“But he hasn’t called you? Was there a rift?” Muños wondered.
Sylvia regarded his face and decided he wasn’t getting possessive about her. She was a little worried about that. He was a bit old school, but that had its charms too. Everything had trade-offs.
“He may have called. I turn my com off to messages when I go away. I come back to hundreds of irritating messages I have to sort if I don’t do that, like people wanting glass sculptures for five bits and the valuable exposure of displaying my art. He hasn’t been to Home since we moved, and he keeps offering for me to come down to the Slum Ball to visit him.” She made a face to indicate what the chances of that happening were.
“So, he isn’t on the short list of a dozen people with my priority com code. I won’t be a slave to my com like some people are. No matter how charming Pierre is, I’m not sitting at the com waiting for his call.” She didn’t look at Muños, but hoped she planted the idea she wasn’t going to wait in breathless anticipation for his calls either, though in honesty Muños was on the priority call list, for now.
“I think she’ll take him to the Fox and Hare,” Diana said, “It’s her place, so it gives her that much more control of the meeting. Let’s go too. I’d like to check this bird out. If she doesn’t show it’s still a fun evening.”
Sylvia might have passed on letting Pierre know she was back on Home right now, but it would be awkward and a little cowardly to admit that.
“Indeed, we shall go, and you can see this ‘bird’ all the fuss is about,” Sylvia agreed. Hopefully, Pierre would be bright enough to see she was otherwise engaged, and not ask something silly like coming to crash on her couch like a college student.
* * *
“You really need a decent pair of spex,” Eric insisted. “I’ll introduce you to Irwin and go get you a pair. There’s no reason for me to stand around listening to your business.”
“April mentioned I should get a pair. It just slipped my mind. She said something about 3D mapping to get around. I have a pocket phone, with a big screen.” Pierre showed it to Eric. “I believe from my previous visit the local usage is to call them a pad. Will it run mapping software? How much would I be spending for the spex headset?” Pierre wondered.
“I deal in used spex,” Eric said, with a dismissive wave. “Folks tend to buy a new pair every six months or so to get new features. I’ll just give you a pair from the second generation back that nobody but kids or poor people will buy now. That’s less trouble than finding out if a map will run on a pad. It’s a trivial expense to worry about. You may need it to get around after dinner because that terminates my contract with April, unless you would decide to hire me after.”
Pierre was coming to appreciate that Eric wasn’t like the simple minded children of his cousins and brother at home. Nobody expected them to display any maturity until they were well out of university. Indeed they actively retarded them and barred them by law from grasping any responsibility. He’d seen the same thing with April and Heather so long ago, and the lesson had faded in his mind. They’d gone off to work on their spaceship, when he’d assumed they were headed for a night of dancing and entertainment. He’d thought Sylvia was pulling his leg when she told him that. He put a question to Eric bluntly.
“Does her contract with you include a debriefing after we are done?”
“She didn’t request one. Neither did April ask me to find out any specific facts about you. I was told to be generally helpful to you. If she decides to ask how I discharged my assignment after the fact, she is paying for my time, isn’t she? When I asked, she did specify how information should flow the other way, which seems reasonable to me too. That’s more than I was obligated to say, but I don’t want you thinking I’m one of her intelligence operatives.”
“The other way?” Pierre asked, uncertain what he meant.
“I asked how I should respond to your questions about her. She advised me that I was welcome to tell you anything I knew to be public knowledge about her.
“I can see that,” Pierre admitted. “If you do all sorts of work for them you know too much about their everyday business and private comings and goings to share. That why people get paranoid about their phone security, because they can reconstruct their lives from all the little pieces if you let them.”
“That’s why the mapping program on your spex is totally on board and doesn’t work with an external server,” Eric told him. “Spacers don’t like being spied on. Neither would I supply you a spex with a back door. If I did that and it got out nobody would ever hire me or buy from me again.”
Pierre hadn’t even considered that possibility. But something Eric said finally clicked in Pierre’s mind.
“You imply April does have intelligence operatives?”
“The three of them, her partners included, do. People know that, but I’m not sure I know all of them, and I wouldn’t want to name the ones I suspect. You have to understand, it’s well known to all the shift workers and kids that April pays for information. They send a continual flood of anything they find unusual or suspicious to her com code. Things like what ship is unloading odd cargo or people you don’t usually see together are having lunch with each other. Stuff like that. If you send too much stupid stuff and waste her time she’ll send you a notice that she blocked you. Nobody wants that to happen,” Eric assured him.
“Bothering her with things she didn’t ask for?” Pierre assumed.
Eric looked blank and uncomprehending for a moment, and then smiled.
“She never asks for anything. If she did people might start filtering and tell her only what they think she wants. She’d miss things she never imagined to ask for. Some greedy people might even send false reports thinking they’d get paid for the lie. But if it falls under gossip she usually doesn’t want to have to hear it.”
“But, doesn’t the pattern become obvious as she pays for particular tips?”
