17 had thought that the world was called the World; that its sun was called the Sun. Doc told her that the world was really called Tierra; the sun was a star called Delta Pavonis.
“We came from a long way away,” Doc said. “So far away you have to measure the distance in years.” It took two days to explain Einsteinian relativity, and the reason why nothing could go as fast as light. “That’s why our ancestors came as zygotes in the seeder ship,” he said.
“Was it big?” 17 had a hazy idea of something as big as the Factory falling through space toward a star that swelled like a balloon to become the sun.
“Oh no. In travel mode, it was not much bigger than you or me. It had a light sail for braking that spread out for thousands of kilometers, but that was only a few molecules thick.”
Explaining all this took more days, extra lessons after the lessons 17 bought with her cycler money.
Doc told her, “When the seeder hit dirt it built the first Factory, and that built us, and cows and wheat and all the other stuff we eat.”
“Like porridge and yeast?”
“Porridge is edible plastic. Yeast—I don’t know where yeast came from. Maybe we brought it here, maybe it’s native. Some of my plants came on the seeder ship, 17. See the thin green ones? That’s wheat grass. I pulp it and drink the juice. That’s from Earth, like you and me and cows. The other plants, the orange and red ones, are native. We got rid of most of the native life, but there’s still a lot around in unlooked corners.”
“Bugs and haunts.”
“Yes. I suppose you might have seen one, now and then.”
“Seen plenty of bugs, but never yet a haunt. But they say there’s one down in the tunnels now. A couple of kids went missing. Bloodworms, though. I know about those.” She showed him the welts.
“I suppose the haunts get in through the vents of the main cooling plants, or along the slurry pipes from the mines,” Doc said. “They are tough things because this was a hard place to live. You know why?”
17 nodded. She had learnt it last week. “Because of there’s no broom in the system. No Jupiter to sweep up comets that fall from the Oort Cloud. That’s why the Service and Comet Watch is important, else the world would get hit bad every hundred years. But why is it that way, Doc? Why are all the big planets near our sun?”
“No one really knows. Maybe the primordial disc from which the planets condensed was spinning slowly, so the big planets formed close in and locked up most of the heavy metals in their cores. But that’s only a theory.”
“Well, they should know why. It’s why cycling is so important, like they always tell us. Why heavy metals cost so much. They don’t pay well for cycling, though. They should, don’t you think?”
“That’s economics, not orbital mechanics, 17. But I suppose it does all fit together.”
Doc was constantly amazed by her ignorance and by her eagerness to learn. She knew about the One Big One, but had thought it had wrecked only the Factory, not the whole world. She hadn’t known about the settlement of Tierra, the rise of the Syndic, and the reason why people went up, hadn’t even known that the world was just one of a hundred worlds. She was like a plant that will push up concrete slabs and break apart the seams between steel plates to get at light. She was hungry for everything he could give her. He had watched her work out from first principals why orbits were elliptical. She had soaked up Newtonian mechanics, tensor calculus, n-body interactions. He didn’t spend any of the money she gave him. She would need it later, when she got out into the world.
People began to notice that she spent a lot of time with Doc Roberts. 17’s mother said that she shouldn’t start thinking that she was more than she was, and they had a furious argument, with her mother stirring yeast soup all the time and the latest baby crawling around. 17 stormed out, and then Dim cornered her in the market.
“Tell me why you go wi’ that old cripple-man,” he said. He was running solo, her one piece of good luck. He had tattoos everywhere, wore only ripped shorts and a harness to show them off, and to show off his steroid-enhanced muscles, too. He stank of sweat and the goo he put on his skin rash. People avoided looking at the two of them; Dim had a hard rep.
Dim said, “He not a real man.” His spittle sprayed her cheeks. “They cut it off when they go up. Or do you do it with his rack?”
“You dumb as a worm,” 17 told him. “Hung like one, too. What you have isn’t anything. I didn’t even feel it.”
“You getting a filthy tongue, girly. You getting above yourself.”
Dim tried to put his hand over her mouth, but she bit his thumb and got away from him. He shouted after her. “Me and my jacks will find you in the tunnels, quim! We ream you both ends!”
The next day, someone saw a haunt in the sewers, stooping over a kid it had just killed. The day after, Doc told her that some bosses were coming for a bug hunt, that it would be a chance better than any test.
“You shine in this, 17, and they’ll take notice.”
“You can get me a job bait-running? It should be mine. I know the tunnels good. Better than anyone.”
“I have a little pull. I’m part of the Syndic, 17, but at a low level, about the same as the Factory bulls. The bulls work for the turf bosses. Above them are the ward bosses, and above them are the big capos. The higher you are, the more you see. The capos see a long way. They give up some of what they have to make sure the world holds together so that they can keep what they have. That’s why we have Comet Watch and all the rest of it.”
“And one of them will help me?”
“They’re coming here to hunt bugs, not little girl geniuses. But you shine, maybe one of them will notice, and he’ll ask me about you.”
“Will he put me in the Service? Will he send me up?”
“Better than that. You’ve got a mind, 17. It shouldn’t be wasted in the up and out.” Doc lifted an arm with a whine of servo motor. Loose skin hanging off bone, like the old women who sorted rags. He said, “Look at me. This is what happens to people in the up and out. Muscle wasting, decalcification of bones, circulatory collapse. Radiation fries gonads so the Service sterilizes its recruits. Radiation gives you cancers. These scars on my face, they’re where keloid growths were cut away. I lost a meter of gut, too.”
“But it’s still better than the Factory.”
“That’s true,” Doc said. “They made me a citizen, they gave me medical training and the rest of my education. But you can’t keep reupping. The Syndic doesn’t want people living permanently in the up and out because they don’t want to lose control. Suppose people decided to aim comets at the world instead of deflecting them? You get upped, and if you do good, you can reup, but then they drop you into the well. I’m forty-two, 17. I got maybe five more years.”
17 started to say that that was ten more years than anyone in the Factory, but she saw he wasn’t listening.
“A mind like yours,” he said, “it should burn for a hundred years. That’s what a boss can give you, if he sees what you are.”
Almost every free laborer and jack signed up for the hunt; hardly any made the cut. But 17 did, and she had learned enough to thank Doc even though she thought that she would have made it without his help. Dim wasn’t on the list; none of the jacks were. She saw him one time afterward, and couldn’t resist taunting him. She would be safe from him for the next decad, because there was a lot of training to be done.
One of the junior bulls took charge of them. Divided them into groups of three, told them they were bait-runners now. They would go ahead of each boss, flush out anything bigger than a rat-crab and drive it toward the guns. He taught them signals made up of long and short whistle blasts, how to use proximity radar and flash guns. But most of the time was spent drilling etiquette into them.