The Venus Belt

by L. Neil Smith

  “Terrible! I was madder’n a nesta riled-up yellerjackets, Winnie, coulda kilt you cheerfully. A body under th’ influence knows it, hates it, an’ can’t do a flea-bitten thing about it. Second most horrible thing I ever went through!”

  Now I knew she was all right—and I wasn’t about to hand her a straight line for free. I pulled a cigar out, lit it casually and enjoyed a puff or two. But she outlasted me, after all: “Okay, what was the first, dammit?”

  “The first what? Oh, that. You don’t wanna know. I’ll just say th’ next bastard nominates me fer th’ Presidency better be faster on th’ draw than I am. Was a pretty near thing—’None of the Above’ beat me only by a single vote: mine!”

  “I’ll decide later whether to believe that. Any idea why this medallion gets only to you, and not to me or the cat?” Lysander had taken off like a scorched tachyon when Lucy started acting funny—funnier than usual, that is.

  “Winnie, you disappoint me. Anybody with th’ brains of a finely diced planarian could—”

  “Thanks, Lucy.”

  “Y’see, what’s keepin’ me alive is basically th’ same technology as that brain-bore thingummy. Shucks, ain’t even a choice of control-frequencies—that’s all determined by th’ neurophysics of th’ situation. Anybody wired up right’s a sucker, plain an’ simple, get it?”

  I got it, but didn’t have to like it. At least there were some limits to this; we weren’t all going to wind up zombies day after tomorrow. I gave some thought to sleeping in a football helmet for the next few years. At that moment the doorbell started squawking—well, a little adrenaline’s good for you—announcing the impending arrival of what passed for the authorities. They were asking for permission to come aboard.

  In twelve years, I still hadn’t gotten used to polite cops.

  Lucy went to answer. I finally found Lysander anchored to the ceiling by his toenails, batting at a small shiny object he’d discovered. I kicked myself into orbit, admiring my new-found dexterity at such things, to see what had taken his fancy. Three midcourse corrections and a pair of barked shins later, I had it, an empty, pinky-size, semirimmed, nickel-plated brass cartridge case inscribed: CDM .38 AUTO. Interesting. Confederate cases are all mild-steel or titanium.

  ***

  We found Ed’s Broach-detecting equipment spread out in the workshop where he’d set it up during Lucy’s prolonged professional absence. Once the local Civil Liberties custodians had appropriated the Ranger’s body and taken depositions from the both of us, we hurried down and Lucy started twisting knobs and throwing switches. Neither of us was surprised when the dingus on the bench reported noises where there shouldn’t have been any. “Where is it coming from, Lucy?”

  “Gimme a second...sure as corruption’s comin’ in strong. Yep, that’s what I thought: somewheres in th’ Nomad group—parta th’ Sargasso Cluster. Buncha nonconformist rocks sorta wander in an’ outa the ecliptic steada stayin’ neatly put.”

  “Sounds like an ideal place for anarchists. Anybody out there?”

  “Must be somebody, with a signal like that. Coupla minin’ outfits, a few dozen homesteaders. Mighty lonely stretch of sky, till Aphrodite started buyin’ in. Sure is a humdandy of a signal—mebbe Tormount’s fixin’ t’Broachify th’ Rock of Gibraltar in or somethin’.”

  On one of my infrequently productive hunches, I extorted Ed’s notes from a nearby Telecom pad. “How many of these Sargasso disappearances would you say are in that Nomad clump?”

  She took the pad, punched in some instructions, and waited for the results. “Two thirds, could be three quarters. Hard tellin’—folks ain’t too consistent or original namin’ their rocks sometimes.”

  “Lucy, my semimechanical compadre, I think we’ve finally got a solid lead. Maybe it’s time we hit the road.”

  “Gimme a chance t’rinse out a few unmentionables an’ wind th’ cat. Mind you visit th’ little boys’ room— I don’t wanna hafta stop an’ let you out by th’ roadside.”

  ***

  It wasn’t quite that simple. For one thing, there were half a dozen very carefully worded Telecom calls to make, nailing down certain individuals I wanted to interview. The object would be to follow Ed’s investigations as far as we could without ending up among the missing ourselves. According to Ed’s records, a neighbor, discovering my friend’s Earthside background, had pressed him to look for a pair of daughters who’d left home to stake a claim among the Nomads. When word began to circulate, other folks with absent friends and family had added to the pot. Ed found himself tempted by more valuta than he and Lucy could have scratched out in years of ordinary pioneering.

