Zero-G

by William Shatner

  TWELVE

  WAKING, SAM LORD noticed at once that something was different. Several things, in fact.

  Lord snapped to on his cot, its autocontoured fibers holding him snugly in place as always. Unlike most days, however, he had the fleeting sense that he was somewhere else: back in his modest suburban home in Alamogordo, New Mexico, off New York Avenue. That was due to the fact that he was warm—not air-blown warm but human-­proximity warm—and there was a woman beside him.

  His eyes searched the room in front of him. He saw braids and the back of a lunar jumpsuit. The woman wasn’t Erin Astoria, his most recent lover. The hair near his face did not smell desert-dry and dusty, it was the cap-gun smell of space—or moon rocks. The metallic taste sat on the middle of his tongue. Obviously, he’d been inhaling the odor for hours.

  Hours? Dammit.

  Reality returned quickly. Lord was in his log cabin on the Empyrean, Dr. Saranya May beside him. He hadn’t told the staff about his mission to the moon, but the SimAI knew and should have alerted him of the time—

  Carefully disentangling himself from the woman, Lord poked his IC. The clock said they had been asleep nearly three hours.

  “Your vitals indicated you were in much-needed REM,” the SimAI said after announcing the time. “You may take another sixteen minutes based on relative location to the bay and your go-bag needing only dimenhydrinate—”

  “Thank you,” Lord said, even though he was talking to a machine. He terminated the audio with a blink.

  Easing back as far as he could so as not to disturb Saranya as he stood, Lord checked his IC to read up on the status of the lunar shuttle. It was still on Earth, was nearly loaded, and would be at the Empyrean in just under an hour. Though countless hyperplanes had been commandeered to rush humanitarian resources to Japan, the payload of NASA’s craft was deemed urgent and vital to Armstrong Base. Besides, compared to massive cargo planes, the shuttle bay was too small to be worth crowding into that already overcrowded airspace. Nearly half its mass was occupied by the thrusters needed to raise it to Earth orbit and, thereafter, the moon.

  Lord had pills to treat zero-gravity nausea in his small footlocker and they’d have them on the shuttle. He allowed himself a few minutes to gather his thoughts.

  He remembered now, and smiled as he looked down at the woman. Saranya had quickly fallen asleep, as had Lord beside her. He was more exhausted than he had thought and certainly more than he was accustomed to. As he drifted away, he attributed that more to the reception than to his adventure in the cargo bay. Like sitting in his grandfather’s patrol car, hanging around doing nothing was draining.

  It had been a typical sleep—for space.

  When he first arrived on Empyrean, Lord was concerned about his dreams. The colors were more saturated, the movements swifter, and the blue-to-black tableaux never involved Earth. There was no longing for home, no mashup with events or people or places of the past. They weren’t nightmares but they weren’t relaxing either.

  After the second night, Lord went to see Dr. Carter. It was only the second time they had spoken, beyond the cursory medbay check-in Lord had undergone when he first arrived.

  “Some people might say it’s REM taking care of you,” Carter had said in his unwelcoming monotone. “Rapid-eye movement,” he added.

  “Yes, I’ve heard of it,” Lord replied tartly.

  “You’re adjusting to variable gravity and visual cues that are ‘normal’ one moment, tilting the next, then utterly absent a moment later,” Carter went on, oblivious to Lord’s sass. “Vivid and busy and disoriented dreams might be helping you consolidate all of that. I’m not so sure. I do know that babies spend a lot of time in REM.”

  “I see,” Lord replied.

  “It’s in the orientation manual under ‘orientation,’ appropriately enough,” Carter said. “Maybe, when you studied it, you skipped that part, thought they were just repeating themselves.”

  “That’s right.”

  Carter turned his sullen eyes from his own IC to Lord. “You did read the manual?”

  “I keep all four thousand–plus pages at the ready.” Lord indicated his IC.

  “Yet it didn’t occur to you to check there first?”

