April 6: And What Goes Around

by Mackey Chandler

  And What Goes Around...

  Mackey Chandler

  Sixth of the "April" series

  Cover Design Sarah A. Hoyt

  Figures © innovari

  Figures © mg1708

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  The Last Part

  Chapter 1

  April slouched deep down in the oversized Hardoy chair. She bought two in this larger size thinking they would be more comfortable for Gunny and other big men. It turned out she preferred them. The back went up high enough for her to lean her head back and the extra width spread the heavy ballistic cloth flatter than a smaller chair with light rip-stop fabric. It supported her legs clear out to the padded edge under her knees.

  In the half G apparent gravity that her apartment was kept at the chair was as comfortable as a hammock and almost as hard for her to lever herself from its depths. It was low enough she could safely sit her coffee mug on the floor beside her and there was plenty of room on each side to tuck treats or reading material. She had her comp-pad laying screen down on her stomach at the moment paused on the newsfeed she was reading while she gazed out her view port.

  The commonest size of apartment on Home wasn't any bigger than a cheap motel room in North America and every square meter had to do double or triple duty. Kitchen tables and beds that folded up against the wall when not needed were common. Home apartments used the same sort of compact appliances and fixtures common to travel trailers and motor homes on Earth. April had a huge place by local standards. So big it embarrassed her on occasion when a new visitor would freeze for an instant with surprise on their face when they stepped inside her door.

  Her bodyguard Gunny had immediately rated it a four-car apartment upon stepping in the first time, since he had an annoying habit of comparing every place he saw in Home to the size of a garage you'd expect on a North American home. He was of the opinion what he called the half-car model might drive people crazy from confinement, but he had a skewed view of things having lived most of his life in North America. April knew that some of the Japanese found the local accommodations compared very favorably to what they lived in back home.

  She'd been spoiled rotten growing up because her family was relatively well-to-do. Her grandfather helped in the construction of Mitsubishi 3 and put all his money in both spun residential cubic and zero G industrial space. Also her father was the resident manager for Mitsubishi with a generous housing allowance.

  As a child she had her own bedroom that was the size of a walk-in closet on Earth. Even more of a luxury was her own square meter all-in-one unit bath that became a shower stall with the door sealed. By orbital standards that was a palace. So she might have found the very smallest apartment oppressive herself. They were barely more than shift rental hot slots, but she'd never admit that to Gunny.

  Behind her there were two sofas facing each other across a table on a rug that defined a formal living area. In smaller apartments they would be wall hung fold-downs. The sofas were IKEA super light hide-a-beds in case she needed to put up guests. She had enough wall space for both a fairly large 32K video monitor and some big pieces of art. There was also room by the cooking area for a real table that could seat six which she left set up. It looked sturdy enough but the legs could be folded inside the drop apron and set to the side if the floor area was needed.

  The kitchen against the inside bulkhead had a simple two burner stove and a microwave. April had the luxury of a small refrigerator too. A few folks didn't bother with even that much, taking all their meals at the cafeteria. It was decent food too. Mitsubishi saw to that. If you had a stove that meant you needed dishes, pans, utensils and things like spices and volume to store them. It easily escalated to the status of a cooking hobby rather than any necessity. You could keep a few cans of self heating stuff like soup or stew for those rare times when you were sick or just too tired to trek down to the cafeteria. The cafeteria also would pack take away and there were cheap courier services to deliver it.

  Further from the entry, behind the kitchen and dining area, the end of her space was divided into two small bedrooms with a bath between them. Each had a private section but a shared shower stall between them with lockout doors so only one side would open at a time. That was all framed off in temporary wall panels that jammed in place between overhead and deck with locking vertical seams.

  If in the future she let her body guard Gunny go, it would be easy to remodel by removing the panels. Neither had brought up the idea of him leaving in some months now. His one month gig had turned into open ended employment, although less than full time. His status now was more 'on call', especially since Home was further from Earth and trouble now. He was welcome to take short security jobs with April's blessing. She still took him along when traveling away from Home.

  The reason April pulled her chair over by the port was to enjoy the view. Right now the moon was in a thin crescent to the right side out the port. From this side of the moon there was no light reflected off the Earth so it was utterly dark on the left portion. You were made aware of the moon's dark portion more by the absence of brighter stars than any illumination of the surface at all.

  The sun was directly visible to the right of the moon and she had the port darkened until the glare was bearable. Home was at that point in their orbit around the L2 point where the Earth disappeared behind the moon. In a couple hours the thin slice of moon would have the sun just barely shining past the edge of it and the blue marble of the Earth would rise from behind the opposite dark horizon of the moon to the left. It would display a crescent to the same side as the moon but a bigger section. They were much too far away to see the lights of cities in the dark section by the naked eye.

  Neither were there any lights to be seen from here on the dark portion of the moon. All the large settlements of humankind were on the other face of the moon that stayed pointed to the Earth. The few places with any people or surface structures on this side were barely visible with a very good telescope when they were in sunlight. The headlamps of a rover or flood lights outside a habitat entry were insignificant.

