Communications was one such area. Inter-asteroid communication was easy enough, but the cost of a transmitter strong enough to beam transmissions back to Earth made it effectively a Federation monopoly. Federation guidelines dictated the allotment of time each group could have on the Earth-beam channels, which somehow always wound up being defined as not quite enough. ComCentral had been established to control routing of messages, but the job was more political than technical. Or perhaps, Elaine thought as she listened to Jana's rundown of the morning situations, it was more like being in charge of a creche for three-year-olds.
"Oh, and you volunteered to devise a decoration scheme for Unity in Diversity Day."
Elaine groaned. "How? I wasn't even here."
"That's how. Those of us who were on-shift when it came up had the opportunity to explain why we wouldn't be suitable candidates. So you and Dom get the honor."
While Jana brought her up to date Elaine had been murmuring instructions into the mouthpiece, adding entries to her daily work list. Initially she'd had only four items on the list, comprising her regular maintenance and scheduling jobs. Now there were four more:
Think up decorations for UDD
Negotiate settlement between Islamic Renaissance and Prajad Dal
Explain bandwidth allocation priority system to Pieds Nus
Do something about VolksAlliance!!!
The last one was going to be a real pain to deal with; maybe she could get Aksia, her supervisor, to take it up. Elaine glanced through the transparent pod dividers and saw Aksia standing halfway down the ComCen tube, frowning at someone, one hand upraised, tapping the air with her forefinger as she made some point. Didn't look like a good time to be asking for any favors from Aksia.
She needed to plug in the other channels and start dealing in real-time, but she fiddled with the plug for a moment longer. Jana didn't seem to be in any hurry to hand over and get off-shift; there must be something going on besides the usual inter-asteroid squabbling.
"You're right," she agreed, "it sounds like a pretty normal shift. So what haven't you told me?"
Jana spread her hands. "Hey, that's it. Why wouldn't I tell you everything that's in the air? I'm more than happy to go off-shift and leave you and Dom to settle things for the next eight hours."
Usually that was true. In fact, usually Jana was out of her pod so fast Elaine could barely get a decent handover report from her. "So why aren't you going?"
"What's the matter, you want to get rid of me?"
"Stick around if you like," Elaine said, "but I do have to log in, and it would help if you told me why everybody seems so tense."
Jana sighed. "Oh, it's nothing really. There's this new guy . . ."
"Where?"
"Not in ComCen. He's with Life Support. He was just up here for a few minutes, mid-shift, getting his internal com codes set with Aksia. Actually I was the one who implemented the setup."
"So what's the big deal?"
"You'll understand when you see him." Jana sighed. "I did think he might have to come back by now. Oh well. I guess I'll go to the gym. Got to keep those muscles toned, you know."
Elaine blinked in surprise. Jana usually moaned and bitched about the obligatory daily hour of gravity exercise and spent her free time in the lowest-g areas she could find, claiming that saving the wear and tear of gravity on the muscles did as much as any amount of working out to keep her body as perky as she wanted. Oh, well, people were strange and work was waiting.
Elaine liked to use the first hour or so of her shift on routine work like going through the inevitable stack of internal memos, letting each of them flicker over the screen so they would mark as "read" when Aksia checked, while she thought about the problems the day presented and caught up with her lists. Today this was clearly not going to be possible: the board was already lighting up with urgent calls. She blinked twice to bring up the incoming IDs. About what she'd expected from Jana's summary: three from the militant Hindus of Prajad Dal, five from various representatives of Islamic Renaissance, and a handful from ethnically based asteroids near the VolksAlliance. One from the Federation Ethnic Equality Foundation which instinct told her to put off as long as she could, and one from the Pieds Nus which had better wait until she figured out exactly who they were . . . some kind of Indian tribe, wasn't it? In the Yucatan? Why would Mayan Indians be quarreling with the Naturists? Something else for the list:
Research Pieds Nus
Get somebody from Legal to talk to the FEEFs
The work list was getting unmanageably long already, and now her wristcom beeped and flashed an orange light to warn Elaine that she hadn't finished her usual first task on time.
