2312

Kiran and Swan

From the moment Kiran saw the woman his cousins had grabbed, everything changed. She was old, tall, good-looking. She moved as if she were swimming. He knew immediately that she was a spacer, and that kidnapping her was a terrible idea. After that everything went a bit too fast for him actually to be deciding what to do. This is what happened to him when he was in a pinch: he watched himself do what he did from just behind and to one side. People said he was cool, but really he was slow. And yet good things still seemed to happen.

Her hair was black; she looked Chinese or Mongol. Her eyes were brown, with a little blue patch at the bottom of one eye; and really it was her eyes that captured him. Some kind of coincidence—the girls back home had those same dark eyes with luminous whites, in a dark face—it was very compelling to him. She had looked to him the moment he had taken her arm, to show how much she wanted to be free—a very passionate look, as if she knew what being held captive was like, and was afraid. It shocked him how expressive her face was, how firmly she grabbed his attention. Her friend Zasha had called it Lima syndrome—maybe so. Maybe now he was an incompetent Peruvian.

But he was going to space. That meant leaving—but he could send money back to his relatives. They were tired of putting him up anyway. He could go and see what he had always dreamed of seeing—which was really just anywhere, but space in particular, ever since he was a small boy. Mars, the asteroids—anywhere out there. Everyone heard stories.

The woman drove them out to Newark. Jammed in the little seat behind them, he began to realize it was really happening—something, anyway. His idiot cousins were not going to be able to find him and beat him. A new life: he began to quiver slightly, as if he were the hostage who had been kidnapped. In a way it was almost true. Captured by a look, stuffed into the backseat of a car.

They came to an airport that did not look like Newark. They drove out to a hangar and were escorted up a stand of stairs into a small jet. He had never been in anything like it, and was impressed by its speed as they took off. They gave him a window seat and he watched Manhattan below, like a great ship of light. Off they went into the night.

Eventually he leaned his head on the window and fell asleep. Later he woke with a stiff neck, watched the ocean get closer. The jet landed on a green island with reddish soil.

Out into a pungent evening, humid air like mid-August in Jersey, almost like his childhood home in Hyderabad. Rice fields. Childhood memories sparked out of what he saw and smelled, and again he walked as if a little beside himself. He was very distracted as they entered a building. Mercury House, a sign said.

Inside, they took him to a big room, where immense white plastic tubs like those used in industrial kitchens were being sealed and loaded onto a pallet. “All right, young man,” said Swan’s friend Zasha, clearly still a little disgusted to have to be doing this for Swan. “In you go. Put on this spacesuit first, then the helmet. After that we’re going to cover you in dirt and worms, and up you go.” To Swan: “My friend won’t inspect the boxes that have my sign on them. He’s got the next shift.”

“Why the worms?”

“It’s a way to show I’m not using it casually. I only send up a couple people a year like this. And naturally he gets favors back from me.”

“What about the AI inspections?”

“What about them? We do a lot of stuff outside that system.” Zasha grinned fiercely at her. “This is a hawala elevator, the whole thing is set up to skip certain scans.”

Then Kiran was in a crinkly one-piece and had a helmet on and was breathing cool coppery air. They helped him in and laid him out in the tub as if in his coffin, and a wriggling mass of worms and black dirt was dumped over his body and face. He was going to leave Earth buried in worms. “Thank you!” he called out to the woman and her friend.

It was a long trip. Kiran lay there thinking. He could feel the worms writhing all over him. When he freaked out and hyperventilated, the helmet and suit seemed to be able to take it. Eventually he always had to calm back down. There were water and food tubes that would come out of the neck of the suit to where he could suck on them, and though the food was a paste, it was very sustaining. He was not too cold or too hot. The sensation of movement over him was disconcerting, sometimes horrible. This must be what it was like to be dead and buried. The worms would eat you. Or it was like the purification rites in certain festivals—in the Durga-puja, for instance, in which you were steeped in ash or manure until it was time for the cleansing. He liked that holiday. So here he was. As he had to eat and drink, then shit and pee, all in this suit, he was for the moment pretty much like the worms. We are poor forked worms on this Earth, his grandfather used to say. Birds pick us off.

