Loka (The Alloy Era), page 2
The others laughed, and I felt the knot in my chest loosen.
Cariana obligingly went first. I lingered for an extra few seconds on the top rungs, taking it all in. I would probably never see this utility tunnel again. Even if I returned to live on the megaconstruct one day, I’d probably be too old to care about clambering around in awkward places.
At the bottom, Huy pushed open the door that let us out into bright late-afternoon light. We all squinted and blinked as our eyes adjusted. Blossoming plum trees surrounded us with their honey-sweet fragrance. Several of Chedi’s ambulatory constructs moved through the plants, delicately collecting and distributing pollen, but one of them sat unmoving. It listed to one side, and I could see that one leg was shorter than the others.
“I’m going to see if I can help that construct,” I told the others. I grabbed my tool kit from the storage pouch on my bike’s frame. “Go ahead without me.”
A chorus of groans rose from my friends. I flashed a grin at them and jogged away.
“You don’t have time!” Huy called after me.
I waved away his comment and headed forward. The soil warmed my knees as I knelt in front of the injured construct. The metal exterior reflected the light from Chedi’s central axis, the only “sunlight” I had ever known.
“Let me look at you,” I murmured.
Chedi’s ambulatory constructs didn’t have minds of their own, but they had basic machine intelligence, including the ability to understand human speech. I examined the malfunctioning leg. The piston mechanism had jammed, probably from all the dust and pollen in the air. I extracted a bottle of lubricant from my kit and squirted some into the joint.
“Try it again,” I said to the construct.
The construct had no way to reply to me except via Chedi, but I didn’t need words to understand what it was doing. After a brief whirring noise, the leg extended to its full height. The construct walked a couple of meters to the nearest tree and reached up its arms to gather pollen from the blossoms. My emchannel alerted me to an incoming message. Chedi had noticed and sent a note of thanks.
I dusted off my leggings with a smile and trotted back to my friends. They had waited for me and were laughing about something when I reached them.
“Satisfied?” Somya asked.
“Yes,” I said blandly. I stowed my kit and straddled my bike.
As soon as we started to pedal, Somya—who was in the lead—called out, “Race you back,” and took off. The rest of us followed, cursing in Somya’s dusty wake. I was tempted to use the electric motor to boost my speed. All four of our bikes had gold photovoltaic paint over their frames and absorbed Chedi’s light to charge their batteries. On our longer excursions, we would alternate between pedaling and motoring to save our strength.
Cariana had been shocked the first time Somya had called a race. That kind of competition belonged to alloy society, not humans, and she had never experienced such transgressive behavior on Earth. We didn’t take the results seriously, though, and after the initial reservations wore off, she had learned to enjoy herself with us. Most of the humans who visited Chedi—including the children—did so while Chedi was passing through the Solar System, and they often chose not to stay for a longer journey. Cariana’s family was one of the exceptions, which probably explained why she was able to tolerate our group’s overt ambition.
I rode in last place, as usual, but I didn’t fall too far behind, which was an improvement over the first few years of biking. Part of the motivation for doing all the riding and ladder climbing was so that I’d keep up my conditioning. The first year I’d tried our so-called Utility Circuit, I could only get halfway up a shaft before exhausting myself. Like my mother, I had genes for sickle-cell disease, but mine had manifested less severely than hers. After three and a half years of exercise, I could ride to and scale all ten of Chedi’s access shafts in one day. My mother approved of my push to get stronger. She told me about the cliffs near Homesite, the tiny human settlement on Meru, and how she had climbed those before I was born. She wanted me strong enough to be able to do the same when we arrived there.
Huy ended up winning our impromptu bike race in spite of Somya’s initial lead. By the time I caught up to the others, small knots of adults had already started to gather in the grahin. The two-story pavilion formed the social center of our village, and that’s where most people preferred to rest during Chedi’s reality transits.