Read and delete daily memos
Well, tough. She moved that one to an end-of-shift priority while making soothing noises to the first Prajad Dal complainant. Yes, of course ComCen would look into the matter immediately. No, there was no Federation regulation against the Prajad Dal's using their allotted com time for any purpose whatsoever, but they should bear in mind that the amount of com time given to each asteroid colony was not simply a matter of time and bandwidth available in proportion to colony population, but that such factors as urgency of broadcasts and their relevance to colony survival were also taken into account. . . . In other words, sir, you can use your entire com allotment to broadcast holy chants if you like, but if you do that you'll be lucky to be allotted ten seconds per shift next time there's a budget review. She didn't actually have to say that on the com channel; the Prajad Dal were mostly very bright people as well as very religious ones. But she did have to repeat the soothing noises to the next seriously upset complainant, and the next, and then she had to come up with a variant for the Islamic Renaissance, this time hinting at serious punitive fines for interference with another group's com time and reminding them that nobody was forcing them to listen to Hindu holy chants; if they liked they could turn their com service off entirely for the two shifts and seven hours during which they were limited to using their own equipment instead of bouncing signals to Ceres for amplification and communication to Earth.
In between saying the same things over and over in a very calm voice, Elaine surreptitiously muttered commands to update her personal to-do list. There was nothing scheduled there for the next seven hours, of course; she never scheduled personal tasks during her work shift. But she had her wristlister programmed to re-enter regular chores for the next applicable period as soon as she marked them completed, so she was already scheduled for the first two hours after her shift ended:
Meet Bethy for dinner in Hall G6
Mandatory gym hour
Shower
While she repeated soothing, calming statements to the third Islamic Renaissance caller, who was markedly slower on the uptake than the previous two had been, Elaine added a few items as she thought of them:
Return library vids
They weren't due for several shifts, but she had watched one and given up in boredom on the other two; might as well:
See if the new Cliff Rockhammer vid is in
And since she'd be up on the recreation/vending level anyway, she could also:
Buy Bethy something for anniversary
But what? When Bethy married Henrik they'd been given everything a young couple could want for their new, spacious married-couple quarters, from personal recyclers to real antique plastic dishes manufactured on Earth, where plastics were plentiful and cheap. Bethy was always complaining, in a sly tone of voice that betrayed her pride in the fact, that their quarters were so full of clothes and personal things there was scarcely room to move around—"even if we do have a triple-tuber because of Henrik's Important Work," she never failed to finish, the capital letters quite audible in her voice. Really, it would be better to give Bethy something intangible, take her out to dinner or—but they ate dinner together every time their shifts coincided; well, then, go to one of the fancy expensive restaurants on the level above Recreation/Vending. She could walk around
up there after she finished her errand at the library, take her time about deciding whether Bethy would prefer the rowdy singing and tall rum drinks at Carabanana or the understated elegance of La Plume de Ma Tante.
That would fill in the empty hours after gym and shower quite nicely, with a sensible activity that she could tell people about if they asked. Eight hours work, eight hours sleep, eight hours recreation was the Federation rule, not that there was actually any rule against sleeping more than eight hours. But everybody knew if you were logged as spending ten or eleven hours in your tube on a regular basis, a Personal Counselor would come to talk with you, try to decide whether you were suffering from a depression that would respond to medication or needed to be gently encouraged to find a nice social hobby like zero-g volleyball. I just want to spend a little time alone wasn't considered an acceptable response.
"Elaine, wake up! He's here, talking to Aksia!" Dom, her shift partner, touched Elaine's elbow and startled her into cutting coms with the last Islamic Renaissance complainant a little more quickly than she had intended.
"Who's here, and what's the big deal?"
"The new guy from Life Support." Dom rolled his eyes and gave a deep sigh. "To die for. Unfortunately I hear he's straight, so my chances with him are slim to none."
