by Sarah Zettel
The wind caught a lock of Su’s white hair and whipped it across her forehead. Su brushed it back under her scarf. Most people who went in for body-mod had themselves made artificially younger. Su, on the other hand, had herself aged. She looked about seventy-five, but Helen knew she was only a little over sixty. It had to do with respect and camouflage, Su said. A number of her influential colleagues came from backgrounds that respected age. The ones who didn’t, underestimated her. Both attitudes could be extremely useful.
“What kind of handout were you thinking of, Helen?”
Just a couple of old women sitting on a bench and discussing the future often thousand people. Helen shrugged. “I can show you our budgets. We’re going to need between a third and a half of our operating expenses for, say, five years. By then the slump should be over and we should be able to tap into our normal sources.”
“You want a loan?”
“I want a grant, but I probably can’t have one. So, yes, I’ll take a loan.”
Su sat there for a long moment. Helen watched her face carefully. She looked tired, and, despite the fact that Helen knew most of the lines and pouches were artificial, she really did look old. Something inside Helen stirred uneasily. The last time she’d seen Su look like this was right after her husband had left. Correction, after her husband had cleaned out their bank account to have himself made back into a thirty-something and run away with a professional wife and blamed Su for it.
He’d married someone who was supposed to have a future, he said, not someone who was going to be stuck in the same dead-end bureaucratic appointment for the rest of their lives, nursemaiding miners and importers when there was important work to be done. Oh, and incidentally, I’ve decided I want to get genetic rejuvenation past the 120 years everyone’s guaranteed, so I’ve signed over my reproduction rights. The boy’s all yours.
Helen couldn’t even imagine what that had been like. Su, born and raised in U.N. City, had gone the expected route. She had a career of government service, a family of her own, and a host of people and causes to fill her life to the brim. How did she focus? How did she choose what was important? Helen knew it was how most people lived, but sometimes she wondered how anyone managed when they’d given their heart to more than one thing.
“Helen,” Su broke in on her thoughts. “I don’t think the money’s going to be there.”
Helen smiled. “I think we’ve had this conversation before.”
“We have, several times.” Su leaned her shoulder against the bench’s back. The wind blew her bronze scarf over her shoulder. “But this time its different.”
“How?”
Su turned her gaze to the chimes swinging in the breeze. Their random music filled the park but did nothing to lift the chill settling over Helen’s heart. “Call it a narrowing of horizons, Helen. Call it a selfishness born of the fact that we can now live three hundred years all on our own and we worry less about leaving something behind that will truly last.”
“Can I call it a bunch of cheapskate bureaucrats?” asked Helen lightly.
“You can, if it makes you feel better.” Su’s smile quickly faded. “But you know as well as I do that since Bradbury—”
“No.” Helen pushed herself upright. “No, you do not get to blame this on Bradbury. Bradbury was twenty years ago. Bradbury has nothing to do with the way things are now.”
“I wish that were true. For your sake, I truly do. But it’s not only generals who are always relighting the last war. Bureaucrats do it too.”
No, No. You are not saying this. I refuse to accept this. “And do those bureaucrats really want ten thousand refugees on their doorstep?”
Su spread her hands helplessly. “The C.A.C. doesn’t see you as refugees, Helen. They see you as misfits. You all have citizenship in your parents’ republics. They have to take you, and then you’re their problem, not the U.N.’s.”
All around them wind rang the bells, sending their music out into a world that didn’t care about the work of her life or the futures of her people. “You can’t expect me to be content with this. I can’t just let Venera die.”
“I expect them to and you stone-cold dead with your fingers wrapped around a support girder,” said Su, perfectly seriously. “They’ll have to cut you out of there.”
Helen’s mouth twitched as if she didn’t quite have the energy to smile. “The money’s there someplace,” she said, because it was so much easier than even contemplating the alternative. “We just have to find it. You’re not going to just hang me out to dry, are you?”
“Never, Helen.”
Helen had been right about something, anyway. The money had been out there. All it had taken was the Discovery to prime the pump. For a moment, everything looked like it was going to be all right. But now, now…everything might be about to change again if the U.N. decided the new rumors were true, if they decided she wasn’t handling this right, if Michael said the wrong thing.
Helen stepped up to her window and stared out across the farms. Drones, humans, and ducks made their way between the lush plant life, each with their own mission of the moment. Each with something immediate to do. She was the only one standing still on the whole farming level.
She felt alone. Deeply and profoundly alone, as if she’d lost the feeling for the world around her, the world she’d built from the first dollar and the first strut. She stood in the middle of it, and yet it was somewhere else. Somewhere she wasn’t sure she knew how to get to.
Don’t be an idiot. She shook herself and returned to her desk. You have too much work to do to get depressive. First, you have to decide what you’re going to do about Michael.
She knew what she wanted to do. She wanted to call him in right now and demand to know what he thought he was doing, find out how he could betray Venera, betray her, like this. How could he not know what this could lead to? How could he not realize what the U.N. would do with whatever he told them?
The sudden memory of Grace’s eyes stopped her. That little smile, that knowledge of possessing a winning move.
