by F P Adriani
“That’s not the way I see things between us!” My hand death-gripped the receiver. I could have sworn my heart was breaking into a gazillion tiny pieces because he sounded as if he were breaking up with me. And I didn’t know how to stop this. I felt paralyzed, like he’d blow off anything I could say and would break up with me anyway.
So I said nothing. I simply breathed hard over the receiver; so did he.
When I couldn’t stand the word-silence between us any longer, I said, “Look, I’m going. I’ll talk to you—whenever!” then I clicked my talk-off button.
I spent the rest of that day and night in a complete funk, in between bouncing round my hotel room and my office and collecting everything I’d need on Hera: my old equipment from my old life, my Granger, my mirage-coated suitcase, where I now stuffed all the stuff I wasn’t supposed to have on Hera….
I spent a very restless night, depressed over what had happened with Tan, yet adrenaline-excited over the impending Hera trip.
In the morning, right before I bolted out of my hotel room, I had to make one more phone call—to the cops.
I couldn’t get either Burroughs or Shaver on the line, so I left a message for them that I was reporting in about my trip as a courtesy. To my own ears, I sounded so damn official…. Christ, I could be so fake. And I hated myself for that fakeness.
My bags and I finally took a cab to the shuttle-port. I arrived there early for the flight; I was supposed to meet Mike, who was supposed to hand me a list from Derek—a list about Hera. I’d told Mike to meet me just as early, but when I reached the designated meeting spot, Mike was nowhere to be found.
“Shit,” I said, lifting my black blazer sleeve and checking my wristwatch. Mike was over half-an-hour late. Had he misunderstood the time to meet up with me? I’d told him to get here about three hours before the flight at 11:00 AM. For all I knew, maybe he couldn’t subtract too well. I’d never hired him for his math abilities….
I was thinking about him and his possible math abilities when I turned my head and spotted Nell walking fast in my direction.
“Nell!” I burst out happily. We’d said goodbye yesterday when she’d briefly come into the office specifically to say goodbye to me. Yet here she was again…and holding a suitcase in each hand. My shocked eyes trailed over her favorite green traveling-jumpsuit and back up to her face—her grinning face.
“Yep, Mike ain’t coming,” Nell said then. “I’m coming with you instead.”
My brow lowered fast. “No way! It’s too dangerous—”
“I’m not debating this, Pia-babe. I promised Tan I’d look after you. And he was also afraid of you and Mike being alone; he’s superjealous of your having Mike around, in case you don’t know.”
I felt furious at Tan. And he probably knew I’d be furious at this companion switching—maybe that was another reason why he wouldn’t come see me off. “So you might be endangering your child because Tan’s being ridiculously insecure?”
“No—no way. I don’t think you get it: you can’t stop living just because you’re pregnant. And even if the worst happened, I could probably have another baby. But I can never have another Pia. I’m not leaving my friend swinging in the wind, especially an ugly Heran wind.”
My mouth shook; I felt flabbergasted at what she was willing to do for me. But I still had to dissuade her. “That’s not necessarily true; you know people have difficulty getting pregnant here sometimes, especially more than once.”
“So if I need to, I’ll move to Earth for a year or two. Don’t you worry about it. We’ve got other things to figure out, like finding that janitor so you can get the cops off your butt. Mike and Derek are watching the office, Tan’s watching Derek—he was spoiled by his mom; he can’t live too well without someone picking up after him. And I’ve got your back, just like I’m sure you’ve got mine. So where do I load my bags?” She looked over my shoulder, seemed distracted by over my shoulder. “But before I do that….”
Now my head turned toward where her eyes were fixed—and I spotted both Derek and Tan walking fast in our direction. I heard Nell’s urgent voice behind my left ear: “Pia—let’s have a nice last time before we leave. Tan feels bad and so do you.” My head twisted around and nodded back at her.
When the two men reached us, we both got big hugs, and from each of them in turn. But of course Tan’s arms lingered on me as Derek’s arms lingered on Nell.
