Voice of the Whirlwind (22 page)

“That might be the next room.”

They finished dressing and Reese pressed the button that signaled the inner door to open. It slid neatly to one side, and an alien breeze entered the airlock door.

The air of the Power Legation was rich and thick, cooler than in the human section of Vesta but filled with organics, an airborne soup that made Steward’s nape hairs tingle. There was a yeasty taste on his tongue. He had read of the Powers’ using hormones for communication but hadn’t realized that the air would be so filled with them, that it would make his movements seem like swimming through a fog.

Steward followed Reese into the next room. His heart lurched as he saw a man in the uniform of a Brighter Suns internal security cop standing on one of the walls, his feet planted onto Velcro strips, and Steward tensed, ready for combat, keenly and suddenly aware of the pressure of the knife along his side. The cop had a scanner in his hand. His skin was bright orange and Steward concluded the man had been overdoing carotene supplements.

“Reese?” the cop said. “I’d like to look at that ankle, please.”

Steward warily moved into a corner, putting his back against one wall and his feet on the Velcro strips of another. Reese drifted up to the cop and hung onto the wall near his feet. He reached out, scanned her ankle for a few moments, looking for explosives or wetware or a reservoir of hostile biologies, then the cop smiled and lowered his scanner.

“You scan clear,” he said. “Your ride’s waiting on the other side of the door.”

Steward kicked out hard for the door, hoping to catch the cop by surprise, then hit the button and tumbled out as soon as the door started to slide open. A sound arose like the whining of an untuned organ. The hairs on the back of his neck rose. The next room was big, and it was full of Powers.

Something squirmed in Steward’s insides. There was an acid tang to the air here that had been muted in the airlock antechamber. The Powers ignored him, their centauroid bodies rocketing at high speed across the long chamber, propelled by thrusts from their powerful rear legs. Their forelegs and ropy arms were cocked forward to absorb the shock of impact, and their eyes were moving constantly in their flexible heads. The organ-pipe sounds came from their upper nostrils and echoed from the hard stone and alloy walls. Steward hadn’t realized they’d be so big. Though they were shorter than he, their body mass exceeded his by at least a factor of two. Their size seemed threatening.

And they were
fast.
Their heads twitched, and their bodies, arms, and legs moved with inhuman fluidity as, nearing each other, they performed their rituals of obeisance and power.

Reese drifted gently up from the door. Her head moved as if on a stalk, scanning the echoing, shrilling room. “Jesus,” she said.

“I thought you’d be used to them. Having been on Archangel.”

She looked pale. “I don’t like the Powers. Even if they did save our asses in the war.”

The organ keening wailed in Steward’s ears. He shuddered and thought of Griffith. “Some people love them.”

“Not me.”

The cop emerged from the door, his face set in a knowing smile. Steward imagined he saw this reaction often, on people first exposed to the Legation. The cop waved a sketchy salute, then jumped out across the room, swimming for an exit marked with a bright orange holographic numeral. There was the sound of an air horn, blatted twice. Reese looked down, then tugged Steward’s sleeve. “Our transport,” she said. He took his eyes away from the Powers and saw another shuttle waiting, a smaller four-seater, driven by an impatient man in Starbright coveralls.

“Sorry to rush you,” he said, as they began buckling themselves in, “but we’ve got a situation here.” The accent seemed faintly South American, but he could have been born anywhere in human space. “The Powers’ automatic unloaders have broken down completely, and a lot of our people came down with dysentery from some bad food in the cafeteria.”

“I don’t mind,” Reese said. “I wasn’t doing anything.” Steward gave her a look.

The driver turned around. His skin was blue-black, with diamonds set into his brows and cheekbones and a black plastic radio receiver implanted where his left ear had once been. “I’m Colorado, by the way,” he said.

Steward looked into Colorado’s eyes and wondered if he was the assassin. The man seemed too soft, but you never know. “Pleased to meet you,” Steward said.

Colorado blatted the horn and fired his hydrogen maneuvering jets. He took them across the room, toward an exit marked by a flashing green holographic target symbol.

