Cydney saw Elfrida, and froze. The bouquet drooped towards the floor.
Elfrida realized, too late, that she was still holding Mendoza’s hand.
★
In an arboreal bubbleburb outside Dingzhou, in Hebei Province, birds cheeped in the trees, sprinklers pattered on impeccable lawns, and children rode trikes along the sidewalks. They stared at a girl who scuffed through the ginkgo leaves, leading a Jack Russell terrier on a leash. The girl had a blue pixie cut. She wore an eye-patch.
She cut across Mathematics Is The Future Park and approached a three-storey brick house set in a High Chinese garden. Before she got across the moat, the front door opened and several adults came out, having been alerted by security.
“Hello,” she said. “Ni hao. My name is Rurumi.”
The terrier jerked its leash out of her hand and scampered up to one of the women, who embraced it with an inarticulate cry.
“I brought Amy back,” Rurumi said.
“You have a Japanese name,” said one of the men. He did not remark on the obvious fact that she was a phavatar. In High Chinese society, that was not something to remark on.
“Yes,” Rurumi said. “My former owner was an animé fan. But he’s dead. So I’m on my own now. I have to turn myself in to my manufacturers within the next thirty days, unless someone buys me.” Her saucer-like eyes welled up, limpid, inhuman, utterly sincere. How could the family of Jimmy Liu remain unmoved—by her cuteness, and more meaningfully, by her implicit offer to give them information?
It would be some hours before they discovered that Rurumi had a penis. This matter was dealt with by asking her to keep away from the children.
★
The Unicorn burned into the emptiness of Gap 2.5. Aboard, sixty-three Neu Ordnung Amish held a prayer meeting to thank God for upending their plans in such an astonishing manner. They embraced the unpredictable with steely zest.
Captivated, Captain Haddock and his family hovered on the fringes of the meeting. Little by little they edged closer to hear the preacher better over the rattle of the Unicorn’s antique air circulation system. They had wandered into Amish country in hopes of selling some fancy kitchen appliances to the colonists. They ended up staying for supper (nutriblocks disguised as mashed potatoes and bratwurst, with sides of real sauerkraut and pickles).
Up on the bridge, Kiyoshi was eating a solitary meal of pouch noodles and watching the news.
President Hsiao had praised UNVRP’s purchase of Vesta as a “win-win solution.”
“For everybody except us,” Kiyoshi muttered.
“What shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” Jun said. He was keeping Kiyoshi company by slurping noodles; at least, his projection was slurping projected noodles.
“Well, yeah.” It was astonishing how fast normality set in. Kiyoshi caught himself wanting a dose, not wanting one. He did not want to lose the exalted mood that still surprised him in odd moments, a sense of proximity to a vastness that was the mathematical opposite of the vastness of space—abundant, willed, joyful. These thoughts were too private to share even with his brother. He ate another mouthful of noodles. “The boss-man’s gonna be pissed.”
“No, he isn’t.”
“He’ll probably threaten to space me.”
“No, he won’t. Come have a look at this.”
Jun vanished his noodles and floated over to the refrigerator, which stood in a corner between the head and the disused comms officer’s desk. He clicked his fingers at the screen on the refrigerator door that would normally display its contents.
The screen turned death blue.
“Oh my God,” Kiyoshi said. He snatched the refrigerator open. Inside were bread and fruit and vegetables from their Karl Ludwig City grocery run; soft-drink pouches; a half-used carton of Zilk imitation milk; an opened pouch of nasi goreng that had been there for months; and a failed experiment in homemade natto. The same health hazards as usual.
Kiyoshi closed the refrigerator door. He stared at Jun.
“I didn’t want you to freak,” Jun said. “That’s why I put it in the fridge. You never go in there.”
“I’m throwing all that stuff out. Now.”
“As Mom would say, mottai nai—what a waste. Anyway, it would be the first case in history of demonic possession of a cucumber.”
“That thing is dangerous.” Kiyoshi sounded like their father. There were times you needed to sound like your father.
“It’s isolated. In the fridge,” Jun said patiently.
