moes, simmering-pissy and sneaking glares at Derlock. Figuring it’s where I’ll get the most accurate reporting, I squeeze over next to Emerald and mutter, “Why isn’t any of the crew here?”
She mutters back, “One day of the moes was more than enough. Tell you later.”
We pick up our concealed bags from the cap and slip back out. Derlock hits the red-yellow-green keys, close/seal/ready-for-launch, as he ducks out. The door thrums shut behind him.
We push off from the wall and float 25 meters to where an airlock connects to the tail disk of the pod.
I’d have expected F.B., Marioschke, and Wychee to be awkward airswimmers, but I’m surprised at how awkwardly Derlock and Stack bounce around in milligravity. On the other hand, Emerald airswims like a natural. Maybe she went to space a lot as a kid, the way Glisters, Fleeta, and I did.
Glisters has our route memorized, so he glides ahead, graceful as a cat walking a roof ridge. Emerald and I, the unofficial rearguard/catchers, fly in comfortable tandem. In between, it’s all awkward chaos.
We’re still in the ring corridor when the catapult sends the moe-less cap out of the ship. It’s only maybe a half-second of 5% gravity—like being tugged briefly by one-twentieth of your Earth weight—and Glisters, Emerald, and I glide slightly to the right, correct course, and continue, but the moes in the middle tumble and tangle with each other, even throwing Fleeta’s good balance off. Derlock falls out of that aerial scrum and bumps against Glisters, who guides him back into airswimming position. Derlock thanks him with an elbow to the ribs and a very insincere “Sorry.”
Glisters winces but doesn’t say anything.
“Hey, Emerald,” I whisper, “how did they get them around for the tour?”
“Me, Glisters, and Fleeta took the tour,” she whispers back. “The rest were so pissy and nasty that the crew just stuffed them into a room to watch meeds and eat all day. And by the time they did that, Rojdeff had lost all patience and was barely civil. Do you think we’ll have to nursemaid them like this forever?”
“Stack will get his wings pretty quick.”
“Unh hunh.”
Neither of us says a word about the others. We find the path to the coretube that Glisters is looking for and begin a complicated, awkward group struggle through the corridors; I could do it by myself in three minutes.
Finally we drag Marioschke off the last ladder she’s clinging to, pull Stack back to the railing after he overswims, and climb into the coretube. We airswim 20 meters, open a hatch into the Pressurized Cargo Section, and emerge onto a narrow railed platform just below the coretube on Cargo Wall 98. On Cargo Wall 99, tailward across from us, a vast array of crates, barrels, cubes, and odd shapes like eggs, balls, and pie wedges, cling to the wall in a dozen different colors. Almost 100 meters below us, the window keeps flashing from harsh sunlight to dim starlight, every hundred seconds or so.
“How do we get down?” Marioschke asks, nervously, clinging to the rail and frantically pushing herself back down as her feet float off the platform.
Glisters says, “Basically, if we just step over the rail and let the section wall bump into us, we’ll slide down and hit the bottom with about as much force as you’d get falling off a low stool on Earth.” He adds, “However, it would take us most of an hour to fall to the bottom, so I suggest doing this.” He grabs the railing with one hand, puts his feet on either side of his hand holding the railing, bends over the edge like a bat hanging from a rafter, and pushes off. I follow suit; it’s more like flying than swimming, and it’s great, zooming down to the window in maybe 20 seconds, plenty of time to turn around and land on our feet on the sunlit window, looking up.
Fleeta and Stack are coming down after us, Fleeta grinning because it’s fun, Stack grimacing and flailing. As the windows darken again, I catch Stack. He overcorrects, almost knocking me down. “Sorry, I need practice.”
Fleeta doesn’t need catching, exactly, but Glisters helps her land. “You’re practically a gentleman,” I tell him.
“Don’t tell the other guys.”
Derlock is next, tumbling slowly, trying to airswim into the right position. None of us moves to catch him, so he bumps backward against the starlit window, bounces a couple of meters like a goon, and lands on all fours with a thud. Wychee comes down in a slow tumble, turning over twice, which she styles all huffy, impatient, and put-upon, but she lands on her feet, waving Glisters off; F.B. is the exact opposite, tumbling gracelessly in a bony jumble of arms and legs, landing in a silly-looking headstand and flopping onto his back on the window, but obviously having a great time, and thanking me too profusely as I push him back to keep him from bouncing.
