Places in the Darkness

by Chris Brookmyre

  “A family?”

  “Tourists.” He gives her a knowing look. “Every million they spend pushes us a little closer to the stars.”

  Alice strains to look around, but her head is snugly secured.

  “If you feel you’re good to go, I’ll disengage your restraints. You ready?”

  He means is she ready for physical movement and for microgravity, but these are merely physical considerations.

  “My body seems fine, but my brain feels like it is still catching up.”

  “Don’t worry, that’s perfectly normal too. Do you need any pointers? Like who you are and what you’re doing here?”

  She realises that this is a joke, though it is uncomfortably close to the truth.

  “Probably wouldn’t hurt.”

  It is coming back in waves: articles and fragments of memory washed up like flotsam that she now has to assemble into coherent objects. She hopes this is all an effect of the ascent, and therefore temporary, rather than a result of being in space. Her name is Alice Blake. She is travelling to CdC on behalf of the Federation of National Governments to replace the outgoing Principal of the Security Oversight Executive. She will be here a minimum of six months as long as she doesn’t screw up; considerably less if this woolly-headedness proves chronic.

  She remembers things about her journey but she isn’t sure they are in the right order. The capsule. The elevator. A platform in the ocean.

  Logic helps fill in the blanks between specifics like track between stations. There was a long flight in an airplane. Did she fly direct to Ocean Terminal? No. It was too small to land an aircraft that size. She was on a large passenger jet, a long-haul flight. There was a delay, a problem with hydraulics.

  She remembers the docks, azure water all around the platform, sparkling in the hot sun as she climbed the gangway. She went there by boat, a hydrofoil. She remembers ships moored at other points on the hexagon, offloading cargo. The shouts of men on the vast floating docks working to prepare the payloads for the elevator, the complex tessellation of pallets and cases in the vast hold beneath the tiny passenger capsule.

  There is a soft hum as restraints withdraw from around her body, the head brace folding up and back. She attempts to stand but finds she cannot: one final anchor point at the base of her spine is preventing her from moving.

  “Yeah, before I uncouple the last safety bolt, I have to advise you to please let me know if you think you might throw up, in which case I’ll guide you to the nearest vacuum sluice. A proportion of people get nauseous in microgravity. We still don’t know why: it’s been happening since the first rocket crews, though obviously what they brought up was the right stuff.”

  She doesn’t understand what he means, how twentieth-century astronauts’ vomitus could somehow be a suitable substance, though from his expression she suspects it was another joke. She does not get it, but responds with a polite smile.

  “Just take it slow, see how it feels.”

  Alice hears the clunk of the maglock disengaging and pushes up with her palms. She recalls her briefings on this but the result is still massively disproportionate to the effort. She rises instantly and at speed, shooting up past her escort before throwing out a hand to stave off impact with the ceiling.

  Another childish giggle reverberates in her ears, but this time the source is her own throat.

  As the sensation of drifting through the air registers around her body, she experiences the most intense endorphin rush. It is as though the weightlessness extends beyond the physical, a feeling of the purest pleasure, the simplest, most undiluted awareness of mere being. She is lost in the moment, everything beyond it divested of relevance. It only lasts a few seconds, but even as her body thrills, it is as though this purge reboots her mind. Everything comes rushing back in, the fragments assembling themselves into place, properly this time.

  He guides her towards a circular hatch in the ceiling, a bladed aperture on a surface ninety degrees from the doorway by which she entered the capsule. It dilates in response to his proximity, granting access to an airlocked passage at the end of which is a second blade-locked circle. She is uncomfortably reminded of an automated device for chopping vegetables that sat in her parents’ kitchen, but she obliges as he glides to one side and beckons her to pass through first.

  The second aperture swishes quietly open once they are both inside and its counterpart has closed. Again he urges her upwards. She rises into a white-walled corridor, punctuated by panels of black. As she draws closer, she sees that they are not black, but transparent: there are tiny points of light in the darkness. She is looking into space. Then as she floats closer and higher, her elevation affords her a perspective directly down upon the Earth.

  She gasps, quite involuntarily, looking round at him as though to say: “Are you seeing this?”

  “Yeah. It never gets old.”

  He looks pleased but there is something knowing about his intonation, something minutely self-conscious, like when he said “we are floating in space.”

  She does not have enough experience of this individual to get a reliable reading on his microgestures and the subtler nuances of his speech. She can’t be sure, but something seems insincere, rehearsed. She searches for a comparison. It prompts a memory of a tour guide, an attendant at a theme park. And, of course, that is all he is. This is not her liaison.

  Glancing up again, away from the mesmerising sight of the glowing sphere beneath, Alice looks out into the blackness and observes that the points of light she saw were not stars. They are shuttlecraft, part of a constant traffic between here and her final destination.

  “Getting like a freeway out there,” her escort tells her. “Our fleet of ion shuttles are the workhorses of modern space. CdC is in an orbit seventy thousand kilometres above us, but these old faithfuls make each round trip burning less energy than it takes to drive a city block.”

  He beckons her along the passage, leading her upwards at a perpendicular junction. His hair moves like he is underwater, and as it lifts she sees a thin line below the base of his skull, where no new hair will grow: the site of his mesh implant.

