CHAPTER SIXTEEN  The Deepest Tower

Norla rolled up her sleeve and activated the subcutaneous injector against her right shoulder. The device shot its drugs and antibodies and pseudovirals under her skin. She didn’t know, and didn’t care, if the cocktail of chemicals in the injector was supposed to keep her from spreading a plague she carried out into the station or supposed to keep her from catching a plague that was already out there. Norla felt numb, lost, her spirit deadened. If she caught their plague, or they caught hers, what did it matter? They were all going to die. The planet was going to collapse.

Koffield used his own injector, then readjusted the sleeve of his tunic and needlessly straightened his collar. He looked every bit the ramrod-straight military man, emotionless, imperturbable. Norla envied him that. She had no such ready-built role she could draw on, or hide behind. She had only herself.

But if Koffield had his military persona to hide behind, to use as a shield between the outer world and his inner self, there had to be a cost. It had to eat at him. How much of the inner man still survived behind that shield-wall? How much of his soul had been hollowed out by the endless discipline, the rigid self-control?

“Ready?” he asked her.

“No,” she replied, quite honestly. “Let’s go.”

He nodded and worked the airlock controls. The inner door slid open, and they stepped inside, Koffield hauling the secured container along with him, as well as a carrier bag packed with spare clothes, toiletries, and the like. Norla carried a similar personal effects bag, along with a small utility satchel, but the latter was more for form’s sake than anything else. It held a pocket camera and a note recorder, but beyond that, she couldn’t think of much she’d be certain to need. She had not the faintest idea what was to happen next. She could think of a thousand things they might need, from gas masks to assault lasers to Artlnt pocket translators to inertial trackers, more than would be possible to carry. But even given the evidence they had already seen that not all was as it should have been aboard SCO Station, it seemed to her it would be more diplomatic to assume—or at least pretend—that everything on board would be normal.

Norla stepped into the airlock, sealed the inner door, and reached for the button that would open the outer.

Assistant Station Operations Supervisor Yuri Sparten stood on the walkway inside the Personnel Access Tunnel, a meter or two back from the ship-end of the PAT, staring thoughtfully at the hull of the—well, mystery ship was probably the most accurate term. He had burrowed deep into the station’s record archives and been able to confirm a number of details concerning the Cruzeiro do Sul’s story, but the whole affair sounded too much like the sort of story invented to scare children sitting around a campfire. The ghost ship that came out of the past, the dead crew returned to life.

Yuri felt fidgety, anxious, as if he ought to be doing something. Acting more to use up nervous energy than because it needed doing, he stepped forward to the end of the PAT and started a hand check of the PAPs seal to the ship’s hull. Pointless, of course. There was hard vacuum on the other side of the seal. If there had been a leak, he would have known about it without having to run his hand around the edge of the seal.

Yuri heard a clang and a thud from inside the ship. That had to be the inner hatch sealing. They’d be coming out in a moment. But now that he had started it, he felt obliged to complete his pointless check of the pressure seal. He knelt by the end of the PAT and ran his hand along the seal below the base of the hatch.

A low click and a slight hissing noise were all the warning he had that the outer hatch was about to open. He straightened up suddenly, almost toppling over in the low gravity of the near-axis decks. He moved back a step or two from the hatch, feeling strangely embarrassed, as if he had almost been caught at something untoward.

He managed to come to a respectable version of parade rest just a fraction of a second too late. That much he knew the moment he caught the man’s eye. It plainly required an act of will on the man’s part not to dress Yuri down on the spot. Never had Yuri seen a man who so obviously did not belong in civilian clothes. The man might as well have had the words SENIOR OFFICER stamped across his forehead.

Yuri was suddenly very self-conscious, as if the man were subjecting him to parade-ground inspection. “Welcome to Solace Central Orbital Station,” he said to them, speaking a bit more slowly and carefully than he normally would. Accents might well have shifted a good deal over the last century. “I am Second Assistant Station Operations Supervisor Yuri Sparten.” Unsure of what gesture— a handshake, a salute, a kiss on both cheeks—they might think proper, he offered none.

“Thank you,” said the man. “I am Anton Koffield, and this is Norla Chandray. Our spacecraft is the lighter Cruzeiro do Sul, off the timeshaft freighter Dom Pedro IV.”

“Very nice to meet you,” said Chandray, smiling at him mechanically, an insincere expression that did not reflect her feelings, but was merely meant to reassure Yuri.

“I am delighted to meet you both,” he said, the words sounding awkward and insincere even to him. It seemed to him that Koffield was staring at him intently. He found himself fretting over whether his dark grey uniform was properly cleaned and pressed.

Yuri was suddenly acutely aware of his own youth, and felt embarrassed by it, as if it were a fault or handicap he had to overcome. He was dark-skinned, slender, long-boned. He liked to think he was capable of moving with remarkable grace, but knew how befuddled and clumsy he could be. Yuri had a long, angular face, and he practiced in the mirror to make sure his jaw was set, his eyes determined-looking. He kept his black hair trimmed so short that it looked from some angles as if he had shaved his skull.

But it was no time to worry about his own appearance. He was supposed to be evaluating the visitors. He forced himself to settle down. He decided to concentrate on Chandray for the moment, she being far less intimidating. She was as plainly civilian as Koffield was military. She was a rather nondescript sort, a little over thirty standard years or so, a kilo or two on the heavy side, pale-skinned and round-faced, with-dirty blond hair cut so short it barely fell flat.

“Thank you for meeting our ship,” Chandray said, and Yuri suddenly realized he had let the silence go on too long.

“It is my privilege to serve,” Yuri replied, offering the formal phrase with a very slight, very correct bow.

“Thank you,” Koffield said. “It is an honor to be so well received.”

Not quite the conventional response, but they hadn’t exactly had much chance to practice modern standards of etiquette. It would do. The two visitors both spoke with odd but perfectly understandable accents.

