It was unusually quiet in the office, with the customary Brussels drizzle tapering down outside, and this general air of tranquillity was broken only when the pulse in her ear sounded, the one whose activation almost inevitably made her emit a small wince of pain. At least she didn’t have to make a hasty exit from a conversation with a colleague – calls were expected to be answered immediately – and frankly an abrupt dash out of an interlocution wouldn’t have fitted with the persona, unruffled and impartial, she had generally cultivated. She just rose, walked quietly to the bathroom, and took the call in peace.
She decided to do it vocally; she could have gone to the Blackspace but chose instead looking at her face in the mirror, the device reading her speech intentions through her eyes. She looked at her stern black bob and grey eyes. She had of course chosen the look but it was a different task to try and actually pull it off.
‘Cera,’ came the voice just behind her temple, ‘I’ve caught you at the right moment I see.’
She recognized it at once.
‘Roger!’ He’d handled her missions before. ‘Are you in charge of me now?’
‘To the extent that I’m in charge of anything in this world, yes. I’ve nothing fixed to communicate – this call is a formality, but one I thought I’d do personally for old times sake. Just to say that your request for reinstallation has been received and is being processed.’
‘Do you have any idea when?’
‘I’m not sure if you know what time it is here, but we’re coming up to the docking season. It means we’re getting much more requests to come back than usual, and appropriately fewer requests to leave.’
‘So that’s “No time soon”.’
‘You’ll know within weeks. Until then, keep doing what you’re doing.’
‘What exactly am I doing?’
‘What is it with you, Cera? You’re normally happy to do three or four years. On Hydra, you were practically begging us to be allowed to stay.’
‘It’s true that it’s been more difficult to settle here than in other places.’
‘Just enjoy all that free oxygen,’ came Roger’s voice from another charmless office light years away.
It was true that she had enjoyed easier postings than this.
There had of course been much more dangerous ones, a porthole unexpectedly depressurizing over Proxima b, a shard of broken glass thrust into her leg in a tradeport bar. One time pirates boarded their vessel but were too stoned to do much. Yet none of those missions and moments had had the disconcerting impact of falling in love.
Frankly, this city was miserable; it was also grey, there were building works everywhere alongside no sense of what was being built, and the natives were locked in an interminable dispute about languages her speech processing units recorded as to all intents and purposes identical. Taking advantage of local population density, she went out every night to bars and cocktail events and spoke to the most boring people she had ever met on any world. They went on and on about trade and, almost as dully, their group sex experiences. And then back to trade.
At the parties she presented her back story; a former intern at the Commission, now on a permanent contract at Europatat, the European Potato Trade Association. The specifics of her mission were almost sober enough that you could say them without suspicion; she was to obtain information about New Genomic Techniques and send it back to so that Kerebus could obtain competitive advantages in tuber production.
That’s correct; Cera was on an official espionage mission to counterfeit seed potatoes.
‘Not just potatoes,’ Roger said from behind her temple one night. ‘Genetically modified potatoes. Ones which might give us a competitive advantage over rival bases.’
‘I like potatoes,’ she said, lying on her bed. She was smoking a cigarette, a habit she’d slid into, like so many in Brussels, out of boredom. Had she smoked with Udo? Her emotions seem to distort time. ‘But to dedicate so much of my life to them... I envisaged things little differently at my age.’
‘How did you envisage things at your age?’ Roger asked.
‘I’m lying,’ Cera said. ‘I’ve never envisaged my life at all. I just muddled through.’
‘At least you get to see the universe a bit,’ he said. ‘We’re having power generator issues here.’
‘But you can see “Upsilon’s pyroscape broiling eternally below”?’
‘I can confirm that I can see that.’
‘Then you’re home,’ Cera said.
That wasn’t the reason things had gone wrong though, potatoes, I mean. It was about Udo, and it was a matter of the heart.
It had been in one of the long European Commission social meetings, these ordeals of small talk and incanted American buzzwords, this time enlivened only by a lunch break for duck on dry crispbread. The food was good in this city. There’d been hours of talk in an English only a mother could love and then, in the absence of questions relating to the content of the speech, of which the only valid one could have been ‘What was the content of the speech’, there’d been the announcement of a fifteen-minute break for afternoon coffee.
Moving out into the Europatat lobby, she’d seen him, standing alone at a high table, a tall man middle-aged in a black suit with intensely blue eyes, stood alone with an espresso cup looking tiny in his hands.
‘I’m wondering,’ he said as she approached the table, not even physically committed to a conversation yet, ‘why the coffee here is so extraordinarily bad. Do they make it from the potatoes?’
