The Venus Belt

by L. Neil Smith

  Bedtime for Bonzo, probably.

  She looked up at me. “Lucy’s right, Boss. You need a little decoration, a little flair, like me.” Her smartsuit was pretending to be the uniform of a Revolutionary officer—Continental Army, naturally. Her sleek and ultramodern Whitney .464 spoiled the effect a little; it should have been a sword, or at least a flintlock.

  “Look,” I said, “if you want to go around dressed for Halloween, that’s your business. Leave those alone, will you, Lucy?” She’d pushed another half-dozen buttons while I was arguing with Koko, turning the rest of my suit a glossy black. The feet were still the color of a pair of tangerines, now with just the slightest trace of webbing. They clashed with the pink carpet.

  I sat down on the bed, trying to get them back to normal.

  “Aw, c’mon, Winnie, lemme finish. Cross m’heart, you’ll like it.”

  “You left your heart down in Nikita’s Funerium.” I turned around and looked in the mirror. “This white part on the belly, Lucy, what am I supposed to be, anyway?”

  “It’s a surprise. Now gimme yer arm.” She started pushing buttons again.

  “Listen, if you like decoration so much, how come your own precious body remains unsullied? Sorry, cancel that. I didn’t mean to—”

  “That’s okay, Winnie. Now I think on it, you’re right.” Her skin began to lighten up at once. Suddenly she was swathed in her favorite pattern, a riotous yellow paisley, lots of different shades of green and blue. It made her look like a giant tea cozy. “There, how’s that?”

  “Friendship compels me to reserve comment.” I looked in the mirror again. “Now tell me what this is all about.” My suit had become a solid shiny black, except for orange feet and a snow-white “bib” down the front. I pulled my hood up suspiciously. Sure enough, a pair of beady little birdlike eyes—and a beak.

  “Appropriate,” said Lucy, “seein’s how we’re takin’ off fer th’ South Pole.”

  “Sure, and if we were going back to Gunter’s Landing, I’d have to wear a Santa Claus—the South Pole? I have a freighter to catch, Lucy, providing it ever takes off.”

  “Winnie, I got Eddie’s flivver parked down t’Port Piazzi. Won’t getcha back to Earth, but we’ll all be a lot more comfortable on Bulfinch.”

  Koko sat up abruptly. “We’re gonna see another asteroid? Oh, boy!”

  “Well, so much for the charms of Dr. Francis. After all, who can compete with the Wild Frontier?

  “Hold on, Lucy. How can we leave Ceres, with that solar flare and—”

  “I’m plannin’ t’lay on extra shielding. Ugly thing t’do t’Eddie’s brand-new Cord—a ‘23 Ad Astra, as pretty as they come. But it’ll get us home. Until Lord Kalvan’s primed t’lift, we can go over his notes an’ records, mebbe figger out what happened to him.”

  “Oh, no you don’t! You’re not going to sneak up on me like that. I’m staying right on Ceres until the flare warning is over, then I’m going straight back to Clarissa.” I folded my arms across my chest and glared at her.

  “Clarissa’s also missin’, I’ll remind you. Winnie, what’s wrong with comin’ down t’Port Piazzi? Th’ smaller, independent vessels gather there, mebbe you could find somebody willin’ t’risk th’ passage early.”

  It made a sort of weird distorted sense. The bigger, more cautious companies would wait until there wasn’t a stray photon out of place. Worth looking into, anyway. But not as a penguin. I erased Lucy’s artistic efforts, then discovered I no longer cared for the plain, undecorated look, either. I summoned up the operator’s manual on my hoodscreen, and started pushing buttons for myself.

  “How do you like it?” I examined the results in the mirror: basic blue on blue, with a double-breasted row of brassy buttons down the front. Now if I could only find a helmet. “A policeman’s outfit, circa 1890—that’s 114 A.L. to you anarchists—see the badge? Properly, I’d have a billy club, and—oh, yes, I forgot.” I programmed in a golden chain across my stomach, mimicking a pocket watch.

  They were both speechless with admiration.

  Only after I began packing my bags did it occur to me I’d never gotten any sleep in this hotel. Now there’s a problem with ignoring night and day—you keep on putting off going to bed. Wonder how Alaskans handle it. Neverthless, something here on Ceres seemed to agree with me; I felt just fine, although it took Lucy’s superior mechanical strength to squeeze my suitcase shut—at one-tenth gee, sitting on it doesn’t work at all.

