War Surf (17 page)

“Darling,” I pleaded.

“Help us, beau.” She dashed to an oven and started scooping up cans of food with both hands. Her chaste white longjohn had turned filthy gray, and there was a rip across her belly where something had snagged the smart-skin. Her lovely dimpled hands were bleeding.

Geraldine squeezed past me toward the ladder, then paused to bump me with her hip. Her rank smell almost made me cough. “Lover, you haul the freight hoist. I show you what to do.”

“Go with her, Nass. We don’t have time to discuss things now. We’ll talk soon.” Sheeba’s gray-green-blue eyes shone out of her dark golden face like beacons.

It was useless to argue. Sheeba moved in hasty jerks, totally absorbed in her task. Geraldine handed me a water sack, and as I sucked it down, the wench patted my butt. “This way, sugar buns.”

A large pile of food cans had accumulated in Three’s ladder well, and my task, as Geraldine explained, was to convey them onto the freight hoist—the platform that moved up and down through the cargo door by a hand-operated pulley. Above, a flock of little toads was unloading and stacking the cans.

Imagine how my gut knotted with hunger pangs as I handled that Chili Diablo. After an hour of lifting and twisting, my broken leg throbbed, not to mention my shoulders. The designer additives in my blood gave me extra stamina though, and in Three’s reduced gravity, the cans weighed half what they usually would given their mass. Since the little toads bore up without complaint, I kept my grievances quiet.

After we moved the canned food, Juani and Sheeba started carting out glossy plastic sacks of water, but the sacks were slick and floppy, and they kept sliding off the hoist In a rush of impatience, Sheeba tore off her longjohn and improvised a cargo net to hold the slippery sacks on the platform. Juani and Geraldine both gawked when she stripped naked, but Sheeba didn’t seem to notice. She was plasmically focused on the moment

I tried not to see her nude body. Without the skin dye, her nakedness seemed more intimate and personal. When we met in the corridor, I edged past without touching her. Shee’s unwashed skin radiated a compelling pungency, yet for the first time, her nakedness embarrassed me. I wanted to cover her up. She seemed exposed, yes, but not vulnerable. Nothing about Sheeba seemed vulnerable.

Shee squeezed my arm and grinned. “Ordic emanations, can you feel them? I knew you’d want to help.” Then she hurried off on some new errand.

Far below, the hull rumbled as Provendia’s gunship resumed fire. Deck One was taking most of the hits, but occasionally a stray noisemaker would ricochet across the flank, and its impact would vibrate in the walls.

Juani shouted for me to come help him siphon the last of the water from their collector cistern, but I felt ravenous. I searched the gaping ovens for food—cracker crumbs, moldy powdered soup, anything to stuff in my mouth. Nothing. They’d moved it all. Juani had disappeared beyond the rows of ovens, so I marched along, irritably calling his name.

“Man, don’t yell so loud. I’m in here.”

He was kneeling in a nearby utility closet, shining a flashlight at a bank of old-fashioned analog dials and shaking his head. Some of the ornamental wire in his braid had come loose, and the sharp copper points stuck out like a frayed connection. “Cistern pressure too low to use the pumps anymore. We gotta suck out the rest by mouth.”

“You’re joking.”

He got up off the floor and wrinkled his nose. “How strong your lungs, blade?”

“Is this necessary? We’ve transported a megaton of water already. Why can’t you just turn on your recycler and make more water?”

As we wound through the drying room with his flashlight, he explained how they’d “rehabbed” a food vat to make their cistern. He was talking again as freely as ever.

“Through here” he said. “Watch the overhang.”

I ducked under some pipes, and Juani’s unraveling braid almost hit me in the eye. “Wait, wait, your hair’s a menace. Let me fix it” I caught hold of his braid, and he stopped and let me twist the sharp ends of the wires back into his plaits. “What caused that hull breach anyway?” I asked. “The gunship wasn’t targeting that area. I suspect sabotage.”

“Sabo-what?” Juani felt his braid to see what I’d done.

“Your treacherous chief did it to gain publicity. That’s what I think.”

“Blade, you so sharp you cut yourself.”

