After a while, Dad finally interrupted. "Your courtesy is welcome, Dr. Hidalgo, but you barely know us. I can't help but wonder—"
"Forgive an old man his vanities—"
"You're not that old," Dad said.
"Old enough to be working on my second bottle of Tabasco," Hidalgo said. "You don't believe me? Cut me in half and count the rings. I'm old enough to have seen Lucy first-run—"
Weird shook his head. "Now, I know you're teasing us, Dr. Hidalgo. Lucy was born before the First American Civil War."
"Ann, the first Lucy—I was thinking of the second one. And you're thinking of the Second American Civil War. But yes, you're right, I'm not quite that old, but almost. Nevertheless, please accept my hospitality. I have no one else to share my table—now, let's have a look at this menu and see if they have an old-fashioned chocolate soda for Roberto here. You do like chocolate, don't you? I'm sure you do not get very much of the real thing. It's quite expensive, you know. Trust me, the chocolate sodas here are very very good."
Dad was curious about Dr. Hidalgo's intentions, and some of his impatience was starting to show, but the old man just kept chattering away about inconsequential things, refusing to let politics—or anything else—interfere with a good dinner. And it was a good dinner. There were things on the menu I couldn't even pronounce, but the Señor Doctor ordered them anyway, and when the waiter put the plates in front of us, they looked and smelled delicious, and tasted even better than that. So for a while I didn't care what Dr. Hidalgo wanted. I was too busy eating. And Dad too, finally gave in to the inevitable and ordered himself a steak so thick you could have insulated a wall with it.
For dessert, the waiter rolled a big cart up to the table, covered with cakes and puddings and things even Dad didn't recognize. I'd never seen so many different kinds of fruits in one place before in my life. And chocolate! I mean, real chocolate! Stinky's eyes went as wide as saucers, and I guess mine did too, and I think for the first time, I began to realize just how much we didn't know—and how poor we really were.
I didn't know what to pick, and even Stinky and Weird were overawed, because everything looked too good to eat. Weird actually smiled at me. It made him look almost human. All three of us—four, counting Dad—stared at all the desserts so long that Doctor Hidalgo just started pointing and ordering. "Apparently, the boys cannot make up their minds, and neither can I. So we'll have it all. Just the best. We'll start with some of those fat red strawberries in cream and definitely the fresh grapes on a bed of thick rice pudding—and a big slice of the Chocolate Death, por favor, we shall all share that. Bring extra forks. And, oh my, the spiced peaches and mangoes also look very good tonight, and so do the raspberries and kiwis; is that coconut sprinkled on top? Bueno! Un pocito mas, don't be stingy. And some of that delicious pineapple trifle as well, please. We'll have a taste of everything. Oh, and two cups of your most dangerous Kona espresso."
"Doctor Hidalgo—" Dad began slowly, "I appreciate your generosity, almost as much as my boys do, I'm sure, but it makes me very uncomfortable—as if you're trying to get to me through my sons."
Hidalgo wiped his mouth with his napkin. "Ahh, Señor Dingillian, a thousand apologies. Sometimes my generosity overwhelms people. I am used to giving. Sometimes I forget that other people are not used to receiving. I meant no offense. I only wanted to share some time with you—a man so committed to his sons that he will risk his freedom for them. I think I understand your situation, sir. And I think I might be able to help you. Conversely, you might be of some use to my people too."
Dad shook his head. "I'd prefer not to get involved, sir. Fame is a terrible mistress. She takes a great deal and gives very little in return."
"Ahh, very true, very true. Nevertheless, you are already famous. Twice over, indeed. And it is the foolish man who doesn't use every opportunity he has. Fame can be useful, sir. If you don't take charge of your own—how shall I say it?—your own 'reputation' in the media, I am sure that your wife, or her lawyers, will certainly take charge of it for you. It is a matter of publicity, and in your situation, you are probably going to need some useful friends, comprende?"
Dad sighed. "Doctor Hidalgo—"
"Please, call me Bolivar. Or Bollie. We have broken bread together." He waved at the table. "A great deal of it, indeed."
