Lifeline

She had come to the garden to empty her mind, to get away from thinking. To forget about the War, her work … her estranged husband back on Earth. To distract herself, Karen spent too many hours in the lab, surrounded by chemicals, analytical instruments, and polymer spinnerets, using the clumsy techniques of working without gravity.

She could work out her problems, somehow. She was strong enough for that.

Karen wandered along the manicured aisles of bushes, listening to the fountains, the recorded bird song from tiny speakers hidden in the branches. Kaitanabe knew just how much sound and how much silence to add to his garden. Warm illumination glowed from the walls and ceiling, simulating sunlight. Brighter lamps shone out of artificial Japanese lanterns for those plants that required more light.

Karen wore comfortable clothes—stretch jeans and a sweater—under her lab coat, which she rarely removed because she always needed the pockets for her personal paraphernalia, computer, calendar-beeper, black licorice candy. Anything she had to carry consciously, such as a backpack or a purse, always seemed too much bother.

Part of her wanted to hurry back to the lab, to bury herself in work again. She thought she had just made a major breakthrough, found a much faster way to draw out the monomolecular weavewire she had pioneered years before.…

No, she would stay here and just let some of the calmness soak in for a while, seek that quiet place in her center where all the ideas originated. She had been consciously teaching herself how to relax, but it was very difficult.

She glanced down at the meandering stream pumped by slow turbines under the floor. She looked a little haggard, but she’d had ghosts of gray in her red hair and laugh lines around her eyes long before the War. Leaving Ray had done that to her—the trial separation to see if they would fare better together or by themselves. A year at L-5 doing her work, giving her time to think … and at the end of her assignment, then they could decide what to do.

But the War had decided for them, and she and Ray would never have the chance to find out. Even if he had not been killed in the exchange, they were separated by circumstances more final than any divorce.

Karen did not close her eyes against the pain, but her vision became focused on a faraway place. Everything will work out the way it’s supposed to. It sounded corny and simplistic, but she believed it.

As she rounded a corner of hedges, Karen came upon Hiro Kaitanabe, bent over a flower bed of cream-colored lilies. She was about to greet the gardener, but stopped as she noticed the tension in his back.

Kaitanabe ripped the lilies out by the roots, crushing the bulbs in his hands. He yanked the leaves off silently and tore the delicate flowers.

Karen took a step forward. “What—?”

The gardener froze, then slowly placed the lilies down on the ground, as if embarrassed. He stood up, brushing his dirt-covered hands together. It took him a moment to place an indifferent mask on his face.

“This entire garden … none of it is food.” He indicated the plants with a nod of his head. “All this time I could have been growing food.”

He padded away, leaving the ruined flower bed and clods of dirt on the path.

Karen stared at him until he disappeared into the foliage. She couldn’t even hear him moving. Deep in one of the branches of a sculpted tree, a burst of cheerful bird song echoed in the garden.

The Bifrost Lounge held a dozen people. The chairs, tables, and small holoscreens had been arranged in a haphazard but calculated way. Karen was sure Orbitechnologies had spent a lot of effort on psychological studies to give it just that “homey” touch. Everything was done in earth tones with splashes of green here and there, artificial flowers, real plants.

Three women sat at a table playing a game with a well-worn deck of paper playing cards. Clustered together in the high-throughput ventilation area, four people shared a cigarette. Karen smiled to herself. One of Orbitech 1’s developments had been an alveoli-scrubber drug—a timed-release capsule that cleaned deposits from the lungs. This made tobacco smoking safe again, but since it cost so much to import tobacco from Earth, few of the Orbitech colonists could smoke anyway.

The lab work waited, but Karen avoided it for now. She needed to be with other people, even if she did nothing more than sit and observe. She was getting tired of hiding with nothing but her problems for company. That was no way to make things better for herself.

She entered the lounge quietly so no one would notice her. A man in a red sweat suit hurried up to her. “The shuttles are going down! Either this orbit or the next one.” He looked as if she should be interested, but he went off to tell the others before she could respond.