Starseed

Chapter Two

We didn’t have long to wait. Less than a minute after the doctor and attendant left, the lock cycled open again and someone emerged.

The newcomer got our instant attention.

“Afternoon, folks,” she said. “Welcome to Top Step. I’m a Guide, and my name is Chris.”

No one said a word.

“Oh, excuse me.” She courteously turned herself rightside up with respect to us.

It didn’t help much. Even upside down in that confined space, her face had been far enough from the floor to be seen from the last row. And even rightside up she was startling.

Chris’s p-suit had no legs, and neither did Chris.

I know I tried hard not to gape. I’m pretty sure I failed. One person actually gasped audibly. Chris ignored it and continued cheerfully, “I usually make a little speech at this point, but we want to get you out of suspect pressure as quickly as possible, so you’ve got a temporary reprieve. You are now about to do something you probably thought was impossible: leave a plane intelligently. By rows, remaining seated until it’s your turn, and then leaving at once. You have no carryons or coats to fumble with, no reason to block the aisle—and good reason not to.

“See, if we cycle you through the airlocks a few at a time it’d take over an hour. But to keep the lock open at both ends and march you all out we have to equalize pressure between this can and Top Step—and there’s no telling if or how long that patch there will take pressure. So we’re going to do this with suits sealed, and we are not going to dawdle. I know you’re all free fall virgins; don’t worry, we’ll set up a bucket brigade and you’ll be fine. One thing: if there’s a blowout as you’re passing through the lock, get out of the doorway. It doesn’t matter which direction you pick, just don’t be in the way. Okay? All right, Ev!”

That last was apparently directed to the Captain in the cockpit ahead. My ears began to hurt suddenly. The pressure was rising back toward Earth-normal. Like everybody, I swallowed hard, and watched that pressure patch as I sealed my hood.

“Okay, this side first. No chatter. First person to slow up the line gets assigned to the Reclamation Module for the next two months.” A light over the lock blinked and the door opened. “First row: move!”

Getting up the aisle to the front was easy. Once there were no seatbacks to navigate with, it got trickier. But Chris fielded me like a shortstop and lobbed me to Robert at second, who pivoted and threw me to someone at first for the double play. That must have ended the inning; others tossed me around the infield to celebrate for a while.

I ended up turning slowly end over end in a large pale blue rectangular-box room. Several yellow ropes were strung across it from one biggest-wall to the opposite one. I caught a rope as I sailed past it.

Because I seemed to be drifting light as a feather, I badly underestimated how hard it would be to stop drifting. If that rope hadn’t had some give to it, I might have pulled my arms out of their sockets. I had no weight, but I still had all my mass. I found the experience fascinating and mildly dismaying: in that first intentional vector change I made in space, I knew that some of the zero-gee dance moves I’d envisioned weren’t going to work.

But I was too busy to think about kinesthetics just then. The room was half-full of my shipmates, with more coming at a steady pace. I saw that all of us were treating the biggest-walls as “floor” and “ceiling,” and lining ourselves up parallel to the ropes between them—but there seemed to be considerable silent disagreement as to which way was up. Visual cues were all ambiguous. It was a comical sight.

Finally one side preponderated and the others gradually switched around to that “local vertical.” I was one of the latter group, and as I reached the decision that I was upside down, I realized for the first time that I felt faintly nauseous. The feeling increased as I flipped myself over, diminished a little as the room seemed to snap back into proper perspective again.

The last of us came tumbling in, followed by the last member of the bucket brigade. The latter sealed the hatch, oriented himself upside down to us, let go of the hatch, and floated before it, hands thrust up into his pockets. He looked at us, and we craned our heads at him. A few of us cartwheeled round to his personal vertical again, and before long everyone had done so, with varying degrees of grace.

He seemed to be in his fifties. He wore a p-suit, opaque and deep purple. Compared to the clunky suits we wore, his looked like a second skin. His complexion was coal black, the kind that doesn’t even gleam much under bright light. He was lean and fit, going bald and making no attempt to hide it, frowning and smiling at the same time. He looked relaxed and competent, avuncular. He reminded me a little of Murray, the business manager of one of the companies I’d worked with almost a decade before. Murray did the work of four men, yet always seemed perfectly relaxed, even during the week before a performance.

