"Every old man complains of the growing depravity of the world, of the petulance and Insolence of the rising generation."
—DR. JOHNSON
Two's corridors were just as narrow and scummy as One's had been. The ceilings were just as claustrophobically low, the surveillance cameras dangled just as inertly, and there were no windows anywhere. It amazed me that the engineers hadn't provided a way to see out. More squealing toads milled around, playing their silly games and blocking our way. My left thumb had been vibrating constantly since the episode with the sonic lathe, so as Juani marched ahead, I covertly tapped my thumbscreen with my pinky stylus. A menu popped up with a ton of messages.
"Net not responding" topped the list, and I finally realized why. Provendia's Net blockade was scrambling my IBiS signal as well as my sat phone. Sure enough, the processor in my thumb had logged a dozen missed appointments—scheduled maintenance on my thymus, for one. That device controlled my T-cells. I'd also missed another telomerase infusion. If I skipped too many of those, the telomeres in my cells would shrivel, and my skin would sag. Not good.
Ahead in the corridor, Juani was singing mindless sentimental lyrics of love and heartbreak, as if a boy his age would know anything about that.
"Where did you learn that stupid song?' I asked.
Juani grinned and came back to offer me his elbow. "Sing me some Earth songs, blade."
"I don't sing." I rubbed my jaw and brooded over my shriveling telomeres. But my skin still felt smooth and tight. As we passed bulkhead doors, more and more useless little employee dependents wandered underfoot. Sometimes I had to knee them out of my way. No wonder A13's overhead costs had gotten so seriously out of line.
Juani guided me around Deck Two, narrating like a tour guide. "Over there, ops bay. Here, circulator pumps push the air and water."
He stopped in front of an oval door, grabbed its wheel with both hands and mysteriously wiggled his eyebrow up and down. "Veggies."
"Listen, kid, I just want to find Sheeba."
Juani ignored me. When the door swung open, light blazed through, and a wet gurgling sound echoed. More powerful than light, or sound was the mesmerizing fragrance. How can I describe the amazing perfume that wafted through this door?
Fresh, that was the main impression. Sweet, but also sour, sharp, tangy. The smell appealed to me on a primitive level. My mouth actually watered. I stepped farther in and felt a breeze, the first positive airflow I'd experienced in Heaven. A low rhythmic purr hinted some kind of mechanical rotor fans. And there was dripping, like the tinkle of small bells. The humidity settled on my skin.
Set into the outer curving wall were a score of blinding light-globes like the one in the solar plant. Their beams sparkled through the mist. The inner wall curved, too, giving the room a half-torus shape, like the inside of one half of a hollow donut. The dazzling white beams ricocheted across ranks and ranks of tables. I cupped my hands around my eyes and peered. The tables were covered with leaves.
Hundreds—no, thousands of green leaves fluttered in the breeze of the fans. The room held actual living plants. Scores of them. A veritable treasure trove of greenware. I bent over a table and gawked. The plants were growing in long thick bars of solid plastic.
Juani stepped aside and grinned as he watched my reaction. "Watch this." He jammed his stubby finger under one of the plastic bars, and its top flipped up like a lid. So the bar was not solid plastic. It was a long, slender lidded tray with holes in the top for the plants to grow through. Juani opened the lid only a few centimeters, careful not to disturb the plants. I stooped to peek inside, where plant roots coiled like white threads, soaking up a cloudy yellowish liquid. Yes, I recognized this technology. Hydroponics. I'd browsed video about it.
"The cover keeps the juice from sloshing out during Justment," Juani said, "but we still get a little splatter sometimes."
Justment? Peculiar word. On the floor, furry tufts of black space fungus outlined the strokes where someone had mopped up repeated spills. I wondered what caused the liquid nutrient to splash so much. As I studied the open tray, a new stream of liquid surged through, washing the roots gently back and forth. Then ceiling-mounted misters erupted and shot a fine spray over the leaves for about five seconds. When the misters subsided, the damp leaves trembled and shed heavy, glittering droplets. A sheen of moisture covered every verdant surface. Juani snapped the tray's lid back into place.
