by Pete Molina
Chapter 10
It was late before Terra had realized that she had no place to stay. Usually when one was restored some family or friends would meet you and would have made such arrangements. If she hadn’t been seduced by Johan’s Chicken Caesar she would have gotten a hotel….but it had been so much fun to reminisce with him about the past. Even if most of it wasn’t common, they’d both seen about the same amount of it. And when he asked her to stay with him, she had accepted.
Johan was a good man. He’d had a number of marriages, contracts, and girl friends…it was the cooking, and when he was newly restored he was a very handsome man. The last time Terra had seen him their deltas had been too incompatible but now they were close enough to being in synch that it was acceptable. She had found that she had needed it as much as she had needed some one to talk about her ordeal. Johan was a tender lover and they both knew that it was just for the one night.
Terra Gates was Martian. She had been born there over two hundred seventy years before to a very wealthy family. Her grandfather had made all of the family money three hundred years ago, before restoration became the most lucrative technology ever invented. Her grandfather had decided to use his enormous fortune to finance a private colonization of the planet Mars. He had the money and he found the people with the vision and the skills to make it happen. Mostly he had done it because of the taxes. His plan had always included a succession and formation of a independent government of Mars. The government had begun as a corporation, held almost entirely by her grandfather and gradually become a high tech corporate government. Each person voted shares that were proportional to their contribution to the Mars gross domestic product. At first the vast majority of the shares were controlled by Terra’s grandfather. As the economy grew and more people immigrated, the total amount of wealth on Mars grew and her family’s power lessened somewhat, but that didn’t matter. Her family ran Mars and it always had.
Fortunately they had never used their positions to force decisions that should be decided by a vote of the people. Occasionally they had had to intervene when it was obvious that a majority was simply making a bad decision. As long as they only used their power sparingly and fully disclosed the reasons for overruling a majority vote, the citizens were content. With the wealth came obligation, her grandfather had told her. Terra had been the first of her grandfather’s progeny that had the sense of duty and the intelligence to take over for him. He had trained her in how to govern, how to utilize the family power fairly, and how to run Mars to emulate an efficient corporation out to make profit for its citizen shareholders.
Her grandfather had broken many laws. He would have been prosecuted if he had returned to Earth. Because of that he was never able to utilize the restoration technology once it was available. He had worked hard to try and get the technology for Mars but Damon Harding had already consolidated power back on Earth and made that impossible. When her grandfather died, all Martians had mourned him, Terra most of all. And then she had taken over the Martian Department of Industry. It was the most powerful position on the planet. She was the head of the Martian Board of Directors, or had been before this restoration. It was an elected position but because her family held such a large portion of the shares, it was basically hereditary unless she voted otherwise. After her grandfather had passed away Mars was officially recognized as an independent sovereign nation, mostly because the real power base was on Earth. And also because Mars could be far enough away for data to take ten or more minutes to reach it, that made it hard for them to play a significant role in Earth’s ever-expanding datasphere.
Martians didn’t much care about all that, though. They were mostly content, except when it came to the restoration technology. It was inconvenient and expensive…a constant drain on the economy but even they couldn’t resist the advantages and the lure of immortality. Mars, too, had signed the Nanotechnolgy development ban treaty, which meant that Mars had agreed not to independently develop or exploit nanotechnological assembler based technology without prior approval of the International Nanotechnology Board that certified applications for release from the controlled environment of the Lunar Nanotechnology Research Center. In return it allowed the citizens of the signing nation to utilize the United States restoration technology in the US.
Mars was lucky in one aspect, though. Any nation on Earth would have also had to sign the Population Limitation Treaty that made the citizens of the signing country agree that in order to use the restoration technology they had to agree not to have children unless they were selected in a lottery system or immigrated off the planet. On a planet with finite resources and an immortal population, uncontrolled population growth would quickly destabilize the balance.
On the other hand Mars was under populated and had plenty of resources to exploit for expansion and plenty of space for expansion. They would only have to sign the treaty once their population reached three billion, the maximum population established by the Martian government; then they too would have a lottery system. The rules of the lottery were simple, any couple interested in having a child could purchase a ticket for a few dollars. There could be as many winners as there had been people immigrating permanently off of Earth, or individuals who permanently dissoluted. In that way the population remained constant. The winners had to go to one of the children’s cities to have and raise their child as a condition of the lottery system. It was a fair way to do things, and not that many people were interested in having children anymore anyway, the children all became Newbies. If you didn’t want to wait to win the lottery you could immigrate to one of the space colonies on the Moon, Mars, Europa or one of the asteroid or orbital colonies where population limits were relaxed and any couple could have children, but could then never permanently relocate to Earth unless they won the lottery themselves, in which case they could return. Most didn’t.
In the morning Terra had awaken to an empty bed. She wrapped herself in one of the blankets and headed downstairs to the kitchen where Johan was whipping up a breakfast that smelled wonderful to Terra.
“Ah, good morning!” Johan said after he saw her come down the stairs. “Did you sleep well?” he asked.
“Like a baby,” Terra replied. “Whatever you’re cooking smells wonderful.”
“It is an omelet based on an old family recipe. My mother used to make it when I was a boy, and her mother before her. Today, I make it for you,” Johan said cheerfully. Terra inhaled deeply through her nose. It smelled unbelievable and her mouth was already watering. “I took the liberty of having your clothes laundered in the automat this morning, I hope you don’t mind but I thought you might not have any others yet to wear.”
“That’s very thoughtful of you, Johan,” she smiled.
“It’s nothing. They should be finished any minute now,” he continued. “Ah, it is ready,” Johan said, taking the pan off the stove and sliding one omelet onto a plate for her with a spatula and another on to a plate for himself. Terra picked up her fork and tore into it. The first bite was fabulous; it actually tasted better than it had smelled if that were possible.
After she was done, she took a shower, luxuriating in the water, and then she dressed in her pantsuit. She decided that she needed some more clothing, but that it could wait until after she checked in at the embassy. She said good bye to Johan, who simply smiled and said that his door and his kitchen were always open to her.