Tikuka Station

A thousand sirens blasted him out of his sleep. Attention attention attention, all personnel, please start evacuation procedure, repeat, please start evacuation procedure. Tikuka Station’s voice, but calm, controlled. Still Traxo flailed, caught up in the sheets, and when he instinctively reached for his ready bag - a diagnostic portable, a rough reconstructor and the freezer kit in case anybody needed to be suspended and later resuscitated - he felt his body unexpectedly leaving the bed and floating off and away. Oh shit, Traxo thought, Tikuka’s stopped the rings, and panic swallowed him up.

You didn’t stop the two counter-gyrating wheels of the Chashanna Elevator space anchor point - the Orbital Tower Terminal Station - for anything less than a major disaste. He didn’t know what kind of disaster it was – he had just been on the Station for a couple of ten-days – but he knew it had to be bad. And he was no use in zero gravity. Down on Asgrow, on the surface, he could be up, dressed and running with his bag while still largely asleep - he had been a doctor long enough. Here, every movement was an ungraceful lurch, and everything he tried to grab sailed gently away, mocking his urgence. While chasing his suit’s helmet, he thought: I wanted adventure, yes, I wanted to forget my crushed pride and lost love, but not this much! I wanted distraction, yes, but not destruction!

It only dawned on him when he appeared in the emergency room all suited and tooled up, and everybody else turned to look at him with a faintly puzzled frown. They had each made only very token efforts at preparing for a major emergency. Blinking the last residues of sleep away, he remembered that Sabé had told him something like this would happen regularly. The Mind of Tikuka Station had just sprung its first surprise evac drill at him.

***

A couple of hours later, Traxo was enjoying coming down from the adrenaline rush in the padded quiet of the mess hall, and Tikuka had discovered a consuming passion for photography. So it was showing railings. Black and white photographs of railings, shining from the high-quality wall displays throughout the Station. Balcony railings, stairways railings, small short purely decorative railings on building facades, long stretches of estate railings, snaking or marching off towards the horizon in tensed horizontality. Slanted railings throwing dramatic shadows. Delicately ornate, curlicued railings. Railings, railings, railings.

“There must be some hidden meaning,” Traxo said, looking at the few examples in the mess hall.

“I just like them,” the Tikuka Station said, sounding defensive.

Most of the Second Shift was in the mess hall, having breakfast, but the sound suppressors made the large room quiet and cosy. He was probably one of many holding a conversation with Tikuka at the same time. There were only about three hundred permanent residents of the Station in each of the three shifts, and one physician. It wasn’t a taxing workload, even counting in the occasional sick passenger in transit from a ship to Traxo’s home town of Chashanna, down at the bottom of the Elevator.

“They look like…” Traxo hesitated, and then went on: “They look like prison bars.”

“Do you really think so?” the Station asked, anxiously. “I really had not thought about that. Oh. Hmm.” After a brief silence it said: “Do you think it expresses feelings of claustrophobia?”

“Are you feeling claustrophobic?”

“I can’t feel claustrophobic, Traxo. You know that. I was merely…” The Station trailed off, pure affectation on its part. But then, it sometimes argued that its own conscience was a matter of pure affectation. “Do you feel claustrophobic looking at them? Do you think people will feel claustrophobic looking at them? Oh my.” The Station added, sounding worried.

Traxo smiled. “Station, if people are going to feel claustrophobic, they will, whatever you do or not do, whatever you show or not show on your displays. You can’t help that. You can run everything on board, but can’t rule the people. Quit fretting.”

The Station sighed theatrically. “Yes, yes, you’re right. Hmm.”

A brief, quiet vibration shook Traxo’s shirt pocket. He didn’t take out the tablet to check what it was: he knew. He was due to start seeing patients in less than ten minutes. He finished up his meal and left the Station mulling over its new image gallery.

And so it was just after telling the Station that it could not control the people living within it, for good or bad, that he met Liwa.

She was sitting in his waiting room, reading a book. He could see it was a book because she was completely still, only her eyes scanning the lines hungrily and regularly, gripping the tablet as if she was afraid somebody was about to rip it out of her hand; captured and lost. She didn’t look up when he came in, and it was only after a minute or so, after he had checked his appointment book and the surgery’s log, that she came back to the present with a little start. And that was the moment he knew she was a kindred spirit, another soul whose loneliness didn’t come about from the desertion of others, but from its own secession.

He must have seen her around before that, of course. The Station was relatively small, the people on board relatively few, and he’d been there for four ten-days already. He could have passed her in the station’s corridors, while he tried to look casual while jumping clumsily from foothold to foothold in the weak gravity of the ring. Or met her while failing to show any grace or competence while propelling himself forward on the handholds in the central area. Or sat next to her in the bar, in the mess hall. He must have seen her, and couldn’t have failed to notice her, her blue-black hair, her golden skin, her abstracted eyes. He couldn’t, could he? But he had no memory of her before that day when she showed up in his infirmary with pain on her face, complaining of migraine.

She stood up smiling in his waiting room, reached out her hand and said: “I’m Liwa Ressin – just Liwa,” which was normal on the Station, there were so few of them and they were all on intimate-names terms, but nice and friendly all the same, and he put on his most professional attitude and was quite successful in his efforts not to admire her beauty, not to marvel at her velvet stare, not to burst out singing in harmony with her voice, because she was a patient and he should not be distracted. And it worked - she seemed at ease and trusting.

But all of it changed as soon as she came into the clinic and sat down.

It took him a little to notice, because he had been nodding and going through his usual stock questions, but her answers became more halting and more hesitant all the time and when he got to: “Has there been some specific incident that you can identify which has triggered these migraines?” and she didn’t answer, he looked up from his tablet.

It was a shock. Her soft friendly face had stiffened and closed. Her eyes roamed, flitting all over the room like terrified bats, her hand gripped the armrests with inexplicable terror.

He looked around and, eerily, the everyday objects and tools of his job had suddenly become sinister: the obsessively clean surfaces, the looming apparatus of the imager, the menacing grace of the scanner with its gigantic pincers, even the innocent chrome of the protein splicers.

