by Wil McCarthy
“What research?” Yezu muttered, still glowering at Jack-Jack.
Jhoe shook his head. “Have I missed something here? Has Mr. Snyder offended you in some way?”
“Please, boy, call me Jack-Jack.” The white-haired man did not quite have a smile on, but his eyes twinkled merrily.
“I'm sorry.”
“Oh, nonsense. Now, your little friends here”—he looked at Tom and Yezu—“are very amusing, but I think we really ought to go.” He stuck a hand out, in the normal, Terran way. “Boys, it's been a pleasure.”
Silently, bewilderedly, Tom shook the man's hand. Yezu stared at it, declining. Unruffled, Jack-Jack withdrew the hand, and then faded back suddenly into the crowd.
“Uh,” Jhoe said, looking after Jack-Jack and then back to Tom and Yezu again. “He seems sort of... Damn. I don't particularly know why, but I keep doing what he tells me.”
“He does seem a bit overwhelming,” Tom said, still staring after Jack-Jack.
Jhoe nodded, digging at his shirt clasps. “Yes, exactly so. I have to go, okay? Good luck?”
“Certainly.”
“Enjoy your stay with them,” Yezu said, unhappily, his eyes also on the old man's retreating form.
“Well,” Jhoe said, and then he was gone as well.
An elbow or two emerged from the crowd to jostle Tom, but he didn't turn. Crowd sounds competed with the mournful guitars while he stood there, blinking. Impatience and overbearing were generally traits of the young. Never had he encountered a person like Jack-Jack, or even guessed that one might exist.
“People can get very strange, I think, living in isolation,” Yezu said after a while.
Absently, Tom nodded. His grandparents had all died before two hundred years of age, but from time to time he had met a few very old people. Retired NAU faculty, the relatives of his friends... They'd always seemed quiet, slow, a little confused. And sheltered! Why, the idea of T.T. Feng bulling around in a crowded room like this was... ridiculous.
“I haven't been called 'boy' in a very long time,” Yezu said. “This place will take some getting used to.”
“Yeah.” Tom sniffed. “Welcome to the frontier. You want to try that chokeberry wine?”
“Actually, no. What I'd really like to do is wring that fellow's neck.”
Tom followed Yezu's gaze across the room. Looking not at Jack-Jack now but at Jafre Shem.
The President of Unua stood hunched against the wall, beside one of the exits. He spoke, hurriedly, with... Who was that? The woman wore an Introspectia uniform, but one colored light gray rather than blue beneath the gold trim. Her hair, also gray, hugged her scalp in a tight crew-cut. Tom felt certain he had never seen her before.
Jafre Shem seemed very, very interested in speaking with her.
“I'd call it bad form,” Tom said to Yezu, “to threaten the life of a public figure. Bad diplomacy, too—you could create an incident! Spill a drink on him instead. Who there speaks with him, by the way? I don't recognize her.”
“Lin Chelsea, I would think,” Yezu said.
“The captain?”
For the most part, Introspectia's crew had made themselves available and approachable, if not entirely warm. Chelsea, though, had been a voice on the intercom and nothing more. Tom had heard that she lay strapped to a couch somewhere, fed by tubes and linkwires, literally and permanently mated to her ship.
But it seemed she had a human face after all, at least when the occasion demanded it. He pictured her, with faceless grin, fishing a mask of skin from a jar of reddish liquid... Oh, what an ugly thought!
“Yes,” said Yezu, “I think so.”
“Well. Fancy meeting her here. I wonder what the conversation is about.”
Jafre looked decidedly more animated than he had previously. Indeed, he looked ready to kick off his orange knee-boots and dance a little jig for the captain. But Tom thought he looked a little furtive, as well, like a man with a secret and not much time to tell it. Mouth very close to the captain's ear, with a hand hovering nearby, as if to deflect his voice away from unwanted listeners.
Chelsea, for her part, looked politely and patiently attentive.
Yezu grunted. “I hope she's reading him the Articles of Doom.”
“She looks more like she's listening to a pitch. What could he be trying to sell?”
