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From: elf@halcyon.com (Elf Sternberg)
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NNTP-Posting-Date: 2 Oct 2000 01:33:24 GMT
Subject: {ASSM} Journal Entry 010 / 0101 [ Geographic: Floating Free ]
Date: Mon, 2 Oct 2000 00:10:41 -0400
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Alka's Felinzi smile could have been seen like a beacon from
Pandora, Xing thought as he watched her float up through a long, hollow
tunnel. He wondered what had made her so happy, but he supposed that a
guide in a good mood was better than one who was not. She floated
across the room and without even a pause to let him protest wrapped her
arms around him. "Hi!" she said.
"Hello," Xing said, stiffening just a little at the obtrusive
hug. He had come to like her, but her continued physical affections, so
prevalent among the Pendorians, continued to bother him. When he was
honest with himself, he knew that part of the reason for discomfort came
from desire. He envied their freedom and their lack of fear. He, too,
wanted to no longer be afraid. "You are in a very happy state," he
observed.
"I am," she agreed. They were both speaking Mandarin at this
point, he noticed. Unlike the others on the team, Xing had made no
effort to learn the local language. That's what the guide was for, to
be the translator. "I've been chosen to replace someone on the Terran
Contact Team!" She nearly bounced, just like a kitten.
"You have what?" he asked.
"I've been chosen to replace someone on the Terran Contact
Team!" she repeated. "One of the members of the Conventions and Events
group has decided that she wants to come home. She doesn't like it down
there. So I asked to be part of the team and I was accepted!"
"This means you will be staying on Earth," he said, wondering if
he would have much opportunity to see or speak with her.
"Yes, but I probably won't have much of a chance to see you,"
she said. It was one of her more disturbing talents, this ability of
hers to answer questions he had not given voice. It was as if she could
read his mind. "The Convention and Events team is for talking to the
people of Earth, not the power aggregates, and China doesn't have very
much in the way of science fiction conventions. At best, I might be
able to see you out in some event in Hong Kong; I understand that there
is at least one convention there every year, but whether or not we go
there will be determined by whether or not we think we can reach a large
audience there and, of course, by safety risks."
It made perfect sense, he supposed, but that didn't make him
much happier. He pointed out, "I do make trips to Washington. I am a
science correspondent and go everywhere in the world. I am sure that
there will be conventions is Australia, which is part of the area I
cover."
She nodded. "Don't worry, Xing, I'm sure we'll get together and
have dinner now and then. But, aren't you worried about your government
learning that you're still talking to Pendorians long after you've
returned home?"
He grinned. "I do not care. I will probably be under suspicion
for the rest of my life. I am sure that when I get home they will be
testing me for weeks to make sure I have not been brainwashed. Or
replaced."
"That's the spirit. Anyway, I'm happy to see that you've made it
here on your own. Would you like to go see the rest of the station?"
"It was not hard to get here. I just had to ask the AI. But,
yes, I would be pleased to have such a pretty guide show me around."
Alka flicked her head to one side, an almost pointless gesture
in the zero gravity but still communicative. "I thought you said you
were a terrible flirt."
"I am practicing," Xing assured her, feeling pleased that she
had noticed.
This area of Parma had been completed only a few years ago, and
despite its recent heavy use still had the patina of fresh construction.
The walls were a white just one shade from blinding, with long stretches
of illumination running down the hallways and across the panel that was
clearly meant to be thought of as the ceiling. Handholds dotted the
hallways and walls. The soft hum of fans was the only sound he heard
and that was primarily the air moving, not the fan mechanism itself.
The smell of fresh plastics still hung in the air, but the smell was not
entirely familiar to him. "Alka? What is that smell?"
"Which one?" she said.
"The plastic. They don't smell right. They smell... " He
hunted for the right word. "They smell sweeter than the ones on Earth."
Alka was silent for a moment, and Xing had come to think of this
commonplace pause in Pendorian thinking a time when they were
downloading raw data into their brains. "Probably because they're
agroplastics. Terrans use petroplastics, but as we don't have an oil
reserve on Pendor we had to come up with alternatives. Agroplastics do
the same job, but they're grown on an engineered strain of maize."
"Maybe Earth would appreciate having such a technology," Xing
said. "We will run out of oil eventually and my country would dearly
love to be free of the need for imports."