Chandray looked around the lock complex, and Yuri caught her wrinkling her nose and making a face. It was plain to see that the station’s air scrubbers weren’t doing a good enough job to meet with her approval. Koffield probably felt the same way, but there was no reading anything in that face. Well, if they thought the air up this way was a bit whiff, wait until they got down to Perimeter Level. Even Yuri thought Perimeter smelled like five thousand people who hadn’t bathed in far too long—and that was not far off the mark.

Both of the visitors had the slightly sallow, wan-looking appearance of people who had not yet quite recovered from a long time in cryosleep. Nor was the slightly lost look on the woman’s face all that unexpected. Yuri had seen the same expression on the faces of the abandoned and dispossessed who seemed to crowd in on every part of the station.

It was Koffield’s grim features, his face as hard as stone, that surprised Yuri. The man looked not like a refugee, but like a man prepared to do battle.

“If there is anything you wish,” Yuri said, “please do not hesitate to ask.”

“Thank you once again,” Koffield said. “And I trust you will forgive me if I take advantage of that gracious offer immediately. I don’t know what the proper title might be, but I—we—would like to meet with the station commander or director, or executive, as soon as possible. It is a matter of some urgency.” Koffield patted the handle of the large piece of luggage he had with him, and Yuri concluded that the contents of the case had something to do with the matter of urgency.

“No apologies required, sir. In fact, Station Commander Raenau asked to see you as soon as was convenient.” That was understating the case by quite a bit. Raenau had bluntly ordered that the crew of the Cruzeiro do Sul be brought before him at once, whether they liked it or not. But Sparten could see no harm in being a bit more diplomatic,’seeing how both sides wanted the same thing in any-’event. “If you would care to see him now, before being shown to your quarters, I’m sure I could arrange it.”

Koffield raised his eyebrows in surprise. “I must admit that I expected to spend quite some time arranging things. I’m delighted by the news, but I must admit I didn’t expect your commander to be quite so eager to see us. Might I ask if he gave you any reason?”

“No, sir, he did not.” Any more than you’ve given your reasons, Yuri thought. “But if you’ll allow me the chance to make a very brief call, we’ll go straight to his office, and then take you to your quarters, where you will be welcome as the commander’s guests.”

. It was a diplomatic way of saying they would not be expected to pay for lodging, and plainly Koffield got the message. “Excellent,” he said. “We look forward to your hospitality.”

The word hospitality gave Yuri pause. He considered for a moment, then decided now was as good a time as any for bad news. “Regarding that hospitality—I’m afraid it might not be up to our normal standards. In plain point of fact, we can’t offer much in the way of luxury. As you might or might not be aware, the station is rather overcrowded at the moment.”

“We didn’t know,” Koffield said dryly, “but we were beginning to suspect. The docking bays are remarkably full, and the ships in the bays do not appear to be in top-of-the-line-perfect repair.”

Top of the line? It took Yuri a moment to figure out what the outdated idiom meant. “Ah, yes,” he said. “Just so. But in any event, we can at least put you up.”

“If the station is that crowded, Mr. Sparten,” said the Chandray woman, “we could stay aboard our lighter.”

Yuri looked at the woman in surprise—and noted that Koffield did as well. No doubt what she had said was quite polite and proper wherever—and whenever—it was that she came from. But Yuri could think of half a dozen cultures off the top of his head where to so much as offer to forgo hospitality was a deadly insult. There were certainly communities on Solace itself where it would have been a ghastly mistake. No one with any experience of other cultures would have made such a gaffe. Clearly she was far less experienced than Koffield.

“I’m sure that Mr. Sparten’s offer was quite sincere, Second Officer Chandray,” Koffield said. “And I have no doubt we will find the stationside accommodations more comfortable and more convenient than anything we could arrange for ourselves aboard ship.”

Chandray reddened visibly. “Yes, yes, of course,” she said. “Please forgive me,” she said to Yuri. “If I have offended you, it was quite unintentional.”

“Not at all,” Yuri replied. He regarded the two of them thoughtfully for a moment. The brief exchange had told him a lot about these two strangers. One knew to be wary when approaching a new culture, and the other did not. It was the sort of thing that might be worth knowing, sometime down the road. “In any event, we do have accommodation for you, and the station commander is eager to see you. If you will both come with me, there’s a free-runner waiting for us.”

“A what?” Chandray asked.

“A free-runner. It’s a small open car that isn’t restricted to the transit-tube system, and can travel freely throughout the station. Could you come this way?”

“Certainly,” said Koffield.

“Just a second,” Chandray said. “I need to secure my outer hatches first.” She stepped to one side of the hatch opening and flipped open a panel on the outer hull of the Cruzeiro do Sul, revealing some sort of keypad. Either deliberately or by chance, she moved to put her body between Yuri and the panel, and did something he could not see with the controls. The outer hatch slid shut, and Yuri heard a deep, solid clunk, clunk, clunk from inside the hatch. At a guess, the Cruzeiro’s hatches had triple dead bolts that had just slammed to. “All right. Locks set, combinations scrambled, and keys out,” she said. “Let’s go.”

After the warning she had just received, it should have occurred to Chandray that locking her doors that completely, and that obviously, in front of your host, could be construed as one hell of an insult.

But then Chandray turned around and looked him right in the eye. No embarrassment there anymore, no apology. It was plain she knew exactly what she was doing. And, Yuri noticed, Koffield offered no objection this time, made no effort to smooth things over. Yuri smiled sadly to himself. He couldn’t blame them. They’d seen what the docking bays, and the ships in them, looked like. They might even have seen the Pilot’s Ease being jettisoned. They no doubt had guessed some, if not all, of what was going on aboard the station. Courtesy was one thing. Doing what you could to protect your only way out was quite another.

“This way,” Yuri said. Koffield picked up the oversize hard-sided satchel he had brought out of the ship, and Chandray shut the access panel and stood by him, ready to follow Yuri. He led them down the Personnel Access Tunnel to the Gamma Docking Bays’ airlock center, all three of them studiously ignoring everything that had just been revealed. He found himself wondering just how much else they would all need to ignore about each other.

