by Sage Walker
His interface gave him her name; Elena, Biosystems, was Elena Maury, MD, PhD. He found a headshot that gave him a good look at her huge eyes, her high cheekbones. Her eyes, in the photo, looked more hazel than the gray he’d seen in moonlight and in the elevator lighting.
That was enough to know for now.
TWO
The Man in the Tree
It was Wednesday evening, and Helt Borresen wasn’t up in Center for the sunset. He was beneath Center on Level One, eating supper in the Frontier Diner. The diner was a mundane place of stone-topped tables and bamboo chairs. The air held a reassuring hint of French fries and coffee, and because it served a 24/7 clientele, you could get breakfast at any hour. Helt liked breakfast for supper, so he was having a spinach omelet with a side Caprese salad.
If Elena followed a daily schedule, she would be back in Center about now. He could go up there. She might not be there. She might be looking at her deer and think he was pushy or weird, or, worse, if he went up there she might think Helt Borresen had come hunting for her.
Yeah, it was time and past time to look for a love that would last a lifetime. So he really was hunting and he might as well admit it.
He was afraid, and he might as well admit that, too. His mother had been injured when he was young, and the injury had left scars on her brain. He knew, intellectually, that it was nothing he had done, yet he was still afraid that anyone he loved would get hurt. It was an irrational fear and he knew it.
Admit it, sure. Change it? Not so easy.
Helt scooped up the last bite of the nutmeg-laced spinach with a piece of toast and looked up at the man approaching his table. Navigation coveralls, dark five o’clock stubble on his chin and his shaved head, a lot of muscle in neck and shoulders, and the brown eyes of a puppy who had just been yelled at and didn’t understand why.
“Helt Borresen?”
“That’s me. I’m Helt.”
“Yves Copani. I went to your office but you weren’t there. I apologize for coming after hours, but—” Copani pulled his interface out of a pocket and gripped it tightly.
“But you just got off work and there’s something you want me to see,” Helt said. “It’s okay. I’m still working, actually.” A moonlit walk wasn’t going to happen tonight. Fine. Now he wouldn’t have to worry that seeing Elena again so soon would make him seem like a pest. “Sit down. Send your file to IA Helt.” Helt reached for the folded screen next to his coffee cup and popped it open. “Want some coffee?”
This evening’s waitperson approached and filled Helt’s cup. Copani waved him away. “No, no thank you.”
What came to Helt’s screen was the Curriculum Vitae of Yves Copani, welder, whose engineering doctorate had been earned in Milan. He was overeducated for the job of tunneling out nickel-iron from Kybele’s Level Three. That he was overeducated was no surprise; most contract workers held doctorates in something or other. Helt scanned the rest of the info as well.
“I want to stay here,” Copani said. “I want to spend my life here.”
A lot of dreamers on Earth below wanted to come here, live here, take the risk that their descendants, seven generations down the line, would reach a new planet and be able to live on it. Only a few of the rich, a few of the lucky, made it past the barrier of requirements and became outbound colonists.
A lot of realists on Earth below thought they were crazy to take the chance. Earth was a sad and damaged place, but parts of her still functioned, and that she could support human life was a given. No one knew if the new planet could do that.
“Is it still possible?” Yves asked.
“Barely. There’s still some shuffle room on the passenger list for the last shuttle, but there isn’t much. You’ve asked David II for a colonist slot, I’m guessing.”
“I’m not sure he’s looked at the request,” Copani said.
David Luo II was the Engineering boss on Kybele, a busy, busy man.
“So you came to me.”
“I hoped you could help,” Copani said.
“I may not be able to. I’m the Incident Analyst. My job is to arbitrate conflicts between Navigation, Bioscience, and Systems Support if and when they come up. I do some intramural work in the divisions when I’m called in, but it’s only advisory.” Helt permitted his overdeveloped sense of fairness to come forward and ask questions. Why me and not him? Why don’t I get sent off so he gets to stay? Not fun. Why not him and me both stay? “Yves, it’s true that in extraordinary circumstances I can make upgrades to colonist status, if there are no objections from the division chiefs. For me to sponsor you, I’d need to show you would be of extraordinary benefit to the ship. Are you extraordinary?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think so.”
“You aren’t grandiose, anyway. That’s good, but humility isn’t something I can sell to David II or his boss. Your CV says you have a job waiting in Cape Town for three times the amount of money you’re making here.”
Salaries on Kybele were high. Contract workers usually drew enough AUs, Access Units, Kybele currency, to meet expenses, and converted the rest to euros in Earth-based accounts. The AU was a sound currency. The conversion rate was, as of last week, something like 1 AU to 2.3 euros.
