She had a hell of an imagination that way. Good thing modern e-mail was private.
As best he could under the circumstances, he replied to that bit of her message before he ran the rest of what she’d sent him. He could see she’d been in her own quarters, a tiny one-bunk cabin aboard her family’s asteroid hunter ship. She’d decorated it with filmy, floaty, sheer stuff, mostly the color of Earth’s skies. They usually ran their vessel at a tenth of a gee, and the hangings rippled in the air like water.
“I have to sign off, now, my hero, but before I do, I think we know each other well enough by now to get to know each other a little better.” With those words, she opened her clothes—he hadn’t even noticed before this what she was wearing—more blue filmy stuff—and backed away from the video pickup so he could see all of her at once.
He nearly fell off his chair. Her breasts were fuller, firmer than he’d imagined, her belly flat, her—He wouldn’t be getting any sleep tonight.
Again.
***
Ingrid Andersson sat at her desk with her forehead in her hands, about half a micron away, she realized, from tears or from maniacal laughter.
Why had these things started happening to her? She couldn’t help how she felt about Adam, or that she’d overheard Ardith’s outburst. It had been extremely noisy and the doors and walls were thin on this world. And, as Adam—Dr. Ngu—had said out in the plaza, today was not a holiday. They had fallen behind and there was work to catch up on.
Important work. Vital work. She had no choice, being here, in the next room, where she was forced to hear her boss’s wife’s lunatic bellowing.
As she began to calm down, Ingrid found herself mystified all over again. It was true, her boss had a beautiful young daughter and a handsome, courageous son to think about. But the children were both very nearly grown up, certainly least by Pallatian standards. So why did he put up with that screaming, hysterical bitch—there, she’d finally said it (or at least thought it)—when he didn’t have to any more?
Ingrid couldn’t bring herself quite far enough to imagine exactly what kind of consort—partner—mate—she might be to Adam, or even compare herself in any way to Ardith. But she’d been brought up by both of her parents to believe that a woman must try as hard as she could to be a perfect companion to a man, in any way he wanted her to be.
She could do that.
It was a very old-fashioned ideal, she knew, some might even say sexist or downright backward. But had any notion for organizing human society that had come afterward, ever produced any greater happiness for men or women? All sorts of other ideas and images suddenly cascaded into her mind. Ingrid swallowed hard, undid the top button of her blouse, and turned her desk fan up another notch. At her best, Ardith Ngu was nothing but a cold-blooded scientist. What could a woman like that possibly know about sex—er, passion?
Suddenly Adam stood beside her desk. “Please—Oh, I’m so sorry, Ingrid, I didn’t mean to startle you when you were lost in thought. I get that way, too, sometimes, in case you haven’t noticed. Please find Mrs. Ngu’s—that is, my mother’s—hopper pilot, will you? He’s probably out in the gamera tunnels hanging around with the off-duty crews. They have a kind of a pub down there. Tell him that she won’t be returning to Pallas with him and Manager Blumenfeld, but that Mrs. Ngu—my wife—will.”
That shook Ingrid completely out of her unhappy (if stimulating) reverie. She tried being properly guilty about it, but the feeling simply wasn’t there. Instead, a sense of even greater warmth pervaded her body, making her head spin and her hands shake. Adam’s wife was going away again! So were his mother, his daughter, and even his son. For a while—a very long while, perhaps—she would have him all to herself!
Hope had bloomed again for Ingrid.
***
But what Adam was thinking in that moment would have disappointed her.
Perhaps, he mused resignedly, with everyone he loved heading out for Pallas or the Moon within the next few hours, he was about to have something of a break from the soap opera that his life had somehow become when he wasn’t looking. It was possible that he could get back to living the safer, saner life of the mind. While the transponder planting crews were catching up, maybe he could get in some journal reading.
Ardith would eventually discover the present he’d found her and realize all over again that he loved her. Things would slowly get better.