Yuri gestured for his two guests to sit down in the rear bench seat of the free-runner. “You’ll see more facing forward,” he said. They got in, Koffield being very careful with his oversize case. Yuri got in himself and sat down in the front left-side swivel seat, facing forward. “Go to the Ring Park entrance to DeSilvo Tower, traveling via any convenient scenic route at observation speed,” he said. Lights on the car’s control panel came on, indicating that it had understood the instructions. A proposed route popped up on the main map display. “Route approved,” Yuri said, then spun about in his seat to face his guests as the car started itself up. It rolled out of the Gamma Bays’ airlock center, went down the vehicle-axis ramp, and took the side turning into the west-quad down-axis transit tube.

The transit tubes were utilitarian affairs, scruffy, win-dowless, dimly lit, and a little beat-up. The car turned on its headlight and interior lights as it rolled along the featureless tunnel.

“This is the scenic route?” Chandray asked.

Yuri laughed. “We’re not quite to the scenic part yet. We’ll come out of the transit tube soon, and you’ll see— well, what you’ll see. Quite frankly, even the scenic parts aren’t very scenic at the moment. As it happens, the scenic route is probably the fastest way there, this time of day. But there’s no sense hiding the situation from you. You might as well see us, warts and all.”

Chandray and Koffield looked at each other for a moment. They seemed interested in what he said, but not surprised. “Why aren’t the scenic parts scenic?” Chandray asked. She tried to make it into a casual question, but it was plain from the look on her face they had come to a subject of interest. Chandray would never get far in life if she had to rely on concealing her emotions.

But there was no sense trying to deny what they were going to see for themselves in a moment. Some things, you couldn’t even pretend to ignore. Yuri shrugged sadly. “The whole station is crawling with refugees, and we’ll probably see a lot of them. It was a lot worse not so long ago, but it’s still pretty bad. You’ll see.”

“We’d guessed something of the sort already,” Koffield replied. “We picked up a few transmissions about some sort of evacuation panic on our. way in. One is related to the other, I’d imagine.”

Yuri nodded. “A story got started and it wouldn’t die. A rumor about evacuating part of the population. Madam Kalzant—ah, Madam Neshobe Kalzant, the Planetary Executive, decided the only way to calm the situation down was to give everyone who wanted one a ride off-planet, demonstrate we could handle the traffic. I guess she figured that if she proved there wasn’t a shortage or a traffic cutoff, that would kill the panic. And it did, pretty much. Even if it was awful hard on us, the plan worked. The panic stopped, outgoing traffic tailed back down to normal—or below. Incoming traffic back toward Solace went way up. Inbound traffic probably won’t get back down to normal level for a while yet. But it looks like nearly everyone has decided to go back home to planetside.”

“ ‘Nearly’ everyone?” Koffield asked gently.

Yuri turned his hands up in a sign of helplessness. “We’re a transit facility, a cargo-transfer point. We’ve got a fair-sized population, but this is a working station, not a resort hab with lots of excess capacity. We didn’t have enough life-support service to handle everyone who came through.

“So we passed along as many people as we could to other stations and habitats, even to some of the domed colonies in the outer system. We were swamped getting them all processed through here. We’re still keeping pretty busy getting them back to Solace. But some of the refugees could only get this far. No money, no equipment, no off-planet skills. They got here on ships that shouldn’t ever have left the ground. Ships got here out of fuel, life support dead, propulsion out, some with nothing more than corpses aboard.”

The free-runner shifted to an off-ramp and rolled itself into the waiting car of a cargo lift. The elevator car shut its doors and started to descend the moment the free-runner came to a halt. For whatever reason, the first half of the ride down took place in silence. What was there about lifts and elevators, Yuri wondered, that so discouraged conversation? Of course, to be fair, a ride in an SCO Station cargo lift could be a disconcerting experience. As one moved farther away from the axis of the station, the apparent pull of gravity increased dramatically. They would move from about one-tenth to nearly one-half gee in just over a minute. Yuri never enjoyed it, even if the normal operating speed of the lifts was kept low to try and keep the transition from being worse.

In any event, the lull in conversation offered up the perfect chance for Yuri to call ahead. He might as well take advantage of it. He pulled his pocket phone out, keyed a link to the commander’s office, and put the device to his ear, so only he could hear the other side of the conversation.

“Answered by operations system, office, commander,” the Artlnt on the other end announced. “Instruction to caller: Confirm caller identity via voice check as Yuri Sparten.”

“Sparten confirming,” Yuri said.

“Voice match,” the Artlnt replied, then fell silent, waiting for Yuri to speak.

“Guests, two, from Cruzeiro do Sul arrived,” Yuri told the machine. “En route with same to office, commander. ETA approx twenty minutes. Immediate meeting with commander agreed.”

“Confirmation is redundant. Confirmation noted and logged.”

Yuri nodded to himself, then shut off the phone and pocketed it without speaking further. No point in courtesy hellos and good-byes with machines. Especially when, as the Artlnt noted, the call was utterly redundant. But then, he had made the call for the benefit of his visitors, not the Artlnt. By calling in a confirmation, he had made the commander’s summons seem a bit more like a social invitation,  rather than the peremptory order it was. Yuri spent a good part of his time on such smoothing-over maneuvers. Commander Raenau was not known for his skill at diplomacy.

Yuri glanced at the lift’s floor indicator and saw they were getting close. He looked back down and noticed a quizzical expression on Chandray’s face. “The way you were talking just now,” she said. “I take it you were talking to a robot or some sort of machine?”

“That’s right,” Yuri said. “But why does that strike you as odd? Surely you had talking machines a hundred years ago.”

“Oh yes, of course we do—we did,” Chandray replied. “It’s the syntax, the patterns of how you talked to it. It’s almost like a distinct dialect. Now that I think of it, the traffic-control system had the same sort of odd speech patterns.” She frowned thoughtfully, and then her eyes lit up. “Is that it?” she asked. “A distinct speech pattern when addressing machines?”

