Falling Free (3 page)

Leo secured the last of his scanty personal possessions. Where . . . will they go when they, uh, retire? he asked slowly.

Van Atta shrugged. I suppose the company will have to work something out, when the time comes. Not my problem, fortunately;
I'll
be retired before then.

What happens if they—quit, go elsewhere? Suppose somebody offers them higher pay? GalacTech will be out-of-pocket for all the RD.

Ah. I don't think you've quite grasped the beauty of this set-up. They don't quit. They aren't employees.

They're capital equipment. They aren't paid in money—though I wish
my
salary was equal to what GalacTech is spending yearly to maintain' em. But that will get better as the last replicator cohort gets
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older and more self-sufficient. They stopped producing new ones about five years ago, see, in anticipation of turning that job over to the quaddies themselves.Van Atta licked his lips and raised his eyebrows, as if in enjoyment of a salacious joke. Leo could not regret missing its point.

Leo turned, curling in air and crossing his arms. Spacer's Union is going to call it slave labor, you know, he said at last.

The Union's going to call it worse names than that. Their productivity is going to look sick,growled Van Atta. Loaded language bullshit. These little chimps have cradle to grave security. GalacTech couldn't be treating them better if they were made of solid platinum. You and I should have so good a deal, Leo.

Ah, said Leo, and no more.

The observation bubble on the side of the Cay Habitat had a televiewer, Leo discovered to his delight, and furthermore it was unoccupied at the moment. His own quarters lacked a viewport. He slipped within. His schedule allowed this one free day, to recover from trip fatigue and Jump lag before his course was to begin. A good night's sleep in free fall had already improved his tone of mind vastly over yesterday, after Van Atta's—Leo could only dub it disorientation tour.

The curve of Rodeo's horizon bisected the view from the bubble, and beyond it the vast sweep of stars.

Just now one of Rodeo's little mice moons crept across the panorama. A glint above the horizon caught Leo's eye.

He adjusted the televiewer for a close-up. A GalacTech shuttle was bringing up one of the giant cargo pods, refined petrochemicals or bulk plastics bound for petroleum-depleted Earth perhaps. A collection of similar pods floated in orbit. Leo counted. One, two, three . . . six, and the one arriving made seven.

Two or three little manned pushers were already starting to bundle the pods, to be locked together and attached to one of the big orbit-breakingthru ster units.

Once grouped and attached to their thruster, the pods would be aimed toward the distant wormhole exit point that gave access to Rodeo local space. Velocity and direction imparted, the thruster would detach and return to Rodeo orbit for the next load. The unmanned pod bundle would continue on its slow, cheap way to its target, one of a long train stretching from Rodeo to the anomaly in space that was the Jump point.

Once there,the cargo pods would be captured and decelerated by a similar thruster, and positioned for the Jump. Then the Superjumpers would take over, cargo carriers as specially designed as the thrusters for their task. The monster cargo jumpers were hardly more than a pair of Necklin field generator rods in their protective housings so positioned as to be fitted around a constellation of pod bundles, a bracketing pair of normal space thruster arms, and a small control chamber for the jump pilot and his neurological headset. Without their balancing pod bundles attached the Superjumpers reminded Leo of some exceptionally weird and attenuated long-legged insects. Each Jump pilot, neurologically wired to his ship to navigate the wavering realities of wormhole space, made two hops a day, inbound to Rodeo with empty pod bundles and back out again with cargo, followed by a day off; two months on duty followed by a month's unpaid but compulsory gravity leave,usually financially augmented with shuttle duties. Jumps were more wearing on pilots than null-gee was. The pilots of the fast passenger ships like the one Leo had ridden in on yesterday called the Superjumper pilots puddle-jumpers and merry-go-round riders.

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The cargo pilots just called the passenger pilots snobs.

Leo grinned,and considered that train of wealth gliding through space. No doubt about it, the Cay Habitat, fascinating as it was, was just the tail of the dog to the whole of GalacTech's Rodeo operation.

