The Venus Belt

by L. Neil Smith

  “Swords, already. Don’t you clowns realize it’s almost the twenty-first century?”

  “Not by my calendar.” Forsyth took the knife, ran his thumb along the edge with a casual swipe that made me cringe, and handed it back. “You wanted to know about smartsuits? Well, they heal up, better and faster than ordinary window glass. You can’t always count on a gun to do the job. Knives make bigger, messier holes.”

  “And,” Olongo offered, “asteroiders have a highly sensible custom regarding personal weapons: pistols, for the most part, are for outdoors; blades are for indoors. Reasonable, when you live in a pressurized environment, wouldn’t you say?”

  ***

  Friday, February 26, 223 A.L.

  You’d think of all the places they’d control the climate, it’d be the airport. For some reason, Confederates don’t see it that way. The Lilienthal Aeronautics Building, planted smack in the middle of town, pokes up a couple hundred stories, right into the real weather. We were at the very top, waiting for the shuttle to depart.

  I stood shivering with my cloak wrapped around me as many times as it would go, wondering if Clarissa was really dressed warmly enough. Through blowing snow I could see my assistant huddling against her uncle, who had come to see us off. Despite a four-hour briefing the day before, he was still piling on last-minute advice. She looked up at me in silent appeal, then went resignedly back to having her furry little ear bent.

  I felt sorry for the old gorilla, too. He’d caught his burglar last night: an attractive young American woman who’d apparently expected the ape to be unarmed again. He hadn’t been—his spare persuader’s a .375 Nauvoo Browning; she was DOA before she hit the floor, a sawed-off .22 Colt Woodman clenched in her rapidly cooling fingers. Some people take a while understanding why we have so little crime here.

  Others never get the chance.

  Now Koko and I were off on some mysterious adventure, while the President had nothing to return to but the same old grind, the continuing subversion of my homeworld. Olongo was personally involved, and for a good reason: his species is damned near extinct back there, getting extincter all the time. In order to survive, they had to be educated to the culture their more fortunate Confederate fellows had adopted. Just considering the human politics in that neighborhood, it was going to be a long, dangerous job. The Voice of the Stars, good old Voltaire, had mentioned it last evening, in a slightly different context:

  “The simian population of the other Earth is doomed without our help, but this is little justification for tampering with human affairs in that continuum. Yes, let us lead chimpanzees and gorillas to a better world, but let the established civilizations go their own way. We have better things to do. At least that’s the way it looks, Thursday, February 25, 223 A.L. This is Voltaire Malaise, Ceres Central, good night.”

  Trouble is, nobody could possibly round up all the wild simians. Voltaire hadn’t bothered mentioning porpoises and killer whales—the cetaceans of both worlds, civilized for millennia, had gotten things straightened out right away. Likewise, teach a few apes to speak, and in a few years they’d be rounding themselves up, and not just to escape.

  After all, it’s their planet, too.

  Koko pried herself away and disappeared into the saucer-shaped shuttle. I turned to Clarissa, who looked pretty, pink, and pregnant, the kind of woman no sane man would be leaving. “Well, I—”

  “Oh, Win, promise me you’ll—”

  “Honey, I’ll eat all my galoshes and wear my spinach every day.”

  “Idiot! Take care of yourself!” She threw her arms around me, hot tears trickling into my tunic collar. “I want you back, and so, no doubt, will your daughter...I love you so!”

  I grinned, nuzzling her hair. “Yeah, and I’ve been trying to figure out why for years. I was a worn-out, half-senile old—”

  “Oh shut up! Three reasons, silly—no, not those, well, yes, those, too, but—because you make me think, and because you make me laugh—”

  “That was simple. All I had to do was show you my—”

  “And because you make me horny! You’d better be back soon, or I swear I’ll come looking for you!”

  “Clarissa, I thought we had that settled.”

  “Well, you know what I mean.” She bit her lower lip to keep it from trembling. That, and her little red nose, suddenly made her so appealing I almost started crying myself.

  “I hope so. And I love you, too—don’t ask me why, or I’ll never get on that shuttle. Now don’t stay to wave good-bye, I hate that. And it’s cold out here! Take care of our little girl; I’ll try to get back here before she does, okay?”

