April 8: It's Always Something (37 page)

"No wonder you folks are paranoid," Diana admitted. "I had no idea. I'll stash the stuff with buttons away for my trip home, and look everything else over to make sure no little bits can come off. You know, stretchy stuff can be pretty unflattering for people my age, but I do have a few things with elastic waists."

"You look very nicely trim and in shape for any age," Jeff insisted. "But, you'd be better off to sell your personal items before going home, rather than take them back."

"If clothing with buttons isn't favored why would people buy them?" Diana asked. "At home I usually drop off old clothing I haven't worn in awhile for charity. It's not worth selling."

"The freight cost to lift anything makes it worth selling," April assured her. "There's a couple people who keep an ad in 'What's Happening' to buy your used clothing. They'll buy it as a lot instead of piece by piece if you want, and some will buy your return allowance to fill the bags and drop them. They'll cut the buttoned clothing down and alter it, or sell the fabric. Some might even end up in the charity bin."

"You
have
people who need charity?" Diana asked surprised.

"Indeed we do. There's a fellow who conducts religious services for a small private group who organizes it. Pretty decent of him to volunteer some of his precious cubic for that. It pretty much leaves him without a living room," April said. "He could sell sleeping space and make money instead."

"You realize that sounds crazy to me?" Diana asked.

"You just told me
you
give clothing to charity," April said, confused.

"Not the charity, the renting your living room for sleeping.. Where do these people go when they aren't sleeping? Do they share the bath and leave their things there in the day?" Diana demanded.

"It depends on the landlord," April said. "There are storage lockers a couple places, but they tend to all be as full as living space now. When one comes open there is somebody standing there ready to grab it. If you see somebody every day with a duffle bag they probably sleep on a floor or in a hot slot and keep everything they own in the bag. Some of them go to the gym and pay for a day to use the shower. Some just go in the restroom at their work or one of the few public ones and do a hand bath."

"I can't imagine living out of a bag like that," Diana admitted. "It wouldn't hold my
shoes
."

"You made me remember something," Jeff said. "We recently hired crew for a ship, a big wet water, ocean going ship in the Pacific. The fellow doing our hiring mentioned he'd received a couple crew member's bags already, sent ahead as freight, because it's cheaper than what the airlines charge to carry it as luggage. So it's a similar thing for them down on Earth in their work culture. These aren't menials either. The jobs are considered pretty high end."

"Interesting. I forget not everybody lives in big houses," Diana admitted.

The server arrived to take their drink order. All the drinks were on a daily special card. Jeff ordered a mint vodka, and April a mug of beer.

"We have an Australian amber tonight," the server said. "not too bitter and very smooth."

"You've had that before?" Diana asked.

"No, but we're still a bit behind on shipping luxury goods and some nights we don't have a choice of two beers. I'll take whatever we have," April said. "They are getting kegs again, but bottled beer is still too dear for shuttle space. The bottles you see. They're so heavy."

"Silly me I thought this was just the specials and there were other varieties," Diana said.

"The beer is still from Earth," Jeff told her. "We don't have brewing, yet. The vodka is from the moon and much easier to get. I have an interest in producing that, and so far we're keeping up with the demand."

"I'll have the watermelon vodka," Diana decided. There were no prices on the drink card, and local had to be cheaper. She had no idea what things cost yet.

The drink was surprisingly big. It had an actual slurry of watermelon and didn't appear to have extra sugar added, but it had a little garnish of actual melon rind. Jeff's drink had real mint leaves in it.

"We've only had water melon for about a month now," Jeff said. "It's still pretty rare because the production is only a couple dozen a week. They are grown hydroponically and the racks to support them are rather interesting."

"You grow them here on Home?" Diana asked shocked.

"Heavens no! The cubic is too expensive to grow things here no matter how dense you pack it. They're grown at Central on the moon. The racks are vertical against the tunnel walls to avoid the expense of making them mobile to get at the melons when grown. They're too heavy to move easily and don't stack well at all," Jeff said.

"The racks for other things like salads greens and turnips, radishes and cabbages are in flat racks stacked one on top of another," he illustrated with his hands. "When we need to get to the melons the racks are pushed into the center access aisle to open up room along the edge to get to the fixed melon racks. Nobody has figured out how to automate harvesting watermelons, yet. They only take about a half meter along the wall. It is some of our first mixed growth in the same cubic. We're going to try doing grape tomatoes along the edge of another tunnel too."