“You folks don’t seem to know which way is up, do you?” he said pleasantly.

There were a very few polite giggles, and one groan.

He did something, and was suddenly upside down to us again. He was stable in the new position and had not touched anything. I didn’t quite catch the move at the time—and still can’t describe it; I’d have to show you—but I was fascinated. I wanted to ask him to do it again.

This time we all let him stay upside down.

“All right. My name is Phillipe Mgabi. I am your Chief Administrator for Student Affairs. On behalf of the Starseed Foundation, I’d like to welcome you all to Top Step, and wish you a fruitful stay. I’m sorry you had such an eventful journey here, and I assure you all that Top Step is considerably less vulnerable than your shuttle was. You’re as safe as any terrestrial can be in space, now.”

No one said thanks.

“I must remind you that you are no longer on United Nations soil, in even a figurative sense. Top Step is an autonomic pressure, like Skyfac or The Ark, recognized by the UN but not eligible for membership, and wholly owned by the Starseed Foundation. At the moment, you are technically Landed Immigrants, although we prefer the term Postulants.”

It was weirdly disorienting to be addressed by an upside down person. It was almost impossible to decipher his facial expressions.

“You were given the constitution and laws of Top Step back at Suit Camp, and you’ll find them in the memory banks—along with maps, schedules, master directory, and for that matter the entire Global Net. You have unrestricted and unmetered access, Net-inclusive, free of charge for as long as you’re resident here.”

There were murmurs. Unmetered access to the Net? For everybody?

This whole operation struck me as being run like a dance company financed by task-specific grants. In some areas they were as cheap as a cut-rate holiday (Suit Camp had featured outdoor privies, just like the ones I’d used as a little girl on Gambier Island)…but when they spent, they spent like sailors on leave. It seemed schizophrenic.

“The point is that you are responsible. You are presumed to know your obligations and privileges as a Postulant. The Agreements you have made are all in plain language, and you are bound by them. They allow you a great deal of slack…but where they bind, there is no give at all. I recommend that you study them if you haven’t already.”

Out of the corner of my eye I saw the loudmouthed joker start to say something, then change his mind.

“I hope all of you paid attention at Suit Camp. I said you were as safe as any terrestrial in space. That compares favorably with, say, New York…but not by much, and space bites in different places and unexpected ways. As you learned on your way up here.” Ouch. “To survive long enough to enter Symbiosis, you must all acquire and maintain a state of alert mindfulness—and there are few second chances. Space is not fair. Space is not merciful. I see you all nodding, and I know that at least three of you will be dead before your term is up. That is the smallest number of Postulants we have lost from a single class. I would like it very much if your class turns out to be the first exception to that rule.”

Mgabi cocked his head, listening to something we couldn’t hear. “And now I’m going to hand you over to your Orientation Coordinator. Any and all problems, questions, requests or complaints you may have during your stay in Top Step will go to her; I’m afraid I will not be seeing you on any regular basis myself. Dorothy?”

The hatch opened and admitted a red-haired woman in her seventies, frail and thin, dressed in Kelly green p-suit. One look at her face and I knew I was in good hands. She looked competent, compassionate and wise. She aligned herself to us rather than Mgabi.

“Hello, children,” she said. “I’m Dorothy Gerstenfeld. I’m going to be your mother for the next two months. Daddy here—” She indicated Mgabi. “—will be away at the office most of the time, so I’ll be the one who tucks you in and makes you do your chores and so on. I’ve got a squad of Guides to help me. My door is always unlocked and my phone is always on.

“Now I know you’ve all got a thousand questions—I know at least a few of you urgently want a refresher course in zero-gee plumbing!—but I’ve got a little set speech, and I find if I start with the questions I never get to it. So here goes:

“I’ve used the maternal metaphor for a reason…just as Doctor Mgabi entered this room upside down to you for a reason. He was trying to show you by plain example that you have come to a place where up and down have meaning only within your own skull. I am trying to suggest to you that for the next two months you are no longer adults, whatever your calendar age.”

