Ceres

by L. Neil Smith

  “You’re thinking right,” Mikey answered. “Caught a hell of a rock today, so the first round’s on me. Deal is, you gotta listen to the story.”

  There was some ritual moaning and groaning until the drinks came: more cider for Wilson; beer for Mikey and the Swede; a good Merlot for Marko. Then they ordered from the simple menu, steaks and fries all around.

  “So there I was,” Mikey began, “chasing an iron Larsen Farside had sold me, a fair-sized clinker supposedly headed straight for Rio de Janeiro.”

  Marko shook his head. “Why is it always Rio in these stories? Why can’t it ever be Kalamazoo, Michigan, or Nashville, or even Bozeman, Montana?”

  “Because it just was, that’s why,” said Mikey. “The data had said it was solid, but I decided to play it safe and put some chain link around it. Trouble was, it was an aggregate after all, and the edge of my net struck it a third of the way up, separating the front end from the rest, and causing the bigger back end to start breaking up. The worst of it was that it was now headed for the northern coast of the Yucatan.”

  “No kidding!” several voices said at once.

  “Yeah. So I figured, ‘Been there, done that’, and pondered how to get myself and the rest of my species out of this extinction level mess.”

  “You didn’t,” Wilson guessed, looking at Scotty, “and we all died.” By now, even the bartender, standing in the doorway, was listening.

  “Pretty close. What I did was break out the hose and give the back end a good dousing of reaction mass—drinking, bathing, and flushing water—freezing the whole thing back together again. Then I jetted ahead—”

  “On pixie dust?” asked Marko. “You used up all your—”

  “On powdered olivine and happy thoughts,” Mikey said. “I finally threw chainlink around the front, braked slightly, and let the rest catch up with us. Just made it to L-Five, and here I am to tell the tale.”

  “Tell me something.” The Swede was skeptical. “What was its impact date?”

  “Er, October 23,” Mikey admitted. The current month was April.

  “What year?” the whole table demanded.

  “Okay,” Mike put his face on the table, closed his eyes. “October, 2142.”

  The Swede threw his head back and laughed. “Eleven years from now!” Of a sudden, Wilson realized why he had recognized the man’s voice.

  “Well, they did pay me the E.L.E. bounty—and it makes a good story!”

  At the back of the room, a man who had come in from the bar when nobody noticed took a sip of Grand Marnier, and then a drink of his margarita. The fastest gun in the Moon thought it was a good story, too.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX: RECOGNITION

  Social scientists have determined that, far more than religion, race, nationality, or sex, people tend to identify with one another on the basis of what they do for a living. A West American plumber tends to identify with an Azerbaijani plumber more than he does with his own countrymen who are not plumbers.

  That certainly agrees with my experience, and I think it explains perfectly why politicians, who derive their income from legalized plunder, are inclined to go soft and squishy when it comes to dealing with muggers, rapists, thieves, and murderers. —The Diaries of Rosalie Frazier Ngu

  “I know you!” the young asteroid hunter suddenly said between clenched teeth. His heart was pounding. The short hair stood straight up on the back of his neck. “I know that voice! You’re the Space Viper!”

  Wilson leaned across the dining table and glared at the individual who had just been introduced to him as “Swede Vargas”. It was all he could do to refrain from drawing his great grandfather’s .45 magnum, hanging on his hip. In the crystal clarity that sometimes comes with large amounts of adrenaline suddenly surging through the bloodstream, he noticed that his three friends appeared to be having the identical problem.

  They all froze in place—they’d heard the story—as had the bartender, who heard all kinds of stories. Vargas’ hands stayed on the table. To Wilson’s surprise, the man threw his head back and laughed again.

  “You mean it wasn’t my initials that gave me away?” He indicated a big, shiny, silver trophy buckle he was wearing, an oval of engraved and polished silver with elaborate gold decorations. First associated with rodeo cowboys on the mother planet, buckles just like it were also popular with long haul truckers on Earth and Mars, and asteroid hunters.