Elaine peered through the tube. Despite the Earth-normal artificial lighting and its luxurious three-tube width, ComCen was so long that it still felt like being in a tin can. Elaine's pod was at the very bottom of the can, and the new employee everybody was talking up was near the middle, waving his hands and saying something emphatic to Aksia, who looked more and more sullen the longer he went on. Beside Aksia's dark-browed frown the new guy looked like a shaft of real Earth sunlight miraculously materializing in the middle of the tubeplex: long blond hair pulled back and to one side of his face, bright blue eyes, a sunny smile that radiated the certainty that everything would be all right as soon as he had explained it sufficiently.
"His name's Bryce," Dom said.
"Very nice," Elaine said flippantly. "Rhymes with Bryce." She really ought to get on with the next problem, but she didn't want to take her eyes off Bryce. He looked amazingly like a younger, softer Cliff Rockhammer. "Dom, you know anything about the Pieds Nus? Aren't they some kind of Mayan Indians? And why are they getting crossways with the nudists?"
"Naturists," Dom corrected her. "The new Civil Speech Guidelines defined 'nudists' as a discriminatory term, remember?"
"I haven't even skimmed the new guidelines yet," Elaine sighed. Presumably they were among the stack of memos she hadn't had time to look at yet.
"Anyway," Dom went on, "you're thinking about Piedras Negras. That's a Mayan archaeological site. The Pieds Nus are a French-based splinter group of the Naturists."
"I hate even thinking of splinters in connection with nudism," Elaine said absentmindedly.
"Then you'd like the Pieds Nus better than the Naturists. They mostly keep their clothes on, but they have this thing about the right to go barefoot everywhere."
"Even in space?"
"Well . . . under their suits, probably." Dom grinned. "What do you suppose a truly dedicated Naturist wears under his spacesuit?"
Elaine cross-checked the Pieds Nus on her desk console and found that Jana's estimate hadn't been bad: although they had colonized one of the larger asteroids, their population was about one-twentieth the size of the Naturist home colony. Great, this one didn't even require a personal call, she'd just send an email reminding them of Federation regulations relating com time to population size.
"What do you think Bryce is talking to Aksia about?" She brought up the general complaint response form and typed as she talked. Dear Sir or Madam, we regret to inform you that the Federation regulations assigning central communications times are based on group population rather than philosophy. Maybe Bryce needed a Coms Spec 4 permanently assigned to his Life Support group. She'd be happy to volunteer.
"Fixing his internal com codes," Dom said. "Jana wanted to see him again, so she made a couple of 'mistakes' when she set him up the first time. Unfortunately, he seems not to have noticed the mistakes until she went off-shift and I came on." He grinned wickedly. "Her bad luck, my good luck."
"I thought you said he was straight?" Since your population is less than five percent that of the Naturist colony, which has been allocated one standard hour every four shifts, your allocation ought strictly to be just three minutes in every four shifts.
"Hey. I can have my fantasies, okay?"
Elaine didn't believe in wasting time on fantasies. Since the minimum communications time necessary for basic colony support has been set at five minutes every third shift, this is what you have been allocated and there is no basis for increasing it. Sincerely, Elaine Byelski, Coms Spec 4, ComCen Staff. The note to Pieds Nus taken care of, she switched back to her personal list and added a few new items with suggested deadlines. The office to-do list beeped before she was finished, urgently, flashing from yellow or orange to red even as she responded: the VolksAlliance issue was heating up. Elaine went back into soothing-diplomat mode and cajoled, suggested, sympathised, and mentioned ComCen regulations until the shift was almost over and both sides of her wristlister were flashing unhappily. The office listbot reminded her that she still hadn't read and e-initialed the day's memos, and the personal listbot warned that she needed to sign off-shift and take the railtube to meet Bethy on the cafeteria level.
