“Offer the lowest possible terms on the maintenance contracts.”
“Get the rock rats to come to HSS for maintenance,” he agreed.
“Make them dependent on you.”
He laughed again. “Gillette’s dictum.”
She looked puzzled.
“Give ’em the razor,” he explained. “Sell ’em the blades.”
DOSSIER: OSCAR JIMINEZ
The illegitimate son of an illegitimate son, Oscar Jiminez was picked up by the police in one of their periodic sweeps through the barrios of Manila when he was seven years old. He was small for his age, but already an expert at begging, picking pockets, and worming his way past electronic security systems that would have stopped someone bigger or less agile. The usual police tactic was to beat everyone mercilessly with their old-fashioned batons, rape the girls and the better-looking boys, then drive their prisoners far out into the countryside and leave them to fend for themselves. Until they got caught again. Oscar was lucky. Too small and scrawny to attract even the most perverse of the policemen, he was tossed from a moving police van into a roadside ditch, bleeding and covered with welts.
The lucky part was that they had thrown him out near the entrance to the regional headquarters of the New Morality. The Philippines were still heavily Catholic, but Mother Church had grudgingly allowed the mostly Protestant reformers to operate in the island nation with only a minimum of interference. After all, the conservative bishops who ran the Philippine Church and the conservatives who ran the New Morality saw eye to eye on many issues, including birth control and strict obedience to moral authority. Moreover, the New Morality brought money from America into the Philippines. Some of it even trickled down enough to help the poor. So Oscar Jiminez became a ward of the New Morality. Under their stern tutelage his life of crime ended. He was sent to a New Morality school, where he learned that unrelenting psychological conditioning methods could be far worse than a police beating. Especially the conditioning sessions that used electric shock. Oscar swiftly became a model student.
CHAPTER 4
Kris Cardenas still looked little more than thirty. Even in a gritty, shabby one-room habitat carved out of one of Ceres’s countless natural crevices, she radiated the blonde, sapphire-blue-eyed, athletic-shouldered look of a California surfer. That was because her body was filled with therapeutic nanomachines, virus-sized contrivances that pulled apart molecules of fat and cholesterol in her bloodstream, repaired damaged cells, kept her skin smooth and her muscles taut, acted as a purposeful immune system to protect her body from invading microbes. Nanotechnology was forbidden on Earth; Dr. Kristine Cardenas, Nobel laureate and former director of Selene’s nanotechnology laboratory, was an exile on Ceres.
For an exile who had chosen to live on the ragged frontier of human settlement, she looked happy and cheerful as she greeted Amanda and Lars Fuchs.
“How are you two doing?” she asked as she ushered them into her quarters. The twisting tunnel outside her door was a natural lava tube, barely smoothed by human tools. The air out there was slightly hazy with fine dust; every time someone moved in Ceres they disturbed the rock dust, and the asteroid’s gravity was so slight that the dust hung in the air constantly.
Amanda and Fuchs shuffled their feet across Cardenas’s bare rock floor and made their way to the room’s sofa—actually a pair of reclining seats scavenged from a spacecraft that had limped to Ceres and never made it out again. The seats still had safety harnesses dangling limply from them. Fuchs coughed slightly as he sat down.
“I’ll turn up the air fans,” Cardenas said, gliding to the control panel set into the room’s far wall. “Settle the dust, make it easier to breathe.”
Amanda heard a fan whine from somewhere behind the walls. Despite being dressed in a long-sleeved, high-buttoned jumpsuit, she felt chilled. The bare rock always felt cold to her touch. At least it was dry. And Cardenas had tried to brighten up the underground chamber with holowindows that showed views of wooded hillsides and flower gardens on Earth. She had even scented the air slightly with something that reminded Amanda of her childhood baths in real tubs with scads of hot water and fragrant soap.