  What made it complicated was that Belters turn up missing all the time: there are something like two billion of them scattered through the System, and anybody foolish enough to try taking census or demand identification numbers is a likely candidate for early retirement—and burial.

  Everyone’s a refugee from something. Take that neighbor’s daughters, out to make an independent place for themselves. Thousands of former Czarists, Hamiltonians, cryptoauthoritarians of a hundred different stripes were welcome out here as long as they minded their manners, although they were well advised to change their names. Similarly those who fled from tyranny in my world were flocking to the asteroids, often winding up cheek-by-claimstake with the very characters they’d fled from, driven out by Propertarian progress. Add millions of American embezzlers, alimony-duckers, income-tax evaders, Confederate criminals fleeing restitution obligations: a mighty difficult population to analyze and reduce to statistics. People were getting a new chance out here—sometimes two or three new chances—and often failed to leave a forwarding address.

  Still, Ed’s computations indicated a rash of vanishings unexplainable by such cynical and mundane considerations. Something big and sinister seemed to be going on, centered, at least statistically, on the wandering clump of minerals known as the Nomad Cluster. If there was a difference between my cosmic twin and me, it was that he’s more methodical—at least on paper. I keep my investigation schedule in my head. The last time he’d logged in with the computers here on Bulfinch, he’d decided to take off for the Nomads post-cliché.

  And then he’d disappeared.

  Our first stop would be that original trouble-making neighbor, a rancher of some description named Schroeder. Proximity in the asteroids is a figurative sort of thing; Lucy told me the trip “next door” would take six hours at a standard tenth-gee. Accordingly, I gave my Webley magazines a thorough charging and checked to see there was an explosive-tipped round in the tiny chamber of my confiscated Bauer. Then I hardcopied Ed’s notes and we actually did take care of the cat and go to the bathroom (at least I did—I don’t even want to know what Lucy had to face in that department), then bade farewell to the old homestead. Lysander wanted to come along, so I found myself squeezing ridiculously past him through the front door and shutting it quickly behind me—I think I bent a couple of his whiskers.

  Strapping myself into the seat of Lucy’s flivver (we’d sent the Tucker home on autopilot), a Stanley Flitemaster painted her usual vomitous shades, I watched her laying out the course. “Hey, isn’t that a little out of the way? If you plotted it across this empty-looking stretch, we’d save at least—”

  “Don’t tell grandma how t’suck eggs—a revoltin’ turn of phrase if I ever heard one! Winnie, that’s straight through Charlie’s Cloud; we’d get holed, fer sure. You like breathin’ vacuum?”

  “Charlie’s Cloud?”

  “Named—posthumously, acourse—fer one Charles Cato Montgomery, its late lambasted former owner.”

  “Somehow I sense another shaggy story in the wind.”

  “It’s them egg-salad sandwiches y’had fer lunch, boy. Seems as how, when we first started enterprisin’ this section of th’ Belt, a buncha San Francisco greenies—some say exiled Hamiltonians, mebbe old Nortonians, I dunno—declared themselves th’ Guardians of th’ Asteroids. Swamped about a thousand frequencies
announcin’ they were gonna git things all neatened up an’ organized out here. Told us t’git ready t’receive Cato’s Edict Number One.”

  “And what, pray tell, was that?”

  “Never rightly found out. That rock ol’ Charlie’d settled on just sorta blew up one night, spontaneous-like. Right before his big broadcast. Bullets, lasers, rockets, every kinda deestructive whatnot zeroed in from so many directions at once, we never did figger out who th’ culprits was. All that’s left of Charlie an’ his gang’s a great big swarm of little bitty pebbles. We gotta do some maneuverin’ t’avoid ‘em.”

  “Sounds like plain old-fashioned murder to me. How many of those ‘destructive whatnots’ were yours, Lucy?”

  “Further deponent blabbeth not. Did run plumb outa ammonium nitrate that season. Near cost me th’ whole poppy field. It was a fair bargain: government’s a vice best left—if anywhere at all—back where it started, on Earth.”

  “I see, and if this volunteer government had been accepted by a majority of asteroid-dwellers, what would you have done then?”

