What sweet mother Earth did in a billion years, I did to Gray in fifty. Joyfully! Singing the song of the molecules, in concert with them.
My steps were many, the methods subtle. To shape the mountain ranges, I needed further infalls from small asteroids, taking a century—ferrying rough-cut stone to polish a jewel.
Memories ... of a man and more. Fashioned from the tick of time, ironed out by the swift passage of mere puny years, of decades, of the ringing centuries. Worlds take time.
My ramjet leaps into night, smelling of hot iron and—chung!—discharging its burden.
I glance down at wisps of yellow-pearl. Sulphuric and carbolic acid streamers, drifting far below. There algae feed and prosper. Murky mists below pale, darken, vanish. Go!
Yet I felt a sudden sadness as the jet took me up again. I had watched every small change in the atmosphere, played shepherd to newborn cloud banks, raised fresh chains of volcanoes with fusion triggers that burrowed like moles—and all this might come to naught, if it became another private preserve for some Earth-side power games.
I could not shake off the depression. Should I have that worry pruned away? It could hamper my work, and I could easily be rid of it for a while, when I returned to the sleeping vaults. Most in the station spent about one month per year working. Their other days passed in dreamless chilled sleep, waiting for the slow metabolism of Gray to quicken and change.
Not I. I slept seldom, and did not want the stacks of years washed away.
I run my tongue over fuzzy teeth. I am getting stale, worn. Even a ramjet ride did not revive my spirit.
And the station did not want slackers. Not only memories could be pruned.
Ancient urges arise, needs. ...
A warm shower and rest await me above, in orbit, inside the mother-skin. Time to go.
I touch the controls, cutting in extra ballistic computer capacity and—
—suddenly I am there again, with her.
She is around me and beneath me, slick with ruby sweat.
And the power of it soars up through me. I reach out and her breast
blossoms in my eager hand, her soft cries unfurl in puffs of green steam. Aye!
She is a splash of purple across the cool lunar stones, her breath ringing in me—
as she licks my rasping ear with a tiny jagged fork of puckered laughter,
most joyful and triumphant, yea verily.
The station knows you need this now.
Yes, and the station is right. I need to be consumed, digested, spat back
out a new and fresh man, so that I may work well again.
— so she coils and swirls like a fine tinkling gas around me, her mouth
wraps me like a vortex. I slide my shaft into her gratefully
as she sobs great wracking orange gaudiness through me,
her, again, her,
gift of the strumming vast blue station that guides us all down centuries of dense, oily time.
You need this, take, eat, this is the body and blood of the station, eat, savor, take fully.
I had known her once—redly, sweet, and loud—and now I know her again,
my senses all piling up and waiting to be eaten from her.
I glide back and forth, moisture chimes between us, she is coiled tight, too.
We all are, we creatures of the station.
It knows this, releases us when we must be gone.
I slam myself into her because she is both that woman—known so long ago
delicious in her whirlwind passions, supple in colors of the mind, singing in rubs and heats
I knew across the centuries. So the station came to know her, too, and duly recorded her—
so that I can now bury my coal-black, sweaty troubles in her, aye!
and thus in the Shaping Station,
as was and ever shall be, Grayworld without end, amen.
Resting. Compiling himself again, letting the rivulets of self knit up into remembrance.
Of course the station had to be more vast and able than anything humanity had yet known.
At the time the Great Shaping began, it was colossal. By then, humanity had gone on to grander projects.
Mars brimmed nicely with vapors and lichen, but would take millennia more before anyone could walk its surface with only a compressor to take and thicken oxygen from the swirling airs.
Mammoth works now cruised at the outer rim of the solar system, vast ice castles inhabited by beings only dimly related to the humans of Earth.
He did not know those constructions. But he had been there, in inherited memory, when the station was born. For part of him and you and me and us had voyaged forth at the very beginning. ...
The numbers were simple, their implications known to schoolchildren.
(Let’s remember that the future belongs to the engineers.)
Take an asteroid, say, and slice it sidewise, allowing four meters of headroom for each level—about what a human takes to live in. This dwelling, then, has floor space that expands as the cube of the asteroid size. How big an asteroid could provide the living room equal to the entire surface of the Earth? Simple: about two hundred kilometers.
Nothing, in other words. For Ceres, the largest asteroid in the inner belt, was 380 kilometers across, before humans began to work her.
But room was not the essence of the station. For after all, he had made the station, yes? Information was her essence, the truth of that blossomed in him, the past as prologue—
He ambled along a corridor a hundred meters below Gray’s slag and muds, gazing down on the frothy air-fountains in the foyer. Day’s work done.
Even manifestations need a rest, and the interview with the smug Earther had put him off, sapping his resolve. Inhaling the crisp, cold air (a bit high on the oxy, he thought; have to check that), he let himself concentrate wholly on the clear scent of the splashing. The blue water was the very best, fresh from the growing poles, not the recycled stuff he endured on flights. He breathed in the tingling spray and a man grabbed him.
“I present formal secure-lock,” the man growled, his third knuckle biting into Benjan’s elbow port.