Mgabi drifted nearby in a gentle crouch. It was hard to read his inverted face, and he must have heard this dozens of times, but it seemed to me he paid careful attention, though he was looking at us. He reminded me of an old black and white film I saw once of Miles Davis listening to Charlie Parker take a solo.

“It is said,” she continued, “that space makes you childlike again. Charles Armstead himself noted that in the historic Titan Transmission. Free fall makes you want to play, to be a child again. Look at you all, trying to be still, wanting to hop around. Well you should…and shall! Look at me: I’m considerably over thirty, and I’ve been six-wall-squash champion in this pressure for over five years now.

“Now, what are the three things a child hates the most? Aside from bedtime, I mean. Going to school, doing chores, and going to church, am I right?” People chuckled, including me. “Well, you’ve all just spent several weeks in school. It probably even felt like summer school, since all the Suit Camps are in tropical locations. And now that school’s out, you’re going to have to spend some time doing chores and being in church.” There were scattered mock-groans. “Not only that, you’re going to have to remember, every single time without fail, to wear your rubbers when you go out!” That got giggles.

“Don’t worry,” she went on, “before long you’ll be going out a lot, all you want—and there’ll be plenty of time for play. But church—or temple or zendo or synagogue or whatever word you use for ‘place where one prays’—is sort of what Top Step is all about, what it’s for. It’s just a kind of church it’s okay to play in, that’s all. It has only one sacrament, and only you know—if you do—what it will take to become ready to receive it. We know many ways to help you.

“If you use your time here wisely, then soon church will be done, and school will be out forever, and you will become more ideally childlike than you ever were as a child.

“I hope every one of you makes it.”

A facile and pious cliché, surely—but when she said it, I believed it. Your mother doesn’t lie. This one didn’t, at least.

“Remember: if you have any practical difficulties, I’m the one you want to consult; don’t bother Administrator Mgabi or his staff without routing through me first. But few of your problems are going to turn out to be practical—and some of your practical problems will kill you before you have a chance to complain. When you do need help, it’s more likely to be spiritual help. You’ll find that Top Step has more spiritual advisers than any other kind. We have representatives of most of the major denominations inboard—you’ll find a directory in your computer—but please don’t feel compelled to stick with whatever faith you were raised in or presently practice. You’ll find that personal rapport is a lot more important than brand name. All right, enough speeches—”

People with full bladders sighed, anticipating relief—but there was an interruption from the loudmouth. He wanted to report Shannon, our flight attendant for what he called outrageous authoritarianism and psychological instability. “The woman is dangerous,” he said. “I actually thought for a moment she was going to strike me! I want her relieved of duty and punished.”

The rest of us made a collective growling sound. He ignored us.

“We’ll discuss this in my office,” Dorothy said, “as soon as I’ve—”

“Dammit, I want satisfaction, now.”

Dorothy looked sad. “Eric,” she said, “did you read your contracts with us?” It struck me, that she knew his name.

He didn’t seem to notice. “I ran ’em past my legal software, sure. But she had no right—”

“She had every right. I saw all that happened, from my office. If Shannon had chosen to kill you, I would have been sad—but I would not have been cross with her.”

He snorted. “She’d have had a busy time trying!”

Dorothy looked even sadder. “No, she wouldn’t. Eric, can’t we discuss this later, in my office?”

“I’m afraid not, ma’am. If the setup here actually requires me to take orders from every hired hand, let’s get it straight right now so I can return to Earth at once.”

Now she mastered her sorrow; her face smoothed over. “Very well. I’ll take you back to your shuttle now. It will be departing almost immediately.” She kicked off gently and jaunted toward him.

At once he was waffling. “Wait a minute! You can’t just throw me out without a hearing, after all the time I’ve invested—and you certainly can’t make me go back in that crate, it’s defective. And these p-suits are substandard, I want a real one, with a proper radio, and—”

She approached slowly, empty hands outstretched in a gesture of peace, maternal concern on her face. She killed most of her momentum on the empty rope just in front of his, setting it shivering, covered the last few meters very slowly, reached for his rope—

—and her hands slipped past it, touched Eric behind each ear with delicate precision. His eyes rolled up and he let go of the rope, slowly began to pivot around her hands. He snored gently.

