Up Against It - M. J. Locke [33]
She thought about the Voice she’d heard. It’d been a long while since she had been spooked like that—since before the kids were born. It had been when she and Xuan had first married, during her rock-hopping days, on the Circuit.
The Circuit was a pilgrimage. Every Phocaean was expected to try it once in their lives, if they could, and you earned a lot of giri if you completed the Circuit. Few people tried, and fewer still succeeded. But Jane and Xuan were made of sterner stuff than most Second- and Third-Wave Phocaeans. After they married, as a honeymoon of sorts, they had taken nearly thirteen years to jet from rock to distant rock together, retrograde, all the way around the sun—tethered to each other with only their air packs, a powered supply raft, and the rare settler’s outpost or military or research station or mining concern to sustain them. Nine years unplugged from the solar wave. Nine years trapped meatside—and they two often the only meat for many million kilometers.
For Xuan, their Circuit had been the research opportunity of a lifetime: the chance to map in detail the distribution of rare ores in the Phocaean cluster of asteroids. It had been a huge success, too. His research was still mentioned in the journals. For Jane, what started out as a gift to Xuan had ended as a gift to herself.
She had known it would not be easy. What she had not expected was that the hardest part of the journey had not been the physical, but the psychic one. The dangers and loneliness and sheer splendor of the Big Empty had forced her to reassemble herself from the core out. And the reassembled person she had become she liked a good deal better than the inflexible, defensive person she had been.
There had been times she and Xuan had hated each other; times she thought she would lose her mind from sheer loneliness; times they had clung to each other inside the balloon tent that they had tethered to their supply raft, gazing out in terror at the sheer deadly magnitude of the universe. They had saved each others’ lives times past counting.
She and Xuan had found each other later in life—when she was sixty and he forty-nine—long after Jane had thought she could ever find a soul mate. But during their Circuit, they had come to depend on each other so completely it was as if they had become a single person. She would never have believed she could love another human being so deeply.
Nowadays, longevity made it easy and natural for married couples to spend years apart at a time. Like most couples, Jane and Xuan had had a few such stretches of time apart: once before they chose to have children, when Jane had followed a resource management job to Vesta, and when Hugh and Dominica were young and Xuan went on an extended research effort. But always when they reunited, it was as if they had never been apart.
A private call came in from Thomas Harman, shattering her reverie. As the PM’s chief of staff he had a smaller staff than Jane, but a great deal of clout. They did not get along, but both were always careful to be civil.
“How are things on your end?” he asked.
“I’ll live. What’s the latest on the JRC?”
“They’re eating their young. It’s ugly.”
Ah, politics. “What about Reinforte? Any further developments there?” Councillor Jacques Reinforte was the chair of the Joint Resource Committee, Parliament’s oversight committee for Resource Allocation. He had called her up twice over the past day and a half, badgering her, issuing veiled threats. She could tell he intended to summon her before his committee.
“Not so good. Pressure is mounting. The prime minister is hearing from all the shippers affected by the ship confiscations. And the power rationing and computer glitches are affecting ‘Stroiders’ transmissions just when Upside-Down needs increased bandwidth to cover the crisis. They’re bringing pressure to bear, too.”
“Computer glitches? What computer glitches?” She made a note to talk to Tania about it.
“Slowdowns,