A cold, brittle thunk. His systems froze. Before he could move, whole command linkages went dead in his inboards. The station’s hovering presence, always humming in the distance, telescoped away. It felt like a wrenching fall that never ends, head over heels—
He got a grip. Focus. Regain your links. The loss!—It was like having fingers chopped away, whole pieces of himself amputated. Bloody neural stumps—
He sent quick, darting questions down his lines, and met ... dark. Silent. Dead.
His entire aura of presence was gone. He sucked in the cold air, letting a fresh anger bubble up but keeping it tightly bound.
His attacker was the sort who blended into the background. Perfect for this job. A nobody out of nowhere, complete surprise. Clipping on a hand-restraint, the mousy man stepped back. “They ordered me to do it fast.” A mousy voice, too.
Benjan resisted the impulse to deck him. He looked Lunar, thin and pale. One of the Earther families who had come to deal with the station a century ago? Maybe with more kilos than Benjan, but a fair match. And it would feel good.
But that would just bring more of them, in the end. “Damn it, I have immunity from casual arrest. I—”
“No matter now, they said.” The cop shrugged apologetically, but his jaw set. He was used to this.
Benjan vaguely recognized him, from some bar near the Apex of the crater’s dome. There weren’t more than a thousand people on Gray, mostly like him, manifestations of the station. But not all. More of the others all the time. ... “You’re Majiken.”
“Yeah. So?”
“At least you people do your own work.”
“We have plenty on the inside here. You don’t think Gray’s gonna be neglected, eh?”
In his elbow, he felt injected programs spread, clunk, consolidating their blocks. A seeping ache. Benjan fought it
all through his neuro-musculars, but the disease was strong.
Keep your voice level, wait for a chance. Only one of them—my God, they’re sure of themselves! Okay, make yourself seem like a doormat.
“I don’t suppose I can get a few things from my office?”
“ ’Fraid not.”
“Mighty decent.”
The man shrugged, letting the sarcasm pass. “They want you locked down good before they. ...”
“They what?”
“Make their next move, I’d guess.”
“I’m just a step, eh?”
“Sure, chop off the hands and feet first.” A smirking thug with a gift for metaphor.
Well, these hands and feet can still work. Benjan began walking toward his apartment. “I’ll stay in your lockdown, but at home.”
“Hey, nobody said—”
“But what’s the harm? I’m deadened now.” He kept walking.
“Uh, uh—” The man paused, obviously consulting with his superiors on an in-link.
He should have known it was coming. The Majikens were ferret-eyed, canny, unoriginal, and always dangerous. He had forgotten that. In the rush to get ores sifted, grayscapes planed right to control the constant rains, a system of streams and rivers snaking through the fresh-cut valleys ... a man could get distracted, yes. Forget how people were. Careless.
Not completely, though. Agents like this Luny usually nailed their prey at home, not in a hallway. Benjan kept a stunner in the apartment, right beside the door, convenient.
Distract him. “I want to file a protest.”
“Take it to Kalespon.” Clipped, efficient, probably had a dozen other slices of bad news to deliver today. To other manifestations. Busy man.
“No, with your boss.”
“Mine?” His rock-steady jaw went slack.
“For—” he sharply turned the corner to his apartment, using the time to reach for some mumbo-jumbo—“felonious interrogation of inboards.”
“Hey, I didn’t touch your—”
“I felt it. Slimy little gropes—yeccch!” Might as well ham it up a little, have some fun.
The Majiken looked offended. “I never violate protocols. The integrity of your nexus is intact. You can ask for a scope-through when we take you in—”
“I’ll get my overnight kit.” Only now did he hurry toward the apartment portal and popped it by an inboard command. As he stepped through he felt the cop three steps behind.
Here goes. One foot over the lip, turn to the right, snatch the stunner out of its grip mount—
—and it wasn’t there. They’d laundered the place already. “Damn!”
“Thought it’d be waitin’, huh?”
In the first second. When the Majiken was pretty sure of himself, act—
Benjan took a step back and kicked. A satisfying soft thuuunk.
In the low gravity, the man rose a meter and his uungh! was strangely satisfying. The Majiken were warriors, after all, by heritage. Easier for them to take physical damage than life trauma.
The Majiken came up fast and nailed Benjan with a hand feint and slam. Benjan fell back in the slow gravity—and at a 45-degree tilt, sprang backward, away, toward the wall—
Which he hit, completing his turn in air, heels coming hard into the wall so that he could absorb the recoil—
—and spring off, head-height—
—into the Majiken’s throat as the man rushed forward, shaped hands ready for the put-away blow. Benjan caught him with both hand-edges, slamming the throat from both sides. The punch cut off blood to the head and the Majiken crumbled.
Benjan tied him with his own belt. Killed the link on the screen. Bound him further to the furniture. Even on Gray, inertia was inertia. The Majiken would not find it easy to get out from under a couch he was firmly tied to.
The apartment would figure out that something was wrong about its occupant in a hour or two, and call for help. Time enough to run? Benjan was unsure, but part of him liked this, felt a surge of adrenaline joy arc redly through his systems.
Five minutes of work and he got the interlocks off. His connections sprang back to life. Colors and images sang in his aura.
