Chapter Eleven
The Boiler Room was a terrible place. It was the fanciest, most elite hangout on the planet and it was literally an old boiler room. It had been part of one of the first permanent structures on Mars. It was the furnace room that kept an entire complex warm. Most of the original building was gone. The boiler room was all that was left and since people on Mars didn’t have living rooms, they all met in social clubs like The Boiler Room. Lisbet read about it in one of the info packs Vantz had sent her.
Lisbet was dressed in a white dress that barely covered her knees, white heels, white gloves, and a white fur piece that was about as real as her smile.
Beck met her in front of the elevator that would take them to the second floor, which was the floor everyone went to when it came to arriving and departing. That wasn’t exactly the ground floor, but transportation tubes ran everywhere.
Her underground transport took her through the pipes that were mostly as black as outer space with the occasional clear piece of tubing that let her see the Martian sky. It was red, or yellow, or brown, or black. It was like the back of a sand snake, but perhaps the sky only looked like that because of the diamond-shaped windows in the tubing overhead.
Beck sat next to her in the transport. He puffed on a cigarette that was flavored like pumpkin pie and Lisbet wondered if the isolation really was getting to her because he was looking pretty good. The seams on his dark brown trousers were impeccable. The white shirt and vest he wore suited him remarkably well. Even the line of screens on his forearm served some mystical purpose in making him more attractive. Was he really twenty? Or did the cigarette make him look more mature? He had an excellent forehead and when he rested two fingers against it in thought, she thought he looked pretty good. Better than a pool boy.
“How old are you, Beck?” she asked, wishing she could gaze out a window to hide her interest. The transport had windows, but they were traveling through an opaque tube like a train tunnel and couldn’t see anything around them anyway. Just metal.
“I’m forty-six,” he said drolly.
“Really?” she asked, perking up.
“No,” he admitted immediately with a bored roll of his head. “But I don’t like to talk about my age.”
“Why?”
“People like to use it against me,” he explained. “They tell me I don’t know what I’m talking about. Children don’t know what they want. Did you know facts get more factual when they’re spewed by someone of maturity?”
She frowned. “Oh… Well, I won’t rib you about your age then. Besides, I can’t imagine that our lives have had anything in common.”
He glanced at her curiously even though what she’d said was a conversation closer. “I wouldn’t have thought that. We have science in common.”
“Are you a scientist too?” she asked, annoyed that she was so pleased to have someone to talk to.
“No. I’m a monster,” he replied with a soft exhale on his cigarette.
Lisbet didn’t know how to answer that. She took refuge under flippancy. “Well, it’s a good thing you’re on Mars. I bet you can go unnoticed here because no one can see you. You could be right next to them, but thousands of tons of rocks make for pretty good cover.”
The corner of his mouth twitched. “Do you like fairy tales?” he suddenly asked.
“I… uh…” she tried to think of the last time she had even thought about them. “I haven’t heard any new ones recently.”
“When I was working with Sleeping Beauty Inc. on your sale, I saw that they tell fairy tales to the girls as a way to relax them before they put them into cryostasis. I thought that was a brilliant idea. I’ve never been put into cryostasis, but I’d want to hear a little story as the drugs sunk in. What did you think of the story Vantz sent you?”
“It wasn’t a very good fairy tale,” Lisbet said, without thinking of whether or not Beck would consider it an insulting remark toward his boss.
“Why?” Beck asked, the curiosity transforming his face from boredom to interest.
“W-why?” Lisbet stuttered. “It was a story about transforming Mars into a livable world. He read the story to me to help me get interested in his vision for Mars, but…” she hesitated. “That’s his dream. Terraforming Mars is a great dream. He’s wonderful for having it and for being willing to sacrifice so much of himself to try to achieve it, but I wasn’t very moved when I heard it.” Lisbet did not get the opportunity to explain that she had been moved like a mountain into the sea when she spoke to Vantz for the first time.
Instead, Beck interrupted her when she breathed in and asked, “Really? What would inspire you?”
Lisbet didn’t want to tell Beck what shape her thoughts took, but she didn’t have anyone else to talk to. “He’s not giving himself to me. He’s only giving me his dream and only the fumes of that dream. He’s not here giving me his flashiest smile and trying to convince me to give everything the way he’s giving everything. He’s an antlered head on a body that doesn’t belong to him. Instead, he paid for me and he expects to get what he paid for. That’s fine, but it’s a little disheartening when you talk about inspiration.”
“He’s trying to protect you from being too associated with him if everything goes sideways,” Beck said, offering the obvious reasoning. “He’s not willing to let you burn yourself up in his ambition. Isn’t that loving?”
Lisbet nodded. “Sure.”
“You seem unconvinced,” Beck observed.
“What made you drop yourself all the way down his rabbit hole?” Lisbet asked, her voice low and steady.
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Lisbet turned toward him and his eyes regarded her carefully, but his mouth didn’t move.
Finally, he asked, “Is that the most interesting thing about me?”
“Maybe.” Her mouth was dry.
He looked at her again and then started rolling his shoulder as if to stretch. “If that’s the most interesting thing about me, then I’d better keep it to myself. What I was trying to do by asking you about fairy tales was merely that I wrote a few of them wondering if I could outmatch Vantz. I thought he did a good job, but I wondered if I could do better. If you’d let me read you one before you went to bed, it would mean a lot to me.”
“I’ll think about it,” Lisbet said, feeling particularly inflexible. “I’ll call you if I have trouble sleeping.”
His eyes went back to looking bored and he took another drag on his cigarette. “And who should I call if I have trouble sleeping?”
The sexual tension was thick, but Lisbet hadn’t remained a virgin through the better part of her twenties by being easy. She turned away from him and scratched casually behind her ear.