  “Naturally, it did,” Lord assured him, moving his fingers to bring the document up. “But honestly, Doctor, look—I don’t know a synapse from an apoapsis.”

  Carter’s expression didn’t change as his own fingers moved. “Director Lord, your reluctance to learn by any way other than doing is well documented in your file. I’m prescribing that you at least familiarize yourself with the contents page so that you do not have to divert staff resources, and I’m informing the prime director that you have been so ordered.”

  Lord thanked him for his trouble and left, noticing on his way out the petri dish, labeled BN17, stuck to a wall. It was the first time he had confirmed—and it was absolutely no surprise—that both the doctor and Al-Kazaz had secrets up here. Fortunately, Lord had friends in the Air Force Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Agency. The BN17 bio-nanite program had two components. One was code-named Merlin, after the magician, and was a purely agricultural project that took genetic engineering to a new level; Lord kept meaning to ask Lancaster Liba about it. The other, code-named Rossum, after a fictional robot builder, was a black-ops study in which microscale surgery robots, with lithium niobate IC sensors aboard, took up residence in the brain, through a tear duct or a nostril or even a skin pore. So doing, the tiny robots could not only rebuild or destroy cells, they could plug into the knowledge and memory centers and broadcast that data. Which was illegal, of course. However, so much of what was unlawful on Earth was often just a suggestion or guideline up here.

  Who needs to have nightmares when they sleep? he thought as he left the medbay. They are everywhere on Empyrean.

  Fortunately for his peace of spirit, Lord had long ago learned that he couldn’t fix the system any more than the system could change him. So they circled each other, occasionally crossing swords, each in their own way doing what they thought was best. It didn’t make Lord bitter or frustrated. Somehow, despite centuries of partisan and bureaucratic conflict and struggle, the nation and corporations—who sometimes surpassed the military for its deep pockets—had still managed to put a station in space, to gain a toehold on the moon, to colonize the high frontier. In spite of themselves, people and progress were still a team.

  As were he and Al-Kazaz, even though he had failed to disclose the nature of Dr. Carter’s activities, even though he was one of Lord’s subordinates.

  And so Lord had dreamt of comets, with himself on the tail, now holding it, now riding it with Isaiah’s saddle. Twisting and spinning, he had kept his eyes on the stars that were turning around Polaris like a time-lapse view of the nighttime sky from Earth.

  Lord continued to sit, comfortably crowded on the bed. Since there was time, he scrolled over to the schematics of the lunar shuttle to answer another question that had been on his mind before he drifted off: How were they going to fit in a spacecraft that was laden with everything from spare parts to seeds to amenities like clothes and toiletries?

  Lord saw that the shuttle had the capacity to take on passengers by consigning its cargo to a space pallet that could be deployed behind. He watched the shuttle model rotate before him.

  No, I don’t want to make it life-size and virtual, he dismissed the prompt. Lord disliked the all-consuming “immersive” and “experiential” conceit of IC technology. Though the vast number of users didn’t agree, sometimes it was all right to just watch something or even read it instead of having it read.

  Like driving one of those tandem buses that used to scare me when I was a kid, he initially suspected, though that wasn’t correct: the main joint between the shuttle and the pallet was even unsteadier than that. The pallet would collect, and reimpart to the shuttle, any twists
, imbalances, or changes in direction. The two units had to move together. So it’s more like pulling a speedboat behind your car, he realized. As for passengers, there were fold-down seats as in a military cargo plane.

  He sat there trying to decide whether he should see Dr. Carter before departing. There were conflicting regulations. The FBI rules—which Lord had read—said, “Only persons expressly named in a ­mission-order, written or unwritten, are to be briefed or informed in any capacity, and then at the discretion of the commander on-scene.” Which meant: Lord still wasn’t authorized to tell anyone what he was doing, with whom, or why. Adsila and the others would figure out where he was going when they saw him board the shuttle.

