Ceres

by L. Neil Smith

  The museum now housed the largest collection of what were known as Drake-Tealy Objects in the Solar System. They had so far been found on every asteroid explored, as well as Mars and a couple of the moons of Jupiter. To this day no one knew what they were or why they had been created, only that they were artificial, and clearly non-human in their manufacture.

  Mysteriously, the greatest number of Drake-Tealy Objects were to be found on barren Vesta, third largest of the asteroids, but made of solid granite. Vesta was not inhabitable, not worth terraforming, and was the best proof so far that the makers of the artifacts were completely alien.

  Llyra exclaimed, “Okay, here we go!”

  “About time,” Jasmeen answered. “I’m getting famish-ed!” She’d pronounced the last word with three syllables.

  They had come at last to the part of the walk home she liked best. There was a geologic fault here, resulting in a vertical drop of about fifty feet. Continuing straight ahead, where the road became a long ramp, there was a steep flight of stairs, built of stone and stainless steel. Llyra had never used them. On the Lake Selous side of the walk, two big steel poles, two inches in diameter and also stainless, stood side by side, placed there by some whimsical individual more concerned with fun than practicality. Each was cut with a single heavy square thread. One of them—the “down” pole—constantly rotated clockwise, driven by a small motor powered by a shoebox-sized fusion reactor. The other—the “up” pole—rotated counter clockwise.

  At the top of the “up” pole, where they’d run out of thread, half a dozen objects stood away from the smooth portion of the pole where they’d been waggling and clanking as it turned. They were something like open ended wrenches (and indeed, that’s what people called them), with eighteen inch handles. But they were made to fit the thread of the pole.

  Llyra took a wrench off the “up” pole and placed it on the smooth part of the “down” pole, above the thread. Looking less enthusiastic about the whole undertaking, Jasmeen took another of the wrench-like objects and awaited her turn. Here on Pallas, the long drop to the bottom could have been safely made simply by jumping, but Jasmeen was from Mars, a world with almost seven times the gravity of Pallas. She might also have taken the stairs, but for some reason that had never occurred to her.

  Llyra let the wrench fall onto the thread and stepped off the sidewalk. She hung there by one hand for a moment, with her skate bag in the other hand. Then the rotating pole carried her smoothly and gently to the ground—although the metal-on-metal squealing of the wrench and pole set her teeth on edge. She pulled her wrench from the pole and placed it on the “up” pole so that it would be there for others to use. There were already half a dozen of the things piled up at the bottom of the “down” pole, for people headed in the opposite direction, toward town.

  “I love it!” Llyra shouted.

  “You may have my share to love, as well.”

  Amidst more metallic squealing, Jasmeen alighted behind her, skate bag dangling from her shoulder, and shifted the wrench she’d used to the “up” pole. She wrinkled her nose and was about to make the same comment about the noise that she always did, when Llyra’s phone rang. The girl touched the breast pocket of her light denim jacket and said, “Hello?”

  “Llyra?” It was her mother Ardith’s voice, sounding not quite as cool and detached as it usually did. The girl could see her mother’s face clearly in her mind—delicate features and enormous dark eyes, framed by wavy dark hair. “Llyra, I’ve just heard from your father on Ceres. Something has happened. Something—it’s about your brother Wilson.”

  It was Llyra’s turn to wrinkle her nose. She knew perfectly well that her father was on Ceres—he was the chief engineer there. And she knew who her brother was, as well. Why did her mother always talk to her like a—then her heart froze as she realized that this was probably bad news.

  Jasmeen had heard the message and put a sympathetic hand on Llyra’s shoulder.

  “Is Wilson okay?” the girl haltingly asked her mother. It was her second attempt at it. The first attempt had only produced a nervous squeak.

  Ardith replied, “Yes, dear, Wilson is just fine, and I’m sorry I didn’t tell you that right way. He’s fine, but apparently he’s done something … well, extremely heroic and extremely foolish at the same time. The Curringer Foundation is planning to hold a special ceremony at your father’s headquarters to give him some kind of an award. Your father would like very much for us to be there when it happens, and so would Wilson.”

