Pasi moved a few steps into the lounge area, enough to draw Rex’s attention from the book he was reading. “There’s a call for you, Mr. Rex. It came to the house code, although I think you should take it.”
“Who is it?” Rex asked. The house code was the public one. The people he did business with all knew the direct codes. His family had yet another code to reach him. Pasi was very good at dealing with the house calls so if he said Rex should take it, Rex knew he should listen.
“He says his name is Keton Hobson. His appearance matches his Forum profile.” Pasi had already done the basic security check.
Rex straightened up from his slump on the lounge. “Put it through,” he said, activating the screen emitter on his book.
The screen assembled, just as the call connected. The man looking at him was very old, with thick, bushy brows. His face was lined with very fine wrinkles, the type that came with great age. The skin around his neck was loose. His eyes, though, were young. They were a soft brown.
“Mr. Hobson?” Rex said, his wariness high. There had been a number of people contact him to pour abuse and derision upon him over the more extreme pronouncements on the Forum, until Pasi had learned to weed them out and deflect them.
Hobson nodded. “And you’re Rex Julyan. I checked your profile on the Forum. You look older than you do on there.”
The three-sixty image was only a year old. He couldn’t have changed that much. “It must be the screen I’m using,” Rex said carefully.
“Or the flack you’ve been getting over your Forum postings?” Hobson suggested, with a grin.
“Possibly. What can I do for you, Mr. Hobson?”
“Nothing, Mr. Julyan. I just wanted to thank you.”
Rex stared at him. “Excuse me?”
Hobson’s smile faded. “I knew Micah Thorne,” he said. “I can’t say he was ever a very close friend, only he did end up being a friend, after all.”
“Oh.” Rex cast about for something more adequate to say.
“After all you’ve written about Micah, you still find it a surprise he might have had friends?” Hobson said sharply.
“That’s not what surprised me,” Rex said frankly. “I had overlooked the possibility that people might still be alive who knew either one of them.”
“Aye, I knew them both. Laura was my real friend, though.” Hobson sighed. “I loved her, in my own way. Everyone did. Even Tivoli adored her. He was my partner. We had eighty years together.”
“I’m sorry,” Rex said, as gently as he could.
Hobson smiled. “It happens,” he said, his own voice gentle. “I only wish you and the rest of the ship knew Laura the way I did. She was the most gentle, loving person, Mr. Julyan. Big brown eyes and a smile that lit up any corner she was standing in.”
Rex drew in a breath and let it out. “I have seen her profile,” he admitted. “I did wonder what she was like. There were so many messages left when she died. It was as if the entire ship went into mourning.”
“It did,” Hobson replied. “Micah took it hard.” He let out another gusty sigh. “He only lasted another year after that. Everyone could see it happening and no one knew how to stop it, although we all tried. It was a wretched year, that one.”
Rex stared at him. It was startling to think that the most hated man—well, the second most hated man on the ship beside Rex himself these days—had been surrounded by friends who took his death deeply to heart. When had that changed? When had the ship started to hate him?
Hobson was still talking. “It was about ten years after Micah started the money system that all the talk about how it was destroying the ship started to emerge. I tell you, Mr. Julyan, I could have wrung necks. Only, the talk got worse, year after year.” He looked at Rex with a direct gaze. “I’ve often wondered, if I had said something, right back then when it started, if that might have stopped it, somehow.”
Rex shook his head. “There was nothing you could have done. The forces at work didn’t just turn around public opinion, they changed the ship completely. Think about it. What was life like when credits were first in circulation?”
“It was wonderful,” Hobson said flatly. “Only, I’m an old man looking back on youth and missing it. I don’t trust those memories. They’re too rosy.”
“Perhaps they are not,” Rex said. “There are metrics that can measure such things. They show that the quality of life on the ship has declined considerably since then.”
Hobson chuckled. “You sound just like Micah and Laura. They had metrics for everything.” His smile faded. “It sounds as if you know a lot about this stuff, Mr. Julyan. A lot more than your essays and stuff on the Forum imply.”
“I do.” Rex hesitated, weighing risks, juggling options. “Did you ever meet a friend of Laura’s called Emma, Mr. Hobson?”
Hobson scowled. “I heard Laura and Micah talk about someone called Emma a few times. I never did meet her.”
Rex nodded. Then Laura had kept her condition a secret from everyone but Micah. And Emma.
Hobson shifted uneasily. “Anyway. I just wanted to say thank you for what you’re saying about Micah. I don’t think anyone has been nice about him for years and it was a shock to see his name quoted without some sort of epithet following it. He never was the most popular man on the ship.” Hobson pressed his lips together, as if he was weighing up his words, too. It made the skin on his throat shift. “Although you will lose even more friends if you keep going the way you are.”
“I wasn’t loved in the first place, either,” Rex pointed out.
