April 5: A Depth of Understanding (7 page)

The two seemed unusually comfortable with each other. April kept expecting a frown or a nasty crack, but there was no sign of sibling rivalry. Instead they sat touching hip to hip. She had the sad thought that she wished her brother had been like Iaan when he was alive.

"Ms. Lewis, are there many children our age on Home?" Jenifer asked. "Will we be able to make friends?"

"I remember my mom told me recently there are still less than a hundred children on Home. She runs a private school and the last we talked she had eighteen students. They all study in a room in common, because there aren't enough of any age to have grades or classes like an Earth school. There were even less kids when I was growing up. There will only be a few kids your age, but most of my friends growing up were older than me, some adults even."

Iaan and Jenifer exchanged a look that was a little alarm, a little consternation and Iaan spoke for them. "On Earth, if
we
weren't afraid to have an adult as a friend most of the time
they
  would afraid to be our friend anyway. I never had a teacher I'd have called a friend. They all had an obligation to snoop on us for the government and some of them were pretty good at it. If they tried to be a friend somebody would have thought it was a Bad Thing. They'd probably get a warning on their record that they had an inappropriate relationship with a student. We had a teacher who played basketball at the city park where some of his students went and when it was hot, he not only wore short sleeves, he took his shirt off. They kicked him out of the park and made him transfer to a school in a different county." His sister nodded solemn agreement.

"My brother was older than me," April told them. "He was three years older, but we did all sorts of things together. We didn't always get along, but when you don't have that many people to do stuff with you learn to get along. That's a big difference about Home. If you treat people as disposable you run out of people who will have anything to do with you pretty fast. That applies to adults doing business with each other too. It isn't like Earth where if you get upset over some little thing and want to ignore somebody there are lots of other people to chose from."

"Do you just have one brother?" Jenifer asked.

"I did. He made a few mistakes and got with the wrong people a couple years ago and his ship blew up while it was going around the moon. I wish we'd still been close when I lost him, but we were having a lot of trouble with each other. Now I'll never have a chance to fix that."

The brother and sister looked at each other. You could see them imagining the same situation for themselves. Jenifer put her hand around Iaan's elbow like she was going to make sure he didn't get away. It was kind of touching.

"The lady there that made your breakfast, Ruby, has been my friend since I was your age. She and I traded information lots of times. I knew when stuff like sani-wipes or gloves might get bumped back on the shipping schedule and she seemed to know every time somebody changed jobs or was dating somebody new. I'd make sure she got stuff she needed before it ran low and she knew who could drop stuff off at people's cubic for us, or who would print stuff for my brother and me." She smiled. "That was back when we didn't have a print shop you could walk in and you had to get somebody to run it off their private printer. Things are a lot different now. I'd come by and when she had a break we'd sit at a table and chat a bit. We're still friends and her husband is a good guy to know too. He works outside flying a construction scooter mostly."

"When we went to public school none of the cafeteria ladies were allowed to talk to us. They would tell us if our lunch choices were outside the guidelines, but never just friendly chat. In fact the last school I went to we weren't allowed to talk at lunch. We still would sign and point and do stuff like split up something we hated on a couple trays so the monitor didn't see us throw away too much. You got written up if you wasted too much," Iaan explained.

"I can't see how that is much different than being in prison," April said.

Iaan laughed out loud, shocked at that. "You couldn't say
that
either! If you did you'd be labeled antisocial. Of course I guess the guys in real prison are already so solidly antisocial it wouldn't matter what they say. I mean, what else are they going to do to them?"

"Stick them in solitary?" their dad asked.

"Yeah, like detention," Iaan agreed, frowning at the new thought.

"And your parents wouldn't have been upset to know you were visiting with a service worker?" Matt asked.

"Not at all. You might have to reconsider how you regard people here. Some of the things that were true on Earth may not be here. There aren't a lot of stupid people on Home, even if their job description sounds menial to you. Even for something like corridor maintenance and cleaning, or supply and delivery, they screen for work history and psychological profile. They have more applicants than positions so they can be picky. People with degrees accept manual labor to get up here. You don't get weirdos, stinks and thieves. People who can't get along or manage to hide a problem end up back down on the mud ball pretty quickly."

 "Now Ruby, as an example, is pretty sharp. She grew up in Detroit, spent some time as a loadmaster in the air force and was a college professor teaching Medieval music before she came to Home. But if you called her Doctor Dixon she might smack you with a spatula. She's always been very insightful about people and what motivates them. I've learned a lot from her and she was never shy to tell me when I was out of my depth."

"OK, things are different up here. That's why we're here, but I can see it's going to be true of a whole lot of little things I hadn't planned on being different," Matt admitted.

"It's true, we are getting more people now who are self selecting to come to Home, instead of being hired. But there are still a lot of barriers to really undesirable people coming in. If you don't have a job or a sponsor it takes quite a bit of money to live here until you can establish yourself. You have to be smart or lucky or ruthless enough to get that much money. Things on Earth are making it harder all the time for an average person to accumulate much wealth. That's why you are here right? They were going to make it hard for you to make an honest living."

"Yes, I don't know if you'd classify me as smart or lucky, but I could see every time I made more money they were going to take more. I'm moving my book sales to other countries and the new ones I'm already working on will never have any connection to the USNA. They simply won't have any handle on me to collect the money the court awarded. They may try to block my North American sales, but almost everyone now can circumvent those sort of controls if they want to. There are all sorts of black markets and grey markets and bartering."

"I'm trying to understand how the Earth economy works. My partner Jeff has me studying economics and I read the news feeds and some of the private journals, but nobody will speak frankly about how the underground economy works, or how big it really is. I know my understanding is superficial. I can't
predict
what Earthies will do. But nobody publishes how things really work, or it's actually a crime to say publicly how it works, so how is anybody supposed to get a depth of understanding? If you'd explain the real mechanics of it to me it would be very helpful. I can trade you help with how things work up here. Does that sound beneficial?"

