“Uh,” I said. “No?”
“Guess,” she said. “We’ve had over ten thousand applications for berths on this expedition, all told. Six hundred atmospheric pilots alone have made inquiries. Do you know how many berths we have for atmospheric pilots?”
I know the answer to that question now, because Berto has mentioned it about a thousand times since we boosted out of orbit, but I didn’t have a clue at the time.
“Two,” she said. “We’ve had six hundred pilots apply for two goddamned slots—and these are not weekend-pilot randos. Every single one of those six hundred would be eminently qualified for the job. Miko Berrigan applied to head up our Physics Section. Can you believe that?”
I shook my head. I had no idea who Miko Berrigan was, but apparently he was hell on wheels, physics-wise.
I’ve since learned that that’s true.
I’ve also since learned that Miko Berrigan is kind of an asshole, but that’s not really relevant to the story.
“The point is,” Gwen said, “we have had our pick of the litter for this expedition. As I’m sure you’re aware, it is a tremendous honor to be selected for a beachhead colony mission, one that most people never even get the opportunity to try for. If we wanted to, we could fill every berth on the Drakkar with someone with one green eye and one blue one, and still have a fully qualified crew.”
She brought her chair back down onto the floor with a bang then, and leaned across the desk toward me. I had to force myself not to flinch.
“Which brings me back to our Expendable,” she said. “Do you know how many applications we’ve had for that slot?”
I shook my head.
“You,” she said. “You are the only person who has stepped forward to fill this particular berth. We were seriously considering asking the Assembly for authority to conscript someone until you walked through my door. Now, I can see from your standardized test scores that you are not actually a completely stupid person. In fact, it says here that you’re a … historian?”
I nodded.
“Is that a job?”
“Actually,” I said, “it is—or at least it used to be. The study of history can—”
“Isn’t every scrap of known history available to anyone at any time?”
I nodded.
“So what, exactly, makes you more of a historian than me, for example?”
“Well,” I said, “I’ve actually bothered to access a lot of those scraps.”
She rolled her eyes. “And someone pays you for this?”
I hesitated. “I suppose it’s technically more of a hobby than a job.”
She stared me down for five seconds or so, then shook her head and sighed.
“In any case, the post that you are applying for right now is not a hobby. It is most definitely a job, one which, if you take it on, you will never be able to relinquish—and what, exactly, does the fact that nobody else on this entire planet wants this job tell you, Mr. Barnes?”
She looked at me then as if she expected some kind of response, but I honestly had no idea what to say. Finally, she rolled her eyes again, and slid a bio-print reader across the desk to me. I pressed my thumb to the pad, and felt a tiny prick as it nipped off a DNA sample. She took the reader back and glanced down at the display.
“Can I ask a question?” I said.
She looked up at me. Her expression was unreadable. “Sure. Why not?”
“If nobody has applied for this job, if you were actually thinking about drafting someone for it, why are you trying so hard to discourage me from taking it?”
She looked back down at her tablet. “An excellent question, Mr. Barnes. I guess maybe you just strike me as a decent sort, and I’d rather this particular job went to an asshole.”
She stood then, set the tablet down on her desk, and offered me her hand.
“Whatever,” she said. “I guess it’s going to you. Welcome aboard.”
* * *
HERE’S THE QUESTION that Gwen should have asked me, but didn’t: What’s so rotten about Midgard that you’re willing to take a chance on getting your insides liquefied to get away from it? I mean, Midgard’s a nice enough place, as third-gen colony worlds go. It sits dead-center in the Goldilocks zone of a red giant that just finished eating its inner system. That means they had to do a bit of terraforming when the first boat showed up, which was probably a pain in the ass. On the plus side, though, unlike our current home, Midgard hasn’t been habitable for long enough to have any sophisticated locals to deal with. I’m sure some bad things happened to their Expendable too, but at least he wasn’t getting eaten right and left.
Midgard has almost no axial tilt, so there’s not much in the way of seasons to worry about. It’s warm at the equator and cold at the poles, with a couple of broad, shallow, low-salinity oceans, and one world-girdling continent that completely divides them. Crowding isn’t a problem. There were more people in one mega-city on old Earth pre-Diaspora than there are on all of Midgard. The beaches are nice. The cities are clean. The government is elected, and mostly limits itself to managing the economy. I never even had a problem with that fat red sun filling half the sky, although I’ll admit that the little yellow one we have here already feels more natural somehow.
So, what was the problem? You’ve probably got a few guesses, so let me run down the list. Love affair gone bad? Nope. I’d had a few girlfriends, some good and some bad, but none bad enough to drive me off-planet, and none at all in the year leading up to my first upload. Money problems? You wouldn’t think so, would you? Almost nobody on Midgard had money problems. Virtually the entire industrial and agricultural base was automated, and the government distributed the spinoff on a per-citizen basis, just like nearly every other planet in the Union. In most ways you could measure, Midgard was almost a paradise.
As it turned out, the problem that I had with Midgard was exactly the problem that I had with getting off of Midgard. I wasn’t a scientist. I wasn’t an engineer. I had no talent for art, or entertainment, or rhetoric. I was—I am—the sort of person who in an earlier age would have been a low-level academic of some sort. I would have read obscure books that I found in obscure archives, and written obscure papers that nobody would ever have read. In an earlier age than that, I might have put in my time in a factory, or a mine, or maybe the infantry. On Midgard, though, there weren’t any low-level academics. As Gwen so kindly pointed out, history was anyone’s for the taking. With a blink of your ocular, or a few clicks on your tablet, you could know anything you ever needed to know about anything—not that anyone ever bothered to actually do that, of course.