This Alien Shore (9 page)

D
ON'T GO OUT!

The voices were constant, demanding. No longer the whispered, ghostly essences they once had been, they rang in Jamisia's ears with such volume that at times it was all she could do to shut them out. Was it her circumstances, so recently changed, which had given them new power? Was it her tutor's program which had somehow granted them new strength to torment her? Or was she simply going mad, in the old Earth sense, driven so far beyond normal functioning by the stress of her situation that her mind was beginning to snap? She had no way to evaluate that last possibility, though it was the one which frightened her the most. Earth had conquered insanity long ago, weeded out its biological roots from the gene pool, isolated cases of psychological risk before they could begin to fester. Hadn't the doctors tested her right after her parents' death for just that reason, ever aware that the threshold of mental instability was crossed quickly and silently—and knowing that, like a physical injury, such wounds were easiest to heal when they were fresh and clean? She had been watched all her life, first by the government, and then—after the accident—by Shido. So she was all right, surely. They would have detected an anomaly at one of her regular checkups if she had been otherwise, and treated her for it. Wouldn't they?

She wasn't sure. She wasn't sure of anything any more. Her entire world had become unknown and frightening, and the only way of escaping it was to cower in her room, voices keening anger and warning in her head.

“Stop it!” she sobbed. “Leave me alone!”

Were there remotes in this room of hers, was there a doctor watching her even now by vid as she talked to invisible antagonists, wondering what the best moment would be to take her away for treatment? She had searched the small space a dozen times over and found nothing, but that didn't necessarily mean that her privacy was guaranteed. Shido had remotes throughout its habitat, whose harvest was analyzed by computer for signs of industrial treachery. Or so she had been told. Could she say with any certainty that the metroliner, whose safety depended upon maintaining a fragile peace between hundreds of alien subspecies for three years at a time, had not set up a similar system? Perhaps here it was not computers who did the initial screening, but living men: gazing down into her room from some hidden vantage point, measuring her bouts of fearful hysteria, weighing them against some master list of psychological transgressions which the great ship would not tolerate....

With a moan she forced herself to her feet, and wiped the new tears from her face with a trembling hand. If she cowered in this room for three years, then she really would go crazy, there was no doubt about that. The space was adequate for her needs, but it was small—accommodations on the great ship were priced according to volume, and she was terrified of using up her limited resources before even reaching the ainniq—and it was sterile, bereft of all the trinkets that a teenager would normally use to mark her territory. In her rush from the habitat she had packed little but clothing.

Slowly she drew in a deep breath, trying to make herself calm. It was getting harder and harder to master her fears, but she knew she had to keep trying; it was when she gave up that she would be truly lost. Voices chittered in her head as she forced herself to go to her closet and open it, choosing a no-G jumpsuit from among her meager possessions. God alone knew where she would want to go today, she had best be prepared for anything. Carefully she pulled it on, wary of putting any stress on the cloth that might cause it to weaken or tear. She had so little spare money now, and no source of new income on the horizon; she had to make everything last as long as it could.

She dared a look in the mirror as she closed up the closet, trying to focus on the image, to accept it. The lean jumpsuit flattered her figure, even lent a buxom fullness where her own body lacked development. For a moment she posed before the mirror, pulling the fabric taut at her waist, emphasizing the curves. She was still two E-years too young to have her shape professionally altered; Shido frowned on such cosmetic adjustments while the body was still developing. Only Shido didn't matter anymore, she realized suddenly. Nothing from Earth mattered anymore. If she could get the money, and if she could find a cosmetic therapist willing to trade his skill for her resources, she could become anything she wanted. Taller or shorter. Rounder or thinner. Lighter or darker, as whim or fashion dictated. The thought was accompanied by a bizarre rush of power. Shido had always treated her as a child, therefore she had remained a child. Only Shido was gone. What was she now?

