The Venus Belt

by L. Neil Smith

  The decorated surface of the hood whirled and changed. I was looking at his face! “Not really much point to this, you understand, it’s just my image you’re seeing, a simple trick of nanocircuitry. But actors on the Telecom will insist, and maybe that’s why you’ve never noticed the absence of a faceplate before. Now, may I get on with my class?” He fiddled with more arm buttons, his features distorting into those of Captain Spoonbill, forbidding stoic expression and all. “And, if you don’t let the lock full-cycle this time, Miss Featherstone-Haugh, you’ll walk the plank!”He dubbed in an eyepatch and gold earring, and hornpiped away.

  I wound up using a lifeboat, as I’d been expected to suit up in my stateroom. When I was almost dressed, I looked down at Koko, who’d politely turned her back despite the six-inch hull between us. “Hey, amanuensess, this isn’t fair!”

  I held my foot above the—what, gunwale?—where she could see it through the plastic canopy. It was covered with rubbery material, something like fishing waders crossed with ballet slippers. Instead of feet in her suit, Koko—well, she had an extra pair of gloves. She turned, grinning. “That’s what you get for evolutionary overspecialization, Boss.” She stretched a foot out, fluidly wriggling her toes. I’d caught her that way once, playing our piano back home: Joplin’s “Easy Winners,” for godsake.

  Under the last few days’ decreasing acceleration, my reflexes had become a bit uncertain. I climbed down carefully from the auxiliary craft and latched its bubble back in place. I was still unzipped, the garment open from my left hip to my right shoulder. “Quit practicing arpeggios and help me fasten this suit!”

  “It’s arpiggios, Boss. You know, This little piggy went to market, this’—Boss, what have you got on under there?”

  I tried to smooth the lumps away. “Under where?”

  “Underwear? That’s what I thought! That means you didn’t hook up the catheter and the—”

  “God, do I have to?” Those extra inner fixtures had resembled the intimidating appliances they advertise in the back pages of Hustler.

  “Gonna get pretty uncomfortable, otherwise. Besides, you’re mixing up the sensor system—see those little red telltales on your forearm panels? Boss, it doesn’t hurt or anything, you’ll get used to it.”

  “That’s what the proctologist said. Well, back to the lifeboat, then. You’re sure we’re really going to be suited up that long?” Rejecting her rude offers of assistance, I deposited my shorts with the rest of my earthly duds on the seat of the tiny spaceship, got myself resuited, and strapped Olongo’s Webley back around my middle where it barely balanced the enormous knife hanging on the other side. I missed my leather gunbelt, too, though admittedly, any mildly hard vacuum would have reduced it to a dry crumbling powder in a very few minutes.

  “Catheter and—” or not, smartsuits don’t actually take that much getting used to. They seal shut with a brush of the hand, warning the wearer with a number of idiot lights and buzzers if he manages to louse up even this simple procedure. I didn’t hear or see any warnings—in fact, with the darkened inner surface of the hood resting only half an inch from my nose, I couldn’t see at all, until I felt Koko jabbing buttons on my arm. When vision returned, it was as if the hood weren’t there at all.

  For damage-proof redundancy and the occasional left-hander, each panel of controls is duplicated on the other arm. They’re mostly for minor adjustments which don’t override the safer, automated life-support functions of the suit. And they looked so much like concertina ivories, I was tempted to puzzle out “Lady of Spain.”

  Koko tucked me in all over, an embarrassingly intimate process reminiscent of having your inseam measured by a tailor, making sure the fabric contacted every metric inch of my body. Then we did some careful low-gee bending and stretching to double-check the fit. The freedom and comfort the suit allowed was simply unbelievable. To tell the truth, I felt downright naked, which is how I was supposed to feel, a testimony to the manufacturer’s art.

  Cautiously she took me through a checklist of the controls. The variety of visual input alone was astounding; our instructor hadn’t exaggerated. Images of our surroundings, life-support and other data, even the correct time, appeared and disappeared at the touch of a key, arrayed in border-hugging panels around the field of view, or in multimedia boxes like a TV split-screen display. At one point I discovered I was three feet tall and, even without benefit of runny nose and smelly feet, built upside-down.

