Uranus

by Ben Bova

  He flourished a hand in the air. “Certainly! And I’m happy that you feel this way. I’ll see you in my office at oh-nine-hundred hours, then.”

  “Good.” Glancing at the clock on the kitchen counter, Raven saw that she had more than twenty minutes to get to Waxman’s office.

  “And you can forget about tonight. I’ll find someone else to dine with.”

  Raven started to reply, but held her tongue. Of course he’ll find someone else, she told herself. He must have a whole harem of women waiting for him to crook his finger at one of them. I’m just another conquest for him.

  “Fine,” she said flatly.

  She made herself smile more brightly at his image on the screen. Waxman smiled back. Raven was surprised that he didn’t lick his lips.

  * * *

  It was a strange romance, Raven thought. Every few nights Waxman invited her to his apartment and Raven went willingly, knowing what he expected. They spent those nights in bed together, exploring the many ways a man and a woman can give pleasure to each other. But once the habitat’s lighting system turned on its daylight mode, Raven became a student. She studied the complexities of Haven’s physical layout, the organization of its government and population, the balances of power and authority, who made decisions and who carried out those decisions.

  For the first time in her life, Raven began to see how a community as massive and complex as Haven was actually put together, how it ran, how everything functioned.

  Waxman was a gentle, accommodating lover. Insistent, but not too demanding. She smiled at his relaxed attitude. So sure of himself. He seemed truly concerned about her education, prodding her to learn and teaching her how to use what she learned in the day-to-day affairs of the habitat.

  The nights he spent with her were very different, though. He made Raven feel as if she were the only woman in the universe that he cared for. But then he would go days, even weeks, before calling her to his bed again.

  She did her best to satisfy him, knowing that she had plenty of competition for his affections. Meanwhile, she learned—even in her sleep.

  Waxman gave her a pair of tiny buds that she could worm into her ears. Once her breathing and heart rates showed she was deeply asleep, the buds stimulated her brain directly and she awoke much more knowledgeable than she’d been when she’d fallen asleep.

  During those weeks, every now and then she’d notice Quincy O’Donnell’s hulking figure, usually at a distance, his eyes on her. It made her feel slightly uncomfortable, but whenever the big man got close enough to speak to her he invariably mumbled a “Hello” and then shambled off, as if embarrassed.

  She saw Gomez too, usually in one of the habitat’s cafeterias at lunch time. He too seemed stiff and uncomfortable at first, but after a few weeks his attitude loosened enough so that he would sit at the same table with her. Gomez would ask her how she was. Raven always replied positively but noncommittally.

  “I’m fine, Tómas. And you?”

  He shrugged. “The sub’s still down at the bottom of the ocean, poking around the seabed.” Than he added, “I hope.”

  Leaning over her lunch tray, Raven asked, “When is it supposed to come back?”

  “In two weeks. If it’s still functioning properly.”

  “You won’t know until then?”

  Gomez shook his head slowly.

  “It must be maddening,” Raven said.

  “Oh, it’s been sending up message drones on schedule,” Gomez replied, his hangdog expression unchanging. “Everything seems to be going along as designed.”

  “That’s good.”

  “But it hasn’t found anything. The seabed is just a collection of stones and sands. Nothing interesting. Nothing at all.”

  “What are you hoping for?” Raven asked.

  “Something!” Gomez blurted. “Anything! A sign of life. A seashell, a strand of biologically active chemicals. But there’s nothing down there. That ocean is as lifeless as a dead chunk of rock. It looks like my investigation isn’t turning up a goddamned thing.”

  Raven didn’t know what to say, how to make him feel better.

  “And that means my career goes down the toilet,” he added. “I’m dead meat.”

  “No,” Raven snapped. “That can’t be true. I can’t believe that.”

  “Believe it,” he said, his face a picture of misery, defeat. “The university went way out on a limb to fund my project, and I’m not going to have anything to show for it. Not a goddamned sonofabitchin’ thing.”

