A Handful of Stars (Star Svensdotter #2)

by Dana Stabenow

  “Maile, dear,” Mother said, “we simply cannot take the chance of destroying what little evidence may remain.”

  “I,” Maile stated, still on her feet and still unsmiling, punctuating every phrase with a thump of her fist that shook the table, “left the Big Island because there wasn’t anything left for me. Sheraton built on all the beaches, Libby’s bought out all the macnut and sugar plantations, and Onizuka Spaceport appropriated everything in between. I came to the Belt to find a new life, and make a new home for myself, and I will not be dispossessed again!” By the end of her speech Maile was shouting. Until that moment I hadn’t known she could shout, and judging from the expressions on the faces of those around me I wasn’t the only one.

  “Maile’s right,” Maggie, the first to recover, said. “This may concern our history, but do we preserve it at the expense of our future?”

  “Are you willing to take the responsibility of destroying your children’s heritage?” Mother said stubbornly. “We must preserve the integrity of the site for study.”

  Roger piped up from his seat next to Zoya. “If there were living, growing things out here once, I want to know about them, right down to their gene structure. We can’t just go on melting down possible evidence of their existence.” Next to him Zoya rose to her feet, threw out her hands, and delivered a passionate oration in Russian that lasted by my chronometer for four minutes and twenty-seven seconds. When she resumed her seat Roger said, “And Zoya feels the same way.”

  “And I,” Ari Greenbaum said.

  “I’m afraid I must disagree with my distinguished colleagues,” Whitney Burkette said, very stern. “We are behind schedule as it is, don’t you know. We can’t slow up something as innovative and essential and, may I say, as potentially profitable, as ‘A World of Your Own’ production on the off chance a bald paramecium twenty-six hundred years old once occupied—what? A planet? We have no conclusive evidence of its existence.” His walrus mustache was beginning to bristle. He stroked it down. “It could have been a ship. We do have conclusive evidence of ships built and piloted by other races than our own.”

  “Crude oil on an F-T-L ship?”

  “It doesn’t necessarily have to be a Librarian ship,” Mother pointed out.

  “Mother is right,” Charlie said with reluctance. “We have to know one way or the other. We owe it to whoever was here before us.”

  “This is beginning to sound like a goddam Sierra Club meeting,” Maggie said ominously.

  “We owe it to our children to carry on with what we’re doing,” Simon said, glaring at Charlie.

  “We owe it to ourselves to stay employed,” Crip said, glaring at Mother.

  Mother looked stubborn. Charlie looked furious, Simon enraged. Everyone started yelling at the nearest available target. I left the room.

  · · ·

  The twins were waiting when I got back to our cabin. So was one of the p-suit techs. She had Caleb’s suit in tow. She looked nervous. “Yes?” I said.

  She fidgeted. “I thought—what do you want me to do with Caleb’s suit?”

  I looked at it. Caleb had been a large man. He and I had both needed suits tailored for us. “Ask Maile if she needs a spare,” I said. “She’s almost as big as he was. Or turn it over to the Guard.”

  I turned my back. The door closed behind me. I fed the twins peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, bathed them, and put them to bed. I read them the next chapter of The Pearl Lagoon. As I read, Sean crawled down out of his bunk and into my lap. Paddy slid her hand into my free one, and leaned her head against my arm.

  “Where’s Daddy?” Paddy asked, for the thousandth time.

  “He’s gone,” I said.

  “When’s he coming back?”

  “He’s not coming back, Paddy.”

  “Why not?”

  “Emaa says it’s because he’s with the angels now, Paddy.”

  “But Mommy doesn’t believe in angels, Sean,” Paddy replied, tears welling up in her eyes.

  “I do so,” I lied.

  “So that’s where Daddy is?” Paddy said, sniffling.

  “Yes,” I lied again.

  “Will we ever see him again?”

  “Yes,” I lied for the third time.

  I resumed reading. We fell asleep together, on Paddy’s bunk.

  — 10 —

  Sleeping Alone

  The moon has set, and the Pleiades; it is Midnight, and time passes, and I sleep alone.

