Ceres

by L. Neil Smith

  Jasmeen looked thin, but she had good, broad shoulders. She was also quite full-breasted for her size, and although her hips were slender, they were set off by an exceptionally narrow waist. Just now, having not yet put on her long, black, “official” coach’s coat, she wore a delicate little white cotton top—no female needed more than that at one twentieth of a gee, although in the cold of the rink it could be embarrassing sometimes—that did nothing to disguise her obvious assets. Its frilly hem left a bit of her flat belly exposed over badly faded bluejeans with the waistband turned down.

  Where she stood at her open locker, 13-year-old Llyra Ngu turned abruptly, unconsciously standing on her toes. “How can you possibly know I’ve been pond skating, Jasmeen?” She pronounced her coach’s name correctly—”yahzz-MEEN”—as many others who knew her failed to do. The 19-year-old was more than just a figure skating coach to the younger girl. She was Llyra’s tutor in several other subjects, her best friend, and only six years her senior. Sometimes she was Llyra’s mother.

  Jasmeen looked up at her student and laughed. It was a warm, happy laugh, not intended to inflict pain. “Is elementary, my dear What’sit. Bootsoles still damp, although I know you have had no ice booked here yesterday or this morning. They are playing hockey all day long here, yesterday and day before. So I deduce you must be skating outdoors, somewhere.”

  “Yes, that’s right,” Llyra was incredulous, but delighted. She loved games like this. “But over a mascon?”

  “Why else are you ever skating outdoors?” Jasmeen shook her head, indicating her student with an upturned hand. “Where you have equal chance of falling and breaking something or being eaten alive by wild animal. Possibly both. This is not happy girl unless there is small, extra risk to turn her mother’s hair white—not to mention hair of little Russian coach!”

  “You know why I do it, Jasmeen. Someday I’m gonna skate on Earth.” Llyra gave her coach a good-natured frown and held up a stainless steel object she’d just taken from her skate bag, a Ngu Departure Pocket Ten her parents had given her on her twelfth birthday. “Anyway, I had my little pistol with me—and you aren’t Russian, you’re Chechen.”

  “Mostly, I am Martian,” Jasmeen replied, with a sigh, and it was true. She was the daughter of an intrepid (and desperate) couple who had traveled to Mars under a United Nations program funded and directed by the East American government. Fleeing the political and military perils of the Earth, Mohammed Khalidov and his wife Beliita had been among only a few to survive the Red Plant’s harsh environment long enough to be rescued by Pallations.

  To this day, any time someone mentioned the Earth, Father spat. Due to his influence, she favored a Coprates Industries plasma-driven Express Eleven.

  ***

  Outside the locker room, in the rubber-paved space between the locker room walls and the transparent “boards” of the rink, Jasmeen paused.

  The surface here was unique in all the Solar System—although she suspected it wouldn’t be, once a rink was built on Ceres. At what would normally have been the outer margin of the rink, it curved up smoothly, toward the vertical, so that objects tended to slide back down onto the flat. A dark-stranded net, stretching from the top of the boards, up and completely over the ice, kept hockey pucks—and the occasional involuntary skater—from leaving the rink in the low Pallatian gravity.

  It was the beginning of an “open” or “public” session. The ice this morning was presently occupied by a dozen “recreational” skaters, mostly gliding around the rink in elongated circles. But they had just finished three hours’ worth of hockey practice in here. The cavernous, high-ceilinged room reeked of adrenalin, sweaty bodies, and unwashed pads and jerseys. The odor was tolerable only because it was the kids’ teams that had been practicing, boys and girls of Llyra’s age and younger. If it had been a couple of the men’s teams, the air-scrubbing machinery would be working at full tilt, and the air would still be unbreathable.

  Jasmeen stood momentarily with both of her hands against the boards, one foot beneath her and the other far behind, stretching her calves. It was more than a little awkward, encumbered by the long plastic guards that protected her blades from dirt and grit on the floor, but she’d been doing it all her life and was no longer conscious of the difficulty. She liked doing it out here, where she could see what was going on.