My maker walked up to me and quirked an eyebrow. “Cutting it a bit close.” Curly black hair formed a cloud around zir head, and chromatophores dotted zir bare arms, which glowed green with concern.
Technically, the body that stood before me was my maker’s incarn, a mostly human offshoot of zir true body, which was a massive thing that lived and traveled in space. I’d seen my maker’s true body at least once a year since I was old enough to wear a spacesuit and exit Chedi. When I was small, I accepted my maker’s way of life as a matter of fact. As I got older, I struggled to understand it. Zir true body and zir incarn shared a consciousness. At night, while the rest of us slept, my maker would wake in zir true body and give it nourishment and exercise.
“Your mother is waiting in our room,” my maker said. “She sent me to find you.”
The atmosphere in Chedi matched that of Earth, and my mother had to monitor her activity levels to avoid complications from sickle-cell disease, like pain crises. The first time I was old enough to witness her going through a crisis, I was terrified that she would die. In later years, I feared that it would happen to me, but my genes expressed themselves differently, and I had yet to experience anything besides getting tired faster than my friends. Chedi had built my family an enclosed bedroom with an atmosphere more like Meru’s, with twice the oxygen content of Earth’s atmosphere—much healthier for me and my mother. We’d spend nights in there as needed, usually when my mother was sick or I’d had a strenuous day.
“Wait,” I said, grabbing my maker’s arm. “I was going to make this transit in the rose garden with my friends, remember?”
My sleeve fell back, and apricot light leaked from the chromatophores on my skin. My maker’s eyes narrowed. I hastily covered up and forced my skin back to neutral. Somya was the only person near enough to have seen it, but they already knew my secret.
“I forgot about that,” my maker said. “Do you feel okay? What does your bodym say about your vitals?”
I checked and sent zir the results via emchannel. “All good, see?”
Zie nodded. “Then we’ll see you tomorrow. Rest well.” Then zie flashed in phoric,
I resisted the urge to retort with my own chromatophores. My maker wouldn’t find it amusing, and my sarcasm would unfairly hurt zir. My phores were my mother’s doing. She had promised me since I could remember that she would tell the world about my unusual genes after we were settled on Meru. She had been exiled in part for making me in a womb without proper assistance from a type of alloy known as a tarawan. At the time, only they had license to design and make babies—whether alloy or human—and the judiciary of the Constructed Democracy of Sol hadn’t taken kindly to my mother’s excess ambition. She had confidence that she could safely make me, and she was right, but if people knew that she had given me DNA outside of the Homo sapiens gene pool, she could get into more trouble. Or I could.
In Chedi, I had no one other than my maker to communicate with in phoric. No other alloys lived in the megaconstruct, so my maker had spent many hours in our high-oxygen room teaching me how to communicate with flashes of light, how to interpret colored moods as easily as I did facial expressions. I, in turn, had practiced phoric during my sleepovers with Somya. Their vocabulary was more limited than mine, and they could only reply with speech, but it was enough to feel like a secret language between us.
With another be-careful look, my maker patted my shoulder and walked away. Somya quirked a brow at me. I shrugged. My mother would probably hassle me about the slipup, but I’d deal with that when it happened. She was always lecturing me about something.
DAY -45
When I awoke from the reality-transit sedative, my body felt like it had been rolled between two sheets of rock. While all the humans inside her were unconscious, Chedi had shifted her body to the Solar System. Somya lay on a cushioned mat between me and Huy, both of them still asleep. I sat up, stretched, and slightly regretted my decision to eschew the high-oxygen bedroom with my parents. Remarkably, my mother hadn’t objected to my choice to spend the night outside with my friends. She would probably make an I-told-you-so face if I mentioned my aching muscles, so I resolved to keep them to myself.
The trees around us rustled in a gentle breeze, oblivious to my discomfort. Artificial morning light filtered through their leaves and painted the rosebushes with their shadows. What would sunrise be like on Earth? I’d seen it in immersives and pictures, but those couldn’t substitute for the real thing. Birdsong, golden clouds, the deep blue of sky—I couldn’t wait to experience them for myself.