  April could still call her friend Heather at Central on the other side of the moon or anywhere on Earth for that matter. There were plenty of satellites in lunar orbit to relay the call. There were now several such systems so communications couldn't be cut off easily. Home was further from Earth but still conveniently close here. Hardly any further than Low Earth Orbit in terms of propellant cost. Being at L2 only cost about ten percent more in freight costs over lifting from Earth to LEO. Unless you were in a hurry. On the other hand it was just distant enough from Earth to enhance their safety. The Earthies had never seemed able to resist the occasional pot shot at Home when they had been in LEO and the added distance was sufficient to give them warning of hostile approach.

  That was all a background scene however, which slowly turned every few minutes as the habitat rotated. Their current orientation kept the sun in view although it looped back and forth from her view. Dominating the close view that stayed fixed was the nearby strut tapering from the ring in which April's home was located to the hub above. The same ring extended horizontally across the bottom of her view with another spoke extending to the far side of it a third of the way a
round. The view was dramatic in scale with massive elements one rarely saw in Earth architecture. The only dynamic aspect of the close view was the slow dance of shadows back and forth as Home rotated.

  The glass curved from knee level to almost straight overhead, and most of the new ring being built was visible by looking up. The spokes to the new ring were positioned at the same angles off the hub. April had wondered briefly if there was some reason for that but forgot to ask anyone.

  There were only a few small panels missing from the skin of the new ring and some gaps where ports like her own were not fitted yet. In a few places scaffolding hung off the outside of the ring and two bright yellow lines and hand rails temporarily marked the inside area on which suited workers could walk without danger of sliding down the curved surface. The ring wasn't a perfectly circular cross section. There were center sections top and bottom that were flat before it started to curve.

  Only a couple months ago there had been a lot more machinery, materials, and scooters floating two hundred meters or more distant, which was the closest safety zone in which material and equipment could be parked that would be used that shift. Construction was winding down.

  Some items could be brought in by scooter by matching speed with the ring and side-slipping onto the inside surface. That was fun to watch. Her pilot friend Easy could do that as slick as catching an egg on a plate. She sometimes knew his scooter number for the shift and watched with binoculars. Some items were too massive and had to be lowered from the hub on a tensioned cable and slowly nudged up to match rotational speed without over-torquing the hub.

  There was talk of extending the hub and adding a third ring, but she'd read that would be the last as after that the calculations said a fourth ring would be unstable in too many situations. It would make moving the habitat, as they had from LEO, an impractically slow operation to avoid over-stressing a long skinny hub. Nobody wanted to give up their mobility since it had proved so vital to their safety.

  If they wanted to build a similar habitat it wouldn't be difficult to park it in a slightly different halo orbit around L2 such that they both danced around the same point in space but never crossed over the center at the same time. A necessity that had made Gunny smile and explain to her the Earth custom of a figure eight race or demolition derby. She thought he was pulling her leg until she did a net search.

  The area behind April had headroom to stand but the glass overhead curved down until it met metal shell about knee high. Her chair was pulled forward close enough to the glass she had to be careful standing up. That low area helped make the room feel bigger but was rather limiting in how you could use it. She had some storage cabinets made to fit up to the edge of the glass. They had caster below so they could be pulled out of the low overhead. Heather's mom had a similar lay-out and raised tomatoes and a few herbs in the narrow space along the port. April intended to do that too... someday. Now she just had a few green plants that helped keep the air pure. Most people had one or two even if they didn't have exterior ports and needed to illuminate them. Beside making the apartment smell better plants added something that was pleasantly natural for the eye. A relief from the manmade flat surfaces and straight edges of everything else in their artificial environment.

  There was a pattern of light in the corner of the port she hadn't noticed before, a little dappled splash of light from internal reflections in the port maybe... April squinted at it. But it looked odd. It wasn't something her mind recognized as a familiar pattern. She levered herself out of the chair to investigate leaning over closer... and jumped back.

  "Gunny!" she called out horrified. Gunny appeared from his room looking rattled with a pistol in hand. He scanned the empty apartment looking hard for something like a Ninja army hidden behind the sofas.

  "Not there, here." She said, pointing at the corner of the port.

  He came over and leaned close as she had, but didn't jump back. Then eased back a couple steps so he didn't hit his head when he stood straight. He tried to look neutral but didn't manage to hide his amusement and irritation with her at alarming him.

  "You want him shot? Most folks just pick a spider up in a tissue and flush him down the toilet."

  "I've never seen a spider on Home before. Aren't they venomous?" April asked.