That leaves two people. “Emerald,” I call, “are you okay up there?”
“About to be.” Far above us, Marioschke is suddenly tumbling end over end, sputtering and furious, barely descending at all, bouncing between the walls. Emerald shoots by her, pinging from one section wall to a blank spot on Cargo Wall 99 to the other section wall, repeating the cycle to build up speed, then to brake, till she zooms in for a perfect landing among us. “Slick,” I say. “I’ll have to try that myself.”
“How are we going to get Marioschke down?” Glisters asks.
“I came down here to ask you. After trying to talk her into it, I gave up and just pried her hands off the railing and shoved her by the head,” Em explains. “I think it pissed her off.”
Above us, Marioschke bounces off the section wall, maybe two meters below the platform.
“Push off the wall,” Glisters shouts. “Toward us.”
She kicks hard but only tumbles faster. “I guess one of us could jump up and stabilize her, but I’d be afraid of having her grab on or hit me,” I say.
“Let’s gang up on her,” Emerald suggests. “Glisters and Susan go up above. Stack jumps up and wraps her—just aim straight for her, you don’t really have to swim or navigate. Glisters and Susan dive from the railing and grab Stack, so that their momentum starts everyone moving downward, and then bounce off some walls on the way down and pick up more speed. The rest of us, at this end, will pull you all in for your landing.”
It semi-works. Marioschke flails so much that all Stack can do is convert the rapid tumble to a slow roll, and when Glisters and I dive on them, grab Stack’s shirt, and carry them with us, we’re only adding our own momentum, so they don’t move fast, and we’re centered so we don’t get a chance to pick up momentum by bouncing.
Even though Marioschke won’t hit the deck hard enough to break an egg, she’s fighting like it’ll kill her, so Emerald jumps up with a rope from her pack and ties it to Glisters’s feet, and the rest reel us in.
Once Marioschke’s feet are on the handling deck, she calms down, but she’s pretty sullen as we bounce noseward to Cargo Wall 8, where we’re planning to make our camp.
The empty ledge we’re camping on is only 10 meters up. Marioschke whispers to me, “If I shut my eyes, will you catch me and pull me onto the ledge?”
I say yes, jump up, light on the ledge, and turn around. Marioschke shuts her eyes and jumps; I catch her and pull her over the edge, airswimming to steer her back onto the ledge. She bounces slowly over to where the ledge joins the cargo wall, right at about the midpoint of the section so the ledge floor curves up and away from us in both directions—the maximum distance from any place where she can see down. She unrolls her sleepsack, gets inside with all her clothes on, and turns to face the wall.
“Hey,” I whisper. “If you need to be alone, that’s fine, but before I leave you alone, are you all right?”
“Yeah.” She sounds miserable. “I was so panicky in free fall, too scared to move, and I was crying and yelling about that, and I really wanted to see the farm section, Susan, thank you so much for telling them I’d want to. But I acted up so much they just stuffed me away in a lounge with the other bad attitude people.”
“When we come out of hiding there will be months and months on the way to Mars,” I point out. “And in a couple days you’ll have your space balance and you’ll be fine getting around. You’ll get to see the Forest, and the farm sections, and everything. Probably they’ll even let you help. You’ll see, it’ll be okay.”
“Yeah.” She doesn’t sound like she believes me. “Susan?”
“Yeah?”
“Thanks for being nice to me sometimes. I know I’m a pain in the ass.”
“Good night, Marioschke.”
She mutters “g’night” and curls deep down into her sleepsack, styling ultra DO NOT DISTURB.
The rest are already tying bags and sleepsacks off to brackets; the ledge is about 5 meters across and runs the width of the section, and stacked crates are scattered around on it. While I’m getting my stuff tied down, everyone else breaks out the drugs and music to give Glisters a party to shoot.
When I look up, Glisters is flying from “Look at this!” to “Get this shot!” as everyone acts like they’re having crazy fun. He looks harried and exasperated.
