by John Barnes
"Then what will happen?"
"Then he'll draw my blood, go read the offer, possibly communicate with you, and one way or another engineer Sesh's escape. While he's doing that he will probably keep me somewhere as a hostage, but he'll keep me in touch with you to make sure that no misunderstandings lead to the evidence being released. When I get the message from you that contains the phrase that we never speak or write, I tell Riveroma to go ahead and get the sliver, and by at least three channels not directly in his control, I notify you that I've done it. His surgeon pulls out the sliver, supposedly painlessly, and I go back to the Hilton. You transfer funds for my ticket home. I catch the next sunclipper.
"Through this entire thing, I stay within budget, avoid entanglement in anything that isn't part of the mission, and keep my mouth shut and my ears open." Jak smiled. "How did I do?"
"You're letter perfect, which makes me extremely nervous, but too late to worry about that now."
"Attention all passengers. Boarding for the ferry to the Spirit of Singing Port commences immediately. Repeat, boarding for the ferry to the Spirit of Singing Port commences immediately. Launch in ten minutes. Please advance through the boarding doors at once."
Sib stuck out his hand, Jak shook it, and the two embraced for a moment. Then Sib whispered, "Do good, be lucky." Jak said "Thanks," and he turned and walked through the doors into the ferry, a squat little cylinder barely a quarter the size of a gripliner, studded all around with the heavy tanks and nozzles of a freeflight spacecraft. He had barely strapped in when the tractor platform, on which the ferry rested, began its crawl up toward the North Pole of the Hive, where the launch loop was already spun up to speed—through the viewports, Jak could see little streaks of white, flattened curves or straight lines, blazing brightly across the stars, whenever the sun reflected off the loop. "Your first trip?" an older man beside him said.
"Yeah."
"Thought so. Nobody looks out the window after the first time." The gwont settled into his reading, comfortably sliding a finger into one nostril. "Boring. Lights and streaks in the sky, then an exciting tangle of pipes and tubes and wires. We've got two months of boring ahead of us, and it starts off with the two-hour bore of getting up onto the launch loop. Enjoy the novelty while there is any." Not surreptitiously enough, he checked his finger, and finding nothing, went back to work on his business report and his nose, bent on digging out everything he could.
Jak resolved that he would look at nothing but the viewport until they were safely aboard the Spirit of Singing Port.
It was not a hard resolution to keep. The loop at the North Pole of the Hive was about 200 km across, an immense circle of dark superconducting material only three centimeters wide and two millimeters thick, spun up to just over one rpm; the loop surface itself moved at about 40,000 km/hour. In principle Jak might have been nervous about that massive ribbon moving at tremendous speed passing within a few meters of him; if a human in a space suit touched it, the human would be converted instantly to bloody rags on a long orbit around the sun, and indeed that had happened a few times in suicides and in careless accidents during outside climbing. But Jak had never heard of any accident involving a ferry, and despite the fact that it was enclosing a superconducting ribbon moving at rocket speeds, rather than an ordinary powered rail, the linducer grapple, visible on one of the many screens in the cabin, seemed ordinary enough. It fastened around the band soundlessly, and the automated voice said, in a bored tone, "We are grappled and waiting for departure on an optimal window in thirty seconds… twenty-five seconds…" and so on down to the words familiar and associated with human spaceflight since before Standard had even been a language—"Five, four, three, two, one, boost!"
As the linducer powered up, it became increasingly magnetically coupled to the band passing through it, transferring an ever-increasing small fraction of the loop's momentum to the ferry. The ferry accelerated along the outside of the loop at about four g, traveling more than three hundred kilometers as it whipped halfway round the loop, crushing the passengers into their seats for about two minutes. "Release in five, four, three, two, one, gone," the mechanical voice said. The linducer grapple opened, the loop fell instantly from camera view, and they were moving in space at five kilometers per second relative to the Hive, in free fall.
Free fall lasted a few seconds, and then the engines cut in for about a minute, putting the ferry on trajectory to intercept the sunclipper. The engine cut out and now they would be in free fall for the next twenty hours.
Jak had seen sunclippers pass the viewports of the Hive many times—the Hive was the busiest port in the solar system, and perhaps three dozen sunclippers passed per year. Since their solar sails were tens of thousands of kilometers across, one could hardly miss them—but they passed at distances of anywhere from a quarter million to a million kilometers, so though their spectacular spread of brightly lit curves, vaults, and bows took up vast parts of the sky for the few hours when they were close by, they had seemed like a comprehensible enough thing, like the pictures of planets from close-in satellites, only a few times bigger than the Earth in the familiar pictures taken from its moon.
