April 2: Down to Earth (2 page)

April had been working out with Jon's exercise group every Wednesday, doing Tai Chi, both unarmed and sword and watched people of other disciplines working out. She knew the normal limits of reflex and training. She was certain the doctor had moved with greater speed than any normal human was capable of doing. He had not just swatted the items away, but gathered them in a controlled manner, that spoke of being so fast he had time to carefully observe the motion and grasp all four objects with thought as to what he was doing. It had looked more like rehearsed stage magic, than a spontaneous save. She'd replayed and replayed what she had seen in her mind and still had a sense of awe.

Yesterday, she found Dr. Ames had moved here soon after the hostilities ended with North America last year. He went on vacation to Hawaii after the war and then just never returned to his tenured, secure position at the University of California Riverside. Instead, he had lifted with a very small shipment of his most important belongings, on a supply shuttle from Tonga. It was as slick a carefully planned defection, as she had ever heard of anyone doing successfully from North America and it was done with no public fuss.

She had no doubt if he could slip away that smoothly, he probably got all his money out too. Financial restrictions were the biggest handle the USNA had on defectors. In fact the terms of surrender Home had imposed on North America last year addressed freedom to travel to Home, but made no provision to force them to allow the transfer of assets for emigrants. It was up to people to be smart enough to do so themselves. That was a sort of unofficial intelligence test, that kept the flood gates from opening for just anyone who wanted to emigrate.

She also was able to document online, that the man was associated with the U of C Davis Veterinary program. That would have been regarded with suspicion down below. The inclusion of animal genome in humans was perhaps the touchiest legal aspect of genetic engineering in North America. If you tested for non-human code in your genome, it was enough in North America to have your citizenship revoked and either be deported if you were naturalized, or imprisoned if you were native born. So to even have a human geneticist associated with a veterinary school in North America, was to invite an uncomfortable level of scrutiny from the government and religious groups. The slightest rumor or accusation, invited the modern equivalent of a mob of villagers with torches and pitchforks storming the castle.

The name of the Agency regulating gene mods in North America said it all. The religious forces which had demanded its creation, named it The Genetic Hygiene and Heritage Board. So you knew from the start, promoting change was not what it was all about. Most USNA students insisting on a Genetics career track were in foreign schools by the time they were in graduate work and never returned to America to seek employment.

Italy was the country of choice, for careers or treatment involving human gene mods, because China was still a strange and difficult place for a foreigner to live and work. China's anything goes attitude was hard for even the most liberal genetic modification proponents to swallow. China didn't even
have
an authority which considered the ethics of genetic manipulation, so the only limit was each researcher's conscience. At least Italy, having gone through one cycle of banning and then a moderate relaxation, had some concept of ethics. You might easily get your eye color altered in Italy, but in China they wouldn't balk if you wanted webbed fingers and toes. Gills were thankfully beyond the art at present.

Dr. Ames was named Gerald and she had no idea what he went by, or if he liked to be formal or casual. But the fact he had accepted her invitation to breakfast, without insisting on knowing what she wanted to talk about, or how she was acquainted with him, was a good start. He was not an M.D. She thought - hoped - the company he had formed was aimed at offering genetic modifications, if the title was any indication. After a year of independence, the making of new law and custom was still proceeding with slow caution on Home. There was no legal basis for incorporation yet in Home law. There might not ever be, as some were arguing for personal responsibility being more important than promoting a uniform environment, to attract business to the habitat. Certainly there was no shortage of business coming to Home on their terms so far. So his business had to be a DBA, unless he had some silent partners.

The name on his corridor door and his business cards, one of which she had acquired, was Custom Tailored Genes. The name alone would get his office burned out in California. If he had sold genetic services here yet, he was still keeping a low profile, because nobody had bragged or complained about him yet on the public business rating boards. That raised the interesting question of how he was supporting himself, if he hadn't sold any of his services. Home was an expensive place to live.

Dr. Ames had carefully inspected his silverware by eye and passed a small pad over the utensils and breakfast. She assumed he had a pad plug in, which looked for pathogens, but he wasn't as fussy as some Earthies who wore gloves or even masks in public. Of course some of the recent epidemics gave them cause to be cautious. Her own mom could be a bit of a clean freak when they went Earthside.

He had a substantial breakfast of waffles, carefully brushed with butter, piled with fresh strawberries and blueberries and covered to excess with whipped cream, an eggs and bacon plate to the side with orange juice. But he paid attention to the waffles first. He wasn't in any hurry to talk either, patiently waiting on April after a brief greeting.

"I do the same thing," April told him, nodding at the waffles. "If you don't eat them fairly quickly, they get all soggy and aren't very good."

"Yes, the butter slows it down, but you really have just a few minutes before they are all limp. When I came up here I wondered what the food would be like, because I do enjoy eating so much. I was really getting tired of the pressure at the University, to put on a public display of limiting consumption. Skipping a decent meal doesn't really mean anything, if there is no mechanism in place, to let a starving person buy the food I just skipped. I knew having all the equipment and space to cook myself, would probably not be practical. I have to say, I am very pleased with the service available on the standard monthly contract. Do you have a private kitchen available to use Miss Lewis?"

"Yes, not what an Earthie would consider a real kitchen, but we have a two burner stove top and a small combination oven, as well as a coffee maker."

"Then your family must have been fairly well to do to have room for that, even before you gained notoriety last year for your part in the revolution."

April blushed, because she was already uncommonly conscious of the fact her family had a much bigger apartment than usual, even before the war and the hostilities over the Rock had improved the family fortunes. Since then she had become much more publicly visible, as a crew member of the
Happy Lewis
. Now there was no way to conceal her interest in Lewis Couriers and Singh Industries. Her family's partnership in the captured asteroid trailing Home in orbit, the Rock, hidden behind a corporate name before, was too well known now. It had been easy to turn such comments aside before, by saying everybody on Mitsubishi 3 was relatively wealthy, because it is so expensive to live here you have to be well off. But now her finances were so public it was impossible to shrug them off.

