Outside the port, I followed the other's example and pulled off the breather hood. Sweat still streamed down my face and down the back of the coverall singlesuit, leaving it an even darker gray than when I had started that morning.
'Time to eat. We get a standard hour to eat and rest each four hours. I'm Fersonne.' She was angular, and as tall as I, with brown hair not much longer than mine.
I followed Fersonne, pulling myself after her through the tube down to mid-deck three and the canteen, a gray windowless space that would have fit into a prehistoric castle, except for the formulator. The spiced orange pasta and chicken dish was good. But I was certain that was only because good food cost no more than bad with a nanite food reformulator. Fersonne had something else, something that was mostly rice, and she ate without talking.
The sticktites on the chair seat held me in place. I wondered why they even bothered with seats in null grav, but supposed it was part of the effort to re-create the familiar ... or something. There was nothing on the reasons for anything in the briefing sprays, just facts, figures, and schematics.
'Tyndel?' asked Fersonne, her mouth half full.
'Yes?'
'Why are you here?'
I shrugged. 'Because I wouldn't be a needle jockey.'
There was a definite silence before she spoke again.
'They offered you that kind of chance? And you turned them down? Do you know what kind of life needle jockeys have?'
'No. No one explained very much of anything.'
Fersonne looked at me with those wide brown eyes, and, for some reason, I wanted to duck under the table.
'I'm on an extra two years' objective here, Tyndel. You know why?'
'No. I don't know much, I've discovered.' I followed the words with a shrug.
'I'm adjusted. That means I can't do much on earth. More on an outplanet, maybe. A year's station stipend here is almost ten years what I could earn anywhere else, and they'll let me choose any open outplanet after station duty.'
Fersonne shook her head. 'A needle jockey gets ten times that, or more, I hear.'
After the first years, I suspect.'
'They live well even then.' She dropped her eyes.
There was little enough I could say without making matters worse. I took another mouthful of the pasta, wondering how long before the gray bulkheads would start to close in on me, if I ever would regard OE Station as anything more than the demon equivalent of a Dorchan stone demon trap with food.
Fersonne's guileless brown eyes studied me. Meeting them was hard, and I didn't know why. Or was it that I didn't want to think about why? I sipped Arleen tea that was already lukewarm from a squeeze bottle, as much to avoid speaking as from thirst.
26
Freedom and ignorance are incapable of long coexistence.
I half glided, half scrambled toward the maintenance office as my internal timepieces warned me - zero seven fifty-five ... zero seven fifty-five.
Every muscle ached from the maintenance details of the preceding five days. I never would have thought how muscles could ache in null gravity, especially with the extra strength provided by both personal nanites and the nanite-reinforced coveralls. Gerbriik found ways to use every bit of that strength.
Beyond that strength, as a Dorchan I still sometimes had trouble believing that the demons had returned to space and the stars, apparently so easily. That was inconceivable, yet, as a Dzin master, I could see that it had happened. The conflict between what my Dzin training and perceptions told me had happened and what my upbringing had told me couldn't have happened sometimes gave me a headache if I thought about it for long. Why? Because all my early upbringing had emphasized that the return to space was inconceivable? Because my Dzin training had also conditioned me to accept what obviously was? Because the ancients' dream of the stars was considered impossible? But if the demons had the stars ... what was the next dream? Was there one beyond just stars and more stars? Somehow, conquering the Void didn't seem like a real dream.
I wasn't ready to think more about that, and I didn't. Instead, I slid into the maintenance office and closed the hatch behind me. Gerbriik waited by the large wall screen, drifting in midair in the null gravity. Fersonne floated beside the maintenance officer, her wide brown eyes expressionless.
'Tyndel,' began Gerbriik, pointing to the image on the screen, 'this is a cargo sled. Fersonne and Sanselle will help you practice with it. That practice is not because I'm babying you. That's because of all the jump-credits it takes to get one out here. I don't want one of our sleds damaged. Neither do you, because I can charge the damage to your contract time.'
'Yes, ser.' I looked at the image of the sled - nothing more than an open-topped box with dark gray reinforcing beams on the bottom and both ends, and with netlike webbing on the front, back, and top.
'How do you think it works?'
Rather than ask, I searched the briefing data, a mental chore that continued to feel like rummaging through piles of unread papers in my skull. 'Magnetic induction, ser?'
'What does that mean, O former Dzin master?'
'The sled centers itself on the guides on the left side of the cargo spaces and transit corridors.'
The maintenance officer nodded abruptly toward Fersonne, in a motion that was swift and effortless, the kind of movement that created no reaction in null gravity. 'Have him run it up and down Beta Corridor - quick stops, turns, shifts to the opposite rails.'
'Yes, ser,' answered my brown-haired colleague.
'Tyndel, you do exactly what Fersonne says. Do you understand?'
'Yes, ser.'
'Good. Over the next few months we're scheduled Jo get three ships' worth of cargo for the terraforming project. You'd better be as good as Fersonne by then.'
'Yes, ser.'
Gerbriik turned in his usual manner to signify he was through with us.
I followed Fersonne to the transit shafts and then all the way to the bottom - where I'd never been before.
'Lower level's all cargo stuff,' she announced as she opened the three-door hatch from the shaft. Her fingers were deft with the wrench key for the middle door.
'Does the station get much?'
'No. Just supplies and stuff for the projects.'
'Gerbriik mentioned terraforming ...'
Fersonne gave me another of those wide-eyed looks that made me feel embarrassed that I hadn't searched my internal knowledge before opening my mouth, and I began to rack my brains once more.
After a moment, I nodded. The whole point of the out-stations was terraforming - for those stations in systems without habitable planets, and that was more than half of the dozen-plus systems linked by the needle ships. Nanotech made general trade uneconomical, and none of the outcolonies had the education and resources yet to develop technology or knowledge superior to that of the Rykashan demons of earth.
The idea was simple enough - spread people far enough that no single catastrophe could wipe out the human race. I frowned. Which human race? The one from which I had sprung or the demons? Or were they one and the same?
'Cargo handling's better in some ways,' Fersonne said after my continuing silence. 'Sometimes you get to talk to the crews or the super or even a passenger.'
'Other people.'
'You notice no one on station talks to us except to give an order? Or information necessary to carry out an order?'
I hadn't, but I took her word for it. She led the way down the dimly lit cargo corridor with the gliding movement everyone but me seemed to have mastered. The corridor was a good three times as wide and high as the tubular corridors on the other station levels and gave me the impression of a vaulted basement of an ancient building, for all that the walls were seamless gray, shaded slightly with brown.