I'd seen so few real plants in my life. Hothouse orchids brought in for parties. Astronomically expensive endive salad to celebrate a birthday. Even wealthy execs relied on synthesized foods, textiles and medicines most of the time. When greenhouse gases thickened our skies and poisoned our rain, plants had to be moved indoors. On a mass scale, that absorbed way too many resources, and the results were too chancy, too subject to terrorist attack and genetic mutation. Farming had never been a good investment. Synthetics, on the other hand, paid back in spades. Synthetics could be standardized, patented and kept secure. After years of Provendia board meetings, I knew more about food processing than I cared to admit.
"What are these plants, Juani?"
"This ruffled one, this kale." He ran his open palm along the tops of the leaves, smiling with gap-toothed affection. "Those over there, they look like heads. They cabbages."
Nearby stood a tray of deep green foliage. I parted the dark leaves and discovered, to my delight, a small pulpy floret the color of emeralds. It sparkled with droplets of mist.
Juani said, "That broccoli, man. Pinch off a piece. It's okay."
I snapped off a floret, sniffed it, then tested it with the tip of my tongue.
"It's good." Juani broke off a larger stalk and chomped, smiling as he chewed.
I took a tiny bite, then another. Bittersweet, crunchy. The texture alone was a marvel. And the flavor, transcendental. I snapped another floret and devoured it Nothing in my experience had prepared me for this exotic taste.
"This Primo," said Juani, gesturing at the crescent-shaped room. Half a dozen prepubescent kids were moving among the tables, doing things to the plants. Juani kept talking. "Dr. Bashevitz, he built this. This our first hydro-pod. This where we start our seedlings."
Without thinking, I rested my weight on my injured leg, but in Two's reduced gravity, the pain jarred me with less force. When I moved toward the cabbages, a brilliant beam spotlighted me, and that's when I noticed the light beams were moving—slowly roving over the leaves like searchlights.
"Just babies here. Little shoots. Our main garden up on Five," Juani said.
"Deck Five is the factory floor," I mused absently, studying the light beams.
"Up there, man, we got fruit. Melons." Juani followed at my heels, speaking rapidly. "Dr. Bashevitz, he brought the seeds here. He a botanist. He built this Primo, and we copied his plans up on Five."
I squinted to see what made the light beams move. On the ceiling, rows of small round mirrors hung on mounts that swiveled like searching eyes.
Juani kept chattering away. His thick eyebrow fringe rose and fell as he talked, and a happy grin wrinkled his pug nose. "Primo supposed to breed psuedoplankton to make oxygen. Green stinky mess. I used to go rake it But Dr. Bashevitz, he snuck in veggie seeds. They say he plant seeds in a thousand factories before he got busted. For a while, his veggies growin' all over the G Ring. Then the 'xecutives go burn 'em out."
The ceiling mirrors were reflecting the light beams from the globes and sweeping them evenly across the growing plants. Clever design, I thought.
" 'Xecutives say the gardens not clean enough. Harbor germs. Say we gotta sterilize."
Juani bent over another tray, pulled off a dead leaf and rolled it between his palms. He raised the lid and crumbled the leaf into the pale liquid sluicing through the channels, feeding the threadlike roots.
I watched the fluid waves in fascination. "What's in that liquid?"
"Everything good goes into the garden." Juani's large brown eyes gleamed with mystery and mischief. "We recycle."
"Oh." I plucked another bit of—what did he call it, broccoli? The taste aroused deep feelings of satisfaction, as if I remembered its essence from a former life. What would Sheeba say about that? She loved the concept of reincarnation.
"Sooner later, I show you the garden on Five. That one beautiful sight."
