Downbelow Station (5 page)

He keyed it open, saw with relief the lights on, heard the familiar rattle of plastic in the kitchen.

“Elaine?” He walked in. She was watching the oven, her back to him. She did not turn. He stopped, sensing disaster, another world amiss.
 
The timer went off. She removed the plate from the oven, set it on the counter, turned, managed composure to look at him. He waited, hurting for her, and after a moment came and took her in his arms. She gave a short sigh. “They’re gone,” she said. And a moment later another short gasp and a release. “Blown with Mariner. Estelle’s gone, with everyone aboard. No possible survivors. Sita saw her go; they couldn’t get undocked… all those people trying to get aboard. Fire broke out. And that part of the station went, that’s all. Exploded, blew the nose shell off.”

Fifty-six aboard. Father, mother, cousins, remoter relatives. A world unto itself, Estelle. He had his own, however damaged. He had a family. Hers was dead.

She said nothing more, no word of grief for her loss or of relief to have been spared, to have stayed behind from the voyage. She gave a few more convulsive breaths, hugged him, turned, dry-eyed, to put a second dinner in the microwave.
 
She sat down, ate, went through all the normal motions. He forced his own meal down, still with a disinfectant taint in his mouth, reckoning it clung all about him. He succeeded finally in catching her eyes looking at him. They were as stark as those of the refugees. He found nothing to say. He got up, walked around the table and hugged her from behind.

Her hands covered his. “I’m all right”

“I wish you’d called me.”

She let go his hands and stood up, touched his arm, a weary gesture. Looked at him suddenly, directly, with that same dark tiredness. “There’s one of us left,” she said. He blinked, perplexed, realized then that she meant the Quens.
 
Estelle’s folk. Merchanters owned names as stationers had a home. She was Quen; that meant something he knew he did not understand, in the months they had been together. Revenge was a merchanter commodity; he knew that… among folk where name alone was a property and reputation went with it “I want a child,” she said.

He stared at her, struck with the darkness in her eyes. He loved her. She had walked into his life off a merchanter ship and decided to try station life, though she still spoke of her ship. Four months. For the first time in their being together he had no desire for her, not with that look and Estelle’s death and her reasons for revenge. He said nothing. They had agreed there would be no children until she knew for certain whether she could bear to stay. What she offered him might be that agreement. It might be something else. It was not the time to talk about it, not now, with insanity all about them.
 
He simply gathered her against him, walked with her to the bedroom, held her through the long dark hours. She made no demands and he asked no questions.
 
ii “No,” the man at the operations desk said, without looking this time at the printout; and then with a weary impulse toward humanity: “Wait. I’ll do another search. Maybe it wasn’t posted with that spelling.”

Vasilly Kressich waited, sick with terror, as despair hung all about this last, forlorn gathering of refugees which refused to leave the desks on dockside: families and parts of families, who hunted relatives, who waited on word. There were twenty-seven of them on the benches near the desk, counting children; he had counted. They had gone from station main-day into alterday, and another shift of operators at the desk which was station’s one extension of humanity toward them, and there was nothing more coming out of comp but what had been there before.

He waited. The operator keyed through time after time. There was nothing; he knew that there was nothing, by the look the man turned toward him. Of a sudden he was sorry for the operator too, who had to sit out here obtaining nothing, knowing there was no hope, surrounded by grieving relatives, with armed guards stationed near the desk in case. Kressich sat down again, next to the family who had lost a son in the confusion.

It was the same tale for each. They had loaded in panic, the guards more concerned for getting themselves onto the ships than for keeping order and getting others on. It was their own fault; he could not deny that The mob had hit the docks, men forcing their way aboard who had no passes allotted to those critical personnel meant for evacuation. The guards had fired in panic, unsure of attackers and legitimate passengers. Russell’s Station had died in riot.
 
