by Wil McCarthy
“Gladholders.”
He grunted, amused. “No imagination, eh? Seek, maybe we should just head straight for the market.”
Wallich nodded. “I think that might be best, yeah. Are we walking?”
“Floating?” Baucum corrected.
Dibrin nodded. “It isn't far. If you'll follow me?”
He braced his feet and shoved off for an opening high on one wall.
We followed, awkward not so much from gravity—for weeks we'd been bouncing from zero to point-two gee and all levels between—as from the geometry of the space. Like playing a new sport for the first time, before you've quite gotten a feel for the ranges, the angles, the available traction. I, for one, fell short of the opening and had to leap again. Would have felt bad about it, too, except that Wallich did exactly the same thing.
The opening proved to be the mouth of a trapezoidal tunnel, wider at the bottom than on the top, and once we'd assembled there, Dibrin propelled himself down its length with a pair of lazy but decisive kicks, like something a swimmer would do. No mystery where he'd gotten those strong toes! We “Munies” tried to replicate the feat with limited success. The idea was clear enough: launch into a flat parabolic arc that would bring you to touchdown far ahead, without first intersecting any solid surface.
Head against the ceiling, it took about four seconds to fall feet-to-the-floor, maybe twice as long as it would have been on Ganymede, and many, many times what Earth would have to say about it. I'd have thought it'd be even slower than that, based on our extremely minimal body weight on Saint Helier, but nature never seems to care what I think. Anyway, these long, straight leaps proved no easy feat, especially in gold-weighted shoes.
As I collided softly with the walls, it was difficult not to notice that here, as in the docking bay, they were covered with creeping vines. Up close, though, I could see what was hanging from them, and it proved to be a sort of smooth and tough-looking fruit, ovoid in shape and somewhat smaller than a human head. I dug back into old Earth memories. Coconut? Breadfruit? Cantaloupe? I wasn't sure any of those grew on vines. I fingered up my notetaker, jotted down a reminder to ask about it sometime.
Right now, though, Dibrin had got back to talking business.
“You've got a thousand-dollar line of credit,” he was saying, “and Governor has instructed me to haggle on your behalf. Food and clothing, right? I know you need oxygen and uranium as well, but those are supplied by the port authority at standard rates. A kilogram of uranium? Seek, that's a lot. Lucky you get it cheaper down here!”
“You don't use much ladderdown,” Davenroy said, not asking but prompting.
“Ladderdown, no. For propulsion, for excavation, a few things like that, but what are we supposed to do with the waste heat? Small, metal-rich planetoids do not provide the heat sink you people are accustomed to, and anyway we have the sun blazing at us all the time. So we use that.”
“Mirrors the size of Innensburg, right?” Wallich smiled. “We didn't get much of a look at the sunward face on our approach, but I guess we'll see it on the down and out. Must be quite a sight.”
“We can visit if you like. It'll be tomorrow before that uranium is cast in a single mass.”
“Tomorrow?” Wallich's grin faded. “Our mission is fairly urgent, sir.”
Dibrin shrugged. “Can't be helped. I can't make it happen any faster.”
Wallich's mouth twitched, indecisive for a moment before the grin surfaced again. “Well, there's an excuse to spend the night away from work.”
“I'm to set up accommodations if you so specify,” Dibrin said. “There are staying homes all along the main concourse.”
Wallich's grin widened. “Well hey, then. Shore leave, everybody. What do you say? Ha ha.”
My own mumbles of approval were joined by many others. The Immunity's plight was desperate enough, but it wouldn't worsen measurably just because we'd stopped here for the night. It smelled funny in the Gladhold, like cheese and freon and potting soil gone slightly bad, but by comparison Louis Pasteur was a veritable sewer, and going back inside her before she aired out was not a notion that appealed. And of course, there was the food thing; flavor issues aside, my teeth tingled at the very thought of tearing and grinding and chewing again. Enough with the nutrient pap!
