The Vesta Conspiracy
Page 9
“Well, you can depressurize it again now,” Mendoza said. “See you in the morning.”
He joined Elfrida in the chamber of the airlock. As they plodded back towards the rover, Elfrida broke the silence. “Did you hear what she said? She was watching us from the Vesta Express. That must be what they call the train.”
“Yeah, makes sense that’s where the operators are. I heard they’ve got a real hab in the passenger compartment, with spin gravity.”
“I heard that, too.”
Silence fell again. They got into the rover and took off their EVA suits. Elfrida felt deeply embarrassed by what they’d just seen. She was searching for another topic when Mendoza said thoughtfully, “I’m kind of surprised …”
“What?”
“Don’t take this the wrong way, but I would have thought you’d go for it.”
“You mean—me—with them? God! Mendoza! Don’t you know me at all?”
As she spoke, she remembered that no, he didn’t really know her, and she didn’t really know him, either.
“Like I said, sorry. I just had the impression that you’re the free and easy type. It’s interesting to know you’re not like that.” He shrugged. “Kind of good to know.”
Elfrida wanted to ask how he’d got that impression. Was it because she lived with Cydney? How did that equate to free and easy? It was funny that he could have thought that of her, when she used to be considered the most uptight chick on Botticelli Station, and in fact, she still thought of herself that way. But she was too uncomfortable to probe the subject any further.
“Well, I’m glad you didn’t go for it, either,” she said. “Rurumi is cute, but ...”
“She’s a moe-class. They’re designed to be cute. Would be cuter if she weren’t a hermaphrodite, though. Ugh! Talk about hidden … lengths.” Mendoza opened his meal pouch, squeezed, and sniffed. “Fettucine alfredo. Not a fan. Oh well, it’s calories.”
Elfrida opened her own meal pouch. The picture of salmon meunière on the label did not bear much resemblance to the contents. It never did. “Dean Garcia’s secretary is a hermaphrodite,” she said.
“I know. There’s a bunch of them on campus. Probably because of the PHCTBS Studies program.”
“That’s what the H stands for.”
“What’s the rest of it, again? I always forget.”
Elfrida ticked off on her fingers. “Phavatarism, Hermaphroditism, Cyborgism, Transhumanism, Bestialism, and Spaceborn Studies. I always think it must kind of irk the spaceborn to be lumped in there. Cydney thinks so, too.”
“All those isms. It really is a hothouse of ideology out here.”
Elfrida sucked on her drink pouch—iced tea; it didn’t go well with the salmon meuniere. “I know,” she said. Her heart was pounding. This conversation was an order of magnitude more intimate than if they’d carried on talking about sex. “Remember, Mendoza, you once said, do you ever feel like you’re a long way from home? Well, that’s when I do. When I’m around Cydney’s friends. They’ve all got so many … ideas.”
Mendoza nodded. Seated in the driver’s couch, he twiddled the manual dial of the radio, meaninglessly—it wasn’t on. “But you’ve worked in space before.”
“Yeah, but I was on Botticelli Station, and before that I was on Luna, and that’s a lot closer to Earth. Well, no, that wouldn’t explain it. I don’t know why this place is the way it is.”
“I’ve got a theory about that,” Mendoza said, still twiddling. He was doing it as an excuse not to look at her, she realized. “It’s because there’s only seven UN people here, counting us.”
“And the blue berets. But why would that make such a big difference?”
“They’re not the ones who are different. We are.”
“I don’t get you. I don’t think it’s very different to be non-ideological.”
Mendoza pointed at her, with a strange, embarrassed smirk on his face. “But you work for the UN. And, can I ask you a question?”
“Sure.”
“Do your parents work for the UN, too?”
“How did you know? My mom does. And actually, her mother did, too. And my grandfather on my father’s side. And my paternal grandmother, although she was just a TS who worked part-time.”
“See! You’re a third-generation UN person. TS, trailing spouse. You even use the jargon.”
“Well, what about you? Were your parents UN employees?”
