Dark Orbit Read online

  For others, time passed. For a Waster, it was always just now.

  The door into the refectory was through a small closet, and positioned three feet above the floor. Someone had temporarily placed a stepstool below it, and there was a line of people waiting to get in and out. “We had a devil of a time finding it at all,” David said.

  Once inside, Sara paused, scanning to see who was there. People were scattered around the room in clumps at round tables. She had barely had time to take it in when she heard a menacing growl from a table by the back wall, and saw a familiar form rising from his chair—and rising, and rising, till he unfolded to his full seven-foot height.

  “Touli!” she called out, waving.

  With a forbidding glower, he started across the room toward her, attracting alarmed stares from other tables. Black as carbon soot, with a crown of hair matted into a solid mass atop his head, he still wore the orthodox gbinja’s tubular garment. He had put it on at puberty and would never remove it while he lived. It looked in better condition than Sara remembered it—but then, she had once had the duty, compelled by pure rebellion among her peers, of taking Touli aside and persuading him to bathe, gbinja robe or not. They had been pals ever since.

  “So. You are still alive, heathen,” he roared like heavy machinery. The Worwha Shana believed all races but themselves were on a swift path to eternal damnation. But Touli didn’t hold it against anyone.

  “I think you’re older than me now,” Sara said with some surprise. He had been barely out of graduate school when she had known him before—only seven years ago, in her life.

  “You travel too much,” he said.

  “It keeps me young.”

  “It gets you in trouble.”

  So he must have heard about the Andaman debacle. She tried to put a devil-may-care face on. “Well, I’m temporarily out of trouble now and ready for more, if you are.”

  He bellowed—laughter, though not immediately recognizable as such. “You forgot—I am trouble,” he said.

  Sara and David followed him back to his table, where Ashok Chittagong was waiting, sipping his usual brew of poisonously strong green tea.

  “Ashok!” Sara said, taking the chair beside him. “Thank God I’m not going to be the only discipline problem on board.”

  Like Sara, Ashok was Balavati. He looked the part: dark, brooding eyebrows, and a mustache and beard that framed his mouth squarely, like ancient images of the devil. Everyone knew that Balavatis were rebels who loved to undermine all hierarchy, and Ashok fit the description: he was fascinated with authority and all its susceptibilities. What people didn’t know was that, to undermine hierarchy in truly creative ways, you have to understand it extremely well. The exercise of power was something Ashok absolutely rejected for himself, but analyzing it in others filled him with evil glee. His dilemma, of course, was that to study authority, he had to leave it strictly alone.

  Sara had often told Ashok that he should have been an exoethnologist, but of course he rejected sensible advice. His training was in an arcane branch of particle engineering. He was the operator of the paired-particle communicator—the PPC, or pepci, as Wasters called it. It was their means of instantaneous communication with home base on Capella Two.

  “So fill me in,” Sara said. “What have you two been up to? Ashok, you look like you’re at a wake.”

  Glumly, he said, “We didn’t capture the first batch of paired particles for the pepci.”

  Pepci technology had not existed when the questships had been launched, so the equipment was always one of the first things sent out by lightbeam. The entangled particles that made the communicator work had to travel like lightbeams, through space, to be captured in a magnetic bottle on this end.

  “They sent more than one packet, didn’t they?” Sara asked.

  “They were supposed to,” Ashok said. “They were supposed to send more every two weeks for six months.”

  Of course, no one could phone home and ask, until they had the particles. Without a functioning pepci, they were isolated by a fifty-eight-year time lag. It was then that Sara realized, deep down, that she had never been so far from home.

  To shake off the odd feeling, she said, “Oh, stop worrying, Ashok. Are you really in a hurry to find out that your grandchildren are older than you are?”

  “Thanks, Sara. You’re always such a comfort.”

  Touli was scratching his beard with a sound like steel wool on a rusty file. “I’ve been telling him, it might not be his equipment at fault. This is a strange part of space we’re in.”