His in-laws, Ardith’s parents, had been deeply involved with the Jupiter habitat project for years. He was fairly familiar with its modified O’Neill design. Five miles long, two hundred fifty million tons of spinning metal, all alone in the night, it would combine some of the best opportunities for scientific research in history with a wonderful luxury hotel featuring the most spectacular scenery in the Solar System.
But he wanted to know all about the Martian dome Sheridan Sinclair had mentioned. Hellas Planitia was one of the lowest places on the Red Planet, with the densest air, but it was also one of the coldest. Before Mars had acquired a breathable atmosphere, frost used to gather in it—frost made of carbon dioxide. Maybe an atmospheric dome on an already terraformed planet made a little more sense than he’d first believed.
Idly, he wondered what that perfume was that Ingrid was wearing.
***
Well, she’d done it.
She’d finally done it.
Ardith threw what few things she’d taken out, back into her only suitcase. She wanted to be out of this room before Adam came back to it. She wished she could be gone from this asteroid sooner than was likely. She felt grateful she didn’t have to wait for the regularly scheduled passenger liner. Three long weeks. That would have been unbearable.
Yes, she’d finally driven her entire family, practically everyone she’d ever loved, away from her—all at the same time! There ought to be some kind of category for it in the Guinness book of records. Adam would stay here on Ceres because it was his job, a job he loved, and because it kept him safely millions of miles away from her insane rages.
Here was a little handful of underthings that needed washing. She decided they could wait. She stuffed them in her suitcase and forgot them.
Wilson, her one and only living son, was travelling downsystem, to Earth’s Moon, to buy himself a spaceship, to find himself a new life like all young men must eventually do or remain children, and no doubt to claim himself another kind of prize, as well. He was a hero, after all, very handsome and well-poised. It surprised his mother mildly that the idea of her son having a romance didn’t scandalize or dismay her the way it should. Instead, she hoped sincerely that he was better rewarded with regard to that part of his life than his poor father had been.
What was this? A fist-sized gray velvet bag she didn’t recognize, tucked into the inside pocket of her suitcase with her jewelry and accessories.
And Llyra, her lovely and amazingly talented baby daughter, was going downsystem, as well. The half dozen developmental physiologists she’d quietly consulted without Llyra’s knowledge had warned her that, at the very best, it would take no less than two years of intensive training before she could hope to be competitive against athletes who had grown up at one sixth of a gee. At worst, Llyra could destroy her beautiful little body and wind up crippled for life. And her abject failure of a mother wouldn’t be there to help and comfort her if it happened.
Instead, having disgraced and embarrassed herself for no reason at all—and for the last goddamned time, she swore grimly to herself—she was tucking her tail between her legs, and heading home to Pallas, a prospect that offered her no comfort at all. Her parents were long gone—they would be among the first to live in the completed Jupiter orbital habitat.
Inside the bag, she found six rough transparent stones the size of her thumb. She knew at once what they were: asteroidal diamonds, clots of kerogen trapped in the centers of only the largest carbonaceous chondrites, crushed and heated for billions of years until they became pure, allotropic carbon. These were abo
ut eight carats each, and were accompanied by a strip a flimsy plastic certifying that their purchase by Dr. Adam Ngu from the Curringer Corporation’s deep boring teams at the poles—where they were placing the cable piers—was legal and proper.
The monetary figure had been blacked out.
Adam’s contract permitted him to do things like this occasionally. Without a politically powerful cartel to inflate their value by making them artificially scarce, the uncut stones were worth, at the most, a tenth of one percent of what they might have been on Earth a hundred years ago. But they were still valuable and very beautiful, a gift of love.
On the back, a handwritten note: My darling Ardith, Adam. She sat on the unmade bed, put her face in her hands, sobbing helplessly. How was it possible that a man like this one could waste his love on her?
