Falling Free Read online

  "Ow!" The dark-haired girl laughed and spared a lower hand to pry the little fat fingers loose, without missing a beat of her upper hands patting sealant in place around a stem. She finished with a quick squirt of fixative from a tube floating conveniently beside her, just out of the infant's reach.

  The girl was slim, and elfin, and wonderfully weird to Leo's unaccustomed eyes. Her short, fine hair clung close to her head, framing her face, shaped to a point at the nape of her neck. It was so thick it reminded Leo of cat fur; one might stroke it, and be soothed.

  The other girl was blonde, and babyless. She looked up first, and smiled. "Company, Claire."

  The dark-haired girl's face lit with pleasure. Leo flushed in the heat of it. "Tony!" she cried happily, and Leo realized he had merely received an accidental dose, as it were, of that beam of delight, as it swept over him to its true target.

  The baby released three hands and waved them urgently. "Ah, ah!" The girl turned in air to face the visitors. "Ah, ah, ah!" the baby repeated.

  "Oh, all right," she laughed. "You want to fly to Daddy, hm?" She unhooked a short tether from a sort of soft harness on the baby's torso to a belt around her own waist, and held the infant out. "Fly to Daddy, Andy? Fly to Daddy?"

  The baby indicated enthusiasm for the proposal by waving all four hands vigorously about and squealing eagerly. She launched him toward Tony with considerably more velocity than Leo would have dared to impart. Tony, grinning cheerfully, caught him —handily, Leo thought in blitzed inanity.

  "Fly to Mommy?" Tony inquired in turn. "Ah, ah," the baby agreed, and Tony hung him in air, gently pulling his arms out—like straightening out a starfish, Leo thought—and imparting a spin rolled him through the air for all the world like a wheel. The baby pulled his hands in, clenching his face in sympathetic effort, and spun faster, gurgling with laughter at the success of his effort. Conservation of angular momentum, thought Leo. Naturally . . .

  Claire tossed the infant back one more time to his father—mind-boggling, to think of that blond boy as a father of anything—and followed herself to brake to a halt hand-to-hand against Tony, who proffered an automatic helping grasp for that purpose. That they continued to hold hands was clearly more than a courteous anchoring.

  "Claire, this is Mr. Graf." Tony did not so much introduce as display him, like a prize. "He's going to be my advanced welding techniques teacher. Mr. Graf, this is Claire, and this is our son Andy." Andy had clambered headward on his father, and was wrapping one hand in Tony's blond hair and another around one ear, blinking owlishly at Leo. Tony gently rescued the ear and redirected the clutch to the fabric of his red T-shirt. "Claire was picked to be the very first natural mother of us," Tony went on in pride.

  "Me and four other girls," Claire corrected modestly.

  "Claire used to be in Welding and Joining too, but she can't do Outside work any more," Tony explained. "She's been in Housekeeping, Nutrition Technology, and Hydroponics since Andy was born."

  "Dr. Yei said I was a very important experiment, to see which sorts of productivity were least compromised by my taking care of Andy at the same time," explained Claire. "I sort of miss going Outside—it was exciting—but I like this, too. More variety."

  GalacTech reinvents Women's Work? thought Leo bemusedly. Are we about to put an R&D group to work on the applications of fire, too? But oh, you are certainly an experiment. . . . His thought was not reflected in his bland, closed face. "Happy to meet you, Claire," he said gravely.

  Claire nudged Tony and nodded toward her blonde co-worker, who had drifted over to join the group.

  "Oh—and this is Silver," Tony went on obediently. "She works in Hydroponics most of the time."

  Silver nodded. Her medium-short hair drifted in soft platinum waves, and Leo wondered if it was the source of her nickname. She had the sort of strong facial bones that are sharp and unhappily awkward at thirteen, arrestingly elegant at thirty-five, now not quite halfway through their transition. Her blue gaze was cooler and less shy than the busy Claire's, who was already distracted by some new demand from Andy. Claire retrieved the baby and reattached his safety line.

  "Good afternoon, Mr. Van Atta," Silver added particularly. She pirouetted in air, with eyes that cried silently, Notice me! Leo noticed that all twenty of her manicured fingernails were lacquered pink.

