How Dark the World Becomes (11 page)

Here’s an interesting thing about those vids. Most of the Human folks I knew who watched them—at least the grown-ups—watched them as comedies. Sometimes Henry and I and a couple others would get together and put one on, drink some beers, and make up our own dialog. The late and unlamented Ricky had actually been pretty good at coming up with funny lines, interestingly enough. Of course, a lot of teenaged boys used the vids to jumpstart themselves into puberty. I’d smiled a bit to myself thinking about that.

Here’s another interesting thing about them. I know this thing because I go way back with Pat Jarawandi, the regional manager for Cinestellaire A.G., the outfit that imports and distributes a bunch of these—I actually got him his first job there as a sales rep. The thing is, between seventy-five and eighty-five percent of the paid views of these things locally are by Varoki, not Humans. Figure that one out.

But then Hlontaa had found the news story on his hand viewer about the surge in murders in the Quarter over the last three days.

“And what about this?” he’d asked me. “All this violence in the Human Quarter—you can’t just shrug that off, can you?” 

Marfoglia looked at me coldly and nodded.

“Yes, what
do
you have to say about all those killings in the Quarter, Mr. Black?” 

Mr. Black was my cover name—not very creative, but if you’re going to lie, keep the lie simple, so you can remember it. 

I shrugged.

“Oh!” I said. “Gee, I guess I
can
just shrug it off, after all.” 

Barraki giggled again.

“That’s what I meant by no value on life. They’re
your
people, and it means nothing to you,” Hlontaa said in disgust.

“None of
my
people fell down. Not yet, anyway.”

He looked at me in confusion, but Marfoglia knew what I meant, and the look of cold hostility momentarily left her face. Barraki didn’t really understand what had just gone on, but he knew something had, and he wasn’t giggling anymore.

Maybe Marfoglia had forgotten that those were real people back there—Big Meg and Henry, and Phil, and June—assuming she’d ever known. Or maybe she’d forgotten that this wasn’t just about making clever conversation on the train—it was about killing, and maybe about getting killed. 

She didn’t know exactly what I’d had to do with the stuff in the news, since we’d kept her in the dark about the operation back there, our plans, and what I’d been doing with Phil the last couple days—but she had a few notions, and she’d figured to find out something by bringing it up, and maybe make me uncomfortable while she was at it. Instead, she was the one looking out the window and frowning. She didn’t have any more answers about me, either, and the questions were just as dark as ever, and that was fine with me. She could stew about it all the way to Akaampta, as far as I was concerned.

She’d actually started talking to me again the day before. When the kids weren’t around, she’d asked me why I’d killed all four of the men on the elevator. 

“What should I have done?” I’d asked.

Take them prisoner. Disarm them. 

“Yeah. Good plan. And if just one of them decides to be a hero, just one, there’s two-way gunfire and the odds are we’ve got a dead kid. But suppose I disarm them. Then what?”

Leave them behind when we take the elevator.

“And they call Kolya on their comm links and tell him we’re on the way down and which elevator we’re in.”

Oh. 

Well, then take them with us.

“Sure. Eight of us packed cheek-to-jowl in one elevator, and me with the only gun. On the way down, a hero just reaches out and grabs one of the kids, and then what?”

No answer to that, of course. And the real truth is that you never get that far, because while you’re standing there at the elevator door, trying to sort all of this out in your head, weighing the upside and downside of every possible course of action, one of Kolya’s thugs just shoots you. 

Now, with the Needle in sight, Hlontaa was giving Barraki and Tweezaa a science lecture on how the lasers lit the photo panels on the lift capsule, which provided power for the traction assembly, which walked the lift capsule up the Needle to orbit. Barraki had heard it all before, and Tweezaa wasn’t listening, even to the aGavoosh version, but Hlontaa kept going. Some people love to hear themselves talk. Madame Hlontaa, I noticed, looked about as bored as Barraki and Tweezaa—she’d heard it all before, too.

*   *   *

The view on the way up to the Upstation is something you just never forget, and looking down at Peezgtaan’s barren, meteor-pocked surface, was a reminder—if you needed one—of how precarious existence was down in the Crack. For the first half hour or so, you could even see the Crack, off in the distance. It didn’t look like much from up here. 

