Keene stood in the store in Kropotkin, watching as Imel, the assistant, wrapped the synthetic sausage, a slab of "Mimas cheese"—processed from a coagulation of bean curds—carton of bread wafers, and the packs of reconstituted vegetables that Keene had selected, and added them to the bottle of wine and six of Celtic Dark beer in the plastic bags standing on the counter. On the shelf behind, there were also maybe half a dozen bottles of a distilled liquor called Tennessee Amber—smooth, mellow, reminiscent of a good Irish whiskey, which in his previous life Keene had been partial to. It was rare and highly valued. He stared at the tiny display and wrestled with himself inwardly.
The decision ought to have been simple—the bottles were there for the taking; there would be no call to justify himself or account to anyone. And yet, he hesitated. . . .
A quick calculus replayed itself in his mind. He had been back on Dione for two days, the first of which he had practically spent sleeping after several weeks of unceasing effort on Titan, in which the artificially maintained day-night cycles had ceased to have any meaning. To play their part in something that would one day revolutionize engineering and make the colony viable, Pang had said. Yes, dammit, he'd earned himself a drink, Keene decided. He nodded in the direction of the Ambers. "And one of those too," he told Imel.
Imel took down a bottle, rolled a sheet of coarse paper around it, and added it to the contents of the bags. "Will that be all?"
"That's it."
"Enjoy your stay on Dione, Lan."
"Thanks."
"My pleasure."
Keene picked up the bags, went out to the pedestrian way, and turned in the direction that led back toward Vicki's. He didn't really understand the details of the things happening inside his head, but he was becoming a Kronian—he had learned what "felt right."
On Titan, Wernstecki had joined the Artificial Gravity project, which was moving at a pace that Keene still found astonishing, even after all his time here. Pang had insisted on calling the program to build a scaled-up engineering system "Gravestone"—from GRAVitic-Electromagnetic Synthesis Test ONE. The intention was to endow one of the rooms in the group's lab area in the Tesla Center with earth-normal gravity as a demonstration.
A political movement calling itself "Pragmatist" had emerged, initially among the Terran contingent but finding sympathizers too in certain sectors of the Kronian population. Consolidating behind Valcroix, they were making a case to the Kronian governing administration for a "fairer" Terran voice in the making of policy decisions that would now apply to everybody. Yes, they conceded, it was true that Kronia had been founded specifically for the freedom to pursue its own independent ideals. But circumstances had changed since then, forcing a situation whereby, like it or not, Kronia had become de facto the common heritage of all that was left of human civilization. The Terran-originated portion of that civilization along with its views and its values, they argued, was entitled to representation accordingly. The real issue, of course, was finding an angle that would get a bigger say in the way things were going to be run. In short, as always, where the power would come to lie.
Keene left the pedestrian way via a fire door into a side passage and descended in what had been intended as a freight elevator to emerge at a three-way intersection of corridors with floors of metal mesh and ribbed yellow walls interrupted by doors spaced at intervals. It always put Keene in mind of the lower decks of a cargo ship. With the influx of Terran refugees in addition to the general migration of the population underground, accommodation in Kropotkin was still in short supply. Also, damage repair took precedence over new construction, which didn't help matters. The unit that Vicki occupied was the same one that she and Robin had been assigned when they first arrived, hastily improvised from storage levels in the lower parts of the complex as a temporary measure until something became available in the regular residential sectors. More recently, Robin had moved into dormitory quarters with fellow students from the Academy, and Vicki, finding the extra space useful, had stayed on. Keene came to a cross-passage bearing the unlikely sign Mimosa. The first door to the right carried the number 2 and a sign reading Delucey, Vicki. Keene waved his card at the scanlock and went in.
Vicki and Cavan were sitting at the bench seat in the living area, talking across the remains of the meal they had finished earlier on a foldaway table hinged down from the wall. Alicia was in the kitchen alcove, loading dishes into the washer. Vicki acknowledged Keene with a wave as he came in. "How's the weather out?" Cavan quipped, turning his head.
"Hasn't changed much."
"Vicki's been telling me this stuff about Mars coming by periodically and hanging over India. Absolutely astounding, Landen! And do you go along with it too?"
"I'm just the engineer. But Sariena and Charlie seemed to be impressed by it. They're the experts."
"Astounding!" Cavan said again, shaking his head. He was in his sixties, with wrinkles beginning to collect in pink skin about a frame that had once been fuller, and thinning silver hair combed conventionally to the side. But his eyes betrayed him, alive and alert, harboring the same penchant for intrigue and mischief that made him an invaluable ally to have on the inside of a political situation for as long as Keene had known him. These days, Cavan spent most of his time circulating among the various departments of the governing administration at Foundation. What he involved himself in there, Keene still wasn't sure.
