This file is a part of Elf Sternberg's Collected Works on ASSTR.  The
complete archive of Elf's work can be found on his website at:

http://www.drizzle.com/~elf

The author can be contacted at:

mailto:elf@drizzle.com

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                        Geographic: Floating Free

Journal Entry 010 / 00101

Noren, Narrin 09, 00101

January 12, 1985

Alka's Felinzi smile could have been seen like a beacon from Pandora,
Xing thought as he watched her float up through a long, hollow tunnel. He
wondered what had made her so happy, but he supposed that a guide in a
good mood was better than one who was not. She floated across the room and
without even a pause to let him protest wrapped her arms around him. "Hi!"
she said.

"Hello," Xing said, stiffening just a little at the obtrusive hug. He had
come to like her, but her continued physical affections, so prevalent
among the Pendorians, continued to bother him. When he was honest with
himself, he knew that part of the reason for discomfort came from desire.
He envied their freedom and their lack of fear. He, too, wanted to no
longer be afraid. "You are in a very happy state," he observed.

"I am," she agreed. They were both speaking Mandarin at this point, he
noticed. Unlike the others on the team, Xing had made no effort to learn
the local language. That's what the guide was for, to be the translator.
"I've been chosen to replace someone on the Terran Contact Team!" She
nearly bounced, just like a kitten.

"You have what?" he asked.

"I've been chosen to replace someone on the Terran Contact Team!" she
repeated. "One of the members of the Conventions and Events group has
decided that she wants to come home. She doesn't like it down there. So
I asked to be part of the team and I was accepted!"

"This means you will be staying on Earth," he said, wondering if he
would have much opportunity to see or speak with her.

"Yes, but I probably won't have much of a chance to see you," she said. It
was one of her more disturbing talents, this ability of hers to answer
questions he had not given voice. It was as if she could read his mind.
"The Convention and Events team is for talking to the people of Earth,
not the power aggregates, and China doesn't have very much in the way
of science fiction conventions. At best, I might be able to see you
out in some event in Hong Kong; I understand that there is at least
one convention there every year, but whether or not we go there will
be determined by whether or not we think we can reach a large audience
there and, of course, by safety risks."

It made perfect sense, he supposed, but that didn't make him much
happier.  He pointed out, "I do make trips to Washington. I am a science
correspondent and go everywhere in the world. I am sure that there will
be conventions is Australia, which is part of the area I cover."

She nodded. "Don't worry, Xing, I'm sure we'll get together and have
dinner now and then. But, aren't you worried about your government
learning that you're still talking to Pendorians long after you've
returned home?"

He grinned. "I do not care. I will probably be under suspicion for the
rest of my life. I am sure that when I get home they will be testing me
for weeks to make sure I have not been brainwashed. Or replaced."

"That's the spirit. Anyway, I'm happy to see that you've made it here
on your own. Would you like to go see the rest of the station?"

"It was not hard to get here. I just had to ask the AI. But, yes,
I would be pleased to have such a pretty guide show me around."

Alka flicked her head to one side, an almost pointless gesture in the
zero gravity but still communicative. "I thought you said you were a
terrible flirt."

"I am practicing," Xing assured her, feeling pleased that she had noticed.

This area of Parma had been completed only a few years ago, and despite
its recent heavy use still had the patina of fresh construction. The
walls were a white just one shade from blinding, with long stretches
of illumination running down the hallways and across the panel that
was clearly meant to be thought of as the ceiling. Handholds dotted the
hallways and walls. The soft hum of fans was the only sound he heard and
that was primarily the air moving, not the fan mechanism itself. The
smell of fresh plastics still hung in the air, but the smell was not
entirely familiar to him. "Alka? What is that smell?"

"Which one?" she said.

"The plastic. They don't smell right. They smell... " He hunted for the
right word. "They smell sweeter than the ones on Earth."

Alka was silent for a moment, and Xing had come to think of this
commonplace pause in Pendorian thinking a time when they were downloading
raw data into their brains. "Probably because they're agroplastics.
Terrans use petroplastics, but as we don't have an oil reserve on Pendor
we had to come up with alternatives. Agroplastics do the same job,
but they're grown on an engineered strain of maize."

"Maybe Earth would appreciate having such a technology," Xing said. "We
will run out of oil eventually and my country would dearly love to be
free of the need for imports."