  "A few. The really bad ones are big hunters and jumpers like tarantulas. Not little web weavers. None of them are deadly unless you have a sensitivity, but I have to admit some of the little house spiders can give you a nasty bite if you roll on them in your sleep. I've had a couple nip me but it didn't even wake me. Down below nobody makes a house perfectly air tight to keep everything out. They just aren't a big deal. On the other hand I was very happy leave mosquitoes behind on Earth. They really bother me. The filthy little things carry disease," Gunny said, making a sour face.

  "Just do the tissue thing would you? It doesn't belong here."

  "OK," Gunny agreed, but stopped after a few steps and pursed his lips, looking back thoughtfully.

  "What?" April demanded.

  "Nothing, I'll get rid of him for you. I just have to ask. What has he been living on?"

  That question didn't make April happy at all.

  * * *

  Once the unwelcome invader was removed April went back to her paused news feed. The first week's experiment with allowing automated trucks to make deliveries in Manhattan between 0200 and 0400 local time was successful for safety. There was no incident of damage to property by the self guided trucks. The delivery points had been picked carefully since the usual failure point for such vehicles wasn't negotiating the streets. There was plenty of high end software to do that well. Rather it was the close quarters high angle maneuvering in narrow alleyways and receiving yards that challenged a robotic semi truck getting backed up to a dock.

  The down side was that three of the expensive vehicles and their loads had vanished without a trace after their tracking systems indicated they were safely at dock and shutting down. It should have been impossible to start them up and drive them away on manual without the tracking starting. Obviously there were work-arounds. The Teamsters union said, "We told you so."

  Something didn't smell right about the story to April. Weren't there private security cameras all over the city? Especially when there were only so many ways on and off of the island. She'd ask Gunny later.

  In Singapore a new regulation required all jewelry with gold content over a half gram to be registered and a photograph filed with police. This was part of a new wave of capital controls which included limits on funds travelers could carry abroad and new tariffs and taxes. Police announced the breakup of a gang avoiding export fees by smuggling bespoke suits to Japan on body doubles. The ploy came to light when customs officials noted a man wearing two pairs of pants.

  An aged widower in Belgium died alone at home and the family in going through the house and sorting out his things found an alcove in the basement they didn't understand. Upon being inspected by workmen from the local utilities it was discovered that the man had some decades earlier tapped into a pipeline which had an easement along the edge of his property. It ran between two nearby industrial sites separated by about a kilometer. The pipeline carried beer from a brew house to a bottling facility. What made April smile were his relatives' memories about what a happy man he'd always been.

  The New Jersey legislature passed a bill making the possession of a program for instructing automated machine tools or 3D printing devices to create a firearm legally the same as possession of the weapon. A simple paper blueprint was still considered legal 'speech'.

  The same bill also outlawed possession of arrows with broadhead hunting points and bows or crossbows with a pull in excess of 133 Newtons or 30 pounds. New Jersey joined the same standard in effect in California, Ontario, British Columbia, Quebec, Mississippi, New York, Connecticut , New Jersey, Vermont, Rhode Island and Massachusetts.

  USNA trade regulators accused Australia of dumping graphene coated glassy metal foil
on the market below cost. Australian trade ministers in turn accused the USNA of doing the same with diamond whiskers and DW composites. April still didn't see how anybody thought subsidizing an industry was an advantage. It was like the old joke about selling at a loss but making it up on volume. The first time she'd heard that one she hadn't thought it funny. She still didn't.

  Designs by Daniel had to rethink their decision to display his rack line on a robotic mannequin in front of the fashion house. NYC police called to the address on reports of a woman acting strangely ordered the mannequin to the sidewalk and when she didn't respond to commands shot the 1.6 Million dollar machine to junk. "She didn't comply when ordered," the department spox insisted.

  Natural clover honey reached an average wholesale price of $150USNA/lb, aided by a ban on imported honey due to persistent adulteration and contamination. Indoor producers of honey from human supplied sugar feed stocks and flavorings were heavily promoting its consistency, lack of pollens and pesticides and much lower cost in targeted advertising. The traditional producers held that the pollen was an advantage not a defect and claimed their flavor was superior. They had a strong advantage in a trademarked bee mascot that the public recognized positively.

  April made a note in her collection of things to research to see if that industrial sort of honey production would be suitable for tunnels in the moon. She hadn't realized bees would make honey from anything but flowers.

  Permit fees for photographing various government buildings, monuments and government property such as the reflecting pool in Washington DC were consolidated into a single day pass for the entire Federal district with a graduated fee structure for students, residents, tourists, professional photographers and news journalists. Virginia declined to join the program for historic sites and battlefields outside the district.

  The city of Berkeley California raised the bond necessary to license a dog or cat to $200,000USNA because of the increases in medical costs and insurance for companion animals. The ordinance was also changed to require the naming of three willing custodians in the event of death or inability to care for the animal. The use of the word pet was discouraged before, but the new ordinance made its use grounds for refusing a license application. Objections to the word animal were put aside for now due to lack of agreement on a suitable substitute. Companion animals with any gene modification beyond traditional breeding selection were strictly prohibited.