Up Against It Part 5

This summons from Beyond-or this psychotic break, she thought; she thought; let's be honest with ourselves, Navio let's be honest with ourselves, Navio-was the last thing she needed. Her suit stank and her back hurt. Her fatigue went right down to the cellular level: her DNA, she felt sure, was knotted in snarls of disarray. Even her mitochondria hurt. She couldn't possibly feel this lousy otherwise.

She had to be back in Phocaea in nine hours. There were a million things to do, and the memorial services were to be held first thing in the morning. She could have waited a day or two-and she should have; at the very least she would have gotten another hour's sleep tonight. But she needed to go home so badly she could hardly stand it. She needed her own bed and Xuan's arms around her.

The suit gave her an alert. Klosti Xi-Upsilon-Alpha was coming up: her exit. Jane launched her port tether. It shot out. Ten minutes and twenty kilometers later, the tether latched onto Xi-Upsilon-Alpha's tether rail, then reeled in the slack, jostling her onto her new trajectory: a high-tech primate swinging on her vine. As she detached her starboard tether from Klosti Alpha, she glanced back over her shoulder.

She often wondered afterward why she looked back just then. She couldn't think of a particular reason, yet it seemed significant. As if she would not have heard the Voice, if she had not.

Beyond her retracting starboard tether, Cable Klosti Alpha's receding marquis of red lights did its stately march. Sol, a brilliant b.u.t.ton, dominated the dark sky. A quarter of the way across the heavens, back the way she had come, was 25 Phocaea. The stroid shone in the middle distance, a small bright blob about which swarmed a flock of orange, green, blue, and white sparks: the confiscated ships.

Two handspans above the faintly visible cable and the arrays of buckybeam branches that made up the commuter treeway-along with a scattering of asteroids moving against the starry backdrop-hovered distant Earth: a bright cerulean fleck with the moon a faint dot snuggling beneath it.

It was as her gaze fell on Earth that she heard the Voice.

Jane? It said, It said, Jane...? Jane...?

It held a hint of inquiry, and spoke in a timbre so resonant-so saturated with love-pa.s.sion-mercy-Beingness-that tears stung her sinuses. Though barely a whisper, it rang through her like tones from a great, distant bell. Jane spasmed in the confines of her suit. Hairs bristled along her arms and on her neck. "What the h.e.l.l-?"

Even as the Voice ebbed she looked around for the source, wondering if someone was playing a prank, cracking her commlink. Just as quickly, she knew that couldn't be. She had not heard it outside, she had heard it inside inside. Something had filled her: a presence so vast that despite its velvet-gentle touch, its departure left her limp and useless as exhaled vapor.

Calm down, Navio. Think. She slowed her breathing and waited for the pounding in her chest and throat to subside as her starboard tether's electrostatic grappler slid into its wrist holster. She slowed her breathing and waited for the pounding in her chest and throat to subside as her starboard tether's electrostatic grappler slid into its wrist holster.

She was no fool. She had lived out in the stroids for most of her adult life, and she was as tough-minded as they came. She had no patience for the d.a.m.n religious freaks who came out here looking for G.o.d or Nirvana, magic or s.p.a.ce angels or beneficent aliens, and heard voices out in the rocks. Noodgers, Pagans, Viridians, conspiracy nuts, abductees. They were a hazard to themselves and everyone else. Crackpots and losers, the lot of them.

Even old-timers hallucinated, though, once in a while-when they were out alone in four Kelvins with nothing but their helmet light, tethers, and pneumopacks for company; when the cold seeped in or the pneumopack faltered and they remembered how far they were from the nearest aid station; when they reflected on just how many people had died out here, with their frozen corpses not found for years, if ever. Or when they were grieving, or in shock.

She had heard her mother's voice once, shortly after her parents had died. She had dreamt of their death before it happened, too, in a bizarre dream sequence that made it seem as if she had somehow known-though of course that was nonsense. She wasn't the type the unexplainable happened to.

