“Haven’t you even seen a picture of her?”
Barbary shook her head. “Not for a long time. I had some stuff, but it got lost. I don’t know. I don’t remember.” She did remember. She used to have some smoke-damaged photographs, and a ring. In one of the places she stayed, the ring disappeared. In another, they threw away her photos as a punishment. She pretended not to care, because she would not give anyone the satisfaction of hurting her. Who cared about a bunch of old pictures, you couldn’t see anything on them anyway. That’s what she said out loud.
It was true that the images were out of focus, obscured by time and misfortune, and only two-dimensional anyway. She had no clear memory of her mother’s face, either from life or from pictures. But she did care.
“I’ve got a couple of snapshots,” Yoshi said. “They’re from a long time ago, but still… I’ll get you some copies.”
Yoshi glanced at the diplomats and assistants and secretaries who surrounded them. Most of them looked awkward and uncomfortable in zero g. “This crowd will be about as useful as a flock of sheep.” To Barbary he said, “Did anyone tell you what’s happened?”
“Yes,” she said. “But it’s still a secret back on earth.”
“They’re afraid an announcement will make the grounders panic,” Heather said.
“I didn’t panic,” Barbary said.
“But you’re not a grounder anymore.”
“Grounder or not has nothing to do with it,” Yoshi said. “More than a handful of people should know what’s going on. When we meet that ship — it’s history. Even if it’s a derelict. That’s the majority view. Which I don’t subscribe to.” He reached for Barbary’s hand. “Aren’t you hot in that jacket?”
“No. Yes. A little. It’s easier to wear it than carry it.”
“Okay. Ready?”
Barbary nodded. Yoshi and Heather pushed off, towing Barbary behind them.
Yoshi sailed from wall to brace to floor, around small groups of people, past doors and monkey-bars and tracks. He oriented himself as if the edge of the doughnut-shaped room were the floor, and the flat top and bottom its edges. Barbary would have put herself ninety degrees the other way, so the flat parts of the room were floor and ceiling, and the curving places were walls. That would have felt more natural. Farther out toward the rim of the station, the curving wall would be the floor, so Yoshi’s orientation made more sense. Heather, when she was not holding Barbary’s hand, paid no attention at all to walls or floor or ceiling. She swooped from one point to another, turned upside-down or sideways to the direction her father was facing. She acted as if she saw no difference at all.
They slyed over the juncture between spinning and non-spinning parts of the station. The slow relative motion was hardly noticeable. They got into one of the elevators. It had a weird paint job: white footprints on the surface of one wall, which was green, and the outlines of people on the beige wall opposite the elevator door.
“This will be the floor when we reach bottom,” Yoshi said, indicating the footprints. “But this wall will tilt on the way down.” He used a strap to hold himself against the wall with the outlines, and to keep his feet on the surface with the footprints. Heather did the same.
“You want to be pretty firmly planted,” Yoshi said. “Between the momentum and the spin, it’s a fairly strange feeling.” He drew Barbary beside him.
The elevator started to move. Barbary felt as if she were leaning against a steeply-tilted wall. Startled, she grabbed Yoshi and held on, afraid they were going to crash.
“It’s okay,” Yoshi said. “You see what I mean.”
“It’s supposed to work like this?”
“This is the way the laws of physics make it work.”
As they fell, the tilt changed, making Barbary feel as if she were standing more and more upright.
Heather seemed not even to notice the odd sensation. “Turn around,” she said, “and look over this way.”
“What?” Barbary suspected a trick, for Heather was directing her to face the side wall. “Why?”
“Just do it, trust me, quick!” She pushed Barbary around, not very hard. Barbary could have resisted, but she decided to give Heather a chance. She faced the wall. It was glass — she had not realized that till now because the metal casing beyond was featureless and very smooth.
Its edge passed up the window, like a shade rising, and suddenly Barbary was looking out at the station, from inside it, with the universe beyond.
“Ohh…” she said. Heather squeezed her hand.
The stars were as beautiful as they had been from the observation deck of the transport ship. But the overwhelming sight was the station, a huge wheel within a wheel spinning past the stars. As they dropped through one of the spokes, the wheels grew larger, much larger than she had expected, even knowing the dimensions, even seeing the station on the screen in the transport’s lounge.
Shadows in space were very black and distinct. Some distance away, a silvery craft sprang suddenly into view. Invisible one moment, the next it was in plain sight. Nothing was out there for it to hide behind — then Barbary understood that it had been in the shadow of the station. She was used to thinking of shadows as falling on a surface, not as great lightless volumes of space stretching out into infinity. She shivered.
“It’s beautiful,” she said to Heather.
“I want to show you everything! We can drop off your bag and go see the labs and the garden and the observatory —”
“You mean right now?” Barbary said, stricken.
“Sure!”
“Heather, honey, Barbary’s been traveling for a long time, she’s tired,” Yoshi said. “Let’s get her settled before you two start exploring.”
“Okay, sure, that makes sense,” Heather said, sounding downcast. “But there’s an awful lot to see, and you need to be able to find your way around.”
“Hold tight,” Yoshi said. “Feet on the floor?”
The elevator braked. Barbary’s stomach lurched. She was afraid that after all, after going through everything, now at the end of the trip she would throw up. She fought down the queasiness.
The tilt vanished: the floor steadied and leveled out. They had stopped at the inner wheel, which was about halfway to the outside rim of the station. Barbary thought she weighed maybe half here what she did on earth. It was hard to tell, though, after several days in nearly zero g. The elevator doors opened. Yoshi and Heather glided out.
“Why did we stop on this level?” Barbary asked.
“We live on this level,” Yoshi said.
“Oh… The booklet said all the living quarters are out on the rim.” The rim rotated with an acceleration of one gravity.
“Most of them are,” Yoshi said. “But we live here.”
Heather, walking faster, left Yoshi and Barbary a little way behind. Barbary wondered what it was that she and her father were not telling.
Chapter Five
Barbary followed Heather. The corridor rose before and behind them, for it followed the arc of the station’s inner wheel. But though Barbary could see that the hall curved upward, she felt as if she were walking down a gentle incline. It was a very strange sensation.
Heather turned right, into a crossways hall, and both the curve of the floor and the perception of going down disappeared.
Barbary followed Heather around a second right turn. Now they were walking the opposite direction from the way they had started. Again the hall looked like it rose, but this time Barbary felt as if she were walking up a shallow incline.
She had no chance to ask what was going on. A few paces beyond the corner, Heather opened a door and went inside. Yoshi followed.
Barbary entered a small, sparsely furnished living room.
Of course it had no windows. People who lived in space needed more protection from solar radiation and cosmic rays than glass or plastic could give. The station had lots of observation ports, but Barbary would have to learn to be careful how long she gazed through them, and she would have to keep track of the readings on her radiation tag.