Somya rolled and mumbled in their sleep. I reached out a hand and rubbed their back gently. They’d always been a restless sleeper. It was why we put them in the middle—so they wouldn’t thrash themself out of the cot. I figured their nighttime personality gave their negative emotions an outlet. They rarely took anything seriously in their waking hours, so the bad stuff had to express itself somehow.
I fought back the sting of tears as I thought about never seeing my heartsib again. Our families lived on different parts of Earth. After our stay there, we’d reunite for a couple of months on Chedi, and then I’d end up on Meru, while Somya, Huy, and their families would travel to wherever Chedi’s residents decided to go next. With interstellar distances between us, we could only exchange messages by courier. Reality transits enabled instantaneous travel between stars, but in-system travel was limited by the speed of classical physics. A transit couldn’t occur until a pilot or megaconstruct had passed the edge of the local heliosphere. That meant weeks or months of delay between courier drops. In the seven years since Somya had come to Chedi, we’d only been apart when they’d gone to Earth with their parents to visit other family. How would I face the challenges of Meru without them?
Somya mumbled something again and flung an arm over my legs. I placed my hand over theirs. My parents and I would leave for Earth on the first shuttle from Chedi. She usually selected passengers by lottery, but everyone had agreed to give my family priority because we’d lived in exile for so long. I wondered if I could talk my parents into letting Somya come with us until Somya’s parents arrived. It would take Chedi two hundred and forty days to travel from heliopause—the outer limit of the Solar System—to a point close to Earth and then back out again. Letting Somya join us would mean we’d get to spend two extra months together.
If only we could spend my entire stay together, we’d have a full eight months. That’s more time than it takes to complete the Anthro Challenge.
The thought jolted me out of the drowsy slump I’d fallen into. I slow-blinked and thought-retrieved A Journey of Human Power, the book by Rune Edersan. It had detailed information about his route, equipment, and everything else someone would need to know in order to replicate his success. The rules of the Anthro Challenge stated that a human had to circumnavigate the Earth, defined as journeying around the entire planet and crossing its equator at least twice. The start and end points had to be the same, and most importantly, the challenger could only use human-era technology along the way. That meant no assistance from alloys, constructs, or devices that relied on infrastructure maintained by either. That’s what made it so appealing to me.
When Rune had tried it the first time, in 683 AE, he’d spent a lot of days scouting for ways to avoid roads, bridges, and such. He’d also had to find community farms and gardens that only humans tended to—not an easy thing to do in Loka because the alloys had filled ecological gaps with constructs. He had run into unexpected weather delays in the Out of Bounds, where alloys often redirected atmospheric energy in order to keep Loka more livable. After eight months, he’d exhausted himself to the point that he had to quit. On his second attempt, Rune used everything he’d learned the first time and completed the journey in 155 days with less overall effort.
If Somya could come with me to Earth and take the last shuttle back to Chedi, we’d have six months together on the planet. As long as we followed Rune’s successful path, we could finish with almost a month to spare. The odds of convincing our parents to let us attempt it were the longest of long shots, but I had to try.
“Absolutely not.” My mother wore the frown that she always displayed when she had made up her mind about something.
“Jayanthi,” my maker said, placing zir hand on my mother’s arm. “Maybe we should take a minute to consider it?”
She turned her glare upon my maker. “There is no way Akshaya can do something that physically demanding while on Earth.”
The three of us sat in the high-oxygen bedroom where my mother and I often slept, one of the few enclosed buildings in Chedi. After seeing my morning bodym numbers, she’d insisted that I spend a couple of hours in the room’s special atmosphere. I had asked my maker to join us so I could tell them both about the plan I’d come up with. My parents sat on their bed while I sat on mine. Our feet rested on a hempen rug dyed with colorful geometric patterns. Artwork from my childhood hung on the painted wooden walls, a luxury available only in Chedi, according to my mother. The early scrawls contrasted with the less embarrassing pieces of recent years, but all of them featured the flora and fauna of Earth.