"Doctor Hidalgo—" Dad tried again. "I'm grateful for your hospitality, but—"
"You have not heard me out, Señor Dingillian. Please—you have enjoyed my hospitality, you owe me a bit of your time, don't you think? Por favor?" Dad looked unconvinced. "Are you in a hurry? Do you have someplace to go, something better to do ... ?"
Dad sat back down again. "All right," he said. "I'll listen. But I want you to understand something first. I'm not kidnapping my children. I'm giving them the choice that their mother tried to deny them."
"Yes, I'm certain that's what it looks like to you, and I'm not so big a fool as I seem, that I would try to argue that with you. And that is not the discussion I want to have with you anyway."
"Oh?"
"Do you like money, Señor Dingillian? Si? Bueno. Everyone does. Money is like gravity. When you have enough of it, it draws more money to it, increasing its gravity even more. When you have too much money—is there such a thing as too much money? The SuperNationals don't think so—but when you have too much money in one place, it stretches the fabric of the universe like a great black hole, sinking deeper and deeper into itself. Nothing escapes, not even light. If a black hole is an astrophysicist's nightmare, then a SuperNational corporation is an economist's nightmare. The money flows into it, nothing comes back. We don't even know where the money has gone. It leaves no trace of its passage, nothing comes back—not even light. Did the money pass through Atlantis or Oceania? Did it leave the planet? Where did it go? Who knows?" Hidalgo sat back in his chair comfortably; he held up a hand for patience, while he stifled a belch. Even with the napkin in front of his face, it was impressive. Stinky and I looked at each other and giggled.
"A nine!" whispered Stinky,
"Nine point five," I whispered back.
Dad glared. We both shut up.
Hidalgo glanced around the table. "Would any of you like anything more? No? You do not eat enough, Roberta y Carlito. You will never grow as big as me unless you practice your eating. But getting back to my point, Señor Dingillian, money is neither good nor evil—but it can be dangerous. Because money does what money wants. Money goes where money wants to go. And money doesn't care who it rolls over. It just wants to collect itself—like I said, like gravity. You should respect money; you should never get in its way. Unless you have a big enough bucket. Do you?"
Dad started to answer, but Hidalgo patted his hand and stopped him. "Never mind. I have no right to ask that question. But the answer is the same for everyone: 'Not as big as I'd like.' But if the bucket is big enough to take care of your children, then you are truly a wealthy man." He looked around at us. "Clearly, you have done well with your young men. I am envious. You should be proud of them." Hidalgo wiped his mouth again and conveniently looked at his watch.
"Oh, Madre de Dios, look at the time. I have a very important conference call that I must be a part of. Mucho importante. It starts in five minutes. I must rush. Thank you so much for your company tonight, all of you—you have been very kind to an old man, listening to me prattle on like a teacher in search of a classroom. No, no, sit down, finish your desserts. Do not leave the table until all of these plates are clean—" He shook hands all around. "I shall see you again before we reach our destination, I'm sure of it. Señor Dingillian, we still have much to talk about. Let us connect with each other tomorrow. For breakfast, perhaps? Or lunch? Please. Your company has been most gracious. Au revoir."
Douglas giggled. "Au revoir—?"
Dad smiled. "Perhaps he forgot he was supposed to be Spanish." He glanced at his own watch. "That certainly was a convenient departure on his part. Just when he was getting to the punch line."
/>
"Do you think he timed it that way?" Douglas asked.
"I think Señor Doctor Hidalgo is way too good a snake-oil salesman to leave anything to chance. Yes, I think he timed it that way."
"Snake-oil?" Stinky asked.
"It's what you buy when your snake gets squeaky," I said, wondering what it really meant. Mostly, it meant another trip to the dictionary.
"Right," said Dad, heaving himself up from the table with a grunt. "And right now, it's time to get our squeakiest snake into bed—"
DECISIONS
Later, after stinky had finally fallen asleep, the three of us sat around and talked about Doctor Hidalgo and what he might want. Dad had no idea, but he was sure that the old man wanted something. "No one spends five thousand on dinner without expecting at least a good-night kiss." We all laughed at that. Even I understood the joke.
