Конни Уиллис - Terra Incognita - Three Novellas

Oh, frick.

“So I went online and found a lawyer who specializes in Academy law.”

“And?” Creez, this lag was maddening.

“He said he only handled cases of cadets who’d been eliminated from the Academy and were trying to get reinstated. He said he couldn’t find any record of a case where a cadet had wanted out .”

“Did he say how these cases he handled got eliminated?” I asked, thinking maybe I could do whatever it was they did.

“Failing their courses, mostly,” she said. “But, listen, don’t do anything that might mess up your chances at UCLA. That’s why these cadets file lawsuits, because flunking out of the Academy pretty much ruined their chances of getting into any other university.”

Worse and worse. “Listen, you’ve got to figure out some way we can talk.” I told her about the one call a month.

“I’ll see what I can do. They didn’t take your phone away from you, did they?”

“No,” I said.

“Did they say anything about how this call worked?”

“They called it a Y49TDRS, whatever that is.”

“It means it’s relayed through tracking, data, and relay satellites,” she said. “A Y49 shouldn’t be too hard to patch into, but it may take—”

There was a buzz. “Call over,” an automated voice said.

I spent the next day and a half checking my phone for messages and hoping Kimkim hadn’t been about to say, “It may take months for me to come up with something,” or, worse, “It may take extensive modifications to your phone’s circuits,” and worrying that if the registrar had been listening in, it didn’t matter. They’d jam whatever Kimkim tried.

Then classes started, and I spent every waking moment trying to keep up with cadets who’d not only taken astrogation and exobotany, but knew how to dock a shuttle, read a star chart, and brush their teeth while weightless. First-year cadets had to spend half of each watch in the non-rotated sections of the RAH, learning to live and work in microgravity. Most of them (including, of course, Libby) had taken classes in weightlessness on Earth, and the rest had clearly been chosen for their ability to float from one end of the module to the other without crashing into something, a gene I obviously lacked. The second day, I sneezed, did a backward triple somersault, and crashed into a bank of equipment, an escapade that gave me the idea of pleading a bad cold and asking to see the doctor—a medical discharge surely couldn’t hurt my chances at UCLA—but when I went to the infirmary, the medic said, “Stuffiness in the head is a normal side effect of weightlessness,” and gave me a sinus prescription.

“What about chronic vertigo?” I asked. I was actually down to only a couple of episodes a day, but it had occurred to me that “inability to tolerate space environment” might be a way out.

“If it hasn’t disappeared a month from now, come see me,” he said, and sent me back to EVA training. Luckily, I didn’t sneeze during my spacewalk and go shooting off into space, but being outside and linked to the RAH only by a thin tether reminded me just how dangerous space was.

Well, that, and the fact that those dangers were the second favorite topic of the cadets at mess and during rec periods. If they weren’t talking about the difficulty of detecting fires in a weightless environment (there aren’t any flames, just a hard-to-see reddish glow), they were recounting gruesome tales of jammed oxygen lines and carbon monoxide buildup and malfunctioning heating units which froze students into cadet-sicles. Or speculating on all the things that might happen, from unexpected massive solar flares to killer meteors to explosive decompression. All of which made it clear I needed to get off of here soon . I messaged the registrar during my study period, but he said he was still waiting for the cadet files.

There was still no word from Kimkim. I checked my phone every time I had the chance and tried to send her periodic Maydays, but each time the display said, “Number out of range,” which was putting it mildly.

I messaged the registrar again. Still waiting.

You’re still waiting ? I thought. At least he had an office of his own. He didn’t have to share with Miss Ohmigod, This Is So Incred! Libby adored everything about the Academy—the sardine-can cabins, the rehydrated food, the exhausting schedule of lectures and labs and exercise and freefall training. She even loved the falling-off-a-log vertigo. “Because then you know you’re really in space!”

And she wasn’t the worst one. Several of the cadets acted like they were in a cathedral, wandering the corridors with their mouths open and speaking in hushed, reverent tones. When I mentioned that the place smelled like a gym locker, they looked at me like I was committing heresy, and went back to the cadets’ favorite topic of conversation, how lucky they were to be here. By the end of a week, I was ready to walk through an airlock without a spacesuit just to get away from them.

I was also worried about how I was going to talk to Kimkim, if and when she figured out a phone connection, and about finding a safe place to stash my phone so the registrar couldn’t suddenly confiscate it. I checked the RAH ’s schematics, but there was nowhere a person could go to be alone on the entire space station. Every classroom and lab was used every hour of every watch. So were the mess, the gym, and the weightless modules, and when I’d gone to the infirmary, there hadn’t been separate examining rooms, just a tier of cots.

There was temporary privacy in the shower (very temporary—water is even more limited than the phone call times) and there was supposed to be “private time” half an hour before lights-out, but it wasn’t enforced, and Libby’s half of the cabin was always crammed with cadets discussing how exciting it had been to learn to use the zero-g toilet. I began to actually miss Coriander.

I checked the schematics again, looking for anything at all that might work. The inner room of the registrar’s office might in a pinch, though when I’d gone over to ask him what was taking the files so long, I’d been told the section was off-limits to first-years. So was the docking module, and all the outer sections were exposed to too much radiation to make them practical.

The only other possibility was the storage areas, which in the super-compact world of the RAH meant every space that wasn’t being used for something else—floors, ceilings, walls, even the airlocks. The diagrams showed all those spaces as filled with supplies, but it occurred to me (during a private-time discussion about the joys of learning to sit down in two-thirds g) that once those supplies had been used, the place they’d been might be empty.

I noted some of the possible spots and for the next few days spent my rest period exploring, and finally came up with a space between the plastic drums of nutrients for the hydroponics farm. It wasn’t very big, and it was above the ceiling, but luckily it was in the freefall area, and I’d finally figured out how to propel myself from one location to another in it without major damage. I half drifted, half rappelled my way up (over?) to the ceiling, squeezed into the space (which turned out to be a perfect size, big enough, but too small to drift around in), replaced the hatch, and spent a blissful fifteen minutes alone.

It would have been longer, but I remembered a class was scheduled to come in sometime soon, and I couldn’t afford to get caught. When I got back to my cabin, I memorized the freefall-area-use schedule and checked for a message from the registrar.

There wasn’t one, but on my schedule was “Conference Registrar’s office. Tuesday. 1600 hours.” Which meant I wouldn’t need a hiding place after all.