"We are always the same age inside."
—GERTRUDE STEIN
Have I mentioned Sheeba's arms? Round and long, with fine downy hair. Her young muscles burgeoned gently under taut smooth skin, and how those swelling shapes bewitched me. How I loved to watch her arms move. Especially when she lifted heavy objects like her weight bench or the massage chair.
Sheeba's vigorous arms filled my thoughts as I pushed and pulled myself awkwardly through the drying room in Three's light gravity. The ovens stood in rows like battered sarcophagi. They were used to bake raw food product into hard dry bales for easier transport to Earth. But they weren't operating. The room felt stone cold, and the sight of these nonproducing assets irked me. I visualized the red ink bleeding across Provendia's balance sheet.
Protein-glucose slaked the world's hunger—as much of the world's hunger as could ever be slaked by market forces. Of course, mere would always be pockets of mismanagement and famine. That bearded prophet was right twenty-three centuries ago when he said the poor would always be with us. Still, "pro-glu" was a miracle of chemistry. With appropriate additives and processing, it could be made to resemble any menu item, from petit fours to pepper steak. The original inventors sold their patent to Provendia.Com for 60 billion deutsch.
As Juani hurried me ahead, I held my nose to block the saccharine reek. I'd seen plenty of oven rooms like this— on video at our board meetings. They all looked the same. Three decades ago, a Provendia scientist discovered that pro-glu congealed faster in low gravity, and since then, we'd sited all our bulk brewing factories in orbit. We bought cast-off fuel tanks at bargain rates, then rehabbed them as multilevel vat farms. Space garbage made excellent counterweights, and we got our tethers, guidance rockets and radiation shielding from contractor surplus.
None of our other satellites had developed Heaven's malady though, not so far. To date, our other properties still cycled around the G Ring, functioning at optimum throughput. Who knows why this one unit, A13, was stricken? The situation baffled our analysts—and scared us board members to death. None of us wanted to contemplate another financial panic like the Crash of '57. So we altered Heaven's course to a high polar orbit, locked down communications and laid plans for damage control.
Far ahead, Liam loped in high-arcing strides among the drying ovens, then disappeared around a comer. We found him wrestling with a portable welding rig that was cabled to the floor. Impatiently, he flung his yellow braid over his shoulder and unclipped the last cable. Then he and Juani grabbed its handles and slid the thing across the deck toward the ladder well. I brought up the rear, asking myself why I'd been in such a hurry to follow.
Back at the ladder, Liam punched a switch that irised the huge cargo door open, the door they used to move bales of product down the well. Together, Liam and Juani hoisted the welder onto a suspended freight platform, men used a pulley system to lower it to Deck Two. Geraldine shoved me down through the cargo door, and when I landed on my injured leg, it was all I could do to choke back a curse. The others jumped down after me, and as soon as Juani closed the cargo door, Liam pried open the door to the veggie room.
The bulkhead seal popped open with a sucking hiss, and the door swung inward and banged on its hinges. Wind whistled past my ears, and a herd of little toads burst out. I recognized some of their faces. Keesha for one. Quickly, Juani herded them into the solar plant and sealed the door behind them, while Liam tilted the welder into the veggie room. As we entered behind him, a sudden gust plastered my curls flat.
"Help me shut this door," Geraldine demanded.
She leaned her short burly body against the door we'd just come through, trying to push it closed against the air rushing in from the ladder well. Her shank muscles popped with strain. Reluctantly, I wedged my back against the door and helped her force it closed. Only after the fourth turn of the wheel did the air stop shrieking through the door's gasket.
Geraldine gave the wheel one final twist. "We got a bad leak."
Finding the hull breach wasn't difficult. We followed the flying bits of green leaves. The seedlings lay flat in their trays, pummeled by the rushing air. I nearly slipped on a wet cabbage leaf stuck to the floor.
