Zero-G

by William Shatner

  “Learn this, ‘eternal student,’ ” he said contemptuously. “You see these eyes?” He leaned closer, opening those dark, cephalopod orbs. “They’re an improvement over human eyes. No blood vessels in the way of the retina, no imperfections in the optics, no blind spot.” He backed away very slightly, the eyes steady in flat, dull conquest. “Ziv Levy is neither a fool nor a one-night stand. I have relationships, if you take my meaning.”

  She did. Sobriety returned swiftly.

  “I will be contacting you, EAD Adsila Waters.” Ziv snickered again, and leaned very close. “That could just as easily have been you I grabbed. I wonder—would it have grown back?”

  With that, the CHAI took a powerful step back, drew up his pants, and snatched the rug from the floor to cover his chest . . . and to announce his conquest to anyone who saw him. Adsila moved aside and he was gone, his footsteps thumping on the rubber-coated flooring.

  Adsila stood there feeling used, though not for sex. She had used him too and she had expected him to try to pull information from her in the midst of passion. But his parting threat—and the rug which she had just let him take . . . that fear, that paralysis was new, and it was something she began to fear she might not be able to handle alone.

  ELEVEN

  EVERYONE BUT THE Chinese referred to it as the Icicle.

  On the outside, the space station Ch’ih-zhāng, the Jade Star, was a cold white spear in the darkness, white from the sunlight and frosted by the myriad stars in the distant cosmos. It sat eerily still around its central axis, creating no gravity, while its forward, scalpel-shaped bridge seemed to challenge the heavens like one of the terra-cotta warriors of Emperor Qin Shi Huang.

  On the inside, the Jade Star was even colder. That was partly due to the design: porcelain-white walls kept uniformly that color by external aerogel shields, gauzy silica that ingested both radiation and micrometerorites. On these walls were intermittent wall hangings made of knotted red cloth—the color of celebration. They floated weightlessly, like seaweed, occasionally stirred by the passage of one of the station’s occupants.

  Yet most of the impersonal chill was due not to the structure or its trappings but to the personality of its commander, Chairman Sheng Fan.

  Small of stature, slight of shoulder, Sheng nonetheless towered like a mountain over the Jade Star, its crew . . . and the world below it. He had grown up in the Henan Province, where he had studied Shaolin Kung Fu. He had excelled in Leopard style, and to this day walked with his hands taut, like paws: fingertips pressed to the top of his palm, knuckles forward, thumb clenched. He was like a great cat in the jungle, pushing away branches, vines, roots, his eyes set on prey only he could see.

  Seated beside him in his tiny, spartan office was his young personal assistant, Tse Hung, whose quiet expression balanced respect with fear. Tse was not that prey, but he acted like it.

  Both men had been aloft since the core of the space station was completed a year before, and both proudly wore the standard dark-­olive uniform of the China National Space Administration. Behind Sheng were volumetric images of the flags of China and the Jade Star. The former was the traditional red flag with one yellow star with a semicircle of four smaller yellow stars; the latter was a yin-yang symbol composed of the intermingled sun and moon on a starry background.

  On Sheng’s desk was a plaque that floated on the end of a leather strap, one he had once used to protect his wrists during stick fighting. The characters stood for fighting achievement, though he did not mean for them to apply to him as most people thought. They referred to the Jade Star.

  Sheng raised a finger. Tse activated the IC feed, sitting just out of view of the six faces that appeared before them—heads that hung like little worlds, complete with moonlike logos that indicated the many news services for which each reporter worked.

  The forty-two-year-old Sheng looked directly and placidly—some would say dead-eyed—at the face of Hiromi Tsuburaya in his IC. She was one of the half dozen Asian correspondents who had been invited to an exclusive press conference organized by Beijing. Their faces showed exhaustion that went deeper than the usual strain of hardworking journalists. They weren’t just competing for news: they were serving populations desperate for answers.