  Amazing—and a little scary. Her mother actually sounded worried and proud of Wilson at the same time. She’d mentioned their father without any trace of bitterness in her tone. She’d even called her daughter “dear”.

  “Then when do we start?” Llyra asked. Unbelievable! She was finally going to get a real ride on a real spaceship! The furthest she’d been, so far, was in a tourist jumpbuggy to Pallas B, the asteroid’s tiny moon. They hadn’t even EVAed. She’d had better views of the surface of Pallas B through a telescope from her bedroom window.

  Her mother was speaking. ” … sending an ionopter to pick us up at the house and take us to Port Peary. I’ll close the lab and meet you at home. It’s an eighteen hour trip from Pallas to Ceres right now, so pack your toothbrush. Oh—and please ask Jasmeen to come along, will you? Your father was quite insistent about that, although he didn’t say why.”

  Maybe, Llyra thought, it was to save his daughter the fate of being cooped up alone in a small spaceship with her mother for eighteen hours.

  But what she said was, “Okay, Mother. We’re almost home right now. See you.”

  “Yes, dear. Goodbye.”

  Amazing.

  ***

  The Ngu house, just outside of Curringer—some called it the Ngu mansion—had been constructed from native stone by Llyra’s great grandfather, Emerson. It was here that he’d brought his bride Rosalie Frazier, the famous archaeologist, and here that their eight children had been born. Mystery still shrouded their eventual fate. They had headed for the Cometary Halo, made a few reports that had taken hours, at lightspeed, to get back to Pallas, and then no more had been heard of them.

  Their last communication had been garbled but had mentioned alien artifacts.

  Llyra’s grandfather William had been born here, like the rest, and grown up on the hospitable shores of Lake Selous. He’d been the eldest of Emerson and Rosalie’s children. When he was barely in his twenties, he’d left the family homestead and gone with his younger brother Brody to Mars, to help keep colonists from Earth from dying of what he’d called “a faulty space program”. Several years later, he’d returned with one of those colonists, former East American Marine Lieutenant Julie Segovia, married her, and settled back into the Ngu family dwelling.

  Llyra’s father Adam, William’s eldest son, had been born here, too, although by then there was a genuine hospital in Curringer. He’d studied engineering over the Solar Internet, apprenticed himself to one of the engineers who’d terraformed Pallas, grown up, opened his own practice, and married another native Pallatian, Llyra’s mother, Ardith Zacharenko.

  Thus the house, to Llyra, was like another member of her family, as ancient as her missing great grandfather, but always there to protect and comfort her. Like most of the buildings on Pallas, it was built from the asteroid’s native gray-brown stone—carbonaceous chondrite with the petroleum-like kerogen carefully baked out. The kiln still stood, like a concrete igloo, on a remote corner of the property. Three generations of Ngu kids and their cousins had cleaned it out and used it as a playhouse.

  Unlike most other buildings on Pallas, however, the Ngu house had not been made to resemble the architecture of any other place or time. Most of the buildings downtown, for example, looked like they’d come from a western movie set.

  The Ngu house was wide, where it sat along the Lake Selous shore, made up mostly of bold horizontal strokes, raw stone interspersed with balconies and broad, deep-set windows. In mos
t places the house was four stories tall, and not symmetrical. It fell, rather, into “split levels”. The design had sprung from the inventive mind of Emerson Ngu, who referred to the style as “Frank Lloyd Wright without the useless spaces”.

  Leaving the sidewalk from town, Llyra and Jasmeen descended a flight of broad, gentle steps, and crossed a swinging footbridge made up of huge blond-colored wooden planks and “musket-browned” steel cable. They came to the big front door, which overlooked a broad stone terrace, so closely surrounded by trees that they practically made a canopy over it. Llyra thought this was a perfect place to sit on a hot summer day, have lunch, and study. Through the trees at either end of the terrace, she could see the lake. The balcony of her bedroom looked out over the lake, as well.