“Nope. That’s why I know the difference. I …” Mendoza hesitated. She saw him overcome the internal barrier to revealing personal information. “I grew up in the Philippines. Nth-generation hapa pilipino prole. My dad wasn’t around. My mom worked in corporate IT. She was pretty proud when I landed a UN apprenticeship, and then a job.”
“Guess you followed in her footsteps, in a way,” Elfrida said awkwardly. She never knew what to say when people revealed personal information. That was probably because it almost never happened outside of intimate relationships.
“No, I didn’t. That’s the point. I moved to a different universe. I went from taking it for granted that, just for instance, parents are optional, to a culture where it’s almost weird if you don’t have two parents. I bet your parents are married, even.”
Tomoki Goto and Ingrid Haller were going to celebrate their 30th wedding anniversary this year. Now Elfrida felt like that was somehow embarrassing. “Well, so what?” she said. “Everyone’s allowed to make their own choices.”
“Of course they are. I’m just saying, the UN is a bubble. It thinks it’s the whole of humanity, but it isn’t. It’s stagnant, like the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It’s even gone backwards. Again, I don’t mean that in a bad way. But there hasn’t been any social progress on Earth for centuries.”
“Oh, come on! Just look at the way you never used to see phavatars in public, and now they’re everywhere.”
“Well, yeah, but I mean in general. There aren’t any isms on Earth. Liberal technocracy won, the end. That’s what people think. But the isms haven’t gone away. They’ve just been pushed out to the periphery, to the places where the UN doesn’t totally dominate. Like the Philippines.”
The Philippines were only an affiliate of the UN, not a full member state, as were most countries within China’s sphere of influence.
“Like the asteroids. Like Mercury. Like the Jovian moons. Like random little enclaves in space where people stay on-station for years because of corporate penny-pinching, and get all incestuous and weird,” Mendoza went on. “Like here.”
“I don’t think having phavatar orgies is an ism.”
“Oh, what is it that the P in PHCTBS stands for, again?” Mendoza said. Then he shook his head. “Sorry. It’s just a theory, anyway, based on what I’ve seen on the job.”
Elfrida, as a Space Corps agent, had seen even more weirdness than Mendoza had. She’d visited dozens of asteroid colonies with fringey, freaky cultures that would never survive on Earth. So what Mendoza said rang true. It was just that she’d never conceived of lifestyles as ideologies. Mendoza was implying lifestyle and ideology were two sides of the same coin, if they weren’t in fact the exact same thing. “I dunno,” she said. “I’ll have to think about it.”
“You don’t need to think about it,” Mendoza said, and added something else in a mumble that she couldn’t catch over the hum of the air circulation.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“No, go on, Mendoza, you said something.”
“I said, you don’t have to think about it if it disturbs your complacent worldview. But that wasn’t fair. I know you’re not complacent.”
Upset, Elfrida lapsed back into Space Corps-speak. “I just think that everyone has a right to make their own choices.”
“Of course they do.” Mendoza sighed. He stuffed his empty meal pouch into the recycling compactor and folded his arms behind his head, as if making ready to sleep, although that would have been an uncomfortable position to sleep in.
“Well,
” Elfrida said after a moment that felt way too long. “So much for getting a shower, a good meal, and a good sleep at the refinery, huh? Here we are sleeping in the rover, eating from pouches again. And I really ought to apologize for the way I probably smell at this point.”
“You don’t smell,” said Mendoza, who had begun to smell a bit ripe himself. He opened one eye. “Goto.”
“Yeah?”
“You just made me think.”
“What?”
“I figure Rurumi’s going to be busy for a while.”
“Probably.”
“And the rover’s batteries are fully recharged.”
Elfrida’s heart started to pound again, for different reasons than before. “Mendoza, are you suggesting what I think you are?”
“I guess that scene in there must’ve really twisted us up. I can’t believe we didn’t think of it before.”
“Ditch her and head for the Vesta Express?”
“Or for the Rheasilvia Crater.”
“But what if she takes control of the rover remotely?”
