Voice of the Whirlwind (13 page)

“It’s this special account where they start you off with a thousand Starbright dollars. And then you do whatever you want with it.”

Reese laughed. “Okay.” Her silver ear cuffs flashed in the sun. “The last guy offered me thirteen hundred Pink Blossom, but I’d have to train him. It might be worth three hundred not to have to bother. Hey.” She was waving at someone over Steward’s shoulders, presumably the waitress. She looked at Steward. “I’m starved. Do you mind?”

The waitress was about sixteen, black, with severe acne and a jacket that flashed scenes of beaches, palm trees, and Heineken greenies. Steward watched the pictures’ reflection track across Reese’s face as they ordered. The waitress smiled, then padded back into the interior of the hotel.

Reese finished her drink and leaned forward across the linen tablecloth. “The major thing about this job is that it takes someone who can be comfortable with himself, all alone, for long periods. You’re gonna be spending months in a bottle with only four other people. If you’re the kind who needs other people around him all the time, you’re going to drive everyone crazy.”

Steward shrugged. “I can be as solitary as the next person.”

“Griffith said that about you, but sometimes I don’t know what to think about Griffith’s friends.”

Steward smiled. “I know what you mean.”

She was frowning at him. “You got religion?”

“I’m sort of a Zen agnostic.”

“People who babble about God all the time make a trip a lot longer than it has to be. How about ideology?”

“I thought Starbright has no official ideology.”

“No, it doesn’t. Do you?”

“No.”

“Do you smoke?”

“Yes.”

Reese’s look turned cold. “You’ll quit. That’s a condition of employment. I’m allergic, and I’m not going to live with it.”

“I’ve quit before.”

“I’m talking permanently. No sneaking smokes, either, when I’m not around. I’d rather have a pork junkie on board than a nicotine junkie. At least when you stick things in your veins, it doesn’t pollute the air.”

“I can quit.”

“Okay.” Reese seemed dubious, then shrugged and continued. “As far as benefits and votes are concerned, you spend the first three years as an apprentice. The pay’s shit, but you get room, board, and your health is taken care of. After that, you get citizenship and one vote. There are stock options and such built in, so every ten years you get another three votes. If you buy more stock, you get more votes, but on the basic fifty-year plan you’ll be able to contribute sixteen votes to the political health of our plutocratic democracy. Of course that’s balanced by the tens of thousands of votes that the chairman, board members, and major stockholders can command, but that’s politics. Things are more liberal in Starbright than elsewhere.”

“How does the pay advance?”

“It stays shit. You don’t get into drive rigging if you want to make money. It’s just for those with a yen to travel.” She smiled. “I think that falls under the category of tradeoffs.”

“Clone insurance?”

“Available, but expensive. You put yourself into hock for thirty years if you want it.” Reese leaned closer. “There are some options available on most ships, though, under the heading of private enterprise. If there’s space in the cargo hold, you can ship a limited number of personal goods. These are known as ventures. You pay the shipowners by the ventures’ weight. But if you want to get into making money on the side, you can get enough to retire on in thirty or forty years.”

The girl with the photojacket arrived with Steward’s conch salad and Reese’s second drink. Reese ignored her.

“Something else I should mention,” she said. “I don’t fuck other people in the crew. Neither does anyone else on the ship. That’s a rule. If you think you’re irresistible, or if you have to prove something to yourself by jumping every woman you meet, this job isn’t for you. And if you can’t keep your hormones under control, we have plenty of drugs aboard that will do it for you.”

Steward glanced up at the waitress to see if she was enjoying this. She glanced at him, expressionless. “Another drink?”

“Not just yet. Thanks.”

She took Reese’s empty glass and left. Steward turned to Reese. “I can live with that,” he said. “I have in the past. I had transit time as an Icehawk.”

“A lot of people can’t deal with it. And once the crew starts snuggling up to each other, they start playing favorites on the job, and that’s bad.”

“I see your point.” Steward began working on his salad.

“Just want to make sure it’s made.”

“This is pretty good salad. Thanks for the recommendation.”

Reese narrowed her eyes, said nothing. Then she relaxed, took her drink, and settled back into her chair. She shook her head. “You’re not what I expected. I’m not sure how to read you at all.”

