Ceres

by L. Neil Smith

  But even where she came from—west central New York state—especially in public places like this spaceport concourse, the walls really did have ears—although they were electronic ones—and they were connected with powerful security computers that listened hard and patiently for certain key words that could trigger a person’s instant arrest.

  Words like “grenade”.

  “Er, little device,” Brian went on, knowing exactly what she was thinking about. He was from Philadelphia, the cradle of East American tyranny. “And then we’d only have the mother and the father to contend with!”

  Krystal lifted her eyebrows and tilted her head in a manner saying that she didn’t disagree with him. He’d been told how much she hated Julie Segovia Ngu. Any East American with a sense of political decency did.

  A few positions ahead of them in the line, a fat, nasty little boy wearing shorts and a striped shirt suddenly discovered that the door to the small steel cage he was carrying was open, and that whatever had been in the cage was gone. It could have been a hamster, a gerbil, or a guinea pig—or a rat. The child set up a wail that bordered on the ultrasonic, giving her a headache, and people started looking at their feet. If it was a rat, she hoped someone would stomp on it. She hated rats. Her early training in Central America had been more or less paved with rats, some almost big enough to throw a saddle on and ride.

  “But we’d have to leave the System to avoid their revenge,” she told Brian, abandoning caution for a moment—or simply avoiding key words. “Look, partner, this is hard, even for me, sometimes, but while the Ngus are our enemies, they are not the cause, nor are they the mission. In fact, annoying them unnecessarily could greatly endanger the mission.” It was a very difficult thing for someone in her trade to learn and remember; it made the difference between professional and amateur.

  He grinned. “Well, then, how about just doing the grandmother on this trip? We could easily make it look like an innocent, if tragic, mishap. She may not be a little old lady, exactly, but accidents do happen, and I would guess that a spaceship must be full of potential hazards.”

  By this time, somebody else’s disgusting offspring had started to cry, a little baby. Herded together as they were in the security line, nobody could move to get away from vile, noisy children or take the repulsive little things away. One or more of them had started to smell bad, too. She hoped that they and their parents would still be on Mars a year from now, when she would be—better not think about that now, though.

  Krystal closed her eyes, running a weary hand through her short, pale blond hair. Her head hurt more than ever and her clothes had begun to feel sticky, hanging on her. “Let me tell you something. That person over there just happens to be the toughest of all the Ngus! And the best trained, a Special Ops Marine! I know your resume, Brian, your background in the martial arts. It’s very impressive. But I promise, you wouldn’t survive a physical encounter with her for twenty seconds!”

  “Hold it down, Krys—I mean, Amelia.” He, too, believed that there might be microphones to throw off. “Your voice, I mean. You’re starting to spit a little when you talk. People are starting to look at us funny. Let me get this straight: you’re telling me that little woman—”

  She breathed in and let it out again. “I know that it’s hard to believe, just looking at her. I certainly wish I had her waistline. But fifty years ago on Mars, she was assigned to a U.N. military unit sent out there to put down a colonial rebellion. Not just one of the grunts, mind you, but an officer who’d worked her way up through the ranks.”

  “What? You must be kidding me. I didn’t know you could still do that.”

  The woman shook her head. “You can’t, Brian. This was fifty years ago.”

  “Oh, yeah, I remember. Fifty years.” She wasn’t sure he believed it.

  “Good,” said the pale-haired blond. “Understand, she’s hard—so damned hard, as someone said once, that you can rollerskate on her. But she fell for Billy Ngu, and became a traitor. There are stories about what she did after she turned her coat that would curl your hair.”

  He nodded. “So that would mean the tabloids are right, that she’s nearly—”

  “In her mid-seventies, at least,” said the woman bitterly. “Taking up space and using up precious resources that Nature intended for the next three generations! And there’s no reason to think that she won’t keep on defying Nature for another thousand years! And using her as the pretty pinup example, before you know it, everybody’ll be doing it!”

  “Calm down, er, Amelia! I didn’t know this was so important to you. Maybe we ought to seize the opportunity of this trip to put an end—”

  She smiled and closed her eyes. The feeling deep inside her was warm and comforting. “I wish we could, partner. I dearly wish we could.”

