The Venus Belt

by L. Neil Smith

  The System’s best-known bridesmaid swallowed and looked at his watch. “Tell you what: come on down. We’re setting up in the lobby. Try and stay out of the way, maybe he’ll give you a minute after the ‘cast. Will that do?”

  “Guess it’ll have to.” I lit another stogie on the same attention-getting principle that generates deliberately annoying commercials—maybe they’d give me what I wanted just to get rid of me—and followed him to the elevator. Downstairs it was a regular Pentagon fire drill, tangled-up machinery, technicians snarling hysterically, more trailing cable snaking across the carpet than you could swing a whole jungleful of Tarzans by. And, no matter how technology progresses, TV people still feel the need for enough light to bleach the hairs inside your nose. I found a darkened, relatively quiet corner and parked myself.

  The whole asylum suddenly fell silent as the Journalissimo manifested himself in a ten-ounce smoky-silver tunic, tastefully selected to match his eyebrows. Or perhaps the other way around. He paused ceremoniously here and there, dispensing pleasantries and personal advice upon those who couldn’t defend themselves, made his way to the focus of all those bright lights, draped his jacket on the back of a complicated, gimmicky chair, and sat down in his pinstriped shirt-sleeves to pass judgment on a stack of hardcopy some humble scriptperson had laid before him.

  He looked up just once, directly at me, an odd perplexity in his gray-blue eyes, shook his head, and returned to the stopwatch in his hand. Occasionally he’d slash the copy with a stylus and read it softly to himself, stopping frequently to suppress a lingering cough. Seen this close, he remained the same stern grandfather North Americans had grown up watching and believing for half a century: sandy-gray—was it a hairpiece?—bushy salt-and-pepper eyebrows; a gritty little semivisible mustache that made him look just like a branch manager of Confederate Mutual Life. Beneath the wise and weathered face, he favored neutral, conservative attire—a swell trick in this particular corner of the universe. Even his deep midwestern voice had the same sandy-gray quality, an inexorability that had become the standard for Confederate enunciation. In a culture almost totally devoid of authority figures, despite the competition of a thousand other networks, his word carried the weight of divine revelation.

  Earlier that morning, when Navigation Rock first got wind of his intentions, I’d taken time to look him up in the Encyclopedia of North America. Born in 140 A.L., he’d been a print reporter long before going electronic just in time for the 1957 War Against the Czar. “He’d landed with Confederate volunteers in Antarctica and parachuted into the Kingdom of Hawaii when the Russian-supported Hamiltonians were driven into the sea. He’d been with Admiral Heinlein, a fellow Missourian, at the Battle of the Bering Straits.

  Impressed by the Confederate Lunar colonists’ use of propaganda to finish off the Czar, he became an enthusiastic space advocate, although it had taken him nearly thirty years to get out here himself. Now his daily programs from Ceres Central were a fixture. To many, Malaise was the very soul of credibility, a veritable walking catalog of Boy Scout virtues, the single most convincing and authoritative person on the ‘com. To some few curmudgeons, he appeared brisk, remote, self-important gravity personified. It was rumored that his rivals called him Titanpants.

  Well, you can’t please everybody.

  Abruptly now, he set aside his stylus, stretched, and slickerseamed his jacket. An attendant brought him mouthwash in a baggie. He gargled, spat, and sat again, precisely at the instant that a chimp wearing a headset pointed a hairy finger at his solar plexus.

  “Good evening. Twenty thousand miles above the golden face of Ceres hangs the nerve center of interplanetary transportation, Navigation Rock. We’re here tonight to report a series of bizarre events that...”

  From there he told about the installation’s failure, the evidence of sabotage, and what was being done about the damage. A ‘com screen behind him flashed with views of the asteroid’s inside-out ocean, the killer whales responsible for the guidance and safety of half the System. Regular news followed; Malaise introduced each segment, and in between, with the studio cameras off, conferred in quiet tones with his assistants, touching up his notes as he received the latest on a dozen different developing stories.

  ***

  Tuesday, March 16, 223 A.L.

  At last, the famous sign-off: “That’s the way it looks. This is Voltaire Malaise, good night.”

