CHAPTER FOURTEEN  Jonah and Pandora

Anton Koffield watched and listened as an alert tone sounded and lines of text appeared on the Cruzeiro do Sul’s pilot station’s display.

POWER-OFF ALL ATTITUDE CONTROL, ALL PROPULSION SYSTEMS. EXTEND SHIP LANDING GEAR. WILL NOT PROCEED UNTIL COMPLIANCE DETECTION.

The syntax was a little odd, but the intent was clear enough. SCO Station didn’t want powered ships flying around inside itself.

Anton Koffield looked to Norla Chandray, and nodded at her unspoken question. She let out a worried sigh and flipped the appropriate switches.

COMPLIANCE DETECTION. PT SYSTEM NOW WILL TRANSPORT TO SHIP BAY GAMMA TWO (G2). MAINTAIN PASSIVE STATE.

Interesting. There had been no noticeable shift in language or context when Second Officer Chandray had been talking with the human controllers. Why would an automatic system use such strange phrasing?

Koffield looked at Chandray again. The woman did not much like the thought of powering down her ship. Well, he could not blame her. Even under normal circumstances, no pilot liked to cede control of her craft—and these were far from normal circumstances.

The PT Arm folded back on itself, pulling the Cruzeiro do Sul toward the station. Koffield peered into the station’s central access tunnel and saw their PT Arm’s carrier car starting to roll forward, hauling the arm and the Cruzeiro along. There was a creak and a groan from the docking system’s load-bearing structure as it took up the towing stress. Then the ship started moving slowly forward toward the station.

Koffield checked his recorders again and confirmed they were working, then concentrated on seeing everything, noting everything, that he possibly could.

The carrier car moved steadily forward, the PT Arm and the ship trailing along behind. It was hard not to imagine the open end of the central access tunnel as a giant mouth swallowing them up, and the tunnel itself as a gullet of some monstrous beast. Jonah being swallowed by the whale. Well, Jonah had come out of it all right. Perhaps they would be equally lucky.

The Cruzeiro passed out of sunlight into the shadow of the station, then entered the station’s access tunnel. Without taking his eyes off the tunnel, Koffield removed his bright-tracking glasses and handed them to Chandray. She removed hers and put both pairs back in their storage compartment.

Koffield’s attention was focused on the interior of Solace Central Orbital Station. The place had doubled in size in the last century. That in and of itself was not remarkable. It was the way that time and use had made their mark that told him what he needed to know, and that gave him reason for alarm.

They passed by a loading bay that was stripped down to its structural members, wall panels pulled out more or less at random, and some of the structural hardware missing as well. What looked very much like the same type of wall panels had been used to add an extra repair bay in a nearby yard. A beat-up old orbital tug in that repair bay was half-disassembled, but whether it was being taken apart or being put back together was impossible to tell. There were no work lights on, no cables strung, no test equipment running, no workers on duty. Koffield got the very strong impression that no one had worked on that tug, or in that yard, for a long time.

A quarter rotation around the cylinder, a new, bright, gleaming repair yard had all lights on and a full staff in pressure suits, swarming over a gleaming-new atmospheric shuttle.

That was the pattern, writ small. The old was not preserved, or restored, but left to fall into decline and decay, scavenged and stripped for parts. The newly built sections and systems were not integrated into the old, but simply slapped into place over them. It was not a rational way to do work, or an efficient way. And things would not be the way they were unless someone, probably a large group of  someones, generations of someones, benefited in some way from doing things in that irrational way and had the power to make things happen to benefit them.

In other places, in other circumstances—on the surface of the planet, for example—abandoning one old loading crane where it stood, while building a newer, bigger, more powerful one a hundred meters away would not have held so much significance, or served as a warning sign of larger problems. But things were different in the tighter quarters of even a large orbital station. “They’ve doubled the size of the place,” he said to Norla. “But half the place looks close to abandoned. What does that say to you?”

“I don’t know, exactly, sir,” she replied. “Maybe they’re bad planners, or maybe it’s just plain old corruption. Or maybe the old guard just refused to rebuild or improve, and the up-and-comers left them where they were and went around them.”

Not for the first time, Koffield mentally gave Norla high marks. She was not a trained observer, but she was sharp, and she knew how to interpret what she saw.

As they were drawn in toward the older central disks, the pattern became more obvious and more extreme. Wrecked service bays, no busier than ghost towns, were side by side with bustling supply depots. Brightly lit VIP observation windows stared into the ports of darkened, smashed-out fueling stations. That too seemed to be part of the pattern. Not just the vibrant new next to the impoverished old, but the prosperous luxury establishment next to the bankrupt essential.