"I had no idea," Diana said. "I assumed it was all lifted from Earth."

"The moon is much cheaper from which to transport, because it take less reactive mass to lift things. Earth is such a deep gravity well it's always expensive, even with fusion power, and a lot of shuttles still get carried aloft with chemical fuels on a mother ship to be released. Of course with fusion power you can make chemical fuels cheaper than fossil fuels. It's a shame to burn them. Even methane. I imagine they'll stop burning it locally in time, it's just too valuable. With water as a source for reactive mass at least you are recycling it leaving Earth. Shooting it straight back where it came from."

"I never thought of it that way before," Diana admitted.

"We're getting more volatiles soon from regolith, and it appears we'll soon have an ice ball coming in more than annually from out system. Our next design for automated freight shuttles from the moon will use waste mass from processed regolith, the leftover stuff with the carbon and water and other valuables extracted, to bulk out the exhaust," Jeff said.

"Everything here is so complicated," Diana said. "At home in my yard we clear an area for a garden, put down some plastic and plant. It pretty much grows on its own. Most of the time we don't even have to water it. You can easily get three cycles of growth and harvest in a year."

"Some of our crops we'll get ten cycles a year," Jeff said. "But we are growing at higher pressure and concentrations of carbon dioxide than natural air on Earth. The temperature is controlled, and the light constant or cycled shorter for those crops that benefit from it. We've also experimenting with tuning our lights to specific wavelengths for different plants."

"I'm just a gardener not a farmer," Diana said. "I know they grow a lot of stuff indoor in Europe, but food there is more expensive too. I know they import a lot of grain from places that can grow it outside."

"Yes, grain is difficult. We can't grow wheat cheaper than importing flour. We'd like to try amaranth, but people who didn't grow up eating it balk at the flavor and texture. Rice is difficult and corn, corn takes
so
much room. And we don't have enough uses for the rest of the plant. We have a variety that grows to a little more than a meter and has four ears per plant, but it still isn't efficient enough. It wouldn't survive at all, outdoors in your garden in natural conditions. I suspect a lot of our plants are going to become specialized that way."

"We are in a similar situation on Hawaii," Diana explained. "We have a larger population to feed than cheap ways of farming will support. There are better economic uses for the land, and aesthetic and political reasons to limit a lot of farming operations. Nick has mentioned fertilizer run-off is a limiting factor. But all of that that leaves us at the mercy of disruptions in shipping and political blackmail. A large part of the population can't pay for more expensive food, and a lot of the people who returned to the mainland or Asia were those who could have paid more."

Their server asked if they'd like to see dinner menus and Jeff nodded yes.

"So, you don't have to worry about how secure coms are now, so tell us what is happening in Hawaii," April demanded. "And how thick my caretaker Nick is involved in it, and if I have to worry that people will come kick down my doors looking for him."

"You probably can go online and find out more than I know," Diana admitted. "Anytime I got too nosy about it Nick always said I couldn't be blamed for anything I didn't know about."

"Nor spill your guts about it to others..." Jeff noted. When Diana looked upset he added, "Not even under duress." He really hadn't meant she'd betray Nick.

"That too. But I have no idea what their full platform is. I don't even know how highly placed Nick is in the organization. At least he thinks well enough of me that he suggested about two months ago I should start planning a cruise or vacation someplace
safer
. He's honest enough I think he'd have told me if it was going to be one way for sure, so I could take some keepsakes. He talked about taking care of Ele-'ele like he expected me to come back."

Jeff raised an eyebrow, but with his head turned to April, not Diana.

"Her dog," April supplied. "He's
huge
, and it would be cruel to have him on Home."

"I've only
seen
a dog on Home once," Jeff remembered. "One of those tiny things a visiting tourist woman carried around in the crook of her arm, like a fashion accessory."

"I missed that," April said.

"It was back before the revolution," Jeff said. "She was some kind of celebrity."

They were provided the daily menu sheet. Diana looked irritated. "There's no prices. I didn't expect to mooch off you guys," she objected.

"You are giving us valuable international intelligence," Jeff explained. "Information that affects Home's status with Earth, our company's prospects to do business there, and the security of April's personal property on the island. That is not
mooching
. In any case, they won't show April a priced menu. It is their pleasure to serve her and her guests. She's a partner in the enterprise."