  —Sappho

  THE ONE-DAY REVOLUTION on Terranova was nothing compared to the skirmishing that occupied every waking moment on Outpost for the next week. There wasn’t a friendly conversation that didn’t end in a shouting match. There wasn’t a meal that didn’t finish in a food fight. There wasn’t a job that got an inch closer to being done before one of the riggers on it downed tools and stamped away in disgust. And then it got personal.

  Early Wednesday morning I stumbled down to the galley for coffee and found Crip huddled on a bench with a jacket bunched beneath his head, trying to sleep. That night Charlie was routed out of bed to treat a beauty of a shiner Maile said she got when she ran into a door. You can’t run into a door on a space station. On Thursday the league playoffs for tridee basketball were scheduled. I toyed with the idea of canceling them. Mother counseled against it. “Better they take it out on the court, dear,” she said.

  I don’t know that “better” was the adjective I would have employed. The score was tied at the half and stayed that way until the final buzzer sounded, by which time every member of both teams, first and second string, had fouled out. “Well, dear,” Mother said, preparing to rise from the bleachers next to me, “if I’d wanted to see a fistfight, I would have gone to a hockey game.”

  Friday evening the Globe Theater Company put on a production of The Cherry Orchard in Piazzi City Square. It took the Star Guard to break up the riot that greeted the curtain call. Simon and a group of like-minded Outposters and miners treated the actor who played Lopakhin to a night out in Piazzi City, finishing up at Maggie’s. Saturday’s performance was canceled.

  · · ·

  On Sunday, I left the twins with Charlie and suited up to go EVA. I clicked on my helmet, checked to see that all the lights were green, and cycled the lock. Outside I attached my tether, pulled myself over to the jetpack rack, and fumbled through them until I found one whose gauges read full. I spent another ten minutes untangling and detaching my tether and pushed off. I nudged the comm switch with my chin and said, “Outpost Traffic Control, this is Star Svensdotter.”

  “Outpost to Star, go ahead.”

  “I’m stepping outside for a bit. Permission to move out five klicks on two-forty, there to maintain position until further notification.”

  There was a click as Traffic Control accessed my locator beacon. “Okay, Star, gotcha. What’re you doing out there?”

  “Rubbernecking.” I pushed off and maneuvered with my thrusters until OTC, following me on their grid, told me I was where I wanted to be.

  I hung there, kicking my feet over the edge of the universe.

  Outpost floated five klicks in front of me, outlined against the expanse of space, white opposing its black, less than minuscule against its immensity, so brightly illuminated by Sol’s rays that I had to switch on my helmet polarizer. And yet it was dull in comparison to the innumerable stars burning brightly at its back.

  Space stations are never outwardly neat, and Outpost was no exception. A beehive of bombs tethered themselves to one arm by a single slender strand of steel. PVAs unfolded themselves in geometric precision inside the rim. Geodomes popped out all over like mushroom caps. Stabilizers tangled with heat radiators and heat radiators fouled antennae and mirrors rotated slowly, bringing the sun inside.

  The first day we’d spent together, Caleb had wanted to know where I lived on Terranova. I’d told him, in a tiny house all by itself in the foothills of the Rocky Candy Mountains. “Sounds lonely,” he had said. And I’d replied, “S
ometimes. Sometimes just alone. I like it that way.”

  I’d been alone since we’d come back from Tomorrow, but not lonely. The twins were always there. So was Simon, trying not to sound sympathetic. Looking at me and then looking away hastily, to grab for Charlie’s hand and hold it so tightly she winced. Charlie, who knew me better and so said nothing at all, was just there. Mother brought me coffee with one hand and printouts of obscure texts of Schliemann’s discovery of Troy with the other, and told me how from then on The Iliad and The Odyssey were more than the sum of a blind man’s telling of fanciful legends. Proof of the existence of Troy, Mother pointed out, had changed the way Terrans studied their history. And Crip and Maggie and the rest of the crew, always dropping by the cabin on little or no pretext. I’d never had so many offers to baby-sit, or to dinner, or to help with administrative duties. I realized I hadn’t seen a miner in weeks. The crew had been running interference and I hadn’t even noticed.

  The swelling on Leif’s face was down and the bruises had faded. He still avoided me. I didn’t blame him. If I could have, I would have avoided myself.

