00-Falling Free

by Lois McMaster Bujold

  Ti sat beside her in the commander's chair, his hands and feet barely moving the controls in tiny, constant corrections, eyes flicking from readout to readout and then to the real horizon, totally absorbed. The atmosphere roared over the shuttle's skin and the craft rocked violently in some passing wind shear. Silver began to see why Leo, despite his expressed anguish at the risk to them all of losing Ti downside, had not substituted Zara or one of the other pusher pilots in Ti's stead. Even barring the foot pedals, landing on a planet was definitely a discipline apart from jetting about in free fall, especially in a vehicle nearly the size of a Habitat module.

  "There's the dry lake bed," Ti nodded forward, addressing her without taking his eyes from his work. "Right on the horizon."

  "Will it be—very much harder than landing on a shuttleport runway?" Silver asked in worry.

  "No problem." Ti smiled. "If anything, it's easier. It's a big puddle—it's one of our emergency alternate landing sites anyway. Just avoid the gullies at the north end, and we're home free."

  "Oh," said Silver, reassured. "I hadn't realized you'd landed out here before."

  "Well, I haven't, actually," Ti murmured, "not having had an emergency yet. . . ." He sat up more intently, taking a tighter grip on the controls, and Silver decided perhaps she would not distract him with further conversation just now.

  She peeked around the edge of her seat at Dr. Minchenko, holding down the engineer's station behind them, to see how he was taking all this. His return smile was sardonic, as if to tease her for her anxiety, but she noticed his hand checking his seat straps, too.

  The ground rushed up from below. Silver was almost sorry they had not, after all, waited for the cover of night to make this landing. At least she wouldn't have been able to see her death coming. She could, of course, close her eyes. She closed her eyes, but opened them again almost immediately. Why miss the last experience of one's life? She was sorry Leo had never made a pass at her. He must suffer from stress accumulation too, surely. Faster and faster . . .

  The shuttle bumped, bounced, banged, rocked, and roared out over the flat, cracked surface. She was sorry she had never made a pass at Leo. Clearly, you could die while waiting for other people to start your life for you. Her seat harness cut across her breasts as deceleration sucked her forward and the rumbling vibration rattled her teeth.

  "Not quite as smooth as a runway," Ti shouted, grinning and sparing her a bright glance at last. "But good enough for company work . . ."

  All right, so nobody else was gibbering in terror, maybe this was the way a landing was supposed to be. They rolled to a quite demure stop in the middle of nowhere. Toothed carmine mountains ringed an empty horizon. Silence fell.

  "Well," said Ti, "here we are. . . ." He released his harness with a snap and turned to Dr. Minchenko, struggling up out of the engineer's seat. "Now what? Where is she?"

  "If you would be good enough," said Dr. Minchenko, "to provide us with an exterior scan . . ."

  A view of the horizon scrolled slowly several times through a monitor, as the minutes ticked by in Silver's brain. The gravity, Silver discovered, was not nearly so awful as Claire had described it. It was much like the time spent under acceleration on the way to the wormhole, only very still and without vibration, or like at the transfer station only stronger. It would have helped if the design of the seat had matched the design of her body.

  "What if Rodeo Traffic Control saw us land?" she said. "What if GalacTech gets here first?"

  "It's more frightening to think traffic control might have missed us," said Ti. "As for who gets here first—well, Dr. Minchenko?"

  "Mm," he said glumly. Then he brightened, leaned forward and froze the scan, and put his finger on a small smudge in the screen, perhaps fifteen kilometers distant.

  "Dust devil?" said Ti, plainly trying to control his hopes.

  The smudge focused. "Land rover," said Dr. Minchenko, smiling in satisfaction. "Oh, good girl."

  The smudge grew into a boiling vortex of orange dust spun up behind a speeding land rover. Five minutes later the vehicle braked to a halt beside the shuttle's forward hatchway. The figure under the dusty bubble canopy paused to adjust a breath mask, then the bubble swung up and the side ramp swung down.

