Starmind. Part 13

It seemed to work. "What is it, Daddy?"

"It's all right, baby-there's a flare on the way, but it's only Cla.s.s One. We're all going on a picnic together for a little while. Wanna come?"

Her eyes got big and round. "Sure, Dad. Can I bring the White Rabbit? Harvey, I mean? I changed his name."

"So I hear. I'm sorry, honey-radiation lockers are meant to keep electrons out, and that's pretty much what the White Rabbit's made of. We're going to have to rough it, like they did in the Olden Days. Do you have any books around?"

"Hard copy, you mean? None I haven't read a jillion times. You mean no games, oranything ?"

"Only if they're free-standing, hon. Nothing that uses the Net. Get your Anything Box." It was a nanotechnological toy-set, which could be caused to become a range of things, from a 3-D chess set to a Monopoly board to Scrabble game.

"I forgot to charge it," she wailed.

Duncan already had the locker hatch open, and was waving Rhea to enter; she held back. "Come on, Colly," he called. "You don't need machines to play games."

"Youdon't ?"She looked dubious. "Okay." She started for the hatch. "Hey-what about supper?"

"That kitchenette will make sandwiches in under two minutes," Rhea said, and began to turn toward the door. "We've got about seven left-"

"No, Rhea!" Duncan ordered. "That was a best-guess, and you don't screw around with a flare emergency, foranything. There's food and water in the locker-come on!"

"Go ahead," Rand said. "I've got Colly."

Rhea gave up and went to the hatch. Duncan caught her as she arrived, and handed her through the door. To guide a body from behind in free-fall without causing it to tumble, one pushes the b.u.t.tocks.

Rand had been in s.p.a.ce long enough to know that, so he couldn't even be annoyed. He put his attention on his daughter. "Push off on me, hon," he said, and spread-eagled himself facing the hatch. Colly doubled up, put her feet against his stomach, and jumped. He used his thrusters to recover and follow her. Her aim was superb; she went through the hatch like a perfect slam-dunk and into Rhea's arms.

Duncan seemed to have a.s.signed himself the role of doorman; he waited for Rand to precede him.

"After you, son," Rand said gruffly. And as Duncan turned, he pushed the lad in, the same way he had done for Rhea.

The next few hours were not particularly pleasant ones. Perhaps no one has ever spent a really comfortable three hours in a radiation locker. They were the only cubics in the s.h.i.+mizu which could reasonably be called "spartan," being simple boxes designed to keep a human alive for up to three and a half days despite the best efforts of energetic protons to kill him.

(X-rays, although they arrive first, and keep coming as the following plasma cloud of electrons and protons strikes hull metal, are not a problem: a mere millimeter of aluminum will stop most of them.) A radiation locker is very easy to get into, impossible to get out of until the emergency is past, and will supply breathable air, potable water, digestible food subst.i.tutes, basic emergency medical care, and plumbing facilities. Period. If one wishes to make it congenial, one can stock it with one's own free-standing computer gear, library of music and literature, programmable furniture, or a supply of gourmet delights, for there is a fair amount of room. But almost no one ever does . . . for the same reason that people still build at the base of volcanos. Bad solar flares are quite uncommon for about nine and a half out of every eleven years. When the tornados come once every decade or so, it is easy to forget to keep the storm shelter adequately stocked. So most visits there begin with a mournful inventory that is finished all too soon, followed by the dawning realization that this will be a sentence.

In this case, Rand decided early on not to dwell on the dark side of things, and resolved instead to concentrate on whatcould be accomplished while in here. So he checked his mental buffer, and found a task waiting: chewing his daughter out for using the telephone against express orders. But to his intense annoyance, Duncan interceded on her behalf ("b.u.t.ted in," was how Rand phrased it to himself), claiming that she deserved praise for having figured out how to circ.u.mvent an AI lock. When he rejected this as irrelevant, Colly took over her own defense, presenting in a shrill voice the novel theory: "Anyway, I'm not even getting a real birthday party; s.p.a.ce stinks and I want to go home."

Since Rand had been counting on Colly's enthusiasm for s.p.a.ce to help win over Rhea, he took recourse in a strangled silence. Rhea had privately asked him, several days ago, about interfacing his shaping equipment with the phone so that the friends at Colly's party could at least be convincing fakes. At the time he had been too busy, and said he would "think about it," but later he had thought it through in financial terms only, and rejected the idea on those grounds. He wanted mightily now to promise-to have promised-to do it . . . but he could not construct a logic-bridge that would get him from "You're spending too much money on the phone" to "I'm going to help you spend a king's ransom on the phone,"

and did not have Colly's daredevil indifference to logic to help him. He made a firm private resolution to tackle the project-and banged his nose on the fact that he could not even begin for . . . how long did Cla.s.s One flare emergencies generally last, anyway? He was forced to ask Duncan. And the answer-three hours to three days; we'll know when the door opens-did not please him. It began to dawn on him that he was going to have to fill an indeterminate time with small talk, with a wife whom he had hurt, a child he had disappointed, and a young man who was beginning to annoy the h.e.l.l out of him.

