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20: FRUITY SWEET DARK

"It is not possible for civilization to flow backward while there is youth in the world"

—HELEN KELLER

Sheeba Sheeba Sheeba, why did you go to that gunship? Feel my legs buckling. See me dropping with a thud to the sick-ward deck. "How long have they been gone?"

"Shoulda been back by now."

"How long, Geraldine?"

"One orbit," she said listlessly.

One flight around the Earth! The air supply in those suits wouldn't last that long. They'd been captured—or shot I pushed up off the floor and careened toward the exit. The troops would have taken her prisoner, yes. She would be safe aboard the gunship. But she wore no signet, no executive ID. Would they bother to sample her DNA? No, they would leap to conclusions, and the dear naive child would not protest. I dashed through the anteroom and leaped into the ladder well. I broke fake nails, tearing open the safety hatch. Shee would hide her identity. Hadn't I taught her that war-zone rule? She would surf the tide of adrenaline and pretend to be an agitator.

How slowly the safety lock cycled. Liam was supposed to die, not Sheeba! I could see her standing shoulder to shoulder with that malevolent punk, squeezing his hand and beaming with misplaced ardor. How beautifully her dark golden face would glow as she joined him in the euthanasia stall.

Beloved Shee, don't do it!

The syrup of gravity thickened around my limbs as I dropped through the ladder segments from Four to Three to Two. Why had I wasted so many precious minutes talking to Geraldine? The solar plant blazed with all its nuclear fierceness as I dodged among the turbines. Juani was kneeling by the airlock, pressing his ear to the steel.

"My fault, blade. They out there 'cause of me." Dribbles of vomit stained the front of the old gray surfsuit he wore. "I tried to reach them, but I weak. I weak."

"No time," I said, shoving the boy aside.

He slumped and hid his face as I opened the airlock. I felt a qualm, treating him that way, but necessity drove me. Inside the lock, I clamped my gray helmet in place. No time to check the duct tape. No time.

I found Shee clinging to the hull among the shattered solar panels. In the blistering white heat of direct sunlight, she was gripping a broken support strut with one glove and clutching Liam's belt with the other. The punk had lost consciousness. Laser burns pocked his white body armor, and his long legs rippled away from the fast-spinning hull like a flag in a cyclone.

I lunged toward Sheeba, gripping handholds and hiding my face from the fiery sun. Solar reflections glared off her visor, so I grasped her helmet and tilted her face toward me. Her lips were turning blue.

No time. I hooked an arm around her waist and scrabbled back toward the airlock, using my one free hand to pull us along and wedging my boots into any kind of crevice to keep us from flying away from the spinning tank. No thoughts, only long seconds and labored panting. Radiation flared up from the bright pitted steel, burning through my gloves and forcing me to squint. Go go go, I chanted. The war surfer's mantra. With agonizing slowness, I grunted and slithered and hauled my precious Shee around Heaven's circumference. Finally, we passed into frigid shadow, and there was the oval rim of airlock.

I drew Sheeba inside and discovered she was still gripping Liam's belt. The three of us filled the narrow space like compacted debris, and when the compressor finished cycling, we fell through the inner hatch in a jumble. Juani lifted Liam while I twisted Sheeba's helmet free. She wasn't breathing. Though her hand continued to grip that cur's belt, her own lungs failed to draw air. I dropped to my knees and gave her mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.

How long did I blow air into her moist pink lips and watch her chest fill with my breath? When she started coughing, I sat back and wiped my spit from her blessed chin. Juani had removed Liam's helmet. I half hoped the chief had suffocated, but no, that punk still bad plenty of air left. Sheeba had given him her reserve cylinder!

Oh beloved, what alternate dimension do you inhabit? Is there no point where our two separate realities overlap? I don't understand you, Sheeba. Is it because you haven't lived long enough, or because I've lived too long? Why would you sacrifice your very breath for that criminal?

"Rest, my love," I said, stroking her cheek.

Sheeba rolled on her side, gasping and coughing. Her first clear act was to reach for the unconscious punk sprawled next to her. Side by side, white and golden dark, they curled into each other like a pair of commas—as if their bodies were made to fit. Dark and light, they were poles apart. Freaking diametric opposites! They didn't belong together!

