So did a towel, to dry my sweaty face. Then I eased back into the net and reclosed it. I needed more sleep. Perhaps I would dream of gravity, where I would not be lost in the aimlessness of null gee.
My eyes wouldn't stay closed, nor my thoughts quiet.
Foerga's face in the middle of a spinning star? The arcs of golden-red fire. I had seen them before. Where?
Why would they return to a dream now?
Stars? Now that I thought about it, I hadn't seen a single star since I'd left earth, and yet I was on a station orbiting a planet circling one of the most distant stars to which the demons had sent their needle ships.
A laugh started within me but died away, cold and distant, as I recalled the insight in Foerga's face. Foerga's face, and penetrating deep azure eyes and niellen hair.
I shivered again, cold all over now. Hybra seemed far away, much farther than mere stellar spacing, an infinitely distant land of auspexes, lithoidolators, and dzinarchists.
29
The passion for analysis does not reflect upon the accuracy of the analyzer.
Eventually, even on a demon orbit station as far from Rykasha as possible, as low as a maintenance tech was, I settled into a routine. Gerbriik's voice became bored when he issued me orders, as it was with Fersonne and Sanselle. I began to recognize the names and references to the needle ships that called, and their officers, even though none of them ever looked at maintenance crews as more than high-level AIs with organic limbs designed to off-load cargo and carry out simple tasks.
I developed a consistent exercise routine in the gym and the full-gee spin chamber, even if I never exercised when the station officers or Sanselle did.
Finally, for lack of anything else to do, I began to study again - this time what there was on the background of nanite development and engineering. And I did it the way that seemed to work for me - by reading the information from the station's databanks on a portable screen.
The Rykashan history that had been pumped into me had never made much sense, nor did the additional bits and pieces I overheard. Initially, the history of nanite technology implementation made just as little sense. Whole sections of the text referred to events that were not in my basic indoctrination history. Nor did they correspond in more than vaguely general terms with the history I had learned in Henvor.
Sorting all that out required more research to fit historical developments together with nanite technology evolution. Even so, seemingly rational passages made little sense, especially when I was tired after three straight shifts. But I persisted, after a fashion.
In the dimness of my cube, I blinked at the words on the screen clipped to one side of my sleeping net, then blinked again.
... the implementation of the first nanite-based psychohistory projects (circa 530 A.S.) in the Amnord nation precursors to Dorcha and Toze established the applied feasibility of accurate projection of political behavior on the first true microaggulatinated-socio-economic basis ... despite the so-called Free Action massacres that followed ...
... although uncontrolled nanite-based organic rehabilitation developed by Dretias and Kestmayer (see Prehistory of Nanosystems) was cited as the cause of the Demon Gluttony Famines (515 A.S. and 510 A.S.)... analysis indicates that climate readjustments caused by industrial greenhouse offgasing played an equally pivotal role ... such changes ... led first to global geoponic restructuring, to silval reengineering, and to the forced development of advanced low-cost formulator technologies ...
... Dorchester compact rejected use of formulator-derived nutrition ...
... of nanite-fisheye invisibility was deployed by the Risen Shin (?) Empire against the Chungkuo Republic in approximately 490 A.S. (2060 AD or old era measurement) ... led to the sterilization of the archipelago ... reclamation was not begun until 200 PSE ...
I clicked off the screen. The information was too detailed and created too much conflict for me to digest more than a few thousand words at a time - and there were many thousands of words written about the technology that had created my world and then thrust me from it.
As my eyes closed, the blackness was filled with red-golden arcs of fire, arcs that cascaded across a starlike pinwheel circling in blackness. I opened my eyes quickly, and the fire arcs and pinwheel vanished into the dull blackness of my cube, fuzzy and indistinct compared to that niellen-backed tableau of stars and flame.
Sleep came less easily - far less easily - as my facility with maintenance duties improved.
30
When the complexity of social patterning is reduced, so is individual freedom.
One of the continuing menial duties of the maintenance crews was to cart up linens and supplies for the transient guest quarters on the upper station levels. The job wasn't onerous, merely menial, and often a welcome relief from tasks such as using a SARM between decks, or unloading needle ships, or patching scars in corridor bulkheads too large for the maintenance nanites.
I was halfway though unloading the clean linens for the guest suites on the uppermost level of the station when
Gerbriik appeared at my elbow. It wasn't Gerbriik, but a nanite-generated image from my own commpak, but he might as well have been there, square-faced, sharp-nosed, black-haired. Would that Manwarr had seen such iconraising. I held in an amused smile, thinking how he would have called Gerbriik far worse than a cophrologer.
'Tyndel.'
'Yes, ser?'
'You should have finished by now.'
The maintenance officer scowled. 'Yes, ser.'
Gerbriik's eyes seemed to go to the small sled - two-thirds empty - tethered loosely on one side of the corridor. You'll have to finish later, and you will finish it before you go off-shift.'
'Yes, sir.'
'Glide your corpus down to lock three. Hay Needle's on final approach. You and Sanselle need to unload it quickly.'
Quickly? What difference did it make with all the time dilation involved whether we took a few minutes or hours longer? It would still be weeks or months before the Hay Needle returned to one of the earth orbit stations. So much hurrying was because people thought that haste saved time for something more valuable. The Hay Needle was likely to lose more time from a poor insertion than from a few more minutes spent unloading.
'There's a big singularity in the overspace Web, and it's angling toward us. The pilot wants his cargo off. Otherwise, he'll be here for a long time.' Gerbriik smiled coldly. You wouldn't want a needle jockey mad at you. Or me.'
'No, ser.' I tightened the tethers on the small sled and refastened the straps over the linens I hadn't unloaded. The transient guests needed linens because their beds were more like pallets into which they were netted. Towels we all needed to mop up the water around us after null grav showers, as well as what clung to us that wasn't recovered by the nanite collectors.
'You'd better get moving, hadn't you, Dzin master Tyndel?'
'Yes, ser.'
As I glided toward the transit shaft, I tried to access what I knew about singularities. Singularity - a region of space-time where one or more components of the nonstandard curvature tensor become infinite. Singularity - a discrete but dimensionless discontinuity in the supra-wave-vector space. Singularity - the result of an object collapsing with a mass of S(s-V and with a gravitational radius greater than its physical radius. Were they all the same? Or were there three kinds of singularities? The second one sounded like what Gerbriik was talking about, but I wasn't in any position to ask.