I peered up. Dimly through the translucent sliding doors I saw people in cells 74 and down, sitting comfortably on the floors; 77 and up remained empty.
“Now, if your mother and I take one, will you three children get along in the other?” my father asked, and the tone of his voice made the suggestion sound eminently reasonable. That’s another adult talent. It was, of course, more than a suggestion.
“We should have two and a half cages,” Spirit said belligerently. We were all very tired, and it was manifesting more openly as our certainty of survival increased. “Even doubled up, that’s our share.”
“If one of you can find a free space—” my father said, shrugging. He really didn’t want to argue.
The hatch to cell 74 slid open. A boy about my own age poked his head down. “I’ll take a roommate,” he called. “Are you nice people?”
“Well...” Spirit began mischievously. She was never too tired for a flash of humor.
“I’ll take it,” I said. “It’s no fun rooming with sisters anyway.” Actually, it would have been okay with Spirit; but Faith was too conscious of her maturity, and would have made things difficult in various minor but cumulatively overwhelming ways.
Spirit frowned but did not protest. She knew she would get along with Faith better than I would. It was my position in life to protect Faith from molestation on the street, and Spirit’s to preserve her privacy in the home. It is a fair sized responsibility to have a pretty sibling.
“Spring up and catch the edge of the opening,” the boy advised.
I touched Spirit’s shoulder and gave it a squeeze. I would rather have roomed with her than with some stranger, and she knew it; this reminder was merely my gesture of thanks for her understanding. We could not put Faith in with a strange boy.
I tossed up my pack, then sprang up and hooked my fingers in the opening, then hauled myself on inside. Acrobatics are easy in eighth-gee. When I was clear of the entrance, the boy slid the panel closed, so we could relax without fear of falling through the floor. I didn’t worry about my folks; I knew they’d manage.
I sat up and contemplated my companion. He seemed to be my height—it wasn’t possible to be certain while sitting—but more slender of structure, with very thin arms. His hair was short and brown, like mine, and his eyes were brown too and seemed a bit too large for his face, but his features were well formed. I decided I liked him—but my sense-of-people signaled warning. There was something about him that didn’t jibe.
“What’s your name?” I asked forthrightly.
“What’s yours?” he returned less forthrightly.
Still that slight wrongness. “Hope Hubris. My father’s a tallyman of the coffee dome. Was, I mean. I got into trouble with a scion, and now we all have to get out.”
He smiled. It was a fetching, compelling expression that transformed his face into something wholly likable. Some people have practiced smiles that are letter-perfect but that lack warmth; this was a natural one. “I’m Helse. My folks are servants—when they find work. They can’t support me, so I’m emigrating.”
“Helse?” I asked. “That’s an unusual name, for this planet.”
“And Hope isn’t?”
I laughed. “I guess a person can be named anything his folks want.”
“Helse is the plural of Hell, they tell me. I’m a hellion.”
I was already sure he wasn’t that. Violence was not his way. But what he was, I had not yet fathomed. Maybe he had more urgent reason to emigrate alone than economics.
The ice was broken. We chatted a little about inconsequentials, and my awareness of the oddness about him intensified. He wasn’t bad or dangerous, just subtly wrong. I liked him, for he was at least as well educated as I, and he wasn’t mean. My judgment of people in this respect is infallible.
After a time I checked on my folks. Faith and Spirit were next to me, in 75, and our parents in the next one over. They were already lying down for a nap.
“Go back and finish your conversation,” Spirit told me. “It’s interesting.”
But I was too weary for that, or even to be embarrassed. Naturally there was no privacy of sound in a situation like this; one would have to whisper to keep any secret from those in adjacent cells. Helse and I had not said anything confidential, anyway.
