She burst into giggles, and they were friends.
The tour was not the standard first-time first-day grand tour Rhea had taken on her previous trip here. This seemed more like a kind of VIP, behind-the-scenes version. It was still quite impressive, but more intimate, somehow, conveying the added message that only special people got to be impressed in this particular way. “Of course, you’ll still be learning things about this place the day before you go back home,” he said at one point. “I’m still learning things about it.”
“How long have you had this job?” Rhea asked politely.
“I just got it. But I’ve been coming here since I was a kid.”
That long, huh? she thought ironically, but kept the thought to herself.
She swapped bio synopses with Duncan as the tour progressed. He was twenty, bisexual, single, and had a bachelor’s degree in molecular electronics from U.H.E.O. which he hoped to parlay into a Master’s once he had earned the tuition. If only he had been fifteen years older, massed twice as much, had a hairier torso and been muscled more like an earthborn, she would have considered trying to pair him off with Jay. His parents were both spacers who worked at Skyfac.
Colly’s favorite part of the tour was what she instantly dubbed the Blob: the Shimizu’s famous zero-gee swimming pool. Located at the very center of the hotel for reasons of orbital stability, it was essentially a large spherical tank, thirty meters across, containing 210,000 liters of crystalline water and happy people.
Of course Colly insisted on going in. You donned breathing and comm gear and four fins, and entered through an air-lock. Inside, it was preternaturally beautifuclass="underline" artistically colored lights were deployed all around and blended to produce shifting effects, and the tank was stocked with multihued fish of tropical breeds—robots, of course, but no less brilliant or beautiful for that. They were absolutely impossible to catch, or even touch: Colly spent a happy time trying. Rhea enjoyed herself almost as much as her daughter. Afterward in the dressing room, Colly announced that air bubbles were prettier in free-fall—and acted more interesting too.
What Rhea thought was that swimming in P-Town was better—whether you did it on the ocean or bay side. But she kept the thought to herself.
When they rejoined Duncan, the first thing Colly said was, “Duncan, how come you don’t have muscles, like Daddy?”
“Colly!” Rhea began.
But Duncan cut her off, smiling. “I know that would be a rude question on Terra—but things are different in space. Here it’s just a good question.”
Colly looked pleased. “So what’s the good answer?” she asked.
“Because I don’t need ’em. Earthworm muscles—excuse me, Terran muscles—are worse than useless up here. You don’t need that much power, and you keep hurting yourself, by pushing off too hard.”
“Oh.” Colly looked down at her skinned knees, and rubbed a banged elbow thoughtfully. “I knew that: I was just testing you.”
“Can I ask you a question now?”
“Sure.”
“Back there in the pool—why did you like those angelfish so much?”
“They kept making, like, a flower,” she said. “You know, tails together but each head pointing out a different way, like a puffball.”
“Don’t real angelfish do that on Terra?” he asked.
She stared at him. “How could they? Some of them’d be upside down!”
He blinked, and grinned. “Isn’t that funny? I knew real fish can’t live in free-fall, because they die without a local vertical to align to; I’ve read that. But I didn’t follow it through and realize they wouldn’t ever make puffballs down there.”
“That’s the difference between book learning and experience,” Rhea said, seeing a chance to make this a lesson for Colly. “Duncan was born in space. He knows a lot, but you know things he doesn’t.”
“And vice versa,” he agreed. “That’s why I’m here. Over the next couple of days you’re both going to get real tired of hearing me repeat certain things. Free-fall safety, vacuum-drill, flare-drill, p-suit maintenance, things like that. And you’ll tell me that you know all that stuff, and you’ll be right. You know it as book learning. So let me keep bugging you, okay? Otherwise you may get in some kind of trouble, from expecting an angelfish to make a puffball.”
Colly nodded solemnly. She had been watching the way he handled himself in zero gee, and trying to copy his movements, but from then on she would ask his advice, and take it.
“For instance, both of you put in your earphones for a second.”
Rhea and Colly both complied.
“I want you to hear a sound without others hearing it. Listen—” He touched a pad at his wrist, and they heard a distinctive warbling shriek. “If you hear that, you have less than twenty minutes to get here to the pool. If you’re late, you’ll die. It means a bad solar flare is on the way—and this pool is also the Shimizu’s storm shelter.”
“How long do they last?” Colly asked.
“Anywhere from eighteen hours to three days or so.”
“We might have to swim for three days?” She didn’t seem alarmed. Rhea certainly was.
“Oh, no! They pump the water into holding tanks all around the pool, so it’ll do the most good as shielding.”
“That thing is huge,” Rhea said, “but is it really big enough to accommodate twelve-hundred-odd people for up to three days?”
“If they’re friendly,” he said with a grin. “Don’t worry: most flares you’re ever liable to see, you can deal with by just getting into the radiation locker in your suite. It takes a Class Three flare to empty the pool, and that hasn’t happened in my lifetime. Doesn’t mean it couldn’t in the next ten minutes—but they’ve got some real sharp folks modeling the sun nowadays, plus the Stardancers keep a couple of angels way in past the orbit of Venus all the time, keeping an eye on the old girl. They can send a telepathic warning back to Earth orbit instantly, a lot faster than a radio or laser message: when Mama Sol clears her throat, we get a lot better warning than you get of a quake in San Francisco. And in any emergency, trained men in radiation suits will chase down stragglers and sleepers. But—and this is what I was talking about before—you can’t ever leave safety to machines and other people. Sometimes they goof. If you ever start seeing green pollywogs—little green flashes in your vision—get into that locker, fast. Don’t wait for the central computer to tell you to… and don’t stop to pee.”
After lunch he took them to Wonderland. Both ladies found it delightful. As you approached it, the first thing you noticed was a child-sized white rabbit a little ahead of you, wearing a vest and consulting a pocketwatch. You followed him as he jaunted feetfirst “down” a long tunnel; onrushing air gave a reasonable illusion of falling in a magical sort of way.
The place into which you emerged lived up to its name.
Colly wanted to stay—forever. After an hour, Rhea was sick of rosy cheer and wanted to go be sullen with her husband. She left Colly with Duncan, made an agreement to meet them at suppertime, and followed Maxwell Perkins’s excellent directions through a maze of unfamiliar corridors to Jay’s studio. One thing about AIs: they made it hard to be a stranger in a strange land, even if you wanted to be. As long as there was a local database for your AI to invest, wherever you went, you were home.
She paused outside the door, and had Max ask his alter ego—Rand’s AI avatar Salieri—whether she could enter without disturbing her husband; with his assurances she thumbed the door open and jaunted in. The work in progress looked so odd that her eye ignored it, noting only that it seemed to involve some sort of pseudo-underwater visuals and twelve-tone music. She had been married to a shaper too long to expect a rehearsal to look or sound like much.