Eleven seconds. Twelve seconds.
“Ye’re on,” said the leader. “But I warn ye, it’s a mess.” He streaked towards the smaller of the habs. “We weren’t expecting company. Arrr!”
★
With their EVA suits off, the pirates turned out to be two women, two men, and a boy of about ten. The child, so thin that Elfrida could almost see through his bare hands and feet, was prepubescent, but closing in on two meters tall. Spaceborn. The adults, in contrast, had standard Earthborn frames. Nevertheless, they all shared a buttery-brown skin tone and straight black hair. The leader wore his in dreadlocks.
“Haddock,” he introduced himself. “Ye can call me Captain. These are Coral and Anemone—” the women— “Codfish, and the kid is Kelp.”
“Nice to meet you,” Elfrida smiled. “Are you all related?”
Coral shuddered, Kelp giggled, and even Haddock winced. Elfrida figured they were reacting to her phavatar’s axe-murderer smile, rather than her question. “Aye,” Haddock said. “Anemone is my lady wife, Kelp is the fruit o’ our loins, Coral is Anemone’s sister, and Codfish is my brother and married to Coral.”
“For my sins,” said the dour-faced Codfish. “Also, I get the least cool name.”
“Someone had to be Codfish,” Haddock said. “Come tell me, who am I? A codfish, only a codfish!”
This gibberish had the ring of a quotation, and Elfrida thought of Captain Okoli of the Kharbage Can. He’d have known where it came from. She queried the UNVRP databank on Vesta with a video clip of Haddock delivering the line, not expecting much. In the meantime, she said, “Am I really meant to believe that you reside on this asteroid?”
The Bigelow hab did not give the impression of a home, so much as a spherical tool-shed. It measured about ten meters across. Fabric partitions walled off private compartments for sleeping, but there was no furniture in the hab apart from basic life-support equipment. The triple-stage airlock through which they’d entered contained an electrostatic scrubber, to make sure they brought no dust inside. Her phavatar’s olfactory sensors transmitted a reek similar to the smell of ripe kimchi, overlaid with air freshener. Magnetic clamps held tools and spare parts for the D/S bots. Wall screens displayed the ongoing excavation, as well as panoramas of the asteroid’s surface.
“Care for a cup of char?” Haddock said, while Anemone stuck a handful of drink pouches into the microwave. “Oh no, I forgot; ye’re a phavatar. And the real you is probably sitting comfortably on some palatial space station, enjoying the gravity and the high-O2 air, wi’ a cozy bunk and a real dinner awaiting ye at the end of the day.” He shook his head sadly. “Ye’ve no idea what it is to be alone in the solar system, despised by one and all, wi’ nowhere to lay your head. All we want is a place to call home, humble as it may be, where we can live in peace, troubling no one. And for this sin ye’d treat us like criminals—”
At this point Elfrida interrupted. “Oh, come on,” she said. “You aren’t settlers, any more than you’re pirates. Dude. Haddock, or whatever your name really is. You’re not fooling this chick.”
She smiled to take the sting out of her accusation, and all five of them shuddered. “Would you mind not doing that?” Coral fished a crumpled tablet out of her webbing, smoothed it out, and said, “Mirror.”
In the now-reflective surface, Elfrida saw a horrifyingspectre. Her collision with the wall had rearranged her phavatar’s face, leaving pink polyfoam and nanofiber muscles exposed by hanging shreds of fake skin. Her telescopic left eye stared from its bare plastisteel socket. She now looked less like an axe murderer than an axe murderer’s victim. Her grin was the final, awful touch.
She pawed fruitlessly at her hair, which was sticking out in all directions, and said, “Sorry.”
~Cosmetic damage? she subvocalized to the phavatar’s MI. ~This is a cosmetic disaster!
“As I said, I’m sorry,” she ploughed on. “But you’re not fooling anyone. You’re already known to us, as it happens. While we’ve been talking here, I queried our databanks …” Her query about Haddock’s ‘codfish’ quotation had turned up some interesting results. “Facial recognition and voice analysis put you with 99.9 percent certainty on 1856902 Alhambra, 738688 Duxi, and probably several other asteroids before that. I wasn’t involved in those missions personally, but my colleagues based on Hygiea were. Apparently, when you were operating in the outer Belt, you called yourself ‘Hook.’ And I do know that reference. Hook! was a twenty-first-century musical about pirates, by Walt Disney. However, the record makes it clear that you aren’t pirates. If anything, I guess you’re the solar system’s smallest pirate fan club.”