“Is something wrong?” he asked, but he had no doubt something was. He had never seen this kind of reaction from one of his patients.

“I just think this wasn’t such a good idea,” the woman said, standing up.

He jumped up too. “No,” he said. “No, please.” Young doctors are sensitive to the sacred duty of helping the sick and pain-ridden. Young doctors from the Outer Planets, having been told since infancy that there is no greater sin than not helping the Community enough, are even more sensitive to it. Young Outer doctors from Asgrow, the most righteous and vociferous planet in the whole Outer Planets Collective, make a point of being sensitive to it to the point of mania. Young Outer doctors from Chashanna, Asgrow’s more self-consciously intellectual city… Well, Traxo would have been utterly devastated at letting his patient walk away with all her pain. “Let me help. Please.”

“Traxo,” the Station’s voice said, serious and quiet, in his ear. Tikuka was talking to him through his coclear implant, so that Liwa could not hear. It was impolite, and the Station almost never did it. “She fled the Tyrosian Federation. She’s a refugee. An exile. Migraine is the least of her problems.”

Traxo didn’t acknowledge the voice. I occurred to him suddenly – belatedly – that he hadn’t asked the woman if she was bothered by the Station listening in. Station, please, he wrote unobtrusively on his tablet, switch off.

“All right,” Tikuka said. “But I need to talk to you afterwards.”

***

They retreated to a private place to talk. Actually - to the Station’s endless regret - the most private place on board at all.

The outermost edge of the station’s ring was a running track looking out, or better still, down. It wasn’t made of glass, but of some sterner material, which didn’t scratch, and which Traxo didn’t know much about save that the Station was quite extraordinarily proud of it. Most people, though, found it too disconcerting to run on a curving band of transparent glass with the universe below their feet, and with the planet turning dizzingly quickly and tantalizingly out of reach on one side. They got sick or scared and opted for the other track, just inside this one, with its comfortable side ports and opaque walls.

That was why Traxo was all alone with the Station today on the dark track, the only light coming from the planet and the only sound a faint far away whisper of running feet above him. He was huddled on one side of the curving glass floor, the universe below him, as he listened to the Station.

“She was a professor in the State Central Polytechnic in Resfa Alta,” the Station was telling him. “In the Fernys Major Republic. She was picked up just before the crackdown, two years ago. You heard about that, did you?”

Traxo was looking at his feet. “Maybe. I don’t remember now.”

“Well, I can’t blame you. The Federal Tyrosian Government has been going around slapping each of the member States into submission for quite a while now and one loses track of which turn it is now. She was held for two months, that’s the maximum allowed for custody without trial in the Tyrosian Federal System. She was never charged.”

Traxo frowned.

“After she was released, they fired her. She found some other job but then she was picked up again, last year, when the Fernys Local Government tried to oppose the Federal police reform. This time it was the SATO.”

“The what?”

“The new Federal police, Traxo. The secret police. Don’t tell me you don’t…”

“Oh. That. Yes, I knew about that.”

I knew, sort of, Traxo thought. I just didn’t believe it was real.

“Just for a couple of days, but after that, she came here. She asked for refugee status, and we granted it.”

“I thought she worked here.”

“She does. She’s a mediator for the Trade Department.”

Traxo stood up, arms crossed, and started pacing. “I thought…” he said plaintively, and he stopped. He swallowed. “I guess I didn’t think things were really that bad, you know...” he jerked his head to a side, in a direction that had nothing to do, really, with the position in space of the Tyrosian Federation, “next door.”

Tikuka didn’t respond. Traxo stopped at one of the track’s edges, and kicked morosely the little upsurge of the not-glass where it rose to meet the dark opaque material of the side walls. “So,” he asked. “Was she tortured? Is that what you’re saying?”

“I don’t know,” the Station said, its voice soft. “What I told you is a matter of public record, what the Tyrosian Federation has chosen to share with the rest of the galaxy. If something happened while she was imprisoned, and if they kept a record of it, they certainly didn’t told us. You’re the doctor. What do you think?”

Traxo turned, got to the other edge of the track, and kicked that one too. “I only conducted a routine neurological examination,” he said. “I didn’t dare ask her, and she didn’t volunteer any information. Migraine isn’t exactly an unheard-of condition, but the phobic reaction she had... And she... she jumped all the time. As if she was scared of me. She looked at the imager as if it was... as if... She also has some funny reactions,” he went on. “Motor reflex anomalies. I don’t know what they mean, if they mean anything. I don’t know... much about these things. I don’t know what the signs are, what to look for. I don’t know if she needs help, and what help she does need.”

There was a short silence. “She lost her job,” the Station said. “Her status, her home, her nation. Her friends and relations. We can comfortably assume that she does need help.”

“I meant medical help,” Traxo said, testily.

“Ah,” the Station commented. It had this annoying way of expressing lengthy lectures in one syllable, and not even a properly syntactically significant one, too.

“Tikuka,” he said, exasperated, “I don’t want to make things worse. She doesn’t seem to be in obvious pain and distress now.” Then he went on: “Well, apart from the migraine. And insomnia. And...”

“I thought you liked her.”

Traxo stopped cold in his back-and-forth pacing. The planet had whizzed past next to him, beautiful but just a tad nausea-inducing.

“I did,” he said. He plopped down again, feeling discouraged. I liked her but I’m scared by her, he thought. I want her for the happy reader I saw, I want her smile and her soft voice, but I’m afraid of her pain and her silence and I’m afraid of slamming my stupid naïveté against her real drama. As soon as I saw her I wanted her, but I’m not ready to confront real trauma. It would make me too ashamed. “I do,” he amended himself, and tried to find a way to explain it to the Station. “It’s just that I feel so helpless,” he said.

“I know,” the Station said. “I know how it feels.”

Traxo looked up – this was something they all tended to do, for some reason, despite the Station having insisted that all her speakers be placed very low down, to be as little intimidating as possible.

