The Spare Man, page 34
“Pretty much.”
“The man who bribed Immanuel and who ran up the stairs were … both Astaire? Trying to frame Immanuel and me?”
Maria nodded, “It was a toss-up between framing you or Jalna and Annie. He decided on you because, get this, Annie was famous and you were just regular people. He’s telling us everything now, which Leigh thinks is because—now that he’s caught—he wants to sell the rights to his story. Kill it, Gimlet! Kill the weasel. So in this version, he’s an actor who was duped into helping a very dangerous magician who was having an affair with the famous Tesla Crane, which is, of course, why you assaulted him.”
“Wow.”
“I know. I’m just letting him sing all he wants.” She let go of the weasel so that Gimlet could shake it.
“Any idea why he went up the stairs instead of back into his room?” Shal asked.
“He didn’t say this, but I’ve got a bet.” Maria grabbed the other end of Gimlet’s weasel and tugged. “Grr. So fierce. The Terran ring is huge, and it can take half an hour to get from one side to the other, but if you go up to the Lunar level and back down it’s good shortcut. Ooh! Who has the weasel?”
Gimlet ran in a tight circle, shaking the weasel with satisfied growls.
“An alibi!” Tesla nodded as pieces clicked together. “He mentioned that he was coming back from the casino, which is on the far side of the Terran ring.”
“Yep. Hey, Shal? Since you’ve got that network up and running again … Any chance you can shed light on Ewen Slootmaekers? I’ve got them and Ory separated, but I feel terrible for the kid.”
Sighing, Shal nodded. “Yeah, I don’t even have to look it up. I already found the article that I remembered reading. Ory Slootmaekers’s real name is Philippe Olson. He was in a two-year relationship with Ewen’s mother that started about three months before Ewen was born. He sought visitation rights when they split, but without legal standing … He was always the top suspect and very, very careful. He worked in cybersecurity, so when he decided to vanish, he had all the tools to create a new identity.”
“Ah…” Maria nodded as if that unlocked something for her. “So the ‘not what we agreed’ conversation was either about Nile giving them security access or him providing a fake identity for Astaire.”
“Not a fake ID, or Astaire would have killed him … probably before George, if I were to guess.” Shal sighed and ran a hand through his curls. “I’ve got contact info for Ewen’s mom. If they want it.”
Tesla cleared her throat. “I may have offered them an internship.”
Maria raised her brows. “Swimming in opportunity. Jalna did too.”
“I would have too.” Shal carried the paper bag over to the bar. “But that would involve me not being retired.”
Maria’s brows went higher and wrote a treatise questioning what he meant by “retired.”
“So … that smuggling that Nile was doing.” Shal pulled a bottle of Lunacy Gin out of the bag. “Is that where you got this?”
“No, because that would be interfering with a criminal investigation.” Maria clambered back to her feet. “However, Captain Valdísardottir opened her personal stash and adds to the cruise line’s apologies with her own apologies.”
Tesla smiled. “Well, tell her thank—”
The chime rang and Gimlet sprang to her feet, running to the door to fend off whoever was outside. “Gimlet!” Tesla sighed and raised her voice to be heard over her dog. “Sorry about this. She’s never been fond of delivery people, and this has all made her more protective than ever.”
Maria nodded and walked to the door, fishing in her pocket. “Gimlet, treat?”
The little dog abandoned her efforts and came to sit in devoted adoration at Maria’s feet with her silky ears in perfect triangles of attention.
Handing her the treat, Maria looked through the peephole, and then opened the door. “No. They don’t want balloons.” She looked back into the room. “Unless I’m wrong?”
“Not even a little.” Shal raised the bottle. “This is plenty.”
“And none of it is going to stop Fantine from suing.” Tesla shrugged apologetically. “She would crochet my soul into a garrote and use it to strangle my body if I tried to keep her from having fun. If they are trying to butter someone up, she likes yarn…”
“Noted.” Maria came back into the main room, tapping on her handheld. “Do Not Disturb is on now. I’ll suggest yarn to Legal. Y’all have fun now, y’hear?”