In the end, it was only eight hours, and even they were not the horrors they might have been. But only because Rhea rose heroically to the occasion, and almost singlehandedly carried the group on her shoulders, quelling negative emotions by sheer force of personality. She changed subjects, she suggested topics, she refereed potential disputes before they could occur, and she took upon herself any housekeeping task that might otherwise have brought Rand and Duncan into contact.

Eventually she bullied them all into the proper bomb shelter spirit. She told them endless stories, some pirated and some improvised. She cajoled Rand into singing the songs he sang best. Duncan reached back into the memory banks of a childhood in circ.u.mstances so primitive (by contemporary Terran standards) that he had frequently been deprived of amus.e.m.e.nt facilities, and pulled out game after game that could be played without tools or power. Before long Colly too was making her unique contribution: giggling. Not long after her usual bedtime, she fell asleep, but a child's snores and other sleepsounds are nearly as uplifting as her giggles. And it is difficult for a conversation to turn to an argument if there is a child sleeping in the room. Before long, Rand had regained his original impression of Duncan as a decentenough young man-just needed a little seasoning among Terrans to learn the fine points of good manners, that was all. After all, Rhea seemed to like him, and she had good people radar.

Good spirits might not have lasted, but luck was with them: just as group morale peaked, the locker door opened and a loud voice began rea.s.suring them that everything was fine. They managed to silence it before it could wake Colly, and emerged smiling together. Duncan had the grace to make his excuses and leave nearly at once. By the time Rand had finished seeing him out the door, Rhea had put Colly into her sleepsack and gone to their bedroom; he put the suite to sleep and joined her. He was quite tired; the only things he intended to do before sleeping were check to make sure their AIs were still sentient, and make sure that if there were any casualties, no one he knew was on the list.

But by the time he reached the bedroom, Rhea was more than halfway out of her clothes.

"Uh . . ." he managed to get out before the process was complete, and then she advanced on him like a cloud of electrons and protons. His own clothing was no protection at all. His next syllable was some five minutes later, and was even less spellable; he repeated it several times over the next few minutes, with increasing volume and decreasing period. The last iteration was a shout, which by then seemed to him to contain all the information the universe out there desperately needed to hear-until he heard Rhea shriek the message's other half in harmony with him.

Before he fell asleep, he regained enough intelligence to compose a plat.i.tude, something along the lines of "Out of adversity comes fort.i.tude." Maybe . . . just maybe . . . Rhea was going to snap into it.

Talking work with Jay wasn't as much fun as it had been; with four days left before the premiere of Kinergy (as they had decided to name the new work) Jay had too much else to do, Rand had too little else to do, and there was nothing to discuss together but things that might go wrong. And the incessant ego-struggles and other personal frictions among the dancers-but Rand hated that particular topic. He had himself pointedly chosen a field that allowed him to work alone when it suited him.

So he had no digression to propose when Jay said, "How's it going with Rhea, bro?"

He decided to tackle it. "You know, last week I'd have said it was f.u.c.king hopeless. But it's the funniest thing: somehow that flare emergency seems to have turned things around. At least a little, anyway. She came through it like a trouper, never complained once, never even frowned-and as soon as it was over, so was she:all overme. We haven't had a session like that since . . . Jesus, I don't know, but whenever it was, it was back on Earth. It felt . . . it felt like christening the s.h.i.+mizu, christening s.p.a.ce. Do you know what I mean?"

Jay nodded at once. "Ethan and I christened High Orbit that way, once."

Rand winced away from the thought. Obviously the event had not cemented Ethan's commitment to living in s.p.a.ce very effectively. "I mean, it's like when I first moved to P-Town. I'd never lived by the ocean, and I wasn't sure if I could take that much horizon. And the storms, you know, the winds. And then we went through our first hurricane together, and it was hard, but when it was over I felt like, 'Well, that wasn't so bad; I can live here.' Sitting in a radiation locker isn't fun . . . but it's a lot more fun than sitting in a singles bar. Maybe she's going to steady down and learn to live here."