“You cannot ignore it,” Tikuka said. “You see all these things happen, and you cannot look away, discount them, ignore them, you see people suffer needlessly, intolerably, you see tragedy and pain you cannot bear and yet you can do nothing about it. Nothing at all. You must help them, but you can’t. And you feel...”

“Station,” Traxo said, in a fit of irrational pique and irritation, “you cannot feel.”

There was a long silence. Traxo, who had repented already of his outburst, was irresistibly tempted to consider it a hurt silence. But of course, he had spoken the simple truth: the Station couldn’t feel.

“I have organs of sense,” the Station said slowly. “I grant you, I do not have pain receptors, but I...”

“That wasn’t what I meant, Tikuka.”

“...I have been furnished with a set of fundamental reactions, as you well know. Self-preservation is one. I know fear. Fear and pain are very close. As for...”

“What I meant is that you only have reactions. How do you know that you really feel something?”

“How do you?” the Station shot back. “How do you know that there is something inside you, and you’re not a clever simulation?”

“Because I wasn’t built that way.”

“Traxo,” the Station said, “are you trying to tell me that the Tyrosians are right? That I’m not really a sentient being at all? That I am only a pretense, an anomaly, an abomination, and a dangerous one at that? That I ought to be switched off?”

Traxo swallowed. “What has that got to do with anything?”

“It’s got everything to do with it!” The Station said, with a good imitation of heath. “Does it really matter if it’s a simulation or not? I am capable of empathy, I am capable of expression. I feel self-awareness. You perceive it. Does it have any real meaning to decide if something so intrinsically subjective as self-awareness exists objectively? And does it matter to you – or to a woman I gave shelter to and I feel sorry and worried for?”

Traxo made a I-give-up motion. “Sorry, Station. I was being an asshole.”

There was a short silence. “You’re supposed to deny that, Station,” he hissed.

The Station simulated a laugh. One of its hoverbots dived down from above, where it seemed to have been attending to some small maintenance chores, unrolled a small display and extruded a couple of holographic, insubstantial and cartoonish white wings. On the display, a sketchy face was smiling winningly. Traxo swatted it away, good-naturedly. “Look, stop trying to be cute,” he said. “Humour is not a good substitute for real consciousness, you know?”

***

Now Tikuka was showing windows. It was in colour, this time: pink peeling plaster and grey wooden shutters from the Fernys, gleaming ceramic and stretched starched half-curtains from the Hyadis, the bare white shutterless perfect square of a Chashanna window. And in all of them some unexciting but somehow riveting slice of life was going on: people getting out of bed, walking in or out or across a room, curled up on an armchair under a blanket, even making love, though Traxo walked away from that one because it looked immediately obvious that it wasn’t a public bath and he was too much a child of his culture not to react with appropriate discretion, even if the people involved were patently nothing more than a simulation.

The windows followed him all the way to the mess hall. They kept snagging his eye, with a flash of intense colour or a subtle harmony of shades or the slow quiet going about their business of their inhabitants. But he was hungry, and that kept dragging him along, tearing him from each mesmerizing scene, until the next one snagged him again.

When he finally came to the mess hall, Liwa was there. She looked up and flicked a long, glossy black strand of hair backward, and smiled broadly, and said: “Strawberries!”

She was holding them up for him to admire, to enthuse about: a frosted glass cup of the elaborately simple style the Station had copied from a celebrated furniture designer of Hanvard’s time, half-emptied, half-filled with small and, well, yes, decidedly attractive strawberries, buried in whipped cream. They smelled like strawberries with a very definite belief in their mission.

Liwa put the cup down and made an encouraging shooshing gesture with both hands. “Go get some before they run out of them.”

He cared less about eating the strawberries than seeing her so happy and cheerful: but he smiled and went, just to have something to share.

She wasn’t alone, of course. Traxo had registered the man sitting opposite her early on, but couldn’t bring himself to pay too much attention to him. He wasn’t too fond of the guy anyway: he was irritated in equal measure by the crumpled, suspiciously unclean appearance of his clothes and hair, his perpetually cross expression, and his half-empty glass attitude. He was Eri Kalori, one of the dock workers. But he smiled graciously at him anyway.

When he came back, after having coaxed some strawberries from the kitchen staff, Kalori looked suspiciously at the berries and asked Liwa: “Where do they come from, anyway?”

Liwa shrugged. “I don’t know.”

“From the Cirteh,” Traxo said, feeling modestly triumphant at being able to provide that information. “They told me so back at the kitchen.”

The smallest frown appeared on Liwa’s face, and Kalori snorted.

“The Cirteh,” he said.

“Well,” Traxo said, embarrassed. “It seems the people in their transit Station have a sort of soft spot for Tikuka. Every time there’s a direct shipment from there to here they add some sort of present. It’s because of the stuff we managed to send them past the blockade all those years ago. They haven’t forgotten.”

“They’re not the forgetting kind,” Liwa said. She poured herself some water from a frosted glass jug matching the cup, and drank.

“Have you ever been there?” Traxo asked. He couldn’t help himself - the strawberries had opened up for him a vista of imposing mountains peaks and dark green forests like fuzzy fur on an undulating landscape: the Koeryan Range which was probably where the strawberries where coming from. The Cirteh might be a particularly enthusiastic part of the no longer friendly neighbouring Tyrosian Federation, but it was still the stuff of legends.

Liwa shook her head. “No,” she said. “Few people who haven’t been born there get to see it. They’re not much into tourism either.” She smiled again. “You never left Asgrow, did you?”

“Not really, no,” he said. “This is as far from the surface I’ve ever been.”

Kalori snorted again. “Well, what would you want to leave for? Best place in damn universe is right here. Bloody idiots all over the place as soon as you leave the Outer Planets. Cowards and slaves. Ah.”

“Is that a fact?” Traxo said, mildly. He seldom was very obvious about being irritated, but Liwa shot him a quick look. It’s not that he himself hadn’t often thought that the Outer Planets were right in their unchecked freedom, in their reliance on self-regulation and sense of duty. It’s not that he hadn’t felt smugly superiors to other places where they needed money, police, government for things to work, and work badly at that. Outers always felt it was their duty and mission to rescue the rest of the Galaxy from their wretched state of poverty and oppression. They were eager evangelists of cooperative anarchy.Traxo was no exception. But with Liwa next to him, he felt a burning resentment for such facile arrogance, such smug superiority.