All my practice and training says to dive in and grab focus, but instead I jump over a 10-meter stack of crates, grab a bracket to change direction, and touch down noiselessly out of sight of the others. I bounce along the ledge to the corner it makes with the section wall, pull my butt down onto the edge with my hands, and sit with my feet dangling over, watching the stars and sun alternate through the glass-covered water below.
I just want to think about Bari for a while.
I used to love his arm around me. Weird. His skin was pale, unhealthy-looking, damp, and cool. He had muscles as flaccid and squishy as an old woman’s. Yet I loved to lay in his arms; he was an ultra good listener.
I sprawl with just my head off the ledge, looking hullward into the thick white band of the Milky Way. I wish Bari could see this.
Emerald floats in beside me. “Derlock wants Glisters to record him and me doing some naked dancing, all flirty and holding squeezebulbs of gin, with some grabs and gropes, like we’re drunk.”
I shrug. “Derlock and I are not declared yet.”
“I’m trying to be sisterly.”
I look sideways at her. “And you are. And it’s appreciated. I’m just—you know, I don’t want to party tonight. I don’t feel real good about this, I’m going to get my aunt in a lot of trouble, and Bari…”
She nods. “You style that so well. Glisters ought to come over here and shoot you being sad; you look ultra more interesting than me bouncing my boobs at your boyfriend-to-be.”
“Well, maybe to you or me,” I say, “but the splycterage is in bouncing boobs.”
“Yeah.” She sits next to me. “Want company, or to be alone?”
I smile as much as I can. “I’m grateful for the company, but don’t miss your chance for good meeds. You want to get shot before everyone’s too blasted and while Glisters is still doing his best work, before he takes enough stuff to feel like a genius.”
She laughs. “How’d you learn to airswim so well?”
I tell her a little about being Crazy Science Girl growing up, and it kind of slides over into some girl bonding stuff, about my mom, and Stanley the dog, and even why I call Destiny Anny Dezzy and a lot of other embarrassing, losery sheeyeffinit. Emerald counter shares: she was Crazy Space Gymnast Girl, and her cat was named Dog, which she thought was ultra original until it turns out it goes back almost two hundred years in meeds.
“We’d probably have been ultra friends if we’d met before Excellence Shop,” she says, “and then we could have had betrayal and rivalry and reconciliations, and we’d’ve had a great story line for meeds.”
I mean to smile but it comes out really sad. “Fleeta and I were like that. You’d have made a great addition to the team, Emerald, I’m sorry you weren’t at our school.”
“Your eyes get so sad when you look at Fleeta.”
“You should get back to Derlock. Don’t let him hog the camera.”
“No risk with Glisters shooting; you’d think that guy never saw a girl naked before. Hey, we should redo this girl-bondosation in front of him sometime soon; seriously, great hooks in it.”
“Yeah. Maybe when I’m more over Bari.”
“Won’t be as good then, you know. The shots where people really feel emotions intensely are the most splycterable hooks. Thanks for understanding about me and Derlock.” She pushes up and airswims away.
I let my mind empty out and even doze for a bit; I wake up in a sun flash, rolling over till my eyes adjust and I can see stars through the window again. By now the little party is pretty loud; most bloodstreams must be loaded up.
I airswim up onto the stack of crates beside me and peek over the edge. Glisters is shooting Fleeta’s boobs wobbling around in milligrav; she’s goofing around, giggling at the funny ways she can make them move, and he’s trying, without success, to make her be serious. “But you’re smiling,” she says.
“You’re having so much fun,” he says, “but the audience wants to see you act hot. Having fun doesn’t get splyctered.”
Wychee and Emerald are dancing naked with Stack, with a lot of feeling and making out. F.B. is kind of flapping around at the edge, maybe hoping Glisters will ask him to help with the camera.
I’m missing a chance for major exposure. I still think, No. Not tonight. I airswim to my sleepsack and crawl in.
Sometime after I doze off, I feel the sack opening, and Derlock says, “Hey.”
“Hey.” I try for the least-committal “hey” in the history of the universe.
“We haven’t talked since hearing about Bari.”
“What happened?”
“Susan, it’s tearing me up inside, I dosed with the hibernifacient like we talked about, so they’d go into coma, I thought that would get them caught and stop everything, I didn’t know they’d give them a big shot of Fendrisol and anyway I didn’t know about how it interacts with Torporin. I’m so sorry. I know Bari was special to you.” He runs a hand along my neck, strokes my face and hair. “Anyway, I thought you might like me to hold you and comfort you.”