  “But isn’t that a worthwhile finding?” Raven asked. “It’s a result that nobody knew before.”

  “That the planet is sterile?” He hm’phed. “Big fuckin’ deal.”

  “It’s a surprise, isn’t it? I mean, the other gas giants—Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune—they all have biospheres, don’t they?”

  Gomez nodded. “But Uranus doesn’t.”

  “How come? What makes Uranus different?”

  He hunched his shoulders. “Whatever makes Uranus different must have happened very early in the solar system’s history, when there were lots of planetesimals whizzing through the system. One of them smacked into Uranus, knocked it over sideways, sterilized it.”

  “So you’re proving that that’s what happened, aren’t you?”

  “I guess,” he admitted slowly. “It all happened so far back in the system’s history—billions of years ago—that we can’t really be sure of who did what to who.”

  “To whom,” Raven corrected.

  “Whatever.”

  She saw that he was really down, staring inescapable defeat in the face.

  Putting on a smile, Raven said, “Well, maybe you’ll find something that your submarine dredged up from the sea floor once you get it back here.”

  “Or maybe I should just put an electric probe in my mouth and scramble my brain permanently.”

  “Don’t talk like that!” Raven snapped. “This isn’t the end of the world.”

  “It’s the end of my world,” said Gomez.

  He pushed his chair back, got to his feet, and slowly walked toward the cafeteria’s exit doors. Raven stared at his retreating back. Then she noticed that he hadn’t touched his breakfast. His tray lay there on the table, just as it had been when he’d first put it down.

  BOOK TWO

  THE MANAGER

  RUST

  Raven spent her days studying and learning how Haven was administered—and occasional nights in Waxman’s bed.

  On one particular morning, he met her in his outer office as she came in from the passageway outside.

  “Raven,” he said, with a beaming smile, “you, of course, know my executive assistant, Alicia Polanyi. Alicia, I want you to be the first to know that Raven Marchesi, here, is now my new administrative assistant.”

  Raven felt surprised, even delighted. Until she saw the expression on Alicia Polanyi’s sallow face.

  Polanyi measured Raven with her eyes, which were glacial-blue, the color of an Arctic iceberg. Her light brown hair was cut spiky-short, her face cadaverous with sunken cheeks and nothing more than a thin, faintly pink line for lips, her body lean to the point of emaciation. She was wearing a single-piece uniform that hung on her bony frame, two sizes too large.

  No competition, Raven thought as she extended her hand toward Polanyi’s cadaverous fingers.

  “Congratulations,” Polanyi said, her voice flat and dark.

  “Raven’s going to be working with me here in the office from now on,” Waxman announced. “She’ll need a space for herself, with a desk, console, all the trimmings.”

  “I’ll take care of it right away,” said Polanyi, her icy blue eyes never moving from Raven’s face.

  Waxman smiled brightly, then said to Raven, “Come on into my office. We have work to do.”

  Raven turned and followed Waxman into the inner office. But she could feel Polanyi’s eyes burning into her back.

  * * *

  It took less than a day for a tea
m of robots and a single male supervisor to create an office all her own for Raven. It was several doors down the passageway from Waxman’s suite, and she had to go past Polanyi’s cold-eyed stare to get to Evan’s office, but she got accustomed to that.

  Although there was no written record of it, casual conversations with other staff members over the lunch tables in the cafeteria told Raven that Waxman and Polanyi had once been lovers.

  “She was a knockout in those days, less than a year ago,” said one of Raven’s newfound office mates. “But that was before she started toking Rust.”

  Raven knew better than to ask obviously pointed questions. She just let the office gossip gradually fill her in. Rust was apparently a hallucinogenic, a powerful narcotic.

  “It lifts you up to the stars,” one of the office crew told her—the guy who had supervised the robots that had built her office. “But then it drops you down into a pile of shit.”

  Raven understood what they were saying: stay away from Rust.

  But a few days later, she found a line in an invoice buried among the other office records. Just a single line. It was a bill for the sale of ten kilos of Rust. Close to a million international dollars! Raven got up from her desk and headed for Waxman’s office.