"Yes, but I'm trying to understand, how is it that Jeff assigns you something to study? Are you both in some sort of a study group in school? He looks quite a bit older than you. And are you planning a career track that will use economics?" He looked genuinely puzzled.

"I'm not in any formal school right now, except a Japanese class at the University of Kyoto. I don't think I'll ever
not
be studying something. I'm studying to get my lander certification and I'll have to put some hours in to qualify on the specific type lander I have access to. When I went down to Earth the trip before this one, I suggested strongly to Jeff he start a bank while there was a window of opportunity on Home. By the time I came back he'd formed it and was gathering a clientele and doing transactions. He'd just started coining a local currency, the Solar, and if I wanted to be of any use to Jeff and Heather to actually help run the thing I needed to understand economics. Since it was my idea in the first place it seems like it would be pretty hard to refuse to help run it. We three do a lot of business together and they always pitch in when I need something."

"How can you contract to do business? I mean, how old are you?"

"I'm sixteen, but I'm an emancipated adult. If I look young to you, well I've had Life Extension Therapy and it pretty much all kicked in before I was fourteen. I probably won't look much different until I'm past twenty five. I'm content with how I look. If anybody has a problem with it – it's their problem."

"She's the girl who was in Hawaii last year dad. They tried to hush it all up because it's super antisocial to dress like her and she disappeared from Hawaii and nobody knew where she went or anything and then she showed back up here and was in the gossip boards and stuff again. But my friends in Europe and Australia all send me pix and stuff the net censors block. I got 'em all on my phone. I'll show you sometime if you want," Jenifer offered.

"Don't believe everything you see about me," April begged. "If you want to know if something is true ask me and I'll tell you honestly,OK?"

"OK, then tell me please, how can you eat such a big breakfast? You had twice as much as Mr. Tindal and you're half his size." Her dad looked horrified at the question.

"My parents bought me some genetic modifications and I added some myself later. My metabolism can run quite a bit faster than normal so I eat more. It lets me do some things like run a lot further than other people."

"That's really
personal
stuff, Jenifer," her dad told her.

"Well she said to ask!"

"If there is ever anything I ever don't want to answer, I'll just tell you. Your dad is right, I have some stuff I keep private, just not the same stuff he might guess. Now down on Earth lots of people believe gen mod people are horrible and a lot of people think Life Extension Therapy is bad too, but nobody makes a fuss about it up here."

"This is a whole lot better than the breakfast at school," Iaan told them. "And there's no compliance officer counting our food groups." He blinked and looked at his empty plates and his sister's with a funny expression. "And I didn't even think about throwing any of it away!"

* * *

"You were unusually tactful with Mr. Wilson," Gunny said later, out in the corridor.

"Compared to my – usual self?"

"Well, you could have felt he was attacking your friend Ruby when he suggested service workers were not fit company. You do tend to have a certain directness."

"I'm remembering how Lin told us they need to be so careful hiring people for the boat. It is probably the same in North America. Desperate people do bad things. If Lin is careful of his boat and crew how much more is Matt going to guard his kids? But we'll nudge him along to see it's Earth think, that he can ease off on a little bit. Maybe we are as hard to understand to them. I sure
hope
we don't get more criminal and corrupt people than we can weed out, so Home stays different than Earth."

"I'm sure we'll have some native criminals. Some people are just born defective and the Assembly will have to deal with them. I'm just not sure how yet. You can hardly exile somebody who was born here. Where would we send them?" Gunny asked.

"Good question."

"You know I'm not having much trouble switching from Earth to Home. Most of it makes sense to me. I even elected to pay taxes so I can vote."

"Good, that's one more sensible voter we have."

Chapter 6

"Heather needed to get back to Central," Jeff told April on com. "She had a lunar flight connection last night and said to tell you goodbye. I have to stay here for now and work out some things with Dave for the guys doing the next snowball run. They are leasing some tech and we'll get a little money now and a small percentage down the line."

"How big a snowball do they want to bring back?"

"This one they are looking for something small, no more than a half million tons. Anything bigger would take too long to bring back. The cost of borrowed money for a longer trip adds so much expense they couldn't have gotten investors."

April had a sudden concern. "There's a company bringing one back right now. Is this new company going to undercut their price? Is that going to ruin the first guys?

"Every ton the first expedition will bring back was pre-sold. Just like this one will be. It's going to be a long time before supply catches up with demand, and yes, I expect every trip to get water will be cheaper as they refine the methods and know where to find the best size and density of ice to grab."

"So where are they going to park it?"

"They are going to put it near us, but as deep inside the Earth's shadow as they can make it, to hold station without eating up too much mass stabilizing it. They can't keep it in the umbra all the time, but they are going to work at minimizing the time it is sees any solar disk at all."

"Could they cover one side in something reflective?"

"It would cost too much. But they are going to mine it starting on the edges and reduce it from a sphere to a cylinder as they use it up. They think it can be kept end on to the sun as it is reduced. They may directly vacuum deposit a reflector on the end of the cylinder when it gets small enough."

"So they will just accept a certain amount of loss?"

"They're already doing that with the propulsion, bringing it back. They can only take so many plasma drives, so they are going to throw a lot of extra mass out at less than optimum velocity to get it back faster. They may use up eight to ten percent of it just getting it back. They'll accelerate all the way, but they aren't sure if they will try to flip it over to brake or just take the drives to the other end. It depends a lot on how stiff or slushy the ice is. If it seems too soft they might break it up trying to rotate it."