Terraform (an Ell Donsaii story #15) Read online

  “I saw it in the news. You assholes are starting to mine my asteroid.”

  She sighed, “I assume you’re speaking of Psyche 16?”

  “Haven’t I called you enough times that even a retard like you should be able to remember Psyche 16’s the one that belongs to me?!”

  “You’ve called enough times for me to remember that Psyche 16’s the one you think belongs to you,” Branson said exasperatedly.

  “Then,” Jason said angrily, “you’ve probably heard from me enough times to remember that you’re supposed to negotiate me a percentage before you take any ore off my asteroid!”

  “Mr. Stackhouse…” Branson said, back to speaking patiently, “like I’ve told you, you can’t claim to own an asteroid based on the fact that you filled out a claim on a website. There’re literally thousands of people who think they have claims on asteroids. ETR’s not the company that’s disrespecting or taking advantage of you. The people who took advantage of you are the ones that charged you fees to fill out claims on bogus websites. Such claims have no legal—”

  “I made my claim fair and square. I own that asteroid. You people better respect my claim or you’re gonna be sorry!” Jason told his AI to cut the connection.

  “Are you threaten—?” the woman said before the disconnection cut her off.

  Incandescently angry, Jason threw his now empty coffee mug across the room. It shattered against the old brick fireplace.

  His wife looked up as if she might say something. When she saw his face a frightened look crossed her features. Saying nothing, she quietly got up and left the room.

  I’m gonna hurt those bastards so they’ll never forget it, he thought.

  His wife came back in and silently began sweeping up the remains of his mug. Normally he’d have pointed out how she was doing a shitty job of it, but he was too focused on ETR-D5R and the revenge he was going to take.

  It’ll take some planning. Jason wished his old sarge was there. Sarge was way better at planning than Jason.

  ***

  Phil’s AI said, “You have a call from Ell Donsaii.”

  “Put her on,” Phil said with a frisson of excitement. “Hey, Ell, you must be really bored if you’re calling me.”

  Ell’s image popped up on the video screen across from him. She said, “Yeah, but I thought I ought to check in and see how your hip and head’re doing?” Her eyes went to the spot next to Phil and she gave a little wave, “Hi Carol.”

  “Hi Dr. Donsaii,” Carol said with her own little wave.

  “Oh my goodness,” Ell said, “can’t you call me Ell?”

  Phil saw Carol catch her lip between her teeth for a moment. He knew his wife felt conflicted. Grateful to Ell for getting them on the Mars mission and rescuing Phil when he broke his hip, yet with an undercurrent of jealousy because she was Phil’s good friend. Make that Phil’s beautiful best friend, he thought.

  Carol gave a nod, “Hi Ell. I wanted to thank you once again for taking a chance on sending the lunkhead here back and forth to Earth.” She waved at Phil. “His hip seems to be functioning almost normally… well, at least it seems almost normal in Mars gravity. We need to get him back to Earth and find out how it does there. Also, I wanted to let you know that, despite two trips through that port, he really doesn’t seem to be any dumber than he was originally.”

  Ignoring his wife’s insult, Phil said, “They’ve just finished putting me through a huge battery of IQ tests. They say they’re confident the trip from Earth back to Mars didn’t make me any dumber. They’re pretty sure the first trip from Mars to Earth didn’t affect my smarts either.”

  Ell grinned, “That’s great to know. When your IQ’s starting in the single digits, knocking off a couple of points really makes a difference.” She glanced around the limits of what she could apparently see, then gave them a curious look, “How’s the shielded dome working out? I thought you guys were going to live in it?”

  Phil lifted an eyebrow, “You’re thinking this still looks like the same tunnel we used to live in?”

  Ell nodded.

  “You’re right.” He sighed, “We actually have lived up on the surface a little. NASA sent us the stuff to build a little house in the shielded dome and we’ve kind of camped out in it some nights.” He shrugged, “The problem’s that, even in that huge dome, you still feel like you’re inside. It’s true that some sunlight comes in, but you really can’t see out very well. Looking through a meter of water plus the graphene membranes on each side kind of blurs everything. And,” he said sounding disappointed, “once you get over the excitement of looking down into the Valles, the rest of Mars’ scenery’s pretty boring. Just reddish-brown rocks everywhere you look.”

