War Surf (24 page)

Then Geraldine rested a hand on Liam’s unconscious thigh. “Now there be two for the garden.”

“No one’s going into the garden.” Sheeba ripped the sheet with her teeth. “Do you hear me? Kai-Kai and the chief are both going to recover.” She spoke with force, but there was no pretense of a smile.

“Where’s Juani?” I said.

Geraldine pointed at the ceiling. She meant Deck Five. She seemed enervated. Maybe it was the stuffy sick-ward air that robbed her of motive force. Sheeba shook my ankle to get my attention.

“Nasir, go check on Juani, okay? I’m worried about him.”

“Okay,” I said. Like a father, her words echoed. You’ve been like a father to me.

“He’s probably tending his garden,” Shee said.

“Okay,” I said again. This time I moved.

Heavy blooms of fungus filled the well segment leading to Five. I had to brush them off the ladder to find a grip. Just because I had hired Shee to massage my aching joints, that didn’t make me an old man. A father? The fungus felt stiff and rubbery. I held my flashlight between my teeth and ripped it loose by the handful. I was strong, passionate, open to new ideas.

Savagely, I ripped and tore, and the fibers cut my palms. Shee knew my age. I hadn’t concealed it. But had anyone ever caught me drooling in my soup or taking afternoon naps? No. At the safety hatch leading to Five, I scraped the lever free with my split fingernails. My body did not feel old. My muscles rippled with steroid vigor. My sexual organ performed faithfully. Damp crumbs of fungus rained down and got in my eyes.

Fungus grew so thick inside the airlock leading to Five that I had to scoop some out before I could climb in. The spores smelled of musk and sweet burnt caffeine. Father? I was nobody’s father. Slowly I hollowed out a cavity inside the lock. How long since Juani cycled through here? What kind of fungus could regenerate that fast?

I squeezed into the lock, inhaling the stuff through my teeth. Father, ha. Sheeba was deliberately mocking me. She’d fallen under the spell of that agitator, that’s what. He’d corrupted her. She was no longer the dear golden goddess I used to know. Father indeed.

When the upper hatch slid open, I leaped upward into the vast echoing chamber of Deck Five, where the centrifugal gravity was barely strong enough to settle me back to the floor. Deck Five held the food vats. This was the factory proper.

Picture if you will an enormous open cylinder crammed with an array of gleaming spherical vats, sheathed in white insulation and linked by interconnecting pipes. No ladder well pierces the core. No walls partition off wedge-shaped rooms. The factory lies open from end to end, and the sterile array of vats suggests a child’s Tinkertoy model of a molecule. Pristine ranks and files of white spheres reflect against the cylinder’s polished steel walls like clouds. The food vats fill Deck Five to capacity. Do you see the gentle steam wafting through their vents? Do you hear the soft gurgle of fermentation? This is the Provendia food factory you will browse in the corporate video. This is not what awaited me in Heaven.

Oh, the vats were there, barely visible between dense green layers of foliage. I’d arrived in a jungle. Leaves the size of rooms, vines thicker than my body, swelling red pulpy seedpods—I couldn’t keep track of the colors and shapes of the fruits. Exotic varieties that must have been genetically modified to grow in fractional gravity. Melons, squash, coconuts, avocados, ears of corn, luscious bunches of grapes. Also flowers, exquisite blossoms saturated with color, finer than any hothouse orchid I’d ever seen on Earth. And running through it all like a bass note were the fibrous black filigrees of fungus. Around the nearest spherical vat, they branched like veins. And tumbling, swinging, soaring among the vines in every direction were juveniles.

Toddlers. Teenagers. Kids of all ages. Three boys of about Juani’s size were picking fruit and rough-housing. An older girl cradled an infant against her breast and scolded the fruit pickers to get on with their work. A loose line of adolescents handed the full fruit baskets along to a young woman, who heaped them in a dangling hoist. Their pale bodies ranged in hue from ash white to deep caramel. A few were as dusky as Geraldine. As the youngest ones romped in the fractional gravity, their hair streamed in every shade of gold, copper and jet. It was impossible to count the little demons because of the way they frolicked through the leaves.

Lensed portholes like the one in the solar plant perforated the cylinder’s Up side, and sunlight slanted through in pearly parallel rays. A tapestry of mirrors swiveled the rays through the garden, illuminating fruit, faces, vines and legs, backlighting the foliage in brilliant luminous green.

