Once I had decided to be on The Chaser, the next big question became how to get all three of us on it. That Yanci would get on looked like a no-brainer: he'd been working on this for years, and he had all the right credentials. But, his getting on was making a problem for Sherry. She was his sister, and many Solar System people -- Inner and Outer -- felt that close family should not be on the same ship. It was an old idea, and to my mind a curious one. But there were a lot of people who felt strongly about it, and The Chaser was so swirling in controversy anyway... she and Yanci were both going to have to be something special for both to get on.
"... or low key." said Sherry, "If we don't advertise the fact that we are brother and sister, it may be easier." We were having one of our planning sessions.
"It sounds like if we get married, that won't help, either." I said routinely. I was brainstorming our options of ways to get on the boat.
Sherry and Yanci stopped talking and stared at me. When they did, I realized I'd only asked Sherry in my dreams, not in real life.
"Whoops, got that out of order, didn't I." I said sheepishly. "It's something I've been thinking about for a long time."
Sherry smiled a relaxed smile, "So have I. And it's sounded like a good idea to me, too, for a long time."
And that was how I first asked Sherry for her hand.
We continued our brainstorming session.
In May our senior year, Yanci got his invite to work with one of the HX Chaser planning boards. This meant he was on the fast track to a ticket -- one of the perks of the planning boards was first right of refusal to a berth on the mother ship.
Sherry was building her own foundation. She would land a valuable job in Titan Colony, and then do volunteer work for another planning board. That way she would be looking competent with her "day job", and building her network of people who knew about that competence with her volunteer work.
That left me. I wanted to be physically close to Sherry and at the same time pursue my own Get Onboard Campaign. It was a tough mix of objectives. What kind of important job could a History major land in Titan Colony? I thought seriously about changing my major, but I really love the perspective history puts on what's happening around us day-by-day.
Beyond the difficulty of getting a good job on Titan, Titan was going to take me a long way from Earth, both in space and in culture. I was concerned about the risk of living there: not all the horror stories about Titan Colony reported in Earth's media were exaggerations or fabrications; people did die there from accidents.
Then, I thought some more, and realized that if I was actually going to get on the HX Chaser, I was going to do something a whole lot riskier than go to Titan. I began to rest easier about that issue.
I did my research and long-distance interviewing. It wasn't just risk that made Titan Colony different, it was attitude. If I wanted to do something in Titan Colony, do some business enterprise, I could. I didn't need to get a lot of approvals, and I didn't need to do a lot of networking. But... I wasn't going to get a lot of sympathy or support if things didn't go as I planned. I could bring resources to pretty much any "party" I wanted to on Titan, but what happened to them once I committed was mostly my responsibility. It was quite different from the attitude on Earth. On Earth you got a lot of approvals, but once all those people said, "yes", you had developed a big safety net to help make sure you succeeded.
I found that I was doing a lot of prospecting through Yanci and Sherry's connections. A lot of them were fruitful in the sense that they were willing to listen to me, but some "turned off" suddenly and became cold for no reason. I talked about this with Sherry and Yanci. It took a while to figure out, but we finally did: it was Mr. Krazney. He was still upset that all three of us where trying to get on this same ship. When Titan Colony people heard about his feelings on this matter, some would cool off -- many Titaners didn't agree with the feeling that close relatives shouldn't ship out together, but all respected that feeling. There wasn't much we could do, but look for those who were willing to overlook his feelings.
The other worry I had was that going to Titan would put me on the Titan side of the Earth - Belter Crisis, and this crisis was not cooling down. The Food-for-Kansora controversy was raging as hot as ever, and one thing my History studies had taught me was that meant that unpleasant surprises concerning Earth-Titan relations were in the offing.
In the end, I found that a good position, good as in high profile, was not as hard to find as I thought it would be. Several of Titan Colony's major corporations were new, about twenty- to forty-years old. Those corporations were getting just old enough that they wanted better presentations of what they had done for Titan and humanity. They wanted... a historian! I got into a partnership with a Titan Colony MBA that Yanci and Sherry introduced me to and started RightNStone, a history-writing consulting firm. Our specialty was to data mine company archives, and, through what was kept there, identify the company's early "movers and shakers" and what their ideas were. Often these early leaders and innovators were the losers in company infighting, but nowadays the public was asking for more "authentic" stories about those early company days, so this information was in growing demand.
Graduation was a bittersweet time. They actually had to delay it for two weeks because there was a terrorist alert on the flight from Earth to Mars that was carrying about fifty parents of graduates. The only good news about that was the delay let my father get through his red-tape hell in time to make the flight. I couldn't believe it, but at the ceremony one Earth family complained that there wasn't enough security because they didn't see armed guards ringing the auditorium.
"My Gosh! This is Mars, lady!" was my comment when I read the news. But it was just another example of the gulf that was widening between Earth culture and the Outer Systems. The Earth people were willing to fortify in their daily routines -- as in, put themselves inside personal fortresses -- to enforce "tolerance" as they called it. "Senseless property crime" was what the Outer System people called it, and they would not put up with such nonsense. The day-to-day life of the Outer System was too on-the-edge to support the willful damage to the community that social parasites caused when they "raged" on Earth. And there was still so much that had to be done, and there was too much risk, to support community-damaging horseplay, much less the full-fledged, steal-from-your-neighbor crime that the Earth community tolerated. So the fact that this lady wanted to see armed guards was a symbol of her benighted provincialism.
Or so I thought...