Strider's Galaxy (17 page)

She shook herself, and began staring through the view-window eagerly, lapping up everything she could see.

Which proved to be disappointingly little. The sky was still that unnatural blue, unlike the familiar orange-blue of the Martian heavens, but she had seen pictures of pre-nuke-war Earth; she even knew that those huge, seemingly heavy masses of white were clouds, even though they were nothing like the wisps that occasionally appeared in the atmosphere of Mars. Very far in the distance she could see oddly purple-seeming mountains, but aside from that there was just a broad expanse of yellowed featurelessness with, tiny at its far end, a cluster of box-like buildings. The Spindrifters might have given their spaceport a romantic name, the Gate to the Sky, but from here it looked entirely functional, drab and desolate. Presumably spaceports all over the Universe looked very much the same.

"You may exit your vessel only if you are clad in full spacesuits," the alien voice was instructing in its eerily whispering voice.

"I'm a bot," said Pinocchio. "I have no suit."

There was a pause.

"That is acceptable to us. But your companion must be suited."

Strauss-Giolitto, still absorbing the fact that, whatever the scene through the view-window looked like, she was on a world new to humanity, only half-heard this. Pinocchio reached across the aisle and prodded her shoulder, then gestured towards the wall-chest where her suit was stored.

"About our Image?" said the bot to the screen.

"Images are always welcome on Spindrift." The voice gave a little whinny which Strauss-Giolitto guessed must be the best Ten Per Cent Extra Free could do to represent a Spindrifter's equivalent of a laugh. "We couldn't keep them out anyway, even if we wanted to."

She unclicked her restrainer belt with difficulty; the experiences of the past hour or so had made her fingers numb without her realizing it. As she stood, little cramps shot through her calves and groin area. She moved behind Pinocchio's seat and at last had sight of the Spindrifter.

The Images had said that the Spindrifters were humanoid, and at first glance that seemed to be the case. The face looking out from the screen was vaguely elfin, with slanting eyes and a pointy chin. But then you noticed the differences. The other features were more or less as in a human, but only approximately. The thing in the center of the face was obviously not a nose: it was an organ that lazily coiled and uncoiled as the Spindrifter spoke. The feature that looked superficially like a mouth was clearly constructed quite differently from a human mouth: it had four lips, set in a sort of pouting diamond shape. A high crest of what seemed to be stiff black hair ran from the top of the forehead towards the rear, while the rest of the face was covered with short black bristles. And those human-seeming eyes were utterly black, as if in looking into them you were looking into the voids of space.

Strauss-Giolitto turned away. She was both repelled and fascinated by the face; that there was a twinge of sexuality in the fascination did not help at all.

She suited up thoughtfully. Pinocchio was still discussing procedures with the Spindrifter. She sat down alongside him again, not wanting to look any more at the face in the screen.
God made us in his likeness,
she thought,
but am I his likeness, or is that creature? No, it's not a creature: it's a sentient being, the same as I am. And the Images said the Spindrifters are humanoid, like me, so I suppose they are. Humanoid, but at the same time very different. How many likenesses does God have?

She filed away the question to be thought about later. Now they were here on Spindrift she was keen to be out of the shuttle. She was also already keen to be out of her spacesuit. There's always an offputting smell inside a suit—the combination of hi-tech, vestiges of urine from the last time you used the suit for any extended stretch of time, and your own body odor, both stale and fresh. The net result is a constant reminder that you are in a profoundly enclosed small space; it becomes very easy to start feeling claustrophobic.

Especially since all you can usually hear are your own breathing and the pumping of your pulse. Strauss-Giolitto's pulse was pumping faster than usual.

"Audio," she said to the suit impatiently.

At once her own noises were blotted out by the voices of Pinocchio and the Spindrifter, who seemed to be coming to the end of their conversation.

Yes, they were.

The screen faded, and the bot glanced towards her. "We're to get out on to the tarmac—or whatever it is—and wait for Polyaggle to reach us. She'll take us to decontamination. She seems to be controlling this spaceport entirely on her own." He shook his head. "It seems very strange to me."