Without a Needle, nobody would ever have invested the buckage in eco-forming the Crack, but cheap transit to orbit, coupled with all those handy, exotic mold forms that had lain dormant in the ice down there for a couple million years, made Peezgtaan an economically viable world. 

More viable for some than for others, but what’s new about that?

Humans had come here forty years ago, a hundred thousand or so—including my mother and father—in freezer containers, brought in like any other cargo and thawed out to work for the new pharmaceutical conglomerate that was supposed to make everybody rich—great salary packages, great benefits, and bonded repatriation to Earth. Well, you already know how that worked out. So a generation later, there we were. 

Why hadn’t relief organizations on Earth stepped up to repatriate us? Because they’d already had their hands full. As bad as things were on Peezgtaan, they were worse on Earth. The Collective-wide crash of ’75 hit Earth harder than most places, when its exports went into freefall and the interest rates on all those Varoki-underwritten developmental loans doubled in about six months. Couple that with back-to-back temperate zone droughts and a fresh-water shortage that had been building for a long time, that everyone figured the shiny new technology would fix but didn’t, and things got pretty crazy for a while. The fresh-water shortage was the worst of it. In some places people killed for a drink of water, and nations went to war over watersheds and aquifers. 

All four of the horsemen got in on the act eventually. There were even three or four nuclear exchanges—depending on whether you call a device that about a dozen whacked-out groups claimed credit for, delivered on a freighter to a port city of nine million people, part of a “nuclear exchange” or just an act of terror. I guess by then the distinctions were beginning to lose any meaning. Madness was the uniform of the day—madness and panic and rage. 

So helping a hundred thousand folks on Peezgtaan with no ticket home was not exactly high on anyone’s priority list. Just a year earlier, those people had been the lucky ones—travel, money, and adventure is a hard combination to top, so I guess there was probably some jealousy as well. When things went to hell out here, a lot of people back home probably thought, “Serves ’em right, running out on us.” 

Maybe the Peezgtaan Humans
had
been the lucky ones—we’d died by the hundreds, instead of by the millions. The green hills of Earth weren’t as green as they’d once been, and maybe nobody back there gave a damn about what happened to us out here . . . but the Crack wasn’t home. Earth was home, even if most of us alive now had never been there.

It’s hard to think of any place as home if it’s trying to kill you, and Peezgtaan would kill me or any other Human if it had the chance. So would every other world anyone in the
Cottohazz
had walked on, except Earth. Where there was native life, the protein chains were poisonous to us, and after a while it got to you. Even Bronstein’s World, the largest Human extra-solar colony world, was having a hard time hanging on to its population. The best and brightest young people wanted to move back to Earth, and who could blame them? On most other worlds the Human enclaves were held in place by poverty as much as anything—poverty and inertia and an occasional dully glowing ember of stubbornness. 

Living on an “alien world” sounded pretty romantic and exciting until you’d actually done it for a few years. Then it was just work—hard work.

All those early dreams of colonizing the stars had sort of taken it for granted that a world with life would be one we could sink roots into, one on which we could grow crops we could eat, hunt animals we could eat—if you were into that sort of thing—at least pick berries and nuts and eat them and not die. No such luck. 

There’s something very lonely about living in a galaxy that doesn’t want you. In some ways it’s worse than thinking you’re the only ones there. 

So there I was out of the Crack, but headed in the opposite direction from Earth, deeper into Varoki space. Akaampta was an “old world,” colonized in the first wave of Varoki expansion over three hundred years ago, and close enough to a garden world, complete with Varoki-compatible proteins, that it hadn’t required any eco-forming. What are the odds? Some guy once said it’s smarter to be lucky than it’s lucky to be smart. Boy, ain’t that the truth? Akaampta’s population was in the hundreds of millions now, and it had been politically independent since before Humans joined the
Cottohazz
. 

So we were headed deep into the heart of the
Cottohazz
, and our first step was the ride up the tapering carbon nanotube Needle—really a bundle of nanotubes, a big vertical cable in permanent synchronous planetary orbit—SPO—over one spot in the equator, but reaching way past the SPO orbit track and tethered to a massive captive asteroid, far enough out it moved at escape velocity and would depart orbit if it weren’t for the mass of the Needle holding it back; the centrifugal force of the asteroid trying to escape orbit held the Needle up and balanced the centripetal force of gravity trying to pull the whole thing down. 

