This time, he did sigh. “Sure thing. Fire away.”
“Where, when, and to whom were you born?”
“I was born in transit to Ceres from the outer belt. My father, Jym, and my mother, Geena, were both independent miners working mainly in the Ceres group. They helped build what Ceres is now, actually.”
“I see. And when?”
“Oh, right. April 6, 2199. Terrestrial, of course.”
Su nodded and looked him over, without bothering to conceal her intention to evaluate him. “Never went for any rejuvenation treatments, then, did you?”
Collier chortled. “Cosmetic ones? No, never did. I’ve had the usual gene therapy and biochemical cleansing routines, of course. But never went in for the Peter Pan stuff. I’m fifty-one, and I probably look like it. Though the free fall environment has kept me from sagging,” he added, tapping the bottom of his still-firm neck.
“You’re completely biological?” Su asked, her voice betraying a faint hint of interest.
“So far, yep.”
“What do you mean, ‘so far’?”
His casual answer bordered on flippant. “Well, you never know. If I were to meet with an accident, say, lose a limb or two, I’d have to decide if I wanted to grow a new one, use a mechanical, or just do without. Hasn’t come up yet. What about you?”
Su hesitated the barest fraction of a second, then answered in clipped tones, “I’m sixty-eight terrestrial. Full course of genetic and biological renewal procedures. About 90% biological, 10% cybernetic.” She paused, then said in a slightly lower register, “But this session isn’t about me. Tell me about your upbringing.”
Collier was still assimilating her answer. “You’re sixty-eight?” He whistled. “You must have a very thorough rejuvenation process here. You look about thirty.”
Su did not appear to take that as a complement. “We do, yes,” she said flatly. “Now, your upbringing.”
Collier spoke for a good hour about his childhood among the belt, his education at his father’s knee, remembering the arguments his mother and father would get into about whether or not to subscribe to the Solarnet education service.
“In the end,” Collier said, “they compromised. Dad went ahead and ordered the service — do you know about Solarnet?”
“Ganymede is where the bulk of the lessons on Solarnet come from. We export the lessons in trade.”
Collier blinked. “I never knew that. Anyway,” he continued, “the compromise was that even though I would sit with the Solarnet vinstructor, Dad would sit right behind me and amend, contradict, and otherwise argue with the lesson at almost every turn.” He laughed, remembering some of the disagreements Dad had had with the vinstructor. Lessons that were slated to take half an hour would stretch to two or three hours as Jym argued relentlessly with the poor synthetic. The virtual personality of the teacher was not at all up to the challenge, and frequently got caught in logical loops and had to be restarted with Jym out of earshot. Collier had learned the art of stubbornness at an early age.
Su continued to ask him about his growing up, and Collier happily recalled tales of his boyhood until she asked him where his parents were now.
“Dead,” he said evenly. “They died, oh, maybe twenty-five years ago. In the Crash of ‘24.” He pretended to not quite remember, but he could feel the tearing wind of escaping atmosphere as if it were happening right now. The corporate miner had slammed into Ceres at nearly a kilometer per second, fully loaded, and transferred its incredible kinetic energy to the surface. Even the deep levels of the fledgling Ceres habitat had felt the impact, and parts of the colony had lost pressure. Jym and Geena had been in one of the lost sections. Collier had been, ironically, at a learning crèche, submitting to real-time oral exams to confirm his probationary Master’s license. He had been bundled into the still secure areas of the base with the other survivors, not knowing the fate of his parents.
Over three hundred souls lost their lives that day. The corporation responsible dragged the lawsuits out until they were able to pay off enough litigants and judges. The suit went away, and aside from a memorial plaque on the surface of Ceres where a deep scar still marked the event, there was no evidence that such an occurrence had ever taken place.
“I remember that. A horrible day,” Su said, and seemed to mean it. “I am sorry for your loss.” She put more emotion into that stock phrase than anything else she had said during the session.
Collier found himself suddenly very weary. “Hey, let me ask you something.” Su did not respond, but waited patiently. “What is the point of asking me about my childhood? You’ve been at it for, what, four hours now?”
“Closer to four and a half.”
“Okay. What good is it? I mean, Tacat said you guys find information valuable, but I can’t see what there is in my life story for you to make use of.”
Su paused, her demeanor conflicted, as if she were trying to decide whether to answer his question or just brush it off. She finally said, “We’ve extensively psychoanalyzed everyone on Ganymede to the point that we are allowing significant observer bias to cloud our data. Every psychologist knows too much about the subject beforehand, and this skews our information. You, on the other hand, are as close to a tabula rasa as we are going to get. No one from Ganymede knows much about you, so we can gather data without fear of interviewer prejudice.”
“That doesn’t answer my question,” Collier said, smiling. “What do you hope to do with my life story? Sell the holomovie rights? And if you do, what’s my cut?”
“When you submit your germ plasm to us, it will represent a valuable variable to our stock. But in addition to the purely chemical analyses of your DNA, we need to know how you came to be the man you are from social and psychological forces. The nature/nurture debate is still very much alive, and your personal data, both chemical and psychological, will help to understand it.”