One vigorous bound took me up into the canopy, where a flock of inquisitive kids leaped among the branches and converged around me, shrilling their tinny voices. Then hundreds of misters clicked on and drenched the jungle in a downpour. Rainbows shot through the leaves in vaporous hues mat wavered and disappeared when the misters shut off. For an instant, droplets wobbled through the air in the surreal slow motion of reduced gravity. Then the water dripped like ringing bells, and raindrops wobbled in slow-motion off my old gray space suit. When the kids started chattering again, I leaped higher.

And here were clouds of gray-green moss, feather pillows of fern, massive knotted tree trunks wreathed in vines. Everything grew larger in the weak gravity. Overhead waved a tall swath of seeded grasses, and higher still, bean pods. Children raced and fought and squealed. They threw fruit at each other, screaming insults. They made me laugh.

And the aromas. Fruity sweet dark stinging bitter. Fanning through the air like music. Flute notes and deep sonorous drums. Every cell in my olfactory brain trembled to these perfume vibrations, brighter even than child song.

But how were these plants rooted? Did they spring to life in midair? I followed a tree trunk down to its source and found it fixed inside one of the spherical food vats. Its growth had pushed the vented hood askew. Other plants large and small sprouted from the tank as well, vying with the tree for space, and someone had wrapped layers of duct tape around and through the stems as if to tie them into the vat so they wouldn’t fall out. I tore away some tape and squeezed my arm down among the roots. Warm liquid washed over my hand, and a few globules rose sluggishly into the air, then splashed in a slow dance among the leaves. The liquid had the same smell as Juani’s veggie trays. Liquid nutrient. The Heavenians had “rehabbed” our food factory as a vast hydroponic rain forest.

“Blade, you some kinda tree frog.”

Juani’s eyelids were still puffy, but his tears had dried, and he’d rewoven his braid with colored wire. He swung hand over hand along a potato vine and landed in a crouch on the tank beside me. “This our garden. You ever see a sight like this on Earth?”

“No,” I answered. “Not even close.”

He picked up a little toad who’d just landed on the tank beside him, the girl with the red birthmark on her cheek. “Keesha girl,” he said fondly. Then he unwound a wire bracelet from his wrist and began braiding her hair into pigtails. “Everybody love the garden. Mostly, we keep the people down on One. Chief say gravitation help their bones. But they sneak up here anyway.”

“We play hide,” the girl said happily.

“It’s amazing,” I said breathlessly.

Juani finished arranging Keesha’s hair. Then he let her run off to play, and he climbed along a thick branch, motioning for me to follow. The branch dipped slightly with our weight, and its leafy end rested against a food vat crusted with green algae. Juani pulled the leaves aside and scrubbed at the algae with his fist. Soon a pattern emerged underneath. A picture was scraped into the vat’s white insulation. A portrait.

Wild, tangled hair framed the old man’s face. His beard forked like tree roots. Heavy lines crisscrossed his cheeks, and spots mottled his large nose. The artwork was primitive, but there was no mistaking the zeal in the man’s startling, green-stained eyes.

Juani slapped the side of the vat. “This Dr. Bashevitz. He here.”

“In spirit, you mean.”

Juani gave me an enigmatic grin. “This the last garden. ‘Xecs burned all the rest. They don’t like veggies growing in the G Ring. They say our garden pose a health risk.” He leaned across me and snapped off a prickly, brown pod from one of the plants, slit it open with his thumb and showed me the inside. Its inner husk gleamed like new satin, and, at the center, nestling in a wisp of downy silk, were dozens of round black seeds. Juani plucked out the seeds and rolled them between his palms.

“This our future, blade. This what we gotta save.”

Juani and I returned to sick-ward and found Sheeba pumping Kaioko’s chest with both hands. The girl’s heart had stopped. Sweat gleamed on Sheeba’s forehead as she performed the CPR, counting under her breath, one-two-three-four-five. Near the foot of the mattress, Geraldine sat in a trance, quietly slicing the back of her arm with a small knife. Tiny bracelets of red beads brightened in the wake of her blade.

“Nass, help me,” Sheeba commanded. “When I tell you, blow two hard breaths in her mouth.”

“Right.”