  Llyra had gone to the rinkside weight room, a few doors back up the corridor, to spend a useful 20 minutes or so warming up on one of the treadmills her engineer father had redesigned for a world that had only one twentieth of the gravity that the machine had been intended for. She also enjoyed using the free weights (cast of solid tungsten, a relatively cheap commodity among the asteroids, especially for this facility) and machines, but it was always hard to get her to stretch sufficiently.

  Not for the first time, Jasmeen reflected on how was amazing it was, how the lives and fortunes of their two families, the Khalidovs and the Ngus, were so deeply intertwined. Llyra’s great-grandfather Emerson had been one of the founders of the settlement here on Pallas, before his notorious disappearance aboard the exploratory vessel Fifth Force, and had helped convey it safely through many perils in the early years.

  Llyra’s grandfather William and his brother Brody (named after the same individual this facility had been constructed to honor) had flown to Mars, decades later, to rescue her—Jasmeen’s—mother and father, and other colonists, after the East American government and the United Nations had simply abandoned them there. Now she—Jasmeen—was here, working for William’s son Adam and Adam’s wife Ardith, helping to educate their daughter, whom she’d come to love as if she were a little sister.

  Llyra badly needed love, Jasmeen thought, although she would never have said so aloud, to anyone. Adam, her father, was a good man, but he was absent most of the time, lately on Ceres, which he was making over as he had made over the exercise machines here—and as others had made over Pallas itself. Jasmeen wasn’t absolutely certain, but she believed that Llyra’s mother Ardith regarded affection as a sign of weakness. It was possible that Jasmeen was prejudiced, but she didn’t think so.

  She put a heel up on the little unintentional shelf, four feet high, that separated the upper and lower boards surrounding the rink. She bent, wrapping both hands around her foot. As she stretched the muscles of her back and legs, she watched three of Llyra’s friends. She couldn’t remember their names, but she’d seen them here before. A little boy, perhaps 10 or 11, sat on a big plastic footlocker the hockey teams used sometimes, just outside the rink gate, with a little girl, a tomboy. Neither of them looked at the other. Both stared down self-consciously at their hockey skates. It was obvious that he was working up to taking her hand, but was happy merely to be sitting beside her. That most magical of instants was only a heartbeat away when—

  All at once, they were interrupted by another little boy who had just come off the ice, pink-faced and breathless. He was begging the first boy to come out into the rink and skate. “That’s the reason we came, isn’t it?”

  A long, silent struggle ensued, played out entirely on the first little boy’s face. At long last he got up, mumbled a perfunctory apology to the little girl, and dashed out onto the ice with his buddy. The little girl stared back down at her skates again, lower lip trembling.

  Life’s little dramas, Jasmeen sighed to herself. Something inside her wanted her to hurry to the little girl, put a comforting hand on her arm, and tell her that she wouldn’t always lose this kind of struggle—that, in fact, in the end, she’d always win, that being the nature of life.

  But it simply wasn’t in Jasmeen to intrude. Martians were almost insanely reticent, and it had required a supreme effort on her part not to be that way with Llyra, who required affection, required human contact, as a beautiful flower requires sunlight and raindrops in order to live.

  Three of the raindrops—or rays of sunshine—in Llyra’s life came down the corridor toward Jasmeen now, having emerged from the girls’ lo
cker room. All three were freshly showered and dragging big hockey equipment bags behind them that they could have used as sleeping bags.

  Nikki Johnson had dark, curly hair, almost black, with threads of auburn through it. Just now she wore it in a pair of braids. Her pale Celtic skin was covered with freckles from hairline to chin, across both cheeks and her turned-up nose. It always surprised Jasmeen that her thoroughly Irish eyes weren’t blue. Ordinarily, she was a little chatterbox, but she’d been playing this season with an ankle injury, and practice this morning had worn her out. Her face was grim, and all Jasmeen got from her was a reasonably cheerful “Hey-oh!” as the girl, a year or two older than Llyra, but one of her closest friends, set her hockey bag down and leaned against the transparency to watch the rink.