Towing Eric, Dorothy jaunted slowly back to her original place by the hatch; it opened as she got there, and she aimed Eric out through it to someone out in the corridor. Then she turned to us.

All the sadness was gone from her face, now, replaced by resolution. She looked as strong, as powerful, as my own grandmother. “I’m sorry you’ve all had such an inauspicious trip so far.” Small smile. “It can only get better from here. Now: Eric raised a good point. The p-suits you’re all wearing are inadequate. They’re tourist suits, designed only for emergency use by passengers in transit. They’ll be going back to Earth on the shuttle, so please remove them now. You’ll be issued your own personal suits—real suits, the best made—in just a little while.” We all began removing our suits. “From here you’ll go through Decontam, where there’ll be washrooms for those who need one—and, I’m afraid, for those who don’t think you do—and then you’ll be guided to your rooms. You’ve got three hours before dinner; I recommend you spend them either at your terminals, learning your way around Top Step, or resting. They’ll be plenty of time for physical exploring, believe me.”

Again there was a bucket-brigade. We were warned not to attempt any maneuvers of our own along the way, but I intended to cheat just a little…until the line was held up by the first couple of jerks to do so, and people with full bladders began to get surly. Sure, I knew more about kinesthetics than the two jerks. That gave me the opportunity to make an even bigger jerk out of myself. I decided to be patient.

There was plenty of time. We wouldn’t be allowed to go EVA for another four weeks, and we wouldn’t be allowed to enter Symbiosis until we’d had at least four weeks of EVA practice…and we were entitled to hang around Top Step making up our minds for another four weeks after that, if we chose, before we had to either take the Symbiote, or go back to Earth and start making payments on the air, food and water we had used. I’d have lots of time to play with zero gee.

Having toured a lot of strange places with various dance companies, I’d been through several sorts of stringent international decontamination rituals before, and thought I was prepared for anything. You don’t want to know about Top Step Decontam, and I don’t want to discuss it. Let’s just say they were thorough. Top Step is a controlled environment, and they want it as sterile as possible.

When I got out the other end, naked, dry, and bright red, I found myself drifting in a boardroom-sized cubic with five other naked females. Kirra was among them, and I recognized Glenn Christie, an acquaintance from Suit Camp. At the far end of the space were what looked like several dozen drifting footballs, tethered together. Kirra threw me a grin. “Am I still black?” she called softly.

“On this side,” I agreed.

She giggled, and…wriggled, somehow, so that she spun end over end gracefully, like a ballerina pirouetting but in three dimensions.

“Couple of pink places,” I said, “but I think you had them when you started. How did you do that?” It hadn’t looked at all like the maneuver Mgabi had used.

“Little pinker now, maybe. I dunno how I did it. You try it.”

When I try out a new move, I’m alone in the studio. I was saved by the bell. An amplified voice came from nowhere in particular. (I tried to locate the speaker grille, but it seemed to be hidden.) It was female, a warm friendly contralto. After what we’d just been through, it shouldn’t have mattered much if she’d been a male with a leer in his voice…but I found myself liking her somehow, whoever she was. She sounded sort of like the best friend I never really had. “Welcome, all of you, to community pressure. One of the containers you see on the inboard side of the chamber will have your name on it. Please put on the contents and check them for fit: let me know if you have any problems.” We all thanked her.

It occurred to me briefly to wonder why she wasn’t present in the room. Surely we were as thoroughly decontaminated as we were ever going to be. But the tone of her voice said that whatever the reason was, it was unimportant, not anything scary, so I put it out of my mind.

Getting to the football-shaped containers got comical; we were like kids in some Disneyland ride, giggling and trying to help each other and getting tangled up and giggling some more. By the time I located the box with my name on it, we all had aching sides. The unseen woman did not chastise us for our antics; she seemed to understand that we were ready for some laughter.

