Three Lives Of Mary (2 page)

The city looked beautiful under the double moon-rise, the taller buildings painting the others with overlapping patterns of orange and yellow to create an abstract three-dimensional checkerboard. Magellan might be "just" a space port, but the skyline was one of the most beautiful she could imagine.

"Hey." It was Ben. "I thought I was the only one who knew about this spot."

Mary felt uncomfortable and a little cheated by his intrusion. "You must be looking for a place to escape with your friend. I'll get out of your way."

Ben stepped up to the terrace wall next to her. "Are you always so accommodating?"

"No, but I'd hate to see you deprived."

"Depraved?" Ben grinned. "I sure am. Especially for the right woman."

"So I saw." Mary moved to leave, but Ben got in her way.

"So you know all about me and my motives?"

"It doesn't take a mind-reader." Mary moved the other way, but again Ben blocked her.

"What if you're wrong about my reason for coming out here?"

Mary leaned back against the railing, the smell of jasmine wafting from the shrubs along the wall and around the archway. "Perhaps you'd care to enlighten me?"

Ben looked out across the city. "Would you believe me if I told you that I came here looking to escape?"

"Probably not…" Mary caught herself, not wanting to sound too negative. "The hasty fiction is entertaining though. Let me guess, you're a Ridellian cattle rustler on the run?"

Ben leaned in closer, his voice dropping. "I wanted to get away from the woman you saw me with."

"I don't believe it. You're a man on the make, you'd say anything." Mary knew she should have left, but the moonlight reflected in Ben's eyes seemed to hold her there.

"Ouch." Ben leaned casually against one of the pillars framing the door, his broad torso still blocking any chance of escape. "I can prove it."

"How?"

"With this." Ben reached inside his jacket and pulled out a shiny metal tube with what looked like a bent piece of wire sticking out at one end. He pressed it to his lips and blew.

A squeaking whistle came from the tube, varying in pitch in a way that was almost musical, but failed to quite get there. Mary winced—it conjured up visions of a small rodent in pain. Then, after a little while, she recognized the classic tune "All My Words Are True"—a normally soulful ballad, which Ben was joyously murdering.

"Stop!"

Ben carried on playing, grinning constantly. "Leave the party with me and I'll stop." He resumed the raucous whistling.

"No, you idiot." Mary pushed her fingers in her ears, but the squeaks still penetrated. Several heads appeared through the archway, then a few more and suddenly the balcony entrance was jammed with a throng of people.

Mary realized how silly she must look and took her fingers from her ears, trying to squeeze through the door. Every time she thought she'd made an opening, Ben would worm in front and stop her. She saw Rhyana through the crowd, the other girl looking as if she'd tasted something unpleasant. Mary couldn't help but laugh. She grabbed Ben's wrist and pulled him with her through the crowd and out the front door.

They'd spent all night together. And every night since. His whistling hadn't improved though.

****

Mary felt a pleasant stirring in the right orbitofrontal cortex of her brain and instinctively stretched as Ben stimulated it. "I see some things aren't damaged."

"You know me."

Mary did and tried to relax, but it took a lot longer than usual. The plant-things on ST2398-5 kept popping into her thoughts, disrupting her efforts to soften to Ben's SLink.

"What were those things?" she asked later. "I thought there were no signs of animal life."

"There weren't. They weren't animals in a classical sense." Ben sounded confident. "With the data you gathered they'd be classified as plant-animal hybrids. Physically they seem to be composed of individual independent specialized zooids forming a colonial animal. Fifty bucks says the scientists will be flocking there within twelve months."

Mary hesitated. Ben had said something almost the same a little earlier. "That must be pretty rare."

"Not so much as you'd think. There are several microscopic examples and at least one large one from Earth." Ben paused. "I thought there were others but I can't access the data right now."

"Don't worry about it. It's not important."

"Jump to Haven in… Five. Four. Three. Two. One."

****

It took even longer to get to Haven than anticipated. Ben's Jump left them a long way from the station and it took another low-speed cruise until Mary could finally see the lattice-work of the geodesic domes through the optical pickups.

When traffic control found out about the damage, they forced Ben to shut down his engines at the outer perimeter and suffer the indignity of being pulled in by a tug. That didn't help his mood and Mary fought to stay neutral against his petulance, discounting it because of the damage he'd suffered and his sense of helplessness.

They'd seen so much together, it was hard to remember when it had been different. Mary still thought of Ben as he was when they were first married. He'd always been easy going, with an almost endless joy of life in general. But after they became CySaps he'd become more intolerant and obsessed with the latest technology. Sometimes Mary wondered if the gain of extended lifespans was worth the sacrifice.

The tug brought them into one of the cavernous service bays, the walls lined with various repair gantries and heavy-duty lifting booms. It was much easier than executing a routine dock and then moving later, but Ben still complained.

"I could have brought us in here. I only lost one thruster unit. Geez, I'm not a cripple or something."

Several gantries craned out to Ben's hull and locked in position, allowing the Tech team access. They'd already wired up a dozen multi-line conduits to the external service ports and were now connecting a number of internal lines too. Mary understood that they had to do it, but it made her uncomfortable. Over seventy years previously she'd seen her father in hospital for the last time. He'd been wired up to a frightening array of bioregulators, pumps, and monitors that in the end couldn't save him. Now Ben was looking the same way.

"I'm going to visit the Controller and get the full picture," she said. "He's only honest when I'm there to intimidate him."

"That snake Tartoa would cheat his own mother, if he'd ever had one. You go and roust him, Munchkin. I hope the bastard is asleep and you wake him up."