  “Now you’re seeing with your fingers, Boss,” Koko explained. “Hold them up.”

  It was like looking through a periscope. I fumbled over to the lifeboat and poked a pinky under the hatch. Sure enough, there were my baggy pants and poncho crumpled on the pilot’s seat. “Nifty. Now how about putting my eyes back where they belong?”

  We spent the next couple of hours showing me how to do things like that for myself. Radar, sonar, stereo, back-scratching flagellae, and waste-disposal. She’d been right about the biological functions—the suit took care of those, storing the somewhat disgusting residue and recirculating water and oxygen. I was unwilling to experiment, but Koko assured me you could even throw up in a smartsuit with minimal discomfort.

  After a while, we cycled out through the lock and into the cargo bay, Koko so impatient she overrode the outer door with a whoosh! that threatened to set me on my fundament. Hanging outside were ropes, ladders, swings, a jungle gym, and various other hardware for risking the integrity of your suit.

  “Koko?” Wishing I had interrupted our ground-school indoors for a smoke, I watched her climb a wall under our locally decreasing gravity, using sticky pads she’d activated on her hands and knees.

  “What, Boss?” Abruptly Koko’s face appeared in a lower corner of my view field.

  “That’s pretty neat.” I diddled with my forearms until she was receiving a similar picture of me. “Now what was it I wanted—oh, yeah; how long are we going to be out here? Even with recycling, these rubber leotards can’t hold much— Careful!”

  She sprang clear of the wall, executed a double backward somersault, and landed lightly on the deck. “Get some exercise, Boss, don’t just stand around. And you’ve got plenty of air. Everything with oxygen in it gets broken down, in addition to which, the suit is one big sandwich, lots of layers, millions of tiny, selectively permeable microtanks. Just like the beads in that—that red-tape whatchacallit you were telling me about?”

  “NCR paper? But how much air could that—”

  “At a couple thousand tons per square— Boss, you’ve got to be kidding.”

  No wonder it was so damned hard to puncture a smartsuit. Half its substance was semiconductors, and the other half, microscopic vacuoles pumped rigid with consumables. I jogged in place, then along one wall and back again, reluctant to imitate Koko’s advanced gymnastics; it was hard enough just waiting for my feet to touch the deck again between steps. Finally, I parked it on that selfsame deck, observing the rest of the class a football field away, doing their own thing. With sufficient magnification, it seemed like I was there among them. As the light threatened to grow dimmer with enlargement, the area my suit was using for vision automatically expanded beyond the face, until my forearms blurred the bottom of the screen. A little practice, and I discovered I could sit there and scan the wall behind me—eyes literally in the back of my head.

  And then the deck below—hindsight, already!

  But before too long I began tiring of my new toys, and found myself wondering where Clarissa was, hoping miserably that she was all right. What could have happened to her? Had she gone wherever Olongo, Lucy, and Ed were? Had they all gone the same place, for that matter? Were Deejay and Ooloorie really traveling to Mercury? I’d tried to find out, only to be told that communications sunward were being bollixed up by solar flares.

  Clarissa! I slammed a helpless fist into the titanium decking. What the hell was I doing here, playing space cadet in a suit I’d never have any practical use for? Why wasn’t I doing something? W
hy couldn’t they just stop this tub and let me off? I don’t know how many miserable minutes passed. Incredibly, I caught my chin in mid-nod toward my chest.

  “Win...Boss?” Someone in a decorated smartsuit stood lightly beside Koko, his features repeated in an inset on my screen next to hers.

  “Hunh? Oh—sorry, guess I got lost in there somewhere.”

  “Boss, this is Mr. Camillus. Mike Morrison sent him.”

  I stood up. Morrison was turning into a regular guardian angel. The fellow walked over and extended a hand. “Gerber Camillus—call me Gerb—stunt coordinator for Mike’s new picture, Revenge of the Thrint. Mike said no offense, but maybe you could use some pointers with a blade?” His other hand held a pair of floppy movie knives. I looked him over as much as his suit allowed, a wiry figure, small, but not a chimp—his shoes didn’t have fingers. They were decorated, though, like the rest of his suit: black, with mock red cummerbund and sash, white frilly shirtfront and satin tie. To this he’d tacked on a pair of rubbery tails, and, to top the whole ensemble off, a tall “silk” hat above his face-display.

