Post by Cy Skywalker on Feb 13, 2007 13:13:55 GMT -5
End of Innocence
The palace-analog of the spacer technocracy was hung with red carpets, pricelessly woven with a multitude of hot colors.
I looked at that screen and felt my eyes widen as if taking in the color, as if imprinting. All of the other screens were dominated by the matte gray space-station walls. Only one lived.
I focused on one gray hallway and keyed voice projection. "Baron Kothen, you’ll just have to step to the left to be cleared."
The camera was perched in a corner, so Bob Kothen, money-baron, had to scowl around to try to find me up in the security booth. I didn’t feel like explaining politely to an Earthling, again, just how much their TVs let them escape. "You’ve heard of the aliens, yeah? One can liquefy human insides and substitute its own nervous system in about four seconds. They evolved it as an art form."
I hate that part. The things are so much smarter than we are. They, shall I illustrate, developed fire and Shakespeare at the same time. Their senses can be keener, their morals more twisted than humans'. Aliens; extra-solar amorphous predator-artists, and Kothen promptly followed the corridor to his screening.
While they X-rayed him, questioned and prodded and took blood, I worked my way down to what was called the throne room.
That particular room sat on the edge of the ISR hoop and had gravity. Admin Race waded through it as she came forward across the red carpet toward Baron Kothen. Her yellow, loose garments tugged at her fleshy body. I stood in the doorway like my more present counterparts, the guards, though my stance was much less secure.
The two rich, indulgent humans, Earthling and spacer, muttered together for long enough that I grew bored. They were discussing, as a thousand times before people had discussed this so amicably, whether a truce could be written between the spacers and those who remained on the planet which would keep both happy and unite them against the alien threat. Because the station admin is my mother, I have the authority to listen to most of her conversations, or to leave them when I want--but not to get used to gravity.
I had never thought of it that way before and considered the impact as I shakily walked down the hallway beside the grand room. Of course she wouldn’t want me losing what made me a good little spacer; the naturalness to microgravity, the penchant for geometry and for matte gray, the love for that blue-green-white-brown marble of a planet and not for how many lights dusted it at night.
The International Space Ring and the other stations have enough weapons power to kill all the Earthlings. Most suspect this, too. Robotics is our mainstay--little things that could pick off the humans and leave the soil. We won’t use them. We don’t want to, and admin mom has told me her closest reasons for that, so I know that there really are reasons more powerful than the coldwarring politics the moneybarons do.
A room in the hall had color which it had never had before. It caught my eye as I passed. Purple scarf, lit TV, white-blonde hair on the head of a girl who wore a white jumpsuit and watched one source of color while wearing the other. I leaned in. The girl didn’t look up, but a gray-suited guardsman standing at the near corner of the small room did.
He said, "Security clearance?"
"Yes," I said, and pointed to the patch on my arms that marked me as Security. That he didn’t know me and that he didn’t reply in jesting kind when I wobbled as if unsure how to walk on the floor, told me that he was new the station. Probably a defector, still learning how to swim. I asked, "Who is she?"
"The Baron Kothen’s daughter. She had stayed on his shuttle, but wanted to see the station."
I muttered, "She’s not seeing much of it."
The child looked up then. "No. I don’t like it so far."
"No colors, right?" I said.
The child nodded. "And bad reception."
I laughed. And I sensed a chance to evangelize. "I’ll show you around."
"Who are you?"
Pause. "A born spacer."
The bright scarf followed me up the corridors. I let her peek inside the reception rooms and hangers. She watched with wide blue eyes when we started up the hub and the gravity started to go just as the window appeared around the corner. We smiled at Earth.
I showed her the places where the spacers really live; the game rooms and refectory and library. She asked where I stayed.
I showed her my room and then, on a whim, asked if she wanted to see the master screens. They’d show her all the station. I did not say what else Security controlled, only made sure she was occupied with learning to float when I keyed in the code to my office. She looked at the gray screens, every one, and at the red one. She was not overly quiet; I taught her to swim and she laughed at the somersaults, at how same the hallway looked from what her mind held on to as upsidown. She told me some about her ride up from Earth, about how she was surprised there were so many things in the space around Earth that it almost looked like a suburb.
When we exited that room I left her by the door for a moment while I used the bathroom. I came back and she was there, smiling as she waved her arms carefully and tested how far she would float. I felt this strange mix of things, like wouldn’t the aliens stop wanting us if they saw this innocence.
I left her with the guard and the TV again, convinced that I had gotten my good deed in for the day.
Mother and Kothen were finishing their discussion over a tense pot of tea when I returned. Just as I stopped and stood behind his shoulder mother’s bracelet computer toned, and she asked it what had happened with even more tenseness piling on to her face. I hoped Kothen didn’t allow himself to look pleased at her discomfort.
She looked up at me. "Your computer just told me the keypad code was changed. Did you do this?"
"No..."
She dialed the tech experts. They came into my system from another side and said
nothing could be done, the lock was locked, it was practically rewritten from the first code sequence, there were some initializations in sectors of my jurisdiction that looked suspiciously like they’d be passed as commands to the armed section of the security force for ISR, and they’d be passed as reasons for aggressives to be launched at Earth. No one could get in now to stop it in time, either.
Had I done this?
No, ma’am. Words rushed through my head. No ma’am I had not just broken the truce and sent who knows what down on the fertile Earth. I had not passed judgment. My analytic mind rushed through possible breaches.
"Administrator, only...only the baron’s daughter and I entered the security room this afternoon. Neither of us touched anything." Only I left her alone by that door."
Silence for a moment, then the Baron Kothen gasped. The man stopped, and turned around, looked directly at me and said slowly and perhaps, sadly, "No, I’m sorry, you must be mistaken. I don’t have a daughter."
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This was written for English IV. The prompt was, the story had to end with the lines "The man stopped, and turned around, looked directly at me and said slowly and perhaps, sadly, "No, I’m sorry, you must be mistaken. I don’t have a daughter."". There were no other restrictions.
