Orbit 14 Read online

  He looked up at her thin, shining body, naked in the doorway. “Brandy, God damn it! You’re not between planets—you want to show it all to the whole damn street?”

  “But I always—” Made awkward by sudden awareness, she fled. He sat and stared at the sun-hazed windows, entirely aware that there was no one to see in. Slowly the fire died, his breathing eased.

  She returned shyly, closing herself into quilted blue-silver, and sank onto the edge of a chair. “I just never think about it.” Her voice was very small.

  “It’s all right.” Ashamed, he looked past her. “Sorry I yelled at you . . . What did you want to ask me?”

  “It doesn’t matter.” She pulled violently at her snarled hair. “Ow! Damn it!” Feeling him look at her, she forced a smile. “Uh, you know, I’m glad we picked up Mima on Treone; I’m not the little sister anymore. I was really getting pretty tired of being the greenie for so long. She’s—”

  “Brandy—”

  “Hm?”

  “Why don’t they allow cyborgs on crews?”

  Surprise caught her. “It’s a regulation.”

  He shook his head. “Don’t tell me ‘It’s a regulation,’ tell me why.”

  “Well . . .” She smoothed wet hair-strands with her fingers. “. . . They tried it, and it didn’t work out. Like with men—they couldn’t endure space, they broke down, their hormonal balance was wrong. With cyborgs, stresses between the real and the artificial in the body were too severe, they broke down too. … At the beginning they tried cyborganics, as a way to let men keep space, like they tried altering the hormone balance. Neither worked. Physically or psychologically, there was too much strain. So finally they just made it a regulation, no men on space crews.”

  “But that was over a thousand years ago—cyborganics has improved. I’m healthier and live longer than any normal person. And stronger—” He leaned forward, tight with agitation.

  “And slower. We don’t need strength, we have artificial means. And anyway, a man would still have to face more stress, it would be dangerous.”

  “Are there any female cyborgs on crews?”

  “No.”

  “Have they ever even tried it again?”

  “No—”

  “You see? The League has a lock on space, they keep it with archaic laws. They don’t want anyone else out there!” Sudden resentment shook his voice.

  “Maybe … we don’t.” Her fingers closed, opened, closed over the soft heavy arms of the chair; her eyes were the color of twisting smoke. “Do you really blame us? Spacing is our life, it’s our strength. We have to close the others out, everything changes and changes around us, there’s no continuity—we only have each other. That’s why we have our regulations, that’s why we dress alike, look alike, act alike; there’s nothing else we can do, and stay sane. We have to live apart, always.” She pulled her hair forward, tying nervous knots. “And—that’s why we never take the same lover twice, too. We have needs we have to satisfy; but we can’t afford to . . . form relationships, get involved, tied. It’s a danger, it’s an instability. . . . You do understand that, don’t you, Maris; that it’s why I don’t—” She broke off, eyes burning him with sorrow and, below it, fear.

  He managed a smile. “Have you heard me complain?”

  “Weren’t you just . . .?” She lifted her head.

  Slowly he nodded, felt pain start. “I suppose I was.” But I don’t change. He shut his eyes suddenly, before she read them. But that’s not the point, is it?

  “Maris, do you want me to stop staying here?”

  “No— No … I understand, it’s all right. I like the company.” He stretched, shook his head. “Only, wear a towel, all right? I’m only human.”

  “I promise . . . that I will keep my eyes open, in the future.”

  He considered the future that would begin with dawn when her ship went up, and said nothing.

  ★

  He stumbled cursing from the bedroom to the door, to find her waiting there, radiant and wholly unexpected. “Surprise!” She laughed and hugged him, dislodging his half-tied robe.

  “My God—hey!” He dragged her inside and slammed the door. “You want to get me arrested for indecent exposure?” He turned his back, making adjustments, while she stood and giggled behind him.

  He faced her again, fogged with sleep, struggling to believe. “You’re early—almost two weeks?”

  “I know. I couldn’t wait till tonight to surprise you. And I did, didn’t I?” She rolled her eyes. “I heard you coming to the door!”

