Confluence 2: Remanence

by Jennifer Foehner Wells

  “Me!” Tinor said cheerfully.

  Jane smiled. She wondered if it was her imagination, but she thought Tinor was looking more feminine the past few days. There seemed to be a pretty blush on her high, angular cheeks.

  Schlewan dipped her head. “I’m afraid we come as a pair, if you’ll have us, Qua’dux.”

  “Oh? Do you think it’s a good idea to bring an adolescent on board, Master Schlewan?”

  “Onto a community ship? Of course it is. It will actually be the safest place for Tinor as the child slips into adulthood.”

  Schlewan took a bite of food and seemed unhurried about explaining. “Tinor is an orphan like me. The child is more than my apprentice. Tinor’s father was killed by nepatrox and ius mother died of a genetic illness when iad was very young. Like a lot of people since the squillae plague, Tinor had no other relatives to assume the upbringing.”

  Schlewan took another bite, chewing thoughtfully. “As the mother’s medical caregiver, I could have put ium in an adoption lottery, but since I was separated from my own children on Sectilia I decided to raise Tinor as my own.”

  Tinor leaned forward. “Medical Master Schlewan is my subidia—surrogate mother.”

  Schlewan went on. “By that time I’d been conscripted as the only living medical master in the area.” She frowned. “I was bound to this place. There are a lot of useful years left in this body. If you will have us, I would be happy, happy, happy to serve you.”

  Ajaya looked concerned. “Why do you say Tinor would be safer aboard the Speroancora?”

  Schlewan washed down a bite with a long drink of water, then sighed. “It is extremely likely Tinor carries the same fatal genetic defect as ius mother. In the days before the plague, such things were easily treated. Here, however…” Her eyes swept the room. “Such matters are not considered important in the larger scheme of things. The child will die if the defect takes hold. Likely within a decade of full pubescence.”

  There was a moment of quiet, then Ajaya broke the silence. “Do you mind if I ask how you survived the plague?”

  Schlewan sobered further. “For me, as it was for most, it was by the narrowest of margins. I was most definitely close to dusk. Some of us just took longer to die. I can’t say whether that was due to some anatomical difference, or whether my body simply harbored fewer squillae to exert their nefarious effect, or if there were other factors. Someone—we assume it was the Unified Sentient Races—detonated several fission reactions in the atmospheres of both Atielle and Sectilia, obliterating nearly all technology at that point. If we had any strength left in us, and if we happened to be in a safe place at that moment, we survived. It took a great deal of time to recover and then to find others. I have trained eight medical masters in the time since, who were then traded to other communities in exchange for goods and services.”

  Ron asked, “If you’re the only medical professional in the area, why would Pledor let you go with us instead of keeping you here in the compound?”

  A look of disgust swept over Schlewan’s face for a split second. “Gis’dux Sten is too young to remember the time before the plague. He doesn’t comprehend the types of medical facilities that are aboard the Speroancora. He will allow me to go for the purposes of keeping himself in good health.”

  31

  Alan was happy to leave the Sten compound for good. It couldn’t happen fast enough, as far as he was concerned. While Jane worked out the details of recruitment among the atellans, He threw himself into the only thing he could trust: work. He had to get that tired old shuttle ready for flight.

  He had the help of Ron, of course, but also Jaross, the woman Jane had brought back with her from the Hator compound. Jaross was an engineer and therefore, in Alan’s book, all right. She’d been trained thoroughly on a lot of sectilian tech, even though much of the tech left from before the plague wasn’t in use anymore. She’d be handy to have around on the ship.

  Jaross watched Alan and Ron work for a while until she seemed to come to the conclusion that they knew what they were doing. Then she asked for duties of her own. She worked hard and she didn’t shy away from getting dirty or from asking questions if she was unsure about anything, which he appreciated. Because relations between the Sten and Hator compounds were strained, she said she needed to stay busy and out of sight of Pledor. That made total sense to him.