I saw I had other neighbors in cells 73, 71, and the two corners, and when the remaining cells filled up we would have eight neighbors in all. I see this isn’t clear, so I’ll make a chart, as I like to keep things straight. The band of cells extended all the way around the bubble’s equator, four abreast, numbered consecutively by rows. With a circumference of about fifty meters at the equator, but less to either side of it, there was just room for twenty-four such rows, or ninety-six cells, and four more squeezed in somewhere around the edges. Our particular section was numbered like this:
The line along the center is the bubble equator, the region of greatest centrifugal gravity when it is rotating. It wasn’t really a line, any more than it is on any moon or planet, but it helps a person to align things. The cell numbers continued on either side, upward and downward, but it seems pointless to list all ninety-six. Anyway, I was sure that I would get to know the people in all eight bordering cells soon enough, once we were under way.
Right now the brief exhilaration of de-suiting and settling in and meeting my roommate was giving out, and I just had to rest. I returned to cell 74, handing myself along from panel to panel readily enough, said good night to Helse, though I suppose it was just about morning in Maraud time, and tuned out the universe.
Sleep came like a ton of sand, burying me, for all that a ton only weighed an eighth of a ton in this gravity. At one point I was dimly aware of other people entering the adjacent cells and of the clangs of the outer locks being secured. I didn’t let any of it disturb me. Helse lay parallel to me, presumably sleeping too. I heard him speak once to someone outside, probably another person wanting to share the cell; there was a hassle, but it finally died down without the intrusion of any other person. So if my presence here in cell 74 had been an imposition, it was legitimate now. I had legitimized it by possession or squatter’s rights. But Helse had been instrumental in that effort, for he could have had me booted. I owed him one.
I woke to a hand on my arm, steadying me. “I didn’t want you banging into a wall when the bubble maneuvers,” Helse explained.
I looked about blearily. I was floating in air!
I flailed wildly for a moment, then realized I was not really falling. I used Helse as leverage to get to a handhold and secured myself to a wall. My stomach felt light, and I had to swallow several times before convincing myself that I wasn’t about to throw up, but otherwise I was all right.
“We’re taking off,” Helse explained. “Null-gee. You can see out the port.”
I hadn’t realized the cubic chambers had portholes of their own, and later I learned that many did not; we happened to be lucky. Actually, ours wasn’t much; it was only ten centimeters in diameter, and the thickness of the outer shell of the bubble made it seem tubular. I set my nose against it, holding myself close by means of recessed handholds on either side, and peered out.
I really didn’t see much. Our cube-cell was near the top of the bubble-sphere as it rested on the ground—but it wasn’t on the ground anymore, so that was irrelevant. I knew the propulsion was from the vicinity of the axis, so here at the equator we would be looking straight out at right angles to our line of travel.
I see I have to explain about the drive. Like the little null-gee saucers, bubbles have to use some form of active propulsion. Gravity lenses are fine, but they do not move objects; they merely lessen or eliminate the pull of gravity. Now, you might think that all we had to do was cut off the gravity of Callisto, and Jupiter would pull us right in to itself. Well, Jupiter was trying, but we still weren’t free to respond. We were, in fact, in orbit about Jupiter, as was Callisto. So we stayed right where we were. Releasing us from Callisto was only part
of the job. We had not been released from the basic physics of our situation. So we needed a jet to make us move.
The jet was now boosting us up at an angle to the surface of Callisto; that much I could perceive. We no longer weighed anything, so didn’t have to worry about falling back to Callisto, but our mass remained, and the jet wasn’t strong, so it was slow. But gravity travel is slow, in practice; if you want to get anywhere in a hurry, you have to use a spaceship, not a bubble. The bubble is the rowboat of space; it is not exactly first-class travel. Which is why we refugee peasants could afford it, barely.
So all I saw, apart from Callisto, was Jupiter, and it didn’t even seem to be getting closer. Perspective is like that; it seems you are getting nowhere. Jupiter was moving, of course, as our course wobbled somewhat uncertainly, but that was irrelevant. I pushed away from the port.
Now Helse looked out. “Shouldn’t we be going right toward Jupiter?” he asked.
I saw that I knew something he didn’t. That gratified me. “We can’t go straight to Jupiter,” I explained. “We’re in orbit.”