"Hey, it was good food, and the conversation was interesting—if a little one-sided," Dad concluded.
"I bet he could be a great baritone, if he wanted," Douglas said. "I've never seen anyone go that long without taking a breath."
"I didn't know there were so many different kinds of dessert," I said.
"Yeah, well—don't get used to it," Douglas sounded like a grownup. He turned to Dad. "Are you going to tell him?"
Dad looked suddenly serious. But he didn't look old anymore. He looked relaxed. Sort of. He nodded and turned to me. "It's like this, Charles. Douglas, isn't going back to Earth."
"Huh? What?" I looked to Douglas, dismayed.
"I'm going with Dad. To the moon," he said. "And beyond."
I shook my head. "Yeah—? And what about Mom? What if she has the cops looking for us at Geosynchronous?"
Dad shook his head. "Earthside jurisdiction doesn't apply. As indentured colonists, we're the property of the corporation. If I haven't broken any starside laws, they can't touch me. I checked it out before we left, Charles. As long as we have a valid contract, we're safe."
It sounded too easy, but maybe—I didn't know. There was too much happening for me to figure out. "I don't get it. I thought you said this was a stupid idea."
"Yeah, but staying is stupider. For me, anyway."
"Why?" I demanded.
"It's about my scholarship," Douglas said. "I'm not going to get it."
"I know."
"How do you know?"
"Same way I know about the cops. A kid with a wire and a big mouth."
"Do you know why?" He took a deep breath. "They don't give you the scholarship if you don't need rechanneling."
"Oh," I said. And then, "Oh!"
"It was Mickey," Douglas said.
Mickey? The elevator attendant?! For a moment, I didn't know what to feel. Angry. Or jealous. Or hurt. Or curious. Or just disgusted. While I hadn't been looking, Douglas really had turned into a grownup.
I didn't know what to say, so I said something I'd never said to him before. At least not like this. "I'm sorry, Douglas."
He reached over and put his hand on mine. "There's nothing to be sorry about, Chigger. This is how things turned out."
"I know, but—you wanted to go to UCLA."
"There are good schools in the outbeyond."
"Yeah, but you said it would be slavery—" I shut up. I had the feeling that I didn't know what I was talking about anymore.
"It's an economic decision. You sell what you have. If you don't have anything to sell, you sell who you are. It's only seven years, Chigger. And then I'll be a free man on a new world." He sounded resigned. As if he hadn't finished convincing himself. "And it's not like the old kind of slavery. It's not—not really."
He sounded more like a grownup than I'd ever heard him sound before. I didn't like it very much. It made me feel abandoned, sort of. More alone than before—like someone had taken away my security. Again.
Now, Dad spoke up. "You know what the joke is, Charles? I'd asked Douglas to come with me to the outbeyond, because I wanted him to have the chance at a life without rechannelling. Now—it turns out that it doesn't matter. But it's still a good choice, Charles—I think it's one that will work out all right for him in the long run."
"Yeah," I said, "I sort of see the joke. And I sort of understand. But what about me and Stinky? What happens to us?"
"I really wish you wouldn't call your brother that," Dad said, but that wasn't what he really wanted to say. He tried to run his hand through his hair, he only ended up brushing his near-naked scalp. He looked annoyed, sighed, and started again. "You see, Charles, here's the thing—I was pretty sure that Douglas wasn't going to want to come with me. He'd made that clear back in Mexico. So I'd been counting on him to take you and Bobby back to Earth. That is, if you didn't want to come any farther with me. Now that he's decided to go on, that puts the responsibility on you. Do you want to go back? Or do you want to come with?"
"But what about Sti—Bobby?"
"First we need to know what you want to do."
"If I go back, I'll be living with Mom again, won't I?"
"Your mother is a good woman," Dad said, but he didn't sound like he believed it.
