Ceres

by L. Neil Smith

  “Next best,” Wilson told her, giving his date a glance. “Asteroid hunter.”

  “Oh.” On this world, unprotected by an atmosphere, hunters were respected.

  The girl’s lower lip was pierced twice for small rings, halfway between the center and the corners of her mouth, and there was a shiny metal stud protruding from her flesh below the center of the lip. When she spoke, Wilson saw at least two shiny bits where her tongue was pierced.

  A similar bauble adorned one side of her nose. The nasal septum was pierced, as well, for a larger ring hanging beneath her nostrils and touching her upper lip. One of her eyebrows had been pierced, and her ears were laden with so much jewelry, set in so many holes, that Wilson wondered why they didn’t simply fold forward and collapse on themselves.

  It wasn’t until later that he remembered her tattoos.

  “So what’s this band that’s playing right now?” Wilson’s companion had to shout. He still couldn’t believe that Amorie was actually here, beside him. She was vastly more beautiful in person—and so much tinier—than speaking with her and seeing her over the SolarNet for the past year had ever prepared him for. And her fragrance was … intoxicating.

  “Only the wazziest neopunk orch in the whole wide warren,” their hostess beamed proprietarily. “It’s our house clatch, don’t you know, Spotty Wankers. And they’re playing Thatcher’s superwazziest noise ever!”

  The lyrics seemed to consist mostly of “I hate you, and I berate you”! The bizarre thing, Wilson thought, was that, despite her slang and the hardware in her mouth, he’d understood every word she’d said, more or less. He’d seen earlier signs that the Moon’s popular culture was currently in the throes of a revival of some of the ugliest music ever produced in the twentieth century. Listening to it made his head throb and his teeth ache. He expected his ears to start bleeding any second.

  They arrived and sat at a table in the second tier along one wall, overlooking the dance floor. Just now, it looked like a great place to get killed. People, young men, mostly, were smashing their chests into one another, or diving headlong off the stage, expecting the crowd to catch them. Sometimes the crowd actually did. Other times—well it looked to him like there was a good chance of being trampled to death. The hostess told them that someone would be along to take their drink orders.

  Wilson had arrived in some pain already. Both of his hands ached from the overhaul he was giving the “coffee grinder” aboard Mighty Mouse’s Girlfriend. It was an item of heavy machinery that pulverized useless stony meteorites and other rubble, reducing them to fine dry powder that could be heated to plasma temperatures by the vessel’s fusion engines and flung out as reaction mass. Wilson’s knuckles stung where he’d barked them on the sharp corners and hard edges of the device. But the overhaul needed doing if his ship were ever to fly again.

  As it was, he’d have to expend some of his precious and dwindling cash for his first hopper full of reaction mass, before he could gather and store more in open space, since whatever reserves Mighty Mouse’s Girlfriend might once have contained had been bled off long since to feed some other lucky vessel in Guzman’s fabulous floating junkyard.

  “I hope you don’t mind coming here, Willie darling.” Amorie leaned forward, over the table, toward him, trying to keep her voice low. The dress she wore was a filmy, insubstantial thing. The back was open to well below her waist, although the skirt brushed the floor behind her. But then rose … well, almost too high in front, and when she leaned forward like she did now, he could see all the way down to her navel. He could also see plainly that she wasn’t wearing anything like a brassiere.

  That garment had fallen out of fashion in the lower-gravity worlds.

  “Wha—what?” Wilson felt himself blush deeply. Amorie had caught his eye and she knew exactly where he’d been looking. His mother and sister were both extraordinarily modest at home, and this was the first time he’d ever seen anything remotely like a naked breast in person. He couldn’t quite see Amorie’s nipples, but it was a close thing.

  She grinned and refrained from sitting up again. Instead, she glanced down at herself and told him, “I sincerely hope you like what you see, my darling Willie. It’s for you. It’s all for you. I made and wore this dress especially so that you could see some of what you’re getting.”