The football opened along one seam. Inside it was a wad of something. As I stared at it in puzzlement, it swelled like bread-dough, like a backpacker’s raincoat opening up.

“It’s a p-suit!” Kirra said delightedly, shaking out hers.

Sure enough, we had all been issued our real p-suits. Expensive, state of the art, personally customized and form-fitting ones, as opposed to the cheap standardized movie-costumes we’d all worn aboard the Shuttle.

We’d practiced this in Suit Camp. Timing myself, I slid the bottom half on like greased pantyhose, pulled the rest up behind me and around my torso, put my arms in the sleeves, sealed the seam, and pulled the transparent hood down over my head. Elapsed time, twelve seconds. I thought that was pretty good. It went on easier than a body-stocking: while it was snug, the interior had been treated somehow to reduce friction. I didn’t test the radio or any of the other gear, though I should have. Instead I pulled the hood back, and grinned at Kirra and Glenn and the other women. They grinned back.

Our suits were custom tailored to our bodies, and fit like hugs. They were also, we discovered, customized for colour. They came out of the egg transparent, so we could inspect them for fit and flaws, and except for the barely visible tracery of microtubules that carried coolant and such around them, they looked like an extra layer of skin. But when we located the “polarization enabler controls” they’d taught us about in Suit Camp, and opaqued our suits, each of us was, from toes to collarbone, a different—and well chosen—colour. My own suit turned a light shade of burgundy that suited my complexion and hair colour, and Kirra’s suit became a cobalt blue very close to the highlights that normal lighting raised on her dark black skin.

I liked the colours a lot. To me they were among the first signs that artists had had a part in the creative planning of this outfit.

“Any problems?” our unseen friend asked. “No? Then exit the chamber through the green-marked hatch in Wall Four. You’ll be directed from there.”

I looked around for the green-marked hatch. Where the hell was Wall Four? No walls were marked that I could see—at least not with numbers. One of them, to our right (we were all instinctively aligned to the same local vertical, without knowing how we’d selected it) was painted with a large broad red arrow, pointing in the direction we had come from, but that was little help. My companions were looking confused, too, but the unseen woman didn’t cue us.

It took so long to find the hatch that in a few seconds I guessed where it must be. Sure enough, it was “up,” over our heads. People hardly ever look up, for some reason. (Which seems to suggest that we haven’t evolved significantly since before we came down out of the trees, yes?) I nudged Kirra and pointed. She unsealed the hatch and went through. I followed on her heels, and we found ourselves at the bottom of a huge well-lit padded cavern.

I should have been expecting it; I’d seen pictures. But you just don’t expect to step from someplace as clean and sterile and right-angled and high-tech and profoundly artificial as a Decontam module into the Carlsbad Caverns. I nearly lost my grip and fell up into it.

It was about the size of a concert hall and roughly spherical—but the accent was on rough. Rough curves and joins, the rough fractal topography of natural rock, overlaid with some rough surface covering that looked like cheap kitchen sponge stained dark grey. Tunnels departed from the cavern in all directions; their gaping, irregularly sized and shaped mouths were spaced asymmetrically around the chamber. Each tunnel had one or more pairs of slender elastic bungee cords strung criss-cross across its mouth, obviously used to either fling oneself into the tunnel, or catch oneself on the way out; the larger the tunnel, the more cords.

This spheric pressure was half natural and half artificial. It had happened, as much as it had been built. It was a sculpted and padded cave. Perhaps a dozen people (none of them in p-suits; one was naked) were drifting slowly across the vast chamber in different directions. No two of them were using the same local vertical, and none of them used ours. It was like something out of Escher.

No, it was something out of Escher.

I remembered to move aside so others could use the hatch. There were lots of handgrips nearby; I worked myself sideways like a crab and “lay on my back” a few inches “above” the bulkhead I’d just come through. As Glenn and the other three women emerged into the cave behind us, they too grabbed handholds, stabilized themselves, and stared.

After a long few moments of silence, Glenn cleared her throat. “Which way to the egress, do you suppose?”

