A12 Who Can Own the Stars?

by Mackey Chandler

  “As it happens, I still have my Norwegian documents,” Nathan said. “Mars has never created passports or much of the normal bureaucratic paraphernalia of nations.”

  “There you go,” Heather said. “The clock is ticking.”

  “Thank you. You do have a calm clarity of vision. I’ll take your advice.”

  “How gratifying,” Heather said and disconnected.

  Isn’t that going to surprise the Martians? Heather thought with a small smile.

  * * *

  “Ms. Lewis, I find myself deeply in debt to you and to your friend, Irwin Hall,” Joel Durand said. Without his warning we would not have investigated Henri Colombe until a huge public scandal broke out, damaging to my administration and of no benefit to our nation. He indicated he did not have the resources to investigate this matter to the point he felt safe to speak to us, and you enlisted your assets to do a deeper investigation. The information about the Martians may not be as immediate in its usefulness, but we are holding it close and will undoubtedly benefit from knowing their true motives. My thanks and my wife sends her thanks too.”

  April looked irritated. “So he did make a report? Good. Last I spoke to him he did not fully accept my findings regarding the Martians. He made fun of it and it resulted in quite the rift between us. I haven’t spoken to him since.”

  Joel looked like a puppy kicked. “It is always hurtful to see friends argue. I do note you said you have not spoken to him, not the reverse. He did not speak ill of you, nor indicate there was any problem at all. Rather than let this become a permanent condition, I’d encourage you to speak to others, who like us, value both of you. As I recall you have business interests that touch each other. Think well how that works out.

  “I have to contact him about some of the fall-out from forcing Monsieur Colombe to retire. I shall make him aware I am aware you have had a dispute. Long experience tells me there is no benefit to keeping such things secret in silence. Soon you are making lists of who you can invite to dinner without offending others and the cross-checking gets to be entirely too complex.”

  “Thank you, Joel, give my regards to Mylène,” April said, not addressing the other issue at all. He terminated looking unhappy.

  Joel called Irwin and explained the finding of their internal audit and the sudden decision of the head of the national bank to retire. He also indicated he would not place himself between them in any dispute between Irwin and April.

  “You are magnanimous to allow Colombe to retire with his pension and status left intact,” Irwin decided.

  “On the contrary, we are self-serving not to destroy him publicly, because it would create the very scandal we wish to avoid. The public could never separate us from our high official, even if we are the party bringing a complaint. I have no doubt he’s been involved in other crooked schemes, and in protecting ourselves we’ve guaranteed those other wrongs will probably never come to light. I don’t doubt at all he has other ill-gotten gains hidden away here and there untouched.”

  “Yes, well that reminds me. I have a standard bar held on deposit for a property in his name. I assume he’s not going to follow through now on his plan to remove himself from your legal jurisdiction. How should I go about returning it?” Irwin asked.

  Joel looked amused.

  “That’s quite unconnected with anything we are doing,” Joel assured him. Madame Colombe decided to sell her refinery and consolidate her other businesses and properties. It’s up to the Swiss and a few other nations to assess all the requirements of her divestitures. I don’t see any benefit at all to encouraging them to take a closer than normal look at their process. I do know nothing in the audit of the French bank found any of our bullion missing.

  “If Colombe defaults on his purchase then I’d assume you will retain his good-faith deposit towards his purchase. I sincerely doubt he will contest that or even have reason to be seen communicating with you about it. Such things happen,” he said with a shrug.

  “I see,” Irwin said. “Well, do inform me if that situation changes.”

  “I will, but I am rather hoping for the whole thing to quietly go away, and the sooner the better. Thank you again,” Joel said and disconnected.

  * * *

  “You’re Lindsey Pennington, aren’t you?”

  Lindsey looked up from her lunch. The woman leaning on the table across from her was an Earthie. She could tell because her face had those little tells of a crease in the outside corner of her eyes and she still retained some color from the sun. It wasn’t like natural skin tones, it was subtly uneven on the backs of her hands and her nose and cheeks. She was only in her early thirties but the signs of aging were already started.

  “Yes, I am, but I don’t know you.”

  That produced a rueful smile on the woman’s face. That she imagined herself better known than Lindsey had just demonstrated.

  “I’m Maya Stone. I do travel and human-interest stories for the Atlanta Authority.”

  “Georgia?” Lindsey asked. “Is it a gossip board or a news format?”

  “Local and neighborhood news, but we try to cover national and international news enough from the services to be a one-stop with your morning coffee site.”

  “So are you here for the travel or the human-interest side of things?” Lindsey asked, sipping her tea.

  “I came up to do a story on New Las Vegas and saw you mentioned in another webcast I follow. When I checked I was surprised to find the shuttle from New Las Vegas to Home is much cheaper than lifting from Earth, so I decided to come, expand my story to include Home, and see if I could interview you.”

  “Of course, it takes much more energy to get to LEO than past the moon.”

  The woman nodded but didn’t seem interested in the why of it.