“I’ve worked abroad, haven’t I?” the other man said, turning to him. “People in my line of work, it’s not difficult to find a job. I’ve been to the Fernis, I’ve been to the Siitis, I’ve been to Federal Sector, I’ve been to the Centre. I’ve even been to Erteian space, and don’t let me even get started about them.” He snorted, and Traxo thought for a moment that he was going to spit. “All they want from you is work, work and work. You don’t feel like working, you have to show up anyway. You don’t like the job, you can’t have it changed. It’s a fucking hell, man. And if you don’t work, they don’t feed you, they don’t even let you have somewhere to sleep. You just listen to me, it isn’t worth it. Stay right here where you are son. Best place there is.”

Traxo was looking at him in what he hoped was a neutral way. Liwa was looking at the ceiling with a sort of dreamy expression that he suspected was a front for much violently repressed mirth.

“I see,” he said.

“For anything, even just eat, you know, you need to have money there,” Kalori carried on, indignantly. “And to have money you just have to do every stupid thing they tell you and even thank them for it. I’ve seen people do it, you know? Fucking keel over after working fourteen hours straight and not a word but thank you sir, with your permission sir I’d like to pass out here on the floor sir, if it’s not too inconvenient. You wouldn’t believe it. Really.”

Liwa was looking down now. She didn’t seem amused any longer.

“I see,” Traxo said, uncommittedly.

Kalori shook his head and stood up. “Bloody slaves,” he muttered, and marched off. Traxo watched him go.

“He has a point, you know,” Liwa said, slowly.

“He’s an idiot,” Traxo said. “And a lazy one too.”

Liwa looked at him, surprised. “Oh no, Traxo. You’re wrong there. He may be a silly and bigoted man but I’ve seen him at work. He’s no shirker. That’s why I say he has a point.”

“I guess there must be...” he began, but a sudden blaring from his tablet cut him short and made him jump with fright.

“Alert alert alert,” the Station said in its most formal and cold, and loud, voice. “All medical personnel report to dock fourteen. We have a medical emergency on incoming ship. All medical personnel report to dock fourteen.”

“Station?” Traxo said, taking his tablet out. He had leaped up. “What kind of an emergency?”

“Refugee ship,” the Station said shortly. “At least a couple of hundred passengers in a cargo hold. Dehydration, probably hypothermia. I think they’ve got some casualties on board already, too. Liwa,” it added. “We could use volunteers, too.”

“Where are they coming from?” Traxo asked, perplexed.

“Drayonis,” the Station said.

“What? What’s happened in the Drayonis?”

“Small groups of vandals and criminals have been creating unrest and upsetting the peaceful life of good citizens,” Liwa said, her voice bitter. “That’s what’s been happening in the Drayonis. Don’t you follow the news?”

Traxo squirmed. Yes, he had heard about the escalating unrest in the Drayonis, but it had seemed... so far away and not his concern.

“But never fear,” she went on, “the Federal Governament of Tyros is busy bringing peace and order to the Drayonis. At whatever cost.” Liwa looked very white in the face. “Coming, Station” she said.

***

They stood together on the cold bare expanse of dock fourteen, him and Liwa and all the rest of the doctors and paramedics of the Station, and several other people who could give a hand: all of them wrapped in pale yellow long coats, and Hurai, one of the nurses, had passed out face masks and gloves. Sabé passed by, a formidable meter and a half of commanding intelligence, who was taking on more and more of the responsibilities for the coordination of the Second shift. She turned to him a little short of breath and asked: “Can you handle this?”

“Yes,” Traxo said, teeth chattering.

He felt a lurch in his stomach when amid the revolving yellow flashes of the door beacons the great portals at the end of the square cavernous room started to slid back, whining.

A horrible stench rolled out, just ahead of the figures emerging from the dark interior of the cargo hold, stumbling, blinking, looking around dazed and shocked. For a moment Traxo thought that somebody had indeed died in that frightful hole where people were never supposed to live, and that what he smelled was decomposition. But no, that wasn’t it. As he tried to keep an acid surge from pushing up his throat, he recognized the smell for something even worse: people who had lived among their own excrement and waste for several days, maybe weeks or even months, getting sicker and sicker as contamination spread.

He tried breathing regularly, swallow little controlled breaths, and moved forward. People were taken hold of, stopped in their stumbling all around him, gently steered towards the blankets, the stretchers, the paper cups of water; separated into the sick and the merely exhausted, the young and fit and the old and ill and the very young and hysterically screaming. He went inside, into the black stench of the cargo hold, looking for people who couldn’t crawl out. He moved slowly, repeating in the opposite direction the dazed stumble of the survivors, while he waited for his vision to adapt to the dark and his hearing to tune in on the moans.

Somebody took him by an arm and shook him. “You a doctor?”

Traxo turned. A thin man in dirty clothing, bearded and pale, was urgently pulling on his arm. “Yes.”

“Down here, doctor. I think she’s stopped breathing.”

And so she had – some time before. Traxo didn’t even try resuscitation. He didn’t call for the cerebral death procedure. She was cold. He raised his head trying to find the man in the dark, and wondered what the woman was for him. “I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s too late. Was she...?”

The man shook his head and tugged him away. “Then come here,” he said. “Here’s another one.” His tone was matter-of-factly: he wasn’t a distraught relative, then, just somebody who would rather direct help where it was needed than ask it for himself.

The darkness was being pierced now by pinpoints of light like disbelieving eyes roaming the room: some of the volunteers had got hold of the emergency torches. A small clot of professionals and volunteers formed around Traxo, carrying him around from body to body, triaging and stabilizing and sending each off to be treated, or laid in a cold room. He had long lost sight of Liwa. The thin man was given a blanket and some water but refused to leave, as if only in placing himself on the side of the rescuers he could contain his own need. Traxo understood that, and let him help. His own feeling of helplessness was growing with each hollowed-eyed old man, each puffy face of a once-fat woman. It didn’t matter that for most of them he did manage to be of real, tangible, crucial help: for some reason what clung to him was that first unnamed dead woman he had been too late to help, and a lingering misery too deep even for rescue to lift it.