"Maybe, but I doubt it. Not until you have alternative energy
sources like fusion or M-solar. Agroplastics take a lot more
processing, and that means that the materials and electricity costs on
your world would be prohibitive." Alka put her hand on his arm. "Sorry
about that, Xing. It's something we'd be willing to trade, but I think
Earth already has similar technologies, but they've been rejected for
the reasons I outlined."
Alka led him to the door an which he had been instructed to
wait. "Ready?"
He nodded.
The other side of the door was a surprise. Where the space
behind had the feel of a brand new, high-tech airport, on the other side
of the door he was in a construction zone. "They're still putting in
the panels," Alka said, "So many of the walls here will be exposed."
As they pulled themselves along on temporary handholds held to
fixed pipes with tightened rings, Xing noticed that there were labels
every meter on everything, and asking Alka, she pointed to water and
waste pipes, data lines, power lines, gas lines, high-pressure
atmosphere redistribution pipes, the list of what it took to run one
small section of the facility rattled off and illustrated in cables of
green and yellow, pipes of red and blue. Xing pulled out his camera and
took close-ups of a section of the wall, and then a long backward shot
down the hallway through which they had come.
Alka pulled up her PADD and showed him a cutaway view. "This is
where we are, in crew transit tunnel number four. This is the main
access tunnel, which is currently closed to us because there's a team
installing power conditioners to buffer power needs in this section,
where we're going. They're going to need them soon, because we're
building six starships just as quickly as we're building the station.
That's where we're going. The shipyards."
"You don't have a shipyard separate from the station?" he asked,
surprised. It seemed odd to him, as if one could go to the airport and
see airplanes being assembled on the tarmac. On reflection, he realized
that most spaceports on Earth were still assembly grounds, where the
components that make up a spacecraft were put together on-site before
being launched.
"We plan on having one. The initial design for a separate
facility called Pelcityr has been published and is now going through the
vetting process. But for now, we have Parma, and the same tools used to
build this station are used to build starships, so in the meantime, this
is where we build starships."
"That makes sense. One does not use the same tools to build an
airport that one uses to build an airplane, but an airport is not made
to fly. A spaceport, I imagine, has many of the same needs as a
spaceship."
"All but the engines," she agreed. "We even have the same
weaponry."
"Weaponry?" he asked. "Parma is armed?"
"We don't know what kind of galaxy we have out there," she said,
"So we've made sure that Parma can defend itself. It is, after all, a
sentient being in its own right. The AI that lives here cannot
conveniently leave in a moment of trouble."
Xing digested both bits of news with a feeling of dissonance.
"I am walking around inside the guts of a Pendorian citizen."
"You are," Alka agreed, and Xing gave her a pained expressed.
"Just be glad he doesn't have gastric juices. Or a need to consume
flesh." She gave him a wicked grin and he tried to respond in kind.
The notion of the AI of Parma being an eater of flesh did not improve
his disposition over the station. "Hey, Ossian, are you there?"
"Always," a voice responded, droll and patient in its demeanor.
"What can I do for you, Alka?"
"I just wanted to introduce you to our guest from Earth. Have
you spoken to Xing Kanarak yet?"
"I have not," the voice replied. "But I am pleased to make you
acquaintance, Xing Kanarak," Ossian responded calmly.
"And I to make yours," Xing said before realizing with surprise
that the AI had been speaking Mandarin to him. And he had responded in
kind. "I'm surprised that you speak Mandarin. Some of the AIs I have
met could not."
"It is a difficult language, yes," Ossian replied. "But my duty
is to be an administrator to the gateway through which all people
visiting this solar system's residential neighborhoods will pass, and I
am attempting to learn as many languages as I can." Xing thought for
certain that the pause that followed was to stifle a yawn. Did AIs
yawn?
"But, couldn't you just transfer the knowledge from another AI?"
he asked.
"No, it does not work that way for AIs. We can incorporate much
knowledge and use it quickly. Vocabulary, grammar rules, and the like
can be transmitted from one AI to another. But the use of the language,
the way something is spoken colloquially, can only be learned from
experience."
"I see," Xing said. "Thank you for that explanation."
"You're very welcome. Now, if you will excuse me, my attention
is needed elsewhere."
"Bye, Ossian," Alka replied.
They continued, careful hand over careful hand, until they
reached yet another bulkhead. This one was again a circular doorway
that seemed to roll away in one direction, a curiosity in a place with
no gravity, but Xing thought there must be some technical superiority
reason for that kind of motion. Alka floated ahead into a darkened
room. He followed.
