Noumenon

by Marina J. Lostetter

  “Yes,” it said flatly. A long pause revealed its unwillingness to elaborate. “They were afraid to find you in an unsavory state.”

  “Ah.”

  “Mira’s primary representative would also like to speak with you, though he is aware of the packet and feels you should access it first.”

  “Fine, great.”

  “And Caznal has invited you to—”

  A bubble of irritation rose in her chest. Caznal had been trying to make nice for ten years, and Esper kept shooting her down. Why couldn’t she take a hint? “Tell her no.”

  Toya shot her a frown. “You can’t avoid Caz forever.”

  “Why the hell not?”

  “I’m going to set up that meeting for you,” she said, exasperated, as Esper moved to exit back into the twilight, headed for the office instead of home. “With a counselor.”

  “Fine, whatever.”

  “When are you free?”

  “Never,” she whispered to herself. “Wednesday. Three to four is open.”

  “I’ll do my best.”

  Esper gave her a wave—neither thankful nor dismissive—and stalked down the ramp.

  She didn’t want the message from Alt. Norkal sent to her quarters because that was her safe space. Work was never allowed inside.

  Aesop was quiet, what with it being the middle of the night. The children had all gone home, and most of the educators and historians had either done the same, or gone down to The UG.

  Her office wasn’t much of one: more like a glorified video room. It was made for analyzing data, not entertaining diplomats—that she did in the situation room, where she supposedly had home-field advantage, even though she always felt like she was on foreign ground.

  The encrypted message was much briefer and far more run-of-the-mill than I.C.C. had implied. It informed her that the Ship City’s request for postponing the lease evaluation had been processed, voted upon, and agreed to. They would meet in a month, rather than a week.

  Except, she’d made no request, and everything pertaining to the convoy’s interaction with outside powers went through her.

  Something was up. “I.C.C., is Representative Rodriguez available for that meeting?”

  “He is in his quarters with his wife.”

  “Let him know I’m coming.”

  Since its landing, the convoy had made several changes to the way things were done.

  Their system of perpetual rule by pre-launch sanctioned clones was one of the first practices to come into question. After all, those men and women who needed no election to determine their standing had been chosen to lead them to the stars, not lead them on Earth.

  Now each ship had its own elected representatives, as well as each department.

  Joaquín Rodriguez was from the old, continuous genetic pool—the lines that still carried the most clout. Though his predecessor clone had been captain when they’d arrived at Earth, he’d only been elected as Mira’s representative a few months previously, after the position had unexpectedly opened up—the previous rep having wandered off into the frozen wasteland.

  Esper knocked on his door instead of using the buzzer. She wanted to make her irritation evident.

  His wife answered the door with a sugary, almost grandmotherly smile between her plump cheeks. How a woman no more than five years her senior could project such an elderly air, Esper had no clue. “Come in, Ambassador Straifer,” she said with a flip of her hand and a twist of her hips. “Can I get you anything?”

  “Just your husband and some privacy.”

  “Is something wrong?”

  “Probably.”

  Rodriguez stepped out of the kitchenette, something crumbly struggling to stay confined in his mouth. He quickly swallowed, wiped his hands on his trousers, and motioned for Esper to have a seat at the table.

  Without another word, Mrs. Rodriguez excused herself, leaving the cabin all together.

  “What did the message say?” He jumped right in.

  “That our request has been approved,” she said in the overly excited, plastic tones of a twentieth-century game-show host. A tone which she immediately abandoned for graveyard-bleak in her next sentence. “Who went over my head? You?”

  “The board,” he said with a nod. “It was a unanimous decision.”

  “How’d you do it? No one has implants but me.”

  “We used that machine your mother had made for communicating with Ephenza long-distance. It uses brainwaves.”

  “The machine doesn’t work anymore.” She leaned back, crossing her arms, her face held in the rigor mortis of skepticism.

  “Broken things can be fixed,” he said simply. “It wasn’t difficult for the computers department.”