  “Lucy, how does it feel to—I mean, when you lift an arm, for instance, does it feel like you’re really lifting your arm?”

  “Sure. Wouldn’t make much sense, otherwise, would it?”

  Koko shut off the Gigacom—reminding me that I’d forgotten to include it in the suitcase. I stuffed it in a pocket. “How about walking, Lucy? You move just like a...well, a hovercraft.”

  Lucy’s bulk lifted slightly off the floor, drifted a couple of feet, and set back down again. “That felt like one step. Hadda concentrate, though, ‘cause this rig blends ‘em all together t’smooth out th’ ride. Yeah, an’ I seem t’hear with ears, an’ see with eyes. Watch this—”

  A fine, three-sided slit appeared in the space between her arms, became a sort of trapdoor that pivoted downward, stopping at the perpendicular. Resting on the inside of the door was a metallic cylinder, its half-dozen muzzles gleaming hungrily in my direction.

  “Pardon my aim, Winnie.” She turned slightly until I was out of her line of fire. “No sneak-uppity backshooter’s gonna eighty-six this ol’ lady agin!” She patted the Gabbet Fairfax at her side. “I got this, too, but mainly fer window-dressin’.”

  “Uh, Lucy, if it feels like you’re taking a step when you glide forward, how do you go about unlimbering that Darling gun?”

  “By stickin’ out m’tongue, nosy. T’start th’ fireworks, I just give ‘em th’ raspberry, wanna see? Didn’t think y’would.” She folded up the weapon. “Well, let’s get outa this gruboon fleatrap.”

  Honest Whatshisname, the hovercab driver, was waiting for fares outside. He looked us over and folded away the second pair of back seats for Lucy. The vehicle whooshed forward as she told him “Port Piazzi,” gained speed as we passed the couple of remaining blocks out of town, and curved around to intersect a huge overpass. Suddenly, we did a motorcycle stuntman’s loop, and found ourselves traveling upside-down along the highway’s underside. I gulped, shutting my eyes against the sight of thickly planted fields whizzing overhead.

  “Gruboon?” asked the cabbie. I nodded weakly. “Well, circular velocity on Ceres is a couple hundred miles per hour short of what this buggy’ll do flat out. You wouldn’t care t’wind up orbiting in an unpressurized vehicle—the atmospheric envelope folks wouldn’t like it, either.”

  I indicated tentative agreement and peeked out at the countryside. It was like riding in a small airplane.

  I’ve always hated riding in a small airplane.

  “We’ll do a little better when we hit the main road,” the cabbie said cheerfully. “Have you in Piazzi in thirty minutes, or you can ride for free!”

  Ulp! We didn’t ride for free, but by the time we sighted the side slopes of the south polar crater, I couldn’t even think of sleeping—and I wasn’t very hungry, either. I paid the modest fare and we caught a bus out into the port.

  Gunter’s Landing had been an enormous, Spartan bowl, ringed with cavelike offices and service facilities. Port Piazzi was much the same, except that, where only a few dozen giants had rested on the crater floor, here were thousands of smaller vessels, and a more informal atmosphere.

  Or is that a more informal vacuum?

  As we climbed off the bus, a bright sizzling flash caught my attention. I increased the magnification, tickled the contrast-enhancement, and there he was, five hundred yards away, clinging like a spider to an exposed swatch of skeleton on a small freighter, welding torch splashing over its hull. The registry read:

  PROMETHEUS UNCHAINED

  THE
SOLAR SYSTEM

  But somebody’d chalked it over, changing it to Sitting Duck.

  “Karyl? Karyl Hetzer?” I had to try several frequencies before he answered.

  “Win Bear, Private Eye—and Koko!” He shut his torch off and hopped three dozen feet to the ground, kangarooing over to meet us. “Introduce me to your friend.” He shook manipulators with Lucy, patted Koko’s head (to her annoyance), and clapped me on the shoulder.

  “Whatcha doin’ refittin’ th’ old Duckie, Karyl?” Lucy inquired. “I’da thought she’d be sellin’ fer scrap.”

  In my suitsereen, Karyl’s bearded image grimaced. “Practicing entrepreneurship, Lucy. She’ll do fine, running stasified food to Titan. And it’s Prometheus, unauthorized graffiti to the contrary.”

