“I wish he wouldn’t do that,” Jolene said in an undertone. “Why doesn’t he stay up there and fly the plane?”
“It isn’t a plane.”
“Well, you know what I mean.” She put her headphones on and channel-hopped until she found a holo she hadn’t seen. Her mouth was set in a way he recognized. Christ, she had better feel better, or this trip would be half a megabuck down the toilet.
They watched on the holos as the white dumbbell drifted closer until it was so enormous that the ends went out of sight. They were moving toward the middle, where there was a cylindrical bulge and a cluster of antennas and things. The engines fired and stopped, fired and stopped. There was a barely perceptible jar, then a gentle rotation.
Cabin attendants rigged a guideline up the aisle and helped the passengers along it. Other guidelines led from the exit along a velcro path that curved down, then up, and eventually brought them to a big blue cylinder, like a metal cake pan sticking down from the ceiling. They got in through the open door, about fifty of them, walked up the side, and attendants velcroed their feet to the ceiling. Harry couldn’t tell which way was up anymore. The attendants handed them all barf bags and got out, the door closed, and the cylinder started moving. Then there was no doubt about up and down—they were hanging from the ceiling—but after about a minute the whole cylinder seemed to swing around right-side up. A few people were retching again. After another minute the car sighed to rest; a door opened in the side. Then a glassed-in walkway, through which they could see buildings and shrubbery below, and another elevator.
The ground level was beautifully landscaped, with a lot of flowers and shrubs, but it certainly was smaller than he had expected. The brochures had made it look like a small-town park; it was really more like the lobby of a large hotel. Overhead, cantilevered sections stuck out, level after level, so that the open space was widest at the bottom and narrowest at the top. A tall window curved up one side, and Harry thought he could glimpse another set of buildings through the sunlight that was streaming in. Maybe there was another section over there, but he didn’t see how that could be.
A little open-topped robot bus took them across to their hotel. The air was cool and fresh, with pine and flower scents in it. In the lobby there was a slowly rotating holo of the Earth, with numbers that showed what time it was in all the important places. A sign at the desk said: star towers, your vacation wonderland. TEMPERATURE TODAY: 72° F, 22° C. GRAVITY AT THIS LEVEL: 89% EARTH NORMAL. HAVE A HAPPY!
A computer signed them in at the desk; then a robot bellman came to conduct them to their room. Harry looked at him curiously; he had never seen one before, except once from a distance in a fancy hotel. The bellman’s body was off-white plastic with inlaid brass buttons; his hands were lifelike in white gloves. His head was a holo in a tank on his shoulders. The face inside was that of a cheerful-looking young man.
Their room was on the third floor; it was sparkling clean and beautifully decorated, but pretty damn small. When Harry handed him forty dollars, the bellman looked at it as if he had never seen money before.
“Son,” Harry said, “I just got here. How much do people usually give you?”
“A hundred and up, sir,” the young robot said apologetically. “Everything costs more than you’re used to on Star Towers.”
Harry gave him the hundred. Afterward he looked at the prices on the room-service menu, and saw that the bellman had told the honest truth. Harry had expected to be gouged, had braced himself for it, but two hundred bucks for a bacon and tomato sandwich?
Then he noticed a sign in the holo that said: good evening! this is spacy, your personal computer attendant. IF YOU WOULD LIKE SOME INFORMATION ABOUT STAR TOWERS, PLEASE SAY “YES.”
“Okay,” said Harry.
The holotube lighted up with the image of a young woman’s smiling face. Behind her was a view of the sunlit buildings of Star Towers, with people strolling happily in the park below.
“Good evening, Mr. and Mrs. Conlon. Tell me, what would you like to see first—some general information about Star Towers, or the low-gravity cultural events, the casinos, the cabarets, the restaurants?” As she spoke, an animated menu appeared behind her in the tube.
“Let’s see the casino,” said Jolene. The computer image vanished, and they saw elegant men and women gathered around a roulette table, the men in formal evening wear, the women in long gowns. “Look at that burnout dress!” said Jolene reverently. “Spacy, mirror.”
The holo obediently turned into a mirror, and Jolene fussed unhappily with her hair. “I’ve got to have my hair done,” she said. “Spacy, will you please make me an appointment?”
“Certainly. One moment. You’re in luck, Mrs. Conlon —there has been a cancellation at two o’clock tomorrow afternoon Houston time.”
They went downstairs and walked around the park awhile, looking at the other tourists, then had dinner in the hotel dining room, eight hundred bucks apiece. Jolene got a headache, and they went to bed early. The next day, after breakfast, they went to the light show and the space museum, and they watched some low-gravity ballet on the big holo in the park. There were signs all over in English, French, German, and other languages, some of them not even in regular letters. This place reminded Harry of a theme park without the rides. Except for the lower gravity and the curving wall behind the buildings, there was nothing to tell them they weren’t on Earth—they couldn’t even see the goddamn stars, except in holos that they could have watched without leaving home.
They spent some time at the pool on the top level, where the sign said GRAVITY 83% EARTH NORMAL, and Harry felt like he had lost about thirty pounds. The most desirable rooms were up here, Harry realized; that was one more thing he hadn’t known when he made the reservations.
Later, looking around as they crossed the park toward a cafe visible on the opposite terrace, Harry saw that most of the people here looked rich but few looked happy. There were two or three younger men, flamboyantly dressed, who were smiling too broadly, probably on drugs; the rest seemed glum. A little group of Japanese went by, looking the way Japanese usually did. Then a scowling guy in a turban.
After they ordered breakfast, Harry pointed to the tall window between two buildings on the other side. “What’s over there?” he asked the robot waiter. “Looks like another space as big as this one.”
The waiter smiled courteously. “It’s a holo, sir,” he said. “Many people feel more comfortable if they can see for long distances.”
Lunch, almost the cheapest thing on the menu, was four hundred dollars apiece, and dinner was seven. Counting meals, tips, and entertainment, Harry figured he would be lucky to get out of here for less than ten thousand over and above the cost of the flight and the hotel room.
That afternoon, while Jolene was at the hairdresser’s, Harry went to a cocktail lounge. He sat at the bar and had a bourbon and water. “Tell me something,” he said to the bartender, a tall young robot with bushy black hair. “Is there anything to do in this place that you couldn’t do at home cheaper?”
The bartender smiled. “Sir, have you ever heard of sex in free fall?”
“Yeah. You know, I wondered about that. Is it available?”
The bartender nodded slowly. “At a price, of course.”
“Oh, yeah. How much?”
“Ten thousand for half an hour’s privacy in the docking area. That’s if you bring your own girl.”