Habib was already partially dressed. He was sitting on the edge of the thoroughly rumpled bed, pulling on his suede loafers.
“No, not that,” he said, looking a little red-faced. “I have to go back to my place. I have a meeting with Timoshenko at ten and I have to shower and change and—”
She sat on the bed beside him. “You’re embarrassed?”
“No!” he said. Then, “Well, yes, slightly.”
“No need to be. You were very good.”
“You were wonderful.”
“You could phone your ten o’clock and cancel the meeting.”
“Oh no, I couldn’t do that. It’s important.”
She smiled and patted his thigh. “I understand.”
Habib practically ran from her apartment. Negroponte got up from the bed and went back into the lavatory, disconcerted by how alone she felt.
Cardenas didn’t know how to break the news to Wunderly, so she stalled for time to think of a way.
“You’re going back to Earth, Nadia?” she asked.
Wunderly was grinning happily as she stood before Cardenas’s workbench in the nano lab. Tavalera was nowhere in sight; the lab was empty except for the two of them.
Nodding, she answered, “I’ll be going back with the team of scientists who’re coming out here. I’m going to be famous, Kris.”
“You deserve it,” Cardenas said. “You’ve worked very hard for it.”
Wunderly’s smile faded a bit. “I can’t go back with nanomachines inside me. They won’t allow anybody—”
“I know,” Cardenas said. “The flatlanders are scared shitless of nanotechnology.”
Her expression growing even more serious, Wunderly said, “So you’ll have to flush the bugs out of me before I can go back.”
Biting her lip, Cardenas decided the best way was to be direct and quick, like sticking someone with a needle.
“Nadia, you don’t have any nanomachines inside you. You never did.”
Wunderly seemed to hold her breath.
“You did it all on your own, Nadia,” Cardenas went on. “You lost all that weight on your own.”
Wunderly’s smile returned, bigger than ever. “You faked it! You never injected me with nanobugs!”
“That’s right.”
“I did it by myself!”
“Diet and exercise,” said Cardenas. “Works every time.”
Flinging her arms around Cardenas’s neck, Wunderly exclaimed, “Kris, you’re marvelous! You—I mean—this is the best present anyone’s ever given to me!”
“I lied to you,” Cardenas said softly.
“You gave me a magic potion. Just like a fairy godmother.”
Cardenas nodded. “And you did all the work.”
“I did it by myself.” Wunderly seemed genuinely thrilled by the news.
“You certainly did.”
“So I can keep on doing it, taking care of myself, watching my weight.”
“And looking better and better.”
“Kris, I love you!”
Cardenas smiled back at her. “Just make sure you look good at the Nobel ceremonies.”
Professor Wilmot’s oral diary
Tomorrow is the first of May. No spring fertility rites in this habitat, of course. These people have their fertility rites all year ’round, actually.
However, tomorrow evening there will be the second of three debates between our two candidates for chief administrator.
Although a lot has happened since the first debate, not much has changed. The scientists have proven that Saturn’s rings actually do harbor living microorganisms in their particles of ice. The ICU has already dispatched a shipload of science people to come and see for themselves. Urbain is in his glory, taking as much credit for the discovery as he can grab despite the fact that he initially opposed investigating the rings at all. Ah well, the rings have taken the spotlight away from Urbain’s failed lander on Titan. The useless hulk is still incommunicado: silent as a stone.
Politically, Eberly is insisting that the rings can still be mined for their water without disrupting the ice creatures. The scientists disagree, naturally, but Urbain has been strangely muted on the subject. The woman who made the discovery, Dr. Wunderly, is up in arms against Eberly but I doubt that it will do her any good. Clever politician that he is, Eberly has offered to put her in charge of environmental protection of the rings—while he moves ahead with plans to mine them!
It appears that Holly Lane’s petition to overthrow the ZPG protocol will succeed. She claims to have more than seven thousand signatures, more than enough to repeal the protocol The signatures need to be verified, of course, but that’s merely a matter of form. Unless Eberly pulls some new trick.
At the end of the day, however, the petition might not matter one way or the other. From all that I can see and hear, these people want to mine the rings. They want to get rich. And Eberly has told them once they begin bringing in money from the mining, then they can repeal the zero-growth protocol and start enlarging the habitat’s population.
It would seem that Eberly has everything his own way. He’s even hinted that he would defy an IAA injunction against mining the rings. He’s taken the pose that he would rather fight than give in to what he calls “Earthbound bureaucrats.”
We shall see what we shall see.
1 May 2096: The second debate
Zeke Berkowitz smiled professionally into the middle of the three cameras facing him and the two candidates, who sat at the table flanking him. Each camera was mounted on a self-balancing monopod. Two communications technicians were working behind the cameras; there were no other people in the studio. Berkowitz’s smile was pleasant, unforced, but it had a sly edge to it: the professional newsman’s subtle declaration that he knew more than his audience did.
As the digital clock on the studio’s far wall clicked to 16:00, Berkowitz said, “Good evening, and welcome to the second of three debates between the two candidates running for the office of chief administrator.”
Berkowitz noted with pleasure the real-time readout of his audience’s size displayed on a monitor beside the clock. Virtually every household in the habitat was watching the debate. Good, he thought. Very good. But then he reminded himself that all entertainment broadcasts had been suspended for the length of this debate. People could watch vids from their personal libraries, if they chose; otherwise, the debate was the only show on the air throughout the habitat.
He introduced the two candidates and explained that each of them would have five minutes to make an opening statement, then the floor would be thrown open to questions phoned in by the viewers.
“Holly Lane, formerly chief of human resources, will give her opening statement first.”
Holly inadvertently licked her lips as all three cameras swiveled slightly to focus on her.
She tried to smile as she began: “Hi. You all know me, I guess, and what I’m trying to accomplish in this election. Thanks to your help, we’ve signed more than seven thousand people up for our petition to repeal the Zero Population Growth protocol. Seven thousand three hundred and fourteen, to be exact.”
Holly had not written out a prepared speech. The display screen built into the tabletop before her showed only rough notes of the points she planned to make.
“The human resources department is going to verify the signatures over the next few days, so if you get a call from one of my former workers, be nice to her. Or him.
“Once the signatures are confirmed, it’ll be up to the chief administrator to declare the ZPG rule no longer valid. I expect he’ll drag his feet on this, ’cause he’s never been in favor of allowing women to decide their own lives.”