  She skims the wall with her fingers for propulsion, adjusting the force she exerts following her initial miscalculation. The shaft plunges several storeys beneath her unsupported feet at the perpendicular junction, a drop so dizzying as to make her eerily aware of what would happen should the magic spell wear off and gravity apply as it normally does.

  There is another perpendicular turn, before they pass into what a sign above the larger bladed aperture denotes the Passenger Holding Area. It is a cylindrical chamber, with an airlocked doorway to the shuttle bay dominating one side. Along the other, a row of windows looks down into the cavernous interior of the space elevator’s upper terminus, formally known as Heinlein Halfway Station.

  There are seven people already inside the chamber. Instantly she recognises three of them as the other passengers who had travelled in her capsule. She hadn’t spoken much to any of them, though they were all introduced when they boarded the elevator down on Earth. Their names are Kai Roganson, Davis Ikicha and Emmanuelle Deveraux. The other four comprise the family she has been told about: a man, a woman, a girl and a younger boy. The children are spinning in the air, laughing fit to burst.

  Their mother warns them to cool it down or they might be sick. A sign on the wall cautions passengers against unnecessary manoeuvres in micro-gravity. Alice is dismayed that neither entreaty appears to be having an impact.

  They are small, however. Perhaps the sign is generally more concerned with the greater hazards deriving from the potential of adult collisions.

  She has learned that many rules do not apply so rigidly to children, or at least that some discretion may be applied in their enforcement.

  The children are wearing miniature versions of the same environment suit as was issued to everyone else. It is designed to create a perfect seal with a rebreather mask in the event of a pressure loss, but in pract
ice it functions principally as a giant diaper, collecting and filtering secretions during what could be an eleven- or twelve-hour journey between gravity-dependent toilet facilities.

  Astronaut training used to involve learning to pee through a suction tube (crucially disengaging without spillage). She learned its history by way of background prep for the mission. She thinks of the commitment and determination required simply to enter the selection process, the punishing multidisciplinary programmes and simulations that had to be mastered, the sacrifices and risks driven by an unquenchable desire to reach space.

  This triggers a connection in her memory and belatedly, she gets the joke. The right stuff.

  She’s had plenty of preparation and been briefed exhaustively, but none of it was about making the journey. Like everybody else in this chamber, she got here by stepping into an elevator. None of them was trained for the ascent any more than a commercial airline passenger gets flying lessons.

  “Everyone, this is Dr. Alice Blake, as some of you already know. Alice is here with the Federation of National Governments.”

  He reprises introductions for the three she has already met, then indicates the four she has not.

  “Dr. Blake, this is Mr. Sayid Uslam and his wife Arianne. And of course, taking advantage of the environmental conditions over there are their two children Karima and Zack. They are here on a sightseeing vacation.”

  Alice puts the name and the face together. Uslam is an energy magnate, a riches-to-ultra-riches entrepreneur whose family name has run through the infrastructure of Jadid Alearabia since the days of post-oil and post-war reconstruction.

  Mr. Uslam nods and offers the empty smile of someone who knows Alice is not important enough for him to care who she is or why she is here. His wife doesn’t even look, instead floating closer to the children who are now bumping their heads against the glass despite signs specifically warning passengers not to touch the windows.

  Alice does not believe this is one of those areas where discretion must be exercised.

  “What ages are your children?” Alice asks their mother.

  “Zack is six and Karima is almost eight.”

  “Then presumably at least one of them can read the notices regarding contact with the glass.”

  The woman’s eyes flash with barely suppressed outrage. In Alice’s experience this is often the emotional response when a person is confronted with dereliction of their responsibilities. In this instance it does not prevent her from making amends.

  “Zack, Karima, don’t bump the glass or this lady here will have us thrown off the space station,” Mrs. Uslam tells them.

  This last seems an unnecessary level of threat, but children sometimes require exaggeration in order to make a point.

  There ensues a silence in the chamber, an awkwardness that Alice has learned often follows when a person’s behavioural shortcomings have been made explicit in the company of others.

  The individual most uncomfortable in the aftermath appears to be the escort, which is when it occurs to her that the one person he has not introduced is himself. People are often welcoming of a distraction at such moments, so she decides to offer one.

  “Forgive me, but I don’t believe you told me your name.”

  “Oh, my apologies. I’m pretty sure I did, but I’m forgetting you were a little woozy.”

  He is mistaken. Her memory is functioning perfectly now, and she only ever has to be told someone’s name once.

  “Also, on CdC you get used to people’s names showing up on your lens, so we can be a little lax about introductions. I’m Tony Chu. I am the Uslam family’s official guide on their trip, but up here, we’re all about efficiency so everybody doubles up on tasks to avoid any unnecessary redundancy. I’m to make sure you get to CdC and are met by your official liaison. There was a flight delay from New York, I believe?”

  “Yes. I was supposed to be meeting up with a delegation before we took the hydrofoil, but I didn’t make it. I believe they are already on CdC.”

  “As will you be, soon enough. You’re halfway there, after all.”