Maybe this Chandray woman wasn’t much for questions of etiquette, but she clearly was nobody’s fool. “Quite right,” he said. “Supposedly it was Founder DeSilvo’s own idea.”

“DeSilvo?” Koffield asked.

The name drew a strong reaction from both of them. Another interesting detail to note down. “It’s been handed down since his time, all through the Solace system. The machines can understand and use standard speech if need be, of course, but the convention is for them and us to use machine language whenever we interact. I think the idea is that if you speak to them in a way sufficiently unlike normal speech, you’ll always remember, at a subconscious level, that they’re not human. In a crisis, you won’t waste time shouting at them, or offering arguments or reasons that would only make sense to a human.”

“Subtle,” said Koffield, half to himself and half to Chandray. “Interesting, clever, and subtle. He always did know his way around machines.”

Which strongly implied that Koffield had actually known DeSilvo! Yuri worked the dates out in his head and concluded there was nothing impossible in that. Yet one more useful, even fascinating, item for the debriefers. “Supposedly it’s a status marker as well,” Yuri said. “As least that’s what my social structure teachers called it. We use machine language to talk to robotic servants, but not to each other. It’s supposed to be good psychology, according to my teachers.”

The lift car came to a halt at Perimeter Level, the habitable level closest to the outer, perimeter, hull of the station. The lift car’s doors opened, and the free-runner backed itself nimbly out, turned itself around, rolled down a side passage, and then out onto the Long Boulevard, the only route that ran the full length of the station.

Where once there had been bright light, laughter, and music, now there were only stripped-bare storefronts and the snarl of traffic. The smell, the stench, hit them as hard as a fist, and it would only get worse as they moved closer to Ring Park. The Long Boulevard had lost all her elegance, all her pride, all of it replaced by a wretched miasma of unwashed bodies and failed sanitation systems.

The Long Boulevard was no featureless transit tube, but the main thoroughfare for the station, the only one big enough and long enough to be considered a proper avenue if it were in a groundside city. It was so wide and tall in cross section that the station’s girth was noticeable. Yuri looked straight down the Boulevard, and caught a glimpse of the Aft End Cargo Center at the far end of the station, more than half a kilometer away.

Shops and stores, shipping offices and cafes, theaters and nightclubs lined both sides of the Boulevard. Walkways separated the stores from the central transport road. A pair of glass-walled transit tubes hung from the ceiling, but the Boulevard was a route for more than closed-route transport.

Free-ranging vehicles of all sorts crowded the two narrow vehicular lanes of the Boulevard. Robotic cargo haulers, pedal-powered quadracycles, private free-runners, and taxibots came on and went off the main road to and from all the side and upper accessways. As always, the Boulevard’s vehicular traffic looked to be on the verge of chaos, but Yuri was not concerned about it. The automated road-traffic-control system was highly competent, and would see to it that all the transports got where they were going.

It was the walkways and the shops—and the people in them—that had him worried. Day shift and night shift, around the clock, the Boulevard was ready to boil over into new trouble at any moment. The closer they got to Ring Park, the denser, shabbier, and more surly the crowds became.

Once, not so long ago, the shops had been smart, the shipping offices bustling, the cafes and clubs alive with the sights and sounds of people enjoying themselves. Now half the businesses were shuttered, and a few had been wrecked or burned out in the riots. Most of the establishments that were still open had very obviously armed guards on duty, and very heavy, very utilitarian metal grilles fastened over the display windows.

Anything and everything of any conceivable value, anything even remotely fragile, had long since been removed. Some of it smashed, stolen, the rest put out of harm’s way by the owners. All the signs, all the outdoor tables and chairs, were gone. Stripped of all decoration and on the defensive, the Boulevard was not itself anymore. It was nothing but a row of shabby little stresscrete bunkers barricaded against loiterers and malcontents, just barely hanging on. Business continued, but it was greatly changed and much diminished.

The free-runner slowed down in a particularly heavy knot of traffic. They came to a halt at the next intersection, and sat there, waiting to move again.

“Refugees?” Koffield asked, nodding toward a knot of grimy, bewildered-looking men huddled together on a street corner. It surprised Yuri not at all that Koffield had been able to pick them out. Everything from their haircuts to the style of their clothing, from the gauntness of their faces to the dirt on their skin, shouted out that these were people who did not belong, people who had no place, people for whom there was no room.

“Refugees,” Yuri said, trying to keep the anger and frustration out of his voice. The shabby men looked harmless, even pathetic. But those pitiable men, and their wives and children, had, simply by being on SCO Station, put the station in mortal danger. It had been luck as much as anything else that had kept it from utter collapse.

The normal station population was about four thousand, a little above the official “optimum” population of thirty-five hundred. At the peak of the crisis, there had been two thousand refugees on the station, over and above the normal population. The air-recirculation system had barely held, and the food supply had reached critical levels. Water, waste recirculation, general sanitation, medical services—everything had been stretched to the limit. There were still close to a thousand refugees on board, and they showed no sign of leaving. Things had gotten better, but service and supply systems that had never gotten a chance to recover were still under strain.

“It’s hard to explain to outsiders,” Yuri said, “but for a lot of people, the worst of the refugee crisis wasn’t that they came and took everything we had. It was that they took it all and made nothing, less than nothing, out of it. Our air reserves are down to zero, the whole station is on short food and water rations, we’re completely out of all sorts of medicines—and it’s all gone for nothing. They’re still here, most of them no better off than the day they got here. It’s as if we had done nothing at all—and we did so much it nearly killed the station and everyone on it.”

“And you could do twice as much, and it would do no good,” Koffield said. “I do understand. I wish I didn’t. But I learned otherwise, when I wasn’t much younger than you are now. I was just another junior officer on just another colony-relief mission. All of the rescue team went around wondering how we had come to be so angry at the people we were trying to save.”

