Fifty Degrees Below - Kim Stanley Robinson [85]
While they had been together, their financial arrangement had been informal; a mess, in fact. And so when they broke up, which had come as a surprise to Frank, the money situation had caused big trouble. It had not been entirely Frank’s fault, or so he told himself. At the time they bought a house together in Cardiff, Marta had been in some sort of bankruptcy snarl with her soon-to-be ex-husband. She had married an ex-professor of hers, very foolishly as it had always seemed to Frank, and after the first year they had lived apart, but Marta had not bothered to get an official divorce until it became necessary. All this should have told Frank something, but it hadn’t. Marta was therefore bogged in her ex’s financial disasters, which had gone on for years—making her extra-intolerant of any funny business, as Frank only realized later, when his own affairs had gotten snarled in their turn. His had not been as bad as her ex’s, but on the other hand, there were aspects that were maybe worse, as her ex had gotten into his trouble mostly after he and Marta had split up, whereas Frank had deliberately concealed from her a third mortgage on their house, a mortgage he had taken to give him money to invest in a biotech start-up coming out of UCSD. This start-up had sparked his interest but unfortunately no one else’s, and soon the money from the third mortgage was gone, sucking all the equity they had accrued out of the place with it. So it was a really bad time for Marta to move out and demand that they sell the place and split the proceeds. He had had no time to put back the money, and when he confessed to her that there were no proceeds to split—that the money she had paid into the place, a matter of many thousands, was not there—she had freaked out. First she screamed at him, indeed threw a lamp at him; then she had refused to speak to him, or, later, to negotiate a payment schedule by which he could pay her back. At that point, it seemed to Frank, she actually wanted him to have ripped her off, the better to feel angry at him. Which no doubt helped her to avoid admitting to herself, or anyone else, that it was her wildness—specifically her sexual escapades, always “a part of the deal” of being with her, as she claimed, but increasingly upsetting—that had caused him to demand a different basis to the relationship, which had then started the whole breakup in the first place. In other words it had actually been all her fault, but with the money situation she didn’t have to admit it.
He could only hope she knew this. She had to know it; and probably she felt some guilt or responsibility, which helped to make her so abrasive and hostile. She had cheated on him, and he had cheated her. Love and money. Ah well. The pointless wars of the heart.
“Why did you do it?” she burst out.
“Do what?”
“Why did you take out a third on our house without telling me? Why didn’t you just talk about it? I would have been up for it.”
Well, he owed her an explanation for this. “I don’t know. I didn’t think you would be up for it.”
“Well either I would or I wouldn’t, but since you lost it all, because it was a bad idea, maybe if I hadn’t gone for it, it would have been for a good reason! I’m not stupid you know.”
“I know.”
“You don’t know! You think I’m just a lab tech. You think I’m the surfer slut who kills the mice and makes the coffee—”
“I do not! No way!”
“Fucking right no way.” She glowered viciously. She hated killing lab mice. “I’ve got my own lab here, and the stuff we’re doing with Yann is really interesting. You’d be amazed.”
“No I wouldn’t.”
“Yes you would! You have no idea.”
“You’re making a carbon sink organism. You told me. A way to sequester carbon quickly by biotechnical means.”
“Yes.”
“That’s great. But you know,” Frank said carefully, “much as we need a quick carbon capture these days, your customers are going to have to be governments. Corporations aren’t going to pay for it, or be able to get the permits. It’s the U.S. government or the UN or something like that who will.