The unseen woman spoke again. “Can all of you see the tunnel that’s blinking green over there, Inboard and One-ish?”

Again I failed to spot any speakers, and realized this time that there were none; her voice was simply homing in on my ears somehow. The last two terms she’d used were meaningless to me, but there was no mistaking the tunnel she meant. Soft green lights around its mouth had suddenly started to flash on and off. “We see it.”

“That’s where you’re headed for, now.”

“All the bloody way up there?” Kirra squeaked.

“Push off gently, Kirra,” our companion said soothingly. I hadn’t realized she knew our names. She must have a terrific memory. “Be prepared to take a long time getting there. You’ll find that in jaunting long distances, aim is much more important than strength. And you’re not in a hurry. Why don’t you go first?”

“Well…I guess I—bloody hell!”

Kirra had absently let go of her handhold at some point, instinctively trusting to gravity to keep her in place. But there was none. In the twenty seconds or so we’d been here, she’d drifted far enough away from the floor (as I called that wall in my mind, since it had been under my feet when I started) to be unable to touch it again. Her attempts only put her into a tumble from which she couldn’t figure out how to emerge. “Oh my,” she groaned as she spun. “I think I’m gonna be a puke pinwheel in a minute…”

I tried to reach her, but I couldn’t quite do it without letting go with my other hand myself. And the gap between us was slowly widening.

“Make a chain,” our friend said, and one of the women I didn’t know, who was nearest to me, reached and got one of my ankles in a one-handed deathgrip. I let go of my handhold, lunged, and got an equally firm grip on one of Kirra’s ankles as it went by. Her mass tried to tug me sideways as I stabilized her spin, and partially succeeded. The woman holding me reeled us both in, a little too hard: Kirra and I thumped firmly together into what I thought of as the floor, and clutched it and each other.

Perhaps we shouldn’t have used up our giggles earlier; we could have used some now.

“I’m right,” Kirra said. “Ta, love…I feel a right idjit.”

“It happens to everyone here, sooner or later,” our unseen friend told her. “Proper etiquette is to lend assistance if needed and otherwise ignore it. Are you ready to jaunt now, Kirra?”

She was game. “Reckon so. Where’s that blinkin’ tunnel? Pun unintended.” She spun round to face the cavern and got her feet under her. “Oh, there it is. See you on the other side, mates—”

She kicked off, gently, and began to rise into the air.

Now we giggled. We couldn’t help it. Her lazy ascension looked exactly like a bad special effect. We heard her laughing too, with a child’s delight. She mugged for us as she went, folded her arms and legs into tailor seat, opened out into a swan dive, then tucked and rolled and came out of it making exaggerated swimming motions—in our direction. Any embarrassment she might have felt a moment ago was gone. “I dreamed of this,” she sang, her voice high and dreamy, “so many years ago, it’s like a memory—”

I set my feet, let go of the wallbehindme/floorbeneathme bulkhead, took a deep breath, and jaunted after her.

If you’ve done it you know what I mean, and if you haven’t I can’t convey it. All I can say is, mortgage your condo, take the Thomas Cook Getaway Special, and jaunt in free fall once before you die. That way you’ll know your way around Paradise when you get there.

We were all giggling like schoolgirls as we jaunted up through the vast chamber, drawing amused looks from the old hands. “I like it, Morgan,” Kirra called down to me.

“Me, too,” I called back. I was mildly disappointed that this big cave had no perceptible echo. But I suppose the fun of one would have worn off the first time you smacked your head on bare rock, or tried to make yourself understood to someone on the other side of the chamber.

Kirra had followed instructions, jaunted very gently and therefore slowly. My own jaunt had been a little more impulsive: I was gradually overtaking her. “Look out above—here I come!”

She glanced down, rotated on her axis, and opened her arms for me so that I slid up into a hug—one of the oddest, most pleasant experiences of my life! We grinned with delight and embraced.

Looking past her fanny I noticed four p-suited males emerging from a hatch near the one we’d just left. Robert wasn’t among them. Well, what did I care?

