Jupiter (14 page)

'Welcome to my humble abode,' Karlstad said grandly as they entered and looked around.

Most of the floor was covered with a colorful carpet. Where did he get that? Grant wondered.

'You said something about celebratory ingestants?' Ukara asked.

'Indeed I did,' Karlstad replied, heading for the closet.

Grant felt a pang of worry. He must have alcoholic spirits, he thought. Then, realizing that Karlstad was a biophysicist and his room thick with green plants, Grant wondered, Is he growing something illegal in here? Stimulants? Narcotics?

Instead, Karlstad pulled several plump cushions from the closet and tossed them onto the floor. As the others settled themselves on the cushions, Karlstad led Grant to the one upholstered chair in the room.

'You get the seat of honor tonight,' he said grandly.

Grant saw that Muzorawa had hunkered down next to him, leaning his back against the wall. Karlstad went to the small refrigerator in his kitchenette area.

'Wine,' he announced, pulling out a dark-colored flask and holding it over his head. 'The finest rocket juice, fresh from the rock rats in the Belt. Guaranteed never to have seen an earthly grape.'

'One hundred percent totally artificial, is that it?' huffed Ukara.

'The finest product of the prospectors out among the asteroids,' Karlstad said.

Grant took in a breath. He had drunk wine before. It was all right.

But Muzorawa bent close to him and said in a near-whisper, 'If you're not accustomed to alcoholic drinks, be careful of that stuff. It's quite potent.'

'I don't have enough glasses,' Karlstad told them. 'You'll just have to pass the flask around.'

'How unsanitary,' Hideshi said, grinning. She grabbed the flask out of Karlstad's hand and took a swallow. She gagged, coughed, then croaked out, 'Smooooth,' and handed the flask to Ukara.

'Hey, wait,' Karlstad snapped. 'The guest of honor should go first.' He recaptured the flask and handed it to Grant.

Cautiously, Grant barely let the liquor touch his lips. It burned the tip of his tongue and went on burning all the way as he let the minuscule sip trickle down his throat. Feeling his eyes tear, he handed the flask to Muzorawa.

Who solemnly passed it on to Kayla Ukara without touching it. Moslem, Grant realized. Alcohol is forbidden to them.

Standing in the middle of the room as the five others passed the flask around, Karlstad said, 'I also have some chemical concoctions for those who don't care for asteroidal wine.'

Muzorawa said pleasantly, 'Some hash would be welcome.'

Grant felt totally shocked.

Heading for his fridge again, Karlstad said, 'Devlin says he's run out of stock-'

'The Red Devil, out of stock?' O'Hara looked totally shocked at the idea.

'He's probably just trying to run up the price,' Ukara grumbled.

'Whatever,' Karlstad said as he handed Muzorawa a pair of pinkish gelatine capsules. 'Doesn't matter. I've got a couple of bright kids in the biochem lab who swear this stuff is an almost exact analogue of one of the tetrahydrocannibols.'

Seeing Grant's horrified expression, Muzorawa smiled. 'It's perfectly all right, my friend. This concoction is quite similar to one used medicinally to alleviate stress… even by members of the New Morality.'

'It is?'

Holding the capsules in the palm of his hand, Muzorawa said, 'It's a tranquilizer. Nothing more. I believe in the States it's marketed under a trade name: De-Tense, I think.'

'Oh.'

'Although this is a rather higher concentration of its active ingredients, I should think.' With that, Muzorawa popped the capsules into his mouth and swallowed them dry.

Grant wished he had some fruit juice, but he felt too intimidated to ask Karlstad for some. Instead, he pretended to sip at the asteroidal wine when the flask passed his way again and sat watching as the real drinkers got louder and happier.

After several rounds the flask was empty. Karlstad pointed to the refrigerator. 'Help yourselves to whatever you can find,' he said, slightly slurring the words. '
Mi
fridge
es tu
fridge.' He knit his brows in puzzlement for a moment. 'Or is it
esta
?'

That started a boisterous discussion about the Spanish language, which quickly evolved into an argument about the charms of Barcelona versus the attractions of Paris. Then someone brought up Rome.

'Cairo,' Muzorawa murmured dreamily. 'None of you have been to Cairo, have you?'

'That pest-hole?' Hideshi said. 'It's overcrowded and filthy.'