“She never says what you’re getting paid for,” Eric said. “A dock rat may send her a couple tips a day and all of a sudden he gets tenth Solar and a thank-you. He doesn’t know for which tip. It’s free money and he’ll keep doing it. I do.”
“It’s brilliant, if you can afford to keep enough cash flowing to keep people interested,” Pierre realized. “But the calls, she must get several thousand a day.”
“Shucks, you could program a cheap social secretary program to do a pretty good job of sorting them by key words,” Eric said. “Not even a real AI.”
They’d talked so long they’d been standing outside the bank to finish their conversation. The thought flashed on him the bank might worry they were being robbed by people loitering around outside, but then the man inside waved at Eric, so he knew him. He should have known that.
Eric pointed at Pierre and gave the fellow a thumbs-up through the glass. It was a very abbreviated testimonial, but got a grave nod back.
“Go ahead and do your business with Irwin,” Eric said. “Tell him as little or as much as you want. I’ll go get your spex and he’ll take good care of you.”
And once again Pierre felt like he was in a strange place as he walked in. On Earth he couldn’t imagine doing business with a bank until they knew everything about him. Irwin stood, relaxed, and offered his hand across the desk.
* * *
Eric was waiting on a bench in the corridor when Pierre emerged from the bank. He’d only needed a half hour which seemed insanely fast. Most of that time being taken to answer his many questions. There wasn’t any need to get verification back from his government or employer, them being the same in his case which should make things easier, but seemed to do the opposite every time he bought real estate or a ground car back home.
He now had a credit card that would be accepted anywhere off Earth, and a few small coins and more of the bits to which Jason had introduced him. Irwin insisted on making sure he peeled the tab off and set the taster square on the card to his touch in the man’s sight.
A suff
icient balance took all the funds and gold he carried, and France would be receiving a draw on his letter of credit bigger than he intended to use, but that was simply the reality of the situation. He trusted Irwin’s assessment of what his expenses were going to be. It would have been nice to keep his mission hidden even from some of the accounting sections of his own government, but by the time people became aware of the debit he hoped to be back home and his mission accomplished.
Pierre was used to the political world where appearances meant a great deal. If the press caught you yawning or picking your nose the web sites would glory in exposing your awkward private moment to the public. He’d never allow himself to be seen like Eric was now, sitting with his knees spread apart leaning on them with both elbows. He was holding what must be Pierre’s new spex in his finger tips, swinging them back and forth absentmindedly. It must be nice to be able to relax so in public, unconcerned. If he did that back home the press would mock him for being uncultured and without poise.
“I’d like to do as you suggested, and buy a change of clothing that doesn’t mark me as an Earthie,” Pierre requested. It felt odd to say Earthie. He wasn’t sure it wasn’t a slur.
“I was going to show you how to use your spex for mapping, but let’s go to the tailor shop. They will need a few minutes to sew everything up after measuring you and I can teach you to use your spex while we wait.”
“You said your sister works there, is she a modiste?” Pierre asked.
Eric hesitated, looking the unfamiliar word up in his spex. “Not exactly, she’s a designer, but she’s gone from designing clothing and doing advertising art to her own style of mixed media and portraiture. She’s grown very close to the owners and sometimes works on her art there just for their company.”
“That’s nice. Sometimes one acquires family of the heart that way.”
“Yes, I think you understand exactly,” Eric agreed. “Cindy and Frank have been here a long time. They don’t have much competition. You can buy stuff from Earth by size or Zack carries a few things like t-shirts. But all that stuff is made for full gravity, and now for Earth mores. It’s getting hard to order short sleeves because you can’t wear them much of anywhere out in public. Cindy and Frank make stuff to fit and custom design.”
“Bespoke clothing,” Pierre said.
“Yes, but I didn’t think bespoke t-shirts and other casual clothing are common on Earth, just things like fine suits and tuxedos.”
“Well, shoes and boots still, and there are makers of hunting clothing and riding things, all rather specialized it’s true,” Pierre said.
“Just about everybody wears fitted footies and slippers,” Eric said, “but those are all machine made, often a vending machine.”
Pierre stopped before the entry because there was a poster in the window.
“It seems like windows themselves are rather an anachronism in a completely controlled environment,” he decided.
“People still expect them. If nothing else it’s free advertising to allow traffic in the corridor to peer in. Also, you can post things like this,” Eric said, waving at the drawing.
Pierre leaned closer, too close really for the size of the drawing, and frowned. It was scaled for a mid-corridor viewing distance.
“This doesn’t look like a lithograph,” he said, quizzically.
“That’s some of my sister’s work I was telling you about. The piece in the window will always be an original drawing. She sold them off for awhile, and she still will if somebody waves enough money in her face. There have been a few people who bought the clothing pictured in her sketch, and then just had to have the drawing. Some people have more money than sense. Mostly, she likes to keep the originals and sell prints, like you expected. She’s doing well enough to not grub after every Solar when she’s attached to the drawings.”
“So the design is hers too? Multiple talents are impressive,” Pierre allowed.
