by Linda Nagata
“Devi, look!”
It was the counterweight at the end of the elevator column. The end of their journey was in sight! A cheer went up among their small group, but even before it died away the light failed. Then only the milky nebula could be seen, and a few bright stars.
Skye fell asleep bonded to the top of the elevator car. The pack got in her way, and every time she wanted to turn over, she awoke. She didn’t sleep much.
Daylight came, and they began a second migration around the car, following the cool shadows, staying out of the light. Had Yulyssa realized yet that Skye was missing? Or would she assume Skye had decided to spend an extra night with Zia?
Ord still did not move.
Skye slept better the next night, though she awoke early. It was still dark on the elevator car. Blinking, she looked up.
Dawn light had drawn a silver crescent on the counterweight. Skye gasped, astonished at its size. It had not looked nearly so big last night. Now she watched the crescent of light widen to reveal an immense disk sitting atop arching struts that sprouted from the elevator column like branches, holding up a shimmering gray sky.
The counterweight balanced the mass of the elevator column. Without it, the column would collapse, plunging downward into the planet’s gravity well, falling through the atmosphere and striking the world with such force that most of the life there would likely be destroyed.
The counterweight.
Skye continued to gaze at it as the elevator ferried them upward.
As they neared the end of their journey, the elevator car slowed. It slipped between the arching struts, each one as wide as the widest tower in Silk, but built on a curve so that its base rested on the column while its far end extended well-out beneath the gray roof of the counterweight. What would it be like to climb one of those struts? To walk up its back until it was possible to touch that gigantic roof?
Skye smiled. Maybe someday she would try it.
Buyu stood gazing directly overhead. “I think we should get off the top of the car,” he said quietly. “We don’t want to be trapped against a roof.”
Skye peered upward, to where the track dove into a black circle carved out of the counterweight. It had to be a shaft. Squinting, she made out flecks of white glowing within the dark circle. “That’s starlight! Buyu? Do you see it? Those are stars peeping through an elevator shaft. We’re going to be carried straight through to the other side of the counterweight.”
So they stayed where they were—and it proved a good decision. Kheth’s brilliant light vanished abruptly as the elevator car entered the shaft. Walls slipped past only a few centimeters away. Buyu’s sigh was audible over the radio system. “Zeme dust. If we’d tried climbing down the side of the car, we would have been crushed.”
The elevator carried them up past dimly lit loading bays, floor after floor of them, each filled with ingots of pure elements: metals, and carbons, and things Skye could not name, all formed into precise blocks, each the size of a house, stored here against the day they would be needed in some construction project. Perhaps they would be used in the creation of the great ship. Perhaps they would bide here, awaiting some other future not yet foreseen.
“I had no idea the counterweight had so many levels,” Zia said softly. “And we’re only seeing a tiny part of it, aren’t we? There’s room here for a whole new city!”
“Several cities,” Devi said, “if the ecology can be balanced.”
Room for new people and new cultures, Skye thought. She looked up, to the patch of starry darkness looming overhead, thinking about the hidden lifeboats that had to be out there, somewhere.
The elevator moved slowly now, only a meter or so per second. Zia said, “Let’s lie flat. We don’t want to be seen.”
Sooth.
They pressed themselves against the roof. Skye kept her head up just high enough to peer over the edge of the car. As they rose into the next loading bay, she glimpsed several figures in skin suits near the far wall, all of them waving cheerfully at the arriving car. Instantly, she ducked her head.
A few seconds later the roof of the car drew even with the roof of the loading bay, leaving them safely concealed within the shaft. Then at last it happened.
They stopped.
Skye sat up slowly, staring at the walls of the elevator shaft, hardly able to believe they were really here.
She craned her neck, looking up. The shaft extended for another ten meters or so. Then it ended. Starlight and the milky threads of the nebula filled the void.
Buyu chuckled. “We could jump from here.”
“And never fall back down,” Devi said dryly. “It’s a lot safer to climb.”
Skye wanted to tell them both to shut up. She worried: What if their radio traffic was picked up by the skin suits in the loading bay? That shouldn’t happen. The skin suits used select frequencies, picking up only those transmissions coded for them … just like a phone call.
Still, she could not shake the sense that someone might “overhear” them. Did the personnel on the counterweight scan for all radio signals?
Why would they?
No one knows we’re here, Skye reminded herself.
“Let’s go,” Devi said. “We don’t have a lot of time to get ready for our crossing to the construction zoo.”
Chapter 20
Reaching the construction zoo was a matter of timing … and insanity, Skye amended, when Devi pointed out the zoo in the distance. She squinted at the chain of lights, looking at them sideways, trying to force them into better focus. Her vision improved with remarkable speed—and abruptly Skye realized why. She spun on Devi. “The zoo is coming really fast, isn’t it?”
“About as fast as you were falling at the end of your record setting jump,” Devi said quietly. Then he added, “It’s within the tolerance of the jump cables.”
Zia groaned. “That jump almost broke me in half! Now you’re telling me I have to do it again?”
“No,” Skye said. “I’m the only one who needs to go.”
“The two of us,” Devi corrected. “You could have trouble getting the lifeboat open.”
