Nara

by M. L. Buchman

  “What’s wrong with right here?” he was shouting. “The rent is right and it’s certainly proved popular.”

  Toying with her beer, she finally nodded a little to one side exposing her profile in the golden light.

  Jaron had never noticed how pretty she was. He preferred more solid women, capable of working beside him in the jungle, but she was undeniably pleasant to observe. A fact that apparently hadn’t been lost on the bartender. Bryce exhibited mirroring as he matched Ri’s body posture, leaning in close, his hand almost touching hers on the table. But he must be aware of what was going on. Her teasing smile was so obvious now that Jaron could feel it spill over to him as well.

  “Were you a bartender before?”

  It was the wrong question. He could see Bryce fold up a little, tucking his head farther between his shoulders, his hand retreating. He shook his broad shoulders as if just waking up.

  “No. No, not a bartender. Cook for a while. I was…many things. But it’s what I am now.” He glowered down at his mug.

  By her narrowed eyes, he could see that Bryce’s answer was as enigmatic to her as it was to himself.

  She flashed a radiant smile and inexplicably Bryce relaxed once more. Did women study how to do that? Was it learned or instinctual behavior?

  Would he have fallen for such a thing himself? He could feel himself smiling even though he was just the observer.

  “Do you enjoy being a barkeep?”

  Bryce shrugged and shouted above a sudden surge in the noise level. “The hours aren’t bad. And I’ve had far worse jobs. The crowd usually has a good time. It’s okay. Mostly.”

  Jaron looked toward the noise and saw a grappling mass a few tables away. Several loud curses were followed by a flailing punch. It connected, though apparently not with its original target, and flattened a man who landed at their feet. Before he or Bryce could react, Ri was out of her seat.

  She grabbed his hand and helped the man stand. As he stabilized on his feet, clearly ready to leap back into the action, she flipped his hand up behind his back. Unable to move against the surprising source of pain, he strutted awkwardly toward the continuing melee. They passed through the grappling bodies as if walking through a quiet meadow. When they exited the other side, she had the original assailant by the ear. They protested as she escorted the two hulking figures to the bar. The other fighters had stopped to watch.

  Jaz dumped a pitcher of rinse water and old foam over each of their heads. Without a pause Ri escorted them out into the corridor and threw them both into the wall hard enough that the sounds of two heads hitting plas could be easily heard in the silent bar. They slid to the floor and, without waiting to observe their dazed, head-wagging condition, she returned to the table.

  A round of scattered applause sounded from the patrons. She turned to stare expressionlessly at the room and the applause died abruptly. She had just proved exactly who was alpha-parrot in the room. Several of the tougher macaws actually departed sheepishly with their metaphorical tail feathers drooping. The bar slowly settled back into normal, if much subdued, conversation.

  Jaron was quite impressed, but Bryce simply stared at her wide-eyed.

  She dropped into her seat and smiled at him, not a hair out of place.

  “Where did you learn to do that?”

  Perhaps Bryce had never observed the fearlessness of a tiny shrewmouse when cornered. He’d seen them successfully chase off predators a hundred times their own weight.

  Bryce was still gawking at her.

  “It’s a part of my job. I’m not the Security Chief because of my great stature.”

  Jaron had forgotten about that, he only dealt with her in the biomes.

  “You were telling me of the joys of bartending.” She actually hiccupped on the last word.

  “It has its moments.” Bryce’s voice was gruff, almost angry. Ri waited for something else, but the mood at the table had definitely changed. All signs of their earlier camaraderie was gone.

  Finally she shrugged, rose, and flipped her seat back against the wall. Grabbing her beer, she chugged it and thunked the mug onto the table.

  “Well, I’ll leave you to play with your barrelful of monkeys. And thanks for the brew.”

  “Anytime.” Definitely anger.

  She plinked a fingernail against the mug wrapped firmly in Bryce’s hand, and sauntered away. There was no other word for it. He’d never seen her walk like that. Every male in the room, and many of the women watched as she moved through the path that opened before her through the crowd.

  Bryce took a swallow of his beer. “You didn’t mention she was Security Chief.”

  Was it anger, Jaron wondered. He wasn’t used to observing human emotion. Was it perhaps fear?

  # # #

  Jaron stood a little past the roar of the bar. The sound formed a solid wall pushing against him even though it had taken an hour or so since Chief Jeffers’ display to recover its normal volume. The corridors were still quite busy this early in the evening. Up and down the curve of L1 people were moving at a much more determined pace than he was used to observing.

  By midnight the corridor’s few inhabitants moved much more slowly, but it was barely eight now and most were full of energy. He followed a small group who were huddled over their commpads as they moved quickly along.

  The pressure waves of vocal energy emanating from R4U pushed him even after it had faded to more tolerable levels. The corridor split down either side of the ag-bay in R4 West. Rather than bypassing the ag-bay, he cycled the airlock, and entered into the L1 field. The heat of the ag-bays struck him, but not with the mighty slap backed up by the jungle’s humidity. The air here almost hurt to breathe. His nose was assaulted by sage, garlic, oregano, rosemary, and many of other herbs.

