[ 2.1 ]
When the time came to leave StarCom, Serafin, perhaps optimistically, requested an ASF transport jump, believing it to be the best option now that his face was out there. But the response came swiftly: not only was no jump available, but he would be obliged to pay his own way, since he was technically on leave, even if it was medical.
This did come as any great surprise. During the war, there had been numerous occasions when consensus was inaccessible or discretionaries unavailable or expenditures deemed simply unjustifiable. He trusted the denial from Accountancy was warranted, and so he took the reply with aplomb.
He was, however, somewhat horrified when he finally took a moment to sit down and review his various accounts. It hardly seemed possible — he’d made a tidy sum during his time at the firm, and the family holdings, thanks to an arrangement made by Ashley, were managed by the sort of firm typically reserved for families like the Al Sauds or the Bells. He vaguely recalled authorizing most of the business overrides and waiving various familial requests — Olivia’s treatment, James Junior’s rehab, Lucy’s classes — but he simply hadn’t realized in the frenzy of the past few years how close the family unit had come to bare walls and thin air.
(And, if Serafin is totally honest, money tends to flow out of his pockets as fast as it goes in.)
Still, nothing to be too concerned about. He could sell some shares to tide things over, perhaps let go of the Onizuka row, sell one of the old speeders. The Serafin coffers will replenish themselves, but it will take time. Until then, the belt is best cinched tight — no more picking up rounds at the Alibi Club, or daily haircuts. And as for travel—
He asks Darling for economy booking on any ship heading for Luna, and soon enough he’s rushing to hop on board the Oberoi, which soon attaches itself to a much larger cargo behemoth, like a plover catching a ride across the river on a crocodile.
The Oberoi is no grand beauty. It was a troop carrier in its past life, an obsolete model dating back to the Phobos Occupation, retrofitted for civilian travel. On the inside, they’ve taken some pains to disguise its origins with some plants and drapery and even some fitful attempts at paint, but evidence of the conversion is everywhere if you know where to look: the halls are narrower than standard civilian vessels, with panels indicating old access ports for the shafts that allowed the crew to move quickly between decks in variable gravity conditions.
His cabin is small enough to be measured in paces, but he doesn’t mind. He removes his prosthetic and closes signals: no media, no consistants, urgent comms only. Then he calls up his personal travel instance, a gift from his mother, recorded during her trip to Earth: a loop of a train winding through the mountains, with a coniferous valley stretched out below.
It’s possible to travel from one end of Copernica to the other and not even notice, if you’re sufficiently motivated and financed, but Serafin is old-fashioned; he’s always had a fondness for voyages. If anything bothers him, it’s the extra week of travel time; civilian flights tend to avoid G-plus acceleration to keep passengers comfortable. He doesn’t like to waste time.
But these days, time is all he has.
Oh, he reads. He exercises. Every now and then he even ventures out to take his meals in the little canteen. But otherwise, he is at rest. Otherwise, there is nothing for him but his thoughts.
In the early days, after his rescue, that was all he could do: lie in bed, and think. To be honest, he’d barely been capable of that — his thoughts had been disordered, his memories scrambled — he couldn’t focus — attention came and went of its own accord. After some time (some amount he could not make sense of and still could not clearly remember, but was told had been nearly two months) the churn had finally stopped. But when he began to notice the rhythm of the clock, when hours and days became discrete units once more, he realized there wasn’t much to think about.
It bothered him tremendously.
He’d always enjoyed some degree of autonomy after he’d mustered out. There had always someone above him in the chain of command, of course: a partner at the firm; an ops officer after that; van Arden, during the war — but he’d always been given a voice and considerable latitude on how best to accomplish his assignments. Free-thinking was not just valued in his line of work; it was considered essential, almost foundational, one of the things that separated us from them.
But he’d always had an assignment, at least. Objectives. Directives. Purpose. For months, his only assignment has been to heal, which — aside from the maintenance of his prosthetic and the rehabilitation program he has meticulously observed — is not something over which he has much control, does he? His body will do what it does.
There’d been plenty to do in the ward. Clubs to join, games to play, movies to watch, virtues to experience, and no shortage of counselors and therapists, many of them even human. He’d engaged enough to be polite, to be the good soldier, but it all felt like a distraction.
A distraction from what, though?
From the quiet. From the sifr. The endless nauseating saturated fields of flowers and grass and blue skies they projected onto the walls, and the consensus strips on the floors, guiding you through your day. The sleepless nights in his room, breathing in the stale air and trying not to think about the box. The bickering nurses at their station. The pain of seeing broken brothers-in-arms — truly broken, in ways that could not be repaired, in ways that he was not.
Lord, he thought, give me a distraction from these distractions.
So it was for lack of anything better to do that Serafin began to let his mind wander. When he could walk again, he wandered with it, spending long hours padding through the hallways and exploring the various treks and trails available in the hospital’s database, all the while giving space to his small, neglected inklings.
