Lois Bujold: Falling Free

“Tony, you bring the beam welder over—TURN IT OFF FIRST!” Feedback squeal lanced through everyone’s earphones, and Leo modulated his voice from his first urgent panicked bellow. The beam had in fact been off, but the controls live; one accidental bump, as Tony swung the machine around, and—Leo’s eye traced the hypothetical slice through the nearby wing of the Habitat, and he shuddered. “Get your head out of your ass, Tony! I saw a man cut in half by one of his friends once by just that careless trick.”

“Sorry… thought it would save time… sorry…” Tony mumbled.

“You know better.” Leo calmed, as his heart stopped palpitating. “In this hard vacuum that beam won’t stop till it hits the third moon, or whatever it might encounter in between.” He almost continued, stopped himself; no, not over the public comm channel. Later.

Later, as his students unsuited in the equipment locker, laughing and joking as they cleaned and stored their work suits, Leo drifted over to the silent and pale Tony. Surely I didn’t bark at him that hard, Leo thought to himself. Figured he was more resilient… “Stop and see me when you’re finished here,” said Leo quietly.

Tony flinched guiltily. “Yes, sir.” After his fellows had all swooped out, eager for their end-of-shift meal, Tony hung in air, both sets of arms crossed protectively across his torso. Leo floated near, and spoke in a grave tone.

“Where were you, out there today?”

“Sorry, sir. It won’t happen again.”

“It’s been happening all week. You got something on your mind, boy?”

Tony shook his head. “Nothing—nothing to do with you, sir.”

Meaning, nothing to do with work, Leo interpreted that. All right, so. “If it’s taking your mind off your work, it does have something to do with me. Want to talk about it? You got girl trouble? Little Andy all right? You have a fight with somebody?”

Tony’s blue eyes searched Leo’s face in sudden uncertainty, then he grew closed and inward once again. “No, sir.”

“You worried about going out on that contract? I guess it will be the first time away from home for you lads, at that.”

“It’s not that,” denied Tony. He paused, watching Leo again. “Sir—are there a great many other companies out there besides ours?

“Not a great many, for deep interstellar work,” Leo replied, a little baffled by this new turn in the conversation. “We’re the biggest, of course, though there’s maybe a half dozen others that can give us some real competition. In the heavily populated systems, like Tau Ceti or Escobar or Orient or of course Earth, there’s always a lot of little companies operating on a smaller scale. Super-specialists, or entrepreneurial mavericks, this and that. The outer worlds are coming on strong lately.”

“So—so if you ever quit GalacTech, you could get another job in space.”

“Oh, sure. I’ve even had offers—but our company does the most of the sort of work I want to do, so there’s no reason to go elsewhere. And I’ve got a lot of seniority accumulated by now, and all that goes with it. I’ll probably be with GalacTech till I retire, if I don’t die in harness.” Probably from a heart attack brought on by watching one of my students try to accidentally kill himself. Leo did not speak the thought aloud; Tony seemed chastized enough. But still abstracted.

“Sir… tell me about money.”

“Money?” Leo raised his brows. “What’s to tell? The stuff of life.”

“I’ve never seen any—I’d understood it was sort of coded value-markers to, to facilitate trade, and keep count.”

“That’s right.”

“How do you get it?”

“Well—most people work for it. They, ah, trade their labor for it. Or if they own or manufacture or grow something, they can sell it. I work.”

“And GalacTech gives you money?”

“Uh, yes.”

“If I asked, would the company give me money?”

“Ah…” Leo became conscious of skating on very thin ice. His private opinion of the Cay Project had perhaps better remain just that, while he ate the company’s bread. His job was to teach safe quality welding procedures, not—foment union demands, or whatever this conversation was sliding toward. “Whatever would you spend it on, up here? GalacTech gives you everything you need. Now, when I’m downside, or not on a company installation, I have to buy my own food, clothing, travel and what-not. Besides,” Leo reached for a less queasily specious argument, “up till now, you haven’t actually done any work for GalacTech, although it’s done plenty for you. Wait till you’ve actually been out on a contract and done some real producing. Then maybe it might be time to talk about money.” Leo smiled, feeling hypocritical, but at least loyal.

“Oh.” Tony seemed to fold inward on some secret disappointment. His blue eyes flicked up, probing Leo again. “When one of the company Jump ships leaves Rodeo—where does it go first?”

“Depends on where it’s wanted, I guess. Some run straight all the way to Earth. If there’s cargo or people to divide up for other destinations, the first stop is usually Orient Station.” “GalacTech doesn’t own Orient Station, does it?” “No, it’s owned by the government of Orient IV. Although GalacTech leases a good quarter of it.”

“How long does it take to get to Orient Station from Rodeo?”

“Oh, usually about a week. You’ll probably be stopping there yourself quite soon, if only to pick up extra equipment and supplies, when you’re sent out on your first construction contract.”

The boy was looking more outer-directed now, perhaps thinking about his first interstellar trip. That was better. Leo relaxed slightly.

“I’ll be looking forward to that, sir.”

“Right. If you don’t cut your foot, er, hand off meanwhile, eh?”

Tony ducked his head and grinned. “I’ll try not to, sir.”

And what was that all about? Leo wondered, watching Tony sail out the door. Surely the boy could not be thinking of trying to strike out on his own? Tony had not the least conception of what a freak he would seem, beyond his familiar Habitat. If he would only open up a little more…

Leo shrank from the thought of confronting him. Every downsider staff member in the Habitat seemed to feel they had a right to the quaddies’ personal thoughts. There wasn’t a lockable door anywhere in the quaddies’ living quarters. They had all the privacy of ants under glass.

He shook off the critical thought, but could not shake off his queasiness. All his life he had placed his faith in his own technical integrity—if he followed that star, his feet would not stumble. It was ingrained habit by now, he had brought that technical integrity to the teaching of Tony’s work gang almost automatically. And yet… this time, it did not seem to be quite enough. As if he had memorized the answer, only to discover the question had been changed.

Yet what more could be demanded of him? What more could he be expected to give? What, after all, could one man do?

A spasm of vague fear made him blink, the hard-edged stars in the viewport smeared, as the looming shadow of the dilemma clouded on the horizon of his conscience. More…

He shivered, and turned his back to the vastness. It could swallow a man, surely.

Ti, the freight shuttle co-pilot, had his eyes closed. Perhaps that was natural at times like this, Silver thought, studying his face from a distance of ten centimeters. At this range her eyes could no longer superimpose their stereoscopic images, so his twinned face overlapped itself. If she squinted just right, she could make him appear to have three eyes. Men really were rather alien. Yet the metal contact implanted in his forehead, echoed at both temples, did not have that effect, seeming more a decoration or a mark of rank. She blinked one eye closed, then the other, causing his face to shift back and forth in her vision.