Flare

by Roger Zelazny

  "Sounds pretty cold to me," the sailor said.

  "It was a very enthusiastic letter," Peter insisted. "I really wanted her to file her work samples with the Foundation—she's a technical illustrator—and get on the next ship out."

  "But she never replied," Porter explained for Spivak. "Not a peep."

  "And this was all a week after we shifted orbit...." North pondered. He was pushing his cards around with a fingertip, all thought of the bidding gone from his head. "That was about the time we went through our drill with the solar flare, wasn't it?"

  "A day or two before that, actually."

  "Right," the crewman agreed, but that didn't seem to settle the matter. "Did you follow up with her?"

  "Well…" Spivak paused.

  Peter had been deeply hurt by her silence, and the rejection it implied. Now, he was not sure how much he wanted his love life and his manly pride dissected by these people… But, then, what the hell! They were in it up to their lips anyway.

  "She was kind of vague about her plans in the blip she sent," he told them. "So, when there was no reply to my reply, I kind of figured she'd changed her mind again."

  "But you didn't follow up."

  "No."

  "Not even with the radio shack—to make sure your letter was received?"

  "Why would I?" Although North's questions seemed friendly enough, Peter was still beginning to feel angry with this cross-examination.

  "Why not? This is a survey ship, not an international hotel. Personal messages are sometimes delayed, or even… shit! Nobody told you then, did they?"

  "All right, told me what?" Now Spivak was really tired of the conversation.

  "About the communications blackout. The solar flare was headed up by a wave of high-energy static that knocked out signals all over the system. Happened a day or so before we had to shut down for the magnetic effects. So, if your night letter was in transit at the time, it might have gone into hyperspace."

  "But wouldn't the communications officer have checked?" Peter insisted.

  "What? On a non-official communication? Why would he bother? He was probably bending the regs to send it out in the first place."

  "Then… she must be thinking… that I wasn't…"

  "A month is a long time, pal. You've probably lost her again." Mitch North dropped his head again to study his cards. "So, are you going to bid, or what?"

  Stir

  Stroke

  Beat!

  Whip!

  112 Duck Pond Circle, Sag Harbor, GNYC, April 25

  The fork in Cheryl Hastings' hand worked faster and faster, bringing the dechol-egged batter up to a yellow froth. About the time it started sloshing out of the bowl, her mother glanced over.

  "You're going to ruin that mix, dear," she said quietly.

  "Sorry, Mother."

  "You have to keep your mind on what you're doing."

  "I know, but I can't help thinking...."

  "You weren't thinking, Cherry. You were brooding." Jane Hastings pushed the recipe book back on the table and folded her hands in front of her. A lecture was about to begin. "The one will get you someplace. The other just takes you around in circles."

  "All right, Mother. So I was brooding."

  "Can you tell me the subject of this famous brood?"

  "Well… I should have heard from the Areopolitans by now. Either a yes or a no. Instead, there's just this silence from them. And I can't think why. I mean, my work isn't so good that they'd be calling in some kind of world-class committee to evaluate it properly, would they? And it's not so bad that anybody might hesitate about hurting my feelings over it. So why can't they just give me the answer? Thumbs up or down."

  "Maybe they have too many applications to decide so quickly," Jane offered. "It's only been a month. And, anyway, all those committees, judging panels, paperwork and routing—they can eat up weeks of time."

  "I still should have heard something by now."

  "Is that all that's bothering you?"

  "Well… Peter, too. I should have heard from him as well."

  "Didn't I warn you about sending a picture from the hospital? You certainly didn't look your best, dear."

  "I wanted to be honest with him."

  "Honest would have meant keeping your face away from a camera until it healed. No, I think you wanted to be cruel—showing him what his leaving did to you… Or you wanted to tug at his sympathies."

  "No. I just thought he should see—"

  "You wanted him to see that you really can't take care of yourself? So that he would think you needed him to do it for you? Instead, I think you showed him whata fool you can be."