“This whole thing’s just two inches short of fucking crazy,” Derek said then as he pulled back from Nell, who only rolled her eyes at him. Now toward me, he said, “Please look out for my Nell and our someday daughter.”
My eyebrows shot up as I smiled a little. “So then you know it’s a girl?”
A light smirk twisted Nell’s face. “Of course it’ll be a girl. Woman power of course! And, anyway, the women in my family usually have girls.”
“I want a little Nell,” Derek said then, pulling her closer. “Though I do love the big Nell.”
“Yes and that’s why you shouldn’t worry about her. She can take care of herself. And Pia and I will watch each other’s backs. No worries,” Nell said, winking a long-lashed brown eye at me.
Derek slid a big hand into the shoulder bag on his other arm. He pulled out a letter-sized envelope and handed it to me, saying, “The list.”
I nodded as I put the envelope into my own bag; then, his hand gently clasping my forearm, Tan started pulling me away. He grabbed my biggest suitcase as he spoke to Nell and Derek. “Let’s go have breakfast at the restaurant. You hungry?” he asked me now. And I was hungry. But for more than breakfast actually.
Tan looked particularly good this morning, like his old self, his old dressed-in-all-black self, just like when I’d first seen him and fallen in lust with him. Once again his gorgeous black-covered legs were on display beneath their tight fabric. Why the hell had he dressed this way today? Did he mean to frustrate me? Bluntly, I asked him that.
And now he laughed. “No—no. I just don’t see my legs the way you do.”
“Well, you should. No other man has anything on you, so you shouldn’t feel he does,” I said, referencing Mike without explicitly saying his name, to avoid an argument, as Nell had urged.
Tan seemed to know what I meant. Slowly, he nodded at me; then he gave me a light kiss on the lips as we walked into the restaurant.
Nell and Derek joined us a moment later, and we all had a great breakfast together—a too-short breakfast together. Only an hour long, but one of the best hours of my life. We gorged ourselves on fruit and pancakes, we laughed and even cried a bit, and not just from the joking we did.
Sitting there in the warm environment with my friends surrounding me, suddenly, I didn’t want to leave. Why did I often feel so frustrated with Diamond? It wasn’t all bad here. If I never came back, there would always be moments I missed, just as there had been from my childhood….
I had blocked some of those memories too; I still blocked them most days, but, lately, they came back quite often. Now I remembered sitting with my parents in a similar scenario, having a wonderful breakfast in a restaurant on one of the smaller Astral Mountains.
The largest ones were very hard to traverse, and few people had been up at the tops. But there was this myth that the mountaintops were so high, the sky at night so dark, that if you stood there, it seemed as if your head lay among the stars.
That was the way I felt now, sitting in this restaurant, my head in the stars of my friends. Nothing could top that.
*
We couldn’t linger too long at breakfast because Nell and I had to load our bags onto the baggage service cars, but not before I made some adjustments inside my miraged-case; namely the insertion of Nell’s second weapon (the big one, like my Granger, the ones non-Herans weren’t supposed to have on Hera). I did this under cover of Tan’s and Derek’s bodies intentionally blocking me from the security cameras. I’d considered hiding all our weapons from both the port’s and Hera’s view, but the
n I decided Nell and I would be better off coming clean; that would make us look better if anything with the authorities happened.
As the time to fly drew nearer, there were some tears—from Nell and Derek. I also had some inside me, but I held them back.
And Tan looked more worried than sad. With my hands clasped in his, he said, “Don’t hesitate to contact me if you need to. I don’t know what I could do from here, but if there’s something, let me know.”
Wiping his blue eyes with his brown sleeve, Derek said then, “We expect to hear back from you two every other day!”
“Oh Derek,” said Nell, sounding exasperated, “you’re acting like we’re going to the gallows.”
“You might as well be!” he snapped. “You didn’t grow up there. So you just don’t understand.”