It took them several minutes to usher themselves through the locks and out into the open. The Spindrifters were clearly nervous of infection from the visitors; Pinocchio was equally concerned about contaminating the air in the shuttle with elements from Spindrift's atmosphere, which was likely to be laden with bacteria, some of which the human nanobots might not recognize as detrimental until it was too late. There was no sense in taking plague back to the
Santa Maria
.

Strauss-Giolitto suddenly realized she was due for another bout of decontamination on her return to the starship. She gulped unhappily. Most often decontamination was followed by a couple of days' diarrhoea, because the process tended, willy-nilly, to destroy large parts of the colonies of symbiotic bacteria in the human gut.

A small vehicle, not unlike a cabble but without the protective dome, was floating across the spaceport towards them.

"Have you noticed something?" said Pinocchio, moving away a few paces and tapping with his toe at some mossy weeds growing from between a crack in what did indeed seem to be tarmac.

"Not until you pointed it out," said Strauss-Giolitto. She gazed around her. Several hundred meters away the prow of what looked like an old-fashioned chemical-fuelled rocket protruded from a walled enclosure—a landing-bay, she guessed. There were smears of what appeared to be rust on the rocket's hull. "People don't come here very often," she said.

"And this spaceport was built a very long time ago," said Pinocchio.

"By whom?" said Strauss-Giolitto.

The bot shrugged.

The vehicle must have been moving more quickly than it had seemed to, because it was very soon beside them.

"Are you there, Ten Per Cent Extra Free?" said Strauss-Giolitto softly.

I AM INSIDE THE SUIT WITH YOU.

She squirmed slightly. It seemed a very intimate arrangement.

"Good," she said. "We're going to be needing you."

OF COURSE.
Was there a trace of smugness in that singing voice, or was Ten Per Cent Extra Free merely stating the obvious?

Standing upright in the hovering vehicle was the owner of the face they had seen in the screen—Polyaggle, Pinocchio had called her. Strauss-Giolitto sucked in her breath. The elfin quality of Polyaggle's face was carried through to her body, which was slight, almost like that of a prepubescent child, and at the same time obviously fully mature. From ten meters away one might almost have believed she was a true human with a bizarre taste in hairstyles. Naked, she was very evidently female.

The Spindrifter flipped herself with some grace over the far side of the vehicle and beckoned them towards it. She seemed to be even lighter than her body-shape suggested, like a trained dancer.

"Please don't get into this until I am some distance away," she said. "I don't want to come too close to you. I shouldn't even be this near."

WISE,
said Ten Per Cent Extra Free.

Strauss-Giolitto nodded. There could be possibly dangerous microbes on the surface of her suit. It would have to be thoroughly sterilized and then probably, after she had removed it, destroyed. The same went for her clothing, and Pinocchio's.

"The cabble"—Ten Per Cent Extra Free translated the alien word using a term familiar to them—"has been programmed to transport you to decontamination. You will be guided through that unit automatically. The process will take about fourteen . . ." This time Ten Per Cent Extra Free was unable to make a translation.
He can't have worked out the local units of time as yet,
thought Strauss-Giolitto. She hoped it wasn't going to be fourteen hours, or days, or . . .

"At the end of that period," Polyaggle continued, "I will speak further with you."

She put her hands together—no, they weren't hands but bird-like claws—in what was presumably a formal gesture, and turned away.

And spread her wings.

They unfurled swiftly in a riot of brilliant color. They were ragged, like a butterfly's wings, but brighter than any butterfly Strauss-Giolitto could remember. Around the edges there were broad, irregular patches of crimson and turquoise and black. Closer to the torso, lines of eye-shaped iridescent markings followed the contours of her body.

Polyaggle flapped her wings once, twice, and then allowed herself to drift slowly and erratically off the ground. When she was about twenty meters above them she began to move her wings with more purpose, and soon was fluttering away through the breeze towards the distant buildings.

Strauss-Giolitto couldn't recall having seen anything quite so beautiful. No wonder the Images had translated this world's name as Spindrift, for that was exactly what Polyaggle was doing now: spinning and drifting through the air. It now wasn't so surprising that Polyaggle's body was so light. This was God's image. The minor sexual pang Strauss-Giolitto had experienced on first seeing the Spindrifter's face in the screen was nothing to what she was feeling at the moment. She was going to have a difficult time on this planet.

