child
To resist us is to resist the Knowledge
As the wheel spun, the voices reverberated upon themselves, increasing to a howl. Sparta’s heart thudded violently, shaking her ribs and the mattress beneath her.
Her face was crushed into the pillow; she opened an eye. A peculiar stench filled her nostrils, a bold vegetable smell turning sour, becoming the odor of a cat.
Bits of black curve, bits of black slash, bits of black spot, moving and changing . . . a tiger moving through the tall grass
She sat up, terrified, and opened her mouth to call out, then choked back the unvoiced cry. Her skin was slick with sweat. Her heart chugged like a dry pump.
She got control of her breathing; her pulse rate slowed. The vision in her right eye stopped zooming dizzily in and out, and the spinning catherine wheel collapsed in on itself. Then the imaginary stench vanished, and she was left with the familiar odors of her cabin. Overlaying the ubiquitous space-station stink of rustcoat, lubricating oil, and human sweat was the perfume of hoya flowers.
The hoya flower, a pompon of pink velvet stars, emitted its odor only at night. Night was arbitrary here, but for Sparta, now was the middle of the night. The hoya vine clung to the ceiling above her in intricate whorls, a product of the weightless topiary for which Port Hesperus was famous; the vine had been grown in microgravity under a constantly moving, programmed light source.
In her A-ring cabin the vine’s weight, and Sparta’s, was Earth normal. If the heart of Port Hesperus was a fantastic garden, the rest of the space station had about as much charm as a battleship. Main ring A, starside of the garden sphere, housed most of the station’s maintenance workers, dock hands, interplanetary traffic controllers, and other service personnel. Sparta’s temporary quarters were in the Visiting Officer’s Quarters of the patrol barracks. Barring another emergency like the one that had drawn her to the surface of Venus, this would be her last night in the cheerless room of plastic and steel.
With that realization came another, unbidden, one that had come often in the past months. She missed Blake Redfield, missed him with something bordering on obsession, missed even more because she had not heard from him for so long. And then a trivial, teasing message, unsigned and enclosing no hint of deep affection. “Let’s play hide-and-seek again. . . .”
Exhausted, but with no hope of sleeping, she threw back the tangled sheet and walked to the center of the windowless room. Something had happened; the nightmare had not come out of nowhere. For a moment she stood and listened . . . .
The vibration of the steel walls brought her the electric hum, the metallic screech, the hydraulic plunge and suck of the endlessly turning station; her inner ear easily filtered these to retrieve the human coughs and moans and chuckles, the voices raised in complaint or enthusiasm. The life of Port Hesperus was stumbling along normally. Most of the workers who bunked in Sparta’s sector were sound asleep; their day shifts did not begin for three more hours. The rest were working as efficiently as they ever did.
Close overhead, the spacecraft controllers in the traffic control dome kept track of the hundreds of small craft and robot satellites that crowded surrounding space. Only one interplanetary vessel was nearby, a Space Board cutter due to reach the radiation perimeter in six hours. Sparta’s replacement was aboard it, and she herself would be on it when it burned for Earth.
At the other end of the station, two kilometers away–the end that always pointed straight down toward the center of Venus–the Ishtar Mining Corporation and the Azure Dragon Mutual Prosperity Mineral Endeavor were busily conducting business as usual. The rival companies were the station’s economic base, its reason for existence. Twenty-four hours each station day they dispatched and received the big ore shuttles
To resist us is to resist the Knowledge
As the wheel spun, the voices reverberated upon themselves, increasing to a howl. Sparta’s heart thudded violently, shaking her ribs and the mattress beneath her.
Her face was crushed into the pillow; she opened an eye. A peculiar stench filled her nostrils, a bold vegetable smell turning sour, becoming the odor of a cat.
Bits of black curve, bits of black slash, bits of black spot, moving and changing . . . a tiger moving through the tall grass
She sat up, terrified, and opened her mouth to call out, then choked back the unvoiced cry. Her skin was slick with sweat. Her heart chugged like a dry pump.
She got control of her breathing; her pulse rate slowed. The vision in her right eye stopped zooming dizzily in and out, and the spinning catherine wheel collapsed in on itself. Then the imaginary stench vanished, and she was left with the familiar odors of her cabin. Overlaying the ubiquitous space-station stink of rustcoat, lubricating oil, and human sweat was the perfume of hoya flowers.
The hoya flower, a pompon of pink velvet stars, emitted its odor only at night. Night was arbitrary here, but for Sparta, now was the middle of the night. The hoya vine clung to the ceiling above her in intricate whorls, a product of the weightless topiary for which Port Hesperus was famous; the vine had been grown in microgravity under a constantly moving, programmed light source.
In her A-ring cabin the vine’s weight, and Sparta’s, was Earth normal. If the heart of Port Hesperus was a fantastic garden, the rest of the space station had about as much charm as a battleship. Main ring A, starside of the garden sphere, housed most of the station’s maintenance workers, dock hands, interplanetary traffic controllers, and other service personnel. Sparta’s temporary quarters were in the Visiting Officer’s Quarters of the patrol barracks. Barring another emergency like the one that had drawn her to the surface of Venus, this would be her last night in the cheerless room of plastic and steel.
With that realization came another, unbidden, one that had come often in the past months. She missed Blake Redfield, missed him with something bordering on obsession, missed even more because she had not heard from him for so long. And then a trivial, teasing message, unsigned and enclosing no hint of deep affection. “Let’s play hide-and-seek again. . . .”
Exhausted, but with no hope of sleeping, she threw back the tangled sheet and walked to the center of the windowless room. Something had happened; the nightmare had not come out of nowhere. For a moment she stood and listened . . . .
The vibration of the steel walls brought her the electric hum, the metallic screech, the hydraulic plunge and suck of the endlessly turning station; her inner ear easily filtered these to retrieve the human coughs and moans and chuckles, the voices raised in complaint or enthusiasm. The life of Port Hesperus was stumbling along normally. Most of the workers who bunked in Sparta’s sector were sound asleep; their day shifts did not begin for three more hours. The rest were working as efficiently as they ever did.
Close overhead, the spacecraft controllers in the traffic control dome kept track of the hundreds of small craft and robot satellites that crowded surrounding space. Only one interplanetary vessel was nearby, a Space Board cutter due to reach the radiation perimeter in six hours. Sparta’s replacement was aboard it, and she herself would be on it when it burned for Earth.
At the other end of the station, two kilometers away–the end that always pointed straight down toward the center of Venus–the Ishtar Mining Corporation and the Azure Dragon Mutual Prosperity Mineral Endeavor were busily conducting business as usual. The rival companies were the station’s economic base, its reason for existence. Twenty-four hours each station day they dispatched and received the big ore shuttles
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