That single thruster-load of pods being bundled now could maintain a whole town full of stockholding widows and orphans in style for a year, and it was just one of an apparently endless string. Base production was like an inverted pyramid, those at the bottom apex supporting a broadening mountain of ten-percenters, a fact which usually gave Leo more secret pride than irritation.

Mr. Graf?an alto voice interrupted his thoughts. I'm Dr. Sondra Yei. I head up the psychology and training department for the Cay Habitat.

The woman hovering in the door wore pale green company coveralls. Pleasantly ugly, pushing middle-aged, she had the bright mongolian eyes, broad nose and lips andcoff ee-and-creamskin of her mixed racial heritage. She pushed herself through the aperture with the concise relaxed movements of one accustomed to free fall.

Ah, yes, they told me you'd be wanting to talk to me. Leo courteously waited for her to anchor herself before attempting to shake hands.

Leo gestured at the televiewer. Got a nice view of the orbital cargo marshalling here. Seems to me that might be another job for your quaddies.

Indeed. They've been doing it for almost a year now. Yei smiled satisfaction. So,you don't find adjusting to the quaddies too difficult? So your psyche profile suggested. Good.

Oh, the quaddies are all right. Leo stopped short of expanding on his unease. He was not sure he could put it into words anyway. I was just surprised, at first.

Understandable. You don't think you'll have trouble teaching them, then?

Leo smiled. They can't possibly be worse than the crew of roustabouts I trained at Jupiter Orbital #4.

I didn't mean trouble
from
them. Yei smiled again. You will find they are very intelligent and attentive students. Quick. Quite literally, good children. And that's what I want to talk about. She paused, as if marshalling her thoughts like the distant cargo pushers.

The GalacTech teachers and trainers occupy a parental role here for the Habitat family. Although par entless, the quaddies themselves must someday—indeed, are already becoming parents. From the beginning we've been at pains to assure they were provided with role models of stable adult responsibility. But they
are
still children. They will be watching you closely. I want you to be aware, and take care. They'll be learning more than welding from you. They'll also be picking up your other patterns of behavior. In short, if you have any bad habits—and we all have some—they must be parked downside for the duration of your stay. In other words, Yei went on, watch yourself. Watch your language.An involuntary grin crinkled her eyes. For example, one of our creche personnel once used the cliche' spit in your eye'in some context or other . . . not only did the quaddies think it was hilarious, but it started an epidemic of spitting among the five-year-olds that took weeks to suppress. Now, you'll be working with much older children, but the principle remains. For instance—ah—did you bring any personal reading or viewing matter with you? Vid dramas, newsdiscs, whatever.

I'm not much of a reader, said Leo. I brought my course material.

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Technical information doesn't concern me. What we've been having a problem with lately is, um, fiction.

Leo raised an eyebrow, and grinned. Pornography? I'm not sure I'd worry about that. When I was a kid we passed around—

No, no, not pornography. I'm not sure the quaddies would understand about pornography anyway.

Sexuality is an open topic here, part of their social training. Biology. I'm far more concerned about fiction that clothes false or dangerous values in attractive colors, or biased histories.

Leo wrinkled his forehead, increasingly dismayed. Haven't you taught these kids any history? Or let them have stories . . . ?

Of course we have. The quaddies are well-supplied with both. It's simply a matter of correct emphasis.

For example—atypical downsider history of, say, the settlement of Orient IV usually gives about fifteen pages to the year of the Brothers' War, a temporary if bizarre social aberration—and about two to the actual hundred or so years of settlement and building-up of the planet. Our text gives one paragraph to the war. But the building of the Witgow trans-trench monorail tunnel, with its subsequent beneficial economic effects to both sides, gets five pages. In short, we emphasize the common instead of the rare, building rather than destruction, the normal at the expense of the abnormal. So that the quaddies may never get the idea that the abnormal is somehow expected of them. If you'd like to read the texts, I think you'll get the idea very quickly.

I—yeah, I think I'd better, Leo murmured. The degree of censorship imposed upon the quaddies implied by Yei's brief description made his skin crawl—and yet,the idea of a text that devoted whole sections to great engineering works made him want to stand up and cheer. He contained his confusion in a bland smile. I really didn't bring anything on board, he offered placatingly.