Liam and Juani were kneeling at the X wall, working with the welder. A hairline crack ran from floor to ceiling. Liam knelt and pressed the lower part together with his palms, while Juani operated the welding torch. Geraldine pulled a white squeeze tube from her pocket and started extruding thick brown gunk along the crack near the ceiling. Though the crack was barely visible, air escaped through with an ominous squeal.
"Juani, help me hold this," Liam grunted.
The boy immediately dropped his welding torch and sprang to help press the seam closed, but in the light gravity, they both kept slipping out of position.
"Man, my broccoli," Juani said panting.
This was taking too long. I grabbed Juani's welding torch and started working at the bottom of the crack again, while Geraldine made her way down from the ceiling with her brown gunk. As the rupture closed, air shrieked through in a high-pitched scream. Amazing that such a tiny leak could cause so loud a roar. Geraldine and I gradually overwhelmed the crack with our patch-weld and sealer glue. When we met in the middle, the whistling faded.
"Bless a sweet Jeez." Juani rushed to examine the trays of ravaged foliage. "They down, but they strong. Sooner later, they stand back up." He sounded as if he needed to convince himself.
Geraldine wiped sweat from her face. "This patch won't hold long, chief. We gotta fix the outer hull."
"I'll suit up. You stay here just in case it breaks loose." Liam in profile looked more than ever like a predatory hawk. He turned hastily and almost bowled me over.
"Who go help you with the welder?" said Geraldine. "Juani can't do it."
Liam was already loping away. "I'll get Vlad."
"Vlad supposed to be playing doctor!" she yelled at his retreating back.
Liam halted and half turned. He moistened his lips, thinking. Then Juani leaped out. "I can do it, chief. I won't faint this time, I swear."
Liam shook his head, and his face creased like mat of a weather-beaten old man. Then his blue eyes glittered at me. I was shielding myself under a tray table in case the crack opened again, which of course was pointless. If the hull blew, we'd all be swept into space.
Liam lunged toward me and thrust out his hand. "Let me feel your grip."
What kind of challenge was this? I grasped his hand in a manly squeeze.
"Fair enough. You'll do." He yanked me out from under the tray table and steered me toward the ladder well.
"Do for what?" I said, sailing through the light gravity. As if I couldn't guess. "Call your other crewmates. What do I know about hull repair? You said I could go find Sheeba."
Liam ignored me. "Juani, clear this section. Make sure the people safe. And Gee, you suit up and lock the bulkheads. Just in case."
"In case of what?" I said. "Please let me find Sheeba."
My complaints failed to arouse any response from the chieftain, except another shove toward the ladder. He intended to press me into service as his welding assistant, but why? He should rely on his experienced fellow employees, not me. But who could fathom the mind of an immature prote?
In the ladder well, Liam bullied me across to the Up door and twisted the wheel to open it. When I demanded again why he was forcing an unskilled stranger to help make a critical repair, he took his sweet time to answer.
"Juani get spacesick. Geraldine and Vlad busy. So that leave you." Behind the bristly mustache, his lip curled very slightly. "Or your lady."
"Screw you," I said.
But I was bewildered. A couple of months ago, this factory still had sixty active employees. That's when we killed the surveillance cameras and stopped tracking the death rate, but surely not that many people could have fallen sick in two months.
"I can't believe there's no one else. What about some of those little kids?"
The chieftain gave me a look so full of seeming insolence that I'm ashamed to admit, I cringed. Then he shoved me through the Up door, and I stumbled through the solar plant, trying to make sense of this crazy scenario. Liam, Geraldine, Juani, Vlad, were they the only healthy adults left on A13? Hell, they weren't adults—-they hadn't even broken thirty.
I had to jog to keep pace with Liam. In the operations bay, we found the herd of toads. Twenty or thirty of the little beggars huddled together on the floor looking frightened. Don't get me wrong, I recognize the necessity of children. Haven't I donated my reproductive fluids to EuroBank? But underagers hadn't played any part in my life for molto decades, and I'd never seen so many squirmy toads gathered in one place. It was like some misbegotten human rookery. In my ideal world, there would be no need for replacement offspring because we would live forever.