  Then they did the whole thing over again for relay to those planetoids out of range on the “other side” of the sun. When the lights finally went out, somebody brought Malaise a towel and a sandwich that would have been architecturally impossible on Earth. I saw Roger Benton whisper something urgently and point in my direction across the expropriated lobby. Malaise frowned, gave Benton a few sharp words, and vanished into the next room, rubbing his back and coughing.

  I’d been robbed. Again.

  The System’s number one second banana sadly shook his head all the way over to where I was sitting. “Mr. Bear, I—”

  “Bet you say that to all the detectives.” I got up and relit my cigar, trying to think how Humphrey Bogart would have done this: “Look, sweetheart, I’m gonna see him, one way or the other. For the time being, I’m asking nice, see?” (Was that a little Edward G. Robinson sneaking in there at the end? Nyahh.)

  Benton fussed and fluttered in a way that had me wondering. I was just a P.I., after all—I’d’ve told me where to get off. Suddenly he brightened. “Er, uh...wait a minute, I’ve just had an idea!” With this he practically ran out of the lobby. When he came back fifteen minutes later, he looked positively reprieved. “It’s all set. I remembered what you said about your flivver being stolen. Well, we’ll take you and your friend back to Ceres. Voltaire gets rather bored unless he’s piloting himself—which the network’s insurance won’t allow—maybe he’ll find it diverting to talk with a real detective for a couple of hours. How’s that?”

  “Friend, I was ready to kiss this marble good-bye hours ago. Meet you at the south pole—I’ll be the third penguin on the left.” I started to walk away, then stopped: “And Roger, we’re all rootin’ for you. Old Voltaire can’t last forever.”

  ***

  “Stop, smiling—we don’t do ‘happy news’ here!” Malaise took another pull at his baggie, then folded his arms across his chest. Hoarseness had crept back into his voice and his back was apparently still bothering him. “Drives me out of my excretion-coated ever-loving mind. Blast it, why didn’t somebody tell me you were taking a shot at Aphrodite? You’d think they all work for another bloody network!”

  I grinned, reluctantly liking this irritable shirt-sleeved Scotch-drinker who inserted what serves Confederates for profanity into every off-camera sentence. Old Voltaire wasn’t so bad after all, and neither was his whiskey. Lucy had absorbed somewhat more than a drop or two through her internal nutrient system and settled down in a comer by the bulkhead behind us, making soft humming noises.

  Just resting her eyes.

  Malaise pointed at the autopsy report I’d been carrying around since the Bonaventura, along with terrifying holos from Dr. Scott. “Read me that again, the part about the woman self-destructing. Great Albert’s ghost, how long’s this technology been kicking around without anybody noticing?”

  Once aboard the network cruiser, I’d begun filling him in on recent history, bits and pieces he immediately decided added up to some “grand conspiracy against Civilization.” Lucy’s somewhat hyperprosthetic condition had added a certain amount of credibility. He’d reported her “assassination” himself, the night it happened.

  “Which shows I’m right,” he concluded bitterly, “and the network’s wrong. We have to be more incisive, do more checking. If this’d been caught by another net...I’m going to get on it right away, and Bear, let this be a lesson to you: I’m not an unimpeachable authority on anything. But plague take me, as long as I’m managing editor of this madhouse, I’m going to bloody well try!” He twisted painfully and shoute
d back over his shoulder, “Do you people hear me, we’re bloody well going to try!”

  That’s one thing his staff seemed to agree about in private: Voltaire Malaise was trying. He’d done a sort of double-take when I stepped aboard his cruiser, as if wondering where the hell he’d seen me before. God knows I’m used to it; I’ve got a sort of standard-issue mug. Then he’d quieted down, folded his arms, and listened off and on for a solid hour, nodding here, shaking his head there, as I reeled off my adventures.

  There were continuous interruptions: the guy had been born asking “what’s new” and was foully impatient at even the small degree this excursion (the net’s idea, he grumbled) was keeping him out of touch. Every other minute he got updates, drafts of pieces planned for the next beamcast. He’d read them, making corrections: “Soften that ending a little” or “That’s bullshit, and everybody knows it.”

  I was surprised at the ruthless way he screened his personal opinions out. He was a pro—insisting on the title “managing editor” and no other—and told me there were only two kinds of people in the world (I agree: those who say “there are only two kinds of people in the world,” and...), professionals and amateurs. The Confederacy, in his view, was history’s first amateur civilization, and he didn’t much like it.

