Ceres

by L. Neil Smith

  Wilson laughed. “My sister should see him! I think that was a double Salchow!”

  The intraship intercom went off again suddenly, amidst all the joviality, silencing them all. The Captain hurried to the flashing box.

  “West.”

  “Bridge here, Captain. We’ve got a transponder number from one of the two ships headed this way. It’s Pimble Pharch’s Lilac Waffle, sir.”

  “Fatty.” Wilson spat the name out.

  “Bringing a buddy,” Scotty said, “probably to try and finish us off.”

  ***

  Julie hated waiting.

  She had been sitting just like this, she reflected, the night the news came that Billy had been killed, saving a gaggle of useless idiots from themselves. That wasn’t the way at all that evolution was supposed to work, and it would eventually be the species’ undoing, she suspected.

  Waiting came especially hard to an individual who, due to the science commissioned by her famous father-in-law, still had the physique of a girl in her twenties at age seventy-something. She’d enlisted in the United States Marine Corps at the age of seventeen (or had it been fifteen—she’d have to think; she’d lied about her age in any case), become a young pioneer wife on an alien planet, gone on to another world, and back to this—and started a whole new career as a bestselling author.

  Some people loved her, governments everywhere hated her, nobody was neutral or indifferent. That probably meant she was doing her job right, she thought.

  Even her writing wasn’t all that sedentary. She often went for long walks through the rolling hills of Melas Chasma, the center stretch of Valles Marineris, dictating to her pocket computer. She even had a keyboard rigged on her exercise bicycle. She fenced saber and epee, Florentine, and still practiced with the big knife she’d brought to Mars as a young Marine. She went target shooting—rifle, pistol, shotgun, more exotic, modern weapons—on a regular basis. She had even been known to hit a baseball. Sitting still, even to watch a movie, and sometimes even to read a book, simply wasn’t a part of her life, except at horrible times like this one—an emergency beyond her control—when it seemed she had no other choice.

  At the moment, she was waiting for more news about the City of Newark. She’d already arranged with some of her influential friends this morning to see that no decent port in the Solar System would accept or service any East American ship again, unless the searches and the weapons bans—which had let this mess happen—stopped immediately and were never resumed.

  When would they ever learn that disarming individuals guaranteed that they would be victimized, and that putting their lives in the hands of hired gunsels only meant they would be victimized all over again?

  She’d also offered a reward—two thousand ounces platinum—for those responsible for the abortive hijacking. Dead or alive, as the old-time saying went. Here on Mars it worked for everybody, but she wouldn’t have been allowed to do it back in Jersey. The authorities and the media would be pissing all over themselves once they heard of it.

  Now, now, remember you’re a lady, Julie.

  She was waiting to hear from her granddaughter, aboard the City of Newark. She knew—and exulted in—the naked fact that Llyra and her companion Jasmeen had survived. She also knew that there was a long line of passengers waiting for a chance to communicate with loved ones, friends, and business associates, and that the Ngu family, in the middle of the alphabet, had a long tradition of waiting their turn democratically.

  Julie was also waiting to hear from her eldest son, Adam. Unable to reach him by telephone, she’d recorded a couple of voice messages—not immediately disclosing the fact of the hijacking; voicemail was no way to hear about something like that—and let it be. Adam was so stable and reliable she sometimes worried about him. He’d have a good reason for not having answered, and he’d call her back as soon as he could.

  Meanwhile, she sat uneasily, watching fleeting images on the wall across from her favorite chair, alternating between the news—which she usually avoided like the life-shortening plague it happened to be—and a ballgame. Syrtis Major Carpet was playing Coprates Muffler today, at Old Survivor Stadium. The score was tied at zero in the seventh—

  Her phone rang, and, surprisingly, a message on her 3DTV screen said that the incoming call was visual, as well as auditory, and that the party was within range for two-way conversation. She answered it, “Hello?”

  “Mom? This is Adam.” The lag was less than five seconds, annoying but endurable. “We just got your phone messages. What can we do for you?”

