Shivering World Read online

  No, he mustn’t sympathize with the people here. They could take care of themselves. He needed to save his own ugly hide. His three escorts didn’t speak during the ten-­minute ride, and if they couldn’t be decent to a homely eighteener, he didn’t have to put on manners.

  They marched him down into a broad, bright tunnel, sheltered from the wind and almost warm. His stiff, chilled legs hurt. “Left,” said the smallest escort. Trev took the corner, saw a rough-­walled stairwell going up, and ascended with them. He ran a finger along one wall, shuddering at the sharp pebbles sticking out through concrete. He was getting used to a furtive lifestyle, had even befriended a softhearted recycling tender aboard the last ship. After its stop at Copernicus, here in the Eps Eri system, the shuttle had been scheduled to head back for Barnard’s Star and Halley Hab, making only one “local” stop.

  But before that stopover, corporation snoops caught him. So primitive or not, Goddard had to take him.

  They’d regret it.

  He stomped on upward. At the third landing, his escorts took him across a secretarial room into a smaller office. With the temperature in the metric twenties up here—or were they primitive enough to be using Fahrenheit degrees?—they peeled off their coats. The smallest man sat down on the desk chair. He wasn’t all that short. Trev probably had only five centimeters on him. Small, strong features, look-­at-­me-­I’m-­in-­control posture. Trev’s father had looked a bit like this, back when Blase LZalle did classical and wanted to be “pretty” to do the “pretty music,” as little Trev had called it.

  The man muttered at a pocket memo, then motioned Trev to a chair. A bleak, bumpy horizon much like Venus’s, with something that looked like a pipeline running toward it, extended outside the office window.

  One tall goon stayed at the open door. Workers in the adjoining office seemed quiet, listening.

  You’re dead meat, you dimbrains, Trev thought, and you haven’t got a clue.

  The man behind the desk finally spoke up. “I’m Lindon DalLierx,” he said, elbows resting on the—oh chips, the desk was concrete. “Chairman of Colonial Affairs. The shuttle company contacted us by relay. We know you stowed away shipboard, wouldn’t give a name or other identification, and they’re working on tissue typing. I’m not affiliated with Gaea nor ExPress Shuttles. I’m a colonist. In case you don’t realize what that means, this is our world. We’ve contracted Gaea Consortium to terraform it; we’ve set up shuttle service. We’d appreciate some straight answers.”

  Trev crossed one leg over the other knee and laced his fingers on one thigh, letting the man stare at his grotesquely blotched brown skin, widely spaced eyes, and uncontrollable hair, worn long in defiance of style and his famous father. His doughy body wasn’t yet fat, but it was definitely smelly after three months living the ship-­rat’s life.

  And he sure could use something to eat. “Do you suppose we could make some kind of a deal?” he asked. Maybe this time, things would turn out different.

  “Deal?” The man frowned. “What did you have in mind?”

  DalLierx didn’t look old enough to act so stuffy. For one instant, Trev was glad the guy had gotten in Blase LZalle’s way.

  But not really. There must be some way out—for them both. “I’ll tell you about myself if you’ll let me, um . . . I think the phrase is give me sanctuary. Don’t tell anyone I’m here, and don’t send me back.” Please, he added mentally as the specter of cosmetic reconstruction brandished a scalpel against his mind’s eye. Blase wanted his son’s defective face fixed. Wanted him pretty. Even if it hurt—hurt him and everybody who helped him try to escape. Trev had grown to like the way he looked.

  DalLierx glanced over Trev’s shoulder, probably at the goon by his door. “Maybe you don’t know what the fuel to ship a hundred-­kilo human body as far as the nearest habitat costs. You’d have to earn passage up out of the gravity well. But if you’d like to live out of confinement, you’ll need to answer some questions.”

  “And then maybe you’ll let me stay? Call me X, then. I could give you any name I wanted, you know.”

  “Ex. First name or last?” DalLierx asked, straight-­faced.

  Trev gritted his teeth, then let his chin relax. “Actually, I’m traveling under the name George Smith.”

  “I know. I don’t think I’ll bother asking where you live. Are you of legal age, Ex?”

