Free Starbound by Joe Haldeman Page A

streak. And in that particular case, so does everybody else’s.”
    “Are you always such an optimist?”
    He picked up his hydrator, and we moved on to the next patch. “By Earth standards, America anyhow, I really am an optimist. You can define that as ‘anyone who isn’t suicidally depressed.’ There may be free energy, but that doesn’t translate into universal prosperity. Most people work at unsatisfying jobs with ambiguous or worthless goals and low pay, and anyhow, they’re just marking time until the end of the world. Namir and Elza and I, like you guys, are in the unique position of being able to do something about it.”
    I was still living in a kind of double-vision world, the sanitized version that was broadcast (and which I sort of believed for years) versus the grim reality that was in Namir’s newspaper. And America was far from being the worst off. The front-page picture in the last paper showed the Ganges, a clot of corpses from shore to shore. A block-wide funeral pyre in Kuala Lumpur, within sight of the proud old Twin Towers.
    These were beets, four small plants per net bag, 50 ccs water each. I wouldn’t touch beets as a girl, but in Mars I came to love them. Red planet and all. I mentioned that to Dustin.
    He laughed. “I grew up in a vegetarian family. Beets were the closest thing I had to meat until I got off the commune.”
    “Bothers you to go back to veggies?”
    “No, I just eat to fuel up. Pseudo-hot dogs with fake mustard, yum. Elza’s about the same. Namir might go crazy, though.”
    “He likes his meat?”
    “Fish, actually. He doesn’t like to be far from the sea.”
    “He better take a good last look.”
    “On Mars, you had actual fish.”
    We said “in Mars,” usually. “A pool of tilapia.” They lived on plant waste.
    “He was hoping.”
    “Guess we’re not a big enough biome. It was marginal on Mars, a luxury, and we didn’t have to deal with water at zero gee.” I clicked on the notebook. “Twenty kilos of dried fish in the storeroom.” The storeroom was already in place on the iceberg. It had five hundred kilos of luxury food. Including fifty liters of two- hundred-proof alcohol, more than enough for each of us to have two drinks a day.
    “He can do something with dried fish, Spanish. Some kind of fritters.”
    His smile was interesting. “You really like him. I mean, apart from . . .”
    “There’s no ‘apart from,’ but yes. We’re closer than I ever was with any of my natural family.”
    I wasn’t sure how to interpret that. I wanted prurient details. “You knew Elza first, though.”
    “By a few weeks, maybe a month. By then it was obviously a package deal or no deal.
    “I’d heard of Namir professionally, and was curious anyhow. We first met without her, very American, shooting pool.”
    “You beat the pants off him.”
    “Not a chance. He’s a shark. Shows no mercy.”
    “You knew about him and Gehenna.”
    “In what way?” he said without inflection.
    “That he missed the first part, and so survived the second.”
    “Oh, sure. He was about the highest-ranking officer of the Mossad in Israel, certainly in Tel Aviv, who survived.”
    That was interesting. “I wonder why he didn’t press his advantage with that.”
    “How so?”
    “He’s still with the UN, isn’t he? If he’d stayed in Israel—”
    He laughed. “Smartest thing he ever did was go back to New York. Lots of ruthless people jockeying for position in the Mossad, with three-quarters of them suddenly gone. His turf in New York was safe. Besides, it’s the place he loves best.”
    We moved on to the delicate celery plants. “There’s an odd chain of circumstance that winds up putting the three of us here. As if we’re collectively a lucky chicken—or an unlucky one.”
    “What makes you say that?”
    “Like this . . . the Corporation wound up agreeing that they needed no more or less than three military people on the mission. So they sent the computers out