  Right behind her, dragging her own bag, followed Katie O’Hara. Katie’s hair was straight and brown, and at some point in her young life, laughter had moved into her amber eyes to stay. In Llyra’s absence, Katie was the clown of the ensemble. When the two of them got the giggles, it was as contagious as the Black Plague and they couldn’t be shut off.

  Emmy Morimura seemed to be constructed on a smaller scale than the others, with glossy black shoulder-length hair, and eyes so dark that they looked black, as well. It was impossible, Jasmeen often thought, for a human being to be so beautiful. Third and last of Llyra’s trio of closest friends, Emmy dragged behind her the extra-large bag and extra-wide stick of a goalie, an odd position, Jasmeen thought, for someone so withdrawn, quiet, and small. Ordinarily, even when an adult asked her a direct question, she would simply look down at her shoes and say nothing. Emmy apparently saw Jasmeen, however, as something in between child and adult, for she sometimes engaged the older girl in long, animated conversations.

  Just then, Llyra emerged from the weight room in a brilliant metallic blue leotard, with a towel around her neck, and her skate bag dangling from two fingers. The girl’s dark blonde hair was pinned up, with a few escaping strands around her face and at the back of her neck.

  “Here comes the ostrich!” Nikki hollered at her. The girls had recently watched an old recording of Fantasia together, so they all knew what she meant.

  Katie echoed her. “Where’re your pink toe-shoes, ostrich?”

  Emmy grinned, but said nothing. That was usually her part in this ritual. Llyra stuck her tongue out at them as she passed, and patted Emmy on the head. She set her bag down on the locker, sat, and began lacing her skates. The other three girls gathered around her in a half circle.

  “Watch out!” she told them, pointing a jagged toepick at them. “My toe-shoes are white—and have teeth!”

  “Say,” remarked Emmy, startling them all. “Wouldn’t that be assault with a sledly weapon?”

  There was a moment of stunned silence.

  “Mighty big talk,” Katie observed at last, “for somebody who skates in her skivvies.”

  Llyra pointed at Katie’s huge equipment bag, which contained her helmet, armor, and padding. “Mighty big talk for somebody who skates wearing a canoe.”

  They all laughed. “Score one,” Nikki grinned, “for the underwear lady!”

  Jasmeen laughed, too, despite herself. She’d been alarmed until she learned that they all prepared for these episodes days in advance. She’d once caught Katie writing down comebacks on her pocket computer. Llyra finished lacing her skates, stood, and strode toward the gate in the boards where Jasmeen was waiting for her. Llyra used the public sessions to warm up for her lessons.

  “Excuse me, Miss?”

  The voice behind her startled her. She turned to see a young man in full hockey regalia. Judging by the smell it hadn’t been cleaned in weeks.

  Jasmeen patted Llyra on the arm as she passed. “Warm up and I’ll be right with you.”

  Then to the young man. “May I help you in some way?”

  “Well I was going to ask about drop-in hockey hours…” he said, just as Llyra sped by and executed a casual waltz jump that took her six feet into the air and covered a dozen yards. She landed silently and lightly as a snowflake.

  “You were saying?” Jasmeen asked.

  “Yeah—what the hell is that?” He pointed at Llyra as she did a set of “stars”—low-bending single spins that ended in an inverted camel so fast that she became a blur. Nikki, Katie, and Emmy stood close by, noses pressed to the thick plastic transparency that wrapped around the rink.

  “Watch your mouth, jackass!” Katie jumped in. “That was a waltz jump and a camel spin. Unless you meant Llyra herself. She’s a figure skater—the only one on Pallas—and a real good one, too! That’s her coach you’re talking to.”

  The young man shook his head, sighed deeply, and muttered. “What a waste of perfectly good ice.”

  CHAPTER FIVE: OLD CURRINGER

  The way a culture treats its past is the best indicator of how that culture will be treated by the future. —The Diaries of Rosalie Frazier Ngu

  “I would appreciate,” said Jasmeen, “if you would not try back-flip again without consulting me. Is dangerous, even when I am there to spot for you.”