He went on until the cargo was empty and then the thin man was the only one left, and Traxo grabbed him with gentle firmness and carried him off. As soon as they were out in the painful brightness of the dock, the man turned and folded. Traxo caught him and held him, breathing deeply in air that suddenly seemed to him impossibly clean and fresh, murmuring inanities and vague reassurances. It took him a while to make out what the man was telling him, crying against his shoulders:

“You’re next, doctor. They’re coming for you Outers. You’re next.”

***

He only told Liwa about the man’s words ten days after that, while they were going down to the planet.

“He may be right,” she said, slowly. “He may be right, you know.”

Traxo felt a sudden, unexpected chill. He had been sure Liwa was going to laugh it off.

“Oh, come on,” he said. “We aren’t hurting anybody.”

“You’ve got an AI,” she pointed out. “Right here.”

Traxo snorted. “It can hardly be a threat to Tyros,” he said. “It can’t go find them, can it? It’s stuck right here on top of the Chashanna Orbital Tower.”

“You’ve been giving refuge and succour to terrorists.”

“What?”

“Hey, we welcomed a coupla hundred of them no more than ten days ago.”

Traxo looked at her, speechless.

“You haven’t been listening to the Tyrosian news, have you?” Liwa said.

“No,” Traxo said. He was horrified.

She shook her head. “Traxo, the President Laney wants to get rid of you. Either because he needs an enemy, or because he hates your guts, or because he genuinely think that AIs are too much of a threat to allow them to exist. I don’t know. But just like everybody else on Tyros, I know one thing for sure: he will come after the Outer Planets as soon as he can.”

Traxo turned and looked out at the growing planet below them. He didn’t know what to say. If Tyros declared war on them, he knew damn well they’d be swept away. There was nothing they could do.

Liwa must have understood, because she forced a smile and said: “Come on, let’s not think about that. We’re on holiday, right?”

They weren’t, exactly. They both had to take their required three days on the surface to offset the reduced gravity on the Station, and Traxo had invited her to come and visit his family with him. He tried not to read too much into the fact that she had accepted: he just wanted to be her friend. That’s all. That’s what she needed: a friend.

On the planet, Liwa seemed happy, despite the noise, bustle and general embarrassing fussiness of his large and anything but reserved family. She took the kids’ curiosity in her stride and endured the overlong, overabuntant meals with good grace, even issuing occasional appreciative noises when appropriate. She laughed at his siblings’ and elders’ jokes, even when they were not actually very funny, and did not seem bothered by the thick Chashanna accent.

His family assumed, to his chagrin, that they were lovers. Since they didn’t actually come out and say it, he couldn’t deny it, and he was left helpless with the wink wink hint hint atmosphere. It was his sister Mikeo who asked them, with apparent total absence of malice, if they were going to go to the baths. To Traxo’s surprise and, obscurely, dread, Liwa said, cheerfully: “Why not?”

Why not? Because it’s not washing that my sister is suggesting we do, he thought, and I’ve heard too much from abroad about our sex mores, and especially our promiscuous bathhouses, to believe that any foreigner, even one who has lived with us for a little time, can accept to enter such a den of depravity and sin without a blink.

On the way to the baths at Nekekua, which were his usual haunt, he tried cautiously to broach the subject. She turned a dazzling and mischievous smile on him.

“Embarrassed?”

“We are used to this kind of things,” he said, trying to preserve some dignity.

“You’re embarrassed for me then,” she said. “Or is it that there is something you don’t dare ask me?”

Traxo looked at her directly. “Do you want to have sex with me?” he asked, simply and directly, while his heart simply and directly started to skip beats and his breath waited for her answer.

“No,” she simply and directly answered. And then smiled gently and amended it to: “No, thanks, Traxo.”

No better response came to him than to nod sagely, which seemed very stupid even then, and fast became totally idiotic the more he thought about it.

“I don’t want to have sex with anybody,” she added. “I’m just... curious.”

Traxo looked down, walking along and measuring the distance between them. She probably thought, he realized, that he was hurt and rejected. He wasn’t. He was a healthy, decently attractive thirty-year old living in the most casually promiscuous human culture ever to exist (and that took some doing). He had had his share of rejections and they had stopped burning when it had dawned on him, around his twentieth birthday, that sex he could have as much as he wanted and more in the safe warm anonymity of the baths, and as for love and passion, those were perilous things to peg your happiness to. They were best appreciated, like a sudden sunny and fresh day after weeks of sweltering heat, with gratitude for what is always unexpected, although it happens regularly. He could take a no if it was just her body.

So he led her dutifully and gently through the whole bath experience: introducing her to the house minders, illustrating the showers and pools and hot and cold rooms, and matter-of-factly telling her, while treading water with their feet and holding on the rim of the central pool, which of the several color-coded doorways led to what. Liwa listened to him without looking him in the eyes, her chin resting on her wet hands while the rest of her floated gently, distorted and obscured by the water surface.

“Do you want to go in?” she asked after a brief silence.

He would have, actually, but he could not leave her here all alone, in this strange and for her obviously alien place, among the echoing sloshing and the sweetish smell of soap and sex. “No,” he said. “Actually, I’d like to go back home and have something to eat.”

He pushed himself off the rim, forcing the water down with his hands to keep afloat and more or less vertical, waiting for her. She had a disturbed expression on her face when she turned, an almost painful frown. With a helpless, desperate feeling of regret he wondered what of the things he’s said had so upset her. “Do you want to go in?” he asked her. “Without me?” And added, valiantly, “I really don’t feel like it today, but I’ll wait for you here if you’d prefer.”

She gave him a strange look, as if parts of her were away from there, dragged away by memories or thoughts, and not to a pleasant place. “No,” she said curtly, and swam away with clean strong strokes.

