If Jove Stray

Chapter 25: the usual law and blackmail

Levi wasn't sure what to expect when he arrived at Val's berth. He knocked once, and the door slid open almost immediately.

"Thank you for coming over," Val told him brightly. "I made chicken and pasta, I heard you like tomatoes?"

"I do," he laughed. "I sent you some of the files, did you get them?"

"I did," she replied. "Thank you."

He had not met Val but in passing before, she was less stern than her partner. Lully had mentioned that she was designing new clothes for the printers, and if her dress was anything to go by, it was much more interesting than anything else worn on the base. The swirling blue pattern on the white meant that it was less expensive than being all blue, but Levi couldn't figure out how you would get the layers like that.

"Here you go!" she set a bowl down for Levi and took one herself. "Like I said in the message, Titus and I are trying to find some resources to build a new constitution and it doesn't seem like any law materials made it into space. Glancing at the files you sent, I think that you've given us an excellent start. I used to do this for my career and that was only weeks ago. I guess I just got used to all of those things being readily available."

"When I was on the Aeneid, we had power outages that were wiping drives," Levi said. "Radiation flares that that were overloading the system. The worst part was that they weren't even bad enough to notice, but our drives and computers were already decades old. They weren't meant to be continually accessed and definitely not meant to have extra power flooding them. I begged Earth to send us the data we lost, but they either couldn't figure out how or they just didn't care."

"What year would this have been?" Val inquired.

"2054?" Levi guessed. "Give or take."

She laughed. "I was in my twenties. God, I had just met Titus and we were working at his dad's law firm that summer." She smiled at the memories. "The year before we had a couple solar flares that had knocked out a bunch of satellites, communications across the country; I only remember because Titus and I started writing letters because we couldn't call each other."

"So they couldn't reach us," Levi mused. "You know, we would have been in our twenties at the same time. I just went into cryo, and you became the vice president's wife."

"That is very strange to think about," she remarked. "Levi, forgive me, but it seems so odd that you work in botany instead of something to do with your past. I read somewhere that you were the historian onboard the Aeneid. Why make such a change?'

"I love botany," Levi shrugged. "And when I got here, everyone was doing their best to forget that Earth had ever been important. I don't have most of the books on the base because I'm hoarding them, but because no one else cared."

"Would you have been a historian if it had been available?" she inquired.

Levi frowned, thinking about the idea. He couldn't imagine trading his world of flowers and vegetables for a life of paperwork at this point, but he hadn't known any better when he had woke up from cryo.

"Probably?" he hazarded. "Not because I regret botany, but because I had never seen a tree or watered a flower before. I was intimidated when I was initially hired. The pasta's delicious by the way."

"Thank you," she said. "I'm slowly learning to cook. It had never been something I did on Earth, but if I don't we'll starve; Titus is clueless in the kitchen."

"Walsh, the head of environment, has a cookbook," Levi suggested. "We've been trying the recipes we can. We don't have all the ingredients on the base of course, but we've been pretty successful. I've been trying to get him to make a holo-rib version so we can start sharing recipes. Surely someone can make a meringue that doesn't fall flat. It's so depressing."