She seemed to think that over, as if his responses were a little off. “I named him for Dexter Cole, of course. The first guy to Proxima.”
Of course. Who? Where? He backed away from the puzzling little conversation, retreated into himself.
“Hey, buddy.”
He turned his head to the right.
In the bed on that side was a man, around thirty, Asiatic. His scalp was swathed in bandages, and the left side of his face was puffed up with bruising that almost closed one eye. Even so, he smiled. “You OK?”
Yuri shrugged stiffly.
“Listen. It’s just the go-to-sleep stuff the cops give you. They don’t use it sparingly. I took a couple of doses of that myself, while I tried to explain in a calm manner that as a foreign national I did not belong in their sweep for the Ad Astra. Takes you time to wake up from that. Don’t worry, the fog will clear.” His accent sounded American, west coast maybe, but Yuri’s ear was a hundred years out of date.
Yuri said, “Thanks. But I’m guessing that’s not why you’re in here. The sleep thing.”
“You ought to be a doctor. No, the big guy put me in here this time. Although the time before it was a couple of Peacekeepers, they managed to break a rib while persuading me—”
“The big guy?”
“Gustave Klein, he’s called. I guess you wouldn’t know that. King of the Hull, or thinks he is. Watch out for him. So, Yuri Eden, huh? I never came across you on Mars. My name is Liu Tao.” He spelled it out.
“You American?”
“Me? No. But I learned English in a school for USNA expats in New Beijing. That’s why my accent is kind of old-fashioned, everybody picks up on that. I’m Chinese. I’m actually an officer in the People’s space fleet. Yuri Eden? Is that really your name? You lived in Eden, right?”
“Yeah.”
“What was it like?”
Lacking any kind of common reference with this guy, Yuri tried to describe it. Eden had been the UN’s largest outpost on Mars, and one of the oldest. People lived in cylindrical bulks like Nissen huts that were the remains of the first ships to land, tipped over and heaped with dirt and turned into shelters, and in prefabricated domes, and even in a few buildings of red Martian sandstone blocks. The whole place had had the feel of a prison to Yuri, or a labour camp. And all this was just a pinprick, a hold-out; the scuttlebutt was that a colony like this would be dwarfed by the giant cities the Chinese were building on the rest of the planet, like their capital, Obelisk, in Terra Cimmeria.
Liu Tao listened, his face neutral.
Yuri asked, “So how did you end up here?”
“Bad luck. I was piloting a shuttle down from Red Two, that’s one of our orbital stations, heading for our supply depots and manufactories in the Phaethontis quadrangle, when we had an auxiliary power-unit failure. We had to bail out at high altitude, my buddy and I, which is no joke on Mars. He got down safely—well, I guess so, I was never told. My clamshell, my heat shield, had a crack. I was lucky to live through it. But I came down near Eden, and a couple of your Peacekeepers were the first to get to me.
“They held on to me, in defiance of various treaties. I was put through a lot of ‘questioning’.” He let that word hang. “They wanted me to tell them the inner secrets of the Triangle. You know about that? The big trade loop we’re developing, Earth to asteroids and Mars and back. But I’m a Mars-orbit shuttle jock, that’s all. By Mao’s balls, it’s not as if we’re spying on you guys at Eden!” He laughed at that idea. “Well, they kept me in there, and I started to think they were never going to let me go, I mean maybe they’d told my chain of command they’d found me dead, or something. What were they going to do to me, kill me? I guess it’s no surprise that they threw me into the sweep and locked me up in this hull, right? Out of sight, out of mind. But we’re all prisoners here…”
“Nobody’s a prisoner,” said Dr Poinar, bustling down the ward with a tray of colourful pills. “That’s what the policy says, so it must be true, right? Now take this, Yuri Eden, you need more sleep.”
Confused, as weak as Anna’s baby, yet still elated at the basic fact that he’d come home, even if he was stuck in this “hull”, Yuri obediently took his tablet and subsided into a deep dreamless sleep.
Chapter 2
After a day of cautious bending, stretching, walking, and using a lavatory unaided, Yuri was told by Dr Poinar that his time was up. “We need your bed. Sorry, buddy. You’ll be assigned a bunk later. Any possessions you had—”
Yuri shrugged.
“Right now you’re late for a class.”
“What class?”
“Orientation 101,” Liu Tao said. “Some astronaut showing us pretty pictures.” He laughed, though he winced when he opened his bruised mouth wide.
“You’re in the same class, Liu. Why don’t you show your new best friend the way?” Poinar dumped heaps of basic clothing on their beds, bright orange, and walked away.
Yuri had thought the medical ward was crowded, noisy. But once Liu led him outside, into a space that struck Yuri at first glance as like the inside of a big metal tower, he realised that the ward had been a haven of peace and harmony. Looking up he saw that the tower wasn’t that tall, maybe forty, forty-five metres, and was capped off by a big metal dome. It was split into storeys by mesh-partition flooring; there were ladders and a kind of spiral staircase around the wall, and a fireman’s pole arrangement that threaded through gaps in the partitions along the tower’s axis. The walls were crusted with equipment boxes and stores, but in some places he saw tables and chairs, lightweight fold-out affairs, and enclosures, partitions inside which he could see bunk beds, more fold-outs. There were folk in there evidently trying to sleep; he had no idea how they’d manage that. It looked like sleep was going to be a luxury here, just like on Mars.
And in this tank, people swarmed everywhere, most of them dressed like Yuri and Liu in bright orange jumpsuits, a few others in Peacekeeper blue, or a more exotic black and silver. They were all adults that he could see, no kids, no infants. Their voices echoed from the metal surfaces in a jangling racket. And over all that there was a whir of pumps and fans, of air conditioning and plumbing of some kind, just like in Eden. Like he was in another sealed unit.
Liu, moving cautiously himself—evidently it hadn’t been just his face that had taken the beating—took Yuri to that outer staircase, steps fixed to the curving wall with a safety rail, and led him up.
At least, just like on Mars, Yuri didn’t find the stuff here hard. Since his first waking, he’d found twenty-second-century technology easy to work. User interfaces seemed to have settled down to common standards some time before he’d been frozen. Even the language had stabilised, more or less, if not the accents; English was spoken across several worlds now and had to stay comprehensible to everybody, and there was a huge mass of recorded culture, all of which tended to keep the language static. The vehicles and vocabularies of the year 2166 were easy. It was the people he couldn’t figure out. And now Yuri climbed through a blizzard of faces, none of them familiar.
He looked for a window. He still had no idea where on Earth he was. And why the enclosure? Maybe he was in some mid-latitude climate refuge; he’d heard that since his day the whole middle belt of the Earth had heated up, dried out and been abandoned. He could be anywhere. But that steady pull of gravity was reassuring, even as he laboured up the stairs with his Mars-softened muscles. He wondered when his first physio was going to be.
They reached a space enclosed by movable partition panels, with fold-out chairs set in rows like a lecture theatre. Some guy in a uniform of black and silver stood at the front, facing away from the dozen or so people in the room, talking through a series of images, star fields and space satellites.