  “Boring’s one of the things I wanted to ask you about. We’d heard that you were kind of feeling like there wasn’t all that much of a challenging nature to do now that exploration’s kind of paled?”

  Both Phil and Carol nodded.

  “So our terraforming team said they asked you guys for some help setting up their new five-meter port. It’s not a lot of work, just choosing a location and spiking it into place. We’re talking about sending you guys a—”

  “I know all about it,” Phil interrupted. “It’s a trial toward powering some big ports that might actually terraform Mars. We’re excited about it all right, but we’re kind of putting on a little revolt at present.”

  “Revolt?”

  “Yeah, I suppose you know about the mice they sent up here to live in shielded versus unshielded locations?”

  It was Ell’s turn to nod. She looked uncomfortable.

  “You’re aware they were testing some new radiation resistance gene? And how a lot of the mice that were exposed in the unshielded dome got cancer and their pups had mutations?”

  “Yeah, we’re all excited about how well the experimental group did,” Ell said. She tilted her head and continued, “But I’ll bet you guys’re concerned about how the unshielded control group did, since you’re similarly unshielded when you’re out on the surface?”

  Phil turned to Carol and gave her a little nudge, “See, you can tell she hasn’t been back and forth to Mars via port. She was smart enough to figure that out all by herself.” He turned back to Ell, “So, the bottom line is, we don’t want to go out on the surface any more than we absolutely have to. We certainly don’t want to be out there setting up a five-meter port, when it’s a job that could be done perfectly well by waldoes.”

  Ell said, “I see your point. Are you wanting to come back to Earth? You still have the lander, and the transfer vehicle’s orbiting over you.”

  “No. We aren’t excited about spending forty-days cooped up in that little transfer vehicle either.”

  Ell said, “I’m hoping you’ll remember I once said I didn’t see any reason to send humans to Mars when almost anything they could do could be done by waldo. You were one of the people who argued that humans needed to be there.”

  “Yeah,” Phil said. “But, if the technology’s available, those humans should be living on the surface of Mars while protected by the gene doohickey somebody gave those mice. And, they should get to port back to Earth every few months for a vacation and a little exposure to Earth-normal gravity. We don’t want to waste away if we don’t have to.”

  Ell rolled her eyes, “And, I suppose you want to be the guinea pig again?”

  Phil shook his head. “All of us want to be the guinea pigs. This last trip back to Mars was easy-peasy for me. I breathed some of that anesthetic and I woke up here on Mars an hour or so later. A few hours after that I felt fine. The only real drawback was taking all these damned tests to prove I’m fine.”

  “But Phil, we don’t know—”

  “What we do know,” Phil interrupted, “is that coming and going by rocket’s definitely dangerous.”

  Ell sighed, “Granted.”

  “And,” he grinned, “that the transit takes forty days of our lives we’ll never get back.”

 
Ell slowly shook her head in dismay, “Both porting humans and the gene for radiation resistance are untried. They may have all kinds of risks that we don’t even understand.”

  “We know,” Phil said patiently. “But if we ever want them to be ‘tried’ technologies then someone’s got to actually try them. We’ll sign all the releases you want…”

  ***

  Zage looked up when Ell appeared in his doorway. She said, “We got your lab results back.”

  “And?”

  “They were normal.” She shrugged, “Well, there were a couple that were just outside the normal range, but your doctor pointed out that since the,” she made little air quotes with her fingers, “‘normal range’ is set so it includes 95% of results from the general population, that 5% of lab values are typically flagged as abnormal. Since the ones that were flagged in you were barely out of the normal range, they’re almost certainly normal.”

  Zage gave her a big grin, “Shall we celebrate with some ice cream?”

