“It’s my favorite spot on the station, besides the Tread Room of course,” Eve said.
“You’d think we’d be eating like kings.”
“Nah, you saw all those Reds back there. I think they got dibs.” She touched a leaf on a tomato plant that was snaking up a PVC pipe. “My father was high up in the Central Bank on Earth and always said fruit had a way of landing pretty close to the vine. Which kind of became a self-fulfilling prophecy with guys him like him on the job.”
“I knew it,” I said.
“Knew what?”
“Knew that there had to be daddy issues.”
“Oh, fuck you!” She laughed and punched me hard on the shoulder. “It’s not an issue, it’s just, I don’t know . . . healthy friction.”
“Damn,” I said, raising my eyebrows.
She punched me again, harder, and was winding up for another one when I said “Alright, alright, sorry. Platonic I’m sure. What uh—what are those over there.”
I pointed at alien-looking plant beside her.
Eve paused mid-swing and turned. “Oh . . . Pfitisarias—their resin has potent therapeutic properties.” She reached over and picked one. “Put this on a recent wound and it’ll help regrow the tissue, but only when it interacts with light in the 150 to 200 spectrum range.”
“The magic marker,” I said.
“Yeah, it’s the main active ingredient. The idea is to eventually optimize it for field use on the Rim.”
I nodded.
She pointed to another plant. “And this one’s for the Clepsis cure, which came in handy because someone—someone you know, actually—broke a vial of it in Main Lab B today and the whole level went on an automated sterilization lockdown.”
“Someone I know?”
“Yeah, the block captain you all hate. Caelus.”
A chill wound through me. “He’s about the least clumsy person I know.”
“He did seem pretty embarrassed about it,” Eve said. “But Clepsis isn’t that infectious, and they gave us all shots anyway. You know, safety first.”
“Safety first,” I repeated.
“They’re funny about certain things. I’m used to strict lab protocols, but they are very, very cautious up there. I suppose it’s a good thing, but it takes longer and time’s not exactly something . . .”
Sensing her discomfort, I tried to change the subject. “So your dad’s a banker and your mom’s a . . .”
“Oh God, don’t ask.”
“Really?”
“The short answer is lawyer, but the slightly longer one is that my father used the importance of his job as an excuse to basically do whatever he wanted. He argued that because what he did was so stressful, we owed him greater consideration. Mom challenged the premise but eventually gave up and just tried to beat him at his own game.” Eve attempted to laugh. “She’d been volunteering and doing head-of-house-like things along with the rest of her country club friends, but she dusted off her law degree and used Dad’s connections to get the highest-pressure, highest-paying job she could. Unfortunately, the prestigious firm she chose defended some of the largest polluters on the planet, which is probably why they could afford to pay her so much. But guess what?”
“What?”
“Dad still behaved the same way, proving his ‘reasons’ were really just pretexts. He was going to do whatever the hell he wanted no matter what. Pretty messed up, right?”
“I’ve heard worse,” I said as we walked down a row with even thicker plant growth, arching into a crown that splintered the HID lights into hundreds of small shafts.
“Me too, but it’s different when it’s your parents. I just didn’t see it coming from my mom. Dad swore it was just to get attention—thought she was a serial over-corrector.”
“What do you think?”
“That she was desperate.”
I thought that was my cue to change the subject again, but she continued, “The thing is, my parents are so thoughtful about some things, but with others it’s like they’re entirely different people. I used to believe they were just eccentric, but I don’t know . . . it’s scary, because the more I think about it, the more it seems like everything thoughtful they did was actually in their interest. And when it stopped being so, they stopped doing it.”
“Isn’t that a little harsh?” I asked, remembering my own parents and how I’d always given them the benefit of the doubt.
“I don’t know. Everyone just kind of gives everyone else a pass, even when they shouldn’t. And when that goes on long enough, no one knows that they shouldn’t anymore because everybody’s doing it.”
“My mom was always making basically that same complaint about Mars. How kickbacks were becoming expected now and how that was screwing up everything.”
“Is your mom in government?” Eve asked.
“She was. A Fleet diplomat.” I tilted my head toward her. “Come to think, Earth-Mars relations aren’t too hot at the moment, so I wonder what your parents would think about their daughter dating a Martian.”
“You keep calling it that, but it’s really just a tour of the hyd—”
I screwed up my face. “F off.”
“No, I actually think that’ll end up working in your favor since there’s still plenty of patrician sympathy beyond all the rancor. A lot of the best investments are on Mars or Saturn’s GZ colonies, so it’s not like you’re going to get overly indignant if you’re getting rich, no matter what Fleet statute’s being violated. And besides, Mars is pretty critical to the war effort if the scientists here are synthesizing Verex antidote like I suspect. People might be upset that they’re bending Confederation rules, but none of the member planets, even Earth, are going to call them on it. At least not until the war’s over.” She smirked. “As much as I’d like to piss my parents off, you’d just be too establishment to work.”