  “Found some more ammonium nitrate. Nobody’s got a right t’start a government, Winnie. We left that—and typhoid and cholera—back on Earth when we came out here. An’ everybody’s got a right t’stamp it out. Simple self-defense.”

  ***

  Thursday, March 18, 223 A.L.

  Six hours, two Gigacom movies, and a pong tournament later (I think Lucy beat me nine out of eight), our instruments reported contact with a target still too far away to be directly visible. Of course, decelerating as we were, we’d have had to use rearview mirrors, anyway. By the time we’d matched velocities, it was big enough to take me by surprise, an enormous, swollen, rotten-looking apricot of a world whose bilious coloration made even Lucy’s yellow paisley look downright tasteful.

  I was good enough with the instruments by now to see that the thing’s apparent size was mostly an illusion, exaggerated by the plastic atmospheric envelope whose contents were noxious-looking green and yellow soupy gases. Lucy maneuvered us to one pole, where a metal tower pierced the plastic bubble, and set us down on a landing pad. I zipped my hood and drew the Webley to check its charge again.

  “Hold on there, Pecos Bill, leave that hogleg in th’ car.” She began unbuckling her own gunbelt, a sight I’d never thought I’d see. It left her looking sort of lopsided.

  “Lucy, are you leaking nutrient solution? I’m not going into that muck without—”

  “You wanna wind up just like Charlie Montgomery? This here’s a bugranch, Winnie, one big nasty anaerobic crudsy-culture. Touch off a round in that atmosphere, an’ it’ll go up like—”

  “The Second of July. Okay, you’ve convinced me. Where do I hang my belt?” I started unbuckling.

  “Th’ peashooter, too, son. I saw you tuck that little .25 inside yer suit. Don’t matter how big th’ spark is, the bang’ll be big enough to—”

  “Okay, okay! Should I leave my Rezin, too? And where do I check my fingernails and teeth?”

  “Don’t get testy! I don’t like this any better’n you. Pox, I’d leave m’ Darling gun, but it’d take half an hour to unship, an’ anyway, I’m a stabler personality type than you. Keep aholda yer knife, that alloy won’t spark none. An’ mind yer suit integrity—one whiff of that junk in there, it’ll be plantin’ time fer Ma Bear’s only son.”

  Said suit was relaying an automated permission-to-land signal. At the end of the elevator ride, a warning flashed in lurid colors and about twenty-seven languages on the inside of the door, reminding us this wasn’t any health-resort. Except maybe for bacteria. We waited for the lock to cycle. “What’s this bugranch business all about, Lucy, some kind of glorified Confederate ant farm?”

  Her arms retracted and emerged again, thinly sheathed in rubbery smartsuit material. “It’s th’ very latest thing, Winnie. Specially invented microwigglies out there, crawlin’ around, breedin’, eatin’, goin’ to th’ little teeny toilet—burnin’ rock an’ metal into mush that can be refined an’ distilled: metal, chemicals, pharmaceuticals. Watch yer step, now.”

  The door slid aside and we sticky-footed out onto a plastic-coated catwalk that branched in half a dozen directions before us. I looked up at the “sky,” a view of Jupiter, inside out. Twelve feet below the catwalk, plopping, bubbling, and smoking, it looked like the final scene of The Magic Christian.

  I preferred the sky.

  “Eventually,” continued Lucy as we made our way along the grillework toward a small, piling-supported dome, “they’ll collapse the envelope, irradiate th’ whole shebang, an’ bake it sterile in an induction field fer months. Then they’ll introduce new strains of bugs, a few million nightcrawlers, an’ this’ll be th’ nicest little north forty y’ever did see. Sure wish they’d thought of this when Eddie an’ I got started. Woulda saved a passel of elbow grease. As it is, I been expectin’ ‘em t’try it out on Venus fer years, but no one—”

  We’d reached the dome, apparently a terrestrial refuge from the noxious atmosphere, fronted by a special decontamination lock. Judging from his slashed and tattered smartsuit, that was Farmer Schroeder, the guy I’d planned on talking to, lying in the outer door, keeping it from sliding shut. You had to go by the smartsuit; what was left of its contents were semi-liquid, bubbling and steaming, humping with germ-infested hyperactivity. Something crawled as I tried to tear my eyes away from the glistening remains, and I realized it was my stomach.