"Maybe, but I doubt it. Not until you have alternative energy sources
like fusion or M-solar. Agroplastics take a lot more processing, and that
means that the materials and electricity costs on your world would be
prohibitive." Alka put her hand on his arm. "Sorry about that, Xing. It's
something we'd be willing to trade, but I think Earth already has similar
technologies, but they've been rejected for the reasons I outlined."

Alka led him to the door an which he had been instructed to wait. "Ready?"

He nodded.

The other side of the door was a surprise. Where the space behind had the
feel of a brand new, high-tech airport, on the other side of the door
he was in a construction zone. "They're still putting in the panels,"
Alka said, "So many of the walls here will be exposed."

As they pulled themselves along on temporary handholds held to fixed pipes
with tightened rings, Xing noticed that there were labels every meter on
everything, and asking Alka, she pointed to water and waste pipes, data
lines, power lines, gas lines, high-pressure atmosphere redistribution
pipes, the list of what it took to run one small section of the facility
rattled off and illustrated in cables of green and yellow, pipes of red
and blue. Xing pulled out his camera and took close-ups of a section of
the wall, and then a long backward shot down the hallway through which
they had come.

Alka pulled up her PADD and showed him a cutaway view. "This is where we
are, in crew transit tunnel number four. This is the main access tunnel,
which is currently closed to us because there's a team installing power
conditioners to buffer power needs in this section, where we're going.
They're going to need them soon, because we're building six starships
just as quickly as we're building the station. That's where we're
going. The shipyards."

"You don't have a shipyard separate from the station?" he asked,
surprised. It seemed odd to him, as if one could go to the airport and see
airplanes being assembled on the tarmac. On reflection, he realized that
most spaceports on Earth were still assembly grounds, where the components
that make up a spacecraft were put together on-site before being launched.

"We plan on having one. The initial design for a separate facility called
Pelcityr has been published and is now going through the vetting process.
But for now, we have Parma, and the same tools used to build this station
are used to build starships, so in the meantime, this is where we build
starships."

"That makes sense. One does not use the same tools to build an airport
that one uses to build an airplane, but an airport is not made to fly. A
spaceport, I imagine, has many of the same needs as a spaceship."

"All but the engines," she agreed. "We even have the same weaponry."

"Weaponry?" he asked. "Parma is armed?"

"We don't know what kind of galaxy we have out there," she said,
"So we've made sure that Parma can defend itself. It is, after all,
a sentient being in its own right. The AI that lives here cannot
conveniently leave in a moment of trouble."

Xing digested both bits of news with a feeling of dissonance. "I am
walking around inside the guts of a Pendorian citizen."

"You are," Alka agreed, and Xing gave her a pained expressed. "Just be
glad he doesn't have gastric juices. Or a need to consume flesh." She
gave him a wicked grin and he tried to respond in kind. The notion of
the AI of Parma being an eater of flesh did not improve his disposition
over the station. "Hey, Ossian, are you there?"

"Always," a voice responded, droll and patient in its demeanor. "What
can I do for you, Alka?"

"I just wanted to introduce you to our guest from Earth. Have you spoken
to Xing Kanarak yet?"

"I have not," the voice replied. "But I am pleased to make you
acquaintance, Xing Kanarak," Ossian responded calmly.

"And I to make yours," Xing said before realizing with surprise that the
AI had been speaking Mandarin to him. And he had responded in kind. "I'm
surprised that you speak Mandarin. Some of the AIs I have met could not."

"It is a difficult language, yes," Ossian replied. "But my duty is to be
an administrator to the gateway through which all people visiting this
solar system's residential neighborhoods will pass, and I am attempting
to learn as many languages as I can." Xing thought for certain that the
pause that followed was to stifle a yawn. Did AIs yawn?

"But, couldn't you just transfer the knowledge from another AI?" he asked.

"No, it does not work that way for AIs. We can incorporate much knowledge
and use it quickly. Vocabulary, grammar rules, and the like can be
transmitted from one AI to another. But the use of the language, the way
something is spoken colloquially, can only be learned from experience."

"I see," Xing said. "Thank you for that explanation."

"You're very welcome. Now, if you will excuse me, my attention is needed
elsewhere."

"Bye, Ossian," Alka replied.