YOUR TURN NOW,
Ten Per Cent Extra Free reminded her gently, waking her from her thoughts.

Pinocchio was already aboard the cabble, reaching out a hand to help her. She took it gratefully. Ordinarily she would have had no difficulty stepping into the vehicle—she was fifty per cent taller than the Spindrifter—but suited up like this she felt cumbersome and squat.

Holding the T-shaped pole in the vehicle's center for balance, they stood and watched as they were conveyed swiftly across the landing-area.

There was so little to see, and yet in a way so much.

#

She kept trying to forget what it had been like going through the Spindrifter version of decontamination, but it was extremely difficult. At the end of the cycle she had been given a loose white robe to wear, but she still had never felt more naked in her life. Part of the time she had been anaesthetized, which should have made things better; in fact, it had been if anything worse, because she still didn't fully understand everything the Spindrifters' eager little bots had done to her.

She had anticipated losing her suit and her clothing, but the bots had been very much more thorough than that. They had depilated her entire body—it felt bizarre and uncomfortable having a naked crotch for the first time since childhood—and they had probed and scoured every orifice with ruthless efficiency, no great gentleness and strange-smelling chemicals; her ears still gurgled if she moved her head too quickly. But far worse than that had been what they had done to her under anaesthetic.

They had stripped her of her integrated hardware. Neural implants, stim sockets, thighputer, cortical amplification units—everything was gone, right down to her commline. Without her augmentations, everything around her seemed utterly strange: she was experiencing the world as she hadn't experienced it since puberty. It was confusing: she kept bumping into things if she didn't keep a look out where she was going: there was no secondary retinal screen to warn her automatically of obstructions. She kept listening for the tiny background hiss of her commline on standby—a commline that was no longer there. Having just flesh on her left thigh seemed somehow . . . perverse. She was perceiving everything differently, hearing things differently.

She was having to rediscover her natural senses.

And it was all
doubly
confusing: she really
was
experiencing a strange new world. On Mars, and indeed on the
Santa Maria
, when you were inside relaxing you always had the reassurance that you were in a totally enclosed environment. When you were outside you were almost certainly always on the move, because there was little reason to be stationary and almost none to be sedentary.

Here, though, she was sitting on a stool the size of those she expected her schoolkids to sit on and there was nothing overhead but the sky. She could vaguely recall this from her childhood, but only as an experience someone else had had. Ahead of them stretched the weed-infested waste of the Gate to the Sky. On the long, low table in front of her was a tall metal beaker of what Polyaggle had told her was distilled water. Strauss-Giolitto had tried it nervously at first, but the taste proved . . . interesting.

She took another gulp of it.

Strauss-Giolitto and Pinocchio, who was likewise dressed now in a white robe, were together at one end of the table and Polyaggle at the other. The human woman couldn't work out if this was a deliberate ploy to establish some kind of hierarchical demarcation or if it was totally unconscious on the Spindrifter's part: she still seemed cautious about approaching them too closely, as if not thoroughly trusting even the full rigors of decontamination to preserve her from infection.

And what about me?
thought Strauss-Giolitto for the hundredth time.
Dammit, I'm probably picking up every disease in the Universe by just sitting here breathing.

At the next lull in the conversation between Polyaggle and Pinocchio, Ten Per Cent Extra Free—currently resident somewhere in Pinocchio's circuitry—spoke swiftly to her.
THE DECONTAMINATORS WERE WISE ENOUGH NOT TO INTERFERE WITH YOUR NANOBOTS. I AM, NATURALLY, MONITORING THE LATTER CLOSELY. YOU ARE INDEED INGESTING ALIEN MICRO-ORGANISMS, BUT NONE HAS OFFERED YOUR BODY ANY DANGER AS YET, AND ALL HAVE BEEN SWIFTLY IDENTIFIED AND DESTROYED BY THE NANOBOTS. WE WOULD NOT HAVE PERMITTED A HUMAN TO DESCEND TO THIS PLANET UNLESS WE WERE SURE IT WAS SAFE.