Derlock’s concept of “hold and comfort” has a 100% overlap with most people’s concept of “sex.” When he’s done I tell him I want some time alone and that I’m too warm with him there. He goes back to his own sleepsack, and I close mine up tight and plummet into deep, dreamless sleep.
Notes for the Interested, #11
MILLIGRAVITY: just enough but not too much
The milligravity in the farm and cargo sections is strong enough so that work crews on the handling floors can put things where they’ll stay put, spilled liquids eventually collect at low points instead of floating around in blobs forever, and plants in the farm sections grow in one direction. Yet it is still weak enough for people to airswim, push grand pianos around one-handed (as long as they watch out for inertia), and sleep on an alclad deck as comfortably as a featherbed.
On Earth, an object falls 5 meters, about the drop from the roof of a one-storey house, in the first second. In milligrav, in that same first second, that object will fall only 5 millimeters, less than the width of your little finger. Objects gain speed as they fall; on Earth the 100-meter drop from the coretube to the handling floor would take 4.5 seconds and slam you into the floor at 162 kilometers per hour. The same 100 meters if it were all in milligrav would take an hour and fifteen minutes, and you would arrive moving at a good deal less than one kilometer per hour. (That’s why they had such a struggle getting Marioschke down to the deck.)
But in fact it’s not even milligrav all over the ship; only at the hull. In the rotating ship, gravity depends directly on distance from the center. Milligravity at the hull, a bit over 100 meters from the centerline, means less than 3% of milligravity up at the coretube.
Thus in this story, workers on the handling floors (along the inner hull) often push objects into place against the floor to save time, because it takes too long to let them fall. Up near the coretube, where gravity is only a small fraction of milligrav, tour guides often demonstrate all the familiar weightless effects, like water forming spheres in midair, tennis balls bouncing all the way down the tube and back, and (if the tour party includes any boys) fart propulsion.
April 25, 2129. On Virgo, upbound Earth to Mars. 149 million kilometers from the sun, 166 million kilometers from Mars, 3.6 million kilometers from Earth.
I roll out of my sleepsack and dress quickly; Emerald is dressing beside me.
“You look surprisingly well for a girl that was dancing drunk all night,” I say.
She grins. “Styling Party Hot is ultra demanding. I do a better job being an out-of-control drunk for the cam if I keep my squeezebulb filled with apple juice. I don’t remember you ever coming out to join us; I guess you just went to bed?” she asks.
“Yeah. I felt too bad about Bari.”
“Yeah. Welcome to the exclusive club of the un-hungover.”
“Are there any members besides us?”
She nods. “Fleeta can’t, almost everything interacts with Fendrisol. And Glisters was too busy with his camera.”
“Yep,” he says. We turn back to realize he’s been shooting us. We pounce on him together; Emerald gets a hammerlock. “Erase,” I say.
“Susan, I—”
“Erase,” Emerald says. “And let us see you doing it.”
“But it would be sure to make the meeds,” he protests.
“You can shoot me,” I tell him. “Even naked, if you’re nice about it and I’m in a mood for it. But shoot me with bed-head, and you’re gonna be dead-dead.”
“Deader than that,” Emerald says.
“Okay, but just look, first, okay? See how pretty that curve of Susan’s thigh is? And Emerald, that expression is so you—”
“And so are those boobs,” she says. “Yeah, we look zoomed, if you like loser messes. Not splycterable. Erase.”
He shrugs and does. “It’s a stupid world,” he says, “where people would rather see you glaring at the camera and sticking out the hot parts than looking like your authentic, beautiful, graceful selves—”
“Nice try,” I say. “Not that we believe a word of it.”
“I never know what to believe,” Fleeta says, sliding from her sleepsack.
Glisters reaches for his camera.
“Ask,” Emerald says.
Glisters nods. “Fleeta, can I shoot you while you dress?”
“I won’t look hot.”
“But you’ll look beautiful.”
“Why would you want a picture of that?”
“Because I spend most of my time looking at hot, so it bores me. Beautiful is interesting.”
“Oh, okay, then.”