  Van Atta's answering smile was secretive and smug. "Afternoon, Silver. How's it going?"

  "We have one more tube to plant after this one. We'll be finished ahead of shift change," Silver offered.

  "Fine, fine," said Van Atta jovially. "Ah—do try to remember to arrange yourself right-side-up when you're talking to a downsider, Sugarplum."

  Silver inverted herself hastily to match Van Atta's orientation. Since the room was radially arranged, right-side-up was a purely Van Atta-centric direction, Leo noted dryly. Where had he met the man before?

  "Well, carry on, girls." Van Atta led out, Leo following, Tony bringing up the rear regretfully, looking back over his shoulder.

  Andy had returned his attention to his mother, his determined little hands foraging up her shirt, on which dark stains were spreading in autonomic response. Apparently that was one bit of ancient biology the company had not altered. The milk dispensers were certainly ideally preadapted to life in free fall, after all. And even diapers had a heroic history in the dawn of space travel, Leo had heard.

  His brief amusement drained away, and he pushed off after Van Atta, silent and reflective. He held his judgment suspended, he reassured himself, not paralyzed. In the meantime, a closed mouth could not impede the inflow of data.

  * * *

  They paused at Van Atta's Habitat office. Van Atta switched on the lights and air circulation as they entered. From the stale smell Leo guessed the office was not often used; the executive probably spent most of his time more comfortably downside. A large viewport framed a spectacular view of Rodeo.

  "I've come up in the world a bit since we last met," said Van Atta, matching his gaze. The upper atmosphere along Rodeo's rim was producing some gorgeous prismatic light effects at this angle of view. "In several senses. I don't mind returning the favor. The man at the top owes it to remember how he got there, I think. Noblesse oblige and all that." The tilt of Van Atta's eyebrow invited Leo to join him in self-congratulatory satisfaction.

  Remember. Quite. Leo's blank memory was getting excruciatingly uncomfortable. He smiled and seized the pause while Van Atta activated his desk comconsole to turn away and make a slow, politely-waiting-type orbit of the room, as if idly examining its contents.

  A little wall plaque bearing a humorous motto caught his eye. On the sixth day God saw He couldn't do it all, it read, so He created ENGINEERS. Leo snorted, mildly amused.

  "I like that too," commented Van Atta, looking up to check the cause of his chuckle. "My ex-wife gave it to me. It was about the only thing the greedy bitch didn't take back when we split."

  "Were you an—" Leo began, and swallowed the words, engineer, then? As he finally remembered, and then wondered how he could ever have forgotten. Leo had known Van Atta as an engineering subordinate at that time, though, not as an executive superior. Was this sleek go-getter the same idiot he had kicked impatiently upstairs to Administration just to get him out from underfoot on the Morita Station project—ten, twelve years ago now? Brucie-baby. Oh, yes. Oh, hell . . .

  Van Atta's comconsole disgorged a couple of data disks, which he plucked off. "You put me on the fast track. I've always thought it must give you a sense of satisfaction, since you spend so much of your time training, to see one of your old students make good."

  Van Atta was no more than five years younger than Leo. Leo suppressed profound irritation—he wasn't this paper-shuffler's ninety-year-old retired Sunday school teacher, damn it. He was a working engineer, hands-on, and not afraid to get them dirty, either. His technical work was as close to perfection as his relentless conscientiousness could push it, his safety record spoke for itself. . . .
He let his anger go with a sigh. Wasn't it always so? He'd seen dozens of subordinates forge ahead, often men he'd trained himself. Yeah, and trust Van Atta to make it seem a weakness and not a point of pride.

  Van Atta spun the data disks across the room at him. "There's your roster and your syllabus. Come on, and I'll show you some of the equipment you'll be working with. GalacTech's got two projects in the wind they're thinking of finally turning these Cay Project quaddies loose on."

  "Quaddies?"

  "The official nickname."

  "It's not, um . . . pejorative?"