  “I wish to assure you, our terrestrial neighbors, our friends,” Sheng began without preamble, “that every mind, every resource of this outpost is committed to understanding the disaster that befell Japan and, if possible, to preventing its recurrence. Our condolences go out to the people of a great and resilient nation and to the bereaved families.”

  His words are like the artful knots on the walls, Tse thought as he listened to Sheng. Given how expert he had become at diplomatic rhetoric, it was difficult to believe that the commander had been a physics professor just eighteen months before.

  Among the correspondents arrayed before him, Hiromi was the only one from Japan. The language program translated his words instantly. She thanked him with a courteous nod.

  “Are there questions?” Sheng asked.

  “Yes, Chairman,” Hiromi said even as her head was still rising. “Is it your view that this disaster was natural?”

  “We have no data to indicate otherwise,” the chairman replied with aloof certainty. He said, “Have you?”

  “Not yet,” Hiromi replied.

  There was a hint of accusation in her tone. Sheng paid it no attention.

  “Of course,” Sheng said softly, “the unprecedented nature of this phenomenon requires that we all delve further to ensure that there is no recurrence.”

  “I am informed,” Hiromi pressed, “that Beijing’s humanitarian response has been slow and muted compared to that of other nations. Is there a reason for that?”

  “You should ask Beijing—”

  “I have,” she replied. “They say they are moving heaven and Earth. Have they, sir? Have they moved heaven? Have you?”

  The question was sharp and clearly meant to be taken as more than just a figure of speech.

  “I am one man without the power to do very much,” he said. “I am certain that our people will do everything they can to assist in any way they can.”

  Hiromi’s expression was unconvinced . . . and unforgiving.

  “Where will China be looking to help find answers?” asked Yingluck Chan-ocha of the Thai WorldNet and its Indonesian affiliates.

  “In the seas,” Sheng replied. “We have very delicate sensors on our oceanic assets that are keenly interfaced with equipment in various locations on Earth and also on the Jade Star. We will explore climatic and nonclimatic data and share our findings with Tokyo and other governments.”

  “What kind of nonclimatic data?” the woman pressed.

  “That remains to be determined,” Sheng answered in a monotone that was intended to reassure.

  Yet Hiromi’s pained eyes narrowed slightly. “Do your scientists have any theories to explain this disaster, Chairman Sheng?” the Japanese reporter asked.

  Sheng was impassive. “I believe that we will know more when we have completed our analyses. And yet,” he added pointedly, “I feel I must address the unspoken question. Was this an act of war or terror by some nation against your own?”

  Hiromi did not deny his assessment and waited attentively for his response.

  “Despite the unprecedented nature of the disaster, I do not believe that this was the act of willful aggression,” Sheng said. “Such savagery would stain the soul of a nation, any nation, for untold generations. I assure you, Hiromi, that kind of barbarity does not exist among our people or their leaders. To find such, one would have to return to the Middle East of 2015, or Nanking before the Second World War.”

  His mention of the latter was a rebuke, lost on no one, an allusion to the ancient hostility between their nations.

  The remaining questions were about the space station and its work—though
, as always, Sheng politely declined to answer with specifics. He was pressed, in particular, about the new science module that was cloaked not just in secrecy but in a blanket of redundant electronic security measures.

  “How would our security methods be known . . . unless someone has tried to breach our cosmic research laboratory?” Sheng asked with practiced innocence.

  Tse terminated the IC feeds and, once again, Jade Star was cut off from the rest of the universe. The space station didn’t have the human buzz and animal proximity of other orbiting installations like the American Empyrean space station or the Russian Red Giant. The Jade Star was restrained in its human interaction. The spacious, cylindrical corridors filled with purpose—and that purpose was not to expand human knowledge but to expand China; not to look outward but to look down. Untroubled by the economic setbacks and collapses that plagued other spacefaring nations like Russia and India, Mother China coursed into the mid-twenty-first century on the backs of powerful dragons: rockets spitting fire. Twice a year for the last ten years, new modules had arced skyward from the Gobi Desert. Once aloft, they powered themselves into place, controlled from Earth, by powerful onboard engineering rockets. They were restocked by vessels from Xichang, Guizhou, Wenchang, and Donfeng. Other ships expanded the station’s population exponentially. Now, the 122.7-meter-long station had thirty-two permanent residents. That would continue to grow year after year as Beijing was committed to turning its space platform into a space city.

