Hell and away from the Belt, he was. Here you didn’t jam two guys into a fifteen by six, hell, no, Sol Station and Admin? You got a whole effin’ fifteen by six .9 g apartment by yourself, with a terminal that could be vid or VR whenever you opted. If you qualified into the Programming track in the UDC Technical Institute, you got an Allotment that afforded you 2c/d Personals per effin’ seven-day week, which meant oj that was real, coffee that was real, red meat that was real, if you had the stomach for it, which Ben personally didn’t—you lived like an effin1 Company exec and had a clearer conscience. And if you could get that on world posting, your tech/2 graduation rating equaled a full UDC lieu-tenancy in the motherwell, with an Army first lieutenant’s pay to start, full grade technical/1 promotion guaranteed in a year, and access with a capital A to all the services that pay could buy. You knew there was a war out in the Beyond, but it wasn’t going to get to Earth, that was what they were building that Fleet out there to stop—and even if it did nobody was going to hit the motherwell, humans just didn’t do that. You were safe down there. You’d be safe NO matter what.

He’d got his graduation With Honors, he was certain of it; he’d sweated his Security verifications, but they’d come through months ago, and nobody had come up with an objection; he’d sailed through the Administrative Service exams four weeks ago, and the only complication in his way now was the formal interview, as soon as the personnel reps from the various agencies could get seats on a shuttle up here—funding time and some legislative hearing in Admin had had the shuttle up-slots jammed with senators and brass and aides for the last three days; but that was thinning out, thank God. The agency interviewers might turn up by the end of the week, after which time—

After which he could book himself a seat for Earth on whatever assignment shook out—maybe even take his pick: Weiter had dropped him a conspiratorial word that he had three different computer divisions fighting over him, including strategic supply modeling and intelligence, and the prestigious A! lab in Geneva (which was for his personal ambitions a little too scientific and academic—give him something with a direct line to politics, God, yes. There was money in that, and a protected paycheck).

Money. A nice apartment down where you navigated a perceptually planar surface at a 300kph crawl, when be was used to thinking in kps and nanosecond intersects. Life on Earth went so much slower and death came so much later for a man who had money, brains, and position.

He’d had a partner back in the Belt, Morrie Bird, who had used to talk to him about Colorado, and cities and sunsets and Shakespeare. Bird had set a lot of personal store by Shakespeare. Bird had thought Shakespeare was important to understand. So when it had turned out of all things that he was going to the inner system, he had made it a certain point to see this Shakespeare guy—translated tapes. of course. V-vids, where you could wander around and watch the body language. And Bird had been a hundred percent right: Shakespeare really helped you figure Earthers. Blue-skyers. People who had never felt null-g, never seen (he stars all the way to forever—different people, with numbers hard to figure; people who thought they had a natural right to orange juice and gravity, people who (the Guide maintained) felt the moon tides in their blood.

Getting the right numbers in a new situation absolutely mattered. On Earth air was free and ship routes and energy were what the old Earthers had fought bloody wars over. Sincerely skewed values—but you had to think about that two-dee surface constantly, and it was limited that way. Finite. Finite resources. Shakespeare helped you see that— helped you see how certain old Earthers in control of those resources had thought they could run your life, the same as Company execs. And how these king-types always talked about God and their rights, like the preachers on R2’s helldeck, who snagged you with tracts and talked to you about free-shares in their particular afterlife and argued whether the aliens at Pell had souls. Only these old kings had been the preachers and the law and the bank.

Long way to come, from the Belt, from Company brat in a Company school learning nothing but Company numbers— to figuring Shakespeare and human history. But there it was, the motherlode of all living stuff and the home of humankind back when humans had been as backward as the Downers at Pell—Earth was full of museums, full of artifacts, pots and tombs and old walls graffitied with stuff that was supposed to make you live forever. The Guide said so.

Most of all, it was the motherlode of information, data, old and new. And the right numbers and enough data on the systems that ran the Earth Company and the United Defense Command could make him rich; rich made a man safe, and got him most everything Ben Pollard could put a name to.

Visitors to Stockholm may be impressed with the Maritime Museum or the Zoological Garden in Haga Pork....

A planet that wasn’t a radiation hell was a novelty. Earth with its completely outsized moon was a novelty. And life thriving at the bottom of a gravity well was a radically upside down way of thinking. Life that made good wine and food that wasn’t synth, a surface where plants grew and cycled the O2 and the CO2 on sunlight and dark; the habitats where animals lived. Fascinating concept, non-human things walking around where they decided to walk and looking at you with unguessable thoughts going on behind their eyes. People searched the stars for life, and there was all this life on Earth, that blue-skyers took for granted, and ate, if it didn’t look too much like people.

He wanted to see a zoo. He wanted to look at a cow or a dog and be looked back at, when he’d never expect to see any real thing more exotic than miners on R&R and bugs under a lab scope.

Humans had existed such a scarily short time. With this war going on in the Beyond they seemed scarily fragile.

He wished he could talk to Bird about that. Bird had had a peculiar perspective about things. He wished he could really figure out what Bird had been, or recall half that Bird had said over the years. There was so much blue-sky attitude he still couldn’t get the straight of. Baroque, was the word. Curves all over their thinking, like gold angels on the old buildings, that didn’t have a damn thing to do with useful—

The message dot flashed on the corner of the screen.

God, it could be the interview notice. His fingers were on the Mod and the 1 to Accept Mail and the Dv and the 3 to Print faster than he could think about the motion.

It said:

TECH/2 Benjamin J. Pollard CTVSS/UDC 28 DAT 2 0652JUN14/24 SN P-235-9676/MLR Report to FSO-HQ, 0900h/ref/Simons

Fleet Strategic Operations? Fleet Ops?

What in bloody hell?

MRL. Automatic log. No way to pretend he hadn’t gotten the message. No way to query the CO. Weiter would tell him it was a report-to, he didn’t have the answer, and he’d effin’ better answer it and find out what the Fleet wanted with a UDC lad, hadn’t he?

It wasn’t an interview. God, no. Fleet Strategic Operations didn’t need a UDC programmer tech/2 with a Priority 10 for economic/ and strategic/supply modeling. Did they?

Shit, no—the damn tight-fisted legislature insisted on trying to interface the UDC EIDAT with the Heel’s Staatentek system through the EC security screen, that was what. The Fleet Staatentek system tried to phone the UDCs EIDAT 4005 to ask for available assignees, and the 4005, behind the EC’s security cloak, spat up a UDC Priority One assignee for a Fleet data entry post—

But you couldn’t ignore it. You didn’t want to face the interviews with an interservice screw-up or a Disciplinary in your record. Damn the thing!