Habitats (an Ell Donsaii story #7) (4 page)

Ell raised an eyebrow, “Real habitat?”

Braun grinned, “Something with a full gravity and tens of thousands of people.”

Ell
said “Okaay.” She turned to the group, “And you should see their ‘construction workers.’” She raised an eyebrow.

Brian said, “Wait, you’ve already hired construction workers? I
wanted to apply!”

Ell grinned, “You can
work a few shifts out there if you want, without ever leaving North Carolina.” She waited until they’d all looked puzzled a moment, “They’ve been building waldoes! They let me try one out. It’s a lot like you’re out there!” She turned to Ben, “You have video to show them, right?”

***

Carter walked down the stairs feeling the butterflies in his stomach. After dithering over what to wear to an interview for “a physics major with construction experience,” he had finally dressed in nice slacks, a button up shirt and a sports coat.

Jenny jumped up from the table and ran to give him a hug. “You look good Daddy. I’m
sure
they’ll give you the job!”

Carter bent down to hug her
in return, “I hope so honey.”

A young woman at the ET Resources facility interviewed Carter in surprising depth. Interviews he had had for construction jobs in the past certainly had never been anything like this. “Why didn’t he intend to go on to grad school?**

“No… uh, I don’t mind.”

Carter found himself seated on a saddle with his feet in stirrups. She strapped a glittering, all-encompassing HUD over his eyes and put gloves on his hands. In the HUD it looked like he was in a metal room. He could see a pair of mechanical hands. When he moved his hands in the gloves the mechanical hands did just what he did. He thought,
playing some kind of video game is part of this interview?

The
young lady said, “If you’ll look down?” Carter did and saw an adjustable wrench on a metal table in front of him. A nut was on a threaded rod sticking out of the table and an empty rod stuck out of the table next to it. She said, “If you’d just take the nut off the one bolt and screw it onto the empty bolt?”

To himself he said,
Really?!
Outwardly, he said, “OK,” and picked up the wrench. The mechanical fingers were kind of clumsy but he was impressed to realize that they gave him feedback. When he squeezed the wrench the gloves gave him the feeling that he really had something in his fingers. However, the wrench was stuck to the table. He almost said something, but then it came loose and nearly floated away.
Hah! The wrench is magnetized to stick to the table and the environment is supposed to be weightless!
He managed to catch the wrench before it floated away completely. Adjusting it to fit the nut turned out to be difficult with the slightly clumsy mechanical hands. Then he wondered if the nut was so tight that he needed the wrench and tried to loosen it with his fingers. It wouldn’t come, so he applied the wrench and loosened it. Once loose, it came the rest of the way using just the fingers of the mechanical hand with which he began to feel more and more comfortable. When it came loose from the threaded rod he was ready for it to float away and able to catch it. He moved it to the other rod, screwing it back down and tightening it with the wrench.

Next she had him weld a seam with the mechanical hands. To his surprise this seemed easier than welding in person. He didn’t have to wear
gloves or a dark helmet. The HUD just didn’t make the welding arc all that bright and everything else stayed at normal brightness. When he finished he noted with amusement that the “videogame” designers had invested enough time in the realism of the display that the mechanical hands and table showed little marks from the stray sparks of the welder.

His final task, to his amazement, was simply to toss a rock from one hand to the other and back.
It was harder than expected; both because he was doing it with the mechanical hands and because the game followed weightless rules so the rock didn’t arc back down toward the table. He nearly missed the first toss, but the return toss went fine.

They gave him the, “Don’t call
us; we’ll call you,” routine and sent him home wondering if the “ET” in “ET Resources” stood for “extraterrestrial?” His AI did a search and to his delight discovered that it was a company spun off by D5R, the place made famous by the fact that Ell Donsaii helped found it. They were using Donsaii’s little rockets to explhtnkets toore space.

Maybe, this interview had something to do with working in space? The thought both excited and terrified him. He would love to do that kind of work, but didn’t think he could leave Abby and Jennifer to
go work up in some kind of metal can out in space. He assumed the metal room in the videogame was supposed to represent some kind of space station workshop…?

***

Shan climbed down the stairs from the Learjet and onto the tarmac while gazing wonderingly around at the beautiful Caribbean waters surrounding the little island. He and Raquel had gotten on the plane in North Carolina, but shortly into the flight she’d gone into the bathroom and washed “Raquel” off, reappearing as Ell. As he and Ell cleared the stairs, a couple of burly guys headed up to start unloading the equipment that had filled much of the rest of the small plane. Ell walked off toward a big house done in light blue with white trim. It had a huge airy porch. Shan trotted a few steps to catch up. “So they let you catch rides down here anytime you want?”

She grinned up at him, “As long as I’m caught up on my work, the boss lets me enjoy the perks.
The plane was coming down here anyway. D5R needs the island for its space research and keeps the guest house open for the people who are working on the island. So the incremental cost of letting us come down and enjoy ourselves isn’t much. Besides,” she arched an eyebrow, “D5R’s got to keep their CSO happy, you know.”

