Freefall Read online

  If I’d thought the Peace Corp. was out in force when we got off the train, I was unprepared for the solid mass of white uniforms that guarded the entrance to the UN headquarters. They’d set up a cordon right outside, and they were herding the Lowerworld delegates—none too gently, it seemed to me—through a metal detector. Some of the Lowerworlders beeped when they walked through, and the Peace Corp. yanked them from line, swiping their bodies with handheld scanners. The bracelets and necklaces many of the visitors wore seemed to be the worst offenders. But some people without the proper credentials tried to force or slip their way through, and the Peace Corp. weren’t having any of that—the gate crashers ended up being marched away under heavy guard. Off to one side, a small group of protestors waved signs I couldn’t read and chanted in languages I couldn’t understand. But to me, the chants sounded ugly, the unknown words hurled like threats. I guess the Peace Corp. agreed, because they had their guns out where they could use them in a hurry. Taking in the whole setup, I realized there was no way we’d get into the building.

  “Griff . . .”

  “Relax,” he said.

  We stood in line, approaching the metal detector. When we got to the front, Griff held up a codebar and the guard scanned it, then nodded us through. He didn’t bat an eye at our street clothes or pale faces.

  “What the hell?” I whispered.

  “My dad’s MasterCode,” he said. “It’s everywhere you need to be.”

  I shook my head and laughed. I’d never understood exactly what Griff’s dad did, other than being involved in top-secret technical operations for the JIPOC starfleet. But apparently the man had access to everything. I wondered if I should have asked him to help me find the girl instead of bothering with his son.

  With the motley crowd pushing and shoving at our back, we entered the building. The cracked marble floor of the front lobby echoed the delegates’ jabber. Worldlink lenses hovered around the lobby, clicking and whirring—most of them with the familiar logos of Upperworld corponations, but a few with letters that looked like the handwritten signs the crowd had held in that first video I’d seen months before. Peace Corp. officers filled the place, their guns in holsters, but they made no move to stop us as we approached the council chamber.

  Wooden doors opened into a large, crowded auditorium, crumbling like everything else. Some seats still existed, lopsided and chewed by time, but most people were standing on what had once been carpet but had worn away almost entirely to bare flooring. A balcony hung overhead, precarious with all the bodies filling it. At the front of the room a long, curved table sat under spotlights, many of them dead or flickering, so there were patches of light and shadow on the people seated at the table. Some of the panelists were dressed like Lowerworlders, while others wore the suits and ties of corponation execs. I was a little surprised—though relieved—to see that Adrian’s dad had decided not to attend the symposium. All of the panelists had mikes, but with the roar of the crowd and the condition of the sound system, I couldn’t make out what they were saying. Probably most of them weren’t speaking English. Throughout the room, I saw hookups for the worldlink, so I knew the event was being streamed live. Still, it seemed to me that the corponational leaders who’d set up this symposium couldn’t have had too high an opinion of it, or too much faith in its outcome, if they’d decided to hold it in an old-world tenement like this.

  The room stank with bodies. I strained over colorful hats and halos of curly hair, but there was no sign at the speakers’ table of Sumati or the girl. Maybe they hadn’t come. Maybe they’d only been the ones to set this up, and now other Lowerworld reps had taken their place. Maybe, at that, the whole thing was a sham, a PR move like Griff had said. With all the color and noise and electricity in the room, it sure made great video.

  Then there came a loud rustle from the crowd, voices and robes murmuring in confused excitement. Lights flickered above the stage as they struggled to come on. Lenses wheeled to a hidden doorway behind the speakers’ table. I caught a flash of white, followed by purple. Sumati’s bodyguards trooped in and arranged themselves at the foot of the stage, while the girl led Sumati to a seat at the table.

  I could hardly believe it. She was there, not thirty meters from where I stood. She’d been staring at me for months from half a world away, and now, if it hadn’t been for the mob between us, I could practically have caught her eye.

  The crowd erupted. Cheers, whistles, feet stamping. Some people in the balcony let out what sounded like boos, but when I looked up at their beaming faces I realized that must be their form of applause. Sumati sat heavily, but the girl remained standing for a moment longer, smiling in the spotlights, the fold of her purple robe tucked in one hand while she raised her other to the crowd. The Lowerworld delegates at the table stood and applauded. Some of them bowed, while others performed an elaborate hand gesture I had trouble following and no luck deciphering. The girl acknowledged them with a nod before sitting. Her exotic eyes swept the audience, piercing me where I stood, and the red jewel on her forehead flashed a message I longed to read.

  Griff nudged me. I turned to see his smile.

  “They sure know how to work a room, don’t they?” He raised fingers to his mouth and blew a loud, shrill whistle.

  I clapped and cheered, swept up in it, vowing that somehow, before this day was over, I would meet the girl. Talk to her.

  And learn what she’d been trying to tell me at last.

