Ceres

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Ceres Page 28

by L. Neil Smith


  “I’m thinking maybe I should finish overhauling and refitting Mighty Mouse’s Girlfriend, and sell her for three times what I paid for her, as Lafcadio was planning to do, and go back to work on Ceres.”

  “Where you belong?” Julie asked, arching her eyebrows.

  He met her gaze. “Something like that, sure. If Dad will have me.”

  “Why shouldn’t he?” he asked. “You think your father’s likely to be angry or ashamed of you because you got your heart broken?”

  He sat up. “Wow! You know, somewhere down deep inside, that’s exactly what I was thinking.”

  “I knew you were. Remind me sometime to tell you some stories about him when he was your age. He was the king of broken hearts, himself.”

  Wilson grinned ruefully and shook his head. “Sometimes I think he still is.”

  She nodded. “Me, too.”

  Julie put an arm around her grandson’s big shoulder. “Look here, Honey, you can’t throw your whole dream away because one corner of it turned sour. I’m going to tell you something that you won’t believe right now. But I solemnly promise you that a day will come when you finally realize that this was the best thing that ever happened to you.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR: SAVE THE SKY

  There is more than one kind of courage. One is the physical willingness, despite great fear, to leap into the jaws of death. The other is to maintain a difficult—sometimes unpopular—effort for years or even decades, despite loneliness, privation, or public derision. Of the two, the latter is less easy, but more likely to produce lasting results.

  It is also, by far, the rarer.

  When those who have earned great wealth legitimately, by demonstrating that latter kind of courage, are criticized or attacked, it is usually by those who lack it altogether. —The Diaries of Rosalie Frazier Ngu

  The fastest gun in the Moon wasn’t in the Moon at this particular moment.

  At this particular moment, he had concealed himself in a kitchen cupboard he had folded his entire length into, onboard “L-Sex”. He had held the position, knees pressed against his ears, breathing shallowly since there was no room to breathe deeply, for slightly more than two hours.

  That was nothing, of course. As a young Special Forces sergeant in East America’s ill-fated war in easternmost Siberia, twenty years ago, he’d been captured by a mixed force of Chinese, Koreans, and Russian mercenaries, taken to a small camp on the Manchurian border, forced into smaller boxes than this, and kept there for days, or even weeks. They hadn’t bothered to interrogate him. He didn’t possess any valuable information, and they had known it. They had simply wanted to see him suffer.

  When the P.O.W. camp was overrun by his own side’s mercenaries, he had been made to walk back three hundred kilometers to his old unit. In the hospital, his superiors had debriefed him around the clock for weeks, employing drugs and electronic “stimulation” to make absolutely sure he was telling them the whole truth concerning what he’d been put through.

  The day of his discharge, he’d robbed a company armory and deserted. Alone, laden with weapons, he’d retraced the three hundred klicks to the ruins of the camp, then another hundred to where they’d relocated. The raid that had delivered him into the hands of what he’d ceased to think of as his own side had not been successful in any other respect. On returning, he’d killed every one of his former tormentors, mostly with his bare hands.

  Following that, he’d walked out, living off the country, until he reached India, three years later, where he established a new identity—he’d had no money to begin with, but he was very good at certain high-paying tasks—and let his old self remain listed as Missing In Action.

  He doubted by then that anybody cared.

  But that was then and this was now. Hearing both ships break with the station and depart, he pushed the cupboard open with an elbow, and began unfolding his long legs above the kitchen countertop. As soon as he could, he used a personal phone (not his own) to call the computer he’d left aboard his own rental vessel, and ordered it to come get him. As he waited for ship and circulation to return, he reached back into the cupboard for an item he’d left there, and placed another call.

  “Oh. It’s you,” said the voice at the other end. Please wait for one minute while I take this somewhere where we can talk privately.”

  The man sitting on the kitchen countertop heard the other man get out of a spring-loaded desk chair, open a door, and close it again. Pretty clearly, he’d locked himself in the bathroom.

  “Very well. What have you got?”