And in time, one of them began to grow.
In the past, he’d never been the sort for idle musing. He’d always been too occupied with the crisis in front of him, too focused on what he needed to know right now, this instant — where do we go? Who do we talk to? He excelled at practicalities: he was keenly attuned to the ebb and flow of ships and satellites; he could explain the reasons for every satellite’s course and every cluster’s arrangement. He knew why miners prefer Cavor brand cargo containers and why smugglers didn’t, why the rapid transit systems on Foale run on chained tracks instead of one continuous loop. He had an astonishing recall for colonial politics, and was familiar with every player, major and minor — who was working for whom, who could be trusted, who could be betrayed — not only on his local station, but in every habitat and ship in the cluster as well; all without a single flick of the eye. He was mildly notorious around the office for reading unprocessed reports and sitting in on live interviews with suspects and refugees, acts which were viewed by even his more dedicated co-workers as something akin to eating coffee beans raw.
At first, he’d tried keeping up with the news from Sharman, but the coverage failed to cover anything important or failed to understand the importance of what they did. The ‘Lockers sabotaged a water treatment facility in the slow rings. (Whatever for?) The ASRC attempted to hold a rally at Sellers University, which was shut down after a counter-protest turned violent. (Why Sellers, whose student body trended far more planetarian than average?) The media’s depiction of reality was so appallingly shallow and consistently sloppy he began to wonder if it wasn’t malicious. Sometimes he’d run collection engines to try and extract answers from the available raw public transmissions, but they still hadn’t relaxed the wartime restrictions and more often than not he was left with only uncomfortable impressions and unreliable signifiers.
It would certainly be easier with full clearances and real intel. But the ward hadn’t been set up for hard cryptos — they’d wheeled him across a docking bridge to a skiff with an HSCX pod for his debriefs — and the Oberoi seems barely capable of basic comms. Eventually, he’d eventually given up on trying to stay in the loop.
But he didn’t stop thinking. He never could.
The idea has its hooks in him now, and isn’t letting go. He jogs a few miles every day, just like before, and he’s building muscle fast — almost back to his old fighting weight, in fact. There’s a million things for him to do today, if he wants to, but now he can’t stop thinking about the idea. To be honest, it’s getting harder to think of anything else.
The Notion, he calls it.
They’ve gone to some effort to gussy up the meals in the canteen, but looks are about all they’ve got going for them. Take this morning’s breakfast: you can’t tell the difference between synth eggs and the real deal if you prepare them correctly, but these have not been prepared correctly. There’s too much paprika and curry, and whatever they’ve mixed in to compensate for the texture has left a mildly sour aftertaste. He’s fairly sure the potatoes are real, which makes their present sodden state all the more tragic. He’d dreamed about potatoes back on Sharman; there’d been a shortage since ‘75, but these are so unappetizing he can’t even be bothered to finish them. The coffee is a standard Rossana blend, at once universal and universally reviled, but for Serafin it brings back fond memories.
He’s reminiscing about the time Ashley managed to hack into the hologens when he realizes a young blonde woman is asking if she can join his table. He gives a polite nod, and the woman waves over a heavy-set, short-haired, apple-cheeked fellow who says — more bellows, really — “Hey there! How ya doing!” before he bangs his tray down on the table, startling nearby diners and driving Serafin’s school reverie scrambling for cover.
“Good morning,” says Serafin, who would be polite to the devil, should they ever meet.
The woman returns to her story about her best friend who won’t stop drinking — the silly thing simply refuses to take the cure, can you can even imagine — and Serafin thinks he might be free, but when he looks up from his coffee he notices the big man’s stare.
“You’re the fella,” the man says, with mounting confidence. “You’re the fella from the recording! The one that was on the news!”
“Oh, Hermy,” says the woman. “Don’t let’s bother him.”
“Boy, they sure did a number on you!”
“Yes,” says Serafin, mortified. “I suppose they did.”
“What a bunch of dirty dogs!” the man bellows. “What I wouldn’t give to get my hands on one of them. Goddam them! Say, are you really in Solar Intelligence?”
Here, Serafin finds firmer footing: “No, that’s—”
The man slaps the table, then gives it a few more. “Then Goddam ‘em twice, for doing that to a civvie!” he says. “But still: it’s you! The man from the recording! Don’t that beat all!”
“Would you look at that!” the woman says. “We’re dining with a celebrity!”
“I’m no celebrity—”
“You know,” the man says, leaning in but not actually lowering his voice. “I’m a bit of a celebrity myself! This handsome mug look familiar at all? No cheating, now!”
Serafin flicks his eye to the roll call — Herman Schott, but it doesn’t ring any bells.
“I’m afraid not.”
“You ever see any ads for Peverall Entomologics?” says Herman brightly.
“I can’t say I—”
“Well, that’s me! In the ads!”