I looked over the children's heads and examined the ops bay. Heaven's nerve center. Our site manager had worked there, tracking product volume, value and cost every second to the centime. Inventories, purchase orders, shipping transmittals, profit and loss, every vital statistic was documented here. But the Net nodes were gone. Our manager must have absconded with the hardware when he fled.
The ops bay held only a few useless dumb terminals, overturned wastebaskets and broken lamps. Empty desks lay tumbled on their sides, drawers flung helter-skelter. Office supplies strewed the floor, some shattered to bits. I saw one stylus impaled in a terminal screen. Watching the children's anxious faces, I found it slightly pathetic that the protes had taken their revenge on this furniture.
In one shadowy corner, something odd spirated across the wall like a woolly vine. Had one of Juani's hydropods grown out of control? On closer inspection, it turned out to be a swirl of furry black space fungus following the outlines of the factory's blossoming corrosion.
We hadn't gone far when Liam yanked open a service closet and drew out two space suits. Mine and Sheeba's. Crisp white, with attractive military-style black piping, they looked only slightly the worse for their one brief flight to Heaven. I could see where the tom right leg of my suit had self-sealed. The patch looked solid. A sparkling point of bliss tickled my nerves. These suits would get us home.
"Pick one and put it on," said Liam.
Never had I expected to see our suits again, and this inept war leader was simply handing them over. My confidence swelled. This was going to be easy. Soon, I thought, Sheeba and I would be drinking toasts back in Nordvik, telling tales and celebrating our escapade. I hefted one of the thruster packs. Sheeba's had performed just fine, but mine had malfunctioned. Now I saw why. One of Provendia's noisemakers had ruptured the fuel reservoir. That blackened gash made my neck prickle. Only pure chance had kept my thruster from detonating like a bomb and cutting me in two.
"Leave that," he said.
No prob. I set the damaged thruster next to the good one and made careful note of the surroundings so I could find the closet later. I took Sheeba's suit. Then Liam showed me the way to the airlock. No blindfold. No circuitous route. Can you imagine? He led me straight to it. How easy could he make this?
I tried not to grin as I slithered into Sheeba's suit and inhaled her soapy herbal aroma. When the suit snagged on my cast of plastic and wire, I ripped the blasted contraption to pieces. My fracture didn't hurt as much as before. Soon, I reflected, Sheeba and I would be snuggling together in a nice hot bubble bath, telling each other jokes.
Then a wrenching shudder spiked through my left thumb. As Liam stuffed his long braid into his helmet, I took a quick peek at my IBiS. I'd missed an appointment to have my false eyes recalibrated. More worrisome, my dental NEMs had gone totally dormant. That scared me. Without Net access, how many other classes of NEMs would shut down? My heart NEMs? The buggers in my brain? I had to get back to the Net
Right I would signal the gunship the minute we exited. Surely they would notice my blinking helmet lights, and surely their onboard AI would recognize my face. The Provendia chairman emeritus—they were bound to have my facial pattern on file. Right?
If only I still wore my signet I pinched my earlobe with a groan. One scan from the gunship would have revealed my full profile: "Nasir Deepra, billionaire, majority stock holder, molto senior exec. Handle with awe."
Inside the suit, I sniffed the pungency of Sheeba's soap and let luxurious memories drift through my head—of Shee reposing in bubbles. Yes, we had bathed together. That herbal scent brought back a deluge of warm sensations. Shee lived at peace with her body and went nude as often as not for which I lit incense of gratitude to the gilded gods. I, though, had grown to manhood in a different time, and public disrobing gave me goosebumps. You'd think the millions I'd invested in manly beauty would make me bold, but on the four occasions when Sheeba and I shared a bath—yes, I count them on my fingers and salivate—still I was always glad of the bubbles.
"What's gnarling you, beau? Your neck's got heinous knots." Shee sat behind me in the tub, wrapping her soap-slick legs around my waist and massaging my back with her foamy fingertips. She'd scented the water with essential flower oils—artificial esters mixed by hand, paradise in a bottle.