  “Switch on your video,” the man in the kitchen replied.

  “This is necessary?’

  “If you want to see it.” He held it before the pickup. “East American fragmentation grenade. Depleted uranium. Would have blown the place to bits, where it was, on the fusion reactor. I came because I knew one of your subjects was coming soon, found it, defanged it, got it off the reactor just in time. A pair of horny young grad students got here just before your subject did and almost interrupted me.”

  “Any idea who is responsible?”

  “The individual who planted it I didn’t recognize. With the disposable push unit I attached to it, the body will probably burn up in the sun, given a decade or so. I only have suspicions about the client. It’s typical of the work and style of Null Delta Em.”

  ***

  “What do you mean, it just didn’t go off?”

  Anna Wertham Savage, world-acclaimed author of the bestselling book Massquake! (now in its fifty-seventh printing), and leader of the Mass Movement, wasn’t having one of her better days. In fact, it was by far the worst day she could remember since that young criminal Wilson Ngu had single-handedly wiped out Null Delta Em’s valiant Environmental Defense Brigade, and been given a medal and money for it.

  Come to think of it, the same people were here now who were here then. P.E. “Honest Paul” Luegner, leader of Null Delta Em, occupied the sofa this time, and Johnnie “the Fish” Crenicichla, a go-between who worked for both organizations, sat in the most comfortable chair. Aside from that, the only other difference was that the portrait on the wall above her desk was that of the eternally blessed Paul Erlich, instead of Rachael Carson, who had recently fallen out of political fashion.

  Savage had not thrown Carson’s framed portrait away, however, but stored it in a closet. Day to day changes in the acceptability of historic personalities were unpredictable. Sometimes it seemed that some people were far more politically active after they were dead than before.

  “That’s right, Annie,” Luegner told her. He’d just returned from a rare visit to the Moon on the very Null Delta Em business they were discussing now. “The damn thing should have been several thousand tons of rapidly-dispersing metallic confetti by now, floating around in an unnatural and decaying orbit. Instead, it’s still the very picture of technological health. We have no idea why, or of what happened to our operative.”

  “It’s so difficult to get good help these days.” Crenicichla looked unhappy. “Meanwhile we’re standing out in public with our flies open, and we have no effective counter-statement to what’s happening on Ceres, later on this week.” This pair of idiots had it easy, he thought. They didn’t have to report upstairs to “You-Know-Who”, the powerful and faceless men and women who were the real controllers of everything that happened, both politically and economically, in East America.

  He’d just come from the paneled boardroom of the ancient Boston Bank where they met—he still felt as if he’d been chewed on—and he was expected back there this afternoon, presumably for more of the same.

  In despair, Savage gazed out the office window at her beloved City of Five Colleges. In a world that often sped by at a blurring speed, this refuge from cupidity and avarice never changed, except for the better. It couldn’t change, because change was against the law. The Amherst board of governors had recently managed to push the legal limit on visible technology backward, from the originally vote
d-on 2000, to 1950. All over town, construction scaffolds across the faces of buildings were helping to eradicate another fifty years of false progress. Streets were being scoured for automobiles of inappropriate vintage, and this time, there was a dress code to compel compliance with.

  Perhaps in that spirit, she wouldn’t own a 3DTV set and almost never read a newspaper or magazine, so she was often behind the times. Now she braced herself for another set of outrages. “I’m not supposed to know about things like this observatory business. And I don’t know what’s going on on Ceres. I’ve been too busy recording lectures for distribution.”

  “And hiding out in this toy town of yours.” Luegner rolled his eyes. “Honestly, Annie, I don’t see how you can hope to change the world without keeping updated on what it is and what it’s turning into.”

  Indignantly, Savage retorted, “I know perfectly well what the world is, Paul—I do travel, you know, on the lecture circuit—and I also know all too well what it’s turning into, thanks to nothing but greed.”

  More and more—perhaps because of forty-odd lectures she gave every year, mostly in North America and Europe, but all around the globe, and despite the studied cynicism of these two men and others like them—the threat of worldwide gravitic catastrophe was real to her.