“Peter Pan was a novel by Sir James Matthew Barrie! Disney was a philistine,” said the child Kelp.
“Sure they’re all bloody philistines in the UN,” Haddock said. He pushed off from the wall he was holding onto. Anemone released the handful of drink pouches she had just taken from the microwave. Globules of hot tea escaped into the air. “You’re right,” Haddock said to Elfrida. “We’re not pirates. We don’t jack passing spaceships, or mine asteroids that ain’t ours. Billions of blistering blue barnacles! Who would bother mining a water-poor vestoid? You’d scarcely cover your costs. No, me beauty.” He drifted closer to the phavatar, holding a socket wrench in one hand. “We’re just construction workers, trying to earn a crust in the outer-space home-building industry.”
“You’re already wanted by the UN Occupational Health and Safety Agency on charges of illegal construction,” Elfrida said urgently. “Don’t make things worse for yourselves!”
A violent impact blacked out her optic sensors. The phavatar’s audio feed lasted a few seconds longer. The olfactory, a few seconds beyond that. By the time she lost the smell of body odor and kimchi, she was fighting the restraints that held her on the couch, pulling her headset off. She floated upright, gasping, in the golden evening light that poured through the windows of the U-Vesta telepresence center.
v.
“I need a drink,” Elfrida said, pulling off her coat.
She had spent the day filing paperwork on the 550363 Montego disaster. To be sure, a day on Vesta was only five and a half hours long, but that was still a lot of paperwork. She’d helped Petruzzelli—who was understandably outraged by the loss of her phavatar—prepare an application for compensation. She had also written a report for her supervisor back home. Her formal debrief was scheduled for tomorrow.
She had also decided to pay a visit to Dr. James, the head of the astrophysics program at U-Vesta.
But before tackling Dr. James, she needed to rest and recharge, so she’d come home.
UNVRP had rented an apartment for her in one of the best buildings in Branson Hills, a sprawl of habs climbing the slope north of Olbers Lake. While the newer habs were just that—expandable Bigelows, like headless snowmen squatting among the trees—Elfrida’s building dated back to the early days of the Vesta colony. Those first settlers had not contemplated the sacrifice of right angles for cost-efficiency. So her apartment had four walls. It had a ceiling. It had floors that did not give at every step. And it had doors that closed and locked, so you could shut out the world.
That sounded really good to Elfrida right now.
She dropped onto the ergoform couch. “I said I need a drink!” she shouted. “What are you, stupid?”
From the miniature kitchen came a grinding noise and a series of beeps.
“Oh God. Not again.”
Elfrida heaved herself off the couch and squelched in her dry-grip boots to the kitchen. Spilt breakfast cereal littered the counter. The beeps were coming from the corner behind the refrigerator. Elfrida got down on her hands and knees. Jammed into the corner, her housekeeping bot beeped at her. Its sucker-feet retracted and extended, fastening onto the floor and ripping free again—that was the noise she’d heard—as it tried to gain leverage to free itself. Its vacuum nozzle was stuck behind the fridge.
“Aw,” Elfrida said. “Did poor wittle bot
tikins try to vacuum up the spice rack again? I put it back there, you know, so you wouldn’t. My mom gave me that spice rack, and all the spices in it, because everything tastes like crap in micro-gee. But you’re just convinced, aren’t you, that nutmeg and turmeric are hazardous substances. Diddums.”
She jerked the maidbot out of the corner. The vacuum nozzle came free. It had a noticeable bulge near its tip. Maybe the bot had just been trying to vacuum up the spilt cereal. Feeling a bit guilty, she set it on the counter.
“Spit it out!”
The maidbot hiccuped. Out of its nozzle rolled a sphere the size of an eyeball.
“Hmm.”
Elfrida examined the sphere. It was pink. It had a hole through the middle. It had what seemed to be an ON button, but nothing happened when she pressed it.
“Maybe I owe you an apology, bot,” she said. “What is this? … Oh, right.” She raised her voice to an imperative pitch. “BOT COMMAND! Enable voice communication.”
