Falling Free

legs.

Are you saying you need a front man? he’d asked, amused.

Is that what it’s called? Her gaze upon him had been coolly pragmatic.

He was getting too old, his brain was short-circuiting to some distant rock beat, slipping back to the noisier rhythms of his adolescence. Let me be your front man, baby. Call me Leo. Call me anytime, day or night. Let me help. He eyed the closed airseal doors. Was the man waving the baton at the front of the parade pulling it after him—or being pushed along ahead of it? He had a queasy premonition he was going to learn the answer. He woofed a breath, and returned his attention to the lecture chamber.

“As some of you have already heard,” Leo began, words like pebbles in the pool of silence, “a new gravity technology has arrived from the outlying planets. It’s apparently based on a variation of the Necklin field tensor equations, the same mathematics that underlie the technology we use to punch through those wrinkles in space- time we call wormholes. I haven’t been able to get hold of the tech specs yet myself, but it seems it’s already been developed to the marketable stage. The theoretical possibility was not, strictly speaking, new, but I for one never expected to see its practical capture in my lifetime. Evidently, neither did the people who created you quaddies.

“There is a kind of strange symmetry to it. The spurt forward in genetic bioengineering that made you possible was based on the perfection of a new technology, the uterine replicator, from Beta Colony. Now, barely a generation later, the new technology that renders you obsolete has arrived from the same source. Because that’s what you have become, before you even got on-line—technologically obsolete. At least from GalacTech’s point of view.” Leo drew breath, watching for their reactions.

“Now, when a machine becomes obsolete, we scrap it. When a man’s training becomes obsolete, we send him back to school. But your obsolescence was bred in your bones. It’s either a cruel mistake, or, or, or,” he paused for emphasis, “the greatest opportunity you will ever have to become a free people.

“Don’t… don’t take notes,” Leo choked, as heads bent automatically over their scribble boards, illuminating his key words with their light pens as the autotranscription marched across their displays. “This isn’t a class. This is real life.” He had to stop a moment to regain his equilibrium. He was positive some child at the back was still highlighting “no notes—real life”, in reflexive virtue.

Pramod, floating near, looked up, his dark eyes agitated. “Leo? There was a rumor going around that the company was going to take us all downside and shoot us. Lake Tony.”

Leo smiled sourly. “That’s actually the least likely scenario. You are to be taken downside, yes, to a sort of prison camp. But this is how guilt-free genocide is handled. One administrator passes you on to the next, and him to the next, and him to the next. You become a routine expense on the inventory. Expenses rise, as they always do. In response, your downsider support employees are gradually withdrawn, as the company names you ‘self-suflicient.’ Life support equipment deteriorates with age. Breakdowns happen more and more often, maintenance and re- supply become more and more erratic.

“Then one night—without anybody ever giving an order or pulling a trigger—some critical breakdown occurs. You send a call for help. Nobody knows who you are. Nobody knows what to do. Those who placed you there are all long gone. No hero takes initiative, initiative having been drained by administrative bitching and black hints. The investigating inspector, after counting the bodies, discovers with relief that you were merely inventory. The books are quietly closed on the Cay Project. Finis. Wrap. It might take twenty years, maybe only five or ten. You are simply forgotten to death.”

Pramod’s hand touched his throat, as if he already felt the rasp of Rodeo’s toxic atmosphere. “I think I’d rather be shot,” he muttered.

“Or,” Leo raised his voice, “you can take your lives into your own hands. Come with me and put all your risks up front. The big gamble for the big payoff. Let me tell you,” he gulped for courage, mustered megalomania—for surely only a maniac could drive this through to success—”let me tell you about the Promised Land.…”

Chapter 9

Leo stretched for a look out the viewport of the cargo pusher at the rapidly-enlarging Transfer Station. Damn. The weekly passenger ship from Orient IV was already docked at the hub of the wheel. Newly arrived, it was doubtless still in the off-loading phase, but nothing seemed more likely to Leo than for a pilot—or ex-pilot—like Ti to invite himself aboard early, to kibbitz.

The Jump ship was blocked from view as they spiraled around the station to their own assigned shuttle hatch. The quaddie piloting the pusher, a dark-haired, copper-skinned girl named Zara in the purple T-shirt and shorts of the pusher crews, brought her ship smartly into alignment and clicked it delicately into the clamps on the landing spoke. Leo was encouraged toward belief in her top rating among the pusher pilots after all, despite his qualms about her age, barely fifteen.

The mild acceleration vector of the Station’s spin at this radius tugged at Leo, and his padded chair swung in its gimbals to the newly-defined “upright” position. Zara grinned over her shoulder at Leo, clearly exhilarated by the sensation. Silver, in the quaddie-formfit acceleration couch beside Zara, looked more dubious.

Zara completed the formal litany of cross-checks with Transfer Station traffic control, and shut down her systems. Leo sighed illogical relief that traffic control hadn’t questioned the vaguely-worded purpose of their filed flight plan—”Pick up material for the Cay Habitat.” There was no reason they should have. Leo wasn’t even close to exceeding his powers of authorization. Yet.

“Watch, Silver,” said Zara, and let a light-pen fall from her fingers. It fell slowly to the padded strip on the wall-now-floor, and bounced in a graceful arc. Zara’s lower hand scooped it back out of the air.

Leo waited resignedly while Silver tried it once too, then said, “Come on. We’ve got to catch Ti.”

“Right.” Silver pulled herself up by her upper hands on her headrest, swung her lowers free, and hesitated. Leo shook out his pair of grey sweat pants he’d brought for the purpose, and gingerly helped her pull them over her lower arms and up to her waist. She waved her hands and the ends of the pant legs flopped and flapped over them. She grimaced at the unaccustomed constraint of the bundled cloth upon her dexterity.

“All right, Silver,” said Leo, “now the shoes you borrowed from that girl running Hydroponics.”

“I gave them to Zara to stow.”

“Oh,” said Zara. One of her upper hands flew to her lips.

“What?”

“I left them in the docking bay.”

“Zara!”

“Sorry…”

Silver blew out her breath against Leo’s neck. “Maybe your shoes, Leo,” she suggested.

“I don’t know…” Leo kicked out of his shoes, and Zara helped Silver slip her lower hands into them.

“How do they look?” said Silver anxiously.

Zara wrinkled her nose. “They look kinda big.”

Leo sidled around to catch their reflection in the darkened port. They looked absurd. Leo regarded his feet as though he’d never seen them before. Did they look that absurd on him? His socks seemed suddenly like enormous white worms. Feet were insane appendages. “Forget the shoes. Give ‘em back. Just let the pant legs cover your hands.”

“What if someone asks what happened to my feet?” Silver worried aloud.

“Amputated,” suggested Leo, “due to a terrible case of frostbite suffered on your vacation to the Antarctic Continent.”

“Isn’t that on Earth? What if they start asking questions about Earth?”

“Then I’ll—I’ll quash them for rudeness. But most people are pretty inhibited about asking questions like