“Congratulations, Tómas,” she shouted into his ear. “You’ve made a great discovery.”
“You’re my discovery,” he answered, taking her in his arms.
Raven let him swirl her away through the crowd, dancing to the heavy beat of the music.
Nothing else matters, she told herself. Only Tómas. Only his happiness.
She awoke the next morning in Tómas’s bed, curled next to him as he snored softly, a contented smile on his lips. Raven realized that she had hardly ever seen Tómas smile: he was always so serious.
She lay there beside him and studied his face. It was a handsome face, she decided. Strong. Capable. Serious. And she realized that she was serious, too. Despite everything, despite her past and her unknowable future, she wanted to be with Tómas for the rest of her life.
But a voice in her head asked, Will he want to be with you? Once he knows what you were, will his love dissolve and disappear like a beautiful dream burned away by the morning sun?
Then she remembered Alicia and the boutique. I’ve got to get to work, she told herself.
As gently as she could, she eased herself away from Tómas’s arm and began to slip out of bed.
“Good morning,” he mumbled drowsily.
“Oh! I didn’t mean to wake you. I’m sorry.”
Half covered by the twisted bedsheet, he turned and squinted at the bedside clock. “I ought to get up. Work to do.”
“Yes,” said Raven, sitting up on the edge of the bed. “Me too.”
As casually as a man seeking travel directions, Gomez asked, “Will you marry me?”
Raven stared at him. “Marry? That’s… that’s a big step, Tómas.”
Lying there with a soft smile on his lips, Gomez replied, “It’s not an unusual step.”
Raven fought down an urge to cry. “Tómas, you don’t know anything about me… who I am, really…”
“I know I love you.” Before she could reply, he added, “And you love me.”
“One night in bed together isn’t love!”
“Isn’t it?”
The tears were threatening to burst out. “Tómas, I was a whore! Back in Naples—”
“I know,” he said, reaching out to grasp her arm. “Waxman told me.”
“He told you? And you still…?”
“Raven, you were a whore. Were. You’re not a whore now. You’re never going back to that. I’m here for you. I’ll protect you.”
She collapsed into his arms, sobbing softly, and for long silent moments they clung to each other as Raven said to herself, I love him and he loves me. This is wonderful. Nothing else matters. Nothing. Nothing.
Evan Waxman was sitting before Reverend Umber’s ornate desk, spelling out the future.
“I have no idea how many scientists will want to come here, but it will be considerable. Hundreds. Maybe thousands.”
“Thousands?” Umber’s round face went pale.
“This is a momentous discovery, Kyle. Uranus was once populated by an intelligent species, and now they’re gone. Eradicated.”
“God’s will.”
Waxman huffed. “Well, there are going to be a horde of investigators coming here to try to figure out how and why God wiped out a whole intelligent species and every other living creature on the planet.”
“We can’t allow them into Haven,” Umber said firmly. “They’d ruin everything we’re trying to accomplish here.”
With a slow nod, Waxman replied, “I suppose we could house them in Haven II.”
“No! That’s for more refugees. We already have contracts with the social agencies on Earth and the transportation corporations.”
“The Astronomical Association can invalidate those contracts.”
Umber’s face settled into an unhappy scowl.
“And,” Waxman continued, “they can commandeer Haven II as a shelter for the incoming scientists.”
“And set our work back for how long? Months? Years?”
Waxman shrugged. “I think you should sit down with this man Abbott. He sits pretty high in the Association’s pecking order.”
“I don’t want them here in Haven,” Umber said firmly. “I’ve thought it through time and again. I don’t want them mixing with our people here in Haven.”
“Neither do I,” Waxman agreed. “But there’s no way we can keep them from taking over Haven II.”
Umber shook his head unhappily.
BOOK FOUR
THE INVESTIGATORS
GORDON ABBOTT
Gordon Abbott tugged at one end of his extravagant moustache as he repeated in his mind a few lines from Kipling:
“Penny-fights,” he muttered. “That’s what I’m doing. Penny-fights.”
With an exasperated sigh, he gazed up again at the wall-sized viewscreen that displayed the habitat Haven II: a huge spoked wheel riding in orbit alongside the original Haven space station. Dozens of teams of workmen and robots crawled across the habitat’s skin. To Abbott they seemed like maggots infesting a corpse.
His superiors at the Astronomical Association’s headquarters on Earth had sent another “reminder” this morning. Abbott scanned it quickly and suppressed the urge to delete it and send it to electronic oblivion.
The message told him that the construction of Haven II was still behind schedule—a fact that Abbott was well aware of—and asked when it would be ready for the groups of scientists who were champing at the bit for their chance to investigate the extinct civilization of Uranus—a question to which Abbott had no reliable answer.
Trying to use the man-and-woman power of the refugees living on the original Haven habitat to build Haven II had been—at best—a long shot. The Reverend Umber had hatched the idea and insisted on it; his administrator, Waxman, had reluctantly bowed to the lamebrained concept.
Uneducated, for the most part, and unskilled, the immigrants were doing their best, and actually learning to control and command the robot workforce, but it wasn’t good enough, fast enough, polished enough for the deskbound bureaucrats Earthside.
Abbott pointed out to his superiors that the task of organizing an experienced construction team and sending them a few billion kilometers out to Uranus was extremely expensive. Use the local talent. Train the uneducated. Teach the beggars. Besides, Umber insisted on it, and without his cooperation nothing could be accomplished.
But the Earthside bureaucrats saw only the original timetable of the construction task and the fact that Abbott’s amateurs were lagging behind their preset goals.
There’s only one way to ease the pressure they’re putting on me, Abbott knew. It was a course he did not really want to take, but when one’s career is on the line, a certain amount of risk is called for.
“Memo to Harvey Millard, Interplanetary Council Executive Director,” he dictated. As he spoke, his words appeared on the viewscreen.
“Harvey: We’re working as hard as we can to prepare the habitat Haven II for the scientists who want to come here to Uranus. But we’re behind schedule, and the Astronomical Association is putting a lot of pressure on us. Do you think it might be possible to send a small group of the scientists here, sort of an advance guard? We can house them in the portion of the habitat that we’ve finished and let them get started on their investigation. Then we can add more groups as the work on the habitat progresses. Do you think that’s a reasonable course of action?”