“That’s a shame.”
“You would piss off my brother, though—at least until he met you. He wrote his secondary-school thesis on why Mars should be sanctioned, double Mylan-Chipped, and stripped of their remaining military forces. If he had his way, they wouldn’t even get to operate this station anymore.”
“He might be onto something,” I said.
“Yeah, he’s quite the guy . . . you two would actually really like each other. I can just see it.” She sighed, her eyes slowly drifting across the bay. “Guess I can’t really complain about my parents too much, considering I got so lucky with him.”
“I got lucky with my sister, too.” Just the mention of her caused both nostalgia and self-loathing to percolate in, clouding the lightness. More and more I was coming to know that it would always be that way as well. Even when I was as exhilarated as I had been a few minutes ago, the beast was perennially lingering, dormant, waiting for the right word or image to stir it to life.
“When you get down about the bad things, it reminds you of the good things, and they matter that much more. Things just shift.”
“I don’t know if I’d go that far,” I said, trying to regain my composure.
“Me neither, but I didn’t want to get too gloomy,” Eve said.
“That’s the trick, isn’t it?”
She led me into another section, an arched, trellised canopy with multicolored squash and gourds hanging above us like mini-chandeliers. Spaced between them every fifteen or twenty centimeters was a nozzle that sent little globules of growing solution dripping toward the mesh bags holding each plant’s roots. It seemed impossible then, thinking about it, that someplace so green and so full of life could exist somewhere so devoid of it, surrounded on all sides by hundreds of thousands of kilometers of nothingness. “Yeah,” she finally replied, “there are already too many morose people around here. And once they get that way, there’s only a month lag before they’re on Zeroes.”
“Simon seems pretty gloomy and he’s not on Zeroes.”
“Pessimism’s his drug. Guys like Whistler see people behave poorly and it depresses them, but Si
mon sees the same thing and it makes him feel better about himself. It makes him feel like the good guy. And if there are a bunch of people doing it, all the better, because it makes him that much more special.”
“Yeah.”
“He’s honest, and that’s rare,” she continued. “It helps you remember which way is up.”
“But he gets carried away with it, don’t you think? You know, breaking everything down until it’s absurd,” I said.
“That’s what he thinks it is. He talks about wanting to be a Fleet officer but, knowing him, that’s the most absurd thing of all. Lying to himself is his way of escaping. That’s probably where you guys are different,” said Eve.
I shrugged.
“He likes you, you know. Says he tried his best to hate you but couldn’t.”
“I get that a lot.”
She shook her head, smirking again.
“We’ll just have to see how long it lasts. Did he tell you about the little chat we had in the Ship Room?”
“He might have. But as much as I’d like to keep gossiping here . . .” She glanced down at her U-dev. “It’s late and I want to get an early start.”
“Yeah . . . can’t say I’m dying to get back to the barracks, though. People haven’t come over in the hoped-for numbers since we got C4 up, so the mood’s pretty tense down there. Everyone’s blaming each other.”
“Did you think they would?” she asked.
“All come over?”
She nodded.
“Yeah, but I’ve been wrong about so much.”
When we got to D Block, I kissed her good night but broke it off prematurely, noticing Brandon out of the corner of my eye. He was passing through a bisecting corridor about twenty meters down and had glanced over in our direction. What is he doing in D Block?
“Hey, Eve,” I said, stopping her before she could slip into her barracks. “Do you know our opposition lieutenant, Brandon Baez?”
“I know of him.”
“Does he have any friends here?”
“No, I don’t think so. Why?”
“Because I just saw him down the hallway.”
I couldn’t help but think Brandon had been spying on us. It was one of those so-casual-that-it-wasn’t-casual looks, but since I didn’t need anything else to be anxious about, I tried to talk myself out of the idea. By the time I made it back to C3, I was actually starting to feel okay about stuff again, until I found a note from Caelus underneath the blanket on my hammock, asking me to meet him.
Chapter 37
The rest of the station was a white, sparse kind of neat, but Caelus’ room was of a variety born of arrangement. There were bookshelves, rows of miniatures, artifacts, and a telescope trained on the planet below—all of them related to each other but foreign to everything newer and sleeker on other decks. Stepping closer, I could see that not only were they orderly, but the polished surfaces reflected the overhead lighting, mixing with the planet’s green hue to make the entire room appear awash in some luminescent chemical. Even the crevices and undersides of things were dustless and grimeless, leading me to believe that he wasn’t just trying to be clean but needed to be. My mom had been like that.
“Nice, aren’t they?” Caelus said.
I’d been perusing a thick, multivolume set of anthologies, and having no idea how long he’d been standing by the door, I flinched when he spoke. “Your message just said to come in . . .”
“Don’t apologize for being curious,” he said, holding up a hand. “There are still some places where that’s allowed.”
“Oh . . . I was thinking all of these were just for show,” I said, putting a book back on the shelf. Trying to sound as relaxed and confident as he did.
