Creation (6 page)

S
am’s voice
came out as croaking, grabbled sounds in no way resembling words. The man put a hand on his shoulder. “Take it easy. Lev said you’d be pretty groggy. Give it a minute or two for your senses to adjust.”

Sam nodded, unsure of what else he could do. The cold grass under his hands gave him something tangible to focus on. Arching his head up, he slowly focused his blurry eyes on the vines and plants that towered overhead. Above it all, light reflected off the transparent walls. It had to be the agro pod. The smells of plants, the quiet sounds of nature, even the low light conditions of the capsule of Earth so far from the sun quieted his initial fears.

“My name is Dr. Andrew Lane, but everyone calls me Doc. Do you remember your name? Samuel Adamson?” The man looked only slightly worried about what the answer might be.

Again Sam nodded. He knew who he was and knew he’d never met this guy before, but who the hell was Lev?

“Good. Lev wasn’t sure how much you’d remember. Don’t worry too much if it’s not all in that raddled brain of yours right now. It’ll come back. You’re in the agro pod of the space freighter
Leviathan
. You were up here working on her systems. Do you remember that?”

Sam had that pretty clear, though after some details about entering the central computer core everything grew a bit hazy.

“This piece of information’s a little tougher. That was six months ago.”

Sam shook his head. That wasn’t possible. The longest anyone had stayed in one of those building tubes was—what? He couldn’t remember, but it had been days, not months.

“Yeah, that one’s a doozy. Whatever you were doing in there worked. The computer finally powered up. But it happened too fast, and the crew couldn’t get you out before the vortex of energy—that’s what Lev called it—flooded the computer core. She was able to protect you for the most part, but the energy bonded you to the computer. Once you became one with the ship, separating you became a problem. As we moved in from the Kuiper Belt, it received more energy from the solar-transfer array. Power surged into that tube you were in. It was almost more than she could handle. But it also improved her functionality to the point where she could let you go. Getting you out through the bridge access involved too much risk of the builder pod punching a hole in the nose cone of the ship. And trying to get you out the back of
Leviathan
would have incinerated you in her engines. The only answer was to use this escape hatch. On my last supply run to the main living pod of the ship, Lev told me to keep an eye out for you. That’s how I knew where to find you. Do you have any recollection of any of that?”

Sam turned his head from side to side. Six months. He tried to stretch out his arms but only managed to bend them halfway.

“The crew thinks you’re dead. Lev says that gives you some freedom. You get to decide your future. Does that make any sense? ’Cause it doesn’t really to me.”

Sam had to shake his head again. He had some fragment of a memory about Xavier not waiting forever for him to finish his work. But dead? At least that explained why they hadn’t tried to rescue him from the builder’s pod. A fully functional computer wasn’t something most people wanted to mess with even if it had a corpse inside.

Doc’s smile drew wrinkles next to his eyes. “Don’t worry about it. You get to choose your own fate. As far as the rest of the solar system is concerned, if you want to stay dead, you can. If you want to go back to the life you had, Lev can make that happen. But before you decide, let me tell you a little about where you are, who we are, and why you might want to stay.”

Sam leaned back against a thin tree trunk. Glancing up, he saw it spiraled out of sight toward the transparent wall of the agro pod.

Doc sat down next to him. “There are one hundred forty-three of us—and one more in a few days. We left Tethys, one of the moons around Saturn, twenty years ago. Our plan was to terraform the rock known as Chariklo. We got permission, funding, all that pesky stuff. I had a source for old terraforming kits. We were doing pretty well. The first set of pods established a livable atmosphere, solar arrays to provide heat and light, and basic plant life around the planet. Then the empty pods were each cut in half and secured together to build the planet’s outpost. It looked like some old greenhouse made of eight one-mile-long half cylinders all stuck together.”

Sam closed his eyes. The outpost would look like all the other outposts across the solar system.

Doc continued with his history lesson. “The outpost was the commercial part of the deal. Chariklo makes for a nice stopover between the Kuiper Belt and Jupiter. We’d let the shopkeepers run the outpost, and we’d get the rest of the planetoid for our village. Of course, twenty years ago, most of the belt was used for mining, not pirates’ hideaways. So the shops are more commercial than illicit.”

The man had a deep, calming voice. After six months of dizzying dreams, a story that followed a normal plotline soothed Sam’s imagination.

“We needed a second set of terraforming pods. One set was only enough for the most basic of living conditions. So we dropped off the shopkeepers who wanted to build the outpost and headed back to Tethys for our second set. On the return trip to Chariklo, our flight crew turned pirate on us. Energy this far out proved too enticing. And we had a shipload of it. They drained every solar cell from the
Leviathan
. These computers don’t need much, and they can go dormant given enough warning. But pull the plug that fast, and there’s bound to be damage.”

The man looked in Sam’s eyes with concern. “Am I going too fast? Too much information?”

Sam shook his head. He didn’t understand everything Doc said, but so long as he didn’t have to exercise his vocal cords, he was happy to let the man talk. Six months without hearing another human voice, of being trapped inside his brain, of some mysterious link with a computer that apparently didn’t want to let him go—it was all too much to deal with first thing out of a coma.

Doc continued looking Sam in the eye as he again took up his story. “As far as the ship was concerned, there wasn’t much to steal other than the energy.
Leviathan
’s too big to be used as a pirate ship. And the solar kits are all registered with the transfer array. Had they wanted to terraform something out there, they’d have had a tough time without solar energy.”

Sam smiled at the man in encouragement. It was a lot of information all at once. But the lilt of the man’s voice and the story of a people Sam had no connection with proved a nice diversion as his brain got reacquainted with his body.