  The walk home wasn’t long. Chattering to one another about the morning’s session on the ice, Llyra and Jasmeen left the rink by the south doors, following the footpath where it paralleled the east side of Curringer’s main street. Chopped by a light wind, Lake Selous was at their left. Its opposite shore could be seen from the rooftops of some of the taller buildings in town, but not from ground level. From here it looked like a small ocean.

  Llyra said, “Okay, coach—but I warn you, next time I’m going for a double!”

  “Is fine,” Jasmeen scowled at her. “You want remains cremated or buried at sea?” She pointed at the lake.

  Llyra made a scoffing noise that her coach found particularly annoying. “Jasmeen, a little thing like a double backflip isn’t going to kill me.”

  Jasmeen’s eyes widened, suddenly and menacingly. It was a technique she’d learned from her father, who called it his Rasputin expression. “No, but if you try without proper preparation, I kill you!”

  “Then how about shooting my remains into orbit?” Llyra laughed and Jasmeen laughed with her. They picked up the pace a little because they were both very hungry and looking forward to a big lunch at home. Figure skaters are always hungry.

  It was early on a warm, bright, sunny afternoon. Lake Selous was dotted with small boats, many of them with brightly-colored sails, others under power. One pulled a water skier in a bright red bikini, sending spray high into the air. People of every possible sort, native and tourist, stood along the shore, and on the railed porches of lakefront buildings, fishing. Overhead, all over town, and all over the lake, others hung from flying belts like Llyra’s. Some of those had fishing poles, too. The street was full of the lightweight, spindly-looking three-wheeled vehicles that were characteristic of Pallas.

  On a red brick traffic island in the middle of the cobbled street, stood an heroic-scale bronze statue of William Wilde Curringer. “Wild Bill”, as he’d been known, was the billionaire genius who had caused Pallas to be terraformed, even before Llyra’s own great grandfather, Emerson Ngu, had arrived here with his parents. Curringer—one of his companies had created and produced the tough, self-healing plastic that the Pallatian atmospheric envelope was made of—had brought tens of thousands of human beings to the little planetoid in his great fusion-powered space liners. And he’d died here, in an ultralight aircraft accident, helping to seed the barren, crater-pocked surface with life.

  Curringer’s statue stood in the exact spot where he’d “screwed his little plane into the ground,” as her father always put it unsentimentally. Someone had actually proposed that a bronze replica of the crash itself might be more appropriate. City builders had chosen a more conventional design and left an a empty lot, a small park, directly across the street, between two buildings, so that he could always “see” Lake Selous.

  In the wild old frontier days of her great grandfather’s youth, a
t least half of the buildings standing around her now had been notorious and historic saloons, the other half what her Uncle Arleigh referred to as “houses of swell repute”. Llyra understood perfectly what that meant—she couldn’t understand why anybody would want to do that for a living—and why her mother invariably scowled at Arleigh whenever he said it.

  These days, it had been whispered among the older girls at the rink, such establishments had moved away from Lake Selous with its elderly tourists and its souvenir shops, up into the fashionable hills above the old town. However in one former saloon or bordello, some member of her own family had established the Drake-Tealy Museum, named in honor of Raymond Louis Drake-Tealy, the famous and innovative anthropologist who had founded the unique Pallatian culture that Llyra had grown up in.

  Drake-Tealy had reckoned that the adoption of agriculture as a way of life had, for many reasons, been humanity’s greatest mistake. It had given rise, for example, to the tyranny of government. He had persuaded Wild Bill Curringer (who had wanted to avoid such tyranny for reasons of his own) to avoid that mistake and charter a high-tech hunting culture on Pallas that was still going strong after more than a century.

  However the principal attraction of the museum had nothing to do with any of that. Soon after people had come to the asteroid, they had discovered fist-sized oddly-shaped lumps of metal that Drake-Tealy had declared to be ancient alien artifacts, perhaps as old as a billion years. Established scientists had made fun of him until a brilliant young woman whose specialty was “speculative xenotechnology” had pronounced his theories to be correct—and presented scientific proof to that effect.

  That brilliant young woman, Rosalie Frazier, born on Pallas but raised and educated on Earth, had eventually married Llyra’s great grandfather Emerson. Decades later, she disappeared with him aboard the Fifth Force.