Not good. None of it was good.

The PT Arm towed them smoothly past it all, past the center point of the station and toward the far end of the cylinder. They came to the forward docking complex, and were greeted by the sight of a quite different sort of pattern—or perhaps, Koffield reflected, merely a variation on the same theme.

Every docking bay was full, and that made no sense. If there was one thing not in short supply, out in space, it was space itself. At every other station Koffield had ever seen there was a very simple way to deal with overcrowding. If a bay was needed, one simply waited until the ship in it was finished unloading, then undocked it and left it in a matched parking orbit close to the station. Assuming one. took basic anticollision precautions, and assuming the ships had sufficient propulsion power and life support, there was no practical limit to the number of ships one could stack up, and no purpose served by leaving ships at their bays. Koffield peered down the forward end of the access tunnel, toward open space. Even just with the naked eye, he could see a good ten or twenty ships—interorbit jobs, mostly—of one sort or another, all plainly in just that sort of standard stationkeeping orbit. They used the normal techniques.

Then why were SCO Station’s docking bays filled to bursting?

Koffield found his answer by noting what sorts of ships were in the bays themselves. Atmospheric transports, nearly every one of them. All of them of vaguely futuristic design, as seen from the perspective of a century and a quarter in the past, and nearly all of them showing signs of long and hard use. Few showed anything more than minimal interior lights through their portholes. Few had propel-lant lines or personnel access tunnels running to them—but all of them had what looked to be life-support umbilicals hooked up. Only a few had their locator lights blinking, and no pilot liked to power down those unless absolutely necessary. Yet a few ships had their beacons going, so there couldn’t be a local prohibition against running lights. Then why shut them down, unless—

Second Officer Norla Chandray was a step ahead of him. “I think there must be worse trouble on the planet’s surface than we thought,” she said. “Those are all ground-to-orbit ships, not orbit-only craft. That’s why they’ve got LSUs running to them, but not propellant lines or personnel access tunnels.”

Koffield nodded. He had read it the same way. The ships down there didn’t have enough power reserves or propellant to get themselves back, so they had to stay docked. The station was feeding them power and air because the ships didn’t have enough of their own. And the Personnel Access Tunnels weren’t extended because a PAT gave, well, personnel access. And for whatever reason, SCO Station didn’t want anyone from those ships getting into the station. The passengers and crew of the distressed ships were trapped there.

So why didn’t the station refuel them? None of the three possible answers Koffield could come up with made him feel any better. Either the station didn’t have the fuel to give the ships, or the ships couldn’t afford to pay for it, or the ships were refusing to take the fuel, for fear of being sent back.

But who would fly from the planet’s surface to SCO Station under such circumstances unless—

Unless things on the surface of Solace were getting very bad indeed.

“How’s our propellant holding out?” Koffield asked. He could have checked for himself, but he couldn’t tear his eyes away from the grounded hobo fleet spread out before his eyes.

“Tanks at just under eighty percent full,” Norla said. “We can get anywhere in the system, or get back to the Dom Pedro with no problem, if we have to.”

“The Dom Pedro sounds good right now,” Koffield said. “But I can’t think of anyplace else in this system I’d much like to go.”

“I’m right with you there, sir,” Chandray replied. “What I’d like to know is, where are they going to put us?”

“You saw it on the heads-up,” Koffield said. “Docking Bay Gamma Two.”

“Yes, sir. But it looks as if someone is there already.” She pointed over his shoulder. He looked in the direction she was pointing. He hadn’t been watching for the marking placards, but clearly Chandray had been. And there, very plainly, was the sign indicating G2. And just as plainly, there was a ship already there, a cone-shaped ballistic atmospheric lander that was plainly too large to share G2 with a minitug, let alone an intersystem transport the size of the Cruzeiro do Sul. The name of the ship, the Pilot’s Ease, was painted in bold letters on the side of the ship.

The answer to Chandray’s question came almost before she was finished asking it. The PT Arm towing the Cruzeiro slowed to a smooth, steady halt, and the Cruzeiro’s superstructure creaked and moaned as the stresses readjusted. Another PT Arm rolled up on its carrier car and came to a halt just ahead of the Cruzeiro do Sul. The second PT Arm swung down over Docking Bay Gamma Two and connected its docking probe to the docking probe in the nose of the Pilot’s Ease. The arm pulled the Ease straight up out of the bay and brought it to the centerline of the station. The arm rotated its docking collar about until the base of the ballistic ship was pointed straight at the forward end of the station, the end opposite to the one through which the Cruzeiro had entered the station.