  As she strode down the corridor, she remembered that Tómas’s submersible was due to break out of the ocean tomorrow and return to the habitat. She hadn’t seen Tómas in several days. Was he hiding from her?

  But she put her thoughts of Gomez aside as she stepped into Waxman’s outer office and locked eyes with Alicia Polanyi, who nodded silently to Raven and touched the keypad that opened the door to Waxman’s private office. All without a word spoken by either of them.

  That’s what Rust does to you, Raven told herself as she swept past Polanyi’s desk. Alicia is the wreckage of what had once been Evan’s mistress. Don’t let that happen to you!

  Waxman was seated at his desk. The wall screen to his right showed a view of Uranus, blue-gray and bland as usual, except for a cyclonic swirl of dark clouds near the planet’s north pole.

  Without preamble Raven asked, “What is Rust?”

  Waxman’s face froze. For a heartbeat he just stared at Raven, unmoving, his mouth slightly open, his eyes unblinking. Then he asked, “Rust?”

  “There’s a charge for Rust on invoice 26-953,” Raven said.

  Waxman shook his head. “That’s not possible.”

  Pointing to the desktop screen, Raven said, “Take a look.”

  Waxman hesitated a brief moment, then took a breath and called up the invoice. He scanned every item. “I don’t see any mention of Rust.”

  Raven stepped around his desk and stared at the screen.

  “I saw the entry,” she insisted.

  Leaning back in his desk chair, Waxman said coolly, “It’s not there now.”

  “It’s been erased.”

  For an eternally long moment Waxman stared into Raven’s eyes. She stared back, unflinching.

  At last he said, “It wasn’t supposed to be there. One of the accounting robots made an error.”

  “We’re buying narcotics?”

  Waxman eased into a sly smile. “No. We’re selling the stuff.”

  “Rust?” Raven asked, in a voice half an octave higher than a moment earlier. “We’re selling Rust?”

  “To whoever wants to buy it,” said Waxman. “How do you think we keep this habitat running?”

  Raven stepped over to one of the chairs in front of Waxman’s desk and sank into it.

  “We’re selling narcotics?”

  “Down in the Chemlab Building we manufacture the drug called Rust. It’s our major export item.”

  “But it’s illegal.”

  “Not here. Not aboard Haven. There’s no law against it here.”

  “But on Earth … on the other worlds, the Asteroid Belt…”

  Waxman tilted his head slightly. “They have their laws, we have ours.”

  It took several moments for Raven to process what Waxman was telling her. Then she asked, “What does Reverend Umber have to say about this?”

  “Nothing. Not a thing. He closes his eyes and doesn’t get in our way. He acts as if he doesn’t know anything about it.”

  “But he does know?”

  With a shrug, Waxman replied, “Of course he knows. But I can tell you this: he doesn’t want to know.”

  An almost delirious laugh bubbled out of Raven’s throat. “This entire habitat—this haven of refuge—it’s built on money from narcotics.”

  Waxman shrugged again. “Politics makes strange bedfellows, Raven.”

  “This isn’t politics,” she retorted. “It’s drugs! It ruins people. Kills them!”

  “They kill themselves,” Waxman said sternly. “We don’t force anyone to use the stuff. They pay good money for the privilege.”

  Nodding toward Waxman’s office door, Raven said, “Like Alicia.”

  “Like Alicia,” Waxman agreed. “She’s working hard to get off her habit. She might even be successful, sooner or later.”

  “Sooner or later,” Raven echoed.

  Waxman leveled a stern gaze at her. “That’s up to her. People bear the responsibility for their actions, you know.”

  “I know that narcotics can sizzle your brain, turn you into a zombie, kill you.”

  “That’s not our fault. We simply sell the stuff. We don’t force anyone to use it.”

  A picture of some of the people she knew in Naples filled Raven’s mind. No, she thought, you don’t force anyone to use the drugs. You just make them available. You just lay them out in front of them, like offering candy to a baby. You pocket their money and leave them to tear themselves apart.

