by M M Buckner
Earth’s plants died because of chemical alterations in the atmosphere that heated the oceans and drove our weather patterns into cosmic freak-out. When the last tundras burned off, I was building my first Com, working night and day, recruiting coders to patch the sub-Asian Internet back together. Meeting payroll took my entire focus. I didn’t have time to spare for moss and lichen.
“You’re too young to understand.”
“I old, blade.”
“Ridiculous. You can’t be more than sixteen.”
“I been living fast”
Juani stripped the leaves from a broccoli stem and used it to clean his teeth, all the while studying me with his clear brown eyes. They made me nervous, those eyes. If I didn’t know better, I’d have said he felt sorry for me.
“Are you going to take me to Sheeba or not?”
“What happened to Earth?” he said. “For real.”
I propped up my splinted leg and picked at my sock. Earth’s past was not a subject I liked to remember, any more man my own, but the distress in Juani’s eye touched me. Maybe he deserved an answer.
“Rainfall. That’s what we noticed first. It fell too hard in the wrong places, gorging out gullies and washing away the soil. In other places, there were droughts and dust storms.”
The kids scrambled closer again, all ears. Juani wrung out a wet rag and wiped veggie juice from their faces. They probably expected an adventure tale. Ha, they had no idea. Nothing I could say about our magnificent home planet would make sense to them.
“The floods blew out landfills and waste sites. There were toxic spills and leakages. Bad things started washing into the oceans, which were heating up faster than we knew.” I rambled on, knowing the kids wouldn’t understand. “The polar ice melted so slowly, we didn’t notice at first how the ocean currents were shifting. The Ag Corns kept gengineering their major crops to survive the hotter climate. And who cared about a few wild species going extinct?’
Juani sat down with the kids and waited for me to go on, but I couldn’t meet his eyes. I picked at the fungus matted to my sock.
“The big changes came gradually. Wind storms carried poisonous dust as high as the stratosphere. The cyclones got worse, and the tides—”
I scraped at my socks, remembering the filmy floodwaters overtaking my parents’ home. “People had to move inland. There were mass evacuations.”
Who can see the future? I had gone to Delhi for a conference. I wasn’t there when the storm tides bit the coast, higher than any on record. Prashka’s voice lilted over the phone like birdsong. “Don’t worry, my love. We’ll meet in Lahore.” But when the floods took Calcutta, she couldn’t get out. Airline employees seized the airport and auctioned off tickets to the highest bidder. They laughed at her worthless rupees___
Keesha reached up and patted my hand. Her little round eyes held such compassion—ye gilded effigies, I jerked away. I didn’t need sympathy from a prote child.
“Show’s over.” I stood and gruffly waved the toads away. “No more fucking nursery school. Take me to Sheeba now.”
Keesha drew back as if I’d slapped her, and the kids scattered. Juani folded his wet rag and laid it on a bench. Then he knelt beside the table where I’d been sitting and clamped down the tray lid I’d knocked askew. For a moment, I regretted my rudeness. He was brainier than I’d expected. Curious, enthusiastic and fairly polite. Not a bad sort. But I was getting sappy again.
“Sheeba may be lost,” I said.
“Lost here? It just one old tank, man. How she go get lost?”
Juani instructed the kids to finish picking tomatoes. Then he led me back to the ladder well, and he sealed the door behind us. Straight across the well, the reflective silver U glinted from the Up door. We’d entered the solar plant that way, but we were coming out through the Down door. Juani had led me halfway around Deck Two.
“Sick-ward on Four. We go climb.” He helped me hop up the first rung.
The ladder well seemed darker and smellier after the bright hydroponic rooms. Straggling upward, I felt the short ladder slope away again, and no matter how rigid it appeared to my eye, I had to cling with both hands to keep from flying off. The Coriolis effect unzipped my equilibrium. Yet with each step upward, the artificial gravity grew very slightly weaker. At the ceiling hatch, I felt light and nimble enough to pull myself up with my hands. But in this crazy place, “up” didn’t mean what it did on Earth. Climbing the ladder meant moving closer toward the tether that spun Heaven around its counterweight
“Why won’t you talk about the sickness?” I asked when we reached the low ceiling.
