The collected short fict.., p.12
The Collected Short Fiction, page 12
A black-haired boy, about fifteen years old, with wide green eyes and clean, sharp features was reading a tapas pad as they entered. He switched the device off and got up from his seat. The room was counter-gravitated, as were most human quarters, and much more comfortable than the outside. Green breathed deeply and unhooked the braces on his MAS. Berker and Margul stripped out of theirs more gracefully and left them standing near the door. The boy smiled a greeting.
“Herbert Fromm, this is Commander Green,” Margul said.
“Good to have you with us,” Fromm said. “You’re here for a tour of Water?”
Green nodded and looked around. The room was spare and tacky-looking. Its plastiform walls had not been resurfaced in some time. The cracks and chips gave it an abandoned look. “I’m serving my apprenticeship to these helpful gentlemen until I g-get my steady legs.”
“Takes a while for someone not born here,” Fromm said. “I’m on visitor watch, not very important most of the time, but it seems I’ve hit interesting duty today. May I act as guide, gentlemen?”
Berker nodded. “First, is Maday where we can meet and chat?” Bethanie Maday was the leader of the tenders in Water.
“Not here. She’s at the Broken Level working with a party of young tube readers. We’ll probably see her on the tour. Pardon a second—I’ll get my MAS and be right with you.”
The room echoed a little, and 12 made Green think of the deserted military towns he’d commanded twenty years ago as a young JG on Old Mao. Those quiet green halls and scuffed floors were almost exactly matched here.
Fromm returned and led them down a corridor. The walls abruptly ended and they were inside Water, standing in a dark tunnel. The tunnel material had been bevelled to make a platform. Beyond the edge, water quietly plashed and gurgled.
“We’ll have a tuberider here any moment,” the boy told them. “You won’t see many setties coming in this way. There are too many bubble and pressure spaces this side of the mass. Their entrance is on the other side.”
A grey shape with bright lights on its snout cruised up to the platform and surfaced. The tuberider was a metal cylinder with three evenly spaced wings, one of which served as a conning tower. Rubber stripping cushioned the end of each wing. A hissing stream of bubbles flowed from the rear.
“This one is piloted by Sandra Neps,” Fromm said brightly.
“Mr. Fromm’s fiancée,” Margul explained.
They stepped down into the tuberider, hauling their suits after. The hatch swung shut with an earpressing plonk.
“Take you anyplace, gentlemen?” Neps asked, turning in her conning bubble to smile at them. Fromm introduced Green, and Neps held out her hand. “Pleased to meet you, Commander. Looks like you’ve had a hard day.”
Green felt irritation that it was so obvious. “And it’s just beginning,” he said. “My preparatory fitness sessions didn’t last long enough, I’m afraid.”
“I’ve always wondered about the MAS’s we use,” Neps said. “There has to be a better design.”
“Nothing as flexible,” Berker said, squeezing past a bank of equipment to take a seat near the bubble. Fromm moved past and sat in the seat across from him. Green took a seat next to a broad, thick port. He was near enough to the front to look through the bubble and see where they were heading.
“I haven’t worn one often enough to get used to it,” he said. “The main bother is hauling it wherever we go.” He stashed it in a special cabinet and strapped himself into the seat, carefully following the instructions on a metal plate under the port. He adjusted the padding wherever it touched his body, and found the position surprisingly comfortable.
“Won’t be much to see for a few minutes, so relax,” Neps said. “Here we go.”
The tuberider moved ahead with a gentle whine. The ride wasn’t smooth, but it wasn’t rough enough to make Green’s stomach rebel, and he was thankful for small favors. His hands automatically gripped the seat arms as the tuberider angled up. “We won’t hit an angle greater than sixty, though we may roll one-eighty, and if you . . . there . . .” Neps reached back to point. “Mr. Berker, show him where the unlock switch is? There. Press that and the seat will swivel to take up most of the angle.” The seat swung free and he relaxed his grip.
