Rhea felt as if she were on a conveyor belt, sliding ever closer toward the butcher's blade.
Logan Aerospaceport was used to celebrity press conferences; a soundproof room had been found for Rand, Rhea, Colly and the cronkites and riveras representing the planetary, national and local-birthplace media pools. Cambots swarmed like blackflies, recording the scene from at least eight directions. Once in a long while, one of them would decide the ambient light was insufficient, and turn into a white firefly for a moment or two.
Tough new laws had finally succeeded in taming the media: all four cronkites, and even the riveras, were scrupulously polite. Nonetheless they managed to annoy Rhea—by putting seventy percent of their questions to Rand. In the half-dozen previous press conferences they'd had together, the percentages had usually been reversed. It embarrassed her to be annoyed by that, but she couldn't help it. At least she was able to keep him from noticing . . . though she wasn't so sure about the cambots.
Colly lapped it up. And put on a performance that would have made a child holostar blush. That annoyed Rhea too.
Which made her ask herself why she was so irritable. She realized what bothered her most of all was how much Rand was enjoying the attention and flattery. It scared her. This was going to be a hard thing to undo. It was feeling more and more like a done deal . . . and she still hadn't given her agreement to it. Rand knew that, but he wasn't acting like it. Oh, he told the reporters—and the world beyond them—the assignment was only temporary, just completing Pribhara's season: the story he'd worked out with Jay and that horrible-sounding Martin person. But when he said it, she heard in his voice the quiet certainty that the permanent job was his. She wasn't sure if the cambots were hearing that too, or if she was projecting it.
She felt disconnected, surreal, moving against a tide of invisible molasses. This is a hell of a way to spend my last hour on Earth, she decided. "Time to go, darling," she said helpfully, as Rand finished a reply.
"Just one more," the flaky-looking rivera from the planetary pool said. "Do you have any comment on the breaking story about outbreaks of rogue assemblers?"
Rand looked startled. "I'm sorry, I've been too busy packing to monitor news. Nanoassemblers, you mean?"
The rivera nodded. "There seems to be growing evidence over the last few days of random instances of . . . well, of anarchist nanotechnology, all around the globe. Spontaneous healings, spontaneous slum regenerations—sort of little miracles. There's no telling how many, since the tendency is to underreport miracles. Some say there may be some sort of . . . well . . ."
"A conspiracy of rapturists?" Rhea said, thinking of an old story-idea she had never gotten around to developing.
"Rapturists?" the woman from the New England pool pounced.
"The opposite of a terrorist," Rhea said. "But what has this got to do with us?"
The flaky one tried not to look like he knew he was stretching for a tie-in hook. "Well, you're going to space, where nanotechnology comes from. Are you, I don't know, at all afraid some . . . uh, `Rapturist' might decide to put laughing gas in your p-suit tanks?"
To everyone's surprise, it was Colly who spoke up. "There hasn't been one of those stories in space so far," she said. They all stared.
"It's true," she insisted. "Not one. I watch the news. Anyway, they haven't hurt anybody, have they?"
No one replied.
"Maybe not yet," Rand said. "But anarchy can get pretty scary even when it means well, honey. Maybe especially when it means well." He turned to the rivera. "But no, we're not worried at all. Everybody knows you're safer in space than you are on Earth: look at the stats. We really have to go now. Thank you all—"
On the flight up, Rhea tuned her seatback screen to a news channel, in time to hear herself ask, " . . . a conspiracy of rapturists?" and then, in response to the rivera's prompting, define the term. A few moments later, Colly and Rand's exchange was quoted too.
The piece in which the soundbite was featured might as well have been titled, "Nanotechnology—Threat or Menace?" It was about three times as long as the item she managed to find later on an arts channel, about Rand's return to the Shimizu.