Yuri nodded eagerly. “That’s it exactly, sir. Except that— well, you went out intending to rescue people. We just got the problem dumped in our laps.” Yuri shrugged. “We’re not angry all the time, of course. We feel for them. We care about them. I can’t really blame them for trying to stay.

Most of them came from places on the planet that are bad enough that no one in their right mind would want to go back, places that make the mess we’re in look like paradise.”

“Why did you allow them here in the first place?” Chandray asked.

“It was out of our hands,” said Yuri. “Orders from the planetary government. The official policy was that whoever wanted to go could leave the planet. Probably that was even the right policy, even if it wasn’t too popular up here. It stopped the panic from getting worse. Most of the people who left the planet went back. But most of the ones who didn’t go back are on this station, though there are a few refugees on other stations. But we’re stuck with over ninety percent of them.”

“And now you’re stuck with two more,” Chandray said, half under her breath.

Yuri wasn’t sure if it was meant to be a joke, or even if he had been meant to hear it. For a moment or two, he considered treating it as one thing more that needed ignoring, but Chandray’s words came too close to the truth. They had to deal with the issue. “If I can be a bit reassuring, at least on that point, I can tell you that the Station Administrator does not regard you as being in the same category as the gluefeet.” He reddened as soon as the word was out of his mouth.

“You call the refugees ‘gluefeet’?” Chandray asked.

“Ah, yeah. Gluefeet or gluefooters. Because they’re stuck here. You can’t get them to go.”

No one spoke for a moment. Yuri was ashamed of himself. A fellow station-dweller would have understood and sympathized, but could these two? Yuri had started out believing, and wanting to believe, that the refugees were people just like anyone else. They might be displaced groundside peasants who had nothing in common with the engineers and traders who lived on the station, but people for all of that. But then came the endless trouble they caused, the crowding, the rationing, the riots—and the smell. There were times when Yuri felt he could forgive the gluefeet everything else, if only the camps didn’t smell so bad. It was getting harder and harder not to think of the refugees as the enemy, as a willful source of trouble, as freeloaders who offered nothing and asked for everything. The station-dwellers equated the refugees with the squalor in which the refugees lived. It was hard, damned hard, to remember that the glue-feet had ever been anything else but a pack of filthy rabble.

And maybe that was what the station-dwellers hated most about them. Because the station-dwellers knew, Yuri knew, that the refugees were just like them, were human beings. The refugees showed the dwellers what they might become, if their luck went bad. If others could fall so low, then perhaps they could as well.

“I’m sorry,” Yuri said. “It’s not the kindest thing to call a group of people. But, well, that’s the name they’ve gotten. The point I was trying to make, even if I did a bad job of it, is that for better or worse, you’re not like them.”

Chandray looked at him, her expression hard and cold, before she returned her gaze to the shabby men on the street corner. “I can think of things we have in common,” she said. “They and we are both a long way from home— and neither they nor we can go back.”

The traffic started moving again, and the free-runner rolled forward, leaving the little crowd of weary, defeated men behind.

Norla Chandray wanted to scream, wanted to cry. She had so long dreamed of seeing what people and places were like in other star systems. Now she knew. She knew the people on top were callous and angry at the helpless, and the ones down below had all life, all hope, crushed out of them. She knew this place was a bewildering, crowded, foul-smelling hell-maze. And she knew she was trapped here. She could see no likelihood of escaping this world, this future. Even if they did manage to repair the Dom Pedro IV, Norla doubted she could bring herself to set foot back in the cryo-can that had nearly killed her and had killed her two friends. Or perhaps risking cryodeath would be preferable to life in this nightmare. Norla shuddered. How had she come to be in a time and place where the choices were so few and so unpleasant?The free-runner rolled forward through the thickest of the traffic. The signs indicated they were getting closer to Ring Park, whatever that was. Road traffic was thinning out, but the crowds of refugees on the walkways were growing thicker. Up ahead, the sidewalls of the Boulevard opened out, and the overhead transit tubes split apart, one to either side of the Boulevard. Both angled down steeply and vanished below street level. The rows of shops and buildings stopped dead. A flat, featureless blue wall on either side of the road marked the end of the commercial area, but the road and the walkways passed through a wide circular opening in the wall. The way ahead was clear, straight into what had to be Ring Park.

The road itself pointed straight ahead, toward another circular opening at the far wall, and the aft end of the station visible beyond. A huge green space—or at least space that had once been green—opened up on all sides of them as they moved past the barrier. Ring Park wrapped itself entirely around the Perimeter Level of the station. Norla looked up at the sky-blue ceiling, and estimated that the park took up three or four levels of the station. Beyond that ceiling there had to be several more decks, and then the central access tunnel of the station, through which the Cruzeiro do Sul had traveled.

There had been no attempt to make the overhead bulkhead look like anything but a high, blue-painted ceiling. Stations with similar parks sometimes used holographic projections and other tricks to simulate cloudscapes and sunshine and so on. Better to do what they did here, Norla decided, and let a ceiling be a ceiling. Here and there, flying figures and sky scenes from legend and history had been painted onto the ceiling. A dragon breathed fire here, an impossibly rickety wood-and-paper airplane from the near-ancient period struggled into a patch of painted sky there, but these were mere decoration, not intended to fool anyone.

Before her and behind her, the forward and aft bulkheads were painted in an abstract pattern of browns and greens that gradually merged with the overhead blue. It was enough to suggest and evoke imaginary forests, but not so much that it was an attempt to make anyone think there were forests instead of metal bulkheads. Perfectly normal direct lighting illuminated the park—no optical illusions of a simulated sun, or overly clever indirect lighting systems. The one lighting effect she could not understand was a sudden, brief, and faint pulse of light every three minutes or so, coming from off to the right..

The grounds of the park were—or at least had been—a fairly conventional approximation of open parkland. Broad lawns with small pools of water here and there, and small stands of trees dotted about the place.