“If I get the job,” Steward said, “you’ll have months to figure me out.”

“I guess so.” She looked over her shoulder, toward the beach. “What do you think of Curaçao so far?” she asked.

“Lots of rocks and lizards. I haven’t seen much else.”

“Parts of the island are lovely.”

Steward glanced up at her. “Care to show me a few later?” he asked.

Reese laughed. “Hey,” she said. “If I give you the appointment, we’ll have months in which to get sick of each other. Why start now? I want to preserve my mystery for the moment.”

“As you like.”

Steward watched Reese sip her golden cocktail and concluded that he could get along with her. She insisted on being in charge, which was okay, but she hadn’t made a fetish of it, which was better. It argued for her confidence, that she wasn’t interested in scoring points off him, and that would make someone he could live alongside for a long time without it getting wearisome.

He also decided he’d liked the way she’d accepted her bribe. Like it was part of business, an accepted thing. Not as if she were royalty. She’d even laughed.

Steward, like Reese, had standards for the people he had to live with.

Bright color reflected on Reese’s face told Steward that the waitress was bringing their dinners. The girl set plates on the table and asked if there was anything else she could bring.

“Coffee,” Steward said, and she smiled and nodded.

When she brought the coffee later, he thanked her.

“God bless,” she said.

*

The next morning, before breakfast, Steward worked out on the beach. The sand provided elusive traction that tired his calves early but proved interesting in terms of balance and coordination. Accordingly, he practiced spin kicks, which were harder on the inner ear anyway: whirling, cocking, looking over his shoulder, stabbing the air with his thrusting foot.

Rhythm built. Heart, lungs, body, mind, all working in synchrony. Balance became second nature, even on the treacherous ground. The sea was white noise in his mind, background noise for an empty universe, a null filled by his motion.

He spun, cocked, glanced, and saw Reese rounding a headland. He lashed out with the foot, retracted, planted on the sand.

She was wearing a dark green one-piece swimsuit and running barefoot on the sand.

Steward whirled, spun, cocked, fired. Into the rhythm.

She was running wind sprints, Steward concluded.

He spun again, kicked again. Sand flew in a wave from his lashing foot.

She passed him without speaking, without acknowledging his presence, absorbed by her own rhythm. Sun gleamed on the coppery hair on her arms and legs.

Steward kicked again, then again. Sand adhered to the sweat on his body.

He decided he had the job.

*

Griffith met him as he got off the coleopter that had taken him from Vandenberg to the Los Angeles airport. He was dressed in a dark silk shirt over a pair of tan slacks. He seemed healthy, even exuberant. “Congratulations on your new job,” he said, as he offered his hand.

“It was all your doing. Thanks.”

Griffith smiled. “I had ulterior motives.”

Steward looked at him. “Please don’t tell me that you want me to deliver a package to some friend on Titan.”

“No. I don’t. I want you to pick up some packages.” He saw the warning look in Steward’s eyes. “No,” he said quickly. “It’s not what you think.”

“Tell me how it’s different.”

“Come with me to the coffee shop, and I will. But first. Do you play chess?”

“I know the moves. Not much else.”

“At least you have some idea. Good.” The coffee shop was a small dim place, almost deserted at one in the morning. Half the place was roped off. The hum of scrub bots came from the closed section.

Griffith bought two cups of coffee and paid. He led Steward to a small table in a corner and lit a cigarette. “Okay. Here’s the deal.”

“You’re going to tell me that this isn’t even illegal, aren’t you?”

Griffith seemed surprised. “It’s not. Would you rather it was?”

Steward didn’t answer. A craving for tobacco was stirring in him. He ignored it and sipped his coffee.

“See, my friends and I, we usually move information. Moving goods, like last week, is kind of a sideline.”

Steward looked at him. “How big is this group anyway?”

“Counting part-timers, a couple hundred. Mostly veterans of the Artifact War. I don’t deal with very many, not personally.”

“If there are a couple hundred, people know about them. There are files. Probably lots of files in lots of places.”

Griffith shrugged. “So maybe there are. Who cares? We don’t break any laws.”