She wanted the flight to be miserable. It was idyllic. No dropsickness in her family—none on the whole plane. No emergencies; minimal, gentle maneuvering; a perfect hop. Superb, pleasant service from human and robot alike. Even the food was excellent: real, microwave cooking rather than flashpak. The Shimizu did not permit clients to arrive unhappy, whether they wanted to or not. The hardest part of the flight was keeping Colly's seat belt buckled once the gravity went away.
The approach was spectacular. The Shimizu looked like God's Christmas ornament, a vast gleaming globe. Its exterior was fractalized for maximum radiating surface, so it sparkled in the sunlight like a vast ball of crinkled aluminum foil. It was girdled by an equator of huge cooling and power-collecting vanes, brilliant silver on one side and space black on the other, that slowly rotated independently as the relative position of the sun changed. A thousand points of light—peoples' windows!—added to the illumination, randomly distributed, going on or off as tenants entered or left their rooms.
The plane crept up on the hotel sideways, spinning slowly around its own axis to distribute the sun's heat, so there were no bad seats. Every time you decided you were there now, the damned thing got a little bigger; it seemed planet-sized by the time they actually reached the spaceport at the "north pole."
After a textbook docking, all four doors opened the instant the seat-belt light went out, so that passengers need not stand in line to debark; customs formalities occurred electronically without any of them noticing. The dock itself was beautiful and impressive, its layout and decor operating somehow on the subconscious to make you feel you were home.
Then Rand muttered, "Oh no—that asshole."
A large spider monkey with a head like a red sea anemone sprang at them out of nowhere. At the last possible moment he braked to a stop with smelly, poorly tuned thrusters and flung his arms around Colly. She looked wildly around to Rhea, her eyes asking permission to be terrified.
"I could kiss you," the apparition said, and did so, on the forehead. Colly decided she didn't need permission; the man said "Eek" and let her go and clutched his groin.
"Nice shot, dear," Rhea said, and interposed herself between them before Rand could. She was pleased to find that free-fall reflexes came back quickly to her; she still remembered how to jaunt. "Who or what are you?" she asked him.
He forgot his aching testicles. "The guy who could cheerfully strangle you, Ms. Pash-o," he said cheerfully. "What ever possessed you to give them a bite like that, for God's sake? You blew my whole story right off the Net with that rapturist line, lady. Who asked you to improvise? If it hadn't been for this little genius here," he said, pointing to Colly, "it could have been a disaster." Forgetting that she had just kicked him, he reached out and tried to pat her head. "You just keep following your mama around, kid, and every time you see her open her mouth to a sniffer, you talk instead."
Colly ducked until he gave up. "Rhea and Colly," Rand said through clenched teeth, "this is Evelyn Martin, Shimizu's publicity chief."
"And people still come here?" Rhea asked. The man was strikingly ugly. His head looked like a large red Brillo pad with bat-ears and pop-eyes. She had not met him on her previous visit, but Rand had assured her Martin was an excrescence; she decided he had understated the case.
Martin didn't seem to hear. "It's okay for you to talk like that now; I'll dub the audio later, give us all beautiful lines for the release. But I've got the top three cronkites in space waiting nearby to do the personal bit, so pee if you have to and we'll—"
Jay arrived. "Rand and his family will be happy to meet with them later this evening," he said firmly, and embraced his brother. "Sorry I'm late, bro."
Martin continued to talk rapidly while Jay greeted Rhea and Colly in turn, but they all ignored him. "Twenty-one hundred, Ev," Jay said as he led them from the hall. "They'll wait. Nobody ever turned down a free dinner at the Shimizu. Least of all a cronkite." Martin watched speechlessly as their luggage emerged from the plane and began to follow them.
Rhea had known Jay since her courtship with his half-brother over a decade ago, had chatted with him for dozens of hours on the phone since. But since Jay had made the permanent move to space, around the time she and Rand got married, she had only been in his physical presence once, briefly, during Rand's previous residency. In one sense she knew him well already. But to know if you really like someone, you have to smell them. As they all relaxed over drinks in their suite—Rhea's new home!—she found herself remembering how much she really liked Jay.