  The men and women of the swing shift worked around the field. Here there was none of the hurried pace of the outer corridors or even the intense work of the jungle. He walked past a large planting of rosemary, its tall thin branches covered with small, spiky leaves reached well over his head. He’d remembered it as a much lower plant but the tangy odor was unmistakable. A burst of swearing sounded from a few rows ahead.

  “Yer a goddamn cheat, Nelly.”

  Jaron reached the source of the noise. A dozen bushes had been pushed over or uprooted and kicked aside to make room for a crate and some fold-up seats. Two men and three women sat hunched forward with cards clenched tightly in their fists. Bits of scrawled paper were piled in the center of the table.

  A thin, parched, woman with stringy dark hair was shouting at one of the men. “I ain’t no cheat. And there is no way in hell that I’d ever sleep with some goddamn moron like you even if you had won that hand fair and square.”

  She turned to face Jaron who had come to a halt at the opening in the field.

  “What the hell are you staring at? You ain’t gettin’ any either.”

  Jaron raised his hands against her baleful glare and moved away.

  “I won you fair and square, Nelly. Should’ve made a different ante if you didn’t want to pay up.”

  “I’d pay up if I didn’t already know you was so lousy in the sack.”

  Their voices followed him like a high, thin wind as he walked through golden sage and on into the sharp bite of chives. By the time he exited the far airlock he’d seen far more people relaxing than working. Some slept, some read. Once he heard a rhythmic sound he couldn’t identify until a male voice grunted deeply. He never saw the source of the noise lost somewhere in the rich, bay leaf scent of the laurel trees.

  Jaron was glad for the relative sanity of the corridor when he reached the far end. He continued to pass through waves of smells almost as thick as the ag-bay. Rich garlic from a pasta café, the eye-smarting sting of stir-fry with too much chili oil. Human sweat assaulted him where a different sound of grunting echoed out a gym’s ope
n doorway.

  He could see men and women pumping iron, riding exercise bikes, running on machines to nowhere as if the world would end if they didn’t come in first. Most of these specimens of Homo sapiens had far more muscle mass than they could have any use for. Even the women’s arms and legs bulged and rippled with each pull on the rowing machines. Not a single person in his biome would be a match for the weakest person in the room before him. Except perhaps Robbie, but she’d always been strong. This was all quite educational.

  A short way farther on, he arrived at the Arctic biome. The chill radiated out of the walls and into his bones. He hurried down the narrow corridor alongside the dead ice and ocean until he once again arrived in the wide residential areas.

  He’d never been in Northeast before, bounded by the Arctic north and the eastern ag-bay. There was no activity. A patina of dust overlaid the entire area. He stirred it with his feet and realized that only a few other trails of footprints wandered through the corridor. Two of the sets moved along side-by-side and tracked in and out of each abandoned store front along the way. He occasionally lost track of the prints and completely missed when one of the sets failed to continue.

  Carefully backtracking, he found a room where two had entered but only one set had left. He tried to walk away, but after a dozen paces he couldn’t continue. He returned to the door and was once again faced by the blank doorplate. He knew he was being childish, but it took him a full minute to press his thumb to the lock. It flashed red and failed to open. He was relieved, but still could not move away.

  He’d never used his leader authority, yet, almost without his volition, he raised both hands together and double-thumbed the lock. He wished he hadn’t when he saw the empty space.

  It would have been easier if there had been some trace, something wrong, but the normalcy of the barren space was even more threatening. The light from the hall cast his shadow starkly into the darkness. There was no furniture and the echo of his call was enough to daunt him into silence. He had never before considered danger aboard ship worse than a stray fist in one of R4U’s brawls, but when he attempted to step forward he found he had taken a step back.

  The door closed and he couldn’t bring himself to reopen it.

  It wasn’t his business anyway. He continued down the corridor, looking over his shoulder several times. He was intensely aware of the door at his back until long after it was hidden by the ring’s curve. He used the side corridor past the ag-bay in East rather than seeing what lurked behind its closed doors.

  Soon he arrived in the familiar territory at the east end of his jungle.

  # # #

  By the time he had reached his room, Jaron could barely find the energy to thumb into his quarters. He couldn’t imagine why he was so exhausted. It was barely past the time he’d normally leave the jungle, but every muscle in his body screamed for rest.

  He double-thumbed the door lock, staggered across the room, and, for the first time, realized it was as empty as the corridors. What did he have to place on the shelves and walls? All that he loved was in the jungle waiting for him. He shook his head. Maybe he should move back into the trees.

  He forced down a pre-mix carbo-drink and felt a little better. He tossed a minestrone soup pouch into the heater. Before the soup was ready, he wandered into the bedroom and dropped onto the wide platform.

  A loud beep notified him of his mistake in lying down, his muscles were far too weary to attempt any retrieval of the soup. He lay there looking at the ivory ceiling, trying to forget what he had seen as he’d walked the other levels of Ring Four.

  Each level had revealed new and different insights regarding the animal Homo sapiens. Level One was the only one he was truly familiar with and the narrow section of five that contained his quarters and the lift down to his jungle and up to the core.

