Exo: A Novel Page 7

The Eyrie is about twelve miles from the pit, deep in El Solitario, a cliff house two hundred feet from the bottom of a steep canyon.

  Long before I was born, Dad took a ledge with an overhanging shelf and enclosed it with a wall of natural rock. He used dye in the mortar to match the rock, but you can’t really see it from anyplace but the opposite wall of the canyon. From the floor, the ledge blocks it. From above, even on the opposite ridge, the shelf blocks it. Dad says he’s seen hikers in the canyon, but it’s been secure since before they got married.

  I was surprised when Dad said I could have it, but Mom filled me in.

  “He’s not comfortable with the idea of live-in help. I insisted we have medical resources on-site, but he’s worried we’ll end up with a mole—with one of them. He was the one who suggested you not sleep here. He figures you’ll be fine while awake, but he didn’t want anyone sneaking up on you.”

  That I could understand. Dad is paranoid, but he has reasons for his paranoia.

  I’d already helped Dad set up new shelves in the warehouse. He started loading them with his books out of the Eyrie immediately after that.

  I jumped the contents from my bedroom shelves to the knotty pine shelves in the cliff house. It was clear why Dad hadn’t moved them. The ledge that formed the Eyrie’s floor sloped from one end to the other, a gradual descent. All the shelves had been built in place to be level on that uneven surface.

  I spread out my collection of books and manga and videos, leaving room for expansion, but there were still four empty units down at the far end when I was done.

  Mom had me take my desk and chest of drawers, and we rigged some rods for my hanging clothes. We moved my bed, with the reading nook beneath, to the warehouse.

  It was weird standing there, in the empty bedroom. The carpet was still there, but Mom said she was going to pull it for sanitary reasons. “Your grandmother has enough trouble breathing without dealing with old mold and dust.”

  I felt guilty. I was certainly responsible for any mold. My first jump put a couple of cubic yards of snow in this room. I offered to help strip the carpet, but Mom knew I had other plans.

  “Go on. I’ve got this.”

  * * *

  I jumped to the Stanford campus. Not only was it still light, it was forty degrees warmer. It was after hours for the observation deck on Hoover tower, so I jumped there and sat in the sun.

  Of course I thought about Joe. I looked south toward Stern Hall. I could walk it in five minutes, but of course I didn’t have to walk.

  I tried to look away but it took a conscious physical jerk to turn my gaze west instead, toward Cory’s lab in the Durand Building.

  Cory wasn’t in, which was good, ’cause I wasn’t going to talk to him before I’d proven it could be done. Apparently he’d taken his laptop home, so I didn’t have worry about disconnecting the USB cables. I slowly turned up the power running to the suit’s EAP fibers and watched in fascination as it expanded and relaxed, sagging on the life-model form, hanging suspended from the arm supports and the helmet flange.

  I couldn’t see how the pieces of the life model were connected to each other and was about to give up when I saw the edge of a strip of Velcro sticking up between the neck and one of the shoulder sections. I gritted my teeth and, using a screwdriver, pried it apart. The Velcro let go with a tearing sound and I winced, sure I’d ruined something, but I hadn’t. When I repeated the process on the other side, the entire central section of the torso, from neck to crotch, came up through the helmet flange. It was trailing six fine wires, but there was enough slack I could lie it on the floor by the suit.

  Inside, the wires wound off toward the remaining modules, terminating, on the two I could see, in connectors glued to the surface of the left and right parts of the torso. Both sides of the connectors were clearly labeled so I unplugged them.

  The two remaining torso modules were Velcroed in turn to the arms and the hips. I eased them out. At this point, I was able to unplug the remaining four wires, so I lay the torso pieces on the bench, face up, keeping their orientation to each other. The ease with which the arms and legs came out was comical after my initial frustrations. In all, it took a half hour, but half that time was just finding that first piece of Velcro.

  I laid out the life-model legs and arms with the torso and the result was a bit disturbing—a headless man lying on the workbench. The sun was down and the light coming through the windows had diminished. I looked at the bench and shuddered, and turned on the lab lights.