  “You people are just full of cheerful suggestions,” Ashok said. “What you mean is, it might be a problem we can’t do anything about.”

  “What are you talking about?” Sara asked.

  Touli’s specialty was gravity mapping, which normally put him in the geology department, but not this time. “We’ve been deploying a network of space-based gravitometers,” he said. “The gravity map of this system is incredibly complex, but the gravity wells don’t all match the distribution of matter.”

  “Is that because of the dark matter?”

  Touli inclined his head in ponderous agreement, but only said, “Presumably. The physicists expected the dark matter to be clumped around the central star. No one thought it would be in linear streaks and pinwheels.”

  “That’s bizarre,” Sara said.

  “You have no idea. We have cosmologists who are going to need counseling. Anyway, Ashok’s particles could have been deflected by a close approach to a gravity hole we can’t see.”

  Which gave Sara the uncomfortable thought that the same thing could have happened to her lightbeam. She didn’t know if that were possible, and didn’t really want to know.

  “Did you show her the planet yet?” Touli asked David.

  The doctor shook his head. “Saving the weirdest for last.”

  “You mean it gets weirder than this ship?” Sara asked jokingly.

  All three of them nodded. Touli said, “Iris is tiny, just an overgrown moon, but its average gravity is the same as Capella’s. On top of that, the gravity’s not evenly distributed; there are heavy spots and light spots, and they don’t match the terrain that the radars show. I’m not talking about the usual small variations in gravity caused by planetary mass; you would be able to feel these differences. It’s as if there is a dark-matter planet that occupies the same space as the visible-matter planet, or some sort of dark-matter structure. We’ll need to get down to the planet to know more.”

  And that was not where the strangeness ended, Sara found out as they continued to talk. Electric currents skittering over the planet’s surface at first had made the physicists think they had been wrong in supposing it to be uninhabited, but the pulses were too random for power lines—more like weak horizontal lightning. The planet had no magnetic field strong enough to shield life from the solar wind, but strong local fields were scattered over the surface, polarities randomly oriented. Even mapping, usually the easiest part of a survey, had proved difficult. Iris, it seemed, was an escape-artist planet, resisting attempts to harness her in explanation.

  Inevitably, the conversation exhausted the peculiarities of Iris and came around to Sara. Ashok said, “Don’t take this wrong, Sara, but what the hell are you doing here? There is no native population, so why did they send an exoethnologist?”

  Sara said, “Well, don’t take this wrong, Ashok, but I’m studying you.”

  Touli guffawed, a truly frightening sound.

  “I’m serious,” Sara went on. “Epco is trying out some sort of new management strategy, and wants to know how well it works.”

  She had half expected the reaction she got, an eruption of cynical laughter.

  “Trans-Methodism,” Ashok intoned, mock evangelical. “Brothers and sisters, I have seen the light, and I say to you, throw off your blinders and embrace the new vision.”

  Sara said, “What are you talking about?”

  It was David who answered. �
��See the Three Horsemen over there?” His eyes flicked at another table where three people sat stiffly, each one obviously unhappy with the identity of the others. “Those are our heads of science. We’re not going to be discipline based, but method based. Our departments are Descriptive Sciences, System Sciences, Intuitive Sciences, and Corroborative Sciences.”

  “Corroborative?” Sara said.

  “The people who are trying to combine scientific method with already-formed systems of thought, mostly about the creation of the universe. What a happy department that’s going to be. They’ve lumped the animists in with the orthodox monotheists and the Gnostics. They’re headed by that elderly gent who looks like he just swallowed a beetle and can’t cough it up.”

  “You can’t blame him,” Ashok put in. “His belief system teaches that God is watching him every second, literally. Can you imagine the invasion of privacy?”

  “Descriptive and System Sciences are both reason based, at least.” David nodded at the man and woman in starchy lab coats, glaring at each other. “Each just believes the other is fundamentally misled. Descriptive is all the analytical scientists who classify and reduce to parts. System is the inductive reasoners who model relationships, patterns, and interaction of wholes.”

