(9)
Engineer Traan Dol strapped himself in as the re-entry pod was prepared for ejection. A pod was dropped to the planetary surface every nine days – Imperial days that is, artificial days timed to fit with the biological rhythm of the human body, that as far as humaneticists could tell hadn’t changed very much, ever since people had left the hypothetical planet they had originally emigrated from.
The planet Otrid-KS of course had its own day, unsuitable for human timekeeping though.
It was a fringe world, just barely habitable.
There was the usual talk as the men took their seats.
Most of them would be going to Joy.
One actually had a wife to visit planetside.
A man was allowed to marry locally, but you couldn’t ever bring up wife and kids to the station and could only settle down with them once you’d done your time, which was usually two decicycles. Otrid wasn’t really the place though where it was easy to find a girl, except of course the ones you rented from Joy.
“So you’re taking your time off early this time round, Traan? Got blue balls?”
“Nope. Got business. Gamble of mine paid off.”
Traan knew that someone would probably notice him acting unusually, spending more money than he ought to have, so there needed to be at least some hint of a cover story.
“Look at this guy. Once a smuggler always a smuggler. They should have sent him to Realignment.”
“Couldn’t be any worse than here. But at least I ain’t never been no space pirate!”
For all intents and purposes the research station was a penal colony. There wasn’t anybody on it who hadn’t been some sort of criminal, deviant or misfit. If you had a useful skill, your sentence could sometimes be commuted from Realignment, to service in a place like this.
Realignment usually took only half as long but most people preferred to stay themselves. A really hardened criminal might be banished here after getting Realigned.
Traan sometimes wondered what Instructor Lys might have done to get herself posted to the station. The technical and maintenance crew were basically a bunch of scoundrels – smugglers and space pirates weren’t even the worst of it – but the scientific experimenters usually had some white collar crime up their sleeve.
“Anyway it’s not like I’ve gotten filthy rich. But before we go up again, everyone just come to Escape Velocity, drinks are on me,” Traan promised.
“Worst dive on the planet.”
“Just right for scum like you!”
.
The men were jostled around as the capsule was ejected from the station and started its rapid descent.
The pod had only minimal thrust capability for course correction.
Its entry into atmosphere was much like the fall of a meteor; the outer hull grew white hot and started ablating, tracing a glowing path across the sky.
As it entered deeper layers of the dense atmosphere, hull geometry was reconfigured for air-braking; now the falling capsule left a cloud of thick, oily black smoke as the last layers of the outer shield cooked off.
Finally, the parachutes were deployed. The pod jarred violently as the chutes snapped open and grabbed hold of the air.
Those who sat close to one of the viewports of heat-resistant crystal could see the landing zone rushing up to them.
Impact zone would be a better word.
After they had recovered from the concussion, the men waited for a few minutes before levering open the exit hatch.
They knew that planetfall would kick up a huge cloud of irritant dust, and there was the matter of the parachute fabric which might be draped over the exit. It was a self-dissolving material that would turn to goop and then vanish within minutes of landing, but you wouldn’t want to walk into or through it while it was decaying.
Air pressure inside the cabin had been slowly increased during the trip to be equal to the planet’s surface.
So all they had to do was kick away the exit hatch.
Then, one after the other, drop down to the planet’s surface.
Real ground, real soil beneath their feet, ground from which things grew, ground in which things lived, even if they were black-lobed mega-lichens and rock-boring trilobites. Somehow it always felt different making planetfall on living ground, and however marginal it was, this place harbored life.
On a fringe world like this, there wasn’t such a thing as a spaceport.
If there was some pressing need, you could arrange – and pay – for a vehicle to pick you up after planetfall.
There was no infrastructure except for a shelter dome in case of solar flares or superstorm winds, neither of which were rare.
The average visitor just shouldered his pack, and hiked to town.
And that’s what they did, marching off in single file, under the great spotty disc of a red sun that hung behind the racing clouds, glaring from the same spot of the sky eternally, the scaly lobes of the sparse coal-black vegetation all fixed to face the same direction. As they went up a low ridge, the men braced themselves against the howling wind; since one side of the planet lay in eternal darkness and the other in never-ending daylight, there were enormous temperature differences that drove perpetually racing cyclones.
