With nowhere left to go in this fantasy, I let my mind wander to life on Farraway, that temperate green world just inside the edge of settled space, with its vast expanses of flatland where bountiful and diverse crops of food are grown in huge open outdoor fields surrounding sleek and modern towers that reach toward a distant blue sun. I’m speeding on an airskimmer over a green and red blur of lush limeberry plants, toward a shining blue coin of water in the distance. I’m there quickly, parking my vehicle in the dark and porous volcanic dirt a few dozen meters away from the deep hot spring, where a handful of trim, long-limbed people swim and sunbathe. Getting off the skimmer, I bound toward the shore, the ground patting gently against the balls of my feet with each long stride, light in the low gravity. Steam curls in wisps against my calves as I slosh into the hot water.
As I let myself float I look back toward the dark, coarse shore at the sunbathers, a few young, a few old, many somewhere in between, most of them tall and lanky. I try to make eye contact with a nearby man about my age, but my imagination is not quite strong enough to put a clear face on him, and suddenly my thoughts are meandering to the milk party at Aaron Greenman’s and the bodies in Marvin Chan’s office and Jessi Rodgers in a hydro house in the warehouse district, picking strawberries with tired, wiry little hands. Thoughts of what it was like when I toiled in one just like it twenty years ago, attached to the house I grew up in, where I’d come home every day with sore knuckles and fingers gritty with soil and chemicals. Where one day I entered to find a simple little box with a note on top just a step inside the front door. Struggling to bring myself back into the here, back into the now, I shudder, trying to forget these things, trying to turn my mind back to faraway places and a better life, even as the morass of my own existence keeps pulling at me.
I cut the water and stand in the steam for a moment, lost in unpleasant thoughts. Realizing that I forgot to get a towel, I shake some of the water off and step out, dripping on the floor as I take a towel from the cabinet under the sink. The scores in the stone press into the bottoms of my feet as I dry myself off. The image in the mirror is completely different from the one I saw before I stepped into the shower. My lower eyelids are still just a bit dark from lack of sleep, and I’m still lean, but my muscles run smooth below skin that now seems to glow with new life, and though my hair hangs limp at the tops of my shoulders, it has a healthy glisten to it.
I stare at the pile of clothes on the ground. They’re too dirty to change back into, so I wrap the towel around myself strategically, open the door, and lean out. “Hey, Kearns?”
“Yeah?” he calls back.
“You got a pair of clothes I could borrow while I wash my uniform?”
“Uhhhh… hang on.”
A minute or so later he hesitantly reaches some clothes through the doorway, keeping his eyes averted. I can’t help but find his politeness endearing.
I shut the door and put on the surprisingly bright pink exercise clothes he handed me, which are far from my style but end up fitting nicely, hugging my skin and exposing the long stretch of midriff they’re designed to. I could be a rich girl, from the look of me.
I go back out though the hallway, drop my dirty Collections uniform and khaki casuals into the auto-washer, and continue to the living room where Brady is reclined on one of his sofas, watching a financial news program with pundits yakking about the Commerce Board’s renegotiations of the import quotas, speculating this way and that about what the numbers will be and how they’ll affect the markets. He sits up when he sees me coming, a sheepish look on his face.
“These clothes don’t seem like they’d fit you, Kearns,” I chide, placing my sidearm gently on the coffee table and plopping down into the surprisingly firm easy chair.
“An ex-girlfriend left them here,” he answers. “I just never threw them out.”
“Sure.” I wonder what type of women Brady dates. Upper class, physically fit airheads, judging from the clothes I’m wearing.
As if uncomfortable with this line of conversation, Brady gets up and goes into the kitchen, then returns a moment later with a couple of bottles of Simphon-e. The inexpensive, ten percent ethanol cocktail is a working-class standard in the City, and I’m surprised that Brady drinks it. He hands me the blush cactus flavored one, and I crack the sliding top open and drink.
“Tell me something, Taryn,” he says, sitting back down, “what’s so important to you about this whole chalk weevil mystery?”
“I think that’s obvious.”
“Money.” He shrugs, taking a stiff little sip from his Simphon-e, which is the “Blue” flavor, a euphemism for a mixture of cheap but strong-tasting Brink-native sea herbs. “But you’re risking your life, and even if you live through it, there might not be any big payoff at the end.”
“You know that there’s a well of money at the bottom of all this.” That doesn’t seem to convince him.“It could get me all the way to a ticket off this world if things go right. This is my chance, and I’ve got to seize it.”
“That’s what you want, then,” he states, not particularly surprised, “a ticket off-world.”
“I don’t want to restart my life in my midthirties.”
“Why restart it at all?”
I let out a sigh, surprised at how unprepared I am to answer. I can’t remember the last time someone asked me that question, but then again, I can’t remember the last time I told someone other than Myra that I wanted to leave. “This… ” I answer, “The way things work here… It’s no way to live.”
Brady smiles slightly. “You watch too many imported movies. It’s pretty much the same everywhere.”
“You gonna tell me every other world has a problem like ours?”
“Not the same problem,” he says. “But problems like Brink’s? Sure. Most colonies on moons have chronic water shortages, for example.”
“What about Darien?” I ask, “What’s so terrible about that place?”
He bristles, like I’ve touched a nerve. “You think people don’t starve on Darien? That people don’t die of curable illnesses?”
I don’t know if they do, but all the info I’ve seen about the place makes it look pretty nice, if still a bit of a backwater. “That can’t be why you left.”
“It had something to do with it,” he responds, a touch of bitterness in his voice.
I have to admit, I’m intrigued. “Don’t tell me the privileged SCAPE executive grew up poor or something.”
“No,” he says, leaning back on the sofa. “My parents were still wealthy even after paying for the flight to Darien. Which included a surprise extra fare for me, by the way, because I was born during the last leg of the trip. Soon as their feet hit the soil, they set up a big robotics factory which is now the leading manufacturer on the planet.”
“Why’d you leave, then? Some kind of rebellion against your parents?”
He scoffs but answers, “You could call it that, I suppose. My parents paid for the finest online education money could buy. Academies based on Earth and Ryland. But I finished college, and I realized there was nothing for me to do on Darien.”
“What about riding sulfur dragons? Don’t they do that there?”
“You know what I mean. I had ambition. I wanted to make a difference for humanity. Still do. And Darien’s problems are the age-old ones, the unsolvable ones. Economic inequality. You know: not enough food or power for the poor, not enough floating hotels and oeufs du massepain-poisson for the rich. It’s like I said, every society has its shortages. And if there is no shortage, society invents one. The difference with Brink is that its most serious one may be fixable.”