“I don’t think you can do science without data. I do have an intuition, though, or an optimistic delusion.” I sat down on the edge of the tank. “Do you know the story of the lucky chicken?”
“Tell me.”
“Well, suppose you had a flat of fertilized chicken eggs—that’s one hundred and forty-four—and you dropped the flat from waist height or shoulder height. Some eggs would break. Discard them and do it again, and again, until finally you have just one egg.”
“The lucky egg.”
“You’re getting it. You hatch it and collect its fertilized eggs—”
“Unless it’s a rooster.”
“Then you have to start over, I guess. But you do the same thing, dropping them over and over until one survives. Then you wait for it to mature and collect its eggs. And again and again.”
“I see,” he said.
“Eventually, you will produce the luckiest chicken in the world. The version I heard, the benefactor was the pope. He put the chicken in a fancy papal chicken basket, and it never left his side. So nothing bad ever happened to him.”
“This is not the last pope we’re talking about, then.”
“Not a real pope. Me, actually. I’m the lucky chicken.”
“They dropped your mother from a great height?”
He was so much like Paul I could smack him. “Not that I know of. But ever since I got to Mars, I’ve had the most incredible luck. All ‘The Mars Girl’ crap. All kinds of trouble, and I always seem to come out on top. So maybe my main qualification for this job is as a talisman. Stay close to me, the way the pope stayed close to his lucky chicken.”
He was nodding, looking serious. “You do believe in luck?”
“Well, at some level I suppose I do. Not in lucky charms, talismans. But just as an observation, sure. Some people seem to be lucky all the time, while others seem to be born losers.”
“That’s true enough. Something that statistics would predict.”
“I suppose you could pretend to be scientific, and put the whole population on a bell curve, just like you would for height or weight. Normal people bulking up in the middle, the unlucky ones off to the left, the luckiest trailing off on the right.”
“Ah ha!” He grinned and rubbed his beard. “There’s your fallacy. You can only do it with dead people.”
“What? Dead people have all run out of luck.”
“No, I mean, all you can say of someone is after the fact: ‘he was lucky all his life’ or ‘she was unlucky’—but a living, breathing person always has tomorrow to worry about. You could be the luckiest person in the world, in two worlds, in the whole universe. But some tomorrow, like the day you meet the Others, boom. Your ‘luck’ runs out, like a gambler’s winning streak. And in that particular case, so does everybody else’s.”
“Are you always such an optimist?”
He picked up his hydrator, and we moved on to the next patch. “By Earth standards, America anyhow, I really am an optimist. You can define that as ‘anyone who isn’t suicidally depressed.’ There may be free energy, but that doesn’t translate into universal prosperity. Most people work at unsatisfying jobs with ambiguous or worthless goals and low pay, and anyhow, they’re just marking time until the end of the world. Namir and Elza and I, like you guys, are in the unique position of being able to do something about it.”
I was still living in a kind of double-vision world, the sanitized version that was broadcast (and which I sort of believed for years) versus the grim reality that was in Namir’s newspaper. And America was far from being the worst off. The front-page picture in the last paper showed the Ganges, a clot of corpses from shore to shore. A block-wide funeral pyre in Kuala Lumpur, within sight of the proud old Twin Towers.
These were beets, four small plants per net bag, 50 ccs water each. I wouldn’t touch beets as a girl, but in Mars I came to love them. Red planet and all. I mentioned that to Dustin.
He laughed. “I grew up in a vegetarian family. Beets were the closest thing I had to meat until I got off the commune.”
“Bothers you to go back to veggies?”
“No, I just eat to fuel up. Pseudo-hot dogs with fake mustard, yum. Elza’s about the same. Namir might go crazy, though.”
“He likes his meat?”
“Fish, actually. He doesn’t like to be far from the sea.”
“He better take a good last look.”
“On Mars, you had actual fish.”
We said “in Mars,” usually. “A pool of tilapia.” They lived on plant waste.
“He was hoping.”
“Guess we’re not a big enough biome. It was marginal on Mars, a luxury, and we didn’t have to deal with water at zero gee.” I clicked on the notebook. “Twenty kilos of dried fish in the storeroom.” The storeroom was already in place on the iceberg. It had five hundred kilos of luxury food. Including fifty liters of two- hundred-proof alcohol, more than enough for each of us to have two drinks a day.
“He can do something with dried fish, Spanish. Some kind of fritters.”
His smile was interesting. “You really like him. I mean, apart from…”
“There’s no ‘apart from,’ but yes. We’re closer than I ever was with any of my natural family.”
I wasn’t sure how to interpret that. I wanted prurient details. “You knew Elza first, though.”
“By a few weeks, maybe a month. By then it was obviously a package deal or no deal.
“I’d heard of Namir professionally, and was curious anyhow. We first met without her, very American, shooting pool.”
“You beat the pants off him.”
“Not a chance. He’s a shark. Shows no mercy.”
“You knew about him and Gehenna.”
“In what way?” he said without inflection.
“That he missed the first part, and so survived the second.”
“Oh, sure. He was about the highest-ranking officer of the Mossad in Israel, certainly in Tel Aviv, who survived.”
That was interesting. “I wonder why he didn’t press his advantage with that.”
“How so?”
“He’s still with the UN, isn’t he? If he’d stayed in Israel—”
He laughed. “Smartest thing he ever did was go back to New York. Lots of ruthless people jockeying for position in the Mossad, with three-quarters of them suddenly gone. His turf in New York was safe. Besides, it’s the place he loves best.”
We moved on to the delicate celery plants. “There’s an odd chain of circumstance that winds up putting the three of us here. As if we’re collectively a lucky chicken—or an unlucky one.”
“What makes you say that?”
“Like this… the Corporation wound up agreeing that they needed no more or less than three military people on the mission. So they sent the computers out sniffing for three military people who could live together in close quarters for thirteen years, getting along with four civilians at the same time, people who had a certain amount of academic training and professional accomplishment. They didn’t want three men or three women, so as not to have one gender dominate on ad Astra.”
“And they had to be spies, of course. Don’t forget that.”
“In fact, the probability that they’d come from intelligence was high. A person who’d spent his professional life shooting down planes or disarming bombs wouldn’t be too useful. They wanted one of the three to be a medical doctor, too, who’d done general practice.”
“We all agreed on that. Someone who could work without consultation.”