Resting his head against the wall, Muzorawa smilingly replied, 'That overcrowded and filthy pest-hole has the grandest monuments in the world sitting just across the river.'

'The Pyramids,' said O'Hara.

'And the Sphinx. And further upriver, the Valley of the Kings.'

'And Hatshepsut's tomb. One of the most beautiful buildings of all antiquity.'

'You've seen it?' Muzorawa asked.

O'Hara shook her head. 'Only in virtual reality tours. But it's truly grand and impressive.'

Without Grant's seeing her do it, O'Hara had unpinned her hair. Now it flowed like a long chestnut cascade over one shoulder and down almost to her hip.

But she was deep in conversation with Muzorawa now. The others were all talking among themselves, as well, Karlstad and the two other women were off by his bed, in an intense three-way discussion of something or other. Grant was completely out of it. Some guest of honor, he thought. His mouth felt dry, so he got up from the chair and went to the refrigerator.

Its shelves were bare, except for a small plastic case that held three more capsules and what looked like the last few slices of a loaf of bread, green with mold.

Grant suddenly felt tired. And bored. He thought parties should be more fun than this. I'll go back to my quarters and send a message to Marjorie, he thought.

He crossed the room and reached the door without anyone paying any attention to him.

Clearing his throat loudly, he said to them, 'Uh, thanks for the party. It was great.'

'You're leaving?' Karlstad looked shocked.

Grant forced a smile. 'I've got to start work with the fluid dynamics group tomorrow morning, bright and early. Director's orders.'

Muzorawa gave him a wobbly wave. 'Good man. See you at eight sharp.'

Grant nodded, opened the door, and stepped out into the corridor. No one said another word to him. Karlstad barely looked up. As he shut the door, Grant recognized that he wasn't the central focus of the party, he was merely the excuse for having it.

Grant was surprised to see so many people still roaming along the corridor. His wristwatch read 21:14, early, he saw. For several moments he simply stood there as people passed by, staring at the quickly flicking numerals counting out the seconds. How many seconds until I can get back to Earth, back to Marjorie - if she still wants me? He didn't dare try to calculate the number.

It was only a few meters to his own door. Better get to sleep, he told himself, and start tomorrow fresh and alert. But just as he started to tap out his security code, he felt a hand on his shoulder.

It was O'Hara. Tall and lithe, with her hair still tumbling down past one shoulder. She smiled at him.

'You never had dessert,' she said.

Grant had to think a moment. 'That's right,' he said. 'I never did.'

'Come on.' She tugged gently at his arm. 'I've got a cache of ice cream in my place. And some real Belgian chocolate.'

Grant allowed her to lead him to her quarters, only a few paces further along the corridor.

'Has the party broken up already?' he asked.

'No, but it was going downhill, don't you think? Egon and the colleens were getting pretty frisky with each other. I don't like group scenes.'

'What about Zeb?'

'He's retreated into his own private little mirage. Lord knows what he dreams about, but it's no fun watching him staring off into space.'

They had reached her door. She pecked out the security code and they stepped in.

O'Hara's room was the same size and shape as the other quarters, but it was completely different from anything Grant had seen in the station. The wall screens displayed underwater scenes from Earth's oceans: myriads of colorful fish, octopi pulsing and waving their suction-cupped tentacles, sharks gliding past menacingly. The floor began to glow, too. Before Grant's eyes a coral reef, swarming with more fish, took shape and fell steeply off into an endless, bottomless abyss. Grant flattened himself against the closed door, suddenly giddy with vertigo.

O'Hara noticed his near-panic. 'Now don't be alarmed. The floor's quite solid.' She tapped on it with one moccasined foot. 'See? I forget that people are thrown off by the effect. I don't have visitors in here very often.'

Taking a breath, Grant stepped out onto the floor. It felt firm enough, but it seemed he could stare down into the teeming crystal-clear sea for thousands of meters.

'Look up, why don't you,' O'Hara suggested.

The stars! Instead of a ceiling, Grant saw the infinite bowl of black night, spangled with thousands of stars. The underwater scenes on the walls vanished, replaced by more stars. It was like being far out at sea on a clear moonless night.

'That's what we'd see if we were outside the station,' she explained. 'Minus Jupiter, of course. I could put Jupiter into the display but it would overpower the grand view of it all, don't you think?'