Presently, a young man, black-haired and blue/gold clad in standard Introspectia style, materialized at Lin Chelsea's elbow. He leaned toward her, much as Jafre had done, and spoke hurriedly.
Jafre puffed up visibly. “Can't you see I'm speaking,” he snapped at the crewmate, his voice inaudible but his mouth quite clearly forming the words.
Lin Chelsea held up a hand to silence him, and nodded at the crewmate to continue. Jafre turned nearly as red as his shiny jacket, and stuffed his hands in his pockets and glared at the captain and the crewmate. He did not seem at all accustomed to being ignored.
Tom watched the young crewmate speak. There seemed an urgency about him, an impatience or frustration. “...gravity well...” Tom watched him say. “Something something in the gravity well.”
The crewmate must have been speaking very quietly, because the Red King leaned forward, as if straining to hear. Chelsea waved him away again. Whatever the crewmate said, it had certainly gotten the captain's attention.
“That looks like something important,” Tom said.
“Huh,” Yezu said, looking away. “If it is, I suppose we'll know soon enough.”
“I suppose so,” Tom said, and found that he wanted a glass of chokeberry wine after all.
~~~
Beth was still in the Tech blister when Miguel got back. She smiled as the door whoomped shut behind him.
“That didn't take long. How's the party?”
“Crowded and bright,” he said. Indeed, it seemed surprisingly dark and gray in here after the harsh lights and screaming colors of the station. His eyes fairly throbbed, even now.
“Was there dancing?” Beth's eyes sparkled. She tucked a lock of hair behind one ear.
“I didn't notice. Listen, it seems we won't debark after all. Captain wants to light out for the hypermass again in twenty minutes.”
Beth's smile drooped. “Twenty minutes? Why the hurry? Good heaven, what did you say to her?”
“I just told her our theory.” Miguel shrugged. He and Beth had hypothesized that a large rock fragment had fallen down the Malsato gravity well, and was somehow breaking up much more slowly than it should do. No other scenario seemed to fit the instrument readings, and the fact that Introspectia was here looking for unusually tough rocks lent more than a little credence to the idea.
“I guess she bought it,” Beth said, a little sarcastically. “What, did she worry about losing a science bonus or something?”
“Well, I did mention that we might be missing the final breakup. That got her attention. I didn't see credit lights in her eyes, though; I think she's just honestly curious. Anyway, we'll be back here in a couple of days. Maybe they'll throw another party.”
Beth smiled again. “If they do, will you dance with me?”
He shook his head, ruefully. “Ms. Lahler, I'm an officer. Best I can do is watch you dance, and even that might get us in trouble.”
Chapter Seven
Air screamed past the window, which still radiated an intense, prickly-dry heat. Jhoe's stomach churned again as the lander banked, cut through a layer of cloud. Ten other people on board, and none of them seemed to have any trouble so far. And how could that be?
After popping from a launch tube somewhere on Port Chrysanthemum's hull, the lander had fired a long series of pulses with its fusion motor, slowing the vehicle down in its orbit. Slowing it down all the way! The damn thing had fallen three hundred kilometers before it started asserting aerodynamic control, and that had been ungentle when it came.
The sky had faded quickly from black to dark brown, and from dark brown to a color which, Jhoe thought, would have to be called de
ep dark brown, in the sense of actual three-dimensionality, of tremendous distance showing through the murk. Like looking down into deep, deep water. Unua's atmosphere was twice as dense as Earth's, and towered nearly three times higher above the lowland plains.
“...we'd brought what we perceived as all the best of Earth,” Jack-Jack's voice droned beside him. “Art, science, philosophy, music. All the cream, skimmed off the top of Earth's enormous vats. And we came here prepared to work, to batter and beat this planet until it yielded us comfort. To batter it gently, I mean; we went to great lengths to avoid ecological disturbances and such. Why do you think the cities are so far from the mountains, and the seas? My point is that we brought the best, we were the best, we did out best.
“You see what I'm talking about? This was the context against which the first generation rebelled! Little brats, all of them, but by the second decade they outnumbered us three to one.”
“And you've been waiting ever since for someone to complain to,” Jhoe quipped, perhaps a little irritably.
