“It’s true,” she insisted. “Not one. I watch the news. Anyway, they haven’t hurt anybody, have they?”
No one replied.
“Maybe not yet,” Rand said. “But anarchy can get pretty scary even when it means well, honey. Maybe especially when it means well.” He turned to the rivera. “But no, we’re not worried at all. Everybody knows you’re safer in space than you are on Earth: look at the stats. We really have to go now. Thank you all—”
On the flight up, Rhea tuned her seatback screen to a news channel, in time to hear herself ask, “… a conspiracy of rapturists?” and then, in response to the rivera’s prompting, define the term. A few moments later, Colly and Rand’s exchange was quoted too.
The piece in which the soundbite was featured might as well have been titled, “Nanotechnology—Threat or Menace?” It was about three times as long as the item she managed to find later on an arts channel, about Rand’s return to the Shimizu.
She wanted the flight to be miserable. It was idyllic. No dropsickness in her family—none on the whole plane. No emergencies; minimal, gentle maneuvering; a perfect hop. Superb, pleasant service from human and robot alike. Even the food was excellent: real, microwave cooking rather than flashpak. The Shimizu did not permit clients to arrive unhappy, whether they wanted to or not. The hardest part of the flight was keeping Colly’s seat belt buckled once the gravity went away.
The approach was spectacular. The Shimizu looked like God’s Christmas ornament, a vast gleaming globe. Its exterior was fractalized for maximum radiating surface, so it sparkled in the sunlight like a vast ball of crinkled aluminum foil. It was girdled by an equator of huge cooling and power-collecting vanes, brilliant silver on one side and space black on the other, that slowly rotated independently as the relative position of the sun changed. A thousand points of light—peoples’ windows!—added to the illumination, randomly distributed, going on or off as tenants entered or left their rooms.
The plane crept up on the hotel sideways, spinning slowly around its own axis to distribute the sun’s heat, so there were no bad seats. Every time you decided you were there now, the damned thing got a little bigger; it seemed planet-sized by the time they actually reached the spaceport at the “north pole.”
After a textbook docking, all four doors opened the instant the seat-belt light went out, so that passengers need not stand in line to debark; customs formalities occurred electronically without any of them noticing. The dock itself was beautiful and impressive, its layout and decor operating somehow on the subconscious to make you feel you were home.
Then Rand muttered, “Oh no—that asshole.”
A large spider monkey with a head like a red sea anemone sprang at them out of nowhere. At the last possible moment he braked to a stop with smelly, poorly tuned thrusters and flung his arms around Colly. She looked wildly around to Rhea, her eyes asking permission to be terrified.
“I could kiss you,” the apparition said, and did so, on the forehead. Colly decided she didn’t need permission; the man said “Eek” and let her go and clutched his groin.
“Nice shot, dear,” Rhea said, and interposed herself between them before Rand could. She was pleased to find that free-fall reflexes came back quickly to her; she still remembered how to jaunt. “Who or what are you?” she asked him.
He forgot his aching testicles. “The guy who could cheerfully strangle you, Ms. Pash-o,” he said cheerfully. “What ever possessed you to give them a bite like that, for God’s sake? You blew my whole story right off the Net with that rapturist line, lady. Who asked you to improvise? If it hadn’t been for this little genius here,” he said, pointing to Colly, “it could have been a disaster.” Forgetting that she had just kicked him, he reached out and tried to pat her head. “You just keep following your mama around, kid, and every time you see her open her mouth to a sniffer, you talk instead.”
Colly ducked until he gave up. “Rhea and Colly,” Rand said through clenched teeth, “this is Evelyn Martin, Shimizu’s publicity chief.”
“And people still come here?” Rhea asked. The man was strikingly ugly. His head looked like a large red Brillo pad with bat-ears and pop-eyes. She had not met him on her previous visit, but Rand had assured her Martin was an excrescence; she decided he had understated the case.
Martin didn’t seem to hear. “It’s okay for you to talk like that now; I’ll dub the audio later, give us all beautiful lines for the release. But I’ve got the top three cronkites in space waiting nearby to do the personal bit, so pee if you have to and we’ll—”
Jay arrived. “Rand and his family will be happy to meet with them later this evening,” he said firmly, and embraced his brother. “Sorry I’m late, bro.”
Martin continued to talk rapidly while Jay greeted Rhea and Colly in turn, but they all ignored him. “Twenty-one hundred, Ev,” Jay said as he led them from the hall. “They’ll wait. Nobody ever turned down a free dinner at the Shimizu. Least of all a cronkite.” Martin watched speechlessly as their luggage emerged from the plane and began to follow them.
Rhea had known Jay since her courtship with his half-brother over a decade ago, had chatted with him for dozens of hours on the phone since. But since Jay had made the permanent move to space, around the time she and Rand got married, she had only been in his physical presence once, briefly, during Rand’s previous residency. In one sense she knew him well already. But to know if you really like someone, you have to smell them. As they all relaxed over drinks in their suite—Rhea’s new home!—she found herself remembering how much she really liked Jay.
During a visit to the bathroom she took the occasion to summon Diaghilev, Jay’s AI, and ask if there had been any recent news of Ethan. “Ethan who, Ms. Paixao?” was the reply, which was all the answer she needed. The relationship was irreparable. A shame; Rhea had liked Ethan, at least over the phone. “Is Jay seeing anyone?”
There was an imperceptible hesitation while Diaghilev made sure she was cleared for that information. “No, ma’am. He dates occasionally, but has not dated anyone twice.” She made a mental note to keep an eye open for a nice young man for Jay, and rejoined the others.
The suite was considerably nicer than the one she’d had on her last short visit. It took her a while to note, and a little longer to believe, that the window was real. Earth was centered in the frame, the terminator just reaching what looked like a major blizzard over the northwest coast of North America. This was one of the more expensive suites in the hotel. She hunted for flaws, and cheered up a little when she noticed the furniture was all permanent. Excellent, and fully programmable, but it didn’t go away when you were done with it.
But everything else she could see was state of the art or better.
She told herself sourly that the hotel had given them this suite to soften her up—that once Rand signed on for good, they’d be moved to somewhere inboard with the rest of the peons.
It was Jay who snapped her out of her gloomy mood, by asking her about her work. She thought of the story about Mr. Hansen and his beloved nun, but did not bring it up, speaking instead of the novel she had been struggling with for nearly a year now. Jay listened well, widening his eyes at the right spots, making little murmurs of agreement, asked insightful questions with great diffidence. Several of the questions made knowledgeable reference to her earlier works. He was either as much of a fan as he claimed to be, or a gifted actor. Either was gratifying.