‘I don’t have any proof that they don’t,’ she said.
‘Oh, you’re intern?’
‘Do you mean am I an intern?’
‘I mean internal. From the house.’
‘I work here, yes. In the public relations side of things.’
‘Well, maybe you can obtain the secret formula. Coffee made from cigarettes is surely the next frontier.’
‘From cigarettes?’
‘I mean from potatoes. I’m tired. Well, I’m bored. Do you smoke?’
‘I can,’ she said.
‘I still smoke cigarettes,’ he said. ‘I remain very Gen X in my habits.’
About 50 then, though all the people looked younger than back on Kerebus. There the 30-year olds looked like 60-year olds here, with the difference that Kereban 30-year olds didn’t make 60. And the man in front of her, with his full hair and clear skin, looked late thirties at most.
‘Are you inviting me for a smoke?’
‘Well, I can share my precious life shorteners with you if you want,’ he said. ‘It might mean there’s less meeting for us both to get through. We might die.’
Cera and Udo went and stood outside on the pavement. The air was grey – it was the weather of a depressive, which, even after sunny intervals, slid back into its default slate hue.
‘Bernard from the Commission is talking a lot. One of those men who prefer to impress other men than women. I’ll never understand that.’
‘You like women?’
‘I do like women.’
‘Easy to please then. Our office is an endless parade of 25-year olds.’
‘Oh, not those ones. I like proper women. Experienced women with shredded dreams. Like – you can tell with you that you’ve already lived outside of Brussels.’
Well, he wasn’t wrong. If ten hardscrabble years dealing with contraband trade, unreliable arms suppliers and satellite base establishment didn’t count as ‘Outside Brussels’, what did?
‘Yeah, I mean, Brussels is just one stop on the road for me.’
‘Where are you from?’
‘Canada. And you?’
‘Frankfurt, in Germany. My name is Udo, by the way.’
‘Cerise.’
His English was very good, in that way Germans cultivate it to the point of determined elegance, choose it as their tool to communicate with the world; their own language they hoarded for themselves. It was the way that Udo as non-native speaker savoured a word like accustom, spoke the word, as it were, as if to a lover not a relative.
‘Have you been here long?’
‘Yes. I’ve been here seventeen years.’
‘So you like it.’
‘I wouldn’t go that far.’
‘Why seventeen years then?’
‘It grows on you.’
‘You mean the women, I presume.’
‘I’m married, actually.’
He wore no ring.
‘But my wife is in Frankfurt.’
‘What does she do?’
‘My wife is not very well,’ said Udo quietly. ‘She has not been well for a very long time.’
‘I’m sorry to hear that. Do you have children?’
‘My wife is not very well,’ Udo repeated. ‘What about you?’
‘I’m alone. I travel a lot with work.’
This was the reason placings only lasted two or years or so; it minimized the chance of close relationships being developed with locals. Of course, that did happen, and if relationships were detected early a portal would be swiftly opened; if resistance was made an agent was dispatched to a full memory wipe. Some could not bear this, could not bear to lose the memory of the love they had found for another. In those cases, when lovers often disappeared underground, more drastic means were said to be taken.
Meanwhile relationships with fellow Kerebans were permitted but tended to be brief and transactional.
‘Listen,’ said Udo as they were about to go back inside, ‘You want to go out for a drink sometime?’
‘What – you and me?’
‘Yes. I mean, when people go out for a drink, there’s normally two of them there. Otherwise it’s more of a solo affair. So?’
‘So what?’
‘Would you like to.’
‘Well, forgive my surprise. It’s just I don’t normally really get asked out on dates.’
‘You don’t get asked out on dates! Are you not into men?’
She thought.
‘To be honest, I can’t remember.’
There had been others, but usually they had stolen moments, an under the sheets rummage on a docking ship. Gender was not a decisive factor in the equation. As for duration, beyond a certain range long-distance relationships seemed to cease to be conceivable; they just drifted into obliviousness.
‘Well, you’re invited out for a drink. How’s Thursday?’
‘What?’
‘You don’t drink.’
‘No, I mean – we just go out – and drink?’
‘Yes, and we talk a bit.’
‘About what?’
Udo smiled. ‘I mean we can choose. That’s the beauty of it.’
She stood there. ‘OK,’ she said. ‘I’ll come.’
‘On Thursday?’
‘Is that when we do it?’
‘Let me give you some days to get used to the concept,’ Udo said. ‘Here, give me your GSM.’