During a visit to the bathroom she took the occasion to summon Diaghilev, Jay's AI, and ask if there had been any recent news of Ethan. "Ethan who, Ms. Paixao?" was the reply, which was all the answer she needed. The relationship was irreparable. A shame; Rhea had liked Ethan, at least over the phone. "Is Jay seeing anyone?"
There was an imperceptible hesitation while Diaghilev made sure she was cleared for that information. "No, ma'am. He dates occasionally, but has not dated anyone twice." She made a mental note to keep an eye open for a nice young man for Jay, and rejoined the others.
The suite was considerably nicer than the one she'd had on her last short visit. It took her a while to note, and a little longer to believe, that the window was real. Earth was centered in the frame, the terminator just reaching what looked like a major blizzard over the northwest coast of North America. This was one of the more expensive suites in the hotel. She hunted for flaws, and cheered up a little when she noticed the furniture was all permanent. Excellent, and fully programmable, but it didn't go away when you were done with it.
But everything else she could see was state of the art or better.
She told herself sourly that the hotel had given them this suite to soften her up—that once Rand signed on for good, they'd be moved to somewhere inboard with the rest of the peons.
It was Jay who snapped her out of her gloomy mood, by asking her about her work. She thought of the story about Mr. Hansen and his beloved nun, but did not bring it up, speaking instead of the novel she had been struggling with for nearly a year now. Jay listened well, widening his eyes at the right spots, making little murmurs of agreement, asked insightful questions with great diffidence. Several of the questions made knowledgeable reference to her earlier works. He was either as much of a fan as he claimed to be, or a gifted actor. Either was gratifying.
Colly jaunted around the room like an old-fashioned maid robot, inspecting everything and trying out acrobatic maneuvers with both her wings and her child-strength thrusters, having the time of her life. Every few minutes she found something that made her giggle and call Rhea or Rand to "Look!" or "Come see!" Rhea let her roam unchecked, knowing she would tire herself out and nap soundly soon. They'd all had to get up before dawn to make the flight, and it was now nearly 6 PM, Shimizu time. Besides, this suite was safe for kids. It was probably safe enough for a blind hemophiliac epileptic.
One of Rand's early songs, "Blues in the Dark," was playing in the background. It was relatively obscure, but one of her personal favorites, since it was about her and Rand's courtship. Jay had selected it when they came in; either he had remembered some casual reference she'd made in a phone chat, or they shared similar tastes. Either way, it helped her warm to him.
She had to admit, it did feel good to be in free-fall again. She had forgotten how restful it was, how reminiscent of childhood fantasies of being able to fly, like the Little Lame Prince. The drugs had controlled the stuffy-head feeling this time, and her stomach felt fine. Rand had already inserted his personal wafer into a terminal in the suite: Maxwell Perkins, her own personal AI avatar, was again at her beck and call, moved from home into new quarters in the Shimizu's memory cores, as was Rand's version, Salieri—while their original copy still maintained the house back in Provincetown. (Also present, and presently in use, was the persona by which Colly addressed it: a large rabbit named Harvey.) Before long Rhea found herself thinking that this wasn't the worst possible place in the world . . . and then reminded herself sharply that it wasn't in the world. Not the same one P-Town was. She glanced out the window at the distant Earth and failed to locate New England.
Look on the bright side. Your husband might fail spectacularly. You might get a terrific divorce settlement. You might even convince your daughter to come back to Earth with you. The damned hotel could get hit by a runaway planet. Some Rapturist might put laughing gas in your air tank. The future holds infinite possibility.