Juani opened the hatch, which led to another tiny black enclosure—the safety lock between Two and Three. The engineers should have built some lighting in these double-door coffins between the decks. I made a mental note: Heaven’s lighting needed a thorough upgrade.
“What about it, Juani? Why won’t you tell me?”
He’d turned sullen. Not good. I needed Juani on my side. “Okay, forgive me for prying.”
“Blade, you too keen.”
“My intentions are good, I swear.” We squeezed into the tiny lock, and just as Juani finished sealing us in, a jolt knocked us against the upper hatch. “What was that?” I said.
“Dunno.”
Juani pressed his hand to the enclosure’s floor, apparently feeling for vibrations. I could feel them, too, through the soles of my sock feet. The gunship was firing again.
He said, “We better move outta here.”
He locked the hatch beneath us, then opened the one above, and we hustled up into the next ladder well segment. On Deck Three, the false gravity was noticeably weaker, and I could walk on my injured leg without pain. Juani sealed the floor hatch, then opened the bulkhead door marked D for Down. As soon as the door swung open, a new aroma hit me like a warm bam. I knew that smell. Sweet syrupy protein-glucose base, the smell that gave Heaven its name. I held my nose to keep from gagging, and Juani said, “This the drying room.”
Almost at once, we heard a clanging in the ladder well behind us, and I turned just in time to see the floor hatch open again. Liam popped out and raced past us in a dead run. He moved in long, loping strides into the drying room, and his blond braid streamed out behind. He didn’t so much as acknowledge our presence. Next, Geraldine’s brown face poked up through the hatch.
“What happened?” Juani asked.
“Hull breach on Two.” She elbowed her way up. “Damn commies splintered our X wall. Chief gone to get the welder.”
“My seedlings okay?” Juani’s adolescent voice cracked on the last syllable.
Geraldine shook her head. “Help the Chief get that welder. And bring the houseguest. Maybe we can use him for glue.”
12
KIDS DON’T THINK
“We are always the same age inside.”
-GERTRUDE STEIN
Have I mentioned Sheeba’s arms? Round and long, with fine downy hair. Her young muscles burgeoned gently under taut smooth skin, and how those swelling shapes bewitched me. How I loved to watch her arms move. Especially when she lifted heavy objects like her weight bench or the massage chair.
Sheeba’s vigorous arms filled my thoughts as I pushed and pulled myself awkwardly through the drying room in Three’s light gravity. The ovens stood in rows like battered sarcophagi. They were used to bake raw food product into hard dry bales for easier transport to Earth. But they weren’t operating. The room felt stone cold, and the sight of these nonproducing assets irked me. I visualized the red ink bleeding across Provendia’s balance sheet.
Protein-glucose slaked the world’s hunger—as much of the world’s hunger as could ever be slaked by market forces. Of course, mere would always be pockets of mismanagement and famine. That bearded prophet was right twenty-three centuries ago when he said the poor would always be with us. Still, “pro-glu” was a miracle of chemistry. With appropriate additives and processing, it could be made to resemble any menu item, from peti
t fours to pepper steak. The original inventors sold their patent to Provendia.Com for 60 billion deutsch.
As Juani hurried me ahead, I held my nose to block the saccharine reek. I’d seen plenty of oven rooms like this—on video at our board meetings. They all looked the same. Three decades ago, a Provendia scientist discovered that pro-glu congealed faster in low gravity, and since then, we’d sited all our bulk brewing factories in orbit. We bought cast-off fuel tanks at bargain rates, then rehabbed them as multilevel vat farms. Space garbage made excellent counterweights, and we got our tethers, guidance rockets and radiation shielding from contractor surplus.
None of our other satellites had developed Heaven’s malady though, not so far. To date, our other properties still cycled around the G Ring, functioning at optimum throughput. Who knows why this one unit, A13, was stricken? The situation baffled our analysts—and scared us board members to death. None of us wanted to contemplate another financial panic like the Crash of ‘57. So we altered Heaven’s course to a high polar orbit, locked down communications and laid plans for damage control.