  Otherworld

  Earth Year 3151

  Night

  I don’t know how long I run, but finally the halfway rational part of my brain tells me it’s pointless to keep going. The Freefall lies out of sight, out of reach. Even if I could find it in the fog, its hull will be white hot from atmospheric entry, and I’ll never be able to get inside. By the time it’s safe to approach, daytime will have come again, and I’d need radiation gear to make the trek.

  We’ve traveled trillions of kilometers, Sofie and me. I’m far closer to her than I dreamed of being again. But she’s still impossibly far away.

  Adrian pulls up by my side, panting, sweat pouring from his face. He’s ditched his helmet too. The beam of his flashlight shines uselessly against the fog. He glares into the distance as if the invisible ship is an affront to his own abortive colony. His mouth opens, and I hear his distorted voice through the air: “Goddamn Lower-lifes . . .”

  Without saying a word, I haul off and punch him in the face.

  The punch, a right cross, is strong enough to knock his mask askew and make blood spurt from his nose. He’s staggered for a second, but then he straightens, arm reaching back, and at first I think he’s grabbing for his gun. Instead, the fist holding the flashlight whips forward and collides with my jaw. My head rings, and I’m knocked to my knees. Adrian was always bigger and stronger than me, a power hitter where I batted for average—and my left arm, much as I’ve trained it, turns out to be too weak to fend off his fists. For all I know, he’s been splurging on nanoroids while I was recovering my strength in the weight room. Before I can regain my feet, he crashes into me and lands straddling my chest, pinning me with his knees so his arms are free to batter my face.

  “Let me go!” I yell, blood flying from my mouth, trapped by the plastic mask. My tongue feels swollen double, and the words come thickly, painfully. “Get off of me, you asshole!”

  I buck upward with all my strength, and he falls away. I scramble to get my feet under me, but I receive a kick in the temple instead. The world goes up and over and down, and I land with it.

  My shoulder throbs. My head aches. I have trouble focusing on Adrian as he stands above me. I think my eyes are swelling shut, too.

  “She’s here,” I say dizzily. “I have to find her.”

  “You make me sick,” he says, and lifts his mask to spit bloody saliva in my face. “You and your Lowerworld lover.”

  I go for him one last time, but I have no strength in my legs. He leans down and backhands me so hard I fee
l like my jaw’s been broken.

  “I told you, brother,” Adrian breathes, pressing the back of his hand against his mask to stanch his bloody nose. “Back on Earth, I told you to let the Lower-lifes alone. But you couldn’t keep your hands off that Lowerworld bitch.”

  I try to curse him, but all that comes from my swollen mouth are blood and spit.

  “Now we’re all here together,” Adrian says. “But you’re not going to screw things up anymore. We’re going to take what we need from the Lowerworld ship and leave them to rot on this place like they should have on Earth. And you’re not going to see your little girlfriend ever again.”

  He takes a step until he looms above me. My eyesight’s blurring badly, but I see something rising behind him out of the mist, something shadowy and much bigger than either of us, with spindly arms that stir the darkness. The shadow splits, or possibly it’s another figure appearing behind the first. The arms reach for Adrian, more arms than it seems two creatures should have, and a thought flickers through my hazy mind.

  Underground. That’s why we couldn’t find them. They live underground.

  But my mouth won’t form the words, and there’s no time to warn him. He’s leaning toward me, pulling his arm back. Smiling.

  The shadows swarm.

  I watch his fist coming at me, but I don’t remember the impact.

  Earth, 2150

  Upperworld

  She was telling a story, in her precise, lilting English.

  “We have traveled a long way to your city, your world,” she said, while worldlink transmitters reeled and TranSpeakers hummed in the air all around me. “We feel like voyagers already, emigrants to a new land, though we know we are only visitors and guests. We know as well that the greater voyage that is here contemplated is full of uncertainty, a leap across the stars. It must seem so to you as well?”

  Her voice lifted, making me think she was asking a question. But that might have been her way of speaking.

  “We have a belief in my country,” she went on. No one used the word “country” anymore, much less “belief.” But there was an old-fashioned feel to her words that fit her perfectly. “We believe that this world we inhabit is not the first world to come into being, nor will it be the last. There have been and will be other worlds, more than the drops of rain that fall from the skies, more than the grains of sand that line the seas. These many worlds are nourished by the spirit that rules the cosmos, but they will all be destroyed in their turn, and new worlds will arise from them. Thus we do not mourn things that are no more, for in the end of things we see the same great necessity that has made all that is and ever was.”

  Members of the audience nodded at her words, clasped their hands, bowed low in that peculiar motion I’d seen months ago on the worldlink. Sumati sat silent and motionless by the girl’s side. The corponational reps at the head table frowned and fidgeted in their seats.