Alicia cleared some space on the worktop for Keene to set the bags down and began helping him unload them. Blond, curvaceous, still managing to look stunning in Kronian tunic garb and with her once-long hair cut short, she was little more than half Cavan's age but everyone thought them ideally matched. Cavan had joined Keene in California with a military unit from Washington during Earth's final days, bringing Alicia with them too when it became plain that there would probably be no going back. Her background on Earth had been medical. Since coming to Kronia she had been working to help rehabilitate Terrans suffering from traumatic disorders and depression.
"Hello, what's this?" Alicia held up the bottle of Tennessee Amber. "Claiming the good stuff, I see."
"Splendid!" Cavan pronounced. "Good for you, Landen. Make it a real party."
"You've earned it, Lan," Vicki said.
"Hell, we all have," Keene muttered. "Who'd like one now?" Everyone did. Keene opened the closet where the glasses were kept, while Alicia put the rest of the provisions away. Vicki and Cavan resumed talking about the Vedic Mars encounters.
"You know, I'm still not sure I understand how this works here," Alicia said to Keene as she opened the bottle. "You just walk in the store and you take this. You know no one is going to say anything or stop you. But still you have a hard time deciding if you should. It happens to me too. Can you explain it?"
Keene set down four glasses. "I'm not sure I can. I was talking to Imel yesterday—he's the guy in the store. He told me he used to be a skimmer once."
"Oh, really?"
"I never knew that," Vicki threw in from across the room.
"And I'm just arrived here. You should get to know your neighbors," Keene said. "Skimmer" was the Kronian term for one who took and gave nothing back. "But he said it doesn't last long. Nobody judges or says anything. But something inside gets to them. They need to find a way to pay. So now he works on one of the city repair crews, does a day a week in a shoemaking shop, and helps mind the store up there."
"Careful, Lan. You might start restoring my faith in human nature," Cavan said.
"Restore? How could I, Leo? You never had any."
"Weren't there supposed to have been societies back on Earth at times, where nobody locked their doors or bothered safeguarding their possessions because stealing was unknown?" Vicki asked distantly. "Do you really think it's possible for something like that to work here—even when Kronia gets bigger? I was talking with Sariena about it."
"I think we might soon be finding out," Cavan answered. "There are people here now who'd be the last to let it work if they get their way."
"Because the only power they understand comes from controlling what others create," Alicia said.
"You mean steal," Vicki corrected.
"Ah, now, you can't say that," Cavan told them. "Of course it would be legalized first."
"The really big criminals never break laws," Alicia agreed. "They make them."
Keene came around the kitchen worktop and handed a glass each to Vicki and Cavan. "But you can't run that as a platform to get elected on," Cavan said. "You have to have a front that sounds reasonable."
They were talking about the motives behind the Pragmatist movement. Its stated position was that at this juncture Kronia couldn't afford to expend resources on nonproductive scientific issues far from home that they dismissed as "quasi-religious." Necessity dictated concentrating on the industrial development and construction, here and now, that would mean long-term security for everyone. It was the line that Keene had heard from Grasse and Valcroix when he met with them. The real issue, of course, was who would decide the allocations of those resources, and by what means.
"It's a familiar-enough pattern to any of us," Vicki said. "But how many Kronians will be able to see through it? Look at what happened in Washington." The Pragmatists were striving to recruit numbers beyond the Terran contingent by exploiting discontent and resentments among the Kronians wherever possible—and in some instances, by fomenting it. And there were those among the Kronian population who felt that the limited-resource argument perhaps had some merit.
"Yes, I'll grant you that," Cavan said. "The recognizable face of old-style political unrest so beloved to us all is showing itself again." He shook his head. "But they won't win here. I can't see it. The fertile ground they need to grow in doesn't exist."
"That's pretty much what Sariena says too," Vicki said, nodding.
"Well, she should know." Cavan showed his palms, indicating nothing more to add. Vicki still seemed to need more convincing. Cavan looked up at Keene as he tilted his glass. "But things could still come to a fight before we're through. Would you be up to it, Landen?"
"What? Are you trying to drag me into your sordid underworld schemes again, Leo?" Keene said.
"I am, of course. You set thieves to catch thieves, isn't that right? If we've got the kind of situation that we're all too familiar with rearing its head again, we need old hands at the game on our side too."
Keene saw Vicki's pained look and her shaking her head almost imperceptibly. No, he told himself firmly. It was time he lived his own life for once, of his own choosing. Besides, if the Pragmatists were playing a lost game in the way Cavan had said, the Kronians should be able to deal with them here, regardless of how they had fared in Earth's totally different, hostile environment. Keene had better things to do than be used as extra insurance.
He shook his head and smiled tiredly. "I had my fill of all that on Earth, Leo. Did my share, if you want my honest opinion. Do you realize what that means to me back there on Titan—at the Center? Finally, for the first time in my life, I'm involved in truly free, creative science—what science should be—without having to answer to bureaucrats, funding committees, or closed-shop peer review panels. We're talking about artificial gravity, Leo!—a whole new landscape of physics and engineering." Cavan's eyes were fixed on Keene penetratingly, as if weighing up whether or not to let it go at that. If there was more to go into, Keene would have preferred it to be between the two of them at another time, rather than imposed on the party. He judged it a good time to withdraw tactfully. "Where's Robin?" he asked, looking around and then at Vicki. Robin had stopped by to pay due respects to the visitors, but had been withdrawn and quiet, finally retiring to what had once been his room.