  “Lucy, I’m going to be sick. How do I—”

  “Urrrk!” Lucy shook all over, lurched, and started going round and round in circles. She bumped against the catwalk’s guardrail, dangerously bending it outward, circled round again, and hit it in a slightly different place, where it groaned and squeaked with strain. I cast about in desperation, snatching at my absent holster.

  Suddenly, behind me, a smartsuited figure screamed out a challenge. I whirled just as he lunged, the glint of steel naked in his hand.

  15: Cut of a Thousand Deaths

  Somehow I squirmed aside, and once the shock boiled away, settled into that icy, slow-motion clarity of mind I’ve learned to call “second-order panic,” an exhilarating stupidity which, if you live to tell about it, is always impossible to explain: smugglers, downhill racers, shoplifters, parachutists, nod their heads and grin—they know. My hands were steady now, fingers curled around the Rezin’s grip without memory of its being drawn.

  Maybe a head taller, my antagonist was lightly built, with not too much advantage in the way of reach—and that little offset by the greater length of my knife. His smartsuit was a lustrous pale gray, the face sealed in anonymity. But a Hamiltonian medallion glinted openly around his neck, removing Lucy from the picture. He seemed to understand the ground rules here, showed no interest in using the pistol strapped to his waist, and took not a martial artist’s stance, but that of a fencer.

  Something, anyway,

  It wasn’t much. I kept thinking: I’m fifty-nine years old, already out of breath, twenty pounds overweight at a charitable estimate. In this sort of ceremony, victory—and life—are to the swift; the first guy to get in and out again leaves the other fellow leaking.

  He circled, a short dagger extended in his left glove, making tiny distracting figure eights in what passed for the air. Grateful for the practice I’d inflicted on myself, I stood my ground, let him bring the fight to me, unwinding from a reflexive Korean walking-stance, turning with him, holding my weapon raised halfway before me, its tip level with his throat.

  He lunged, knifepoint streaking at me! I pivoted, kicked, let him dash himself against a solid heel to the short-ribs. His suit took most of the grief; as he shook himself alert again, I saw a transient glitter in his other hand, a second blade tucked defensively along the forearm. If I’d known about that, I might’ve canceled the sidekick. Sure enough, there was a whitened scuff along my shin.

  Given the climate, I’d nearly bought it, right there.

  Okay, we’d felt each othe
r out. The question’s always which side of your blade the other guy’ll come in on, especially with southpaws. I made his decision for him, shifting to a diagonal guard, his right shoulder lined up with my bowie tip. Now he’d have to come in on the right.

  So I told myself.

  He circled, shadow-fencing in the air beyond my reach, then lunged again, straight for my midsection. I began a parry, somehow sensed the insincerity of his thrust, and barely blocked a low strike he’d essayed with his other blade, just saving my groin.

  Idiotic thoughts about the nick of time. I’d seen that putrefying cadaver in the doorway: it wouldn’t take much; one good cut, the hellish environment would finish the job—clear down to the bone. Abruptly, something slammed me hard against the catwalk rail. It was Lucy, quacking mindlessly. I nearly lost the knife as pain surged through my legs from hip to toe, my opponent closing for the kidneys. With a grunt of agony I twisted, half a tick from flopping into bottomless corrosives. He leaped, both knives extended like the swords they poke at fighting bulls, and struck!

  Supported from the armpits by the guardrail, I snapkicked; he took it squarely in the crotch, lifted off his feet, but I was busy regaining mine and couldn’t press the minimal advantage. He stumbled crookedly away, preoccupied. Somehow, he’d connected, too: the right sleeve of my suit was deeply sliced, not quite through the fabric. Edges stirred, trying to reseal. They wouldn’t stand much more strain.

  The guy must have been made of stone. He outclassed me all around, and he had two blades—he wouldn’t fall for any more dirty footwork. I rushed him. He stepped back just in time to get run down by Lucy on another careening circuit. As they crashed, the knife in his left hand went flying and vanished in the muck with an evil hiss and a wisp of yellow steam.

  I charged again, blocked a right-hand cut, and gave him pommel and quillon in the face. He slashed blindly, blade skittering across my suit controls. I chopped two-handed, aiming for his neck. The blade arrived off-center. I felt his suit’s resistance, the greasy parting of flesh. My edge grated to a sickening halt in green shoulder bone.