  Northeast was the worst one on every level below five. The echoing silence of the abandoned area abutting the dead Arctic biome had left him a nervous wreck each time. It was only here on level five, where the corridors continued uninterrupted by the biomes and ag-bays that Northeast was even tolerable. Still it felt darker than the rest of five, if only because he knew what lay below his feet.

  Jaron closed his eyes and tried to block out the only possible conclusion.

  Homo sapiens was not a particularly healthy species.

  Chapter 21

  11 January 1 A.A.

  Ri sat in the command chair and watched nothing happen. She’d been watching it for hour upon hour as being drunk slid agonizingly down into hangover. Stellar One was stable. A twenty-four hour watch was pretty pointless.

  Regrettably she’d been drunk enough to suggest that to Olias. A mistake she would not repeat; he’d rewarded her with a double, back-to-back night watch. Apparently Strickland, the assistant pilot, had gone missing. She’d forwarded the data to the Icarus team for follow-up.

  She tapped the main viewer on and let the image spin with the rings. The stars were swinging into view from above and shooting off the bottom of the screen a moment later. Her chair felt like it was pitching her out onto the floor. The vertigo grabbed at her far worse than when riding the lifts to the core.

  Clamping her eyes shut didn’t stop the slide already begun in her inner ear until her knees hit the floor, her right one complaining bitterly, and she crumbled forward. She groped back to the chair and pressed the stabilize-image button by feel. She opened one eye carefully and checked the viewer.

  Straight down a vast well, the shining disk of Earth left her standing sideways on a deck above an infinite visual fall. She jumped the image thirty degrees and the Earth became a sliver of light along the right of the viewer.

  She lowered herself weakly into the chair. She swallowed hard to keep down the nutrition bar she’d choked down an hour ago hoping the belated protein would counter the hangover. It hadn’t.

  A crescent moon glittered beyond the Earth’s horizon. The sun shone red and gold off the moon’s glass surface. Radiometry had revealed that a half meter of glass covered the moon where it had faced the sun that day. Even Mars was significantly brighter in the sky, when the melted face was toward them; a crystal red ruby in the sky. The iron-rich soil, fused by the bath of solar plasma, sparkled.

  The Earth and its satellite were in the same position as the photograph of Earthrise from beyond the rim of the moon on the wall of her quarters. Except the moon was rising above the Earth.

  Earthrise over the moon’s horizon had been her image of hope in Nara. The hope had been torn away, but she’d never managed to do the same to the picture. One day they would indeed see it from that perspective, the backside of the moon on their way to the stars. All they had to figure out was how to leave Earth orbit.

  She flipped a camera aboard the last remaining satellite that had been safely in Earth’s shadow for long enough to survive and high enough to not need constant orbital corrections from Hanoi Launch. For lack of anything better to do, one of its cameras was aimed at Stellar One.

  She zoomed in until the four six-spoked wheels could be seen spinning on the central axis, only the core and R5 were still. She felt a little queasy as the rings spun through a rotation on the screen, knowing she had just flipped through a complete circle even as she watched. She could make out both the Icarus and the counterbalance. She’d really have to go face Jackson and explain why she’d left his bed with no note or goodbye, but she couldn’t leave her watch duties. Maybe once she was off. Or maybe not.

  The other vator on R5 had never been built at all, but that didn’t matter as there was only the one shuttle. Even if there had been the materials, there would not have been the will to finish it.

  Humankind was becoming stagnant. Maintenance happened, though R3L0 was still all torn up. The response from maintenance was that a full team would show up as soon as they fixed the blowout on R2, but that wasn’t happening very fast either. Of c
ourse, R2L1 East had become quite creepy since the decompression accident. People there slipped out of sight as she approached and, she was sure, watched her carefully after she passed by.

  Ri shifted in the command chair trying to get comfortable, but it was clearly designed by some masochist who didn’t want hung-over watch officers taking naps. She almost brought up a training simulation when a menu option caught her eye. She flashed up the business roster on a side viewer.

  “R4U” wasn’t listed. She tried searching under “Ring Four” as well as bars, saloons, and alcohol. She finally scanned all the businesses starting with “R” and ended up none the wiser. As far as the system was concerned, Bryce’s place didn’t exist. She glanced around the command deck, but she was the only one on duty.

  She searched for Bryce, but the interface wanted a last name. She didn’t know it. “Bryce the Bartender” wasn’t going to cut it. She checked the occupations’ listing, but there was no Bryce under bartender. She edged forward in her seat and called up a full listing of all personnel. She started scanning the alpha list for first names starting with “B” but stopped quickly remembering there were over ten thousand names.

  What idiot had designed a system so that you couldn’t search by first name? She double-checked the R4 maintenance log, but it showed that no one had entered R4L0 other than herself.

  “Liar,” she accused the listing, not that it cared.

  A trick that Olias had once shown her came to mind. It took a bit, but she managed to dump the personnel data. Hundreds of columns of information listed out, but one of them was first name. A quick sort and she had it.

  But she didn’t. Ri bit the inside of her cheek as she scrolled up and down. No Bryce. No Brice. Seventeen Brian’s and over thirty Bruce’s, even one Bryan, but that was no help. There was no nickname column. She dumped the data.