Lifeline

Chapter 8

ORBITECH 1—Day 8

The fountain jets in the Japanese garden looked like spurting diamonds. Karen Langelier watched with wonder as each droplet of water rose to its apex, hung there for a prolonged instant, then began its glide back down to the pool. She listened as the drops hit the surface, like a slow-motion rain shower. Her eyes glinted, and she smiled at the beauty that low gravity gave to the downpour.

Karen closed her eyes and drew a deep breath, smelling the air, the moisture, the plants. Relax, unwind. Then you can get back to work on the new weavewire process. She moved around the fountain to look at a burst of magenta, button-shaped blooms. The gardener, Hiro Kaitanabe, kept a variety of flowers in bloom, mixing the scents like a master tea blender.

She was glad Kaitanabe refused to label the plants with their scientific names. Karen was a polymer chemist, not a botanist, and had little grasp of Latin names for living species. Scientists loved to name and categorize things, but sometimes it became a little oppressive. She wanted this place to feel like a park, not a plant museum.

She had come to the garden to empty her mind, to get away from thinking. To forget about the War, her work … her estranged husband back on Earth. To distract herself, Karen spent too many hours in the lab, surrounded by chemicals, analytical instruments, and polymer spinnerets, using the clumsy techniques of working without gravity.

She could work out her problems, somehow. She was strong enough for that.

Karen wandered along the manicured aisles of bushes, listening to the fountains, the recorded bird song from tiny speakers hidden in the branches. Kaitanabe knew just how much sound and how much silence to add to his garden. Warm illumination glowed from the walls and ceiling, simulating sunlight. Brighter lamps shone out of artificial Japanese lanterns for those plants that required more light.

Karen wore comfortable clothes—stretch jeans and a sweater—under her lab coat, which she rarely removed because she always needed the pockets for her personal paraphernalia, computer, calendar-beeper, black licorice candy. Anything she had to carry consciously, such as a backpack or a purse, always seemed too much bother.

Part of her wanted to hurry back to the lab, to bury herself in work again. She thought she had just made a major breakthrough, found a much faster way to draw out the monomolecular weavewire she had pioneered years before.…

No, she would stay here and just let some of the calmness soak in for a while, seek that quiet place in her center where all the ideas originated. She had been consciously teaching herself how to relax, but it was very difficult.

She glanced down at the meandering stream pumped by slow turbines under the floor. She looked a little haggard, but she’d had ghosts of gray in her red hair and laugh lines around her eyes long before the War. Leaving Ray had done that to her—the trial separation to see if they would fare better together or by themselves. A year at L-5 doing her work, giving her time to think … and at the end of her assignment, then they could decide what to do.

But the War had decided for them, and she and Ray would never have the chance to find out. Even if he had not been killed in the exchange, they were separated by circumstances more final than any divorce.

Karen did not close her eyes against the pain, but her vision became focused on a faraway place. Everything will work out the way it’s supposed to. It sounded corny and simplistic, but she believed it.

As she rounded a corner of hedges, Karen came upon Hiro Kaitanabe, bent over a flower bed of cream-colored lilies. She was about to greet the gardener, but stopped as she noticed the tension in his back.

Kaitanabe ripped the lilies out by the roots, crushing the bulbs in his hands. He yanked the leaves off silently and tore the delicate flowers.

Karen took a step forward. “What—?”

The gardener froze, then slowly placed the lilies down on the ground, as if embarrassed. He stood up, brushing his dirt-covered hands together. It took him a moment to place an indifferent mask on his face.

“This entire garden … none of it is food.” He indicated the plants with a nod of his head. “All this time I could have been growing food.”

He padded away, leaving the ruined flower bed and clods of dirt on the path.

Karen stared at him until he disappeared into the foliage. She couldn’t even hear him moving. Deep in one of the branches of a sculpted tree, a burst of cheerful bird song echoed in the garden.

The Bifrost Lounge held a dozen people. The chairs, tables, and small holoscreens had been arranged in a haphazard but calculated way. Karen was sure Orbitechnologies had spent a lot of effort on psychological studies to give it just that “homey” touch. Everything was done in earth tones with splashes of green here and there, artificial flowers, real plants.