The arm moved forward, pushing the Pilot’s Ease ahead of itself. Arm and ship moved forward, toward the end of the tunnel. Twenty meters or so shy of the tunnel’s end, the - arm let go, and set the Pilot’s Ease adrift. The big ballistic ship sailed slowly out into open space. So far as Koffield could see, she made no effort to adjust her course or slow her forward motion relative to the station. The PT Arm hadn’t pushed her hard, but it had put a few meters per second of speed into the ship, enough to shift her orbit somewhat. If she did not slow her forward motion, the Ease would stay in her slightly variant orbit, gradually drifting away from the station. Koffield could not see any nav locator lights or interior lights on the Ease.

Chandray and Koffield looked at each other. Was the captain  of the  Pilot’s Ease just being extremely—even insanely—economical of his onboard power, or had they just seen a ship being deliberately set adrift, made a derelict? Had there even been a crew aboard that ship? And if there had been crew aboard, were any of them still alive?

Had SCO Docking Control just performed a routine bit of ship-handling—or had they just seen a corpse thrown overboard to make room for the new arrival?

There was no time for such questions. Their own PT Arm had started moving again, swinging the Cruzeiro do Sul through ninety degrees so that her base and her landing jacks pointed straight at Docking Bay Gamma Two. The arm started lowering the ship down toward the deck of the docking bay, setting the Cruzeiro into her docking bay, a pawn being set down on a giant chessboard. But what of the Pilot’s Ease) Had they just seen some other pawn sacrificed so they could take its square? Would they sacrifice the Cruzeiro just as casually, should that suit their purposes?

It seemed to Koffield that he had been moved about by others, often by forces he could neither see nor understand, moving without any real choice of his own, for far too long. Ever since Circum Central, or so it sometimes seemed. Games within games. Who had maneuvered him to this place and time, and why? And what, exactly, did the position of the pieces on the gameboard that was SCO Station tell him? What game were they playing here, and what, exactly, was the state of play?

With a sudden, sharp thud, the Cruzeiro do Sul landed on the docking bay deck. They had arrived.

It was, Anton Koffield realized, his move now. And he hadn’t the slightest idea what the rules of this game were.

It should have been the climax of their trip. A few quick housekeeping chores to secure the piloting station and power down the ship’s propulsion and nav systems, and then should have come the big moment when they stepped from the Cruzeiro into a Personnel Access Tunnel, and from the PAT into Solace Central Orbital Station, into the up-close-and-personal, in-your-face, future full of people and events.Now that they were here, with no turning back, now that they had crossed their Rubicon, and, at long last, had gotten to where they were going, Norla was eager to get off the ship and see what there was to see of this place.

Even the great Anton Koffield himself exhibited a bit of eagerness and impatience, and he even did something that was just microscopically irrational. While Norla was still completing her postflight checks, Koffield went into his cabin and brought out his precious secured container. He set it down by the side of the airlock. Norla watched him do it, and he caught her watching him. He smiled, and shrugged, and went back into his cabin without saying a word. It was quite absurd, really. How much time was he really going to save by having it that much nearer the airlock, once the lock opened? And for that matter, what point had there been in keeping the secured container in his cabin all this time? Had he expected her to try and steal it, or pilfer the contents?

At least it was proof, or at least strong evidence, that Koffield was indeed human. And proof that he, as much as Norla, was ready, willing, and eager to get on with it.

But SCO Station wasn’t ready for them. Station Medical saw to that. Station Med did not volunteer explanations and refused to give explanations when asked. Station Med simply made it clear that Koffield and Chandray would not be allowed to enter the station until they cleared a much more rigorous medical survey than usual. A service robot wheeled over to the Cruzeiro’s exterior airlock door and delivered two sampling kits.

Once they retrieved the kits from the airlock, both of them had to go through the unpleasant, undignified process of providing the required samples of hair, nail clippings, saliva, stool, urine, ear wax, a balloonful of exhaled breath, and even scrapings off the inside of their mouths.

Norla managed all of those on her own, but she knew not to try drawing her own blood if she didn’t have to. It would seem Koffield’s experiences had taught him the same lesson, and he was more than happy to trade help with the chore.

