The door slid shut and cut it down to background—a centimeter of basalt foam was a good sound insulator. He knew damn well what the lawyer wanted to talk about, and it wasn’t for Tina’s ears. So he sat on her bunk in between her stuffed animals, with her crayon drawings taped to the wall for a backdrop, and faced the video screen, which dissolved into a holo of a distinguished-looking balding man in a white turtleneck with an pointed black beard just starting to turn gray.
“Mr. Wigner, Jaynes Femrite. I’m with Femrite, Carson and Lu, doing pro bono for IPA Legal Assistance. I understand Eileen’s giving you her, uh, best.”
Eileen? Dolph shook his head. Did everyone know everyone out here?
“I’m about at the end of my rope, Mr. Femrite. Her standards are a moving target. I’ve met all the legal requirements, all the specifications, and I can’t get from here to there with her. We just don’t have the money to pay her, and all her friends, for everything she wants us to buy from them.” He took a breath. “We don’t want to cause trouble. We just want to be left alone. But I have to do something. We can’t go back and we’re within a month of being self-sufficient here.”
Femrite inclined his head slightly. Dolph saw the “secure comm” telltale in the comer of his screen. Could he trust it? Did he care anymore?
Femrite cleared his throat. “Got yourself in a little trouble back at Shepard City, didn’t you?”
Dolph looked down. So the guy already knew, and so did everyone else. That was probably another reason for “Eileen” to hound him out.
The lawyer waited a minute for an answer, but when Dolph didn’t say anything, he continued. “Her name was Shan Toy. Want to tell me your side of it?”
Why not, Dolph thought. What more harm could it do? “I’d just finished a three-week mine engineering school and was celebrating. She picked me up at the bar. I didn’t know how old she was, didn’t even suspect because she came on so, so mature. I told her I was married and she said ‘so what, it’s just for a night.’ So we checked our records and went to my room.
“We were just getting into it when she complained about my ring hurting her back so I took it off and put it on the nightstand. It was my greatgrandfather’s college ring, with a hand-cut diamond in it. She apparently suspected what it was worth, because as soon as I set it down, she jumped up, grabbed it, and headed for the door.
“I went after her and she pulled a gun—I don’t know from where. I kept after her anyway because the ring meant so much. She shot once and missed and then I was grappling with her and the gun went off again. The dart got in between the vertebrae in her neck somehow and the trank shut her heart down. It was a freak accident. I ran, then came to my senses and realized they could trace me a hundred ways. So I called Sasha, and turned myself in.”
The lawyer nodded. “Self-defense, hung jury on the murder charge. Parole with time served on the attempted statutory rape charge—you could have checked her age.”
“She said she was twenty, right from Earth on a tourist visa with her parents and five sisters. I was drunk and fell for it. It turned out her so-called parents weren’t even related to her and they both had rap sheets in Thailand. The girls were supposed to sell themselves, or get in someone’s room and grab something valuable. Preferably both. I wasn’t thinking… damned stupid.”
It had been the most miserable episode in his life, and he felt like he had used up a lifetime’s worth of emotional self-control getting through the hearings. He stared at Femrite. Enough was enough. The Universe had to get off his back sometime.
Femrite raised an eyebrow. “But the court of public opinion wasn’t so kind?”
Dolph sighed. “Her parents and the tabloid media said I made up the ring story. Dad was mad as hell. He gave me a grubstake, pointed me at the Belt, and told me not to come back. Sasha’s family tried to keep her at L4, but she stuck with me. That was all that counted.” Damn it, his eyes were getting wet. That big knot in his stomach, that had been there ever since Shepard City, got a little tighter. Get a grip, he told himself. “Until now.”
“Uh, huh,” Femrite agreed. “That counts for a lot. That and your daughter. Look, I want to set you clear on a couple of things.
“First is that Eileen doesn’t care what your past is. That’s usually the case in the Belt, and there are minuses as well as pluses to that. For instance,” the lawyer flashed a shark-like grin at Dolph, “you’ll probably end up doing business with a certain former drug dealer with a manslaughter rap which, they say, included cannibalism. He’s behaved himself since getting out here. Of course people take care not to rile him.” Femrite s grin was distinctly chilling. “At any rate, your crime is small potatoes out here, even if you’re lying about what happened at Shepard City.”
“Lying!” Dolph couldn’t think of anything to say. Then anger turned to uncertainty, tinged with fear. He wondered if the drug killer was named Femrite.
“Now don’t get mad. I said if, and, in fact, I think you are being truthful. But my point is that all that’s irrelevant. What counts now is what you do out here.
“The second point is that, out here, what an inspector says, goes. We don’t, and can’t, have the public infrastructure with all the appeals you’re used to. Even with robotics and beam propulsion, the rocks are too far apart. Rescue missions use up a lot of human resources, and we can’t do hundreds of them a month. We’re a community out here, and while we scratch each other’s backs a lot, we want time for our own lives. We don’t have a lot of laws and not much to litigate; almost a million people now and only a couple of dozen lawyers. So forget torts; you have to take care of yourself.
“And yes, we buy local and favor those who do. We know each other. The belt runs on a lot of handshakes and understandings. That’s just the way it is.
“Now, Eileen’s not that unreasonable. She might be willing to ameliorate some of these fix-it log items that you’re complaining about, but the main requirement—” the lawyer’s voice took an icy edge “—I say the main requirement for not having the Interplanetary Association ship you out as a menace to yourselves and anyone that might have to rescue you, is that you pass inspection. There’s no appeal to that. We’re a pretty independent lot, so we don’t choose inspectors at random. Am I clear?”
He was clear, but Dolph had to ask anyway, just to rub in the unfairness of it. “No appeal? No legal recourse?”
Femrite threw up his hands in apparent exasperation. “If, and I mean a big if, we could prove pecuniary bias on Eileen’s part, you could get reinspected by someone else. But you can imagine what the next inspector is going to think about your filing such charges against Eileen McCarthy!”
“I thought,” Dolph said lamely, “some people from the Moon might be using their influence on her. Or someone who wanted the rock; second mineral rights or some such. You hear a lot about that kind of conspiracy thing on the university.”
Femrite nodded. “That you do. Conspiracy is the sophomore’s favorite religion—kids want to believe that things happen for a reason, even if it’s a bad one.” He sniffed. “They learn. Anyway, Eileen’s not one to be influenced by anything like that—quite the opposite, I’d say. Try to push that woman and she’ll push harder in the other direction.”
Dolph couldn’t suppress the flicker of a smile. That he could believe.
“Of course,” Femrite continued. “I’m obligated to file a protest and represent you if you insist.”