Once I’d fully committed to the Chaser, I had a new cause for worry: How to get all three of us on it. With all the right credentials, Yanci’s berth seemed a no-brainer: He’d been working on this for years. But that very fact made a problem for Sherry, because a lot of people agreed with their father, that close family should not be on the same ship.
“With the Chaser swirling in controversy anyway, both of us Krazneys need to be something special to get on together,” said Sherry, as we sat in her dorm room one evening. “Hey, what if we don’t advertise the fact that we’re brother and sister? That might make it easier.”
“When we get married, you’ll be a Bolognese, not a Krazney,” I said, brainstorming. “And people expect couples to go together.”
That stopped the discussion cold. Sherry and Yanci both stared at me.
“Whoops, got that out of order, didn’t I?” I said sheepishly. “Ever since we talked about it in Palau, I’ve just figured we’d do it. I’ve dreamed of how I was going to ask you for your hand, Sherry, and it sure wasn’t blurting it out like this.”
Sherry smiled a relaxed smile. “Well, that’s about how long it’s sounded like a good idea to me, too, Joe.”
“Hey,” said Yanci, “this is great! Now I’ll be able to make dumb-brother-in-law jokes.” And ruined the mockery by getting up and hugging me, hard and long, while I hugged him back.
So not to be outdone, Sherry had to give me the first really good kiss we’d ever had in front of her brother, while he pretended he was having a heart attack watching, until we all got the giggles at once, which makes it hard to sustain a kiss.
* * *
At the beginning of our senior season, Yanci got his invite to join the HX Chaser Planning Board for Technology. One of the perks of being on a board was first right of refusal to a berth, so he was on the fast track to a ticket.
Sherry had landed an internship under Titan Colony’s Intra-System Trade Department, working with the Trade Representative on Mars; she did volunteer work for the Chaser Sociology Planning Board; and she made sure the people in both groups knew about the other, so they all saw her as both competent and dedicated. More than once she fell asleep in my arms exhausted while we talked at the end of a day, but she was exhilarated about building her foundation for being selected.
That left my own Get Onboard campaign. Staying physically close to Sherry while I made myself look good for selection was a tough mix of objectives. There wasn’t any HX Chaser Planning Board for Technological Impacts, let alone any History Planning Board. I had a part-time gig as a research assistant for Prof. Codrescu, who was doing a book about the effects of the Industrial Revolution on the Kingdom of Croatia, but that wasn’t going to lead directly to anything on Titan. I seriously looked at changing my declared major to something more practical—for about an hour. Best case, it would have delayed my graduation by a full season, besides the danger of making me look like a flake. Anyway, I really loved the perspective history puts on what’s happening around us day-by-day. Still do.
My predictions about the transshipment industry boom on Mars were coming true, but turned out not to open any job prospects for me. So I did my research and discovered that if I wanted to be an entrepreneur on Titan, I didn’t need to get a lot of approvals, and I could bring resources to pretty much any party that would have me, but what happened to me or my resources once I committed was mostly my responsibility. I wasn’t going to get a lot of sympathy or support if things didn’t go as I planned. On Earth, then as now, you had to get a lot of approvals, but once enough people had said yes, you’d developed a big safety net to help make sure you succeeded.
I found that a good position, good as in high profile, was amazingly easy to find, once I looked in the right place. The clue came from Didier, a history grad student that I was on the house R-ball team with. He was telling everybody in the showers that he’d landed a post in the Company History Department at Novell Interplanetary, where they wanted him to take a fresh look at their Utah Era.
Before I even dressed, I’d discovered from the Net that several of Titan Colony’s major corporations had been founded between twenty-five and fifty years ago, just old enough to want better presentations of what they’d done for Titan and humanity. They needed a historian with a concentration in technological impacts! But apparently none of them knew it yet, because they didn’t have any Company History Departments to contact.
After I broached this idea with the Gang of Three, Yanci found me Wilhemina “everybody calls me Will” Tell.
“I’ve got my DBA,” Will announced at our first meeting, of course meaning her Doctorate in Business Administration, “and I want to DBA something back on Titan Colony.” At my fleeting blank look, she explained, “Do Business As! Technical term, my good historian.” And guffawed.
One of the best things about Will was that we liked each other only as business partners. No matter how many hours I needed to spend with her, it was never going to make Sherry jealous.
We partnered as RightInStone®, a consultancy for producing corporate histories. Our specialty would be data-mining a company’s archives to identify the company’s early visionaries and their ideas. Almost always, those leaders and innovators, precisely because they were visionaries, moved on or were forced out as their companies matured. That made for dramatic and insightful stories that burnished the company image, at least when they happened long enough ago not to make the current management look evil.
We had one contract before I even left Mars, using a data conduit between my dorm room and Will’s assigned workspace at Catalyst Converters on Titan.
My remaining worry about going to Titan was that it would put me on the Titan side of the Earth–Titan Crisis, which was not cooling down. The whole controversy, including the Food-for-Kansora element, was raging hotter than ever while the other colonies quietly came to Titan’s economic aid. And I’d learned about depressingly many historic parallels that suggested unpleasant developments would soon manifest.
Graduation was a bittersweet time. They actually held two ceremonies, the second a couple weeks after the first to accommodate the families of over fifty graduates delayed by a terrorist alert on their flight from Earth to Mars. That ill wind did blow somebody good: It let my family get through their own red-tape hell in time to get on the rescheduled flight.
Before the second ceremony I listened to one Earther grandmother loudly complain that there wasn’t enough security, because she didn’t see armed guards ringing the auditorium. “My gosh, this is Mars, lady!” I muttered aloud.
She didn’t hear me, so I didn’t have to explain the gulf that was continuing to widen between Earth and Colonial culture. Earthers were willing to live, effectively, inside fortresses so they could allow “tolerance” of social parasites when they “raged”. In every colony there was too much that had to be done, and too many unavoidable risks, to accept damaging horseplay, much less looting and vandalism for any reason, certainly not as a mere emotional outlet.