“I know that,” he said, miffed. “We’ll approach Jupiter in a big spiral. Because our orbital velocity joins our approach velocity in a compromise vector. But at least we can accelerate toward Jupiter, to help tighten the spiral.”
“No good,” I said. “The closer an orbiting object gets to its primary, the faster it orbits. We’d end up going so fast we’d bounce out again. What we have to do is slow our orbital velocity. Then we’ll fall in naturally—though we’ll still be orbiting faster.”
He shook his head. “We slow—so we go faster? I don’t understand that.”
“Lots of people don’t,” I said somewhat smugly.
He let it drop. “I’ll be glad when they spin the bubble, so we have weight again.”
With that I agreed heartily. Free fall is fine for a moment, but it rapidly palls as the novelty wears off. I had spent all my life in gravity, mostly Earth norm; I could get along on less, but my stomach definitely didn’t like null-gee. “I think it’ll be some time, though,” I said. “The jet drive doesn’t have much thrust, only enough to nudge us into the wall. This is no space liner.”
He laughed, with a surprisingly high pitch. “No, this is a little sailboat!”
It was a nice enough analogy, better than my prior thought about a rowboat. Back on the historical oceans of Earth, a thousand years ago, there were all kinds of ships. It was impossible to go to space in an open craft, but the contemporary bubbles were as close to it as was feasible, using mainly the ambient gravity fields of space for propulsion, much as the little sailboats used vagrant winds on the planetary surface. Winds could let a person down—and so could gravity.
We waited interminably. The pilot made a circuit of the Commons—that was the torus-shaped central hall—and advised us to remain in our cells until we got clear of the planet, except for use of the heads. The heads were the bathrooms; there were eight of them, which was supposed to be enough for one hundred people. But we had about two hundred people. So that meant twenty-five to a head. We organized it by the numbers—and cells 74 and 75 were at the line for head number 6. Suddenly my business there seemed overpoweringly urgent.
Helse seemed to be in even greater distress than I. “May I talk to you privately?” he asked.
I realized that he meant he didn’t want the people in the neighboring cells overhearing. I moved close. “Sure.”
“Will you keep a secret?” he whispered in my ear.
“Not if you plan to do anything illegal or unethical,” I whispered back, not certain whether I was serious. We were all doing something quasi-illegal by sneaking away from the planet like this. The feeling of oddness about him returned, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear his secret. The very knowledge could compromise my own situation, somehow.
“Nothing like that,” he answered me. “But awkward—and I’ll need your help. Please do not betray me.”
I squinted at him. The urgency in his voice was manifest; he was not joking. I was becoming excruciatingly curious about his oddness. “I’ll keep your secret, so long as it doesn’t hurt me or anyone else,” I said. “But if you have, for example, a contagious disease, common sense should indicate that secrecy is not—”
He smiled instantly. “No, nothing like that.”
“But I don’t promise to help you,” I finished. “The secret is one thing, inactive; help is another.”
“All right.” He took a breath, then leaned close to my ear again. “I’m a girl.”
“So that’s it!” I exclaimed in a whisper, as the oddness fell into focus.
His—her brow furrowed. “You knew? What gave me away?”
It was my turn to smile. “I didn’t know, but—well, I have this sense about other people. I know what their strengths and weaknesses are, and what motivates them, and how far I can trust them. It’s not psychic; it’s just a judgment I have, after I interact with them a little. Maybe I pick up private signals from the body; I don’t know. With you there is something wrong. Was something. I knew you were a nice person, but you didn’t quite fall into place. Now I realize it’s because I was trying to fit you into a masculine mode, and you were—are feminine. That’s a relief.”
“You don’t mind?” she asked uncertainly.
“I like to solve mysteries. You aren’t odd anymore. I mean, not to my special perception. Probably no one else would have felt it at all, but I—well, that’s my one real talent, the thing that distinguishes me from other people. I’d really hate to have it be wrong.”
“I deceived you, pretending to be a boy. You might have refused to room with me, otherwise.”