  Her companion tugged at her sleeve. The Ngu party were standing up, embracing the pretty grandmother one by one. Even the girl’s paid companion was included in the family hug-fest. One of the pale blond woman’s first professional assignments had been to serve as personal assistant—meaning secretary and maid—to a wealthy old woman in Wichita, while the old woman’s favorite niece was being kidnapped for ransom by a group of colleagues. Somehow, the operation had gone sour on their end, and she’d wound up garroting her former employer with a lamp cord. She hated the way that rich people often tried to pretend that their servants were their equals. It was as unnatural as it was disgusting.

  Now Julie Ngu was being accompanied by a pair of smarter-looking, better-uniformed security stooges—men, of course—to a VIP lounge where she would neither have to stand in line or have her person searched.

  “Now that,” Brian told her, “I find annoying.”

  “Don’t worry, partner,” said the pale-haired woman, grinning and nodding with satisfaction. “It’s a good thing. Look around you. Sure you resent the abuse of power and privilege—and so does everyone else.”

  ***

  The tall, skinny Pallatian pilot stood in the airlock atrium of the Guzman Brothers’ Used Spacecraft offices, waiting for an answer and wishing he’d made an appointment. On the other hand, after dozens of hours of fairly high acceleration getting here—time being money, after all—it felt good to relax for even a little while in zero gee.

  It was a vice, he understood. Bad for the musculature and bones, as well as for the immune system. But it felt just like heaven to him, and he could never understand why other people didn’t seem to care for it.

  Funny, nobody seemed to be home, although the open sign was on. Helmet under his arm, politely, he reached a space-gloved hand up to thumb the doorbell once again, but a large, dark face with villainous eyes and a huge hooked nose appeared in the viewing screen before he could.

  “Aha!” said the face. “A customer! I suppose we are still open for doing business for a little while. What can I do you out of today, customer?”

  “Lafcadio Guzman?” the pilot asked. The man had been described to him.

  The man replied, “Who else in heaven’s name would I be, if I had a choice?”

  “I don’t know about that, sir. I’m R.G. Edd, representing the Raymond Louis Drake-Tealy Museum in Curringer, on Pallas. You know, the asteroid? I’m also captain of the Pallatian towing vessel Little Toot. See her right over there? I’m also the crew. I’m here to make sure that you got paid properly, and to pick up the Drake-Tealy object for the museum.” The truth was, he was dreading the long lonely haul back to Pallas and he hoped the guy would ask him in for a bag of coffee.

  The big oval airlock door swung open, and Edd was greeted by a strange looking individual. The man’s head, shoulders, and torso appeared to be normal-sized, if not a little oversized. His arms looked extremely powerful. But his legs were those of a child. Some kind of accident to the spine, he supposed. The man reminded Edd of pictures he’d seen of the famous French artist Henri de Toulouse- Loutrec.

  “Come in, come in, Captain Edd! Yes, yes, I am Lafcadio Guzman, himself! The very se
lf! And I seem to be saying everything twice! Twice! And yes, yes, I received the museum’s ridiculously generous payment! You know I had to call the bank and make sure that a zero hadn’t been added by accident! You must excuse me, Captain, I am about to go on vacation for the first time since around the year you were born! I think I’m going to buy myself some new legs—and perhaps a brother!”

  Edd had known some pretty odd people in his life, so he simply filed Lafcadio Guzman away with the rest of them. Everywhere he looked, shoes, socks, shirts, pants, and underwear floated through the air. Happily, the pair of shorts that lighted on his ear seemed to be clean.

  Guzman offered him a baggie of champagne, imported all the way from Paris, France. It pained the pilot to turn the fellow down, just as it pained him to come all the way, almost to Earth, only to turn around and head straight back to Pallas. Somehow, he thought, you’d expect a museum to take a longer view of things. But that was what he was being paid extremely well to do. He took more frequent vacations than this fellow, here, so it would all come out in the wash eventually.