New corridors crossed ours at right angles every thirty meters or so, and while there were no other pedestrians moving along with us, there were quite a few cutting across our path, all skating along bare-footed like Chris Dibrin. My glimpses of them were brief, and alas I recorded no images, but my memory is of a festival of colors, skin and hair and clothing of every imaginable hue. More skin than you'd expect to see back home, though modest enough, not so much a flesh display as a pajama party. Or gangs of teenagers on their way to one, I suppose; yes, the crowd was a young one. Higher birth rates will do that to you, I suppose, but I'd begun to feel self-conscious, overmature, unnecessarily stiff and hot in my spacer uniform. And far from home.
The air, I should mention, was a good deal warmer and more humid than in the Immunity, or even aboard the Louis Pasteur. It felt a bit unclean somehow, and a bit unsafe. Not so much from the added bloom danger—though that was certainly a consideration—as from a general upper-system wariness of moisture. Even deep inside Ganymede, water ice is an important component of the rock, and hot, moist air is a clue that the cavern roof is maybe about to fall on your head. It happens. Anyway, I knew St. Helier wasn't going to melt or collapse or anything, but I did have the unpleasant sense that I was not in the Immunity, that all sorts of nanoscopic crap was bouncing around in my lungs and on my skin, phages and microbes and God knew what else, and the moisture lent the feeling that all of it would stick. Unclean. I'm not sure how else to describe it.
Not that my attention was really on this, though. It was one more detail, one more component of the alienness of this place. Mostly, my attention was on trying to walk without falling over, especially when Dibrin turned suddenly into the crowd, slipping easily into one of the side corridors while inertia carried us Munies into walls and people en masse, in a great flailing of limbs.
Darren Wallich roared and guffawed at this, and the Gladholder children took the cue and laughed right back, slapping our backs and grabbing our hands as if these skiddings and crashings were the most brilliantly amusing bits of cocktail Tom-foolery they'd encountered all month. Well, maybe that was so. At any rate, by the time we got moving again, Dibrin had on a half-smirk that he wasn't bothering to hide, and moved through this more crowded hallway with an exaggerated care. This way, freunde. This is how we do it.
And then, suddenly, with no warning at all, we were at the market.
TWELVE:
The Fear Doll
One of the deepest and most enduring mysteries of the Mycosystem is where, exactly, it came from. New Guinea, yes, obviously, but how far had those first few spores traveled before grounding in that rich, tropical loam? Most doctors reject the “panspermia” hypothesis outright, citing the “keyhole problem” as prima facea evidence of terrestrial origin. If mycora were truly visitors from another star, whether transported here naturally or otherwise, would their chemistry be so uniquely suited to the consumption of Earthly biomass? Would they have, ready at hand, the enzyme analogs to reduce those steaming jungles so quickly and so completely?
That the Mycosystem might be an alien weapon deliberately targeting Earth's biomass seems equally improbable; the metabolism of the First Mycorum is thought to have resembled, in various aspects, that of recycling and agricultural nanocytes, in-vivo microautomata, and of course the “prank” self-replicators that were already a major social problem in the developed world. So did somebody's mutant vandalbug go walkies and take on a life of its own? Again, the experts deny it.
“No doubt there were malcontents down there,” one nameless doctor assured me in a hurried hallway conversation, “who would have destroyed the Earth's teeming masses if they could. Without a crack research team and a large,
expensive laboratory, though, I doubt very much that a technogenic organism like that would have happened. The sophistication is well beyond what a lone amateur would accomplish.”
So much for the notion—romantic in its own, grim way—of the mad scientist and his years-long toil in a musty attic workshop. The truth is doubtless much harder and more complex. We have, almost certainly, no one but ourselves to blame.
I claim no great knowledge in this field, but my own pet theory—built wholly of fragments and naive supposition—revolves around the so-called “smart liquids” that mathematicians and other theorists sometimes employed for massively parallel numerical analyses. The easiest way, it seems, to run a trillion simultaneous computations, was to code them in a broth of replicating, self-modifying nanocomputers. Powered by a very specialized chemical diet, of course, but otherwise left to run and mutate unattended...