  Without the life model, the suit was much lighter when I put it back up on the stand. Sure, heavier than normal clothing, but less than seven kilos, including the helmet flange.

  Though Cory hadn’t been using it while the life model supported the upper part of the suit, the stand had a two-pronged fork on a hinge that, when flipped down, was the right width and height to support the helmet flange where it had been before.

  The suit looked huge.

  Stop stalling.

  I peered carefully at the thing and thought about how I should hold my arms. I took a deep breath … then let it out again and stepped back.

  Something wasn’t right.

  I looked down at the floor and swore. The feet were pointing away. The cable connector should’ve clued me in, since it was on the opposite side. I took the suit back off the stand and turned it around again, carefully arranging the feet and arms.

  And then I did it.

  I was standing in the suit.

  The top of my head was sticking out of the helmet flange but my eyes were below it. I laughed. I flapped my arms—my hands came near the sausage-sized fingers at the end of the sleeve. It felt like putting on Daddy’s clothes when I was a little girl, practically vanishing into the oversized shirts and pants.

  I jumped back out.

  Well, that advances the timetable a bit.

  I turned my phone on, hooked into the Stanford guest WiFi, and loaded the Skype app.

  “Cory, could you meet me at your lab tonight?”

  * * *

  I’d considered going to the next step by myself—the bit where I turned the power off and let the suit shrink, squeezing in, until the thing was pressing against my skin, hopefully uniformly, at the predicted thirty kilopascals. But for all I knew, it would bind or even trap me, not letting me move enough to reach the switch.

  Awkward, at the very least.

  I’d changed clothes by the time Cory, got there, though I wore my long dark-wool coat over all.

  He’d seen the light was on and opened the door, the key still in his hand. “How’d you get in?”

  I smiled. “The same way I got in when I delivered your equipment. Sorry. No one let me in, just as no one let me into your old lab when I recovered the suit.”

  He looked down at the doorknob. “Uh, these aren’t cheap locks. You didn’t ‘bump’ them open. And that security padlock at my old lab was a level up from even this.”

  I nodded. “Don’t forget the evidence seal.”

  He frowned. “Right. Uh, this is a little creepy.”

  “I’ve been in the suit, Cory.”

  His head swiveled and he looked at the suit, hanging empty, still powered, at full extension, baggy and hanging. “Impossible—unless you ruined it.” He walked past me, his steps quickening. He ran his fingers over the cloth, around the flange. He twitched the rheostat on the power supply, reducing voltage, and let it shrink in until it hung there like a thin-limbed child’s onesie instead of a shroud for a giant.

  He turned back to me and said, “I’m going with ‘impossible.’”

  I opened the coat. I was wearing my high-tech snowboarding skintight long underwear over briefs, bra, and ankle socks. “Expand it again.”

  He stared at me, then said, “Unless you don’t have a human bone structure, you’re not fitting through the flange.”

  I jerked my chin at the suit. “Expand it.”

  He turned and flipped the rheostat. When he turned back towar
d me, I wasn’t there.

  What he saw was my black coat dropping to the floor.

  I had to stand on tiptoe and raise my chin to look through the flange. Cory took two steps toward the coat, tilting his head to look at the connecting door to his office, before he thought to look back at the suit.

  “See,” I said. “I didn’t break it.”

  * * *

  Well, that didn’t go like I expected.

  I was kneeling on the floor holding a plastic bag full of snow against the bump on the back of his head.

  “Sorry, I should’ve had you sit down first.”

  He was still blinking. “What happened?”

  “You fainted and hit your head on the floor.”

  “Fainted? I don’t faint,” he said, offended. He sat up and groaned, then reached up and touched his head. “Ouch.” He glared at me. “Did someone hit me?”

  “You fell. Your head bounced off the floor. Here.” I handed him the Baggie of snow.

  He touched it, squeezed it. “What’s this? Shaved ice?”