He was out the door, away—
The cramped corridors seemed to shrink, dropping down and away from him, weaving and collapsing. Something came toward him—chalk-white hills, yawning craters.
A hurricane breath whipped by him as it swept down from the jutting, fresh-carved mountains. His body strained.
He was running, that much seeped through to him. He breathed brown murk that seared but his lungs sucked it in eagerly.
Plunging hard and heavy across the swampy flesh of Gray.
He moved easily, bouncing with each stride in the light gravity, down an infinite straight line between rows of enormous trees. Vegetable trees, these were, soft tubers and floppy leaves in the wan glow of a filtered sun. There should be no men here, only machines to tend the crops. Then he noticed that he was not a man at all. A robo-hauler, yes—and his legs were in fact wheels, his arms the working grapplers. Yet he read all this as his running body. Somehow it was pleasant.
And she ran with him.
He saw beside him a miner-bot, speeding down the slope. Yet he knew it was she, Martine, and he loved her.
He whirred, clicked—and sent a hail.
You are fair, my sweet.
Back from the lumbering miner came, This body will not work well at games of lust.
No reason we can’t shed them in time.
To what end? she demanded. Always imperious, that girl.
To slide silky skin again.
You seem to forget that we are fleeing. That cop, someone will find him.
In fact, he had forgotten. Uh ... update me?
Ah! How exasperating! You’ve been off, romping through your imputs again, right?
Worse than that. He had only a slippery hold on the jiggling, surging lands of mud and murk that funneled past. Best not to alarm her, though. My sensations seem to have become a bit scrambled, yes. I know there is some reason to run—
They are right behind us!
Who?
The Majiken Clan! They want to seize you as a primary manifestation!
Damn! I’m fragmenting.
You mean they’re reaching into your associative cortex?
Must be, my love. Which is why you’re running with me.
What do you mean?
How to tell her the truth but shade it so that she does not guess ... the Truth? Suppose I tell you something that is more useful than accurate?
Why would you do that, m’love?
Why do doctors slant a diagnosis?
Because no good diagnostic gives a solid prediction.
Exactly. Not what he had meant, but it got them by an awkward fact.
Come on, she sent. Let’s scamper down this canyon. The topo maps say it’s a shortcut.
Can’t trust ’em, the rains slice up the land so fast. He felt his legs springing like pistons in the mad buoyance of adrenaline.
They surged together down slippery sheets that festered with life-spreading algae, some of the many-leafed slim-trees Benjan had himself helped design. Rank growths festooned the banks of dripping slime, biology run wild and woolly at a fevered pace, irked by infusions of smart bugs. A landscape on fast forward.
What do you fear so much? she said suddenly.
The sharpness of it stalls his mind. He was afraid for her more than himself, but how to tell her? This apparition of her was so firm and heartbreakingly warm, her whole presence welling through to him on his sensorium. ... Time to tell another truth that conceals a deeper truth.
They’ll blot out every central feature of me, all those they can find.
If they catch you. Us.
Yup. Keep it to monosyllables, so the tremor of his voice does not give itself away. If they got to her, she would face final, total erasure. Even of a fragment self.
Save your breath for the run, she sent.
So he did, gratefully.
If there were no omni-sensors lurking along this approach to the launch fields, they might get through. Probably Fleet expected him to stay indoors, hiding, working his way to some help. But there would be no aid there. The Majiken were thorough and would capture all human manifestations, timing the arrests simultaneously to prevent anyone sending a warning. That was why they had sent a lone cop to grab him; they were stretched thin. Reassuring, but not much.
It was only three days past the 3D interview, yet they had decided to act and put together a sweep. What would they be doing to the station itself? He ached at the thought. After all, she resided there. ...
And she was here. He was talking to a manifestation that was remarkable, because he had opened his inputs in a way that only a crisis can spur.
Benjan grimaced. Decades working over Gray had aged him, taught him things Fleet could not imagine. The Sabal Game still hummed in his mind, still guided his thoughts, but these men of the Fleet had betrayed all that. They thought, quite probably, that they could recall him to full officer status, and he would not guess that they would then silence him, quite legally.
Did they think him so slow? Benjan allowed himself a thin, dry chuckle as he ran.
They entered the last short canyon before the launch fields. Tall blades like scimitar grasses poked up, making him dart among them. She growled and spun her tracks and plowed them under. She did not speak. None of them liked to destroy the life so precariously remaking Gray. Each crushed blade was a step backward.
His quarters were many kilometers behind by now, and soon these green fields would end. If he had judged the map correctly—yes, there it was. A craggy peak ahead, crowned with the somber lights of the launch station. They would be operating a routine shift in there, not taking any special precautions.
Abruptly, he burst from the thicket of thick-leafed plants and charged down the last slope. Before him lay the vast lava plain of Oberg Plateau, towering above the Fogg Sea. Now it was a mud flat, foggy, littered with ships. A vast dark hole yawned in the bluff nearby, the slanting sunlight etching its rimmed locks. It must be the exit tube for the electromagnetic accelerator, now obsolete, unable to fling any more loads of ore through the cloak of atmosphere.
The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twentieth Annual Collection Page 59
