Aubrey helped Priss pull her shirt back into place, wiggling her shoulders a bit to test the new fit. The spacer woman shook her head and sighed. “That’s better. Your idea of gravity is a killer.”
“Yeah, I think anyone would need a reinforced bra with that kind of chest.” Aubrey tossed a couple of failed attempts at structural engineering back into the clothes recycler. “Is that how you got those? A result of lower gravity?”
“More like genetics. Women on Copernicus run the usual range of sizes.” Priss pulled her shirt on and straightened it, trying to get the folds to lie right. “Actually long term microgravity causes people to lose a lot of mass most of the time. Atrophy and all that. I don’t think it has any effect on human body type beyond that. Just clothes. You should see some of the supports ladies on Newton wear. They practically take half a cup off the way you look.”
“Dex would love that.”
“He has a contractual obligation to like guns of all sizes and types.” Priss gave herself a once over in the mirror then scoped up her bag.
Aubrey shrugged. “He seems like…”
“A pervert?” Priss nodded. “He’s one of those fools who thinks a girl goes for honesty above all. Never figured out that most of us like a guy to at least pretend to be a little more than the stereotype. What about Sean?”
“What about him?”
Priss gave her an incredulous look. “I mean, you clearly spend a lot of time around him. You were camping in the wilderness – for values of wilderness – with him when we met. That looks like…” A look of shocked sympathy crossed her face. “Oh. Oh, that’s harsh.”
Bewildered, Audrey demanded, “What are you talking about?”
“You still have the friend zone on Earth, at least.” Priss shook her head and tsked. “Not my problem.”
“So that’s two new places in one minute.” Audrey sighed. “The friend zone doesn’t sound that interesting. Where’s Newton?”
“Friend zone is boring by all accounts,” Priss muttered, thenshrugged uncomfortably, struggling with what to say for a moment. “It’s the last of the Triad worlds to be settled. Gravity there is five percent above Earth’s and they grow a lot of grain. It’s nice, except for the whole weight thing. I’ve never been, Copernican gravity is about eight percent below Earth so the adjustment is pretty rough. Therapists tell me you need about four months to really make the change. We don’t visit much, since Copernicus can grow most of its own food at this point and the Isaacs don’t have a whole lot of tourist traps to get lost in. The moonies put up with it but they kind of have to.”
There was a lot there that she wanted to dig in to but Aubrey knew better than to push too hard, given the way the martians had clammed up when pushed about where they were from. She tried to keep her questions as innocuous as possible. “What’s a moonie?”
Instead of answering Priss broke eye contact, turned and let herself out of the fitting room. Aubrey followed behind, figuring this was just another stonewalling attempt, but it turned out Priss had just been collecting her thoughts because as they walked towards the door of the clothes factory Priss started again. “I know this is going to sound weird with the environment you’re from. But each of the Triad worlds is fucked in its own way, and we’re not afraid to remind each other of it. Copernicus is stubborn as hell and doesn’t want to be involved with the other two systems if we can help it. Not always healthy but there it is. They call us roundheads, because they think good sense bounces off of us. And because Copernicus – the man – liked perfect circles and used them when he created the heliocentric structure of the solar system.”
“Not familiar with him, but otherwise the description fits.” She thought over the term moonies again but still came up empty. “Don’t tell me one of your worlds is known for dropping their pants and-”
“No.” Priss rolled her eyes and pushed through the door and out into the streets. “Galileo was supposed to be a habitable world but turned out to be a gas giant abnormally close to its star. Close enough that several of the larger moons that orbited it could sustain life with some difficulty. After a lot of debate, rather than split up and go back to Copernicus or on to Newton, the Galilean colony ships chose to try and settle three of the moons.”
“Oh!” Aubrey nodded. “That makes sense, then. You call them moonies because they live on moons.”
“No. We call the moonies because they’re fucking crazy, and people who went crazy from seeing the Moon used to be called moonstruck. I think. There’s logic there somewhere.” Priss shook her head. “There are twenty moons around Galileo and the planet has rings like Saturn on top of that. All the big moons people live on are surrounded by enough debris to shred our biggest orbit ships in seconds and that’s before you try and take all the weird gravity well overlaps that happen as you pass the moons into account. Just getting to Minerva or Ceres is taking your life into your hands a dozen times and Tellus isn’t that much easier to reach. To make matters worse, two of the six colony ships that settled there were damaged on the way in – one crashed – and Ceres won’t be able to sustain agriculture for another thirty years. They’re always short on something and bickering with each other, then coming to Copernicus or Newton for help. They can’t always get it. Every major armed conflict between the Triad worlds has started because of one of the three colonized moons of Galileo and they’ve practically turned raiding and piracy into a cottage industry.”
“So why do you put up with them?”
“For a long time Copernicus didn’t.” Priss grimaced, looking a bit displeased with that fact. “Not the most charitable response but the colonies weren’t as stable back then as we are now. And that’s why Newton couldn’t afford not to stay in touch with the moons. Newton is almost entirely devoid of the rare earths needed for serious electronics work while Minerva and Tellus are practically made of them. So in the early days they traded for crops from Newton a lot.”
