Janus (10 page)

Grebbel left the treatment room and closed the door behind him. In the lobby, he checked the room number he had written down and followed a short corridor to a room smelling of solvents. He knocked on the open door and went in. A lab and storeroom. He found he recognised fume hoods and petri dishes, a centrifuge, a microbalance, among other glassware and instruments. Near the door was a desk that looked to have been recently tidied, and a dark computer screen.

“Can we help you?” A middle-aged woman in a white lab coat approached him. She wore transparent gloves. In a far corner, a short, heavily built man was rewiring a grey-shelled instrument.

Grebbel introduced himself to the woman. He explained who he was and that he believed he had been trained as a technician and retained most of his skills. “I understand you’re short of help now.”

“We have been from the start,” the woman said. “Now we’re two short. I’m Rena Schneider, our chief excuse for an exobiologist, and that’s Raul Osmon in the corner there. He comes in a couple of days a week and does our general maintenance. So they put you in the driving pool, did they? That’s odd, they’re usually more sensible than that. So I take it you’re looking for a different work assignment, rather than just a tour of our little empire.”

“That’s right. I’d be willing to work here in my spare time. I thought, it might help me remember my life back there.”

“What am I supposed to say, ‘No’?” She pursed her lips. “But first let’s see how much you really do remember.”

She went back to the bench she had been working at and pipetted solutions from a set of phials into labelled centrifuge tubes. As she worked, she asked him the names and uses of pieces of equipment, and asked him to describe some standard laboratory techniques. Terminology floated into his mind; his hands knew the feel of forceps and polycarbonate glassware. At the end, she loaded the centrifuge and switched it on, and peeled off her gloves.

“You’ve obviously been in a lab before,” she said, “though I wouldn’t have guessed it was in the last five years. But I think we can give you a try-out. If you don’t look like destroying the place, we’ll see if we can make it official.”

They arranged that he would come in for about an hour after dinner that day, and he left, feeling he had taken one real step towards recovering his identity.

The dump-truck motor whined and then howled as Grebbel took the slope too quickly. He eased off and pulled to the edge of the ramp under the loading chute. Gravel thudded into the truck, then came in a steady stream that set the cab shaking. On the windscreen, splashes of mud shivered across the unfurled fronds of the trees that clung to the far wall of the valley; a wave of slate colour and shadow with tiny highlights slithered across it as a sudden burst of sunlight struck low along its wind-tossed surface. His knuckles on the steering wheel briefly gleamed back at him from the windshield.

He thought of Elinda’s friend lying out in the woods alone, with that wind tearing at her. He would have to ask Elinda what they had learned since then.

He wondered how deeply Elinda was getting under his skin. How easily had he formed attachments in his old life?

He turned onto the causeway.

The rest of the morning passed. The sun rose a few more degrees. The wind calmed. The heavy, ragged clouds began to thin; between them the sky turned smoke-blue. He parked the truck and plugged in the charger, and headed for the cafeteria.

At the entrance, a man called out behind him, “Hey, get the door for me, will you, mate?”

Grebbel turned. “Sorry, I didn’t see you. I was looking for someone.”

The other was the man in the silver astronaut uniform and the black exoskeleton enclosing his legs whom Grebbel had met earlier. He swayed forward, his arms out for balance. Grebbel heard the whine of motors.

“Hold it open for me, will you? Servo control’s fucked up on the legs. All I can do to stay aloft today.” The man was black-haired and gaunt, his face tanned and deeply lined so that his eyes peered darkly from under his brows. “Can’t always predict when it’ll give trouble, but I’d be fixed and back up there if this port had its priorities sorted out. Standard feedback nets, these things take; but they don’t have them here, and it’ll take a month to tool up to make them.”

He nodded to Grebbel. “Still finding your way around here, are you? If you don’t see your friend, you want to join us? There’s a few of us getting tired of our own company. Bill Partridge, that’s me. And over there, that’s Lucinda and Olaf.” The two nodded in Partridge’s direction from a table by the far wall.

“Jon Grebbel.” He scanned the room, briefly wondered whether to wait. “Thanks, I’d like to join you.”

Partridge grimaced as he lurched and paused collecting a tray. “Too much microgee—to save you asking—” he said crisply, “and a slight disagreement with a shuttle about who had the right of way into the dock.”

“So what’s going to happen to you? Will they ship you back?”

Partridge concentrated on loading his tray before he replied. “Shipping back—that’s a bitch of a job. The delta-vee’s not as bad as it should be, but it’s nothing to giggle about, and there’s all the little warps and tricks the transfer does to your clocks and your hormone levels and your brain. It’s worse going that way, and it’s worse the second time through. No, I’m stuck this side for a week or ten yet, and not too heartbroken about it. Almost like the good old days at times.
Challenger
,
Columbia
—saw that one, I did—Need Another Seven Astronauts . . . But I’d give up what’s left of these dry-stick legs if it would get me back on the circuit up there.”

“You like your job,” Grebbel commented. They had made their way to a table with the other astronauts.