I'm sorry, she told the Voice; she told the Voice; you've reached an address that has been disconnected or is no longer in service. you've reached an address that has been disconnected or is no longer in service. She said aloud, "Let's hear it for free will!" and smiled, feeling better for this small rebellion against Fate. She said aloud, "Let's hear it for free will!" and smiled, feeling better for this small rebellion against Fate.

Which would have been fine if that had been the end of it.

Twenty minutes later, her telemetry told her that she was nearing home. She spotted it: a dim dot that moved against the deep black. She launched her port tether and it blasted away, steering itself like a kite in gusty winds as it homed in on the stroid's mooring beacon. The tether took ten minutes to find the magnetic hook. It latched on, and the line tugged at her, sending Jane into a lazy loop until her pneumojets and processors stabilized her. She detached her starboard tether from Klosti Xi-Upsilon-Alpha, which pa.s.sed by twenty kilometers away with its own sparkling marquis, and turned on her brakes as the tether began the long process of reeling itself into her holster. Soon she could make it out: a carbonaceous peanut of a rock, a phrenologist's dream. Now the rock neared quickly, but her deceleration was swifter: within moments she was falling slowly toward the two-kilometer-thick rock that housed the habitat she shared with Ngo Minh Xuan, her husband of thirty-nine years.

She shut off the autopilot and reeled her port tether in with the asteroid tumbling under her, her suit making the needed corrections, till she had circled the small asteroid, and touched down at the mooring station. She stumbled and braced herself on a boulder.

This was a tiny world: perpetually twilit on this side, with its pole of rotation pointed toward the sun. Its horizons were coa.r.s.e and close, curving sharply away underfoot on all sides. It gave her a h.e.l.l of a view of the wheeling, starry sky. They had claimed the stroid together, she and Xuan, back in '72. Officially it had only a number, but they had dubbed it No-Moss.

Ordinarily she took a few moments to soak in the view, but today her thoughts coiled inward.

I killed eight. Eight dead, because I made it so.

Their families' faces loomed in her thoughts as they had appeared when she had notified them: faces twisting into horror, or going blank with shock. She propped herself against the boulder for a moment to rest, with sweat cooling on her face and under her arms, looked out at the Big Empty, and let dread wash over her: dread for herself, and the fate of her people.

Hold it together, she told herself. she told herself. You did what you had to, and there's still work to be done. You did what you had to, and there's still work to be done. She stood. She stood.

From there it was a dozen steps home. Jane pulled herself along the handrails set into the rocks, overbalanced in the featherlight gravity by her pack. She took great care not to launch herself into orbit with too much spring in her step. Then she jumped down to the airlock in their creva.s.se, and anch.o.r.ed herself there, one-handed, while her port tether detached from the asteroid's mooring station and reeled in. She zipped the airlock closed. The vents opened up, air rushed in, and the walls and outer hatch, made of pillowed nylon, quivered with the eager energy of a puppy. A sigh escaped between her lips.

"h.e.l.lo, House," she said, and removed her helmet. The all-clear sounded; underfoot, the inner hatch opened. Xuan floated there, two fingers on the handle, a smile ghosting his lips and worry ghosting his outsized eyes. "h.e.l.lo, yourself."

She smiled back, and chinned herself down into the habitat. Xuan moved aside and closed the inner lock. As her ears crackled with the pressure change, she drew in the smells and sounds and sights of home. The burnt-almond-cookie smell of s.p.a.ce mingled with the habitat's cool, moist air, which carried to her nostrils the scents of incense, pot herbs and chilis, must and dust and cleaners, twisted-hemp netting and molded-plastic fixtures, machine lubricants, and twenty-four years' living. Home.

From the instant he had heard her voice, Xuan knew the toll the past day and a half had taken. He opened the airlock and she sank inside before him. Her sweat-soaked hair was plastered to her head. He took her helmet and she climbed stiffly out of her suit. At eighty-nine, at the apex of middle age, Jane prided herself on keeping fit. She took her antiaging meds; she ate well; she worked out almost daily. Her motions were normally swift and self-a.s.sured. It was the disaster, he realized, that had caused this stiffness.