  “I—errm, ah!” Wilson had to clear his throat and start again. Every muscle in his body tingled painfully. There was fire in his veins. He refused to think about what was going on between his legs. And as if by some lovely magic, the obnoxious cacophony of the band had somehow been transformed into a tender ballad. “I thought your people—”

  She nodded. “‘The first meeting in the flesh must be in a public place,’ she quoted with exaggerated solemnity. “Believe me, darling Willie, I’d much rather have put on a t-shirt and a pair of jeans and visited that little ship you’re so proud of. They come off as easily and quickly as any evening dress does. I chose this place because the tourist guides all warned that it was extremely noisy. That way, I figured, we could have at least a little privacy in the middle of the crowd.”

  “I—errm, ah!” Hopelessly lost in the mist of her eyes and the scent of her body, this time Wilson couldn’t even think of what to say.

  “Later on,” she told him huskily, “we can dance.”

  ***

  The gigantic billboard, five hundred feet tall, at least three times as wide as that, and bright enough to be seen for fifty miles, proclaimed:

  BURNS BROTHERS COFFEE * FUEL * FOOD * AIR RESTAURANT

  * MOTEL * SHOWERS LAST CHANCE FOR 1000 MILES

  “That is only about hour and quarter,” Ali observed from behind the big wheel of his brand new pride and joy, a 2031 Rasputin Electric MoonMaster. He added, “Now that they’ve put new surface on highway.” The process of long haul driving on the Moon, he’d explained earlier to his passengers, was about ninety-five percent automated, but from time to time, the road below or the vehicle itself signaled for his attention.

  At this velocity, Llyra thought, somewhere between six and seven hundred miles an hour, the condition of the highway was very largely academic. They’d trundled along at much lower speeds through several of the underground traffic tunnels of Armstrong, when Ali and Saladin had picked them up at their apartment. And they would need a modicum of off-road capability on the dirt roads of the frontier town where they were headed.

  Anywhere above a hundred miles an hour on this highway, however, and magnetic levitation kicked in. The monster vehicle’s dozen tires hadn’t touched the ground since shortly after they’d left Armstrong behind, and they wouldn’t support the vehicle again until they’d arrived at their destination, the System-famous Larsen Far Side Observatory.

  Saladin was in the kitchenette at the opposite end of the machine, just now, trying to get the ancient family samovar to work. Llyra didn’t know what was wrong with the thing. Generating a cloud of colloquial Chechen epithets that no mullah would ever have approved of, he gave up and put a Pyrex container of water in the microwave, instead.

  Sitting at the dining table in the MoonMaster’s well-upholstered, comfortable lounge between Jasmeen and her grandmother, Llyra wished that her brother were here with them, today. But he was a big boy, now. And he was a busy boy, as well, going to the zoo or something with that Amorie creature. It seemed that he only had eyes for her, these days, and she only had eyes for him, apparently. It was both boring and disgusting. They couldn’t keep their hands—or much of anything else—off of each another. Llyra shuddered to imagine what it might be like to have Amorie Samson around all the time, as her sister-in-law.

  As if she knew exactly what Llyra was thinking, Jasmeen turned and grinned at her in sympathy. Julie seemed telepathic this morning, as well.

  “You know what we used to say in the Marines, honey,” she asked, “when one of our guys had gone missing and we were afraid he’d been captured?”

  Llyra found she was almost in tears, “No, Grandm
a, what did you say?”

  “They can kill him but they can’t eat him, it’s against the Geneva Convention.”

  Jasmeen laughed, “I would not be too sure of that!” and then shut up suddenly and blushed. It had sounded more genteel in her head. Most of Julie’s military career, she knew, had been wasted on Mars, in a doomed attempt to suppress a colonial rebellion by Jasmeen’s parents, among others. “But you are correct, is also what we Martians used to say.”

  She and Julie laughed while Llyra looked confused. She’d been vaguely aware that Julie had once been an officially sworn enemy to the Ngus and Khalidovs. She knew very few of the details because they made her uncomfortable. Her grandmother had always been a special, magical spirit to her, her occasional visits to Pallas reason enough to declare a holiday. She knew her grandfather William had won Julie’s heart. That part seemed romantic and somehow made her feel sort of breathless.

