“Are you sure you really want to come?” were the first words out of Elfrida’s mouth.
Hurt colored Cydney’s heart-shaped face. She fiddled with a blonde ringlet. “If you don’t want me to come, I wish you would have said so last week.”
“It’s not that,” Elfrida said hurriedly. Their relationship had been rocky ever since they’d got back from 4 Vesta. “I meant, where’s your luggage?”
“Oh, I’ll go shopping on UNLEOSS!”
They shuffled towards the boarding gate. Cydney smiled at the other passengers who were covertly vidding her, having recognized her as someone micro-famous. Aboard the Airbus Hyperplane, they had a mini-fight over the stowage compartment above their seats: there wasn’t enough room for Elfrida’s rucksack and Cydney’s cotton-wool coat, which was actually quite bulky.
“See,” Cydney said sweetly, “this is why I didn’t bring any luggage. I knew you’d be toting the kitchen sink.”
“I was ordered to max out my weight allowance with food coloring.”
“Food coloring?”
“Yeah, the stuff that makes spinach bars green, and sweet potato chips purple.”
“I don’t eat that junk,” Cydney said. “And I know what food coloring is. But why does UNVRP HQ want it?”
“Maybe they’re tired of eating beige nutriblocks.”
“Mercury isn’t one of your barely-functioning asteroid colonies. It’s a planet.”
“Yeah?”
“You didn’t know that, Ellie?”
Elfrida had been being sarcastic, she just hadn’t said “Sarcasm” out loud. She had thought she and Cydney didn’t need to use emoticodes with each other. She stared out of the porthole as the Hyperplane slid along its launch rail.
Snowy wastes stretched to the horizon beneath slate-grey clouds. The overall warming of the planet had, for complicated reasons, not improved the climate of Antarctica. A few people did live along the coast. There were interspecies communities, made up of cetaceophiles who lived in wetsuits, and whales who put up with them. There was also a prepper industry catering to wannabe emigrants to the asteroid belt, who could be convinced that they needed to fork out for survival training courses in Earth’s most unforgiving location.
Far from these communities, the spaceport sprawled down the flanks of Mt. Erebus in a slovenly, high-albedo jumble. Bots serviced private spaceplanes parked on sidings. Employees vaped cigarettes outside loading bays.
“Earth,” Elfrida half-said, half-snarled.
“What about it?”
“This tired old planet.” I don’t belong here, she thought. Maybe I did once, but I’ve spent too long in space. This isn’t home anymore.
The Hyperplane entered the magnetically levitated launch tube, cutting off the view. Cydney bundled her hair into a scrunchie, tucked her feet under her, and settled down to read. Now and again she made soft noises of interest.
Elfrida was just about to cave in to curiosity when Cydney looked up. “This is really interesting.”
“What is?”
“About Mercury. Their unique political situation. But I guess you know all this stuff.”
Elfrida made a loose fist and pretended to take a swing at her. They both laughed.
“OK, you win,” Elfrida said. “I was so busy doing my paperwork and getting my hyronalin prescription filled, etcetera, I didn’t have time to do a whole lot of research. So, fill me in.”
“Well, I’ve been looking into this Charles K. Pope business. No one’s been arrested, so maybe it really was a windsurfing accident. But regardless of how he died, it’s a big deal on Mercury. Basically, he was an absolute monarch out there.”
“Oh, come on.”
“I’m exaggerating, but only slightly. UNVRP is headquartered on Mercury. That made Pope the ranking UN official in Inferior Space, the volume that includes the Near Earth Objects as well as Mercury and Venus, and—oooh, can I have a dragonfruit gelato?” She broke off to address the waiterbot navigating down the aisle.
“Coffee for me,” Elfrida said. “So Pope was the lay judge for Inferior Space. The most important person in the volume always gets it. So?”
“So, that makes the election of his replacement a big deal. They’re not just competing for the directorship of UNVRP, which, not to offend you, Ellie, but who would want it? They’re competing to become the most powerful person in Inferior Space.”
The tannoy instructed them to fasten their seatbelts in preparation for weightlessness. Elfrida felt a jolt of excitement, as if she were a child on her first trip into space. Unlike the bored business travellers around them, she would never get blasé about this.
