Gateway (8 page)

I celebrated completing the week on ship-handling by offering to buy Dane Metchnikov a drink. That wasn't my first intention. My first intention had been to buy Sheri a drink and drink it in bed, but she was off somewhere. So I worked the buttons on the piezophone and got Metchnikov. He sounded surprised at my offer. "Thanks," he said, and then considered. "Tell you what. Give me a hand carrying some stuff, and then I'll buy you a drink." So I went down to his place, which was only one level below Babe; his room was not much better than my own, and bare, except for a couple of full carry-alls. He looked at me almost friendly. "You're a prospector now," he grunted. "Not really. I've got two more courses." "Well, this is the last you see of me, anyway. I'm shipping out with Terry Yakamora tomorrow." I was surprised. "Didn't you just get back, like ten days ago?" "You can't make any money hanging around here. All I was waiting for was the right crew. You want to come to my farewell party? Terry's place. Twenty hundred." "That sounds fine," I said. "Can I bring Sheri?" "Oh, sure, she's coming anyway, I think. Buy you the drink there, if you don't mind. Give me a hand and we'll get this stuff stored." He had accumulated a surprising amount of goods. I wondered how he had managed to stash them all away in a room as tiny as my own: three fabric carriers all stuffed full, holodisks and a viewer, book tapes and a few actual books. I took the carriers. On Earth they would have weighed more than I could handle, probably fifty or sixty kilos, but of course on Gateway lifting them was no problem; it was only tugging them through the corridors and jockeying them down the shafts that was tricky. I had the mass, but Metchnikov had the problems, since what he was carrying was in odd shapes and varying degrees of fragility. It was about an hour's haul, actually. We wound up in a part of the asteroid I'd never seen before, where an elderly Pakistani woman counted the pieces, gave Metchnikov a receipt and began dragging them away down a thickly vine-grown corridor. "Whew," he grunted. "Well, thanks." "You're welcome." We started back toward a dropshaft, and making conversation, I assume out of some recognition that he owed me a social favor and should practice some social skills, he said: "So how was the course?" "You mean apart from the fact that I've just finished it and still don't have any idea how to fly those goddamned ships?" "Well, of course you don't," he said, irritably. "The course isn't going to teach you that. It just gives you the general idea. The way you learn, you do it. Only hard part's the lander, of course. Anyway, you've got your issue of tapes?" "Oh, yes." There were six cassettes of them. Each of us had been given a set when we completed the first week's course. They had everything that had been said, plus a lot of stuff about different kinds of controls that the Corporation might, or might not, fit on a Heechee board and so on. "So play them over," he said. "If you've got any sense you'll take them with you when you ship out. Got plenty of time to play them then. Mostly the ships fly themselves anyway." "They'd better," I said, doubting it. "So long." He waved and dropped onto the down-cable without looking back. Apparently I had agreed to take the drink he owed me at the party. Where it wouldn't cost him anything. I thought of looking for Sheri again, and decided against it. I was in a part of Gateway I didn't know, and of course I'd left my map back in my room. I drifted along, more or less at random, past star-points where some of the tunnels smelled musty and dusty and there weren't many people, then through an inhabited section that seemed to be mostly Eastern European. I didn't recognize the languages, but there were little notes and wall signs hanging from the everywhere-growing ivy that were in alphabets that looked Cyrillic or even stranger. I came to a dropshaft, thought for a moment, and then caught hold of the up-cable. The easy way not to be lost on Gateway is to go up until you get to the spindle, where "up" ends. But this time I found myself passing Central Park and, on impulse, dropped off the up-cable to sit by a tree for a while. Central Park isn't really a park. It's a large tunnel, not far from the center of rotation of the asteroid, which has been devoted to vegetation. I found orange trees there (which explained the juice), and grape vines; and ferns and mosses, but no grass. I am not sure why. Probably it has something to do with planting only varieties that are sensitive to the available light, mostly the blue gleam from the Heechee metal all around, and perhaps they couldn't find a grass that could use it efficiently for its photochemistry. The principal reason for having Central Park in the first place was to suck up CO2 and give back oxygen; that was before they spread planting all over the tunnels. But it also killed smells, or anyway it was supposed to, a little, and it grew a certain amount of food. The whole thing was maybe eighty meters long and twice as tall as I was. It was broad enough to have room for some winding paths. The stuff they grew in looked a lot like good old genuine Earthside dirt. What it was, really, was a humus made out of the sewage sludge from the couple of thousand people who had used Gateway toilets, but you couldn't tell that by looking at it, or by smelling it, either. The first tree big enough to sit by was no good for that purpose; it was a mulberry, and under it were spread out sheets of fine netting to catch the dropping fruit. I walked past it, and down the path there were a woman and a child. A child! I hadn't known there were any children on Gateway. She was a little bit of a thing, maybe a year and a half, playing with a ball so big, and so lazy in the light gravity, that it was like a balloon. "Hello, Rob." That was the other surprise; the woman who greeted me was Gelle-Klara Moynlin. I said without thinking, "I didn't know you had a little girl." "I don't. This is Kathy Francis, and her mother lets me borrow her sometimes. Kathy, this is Rob Broadhead." "Hello, Rob," the little thing called, studying me from three meters away. "Are you a friend of Klara's?" "I hope so. She's my teacher. Do you want to play catch?" Kathy finished her study of me and said precisely, each word separate from the one before it and as clearly formed as an adult's, "I don't know how to play catch, but I will get six mulberries for you. That's all you can have." "Thank you." I slumped down next to Klara, who was hugging her knees and watching the child. "She's cute." "Well, I guess so. It's hard to judge, when there aren't very many other children around." "She's not a prospector, is she?" I wasn't exactly joking, but Klara laughed warmly. "Her parents are permanent-party. Well, most of the time. Right now her mother's off prospecting; they do that sometimes, a lot of them. You can spend just so much time trying to figure out what the Heechee were up to before you want to try your own solutions to the puzzles." "Sounds dangerous." She shushed me. Kathy came back, with three of my mulberries in each open hand, so as not to crush them. She had a funny way of walking, which didn't seem to use much of the thigh and calf muscles; she sort of pushed herself up on the ball of each foot in turn, and let herself float to the next step. After I figured that out I tried it for myself, and it turned out to be a pretty efficient way of walking in near-zero gravity, but my reflexes kept lousing it up. I suppose you have to be born on Gateway to come by it naturally. Klara in the park was a lot more relaxed and feminine than Klara the teacher. The eyebrows that had looked masculine and angry became outdoorsy and friendly. She still smelled very nice. It was pretty pleasant, chatting with her, while Kathy stepped daintily around us, playing with her ball. We compared places we'd been, and didn't find any in common. The one thing we did find in common was that I was born almost the same day as her two-year-younger brother. "Did you like your brother?" I asked, a gambit played for the hell of it. "Well, sure. He was the baby. But he was an Aries, born under Mercury and the Moon. Made him fickle and moody, of course. I think he would have had a complicated life."