  Just imagine, Llyra thought, what it must be like, getting swept off your feet by your mortal enemy, an individual who’d been trying to kill you—and whom you’d been trying to kill—only a little while before. Just imagine. Billy Ngu must have been a pretty persuasive guy.

  For the first time in a long while, the highway began to curve, and the MoonMaster, only a yard above its surface, curved with it, its passengers and everything else inside it banking, so that it looked and felt to them as if it were the surface of the Moon that had tilted. For a while, they could actually sense the speed of the thing—about the same as the speed of sound on Earth. Here, of course, the speed of sound was zero.

  As the road straightened, they crossed an abyss—a deep crater, Llyra thought, rather than some mere crack or chasm—and for a long moment, the highway resembled nothing more than a flimsy, unsupported ribbon casually flung from peak to peak across the crater floor miles below.

  She looked at a display, set in the headliner behind the driver’s seat. Like most of the timepieces on public view in the Moon, it was a “terminator clock”, the round face behind the analog hands (which kept Greenwich Mean Time everywhere on the Earth’s satellite) representing the surface of the Moon, with the observer always at its center. A Lunar Positioning System kept track of the observer’s location, a few major features of the Moon’s surface, and the terminator—the hard line between a day that lasted two weeks, and a night that did the same. There was a clock exactly like this one—only much bigger—opposite the “Zamboni end”, in each of the rinks at the Heinlein Center.

  It was dark, just now, where they were headed, which was a good thing for astronomers, she guessed. Jasmeen’s uncles had spent the observatory’s daylight hours as they were accustomed to doing, in Armstrong, minding some business and catching up on any recreational opportunities they might have missed out on over the past couple of weeks.

  Looking at the men, Llyra didn’t want to think about what that implied.

  ***

  As he pushed his way out through the swinging slatted doors, he wondered once again how he always seemed to get into messes like this one.

  He’d been told, when he came downstairs from his rented room this morning, into the saloon that served the place for a lobby, that he’d had too much whiskey the previous evening, and gotten into a noisy argument of some kind with the notorious Sanddune Sandy Malloy, known far and wide throughout the southwest as the Alamosa Kid. Of course he had no memory of it, but apparently wiser, cooler (and far more sober) heads had prevailed, and the consummation politely deferred until noon today.

  High noon, somebody had said, laughing.

  At present, his own head ached, his guts were cramped, his hands shook, and his vision was blurry—it was the worst hangover he’d ever had. That was why, in addition to the .45 caliber 1858 Remington revolver he wore on his right hip—taken from a Union officer he’d killed during the War for Southern Independence, he’d later paid the factory two dollars to convert it to cartridge use—he carried a Winchester’s lever action saddle carbine chambered for the same pistol caliber.

  He also wore hand-lasted Lucchese boots from El Paso, Texas, a pair of huge-roweled Mexican spurs, what the catalog called a “pearl- gray” Stetson hat with rolled brim and Montana peak, a bib-fronted shirt, horse leather vest, a huge red paisley bandana, and over his tan canvas trousers, a pair of heavy leather chaps. He probably didn’t need those today, but he felt more comfortable with them than without them.

  Outside, it was so bright that it hurt his teeth. He glanced back into the dim interior of the saloon. The Regulator clock over the bar said it was exactly five minutes of noon. And there was that craven dog Sandy now, across the furrowed street, at the end of the block on the boardwalk in front of the general store, just one step away from the corner of the building where he could take cover once the shooting commenced.

  The air was hot and still. It smelled of dust and horses. High overhead a pair of buzzards circled as if they knew what was about to happen.

  He pulled a rolling paper and a pouch of tobacco from his shirt pocket, rolled himself a cigarette one-handed, put it in his mouth, struck a match on his belt buckle and lit it, savoring that first good taste.

  Another figure stood at the other end of the street in front of the livery stable, another on the roof of the drygoods store, and yet another sat in an open window of a room in the hotel over Delmonico’s. They hadn’t told him he would have to face not only Sanddune Sandy, but his brothers, Durango Dave, Gunnison Gus, and Montrose Monty. Each of them was known, in his respective social circles, as the Alamosa Kid.