"But it's still that much up in the air, is it? With four days to curtain? You have to give Kate an answer one way or another the following week." "I know, I know. But it's the kind of problem where you can't push for an answer, no matter how urgent it is."

"Well, all I'm saying is, if she bails out, don't necessarily a.s.sume that you have to follow her-for keeps, I mean. Just because Ethan and I couldn't make it work on a commuter basis doesn't mean it can't be done. Look at that Philip Rose andhis wife-and he's a writer, like Rhea. Quite a few s.p.a.cers have made marriage with a groundhog work."

"You really think it's an option? After what happened to you?"

"Well, maybe not a great one. But it might be worth giving it a year and seeing how it works." He seemed to start to say something, and then changed his mind. "I'm just being selfish, bro.Kinergy is a good piece. I like working with you; I don't want to give it up. Losing partners is a habit I'm trying to break."

Rand thought about it, and shook his head. "I hear you. But I just can't see Rhea and I staying married that way. Besides, it's not fair to Colly to yo-yo her that way, uproot her every three months."

"There are other rotation schedules."

"Doesn't change anything. If Rhea goes, my choices are her-and Colly-or my work. So you can imagine how relieved I am at any hint that she might be willing to stay."

Again Jay seemed to choose his words carefully. "Rand? Suppose she does go? Suppose the wild s.e.x after the flare was just the bomb-shelter reflex to celebrate not having been killed after all? Suppose your choiceis Rhea or the s.h.i.+mizu: what then?"

"That I can answer concisely and with absolute certainty. The answer is, it beats the s.h.i.+t out of me." He picked at a cuticle. "I really like this place. I really like this job. I really love working with you. But Ireally love Rhea and our kid. All I can tell you is, I'm praying it never comes up. And all hopeful omens are welcome."

15.

a.s.sorted Terran Locations 19 January 2065.

Hidalgo Rodriguez woke from a troubled sleep. His nightmares had been stranger and more unsettling than even a full gourd ofwheero could account for. But opening his eyes was less than no help. Heshrieked, and sprang to his feet even faster than he had on that distant childhood day in his father's goat shed when he had learned empirically that a human sneeze means "Run for your life!" in Goat.

The shriek woke Amparo and the children; within seconds they were harmonizing with him.

Their homey familiar hovel was gone. It had been replaced, by something indescribable, almost literally unseeable. It was everywhere, on all sides, had no apparent openings, and no features that any of them could identify. The light by which they saw it had no detectable source. Their first and best guess was that it was some kind of magical trap.

This diagnosis caused Hidalgo to utter a bellow of what he hoped sounded like rage, and throw himself bodily at the nearest part of the thing he could reach. He did not really expect to break through, but he had to try. He struck hard with a hunched shoulder, rebounded and gasped. He had not produced an opening or even a dent-but part of the omnipresent . . .stuff . . . had suddenly became transparent.

A window . . .

Outside it Hidalgo saw the familiar landscape of his home region, with some odd alterations he was too busy to study. He grabbed up a rag, wrapped his fist in it, and smashed at the window. It emphatically refused to break. His hand was more equivocal; he swore foully.

His son Julio followed Hidalgo's example, racing full tilt into the nearest wall to him. When nothing happened, he picked another spot and tried again. This time he was spectacularly successful: a door appeared in the stuff. He tested it; it worked just fine . . . and the entire Rodriguez clan joined him at high speed.

They stood outside the thing for a minute or so, all talking at the top of their lungs, none of them hearing a word-or noticing the sounds of similar loud "conversations" in the near distance.

The thing was still unidentifiable. It certainly did not look like a house, or even a building-not any that they had ever seen. It did not seem to have any straight lines or perpendiculars or right angles to it; there was no chimney.

Curiosity-and the growing realization that it wasmuch hotter out here than it had been inside-finally caused them to reenter it.

They tried poking it some more. Finally Luz let out a scream. She had found a spot which caused it to grow a basin. Shouting at her to get away from it, Hidalgo cautiously approached the thing. For some reason, it had an extra faucet. He tried the one nearest him; its mechanism was unfamiliar to him, but not hard to figure out. Water came out, and swirled away.

Hidalgo gaped. His family had never, as far back as history recorded-yes, even unto his grandfather's day!-had access to running water in the home. He was rich! And there weretwo of the things. He tried the other one-and when he had grasped what it produced, he fainted dead away.

Hot.w.a.ter . . .

When he awoke, his new house was talking to him, telling him cheerfully of traffic conditions in a city he had only heard of. It showed him pictures. . . .

