One of the last things I’d done before the attempt on my life was compose that update for Bringen. Now I found myself worrying that Gibb hadn’t passed it along. For all I knew, maybe he’d sabotaged the hammock himself to keep from having to send it.
Or maybe Lastogne had. The message had queried his background, after all.
Once again I suffered that oddly frustrating certainty that there was something I would ordinarily do now. It was so vague, so hard to pin down, that it disappeared the moment I tried to chase it. “And the AIsource? I sent word I wanted to talk to them as soon as possible.”
He shook his head. “Nothing.”
Which might have made sense, in a different context. Human bureaucracies, and most alien ones, are slow by design, their response times slowed to a crawl despite all the technology we employ to make their progress visible to the naked eye. That’s because they’re still subject to all the delays native to organic life: the mistakes, indecision, the malice, the covering of asses, and the reluctance to transmit even the most urgent message until after a leisurely break for lunch. The AIsource, by contrast, would have gotten my message hours ago, within a millisecond of me sending it. They would have mapped out the consequences of any possible response and been able to answer me, before I even thought of taking another breath.
They were playing games, all right.
They were stirring the pot and watching to see how well the little bug rode the waves, trying not to drown.
But I wasn’t about to wait around for them to decide to count up the score.
The skimmer entered the Habitat, rotated to comply with local standards of up and down, and accelerated spinward.
It was the most dizzying of all possible courses. At least a flight along the length of the cylinder turned the Uppergrowth into a conventional ceiling, with a consistent upward curvature to both port and starboard. A flight against the axis of rotation accentuated that curvature and made the landscape above us seem to be spinning, its vines and clumps of manna fruit hurtling toward us as a speed that made me look away.
Mo Lassiter, who was handling the Interface, sensed my losing battle with vertigo and said, “I could fly upside down if you’d prefer.”
Sheer terror at the prospect thrummed my spine like a stringed instrument. “What?”
“It’s sometimes more comfortable for folks still adjusting to the geometry here. It puts the Uppergrowth where you’d expect the ground to be, and that soup below us in the place of an identifiable sky. Don’t worry. Local grav will keep us oriented.”
Pride made me want to refuse. The things happening at the base of my throat made me realize I’d better not. “Please do.”
The biggest mistake I made all day was not shutting my eyes at the moment of rollover. There was no sense of actual movement, but my mind’s sense of up and down lagged behind the skimmer’s by a full second, and I spent that eternity irrationally certain that I was about to be dumped from the vehicle like a fish dumped from its overturned bowl.
After a heartbeat my eyes adjusted to our new orientation and the interior of One One One became close to bearable. The Uppergrowth now below us became a kind of ridge, gently curving downward toward a distant and blurred horizon. By contrast, the sky now high above us became a vast arched ceiling, lined with dark and roiling storms. I considered the toxic ocean hidden behind it, imagined all of those billions of gallons of poison hanging up there with nothing to support them, and felt sick again, this time in an entirely new way.
One One One wasn’t a happy sight from any angle.
“That better?” Lassiter asked.
A thousand savage retorts marched through that atrophied part of my brain responsible for censoring what I say.
None of the other passengers looked any happier than I felt. Hannah Godel, who occupied the seat beside me, sat pressed against the opposite bulkhead, putting as much distance between my body and hers as she could without thinking to step aside. Back at the hangar she’d asked me why I’d chosen her, out of so many other candidates, for this particular expedition; my answer, that it would give us an opportunity to get better acquainted, hadn’t satisfied her a whit, and from the look on her face may have actually disgusted her. Lassiter herself kept gauging me with her eyes. And the Porrinyards, cramped into the row behind us, flashed smiles whenever I looked at them, but those smiles faltered with a regularity that suggested sustained internal dialogue.
I hadn’t thrilled either Lastogne or Gibb with my plan to appoint my own guides as I resumed my investigation inside the Habitat. I was willing to believe their mutual claims to be concerned over my safety, but it would have been much more comfortable, for them, to appoint keepers they could trust to report on my progress. That element of this investigation had only grown more intrusive with Gibb’s arrest, and wasn’t likely to lighten up as long as he remained in custody.
All of which was fine with me.
It didn’t hurt to keep the pot boiling.
Over the next three hours Lassiter took me on a tour of random sights, displaying the uncanny, unearned pride of a human being who thinks she owns a place just because she lives there. Despite the homogenous nature of the Uppergrowth, which had struck me as the kind of place that would have been dull indeed, if not for the fact that it was
“What’s the problem?” I asked. “Not hot enough?”
“Naaah. Too acid. And too filled with stuff meant for the Uppergrowth and through it, the Brachs. Get wet with this stuff and you’ll feel dirtier, not cleaner. But it sure is pretty, isn’t it?”
I ticked a mental check-mark next to my longstanding prejudice against ecosystems, and said nothing.
After that she dimmed the shields to protect our eyes and took us as close to one of the glowsphere suns as she dared. From a distance of several kilometers, they were clearly roiling balls of flame, churning the storms near them with the force of their radiated heat. No human or alien habitat I’d ever visited had ever harnessed forces anything like these to warm and light their ecospheres, and I confess my knuckles turned white on the armrest as I wondered just what kept the entire atmosphere from burning. But Lassiter laughed at me.
“They give off about as much warmth, in relation to the space they take up, as conventional fires of the same size. They’re certainly hot as hell, by human standards, but they’re not about to incinerate everything in sight. No, as near as we can figure it, they’re mostly here to give this place its night and day. You want to know what provides One One One with the majority of its heat? Its oceans. Whether by internal forces we don’t know about, or by the force of their own chemical reactions and the sheer atmospheric pressure down there, they’re at a state well above what we consider boiling, and the heat rising from them is more than enough to keep us warm and toasty. The storm patterns are just one huge engine for redistributing the heat.”
“As are all weather patterns,” the Porrinyards said.
“Well, yes,” Lassiter said.
What had I been thinking, about boiling pots? I reminded myself how much I hated ecosystems, on general principle, and kept my own counsel.
Then the time for travelogue ended as our attentions turned to the phenomenon we were here to see in the first place.
Lassiter tapped the ROM disk on her forehead. The air before her shimmered and became a blurry 2-D grid marked with isobars and symbols that my eyes read as so much spaghetti. She impaled one spot with an index finger, rippling the image with distortions. “I’ve done a pretty good job modeling their migration patterns, though it’s not all that hard to do, given their rate of movement. At this point there should be four tribal confrontations of the kind you’re talking about: one just starting, one pretty much over, two which should be entering the most