“Have you been poking at it?”
Jun’s silence was a confession.
Kiyoshi folded his arms.
Jun gabbled, “Coming from our background, you learn how to do a lot with a little, right? And on the Unicorn, I’ve learned to do more with less. Specifically, I can run a mean sim on minimal processing power. That turns out to be the key. The Heidegger program is dangerous, but it’s also kind of dumb. I’ve given it the illusion that it’s taken possession of a small ship. It doesn’t know any different …In all honesty, Kiyoshi, this fridge is as smart as the rest of my subsystems put together.”
“So we’ve got a demonically possessed refrigerator.”
“Yeah,” Jun said, not catching the humor. “But it’s totally going to be worth it. Based on the way it’s trying to customize its imaginary ship, I’ve already picked up a few clues about the PLAN’s stealth technology.”
“OK,” Kiyoshi said. “OK.”
Their eyes met in a shared acknowledgment of what this meant … and how very, very pleased the boss-man was going to be.
★
Elfrida walked down to Lac Léman, past the ivied palaces of the WTO, IMF, CERN, WHO, WEF, and the rest. Grandest of all, isolated behind high-security barriers in Parc Moynier, UNSSCHQ (United Nations Select Security Council Headquarters) thrust its glass spires into the cerulean autumn sky. Tourists vidded each other in front of the famous gates. You’d never know that SSC was just a front for the smaller, even more select organization that really ran the show: the President’s Advisory Council.
Elfrida limped along the lakeshore. Colors were painfully crisp. A breeze blew, but the sweater she had bought at the mall on UNLEOSS kept her toasty. People swam in the crystalline water. On the far bank, forested slopes eased out of the water to become the Alps. The mountains ringed the city like a bank of low-lying clouds. Compared to Rheasilvia Mons, they were toy-sized. Human-scale.
Elfrida leaned against a tree, closed her eyes, and turned her face up to the sun.
In a minute she’d text her parents, let them know she’d landed safely. In a minute. Cydney had been texting her, too. Maybe to make up; more likely, to continue their fight. In a minute. Right now, Elfrida just wanted to feel the sun on her face, listen to the children splashing in the lake, and breathe … breathe … breathe.
She was home.
THE STORY CONTINUES IN
THE MERCURY REBELLION
BOOK 3 OF THE SOL SYSTEM RENEGADES SERIES!
PREVIEW CHAPTERS
THE MERCURY REBELLION
i.
The man balanced on his longboard, leaning back against the wind filling its sail. The ultralight ceramic board skipped across the tops of the waves ruffling Lake Como. Felt like flying. It reminded him of the lower gravity on the planet where he’d spent most of his life: Mercury.
But there were no lakes on Mercury. No green slopes fringed with dainty houses. No sky.
This sky had turned unfriendly. Gusts of rain pelted the man’s face, mingling with the windspray. Leaden clouds threatened heavier rain before dark. A wet afternoon in April was not ideal for windsurfing. But he’d squeezed this trip in between meetings, and he wasn’t staying off the water just because the locals had gone and scheduled a rainstorm.
Shame it wasn’t more of an outing for Angie. She’d camped out on the terrace of the hotel where they’d had lunch, beneath an oversized umbrella, occasionally looking up from her
tablet to wave.
Spray hammered his face. (Spray or rain? He couldn’t tell anymore.) He pulled on the bar. His grip seemed weak, his fingers unresponsive. Getting tired. Or just out of shape. Too many years in space. Progressive bone and muscle loss kicking in. Time to call it a day.
But Charles K. Pope had not got where he was in life by caving in to adverse conditions.
He performed a planing jibe. Swung into another beam reach. Before the sail hid the shore, he looked for Angie’s umbrella, but couldn’t see it anymore. She must have gone in.
★
The woman sat on a bar-stool in the lounge of the Hotel Panorama, sipping an espresso. She’d added sugar and cream to the tiny cup, which made the bartender roll his eyes. But, so what? She wasn’t from around here, and she didn’t care who knew it.
