A Handful of Stars (Star Svensdotter #2)

by Dana Stabenow

  And beneath that someone else had scribbled, “The Only Habitat Rates Per Square Meter for Multiple-Family Dwellings in the Solar System.”

  — 7 —

  Bacteria and Blue Whales

  Galaxies and stars, planets and moons, bacteria and blue whales, they are all merely arrangements of ninety-two atomic elements… Give me the ninety-two elements and I’ll give you a universe.

  —Chet Raymo

  THREE YEARS AFTER OUR ARRIVAL in the Belt we threw a party, a combination celebration of the fifth successful launch to Terranova and a sort of inaugural party for Homemade Homes. I got out my guitar, Charlie brought her keyboard up from the dispensary, and Simon beat percussion with a pair of drumsticks on the bottom of a couple of empty pots, one large, one small. We missed Elizabeth’s flute. At that time I felt we had established enough of a routine to ease up on the constraints I had originally placed on alcohol, drugs, and the noxious evil killer weed. I had Caleb pass the word that such substances would now be tolerated in controlled amounts so long as they did not affect performance, whereupon I was obliged to view with at least the appearance of equanimity the materialization of a dozen illegal vacuum stills and the harvest of what I in my innocence had thought were tomato plants in Geodome One. “You haven’t been lying to me about the UAs, have you, Charlie?” I shouted as the party went into overdrive.

  “We’ve been straight on the job, Star,” she shouted back, and I was satisfied. There wasn’t a thing I could do after the fact anyway.

  If you took your poison in liquid, powder, or gas, the party went a long way toward easing the tension we’d all been working under. The galley was so crowded I was convinced the atmospheric pressure was up by half a kay. No one seemed to mind, and at least this way no one had room to fall down and hurt themselves. I saw Perry Austin with a genuine thirty-two-tooth grin on her face as she listened to Maggie, listing precariously to starboard, tell lies about the madaming business. Whitney Burkette, whose normally immaculate exterior was looking slightly mussed, was drinking with one hand and drawing complicated diagrams on a bulkhead with the other for Leif, who was holding a lab beaker full of what I most sincerely hoped was fruit punch. Ari Greenbaum was talking New Yawk Bronx to Claire and she was coming back with pecan-pie Southrun. I couldn’t understand a word either one of them was saying, but they looked like they were enjoying themselves. Bob Shackleton was making a move on Ursula Lodge, which made me think better of both of them. Roger and Zoya were nuzzling each other in one corner, Crip and Mother vanished before the evening was half over, and Charlie and Simon were working up to one of their better fights. The kids— there were over ten resident on the station by now—had long since sacked out. Caleb was looking yearningly toward our cabin and nudging me in that direction when somebody decided that Belt Station Hokuwa’a-Voortrekker needed a better and shorter name.

  The festivities turned into a christening party as everyone advanced their choices—Fort Apache, Homestead, Frontier Fanny, Baby Belter, Botany Bay, Providence, Plymouth Rock, Sagres, Resolution, Santa Maria, et cetera, ad infinitum, ad nauseum. I never called it anything but the station so I didn’t really care. We settled on Outpost, which was short enough and evocative of living on both a physical and social frontier.

  “I got an idea,” Maile said, and incorporated the new name in a weekly newsletter, the Outposter. The lead article of the first edition concerned our plans for redesigning the interiors of asteroids. I took the coward’s way out and blipped a complimentary copy to Terranova in care of the American Alliance ambassador. It wasn’t long before we had Frank breathing heavily down the commnet to find out what was going on. We responded with a sample demographics study Archy and Mother worked up on every social, economic, political, and religious splinter group ever assigned an acronym by the American Times-Post. Frank waited a week, during which time I had the distinct feeling Helen was talking hard and fast, and then replied with two symbols, a dollar sign and a question mark. I responded with a dollar sign and an exclamation point. Six months later we received two crates via a Truax Volksrocket. Caleb got out a crowbar, I got out my self-control, and we opened them up. One was filled with cryohed silver salmon roe, the other with milt. They were accompanied by an unsigned note that read as follows:

  Put these up a creek or I’ll put you there.