  She sat curled on his aging striped couch, squinting out the window as he fastened his sandals. “You used to have so much room. Houses haven’t filled up your canyon, have they?” Her voice grew wistful.

  “Not yet. If they ever do, I won’t stay to see it . . . How was your trip this time?”

  “Beautiful, again … I can’t imagine it ever being anything else. You could see it all a hundred times over, and never see it all—

  Through your crystal eye, Mactav, I watch the midnight’s star turn inside out. . . .

  Oh, guess what! My poems—I finished the cycle during the voyage . . . and it’s going to be published, on Treone. They said very nice things about it.”

  He nodded smugly. “They have good taste. They must have changed, too.”

  “‘A renaissance in progress’—meaning they’ve put on some ver-ry artsy airs, last decade; their Tails are really something else. . . Remembering, she shook her head. “It was one of them that told me about the publisher.”

  “You showed him your poems?” Trying not to—

  “Good grief, no; he was telling me about his. So I thought, What have I got to lose?”

  “When do I get a copy?”

  “I don’t know.” Disappointment pulled at her mouth. “Maybe I’ll never even get one; after twenty-five years they’ll be out of print. ‘Art is long, and Time is fleeting’ . . . Longfellow had it backwards. But I made you some copies of the poems. And brought you some more books, too. There’s one you should read, it replaced Ntaka years ago on the Inside. I thought it was inferior; but who are we . . . What are you laughing about?”

  “What happened to that freckle-faced kid in pigtails?”

  “What?” Her nose wrinkled.

  “How old are you now?”

  “Twenty-four. Oh—” She looked pleased.

  “Madame Poet, do you want to go to dinner with me?”

  “Oh, food, oh yes!” She bounced, caught him grinning, froze. “I would love to. Can we go to Good Eats?”

  “It closed right after you left.”

  “Oh . . . the music was wild. Well, how about that seafood place, with the fish name—?”

  He shook his head. “The owner died. It’s been twenty-five years.”

  “Damn, we can never keep anything.” She sighed. “Why don’t I just make us a dinner—I’m still here. And I’d like that.”

  That night, and every other night, he stood at the bar and watched her go out, with a Tail or a laughing knot of partyers. Once she waved to him; the stem of a shatterproof glass snapped in his hand; he kicked it under the counter, confused and angry.

  But three nights in the two weeks she came home early. This time, pointedly, he asked her no questions. Gratefully, she told him no lies, sleeping on his couch and sharing the afternoon . . .

  They returned to the flyer, moving in step along the cool jade sand of the beach. Maris looked toward the sea’s edge, where frothy fingers reached, withdrew, and reached again. “You leave tomorrow, huh?”

  Brandy nodded. “Uh-huh.”

  He sighed.

  “Maris, if—”

  “What?”

  “Oh—nothing.” She brushed sand from her boot.

  He watched the sea reach, and withdraw, and reach—

  “Have you ever wanted to see a ship? Inside, I mean.” She pulled open the flyer door, her body strangely intent.

  He followed her. “Yes.”

&
nbsp; “Would you like to see mine—the Who Got Her?”

  “I thought that was illegal?”

  “‘No waking man shall set foot on a ship of the spaceways.’ It is a League regulation . . . but it’s based on a superstition that’s at least a thousand years old—‘Men on ships is bad luck.’ Which is silly here. Your presence on board in port isn’t going to bring us disaster.”

  He looked incredulous.

  “I’d like you to see our life, Maris, like I see yours. There’s nothing wrong with that. And besides”—she shrugged—“no one will know; because nobody’s there right now.”

  He faced a wicked grin, and did his best to match it. “I will if you will.”

  They got in, the flyer drifted silently up from the cove. New Piraeus rose to meet them beyond the ridge; the late sun struck gold from hidden windows.

  “I wish it wouldn’t change—oh . . . there’s another new one. It’s a skyscraper!”

  He glanced across the bay. “Just finished; maybe New Piraeus is growing up—thanks to Oro Mines. It hardly changed over a century; after all those years, it’s a little scary.”

  “Even after three … or twenty-five?” She pointed. “Right down there, Maris—there’s our airlock.”