“What about the third moon?”
“Ceres?” Her displeasure turned to wry humor. “Not as much in the way of rare earths but plenty of guns. They consider Viking to be a viable career choice there. Ceres pirates have stolen a shocking percentage of cargo going through the Galileo system in the last hundred and fifty years. Eventually Minerva took them on as allies and turned them into a sort of unofficial space navy and that’s when the Triad worlds started fighting honest to goodness wars.”
Aubrey shook her head in amazement. “That sounds so…”
“Stupid?”
“Avoidable.” Aubrey had been watching the patterns of traffic but a rumble in her stomach reminded her that she was hungry. She glanced down at foot traffic – at once harder and easier to track – and turned them in a slightly different direction. “Don’t any of you ever… get tired of it?”
“A whole colony’s worth, actually.” Priss grinned. “Even the most dyed in the wool martians have their sapiens, I guess. The most sanctimonious people in all three systems got together and went a couple of weeks out to a new system and founded a colony named after the most utopian nutjub they could find and sat out the last war. Gene Rodenberry would probably be proud but mostly we’re just annoyed.”
“Hey, him I do know.” She waved her hand through the access point on a food cart and pulled out two burritos, handing one to Priss automatically.
She took the food, looking at the cart skeptically for a moment then following Aubrey away. As they put a little distance between themselves and the cart she asked, “Where was the owner? Is it okay to just walk off with food like that?”
“It’s credited to me,” Aubrey mumbled around a mouth full of warm but not too hot rice and spicy sauce. “And the food carts belong to UNIGOV so there’s no owner to worry about. They’re deployed at the beginning of the day and brought back in during the early evening.”
“No one keeps an eye on them during the day?”
“We’re not moonies,” Aubrey said, a weird thrill running through the pit of her stomach at the thought that she’d just shared a secret with the other woman no one else around them would understand. “We’ve got enough food we don’t have to worry about people stealing it. It’s simpler to automate distribution.”
“I suppose,” Priss said, nibbling on her own burrito. “Kinda surprised no one lobbied to keep the job, though. Lots of people were upset when Copernicus moved from assembling ships the old fashioned way to pure nanofacturing. Shipbuilding jobs dried up after that.”
“There hasn’t been any protest over jobs that I know of for decades. Sean and I work two days a week and frankly that feels like too much some times.”
“Two days…” Priss shook her head and took a larger bite, chewing thoughtfully. Once she swallowed she said, “That does explain some things. With your level of nanotech I guess nanofacturing most material needs comes pretty cheap. But… what do you do with five days off a week? Besides diving for auto parts, I mean.”
“Do?” She mulled it over. That wasn’t something she’d ever been overly concerned about. “I mean, I’m in a band, I think Sean helps monitor environmental reclamation programs and sometimes volunteers for extra shifts of at work… what do you mean what do we do? What do you do?”
“I’m a spacer. We keep the colonies moving, and moving safe. We make sure unscrupulous people don’t prey on the people working on terraforming or nanofacturing. And when necessary we fight wars. I mean…” She gestured helplessly with her free hand. “Environmental work and traffic control are fine, I guess, though I don’t know as it wouldn’t work out fine without a whole bunch of people specifically to bean count it. Does any of that really help anyone?”
Aubrey recoiled. “What?”
“No, that’s not what I meant…” Priss shook her head. “It’s just… I know not everyone goes to work because they love what they do. But don’t you feel kind of… I dunno, unanchored?” She nibbled on her burrito again.
Aubrey finished her own morning snack, thinking it over. She was tempted to come back to Theory One, her explanation for all the strangeness of the past few days. Martians were weird.
On the other hand, something about what Priss said gnawed at the back of her mind. She turned to ask the other woman… something, just to keep the train of thought going, only to see her stagger a couple of steps, swaying unsteadily from foot to foot.
Aubrey quickly stepped closer and grabbed her by one arm, trying to keep her upright. “Are you okay?”
“Dizzy…” Priss mumbled, her head starting to sag forward. With an effort she turned to look at Aubrey. “Thanks.”
“Yeah, let’s get you somewhere to sit…”
A look of confusion passed over Priss’s face. “Your eyes are glowing…”
On that total non sequitur Priss slumped down to the ground. Panicking a little Aubrey dropped to her knees and grabbed for her shoulder bag, which she was positive had the martian’s medical device in it. People gathered around, making curious and helpful sounds but Aubrey wasn’t paying a lot of attention.
Until a hand touched her on the shoulder and she glanced up. Two men in UNIGOV uniforms stood there. The one who had tapped her shoulder smiled and said, “Is everything alright?”
The other was in the process of closing a holodisplay which showed Priss laying on the ground, just as she had looked from Aubrey’s own perspective a few seconds ago.
Nate Chen Publications 