Far ahead, Liam loped in high-arcing strides among the drying ovens, then disappeared around a comer. We found him wrestling with a portable welding rig that was cabled to the floor. Impatiently, he flung his yellow braid over his shoulder and unclipped the last cable. Then he and Juani grabbed its handles and slid the thing across the deck toward the ladder well. I brought up the rear, asking myself why I’d been in such a hurry to follow.
Back at the ladder, Liam punched a switch that irised the huge cargo door open, the door they used to move bales of product down the well. Together, Liam and Juani hoisted the welder onto a suspended freight platform, men used a pulley system to lower it to Deck Two. Geraldine shoved me down through the cargo door, and when I landed on my injured leg, it was all I could do to choke back a curse. The others jumped down after me, and as soon as Juani closed the cargo door, Liam pried open the door to the veggie room.
The bulkhead seal popped open with a sucking hiss, and the door swung inward and banged on its hinges. Wind whistled past my ears, and a herd of little toads burst out. I recognized some of their faces. Keesha for one. Quickly, Juani herded them into the solar plant and sealed the door behind them, while Liam tilted the welder into the veggie room. As we entered behind him, a sudden gust plastered my curls flat.
“Help me shut this door,” Geraldine demanded.
She leaned her short burly body against the door we’d just come through, trying to push it closed against the air rushing in from the ladder well. Her shank muscles popped with strain. Reluctantly, I wedged my back against the door and helped her force it closed. Only after the fourth turn of the wheel did the air stop shrieking through the door’s gasket.
Geraldine gave the wheel one final twist. “We got a bad leak.”
Finding the hull breach wasn’t difficult. We followed the flying bits of green leaves. The seedlings lay flat in their trays, pummeled by the rushing air. I nearly slipped on a wet cabbage leaf stuck to the floor.
Liam and Juani were kneeling at the X wall, working with the welder. A hairline crack ran from floor to ceiling. Liam knelt and pressed the lower part together with his palms, while Juani operated the welding torch. Geraldine pulled a white squeeze tube from her pocket and started extruding thick brown gunk along the crack near the ceiling. Though the crack was barely visible, air escaped through with an ominous squeal.
“Juani, help me hold this,” Liam grunted.
The boy immediately dropped his welding torch and sprang to help press the seam closed, but in the light gravity, they both kept slipping out of position.
“Man, my broccoli,” Juani said panting.
This was taking too long. I grabbed Juani’s welding torch and started working at the bottom of the crack again, while Geraldine made her way down from the ceiling with her brown gunk. As the rupture closed, air shrieked through in a high-pitched scream. Amazing that such a tiny leak could cause so loud a roar. Geraldine and I gradually overwhelmed the crack with our patch-weld and sealer glue. When we met in the middle, the whistling faded.
“Bless a sweet Jeez.” Juani rushed to examine the trays of ravaged foliage. “They down, but they strong. Sooner later, they stand back up.” He sounded as if he needed to convince himself.
Geraldine wiped sweat from her face. “This patch won’t hold long, chief. We gotta fix the outer hull.”
“I’ll suit up. You stay here just in case it breaks loose.” Liam in profile looked more than ever like a predatory hawk. He turned hastily and almost bowled me over.
“Who go help you with the welder?” said Geraldine. “Juani can’t do it.”
Liam was already loping away. “I’ll get Vlad.”
“Vlad supposed to be playing doctor!” she yelled at his retreating back.
Liam halted and half turned. He moistened his lips, thinking. Then Juani leaped out. “I can do it, chief. I won’t faint this time, I swear.”
Liam shook his head, and his face creased like mat of a weather-beaten old man. Then his blue eyes glittered at me. I was shielding myself under a tray table in case the crack opened again, which of course was pointless. If the hull blew, we’d all be swept into space.
Liam lunged toward me and thrust out his hand. “Let me feel your grip.”
What kind of challenge was this? I grasped his hand in a manly squeeze.
“Fair enough. You’ll do.” He yanked me out from under the tray table and steered me toward the ladder well.