“I don’t care what sex you are, if you don’t care,” I reassured her. “I have two sisters; I was going to share a cell with them, but this is more fun and less crowded.” I considered, looking at her with a changed perception. “How old are you? You’re my size—”
“Sixteen,” she said. “Girls don’t get as big as boys.”
“I know. My sister Faith is eighteen, and she’s the same size as me, and I’m not big. But I fight for her, because—you know.”
“I know,” she said, smiling herself. Now, with my perception of her as feminine, the expression was cute. She wasn’t as pretty as Faith—wouldn’t be even if she were all garbed and coifed like a girl—but of course no one was as pretty as Faith—but she was nice enough. There is something sort of special about any girl; they’re a distinct and intriguing species. “I have no brother to fight for me, so I became a brother.”
“Makes sense.” It did indeed. “The way men go after Faith— that’s really why we’re here. I stopped a scion from getting at her.”
“Scions are bad ones,” she agreed. ‘Any man is potential trouble. I don’t mean you; you’re a boy. No offense.”
“And you don’t want to room with a man,” I said, working it out. “He would make demands—I guess we should have had Faith join you. But we didn’t know.”
“No, I wanted you,” Helse said quickly. We were still conversing in barely audible whispers, of course. “It would look funny, a mixed couple unrelated, even at our ages, and I still have to hide my nature. I don’t know who may be aboard this bubble, or what may be expected when things get dull. Please don’t tell anyone.”
“I promised,” I said a little stiffly. “It’s your secret. I’ll keep it.”
“And I’ll need your help, if you will give it. You see, the bathroom—”
The rest of her problem illuminated. “You’ll have to use the male head! That’ll be awkward, if—”
“If there’s anyone else there,” she finished. “Will you help me?”
“It’s something no person can do for another,” I pointed out, embarrassed.
She blushed. She would have to watch that, in public. “I need someone to cover for me, in case—”
“Oh, to stand by the door and make sure no man interrupts,” I said. “I’ll try.”
“Oh, thank you! I’m most grateful.”
“Actually, I’m glad to get a half share of a cell, instead of a third share. You don’t have to be grateful to me.” The truth was, sharing a cell with a young woman not my sister was a prospect that promised to be interesting. Like most adolescent boys, I had dreams of the opposite sex, but lacked the courage to implement them. It wasn’t that I envied youths like the scion; he was obviously a heel from the outset, and should come to a bad end, if we had not succeeded in ending him. It also wasn’t that I had any overwhelming procreational urge; as far as I can tell, mine is normal for my age. But there are few convenient avenues of general acquaintance with girls available to boys in my situation, and none for full sexual expression. I knew girls were not mere sex objects— after all, Spirit is a girl—but when society places a sexual emphasis on association, it is hard to relate to the opposite sex as regular people. Here was my chance to really get to know a girl who was not my sister.
Helse was looking at me as if trying to assess the nature of my agreement. I fathomed her concern. “Don’t worry,” I said. “I’m a boy, not a man. I won’t be grabbing for you.”
“Thank you,” she said, smiling wryly.
Yet I was close enough to manhood to feel the desire to grab for her. I had told myself that I valued the opportunity to have a young woman for a friend, and I did—but there was an insidious and powerful undercurrent of sexual interest too. I would have to guard myself, because if she got the notion that I might appreciate her sexual qualities, she would surely seek some other roommate, and that would abolish all speculations, licit and illicit. I had a secret of my own to keep, now.
Our turn for the head came. We slid open the panel and floated down. Head number 6 was alongside the quadruple row of cells; it was more triangular in cross section, because of the curve of the bubble shell. The Commons was a doughnut, but near the bubble’s axis the chambers were lined up parallel to it. This left a wedge-shaped space between the cellblock and the axis, where storage sheds, fuse boxes, and bathrooms were squeezed in. The bubble didn’t need space for bathtubs or shower stalls, as there was no spare water in space for this sort of nonsense. People were expected to wash their bodies with small sanitary sponges that could be rinsed with half a cup of water. We didn’t even bother with that; no sponges were left. People were going to have to stink. Fortunately the air recycling removed odors as well.