Over dinner Bethy started in again about Elaine's getting married. Before she could get into the familiar arguments about the greater space allocation for married couples, the wonderful creche she and Henrik had already signed up to use if and when Bethy got pregnant, and the nice boy in Henrik's department, Elaine cut her off. "Don't worry, Bethy, that's all taken care of."
"You've met somebody? But how? You never do -anything except go to work and exercise at the gym."
"Well, I haven't exactly met him," Elaine admitted. "But he's on the list."
"What list?"
"Personal, naturally. Look here." Elaine set her wristlister to display the personal calendar side and zoomed out so that the regular daily items shrank to illegible squiggles, leaving only major events highlighted. Meet Bryce was scheduled for shortly before Bethy's anniversary, followed by Get date with Bryce, fall in love, and get married.
"Elaine, you can't do that."
"Why not?"
"It's—not how it works."
"It's how you worked it," Elaine commented, remembering clearly how Bethy had picked out Henrik as a suitable partner, maneuvered her way into his group of friends, and reported nearly every shift on the Henrik Campaign until the day of their marriage.
Bethy's face turned a faint and becoming pink. "That's different. I really cared for Henrik."
"You didn't love him before you met him, though, did you?"
"Of course not! How could I?"
"Well, there you are. These things have to happen in the right sequence. First you meet, then you date, then you fall in love, then you get married. What's so bad about writing it down? At least that way I can make sure I stay on track and meet my deadlines."
"Do you always do everything exactly the way you have it on your lists, and exactly on time?"
"Of course I do," Elaine said. "That's the only way to stay in control."
It was unfortunate, to say the least, that her wristlister chose that moment to beep a double emergency red to remind her that she never had read and date-marked the day's memos at ComCen. She tapped the sound off immediately and put her hand in her lap to hide the flashing red light, but Bethy was already smirking. And it was impossible to saw through the algysteak one-handed; Food Processing had seriously overdone the simulated texturing. Elaine gave up the attempt to conceal her wristlister. "I'll take care of that tomorrow," she said. "No, tonight, before I go to sleep." She could call the memos to the screen in her personal tube and deal with them there, and start her next shift at ComCen with a clean list.
&nbs
p; It looked like the usual day's mail list:
New energy conservation restrictions on office tube lighting
Prejudicial terminology to be discarded immediately
Sanctions for first-, second-, and third-time use of prejudicial terms
Let's gear up for Unity in Diversity Day!
How YOU can make a difference to ComCen's public image
Dear Elaine
What?
Elaine stopped scrolling down the list of memos and highlighted that one. How did her personal correspondence get mixed in with the ComCen memos? And who was sending her personal correspondence, anyway? ComCen policy frowned upon personal involvement with members of the asteroid colonies for fear of allegations of prejudice, it wasn't time for the monthly note from Mom and Dad back on Earth, and everybody she knew on Ceres worked at ComCen and wouldn't bother sending a note when they were sure to see her in person in the next shift or two. Except Bethy, but Bethy had said plenty over dinner and would hardly have had time to write to her, and . . .
Oh.
The header showed it was a reply to a message going out from ComCen, that was why it had landed in her office mailbox instead of her personal one.
But it was such a highly personal reply!
Dear Elaine, thank you for your prompt attention to my request. Are you really as pretty as your picture in the Federation Employee Database, or do they enhance those photos before posting them? Since Federation regulations allow each asteroid settlement five minutes of central broadcast time every three shifts, and the population of Pieds Nus is entitled as you say to three minutes every four shifts, clearly our total broadcast allocation should be five in three plus three in four, which is too complicated to figure out, so why don't we just say that it's eight minutes every three shifts. The directory note says you're a classical music lover, just like me, so why don't we get together some time to listen to audio cubes? I have cubes of the Doors, the Rolling Stones, Grateful Dead, and many other early-music groups. Or if you'd like to round it up to ten minutes every three shifts, which might be easier to calculate, that would be fine with me. Sincerely yours, Orlin Okusa, Pieds Nus
Cosmic Tales - Adventures in Sol System Page 11