Damon Knight - Orbit 19

Kalkas held out his hand, first to the technician, then to the diplomat. “Your comrade, man Abramowitz. What’s the local treatment for hunger?”

“Best food in the System. I hope you like it.”

The provender of Trojan Port was not uniformly depressing; several fruits and vegetables flourished in weightless hydroponics. But protein appeared as either little cubes of vat beef or eggs from the automatic chicken, and the only condiment was salt. Among his twenty kilograms of luggage Kalkas had brought fifteen grams of oregano, forty of paprika, and seventy-five of powdered garlic. During his first months on Mars as Agent Delegate in Libya Dome, Kalkas had attempted to introduce a few mild spices into the bland cuisine of his official entertainments; the subsequent complaints of gastritis among those of his guests who swallowed more than a bite or two had puzzled him until he learned that he was contending not only against tastes, which could be educated, but also against biochemistry, which couldn’t. Kalkas told Neal Abramowitz that eating a good lunch would be a pleasure.

When the adrenalin pump stopped, the technician disconnected Kalkas from the capsule and Abramowitz led him to the personnel hatch. The Spaceman spidered easily along the net that lined much of the wall, while Kalkas moved painstakingly lest he cast himself adrift. His muscles had to work continuously against themselves, as if he were moving a heavy weight or a stiff lever just a millimeter or so; resistance must be overcome, but it must not be overcome too vigorously. At the hatch Kalkas needed to catch his breath. He had an uncertain sense of having passed this way before: perhaps he had been brought, for his last drop to Earth, to the same portal through which he had just returned to space. But all the portals are similar to each other, and on the day of going down he had been stupid with the drugs that would buttress him as he resumed the burden of his home planet’s gravity. Amid the fuss and melancholy of the Retirement he had too long extended his tour of duty on Mars; then he had paid for his added weeks there with an invalid year. At the end of this journey he would, he hoped, not need the lyserganol or the walking armor. To the pacemaker, the kidney drain, and the calcium seep, Woomera Clinic had added two stabilants and a broad-spectrum trace implant. If he kept up his exercises and his potassium intake he should be able to go home without danger.

Beyond the hatch, cables of various colors hissed along the wall, towing orbiters at a quickstep pace. Open-frame buggies, propelled by electric fans, whirred more rapidly through a screened central passage. Fashion in dress had apparently altered more in space than it had on Earth; the deep green leotard worn by Neal Abramowitz was conservative among the florid bikinis, cutaways, mesh vests, jockstraps, shorts, longs, and odd wrappings aswarm in the tube. For Kalkas the invariable seventeen degrees of the spaceworlds had always been sweater weather; he had many years ago become inured to the second glances or the stares of the acclimated.

“Do we go now to the hostel?” he asked Abramowitz.

“We can if you want to, but we’re only a hundred fifty meters from the best cafeteria on the Port. Are you nervous about riding the cables?”

“There’s some slight technique involved, I believe? Perhaps you’ll refresh my memory.”

“It helps to give yourself a little push and match speeds with the cable. And you have to remember to go overhand past the pulleys. Or I can get a buggy if you’d rather go that way.”

“I’ll do well enough on the cable, I believe. I have ridden them before. By the way, how is my luggage being handled?”

The Communications Officer was puzzled for a moment. “Hey, I don’t know, exactly. The freight rack, I guess, or a buggy, if that’s handier.”

“It will, in any case, be placed in my room at the hostel?”

“Room. Oh-right, right.”

Kalkas found once more that riding the cables was a simpler though more conscious skill than cycling; he was at leisure to look about as he rode. Trojan Port appeared not to have changed substantially since he had last been in its tubes and volumes. Its characteristic colors were still the off-whites and greys of various plastics, its characteristic sound was still the hum of fans, and its characteristic odor was still the vaguely fecal scent from the food-machines. Its people, however they dressed, were mostly long and pink. Kalkas was accustomed to the compromises struck between the needs people carried with them and the requirements of the places they came to; those compromises marked all of the Spaceborn’s homes, built where there was no air that men could breathe, where no grain grew. But the new homes were not identical each to each. Outside the wall of Libya Dome on Mars were hills and plains and craters, land and dust, a kind of air and a kind of life. Beyond the hulls of Trojan Port was the void. In a sense, the orbital station was the furthest from the old world of all the new worlds, even though it was the old world that the station orbited, and not many more generations could pass before Trojan Port was as alien to the other spaceworlds as they all now were to Earth.

The best cafeteria on the Port was a smallish volume nicely paneled in imitation redbrick and genuine moondust tile. Dining cotes, their frames covered with brown velvet, were anchored along a web of stationary cables sheathed in leathery scarlet plastic. The lighting was the dimmest Kalkas had ever seen, except in radar rooms, anywhere off Earth. He remarked to Abramowitz that the Spaceborn were beginning to develop sophisticated tastes.

“We’ve got a little time and energy to spare these days, so we can afford some fancy touches. Nothing wrong with a little nostalgia, either. The woman who designed this volume worked from holos of some of the big . . . cafes? Do you call them that?”

“Restaurants. Or clubs.”

“Right, right—clubs. Clubs in Miami and Honolulu. Does it remind you of them?”

“Yes. It certainly does.” Kalkas omitted to add that like the designer, he had seen such clubs only in holos.

“Hey, you’ll feel right at ease. That’s good.”

Putting the traveler at ease was the prelude to discovering the purpose of his trip, an enterprise that Neal Abramowitz undertook with vigor. Kalkas had decided months ago that only a convincing imitation of forthrightness could carry him through such interviews as this one. Few Spaceborn understood statements that depended for their significance upon implication or allusion; none that Kalkas had ever met were receptive to innuendo. If Kalkas tried to talk with Abramowitz as he would under comparable circumstances with, say, the Clerk Plenipotentiary of North America, the orbiter would almost surely be puzzled, even vexed, and might feel insulted. Since Kalkas had not only to reach Ganymede but also to gain a prize there and return with it to Earth, he must take care both to keep his way clear ahead and to leave no suspicions or dislikes behind. Fortunately, the Blushing Tunnels themselves provided a serviceable public motive for his journey.

“So the Conservancy has heavy hopes for the N’yerere process?” Abramowitz asked.

“We hope eventually to reforest all the Northern Rockies, perhaps re-establish grasses on the Great Plains. Terrestrial stocks of europium will be quite inadequate for the task.”

“If the Conservancy were negotiating through us, we’d save you the flight.”

Kalkas smiled at what passed for subtlety among the Spaceborn, knowing that Abramowitz would understand the smile to be an acknowledgment of Trojan Port’s commercial acumen. He specifically reinforced that understanding by saying, “I’m sure you’ll devise means of collecting your share, and probably more, of the transfer costs. And the transaction will be sufficiently expensive for us without our paying you ten per cent for making arrangements.”