Ceres

by L. Neil Smith

  “They’ve just arrived from the depths of interplanetary space and it’s past their bedtime,” Wilson told her. “Perhaps warm milk all around?” The intended witticism only made matters worse, and embarrassed Wilson thoroughly.

  When the waitress had departed with their orders, Scotty leaned toward the center of the table. “Did I hear you ask us what we’re doing out here, Wilson? Because I’ll tell you, if you can keep it to yourself.”

  Wilson leaned into the center of the table, nose to nose with Scotty. Mikey and Marko followed his example. “Okay.” He sat back again.

  Mikey complained, “The wise guy! Always the wise guy! Tell him, Marko!”

  That individual looked around cautiously and lowered his voice until Wilson could barely hear. “We think we’ve found the Diamond Rogue.”

  Wilson shook his head. “That’s a hunter’s myth. My mother—”

  “Is an expert on asteroids,” Scotty finished for him. “And a very nice, very pretty lady, if you don’t mind me saying so. I’ve met her, and I know. And yet you yourself found a giant—”

  “Garnet. The size of a basketball. My grandma used to tell me the Diamond Rogue is bigger than a house—or a castle. In Transylvania. So is this object that you think you’ve found an aggregate, or one huge, gigantic diamond? And exactly how big is it? Bigger than a breadbox?”

  “Bigger than one ship can haul. Bigger than three ships. That’s why—”

  More noise issued from the other end of the restaurant, and four young men, talking loudly and walking a bit uncertainly made their way toward Wilson’s table. The four newcomers were dressed much like Wilson and his friends and were similarly armed. They walked with what people who didn’t hunt asteroids for a living called a “spaceman’s swagger”.

  “This is a hunter’s bar!” The obvious leader spoke up. He was the shortest of the lot and the most in need of a shower and a shave. He breathed alcoholically on Wilson. “Whadda you think you’re doing here, Pinky?”

  “I’m having my dinner, formerly in peace.” Wilson didn’t appear to look up. He knew that the expression “pinky”, among hunters, meant an inexperienced beginner. He also remembered this little man, who’d taken spacemanship courses at the same time he had, downsystem, in the Moon. “Look around, Shorty. This isn’t a bar, it’s a restaurant, Deep Space Little America, and the only asteroid hunters here are at this table.”

  Which could be taken as an insult or not, as the little man preferred.

  Starting to anger, Shorty said, “You’re no hunter, rich boy! Prove it!”

  Wilson pointed to the window in the floor, where Mighty Mouse’s Girlfriend was coming around again. “There’s my ship, Shorty. And you know perfectly well that I’ve been doing this exactly as long as you have.”

  Shorty snarled, “You didn’t earn that ship, Pinky, you bought it!”

  “Way I heard it, you inherited yours. I bought mine with money I earned.” In some locales—what was left of southern California, for instance—”inherit” was a euphemism for killing somebody and taking their property.

  “Oh, that’s right.” He got his friends’ attention with his elbows. “I saw it on 3DTV. Look out boys, we’ve got the Cereal Killer among us!”

  Later, Wilson didn’t remember how he’d managed to scramble over Scotty. All he knew was that, before he realized what he’d done, he was standing in the aisle between tables with an extremely sore right hand. The fellow who’d insulted him was lying on the floor ten feet away, where he’d fetched up against another booth, following a long skid.

  Almost immediately, one of Shorty’s pals, the one Wilson thought of as “Boils” rounded on him, his arm cocked back, telegraphing a punch. He never got to make it, however, as Marko seized his elbow from behind, spun him around, and punched him hard in the solar plexus. Boils sank to his knees, pitched over, and made retching noises.

  While Boils was preoccupied vomiting on the floor, another of the four thugs, the one Wilson thought of as “Fatty”, jumped up onto the seat of the booth, and from there, dived on Marko. Unfortunately for him, Marko moved at the last moment, and Mikey helped by grabbing Fatty’s foot. He landed hard on Boils, making a worse mess than before.