  But there was also the Empyrean charter, which mandated that anyone who was going outbound—meaning to a higher orbit or leaving Earth orbit altogether—had to be approved for flight by a station-based medical officer.

  When orders conflicted, Lord always ignored the one that was least convenient. In this case, he’d follow FBI protocol. He was going to the moon on his own authority.

  He craned to one side, slapped the panel that opened the footlocker beneath his cot, and the small drawer whooshed open. He grabbed the small vacuum-packed strip of pills and tucked them in a side slot of the go-bag beside them. He had never needed them—parabolic dives in his fighter had given him decades of zero-g training—but, just in case, he also didn’t want beads of partially digested crackers and caviar from the reception circulating through the cabin of the shuttle, literally gumming up any exposed works.

  Leaning forward, he placed a hand lightly on Dr. May’s shoulder and gave it a gentle squeeze. The woman started as though she’d been slapped. She gathered herself to a sitting position, threw her legs over the bed, and looked around.

  “We were asleep,” Lord said from behind her.

  She whipped around, momentarily alarmed, then relaxed. “How long—?”

  “Three hours and a frac,” he said. “We’ve got a little time.”

  Dr. May inhaled then exhaled again more slowly. Lord stood. He shook out his hands, a qigong energy-stirring exercise he’d learned in Hong Kong. Throughout Lord’s life, the ancient technique had proven useful for everything from waking up to fending off colds.

  “You shouldn’t have let me sleep,” she said.

  “Why? There’s nothing we can do and you needed rest.”

  “Is there any news?” the scientist asked.

  “I didn’t check,” Lord admitted.

  “Please do,” she said.

  Lord looked at his IC. “There’s nothing,” he said. “Perhaps there won’t be.”

  “I wish I could believe that.”

  “What kind of news do you expect to hear?” he asked.

  “I truly do not know,” she told him. “I wish I did.”

  “Then let me ask it another way,” Lord said. “What else is in danger?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “Saranya? We are past the point of withholding information you consider sensitive. If there are alerts I can give to my superior—”

  “I gave him the alerts and he told me to say nothing,” she replied solemnly. Her eyes went to the chimes and their jingling. “What is in danger? Everything is.”

  “Out here, that’s a big word, Doctor.”

  She turned toward him. “No one is more aware of that than I am. You’ll understand better when we get to the moon.”

  “A name, then,” he said. “Give me that, for now. What do we call your work?”

  She hesitated, then replied, “SAMI. Subatomic Magnification Interface. ”

  “From the sound of that, you—”

  “I’ve come up with the most destructive force humans have ever gotten their hands on,” she blurted. “You say you enjoy trailblazing, Director Lord? I truly hope so, because this is unprecedented.”

  Lord had spent a half century listening to voices from air base towers, from other pilots. He recognized terror when he heard it. He let the matter sit for now.

  Lord left her and packed a few sets of clothes in a small grip, stuffed his go-bag inside, then used the lavatory—an area just inside the cabin with a wall but no door. He didn’t have a lot of experience washing in zero gravity and decided to stick with what he had mastered. He shaved using the foaming chemical depilatory CiliAx, which came in a hatchet­shaped container. The edge of the packaging could be used to scrape away anything the lather missed.

  When Lord emerged from the lavatory, he was surprised to see Dr. May’s eyes and fingers flashing as she worked her way through her IC.

  “I’m looking through security images of Armstrong Base,” she said.

  “I didn’t realize you had any,” Lord said, a trace of annoyance in his voice.

  “I didn’t until now,” she said. “I never needed any. My lab is in a module that will depressurize if the wrong person attempts to enter.”

  “They would be wearing a space suit—”

  “That won’t help,” she assured him. “A space suit cannot fit through the inner door of the airlock. And the inner door won’t close unless an authorized person enters.”

  Lord moved toward her. “So what footage is this?” he asked.

  “Footage?”

  “Imagery,” he said, forgetting that not everyone was old enough to remember film.