  But she said nothing. She knew that Waxman would not tolerate any objections from her, any questions, any doubts.

  Instead, she asked, “You pay for this whole habitat with the money you make from Rust?”

  With a shake of his head, Waxman smilingly replied, “Oh no, not at all. Most of the habitat’s money comes from good-hearted people who honestly want to help the poor. They donate money and tell themselves they’re doing good.”

  “And they stay in their mansions and live their lives and think everything’s okay.”

  Waxman sighed. “That’s about the size of it. We help the good, honest, high-minded citizens of the worlds to feel they’re doing the right thing.”

  “While you make millions from selling Rust. Or is it billions?”

  “Not quite billions,” Waxman answered with a thin smile, “but it’s getting close.”

  “I see.”

  “Now that you know,” Waxman told her, “naturally I’d like you to keep quiet about it. No sense advertising it all through the habitat. Not that it’s illegal here, remember. It’s perfectly legal.”

  But slimy, Raven thought. Dirty. Filthy.

  Unaware of what she was thinking, Waxman went on, “We try to keep a low profile here in the habitat. We’ve used Rust to help pacify some of our rowdier residents, of course. There’s always a few who slip through the screening process—as you did.”

  Raven saw that he was staring at her, his face set in a mask of authority. Automatically, she made herself smile back at him. “Why Evan, I thought you liked me.”

  “I do,” he said, breaking into a sunny smile. “I like you very much, Raven.”

  Like you once liked Alicia, she thought.

  His expression hardening again, Waxman said, “But I want this Rust business kept as quiet as possible. Loose lips sink ships … and sailors.”

  THE PRODIGAL RETURNS

  Raven went to the main auditorium to watch the recovery of Gomez’s submarine. Tómas had invited her to his quarters, but she couldn’t make herself accept his invitation. That would be too close, she told herself. It might give him ideas. Better to stay separated.

  Waxman had declared an official holiday, so the auditorium was already crowded, and more people were coming in to watch the sub’s return, stand
ing and staring at the big screens that hung on every wall. So far, they showed nothing but Uranus’s blue-gray clouds.

  Raven was surprised—almost shocked—when she saw Tómas shouldering his way through the crowd that had gathered in the auditorium. Heading toward her.

  “Tómas!” she called to him. “What are you doing here?”

  His face looked tense, worried. “Same as you,” he shouted over the hubbub of the crowd. “I’ve come to see if my sub had survived its mission.”

  “But not in your quarters?”

  “I couldn’t stand being alone,” he said, stepping beside her.

  And you wanted to be with me, Raven said to herself. Well, there’s nothing I can do about it. He’s here. She realized that she was glad that Gomez had come to be with her. And that her reaction was anything but wise.

  The speakers set into the auditorium’s ceiling announced, “Breakout from the ocean in thirty seconds.”

  “If she breaks out,” Gomez muttered. “If she’s intact. If nothing happened to her while she was down on the sea bottom.”

  A different voice sang through the speakers, “Breakout attained at oh-nine-seventeen hours GMT.”

  The crowd roared out a lusty cheer. Raven threw her arms around Gomez’s neck. “She’s okay! She made it!”

  Gomez’s grin could have lit up a major city. They both stared at the wall screens, which still showed nothing but Uranus’s endless expanse of clouds.

  “It’ll take almost an hour to climb through the atmosphere and break out of the clouds,” said Gomez tensely.

  They waited. Nearly quivering with anxiety as they stood in the middle of the crowd, they stared at the pole-to-pole expanse of blue-gray clouds, together with all the others, half-listening to the scraps of conversation from the people around them.

  “… atmospheric turbulence…”

  “… wind shear in the clouds…”

  Raven was surprised to hear so much talk about the conditions in Uranus’s atmosphere. These people didn’t sound like poor, ignorant dregs of civilization. They had learned something, many of them, since they’d arrived at Haven. She realized that she wasn’t the only one who had been educating herself.