I forgot all about hiding my puckered face. I knelt by the mattress and drew Kaioko’s chin up to clear her airway. On Sheeba’s signal, I puffed into her diminutive mouth and watched her narrow chest rise. War surfers train regularly in cardiopulmonary resuscitation. It’s part of our safety drill. I had never kept it up two hours straight though, which is what we had to do to revive Kaioko.

Sheeba and I traded places every twenty minutes to ease our cramping muscles. Juani didn’t know how to give CPR, but he blotted sweat from our faces with a rag. He didn’t bother trying to rouse Geraldine. She looked scary, slumped in her lotus pose, slicing her arm.

I kept two fingers pressed against Kaioko’s carotid artery, hoping for some sign. Tears of fatigue leaked from

Sheeba’s eyes as she thrust downward, stiff-armed, against the girl’s sternum, again and again and again. “Wish I had a cardio-stim,” she muttered like a prayer.

At last, Kaioko’s artery jumped. A tiny twitch. Then another. “She has a pulse,” I said.

Sheeba crouched and pressed an ear to Kaioko’s chest. “Yeah.”

When her breams came steadily, we collapsed on the vacant mattresses. We were completely done in. Naturally, the chief slept through it all.

“I think Liam has a concussion.” Flat on her back, Sheeba spoke to the ceiling. Her voice sounded groggy and distant. “The gunfire knocked him against the hull.”

I was all set to curl on my mattress and snooze, but Sheeba sat up and fished through the medical tray till she found an unused needle. With the swift efficiency of surfer adrenaline, she prepared the girl’s vein and drew out a blood sample. Then, holding the crimson vial in her fist, she hurried to the anteroom.

I staggered after her, fighting fatigue. “Sheeba?”

Among the litter of parts from the eviscerated cyber-doc, she found a nanoscope. Then she swept everything else off the counter with her arm. Next she placed one bright red drop in the ‘scope, wiped her hands on the front of her uniform and stooped to peer through the eyepiece.

“I see a few NEMs. Not many.”

Exhaustion seamed her face, and sweat matted her short hair. Her skin was greasy from lack of bathing, and her fabulous water-colored eyes drooped at the comers. I wanted to take her in my arms forever.

“Nass, will you give more blood for Kaioko?”

I flinched.

“You did it before,” she said, coaxing.

“For you, Shee.” I leaned against the counter and watched her fluttering eyelids. Maybe Sheeba didn’t realize what she was asking. Execs her age had dewy ideas. Maybe sharing blood with a worker didn’t repulse her as it did me.

Sharing health? But when had that act changed to wickedness? And who decided those things? There was a time when I would have laughed at such a rule. Did morals come and go like fashion trends? Kaioko’s blood smeared anemically under the nanoscope. And I doubted. Over how many decades had my attitudes hardened and crusted over?

Abruptly, Sheeba’s eyes lost focus, and when she swayed, I caught her. The adrenaline charge wasn’t powerful enough to keep her going. She needed food and water and rest.

“Juani!” I yelled. “Those provisions we hauled up here, where are they?”

The boy stuck his head through the sick-ward door. “In the ‘pactor room.”

I didn’t ask what the ‘pactor room was. “Get me some. Get enough for everyone.”

Sheeba didn’t want to eat. She refused water, too, pleading with me to donate more blood for Kaioko. What could I do? My darling was ready to faint from thirst. And like she said, I’d already subverted the moral code once. My depravity was a fait accompli.

“Okay, take another liter.”

Sheeba smiled.

After drawing my vital fluid, she sat on the floor between her two patients, Liam and Kaioko, alternately checking their pulses and feeding herself spoonfuls of cold protein stew. Meanwhile, I rested on another mattress, feeling strangely lighter.

My illicit ruby sack hung from a peg on the wall and drained much too slowly into the girl’s vein through a makeshift rig of plastic tubing and clips. Sheeba didn’t complain about the light gravity or the primitive conditions of this sick-ward, but the deficiencies must have frustrated her. This clinic didn’t have basic heart monitors, much less medical amenities like cardio-stims. A dismal place to get sick.