There was a peculiar sort of intimacy to the moment, each of them rolling up a shirtsleeve and baring flesh for the other to stab, however carefully and gently, with a needle.

Norla felt strange, and a trifle uncomfortable, to have Koffield’s hands on her arm, expertly massaging the flesh to bring out a vein. Neither of them had touched the other since the day he had revived her from cryosleep. There was something dangerous in the sensation of feeling his hands on her skin. The jab of the needle was merely cold, sharp, precise, rather than truly painful. The blood welling up in the sampling reservoir as he drew back the plunger looked redder than it should have.

To Norla, it looked too perfect and archetypal to be real. It looked like pretend blood, ghoulish makeup, rather than the genuine article. But blood and steel did not worry her. It was, some deep part of her knew, Anton Koffield who was dangerous.

Koffield cleaned and bandaged the needle mark on her arm, then undipped the sampling reservoir from the needle. The needle went down the trash chute, and the reservoir into its carefully labeled niche in the sampling kit, ready to be set in the airlock for the service robot to collect.

“Now do me,” Koffield said, rolling up his own sleeve. In the most literal way possible, he was placing himself in her hands, opening himself up to her, and she wanted to show herself worthy of that trust. It was the work of but a minute to draw his blood and pack the sampling reservoir into his sample case. It took not much longer to seal up the two cases, confirm they were labeled properly, and set them in the airlock. Norla sealed the airlock hatch and pushed the buttons to start the lock cycle. “That should do it,” she said. “I wonder what they’re afraid of catching from us.”

“Or what it is they’re afraid we’ll catch from them,” he said. “Disease vectors are two-way streets.”

“I hadn’t thought of that,” she admitted. “And I can’t blame them for being careful around people who could be carrying last century’s plague, and definitely aren’t carrying the antibodies to this century’s. But I don’t like being stuck here, waiting while they check.”Nor do I,” Koffield said. “All things considered, we’ve done all the waiting we should be expected to do, don’t you think?”

Norla smiled at the small joke, then glanced down at the secured container that was still this side of the lock. The container Koffield had guarded so carefully still sat on the deck, ready to be moved out the airlock the moment they were allowed off the ship.

“There’s some other waiting I’ve been doing,” she said. “I’ve been waiting to hear the end of your story. What’s in that Pandora’s box of yours? What’s it all about?”

“I read that story about Pandora, read all the myths I could, back when I was a boy,” Koffield said. It was hard not to notice he wasn’t actually answering her question. “The way I remember the story, all the evils of the world flew out of the box the moment she opened it,” Koffield said. “Once the evils had escaped, she looked inside the box, and saw that the only thing still there was hope. That always bothered me. I couldn’t help but wonder—who’d put evil and hope in the same box, and why? And why did hope hide in the bottom of the box, afraid to come out, when the evils were brave enough to rush out the first moment they could?”

“I assume you wouldn’t pack a case full of evil and bring it all this way,” Norla said. Or would you? she wondered. Anyone from Glister would believe you capable of doing just that. But she wanted answers to her questions, and she was damned well going to get them. “So if not evil, what is in your box? Is it hope?”

Koffield frowned, then shrugged his shoulders. It was strange to see any such sign of uncertainty from the man. “Perhaps,” he said. “Hope, maybe, for some, anyway. Knowledge, certainly. And a warning, if anyone will listen.”

“You said you’d tell me the rest of it,” Norla said, tven to herself, she sounded like a petulant child demanding another bedtime story. “You said you’d tell me everything before I needed to know it. Once they give us med clearance and we open that hatch again, things are going to start happening. I don’t think there will be time later on. I have to know before that hatch opens. Tell me.”

Koffield looked down at his secured container, and then back at Norla. He nodded, in a way that seemed to signal, if not willing agreement, at least acceptance.

But the last of the barriers was yet to come down. “It’s not the sort of thing I can tell in two minutes standing by an airlock,” he said. “They’ll need at least several hours before they clear us. Tonight. Tonight, over dinner, I’ll tell you the last of it.”

Norla looked him in the eye and nodded back at him, she herself accepting, if not agreeing. She wanted to push harder, to make him get it all out in the open, once and for all—but she could sense that asking for more would likely bring her less. “All right,” she said. “Tonight.”

Koffield smiled stiffly to her. “Until dinner then,” he said, turned, went back into his cabin, and closed the door.

Norla stood there staring at the closed door. It seemed as good a symbol as any for time spent with Anton Koffield. “Until dinner,” she said to the door.

It was not a meal she was expecting to enjoy all that much.