RSS 2.0 FeedIssue Four-June/July 2009, Speculative Satire Fiction
Mortar Fromage
Destruction by cheese.
I'm glad you had a good trip and all, kid, but hear me out. If I had it to do all over again, I would've swallowed the barium and started law school.
Oh sure. Who cares if you glow in the dark, you're alive, right? Law's a smart career choice. Consider it when you finish the internship.
So, I gotta give you the speech, okay? I say this to all the fresh meat. It's not too late to back out right now and take the next transport home. Law school'd have open arms for someone like you. Great purchasing power you'd have with a dual professional degree, you'd get to eat at the best restaurants, and still have teeth to chew your food, too.
Out here, people don't like me, they *fear* me. That's not supposition. That's fact. Everyone hates me. I think I know how the village hangman must've felt.
Of course... If I come to your door, you must have done something to deserve it... been bad, been lazy, made poor choices.
OK. You insist you're tough enough - I believe you.
Course.
Welcome to the team.
When you get back, you can tell them you met the only professional tax professional in the Greater Diaspora, the only full-timer in the history of outer colonized space. And you can say you, tough guy, just call me Jim.
In fact, I'd prefer if you did just call me Jim. Have you picked out the name you'll be using up here?
It's mandatory for a reason.
Course, a librarian will find it out eventually - why else you think they get paid the big bucks? - but it'll save you some headaches in the short term.
Now. I hate most of what's associated with this job and you will too… Death's the biggie of course. You try to avoid that. Weapons drills help.
Yes, thermal burns are an occupational hazard for any Wharton grad - glad that Career Services is finally warning you newts. Rehab's a bitch.
Wellp, I have to go over the instructions anyway. Sorry. Outside temporary quarters, carry a second oxygen pack and wear your headgear at all times... that's if you “accidentally” dive out an airlock. Headgear gets kind of smelly, you know, so here's a little gift. The Febreze won't save your life - the blaster's for that - but it might save your lunch.
Hmm... No, I don't think they'll bother a student actuary. If you tell them that before you mention Halibarker, it should be fine.
Bitter? Me? let me tell you, it's not a cliché, I can't go home. Now, I've been out so long, I'm not even sure how my bones would handle Earth's grav...
No, no - the cutoff's about two years, that's when...Listen, kid! -- You'll be fine if you rotate back by next August.
Fact is, you're coming along in a proud tradition. I train every new kid as they cycle the stellarfi internship. Collection has had some bright stars pass through. Marie Schwab... Misa Gates. Donnie Trump the Third. Trained 'em all.
Sure! Go ahead, ask me. I like friendly conversation, rare enough! If you don't mind my suggesting, you might want to go ahead and think about some magazine subscriptions, book club deals for your console. It can get hard to meet nice folks with this job --
Places to meet girls? Don't know about that. I like girls who are smart, and if they are, they know better than to hitch up with a guy with a bullseye on his back.
Uh huh. No, I don't have much cause to talk to home. Occasionally I get some care packages. Customs has this phalanx of AKC Bionic Shepherds - DNA descended from Rin Tin Tin, isn't that a toot? So they sniff everything shipped to me. Even then the post mandates a 6 month waiting period. Christmas in July's a pooper.
That's a pretty stupid rumor to believe, kid. No, I didn't pick this way of life. Read my lips: law school.
You sure? You really want to know?
It's all my Mama's fault.
So it's thirty years ago. I got my little B.B.A., and was assigned the regular tour of duty. Back then, everyone who wanted to work, run or own stock in a business, from the micros to the conglomerates, had to do their turn collecting taxes in the Outer Diaspora. There isn't a soul over sixty, in business today, who isn't an alumn of dear old BP Halibarker and their tax office. You're in good company, though these days they don't make anyone stick with it longer than a solar year.
Oh, well, they changed the rules a lil' after Misty Buffett got her scalp burned off, and Conrad Ford got thrown out an airlock. Nice kids, too, and all they were doing was auditing a subsidiary of Space Disney. Miralux, I think was the name. It didn't sit too well with their folks, or NASDAQ, and since the provisional government's been in bed with the Ford family since before peak oil, you can just imagine the firefight when the law showed up.