  She nodded, wiping her eyes. “Oh! I almost forgot...” She handed me a gift-wrapped package the size and shape of a paperback book. “And the Captain sent you this.” Another small parcel, heavier, tied up in plain brown plastic. “I wouldn’t let him bring it himself, the cold’s bad for his—”

  “And it’s bad for yours, too. Get downstairs where it’s warm!” I kissed her hard and turned, not daring to look back. Even in the dead of Rocky Mountain winter, the shuttle’s gaily-painted hull shone cheery red and white: LAKER SPACEWAYS ELECTROJET.

  Good thing I brought my own lunch. I crossed the catwalk protecting the impeller grid, climbed the three-step boarding ladder, handed Olongo’s Webley to the stewardess, who racked it with a hundred other assorted pieces of artillery, and clumped around the aisle to find a seat beside my assistant. She’d brought a brown-bag lunch herself.

  “Hey, Boss, want a banana? Frozen clean through, I’m afraid, but I brought an extra one for you!”

  The shuttle began to vibrate, lifting slowly. Clarissa stood outside in the cold, obedient as ever, tearfully waving me good-bye.

  4: Breakheart Hotel

  Six gees ain’t so bad, I can take ‘em standing on my head.

  Which is more or less the way it felt.

  Laporte vanished below us in the clouds as the electrojet was driven skyward by an outboard ring of high-voltage impellers, basically similar to those in my Neova, but powered by a ground-based microwave array. Inside, seats were arranged in concentric circles beneath a transparent dome. In the center, a pylon stretched through the roof: elevator or stairs to the control module; on Laker Spaceways, probably the ladder.

  Fifteen minutes later, we’d gained a hundred fifty-odd thousand feet, where even anaerobic bacteria have trouble catching their breath, and where the impellers ended their usefulness. The major drag on a bullet, I’m told, isn’t so much gravity as air. Presumably the same holds true for spaceships, which is why it pays to use a ground-powered boost before torching off the main machinery.

  Spaceships? I was on a spaceship! Beside me, Koko munched away, humming dementedly to herself as she gazed in rapture through the ceiling. A stewardess came by to fold our seats back like psychiatrists’ couches, tucking us in for a stomach-thrilling moment of freefall as the impellers folded like a cheap flashbulb reflector. Wind whistled past the plummeting hull, then...

  Whaaammm! I suddenly weighed more than Nero Wolfe ever dreamed of, my breathing a matter of conscious exercise. Three minutes’ acceleration—my features melting toward my ears like Silly Putty—didn’t seem much longer than an hour. How time flies when you’re having fun. Abruptly, the fusion drives seemed to cut, my seat straightened up, I could breathe again.

  Zero gee? This I’d been looking forward to: I groped past the safety-webbing, extracted my favorite felt-tip pen, LAPORTE PARATRONICS, LTD. stenciled along its barrel, and held it a foot or so in front of my face. I let go.

  It fell in my lap and rolled off onto the cabin floor.

  “Gravity and government stop here!” A central panel displayed the daredevil visage of a chimpanzee in a space-black tunic. I folded myself painfully in half, head between my knees, and groped beneath the seat in front of me for my pen, only to discover I was wedged in that position. “Welcome aboard Laker’s Electrojet service to synchronous rendezvous. Sorry about that lift
-off, folks, heh, heh. We’ll be pushing along now at a comfortable and convenient one gee for approximately twenty-eight more minutes. Thanks for flying Laker, and good morning.”

  One gee? Now he tells me! “Koko!“ I whispered in embarrassment.

  “What’s up, Boss?” She bent and stared down at the veins bulging in my forehead. “View’s better through the windows, y’know.”

  “Get me out of here! Mother didn’t raise me to do slapstick!”

  “Okay, okay! Move your shoulders a little to the right...that’s it. Now, lift your leg and...want me to call the stewardess?”

  “For godsake, no!” Something went scrunch! in the back of my neck, and I was free. The passenger ahead craned around and glared. I grinned sheepishly and tried to straighten a tie I wasn’t wearing. Comfortable and convenient? Have to check that out with my chiropractor.