  If only! “In some places.”

  “Here on Goddard, the voting and marriage ages are twenty and sixteen.”

  Sixteen? “Yipe. I’m not wife shopping. No, then.”

  DalLierx worked his keyboard. “Not yet twenty. Teeners work eight-­hour circadays. What can you do?”

  “Do? What do you mean, do?”

  “Work experience?”

  Trev frowned. “I don’t work. I’ve been in school.”

  “What level?”

  This was awkward. “It, uh, varies. I had a tutor.”

  As DalLierx swiveled back to face him, Trev spotted a row of small, primitive clay sculptures at one end of his desk, near some fat hardbound books.

  Another proud father. Oh, joy.

  “No work experience while in school,” DalLierx observed. “Your family has money.”

  Trev scratched one arm through his black pullover. This interview was getting more irritating by the moment.

  DalLierx raised an eyebrow. “Do I need to phrase that as a question for you to answer it?”

  “No. I didn’t have to work.”

  “And you dislike authority.”

  Trev rocked forward and started to stand up. “I dislike all these questions.”

  “Sit,” came a voice behind him. DalLierx didn’t flinch but picked up something that looked like a pen and twirled it between the fingers of one hand.

  Trev sat back down. On his left, a window revealed some sort of crop fields. Back home, the only exterior views were of scummy lakes under sulfurous clouds.

  He couldn’t go back. He had to convince DalLierx to let him stay. Hide him, give him a bed. Surely they needed more colonists. “I don’t eat much,” he offered. His stomach growled as he said it.

  DalLierx rubbed his face. As he lowered his hand, Trev decided the man was even prettier than Blase’s classical look. Unlike Blase, he was probably born that way.

  Did he have a sympathetic streak to match that face? “Really,” Trev added.

  DalLierx shook his head. “Obviously, you don’t understand. We don’t grow food to share out. Our margin of survival is too slim to support freeloaders. If you don’t want to be locked up on survival rations until your family sends money for your fare home, you’ll work.” He made a sweeping gesture with one hand. “So give me some kind of information on your background.”

  The knots tightened in Trev’s stomach, and his hope for sympathy dissipated like so much smoke. If these people were cash poor, they might try for ransom money. That would ruin them all—Trev, along with DalLierx and his goons. “I’ll . . . be glad to work.” He tightened his arm muscles to make them bulge. “I’m pretty strong.” Looking out the window, he added, “There’s probably something I can do for you.”

  “You’ll work, on trial. I don’t know what you’re running from, and”—he raised one hand as if he hoped Trev might start explaining—“maybe I don’t have to know. You don’t act criminal, just spoiled. That’s likely enough, since there’s plainly enough money in the picture that you’re afraid someone will come this far to get you.”

  If he only knew how much money! Trev relaxed the fists in his lap. He had to stop giving information away. DalLierx was no dimbrain. Maybe he knew the signs from experience. Maybe he grew up rich, too.

  “The shuttle company will try to extract fare from your family,” DalLierx said. “I’m sorry, but that simple fact means your people will find out where you are eventually.”

  You think you’re sorry now? In that case, the countdown to disaster had already started. There had to be some way of warning them—

&n
bsp; No. He could only hope to save himself. This looked like a big enough planet. All he’d need was a place to hide. “All right,” he said, meekly ducking his head.

  “Have you spent any time with animals?” DalLierx asked.

  “Animals?” Gruesome thoughts sliced through his brain. “Don’t tell me you don’t clone your meat.”

  DalLierx laughed softly. “If our power went down, tissue tanks would die. You can’t hitch a tissue tank to pull a plow, either. And halfers breed themselves. Happily.”

  Trev’s mouth twitched. He tried not to smile.

  “So. Have you worked with animals?”

  “’Fraid not.”

  “No pets? Anything?”

  “Animals”—Trev echoed the nanno who raised him—“are dirty.”

  DalLierx shot a glance at the door goon again. “If dirt’s a problem, you chose the wrong world to stow away to.”

  He hadn’t chosen it. He didn’t dare insult DalLierx by saying so, though. He folded both hands in his lap and tried to look appealing. Fat chance, with a face like his.