  The last of the four, whom Wilson thought of as “Beanpole” was tall and lanky, even for someone born in the lower gravity of the Settled Worlds, but there was nothing wrong with his muscles. He reached across the table, grabbed Mikey by his shirtfront, and hauled him out onto the floor, where he began hitting him in the stomach and face. Mikey, who seemed impervious, returned punch for punch, face and stomach.

  Having nothing better to do at the moment—although by now, there was plenty of fighting all around him—Wilson stomped on one of Beanpole’s feet, as hard as he could. Beanpole raised his head and bellowed. Mikey kicked him in the crotch, and he let go and grabbed himself between the legs. Mikey delivered a good solid punch and Wilson heard Beanpole’s nose break with a satisfyingly cartilaginous crunch.

  By now, Shorty had gotten to his feet and jumped back into the fray. He’d picked a fiberglass tray off another table and was about to brain Marko with it, but Marko ducked out of the way and tripped him. The tray-slinger struck Wilson at waist-height and both of them went down.

  “Sorry ’bout that,” Marko said, punching Boils, who had gotten up again.

  “‘Sokay,” Wilson flipped the serving tray up into Shorty’s face. He scrambled to his feet and kicked Shorty in the jaw before the thug could get up again. Beanpole was down and staying down, thanks to the pain between his legs and his broken, bleeding nose. Boils, decisively punched by Marko, and Fatty, who’d never recovered from his crash landing on Boils, were out of it, as well. It appeared the fight was over.

  It was then that Wilson realized that Scotty had spent the entire time sitting in the corner of the booth, sipping his tea, watching the fight.

  Scotty looked up at him and grinned. “Some do the work, while others are—”

  They all heard a clacking they recognized and looked up. There, at the end of the aisle, was the waitress, in her hands, a heavy laser- augmented particle beam projector with a pitted .90 caliber emitter orifice.

  Swinging it up at them, she asked, “Okay, who wants to get cut in half first?”

  ***

  The business card read:

  John F. Crenicichla (Pronounced “krenny KICK la”) Consultant Hotel Nelson Mandela, Johannesburg, S.A. e-mail: thefish@liaison.com telePHONE: 0-010-456-7392

  The man who handed it to the uniformed hostess as he stepped through the shuttle’s inner airlock door was crisply dressed in an expensively understated blue suit of the latest cut. Well groomed and manicured, he appeared to be in his middle thirties (he was actually a decade older than that) and most women in his experience found his boyish grin irresistible.

  As usual, East American Spacelines had set up a sort of boarding office in the airlock of the shuttle that had brought him and a couple of dozen other passengers to the place where the company’s City of Newark flagship stood in stationary orbit about the Moon. Boarding a big passenger vessel like this one was a lengthy process and would require many shuttle visits from several destinations. Beyond the outer airlock door, he could see into the open airlock of the larger ship.

  Crenicichla believed in traveling light. Today he carried with him only a small African buffalo leather briefcase containing his East American travel papers (it was the last country on Earth that still required anything resembling a passport) and his personal computer, a flat, platinum- titanium alloy square from Sony, perhaps a quarter of an inch thick and three inches on a side, with rounded corners and edges. He had checked in with one additional bag, very small and also of African buffalo leather, containing a change of clothing and various personal items.

  “I find the card saves a lot of trouble with pronunciation,” he explained.

  The hostess nodded, gave him the obligatory welcoming smile, and immediately shifted her attention to the next passenger
coming through the airlock door from the shuttle. Crenicichla was prepared to give her excellent marks on her performance. She had seen him on several occasions, most of them at recent Null Delta Em tactical briefings, but no casual observer would ever suspect it. She was another of Krystal’s Sweet’s protégés, a young woman he knew by her cell-name, Donna.

  Just this side of the shuttle’s outer airlock door, a small folding desk had been set up for another young woman, whose nametag declared her to be “Denise”. Sitting at the front edge of the desktop before her, a tastefully-engraved strip of gold, an inch wide, six or seven inches long, and at least an eighth of an inch thick, attached with small gold nails to what was in Lunar orbit, an even rarer and expensive strip of dark-grained hardwood, identified her as “Purser’s Assistant”.

