At a certain point in the trip up the beanstalk, Marce was aware that his (fake) hair felt like it was being pressed down onto his scalp. He mentioned this to his seatmate, who nodded but didn’t look up from whatever he was reading on his tablet. “Push field,” he said, then went back to his reading.
Marce nodded to himself. Push fields were humanity’s best approximation for artificial gravity, in which objects were pushed on from “above”—whatever “above” was in any particular scenario—rather than pulled on from below, as gravity was generally understood to work. The physics of push fields were discovered accidentally. Researchers back on Earth had tried to work out the problem of shaping a small bubble of local space-time around a starship in order to take advantage of the then newly discovered Flow, and ended up taking a lot of side detours in the math. Most of these detours offered nothing of any benefit, but one of them did, and it was pressing on Marce’s hair.
Marce looked up and found the push field generator tubes, running down the length of the passenger compartment like fluorescent lighting. He of course understood the physics of the push field, since it was a consonant subset of the Flow physics. But he’d never been off End. He’d never experienced one. As he was experiencing it now, he found it slightly unsettling. He didn’t like what basically felt like a giant hand pressing down on his head and shoulders, and he didn’t like how it made his fake hair lay on his scalp. He looked around the compartment and noted there was a reason why most of the experienced crew kept their hair either very short or in tightly wrapped braids and queues.
From the beanstalk now to Imperial Station, which featured a rotating ring section for the marines and imperial staff who stayed at the station long term, and a separate merchant section managed by push fields, where visiting ships unloaded and managed their cargo. Marce and the other crew got out in the merchant area, and he immediately understood why long-term residents would prefer to live in the ring. The push fields here, set to a standard G, were almost intolerably pushy.
As Marce and the rest of the crew were led to the crew muster area for the Yes, Sir, he saw a collection of people in the cargo hold, waiting. Those would be the Yes, Sir’s passengers, he knew, with whom he would have been, if Ghreni Nohamapetan hadn’t kidnapped him and marked him. The passengers certainly didn’t look like refugees. They looked like what they were—wealthy people. They were milling with their children and their stacks of cargo at a thousand marks a kilo as if they were about to have an adventure, rather than flee a planet forever.
Despite the fact that he fully intended to be one of them, Marce managed to feel resentment toward them, toward the people who could, in fact, leave their problems behind through the simple application of money.
Well, you’re a hypocrite, his brain told him. Well, maybe he was. But then again he wasn’t leaving to escape. He was leaving because someone needed to tell the emperox, and then explain to the parliament and everyone else, how the end was coming. That person just happened to be Marce.
Nope, still a hypocrite, his brain said. Then they were out of the cargo area and into a tunnel, funneling them toward the muster area and a shuttle.
A final check of papers and thumbprint and the shuttle detached from Imperial Station to the Yes, Sir. Again there were no windows—windows were a positive hazard in the blank vacuum of space—but this time Marce could access a camera feed from his tablet. He did so and saw the Yes, Sir hone into view, a long tube with two rotating rings, an ungainly but strangely beautiful object. His home for the next nine months.
“What a fucking hole,” his seatmate said, looking at Marce’s tablet screen.
“I think it’s beautiful,” Marce said.
“Looks pretty from a distance. But I’ve friends who have crewed Lagos ships before. They all have problems. House of Lagos is cheap. They run their ships until they fall apart and only repair them when the alternative is exploding. They scare me.”
“And yet you’re here, about to crew a Lagos ship.”
“I was going to crew on the Tell Me Another One, but it’s been impounded. Captain let pirates take her cargo, I heard. Switched over. Last-minute add. Worth it. Things are going to hell on End.”
“The rebels.”
The man nodded. “That and the other thing. About the Flow streams.”
“What?” Marce said. He set down the tablet and gave his full attention to his seatmate.
“A friend of mine who crews on the Tell Me—the one who was getting me the gig on it—said they dropped out of the goddamn Flow stream halfway here and only barely made back in before they were stranded forever. He’s got another friend who told him this wasn’t the first time. Flow streams are getting spotty all over the goddamn place. It’s only a matter of time before the shit really drops. I sure as hell don’t want to be on End when it does. I’m from Kealakekua. I’m going home.”
“This is the first I’ve heard about this,” Marce said.
“You haven’t shipped in the last few years, then. Everyone who crews has heard the rumors.”
“Just rumors.”
“Sure, just rumors, but what the hell else are they going to be?” the man said, irritably. “It can take five years for a piece of news to go from one end of space to the other, and the story’s going to change in the telling. So you don’t listen to the story. You listen to the pattern. And right now, the pattern is, weird fucking shit going on with the Flow.”
“The guilds know about this, then.”
The man looked at Marce like he was an idiot. “They don’t want to know. A ship goes in the Flow and doesn’t come out and they say, oh, pirates got them before they could report in. Or there was some problem shaping the bubble inside the Flow and they just disappeared in it. There’s always an explanation that doesn’t mean the Flow is the problem. They don’t want to believe it. And if they don’t believe it, then who is going to tell the Interdependency? You? Me? Like they’re fucking going to believe us.”
“They might.”
“Well, you try it and let me know. What I’m going to do is go home. I got kids. I want to see them again.”
There was a thump and the shuttle landed in the Yes, Sir’s bay.
“You’re not worried that something might happen to this ship on the way out,” Marce said, while they waited for the air to be pumped back into the bay.
“I figure this ship is safe. I didn’t want to hang around after that.”
“Why not?”
“My friend on the Tell Me’s heard that this stream—the one out of End—is getting shaky.”
“How so?”
“How do I know? It’s a rumor, man. They don’t come up with a science report. But my friend is anxious about it. He even considered jumping ship and coming with us. But the Tell Me’s whole crew is grounded for legal depositions and he didn’t know where to get reliable forged IDs. It’s hard to fool the biometrics.”
“I’ve heard.”
The man nodded. “So he’s stuck. And he’s worried he’s going to be stuck here forever.”
“There are worse places to be stuck than End,” Marce said.
The man snorted at this. “An open planet is no place for humans. Give me a decent ring habitat any day.”