Real pitched battle on the stock exchange after that, between the entertainment hacks and Ford's stockholders. And a couple of Miralux transports went, ah… missing. Good ol' Orange Tuesday, “it was a tart day for the Mouse”, you remember that song? ORANGE TUESDAY… They never taught you that one? I thought at least Lunar Idol would have the twerps sing it ONCE.
Orange Tuesday, they call it that because there were a lot of hot blasters that day. I mean, my old boss at Halibarker always had 'em warmed up onsite. You never know when someone'll show up, pissed off about an audit. But that was the day they started letting folks carry at Space Disney. Nasty thing they found in Cinderella's castle Wednesday morning.
Did I mention that law firms usually get the first shot at the good blaster designs?
Actually, I've been in long enough to know the real reason why they started cycling fresh grads in the first place. Scrambled eggs. Not the breakfast kind.
Oh, don't let the episodes of “Fashion Comet” fool you - actually, don't believe anything you see on E! - Stacy Murdoch was *born* with that third eye, because Mommy used to collect dough for Halibarker.
Helluva christening, I bet. This was before they started their “optional” Icicle program for future parents, but our shielding's a lot better these days.
Anyway. I was young, and Halibarker's the best at filling your head with lots of nonsense about patriotic duty and helping society...
No, kid, I told you, if you return around August you'll be fine, no major radiation. Just watch out for solar flares on the elevator back.
They did tell you that radiation adds up too?
Well, I thought it was basic stuff, but if they didn't tell you about Orange Tuesday...
So. Excise taxes were the worst, and we usually did those in teams of two or three, even before Misty and Conrad got capped. Not that it mattered much if a whole quiverfull of greenhousers came at you with servos. My old supe was Brad Tobias, the last head of Jaffe Gore Pernoud Finkelstein Deloit and Touche. You've probably seen him on the vids, now that he's the new czar for the Mars conflict. Ever wonder how the president got him to take the job, why he wasn't scared? Or why he wears that goofy breathing apparatus? Greenhousers, kid.
Hey, I just email them the bill now. Let the Comptroller handle it. Most of them have fines as long as your arm and pay when they want - usually when they want to build another compound further out, helps them get the proper permits on time. Not so different from Miralux! Comptroller doesn't like it, I tell him he can audit them personally. Long as I've been here, they can't afford to lose me over a grudge with some fecund tree-huggers.
So I finished the year. Hated it pretty much. Had my doubts about taking the slot they'd saved at KBR-Astra. But I was proud to head home. It may have made me wet behind the ears, but I was eager to tell everyone what it's like to do an audit at blasterpoint, I mean, I had some good stories.
I would have understood if my mother had balked at me an' Gertie, with our big dreams of going into private space, just like Daddy - who came back here when the shielding was really bad, rest his soul.
But instead Mama told us to follow our dreams, like all the other great Altarbustos before us.
So you have heard of her? Wow.
Uh-huh… uh.
Hmm...Really. God, they've really got to improve those textbooks. I guess they have to kind of, sweeten what they tell you in school, or else you wouldn't be out here. First, trade restrictions on gorgonzola had nothing to do with the Mortar Fromage…
No, that was the Mozzarella Squagliaste. You're thinking about the one where the sailors got into a gun battle with organized crime, right? That was kiddie stuff. The garbage guys were on strike in Napoli. This was scary crap, kid. The Canadian military got involved. Ay yaaaah. Those guys - stone cold! You know what I'm saying?
So let me go back to it. I want to say, I'm not proud of what Mama did... But you know, she worried when Gertie and I took off Earth, and decided not to stand still. She took a nice Veep spot at the Interplanetary Project of Oversight. Lots of perks. Prague was full of blossoms.