Gripping her pouch of coffee in her teeth while she fastened her seatbelt, she said, “So, did you find out who’s getting the job … Wait a minute. You said election?”
Cydney grinned. Her gelato had left her teeth purple. “Yup. The director of UNVRP is elected! Everyone in Inferior Space gets to vote.”
“You mean like in a democracy?”
“Yup.”
“That’s medieval.”
“I know, right?”
“What if people vote for some garbagehead that doesn’t know anything about the Venus Project, and doesn’t care?”
“Well, then, I guess they deserve what they get. But Pope’s deputy is standing as a candidate. He’ll probably win.”
“I should hope so.” Elfrida drank her coffee. The informational display in her contacts said that the Hyperplane had reached the tropopause. Gentle but perceptible acceleration pressed on her body. “Why didn’t I know about this democracy stuff? I guess they don’t make a huge effort to publicize it. But why allow it in the first place?”
“Insert complicated historical reasons here,” Cydney said. “Mercury’s pretty unique. The only colonized planet. I’ve always wanted to visit.”
“Oh, you lie like a lying thing. Now I know why you wanted to come.” It was actually a relief to know that Cydney had an agenda of her own. It put less pressure on their relationship. “You want to cover the election and get all the juicy gossip first-hand.”
“Am I that transparent?” Cydney pretended to be offended. “It certainly won’t hurt my access figures. But I wanted to come with you since way before this happened.”
“I know. I was just a bit concerned that you’ll be 77 million kilometers from all your parties and red-carpet events.”
“Ellie, I have confidence that with you around, something interesting will happen.”
The joke stung. It felt like a dig at Elfrida’s failure to prevent catastrophe on 4 Vesta, although Elfrida knew Cydney hadn’t meant it that way. “God, I hope not,” she said, forcing a smile.
The Hyperplane shot out of its launch tube. Outside the portholes, Earth dawned. Tourists bobbed up against their seatbelts, laughing in delight.
Cydney enabled the privacy screen around their two seats. She undid Elfrida’s seatbelt, and then her own. They kissed, weightless, in front of the awe-inspiring view.
Ping … ping … “Oh, bother. I’d better take this. Wow, hi, Lauren … Yes? Yes. Really? Well, of course, we’d be thrilled. Tell him thank you so much.”
“Who was that?”
“Well, I certainly didn’t expect that,” Elfrida said. “It was my boss.”
“Onwego?”
“No, the boss. Dr. Hasselblatter, the director of the Space Corps. Actually, it was his secretary.”
“Is this good? Bad?”
“I’m not sure. He’s playing in a quidditch game tonight, and we’ve got complimentary tickets.”
★
The Space Corps was headquartered on the United Nations Low Earth Orbit Space Station (UNLEOSS). What with all the satellites and private spaceplanes dodging around in low earth orbit, the traffic up here was almost as bad as in Rome. They had to wait hours for an orbital transfer vehicle, and then another four hours in transit. At last UNLEOSS loomed in Elfrida’s porthole. A giant sphere clamped between cylinders of stacked toru
ses, the space station floated half in sunlight, half in shadow. Rotating at speed, it looked bigger from here than Earth did.
Elfrida had seen UNLEOSS many times before, but this incredible feat of space engineering never failed to awe her.
“Someday, someone is going to get off their ass and invent teleporting,” Cydney groused as they queued to get off the orbital transfer vehicle.
“We’ll have to rewrite the laws of physics first,” Elfrida said.
But then again, she reflected later, a few hundred years ago, people probably thought you’d have to rewrite the laws of physics in order for human beings to fly.
The early pioneers of space exploration surely could never have envisioned bureaucrats in capes and pointy hats flying around on jet-powered broomsticks, 800 kilometers above Earth, in pursuit of a winged cricket ball.
The lower-gravity regions at the ‘poles’ of UNLEOSS curved inward to the axis of the sphere, where gravity was null. Here at the ‘north pole,’ netting enclosed a playing field as large as a terrestrial soccer stadium. Elfrida’s complimentary tickets entitled her and Cydney to ringside seats.