“I thought it was a simple damn question,” Collier murmured. “I still don’t see how asking me about my mom’s cooking helps Ganymede.”
An emotion flashed across Su’s face — was it amusement?—then was gone. “The gathering of pertinent data remains an imprecise science.”
“Woolgathering.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“You’re describing woolgathering. One of Dad’s favorite words.”
“Ah.” Su nodded, then, with a slight shake of her shoulders, said, “Shall we continue?”
“One more question about you, then we can. You’ve asked me plenty, so I figure I get a few. You deflected my question about you being a woman. Without scientific flim-flammery, can you just tell me why you are a woman and not a hermaphrodite?”
Su lowered her face slightly to look at him through her eyebrows. “Your question is highly personal, you realize this?”
“Personal. You’ve asked me everything about myself except which side I hang. You can answer this.”
Su didn’t react to his vulgarism. “Very well. I am a descendant of the original group of scientists who colonized Ganymede. I am first generation native to this moon. As such, I was expected to breed prodigiously, both naturally and through cloning. I did so, producing nine children of superior stock myself. When the technology caught up to us, allowing the inhabitants of Ganymede to alter themselves and be fully functional hermaphrodites, most of the Firsters — for that is what we called ourselves — chose to remain as they had been born. Most of us simply could not psychologically make the adjustment to gender reassignment. I was one of those people. This behavior, though not encouraged, is tolerated for now among the Firsters and of course the Originals.”
Although Su spoke as if she were reciting a speech, Collier could nevertheless hear hidden in her voice some pain, and he wondered at it.
“You’re not ashamed of being a woman, are you? I mean, just a woman?”
“You said
you’d ask only one question, Captain.” Su said, but her voice was shaky.
“You’re right. I did. Sorry about that. Fire away. But for what it’s worth … I think you made the right choice. Those inbetweeners give me the willies.”
Su’s lips did not smile, but her eyes crinkled slightly. “Another point for my research. Let us continue.”
“Sure thing. Left.”
“I’m sorry?”
Collier fought to keep a straight face. “Left side. Where I hang it.”
This time, Su quite definitely smiled. It was very faint, but it was there.
Su didn’t stay much longer: she asked a few more questions about Collier’s childhood, but seemed to want to compartmentalize her questions into the period before his parents’ death. Perhaps two hours later, she switched off her recording gear and stood up.
“That will be all for now, Captain. I shall return tomorrow, and we will discuss your young adulthood.”
“Sounds good. I’ll be here.”
Su nodded gravely, though Collier noticed she was not quite as emotionless as she had been when she first entered the ship. It was an almost imperceptible wilting of her stiffness that gave her away. Collier escorted her to the flextube airlock and once again smelled the orchids as she passed by him.
“Well, what do you think, Sancho?” Collier said when she had gone.
“I’m with you, Skipper: I don’t know why they are questioning you. As far as I’m concerned, the schematics of the ship and the data stored in my banks are far more valuable. No offense.”
“None taken. How did the linkup go?”
“Fine. I have nineteen holds for you to look at — I wasn’t sure about a few things relating to fuel consumption. You said to hold anything that might be connected to the wand, and if we produce our own hydrogen using it, that might come under the heading of fuel consumption, so I—”
“I see. Show me the questions, and we’ll work through it together.”
The questions were all innocent enough: the Ganymedians wanted to know about Dulcinea’s performance and fuel supply for the ion drive. Again, Collier couldn’t understand what it was about his ship that would be so interesting — Dulcinea was almost twenty years old and hadn’t been upgraded in all that time. What the Ganymedians could learn from him was baffling, but if they wanted to take data in trade, Collier was happy to give it to them. On his terms, of course.
Once Collier had cleared Sancho to send the data, he stretched out on the acceleration hammock and yawned. “I’m going to turn in, Sancho. Talking to that woman took more out of me than I thought. Wake me if there’s a fire.”
“Copy that, Skipper. Pleasant dreams.”
Chapter Eight
The next three days’ worth of interviewing with Su were not exactly tedious, but seemed even more trivial and worthless. He didn’t mind talking to the woman — she had warmed to him slightly in the three days — but he had grown tired of what seemed to be a never-ending chore. The interview questions were mundane and banal, and despite Su’s assurances that the information Collier was providing would be valuable, he could not understand how.
On the fourth session, while the two were discussing his mining methods and daily life aboard the Dulcinea, Su shook him out of what had become his half-awake state by asking if he had ever discovered anything unusual in the Belt.
“What do you mean by ‘unusual’?” he asked, keeping his voice carefully calm.
“Out of the ordinary,” Su said evenly. “I suppose if you discovered a metal not normally found in the belt, or perhaps an old derelict spacecraft, something you wouldn’t expect to find.”
“Well, once in a while I’ve tapped into an unusually high concentration of iridium.”
“I see. But have you ever found anything that no one else has ever found?”
Collier smiled artificially. “How can I know if no one else has ever found something?”
