“Now, we’ll wait a few jiffies while Earth Girl analyzes it.”
“That your mentar?”
“That’s right.”
As Fred waited, his arm still tied down, lingering cold spread up his wrist, and the bitter HALVENE taste was in his mouth.
The restraints suddenly retracted, and a female voice said, “Welcome to Trailing Earth, Myr Londenstane. Please accept a temporary medallion to get around until you are issued a sidekick.”
The medbeitor offered Fred a paper medallion. The inner door opened, and the russ officer said, “A cart will take you to the lift, which will return you to the hub, where you will follow an usher line to your assigned rez wheel.”
Fred took his time standing up. His knees were weak, and he felt lightheaded. He grabbed his duffel bag and thanked the officer as he exited, but the man only returned a cold stare.
_____
BACK IN HUB microgravity, Fred swiped the kiosk with his medallion, and a candy-striped usher line appeared on the wall beside him and led out of the wheel. At first his usher line was mingled with hundreds of others, and he traveled with fellow
Fred’s usher line led him up several levels and down several more and made more turns than he could keep track of. The doors and corridors were marked with coded glyphs he had no way of interpreting without a sidekick, and after thirty minutes of meandering, when he found himself in a block that looked like it was under construction, he finally admitted to himself that someone was fecking with him. Behind Fred, the usher line had disappeared. Ahead of him, it beckoned with untold kilometers of wild goose chase.
Fred stopped and addressed the ceiling. “All right, Earth Girl, very funny, ha ha, you got me. So, enough’s enough already.” He waited for a response, but there was none. “Marcus, can you read me?” Fred did not want to make a labor issue out of his treatment within hours of his arrival, but he wasn’t going to play dead either. When neither Earth Girl nor Marcus responded, Fred waved his medallion around to try to identify comlink nodes, but he didn’t find any.
Fred abandoned the usher line and tried to retrace his path by memory, pulling himself along unfinished hallways, towing his duffel bag behind him. After a while he had to admit he was good and lost. Then he heard machine noise in the distance, like a power tool, and he changed course to try to find its source. After several turns, the sound was closer. He continued on and was startled when two men flew unexpectedly out of a room and Fred nearly ran into one of them. He managed to arrest himself, but his duffel got away from him and continued down the corridor where the second man snagged it. Fred laughed with embarrassment. “You’ll have to pardon me, myren,” he said. “I don’t quite have my space legs on yet. I just —” The man Fred had nearly flown into moved with menacing grace to hover mere centimeters from him. He was a short, stocky fellow in a loose gold-and-yellow jumpsuit. Stuck to a mesh belt around his waist was an assortment of low-g hand tools. His gloved feet were shaped more like hands than feet, with long, large-knuckled toes. He was, no doubt, one of the new spacer types, a donald. His head seemed a little smallish for the breadth of his shoulders, and he was bald except for a triangular patch of wispy auburn hair on his forehead. He didn’t say anything, but just glowered at Fred, which Fred thought was a little comical without eyebrows or eyelashes.
Fred couldn’t afford to let himself be stared down, even though he was the one at fault. “No offense intended, little guy,” he said, and couldn’t believe he had just called the man a little guy. “I mean, no offense intended, Myr —” He looked for the man’s name patch and found nothing but a badge with a star code. “Say, do you suppose you could direct me to the rez wheels?”
The donald continued his silent contest of intimidation, but then his eyes shifted with surprise to something rising in the narrow space between him and Fred. It was a long and sinewy thing. It undulated like a snake, but instead of scales, it was covered in rough, creased skin. No fur, no tuft of hair at the tip, the end was blunt, like a fingertip, but with no nail or nail bed.
This appendage, this tail, seemed to wave a greeting to Fred, then doubled back on itself in a loop that trembled with strain.
Fred thought, What the — ? when the tail popped, like a finger snap, but with ten times the force. Fred reared back in surprise, and his tense muscles and poor freefall skills sent him into a backflip against a wall. When he regained control and spun around, the two donalds were gone, and his duffel bag floated in the spot where they had been. The bag’s contents, Fred’s personal items, were strung out and flying down the corridor. He snatched the bag and hurried to collect his things: his datapin library, a holocube emitter, his robe and moccasin slippers, and the other trifles that connected him to Mary and home. His robe was damp and warm. This can’t be, he thought, and brought it to his nose. Yes, it was — urine. All his things were damp with piss.
Fred boiled. He stuffed everything into the duffel and closed it and tried to focus on the problem at hand, the fact that he was still lost. He set off again, and in a little while he cleared the construction zone and saw someone pass at the far end of the corridor, a doris it looked like.
IN HIS ASSIGNED stateroom in the rim of Wheel Nancy, the first thing Fred did was empty his duffel bag into the shower/sink stall. He picked out the replaceable things and took them and the duffel out to the hall where he stuffed them down the trash chute. Then he stripped off his clothes and got in the shower. He quickly foamed himself and rinsed, then scrubbed his soiled things with disinfectant cleanser and rinsed and scrubbed the shower stall itself, hurrying to finish before his daily allotment of shower water timed out.
All told, he discarded his robe and slippers, slate, spex, and other odds and ends. He just didn’t feel he could ever remove the taint from them. The holocube emitter, however, was irreplaceable. It was a gift from his mother. It displayed his ur-brother, Thomas A. Russ, as a boy of ten years standing with his parents, in front of their Villa Park suburban home in the early years of the twenty-first century. Brian and Agnes Russ, by extension, were Fred’s parents, too, and the parents of ten million other boys. The little family waved at the camera in an endless loop. Brian Russ died a few years after this holo was taken, but Agnes survived to see her son Tommy become a national hero and be selected as the first commercial clone donor. She died when Fred was only five years old, but she left behind a beloved sim who cherished all her many batches of boys at Russ School. The holocube was a gift from her on the occasion of his entering kindergarten.
Fred disinfected the holocube emitter again and, cursing the donald with all his heart, placed it on a shelf in his stateroom.
Besides the comfort station, Fred’s new quarters consisted of one small multi-room. It was set to “sitting room” and was nearly identical to his and Mary’s tiny null room back home except that instead of armchairs it had a daybed/couch. On the counter were several packages of clothes. Fred opened the house togs and put them on. Another package contained his TECA uniform: a visor cap, sidekick, and a gray-and-green jumpsuit with TECA patches and his misspelled name — LONDENSTAIN.
Fred opened his DCO board in a frame to see what his duty schedule looked like and was surprised to see that his first shift was scheduled for 0600, less than six hours away. It didn’t look like they were planning on taking it easy on him.
Proxy Patrol
Dressed in his new TECA uniform, Fred left his stateroom just as his neighbor from across the hall, a doris, was entering hers. She looked at him quizzically. “Everything all right, officer?”
Fred was confused by the question. “I just moved in,” he said. He reached out to shake her hand. “Fred Londenstane. I guess we’re neighbors. I’m off to do my first shift.”
“Dolores Whisenhunt. It’s a pleasure to meet you, Myr Londenstane, but — it’s just that they always put you russies in Wheel Delta. This is Wheel Nancy, and it’s for dorises, johns, and kellys. At least when we still had johns