When he tried to take off, I caught his shoulder. “Provendia’s gunfire didn’t cause that breach. How do you explain it?”

“Plain old stress.” Juani grinned and thumped his fist softly against the steel wall. “This tank, he ancient. All mat gunfire, he tremble.”

Well, that gave me something to chew on.

Juani led me to their makeshift cistern, a spherical steel food vat anchored to the floor with bolts, patch-welds and also magnets. Quite a lot of redundancy, I thought. Still, the mounts had obviously bumped around a few times. I wondered what force could have moved this heavy cistern.

We had to crabwalk around the vat to locate the small pump valve, and the floor was wet where they’d been filling water sacks. When Juani twisted the valve full open, only a hollow whuffing sound came through. He insisted the tank held more water, though, and he jammed a short section of plastic tube inside the faucet to siphon it out. While I held the tube in place with both hands, he tried his manful best to suck the water out, but there was no result. He sank back on the floor, red-faced from the strain.

“We already have enough water,” I said.

“For how long?” His words struck me as ominous.

How long indeed? And how many people would have to share it? I envisioned the sick-ward crowded with thirsty, dying workers. All the adults must be there.

“Where’s the recycler?” I said. “Ye gods, was it damaged in the blowout?” From my decades of board meetings, I knew just enough about life-support recyclers to spout a little jargon. “If the main lagoons are intact, maybe we can repair the machinery. We still have power, right?”

Juani leaned back on his hands and gazed at the underside of the cistern, humming softly. “The recycler safe on Five, man, but it may as well be on the other side of the moon. The pumps down in Two, and I can’t get there to restart ‘em.”

I sat beside him, careful to avoid the puddles. My muscles were so fatigued that the steel deck actually felt comfortable. Silently, I worked out the ramifications of not having water pumps. “But we still have power, right? Those fluorescent lights were working.”

“We running off sick-ward’s emergency generator.”

Then another thought hit me. “What about air?”

Juani fingered his woven wire braid. “All the pumps down on Two.”

“Great golden gilders, we’re trapped with no air.” I thought fast. ‘Take my EVA suit. You can exit through the hull breach and get to the pumps through Two’s airlock.”

When Juani’s mouth shut in a flat line, I remembered the earlier discussion about his spacesickness. Fainting on a space walk was no joke. It could mean asphyxiation. But so could no air pumps.

“All right, if you can’t go, someone else can,” I said. “Surely you’re not the only one who knows the recycler machinery.”

“Not machinery. It’s the garden.” Juani ground his knuckles in his eye sockets. “The garden, she breathe and drink. She give us air and water and food.”

At first, I couldn’t take this in. “You don’t have recycling machinery? But every Provendia satellite comes equipped with a standard recycling plant.”

“We rehabbed it,” he said.

“What do you mean, rehabbed it? Did you have proper authorization?”

“We cut up the parts to build our garden.” Juani jammed the plastic tube back into the cistern faucet. “We fine, blade. The garden keep us alive. It’s the people on One and Two, they trapped.”

“Where’s Liam?”

“The chief down there trying to fix the cracks so we can repress’.’

I got up and started crabwalking toward the exit.

“Hey, man, we gotta get this water,” he said.

In my weariness, I didn’t notice the overhead strut till it banged my forehead and knocked me dizzy. I got back up, rubbed my head and staggered on. I had to find Sheeba. She and I were spinning through space in an ancient, decomposing fuel tank run by a covey of little hellions who had destroyed their recycling plant. And any second, the whole decrepit place might tremble to bits.

“This place is a freaking death chamber.” I charged along the corridor, ignoring hunger and fatigue, searching for Sheeba. Surf the moment. Ride the contingencies. We had to get out of this leaky spinning tank before it self-destructed.

But how? Liam had stolen my helmet. I had to find the wordless brute and get it back. Juani followed at my heels. Maybe he thought I had a plan to save everyone.

“Where did Liam put my helmet?”

“He gave it to Geraldine.” Juani patted my shoulder. “Be calm, man. You gonna bust a vein.”

I wheeled open a bulkhead door and collided head-on with Geraldine.

“Strip, lover. I need your trousseau,” she said.