"
Wooo...
I've heard the expression, 'Your money is no good here.', but I've never actually
seen
it before," Diana said.

"So glad to extend the envelope of your experience," April said, wryly.

"Don't get all frosty on me, Kiddo. I'm not easy to impress, but that managed it."

"I've known April longer than you, and she still surprises me, frequently," Jeff admitted.

"OK," Diana
acquiesced, making a show of reexamining the menu. "Thank you for dinner."

"The pasta is quite good with any sauce," April suggested. "I particularly like the bacon cream sauce. The petite filet is melt in your mouth good."

"A hunk of beef must be worth its weight in gold the way you are talking about freight costs!"

"The filet is from the moon," April corrected her."

"You're running cattle on the moon?" Diana asked unbelieving.

"It is grown...without the cow," April assured her. "It is
very
good."

"That must be...lonely. Don't tell me too much," Diana asked, holding a hand up. "I'll try it. But if you get too technical and make it sound gross you'll ruin it for me."

"Not another word," April agreed. "The mixed salad is quite good and the roast potatoes go well."

"All from the moon I bet," Diana said, but it was inflected as a question.

"All but the butter I think, and possibly some oil in the salad dressings," April allowed.

"Ah, here are our appetizers," Jeff said, spotting them before they reached the table.

After noshing on them a bit Diana admitted, "These are nice and fresh and crunchy. I know the olives have to be from Earth, and the cream cheese, but all the local stuff is wonderful."

"The cream cheese is fake," Jeff told her. "It's from local soy, the olives, yeah that's going to be a tough one. Maybe with some
serious
gene mod. We have a guy who can probably do something that radical. If we can get it to grow up a trellis as a bush," he speculated.

"Some things...why not just stay wealthy enough to buy the imported?" April asked. "It's not like we are in danger of starving anymore if they cut us off. Money needs to flow back the other way too, no?"

Jeff stopped and looked surprised. "Yes, yes it does. Thanks, it's easy to lose sight of that."

"Finally," April said. Diana didn't know what she meant, and then the house lights dipped a little. The first act was coming on and the place quieted down.

Chapter 27

The door signal was insisting April wake up. They'd stayed up very late talking, and she wanted to sleep in. The clock in the corner of her bedroom screen said 10:36. It really wasn't that early to be bothering someone, normally. April threw on a long t-shirt she sometimes wore to sleep and stumbled out to the door half asleep. She picked her pistol up in passing and hesitated long enough at the com desk to demand: "
House, display corridor cam.
"

There was a very young man, boy really, standing in the corridor with a bunch of flowers. April couldn't have been any more surprised if it had been a horse. The kid tried the buzzer again and the house was smart enough to know she was in the living room instead of the bedroom, but not smart enough to see she'd looked to see who it was and stop pestering her. Diana stirred on the couch.

"Good morning," April said, opening the hatch. Her assertion totally lacked sincerity, and the boy, although he was perhaps ten looked dismayed. His eyes also followed the line of the arm held behind her, and he probably figured out she wasn't holding his tip.

"Begging your pardon, I have a delivery for this cubic," he said, hefting the bouquet of roses.

"The address, or are they for a particular person? Need a signature?" April asked.

"It's odd," the boy admitted. "Here's the card for them," he offered and extended it slowly like he didn't want to startle April. She took it left handed.

My damn reputation for mayhem,
she thought ruefully.

The card said: For the lovely lady in the tropical print. You brightened my day. Eduardo Muños. It was written by hand in wet ink.

By then Diana was looking over her shoulder. April just handed the card to her.

"Stay here," April commanded. The kid looked worried but didn't say anything, didn't even nod. Damn, she
hated
it when people were afraid of her..."Acknowledge it please," she said, as nicely as she could so early in the morning.

"Yes, Ma'am, I'll wait right here," the boy promised. April hated being called 'Ma'am' even more, but she forced a smile, and tried not to show too much tooth. She walked away and didn't even try to hide the gun. The kid had that figured out anyway. She got in her pouch and got a bit card, remembered how badly she scared the kid, and added a second bit. That was extravagant, but what the heck...

Diana was still standing there, but at least she had the flowers now. When April gave the kid his tip he bowed way deeper than any Japanese had ever acknowledged her, and thanked her. He was even bright enough to figure out he was excused when tipped without her needing to formally dismiss him.