  His mother snorted, but said, “Sure. I’ll bet your dad’d like to have some with us.”

  As they headed down the stairs Ell said, “I think we should repeat your lab tests every six months for a while.”

  “Okay,” Zage said resignedly.

  ***

  Carley rolled down the window of her car. “Eli?” she asked.

  “Yeah,” her brother responded without getting up off the street-side bench. He sounded a little belligerent.

  Her shoulders sagged, “You’re drunk, aren’t you?”

  “I’ve had a couple of drinks. Not enough to make me drunk.”

  Carley’s initial impulse was to leave, but then she decided she could at least get a little bit of information. “Did the test dose of the FGF-21 cause any problems?”

  “Nah.” Eli said dismissively, “But it didn’t do any good either.”

  “It wasn’t supposed to do any good. It was just a small dose to see if you had any reaction to it. You didn’t have any itching or other reactions? You’re feeling okay?”

  “I’m feeling hungry. Got a solution for that?”

  “I’ll buy you dinner,” Carley said, feeling resigned, but trying to keep her voice chipper. She started getting out of her car. “We can talk about whether you want to try bigger doses of FGF-21. The doses I hope’ll actually make a difference.”

  As the car pulled away to go find a place to park, Carley wondered what she was doing. He admitted having a couple of drinks! That probably means four or five. If he’s drunk, he’ll probably start acting like a real jerk. She’d promised herself that she wasn’t going to hang around him when he’d been drinking, but she desperately wanted to help him stop and he wasn’t sober very often. She checked her pocket for her pepper spray and said, “You want to go to McDonald’s?”

  “Why not try the new brewpub?”

  “Because you’d start trying to talk me into buying you a beer, not just a burger. Besides, I don’t have enough money to take you to expensive hamburger places like that.”

  “All right,” he said, channeling a lot of disappointment into the words. “Take me to McDonald’s.”

  It was a couple of blocks. A nice walk on a pleasant afternoon. Eli wasn’t staggering, suggesting that he might not have had all that much to drink. Or, that he was getting really booze tolerant. They walked a block in silence, then Carley said, “Do you think you’re ready to try the bigger dose of FGF-21?”

  “Whatever you say. You’re buying dinner.”

  Carley sighed, “Eli, I think that shots will help you stop drinking. But if you don’t have any interest in quitting… I mean, after all, you’ve got to give yourself the shots for it to have any chance of working.”

  “Yeah, yeah. I, want, to, stop, drinking,” he said, spitting out the words with metronomic regularity. “I admit I can’t do it by myself. Give me the stuff and I’ll give myself the shots.”

  When they got to the McDonald’s, Carley gave him one of the loaded syringes and he took it into the bathroom. He came back out a minute later and joined her in the line to place their order. “Did it go okay?”

