Long way to come, from the Belt, from Company brat in a Company school learning nothing but Company numbers— to figuring Shakespeare and human history. But there it was, the motherlode of all living stuff and the home of humankind back when humans had been as backward as the Downers at Pell—Earth was full of museums, full of artifacts, pots and tombs and old walls graffitied with stuff that was supposed to make you live forever. The Guide said so.
Most of all, it was the motherlode of information, data, old and new. And the right numbers and enough data on the systems that ran the Earth Company and the United Defense Command could make him rich; rich made a man safe, and got him most everything Ben Pollard could put a name to.
Visitors to Stockholm may be impressed with the Maritime Museum or the Zoological Garden in Haga Pork....
A planet that wasn’t a radiation hell was a novelty. Earth with its completely outsized moon was a novelty. And life thriving at the bottom of a gravity well was a radically upside down way of thinking. Life that made good wine and food that wasn’t synth, a surface where plants grew and cycled the O2 and the CO2 on sunlight and dark; the habitats where animals lived. Fascinating concept, non-human things walking around where they decided to walk and looking at you with unguessable thoughts going on behind their eyes. People searched the stars for life, and there was all this life on Earth, that blue-skyers took for granted, and ate, if it didn’t look too much like people.
He wanted to see a zoo. He wanted to look at a cow or a dog and be looked back at, when he’d never expect to see any real thing more exotic than miners on R&R and bugs under a lab scope.
Humans had existed such a scarily short time. With this war going on in the Beyond they seemed scarily fragile.
He wished he could talk to Bird about that. Bird had had a peculiar perspective about things. He wished he could really figure out what Bird had been, or recall half that Bird had said over the years. There was so much blue-sky attitude he still couldn’t get the straight of. Baroque, was the word. Curves all over their thinking, like gold angels on the old buildings, that didn’t have a damn thing to do with useful—
The message dot flashed on the corner of the screen.
God, it could be the interview notice. His fingers were on the Mod and the 1 to Accept Mail and the Dv and the 3 to Print faster than he could think about the motion.
It said:
TECH/2 Benjamin J. Pollard CTVSS/UDC 28 DAT 2 0652JUN14/24 SN P-235-9676/MLR Report to FSO-HQ, 0900h/ref/Simons
Fleet Strategic Operations? Fleet Ops?
What in bloody hell?
MRL. Automatic log. No way to pretend he hadn’t gotten the message. No way to query the CO. Weiter would tell him it was a report-to, he didn’t have the answer, and he’d effin’ better answer it and find out what the Fleet wanted with a UDC lad, hadn’t he?
It wasn’t an interview. God, no. Fleet Strategic Operations didn’t need a UDC programmer tech/2 with a Priority 10 for economic/ and strategic/supply modeling. Did they?
Shit, no—the damn tight-fisted legislature insisted on trying to interface the UDC EIDAT with the Heel’s Staatentek system through the EC security screen, that was what. The Fleet Staatentek system tried to phone the UDCs EIDAT 4005 to ask for available assignees, and the 4005, behind the EC’s security cloak, spat up a UDC Priority One assignee for a Fleet data entry post—
But you couldn’t ignore it. You didn’t want to face the interviews with an interservice screw-up or a Disciplinary in your record. Damn the thing!
No second cup of coffee. He drank the half he had left while his fingers tapped up the station map and asked it where in hell FSO-HQ was on the trans system from his apartment in TI 12 for a 0930h appointment.
9:15 2 green to 14, blue to 5-99: pass required for entry.
Hell and gone from TI, and it was already 9 o’clock. Ten effin’ minutes to shave, dress and find his copy of his rating, which clearly said UDC Priority Technical/2, before the
Fleet grabbed him and stuck him at Mars Base doing data entry in Supply.
He burned the beard off, pulled on his dress blues: never wear fatigues to an interservice glitch-up. He had to talk to officers, no question, before this one was straightened out, maybe all the way up the effin’ C/O/C in the UDC and the Fleet. It could be a long day.
Envelope from UDC Technical at Geneva in the briefcase, where it belonged. He put it in his breast pocket.
Never a friggin’ situation without a last friggin’ minute complication. God, he didn’t know why things like this happened to him. His interview appointment could come through at any hour, he didn’t want Meeker to grab the first slot—first effin’ thing he was going to do if they gave him Geneva was put the shove on that damned EC Software.
He checked his watch. 0908. Five minutes to walk to the trans. Orders in his pocket. Yes. And out the door.
Trans was packed. A whole wide-eyed batch of shiny new C-l’s with their entry tags and their hand-baggage occupied all the seats, and Ben clung with an elbow about a pole and punched buttons on the hand reader, running down the applicable rules on interservice transfer apps.
Wasn’t any reason to sweat it. Couldn’t be. Weiter’d shoved him through three levels in a year.... He was Weiter’s fair-haired baby, best Weiter had ever had in the department. Him and Meeker, neck and neck all the way. No way Weiter wouldn’t go up the chain for him.
Green 14. He made the transfer and lost the C-l’s—thank God. He got a seat, sat down and read.
Right of appeal. Ref: Administrative Appeal, Sec. 14.... Through chain of command in service of origin.
In service of origin. Which meant the United Defense Command, which wasn’t, never mind Fleet Captain Conrad
Mazian’s performance at the UN, going to let the Fleet get its hands on whatever it wanted.
Blue line now. Institution blue. The walls outside the spex in me doors grew skuzzier and skuzzier and the air that sucked in when the doors opened was cold and smelled of oil.
Descent into hell, Ben thought. Like R2 all over again. He sat in his dress uniform and watched the scenery, dark tunnel and grim flashes of gray-blue panels and white station numbers as the trans shot past stops without a call punched. Thump of the section seals. He could almost smell helldeck, all but hear the clash of metal and the hard raucous beat of the music echoing down the deck. He smelled the peculiar taint of cold machinery and kept having this most damnable feeling of—
belonging in the dark side, living on the cheap, getting by, scamming the Company cops and knowing he could always slip through the system, knowing far more about the company computers and access numbers than the Company thought he’d learned. Him and Bud. —And Sal Aboujib.
Damn.
Helldeck wasn’t a place you’d miss. He was someone else now. Spiff uniform and a tech/2’s collar phi. Clean fingers—in all senses. He didn’t do a thing illegitimate with the computers he worked with. He didn’t know anybody who did, no, sir, didn’t even dream about that h-word near the Defense Command computers.
He’d got away with it. Was still getting away with it. He’d dumped the card on R2, and it had never surfaced; he’d gotten his security clearance. He’d gotten his rank. Nobody was going to screw that up. Nobody could have found anything to screw him now...
The sign outside the doors said:
SECURITY AREA.
RESTRICTED.
SHOW PASS.
He got up and got out in a beige, plain hallway, warmer here, thank God, it wasn’t going to freeze his ass off or have him shaking when he was talking to the desk. He straightened his coat, clipped his fancy-tech reader onto his belt and walked up to the only door available, under a security array that was probably reading his respiration rate and taking notes.