She would go home, then, and do her science—it was the only damn thing she’d ever been any good at—pushing back the barriers of the unknown and all that nonsense. If the day should come that Adam asked her for a divorce, then she would acquiesce quietly, no matter how much it hurt, as a sort of penance. She couldn’t kid herself that it would never happen. She hadn’t missed the way that Ingrid, that little Asian secretary of his, looked at him. If not her, then it would be somebody else.
Eventually.
Aside from her professional colleagues, Ardith would remain all by herself in that big dark house on Pallas, possibly for the rest of her life.
And the Zacharenkos were notoriously long-lived.
PART TWO: ONE SIXTH GEE
The so-called “Cretaceous-Tertiary Event”, put an end to the dinosaurs sixty-five million years ago. A similar occurrence, a hundred forty million years earlier, the “Permian-Triassic Event”, killed off ninety percent of the planet’s species. There have been perhaps as many as a dozen of these “Extinction Level Events” in the history of the planet.
Human beings are the first species with the ability to understand these events. Since we’re about fifteen million years overdue for another one, we must also become the first with the ability to prevent them.
To establish perspective, the calamity which has brought us here together, the recent, horrific cataclysm in and around Ashland, Ohio—a perfectly natural tragedy that snuffed out fifteen million lives and created a sixth Great Lake in the center of the North American continent—doesn’t even come close to qualifying as one of these events.
—Dr. Evgeny Zacharenko Addressing the Ashland Event Commission
Of the Solar Geological Society Curringer, Pallas, August 9, 2095
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: GRAVITIC SHOCK
Taking a captured asteroid apart can be rather like dismantling a whale aboard 19th and 20th century factory ships on Earth’s oceans. If it’s small enough to move around, it’s small enough to turn beneath your tools and yield up riches, layer by layer, until it’s nothing more than a handful of worthless—and harmless—pebbles. —The Diaries of Rosalie Frazier Ngu
“Homebase, this is ‘Clara Barton’ leaving ACCS Bay 13, Slip 5 as dispatched, two cases of G-shock, both young Pallatian women. Do you copy?”
All around her, it seemed, bright lights were flashing red and blue. From somewhere outside, she could hear the plaintive wail of a siren.
Despite calling itself “Clara Barton”, a name Llyra thought she recognized from her history lessons, the voice coming from the front of the vehicle was definitely male, low-pitched, and a bit gruff. She couldn’t see who was speaking. Strapped down, flat on her back, she was looking up through a plastic transparency at what appeared to be the ceiling of a cave ripping by overhead, surrealistically illuminated by flashing, whirling lights.
“Copy, Clara,” came a woman’s voice, filtered by some sort of communications system. “Treat as indicated and transport to L.E.I., stat.”
“We are in transit. Say again, Homebase, L.E.I.?”
“That’s correct, Clara, L.E.I.”
“L.E.I. Roger that, Homebase, this is ‘Clara Barton’, out.”
***
When the William Wilde Curringer arrived at the landing terminal of the Arthur C. Clark Spaceport, Llyra had to be carried off on a stretcher.
To her eternal chagrin, Jasmeen came off Billie on the stretcher right behind Llyra. After a brief, exciting ambulance ride they were both rather grateful they hadn’t had to watch through a front window, they were greeted by attendants and technicians from the Life Extension Institute, the facility responsible for keeping Llyra’s grandmother young.
Julie had called the facility while the ship was still in orbit.
It had been a good flight from Ceres, Llyra thought, up to a point—the point where she had to be carried off on a stretcher. On Ceres, the small corporation spaceship Billie had sent an automated landing pod down to the asteroid’s surface, which she, Julie, Jasmeen, and Wilson had boarded via the airlock of one of the project’s gamera, driven by Lindsay, while Arleigh had observed and offered unnecessary advice.
Goodbyes were prolonged and tearful; Billie had to make an extra orbit while they went on. Llyra’s mother, who would herself be leaving within the hour for Pallas, came to say farewell and express all of a mother’s misgivings about sending both of her children—or maybe it was all three of her children—more than a hundred million miles away. For Llyra, the worst of it was that her father didn’t come to see her off. It wasn’t that she didn’t understand, with her mother there and all, just that it hurt so much anyway.