  "All right, Mother. Have it your way."

  Jane Hastings gave a little sigh. "No, dear. I don't want 'my way.' Not really. I just want you to have whatever will make you happiest."

  "I want to go to Mars. And I want to be with Peter."

  "Well then, stop brooding about it."

  "What should I do?"

  "In my day—which you probably think was back with slash skirts and three-wheel convertibles—a woman didn't have to be so shy and retiring about these things. Or so stiff-necked."

  "Mother!"

  "Why don't you do something? Call the Foundation, politely, and ask if they received your application, or did it get lost in the mail. Call Peter and ask him the same thing."

  "I don't know. I guess I'm afraid of being rejected. Twice."

  "In the long run, knowing for sure will hurt less than waiting and wondering."

  Thump

  Thump

  Thump

  Bump!

  Radio Shack, ISS Whirligig III, April 25

  Communications Specialist 1C Wilbar Fredrix looked up from his handheld Skeedaddle game to see that young articled passenger, Peter Spivak, coming through his curtain, rubbing his left elbow.

  "Hurt yourself?" he asked cheerfully.

  "Awkward place to put a turn," Spivak grumbled.

  "Yeah, I have to slow down there myself… What can I do for you?"

  "I want to send a blip-tape. Better yet, a two-way transmission if you can arrange it."

  "Be my guest. Where to?"

  "Unh, same place as before. Sag Harbor in Greater New York."

  "Time difference there is—wait a minute!" Fredrix said. "Now that does ring a bell. We just got in a batch of ship's mail, and one of the items had a return code from Sag Harbor. Funny coincidence, huh?"

  "The message was returned?" The young man's face looked like it was going to crumple up.

  "Oh my, no! They don't pay to send back radio waves out here. I'm saying that Sag Harbor was the originating station."

  "Was it for me?"

  "Well, just a second." Fredrix put down his game, turned to his console, and began punching up the message list. Seventeen from the top was the item in question. "If you're Peter Spivak, it is."

  "Can I have it?"

  "We have to do things in order around here, fella. First I have to sort these incomings and separate out ship's documents from private mail. Then decode and route the official business. Then sort and route the personal stuff. Maybe after lunch…"

  Spivak gave a weak smile. "Couldn't you, just this once, break your routine and take that one message, number seventeen there on the screen, and just give it to me?"

  "I'd have to execute a special spooling."

  "Oh… Is that hard to do?"

  Fredrix studied the younger man.

  "It is a lot of work," the communications specialist admitted cagily. "But I tell you what. For you, because you're such a pal of mine, I'll do it as a favor."

  "Great!"

  "And one day, say when we're both on planet, maybe you can do me a favor in return."

  "Unh—sure. Just name it."

  "Maybe you can introduce me to your girl."

  "Well, yeah. I'm sure she'd like to meet you."

  "And maybe she has a sister who'd like to emigrate."

  Spivak looked at Fredrix
long and appraisingly. "No sisters in the family. Sorry."

  "Or a real close friend, possibly?"

  "Of course. Cheryl knows a lot of interesting people on Earth."

  "It's a deal, then." The operator turned to his console and began breaking out the message. Then he stopped and turned back toSpivak. "Oh, you still want to send that outgoing?"

  Peter Spivak gave a tight grin. "I'll let you know in two minutes."

  Chapter 30

  Criminal Negligence

  Qiang v HK2X3:2D

  MorsyBio v WhitCen 2:1 D

  Carlin etal v TranShore 9:4 P

  Aaronson etal v Virty 30:1 P

  Offices of Bingham & Bingham, Troy, New York, April 29, 2081

  Whoa, there! What was that? Must be a misprint. Who in the blue hell could be getting such lousy odds of thirty-to-one against—as the plaintiff?

  Louie "the Linchpin" Bingham flicked a muscle in his left cheek to scroll back the lines in his data goggles. When the light bar settled on the entry for Aaronson et al, he tipped his head to get the drawn-out details.