The view outside his port was dark, with a faint glow from the headlights beneath the conning bubble. The walls were evenly pocked, like the surface of a golf ball. He craned his neck to look out the front, and saw a section of tunnel brilliantly illuminated, with swallowing darkness beyond the range of the lights.
“The higher we go, the thinner the walls become, and the more transparent,” she said. “Down here, they’re about thirty feet thick. In a few minutes we’ll be near the middle. Of course, it never gets very bright outside anyway, but the higher we go and the closer to the outside we get, the more light will filter through. We get eerie effects in here sometimes.”
For fifteen minutes they rode level, bucked about in strong currents. The wings provided effective but not very gentle protection when the tuberider struck a wall. “This is our steepest climb,” Neps said, and the tuberider pulled back until Green had to look down to see the rear of the cabin. They cruised up a narrow capillary for another quarter hour before leveling off, as the tube became wider and the water lost some of its turbulence.
“Oops,” Neps said softly. “Looks like a skipperjack ahead. They don’t get in here very often—must have snuck past last night during the power failure.”
Green saw a pattern of silvery dots coursing ahead.
“Do you have a prod mounted?” Fromm asked.
“Not a long one. It’ll have to do.”
“Here’s where you impress the commander with your expertise,” the boy said. He chuckled nervously.
“Expertise, hell. I do this for a hobby. All buckled, gentlemen? We’ll have to roll to prod it.”
Tentacles coiled like tubes of crumpled plastic in the murkiness beyond the main glare of the lights. Seemingly random glints played along the fluorescent patches within the skipperjack’s arms and body. “That’s their talk,” Fromm said. “They do it to each other like birds singing. A few biologists on Home Field claim they see language patterns, but they haven’t come up with anything conclusive.”
The eyes suddenly caught the tuberider lights and Green blinked at the reflected brilliance. They shone like two suns in the otherwise dark capillary. Then they vanished and he had an impression of powerful tail and fins flapping. Turbulence from the animal’s backwash rocked the ship.
“Going away,” Neps said under her breath. “I’ll have to route it into another main tube or it’ll get lost and die and make the water unlivable. Here we go, hang tight—” The tuberider twisted until they were hanging from their seats. The compensators swung them around slowly. Neps remained upside down. “Herb, my straps are biting—dammit—could you put some spare padding around my legs?”
“Can’t get at you,” Fromm said. “It hurts,” the girl complained in a matter-of-fact tone. “I’m going to be black and blue.”
“Can’t help you,” the boy said. “Bring us back around. You shouldn’t hang like that too long.”
“Thing’s moving faster than we can. Okay. Can’t get it here.” The tuberider twisted about. “Ow. That hurts. Should have added the padding before I strapped in. I ignore those little things.”
Berker grunted. “Call ahead. Looks like it’ll take one of the two main forks. Don’t they lead to the nurseries? There should be settie guards up there—wouldn’t want a skipperjack in the nurseries.”
Neps made a call with signal keyed through the translator. A blast of sound pounded Green’s ears, then reverberated up the tube. Echoes came back in ghost groans. A few seconds later, the twitter of distant replies reached them. The electronic converter boosted the signals and the translator replied, “Understood. Acted upon.”
Green watched the last glimmer of the skipperjack as it disappeared around a bend.
“We’re going to turn left about two hundred meters from here,” Neps said. “Then we go up another fifty or sixty meters and we’ll come out in the pools at the Broken Level. Sorry about the interruption.”
The tuberider followed its indicated course and Neps brought them up to a surging, rain-speckled surface. The vehicle broke through and wallowed in the wide mouth of the capillary, stabilizing as gyros activated. She jockeyed it into position and metal clamps lifted the tuberider gently out of the water. The hatch popped and swung open, and Margul stepped out first. Berker followed, then Green, who came up abruptly, banging his head against the outstretched hand of a woman. He dodged and smiled apologetically. “S-sorry,” he said. “Didn’t see you.” The woman helped him out onto the buffer platform, rubbing her fingers.