  “Why?” She shot her questions and responses off in short succession.

  “We need time to find a suitable replacement.” He paused long enough for her brow to raise a millimeter. “For you,” he added.

  “They won’t have anyone else,” she said, leaning forward. “That was the whole point. They picked me so that you couldn’t pick someone better. They twisted our ways, our processes and used them against us. They understand perfectly well that the convoy puts no stock in my abilities, that my mother being Nika Marov means nothing. They wanted it to look like a grand gesture—misguided, but too gracious to refuse. And we didn’t turn them down, did we? Even Mom—” her tongue stumbled “—even Mom told them it wasn’t a good idea. But we accepted because we didn’t want to cause an international incident. They insisted, and we caved. You’re crawling through the wrong access tunnel with this. They want me because I can’t be as effective as Nika. I’m not as skilled with words—they always find loopholes, or ways to twist them. They want that, don’t you get it?”

  Rodriguez stood and walked back into the kitchenette. Esper didn’t know whether to feel offended or smug. He returned with a cookie and a glass of milk, and slid them both in front of her. “If it doesn’t matter,” he said, “then why are you so upset? You don’t like the job. I’d think you’d welcome any chance to move on.”

  “As people are fond of telling me: my actions don’t always make the most sense.” She didn’t touch the cookie. It smelled of warm chocolate and peanut butter. “That’s part of what you all don’t like about me, isn’t it? I’m unpredictable? Illogical?”

  “We can’t expect someone who so openly loathes their job to be good at it—despite what you think, there were people who believed in you, once.”

  She remembered. Ephenza had been her biggest champion, and she’d resented him for it. She resented him for everything, really.

  “All we want is a fighting chance, Ambassador, especially now . . .” Rodriguez trailed off, failing to elaborate. After a missed half beat, he said, “And you’re not it.”

  “Sorry you feel that way.”

  “We’re sorry you felt it first.”

  “Did he say who they’re considering?” asked Toya. Esper had run straight to her after the meeting with Rodriguez.

  “Every single clone, I’m guessing. I’m sure all the other unstable, unpredictable nature-borns are off the table.” She lay on Toya’s impeccably made bed, staring up at the ceiling. Toya had an interesting cabin. The person who had owned it previously had a flair for art, and the walls and ceilings had various minimurals scattered across them. Toya had saved the paintings from the janitorial staff, who had been tasked with making the cabin spotless for the new occupant. The doodle Esper had her eye on looked like a nebula, but also like an ethereal flower floating in an inky pool.

  “What do they expect you to do?”

  Esper shrugged. “I have other meetings scheduled. I could cancel them, wash my hands of this crap.”

  “But you won’t.”

  “But I won’t.”

  “Why now?” Toya mused, wandering in lazy circles across the matted carpet.

  “Well, it’s like you said, right? The board’s decided they want off this rock, so instead of negotiating how many cof
fee beans or tea leaves or cacao pods it’ll take to secure our rent, they want to present an ultimatum. They want to give the land back, and they know Earth doesn’t want it back. They want to keep getting our luxury supplies.”

  “We’ve sent them enough, they can grow their own by now.”

  “Ah, but that’s not how the economics of scarcity works. We grow the treats that went extinct and got lost in those terror attacks on the seed banks. We send them to the governments as tribute—they can call it rent, but it’s good, old-world tribute—they turn around and sell it, roasted, toasted, and sufficiently nongerminal, to high-end individuals who are more than happy to pay millions for a cup of coffee. They bank on the idea that only we can grow it. That makes it exotic. Special. We leave and they’re forced to produce it themselves, which people will figure out means it can be produced in high quantities. These aren’t delicacies from the Jurassic—it wouldn’t be hard to bring these things back into the modern era.

  “But their current profit margin is ridiculously high. Our squatting doesn’t do a damn thing to anyone. We’re on land no one wants. Right now they’re treating us like a money farm. And every few years they press us, whine about protestors in front of their government buildings, and make us hand over a few more tons of that, or a test batch of this, on and on.