  “Welcome aboard East American Spacelines’ flagship, the City of Newark, sir,” this young woman said, scarcely looking up at him, but eyeing his meager luggage as if she expected to see a tag hanging from it declaring “No animals were injured or killed during the production of this briefcase”. The majority of East Americans were no longer accustomed to seeing animal products openly displayed. “Is there anything you’d care to have locked in the purser’s safe? Money? Valuables?”

  “Just my vest—it’s made from real gorilla chest.” Her eyes grew wide and the color went out of her face. “I’m only kidding! No thank you, dear, nothing at all.” He smiled down at her (she was another of Krystal’s people and like all of them, remarkably good at what she did) and stepped aboard the vast cylinder that was the City of Newark.

  Something about that solid gold name plaque lingered in his mind. In an earlier era, it would have been made of engraved brass, or even of the kind of plastic that was one color, usually black, on the surface, but another color, usually white, when writing had been cut into it with a special routing machine. Here at a LaGrange point, high above the Earth, a plaque of laser-cut wood would have constituted conspicuous consumption all by itself. That gold plaque was a symptom, he knew, of everything that was wrong with today’s Solar System-wide economy.

  For all of the alarmist rhetoric spouted daily by that hapless idiot Anna Wertham Savage and her so-called Mass Movement—not to mention Paul Luegner’s Null Delta Em—concerning the mythological environmental dangers of importing objects and materials from other worlds, the concerns of both organizations’ ultimate sponsors were far different, far more specific and practical. The more gold that was produced by collecting operations in the Asteroid Belt, for example, the less valuable the gold already mined on Earth became. Exactly the same was true of silver, platinum, iridium, palladium, rhodium, and other precious commodities. Handfuls of diamonds were being found out there, as well, and DeBeers, among others, were desperate to keep them offplanet.

  Economists called it the “Law of Marginal Utility”, although it was actually more of an observation about human psychology. The more there is of anything—tennis shoes, comic books, pistol ammunition—the less any individual unit of it is worth. If iron were scarce and palladium abundant, the two metals would swap positions on the scale of value. It had actually happened, on occasion, with gold and platinum.

  Reflexively, unconsciously, Crenicichla reached up and touched a spot on his expensively tailored shirt that covered a series of small but curious scars midway between collar bone and nipple, where he had once been in the habit of attaching the symbol of his membership in the most secretive fraternal organization in the world—a precious metal pin featuring a death’s head—to his naked chest whenever he went swimming or did anything else without his clothing on. Although it had nothing to do with the reasons he valued it, the metal in the pin was now worth half as much as it had been when he was a Junior at Yale.

  Someday, if individuals continued to be permitted to live and work in space, it might very well be worth nothing at all. And so might be the accumulated fortunes of his sponsors. A nickel-iron asteroid a mile in diameter, he recalled someone saying (and there were hundreds of thousands, if not millions of them), contained more gold—merely as a trace element—than had ever been mined on Earth in ten thousand years of human history.

  The idea made him shudder. In many ways, his life so far had been a lucky one. Born into abysmal poverty in a working-class slum of New Bedford, he had supplemented what little the public schools had taught him with a course of study designed by his mother—a public school teacher, until she had been fired for teaching more than just what was required by the official Massachusetts state curriculum. He had won a scholarship to Yale, and in time, attracted the attention of a certain fraternity.

  Once he had endured the initiation rituals, they had taken him in and treated him as if he were one of their own, a scion of ancient and unspeakable wealth and power. They had seen to his mother, forcing the educational system to reinstate her with back pay and benefits, making her final years lavish. Now a wealthy man himself, he had sworn many oaths as a part of his initiation, but had privately vowed, as well, to protect the interests of his adopted class, with his very life, if necessary.

  After all, they had given it to him.

  Some of the flight crew had ventured off the flight deck to greet the latest flock of passengers as they stepped aboard the spaceship. The couple ahead of him were obvious newlyweds, giggling and snuggling, off on a Martian honeymoon. Watching them, he was grateful that they would be dead in two weeks, and not contributing to the human gene pool.