Hidalgo was a little comforted when he learned, shortly, that all of his neighbors in the hillsideshanty-community were undergoing essentially identical experiences. So, elsewhere around the planet, were the family of Nkwame Van der Hoof, andtheir neighbors . . . the family of Algie Bent and their neighbors . . . the family of Trojan (his parents had named him after their hero) Khamela and their neighbors . . . the family of Lo Duc Tho and their neighbors . . . the list went on. Indeed, it was never completed.

A plague of houses seemed to be loose on the world. . . .

It took much longer for it to become apparent-and longer for it to be believed by anyone with an education-that people who lived in those toadstool houses could not get sick.

PART SIX.

16.

The s.h.i.+mizu Hotel 20 January 2065.

Jay was watching the first full tech run-through ofKinergy, and wistfully praying G.o.d to strike him dead, when the alarm went off.

"FLARE WARNING-CLa.s.s THREE-".

"Again?" someone groaned.

"-REPEAT, CLa.s.sTHREE! THIS IS A SAFETY EMERGENCY: ALL GUESTS MUST GO AS.

QUICKLYAND CALMLY AS POSSIBLE TO THE POOL AREA, AND REMAIN THERE UNTIL.

FURTHER NOTICE. THERE IS NO CAUSE FOR ALARM AS LONG AS-".

"Jesus, Cla.s.s Three!" Francine said. "All right, everybody: drop what you're doing andmove. Quietly!

Rand, Andrew, kill the holo and sound-"

It vanished, and the theater reappeared.

"-PLEASE REPORT ALOUD WHEN YOU HAVE LEF'T FOR THE POOL; THE s.h.i.+MIZU.

WILL HEAR YOU AND NOT WASTE TIME SEARCHING FOR YOU-".

"Nova Dance Company, all members, leaving the theater now," Jay barked. Andrew, the tech director who had replaced the murdered Nika, was a s.p.a.cer: he came popping out the hatch from backstage like a cork leaving a champagne bottle. Jay suddenly remembered that Colly was back there with Rand, and headed for the tech hole to see if his brother needed any help. On the way it dawned on him that his troubles were over, or at least postponed: the company-and everyone else in the s.h.i.+mizu-would all still be in the pool when the curtain was supposed to go up onKinergy.

Rescheduling after the emergency would take days. The Sword of Damocles had extended its expiry date.

Rand and Colly were emerging from the tech hole as he reached it. Colly seemed frightened, but not panicked; Rand was looking grim. "Honey," he said to her, "Uncle Jay is going to take you to the pool.

Mom and I will join you there in two seconds."

"Daddy, no-"

"Take her, Jay."

"Rhea will befine, bro," Jay began, but Rand cut him off.

"I tried to phone. Not accepting calls."

"At worst, somebody in a rad-suit will fetch her-"

"It's only a little out of the way-take Colly."He kicked off and fired his thrusters. Jay found himself rea.s.suring Colly, which helped calm himself; they jaunted for the pool together.

So did most of the population. The crowd of course thickened as it neared the center of the hotel. Some had a festive, holiday spirit; some were manic; some were silent and terrified; some were being dragged, protesting bitterly, by employees in bulky anti-radiation gear. Those whose protests became loud were sedated. Every corridor seemed to have a calm, competent employee whose sole job was to keep traffic flowing, and another who said rea.s.suring things to anyone who would listen. Colly was actually enjoying herself by the time they reached the pool area. A smiling employee gave her and Jay ear-b.u.t.tons to insert; at once a calm voice was murmuring instructions in their ears. "The pool is nearly empty now.

When you are told to enter, do so promptly. Look for your last initial in the large green letters on the pool wall, and jaunt to that area so we can sort you out. Look for an employee with red arm- and leg-bands.

If you have any emergency-first aid, medicine, need for a toilet, a missing loved one-report it to that employee-" and so on. The whole thing was well thought-out, well rehea.r.s.ed, and worked wonders in holding down the general confusion; the s.h.i.+mizu had been doing this, successfully, every eleven years for the last half-century. In under a minute, all of the pool's large doors opened at once, and they were told to enter. The ear-b.u.t.tons became strident on the subject of not stopping in doorways to gawk. Jay and Colly were swept along with the flow, and found themselves inside the pool, with hundreds of chattering guests.

Jay looked around, located a green "P" on the wall a few hundred meters away, and took Colly there, breathing a sigh of relief that both Rand's and Rhea's last names happened to end with the same letter.

"We'll wait here for your folks, pumpkin," he told the child. "This is gonna be lots more fun than a dumb old rad locker, huh?"

"Sure," she agreed, counting the house. "Wow! Kids I don't even know! There's one that looksmy age-over there, see? Uncle Jay, can I go say hi?"