Titan

28 December 2095: Breakfast

“So how serious are you about this bodyguard of yours?” Holly asked her sister.

The two women were sitting in Holly’s kitchen. She had invited Pancho for breakfast and a one-on-one talk. There were no eggs in the habitat, no chickens. Most of the protein came from aquaculture fish, frogs or shellfish, or from the genetically engineered protein the inhabitants of Goddard fondly called “McGlop.” Holly had microwaved a plate of the processed protein for them and added sliced fruits from the habitat’s orchards.

Pancho shrugged her slim shoulders. “We been livin’ together for a few months now. We get along real well.”

“In bed?”

“That’s none of your business, girl,” Pancho said. But she grinned widely as she said it.

Holly grew more serious. “You know I’m in charge of human resources here.”

“Very responsible position.”

“If you and Jake are going to apply for permanent residency, I’ve got to know as soon as possible.”

“Permanent residency?” Pancho’s face clearly showed surprise. “I hadn’t even thought about that.”

“You mean you just came out here to visit me?” Holly realized that she was surprised, too.

“Yep. I told you that, didn’t I?”

“You did. But I thought—”

“You thought I was bullshitting you?”

“Well …” Holly felt her cheeks burning. “Yeah, I guess I did. A little.”

Pancho glanced down at the protein slices on her plate. “I dunno, maybe I was. A little. Truth is, I don’t know what I want to do.”

“Malcolm’s afraid you’ll become a citizen and then run for his job.”

“Me? Hell no! I’ve had enough sittin’ behind a desk. I’ve made all the executive decisions I’m ever gonna make. Never again!”

She said it with such fervor that Holly wondered what was behind her sister’s outburst.

“Anyway,” Pancho went on, “I want you to get to know Jake. And I want to see more of this guy of yours.”

“Raoul?”

“Yeah, Raoul. Sounds like a flamenco dancer.”

Holly smiled. “He’s an engineer. From New Jersey.”

“Raoul,” Pancho repeated. “He looks like a real downer, you ask me.”

“I didn’t ask,” Holly said pointedly. “And he’s not a downer. He’s just—well, Raoul wasn’t one of our original people. He was an engineer at the Jupiter station. He came aboard when he had an accident while we were refueling at Jupiter on the way out here. Applied for citizenship after … after the trouble we had with those religious fanatics. They beat him up, too.”

“And he decided to stay here?”

“I think it’s because of me,” Holly said.

“Well, well.”

Growing somber, Holly confessed, “Thing is, Panch, he’s given up his chance to go back home because of me. That’s a load.”

“You like him?”

Holly nodded, a little uncertainly.

“You get along well?”

“Oh, yeah, sure.”

“In bed?”

Her chin went up. “Like you said, that’s none of your business.”

“But you’ve got no complaints.”

A hint of a smile sneaked across Holly’s face. “No complaints.”

“So what’s the problem?”

“I think that sooner or later he’s going to want to go home.”

“To New Jersey?”

“It’s his home. His family, his friends, they’re all there. He misses them. He was at Jupiter station doing his two years of mandatory public service.”

“So you’re scared of him dumping you.”

“And that makes it tough to make a real commitment.”

“Which increases the chances of him dumping you.”

“Catch twenty-two,” said Holly unhappily.

“You could go back Earthside with him, you know.”

Holly’s eyes went wide. “And leave Goddard? I couldn’t do that, Panch. I’m somebody here. All my friends are here.”

“And all your family, too,” Pancho said gently. “Even though I’m not sure how long I’ll stay.”

“This is a good place, Panch,” Holly said earnestly. “It’s got everything a person could want.”

“Maybe,” Pancho said, a slight hint of wistfulness in her voice. “It’s a big solar system, though. Lots of places. They’ve rebuilt the Ceres habitat. Enlarging it, even. And they’re finding more on Mars every day, just about.”

Holly took a good long look at her sister as Pancho rambled on about the solar power stations being built on Mercury and the new cities being dug into the Moon’s battered regolith. She realized that Pancho had a wanderlust, a longing to see new places, to travel across the breadth of the solar system. That’s what’s brought her here to Saturn, Holly realized. She thinks it’s to visit me but it’s really that wanderlust of hers.

Holly found that she felt almost relieved about it.

Oswaldo Yañez felt almost delighted that the poor man had mashed his thumb so badly. His hours of duty at the habitat’s hospital were almost always so boringly quiet that he welcomed an opportunity to actually practice medicine. The habitat’s population was mostly young; even most of those whose calendar age was climbing up there took rejuvenation therapies that kept their bodies youthful.

Yañez was considering rejuve therapy for himself, although he had told no one about it yet, not even his wife of thirty-two years. He was still vigorous, his dark hair still thick and luxuriant, but he had added nearly ten kilos to his weight since joining this habitat and he worried about that. Too much easy living, he knew, but his determination to exercise and go on a diet always melted away in the presence of his wife’s cooking.

As he cleaned away the blood, he saw the technician’s thumb wasn’t all that badly mangled.

“I was working on the main water pump,” the younger man explained, “down in the underground. My power wrench went dead, poof! just like that. When I tried to figure out what was wrong with it, the damned thing snapped on again. Whacked my thumb real hard.”

“It’s not serious,” Yañez assured him. “I’m going to extract some stem cells from your bone marrow, culture them and then inject them back into you to rebuild the damaged tissue. You’ll be fine in a week or less.”

The technician nodded, but kept on muttering about his power wrench. “Shouldn’ta crapped out on me like that,” he insisted. “It was like it was tryin’ to mangle me, you know?”

Vernon Donkman frowned at his desktop screen. This shouldn’t be happening, he told himself.

Donkman was the chief financial officer of Goddard, a position that sounded impressive to the uninformed until they learned that he was the only financial officer in the habitat. Still, his was a very responsible position, despite the fact that virtually every financial transaction among the habitat’s citizens was done electronically. The bank’s computer handled all financial links with Earth and the other human settlements throughout the solar system, as well.

The frown that etched Donkman’s lean, almost gaunt face was engendered by the fact that the bank’s central accounting system showed an anomaly. The master account didn’t balance! It was off by only a few hundred credits, but it should not be off at all. Not by a single penny, Donkman told himself sternly.

The problem was easy enough to fix, he knew. Simply liquidate the unbalanced amount from the habitat’s internal account. That would balance the books. But the thought irked Donkman mightily. Accounts should balance without jiggering. It was his insistence on such purity that got him exiled from Amsterdam in the first place. Someone high up in the hierarchy of the Holy Disciples had been bleeding off cash from the church’s banking system. Donkman had tried to track down the embezzler and found himself accused of the crime and exiled to habitat Goddard.

The memory of that injustice rankled him, but this tiny misbalance in the habitat’s account aggravated him even more. The amount involved was too small for anyone to deliberately have stolen it. It was a mistake, somewhere in the accounting system, a simple mistake.

But try as he might, Donkman could not find where the mistake originated. At last his wristwatch alarm buzzed. With a reluctant sigh, Donkman pushed himself up from his desk and headed for the cosmetics clinic. Everyone was getting enzyme injections to turn their skin golden tan. He didn’t want to be the only one among his acquaintances to look like a palefaced mouth breather.