  “Snow,” I said.

  “Snow. In the Bay Area?”

  “Let me see your pupils. Do you have a concussion?”

  He glared at me again and told me the date, the day of the week, and the current president.

  I said, “Tell me what happened right before you fell down.”

  “Uh, I turned the power back up on the suit and then looked back at you, but you’d dropped your coat and moved while I was looking away. I checked the office then looked back at the suit and you were standing behind it, looking over the flange.”

  “I wasn’t behind the suit,” I said gently.

  He blinked like an owl again, several times, and pressed the snow against his head, then said plaintively, “Why snow?”

  “It’s softer than ice. Against the bump on your head.”

  “Where did you get snow?”

  “Canada.”

  He rolled his eyes.

  There were two tall backless bench stools in the room, but I thought they would be more dangerous than standing. I went back into his office and rolled his desk chair back into the lab.

  “Here. Sit down in this. You’re a rational man, aren’t you? Ph.D. engineer and all?”

  He nodded reluctantly and let me help him up into the chair. I thought about going back into his office and getting his bicycle helmet, but he looked pretty secure in the chair. It had a cloth seat, not leather, so I thought he wouldn’t slide out of it even if he fainted again.

  I walked back to the suit, still in its expanded form. “Let’s try this once more. Call it a reproducible result.”

  He was watching me, outwardly calm, but it was clear some part of him was not calm, for his fingers were clutching the arms of the chair hard enough to dimple the padding.

  I jumped back into the suit, and looked over the rim of the flange as soon as I could. The seat was moving back a bit, but his eyes were still open and, in fact, he was sitting bolt upright, his hands still clenched to the arm rests. I lifted my right arm, twisting it back and forth until my hand found the sausage-sized fingers. I flapped them at him.

  He stood up slowly and I watched him carefully. If he started to pass out again, I’d catch him this time, but though he clenched his eyes shut and leaned against the workbench top for a minute, he eventually walked forward, breathing slowly and deliberately.

  “You okay?”

  He licked his lips. “I’m not sure. I don’t think I’m going to faint again, though.”

  “That’s good.”

  He reached out and lifted the helmet flange off its supporting fork. “Step forward.”

  I shuffled forward, feeling the underarm supports scrape along my armpits, and then I was in front of the stand. When he lowered the flange so it rested on my shoulders, it was much less claustrophobic.

  “How did you do that?”

  He didn’t scream it, but the intensity in his voice and face made me want to jump away. “We’ll talk about that,” I said. “But right now, let’s just see if the suit fits.”

  He blinked again.

  “Cory?”

  He shook his head, as if to clear it. “I haven’t cleared any human trials with the institutional review board. Uh, you are human, right?”

  “We mean no harm to your planet,” I said.

  He didn’t think that was funny at all.

  “I’m human, honest. Very human. Ultrahuman.”

  “What does that mean? Ultra?”

  I backpedaled. “Just human, Cory. I have this one thing I can do, and we’ll talk about it, but I’d rather not go through the institutional review board. I promise not to sue you if you promise not to pinch me in two.”

  He blinked. “No, that won’t happen.”

  “Well, how should we do it?”

  “Slowly,” he said.

  First thing he had me do was shift my feet all the way into the legs, toes all the way into the ends of the feet, then get my fingers and thumbs into the corresponding sausage casings at the ends of the arms.

  “Ready?” he asked.

  I nodded, nervous, excited.

  He slowly lowered the voltage, pausing several times to check how the suit was conforming to my body, but paying special attention to my hands. He got to the point where it fit, all over, like comfortable clothes, not tight, but the fingers felt like they were in oversized work gloves and the feet felt like they were in slippers.

  “Walk around a bit, flex your joints.”

  I did.

  “Okay, hyperventilate.”

  “Excuse me?”

  He pointed at my chest. “Remember what I said about it being hard to breathe?”

  “Oh, yeah. Squeezing in on the lungs.”

  “Right. Just want to make sure you’re stocked up on O2.”