  Van Atta stared, then snorted. "No. What you do not call them out loud, however, is 'mutants,' genetic paranoia being what it is after that Nuovo Brasilian military cloning fiasco. This whole project could have been carried out much more conveniently in Earth orbit, but for the assorted legal hysterias about human gene manipulation. Anyway, the projects. One to assemble jumpships in orbit around Orient IV, and another building a deep space transfer facility at some nexus away the hell-and-gone beyond Tau Ceti called Kline Station—cold work, no habitable planets in the system and its sun is a cinder, but the local space harbors no less than six wormhole exits. Potentially very profitable. Lots of welding under the most difficult free-fall conditions—"

  Leo's brief angst was swallowed in interest. It had always been the work itself, not the pay and perks, that held him in thrall. Screw executive privilege—didn't it mostly mean being stuck downside? He followed Van Atta out of the office back into the corridor where Tony still waited patiently with his luggage.

  * * *

  "I suppose it was the development of the uterine replicators that made it all possible," Van Atta opined while Leo stowed his gear in his new quarters. More than a mere sleep cubicle, the chamber included private sanitary facilities and a comconsole as well as comfortable-looking sleep restraints—no morning backache on this job, Leo thought with minor satisfaction. Headache was another problem.

  "I'd heard something about those things," said Leo. "Another invention from Beta Colony, wasn't it?"

  Van Atta nodded. "The outer worlds are getting too damn clever these days. Earth's going to lose its edge if it doesn't shape up."

  Too true, Leo thought. Yet the history of innovation suggested this was an inevitable pattern. Management who had made huge capital investments in one system were naturally loath to scrap it, and so the latecomers forged ahead—to the frustration of loyal engineers. . . . "I'd thought the use of uterine replicators was limited to obstetrical emergencies."

  "Actually, the only limitation on their use is the fact that they're hideously expensive," said Van Atta. "It's probably only a matter of time before rich women everywhere start ducking their biological duties and cooking up their kids in 'em. But for GalacTech, it meant that human bioengineering experiments could at last be carried out without involving a lot of flaky foster-mothers to carry the implanted embryos. A neat, clean, controlled engineering approach. Better still, these quaddies are total constructs—that is, their genes are taken from so many sources, it's impossible to identify their genetic parents either. Saves quantities of legal grief."

  "I'll bet," said Leo faintly.

  "This whole thing was Dr. Cay's obsession, I gather. I never met him, but he must have been one of those, you know, charismatic types, to push through a project with this enormous lead time before any possible payoff. The first batch is just turning twenty. The extra arms are the wildest part—"

  "I've often wished I had four hands, in free fall," Leo murmured, trying not to sound too dubious out loud.

  "—but most of the changes were this bunch of metabolic stuff. They never get motion-sick—something about rewiring the vestibular system—and their muscles maintain tone with an exercise regimen of barely fifteen minutes a day, max —nothing like the hours you and I would have to put in during a long stint in null-gee. Their bones don't deteriorate at all. They're even more radiation-resistant than us. Bone marrow and gonads can take four and five times the rems we can absorb before GalacTech grounds us—although the medical types are pushing for them to do their reproducing early in life, while all those expensive genes are still pristine. After that, it's all gravy for us: workers who never require downside leave; so healthy they'll go on and on, cutting high-cost turnover; they're even"—Van Atta snickered—"self-replicating."

  Leo secured the last of his scanty personal possessions. "Where . . . will they go when they, uh, retire?" he asked slowly.

  Van Atta shrugged. "I suppose the company will have to work something out, when the time comes. Not my problem, fortunately. I'll be retired before then."

  "What happens if they—quit, go elsewhere? Suppose somebody offers them higher pay? GalacTech will be out-of-pocket for all the R&D."

  "Ah. I don't think you've quite grasped the beauty of this set-up. They don't quit. They aren't employees. They're capital equipment. They aren't paid in money—though I wish my salary was equal to what GalacTech is spending yearly to maintain 'em. But that will get better as the last replicator cohort gets older and more self-sufficient. They stopped producing new ones about five years ago, see, in anticipation of turning that job over to the quaddies themselves." Van Atta licked his lips and raised his eyebrows, as if in enjoyment of a salacious joke. Leo could not regret missing its point.

  Leo turned, curling in air and crossing his arms. "Spacer's Union is going to call it slave labor, you know," he said at last.