“All right, all right. Don’t jump down my throat.” Nell sighed now. Then her mouth easily slid into a reassuring smile. “Really. I’ll be back before you know it. Now, kiss me one more time before I go!”
That sounded like a plan—a plan that Tan immediately followed, with me.
*
It wasn’t long before Nell and I were seated together on the shuttle and heading toward Hera.
When we’d reached Diamond’s upper atmosphere, I said to Nell, “You know, I don’t understand your ticket, how you got on—you’re clearly not Mike.”
Nell shrugged her green-covered wide shoulders, and her eyes seemed to be on the dark space outside the oval window beside her, on the distant tiny flashes of starlight. Now she said, “We came here together yesterday and traded in his. No big deal. You know something? A part of me is looking forward to this.”
I knew what she meant. Nell and I had never been on anything even remotely like a vacation together, and this trip certainly wouldn’t qualify as one. Nevertheless, I now realized how nice the two of us being alone felt—in other words, spending day after day together with no men to distract us would be a great feeling.
A little later, the shuttle docked at Diamond’s Spinning Space Station, and since the shuttle was quite still then, I decided to use the bathroom.
As I peed, I thought about the things that needed doing on this flight: for one, I needed to think on Millie Rodriguez’s Heran traveling itinerary more. Last night, Mike had dropped off a copy of it at my hotel room, which I should have been suspicious about then—like, why wouldn’t he have just brought the itinerary today?
But my mind had been on the document then. It wasn’t a long one, yet the places Millie had planned on visiting were troubling.
A Hera traveling plan was a requirement for noncitizens. Visitor whereabouts had to be revealed to the government there, at least at first. Heran government officials—a.k.a. goons—could then spot-check a traveler, so it was best to stick with at least a little of an itinerary plan. But that checking couldn’t possibly last: too many people, not enough goons, and that meant that once a person had been on the planet for a little while, she kind of could do whatever she wanted. Basically, that was the trouble with Hera: lots of things were done for show only.
Whether Millie had taken advantage of that laxness or had actually followed her whole itinerary, I didn’t know yet. But that document was all I had to go on at the moment, other than the John-crap Hu had relayed to me….
As I walked back to my seat, I was sighing: while having Nell’s companionship would be great, we still had business to attend to, which Nell knew just as well as I.
In my chair again, I pulled out Derek’s envelope, rereading the title on the front: Things You Shouldn’t Do On Hera (In Most Cities There). Then I pulled out the list inside, immediately realizing that if one page had been laid after another, the list would literally be as long as both of my legs.
“Holy shit,” I said, my eyes widening, my fingers flipping the pages as the list droned on and on. I scanned the words on the list, some of which said:
Don’t stay outside a dome without a breather mask for more than fifteen minutes at a time, for more than two hours a week total—otherwise, you’ll get Daxon Sickness, and the first time you get it, you’ll probably need hospitalization
Before going outside a dome, always be fully dressed and apply palella-oil-based sunscreen: in low-wind high-density daxon pockets, the daxon concentrates sunlight like a lens—you can get second-degree burns after only a few minutes of exposure, even during early evening if the daxon molecules are still excited, though that chemical burning takes longer
Never leave your hotel room door unlocked
Always lock the bathroom door when you’re in your hotel bathroom if no one else is in the outer room
Avoid staying alone in a hotel room, no matter if you’re a guy
Never go out a large bar’s back entrance (too many muggings from drunk gang members, who tend to hang out at large bars as their “turf”)….
On and on the list went, sounding like the most hostile-to-life place I’d ever read about. Some of it I knew already, some of it I didn’t—and much of it scared the shit out of me even if I’d already heard of it. Just seeing it all written down so damn officially….
“People bring up kids on Hera?” I asked out loud now.
“Yeah—kids like Derek,” said Nell.
“How the hell did he come out so nice?” I looked up at Nell beside me. But she had pulled out her copy of the list, and her eyes were casually scanning it now.