  It made me feel even more naked. “Yeah, I guess I could stand a lesson or ten. But not now, I’m right in the middle of a—”

  “Nap,” finished Koko. “Getting comfy with a suit real fast, aren’t you?” She glanced at my forearm displays and made a few adjustments. “Oh, I see. If you’re going to fret yourself to death, Boss, then override your medication circuits—see, like this. Otherwise, you’ll find yourself being electrotranked again.” As she lectured, we noticed that the other students were filing back through the lock.

  “I guess class is over for today. Not too sure I like this automatic medication jazz. You sure I’ll be all right, now?”

  Koko nodded.

  “Then let’s get started,” suggested Camillus. “Mike said you were doing some weird kind of hand-to-hand fighting up in the bar.”

  “Tae Kwon Do,” I replied. “Green Belt, though I haven’t been working out regularly for a while. Camillus bobbed his head, not understanding a single word. As with the idea of concealed weapons, there’d never been any need in the Confederacy for unarmed combat—nobody was ever unarmed! Also, under a more enlightened North American foreign policy, Japan had remained self-isolated until the 1950s. My detective business had been a little thin at first, and I’d fattened it up giving elementary Korean martial arts instruction. I’d been a Gold Belt, a virtual beginner myself, and after a few bonafide masters from the U.S. and Korea set up real dochangs, I’d quit to become a student once again.

  And slacked off about twenty-five pounds ago.

  Camillus led us back upstairs to a gym. Koko watched a while, then made excuses lamely and departed. “Doctor’s appointment,” I guessed. Gorillas don’t really need much in the way of training for fisticuffs, anyway—they just break their opponents in half and tie knots in what’s left.

  Starting with a number of fencing and karate stances, we walked through variations allowing for the use of the big heavy choppers common in the asteroids. Mine was typical enough, as was Gerb’s, a double-edged fourteen-inch snickersnee. We sparred with his toy replicas, however. He showed me a swell trick with a smartsuit, adjusting the surface so the pressure of a blow leaves a visible mark in simulated gory crimson—no arguments whether a touch has really been scored.

  But the main thing I learned in that first afternoon was that, all these years, I’d been holding my Rezin upside-down, rather like a kitchen knife, thumb overlapping my fingers in what’s contemptuously termed a “hatchet grip.” Gerber demonstrated how the short back “clipped” edge is for hacking arms and shoulders, and to protect you from the other fellow’s blade. The main, “lower” edge is carried upward, thumb behind the quillon like a saber, the long razor-curve slicing into the opponent’s belly clear up to the sternum.

  No two ways about it, self-defense is just plain messy.

  I divided the rest of the trip between smartsuit lessons and sword-fighting, with a little target practice on the side. Tactically, the pistol is a sword, most effective at a sword’s distance, intended for the same primarily defensive purpose, personal protection, rather than as a military or political instrument (one reason rifles are scarce in the Confederacy, and why they’re so conveniently immune to political attack in the United States). And, like a sword, a pistol comes to possess for its bearer a unique personality all its own, almost symbiotic with the personality it defends. Say what you will about the mystique of cutlery, the civilized individual’s edge is the handgun.

  The Webley’s new sights were perfect, a big square notch in back, a big square post on a ramp up front, coarse and quick-to-center, just like my old S & W. Captain Forsyth’s extra ammunition came in mighty handy—I sure as hell needed the practice. I also decided to hang on to the little Bauer .25. In an emergency, it’d be better than no gun. But not much.

  The Bonaventura passed its turnover point (which I spent snugly strapped to a barstool), and continued roaring along backward through the cosmos, acceleration dropping steadily until I was grateful for the heavy padding on the ceilings: I weighed about twenty pounds at the end of the journey, easy weight to throw around with muscles built for ten times that amount.

  All the better to smash your head in.

  ***

  Seen from space, Ceres is enough to convince you that the Bonaventura is a big, expensive fraud. The asteroid shows up as a swirly blue-and-white marble shining in the void, occasional patches of dry land peeking through the clouds, exactly like Terra Firma.