Geraldine ignored her bowl of stew, but Juani and I gulped the food in big mouthfuls, and I emptied three water sacks. This second bloodletting also made me woozier and thirstier than the first. I couldn’t seem to get enough to drink, and forming complete thoughts proved a challenge. Let’s see, if my body held five liters, and Sheeba took two, what percentage was that? It sounded like a lot

When no one was looking, I peeked at my thumbscreen and clicked a few menus. Good news, my IBiS showed a steady production of new red and white cells to replace the lost ones. New plasma, too. My NEMs were working overtime to restore my vital sap. Thank the gilty gods, they hadn’t bothered to wait for doctors’ orders. I grabbed a water sack for another swallow, and as I leaned back to tip it into my mouth, zillions of pin-sized black spots obliterated my view of the ceiling.

“Man, you look pale,” Juani said.

Sheeba held my head and made me lean forward till my nose practically touched the scummy floor. “Take deep breams,” she said. As if I wanted to snuffle up that fungus, ha. Then she made me lie flat on my back and put my feet up on a pillow while she patted my forehead with a cool damp cloth. Molto comforting. I nuzzled against her hand. If only my face hadn’t developed those annoying little grooves and puckers, it would have been celestial.

But her attentions were cut short. The thug chief chose that instant to rise from the dead. He sat up groaning and wincing, making a production out of the minor bruises on his ribs. Sheeba abandoned me and rushed to his side. She wanted him to lie down again, but he refused. Too much to do. Everything depended. Blah blah blah. What an infernal superman. Sheeba mentioned that I had saved his life—again. When he noticed me lying on my mat, he lifted my arm, and—I figured I was hallucinating—he gave me the prote handshake.

“Gee was wrong about you, Nasir. You a good man.”

Next, an odd thing happened. He was going through the pockets of his (my) EVA suit, looking for his flashlight, when his pulled out a small shiny bit of gilded metal. It was the good luck ankh Sheeba had hidden there for me, eons ago, when we first began this blighted war surf. As he turned it over curiously, the polished Egyptian cross reflected sick-ward’s light like a mirror.

Sheeba noticed what he’d found and took it “Silly junk.” She threw it against the wall.

Liam seemed as surprised as I was. “Sheeba, what is that thing?”

She shook her head. “Just a gold-plated trinket. It reminds me how stupid I used to be.”

“But it’s the symbol of the life force,” I said. “You gave it to me as a gift. You told me it had rejuvenating power.”

“Nass, that was make-believe.” Her mouth set in a hard line as she adjusted one of the clips on Kaioko’s transfusion tube. “I’m done with fairy tales.” Poor exhausted child.

She fed her punk stew with my spoon and gave him the rest of my water. As soon as he could stand without wobbling, he gripped my arm with manly affection—presumptuous cur. Then he whispered quiet instructions to Juani, and he set off again to go EVA and play Heaven’s dogged guardian.

Sheeba followed. What did she mean, deserting her sick patients? Why, look at poor Kaioko ringing death’s doorbell. And me. I felt nauseous. In fact, a moment later, I turned on my side and threw up. About a liter of bright red Chili Diablo oozed across the floor like molten lava.

“Bless a Jeez.” Juani made a face and went to get a mop.

Wiping my mouth, I happened to glance at Geraldine, who was staring straight at me. No longer blank, her dark eyes shimmered with malice, and she clenched her teeth in a mega-unfriendly way. Another mood swing. I was just trying to decide if I should call for help when she sprang across the room and grabbed my throat

Freaking hell, not again. In Four’s light gravity, she literally lifted me off the mattress by my neck. I clutched at her hands and tried to get my feet underneath me, sputtering through my constricted larynx. Geraldine’s muscles knotted, and her handsome, scarred face quivered with the effort of strangling me.

I started going faint. Ye gilders, I would not let this hysterical juve choke me to death. No way would Nasir Deepra meet his end at the hands of a teenager. Especially not in a vomit-stained longjohn. I went at her face with my fingernails.

Then she punched my head so hard, I lost balance and fell against the wall.

“I know who you are,” she growled, touching the scratches I’d made on her cheek. “Chief won’t believe me, but I know.”

Her blow rang my artificial eardrums, and the noise blared like an unholy siren. Louder it grew. As shrill as the sonic lathe.

Then Juani ran in, threw down his mop and grabbed Geraldine by the shoulders. “Gee, the alarm. The alarm going off. We gotta get ready.”

Geraldine stood gawking like ah idiot while I cringed and tried to look harmless. Juani shook her again and repeated his announcement about the alarm. The siren was not in my head after all. What I heard was the blare of a major warning signal:

“What is it, Juani?”