"Has Sheeba seen this?" I asked. This was definitely her kind of place. She would imagine all sorts of mystical forces among the seedlings. I could almost hear her joyful gibberish. "Let's go find Sheeba."
"Yeah, man." Juani escorted me through the curving torus room, proudly explaining as we went how the mirrors bent the sunlight around to reach all the tables. He recited plant names. Clearly, he loved having an audience. I knew he was taking unnecessary detours to show off his seedlings, and I had to keep urging him forward. Still, he amused me. He revered those plants.
"Juani, I've lost all sense of direction. Which way is Sheeba from here?"
He leaned against the curved outer wall and scoured away the film of black fungus with his thumb to reveal a stenciled X. More wall alphabet. I'd noticed a few X's earlier, intermingled with the A's, E's, W's, U's and D's.
"X mean exterior," he said. "This the hull. Nothing beyond this wall but vacuum, and it sucks." His eyes closed to merry slits, enjoying the stale joke. "If you get lost, follow a X wall till you come to something familiar."
My leg was aching, and I tried to shove a hydroponic tray aside so I could sit on the table to rest. But since the trays were welded in place, I could only lean my butt against the table edge. "Juani, try to grasp this. Nothing here is familiar to me."
The comical way his nose wrinkled almost made me laugh. He didn't have an inkling what I meant. Every centimeter of this hellish satellite must have been engraved in his brain like tribal memory.
"Enough X-wall lessons. Let's just find Sheeba."
He rubbed the stenciled X, and Ms caramel face gleamed with the damp. Fungus blackened his stubby, boyish hands. The fungus was everywhere. Here in the hydroponic section, rings of it bloomed along the walls in a morbid floral pattern, following the arcs of a scrub brush where someone had tried to clean. With disgust, I noted my own blackened hands and sock feet.
"You don't have X walls on Earth?" Juani said. "You gotta have something to hold in the air."
I sighed, because he was right. Even on Earth, bream-able air had to be contained within sealed habitats. Beyond our terrestrial walls lay not the airless void but something just as lethal—toxic pollution. "We don't stencil X's everywhere," I said. "On Earth, we use street signs."
Juani gave me that googly expression kids get when they're curious. His liquid brown eyes widened. How do you deal with a look like that?
Some of the urchins drew closer, and Juani lifted a toddler in his arms. I scooted farther back against the welded tray and rested my sore leg across my knee. It crossed my mind to abandon Juani and go looking for Sheeba on my own, but more toads gathered at my feet, hemming me in. They gripped their knobby knees and looked up at me with big, popping eyes. Among them sat the little girl with the red birthmark. She scratched my foot to get my attention. "What color is Earth?"
That started a deluge. The little beasties had more questions than a Com has vice presidents. They wanted to know what held the oceans down, and why mountains changed into sand. These infants knew so little, only myths and half-truths gleaned from storytelling.
"Don't you ever browse the Net?" I asked.
The toads looked at Juani, who merely shrugged and jostled the toddler he was holding in his arms. Then I remembered that employees weren't given Net access unless their jobs required it. I glanced at the dingy surface of the X wall, decorated with graffiti. "How do you stand this place without windows? You can't see anything."
Juani puffed out his chest like a strutting young bird. "Some day I go spacewalking again."
The birthmark girl scratched my foot again. "What's a window?"
Juani tousled her hair. "Keesha, you a smart aleck."
Then he got up, lowered the child he was holding into Keesha's lap, and started picking veggies to feed the kids. As the wee ones crunched and nibbled, Juani kept interrogating me, and each time I answered, he would lean toward me and wiggle his fingers as if he could pluck learning from the air. He made me feel like a sage.
"The oceans stay put because the land is above sea level . . . . No no no, you don't get lighter when you climb a mountain. Gravity's the same everywhere." I answered whether I knew the facts or not. No one had ever hung on my words the way Juani and these toads did.
