“Why risk it, then? Take it out and just use the main valve.”
A sarcastic comment bubbled up—have you never heard of a safety exit?—but I gazed into her big brown eyes and it faded into the clouds.
“We need two valves in case of emergencies,” I mumbled.
Ricci and I watched the pellets plunge through the sky. When they hit the ice slush, the concussive wave kicked up a trail of vapor blooms, concentric rings lit with pinpoints of electricity, so far below each flash just a spark in a violet sea.
A flock of jellies fled from the concussion, flat shells strobing with reflected light, trains of ribbon-like tentacles flapping behind.
Ricci looked worried. “Did we hit any of them?”
I shook my head. “No, they can move fast.”
After we’d finished dumping waste, Ricci said, “Say, Doc, why don’t you show me the main valve again?”
I puffed up a little at that. I’m proud of the valves. Always tinkering, always innovating, always making them a little better. Without the valves, we wouldn’t be here.
Far forward, just before the peduncle isthmus, a wide band of filaments connects the petals to the bladder superstructure. The isthmus skin is thick with connective tissue, and provides enough structural integrity to support a valve big enough to accommodate a cargo pod.
“We pulled you in here.” I patted the collar of the shutter housing. “Whoever prepared the pod had put you in a pink bodybag. Don’t know why it was such a ridiculous color. When Vula saw it, she said, ‘It’s a girl!’.”
I laughed. Ricci winced.
“That joke makes sense, old style,” I explained.
“No, I get it. Birth metaphor. I’m not a crechie, Doc.”
“I know. We wouldn’t have picked you if you were.”
“Why did you pick me?”
I grumbled something. Truth is, when I ask our recruiter to find us a new hab-mate, the percentage of viable applications approaches zero. We look for a specific psychological profile. The two most important success factors are low self-censoring and high focus. People who say what they think are never going to ambush you with long-fermented resentments, and obsessive people don’t get bored. They know how to make their own fun.
Ricci tapped her fingernail on a shutter blade.
“Your notes aren’t complete, Doc.” She stared up at me, unblinking. No hint of a dimple. “Why are you hoarding information?”
“I’m not.”
“Yes, you are. There’s nothing about reproduction.”
“That’s because I don’t know very much about it.”
“The other whale crews do. And they’re worried about it. You must know something, but you’re not sharing. Why?”
I glared at her. “I’m an amateur independent researcher. My methods aren’t rigorous. It would be wrong to share shaky theories.”
“The whale crews had a collective research agreement once. You wrote it.”
She fired the document at me with a flick of her finger. I slapped it down and flushed it from my buffer.
“That agreement expired. We didn’t renew.”
“That’s a lie. You dissolved it and left to find your own whale.”
I aimed my finger at the bridge of her goggles and jabbed the air. “Yes, I ran away. So did you.”
She smiled. “I left a network of habs with a quarter billion people who can all do just fine without me. You ran from a few hundred who need you.”
Running away is something I’m good at. I bounced out of there double-time. Ricci didn’t call after me. I wouldn’t have answered if she had.
The next time she talked to Jane, Ricci didn’t mention me. I guess I didn’t rate high enough on her list of problems. I didn’t really listen to the details as they chatted. I just liked having their voices in my head while I tinkered with my biosynthesis simulations.
Halfway through their session, Vula pinged me.
You can quit spying, she said. None of us are worried about Ricci anymore.
I agreed, and shut down the feed.
Ricci’s been asking about you, by the way, Vula added. Your history with the other whales.
Tell her everything.
You sure?
I’ve been spying on her for days. It’s only fair.
Better she heard the story from Vula than me. I still can’t talk about it without overheating, and they tell me I’m scary when I’m angry.
Down belowground the air is thick with rules written and unwritten, the slowly decaying husks of thirty thousand years of human history dragged behind us from Earth, and the most important of these is cooperation for mutual benefit. Humans being human, that’s only possible in conditions of resource abundance—not just actual numerical abundance, but more importantly, the perception of abundance. When humans are confident there’s enough to go around, life is easy and we all get along, right?
Ha.
Cooperation makes life possible, but never easy. Humans are hard to wrangle. Tell them to do one thing and they’ll do the opposite more often than not. One thing we all agree on is that everyone wants a better life. Only problem is, nobody can agree what that means.
So we have an array of habs offering a wide variety of socio-cultural options. If you don’t like what your hab offers, you can leave and find one that does. If there isn’t one, you can try to find others who want the same things as you and start your own. Often, just knowing options are available keeps people happy.
Not everyone, though.
Down belowground, I simply hated knowing my every breath was counted, every kilojoule measured, every moment of service consumption or contribution accounted for in the transparent economy, every move modeled by human capital managers and adjusted by resource optimization analysts. I got obsessed with the numbers in my debt dashboard; even though it was well into the black all I wanted to do was drive it up as high and as fast as I could, so nobody would ever be able to say I hadn’t done my part.
Most people never think about their debt. They drop a veil over the dash and live long, happy, ignorant lives, never caring about their billable rate and never knowing whether or not they syphoned off the efforts of others. But for some of us, that debt counter becomes an obsession.
An obsession and ultimately an albatross, chained around our necks.
I dreamed about an independent habitat with abundant space and unlimited horizons. And I wasn’t the only one. When we looked, there it was, floating around the atmosphere.
Was it dangerous? Sure. But a few firms provide services to risk-takers and they’re always eager for new clients. The crews that shuttle ice climbers to the poles delivered us to the skin of a very large whale. I made the first cut myself.
Solving the problems of life was exhilarating—air, food, water, warmth. We were explorers, just like the mountain climbers of old, ascending the highest peaks wearing nothing but animal hides. Like the first humans. Revolutionary.
Our success attracted others, and our population grew. We colonized new whales and once we got settled, our problems became more mundane. I have a little patience for administrative details, but the burden soon became agonizing. Unending meetings to chew over our collective agreements, measuring and accounting and debits and credits and assigning value to everyone’s time. This was exactly what we’d escaped. Little more than one year in the clouds, and we were reinventing all the old problems from scratch.
Nobody needs that.