  “And—what was it?—Intuitive?”

  “Some Vind too mystical even for Vindahar. We haven’t seen much of her.”

  “Why do you think they organized it this way?” Sara probed.

  It was Ashok who answered, this time mimicking a motivational speaker. “We’ve got a chance in a lifetime to rise above the narrow intellectual imperialism of the past. This is a cutting-edge, innovative plan to form trans-methodal teams to produce new thought-modes.”

  “What kind of word is ‘methodal’?” David asked.

  “A buzzword,” Ashok answered, this time himself.

  “Methodal. Sounds like a drug.”

  “That’s what buzzwords are. Tranquilizers.”

  “Thought suppressants, you mean.”

  Sara wasn’t nearly as scornful as her friends. Her specialty was the study of non-Capellan scientific methodologies. On one planet she had visited, they explored the nature of a thing by swallowing a sample and letting it pass through their bodies. Another culture composed songs from statistical data, with different harmonies implying different conclusions. She was rigorously nonjudgmental about it all. Now, she simply said, “Science used to be so simple when we were all empiricists.”

  David said, “Well, if we can’t get everyone down to the planet pretty soon, my main medical problem may be homicide.”

  Sara looked around the room, thinking it was going to be interesting to be a fly on the weirdly tilted walls of this ship. The body language in the refectory was all self-consciousness and unease. Everyone was trying to figure out how the team skeleton would fit together. It was fluid so far; no one was locked in a role, and everyone was uneasy with it. They were assessing each other, measuring, trying out hierarchies and alliances in their minds. Who would be dominant and who subordinate? Where would the clique lines form? They were like the surface of a lake on the verge of freezing.

  Just then a striking newcomer entered. He was tall, thin, ebony skinned, and held himself with a lofty hauteur—a prince in an Epco security uniform. As he assessed the room with narrowed eyes, half a dozen conversations faltered and the temperature seemed to drop.

  “Our head of security,” David whispered. “Dagan Atlabatlow.”

  “He’s from Orem,” Sara observed.

  “No, he’s not,” the doctor said, frowning. “I’ve seen his file. He’s Capellan.”

  “Maybe this generation,” Sara said. She had been doing some rather recent research on Orem. “His family is probably Otlala. He’d have a tattoo on his upper arm.”

  From the doctor’s expression, she knew he had seen the tattoo. “What does it show?” she asked.

  “A knife impaling a snake. The snake is writhing back to bite the blade. Quite lurid.”

  “Quite aristocratic. That clan was known for its war leaders. They were nearly wiped out a century ago. His family must be refugees.” She watched Atlabatlow say something into a lapel mike, then cross the room and sit alone at a table, straight as a steel ruler. She was trying to figure out whether his presence had any relevance to her other assignment, the secret one. “I wonder what he’s doing working guard duty for Epco.”

  “Feeling it’s beneath him, that’s for sure,” the doctor said. “But maybe that’s normal. I don’t know much about Oremen.”

  “They believe the closest relationship in life is between predator and prey.”

  David’s left eyebrow went up. “What nice people.”

  A small, dark-haired woman in a monosex business suit entered the room, glanced at Atlabatlow, then followed his gaze to their table.

  “The eye of Epco is upon us,” Ashok said. “My friends, it’s been nice knowing you.”

  “Who is it?” Sara whispered as the woman started across the room toward them.

  “The Director’s flunky, Penny Sutton.”

  When Sutton came up, it became clear that Sara was the one she had come for. She held out a hand without smiling. “Magister Callicot,” she said gravely. “We have been awaiting your arrival. If you have time, the Director would like to see you. Now.”

  A little mystified, Sara rose and nodded to her friends. “It’s heartwarming to see how you’ve all bonded, guys,” she said. “See you later.”