“Dunno,” the maidbot said. “It’s a foreign object! It was on the floor! I have to keep the floor clean!”
“Now I remember why I muted you. BOT COMMAND! Disable voice communication.”
The maidbot clattered at her with what seemed like pique, and began to vacuum up the cereal on the counter.
Elfrida fixed her own drink, a margarita flavored with chili pepper from her mother’s spice rack, and carried it back into the living-room. She sat on the couch and treated herself to a trip to Venus. After a while, she removed her stabilizer braces, although she knew she shouldn’t. The dang things were just so uncomfortable. Ahhh … that was better.
Headset in place, gel mask over her face, gel gloves on her hands, she wandered among the fig and olive trees on the shore of Venus’s warm, planet-girdling sea. Behind her, the Lakshmi Plateau reared against the blueberry-colored noon sky.
Post-terraforming, Venus was still an inhospitable world. A shallow, brine-saturated ocean covered 80% of its surface, and its continents were arid. Ferocious winds circled the planet. Only the polar regions were cool enough for mammalian life. The day remained long—the dispute about how long was still ongoing, but Elfrida had picked a best-guess setting of 40 sols. A day, then, was an Earth month. Seasons were nonexistent, due to the low obliquity of the planet’s spin axis, and most people lived underground, to escape the sun’s relentless glare (or, at night, the endless dark), as well as the hurricane-force winds.
But you could go outside. Without an EVA suit. Without gecko boots. Without stabilizer braces. You could walk on Cytherean rock, breathe Cytherean air, and irrigate your GMO fig and olive trees with Cytherean water piped from the local desalination plant. The Venus Remediation Project had achieved its goal of transforming the solar system’s problem child into a shirt-sleeve environment.
Elfrida picked a fig and sat down in the shelter of the rocks to watch the windjammers. These sailboats zipped back and forth from Ishtar to the southern continent of Aphrodite, making use of the very same gales that foiled air travel on Venus. They looked like giant butterflies skimming on the silver sea. She bit into the fig.
“Ellie! Ellieeee! I’m ho-ome!”
Elfrida’s jaw clenched. With deliberate slowness, she exited the immersion environment. The fig in her hand dematerialized. The Cytherean landscape vanished, to be replaced by the log-out screen. She spat out her gel tongue-tab, took her mask and gloves off, and removed her headset.
Cydney Blaisze, Elfrida’s girlfriend, stood in front of the couch, bouncing up and down impatiently on bare feet. “Put that away. Let’s go out! I’m so glad you’re home! I didn’t expect you to be back yet. I actually just came back to change. Do you think I should wear this? Or this?” She held up two jumpsuits. One was a retro transistor print, the other was solid pink with a snake twining up one leg and down the other. “I’m kind of favoring the pink,” Cydney went on.
Her stream-of-consciousness chatter had buried the question of Elfrida’s early return several sentences back, so Elfrida didn’t have to explain it, even if she’d wanted to. “You’ll be cold in either of them,” she said. The phantom taste of fig lingered in her mouth.
“I’ll wear my coat, of course. It is totally freezing out there! Facilities Management is so cheap. But if I wear the pink, there’s an accessory problem. I mean, none of my scarves go with it. I suppose I could do a necklace. The stainless steel choker might work. But it’s so 2286. I was planning to recycle it, but it’s handmade, and I hate doing that. It just seems wrong.”
Cydney bounced into the bedroom. Elfrida packed her immersion kit into its case.
The apartment seemed brighter now that Cydney was here, and it wasn’t just because Cydney had switched on the lights. Cydney’s Chanel No.666 perfume perked up the flat air. Even the boring black walls seemed stylish, not oppressive, when they were serving as a backdrop for Cydney’s gazelle-like form.
Cydney came from a more elite background than Elfrida. She’d been born in Johannesburg and grown up in another gated community on the Cape. She was half Xhosa, a quarter Afrikaaner and a quarter Anglomutt, not that you’d ever guess from her milky-coffee skin, slightly oversized green eyes, and silky blond hair—all courtesy of pre-birth genetic tweaking. She had got her start in the media thanks to her father’s contacts in the Xhosaland government.
She bounced back into the living-room, stark naked except for a necklace. “Look what I found! Remember when you gave me this?”