But things were not as they had been. What little grass was left was brown. The water in the decorative ponds was a most undecorative greasy grey-green. Someone was emptying a slop bucket into the closest pond as Norla watched, while someone else was drawing water from the same source. Nearly all the trees had been cut down, leaving only a collection of ragged stumps. In among all the other odors that clouded the air, Norla identified woodsmoke. She could see the glow of half a dozen campfires.

The air was hazy with smoke and laden with the smells of unwashed bodies, rancid food, decaying feces, stale urine, burned food, and a dozen other things Norla could not identify.

And, everywhere, in groups of five or ten or a dozen huddled around a fire, wandering aimlessly or sitting huddled by themselves, were the refugees. Sparten’s gluefeet. The people washed up on this noisome shore by a crisis that seemed to come out of nowhere.

The free-runner turned off the Long Boulevard onto a paved side path that led off to the right, toward the direction of the light pulses. “Vehicle command. Pause here,” said Yuri Sparten. The free-runner slowed, pulled itself off to the side of the road, and came to a halt. “Well, here we are, Second Officer Chandray,” said Sparten. “You wanted to see the scenic part of the scenic route. This is it.”

“Damnation,” Koffield said. It was hard to know if he meant it as a curse, or as a perfectly apt description of the place. The three of them just sat and looked for a long moment, the scene overwhelming them all.

“This is where you put them?” Norla asked. “In an open park?”

“The park is as closed-in as anything in the station,” Sparten said. “There’s no weather to speak of. We have guest quarters for two or three hundred to accommodate visiting crews—and those quarters are virtually at full capacity. Where else were we going to put two thousand people but here?”

Norla desperately wanted to have an answer to that, something she could throw back in his face, but she had nothing.

“I’m amazed your environment systems held together as well as they have,” Koffield said. “With so many extra people on board, you must have been near the ragged edge.”

“At it and over it. But we’re coming back, starting to recover. Believe it or not, it was a lot worse than this. For one thing, the stink isn’t nearly as bad as it was,” Sparten went on with a studiously matter-of-fact tone. “Most of this is residual from when things were really bad. The air scrubbers are finally starting to cut into the worst of it. And we’re actually a lot closer to being on top of the sanitation situation now. They were burying their dead here for a while, except the soil’s not deep enough to do it properly. We had corpses rotting under fifteen centimeters of dirt in here. We’ve disinterred them and put a stop to further burials. We think.”

Norla stared at Sparten. He almost made it sound as if the refugees buried their dead as some sort of sport, or game, without realizing the nuisance it caused. She wondered what had happened to the disinterred bodies, and decided she didn’t want to know. Besides, Sparten was still talking.

“The biggest problem we have now is getting them to stop burning fires,” he was saying. “We can’t afford to waste the oxy, and the smoke and soot are hell on the air scrubbers.”

“Why are they burning fires?” Norla asked.

“To keep warm,” Yuri said, as if it were obvious. “It gets cold here in the park during night shift. Most of the gluefeet are laboring class, not all that well educated, but still they should have had the sense not to set the fires in the first place. It was. worse than useless. The park was actually built over the outer hull’s thermal superconducting coils—the coils are right under the park surface. Heat-dumping was part of the idea designed into the park. The station air system drives warm air into the park. See that meter-high grey cube over there? There are lots of those all over the park, though most are better hidden by the landscaping. Some are air intakes, and the others are outlets. They connect to a convection pumping system that runs the air through the superconducting thermal coils, cools it, condenses water vapor out, then dumps it back out into the park.”

“If the people are that cold, can’t you shut down the coil coolers?”

Yuri shook his head. “They’re an integral part of the station’s cooling system. We generate a lot of waste heat here in this station. If we didn’t dump the heat, the whole station would get above habitable temperatures in a few days and just keep going. We’d literally cook. We have to cool the station, and we use the park as a heat sink. So it gets cold in here, so the refugees cut down trees and light fires to stay warm, and pump more heat into the system right on top of the cooling system, so the system automatically compensates until we can correct manually, and then—well, I could go on, but it’s a hell of a mess. The one bright spot is that they’ve just about run out of things to burn.”

“So now they’ll freeze.”

“They’ll be cold, that’s all,” Yuri said sharply. He frowned and shrugged. “I know how harsh it all sounds, but there’s only so much we can do, and we’re doing it. We’re shifting machines off other work .to make blankets and warm clothes and portable heaters and so on, but we don’t have the manufacturing capacity or raw materials to do it very quickly. If we shifted enough resources to give them everything they need as quickly as possible, it would wreck the station. Probably kill all of us. That’s the tightrope we’re walking, in a dozen ways at least. Vehicle command. Drive on.” The free-runner pulled itself back onto the paved path and drove on.

The path ran roughly at right angles to the Long Boulevard, following the inner circumference of the station, driving along on the inside of the huge cylinder. Norla’s eyes insisted that they were constantly just about to start climbing a hill that grew steeper and steeper, while an equally steep hill was always just behind them.

What they had seen at first arrival repeated itself over and over again as they drove; the same destruction, the same huddled groups of people, the same dust and smoke and gloom.

At last the free-runner slowed down, and then turned onto a side path. There was what seemed to be another of the decorative ponds, a round dark hole in the lawn. But then Norla noticed one thing different about this pond— and then another, and another. The other ponds had all been artfully rounded abstract shapes. This one was perfectly and precisely circular. The others had no barriers between themselves and the surrounding lawns. This one had a quite substantial meter-high metal fence around it. And none of the other ponds had anyone watching over them. Norla counted six rifle-toting guards around the perimeter of this “pond.”

And then came another of those pulses of light—flaring up out of the pond. It was increasingly clear that it was no pond at all—though what the devil it might be, Norla had no idea.

“What is this place?” Norla asked as the free-runner came to a halt by a footpath that led toward the whatever-it-was.

“DeSilvo Tower,” Yuri said. “Come along.” He stepped out of the free-runner and gestured for his two guests to do the same.