She closed the door behind her and Gimlet stared up at it mournfully for a moment, then ran back into the main room and attacked her new weasel. Shal sighed and brought his arm around Tesla, hugging her while still holding the bottle and bag. He rested his chin on her shoulder and turned his head to kiss her on the neck.
“Well? How do you want to spend the remaining six days of our honeymoon? Karaoke?”
She laughed and slipped her hands down to squeeze his buttocks, partly so she wouldn’t put pressure on his ribs, and partly because his ass was glorious. “Are you serious? I still owe you make-up sex.”
“Well, in that case…” He led her back to their bedroom with the ginormous Martian king bed and set the Lunacy Gin on the sideboard. “So we don’t have to get out of bed for the postcoital martinis.”
“Ice?” She came up behind him and found the drawstring on his pajama trousers. “Vermouth?”
“Dammit.” He turned in her arms and slipped his hands under the edge of her blouse. “I’m always forgetting something. Can we train Gimlet to make cocktails?”
“It depends on how much dog fur you want as a garnish.” She raised her arms to let him pull her shirt up over her head.
He stopped, hissing. “Nope. Sorry.”
“Ribs?”
“Rib. Singular.” Shal grimaced as he lowered her shirt again. “It’s just certain movements.”
“Fortunately, I can take my own shirt off…” Tesla drew it up and over her head in a way that did wonderful things to her breasts and waist. Her back twinged, but nothing outside of tolerances. When she dropped her shirt on the floor, Shal was staring into her eyes with a crooked, goofy grin.
She closed the remaining distance between them, sliding her hands up his back and into his hair. His breath was warm on her neck, and she could feel every soft returning caress of his hands.
When he had suggested a cruise to Mars for their honeymoon, she had been, at best, dubious. Shal kissed her neck, lips warm and soft along her skin. “What about the martinis?”
“I suggest very”—Tesla Crane kissed her spouse’s neck, tasting the sweet salt of his skin—“very”—she nipped his ear—“dirty.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
There are as always so many people to thank for getting this novel into your hands. This book was supposed to come out in 2021. Ahahahaha … My editor, Claire Eddy, was totally calm when I said that writing in 2020 and 2021 was hard because I was not the only author having that conversation with her. When I started this, there were no courtesy masks in it. I went back and wove them in to the early parts of the book because I can no longer imagine a future in which they aren’t part of our lives. Not as constant, perhaps, but still present.
My agent, Seth Fishman, who always has my back, worked with Claire to take the novel off the schedule and told me to just take my time. That is … not easy for me. My assistants, Christine Sandquist and Alyshondra Meacham, kept things moving so that I had time to work on this novel even after I foolishly said “yes” to things like running a major convention. Christine also doubled as my sensitivity reader on trauma and gender. It turns out that I’m heavily programmed to write gender binaries even when I’m trying not to and they give excellent notes. Jordan Kurella was also a sensitivity reader on service dogs and was an invaluable help. For those listening to the audiobook, my engineer, Andrew Twiss, is a genius who makes me sound good and as if I can speak French. Lunar French at any rate.
The members of the Lady Astronaut Club have been an amazing addition to my life. Without our coworking sessions, I don’t know that I would have kept writing at all during the pandemic. Special shout-outs to Anne Delekta, Stephanie Franklin, C. L. Polk, Jen Coster, Kate Montgomery, Kendra Zzyzwyck, Leane Parsons, Meagan Voss, Nathan Beittenmiller, Rachel Gutin, Dede, Stephen Rider, and Wen Wen.
The Whiskey Chicks have my heart. Thank you Eileen Cook, Elizabeth Boyle, Susanna Kearsley, Kathy Chung, Nephele Tempest, Crystal Hunt, and Liza Palmer. You make me a better writer and a better person.
I also had help on some specific things, which are all kinda cool. Stuart Pluen-Calvo answered a call on Twitter to help me make the Lunar French nonbinary. Y’all … that ain’t easy.
