Orbital Resonance Read online

  JOHN BARNES

  Orbital Resonance

  This book is dedicated to the people who made it possible for me to get through the worst time of my life thus fer:

  To Kathy Albe, for the many good times and for the gracious, generous way she chose to end our marriage; and

  To many people who were there when I needed them, but most especially to (in alphabetical order):

  Liz and Bob Applegate

  James Crumley

  Russ Gay

  Ashley and Carolyn Grayson

  Jerry Oltion

  Lyle Schmautz

  Rick Williams

  The truly brave are soft of heart and eyes, And feel for what their duty bids them do.

  —Byron, Marino Faliero

  CHAPTER ONE

  December 8, 2025

  Dr. Loveix says I have writing talent, so I have to enter this stupid contest, so I’m stuck with a bunch of extra hours at the werp—and with my Full Adult exam less than six months away, too. The people at Scholastic decided that Earth kids wanted to know what it was like to live in space, so they have this special contest for all of us on the ships, the ports, and the stations. Of course you know all that, if you’re reading this, so they’ll probably cut this first paragraph. I hate that—it makes me think about just giving up and not writing when people cut my work without asking.

  Anyway, my name is Melpomene Murray, I’m thirteen ground-years old, and I live on the Flying Dutchman, where I was born. I’ve done eight and a half orbits, which are the “years” of the Flying Dutchman, but they aren’t of equal length so nobody uses them to measure time the way you do years.

  I guess I could just transcribe the “useful facts list” they gave us with the assignment. That ought to be boring enough so that I won’t advance in the contest and have to do a rewrite:

  Like the other four ships owned by NihonAmerica, the Flying Dutchman is a domesticated asteroid. The original capture of Inoueia 1996 YT was made in 2008; the crew began moving aboard in 2011, and construction is still continuing. The Flying Dutchman has a permanent population of seventy-two hundred, down from eight thousand last year since so many older people left. Sixty-seven hundred of us are under the age of twenty, and sixty-four hundred of us were born here on the ship. All the people take up less than one percent of the ship’s volume for living space. The cargo bays, when they’re completed in 2059, will hold just over three cubic kilometers of cargo.

  Our orbit is continuously modulated—that is, we have engines always running, speeding us up or slowing us down—so that aphelion is always a near approach to Mars and perihelion is always a near approach to Earth. The ship is powered by eight MAM reactors with a combined output of thirty thousand terawatts.

  Oh shit. I can’t stand this. Cut that later and keep going.

  I’m already boring myself, and I have to hand in at least twenty thousand bytes on Friday. Besides, the “useful facts list” says Earth kids my age aren’t even doing calculus yet, and almost all this stuff is physics.

  I don’t like physics that much—and I don’t need to, because I’m going to be the mayor.

  There, they would really stop Dr. Lovell from sending this out. I could write about that … as if I would …

  Anyway, I’ve written a whole screen full and I still don’t really have anything to tell you. I keep thinking about books I like, but none of them help much:

  “Call me Melpomene”—well, I already said that, and it didn’t get me anywhere.

  “She was a centimeter, perhaps two, under 160, skinny, and she advanced straight at you with a slight stoop of the shoulders …” hah! And her mother told her to straighten up.

  “When Ms. Melpomene Murray of Block A Corridor Twelve Living Unit Six announced that she would be celebrating her thirteenth birthday—” Please! And this isn’t helping since I’ll have to cut it all anyway. I need something that I can talk about for 20kb and so far I can’t even plagiarize an opening paragraph, much less think of one of my own.

  The only beginning that would make any sense comes from a book I hate, but it was my grandfather’s favorite book—I never knew him, of course, because he died in the Die-Off in 1994, but I’ve heard a lot about him.

  Much more than I wanted to. Mother is always quoting him—she’s so weirdwired on the subject of Grandpa she actually blew some weight allowance to bring up his personal hardcopy of that book. Papa said he liked it too, which just made it worse—I had to read it. It starts off, “If you really want to hear about it… .”