Not an adult yet,
she thought, looking in the mirror. But
not what I was either. Something in between.
She forced herself to take a good look at herself, to try to assess what others might see in her. It wasn't an easy exercise. Studying her personal appearance sometimes brought on a wave of dizziness, even nausea, powerful enough on occasion that she had to force herself to look into mirrors at all. She had once asked her tutor about it, and he had looked at her strangely—very strangely—and then finally had said something about how teenagers were often insecure about their appearance, this was just a phase she was going through ... only she'd had the distinct impression that he was making a mental note of the phenomenon. Why? What made it significant?

What she hadn't told him was that sometimes her body seemed ... well,
wrong.
Like it wasn't really her body. Like deep inside she expected to see different features than those which were reflected in the mirror. Sometimes it would seem to her that her height was all wrong, or her skin should be dark instead of pale, or her hair should be black or blonde or some strange artificial color like they wore on Earth, instead of the reddish brown that it truly was ... she couldn't think of any feature or body part that she hadn't at some point doubted. There were days it
all
seemed wrong, and panic would well up inside her so suddenly and so intensely that the alien shell reflected in the mirror would double over and vomit. But today ... she breathed a sigh of measured relief. Today her body looked like it should. Today everything seemed to be all right.

Maybe it's an omen,
she told herself.

She wished she could believe that.

With a trembling hand she unlocked her door, watching as it whisked to one side to allow her egress. For a moment she hesitated, and then, with a deep breath, forced herself to step over the threshold. Voices inside her were screaming for her to run back inside the room and cower there, it was the only safe place to be.... But if she let the voices run her life, then she really would go crazy, and so she forced herself to step the requisite three feet from the threshold, far enough that the portal mechanisms sensed her absence and the door whisked shut behind her. There. She had done it. She was outside. Now if only she could figure out where she wanted to go....

The metroliner was vast and varied, as befit a playground for wealthy travelers. It would take a passenger ages to explore it all, far longer than the three E-years of a one-way ticket, or even the six of a round-trip passage. Who could say how much trouble had been averted because of that? Teenagers grew from childhood to independence within its confines, finding enough secret corridors and forbidden corners to satisfy even the most restless pubescent spirit. Rebels could establish city-states of their own within its tangled web of domiciles, organizing whatever social contracts they chose—even redesigning the physical structure of the ship itself if they had the resources to do so. Variants could isolate themselves from their true-human neighbors, or else walk among them to the sound of startled gasps and muttered prayers, sounds of disbelief unvoiced (so Jamisia had been taught) in the true up-and-out. And those true humans who could not or would not tolerate the sight of their mutated cousins could themselves withdraw to a part of the ship where no Hausman victims were permitted, and create a false Terran sanctuary of three years' duration.

Which all left almost too much to choose from. For a moment the sheer variety of options was almost too much for her, and she nearly did go back into her room then and there—not to cancel the excursion, she told herself, merely to delay it. But she had followed that course before, often enough to know that an hour's delay easily led to two hours, then to three ... and ultimately to a whole E-day spent cowering in her safe little comer of the ship, while the voices inside her head keened their triumph. No. Not this time. Biting her lip in newfound determination, she turned to the left—toward the head of the great ship—and began to walk with a measured stride toward the public areas.

It was not long before her narrow home corridor emptied out into a larger conduit, and other passengers crossed her path. Most of them were true humans, but a few Variants had apartments in this sector, or else were on their way to visit someone who did. She tried not to stare at them. Her tutor had told her that in the up-and-out such Variants were commonplace, and it was the worst form of rudeness to gape at them—but it was so hard not to! The first one she saw today looked more like a spider than a person, with weird, oddly-angled legs jutting out of its torso in pairs; that it walked as an arachnid would, with its body parallel to the ground, only added to the illusion. Its eyes were covered over with a thick white film, and she could not tell as it passed her whether it retained some manner of human sight, or relied upon mechanical devices to “see” her. She raised a palm in polite greeting and then quickly turned her eyes away. Her tutor had said that such a gesture was culture-neutral, all Variants used it ... but what about the ones who lacked hands as such, or used their own for walking? Would they respect such a gesture, or be angered by its somatic arrogance? Little wonder Variant diplomacy was such a touchy discipline....