  “What the hell?” I was lounging at a window in the 790-level bar, watching my assistant sipping from a freefall plastic baggie.

  “What the hell are you what-the-helling about now, Boss?”

  I shook my head. “I’ve been staring at that blasted rock out there half an hour, trying to figure out what’s wrong. Koko, real planets don’t have longitude and latitude lines!” I held a short cigar stub near an ash tray and let the suction carry it away.

  She giggled. “Yeah, that’s what it looks like. Panels in the atmospheric envelope, that’s all.” A pretzel got away from her. She snagged it from the air and chomped it down.

  “You mean there’s a big plastic bag around the entire—”

  “And every section is just one enormous molecule, holding in the air and straining out excess ultraviolet. Icarus would bump his head long before his wax started to soften.” The Bonaventura slowly spiraled around the miniature globe, aiming for Gunter’s Landing on the north pole, the bartenders spending a final precious hour nailing down anything that was floating loose.

  Ceres is green enough to satisfy her mythological namesake, interrupted everywhere by thousands of perfectly circular lakes, a legacy of countless prehistoric collisions. At least I hoped they were prehistoric. As the ship swung inward toward the planetoid, it lit up like a titanic Japanese lantern, the “night” side hardly an f-stop darker. I’d been keeping half an eye on the Telecom screen, where Captain Spoonbill was giving a guided tour. Now the electronic point of view swiveled from the asteroid to a dozen giant thin-film plastic mirrors hanging in orbit, trained on the surface below.

  Book-type facts don’t do it for me, somehow. I knew the miniplanet was a “mere” six hundred and twenty miles in diameter, though there was nothing out the window to give me any real perspective. The Gigacom’s built-in Encyclopedia of North America states that Ceres has about the same surface area as India—a hell of a lot of real estate most astronomers back in the States are overlooking as “insignificant.”

  The acceleration warning hooted and the planetoid dipped crazily, setting below the windowframe. Then it rose again all around us, the Telecom displaying an enormous, brightly lighted bull’s-eye beneath the ship. There was a bump.

  We were down.

  ***

  Ceres is a big, round refutation to the argument that massive projects like dams or highways are too big for little old private enterprise (funny how the Post Office alwa
ys has to enforce its “natural” monopoly at gunpoint), or that some “necessary” services can’t easily be denied to those unwilling to pay and therefore (this is where the steamroller was headed all along, of course) they should be provided “free” by the State.

  Hell, American corporations—many of which gross better yearly than three-quarters of the Duck Soup republics in the U.N.—could stack the pyramids up all over again; Confederate companies run smaller, and they do build dams and highways—though they aren’t free to steal the wherewithal, an ethical consideration that somehow misses registering on advocates of government construction.

  We have only one “telephone” at home, but it receives calls from thousands of companies, and delivers the mail, too; parcels arrive via a pneumatic system Edward Bellamy would envy. Cheyenne Ridge controls the weather as a by-product of the highly competitive power-generation business, strictly for PR. If you don’t like the flavor they serve, you can either move or have your own climate dropped in—as long as you don’t clutter up the neighbors’ lawns.

  Free riders? Well, suppose you want a streetlight: you either pay for it yourself or get the neighbors to chip in. If one or two surly curmudgeons refuse, well, what’s more important, forcing old man Carruthers to cough up his negligible share, or getting the streetlight you wanted? Most likely the old bastard’ll demand you keep your crummy photons off his property!

  Ceres was developed by the same outfit that runs the Bonaventura: Harriman, Taggart & Hill. In a daring stroke of capitalism, they organized a transport service to the asteroids, ignoring nit-pickers who pointed out that there wasn’t anyone out there to run a service to. Staking a claim on Ceres, H T & H modified its orbit, erected the plastic envelope, and offered homestead tickets on ships like the Indomitable Spirit. Utilities, like atmosphere and mirrors, they sold to other clients, as concessions. The question of who governs never arises: back home we’re stuck with what’s left of a Congress. Here, where everybody ran his own life from the start, there isn’t even anything to vote on.