Those in the process of loading had been hurried aboard the nearest ship at the last, doors had been sealed as soon as the counters reached capacity. Jen and Romy should have been aboard before him. He had stayed, trying to keep order at his assigned post. Most of the ships had gotten sealed in time. It was Hansford the mob had gotten wide open, Hansford where the drugs had run out, where the pressure of lives more than the systems could bear had broken everything down and a shock-crazed mob had run riot. Griffin had been bad enough; he had gotten aboard well before the wave the guards had had to cut down. And he had trusted that Jen and Romy had made it into Lila. The passenger list had said that they were on Lila, at least what printout they had finally gotten in the confusion after launch.

But neither of them had gotten off at Pell; they had not come off the ship. No one of those critical enough to be taken to station hospital matched their descriptions. They could not be impressed by Mallory: Jen had no skills Mallory would need, and Romy—somewhere the records were wrong. He had believed the passenger list, had had to believe it, because there were too many of them that ship’s com could pass direct messages. They had voyaged in silence. Jen and Romy had not gotten off Lila. Had never been there.

“They were wrong to throw them out in space,” the woman nearest him moaned.
 
“They didn’t identify them. He’s gone, he’s gone, he must have been on the Hansford”.

Another man was at the desk again, attempting to check, insisting that Mallory’s id of impressed civilians was a lie; and the operator was patiently running another search, comparing descriptions, negative again.
 
“He was there,” the man shouted at the operator. “He was on the list and he didn’t get off, and he was there.” The man was crying. Kressich sat numb.
 
On Griffin, they had read out the passenger list and asked for id’s. Few had had them. People had answered to names which could not possibly be theirs. Some answered to two, to get the rations, if they were not caught at it. He had been afraid then, with a deep and sickly fear; but a lot of people were on the wrong ships, and one of them had then realized the situation on Hansford. He had been sure they were aboard.

Unless they had gotten worried and gotten off to go look for him. Unless they had done something so miserably, horribly stupid, out of fear, for love.
 
Tears started down his face. It was not the likes of Jen and Romy who could have gotten onto Hansford, who could have forced their way among men armed with guns and knives and lengths of pipe. He did not reckon them among the dead of that ship. It was rather that they were still on Russell’s Station, where Union ruled now. And he was here; and there was no way back.

He rose finally, and accepted it He was the first to leave. He went to the quarters which were assigned him, the barracks for single men, who were many of them young, and probably many of them under false id’s, and not the techs and other personnel they were supposed to be. He found a cot unoccupied and gathered up the kit the supervisor provided each man. He bathed a second time… no bathing seemed enough… and walked back among the rows of sleeping, exhausted men, and lay down.

There was mindwipe for those prisoners who had been high enough to be valuable and opinionated. Jen, he thought, O Jen, and their son, if he were alive… to be reared by a shadow of Jen, who thought the approved thoughts and disputed nothing, liable to Adjustment because she had been his wife. It was not even certain that they would let her keep Romy. There were state nurseries, which turned out Union’s soldiers and workers.

He thought of suicide. Some had chosen that rather than board the ships for some strange place, a station which was not theirs. That solution was not in his nature. He lay still and stared at the metal ceiling, in the near dark, and survived, which he had done so far, middle-aged and alone and utterly empty.

« ^ »

Pell: 5/3/52

The tension set in at the beginning of mainday, the first numb stirrings-forth by the refugees to the emergency kitchens set up on the dock, the first tentative efforts of those with papers and those without to meet with station representatives at the desks and to establish rights of residency, the first awakening to the realities of quarantine.

“We should have pulled out last shift,” Graff said, reviewing dawn’s messages, “while it was all still quiet.”

“Would now,” Signy said, “but we can’t risk Pell. If they can’t hold it down, we have to. Call station council and tell them I’m ready to meet with them now.
 