Speaking of difficult languages, I had the pleasure of attending IceCon in Reykjavík in one of the tiny gaps of normal. The last night there, a group of us sat around and filled in the Mad Libs where I’d left placeholders. Hildur Knútsdottir and Júlíus Árnason Kaaber, in particular, were greatly helpful with the Icelandic. One thing of interest is that Icelandic has historically had binary patronyms. So Captain Valdisardottir is literally Valdis’s dottir. Valdis is a woman’s name, which is allowed now. And in contemporary Iceland nonbinary folks can have “-bur” (“child of”) instead of “-dottir” or “-son.”
I need to thank Max Fagin, who made me the most amazing transit calculator to help me figure out the lag time as they went as well as brainstorming about how the wacky ship works. More about that in the About the Science portion.
I wrote parts of this while on a cruise with the Writing Excuses gang. We run a workshop every year and for six years it’s been on a cruise ship. So thank you, Brandon, Dan, Howard, Marshall, Dawn, Sandra, and especially Erin Roberts for her karaoke expertise. Thank you to everyone on the 2021 WXR at Sea. That group of writers in the R-Bar? That’s all of you. Shauna Hoffman and Lisa Harding introduced me to cruising and make my world a brighter place. Many thanks to Chef Calphus McDonald, the executive chef on Royal Caribbean’s Independence of the Seas, for taking an hour out of his day to talk with me about how kitchens work on a cruise ship.
Gabriel Swiney, who is an actual space lawyer—and yes that’s a real job—made both of my space lawyers better. Many thanks to my Patreon supporters and beta readers who read this and gave very helpful feedback, especially thanks to: Abigail Pankau, Alex McKenzie, Amanda Joy, Anne Bingham, Annie Scribbles, Auriel Fournier, Bee Bube, Chanie Beckman, Christina Skelton, Deana, Debbie Lee, Francesca Kuehlers, J Zimmerman, J.A. Ironside, Jasmin Nyack, Jen Fiero, Jenn Mercer, Kimberly Savill, Kris Johnson, Lisa Pendragon, Lisa S, Marzie K, Megan Sohar, Meredith W, Mike Baltar, Natasha Gapinski, Nicole Murphy, Sarah Swarbrick, Susan Anne Kadlec, Vicky Hsu, and Victoria Winner.
My cats, Elsie and the late Sadie, who played tag across my notecards as I was working on the plot. Without them, the visit to the yoga studio would have been elsewhere in the novel.
And, of course, my family, who encourage me to vanish for long stretches of time. Mom and Dad, I love you so much.
Robert, you are the Nick to my Nora.
ABOUT THE SCIENCE
The Lindgren is a bonkers ship that no one would actually build. Except a cruise line. For the past seven years, I’ve been running writing workshops with the Writing Excuses podcast on cruise ships. Royal Caribbean, specifically. We held one on the Oasis of the Seas, which is also a bonkers ship that no one would build—I mean, it has a water show with three-story-tall diving platforms. Cruise lines build floating cities all the time, so why not a spacebound one? And if you are serving the populations of three different gravity wells, why not cater to them?
So the Lindgren is bonkers, but it would work in theory. Max Fagin, an actual rocket engineer, helped me work out the parameters of the ship to fit the needs of the story. Departure is on Tuesday, April 30, 2075, and is a twelve-day transit under constant thrust, which provides consistent Lunar gravity to the central column of the ship.
Extending from that are two centrifuge rings that allow the passengers to experience Martian or Terran gravity. I fudge a lot about distances between the rings because it’s about fifty meters, which is about eleven stories. The theater makes no sense, really. I mean it works, but who would watch from the Lunar level twenty-two stories from the stage? I’m figuring there are massive screens up there. As I said, the ship is bonkers.
On the other hand, the Deep Brain Stimulator that Tesla uses is only barely science fiction. My mom has Parkinson’s disease and has a DBS to help with symptom control. It took five different surgeries to install it, two of which were brain surgery. When she went it to have it activated for the first time she needed to use a walker and her speech was mushy. The doctor activated the DBS and the tremor just stopped.
I have never seen anything more miraculous in my life and it was a miracle made of science.
She walked out of there without assistance and her speech sounded like her again. It’s adjustable, but you have to use a clunky device with direct skin contact to make changes. There are experimental DBS devices to control pain, but pain—it turns out—is so specific and so personal that doing a controlled study on this sort of management is really hard. There are also efforts to use DBS to help with various aspects of mental health like depression.