---------------------------------------- This Park Is MONITORED By Closed-Circuit PV

You are welcome to enjoy it. Do not pick flowers or fruit. Do not damage any plant. While visiting, you may eat any fruits which have fallen, to the following limits:

Grapes, cherries

8 per person Other small fruits or berries 6 per person Oranges, limes, pears

1 per person

Gravel may not be removed from walks. Deposit all trash of any kind in receptacles.

MAINTENANCE DIVISION THE GATEWAY CORPORATION ----------------------------------------

I was less interested in asking her about what happened to him than in asking if she really believed in that garbage, but that didn't seem tactful, and anyway she went on talking. "I'm a Sagittarius, myself. And you -- oh, of course. You must be the same as Davie." "I guess so," I said, being polite. "I, uh, don't go much for astrology." "Not astrology, genethlialogy. One's superstition, the other's science." She laughed. "I can see you're a scoffer. Doesn't matter. If you believe, all right; if you don't -- well, you don't have to believe in the law of gravity to get mashed when you fall off a two-hundred story building." Kathy, who had sat down beside us, inquired politely, "Are you having an argument?" "Not really, honey." Klara stroked her head. "That's good, Klara, because I have to go to the bathroom now and I don't think I can, here." "It's time to go anyway. Nice to see you, Rob. Watch out for melancholy, hear?" And they went away hand in hand, Klara trying to copy the little girl's odd walk. Looking very nice. . . for a flake.