  “The danger looms larger,” she would tell them, “with every ship that lands on the planet, bearing cargo from the Moon, from Mars, and especially from the Asteroid Belt. And now, despite my warnings, despite the ill-considered but understandable threats from Null Delta Em to destroy them before they can be completed, there is talk of building so-called ’space elevators’ in equatorial South America and Africa, so that even more life-threatening alien mass can be imported from outer space.”

  Of course they wouldn’t listen to her in South America and Africa, where she had never been invited to speak, and where projects like the space elevator offered false promises of ending centuries of poverty among the masses. Increasingly, in her mind’s eye—in her dreams, as well—she saw the Earth’s crust slow, relative to the motion of the core. She saw it slip and crumble, worldwide, so that in a single day, a single hour, humanity and all of its works were shattered and ground to dust, ending six thousand years of history, of Sumeria, Babylon, Egypt, and Rome, of Michelangelo and Mozart, in flame and smoke and horror.

  “Annie!”

  “What?” She blinked. “Oh, sorry. Woolgathering, I’m afraid.”

  “Where did you go?” Luegner asked her, looking concerned. “For a moment, there, I thought you’d had a stroke. We were about to discuss Adam Ngu. He and his company are about to do something significant on Ceres.”

  She nodded. “I’ve been concentrating hardest on space elevators for the past few weeks, Paul, and I haven’t been paying much attention to Ceres. Anyway, there’s never very much in the news now about the asteroids—”

  “Because,” Crenicichla broke in, “we arrange it that way. There’s plenty happening out there all right. What Paul is talking about, on Ceres, they’ve got their plastic envelope down on the surface, welded together, and tested for leaks. Before they start stringing the steel cable to hold it down, they’ll hold a big ceremony, and inject the first generation of tailored microbes into the soil. It’ll generate a poisonous reducing atmosphere at about the same rate that they string the cables.”

  Luegner nodded. “They’re going to throw a party at the end of the week to celebrate this stage of completion. We’d hoped destroying Larsen Farside’s orbiting observatory would throw cold water on their enthusiasm. Now we’ve got a missing agent, his weapon—and possibly his fingerprints—in the hands of the enemy, and a party about to start.”

  “I told you I’m not supposed to know about these things, Paul!”

  “It isn’t pretty,” Crenicichla agreed. “That’s the plain truth. I could probably use a large dose of credible deniability, myself. The reason I asked you to meet me here today, all three of us, that is—although ordinarily, we’re never even supposed to be together, let alone seen together—is that something extraordinary has happened, something absolutely unprecedented.” He reached into his stylish (for Amherst) two-toned 1950s sportcoat and extracted two folded sheets of paper.

  He handed one to Savage. the other to Luegner, then held up one of his own. “Careful,” he warned them. “That’s flash paper, tissue soaked with a nitrate and dried. There’s another chemical on one corner. All you do is stomp it, or put it on a hard surface and strike it with something. It bursts into flame and burns so quick it’s like it wasn’t there.”

  “So what’s so remarkable about this?” Luegner asked. “I seems to outline a basic Null Delta Em mission—albeit a rather ambitious one.”

  “And why am I being told about it in advance?” Savage wanted to know.

  “It’s remarkable because it won’t happen for about eighteen months—it’s partly dependent on Adam Ngu’s schedule—but instead of letting us pick our target as we usually do, and decide how to take it, this mission has been planned in detail by the folks who pay our salaries.”

  “And I—” Savage began.

  “You’re being told about it, Annie, because the Mass Movement will make a case against Ngu and his cohorts for us, from now until the big moment. This will be an exceptionally violent and bloody action; we’ll want at least a fraction of the voting public to believe it was justified.”

  Luegner peered at his sheet of paper and whistled. “Violent and bloody hardly describes it! They’re looking to change the course of history!”