  Something didn’t add up in Lindsey’s mind. Why hadn’t this woman called? Her com number was public. It felt like an ambush. Why would the woman feel she had to approach Lindsey in a public place instead of just asking for an interview? Some of the stories Sylvia related about her customers getting all weird on her came to mind. Some of the rich and famous felt entitled beyond the price of her art thinking they were owed more than just a carved slab. Lindsey took those stories to heart.

  “Are you a fan of my art?” Lindsey asked.

  “I didn’t know you were an artist until I looked up what I could find on you. There isn’t as much online of your work as I’d have expected. I’m surprised you don’t market yourself more aggressively. You don’t even have a store where your original art can be purchased. Just prints and most of those are marked sold out,” Maya said.

  Lindsey scrunched her eyebrows together reviewing what the woman said.

  “Why would I be mentioned in a webcast if not for my art? I live a very quiet life. I don’t get involved with politics other than when it is a theme in my images, I haven’t even been dating anybody to be mentioned in the local gossip sites. I don’t go to fancy clubs or private party rooms.”

  “You don’t subscribe to a clip and search service to track any mention of you?”

  Lindsey got an amused smile. “No, do you?”

  “Of course. In my profession being know to the public is everything,” Maya said. “How often other information professionals mention me and how they regard my work will pretty much determine my public stature.”

  “I already know the professional and scholarly critics think my art is childish, garish, and lacking in sophistication and depth. It’s regarded as dark and too space-centric.”

  “You don’t seem very upset at that,” Maya said, it had the inflection of a question.

  “I can sell every drawing I make and no matter how I keep increasing the price of them I still sell every one of them I want to. Most of the original drawings I keep unless somebody insists that they just have to own the original by waving a ridiculous amount of money at me. As you noticed, the prints sell out an edition of a hundred pretty easily. Why should I care what the critics say? My fr
iend Ben Patsitsas has the same thing with his mystery novels. The people who have appointed themselves arbiters of what is worthy consider being popular as evidence his work is inferior the same as mine. It’s the only way they can feel superior I suppose, to insult the common people’s taste. We don’t need any gatekeepers and laugh all the way to the bank.”

  “What are you going to do if your market becomes saturated and declines?” Maya wondered. “You are what? Seventeen? Eighteen? What will you do when you are thirty?”

  “Most of my work sells to a market of about seven thousand people on the habitats and the Moon,” Lindsey explained. “The people on New Las Vegas, the Turnip, and even on ISSII can find it a little easier. I bet you never saw any of my work at home. Most people have to know how to bypass the net censors to even see my stuff. Very few people who buy my work on Earth post pix of it, because it’s spacer art and disapproved. If I wanted, I could put up a server in a free country like Switzerland and sell to a lot more Earthies. It’s pretty hard to saturate a market of nine billion.

  “The thing is, I haven’t even started to explore other art. I do know fashion design but just play at that. The lady I live with does carved glass panels and I’m still learning how to do those and occasionally contributing new ideas in that media. I haven’t tried ceramics or oil painting, photography, or jewelry making. There’s no end of other things to do. Spacers appreciate thoughtful original designs and they can afford to pay for it. You have to be plain lazy or stupid not to be able to make a good living on Home.”

  “Do you support your younger brother then?” Maya asked.

  That jolted Lindsey back to reality. She’d dropped into a friendly chat mode too easily and hadn’t insisted on knowing Maya’s intent. She still hadn’t invited Maya to sit down even if she had dropped her guard a little. She wouldn’t now.

  “My brother could support himself,” Lindsey assured her. “But he hasn’t been voted his majority yet. I’m still his guardian. I don’t regard him as a public figure at all so we shouldn’t talk about him. What sort of a webcast would even mention him?”

  “John Foster’s What You Should Know. It’s a very well-regarded show and your mother was invited on as a spox for the Bureau of Labor Allocation,” Maya said. “She only mentioned her children in passing. Although she did make clear she was upset with the way Home beguiled both of you and permits child labor.”

  Lindsey’s face hardened. “I am estranged from my mother. I won’t even take her calls. She should not be speaking of us in public if she doesn’t want the favor returned. Words have meanings. Beguiled suggests Home or Homies have taken advantage of us in some way. The truth is, the only person who has ever tried to steal my work or the money from it was my own mother.

  “Not content to do that with my brother she abused him physically. She struck him so hard she put him in the clinic with a brain bleed. That was what finally pushed my dad over the edge to divorce her. If you want to do some real reporting you can run down that story. The Sovereign of Central doesn’t have to be concerned with offending anyone. She would probably give you an earful about why she kicked my mom out of her kingdom if you ask. She was happy to pay for her shuttle ticket just to be rid of her.

  “Now, you’ve quite ruined a pleasant lunch and I don’t care to talk to you or ever see you again. If you don’t walk away from me, I’ll call security to complain you are harassing me. If you make yourself a pest to too many residents, they will put you on the next shuttle leaving. They aren’t too particular whether it’s somewhere you want to go.”

  “Oh, that’s quite sufficient, Miss Pennington. I won’t bother you again.” She left quickly before Lindsey could say anything more or think about it further.