  “Salmon!” Roger said as if it were a four-letter word. “Salmon! I thought we were building a freshwater fish farm! I’ll have to change every plant in the place!”

  “Now, Roger,” I said soothingly, “you know since the Greenhouse Effect caused the Ten-Year Drought in the Pacific Northwest—”

  “A saltwater aquarium? Really, Star,” said Whitney Burkette with a calm even more icy than usual, “does Dr. Sartre have any idea of the effect of salt water on moving metal parts? It will be necessary to effect a complete redesign of the aerators.”

  “—during which time the creeks were so low the salmon couldn’t get upstream to spawn—”

  “Creeks!” Ari Greenbaum exploded. “Creeks! The river was hard enough to design and now she wants creeks yet!”

  “—and there was no escapement and the three- and five-year schools have yet to restock themselves to pre-drought levels—”

  By then I was talking to an empty room. “—so fresh salmon is now worth more per pound downstairs than starstones. How is it,” I asked Charlie plaintively, “that Frank can cause a near mutiny from one-point-eight AUs away?”

  “Talent,” she said. “Also cussedness, and jealousy that it wasn’t his idea in the first place.”

  Fortunately for the mental health of my crew the same Volksrocket bearing roe also bore an acting troupe. They settled into quarters on Ceres and began staging plays and musicals in Piazzi City Square. They scheduled performances for every night except Wednesday and a matinee on Sunday so as not to interfere with Brother Moses’ evening services. The anticipation with which this news was greeted stationwide, even after the blowout christening party, forced me to realize just how hard we had been working and how much in need all my people were of rest and recreation. Just because, lacking a skating rink or a zerogee flight habitat, my only hobby is work, doesn’t mean everyone else’s is. I gave half the station leave Friday and the other half Saturday, and in a burst of generosity I immediately regretted, both sections all day Sunday off as well. I attended the first performance myself, holding Paddy on my lap, sitting next to Caleb with Sean on his. The initial production was Les Miserables.

  The thing is, you have to remember when you’re reading a Victorian novel or watching a play based on one that in Victorian novels people drop like flies, and I always forget. Characters fade gracefully away from consumption and are beheaded at the guillotine and stab their lovers and poison their husbands and fling themselves beneath trains, and a deathbed scene that lasts seven and a half pages in the novel and twenty minutes worth of dialogue in the play can go on for two solos and a production number in a musical. I managed to control myself through the deaths of Fantine, Eponine, Enjolras, and even Gavroche, but when Javert went off that bridge, and in the low gee he took a long time falling into the Seine… It didn’t help that I was sitting front row center. Or that I laughed so loud I woke up both twins. Or that our tickets were complimentary. They never were again. “I can’t take you anywhere,” Caleb said after the show limped to its finale.

  It was the thin end of the wedge; the troupe’s arrival in the Belt seemed to act as some sort of signal and hard on their heels came a series of performing groups, including the Duke Ellington Orchestra. “This is more like it,” I told Caleb. For their finale they played Jelly Roll Morton’s “Smokehouse Blues” slow, low-down, and dirty, with all five saxophones up front. I didn’t bother to wait around for the encore. “I really can’t take you anywhere,” Caleb said in our cabin afterward. “Where’s my clothes?”

  “I don’t know. By the door.”

  “Where’s the kids?”

  “I don’t care. Stop talki
ng and come back over here.”

  “Could I have maybe five minutes to catch my breath?”

  “No.”

  “Help. Help?” And he laughed.

  Jelly Roll Morton and saxophones. You’re talking real music, there.

  · · ·

  As our social and cultural lives picked up, the fatigue and enervation of the crew began to alleviate, and they turned to R and D into asteroidal worlds with a will. The basic structural requirements would never vary all that much. No vehicles faster than a bicycle, so no transport hassles. Low gee swimming pools. Hangars for low gee flight gear up close to the axis, walking to them the equivalent of climbing a gentle hill four hundred feet high, take about twenty minutes. Separate the sphere into three villages of four thousand people each. Make each village’s day independent, and you had a round-the-clock work shift.

