“DeSilvo?” Koffield asked.
The name drew a strong reaction from both of them. Another interesting detail to note down. “It’s been handed down since his time, all through the Solace system. The machines can understand and use standard speech if need be, of course, but the convention is for them and us to use machine language whenever we interact. I think the idea is that if you speak to them in a way sufficiently unlike normal speech, you’ll always remember, at a subconscious level, that they’re not human. In a crisis, you won’t waste time shouting at them, or offering arguments or reasons that would only make sense to a human.”
“Subtle,” said Koffield, half to himself and half to Chandray. “Interesting, clever, and subtle. He always did know his way around machines.”
Which strongly implied that Koffield had actually known DeSilvo! Yuri worked the dates out in his head and concluded there was nothing impossible in that. Yet one more useful, even fascinating, item for the debriefers. “Supposedly it’s a status marker as well,” Yuri said. “As least that’s what my social structure teachers called it. We use machine language to talk to robotic servants, but not to each other. It’s supposed to be good psychology, according to my teachers.”
The lift car came to a halt at Perimeter Level, the habitable level closest to the outer, perimeter, hull of the station. The lift car’s doors opened, and the free-runner backed itself nimbly out, turned itself around, rolled down a side passage, and then out onto the Long Boulevard, the only route that ran the full length of the station.
Where once there had been bright light, laughter, and music, now there were only stripped-bare storefronts and the snarl of traffic. The smell, the stench, hit them as hard as a fist, and it would only get worse as they moved closer to Ring Park. The Long Boulevard had lost all her elegance, all her pride, all of it replaced by a wretched miasma of unwashed bodies and failed sanitation systems.
The Long Boulevard was no featureless transit tube, but the main thoroughfare for the station, the only one big enough and long enough to be considered a proper avenue if it were in a groundside city. It was so wide and tall in cross section that the station’s girth was noticeable. Yuri looked straight down the Boulevard, and caught a glimpse of the Aft End Cargo Center at the far end of the station, more than half a kilometer away.
Shops and stores, shipping offices and cafes, theaters and nightclubs lined both sides of the Boulevard. Walkways separated the stores from the central transport road. A pair of glass-walled transit tubes hung from the ceiling, but the Boulevard was a route for more than closed-route transport.
Free-ranging vehicles of all sorts crowded the two narrow vehicular lanes of the Boulevard. Robotic cargo haulers, pedal-powered quadracycles, private free-runners, and taxibots came on and went off the main road to and from all the side and upper accessways. As always, the Boulevard’s vehicular traffic looked to be on the verge of chaos, but Yuri was not concerned about it. The automated road-traffic-control system was highly competent, and would see to it that all the transports got where they were going.
It was the walkways and the shops—and the people in them—that had him worried. Day shift and night shift, around the clock, the Boulevard was ready to boil over into new trouble at any moment. The closer they got to Ring Park, the denser, shabbier, and more surly the crowds became.
Once, not so long ago, the shops had been smart, the shipping offices bustling, the cafes and clubs alive with the sights and sounds of people enjoying themselves. Now half the businesses were shuttered, and a few had been wrecked or burned out in the riots. Most of the establishments that were still open had very obviously armed guards on duty, and very heavy, very utilitarian metal grilles fastened over the display windows.
Anything and everything of any conceivable value, anything even remotely fragile, had long since been removed. Some of it smashed, stolen, the rest put out of harm’s way by the owners. All the signs, all the outdoor tables and chairs, were gone. Stripped of all decoration and on the defensive, the Boulevard was not itself anymore. It was nothing but a row of shabby little stresscrete bunkers barricaded against loiterers and malcontents, just barely hanging on. Business continued, but it was greatly changed and much diminished.
The free-runner slowed down in a particularly heavy knot of traffic. They came to a halt at the next intersection, and sat there, waiting to move again.