If Jay was scheming to convert her, his next move was below the belt—literally. He led them all to dinner at the Hall of Lucullus. Not the Grand Dining Room, which peasants like governors and pop stars had to make do with—where Rhea had dined on her last visit—but the Lucullus, the most famous oasis in human space. Rhea had dined well in her time, but this was something out of the realm of her experience. They did not turn the cherries into beans for her dessert coffee until she had named the blend she preferred—then roasted them before her eyes . . . and under her nose. The coffee waiter—there was a separate, live coffee waiter—announced proudly as he was pulverizing them (pausing every few seconds so as not to overheat them prematurely) that these cherries had seen the sun rise from a tree on the island of Sulawezi that very morning. When she had tasted the result, she believed him.
The meal preceding had been so perfect that Rhea took the coffee almost in stride, which mildly shocked her. Lucius Licinius Lucullus, dead over two millennia, would have been proud of what was being done in his name. She was halfway through her bulb before she realized how many live human beings had been waiting on them hand and foot throughout dinner, with only the maitre d', wine steward and coffee waiter ever coming to her conscious attention. Zero gee left a lot of ways to skirt the edges of peripheral vision, but still . . .
Jay saw her glance around and read her mind. "They're a highly specialized breed of dancers," he said, grinning. "A few of them take class with me. The standard joke is, if you can see one, you don't have to tip him."
Rhea was used to superb service from machines. From human beings it was much less common, and a bit unnerving. It made her feel a little like a plantation owner before Civil War One. She reminded herself that these serfs almost certainly made more money than she did—and didn't have to keep thinking up new ideas.
Even Colly, who hated restaurant dining, was impressed. The peanut butter and jelly sandwich she was served (by yet another waiter! They couldn't keep one around just for that; he must be a kind of utility infielder) precisely matched her specifications down to brand and relative proportion of ingredients, and when she challenged the kitchen by impishly requesting an obscure brand of ice cream only sold in Provincetown, they accommodated her without batting an eye.
For all of Rhea's life, "cooking skill" had consisted of selecting the right equipment. It still tended to be the wife who told the equipment to start working, but it had been half a century or more since women's sense of self-worth had depended to any significant degree on the results. Nonetheless, she was mildly irritated to see Rand put away twice as much food as usual.
She managed to find a more acceptable reason to be disgruntled almost at once. A glance around the sumptuous room reminded her of how terrifyingly easy it was to get fat in free-fall. A fat person floating overhead will never again be able to impress you face to face. She had heard that plumpness was fashionable in space—at least among those raised in gravity—but she didn't care if it was.
For his pièce de résistance, Jay let Rand pick up the check . . . making the point that he could now afford to. Colly's eyes grew round at that, and Rand swelled visibly as he thumbprinted the pad.
What can I do? What can I possibly do?
The second press conference was a little more fun than the first, because at least half the time was devoted to asking her to expand on her comments about Rapturism, which by now had acquired an audible capital letter. The fun part was ignoring Martin's frantic attempts to change the subject or put words in her mouth. Book interviews were wonderful training for that sort of thing. And Rand didn't seem to mind sharing the camera—perhaps because this time the implied larger audience was spacers, people he didn't identify with yet. Or perhaps, she had to concede, he was just being in love with his wife.
An hour later, on that assumption, she gave him the fuck of his life in the ingeniously designed bedchamber of their lavish new suite, using tricks only possible in free-fall, and drifted (literally) off to sleep curled around his back, furious at him.
The next day she and Colly were peeled away from Rand, and sent on a tour of the hotel with a slender, frail-looking, yet strikingly handsome young Orientator, while the two brothers holed up in Jay's studio to try and salvage what Pribhara had started.
Colly gaped at him when he stated his name. "Duncan Iowa?"
Rhea started to chide her, but Duncan only grinned broadly. "My mother was a Frank Herbert fan." Seeing that she didn't get it, he went on, "He wrote a book called DUNE with a character named Duncan Idaho. So she always wanted a son named Duncan . . . and then she married my dad, Walter Iowa, and just couldn't resist."