“If this thing had remote control functionality, they wouldn’t have needed to send her along in the first place.” Mendoza slapped the dashboard. “It’s not even smart. My desk is smarter.”
“Then let’s go,” Elfrida said, bouncing gleefully. Her bounce carried her into the passenger seat.
“Lovatsky, your predilection for hermaphroditic sex has undone you,” Mendoza said, hitting the button that disconnected the charging cable. “It’s like, if you’re into that kind of thing, man up and get the surgery. But hey. As you said, Goto. Freedom of choice.” The rover started to move. “The lesson Lovatsky will take from this, if he’s got an IQ in the triple digits? There are good choices. And then there are dumb ones.”
As the rover plunged into the Vestan night, Elfrida just hoped they weren’t making one of the latter.
xii.
Cydney skipped her morning lecture and headed downtown, dressed in a mao jacket and microshorts that showed off her legs. (Her legs were looking less toned these days. Oh well, there was always rehab.)
Her team’s analysis of the data stolen by her scraper program had turned up some more nuggets. In addition to the evidence of money laundering, or possibly blackmail, related to the astrophysics lab, there was a fascinating sequence of emails involving the dean’s office, the university’s financial department, and an individual who worked at Virgin Atomic headquarters in downtown Bellicia.
The town, at the head of Olbers Lake, wasn’t laid out on a grid, but had grown organically into a sprawl of alleys defined by the odd shapes of the buildings. Cydney got lost, which was quite the feat in a town of no more than fifty thousand souls. She was no good at navigating without satellite guidance, which the Bellicia ecohood didn’t offer, owing to the thickness of the roof. Delicious and dubious scents drifted from restaurants prepping for the lunchtime rush. Monkeys leapt up and down the faces of the green buildings.
Cydney was warm from her walk by the time she reached VA headquarters, a low-slung green building with a lake view. The vegetable garden out front was the most ostentatious thing about the place.
“So, why did you try to sell the Arruntia crater to a corporation based on Ganymede?” she said to Jay Macdonald, the CFO of Virgin Atomic.
Macdonald’s round face turned a shade pinker. He hadn’t been expecting that question. She had landed the interview on the pretext of doing a piece about soycloud technology development. Her curveball had clearly hit him square in the goolies.
“No comment, Ms. Blaisze,” he said frostily.
“You should have known you’d run into opposition from the university. They don’t want a bunch of newbies moving in next door. It would degrade the cultural environment, and if VA had to provide life support for new colonists, it would divert important resources from U-Vesta’s educational mission.”
Cydney was quoting an email from Dean Garcia to the head of the U-Vesta financial department. Well, paraphrasing it. Garcia hadn’t said new colonists, she’d said a bunch of crazies who can’t survive without hand-holding. Of course, Garcia also had her own agenda.
“The university’s had its eye on Arruntia for ages. They want to build a satellite campus there. Why’d you try to sell it out from under them?”
Macdonald exhaled pointedly. “Ms. Blaisze, I was under the impression that you wanted to interview me about Virgin Atomic’s CSR policy.”
Yeah, like that wouldn’t lose me gigafans, Cydney thought. Snooze-a-minute. “I am,” she said. Beaming, she recrossed her legs. “Corporate social responsibility means consulting your biggest stakeholder before you build a new habitat next door, don’t you think?”
“We did consult the university,” Macdonald said. “The upshot was intense opposition to our proposal. Therefore, we dropped it. All this is a matter of public record.”
“Yes, but—”
“Besides, it was five years ago. Why is this news now?”
“Because it isn’t a matter of public record that your potential buyer at that time, the Haven Company, which was dissolved after its bid was rejected, was actually a front for another company called Five Dreams Incorporated, a venture capital outfit which is majority-owned by Empirical Solutions.”
Cydney sat back, smiling, as Macdonald absorbed this body blow. Empirical Solutions was a Chinese conglomerate. As bad as selling the Arruntia Crater to a supermajor would’ve been, from the university’s point of view, selling it to a Chinese supermajor would be infinitely worse.
It wasn’t that no one trusted the Chinese. They were equal partners with the UN in the peaceful exploitation of the solar system.