  The family kept several boats in their boathouse on the shore. One was a contraption with pontoons and a canopy they could go out and have barbecues on. They hadn’t used it since Adam and Wilson had gone to Ceres. Another was a little canoe with an outrigger and a big wind-driven rotor that turned a shaft that turned a gear that turned another shaft that drove a propeller. It actually sailed faster into the wind than running from it—and Llyra had built it, by herself, from the keel up.

  But what was truly magical about the Ngu house was the fact that from nearly every level, water fell in broad and shining curtains, sometimes onto the level below where it fell again, sometimes all the way to the ground, where it was collected, filtered, and sent back to the rooftops once more. The noise of all this falling water was deeply relaxing. Llyra had grown up with it and missed it whenever she was away.

  “There it is!” Before Llyra and Jasmeen could reach the front door of the house, they heard the breathy roar of an ionopter high overhead. Jasmeen shielded her face from the sun and from wind-driven spray from the waterfalls being thrown around by the machine. Together, she and Llyra watched it begin to settle on the rooftop landing pad.

  Even to those accustomed to it, it was quite a sight. Jutting out and upward at about a forty-five degree angle, two dozen feet above a boxy metal and plastic body the size of a small city bus, three large booms, two forward and one aft, cut through with circular lightening holes, each supported a twenty foot double disk—one set above the other—of metallic mesh. The upper disk put an electric charge on the air molecules above it, and the lower disk pulled them through and expelled them, creating enough thrust to lift the ionopter and pull it through the air.

  Occasionally, some foreign object—a large insect or the feather of a bird—got between the disks, and there was a flash of momentary lightning and an alarming crackle as it was reduced to its constituent ions.

  Ionopters were the fastest means of transportation on Pallas. Between them, various corporations and individuals maintained a fleet of fewer than a hundred of the peculiar vehicles. This asteroid was the one place in the Solar System where such a craft could operate. Mars had too much gravity, Earth’s Moon had never been terraformed and lacked the necessary atmosphere, and terraformation had only begun on Ceres, for which a bigger, more powerful ionopter was already being designed.

  In some ways Curringer was the System’s largest small town. Both young women knew the pilot, R.G. Edd—a frequent drop-in hockey player—who waved at them cheerfully from his tinted plastic window as the big fusion-powered aircraft’s ridiculously tiny landing gear touched the roof.

  Precisely at that moment, Llyra’s mother Ardith wafted onto the terrace in her flying belt. As her feet lightly touched the flagstones, she said, “Aren’t you two inside, yet? We’ve got to get packed and going!”

  “But Mother,” Llyra protested as she felt her stomach growl. “What about lunch?”

  CHAPTER SIX: SAVE THE EARTH

  There are those who insist that nobody ever thinks of himself as a villain. On the contrary, I think that villains know perfectly well who they are. Don’t you? —The Diaries of Rosalie Frazier Ngu

  “Bad enough they wrecked the natural environment of Pallas with their illegal ‘designer’ microbes. They actually altered its rotation, first, using nuclear weapons! Nuclear weapons! All so they could have a 24-hour day!”

  Anna Wertham Savage, recently chosen as the new leader of the Mass Movement, finished her signature with an angry slash, taking her pen off the page and across her desk blotter before she could stop it. She sat in her meticulously restored Victorian office, with its mellow, hand-carved rosewood wainscoting, tastefully figured beige wallpaper, and embossed ceiling high overhead set off with more rosewood, signing copies of the latest edition of her last year’s bestselling book, Massquake!, in preparation for an enormous rally later that week in Boston.

  It was hoped—Savage hoped—that the city would ban purchase and sales of all offworld items and materials—perhaps even outlaw their ownership, triggering door-to-door police searches for imported asteroid contraband. Accomplish such a thing in Boston, and the entire state of Massachusetts would surely follow. Accomplish such a thing in Massachusetts, and that would be a significant step toward banning imports from East America altogether. It would probably be followed by United Nations embargo.

  She found the idea breathtakingly wonderful.

  Savage felt she needed some cheering. Together, she and the guest in her office had just watched videos from the asteroid Ceres, pieced together by some enterprising soul from several different industrial cameras aboard the Percival Lowell, and sold to one of the 3DTV news networks.

