“That looks like a decent spot,” Tsosie said, picking it out for me in the senso feed.
I studied the highlighted patch. It was flat and there were grab loops. I couldn’t see an airlock hatch, but some of the handholds and what I assumed were tether safeties led toward the interior surface of the wheel. You get a good sense of ship design in my business. I’d put airlocks there, where you wouldn’t have to deal with centripetal force on the way out or in.
“Let’s go around the corner,” I said. As soon as we touched the ship, the spin would start trying to throw us off. This was easier.
Tsosie followed my lead.
The inside surface of the wheel reminded me of the plated underbelly of some kind of legless lizardmorph. It was slightly concave, and though the concavity was a little uneven due to the broken cables, I assumed it had been intentional. Anything that made running around on the outside of your ship a little less profoundly hazardous was good. You never know when you’ll need to go outside and fix a lightsail or something, and space is awfully big.
Lose track of your ship for a few moments and you might never find it again.
We touched down lightly. Our mag boots latched onto the hull, and suddenly we were standing comfortably under about a third of a g.
Tsosie looked over and grinned at me through the faceplate. “Smooth.” He crouched down. “Do you know what I hate?” he continued, running his gauntlets over the hull.
“Do I care what you hate?” I asked.
“I hate it when you take a shit, right? And at the end of it there’s this little hard nodule—no, splinter, this little hard splinter of poo, all by its lonesome. And, you know, there’s no bowel movement behind it to push it out. It’s stranded there in your sphincter, and you can feel it but there’s nothing civilized you can do to get it out.”
“This conversation is being recorded.”
He shrugged.
“You could eat a carrot.” I lowered my head over the readouts on the backs of my hardsuit gloves.
“A what?”
“Carrot,” I said. “A sugary, edible root.”
“What’s that supposed to do, push it out the other end?”
“Nah,” I said. Then, “Well, sort of. If you’re experiencing hard little pellet feces, you’re constipated because you’re either dehydrated, or because you’re not getting enough fiber. Or both. Carrots have water and fiber. Eat carrots and you’ll get nice clean poops. If we lived on a planet, I’d tell you about apples—”
“What’s an apple?”
“What you eat every dia to keep the doctor away,” I said. “At least if your problem is an impacted bowel. Of course, if we kept doctors away, neither one of us would have anybody to talk to.… Oh, look. There’s the airlock.”
I walked toward it, boots clomping with each step. I could hear it through the contact with the hull and the atmosphere inside my hardsuit.
Tsosie followed. “Are you okay, Jens? You look kinda grayish.”
It was taking a fair amount of concentration not to wobble as I walked. “Food is not sitting so well.”
Tsosie grinned at me. He didn’t turn his faceplate toward me, but I could feel it through the senso. “I guess the potty talk isn’t helping.”
“I’m wearing too many ayatanas.” I had half a dozen recorded memory packets from various individuals loaded into my fox: drawing on their expertise for any clues about how to communicate with or help either the ancient humans that might be inside Big Rock Candy Mountain, or the methane-breathing systers aboard the docked, modern ship.
It was a plausible excuse for walking funny, anyway.
The airlock was a manual one, dogged with a wheel. The wheel was stiff with age and lack of maintenance, but I wear an exo for medical reasons. Between me, the exo, and the hardsuit’s servos I got the thing to grind free without having to throw myself on Tsosie’s mercy. I like to do things for myself, because I haven’t always been able to.
It makes me appreciate the small things. Such as being able to turn a sticky wheel.
“Deploying bubble,” Tsosie said.
I gave the wheel a turn or two, but didn’t undog it completely until Tsosie had set the bubble up, adhering the rim to Big Rock Candy Mountain’s hull. It wasn’t a full airlock. Once it was installed the only way out was to cut the membrane. But we had no way to gauge whether the airlock behind the hatch was pressurized, or even intact. Or if the interior door was open. We could explosively decompress part of the generation ship, if we weren’t careful.
There was a thing that might be a pressure gauge. The crystal over it was cracked, and if you squinted past the cracks the needle inside lay flat against one peg. If I was reading the archaic numerals right the needle rested on the depressurized side. That was a good sign for avoiding explosive decompression, if it was accurate: nothing inside to decompress.
It might be a bad sign for anybody inside the generation ship, though.
Sensible airlock design provided for a safety interlock such that one could not open both hatches at the same time. You probably wouldn’t be surprised by how often people—even modern rightminded people, even nonhuman people—fail to do what’s sensible. I wasn’t prepared to assume that unrightminded folks from the distant past—desperate enough to light out for stars even their great-grandchildren would never see, while flying the spacefaring equivalent of a very large, leaky rowboat—would be notably cautious individuals.
I checked Tsosie’s work on the bubble, which was as meticulous as ever. I was having a bad pain dia, so I tuned a little to control it. Not too much, though. Being dopey feels gross, and depressing your reflexes is a terrible idea when you’re entering a rescue zone.
Okay, maybe the ayatanas weren’t the only reason I was looking a little gray.
While I was adjusting, Tsosie finished opening the hatch. No air puffed out. It looked like the