Except … no one did trust them.
After the Mars Incident, when the AIs of the Mars colony went rogue and slaughtered every human being on the planet, it had been the People’s Liberation Army Navy that went to investigate … and never came back. What had come back instead was the PLAN.
So—even though it wasn’t fair on ordinary Chinese companies—Jay Macdonald would not want it known that VA had been trying to sell a piece of Vesta to them.
He was so red in the face now that Cydney hoped there was a medibot standing by. “Ms. Blaisze, I can neither confirm nor deny what you’re saying, but if there is any truth to your remarks, that information would be confidential and protected by privacy law—”
“Oh no, it’s not,” Cydney said. “It’s all there on the internet. You just have to dig for it.”
Smiling, she sipped from the cup of sweet, milky tea that Macdonald had offered her before he knew why she was here. The teacups were special gadgets for use in microgee, with invisible lids that retracted at the approach of your lips.
“Ms. Blaisze, are you recording this conversation?”
“Oh, no,” Cydney lied. “This is just a casual chat.”
He peered closely at her, as if hoping to see whether her eyes were augmented. He was looking in the wrong place. Her microcamera was in her left earlobe, disguised as a pearl stud.
Macdonald’s eyes were pale blue, watery with alarm. Cydney suddenly felt sorry for him.
“Hey,” she said gently. “I wouldn’t vid you. I can see you’re, you know. That. P’b’d.” She gabbled the word pureblood, trying not to hurt his feelings. “It would be unethical to put vid of you out there.”
No pureblooded person ever wanted vid of them floating around, for the PLAN targeted purebloods with incomprehensible and relentless ferocity. It was highly unlikely they’d send a ninepack of toilet rolls to Vesta to hit one pureblooded corporate executive, through a 2-kilometer roof yet, but Cydney sympathized with the insecurity that all of Macdonald’s ilk must feel. She’d get Aidan and the team to blur his face before she uploaded this interview to her feed.
He slumped, grabbed his teacup and drank. “Yes. I’m pureblooded. I can trace my ancestry back to the sixteenth century. Dh'aindeoin co theireadh e!”
Cydney smiled uncomprehendingly.
&n
bsp; “I appreciate your consideration, Ms. Blaisze. However—” the pale blue gaze suddenly hardened— “it appears you are recording.”
“Not!” Cydney yelped.
Macdonald made a complicated gesture at his computer screen and then flipped it around so she could see. It displayed a systems monitoring suite, which showed all the electronics drawing current in Macdonald’s office. There was Cydney’s BCI, powered by a glucose fuel cell. And there was her microcamera, piezoelectrically powered by her own movements.
“All right, I’m turning it off,” she said. Well, she’d already got the essential clip of Macdonald denying everything. “There! I wasn’t going to use that, anyway.”
“Glib i the tung is aye glaikit at the hert,” Macdonald said.
“Eh?”
“Given your profession, you ought to be aware that it’s illegal to transport any data off these premises that you didn’t have when you came in.”
“Fine! I’ll wipe it.” He wouldn’t be able to tell.
“We’ll have to confirm that.”
“You’ll have to take my word for it.” Cydney knew her privacy law. The inside of someone’s head was their territory, period. And earlobes counted.
“We’d prefer to run a scan,” Macdonald said. “Metadata only, of course.”
“No! I refuse.”
Macdonald’s eyes widened in their pouches of puffy skin. He was looking at his screen. “Well, well,” he said.
“I’m leaving,” Cydney said, jumping up. “Thanks for your time.”
“Just a moment, Ms. Blaisze. It looks as if you’ve got some rather … unusual programs stashed in there.”
“You have been scanning me!” Cydney shot a glance around the deluxe executive office. Given that Macdonald was not in the best of health, it made sense that there’d be a telemetry monitor running in here. If he had a cardiac implant or something, the monitor would also have the ability to read electronic data wirelessly. But she hadn’t thought they would have the gonads to run a scan on her, after she’d explicitly refused permission. “That’s illegal!”