  And as soon as I start writing about all the “madman stuff” that happened last year, it’ll get into how I’m going to be mayor and then I’ll be out of this contest because pos-def Dr. Lovell won’t let it be transmitted. She’ll probably just accept the piece and then wipe the file.

  On the other hand, I didn’t want to be in this stupid contest anyway. I could key in fuck you dr. lovell and have the werp repeat that till it fills up enough space, but she’d just erase that and give me a zil. But if the whole story is about what happened last year I bet I don’t even get entered. Which is fine with me—no rewrite.

  Okay, now I have a topic. You’re never going to see it, but I might as well get it written; maybe Dr. Lovell will bokk up and it will go through.

  But I really hope not.

  It started with Theophilus Harrison. The first time I saw him in class, I knew what was going to happen. There were three things wrong with him.

  One, Theophilus was pudgy. I guess that wasn’t his fault, but we’ve all been on controlled diets from birth, so though we have some big husky kids—everyone calls Bekka Hayakawa “Roundie”—we don’t have any real fat people.

  Two, first thing that morning he took top standing in Individuals Math away from Randy Schwartz. That was kind of fun—no one had in almost a year, so when Dr. Niwata read off standings you could feel Randy’s shock like a drilling blast.

  Three, which was really the whole problem, Theophilus was from Earth.

  I don’t want you to get the impression that I don’t like Earth people, but they can be obnoxious—at least the bu-roniki, corporados, and plutocks who come up here for the one-week tour at perihelion are. They always act like this place is an exhibit or something: “Isn’t it amazing how gravity is always changing?” (And of course it’s not, since it’s always equal to ship acceleration in the Main Body and centrifugal force in the Mushroom. I’d be more amazed if the grav was always the same.)

  Also tourist kids are never any good at anything.

  Theophilus would be a little better, I assumed, since he was a settler and not a tourist, and before you come up you have to have at least a year of intensive schooling to catch up with your birthyear, since school here starts at age three and runs 250 ten-hour days per year. (Those are some more numbers from the useful facts list. I hope I get extra points or something for working them in.)

  But anyway, having a fat Earth kid p.d. Randy in math meant collision course—and Randy was big and mean and not known for good sportsmanship. (Stupid werp just flagged me to ask what p.d. means. P.d. = “push down,” like what happens in a computer when you add a record to the top of the stack.)

  When it was time for rec, Theophilus got up too fast and whacked both his knees on the underside of his desk with a thump loud enough for everyone to hear. I suppose even the half-gee in the classroom, out on the rim of the Mushroom, was much less than what he was used to.

  Everyone turned to look at him, as he tried to pretend his knees didn’t hurt. “Better ask Maintenance to install a safety belt there,” Kwame van Dyke said.

  Kwame is always saying things like that, but for some reason this time everyone laughed—except Theophilus and me. Dr. Niwara turned and looked slowly, qui
etly, around the room, and it got very quiet.

  People had even more fun watching Theophilus climb stairs with the grav decreasing the whole way. The grav increases linearly with distance from the center, so at first it’s barely noticeable, but up toward the top it decreases perceptibly for every meter you climb. So people who aren’t used to it start walking up the stairs in their usual way, and then gradually start to bounce higher and higher.

  That’s exactly what happened to Theophilus. He was walking directly behind Dr. Niwara, and all of the rest of us were trailing after. I was with Miriam, my best friend, about seven or eight meters back. She kept digging an elbow into me every time he’d take a high bounce, especially up toward the top where they stopped being occasional and started to be all the time.

  “Looks like he’s from Australia,” Kwame whispered behind us. Miriam always laughed at his jokes, so he was lim looped on her. “Obviously—”

  “—one of his ancestors is a kangaroo,” I finished for him. “I think it’s really interesting that you start so many of your jokes with ‘obviously.* “

  “And now,” Miriam said, “a chaotic process goes into complete divergence.” He had lost contact with the steps entirely, and was frantically grabbing for the handrail to pull himself back down. He thumped awkwardly into the wall and the rail before righting himself again.