It’s very creepy, at least to me, to think of that whole big thing—tethered asteroid, upstation complex, and long carbon nanotube ribbon down to the planetary surface—as a single structure in orbit, but it is. It’s one big thing with its center of mass at the SPO altitude, going round and round, but at the same rotational rate as Peezgtaan does, so it never gets anywhere. As soon as the passenger capsule started up the ribbon, I’d turned to Baraki and said, “We’re in orbit.” Hlonta wanted to argue the point, but he lost. We
were
in orbit as soon as we became part of the mass of that one big structural system. We just needed to get to a different place in the system to do anything interesting, and at a fairly leisurely 200 klicks an hour, that would take a while. Rockets were an awfully expensive way to get to orbit; elevators are cheap, the ride’s a lot more comfortable, and the view is spectacular.

After about half an hour, we overtook the terminator and Prime’s yellow light momentarily flooded the interior of the compartment, until the windows polarized and damped it back down. By then we could see the shuttle, white and gleaming in reflected light—at first just the brightest star in the sky, but soon a recognizable shape. 

From a distance, it looked more like a part from a machine—some sort of gear and axle assembly from a transmission—than a ship. There was a long, narrow spine—not much more than a communications tube full of power cables and life-support conduits—and everything else was built onto that: fuel tanks and thrusters at the back, spherical command module way up front, couplings for big cargo modules along the spine behind Comm and forward of Drive, and in the middle of the ship, the two big counter-rotating wheels of the warm accommodations. It was so ugly it was beautiful, in a no-bullshit form-follows-function kind of way. 

We’d spend the trip in the aft wheel; all the passengers would. Both wheels were over a hundred meters in radius, with the center hollow except for structural members and the access tubes up to the spine. Because of the artificial gravity generated by the centrifugal force of the rotating wheel, “up” was toward the spine and “down” toward the rim. The body of the wheel was about thirty or so meters thick, and the same width. Inside the wheel was divided into six decks, numbered from one, on the outside of the wheel, up to six closest to the spine. Gravity was noticeably weaker on Deck Six—where the luxury suites were—than on Deck One.

It was Varoki-built, like every other ship in the Peezgtaan system, but this was one of the newer shuttles that AZ Simki-Traak Trans-Stellar was flying, which meant it was mostly Human-designed. That was good news. Varoki-designed ships fly okay, but the accommodations are pretty lousy—not that Varoki don’t care about comfort; they just don’t have a knack for interior design, so the layouts make everyone—including them—claustrophobic and jumpy, and you’re always cracking a shin or an elbow on some piece of shit housing sticking out where it shouldn’t be. Varoki engineers don’t know
Feng Shui
from
Dim Sum
.

One advantage to living on Peezgtaan was you didn’t have to decompress going up the Needle. Spacecraft run on a low-pressure high-oxygen atmospheric mix, very similar to Peezgtaan’s. But the higher up the Needle you get, the less you weigh, and the purser’s staff came around and secured us in our seat harnesses about the time the kids started seeing how high they could jump. Once we got to the top, the seat harnesses became our transport slings, moving us along the magnetic tracks to the air locks and out into Peezgtaan Upstation. Most people have trouble moving around in zero gee, and if you let them try, you just have a mess, so better to relax and let the slings do the work. The staff had given each of us a vomit bag, and a couple of the passengers used them. I kind of enjoyed the feeling of weightlessness—like falling, but without the prospect of a sudden stop. 

The last time I’d been up and down the Needle was almost ten years earlier. Upstation looked different now—kind of worn out. Somebody was skimping on maintenance—hopefully not the kind that mattered—and it had that run-down look that made you wonder if anyone gave a damn anymore. There was something else different—the big sign by the passenger in-processing gate read AZ Simki-Traak Trans-Stellar instead of Peezgtaan Planetary Authority, and the staff had AZSTTS (in the aGavoosh alphabet, of course) flashes on their jump suits. Another triumph for private enterprise, and some consultant like Marfoglia had probably cashed a six-figure check for coming up with the idea. Well, everyone’s gotta make a living, and since we were traveling on phony docs, this was actually good news for us—security is always half-assed when the bottom-line meat-heads are in charge.