The area around the impact zone was covered with several dozen of what looked pretty much like enormous cow-pats, or maybe giant fossilized dinosaur turds.
That’s what they called them, ‘turds’, and that’s what the re-entry capsule would look like in a few days.
It would flatten and sink and collapse onto itself, its surface becoming wrinkly and discolored.
All this was designed into its synthetic life-cycle – a pod was dropped from the station every nine imperial days, after a centicycle thirty of them would have accumulated, and the dry, compressed ‘turds’ would all be stacked into a recovery ship that would bring them back into orbit.
There the collapesd pods would be re-energized, and would resynthesize the heat shield and the parachutes, and expand to regain their previous shape. This cycle had proven far more effective than building landers that included all the complexity and weight involved with having their own engine to lift off back into space.
Maintenance was also easy, as it was practically guaranteed that if a pod successfully resynthesized, it would later be flight-worthy. If anything went wrong during the recovery process, the pod would be broken down and recycled for its constituent elements.
Return to the station would be from a separate launch zone, the rockets there slowly synthesizing their outer skin, crew capsule and fuel from air, minerals and sunlight.
They grew from ‘seeds’ that consisted of the engine pack only. Once in orbit, all fuel burnt off, the thin hull would be diverted into the growth cycle of the re-entry pods, the engine packs stored, and every now and then a pod would go back down with a set of the compact engine packs that would regrow the fueled rocket around themselves. Since this was a slow process, there were hundreds of such ‘seeds’ at the launch zone, in various stages of regrowth, so one would ‘ripen’ into a launch-ready rocket every nine days.
Much of the technology of the Pantocracy worked in this way, it had proven sustainable over the range of many human lifetimes.
In fact the subjects of the Pantocrator were not treated much differently, those who had been found irredeemably deviant and couldn’t fulfill their purpose, were broken down into their constituent elements and recycled.
Human beings, however, no matter what their failings or transgressions, were by birthright always entitled to a second chance, a Realignment – that wouldn’t happen with a defective piece of technology like a failed pod.
.
As the men on leave from the station arrived at the outskirts of town – people just called it town, as there wasn’t anything nearby it could be confused with – Traan Dol said goodbye to the group for the next three days, when they would meet up at the bar and then, in time for the next shift on the station, they’d march out and take a rocket up again.
The local ‘day’ of the planet – the time it took to turn around its axis of rotation – was the same as its year, since it was tidally locked to its sun. A local day and a year on Otrid KS were both 42 imperial days, and there was no such thing as a ‘month’, as planets that circled so tightly around red dwarf stars never had moons. The settled zone of the planet was about twenty degrees inside of the terminator, the line that separated endless dark from endless night. In these places it was eternally late afternoon, or early evening, depending on whether your glass was half full or half empty. It never felt like morning.
All in all it meant that there was no natural concept of time on the planet, and so people just used Galactic time for all affairs of life, just like the station did, and it made sense to organize society around overlapping shifts, just like the station did.
And so, even though it had only 30,000 people, ‘Town’ or ‘Capital’ or what you called it, was a city that never slept. At any moment in time ten thousand people were asleep, twenty thousand awake and about.
.
Traan headed straight for Joy.
Once inside he went for the reception, were individual requests were received.
Anyone who requested a price for a service there, but in the end didn’t book a girl, had to pay a hefty ‘consultation fee’. That kept the riff-raff away.
“How can I help you to be happy today?” asked the girl behind the counter.
Her voice was trained to be artificially flat, probably to make sure no one forgot she was the receptionist – and not a product.
“I want to have a good time” said Traan, being deliberately obtuse.
“That’s what Joy is there for, anywhere in the Galaxy, any time, any way. Please just inform me of your wants and desires.”, she chirped like an impersonation of the advertisements.
“Okay, let’s flip this around. Here’s my credit pad. What can I get for that?”
“Hmmm…. “ – she raised an eyebrow, with a slightly surprised expression that was no longer entirely puppet-like.
