Again there was a bucket-brigade. We were warned not to attempt any maneuvers of our own along the way, but I intended to cheat just a little…until the line was held up by the first couple of jerks to do so, and people with full bladders began to get surly. Sure, I knew more about kinesthetics than the two jerks. That gave me the opportunity to make an even bigger jerk out of myself. I decided to be patient.
There was plenty of time. We wouldn’t be allowed to go EVA for another four weeks, and we wouldn’t be allowed to enter Symbiosis until we’d had at least four weeks of EVA practice…and we were entitled to hang around Top Step making up our minds for another four weeks after that, if we chose, before we had to either take the Symbiote, or go back to Earth and start making payments on the air, food and water we had used. I’d have lots of time to play with zero gee.
Having toured a lot of strange places with various dance companies, I’d been through several sorts of stringent international decontamination rituals before, and thought I was prepared for anything. You don’t want to know about Top Step Decontam, and I don’t want to discuss it. Let’s just say they were thorough. Top Step is a controlled environment, and they want it as sterile as possible.
When I got out the other end, naked, dry, and bright red, I found myself drifting in a boardroom-sized cubic with five other naked females. Kirra was among them, and I recognized Glenn Christie, an acquaintance from Suit Camp. At the far end of the space were what looked like several dozen drifting footballs, tethered together. Kirra threw me a grin. “Am I still black?” she called softly.
“On this side,” I agreed.
She giggled, and…wriggled, somehow, so that she spun end over end gracefully, like a ballerina pirouetting but in three dimensions.
“Couple of pink places,” I said, “but I think you had them when you started. How did you do that?” It hadn’t looked at all like the maneuver Mgabi had used.
“Little pinker now, maybe. I dunno how I did it. You try it.”
When I try out a new move, I’m alone in the studio. I was saved by the bell. An amplified voice came from nowhere in particular. (I tried to locate the speaker grille, but it seemed to be hidden.) It was female, a warm friendly contralto. After what we’d just been through, it shouldn’t have mattered much if she’d been a male with a leer in his voice…but I found myself liking her somehow, whoever she was. She sounded sort of like the best friend I never really had. “Welcome, all of you, to community pressure. One of the containers you see on the inboard side of the chamber will have your name on it. Please put on the contents and check them for fit: let me know if you have any problems.” We all thanked her.
It occurred to me briefly to wonder why she wasn’t present in the room. Surely we were as thoroughly decontaminated as we were ever going to be. But the tone of her voice said that whatever the reason was, it was unimportant, not anything scary, so I put it out of my mind.
Getting to the football-shaped containers got comical; we were like kids in some Disneyland ride, giggling and trying to help each other and getting tangled up and giggling some more. By the time I located the box with my name on it, we all had aching sides. The unseen woman did not chastise us for our antics; she seemed to understand that we were ready for some laughter.
The football opened along one seam. Inside it was a wad of something. As I stared at it in puzzlement, it swelled like bread-dough, like a backpacker’s raincoat opening up.
“It’s a p-suit!” Kirra said delightedly, shaking out hers.
Sure enough, we had all been issued our real p-suits. Expensive, state of the art, personally customized and form-fitting ones, as opposed to the cheap standardized movie-costumes we’d all worn aboard the Shuttle.
We’d practiced this in Suit Camp. Timing myself, I slid the bottom half on like greased pantyhose, pulled the rest up behind me and around my torso, put my arms in the sleeves, sealed the seam, and pulled the transparent hood down over my head. Elapsed time, twelve seconds. I thought that was pretty good. It went on easier than a body-stocking: while it was snug, the interior had been treated somehow to reduce friction. I didn’t test the radio or any of the other gear, though I should have. Instead I pulled the hood back, and grinned at Kirra and Glenn and the other women. They grinned back.
Our suits were custom tailored to our bodies, and fit like hugs. They were also, we discovered, customized for colour. They came out of the egg transparent, so we could inspect them for fit and flaws, and except for the barely visible tracery of microtubules that carried coolant and such around them, they looked like an extra layer of skin. But when we located the “polarization enabler controls” they’d taught us about in Suit Camp, and opaqued our suits, each of us was, from toes to collarbone, a different—and well chosen—colour. My own suit turned a light shade of burgundy that suited my complexion and hair colour, and Kirra’s suit became a cobalt blue very close to the highlights that normal lighting raised on her dark black skin.
I liked the colours a lot. To me they were among the first signs that artists had had a part in the creative planning of this outfit.
“Any problems?” our unseen friend asked. “No? Then exit the chamber through the green-marked hatch in Wall Four. You’ll be directed from there.”
I looked around for the green-marked hatch. Where the hell was Wall Four? No walls were marked that I could see—at least not with numbers. One of them, to our right (we were all instinctively aligned to the same local vertical, without knowing how we’d selected it) was painted with a large broad red arrow, pointing in the direction we had come from, but that was little help. My companions were looking confused, too, but the unseen woman didn’t cue us.
It took so long to find the hatch that in a few seconds I guessed where it must be. Sure enough, it was “up,” over our heads. People hardly ever look up, for some reason. (Which seems to suggest that we haven’t evolved significantly since before we came down out of the trees, yes?) I nudged Kirra and pointed. She unsealed the hatch and went through. I followed on her heels, and we found ourselves at the bottom of a huge well-lit padded cavern.
I should have been expecting it; I’d seen pictures. But you just don’t expect to step from someplace as clean and sterile and right-angled and high-tech and profoundly artificial as a Decontam module into the Carlsbad Caverns. I nearly lost my grip and fell up into it.
It was about the size of a concert hall and roughly spherical—but the accent was on rough. Rough curves and joins, the rough fractal topography of natural rock, overlaid with some rough surface covering that looked like cheap kitchen sponge stained dark grey. Tunnels departed from the cavern in all directions; their gaping, irregularly sized and shaped mouths were spaced asymmetrically around the chamber. Each tunnel had one or more pairs of slender elastic bungee cords strung criss-cross across its mouth, obviously used to either fling oneself into the tunnel, or catch oneself on the way out; the larger the tunnel, the more cords.
This spheric pressure was half natural and half artificial. It had happened, as much as it had been built. It was a sculpted and padded cave. Perhaps a dozen people (none of them in p-suits; one was naked) were drifting slowly across the vast chamber in different directions. No two of them were using the same local vertical, and none of them used ours. It was like something out of Escher.
No, it was something out of Escher.