“Fine.” But he added in a sub-voice, “I don’t like this, Captain.”
“We’ll talk later.” Garrett asked the tourists, “Where did you get that, anyway?”
“A friend on Cuba.”
Garrett relaxed; he’d feared a secret greenhouse. “Don’t do this again.”
So, he mused later in his office, the matter had been resolved. He wasn’t at all confident it’d stay that way. Even with those two gone, the next bunch might have crack or something. In his limited understanding, some of the new drugs weren’t physically addictive, but they were just as illegal.
Come to think of it, he hadn’t yet caught anyone using tobacco. Since Castor was a workplace, it was illegal to smoke within a hundred feet of the station under American law. But Garrett was already breaking any number of workplace rules, some of which were physically impossible to obey here. And he’d not registered Zephyr, he didn’t carry all the required insurance, he was operating a de facto hotel without a license, and he was suspicious of the corporate structure tangled in Martin’s records. He was pacing, hands behind his back, when Phillip and Tess arrived for a meeting.
Garrett said to Tess, “You’ve got Zephyr listening, right? Good.” He went on. “I’d like to bring Martin in on this, but he’s busy, and it’s not something to discuss over a public channel. We just had drug users on the station. The larger problem is, I don’t think we could obey US law if we wanted to.” He explained the situation.
“That’s stupid,” said Tess. “We don’t have to follow foreign laws, except maybe Cuba’s.”
“Foreign.” Garrett pondered the word. “We’re American. We could be jailed if we disobey.”
“No way. Nobody could arrest us while we’re offshore.”
Phillip broke in. “I am fairly sure they could. The question is whether they would.”
Garrett said, “We can keep this incident quiet, but it’s sure to happen again. I’d like your thoughts on what to do.”
Phillip said, “You were the one who refused even a common-sense set of moral laws.”
“No, I agreed to the common-sense ones—” Garrett stopped himself from getting into that argument again. “Look, I still have no police force.”
“Why don’t you use your robot to watch visitors for trouble?”
An answer came from a nearby computer and from Tess. “No.”
“Bah. If the robot won’t enforce the law, then, and we humans can’t, what does that leave? Anarchy?”
“It’s not that we can’t enforce any law at all,” said Garrett. “It’s that we don’t have the resources or the authority to do more than boot people out. And we’re breaking US law, like it or not.”
Phillip sat and thought. “What if we stopped being citizens?”
Tess said, “Huh?”
“If I and Captain Fox and Martin were to rid ourselves of the whole mess by renouncing our citizenship—”
“Absolutely not!” said Garrett. “What are you thinking — that I should give up what I am because it’s too annoying to comply with the rules my elected government has imposed?”
“All right, Captain. Where shall we put the differently-abled car parking spaces? How about the passenger-only elevator? We need to monitor our employees’ diet and exercise habits; how shall we do that? Are we spending the required share of our profits on minority-owned businesses within a ten-mile radius of the workplace? And we do need to get the robot busy monitoring all residents’ social media posts for hate speech such as positive references to the Confederate States of America.”
“We’ll get exceptions for those things. I’m saying—”
Phillip said, “You’d rather be a criminal and a weasel than say, as the girl has put it, that these rules are stupid?”
Garrett faced Phillip down. “What you’re proposing disgusts me. I’m not here to play at being a rebel. I’m here to make an honest living, and I’ll figure out a way to do that.”
“Fine highfalutin theory, Captain. To focus on the drug problem alone, how do we prevent people from getting high?”
“We can’t. We can only say it’s not allowed here, and if we catch you we’ll throw you off. Not literally.”
Tess looked puzzled. “But we can’t let people just do what they want. We have to make sure they stay within the rules in advance, right? But then, I don’t want us to be in everyone’s faces and ordering them around. Gah, I don’t know! Why do we have to decide this at all?”
Garrett sighed. “I suspect that if we don’t find a reasonable answer, others will answer for us. Thanks for your input, everyone. It’s a lot to think about.”
Garrett found Tess among the Pilgrims, feeding fish. “Come with me tonight to the Hidden Pirate Cave.”
Tess sputtered, “I, uh, all right! Sure!”
Hidden Pirate Cave was the leveled-up version of the dinky plastic dome Tess had installed underwater. This version was anchored to the seabed and to the main platform. Garrett and Tess dived at sunset when things were getting quiet. By now Garrett was good enough to wear diving gear as easily as a shirt and wise enough to know his limits. He swam slowly with Tess, chatting along the way. “How is Squeaky?”
“Oh, the little bot? We’ve gotten some use out of her, inspecting that broken cage we had yesterday. If my mad science department had the equipment we’d do even cooler stuff.”
Garrett was quiet as they entered the depths. The white geodesic dome was only about twelve meters down, but it felt like another world. When his head reached the airspace inside the dome, there was no sound but the water sloshing beneath the trapped air.
He cranked the lighting system with Tess and they sprawled on the broad ledge that gave the inverted bowl a partial floor. Tess pulled out towels and some pretzels and bottled water. Garrett cranked more charge into the lights and sat there, drying off, knowing he couldn’t stay long.
Tess said, “What if we gave ourselves nitrogen-scrubbers in the blood, so we could stay longer at this pressure?”
“I guess it’ll be possible someday. That and some kind of hybrid human/crocodile hemoglobin for breath-holding.” Diving was limited more by physiology than by technology; stuffing more air into a tank wouldn’t help if your body chemistry couldn’t handle it. Divers had run up against basic physical limitations of their own bodies, and the only way to improve any further was to upgrade themselves.
“Someday,” said Tess with a sigh. “But when? And who’s gonna do it?”
“Maybe us.” Garrett eyed her, trying to relax but failing. “Are we actually private down here? Has nobody got access to us — Zephyr included?”
She wasn’t wearing her headset. “They don’t. We’re private.”
“Good. I’ve been wanting a little time away from everyone.”
Tess twisted the towel in her hands. “Oh?”
Garrett watched the light ripple over the water. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but — what’s going on between you and Zephyr?”
“I don’t know what you mean.” Garrett looked at her until she gave in. “We took some intelligence tests. I’m smart. Zephyr is pretty bright. We are a genius.”
“When you work with him, you mean.”
“It’s more than that. We’re almost always together. We almost share thoughts and memories. I’ve told him things.”
“Even…?”
“The incident with the priest, yeah. We have a kind of friendship going that I’m not sure is even possible between humans.”
Garrett groused, “I bet there are things he can’t do for you.”