  The girl went on, smiling, unfazed by their stares. “None of us knows what transpires when an old world is destroyed and a new one created. Some say that nothing is left but a vast and empty sea, others that a seed of the old world is planted in the soil of eternity and becomes the basis for the new. Some say that the spirit that makes and breaks the universe grows lonely in the solitude of the old world’s ending, and so splits into two selves, male and female, so as to create again.”

  “Good story,” Griff muttered. I couldn’t tell if he was joking.

  “But this we believe,” she continued. Her voice had quieted, and everyone leaned forward to hear her words. “What is created from the old is not the same as what once was. We cannot say what the new world will hold. Might we find that stars rain from the skies, and sun orbits moon, and the life of each of us glows as brightly as the dawn? We cannot say. We can say only that the cycle must continue, forever and ever, until that one day when the light shines all around us, and the supreme consciousness that rules this vast cosmos pierces us to the soul, and the world is like a dream beyond our imagination. This is the day for which we hope, and pray, and struggle. Thank you.”

  She finished, lowering her eyes demurely and bowing her head. The crowd, resting back as if her words had suspended them against the force of gravity, exploded in wild cheers, shouting, hooting, laughter. I hadn’t understood much of what she’d said, but I felt my body shaking with the energy of the room, the power of her presence.

  “Thank you, Miss Patel,” the Upperworld moderator broke into the celebration. He tapped his microphone, the sound thudding through the antiquated speaker system. I realized with a shock that this was the first time I’d heard her last name, or any part of her name. “We appreciate your”—he cleared his throat—“little history lesson. The Upperworld so seldom has the opportunity to hear the quaint folktales of your people.”

  The girl looked up, her face and eyes placid, undisturbed.

  “But our purpose here, as you know, is weightier than that,” the moderator continued. “We are attempting to determine the basis of the Lowerworld unrest, and to prevent its reoccurrence in the future.”

  “As are we,” the girl said.

  “Perhaps you might help us out, then,” the rep from MediTerri jumped in. “What precisely is your plan for quelling the riots that have convulsed the Lowerworld corponations?”

  “Riots, Mr. Chevalier?” she asked.

  “What would you prefer we call them?” the rep from SubCon said in a voice that barely disguised her loathing.

  “There are a great many things one might call them,” the girl said. “But we call them demonstrations. Lawful demonstrations, such as we know were common in the old world, when law was not the forgotten concept it is today. Demonstrations in which not one member of the Upperworld has been threatened or harmed, though I regret that the same cannot be said for the Lowerworlders who have given their lives in the quest for justice.”

  The final word echoed through the chamber, which then fell silent. The moderator looked up angrily, but his expression shifted when he saw a collection of worldlink lenses aimed directly at him.

  “Very well, then, Miss Patel,” he said. “Perhaps you can clarify for us the conditions under which we might expect these demonstrations to end.”

  “Grant us passage on the starship fleet when it leaves this planet for worlds unknown at precisely oh-nine-hundred hours on midsummer’s day of the calendar year 2151,” she answered without missing a beat.

  The room stilled. My own breath caught in my throat. Part of me couldn’t believe she’d said it, and part of me couldn’t see why she shouldn’t. By far the biggest part of me, though—the part that spoke through my pounding heart—wondered if it might be possible, if she might actually travel to the new world with me.

  “There’s insufficient room on the starships for even a fraction of the Lowerworld population,” the moderator said, breaking the silence. His splotchy face seemed ready to burst above his too-tight collar. “The Executor is already booked to capacity, and the Freefall is a supply ship, carrying an array of materials essential to our own colonization. The logistics of such an emigration—”

  “We do not ask for wholesale emigration of the Lowerworld populace,” she interrupted. “We know that relatively few of our people can hope to make this journey. We are resolved among ourselves to accept the sacrifices that must be made, and we do not request what is beyond anyone’s ability to provide.”

  “What do you want, then?” he asked in a clipped voice.

  “We want the opportunity to make those decisions ourselves.”

  Again, silence.

  “Miss Patel,” the moderator sighed. “The Otherworld colonization project has been ongoing for much of the present century. You can’t honestly believe it’s possible to alter our plans at a moment’s notice. As it is, Upperworld colonization has been strictly monitored to ensure—”

  “Of course,” she interrupted again, her voice remaining polite. “We appreciate the magnitude of your own decision-making process. We appr
eciate that, according to an intercorponational protocol dated 12 December 2145 and signed on behalf of the chief executive officers of the Upperworld corponations of CanAm, ExCon, MediTerri, and UniVers, as well as by Chairman Conroy of JIPOC”—she produced a document from her robe, the first piece of paper I’d seen in years, and began to read—“ ‘the security of our joint financial interests dictates a tightly restricted colonization factoring into account numerous variables, including but not limited to personal wealth, professional and social status, genetic viability, and ideological orthodoxy—’ ”

  “Miss Patel—”

  “ ‘—and stringently excluding any cross-world contamination through a rigorous pre-screening process to identify and eliminate applicants expressing Lowerworld tendencies, whether hereditary or acquired—’ ”