Skye Object 3270a (17 page)

I
t was, Skye decided, a lot like going nowhere.

They had climbed to the top of the elevator car, the hot zones on their suits bonding and releasing as they moved hand and foot, hand and foot. Low gravity made the ascent easy. As Skye climbed, she felt like a fly crawling up a wall.

Skye and Zia stayed close together . . . just in case one of them needed comfort on the way. Skye's belly still felt hollow with fear. She couldn't imagine how Zia was feeling. They climbed in silence, until suddenly Skye gasped, as a new worry hit her. Zia turned at the sound.

“What?”

“Ord,” Skye squeaked. “Where's Ord?” She hadn't seen it since they spilled out of Devi's badly designed bubble.

Zia squinted through her visor. “It's on your shoulder.”

Skye turned to look. She could just see a flash of gold out of the corner of her eye. She reached up to touch the little robot, to assure herself it was all right. She waited for a tentacle to wrap affectionately around her hand. But Ord did not stir. Through her gloved fingers, its body felt oddly stiff. Almost frozen.

Zia's frown deepened to a scowl. She poked at it, but still Ord did not move. “Is it dead?”

“Don't say that.”

Devi climbed up on her other side. He touched Ord too, tugging at one of the long tentacles wrapped around Skye's pack strap. “It's sure not active. I guess it wasn't made to work in vacuum. You know, without our suits, we'd fail out here too.”

“No kidding!” She felt the hot sting of tears in her eyes. Whenever she and Zia had jumped, she'd been careful to leave Ord behind, locked up somewhere. This time though, she hadn't thought about its safety at all.

“Hey,” Devi said gently. “All I meant was, it's probably gone dormant.”

She blinked hard, searching for his eyes behind the shadowed curve of his visor. “You think so?”

“Well, why not? It doesn't look damaged. It just looks . . .”

“Cold,” Zia suggested.

“Sooth. Cold.”

Skye fingered one of Ord's tentacles. It was stiff, and harder than usual, but otherwise it looked normal. . . . “I guess we'll find out when we reach the lifeboat.”

They started climbing again. It was only a few minutes later when they reached the top. Buyu and Zia tramped away from the edge, but Skye could not resist the allure of the abyss. She rolled out on top of the elevator car. Then she sat up.

Her legs dangled over the side. Her gloved hands clenched the lip as she leaned forward, looking down, swinging her feet over . . . sixteen thousand kilometers of nothing.

Morning spilled over the horizon of the little world far, far below them. So very far, yet she could still feel the insistent presence of that world in the weak gravity that let her sit, instead of floating away. How could Deception Well reach out so far, through so much empty space, to affect her? Gravity. Invisible and ever present. This was surely the craziest moment of her life.

She leaned back, looking over her shoulder now at the elevator column. Kheth's light had not yet reached this far. It was still night here. They were in the planet's shadow, so the column looked like a vast, featureless, black wall. Skye squinted, but she could not make out the track the elevator followed. She could see no sign at all that they were moving.

For a moment she felt disoriented, wondering if the car had stopped.

Then she looked up. A few kilometers overhead, the black column blazed brilliant silver. Sunlight! Of course. The end of the elevator column would swing out of the planet's shadow first, catching the light long before sunrise chased away the night in the rainforest at the elevator's base.

The boundary of darkness and brilliant light raced toward them, banishing all her doubts about the elevator car's speed. They were shooting toward that silvery light. She held her breath, and within a handful of seconds they slid from starlit night to blinding day. Devi whooped.

Skye turned to look for him, and found him only a few steps away, standing on the edge of the car, his arms outstretched as if were ready to take the whole of that magnificent vista in his embrace.

She shared his exhilaration. Throwing back her head, she howled—a tiny spark of radio noise—the voice of life—in a vast and beautiful galaxy. When her lungs were empty, she refilled them again with a deep breath of manufactured air that tasted better than any air she had ever breathed before.

It didn't get boring after that.

Not exactly.

She felt a little discouraged though, when Zia commented dryly, “You know Skye, we're going to be out here two days.”