Dr. Abdullah Hasselblatter, director of the Space Corps and member of the President’s Advisory Council, zoomed past them on his broomstick, cape billowing.
“Go, Hasselblatter!” Elfrida shrieked. “Wizards! Wizards all the way!”
The Wizards (high-ranking Space Corps officials and the odd beefy secretary) were playing the Hardy Perennials (gardeners plus a few shifty-eyed ringers from the janitorial division). The contrails of their broomsticks crisscrossed the playing field. The spectators directly across from Elfrida seemed to be suspended upside-down from an invisible ceiling. ‘Above’ them, roads and parkland receded into the dusk. The 3m-diameter axis of the habitat ran through the middle of the playing field, but this was a feature, not a bug: it was wrapped in magnetized astroturf on which several players, blatched, sat rubbing their knees.
The Hardy Perennials won, 230 points to 180.
“That freaking Chaser of theirs is not a gardener,” Dr. Abdullah Hasselblatter complained, towelling his thick silver hair. “He won the All-Europe Janitorial Arts trophy for bin-throwing in 2284. Never been spotted near a flowerbed. And the league turns a blind eye.” He chucked his towel across the locker room. “Did you want something?”
Elfrida’s mouth opened and closed. She’d made her way to the locker room on the assumption that Dr. Hasselblatter had given her the tickets because he wanted to see her, and this was the only time he could fit her into his schedule.
Dr. Hasselblatter laughed. “Just joking. Listen, Goto. These people on Mercury are plebs. Mindless, self-centered, tech-obsessed bubble-dwellers. They’d sell their own mothers for the illusion, the illusion, mind you, of independence. But the Space Corps isn’t and will not be involved with any political shenanigans, do you understand? Our mission is to protect and support communities in space. Nothing will deter me from that. This agency exists to maximize human wellbeing and safety, without regard to anyone’s political agenda.”
Elfrida nodded vigorously. She hadn’t the slightest idea what he was talking about. This was normal with Dr. Abdullah Hasselblatter, whose political skills were second to none.
“The human resources department at UNVRP HQ? Unfit for purpose. You’ll be effectively without local support.”
“Isn’t that how it always is, sir?”
“Yes, Goto. You’re quite the veteran. That’s why I’m delighted you accepted this posting.”
Conversations in a dozen languages filled the changing room. Trainers sprayed their charges with cooling aerosols (temperatures in UNLEOSS were tropical, even after dark). A wandering globule of deodorant smacked Elfrida in the eye.
“Do you have any special instructions …” Her right eye streamed. She wiped it with the back of her hand. “Or advice for me? I’d be really grateful, sir.”
Her right contact had come out. It was already out of reach. Mortified, she watched it float away.
“Advice? Oh, stay out of trouble.” Dr. Hasselblatter laughed. Crooking a finger at her, he pushed off and exited the locker room, forcing players and groupies to dodge. Elfrida followed him out to the vertiginous emptiness of the parking lot ‘under’ the playing field. Dr. Hasselblatter’s private glider awaited. “That reminds me,” he said, one foot on the step. “Vlajkovic might try to make trouble for you. In fact, he certainly will. But don’t take him too seriously. He’s on the wrong side of history.”
With this oddly momentous pronouncement, Dr. Hasselblatter leapt into his glider, broomstick over his shoulder.
“Sir! Sir …”
Dr. Hasselblatter’s head popped back out. “What?”
Elfrida wrung her hands. With only one contact in, she was off balance. “Sorry, sir. I was just wondering if you could tell me anything about the community … the local community on Mercury ……” Her briefing packet had been mysteriously silent on this aspect of her mission.
“The community? The community, Goto? There’s only one community on Mercury that concerns you. The UNVRP community. Especially the R&D division. Worst. Bunch of. Plebs. Ever.” Dr. Hasselblatter ducked back into his glider and was gone.
★
“Vlajkovic.”
“What?” said Cydney, straining to reach a bunch of caramels on a high branch.
Elfrida, five centimeters taller, grabbed at the branch. Leaves sprinkled their faces. “Mike Vlajkovic. Did you find out anything about him?” She had asked Cydney last night to research the name Dr. Hasselblatter had thrown out.
“Oh. Yeah, I did! Here.”