Grace had known what this news would do to her. Grace had wanted this. She had wanted to turn Helen against Michael, to send her running off after a traitor, off after some one who was just doing his job but wounding her ego….
Grace had been sure it would work, and it almost had.
Helen realized her hands were shaking. Oh God, am I that forgone?
She got up, went into her little private lavatory, pulled a cup of water from the sink, and drank it in three swallows. Then she met her own gaze in the mirror for a long moment.
Am I that far gone?
Almost, Helen. Almost, but not quite.
It was a good face, a strong face, a well-meaning face that had worked so hard and had almost lost its way. God, had come so close….
Helen removed her scarf and pulled all the pins out of her hair. The mane tumbled down over her shoulders, a waterfall of white and gray. With long, competent fingers she twisted it into a fresh knot and one by one, slid the pins back to their places. She laid the scarf back and pinned that firmly down, too.
“Desk,” she said as she returned to her work area. “Locate Michael Lum.”
After a pause, Michael’s voice came back through the intercom. “I’m here Helen.”
“Where’s here?”
“Admin. Security. My desk, specifically. Do you want me to come up there?”
“No. I’ll come down. Do me a favor though. Find Ben and your friend Bowerman. We need to talk.”
“I’m on it, Helen.”
“Desk. Close connection.”
I will deal with this. We will all get through this, and if this isn’t the permanent solution I dreamed it would be, then I’d better find that out now, hadn’t I?
Helen strode out the door.
“Hi,” said Angela Cleary as the hatch swung back. “Can I borrow a cup of sugar?”
Vee chuckled from her seat in the kitchen nook. It was strange seeing s
omeone emerge from the airlock without a suit on. But the two scarabs had backed up against each other in a clunky but effective docking procedure that preceded what Terry called the “gab and grill.” It happened at dinner every other day and allowed the passengers to circulate and talk about their work face-to-face. It also allowed the crews to sit with their friends and talk about the passengers, Vee was certain.
Angela was the first one over, but she was followed quickly by Lindi Manzur, who hugged her Troy happily and fell into talking with him about a theory of universal curiosity as a mainstay of sentient life that they’d been cooking up together. It might even be a good theory. Pity it wasn’t going to come to anything. Isaac and Julia made a beeline for the fridge and the mango juice, which they both seemed to live off. Josh grabbed Bailey Heathe, the copilot for Scarab Fourteen, briefly by the hand as Bailey brushed past to the pilot’s compartment to catch up with Kevin and Adrian.
Angela moved out of the way of the new arrivals and came to stand over the kitchen table. Vee saluted her with a plastic cup of tea.
“Dr. Hatch,” said Angela, her voice low and formal. “I was hoping we could talk. There’s some incidents in your background check that I wanted to go over….”
Vee pulled on an expression of surprise. “Yeah, sure.” She downed the last of her tea in one lukewarm gulp and stood up. “I think the couch compartment’s empty.”
It was. Vee touched the lock on the door. Now anyone who wanted to come in would at least have to knock.
“You don’t think anybody believed that, do you?” For the past week they had been doing most of their talking via e-mail or the occasional comments on gab-and-grill nights. But now that the investigation was in full swing upstairs as well as down here, Angela was becoming visibly less patient with sporadic communication.
“People have a tendency to believe the Blues are after them personally.” Angela shrugged. “So they’re not all that surprised to hear we’re after somebody else.” She picked her way unerringly to Vee’s couch and perched on the edge. “Show me what you’ve got?”
“Just simulations so far.” Vee snatched up a pair of used socks off her couch and stuffed them into the storage bin overhead. Then she sat down cross-legged with her case open on her lap and switched on the back screen so Angela could see what was displayed. “But they’re based on reality. I found all the drones you’re going to see in Venera’s current inventory.”
Vee had been expanding her image library every day since she’d gotten to Venera, so the simulations actually hadn’t taken all that long to put together, once she’d tracked down what she thought of as the component parts.
The screen showed a three-dimensional rendering of the little cup of a valley outside. A fat, multitreaded drone rolled down the lava corridor. It’s main features—a tank and a hose.
“Experimental emergency drone,” Vee told Angela. “Number ED-445. The idea was it’d be able to carry coolant down to a scarab in trouble. But it could do this too.”
The drone extended its hose and planted it against the ground, as if it was nuzzling the stone. In the next second, a huge white cloud rose up around the nozzle and the hose started sinking into the rock, like a drill into cement.
“What’s it spraying?” asked Angela.
“Water,” Vee told her, and just nodded at the look of skepticism that appeared on Angela’s face a moment later. “I checked with Josh on this. He ran a lab-level simulation. The rock outside has no water in it, which makes it stronger than normal terran rock, which is how you can get these massive continents thrusting out of the crust. But, power-spray that rock with water, and it weakens. Add in the fact that the water reacts with the sulfuric acid in the atmosphere, turning the air around the stone into a corrosive, then the rock crumbles.” The hose on the screen had already buried itself eight or nine centimeters into the ground. “They could have hollowed out the whole thing with one or two of these. And they do have one or two.” She entered another command, and the image skipped forward. “The metal in the ladder rungs and the laser is your basic iron. You could either bring it down from the base, or you could sort it out of the waste rock from the digging.”