The toll was written also on her face. Her affect was as smooth and hard as a marble bust. Others would read nothing there. But Xuan saw the anguish and fear beneath her calm demeanor. He lifted his eyebrows at her in a subtle invitation to talk about it, but she did not respond. Well, there would be time later.

Xuan removed her commuter pack and put the batteries and air tanks in their rechargers, and did the shutdown checks. Meanwhile, Jane removed, cleaned, and checked the suit itself. As always, this process consumed a good ten to fifteen minutes, and as always, they performed it together in comfortable silence, bobbing like soap bubbles on air currents as they did so-wafting in various orientations across the room's upper reaches, lofting themselves with a lazy toe- or hand-push back over to the equipment racks.

Now that Dominica and Hugh were gone, Jane and Xuan had what amounted to a mansion, by stroider standards: a four-room (not counting the head), one-hundred-fifteen-cubic-meter, mostly vertical habitat of nylon, plastic, and alloy that burrowed like a plantar wart into the side of their asteroid. Right now they were sharing their spare room with a surly miner who had drifted Down from Ilion. He and Jane were doing a favor for a mutual friend from Jane's Vestan days. This guy was no trouble, really, other than the fact that he was using up their food, water, power, and air.

Upsiders' social network was tight, for all that it was spread across vast differences. You could be an asocial recluse all you wanted, but when someone showed up at your airlock and asked for help, you gave it, no questions asked, cold equations notwithstanding. The j.a.panese First Wavers who had populated this asteroid cl.u.s.ter had called it giri giri. The Second and Third Wavers called it the sammy system, and built software to keep a tally. Selfish, h.o.a.rding p.r.i.c.ks did not last long Upside.

Finally, with a stifled groan, Jane slipped off her boots and flexed her foothands, clinging to the wall netting with her fingers. She wrung her feet together, rubbing the arches with her thumb-toes, while Xuan checked her radiation levels. "Your numbers look good."

Jane pulled his radiation monitor off his belt. "Yours are high."

"I was out in the field for the past two days."

"Take your shirt off," she said.

"I bet you say that to all the gents."

That brought a brief grin. "Only the cute ones."

She pulled the bone density scanner out of its cupboard and charged it up. Xuan kicked back, and she ran the scanner over and under him, front and back, while he floated in midair. She gave him his regen booster, then kissed him on his belly with a hand under his back. Then, as he rolled over, she slapped him on the a.s.s. Xuan yelped, and grabbed her.

They kissed. He ran his hands down her back. She wrapped arms and legs around him, releasing a breath, and he felt tension drain from her muscles.

"OK, your turn."

She stretched out. He did the scans. All normal. He prepped a booster shot anyway. She saw it, and grimaced. "That's not really necessary today, is it? My numbers are fine."

"It's better to stay on a regular schedule."

"But why waste supplies when it's not strictly necessary?"

Xuan sighed, exasperated. She always resisted taking her meds. Without fail. "So I guess we're going to do our little pharmacophobia tango once again."

Jane glared at him, and then crossed her arms with notably poor grace. "Fine. Go ahead."

He compressed the ampoule against her thigh. She kicked off into the habitat to shake off her sulks, while Xuan put the supplies away, shaking his own head over this irritable island of irrationality she nurtured. He bounded past her, ricocheting off the ceiling into his office, a nook nestled in the rock above the kitchen, to put some of his tools away.

He noticed her checking their "Stroiders" numbers in her office nook.

"Your numbers are up," she said. She seemed mildly amused. "Stroiders" fans back on Earth ranked Phocaeans on a daily basis. You had two sets of "Stroiders" numbers: eyes (how many people watched you), and thumbs (what they thought of you on a scale of one to ten, plus a set of keywords and viewer reviews that told why you got the ratings you did). His current popularity resulted from a big new mining research contract that he had helped his university snag. The negotiations, and his handling of them, had caught the attention of "Stroiders" fans, to his bemus.e.m.e.nt. His viewer ratings had, at least briefly-before the disaster struck-rivaled Jane's.