  It was good to have help because there was a fuckton of crap to do, but it also irked him. He preferred to work by himself, and with the foul mood he’d been in, he didn’t really enjoy the hassle of trying to communicate in a foreign language all the time, though he knew this was something he would have to put some effort into or life from here on out was going to be miserable.

  He was getting better at it though, every day—almost exponentially better. Mensententia was worming its way into his head, that was for sure. Just hearing it all the time helped. He didn’t have to ask people to speak more slowly nearly as often. Talking was harder, but he was managing.

  They worked around the clock, installing the new power cells in the old shuttle, as well as putting in the nanite production module—which they kept hidden from the Sten people because he got the feeling it would just create additional problems. If Jaross took issue with it, she kept that to herself. Then they painstakingly checked every system.

  There had been a lot of wear and tear on the older craft. Unfortunately they couldn’t just remove the engines from it and plunk them in their shuttle. They were incompatible, of course. So he did the reverse. He replaced every vital system he could with parts from their shuttle. When things couldn’t be replaced or repaired, he surreptitiously dumped nanites on them to reinforce structural integrity, which was basically how they worked on the Speroancora. He gave the nanites raw materials from discarded components and they worked their magic. Without these little machines, they’d have been in trouble. This shuttle was near the end of its useful life. He didn’t want to crash and burn. Again.

  Ron worked on the electrical systems in a similar manner. Ajaya brought them food so that they could stay focused. Tinor liked to watch them and often hung around so quietly that he hardly knew the kid was there until he or she spoke, usually to ask pretty intelligent questions.

  He was wedged into a small space in the dash in the pilot compartment. It would have been much better suited to a skinnier person like Jaross or Tinor, who was sitting in the copilot seat, watching. He didn’t know how long the kid had been sitting there, but he was tempted to put him or her to work.

  He’d removed the emergency release for supplemental oxygen from the dash and the keg-shaped canisters of O2 it was connected to, so he could inspect the components beneath. Tinor pointed to the assembly. “These are for breathing in vacuum?”

  Alan strained his arm to reach with the tool that would loosen the part he wanted to see. A small flashlight was in his mouth. He didn’t look back at the kid. He mouthed the Mensententic word for “Uh-huh” around the flashlight. Finally he grabbed the component and pulled himself out of the tight space. His right shoulder grazed the rough opening. He cursed in English.

  Tinor was unfazed. The kid was examining the components avidly, getting very close, but not touching. Not touching was good. It raised his degree of respect for the kid a couple of notches. “How does this work?”

  He was tempted not to answer. He was in a shitty mood these days. But apparently Jane had decided the kid was going with them, and this technology was his or her heritage. It was good that the kid was curious about it.

  He rubbed his shoulder and straightened.

  Tinor asked, “Do you need medical attention?”

  “No. Look—you pull the lever and it handly releases.” He was mangling the words. He pulled up the ship’s schematic on the copilot’s holograph generator. “You seen one of this?”

  Tinor dipped a hand into the hologram and swung it around, then magnified the part that he or she had been asking about. Tinor swirled a finger around that component and
a text box popped up. “Yes. Every child takes basic engineering and design.” He or she said it sternly, as though Alan should know that.

  The kid seemed intent on reading it, so he went back to work, smiling slightly. The kid managed to teach him something about the Sectilius every time they hung out together. Jane had said that these people were very focused on science and engineering. It was one thing to like about this crazy planet.

  “I told the girls that they upset you. I told them to leave you alone, that you don’t like them to touch your genitalia.”

  He froze. Had he just heard that right? He was pretty sure he had. “Um. Thank you.”

  “Do you prefer to enjoy sexual activities with men?”

  He sat up abruptly and banged his head on a protruding component that he should have tucked back away the night before. He peered around the pilot’s seat and saw Ron grinning at him. Alan rolled his eyes. “No.”

  “Are you are asexual, then?”

  “No! I…” He switched to English. “Jesus, Ron, do you think you could help me out, here?”

  Ron guffawed. “I wouldn’t dream of it.”