I’ll go to them. It’s safer than bringing them out on the docks.” “Take a shuttle round the rim,” Graff suggested, his broad face set in habitual worry. “Don’t risk your neck out there with less than a full squad. They’re less controlled now. All it takes is something to set them off.” The proposal had merits. She considered how that timidity would look to Pell, shook her head. She went back to her quarters and put on what passed for dress uniform, the proper dark blue at least. When she went it was with Di Janz and a guard of six armored troopers, and they walked right across the dock to the quarantine checkpoint, a door and passage beside the huge intersection seals. No one tried to approach her, although there were some who looked as if they might want to try it, hesitating at the armed troops. She made the door unhindered and was passed through, up the ramp and to another guarded door, then down into the main part of the station.

After that it was as simple as taking a lift through the varied levels and into the administrative section, blue upper corridor. It was a sudden change of worlds, from the barren steel of the docks and the stripped quarantine area, into a hall tightly controlled by station security, into a glass-walled foyer with sound-deadening matting underfoot, where bizarre wooden sculptures met them with the aspect of a cluster of amazed citizenry. Art. Signy blinked and stared, bemused at this reminder of luxuries and civilization. Forgotten things, rumored things. Leisure to make and create what had no function but itself, as man had done, but himself. She had lived her whole life insulated from such things, only knowing at a distance that civilization existed, and that rich stations maintained luxury at their secret hearts.

Only they were not human faces which stared out from curious squat globes, among wooden spires, but faces round-eyed and strange: Downbelow faces, patient work in wood. Humans would have used plastics or metal.
 
There were indeed more than humans here: that fact was evident in the neat braided matting, in the bright painting which marched in alien geometries and overlays about the walls, more of the spires, more of the wooden globes with the faces and huge eyes all about them, faces repeated in the carved furniture and even in the doors, staring out from a gnarled and tiny detail, as if all those eyes were to remind humans that Downbelow was always with them.
 
It affected them all. Di swore softly before they walked up to the last doors and officious civs let them in, walked with them into the council hall.
 
Human faces stared at them this time, in six tiers of chairs on a side, an oval table in the pit between, their expressions and those of the alien carvings remarkably alike in that first impression.

The white-haired man at the end of the table stood up, made a gesture offering them the room into which they had already come. Angelo Konstantin. Others remained seated.

And beside the table were six chairs which were not part of the permanent arrangement; and six, male and female, who were not, by their style of dress, part of the station council or even of the Beyond.

Company men. Signy might have dismissed the troops to the outer chamber in courtesy to the council, rid herself of the threat of rifles and the remainder of force. She stood where she was, unresponsive to Konstantin smiles.
 
“This can be short,” she said. “Your quarantine zone is set up and functioning.
 
I’d advise you to guard it heavily. I’ll warn you now that other freighters jumped without our clearance and made no part of our convoy. If you’re wise, you’ll follow the recommendations I made and board any incoming merchanter with security before letting it in near you. You’ve had a look at Russell’s disaster here. I’ll be pulling out in short order; it’s your problem now.” There was a panicked muttering in the room. One of the Company men stood up.
 
“You’ve behaved very high-handedly, Captain Mallory. Is that the custom out here?”

The custom is, sir, that those who know a situation handle it and those who don’t watch and learn, or get out of the way.“ The Company man’s thin face flushed visibly. “It seems we’re constrained to bear with that kind of attitude… temporarily. We need transport up to whatever exists as a border. Norway is available.”

She drew a sharp breath and drew herself up. “No, sir, you’re not constrained, because Norway isn’t available to civ passengers, and I’m not taking any on. As for the border, the border is wherever the fleet sits at the moment, and nobody but the ships involved knows where that is. There aren’t borders. Hire a freighter.”

There was dead silence in the hall.

“I dislike, captain, to use the word court-martial.”

She laughed, a mere breath. “If you Company people want to tour the war, I’m tempted to take you in. Maybe you’d benefit by it. Maybe you could widen Mother Earth’s sight; maybe we could get a few more ships.” “You’re not in a position to make requisitions and we don’t take them. We’re not here to see only what it’s determined we should see. We’ll be looking at everything, captain, whether or not it suits you.”