At about the mid-point Kirra and I began to think about the other end of the journey, and plan our landing. As we did so, it suddenly dawned on us both that we were not floating up—we were upside down, falling. It was as if the whole cave had flipped end over end in an instant. We clutched each other even tighter…and then relaxed, trying to laugh at ourselves. But there was a queasy feeling in my stomach that hadn’t been there before. This “thinking spherically” business they kept talking about at Suit Camp was going to take some work. And time…

I could see, now, why some people just can’t ever get it. For the first time, I seriously wondered whether—dancer or no dancer—I might be one of them. I had automatically assumed that spherical perception would be a snap for any modern dancer, since we do our moving much farther from the vertical axis than ballet dancers…but when I thought about it, weren’t even modern dancers more tied into gravity and perpendicularity than ordinary people? A civilian tries to not fall down; a modern dancer tries to move all over the place in odd and interesting ways, and not fall down: therefore she pays more attention, more of the time, to not falling down—pays more heed to gravity. Maybe I had more to unlearn than my companions…

But I thrust aside the thought, determined to keep enjoying this magic jaunt, and got Kirra to show me that reversing-your-vertical trick. It turned out to be something like trying to exaggerate a swan dive, if that helps you. I ordered my stomach to settle down. Fine, it said, Define “down.” I told it “down” was toward my feet, and that seemed to help a little.

When I’d kicked off to follow Kirra, she’d been a near target, so I’d aimed well enough to jaunt right into her embrace. But the target she’d been aimed at was much farther away, and docking with me had probably further disturbed her course. We landed close to the tunnel mouth we wanted, but not very. About ten seconds later Glenn threaded it like a needle, spinning around the bungee cord like a high-bar gymnast, and those of us who could applauded. The others did no better than Kirra and I. We all met at the tunnel mouth.

“Not bad at all,” our woman friend said. “And Glenn, that was excellent.”

I understood that she was monitoring us from some remote location—but it seemed odd that she was still giving us her attention. Surely there were other women coming out of Decontam after us. Yes, there was one now: I could see her “up” there, emerging upside down from the hatch we’d left, gaping up at us…

The penny dropped.

Now how did one phrase this? “Uh…excuse me?”

“Yes, Morgan?” she said.

“…are you organic?”

There was a smile in her voice now. “Elegantly put, dear. No, as you’ve guessed, I’m an AI program in Top Step’s master computer.”

“And a bloody clever one you are,” Kirra said delightedly. “I never sussed. What’s your name, love?”

“I’m generally known as Teena. If you think of a name you like better, tell me and I’ll answer to that with you. At the moment I have one hundred and sixty-seven names. But if you want to refer to me, to another person, call me Teena.”

I’d been crabwalking my way to the tunnel mouth with the others, but suddenly I paused. “Uh…Teena?” I began, pitching my voice too low for the others to hear. “…do you—I mean, is there any way to—”

“May I try to guess your questions, Morgan?” she murmured in my ear. “Yes, I will be monitoring you every minute you’re in or near Top Step, while you’re feeding the felcher or making love or just trying to be alone. No, there is no way to switch me off. But there’s only a very limited sense in which I can even metaphorically be said to be thinking about what I perceive. In a very real sense, there is no me, save when I am invoked. My short-term memory is much less than a second, I don’t save anything that is not relevant to health, safety or your direct commands, and even that can be accessed by only eight people in Top Step—to all of whom you gave that specific right when you sighed your contract. So please don’t think of me as a Peeping Teena, all right?”

“I’ll try,” I said, resuming my journey to the tunnel mouth. “It’s just that…well, I’ve heard AIs before—but you’re so good I’d swear you’re sentient.” Glenn heard that last and said, “Me too.”

“Artificial sentience may be possible,” Teena said, “but it won’t be silicon-based.”

One of the women I didn’t know said something in Japanese.

“Why not?” Glenn translated.

“The map is not the territory,” Teena said—and apparently the Japanese woman heard the answer in her own language. What a marvelous tool Teena was!

Glenn seemed disposed to argue, but Teena went on, “It’s time we got you six to your quarters. Follow me—”

A group of little green LED lights along the tunnel wall began twinkling at us, then moved slowly away into the tunnel like Tinkerbell.