  The flyer settled on the water below the looming, semitransparent hull of the WGH-709.

  Maris gazed up and back. “It’s a lot bigger than I ever realized.”

  “It masses twenty thousand tons, empty.” Brandy caught hold of the hanging ladder. “I guess we’ll have to go up this . . . okay?” She looked over at him.

  “Sure. Slow, maybe, but sure.”

  They slipped in through the lock, moved soft-footed down hallways past dim cavernous storerooms.

  “Is the whole ship transparent?” He touched a wall, plastic met plastic. “How do you get any privacy?”

  “Why are you whispering?”

  “I’m no— I’m not. Why are you?”

  “Shhh! Because it’s so quiet.” She stopped, pride beginning to show on her face. “The whole ship can be almost transparent, like now; but usually it’s not. All the walls and the hull are polarized; you can opaque them. These are just holds, anyway, they’re most of the ship. The passenger stasis cubicles are up there. Here’s the lift, we’ll go up to the control room.”

  “Brandy!” A girl in red with a clipboard turned on them, outraged, as they stepped from the lift. “Brandy, what the hell do you mean by— Oh. Is that you, Soldier? God, I thought she’d brought a man on board.”

  Maris flinched. “Hi, Nilgiri.”

  Brandy was very pale beside him. “We just came out to—uh, look in on Mactav, she’s been kind of moody lately, you know. I thought we could read to her. . . . What are you doing here?” And a whispered, “Bitch.”

  “Just that—checking up on Mactav. Harkane sent me out.” Nilgiri glanced at the panels behind her, back at Maris, suddenly awkward. “Uh—look, since I’m already here don’t worry about it, okay? I’ll go down and play some music for her. Why don’t you— uh, show Soldier around the ship, or something . . .” Her round face was reddening Jike an apple. “Bye?” She slipped past them and into the lift, and disappeared.

  “Damn, sometimes she’s such an ass.”

  “She didn’t mean it.”

  “Oh, I should have—”

  “—done just what you did; she was sorry. And at least we’re not trespassing.”

  “God, Maris, how do you stand it? They must do it to you all the time. Don’t you resent it?”

  “Hell, yes, I resent it. Who wouldn’t? I just got tired of getting mad. . . . And besides—” he glanced at the closed doors—“besides, nobody needs a mean bartender. Come on, show me around the ship.”

  Her knotted fingers uncurled, took his hand. “This way, please; straight ahead of you is our control room.” She pulled him forward beneath the daybright dome. He saw a hand-printed sign above the center panel, NO-MAN’S LAND. “From here we program our computer; this area here is for the aafal drive, first devised by Ursula, an early spacer who—”

  “What’s awful about it?”

  “What?”

  “Every spacer I know calls the ship’s drive ‘awful’?”

  “Oh— Not ‘awful,’ AAFAL: Almost As Fast As Light. Which it is. That’s what we call it; there’s a technical name too.”

  “Um.” He looked vaguely disappointed. “Guess I’m used to—” Curiosity changed his face, as he watched her smiling with delight. “I—suppose it’s different from antigravity?” Seventy years before she was born, he had taught himself the principles of starship technology.

  “Very.” She giggled suddenly. “The ‘awfuls’ and the ‘aghs,’ hmm . . . We do use an AG unit to leave and enter solar systems; it operates like the ones in flyers, it throws us away from the planet, and Anally the entire system, until we reach aafal ignition speeds. With the ag you can only get fractions of the speed of light, but it’s enough to concentrate interstellar gases and dust. Our force nets feed them through the drive unit, where they’re converted to energy, which increases our speed, which makes the unit more efficient . . . until we’re moving almost as fast as light.

  “We use the AG to protect us from acceleration forces, and after deceleration to guide us into port. The start and finish can take up most of our trip time; the farther out in space you are, the less AG feedback you get from the system’s mass, and the less your velocity changes. It’s a beautiful time, though—you can see the ag forces through the polarized hull, wrapping you in shifting rainbow . . .