Heard nothing about her job, I had some old vid messages that I'd forgotten to return. I was too busy rassling Alternative Maximum Tax out of some blowhard. Before I knew it, bing, I was cooked, I mean - I was done. Could go home.
No, my stuff was fine, kid. I used the icicle program.
Well, make an appointment tomorrow, okay? I'm trying to tell a story here!
My return day, I was so restless, waiting in the travel chamber on Rattler. Rat's the oldest and longest of the first string elevators on Mars - doubt it's even running anymore. I'd been terrified of those rides, metal scraping in these long groans. You've got no attendant there to pat you and tell you it's “space turbulence”. You guys have it made now. Not only did we not have a nightclub, we had to use seat belts back then.
I was in plain clothes, so the other passengers weren't hostile. My scanner showed no heat signatures, so no one was packing a hot blaster. I had a few thermal burns from my last audit. Nothing some nanofiber and bed rest wouldn't fix. You'll find out.
Then Rat stopped, went all quiet - and then back again, the wrong way, towards Mars. When we got to Station Anne, all us passengers had agreed that we would complain together - hopefully getting some food and cube vouchers until we could go home. Or just get to sit in a lounge with HBO till they fixed service. The Lincolns? I loved that show, man.
We got out, saw everyone crowded together, watching the news monitors. Lots of overlap in the feeds this time. Big news - glacier had been flash-burned off the map in the Northern hemisphere, one of the last Greenland had, too.
Cargo traffic had been held up - all elevators, even those in the Outer Diaspora, were temporarily shut down.
I don't know how long I sat watching the monitors in Station Anne. Cos it hit me - at three different gatherings, around the globe - my mama's face appeared on the picket screens. I never did get a cube, either - too afraid someone would notice my last name.
They didn't call it the Mortar Fromage yet, but just said cargo traffic for the Polaris colony was on hold, since a faction of these cranks had just blown up a key elevator entrance near Bangor.
And this pissed off another group, angry 'bout the “desecration of Nuevo Angland”, some bunch calling themselves the “Montana Verde”.
These guys, Montana Verde, targeted a control burn laser at northern Quebec, rather than at a forest fire, and -- zeeeep.
Got worse the next morning. Cheese factory on the other coast, in Tillamook, Pacifica, had been taken over by friends of Polaris. Montana Verde warned that they'd use the laser again, that they'd make the Boston Molasses Disaster of 1919 look like a lollipop.
So Mama was no hero. I don't care what your assigned texts said. She had done something very foolish, pissing all these people off.
My grandfather was a registered dietitian. And it came out later, cos of Mama, how he was one of the charter members of the Food Police. You know.
Oh, okay… Food Police… terrorist group, established in 2015, went off big about a decade later, started chasing heavy people in the streets, taking over workplaces and forcin' em to do aerobics. Big Pharma unlocked the obesity gene in a hurry, let me tell you.
So, maybe that's why Mama said what she did. Her brain sprung a leak, or something. In an open meeting, one week before the fighting broke out, she tagged the Polaris colony, saying they were importing far too much cheese.
Mama was always tactless. “It's time for us to stop calling it a 'milk run' and start thinking about a fruit and veggie run,” she says. She said the cheese imported by Polaris burdened the regional elevator and subsequent cargo runs with unnecessary weight.
Oh yes, weight… that's my granddaddy talking. He was a born ectomorph, long before they had gen-therapy to keep everyone about average size. I remember when I was a little one, how he'd grouse about the “chubsters”. He didn't have much tolerance. And, neither did Mama.
And Mama had never heard of poutine - heck, outside of Lower Canada, I doubt you could pay someone to eat that muck back then. But oh ho, Polaris colonists - mostly from the old Eastern provinces - loved to pour melted cheese and gravy over string-sliced potatoes.
It became kind of a cause celebre, popular like. Teenagers chugged poutine in public, rebellion on the street corner!
Most folks probably tried it at least once… in the privacy of their own homes. To be different, you see. I guess the fad wore off, huh?
Fondue again?! Well, that's no surprise. Goes great with board games, and I just love board games.