When they arrived at The Boiler Room, there was nothing to see. The entrance was underground. The only thing there was a sliding door where she was met by a pair of security guards who confirmed her and Beck’s IDs before opening the door and welcoming Lisbet into the club.
Beck had escorted her the first day, but he warned her that she would need to go alone after that. He closed the hatch on the transport and offered her a deadpan, “Good luck,” before leaving her at the door.
The security guards escorted her to the front desk where she was greeted by a woman dressed in a suit. Her hair was cut short, she wore no makeup, and Lisbet was certain she would have mistaken her for a man except that her bosom was straining her buttons.
“Lisbet Bloomburg!” the woman exclaimed happily. “I am Bridget and I am so pleased you’ve chosen The Boiler Room for your social needs. It would be my pleasure to help you arrange your visitors.”
Lisbet nodded and said she would be happy for Bridget to do so.
With that, Lisbet was brought onto the main floor of the social club. It was a hundred hammocks with glass separating them and a view of the pink sand mountains on one side. It was arranged like that because people wanted to see each other, that was the purpose of a social club, but they also wanted to have their conversations be private. A huge space divided by glass was their solution.
“When the complex crumbled into a fissure, only the boiler room was left and there was this magnificent view,” Bridget explained as she led Lisbet to a hammock.
“Are you saying we’re hanging off the edge of a mountain?” Lisbet asked, looking for confirmation.
“Yes. Fun, right? You can’t have fun like this on Earth,” she said, giving Lisbet a demonstration as to how to properly enter and exit a hammock while wearing a pencil skirt.
Lisbet appreciated the demo.
She dropped into it like it was a chair and swung a little like a lazy girl before removing her fur piece and placing it in her lap.
“You’re going to love coming here,” Bridget said enthusiastically. “Can I get you a drink?”
Lisbet had been told that even though Vantz couldn’t spare another cent on her wardrobe, he had budgeted for her to spend money at The Boiler Room. Something would look very wrong if she didn’t have a drink beside her constantly while she was there.
Lisbet ordered a soda water, which seemed like the perfect thing to settle her stomach, and prepared to accept her first visitors.
They were all reporters.
They asked her questions about her wedding.
Lisbet had a stack of lies prepared. She sounded a little lovesick as she told falsehoods about the joy of her wedding day, the beauty of Castle Ares, and all the gifts showered on her by her loving husband. They didn’t sound like lies.
The reporters asked her questions about how much she missed Earth.
Here, Lisbet didn’t lie and didn’t feel like she had to. She talked about how she had done everything her family had desired of her and how she felt content that she’d made her family happy by marrying Vantz. It wasn’t a lie. It was the truth. It was just omitting how cranky she felt.
It was her first day, so the reporters had been asked to keep the questions light. In particular, none of them were allowed to ask her about the battle that had taken place in space with the armada from Earth or her being the thing everyone was fighting over. A few pieces of discarded rubble had fallen to the surface of Mars, but the pieces had hit open desert. Because their questions were so limited, only one of the reporters asked her a question that was even a little bit interesting.
“How do you feel about your younger sister’s engagement?”
Lisbet looked up. She hadn’t heard anything about either of her younger sisters getting married. She hadn’t heard anything about home since she arrived because she deleted all the messages from her father without reading the subject line. The reporter was a suave man with an unshaved chin and a look about him that suggested he was a rascal. The name tag on his breast coat pocket said Osric.
Lisbet hated to admit she didn’t know anything, but she didn’t feel like she had much choice. She clucked her tongue cutely. “I suppose I’ve had my head in the clouds since I’ve been honeymooning. Which of my sisters?”
“Oh,” he said, eager to fill in the blanks. “Your sister, Cassica, is engaged to Plymouth Rogerson. Do you know him?”
“I’m afraid not,” Lisbet admitted shyly.
“He’s the head of an ice drilling company on Europa,” Osric supplied for her.
Lisbet bit her lip on the words that it was good that he wasn’t head of a mining company on Mars. She didn’t know if Europa was any better than Mars for having pleasure palaces underground. However, life had to be better on Europa as they had no shortage of water under the ice sheets.
“What else do you know about my family?” she asked, turning her violet eyes on Oscric with a smile.
He did a double-take. “Were you looking to get some information?”
“Maybe.”
He took a card out of his breast pocket. “I should tell you, I’m not really a reporter. I’m a private investigator. I was hired by your father to bring you this information. You have been ignoring your father’s calls. He wants to apologize to you and open a channel of communication.”
“My father hired you?” she chuckled. Her father must have gotten quite desperate. Getting a seedy man like Osric to sidle up to her for information sharing? She chuckled.
Osric pulled at his collar. “Is there something funny about me?”
She shrugged her shoulders and looked at Osric’s card like it was fascinating. “Did my father happen to tell you why I’m unhappy with him?”
“No.”
“That’s fine then. Listen, I’m not ready to speak to my father. If he wants to give me news, he can give it to me through you for the time being. I’ll mark you as an important contact so that you can ‘interview’ me when you’ve got something to say. Please save our meetings for real info, not nonsense about me and my father making up. Please pass that on to him. If you or he abuse our arrangement, I’ll cut you off. Is there anything else you’d like to talk to me about before we end our meeting?”
He glanced at her bracelet. “If you ever want that off, I might be able to help.”
Lisbey colored in shame and covered her wrist.
“It’s not noticeable,” Osric reassured her. “If you didn’t arrive on Mars with a fleet of Sleeping Beauty Inc. ships, no one would have noticed anything amiss from your bracelet. I happen to have a lot of experience with those. I’ll be in touch.”
With that, he stood up and thanked her for their meeting before being perfectly visible as he strode away though a dozen pieces of plate glass came up between them.