An email flew into the HUD area of Elfrida’s new contacts, peeping and fluttering on pearly wings. She’d bought these contacts, after losing one of her old ones, at the UNLEOSS shopping mall. All they’d had was a novelty set themed on the children’s brand of Unicorn Tears®. Now that more people were opting for retinal implants, with or without BCIs (Brain-Computer Interfaces), the market for contacts had shrunk to children. Girls were assumed to want unicorns and cherubs. (The other option had been Knights of the Milky Way™—for boys. Elfrida had wavered for ages.)
She opened the report on Mike Vlajkovic and skimmed the bullet points while Cydney gathered candy.
The gengineered trees of the pick-your-own orchard—a major UNLEOSS tourist attraction, despite the fact that you could find similar places on Earth—grew on the bank of the Angelou River at the equator of the sphere. The air was sweet, hot, heavy. Down here, one full gravity obtained. Tourists wandered through the taffy grass, carrying buckets of caramels, trufflefruit, toffee apples, sugarplums, marshmallow berries, and chocolate bananas.
Mike Vlajkovic (38, married with two children) had lived all his life on Mercury. He worked for UNVRP’s human resources department. Lately, he’d taken on a role so archaic that Cydney’s researchers had added an explanatory footnote: labor organizer.
“Uh oh,” Elfrida murmured. Suckered again! she thought, not without a certain amount of admiration for Dr. Hasselblatter’s style. He had not pressured her to take this assignment. But she should’ve known that the director of the Space Corps would not meet with one of his roughly 6,000 employees in person unless there were more to it than a routine job transfer.
Mike Vlajkovic had gotten himself in the news last month by speaking out against UNVRP’s scheduled ramp-up of mining operations. Ponytailed, skull-faced, he raved about ‘anti-humanism’ and ‘AI boosterism’ in an embedded vid clip.
“This is great stuff, Cyds. Thanks.”
“My team is the best,” Cydney replied. She bit into a toffee apple. “Oh. My. God. Yummo.”
So Elfrida was heading back into the land of ‘isms.’ On Earth, there was no such thing as ideology. It had died the gentle death of a bad-tempered but toothless dog. But out on the frontiers of civilization, people still got worked up about ideas and the choices they represented. And apparently, Mercury still qualified as a frontier.
Suddenly
, Elfrida couldn’t wait to shake the candy-flavored dust of this faux-tropical paradise off her heels. “Cyds?”
“Yeah?”
Elfrida kissed her, and tasted toffee.
“What was that for?” Cydney squealed, obviously pleased.
“I think I made the right choice. You were so wise to tell me to take this job.”
★
Neither of them had ever travelled on a Starliner before.
“This is the life,” Elfrida acknowledged. She sank beneath the surface of the Olympic-sized scuba pool, which was framed by non-slip cliffs and stocked with tropical fish. She came up spitting and smiling. For a moment she reflected on the irony that she could’ve gone swimming anytime when she was in Italy, but she hadn’t.
A slender woman in a burkini dashed out of the changing rooms, chasing a boy of four or five. Shrieking in glee, the boy cannonballed into the deep end.
Elfrida flippered towards the boy. She stopped when another swimmer surfaced from the depths, bearing the child aloft. The swimmer pulled off his scuba mask. It was Dr. Abdullah Hasselblatter.
Elfrida swam away in a hurry. She found Cydney lurking behind a crag, vidding the family scene. “What’s Dr. H doing on board?”
“You didn’t look at the passenger list?”
“I didn’t even know he had a family. Are they on vacation, or what?” Life on UNLEOSS was a permanent vacation. To go on vacation to Mercury would be kind of perverse.
“You could put it like that. And he’s not the only one. Look at the passenger list, Ellie.”
A winged unicorn presented it to her with a curtsey.
“I don’t get it.”
“You really don’t access my feed often, do you?”
★
Elfrida pored over the passenger list as she towelled off.
The ship was infested with minor celebrities. They included:
—Zazoë Heap, songstress and nose flute virtuoso, known for her outspoken support of euthanasia rights.
The Sol System Renegades Quadrilogy: Books 1-4 of the Space Opera Thriller Series Page 63