  Well, that explained it—and the Linch decided he must be getting old to have missed the clues. First, there was the plaintiff's name, which was clearly the first in a long alphabetized list. Second, that telltale "etal," from the old legal term et alia, meaning "and others." So Louie should have guessed that Aaronson was a major class action. Those were becoming increasingly dicey with the juries.

  Especially this class action.

  "Virty" was the abbreviated listing for Virtuality, Inc., the international data and entertainment cyber-simulation conglomerate. The merits of the case against them, as Louis read it, looked pretty shaky. "Aaronson etal" represented 2,254,361 plaintiffs who were either direct customers of Virtuality, Inc., or survivors and guardians suing on their behalf. The customers, all brain-damaged in the March 21 solar flare, now claimed damages based on Virtuality, Inc.'s alleged negligence in routing "signals intended for electro-organic interface" through "circuits exposed to extraterrestrial influences, including electromagnetic interference from all sources." The short form was, the company shouldn't have used the commercial phone beams in connecting with its customers. Or, using the beams, it should have installed cutouts—in third-party phone company equipment, and at its own expense—to protect all users against potential solar flares.

  "Right!" chuckled Louie Bingham, who knew something about criminal negligence himself. "Sell me another one."

  On such examination, thirty-to-one started to look generous.

  There was a time, Bingham knew, when civil suits were essentially a private matter. The litigants argued their case in a closed courtroom before a jury, which then awarded damages to one side or the other. Only if the parties were celebrities or otherwise notorious would the case make the media—which was paper back then.

  Yeah, this was all maybe a hundred years ago, when there was such a thing as civic duty. Back then, you could get citizens to serve on a jury, to sit down and listen to both sides, and even, occasionally, to render a sane verdict

  But the State of California, for one, hadn't summoned a jury in a civil case—and damn few for routine criminal procedures—since 2032. By then, most people were ineligible to serve a panel because they either had a record or were some other kind of illegal. Fuck their ever registering to vote or hold a taxpaying job. For a while, the bench heard and decided all the cases, until the backlog started stretching into the century after the next one. Then the Judges Revolt of 2042 put an end to tort cases entirely—but not to the purely human desire to get some of your own back against somebody who done you wrong.

  So, in the spirit of fun and games, the California state legislature passed the Adjudication by Referee and Referendum Act of 2044. Essentially it said that anyone who wanted damages against another party just had to get up a petition—and there were plenty of professional signatories who for a fee would facilitate the process—and submit it to the State Judiciary Committee. If the committee validated your petition, they scheduled your case, along with four others at a whack, for some future issue of the weekly Lotto tickets. Then anyone who played could punch either your number or your opponent's, as often as they bought a ticket. All decisions of the Court of Popular Appeal were final.

  Well, it wasn't ten minutes before every other state with an overworked civil bench was passing similar legislation. The genius of it was that every state, and most counties and municipalities, too, had their own lottery games going by then. In short order the federal bench adopted the system for most of its cases, both criminal and civil.

  It wasn't twenty minutes after that before Legal Futures, Inc., set up shop to assign odds and take side bets on all these cases. Well, come to think of it, LFI wasn't the first or the only wagering system to grow up around the Court of Popular Appeal. It was just the last one left standing after the successive waves of scandal and consolidation. By now, it was a national system and published a daily roster of current cases, The Legal Eye, for the convenience of all players.

  Most of them were lawyers, who made their living by picking winners and placing bets for the public. For example, fourteen local mutual funds, twenty-six chartered consortia and investment groups, and about a thousand individuals with money to spread around all had accounts with Bingham & Bingham. Louie's firm then managed their action and issued them quarterly statements of profit and loss.

  It was about all a practicing lawyer had going these days, other than writing up one-paragraph descriptions of the merits—they used to be called "briefs," and now they certainly were—for clients entering litigation, corralling the petition signatures, and submitting the case to the Judiciary Committee. For all this work, Bingham could charge his clients no more than the going rate ofjust five hundred neu.