  “Ex—or George, or whatever your name really is—you remind me of my brother.” DalLierx leaned back in his tall chair. “He wanted to stay at Einstein Hab when the rest of us moved out to Goddard.”

  This looked like his own chance to get information. “What about him?”

  “He was tired of the family line,” DalLierx said. “Chafing to be anything other than what he was, but he was underage, so he had to come with us.”

  Okay, so there was a family story. There might be money. “What’s your point?”

  “Why here? Why not the bright lights?”

  This man’s guesses—or conclusions—were downright uncanny. Trev exhaled slowly. “I don’t like bright lights.”

  DalLierx’s mouth crinkled as he said, “This gets more interesting all the time.”

  Trev blew out another breath. At least this room was warm enough not to give him a condensation cloud.

  “You’ve had enough bright lights to dislike them?” DalLierx pressed.

  Trev stared out the window.

  “All right.” DalLierx’s voice hardened. “Frankly, I don’t want you in with my people. They have to get dirty to survive, and that’s a fact of colonization.” He made a few jabs at his pocket memo. “Three days’ confinement, disciplinary, just because it’s USSC law. Then I’m assigning you to the Gaea building. They can probably use untrained help. It may be dirty,” he added, mocking the word by accenting both syllables, “but it will be indoor dirt. It’s time you learned how people live without money to waste or bright lights to hide from.”

  That stung. “You don’t want my family mad at you, DalLierx.”

  The man laid down his pen, or whatever it was, and glared up from under those narrow, dark eyebrows and long eyelashes. “Is that a threat?”

  “I didn’t choose to come here,” Trev said. “Maybe if you send me away, you’ll—” DalLierx’s scowl made him change course. “Never mind,” he muttered.

  “Listen,” said the other man. “I’d love to send you back where you came from. We don’t need bodies that aren’t our own. We’re barely storing reserves as it is. I’ve been honest with you, even if you’ve weaseled your way around the truth. You’re an imposition, but it would be expensive to send you back. You’re lucky to be alive, George.”

  No one had ever spoken that way to Trevarre Chase-­Frisson LZalle. “So are you, DalLierx.”

  DalLierx beckoned to the door goon. “You probably haven’t heard,” he said, “but shuttle crews used to jettison stowaways. Into space.”

  Appalled by the image, Trev followed two tall goons to a bare little underground room, where they left him an amazing fast-­breaking meal: half a tureen of bean soup, three shades of cheese, and a chunk of fresh brown bread. After stuffing himself, he felt hope seep back into his brain. It helped him think again. He pushed up off the floor and grasped the door handle. When it didn’t shock him, he applied pressure. It stayed stuck. Locked.

  Okay, scratch that possibility. A quick escape would’ve been hard to trust anyway.

  He sank down on the thin mattress, thinking things through. He needed information, and he couldn’t wait three days to get it. He had to find someplace to hide. Goddard had to be better than Venus—or Earth, where his father’s cosmetic surgeon waited.

  Venus had cooled enough to support human life under domes, but to call it beautiful, a person would have to love poisonous seas and roiling, boiling clouds. Dome lights suited his father. They could be darkened at any hour.

  Trev preferred natural light. He’d run to Mars the first time. Terraforming had made it marginally habitable, but it proved too close. Blase found him only two weeks later. He’d hired agricultural and financial experts and wiped the small community that had harbored his runaway son right off the maps.

  Could he take on Gaea Terraforming Consortium?

  Trev clenched his hands in his lap and considered the magnitude of that vast commercial enterprise. In 120 terrannums, Gaea Consortium had run up its own problems. Terraforming was harder than building space habitats—and didn’t pay off as quickly. It was also dangerous. The Messier project, a planet Gaea terraformed and abandoned in the Barnard’s system, had been a disaster. And rumor said Goddard’s temperature, which ought to be rising, was going back down.

  If there’s a way to make Gaea abandon one more Mars-­type world, he reflected bleakly, Blase LZalle will find it. Any corporation can be leveraged from inside. Even clear out here in Eps Eri’s neighborhood.

  Oh chips. Gripping his head with both hands, Trev wracked his brain for a plan.