She led him off for a tour of the dormitories, and the supervised creches of the younger quaddies.

The little ones amazed Leo. There seemed to be so many—maybe it was just because they moved so fast. Thirty or so five-year-olds bounced around the free fall gym like a barrage of demented ping pong balls when their creche mother, a plump pleasant downsider woman they called Mama Nilla, assisted by a couple of quaddie teenage girls, first let them out of their reading class. But then she clapped her hands, and put on some music, and they fell to and demonstrated a game, or a dance, Leo was not sure which, with many sidelong looks at him and much giggling. It involved creating a sort of duo-decahedron in mid-air, like a human pyramid only more complex, hand to hand to hand changing its formation in time to music. Cries of dismay went up when an individual slipped up and spoiled the group's formation.When perfection was achieved, everybody won. Leo couldn't help liking that game. Dr. Yei, watching Leo laugh when the young quaddies swarmed around him afterwards, seemed to purr with contentment.

But at the end of the tour she studied him with a little smile quirking her mouth. Mr. Graf, you're still disturbed. You sure you're not harboring just a little of the old Frankenstein complex about all this? It's all right to admit it to me—in fact, I want you to talk about it.

It's not that, said Leo slowly. It's just . . . well, I can't really object to your trying to make them as group-centered as possible, given that they'll be living all their lives on crowded space stations. They're disciplined to a high degree for their ages, also good—

Vital to their survival, rather, in a space environment!

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Yes . . . but what about—about their self-defense?

You'll have to define that term for me, Mr. Graf. Defense from what?

Well, it seems to me you've succeeded in raising about a thousand technical-whiz—doormats. Nice kids, but aren't they a little—feminized? He was getting in deeper and deeper; her smile had quirked to a frown. I mean—they just seem ripe for exploitation by—by somebody. Was this whole social experiment your idea? It seems like a woman's dream of a perfect society. Everybody's so
well behaved.
He was uncomfortably conscious of having expressed his thought badly, but surely she must see the validity. . . .

She took a deep breath, and lowered her voice. Her smile had become fixed. Let me set you straight, Mr. Graf. I did not invent the quaddies. I was assigned here six years ago. It's the GalacTech specs that call for
maximum socialization.
But I did inherit them. And I care about them.It's not your job—or your business—to understand about their legal status, but it concerns me greatly. Their safety lies in their socialization.

You seem to be free of the common prejudices against the products of genetic engineering, but there are many who are not. There are planetary jurisdictions where this degree of genetic manipulation of humans would even be illegal. Let those people—just once—perceive the quaddies as a threat, and—she clamped her lips on further confidences, and retreated onto her authority. Let me put it this way, Mr. Gra f. The power to approve—or disapprove—training personnel for the Cay Project is mine. Mr. Van Atta may have called you in, but I can have you removed. And I will do so without hesitation if you fail in speech or behavior to abide by psych department guidelines. I don't think I can put it any more clearly than that.

No, you're—quite clear, Leo said.

I'm sorry, she said sincerely. But until you've been on the Habitat a while, you really must refrain from making snap judgments.

I'm a testing engineer, lady,thought Leo.
It's my job to make judgments all day long.
But he did not speak the thought aloud. They managed to part on a note of only slightly strained cordiality.

The entertainment vid was titled Animals, Animals, Animals. Silver set the re-run for the Cats sequence for the third time.

Again? Claire, sharing the vid viewing chamber with her, said faintly.

Just one more time, Silver pleaded. Her lips parted in fascination as the black Persian appeared over the vid plate, but out of deference to Claire she turned down the music and narration. The creature was crouched lapping milk from a bowl,stuck to its floor by downside gravity. The little white droplets flying off its pink tongue arced back into the dish as though magnetized.

I wish I could have a cat. They look so soft... Silver's left lower hand reached out to pantomime-pat the life-sized image. No tactile reward, only the colored light of the holovid licking without sensation over her skin. She let her hand fall through the cat, and sighed. Look, you can pick it up just like a baby. The vid shrank to show the cat's downsider owner carting it offin her arms. Both looked smug.