  Sheng pulled his feet up and floated from the seat. As he straightened his legs, his soft boots connected to the floor like little cats’ feet. As he moved toward the exit, not wasting a motion, it appeared to Tse that Sheng was gliding—a skill the younger man had not been able to master in all his time on board.

  Tse’s eyes focused on a sudden barrage of inflammatory IC posts.

  “Madam Tsuburaya is not allowing the matter to sit,” Tse calmly advised his superior. “Her image and your own are coupled on every newsfeed, asking for an investigation into the station and its scientific experiments—”

  “Expected and unimportant,” Sheng replied as he slid forward. “Instruct Yuen Mui not to share that with us.”

  Tse nodded and informed the Ministry of Space Security in Beijing of Chairman Sheng’s wishes. Tse knew that the ministry would continue to monitor the feeds, as they had done for nearly fifty years. He also knew that it didn’t matter what the rest of the world thought, only that the huge majority of China’s billions would never see or hear the shrill, endlessly recycled complaints from Japanese reporters like Hiromi.

  “Your next meeting is in an hour,” Tse advised, checking the Chairman’s IC schedule. “The premier’s staff has just confirmed.”

  “I will be back before then,” Sheng said, looking straight ahead. He did not simply nod in the stoic manner of all Chinese law enforcement, military, and political leaders. That was one of the first silent habits to go up here: in the station’s weightless environment, such a move might send an occupant tumbling.

  Tse acquiesced by saying nothing.

  The diminutive chairman drifted along the station’s central tube­like corridor, passing without acknowledgment the dozen or so male and female taikonauts, “outer space voyagers,” who traversed it with Sheng. They embodied a different spirit than Sheng had felt as a teacher at the School of Aeronautics and Astronautics in Zhejiang University. The specially chosen workers here were not subject to the industrial pollution and gender inequities that plagued the population on the world below. They were happy, they were proud, they were productive—a rare combination in modern China. They were a sharp and vital future.

  Sheng took a moment to appreciate how the taikonauts drifted, and even flew, in confident harmony with each other. Tse joined them with a polite smile, inwardly delighted to be no longer attempting to walk, and then the commander was alone in a distant corridor, a sector added just four months before, one that required the highest security clearance. Here the red decorations gave way to black and blue gemstones drifting on ribbons—somber colors further signifying this area’s exclusivity.

  Seemingly without instigating the move, Sheng turned around slowly midway through the module and entered a door whose Chinese characters indicated that it was the Development and Research Center. His IC EEG pattern caused it to slide back.

  Sheng felt his muscles tighten. These were the trials that tested a man, the decisions that shaped futures—but also the risks that made life worthwhile. Even before he entered, he had a sense of what the answer to his one question—to the premier’s question—would be. He had pushed the team, worked them relentlessly. But Beijing had expended resources, drawn up a timetable, and expected results. His only task was to deliver.

  You cannot put this off any longer, he told himself. The team had needed a device and it had been obtained for them. The premier will want an answer about its operational status.

  But inside—not very deep inside—Sheng had concerns . . . and his own suspicions. He didn’t like Hiromi Tsuburaya. She had a right to her grief, of course. But that did not entitle her to express the darkness in her heart, to accuse him of concealing a Chinese hand in the disaster. Sheng had seen the reports about Japan, both public and secure. He had told those reporters the truth. And yet—

  It was not Hiromi who troubled him. Nor was it the solid wall of disapproval represented by the other five reporters. They clearly believed her, or at least had reason not to doubt her. And it was more than just the fraternity of their profession. It was also more than fear and jealousy over China’s triumphs in space. It was a sense of the inevitable. Sheng had seen that in the beaten expressions, the broken postures of the once-independent people of Taiwan, of Tibet, of Hong Kong. The world was to be China, by any means necessary.