But as they neared the Spirit of Singing Port, Jak found himself swept away in awe. His seatmate had pulled on sleeping shades and plugged in a skull jack and was now off in some dreamworld. Jak could hardly imagine how anyone could voluntarily miss this. Though the sails were big enough to wrap Venus and the Earth with enough left over for most of Mars, they were only microns thick and hung on monosil cables too thin to be visible to the naked eye; look at a sail edgewise and it vanished, but seen flat on, it was far brighter than the face of Earth's moon.
Yet among all these great planes and gentle curves of white light, it was almost impossible to pick out the tiny bright dot of the ship itself. Barely a kilometer across, the little sphere at the center of the sunclipper was its whole reason for being, the place where several thousand human souls were born, grew up, had children, and died, where all the working and thinking happened, holding the precious tenth of a cubic kilometer that was all the inside cargo space, plus the tight little complex of chambers, corridors, shops, and workrooms for the permanent crew and the passengers—the space given over to human beings was less than what might be found in a giant hotel.
As their angle of approach changed and the sails moved and shifted in the sunlight, the tiny dot of the habitat, like a bright star, moved in and out of sails and shadows, now visible, now concealed. The viewports were filled from edge to edge with sails; the sky was nothing but the great spread of monosil; and yet the habitat itself remained a little dot.
Presently the little ferry began to bounce and bob, brief accelerations of no more than ten seconds each, as it made its arrival approach. Now the Spirit of Singing Port's habitat was a tiny dark circle, with a distinct area, in the center of the vast brilliant expanse of her sails; they were coming in from the sun side, as ferries always did. The automated systems gradually reduced their relative velocity until they shot across the path of the oncoming sunclipper, about sixty kilometers sunward of the habitat, moving at a few kilometers per second. An instant before they aligned with the sunclipper's loop, it caught the sun in one view camera, and Jak saw the great ribbon, just like the one on the Hive to the naked eye, but if the two had ever been able to be seen together, you'd have known at once that the one on the ship was about a third the size of the one on the Hive.
The linducer grapple closed on the track in a camera closeup. Everyone's life, at that instant, depended on the machines successfully managing speeds measured in kilometers per second, at distances measured in millimeters. Jak toktru wished he had been nicer to his purse.
The grapple did what it was supposed to. They were slammed by over two g of weight as the linducer grapple pulled against the loop, which carried them around in a great arc, bringing their velocity to zero relative to the ship as they glided soundlessly into the receiving dock. "Everyone on board will deboard n
ow," the voice of the ferry said. "Relaunch is in nine minutes four seconds, repeat nine minutes four seconds, from now. Everyone off now." Because so many people had napped through most of the trip, it flashed the lights and made a variety of annoying noises.
Jak knew that his meager bags were supposed to be waiting for him in his compartment on board, and he hadn't taken anything out of his pockets or his jumpie, so he just slung his jumpie on and swam forward to the hatch, which led to a flextunnel, and from there into the ship's receiving bay, a big airlock where a DNA reader took a small skin scraping to confirm that he was the person who owned the ticket. With eight terminals and fewer than twenty passengers, the process took less than ten minutes.
Now there was just the matter of seventy-eight days to fill. The two greatest concentrations of human population in the solar system, the Hive and the Aerie, are in the Earth's orbit, at the stable L4 and L5 Lagrange libration points—the places where the balance of gravitational force between the Earth and the sun on any object is such that if it drifts out of position, it will be pulled back into it—hence the cheapest place to be located, since fuel need not be expended for station-keeping. The L4 and L5 points form equilateral triangles with the planet and sun, so that L4, where the Aerie is, is 149 million kilometers—or just about two months—ahead of the Earth in orbit, and L5, where the Hive is, is the same distance behind.
Though this saves energy and therefore money for the great majority of the human race that just wants to stay where they are, it complicates matters a great deal for the few travelers; there are few cheap or easy trajectories for going between L4, L5, and Earth. The problem would be much worse if it were not for Mercury; almost always, the cheapest way involved making a flyby of one of the libration points, using the solar sails to drop down into a low fast orbit, intercepting Mercury, then using a gravity assist, and the extra force light sails get close to the sun, to send the ship upward on a close pass by either the other libration point or the Earth, with enough momentum to continue on up into the farther reaches of the solar system. On this particular trip, they would be dropping within Mercury's orbit and overtaking that planet, making a flyby there, before shooting up past the Earth, where Jak would leave on the ferry, seventy-eight days after getting onto the sunclipper, having been all the way round the sun (a fact that was endlessly belabored in travel ads touting the glories of vacations on Earth or the moon or in the Aerie—"and every time you travel, you put another year into your life.") Sunclippers never stopped except for overhauls or damage; as Jak left her, the Spirit of Singing Port would be upward bound to the Jovian system.
Jak spent ten minutes trying to speck the ship map, and then just spent the util to have a sprite guide him to his stateroom. The little dot of light, like a stage Tinker-bell, danced down the corridor in front of him. At the moment this part of the ship was in microgravity, so it was easier to airswim and leap than to try to walk for a while, until they descended into the outer rings.
