第12章 The Terms

Oskar Fehr was waiting at the casing head, and he had brought two men and a rover with its lights on, and he did not look surprised to see her come up out of the ground. "You are thorough, Doctor Amaral," he said. "I have said so from the beginning. Thorough is a virtue right up until the moment it becomes an accident." "Then let me save you the paperwork," Delyth said, and began clipping off the drum. "I found a station under the basin that predates this colony by twenty-nine years, with six names on a wall and a tank farm draining into a hole that the founding survey says is bedrock. I photographed all of it. I have a native water sample and a data core in a locker above the flood line and a chain of custody that starts with a hatch and a date. You can call it an accident. I'll call it what the file will call it, which is theft, and fraud, and the burial of six people you never bothered to count." Fehr listened to the whole speech without moving his hands or his face, and when she finished he nodded, slowly, as if she had confirmed a figure he already had. "Six," he said. "Everyone always comes back with the six. Do you know what I remember about the six? I remember that the paperwork that buried them was signed by a director who retired rich and died old, and that the water they found has been paying this colony's bills ever since, and that if you stand in the concourse at dawn and watch the shift change, you will see ten thousand people who have never heard of any of it and are alive because of it." He stepped back from the casing head. "I am not the villain of this, Doctor Amaral. I am the arithmetic." Delyth let Wim climb out first, and she came up last, and she handed nothing to anyone, because the module and the vial and the cards were distributed across three pockets of her suit and one glove of Wim's and the inside of her jacket, and a search would have to be very careful and very slow to find all of it, and Fehr did not have the authority to search her and they both knew it. "Director Rennard would like to speak with you," Fehr said. "Both of you. Now." Rennard's office at four in the morning was the same office it had been at four in the afternoon, and Rennard herself looked as though she had not slept, which was the first crack Delyth had ever seen in her. "Sit down," Rennard said. "Not you, Mister Dray. You may wait in the corridor." Wim looked at Delyth, and Delyth nodded, and he went out, and the door closed, and she and Rennard were alone with the north window and the landing pad and the hard light of a colony that had not yet woken. "You went into the station," Rennard said. "Yes. I know what is down there, and I have known since before you were hired, and I have spent nine years keeping it quiet, and now you have made it a problem I cannot file." "Then help me make it a fact instead." "Facts are expensive here." Rennard leaned forward. "I am going to make you an offer, and I am going to be honest while I make it, which is more than you will get from anyone above me. K-7 is a resource that can fund this colony's expansion for a decade. The station under it is an inconvenience, and it is going to be sealed, and it is going to be sealed with water, and in twenty years no one will care because everyone will be drinking from the ice that sealed it. That is the arithmetic. I am offering you the lead on the expansion, a full imaging program under your own name, and a permanent Earthside posting when your tour ends. All you have to do is file the paleocavity label and let the ground close." "And the six people on the wall?" Rennard's face did not change, and that was the answer. "They died in a collapse forty-one years ago, in a station that was never chartered and never inspected," Rennard said. "Their families were told what the company of that year could afford to tell them. I did not make that decision. I inherited it, along with the water, along with the colony, along with you. And the one thing I have never been able to do, in nine years, is decide whether inheriting a lie makes you its owner or its servant. I have decided it both ways on different nights." She stood. "The offer expires when I walk out of this room. If you refuse, your suit privileges go into review, your survey access is suspended pending the incident inquiry, and Mister Dray's apprenticeship goes back to the pool with a note in it. I am not threatening; I am describing the machine, and I am telling you which way it turns." Delyth stood too, and for a moment the two of them faced each other across the desk with the landing pad behind them and the whole dead weight of the basin under the floor. "I have a counter-offer," Delyth said. "You tell the truth, publicly, tonight, and give the six a real grave and the colony a real accounting, and I'll file it exactly the way you want it filed, and you can keep working here, and I'll keep working here, and we'll fix the rest of it together." Rennard looked at her for a long, long moment, and something in her face was tired in a way that had nothing to do with sleep, and Delyth thought for one second that she had found the person behind the office. "Denied," Rennard said, softly, and the machine turned. Delyth had known it would. She had known it before she opened her mouth, and she had said it anyway, because there is a difference between losing an argument and declining to make it, and only one of those leaves a record. She put her hand on the door and looked back once at the office and the window and the woman behind the desk who had spent nine years keeping a lie in good repair, and she felt something close to pity, and she put it away, because pity was a luxury the six names could not afford. Delyth walked out past Wim in the corridor and did not say anything, and Wim did not ask, and they walked together toward the south corridor while the lights came up one section at a time, right on time, and somewhere behind them somebody was already typing the order that would take their suits away. At the junction where their routes split, Wim stopped and looked at her, and in the flat corridor light he looked younger than he was. "Whatever you decided in there," he said, "you should know I already decided the same thing before we went down, which is that I'd rather have this on my record than not have it on my record. That's the only arithmetic I've ever been good at." Then he went his way, and she went hers, and neither of them said anything that could be read back to a lawyer. At the door to her quarters, Delyth stopped and looked at her wrist, and the weather summary blinking there was wrong in a way she had learned to respect. The eastern ridge had gone dark on the horizon, and the pressure was falling faster than the forecast allowed, and the dust front that was supposed to arrive in five days had decided, without asking anyone, to arrive tonight. ---