  "The Union's going to call it worse names than that. Their productivity is going to look sick," growled Van Atta. "Loaded language bullshit. These little chimps have cradle to grave security. GalacTech couldn't be treating them better if they were made of solid platinum. You and I should have so good a deal, Leo."

  "Ah," said Leo, and no more.

  Chapter Two

  The observation bubble on the side of the Cay Habitat had a televiewer, Leo discovered to his delight, and furthermore it was unoccupied at the moment. His own quarters lacked a viewport. He slipped within. His schedule allowed this one free day to recover from trip fatigue and jump lag before his course was to begin. A good night's sleep in free fall had already improved his tone of mind vastly over yesterday, after Van Atta's—Leo could only dub it 'disorientation tour.'

  The curve of Rodeo's horizon bisected the view from the bubble, and beyond it the vast sweep of stars. Just now one of Rodeo's little mice moons crept across the panorama. A glint above the horizon caught Leo's eye.

  He adjusted the televiewer for a close-up. A GalacTech shuttle was bringing up one of the giant cargo pods, refined petrochemicals or bulk plastics bound for petroleum-depleted Earth perhaps. A collection of similar pods floated in orbit. Leo counted. One, two, three . . . six, and the one arriving made seven. Two or three little manned pushers were already starting to bundle the pods, to be locked together and attached to one of the big orbit-breaking thruster units.

  Once grouped and attached to their thruster, the pods would be aimed toward the distant wormhole exit point that gave access to Rodeo local space. Velocity and direction imparted, the thruster would detach and return to Rodeo orbit for the next load. The unmanned pod bundle would continue on its slow, cheap way to its target, one of a long train stretching from Rodeo to the anomaly in space that was the jump point.

  Once there, the cargo pods would be captured and decelerated by a similar thruster, and positioned for the jump. Then the superjumpers would take over, cargo carriers as specially designed as the thrusters for their task. The monster cargo jumpers were hardly more than a pair of Necklin field generator rods in their protective housings so positioned as to be fitted around a constellation of pod bundles, a bracketing pair of normal space thruster arms, and a small control chamber for the jump pilot and his neurological headset. Without their balancing pod bundles attached the superjumpers reminded Leo of some exceptionally weird and attenuated long-legged insects.

  Each jump pilot, neurologically wired to his ship to navigate the wavering realities
of wormhole space, made two hops a day, inbound to Rodeo with empty pod bundles and back out again with cargo, followed by a day off; two months on duty followed by a month's unpaid but compulsory gravity leave, usually financially augmented with shuttle duties. Jumps were more wearing on pilots than null-gee was. The pilots of the fast passenger ships like the one Leo had ridden in on yesterday called the superjumper pilots puddle-jumpers and merry-go-round riders. The cargo pilots just called the passenger pilots snobs.

  Leo grinned, and considered that train of wealth gliding through space. No doubt about it, the Cay Habitat, fascinating as it was, was just the tail of the dog to the whole of GalacTech's Rodeo operation. That single thruster-load of pods being bundled now could maintain a whole town full of stockholding widows and orphans in style for a year, and it was just one of an apparently endless string. Base production was like an inverted pyramid, those at the bottom apex supporting a broadening mountain of ten-percenters, a fact which usually gave Leo more secret pride than irritation.

  "Mr. Graf?" an alto voice interrupted his thoughts. "I'm Dr. Sondra Yei. I head up the psychology and training department for the Cay Habitat."

  The woman hovering in the door wore pale green company coveralls. Pleasantly ugly, pushing middle-aged, she had the bright Mongolian eyes, broad nose and lips and coffee-and-cream skin of her mixed racial heritage. She pushed herself through the aperture with the concise relaxed movements of one accustomed to free fall.

  "Ah, yes, they told me you'd be wanting to talk to me." Leo courteously waited for her to anchor herself before attempting to shake hands. He gestured at the televiewer. "Got a nice view of the orbital cargo marshaling here. Seems to me that might be another job for your quaddies."

  "Indeed. They've been doing it for almost a year now." Yei smiled satisfaction. "So, you don't find adjusting to the quaddies too difficult? So your psyche profile suggested. Good."