  The elderly couple behind him was almost as bad. All they could talk about was returning to the Moon for another set of DeGrey regeneration therapies as soon as possible. Apparently, they were in their nineties, and she hadn’t been able to walk for the last twenty years, but had now abandoned her wheelchair. In time, they would come to look and sound just like the couple ahead of him. It was unnatural and disgusting, another abomination that, once they had sufficient political and military power, he and his sponsors would put a stop to.

  Except, of course for him and his sponsors.

  Captain Alan West was a physically enormous individual, both wide and tall, middle-aged, but without a single gray strand on his head. West shook Crenicichla’s hand and welcomed him aboard in an accent that seemed to the younger man to be half Texan and half big-city Jewish. NDE intel said he was from someplace called “Chugwater” in the West American state of Wyoming.

  The Captain’s second was younger, shorter, slimmer, but completely gray. The tan-line slanting across his forehead said he liked to be outdoors when he wasn’t helping to drive a spaceship between the Moon and Mars, probably riding a horse with a sixgun on his hip and a rope in his hand. That hand was rough with calluses when he reached out for Crenicichla’s.

  The flight engineer (a position entirely as redundant as a fireman on a three hundred mile per hour electric bullet train, but required by the East American unions) was a pretty blonde, leaning more to the voluptuous than the slender or athletic. Like the others, she, too, shook Crenicichla’s hand and smiled at him. This would be Minde, he understood, another of Krystal’s oddly-assorted collection of female henchpersons.

  Glancing at the boarding pass someone had handed him, he noted his stateroom number, 4-3, but, not enjoying Krystal’s advantage of having already traveled on this ship, had to consult with a big interactive chart mounted on the bulkhead once he’d exited City of Newark’s airlock.

  Like all large deep space passenger vessels, East America’s City of Newark was nothing more than an enormous, flat-ended cylinder, divided into a number of decks built around a service core that housed two or three elevators, numerous cable runs, plumbing for various gases and liquids, and an emergency staircase. The basic design, he knew, had been stolen from shipbuilders working for Pallas’ Fritz Marshall Spacelines.

  On most of the decks, running around the outside of the service core, there was a circular corridor lined with the numbered doors of passenger compartments. The higher within the structure of the ship—which also meant the further forw
ard—the fewer compartment doors there were, and the larger and more luxurious the compartments behind them. No one ever commented on this peculiarity aboard a passenger liner belonging to what was supposed to be a classless society. In history’s last “classless” society, the highly pampered passengers, those possessed of the most power and greatest wealth, had been called _nomenklatura_.

  Crenicichla was unapologetically grateful that he qualified for such a title. The airlock he’d come aboard by let out on the lowest of the passenger decks. While he waited for an elevator, he noticed that the facilities were nominally clean and sanitary—eight bunks to a “stateroom”, two rooms to a bathroom—but that they were dismal and depressing. An earlier culture had called it “steerage”.

  Other decks served other purposes. Toward the bottom of the entire stack—aft, as the crew called it, but forward of the engineering spaces—there were a great many cargo storage decks, one of them all of three storys tall for the transportation of heavy equipment, building materials, and vehicles. There was a kennel deck, dedicated to housing pets and livestock, and a gymnasium—although it had no swimming pool.

  All the way forward, almost at the top of the stack, there was a big hotel-style restaurant and bar, and forward of that, accessible by a fancy spiral staircase of wrought iron, a comfortable observation lounge.

  The flight deck, or control room, or bridge (the brochures and the crew used the expressions interchangeably) was walled off with a thick, circular, bulletproof transparency. It stood in the center of the observation lounge, but the only access to it was by a secured elevator from the service core.

  Crenicichla’s ticket was for Deck Four, the second most comfortable and expensive passenger accommodation aboard the ship. If he hadn’t acquired it so late in the game—having been abruptly ordered by his sponsors to do so—he’d have demanded Deck Three. Years ago, he had very carefully arranged for his undercover identity to be wealthy, accustomed only to the very best. This not only gave him open entry to any social level he desired, but served to gather all the most decorative and compliant women. His undercover identity also required that he attract a lot of women.