“Yes. Your mother…”
“My mother?” Today’s orchid was, I noted, perfect.
“You have recently become the registered next-of-kin of a certain Maria Kowalski.”
Of course Everlight kept tabs on their employees, and something like that would get flagged up. “Yes. Yes I have. For my sins.” Lunan law allows you to divorce parents as well as partners, so if I’d had the money, I could’ve made the distance between me and my mother formal, rather than relying on our default state of estrangement. But I hadn’t. “I hope and believe, Mr. Lau, that you can see beyond a person’s initial circumstances to what they may achieve for themselves.” Creep, said a small, rebellious part of me I thought I’d excised.
“It would be easier to overlook these circumstances had you declared them when you first joined us.”
There had been a box on the application form to add Any Other Pertinent Information and I had agonised about using it to declare my “criminal connections” at the time. “My apologies, Mr. Lau. I should have done so.” But then I probably wouldn’t have got the job. Plus, it was just an office admin post and if they really cared they’d do a background check. I assumed they had, before I reached my current, somewhat more important, position. Apparently not. Or they had, but when Mum had no legal hold on me, they’d been willing to ignore her. My face felt hot.
“Suspension pending an investigation is the minimum you can expect, I fear. However, I will fight to the best of my ability to retain you as an employee of Everlight.”
I believed he would. He got good work out of me. And, for a half-gwailo, I made the effort to fit in. Which just made me more angry with the company, and with myself, and with Mum. And anger makes you do, and say, stupid things. “Thank you.” Don’t thank him, creep. “Given the situation, I would like to request a formal sabbatical from Everlight.” Even as I said it, I was stunned at myself.
His eyebrows went up. “That is an interesting proposition.” Then lowered, as his initial surprise settled. “Possibly a sensible move though. How long would you wish to take?”
My subconscious had already done the maths. “Three months.”
I like space travel. Granted it’s potentially dangerous and often uncomfortable, and the cramped conditions on the cut-price flight I ended up on were grim, but I travelled enough when I was younger that I don’t puke when gravity goes away, and I love the sense of going somewhere, towards something better, a place where things would go right. Mind you, when I was younger we were more likely to be running away from something that’d gone wrong.
Even taking the budget option, I had to sell most of my remaining possessions to buy passage to Mars. A return, because when I’d worked through this upwelling of the past I’d be back, returning to what was left of the life I’d built on Earth; by then Mr. Lau would have smoothed things over, and be really missing his star admin, and I’d be able to go back to my old job. That’s what I told myself, as I boarded the flight.
I should have spent the journey working out my options but my thoughts just went round and round, tumbling in the near freefall, and coming back to two facts: nine years ago I’d decided to miss out a detail, a simple declaration on a form, and now it was coming back to haunt me; then a few days ago I’d acted on a crazy impulse, and in doing so risked undoing the chance at a normal life that form had bought me.
Stepping off the shuttle into Martian gravity, seeing people as tall as I was, gave a brief, comforting illusion of coming home. But this wasn’t Luna. The sky beyond the dome was red, not black, and the air smelt of dust, ozone and something sweet—orange peel, perhaps?
By the time I’d queued for, and been crushed into, the lift down from the crater rim and queued for, and been glared at by, customs and joined the even longer queue for immigration, the scale of my potential mistake was sinking in. I was on an alien planet, with little money and no plan.
The walls in Arrivals were covered in the usual combination of adverts, infomercials and warnings about contraband and contagions. One image showed the Eye of Heaven floating, like some round shining god, over a hyper-real and lightly animated—or possibly real-time—depiction of the Olympus region, with the caption, Peace and Prosperity For All; the Everlight logo at the bottom left was subtle enough to miss if you weren’t looking for it. On Earth, Everlight were a major player; on Mars, they were top dog. The last two decades had seen a meteoric rise in their fortunes on the red planet as every major decision turned out to be right, every gamble justified.
The Arrivals hall also contained discreet niches with actual gods in; the nearest contained a happy jade Buddha. The orange peel smell was stronger here: dry incense, for when you wanted to appease the ancestors without clogging the air scrubbers.
One wall had a flatscreen newsfeed—very retro, or possibly normal, for Mars—and I distracted myself by watching it while I queued. On screen, a thin-faced young man was complaining about Project Rainfall, saying Everlight had no right to hold people to ransom with the promise of rain. The comet’s water belonged to all Martians, he insisted. Something about that phrase, “all Martians,” lifted my spirits. No one ever says, “All Earthers.” Okay, so Mars is just a bunch of semi-independent enclaves and habitats, as is Luna, but hearing someone speak like that made me feel warm and fuzzy inside. I just couldn’t escape that early communal upbringing. As a caption appeared at the bottom of the flatscreen, I realised I wasn’t so far from the truth: this was a spokesperson for the Deimos Collective. Somewhat ironic, talking about “all Martians” when he didn’t even live on the surface of Mars. Still, the Deimons did claim to speak for the ordinary folk of the planet below them and they had the height and weight—physically, morally, financially—to make statements like that. And the Chinese had the temporal power and self-assurance to ignore them. The queue moved, and I looked away.
Once through the formalities I used the public comm service to book into the cheapest accommodation I could find; it called itself a hotel but was more like a person storage facility, and made my accommodation back on Earth look downright spacious. Then I paid a visit to Shah, Shah & Needlam. I didn’t call ahead in case the lawyers refused me an appointment, and I had to sweet-talk their receptionist and wait for an hour before I got to speak to Mr. Shah, junior. He was predictably surprised to see me. When I made my request, his face fell further.
“Your brother’s remains? I am sorry, Ms. Choi, but he had no stated religious beliefs or relatives in a position to collect said, ah, remains. Therefore he was, well…”
I knew the drill. “He was resyked.”
“The phrase we use is ‘physically reintegrated.’”
“I understand.” On Luna the official term was “returned to the system.” I’d half expected this, and I wasn’t sure what I would have done with Shiv’s body or ashes anyway. But I had to ask. It was an attempt at what the Americans used to call closure. His final mark on the world.
It didn’t have to be, of course.
“Tea, Ms. Choi? I have jasmine, green, chai or English.”
The available selection implied considerable resources, which was no doubt the point. But I hadn’t had a decent cup of tea since I left Earth. “English, please. White no sugar.” Though I preferred Western tea I usually drank Eastern teas in social situations, but I didn’t have to worry about fitting in here. Besides, I was curious to see whether the perfectly turned out young woman sitting opposite me had access to cows as well as decent hydroponics.
She waved a hand at the boy who’d shown me into her office-cum-parlour. He drew back from the threshold, pulling the painted screen-door closed behind him. A subliminal hum started in the roots of my teeth.