Su wrinkled her nose. She had dropped the expressionless face two sessions ago, and had allowed feeling to enter her voice. She answered him with scorn. “All right, then, have you ever found anything that no one else, to your knowledge, has ever found or reported finding? That clear enough for you?”
“No, I can’t say I have,” he answered, too quickly.
Su stared at him for a moment. “You seem very sure.”
“I am.”
“Then why’d you dodge the question when I first asked it?”
“I didn’t dodge the question. I wanted you to be clearer.”
“But surely, if you had never found anything unusual, you wouldn’t need me to clarify what—”
“Look, you’ve been asking me questions for five days now. I’m getting a little bit tired of it, okay?”
Su nodded. “It can be a draining experience. For both subject and interviewer, I might add.” She rubbed her eyes, the first sign of weakness or fatigue she had shown.
“How about we take a short break,” Collier said.
Su nodded again and sat back a few inches. To anyone else, Su would have appeared still very stiff, but Collier’s recent experience with her allowed him to see just how much she had relaxed. He swung himself out of his hammock and went to the pantry. “I don’t have much,” he said, glancing at the dwindling supply of plastic-wrapped foodstuffs, “but Ceres makes a mean vat-grown chicken vindaloo. You want some?”
Su had always refused his offers in the past, but this time, she accepted. Collier tossed her a dark red packet, which she snagged out of the air with aplomb.
“Thanks,” she said. She studied the packet for a moment, seeing how it opened and heated. Collier studied her as she manipulated the material. Despite the interviews, he still knew very little about Ganymedian culture.
“So, what’s a nice girl like you doing on a Jovian moon like this?” he said in an exaggerated drawl.
Su sucked on the plastic opening and chewed. “If it is your plan for me to regurgitate this packet, then continue using lines like that. As to why I am here … just lucky, I guess.”
“I wouldn’t say that,” Collier countered, chewing on his cashew chicken.
“Oh? Why not?”
“You can’t say you like living here,” he said matter-of-factly. “From what I’ve seen, your little utopia is a police state where every life decision is made for you by the powers-that-be. Hell, a man doesn’t even get to keep his balls.”
“In the first place, Captain, you haven’t seen the community at all. You’ve been confined to a hospital bed and then made some heroic mad dash through a few transpod stations. In the second place, it’s not a police state. We are free citizens, just like you would find on Earth, or Mars, or in the Belt. And lastly, our men and hermaphs have balls.”
Su delivered the last sentence with locker-room directness that stunned Collier. Somehow, she managed to maintain her propriety even while slumming with faint vulgarity.
“Oh yeah? Well tell me something, then, Su: how do you choose your profession on Ganymede? How do you choose a mate?” He had gleaned enough from Tacat’s description of the community and from the very few hints Su had let slip during the interviews to think he knew the answers to those questions.
“We choose a profession based on our own strengths and proclivities, just like you might.”
“Don’t you mean, the wise men and women of the community decide for you?”
Su hesitated a fraction of a second, then said, “We receive guidance from a panel of experts, yes.”
Collier snorted. “Say it how you want — you are told what job you will do. You don’t really have freedom.”
“And you think you lot do?” Su said, angrily. “You really think you can choose to be, say, a successful sculptor or a zero-g sports star?”
“I could have made the attempt,” Collier said.
“And you would ha
ve failed, and your economic status would have suffered. So much so, that you would have been forced into another line of employment by economic necessity. Don’t try to tell me you are free. You are a slave to economics.”
“And you’re one to your so-called panel of experts!”
“At least they have my best interests at heart!” Su was by now shouting, and Collier found himself inexplicably distracted by the sight of her breasts heaving under her deep breathing. He tore his eyes away and took a breath himself, feeling a stirring in his own loins.
“All right. Sorry. So we’re both slaves to other masters. But how do you choose a mate?”
Su glared at him, still angry. “You wouldn’t understand. You will just say it is wrongheaded and evil.” Her voice was petulant.
“I’ll try not to,” he said, grinning.
“We are matched genetically with another member of the community. Sometimes, the best genetic match is someone of the same gender, hence the trend toward hermaphroditism. In producing offspring, there is more and more a detachment of the conventional father/mother paradigm.”
“What does that mean?”
Su sighed, and for a moment Collier saw wistfulness in her eyes. “It means children are produced as a biological function, not as a family unit. Sometimes the genetic mother and father cohabitate to help the community raise the child, but the trend is quite clearly away from this habit. There are currently only thirty-three families of this type on Ganymede. Those families are barely tolerated by the authorities, and the members of those families are as ostracized as our social structure permits. The other two hundred and sixty five children are being raised by the community.”
Collier did not immediately answer. When he did, his voice was soft. “You wanted to raise your own children, didn’t you?”
Su was not looking at him. Her eyes were fixed on some moment in the past. “Yes, I did. But I was not strong enough to resist the social pressure. That happens sometimes — an individual buckles to increasing societal norms and makes a decision that may be detrimental to his or her own well-being in one way, but allows for increased status in the community of which he or she is a part. Thus, the organism rises in social status with the concomitant privileges thereto.” She swallowed, then added in a wavering voice, “And all it took was a cancelling of a basic personal need.”
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