Carbide Tipped Pens Part 30

Whatever. What Jewel knows is that at age eighteen she's the queen of this white bucking moon. She rides this baby. The G.o.ddess Europa herself couldn't drill that white bull better.

The Irishman's having problems with his machine today, can't keep himself focused. Jewel senses his trouble out of the corner of her mind, her eyes too, she struggles not to let it affect her performance. "Come inside and clear your head," his technician Nance finally snaps.

"Yeah, Buddy. Commend me to your lady." Paris's voice crackles in Jewel's ear. She feels his frustrated desire for her own body, his jealousy of Buddy and Nance. This happens between technicians and miners, she's been told. Which means he can sense her antipathy.

"I make my exit." Buddy limps off toward the base, little soaring hops in the low-g. The other miners hoot and whistle.

Jewel takes a deep breath, refocuses. Jupiter fills most of the sky, the great orange-and-white swirl of it, blue curling under and over like patterns the Celts used to carve in their metals. Gleaming, ever-changing; she could look at this forever.

Jewel finds that emptiness, the clarity you need. Breathe in, out, in, a slow countdown to a bright hard point of light. Her muscles relax, the plug-in at the base of her neck heats up. Nothing will shake her now, not even cowboy whoops from that madman Tybalt, driving his body so hard his plug-ins scream.

Europa, she swings around Jupiter clad in her flimsy gauze of an atmosphere. She's a botoxed and sculpted old girl. Rings and lines appear, fill and sink, a constant erasure of the palimpsest of Solar System history. This moon's got flex. They're mining for water. "Mining" means pounding ice: vast, swirling, salty, gritty ice-cream scoops of it. They extract, desalinate, and send back to parched and poisoned Earth vast quant.i.ties of cool, sparkling H2O. Every miner is outfitted with "wetsocket" plug-ins. Not just anyone can do this. You have to be fit, strong, but also possess an obsessive ability to single-mindedly focus on what is ultimately a boring and repet.i.tive task.

Jewel moves with precision, finding the cleanest seams. It's as if the water in her body recognizes the precious liquid here and draws it out. Magic.

Over on the other side of the seam they're excavating, a Monty team works.

Jewel senses him. She knows it's him by the elegance. Not a single unnecessary move. Almost, he dances.

He's almost as good as she is.

It might have been an Earth follower who first put it into words: Rudo and Jewel would be hot together.

Yes. Yes they would.

Fan fiction starts cropping up, featuring erotic scenarios between the two miners.

"What man is that."

Paris doesn't want to tell her. He's jealous, this one. She needs to watch that, Jewel thinks; he's getting attached.

But what is that one's story? He teaches the stars to burn bright!

Alone in her room, Jewel touches the soft skin of her forearm to call up a screen.

There's something comforting about the Nurse. White background, gentle blue lettering, rounded font. She organizes your comments, pics, videos, and avatar, so that everyone is sort of the same. It's fun to f.u.c.k with her, try for uniqueness. But Jewel is aware of the familiarity. You know your way around the Nurse, so you have a degree of competency, which everyone craves. She connects us all. She is comforting.

Jewel's already creeped Rudo, of course.

She sucks on her finger and flips through. He's new on Europa, almost as new as she is. Some experience on Luna, but before her time there. That tall, dark, and handsome. She'd remember him.

Some girl named Rosaline features largely. She's beautiful, tall, blond, et cetera. f.u.c.k. But when Jewel looks at his friend roster, no Ros. And his status is single.

Breakup.

Bad one.

Bad enough to send him screaming into s.p.a.ce, to the most remote mining outpost Earth has, a place where you lose two years of your life in cryo-travel time, yes, a year each way-and the chances of dying on the job are almost thirty percent.

Jewel clicks on a follower's link to some fan fiction. Jewel has always garnered more than her fair share of this stuff, given her looks-mostly written by females, interestingly.

Wow. This follower certainly has imagination. The scenario, involving Jewel, Rudo, and group s.e.x with some hither-to undiscovered intelligent and sensuous life-forms here on Europa, is strangely compelling.

"In truth, fair Monty, I am too fond."

She likes his status (one of those fake-modest posts about his big take today) and updates her own. Hey Rudo. Check out the compet.i.tion. Her take today exceeded his.

Too macho?

She adds a cute animated emoticon.

She dozes, surfacing now and again to watch as the hits on her status go up and up and up.

The bar. Of course. There's nowhere else.

Jewel shakes off Paris, that bug. Larry gets her a whiskey ("Any more gla.s.s-smashing stunts and you're outta here; I don't care how pretty you are or how much ice you pump, princess") and she waits.

And waits.

Is he going to show?