  So, because the rules of ethics prohibited an attorney from wagering on the briefs he wrote—apparently it was some kind of conflict of interest to know the merits of a particular case through firsthand acquaintance with it—damn few of the biggest firms actually handled private cases. There was just too much money in the other action.

  So, what was good this morning, other than his laugh over that piece-of-shit Aaronson?

  Carlin etal v TranShm looked like another class action, and therefore practically untouchable, until you sat down to read it. The etal in this case was limited, with only twenty-three names in the plaintiff box. The merits were a little less sweeping than in Aaronson, too. The plaintiffs claimed that inadequate spacesuit design exposed them to high doses of ionizing radiation. The brief did not mention the March 21 solar flare directly, although it was there to be presumed. Carlin etal suggested that the persistence of "cosmic radiation," which unlike the flare was a wholly predictable phenomenon, would have led a prudent resort manager to design the suits with greater levels of radiation shielding.

  It was a weak argument, of course, because cosmic rays were not generally regarded as lethal under normal conditions of exposure. Still, anything having to do with radiation was a spark plug with the know-nothing public. So why, then, was this case getting such a pessimistic nine-to-four?

  Well, for one thing, it was a mixed bag of plaintiffs. Most of them seemed to be customers of the Tranquility Shores, Inc., resort, but one was actually, on close reading, the tour guide who conducted their Moon Walk and thus a paid employee of the defendant. Putting in a ringer like that—someone who should have known the risks the company was taking and was presumed to be making her own free choice about accepting them—well, that just cut the case apart. But maybe not enough to damage it with the Court of Public Appeal. Juries almost never read the brief, that was rule one. And if they did, they wouldn't understand it: rule two.

  The other thing was the current status of the plaintiffs. All of them—with the possible exception of the tour guide—were reasonably wealthy, being able to afford a royal-gut vacation on the Moon. Half of them were also dead of radiation poisoning by now. That meant the beneficiaries of the case w
ould likely be rich inheritors. Public sympathy just didn't go that far with fattening the already fat cats.

  Nine-to-four against was a pretty fair reading of the outcome.

  The other fallout from that solar flare looked more promising.

  Morrissey Bio Designs had an excellent, if unexciting, case against the Whitney Center catapult. By the time Morrissey's payload had gone into the tube, and was subsequently destroyed due to magnetic instability, NASA had given the launch operations office fair warning of the flare's effects. That was a matter of record. The operators took a calculated risk and lost it. Whitney Center's countering claim of force majeure just didn't wash, not when NASA had a public notice out on the boards like that.

  So this case should be open and shut. Morrissey's odds were compounded by the fact that, these days, suing the government—or even quasi-governmental agencies like the catapult—was easier than hooking fish in the bathtub. The only thing keeping the odds from going higher was the pity factor: people just might feel a little silly awarding two million in contract damages to a freight customer when the catapult carrier had lost seventeen billion in the same accident. Still, there was no accounting for the stupidity of the playing public.

  Louie the Linchpin had a rule against touching sure things. No room for real action.

  Qiang was another untouchable, from Bingham's point of view. The merits were just too sound. Winston Qiang-Phillips wasn't bringing suit for his neurological damage, although there was evidence of it, all right, and that played to the pity factor, too. Instead, he was contesting the decision of the Hong Kong Two Exchange to put the market back ten hours after the disruption in communications. This, Qiang-Phillips claimed, had damaged his business prospects by erasing trading positions he had garnered during that interval.

  Now usually the minutiae of stock trading and arbitrage were lost on the common public. People tended to dismiss both sides in the case as crooks and scoundrels. But look where Qiang was playing! On the California roster, instead of nationally. There that Chinese name of his was sure to catch the attention of the state's Asian majority. And Chinese players were notoriously attracted to affairs of business. They were sure to study the merits, something juror-players never did, and would probably buy extra tickets just to voice their opinion on the case.