"Yes," he said. "Bizarre."

Her expression didn't change as she continued to scroll through the reports, but he could tell she was viewing her own numbers. Her thumbs were in the c.r.a.pper: her popularity had dropped through the floor-though, not surprisingly, her eyes were thicker than ever. Clearly, "Stroiders" viewers were blaming her. She switched off the console.

"Good thing they can't dole out bad-sammies."

"True." Sammies were the counts that mattered: the confidence of the people of Phocaea. Xuan had viewed her sammy cache earlier on the "Stroiders" wavesite. To his relief, she had plenty of good-sammies, and the numbers were holding steady. Phocaeans, at least, were not jumping to conclusions about her performance. Yet.

"I don't give a d.a.m.n about the ratings," she told him. "I'm all right."

He put his arms around her from behind, and she laid her head against him. "Sorry I was cranky about the meds."

"You're forgiven." He planted a kiss on her neck. She turned and put her arms around him, and they kissed. The moment lasted.

"Foot rub?" she said hopefully.

"I'll go you one better. Full-body treatment."

"Oooh."

"Food first, though. I'll wager you haven't eaten all day." Even as he said it, Jane's stomach growled noisily.

"You're on. Er, is Ferdy around?" Ferdy was the miner they were putting up. Xuan shook his head. "Gone for several days, he said. Maybe for good this time."

"Oh ree-e-a-lly?"

"Reee-e-a-lly." Xuan leered.

"Mmmm." Jane gripped his hips with her foothands and pulled him close, ma.s.saging his sore back muscles with her nimble toes. Xuan loved her foothands. The couple drifted to the floor in a meandering tumble for some prehensile snuggling.

A timer went off in the kitchen. "d.a.m.n." She nuzzled his neck.

"You won't regret the wait." He disentangled himself. "Dinner in ten."

"Thanks," she said. "I'll make some calls."

Whatever Xuan was cooking, it smelled fantastic. The aroma made it hard for Jane to concentrate. She worked virtually-met with her managers and peers, reviewed emergency measures to get the storage hangars and tanks up again and the distribution schedules back in order, and probed the life-support systems to see whether they had recovered. Then she left messages for her political allies: shoring up her support and fending off the predators.

A call came in. It was her old mentor, Chik.u.ma Funaki. Jane pulled on her favorite pair of sweats and then activated her waveface.

Funaki was tiny, not much more than a meter and a half tall, and thin, with skin soft and wrinkled as crumpled tissue. Her eyes were the color of hot chocolate, and her hair was s.p.a.ce-black, run through with streaks of white, which she piled atop her head and pinned there with jeweled sticks. She wore the basic stroider tunic and leggings. An attendant stood beside her, whom she dismissed with a nod.

Jane smiled. "Sensei! I'm so glad you called."

Chik.u.ma was a hundred sixty, perhaps older. A First Waver, she had moved to Phocaea at the age of sixteen. Jane had heard she was a mail-order bride back in the days when Phocaeans were a few thousand j.a.panese and North American miners, clinging to the asteroid's surface in their rickety domes, awash in radiation. After her husband had been killed in a mining accident, Funaki had taken over her husband's small business, and had fought, finessed, and extorted her way to success. Among the bankers of Sky Street, a network of mostly j.a.panese investment houses and securities and commodities traders, Chik.u.ma was now supreme matriarch. She could be rather awful, if you got between her and something important that she wanted. But she and Jane had always gotten along, particularly since Chik.u.ma had supported Jane's appointment, fifteen years ago, as Phocaea's resource czar.

Chik.u.ma never saw anyone these days. She had grown rather frail. Jane was of course a member of Chik.u.ma's inner circle, but her own reluctance to disturb Chik.u.ma's peace caused Jane to maintain a certain reserve. (Also, alerting Funaki-sensei to local political events was akin to releasing the whirlwind.) But n.o.body knew better than Chik.u.ma Funaki the threat that Ogilvie & Sons posed to Phocaea. If Jane could choose a single ally to back her in a fight against the mob, it would be Chik.u.ma Funaki.

