Long way to come, from the Belt, from Company brat in a Company school learning nothing but Company numbers— to figuring Shakespeare and human history. But there it was, the motherlode of all living stuff and the home of humankind back when humans had been as backward as the Downers at Pell—Earth was full of museums, full of artifacts, pots and tombs and old walls graffitied with stuff that was supposed to make you live forever. The Guide said so.
Most of all, it was the motherlode of information, data, old and new. And the right numbers and enough data on the systems that ran the Earth Company and the United Defense Command could make him rich; rich made a man safe, and got him most everything Ben Pollard could put a name to.
Visitors to Stockholm may be impressed with the Maritime Museum or the Zoological Garden in Haga Pork….
A planet that wasn’t a radiation hell was a novelty. Earth with its completely outsized moon was a novelty. And life thriving at the bottom of a gravity well was a radically upside down way of thinking. Life that made good wine and food that wasn’t synth, a surface where plants grew and cycled the O2 and the CO2 on sunlight and dark; the habitats where animals lived. Fascinating concept, non-human things walking around where they decided to walk and looking at you with unguessable thoughts going on behind their eyes. People searched the stars for life, and there was all this life on Earth, that blue-skyers took for granted, and ate, if it didn’t look too much like people.
He wanted to see a zoo. He wanted to look at a cow or a dog and be looked back at, when he’d never expect to see any real thing more exotic than miners on R&R and bugs under a lab scope.
Humans had existed such a scarily short time. With this war going on in the Beyond they seemed scarily fragile.
He wished he could talk to Bird about that. Bird had had a peculiar perspective about things. He wished he could really figure out what Bird had been, or recall half that Bird had said over the years. There was so much blue-sky attitude he still couldn’t get the straight of. Baroque, was the word. Curves all over their thinking, like gold angels on the old buildings, that didn’t have a damn thing to do with useful—
The message dot flashed on the corner of the screen.
God, it could be the interview notice. His fingers were on the Mod and the 1 to Accept Mail and the Dv and the 3 to Print faster than he could think about the motion.
It said:
TECH/2 Benjamin J. Pollard CTVSS/UDC 28 DAT 2 0652JUN14/24 SN P-235-9676/MLR Report to FSO-HQ, 0900h/ref/Simons
Fleet Strategic Operations? Fleet Ops?
What in bloody hell?
MRL. Automatic log. No way to pretend he hadn’t gotten the message. No way to query the CO. Weiter would tell him it was a report-to, he didn’t have the answer, and he’d effin’ better answer it and find out what the Fleet wanted with a UDC lad, hadn’t he?
It wasn’t an interview. God, no. Fleet Strategic Operations didn’t need a UDC programmer tech/2 with a Priority 10 for economic/ and strategic/supply modeling. Did they?
Shit, no—the damn tight-fisted legislature insisted on trying to interface the UDC EIDAT with the Heel’s Staatentek system through the EC security screen, that was what. The Fleet Staatentek system tried to phone the UDCs EIDAT 4005 to ask for available assignees, and the 4005, behind the EC’s security cloak, spat up a UDC Priority One assignee for a Fleet data entry post—
But you couldn’t ignore it. You didn’t want to face the interviews with an interservice screw-up or a Disciplinary in your record. Damn the thing!
No second cup of coffee. He drank the half he had left while his fingers tapped up the station map and asked it where in hell FSO-HQ was on the trans system from his apartment in TI 12 for a 0930h appointment.
9:15 2 green to 14, blue to 5-99: pass required for entry.
Hell and gone from TI, and it was already 9 o’clock. Ten effin’ minutes to shave, dress and find his copy of his rating, which clearly said UDC Priority Technical/2, before the