Two days.

An awfully long time in a skin suit.

Now that they were in full sunlight, Skye once again experienced the odd sensation that they were not moving. “Sooth,” Devi said, when she mentioned it to him. “Moving at a constant speed is almost the same thing as standing still. If you're not speeding up or slowing down, if you're not turning, if there's no wind in your face, or landmarks sliding past, then there's no way to tell whether you're moving or not. It's not motion that the body senses. It's
change
in motion. Here on the elevator car, everything is constant, including our speed.”

Sooth. Deception Well was so far away now that Skye could not perceive it getting smaller from moment to moment. Only when she looked again after several minutes did she notice a difference. The only possible reference was the elevator column itself, but their speed blurred any landmarks that might be there.

It was, she decided after awhile, a lot like going nowhere.

There might be no sensation of moving, but progress could be measured in other ways. The pull of gravity continued to decline the further they rose above the planet. Deception Well continued to shrink in size, until it seemed impossible that such a tiny sphere could anchor a structure as immense as the elevator column. Most embarrassing, Skye's bladder continued to swell, until the pressure became unbearable.

She switched off her suit radio. Then she closed her eyes and whispered to the DI, “
I have to pee
.” Her cheeks grew hot as she said it. She knew a skin suit could be used for days and days without a break so long as it was supplied with liquid nutrients. A skin suit was almost a living thing. It consumed the same liquid nutrient diet that she sucked from a feeding tube that would emerge by her mouth whenever she asked for it.

So obviously her skin suit must be able to handle the other end of the digestive cycle—but despite all the time Skye had spent jumping off the elevator column, and even during her trip to Deception Well, she had never investigated its humble functions.

Her suit DI did not answer for several seconds. Finally, it spoke in its soft, female voice, sounding puzzled. “Is this a query?”

“Yes,” Skye said, her voice low, as if someone might hear her. “Is there some special procedure . . . something I'm . . . supposed to do . . . when I pee?”

“Urination requires the contraction of the smooth muscles surrounding the bladder. Do you require assistance with this?”

Skye covered her face with her hands. Her cheeks felt so hot she thought they might melt. “No! I just . . . I mean . . . I should just pee, right? And the skin suit will handle the . . . the waste?”

“That's correct. All bodily wastes are broken down and recycled into nutritional components.”

“Okay then.” She stared out at the abyss for several seconds. Then she gave in, feeling like a little kid who had waited too long.

To her surprise, there was no sensation of liquid flooding her legs. The suit absorbed it all, so that she experienced only a rush of intense warmth that remained steady as she emptied her bladder, then faded gradually when she was through.

Quite convenient, really.

Heat was a problem. They were far above any sheltering atmosphere. Kheth's light poured over them, undiluted by layers of air, or by a protective canopy like the one that covered Silk. The heat was intense, so after awhile they climbed a few meters down the shady side of the elevator car. They moved again as the light advanced, so that they stayed always in shadow. As the hours passed, they eventually climbed all the way down the side of the car, then across the bottom, and up again on the other side.

“It's not just the light we can see that could hurt us,” Devi said. “There's a lot of hard radiation up here. Our suits can screen out some of it, but most of our protection comes from the medical Makers in our bodies. They're always working hard to repair any damage to our cells.”

“Cell damage is repairable . . . right?” Zia asked.

“Oh sure. So long as our nutrients hold out.”

Just as dawn had touched the end of the elevator column first, so day lingered there the longest. Night flowed up from the planet, a sharply defined shadow that silently engulfed the elevator car. Skye turned, to watch the shadow-line climb beyond them, higher and higher along the column until, just before the last of the light disappeared, she was able to make out a silver parasol, gleaming in the distance.

“Devi, look!”

It was the counterweight at the end of the elevator column. The end of their journey was in sight! A cheer went up among their small group, but even before it died away the light failed. Then only the milky nebula could be seen, and a few bright stars.

Skye fell asleep bonded to the top of the elevator car. The pack got in her way, and every time she wanted to turn over, she awoke. She didn't sleep much.