As time passed he went entirely weightless. He had heard it took five days to ascend. It seemed longer. He began to get bored. When he felt a jolt upward, and then light flooded the dirt and the lid disappeared, he struggled up as carefully as he could, thinking the worms in the box were fellow travelers who deserved no harm. “Careful!” he commanded the people helping him out of the box, and Swan laughed at him.

She led him to a little bathroom. Once out of his suit, he showered. In the hot water he thought, Ah yes, this is the cleansing. Next came the purification; what would it be? Was this woman who had seized him a manifestation of Durga, mother of Ganesh—also sometimes manifested as Kali?

“You look good,” Swan said when he emerged from the bathroom. “Not too traumatic?”

Kiran shook his head. “Time to think. Where to next?”

Again she laughed. “This ship is going to Venus,” she told him. “I’m on my way to Mercury, so I’ll drop you off.”

Kiran said, “Isn’t Venus a Chinese place?”

“Yes and no,” Swan said.

Kiran persisted: “So I become Chinese?”

“No. There are all kinds of people there. My friends will give you an ID. After that, anything can happen. But Venus is a good place for you to start.”

They were traveling in a terrarium called the Delta of Venus, an ag asteroid dedicated to growing food for Earth—mostly enhanced rices but also other crops that liked it warm and wet. The internal gravity felt like Earth; Kiran couldn’t detect the famous Coriolis push to the side.

They spent their days out in the upcurving fields, working alongside water buffalo, tractors, canal boats, and many other workers, most of them passengers. After an hour the work became hard on the back, and as the passengers—some of them only a little taller than the rice sprouts, while others were taller than giants, which was at first startling to see—sloshed up and down the rows, they talked to pass the time. Complaint and desire to be elsewhere were natural themes. “I’m festivalled out.” “I’ve tried them all.” “The only place terraforming matters is on Earth, and they’re terrible at it.” “It’s all turning out to be face business.” “We could have taken the Grindewald and gone mountain climbing. The Mönch, the Eiger, the Jungfrau, they’ve reproduced every damn crack.” “I’d rather go in an aquarium and swim around. Live with a mermaid for a week.”

Beachworlds were wonderful, all agreed. With Earth’s beaches gone, the ones inside aquaria were much beloved.

Others advocated cloud forest worlds; these were visits to arboreal heaven and an earlier stage of primate life. “Such bliss to be a monkey!”

Someone said, “Or a bonobo. I wish I had gone on a sexliner.”

This broke a little dam of reticence and brought the talk immediately around to sex on those sexliners, which were often designed to look like Caribbean resorts. Dionysian dances, perpetual tantric orgies, Kundalini panmixia, everyone had a story. One of them said mournfully, “I could have spent the whole trip in a touchy-feely box, and here I am wielding a hand hoe.”

“Touchy-feely box?” Kiran couldn’t help asking.

“You get in a box that has holes cut in it about as big around as your hand, and then people reach in the holes and do what they want.”

“I’m surprised people would do that.”

“Lines always seem pretty long, for both inside and outside.”

“I should have thought of the worms that way,” Kiran said to Swan. “Could have been happy all the way up that elevator.”

“I’d rather be in here than in one of those,” someone else called. “Farms are sexy! All this fertilizer!”

Many groaned at this. It was not a joke that resonated.

Someone else said, “Last time I was on a sexliner, this group of bisexuals ran out to the pool, about twenty of them, all with the biggest tits and cocks you ever saw, and all of them with erections, and they got in a circle one behind the next and plunged into the one in front of them and away they went. It was like when you see insects clumping together on a summer day, keep fucking till they fall to the ground.”

This brought on quite a silence until someone said heavily, “Wish I had seen that,” which got the others laughing, or loudly protesting that any such image had ever been put in their heads. “I’m just saying,” the witness insisted. “These things happen. It’s a regular sport.”

And it seemed to Kiran that after the talk about sexliners the rice planting hurt less. And when these people were done for the day and back at the dorm, it seemed like the farm might turn into a sexy place after all. There was a look in people’s eyes Kiran thought he recognized.