“Make it three,” Buyu said. “There’s a lot more to the zoo than your lifeboat, Skye. It could be dangerous.”
Zia sighed. “Buyu’s right. There could be lydras. So I’m going too—but zeme dust!—why is the zoo moving so fast?”
“It’s not the zoo,” Skye said. “It’s us.”
Devi grunted. “The elevator column turns with the planet. We go around once every day—whether we’re at the top of the column or the bottom. Which means that everywhere except at PSO, we’re not in orbit. We’re either going too fast, or we’re going too slow. That’s why, if we stepped away from the column, we would fall away—either toward the planet or away from it, depending on where we are.”
Zia nodded slowly. “But the construction zoo is in orbit,” she said tentatively. “So it goes around the planet at its own speed?”
“Right. And that’s a different speed then ours. The zoo takes about two hours longer to make a full circle.”
Buyu spoke thoughtfully. “So it’s not really shooting towards us. Actually, we’re catching up.”
Devi nodded in agreement. “Though you can’t tell by looking.”
They were silent a moment, watching the approaching lights. Then Skye added softly, “If their periods are only two hours different in every day, then it’ll be days before the elevator and the zoo pass one another again, won’t it? Devi, you got us here just in time … and this is our only shot.”
In the time they had been talking, the construction zoo had grown much larger. Now Skye could just make out circular sections of the great ship being assembled in the zoo, tiny white rings strung in a line, one after the other, their neat order disturbed here and there by softer shapes that she could not identify.
“This is it,” Devi agreed somberly. “There’s no way we can camp out here until the next transit. We have to cross now.”
When Skye turned to look at him, she discovered him down on his knees on the wide plain of the counterweight. He was setting up a knee-high tripod that held the launch gun. She’d seen the gun before, when they were planning this expedition. It was a modified version of the festival guns used to launch dissolving streamers high in the air of Silk. Devi had boosted its power, and added a low-intensity laser beam for targeting. The harmless laser would strike an object and be reflected back to a sensor on the gun, giving them an exact measure of just how far away it was, and the relative speed of its approach. “The targeting system will track the zoo, while calculating its distance, direction, and speed,” Devi had explained. “Then it will launch our cable.”
“Cord,” Skye corrected. The cables used for jumping off the elevator column were called cords. The end of the cord would strike the target and bond to it, creating a seamless high-strength joint. Several seconds after that, the slack would run out. By that time they would all be tied in. When the cord went taut, they would be yanked off the counterweight together.
Of course a sudden, extreme change in speed could be deadly—running into a wall at a thousand meters per second was never a good idea—so the cord would stretch, just as it did on a jump, to cushion the shock. Hopefully, it would be enough.
With her palm raised, Skye turned to Zia. “I’m scared.”
Zia slapped her open hand, completing the jump ritual: “And I’m your mother.”
“Okay,” Devi said, peering at a display on the back of the gun. “We’ve acquired the target.”
“We have enough cord, right?” Zia asked nervously.
“Sooth. Just enough. The zoo will pass between four and five kilometers above us.”
Skye looked at the approaching construction zoo. Now she could easily see the white rings that would someday be part of the great ship. Following after them, she made out a smaller, darker wheel, with lights all around its curved edge. That would be the workers’ habitat. They would need to stay away from that.
Strung through the center of the nearest white rings was a long line of irregular blobs, like poorly-made beads on an invisible wire. They glinted different colors, from pure white, to rose, to red and blue and purple. There was even an empty space between two of them, that Skye guessed to be a bead of purest black, made invisible by the black background of space, and the harsh light of Kheth. “Those beads,” she said softly. “They’re construction material for the great ship, aren’t they? Like the ingots we saw in the loading bays. They’re made of different kinds of matter.”
“Sooth,” Devi said. “They look irregular because they’ve been partially used. There’s a big cache of ingots halfway down the line of rings. That’s where we’ll find the lifeboat. Hey. Look at the far end of that ingot chain.”
Skye squinted as she looked at the last bead in the string. It was smaller than the rest, bright orange in color. And … it moved! She gasped when she saw it. The bead unfolded, blossoming into a flower whose petals were long, writhing tentacles, blazing orange in the light of the distant sun. “It’s a lydra,” she said in wonder.
“Sooth,” Zia agreed. “A full-sized construction beast. It’s getting construction material from the ingots.” Then she added in a soft voice, “We’ll need to stay away from the big lydras.”
Skye couldn’t decide just how big this one was, but it had to be far, far bigger than even the biggest monster in the shipping crate.
“There’s something else we’ll need to stay away from,” Buyu said, his arm raised as he pointed at an object far beyond the line of the construction zoo.
It was only a dot in the distance, but when Skye squinted she could make out a flash of red and green lights. “It’s a ship,” she said. “Tannasen?”
“Sooth,” Buyu agreed. “That’s Spindrift, coming in to pick up supplies.”
When Devi spoke, he sounded grim. “Spindrift is equipped with robotic arms. If Tannasen sees us, he could try to grab us.”
“Yuck,” Zia said. “That’s not the kind of hug I’ve dreamed about. We have to stay out of sight, gang. As best we can.”
