She saw Gomez too, usually in one of the habitat’s cafeterias at lunch time. He too seemed stiff and uncomfortable at first, but after a few weeks his attitude loosened enough so that he would sit at the same table with her. Gomez would ask her how she was. Raven always replied positively but noncommittally.
“I’m fine, Tómas. And you?”
He shrugged. “The sub’s still down at the bottom of the ocean, poking around the seabed.” Than he added, “I hope.”
Leaning over her lunch tray, Raven asked, “When is it supposed to come back?”
“In two weeks. If it’s still functioning properly.”
“You won’t know until then?”
Gomez shook his head slowly.
“It must be maddening,” Raven said.
“Oh, it’s been sending up message drones on schedule,” Gomez replied, his hangdog expression unchanging. “Everything seems to be going along as designed.”
“That’s good.”
“But it hasn’t found anything. The seabed is just a collection of stones and sands. Nothing interesting. Nothing at all.”
“What are you hoping for?” Raven asked.
“Something!” Gomez blurted. “Anything! A sign of life. A seashell, a strand of biologically active chemicals. But there’s nothing down there. That ocean is as lifeless as a dead chunk of rock. It looks like my investigation isn’t turning up a goddamned thing.”
Raven didn’t know what to say, how to make him feel better.
“And that means my career goes down the toilet,” he added. “I’m dead meat.”
“No,” Raven snapped. “That can’t be true. I can’t believe that.”
“Believe it,” he said, his face a picture of misery, defeat. “The university went way out on a limb to fund my project, and I’m not going to have anything to show for it. Not a goddamned sonofabitchin’ thing.”
“But isn’t that a worthwhile finding?” Raven asked. “It’s a result that nobody knew before.”
“That the planet is sterile?” He hm’phed. “Big fuckin’ deal.”
“It’s a surprise, isn’t it? I mean, the other gas giants—Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune—they all have biospheres, don’t they?”
Gomez nodded. “But Uranus doesn’t.”
“How come? What makes Uranus different?”
He hunched his shoulders. “Whatever makes Uranus different must have happened very early in the solar system’s history, when there were lots of planetesimals whizzing through the system. One of them smacked into Uranus, knocked it over sideways, sterilized it.”
“So you’re proving that that’s what happened, aren’t you?”
“I guess,” he admitted slowly. “It all happened so far back in the system’s history—billions of years ago—that we can’t really be sure of who did what to who.”
“To whom,” Raven corrected.
“Whatever.”
She saw that he was really down, staring inescapable defeat in the face.
Putting on a smile, Raven said, “Well, maybe you’ll find something that your submarine dredged up from the sea floor once you get it back here.”
“Or maybe I should just put an electric probe in my mouth and scramble my brain permanently.”
“Don’t talk like that!” Raven snapped. “This isn’t the end of the world.”
“It’s the end of my world,” said Gomez.
He pushed his chair back, got to his feet, and slowly walked toward the cafeteria’s exit doors. Raven stared at his retreating back. Then she noticed that he hadn’t touched his breakfast. His tray lay there on the table, just as it had been when he’d first put it down.
BOOK TWO
THE MANAGER
RUST
Raven spent her days studying and learning how Haven was administered—and occasional nights in Waxman’s bed.
On one particular morning, he met her in his outer office as she came in from the passageway outside.
“Raven,” he said, with a beaming smile, “you, of course, know my executive assistant, Alicia Polanyi. Alicia, I want you to be the first to know that Raven Marchesi, here, is now my new administrative assistant.”
Raven felt surprised, even delighted. Until she saw the expression on Alicia Polanyi’s sallow face.
Polanyi measured Raven with her eyes, which were glacial-blue, the color of an Arctic iceberg. Her light brown hair was cut spiky-short, her face cadaverous with sunken cheeks and nothing more than a thin, faintly pink line for lips, her body lean to the point of emaciation. She was wearing a single-piece uniform that hung on her bony frame, two sizes too large.
No competition, Raven thought as she extended her hand toward Polanyi’s cadaverous fingers.
“Congratulations,” Polanyi said, her voice flat and dark.
“Raven’s going to be working with me here in the office from now on,” Waxman announced. “She’ll need a space for herself, with a desk, console, all the trimmings.”
“I’ll take care of it right away,” said Polanyi, her icy blue eyes never moving from Raven’s face.
Waxman smiled brightly, then said to Raven, “Come on into my office. We have work to do.”
Raven turned and followed Waxman into the inner office. But she could feel Polanyi’s eyes burning into her back.
It took less than a day for a team of robots and a single male supervisor to create an office all her own for Raven. It was several doors down the passageway from Waxman’s suite, and she had to go past Polanyi’s cold-eyed stare to get to Evan’s office, but she got accustomed to that.
Although there was no written record of it, casual conversations with other staff members over the lunch tables in the cafeteria told Raven that Waxman and Polanyi had once been lovers.
“She was a knockout in those days, less than a year ago,” said one of Raven’s newfound office mates. “But that was before she started toking Rust.”
Raven knew better than to ask obviously pointed questions. She just let the office gossip gradually fill her in. Rust was apparently a hallucinogenic, a powerful narcotic.
“It lifts you up to the stars,” one of the office crew told her—the guy who had supervised the robots that had built her office. “But then it drops you down into a pile of shit.”
Raven understood what they were saying: stay away from Rust.
But a few days later, she found a line in an invoice buried among the other office records. Just a single line. It was a bill for the sale of ten kilos of Rust. Close to a million international dollars! Raven got up from her desk and headed for Waxman’s office.
As she strode down the corridor, she remembered that Tómas’s submersible was due to break out of the ocean tomorrow and return to the habitat. She hadn’t seen Tómas in several days. Was he hiding from her?
But she put her thoughts of Gomez aside as she stepped into Waxman’s outer office and locked eyes with Alicia Polanyi, who nodded silently to Raven and touched the keypad that opened the door to Waxman’s private office. All without a word spoken by either of them.
That’s what Rust does to you, Raven told herself as she swept past Polanyi’s desk. Alicia is the wreckage of what had once been Evan’s mistress. Don’t let that happen to you!
Waxman was seated at his desk. The wall screen to his right showed a view of Uranus, blue-gray and bland as usual, except for a cyclonic swirl of dark clouds near the planet’s north pole.
Without preamble Raven asked, “What is Rust?”
Waxman’s face froze. For a heartbeat he just stared at Raven, unmoving, his mouth slightly open, his eyes unblinking. Then he asked, “Rust?”