This section of the simulation showed a “scoop-and-chute” drone next to a pile of dust and rubble. Its shovel-tipped waldo shoved into the pile and came up with a sample of dirt. The sample ran through the chemically sensitive filters in the drone’s body, and everything except what was needed got shaken out of its belly.
“What about the delicate work?” asked Angela, without taking her gaze off the screen. “Shaping the ceramics? Making the lenses in the lasers?”
“A lot of that could be done with lasers,” said Vee. She skipped the simulation ahead to a neat row of three separate measurement drones, each of which had its array of small lasers and waldos, so delicate they looked more like insect pincers than human hands. “Take your pick. These are just the three most likely.”
Angela folded her arms and hung her head down. “You know, there are days I hate my job.”
Vee shut the simulation off. “It’s a fraud.” Why are you, of all people, missing the point here? “I don’t care what was about to happen to their precious base; they don’t get to perpetrate a fraud.”
Angela just shook her head. “So you’re enjoying this?”
Vee threw up her hands. “Why does everybody think I’m doing this to get my ya-yas?”
“Because I saw the playback of you at the Dublin gallery opening when you called the arts minister a bribe-taking nationalist pig, in front of every major news service in the stream,” replied Angela evenly.
“Oh.” Vee cocked her head from side to side. “That was probably not my best day for P.R.” She’d frequently wished she really had been drunk, which was the cover story Rosa worked so hard to put out for months afterward. “My only excuse is I was right then too.”
“Yes,” Angela admitted. “But you have this tendency to be right in public, loudly. It’s not reassuring.”
A powerful image of Rosa leaning against the rail in U.N. City flashed in front of Vee’s mind. “Be careful what you pretend to be,” Vee muttered.
Angela nodded. “You hear that one a lot in my business.” She slapped her hands down on her thighs. “I’m going to need a copy of your drone file so Philip can confirm the inventory.” She straightened up. “And I need you to be ready to testify to the truth of your findings and that you created this without help or interference.”
“Of course.” A few more commands and Vee shot a copy of the simulations out to Angela’s contact code. “It’s got to be Derek Cusmanos then, doesn’t it? He’s the one who has access to all the drones.”
“That would be the logical conclusion based on what you’ve seen so far,” said Angela.
Vee glanced at her and knew she was not going to get any more of an answer than that. They were investigating her accusations inside Venera, but Angela had wanted Vee to remain independent of any kind of suggestion. “If we can show we arrived at this from separate angles,” Angela had said, “it’ll be even more convincing when we have to go public with it.”
“Well, glad I could help,” said Vee.
“I’m sure.” Angela headed out the door, leaving Vee sitting alone with her simulated evidence.
Vee had tried to understand. She tried to imagine what it was to have your life shut down, to have to move to a strange new world with such things in it as Earth at its craziest could surround you with. She felt sad, she felt sorry, she wished there was something she could do, but they did not get to lie about this. They did not get to lie about life on another world. The hope of finding that human beings weren’t alone was such an old, precarious hope. To one day discover that there was somebody else out there who asked the same questions and dreamed the same dreams. Every time she thought about somebody playing on that venerable dream…again, again, rage shot through her veins.
This was supposed to be real. This was supposed to be her one real thing, t
o make up for the tantrums and the farces and the pretty veneer she had made out of her life.
And what did they do this for? For money, again, like the worst of the Universal Age frauds. Was it really all that different? Was she the only one here who didn’t see that it wasn’t different at all?
Except, maybe it was. This one was built for love and worry, not just greed. This was done to fill, not to drain. Maybe it was different. But that just made it sad, in addition to making it wrong.
Vee sighed, closed her case, and stowed it. She looked at the hatchway and decided she didn’t want to face the rest of the team. She’d munch on some leftovers later. Her stomach was all in knots. Instead she curled up in the couch, hugging her knees. In the silence, she mourned the loss of a dream, again.
Chapter Ten
“PRESSURE GOOD, OPENING AIRLOCK.”
Adrian brought his band down on the key that opened the inner hatch. The clank of the portal opening was followed fast by the thumping of multiple pairs of stiff, heavy boots and the clunking of armored limbs as they accidentally bumped into walls and other people in a confined space.
“Another day, another dollar,” said Kevin, rubbing the back of his neck.
“So they tell me.” Adrian got to his feet and arched his back in a prolonged stretch. The team had gotten good enough at managing their suits that he no longer had to hover around them each time they returned. The snapping of catches and various, wordless, relieved noises drifted up the central corridor. He knew how they felt. He was really looking forward to the end of this run. Terry Wray in particular was becoming a bigger pain in the ass all the time, despite her good looks. For the past week she’d been running back and forth, asking them both for the story of how the base was found over and over, until finally Kevin said to her, “Ms. Wray, you’re sounding less like a media face and more like a lawyer all the time.”
“What an interesting choice of words, Mr. Cusmanos,” she had replied mildly.
After that, Kevin’s normal good humor had started to fade, and Adrian had found himself engaging in the unhealthy and unproductive hobby of marking time until the run was over.