Three women sat at a table playing a game with a well-worn deck of paper playing cards. Clustered together in the high-throughput ventilation area, four people shared a cigarette. Karen smiled to herself. One of Orbitech 1’s developments had been an alveoli-scrubber drug—a timed-release capsule that cleaned deposits from the lungs. This made tobacco smoking safe again, but since it cost so much to import tobacco from Earth, few of the Orbitech colonists could smoke anyway.

The lab work waited, but Karen avoided it for now. She needed to be with other people, even if she did nothing more than sit and observe. She was getting tired of hiding with nothing but her problems for company. That was no way to make things better for herself.

She entered the lounge quietly so no one would notice her. A man in a red sweat suit hurried up to her. “The shuttles are going down! Either this orbit or the next one.” He looked as if she should be interested, but he went off to tell the others before she could respond.

The shuttle Miranda had crashed on the Moon days before. Most of the people on Orbitech 1 were still furious with Mr. McLaris and the pilot who had stolen the shuttle. Mutineers, some people called them. Some claimed that it was just like upper management to steal the goods and screw the other employees; others chuckled bitterly that McLaris had screwed even the other managers.

But the other two shuttles were a different story. The Ariel and the Oberon had been trapped in low Earth orbit, arriving at the end of their runs just after the War. At least they hadn’t been blasted in the space-based weapons exchange like the Earth-orbiting stations, but now the two pilots had limited supplies and no fuel to go anyplace else.

Every ninety minutes the two shuttles dipped lower in their orbits as the vanishingly thin atmosphere slowed them like quicksand. They had about another day and a half before the craft would hit the ionosphere—not like a stone skipping across the water, but streaking across the sky in a dazzling fireball.

The Colony Communications—ConComm—network between the Aguinaldo, Clavius Base, and Orbitech 1 kept communications open twenty-four hours a day. Occasionally it picked up low-wattage broadcasts from Earth or amateur radio operators, or intercepted transmissions between groups of War survivors, but very few of the transmissions were directed out into space. The colonies were on their own as far as Earth was concerned.

But ConComm also broadcast regular updates of the situation with the Ariel and the Oberon. What else did the people have to do but watch and listen to the pilots’ gamble for survival? Heroes—we could use some about now, Karen thought.

Clavius Base had suggested to the pilots that they maneuver their shuttles together, transfer all remaining fuel from the Ariel into the larger Oberon, which had been built for landing on the Moon, and kick themselves into a higher, stable orbit. But even if that succeeded, they had only food enough for another week.

The pilots had been more enthusiastic about another suggestion made by someone on Orbitech 1. The Ariel contained a shipment of tungsten-alloy wire that had been intended for transfer to the Orbitech 2 construction site at L-4. If the pilots maneuvered close enough, they could lash the two shuttles to each other, strapping one in front to act as a heat shield.

Karen sat down in a chair and thought about dozing, lying back and letting the tension ripple out the base of her neck. Ray used to be so good at giving back rubs.…

She must have dozed, because the shuttle pilots broke over the intercom again, ending their forty-five-minute silence. They had successfully attached the two craft together. They were going to toboggan through the atmosphere with the Oberon in front as a shield. Karen looked around the lounge and saw that the card game had ended. Several other people had arrived and were listening to the transmissions.

“They’re going down!” said the man in the red sweat suit.

Karen closed her eyes, traveling back into her mind and imagining a dull-red glow of plasma forming at the shuttle’s ablative front, seeing what it would be like if she were floating along with the craft. The spot of roasting metal grew quickly, heating up until the craft was immersed in a blue-bright bath of light. How long before the bottom shuttle started to melt and crumble?

“Plasma interfer-# # #-communica-# # #.” The static in the transmission made it impossible to tell which of the pilots had spoken. “We prom-###-say hello-###-every-###.”

All the people in the lounge seemed to be holding their breath. Karen realized that she had unconsciously crossed her fingers. Smiling at her childishness, she straightened her hands and looked around the room.

The Earth kept its radio silence.

The people waited in the lounge, and kept waiting. After the silence grew too thick, mumbled conversation began to rise and fall in the air.

ConComm remained quiet. After half an hour, the first people started to leave. Karen walked out of the lounge, heading back to her lab.

The shuttles never re-established contact.