  If only we hadn’t taken that sample. If only I hadn’t recognized that damned crude for what it was. If only we’d never heard of Lavoliere, or the Conestoga, or 7877Tomorrow. If only—

  Enough. You can’t blow your nose inside a p-suit helmet. I called OTC for clearance and triggered my thrusters.

  Back inside the station, I called Archy. “Archy, notify department heads that there will be a station meeting tomorrow—no, make it Wednesday—after breakfast in the galley. Attendance is mandatory. All personnel, I say again, all personnel must attend. Pull in the Star Guard, the people in the assaying office on Ceres, and all of Claire’s crew. Anyone who has to be on duty must stand by on their communits. Get Maile to set up a bounce to anyone who’s off station and can’t make it in on time. Get it?”

  “Got it. What’s going on?”

  “I’m calling a cease-fire.”

  “And about time, too.”

  Three days later I told my crew how it was going to be.

  Outpost had the equipment and the personnel to find new rocks, catalogue them, and analyze them before either (A) putting them to use or (B) leaving them strictly alone. Very well, then, we would carry on with our charting and core sampling and specimen gathering.

  At the same time, we would pay special attention to anything that might conceivably be organic or man-made in origin. Anything we found would be run by Outpost’s newly formed archaeology department. I took the path of least resistance and named Mother head of the department. Archy rifled through the personnel files and turned up an agrotech with an undergraduate minor in anthropology and a biotech who had worked one summer on a dig in Mazatlan. When Mother squawked over their combined lack of qualifications, I reminded her that we were almost two AUs from the University of Cairo, that they were the best qualified people we could come up with, and that they held the singular virtue of being on the scene. Bob Shackleton volunteered his services, and Leif nominated himself aide-de-camp, completing the employee roster.

  Shackleton knew more about archaeology than the rest of them put together, and he reminded us, “As yet, all we’ve got to go on is an ecofact.”

  “The crude.”

  “Exactly.”

  Claire bristled. “What about the reservoir?”

  “I don’t know that I’d qualify something in that many bits and pieces as an artifact.” Shackleton shrugged. “I’m no expert. I make maps. Anyway, before we start asking questions about who and why and how and where, we need to know when. The good news is, if there is anything left, it’s been floating around in a vacuum. No friction, no erosion. No tourists chipping bits off to put on their mantels back home. What we find, if anything, might be in decent enough shape to at least date.”

  “What’s the bad news?”

  “The bad news is, whatever blew whatever this was apart did a thorough job of it, and we’re talking a search that will incorporate billions of square kilometers. We’ll be lucky to find anything as concrete as even the remains of an oil reservoir anytime soon.”

  “And if and when we do?”

  “What are we looking for, anyway?” Strasser said. I’d called him in as a sort of amicus curiae. If Outpost stopped buying ore, the miners would be interested in knowing why.

  “Anything that looks like—well, let me put it this way. Anything that doesn’t look like a hunk of rock.”

  “And then? Always supposing we find something that doesn’t look like a hunk of rock?”

  Simon’s irony was heavy-handed but Bob was unfazed. “We try to date them.” He looked down at a list. “There are different techniques for different materials. If we find pottery, ceramics, that kind of thing, we can date its age up to thirty-five thousand years with TL, or thermo-luminescence. And, on Terra at least, pottery preserves a replica of the earth’s magnetism at the time of firing. Archaeomagnetism, they call it. There’s no reason to think this planet didn’t have a magnetic field. All planets do.”

  “Mars doesn’t,” Sam said. “Or not much of one.”

  “Oh,” Bob said blankly. This is what comes of specializing in one field. Bob’s long, earnest face still looked faintly startled whenever one of us addressed him directly. For four years he had been regarded and treated as at best a nonproductive nuisance wished on us by capricious and publicity-hungry expedition planners; now we were responding to his words as supplicants before an oracle, and he didn’t quite know what to do with his newfound authority.

  “And that’d only help us if we had some kind of frame of reference,” Simon said. “An ocean bed to take a core sample of, say, to match the sherds to, so we could place the time they were made. We don’t. We won’t.”

  “We haven’t been all the way around the Belt yet, Simon,” I said.