"By my father...!" Xing could not restrain himself. The sight
before his eyes was astounding.
One entire wall of the large room in which they floated was a
window out into space. Sunlight blazed in that space, reflecting off
six enormous vehicles that were nothing like the spherical starships in
which he had traveled from Earth to Pendor. Four were elongated,
rectangular shapes with a flared tail that suggested to Xing a heavy
sword in a scabbard more than anything else. Each was a different
color, and on the side of two he could see clearly a blazoned shield of
deep blue with a ring-and-star logo on a stellar background peppered
with nine shining, standout stars. The other two were like the four in
general shape, but the main body of the ship was a hollow space with
only a lattice framework holding it together.
"That's our initial fleet," she said. "The spherical ships were
good enough, but some discoveries and refinements have led to these.
They can make the trip in three and a half months instead of six and
some. What you can see there are two cargo ships, two warships, and two
general purpose transport vessels. This is just what we're keeping for
Earth to Pendor transit. When these are done, we're going to work on
six more fitted specifically for exploration. But we needed to get
commerce with Earth up and running."
Alka stared out into the blackness. Each ship hung in an
enormous framework of its own, a framework with robotic crane arms, each
of which must have been hundreds of meters long. One wall of the
framework was closed, complete, and there were windows here and there.
His eyes could just barely pick out a tiny, man-shaped figure clambering
over one of the warships Alka had indicated, accompanied by a pair of
large, hulking robotic shapes. From here, the construction party looked
like an ant and two beetles attempting to scale a full-sized bus.
He stopped to take pictures. Hundreds of them. He understood
why Alka had had the lights turned off in here. It let him take the
photographs without worrying about glare from the window, although he
had been notably impressed by the glare-free quality of much of Pendor's
glass.
"Why do you need two warships?" he asked.
Alka floated closer to the glass. Xing took a moment to admire
her form beneath the one-piece jumpsuit before attempting to put that
thought away. "One for here, one to keep in orbit near Earth." That
made him look up to her face. "Because our people are vulnerable down
on your planet. One of those ships could end any war on your planet in
a matter of days. We hope. We have robotic troops, great battlefield
information, and no experience whatsoever, so we're likely to be very
strong and somewhat clumsy in our response. I don't think you want
that."
"No," he agreed, understanding now that Pendorian good will was
going to be backed up with some of the biggest guns Earth had ever seen,
and people who prided themselves on the competence to use them correctly
but with the full knowledge that they lacked the experience that came
with them. It was one of the many paradoxes of Pendor that he had
noticed. They were better-equipped, better-educated, and more wisely
motivated than many a general or politician, but they were on constant
guard against their own inexperience, which was their biggest problem.
A thoughtful, well-intentioned, but clumsy Goliath.
"Can I visit one of the ships?" he asked, coming back to the
subject outside the windows.
"The general purpose ship number one can be visited," said
Ossian's voice. "It is mostly deserted at this time, as the crew that
was building it has moved on to number two, and the interior engineering
and decor teams have not completed muster yet. There is a skeleton team
of engineers in the rear of the vessel, but that is it."
Alka said, "Then let's do it." She indicated yet another
doorway, which he followed her through.
The next room over was as unfinished as the one they had just
occupied. Cables and pipes wormed through the room with no apparent
purpose, and a duct large enough to permit two men side-by-side pumped
air into the room as a gentle breeze. But what caught Xing's attention
was the first standalone SDisk he had ever seen. It was like many of
the SDisks he had seen, flat and about a meter across, but this one was
not mounted to anything. It was a temporary measure, hooked up to the
station's power supply by a thick cable that plugged into the wall. The
wallside of the plug, he noticed, had a hook-and-cage mechanism over the
plug itself; it would not be coming out by accident. "Alka? Is there a
danger if the SDisk should become unplugged during transport?" He
indicated the doubly-redundant plug assembly.
"Not that I know of. It is an expensive operation in power to
create an SDisk, and they require a certain amount of low-level constant
power to operate or else the system stops working and has to be rebuilt,
so maybe that's just to keep the power on." She paused. "Then how do
they move the SDisk around?"
"Are you asking me?"
"No, just trying to figure it out." She shrugged. "Anyway,
let's go visit that ship." She put her hand on the SDisk; in the low
gravity it would have been hard to arrange anything more elegant. Xing
joined her and in a second they were floating in blackness.