  The individual adaptations, however, would change from world to world, depending on the prospective client. For example, how does a Moslem bow five times toward the east from a kneeling position inside a world that is 1.8-plus astronomical units from Mecca? In a world 450 meters in diameter, for a population of 10,000 people, Roger estimated a growing area, of about 600,000 meters, but how many square meters must be given over to agriculture if that population is vegetarian? In such a vegetarian society, if an increase in arable land is called for, does that require a comparable decrease in living space, and what does that do to our baseline ten thousand population allowance? The design for such a world does not have to allow space for mycoprotein meat vats, but if they happen to be the kind of vegetarians who drink milk it does have to be plumbed for fixed-bed-enzyme synthesis equipment. If they didn’t eat meat or drink milk, they might eat eggs and the design must incorporate a chicken farm. Some vegetarian sects, I was pleased to discover, eat seafood, which elevated our saltwater aquarium from a flashy showcase to necessary research for future products, and quelled the lingering rebellion among Messrs. Lindbergh, Burkette, and Greenbaum against all creatures great and small nourished on salt water.

  But if the New England Territorial Penitentiary wants to explore the possibility of maximum security prisons in orbit, does the promise of a gargantuan federal grant for study purposes mean you can tell Frank to go piss up a rope? After he records a message in a tone of voice marginally below that of a primal scream to inform me that Terranova is not never was and never will be into criminal rehabilitation, which phrase he considered an oxymoron anyway? “We are not building whole new worlds so Cyrus the Second can tuck away renegade Bedouins and other of his political mistakes a nice tidy billion miles from New Persia!” ran one bitter bulletin.

  You could always tell Frank was upset when he shifted from metric to oldstyle. But, as Simon pointed out, “At least it’s ‘we’ now, instead of ‘you.’ ”

  An added benefit to my idea was that Claire’s people were prospecting farther and farther afield for the perfect test rock. They went up- and down-arm, trailed by a doggedly persistent Bob Shackleton, cataloguing and surveying and assaying and evaluating and finally plotting the orbits of all the asteroids they encountered. Some they flagged for future study, a very few they claimed outright. Our knowledge of what was where increased daily. Sam Holbrook said, “I got an idea,” and with Bob Shackleton began publishing an updated map a month, incorporating the new discoveries we were making. They sold them for $100 Alliance or equivalent apiece, and the miners snapped them up like lottery tickets with a $1,000,000 Alliance jackpot. Finally, Shackleton’s presence was showing a return. The day the map-selling business paid him a personal profit and he realized for the first time the possibilities inherent in a free market society, he became suddenly less concerned about the expedition’s rock-moving and mining activities in the Belt. Every discovery, every shipment, every artificially induced movement out of natural orbit by an asteroid, meant the sale of a new map. Shackleton turned into a capitalist right before my very eyes. Now if I could only talk Mother Mathilda into charging a small fee for services at her free clinic on Ceres.

  And then one day one of the geologists ranged even farther afield than usual, was out of range for three days, and just when Caleb had decided to go after her, she called in a contact with the long-lost Conestoga.

  “Just the Conestoga?” I asked Archy.

  “Parvati says the Tallship’s nowhere she can see it.”

  “Tell her to return to base, Arch. We’ll take it from here.” I cut out of the link and looked at Caleb.

  “What’s the Conestoga?”

  “Remember? We saw them on Luna that night we spent with Jorge.” He still looked blank, and I said impatiently, “It’s one of two ships sold by Space Services to a group of Terran geneticists. We saw them parked inside Copernicus—”

  Caleb snapped his fingers. “I remember. They were part of that BioScience Engineering and Ethics Committee the American Alliance formed when genetechs started to grow little blond boys.”

  “That’s the ones. Their chairman—what was his name? Leander? Lafayette? Lavoliere, that’s it—Lavoliere led them out on strike, and then to Luna. They launched for the Belt right after the One-Day Revolution, and no one’s heard from them since.”

  “Do we care?”

  “Not much. Although Deke at SSI asked Helen to ask me to keep an eye out for them.”

  “Why?”