They continued, careful hand over careful hand, until they reached yet
another bulkhead. This one was again a circular doorway that seemed to
roll away in one direction, a curiosity in a place with no gravity,
but Xing thought there must be some technical superiority reason for
that kind of motion. Alka floated ahead into a darkened room. He followed.

"By my father...!" Xing could not restrain himself. The sight before
his eyes was astounding.

One entire wall of the large room in which they floated was a window out
into space. Sunlight blazed in that space, reflecting off six enormous
vehicles that were nothing like the spherical starships in which he had
traveled from Earth to Pendor. Four were elongated, rectangular shapes
with a flared tail that suggested to Xing a heavy sword in a scabbard more
than anything else. Each was a different color, and on the side of two he
could see clearly a blazoned shield of deep blue with a ring-and-star logo
on a stellar background peppered with nine shining, standout stars. The
other two were like the four in general shape, but the main body of the
ship was a hollow space with only a lattice framework holding it together.

"That's our initial fleet," she said. "The spherical ships were good
enough, but some discoveries and refinements have led to these. They can
make the trip in three and a half months instead of six and some. What
you can see there are two cargo ships, two warships, and two general
purpose transport vessels. This is just what we're keeping for Earth
to Pendor transit. When these are done, we're going to work on six more
fitted specifically for exploration. But we needed to get commerce with
Earth up and running."

Alka stared out into the blackness. Each ship hung in an enormous
framework of its own, a framework with robotic crane arms, each of
which must have been hundreds of meters long. One wall of the framework
was closed, complete, and there were windows here and there. His eyes
could just barely pick out a tiny, man-shaped figure clambering over
one of the warships Alka had indicated, accompanied by a pair of large,
hulking robotic shapes. From here, the construction party looked like
an ant and two beetles attempting to scale a full-sized bus.

He stopped to take pictures. Hundreds of them. He understood why Alka
had had the lights turned off in here. It let him take the photographs
without worrying about glare from the window, although he had been
notably impressed by the glare-free quality of much of Pendor's glass.

"Why do you need two warships?" he asked.

Alka floated closer to the glass. Xing took a moment to admire her form
beneath the one-piece jumpsuit before attempting to put that thought away.
"One for here, one to keep in orbit near Earth." That made him look up to
her face. "Because our people are vulnerable down on your planet. One of
those ships could end any war on your planet in a matter of days. We hope.
We have robotic troops, great battlefield information, and no experience
whatsoever, so we're likely to be very strong and somewhat clumsy in
our response. I don't think you want that."

"No," he agreed, understanding now that Pendorian good will was going
to be backed up with some of the biggest guns Earth had ever seen, and
people who prided themselves on the competence to use them correctly but
with the full knowledge that they lacked the experience that came with
them. It was one of the many paradoxes of Pendor that he had noticed. They
were better-equipped, better-educated, and more wisely motivated than
many a general or politician, but they were on constant guard against
their own inexperience, which was their biggest problem. A thoughtful,
well-intentioned, but clumsy Goliath.

"Can I visit one of the ships?" he asked, coming back to the subject
outside the windows.

"The general purpose ship number one can be visited," said Ossian's voice.
"It is mostly deserted at this time, as the crew that was building it
has moved on to number two, and the interior engineering and decor teams
have not completed muster yet. There is a skeleton team of engineers in
the rear of the vessel, but that is it."

Alka said, "Then let's do it." She indicated yet another doorway, which
he followed her through.

The next room over was as unfinished as the one they had just occupied.
Cables and pipes wormed through the room with no apparent purpose, and
a duct large enough to permit two men side-by-side pumped air into the
room as a gentle breeze. But what caught Xing's attention was the first
standalone SDisk he had ever seen. It was like many of the SDisks he
had seen, flat and about a meter across, but this one was not mounted to
anything. It was a temporary measure, hooked up to the station's power
supply by a thick cable that plugged into the wall. The wallside of the
plug, he noticed, had a hook-and-cage mechanism over the plug itself;
it would not be coming out by accident. "Alka? Is there a danger if
the SDisk should become unplugged during transport?" He indicated the
doubly-redundant plug assembly.

"Not that I know of. It is an expensive operation in power to create an
SDisk, and they require a certain amount of low-level constant power
to operate or else the system stops working and has to be rebuilt, so
maybe that's just to keep the power on." She paused. "Then how do they
move the SDisk around?"

"Are you asking me?"