  “Asshole,” Alan muttered. He drew in a deep breath and turned back to Tinor. “I like girls—women. Just not people grabbing me. Any part of me. But especially…there. And you, Ron? Do you like it?”

  Ron chuckled. “Under these conditions? No.”

  “Is this a cultural phenomenon?” Tinor asked.

  “Yes,” Ron and Alan said in unison.

  There was a momentary silence. Alan went back to work under the dash and Tinor seemed to be absorbed in the 3-D blueprint. Suddenly Tinor said, “I just want to understand. I’m going to be a girl soon, I think.”

  Alan’s eyes bulged. He heard Ron cough. He lifted his head to see Jaross pause outside and glance in through the open hatch, her ears pulled back and a frown on her grease-smudged face.

  Alan didn’t know what to say. He should say something discouraging. He didn’t want this kiddo to get the wrong idea. But what would he say that didn’t sound…weird or gross? And he had to be careful not to assume he knew what the kid meant.

  He waited too long. By the time he’d formulated something and emerged again from under the dash, Tinor had left.

  * * *

  Alan was brooding in the back of the refurbished shuttle, squished between Ryliuk and Jaross on a shabby recycled bench seat from a land car. It was relatively quiet. The diverse group wasn’t very comfortable yet. He wondered if that would ever change.

  Their merry band of four now numbered nine. Once they were aboard with the Squid, their party would reach the dubious sum of ten—on a ship that was supposed to hold thousands.

  He looked around, sullenly assessing his new crewmates now that he wasn’t busy rebuilding the ship anymore. Jaross’s features were always set in a serious expression, though now free of grease for the first time in days. She always held herself with a queenly air which was oddly punctuated by a light-brown, fizzy mop of hair that she seemed to barely take care of. It was always coming undone from hasty makeshift braids. That might have given one the sense that she didn’t care about her appearance or something if she hadn’t been so freakishly graceful. Her skin was normally toffee colored, though all of the Sectilius, atellan or sectilian, could get as dark as Ron pretty fast when exposed to sunlight—a pretty nifty little metabolic trick and far better than getting sunburned. His own skin was peeling off his face in flakes from his suesupus excursion. He wouldn’t have minded a little extra protection that day.

  Jaross was pure atellan, tall and lithe. Her bones jutted out at angles that made him feel like someone should remind her to eat a sandwich, though it seemed that her appearance was pretty normal, based on what he’d seen of atellans in general.

  Ryliuk was the opposite—just as tall, but built like the Hulk—all muscle and heavy bone structure. He must have had some kind of hybrid vigor going on from mixed parentage. Alan wasn’t too keen on this dude. He apparently was nearly as powerful telepathically as the Squid. That automatically put him on a sort of temporary shit list. So far Ryliuk hadn’t said much, so Alan couldn’t know whether he was as much of a dick as Ei’Brai or not.

  He already knew Schlewan, Tinor, and, of course, Pledor. Now that Pledor was no longer a leader, he wasn’t going by the name Gis’dux Sten anymore. They were supposed to call him Pledor Makya Sten, but Alan declined to be so pleasant after the way the asshole had blackmailed Jane into coming along. He tried not to talk to him, but if he had to, he just called him Pledor, and the others had picked up on it and were doing the same. That seemed to piss the dude off. His lips tightened and his eyes narrowed every time Alan did it, so Alan would be sure to continue.

  It was going to be a fun mission, he thought sourly.

  They’d gotten fairly decent weather for the trip—which meant fewer and lighter storms, not sunny skies. Jane and Ron were flying the shuttle to an island in the middle of an ocean on the other side of Atielle where there resided an antique space elevator.

  Alan worried they were wasting a day of decent weather for this wild goose chase when they should have just used the shuttle itself to achieve escape velocity. But Jane was gun-shy about flying through the atmosphere again. He didn’t blame her, but he also didn’t have high hopes that the space elevator would work.