Jane said, "I apologize for not calling. Matters have been hectic."

"You have been dealing with a terrible crisis. I want to offer my support in whatever way we can help." By "we" she meant not just her family, but 25 Phocaea's entire business community.

"Thank you."

"Perhaps we could meet to discuss the situation in more detail, sometime soon." Jane wondered if she knew something more specific than she was saying. Though Chik.u.ma was one of the six Phocaeans whom Upside-Down Productions wasn't permitted to record, and she used the best encryption money could buy, she and Jane never got too specific online.

"I would be delighted."

"Will you come for tea tomorrow afternoon, then?"

Jane bowed deeply. "I'd be delighted, Sensei. Thank you."

She started to make another call, but Xuan floated over with a bowl and waved it under her nose. Her stomach complained.

"Come. Eat. Trust your people and let them do their jobs."

So she signed off. They ate a green Vietnamese curry with nonspecific vat-grown protein, fresh veggies, and enough chili to take the lining off her sinuses. She wiped her eyes and nose. "Just what I needed." She carried the dishes into the kitchen to wash. "Thank you, dear."

"Kieu and Pham and their families are packing up and heading into town tomorrow." His siblings. "I'll be helping them move."

"Good. We'll have a s.p.a.ce set aside."

The kids both called after dinner. Lag from Earths.p.a.ce was a good forty-four minutes, so it wasn't a conversation, merely an exchange of messages. Dominica called first, from Indonesia. "Checking in again," she said. "Tell the Agres... I'm very, very sorry."

And then Hugh, from Joves.p.a.ce, anguished, distraught. "How could this have happened? It doesn't feel real. I wish I weren't so far away." A long, heavy pause. "There's a rock I left on my shelf. It was a gift from Carl. I want you to give it to Geoff. He'll know why."

Jane and Xuan shared a glance. "Can you come tomorrow?" she asked. The look on Xuan's face told her just how big a crisis the disaster had created in his own professional life. But he nodded. "I'll be there, if at all possible."

He did not know the Agres well; he was going for her sake.

Jane shook her head. "On second thought, never mind. But I will take you up on dinner in town tomorrow night, if you can swing it."

After his evening meditations, Xuan made good on his promise for a full-body ma.s.sage. The knots in Jane's shoulders and back released their grip under his hands; she hissed with mingled pleasure and pain. Other pleasant activities ensued.

You have to really want s.e.x to achieve it in low gee; Newton's three laws play havoc with bodies in motion. Fortunately, Xuan had jury-rigged all manner of pulleys, slings, and other gear, enabling them to achieve a pleasing degree of mutual, sweaty satisfaction. Afterward they snuggled in each others' arms in their bed webbing-drowsy, skin touching skin.

Xuan had optic upgrades, and he loved looking at her, naked, in the dark. It was the one time she truly relaxed. Her skin glowed like liquid jewel; the muscles of her face relaxed, lips slightly parted in a smile; the warmth from where his own flesh had pressed against hers was slowly fading from her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, belly, and thighs. Xuan kissed her open palm and folded her hand in his.

"So," he said.

Jane's face contorted in pain. She pressed her face against his chest, stiff with anguish. Xuan took her into a hug. He stroked her hair, and felt the warm stain of her tears turn cold against his chest. He held her, silent.

"Any clues yet as to the cause?" he asked.

She drew back, shaking her head, and wiped at her eyes. "Sean has been tied up getting repairs done. I haven't been able to get with him about his root cause a.n.a.lysis. Tomorrow is the memorial service, and I have a debriefing on Friday with Benavidez. Parliament is threatening to launch an independent investigation. I don't see how he can hold out against all this pressure to offer me up."

"The cl.u.s.ter needs you. Everybody knows it."