Polaris Colony broke rules in the Food And Transport act, turns out. Cheese failed the NDB equation that all colonist imports had to pass - balancing nutrition value with appropriate density. But it wasn't worth losing sleep over - or worth losing the ore that Polaris was shipping back to Earth.
Worse yet, Mama started doing personal interviews! She says, she has a personal interest, wants to make sure the outer diaspora did not develop the same “reliance” on cheese. And then she says, “My son Danny has lactose intolerance,” starts telling people what it does to me, in detail… Talk about humiliating. Worse than her emailing my old baby pictures with the beer bottle. She says then, “I've done a lot of research over the years. Many educated people know that milk is bad for you.”
Mama was no hero, kid. Especially not to me. I was single, you know… I had girls to chase. Girls who want a guy to buy 'em an ice cream cone, all romantic like. Mama killed any chance I had of doing that again.
And the Polaris folks were cheesed off, all right. Argued it was central to their sense of identity, their regional pride. The Battle of Gettysburg was started because one side needed shoes for their soldiers, right? Well, the Mortar Fromage was started because Polaris needed their poutine. Mama was not some efficiency expert, even if your old professor did think she was the second coming of Jack Welch. Ha.
Thanks to Mama, the pissing match kept spiraling out of control, so that it was no longer about poutine, but all the fatty foods and niceties colonists had left behind. All the tensions between the Near Colonies, the Diaspora and Earth… caught fire.
It was one of the biggest threats to planetary and colonial - hell -- human unity since World War II. Fortunately, nobody died, but as you can imagine, a lotta folks hated Mama. Pacifica's government didn't much like the cleanup, all the oozed, molten cheddar along the old Oregonian coast. I mean, with the big burn o' Tillamook, it took 'em years to get rid of the crusty stuff. What were they going to do with /this/ goo, hand out crackers? Herd some cats to chomp it all up?
They were pissy all right. And their bad mood extended to her “whacked out son Danny with his dairy issues.” The news feeds got shut off after three days - we started seeing a little of the revolt start right there - Montana Verde had made the Mars Libbers feel very bold. Thought they'd blast the ice caps, free slurpees for everyone!
I returned back to my beat out here, and learned what I could from our local feed, and from Gertie's few messages. Then the government came back online. And I started getting the death threats - time-shifted, of course, but… still, not my favorite kind of email.
Tonight, you send your first message home, and ask your parents not to do anything weird while you're on this mission, okay? Cause let me tell you, my bio got spread out over all the news feeds. KBR-Astra told me they were reconsidering my position. Who wouldn't, with a headline like “Party Pooper's Poo Problems Prompted Polaris Problem”? It'll be on my epitaph.
When it all died down, she was asked to speak before a public tribunal. Can't be sure whether she said it or not - they say some jokers from Pacifica mushed some goat chevre over the news feed cams, early on.
“Let them eat brioche,” she was supposed to have said, “They'll have no problem making maple sugar pie.”
I don't know about that. It sounds like a myth, but you never know with someone like Mama. Feisty.
So...
The IPO offered her witness protection for life. Gertie changed her name, and then signed up for a fifty year semi-sleeper run to the Outer Rim.
Oh sure. I get messages from Gertie every year or so. She always asks if they have forgotten yet. Too bad we can't hide from history, even if your professors tried to put a good spin on it.
I understand in old Hull, and even parts of Toe, there are still wanted posters with my DNA code on it.
It's ironic, because, I really like a nice brie now and again - and I'm willing to pay black market prices to import it.
Oh, don't give me that look. Just wait until you see what chocolate costs around here.
So that's why, kid, I'll spend the rest of my life out here. The further away, the better. The far colonists don't talk much “old days” spew, and just concentrate on surviving.
Good attitude for you, too.
Hey. It'll be okay. Cheer up. Listen to old Dann… I mean, Jim. Listen to Jim.
It's not too late to pick law school.
Next shuttle run to the Inner Colonies is Friday. And I always buy an extra ticket when Halibarker sends the latest newbie.