When the little shuttle finally reached the Billie, in orbit about Ceres, Sheridan Sinclair had already been aboard for some time. “It is important to make certain,” he informed them grandly, “that all is made as commodious as possible for our most esteemed and honored guests.”
Two of his guests, Llyra and Wilson, hadn’t experienced anything gravitically more rigorous than the one tenth gee of Ceres. Two more of Sinclair’s guests—Julie and Jasmeen—had spent significant portions of their lives in gravity fields twice as strenuous as the one sixth gee the ship would gradually build up to during its voyage Moonward.
“It’s pretty clear,” Julie observed as they came aboard through an airlock in the vessel’s side near the pilots’ compartment, “that none of us is going to be wandering around very much for the next few hours.
The little vessel, she told Llyra and Jasmeen, was about the size of a small corporate jet on Earth. There wasn’t a lot of room, they agreed.
Sinclair conducted them to enormous, overstuffed chairs that did double service, he explained, as acceleration couches once Billie started moving under her own power. Instead of being designed the way Beautiful Dreamer had been, as a simple, utilitarian multi-leveled cylinder, Billie, a cylinder with a bulge at one end for the flight deck, looked to Llyra something like a wingless commercial airliner, or even an ancient bus from old movies she’d seen about life back on Earth.
“If you’ll glance forward, you’ll notice that there’s a bulkhead with a door. It’s intended as much for the privacy of this vessel’s passengers as for any security purposes. On the other side of it are the traditional work stations for a flight crew of three, the ship’s pilot, the ship’s copilot, and a flight engineer who also serves as communications officer.”
Aft of the flight compartment bulkhead were a dozen rows of three passenger seats with a broad carpeted aisle separating one of the seats from the others in each row. “Each seat features a screenfield generator on the seatback ahead of it,” Sinclair told them, “so we can offer various choices of programming, either in recorded form, or transmitted in real time from the Earth or the Moon. There are also several ports for different models of personal computer or media player.”
Llyra noticed that Wilson immediately got his computer out and logged onto the SolarNet, no doubt to commune with his dearly beloved (and embarrassingly boring) Amorie. Her brother would be as good as not even here, for the rest of the voyage, however long it happened to last.
“What’s this?” Llyra asked, as Mr. Sinclair
showed them all of the technological gadgetry available to them. It was an oddly-shaped port beside a palm-sized door in the back of the seat ahead of her. Julie and Jasmeen were already watching an old 2D movie together, a classic 21st century western starring the legendary David Boreanaz and Lexa Doig.
“Virtual Reality,” he told her, opening the little panel. Inside was a fist-sized piece of tan fabric, porous and open as cheesecloth, covered with tiny, glittering metallic points connected by a mesh of fine wiring. Unfolded, it was obvious that the object was intended to cover the head and face. The wiring all came together in a slender cable ending in a plug that fit the peculiar port Llyra had asked about.
Reaching deeper into the recess, Sinclair removed a little plastic basket that stayed connected to the seatback by a lightweight bead chain.
“And here’s the software!” he exclaimed. The basket offered three rows of brightly-colored plastic objects about the size of an old fashioned twenty-five cent piece. “You can be a Roman gladiator, a West American cowboy, a British seaman in the Napoleonic Wars, or any one of fifteen other things.”
Llyra grinned. “How about a champion figure skater?”
“I’ll talk to the manufacturer,” Sinclair laughed, “as soon as we get home.”
***
The changes came, as nearly as Llyra could remember afterward, at some point after the Billie had gradually accelerated to about one eighth of a standard Earth gravity, halfway between that of Ceres and the Moon. Both she and her coach had managed to endure a much greater amount of gravity than that, Jasmeen having grown up in the one third gravity of Mars, and her young student having tried out Lunar gravity for a few hours, at least, in the centrifuge aboard the Beautiful Dreamer.
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