  “They all think they can casually switch from farming or mining to construction, banking—Constitution take ‘em, even to newscasting—any time the mood hits ‘em. Bloody dilettantes don’t understand a division-of-labor economy, specialization. Nobody respects credentials any more! Maybe it’s true after all —the public’s a great beast and shouldn’t be allowed even to vote.”

  I laughed. “Well, we’re very nearly there. Nothing left to vote on, really.” And much the same was true back in the States—except that it’d been accomplished differently: only about 10 percent of the electorate were expected to turn out next year. Propertarians thought it was a good sign.

  “We could be moving,” answered Malaise, “on the march, outward to the stars. Instead, precious time and energy get wasted, dissipated, fiddling around in a country that hasn’t anything to do with us.”

  “The States? I wouldn’t exactly call that a waste. I wouldn’t be here without that ‘fiddling.’”

  Abruptly, Lucy took an interest in the proceedings. “The stars are mighty patient, sonny, an’ anyway, that time an’ energy you’re reallocatin’ so casual-like belongs t’private individuals. Shucks, they may think goin’ to th’ stars is a waste, mightn’t they?”

  The newsman glowered. “Which only proves the limitations of amateurs. Blast it, woman, they’re wrong, somebody needs the authority to make them see it!” He slammed his half-filled baggie to the floor, where it lay wiggling like hospital jello.

  “Hold on there, boy! As I recall, we had a Revolution or two settled just that little point.”

  “What if we did? Circumstances change. Times are different now, and—What’s that, Roger?”

  Benton had come up behind him with a Telecom pad emitting groans and whistles of a particularly repulsive nature. “It’s those signals, sir. The ones from interstellar space. They’ve started up again.”

  It was hard to say for sure, but for some reason Malaise seemed a touch paler. “You know I don’t report on crap like that. It’s stale information, and won’t be relevant again until the signals are translated—if there’s anything to translate there. They haven’t been, have they, Roger?”

  Now I saw why Benton looked unhappy all the time. He stared down at his feet and sighed. “No sir, this is just a new—”

  “Then take that thing away and don’t bring it back until somebody can tell me what it means!” He turned toward me as Benton slunk away. “Amateurs! Sometimes I think that kid’d be better off hustling used flivvers.”

  I eventually got through to the end of my story, more or less in sequence. I finished up with Koko’s—well, defection you might call it.

  “Featherstone-Haugh, you say?” He seemed genuinely startled. “First the President of the Confederacy—we should have known about that—and then his...?”

  “Niece. I don’t know what the hell is going on, but— Listen, those space signals really give me the willies, too, I—”

  “Bear, I misjudged you. You have a professional’s eye for detail, and you’re not too bloody bad at doping out the angles. But we’re going to have to cut this short.” He readjusted the straps of his special chair, the same one he’d used for the beamcast. “My back is killing me, and I’d better try to get a little sleep. You and Mrs. Kropotkin, here, help yourself to the bar. I’m going aft.”

  And that, as they say, was that.

  ***

  Wednesday, March 17, 223 A.L.

  Next day, Lucy and I were outbound again from Port Piazzi in a borrowed Tucker Thracian, heading for Bulfinch 4137. It was going to be a longish trip, and I’d been watching movies on my Gigacom for about three hours when I noticed it was newstime. I tuned the flivver’s Telecom, wondering if Voltaire would mention anything I’d told him yesterday. The picture blossomed into life and there was the wrong familiar face:

  “—Roger Benton, substituting for Voltaire Malaise. At the top of the news, Voltaire Malaise, 83, veteran fifty-year journalist and Managing Editor of the Ceres Central Evening News, has vanished without a trace. Network security police report signs of a violent struggle in the missing beamcaster’s apartment.”

  And speaking of violent struggles, that’s exactly what Benton was going through now, trying to suppress his sheer, undiluted glee.

  13: Basalt of the Earth

  Bulfinch 4137 was a chunk of carbonaceous chondrite whose main excuse for existence seemed to be holding about a billion assorted craters together. Call it an incompetently squashed-out hamburger patty two miles across, maybe half that thickness; eight thousand acres that Lucy and Ed (when he was in) called Home Sweet Homestead.

