Al Shei hated shuttle flights. They were a boring interval in between events. Usually, however, it took fifteen or twenty minutes before the irritation build up. This time, though, they hadn’t been in free fall for ten seconds before she fidgeted with her chafing straps, drummed her fingers against her chair arms, and let her gaze dart around her tiny space, looking moodily for something to distract her.
There was a memory board and a view screen in front of her. She could call up some entertainment, or work over the Pasadena’s schedule one more time and see if she could get an optimistic projection to hang her hopes on.
Or she could just hang here and try for the thousandth time to understand why Ruqaiyya had married Marcus Tully.
She could remember Tully the way she first saw him. His eyes had all but glowed with energy. He talked animatedly about human potential and the unlimited possibilities that all lay in the sky. “God has created more wonders than we’ll ever know about,” he used to say. “But there’s no harm in trying!” He used to smile at Ruqaiyya when he talked like that, and Al Shei could feel her sister’s admiration for Tully’s boldness like the sun against her skin. She admired him herself. His dreams ran so close to hers. A ship of his own, freedom to pursue his own ideas, but not as a vagrant or a lone hero. That was the man Ruqaiyya had married before Al Shei had enough experience to warn her sister that Tully was too naive to be trusted with such giddy dreams.
Reality sneaked in soon enough. Tully began to see how corporate interests were valued above individual skill, how the daily business of living could make money vanish like smoke and how no one would give him a ship when all he had were dreams in his head and burns on his hands.
That was when he started to change. She had watched the glow dim in Tully’s eyes, and in her sister’s. He had stopped talking about human potential and started talking about human greed. He began to lower his sights from the secrets of the universe and focus on the secrets of the corporations that he thought were hemming him in. He began to take pride in making their systems leak. He began to enjoy it, and that joy gave him enough comfort that he forgot what he was, and allowed him to tell himself that he was still pursuing his dream of life in space, even though his wife was marooned on Earth because she had no skills he could use and he could not afford to take along a non-working passenger. Tully’s budgets ran even tighter than Al Shei’s did.
Al Shei sometimes wondered why Ruqaiyya didn’t get training as a nurse, or a steward, or even a lawyer so she could pay her own way. The Pasadena was not palatial, but it was liveable. She thought she knew the answer, but she did not like it. Ruqaiyya did not want to see what her husband did while he was away from her. She did not really want to know how far he had fallen from the dreams she had married. That was why she stayed on the ground, so she could pretend to herself and the family that nothing had changed.
And that is why I never said anything, isn’t it?
Al Shei ran her hands over the chair’s arm rests. I didn’t want to have to be the one to strip the last of her pride away.
She was so far gone in her reverie, Al Shei barely noticed when the shuttle hit the atmosphere, until the thrusters roared to life and brought gravity back down with a vengeance.
Al Shei did not request the view screen to show her the outside. She had no trouble with flying under any conditions, but something inside her rebelled at landings. She never got comfortable watching the ground rise up to meet her.
The roar grew louder and the thrust shoved Al Shei back into the padded seat until her spine pressed against the couch frame. Her lungs labored against a ribcage that wanted to collapse. Then, the pressure was gone and she could breathe and sit up, and, very soon, get impatient about the exit procedures. The ship’s voice reeled off a set of seat numbers and all the passengers in the named seats had to be out of the shuttle and on their way before the next set could be called.
When the ship finally told her she could go, Al Shei snatched her pack out of the holding bin and made a bee line for the exit ramp. Down at the end of the sloping tunnel, Lipinski was explaining the contents of his tool kit yet again, this time to a tall, walnut-skinned customs official in tan coveralls with a piece of film clutched in his hand.
Al Shei shook her head and made her way over to the banks of luggage carriers. She took out her pen and wrote her hotel address and Lipinski’s on the cart’s memory board and added enough credit for the cart to get their bags to their rented quarters. The receipt had just finished printing off when Lipinski came up behind her.
“I know, I know, I know,” he said, dropping his duffle into the cart and sliding the lid shut. “It’s necessary to keep the colony functioning. They have to be careful, but do they have to run you through the same questions three times?”
Al Shei didn’t bother to answer. She wanted to be at the hospital already. She wanted everything to have gone right and to be over with.
They followed the signs to the tram station which was little more than an insulated metal tunnel riveted to the side of the port building. The tram was automated and roofed, but open on the sides. Under the bored eye of the operator in his white tunic and trousers, Al Shei wrote their destination across the memory board and was relieved to see it slot them first on the list.
They had barely sat themselves down on one of the thinly padded benches when the tram lurched forward and pulled out into the bright sunlight.
New Medina was situated in the middle of a desert plain. Distant mountains provided a backdrop for the minarets and domes. Cultivated fields patrolled by automated irrigators passed on both sides. The farmland was broken occasionally by boxy outbuildings or processing mills. The shuttles flights to and from the port were bright needles of silver in the blue sky. On the road, the rest of the traffic glided or rattled by, depending on its state of repair. The wind was hot and dusty, but Al Shei could still smell the distant cool scent of the Persian River.
Al Shei felt her shoulders hunch up. All the openness was a little intimidating. As a child of the Management Union Earth, Al Shei was used to a barrier between herself and the wide outer world.
Maybe that, she reflected, is why most starbirds are from Earth. We’re used to being shut in all the time.
Gradually, the greenscape became narrower and the buildings became bigger. None of them, though, were allowed to actually touch the tall sandstone wall that marked the edge of the city proper.
The New Medina hospital was a bright, white conglomeration of buildings with grounds that backed onto the city wall. Arched corridors like tunnels of chalk connected its modules. Red crescent moons topped the spires on its three central domes. The tram took them past carefully cultivated groves of orange trees and date palms. Patients in clean blue robes strolled on the lawns or sat in the sun, each one followed by a crab-legged medical drone. These patients had conditions too severe to be taken care of by the neighborhood doctors that the hospital serviced with information and advice. These were the surgeries, the long-term illnesses and those who needed new tissue, limbs or organs grown in the bio-gardens.
The tram took them to the main entrance of the administrative building. No one waited outside the wood and wrought-iron door to greet them. Al Shei wrote her name and their contact’s name on the memory board that hung above the door handles. The door swung open and she and Lipinski strode into the hospital.
They entered a broad, three-tiered gallery. The light was adjusted to imitate spring sunlight and the air circulated constantly, spreading a vague scent of lemon and orange. The dark-tiled floors and cream walls were as clean as the inside of the Pasadena’s data hold. Windows were set in the walls at about six meter intervals. Some of them were darkened, but through the clear ones Al Shei could see into chambers containing one person manning more boards and monitors than would be found on the bridge of a major passenger ship.