She passed a Frisian, whose skin was covered with overlapping scales, like the armor of some ancient Earth reptile. Then an Iotha, whose facial features looked as if they had been randomly scrambled on a large, misshapen skull. There was a pair of Variants from Hellsgate, whose long, emaciated limbs twitched constantly in some kinesthetic simulacrum of speech.
They're all human,
she told herself, as a Variant from Gehenna looked her over with ill-concealed disdain. She shivered.
Every single one of them is a human being. The differences are only superficial.
But that wasn't quite true, and she knew it. There were the Lakis, whose malformed brains were barely capable of human thought. And the Yins, whose crippled right hemispheres squeezed forth psychic fantasies even as their withered left legs dragged behind them. And of course the Guerans—most terrifying of all!—whose mental instabilities mimicked all of Earth's ancient madnesses, who had no more in common with each other than she had with these Variants. Those were true aliens in every sense of the word, and if they looked like real Terrans, that was only an accident of biology.

She took a turn before reaching the first common area, avoiding the nearest marketplace node and its crowds. Once she had dared to visit there—only once—and she had instantly regretted it. She might have been born on Earth, but she was habitat-raised; by the time she was ten, she had all but forgotten the teeming cities of Terra, with their constant press of flesh and their dirt and palpable sense of hair-trigger anxiety. Perhaps at a later date she would be able to deal with such a crowd—savoring its energy, perhaps, admiring its drive, their purpose—but at this point in her life all it would inspire was panic. As she had learned to her shame once, in this very place.

She glanced in the main portal as she passed by the circular node, at the goods of a thousand stations and habitats which hung from display trees, from walls, even from the arms of a few enthusiastic vendors. It was said that if a product existed anywhere in human space, someone on the metroliner would sell it. She could well believe that. Spider-silk scarves fluttered on their display racks as passengers of the great ship passed beneath them, fingering delicate jewels from Hellsgate, bittersweet candies from Station Aires, music cubes from Candida. And headsets. Nearly all the passengers from the up-and-out wore them as a matter of course, more as a statement of fashion (Jamisia suspected) than for any real purpose. She caught a glimpse of one woman with a golden vulture perched atop her head, its delicately engraved wing feathers curling around her ears; another wore an intricate web inlaid with jewels, that sparkled as she moved. Lines of silver swept back from one man's temples in surreal coils, and another man, more whimsical than most, wore a pair of crystal horns jutting out from behind his ears. If the ship had been near one of the outspace stations, the style would have made sense, for the headsets could have connected their owners to the outernet, and through that to a billion other minds and data sources ... but here they were little more than a bizarre form of ornament, all the more fantastic because of their uselessness.

Beyond the market node was a series of flyways. She paused for a moment, hesitating, then opened the hatch of the nearest unoccupied tube and slid herself inside. Like so many of the metroliner's flyways this one was designed as much for divertissment as transportation, and as she pushed herself off into the no-G field, the clear walls made it seem as if she were launching herself into the very darkness of space itself. Beside her a silver catch-cord hummed, inviting her grip, but years in the habitats had made the flyways second nature to her, and with a few well-placed kicks along the joints of the walls she worked up enough velocity to send herself hurtling down the center of the tube without it. Stars were spread out on all sides of her, punctuated by the sinuous coils of the metroliner's tail. There was peace in the flyways, albeit of a tenuous nature—as if all her voices were equally hushed by the beauty of this place, and by its wonder. But it was a short-lived peace, that gave way even as a series of bright red rings warned her to slow down. She dragged her soft-soled shoes against the walls of the tube, still not grabbing hold of the catch-cord by her side. Her tutor had once said she was like a cat in her adaptation to no-G, but in fact she was simply a teenager—and like all habitat teenagers she had participated in enough forbidden races and games and pranks in the flyways that using them was second nature to her.