“Do for what?” I said, sailing through the light gravity. As if I couldn’t guess. “Call your other crewmates. What do I know about hull repair? You said I could go find Sheeba.”
Liam ignored me. “Juani, clear this section. Make sure the people safe. And Gee, you suit up and lock the bulkheads. Just in case.”
“In case of what?” I said. “Please let me find Sheeba.”
My complaints failed to arouse any response from the chieftain, except another shove toward the ladder. He intended to press me into service as his welding assistant, but why? He should rely on his experienced fellow employees, not me. But who could fathom the mind of an immature prote?
In the ladder well, Liam bullied me across to the Up door and twisted the wheel to open it. When I demanded again why he was forcing an unskilled stranger to help make a critical repair, he took his sweet time to answer.
“Juani get spacesick. Geraldine and Vlad busy. So that leave you.” Behind the bristly mustache, his lip curled very slightly. “Or your lady.”
“Screw you,” I said.
But I was bewildered. A couple of months ago, this factory still had sixty active employees. That’s when we killed the surveillance cameras and stopped tracking the death rate, but surely not that many people could have fallen sick in two months.
“I can’t believe there’s no one else. What about some of those little kids?”
The chieftain gave me a look so full of seeming insolence that I’m ashamed to admit, I cringed. Then he shoved me through the Up door, and I stumbled through the solar plant, trying to make sense of this crazy scenario. Liam, Geraldine, Juani, Vlad, were they the only healthy adults left on A13? Hell, they weren’t adults—-they hadn’t even broken thirty.
I had to jog to keep pace with Liam. In the operations bay, we found the herd of toads. Twenty or thirty of the little beggars huddled together on the floor looking frightened. Don’t get me wrong, I recognize the necessity of children. Haven’t I donated my reproductive fluids to EuroBank? But underagers hadn’t played any part in my life for molto decades, and I’d never seen so many squirmy toads gathered in one place. It was like some misbegotten human rookery. In my ideal world, there would be no need for replacement offspring because we would live forever.
I looked over the children’s heads and examined the ops bay. Heaven’s nerve center. Our site manager had worked there, tracking product volume, value and cost every second to the centime. Inventories, purchase o
rders, shipping transmittals, profit and loss, every vital statistic was documented here. But the Net nodes were gone. Our manager must have absconded with the hardware when he fled.
The ops bay held only a few useless dumb terminals, overturned wastebaskets and broken lamps. Empty desks lay tumbled on their sides, drawers flung helter-skelter. Office supplies strewed the floor, some shattered to bits. I saw one stylus impaled in a terminal screen. Watching the children’s anxious faces, I found it slightly pathetic that the protes had taken their revenge on this furniture.
In one shadowy corner, something odd spirated across the wall like a woolly vine. Had one of Juani’s hydropods grown out of control? On closer inspection, it turned out to be a swirl of furry black space fungus following the outlines of the factory’s blossoming corrosion.
We hadn’t gone far when Liam yanked open a service closet and drew out two space suits. Mine and Sheeba’s. Crisp white, with attractive military-style black piping, they looked only slightly the worse for their one brief flight to Heaven. I could see where the tom right leg of my suit had self-sealed. The patch looked solid. A sparkling point of bliss tickled my nerves. These suits would get us home.
“Pick one and put it on,” said Liam.
Never had I expected to see our suits again, and this inept war leader was simply handing them over. My confidence swelled. This was going to be easy. Soon, I thought, Sheeba and I would be drinking toasts back in Nordvik, telling tales and celebrating our escapade. I hefted one of the thruster packs. Sheeba’s had performed just fine, but mine had malfunctioned. Now I saw why. One of Provendia’s noisemakers had ruptured the fuel reservoir. That blackened gash made my neck prickle. Only pure chance had kept my thruster from detonating like a bomb and cutting me in two.
“Leave that,” he said.
No prob. I set the damaged thruster next to the good one and made careful note of the surroundings so I could find the closet later. I took Sheeba’s suit. Then Liam showed me the way to the airlock. No blindfold. No circuitous route. Can you imagine? He led me straight to it. How easy could he make this?