AUs, like any currency, were tokens for barter, their value based on energy expenditure, physical or mental, and traded for other energies or material things. For now, they could be converted back to euros for Earth-based transactions.
The lottery for colonist selection and funds from supporting nations had given Kybele a fat bank balance. She spent like a sailor on shore leave, but she also exported tech advances and media to Earth below and was making money from them.
“You’re telling me you are willing to give that up, to stay here as a flunky welding steel rods to keep tunnels from collapsing, for the rest of your life. Why?”
“I’m in love,” Copani said. “She’s in Biosystems, a colonist. She doesn’t want to leave.”
Oh. “I see.” Elena’s name was a version of Helen, and a Helen in a time long past had launched a thousand ships and a war. Helt was screwing up his courage to go to war with himself, his old fears, his new ones, over the Helen he had met last night. Love, the possibility of love, counted, damn it.
“That’s an honest reason to want to stay,” Helt said. “In that case, why don’t you order some dinner and we’ll figure out a narrative I can use to bring you to David II’s attention. That would be the place for you to start.”
Helt signaled the waiter.
* * *
Back in his office, Helt promised himself he would only work one more hour and then go home.
Because linear information, lists, two-dimensional graphs got too visually busy too fast for him, Helt looked at the humans on Kybele as bubbles of information. He liked Venn diagrams, spherical ones. His programs rendered facts and factoids about a particular individual into colors, shapes, and varying degrees of opacity. In the past ten years, some of the bubbles had acquired accumulations of biography, work history, friendships, frictions. Over time, as events, likes, and dislikes pushed and pulled, aggregates formed. Attractive traits drew other bubbles closer. Givers and team players attracted other souls; takers and users were often, but not always, repelled.
Sometimes he displayed the ever-shifting groups as a coalescence of wrinkled balloons, sometimes as clusters of spiky morningstars, ferocious weapons. Over time, they had formed ameboid blobs that corresponded pretty well with the three working departments on Kybele, Navigation, Systems Support, Biosystems.
Take thirty thousand people and create a framework of habitats, interactions, and work that will let their descendants survive and reproduce for two hundred years, while keeping the skills needed to live on a new world. The population will live in isolation. No one gets to go outside and play. There will be no visitors.
It was a prison or a paradise, depending on your philosophy. The people in Helt’s new world, his fellow passengers, were prisoners of nothing but
their own hopes and dreams. They had chosen to live in this enclosure, a hollow asteroid on a one-way journey to a relatively nearby star. They knew the risks.
They knew the risks of staying on Earth as well. Wars were continuous, but entire civilizations sustained themselves on arable land at the poles. The population was down to three billion and might have stabilized there. It would be centuries before the planet’s oceans, her basic life-cycle drivers, recovered from the acid the Anthropocene era had dumped in them. Maybe old Gaia could heal herself. Maybe not.
Odds were, this worldlet named Kybele would get where it was going. It would reach a new world, a full-sized one, a planet with liquid water and all the building blocks of life. That the new planet would sustain human life was not a given. Even so, a lot of people were willing to take the gamble.
Odds were, the only thing that could make Kybele herself uninhabitable were the people inside it.
The hollow rock that was Kybele, once thrown toward its new star, would get where it was going, but by design and necessity, its air and water and food supplies would fail without the constant input of skilled human hands and human minds. That reality, hopefully, imposed a social contract of mutual tolerance that would survive the stresses and conflicts humans make for themselves. Maybe. If everyone worked at it.
Helt was daydreaming himself into the what and how of scenarios he could not, on his own, control. The broad-spectrum lights on the west wall of his office had gone dark so the greenery could rest. A bot searched for leaves on the floor. Helt searched for a pear in yellowing leaves, but all of his were gone. He got out of his chair, walked out into the hall, stretched out his arms, remembered a plaid shirt worn by a beautiful woman, and went back to his desk.
A lot of people weren’t entered in his State of Kybele construct. Only the ones who had been players in interdepartmental disagreements of one flavor or another interacted in Helt’s spheres of data. The three divisions on Kybele handled their own internal affairs when they could, and those interactions didn’t usually come to Helt’s attention.
Yves Copani wasn’t in there.
Only one more hour’s work, Helt had told himself, but he really wanted to find an excuse to let Yves Copani stay on Kybele. He liked the man.
Yves Copani was trained as an architect, but he’d hired on as a welder. He loved his quarters in Petra, and music, and his buddies, and hard work, and his girl. Oh, he loved his girl. She worked in Stonehenge and her name was Susanna, not Elena. Yes, he checked, and felt a little embarrassed about it.