  She followed her guide, wondering what the woman’s real title was—Flunky was probably not it—as she traced a winding path down a ramp, around a hairpin turn, and through a hall where the walls were slightly akimbo. At last they came to a stop outside a massive door finished to look like it was clad in copper. Sutton pressed her thumb to a scanpad, and a latch clunked open. She opened the door for Sara to enter.

  Inside was a carpeted antechamber that Sara recognized instantly as an imitation of the rooms of power on Capella Two. To someone who had not seen those rooms, it might have sufficed. But Sara instantly spotted telltale differences—a seam in the carpet, wood-grain laminate on the walls, and worst of all, in the recessed niche where an enigmatic artwork should have gone, a motivational poster showing an eagle rising with prey in its talons. This was not power, just ostentation. It said something to her that the Director had used scarce resources for office décor.

  A pretty receptionist in a tight sweater sat alone behind a curved desk. She and Sutton seemed to communicate with a silent eye signal. The receptionist pressed a button on a console, said something inaudible to it, then rose and keyed a code into a pad next to another door. When the door opened, she showed Sara through, asking if she wanted anything to drink. Sara declined, and was left alone.

  It was another waiting room. The only other door had no handle, so Sara did not try it. There was a fifty-eight-year-old Epco annual report on the side table, and a silver bowl of mints. She waited just long enough to make her wonder if she had been forgotten. Then the knobless door clicked open and Director Nelson Gavere entered.

  He was a handsome man with expertly styled gray hair, a strong chin, and too-white teeth, wearing an expensively tailored suit. He shook Sara’s hand with both of his, gazing solicitously into her eyes. “Magister Callicot,” he said, “I hope you had a good trip here to the Epco Explorer. Please, come into my office. Did Leandra offer you a drink? Good, good.”

  The window simulation in his office showed Epco headquarters on Capella Two. He gestured her to a chair facing it, so that when they both sat, his head was framed by the administration tower.

  “I want to make sure we get started on a good footing,” he said, leaning forward so that Sara was afraid for an instant he would pat her knee. “I know the nature of your assignment, and I want you to know, I support it wholeheartedly.”

  “Thank you,” Sara said, not sure what else to say.

  “This is a showcase project. We have an opportunity to demonstrate how ne
w management methodologies can achieve breakthroughs that our shareholders will profit from for decades. I expect great things from this expedition.”

  Sara realized that he was talking about her public assignment from Epco, not her private one from Gossup. He thought it was him she had been sent to observe. No wonder he was so ingratiating.

  “I’m excited about the expedition myself,” she said.

  “Can I ask about the rubrics you will use to conduct your evaluations?” he asked.

  “Oh, well, you know, we have customized metrics for assessing multiplatform work flows,” Sara improvised.

  He nodded as if he understood perfectly, and her opinion of him dropped. He said, “Well, if there is anything my office can do to assist you, be sure to let us know. My door is always open.”

  Sara hadn’t seen an open door yet, but decided not to mention that. Instead, she said, “I haven’t had a chance to view the planet. Where is the observation deck?”

  “Sutton will show you,” he said. “She’s quite a sight, Iris.”

  He ushered Sara through to the first antechamber and told Leandra to summon Sutton. Then he shook Sara’s hand with the other hand on her shoulder, and disappeared back into his office.

  When Sutton appeared from another door, Sara said, “Really, all I need is directions—”

  “No, he wants me to show you,” Sutton said firmly, as if obeying to the letter were a matter of dogma. As they left through the brazen doors, Sara tried to make some aimless conversation, but Sutton answered only in monosyllables, so she gave up.

  The observation deck was a bubble that projected out from the bow of the ship, turning so as to stay stationary with respect to the outside world as the ship spun behind it. Because it lay on the ship’s axis, there was no gravity. By the time Sara passed through the circular hatch, leaving Sutton behind, she was already queasy from the transition back into weightlessness. Then she had to pull up short at the acrophobic sensation the room gave her. The curved floor, walls, and ceiling were all transparent. It gave Sara the impression of being suspended in open space. She closed her eyes and pressed her back to the door to regain her equilibrium.