  “Do you honestly think—”

  “I stopped thinking when I smelled sulfur on my hands a month ago where no sulfur should have been,” I said. “And knowing is always better than not knowing. What else you got, Bob?”

  “If we find bones, teeth, antlers, ivory, we can use the fun techniques.”

  “Fun?”

  “F-U-N. Fluorine, uranium, nitrogen. They’re like C-14, time passes, their levels change in whatever material they exist in, we count what’s left and take a guess. Fluorine and uranium’s no good for anything younger than ten thousand years, nitrogen’s just the opposite.”

  “What about C-14?”

  He frowned. “Carbon dating? It works, but it’s clumsy, time-consuming, and inexact. It worked easy on the petroleum because petroleum’s a hydrocarbon.” He thought. “If we find charcoal, it’d be worth the hassle. Otherwise, I’d hold the process in reserve for anything we find that’s really old.”

  “How old?”

  “Older than fifty-seven hundred thirty years. Plus or minus forty.”

  There was a pause. “How are we supposed to tell?” Steve the zoologist asked timidly.

  Bob looked taken aback. He laughed. “Damned if I know.”

  There was another pause. “I’d kill for some good old-fashioned tree rings,” Simon said finally.

  In the meantime, I decreed, we would continue work on Homemade I, since most of its interior—and any evidence of previous life—had been smelted away by the pahoehoe. We were already at work with the MeekMakers. Claire would continue shipping rocks to Terranova, after a thorough examination had pronounced each one free of artifact or corpse. Charlie spoke for the majority of the closet Luddites when she said, “That sounds reasonable,” but Mother was still displeased. “If you think by a cursory examination of the surface features—” she began.

  “Not cursory, Mother,” I said patiently. “We’ll be careful.” She looked at me from beneath a suspicious brow and I said, “Very, very careful. We’ll use thump trucks and core samplers. We’ll quarter and map each rock minutely. We’ll run sonograms of every meter before we okay it for use. And we won’t buy
ore from a miner’s claim without running a survey of it first. I’d like to point out that this is adding considerably to the lead time of each delivery to Terranova and to the fish farm’s timetable and delays payday for miners who sell to us, and that everyone has agreed to it is a minor miracle for which we should thank God, fasting.”

  “Dear, I—”

  “Mother,” Charlie said warningly.

  Mother said gently, stubbornly, “Carlotta dear, I merely wish to ensure that Esther realizes how important it is to locate and preserve any clue to the Belt’s past history.”

  It had been a long, hard, very loud month. I looked at Mother. I stood up.

  “Star.” Charlie’s voice was plaintive. Her eyes pleaded with me. Charlie very seldom asked me for anything. She demanded, she ordered, she insisted, often at the top of her voice, but she very seldom asked.

  I forced myself to sit down. I poured out a cup of coffee with a shaking hand. I stirred cream and sugar into it. I blew on it. I sipped it. When I could trust myself to speak and not scream, I said tightly, “Mother, I am sick and tired of fighting you on this every step of the way. You want to tell the prospectors they can’t prospect and the miners they can’t mine? Fine. Be my guest. Have at it.” Mother looked at me, surprised, and I said, “Go ahead, go on. I won’t stop you. I’ll green light your p-suit for you. I’ll charge up your solarsled. I’ll lock the coordinates into the IMU. I’ll tell you what, I’ll even see to it that you get a decent burial.”

  “The Star Guard—” Mother said.

  “The Star Guard, Natasha, is a security force, not a hit team for Outpost,” Perry said, spacing her words precisely.

  “I know that, dear, but—”

  “They have a responsibility to protect and defend their paying customers,” Perry said in a louder voice.

  Mother, mercifully, fell silent. “All right,” I said. “Now this is what we will do. Archy, are you on?”

  “Always, Star.”

  “I don’t know why I find that reassuring. I want you to get together with Maile and put out a special edition of the Outposter. Include all the information we have up-to-date on what we found on 7877Tomorrow. Include a summary of our conclusions and how we reached them. Broadcast it hourly over KBLT, run a loop over Channel 9, run off five thousand hard copies for Ceres, and of course no one gets off the station without reading it and carrying a fax or a tape of it to their claim.”