  Dr. Minchenko adjusted his own breath mask firmly over his nose and, followed by Ti, rushed down the shuttle stairs to assist the frail, silver-haired woman who was struggling with an assortment of oddly-shaped packages. She gave them all up to the men with evident gladness, but for a thick black case shaped rather like a spoon which she clutched to her bosom in much the same way, Silver thought, as Claire clutched Andy. Dr. Minchenko shepherded his lady anxiously upward toward the airlock—her knees moved stiffly, on the stairs—and through, where they could at last pull down their masks and speak clearly.

  "Are you all right, Warren?" Madame Minchenko asked.

  "Perfectly," he assured her.

  "I could bring almost nothing—I scarcely knew what to choose."

  "Think of the vast amounts of money we shall save on shipping charges, then."

  Silver was fascinated by the way gravity gave form to Madame Minchenko's dress. It was a warm, dark fabric with a silver belt at the waist, and hung in soft folds about her booted ankles. The skirt swirled as Madame Minchenko stepped, echoing her agitation.

  "It's utter madness. We're too old to become refugees. I had to leave my harpsichord!"

  Dr. Minchenko patted her sympathetically on the shoulder. "It wouldn't work in free fall anyway. The little pluckers fall back into place by gravity." His voice cracked with urgency, "But they're trying to kill my quaddies, Ivy!"

  "Yes, yes, I understand . . ." Madame Minchenko twitched a somewhat strained and absent smile at Silver, who hung one-handed from a strap listening. "You must be Silver?"

  "Yes, Madame Minchenko," said Silver breathlessly in her most-politest voice. This woman was quite the most aged downsider Silver had ever seen, bar Dr. Minchenko and Dr. Cay himself.

  "We must go now, to get Tony," Dr. Minchenko said. "We'll be back as quick as we can drive. Silver will help you; she's very good. Hold the ship!"

  The two men hustled back out, and within moments the land rover was boiling off across the barren landscape.

  Silver and Madame Minchenko were left regarding each other.

  "Well," said Madame Minchenko.

  "I'm sorry you had to leave all your things," said Silver diffidently.

  "H'm. Well, I can't say I'm sorry to be leaving here." Madame Minchenko's glance around the shuttle's cargo bay took in Rodeo by implication.

  They shuffled forward to the pilot's compartment and sat; the monitor scanned the monotonous horizon. Madame Minchenko still clutched her giant-spoon suitcase in her lap. Silver hitched herself around in her wrong-shaped seat and tried to imagine what it would be like to be married to someone for more than twice the length of her own life. Had Madame Minchenko been young once? Surely Dr. Minchenko had been old forever.

  "However did you come to be married to Dr. Minchenko?" Silver asked.

  "Sometimes I wonder," Madame Minchenko murmured dryly, half to herself.

  "Were you a nurse, or a lab tech?"

  She looked up with a little smile. "No, dear, I was never a bioscientist. Thank God." Her hand caressed the black case. "I'm a musician. Of sorts."

  Silver perked with interest. "Synthavids? Do you program? We've had some synthavids in our library, the company library that is."

  The corner of Madame Minchenko's mouth twisted up in a half-smile. "There's nothing synthetic in what I do. I'm a registered historian-performer. I keep old skills alive—think of me as a live museum exhibit, somewhat in need of dusting—only a few spider webs clinging to my elbow. . . ." She unlatched her case and opened it to Silver's inspection. Burnished reddish wood, satin-smooth, caught and played back the colored lights of the pilot's compartment. Madame Minchenko lifted the instrument and tucked it under her chin. "It's a violin."

  "I'v
e seen pictures of them," Silver offered. "Is it real?"

  Madame Minchenko smiled, and drew her bow across the strings in a quick succession of notes. The music ran up and down like—like quaddie children in the gym, was the only simile Silver could think of. The volume was astounding.

  "Where do those wires on top attach to the speakers?" Silver inquired, pushing up on her lower hands and craning her neck.

  "There are no speakers. The sound all comes from the wood."

  "But it filled the compartment!"

  Madame Minchenko's smile became almost fierce. "This instrument could fill an entire concert hall."

  "Do you . . . play concerts?"

