“I’ll be down in a moment, Martin.”
Amanda returned to the lavatory and began repairing the makeup on her face. Pancho thought that if the Humper even noticed she’d been crying, it wouldn’t make any difference to him.
Then a new thought struck her. If Lars knew about this he’d kill Humphries. He’d fight his way past all the armies in the solar system to get to Humphries and rip his throat out.
SELENE: HOTEL LUNA RESIDENTIAL SUITE
Pancho could not sleep that night. She roamed the rooms and corridors of her residential suite, her mind in a turmoil over Amanda and Humphries.
It had taken Pancho years to realize that, as the top executive of one of the largest corporations in the solar system, she could afford luxuries. It wasn’t until her younger sister left on the five-year expedition to Saturn that it finally hit her: Sis is on her own now, I’m not responsible for her anymore. I can start living any way I want to. She changed her lifestyle, but only minimally. Her wardrobe improved, although not grandiosely so. She didn’t become a party-goer; she never got mentioned in the tabloid shows. She still worked nearly every waking moment at her job as chief executive officer of Astro Corporation, still spent as much time in the factories and research labs as in the corporate offices and conference rooms, still knew each of the division heads and many of the lower-echelon managers on a first-name, drinking buddy basis.
Her one obvious change was her domicile. For years Pancho had lived with her sister in a pair of adjoining two-room units on Selene’s third level. When she traveled to Earth she stayed at corporate-owned suites. After her sister left, Pancho spent several months feeling lonely, betrayed by the sister she had raised from infancy—twice, since Sis had died and been cryonically preserved for years while Pancho watched over her sarcophagus and waited for a cure for the cancer that took her first life.
Once Sis was revived from her liquid-nitrogen immersion, Pancho had to train her all over again to walk, to use the toilet, to speak, to live as an adult. And then the kid took off for distant Saturn with a team of scientists and their support personnel, starting her second life in independence, as far from her big sister as she could get.
Eventually Pancho realized that now she could live in independence, too. So she splurged for the first time in her life. She leased several units from the nearly bankrupt Hotel Luna and brought in contractors who broke through walls and floors to make her a spacious, high-ceilinged, thoroughly modern home that was perfectly suited to her personality. The double-height ceilings were a special luxury; no one else in Selene enjoyed such spaciousness, not even Martin Humphries in his palatial mansion.
Some said she was competing with Humphries, trying to show that she too could live in opulence. That thought had never occurred to Pancho. She simply decided to build the home of her dreams, and her dreams were many and various.
In every room, the walls and floors and ceilings were covered with smart screens. Pancho could change the decor, the ambiance, even the scent of a room with the touch of a button or the mere utterance of a word. She could live in the palace of the Caliph of Baghdad, or atop the Eiffel Tower, or deep in the fragrant pine forest of the Canadian Rockies, or even out in the flat dusty scrubland of her native west Texas.
This night, though, she walked on the barren, pockmarked surface of the Moon, as the cameras on the floor of the crater Alphonsus showed it in real time: silent, airless, the glowing blue and white crescent of Earth hanging in the black star-strewn sky.
Mandy doesn’t want Lars to know what she’s been going through, Pancho finally realized, because he’d go wild and try to kill Humphries, but Humphries’s people would kill Lars long before he got anywhere near the Humper.
She stopped her pacing and stared out across the dark uneven floor of Alphonsus, dotted with smaller craterlets and cracked here and there by rilles. Maybe that’s what Humphries wants. He promised Mandy he wouldn’t try to kill Fuchs if Mandy married him, but now he’s making her life so miserable that Lars’ll come after him. And get himself killed.