  “He wants to know how SSI’s ships held up in service.” Caleb frowned, and I said, “What?”

  “I think this family is owed a bit of time off, don’t you?”

  “What have you got in mind?”

  “Oh, a little rock hopping. See some new faces and new places. What do you say?”

  “You want us to leave Outpost all by itself? Leave the lunatics in charge of the asylum?”

  “Yes.”

  I considered it for maybe five seconds. “Okay.”

  He laughed and hugged me. Affronted, Paddy demanded, “Want down. Now!”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Caleb said. “I’ll call Leif. Make this a real family outing.”

  “Oh. Okay. If we can tear him away from Mother and Sam and Archy.” I added, “We’ll make Mom and Pop’s our first stop. Check out that rumor you heard about a chromium find.”

  He gave me a look. “I might have known you’d figure out some way to work a little business into a pleasure trip.”

  “And we’ll turn Archy off.”

  Caleb whooped and grabbed me up in a bone-crusher of a hug.

  “Star!” came Archy’s indignant protest. “You can’t do that!”

  Caleb stilled. “We’ll be out of range most of the time anyway, Archy. You can keep track of us on the Cub’s locater.” I looked at Caleb. He smiled approvingly at me and I wriggled all over like a petted pup.

  Caleb, Leif, and I and the twins set out two days later in a souped-up Piper Solar Cub. Caleb drove, Leif navigated, and I prayed. Travel through the Belt was always interesting, if confusing. Our first stop required a jump “up” from the plane of Outpost’s rotation. When we’d moved three hundred thousand klicks (about three fourths of the distance from Terra to Luna) in that direction we hit the brakes, slowing to dead in space relative to Outpost orbit. We had to slow our orbital velocity to allow our first stop to catch up with us. That meant rotating ninety degrees and kicking into reverse, again relative to Outpost orbit. All this was accomplished with Sol burning brightly on our left, and it was a relatively easy navigation drill.

  The second stop was a rock over twenty-seven degrees out of the ecliptic with an eccentricity of .25563 percent. Landing on it required a corkscrew maneuver that made me glad we had Archy and a three-man engineering team designing and redesigning inertial guidance systems for space compasses for Outpost’s Transportation Department. Our third stop we had to catch up to. That required one long, grinding boost on a direct trajectory.

  Because all these objects were moving closer to or away from each other as they pursued their own individual orbits, as did Outpost, the return trip would require
an entirely new set of coordinates and a revised flight plan. When you add a third dimension to travel you complicate the act of getting from Point A to Point B by a factor of ten. Million. Ask any pilot. At least in the Belt we had little to worry about in the way of traffic, although we did need a collision alarm for those as-yet uncharted planetismals too small to eyeball.

  We took a geodomepak with us and camped out on 6789Cribbage and 6012Black Rock. At Mom and Pop’s on Cribbage, Mom, a tiny little fireplug of a woman with a long gray braid, and Pop, a muscular young man with skin burnt brown from working EVA, had more kids crawling around their dome home than we did on Outpost. “This is Betty,” Pop said, displaying the latest addition proudly. Mom, who didn’t look half as tired as I thought she should, said, “Isn’t she sweet?”

  “Adorable,” Caleb said, and hauled out the twins.

  Mom clicked her tongue and said, “My, haven’t they grown!”

  They had. They were taller, they could walk and talk, and they still looked exactly alike, cafe au lait skin, blue eyes, black curls. I looked at them through Mom’s and Pop’s admiring eyes and my heart turned over. I cleared my throat. “What’s this I hear about a chromium strike, Pop?”

  A group of miners stamped in from the warehouse. “Hey, Mom, where’s our order?”

  “Just a minute, Bob.”

  “We’re in kind of a hurry, Mom, 9722Lodestar’s at Cribbage perigee in an hour and a half, we’ve got to load for the jump now if we’re going to make it.”

  “Well, I got visitors, boys, so you get on in there and help yourselves. The price list’s on the clipboard next to the scale and the assaying kit’s hanging on the wall at the back of the room. Add up your bill on the ten-key and weigh out your payment and leave it by the lock.”