"Lights!" Alka shouted. The lights came on, revealing what had
to be one of the largest rooms Xing had ever been in. It was a cube
fully forty meters on a side. The walls were peppered with small,
welded rings, cargo tie-downs and the like. The SDisk they hovered
against was certainly not a temporary one, welded as it was to the
surface. Xing started to feel disoriented. His brain insisted that he
was in a normal position-- he had become used to working in low
gravity-- but his eyes told him that if this was the SDisk, he must be
lying on the floor.
He straightened up out of habit and immediately shot into the
cargo room. "Xing!" Alka called.
"Help!" He was floating away and there was no way for him to
get back down again. Someone was listening, however, because a
basketball-size drone floated out from somewhere and in a controlled
fashion came to a stop near Xing. It had a handgrip. He took it. The
ball jetted towards Alka, dragging him along, and he went willingly.
"There," Alka said. "Now, don't do that again."
"I have no intention of doing that again. Where are we?"
"Cargo deck one," the ball said in Ossian's controlled tones.
"There is no shipboard AI yet, but several are being built to take over
minor tasks planetside while their elders are considered for volunteers.
There are a number of volunteers."
"I... see." He watched Alka's grin. "So, is there anything of
interest on this ship to show me?"
"Everything," Alka replied with a smile. "But I know what you
mean. Let's go see. We'll start at the bridge."
Xing agreed readily. On the ship he had taken from Earth, the
bridge was one of the parts that he had not been allowed to visit. He
had been told that they were cramped and professional affairs and that
accommodating guests would not be practical. He had accepted that at
the time.
She led him down hallways that were clearly meant to be used
only during freefall. He wondered how this ship would handle the
apparent gravity from acceleration needed for their non-FTL maneuvering.
He also had trouble keeping his eyes from her lithe, feline form as she
navigated the handholds with acrobatic ease.
This bridge was not what they had described to him. It was
quite the opposite-- large and laid out so that people could maneuver
comfortably. It was also designed more along the lines of a NASA ship,
with equipment everywhere. "I thought you were going to build spheres
again."
"There's discussion going on. We have several large living-
space drums for the crews, but these ships will be mostly about cargo.
Personnel transport ships are being built after these."
Xing satisfied himself that he had taken enough pictures and
they headed back down into the ship itself. The walls were a dull grey
in color, and for the most part the hallways were rectangular affairs
with rounded corners and handholds everywhere. The colors chosen were
those of the construction material and not that of an interior decorated
by professionals. That got him thinking.
"How... how will you decorate these walls? The starship I
traveled in, and the Ranch ship especially, was very utilitarian. You
had very comfortable sleeping quarters, but the hallways and many of the
common rooms were painted in the colors one might find in a prison."
Alka gave him her downloading pause for a moment and then said,
"We actually brought a lot of that back with us from Terra. It was one
of the few things we could get in the short month we were there.
Apparently, that was one of the few things that Shardik recommended we
buy on library and distribute the same way-- according to library rules
as in the United States, where we bought them. It's difficult; it means
that only one person at a time may actually possesses the material, a
strange concept to us, but we're abiding by it until we can negotiate a
better deal."
"So, you're guessing what works based on past experience. These
are working ships, however. From what I have seen of your cabins, you
would appoint them as if this were a cruise ship and expect that level
of maintenance out of the crew.
Alka nodded. "Probably."
They wandered throughout the ship. Alka showed him everything
he asked for, including Engineering, where a group of Pendorians looked
up with curiosity before realizing that Alka and Xing were working just
as much as they were, then assisting him by explaining to him whatever
he pointed at. He shot thousands of pictures, rationalizing that the
editorial team back on Earth would want every one of them.
They stopped in the rotating sections, which Xing found curious
in their lock-down positions. "Sometimes I still feel as if I'm in a
movie."
Alka grinned. "Sometimes I wonder when your movies will catch
up with reality." She floated past him to the center spindle. "Come
on." He followed her into the tunnel and down into another rotating
section, this one obviously decked out as sleeping quarters. "There's a
crew of 24 on a ship like this," she said, counting out fourteen rooms.
"Eleven pairs, captain, first officer, and medical." The drum was
little more than a hallway to the attached rooms and was narrow enough
that fully stretched Xing could touch both walls.