  ***

  The void around the liner glittered with a thousand fireflies; shuttles like ours, vehicles from Luna, the Lagrange stations, synchronous and near-Earth satellites. But as we swam nearer with little puffs and bumps of course-correction and the giant ship gradually acquired recognizable shape, I knew it wasn’t the vessel I had tickets for. According to the tourist brochure, Indomitable Spirit was a big round ball, half a mile across, propulsion assemblies sticking out behind like the stem of a pumpkin. The apparition ahead of us was at least four times that size, a collection of giant silvery mailing-tubes glued to a cigar box. As we swept by her colossal drivers, it was spelled out for us in hundred-foot letters:

  BONAVENTURA

  LOS ANGELES, N.A.C.

  A nominal registry, to say the least. This thing would never make it to the surface whole. But what had happened to Indomitable Spirit? Were we all being shanghaied or something? There followed a funny elevatory queasiness: zero gee at last—though I wasn’t going to risk my souvenir pen (or my dignity) twice in one day. The shuttle aimed for the liner’s rectilinear stern, slid into an enormous hangar on one edge, where it clanged gently to a stop. Weight returned; the seatbelt light went out.

  Koko favored me with an uninformative shrug.

  At the lock, the stewardess was passing out briefcases, umbrellas, and guns. “Indomitable Spirit has been chartered for scientific purposes. This is Bonaventura. All reservations will be honored. Indomitable Spirit has been charted for...”

  For scientific purposes? A whole spaceliner? Glad I didn’t have to pay for it! I followed Koko’s waddling bulk into an accordion-pleated tunnel stretching from the shuttle to an inner wall of the hangar. We filed through a submarine-type door that shut behind us with a hiss. Wondering where all this free gravity was coming from, I nudged my assistant and turned back to a window: the passenger tunnel had retracted, the shuttle was buttoning up. Mist filled the hangar, and the electrojet slid outward across the threshold, dropping instantly from view. Now I understood: we were underway!

  ***

  The ticket they swapped me said Stateroom 12-22. Koko’s, some seventy-seven levels forward, was 89-141. I don’t usually cotton to cute little three-foot robots, but this one had wheels and brought back memories of a time and place where Good Humor men were pedal-powered. Besides, it volunteered to carry my luggage. I bade adieu to my apprentice and let the machine show me through the confusing lobby several decks above the hangar, a maze of pathways and irregularly shaped pools where dolphins squeaked and paddled, conversing with humans and simians seated at the water’s edge in little oval cocktail bays. Laced about with curving stairs and escalators, a dozen lapping, overhanging mezzanine levels created a bewildering perspective overhead. The suitcase-critter led me to an impressive ochre-hued column, one of many varicolored cylinders that appeared to be holding up the lobby roof. A pair of doors slid open, admitted us, and closed.

  “Ohmygodwhatthefuckisthis!” The elevator shot past mezzanines and stairways, through the very ceiling, and suddenly the little glassy cage was outside the ship, skimming along its leviathan hull. I huddled numbly by the doors, peeking between my fingers with a sort of suicidal fascination. The little robot emitted a disgusted snigger. I glared at it: “R2, Brutus?’’ It swiveled its head, staring pointedly the other way.

  It was almost a religious experience for me when the elevator surged to a halt and its blessed portals slid aside. I was indoors again, being dazedly directed leftward around a corridor to my room. There, another spell of vertigo awaited: one entire wall was transparent from ceiling to floor, riveting my paralyzed attention like a cobra hypnotizing dinner. The bellbot polarized the glass a trifle and waited, humming softly.

  With sweating hands I fumbled for a coin—anything round and shiny—and dropped it in the little machine’s receptacle. It departed, vibrating a cheerful octave and a quarter higher. I counted my change—I’d given it half an ounce of gold! The architect who built this mind-bending Disneyland for claustrophobes must have been taking payola from the Business Machines’ Union!

  Polarization or not, there was still quite a fireworks display visible through the wall-sized window. The elevators, four of them from my vantage point—one pair reflected by another silvery tower across the way—were capped with little haloes of blue flame. The damned things had their own rocket motors! Intermittent brilliant flashes sparkled in the greater distance, I knew not why. And, despite acceleration, we were still admitting last-minute shuttles. I watched one from AntarcticAir slide into the hangar-deck below.