But Jack-Jack simply chuckled. “That's right, more or less. Touche'. You make me proud.”
“You know, I've heard most of this before. I've combed through every broadcast this system has ever sent.”
“For a long time,” Jack-Jack said, not seeming to notice Jhoe's remark, “the children still came running to us when things blew up on them. Mommy, Daddy, what do we do? They were cheeky enough to take on the world, they just didn't know a damn thing. But eventually, that stopped bothering them. Now, their children grew up very confused. Frightened of everything, and with pure foolishness foisted off on them as parental wisdom. They barely even knew their grandparents existed, we who had built the walls they were cowering behind!
“The third and fourth generations, well, they sort of found their own way. Space program, industrial program, arts and sciences... They'd learned to ignore their parents, you see, to sort of amputate the stupidity they'd been brought up with. They're not so bad, really.”
“But not your own,” Jhoe observed, putting a hand on his stomach to settle it.
For the first time since he'd accosted Jhoe, Jack-Jack Snyder looked tired. But still, he smiled. “No, son, they're nothing of mine. I, we, are sort of the inflamed appendix of their society. They've never cut us out, per se, but we've been drugged and palpated and chilled with icepacks, and I think they'll all breathe a little easier when we're gone.”
I should be recording this, Jhoe thought, suddenly regretful. Jack-Jack's metaphors had exactly the sort of colorful charm Jhoe had expected to find here. Surgery! People born with vermiform intestinal appendices! Had Malhelan society really been so brutish? Or... Was it still? The thought chilled him slightly. Interstellar broadcasts didn't show everything about a culture, didn't show much at all that was bad.
“Gooh!” He said as the lander heaved through another pocket of atmospheric turbulence.
“The thing that really makes it all...” Jack-Jack started up again, but Jhoe filtered him out, and reached for his sickness hose.
Sweat popped out on his brow as the little craft groaned and vibrated around him. The suction of the hose pulled cool air against his face, but not enough, not enough for comfort. Well, damn Malhelan technology anyway. There was a hard and unpleasant texture to this place that he somehow had never anticipated.
His gorge rose, and his breakfast came right along behind it, and he discovered that the mask end of the sickness hose had a top side and a bottom side, so that it could fit comfortably over the nose and chin. But he was holding the thing upside down!
No indeed, he thought, as noxious fluid, only partially caught by the mask, squirted out along his cheeks. The broadcasts didn't show everything.
~~~
Jhoe walked, on unsteady legs, out onto the paved surface of the landing field. He felt sweat evaporating off him, sucked away by the dense, dry atmosphere, and his bag hung heavy on his shoulder. The gravity here felt much stronger than 1.16 gee. Beside him, Jack-Jack babbled on unheard.
Darkness above, a muddy brown sky. The field itself was illuminated with bright yellow lights that cast long and unpleasant shadows.
In the gloom a hundred meters ahead, there waited a building. One which, Jhoe fervently hoped, had a sink for him to clean up in, a couch for him to sprawl out on until his head and stomach stopped spinning.
“...and we didn't even have communication!” Jack-Jack proclaimed, cuffing Jhoe's shoulder with a loose fist. “Ah, those days will never come again.”
“I'd certainly hope not,” Jhoe muttered.
The building looked peculiar in the darkness ahead. Its sides were shiny and rippled-looking, with curved supports bulging visibly beneath them like the bones of a giant beast, stretching out against its skin. A slight breeze whooshed by, and moments later the sides of the building began to sway noticeably.
With a shock, Jhoe realized the thing was little more than a glorified tent, a sheet of thick fabric stretched over a more-than-slightly flexible truss. It had doors and windows that looked normal enough, and a roof of different stuff than the walls, or at least differently colored. Some attempt, then, to have it at least look like an actual building. But Jhoe could not be comforted so easily. The whole structure seemed ready to collapse at any moment.
“You call that thing a building?”
“Why wouldn't I?” Jack-Jack said, without breaking his long stride.
“It's soft.” Jhoe said. “Why in God's name is it soft?”