“Being on file somewhere can be bad for one’s career,” Steward said.

“Being a drive rigger,” said Griffith, “is not a career. It is a dead-end job that people take because they want to get into space and can’t find real work.”

“Exchanging information. That sounds like espionage, right?”

“Hey. You’d be a mailman. Mailmen don’t know what’s in the letters they carry. They don’t end up in jail for carrying mail.”

Steward looked at his coffee cup. The smell of tobacco was making his mouth water. “Tell me how it works,” he said.

Griffith laughed. “Okay, buck. It’s actually very simple. You know chess people, they have online bulletin boards, right?”

“It wouldn’t surprise me.”

“Well, a lot of these people put chess problems up on the bulletin boards for other people to solve, okay? Or they play chess against one another on computers, or whatever.”

“I follow.”

Griffith smiled, sucked in tobacco smoke, exhaled. “Okay. So here’s how it works. You go into the station, find a terminal or a telephone, get onto their chess bulletin board, and look for a particular chess problem. You take a memory spike with you and plug it into the terminal. You punch in a certain incorrect answer that we’ll give you, then a password. The computer will feed your memory threads some data. You unjack and go back to your ship, you get some time on the ship’s transmitter, you aim the antenna, and you shoot the data to a certain address in Antarctica that I’ll give you. After that the information is put on the market and you get a cut, ten percent, wired to an account of your choice anywhere between here and Neptune.”

“Why can’t the guy who steals the data in the first place send it off?”

“Because he wouldn’t have unrestricted access to transmission equipment. A lot of these corporate habitats are worried about signal intelligence, and they monitor transmissions very carefully. They can’t do that with a ship halfway between Jupiter and the asteroid belt.” Griffith grinned. “Pretty good, huh?”

Steward frowned, tried to think of a problem with it. “I don’t even have to see the guy I’m dealing with?” he asked. “Not at either end?”

Griffith shook his head. “That’s the beauty of it. And if you access the chess problem over public lines from the station, and not through any commo hookup from your ship, they don’t know who’s doing it even if the whole system is compromised.”

“I’ll have to think about it.”

A smile creased Griffith’s face. “Let me know before you go up the well. I’ll give you the problem and the password, and we’ll set up your mode of payment. And some way I can contact you. The chess problem and password change from time to time.”

“I’ll think about it.” Steward watched Griffith stub out his cigarette and knew that his delay, his insisting on thinking about it, was just a method of retaining a certain amount of his self-respect, that in the end he would agree to Griffith’s plan. He couldn’t find anything wrong with it. He wouldn’t have to meet any more of Griffith’s friends, not unless he wanted to go looking. And he’d make some money.

But more important, it would keep him in touch with the way things moved in the real world. Keep some of his reflexes honed, keep him looking over his shoulder at least part of the time. So that when he wanted to do some things, up there in the vacuum, he wouldn’t have to worry about being entirely out of practice.

He could look on it, he thought, as free training.

*

The night flight from LA arrived at six in the morning. Steward took a cab from the airport and tried to sleep in the back, but caffeine was still trickling across his nerves, keeping him awake.

When Steward opened the door to Ardala’s apartment, he saw her across the living room, dressed for work, watching the silent video while holding the mastoid audio receiver to her skull. She looked up at him quickly and raised a finger to her lips. Steward moved into the room and saw Ardala’s niece, age five, lying on the couch under one of Ardala’s discarded jackets. Ardala put down the mastoid receiver and stood, walking into the hallway where they could talk.

“Lisa’s picking her up before I leave for work,” she said. “She wanted a night out.”

“I got the job,” Steward said.

Her eyes narrowed. “Congratulations. It’s what you wanted, right?”

“I still have to pass the corporate exam. But with an apprenticeship appointment all I have to do is pass, not get into the top two percent. I can do that easy enough.”

“Space. Freedom. Destiny. Adventure. Vacuum.” Ardala waved her arms. “How can a place be free if you can’t even go out of doors and breathe?”

“I’ve got a week before I have to take the test,” Steward said. Ardala looked at him. He gazed at the elaborate eye makeup, saw tension twitching the pale eyelids.