  No. What unsettled him was just one thing: ignorance. It was a quality he did not tolerate in others, and less so in himself. The press conference merely reinforced how much he didn’t know.

  Sheng floated through another, smaller empty corridor. The door behind him sealed seamlessly before the one in front of him opened and he stepped into what seemed to him like the engine room of a scuttled freighter he used to play in as a boy: a huge, cavernous area, only this one had a ten-meter-long oblong, baffle-covered object hovering in the center. It looked like a coffin festooned with rose petals.

  Dr. Ku Lung was waiting for him, having been advised by Tse that the commander was on the way.

  The lithe, muscular astrophysicist had been floating above the device. He dropped down beside the chairman, facing away, his eyes still locked on the two magnetic horns set fifteen feet apart, which were connected by rows of large, kite-like panels. Three young men and one woman continued to hover high around each side of the object.

  “Well?” Sheng’s soft word managed to sound like a demand.

  “It is essentially ready,” Lung replied, cautiously certain.

  “Essentially?” Sheng echoed with disapproval. “In what way is it incomplete?”

  “Chairman, we built a magnetic lens to focus the ambient neutrino flux,” he said. “It has been enhanced to focus them further, to the density of deep-space haloes where they self-annihilate with enough power to prolong the lives of stars.”

  “I know all of that,” Sheng said with rising impatience.

  “Yes, Chairman,” Lung said. He had not been informing but apologizing. “We know it functions as one and believe it will serve as the other, Commander. So . . . it is ‘essentially’ ready. We will not know for certain until we test it.”

  Sheng grew visibly impatient. “You told me that would have been done by now, Doctor.” Sheng moved closer. Though he was looking up at the taller man he seemed to be looking down.

  “What is wrong?” Sheng demanded.

  “One cannot control the forces of the universe on a schedule,” Lung said. He was uncomfortably aware of the others staring
down at him.

  Sheng was staring as well. They were waiting, clearly expecting more—

  “You did test it,” Sheng said. Then he said angrily, “You tested it—this morning!”

  None of the four scientists spoke. Lung barely breathed.

  Sheng felt his heart throbbing hard, his fingers swelling with blood. “Japan was you,” was all he said.

  Lung’s taut expression said It was us, Commander. When he spoke, he replied, “The—the device, the American device, did not function as we expected.”

  Sheng was staring past the man at the remembered face of Madam Tsuburaya. It wasn’t the inadvertent lie he’d told that bothered him. Nor the destruction they had caused to Japan. It was ignorance coupled with the fact that he was wrong and that bitter, bitter woman was right.

  “But I am confident that you have fixed the problem,” Sheng said coldly.

  Lung was silent. Sheng’s eyes sought the others in the room.

  “Have you fixed the problem?” he yelled.

  No one replied. Sheng’s eyes returned to those of Lung. The scientist stared into the chairman’s dark gaze. “We . . . we . . .”

  “It is ready, sir,” one of the other men shouted down. “I am very certain that the flaw in Dr. May’s computations has been fixed.”

  Sheng looked up at Dr. Bao Hark, then glared at Lung. “Do you concur, Chief Scientist?”

  Lung hesitated. “I would like more time, Chairman.”

  “Very well.” Sheng checked the time. “You have it. Thirty-four minutes. That is when I must report to the premier. What I will be reporting to him is that my team—whose members were hand-selected from over twelve thousand applicants to achieve one goal, one objective—that my team has managed to complete the project.”

  Faced with no choice, like a man about to be shot, Lung seemed to grow a little in stature. “Tell his excellency that it . . . it is ready, Chairman.”

  “He will be pleased,” Sheng replied. “And after my conference I will return to see it activated.”