That night I took Sheri to Dane Metchnikov's going-away party. Klara was there, looking even nicer in a bare-midriff pants suit. "I didn't know you knew Dane Metchnikov," I said. "Which one is he? I mean, Terry's the one who invited me. Coming inside?" The party had spilled out into the tunnel. I peered through the door and was surprised to find how much room there was inside; Terry Yakamora had two full rooms, both more than twice the size of mine. The bath was private and really did contain a bath, or at least a showerhead. "Nice place," I said admiringly, and then discovered from something another guest said that Klara lived right down the tunnel. That changed my opinion of Klara: if she could afford the high-rent district, why was she still on Gateway? Why wasn't she back home spending her money and having fun? Or contrariwise, if she was still on Gateway, why was she fooling around keeping barely even with the head tax by working as an assistant instructor, instead of going out for another killing? But I didn't get a chance to ask her. She did most of her dancing that night with Terry Yakamora and the others in the outgoing crew. I lost track of Sheri until she came over to me after a slow, almost unmoving fox-trot, bringing her partner. He was a very young man -- a boy, actually; he looked about nineteen. He looked familiar: dark skin, almost white hair, a wisp of a jaw-beard that drew an arc from sideburn to sideburn by way of the underside of his chin. He hadn't come up from Earth with me. He wasn't in our class. But I'd seen him somewhere. Sheri introduced us. "Rob, you know Francesco Hereira?" "I don't think so." "He's from the Brazilian cruiser." Then I remembered. He was one of the inspectors who had gone in to fish through the baked gobbets of flesh on the shipwreck we'd seen a few days earlier. He was a torpedoman, according to his cuff stripes. They give the cruiser crews temporary duty as guards on Gateway, and sometimes they give them liberty there, too. He'd come in in the regular rotation about the time we arrived. Somebody put on a tape for a hora just then, and after we were through dancing, a little out of breath, Hereira and I found ourselves leaning against the wall side by side, trying to stay out of the way of the rest of the party. I told him I had just remembered seeing him at the wreck. "Ah, yes, Mr. Broadhead. I recall." "Tough job," I said, for something to say. "Isn't it?" He had been drinking enough to answer me, I guess. "Well, Mr. Broadhead," he said analytically, "the technical description of that part of my job is 'search and registry.' It is not always tough. For instance, in a short time you will no doubt go out, and when you come back I, or someone else in my job, will poke into your holes, Mr. Broadhead. I will turn out your pockets, and weigh and measure and photograph everything in your ship. That is to make sure you do not smuggle anything of value out of your vessel and off Gateway without paying the Corporation its due share. Then I register what I have found; if it is nothing, I write 'nil' on the form, and another crewman from another cruiser chosen at random does the same thing exactly. So you will have two of us prying into you." It didn't sound like a lot of fun for me, but not as bad as I had thought at first. I said so. He flashed small, very white teeth. "When the prospector to be searched is Sheri or Gelle-Klara over there, no, not bad at all. One can quite enjoy it. But I have not much interest in searching males, Mr. Broadhead. Especially when they are dead. Have you ever been in the presence of five human bodies that have been dead, but not embalmed, for three months? That was what it was like on the first ship I inspected. I do not think anything will be that bad ever again." Then Sheri came up and demanded him for another dance, and the party went on. There were a lot of parties. It turned out there always had been, it was just that we new fish hadn't been part of the network, but as we got nearer graduating we got to know more people. There were farewell parties. There were welcome-back parties, but not nearly as many of those. Even when crews did come back, there was not always any reason to celebrate. Sometimes they had been gone so long they had lost touch with all their friends. Sometimes, when they had hit fairly lucky, they didn't want anything but to get off Gateway on the way home. And sometimes, of course, they couldn't have a party because parties aren't permitted in the intensive care rooms at Terminal Hospital. It wasn't all parties; we had to study. By the end of the course we were supposed to be fully expert in ship-handling, survival techniques and the appraisal of trade goods. Well, I wasn't. Sheri was even worse off than I. She took to the ship-handling all right, and she had a shrewd eye for detail that would help her a lot in appraising the worth of anything she might find on a prospecting trip. But she didn't seem able to get the survival course through her head. Studying with her for the final examinations was misery: "Okay," I'd tell her, "this one's a type-F star with a planet with point-eight surface G, a partial pressure of oxygen of 130 millibars, mean temperature at the equator plus forty Celsius. So what do you wear to the party?" She said accusingly, "You're giving me an easy one. That's practically Earth." "So what's the answer, Sheri?" She scratched reflectively under her breast. Then she shook her head impatiently. "Nothing. I mean, I wear an airsuit on the way down, but once I get to the surface I could walk around in a bikini."