  “And you are isolate”—she leaned against a silent panel and punched buttons; the room began to grow dark—“in absolute night . . . and stars.” And stars appeared, in the darkness of a planetarium show; fire-gnats lighting her face and shoulders and his own. “How do you like our stars?”

  “Are we in here?”

  Four streaks of blue joined lights in the air. “Here … in space by this corner of the Quadrangle. This is our navigation chart for the Quadrangle run; see the bowed leg and brightness, that’s the Pleiades. Patris . . . Sanalareta . . . Treone . . . back to Oro. The other lines zigzag too, but it doesn’t show. Now come with me . . . With a flare of energy, we open our AAFAL nets in space—”

  He followed her voice into the night, where flickering tracery seined motes of interstellar gas; and impossible nothingness burned with infinite energy, potential transformed and transforming. With the wisdom of a thousand years a ship of the League fell through limitless seas, navigating the shifting currents of the void, beating into the sterile winds of space. Stars glittered like snow on the curving hull, spitting icy daggers of light that moved imperceptibly into spectral blues before him, reddened as he looked behind: imperceptibly time expanded, velocity increased and with it power. He saw the haze of silver on his right rise into their path, a wall of liquid shadow . . . the Pleiades, an endless bank of burning fog, kindled from within by shrouded islands of fire. Tendrils of shimmering mists curved outward across hundreds of billions of kilometers, the nets found bountiful harvest, drew close, hurled the ship into the edge of cloud.

  Nebulosity wrapped him in clinging haloes of- colored light, ringed him in brilliance, as the nets fell inward toward the ship, burgeoning with energy, shielding its fragile nucleus from the soundless fury of its passage. Acceleration increased by hundredfolds, around him the Doppler shifts deepened toward cerulean and crimson; slowly the clinging brightness wove into parabolas of shining smoke, whipping past until the entire flaming mass of cloud and stars seemed to sweep ahead, shriveling toward blue-whiteness, trailing embers.

  And suddenly the ship burst once more into a void, a universe warped into a rubber bowl of brilliance stretching past him, drawing away and away before him toward a gleaming point in darkness. The shrunken nets seined near-vacuum and were filled; their speed approached 0.999c . . . held constant, as the conversion of matter to energy ceased within the ship . . . and in time, with a flicker of silver force, began once mor
e to fall away. Slowly time unbowed, the universe cast off its alienness. One star grew steadily before them: the sun of Patris.

  A sun rose in ruddy splendor above the City in the Clouds on Patris, nine months and seven light-years from Oro. . . . And again, Patris fell away; and the brash gleaming Freeport of Sanalareta; they crept toward Treone through gasless waste, groping for current and mote across the barren ship-wakes of half a millennium. . . . And again—

  Maris found himself among fire-gnat stars, on a ship in the bay of New Piraeus. And realized she had stopped speaking. His hand rubbed the copper snarl of his hair, his eyes bright as a child’s. “You didn’t tell me you were a witch in your spare time.”

  He heard her smile, “Thank you. Mactav makes the real magic, though; her special effects are fantastic. She can show you the whole inhabited section of the galaxy, with all the trade polyhedra, like a dew-flecked cobweb hanging in the air.” Daylight returned to the panel. “Mactav—that’s her bank, there—handles most of the navigation, life support, all that, too. Sometimes it seems like we’re almost along for the ride! But of course we’re along for Mactav.”

  “Who or what is Mactav?” Maris peered into a darkened screen, saw something amber glimmer in its depths, drew back.

  “You’ve never met her, neither have we—but you were staring her right in the eye.” Brandy stood beside him. “She must be listening to Giri down below. . . . Okay, okay!—a Mactavia unit is the brain, the nervous system of a ship, she monitors its vital signs, calculates, adjusts. We only have to ask—sometimes we don’t even have to do that. The memory is a real spacer woman’s, fed into the circuits . . . someone who died irrevocably, or had reached retirement, but wanted to stay on. A human system is wiser, more versatile—and lots cheaper—than anything all-machine that’s ever been done.”

  “Then your Mactav is a kind of cyborg.”

  She smiled. “Well, I guess so; in a way—”