Words crawled over her retinal implants. She blinked them aside. Who could get any work done in here? The view from the bar was phenomenal. Even in the rain, Lake Como stunned the eye, a giant’s leaden thumbprint pressed into the peaks of the mountains.
The rain was getting heavier. She spotted Charlie’s rig. It flaunted the logo of the agency he headed, the Venus Remediation Project.
The sail wobbled. It heeled over and crashed into the water.
A chime rang behind the bar. The bartender glanced at his wrist tablet. His eyes widened.
“Signora, it seems your, ah, husband has triggered his emergency beacon.”
At the same time a ping from Charlie, who wasn’t her husband, flashed up on her retinal implants. She looked away from it.
“Please do not be alarmed,” the bartender said. “Our rescue drones have already been dispatched. They will reach him within one minute.”
Together, they hurried to the windows. The bartender pointed at a pair of tiny orange lights in the rain. The rescue drones carried life-vests, flares, and twang cords with which they might tow Charlie to shore. There was no way they could lift his fat ass. She knew; she’d researched their capabilities.
“They will reach him very quickly,” the bartender repeated. “He will be OK.”
She enabled the zoom function of her retinal implants.
Charlie wallowed in the water, several meters from his board. His smart wetsuit was keeping him afloat. She glimpsed the pale circle of his face for an instant, and then a wave washed over it.
Her implants kept blinking. You have a call from Charles K. Pope.
“I can’t see,” she said thickly. “The rain.”
The water obscuring her vision was tears.
You have a call from Charles K. Pope …
She turned away, cramming her hands over her face, as if she were crumpling with grief.
Ignore.
ii.
Later the same day, two women sat in a small room in Naples. Shelves groaned with handmade pottery and baskets woven from seagrass. A marble copy of Michelangelo’s David modelled jewelry made from found objects.
The atmosphere was decidedly tense.
“What’s the problem? Do I need more therapy?”
“Sometimes, time is the best medicine of all.”
“I know,” Elfrida Goto said. “It was that bracelet I made out of old phones. It suggested that I don’t take this seriously.”
“Take what seriously?”
“Y’know. Therapy.”
“Don’t you take therapy seriously?”
“I do. I was just saying that based on that bracelet, you might have thought I didn’t. Oh, never mind.”
“I thought it was quite witty.”
“ … Really?”
“Yes. A comment on the performative nature of communication in the modern era. Humanity has colonized the solar system, spread out over interplanetary distances, but people still haven’t outgrown the need for intimate associations. Families. Tribes. Groups. Teams. If anything, the need to belong is more acute than in the past.”
“Oh, hell.”
“Would you like to be a bit more specific, Elfrida?”
“No. I stuck my finger.”
“Ah.”
Elfrida sucked her finger. She tasted blood. She had pricked herself on the seagrass that she was braiding into a basket. She loathed basket-weaving slightly less than making ugly jewelry or lopsided pots, but that didn’t mean she was any good at it.
She’d been in therapy for six months, following the dramatic conclusion of her last assignment, on 4 Vesta. It was a bureaucratic requirement. She’d blown off a few of the sessions. Maybe that was the problem.
“Why didn’t you clear me for field assignments?”
Louise looked up from her weaving. Their eyes met, a rare occurrence. Louise’s were gray-green, startling in her brown face, and slightly glassy, as if she were concealing extreme boredom. Maybe she was.
“If I’m forced to be honest, Elfrida, you experienced significant trauma on 4 Vesta. You’re still very fragile. It would be unethical to approve you for telepresence missions in outer space at this time.”
“I don’t feel fragile.”
Louise smiled. The shelves full of craft projects whispered of shrunken ambitions, compressed horizons, agents removed from the field and reduced to seeking fulfillment in wet clay or baubles. The Space Corps was known for its agents’ high burn-out rate.
“You might enjoy working at a café or in a boutique for a while,” Louse said. “That kind of job confers a sense of belonging, and plenty of human contact, without the responsibilities. Also, there are fewer deadly AIs, space pirates, and rogue ISA agents in Italy.”
“You suggested that before.”
“I did.”
“And I said that if you suggested it again, I would jump out of the window.”