"Is it some of those boards?" she asked. Sheeba knew I served on the boards of a dozen commercial enterprises. She knew I sat for hours in uncomfortable chairs, sipping tepid brandy and listening to memoranda. She understood how I loathed Robert's Rules of Order. Grueling work. But that wasn't what knotted my shoulders. It was Sheeba.
"You've taken on some new clients," I said.
"Urn-hum, my practice is going supernova." She sucked my ear and closed her teeth just enough to let me feel the sharp pressure. Hot shivers rode up my spine, and I sank deeper in the bubbles. "It's because of you, Nass. You told your friends how I balanced your soul's primal energy, and how it cleared up your backache."
Rubbish. My friends were letches and slimes. They didn't want Shee to balance their souls. "Dear heart, not everyone's as pure-minded as you are."
"Oh, I'm not especially virtuous."
"You're generous and trusting and very inexperienced," I said. "How old are you now? Nineteen?"
'Twenty-three!" She laughed and roughed up my scalp with her plastic loofa. "You never notice time passing, beau. You live the same year over and over."
* * *
"Need help with that?" Liam's words jolted me back to the present. He was pointing at the helmet clipped to my belt. We had already entered the airlock, and Liam had wrestled the cumbersome welding rig in between us. Chagrined, I clapped the helmet on my head and sealed the neck ring.
"Ready to go?' he asked.
I nodded curtly. His baritone sounded muffled, and I realized the satellite phones in our helmets weren't working. They needed the Net to relay their signals back and forth. "How're we supposed to communicate?" I shouted.
"Hand signals," he shouted back, though his hands remained motionless.
While we waited, I casually chinned on my helmet's heads-up display and checked the time. And the date! Ye golden statuettes. Over sixty hours had passed since Sheeba and I crashed into Heaven. By Earth measure, we'd spent more than two days in this pestilence-ridden satellite. Breathing this air, imbibing these molecules, suffering the onslaughts of Heaven's mysterious influence. We had to get out of here.
With a barely audible thump, the airlock's outer door slid open. Our home planet swelled below us like a fat yellow belly, blanketed in woolly whorls of smog, and its glow blotted out the stars. I couldn't see the gunship. The sun was not in sight. We had exited on the wrong side of Heaven.
The instant I stepped out, my body careened away from the hull. I'd forgotten how fast Heaven rocketed around its counterweight. There was no friction, nothing like wind resistance to indicate our speed, but the very blood in my veins felt the momentum. And I had no computerized thruster navigation to hold me in track with the spin.
In panic, I clutched the safety line clipped to my belt The line jolted me to a stop, men hauled me along like the tail of a kite as Heaven raced around its tight circular path. Grunting with effort, I pulled myself hand over hand back toward the hull—and felt like a dunce for drifting loose, like any green kid on his first space walk.
Liam was already heaving the welder along a line of handholds fastened to the hull. I got myself oriented and realized Liam had brought us out on Heaven's shady side, where the ship couldn't see us. I would have to crawl around to the sunny face where the solar panels were mounted—straight into the fire zone.
You may think Nasir Deepra, surfer ace, was thrilled to the ends of his hair follicles by the magnificent danger surrounding him. This had to be the most exhilarating war zone I'd ever surfed. Oh yes, I would have been blissed to the max—with a working sat phone in my pocket and my friends standing by with rescue robots. But Heaven was proving too actual and acute for entertainment value. Surfs were not supposed to last this long.
The almighty chief of thugs was watching me, so I had no choice but to haul myself along the safety line and scramble after him. Still I glanced around, trying to devise a plan.
One end of the dented tank terminated in a blunt base, while the other tapered to a vanishing point, beyond which, far in the distance, the white chunk of asteroid gleamed. The counterweight looked small from my perspective, and the tether stretched toward it like a shining ribbon. I couldn't see how the tether attached, but I remembered a schematic of massive cables and bolts affixed to the tank's bullet point.