They dressed in silence and started the walk back feeling damp and troubled. Traxo reached down to his professional calm and, facing that slightly frowning face that felt, to him, like a hole opened on a cold, wet, dark night, asked, “Liwa, do you need help?”

She looked up from the ground, startled and frowning as if she didn’t know what he was going on about. “Help with what?”

“With getting your life back,” he said. “With getting your body back. With getting free.”

She smiled a sad and wary smile. “Free,” she echoed. Then she seemed to recover her guard. “Traxo, casual sex just doesn’t come as easily to us as it does to you. There’s nothing pathological in that.”

“I know.” He crossed his arms, gripping them with his hands. “But you’ve been with us for two years and the Station tells me...”

“It’s been spying on me?” she asked, in a carefully neutral voice.

“It’s been checking on you,” Traxo said. “And so have I. You’re scared of anybody even coming close to you, never mind touching you. Too scared, Liwa. Look, I’m not offering my body. I’m offering my professional expertise. I’m offering you therapy.”

“I don’t need therapy.”

“Liwa,” he said slowly and seriously. “I can recognize the symptoms. I’m a doctor. I’m your doctor. I know what happened to you.”

“Listen, Traxo.”

She turned suddenly, walking backwards for a moment, and the wind snapped her long black hair to her face, forcing her to narrow her eyes and lift a hand to keep the ending to get into them. She was, for a moment, a dark shape cut out of the glimmering metallic sheet of the sun’s reflection on the sea, glinting silver and gold and painfully bright and endlessly unquiet.

“What happened to me,” she said, urgently, and then the whipped-up hair proved too annoying for her, and she turned forward again, to face the sun, and the direction of the wind, and the shining ribbon of the Tower. “What happened to me was nothing special. It’s happened, it happens, to lots of other people, thousands and thousands of them, every day. It is really nothing exceptional, though people like to think it is. It’s commonplace, normal... it’s routine. It’s really nothing unusual.” She stopped, and shook her head. “I’m not a particularly tragic case, Traxo. If anything, I had it better than a lot of people.”

“That doesn’t mean that you can’t be or shouldn’t be helped,” Traxo said seriously.

Liwa looked at him in something like exasperation. “There is no help, Traxo. Some wounds do not heal. Period.” She took a big breath. “The first time they picked me up,” she said, “I thought it wasn’t actually as bad as I had feared. Because after all, I had managed to survive, and I was pretty damn pleased with myself. And since I didn’t have much to say in the first place and they had let me out, I thought I was over the worst.” She paused for a moment. “But then the second time... That was when I understood. I thought I had gotten away but I hadn’t. I couldn’t. They could come for me again, and again, and it wasn’t about what I had to give them at all...”

“They can’t get at you here.”

She turned to him. “You don’t understand. They don’t need to. They took my body away from me, they took my mind away from me. I’m done for, Traxo. I’m dead. Every night I go back to them, every night I wake up screaming and I’m back there, and I know I’ll never get away. Not tomorrow, not in five year’s time, not ever. I’m never going to get away.”

“You did get away, Liwa.”

She looked at him in silence, this time, for long. “You don’t understand,” she said, with soft affection, as if to show she really didn’t bear him any grudge for it. “You can’t.”

***

Most of his moms and dads had gone out by the time they got home, and had taken all of the younger kids with them for a great unscheduled trip to the communal hall in Thinnua; the others were nowhere to be seen. Traxo knew that it had been done for him, to give him a chance to spend some time with his siblings in relative calm, and felt deeply embarrassed and very touched. Mikea was waiting for them on the porch, her long dark legs up on the railing, a display flapping gently in the breeze, the volume turned down. She was reading a tablet with a rapt expression, but not enough gone into the book not to notice them coming back and wave at them.

Dikethi and Lillai drifted out after a while, and Kidaré’s partner Thrazien, bearing jugs filled with apparently innocuous but pungently-smelling liquids and floating bits of fruit, probably from Kidaré’s biolab if the tradition still held true.

The sun drowned amid glorious spillage of unsubtle colours, and the sky turned turquoise, and then a deeper, royal shade, and the tip of the Orbital Tower shone like a vertical star on them while a polite breeze came up from the sea, carrying a smell of cooking meat with it from some other, well, meatier party.

Kidaré never did show up, being caught up in some riveting job, as usual, but slowly, as the evening wore on, most of his brothers and sisters filled the long porch. At one point, too late really for their hunger, they went back inside and cooked enormous pots of spicy stew which were then duly and ruthlessly eaten and drowned in beer.

Drowsy and a little befuddled with the alcohol and food, Traxo listened to his siblings and Liwa talk from a vague distance, a fatigued smile on his face. His eye fell on the display, still swinging gently, still switched on, casting a pale cold irregularly moving light on the table.

“…nothing very different from any large family in the rest of the Galaxy,” Mikea was telling Liwa.

“Oh, very different,” Liwa said. She seemed to recall something, sighed and had another sip of beer. “Very different.”

“In which way?” Vathrei asked, her arms tight against her knees and an intense expression on her face.

Liwa seemed to collect her thoughts. “Well, it is all so much simpler and painless here. You fancy somebody, you just bring it into the family. No jealousy, no tragedy, no broken hearts.”

Traxo winced. The memory of his own recent cardiac breakage suddenly became too keen. No jealousy indeed. You just get told that the great love of your life doesn’t want you around any longer. There’s not even the excuse of Somebody Else. He concentrated for a moment on the moving display.

“It’s not that simple,” Mikea said.

“No, it’s not that simple,” Vathrei agreed.

Traxo found, to his surprise, that he could hear tiny tinny voices coming from the display if he concentrated. Transported by the benevolent flow of his mild alcoholic daze, he left the conversation on the relative merits of Outer and Tyrosian marriages behind and devoted his whole concentration on the display.

“...the underestimation of the risks involved. We certainly do not want to interfere in the affairs of another commonality, but this is, regrettably, an issue that concerns all human beings, wherever they are, and is not limited to one polity.”

“...At least you can’t be trapped by law, bound by money.”