“No harm,” she said. “I haven’t met you before, so you must be Commander Green.” Fromm handed out the MAS’s, and the woman helped Green climb into his. She was about Green’s age, with tight-packed hair and a cleanly molded face, primly wrinkled around the mouth but not unattractive. “I’m Katrina Korliss, a tender. Glad to have you with us, Commander.”
“F-fascinated to be here,” he said. The suit began to amplify movement and he relaxed a little. “Mr. Berker and Mr. Margul are guiding, and Ms. Neps brought us through a tight spot.”
“I flubbed it a little, Kat,” the girl said. “Deserve to have my wages docked.”
“We’ll consider it,” Korliss said. “Herb’s along for the ride, I take it. Who has visitor watch?”
“Nobody else coming today.”
“Anxious to join in the excitement? We won’t dock your pay too much, either. As you see, Commander, we don’t run a tight mountain here. Our discipline is applied in other directions.”
“Katrina is one of our most experienced tenders,” Berker said. “She was a fine wife to me, ten years ago.”
“Mr. Berker has gone through a good many tenders during his stay,” Korliss said. Green wondered what there was about the man that attracted anyone. Perhaps his thinness. He wouldn’t be such a burden in bed.
Green looked around the opening where the tuberider was moored. The Broken Level was three kilometers above the surface of Sun-Planet, and the air was somewhat rarefied, forcing him to breathe harder for what he needed. The MAS couldn’t supplement an internal activity like respiration.
“Gentlemen, we have a shed over here where you can rest. This pull is rough on newcomers. How are you adjusting. Commander?”
“Slowly,” Green answered.
“You stutter, I understand,” Korliss said. “Used to stutter myself.”
Green felt his stomach muscles tighten. He wasn’t used to such familiarity, especially about his personal problems.
“How did you cure it?” he asked.
“Setties gave me linguistic therapy. Turns out I had a speech program maladjusted, here,” she tapped the left side of her skull. “I’m more right-handed now, too. Used to be a complete southpaw. And you?”
“Still a lefty,” he said. Therapy had been available on almost every world Green had lived on, but something had prevented him from seeking outside help. If s my problem, he told himself. My dichotomy.
The Broken Level was a horizontal slice taken out of Water sometime in the distant past, leaving three flat plains where the capillaries popped out into open air. It looked like a field of craters, or the magnified xylem of a tree, each hole filled with rocking, sloshing water.
Some of the holes were a hundred meters across, signifying enormous tubes passing through the bulk of the mountain.
He saw two setties rolling and spouting in one of the pools. Their spray had a curiously flat, leveled-out look, caused by the greater gravitation.
“This way, Commander,” Korliss said.
They went to the shed, a small plastic cubicle supplied with counter-gravitation, and removed their MAS’s. He was beginning to he adept with the suits, catching little tricks from the others on quick and easy unstrapping. A food unit stood in one corner, and Korliss offered refreshments to everyone. A small breakfast was served when the orders were in.
When they began to eat, Korliss asked him if he minded discussing business over food. “The setties would consider it a heinous breach of ritual,” she said. “Of course, their eating is much more complicated than ours.”
“I don’t mind,” Green said. “Time is time.”
“Then I have a question to ask. How much longer until the Perfidisians start pressing us again?”
“Ab-about a year.”
“Is that a firm figure?”
“Fairly. The Hafkan Bestmerit people who still have diplomatic ties with us say the Season of Regain is due about that time for them. It’s the closest guess anyone can offer.”
Hafkan Bestmerit was the only mercantile consolidation made up entirely of non-human species. Its dealings with the Combine, which served as overseer to the consolidations, were notoriously unsteady.
“What can we expect when they do come?”
“We’ll try to evacuate before then,” Green replied drily.
“And if we don’t get a chance to evacuate?”
“I’m not open to unlikely speculation, Ms. Korliss. But for the sake of argument, we’d be physically safe. Sun-Planet means very little to them as political and territorial gain. If anything, it’s more inhospitable for them than it is for us. One of the few things we know about them is th-that their native world has a gravitational pull less than Earth’s.”
“I don’t feel reassured, Commander,” Korliss said.