  “It was sent over by your superior, PD Al-Kazaz, at my request,” she said. “They are images from a lunar topographical orbiter that show the movements of the only individual up there who also has access to that laboratory.”

  “And that is?” he asked, still annoyed—but at himself. He saw now that Al-Kazaz had sent the imagery to him a little over two hours ago.

  “Dr. Ras Diego,” Dr. May replied. “His field is dark energy. Specifically, baryon acoustic oscillation clustering—he looks for clues about the invisible in the large-scale structure of visible matter, whereas I just try to look straight at the invisible.”

  That part didn’t interest Lord. What mattered was why she was looking into Diego’s movements, and he said so.

  “We fight for a share of the same funding pool,” Dr. May said. “If something went wrong with my research, Dr. Diego would benefit.”

  “Would he kill hundreds of thousands of people for a research grant?”

  “I do not believe so,” she said. Then added, “I would hope not.”

  “Not a dazzling endorsement.”

  “Not a very nice man,” she replied. “To me, anyway.”

  “To others?”

  “Civil,” she said. “He is very absorbed by his work. Little else matters.”

  “I thought all Armstrong personnel had to go through detailed psych profiling to make sure they were a fit for an extended stay,” Lord said. “How did you two end up together?”

  “Honestly? I think we are part of a psych experiment. To see how angry lab rats fare fighting for cheese in a maze.”

  That didn’t surprise Lord, unfortunately.

  “The thing is, he would not have known my research was incomplete,” Saranya went on. “I’m looking to see if I can find some record of his reaction when word of the disaster reached Armstrong Base.” She flicked it off. “Nothing.”

  “Except him legitimately entering his own lab.”

  “Correct.”

  “But you still suspect him?” Lord pressed.

  “None of my research ever leaves the lab,” she said. “Nothing. Someone had to get in there to steal it. That means him . . . or me. And I didn’t do it.”

  Lord checked the time. He cocked his head toward the door. Dr. May rose and exited first. Lord took a last look around before shutting the door, a habit he had acquired when he graduated from flight training.

  In his line of work, he never knew when his next mission might be his last. It was good to have in mind
a recent image of home, wherever that might be.

  Lord and Dr. May did not speak during the five-minute trip to PriD1. It wasn’t an awkward silence; Lord nodded pleasantly at people he knew, Dr. May was quiet with her thoughts. If she were anxious she did not show it; Lord had known enough mechanical and aeronautical engineers at Holloman to recognize when a mind was working on a problem.

  In a way, Lord envied the fact that Dr. May’s mind had a target.

  His own response—“I didn’t check”—when asked about the news actually upset him. If something big had happened, Adsila Waters would have let him know. Otherwise, unless he overheard conversation in the Scrub or in the command center, he didn’t really know what was happening on his home world. Over the past few weeks, Lord had found it increasingly difficult to reflect on earthly problems. It was a subtle change, the same way he’d stopped paying attention to New York City news when he’d joined the air force. But it was real and a little disorienting. The military skirmishes and political machinations and social dysfunctions of humankind were not only distant, they were small and temporary compared to what he saw outside the viewports: the glare of the sun on the vast seas and the proud shoulders of brown-green land that dared to come between them. From up here, time could only be measured geologically, by weather and continental drift, not by human endeavor. Looking down from Empyrean, the human population of Earth was as invisible as neutrinos.

  From the moon? Lord couldn’t imagine what impact human needs would have on him when he got there, since even the Earth’s expanse would seem smaller than a fingernail. He could actually envision a time when generations of people, spread across the solar system—thousands of humans living on a self-sustaining moon, inhabiting the Mars colony that would soon supplant the Jamestown Base that failed in 2035—when all of those people would feel disconnected. It was both unsettling and thrilling, the idea of Terran cultural and ethnic diversity giving way to true human heterogeneity.

  How long, he wondered, before evolution steps to the plate and starts spacefarers on the path to several truly different species?