  One face was splashed by an enormous impact crater, fully half the asteroid’s diameter, around which rambled their makeshift-looking house, a miniature landing port, and the Mine All Mine, surrounded by nondescript heavy machinery. The obverse of the little world, sporting four gigantic silvery water storage tanks, was carpeted in nitrogen-fixing corn and wheat, hemp, and Lucy’s cash crop, opium poppies.

  She nosed the rented Tucker toward the plastic atmospheric envelope, aiming for a big red-decaled bull’s-eye: “Won’t be a minute now, Winnie. Watch out th’ window.”

  There wasn’t much to see until we made gentle contact. Then, the target-marked portion of the envelope became a bulging funnel under our engine’s steady pressure, sweeping backward from the hood ornament to swallow us up until we were hanging only a few hundred feet above the rocky surface. Behind us, the plastic funnel was closing in, the bull’s-eye shrinking to a dot. Suddenly, the material beneath us ruptured, admitting our little spaceship without losing a single cubic foot of precious atmospheric gas.

  And now I knew what an amoeba’s dinner feels like.

  Lucy hovered a while to let me watch the plastic stalactite shrink skyward like silly putty in reverse.

  Then she put the nose up and set us neatly in a landing area gouged out beside the big crater.

  “Now listen, boy, don’t let the pretty scenery deceive ya—ain’t ‘nough gravity out there t’anchor down a postage stamp. Step out too smartly, you’ll wind up bumpin’ yer head on th’ sky. An’ it’ll snap y’back hard enough t’break yer whatsit. Use yer sticky feet, an’ have a care.”

  I nodded absently. Through some optical chicanery, the sky was a beautiful rich blue. The asteroid’s unimproved surface was a dirty grayish-brown, but in scattered crater bottoms, bushes, grass, and at least a hundred spindly, ridiculously skinny trees relieved the eye. We slipped out of the flivver and began picking our way toward the house, which was bigger than I’d thought, at least a hundred feet on a side, and even then, dwarfed by a pearly dome that stood behind it.

  Lucy went walking on her hands, along a chiseled
stairlike trail to a broad landing. There an odd three-legged contraption rested, a Thorneycroft utility Rockhopper, according to the nameplate, painted, to suit mine hostess’s lack of taste, a garish yellow paisley. It was parked before a cluster of rugged concrete structures and a more finished-looking translucent hemisphere, which together made up the ranchhouse.

  “Started out with that there pour-fab,” Lucy said, pointing toward one of the massive cement cubes. “Hadda cast it centrifugally in freefall an’ set it down real gentle-like. Lived there fer three solid years. It’s a barn now—an’ there’s m’Stairway to th’ Stars!” An impressive metal tower on the barren crater’s central peak seemed to reach up even through the atmospheric envelope. “Usta mount th’ shackles fer th’ Drexler lightsail that drug this rock into our orbit—”

  “Your orbit?”

  “Sure. Shucks, Winnie, so many planetoids out here, they’re practically free fer th’ takin’. It’s the good locations cost money. I was gonna use that tower fer an elevator an’ dockin’ platform, but they went an’ invented dilatin’ plastics.” She chuckled. “Been thinkin’ of upholsterin’ the crater in tinfoil—gimme th’ biggest sun-powered barbecue in th’ System.”

  “So that’s why you haven’t done any landscaping out there. Looks like the backside of the Moon.” Lunatic image of our satellite mooning the rest of the System—maybe I just needed more sleep.

  “Well, it wouldn’t do t’make everything look like Earth, would it, Winnie? All th’ same, someday they’re gonna figger out how t’localize gravity, an’ when they do, that crater’s gonna be m’lake. Be real pretty, don’tcha think?”

  More visions, this time of trout bumping their heads on the sky, but I kept them to myself.

  We entered the house through an ordinary door, but there was gasketing around its edges and an emergency canister of oxygen hanging on the wall beside a fire extinguisher. This room, one of the concrete blockhouses, had a transparent ceiling and seemed to be a greenhouse or conservatory. Lucy stopped suddenly. I avoided bumping into her, but wound up flailing around in the air until she fished me down.