“It’s not my place to be reassuring. I’m here to learn wh-what I c-can.”
“Then let’s get started,” Korliss said. The breakfast was barely finished. “Herb, Sandra—put out a general call for two patris.”
The two suited up and left the shed. A few minutes later, Green heard muffled booming sounds through the walls. Korliss suggested they go to the pools. Green put his fork down with a frown as he gazed at the scraps of synthecam still on his plate. He felt more like a politician than an Astry officer. He put on his MAS, finishing last, and joined the others by the largest pool in Broken Level. Neps and Fromm walked back and forth on the opposite side, talking in whispers. The misting rain carried an electrical smell with it. Green glanced up to see a brief reddish flash overhead. Sun-Planet’s atmosphere was comparatively shallow, and at altitudes as low as twenty kilometers, weather and auroral phenomena mixed in interesting ways.
Two setties surfaced in the pool and lifted their heads out of the water to see clearly. It was Green’s first good look at the creatures, though he had seen holos. He was a little shaken. Their long, flat-topped heads and bowed mouths filled with glistening yellow teeth were nightmarishly vicious-looking. Their eyes were small and piggish, slightly glazed as though by cataracts. Callosities formed bumps along the top ridges of their snouts, whitish and crusty, with an individual pattern of bumps for each settie. The patterns provided the basis for their names. Beneath the lower jaw, rills of wrinkled skin resembled the deck of a wooden ship. They were black for the most part, with a strip of white along the forward edge of their dorsal fin, and greyish tones running in splotches from their underjaw to their articulated flippers. The genetic engineers who had designed them could have done better on aesthetics, Green thought. Had any whales on Earth ever been so ugly?
“Voilci,” Korliss said. “Two patris. You’ll notice they’re a few meters larger than the normal run of setties. Patris are like tribal elders in some ways—they’re leaders of packs. Most setties belong to at least two packs, and there are around seven or eight thousand packs, each with a specific duty and skill. The pack networks cover most of the waterways, and that means, essentially, that they cover most of Sun-Planet.” She produced a portable translator and lowered the pickup cable into the pool.
“We were called,” the box hissed. “Is that White-Neck?”
“It is,” Korliss replied. The translator murmured into the pool. “That’s their name for me. Who knows how they actually see us, hm?” She raised her voice. “We’d like to arrange a conference as soon as possible—a briefing for the new commander of the Station.”
“Who should be there?” the voice asked. Green couldn’t tell which of the setties was talking. The groaning and clicking sounds in the pool seemed to come from both.
“Bring F-Nose and Hack-Fin with you to Top Level.”
“We will meet in an hour,” the voice said. With a splash of spray and a surge from their tails, they vanished.
“F-nose is the coordinator for the Processing Pack in Water,” Korliss said. “He does most of his work with Maday. She’s at Top Level now, in conference with a group of Readers who’ve returned from the North Pole. We’ll meet her later, but she might be too absorbed to spend much time with us.”
Green nodded. “How many setties are there in Water?”
“About thirty thousand,” Korliss said. “This is Grand Central for all information gathered around Sun-Planet. It might be the biggest library in the known Galaxy. At any rate, it’s unique—no books, no tapes or files, only setties, each chock to the brim with facts about the Dark patterns.”
“The tuberider is re-charged,” Neps said. They boarded the vehicle and sank into the darkness of the capillary.
“I’m going to give you some random information about setties,” Korliss said as they rocked gently in their seats. “I’m sure you’ve heard some of it in your briefings off-planet, and in your talks with Mr. Margul and Mr. Berker. But I need to know that you’re aware of some things, for my own peace of mind.”
“Go ahead,” Green said.
“First, a question of my own—why were you chosen to come here?”
Green was caught off-guard. He recovered quickly—it was close enough to a direct challenge to his authority that trained reflexes took over. “Because I’m the only man the Combine Astry could find in its ranks, still alive and commissioned, who’d dealt with the Perfidisians on a first-hand basis. I know them as much as they can be known.”