  "Once, when I was very young—your age, maybe . . . I went to a school that taught such skills. The only school for music on my planet. A colonial world, you see, not much time for the arts. There was a competition—the winner was to travel to Earth, and have a recording career. Which he subsequently did. But the recording company underwriting the affair was only interested in the very best. I came in second. There is room for so very few . . ." Her voice faded in a sigh. "I was left with a pleasing personal accomplishment that no one wanted to listen to. Not when they had only to plug in a disc to hear not just the best from my world, but the best in the galaxy. Fortunately, I met Warren about then. My permanent patron and audience of one. Probably as well I wasn't trying to make a career of it; we moved so often in those days, when he was finishing school and starting work with GalacTech. I've done some teaching here and there, to interested antiquarians . . ." She tilted her head at Silver. "And did they teach you any music, with all the things they've been teaching you up on that satellite?"

  "We learned some songs when we were little," said Silver shyly. "And then there were the flute-toots. But they didn't last long."

  "Flute-toots?"

  "Little plastic things you blew in. They were real. One of the crèche mothers brought them up when I was about, oh, eight. But then they sort of got all over the place, and people were complaining about the, um, tooting. So she had to take them all back."

  "I see. Warren never mentioned the flute-toots." Madame Minchenko's eyebrows quirked. "Ah . . . what sort of songs?"

  "Oh . . ." Silver drew breath, and sang, "Roy G. Biv, Roy G. Biv, he's the color quaddie that the spectrum gives; Red-orange-yellow, green and blue, indigo, violet, all for you—" she broke off, flushing. Her voice sounded so wavery and weak, compared to that astonishing violin.

  "I see," said Madame Minchenko in a strangely choked voice. Her eyes danced, though, so Silver didn't think she was offended. "Oh, Warren," she sighed, "the things you have to answer for . . ."

  "May I," Silver began, and stopped. Surely she would not be permitted to touch that lavish antique. What if she forgot to hold onto it for a moment and the gravity pulled it from her hands?

  "Try it?" Madame Minchenko finished her thought. "Why not? We appear to have a little time to kill, here."

  "I'm afraid—"

  "Tut. Oh, I used to protect this one. It sat unplayed for years, locked up in climate-controlled vaults . . . dead. Then of late I began to wonder what I was saving it for. Here, now. Raise your chin, so; tuck, so," Madame Minchenko curled Silver's fingers around the violin's neck. "What nice long fingers you have, dear. And, er . . . what a lot of them. I wonder . . ."

  "What?" asked Silver as Madame Minchenko trailed off.

  "Hm? Oh. I was just having a mental picture of a quaddie in free fall with a twelve-string guitar. If you weren't squashed into a chair as you are now you could bring that lower hand up . . ."

  It was a trick of the light, perhaps, of Rodeo's westering sun sinking toward the sawtoothed horizon and sending its red beams through the cabin windows, but Madame Minchenko's eyes seemed to gleam. "Now arch your fingers, so . . ."

  * * *

  Fire.

  The first problem had been to find enough pure scrap titanium around the Habitat to add to the mass of the ruined vortex mirror to allow for the inevitable losses during refabrication. A forty-percent-extra mass margin would have been enough for Leo to feel comfortable with.

  There ought to have been titanium storage tanks for nasty corrosive liquids—a single, say, hundred-liter tank would have done the trick—conduits, valves, something. For the first desperate hour of scrounging Leo was convinced his plan would come to grief right there in Step One. Then he found it in, of all places, Nutrition; a cooler full of titanium storage canisters massing a good half-kilo apiece. Their varied contents were hastily dumped into every substitute container Leo and his quaddie raiders could find. "Cleanup," Leo had called guiltily over his shoulder to the appalled quaddie girl now running Nutrition, "is left as an exercise for the student."

  The second problem had been to find a place to work. Pramod had pointed out one of the abandoned Habitat modules, a cylinder some four meters in diameter. It was the work of another two hours to tear holes in the side for entry and pack one end of it with all the conductive scrap metal mass they could find. The mass was then surfaced with more abandoned Habitat module skin, pounded out and rendered as nearly glass-smooth as they could make it in a shallow concave bowl of carefully calculated arc that spanned the diameter of the module.

