Ceres

by L. Neil Smith

  Jasmeen looked at Ardith carefully, calculating. “On Mars we are not tolerating royalties—on Mars we are having only glorious revolution!”

  Ardith frowned, blinked, and shook her head.

  “She’s pulling your leg, Mother!” Llyra laughed and punched her coach gently on the shoulder. “Jasmeen, you are the silliest person I know!”

  Jasmeen shrugged. “This is only because you are not knowing my father. But I graciously accept compliment anyway. Is good to be appreciated.”

  The pilot laughed.

  The ionopter flew directly over the town at just above treetop altitude. Llyra and her companions could see the upturned faces of people peering into the sun to see the aircraft. At the very foot of the crater rim mountains, it set down amidst blowing leaves and dust on a paved circular landing pad, and the roar of the ionic screens overhead died abruptly.

  Now they could see a huge hangar door cut into the mountainside. It looked dark inside, and they couldn’t see very far. Two men wearing coveralls marked “Curley’s Gulch Air Services” ran out, pulling light cables behind them, and affixed them to the ionopter’s landing gear. The cables taughtened and began to pull the flying machine into the vast hangar.

  The interior, it developed, was perfectly well-lighted. It was only by contrast with the sunlight outside that it seemed dim. More figures in coveralls swarmed around the ionopter, attending to its needs, while others wheeled a short staircase to the side of the aircraft. As Llyra, her mother, and Jasmeen descended, an open car drove up, the same “Curley’s Gulch Air Services” emblazoned on its side. Its driver got out and opened a back door. A member of the maintenance crew brought their luggage on a cart, and this was placed at the front of the long floor of the back seat, directly behind the driver’s seat.

  Marveling a little, the three passengers climbed into the car. To Llyra, the vehicle looked quite a lot like a 21st century Earthside luxury machine with the top down, but its red rubber tires seemed foreign to the design and were enormous, five feet in diameter—they stuck up above the top edge of the car—treadless, and they looked relatively soft.

  “It’s a 2039 Raleigh convertible, refitted for Pallas.” The driver stood by his own door and grinned at them. “It’ll be a twenty mile ride from here to the Marshall spaceport offices, ladies, and I can’t manage over about forty miles per hour through these tunnels, so you’ll have time for a short nap. I can promise you that the ride will be smooth, and I’ll point out features of interest—unless you don’t want me to.”

  “Oh, please do,” Jasmeen asked, beating Llyra by a fraction of a second. “I took very different route from spaceport when I came here from Mars.”

  “Here we go, then!” the driver exclaimed. The car surged forward smoothly—it appeared to Llyra to be electric—as windshields along the back edge of the driver’s seat, and on either side of the rear seat automatically rose a foot or so to keep the three of them from being blown on uncomfortably by the car’s passage through the tunnel.

  The route turned out to be less … subpallatian, Llyra decided to call it, less troglodytic, than she’d expected. In many sections of the tunnel, which was at least forty feet high, and wide enough for at least four of these vehicles to pass each other safely, well-lit and interesting shopfronts presented themselves. Streets branched off from the tunnel, down which she briefly glimpsed even more shopfronts. The sight of several restaurants reminded her that she’d never gotten more than peanuts and a Coke for lunch.

  About six miles along the tunnel, the neighborhoods became residential, with broad sidewalks, and apartment complexes carved out of native stone. People strolled and walked dogs. Businesses were tiny here, the sort of thing you’d want around the corner, where you could buy a pack of cigarettes, a box of cartridges, or a carton of milk. Small trees stood at intervals in holes cut in the sidewalk—Llyra wondered if the holes were planters or the trees were rooted in the substance of the asteroid itself—basking in the glow of bright lights set in the ceiling.

  Ten miles along, halfway through the tunnel, the driver slowed to point out an enormous metallic construction, buried in the wall to their right, that resembled, more than anything else, a great fuel or water tank that seemed to begin at some level far below the street and continue upward through the tunnel’s ceiling. There wasn’t a seam or rivet visible. Llyra knew that she must looking at one of the great piers that anchored the thousand-mile cables that held the atmospheric envelope of Pallas in place. Judging from the portion she could see, she guessed that the diameter of the thing must be at least a hundred feet.