  “Prometheus,” Koko mused, “wasn’t that supposed to be—”

  “Th’ System’s first starship!” snorted Lucy. “There’s a project Deejay an’ Ooloorie won’t do much braggin’ on. Got three-quarters into construction when a little problematic glitch they were sure of solvin’ failed t’unravel on schedule.”

  Karyl chuckled. “They finally towed her out of Earth orbit, and she’s been squatting here gathering micropits ever since. Cost the backers a pretty piece of change. I picked her up for a song—and that a quarter-tone off key.”

  Koko’s image was a portrait of chagrin. “Yeah. Uncle Olongo was one of those backers—now he’ll have to wait a few more years to reach the stars.”

  “How come?” The little ship certainly looked unprepossessing, something like an upended onion, loose cablery and stanchions sprouting from the top.

  “Well,” began Lucy, and it was clear by her tone that she was unlimbering for a lecture. I regretted the pair of innocent words that had started her. “Theoretically, Winnie, two, as they say, is a ridiculous number. Zero’s fine, an’ even one ain’t strainin’ things. But shucks, wherever there’s two of anything, there oughta be more—somewheres between n an’ infinity.”

  “That’s interesting,” I lied. “Like Loch Ness monsters—there has to be a herd of them or nothing. But what’s that got to do with a used starship?”

  “Unused—that’s th’ point. Winnie, when the United States got discovered, it created problems: suddenly there was two universes—an’ there oughta be either one or some silly number with a lotta zeros. Get it?”

  “I admit I’ve always wondered why they hadn’t discovered more alternate probability worlds. It’d be pretty interesting, wouldn’t it?”

  “Now yer talkin’. They have run across at least one more, an’ mighty strange, at that. See, in theory, all these universes laid out end t’end—accordin’ t’their well, sort of likelihood—oughta form a big multidimensional bell curve. Statistics, unnerstand?”

  “Go on,” I dodged, hoping for something in the next few paragraphs I did unnerstand.

  “Well, each universe got created when some event, major or minor—they don’t really know how big a change it takes—caused it t’diverge from th’ universe it started out identical with.”

  “Sure. Like Gallatin winning the Whiskey Rebellion caused this universe to diverge from the one Karyl and I were born in.”

  “Or losing the Rebellion caused yours to diverge,” offered Koko.

  Karyl laughed out loud.

  “Whatever,” said Lucy, ducking a swell fight. “Anyhow, ‘way at th’ end of th’ curve, there’s this teensy little continuum where th’ very first event sorta fizzled out ‘fore it got started.”

  “The Big Bang?” I asked, with sudden inspiration.

  “Little Bang. Natcherly, the laws of physics are a mite different there, which makes that universe plumb easy t’detect with instruments. An’ that’s what Deejay an’ Ooloorie did.”

  I thought about it. “Swell. So what happened then?”

  “They built the Prometheus,” Karyl answered.

  “Persuaded my uncle and his friends to,” Koko corrected. “The idea’s that the Little Bang universe is so tiny—just a pinpoint, really—that traveling across it is easier than traveling across ours.”

  “A few cosmologists’d swaller their gum t’hear that explanation, dearie, but y’got th’ high points. Fer each location here, there’s a theoretical correspondin’ one there.” Lucy drew a diagram in the crater dust, corrected it, corrected it again, and finally gave up, erasing it with her impellers. “Just go from point A— Earth, fer example—t’point A-prime in th’ Little Bang universe—”

  “Via Broach?” I asked.

  “Right,” said Karyl. “And since all points are common by geometric law in the Little Bang universe—”

  “Yer already at point B-prime—say, th’ location correspondin’ t’Alpha Centauri...Who’s tellin’ this, Karyl, you guys or me?”

  “Call it a cooperative venture, Lucy. Anyway, all you have to do is emerge at point B, and you’re already automatically where you want to go—without traveling the invervening distance in our universe.”

  “I see what you mean—hyperspace. What went wrong?”

  “Hypospace, more like,” said Lucy. “An’ since all them geometric points are common in th’ Little Bang universe, there’s no way t’tell ‘em apart. Y’might wind up ‘t Alpha Centauri—or y’might’s easy wind up over in th’ next galaxy somewheres!”

  “Or fifty thousand years in the future,” added Koko. “Works with time, too.”

  “Hmm. That’s a problem, all right. And they never solved it?”

  “Else we’d be havin’ this conversation on Beetlejuice XVII, or somethin’, wouldn’t we?”