Before I could react, she unzipped my EVA suit, and Juani slid past me, whispering under his breath, “I go check the generator, just in case.”

Ha. There lay my helmet at Geraldine’s feet. But when I bent to reach it, she jerked my EVA suit off my shoulders. I grabbed the folds of silky Kevlax and tried to fling her off, but the wench clung to me like Velcro.

“Nass, give her the suit,” Sheeba said. Out of nowhere, Shee was standing behind me, whispering in my ear and tracing tiny circles up and down my neck. Gently, she tugged the suit loose from my fingers. “Gee needs it. Her suit’s leaky. She has to help Liam restore our life support.”

Sheeba’s words sounded reasonable. Life support, yes. Restoring it had to be a positive step.

“Nass, let go of the suit,” she whispered, caressing me from behind.

As her breath warned my ear, my grip on the Kevlax loosened. Geraldine tugged the suit down around my ankles, and the two of them helped me step out of it like a docile old geezer. Then I just stood there in my longjohn.

Sheeba helped Geraldine suit up. “Nass, this place is mesmic. Do you sense the dark energy? It’s got my aura streaming, like, ultraviolet.” Shee wasn’t naked anymore. She’d dressed in a gray prote uniform, cut off at the elbows and knees.

Only when Geraldine stretched out her short brawny arms to admire the black piping on my suit did I realize how they had violated me. Hot blood rose to my cheeks. “Sheeba,” I sputtered, misting her face with saliva, “this satellite’s about to rupture. We’ll be killed.”

Sheeba whistled through her teem. “Be here now, Nass.” Then she waved a cheery good-bye and galloped after Geraldine toward the ladder well.

“Wait. I’ve come to save you. Don’t leave me.” In my eagerness, I momentarily forgot about the Coriolis effect, leaned in the wrong direction and smacked against the wall. “You said we would talk.”

But she didn’t hear me. Her bare, sooty feet disappeared down the corridor. I remembered kissing each one of those dimpled toes.

“Sir, would you like something to eat?” said a soft girlish voice.

I barely heard. I was watching the corridor where Sheeba had vanished. A strange new Sheeba. Transfigured by the zone.

“I cooking a meal, sir. Will you come?”

Kaioko waited some distance away, and her Asian eyes rested on me with a look of profound distrust. She’d arranged her white head rag in a more becoming fashion, and she touched it self-consciously. For the first time, I noticed her delicate nub of a nose and her small lips. The pointed chin shaped her face like a heart. Too bad her eyes were so small and squinty. She got to her feet and moved down the hall, glancing over her shoulder to see that I was following.

“Are we going to sick-ward?” I asked.

‘To the galley,” she said.

“Is that where Sheeba went?” I asked hopefully. The last place I wanted to see was sick-ward. Lurid video of Heaven’s afflicted workers flashed across my mental screen. I really did not want to see those faces.

Kaioko tiptoed close to the wall, bending forward at the waist to see around the curve. She seemed fearful of running into some obstacle. No little toads blocked our way, and this gave Deck Three an air of vacancy. “Where are all the brats?” I asked.

She didn’t answer. At the galley door, she motioned for me to pass ahead, and as I came near, she flattened herself against the wall. Did she mink I would bite?

My injured leg still ached, but I could tell from the way it moved that my bones had healed. Amazingly, my orthopedic NEMs had not waited for doctors’ orders. The smart little buggers had figured a way to act on their own. If I’d had Net access, the NEMs would have mended the fractures in an hour. But I couldn’t complain. The glass man had finally done his job. I stomped past the stiff-lipped Kaioko, entered the galley and found it empty. No Sheeba. I flopped down in a chair.

A chair. An actual piece of furniture designed to hold the human form. This was the first comfortable seat Heaven had offered me. The galley turned out to be yet another miniscule wedge-shaped closet. Besides the delightful molded plastic chair, it held a tiny stainless-steel table, a small work counter, two cabinets, an infinitesimal sink and a stack of microwave ovens. Like everything in Heaven, these items were heavily bolted and secured to the floor. On the wall hung an old-fashioned clock. It had the face of a large-eared cartoon bunny with whiskers for clock hands.

“So Where’s Sheeba?” I asked.

