Her immediate plans she knew. She was going to see her sister for the first time in nearly three years. Spend the holidays with the only family she had. The thought made her tense with apprehension.
Once Susan had been revived from her long years of cryonic suspension and her cancer removed by therapeutic nanomachines, she was like a newborn baby in a young adult’s body. The years she had spent bathed in liquid nitrogen had saved her body but destroyed most of the synapses in the cerebral cortex of her brain. She had practically no higher brain functions. Pancho had to feed her, teach her to speak again and to walk, even toilet-train her.
Slowly Susan became a mature adult, yet even when the psychologists happily proclaimed her training to be a complete success, Pancho was disturbed. She wasn’t the same Susie. Couldn’t be, Pancho realized, yet the difference unsettled her. She looked like Susie, talked and laughed and flirted like Sooze, but she was subtly different. When Pancho looked into her sister’s eyes, it was somebody else in there. Almost the same. But only almost.
And the first thing Sooze did, once she was fully recovered, was to change her name and traipse out on the space habitat Goddard on this wild-ass mission to explore Saturn and its moon, Titan. She picked up and left Pancho behind, with a smile and a peck on the cheek and a perfunctory, “Thanks for everything, Panch.” She ran off with that slimy son of a bitch Malcolm Eberly.
That was why Pancho was not in her most chipper and cheerful mood as Starpower III docked with Goddard and began to disembark its VIP passengers. She felt sullen resentment and an anger she believed to be completely justified. And she was more than a little apprehensive about how Susie would receive her. How’s she gonna react to having her big sister drop in on her, after she’s flown almost a billion and a half kilometers to get away from me? Merry Christmas, now go home: that’s what Pancho feared her sister’s attitude would be.
Stewing inside, juggling these emotions, Pancho made her way down the ship’s central passageway to the main docking port after the skipper had announced they’d mated with Goddard. All the big muckety-muck scientists and news execs were gathering in the port’s waiting area, chatting and buzzing impatiently. She saw Jake Wanamaker easily enough; he towered over the others. His craggy face broke into a smile as he spotted her and Pancho couldn’t help but grin back at him.
“Hi, there, sailor,” she said, once she had sidled through the gathering crowd to stand beside him. “New in town?”
“Yes, ma’ am,” answered Wanamaker, falling into the old routine. “Thought maybe you’d show me the sights.”
They both laughed and Pancho felt better.
Until they finally stepped through the airlock and into Goddard’s reception area. The crowd was arranging itself into a straggly line as personnel from the habitat checked names and assigned the visitors to living quarters. Then Pancho spotted Susie, tall and lean as herself. She looks okay, Pancho thought, her heart leaping. She looks fine.
“Panch!” Sooze yelped, and she pushed through the line of notables toward her sister.
Mustn’t call her Susan, Pancho reminded herself. She’s Holly now.
Her sister threw her arms around Pancho’s neck and Pancho knew it was going to be alright between them. No matter what, it was going to be okay. She introduced Holly to Jake, who took her hand in his meaty paw and said hello almost solemnly while Pancho beamed at them.
“C’mon, let’s go to my place,” Holly said. “You can find your apartment later, after the crowd’s thinned out.”
Pancho happily followed her sister as far as the hatch that led out to the corridor beyond the reception area. Standing there was a handsome, youngish man, hair the color of straw swept in thick waves, strong cheekbones, thin straight nose, chiseled firm jaw and piercing sky-blue eyes. His face was sculpted so perfectly that Pancho guessed he’d had cosmetic therapy. What was that word the old-time racists used? she asked herself. The answer came to her swiftly: Aryan. That’s what he looked like: the ideal Nordic hero. Yet below the neck he looked soft, a slight potbelly bulging his loosely draped tunic. As if his face was all that mattered to him.
“Panch, this is Malcolm Eberly, Goddard’s chief administrator and—”
Pancho lashed out with her right fist in a lightning punch that caught Eberly’s smiling face solidly on the jaw and knocked him backward onto the seat of his pants.
“That’s for damn near killing my sister, you no-good son of a bitch,” Pancho snarled at him.
23 December 2095: Habitat Goddard reception area
For an instant, nobody moved. No one spoke. Eberly shook his head groggily and sat up, rubbing the side of his face with one hand.
Holly broke the silence. “Pancho! For god’s sake!”
“It wasn’t my doing,” Eberly said, almost in a whine. “I tried to stop them.”
Pancho snorted and stepped past the man, suppressing an urge to kick him where it would do the most good. A pair of men in black coveralls moved toward her; both wore white armbands proclaiming SECURITY. Both had stun wands strapped to their hips. Wanamaker pushed in front of Pancho protectively.
“It’s all right,” Eberly told the security guards as he slowly got to his feet. “I’m not hurt.”
“Too bad,” Pancho huffed and, without a glance back, stepped through the open hatch.
Holly quickened her pace to catch up with her sister. “Pancho, he’s the elected head of this whole flamin’ habitat!”
“He stood aside and let those New Morality bastards beat you half to death,” Pancho growled, walking determinedly down the short passageway, Wanamaker at her side.
“That’s over and done with,” Holly said, from Pancho’s other side. “And they weren’t New Morality; they were from the Holy Disciples.”
“Whatever.”
“The people responsible have been sent back Earthside. One of them was killed—executed, for creep’s sake.”
Pancho stopped at the hatch set into the far end of the steel-walled passageway. “Come on, let’s get out of here before those network execs remember they’re in the news business and start sniffing after me. Where the hell are we, anyway? Am I going in the right direction?”
Holly’s anger dissolved; she grinned at her sister. “Yep, this is right. C’mon, let me show you.” And she tapped out a code on the keypad next to the hatch.
Pancho looked back over her shoulder. Eberly was on his feet, the two security guards flanking him, several of the visiting executives peering curiously in Pancho’s direction. Neither Eberly nor any of the incoming visitors had left the reception area, though.
The hatch swung inward and Pancho felt a breath of warm air puff against her face. Still grinning, Holly made a little bow and, with a sweep of her arm, announced, “Welcome to habitat Goddard.”
Pancho stepped through the hatch, Wanamaker right behind her. Despite her knowledge, despite her expectations, her jaw dropped open and she gasped with delighted surprise.
“Jumpin’ jeeps,” she breathed. “It’s a whole world in here.”
They were standing on an elevated knoll, with a clear view of the habitat’s broad interior. A green sunlit landscape stretched out in all directions around them. Gently rolling grassy hills, clumps of trees, little meandering streams went on and on into the hazy distance. Pancho’s breath caught in her throat. So much greenery! Nowhere off Earth had she seen such a … a … it was a paradise! A man-made Garden of Eden. The breeze was fragrant with the soft scent of flowers. Bushes thick with vivid red hibiscus and lavender jacarandas lined both sides of a curving path that led down to a village of low buildings, white and gleaming in the light streaming in through the solar windows that were wrapped around the great cylinder like a ring of brilliant sunshine.