Zero-G

by William Shatner

  “All right,” Lord said, carefully coaxing her. “So you went to Earth.”

  “I went to Earth to—” She stopped herself, like her brain had hit a wall, like the words were too heinous to utter.

  “To try to prevent what happened in Japan?” Lord pressed, just a little more.

  She turned from him, coiling a little into herself. “I didn’t know about that,” she said. “I didn’t.”

  “But you feared something like that.”

  “Not imminently. God, not like this.”

  “You knew it could happen, though.”

  She grew even smaller.

  “All right,” Lord said soothingly, holding up his hands. “Backing off.”

  The irony of having half wished for a new cosmic challenge was not lost on Lord. Apparently, he had one here—full blown.

  The chimes rang out like a symphony of anvils echoing across a plain. “As much as things change form, their nature remains the same.”

  Lord caught her general meaning. “The new is just the old, repackaged?”

  She nodded. “I came to space to escape the limitations of the Earth. Limitations followed, only they took a different form.”

  “Every frontier has unexpected obstacles. When I built my mountain cabin, I read up on the history. My God, the first time that old fur trapper Jebediah Smith ran up against the Sierra Nevadas in California? He must’ve fallen to his knees and both praised and cursed the god that made those mountains. But he went ahead just the same. You’ve seen the wilderness, on Earth and up here. You know.”

  The woman nodded again, slowly.

  Lord eased a little closer, spoke a little more softly. “That’s why we’re here, in a log cabin, with a saddle. Curiosity has to trump fear. Activity over inertia. Progress over entropy.”

  “Progress,” she said, her voice peppered with sudden distaste for the word. “I became a scientist to expand what we know. Instead—”

  Another hard stop. Lord regarded her carefully, trying to find a way in. Words? Looks? A touch? A walk?

  A sneak attack, he decided.

  “What is your area?” Lord asked solicitously. “What do you study on the moon?”

  The wall fell like it was painted on a scrim. “You really didn’t look me up?” she asked with surprise.

  “Don’t like the IC,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “Same reason I disliked flight simulators,” he replied. “They’re a useful tool but, in the end, they’re a simulacrum of experience—the same way the IC is a façade of actually knowing things. Wall after wall after wall of cold information.”

  “I understand,” she said. “One of my professors would only use a blackboard. He said he didn’t feel like a physicist without chalk dust in his beard.”

  “So . . . you’re a physicist.”

  Her eyes grew guarded. “Do you never stop?”

  Part of him wanted to say, I cannot afford to! Millions of lives have been lost. Answers were needed and this was the best way he knew to get them, carefully but without retreat. Instead, he said simply, “I guess not.”

  She remained tight and was once again very guarded. “Director Lord, I do believe you’ve turned me into that fur trapper you spoke of.”

  “How so?”

  “You’ve got me half impressed, half worried.”

  “Why?”

  “I would have thought you’d want all the information you could get as soon as you could get it.”

  “I much prefer this”—he moved a hand back and forth between them—“to a cold tutorial. I thrive on dialogue, nuance. When you’re used to hearing people, not seeing them, in a headset, words become an anchor.” He smiled. “I was never very good in school. Couldn’t study worth a damn. But what I learned on the playground, interacting with people, using my hands to do things—priceless.”

  The scientist began to relax a little. “Astrophysics,” she replied.

  Lord knew that she knew she had just made his point. Her living, face-to-face answer, the way she caressed the word, had told him that it was not just her profession but her life.

  “So you look outward,” he said with the amiable charity of a victor. “Cosmology? Relativistic jets? The supervoid?”

  “What do you know about those?” she asked, interested and a little impressed.

  “Only what I’ve overheard in the comm,” he admitted. “My science agent, McClure, is a major teacher.”

  She hesitated, considered her previous surrender, then replied, “I went to the moon to do particle research. Neutrinos and dark matter. I really can’t say more than that.”

  “About your research?”

  She nodded.

  “Even with—” He circled a finger overhead, at the chimes.

  “It isn’t just a matter of security, though that’s essential,” she confided. “It’s also about . . .” Her voice trailed off and she struggled to restart it; her mouth refused.

  “Finding solutions,” Lord said, interpreting. “You want to know exactly what happened and how.”

  She did not respond.

  “It’s okay to be scared,” he assured her. “It’s not okay to feel guilty. You didn’t do this.”

  “It’s more than that,” she replied. “Have you ever been in a situation where you are the only solution to a problem? Where it is all on your shoulders?”

  “A couple of times,” Lord admitted.

  “Then you know what doubt is like, what that pressure does,” she said.

  “Actually, I don’t,” he said. “I’ve experienced fear, concern for my colleagues, respect for an enemy. But I have never doubted that I would do my utmost.”

  “Did your training give you that?” she asked.

  “No,” he said with a smile. “It’s my nature.”

  “I see. Very bold. I am not.” She studied the serene face before her. “Have you ever been on a trail that you built in a frontier that is utterly black, with no map?”

  “Not yet,” he said. “But personally, I’d welcome the challenge. Would you? Do you?”

