No one said a word.
“Oh, excuse me.” She courteously turned herself rightside up with respect to us.
It didn’t help much. Even upside down in that confined space, her face had been far enough from the floor to be seen from the last row. And even rightside up she was startling.
Chris’s p-suit had no legs, and neither did Chris.
I know I tried hard not to gape. I’m pretty sure I failed. One person actually gasped audibly. Chris ignored it and continued cheerfully, “I usually make a little speech at this point, but we want to get you out of suspect pressure as quickly as possible, so you’ve got a temporary reprieve. You are now about to do something you probably thought was impossible: leave a plane intelligently. By rows, remaining seated until it’s your turn, and then leaving at once. You have no carryons or coats to fumble with, no reason to block the aisle—and good reason not to.
“See, if we cycle you through the airlocks a few at a time it’d take over an hour. But to keep the lock open at both ends and march you all out we have to equalize pressure between this can and Top Step—and there’s no telling if or how long that patch there will take pressure. So we’re going to do this with suits sealed, and we are not going to dawdle. I know you’re all free fall virgins; don’t worry, we’ll set up a bucket brigade and you’ll be fine. One thing: if there’s a blowout as you’re passing through the lock, get out of the doorway. It doesn’t matter which direction you pick, just don’t be in the way. Okay? All right, Ev!”
That last was apparently directed to the Captain in the cockpit ahead. My ears began to hurt suddenly. The pressure was rising back toward Earth-normal. Like everybody, I swallowed hard, and watched that pressure patch as I sealed my hood.
“Okay, this side first. No chatter. First person to slow up the line gets assigned to the Reclamation Module for the next two months.” A light over the lock blinked and the door opened. “First row: move!”
Getting up the aisle to the front was easy. Once there were no seatbacks to navigate with, it got trickier. But Chris fielded me like a shortstop and lobbed me to Robert at second, who pivoted and threw me to someone at first for the double play. That must have ended the inning; others tossed me around the infield to celebrate for a while.
I ended up turning slowly end over end in a large pale blue rectangular-box room. Several yellow ropes were strung across it from one biggest-wall to the opposite one. I caught a rope as I sailed past it.
Because I seemed to be drifting light as a feather, I badly underestimated how hard it would be to stop drifting. If that rope hadn’t had some give to it, I might have pulled my arms out of their sockets. I had no weight, but I still had all my mass. I found the experience fascinating and mildly dismaying: in that first intentional vector change I made in space, I knew that some of the zero-gee dance moves I’d envisioned weren’t going to work.
But I was too busy to think about kinesthetics just then. The room was half-full of my shipmates, with more coming at a steady pace. I saw that all of us were treating the biggest-walls as “floor” and “ceiling,” and lining ourselves up parallel to the ropes between them—but there seemed to be considerable silent disagreement as to which way was up. Visual cues were all ambiguous. It was a comical sight.
Finally one side preponderated and the others gradually switched around to that “local vertical.” I was one of the latter group, and as I reached the decision that I was upside down, I realized for the first time that I felt faintly nauseous. The feeling increased as I flipped myself over, diminished a little as the room seemed to snap back into proper perspective again.
The last of us came tumbling in, followed by the last member of the bucket brigade. The latter sealed the hatch, oriented himself upside down to us, let go of the hatch, and floated before it, hands thrust up into his pockets. He looked at us, and we craned our heads at him. A few of us cartwheeled round to his personal vertical again, and before long everyone had done so, with varying degrees of grace.
He seemed to be in his fifties. He wore a p-suit, opaque and deep purple. Compared to the clunky suits we wore, his looked like a second skin. His complexion was coal black, the kind that doesn’t even gleam much under bright light. He was lean and fit, going bald and making no attempt to hide it, frowning and smiling at the same time. He looked relaxed and competent, avuncular. He reminded me a little of Murray, the business manager of one of the companies I’d worked with almost a decade before. Murray did the work of four men, yet always seemed perfectly relaxed, even during the week before a performance.
“You folks don’t seem to know which way is up, do you?” he said pleasantly.
There were a very few polite giggles, and one groan.
He did something, and was suddenly upside down to us again. He was stable in the new position and had not touched anything. I didn’t quite catch the move at the time—and still can’t describe it; I’d have to show you—but I was fascinated. I wanted to ask him to do it again.
This time we all let him stay upside down.
“All right. My name is Phillipe Mgabi. I am your Chief Administrator for Student Affairs. On behalf of the Starseed Foundation, I’d like to welcome you all to Top Step, and wish you a fruitful stay. I’m sorry you had such an eventful journey here, and I assure you all that Top Step is considerably less vulnerable than your shuttle was. You’re as safe as any terrestrial can be in space, now.”
No one said thanks.
“I must remind you that you are no longer on United Nations soil, in even a figurative sense. Top Step is an autonomic pressure, like Skyfac or The Ark, recognized by the UN but not eligible for membership, and wholly owned by the Starseed Foundation. At the moment, you are technically Landed Immigrants, although we prefer the term Postulants.”
It was weirdly disorienting to be addressed by an upside down person. It was almost impossible to decipher his facial expressions.
“You were given the constitution and laws of Top Step back at Suit Camp, and you’ll find them in the memory banks—along with maps, schedules, master directory, and for that matter the entire Global Net. You have unrestricted and unmetered access, Net-inclusive, free of charge for as long as you’re resident here.”
There were murmurs. Unmetered access to the Net? For everybody?
This whole operation struck me as being run like a dance company financed by task-specific grants. In some areas they were as cheap as a cut-rate holiday (Suit Camp had featured outdoor privies, just like the ones I’d used as a little girl on Gambier Island)…but when they spent, they spent like sailors on leave. It seemed schizophrenic.
“The point is that you are responsible. You are presumed to know your obligations and privileges as a Postulant. The Agreements you have made are all in plain language, and you are bound by them. They allow you a great deal of slack…but where they bind, there is no give at all. I recommend that you study them if you haven’t already.”
Out of the corner of my eye I saw the loudmouthed joker start to say something, then change his mind.
“I hope all of you paid attention at Suit Camp. I said you were as safe as any terrestrial in space. That compares favorably with, say, New York…but not by much, and space bites in different places and unexpected ways. As you learned on your way up here.” Ouch. “To survive long enough to enter Symbiosis, you must all acquire and maintain a state of alert mindfulness—and there are few second chances. Space is not fair. Space is not merciful. I see you all nodding, and I know that at least three of you will be dead before your term is up. That is the smallest number of Postulants we have lost from a single class. I would like it very much if your class turns out to be the first exception to that rule.”