I sat munching handfuls of what they called "cherry tomatoes," and while I gushed erudition, the juice ran down my chin. Ye gilders, I hadn't met so many inquisitive minds in decades. The younger kids must have lived all their short lives in this rusty spinning bucket, and these wedge-shaped steel rooms comprised their entire universe. As I watched Juani dawdle over his greenery, I tried to imagine what that would be like.
Ditch the sentiment. You're going sappy, Deepra.
The edge of the table was eating into my butt, and the little red fruits began to upset my stomach. They looked too much like lychee nuts. Nearby, another broccoli flower glistened, so I broke off the entire stalk and took big bites to wash the bitter taste away. "Juani, let's get going. We've wasted enough time."
He was examining another withered leaf, smoothing it with his blunt boyish fingertips. "Strange. Live all your life on Earth, and never see broccoli."
The younger kids laughed at mat.
"There's some kind of disease in this place," I said abruptly. "Tell me about it."
Juani flinched. My change of subject must have shocked him. His face closed up, and he turned away to adjust a mister nozzle, while the kids glanced back and forth between the two of us with worried frowns.
"What about you, Juani? Do you have any symptoms?"
He found a tool under the table and began to scrape a whitish crust off the nozzle jet. "Dr. Bashevitz say the plants on Earth all gone. Why you go let them die, blade?"
"What?"
"Why you make such a wreckage?" he asked.
"I didn't do it!"
I bit down hard on the broccoli stalk but found it difficult to chew. Wreckage, he called it. Earth's Big D— Defloration—began in the twentieth century, long before I was born. And this illiterate child was accusing me? What did he know, stupid kid. I crunched another bite. He talked as if I were personally responsible for the climate change.
Juani gave me a stem look and put his tool away. Keesha whispered something, and the other kids drifted back to their chores, while I sat chomping and scowling and ruminating.
Earth's plants died because of chemical alterations in the atmosphere that heated the oceans and drove our weather patterns into cosmic freak-out. When the last tundras burned off, I was building my first Com, working night and day, recruiting coders to patch the sub-Asian Internet back together. Meeting payroll took my entire focus. I didn't have time to spare for moss and lichen.
"You're too young to understand."
"I old, blade."
"Ridiculous. You can't be more than sixteen."
"I been living fast"
Juani stripped the leaves from a broccoli stem and used it to clean his teeth, all the while studying me with his clear brown eyes. They made me nervous, those eyes. If I didn't know better, I'd have said he felt sorry for me.
"Are you going to take me to Sheeba or not?"
"What happened to Earth?" he said. "For real."
I propped up my splinted leg and picked at my sock. Earth's past was not a subject I liked to remember, any more man my own, but the distress in Juani's eye touched me. Maybe he deserved an answer.
"Rainfall. That's what we noticed first. It fell too hard in the wrong places, gorging out gullies and washing away the soil. In other places, there were droughts and dust storms."
The kids scrambled closer again, all ears. Juani wrung out a wet rag and wiped veggie juice from their faces. They probably expected an adventure tale. Ha, they had no idea. Nothing I could say about our magnificent home planet would make sense to them.
"The floods blew out landfills and waste sites. There were toxic spills and leakages. Bad things started washing into the oceans, which were heating up faster than we knew." I rambled on, knowing the kids wouldn't understand. "The polar ice melted so slowly, we didn't notice at first how the ocean currents were shifting. The Ag Corns kept gengineering their major crops to survive the hotter climate. And who cared about a few wild species going extinct?'
Juani sat down with the kids and waited for me to go on, but I couldn't meet his eyes. I picked at the fungus matted to my sock.
"The big changes came gradually. Wind storms carried poisonous dust as high as the stratosphere. The cyclones got worse, and the tides—"
I scraped at my socks, remembering the filmy floodwaters overtaking my parents' home. "People had to move inland. There were mass evacuations."