Koffield’grabbed his secured container by the handle, lifted it, and carried it out of the vehicle. Norla got out after him. “Doesn’t look like much of a tower to me,” she muttered to Koffield.

“It looked like more of one when we saw it from the other side,” Koffield replied with a chuckle.

It took a moment for Norla to understand. “Oh!” she said. “Of course.” They weren’t looking at the top of this tower. She walked toward the base of the tower with a more eager tread. For the first time since setting foot off the Cruzeiro do Sul, she was curious and eager to see something.

She followed Sparten up the path. He gestured to one of the guards, who nodded and signaled the others to let the party pass. Sparten stopped at the guardrail around the perimeter of what Norla had taken for a pond. Sparten smiled, and it was a faintly weary, tolerant expression: the local who had taken endless tourists to the same site, and knew exactly how the ritual went.

He turned his back on the guardrail and leaned against it, facing out away from the abyss behind him. “Take a look,” he said. “It’s worth seeing, even in its present state.”

Norla moved cautiously over to the guardrail and looked down into the “pond”—and at three towers reaching down toward infinity. Beyond a massive slab of nonre-flective and highly transparent glass, easily ten meters across, there was nothing but space itself. Space and—a structure. Three shafts of steel and glass, each hexagonal in cross section, stabbed up from beyond the edges of the huge observation port. They were equally spaced from each other, angling in to join far below, connecting with the base of a glittering steel-and-glass hexagonal something directly below. The sight was strange enough, bewildering enough, that it took her eyes a while to understand what she was seeing.

“DeSilvo Tower is really three towers in one,” Sparten answered, before she could ask, in the faintly singsong cadences of someone who has said the same thing many times. “The three pylons form the three legs of a tripod. At their far end, as seen from the station, the three pylons attach to the base of the hexagonal structure you see.

Officially, that six-sided structure held in place by the pylons is called the Grand Pavilion, but some people call it the Outrigger, or Outrigger Pavilion. I don’t quite understand that name, but I’m told an outrigger is a sort of auxiliary hull on some kinds of watercraft. Most people call it the Gondola, which makes a bit more sense to me.

“You’re looking straight down at the base of the main structure. Depending on how you look at it, it’s either the highest point or the deepest point on the station. At any event, the station commander’s office is on the farthest-out deck of the Gondola, and is therefore the point on the station farthest from its center.

“The three pylons you see rise up out of the station’s hull. They are ten stories high—or deep. You can’t tell from this angle, since we’re exactly face on to it, but the Pavilion is six stories tall.”

“There must be a hell of a counterweight on the other side of the station,” Koffield said.

“Well, obviously, we have to build all the extruded structures in tandem, or the spin would be thrown off completely,” Sparten said. “There were questions of moment-arm and so on, of course, but naturally, if we hang a megaton of steel out this side of the station, we need to hang another megaton a hundred eighty degrees away. In fact, DeSilvo Tower is the real counterweight. One reason it got built was to balance off the bulk-storage towers on the opposite side of the station.

“You can see that the three pylons are not just support structures, but true buildings in and of themselves. Supposedly they resemble a certain style of antique steel-and-glass towers they used to build on Earth, though I don’t know much about that. We’re about to ride an elevator down one of those towers, down to the Pavilion, where your quarters are. Come this way.”

Norla lingered as long as she could, fascinated by the incredible structure. It seemed a mad thing to build on a station that plainly had so many old, half-complete repairs on its outer hull, but that madness almost—almost—didn’t matter. Its own magnificence was nearly reason enough for building such a thing.

As she watched, the heavens wheeled past the rotating station, and the surface of Solace hove into view beyond the fixed frame of DeSilvo Tower. The brightness of the planet flooded the huge viewplate with light, and seemed, from this vantage point, to light up the whole interior of Ring Park. At least that explained the light pulses.

Norla wondered why the station managers didn’t opacify the viewplate in order to eliminate the pulses. Maybe there was such a mechanism, but it had been damaged. Maybe leaving the viewport transparent helped with the temperature management problem. Or maybe the station managers were hoping that a blast of light every few minutes would help drive the gluefeet away.

Norla shaded her eyes until the light pulse was over and watched again through dazzled eyes as the stars swept past the triple towers. She could see people inside the pylon buildings, moving around behind glass walls. A bit of movement at the corner of her vision caught her eye. She looked down one of the three pylons and saw what was plainly an exterior glass elevator car climbing from the Pavilion toward the station. She could see the people in the car, their faces close to the glass, staring at the view.

That was one elevator ride she just had to take. She looked up, intending to point out the car to Koffield, but he wasn’t there anymore. She looked around, and suddenly saw that he and Sparten were already heading toward a low building set into an artificial hillside. Judging from the angle she saw through the viewport, it was the access point for the aft pylon.

She hurried to catch up.

Yuri Sparten paused at the entrance to the elevator, letting his two visitors go in first and get closest to the glass outer wall of the elevator car.

Koffield could not help but be amused at the way Norla eagerly moved forward toward the glass, even though they were still inside the station and there was nothing to see but the black wall of the elevator housing.

Koffield had been doing his best to hang back and observe Sparten, along with everything else—but even the best human observer cannot watch in every direction. Sparten’s behavior had told him a lot already, and no doubt the view out the elevator would be worth seeing. He turned his attention to the view out the car’s glass wall just as the car started its descent toward the Outrigger, or Pavilion, or Gondola, whatever name they called it by. The car dropped out of the station’s hull, revealing the universe beyond, daz-zlingly brilliant objects—the planet, spacecraft on approach, the far-off stars—set against the jet-black skies of deep space.

The view_% from the elevator car was, of course, spectacular. Anton Koffield had expected nothing less. More than likely, the remarkable view had been one of the major reasons for building this whole absurd complex.