In short, Yves loved everything he saw or touched or ate, unless he hated it, and if he hated something he wanted to make it beautiful so he could love it. He wanted the stars, and he wanted to stay with his true love.
True loves seldom lasted, but Helt liked the simplicity of the man’s outlook. He liked it, but he wouldn’t let it change the multiple factors in his off-list protocol, the one designed to sort out who went back to Earth and who stayed aboard.
The protocol was used to sort through nets of relationships and interactions if the three division chiefs disagreed about who should go and who should stay, and no one was disagreeing about Yves Copani. He was just a contract worker who had never come to their attention or given them a problem. But Helt was sifting the files all the same.
Yves had worked some off-shift hours in the vineyards in Center. Helt wondered if that’s how he’d met his true love, or if he worked there to please her. Yves’s grandfather had worked for Ferrari, certainly not a sound reason to want to keep him aboard.
Helt was admiring a Ferrari in one corner of his screen when Severo Mares’s face took over the other. The chief of Navigation Security Services, Kybele’s euphemism for cops, was in uniform, well past time to be off-shift.
“Why do you look so happy?” Severo asked.
“Because you reminded me it’s time for me to go home three hours ago.”
“It’s about a man in a tree,” Severo said.
“Tell me.”
“At twenty forty-four we got a call from a couple who were out, uh, hiking. They saw something in a tree, and it scared them. We went up and found a man in a tree, and blood everywhere. We just got him down. He’s dead.”
Location coordinates flashed across the screen. The tree, and the EMTs who surrounded it, were half a kilometer spinward from the base of Athens tower, in wilderness. “We think he jumped. There are broken limbs on some of the trees around. He must have tried to glide down.”
“What the hell? Did he hallucinate a hang glider or something?”
Hang gliding in Kybele’s half-g and strong Corolis force was fun, the survivors of the sport had said—before Navigation started giving stiff fines for trying it.
“Damned if I know,” Severo said.
ALSO BY SAGE WALKER
Man in the Tree
Praise for Whiteout
WINNER OF THE 1997 LOCUS AWARD FOR BEST FIRST NOVEL
“This is an impressive debut, rich in ideas and feeling, told in a voice all its own.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“A strikingly assured, mature drama, engrossing and beautifully constructed … an estimable and highly auspicious debut.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“Considering how often (and badly) virtual reality is being used in the field, and the rather simplistic approach SF usually takes toward international politics, this debut novel should be inhaled quickly—for it is as invigorating as the fresh, frosty air enlivening Walker’s Antarctic winter.”
—Locus
“Tough, sexy, and smart—as smooth and savvy as the best thrillers, but peopled with real human beings, and carrying a real science fiction kick. Walker is a stylish and powerful new voice for the nineties.”
—Gardner Dozois, editor of Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine
“A striking debut …Walker’s command of character and vivid rendition of virtual reality distinguish her as a new writer of special promise for cyberspace fans.”
—Booklist
“Whiteout shows us virtual reality for grown-ups—not as an excuse for pumped-up power fantasies, but as a real tool for getting real things done. Stylish, intelligent, and sublime.”
—Walter Jon Williams
“Realistic virtual-reality and Antarctic scenes enhance the mystery. Highly recommended.”
—Library Journal
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
SAGE WALKER is the author of Whiteout, which garnered critical acclaim and won the Locus Award for Best First Novel. She was born in Oklahoma and grew up steeped in simile and sultry south wind from the Gulf. She entered college as a music major and exited with a B.S. in Zoology and eventually a M.D. A long time Taos resident, her company established the first full-time Emergency Physician coverage in hospitals in Taos, Los Alamos, and Santa Fe. She stopped practicing in 1987 and describes herself as a burned-out ER doc who enjoys wilderness, solitude, good company … and telling stories. You can sign up for email updates here.
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CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Ch
apter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Epilogue
Excerpt: The Man in the Tree
Also by Sage Walker
Praise for Whiteout
About the Author
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
WHITEOUT
Copyright © 1996 by Sage Walker
All rights reserved.
A Tor Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates
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Tor® is a registered trademark of Macmillan Publishing Group, LLC.
ISBN 978-0-7653-8980-0
Our e-books may be purchased in bulk for promotional, educational, or business use. Please contact the Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department at 1-800-221-7945, extension 5442, or by e-mail at [email protected].
First Edition: April 1996
First Mass Market Edition: October 2017
eISBN: 9781250175120