The display now was occupied alternatively by the sadly smiling face of a shortish, thinnish, grey-haired middle-aged man, and the smooth concerned frown of the woman he was talking to. Jazel Laney, the President of the Tyrosian Federation, Traxo realized, at his most suave and benign.

“But the Outer Planets AIs have been around for almost three centuries. What makes them so dangerous now?”

“You can still be trapped by loyalty, bound by love.”

“Liwa,” Traxo said, somewhat urgently.

Liwa looked over at him. “What?” She followed the direction of his gaze. “Oh,” she said dismissively. “You don’t want to pay any attention to that piece of shit.”

“They’re talking about us.”

“Well, you see, the fact is, new artificial intelligence-equipped machines are being constructed every day, right now, being switched on all the time, and being more or less immortal and indestructible means that they will sooner or later reach a critical mass point, and my worry is that we will let the situation deteriorate to the point when it will be too late to act. And I am genuinely worried at the fact that...”

“He’s talking about us,” Traxo repeated.

Liwa, still trying to listen both to him and Mikea, said: “Us?”

Mikea frowned. “Us Outers?” she asked.

“Well, yeah, I suppose, but mainly the Station.”

“The Station isn’t us,” Liwa said.

“Well it becomes sort of our problem too if they come at it with battle cruisers, doesn’t it?”

“What battle cruisers?” asked Vathrei, confused.

“No battle cruisers,” Liwa told her firmly. “There will be no battle cruisers,” just as Traxo was saying: “The Tyrosians’ ones, right?”

“Is that what he’s been saying?” Mikea said, alarmed. She bent in her chair and increased the volume on the display. Conversations died all around the long table.

“Which is why I have formally issued a request to the Outer Planet Representative to the Tyrosian Federation that the self-aware space stations, especially the Chashanna Orbital Tower Station, be subjected to the impartial scrutiny of an international panel of experts in mentation...”

“That’s a long way from coming at you with battle cruisers,” said Yunaxè, one of the oldest of his brothers.

“Yeah? And do you think we’re going to let strangers chosen by that cheap demagogue on board, handing to them the authority to decide if Tikuka is to go on living or not? No fucking way. And what do you think they’re going to do when we say no?”

There was a short, heavy silence, in which the display tinnily and cheerily went on: “And in the event of a lack of cooperation, well, then we will be forced to evaluate all possible courses of action. But I’m truly sure that it will not come to that, and that the Outer people will see that we are merely acting to protect their own security and freedom.”

“Thank you, sir. I’m sure we’re all hoping the same.”

“They’re always talking like that,” Mikea said, but with a shade of nervousness. “Nothing’s ever come of it.”

“No,” Yerkika said, looking at the display as transfixed. “But he wasn’t President then.”

Mikea turned toward Liwa. “What do you think?”

Liwa wasn’t looking at the display. She was looking up, up, up, at the invisible end of the glimmering thread of the Orbital Tower.

“The Station...” she said. “It’s got weapons, doesn’t it? Anti-craft and space-to-ground weapons, right?”

“Yes,” Traxo said, and felt a shiver go through him. “Yes, all the stations have anti-intrusion measures. They are all built that way, ours and theirs alike. It’s to prevent somebody getting it into their heads to shoot them down. And, you know, after what’s happened to the Centre Turnstile...” And in the sudden chill he felt, without even realizing it, he forgot his previous insistence that doom was going to come. “But they can’t shoot simply us off the sky, can they?”

Liwa did not answer. She was still looking up.

***

Sabé grabbed him as soon as he came back on board. The summon came with pleadings from the Station, so he left his bag still packed and went. He found himself back in the no-gravity section, trying hard to keep up with Sabé’s deft, quick movements, her wiggling through the tunnels joining and splitting throughout the interior.

“What’s all the hurry about, then?” he said, a little short of breath, when they finally stopped.

They were in a strange room, quite different from what he was used to see in the Station – but then, he hardly ever went through the service corridors. It was blindingly white, and utterly devoid of any feature save for one black slit in one wall and four black buttons in a square: no rivets, no joints, no vents, ports, locks, handles, displays, readouts, dials, stepladders, none of the usual irregularities and devices and tools the walls sprouted whenever and wherever they could. This was like the inside of a neurotic’s cleanest drawer. Traxo blinked in the aggressively white starkness of the place.

“We’d prefer for all the keys to be out at any given moment,” the voice of the Station said.

“The what?”

“The keys,” Sabé said, serious. “Kola’s just had to go back down and he’s probably not coming back any time soon.”

Kola was one of the other doctors, an elderly, gentle and somewhat cautious man with a large family down on the planet he was always fretting about. Traxo knew he had been looking for a decent excuse to go back to them for ages. He had been stopping him for friendly chats very often lately and he had assumed he felt lonely: it dawned on him now that he was simply checking him out.

Sabé, revolving gently around her center of mass, handed him a black strip of plastic that looked like nothing much. “This is it,” she said.

“This is it what?” Traxo said, automatically taking it.

“This is the key that switches me off,” the voice of the Station said.

He looked towards the one wall he most thought of as the ceiling. “What?”

“You slide that into that port in the wall, push the buttons in order, and that’s it for me,” Tikuka said. “Dead. My core processors get hard-thrashed. It also wipes all my backups.”

Traxo looked at the strip of plastic. “Is this some kind of joke?”

“No. It’s a safeguard. If I were ever to become unbalanced, or if something happened to turn me into a danger for the personnel on board...”

“Something like what?”

“Something we cannot anticipate. You will have to...”

Traxo thrust the key angrily back at Sabé. “I don’t want anything to do with it.”

Sabé pushed herself back, with her superior skill in weightless movement, and Traxo found himself flailing around, upset and helpless.

“Traxo, please,” the Station said. “I need you to do it.”

“Whose sick idea was this?”

“Mine,” the Station said. “I had it installed.”

He was left speechless for a while.

“I know it’s not a fun assignment,” Tikuka went on. “But sometimes power of life and death over somebody is a good and necessary thing, Traxo. You’re a doctor. You of all people ought to know it.”

“I do not kill people.” Traxo shook his head. “Things. Beings. I’m not a killer.”