  Her stoic non-answer was an answer. But she still hadn’t told him what he really needed to know: why she needed a bodyguard.

  “Let’s talk simple logistics then,” he went on. “Does your presence here have a shelf life?”

  “It does,” she answered that one quickly. “The Armstrong resupply shuttle that took me to Earth will pick me up on the way back to the moon. The ship will stop here to pick me up”—she checked her IC— “in just over three hours.”

  “Do you want to go back to the moon?”

  “I do. And I must.”

  “But you won’t tell me why.”

  Once again, she hesitated. Lord waited. He had promised he wouldn’t push because he hoped that right now Dr. May was going to push herself. Lord had been on the ground with enough pilots who had dropped their first ordnance for a kill, who had blown up the wrong building, who saw children in the car of the right enemy, to know what the desire to unburden one’s soul looked like, felt like. This was a woman who desperately wanted to talk to someone.

  “It’s more than work,” she finally confided. “It’s what else might happen if I don’t get back.”

  “What else might happen?” he asked as calmly as he could. “Are you saying this isn’t a onetime event?”

  She took a breath and held it before exhaling. “You said before this is about ‘finding solutions.’ You were correct. But not just about the theft of data. It is about the possibility of disaster on a scale unprecedented in human experience. It is about weaponized science. That’s why I went to see your colleagues in Washington. I could not remain on Armstrong Base, knowing what I knew, and I cannot go back there alone. I need eyes and ears I can trust while I make that chart into the darkness, finish the road I started
.”

  And then the proverbial sun burned through the mist for Sam Lord. He suddenly understood what his place was in all of this. She had been feeling him out, seeing if she could trust him, and overcoming her natural reticence to talk about her work; now he was going to have to press her for details. All of them.

  What she’d just told Lord—why Al-Kazaz had sent her to him—was that she needed a bodyguard.

  Sam Lord was going to the moon.

  NINE

  SINCE ARRIVING AT the Empyrean, Adsila Waters had felt detached from her home world. She kept telling herself that it would pass, that she had only been here a few weeks, but it only got worse.

  The feeling here was akin to the experience she had every time she crossed the country by jet: those specks crawling on ribbons of roads; those buildings that barely dented the clouds. They seem insignificant. What impact do they have, could they have, on me?

  Up here, the sensation was exponential and she wondered at the wisdom of having an office that investigated matters that impacted a globe whose sole acknowledgments of human activity were tiny lights at night; grand landmarks like the Great Wall of China; and the ­persistent industrial haze that hung over India, China, and Pan-Persia like a campfire in a grotto. Indeed, this was the argument psychologists had made about the difficulties faced by babies born in space. She’d had a heavy dose of it in sensitivity training before coming up here: each ­successive generation had trouble enough connecting with their parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents. It was one thing when music and clothes were outdated. But a planet?

  As she sat at her desk watching news feeds from around the globe and reports from field offices, Adsila was grateful for the one great thread that connected her with the past: her spiritual heritage. That was something she found she had in common with Director Lord. Even though their ancestors may well have fought one another, they had a sense of honored continuity—he through his ancestor Isaiah, she through her Cherokee blood.

  She had been raised, of course, respecting the structure of the Cherokee Nation—how the principal chief wielded executive power, the tribal council oversaw legislative power, and the Cherokee Nation Judicial Appeals Tribunal was caretaker of judicial power. On Earth, that mattered; up here, it did not seem to.

  But the Cherokee belief system? The fact that all things were connected both physically and spiritually; that was vital, proud, relevant.

  “Did everyone see that?” Grainger asked everyone in the command center.

  The voice of the associate executive assistant director was urgent, surprised.

  “Yes, they’re using Fei-Tengs on the water,” McClure said. “What are they, nuts?”

  The agent was referring to the Fei-Teng, Jing-Que, Zhi-Dao, Zha-Dan, China’s guided bombs. They were old-style ballistics, big and brawny and used to create impressive dimensional images when shared over IC. The live feeds—interrupting all the major newscasts—showed the explosives turning the debris that was clogging up the waters off northeastern Japan into a wall of fire.

  “That’s not just a visual,” Adsila remarked. “That’s a statement.”

  “Not following, EAD?” McClure said.

  “The yin and yang of Chinese philosophy,” she said. “Water in the morning, fire at night. Beijing is breaking up the detritus, they can defend their action that way—but they’re also signaling that they can match whatever was done and whoever did it.”

  “How do we know they didn’t do it?” McClure asked.

  “We don’t,” Adsila remarked, watching as the flames reached very nearly to the low-hanging clouds. “In which case this is a bookend. China controls the light with water, the night with fire.”

  “They may have planned this?” McClure said.

  “We are only speculating here,” Adsila cautioned. “You have ideas, you put them out there.”

  “That is sick and opportunistic, if it’s true,” Agent Abernathy remarked.

  Everyone fell silent as views from the Empyrean registered the line of fire burning on the North Pacific. It was massive and had to be terrifying to the survivors who had already seen so much.