  Behind her son she saw what looked like a small stateroom aboard a spaceship. Adam appeared to be sitting at the end of a bed, leaning toward a dresser where his personal computer must be sitting. Beside him sat Ardith, looking a good deal healthier and happier than Julie had seen her in a very long while. It seemed a terrible shame to spoil it.

  Julie asked gently, “Where are you two, anyway?”

  “Aboard a charter we booked on Pallas.” He grinned at Ardith, then at his mother. “We’re headed your way, as you’ve guessed by now. In spite of some pretty exciting developments with that big rock you bought her, Ardith locked up the materials lab. I left Arleigh minding the store on Ceres.”

  “Yes,” Ardith continued, momentarily carried away. “You see, the pulse rates vary for each form of radiation, but not according to any pattern we can discover. Computer analysis indicates the rates are converging—”

  Julie nodded. “The whole thing has gone public, Ardith. Similar pulses are being observed from a point source out in the Cometary Halo. Sherry Sinclair has pointed the William Wilde Curringer in that direction and will investigate.”

  “It’s very exciting, Mom, but nothing we can do much about for a while, so we thought we’d surprise Llyra and Jasmeen. Sorry I was out of touch. We were—”

  “Never mind what you were,” Julie laughed. “You’re your father’s son—”

  Ardith grinned and said, “Thank heavens!”

  “Thank decent genes, young lady.” Her expression changed as she came to her real reason for calling. “I assume you haven’t seen 3DTV for—”

  Adam blinked. “Absolutely not. What’s up?”

  “Understand first, that Llyra and Jasmeen are both perfectly fine. Other folks were hurt or killed, but they weren’t. In fact, they have helped—”

  “Mom!”

  “Oh, pardon me, dear. Their ship was hijacked by around two dozen Null Delta Em people. Most of them were killed. A couple managed to escape.”

  Now the lag was really annoying. She watched their faces change, too, as they received the news. Ardith bore it pretty well, which was why she’d told them first that the girls were all right. She hadn’t gotten the news that way, herself. It felt like she’d lost ten years from her most recent rejuvenation. She really ought to talk Ardith into—

  “What can we do?” Adam asked his mother. Ardith was sitting closer to him now, biting her lip just a little and leaning hard against his shoulder.

  “I’ve done about as much as can be done at this remove, dear.” She told him about the ban on East American ships, and the reward she’d offered.

  She went on. “Apparently they’re having some difficulty—I don’t have any coherent details, mind you—with getting the spaceliner’s engines started again, or shut off, or something. I learned what little I know from a news media creature here in Bradbury who wanted to interview me, to ask what I feel about this, and feel about that.”

  Five seconds later, Adam nodded. “We’ll be docking at Deimos in about three hours,” he told her. “You know the routine. Down in a shuttle to the Coprates spaceport. Then a sandskipper ride to your place.”

  “Don’t bother with the sandskipper to my place. In fact, don’t bother with the shuttle to Coprates. I’ll be meeting both of you at the transfer port on Deimos itself. I intend to be there when the City of Newark arrives.”

  ***

  He said, “They’re finally gone!”r />
  “Yeah,” she replied, spitting sand. “How long does it take to rescue a guy who oughta be dead and write a crashed ship off as a total loss?”

  Crenicichla and Krystal had used the folding latrine shovels they’d found in their survival gear to dig into the sand behind a car-sized rock, and hidden there for hours while rescue crews who had arrived in three giant helicopters pulled their unconscious enemy out of the pilot’s seat, patched him up, got him onto a backboard, and transported him to some hospital somewhere to the east of the landing site.

  “I never saw choppers with such enormous rotors!” Crenicichla had exclaimed as they’d roared overhead. The machines had had a set of eight broad blades at each end, about twice as long as anything they’d ever seen before. Between the local geology—make that “areology”—and the machines adapted to it, he was finally convinced at the gut level that he was on an alien planet.

