Variable Star (12 page)

Even those three factors might not have been enough to get me aboard one of the very earliest colony ships—the
Gaia
, say—not at the last minute. For the first dozen voyages or so, crew and colonists alike were minutely scrutinized, rigorously tested, and meticulously matched according to carefully worked out social, psychological, and ergonomic principles (it says here), with hopeful alternates ready to fill a last-minute opening in any niche, long before the ship was ready to boost.

But by now, almost two dozen ships had left the Solar System—and the supply of applicants was beginning to thin out just a little.

Correction: the
cream
was beginning to thin out a little. There was still a copious supply of applicants…99.99 percent of whom were eliminated by gross tests. Half the remainder then changed their minds halfway through.

Part of the problem was, hardly anybody still left
wanted
to pioneer, wanted to leave everything and everybody behind forever, and go plant beans by the sweat of their back under the miscolored light of an alien sun. It wasn’t really a question of pioneer spirit being just about gone, as jeremiahs were always complaining on the wire. Even way back in history, so-called pioneer spirit was usually the result of intolerable conditions back home more than anything else.

That applied back at the very dawn of star travel. Volunteers to leave the Prophet’s Paradise were not hard to come by. But the Solar System was a fairly tolerable habitat for most people about now, particularly Terrans and O’Neillers. There was still plenty of frontier to go around, too, for those who hated crowds and regulations. The Asteroid Belt seemed unlikely to fill up anytime soon. To want to leave Sol altogether, forever, you almost had to be a born misfit, or a perpetual tourist, or as brave and curious as a bodhisattva. Most of the last category had signed up already and left in the first or second wave.

I’ve omitted two other historically significant categories of pioneer. Fortunately, things had not yet reached the point where colony planners willingly accepted members of the first category: perpetual fuckups. But this
would
be the third ship so far to carry transportees—prisoners, guaranteed by their various sentencing jurisdictions to be “nonviolent,” “suitably skilled,” “highly motivated” “volunteers.” But there would be just over two dozen of them, five percent of the colony’s total population, and the majority would be political prisoners rather than predators. Neither of the previous transportee experiments had sent back reports of any problems so far.

One other thing I’ve speculated about. I said that the Immega 714 colony’s underwriters were not allied with the Conrads. In fact, they were instead associated with the Kangs and the da Costas, both houses that were hereditary enemies of the Conrads. The RSS
Sheffield
’s designers, the prestigious firm of Ray, Guy and Douglas, belonged to neither house—but were all notorious defectors from the giant Conrad subsidiary Starship Enterprises MDA.

I knew nothing of the history between the three houses, and still don’t—but sometimes I wonder whether a deep enough background check on me mightn’t have turned up the information that the Conrad family had put the Black Spot on me…and why. Are relationships between financial empires really petty enough that some Chinese or Brazilian exec way beyond his Peter Principle point might have upchecked my application purely to spite Richard Conrad?

I don’t know. Do you?

I
expected
something like a vocational/educational boot camp on the ground—several rigorous weeks at least of cramming, training, testing, observation, evaluation, and ultimately final placement in my proper place on the great ship’s table of organization.

I didn’t even get orientation indoctrination. They called me at a little after 7:00
A.M.
Pacific Standard Time in White Rock—near the end of business hours in Brussels, where the decision had been made—to tell me I’d been selected to take passage on the
Sheffield
. By nine that night, Pacific time, I was aboard her.

W
here it
was 6:00
A.M.
local ship’s time, since the
Sheffield
was using the same Central European Time that Brussels did, for reasons left as an exercise for the reader who likes easy lifting.

I emerged from the airlock braced, I thought, for a barrage of new sensory data and impressions, expecting the unexpected insofar as that phrase has any meaning. Which is not much: I was definitely sideswiped by the smell.