Rhea noticed that he did not go one step too far, and explain to an eight-year-old Terran that Idaho and Iowa were both the names of states. That was careful diplomacy. He was spaceborn, and would have explained it to another spaceborn, to whom states were distant and remote abstractions. But he could think like an earthborn, well enough to preserve a child's dignity. She decided she liked him.
So did Colly. "I have the same problem," she said solemnly. "My own parents thought it would be fun to name me after a breed of dog."
Duncan nodded gravely. "That's something to bitch about."
She burst into giggles, and they were friends.
The tour was not the standard first-time first-day grand tour Rhea had taken on her previous trip here. This seemed more like a kind of VIP, behind-the-scenes version. It was still quite impressive, but more intimate, somehow, conveying the added message that only special people got to be impressed in this particular way. "Of course, you'll still be learning things about this place the day before you go back home," he said at one point. "I'm still learning things about it."
"How long have you had this job?" Rhea asked politely.
"I just got it. But I've been coming here since I was a kid."
That long, huh? she thought ironically, but kept the thought to herself.
She swapped bio synopses with Duncan as the tour progressed. He was twenty, bisexual, single, and had a bachelor's degree in molecular electronics from U.H.E.O. which he hoped to parlay into a Master's once he had earned the tuition. If only he had been fifteen years older, massed twice as much, had a hairier torso and been muscled more like an earthborn, she would have considered trying to pair him off with Jay. His parents were both spacers who worked at Skyfac.
Colly's favorite part of the tour was what she instantly dubbed the Blob: the Shimizu's famous zero-gee swimming pool. Located at the very center of the hotel for reasons of orbital stability, it was essentially a large spherical tank, thirty meters across, containing 210,000 liters of crystalline water and happy people.
Of course Colly insisted on going in. You donned breathing and comm gear and four fins, and entered through an air-lock. Inside, it was preternaturally beautiful: artistically colored lights were deployed all around and blended to produce shifting effects, and the tank was stocked with multihued fish of tropical breeds—robots, of course, but no less brilliant or beautiful for that. They were absolutely impossible to catch, or even touch: Colly spent a happy time trying. Rhea enjoyed herself almost as much as her daughter. Afterward in the dressing room, Colly announced that air bubbles were prettier in free-fall—and acted more interesting too.
What Rhea thought was that swimming in P-Town was better—whether you did it on the ocean or bay side. But she kept the thought to herself.
When they rejoined Duncan, the first thing Colly said was, "Duncan, how come you don't have muscles, like Daddy?"
"Colly!" Rhea began.
But Duncan cut her off, smiling. "I know that would be a rude question on Terra—but things are different in space. Here it's just a good question."
Colly looked pleased. "So what's the good answer?" she asked.
"Because I don't need 'em. Earthworm muscles—excuse me, Terran muscles—are worse than useless up here. You don't need that much power, and you keep hurting yourself, by pushing off too hard."
"Oh." Colly looked down at her skinned knees, and rubbed a banged elbow thoughtfully. "I knew that: I was just testing you."
"Can I ask you a question now?"
"Sure."
"Back there in the pool—why did you like those angelfish so much?"
"They kept making, like, a flower," she said. "You know, tails together but each head pointing out a different way, like a puffball."
"Don't real angelfish do that on Terra?" he asked.
She stared at him. "How could they? Some of them'd be upside down!"
He blinked, and grinned. "Isn't that funny? I knew real fish can't live in free-fall, because they die without a local vertical to align to; I've read that. But I didn't follow it through and realize they wouldn't ever make puffballs down there."
"That's the difference between book learning and experience," Rhea said, seeing a chance to make this a lesson for Colly. "Duncan was born in space. He knows a lot, but you know things he doesn't."
"And vice versa," he agreed. "That's why I'm here. Over the next couple of days you're both going to get real tired of hearing me repeat certain things. Free-fall safety, vacuum-drill, flare-drill, p-suit maintenance, things like that. And you'll tell me that you know all that stuff, and you'll be right. You know it as book learning. So let me keep bugging you, okay? Otherwise you may get in some kind of trouble, from expecting an angelfish to make a puffball."