  Now their mass of scrap titanium hung weightless in the center of the module. The broken-up pieces of the vortex mirror and the flattened-out food canisters were all bound together by a spool of pure titanium wire some brilliant quaddie child had produced for them out of Stores. The dense gray metal glittered and glowed in their work lights and the reflection from a shaft of hard-edged sunlight falling through one of their entry holes.

  Leo glanced around the chamber one last time. Four work-suited quaddies each manned a laser unit braced around the walls, bracketing the titanium mass. Leo's measuring instruments floated tethered to his belt, ready to his pressure-gloved hands. It was time. Leo touched his helmet control, darkening his faceplate.

  "Commence firing," said Leo into his suit com.

  Four beams of laser light lanced out in unison, pouring into the scrap. For the first few minutes, nothing appeared to be happening. Then it began to glow, dark red, bright red, yellow, white—then, visibly, one of the ex-food canisters began to sag, flowing into the jumble. The quaddies continued to pour in the energy.

  The mass was beginning to drift slightly, one of Leo's readouts told him, although the effect was not yet visible to the naked eye. "Unit Four, power up about ten percent," Leo instructed. One of the quaddies flashed a lower palm in acknowledgment and touched his control box. The drift stopped. Good, his bracketing was working. Leo had harbored a horrid vision of the molten mass of metal drifting off into the side wall, or worse, fatally brushing into somebody, but the very beams that melted it seemed enough to control its motion, at least in the absence of stronger sources of momentum.

  Now the melt was obvious, the metal becoming a white glowing blob of liquid floating in the vacuum, struggling toward the shape of a perfect sphere. Boy, is that stuff ever going to be pure when we're done, Leo reflected with satisfaction.

  He checked his monitoring devices. Now they were coming up on a moment of critical judgment: when to stop? They must pour in enough energy to achieve an absolutely uniform melt, no funny lumps left in the middle of the gravy. But not too much; even though it was not visible to the eye Leo knew there was metal vapor pouring off that bubble now, part of his calculated loss.

  More importantly, looking ahead to the next step—every kilocalorie they dumped into that titanium mass was going to have to be brought back out. Planetside, the shape he was trying to get would have been formed against a copper mold, with lots and lots of water to carry away the heat at the desired rate, in this case rapidly; single-crystal splat-cooling, it was called. Well, at least he'd figured out how to achieve the splat part of it. . . .

  "Cease firing," Leo ordered.

  And there it hung, their sphere of molten metal, blue-white with the violent heat energy contained within it, perfe
ct. Leo checked and rechecked its centered position, and had laser number two give it one more half-second blast not for melt but for momentum's sake.

  "All right," said Leo into his suit com. "Now let's get everything out of this module that's going out, and double-check everything that's staying. Last thing we need now is for somebody to drop his wrench in the soup pot, right?"

  Leo joined the quaddies in shoving their equipment unceremoniously out the holes torn in the side of the module. Two of his laser operators went with it; two stayed with Leo. Leo checked centering again, and then they all strapped themselves to the walls.

  Leo switched channels in his suit com. "Ready, Zara?" he called.

  "Ready, Leo," the quaddie pilot responded from her pusher, now attached to the gutted module's stern.

  "Now remember, slow and gentle does it. But firm. Pretend your pusher is a scalpel, and you're just about to operate on one of your friends or something."

  "Right, Leo." There was a grin in her voice. Don't swagger, girl, Leo prayed inwardly.

  "Go when you're ready."

  "Going. Hang on up there!"

  There was at first no perceivable change. Then Leo's harness straps began to tug gently at him. It was the Habitat module, not the molten ball of titanium, that was moving, Leo reminded himself. The metal did not drift; it was the back wall that moved forward and engulfed it.

  It was working, by God it was working! The metal bubble touched the back wall, spread out, and settled into its shallow bowl mold.

  "Increase acceleration by the first increment," Leo called into his com. The pusher powered up, and the molten titanium circle spread, its edges growing toward the desired diameter some three meters wide, already losing its bright glow. Creating a titanium blank of controlled thickness, ready (after cooling) for explosive molding into its final subtle form.