“You were admired. Don’t think I haven’t been keeping up on ship gossip even these days. There are a lot of people wondering what the hell you’re doing, Mr. Julyan.”
“As long as they keep wondering, as long as they keep disputing what I’m saying, that’s a good thing,” Rex assured him.
Hobson frowned. “Are you up to something, boy?”
“I might be. Can I keep your comm code, Mr. Hobson? I would like to talk to you again, about both Micah and Laura.”
“As you’re the only person on the ship besides me who gives a damn about either of them, I can’t say no,” Hobson said. His scowl shifted and became pain-filled and sorrowful. “Those two worked their asses off for the ship, you know. If they could see what life is like these days, they would be horrified. People disparaging civil servants…we were all civil servants then!”
“I know,” Rex said softly.
Hobson shook his head. “It’s as though the baby they thought they were raising grew up into something that wasn’t theirs at all, you know?”
“I know that now,” Rex told him. “It took me a while, yet I’m finally starting to understand.”
Hobson grinned. “Then you’re one of the ones who Micah would have called ‘adequately smart’.”
Rex thought of the constant lectures Emma kept making him listen to. “Some days, I feel as though I am the most ignorant man on the ship.”
Hobson nodded. “And maybe, that just makes you the smartest. You at least know what you don’t know. The idiots around these days…they think they know it all. The arrogance is staggering.”
“Let’s change that,” Rex suggested.
Hobson leaned forward, his expression eager. “Then you do have a plan. Tell me about it. Let me help. Please. For Laura. And for Micah, damn him. He deserves better.”
Rex told him.
* * * * *
Tony looked up from the screen as Belen entered his office. He frowned. “What’s the time?” he asked.
“You missed dinner.”
“Sorry.” He sat back. “I’m trying to wrap my head around this thing….”
“You looked uneasy, when I came in.”
“It’s making me uneasy,” he admitted.
“What’s happened?” She sat on the edge of the visitor chair in front of his desk.
Tony dissolved the screen floating between them so she could see him properly. “Ursula Pavia stopped by to see me today. She made a formal appointment and brought her finance manager with her.”
“Uh-oh. What does she want changed now?” Ursula was one of Tony’s biggest supporters in both time and money. She expected a lot in return for her money, everything from changing the sunlight hours to suit her tanning schedule, to shifting entire housing units to make a more pleasing layout in the Esquiline and much more.
Tony rubbed the back of his neck. “She wants the mortality laws changed so that when she dies, all her accumulated wealth is given to her son.”
Belen stared at him.
“I know.” Tony grimaced. “That was my reaction, too.”
“It’s at the same level as some of the things that Rex has been saying lately. His, at least, are truthful observations, even if no one else likes to hear about it. This is…something else entirely.”
“I believe I tried to convey that to Ursula.”
“A persons’ possessions, their body…it all gets returned to the ship. It has to! If it isn’t, then the ship would be slowly drained of energy and resources. Everything we think we own really belongs to the ship and should go back there!”
“Except this is the first time in the ship’s history when people have accumulated wealth. Ursula worked hard to build her life and she did it to help support her son. He should be given what was hers. It should be passed on.”
Belen could tell by the tone of his voice that Tony was quoting what Ursula and her advisors had said. “Not everyone has a child to pass the wealth on to,” she countered. “What happens to their fortune?”
“Ursula said the possessor of the wealth should get to say where it goes when they die. There was a phrase she used—” Tony grimaced. “A last will and testament. Everyone had them on Terra.”
“She’s done her homework,” Belen murmured.
“She paid for the homework to be done for her,” Tony amended. “With her vast wealth,” he added sourly.
“If everyone had a will, if they get to say who gets what when they die, then the ship would not receive any of it. The energy would stay out there, endlessly assigned to the next individual. Tony, this is…just awful. You can’t be thinking about agreeing to it?”
Tony didn’t look happy. “Ursula has powerful, wealthy friends. If I refuse, they’ll just go and get a puppet elected who will fix it for them.”
Belen stared at him, her heart throwing itself against her chest.
“I put her off,” Tony said. “I said something about research and consideration. That won’t hold her forever, though.”
Belen touched the back of her neck. “I’m sweating,” she breathed. “This is actually making me feel sick.”
“It’s bad,” Tony agreed. “First, wills. Then…what? An uprising of the masses without wealth, who can never get their hands on it in the future because the wealthy are passing it on to their kids and not sharing?”
Belen shook her head. That wasn’t it. Tony was thinking about politics and power flows. Only, it was the idea of confined wealth that was lodged in her heart and her mind and glowing like radioactive waste.
Why was it bothering her so much? What was going on here? Tony didn’t see it. He wasn’t reacting the way she was.
Rex will understand, the sneaky, subversive voice whispered in her mind. Rex, who had spent weeks posting about finances and wealth and the privileged, who seemed to have no time for those who believed they were entitled to anything at all.
Rex would see it her way.