"Got a vase for these things?" Diana asked.

"No," April realized, and wasn't even sure where to get one. She could order one from Earth on standby, because they were heavy, weren't they? But the flowers would be history by then. Her brain wasn't working yet, and Jeff came out of the bedroom in spex, shorts and footies, and saved her

"I'll put those in the tall pitcher you keep for lemonade and mimosas," he volunteered. April closed the hatch, came back in, and laid the pistol on the com console in passing.

Since Jeff was busy doing something with the flowers at the sink, April started coffee. Diana knowing where the bath was from last night headed there on her own.

"What are you doing?" April asked Jeff when her task was done, and it was brewing.

"The cut ends get dry and they can stop taking water up. You should recut them under water before you put them in a vase. I'll add a pinch of sugar to the water too. It makes them last longer."

How does he know this stuff? April silently wondered.

Diana came out and April traded places and went off to the bathroom without a word. Jeff was getting mugs out and put the roses on the slab table between the couches. Muños favored bright colors and pastels, so the yellow roses didn't surprise him. They went with April's decor too.

"I'm going to special order some breakfast from the cafeteria," he told Diana. "I'll order up a buffet, unless you want lunch stuff?"

"They deliver? That isn't like any corporate cafeteria I ever saw," Diana said. "You haven't starved me yet. I'll take whatever you guys are having. Breakfast is fine."

"They don't deliver, but there are lots of courier services. The kids love it for spending money. We might get the same kid back that brought your flowers," he predicted.

"What did April give him? I thought she was getting him a tip, but it looked like a fancy business card, a double one that folds over."

"That's a bit. A certificate for a hundredth of a gram of gold," Jeff explained.

"Really? Kids can get paid in gold for running errands? No wonder they're hot to do it. Who guarantees it?" Diana asked. "I may start delivering pizzas myself."

"I do. Well, April and Heather too, as officers of the System Trade Bank," he added when Diana looked askance. "Irwin Hall of the Private Bank does too, but
through
our bank. I trust him to cover the gold if it gets called, but we will pay up even if he goes broke," Jeff vowed. "There isn't all that much out in bits to demand he transport bullion for every printing."

Diana was regarding the flowers, and card. "So, who is this Eduardo Muños? If I brightened his day so, why didn't he come by our table and introduce himself?"

"I saw him with some other people on the same level we were at, but across the room. Likely he didn't feel free to leave his company. Here, I can pull his image up from my spex and show you."

He routed the pix to the wall screen and it showed a slow sweeping scan of the whole room.

"Do you always record the entire room when you go out to a club?" Diana asked.

"Yes, if there is a problem later, if someone tries an assassination, we can identify who might be responsible," Jeff said.

"And this happens, how often?" Diana asked.

That irritated Jeff. "Often enough I can show you the scars if you want," he said sharply.

Before she could say more he froze the scan and said..."There, the gentleman with the soft unstructured creme jacket over the melon colored shirt." He was with two other men. They all looked of a similar age, and had drinks.

"A business meeting I'd guess," Jeff said.

"What sort of business is he in? Diana asked.

"Do you know, Mr. Muños has never made that very clear to me. As far as I know he's in the business of being rich," Jeff joked. "How he made it, back on Earth, I don't know. He's made a number of valuable suggestions to me, to talk to this person or that, but our business has never been intertwined to any degree. He does have deposit accounts in our bank. But of course I can't discuss that."

"But enough you know him," Diana said.

"
Everybody
knows Eduardo," Jeff said. "He's the Registrar of voters and conducts the Assembly. Let me tell you this, so you understand the trouble to which he went. There's a family on the moon selling flowers. That's the only source I know of unless Eduardo grows his own. To have called and gotten them ordered and on the early shuttle here would have been difficult. He probably had to call from his table last night at the club. A dozen long stemmed roses likely ran him five thousand Australian dollars, and an expedited shipping fee."

"He's not bad looking," Diana allowed. "Maybe a little young for me."

Jeff laughed. "Eduardo is older than you, but he's had Life Extension. After you've seen it enough you'll recognize the signs, but I was reliably informed that he was extremely good looking when he had a full mane of white hair and some wrinkles beside his eyes. He's almost as bad as April for knowing everything that's going on. He might have been looking you over, figuring that Life Extension is why you are here."

"Hmmm. I'm
not
going to marry again," Diana declared. "Been there done that."

