Been There, Done That

by Mackey Chandler

  “Thank you,” Heather said in her command voice still. Jeff was glad he caught that, and hadn’t forced her to switch to the majestic plural.

  Chapter 23

  Linda Pennington looked in the mirror and examined herself with more than the usual honesty. The last couple times she came home from work she was tired. That was something she wasn’t used to feeling. There were a couple folds at the corners of her eyes when she squinted. They weren’t crow’s feet yet, but she was pretty sure they were announcing where they would be in five or six years.

  Overall, Linda still felt she looked pretty damn good for a lady of thirty six years, but forty seemed awfully close, and in balancing all her options and desires she had finally come to the realization that if she went back home she was going to be old soon, while most of the people she saw here every day would stay almost the same in appearance, never mind healthy. Linda cared a great deal for appearance and health was something she took for granted.

  If you lived in North America, or most of Earth for that matter, the official position driven home every day in the news and entertainment shows could be pretty convincing. Life extension was unnatural and ungodly. It made you crazy if not outright evil.

  Well, if life extension was making the people she worked with everyday crazy, it was crazy like a fox. She couldn’t think of one person she knew who didn’t have work if they wanted it. The constant labor shortage meant people treated their employees better because there weren’t three or four people waiting to replace them. Everybody here seemed much more secure than back in North America, where if you got on the negative tax it was almost impossible to get back off of it. Security and stability was something Linda had always craved because it was so lacking in her life as a child.

  One facet of that was that Linda hated change. Her childhood taught her to expect change is always going to be a bad thing. But she’d been on Home so long now that going back to Earth would be a bigger change than staying. Trouble was, she was remembering the things that made them leave Earth in the first place. None of those had gone away. She was pretty sure it was going to be a choice between going back to Earth or going on the Moon with no option to stay on Home.

  She couldn’t fault Mo no matter how she thought on it, and she was no stranger to finding fault. He’d taken care of her and the kids pretty well, as well as could be expected given how things had been on Earth. Certainly he’d done better than her father had cared for her mother. She’d barely trusted him to come to Home and here he wanted her to go on to the Moon now. Would that be stable or would they be off to Mars or someplace just about the time she was settled in on the Moon?

  Even if she made Mo promise to stay put, she realized that wasn’t really the sort of promise he might be able to keep. Events change, just like they did on Earth to force them to leave. There wasn’t a choice to be had she really wanted. If she wanted life extension therapy, which sounded better by the day, she was cutting herself off forever from Earth. Lindsey wasn’t going to come back and live with her again here or on Earth. She knew that in her heart once Lindsey blocked her calls, and everybody else made it quite clear they were on her side of that issue. So she was on her own. Well, not all alone. Mo still offered the Moon if she’d go look at it.

  If she went to the Moon they said most folks made enough to buy LET if they saved up for it. Mo might share his income again, because he stopped doing that when she wouldn’t come and at least look at conditions on the Moon. She was never going to make enough with her cleaning job at the club to buy LET, and she wasn’t going to be able to keep this apartment forever. When that ended she’d have to watch her pennies even closer to live on her cleaning job. She’d be doing good to sleep in a rented bunk and live out of a locker. Everything considered, she decided she better go check out the Moon before Mo withdrew his offer.

  If her kids or Mo could have heard her internal debate they would be horrified and she wouldn’t understand why. Nowhere in her calculations had love or affection come to mind or been given any weight towards her decision. It simply didn’t occur to her. It hadn’t been a factor when she married to get away from her horrible family life, and it wasn’t something she’d grown to feel over time. And yet, she valued loyalty and keeping your word. It was vital to there being any stability and security.

  * * *

  “Did you forget to charge me my part of the expenses?” Eric asked warily. He was looking at two Solars, a half Solar, plus a few bits in his palm.

  “Do we suddenly look stupid?” Diana asked. “Don’t answer that! You have access to the books. Did you lose the address?”

  “I’m busy and not very good with spreadsheets, but I’ll look,” Eric promised

  “That’s your cut after shared expenses, and this is just the first game. We had start up expenses. The next game will be more profitable,” Sylvia said.

  “Do we need any further funding? I can plow this back into the partnership if you want me to,” Eric offered.

  “No, not really,” Sylvia said. “Read the report. I didn’t consult with you or Diana, but I set aside ten percent of the net to build up our cash holding. I figured it was easily undone if either of you objected. Unless we start some new big game or venture we’re set for operating funds. I don’t see us needing to bring in any new partners either.”

  “I should have thrown more in the open pot when we started,” Eric said.

  Diana kept a straight face, with some effort. Eric contributed a half kilogram of gold when they started their partnership. That had shocked her at the time, now she wondered just how much more he could have kicked in. He’d literally pulled that out of his pocket, but she’d seen him count that out and put some back. How old was he? He looked about fourteen, but he still went to sleep in the full G dorm. Any way she asked would sound like Earth Think.

  “Are you happy with the ticket token system my guy created?” Eric asked.

  “It looks good,” Sylvia said, “but I’m no better with computer security than you are with spreadsheets. That’s why we asked you to farm it out. Is it really secure enough nobody can fake having bought an electronic ticket?”