“Are you going to jump out of the window?”
They both looked out. The window offered a lovely view of Naples. Pigeons flurried up from the dome of the former San Francesco di Paola, reacting to the passage of a delivery drone.
“No,” Elfrida said. “The Space Corps frowns on suicide attempts. Also, I wouldn’t want to land on that guy selling balloon animals.”
“There’s an idea for a sabbatical.”
“Louise, sometimes I suspect you of having a sense of humor.”
“Ha, ha,” Louise said. “But I understand that you have been offered an alternate assignment, if you wish to accept it?”
“Two alternate assignments. I can go to Luna as a coordinator for Space Corps field operations in the Inner Belt region. That would mean I would no longer be involved with the Venus Project. Or I can stay on the UNVRP contract, and go to the Project’s headquarters, on Mercury, as a human resources consultant.”
“Coordinator. Consultant!” Louise marvelled. “Either of those sounds like a promotion.”
Elfrida shook her head. “Those titles are meaningless. They hand them out like lollipops to people who aren’t qualified for promotion to field manager.”
“Is that what you wanted?”
“Yeah. After 4 Vesta, I thought … Ow!” Elfrida had pricked her finger again. She stared at the bead of blood on her skin. Dozens of dried blood smears already dotted her basket, such as it was. “Stupid, huh?”
“You could think of this as putting in the time to burnish your resume,” said Louise. “Have you decided which assignment to take?”
An ear-splitting ululation pierced the office. Far below the window, atop the 21st-century minaret that topped the dome of the former San Francesco di Paola, a black-clad muezzin yearned in the direction of Mecca. The shower scheduled for 17:21 started to fall, a minute early. Raindrops stippled the glass.
“If it were me,” Louise mused, “I’d go for Luna. Shackleton City’s got it all: culture, theater, great dining experiences, the zoo, concerts, extreme sports …”
Elfrida put down her basket. “Concerts?” she said. “Great dining experiences? Louise, you’re a robot. What the hell would you know about that kind of thing, what it means to a human being?”
Louise’s gray-gree
n eyes blinked rapidly. Elfrida had committed an indiscretion. All therapists were robots. It was well-established that people confided more freely in machines than in their fellow humans. (Elfrida was doing her best to singlehandedly prove the research wrong.) Louise 361AX was a geminoid bot, realistic enough in appearance to fool almost anyone, but the so-called brain inside that shapely head was just a bunch of processor crystals. But it had been rude to rub Louise’s face in it. Despite herself, Elfrida muttered, “Sorry.”
★
After saying goodbye to Louise, Elfrida hopped on her Vespa and navigated through traffic to the A3 autostrada. She could have got home faster by train, but one of the pleasures of being back on Earth was riding her Vespa.
She joined the motorcycle lane of the A3 and kicked back, sipping a can of San Pellegrino. The bike maintained a safe distance from the Harleys and Ducatis weaving around her. Some of them were going so fast they must have been jailbroken—their autodrives illegally disabled to allow manual control. Elfrida had her Vespa on the “Basta!” setting, but this, like so much else, was relative.
The rain stopped on schedule, and the sky cleared. The sun descended into a bubblebath of pink clouds in the Bay of Naples. The autostrada plunged into wet, dense forest. By law, every square meter of Europe not otherwise in use had to be forested, to assist the global climate’s recovery from centuries of abuse. In fact, parts of the continent—though not southern Italy—had returned to a state of wildness not seen since the Visigoths menaced the Roman Empire. Some people found it depressing, but Elfrida liked being enclosed by towering corkwoods and stone pines.
Exhaust vapor glowed around the lamps that lined the autostrada. She raised the visor of her helmet. The damp May evening blew away her lingering irritation.
She loved Earth. Loved fresh air, weather, sunsets, seasons. So why was she so eager to get back into space?
She’d reconnected with some of her high-school friends during this furlough. Now that they were all hitting thirty, some of them had found spouses. Some had begun to have kids. They seemed happy enough, but that path just wasn’t for her.
The Vesta Conspiracy Page 36