The chieftain shook my shoulder. Well, of course I was distracted by all these sights. I didn't go spacewalking every day, certainly not on a crazy whirling satellite. Liam grabbed my arm and towed me like deadweight toward the welder, which he had clamped into place with magnetic lock-downs. He grasped my helmet and shook it to make sure he had my attention. I batted his hand away.
Very conspicuously, he pointed to a valve mechanism attached to the welder's gas cylinder. It apparently controlled the regulator, which released compressed gas through the hose to power his welding torch. He mimed twisting the valve clockwise, then made a thumbs-up signal. Next he mimed reversing it counterclockwise, and that came with a thumbs-down. I nodded to show I understood.
Before he left me, he pressed my fingers around a handhold. Insolent pup. As if he expected me to drift away again. Next, incredibly, he unclipped himself from the safety line. Spacewalking without a safety line! On a hull spinning this fast!
You know, kids don't think. They're dumb as rocks. I would've lectured him about the risks, but we hadn't worked out the hand signals for scolding.
Without looking my way, he garnered up the coiled hose and slid along the hull. Not only did the punk dispense with his safety line. He also moved away from the row of handholds. He flattened himself to the pitted hull, wedged his boots against small bolts and forced his gloved fingers into tiny crevices. Obviously, he'd pulled this prank before. He moved with extreme deliberation, like a mountain climber seating a sheer face. At tunes he seemed to cling by willpower alone. I had to admire his agility. It crossed my mind that my surfer friends would pay serious deutsch to learn those skills.
With a tense grace I envied, he passed around the curve of the hull deeper into the shade of Heaven's underbelly, until all I could see was the top of his helmet. Could I do that—crawl around the hull in the other direction, with no safety line, no handholds, hoping the gunship's cameras would spot me? Well, Liam did it I examined the section of hull nearest me. It looked ancient, the seams ridged and knotty, the metal pockmarked by space debris and degraded by radiation. But the dents looked too shallow to provide a decent hold. It was a dicey plan.
Still, the gunship had to be right there, just above the tank's horizon. If I could free-climb a few meters into the sunlight, I would see it This might be the best opportunity I would ever get. Surf the moment
I eased away from the handhold and grasped a cooling vane. The hull's powerful momentum strained my shoulder ligaments as I pulled up around the curve as far as my safety line would extend. From there, I could see the tops of the solar panels glittering in the sunlight. Many were twisted and shattered. I saw only two panels left standing. The gunship's noisemakers weren't supposed to damage them like that. Someone was going to be held accountable.
Liam's welder hose looped like a bowel, silhouetted against Earth's albedo, but Liam had disappeared. A chill solitude overtook me. Distances in space are so incomprehensibly vast, they play with your mind. Why didn't my friends circle around and see me? But they wouldn't be looking here in the shadows. No one would look for me here.
Briefly, I imagined yanking free of the safety line and kicking off into space, flying out into view of Provendia's gunship. I pictured the troops recognizing me as their patron, drawing me into their hold and paying homage. Huah! What a surf! Only the ace Nasir Deepra could have pulled it off. Yes, we'll go back at once and rescue your mistress.
Conceive the reinforcements I would call in, the spaceships, the hordes of special assault troops, the lawyers and bankers. Visualize the relief on Sheeba's face when I swooped down and lifted her to safety. Her head thrown back. Her lips moist and parted. Her bosoms gently rising toward my mouth. Oh.
But what if the gunship didn't spot me? Streaking off at a tangent to Heaven's spin, hardly a speck in this great black void—I might fly away too quickly, beyond the range of the Net, beyond health churches and bioNEMs, beyond the glow of the known world.
"Into the dark," Sheeba whispered with breathless enthusiasm. And I slipped back to my handhold and gave the safety line a tug. Still secure, yes.
Then the hull exploded. A gaping rent flapped open in Heaven's underbelly, and pressurized air rushed from the interior outward toward the vacuum, carrying twisted steel tables, water vapor and a supernova of green foliage. Among the debris, I saw a strange white shape whirling above me. It was Liam tumbling head over heels.