“Sure as hell I like it. But they
need
us up there too. They want fuel if they’re going to survey this system. Reaction mass, and no one’s found an oilfield. We could put up solar arrays in orbit: need a couple of shuttles for maybe five years, or you could even ship the mirrors through in bits from the other side. Five years, ten max, and you’ll get all the power you can use. If you can wait ten years, reaction mass isn’t such a problem: if you’re that patient, there’s nothing wrong with sails or ion drives. But they want it faster—they say. That means oxy-hydrogen for the foreseeable future. So they build hydro plants down mudside here. Then you need electrolysers, compressors, cryogenics to store the stuff, and you’ve got to wait till all that’s checked out and working before you can start lifting fuel into orbit. Sure, it’s still a bit faster, and you get a chance for a look at the real estate here while you’re working. But you don’t gain that much.”

Partridge broke off and started forking down the casserole on his plate. He gestured with his free hand, while he swallowed. “If they really wanted to do it right, they’d send a couple of ships—no crew, no life support, just smart robots—out to the gas giants. Get hold of a comet or two, or a hefty piece of ring. Eighty percent ice—all the fuel, all the reaction mass you need, and it’s in orbit, right where you need it.”

“So why don’t they listen to you?”

“Politics. They want their colony. Something to show the voters for the money. Not much gets shipped back yet, but there’s a feed into the news net damn near every ten minutes, and you’d better believe it’s given some kind of priority.” He made another attack on his meal.

“Perhaps there’s no urgency about fuelling up for a full-scale survey, then,” Grebbel said, “if we haven’t found a good way of shipping things back yet.”

“Sure, that’s a part of it, too. But even that’s to do with fuel—delta-vee, energy transfer.”

“In the meantime, you’re stuck down here spectating?”

“Oh, I do the odd bit of bookkeeping, check manifests on the gasbags, a bit of maintenance. I’d like to get back to the Flats—at least I’d be able to work on the shuttles there, be more a part of things. Still, being a spectator with some time on your hands has its advantages now and then. You see things everyone’s forgotten about. You see how some old folk behave, and how things go on that others haven’t had time to notice.”

“Such as?”

“Such as—well, such as that redhead in the brown shirt off to your left. Listening to her headset, closing her eyes and rapping her fingers. Damn near every day she’s here like that. Except, you get close to her—get her to open the door for you, say, and you’ve got good ears—there’s nothing going through those phones.”

“You think she’s lost a few chips from her motherboard?”

Partridge leaned back, narrowing his eyes. “That’s the best part of being a spectator,” he said. “You get to watch and listen, but you don’t have to think. Anybody asks you what it means, it’s just another inexplicable quirk of human behaviour.”

“Do you have any idea where we are?” Grebbel asked. If Partridge really wanted to hint at something, let him come back to it himself. “I mean if they can transmit radio signals through the Knot both ways, doesn’t that mean we can’t be too far from the transmitter on the other side?”

“Man, I’m a plumber, and you want the city surveyor. Or a Zen Buddhist, maybe. All I know, when they have to clean up the signals they receive at this end, it’s like they’d been stretched and then not quite sprung back into shape. Like a rubber ball that’d been forced through a hosepipe, maybe. You’re asking how long the hose might be, or which end has the tap on it, or maybe where the gardener is. One thing for sure: the last I knew, they hadn’t got a fix on anything they could recognise here—pulsar frequencies don’t match, none of the galaxies in the local group, quasar shifts—nothing fits. And needless to say, none of the local stars match anything in their catalogues. It’s the same sort of place as ours, but it’s not ours. Or if it’s ours, it’s not ours when we left it.”

“You think we might be back in time? Or ahead?”

“Makes nearly as much sense as any of the other choices, which isn’t a lot. But I just sit here and watch and listen. Thinking’s a job for those that like it.”

Grebbel frowned. “Unless it becomes a habit.”

“Ah, then—it depends on what you’re thinking about—it can get you in serious problems. Even here.”

Grebbel raised his eyebrows and said nothing.

“Thinking, it puts all sorts of stress on the body, running those voltage pulses up and down the circuits, burning up calories, increasing the need for food, developing ulcers, overheating the skull. Stands to reason, something’s gonna wear out faster when you use it like that.”

“Sounds fair enough,” said Grebbel. “But why here especially? And thinking about what?”

Partridge leaned back again, squinting so that Grebbel could not tell whether the man was looking at him or the ceiling. “Depends who you are,” he said finally. “If you were the wrong sort of person, you might get yourself quite sick wondering about our red-headed friend—who’s just leaving through the main doors now, incidentally—asking yourself if she really was two spots short on her dice. Or, if you were a slightly different type of person, you might have a morbid curiosity about what she thinks about, sitting in the middle of all those conversations with her player that doesn’t make any sound playing all the time. But of course, you’re not a bit like those sorts yourself.”

“You’ve got it. I’m just curious about who I was and why I came here.”

“Well there you are then. No problem at all. Nothing like the other two topics at all. Absolutely no connection whatsofuckingever.”

“I was beginning to think that myself.”

“There’s that word again,” said Partridge. “You’ve got to keep away from it.”

“Right.”

“Ah, you’ll be all right. Just got to learn when to keep your head down, and you’ll pick that up easy enough.”

“Well, thanks.” Grebbel looked around the dining area. He hadn’t seen Elinda come past, and he couldn’t find her at any of the tables. “It’s been an interesting conversation. Though I’m afraid I can’t recall a thing we talked about.”

“Neither can I. Funny, isn’t it?”

Elinda made her way to the clinic. She had been awake most of the official night, watching an almost motionless sliver of sunlight angle through the blind, and now the daylight was harsh enough to hurt.