  Eric shrugged. “Nothing is unbreakable. They declare something is mathematically unbreakable until the heat death of the universe, and a couple years later it’s busted. It’s bit chain so you can trace every sale as unique. If somebody wants to argue with your records you can tell them to go pound sand, because if Earthie law doesn’t agree it can’t reach here anyway. They aren’t going to intercept the key because it’s elliptic curve encryption. It might be broken, but not within the time frame of a lotto game. Breaking it fifty years from now is kind of pointless.”

  “Did one of your little friends whip this up?” Diana asked.

  Eric looked at her oddly. “He’s one of my people, but nothing little about him. He’s a big dude in his seventies and supposedly retired. Now that he’s had LET he feels good again and wants to do little contracting jobs like this. He figures he better get back into it because he doubts his pension will keep paying him forever once they figure out he isn’t going to conveniently die.”

  Well crap, Diana was being so careful and she still stuck her foot in it.

  Sylvia saved her by filling what would have been an awkward silence.

  “The Earthie talking heads and politicians speak in public about LET like it is a moral issue. Truth is it would destroy not just pensions but just about any form of life insurance and government entitlements. If you create enough angry people who don’t care that what they were promised is now impossible, that can bring down governments.

  “One minor problem is Mackay Christian was so disgusted by the winner we had him baby-sitting he told us not to ask him to do another. He was kind enough to ask his partners if anybody would do it for us. He said his partner Otis Duggan would do it, even after hearing of Mackay’s experience.”

  Eric looked so alarmed Sylvia had to ask why?

  “I’ve met him,” Eric said, �
�He’s kind of scary, but I should leave it up to you to form your own opinion. You should ask Gunny to tell you the whole story about how Otis came up to Home. The main point that impressed me was that he basically conned the Patriot Party out of a seven figures in EuroMarks and saved President Wiggen’s butt as a freebie. Gunny was very impressed, and given Gunny’s own level of competence it takes a lot to impress him.”

  “Well, that explains why I’ve seen him with Wiggen and her husband at various functions a few times,” Sylvia said, looking thoughtful. “I can’t see ripping the Patriot Party off as anything but a sterling recommendation.”

  Eric nodded. “It’s just that hiring him to escort a lotto winner might be like buying a sledge hammer to crack eggs.

  “Have you ever cracked a real shell egg?” Sylvia asked, dubious.

  “When we lived on Earth we had a real kitchen with pots and pans and stuff. I’ve cooked eggs and sausage and bacon, and just about any fool can use a toaster,” Eric said. “I even know how to properly load a coffee maker. You didn’t think we were heat-and-eat negative tax people did you?”

  * * *

  “As you suspected, when a vessel jumps out it tends to drag along anything near it.” Jeff told April.

  “Did I say that? We went back and forth so much I’m not sure I remember.”

  “I’m sure Heather has it recorded if you want to look up the file,” Jeff said.

  “No, it’s not like I’m trying to argue with you, we just bounced back and forth between so many ideas I just don’t remember exactly. That’s the kind of thing people do who are picking an argument. I’m not going to start doing that to you,” April promised. “You’d come to hate me quickly.”

  “Thank you. They tried quite a few objects. They seem to either come along or not. They don’t get cut or crushed or anything, but if they stick out too far even a piece of electrical conduit will keep one of our current vessels from jumping if it sticks out more than about nine meters.

  “Dragging something along located closely behind the ship works much better. Until you hit a certain mass and then it just won’t drag it along. Now it it’s really the mass, or if it is that the far side of the object is too far away I don’t know. It will be interesting to find out,” Jeff said.

  “How are you going to do that?” April wondered.

  “By finding some object of very different density but similar size and trying to haul them along with the same settings. The crew has warned me however there is some sort of disturbance near the ship when it jumps. They tried to drag along a small snowball and when they failed to take it with them they came back and the radar reflector they put on it was there, but the ball had been shattered to a big cloud of ice particles. It appeared most of it would reconsolidate again gravitationally, but it was a slow process.”

  “Well that answers one question that I kept coming back to,” April said.

  “Do share, please,” Jeff begged.

  “I wondered if you could jump straight from sitting on the landing field at Central.”

  “Knowing you, I’m surprised you didn’t ask them to try,” Jeff said.

  “Oh no, that would be much too dangerous,” April insisted. “What if… but never mind. I’m being silly.”

  “For some reason, the possibility simply never occurred to me,” Jeff admitted. “Your instincts are very good. You wanted me to aim somewhere that first time, even though I thought I was just doing a field test. Why would it seem dangerous to you?”

  “What if the Moon came along with you?” April asked.

  Jeff looked horrified, but said nothing.

  “I mean, sure you should be able to get it back the same way if you could jockey it around enough, but back exactly where it was supposed to go?” April asked. “You’d never get it just right and all the years and years of predictions of the astronomers and data for navigation… even the tides would be screwed up and one has to assume people would notice no matter how fast you got it back. Sure as anything, somebody would figure out who was to blame too.”