  Vargas’ buckle bore the large initials S.V. “To tell the absolute truth, kid, I found it in a recycle bin here at the spaceport, ten or twelve years ago. Don’t know why it got thrown away, but it seemed like a waste to let it get melted down, so I decided then and there to change my name, thinking it might just change my luck, as well. Now sometimes I’m known to my adoring meteor hunting public as ‘Skylark Valentine’, or ‘Smedley Veritas’.”

  “Or Sid Vicious.” Wilson laid his right hand on the big, coarsely checkered rectangular ivory grip panel of the .45 Grizzly autopistol. “Mister, I don’t give a roach’s rectum if you want to call yourself ‘Susannah Vusannah’. You’re still a rock pirate, and we’ve got you. Now you’re going to pay up for everything you’ve done! Scotty, call a magistrate—”

  “Not necessary, love” said the bartender, matter-of-factly. He took the toothpick out of his mouth. In the background, on the 3DTV, a band was playing “Jack Was Every Inch A Spacer”, about an asteroid hunter who bored a hole halfway through an asteroid with his fist, so he could reach in and turn it inside-out. “I’m a magistrate, but I prefer plain old ‘judge’. What’s this fellow here supposed to have done?”

  “Why, he—” Wilson began, then stopped abruptly, thinking and remembering as hard as he could. “Well, he ordered me out of what he claimed was his hunting territory and demanded I give him a rock I’d found.”

  “And what were you after doing then,” asked the bartender.

  “Only what I’d been taught to do. I reminded him that nobody is obliged to recognize anybody’s claim to a hunting territory and he should shove off. I waggled an empty particle gun mount at him—” He glared at the Swede. “I have the gun installed now—and then he went away.”

  “He went away, is it?” The bartender raised his eyebrows. “It sounds more like hazing than piracy. Was he actually after doing anything?”

  Wilson closed his eyes, thought about it again, sighed, and shook his head. “No, I guess he wasn’t—say, do I call you ‘Your Honor’ now? Like I said, all he did was try to lay claim to the region of space I was hunting in, and demand that I turn loose of the rock I was intercepting.”

  “Call me Wally,” the bartender said. “And did you?”

  “Did I … ?”

  “Turn loose of the rock.”

  “That he did not!” Vargas turned and grinned up at the bartending judge. “The kid ran me off at the point of a particle cannon that he didn’t even have yet! Balls of brass, this one, I tell you! When I heard his friends here out at the repair yard mention him by name, I knew I had to meet him and buy him a drink. He’ll do. He’ll definitely do!”

  The judge nodded. “Then I order you to apologize, and that’ll end it.”

  “Not likely,” Vargas replied. “I didn’t to anything wrong.”

  “He has a point, there,” the judge agreed. “Any ideas from you, love?”

  He looked to Wilson. “I suppose he could buy me that drink.”

  The judge said, “How’s about you buy all of these lads a drink, then?”

  “Done!” Vargas answered. “One for you as well. Your honor. In fact, bring me the tab for the meal. This adventure’s been worth that much.”

  Marko leaned across a corner of the table until he and the black man were nose to nose. “Okay, now, Ess Vee, why not tell us your real name?”

  The man closed his eyes and even shuddered a little. “Believe me, you’d change your name, as well, if you found yourself in my place, I guarantee—”

  “What’s your name!”

  “Othniel James S
impson. The original was a remote ancestor of mine.”

  The four young men at the table blinked at one another.

  “What,” asked the bartender, “is so bad about that?”

  ***

  “Attention all Marsbound passengers for the City of Newark. That’s all Marsbound passengers for the City of Newark. Your shuttle craft to the Marsbound City of Newark will begin boarding in twenty minutes.”

  The Armstrong City spaceport seemed unusually crowded today, Llyra thought, although she didn’t have very many other visits to compare it with. Through an endless series of heavy glass windows along the great concourse, she and her family watched shuttlecraft and interplanetary vessels in various stages of preparation for wherever they happened to be going. There were also several small herds, it seemed, of ground- bound tenders, both wheeled and tracked, that reminded her of vacuum- breathing dinosaurs, as well as individuals walking around in numbered envirosuits.