Kaioko rolled up her long sleeves, climbed onto a stepstool and began struggling over a huge can of Chili Diablo that was set out on the counter. She used a hand-operated opener with a crank turn that seemed to require all her strength. What a production she made of it, bending her small body over that ten-liter can.

I relinquished my cozy chair with a sigh. “All right, give it here.”

When I took the can, she jerked backward and rolled down her sleeves to cover her hands. Then she explained the complicated can opener. It had a coin-sized wheel that fit down over the can’s rim, and when applied with a clamp, it sliced into the steel lid and cut neatly all the way around by the force of the hand-turned crank.

I was just remarking on its clever design when, without warning, Provendia’s noisemakers drummed the hull, and Kaioko threw herself against me. Her frail arms clutched my waist like pliers, and she buried her head against my ribs. I’d never had such intimate contact with an employee before. Hesitantly, I patted her shoulder. The walls groaned and popped, and I held my breath, waiting for the next hull breach. But the barrage didn’t last long. When it ended, Kaioko jerked away as if my touch burned her. Then with a show of mutual nonchalance, we finished opening the can.

You may find it odd that I would calmly help Kaioko heat stew when Sheeba had gone missing again and at any moment the satellite’s creaky old hull might blow to pieces. If so, you have forgotten the violence of human hunger. Too many hours had passed since my last meal, and my NEMs had devoured my blood sugar. “Chili Diablo.” Those words set off my taste receptors like a call from the gods, and though the cartoon bunny face said four o’clock, my biorhythms roared, “Dinnertime!”

Four o’clock. I gazed at the bunny face while Kaioko put away her utensils, locked the drawers and bins and waited for the microwave to beep. Exactly how many hours had passed since I checked the time and date in my helmet display? That was just before the blowout “What day is this, Kaioko?”

“What day?” She stopped scrubbing the counter and screwed up her wide-set little eyes.

“Sunday, Monday, Tuesday? You know, what day?”

Slowly, her fingertips searched the folds of her head scarf. “Sun day?”

“Okay, what day of the month? Surely you have months. The moon’s, right outside.”

She continued to fondle her head scarf, squinching up her eyes. Then her fingers closed on something tucked in one of the folds. A small dried flower. “I’ve heard of the moon. When it come close, it pull our blood.”

What gibberish. “Forget the moon. I just want to know how long I’ve been here.”

She resumed her scrubbing with a look of satisfaction. “You want to know how many orbits.”

“That’s a start,” I said, “How many?”

“I don’t know. We lost our senses.”

She said this with such deadpan sincerity mat for a moment I simply gawped. Then she blinked her beady eyes and gave me mat resentful look.

Laboring to keep a straight face, I said, “Explain that again.”

She pursed her lips and scoured the cabinet doors. “The commies took our senses.”

Sensors, she meant I couldn’t help but chuckle as she flayed a layer of plastic off the countertop. Then I went and tapped the bunny face clock with my fingernail. “What about this?”

Impudent child, she refused to look my way—until I started moving the bunny’s second-hand whisker. That caught her interest and she watched in silence. Next, I touched the hour-hand whisker. “Since I came here, how many times has this short whisker gone around?”

Very hesitantly, she stepped closer, stood on tiptoes and pushed the minute-hand whisker. When it budged a centimeter clockwise, she said, “Ah.” Then she screwed up her little eyes and pushed the hour hand from four to five. Her long sleeve fell back, revealing her dainty white forearm crosshatched with fresh knife wounds. The sight stunned me, but Kaioko didn’t realize I’d seen it. She spoke with gentle eagerness. “I didn’t know his nose hairs would move.”

“You’ve never seen them move?”

“No one touched them before.”

In other words, the clock was dead. I dropped back into my chair and slumped over the table. The microwave was taking an eon, and the girl’s wounded arm lingered unpleasantly in my memory. “Kaioko, do you understand the concept of time?”

“What is time?” she said with forced politeness.

‘Time? Well, it’s the past, present and future. Every event happens in time.”

She polished the sink, and her sleeves trailed in the soap lather. “You asked how many orbits. Orbits happen in space.”

“No, no, time is different from space.”