When I shared this idea with my anonymous doctor friend, though, he simply smiled and shook his head. “No, no, I doubt that very much. But it's a nice thought, isn't it?”
Yeah, nice. That was exactly the word I had in mind.
—From Innensburg and the Fear of Failure
(C) 2101 by John Strasheim
~~~
I don't know quite what I'd been expecting. On Earth, we used to get our food and clothing and such from shopping malls. On Ganymede, of course, you'd simply flash down a price guide, order remotely, and wait twelve to twenty-four hours for delivery, the term “market” referring exclusively to the hypothetical trading and dickering that established the quarterly prices. But here in the Gladhold, the market was a physical locus of real, physical activity, voices and bodies and currencies hurling this way and that. And still there was no sense of up!
Well, almost no sense. The market's cavern was fifty meters across and by no means dome-shaped or even spherical. Not quite random, either, but the jagged, right-angle contours followed some plan that was not apparent to me. A chamber, as they say, of high fractal dimension. Imagine the inside of a geode. The merchants themselves sat surrounded by their wares in flat, steel-mesh baskets the size of ballista cars. The baskets did point more or less in the same direction, toward us, which meant that we were more or less looking straight down on the display, but right there any semblance of order ended.
The baskets sat at a hundred different levels and ledges, tilted slightly this way, slightly that way, slightly heaven knows what other way, and the milling throngs of shoppers, several hundred people at least, could be seen leaping and gliding from perch to perch like so many birds in a jungle cage. And the noise! A hundred voices chattering and dickering and arguing and laughing! The mind boggles at such waste, such extravagance. Surely there must be a better way to get goods from producer to consumer! On Ganymede, one tended to work and eat and sleep and perform routine household maintenance, with shopping being an inevitable but oft-postponed inconvenience. How long would we avoid it if it had to be like this? Surely these people must have better uses for their time!
Dibrin looked back at us, shrugging eyebrow and chin and shoulder together as if to say, “Come on, it's not as bad as it looks, and anyway what other plans have you got?” And then he leaped feet-first into the space where the corridor dead-ended and the floor opened out into marketplace.
“Look around for what you need,” he said, or rather, the zee-spec said he said, as he fell gently into the malestrom. “Bag it and wait for me. I'll come around with money in a little while.”
Baucum and Davenroy exchanged uneasy glances. Lehne and Rapisardi stood by waiting for someone else to make the first move, while Darren Wallich looked down and snorted several times with amusement. I, having nothing better to do, jumped down after Dibrin.
He lighted on a ledge three meters below, and pushed off to one side. I copied him, a bit more forcefully, and landed a moment after him in a basket filled with... dolls?
The merchant seated there, a flabby woman with wavy brown hair and skin the color of walnuts, called out a single word, which the zee-spec translated as, “Hallo, please buy something!”
“Just stepping through,” Dibrin assured her without looking up. But he grinned and nudged one of the dolls with his foot.
It screamed. “No! No, I can't, I won't! Get away from me! Get away!”
Catching my expression, Dibrin smiled mischievously and toed the doll again.
“Help! I weep, I tremble. I can't! I can't!”
“My God,” I said, “What is it? What are you doing to it?”
The woman looked sharply at Dibrin. “Pay for it if you're going to play.”
“Sorry,” he said to her. And then to me: “It's a phobia. You feeling alone or afraid or nervous about something, you kick this thing around. Confront your fear, crush your fear underfoot. Symbolic. Very popular.”
“It's horrible,” I told him. “What if you're a sadistic bastard? What if you just like to kick things around, make things scream?”
“Different doll,” he said, shrugging, and leaped away for another basket.
Well.
I couldn't help myself—I bent for a closer look at one of the dolls. Even its appearance was awful, a red-brown body of soft, wrinkly leather crowned with a blank, faceless head and four empty limbs that bent off in any and all directions. When I touched it, the texture was precisely the cool, smooth, almost wet feeling I'd been expecting. And squishy-soft, like a bag of phlegm.