  Sandy drew and snapped a quick shot off at him. Too quick: it hit the narrow lathe-turned column holding up the balcony over the saloon and threw off splinters and whitewash. Horses tethered at the hitching post tossed their heads in protest. He even thought he heard a woman scream.

  Having anticipated Sandy’s next move, he lifted his levergun, leaned its receiver against the battle-scarred column, and put a bullet precisely between where the man had stood and the sheltering corner of the general store. In effect, Sandy walked right into a 255-grain flat-nosed slug going 1000 feet per second, and went down hard with it, skidding off the end of the wooden sidewalk and over three or four steps into the street until only his mule-ears could be seen.

  Times like these, the smell of blackpowder smoke was like a tonic to him. Without waiting, he shot the figure standing on the roof—he didn’t know if it was Dave or Gus; the boys were twins and nobody could tell them apart, not even their mother—and the one lurking in the window. The latter ducked or collapsed back into the room, but the former pitched frontwards over the edge of the roof, hit the porch covering over the boardwalk, and rolled off into the street onto his face.

  Even as he wheeled around the column to confront the man in front of the livery stable, he knew he would be too late. It was Monty, who fired both barrels of a shotgun he hadn’t seen—thinking Monty only had a sixgun, he’d taken care of the other brothers first. It was a long reach, even for a 10-guage, about seventy-five yards, and when half a dozen of the pellets struck him in the leg, they only felt like bee-stings and failed to penetrate the tough, seasoned leather of his chaps.

  Theodora Gibson, the handsome proprietress of the hotel over Delmonico’s, with whom he’d spent many a pleasanter moment than this, leaned out the window to tell him that Gus was dead. Nodding, he raised his rifle and fired twice. So much for Montrose Monty Malloy, most alliterative of the four notorious Malloy brothers of Alamosa, Colorado.

  He hadn’t even drawn his revolver. He took another draw on his cigarette.

  Holding the Winchester in his left hand again, he reached to his belt buckle with his right and turned it over. The scene faded, along with his artificial hangover symptoms, and he was in his comfortable hotel room in Leinster City. He pulled the flimsy VR helmet from his face, disconnected it from the computer on his bedside table, rolled it up, and put it in a drawer. He swung his legs over, stepped into his loafers, took his sportscoat from the chair, and pocketed t
he computer.

  He lifted his pistol, a Syrtis Systems coherent plasma gun—or CPG—from the bedside table, holstered it, and stepped into the corridor.

  The fastest gun on the Moon was ready for work.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE: THE ESMERALDA

  Someday we will have the means to reach the stars in a reasonable amount of time. We will eventually meet people who will think surprisingly like us, but who probably won’t resemble us at all. When they refer to the language of our planet, they will mean English. When they refer to its cuisine, they will mean Chinese.

  Make mine kung pao—extra spicy! —The Diaries of Rosalie Frazier Ngu

  Ali Khalidov’s 2131 Rasputin Electric Moonmaster carried Llyra and her companions into the 14-day Lunar night before she fully realized it.

  Abruptly, Saladin leaned toward Llyra, “We are soon to be arriving at what has aptly been called ‘back of beyond’. We are coming here in first place because of something that happened down on Earth in winter of 2089. Is something everybody on Earth knows about. You are not of Earth, little one, not for three generations. Do you know what is happening?”

  Julie had started to say something to the physicist, but held her tongue, instead, and waited. Saladin’s question had been addressed to Llyra, anyway. Although Ali’s big vehicle had just taken them across the terminator, the sky didn’t look particularly different—they weren’t all that much accustomed to looking directly at the sun in any case—but the territory around them now, except for a ridge or mount with a crest or peak still standing in sunlight for a while, was lit only by the pale blue glow of Earth. And even that was just about to set.

  “Everybody in the Solar System knows about that, Dr. Uzhakhov,” Llyra replied. “On December 5th, 2089, an asteroid hit the Earth near the city of Ashland, in Ohio, which was a province of the Old United States. It killed about fifteen million people, and made a new Great Lake.”