“How many of our staff do you want to book, how many clients will there be, and when will the event take place?” she asked, matter-of-factly.
So, people who came in with that amount of money usually threw an orgy.
Traan knew then that the money on the pad was enough to get what he wanted.
“One. One. Now. The best I can buy.”
“Oh” - now he had the receptionist’s attention. She fidgeted a bit and made a show of consulting some records.
“We only offer the first seven levels of Joy here. It’s a fringe world you know. You could afford eight but you’d have to go to the Craldual sector and well … that is a lot of credits you’ve got but it takes three Folds to get there and you know how much that costs, I guess.”
“Seventh heaven is good enough for me, madam. What can I get?”
“I can offer you three days, for sixty kilocredits.”
“I have a hundred and ten”
“You must understand that there isn’t much demand for seventh level here. There’s no continuous service. You can book later again if you so wish.”
Of course three days was all the time he had anyway but no need to let her know he was actually an inmate on the station, who'd have to head back to his drudgery, and not some nouveau-riche from town, with all the time in the world.
“Okay. I’m buying. Show me the menu.”
The receptionist, who now had lost most of her mask, laughed nervously and said,
“There isn’t any. If you want a girl from today on, as you said, and it’s seventh level, you want the best we’ve got, there’s only one option. Her name is Lixuari.”
“So I’m going to be the only person going to the seventh heaven on this entire fucking planet for the next three days. Sounds just right! Those credits are yours, and she’s mine.”
The receptionist harrumphed.
“You are not required to answer this question but may I ask… how you have acquired this wealth?”
“Hit a nest of rock trilobites.” – A tunnel-boring creature endemic to the planet, its blue blood could be sold off at high price, a few among the Alpha Primes considered it to be a rejuvenant.
“Another question you’re not ...officially … required to answer, but … do you have any problems with Exotics?”
“No, not at all. Why?”
“Well, Lixuari is an Exotic. We had some trouble once with an ancestralist fanatic. Ugly incident, believe me.”
“What is she?”
“Uptrivi-Lenki. Here, look at the 'gram, of course you can have a peek before booking.”
She handed him the disc that would project a small animated hologram of the girl; travelling men who could afford it often had them made of various conquests they didn’t want to forget, so they were generally known as femgrams.
Traan was trying – rather successfully he found – to sound nonchalant, but the truth was he had no experience at all with Exotics.
Of course he knew they existed, from Humanetics lessons in school. Everyone learned that. As humanity had spread through the galaxy, sometimes planets would be settled by a small number of people, and then get cut off for decacycles. If any of the founder population had a rare mutation, it might become characteristic for the planet. Other planets might go through a bottleneck, a population that collapsed and rebounded from a tiny group. And then there was natural selection. If people got stuck on a planet like this one for long enough, where all light was dim and red, they’d lose the ability to see different colors, but become more light-sensitive. And then there were planets circling around suns that sometimes exploded in ultraviolet flares, and on one of these, the natives had developed a new sense for very short wave light. They callet it ‘dred’ as they said it didn’t look like a harsher blue or violet, but rather like boiling blood, and instilled a sense of dread, as it triggered the instinct to immediately seek shelter – and clearly those who had gained that sensitivity and that behavior had survived the mistempers of their sun better than those who had not.
Most of these changes weren’t outwardly visible though.
When they were – that's when you had an Exotic.
Uptrivi-Lenki was the textbook example.
All of these changes had come about naturally though, through the adaptability and changeability of the human substance, and so they were all members of the human family. They had grown from the tree of humanity that had been planted by the Former.
Only a few fanatics believed that “true-to-Earth” humans, who supposedly looked like the ancients before they migrated into space, were somehow superior, the problem was of course no one knew what these people had looked like, and “Earth”, if there ever had been such a thing, had probably fallen victim to the Synthropithecine Geocides half a hectocycle ago. What one had to fear, hate and destroy, that were the descendants of artificially created or altered other-men or former-humans, sons of the synthropithecines.
An Exotic would be just right for his plan.
“She’s perfect”, said Traan.
“Seal the deal.”
Her pattern was certainly provocative.