“I haven’t walked this much in years,” Kris Cardenas said, puffing slightly. “I feel kind of light-headed.”

Holly smiled. “It’s the gravity. We’ve climbed closer to the midline; the g force gets lighter.”

They had left Don Diego at the irrigation canal and walked through the plowed farmlands, then climbed the grassy hills down at the endcap of the habitat. Cardenas sat on the grass, her back propped against a young elm tree. One of the habitat’s ecologists had made a personal crusade of trying to save the elm from the extinction it faced on Earth.

Cardenas huffed out a breath. “Whew! I’m glad I spent all those hours in the centrifuge at Ceres. Mini-g can be seductive.”

“You’re in good shape,” Holly said, sitting beside her.

“So are you.”

The habitat stretched out before them, a green inside-out world, like a huge tunnel that had been landscaped and dotted with tiny toy villages here and there.

“What did you think of that crazy old man?” Holly asked.

Cardenas looked out at the landscaped perfection of the habitat: everything in its place, everything neat and tidy and somehow almost inhuman. It reminded her of store window displays from her childhood.

“I think we could use a few more crazies like him,” she said.

“Maybe so,” Holly half-agreed.

They sat in silence for a few moments, each absorbed in her own thoughts.

“I read your bio,” Holly said at last. “I expected you to look a lot older than you do.”

Cardenas didn’t flinch, exactly, but she gave Holly a quick sidelong glance. “If you’ve read my bio then you know why I look younger than my years. And why I was living at Ceres.”

Ignoring the tension in her voice, Holly asked, “How old do you think I am?”

Within ten minutes they were fast friends: two women whose bodies were far younger than their ages.

INFIRMARY

The man lay wheezing on the gurney, his eyes swollen nearly shut.

The young doctor looked perplexed. “What’s the matter with him?”

“I don’t know!” said the woman who had brought him in. She was close to hysteria. “We were walking out in the park and all of a sudden he collapsed!”

Leaning over the patient, the doctor asked, “Do you know what happened to you?”

The man tried to speak, coughed painfully, then shook his head negatively.

Glancing up at the monitors that lined the wall of the emergency cubicle, the doctor saw that it couldn’t be a heart attack or a stroke. He felt a surge of panic: not even the diagnostic computer could figure out what was wrong! The male nurse standing on the other side of the gurney looked just as puzzled and scared as he felt.

The head nurse pushed past the woman and into the cubicle. “Take his shirt off,” she said.

The doctor was too confused and upset to argue about who gave orders to whom. Besides, if the gossip around the infirmary was anywhere near the truth, this tough Afro-American had put in plenty of years with the Peacekeeping troops. She had a reputation that scared him.

With the male nurse helping, they pulled the man’s shirt off. The patient’s chest and arms were lumpy with red welts. His skin felt hot.

“Hives?” the doctor asked.

The nurse turned to the woman, staring wide-eyed at them, hands clenched before her face.

“Walkin’ in the park?” she asked.

The woman nodded.

“Anaphylactic shock,” the nurse said flatly. “Epinephrine.”

The doctor gaped at her. “How could he—”

“Epinephrine! Now! He was stung by a fuckin’ bee!”

The doctor barked to the male nurse, “Epinephrine! Now!”

The head nurse pulled a magnifying lens out of its slot on the cubicle wall and extended its folding arm across the patient’s body. The doctor accepted the hint and took the lens in one hand. Within seconds he found the barb of the bee’s stinger imbedded in the patient’s left forearm, just above the wrist. With a tweezers he gently pulled the stinger out, rather deftly, he thought.

When he looked up the head nurse had gone and the patient was already breathing more easily.

“I never saw a bee sting before,” he admitted to the woman, who also looked much better now. “I interned in Chicago, downtown.”

The woman nodded and even managed to smile. “He must be allergic.”

“Must be,” the doctor agreed.

The male nurse unclipped the patient’s ID badge from the shirt they had dropped to the floor and slid it into the computer terminal. The man’s name, occupation, and complete medical history came up on the display. No mention of allergies, although he did have a history of bronchial asthma. The doctor noted that the patient had grown up in Cairo and had been a lawyer before running into trouble with the Sword of Islam and accepting permanent exile instead of a fifty-year prison term for political agitation. Aboard the habitat he worked in the accounting office.

“A lawyer?” the male nurse grumbled after the patient had recovered enough to walk home with his girlfriend. “Shoulda let him croak.”

DEPARTURE PLUS 269 DAYS

The next morning when Holly arrived at her cubbyhole office, there was a message on her desktop screen from Eberly. Without even sitting at her desk, she went straight to his office.

The door was open; he was already at his desk, deep in discussion with a young Asian couple. She hesitated. Eberly glanced up at her and nodded briefly, so she stayed in the doorway and listened.

“We understand the regulations and the reasoning behind them,” the young man was saying, in California English. Holly saw that he was tense, sitting stiffly on the front five centimeters of the chair.

“It’s my fault,” said the woman, leaning forward and gripping the edge of Eberly’s desk with both hands. “The protection I used was not sufficient.”

Eberly leaned back in his chair and steepled his fingers. “The rules are quite specific,” he said gently. “Your only choice is an abortion.”

The man’s face crumpled. “But… it’s only this one case. Can’t an exception be made?”

“If an exception is made for you,” Eberly said, “others will expect the same consideration, won’t they?”

“Yes. I see.”

Eberly spread his hands in a gesture of helplessness. “We live in a limited ecology. We’re not allowed to expand our population. Not until we arrive at Saturn and prove that we can sustain larger numbers will anyone be allowed to have children.”

“I must have an abortion, then?” the woman asked, her voice shaking.

“Or we could put you off when we refuel at Jupiter and you could return to Earth.”

The young man shook his head slowly. “We can’t afford the transport fare. Everything we had was invested in this habitat.”

Eberly asked, “Do you have religious inhibitions against abortion?”

“No,” the man answered, so quickly that it made Holly wonder.

“Is there no other way?” the woman asked, almost begged.

Eberly steepled his fingers again and tapped them against his chin. The young couple strained forward unconsciously, waiting for a word of hope.

“Perhaps…”

“Yes?” they said in unison.

“Perhaps the fertilized zygote could be removed and frozen — kept in storage until it’s decided that we can expand our population.”

Frozen!Holly shuddered at the idea. Yet it had saved her life. No, she thought. It had allowed her to begin a new life after her old one ended in death.

“Then the zygote can be reimplanted in your womb,” Eberly was saying. “You’ll have a perfectly normal baby; you’ll simply have to wait a year or two.”

He smiled brightly at them. They looked at each other, then back to him.

“This can be done?” the young man asked.

“It would require special permission,” said Eberly, “but I can take care of that for you.”

“Would you?”