Even unconscious, Liam's gaunt body clenched like a stubborn white root dug up and left in the sun to dry. He had no education, no sense of style. Ten to one, he could barely read. His straw beard stuck out in bristly whorls. And his nose, ye idols, a hawk's beak. Whereas Sheeba, nubile olive-dark goddess, rounded and curved, see her flowing with liquid laughter and easy tears, as radiant as the starry ether of space. Feel the cool touch of her hands. Feel her maiden softness. There was no comparison between them.

"We—we couldn't find Vlad," Sheeba said and coughed.

"Don't try to speak, dear." I loosened the collar of her EVA suit.

"He wasn't—on the ship." She sat up despite my protests. Still coughing, she yanked off her gloves and checked her lover's pulse. Then she tore frantically at his surfsuit. "We snuck in through the waste chute. We looked everywhere. Help me with this zipper."

Underneath the suit, Liam wore a Provendia troop uniform with its familiar stylized logo, as meaningful as an alien rune. I helped Sheeba slip it off his shoulders.

"Why did you go there, Shee? You could've been killed."

"She went in my place." Juani lowered his head. His braid had come loose, and black hair spilled across his face. He supported the chief in his arms.

"No way. I wanted to go, Juani." Sheeba worked the zipper open. "Those commies didn't even know we were there till we tried to leave."

With extraordinary gentleness, she peeled the uniform away from Liam's chest. The laser beams had not penetrated his (my) body armor, but their impacts had raised tremendous red welts along his ribs.

Abruptly, Shee clenched her eyes shut, and her lovely features warped with heartbreaking despair. "I think Vlad's dead. They must have killed him before we got mere. Oh Nass, why didn't we listen to you sooner?"

I bit my lip and watched a tear trickle down her cheek, yearning to comfort her with the truth. Vlad was never on the gunship. Our friends had captured him, and they were not killers. But after the lies I'd told before, I didn't dare confess.

"They probably incinerated him." She fussed with Liam's wrist gaskets. "He would've wanted to go to the garden."

"Be calm, Sheeba Zee." Juani touched her shoulder. "Wherever Vlad is, he'll recycle."

Sheeba nodded, wiping her nose.

I helped her strip the chief to his miserable ragged underwear. I hated Liam's twentysomething body. Dead pale, hairy, as smooth and muscular as only a young body could be. I kept thinking, what a handsome corpse you'll make. Soon, thug, you will be dead dead dead. And then Sheeba will be mine again.

"Juani, these are minor wounds." Sheeba gave the boy her cheeriest smile. "Chief's gonna be fine. Will you please go to sick-ward and get a bed ready?"

"Yes, Sheeba Zee." Juani sprinted away.

When he was gone, Sheeba's smile vanished. She'd been faking the optimism. I didn't realize what a clever actress she could be. But now the planes of her exquisite face drained of color. As she fussed over her sleeping hero, her voice shook. "Poor Juani came out to meet us in that awful old suit, and then he threw up in his helmet and had to go back. I didn't think we were going to make it, Nass. I thought—I really thought—"

Dear girl. I tried to caress her, but she was too keyed up. Zone hyper. She searched the punk's body for hidden wounds. "God, his neck's bruised."

"What about you, Shee? Are you okay? You didn't take my NEMs. That blood I gave was meant for you."

"His vertebrae don't feel broken. Oh god, I'm not sure." Her fingers searched the back of his neck

'Take my NEMs now, dear. I'll give another liter. You need them."

"We'll make a collar to stabilize his spine."

She rifled through the contents of the nearby utility closet and found some rags, which she rolled together and knotted around Liam's neck. All the while, she told me about the gunship. She said it was easy to sneak through the waste chute. That Provendia captain must have been molto smug not to set out a security perimeter. He didn't even post guards. What an ass. I couldn't imagine Provendia hiring such a dunderhead. In any case, his overconfidence allowed Liam and Shee to steal uniforms and search the ship without detection. But they didn't find a trace of their medic. They'd arrived too late, she said, as she grimly rebraided the punk's yellow hair.

The Provendia troops finally noticed them when they tried to leave. They wanted to space-dive home under cover of darkness, when Heaven and the gunship passed behind Earth's shadow. But they mistimed their exit and came out in the light. That's when the gunship started firing.

"Darling. Ye graven gods." I accidentally leaned all my weight on the punk's knee and took pleasure in his unconscious groan.

"Nass, I was so scared, my fingers shook. I almost couldn't steer the thruster." Sheeba blinked at her empty hands, remembering, and her marvelous skin stretched tight across her cheekbones. Then she lifted the punk's shoulders. "Grab beau's feet. We'll move him up to sick-ward."