“Refugees?” Koffield asked, nodding toward a knot of grimy, bewildered-looking men huddled together on a street corner. It surprised Yuri not at all that Koffield had been able to pick them out. Everything from their haircuts to the style of their clothing, from the gauntness of their faces to the dirt on their skin, shouted out that these were people who did not belong, people who had no place, people for whom there was no room.
“Refugees,” Yuri said, trying to keep the anger and frustration out of his voice. The shabby men looked harmless, even pathetic. But those pitiable men, and their wives and children, had, simply by being on SCO Station, put the station in mortal danger. It had been luck as much as anything else that had kept it from utter collapse.
The normal station population was about four thousand, a little above the official “optimum” population of thirty-five hundred. At the peak of the crisis, there had been two thousand refugees on the station, over and above the normal population. The air-recirculation system had barely held, and the food supply had reached critical levels. Water, waste recirculation, general sanitation, medical services—everything had been stretched to the limit. There were still close to a thousand refugees on board, and they showed no sign of leaving. Things had gotten better, but service and supply systems that had never gotten a chance to recover were still under strain.
“It’s hard to explain to outsiders,” Yuri said, “but for a lot of people, the worst of the refugee crisis wasn’t that they came and took everything we had. It was that they took it all and made nothing, less than nothing, out of it. Our air reserves are down to zero, the whole station is on short food and water rations, we’re completely out of all sorts of medicines—and it’s all gone for nothing. They’re still here, most of them no better off than the day they got here. It’s as if we had done nothing at all—and we did so much it nearly killed the station and everyone on it.”
“And you could do twice as much, and it would do no good,” Koffield said. “I do understand. I wish I didn’t. But I learned otherwise, when I wasn’t much younger than you are now. I was just another junior officer on just another colony-relief mission. All of the rescue team went around wondering how we had come to be so angry at the people we were trying to save.”
Yuri nodded eagerly. “That’s it exactly, sir. Except that— well, you went out intending to rescue people. We just got the problem dumped in our laps.” Yuri shrugged. “We’re not angry all the time, of course. We feel for them. We care about them. I can’t really blame them for trying to stay.
Most of them came from places on the planet that are bad enough that no one in their right mind would want to go back, places that make the mess we’re in look like paradise.”
“Why did you allow them here in the first place?” Chandray asked.
“It was out of our hands,” said Yuri. “Orders from the planetary government. The official policy was that whoever wanted to go could leave the planet. Probably that was even the right policy, even if it wasn’t too popular up here. It stopped the panic from getting worse. Most of the people who left the planet went back. But most of the ones who didn’t go back are on this station, though there are a few refugees on other stations. But we’re stuck with over ninety percent of them.”
“And now you’re stuck with two more,” Chandray said, half under her breath.
Yuri wasn’t sure if it was meant to be a joke, or even if he had been meant to hear it. For a moment or two, he considered treating it as one thing more that needed ignoring, but Chandray’s words came too close to the truth. They had to deal with the issue. “If I can be a bit reassuring, at least on
that point, I can tell you that the Station Administrator does not regard you as being in the same category as the gluefeet.” He reddened as soon as the word was out of his mouth.
“You call the refugees ‘gluefeet’?” Chandray asked.
“Ah, yeah. Gluefeet or gluefooters. Because they’re stuck here. You can’t get them to go.”
No one spoke for a moment. Yuri was ashamed of himself. A fellow station-dweller would have understood and sympathized, but could these two? Yuri had started out believing, and wanting to believe, that the refugees were people just like anyone else. They might be displaced groundside peasants who had nothing in common with the engineers and traders who lived on the station, but people for all of that. But then came the endless trouble they caused, the crowding, the rationing, the riots—and the smell. There were times when Yuri felt he could forgive the gluefeet everything else, if only the camps didn’t smell so bad. It was getting harder and harder not to think of the refugees as the enemy, as a willful source of trouble, as freeloaders who offered nothing and asked for everything. The station-dwellers equated the refugees with the squalor in which the refugees lived. It was hard, damned hard, to remember that the glue-feet had ever been anything else but a pack of filthy rabble.