  “That’s just about right, young lady” the driver commended her. “And yes, it’s as hollow as a drum, but its wall thickness is around ten feet. Massive. Like I said earlier, this thing would be the largest single piece of machined chromium steel in the history of mankind and the Solar System, if there weren’t three hundred and fifty-nine others just like it, set one degree apart around the crater rim.”

  The cross-street here, the driver explained, Carville Avenue, was the only one where the naked piers could be seen. It was ninety-four miles long, buried ten miles from the crater under its ring mountain, but stretching around its entire circumference. It had been named for the engineer who had designed the incredible structures. Llyra played with the calculator built into her lapel phone. “So what’s inside the hollow?”

  The driver laughed. “Argon-foamed titanium. That’s one of many new substances that can only be manufactured in the absence of gravity, and a major reason we Pallatians are so wealthy, compared to the rest of humanity. The stuff weighs practically nothing, but it’s stiff as it can be, and keeps the piers from deforming—as if that was likely to happen.”

  The open car picked up speed again and moved on. The neighborhood past the pier was no longer residential. It didn’t quite appear to be industrial, but was dominated by office businesses that served industry in various ways. Like any properly schooled Pallatian, Llyra knew that her homeworld had gradually become heavily industrialized since it had been founded as a high-tech hunter-gatherer economy, but that most of the manufacturing was done safely, well outside the atmospheric envelope in the polar craters, and on the moon of Pallas, Pallas B.

  At last the driver announced that the odometer read twenty miles. They had came to a broad semicircular turnout. A sign on an island planter in its middle declared it to be the Solar System headquarters of:

  FRITZ MARSHALL SPACEWAYS

  ESTABLISHED 2050

  The driver swung the Raleigh convertible into the turnout. Above three or four steps cut from reddish stone, and a narrow landing, the entire semicircle was lined with tall glass windows. A revolving door stood in the center, but several coveraled individuals took Llyra’s bags, along with those of her mother and Jasmeen, through an ordinary glass door at one side. The driver shook hands with each of them in turn, and accepted a tip from Ardith. The platinum coins clinked as they hit his palm.

  Llyra couldn’t believe that he actually bowed. “Thank you very much, ma’am. I hope you’ll ride with me again, perhaps on your return from Ceres. It’s always a pleasure to serve one of the Founding Families.”

  Mildly irritated as she always was by such remarks—the Ngus hadn’t really been First anyway, simply among the noisiest—Ardith muttered something polite, and the three of them climbed the steps and went through the revolving door, the first Llyra or Jasmeen had ever seen.

  Inside stood a curve-fronted counter, dominated by an enormous oil portrait of the company’s founder, Fritz Marshall, hanging on the wall behind it. A brass plaque at the bottom of the frame proclaimed that it was “a gift from the grateful people of Mars”. From behind the counter, a pleasant-looking young woman in a company blazer greeted them warmly.

  “The Ngu party? Your transport is ready for you, anytime you wish to depart. There are only about a dozen other passengers, all bound for Ceres, like you.”

  “Where do we go?” Llyra asked somewhat absently.
Through a big floor-to-ceiling window, she could watch the floor of the polar crater, studded as far as she could see with spaceships of various sizes and shapes. The light was harsh, even through tinted glass, and the shadows were coal black, with edges as sharp as a razor. The ship nearest the window was a simple cylinder, its top end bristling with antennae, connected with the crater wall by a large translucent plastic tube.

  “Through that door there, Miss,” the receptionist answered, “which will lead you to that tubewalk outside, which is connected with the ship. I envy you a little: you’ll be travelling aboard the FMSL Beautiful Dreamer one of our lines’ newest and most comfortable vessels.”

  They thanked the young woman and walked to the door, down a short, tidy corridor, and out through a series of mechanical fittings that connected the tube with the offices in the crater wall. Llyra had half expected the tube to have a round floor, and to bounce and sway as they made their way along it, but none of that turned out to be the case.