  Adsila’s mind moved back to her own thoughts, which were an anchor in the face of any adversity. Whether she was on Earth or in space, Adsila often thought about the story of Creation. The narrative was home to her. Roots and stability. So was the voice that came with it. She remembered when her great-grandfather had first recited the tale, rocking in a creaky old chair beside her bed. He told it over and over throughout her childhood, continuing the oral tradition of the tribe, until every word was known to her.

  “The Great Spirit Unetlanvhi, the ‘Apportioner,’ created Earth,” he had said with confidence but also with awe. “During those seven days, only the owl and the cougar managed to keep their eyes open, watching with wonder what was unfolding . . . the formation of the land, of the sky, of the water. That is why these animals are at home in the dark, their eyes keen and far-seeing. They saw, and bowed to, the sacred water spider who brought our people to Earth in a large basket on its great back. You will know them all,” he had told her, “know them more deeply than any who have come before.”

  Adsila was not certain how much her great-grandfather’s belief influenced her choices, or whether the spirit of the owl and cougar were indeed guiding her. But she did know this: when she first saw the design for the Empyrean, when she noted its profound resemblance to pendants of the legendary water spider with its many arms and legs and towering basket on top, she knew that this was where she belonged.

  The EAD refocused on the data but she wasn’t responding with her usual efficiency. She glanced at the time; it was nearly 10:00 p.m. This had been a long shift—fourteen hours—and unusually intense. Maybe it was time to flutter—a youth-expression she had resisted, a conflating of “fly under the radar,” but which accurately described what she needed to do: fly, get out of the command center, not think about what some scrap of information might have to do with Japan. Besides, who knew what Lord was busy picking up from their new arrival? Whatever it might be, he wasn’t sharing it with her. There was no point thinking too hard about situations when she didn’t have all available information.

  Adsila rose slowly.

  “Going off, EAD?” Grainger asked.

  Adsila nodded. “I’m two hours over RCS,” she said. “Things seem quiet and I want to not think for a bit.”

  Recommended Command Shift was twelve hours, and it could only be extended in the event of an emergency. As long as the ranking officer on-site could be reached, time off was not only recommended, it was mandated.

  “Understood. I’ll be here awhile longer,” the AEAD told her. “Press conference.”

  “Will the Japanese newswoman be there?” Adsila asked.

  Grainger nodded. “She’s going to interview the chairman of the Jade Star. I want to see that.”

  “Very good. I’m going to the lounge,” Adsila said. “I need a roomer.”

  “It’s pretty crowded in all the locations,” Grainger told her, checking. “Oxygen intake is way up. They had to break out the old perchlorate burners to freshen the air a bit.”

  “Chatty damn tourists,” Adsila said over her shoulder.

  The ship was designed to recycle exhaled carbon dioxide as oxygen via the regenerative fuel cells, but that couldn’t prevent the air from becoming stuffy.

  Grainger punched in a code. “Ma’am, roomer supplies in all the bars are out. I reserved you one can at the Scrub. They’re almost gone too.”

  “Thank you,” Adsila said, gracious but also grateful.

  The EAD preferred the mushroom tablets produced in Agro, but electronic cannabis sticks were more popular and weed took priority over the mild hallucinogens—though both were several rungs lower than the production of food. Neither was permitted outside the lounge for reasons that Kristine Cavanaugh h
ad made plain and no one was allowed to have more in their system than the lounge electroencephalogram decreed—technology that had not been operating in the reception area due to the lofty status of most of the guests. The Cloud’s lithium sensors peered into each patron’s dose levels, made the bartender privy to the results, and sealed the door against anyone who had overindulged.

  As she headed out, the young pan-gender shut down some of the feeds, but not all of them. Adsila still wanted to be plugged in and accessible to the data here, to Lord’s IC, and to major event feeds.

  No one on the Empyrean was ever really off-duty, she thought as she turned down the corridor. But they did try to maintain a semblance of terrestrial structure.

  That was challenging in an environment that had to ride daylight to stay above the Earth. Chronometrically, the hours on Empyrean were keyed to Central Standard Time on Earth—to Houston, where ­NA­SA’s Johnson Spacecraft Center Empyrean Command was based. And biorhythmic balance was maintained by mandatory time in darkness—something provided in abundance at the biggest and most popular of the lounges among the station’s guest residences.

  The largest Empyrean lounge was the Scrub, a nickname from astronaut slang to describe any program that not only had many failures but particularly annoying ones. People went here to bond, to commiserate, to wash away the old day with chemicals and optimism. It was consciously designed to be the opposite of the blazing gold expanse of the station—dark, mellow, muted with perpetual nighttime.

  The place was serve-yourself. It was kept supplied by a young man named Stephen who held an advanced degree in aerospace engineering; but so did many more capable people. Up here he was one of two stockers, employed to run everything from recycled toilet paper to the lavatories to fresh linings for the docking-bay foot restraints. In the Scrub, Stephen’s job was to dole out the limited supplies of alcohol, to provide fresh cannabis and mushrooms for the electronic delivery systems, and to call station security in case people tried to get around their EEG-mandated limits.