“I'm afraid,” the doll told me with grave sincerity, the words recognizable even without Dibrin's translator.
“Do you want that or no?” the merchant woman demanded.
“No,” I said. “Definitely not.”
I dropped it and leaped away. I had shopping to do.
Picking out food proved easy enough; as I glided from basket to basket, certain sights and smells set me to salivating so heavily I thought my tongue would dissolve. Where was Dibrin with the money? I looked for him in the mad, low-gravity gyrations of the crowd, but didn't find him, so reluctantly I asked the merchants, in slow and careful English, to wrap the goods for me and hold them until my return. Too, I selected some clothing, a couple of shirts and a pair of flappy, loose-fitting slacks that would probably take some getting used to in weightlessness. And loose, meshy underwear, several pairs. Not what I would have chosen for myself back home, but they seemed the best of the available options here, and anyway my Immune spacer coverall and its supporting garments were currently the only clothing I owned. I had washed both the clothes and myself the evening before, but there are limits to what a shipboard shower can accomplish, and I was eager to climb into something a little fresher.
Finally, Dibrin did show up, with a package-laden Renata Baucum in tow, and together we made the rounds, picking up the goods I'd selected.
She was eating something, something round and purple and wet inside.
“Is that a plum?” I inquired, I hoped, not too hunrgily. We had plums in the Immunity, but not affordable ones.
“It is,” she agreed, slurping juice off her chin. Her tongue slipped out, caressed her lower lip briefly before retreating.
“Can, uh, I have a bite?”
Sidelong, she considered me, then the half-finished fruit in her hand. Reluctant to share her spit? Particularly here, in this warm, subtly unclean place?
“Here,” she said finally, fumbling her left hand into a bag and handing me something. “Have a whole one.”
I blushed, embarassed at having put her on the spot that way. “Really? Thanks.”
Then, without further compunction, I took the plum from her, tore into the flesh of it with my teeth. The taste was incredible, wet and sweet and wholly unlike nutrient pap. In three bites, I had reduced it to a bare stone, which I popped into my mouth and sucked on, pulling hard for the last bits of that wonderful flavor.
“Oh, God,” I said to her around the stone. “That's good.”
“Nice, eh?”
She had picked out some clothes as well, a coverall and something cal
led a “body wrap,” which she showed me a corner of as it peeked out from its bag. Green cloth marked with little squiggles.
“It's nice,” I assured her.
We came across Darren Wallich along the way, and then Sudhir Rapisardi, and soon we were all together again. As our purchases were purchased, though, it became apparent that we'd all picked out the same sorts of things, the emphasis on meats and breads and fruits, not preserved or even particularly preservable, unless you were into vacuum storage. So what, we'd eat well for a week or two and then edge back into a liquid diet? No thanks! So we made another pass through the market, more systematically this time, and picked up thirty kilograms of canned and pickled goods, plus a bit more underwear and such.
Finally, laden with bulky packages and awkward in the unfamiliar gravity, we hauled ourselves back to the port complex, beeped our way past Louis Pasteur's security, and dumped our booty in the wardroom, which if anything smelled worse than it had when we'd left. If Gladholder air was replacing our own as per plan, it was doing so very slowly indeed.
“Stinks in there,” Dibrin observed, wrinkling his nose as we emerged.
“Yeah,” I said to him, “tell me about it.”
“Glad to sleep outside for a night?”
“Oh, yeah,” Wallich agreed, smirking. He put a hand on my shoulder, another on Dibrin's. “There was some talk about going to see the mirror, right?”
“Certainly,” Dibrin said. “It's a short walk from here, only about six miles.”
Wallich seemed, for some reason, to find this funny.
~~~
I found out why. Six miles? I didn't really know how far a “mile” was, and by the time I learned, it was too late to do anything about it. Our expedition was over ten kilometers out and back. Quite a hike, for anyone used to living in caverns barely a third that size!