He nodded dumbly, staring at the stars. They looked back at him, solemn, unblinking.

'That one's Earth,' O'Hara said, standing close enough to touch shoulders and pointing to one bright bluish dot of light among the hosts of stars.

Earth, Grant thought. It looked awfully far away.

'It's a regular planetarium,' he heard himself say in a hushed voice.

'My father ran the planetarium in Dublin,' O'Hara said. 'He sent me the program.'

'But… where's the projector? How do you get all those stars on the ceiling… and make it look, well, almost three-dimensional.'

'Microlasers,' she said, moving away from him. 'I sprayed the ceiling and floor with 'em.'

'There must be thousands of them,' Grant conjectured.

'Oh yes,' O'Hara replied, halfway across the room. 'And more on the floor, of course.'

'How did you do it? Where did you get them?'

'Built them in the optics shop.' She popped open the door of the small refrigerator; its light spilling into the room broke the illusion of being out in the middle of the sea.

'I promised you ice cream and chocolate and that's what you're going to have,' O'Hara said, as if there had been some question about it.

But Grant's mind was on more practical matters. Walking through the starlit darkness, across the softly glowing floor, he asked, 'You built thousands of microlasers? All by yourself?'

'They're only wee crystals, a hundredth of a cubic centimeter or so.' She was rummaging in a drawer by the light of the still-open fridge.

'And you built thousands of them?'

'I had some help.'

'Oh.'

She handed Grant a small plate with a scoop of vanilla ice cream in it, topped by a small dark piece of chocolate.

'I used nanomachines,' she said.

'Nanomachines?'

'Of course. How else?'

'But that's against the law!'

'On Earth.'

'The law applies here, too. Everywhere.'

'It doesn't apply at Selene or the other Moon cities,' O'Hara pointed out.

'But it should. Nanomachines can be dangerous.'

'Perhaps,' she said, slamming the refrigerator door shut -with a nudge from her hip.

'I mean it,' Grant said. 'On a small station like this, if the machines get loose they could kill everybody.'

Holding her own plate of ice cream in one hand, O'Hara took Grant by the sleeve and guided him to a low couch beneath the stars. He sat awkwardly and sank into the couch's yielding softness.

Sitting beside him, she said, 'Eat your ice cream before it melts.'

He was determined not to be deterred. 'Lane, seriously, nanomachines are like playing with fire. And what if Dr Wo found out?'

She laughed. 'Wo started using nanotechnology here more than a year ago.'

Grant felt stunned.

'It's all right, Grant,' said O'Hara. 'We're not terrorists. We're not going to develop nanobugs that eat proteins. We're not going to cause a plague.'

'But how can you be sure?'

'They're
machines
, by all the saints! They don't mutate. They have no will of their own. They're nothing but tiny wee machines that do what they're designed to do.'

Grant shook his head. 'They're outlawed for good reason.'

'Certainly,' she agreed. 'On Earth, with all its billions of people, nanotechnology could easily fall into the hands of terrorist fanatics, or lunatics, or just plain thrill-seekers. But it's different here, just as it's different in the lunar cities.'

'They claim they need nanotechnology to survive on the Moon,' Grant muttered.

'Of course they do. And we need it here, too.'

Looking up at the stars, Grant sneered, 'For interior decoration?'

In the darkness, he heard her take in a sharp breath. Then she answered, 'For that. And other things.'

'Such as?'

She hesitated again. 'Maybe you'd better ask the director about that.'

'Sure,' Grant said. 'Wo is going to unburden his soul to me. All I have to do is ask.'

She laughed gently. 'You're right. Wo's just allowed you to step up a notch. This wouldn't be the time to ask him sensitive questions.'

'There's that word again.'

'Which word?'

'Sensitive. Every time I ask just about anything, somebody tells me it's sensitive information.'

'Ah, yes.'

'What's going on, Lane? What on earth is so blasted sensitive about studying Jupiter?'

For long moments she was silent. Then, in the starlit shadows she reached up and removed the long cascade of hair that had draped down her back. Grant saw that her scalp was completely bald.

Even in the dimmed lighting she saw his shocked expression. 'It's the depilation treatments, don't you know. We've got to be completely hairless, all over.'