And maybe that was what the station-dwellers hated most about them. Because the station-dwellers knew, Yuri knew, that the refugees were just like them, were human beings. The refugees showed the dwellers what they might become, if their luck went bad. If others could fall so low, then perhaps they could as well.
“I’m sorry,” Yuri said. “It’s not the kindest thing to call a group of people. But, well, that’s the name they’ve gotten. The point I was trying to make, even if I did a bad job of it, is that for better or worse, you’re not like them.”
Chandray looked at him, her expression hard and cold, before she returned her gaze to the shabby men on the street corner. “I can think of things we have in common,” she said. “They and we are both a long way from home— and neither they nor we can go back.”
The traffic started moving again, and the free-runner rolled forward, leaving the little crowd of weary, defeated men behind.
Norla Chandray wanted to scream, wanted to cry. She had so long dreamed of seeing what people and places were like in other star systems. Now she knew. She knew the people on top were callous and angry at the helpless, and the ones down below had all life, all hope, crushed out of them. She knew this place was a bewildering, crowded, foul-smelling hell-maze. And she knew she was trapped here. She could see no likelihood of escaping this world, this future. Even if they did manage to repair the Dom Pedro IV, Norla doubted she could bring herself to set foot back in the cryo-can that had nearly killed her and had killed her two friends. Or perhaps risking cryodeath would be preferable to life in this nightmare. Norla shuddered. How had she come to be in a time and place where the choices were so few and so unpleasant?The free-runner rolled forward through the thickest of the traffic. The signs indicated they were getting closer to Ring Park, whatever that was. Road traffic was thinning out, but the crowds of refugees on the walkways were growing thicker. Up ahead, the sidewalls of the Boulevard opened out, and the overhead transit tubes split apart, one to either side of the Boulevard. Both angled down steeply and vanished below street level. The rows of shops and buildings stopped dead. A flat, featureless blue wall on either side of the road marked the end of the commercial area, but the road and the walkways passed through a wide circular opening in the wall. The way ahead was clear, straight into what had to be Ring Park.
The road itself pointed straight ahead, toward another circular opening at the far wall, and the aft end of the station visible beyond. A huge green space—or at least space that had once been green—opened up on all sides of them as they moved past the barrier. Ring Park wrapped itself entirely around the Perimeter Level of the station. Norla looked up at the sky-blue ceiling, and estimated that the park took up three or four levels of the station. Beyond that ceiling there had to be several more decks, and then the central access tunnel of the station, through which the Cruzeiro do Sul had traveled.
There had been no attempt to make the overhead bulkhead look like anything but a high, blue-painted ceiling. Stations with similar parks sometimes used holographic projections and other tricks to simulate cloudscapes and sunshine and so on. Better to do what they did here, Norla decided, and let a ceiling be a ceiling. Here and there, flying figures and sky scenes from legend and history had been painted onto the ceiling. A dragon breathed fire here, an impossibly rickety wood-and-paper airplane from the near-ancient period struggled into a patch of painted sky there, but these were mere decoration, not intended to fool anyone.
Before her and behind her, the forward and aft bulkheads were painted in an abstract pattern of browns and greens that gradually merged with the overhead blue. It was enough to suggest and evoke imaginary forests, but not so much that it was an attempt to make anyone think there were forests instead of metal bulkheads. Perfectly normal direct lighting illuminated the park—no optical illusions of a simulated sun, or overly clever indirect lighting systems. The one lighting effect she could not understand was a sudden, brief, and faint pulse of light every three minutes or so, coming from off to the right..
The grounds of the park were—or at least had been—a fairly conventional approximation of open parkland. Broad lawns with small pools of water here and there, and small stands of trees dotted about the place.
But things were not as they had been. What little grass was left was brown. The water in the decorative ponds was a most undecorative greasy grey-green. Someone was emptying a slop bucket into the closest pond as Norla watched, while someone else was drawing water from the same source. Nearly all the trees had been cut down, leaving only a collection of ragged stumps. In among all the other odors that clouded the air, Norla identified woodsmoke. She could see the glow of half a dozen campfires.