  On Earth a space elevator was still just a concept—a pretty decent concept, but the materials required to pull it off were almost like something out of a fairy tale. It had to be strong and it had to stretch all the way to geostationary orbit. Granted, that was a shorter distance on a planetary body as small as Atielle, so the materials used wouldn’t need to be as strong as they would for a space elevator on Earth or Sectilia.

  Jaross said it had never been used for anything but taking payloads into orbit. Landings on Atielle were always done manually. Getting payloads to orbit for trading purposes cheaply and efficiently was the primary goal of the space elevator, and when it had still been in use, Atielle’s Ladder had run around the clock.

  Apparently Sectilia had built a twin space elevator. The elevators’ geosynchronous orbits swept near to a Lagrangian point where a trade outpost had been placed. Once a payload was lifted to orbit, it took very little energy to drop it at the outpost. The elevators kept trade costs down, especially since they were only one-way. There was no wait for vehicles to descend the track. It could be in constant operation.

  He perked up when Atielle’s Ladder came into view. There was a tiny island in the middle of a vast sea with a small, fortified, round structure at its center. From there a cable—barely visible until you were right on it—projected vertically and disappeared into the clouds overhead.

  “Well, it’s still here,” Jane said.

  “Am I seeing some twist in the cable?” Ron asked, glancing back at Alan.

  Alan pressed himself against the window as they made the final descent. His brow furrowed deeply. “Huh. I think so.”

  “What purpose would that serve?” Ron asked.

  “Well, I can think of several things,” Alan said, musing. “On Earth, everyone’s always worried about the cable crashing down—but if you mold the thing in a spiral, it falls in a more contained manner. That’s assuming that what we’re seeing here is essentially a stretched-out spring.”

  Jane landed the shuttle on a rocky beach near the building. It was completely deserted and devoid of any wildlife. The topmost greenhouse floor looked brown instead of green like the one in Sten’s compound.

  Tinor asked what they were saying. Jane admonished them for not speaking in Mensententia then translated the gist of the conversation.

  They got out. Alan squinted into the drizzle, trying to see the cable better. It definitely had some twist. The closer they got the more pronounced it was.

  Tinor jumped into the conversation. “A helical shape could be twisted to take the cable out of the path of debris.”

  “The Coriolis force!” Alan blurted out. “As a payload is
lifted, it gains not only altitude but angular momentum—this causes a vertical cable to bias and creates drag. If the cable is a spiral, the angular momentum is always pushing the craft in the right direction, up the spiral. It would be slightly more efficient and, depending on the material used, more durable. It’s genius!”

  Ajaya looked skeptical. “Are we about to need some Dramamine?”

  Now he was getting really hopeful that everything would still be in useful shape. They walked the short distance up to the building, and he was surprised to see that the wide hangar doors lifted automatically. “The building still has power.”

  Master Schlewan clucked. “Someone left the power cells behind. That was poor planning. Those power cells could have saved many, many, many lives over the last decades.”

  Pledor said, “We should take them with us.”

  Jaross looked at him askance. “There is no shortage of power on the Speroancora. We can leave them here for other travelers.”

  They continued to discuss it. Maybe they were even arguing about it. Alan tuned them out. He jogged to the center of the building, which was open to the sky, and looked straight up. At this point the cable was about seven centimeters in diameter, though he was sure it would be much thicker at the other end, at geostationary orbit, where the tension exerted on it would be at its greatest. When he leaned in close, he could see daylight through the circular spiral.

  When he let his gaze come back down to earth, he found himself staring directly into Jane’s eyes. Her expression was wistful and a little sad. He tried not to let that affect him. She’d made her choice.

  “Well? Will it work?” she asked softly.

  He had to look away. “I don’t see any reason why it won’t. Bring the shuttle in here and let’s rig it up.

  32

  Jane watched Alan and Ryliuk huddle together with Jaross, running a diagnostic on the integrity of the cable. After a few tense minutes, Ryliuk turned, smiling broadly, and announced that the cable was viable. They’d yet to find anything that would keep them from the attempt.