  “As convenient as it would be to move Mars in a bit, and Venus away from the Sun, I’m glad we can’t play God at a celestial game of billiards,” Jeff said. “As well as I think of myself I’m not ready for that kind of power.”

  “Also, what would happen if you initiated a jump with something in front of you?” April asked.

  “We’ll know that as soon as you have a ship you will risk losing, and we’ll observe the process from ten thousand kilometers away,” Jeff said.

  “We really should find out,” April insisted. “I can see us in a situation where we’re being blocked from leaving. The commander will want to know what the ship can do to get them away.”

  Jeff thought on that a bit, frowning. “If we keep running into other ships, and you can make a reasonable case for a situation where we’d have to allow them to get close to us, I would risk the Remora to find out. But now it’s already enough of a stretch to our finances to add the Remora,” he complained.

  “So for now we have a policy of non-contact?” April asked.

  “Deliberate avoidance, yes. I don’t think we have anywhere near the resources we’d need for a first contact. I’m not sure anybody does.”

  Heather was nodding agreement. “Even more importantly,” She insisted, “we have to exercise every sort of caution to keep from leading them back here.”

  “I don’t like that. I really want to meet some honest to goodness aliens, but I can see the dangers. We do need to assemble the resources first,” April agreed.

  “This is technically your sovereign undertaking,” Jeff reminded Heather. “If you would explain this is our policy to the crew before they go out again I think they will take it to heart from you better than from me.”

  “We shall do that,” Heather decreed in her royal voice.

  * * *

  Sylvia’s phone chirped at her. The display indicted it was Lindsey’s mother, Linda Pennington, so Sylvia steeled herself for unpleasantness and confrontation.

  “Hello, Mrs. Pennington.” She wanted to say ‘What can I do for you?’ or some other pleasantry, but she stifled it. The woman was pushy and might take it for a commitment to do her bidding. That left an awkward silence since her inflection hinted at a continuing statement that never materialized. Linda’s face never showed any sign it bothered her though, she went on very smoothly.

  “Hello, Ms. Anderson. I’m sorry to bother you, but my daughter Lindsey has blocked calls from my account number. I thought it important she know that I’ve come to accept she has flown the nest and isn’t coming back. I don’t think she is ready, but nobody seems to respect my opinion in the matter. In fact, if she desires to make application to be an adult under Home law I won’t speak against it publicly. I’m going to visit my husband on the Moon since he indicated he is too busy to take his customary leave back to Home. If Lindsey wishes to… normalize relations as it were, I wouldn’t be calling her frequently, and certainly not to argue over things that are over and done. And I thank you for the care you’ve shown her.” She shut up then and it had a note of finality.

  To say much of anything would invite further discussion, so Sylvia just said, “I’ll inform her of all that. Good day,” and disconnected.

  Lindsey was watching from the side, out of the camera’s range, with a little frown on her face. “I’m not going to unlock my com access,” she insisted.

  “I don’t blame you,” Sylvia said. “I don’t intend to urge you to go one way or the other. Notice, I didn’t acknowledge anything at all? Not even her thanks for showing you any care, because I certainly didn’t do it for her.”

  “She had to get that little dig in that she hasn’t changed her mind at all, just accepted that she isn’t going to get her way.” There was a flash of consternation and shock that went across Lindsey’s face from a sudden insight.

  “I was in fear all those years that my mom and dad would separate and get divorced and I would be the cau
se of it. All of a sudden it seems silly. How they treat each other can’t be blamed on me or Eric. They chose each other, but we didn’t choose to be in the family. It’s hard to express exactly without sounding terribly ungrateful for being given life.”

  “Indeed,” Sylvia agreed. “Therein is the power of guilt some manage to wield over an entire clan. They gave you life, but that doesn’t trump everything and give them license to bend you to their purposes forever. I tried to say that before, but it didn’t matter as long as you felt obligated.”

  “I know one thing,” Lindsey said. “I’m never going to marry unless I have a lot more in common with my husband than my mom and dad did. I think Dad got the short end of the deal and has put way more into it than my mom.”

  “And yet, he doesn’t seem eager to end it,” Sylvia pointed out, “which is much easier here than back on Earth. They both still seem to see some value in their marriage. I doubt they will ever candidly discuss their reasons with you. Those sorts of things go so deep and are so complex they might not even fully acknowledge them in their own minds. People are good at fooling themselves.

  “The norm on Earth has been to let the church and state define the terms of marriage, and I find that a huge mistake. People don’t take it personally and seriously if they have no input in defining the terms of a contract. It isn’t entirely voluntary, because the terms are pretty much take it or leave it. Even when people started doing things like writing prenuptial agreements they weren’t seen as part of the vows. We can do better,” Sylvia insisted.

  “And none of my business with which to meddle,” Lindsey decided with finality. “We have our own relationship, but she doesn’t get to define the terms now like she used to do.”

  “That sounds healthy to me,” Sylvia agreed, hoping that ended it for now.

  To her relief Lindsey said, “I have an idea how to texture a recess so it displays the backlighting better. Do you know what a Fresnel lens is?”