As Chappalar and I crossed the zoo grounds, two leaners followed us… one clearly hoping we’d brought sponge-corn from the concession stand, the other a robot chaperoning the first. Every real creature in Cabot Park had a look-alike robot companion, programmed to make sure normal animal behavior didn’t become too much of a nuisance. If, for example, the leaner chose me as its resting post, all well and good (apart from mud stains and leaner smell on my parka); but if the beast went for Chappalar, the robot would cut in like Dads at a dance party, standing sentry between Chappalar and the leaner till the animal went elsewhere.
Here’s the thing: an adult Homo sap could hold the leaner’s weight easily. Chappalar, though, would be knocked ass over teakettle and possibly crushed. Leaners never got it through their dumpy heads that even though Ooloms looked tall and strong, they were actually breakably light. Ergo the need for robot lifeguards — otherwise, the League of Peoples would ask why we let potentially dangerous animals get rough on our sentient citizens.
The League had very strict rules against putting sentients at needless risk. Either you followed those rules, or you got declared non-sentient yourself.
You didn’t want that. The League also had very strict rules for dealing with dangerous non-sentient creatures.
The door to the pump-station building was locked. Routine safety precaution? Or was some paranoid someone truly worried about saboteurs tampering with the city water supply? No. Most likely the staff locked the door for fear some leaner might rest against it and accidentally push it open. Before long, the plant would be full of orts and donkeys, not to mention sheep drowning themselves in the filtration vats. Who wants woolly water?
The mosaicked wall had an intercom screen embedded beside the door; I could easily call someone to let us in. But what would Chappalar think? We’d agreed on an unannounced visit… not an all-out catch-them-with-their-pants-down raid, but still we didn’t want to give the staff time to prepare a show. ("Oh yes, Ms. Proctor ma’am, we surely need all the cash you can funnel our way.")
I glanced at Chappalar. He’d taken his cue from the leaners and propped himself back-against the building’s wall. A creamy dreamy expression settled on his face as he started to turn pointillist, color-matching the teeny mosaic tiles of gloss-fired clay. The perfect picture of a man in reverie over his new girlfriend… not at all waiting to see if I was too wimp-gutless to use my link-seed.
Closing my eyes, I reluctantly reached out to the world-souclass="underline" my first deliberate brain-to-byte contact with the collective machine intelligence that permeated every digital circuit on Demoth… including the axonal vines through my brain and whatever computerized locking device kept the pump-station door closed. Faye Smallwood of the Vigil, I thought, silently projecting the words toward the door. Please grant me entrance. (The same formal way I used to speak to my wrist-implant… which, by the by, had got removed during mushor, to avoid radio interference between it and my link-seed. Since then, my wrist had felt so indecent-naked, I’d taken to wearing a rack of cheap bracelets.)
My Open sesame signal traveled like radio fizz out through my link-seed and into the closest datasphere receiver cell, then shunted through a slew of relays to the world-soul core. My identity got verified; likewise the identity of the lock I wanted to open. (The Vigil could pop locks in public buildings, but not private residences.) In less than a second, the door gave a soft click. I pulled it open and offered Chappalar a weak smile… mostly sick relief my head hadn’t exploded.
Without losing his dreamy expression, Chappalar said, "Next time before you open a door, tap into any available security cameras to see what’s on the other side. On my first scrutiny, I nearly got impaled by a forklift that happened to be passing. The door was locked specifically to prevent such accidents." He smiled and gestured toward the entranceway. "After you."
No forklifts inside… just a fiddly-dick locker room where workers stored their street clothes. Some of the staff had hung private trinkets on their lockers — a photo of someone’s family, a wire-painted miniature of the Blessed Mother Mary, the green-on-gray insignia of Bonaventure’s premier boat-racing team — but overall, the room had a spartan feel, whitewashed concrete, sucked dry of personality.
"Is there a city ordinance against dressing up your work area?" I asked Chappalar.
"Pump stations have to meet sanitation standards," he replied. "Some plant managers interpret those standards more rigorously than others."
"You know the manager then?"
"I know everyone who works for the city. You will too."
I’d already memorized the names of plant staff, and downloaded their files from the civic databanks. (Not through my link-seed. Through the one hard-copy feedbox in the Vigil offices.) The manager of Pump Station 3 was Elizabeth Tupper, age sixty-two, employed by the city works since humans took over Bonaventure. No complaints registered against her from above or below: she’d never screwed up badly enough for higher-ups to notice, and never harassed her subordinates to the point where they lodged an official protest.
You could say the same for almost every bureaucrat in town. I wished the employment records would say things like, "Plodding but competent," or "Goat-wanking control freak." Too bad they didn’t let me make up the checkboxes on performance-review forms.
Chappalar moved ahead of me, holding his arms crossed against his chest so his gliders were folded tight to his body. The walkway forward was camel-eye narrow; if he hadn’t trimmed his sails, they would have brushed against lockers on both sides, knocking off all the hung decorations. I followed, tucking my arms in too — I didn’t have Chappalar’s wingspan, but how often do I have to use the word "Amazonian" before you figure out I’m a big old girl?
Probably three times less than I’ve used it already. Redundancy, thy name is Faye.
Beyond the lockers lurked the vat room: a chamber the size of a skating rink, dominated by massive metal tanks. Water from the local aquifer got pumped up from below, fed through a line of processing vats and squirted out the other end, purified of toxic metals and native Demoth microbes. This station was supposed to have three working lines of four vats each; but the two oldest lines had been jinxed with mechanical gremlins over the past year, forcing the staff to hammer away at stubborn pumps, jammed stir-paddles, and hiccuppy valves. Scarcely a week passed that one line didn’t conk out for a day or so… and over last Diaspora weekend, both bad lines went tits up together.
No wonder city council wanted to rip out the old and put in state-of-the-art replacements. The only question was why they’d let the place degrade so badly to begin with. Elizabeth Tupper, plant manager, must have really cranked someone off.
The moment Chappalar and I entered, we could tell which two lines were on the futz: the ones that were half-dismantled, their high-up access panels open to expose wiring and plastic tubes. A pair of wheelstand stairways had been rolled up to the guts of the nearest vat, as if two workers had been poking around side by side, consulting with each other on how to get a bit more service out of the heap of junk… but no one was there now. No one anywhere in sight.
I turned to Chappalar. "They’re all on rest break?"
He shrugged. "Could be a staff meeting."
"The regular staff meeting is tomorrow." Chappalar would have known the schedule if he’d done his homework on the plant… but then, he’d been busy playing lose the spoon with Maya, hadn’t he? Anyway, this scrutiny had got docketed under my name, so I was the one supposed to know the facts. In his way, Chappalar was giving me a vote of confidence — trust I would cover the background trivia so he wouldn’t have to.