One at a time, we put our soles against the bungee cord and jaunted after them.

The tunnel itself was laser-straight, though its walls were roughly sculpted. There were numbered hatches let into the padded rock at odd intervals, and other, smaller tunnels intersected at odd intervals and angles. The main corridor was about eight or ten meters in cross section, with rungs spiraling along its length so that you could never be far from one. These came in handy as we progressed; we were to learn that a perfect tunnel-threading jaunt is almost impossible, even for free fall veterans. Old hands boast of their low CPH, or Contact-Per-Hectometer rate. (If you’re a diehard American, a hectometer, a hundred meters, is the rest of humanity’s name for about a hundred yards.) We soon began to pick up the trick of slinging ourselves along with minimal waste effort. No matter how fast or slow we progressed, the blinking lights that we followed stayed exactly five meters ahead of the foremost one of us, like one of those follow-from-in-front tails you see cops or spies do in the movies.

We overtook and passed a group of especially clumsy males. They were following pixies of a different colour, so there was minimal confusion between our two groups.

“Who you roomin’ with, Morgan?” Kirra asked as we jaunted together.

“I don’t know. The woman I planned to room with came down with the Foul Bowel three days ago—bad enough to get flown off to hospital. I guess I get pot luck.”

“S’truth!” Kirra exclaimed. “Mine got right to the airlock this morning and decided what she really wanted to do was go back to her husband. Hey, you don’t reckon…? I mean, they sat us next to each other on the Shuttle, do you suppose that means—Hey Teena—”

“Yes, Kirra?” Teena said.

“Who’s my bunkie gonna be?”

“You and Morgan will be rooming together. That is why you were seated adjacent on the Shuttle.”

“That’s great!” Kirra said.

I was oddly touched by the genuine enthusiasm in her voice; it had been a long time since anyone had been especially eager for my company. I found that I was pleased myself; Kirra was as likeable as a puppy. “Thanks,” I told her. “I think so too.”

She grinned. “I ought to warn you…I sing. All the time, I mean. Puts some people off.”

“Are you any good?”

“Yah. But I don’t sing anything you know.”

“I’ll risk it. I dance, myself.”

“So I hear; like to see it. That’s settled, then. Thanks, Teena!”

It occurred to me that Teena hadn’t answered Kirra’s question until Kirra asked it. She’d heard us discussing it, presumably, but had not volunteered the information until asked. She’d told the truth, earlier: unless we called on her, she “paid attention” only to things like pulse, respiration, and location coordinates. (If everyone in Top Step ever called her at the same moment, would her system hang? Or did she have the RAM to handle it?) I found that reassurance comforting.

A woman who knew everything, needed nothing and was only there when you wanted her. I was willing to bet a man had written Teena. She was what my ex-husband had been looking for all his life.

Shortly Teena said, “We’ll be pausing at that nexus ahead: the one that’s blinking now. Prepare to cancel your velocity.”

The “nexus” was an intersection of several side tunnels, important enough to have bungee cords strung across the middle of the main tunnel to allow changes of vector. We all managed to grab one.

“We split up here,” Teena said. “Soon Li, Yumiko, your quarters are this way—” Tinkerbell skittered off down one tunnel, then returned to hover at its entrance. “—Glenn, Nicole, Morgan and Kirra, yours are this way.” Another tunnel developed green fairies.

We did each say leave-taking politenesses appropriate to our culture, but even Yumiko didn’t linger over it. We were all too eager to see our new home, our personal cave-within-a-cave. Have you ever approached a new dwelling for the first time… after the lease has been signed? Remember how your pulse raced as you got near the door? The schizoid cheap/lavish style of Top Step might just pinch here.

Our wing was P7; Teena pointed out the wing bathroom and kitchenette as we jaunted past them, stopped Kirra and me at a door marked P7-23. I’m not even sure I said goodbye to Glenn as she continued on past our door toward her own room and roommate. Teena had Kirra and me show the door-lock our thumbprints, whereupon it opened for us.

Home, sweet spherical home…