A Reasonable World

28

Caroline Bates went to work as a rigger on the Star Towers Project in 2010, when she was twenty-three. She lived weightless in the crummy for five years, with seven hundred others, mostly men. They all moved into the completed shell as soon as it began to rotate, and helped to install plumbing, wiring, and other utilities under gradually increasing gravity. She survived all this; some were not so lucky.

A good friend of hers, Larry Kleinsinger, had been working on the skeleton of Sphere A when a weld parted under tension and a structural member sliced through his leg. They heard him scream; then the sound stopped abruptly. The meds who brought in his exsanguinated body said that his helmet mike had been turned off".

The timing had been about right for him to be the father of the embryo she had aborted two weeks ago, and she couldn’t get that out of her mind. It didn’t make sense, because a woman could not give birth in space— the facilities didn’t exist, and the contract specifically excluded it—but she wished she still had that kid. She put a message in the net to her mother, and her mother sent back: “Why are you still up there Caroline? I don’t understand it, what is there for you with all that danger. Bill asks about you a lot. Come home honey I worry about you all the time.” Her mother was a widow with a bad heart and a drinking problem. Bill was Caroline’s ex; they had planned to go to space together, but he had flunked construction school. Neither one of them had ever been as tough as she was, she realized, in any way.

When the interior work was done in Sphere A and progressing in Sphere B, Caroline’s supervisor called her in. “Bates, we’re phasing out some construction people, as you know, and your name is on the list. Sorry about that, but we can offer you a permanent job here in services. The pay and benefits will be good.”

“What kind of services?”

“Escort.”

“You mean you want me to be a hooker? No, thanks. I don’t even like this place anymore. I’ll take my pay and go home.”

“All right, if that’s your decision.” The supervisor hummed two notes at his console. “After we pay your transportation Earthside and various termination fees, you’ll owe us seven hundred thousand dollars and change. Stick your thumb here and I’ll have it taken out of your Earthside account.”

“Wait a minute. I owe you for transportation? The contract says you send me home free any time after five years.”

“You’ll have to take that up with the legal department.” The supervisor blanked his screen and began humming again.

She requested an appointment with Legal, and was told to go to Room 305 in Sphere B, Building 1. It was in the Services section; the name on the door was Ruby Maxwell. Inside was a plump, dark woman in her forties. “Is this the legal department?” Caroline asked.

“No, it isn’t, but sit down anyway. I understand you have some problem with your contract.”

“Yes. Here’s my copy. I marked the clause about free transportation.”

“Uh-huh.” Ms. Maxwell tapped keys, turned her screen around. “This is their copy. You see here, clause forty-one, where it says they can send you home free if they so desire. You got to realize, the longer they keep you working here, the more money they make on their investment.”

“I understand that, but I’ve got a contract.”

“Sweetie, you ain’t got jack shit until they say so. What you going to do, sue the Company? Get serious. You know how many lawyers they have?”

Caroline was silent.

“Look at it another way,” said Maxwell quietly. “If you tell I said this, I will call you a liar. They don’t want to spend the money to send you home Earthside until they got all the good out of you. If they see you are not going to cooperate, it might be cheaper to space you out. It has happened before. You understand what I’m saying? You got to be nice to them, or otherwise they not going to be nice to you.”

They sent Caroline to charm school for a month, where she had her hair restyled, her ears pierced and her eyebrows shaped, learned makeup and perfume, got a new wardrobe to be paid for out of earnings, learned to walk and sit and hold a drink. By then the hotels in Sphere A were already in business, although construction was still going on in B.

Then they took her to an operating room, and when she woke up she had two neat little incisions in her belly and a neat little plastic button in the top of her skull. She felt sore inside. “What did they do to me?” she asked the nurse.

“Tied off your tubes, honey.”

The next day two men led her into a small room and strapped her into a chair under a black box with a dangling cord. The two men left; a technician came in, wearing an atmosphere suit. He had a vial in his gloved hand.

“Now this is just a little demonstration,” he said. “You’re not going to like part of it, but you’ll like the other part a lot. First I’m going to show you what will happen if you screw up, and then what will happen if you don’t.” He opened the vial and with a glass rod put a single drop on her wrist. A pain like nothing she had ever experienced swept through her; she heard herself screaming.

Then a touch of coolness on her wrist, and the pain was gone. “That’s all of that, baby,” said the technician. “Now here’s the good part.” He brought the cord down from the machine and plugged it into her head. Bliss. Bliss. Bliss.

The memory of it was so strong that she blinked dreamily at him when he put his face close to hers. “Now listen. Can you hear me?”

“Mm-hm.”

“You’ll get that once a day if you behave yourself and meet your quota, understand? If you don’t behave yourself, you won’t get it, and if you really screw up, you’ll get the other. So I’m sure you’ll be a good girl.”

“Oh, yes,” she said.

She learned to retreat somewhere inside and not pay much attention. Some of her charlies were gorks, but some were friendly and fun to kid around with. If she rolled five stunts a day on her own, or eight if there were that many referrals, the rest of her time was her own. She was popular enough to get top dollar, ten percent of her fees went into her Earthside account, and although she knew they would not let her go until she lost her looks, in all probability by then she would have put away at least two million dollars; even with inflation, that would be enough to live on comfortably for the rest of her life.

Bobby Dalziel was a slender young man who worked in the recording booth when there were ballets or sports events in the docking chamber. In between, he rolled stunts for the services department. Caroline saw him with charlies a few times, and then they got to know each other. Bobby had a scheme he wanted to try out on her. They talked about it in Bobby’s bedroom; the rooms where they took charlies had eyes and ears, of course, but workers’ bedrooms didn’t. “I don’t know if it would work,” he said, “but if it did, it would be enough to get us both out of here, and I want to get out.” Caroline turned him down at first; then she listened. She wanted to go home, too, and it was nice to have something to dream about.

The political problems associated with the Standing Wave Transport project proved to be more daunting than the engineering ones. Nevertheless, by the spring of 2015, agreements had been signed with all the countries laying claim to Antarctica. Gravitometric and seismographic readings had found a suitable site on the high plateau within half a mile of the Pole.

A completely assembled SWT device was flown to the site in a Douglas supertransport and installed there in a prefab hut. Thereafter all materials and personnel were transferred directly to the site from Greenland, and the work went rapidly. A second and much bigger prefab building was put up next to the first one. In the second building, heat from solar collectors in Greenland was used to melt the ice down to bedrock; pumps carried the water away. More buildings were added for construction machinery, a dormitory and messhall. While construction proceeded, another site was prepared on longitude 68 W. to serve South America, then two more on longitudes 30 E. and 148 W.: these would serve Africa and Australia.

The first experimental SWT tube line, between Bogota and New York, went into service on May 1, 2017.