He pointed to a rack of antique firearms and a case of knives. “It’s those that are just for show. I stopped short of skulls, but sadly the more people here think you’re a sociopath, the better. The more unpredictable you appear, the better. The scarier you are, the . . .”
“The better,” I said.
“Now you’re getting it.”
“Did you read that in one of your books?”
This seemed to amuse him. “Among other things, yes, but it’s been corroborated, unfortunately, by much firsthand experience.” He gestured at the table. “I hope you like aquaponic fish. I was going to ask ahead, but there’s not much flexibility with the menu, even here.”
Normally I’d have called this false modesty, considering the privilege of having real fish and the fact that he’d been able to requisition so many things from other parts of the station, but there was something about the way he said it that made it seem like he was genuinely concerned.
“Fish is good,” I responded, taking a seat in a large mahogany chair on the side of a long mahogany table with ancient radial engravings.
“I didn’t used to think so, but I was so enamored by how they’re grown here that I couldn’t help but start liking them. The ammonia in their waste, you see, becomes food for the vegetables once the bacteria get ahold of it, along with the phosphorous and potassium. Then after the plants take everything they need, the water is clean for the fish again, and around and around it goes. Still, Fin can’t stand them and seeing as you’re both from Mars, where it’s the signature dish, I figured it might be underwhelming. Then again, Fin doesn’t like anything that she didn’t design herself,” said Caelus.
While I’d figured Fin was a lot closer to him than she’d let on, it threw me that Caelus would admit it so offhandedly. “Does she eat here often?” I asked, attempting to be equally offhanded.
“Now and again. We share an affinity for some of the classics.”
Thinking of the book Professor Dalton had given me that I’d yet to start, I asked, “How do you find the time to read the classics considering there isn’t time to do even half the required reading?”
“Well, how do you find the time for the things you love? You have to, and that’s the whole secret. When someone says this person’s hardworking, or that one’s selfless, I’m like, ‘No, they just love things that just happen to be classified by most people as work.’ But they’re play to that person, just the same as getting shitfaced is to everybody else. And so it’s all the luckier for you if you happen to have unpopular, tedious passions. People will think you’re a force.”
“Is that what people think of you?”
Caelus sighed. Then took a long, deep breath like he was letting his guard down—like we were the only two adults on the Outer Ring and he was able to speak freely with me in a way that he wasn’t with others. “Yeah, but that’s more with the training rooms. Literature’s unfortunately considered an eccentricity. You know something’s amiss in the worlds when the fundamental becomes novel, and the novel becomes fundamental.” He sat down across from me. “You’re a good pilot, right?”
I nodded.
“And what did your first instructor have to do before you could fly?”
The answer seemed so obvious I thought it was a trick question. “Explain how the controls work.”
“Exactly. Well, the right books explain how humans work. And so it’s insane that we’ll all agree that we need technical training, but not training in how to become good people. You seem like a really good guy. How do you think you got that way?”
The question surprised me. I’d always tried to do the right thing, but I’d never thought about why exactly, except that it felt right, and it seemed only right to treat other people the way you wanted to be treated. “My parents, I guess.”
He nodded. “I figured. It makes a big difference, doesn’t it—all that care and guidance? But the thing is, what about all the kids out there who had shitty parents? What about all the kids who watched their parents treat everyone else like trash and get away with it? Who never heard of the Golden Rule because it never came up?” Caelus asked, a sincerity bleeding into his voice that I’d only really heard from Verna or Sebastian before when they got worked up about something. “It’s not like it’s
math, where if your parents don’t teach you how to cross-multiply, you’ll never learn. Your teachers’ll pick up the slack. Just like they will with reading and writing and tying your shoes. But if your parents don’t teach you how to be a good person, it’s over. No one else is going to do it, besides only in a very superficial, ‘don’t fight with the other kids’ kind of way. And how fair is that?”
I looked around the room. At the miniatures. At the knives. Out the two translucent windows on either side of the bookshelf, looking like two cataractous eyes glowing from the planet’s albedo. I remembered my mom’s words about needing a system that was fair for everyone. “Not very.”
He paused for a few moments. “Until I was twelve I had this condition where I’d make a wheezing sound every time I got worked up and I had to really, really focus and stay calm to breathe normally. But what do you think the other kids did?” Caelus asked.
“Got you worked up.”
“Right. They’d mimic the sound. They’d steal my stuff. Call me the worst names,” Caelus continued, expressionless. “But what made it bearable was the books I used to read: Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, James, Wharton, Eliot. The thing is, when you read an author that you feel is correctly assessing the world and know that they’d be calling out the same people who are calling you out, the insults start sliding off. When your world’s small, everything that moves in it matters; but when it’s larger, you get to pick out the important parts.”
“I like that,” I said, remembering Professor Dalton saying something pretty similar once. “But what happened with the wheezing?”
“Nothing, it’s still there. I’ve just gotten really good at regulating my emotions,” said Caelus.
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