  “Yeah, no problem,” he said without enthusiasm.

  ~~~

  After they’d eaten, she had her car pick them up and she dropped him off near the shelter where he usually hung out. Handing him five more loaded syringes, she said, “Remember, since you tend to drink at night, I think they’ll work best if you give yourself your shot in the afternoon.”

  “Yes Mom,” he said sarcastically.

  As she drove away, she wondered whether there was any chance he’d give himself his shots.

  And, she felt bad leaving her brother on the streets.

  ***

  Jillian was parked near the front of the seventh expensive private school she’d observed. So far, she’d only seen two kids she thought might be related to Donsaii, but when she’d followed up, their parents had been so unlike Donsaii it’d been almost laughable. Unfortunately, she still had a number of schools to visit and this project was really getting to her. It was true it didn’t cut into the rest of her workday very much, but it cut into her sleep. And it cut into her morning relaxation, a part of the day she’d always enjoyed.

  While she waited for the first kids to arrive, she wondered whether there was any way to sort the schools somehow, perhaps for those that dealt with gifted kids—on the assumption that Donsaii’s kid was either actually gifted or that his mother thought he was gifted. Starting with those schools might pay off—if Donsaii herself was actually gifted, not just lucky; and if she’d passed her genes on to her kid; and if she was sending the kid to a school for smarty-pants kids.

  A lot of ifs.

  Nonetheless, Jillian ran a search on “schools for gifted children within sixty-miles” and skimmed down the results. Number nine on the list wasn’t about a school. And it was a story with a headline that screamed clickbait, “Five-year-old skips grade school and high school to start college at Duke University.”

  But when Jillian read the article, it was completely serious. And, most interesting of all, the kid’s mother worked at D5R. How could it be that I didn’t know about this? she wondered, though rationally she knew no one could read all the news—not even someone like her who took a real interest in it. Jillian looked to see where the story’d been published and saw it came out in the Duke Chronicle, Duke’s student newspaper. Ah, a story of local interest, published in a place where it’d be unlikely to get picked up by other outlets. Even better, the story said the child’s father was Shannon Kinrais, the UNC mathematician who’d won two Nobel prizes with Donsaii last December! The mother, Raquel Kinrais, was the parent who worked out at D5R. Could Donsaii be paying this Raquel Kinrais to raise her kid for her? That seemed kind of weird, but Donsaii was far from normal.

  Jillian looked at the screen for her camera and saw kids being dropped off and cars pulling away. I’ve missed some, she thought with frustration, thinking about how she’d have to go back over the recording with care. With sudden relief, she thought, But, it doesn’t matter. Unless this Zage Kinrais kid turns out to be some kind of dead end, I’m done watching snot-nosed kids getting dropped off at expensive schools.

  She told her AI to shut down the camera and take her to her morning assignment.

  ***

  In the morning when Eli came out, Carley was waiting outside the shelter. She’d been surprised to learn that homeless people weren’t allowed to stay in the shelter during the day. Rolling down her window, she said, “Eli? How’re you doing?”

  “Fine,” he said.

  He looked better than usual, but it took her a moment to realize why. “You got a haircut!”

  “Yeah, a guy comes by once a month and gives us free haircuts. I usually skip it, but mine’s been getting pretty shaggy.”

  “It looks good,” she said. It looked like he’d washed his clothes as well. She decided not to mention that. Steeling her nerve, she asked the big question instead, “Any prob
lem with the shots? Did they make a difference?”

  “Nah, I don’t think they do anything. In fact, I can’t even tell I’m taking them.” He shrugged, “But it doesn’t matter. I’ve quit drinking anyway.”

  Feeling terribly disappointed, Carley said, “So you didn’t even take them?”

  “No, I took ‘em, every last one. The last one was yesterday afternoon. But, since they haven’t really been doing anything, I don’t want to keep takin’ ‘em. It’s not like the injections hurt a whole lot, but if they aren’t working, there’s no reason to stick myself at all, right?”

  Her unhappiness must’ve shown on her face, because he said, “I know you’re disappointed, but the important thing’s that I stopped drinking, right?”

  Carley gave a weak nod.

  Eli said, “I’ve gotta go. I’ve got a line on a possible job .” He turned and strode away.

  Carley started to ask him if he needed a ride, but then her eyes widened. He’s been taking the shots and he hasn’t been drinking! They might’ve been working and he just thinks he stopped drinking on his own! She started to call after him, but he’d gone around the corner. She thought about chasing him down in her car, but decided she shouldn’t. Let him find out for himself whether he can stay off alcohol without the injections.

  She didn’t want to leave her brother without the medication she thought had made such a difference, But I don’t think he’ll believe it if he doesn’t prove it to himself.

  She told her car to take her to the lab at Duke.

  ***

  Roger looked up. “Dr. Van Horst?” he asked, rising to his feet.

  The woman Bridget was guiding over nodded, then looked around as if bemused.

  Roger grinned, “Expecting something different?”

  She smiled and nodded, “More exotic and high-techy.”

  Roger winked, “We keep all that stuff hidden away.” He glanced around himself. “I admit it isn’t impressive looking, just a big table with benches, but this’s where a lot of our ideas have been hammered into shape over the years, so we’re sticking to it.”