  “If we leave, that free money’s gone. Who would be stupid enough to throw us back into space?”

  “So, how are you going to convince them?”

  “I’m not, remember? That’s some other schmuck’s job, now.”

  Wednesday

  The shrink’s office was too warm. Esper kept pulling at her collar, wishing it were appropriate to pop a few buttons on her jumpsuit. And the place stank of cigar smoke. No one was supposed to smoke in their place of work—and, hell, when the convoy first launched there hadn’t been tobacco to smoke. But now that they were Earth-side again, bad habits—like polluting the air and harboring open flames—had returned. Smoking, though, that was just . . . yuck. The lady hadn’t even entered the room yet, and Esper already didn’t like her. How was someone who couldn’t keep from taking a drag or two at work supposed to help her with her impulse control?

  Normally patients weren’t allowed in their doctor’s office unattended—sensitive information hanging about and all. I.C.C. had told Esper to go on ahead, though, and Dr. Whossername had given her leave.

  “Why does it look like the seventeenth century in here?” she asked I.C.C., spreading out on the fainting couch. She liked talking to the AI. It was the only sentient being that didn’t judge her.

  “The wood-and-leather interior is supposed to imbue a sense of luxury and security. It is supposed to make the room ideal for relaxation.”

  “Then they should have decorated it like a white-sand beach.”

  “By the same token, it wouldn’t do to have you too relaxed.”

  “Of course not. And here I thought the décor invoked a sense of pomposity and waste.” She threw her arm over her eyes melodramatically.

  “Ambassador Straifer?” said a woman.

  She shot up into a sitting position and smoothed out her uniform. “Uh, ah, yes.”

  The woman had a round face, dark hair, and dark eyes. Her Polynesian ancestry was evident in every elegant curve of her face and body. The doctor’s prettiness caught Esper off guard; she’d been expecting something different. A female Freud, perhaps.

  “May I call you Esperanza?”

  She had the catty urge to answer with, no you may not. “Esper, please.”

  “Fine, fine. I’m Dr. Ka’uhane, or Dr. K if that’s easier to remember.”

  “Ka’uhane it is.”

  “Where shall we start?” The doctor sat in a modest hard-backed chair. It was the least comfortable looking piece in the room.

  “You’re the one messing with my mind here, right? Where do you normally start?”

  “Where the patient likes to start.”

  “Not with my problem?”

  “Do you think you have a problem?”

  “Why? Do you think I don’t think I have a problem?”

  “I think that if you thought you had a problem, you would have made the appointment, not Ms. Kaeden.”

  Touché, thought Esper. “Toya thinks I’m an alcoholic.”

  “But you’re not.” It wasn’t a question.

  “Then I guess we’re done here, thanks, doc.” She made no move to leave. Instead she folded her hands in her lap and leaned back, both curious and wary. What was this lady’s angle?

  Dr. Ka’uhane didn’t say anything. She waited for Esper to blurt out the question that hung invisibly between them. Esper didn’t want to give it voice, to allow the shrink the satisfaction . . . But she also didn’t want it to look like she was backing down from a fight.

  “Why am I not an alcoholic?”

  The doctor’s casual manner never changed. “Because you always need an audience. Alcoholics drink any place, any time. They hide the fact that they’re drinking. They hide the alcohol—they put some whisky in their morning coffee, vodka in their juice, wine in their lunch thermos and claim it’s cocoa. You always make a show of drinking, and you never drink alone.”

  “And how would you know this? By definition, if I’m alone—”

  “No one is ever alone in Ship City.”

  Esper clicked her fingernails against her teeth for a moment. “I.C.C.?”

  “I.C.C. It has authorization to track and monitor all potentially damaging social behavior once the board registers it as such. When your drinking interfered with your job, I.C.C. took note every time you had a drink. It found out you don’t drink alone.