  DalLierx

  After Graysha put down a huge breakfast, an uncommunicative pigtailed woman led her from the Health Maintenance Facility out through a wide tunnel into a broad parklike area with a domed roof. Graysha paused and looked up. “What’s this place?” she called.

  The woman, already several paces ahead, spoke over her shoulder. “We refer to it as the hub.”

  It was easy to see why. Several paved routes crossed it like concrete spokes, edged on both sides by strips of closely clipped grass. Heavy benches hunched here and there on the lawns, looking like solid citizens tending the trees and flower beds, separating routes. She took a deep, appreciative breath. The cool air smelled of sweet, fertile soil: Nocardia asteroides, she guessed from its odor.

  Why, on this world where soil-­building was such a critical issue, would someone kill a soils specialist? Professional jealousy, or fear of discovery?

  Graysha’s escort led out again, following one paved route into a nearly cylindrical corridor. Their footsteps echoed off pale, unattractive yellow-­tan concrete. Heavy machines stood parked to one side, some with joints leaking thick black lubricant. A scorched-­metal smell hung in the air around them.

  Not a leisure settlement, she observed, no matter how pretty a hub they built it around.

  Another stairway took her back into her own element. Site Supervisor Melantha Lee, a fiftyish woman with Asian eyes, took over escort duty and walked her into an open laboratory. Graysha looked around momentarily and then leaned against a wall in relief, still clutching her drinking glass of marigolds. “No concrete.”

  “Only the walls and floor.”

  Glancing past Lee’s iron-­gray curls, Graysha saw Jon Mahera still posted disconcertingly on her door.

  “Gaea Consortium does not believe in slighting frontier employees,” Dr. Lee went on. She pushed a gray panel on one side of the lab, and it rippled. “Nonflammable fabric. You can—”

  “I hear voices,” boomed a familiar basso from beyond Lee. “Hello in there.”

  Will Varberg sauntered in to stand beside the site supervisor. He stood head and shoulders taller than Dr. Lee and probably outweighed her twice. Browncloth trousers like the nurses wore showed under Dr. Lee’s lab coat, but Varberg dressed like a well-­off habitant in fine gray woolens, and he smelled of scented soap. Eyeing his thumb ring
, Graysha fingered a naked spot on her own knuckle. She’d left jewelry behind. Too heavy, both with mass and with memory.

  Varberg tipped back his head to peer down his nose, and Graysha wondered if he needed new lens grafts. “Good morning,” he drawled, and she clasped his hammy hand. “Are you sure you’re feeling better?”

  “I’m fine, thank you, Dr. Varberg.”

  From the startled look on Lee’s and Varberg’s faces, Graysha guessed Emmer had finally raised her ears. “Emmer is my family,” she explained. “Just a lab gribien.”

  “It doesn’t do anything.” Varberg wrinkled his nose.

  “She’s warm, clean, soft, and omnivorous. Don’t worry,” Graysha added. “Most of the time, Emmer lives curled up on my bed pillow. I won’t bring her to work very often once I have an apartment to leave her in.”

  “We’ll check you into Gaea housing during lunch break.” Dr. Lee took one step toward the door. “Chairman DalLierx wants to show you a reconnaissance vidi this morning at nine, so you’ll have to head out almost immediately. I’m sorry we had to cancel your overflight. Have a pleasant day.” Lee picked up a notebook from the lab’s countertop island and walked out.

  Varberg sat down where the notebook had lain and rotated the marigolds a quarter turn. “It sounds like this will have to be the quick tour, then.”

  Graysha bent to examine a glass-­walled incubator between Varberg and the window.

  “You should wear your hair down,” Varberg said abruptly. “Backlight through blond hair is beautiful.”

  Hearing that kind of talk from a stranger made her uncomfortable. She lifted a hand to snug her hair tie. “It flops into my face when I work.”

  Varberg hopped down from the countertop and motioned her into a concrete cubicle at one end of the lab. A smaller polarized window broke the office’s outer wall, and up a side wall nestled a composite-­top desk. On its right end near the window, a keyboard and display were built into the desk itself, a conformation Graysha thought she recognized. “Is this computer a microfluidic?”