The Company gives, Varina thought, and the Company takes away. Blessed be the Name of the Company.
She threw a few toilet articles into her bag and slammed it shut. Admittedly she was long overdue for leavetime--one terrahour in the mines on Io and she'd been long, long overdue. The breath masks, the air recirculation systems, could never quite filter out the scent of sulfur. The dark visors and bonded glass in the portholes could never quite conceal the roiling yellow flames--a sea of fire, spitting sparks at the black shroud of a sky.
She picked up her comb and jerked so roughly at the tousled strands of her hair that tears started in her eyes. The chemicals in tears caused by pain, she thought, are different from those in tears caused by grief. And all the chemicals in her body were carefully recorded, percentages defined, proportions monitored--the comb snagged the cap covering the end of the cannula embedded in her skull and she winced. Foolish, the brain feels no pain.
The Company computer found that the biochemical spectra of her pituitary were growing irregular; the Company computer decreed leavetime. Foolish to resent leavetime, just because it meant time to think, to dream. Varina wondered suddenly if even her dreams had been regimented and ordered into Company patterns.
She stalked out of her grey metal cubicle and down the grey metal hall. Indentured engineers had no rights, she reminded herself. Sign the contract and the Company disposes, manipulating a human being into a docile worker.
The door of the grav-tube opened before her and she stepped in, floated upwards, propelled herself onto the grey metal shuttle deck. A few other miners waited, clutching at their own belongings, for transport to the Recreation Station. The Pleasure Palace it was called by those returning, their winks and knowing smiles quickly concealed behind visor and mask.
Pleasure Palace. Would the Company know what would bring her pleasure, what dream-memory to plug into her like a psychotropic drug--the pleasure of the dream, and then the pain of waking.
Varina turned and glanced out a porthole. The cracked, steaming surface of Io stretched before her. Yesterday's eruption had already begun to darken into orange; soon the crawlers would be sampling it for mineral content, for market value.
A plume of fire billowed above the far horizon, consuming the stars; deep fissures glowed flickering red. Lucifer waited for the unwary, a rover slipping down a scoriated lava slope, a crawler caving in the edge of magma pool. A medieval Hell, painted by Bosch and orchestrated by the cries of the damned--except we, Varina thought, damn ourselves.
The Company did not create emotional cripples. The Company bought emotional cripples and fed them oblivion.
)
The Company decrees that an engineer working on Jupiter's moon, Io, needs some rest and recreation. But during her stay at the Recreation Station, aka the Pleasure Palace, artificial pleasure becomes real tragedy.
