Certainly didn’t, in fact, because his rational mind kept on dieseling even though everything that needed talking about was already decided.
“If you were the only Earther and it was Belters doing this, you’d feel different about it.”
“Thank you for letting me know about the problem,” Havelock said. “I’ll see it’s addressed.”
Thorrsen pushed off from the desk and sailed gracefully through the air, vanishing into the corridor. Havelock sighed, opened his desk display again, and paged through the ship reports. The truth was that incidents were on the rise. Most of it was little things. Complaints of petty infractions of corporate policies. Accusations of hoarding or sexual misconduct. One of the organic chemists had been making euphorics. The ship psychiatric counselor was issuing increasingly strident warnings about something he called internal stratification, which just sounded like social politics as usual to Havelock. He signed off on all the reports.
If you were the only Earther.
The funny thing was that Havelock had been the only Earther in a Belter society, and more than once. When he’d been on a twenty-berth hauler from Luna to Ganymede for Stone & Sibbets, he’d been one of two Earthers, outnumbered and always subtly excluded. He’d worked for Star Helix on Ceres Station for the better part of a year, always getting the worst cases, the worst partner, the less-than-subtle reminders that he didn’t belong. He’d been dealt more than his fair share of shit by Belters for not having the right-shaped body or knowing the polyglot mess that passed for a kind of outer planets cant. They hadn’t pissed in his locker, mostly because it hadn’t occurred to them.
Havelock set a monitor specifically on Thorrsen’s locker, then pulled up a fresh security template. He looked at the empty field, asking him by its blankness what he wanted to say.
We’re eight billion klicks from home and a bunch of half-feral terrorists want to keep on killing us, so let’s stay calm.
Or maybe:
Damn near every Belter I’ve dealt with treated me like I was dipped in shit because of where I came from, but now that we’re in the majority, let’s all respect their tender little feelings.
He cracked his knuckles and started typing.
It has come to the attention of security that an increasing number of pranks have been played among the crew. While we all understand the need to keep things light in these stressful times, some of these have gone beyond the realm of good taste. As acting head of security
He paused.
Once, on Ceres, Havelock had been assigned to close down an illegal club up near the center of the station where the Coriolis had been vicious and the spin gravity at its least. When he’d gotten to the place, the combination of bright lights, shrieking dub, and his unaccustomed inner ear had left him vomiting in the carved corridors. An image of him had made its way onto the board back in the offices. He’d played along because objecting would have made it worse. He hadn’t thought about that case in years.
If you were the only Earther.
“Fuck,” Havelock said to the empty air. He cleared the screen.
It has come to my attention that some RCE employees and team members have been singled out for harassment because they are from the outer planets. It is critical under these stressful conditions that we not confuse our teammates with our enemies because of accidents of physiology and environments of origin. As such, I am taking the following actions:
“I’m gonna regret this,” Havelock said to the screen, but by the time he’d finished the announcement, checked it for grammar, and sent it out, he felt almost good.
Chapter Twenty: Elvi
Sitting outside her hut, her hand terminal resting on her knees, the now-familiar sunlight warming her neck and back, Elvi waited for the reports from Luna to buffer. The comm laser on the Edward Israel was the only conduit back to the worlds she’d known, and it was swamped with technical data flowing out from the workgroups on the planetary surface and the sensor data from the Israel. It was sobering to realize that for all the tragedies and fear and death that wracked New Terra, most of the raw data going back home was still technical. And her slow connection was more than the townspeople of First Landing had. The Barbapiccola didn’t even support a feed for them. Their hand terminals were strictly ad hoc, local, line-of-sight networks if they functioned at all.
A breeze lifted a whirl of sand, then set it gently down again. High above, the green clouds scattered apart and rejoined, lacing the blue sky like algae floating on the surface of a pond. The air smelled of heat and dust and the distant presentiment of rain. The reports finished loading and Elvi pulled them up and spent a long hour reading them, listening to the debates, putting together her perspective. It was harder than she liked. Her mind kept jumping around without her.
Everything was changing on the planet so quickly, everything was so different than she’d expected it to be, that just maintaining focus was hard. The voyage into the desert, seeing a two-billion-year-old mechanism actually still functioning, if only barely, had been revelatory. Then the exposure and destruction of the terrorists among the squatters, which should have been a relief, had left her oddly unsettled. And, though she hadn’t mentioned it to anyone and never would, she’d been suffering recurring and intrusive dreams about James Holden.
On the screen, the research coordinator’s report ended, and Elvi realized she hadn’t heard any of it. She sighed, restarted it, and stopped it again before the woman back at the RCE labs on Earth could say anything. Elvi looked up at the sky, wondering where the Rocinante and the Barbapiccola and the Edward Israel were, hidden by the atmosphere-scatter of blue. One of the plant analogs beside the path leading back to the town let out a volley of rising clicks. It was something she’d wanted to investigate, but she hadn’t had the time. Not yet. “Doctor Okoye,” the research coordinator said from sixty AU away, or half a galaxy depending on how you looked at it, “I’ve just come from a meeting with the stats team, and I wanted to bring you up to speed on the plan for how we’d like to proceed with the data collection in the next weeks. The Luna group especially was hoping to request additional sampling on several of your initial subjects so that we can narrow our error bars…”
Elvi listened, focused, pushed away all her other thoughts and feelings. This time, she ended the report with a list of action items, a clear sense of how her work was changing the resources and plans of the labs back at home, and a half dozen questions about mineral sequestration that she wanted to ask Fayez. Protocol said she should record a reply and send it out right away. The hours it would take to reach home meant it would arrive before the morning meetings. But instead, she switched to her organizer and began listing her obligations. Water samples and soil samples. Samples of three different plant analog species. A report on the alien artifact…
She’d been thinking about possible triggers to the artifact’s sudden activity, and since Holden had been there and was, after all, the mediator who was ultimately responsible for making the situation on New Terra better—sensible, sane—she thought maybe, if she could give a solid reason that the artifact in the desert wasn’t moving in reaction to their presence, it would take something off his plate. Just as a kindness, and to help support him in making peace.