That status ... maybe it was too much.

She opens a small screen and re-reads her post.

That emoticon. It's too girlie, too cute. Maybe he doesn't like girlie. She closes the screen with her fist.

Or ... is it the G.o.dd.a.m.n Cap/Monty thing? The Montys are a unified testosterone field; their militia-like training exercises leave bruises. They're totally unlike the polyamorous polymorphously perverse culture of the Caps. Spartans to the Caps' Athenians.

Jewel's not used to failing when it comes to men.

She finishes her drink. One more, just one and then she'll go back to her room.

He walks in.

So beautiful. The ice-walls' lights gleam on his dark skin, making it almost blue.

Their eyes lock. He glances down the bar to the Monty end, then back at her. Gives her the tiniest nod.

Her heart beats faster.

He walks past. Too close-he almost touches her.

She knows. He knows.

Another drink. More glances. The whole bar must sense this budding love.

There's no rule. No one can actually stop a Monty from hanging with a Cap. But ... despite Prince's decree of peace ... it's just not done.

They must be discreet.

He comes down a bit, she edges up.

He leans in next to her, orders a beer from Larry.

Their arms touch.

Above the bar, in his beautifully carved ice-cavern, Prince surveys his domain.

He has access, as does anyone on Europa (or Earth for that matter, if they pay to view) to all the camera feeds on the base.

He also has access to some cameras that no one else knows about.

Oh, and by the way, he's got a degree in exobiology.

And has worked as a glaciologist.

And is a doctor of music.

Just saying.

He lies back on a synthetic-fur covering, ice walls flickering with every color of the rainbow, light playing over his face. He's not looking at any of the screens that flicker in the air, however. No, Prince is wearing headphones.

He's listening.

There are many difficulties a.s.sociated with having an affair in a panopticon society, even when it's a self-imposed panopticon. We made it that way; we like it that way. But you still believe you have secrets. That primitive, private sense of self-a belief that there is a self separate from the avatar-self, your online persona as conveyed by the Nurse-persists.

The online back-and-forth between Rudo and Jewel continues. They like each other's statuses, they like pictures. Followers notice, interest grows.

It is possible that Jewel lets all this go a teeny weeny bit to her head.

Rudo takes a particular interest in her family, she notes. Her Korean birth parents died from radiation cancers, and white Americans adopted her. Him, he's Shona and knows it, knows his lineage. It's so different from how she grew up: in a freckled Anglo-Saxon enclave, with people who purport not to be a tribe, and to be from nowhere, yet at every moment making everyone who is not them feel like strangers.

His parents died years after the conflict too, also of radiation poisoning. The usual story. She and Rudo are both orphans. Most miners are.

His interest in her family touches her. There's something ... old-fashioned about it. Courtly. Stuff like that used to matter, she imagines. Who are you one of? It's not a question very many people can ask anymore.

And why would you, when most people die of radiation-related cancers before they reach forty?

Close Encounter #2 at the Only, face-to-face, real-time, there's a moment when eyes meet.

Another brief touch of skin on skin, as if casual. As if it's a mistake.

"Today, on the surface." His eyes are l.u.s.trous. "I think I have figured out why the Sun is so small and dim here."

The heat builds inside them both.

"Why."

He smiles-O, his smile slays the envious moon!-and shakes his head. "Looking at you, now, I have forgotten."

She catches her breath. "Let me stand here until you remember."

"I will forget, to have you still stand there, remembering how I love your company."

Her heart beats faster. "Rudo. A good name for you. It means love."

A pause.

"How do you know that?"

A smile curves her lips.

"I looked it up."

Waiting for him to reply seems like infinity. But at last he speaks.

"The Sun here is so pale, so distant, because she is sick and pale with grief. She cannot compete with your light. Jewel. Your brightness shames the Sun."

She stares. No one's ever said that kind of thing to her before. It's like poetry. But the bar grows restless, he must walk, they cannot be seen talking.

To stand by his side feels like home.

Sometimes, the difference between ecstasy and terror is difficult to discern.

Some strange things are going on.

It only happens when Paris is working, connected to Jewel.

At first he thought it was just that thing: you get a song in your head, an ear-worm. But then he realizes there's noise. Crackling, like the transmission is struggling. And deep groans, tearing sounds as if glacier-sized chunks of ice are breaking off and drifting, a hundred kilometers down into the deep. And a noise like drilling, amplified, stretched. Also, music. There's sway and flex, almost imperceptible changes in pitch and tempo, like someone is learning the song, trying to get it right.

And the songs play all the way through. Then repeat. That's not how your head does it.

It's almost as if it's coming from outside, and the links are picking it up.