My mother swiveled back to me. “This Rune person, he was young and fit and healthy when he did the challenge, right? And even with all that in his favor, he faced so many difficulties that he had to quit the first time.”
I’d given her ammunition by telling them about Rune’s disastrous initial attempt. He did well the second time, and the route I’d created was based on what he’d written in his book. She knew that, too.
My mother took a deep breath, closed her eyes, and let it out. When she opened her eyes, she wore the expression that I called forced-reasonable face. She leaned across the small gap that separated us and took my hands in hers. “You don’t know what it’s like on Earth.”
“That’s exactly why I want to do the AC.”
“People there aren’t as open-minded as the ones here. In Loka, they won’t like your ambitious nature, and the OOBers—well, who knows how they’ll react.”
It took my brain a second to translate OOBers into “people who live Out of Bounds.” Only one way to find out what they’d make of me.
“Besides, you don’t have as much time as you think. We’re going to visit the Primary Nivid as well, remember? Guhaka is there. That’ll take up another month.”
As if I cared more about the alloys’ pride and joy than the Anthro Challenge. The Nivid stored all the knowledge and data gathered by the Constructed Democracy of Sol, but the human contributions were tiny compared to the alloys’, who made up the majority of citizens in the CDS. I did care about seeing Guhaka, who was like a grandparent to me. He had left Chedi on our previous trip to the Solar System to spend his final years at the Primary Nivid, and visiting him there would make the trip more worthwhile, but it wasn’t enough incentive for me to back away from the Anthro Challenge.
My mother sighed and sat back. “I understand that you really want to do this, so how about a compromise? After we’ve spent a year on Meru and you’ve cleared all your health tests, we can do an Anthro Challenge there. We can request and build whatever equipment we need—the solar bikes, the boat, anything.”
Her suggestion made no sense. Rune had relied on human-tended community gardens for food. He’d used hand-built cabins for shelter. He’d taken advice from locals on which trails to use so that he could avoid interference from alloys. Meru would have none of those resources. On top of all that, I highly doubted that the alloys approved requests for travel items like bikes and boats.
My maker kept turning zir head back and forth between us. Zie raised zir eyebrows at me in a silent question.
“It’ll be so much better for your health to take on that kind of activity on Meru,” my mother continued, ignoring my building irritation. “You’ll understand after we’ve spent some time there. This feeling you have in here?” She waved her hand at the room. “You’ll have it every day, all the time.”
I wanted to say that life was about more than the air I breathed, more than our sickle-cell disorders, more than spending our lives in service of others. Nobody had given me a choice regarding the circumstances of my birth, and now that I could finally go to Earth, my mother insisted that I couldn’t do one thing before banishing me to a barren planet.
“What do you think?” my mother pressed.
As if she really cared. “All right. Let’s do the challenge on Meru.” I lay back on my cot and closed my eyes.
Her lips pressed against my head. “It’ll all work out. You’ll see.”
My maker kissed me as well and whispered, “I’ll talk to her.”
When the door shut behind them, I rolled over and stared at the wall beyond their bed. The screen where Chedi’s face would appear stared blankly back at me. She could watch and listen to everything that happened inside her, but she chose to give her residents privacy because it was better for our health. Her policy didn’t extend to her access corridors, and she’d known about my escapades with Somya long before my parents heard about them. My mother had gotten angry with Chedi—the first time I’d seen that happen—for not telling her. The ship had reassured my mother that she would’ve handled any emergency needs, and then she’d talked my mother into giving me more independence. Maybe Chedi could work the same miracle a second time.
I requested a meeting with her.
Five minutes later, the humanlike face that Chedi assumed popped up on the screen.