Tartoa had been created by the Company in an artificial womb from several dozen DNA sources. The project goal was to massively increase brain capacity and in that sense the experiment was successful. Typically a station the size of Haven would need a staff of over thirty to run it, but Tartoa handled it all with just a couple of general assistants.

Unfortunately the Company hadn't anticipated that the project would also magnify the negative human traits and Tartoa was caught embezzling from them. Then he used the proceeds to manipulate the Company's stocks and multiply his larceny. After some additional Cynetic reprogramming had taken care of the behavioral issues, Tartoa was dedicated to screwing people only at the company's behest.

Mary picked her way through the disordered crowds of the vaulted main avenue towards Tartoa's offices. High above, the artificial "sun" was bright, but did little to improve the appearance of the buildings she passed. The composite walls and support beams stained brown from decades of exposure to the trapped respiration by-products of thousands of transient settlers.

Main deck was even busier than normal. With two new colony departures scheduled over the next week, it buzzed as every settler squabbled over the chance to get their last taste of civilization. Moving to a new world was akin to virtual imprisonment for most of them; few made enough to leave the planet they settled.

A gaggle of young children launched out of a side-corridor and skidded to a halt. Their faces a bewildered mixture of fear and curiosity at the sight of Mary's polished body. She let them stare at her for exactly ten seconds. "Boo!"

The children squealed and vanished back in to the mob, their exultant cries audible long after they were lost from sight. Mary felt a tug on her hand and glanced down. A dark-haired girl of four or possibly five was pulling on her fingers.

"Are you a people?"

Mary lifted the girl by the collar until she was dangling level with Mary's head. The girl's eyes were big and her face solemn.

A man scurried up, his head bobbing up and down comically. "The kids, Ma'am. The children that is. They's only playing. They don't mean no harm. No reason to get upset or anything. She's my daughter, Daina."

Mary wished she could smile. Just briefly. "Hello Daina. Yes, I'm a people." She handed Daina over to her father who wrapped her up in his arms defensively. "I mean no harm either."

"Thank you, Ma'am. Thank you."

There was an antagonism between colonists and CySaps that defied logic. Colonies routinely refused citizenship to anyone less than eighty-five percent organic. And yet they depended almost one hundred percent on CySaps to find the worlds they could settle with at least a fighting chance of survival.

Mary scythed through the pack that was gathering. They made her uncomfortable crowding in like that. Marching down the corridor, she finally slipped inside Tartoa's cavernous offices and leaned against the door for a moment to gather her thoughts. She and Ben hadn't had any children. Something just hadn't worked out and neither of them had wanted to go through the medical prodding and poking necessary to investigate why.

Mary tried to imagine herself getting fat with another life growing inside her and found it impossible. Could she have had a girl like Daina? It seemed ridiculous to even think about such things after all this time. The recent brush with near-disaster had put her more on edge than she'd thought; now she was thinking all sorts of crazy things.

"Mary. How delightful. You're always away far too long for my liking. You look as delicious as ever."

Tartoa's greeting brought Mary back to the present and she picked her way through piles of exclusive stock and trade goods housed there for security, the subdued lighting casting amber shadows around the heavily beamed walls. She entered Tartoa's inner office and raised her hand in greeting.

Tartoa slid towards her, his chair a meter above the ground suspended from a reinforced plastic beam. The support looked like it grew directly out of his spine and there was some truth to that. A nest of umbilicals wrapped around the support like high-tech serpents, feeding both nutrients and information from around Haven into his elephantine skull. In much the same way as Ben, the station was his "body."

Tartoa extended an optical pickup and surveyed Mary from close-up. She always felt the action was a little intrusive. All he could see was her artificial exo-skeleton, but she got the feeling that he got more from it than was entirely decent.

"You've been in the wars." Tartoa retracted the optic. "That's a shame, you were always so… perfect."

"We ran into some trouble on the last survey."

"Indeed?" Tartoa slid closer and sniffed loudly as if smelling Mary. "This is all superficial. We'll have you patched up in no time."

Mary edged back, trying not to make it too obvious how uncomfortable he made her feel. "Ben's the real problem. He's damaged far worse than I am. He's in bay seven at the moment, hooked up to the diagnostics."

"Ben? Oh dear. Let me check to see what they've found."

Tartoa clucked and tutted several times. "Just a moment, I need to make a call."

In the silence, Mary thought about the events on the planet and how Ben had been so eager to burn the plant-creatures. It was very different from the man she used to chide for running "highways" of bathroom tissue to help trapped spiders escape from the bathtub.

Tartoa swung back to face her. "This is serious, Mary. Very serious."

Mary felt suddenly cold and scared. "You can't fix him? The damage wasn't that bad."

"It's not quite that. It's, well… very expensive."

"Hang the cost. That doesn't matter in the least."

"Do you have any assets I don't know about?"

"Assets? You have all our records, you know our business."

"Then we definitely have a problem." Tartoa spun away momentarily. "This is embarrassing, but you can't afford the repairs."

****

Mary explained the situation when she got back and Ben reacted predictably badly. "That low-life bastard. He's been trying to screw us for years."

"We didn't make much on that last trip."

"How come? We tagged four A-Prime inhabitable worlds. They were ripe for colonization."

Mary hesitated. "Most of that went on upgrading to the class five Jump engines and enhanced comm system."

"We had to have those."

No,
you
had to have them, thought Mary. Ben always wanted to be able to go further and faster, justifying it by saying it made them able to search deeper into uncharted territory, but she knew it was just an obsession. "I know we did. I'm just explaining where the money went."