  He smiles again, indicating a plaque above the shuttle bay door. This time she more quickly identifies the note of tour-guide insincerity.

  The plaque reads:

  Once you get to earth orbit, you’re halfway to anywhere in the solar system.

  —Robert A Heinlein

  “What are they doing?” asks the little girl, staring down into the expansive vault that is the core of the facility.

  “They are unloading the freight compartments of the elevator car that these other passengers just arrived on,” Chu replies. “That’s why you’re having such fun floating around.”

  He turns to address the adults. “We don’t have any centripetal gravity systems here on Heinlein because principally this place is about processing heavy cargo. We’ve got the strongest stevedores in human history: one person can move a forklift load with their pinkie.”

  Alice glances into the cargo bay. She counts six shuttle docks, three either side of an octagonal chamber.

  “The freight is broken down into smaller loads and sent to different destinations around CdC.”

  “Are any of them androids?” asks the little boy.

  “Remember, sweetie, we spoke about this already,” his mother reminds him; not for the first time if the weariness in her tone is anything to go by.

  “We have some of the most advanced automated systems known to man,” Chu replies with professionally cheery indulgence. “But if you mean robots or cyborgs like in the simworlds you may have seen, then I’m afraid not.”

  The kid looks crestfallen, like he had been hoping his spoilsport mom was lying or misinformed.

  Chu reads it and responds with cheerful mock-incredulity.

  “You saying space isn’t cool enough?”

  The boy blushes, shaking his head bashfully.

  Alice thinks of the stuttering history of AI, the intoxication of the early days when a few leaps in progress made people believe this was the beginning of an exponential acceleration. In fact, the sum of what those leaps achieved was merely to educate scientists as to the true complexity of what they were trying to comprehend.

  Someone once described it as like building a tower to the moon. Every year they congratulated themselves on how much higher the tower was, but they weren’t getting much closer to their target. In fact, the higher they built, the more they were able to appreciate its true distance. To Alice, the significance of this could not be underlined more firmly than by the fact that she has just ascended a tower to space, an engineering feat that proved considerably easier to achieve than the artificial replication of human intelligence.

  “There are no androids here,” the kid’s mother affirms. “And when we get to CdC, there will be no androids there either.”

  Her tone is final, but her words remind Alice that she was assured there would be no children.

  As the shuttle-bay lights come on, indicating the arrival of their transport, it is a timely reminder that she has no more first-hand knowledge than this child regarding what awaits her when she finally reaches Ciudad de Cielo, the City in the Sky.

  AWAKENING (II)

  Jesus.

  A near-empty bottle of Scotch on the night stand, a faint tang of vomit from the fold-away john. A headache like artillery fire, pounding explosions of light and pain. Knuckles bloody on both hands, dried blacker than the skin beneath. A faint memory of punching somebody, no recollection of who. And, of course, a hooker passed out naked on the bed alongside her.

  Yep, must be Tuesday. Or Thursday. Whatever.

  Nikki fumbles for the button and turns on a light, confirming that she’s in her own place, so at least she doesn’t have a walk of shame to deal with. Less happily this means she’s got to get rid of the hooker, which is complicated by the fact that this wasn’t a paid gig.

  “Hey, wakey-wakey,” she says, giving the sleeping figure a shake. With her face turned away, Nikki ca
n’t see who it is. Probably Donna, going by the short crop. She remembers talking to Donna in Sin Garden.

  “Come on, sleeping beauty. Time’s up. Off you fuck.”

  The girl stirs and rolls around on to her side. It’s not Donna. It’s Candy, but with a new haircut. That’s what she calls herself when she’s dancing or turning tricks. Her real name is Candace. She’s a sous-chef at one of the fancy restaurants over on Wheel Two. Everybody here’s got two jobs, and those are just the official ones.

  Nikki remembers now. She talked to Donna but it was about business. Donna owes her money. She wonders if Candy stepped in by way of distraction. No. She met Candy in the Vault. But who did she punch, and where? Shit, it’s all so blurry.

  She drank so much last night, except according to the clock, last night is not last night. She’s only been asleep a couple of hours. The hangover is kicking in but technically she’s still drunk. Wouldn’t take too much to get a buzz back on, except she has work to do.

  She didn’t really mean to sleep at all. As far as she can work out, the last time she woke up in this bed was only about eight hours ago, though she really, really can’t remember shit beyond that.

  She has to get dressed. She reaches for the floordrobe and grabs the garments she discarded in an eager hurry not so long ago.

  “You gotta be someplace?” Candy asks blearily. “I thought you were on Pacific phase.”

  “Only for my day job.”

  “Shit. Well, I’m on Meridian and I’ve been working eighteen hours straight. Can’t I crash here a while?”

  Nikki thinks about it. Either way she’s going to be rid of Candy in about five minutes, so she might as well bank a favour.

  “Okay. But that don’t include refrigerator privileges, all right?”

  Candy sighs.

  “You okay, Nikki?” she asks. There’s concern in her voice, which makes Nikki’s hackles rise.

  “The fuck is it to you?”

  “Just asking. You were in a weird mood before you fell asleep. You were crying. You want to talk about it?”