"My grandfather was among the riggers and beam dogs who constructed the station and he came from a family of working people, who were all shrewd investors and savers. He put all his money into buying cubic here, when it was speculative and undervalued. If he hadn't acted boldly the family wouldn't have had the financial base to buy into the Rock. We still own cubic outspin on the North end and we were one of only two families that didn't throw their zero G cubic away cheap, when the South hub cubic opened to the public for dockage. Everyone said, 'Who is going to dock up North where there are no facilities?' They didn't see the industrial value."

"And unlike some Earth families I've observed, where the family fortune creates conservative caution in the second or third generation, yours seems bold still, Miss Lewis."

"Thank you, I hope so," she agreed. "I haven't seen the world carefully taking care of the shy and tentative, I'm sorry to say. But if it doesn't offend, I wish you'd call me April. I've never felt like a Miss Lewis."

"Well, I appreciate the offer. It sets my mind at ease." He heaved a big sigh of relief, from a tension she wasn't aware was there. "It would please me to call you April and honored if you would call me Jerry. Although if you eventually count me a friend, you'll find most call me Jelly."

"How did you get such a name? You seem nicely trim and not Jelly-like at all."

"Perhaps now, but when I was in school they didn't have the meds they have now and I constantly struggled to keep an acceptable weight. I'm one of those unfortunate people who when they carry extra weight, wear it as a soft disgusting spare tire, right around the middle were it squishes over the belt. Not one of those flat sided solid fellows who look like a fireplug," he illustrated with his hands, "On top of which I had a reputation for always having a pocket full of jelly beans and when I met friends I'd offer them a few, so the name was an easy choice."

"And why," she asked genuinely puzzled, "would it be such a relief to be on a first name basis with me? A lot of people are very uncomfortable with such informality. I met a very nice Frenchman, a Msr. Broutin last year and he would agree to call me April, but he was more comfortable to be addressed formally himself. Using his given name made him feel as funny, as Miss Lewis did me. But usually older people like formality and the younger ones don't."

"I was relieved, because I was concerned perhaps you or your family disapproved of my business and this meeting was to tell me so. When I saw you were gene mod yourself I
thought
surely that couldn't be, but then when you asked to be on a first name basis, I know you wouldn't extend that courtesy to someone you're going to ask to leave."

"Leave? Jerry, I have no authority at all to ask anyone to leave anything. Not even this table, certainly not Home if that's what you meant. Banishment is the worst possible criminal punishment, the people voted for so far. It's reserved for those who we don't want to live with anymore."

He took the chance while she was talking to polish off the waffles and placed the platter of eggs and bacon on top of the empty dish.

"Well you may have no
official
authority," he agreed, dusting the eggs heavily with black pepper. "But I've been informed, that what the Lewis or Singh families want to happen generally does. When I came up here a few months ago, everybody from the agent who rented me my cubic, to the fellow who fibered up my data net, said what a great place the habitat was, how the future was here and a man could do anything he could dream and don't piss the Lewis or the Singh clans off, or they will flush you out the airlock in your boxer shorts and teach you to whistle without air," he said and went calmly back to his breakfast.

"Why would anyone think such a thing?" she argued indignantly. "I can't think of one person these people have ever actually seen me harm. I mean, we did run down those troopers that invaded us from the Cincinnati, but they were invaders after all. Margaret had already blown half of them to hell and gone at the dock. She blew their shuttle folded over double. Now
there's
a lady with whom to be
very
polite," she advised him. "I helped Easy fry one outside the Holiday Inn, but Neil was the one who nailed the rest of them in the lobby with a homemade Claymore, when we chased them in there," she remembered.

"Jon's crew and the Prentice family wiped out so many of them in the corridors, I don't even know if I ever did get a decent hit on anyone out there, blasting away in the smoke and confusion. North corridor was just horrible - bullet holes and fires, half way across the station and a trail of dead Earthies in breached armor. And it's true Easy and I toasted the Pretty As Jade when we ambushed those two ships, but I was sitting laser weapons board and had hardly even got a start on burning the James Kelly, just took their laser mast out, when Eddie put a missile in them and made ‘em confetti - made my contribution kinda moot."

She stopped suddenly, stricken, realizing how counterproductive her testimony was and sank her face in her hands in understanding for the first time. "Oh crap, I never stopped and really thought out what it all looked like before," she admitted.

"Indeed, by the most amazing coincidence, there does seem to be a history of expensive damage, death and destruction, strewn closely behind when you get rolling. If it isn't by your own hand, you can't blame people if they think you must at least be an inspiration, to this crew who seem to run with you. I might point out, when your people got through with North America, the best they could come up with for the Presidential succession was the Postmaster General. Most of us assumed the rest of them hadn't gone into hiding, to avoid taking the office. That took what? About a week? Speaking as one who has just recently come up and I still maintain contacts below, they are still trying to hide from the public, just how badly you pounded them. In military circles, I believe the term is decapitation."

"Yeah, well, I heard on the news they stopped trying to dig into the bunker at Cheyenne Mountain and the Deepwell bunker, they're calling the Charleston bunker now. The mountains are so broken up inside they shift and are too dangerous to open up. They'd have to work down from the top like a strip mine and what's the point anyway? Nobody is alive in there."

"Hey," she said, thinking back on what he said. "Who says I'm gene mode anyway?" She managed to sound a little indignant for the privacy issue, but her heart really wasn't in it.

Jerry just lifted his chin and looked down his nose at her basic four thousand calorie breakfast, with an expression that invited her to deny it.