For an instant Jeff thought that was a presumptuous stretch, from a gift of flowers, and then he reconsidered. Maybe they would be a pretty good match. Both were bold as brass.

"So, you guys...you three, have a bank, and a nightclub, what else have you got your hooks into?"

"No, no. The part interest in the Fox and Hare is entirely April's holding. She has a number of business interests her brother willed her. I'm not entirely sure what. She does hold a share in the bank and Singh Technologies with Heather and I. We all pooled our resources and agreed to hold them in common for...specific events, that are long past. But we have each acquired or started other interests on our own. We never vowed to keep bringing everything to the pool forever."

Diana's examination of him left him so uncomfortable he added. 'We don't often speak of it, but it's nothing you couldn't piece together from public documents and records, if you wished. Just reading all the archives of the public Assembly would do it."

"I knew she wasn't poor, to afford the house next to me in Hawaii, but I may have been badly underestimating how un-poor she is."

"
This
is not the home of a poor person on Home," Jeff said, surprised he needed to say that.

"I haven't seen any other apartments," Diana pointed out. "I've got nothing to compare it to.

"Compare what?" April said returning, hair wet from a shower. "Are you going to drink that coffee or just stare at it?"

"Let's start by all means," Jeff agreed. "I have breakfast coming. Diana was just inquiring about local real estate," he said, almost truthfully. "I was assuring her it's a very dear market right now."

Diana took a slug of the coffee, and made a noise they took to be approval. "And he filled me in on who Eduardo Muños is."

"Everybody knows Eduardo," April said echoing Jeff and dropped that subject. "We had a few billionaires want to move in from Earth. They came in and named a higher and higher price to a few folks who supposedly weren't interested in selling. When they reached a crazy enough level a couple of them broke down and took the money. Now everybody expects that kind of money to sell any cubic outright. But I think the tide of Billionaires dried up."

"But then, where do the people who sold out live ?" Diana asked her, reasonably.

"I assume they downgraded and paid another crazy price, just somewhat less, for a tiny place. Something like the picture you showed me that Dr. Ames set up. You can figure at the bottom of the chain somebody got bumped and had to live in hot slots or go homeless."

"That's terrible," Diana said.

"But a consequence of their own greed," Jeff pointed out. "We're trying to make unspun housing nearby, but it's going to be awhile. The preliminary work is on the moon right now."

"Another business venture?" Diana asked.

"Yeah, my idea, but I have just a piece of  it," Jeff said.

"That's breakfast," April said, and headed for the door. She let the young man carry the insulated container to the table and said, "Thank you, Eric."

"Are you aware there's a humongous spider hiding behind your entry camera?" Eric asked.

"Oh, don't bother it please," April said. "It's a bot to hunt other bots. You'll probably be seeing more of them in time. These are just in a local test."

"Oh good. I was worried about what something that big could be
eating
."

Eric stopped passing through the living room to smell and touch the roses. "Very nice," he commented on the way out.

"That reminds me," Jeff said, "Natsume got back to me about the tiny bot we killed. Neutron activation analysis of the remains suggests from isotopic ratios that the battery was Chinese. It's a stretch to say the rest was too, but it increased the likelihood of that."

"I thought they were too busy with their own problems to keep bothering us," April said.

Jeff shrugged. "China is big. There must be plenty of areas and enterprises that are moving right along, doing business as usual. Especially anything military will get priority on resources."

Di was ignoring all this byplay that didn't interest her. "The corner over there that's walled off, what is that? Your secret laboratory?" she asked.

"My body guard Gunny's room. But he's off doing security work for a client. You may meet him if he gets back in time," April said, opening containers.

Diana's face said she had even more questions but she concentrated on the food for awhile.

"You tipped the first one, but not this last young man," Diana noticed. "Why?"

"Eric owns his own courier business. You don't tip the owner," April explained. "He has this crazy idea he has to handle our account personally."

"Influence," Diana said. "I'm familiar with the concept myself. But he couldn't run
anything
back home. It's hard to get a variance and permit to employ a seventeen year old in your own family business. The state would take him from his family for child labor abuse, and ruin anybody who'd hired him."

"Perhaps Nick and his friends will correct that if they succeed in removing Hawaii from the grip of North America," Jeff suggested.

Diana looked like she wanted to say more, but she just said, "Perhaps."