He took more pictures, taking care to get extra photos of
sickbay. "I would have thought that it would be more restful for
recovering patients to sleep in zero-G. As well as the rest of your
crew."
Again the download pause. "More restful, maybe. Healthful, no.
The internal workings of your cells don't grow correctly without
gravity. Cells have an internal latticework of fibers that keep
internal operations separate and maintain the cell's shape. Without
gravity, that latticework doesn't form; it has no expectation to. And
you have no idea how difficult it is to do surgery in zero-gravity.
It's nearly impossible to deal with heavy bleeding. Imagine trying to
work on someone as the blood bubbles into a balloon held together only
by surface tension, and when it breaks it keeps traveling until it hits
something."
Xing gulped. It was a gruesome image and he preferred not to
think about it. But she had a point. The necessity of some kind of
acceleration became clear to him.
She gave him her prettiest smile. "Hey, let me show you the
landing bay. And then we'll head back to Parma."
He followed towards what he thought was the middle of the ship.
"Ring," she said. "I was hoping they would have ships in here."
Instead, the hanger bay had only the clamps, cranes and cradles
necessary for four smaller ships, Xing saw. "Since Earth knows that you
have SDisks now, why bother with ships?"
"Because," she said patiently, "We can't SDisk to a place
without a receiving disk. But with one of these, we can go anywhere in
your solar system in a matter of days."
They left the ship and headed back to Parma. She led him into
one of the more populated sections of the station, still without gravity
of any source. "Populated" may have been something of a misnomer, he
thought; it meant that one person had walked by as he sat and reviewed
the pictures he had taken on his loaner PADD and sorted, cataloged, and
annotated the images.
"So," she said as he reached the end of his task, "Ready to do
something relaxing?"
"What could be more relaxing than this?"
She grinned. "True enough. But is following your calling
really the only way to relax?" she asked, reaching out and stroking his
cheek with one finger.
He looked up at her with something of a smile. "You are being a
flirt again," he said.
"You started this," she said softly. She pulled her hand back.
"I'm sorry."
"Are you doing what you think is right?" Xing asked, "Or are you
just doing what you desire?"
"Both," Alka said. "I really like you, Xing. But I want to
show it in ways that you... you would probably think are inappropriate.
"Are they inappropriate for you?" he asked.
She didn't say anything. It was a rhetorical question anyway.
He said, "I want to go back to Earth and start my life over.
Trying to leave it behind was a mistake." He looked up at her. "I will
never understand why, as the shortest person on the Geographic team, I
was assigned the tallest member of the guide staff."
Alka giggled. "Don't ask me that, either. I imagine that there
was something other than physical compatibility in mind when they did
that."
He nodded, and then, awkwardly, stepped closer to her. "If I
were to accept your inappropriate offer, Alka, would we be able to
actually do anything?"
"Actually, yes," she said. "Those parts of us are compatible."
Xing sighed. Then shook his head. "Would you be upset if I
told that I did not think it would be the right thing?"
"No," Alka replied. "No, you have your own values, Xing. I
can't change them, and I'm not going to tempt you to."
He nodded. "Alka? I think it would be better if..."
"If we were just friends?" She giggled.
"I would not have put it so badly."
"You would probably have had trouble find an alternative."
He thought about that. "You're probably right."
"No, I don't mind at all if we're 'just friends.' I know that
you've got your own life, and from what you told me on the trip you're
going to be spending a lot of time putting it back together. It would
be unfair of me to get in the way of that. I'd like to be your friend.
So long as you remember that it's my job to show you around. And don't
forget to call me when we get to Earth."
"I'll do both. I won't forget, I mean."
She surprised him with a laugh and a hug. He returned the hug
chastely. "Thanks, Alka."
"You're welcome," she said with a smile. "Let's go get
something to eat. We haven't had a bite in nearly six hours."
Xing looked at his watch. "Please. Lead the way."
The Journal Entries of Kennet R'yal Shardik, et. al., and Related Tales
Copyright (c) 1989-2000 Elf Mathieu Sternberg.
Distribution limited to electronic media not-for-profit use only.
All other rights are reserved to the author.
--
Elf M. Sternberg, rational romantic mystical cynical idealist
http://www.halcyon.com/elf/
Fast food restaurants are like gay bathhouses in San Francisco,
places where people go to engage in high-risk behaviors.
- Greg Critser
--
Pursuant to the Berne Convention, this work is copyright with all rights
reserved by its author unless explicitly indicated.
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