Up Against It - M. J. Locke [3]
Then he saw Ian tense. Geoff shifted in his chair and looked at the fountain, trying to act casual. He couldn’t believe anyone watching was going to buy their performance. Then he stopped caring.
Something was moving in the water. First a bubble, then two. He held his breath. Soon the water was boiling and seething like a live thing. The students sitting near the fountain began to notice. They scrambled back, scattering coffee bulbs. Flocks of panicked birds rose from their perches on the fountain blocks as dark shapes began to emerge from the surface of the water. A hand bone here. A foot bone there. Part of a skull. Teeth in a jawbone. A spine and pelvis.
The shapes began assembling themselves into skeletons. Most had a hunched, gnomish look. One or two were deformed, with feet where their hands should be, or heads growing out of their butts. Geoff frowned. That glitch again. He thought he had fixed it.
Soon whole skeletons were lurching up and collapsing back into the brew. The glitch seemed to have fixed itself. Good. Soon there were a dozen. Twenty at least!
For a minute Geoff thought that would be all they’d do, and that was dramatic enough. But then they began climbing out onto the tiles of the plaza. They joined bony hands and began to dance. The skeletons made a line and curved through the plaza. Students stepped back and watched as they skipped and capered and leapt, banged on their arms, rib cages, and thighbones, waved their bony arms. They didn’t sing—they couldn’t; Geoff didn’t even know where to start, to program larynxes and lungs—but they sure could shake their bones.
They didn’t last long. They were made of spent juice and glass beads, after all, spun together by weak silica tendrils. The first shattered as its dancing and banging and clattering brought it in contact with a corner wall. Soon another burst. Even their own hands or elbows or knees were enough to cause them to fall to pieces. One burst in front of Geoff and Ian, who leapt back, knocking over their chairs—startled despite themselves. The air filled with clear, tan, and silvery beads and spidery strands of silicone.
In moments the skeletons had all burst. It was over. The plaza tiles were coated in tiny beads.
Geoff realized how many people had gathered. Someone started clapping and laughing. Others joined in—but he could see irritation on some faces, and hear grumblings, and that had its own rewards. People began to disperse, carefully stepping among the beads. One young man slipped and fell. “Stroiders” camera motes had come, too, just as Geoff had hoped, and now swirled in the air currents like fairy dust, smelling of ozone and faint, bitter mint.
Ian pressed his hands over his mouth. “Cool…” Geoff looked over and grinned. “Domo, doof.”
“Come on. Time to spin the sugar.” Ian grabbed his sleeve and dragged him into the plaza. They dashed down the lane to meet Kam and Amaya, slipping and sliding on bug grapes.
Geoff desperately wanted to go home and watch the news. But not today. Today was the big ice shipment, and nothing—not even Geoff’s bug-turd art obsession—could be allowed to interfere with the ice harvest.
* * *
They got separated at the spokeway elevators. Amaya squeezed into a waiting elevator, and then Ian, who was holding her hand, but Geoff and Kamal stood one layer too far back in the crowd when the warning lights went off.
“You’ll miss the harvest!” Ian said.
“We’ll take the stairs!” Geoff shouted, as the doors closed. He and Kam headed off at a run. “Meet you in the Hub!”
* * *
Zekeston was a fat, spinning habitat wheel buried below the surface of the asteroid. The city’s spin generated a gravity gradient, which ranged from barely a thousandth of a gee in the Hub to about three-quarters of Earth’s gravity at the outermost level. The university was on that highest-gee bottom level. That meant that the first fifty levels of Geoff and Kam’s travel