This Alien Shore (4 page)

T
HREE DAYS in a pod. There was barely enough room to turn around, not nearly enough space to work out her cramped muscles and stretch a bit. A singler pod was meant for trips to other habitats, and maybe—just maybe—a rare jaunt to Earth. It wasn't designed for spending three days in space, and people weren't designed for spending three days in it.

Jamisia was miserable, and she was sick, and she was scared. The pod had a lo-G web, but she was afraid to turn it on, afraid that if she used too much power, the pod's limited batteries might run out and leave her stranded in the middle of nowhere. So she was weightless and she got sick and she threw up, and then she had to turn on the gravity long enough to clean out the tiny space ... and when it was over, she floated in a tiny huddled ball at the end of the curved mattress and shivered, more afraid and more alone than she had ever imagined a person could be.

She had opened the tiny box her tutor had given her, but nothing in it looked very helpful. There was a debit chip and an ID tag—
Jamisia Capra,
they both said, with no explanation—and some brainware specs on a card (likewise with no explanation) and half a dozen other small things, including an infochip for the captain of the metroliner, and a similar one for her. The pod's headset could have translated them for her, but she was afraid to use it, afraid that it would send out some kind of signal so that others could follow her. There was a pendant on a chain with a strange linear design etched into it, and at first she thought it was an icon, so she ran her eyes over it again and again, from one end to the other and then back again, in every direction she could think of. But nothing happened. Maybe it was the key to some program that had never gotten loaded into her brainware, she thought. Or maybe she needed some kind of personal pass-key to make it work, which her tutor had intended to give her, but he'd never had the chance. Or maybe it was just some kind of weird gift, the kind of thing you gave someone you cared about when you weren't going to see them for a long time. A kind of amulet. She put the thin chain around her neck and pushed the pendant down into her shirt, so that it wouldn't float up and hit her in the face when she moved.

She managed to eat something from the pod's no-G stores, a packet of orange mush “guaranteed to keep forever.” It was tasteless. She managed to urinate into the waste tube properly, and to get it all tucked away without spilling anything, even though her hands were shaking. She wept until there were no tears left inside her, and then she wept dry until her body and soul were so exhausted that she just lay there in the darkness, floating, too tired even to fear any more. Her wellseeker offered to help her out—it practically insisted—but she turned it down. She needed the outlet, the raw outpouring of fear that crying provided. Brainware could dull the edge of that fear, but it couldn't attack its cause. Only she could do that.

At last, exhausted, she slept.

Green grass. Blue skies. Colors brilliant, like crystal. Overhead the sky seems endless, not like the sky in a viddie of Earth, but rich with secret depths, dizzying in its utter vastness. Likewise the clouds are alien things, and she watches in amazement as they morph from one shape to another, ten thousand times more subtle than any mere viddie could render. She looks down at the land
—
green, so green!
—
and then sees a stream in the distance. She begins to walk toward it. Its water runs clear, not yet choked with the specially designed algae that crowded Earth relies upon for oxygen. She savors the crisp sound the water makes as it gushes over rocks, the feel of the thick grass and the moist dirt giving way beneath her feet as she walks, even the pressure of the hi-G system pulling her downward. Alien sensations, each and every one. And yet ... there are no smells here, she realizes. How odd. You would expect a place like this to smell clean, or damp, or earthy, or ... something.

She begins to study the details of the place, knowing she'll be tested later. But rather than going on with the lesson, he walks up to her, very close, and puts his hand beneath her chin to cradle it upward, gently. His eyes are brown and warm and it calms her to look into them. For a moment—one precious second
—
the fear in her heart subsides. She trusts this man.

For a moment she can't find her voice to respond. She is remembering what her tutor once explained about dream programming, how it's the kind of thing you use when you're afraid that your subject will try to escape what you have to say. Brainware won't accept new input during dreamtime
—
for its own protection—so a dreaming brain lacks the kind of conscious control system the waking brain is accustomed to. She can't shut this program down. She can't run away. If the program was designed well enough, she can't even wake herself up.

For a moment her tutor hesitates. It isn't the pause of a man giving thought to her question, but the downtime of a program accessing its data stores. On what will it base its response? What parameters did her tutor design into it, to define the limits of this briefing? “Your brainware alone makes you valuable, ” he says at last. “As for the rest of it
...
they hurt you, Jamisia. I know you don't remember the details, but trust me, they did They wanted to see what would happen to a human brain under certain conditions, and they used you like a guinea pig to find out. Now that you're away from them, I think there's a chance that what they did to you will heal over time of its own accord, and you may never require knowledge of what it was. God willing. ”

END PROGRAM

S
he was miles away when she first saw the metroliner, and despite the fact that she knew what to expect—or thought she did—still it took her breath away to see it spread out before her like that, not a viddie reproduction but the real thing. It was vast, in the way that the Earth seemed vast when viewed from a habitat window. It was a thing out of fantasy, a creature out of the depths of space that seemed almost alive in its form, so utterly unlike a ship that for a short time her fears were all forgotten, and she pressed her face against the window like a small child seeing Earth for the first time.

At its head was a vast curved dish, so like the cap of a jellyfish in shape and proportion that she half-expected to see it quiver, gathering up the essence of the surrounding darkness to spurt it out for propulsion. Behind that flowed the body of the ship proper: first the stocky core that housed its command center, then strands of domiciles and storage pods and vast curving boulevards where all manners of human intercourse might take place. They twined about each other in loose spirals, the space about and between them webbed with transport tubes and flyways and delicate crystalline spheres that glittered as her pod flew past them. All in all it seemed more like some vast, eerie creature dredged up from the bottom of Earth's ocean than a man-made transport vessel, and she found herself holding her breath as her pod drew closer to it, half expecting it to shiver to life as she watched.