"No, just trying to figure it out." She shrugged. "Anyway, let's go
visit that ship." She put her hand on the SDisk; in the low gravity it
would have been hard to arrange anything more elegant. Xing joined her
and in a second they were floating in blackness.

"Lights!" Alka shouted. The lights came on, revealing what had to be one
of the largest rooms Xing had ever been in. It was a cube fully forty
meters on a side. The walls were peppered with small, welded rings, cargo
tie-downs and the like. The SDisk they hovered against was certainly
not a temporary one, welded as it was to the surface. Xing started to
feel disoriented. His brain insisted that he was in a normal position--
he had become used to working in low gravity-- but his eyes told him
that if this was the SDisk, he must be lying on the floor.

He straightened up out of habit and immediately shot into the cargo room.
"Xing!" Alka called.

"Help!" He was floating away and there was no way for him to get back
down again. Someone was listening, however, because a basketball-size
drone floated out from somewhere and in a controlled fashion came to a
stop near Xing. It had a handgrip. He took it. The ball jetted towards
Alka, dragging him along, and he went willingly.

"There," Alka said. "Now, don't do that again."

"I have no intention of doing that again. Where are we?"

"Cargo deck one," the ball said in Ossian's controlled tones. "There
is no shipboard AI yet, but several are being built to take over minor
tasks planetside while their elders are considered for volunteers. There
are a number of volunteers."

"I... see." He watched Alka's grin. "So, is there anything of interest
on this ship to show me?"

"Everything," Alka replied with a smile. "But I know what you mean. Let's
go see. We'll start at the bridge."

Xing agreed readily. On the ship he had taken from Earth, the bridge was
one of the parts that he had not been allowed to visit. He had been told
that they were cramped and professional affairs and that accommodating
guests would not be practical. He had accepted that at the time.

She led him down hallways that were clearly meant to be used only during
freefall. He wondered how this ship would handle the apparent gravity
from acceleration needed for their non-FTL maneuvering. He also had
trouble keeping his eyes from her lithe, feline form as she navigated
the handholds with acrobatic ease.

This bridge was not what they had described to him. It was quite the
opposite-- large and laid out so that people could maneuver comfortably.
It was also designed more along the lines of a NASA ship, with equipment
everywhere. "I thought you were going to build spheres again."

"There's discussion going on. We have several large living- space drums
for the crews, but these ships will be mostly about cargo. Personnel
transport ships are being built after these."

Xing satisfied himself that he had taken enough pictures and they
headed back down into the ship itself. The walls were a dull grey in
color, and for the most part the hallways were rectangular affairs with
rounded corners and handholds everywhere. The colors chosen were those
of the construction material and not that of an interior decorated by
professionals. That got him thinking.

"How... how will you decorate these walls? The starship I traveled
in, and the Ranch ship especially, was very utilitarian. You had very
comfortable sleeping quarters, but the hallways and many of the common
rooms were painted in the colors one might find in a prison."

Alka gave him her downloading pause for a moment and then said, "We
actually brought a lot of that back with us from Terra. It was one of
the few things we could get in the short month we were there. Apparently,
that was one of the few things that Shardik recommended we buy on library
and distribute the same way-- according to library rules as in the United
States, where we bought them. It's difficult; it means that only one
person at a time may actually possesses the material, a strange concept
to us, but we're abiding by it until we can negotiate a better deal."

"So, you're guessing what works based on past experience. These are
working ships, however. From what I have seen of your cabins, you would
appoint them as if this were a cruise ship and expect that level of
maintenance out of the crew.

Alka nodded. "Probably."

They wandered throughout the ship. Alka showed him everything he asked
for, including Engineering, where a group of Pendorians looked up with
curiosity before realizing that Alka and Xing were working just as
much as they were, then assisting him by explaining to him whatever
he pointed at.  He shot thousands of pictures, rationalizing that the
editorial team back on Earth would want every one of them.

They stopped in the rotating sections, which Xing found curious in their
lock-down positions. "Sometimes I still feel as if I'm in a movie."

Alka grinned. "Sometimes I wonder when your movies will catch up with
reality." She floated past him to the center spindle. "Come on." He
followed her into the tunnel and down into another rotating section,
this one obviously decked out as sleeping quarters. "There's a crew of
24 on a ship like this," she said, counting out fourteen rooms. "Eleven
pairs, captain, first officer, and medical." The drum was little more
than a hallway to the attached rooms and was narrow enough that fully
stretched Xing could touch both walls.