  “And low on CO2,” I added.

  “Yeah, that, too.”

  I took some deep, quick breaths and held up my thumb.

  He took the rheostat all the way down.

  It felt good, like the most complete hug in the world, like crawling under the couch cushions and letting them push down on you. Inhaling, though an effort, wasn’t that bad.

  I flexed my fingers. There was tension and if I relaxed my hand, the fingers and hand would straighten out into a slightly curved extension. When I relaxed my arms, the default position was with the elbows slightly bent and the armpits slightly open, with gravity pulling my hands down toward my thighs. I reached up and fingered the power-cable connector, finding it easy, the fingers, wrist, elbow not having to work harder than they would in a middleweight jacket and heavy work gloves. I unclipped it.

  “Uh, don’t do that!”

  “Why not?”

  “What if we can’t reconnect it?”

  “Don’t you reconnect it all the time?”

  His mouth opened and shut. Then, “Yes, but someone isn’t usually wearing it! If we can’t reconnect it, how do we get the suit off you?”

  I shrugged. “Even if we can’t get the connector to work, I’m sure you could jury-rig a way to energize the EAPs. Alligator clips or something. Worst-case scenario, we’d cut the suit off.”

  He looked like he might faint again.

  “As a last resort.” I walked down the length of the lab and back, then tried some jumping jacks. My feet slipped a bit on the linoleum.

  When I’d jumped to the office, after changing into the long underwear, I’d worn the sheepskin boots that were my Yukon winter kick-about shoes. They were loose enough that when I slipped my suited feet into them, they fit snugly.

  “The suit needs some grip on the soles.”

  Cory shook his head. “The suit is the underlayer. You put on utility overgear as needed. Boots, gloves, knee pads, insulated or electrically heated coveralls.”

  “For Mars, right?”

  He nodded. “Eventually.”

  “But it would work in orbit, yes?”

  “Yes. You might need high-albedo coveralls
to keep the sun off. Cooling is more of a problem than heating. Vacuum is an insulator, after all, and the body produces lots of heat.”

  “But you wouldn’t need active cooling? That’s the idea of the open weave—evaporative cooling from sweating, just like on Earth?”

  “That’s the idea. How’s your breathing?”

  “Inhaling takes some effort but I’d forgotten about it until you asked.”

  “I wish we had sensors under the suit. Need to confirm the counterpressure.”

  “Don’t trust your previous data?”

  “I’d be very surprised if it wasn’t thirty kilopascals, but we need to know before we expose you to low pressure. I’ll have to rig up a bodysuit with strain gauges on it. What are you wearing—long underwear? What else?”

  “Sports bra and panties and a pair of thin ankle socks.” I told him the brand of the wicking base layers. “What did your other candidates use?”

  “We used a dancer unitard with integrated feet, gloves, and hood.” He gestured at me. “What you chose looked relatively slick on the surface,” he said. “And like it conformed pretty well to your body.” He looked away and I think his ears went bright red.

  I felt my own ears warm up a little. “Very slick, yeah. Good movement when I’m snowboarding.”

  “So, no abrasion from the suit so far? No folds of cloth bunching up anywhere?”

  I nodded. “Feels really good, actually.”

  He lifted my arms and pulled them right and left, working the shoulders. “Looks like you chose well. You’ll have temporary marks from the seams.”

  “Duh.” Well, he’d never worn a bra, probably.

  I kept the suit on for a full hour, doing various range-of-motion tests, then spending some time at the bench, manipulating progressively smaller objects. Last, he handed me a device with an LCD readout and a label which read Electronic Hand Dynamometer.

  “Squeeze.” It was for measuring the strength of the grip. He took several measurements from each hand. “We’ll need to measure your grip without the suit, when you’ve rested. Still okay on the breathing?”

  “It’s a little harder now.”

  “Does anything feel numb, like it’s gone to sleep? How about your toes?”

  I wiggled them. “Feel good.”

  “Ready to stop?”