"Oh, yeah," I said. "She's good enough for me to live with, but not good enough for you."
"Point taken," Dad said.
"And if I go with you—"
"When I put my name in the registry, I also put your name in, as a possible. And Douglas and Bobby too. So far, we have one bid from the Sierra Corporation. That's not too bad. But I haven't accepted it yet; I'm waiting to see who else bids. Then we'll pick the best. I'm more valuable if I bring sons, but it'll be your choice to come with me."
"What if nobody else bids?"
"Then we go with Sierra. I'll accept the bid before we disembark."
"What if we don't like the Sierra contract?"
"I took out an insurance policy against that. We're guaranteed a suitable bid or our passage home."
"Oh," I said.
"So you don't have to let that influence your decision."
"But it does," I said. "This really is a Magical Mystery Tour, isn't it?" Just like you said—we're not going to know where we're going until we get there."
"So you're coming?"
I shrugged. "What's to go back to?"
"You know that I'm breaking the law if I try to take you against your will."
"You've already broken the law, Dad."
He nodded. "Consider it a measure of how much I love you."
DECISIONS POSTPONED
When you're a kid, you just keep on going like you're going to be a kid forever. And every time someone calls you young man or young adult or talks about grownup responsibilities, you just blink and wonder what they're talking about. How can a kid make that kind of decision? But that's what Dad was asking me to do now.
Would the grownup I was going to become feel that I had done the right thing? Or would he hate me for condemning him to whatever bad consequences came of this decision? What was I supposed to choose here?
Weird tried to help. In his clumsy way. He punched up some programs on the TV to give me an idea of what the options were.
One program was about the different colonies. What it was like to live and work there. None of the colonies really looked like a fun place to live—they were either too hot or too cold. The sky was the wrong color on all of them. And none of the colony planets had any life at all, except what you brought with you and grew in your own indoor farms. What was true about all of them was that it took a lot of work just to stay alive. Hard work.
On the other hand, none of the colonies had seventeen billion people all competing for the same jobs and the same houses and the same mouthfuls of food. The per capita comparisons were astonishing. Dad said that on Earth the chances of becoming a millionaire were one in seventeen million. On any of the colonies, right now, the chances were one in twenty. All you had to do was survive.
"Why don't they use robots?" I asked.
"They do," Dad said. "But robots can't do it all. They need people to do
the hard part—make decisions and babies. In that order."
"But Douglas can't make babies—"
"Yes, I can," said Douglas. "It's the how that's different."
I shook my head. I didn't want to argue about that stuff.
"Look, kiddo," Dad said. "The human race has eaten the Earth. We're walking an ecological tightrope. A crop failure here, a plague there, a war somewhere else—and every time the system collapses a little bit more, we patch it up somehow and keep on going for a little bit longer. We add a few more mechanisms around the edges to help keep it from collapsing quite the same way the next time, but the basic inequilibrium just keeps on going. The whole thing is staggering like a drunken sailor—sooner or later he's going to fall down. It's not a question of if; it's a question of when. There are sixteen billion people too many on the planet and there's no telling how long that condition can be sustained. But whether it's sustained or whether it collapses, either way, most of those people aren't going to have the kind of freedom in their lives that you can have out in the colonies. The freedom to design your own possibilities."
"We have freedom—" I started to say.
"No." Dad shook his head. "We don't have freedom. The only freedom you have is inside your head, and there's not too much of that left anymore. We can't have freedom the way Earth is presently constituted. If freedom is the ability to swing your fist, there are seventeen billion places on Earth where your freedom stops. In order to keep all of those people alive, we've sacrificed all kinds of individual liberties—including the right to be who you want to be. The more people you have, the more accommodations you have to make to society. But good grief, Charles! What do you think my argument with Douglas was all about? It wasn't about what he would be—it was about the fact that he was being pushed into it. And someday, you're going to be pushed in that same direction. And Bobby too. That's when I started thinking about getting you boys offworld somehow. Someplace where you wouldn't have to make any concessions or accommodations to anyone else."
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