  It went on like that all the way up to the airgym. That’s near the center of the Mushroom, where the gravity is about a twentieth of a gee—still much higher than in the Main Body, but a lot less than in the classrooms.

  It looked like he’d been in space before, at least a little; maybe his parents were rich and he’d been to some of the playgrounds at Supra New York or Supra Tokyo. Anyway, he didn’t flail around helplessly on his glideboard, but he couldn’t get up much speed, he never tried to go up a wall where all the fun is, and he had to use both footgrips and hang onto the weenie string besides.

  The werp just flagged me on an audience note and said you won’t know what a weenie string is because you don’t have airgyms on Earth. I guess that must be because the gravity is always a full gee. (How do you stand it?)

  Okay, explanation: an airgym is a bowl-shaped room thirty meters across. There’s lots of little holes in the floor, maybe half a centimeter apart, with jets of air coming out of them, and you zip around, about a centimeter off the floor, on a glideboard, which is a piece of fiberplas about as thick as a piece of paper and a meter long by thirty centimeters across. There are two grips for your feet, but most people only fasten the left one so that your other leg can help you do some tricks, and if you’re completely clumsy there’s the weenie string, which goes from a ring you hold in your hand to the front of the board for balance. Most people cut the weenie string off by the time they’re six.

  There, I hope I satisfied the werp, I hope you got something out of all the explanation, and I really hope I can get on with this. Because I want to get done. Because I didn’t want to write it in the first place. Edit this out later.

  So anyway we were all shooting around, racing and playing, and Theophilus was trying, but he either hit the wall with too little force to climb it, or he just kind of drifted back and forth in everyone’s way. A couple times he did a bucko, pushing down too hard on the front of his board and flipping face-first against the floor—not hard, since he wasn’t going very fast, but every time he did it people stared.

  “Melpomene.” It was Miriam, gliding up beside me. She always hit that second syllable hard when she was going to lecture me. “You’re not moving and you’re crowding the wall like a groundhog.” She said it just loud enough for Theophilus to hear it and pretend he didn’t. That made me furious, so I got away from Miriam—shot off on a wall-climber, turned into a backspin across the room, and finished with a whirly up the opposite wall. Miriam tried to follow me and flapped out as usual, her board separating from the wall and sending her spinning out into the middle of the room, slowly tumbling back to the floor.

  “Okay, Mel, I’m sorry.” I hated being called Mel—I still do. It was almost as bad as the “Melly” my mother still insisted on.

  I circled Miriam once as she got up. She was rubbing her hands—they must have been stinging after the way she hit.

  “Really, Melpomene—do you have to defend everybody in the world?”

  “I’m sorry, Mim,” I said. I hadn’t meant for her to get hurt, and she should have had better sense than to follow me up that wall that way, but then I knew Miriam would pretty much try to follow me through anything, and should have taken that into account. “It’s just things are going to be hard enough for him. Anyway, you came real close that time on the whirly. If Carole hadn’t cut you off you’d have had enough momentum to get you through. Want to try again?”

  She smiled at me—when she smiles like that, it always feels like happiness pouring in through my eyes in buckets. “Pos-def.”

  “Okay, the trick is that even though it looks like you’re losing control, you aren’t really. You keep your head pointed the same way till the last second, then snap it around and—”

  “Mel, I’m not Theophilus. I know all that stuff—I just can’t do it. Just give me a lead and I’ll try to stay in your track.”

  “Sure,” I said. First I got my best friend hurt, now I treated her like a moron groundhog… . Before I started, I pinched the back of my thigh, hard.

  I went in straight, keeping it easy for Miriam. At the right point—that’s not a place I can describe, it’s just something you feel—I whipped into a spin, my head snapping around to stay on target, and headed up the wall.