He took more pictures, taking care to get extra photos of sickbay. "I
would have thought that it would be more restful for recovering patients
to sleep in zero-G. As well as the rest of your crew."

Again the download pause. "More restful, maybe. Healthful, no. The
internal workings of your cells don't grow correctly without gravity.
Cells have an internal latticework of fibers that keep internal operations
separate and maintain the cell's shape. Without gravity, that latticework
doesn't form; it has no expectation to. And you have no idea how difficult
it is to do surgery in zero-gravity. It's nearly impossible to deal with
heavy bleeding. Imagine trying to work on someone as the blood bubbles
into a balloon held together only by surface tension, and when it breaks
it keeps traveling until it hits something."

Xing gulped. It was a gruesome image and he preferred not to think about
it. But she had a point. The necessity of some kind of acceleration
became clear to him.

She gave him her prettiest smile. "Hey, let me show you the landing bay.
And then we'll head back to Parma."

He followed towards what he thought was the middle of the ship. "Ring,"
she said. "I was hoping they would have ships in here."

Instead, the hanger bay had only the clamps, cranes and cradles necessary
for four smaller ships, Xing saw. "Since Earth knows that you have SDisks
now, why bother with ships?"

"Because," she said patiently, "We can't SDisk to a place without a
receiving disk. But with one of these, we can go anywhere in your solar
system in a matter of days."

They left the ship and headed back to Parma. She led him into one
of the more populated sections of the station, still without gravity
of any source. "Populated" may have been something of a misnomer, he
thought; it meant that one person had walked by as he sat and reviewed
the pictures he had taken on his loaner PADD and sorted, cataloged,
and annotated the images.

"So," she said as he reached the end of his task, "Ready to do something
relaxing?"

"What could be more relaxing than this?"

She grinned. "True enough. But is following your calling really the
only way to relax?" she asked, reaching out and stroking his cheek with
one finger.

He looked up at her with something of a smile. "You are being a flirt
again," he said.

"You started this," she said softly. She pulled her hand back. "I'm
sorry."

"Are you doing what you think is right?" Xing asked, "Or are you just
doing what you desire?"

"Both," Alka said. "I really like you, Xing. But I want to show it in
ways that you... you would probably think are inappropriate.

"Are they inappropriate for you?" he asked.

She didn't say anything. It was a rhetorical question anyway.

He said, "I want to go back to Earth and start my life over. Trying
to leave it behind was a mistake." He looked up at her. "I will never
understand why, as the shortest person on the Geographic team, I was
assigned the tallest member of the guide staff."

Alka giggled. "Don't ask me that, either. I imagine that there was
something other than physical compatibility in mind when they did that."

He nodded, and then, awkwardly, stepped closer to her. "If I were to
accept your inappropriate offer, Alka, would we be able to actually
do anything?"

"Actually, yes," she said. "Those parts of us are compatible."

Xing sighed. Then shook his head. "Would you be upset if I told that I
did not think it would be the right thing?"

"No," Alka replied. "No, you have your own values, Xing. I can't change
them, and I'm not going to tempt you to."

He nodded. "Alka? I think it would be better if..."

"If we were just friends?" She giggled.

"I would not have put it so badly."

"You would probably have had trouble find an alternative."

He thought about that. "You're probably right."

"No, I don't mind at all if we're 'just friends.' I know that you've got
your own life, and from what you told me on the trip you're going to be
spending a lot of time putting it back together. It would be unfair of
me to get in the way of that. I'd like to be your friend. So long as
you remember that it's my job to show you around. And don't forget to
call me when we get to Earth."

"I'll do both. I won't forget, I mean."

She surprised him with a laugh and a hug. He returned the hug chastely.
"Thanks, Alka."

"You're welcome," she said with a smile. "Let's go get something to eat.
We haven't had a bite in nearly six hours."

Xing looked at his watch. "Please. Lead the way."

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Original document is available from:
http://www.drizzle.com/~elf/journals

The Journal Entries of Kennet R'yal Shardik, et. al., and Related Tales
are Copyright (c) 1989-2000 Elf Mathieu Sternberg. Distribution limited
to electronic media not-for-profit use only. All other rights are reserved
to the author.