“He wasn’t there that long. His parents moved off Hera before his teen years. And his parents didn’t come from there….” Still reading, she frowned now. “Well, really, it’s definitely not a place to raise kids.”
“Sounds like even adults don’t belong there.”
“Now do you see why I’m coming along, Pia-babe? And at least I’ve been there once…. Though half this stuff I didn’t even know. No one told me then! And then the different languages Derek mentions. What the hell is the Moonspan language—at Cielo City?”
“Moonspan’s a combo of Old-Earth Spanish and Lunian-English from Earth-Moon Colony 3.” I knew this because I had some spanish ancestry, and I had been to the Earth-Moon.
“Geez, I don’t even know how to process all that,” Nell said now. “Forget about speaking whatever the hell it is. I don’t even know Spanish or Lunian. At least we don’t have to go to Cielo.”
“Unfortunately, that’s exactly where we have to go.”
“Oh shit,” said Nell.
*
The rest of the flight was uneventful, and we slept through half of it. We were both kind of groggy by the time we stepped off the shuttle and into the port, where we had to wait on long lines for other travelers to be processed first.
As I stood there waiting, I noticed the air had changed: it felt heavy, similar to on Diamond, but the air here was more acid or something, like a dark heaviness that lay in your lungs, seeming to burn them.
I knew everything was pretty much indoors here; even the mining was sometimes done under cover. And this indoor air was filtered and supplemented. But it still felt more like breathing soup than air. Apparently, traces of daxon and other gases couldn’t be entirely removed—the daxon was everywhere, in the air, in the crust, in the waterways.
I remembered Tan’s telling me that I wouldn’t like being indoors here. He was so right….
Whenever I moved my head now, afterward, it seemed as if my brain was still bouncing inside my skull and couldn’t stop; I was starting to feel stoned.
And maybe I looked stoned—and maybe that was why the port security stopped us.
*
It happened while we were being processed at the exit terminal.
Nell and I had been standing before the port-security attendants. Both of us had declared one gun each, which we now had on our bodies.
After the attendants frisked us and checked our guns against our itineraries, one of the attendants pushed Nell’s cases and pocketbook through one scanner while another attendant pushed my bag and all of my cases, including my miraged-case,
through another scanner. I breathed a relieved inward sigh when no alarms sounded.
But then my attendant said I couldn’t leave the port yet.
I swallowed hard. “What?” I asked, thinking, “Busted!” Had I fucked up something somewhere, left something exposed? Did I really look high? I felt that way at the moment; the air was doing funny things to my stomach now….
The attendant was speaking to me and Nell again: “This is a spot security check and you got picked.” She handed back our bags. Then her blond head nodded at another attendant, who flashed his side where his gun was strapped as he used his other thumb to point Nell and me away.
As we walked behind him, Nell mumbled from beside me, “Doesn’t seem like any spot-check.”
“Mm,” I said, my eyes on the attendant’s bouncing ass in his gray pants. The guy had very nice round buns. And I was determined to make the best of this moment because, for shit sure, that view might wind up being the best thing in my life for a long while.
*
The Nice-Buns Guy led us into an office and left us alone there. A big desk covered half the room, and an enormous wall-sized window took up the space beside the desk.
I walked up to the window and finally got my first clear view of the outside, where, in the distance, bulbous purple, green and red clouds heavily hugged the ground like a dangerous multifaceted jewel; the clouds slowly floated in front of a gray ominous sky that seemed to stretch upward for an eternity. With such a cloudy dense-looking atmosphere, I thought it amazing that any sunlight reached the surface here….
My eyes scanned the landscape more closely, and beneath all the sky-colors, I could see the shining silvery city bubbles. The domes had been arranged like connecting border growths between the land and sky, the structures now looking as if they’d always been an organic part of the landscape.
“Wow,” I said to Nell, still taking it all in.
“I know. There’s nothing like the view here.”