The two other pylons were gleaming blue steel-and-glass towers set into the station hull forward of their own pylon. They framed the view of the fleet of ships, functional and derelict, that orbited forward of the station and in formation with it. The ships, the stars beyond, the planet below, wheeled slowly, majestically, across the sky.

Koffield looked up toward the station itself as they fell slowly away from it. At first it was nothing but a huge and featureless plain of darkness, the blackness punctuated only by the massive viewport they had just looked through, a rounded pool of yellow-white light that seemed to drop away into the heavens as they descended from the station. But then the station’s orbit brought it out of the planet’s shadow, and into the sunlight. The huge mass of the station blossomed into brilliance, the complicated structures on its surface a sudden hard metallic forest of cranes and towers and piping.

Koffield had flown in an airship once, a lighter-than-air vehicle that was little more than a gondola suspended from a massive, rigid lifting bag. Looking up at the great bulk of the station looming overhead, it was impossible to avoid comparing the two images. He was in a car sliding down a guide wire connecting the gasbag and the Gondola.

He looked down and watched as the planet swept past and dropped behind, to be replaced by the wheeling stars of deep space. If he watched long enough, the disk of Solace would come into view again from the other side, but there was too much else to see now. The view was remarkable. Of course, one could get jaded about nearly anything. He glanced over at Sparten and saw that he was watching the elevator floor indicator, not admiring the view.

Koffield looked down. The main structure of this mad engineering folly was getting closer, the hard edges of its cold blue glass and steel gleaming in the sunlight. In its center, directly underneath the giant viewport they had looked out of at the station, was an oversize hexagonal viewport set into the top deck of the Gondola. He could plainly see people at the hexagon viewport looking up at their elevator car, pointing to it, waving at them. Koffield resisted the urge to wave back, but allowed himself a small smile when he saw that Norla did wave.

Their increase in weight was distinctly noticeable as they moved farther out from the central axis of the station. The increase in simulated gravity brought the matter of masses and stresses and loads to Koffield’s mind. What sort of bearing members and structural reinforcement had it taken to suspend the monstrous load of DeSilvo Tower from the hull of the station? Surely the hull had never been designed to take such stresses. How difficult and expensive had it been to strengthen it? Had they done the job properly?

The sunlight struck the forward pylons, and then the forward end of the Gondola. Instantly, the cool blue of their exteriors shimmered into gleaming silver as the smart glass shifted from transparent to full-reflective mode.

But even full-reflective mode couldn’t keep all the light out. Even if one percent of full-strength raw sunlight percolated through the glass hull of the pylons and the Gondola, that would represent a massive heat influx. Koffield couldn’t even begin to guess at the energy cost for the Gondola’s environmental control system.

Even assuming all that glass was tempered and insulated, and blocked nearly all the unwanted raw sunlight, an air-filled glass box like that would absorb and retain a tremendous amount of heat. And of course they had to keep the interior at an even temperature when the tower went into shadow. Perhaps they actually had to create heat to keep an equilibrium. The cooling and heating problems had to be enormous.

No wonder the station’s air and thermal regulation were out of whack. The basic station structure had a solid, totally opaque, heavily insulated hull, in a shape that was relatively easy to heat and cool efficiently. Its environmental systems didn’t have to be very large or powerful in relation to the station’s size, and they could take advantage of economies of scale. The exterior structures weren’t big in comparison to the entire station, but they had to be drawing on the environment systems out of all proportion to their size. The strain of keeping the Gondola and the other towers comfortable must have put a strain on resources long before the first refugees showed up.

Madness, from start to finish, but not in the least bit surprising, given everything else he had seen and learned so far. Perhaps even predictable, as depressing as that notion was.

The glittering six-sided jewel that was the Gondola loomed ever closer, until the car slipped down into the upper deck of the place. All of them blinked and widened their eyes, straining to make their eyes adjust to the sudden drop in illumination.

They had arrived at the Gondola, at a place that had no business existing to begin with.

Elber Malloon sat by his campfire, holding little Zari in his lap, and stared at the entrance to the Gondola elevator by the big viewport, the viewport they wouldn’t let him use anymore. He had watched them come, and then he had watched them go. And now he stared at their point of departure, as if memorizing the place where they had exited would help fix them in his mind.

The young, hard-featured man in the Station Services uniform he had seen before. The young man had come and gone several times, ferrying these or those dignitaries or specialists through on the official tour of inspection, the scheduled viewing of the gluefeet. That one, he dismissed from his thoughts.

But his passengers this time, the older man with the military bearing, and the young woman with him—they were different, very different from the officials who came and stared, as if gluefeet were merely some odd species of animal life kept penned up for study.

Part of it was the shock on their faces. They were surprised. They had not seen this before, or heard about it, or had any expectations about it. Everyone else who came through on the free-runners was either a bored bureaucrat like the young hard-featured man, tired of seeing it all, struggling to turn a blind eye to what was right in front of him, or else they arrived on the scene with their minds made up. They were angry, or horrified, or dripping with sympathy, long before they got to Ring Park.

Not these two. They were astonished by what they saw.

But there was something more. It was not until his wife returned with their food rations, and he saw the look on her face, that it came to him. That look. No doubt he wore the same expression himself. That was the whole point. “It was the strangest thing,” Elber said to Jassa as she sat down next to him. “Two more uppers just went by on the tour.”

“What’s so strange about that?” she asked, taking Zari from him. “They come and look at us all the time.”

“Nothing,” said Elber. “But it was the looks on their faces. They were uppers, all right, posh, clean clothes. They’d been fed okay—maybe a little thin and pale, but not much. And the free-runner’s driver treating them right. Uppers, for sure. But—but the looks on their faces. They were like us. Like us.”

Jassa looked at him and frowned. “What do you mean, ‘like us’?”

“Those two. You could see it, in their faces, in their eyes, even from far off. Shocked, and scared, surprised— and something more. It was there in their eyes to see. They’d lost everything, been lost to all, and got dropped into a new world they didn’t know.

“Those two,” he said again. “They were as lost and far from home as we are. Maybe more.”