It’s possible to cut your nose out of your breathing circuit completely, and I did at once. But that aroma was just pungent enough to taste with the tongue, and there’s no bypass for
that
, short of tracheotomy. I’d have stopped in my tracks…if I had not been so busy bracing my brain for new impressions that I’d neglected to have the more useful portion of my body maintain a hold on the airlock door. Having thus committed myself, I kept on sailing forward, with the stately inevitable grace of a runaway hospital bed on ice, until I crashed into a naked bald man.

I’m a colonial. We maintain some conservative (public) attitudes about sexuality, by contemporary System standards, but at the same time, being on the frontier we tend to be somewhat more practical and matter-of-fact than most Earthlings are about nudity. It was the bald part that startled me.

Thanks to the unnamed ladies who did us all the favor of tearing the Prophet into little bloody gobbets and bits of bone, it is finally once again permissible to do biological research, so happily all baldness is voluntary today, and is not a popular choice. And extremes of body weight are becoming so rare, one body looks much like another from a distance nowadays—so why would a man who spent time nude choose to shave off his only visual identifier? Was he antisocial? Or just self-effacing?

Neither. “I know exactly what you’re thinking,” he said, and managed to brake us to a halt without sending either of us drifting. His speaking voice was just audible, despite our proximity.

I became aware that I was holding him in something very like a lover’s four-limbed embrace, and forced myself not to flinch. I was the stranger here, he was my host. But I hoped our sexual orientations matched. “So?”

He let go of me, again without setting me adrift. His expression was no clue at all. “You’re thinking, if it smells like this after only a few months of occupancy, what is it going to smell like in twenty years?”

I had to admit I had been on the way to formulating that very thought when I’d crashed. “Right in one.”

“And the answer is, in
far
less than twenty years you will be prepared to swear, truthfully, that this ship has no smell at all, other than local cooking and your wife’s perfume.” Once again, his voice was just barely as loud as it needed to be.

I wasn’t convinced. But I didn’t need to be. “What is it I’m smelling, exactly?”

“Us,” he said simply.

I tentatively half opened a nostril, and frowned. “I know what people smell like, what a ship smells like, and there’s more than that here.”

“You know what Ganymedeans smell like, and Terrans in a limited portion of a third of its northern hemisphere. This isn’t just
everybody
, it’s everybody all
together
. And more
of
’em than you’ve ever been shut in with before. Terrans from all over that varied planet, Loonies, O’Neillers, Martians, Ganymedeans, Belters—all at the same time, in combination. Fewer than two dozen times in history have all those smells been mingled, in large amounts—and the other ones have left the Solar System already.”

“Oh.”

“No one group’s smell is intrinsically better or worse than any others’, and you might very well find the personal body odor of an individual from just about any racial, political, or social group aboard perfectly agreeable to you. But put them
all
together, in one place, and ancient instinct makes you uneasy. Think of it as one of the last remaining traces of our physical predisposition to xenophobia and racism. Like the appendix.”

I had never seen anybody real talk for so long without even momentarily developing a facial expression. “I hope you’re right,” I said politely.

“Also, the two decks immediately above this one are both agricultural decks. We’re sort of in the bilge of Noah’s Ark here.”

“I apologize for crashing into you.”

He shook his head—slowly, the way one does in free fall. “All you did was fail to realize you would need someone to catch you, and that was so close to inevitable that I was waiting there specifically to catch you. Shuttles are always overpressured:
everyone
comes sailing in the door. Apology respectfully returned unopened.”

I shook my own head even slower, to underline the point I was about to make. “You don’t understand. I was
born
in free fall. I could at least have docked more gracefully.”

He nodded, even more slowly. Was that a twinkle in his eye? Or a tic? “Ah,” he said. “In that case, you
are
a dimwit. And an oaf. But you can’t help being either one; so apology is still unnecessary. Come with me, please.”

And as I gaped, he turned over, grabbed a rung on the wall with one hand, and jaunted off down the corridor, at a pace suitable for dimwits and oafs.