Jack-Jack chuckled. “Oh, you'll find out soon, I imagine. Have I told you yet about our first expedition to the Other Ocean?”
“I'm really very tired,” Jhoe groaned, “I'd just like to lie down for a while.”
“I'm sure we'll find you a comfortable nook,” Jack-Jack said.
Jhoe noticed a young man standing on the pavement ahead, holding up a white placard with red lettering on it: UNUA UNFAIR TO ITS YOUTH. The young man, a boy really, probably not yet out of his twenties, looked nervous, his eyes darting back and forth as if he expected to be arrested at any moment. Which he probably would, Jhoe reflected; if this society bore even a passing resemblance to Earth's, as he believed it did, there would be little tolerance for the tantrums of youth activists. Indeed, this bold child attempted to embarass his elders in front of visitors.
The young man suddenly fixed his attention on Jhoe, as if noting his difference from the others around him. “Are you from Earth?” he called out.
Jhoe politely but firmly ignored this question, and was gratified to see Jack-Jack doing the same. Children, when they misbehaved but were not under your direct supervision, were perhaps best ignored in any society.
Jhoe became aware of a feeling of unease. Not about the boy, but about... something else. He heard a low rumbling noise, like thunder rolling off the distant hills.
The building ahead began to shudder, though there was no breeze just now. Then Jhoe's knees began to feel even wobblier than they had, and the ground beneath his feet began to shake.
“Ah,” said Jack-Jack, “just in time!”
The pavement felt fluid, suddenly, a wave-tossed lake of black, slow-motion water. Jhoe lost his footing and fell, grunting loudly, atop his bag.
“Oh my God!” he cried, rolling over onto his back, looking up at Jack-Jack, who remained standing, his arms held out sideways, moving and bending as his balance shifted. “Oh! Oh my God!”
Quite suddenly, the ground stopped shaking.
“Oh my God,” Jhoe said again, more quietly.
“Just a quake,” Jack-Jack said, smiling slightly. “We get them all the time.”
Jhoe nodded. “Right. Yeah. I knew about that.”
Jack-Jack extended a hand to Jhoe. “That's why the buildings are soft. That way, they don't fall down so much, and don't cause much havoc when they do.”
“Right,” Jhoe said. “Okay.”
“Never been in a quake?” Jack-Jack asked, hauling Jhoe to his feet. The old man did not pos
sess any particular strength, but his grip was steady enough, and Jhoe did not weigh a lot. Even at 1.16 gee. “Not even on Earth?”
Jhoe brushed himself off with shaking hands. “Once, I think, as a very young child. Rare. We destress the faultlines, you know.”
“Is that accusation in your tone, young man? You wound me. We haven't got much in the way of geologic engineering, it's true, but there also aren't any faultlines for us to relieve. It's all driven by tidal stress, what with Vano so close... Shakes the crust up, even though it's very thick.”
“Oh,” Jhoe said, nodding. “Yeah. I guess I knew that. I guess I read that somewhere.”
So much for his expert status. He had known about the ground quakes, and yet, in another way, he hadn't. Certainly, the thought hadn't troubled him until now.
Other people were brushing past them, now, Malhelans unconcerned by the shuddering instability of their planet. Only one other man had fallen. Jhoe shot him an unsteady, embarrassed salute.
“Are you from Earth?” the Unuan boy called out again. “Hey! Hey! Are you from Earth?”
Once again, he was ignored.
The man who had fallen waved a hand at Jhoe, and walked over to him with small, cautious steps. “Hi. You're Jhoe Freetz? The social scientist?”
“Yes.”
“Don Kowalski,” the man said, shaking the hand Jhoe held out for him. “Synergicologist.”
“Nice to meet you,” Jhoe said, tiredly.
“And you. Listen, I heard you two talking just now, something about a trip to the ocean? I wonder if I might tag along with you. That's, ah, that's where I'm heading. Hopefully.”
“A synergicologist!” Jack-Jack said, with evident delight. “Come to study the interaction between Terrestrial and Unuan ecosystems?”
“Yes, that's right.”
“Wonderful! I've been saying for centuries, we need to study that whole thing more carefully. How splendid that you're here.”
