They were Oudinkers and they were old. The man and the woman were both dressed in baggy garments that failed to conceal how incredibly thin they were. Here were people whose forebears had gone in for radical adaptation. They were perfectly adapted for station life, for weighdessness. Put mem on a planet with anything approaching Earth gravity, and they would collapse like dolls made of tissue paper. Jarvellis noticed that the man had a crust around his mouth, and there were specks of blood on his bluish skin. She remembered now that Oudinkers could survive in vacuum for a short period of time. It must have been he who had retrieved her.
'This station is still revolving,' he informed her.
She tried to understand what he was getting at. The woman, standing nervously behind him, was holding a nerve-blocker. Why the hell didn't she use it?
The man went on. 'Listen carefully. You will the without proper medical attention. Out here on the edge we're at about a quarter of a G. I got you into here using a cable winder. I cannot get you further into the station by myself, and I do not have the equipment set-up to do so. It would take too long.'
Jarvellis let her head drop back. So that was it. Out here, for them, she was an impossible weight to move. They were probably having enough trouble keeping themselves upright. Habit took over then: the habit of survival. She licked dry lips and spoke with a cracked voice.
'My leg.'
The man said, 'I'll have Sam place a clamp, but that's all we can do for now.'
'Hell,' said Jarvellis, and looked up at the wall behind her. Cable snaked up from the back of her suit to a winder that had been hastily welded to the wall. with her right arm she reached up and gripped the cable. She did not look down in response to the sudden pain in her thigh as the littie robot called Sam placed the clamp. Inch by agonizing inch, she hauled herself back until her lower legs were free of the suit. Her right leg was no problem; her left leg was dead weight. When it came free she yelled, but just kept going. The Oudinkers moved back. An accidental blow from her - if she stumbled, anything - would snap their bones like sugar sticks. Finally she slid sideways from the suit. Actually standing was out of the question.
The man moved further back and pressed a button by the inner door. The door irised open with a cacophonous shriek. This place was old.
'There's an elevator fifty metres round from here. We'll walk just ahead of you. I'll not ask you if you can make it, because you have no other options.'
Jarvellis felt that she did have another option, but she began painfully dragging herself across the floor on her side. The litde robot zipped around in a U beside her and behind her, as if enjoying this one chance of experiencing its true calling as a sheepdog.
23
Skaidon was a genius. At age six he took one of the old-style IQ tests and was rated at 180. After he was congratulated, it is reported that he said, 'If you like I'll do a test to 190, now I know how they work.' Throughout his life Skaidon mocked those he called, 'Hard-wired lead-asses' Should you wish to know more about this, I direct you to one of his numerous biographies. This book is about runcibles. Today we are aware of the dangers of directly interfacing a human mind with a computer (not to be confused with the less direct methods ofauging or gridlinking). Skaidon was the first to do this and he died of it, leaving a legacy to humanity that is awesome. It took him twenty-three minutes. In those minutes, he and the Craystein computer became the most brilliant mind humankind has ever known. He gave us Skaidon technology, from which has come instantaneous travel, antigravity and much of our field technology. The Craystein computer, in its supercooled vault under the city of London on Earth, contains the math and blueprints for the runcible (for reasons not adequately explained, Skaidon loved the nonsense poem by Edward Lear and used its wording in his formulae to stand for those particles and states of existence we until then had no words for, hence: run-cible - the device; spoon - the five-dimensional field that breaks into nil-space; pea-green is a particle now tentatively identified as the tachyon) and to begin to understand some of this math let us first deal with that nil-space shibboleth wrongly described as quantum planing…
An Introduction to Skaidon Formulae
by Ashanta Gorian
Two splits, outlining an area like the outer surface of a segment of orange, appeared in the hull of Hubris. The section of hull pushed out and from the poles of the ship it hinged round, exposing a play of light and shadow in the guts of the ship. Slowly, as of a cub coming from its burrow for the first time, the gleaming front surface of the heavy-lifter became exposed. Then more quickly, confidently, its impellers brought it out. It was in appearance a giant metal boomerang. From wing-tip to wing-tip it measured half a kilometre. Free of the Hubris it turned at ninety degrees to the rapidly closing split. Its impellers drove it on, and then, far enough away for safety, its ionic boosters jetted pulsed orange fire and blasted it for the horizon of Samarkand. Far to the side of it, Dragon sat on the horizon, watching.
Standing in the shuttle bay, while another minishuttle was being taken from storage, Cormac watched the heavy-lifter depart. It carried autodozers and line-laying moles for the clearance of a site to the west of the orig- inal one, which was still far too hot, and for the laying of's-con cables to directly draw off the heat energy from the buffers. Dragon had not left much of the original network intact. Chaline, who was on the lifter, was in her element.
When the heavy-lifter was a speck against Samarkand, Cormac went to the drop-shaft and from there to Isolation. The dracomen had been returned to their original quarters, where Mika continued her study of them. As far as he was concerned, they could stay there.
Mika was not at the viewing window where he expected to find her, but in the small control centre for all the isolation chambers. She was seated before a bank of screens and watching the one with IsolI imprinted above it. Two side screens to this one were giving a continuous readout of information.
'Do you have anything for me?' Cormac asked.
'Yes… yes, I think I do.'
Cormac dropped into the chair next to her.
She went on. 'They have been altered. I'm not even sure if they're the same ones. Their bone and muscle structures are lighter. If before they were made to be strong, now they have been made to be fast.'
Cormac looked at the two dracomen on the screen. Why? What was Dragon up to now?
Chaline watched the moles set off on their long journey to New Sea, and smiled under her mask. Improvisation under difficult circumstances: proof of a technician's abilities. Without the microwave receivers of the stations, they could not use the transmission dish that came with the runcible. But, as always, another way had been found.
Like giant silver woodlice with treads, the moles bumbled forwards in relentless slow motion, dragging their moling attachments along two metres below the surface as they laid the's-con cables. It would take them twenty hours to reach their destination. Hopefully the site here would be cleared by then. Chaline turned and watched the autodozers at work as they shoved huge mounds of dust and flaked stone before them and exposed the clean basalt below.
'Nadhir, is that second shuttle down yet?' she said, over the roar of heavy machinery.
The reply from her comunit was immediate. 'Down and ready.'
'Tell Dave to get over to New Sea and get things ready for the moles' arrival. He should be able to have the heat-sinks ready to be connected up by then. Those's-con cables out there weren't too badly damaged.'