  It might as well have been made of stone. Llyra wondered how it was done.

  As they approached the end of the tube that was attached to the ship, however, their forward progress was obstructed by an overweight middle-aged woman wearing a garish floral-patterned pants suit. She was speaking and gesturing impatiently to a young man in a Fritz Marshall company blazer, standing behind a portable podium marked “Boarding Attendant”. A middle-aged man standing beside her with a camera on a strap around his neck said nothing, but appeared to be embarrassed.

  “What do you mean you recognize us and we don’t need tickets?” she exclaimed. “Young man, I insist, at the very least, that we all be searched!”

  “I’m sorry, ma’am, but if I did that, I’d probably lose my job for molesting the paying customers. It’s against company policy and Pallatian custom. It’s the grossest possible violation of individual sovereignty.”

  “But—” She appealed to the man standing beside her, probably her long-suffering husband, Llyra decided. He rolled his eyes and looked away.

  The young man went on. “Besides, ma’am, anybody who took a job that required it would have to be some kind of pervert, wouldn’t they? I mean, groping people’s little old grandmothers for a living, all day long?”

  “But what,” she almost screamed it, “if I were carrying a concealed weapon—or a bomb?”

  He shrugged. “Well, I wouldn’t be too happy about the bomb, ma’am. But you can make a bomb these days that resembles an arm or a leg, and has no giveaway chemical or electronic emanations. Hire yourself an amputee to carry it—and boom! You can’t do much about that, can you? On the other hand, if you were a Pallatian—you’re from Earth, aren’t you?”

  “We’re from Bricktown, New Jersey, United States of America, the Earth.”

  “I see. East Americans. Well, if you were a Pallatian, ma’am, I’d be surprised if you weren’t carrying a personal weapon of some kind, a firearm or a laser or a plasma pistol. It’s an important tradition on this asteroid—just as it is on Mars and will be on Ceres. It’s considered socially beneficial, a civic duty, and an indispensible source of the individual liberty we all enjoy.”

  The woman looked to her husband again, but was offered little help. “B-but what if somebody with one of those guns took over your little spaceship?”

  “Tried to take over our little spaceship, you mean,” the young man corrected her. “Ma’am, the guy could consider himself damned lucky if the other passengers filled him full of holes before they spaced him.”

  Her eyes grew big and round. “Spaced him?” Her husband, perhaps entertaining a long-held personal fantasy, attempted to suppress a grin.

  “Sure, ma’am. Put him out the airlock—the door, I mean— without benefit of spacesuit. Not the pleasantest way to die, take my word for it.”

  The woman shuddered visibly. “What a violent place this is!”

  He shook his head. “We practically never have any criminal violence out here in the Belt, ma’am. The cost is simply too high. What’s the annual rate of murder, mugging, and rape where you come from?”

  CHAPTER EIGHT: THE WILD BLACK YONDER

  As I dictate these words, Pallas and Mars are the only Settled Worlds, not counting Earth, and there aren’t that many other places to go yet. But a day will come when dwellers in the Asteroid Belt will travel from world to little world as easily and casually as West Americans now travel from city to city by bus or in their own cars. That sort of freedom of movement comes very close, I think, to being the definition of freedom itself. —The Diaries of Rosalie Frazier Ngu

  Rather disappointing in her external appearance (at least as far as Llyra was concerned), the Fritz Marshall Space Lines’ Beautiful Dreamer turned out to be a cylinder a hundred feet in diameter and a hundred fifty-one feet long, the same proportions as a traditional tomato soup can.

  Andy Warhol would be so proud, she thought.

  However, before the boarding attendant would let them pass (and as soon as he’d managed to quiet down the lady from New Jersey) he had a lecture he had to deliver. Along with a handful of other passengers in the portable anteroom at the end of the boarding tube, just outside the spaceship’s main airlock door, Llyra, Ardith, and Jasmeen gave him their polite attention.

  The floor of the little room, its ceiling, and its walls were stark white, as longstanding tradition required. Four features broke the solid white: a window on either side, showing the crater floor, ring mountains, and a black, starry sky; a metal airlock door belonging to the spaceship, rather than to the anteroom, and a large digital clock counting minutes until liftoff. Just now, a little over an hour remained.