So he shoots, and he has to keep telling her not to pose, just do what she’d naturally do, and when he’s all done, Em and I take a look at his work. “You’re right, she’s beautiful, the way your camera caught her,” I admit grudgingly.
“Totally unsplycterable, though,” Emerald says.
“So you don’t like it?” Fleeta asks, obviously scared.
“You’re beautiful,” I say, truthfully, “and Glisters’s work is actually—um, superb, to tell the truth.” He looks more embarrassed than she does, and he’s not the one whose nipples we’re studying. “It’s just not going to make any money for either of you.”
Fleeta takes a look, says, “It looks more like me than most pictures do, is that okay?”
“Ultra okay,” Emerald says. “Zoomed.”
Glisters says, “I’m hungry. Anyone else want to go do our first raid on the crates?”
“Does one of us have tools?” I ask.
“Right here,” Glisters says, holding up a couple drivers. “Also, if we go now, we’ll get firsties at the toilets before the rest start thinking about it.”
Emerald says, “And those are—”
“There’s one on Cargo Wall 9, up by the coretube. They put them all over; nobody wants to airswim half a kilometer to get to a bathroom.”
After the bathroom stop, I say, “Do you suppose the others will figure out where the toilets are, as opposed to improvising something?”
“Eww,” Emerald says. “Maybe we should tell them?”
“I mentioned it to Stack and F.B.,” Glisters says, “and anyway you know Wychee and Marioschke will ask. It’ll be okay.”
So only about half the moes can be trusted not to crap on the floor, but at least I’m having breakfast with the right half. Glisters scans through the manifest through his wristcomp to find a crate of meals from Le Sully on Cargo Wall 88. With all of us proficient airswimmers, it takes only a couple minutes to descend to the handling floor, bound to 88, retrieve the crate, open it, and take a meal each.
We sit on the nearest window on the handling deck, letting the warm sun flash against our butts every other minute and a half. I know that most mineys eat out of temptrol boxes all the time, but I’ve only used them now and then, for camping trips and take out.
The keypad on the temptrol box offers me USE SUGGESTED DEFAULTS or SPECIFY INDIVIDUAL ITEM TEMPERATURES. I figure the packager knows how warm things are supposed to be, so I select USE SUGGESTED DEFAULTS, press NOW, and open it. The ham and over-easy eggs are just hot, with a nice chilled vegetable salad, a pichet of red wine at room temperature, and scalding hot espresso.
“That’s so weird when we fall,” Fleeta says, “all at the same speed, even though we are different sizes. I used to know something about that.”
Glisters’s tone is gentle, earning ultra points with me. “Probably you’re remembering that gravity does the same thing on Earth—Galileo’s experiment?”
“But we don’t fall fast like we would on Earth.”
“No, but inside a gravity field—at least once you take air resistance out of it—everything falls at the same speed. That’s what Galileo proved,” Glisters says.
Fleeta nods. “I think I was trying to remember that. I used to love knowing things.”
When someone pretty is happy, Emerald has to get sarcastic. “Then why did you take happistuf?”
Fleeta’s face screws up with effort, but then her expression clears, like fog blowing off a beach. “Because knowing things only made me a little happy some of the time, but happistuf made me ultra happy all the time. So it’s just like gravity. Different weights but we all fall at the same speed. Like Galileo.” She is obviously delighted with herself.
“Jesus,” I mutter, sick at heart.
“Like Galileo and Jesus,” she agrees.
The silence stretches on till Emerald asks, “Anyone wonder what everyone else is up to?”
“Well,” I say, “Derlock is thinking up a way to hurt someone, and Stack is helping. F.B. is talking about being a great astronomer, and no one is listening. Wychee is whining, and Marioschke is either still terrified or back to being all spiritual.”
Emerald clutches her chest. “And we’re missing it!”
We’re all still laughing when painful, blinding light flashes through the window like a blow directly to my brain. The hull thunders like a drum, and I float off the deck, clutching my face, weightless and tumbling yet crushed. It’s like being a bug slammed in a book and thrown from a plane.
We hit the window hard, all of us shouting in surprise and pain. We’re sliding along the hull’s inner wall, but down is in the wrong direction, along the hull toward the tail, and the gravity is way too high, as if some giant had just grabbed the ship and stood it on its tail on a planet.