Lois Bujold - Falling Free

Claire nodded, paused. Andy was not the only one of them plagued by biology, she reflected grimly. “Tony, do you think we can find a toilet on the way back? I need to go.”

“Yeah, me too,” Tony admitted. “Did you see any on the way here?”

“No.” Locating the facilities had not been uppermost on her mind then, on that nightmare journey, creeping over the floors, dodging hurrying downsiders, squeezing Andy tightly to her for fear that he might cry out. Claire wasn’t even sure she could reconstruct the route they’d taken, when they’d been driven out of their first hiding place by the busy work crew descending upon their machines and powering them up.

“There’s got to be something,” Tony reasoned optimistically, “people work here.”

“Not in this section,” Claire noted, gazing out at the wall of storage cells across the aisle. “It’s all robots.”

“Back toward the hangar, then. Say…”his voice faltered, “uh… do you happen to know what a gravity-field toilet chamber looks like? How do they manage? Air suction couldn’t possibly fight the gee forces.”

One of Silver’s smuggled historical vid dramas had involved a scene with an outhouse, but Claire was certain that was obsolete technology. “I think they use water, somehow.”

Tony wrinkled his nose, shrugged away his bafflement. “We’ll figure it out.” His eye fell rather wistfully on the little wad of diapers in the corner. “It’s too bad…”

“No!” said Claire, repelled. “Or at least—at least let’s try to find a toilet first.”

“All right.…”

A distant rhythmic tapping was growing louder. Tony, about to swing out on the ladder, muttered “Oops,” and recoiled back into the cubicle. He held a finger to his lips, panic in his face, and they all scuttled to the back of the cell.

“Aaah?” said Andy. Claire snatched him up and stuffed the tip on one breast into his mouth. Full and bored, he declined to nurse, turning his head away. Claire let her T-shirt fall back down and tried to distract him by silently counting all his busy fingers. He too had become smudged with dirt, as she had; no big surprise, planets were made of dirt. Dirt looked better from a distance. Say, a couple of hundred kilometers.…

The tapping grew louder, passed under their cell, faded.

“Company Security man,” Tony whispered in Claire’s ear.

She nodded, hardly daring to breathe. The tapping was from those hard downsider foot coverings striking the cement floor. A few minutes passed, and the tapping did not return. Andy made only small cooing noises.

Tony stuck his head cautiously out the chamber, looked right and left, up and down. “All right. Get ready to help me lower the pack as soon as this next forklift goes by. It’ll have to fall the last meter, but maybe the sound of the forklift will cover that some.”

Together they shoved the pack toward the edge of the cell, and waited. The whirring robolift was approaching down the corridor, an enormous plastic storage crate almost as large as a cubicle positioned on its lift.

The forklift stopped below them, beeped to itself, and turned ninety degrees. With a whine, its lift began to rise.

At this point, Claire recalled that theirs was the only empty cell in this stack.

“It’s coming here! We’re going to get squashed!”

“Get out! Get out on the ladder!” Tony yelped.

Instead she scuttled back to grab Andy, whom she’d laid at the rear of the chamber as far as possible from the frightening edge while she’d helped Tony shove the pack forward. The chamber darkened as the rising crate eclipsed the opening. Tony barely squeezed past it onto the ladder as it began to grind inward.

“Claire!” Tony screamed. He pounded uselessly on the side of the huge plastic crate. “Claire! No, no! Stupid robot! Stop, stop!”

But the forklift, clearly, was not voice-activated. It kept coming, bulldozing their pack before it. There were only a few centimeters’ clearance on the sides and top of the crate. Claire retreated, so terrified her screams clotted in her throat like cotton, and she emitted only a smeary squeak. Back, back; the cold metal wall behind froze her. She flattened against it as best she could, standing on her lower hands, holding Andy with her uppers. He was howling now, infected by her terror, earsplitting shrieks.

“Claire!” Tony cried from the ladder, a horrified bellow laced with tears. “ANDY!”

The pack, beside them, compressed. Little crunching noises came from it. At the last moment, Claire transferred Andy to her lower arms, below her torso, bracing against the crate, against gravity, with her uppers. Perhaps her crushed body would hold the crate off just far enough to save him—the robolift’s servos skreeled with overload…

And began to withdraw. Claire sent a silent apology to their oversized pack for all the curses she and Tony had heaped upon it in the past hours. Nothing in it would ever be the same, but it had saved them. The robolift hiccoughed, gears grinding bewilderedly. The crate shifted on its pallet, out of sync now. As the lift withdrew, the crate skidded with it, dragged by friction and gravity, skewing farther and farther from true.

Claire watched open-mouthed as it tilted and fell from the opening. She rushed forward. The crash shook the warehouse as the crate hit the concrete, followed by a booming shattered echo, the loudest sound Claire had ever heard. The crate took the forklift with it, its wheels whirring helplessly in air as it banged onto its side.

The power of gravity was stunning. The crate split, its contents spilling. Hundreds of round metal wheelcovers of some kind burst forth, ringing like a stampede of cymbals. A dozen or so rolled down the aisle in either direction as if bent on escape, wobbling into the corridor walls and falling onto their sides, still spinning, in ever-diminishing whanging pulses of sound. The echoes rang on in Claire’s ears for a moment in the stupendous silence that followed. “Oh, Claire!” Tony swarmed back into the cell and wrapped all his arms around her, Andy between them, as if he might never let go again. “Oh, Claire…” His voice cracked as he rubbed his face against her soft short hair.

Claire looked over his shoulder at the carnage they had created below. The overturned robolift was beeping again, like an animal in pain. “Tony, I think we better get out of here,” she suggested in a small voice.

“I thought you were coming behind me, onto the ladder. Right behind me.”

“I had to get Andy.”

“Of course. You saved him, while I—saved myself. Oh, Claire! I didn’t mean to leave you in there…”

“I didn’t think you did.”

“But I jumped—”

“It would have been plain stupid not to. Look, can we talk about it later? I really think we ought to get out of here.”

“Yes, oh yes. Uh, the pack…?” Tony peered into the dimness of the recess.

Claire didn’t think they were going to have time for the pack, either—yet how far could they get without it? She helped Tony drag it back to the edge with frantic haste.

“If you brace yourself back there, while I hang onto the ladder, we can lower it—” Tony began.

Claire pushed it ruthlessly over the edge. It landed on the mess below, tumbled to the concrete. “I don’t think there’s any more point in worrying about the breakables now. Let’s go,” she urged.

Tony gulped, nodded, moved quickly onto the ladder, sparing one upper arm to help support Andy, whom Claire held in her lowers, her upper hands slapping down the rungs. Then they were back to the floor and their slow, frustrating, crabwise locomotion along it. Claire was beginning to hate the cold, dusty smell of concrete.