The Greater Crime

There was no possibility of making it to the residential dome before curfew. I had been working late going over some videowork in my regulator's office, decomposing falsified video evidence being used in the highly-publicized case of Minerva Corps versus Dr. Mezzini, once a prestigious member of Minerva Corps before his criminal incarceration and on-going trial, when the curfew announcement descended upon the business dome. Some people welcome the sound of that curfew announcement, that same collection of saccharine words delivered at the end of every work day in a female monotone by the colony’s automated city center. Me, I hate it. It might be difficult to distinguish one day from another without these tiresome messages from Minerva’s intercom system, but then, I was born on Earth, not Minerva, and I hate the curfew.

That’s space station Minerva in case you’ve never heard of it, a rotating colony somewhere in the backwater of the solar system, what the Earthers call "the Neptune frontier", not the moon Minerva. Trust me, there couldn’t be more difference between the two. Last time I went on one of those solar system cruises, our shuttle went by the place, and I didn’t much care for it, or the state in which the Martian miners had left it. There’s no appreciable atmosphere or weather on the silent moon Minerva. They are no winds to erode any offensive mark left there by humankind to scar the surface for all eternity. In five billion years, the abandoned quarries will still be there, their gaping mouths forever frozen wide.

But if you’ve seen one moon, you’ve seen them all, I always say, just like my mother, even if I don’t happen to agree with her. Personally, I think Ganymede and Io are worth a trip, and each time I visit Titan, I can hardly recognize the place with all the terraforming constantly going on outside the ancient colonial domes. Maybe someday if the Titanians ever get their artificial sun working, they can dismantle the protective domes and live freely on the surface of Titan. Maybe then they’ll use the domes just as emergency shelters, I don’t know. The Titanians are optimistic about the whole terraforming thing, but for some reason I doubt Earth II will be finished in my lifetime.

Anyway, the main attraction of those cheap little solar system cruises for most people isn’t stargazing or moon-hopping but the stop on the resort colony Dionysia around Saturn, still the closest thing to green paradise Earth in these parts. I go to Dionysia because I don’t usually get enough vacation time to make it all the way to Earth and back; though some day I’m planning to hoard enough vacation days to make the long trip. At least I don’t have to get an interplanetary visa three Earth months ahead of time like everyone else in space station Minverva planning a trip back to their ancestral homeland.

Bless the Earth, it doesn’t revoke citizenship to those of us who’ve gone off to join the colonies. Once an Earth citizen, always an Earth citizen. Mars, on the other hand, makes you renounce everything you ever were for a little piece of dry Martian dirt. Which wasn’t so bad, back in the day, when the Earth government was giving away the Martian land for free to anyone who would move there, when Mars was the newest Earth territory slated for colonization. Ah, but then there was a nasty rebellion a century or two later, and well, the independent planet Mars became the up and coming interplanetary power on the scene.

I guess the rest of us have the Martians to thank for all of the outer colonies. For years, Earth and Mars were working like gangbusters to outdo each other in their space race and establish as many different colonies as they could all over the solar system. But since it’s a tremendously long trip out here to the frontier from the inner circle of planets, I guess it stood to reason that pretty soon, the colonies would be demanding freedom from planetary control.