The other medical assistance that Tesla has is her service dog, Gimlet. Gimlet is based on two real dogs. There’s an actual Westie named Gimlet, who belongs to my friend Eileen Cook. She is too cute to be real. There’s also a service dog in our life named Captain, who is a stability dog for my mom. He’s a chocolate Lab and is a very good boy and also very, very much a Lab. He’s eaten a corncob and five nails. When we got him, the training center said, “He’s a dog, not a robot.”
The difference he’s made in my mom’s life is again, miraculous. The trouble with Parkinson’s is that your brain starts to work slower and you’ll freeze. A walker made my mom more of a fall risk because she’d freeze and couldn’t squeeze the brakes, so the walker would keep going forward. Captain doesn’t. He feels the freeze and stops. He can prompt her to move.
People with PTSD who have service dogs can go out into the world again because the dog can sense signals happening in their body before they do. I’ve talked to people and watched videos of dogs working with their handlers that are just heartbreakingly beautiful. In one, a person with a brain injury that caused random shutdowns was practicing crossing the street with the dog. The dog was doing an alert instead and the person was a little annoyed—then they had one of their shutdowns. The dog was in exactly the right place to catch them as they went down and stayed there until they recovered. If they had been crossing the street when that happened … All of which is to say that service dogs are amazing and can do so much more than you expect. They are highly trained and require maintenance, but can be liberating for their owners. When you see one, you can help their human by doing these things.
1. Don’t make eye contact with the dog.
2. Don’t touch the dog.
3. Don’t talk to the dog.
The dog is working, so let them focus. They’re a dog, not a robot.
And finally a thing that is just for funsies … the trivia game that’s happening in the R-Bar is playable. All the answers are either in the book or in the real world. If you figure out the theme, email spareman@maryrobinettekowal.com for a bonus.
ABOUT THE COCKTAILS
Right up front I want to say that I think that everyone should be able to have a celebratory beverage and that it shouldn’t require alcohol. I am interested in cocktails because I like flavors and alcohol affects the way flavors evaporate or change in your mouth. It’s neat. I’m less excited about getting drunk so having zero-proof cocktails to switch to makes an evening more enjoyable. I prefer that term to virgin or mocktail because both of those seem like they are placing a value judgment on the drink.
As a culture we place a lot of stigma on people who don’t drink. I’d rather we didn’t. Did you know, by body weight, women can only metabolize a third of the alcohol that men can? So all the settings where drinking is expected place women at a disadvantage. If you’re someone from a culture that doesn’t drink or it’s not healthy for you, doubly so.
I’m hoping that seeing the zero-proof drinks in here will give you things to order that are fun. My secret, if the bartender is not on the mixology god end of the scale, is to just ask for tonic and bitters with a lime.
But I also like a well-mixed, spirit-forward drink and can linger over it for ages. This is part of why I favor drinks served “up” because I don’t have to worry about the flavor diminishing as the ice melts.
If you’re new to cocktails, here are some terms that show up in the book that might be useful to know.
Serve up—Stir or shake it over ice to chill it, then strain it into a glass so there’s no ice. This means that the cocktail doesn’t dilute over time.
Rocks—Serve over ice.
Neat—No water or ice has touched this. It’s room temperature and usually a single liqueur.
Dry shake—Shake without ice. You do this to emulsify ingredients.
To shake or stir—Shake if the beverage has fruit juice in it to emulsify it. Stir for pretty much everything else. Shaking breaks the ice up and causes it to melt faster so the drink will be slightly more diluted. If a cocktail is very “hot” you might want to ignore the shake/stir guidelines and go with shaking.
Flamed orange peel—Over the cocktail, hold the orange peel with one hand and a lighted match with the other. Squeeze the peel to express the oils over the glass so that the oil passes through the flame. It’ll do flashy sparkles as the oil falls to the surface.
Cayenne salt—You can buy this, but if you want to make your own mix, use 1/4 cup kosher salt and 1/4 tsp cayenne pepper.