Colly nodded solemnly. She had been watching the way he handled himself in zero gee, and trying to copy his movements, but from then on she would ask his advice, and take it.
"For instance, both of you put in your earphones for a second."
Rhea and Colly both complied.
"I want you to hear a sound without others hearing it. Listen—" He touched a pad at his wrist, and they heard a distinctive warbling shriek. "If you hear that, you have less than twenty minutes to get here to the pool. If you're late, you'll die. It means a bad solar flare is on the way—and this pool is also the Shimizu's storm shelter."
"How long do they last?" Colly asked.
"Anywhere from eighteen hours to three days or so."
"We might have to swim for three days?" She didn't seem alarmed. Rhea certainly was.
"Oh, no! They pump the water into holding tanks all around the pool, so it'll do the most good as shielding."
"That thing is huge," Rhea said, "but is it really big enough to accommodate twelve-hundred-odd people for up to three days?"
"If they're friendly," he said with a grin. "Don't worry: most flares you're ever liable to see, you can deal with by just getting into the radiation locker in your suite. It takes a Class Three flare to empty the pool, and that hasn't happened in my lifetime. Doesn't mean it couldn't in the next ten minutes—but they've got some real sharp folks modeling the sun nowadays, plus the Stardancers keep a couple of angels way in past the orbit of Venus all the time, keeping an eye on the old girl. They can send a telepathic warning back to Earth orbit instantly, a lot faster than a radio or laser message: when Mama Sol clears her throat, we get a lot better warning than you get of a quake in San Francisco. And in any emergency, trained men in radiation suits will chase down stragglers and sleepers. But—and this is what I was talking about before—you can't ever leave safety to machines and other people. Sometimes they goof. If you ever start seeing green pollywogs—little green flashes in your vision—get into that locker, fast. Don't wait for the central computer to tell you to . . . and don't stop to pee."
After lunch he took them to Wonderland. Both ladies found it delightful. As you approached it, the first thing you noticed was a child-sized white rabbit a little ahead of you, wearing a vest and consulting a pocketwatch. You followed him as he jaunted feetfirst "down" a long tunnel; onrushing air gave a reasonable illusion of falling in a magical sort of way.
The place into which you emerged lived up to its name.
Colly wanted to stay—forever. After an hour, Rhea was sick of rosy cheer and wanted to go be sullen with her husband. She left Colly with Duncan, made an agreement to meet them at suppertime, and followed Maxwell Perkins's excellent directions through a maze of unfamiliar corridors to Jay's studio. One thing about AIs: they made it hard to be a stranger in a strange land, even if you wanted to be. As long as there was a local database for your AI to invest, wherever you went, you were home.
She paused outside the door, and had Max ask his alter ego—Rand's AI avatar Salieri—whether she could enter without disturbing her husband; with his assurances she thumbed the door open and jaunted in. The work in progress looked so odd that her eye ignored it, noting only that it seemed to involve some sort of pseudo-underwater visuals and twelve-tone music. She had been married to a shaper too long to expect a rehearsal to look or sound like much.
Rand was drifting a few meters off to her left, upside down with respect to her local vertical. His body was derelict, relaxed into the classic free-fall crouch, all his attention focused on the dozen writhing dancers who filled the cubic before him. Even upside down she could see that he was scowling so ferociously his forehead looked ribbed. He was making little growling mutters deep in his throat, shaking his head from side to side.
She knew she had never seen him happier.
Dammit.
In that first glimpse of him, utterly intent on his work, she knew deep down, below the conscious level, that she was doomed. She could either live the rest of her life here, or start reliving the glorious single years . . . with an eight-year-old. Her subconscious thought about it, decided her conscious mind did not require this information just now, and tucked it away in the inaccessible node where stories got worked out.
It stayed there for the next month. Every time it tried to get out, she went to work on a story instead. It was a very prolific month.