“That’s one of the reasons I’m giving the key to you,” the Station said.

Traxo looked at the key, then at Sabé, who lifted an eyebrow, then at the key again. It came with a metal chain to hang around the neck. With a resigned grimace, Traxo slipped it on.

***

Revolution Day rolled around, and everybody not on vital assignments came to the Station’s two external rings, to watch the cloudbursts as night covered the face of the planet below them. They brought vast buckets of ice with bright colored bottles floating in them, and bowls of fried fruit, and shellfish whose smell would then take forever to dispel from the ring, though the Station was so reluctant at letting them light open fires that they had to give up on the grill idea.

There were plenty of tourists as well, although only the ones with some friend on the staff had managed to get to the external rings - everybody else had to watch from the portholes.

Traxo’s group of close friends, melting and fusing at the edge with other groups of lesser known fellow stationers, got moderately drunk by the time the glittering star that was the city of Chashanna, directly below them, started sprouting smaller burst of light only visible with magnification. People were lighting fireworks, waiting for the grander show of cloud manipulation.

Liwa pointed and whooped at the first flowering of white vapour on the surface below, a series of concentric circles opening against the dark planet, the conventional signal for the beginning of the show. From below, the thin layer of vapour lighted with lasers would appear grandiose and majestic, covering the sky in its huge mantle, but only from above you could appreciate the precision of the design.

Applause greeted the appearance of the first figure, a classic but well-executed trefoil. They opened more bottles, and started flinging ice-cubes at each other, squeals and shrieks mixing with the shouts of awe for the succession of geometric shapes of ever-increasing complexity from below, fading into each other in superbly controlled sequence.

It was about then that the subject of the key came out, with what Traxo found deeply disturbing timing.

“They say there’s a key.”

That was Chip-Chop, whose given name Traxo had been told on meeting him but had promptly forgotten because everybody ever called him Chip-Chop. He had never gotten around to learning how he had acquired the nickname, because, well…

“A what?”

…Because there were just too many of them on the kitchen staff that was there almost in its totality. This, for example, was Socket. Chip-Chop wasn’t such a strange name for a cook, but Socket?

“A key. To switch off the Station.”

“Have a look at that! Did you see that? Wow!”

And this was Laritai Makikeo, whom nobody dared call Chuffa-Bits to her face, her being royalty in the kitchen, that is, the pastry chef.

“Why would anyone want to switch off the Station?”

“To kill the AI, you moron.”

That was Hurai. She had worked closely with Kola and Traxo wondered if she knew more about it than she let on.

“And why would anyone want to do that?”

“Hey, that’s what the Tyrosians want, right? Isn’t it? You follow this kind of thing, Liwa. Didn’t they want us to switch off?”

Lila, one of Hurai’s mates, and backup First Shift Portmaster.

“Yeah. Gosh, I’d have thought even you would have noticed an ultimatum issued by the President himself, Lila.”

“I did, didn’t I?”

“Oooh, look! That’s a new one, right? I’ve never seen that.”

“Amazing, innit? It’s awfully hard to do them asymmetrical, you know?”

“Do you really think there’s a key?”

“I don’t,” said Socket, fishing another bright blue bottle from a tub of iced water.

“I think it’s a sensible precaution.”

“When did you become so technophobic, eh?”

“I don’t think there is one.”

“I do.”

“What do you think, Traxo?”

With a guilty start, Traxo swallowed a half-chewed fried daisy. “Who, me?”

“Yes, you, you relentless muncher, you.”

“Oh, I... I think it’s a bit of a paranoid idea, right?” With the guilty conscience of the lousy liar, he felt everybody’s eyes on him, especially Liwa’s.

“Why would anybody want to switch off the Station for anyway?” Lila repeated. “I mean, really.”

“Well, some people are really freaked out by AIs. Like that Tyrosian bastard, for example.” Chip-Chop.

“What Tyrosian bastard?”

“The President, Socket, the new President, talk softly and machine-gun ‘em down Jazel Laney, the one with the wet brain fetish.”

“Oh yeah, right, the wet brain fetish. And the fact that we’re sitting atop the major city of the planet, and that whoever controls the Station can get the defence weapons trained on it and basically control the gateway to the planet doesn’t come into it at all, right.” Hurai.

“Why would anyone want to control the planet, for fuck’s sake? We’re a bunch of beggars by galactic standards. It’s not as if we have anything worth stealing, we...”

“Oh, no? We may be poor, but we’re sitting right atop one of the most successfully terraformed planet in the whole fucking galaxy. The choicest real estate around, boys and girls.”

Nobody spoke for quite a while. Down on the planet, the neat illuminated clouds had stopped flowering, and the night was once again dark and serene.

***

The Station was showing nothing on its displays. Traxo took a look at them and then got back to the task of making his way with much apologizing and manouvering inside the Assembly Hall. He had never seen it so packed, and the only spot on the tiers of seats was on the opposite side of the circular room. He had only been here when there were matters relating to health and safety being debated, or when it was his turn to show up every six days. Nobody discussed the policies of running a space station for fun.

But today, almost all of the thousand people living or working on the Station had turned up.

The battleships weren’t visible, of course, which was why the Station had chosen the empty starry sky to represent them. When the moment came, they would jump out of hyperspace, deal their wounds of slag and fire, and jump right back – unless the station’s weapons got them first.

But ah, and there was the surprise, the Station had gathered them all to explain that it wasn’t going to use them. It wouldn’t use them at all.

The Hall leaped up more or less unanimously, in a noisy swelling wave of protest and outrage and surprise, whose overall message was clear despite the overlapping of exclamations, protests, demands, and speculations about the sanity of the station’s Mind. Traxo himself only shook his head. He wasn’t that surprised.

“I’d really like to discuss this with you,” the Station went on calmly, without raising the volume of its delivery, and of course its voice was drowned by the rippling protest in the Hall. Hoverbots clutching spherical speakers in miniature pincers floated in or down, discreetly, by ones and twos, until the sound of the station’s voice, though no louder, was much more evenly distributed.