After several turns and descents in a few hundred meters, Jak found himself walking the main corridor of the heavy or "dirtpig" ring of cabins. It had seemed strange to him at first that whereas the expensive neighborhoods in the Hive were the light ones, the expensive cabins on the ship were heavy. It made sense if you realized that people like one-tenth gravity or so—the lightest available in the Hive, and the heaviest shipboard—and pretty much by definition, rich people are the people who get what everyone would like.
The sprite bounded and looped down the corridor. It settled on a door in front of him, making the mad figure eight that indicated it had reached its destination. The door popped open.
Jak's first thought was that he had been delivered to a closet or perhaps a toilet. His "stateroom" was a little rectangular box with a built-in seat at the back, big for a coffin, small for a study carrel.
A white placard on the side wall was titled "Directions for Use of Single Stateroom." On the front of the seat was a handle that he could lift and pull, after bracing himself against the walls with both feet, since otherwise he tended to slip around in the . 1 g. A door opened from under the seat, and a compartment swung open, revealing Jak's bags. He threw his jumpie in with them, and, following the directions, rotated the compartment farther, so that it carried his bags away under the seat.
Another handle appeared on the new surface he had pulled out, so he pulled on that. The structure underneath extended, taking up almost half the remaining stateroom space. He reached over the new surface, gripped the edge of a cushion, and flipped it forward. Small legs popped out and gripped slots in the floor. Jak faced a bed that left him just room enough for his shins between the edge of the mattress and the door.
He folded the bed back and continued to follow the directions; this was amusing, in a horrifying sort of way.
The surprising height of the little room—enough for a tall man to stand upright—was explained by the fact that this was a premier-class stateroom, "with full private bath." With the bed folded back into the seat, pushing on the handle caused the seat to slide into the wall and an inverted suction toilet to emerge from the wall above it. The toilet then rotated down to floor level. Simultane-ously, a shower head emerged from the ceiling. According to the directions, one could either use the toilet for its regular purpose "having particular care to seal the unit before re-storing it," or one could use it as the drain for the shower, allowing the toilet to suck the water out of the room, "again having particular care to seal the unit before re-storing it." Jak thought the repetition was probably warranted considering the consequences of forgetting to do that.
Jak resealed the toilet and folded it back in. The placard had said that there "might be some noise, due to automatic flushing and cleaning, after re-storing toilet." The "some noise" sounded very much like sticking one's head in a running rocket engine.
With his "stateroom" completely explored, Jak set out to see the rest of the areas where passengers were permitted in the ship. Each of the six counterrotating rings of cabins, except the outer "dirtpig" ring where cabin space was priced too light to waste on common areas, had some attraction or other, supposedly. He quickly got the hang of using the scoops to get from ring to ring; the door into the scoop space would not open unless you had at least a half minute to get into the lift box. Once you did, and the door closed behind you, the scoop from the next level, a long gradual slide, would come in under the lift box and carry it up until you matched the next ring for height and speed. It felt like a combination of a slow elevator with a particularly sickening amusement ride.
On each level, Jak discovered that the supposed amusements were the same sort of semantic travesty that "stateroom" had been. The "four pools" on the level just above him were two pairs of individual-sized flowpools on opposite sides of a big rotating drum; you could swim (assuming you didn't become hopelessly disoriented by the Coriolis and the rush of water from the front to the back of the pool), but realistically what they were was high-grav power bathtubs. The "casino" on the next deck was a six-screen gambling machine arcade. Each of the "eleven 24-hour restaurants" on the third deck was two tables with a food dispenser whose ethnicity vaguely matched the painted decorations. The second deck's viv rooms were so small that signs warned against trying to play any game in other than solo seated mode; the "24-hour dance club" on the light deck was an ovoid about five meters on its long axis, with recorded music, a drink dispenser, and some flashing colored lights. Jak had been in at least one jail cell with better atmosphere.
After that tour of the "ultimate in luxury facilities," to quote the sales copy, Jak checked the time and discovered he had used up about forty-five minutes since his arrival. Only seventy-eight days to go.
The viv is the traditional refuge of the truly entertainment-starved, so Jak went to the second deck. But he was used to viv games in big rooms with full contact suits and dozens of people playing, coming and going all the time; these little solitary games were hardly worthy of the name. After an hour of s
hooting it out with bad guys and whipping it out for bad girls, Jak was tired, irritable, and bored.
He still wasn't hungry and anyway dinner would probably not consume an hour. For a few dreadful seconds he considered plugging into some eduviv and studying some subject or other. When he realized he was actually contemplating voluntarily getting more schooling, he wondered how close you could come to going mad in just a couple of hours.