The next room was huge, a kilometers-long docking bay so vast that the far edge of it was obscured in a haze of the organic smog generated by the Powers. Aliens and robots were moving giant blocks of cargo about in the near-zero gravity. The shuttle entered a nonautomated traffic lane and whistled half the length of the dock before braking. Its electromagnets engaged a ferrous strip laid near a twenty-meter-square docking gate.

The smell was different here. More acrid.

Steward began to unbuckle. “The cargo’s all consigned to Starbright,” Colorado said. “The auto cargo movers in the Power ship are slagged out—I heard they’re going to crucify their maintenance officer, or chief engineer, or whatever it’s called. We’ve got to go into the holds, grapple the containers manually, and wrestle them out of the tube and onto the dock, then snug ’em down to pallets. The station equipment handlers can take it from there.” He looked at Steward and grinned. “Good idea, bringing your own hard hat. The rest of us have to draw them from stores.”

*

Steward worked one and a half shifts, sweating in his helmet and jacket, and no one tried to kill him. There was an ozone feel to the air, and he could almost feel the hair on his arms crackle when he moved. There were four Powers on the work gang in addition to nine humans, and the aliens worked like demons, moving in utter silence save for the keening organ calls that rose up in a strange minor-key chorus when one of their superiors arrived to check their progress.

The cargo, whatever it was, was in standardized alloy containers that allowed the contents to be flooded with disinfectant or radiation when they moved out of Legation territory. Ferrous strips along the side of the containers allowed them to be held by electromagnets to the surface of the cargo hold. Steward had to grapple peroxide maneuvering jets to the containers, turn off the magnets, then fly the cargo out of the hold and onto a pallet attached to the wall of the dock. It was tricky work; some of the containers held up to six tonnes. Gravity could be discounted but momentum could not, and a container that massive could do damage if it hit the interior of the Power ship’s bay. Steward moved his containers very carefully.

At the end of the second shift there was a lot left to do. They had emptied one bay and started on a second. There was a third untouched cargo space yet to go.

After work, Colorado took Steward and Reese to a human habitat in the big Legation centrifuge. They were to share a small two-room guest apartment, and were given meal tickets for the cafeteria. Here the rich smell of the Powers faded into the background.

“I’d stay and show you around, and maybe have a drink,” Colorado said, “but I’m dead tired. I’ve been working two and a half shifts. Sorry to be so unsociable.”

“You won’t join us in the cafeteria, at least?” Steward asked.

He shook his head. “I called my apartment from the dock and told it to cook me dinner. I’m going to eat and hit the rack.”

“See you tomorrow.”

The cafeteria was okay, Steward thought. It was completely automated, and he chose his food at random, planning to avoid poison. He sat with his back to a wall and ate warily.

Reese watched him, quietly amused. Her attitude irritated him. “Going to take your helmet off when you go to sleep?” she asked him.

“Maybe.”

“If they wanted to,” she said, “they could have gone on board the
Born
and killed you just as easily. You know that.”

He thought about it for a moment, then nodded. Reese was right.

It didn’t stop him from taking a chair and blocking the door when he went to sleep. He put the knife under his pillow.

*

The next day Steward was scheduled to work two shifts, with an hour-long meal break in between. During the break, Colorado and his friend Navasky joined them in the cafeteria. Navasky was a tall girl of about sixteen, blond and pale, with the perfect features and delicate appearance of the genetically altered. She had painted her face yellow, with a red chevron over the bridge of her nose.

The early Imagists had struck boldly into the realm of genetic engineering, hoping for vast leaps out of the human fleshly prison and into a grand, unseeable future, a period in which Imagist achievement curved upward into infinity, a “posthuman singularity” composed of “posthuman tropes.” They’d created marvels of increased intelligence and heightened cognition, and they’d bred as well for adaptability to nonterran environments, for second-stage humans who would live forever outside of gravity, true inhabitants of space. They’d moved too fast and underestimated the fragility of the human DNA they were dealing with. Their superintelligent, superintuitive creations proved susceptible to schizophrenia, epilepsy, bursts of paranoia. Immune systems proved vulnerable to even the most common bacteria. The Imagists hadn’t realized the limitations of the human genetic structure, that adding to one characteristic might detract from others. The second-stage humans lived well in their gravity-free environments and were useful in nongravity manufacturing, but their sturdier ancestors proved more durable during the high-g acceleration burns that powered human commerce, that moved the goods from the Belt to Earth to Saturn and beyond.