Thirty minutes later,
after they’d taken a room on the top floor of the “guest house,” Ell disappeared into the bathroom to wipe the bronzers off the rest of her body. On the plane she’d only done her face and hands. She’d emerged wearing a gauzy, cute beach cover-up. Watching her lithe form as she moved around gathering up snorkels, masks and fins took Shan’s breath away. As he had so many times before, he found it difficult to believe that such an amazing person enjoyed sharing her life with him. And, my God, sooo beautiful! The mind boggled to think that the Raquel he fell in love with was also the Ell that he so much admired.

Standing back up
festooned with gear she said, “Hey, you going snorkeling with me or not?”

Startled out of his reverie
, Shan stood, “Whoops, sorry, let me get my suit on.”

As they scampered across the hot sand to the water Shan said, “Hey, you aren’t going to embarrass me with some kinds of incredible swimming feats are you?”

“Oh no!” she laughed delightedly. “I’m a
terrible
swimmer. I don’t have any endurance and swimming is
hard
work. Besides,” she cast him a chagrined look, “I
sink
.”

She pulled off the cover
-up, revealing a tiny pale blue bikini that took his breath away. Shan loved the way that, though she didn’t look muscle-bound by any means, her muscular definition was easy to see. She definitely didn’t have a lot of fat tWhlot of o help her float.

Ell splashed happily into the water, “Come on slowpoke, you’ve got to
see
some of the fish they have here! Take this.” She tossed something to him.

He looked at it. It was the mouthpiece of a snorkel, without the snorkel?
Oh, I’ll bet it has a port!
Sure enough, when he put it in his mouth he could easily breathe through it, despite the area where the snorkel would normally turn upwards being completely sealed. When he got into the water he could breathe without any trouble in the shallow water. Water didn’t water splash in like it would with a snorkel tube.
This is great! More like scuba than snorkeling, except he couldn’t go very deep because the air wasn’t pressurized.

Shan climbed the stairs from the beach, admiring Ell’s form enthusiastically bouncing up the steps ahead of him. She’d taken him from spot to spot in the water, delightedly showing him coral and fish… though he’d mostly enjoyed watching her lissome body floating through the crystal water.

As they crossed the big patio Ell squeaked, “Mom!” She dropped her swimming gear and crossed to a table
that had a couple in their early forties sitting at it. Bending to hug her mother she exclaimed, “What are you and Miles doing here?”

Feeling embarrassed to be on the island with her daughter when he hadn’t even been introduced, Shan stood uncertainly
by the swim gear. He noticed that Ell looked a lot like her mother.

Her mother laughed, “We d
on’t seem to get to see my daughter nearly often enough, and when she let slip she was coming to the island, we just thought we’d beat her down here.”

“Great! Shan, c
ome let me introduce you to my mother and her boyfriend, Miles Duncan.”

Shan stepped forward and
Ell’s mother got up and gave him a hug. “You must be the famous Shan Kinrais. I’m just so glad to see Ell has someone she loves at last.” She looked back and forth from one to the other. “I hope you’ll sit and have some umbrella drinks with us?”

After a pleasant afternoon spent sitting on the patio, trying various tropical drinks and talking, Shan realized that Ell’s mother was just as down to earth and unaffected by her daughter’s fame as Ell herself.

As they reached their room after a dinner of jerk chicken and sea bass Shan said, “Can I introduce you to
my
parents sometime?”

Ell stopped and tilted her head, “I’d love that
… But you have to think about whether you want to be Ell’s, or Raquel’s boyfriend.” She looked hard into his eyes, “Before you decide; you need to understand that Ell’s life is crazy and probably dangerous. If I ever have a family, I expect to do it as Raquel. I wouldn’t want children growing up into the kind of life I have right now.”

“Dangerous?!”

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Ell shrugged, “Some of the technologies coming from the PGR chips and the ports have been terribly disruptive. Powerful people are very angry about the effect those technologies have had, or might yet have on their fortunes. Even those people who haven’t been disrupted by the technology often want to try to capitalize on it somehow. I’ve been kidnapped in the past by people wanting me to develop tech for them that depends on my theories.”

He stared out through their window at the horizon a moment. He turned to her, “I want to be the boyfriend of whicheve
r,” he grinned, “of your two split personalities… that you would prefer I be with. If I can support you better as ‘Ell’s’ boyfriend, that’s what I want to do.”

Ell hugged him, “That’s the right answer.”

Shan frowned, “Which one?”

The one where you said, ‘
whichever you would prefer.’” She squeezed him. “I’d like you to be Raquel’s boyfriend and Ell’s acquaintance—who you wrote a physics paper with.”

“OK,” he said, pulling her firm body
against his… After a moment he leaned back, “Hey?”

“Umhmm?” Ell said dreamily.

“I might get offered a job.”

“Really? Great! Doing what.”

“Academic, they’d like someone in their Math Department that understands that “damned Donsaii math.”

Ell grinned;
then her smile turned apprehensive, “Where?”

Shan smiled, “UNC.”

“Hey!” Eyes narrowed, Ell slid her hands up to his ribs, “Were you trying to worry me?”