Elfrida did. It was when they’d only been dating a month. They had met on Earth, when Elfrida had been home recuperating after the 11073 Galapagos incident. Well, technically, they’d met on the net, when Cydney interviewed Elfrida about her amazing survival story. After Elfrida’s returned to Earth, Cydney had taken her out to lunch to thank her for the interview. They’d hit it off, and things had just kind of evolved.
“We were on that gondola in SoHo,” Cydney reminisced. “I thought the trip was a disaster. I thought you hated me. I was thinking, I shouldn’t have asked her to come to New York, we’ve only just met … and then you gave me this.”
She fingered the necklace, which was a string of ten beads representing the consensus number of Sol’s planets. The Venus bead was blueberry enamel, with sand-colored continents, representing UNVRP’s vision of how the planet would one day look. In fact, the necklace came from UNVRP’s public-relations department, as did the immersion environment Elfrida had been simming. The necklace wasn’t just a freebie like the software, though. It had cost Elfrida a packet.
“You said, remember? You said, let’s be monogamous.” Cydney looked up, her eyes soft. An uncertain smile flickered on her lips.
Elfrida pushed off the couch and kissed her. She suddenly felt blessedly charitable towards Cydney again, and that wasn’t anything to do with the fact that Cydney was naked. Absolutely not.
“Oooh … oh … don’t! I mean, do, but not right this second. We’ve got to go out.” Cydney twisted away. “Everyone’s waiting for me. I mean, us. You are coming, aren’t you?”
“Sure,” Elfrida said. “I was only going to stay in and work on my farm, anyway.”
“You mean on Venus? Honestly, Ellie, that’s such a … never mind.”
“No, come on. Such a what? What were you going to say?”
“Nothing. Really.”
“No, what?”
Cydney put on her underwear and climbed into the pink jumpsuit. Elfrida folded her arms. She hated that she was so touchy, so quick to pick a fight. But she had a good excuse today. And Cydney didn’t even want to hear about that. Hadn’t even bothered to ask why she was home early.
Cydney said, “I was just going to say that you spend a lot of time in that immersion environment, when you could be, you know. Living. Talking to people, hanging out, having fun.”
Elfrida bit back the comeback that popped into her mind—Are you aware that some of us have jobs? But that would open up another can of worms that she didn’t want to get into. Besides, Cydney had a point.
It was loserish to hang out in an immersion environment. She used to be one of those who looked down on gamers and sim addicts. She didn’t want to turn into one.
She knew she’d been badly affected by the 11073 Galapagos incident. Therapy had covered the cracks, but they were still there. Her short-temperedness, the way she was pushing Cydney away—she wanted to blame Vesta and/or her job, but she knew she was the problem. She had refused to take meds, but she was using the Homestead Venus sim to block out the world instead.
“OK,” she said. “Let the good times roll. I’m just going to put on my stabilizer braces.”
vi.
The Virgin Café was a Vesta landmark, a quarter-acre of red and white booths with robot spiders crawling through buckysilk cobwebs on the ceiling. It had an infrared heating system which targeted human bodies, keeping them toasty, while their breath clouded white. Its name referred not only to the classical Roman origins of 4 Vesta’s moniker, but also to the private aerospace company that had spearheaded Vesta’s colonization.
As Cydney had promised, ‘everyone’ was there—everyone being Cydney’s friends from the university. Elfrida connected to the café’s wifi and blinked up ID bubbles for them all, so she wouldn’t get their names wrong. Most of them had customized their public profiles. Quirky mascots, runes, and animations overlaid the tattooed and augmented bodies lounging in the darkened café.
Cydney ordered an espresso martini. Elfrida asked for a Colorado Bulldog, in keeping with her resolution to be sociable.
It wasn’t easy, though. She didn’t know any of these people. They all came from the Humanities department, which was permanently at war with the STEM department over supercomputer access, salaries, grants, and who had said what to whom at the latest faculty meeting.
“What are you studying?” Elfrida uninspiredly asked the man beside her, whose lower-body stabilizer braces kept snagging on hers—they were crammed into the booth. She knew from his profile that he was an PHCTBS Studies Ph.D candidate named David Reid, but it was good manners to pretend you weren’t peeking.
The Vesta Conspiracy Page 3