Who can see the future? I had gone to Delhi for a conference. I wasn't there when the storm tides bit the coast, higher than any on record. Prashka's voice lilted over the phone like birdsong. "Don't worry, my love. We'll meet in Lahore." But when the floods took Calcutta, she couldn't get out. Airline employees seized the airport and auctioned off tickets to the highest bidder. They laughed at her worthless rupees___
Keesha reached up and patted my hand. Her little round eyes held such compassion—ye gilded effigies, I jerked away. I didn't need sympathy from a prote child.
"Show's over." I stood and gruffly waved the toads away. "No more fucking nursery school. Take me to Sheeba now."
Keesha drew back as if I'd slapped her, and the kids scattered. Juani folded his wet rag and laid it on a bench. Then he knelt beside the table where I'd been sitting and clamped down the tray lid I'd knocked askew. For a moment, I regretted my rudeness. He was brainier than I'd expected. Curious, enthusiastic and fairly polite. Not a bad sort. But I was getting sappy again.
"Sheeba may be lost," I said.
"Lost here? It just one old tank, man. How she go get lost?"
Juani instructed the kids to finish picking tomatoes. Then he led me back to the ladder well, and he sealed the door behind us. Straight across the well, the reflective silver U glinted from the Up door. We'd entered the solar plant that way, but we were coming out through the Down door. Juani had led me halfway around Deck Two.
"Sick-ward on Four. We go climb." He helped me hop up the first rung.
The ladder well seemed darker and smellier after the bright hydroponic rooms. Straggling upward, I felt the short ladder slope away again, and no matter how rigid it appeared to my eye, I had to cling with both hands to keep from flying off. The Coriolis effect unzipped my equilibrium. Yet with each step upward, the artificial gravity grew very slightly weaker. At the ceiling hatch, I felt light and nimble enough to pull myself up with my hands. But in this crazy place, "up" didn't mean what it did on Earth. Climbing the ladder meant moving closer toward the tether that spun Heaven around its counterweight
"Why won't you talk about the sickness?" I asked when we reached the low ceiling.
Juani opened the hatch, which led to another tiny black enclosure—the safety lock between Two and Three. The engineers should have built some lighting in these double-door coffins between the decks. I made a mental note: Heaven's lighting needed a thorough upgrade.
"What about it, Juani? Why won't you tell me?"
He'd turned sullen. Not good. I needed Juani on my side. "Okay, forgive me for prying."
"Blade, you too keen."
"My intentions are good, I swear." We squeezed into the tiny lock, and just as Juani finished sealing us in, a jolt knocked us against the upper hatch. "What was that?" I said.
"Dunno."
Juani pressed his hand to the enclosure's floor, apparently feeling for vibrations. I could feel them, too, through the soles of my sock feet. The gunship was firing again.
He said, "We better move outta here."
He locked the hatch beneath us, then opened the one above, and we hustled up into the next ladder well segment. On Deck Three, the false gravity was noticeably weaker, and I could walk on my injured leg without pain. Juani sealed the floor hatch, then opened the bulkhead door marked D for Down. As soon as the door swung open, a new aroma hit me like a warm bam. I knew that smell. Sweet syrupy protein-glucose base, the smell that gave Heaven its name. I held my nose to keep from gagging, and Juani said, "This the drying room."
Almost at once, we heard a clanging in the ladder well behind us, and I turned just in time to see the floor hatch open again. Liam popped out and raced past us in a dead run. He moved in long, loping strides into the drying room, and his blond braid streamed out behind. He didn't so much as acknowledge our presence. Next, Geraldine's brown face poked up through the hatch.
"What happened?" Juani asked.
"Hull breach on Two." She elbowed her way up. "Damn commies splintered our X wall. Chief gone to get the welder."
"My seedlings okay?" Juani's adolescent voice cracked on the last syllable.
Geraldine shook her head. "Help the Chief get that welder. And bring the houseguest. Maybe we can use him for glue."