Instead of doing that, I put on his (my) white helmet to check the clock. Then I slowly drew it off. "Sheeba, do you realize we've been in this satellite for over eight Earth days."

"I haven't been counting, Nass. Help me carry him."

"Darling, wait. We don't belong here. We have our space suits and a working thruster. Let's leave now."

"And desert these people?" Sheeba's eyebrows furrowed. "You don't mean that. Besides, the minute you step outside, the gunship will start firing. See what they did to beau."

I clenched my teeth and struggled to hold steady. She kept calling that thug by my name.

Sheeba leaned and rested her chin on my shoulder. "You want to protect me too much, Nass. I'm a grown woman. You have to let me run my own risks." Then her voice dropped to a whisper. "Liam told me something heinous about Provendia.Com."

From her tone, I knew what was coming. "Sheeba, that punk has hidden motives. You can't believe everything he says."

"They issued a euthanasia order," she whispered. "They plan to euth" everyone here."

"Ah." I pursed my lips.

"Yeah, one of the kids found their vicious memo in the trash. They're beasts . I hate them."

"I thought these protes couldn't read," I said, stalling.

"Euthanasia, Nass." Her eyes glittered darkly.

In the boardroom, drinking brandy with my colleagues, the decision had seemed easy to justify. But now and here? Too much Reel was clouding my judgment. Nothing seemed easy anymore. "Maybe they wanted to prevent an epidemic."

"It's grievous. I can't believe it's legal."

"Well, it's one more reason why we need to get away." I took her hands. "The Agonists are waiting outside. I saw them."

"Nass, you're dreaming. C'mon, lift beau's feet and help me."

"His freaking name is not freaking beau!"

Blood rushed to my head, and I stomped away. Chit of sight around the curving corridor, I leaned against the wall to calm down. Sometimes, talking to Shee was like trying to breathe vacuum.

I rubbed my jaw, felt the loose, sagging skin and stretched my neck to take up the slack. And I pondered. My space suit and thruster lay right there within reach. The cylinders were low on air. Probably the batteries could stand a recharge. Those were mere details. The phone in my helmet was still roaming, searching for the Net. All I had to do was dive outside the communications blockade and place a call.

Sheeba's arms circled my waist from behind, and she pressed her body against my back. I could feel the swell of her hard little belly. "Please, Nass. I didn't mean to hurt your feelings. You know I love you."

"You do?" Anger instantly drained from my limbs, leaving me slack and unsteady. When I turned to face her, my nose came level with her soft curving throat. She smelled of rich sweat.

"Of course, Nass. You've been like a father to me. I wouldn't even be here if not for you."

"Shee." I drew her close and buried my face against her collarbone so she couldn't see the puckers around my eyes. Like a father, she said. My lips crushed against her throat.

Gently, she loosened my grip. "Help me, okay? I can't lift him by myself. I need you."

"Okay," I said, turning my ravaged face from the light. But my brain was not engaged. Like a father. I wrapped the words in cottony silence.

Vacantly, I helped her lift the juve off the floor. Like a father. Sheeba spoke in little gasps as we hauled her thug up the ladder well. She told me how they had disguised their voices on the gunship to impersonate Provendia guards and how they nearly got caught when they lingered too long in someone's office browsing the Net. Beau had never seen the Net. She said Beau really liked it.

Like a father. I listened and moved and smiled at the right places. My brain drifted off to some distant exile where it couldn't bother me. Father, a pair of syllables. In Three's light gravity, we made fast progress, and by the time we got to Four, the chief of thugs weighed considerably less. We guided him into sick-ward and stretched him out on the mattress next to Kai-Kai. But I was nobody's father.

Geraldine still sat in her lotus position, lightly snoring, but she snorted awake when Sheeba ripped a sheet to bind Liam's ribs. The wench looked at her unconscious chief, then at Sheeba. Her eyes drooped with sleep. "Vlad?"

Sheeba shook her head. "We didn't find him."

Geraldine's chocolate cheeks bunched in furious knots. Then just as quickly, her muscles relaxed, and all energy seemed to ebb out of her face. She rocked on her haunches. Back and forth, back and forth, like clockwork. Her wife Kai-Kai remained deeply quiet, though a slight movement of her upper lip showed she was still breathing. Sheeba felt for her pulse.

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."

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