Herman extends a hand, but before Serafin can take it, Herman is waving his arms, summoning an oversized viewer and gesticulating toward the image of a similarly animated man on a tractor. It does look a bit like Herman, although they’ve obviously taken some liberties with his hair, and his face, and, well, pretty much everything else.
“And this is my beautiful blushing bride, Maila!”
“Hello!” says Maila, through a mouthful of eggs. Serafin gives her another look, since this sadly seems to have become an actual conversation: she’s a little drunk and a lot of blonde, and has the generous proportions of someone you might see painted on the side of a starship.
A vulgar beauty, Serafin’s uncle would have said.
“We’re newlyweds!” says Herman, nudging Serafin with an elbow.
“Congratulations.”
“Not that you’d know it, the way we’re traveling!” Maila whines.
“Leave it alone, love!” says Herman.
“They said there’s open cabins, Hermy. We could upgrade whenever we like!”
She starts poking him; he tries to fend her off and ignore her at the same time. “How about you, mister? You married?”
“Oh yes,” says Serafin. “Going on thirty years, now.”
“Any tips?!!” Herman asks — interrogates, really.
“Be honest with one another,” says Serafin. “Entomologics. That’s… bugs, then?”
“That’s right! We’ve only been around five years and we’re already the tenth biggest distributor of insects and insect-related materials in the Free Spaces!”
“Is that so? You know, I’ve always wondered why eating insects isn’t more widely accepted — crickets are a staple of the lunar diet, really quite versatile, as protein goes—”
“Oh, we’re not just doing food,” says Herman. “I mean, we do food too — crickets are posting record profits this year — but our big push this cycle is actually the deeper skyfarms.”
“We just got back from the Baskets,” says Maila. “Everyone was so charming!”
“Forgive my ignorance,” Serafin says, “but… I would think, the colonies being controlled environments, that insects would be more of a nuisance than anything. No offense.”
“None taken!” says Herman, delighted by how little Serafin knows, because it gives him the chance to expound. “A lot of people think that, truth be told — they figure bugs, hey, bugs are just pests! But they’re wrong! Beetles, bees, worms, caterpillars, ladybirds — they’re all part of the equilibrium, you see? You take out the bugs, and the whole darn ecosystem starts to fall apart! That’s part of why you saw those famines during the Jump — they tried to run everything like a science experiment, you know? Nice and neat, everything in its proper place. But it just don’t work that way!”
“There’s pollination, I suppose—”
“Pollination’s huge, but it’s more than that!” Herman waves up models, which float around him as he launches into a lecture he’s obviously given before. “Bugs are a part of every step of the cycle on Earth: they spread micro-organisms that plants needs to stay healthy, they break down dead matter and remove waste — see that right there, that’s decomposition — they help with fertilization, they dig through soil and help water flow — there’s a million little rôles to play, and our job at Peverall is to make sure those rôles get filled!”
“I see. And micro-drones—”
“Oh, you can use micros if you want,” says Herman, leaving off to be an idiot. “The SPARCs are crazy for ‘em. But they’re a pain to maintain; the newer models are built with sugar plastics, but they don’t break down so good, and, hey! They don’t self-propagate, if you know what I mean!”
This seems to merit a guffaw and another elbow.
“They got a nickname for me at the office,” says Herman. “You know what they call me?”
Serafin resists the sigh. “Is it Bugs?”
“It’s Bugs!” Herman bellows, and he pounds the table and laughs — a deafening, seemingly involuntary braying.
When Serafin returns to his cabin, a new priority message is waiting. The sender is someone at the Churchill Reconstruction Initiative who doesn’t exist, but running the signature through decryption protocols reveals it’s one of van Arden’s alters.
“Jim,” van Arden says. “Hope you’re well. We’re still digging into the unpleasantness on our end. No breakthroughs, but — best to discuss details at a, uh, later date.”
“Of course,” says Serafin, as though van Arden can hear him two hours ago.
“Unfortunately, the recording is turning into more of an issue than we initially anticipated… it seems to have become a real point of fixation with the colony uncertifieds (awful little jackals). Management wants you to do some media.”
Serafin groans.
“I know, I know,” says van Arden, raising a hand as though he can hear Serafin two hours later. “I don’t like it either, but this is coming from upstairs. I spoke with an old chum who works for c24, they’ll be in touch soon. I also had the boys in PubComms put together a packet for you to make sure we’re all on the same page.”
“Hate to put you through this, but we’ll try to make it all relatively painless. Get this taken care of. Get cleared by the docs. After that, it’s smooth sailing.”
“Unless you decide you’d rather just quit and take up sailing. Think about that myself, sometimes.”
The old man slaps his thighs twice, which is van Arden for conversation concluded.
“Regards to Lucy and the rest.”
The message ends.
Well, here you go, then, Serafin thinks. An assignment. Just like you wanted.