The principle had even acquired a name: appretiare, from the Latin “to price”—the root of “appreciation.” Respecting the real contributions of others—which eventually extended itself to things like motives, and hence judging integrity—became the Kronian “currency” for paying dues. And in its own strange way, which even the psychologists were unable to explain precisely, it worked. In traditional human societies, whether status was won by amassing luxuries, collecting the skulls of vanquished opponents, or having killed the biggest lion, what gave satisfaction at the end of it all was to rank highly on whatever form of totem pole earned the esteem of others. What the Kronians appeared to have done was dispense with intermediates and deal directly in the values that ultimately mattered. In addition, as it transpired, their system eliminated the opportunities for all kinds of misrepresentation and fakery in the process.
Hence, Esh was not just paying a simple compliment but, in acknowledging Keene’s status as indispensable, paying the highest tribute that could be given. Like the intricate social etiquette of ancient Japan, the conventions of appretiare discerned subtleties of shade and meaning that Keene was still working to master. Kronians raised in the system from birth understood the rules intuitively.
Myel seemed about to say something further, when the call beep sounded from Keene’s compad. He took it from his jacket and answered. “Landen Keene here.”
“Ludwig Grasse. Am I calling at a convenient time?”
“Yes, it’s fine.”
Grasse was a former Austrian government official connected with banking, one of an influential group who had gotten off Earth in the final days aboard a European Consortium shuttle commandeered at a launch site in Algeria. They had made it to an orbiting transfer platform for lunar shipments and survived there for almost two months before being picked up by one of the rescue vessels sent from Kronia. Grasse and Keene had met intermittently at reunions of Terran survivors and at several social gatherings. Several days previously he had contacted Keene aboard LORIN 5 to arrange a meeting when Keene returned to Titan. All he had said about the subject was that it involved certain matters that Grasse and others had concerns about, which he would like to hear Keene’s opinions on.
Grasse went on, “Is it possible we could bring the time forward a little? I will be leaving later this evening, and there’s someone else I need to see also departing. Could we make it for before six o’clock?” Since no common system of timing and dating could fit all the cycles experienced by the various habitats and installations scattered across Kronia, a 24-hour Terran model had long ago been adopted as a universal standard, which the local domains endeavored to adapt to as painlessly as possible.
“We’re on distant approach now, due in at Styx in about an hour,” Keene replied. “I’m due to meet somebody who might be joining our project, so I have to go straight to the Tesla Center first. Suppose we said about five? How would that suit?”
“That would be satisfactory,” Grasse replied.
* * *
A little over an hour later, the transorbital detached from holding orbit and sank into the upper-atmosphere clouds of nitrogenous compounds that gave Titan its reddish brown color. It emerged at twenty thousand feet, above a desolate surface of ice, rock, and swamps of liquid methane cloaked in permanent night.
CHAPTER THREE
Although much of Kronia’s industry and related research was located on Titan because of its diversity of minerals, the forbidding gloom had traditionally induced most Kronians to prefer habitats elsewhere. Since Athena’s occurrence, however, more people were forsaking the human liking for being able to see stars, and moving beneath the protective cover of Titan’s atmosphere.
The pioneer group who founded Kronia had established their first base on Dione, naming it “Kropotkin,” after the Russian social ideologist who had spent most of his life trying to impress upon people the revolutionary notion that they needed each other, and whose ideas had partly inspired the colony’s guiding philosophy. The first exploratory expedition to Titan had been mounted later, after the foothold on Dione was secured, penetrating beneath Titan’s cloud canopy to set up a pilot base beside a methane stream flowing from an upland waste of ice and broken crater rims, which for understandable reasons they called “Styx,” after the river enclosing the mythical Greek Underworld. Styx was still the name of the spaceport at the site where the original base had stood, now serving the processing complex of Essen, which handled ores and other materials both mined locally on Titan and brought from elsewhere. The Tesla nuclear and electrical research center formed a part of Essen.