In my embarrassment, I nearly mortified myself completely by bleating out “Wait!” like some fool groundhog. To say “wait” to someone who has just jaunted away from you in zero gee is basically as sensible as saying it to someone who just stepped off a roof: barring unreasonable effort, they’re
gone
. Barely in time, I managed to end the “W—” with “—hat about my luggage?”

“You’ll never see it again,” he called back without turning around, just loud enough to be understood, and continued to drift away.

I realized to my dismay he had left me stationary. That’s not supposed to be possible in free fall, and I suppose technically I must have had
some
sort of vector, but I could see it wasn’t going to close the half-meter gap between me and the corridor wall anytime soon. I had no thrusters, or even wings.

It turns out you
can
swim in air, if it’s thick enough. But not well at
all
, and definitely not without looking like a dimwit and an oaf. By the time I got one hand on a rung, he had receded so far there was great temptation to complete my disgraceful display by flinging myself after him too hard, the classic newbie mistake. Instead I carefully set a measured pace, just faster than his own, and settled back to—

He stuck out his arm as if signaling a turn, grabbed a rung—
zip
—made an abrupt turn in the direction I was falling right at the moment, and disappeared.

When there’s nothing else you can do, breathe slower. There’s no way it can hurt, and it might help. Long before I reached that rung which I had failed to spot as larger than the rest and therefore a corner rung, I had calmed down enough to find at least a few small items to place in the This-Might-Not-Be-So-Bad column.

If it was possible to swim in air
at all
, then the air pressure in this dump was considerably better than that in the low-budget liners and the one military vessel I’d previously traveled aboard. Which explained why smells were more pungent than I’d expected…but also promised that the food was going to
taste
as good as it did on Terra. Presuming, that is, that it started out that tasty.

If you’ve never experienced anything other than Terran normal pressure, I may need to explain that. Most Terrans don’t seem to realize more than half of what they think of as their sense of taste is actually their sense of smell. This confusion becomes clear the first time you eat something you like in lower pressure. Federation military standard pressure is just barely good enough to appreciate superb coffee. Aboard an economy liner everything pretty much tastes like varying consistencies of warm cardboard or tinted water, and you can chew Red Savina habañeros. (Half a million Scoville units.) Economy passage on a luxury liner, I’m told, gets you
warm
spiced cardboard and
flavored
water. I had tolerated both ends of that spectrum, without too much difficulty.

—for the length of an Outer to Inner System hop, most conveniently measured in weeks! Twenty years was going to be a decidedly different matter. It was nice to know I would not spend my first weeks on Brasil Novo weeping with joy at the rediscovery of garlic—of any spice subtler than Scotch bonnet peppers. (A mere third of a million Scovilles, tops.)

Very nice, really. I conceded to myself as I jaunted along that I was in rocky emotional shape, and in need of consolation. And my father had once told me nothing consoles humans like gratifying our appetites. And a good half of my own total appetites were of no further use to me—I was done with women, for good and for all time. Food, music, and good books had damn well better be enough to fill in the hours, because there were going to be roughly 175,000 of them to fill.

There, that was another good one for the Not-So-Bad side of the ledger: thicker air means better sound. And more wind! The music here would be good. Well, as good as the musicians, anyway.

The corner rung was approaching—on my left, now, since I had rolled over while in trajectory. I put some care and effort into my pivot turn, did a
lovely
job, and immediately crashed into the naked man again, this time from behind, and upside down. If you can’t work out where that placed my nose, good. And never mind.

Of
course
he had stopped and waited for me to catch up. Far enough away for me to stop in time, too—if I had happened to round that corner at a more prudent speed, while paying attention to where I was going.

“Excuse me,” I said. It came out somewhat muffled, and nasal, with a small echo.

“I do,” he said, and jaunted away again, leaving me drifting ever so slightly after him in his wake this time.

Fortunately I was near a wall this time. I blinked, wrinkled my nose, and jaunted after him. Again I matched speeds, and this time we were still within conversation distance, sort of. “I’m Joel Johnston,” I called.