  “We wouldn’t be having it at all,” I answered.

  “Since we are,” Karyl said, changing the subject at long last, “how do you like Ceres so far? Oh-oh, you were heading back for home, last time I heard.”

  I nodded. “It’ll be a while, now, with this solar-flare thing going on.”

  He glanced around as if making sure he wasn’t overheard—a futile gesture over the radio. “What solar flare?” He tapped the indicators on his forearm accusingly. “There hasn’t been a whimper on my counter, or anybody else’s I know of. Win, I believe we’re being hoaxed.”

  Lucy slid forward, exhaust gases from her impellers freezing instantly and drifting to the ground. “Whaddya mean, hoaxed? This holdup’s got to’ve cost billions already. Nobody’d stand fer—”

  “And likely to cost billions more before it’s over,” interrupted Karyl. He slapped the Guccione welder into his palm. “Why do you think I’m back to this? Bonaventura’s going nowhere, and taking my restaurant with it. Something big is going on in the Belt, I wish I could find out what.”

  “I don’t believe any of this,” said Lucy. She skimmed away and started gaining speed toward an empty area of the crater floor. “Port Piazzi, this here’s Lucy Kropotkin, puttin’ in fer clearance fer a semi-static test run. Call it twenty thousand feet.”

  A new voice filtered through my suit receiver. “This is Port Piazzi, Lucy. Give us your transponder. Which ship are you in down there?” I scanned the walled horizon, trying to find the window in the cliff above us that was Port Piazzi’s ground control. Karyl saw me, pointed to a light high on a peak.

  “I am my ship, dummy!” Lucy answered. “Can’tcha see me wavin‘ at ya?” She was well clear of us now, enveloped in a cloud of dust. Suddenly she lifted high above it, gathering momentum, growing tinier with distance. A moment later, she was almost out of sight. I stepped up the magnification, and there she was, beginning to drift backward. Plummeting, she finally checked her speed, alighting gently on the rocky floor from which she’d taken off.

  “Well, as I live and breathe!” She skimmed up close to us and halted.

  “Lucy, you haven’t drawn an honest breath in weeks!” I looked her conical volume up and down. “Do you call that living?”

  “Beats th’ pox outa mosta the alternatives, Winnie. Karyl, you’re right. It’s safe as houses out there. Somebody’s pullin’ our leg. I’m gonna get to th�
�� bottom of this if it kills me all over again. Letcha know how it turns out, okay? An’ thanks fer th’ information.”

  We waved good-bye to Karyl and followed Lucy, threading our way among the grounded flivvers until we reached a large white streamlined racy-looking specimen with a boat-shaped tail and chromium venturis. She pushed a series of buttons in a certain sequence and the starboard door swung open.

  “Don’t stand out there all day, you two. I wanna pressurize th’ hull.” We ducked inside the tiny cabin, dogging the door behind us. Lucy folded the driver’s seat away and stood before the fancy woven-metal instrument panel. There was a hiss, and then a rushing, rumbling sound. The indicators on my face-screen said it was safe to take my hat off.

  Koko and I sat down as Lucy played with the wireless. “Hello, Navigation Rock? Lemme have th’ weather report.” She turned to me. “They’re one of Ceres’ natural moonlets, fifteen, mebbe twenty, thousand miles out.”

  Bubbles floated upward past the pickup as a killer whale’s head swam into view. “This is Navigation Rock. Solar flux continues strong and erratic according to our instruments. I advise against departing any time within the next ninety-six hours unless you’re outbound and heavily shielded.”

  “In your hat,” said Lucy. “Where you gettin’ yer skinny these days?”

  The giant porpoise bobbed up and down, momentarily nonplussed. He’d probably never had a hat. “Why, from— Wait a moment, let me check.” Something mildly repulsive with a lot of arms drifted across the screen. Abruptly, the image faded.

  Lucy waited patiently, then started pushing buttons again. “Hello, Navigation Rock, you still there?”

  Silence.

  “Somethin’ funny goin’ on—agin.” She readjusted her controls. “Hello, Port Piazzi, what th’ dung’s got into Navigation Rock?”

  One of the rare orangutans who’d decided to join civilization appeared on the console. “Hello, who am I speaking to?”

  “Cord Ad Astra 4137—Lucy Kropotkin. Listen, I was talkin’ t’Navigation Rock just now, an’ they pooped out alluva sudden.”