Vicki inclined her head in the direction of the doorway leading out to the hall. "Still moping, I guess."
"Maybe someone should go and cheer him up," Keene said. "Shall I?"
"You can try."
Keene went out to the hallway and tapped at the door to the space that Vicki had made into a study and workroom. He waited a moment, then entered.
Robin was at the triangular corner shelf that served as a desk, looking at something on the screen standing unrolled from a portable compad. He clicked it off and turned his head enough to see who was there. Now eighteen, yellow haired and athletically built with an innate tan that still endured, he would have been a natural for a high-school quarterback or swimming team, had such things still existed. "Hello, Lan," he greeted.
"Hi, C.R. Just came to see how you were doing in here. Not in a mood for the party?" From long habit, Keene still referred to him as Christopher Robin, after the English children's book character.
"Oh . . . I guess not. I'd rather just be on my own right now."
"Uh-huh." Keene nodded to say that was okay by him and perched himself on the spare chair behind the door. In addition to Vicki's books and papers, the room still had relics from Robin's days, including a fish tank, his collection of rock fragments from meteorites and various Saturnian moons, and an array of potted creeping plants weaving their way among pictures of spacecraft, habitats, and astronomic objects, along with maps of Dione, Titan, Rhea, and Mimas. Robin brought up a screen showing part of the Mandelbrot fractal world and watched it with a detached expression. "Your mom was telling Leo about the Mars encounters and the new theory that they're talking about," Keene said. "I thought you'd be interested."
Robin pushed himself back in the chair, frowning awkwardly. He didn't feel especially sociable, Keene sensed, and was struggling to maintain outward civility. "It's interesting, sure, but . . ." He tossed out a hand and left it unfinished, seemingly not really sure what he meant. It was a ghost of the Robin Keene had known back on Earth, who had devoured theories of things like dinosaur engineering, planetary origins, and early human history, and would have driven Vicki to distraction with speculations on this latest development.
"I heard it was you who put the idea into Emil Farzhin's head that it might have been Mars," Keene said. "He was trying to make Venus fit with the records. What made you think of that?"
"I just got to reading some of the translations that Mom brought home. When I was looking at some pictures of Mars, I noticed that the descriptions seemed to fit. Then, when they talked about oceans and continents . . . it couldn't have been Venus."
"Emil had taken them as some kind of metaphor."
Robin shrugged. "I just think literally, I guess."
The simplicity of youth, Keene thought to himself. Just following the evidence wherever it seemed to point, without trying to fit it to predetermined answers. The Kronians hadn't really invented anything new. Keene had listened more than once to older and what he considered wiser heads saying that the wisdom so often prized in later years was little more than rediscovering things that had been obvious at sixteen.
But he could tell this wasn't a time for such things. "Vicki tells me you might be enlisting with the Security Arm," he said, trying a change of subject.
"I'm thinking about it. Leo suggested it. It has its attractions." Robin kept his eyes on the screen, zooming endlessly down through finer levels of mathematically generated, never-repeating detail. Keene wondered if it signified an unconscious need to find structure in life when everything else had fallen apart.
"Alicia says she heard from Mitch," he said. Harvey Mitchell had commanded the Special Forces unit that came with Cavan to California. He and three of the others had arrived eventually at Kronia as part of the group that had escaped via Mexico. "It seems he's working with them too somewhere. You might bump into him again out there if you decide to go ahead."
"Maybe."
"You could get a chance at space crew, too, later."
Robin started to answer, but then turned his head away quickly and straightened up from the chair in the same reflex movement. "Lan, look, I know you're trying to help, but . . ." His voice caught. "Sorry. . . . I need to get out for some air." He scooped a windcheater jacket from a hook by the door and left hurriedly, keeping his face averted. Moments later Keene heard the outer door close in the hall.
He shook his head and stared down at his arms resting on his knees, hands still cradling his glass. Well, I guess I get first prize at blowing that, he told himself. But he wasn't sure what else he might have said. His gaze drifted back to the patterns on the screen, descending through endless scales of whorls, traceries, and sunflower bursts. Curiously, he got up, moved across, and killed the Mandelbrot pattern to redisplay the file that Robin had obscured when Keene came in. It contained a list of graphic images. Keene selected one and opened it. A picture filled the screen of a group of grinning teenagers and staff posing in the sunshine for a class photo in front of their school building. Robin was near the center of the third row, standing. The caption read: Jefferson Junior High, Corpus Christi, TX. Keene stared at it for several seconds, then closed the image and reactivated the Mandelbrot display. A lump formed at the back of his throat. He got up and went back through to the living area to rejoin the others.