  Out of the corner of an eye I caught a frigidly official-looking face staring from the ‘com screen on the right-hand wall. I turned up the sound: “. . . your Captain, Edwin H. Spoonbill III. Those bursts of color you see to starboard are tests of our debris-defenses. Nothing to worry about, the flying’s so clean here that our gunnery computer’s had to throw chaff out to practice on. ETA for Ceres: three hundred forty hours—about two weeks—so just relax and enjoy the ride. If you have any questions, our Information Section can—”

  Click! The bathroom was at the opposite end of the cabin, as far from those goddamned windows as I could get. I decided I could use another shower. Maybe three or four, if the microminiature bar of soap held out.

  ***

  Half an hour later, the sack lunch I’d forgotten about until now demonstrated another verity of space travel, to wit: six gees and soft-boiled eggs mix entirely too well. I found a disposal chute and consigned my erstwhile nutriment to the furies of the engine room.

  This reminded me of my going-away presents. Captain Forsyth’s was right in character: half a dozen fully-stuffed, rechargeable Webley magazines. Good old Forsyth. I plugged a pair into the wall and let their guccione cells juice up on Captain Spoonbill’s tab.

  Next I carefully undid Clarissa’s giftwrapping. (She always saves it.) A paperback-sized brick of the same flat white pseudoceramic Telecom screens are made of. No instruction booklet, no nothing. Just a manufacturer’s card advising me to punch the single activating button on the edge, then type out K-E-Y.

  Nice trick, without a keyboard.

  At the bottom of the card, in her professionally indecipherable scrawl, my wife had added, Type out W-I-N first! Same problem, dearest. Oh, well, I pushed the little button. The image of a keyboard materialized across the surface of the gadget. Okay, I touched each phantom letter in succession: W-I-N.

  The keyboard vanished. Clarissa’s picture appeared, dressed in the same golden-brown outfit she’d been wearing this morning to see me off. She stretched sexily across our emperor-size bed like an aftershave commercial; the fact that she was five months pregnant, and the homey sight of my age-stained shoulder holster hanging from the cornerpost, may have spoiled the effect—for anyone but me.

  “Have a good trip, darling, and hurry home. While you’re gone, I hope this gimmick keeps you entertained almost as well as I could!”

  She glanced over her shoulder as the bathroom door swung open behind her. I recognized the hairy body that emerged, dripping wet. “Did you say something, dear?” The naked figure had a towel dra
ped over his face, rubbing his hair dry. I really do need to lose some weight.

  “Bye!” Clarissa winked conspiratorially, grabbed a corner of the duvet, and flipped it over the pickup. Shucks—I’d thought she’d been making the bed. The underside of the quilt lingered for a moment on the screen, then faded.

  I was already homesick.

  This time I punched out K-E-Y: “Congratulations!” congratulated a congratulatory congratulator. “You have acquired the latest in nanoelectronic miracles, the [blare of trumpets, followed by angel chorus] Helmers Gigacom 67G! Contained within its sixty-seven gigabyte memories are movies, books, audio recordings, interactive games, and plenty of room for any audio or visual information you might wish to store. The 67G also functions as computer, calculator, encyclopedia, alarm clock, cigarette lighter...”

  I let the unnecessary sales pitch run down. Nice picking, sweetheart, and thanks. I punched out I-N-S-T-R and, as soon as I felt competent, very carefully lifted Clarissa’s message from temporary storage, where she’d modestly recorded it, burning it permanently into the machine where it would stay like the inscription on a watch.

  Thumbing through the contents, I found hundreds of films, thousands of novels and records, a good many of them custom-selected. She’d included all the Mike Morrison movies I’d learned to love, and a surprising number of my favorites from the States: Cornell Wilde’s The Naked Prey; Thirty-six Hours with James Garner. I conjured up a particularly cherished Maria Muldaur album and let it fill the cabin with weird and lovely music while I finished unpacking. Some call it corn, but others call it heart.

  First thing to attend to: alterations and familiarization on the Webley. All I got when I tried calling Koko was an animated cartoon, a little green chimpanzee, antennae and all, informing me the line was busy. Probably out of bananas and calling room service. Next, another try at Lucy. No go. I wired her a note, care of General Delivery, Ceres Central, and called Clarissa. “Hi! It’s me!”