  Savage and her guest had seen a surface-to-air missile fired from a crater down on the asteroid, rising on a dense column of smoke, and rocketing past the defenseless factory vessel to explode harmlessly thousands of yards away. Then came a lone white-suited figure, like a cliché movie knight. His lucky pistol shot, dashing the missile launcher to the crater floor, had also destroyed the launching party’s only way of getting back to Pallas. At that point, the white armored figure had fought a desperate gunfight with the colorfully-suited laser-wielding defenders.

  These videos would never be seen on East American channels. They had originated at a commercial broadcast 3DTV station near Topeka, Kansas. Receiving radio, 3DTV, or SolarNet signals from outside East America was supposed to have been a serious crime. But since the authorities would have had to admit that places like Topeka and Denver and Houston and Omaha were no longer a part of their country, it was a serious crime that somehow never got prosecuted, a serious crime that everyone committed, every day, even the authorities who were supposed to prevent it.

  For a moment, Savage looked up at her visitor, lounging in the most comfortable chair in the room, under a big formal portrait of the eternally blessed Rachael Carson, sipping at a glass of her bourbon. Coming from a long line of Temperance Movement prohibitionists, Savage never touched alcohol, herself, but kept a bountiful supply for her guests. He was a handsome young man, she thought, wearing a dark colored lightweight turtleneck, a pale gray Armani 2000 suit, and expensive Italian loafers with socks that matched his shirt. She’d never seen the man unkempt, uncreased, or with a speck of lint or animal hair anywhere on his person.

  Sometimes, she wished—but on the other hand, even when she was young, it had always been something of a struggle for Savage to remain pressed and crisp-looking. Now, in her forties, she’d given it up. She kept cats—and everybody knew it with a glance at her baggy sweaters and dresses. She was a natural, prematurely gray-streaked “dishwater” blond, with flat, stringy hair that failed to cooperate no matter what amount she spent on it. She was also cursed with pale, watery blue eyes that … well, she thought, they bulged whenever she got excited. She had to be careful when she was on 3DTV. Worst of all, she had thick ankles and no figure. Clearly, she had been meant for something other than—higher than—romance, marriage, motherhood.

  And although her feminist forebears had taught her that she wasn’t supposed to care about any of those things, to her dismay, she found she cared more deeply about them with every passing year, and couldn’t help herself. Savage wanted
romance, marriage, and motherhood—if it wasn’t already too late—and felt cruelly, personally cheated by a reality in which she’d was made so hopelessly unattractive. Sometimes she even caught herself promising that she would someday make them pay.

  Whoever “they” were.

  But what she said to her guest just now was, “Oh, Paul, I can’t imagine what my predecessors could have been thinking of. Believe me, if it had been me in charge, if they’d had to put ten million bodies out there, protesting in the streets, in a hundred cities, and a dozen countries, I wouldn’t have hesitated. They should have shut Curringer down before he ever got started, and burned his head offices to the ground!”

  There. That felt better. With a little smile, she placed the newly signed book on a big stack on the right side of her desk, used a handkerchief on her palms, which had grown a little damp, took another book from a stack on her left and opened it. Massquake!: the very book that had brought her to the attention of the expensively-dressed men in cigar smoke-filled rooms who made decisions about the tactics and strategy of the Mass Movement, as well as a thousand other groups like it.

  Her guest murmured, “The ‘natural environment’ of Pallas was hard vacuum at Absolute Zero, Annie. It made Antarctica—or even Mars— seem tropical”

  P.E. “Honest Paul” Luegner, Savage’s opposite number in Null Delta Em—an organization whose absolutist rhetoric and violent tactics she was compelled to publicly denounce at frequent intervals—set his drink on an endtable, leaned back in the most comfortable chair in the room, and put his manicured hands behind his head. The man wasn’t supposed to be here; he was never supposed to be seen in Anna Savage’s company, but he had brought important news of the recent unfortunate events on Ceres, where his entire Environmental Defense Brigade had just been killed or captured, not just by a boy, but by the son of Adam Ngu.

  By the grandson of William Ngu of hated memory, the Martian revolutionary.