The NeoImagists were more modest. Navasky’s delicacy showed that her mind had probably been altered in some minor way, but still she was sturdy enough to join Colorado and Steward in their task of unloading the Power ship. She had joined Starbright on scholarship, which meant she was in the top two percent of humanity and was starting at the bottom of the shipping business, but she planned on working her way up to starship captain.

Before she ate she startled Steward by bowing over her plate and offering a prayer. Steward didn’t know to whom.

“They boosted the wiring on my linguistic centers,” she said during the meal, discussing her genes as other people talked about their shoes, “and I’ve had special training in socialization theory. My genetics were intended to make me useful as a diplomat, but that’s what starship captains often have to be. They’re always months out of communication, and if they’re on discovery missions, they often have to negotiate with other policorporate ships. Or even aliens, if there are any more like the Powers around.”

“Can you understand Power speech?” Steward asked.

Navasky frowned, sipping at a bulb of tea while she considered her answer. “A lot of it,” she said. “But not in all its senses or contexts. Simple things only. Power idiom is full of references and patterns that humans haven’t been able to decipher yet, not even with Power cooperation.” Her frown turned to a confident smile. “But I’m just starting—I’d be in class right now if we didn’t have to unload all that cargo.” She rotated her shoulder and grimaced. “I’m not used to hauling stuff.”

“Wrong genes.” Colorado grinned. Navasky laughed and put her arm around him.

Steward smiled. They were relaxed now, and maybe his questions wouldn’t seem strange. “I remember,” he said, “a few months ago, I read about some kind of biological alert on Vesta. A contamination.”

Colorado made a face. Navasky put down her bulb of tea. Her eyes were disturbed. Since the Orbital Soviet fell in a blizzard of biologic strikes, space habitants in general tended to be paranoid about contamination, and Navasky’s NeoImagist history, Steward thought, probably made her even more wary of bacteriological outbreaks. “I was on the other side at the time,” she said, “hadn’t got my clearance to come into the Legation.” She looked at Colorado. “Colorado was here, though.”

He looked at his plate. “Bad time,” he said. “I wasn’t around the worst of it.”

“Any people get hurt?” Steward said.

Colorado shook his head. “Not many. The outbreak was mostly confined to the Power quarters. There are contamination drills here all the time—once the alarms went off, everyone knew to stay in their quarters or jump for the nearest hardened radiation shelter. The Power crews in the ships just sealed themselves inside once the alert was announced, but the rest, the ones living on Vesta, got hurt bad. They say the Power police were just shooting any Powers that were infected. There were a lot of dead ones anyway, someone told me. The whole Legation smelled like”—he shrugged—“like dead Powers, I guess. Bad. There must have been a lot of them.”

“We’re not supposed to talk about this,” Navasky said. She gave a nervous glance over her shoulder.

“A few people got hurt. Trampled to death by stampeding Powers, I suppose. They say the Powers just went mad once they found out they were infected. They did a lot of damage to their own quarters. When we got back to work, the docks were a mess, too.”

“It didn’t last long, though,” said Navasky.

“Just a few days. Apparently any Power infected got sick within hours, so the plague burned itself out. Now they don’t let any human into the Power quarters, just in case he might be carrying something.”

Steward regretted he couldn’t record this. His brain was whirling, trying to remember it all. He wished he wasn’t so tired.

“And then there’s the new Samuel,” said Navasky. There was the sense of an electric snap in Steward’s mind, like a switch closing—somehow he knew this was important. Colorado looked at Navasky in surprise. She turned her dark eyes to Steward and explained.

“Samuel’s the Power Head of Legation,” she said. “See, Powers don’t have names in their own language—all they have are titles, like Second-Cousin-in-Charge-of-Waste-Disposal.” She laughed, and Steward laughed with her, trying to encourage her. “All the prominent Powers,” she went on, “have been given human names, because they’ve got human public-relations people working for them who are trying to give them a kind of human media personality, so that people will feel easier dealing with them. Now that I’ve been around the Powers for a while, studying them, I can tell one from another. I’ve seen tapes of the Samuel before the plague, and I’ve seen the current Samuel up close, and it’s not the same person—I mean Power.”