  Each headsnap accelerated the board a little, kicking me farther up the wall till I was just about horizontal; by snapping a little less than I could have, I spun down the side of the wall and back out into the open floor.

  Miriam was doing fine, but she lost confidence, and when she does that she slows down her spin. It’s actually the downward lift of the board that holds you against the wall— sort of like an upside-down helicopter—and you have to spin fast for that. As always, her spin slowed down, her board bounced up and separated from the surface, and she flailed around in midair before she drifted slowly down to the floor. Another flapout.

  “You think too much,” I told her.

  “Ha. Dr. Niwara would be surprised to hear that.” She got up again; this time at least she hadn’t come down spinning, so she wasn’t hurt. “Nothing will happen if I just try to spin as hard as I can, right?”

  “Uh, pretty much.”

  “You’re a big help.”

  “Well, you do need to slow down to come back down the wall. If you spun up beyond where the air jets are, onto the ceiling, you’d do an upside-down bucko and then fall.”

  “I’ll worry about that when I get up there.” Instead of having me mark the start this time, she just went.

  She started a little before the right time, but she was spinning so hard it didn’t matter. Miriam went right up the wall beyond full horizontal and stayed there halfway around the airgym before loss of momentum brought her back down. She glided into the center, a little awkward coming down, but lim koapy for a first time.

  Everyone was clapping. They all knew, of course, that she’d been working on it for a long time, and it was such a big whirly that they had all seen it. I was applauding too, and when Miriam came back to me we hugged.

  In the middle of all that I noticed that Theophilus was staring at her. I didn’t quite understand his expression: a little like he was angry at her, but like lim loneliness too. I wanted to say something to him, but I wasn’t sure what and besides he was across the room. Rec ended before I got around to approaching him.

  The rest of the day was pretty usual, as usual as it can be when you’ve got a new kid in class—I bet you have new kids every school session on Earth, but for us it only happens when a new family, one with a critical specialty, gets shipped up to us, and that’s maybe two per perihelion, and even then the odds are there won’t be so
mebody in your shift and birthyear, let alone assigned to your class. Rachel DeLane, three years ago, had been the last addition to our class, and her family had just been a transfer from Albatross, the Earth-Ceres ship, so she hadn’t been at all hard to get used to.

  Dr. Niwara called on Theophilus a lot that day, trying to figure out where he would fit in I guess. He was certainly fine at quant stuff, anyway, which was this week’s topic.

  I watched him a lot, too. He had kind of a nice face—regular features, curly light brown hair, nose a little sharp and long, maybe, but well within bounds. His skin was a bit darker than cauc, and he was fairly tall for our birthyear—the pudginess concealed that. Anyway you could tell that with enough rec to slim him down he’d be pretty good looking.

  I was also watching Randy Schwartz watch Theophilus. Randy had been on B Shift until the middle of last year, and the rest of us didn’t know him very well—he wasn’t easy to get to know—there were nasty rumors that his family had been told to change shifts rather than asked. He was smart, and his standing was high, but he didn’t seem to have any close friends and a lot of us were a little scared of him.

  As I looked at him now, I didn’t like the gleam in his eye—something was going to happen in the next few days, I knew it. Randy had been top of the class in math, in all three categories—Individuals, Pairs, and Pyramid—almost since he joined our class. Half his secret was that he was really good at it.

  The other half was that he beat the lim shit out of anyone who got a better score than he did.

  When I got home that night, Papa was at a committee meeting, working late, and Mother had just accessed a newly transmitted novel by her favorite author, some woman named Olson who wrote these long, boring things about people living in small towns surrounded by cornfields back in the 1950s or 1970s, I could never remember which.

  It was especially dumb because nowadays they grow corn in orbit, where there’s no bugs or drought and lots more sunlight, and let robots do the work. Who wants to read about how they did it back then? I read a couple of those books and it sounded like life was dangerous, boring, stupid, and unsanitary—imagine handling rotten animal shit with your hands! (They called it “compost” but I looked it up and that’s what it was.)