“Usually, sometimes Cindy does one or they collaborate. She does portraiture and uh, I guess you’d say political stuff too.”
Pierre’s eyebrows went up. “You mean propaganda? I didn’t know Home had any real self-promotion. I’ve seen some excerpts of your Assembly in session, but that’s supposedly reality. Most Earth nations block those. If they have any music or art I’ve never had the occasion to see it. It must be for domestic consumption.”
“Not exactly stuff like revolutionary art,” Eric said, embarrassed. “I saw some of that when we studied communism. It was pretty ugly to my eye. It hit you over the head without any try at subtlety, solid garish colors and the same symbols over and over.” He drew a flat hand across the air like he could see it again. “The stuff Lindsey draws was bought by private parties, not government to display. I think she would probably describe it as historical rather than political. But a lot of it was of political events or people who made the revolution happen. She sold a ton of portraits of Muños, and she told me he wasn’t all that thrilled by it.
“How modest,” Pierre said. Eric couldn’t tell if it was honest or sarcasm.
“That looks like something for a younger man,” Pierre said, switching the conversation back towards the immediate.
“Maybe a beam dog,” Eric allowed. “I’d look silly in it. It’s to show off all your muscles. Maybe in ten years I could look like that, but if you don’t do hard labor it takes an ungodly amount of time in the gym to look like that. I’ve got more important things to do than sweat in a resistance frame for hours every day.”
“We’re of a mind there. Let’s go in and see what they have for a mature man.
Chapter 5
“The number of people who return after one tour on Mars is far too high,” Jonus insisted to Lukas, his boss. “There are extraordinary measures taken to prevent the people there from feeling isolation or deprivation. They have much more room than many orbital habitats, and just the psychological impact of being able to look out a window and see a world beyond their sealed environment helps. They have recreational opportunities and the gravity is sufficient for almost everyone to prevent health related issues without needing drugs.”
His supervisor looked skeptical, so Jonus moved on to his main point.
“Now, if it was being a hardship post causing these losses then you’d expect things would be getting better as we add cubic and amusements to the base. After all, this is a unique assignment for scientific researchers, and you’d expect after the competition to get there it would be difficult to make them to go home, but that’s not the case. Instead you can see this trend of falling retention over the last four cycles of resupply missions bringing new personnel and taking old away.”
That did get a spark of visible interest from Lukas.
“Now, the administration of the base hasn’t changed. The top two tiers of supervisors, the director and department heads, has been constant from well before this change in retention. So something happened. I’m not sure what, but it changed the retention profile of all the non-administrative classifications.”
“I can see that,” Lukas agreed, looking at the graphs Jonus offered. “I know two hundred is a small sample,” he said, rounding it off, “but that looks way outside the probability of a chance correlation.”
He’d established doubt in Lukas’ mind, so now he’d see if that would overcome the aversion to using resources from outside the department. “I have a friend who audits the flow of physical goods to the base.” Jonus admitted. “He intimated over dinner there was something not right with the resource usage there, but he was having a hard time understanding what. It didn’t match any reasonable theft or fraud patterns he was used to seeing from his professional experience, most of which was with Earth companies and systems of course.”
“So, did the supply discrepancies he could not explain start the same time as the change in how the personnel started behaving?” Lukas asked.
Jonus was delighted. He knew Lukas was no dummy and he’d jumped ahead to the very thing he’d wond
ered himself.
“No. The supply diversions didn’t start until the next ship cycle. They have been going on the last three missions, although the first one was minor and the last two ships loads greater but about the same.”
Lukas narrowed his eyes and looked thoughtfully suspicious. Jonus didn’t ramble on and let him think on everything before he said any more.
“That’s actually more worrisome than if they started at the same time,” Lukas concluded. “There is always a progression from thinking and planning to the actual implementation evidenced by physical deeds.”
“Precisely my thinking,” Jonus agreed. “We’re approaching another supply launch also, so if anyone needs to go investigate it should be arranged quickly.”
Lukas looked at him like he was waiting. Perhaps he expected Jonus to propose a much more detailed course of action, volunteer even. He wasn’t going to, and that was apparent after a long enough pause.
“We have too many barriers to working with accounting,” Lukas said slowly. “I’m sure that they would have similar problems trying to work with us. We each have closely held information that should not circulate outside our departments. However, my intuition is that we are simply seeing the surface ripples of a deeper disturbance that is political in nature, which is beyond the proper purview of either of us. Therefore I’m going to pass this up to those above us who are concerned with security matters. That’s not only the correct thing to do, but much safer for us in my estimation.”
Jonus nodded acceptance. “That doesn’t satisfy my personal curiosity, but it makes sense to me. If you sent me to Mars to investigate this I don’t think I have the tools to do so, and it might even be personally dangerous. The numbers of fatalities on Mars by accident have increased slightly, and I’m suspicious of that too. Let them send an agent or spy used to dealing with intrigue, even if it means we never know the end of the matter.”
Been There, Done That Page 7