Skye knelt by the gun, studying the display. Her skin suit flexed, then hardened, helping her hold the position in the microgravity environment. The zoo was only eighteen kilometers away, and rushing on them with frightening speed. She could see the gun turning on its mount as it tracked the first ring in the line. “We should tie into each other already,” she said, slipping her pack off her shoulder. Her gloved hand brushed Ord’s frozen tentacle. Ord had not moved or responded in any way since they’d gone outside the elevator car. She could almost feel the chill of its tissue – a stunning cold that settled around her heart.
She drew a deep breath to steady herself. What we’re doing … it’s more important than anything else. This thought didn’t make her feel better about Ord – it only made her more determined.
She reached into her pack, and pulled out three pairs of cylindrical cassettes. Each pair was linked by a few millimeters of jump cord, with more cord spooled inside. “I’m going first,” she announced.
Buyu, Devi, and Zia all started to protest, so Skye said it louder. “I’m going first! No argument, okay?”
Something in her voice must have convinced them she meant it, because this time no one said anything.
She handed one pair of cassettes to Devi, and one to Zia. Then, with the third in hand, she felt behind her back for the socket she had recently added to her suit. She found it, and a moment later the cassette snapped into place. “Got it!”
“Compatibility check in progress,” her suit DI announced. “Ten, nine, eight …”
“I’m in too,” Devi said as he locked a cassette into the back of his own suit. “I’m going second.”
Skye felt a slight pressure on her back as Devi tugged at the dangling cassette, unspooling a meter of thin gold cord. He snapped its end into the jump socket on the belly of his suit. Now they were linked, back to front.
Zia tied in behind Devi. Buyu linked to Zia. When they were pulled off the counterweight, the cassettes would unreel hundreds of meters of jump cord, cushioning the shock of their leap across the void, and putting distance between them so they wouldn’t crash into each other.
Skye looked up, to check on the progress of the construction zoo—and gasped. It was almost directly overhead. She glimpsed three huge lydras at work among the separate sections of the great ship.
Quickly, she turned back to the gun. The muzzle was pointing straight up. Grabbing the cord that dangled from a cassette on the gun, she inserted it into her belly socket.
“Compatibility check in progress,” the suit DI said again. “Ten, nine, eight …”
The gun went off.
Skye could not hear it of course—there was no air to carry the sound—but she saw a flash of motion as the anchor shot away. Gold cord payed out behind it, glistening like a single thread of a spider’s web. She knew it must be unreeling several meters every second, yet it looked perfectly still.
Her suit DI announced, “Compatibility check complete. Integration at one hundred percent.”
The gun had picked as its target the first white ring in the construction zoo. Crouching on the counterweight, Skye watched the narrow section pass overhead.
In a tense voice Devi said, “Order your suits to release their bonds with the counterweight. Hurry! We can’t be attached when the cord goes tight.”
Sooth. Skye didn’t want to think about what might happen if the suits were still bonded to the counterweight. Would the cord give way first? If so, the broken end could snap back with enough force to slice them to ribbons. If the suits broke, their bodies would probably tear apart along the same fracture lines.
“Deactivate all hot zones!” Skye ordered her suit DI.
The DI sounded puzzled. “Are you sure?”
“Yes! Yes.” She touched the cassette. “Look. I’m tied in.”
“That line is not secured—”
“I don’t ca
re!” Skye shouted. “Don’t argue with me! Just deactivate all hot zones. Now. The line will be secured in just a few—”
The gun shattered. In the same instant, Skye felt a hard yank against her waist. The cord had gone taut! And the sudden tension had been enough to break the gun into three large pieces. Her eyes went wide as she watched the fragments spiral away into the void. Somewhere out there, the cord must have found a target … but she was still attached to the counterweight. “The line’s secure!” she screamed at her suit DI. “Deactivate—”
She broke off in mid-sentence as she felt her boots peel free, from the heels to the toes. Before she quite knew what was happening, she was yanked off the counterweight. The force of it knocked the air out of her lungs. She hurtled upward, feeling like an abused dokey on the end of a giant’s leash. A barely perceptible backward jerk let her know that Devi had launched behind her. Part of her was glad, but most of her was terrified. She watched the construction zoo pass overhead. She expected to find herself hurtling closer and closer …
But to her surprise, the zoo grew farther away. What was happening?
Think! she ordered herself. It was hard, when she could scarcely get a breath beneath the crushing pressure of this lift.
Still, she tried to wrap her mind around the problem. It was a way of keeping her terror under control. Think.
Getting yanked off the counterweight was like jumping off the column, except she had already been moving at top speed while she stood there waiting. On a jump, she would fall for awhile before she hit the end of her cord, but today she was already at the cord’s end in the moment she left the counterweight. So. If she could turn around, she would see the counterweight racing away.
There was no way she could turn around. A horrible pressure was crushing every cell in her body. She could not move, not even to twitch a finger.
But I’m alive! she thought defiantly. I can still think. So the cord must be stretching, as it was supposed to. Stretching to slow her down gradually, to absorb her momentum so she would not be smashed to jelly inside her suit—even if it felt that way.