  “Well, Mr. Guzman,” he told his host, “I sure hope that you enjoy your vacation. It looks to me like you’re off to a pretty good start. For me, it’s blasting straight back to Pallas, to the tune of something like twenty years’ worth of digitally enhanced recordings of Gunsmoke.”

  Guzman’s eyebrows went up. “Gunsmoke? In full color and false three dee?”

  Edd nodded enthusiastically. It was true, you never knew where you were going to find another fan. Nobody on Pallas seemed to understood it. “You bet, pal—you can see the smoke from Marshall Dillon’s Peacemaker come right out of the 3DTV and into your face. And Miss Kitty—”

  “Oh, I can imagine it perfectly! Festus and Doc! And the young Burt Reynolds! Oh, I thank you so much! I believe I will look immediately into making a purchase of my own. A very good day to you, Mr. Edd. Can you find that accursed rock by yourself? It looks just like a big, dirty old potato, but it sprouts all of the expected knobs and excrescences of any small Drake-Tealy Objet Drat. Do you need me to—”

  “No, no, Mr. Guzman. I already found it, thanks. I’ve thrown two layers of brand new chainlink around it, and we’re all saddled up and ready to ride. You take care of yourself, now, okay? Keep your powder dry.” Edd stepped back over the threshold into the building’s airlock.

  “Okay!” Guzman swung the airlock door. “Thanks again! Happy trails!”

  That was Roy Rogers, not Gunsmoke, but Edd grinned and waved all the same. He turned, entered his own airlock, closed the outer door, closed the inner door, and climbed into his control seat. Separating his ship from Guzman’s building, he thrust back toward the gigantic Drake-Tealy Object and let a loop in the cable that held the chainlink bag closed slip over a bollard at the rear of his ship. The vessel had originally been designed as a space tug, servicing both of the polar spaceports on Pallas, but ships were more nimble now, and didn’t need help.

  Edd planned to use a couple of miles of line so that he could get out of the way in case of some kind of accident. As the slack began to tighten, given the known mass and acceleration of his ship, strain gauges on the line gave him the mass of the Object within a few ounces.

  Funny … how could that be? This damned thing weighed as much as any chunk of sky-iron ten times its size. He could get it back to Pallas, all right, but someone was going to have to meet him after turnover with extra reaction mass—and maybe a spare spaceship or two.

  Damn.

  So be it. He entered values in the navigation and acceleration computer and hit the ENTER button. The computer thought about it for a couple of nanoseconds, then changed the ship’s heading slightly and fired all five of the vessel’s huge fusion engines. But Edd felt no acceleration.

  Not at first, anyway.

  Instead, his powerful little towing ship slowly began to travel backwards. He knew this was the case because his pilot’s seat and the control console in front of it slewed around in their gimbals, and he was plastered into the big chair by acceleration. By the time he got himself oriented, the meter in the chair-arm read three point one-four gees, and, Pallas born and bred, he could hardly breathe or lift a finger.

  “Controls to voice!” he wheezed.

  “Controls to voice, aye,” the ship responded.

  Reluctantly, he cut his engines and watched helplessly in a viewscreen as L-Four and the Moon began to dwindle visibly in the distance.

  “Broadcast the following on all frequencies: ‘Mayday, mayday, mayday! This is the Pallatian towing vessel Little Toot. I am … um, under attack by an unknown object and being towed backward at multiple gees!’ Add our heading and acceleration and repeat till I say otherwise!”

  “Broadcast distress call, aye,” said Little Toot.

  He was headed back upsystem, where this damned thing had come from.

  In a big hurry.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN: PREPARATION

  The United States of America began to disintegrate as a political unity almost the minute that the average citizen came to see clearly that, no matter who he voted for, no matter who got elected, he—the average citizen—was screwed.

  If you’ll pardon the expression.

  When even the tame mass media began referring to the two major political alternatives as a single entity—the “Boot On Your Neck Party”—it was, in the language of the times, all over. What was left of the original United States became known, whether it wanted to be or not, as “East America”, and something altogether new, “West America”—which refused to dignify a federal government and national legislature grown irredeemably corrupt by sending representatives to it—was born. —The Diaries of Rosalie Frazier Ngu

  Wilson fired the high frequency tactical laser again.