Doc shrugged his narrow shoulders. “So there we were. Connected to a dead ship floating on the edge of the solar system in a mature agro pod full of plants. With a tribe of people, all handpicked for their ability to build a civilization. But stuck. A junkyard did take us in and supplied enough supplemental power so we could survive. All for a cut of the sale price of course. I don’t think they expected it to take twenty years, though.”

Sam struggled with memories that didn’t fit yet looked like they should—pirates, Xavier, Lud’s arguments with Xavier. He couldn’t make his brain work that hard.

He tapped his chest with his fingers. Where did he come in?

“Ah, yes. You would be Lev’s idea. She thinks we need someone like you. We’re a pretty closed-off society. The idea was to set up our own ecology, our own civilization, really wanting only to be left alone. So I’m not exactly sure what Lev’s reasons are, but I’ve learned to listen to her. If she vouches for someone, I listen.”

Sam couldn’t take it anymore. Focusing all his energy on his throat muscles, he croaked out the words. “Who’s Lev?”

“Lev? That’s the ship, the
Leviathan
. The computer prefers the contraction, Lev, when I’m talking about her, and
Leviathan
when I’m talking about the ship. An energy vortex was established while you were working. It gave the computer a much higher capacity than the one I ran into twenty years ago. That’s about all I know regarding Lev.”

Sam nodded, partly to the man and partly from a desire to end the conversation. He needed sleep. Conscious thought really took it out of him.

Doc lightly got up, dragging one foot through the vines next to the tree Sam sat against to keep from floating away. “Sit here for a minute. And hang onto this vine. We have gravity around the central core of the ship, but it doesn’t extend very far out into the agro pod. Moving around in zero gravity takes some getting used to. I’ll be right back.”

With Doc gone, for the first time Sam felt alone, small, even scared. He wrapped both hands tight into the vines and closed his eyes against the enormity of his situation. Dead to the crew that had hired him, abandoned by a computer that had used him for its own purposes, at the edge of the solar system, and among a people who had no need for him. He’d have considered his feeling one of homesickness had he any desire to return to Earth.

“Wow, Doc, you weren’t kidding.” The woman’s loud voice sprang Sam’s eyes open. Long auburn hair floated forward from the girl’s face, the ends tickling his neck. Her large hazel eyes stared into his.

He blushed as she inspected his attire. “You realize those clothes were never meant to be lived in for six months, don’t you? You look horrible, like some kind of zombie or something.”

Doc put a hand on the woman’s shoulder, pulling her back from her assessment. “Stop yelling, Jessie. He hears just fine. I doubt there was much of a closet in that builder’s pod. And even if there was, he was in a damn coma. Give the poor man a break. Can you find him something decent to wear? We’re going to have to find him a place to stay too.”

The young woman cast an exasperated look at Doc. Faced with a living flesh-and-blood female, Sam blushed again with the realization that he’d experienced no human contact in six months.

She towered over him, shaking her head in disapproval. Her hair cascaded in waves around her shoulders. “He looks to be about Arturo’s size. I’m sure I can find him something, though he is in rough shape. Are you sure it wouldn’t be better to just take him back to the living pod of the ship? We’re really not equipped to bring someone back from the dead.”

“No, he’s staying with us. At least until he can make his own decision regarding his future.”

The young woman grunted in frustration. “You’re asking a lot. You know this is going to end up being my full-time job, looking after him. He can’t be expected to know how we live. What possible use can he be to the tribe?”

Sam had to agree with each of her concerns. But he was in no condition to strike out on his own or even voice his agreement.

Doc put his arm around the woman’s waist. “I’d consider it a favor, Jessie.”

“I suppose it’s pointless to argue. And I suppose you want me to take him in as well?”

Doc smiled. “It would make the most sense.”

* * *

S
am felt
like a sack of potatoes that Jessie had just been asked to lug to the kitchen. Her hand firmly gripped his as she dragged him along the lush vegetation toward what appeared to be human-sized peapods.

Her hair floated down to their clinched hands as her body danced along the vines in weightless space, her free hand grasping at vines.
Jane of the jungle but without the challenge of gravity.
She had all the grace of an aquatic sea creature moving effortlessly in her environment.

“Don’t take my attitude seriously. I’m quite nice once you get to know me. Doc’s my father, and I guess I can’t help getting lippy whenever he asks me to do something outside of my job description. Please call me Jess. Only Doc calls me Jessie. He can’t help but make me feel like his little girl.”

Eager to focus on anything other than the whooshing plants below and the infinite space outside the transparent wall of the agro pod, Sam flexed his atrophied voice box. “You work here?”

The girl raised her chin as she looked down her nose at him. “Yes, of course. What else would I be doing?”

Sam shrugged. “School?”

She peered at him and laughed. “You think I’m something like sixteen years old, don’t you? I’m twenty-five. I suspect spending so much of my life weightless has kept me from, well, sagging. And I suppose I didn’t make the most mature first impression. Well, never mind. You’ll get to know me. I’m a botanist, in charge of vegetable and fruit generation.”

Sam’s stomach hadn’t known solid food in six months. Nausea was setting in hard with the motion through the agro pod. “What do the rest of the colonists do? I mean what other work goes on?”

Her caring smile of understanding, offset by her swept-back hair, reminded Sam he was in physical contact with a woman—even if it was just holding hands as she pulled them from vine to bamboo pole.

“Well, this is Yoshi’s team. They’re working on the effects of growing building materials in a weightless environment.”

Jess grabbed a bamboo rod, which had been twisted into a spiral, and guided him down the middle of the floating tubular hallway. Reluctantly, he let go of her hand as she placed his against the bamboo handrail.