The air was hazy with smoke and laden with the smells of unwashed bodies, rancid food, decaying feces, stale urine, burned food, and a dozen other things Norla could not identify.
And, everywhere, in groups of five or ten or a dozen huddled around a fire, wandering aimlessly or sitting huddled by themselves, were the refugees. Sparten’s gluefeet. The people washed up on this noisome shore by a crisis that seemed to come out of nowhere.
The free-runner turned off the Long Boulevard onto a paved side path that led off to the right, toward the direction of the light pulses. “Vehicle command. Pause here,” said Yuri Sparten. The free-runner slowed, pulled itself off to the side of the road, and came to a halt. “Well, here we are, Second Officer Chandray,” said Sparten. “You wanted to see the scenic part of the scenic route. This is it.”
“Damnation,” Koffield said. It was hard to know if he meant it as a curse, or as a perfectly apt description of the place. The three of them just sat and looked for a long moment, the scene overwhelming them all.
“This is where you put them?” Norla asked. “In an open park?”
“The park is as closed-in as anything in the station,” Sparten said. “There’s no weather to speak of. We have guest quarters for two or three hundred to accommodate visiting crews—and those quarters are virtually at full capacity. Where else were we going to put two thousand people but here?”
Norla desperately wanted to have an answer to that, something she could throw back in his face, but she had nothing.
“I’m amazed your environment systems held together as well as they have,” Koffield said. “With so many extra people on board, you must have been near the ragged edge.”
“At it and over it. But we’re coming back, starting to recover. Believe it or not, it was a lot worse than this. For one thing, the stink isn’t nearly as bad as it was,” Sparten went on with a studiously matter-of-fact tone. “Most of this is residual from when things were really bad. The air scrubbers are finally starting to cut into the worst of it. And we’re actually a lot closer to being on
top of the sanitation situation now. They were burying their dead here for a while, except the soil’s not deep enough to do it properly. We had corpses rotting under fifteen centimeters of dirt in here. We’ve disinterred them and put a stop to further burials. We think.”
Norla stared at Sparten. He almost made it sound as if the refugees buried their dead as some sort of sport, or game, without realizing the nuisance it caused. She wondered what had happened to the disinterred bodies, and decided she didn’t want to know. Besides, Sparten was still talking.
“The biggest problem we have now is getting them to stop burning fires,” he was saying. “We can’t afford to waste the oxy, and the smoke and soot are hell on the air scrubbers.”
“Why are they burning fires?” Norla asked.
“To keep warm,” Yuri said, as if it were obvious. “It gets cold here in the park during night shift. Most of the gluefeet are laboring class, not all that well educated, but still they should have had the sense not to set the fires in the first place. It was. worse than useless. The park was actually built over the outer hull’s thermal superconducting coils—the coils are right under the park surface. Heat-dumping was part of the idea designed into the park. The station air system drives warm air into the park. See that meter-high grey cube over there? There are lots of those all over the park, though most are better hidden by the landscaping. Some are air intakes, and the others are outlets. They connect to a convection pumping system that runs the air through the superconducting thermal coils, cools it, condenses water vapor out, then dumps it back out into the park.”
“If the people are that cold, can’t you shut down the coil coolers?”
Yuri shook his head. “They’re an integral part of the station’s cooling system. We generate a lot of waste heat here in this station. If we didn’t dump the heat, the whole station would get above habitable temperatures in a few days and just keep going. We’d literally cook. We have to cool the station, and we use the park as a heat sink. So it gets cold in here, so the refugees cut down trees and light fires to stay warm, and pump more heat into the system right on top of the cooling system, so the system automatically compensates until we can correct manually, and then—well, I could go on, but it’s a hell of a mess. The one bright spot is that they’ve just about run out of things to burn.”
The Depths of Time Page 31
