Moonsteed. Manda Benson

      “When buzzards and things are flying around, they can see places mice have piddled. That’s how they know where to look.”

      “What does ultraviolet look like?”

      “I dunno.” Verity shrugged. “Can’t explain it.”

      Vladimir frowned. “Does it look like blue?”

      “No. It sort of merges into it, though. Like how green merges into blue going the other way. You see it with the bird’s eyes, not your own. I can’t explain it in terms of how humans see. Same as you can’t explain to a horse what red looks like.”

      “Are hawks better than horses to interface with, then?”

      Verity sniffed. “When they first give you it, you think it’s really ace, but after you’ve had it for a bit you realize it doesn’t do anything else, and you can’t really train it much. All you can do is tell it where to go and analyze what it sees. Dogs are kind of annoying too.”

      “I like dogs.”

      “Thing with dogs is, they always think they’re starving even when they’re not. And then you’re always having to factor in smells. If you’re working with dogs and something smells, it hijacks their attention and they won’t stop thinking about it, and the worst thing is you get bleed-back.”

      “Bleed-back?”

      “The dogs’ impatience and distractedness get transmitted to you through the interface.” Verity tapped the implant on her forehead. “One time a fox or something had shat in the grass and my dog smelled it and tried to eat it, and for a moment I felt like I wanted to eat it too. Was disgusting.”

      Vladimir grimaced and touched his own implant.

      “And then there were cephalopods,” Verity said. “They were experimental. Didn’t work so well.”

      “Cephalopods? How don’t they work?”

      “They might work, eventually. They’re useful underwater because they’re intelligent and dexterous.” Verity opened and closed her fingers in a way suggesting tentacles. “I think it was just because they’re so different to us in terms of how their brains work. They’re a long way from us on those evolutionary diagrams biologists do.”

      “They’re in a different phylum.”

      Verity frowned. “Whatever they are.” She drained her glass of water, and rose. Vladimir pushed back his chair and stood too.

      “I suppose I’ll see you tomorrow, then.” He followed Verity as she headed for the main doors.

      “At the centrifuge, at eight.”

      Sheets of paper and graffiti covered the wall of the mezzanine. One poster showed a holograph of a middle-aged man with spectacles and a ginger beard. That was Sidney Worrall, formerly something in finance and currently a Spokesman for the Meritocracy. Verity took a marker pen out of her pocket and drew balls and a phallus on Sidney Worrall’s forehead.

      “That’s not very constructive,” said Vladimir.

      “It’s a public expression space,” Verity replied. “Anyone can write what they like on it. I guess you don’t have those in Russia.”

      Vladimir raised his palms and made an exasperated face. “You have the liberty of free speech and you abuse it doing things like that? In some countries, they don’t have that privilege.”

      “His opinions stink.”

      Vladimir sighed. He held out his hand. “Can I borrow your pen?”

      “Not if you’re going to use it to write Sidney Worrall’s opinions.”

      “I’m not. I’m going to write my own opinions.”

      Verity put the marker in his hand. He snapped off the cap, and wrote “More funding for horse gengineers” on Sidney Worrall’s lapel, then continued to write something else in small letters on the man’s jacket.

      “I’m not standing about while you write War and Peace. I’m going to vote. You can gimme my pen back tomorrow.” Verity went to the door, shouting over her shoulder as she left the room, “In Soviet Russia, wall writes on you.”

      * * * *

      Back in her quarters, Verity took up her seat at her computer and began to look through the points of law and regulations that had been nominated for referendum by the Electorate. About a month after she’d arrived on Callisto, the moon had been declared an official province and, with the base having only a few hundred inhabitants, that surely made it the smallest province in the entire Meritocracy. It also meant its electorate was entitled to nominate and cast prerogative votes on matters that only affected Callisto and its denizens. One of the first such matters to be nominated and voted in was that Referendum Day on Callisto would be the afternoon of the twenty-four-hour day on which the sun rose.

      Referendum Day this time around didn’t coincide with the Meritocracy’s universal referenda, which occurred once every Martian month, so there were only these provincial prerogative votes and nominations to be dealt with. As a tier-two meritocrat, Verity was entitled to nominate two matters per referendum day, and to cast votes with a weighting of two on each of the nominations with the highest vote from the previous referendum day.

      She had already decided to nominate a review of the exercise centrifuges at the facility with the intention of voting for more centrifuges to be built for the horses if that nomination was then popular enough to go to referendum the next time. She did that first, using both of her nominations on the same issue, because she saw it as being more pressing than any other issues she could come up with.

      After submitting her nominations to the ANT, Verity turned her attention to the nominations from last referendum day that had been brought forward to today’s referendum. There were four of them: on frequency and allocation of radio communications access, about possibly improving the quality of the food, about regulations for importing animals as pets and, as usual, about division of the resources of the base’s only ANT between the Sky Forces and the scientific personnel. In addition to this, each of the thirty Spokesmen for the Meritocracy–people chosen directly by the Electorate each year, supposedly for their balanced opinions and clear judgment to act in case of emergency on behalf of the Electorate–had written a statement on the prerogative issues for Callisto, explaining their opinions on the nominations and links to statistics and reading material to back up the opinions. Whereas there was nothing to stop anyone from simply casting a vote without bothering to do any research, it was generally encouraged and thought responsible to read the letters from the Spokesmen and try to make one’s vote from as balanced a perspective as possible.

      Verity first opened the letter from Spokesman Julia Tindall. Tindall had been a zoologist before becoming a Spokesman, and she was always the first person Verity would vote for on the universal Spokesman referendum each year. It began with a salutation to the electorate of the province of Callisto and, as Verity had expected, the first comment on her letter was about the nomination for pets. She urged caution about bringing species to Callisto whose tolerance for low gravity had not been tested, as subjecting an animal to an environment it could not healthily cope with was inhumane. Tindall recommended voters choose the option to allow species of pets not considered dangerous and known to be able to tolerate exposure to low gravity.

      Verity read through the other comments and looked at some of the references. She read Sidney Worrall’s letter with disdain, then set about reading the other twenty-eight.