“Justment,” he said, still gripping Geraldine.

At the mention of that unusual word, she seemed to come to herself. She slapped Juani’s hands away and said, “Help me strap Kaioko.”

To my utter bafflement, they started lashing Kaioko into her mattress with thick straps of canvas. All the mattresses had these straps, but Kaioko’s had been unhooked and thrown to the side. Now Juani and Geraldine cinched the straps tight around her chest, legs and forehead. The girl lay as deeply submerged in her coma as ever. Why did they suddenly feel the need to restrain her?

Next, Juani gathered up all the loose items in the room. Empty blood sacks, plastic tubing, chili bowls.

Geraldine motioned him toward the anteroom. “We gotta stow Vlad’s mess. Come on.”

Juani pointed to me. “What about him? Strap him in?”

Geraldine’s nostrils flared as if she were sniffing something vile. “Let him bounce in his puke.” Then she marched away.

Juani opened a wall bin and tossed all the loose items inside. He offered me the mop. “Hurry, go clean up your mess before Justment.”

I frowned at the pool of vomit. Was he kidding? I was almost too dizzy to stand. Juani shrugged, laid the mop at my side and went into the anteroom to help Geraldine. I heard the two of them banging cabinet doors. It sounded as if they were packing up the dismantled cyberdoc in a sudden mania of spring cleaning.

My vomit smelled vile. With a sigh, I stripped the sheet off my mattress and, on hands and knees, I wiped the floor clean. Then I searched for the little ankh Sheeba had thrown away. Carefully, I polished the gold-plated charm with my fingers and zipped it inside the breast pocket of my longjohn.

“We going up to the garden, blade. Best place to be during Justment.” Juani took my arm and helped me stand.

Geraldine blocked the door, fingering the hammer in her pocket. “You go, Juani. Look after the people. I take care of the houseguest.”

“What you gonna do?” Juani’s hesitant tone frightened me almost as much as the wench’s hammer.

“Be calm. I taking loverboy to help me lock down the power plant.” She nodded at the rising sound of the alarm. “We go hurry. Justment coming.”

Juani nodded. Without another word, he raced for the ladder well, leaving me alone with the angel of spite.

“There’s no need for violence,” I said.

Geraldine ignored me. She knelt at Kaioko’s bedside, kissed the sleeping girl’s lips, then tightened die straps more securely. After another quiet kiss, she got up and motioned me to follow.

“Where’s Sheeba? I want to be with Sheeba.”

Geraldine spoke without turning. “Doll-face below.”

She barely looked at me as we cycled down through the ladders and locks to Deck Two. She merely fondled the hammer in her pocket. The shallow cuts on her arm had turned dark red. I didn’t dare ask her what “Justment” meant. The way Juani talked, it sounded like Armageddon. As we climbed down the ladder, I felt nauseous, and the warning siren hurt my head.

In the solar plant, we found Liam and Sheeba lashing down a pile of machine parts under a cargo net. Curiouser and curiouser.

“What’s going on?” I shielded my face so Sheeba couldn’t see my wrinkles.

“Justment,” Liam said. “Gotta go lock everything down.”

Sheeba glanced up from the magnetic bolt she was anchoring to the deck. “He means adjustment. It’s nearly time for the orbit correction.”

“Adjustment?” My brain still wasn’t functioning clearly.

“Remember, we saw the last one from Kat’s shuttle nine days ago. They send a signal from Earth.”

Heaven quakes. I remembered. The guidance rockets on the satellite and its counterweight fired out of time with each other. We hadn’t approved the funds to replace a burnt-out synchronizer, so every orbital adjustment shook Heaven like a whiplash. All too vividly, I remembered Juani tapping the X wall. “He old. He tremble.”

“This tank will break apart!” I yelled.

Geraldine punched my shoulder. “There,” she said, pointing toward ops bay. “We go get ready for Justment.”

She shoved me through the door before I could react. I was still weak from the bloodletting, and Sheeba and Liam were too fully occupied securing loose items in the solar plant to notice what Geraldine was doing. As soon as we’d passed into the ops bay, she closed the door behind us and twisted the wheel to locked position. In bewilderment, I watched her wedge her hammer so no one could turn the wheel from the other side.