  “That’s the idea, Paul. As you see, Ngu’ll hold another ceremony the day the last cable is in place and he injects the second designer microbe to kill off the first and begin generating a nitrogen-oxygen atmosphere. A few hours before that happens—we’re still considering the timing—Null Delta Em will strike, stealing Ngu’s thunder, demonstrating the danger of traveling, working, living, and building in space. The primary team has already been selected and has started training.”

  “That’s enough!” Savage exclaimed. “I don’t want to know any more! I don’t want to know what I already know! I’ll concentrate on Ngu and the terraformation of Ceres if I’m ordered to—although the space elevators are a far worse threat and there’s the danger of simply publicizing Ngu and his efforts—but I demand not to be told any more!”

  “Okay … ” Crenicichla rose and put on the straw fedora that went with his jacket, pleated slacks, and two-tone shoes. “We all have our orders. Read ‘em and burn ‘em. Paul, why don’t you come with me? We have some items to discuss, and I can show my ‘brand new’ Kaiser Henry J.”

  ***

  Contract ice.

  This morning—it happened to be Christmas morning—they were alone, not just on this sheet, but in the entire six-sheet facility, a vast cavern that always reminded Llyra of the salt mines she’d seen in photographs taken on the Earth. The music coming over the Heinlein’s public address system was from Trinward’s haunting Lost Fifth Force suite.

  Wearing her long, black, heavy coat that nearly touched the ice—a tradition with skating coaches; underneath she might easily have been wearing sweats, an evening gown, or daylight fluorescent hotpants and a matching halter top—Jasmeen stood at the rink gate nearest the main lobby doors, watching Llyra and making movies with her pocket computer.

  Llyra sped diagonally across the ice, from one rounded corner the other, until, almost at the boards, as the powerful music swelled to one of its many crescendos, she suddenly leaped upward, six, eight, ten, twelve feet above the ice, turning in the air once, twice, three times, then three and a half, and landing smoothly, trailing leg at full extension, light as a feather, without any impact noise, skating backwards.

  For both of them, it was a wonderful moment, and fully appropriate to a holiday they were celebrating by doing the work they loved best. After a long, dry season, it was Llyra’s first successful triple Axel—in the Moon. It had once been estimated—back in the century of a fifty-state Ame
rica—that a double Axel cost a skater’s parents ten thousand dollars, and the skater herself perhaps as many as a thousand falls.

  Llyra’s first triple Axel had happened on Pallas, at the Brody, a long time before she had met Jasmeen, when she was an athletically precocious six years old. This morning she’d done it in three and one third times the gravity she’d grown up in, after at least a thousand unsuccessful attempts, and “only” six months of nearly superhuman effort.

  “Ta-da!” she sang as she skated back to her Chechen coach with a great big grin. Jasmeen was grinning, too, and there were tears in her eyes, as well. She grabbed Llyra when she arrived and hugged her until she squeaked. They both took a big drink of water from plastic bottles they’d brought with them, then decided to give the triple Axel another try. It was important, because it was the doorway to the quadruple jumps.

  “I have often wondered what it means, this ‘ta-da’.”

  “It means, ‘Lookie what I did!’”

  It was equally important because there was a new and urgent reason for Llyra to perform well and get along quickly to higher levels. She and Jasmeen had seen “the” commercial for the first time on 3DTV last night—Llyra’s commercial—the commercial that Sheridan Sinclair, Chairman of the Board of the Curringer Foundation had promised to make (or threatened, it didn’t make very much difference) and her father had provided recordings for, of his daughter skating her heart out on Ceres.

  That day, on that little artificial pond under the construction dome, she’d done a quintuple Axel without really thinking about it very much. She’d done a heart-stopping, breath-taking double backflip, too. Merry Christmas, Llyra, now you’re really going to look like an idiot.

  The recording was being used by the Curringer Foundation to pique interest in investment—as well as future tourism and homesteading—on that little world. The small Pallatian advertising agency that Sinclair and her father had hired had even sent her a check for her performance. According to SFSA rules, she had to spend the money on skating expenses, or lose her amateur status where competition was concerned.

 

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