  She might not know much else about Home, but Maya Stone knew there was no law prohibiting her from recording her interview with Lindsey. The pendant on her necklace was a small but very capable camera. Now using that interview in North America could be problematic. One had to tread carefully criticizing any government employee or official. The agencies tended to take criticism of one of their own as criticism of the agency and disloyalty to the government.

  Simply quoting a foreign national, however, one had a lot more leeway. They were expected to be critical of North America, belligerent even, and one could avoid adding dangerous commentary on the interview. One could even take a critical stance against their statements while at the same time still letting the interview air third party opinions one could never safely say. Her media company and their legal department knew how to play that both ways to provoke people and suck in the best viewer numbers.

  Chapter 12

  Jeff was present but deep into something on his pad.

  April was reading news summaries but couldn’t have repeated a single one.

  “Am I being stupid about Irwin?” she asked Jeff.

  “You are asking me questions about social things?” Jeff said, not looking up.

  “You’re here,” April said.

  “Did Heather tell you that you were stupid?” Jeff asked. “She understands that stuff.”

  “No, but I didn’t ask her.”

  “Did Gunny tell you that you were an idiot?

  “Not outright. He won’t discuss it. He just looks irritated.”

  “Hmm… You talked to Joel, didn’t you? Did he accuse you of stupidity?” Jeff asked.

  “He explicitly said he wouldn’t get in the middle between us,” April admitted.

  Jeff looked up finally.

  “So nobody has told you it’s stupid. Wherever then did you get the idea?”

  “Oh…. crap.”

  “Uh-huh,” Jeff agreed and went back to his pad.

  * * *

  “In real estate, we set price several ways,” Milly said.

  Jeff wasn’t big on picking up social hints, but she looked really tense to him.

  “We can’t compare it to other sales because there are none. Sales of things like entire Greek isles tend to be very expensive but part of the attraction is usually the isolation and lack of a local population. I’ve found a few ghost towns for sale but they tend to go cheap. They are usually unattractive for all the reasons they failed as a town. It’s an oddity to have a property for sale that is an occupied ongoing community.”

  “Don’t get too attached to that model,” Jeff told her. “Camelot was never an ongoing community in the sense of being able to sustain itself. They never tried to grow enough food to feed their population. It never produced any products to export. There was an effort to appear to be a research center, but it was mired in producing endless details about the Moon that weren’t original or groundbreaking. The only thing it produced was propaganda to support the image of the Chinese government.”

  Jeff stopped with an astonished look of realization and his mouth open in surprise.

  “Some sort of epiphany?” Milly asked, hoping it wasn’t a medical condition.

  “I just realized what a sucker I’ve been,” Jeff admitted. “I’ve known everything about Camelot that I just told you. I’ve known it since the first inspection visit I made after the Chinese foisted it off on me. Yet all this time I have been treating Camelot like you just described it – as a normal ongoing little town with the same concerns and values of any community. With people in residence who have a personal interest and commitment to its success and living and working there. I knew that wasn’t true but it didn’t click until I said it out loud to you.”

  “Sometimes, you don’t know you need to rubber ducky something if it appears to be working,” Milly allowed.

  “The Chinese should have just abandoned it and yanked the population back to Earth,” Jeff decided. “But that would have been admitting the whole thing was a farce from the get-go. Instead, they managed to lay guilt on me to take responsibility for it as conquered territory. I’m in awe. I’ve been scammed, but I have to say it was by master scammers.

  “In retrospect, we haven’t done too badly at all. The place ha
s always been a money pit. A show town just like the old Soviets used to set up for foreign visitors. But Annette got it to the point of breaking even. With a little creative bookkeeping, you could argue it has even made a small profit. Now, I realize what a miracle that was since that was never a goal toward which they were working.

  “All those impossible people she has been fighting with over everything were never meant to be real colonists, they are actors. It all makes sense now, the lack of working people and the abundance of administrators. They always were loyal to China and had no interest in Camelot beyond how they would be rewarded when they returned home. No wonder they are all angry. China abandoned them when it didn’t offer them free passage home.”

  “Is this going to change your desire to sell it?” Milly worried.

  “No! The opposite really. It was a lost cause. The only way I’d have made a real success of it would have been to strip the entire population out and send them back to Earth. China would have had a propaganda bonanza if I’d done that. They’d have painted me as the cruel conqueror and heartless landlord, ripping all these people from their homes and turning them into refugees. It wouldn’t surprise me if that’s what they hoped I’d do from the start. I’ll have that much more satisfaction selling it if I confound their plans and turn a profit from it too.”

  “The other way of looking at a property is to consider what it would cost to replace it with new construction,” Milly said. “Usually, you can’t sell used for the price of new unless it has some special amenities like being on a lakefront on Earth or next to the elevators on a hab. Used properties always have systems with enough hours on them they are close to replacement, and things that are obsolete or just out of style.”

  “The construction at Camelot is functional,” Jeff said, “But the standards for a lot of things like electrical outlets and standard heights and sizes of interior trim don’t match anything in use at any of the other moon bases. So if you go to remodel something you have to steal from another unit, do a short run fabrication, or decide to remake the whole thing to Central standards. The entire casino is built to Central standards. At least they use the same standard two-forty-volt power.”