I imitated him, silently startled to find seams joined with rivets, superglue, solder. I had read of such things only in history surveys. In the Burroughs, as in all the ships that docked there, they only used universal joints and molecular diffusion seams. When I noticed a pair of ancient plates joined with staples and waterproofed with something that looked exactly like a wad of used chewing gum, I decided to stop getting astonished, to avoid short-circuiting my positronic net.
I couldn’t help it, though. The farther Vasily and I went into the labyrinth of passageways and forking paths in the station (it turned out to be much larger on the inside than seemed possible), the looks of the people we passed made the improvised architecture appear almost normal by comparison.
When I first heard this was an independent Romani orbital I may have had the naïve impression that I’d find it full of campfires, mustachioed fiddlers with polka-dotted bandannas around their heads and daggers in their belts, barefoot dancers, knife fights, trained bears—who knows what I was expecting. Anything but this outlandish exhibition of space suits, each more worn-out and patched-up than the last (even the best of them would never have passed muster on the Burroughs; some EVA suits didn’t even appear to have oxygen tanks), and almost without exception virtually coated in monograms, stickers, and buttons from every imaginable source, from ancient Russian stamps celebrating the prehistoric Interkosmos program to logos for the ephemeral Asteroidal Republic of Ceres, not to mention flags and national emblems for every country past and present, from New Botswana to the Valles Marineris Federation on Mars.
Everybody carried their helmets dangling carelessly from their belts, or at best in place but with the faceplates raised. All the same, they seemed ready and able to respond in a matter of seconds if the aging and over-patched station hull suffered a loss of structural integrity.
Some casually nodded at Vasily in passing. A pair of guys, one shaved bald and one with dreadlocks floating like a halo around his head, even exchanged a couple of words with him. It sounded like Standard Anglo-Hispano but with an exotic syntax and substandard pronunciation, and half the words weren’t even in my vocabulary. At least, not with the meanings they seemed to give them.
“Hey, gachó, fresh from the tank?”
“Me likes tu tail, Vas, buratino palsie now?”
“Salve, Jor, what kinda cachorros?”
“Tough monga, Vas, take care tu greenshell. The Old Man te espera.”
During a pause I asked him about this curious language and about the second-rate space suits I saw everywhere, almost all of which looked incapable of doing their job.
He shrugged. “Oh, that. I forget you’re a greenshell. A novato, I mean. A newbie, a newcomer. That’s the old Rom jargon mixed with prison slang. Every subculture creates its own language, and these guys are real good at it. But luckily I speak a little of their dialect, and there’s always a sub-lingua franca that all the sabandijas in the system speak, like Anglo-Hispano for misfits. They’re on top of what’s happening. News spreads faster than light here—not only because of the illegal Web. They already knew I got sprung, and they can see you ain’t just a greenshell, you’re a pozzie—what they call a buratino. And the space suits? Of course they work, believe it or not. Good thing, too. Everything you see here has been holding up to micrometeorites for nearly a century, and they’ve never given it a good maintenance check or overhauled it como Dios manda. Plates are always failing, joints lose their seal, solder splits,” Vasily muttered with another shrug. “Oh, space isn’t what it used to be. But if Magellan could cross the old oceans of Earth in a leaky boat, why should these guys worry? If the hull springs a leak they hold their breath, plug it, and celebrate with home brew. Till it’s time to plug the next leak. At least they’re free here; they don’t pay taxes or serve in any army but their own.”
I didn’t think freedom could make up for some sorts of deprivation, but I didn’t say so. We continued making our way through chambers and corridors until the minutes seemed to turn into hours. The farther we got from the axis, the stronger the centrifugal pseudogravity. The vagrants in space suits began to alternate with small family groups, settled more or less permanently in scattered cubicles on either side of the route we were taking. Now I did begin to see campfires, polka-dot bandannas, and here and there even a pet that seemed to feel as much at home as its masters, both adults and children. I was thankful now that the aliens hadn’t given me a sense of smell. If they smelled anything like as bad as they looked, it was a miracle Vasily’s stomach hadn’t turned inside out like a sock.
Rank-smelling or not, they were all busy with their own affairs (so it seemed) and didn’t give us more than the occasional sidelong glance.
At last we reached a door that had a pair of guards posted in front. With its burnished sheen and solid, mass-produced appearance, the door stood out in that run-down setting.
I recognized the model. I’d have to have been blind not to, given my photographic memory. It was a B-378 reinforced diaphragm hatch from the armored passageway of a Tribuno-class interplanetary destroyer. Knowing this did nothing to help me understand what it was doing here. Even in the chaos of Earth, as we’d always heard it described in comparison to the Burroughs, you assumed a civilian wouldn’t have access to military-grade equipment. Especially not anything this sophisticated.
In the same way, it made no sense to have two sentinels outfitted in Grendel-class combat armor, the flawless finish of their polished mimetic polycarbon contrasting implausibly with the pitiful caricatures of space suits worn by the other station occupants. But in an odd way, standing in front of that door made the two armored giants look more congruous.
The door did not open and the armor-bearing behemoths did not move one nanometer when we showed up. But their array of servo-assisted weapons turned and pointed straight at us. I didn’t find this reassuring.
“Entrance to the Old Man’s quarters,” Vasily whispered nervously. “They’ve always let me through. But now they see me with you—anybody can smell the alien-flunky on you from ten miles away. I really don’t know—”
“Before you say it: don’t even think of trying to give me the slip,” I warned him. “I don’t care if my shell is green or ripe or rotten. I’m your shadow. If they don’t let you in—well, I always thought it was a crazy idea to come all the way from Titan to an Earth orbital to check out a possible lead from some space Methuselah about a hidey-hole in the asteroid belt.”
“Buratino, sometimes the longest way is the only practical one,” Vasily whispered, glancing from the corner of his eye at the guards’ impassive armored hulks. “Man, they’re taking their time checking us out. If all this is just to tell me I’m not welcome around here, they might as well speed it up.”
All of a sudden the two doorkeepers stepped aside with a choreographic precision that displayed their excellent training (one more incongruence: Storm Troopers on the Estrella Rom?). The diaphragm-door yawned wide, its blades overlapping one another as they spun to the outer perimeter of the circle, revealing a long tunnel with a fixed rail along the ceiling from which dangled a number of hold bars. Without hesitation, Vasily passed through and grabbed onto one of the bars with both hands. Again I copied him. The door circled shut behind us. I was not at all prepared for what happened next.