I glanced around the galley, searching for some way to make myself understood. My head buzzed from hunger and lack of sleep. And Kaioko was just an illiterate child. Why was I wasting my—ha—time? Probably, my ego was involved. The microwave buzzed, and Kaioko lifted out two bowls of steaming protein stew, using her long sleeves as mitts. When she placed them on the table, I studied the anonymous brown chunks floating in red sauce.

“Okay, here’s a concrete example. This stew was cold when you set it in the oven. Then a period of waiting passed, and voila! Now it’s hot. That period of waiting was time.”

“Time is heat” Her black eyes gleamed.

“No, not heat.” I tugged at my hair, but by now, I was determined to prove how coherent I could be. Kaioko sat down and blew softly on a spoonful of stew, reminding me of my own ravening hunger. I gulped a scalding mouthful and wiped the juice from my chin. Spicy. What a sting!

“Think of a lifetime,” I said, chewing. “You’ve heard that word, lifetime?”

Her eyebrows rose, watching me eat. Perhaps I slurped.

“You’re born. You grow old. Then you die,” I said. “The length of your life is measured in years. That’s time.”

“What’s a year?” She sipped delicately from her spoon.

Easy question. I tilted my bowl to drink the red sauce, then said, “A year’s how long it takes the Earth to make one revolution around the sun.”

“So it’s space.” She stuck out her pointed chin and smiled, awfully pleased with herself.

What could I do but laugh and surrender? “Is there any more stew?”

We fixed a tray for the others, and as she was setting out bowls, she said, “May I go ask a question?”

I was beginning to realize her stiff courtesy arose from shyness. She wasn’t used to strangers. I sloshed hot stew into the row of bowls and said, “Fire away.”

She wiped up my spills and squeezed out her rag. “Liam told us about the people here before we came. He said they old. What is old? Is that like time?”

“You mean the adult workers. I can’t believe they’re all sick.”

“I didn’t know them. They gone before I remember.”

“Nonsense. Two months ago, this factory still had sixty productive workers.”

“Sixty?”

“Surely you know how to count,” I said.

“I’m learning. Vlad teaching me.”

Great gobs of gilders, this child couldn’t count? No wonder time confused her. Kaioko had to be in her late teens, and she seemed intelligent enough. Had she never entered a classroom? Well no, she hadn’t. Factory profits were too low to cover dependent education. She gazed at my gleaming false fingernails. Her nails were chewed to the quick.

Suddenly, the galley felt too small add crowded. I lifted the tray of bloodied stew and lurched into the corridor.

“Please,” she said, following, “tell me what old means.”

“It means learning not to ask foolish questions.”

At least the Coriolis effect no longer plagued me. With a certain gratification, I adjusted my lean and reeled down the corridor with almost all the dinner tray intact.

“You know about old,” Kaioko persisted. “They say Earth has many such types. How they different from us?”

I was pleased that she included me in the set of youth. One or two wisecracks popped into my mind, but the child’s eyebrows rose so earnestly that I held them back. After a few more steps, 1 set down the heavy tray to rest. Now that my stomach was full, my body cried out for sleep.

“In the pictures, their skin wrinkles.” She pointed at the crayon drawings along the baseboard. The scribbles were everywhere in Heaven, along the bottoms of all the walls. I’d almost stopped seeing them.

“My brother Nobi draw these.” She knelt and pointed to a couple of human figures, white-haired and stooped with age. “See, they puckered like melons falling off the vine.”

This vivid description made me grin, and Kaioko giggled, covering her mourn with both hands. Her laughter startled me. Could it be she was warming up to me a little? As she studied the crayon man, I noticed her dried flower coming loose from her scarf, so I tucked it back in.

“You’ve never seen an old person in this factory?” I asked.

“No one. But Liam and Vlad told us stories. And Nobi put them in his pictures.”

“Nobi, your brother?” Exhaustion fuzzed my faculties, but her words posed a riddle. If Heaven’s oldest workers died before Kaioko could remember, that was nearly eighteen years ago. Had the malady been active that long? If so, our site manager had covered it up with elaborate cunning. Well, that’s what we paid him for. But all those years, how had he kept the product flowing? He must have put more juveniles to work than we realized.