  The announcement repeated itself twice before it went on to inform them, “Passengers for the City of Newark, as well as all other ships of East American registry, are reminded that neither smoking nor the carrying of personal weapons of any kind is permitted aboard the City of Newark or any other vessel of East American registry. All tobacco, marijuana, cloves, kinnikinnik, or other forms of smoking substances, lighters, box or book matches, pipes, cigarette or cigar holders—firearms, offensive lasers, tasers, swords, clubs, knives, or any other object intended for violent purposes must be left here in the spaceport, checked with the ship’s purser, or secured in the baggage hold.”

  The recorded voice repeated itself twice again, and then began to announce the comings and goings, and the rules and regulations, with regard to other ships here today. These announcements were generally a great deal shorter. Imitating the announcer, Llyra proclaimed, “Please bend over. This will be a service of the Department of Redundancy Department.”

  Her brother laughed. Jasmeen and Julie grinned, although they were all sad to be here at the Armstrong spaceport today, seeing Wilson and Llyra’s grandmother off for nobody knew how long. She had explained to them that in the past year, she had finished her business here in the Moon. The Conchita and Desmondo theme park would be completed in two years, on schedule—excavation had begun already in a suburb near the Heinlein—with only a few minor alterations insisted upon by the author.

  Contrary to certain shrill demands and violent threats made by the East American government’s representatives, not a single politician or bureaucrat would be portrayed within the park with any sympathy of any kind. On the other hand, there would be a big discount for government employees and their families, and free admission for those who could prove they had resigned.

  “I can’t describe how much fun it was, seeing their statist faces collapse when I told them that,” said Julie. “They actually thought they could just come up here and order us around. There isn’t anything more laughably pathetic than an authoritarian politico without any authority.”

  Jasmeen grinned and said, “This I wish I had seen.”

  “You would have loved it, dear,” Julie told her, laughing. “This whole trip has been an absolute delight! I got to give an award and a family heirloom to my favorite grandson—glad to see you wearing it; Emerson would be pleased—and watch him get himself established in the asteroid hunting trade. Then my favorite granddaughter takes two firsts and a second in open competition at an ice rink where she couldn’t even walk a little less than a year ago. Medals, medals, medals!”

  “Grandma—” Llyra began. She knew that she couldn’t persuade Julie not to go back to Mars, but she couldn’t keep herself from trying.

  Her grandmother was going on. “But now I need to go back home and complete my new novel about Conchita and Desmondo, lost once again in the land of the Wimpersnits and Oogies, before deadline.” Llyra had read somewhere that millions copies of Julie’s latest book, Conchita and the Brain Eaters had already been pre-ordered, even though it was actually a thinly-veiled exposure of public school psychological counselors—the kind who travel from school to school following some disaster or another. It had been banned already, sight unseen, in East America, a kind of advertising, Julie said, good for even more sales everywhere else.

  “But why do you have to go through all this East American security garbage, Grandma Julie?” Wilson wanted to know. “Turn your gun over to the purser? Leave it in the baggage hold? It’ll be just like flying home stark naked.” He blushed when he realized what he’d said. Julie brought that out in him. “Why not borrow the William Wilde Curringer again? She’s a whole bunch faster than this so-called spaceliner, anyway—”

  “Beautiful Billie? Well, that would be very nice, dear,” Julie agreed. “The trouble, though, is that Sherry’s taken Billie way, way upsystem, ostensibly for an inspection tour of the new O’Neill habitat construction in orbit around Jupiter. I suspect his real interest is following up some fresh rumor about the disappearance of the Fifth Force. Somehow, they all seem to find their way to his doorstep one way or another.”

  “Another one of those?” Jasmeen shook her head and muttered. The unexplained disappearance of that famous exploratory vessel, bound for the Cometary Halo carrying Llyra’s two most famous great grandparents, Emerson and Rosalie Frazier Ngu, and nine hundred other Pallatians, remained the meat of tabloid journalism even after all these years. It had hung over the Ngu family like a dark cloud for most of Llyra’s life.