  “I’ve watched the footage of your worst moments with alcohol,” she said, leaning forward in a caring, open posture. “You don’t drink to have fun, you don’t drink to escape, you don’t drink because your body says you must. You drink for spite. So my question is: exactly who are you trying to hurt?”

  This was not how Esper envisioned the meeting. Weren’t shrinks supposed to lead you along by half-formed threads so that you could figure out your issues for yourself? They weren’t often plain, and never direct. They weren’t supposed to bust down the door to your subconscious, they were supposed to peep through the keyhole. “Why would I want to hurt anyone?” she asked, trying to push the conversation back into the land of indefinites.

  “Why wouldn’t you want to hurt everyone?”

  “What do you mean?” she asked, though it sounded like shut up, which was what she wanted to say.

  “I hear your job is on the line.”

  “News travels fast.”

  “That must upset you.”

  Esper shrugged. She tried to project an air of smug indifference, but the lingering cigar smoke tickled her nose, and she let out a diminutive sneeze instead.

  “This—” Dr. Ka’uhane circled her pointer finger between the two of them “—doesn’t tend to work unless we talk. Really talk.”

  “Well, as you pointed out, I’m doing this to appease Toya.”

  “Then let’s talk about Toya.”

  She could do that. Toya was a safe topic. Good ol’, nose in everyone’s business because she didn’t have any of her own, Toya. No, that was unfair. Toya was drama-free, the most pulled together person in Ship City. “Toya’s a good person. She likes to fix things—like me. I think she could do a lot of good in the world—or, at least, in the convoy—if she was given half a chance.”

  “I don’t understand: chance?”

  “Yeah, she’d like to be on the board. But she can’t.”

  “She ran but wasn’t elected. Wasn’t that her chance?”

  Esper didn’t really want to talk politics, but she wanted “Dr. K” to be clear on one point. “Don’t by naive, doctor. No white-suit has ever been elected, and plenty have run. And they’ve only been allowed to run since we’ve become Ship City.

  “I am not the greatest ambassador—as everyone knows—but I have Marov genes, so I was handed
the job. Toya’s genetic line isn’t as pretty—she’s white-suit spawn through and through. She deserves a spot on the board because of merit: for no other reason than she’d be damn good at the job. But they can’t get past the color of her uniform.”

  “You think she’s being discriminated against because of her heritage. But what about you?” Dr. Ka’uhane crossed her legs and leaned back, her hands laid unthreateningly in her lap, palms up. “Your father was a white-suit.”

  “Apparently, the grandeur of my mother’s successes allowed everyone to think of me as her progeny alone. And then when dad died and she . . . she married Ephenza, well.” Acid dripped from her words. She knew she should hide it—the loathing—but for some reason she didn’t care.

  “They dismissed your father.”

  “They ground him into dust.” Her feet flew across the carpet, carrying her into a stiff pace before she could process the action. “People could have ignored him, could have labeled him—and rightly so—as unimportant compared to my mother. He was a janitor—not exactly a ship-shaking career, sure. He did his job well, but so could any other convoy member forced into that capacity. His position was menial, fine. But that wasn’t enough. To dismiss his importance wasn’t enough.”

  She found herself in front of a dark, photorealistic oil painting on the far wall. In it, a woman lounged in a wheat field on a cloudy day, dressed in a twentieth-century-style sundress. The bright pink of the fabric contrasted harshly, yet attractively, with the dull background, as though it were a spot of reason and compassion in an otherwise bland-but-hostile world.

  “What did they do?” Dr. Ka’uhane prompted. “Worse than dismiss him . . .”

  “They turned him into a monster. Said he attacked my mother. And that I was the result.” She couldn’t say the word. She knew the proper term and hated delicate euphemisms, but she could never, ever say that word.

  “But it’s not true?”

  “No.”

  “No one ever pressed charges? Your mother—?”

  “No. Just a rumor.”

  “Her family? Her coworkers? Did they have evidence that he’d—?”