Daylight came, and they began a second migration around the car, following the cool shadows, staying out of the light. Had Yulyssa realized yet that Skye was missing? Or would she assume Skye had decided to spend an extra night with Zia?

Ord still did not move.

Skye slept better the next night, though she awoke early. It was still dark on the elevator car. Blinking, she looked up.

Dawn light had drawn a silver crescent on the counterweight. Skye gasped, astonished at its size. It had not looked nearly so big last night. Now she watched the crescent of light widen to reveal an immense disk sitting atop arching struts that sprouted from the elevator column like branches, holding up a shimmering gray sky.

The counterweight balanced the mass of the elevator column. Without it, the column would collapse, plunging downward into the planet's gravity well, falling through the atmosphere and striking the world with such force that most of the life there would likely be destroyed.

The counterweight.

Skye continued to gaze at it as the elevator ferried them upward.

As they neared the end of their journey, the elevator car slowed. It slipped between the arching struts, each one as wide as the widest tower in Silk, but built on a curve so that its base rested on the column while its far end extended well-out beneath the gray roof of the counterweight. What would it be like to climb one of those struts? To walk up its back until it was possible to touch that gigantic roof?

Skye smiled. Maybe someday she would try it.

Buyu stood gazing directly overhead. “I think we should get off the top of the car,” he said quietly. “We don't want to be trapped against a roof.”

Skye peered upward, to where the track dove into a black circle carved out of the counterweight. It had to be a shaft. Squinting, she made out flecks of white glowing within the dark circle. “That's starlight! Buyu? Do you see it? Those are stars peeping through an elevator shaft. We're going to be carried straight through to the other side of the counterweight.”

So they stayed where they were—and it proved a good decision. Kheth's brilliant light vanished abruptly as the elevator car entered the shaft. Walls slipped past only a few centimeters away. Buyu's sigh was audible over the radio system. “Zeme dust. If we'd tried climbing down the side of the car, we would have been crushed.”

The elevator carried them up past dimly lit loading bays, floor after floor of them, each filled with ingots of pure elements: metals, and carbons, and things Skye could not name, all formed into precise blocks, each the size of a house, stored here against the day they would be needed in some construction project. Perhaps they would be used in the creation of the great ship. Perhaps they would bide here, awaiting some other future not yet foreseen.

“I had no idea the counterweight had so many levels,” Zia said softly. “And we're only seeing a tiny part of it, aren't we? There's room here for a whole new city!”

“Several cities,” Devi said, “if the ecology can be balanced.”

Room for new people and new cultures, Skye thought. She looked up, to the patch of starry darkness looming overhead, thinking about the hidden lifeboats that had to be out there, somewhere.

The elevator moved slowly now, only a meter or so per second. Zia said, “Let's lie flat. We don't want to be seen.”

Sooth.

They pressed themselves against the roof. Skye kept her head up just high enough to peer over the edge of the car. As they rose into the next loading bay, she glimpsed several figures in skin suits near the far wall, all of them waving cheerfully at the arriving car. Instantly, she ducked her head.

A few seconds later the roof of the car drew even with the roof of the loading bay, leaving them safely concealed within the shaft. Then at last it happened.

They stopped.

Skye sat up slowly, staring at the walls of the elevator shaft, hardly able to believe they were really here.

She craned her neck, looking up. The shaft extended for another ten meters or so. Then it ended. Starlight and the milky threads of the nebula filled the void.

Buyu chuckled. “We could jump from here.”

“And never fall back down,” Devi said dryly. “It's a lot safer to climb.”

Skye wanted to tell them both to shut up. She worried: What if their radio traffic was picked up by the skin suits in the loading bay? That shouldn't happen. The skin suits used select frequencies, picking up only those transmissions coded for them . . . just like a phone call.

Still, she could not shake the sense that someone might “overhear” them. Did the personnel on the counterweight scan for all radio signals?

Why would they?

No one knows we
'
re here
, Skye reminded herself.

“Let's go,” Devi said. “We don't have a lot of time to get ready for our crossing to the construction zoo.”