The Earth-Luna delay was only a couple of seconds, but it was enough for me to see her expression fall into the familiar combination of concern and disapproval. “Beth! Been trying to get hold of you all day.” She sounded more American than I remembered; her only link to the old US was a single grandparent she’d never met, but everyone indulged the remaining Americans, so she’d probably been cultivating the accent in prison.
“I’ve been working. I can’t take personal calls on work time.”
“Working?” The idea still appalled her, it seemed.
I resisted the urge to sigh. “At Everlight, yes.”
“You’re still with the opposition?” My father had called them that, jokingly; given how little time she spent with him, and how that time ended, it hardly made sense to refer to one of the world’s biggest companies as “the opposition.” But that was my mother.
“Yep. Still at Everlight.”
“Well, fuck me.” Another thing about my mother: she loves to swear. She blames it on having had, as she puts it, “a shit childhood” but I think it’s more about image, the street-smart American shtick. And because she swears, I don’t. “And’re you still doing,” she waved a hand dismissively, “office work?”
“Operational administration.” After years of silence, and with a noticeable delay on the line, she could still propel me from mildly peeved to wound-up-fit-to-scream in a matter of seconds.
“And how’s…” another hand-wave, “whatsisname?”
“Fine.” I bit down on the word, but her eyes are narrowing.
She squinted past me. “Thought you two had one of those neat corporate apartments.”
“You’re calling because of Shiv, aren’t you?” She would only have been allowed to contact me because I was now her registered next-of-kin. Because Shiv really was dead.
Her expression fell, and she looked old for the first time. The pain I glimpsed wasn’t entirely faked. “Yes. He… he was everything I could’ve wished for in a child.”
I let my subconscious chime in with unlike you, because I had no desire to be everything my mother could have wished for. “When did he… When did it happen?” My brother’s dead. My brother’s really dead.
“Shit. You don’t know?”
“No. How would I?” I didn’t even know how he’d got hold of my contact details. “I only know at all because of this call.” Not technically true, but I wasn’t giving her any ammunition. “So, how long…?” I let the question trail off into the signal-lag.
“Three weeks.”
In order to reach me when it did, Shiv’s chip must have left Mars three or four days after it happened. Whatever it had been. “And how did he…” I had to say it sometime, “… die?”
“A flyer crash, according to some shyster Martian lawyers. He left details of his final wishes with them.”
The same lawyers who’d presumably found out where I was and dispatched the chip. “A flyer? He was a good pilot.”
“According to these lawyers it was a solo flight, and he didn’t file a flight-plan with Olympus Central.” You don’t say. “They claim he ran into technical difficulties but that the glider’s transponder had been tampered with. A rover-train spotted the wreckage two days later.”
In other words, anything could have happened. “These lawyers, who are they?”
“Shah… something. No, Shah, Shah and something. What the fuck does it matter?”
“Probably doesn’t.” Not a Chinese firm, then; no surprise there, either. Should I tell her about the chip Shah, Shah and something had sent me?
“But it ain’t all shit, Beth. There’s one piece of good news. His legacy, perhaps.”
Mum’s so calm. But she’ll have known about Shiv for a while. “What do you mean?”
“It’s coming up for ten years. Since I first came to this shithole, I mean.” Spoken as though she could leave. Which, I realised with a jolt, she could, potentially.
“You mean, the buy-out clause?” So that was why she was calling me. Not to commiserate on our shared loss, mend fences, or volunteer useful information. No, as usual, she wanted something. Whatever was on Shiv’s chip, I wouldn’t be sharing it with her.
She nodded. “I’ve had a decade to, as the shrink here says, reflect on the human aspect of the incident. Now I’ve done my time and had my therapy the slate’s clean, of the whole culpable homicide thing anyway.”
The remaining ten years of Mum’s sentence were a material loss penalty, which could be reduced by paying certain fines. “The court set a ridiculous price, if you remember.” The vagaries of Lunan law: damaging a hab was as dire an act as taking a life, but if you could pay for a new hab to be built your crime need never be spoken of again.
“Yeah, they sure did. But you’ve done well, you said so yourself.”
I did? When, exactly? She was looking at me like she expected me to conjure the necessary funds out of the air. “Not that well, Mum. Sorry.”
“Ah. So it’s like that.” She sighed, and got that disappointed look in her eyes. I was still working out the best way to field this latest ploy when she continued. “If you could, you’d free me though, wouldn’t you? We could start again.”
“Of course I would.” What else could I say?
She nodded. “Thank fuck for that at least. Sometimes, Beth. Sometimes I wonder about you, how you turned out. But you’re a good girl really.”
“I have to go now.”
“Sure, I guess.”
“Bye, Mum.” I cut the call.
I pulled the package containing Shiv’s chip out of the cubbyhole where I’d stashed it. The chip was in a holder, the holder was in standard packaging along with a hardcopy slip of paper with the cryptic phrase “Remember the world’s dodgiest airlock?” printed on it; the package was labelled with my name and last registered address and a customs mark which indicated it came from Mars. And that was it. The piece of paper would have foxed anyone else; but as soon as I’d opened the package I knew what it meant, and who this package came from.
I should go out and hire the chip-reader again. Instead I decided to go out and get laid. Sex was, truth be told, the solution to a lot of my problems these days, even if it was also the cause of one of them. Which made Ken’s call, as I was putting my lipstick on, perfectly timed. Behind my soon-to-be-ex-husband the apartment looked spacious, comfortable and airy. Still no signs of change, specifically the kinds of change made by another woman.
“I expected to hear from your lawyer today, Lizzie,” he said, doing that looking-up-from-under-his-brows thing I used to love but which I’d come to think of as passive-aggressive neediness.
He did have a point, though. I’d forgotten to call the divorce lawyer. I never forget things like that. “I… had a difficult day.”
“You can tell me about it if it helps.”
I wish he wouldn’t make civilised, genuine-sounding offers like that. Just like I wish there was another woman, or man, or something else; some other reason. He’s trying to make this as easy as he can, and that just makes it harder. “I’m fine. I’ll get on it first thing tomorrow.”
The lawyer in question wasn’t available first thing, so I had to queue the call for lunchtime. If I’d had the money I’d have hired a lawyer who’d return my calls, but the storage charge on those possessions I no longer had room for in my nasty little cubbyhole—which was most of them—had just gone out, and I barely had the money to pay rent on said cubbyhole. My original thought, that I’d get a studio flat in a nice, non-corporate suburb once the divorce went through, was about as likely as me taking Mr. Lau’s place as Everlight Europe’s Junior VP for Finance.