  The beam was invisible, very nearly into the X-ray wavelengths, but he could see—under telescopic magnification, of course; the rock was actually too far away to observe the effect directly—a little jet of vapor where the laser struck. Hot particles and gases burst from the surface of the meteoroid, opposing the direction in which it was presently tumbling, gently bringing its rotation to a halt.

  It felt a lot like he was pushing against the rock with the laser itself.

  At the same time that the hot vapors slowed the meteoroid, sensors on Mighty Mouse’s Girlfriend’s hull analyzed them, giving Wilson a better idea what his catch was made of than he had gotten from the observatory.

  The call had come from Larsen Farside earlier that “morning”: “Captain Wilson Ngu,” the figure on the screen had greeted him. You are next in line for non-exclusive information. Do you accept this opportunity?”

  “Sure, Doc,” Wilson answered. It was one of Jasmeen’s scientist uncles. He could never keep them straight. This was the big fat one. Funny the way his silly Chechen accent sounded sexy when his sister’s coach was using it. “How come you’re doing your own calling this morning?”

  Jasmeen’s uncle shrugged. “Is maid’s day off. Here comes data feed. It looks like carbonaceous chondrite about hundred feet on long axis.”

  “And shaped about like a potato. Gotcha, Larsen Farside, and thank you.”

  “Do not thank, Mighty Mouse’s Girlfriend, just pay bill on time, please.”

  “We always do, Larsen Farside, we always do. Talk to you later!” The stars whirled around him as the little ship changed its heading at the commands he punched into her keyboard. Wilson, pressed deeply into his acceleration chair in a way he always found exhilarating, was off with a mighty whoop and a rapidly dispersing cloud of used reaction mass.

  It would be ninety-three minutes before he caught up with the rock. He called up the latest episode of his favorite 3DTV program, Hong Lee, Secret Agent that his computer had recorded and saved for him. It concerned a private operative, working for a famous Bulgarian philanthropist, against one of the last unfree countries in the world—the United States of (East) America. This week it was about Hong Lee trying to save some precious artif
acts from the Whiskey Rebellion, before they could be destroyed by authoritarians desperate to rewrite history.

  The proximity alarm rang just as the program ended (it originated in the Moon where programs running an hour and a half were popular at the moment) and the ship’s computer began analyzing the target’s several different motions. It was headed downsystem at the leisurely pace of six miles per second, rotating roughly around its longest axis while tumbling end over end. It was also precessing slightly as it tumbled.

  First he stopped the precession with a series of well-timed, well- placed laser blasts. From the incandescent vapor, the system informed him that the rock (at least this section of it) consisted almost purely of carbonaceous chondrite: magnesium silicate with touch of iron, eleven percent water, and five percent kerogen. An ordinary rock it was, but a good one. It was the very stuff that made life in space possible.

  More use of the laser put an end to the tumbling, and finally, to the rock’s rotation. It appeared now to hang motionless in space a hundred yards from Mighty Mouse’s Girlfriend, although both it and the ship were speeding through space, toward the Sun, at twenty-two thousand miles per hour. Happily, the Sun was many millions of miles away.

  Now came the hard part. Sidescan radar and other sensor systems told Wilson that his target was solid enough simply to attach himself to it and haul it off. He had enough reaction mass to get it turned and headed toward L-Five, where it ought to fetch a pretty price, oil and water being almost as valuable as palladium and iridium. He would begin to run low on reaction mass about two thirds of the way there, but the olivine the rock was mostly made of would help him make the stretch.

  As soon as the course was laid in and the correction properly made, he stood the engines down and coasted, then climbed into one of his envirosuits. He pocketed his Herron twelve-shot revolver, and made his way out through an aft airlock. Attaching a safety line to a ring located near the door, he pushed off aftward until he came to the tow cable attachment. Laboriously relocating his safety line to a connection near one engine, he took a pick-axe from a handy tool box, and pulled himself along the cable until he reached the rock, turned, and set foot upon it.