  There was also a transparent plastic lectern to the right of the airlock door, where the boarding attendant stood. As the young man began speaking, a three-dimensional cross section of the spaceship, colorful but partially transparent, formed in the air at his left elbow. As he discussed them, he pointed to various features of it with a finger.

  “Although it reads like it was translated from the original Sumerian into twenty-second century English, I’m sure you’ve read the brochure that they gave you up front,” he opened to polite laughter. “But the Fritz Marshall Space Lines requires me to introduce you formally to the FMSL Beautiful Dreamer, latest and greatest of the fabulous Fritz Marshall fleet, and to explain a little bit about the journey you’re about to make.”

  He turned to the diagram floating beside him. “‘BeeDee‘, as we affectionately call her, is based on what was originally a design for asteroid mining. However, as is often the case in such circumstances, Fritz Marshall eventually discovered that it was far more profitable to provide transportation to asteroid miners, than to mine asteroids, himself.

  “This is, in fact, exactly the same process by which the Strauss brothers’ canvas trousers entered our culture three hundred years ago, during the California Gold Rush, and have remained with us ever since.”

  The attendant pointed to the lowest part of the diagram. “As you can see, BeeDee is a cylinder, divided into eight levels, or decks. The bottom or aftmost deck houses the last word—at least so far—

  in hybrid fusion reactors: the Brown Systems 1.21 gigawatt catalytic Tokamak, along with the three massive Leland-Mazda ion-rocket engines it drives, and a few other engineering utilities peculiar to space travel.”

  Waving his hand up and down the middle of diagram, the young man told them, “Note the central axisway stretching the full length of the ship, with its spiral escalator wrapped around the service core. The next three decks above the reactor room are intended for cargo of every possible kind. These days, of course, we haul a lot more of that, here and there, than passengers—although the company fondly anticipates that this will change once Ceres is terraformed and ready to be settled.”

  He grinned. “Now you’re really going to like this, folks. On the next deck, that’s the fifth level, the Fritz Marshall company proudly offers a recreational-sized swimming pool—the only swimming pool aboard a spac
ecraft in the entire Solar System—and also a fully equipped weight room, convenient centrifuge, and spa with both sauna and hot tub.”

  Seeing a certain look on Jasmeen’s face, Llyra arched her eyebrows innocently and refrained from asking if the pool could be frozen over. “What do you mean by ‘recreational-sized’?” asked another prospective passenger.

  The boarding attendant grinned again, sheepishly, and adjusted the lapels of his blazer. “And here I was hoping that phrase would slide right past you. It means ‘not very big’, I’m afraid, as might be expected of the only swimming pool aboard a spacecraft in the entire Solar System.”

  “I was going to ask you about that,” Llyra couldn’t help herself. Her mother scowled. “Wasn’t there a swimming pool aboard the explorer ship Fifth Force?” She should know; her great grandfather Emerson, her great grandmother Rosalie, and a great many of their friends had taken that ship decades ago, out to the fabled Cometary Halo, halfway to the stars.

  “Fifth Force theoretically crossed Pluto’s orbit long ago,” the attendant replied a bit stiffly. “She isn’t technically in the Solar System any more. Our pool is about forty feet by twenty feet by five feet deep. That’s four thousand cubic feet of water, or about sixteen thousand gallons. That comes to sixty-four thousand quarts, or a hundred twenty-eight thousand pints. Do you remember ‘a pint’s a pound the System round’? The water in our pool masses out at sixty-four tons.”

  “All of which have to be lifted, handled correctly at turnover, and braked,” Llyra suggested.

  The attendant brightened toward her. “That’s absolutely right, young lady, all of which have to be lifted, handled at turnover, and braked.”

  “Excuse me, officer,” said the lady from New Jersey. “What’s with this turnover business you keep talking about? I tried to read about it in that brochure you mentioned, but I couldn’t make heads or tails of it.”

  “Well, you see, Madam—”

  She almost wailed. “It sounds extremely dangerous—do we have to do it?”