  Down at the far end of the concourse, they could see and hear a vendor offering various kinds of ammunition considered acceptable by non-East American transport companies for space travel, which meant bullets, among other things, that could be lethal to an aggressor without damaging the spacecraft. The East Americans must have hated that.

  “In any case,” Julie continued, “although they’re not advertising it, except for the Fifth Force, this will be the longest voyage ever undertaken by a vehicle with a human crew. Sherry and his ship won’t be back for at least six months. By then, his maintenance people will be foaming at the mouth to tear her apart, looking for micropunctures and radiation damage. As much as I’d like to, my darlings, I can’t stay here in the Moon any longer. I write more comfortably at home on Mars.”

  Wilson was concerned. “But they’re gonna make you go through that metal detector over there, Grandma, wave wands at you, maybe even take you somewhere and make you undress, or worse! I’ve heard that there’s worse!”

  The spaceport management itself refused to search passengers or disarm them, so the East American spacelines had to do it here, in their own boarding area. The employees of other companies often made fun of them, goose stepping past and making rude-sounding remarks in mock German.

  “And it’s dangerous!” Llyra put her two cents’ worth in. “The only ships or aircraft that ever get taken by criminals or terrorists are the ones where the passengers have been disarmed.” They all knew that was why most spacelines encouraged their passengers to travel well armed, and even offered them a discount for doing so under certain circumstances.

  Julie smiled, nodded and put a hand on each of her grandchildren’s shoulders. “I’m deeply moved that you care, both of you, I really am. They’ve backed off a little on so-called security since they began to have more competition. I understand that the Fritz Marshall company will begin serving the Earth/Luna to Mars route sometime after the first of the year, and that will almost certainly end these barbaric practices, altogether.”

  “But Grandma—” Llyra began.

  “In the meantime, I have a connection or two, and I’ll be home soon enough.” She began to gather up her hand baggage and a couple of magazines.

  Jasmeen interrupted, “We stay one more year ourselves, Then go home.”

  Julie nodded. “You’re the coach, coach. You know I trust your judgment in these matters. I mean to tell your folks how well you’re doing here. You just let me know whatever you need.” By now she was standing and had bent to embrace Jas
meen and give her a kiss on the cheek.

  “Home? To Pallas?” Llyra was completely bewildered. She wondered what she’d done wrong—or failed to do—to deserve being sent home.

  “Home—to Mars, where we can see your Grandmama again. Where my mother will cook good Chechen food for us and make us eat it until we creosote. And where you, my little, will skate in a third gee—twice what you skate in now. Is necessary next step to finally skating on Earth.”

  “Home,” Llyra repeated, “to Mars.”

  Her coach nodded. “To Mars.”

  ***

  “Just look at that, will you!” The man with the blond moustache and thinning hair was almost quivering, but with what—excitement, rage, bloodlust—his business colleague couldn’t guess, and didn’t know.

  And she didn’t like not knowing.

  From where they both stood in the security line for The City of Newark, he indicated the nearby passenger lounge with a subtle nod, rather than by pointing. “All four of the monsters together! Just one little—”

  It was hot and Krystal Sweet felt sweaty. Fresh, clean clothing she’d put on this morning now felt damp and dirty. The official wand- wielders seemed especially slow today, she thought, a dimwitted pair of unpleasant, unattractive, overweight women from the East American Projects, wearing shabby uniforms that were too tight for them and—she could smell it even this far back down the line—should have been thoroughly cleaned several months ago. She supposed that she shouldn’t complain, though. These minimum-wage genetic rejects were doing her work for her, after all, making sure that the victims chosen for her by her employers would be absolutely helpless when the time came.

  She stopped the man beside her with a look. She knew him as “Brian Downs”. It was true enough, what he’d just said. She could see the murderous Wilson Ngu and his little sister, plus that weird grandmother of theirs, looking half a century younger than she ought to, and the girl’s coach, traveling companion, and who knew what else, all of them sitting together on the black leather, chrome-plated steel furniture, absorbed in some kind of conversation.