  These days, the Moon didn’t seem that alien; it was like living in the Earth’s attic.

  Digging had been really weird, he thought. They’d gone through two inches of the plant called macaroni—nasty, slimy stuff, altogether too much like the real thing—then another nine inches or so of soil, bound by a network of eerie white tendrils the size of a human hair. Then sand, apparently bottomless. For something like four billion years, the Martian wind had carried the powder-fine stuff—at less than a single millibar, that was all it could carry—from the plateaus eight miles above, down into the chasm. It was a wonder it hadn’t filled the place right up.

  Maybe, now that Martian air was five hundred times as dense, it would.

  “Oh, look!” Krystal wiped ineffectually at the outdoor clothing she’d put on. It wasn’t quite a spacesuit. Its rubbery texture was more like what a scuba diver would wear. “I got this cheese stuff all over me!”

  They’d actually been quite comfortable in their premature grave, he thought. Especially compared to some of the camps he’d trained in. The soil had been relatively warm, and the air fresh and rich with oxygen. They hadn’t had to touch the survival canisters they’d brought.

  It wasn’t that way everywhere. On the surface, out of the canyons, there were places—elevations like the four titanic volcanoes that could be seen from Earth—where it was safe to wander in the day. But when the sun went down and photosynthesis stopped, a person could end up like a goldfish that had accidentally flopped out of its bowl.

  He stood up and helped Krystal to her feet. Their kits had also been provided with global locator modules. Pressing the combination for Mars linked him to a network of satellites above the formerly Red Planet.

  “Let’s go,” he told his companion. “That old man was a better pilot than I thought.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. It’s only a four mile walk—at one third gee—into town.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO: ON THE MEND

  The attempt to substitute policy for character—in the form of alcohol control, drug control, gun control, speed control, wealth control, all of them amounting to life control—is the root of all nanny-state evils. It’s amazing—and sometimes amusing—how indignant the nannies become when they discover, over and over and over again, that it just doesn’t work. —The Diaries of Rosalie Frazier Ngu

  “They escaped?”

  The man who thought of himself as the Fastest Gun in the Moon sat up in bed and immediately regretted it. His head began to throb and a cluster of electronics on the table at his elbow began making worried noises. Immediately, the supercharger that kept pressure in the room a couple of pounds higher than what it was outside, went to work with a whir.

  He felt his ears go “pop!”.

  “Is so,” replied one of his new visitors, the one with the beard. “Was rescue mission, not criminal apprehension. They search spacecraft—part that is not squished flat—but nobody even looks for tracks. To save myself, my friend, I cannot help thinking this is most tragic and disgraceful oversight.”

  “Nobody” being the crews that had pulled Manzel from the wreckage of the yacht, where he might easily have died without their speedy ministrations.

  “I trust you will forgive me, if I remain grateful in my own small way.”

  For decades—perhaps even for centuries—popular fiction had encouraged the public in the strange belief that an individuals might be rendered temporarily unconscious, but left otherwise unharmed, by a judicious blow to the head. The ability to do this was sometimes attributed to priests or priestesses of ancient healing cults in the classical world.

  Manzel’s first visitor this morning had been a young doctor whose description of the injuries he’d suffered gave the lie to that popular belief.

  “You have a serious concussion, Mr. Manzel,” the doctor had said. “That’s somewhat like a bruise,” she told him, “that the brain often suffers when the head is struck by a twelve-inch stainless steel frying pan, which they found lying on the deck beside the pilot’s seat that you were taking your little snooze in. Some of your hair was found sticking to its underside.”

  “Yech!”

  She nodded. ”I think that puts it reasonably well.”

  He liked her, even though she appeared young enough to be his daughter’s daughter (if he’d had a daughter). He guessed that she was originally southern Chinese, even if her name happened to be Rachael Abernathy. (He wondered, as he always did, how that had happened.) The young woman was unabashedly straightforward and businesslike with him, but with a sparkle of humor in her eyes and a pleasant lilt in her voice.

