“That may be what happened. The computer pulled out Elza, and she dragged me and Namir along.”
“That could be it,” I said. But computers have to be programmed, and it would be easy to start out with Namir and his mates and make sure they would be the ones the program selected. “I’d hold them like this.” He was picking up the plant by its stalk; I slid my hand under the ball of medium and lifted it out.
“Right,” he said. “Have to be careful with the babies.”
“Were you going to have any?” I asked. “Before you got orders to waltz off into outer space and tilt with monsters?”
“Well, neither Elza nor Namir wanted any children. They’re not that optimistic about the future. Immediate or distant. If it were up to me, yes, I’d like to watch one grow up. Help it grow up.”
“Sort of a social experiment? A philosophical one?”
“Cold-blooded, I know. You have two?”
“Technically. They were born ex utero, though, for which my ‘utero’ is grateful. And they’re being raised by the community, in Mars. Which I don’t like much.”
“You’re so right. Speaking as someone who was raised by a commune. With my mother and father warned not to bond too closely.”
“You didn’t have a mother figure or father figure at all?”
“No. There was a couple in charge of children. But it was obvious we were just a chore. They were pretty harsh.”
“That must have been rough. The two in charge of our kids are nice people; I’ve known them for years.”
“Good luck. Ours were nice to adults.”
We moved on to the carrots, frilly and delicate. “Working in Washington, did you commute every day?”
“No, I had a little flat in Georgetown. Go back to New York on Thursday night or Friday. Sometimes bring Elza back to DC if our schedules allowed. Sometimes I’d just go up overnight; it’s only an hour and a half on the Metro.”
“Best of both worlds.”
“Started out that way. Washington’s falling apart. Both the cities, actually. Less comfortable, more dangerous.”
“Did you go armed?”
“No, I’m fatalistic about that. Elza had a gun, but I don’t think she carried it normally. Namir usually did, and he had a bodyguard as well. But he was threatened all the time, and attacked once.”
“In the city?”
“Oh, yeah, right downtown. Stepped off the Broadway slidewalk and a woman shot him point-blank in the chest. Somehow she missed his heart. She turned to run away, and the bodyguard killed her.” He shook his head. “He got hell for that, the bodyguard. No idea who she might have been working for. No fingerprints or eyeprints. DNA finally tracked her down to Amsterdam; she’d been a sex worker there twenty years before.”
“No connection with Gehenna?”
He shook his head. “And Namir says he’s never used the services of a ‘sex worker,’ not even in Amsterdam. Men lie about that, but I’m inclined to believe him.”
“Point-blank in the chest. That must have laid him low for a long time.”
“Had to grow a new lung. Takes weeks, and it’s no fun.”
Another bit of mystery for the mystery man. “He’s made other enemies, obviously, since Gehenna. Being a peacekeeper.”
“Mostly in Africa. Very few pale beautiful blondes.”
“It’s not my field. But I assume you could hire one.”
“Yes and no. In New York, you could rent a beautiful blond hit woman and probably specify right- or left-handed. But you can’t hire someone so totally off the grid, not in America. If she ordered a meal in a restaurant, she’d get a cop along with the check, asking what planet she just dropped in from.”
“It’s gotten that bad?”
“Since Triton, yeah. But even then, a couple of years before that, America was… more cautious than most places.”
“A police state, my mother said. She calls herself a radical, though.”
He laughed. “She’s no more radical than I am. From her dossier.”
“You’ve read my mother’s dossier?”
“Oh, sorry. You thought I was a lepidopterist.”
“No, but… I assumed you’d read mine and everybody’s…”
“I’m just nosy. And seven days is a long time to kill on the Space Elevator.”
“So what about my father? Was he banging his secretary?”
“Nothing personal. Just blow jobs.” He smiled at my reaction. “Bad joke, Carmen, sorry. Sometimes my mouth gets into gear a little ahead of my brain.”
“I like that in a spy,” I said, not sure whether I did. “Not so Earl Carradine.”
“You see the last one?” he said. “Where he solves your little problem with the Others?”
“Haven’t had the pleasure. What, he takes his Swiss Army knife and turns a bicycle into a starship?”
“No, he discovers the whole thing is a hoax, from a corrupt cabal of capitalists.”
“Oh, good. We can go home now.”
“It actually was a little clever this time. Not so much gadgets and gunplay.”
I had to laugh. “Unlike real life. Where a beautiful blond mystery woman nails the spy as he steps off the Broadway slidewalk. For God’s sake!”
“What can I say?” He injected the last carrot bunch. “Life does imitate art sometimes.”
We could’ve just stayed in the habitat for launch, which might have been fun. Suddenly detached from the Space Elevator, we’d be flung toward the iceberg at a great rate of speed, but the sensation to us would be “oops—someone turned off the gravity.”
For safety’s sake, though, all of us climbed through the connecting tube into the spaceship ad Astra. (We should come up with a separate name for the habitat. San Quentin, maybe, or Alcatraz.)
We helped the Martians get strapped into their hobbyhorse restraints—with all those arms, they still can’t reach their backs—and then got into our own couches, overengineered with lots of padding and buckles. But that was for the landing, 6.4 years from now, at least. Paul didn’t expect any violent maneuvers on the way to the iceberg. There were two course corrections planned right after launch, and unpredictable “refinements” as we approached the iceberg.
Paul had said to expect a loud bang, and indeed it was about the loudest thing I had ever heard. No noise in space, of course, but the eight explosive bolts that separated the habitat from the Elevator made the whole structure reverberate.
“Stay strapped in for a few minutes,” he said, and counted down from five seconds. The attitude jets hissed faintly for a minute and stuttered. Then the main drive blasted for a few minutes, loud, but not as deafening as the bolts had been. I suppose it was a quarter of a gee or so, not quite Martian gravity.
“That should do it. Put on your slippers and let’s go check for damage.”
Our gecko slippers would allow us to walk, as if there were weak glue on our soles, down the ship’s corridor, and through most of the habitat. The sticky patches on the walls and floor and ceiling were beige circles big enough for one foot. (You could squeeze both feet into one if you liked the sensation of being a bug stuck in a spiderweb.)
Those of us used to zero gee just sailed through the tube into the habitat, the others picking their way along behind us. Namir was game for floating through but banged his shoulder on the air lock badly enough to leave a bruise. He’d had a little experience before, in the military and of course getting from the Elevator to Little Mars, perhaps just enough to make him too confident.
My immediate concern was the plants. A small apple tree had gone off exploring and made it almost to the galley, and a couple of tomato plants had gotten loose. Meryl unshipped the hand vacuum and was chasing down the floating particles of medium before we had a chance to ingest them. I returned the apple tree to its proper place and replanted the tomato vines.