Damon Knight - Orbit 19

Kalkas wondered what patterns stood or spun in the body and the mind of the young woman who had been that child.

Neither the Logistics Board nor the Transportation Subcommittee ordinarily levies a fare for passage, but both are scrupulous in the allocation of volume. Of the nineteen primary craft that the Conservancy traded to Luna and Mars at the time of the Retirement, only the five emigrant carriers are properly fitted for passengers, and of those the four oldest, all first launched before the beginning of Trojan Port, are no longer quite safe. Travelers, therefore, must either suit their plans to the schedule of Altair or attempt to wangle part of the supercargo volume of a freight craft. To avoid any formal involvement of Ferenc Troyant, the Conservancy had negotiated Kalkas’ passage with Luna, consigning him thereby to a voyage longer by a week than one undertaken in a Subcommittee craft. Kalkas did not begrudge the time spent in transfer, but he was sorry that celestial mechanics and the acceleration tolerances of Moonmen would require him either to return tediously by way of Mercury or to wait seven months on Ganymede for Betelgeuse. The Director of Information Resources had argued for the layover, but Kalkas had persuaded the Minister of Futurity that two weeks was adequate. Negotiations with the Board grew complex, but finally Kalkas had the option of returning with Vega or waiting for Betelgeuse , and Luna was guaranteed the freighting of europium oxide from Ganymede for five years. Luna also had a choice between Blue Poles and White Light.

A day after his arrival at Trojan Port, Kalkas rode in a vacuum boat the five hundred kilometers out to Vega . Despite Woomera Clinic and Djokjakarta’s finest scotch, or perhaps because of their interaction, he had slept badly, dreaming in fits and snatches of his life on Mars, his many journeys, the horrid year in the walking armor. At last, unable to sleep at all, he had gone to breakfast, then wasted a gram of garlic and half that much paprika attempting to make palatable the fare served by the hostel. His dyspepsia was intensified by Neal Abramowitz’s honest cheerfulness when the Communications Officer came to see him to the boat portal. Kalkas was certain that the orbiter would have come out of mere friendliness even if he had had no official business.

“We’ve been hoping that the Conservancy would find a way to launch out the gamete trade again.”

“You may as well hope for immigrants, which, I assure you, the Minister of Demographics wishes he could send. But Auckland has no reason to think that the results would differ from those of the last experiments.”

“Stein Bayly has a good argument for the mechanistic interpretation. Hey, maybe you saw his paper? We tried to make sure it was broadcast kinda widely.”

Five years earlier the Officer’s predecessor had been less circumspect: “If we have to, we’ll saturate every RTV frequency on Earth.”

“I read it,” Kalkas said. “I read Li Hong’s refutation, as well, and like the Ministers I found the geneticist more persuasive than the biophysicist. But as I understand the situation, Bayly’s thesis did suggest certain interesting new lines.”

He did not add that the lines, when they did not reach dead ends, only reinforced the Conservancy’s determination not to reopen the gamete trade but to pursue New Breed instead. That intention had not disturbed Kalkas until he learned that the pursuit required his services. A third-or fourth-hand rumor of the project had reached him some five years ago, by way of an anthropologist on a working visit. Kalkas had had little interest, then, for anything but his diplomatic history; he was trying to bring the orderliness of hindsight to a concluded age, and he preferred not to speculate whether that age might open anew. But soon the project directors, pressed by nearly all the Ministers to produce results quickly, had set aside their attempts to construct the appropriate chromosomes from purely terrestrial bases and had begun examining the records of Earthmen in space through the fifty years preceding the Retirement. Within a few weeks it had occurred to someone to interview the Earthman who had been longest in space and who had been among the very last to come down.

Thus Kalkas was the first Earthman to come out of Retirement. As he handwalked gingerly through the short tube joining the vacuum boat to the longrunner he felt again, more strongly now, the sense of repetition that had touched him yesterday as he left the portal. This time, however, the sense had a clear association: he recalled, not his first transfer out nor his last one in, but his return to Mars after his rotation leave of 2140. Then he had felt that whatever direction he took he would return to something earlier left behind, as if he could not go away from but only toward. The perception had gratified him, but its notional recurrence, eighteen years later, was subtly disturbing. He intended to have no home on Ganymede.

A long young woman, dressed in the snug, many-pocketed coveralls common to longrunner staffs, awaited Kalkas in the lock at the end of the tunnel. She introduced herself as Nadya Strode, Head of the Astrogation Unit, and Kalkas recognized a diplomatic pattern. The Spaceborn, not wanting to offend the man who might signal the Conservancy’s re-entry into space but also not wanting to appear overanxious, were delegating first officers to escort the traveler. Twenty years ago Kalkas would have been met in Trojan Port by the Logistics Officer, if by anyone; the Associate Quartermaster would have welcomed him aboard Vega . But he suspected that now the Commander’s first impulse and the Captain’s had been to greet the Earthman himself, that impulse diverted by the reflection that the Conservancy occasionally misled by being entirely straightforward. Kalkas guessed that the Blushing Tunnels had already been advised to have the Executive Engineer at the landing zone.

Nadya Strode’s own concerns were obvious: She wanted to store the supercargo for which she had been made responsible and hurry back to the control bay where she belonged. Although she betrayed no curiosity about the only Earthman she could have seen since she was ten or twelve, she did try to put Kalkas at ease in an environment she seemed to assume was thoroughly strange to him.

“Things will seem more normal when we start blasting,” she said. “That’ll give us up and down again.”

Like any flight attendant demonstrating the safety bubble, she showed Kalkas how to use the netting strips and handholds, then led him along the gallery. The interior of Vega differed from the interior of Trojan Port chiefly in scale and the frequency of straight lines. There were no buggy cages, of course, but the elevators had a similar function. Kalkas remarked that the longrunners had apparently not been altered in fifteen years.

“It’s a good design,” said Nadya Strode. “When we build our own they won’t be a tad different.”

In a more amiable mood or of a less businesslike person Kalkas would not have permitted himself to ask, “Do you expect ever to serve on a Moonbuilt longrunner?”

“No, we’ll probably ask Trojan Port to build them. I’ve heard we’re beginning to stockpile capital materiel in Grimaldi.”

Kalkas would have been less discomfited had there been any hint of sardonicism in Strode’s manner.

The design of supercargo volume in a longrunner intended primarily to transfer goods owes much to George Pullman. During the years since the Retirement Kalkas had forgotten what thin partitions divide one acceleration couch from another and what modest arrangements are made for privacy. His own bungalow in Canea was small, of course, but he could never feel cramped while the Mediterranean was soughing forty feet from his window. Now he had neither window nor door but only the grey screen of a tape deck and an accordion-pleated panel. After unfolding the panel and checking the bins to make sure his bags had been stowed, he strapped himself to the couch and, on a whim, asked the library if it had Hugo. He wanted to read “Driving Montana” again, because he had remembered, in this most purely manmade place, that “you are lost / in miles of land without people, without / one fear of being found, in the dash / of rabbits, soar of antelope, swirl / merge and clatter of streams.” The library responded with a sette of Odes et Ballades, leaving Kalkas with nothing to do but doze until the blast started, wondering hazily what sort of bird an antelope had been.