  “I don’t know why you don’t have a depressed skull fracture,” she’d told him, examining the computer display in her hand. “I think you came about as close to it as humanly possible. You must be taking your calcium supplements, or have a pretty hard head in general. They didn’t even break the skin, although you’ve got yourself a spiffy bruise.”

  “Spiffy?” He hadn’t heard the expression in decades.

  “An old-fashioned word I’m trying out this week. Last week it was ’singular’.”

  “You’re not kidding.”

  “I’m not kidding. You don’t seem to have suffered any permanent damage, although one never knows. All of that pain and swelling will gradually go away, but please pay attention to them, and rest. We’ll keep an eye on you against stroke—you don’t live here on Mars, do you?—but I’ve filled your circulatory system full of damage-control nanobots to help clean up your brain-bruise and prevent dangerous clotting.”

  “And … ?”

  “And I’m going to discharge you to outpatient care early tomorrow morning.”

  “Tomorrow?” He’d felt worse than this before and managed to work. “Why not this evening, Doctor? Why not right now? I have things I have to—”

  “What you have to do, Mr. Manzel,” she said, “Aaron, is relax. Let us watch you for the rest of today and tonight. You’ll have lunch and supper with us—all our meals are catered by Maxwell’s, the best restaurant in the Solar System—and the best night’s sleep you ever had.”

  “Because … ?” He knew what she was going to say.

  “Because after I get a little more information from you for our records—”

  “Sorry, Doctor, but I already declined.” She looked frustrated. During the brief period when Mars had a formal government, one measure it had stringently enforced was the right to absolute privacy of its citizens. No one could keep a dossier on anyone else, or even take their photograph, without their explicit, written permission. Another was the strict separation of science—especially medicine—and state.

  “I’m going to give you some morphine anyway, to help your brain heal.”

  He shook his head—which hurt. “And make me groggy and useless tomorrow.”

  “You’re supposed to take it easy. Want to pop one of those damaged capillaries?” He didn’t know if she was persuasive because she was so pretty, or just because she was persuasive. A good night’s sleep was tempting.

  “How about VR? I can’t stand 3DTV
,” he asked.

  She took a breath and let it out. “I’m inclined to say no. Those things can be pretty exciting; they tend to raise the blood pressure. 3DTV’s okay. The news is full of the hijacking, and there’s always baseball.”

  “Baseball. I can always fall asleep during baseball. You’re the doctor.”

  “Don’t you forget it.” She’d taken her little computer and left.

  Now, he had a couple of real visitors who had flown here all the way from the western end of Valles Marineris to see him. He felt he had some explaining to do to them, since they were the individuals who had hired him to look after Llyra Ngu and their own daughter, Jasmeen Khalidov.

  “Escaped?” Mohammed Khalidov repeated the word. He was a short man, slender, but with powerful arms and hands. As he spoke, his huge walrus moustache blew out with his consonants. “They were never even caught! People who rescue you do not know they are aboard spaceship. Perhaps, by time rescuers got there, they were not. Survival gear and supplies are gone from airlock. Two pairs tracks lead west, then vanish.”

  “How do you know this?” Manzel asked. He liked these people very much, and it hurt him—almost as much as his head—to have disappointed them.

  “We just came from there,” said Mohammed’s wife, Beliita. Where her husband was slight, she was tiny, perhaps no more than five feet tall. In her middle years, her looks had coarsened a little, as looks tend to do, and she was plump. But Manzel could see that she had once been a real beauty, like her daughter. “We stopped on way to Coprates City. Was in unclaimed area, so we do not trespass, and broken spacecraft is very hard to miss.”

  Manzel nodded. “I imagine.” He had told them of his decision to board the Null Delta Em getaway vessel. It had contained the last two people who had any wish to harm the girls. He deeply regretted losing Johnnie Crenicichla and Krystal Sweet and still didn’t quite understand how she’d managed to get loose from the ship’s makeshift infirmary.