A Handful of Stars (Star Svensdotter #2)

by Dana Stabenow

  “How about using the Star Guard for distribution? They get around, you know.”

  “They do indeed. Perry?”

  “Sounds good. I’ll tell Caleb—”

  There was a dreadful silence. “Sorry. It’s hard to—” She stopped again. “I’ll tell Ursula about the Guard distributing the fax.”

  “Thank you,” I said steadily. “Archy, front page, above the fold, box a boldface appeal from me to notify Outpost of anything anyone has found that might fit in to our theory—”

  “How about a reward for any artifacts found?”

  “Another good idea, Arch. Mother, you hear?” She nodded, and I said, “Make sure Bob dates anything brought in before you buy it.”

  Mother looked affronted. “Certainly, dear. I would have done that in any case.”

  · · ·

  “The only way Mother would be satisfied is if we chased every miner and prospector out of the Belt and then left it ourselves,” Charlie remarked later.

  “Keep it down. I just got them to sleep.” I stripped off my jumpsuit. “I could sleep for a week myself. God, but I’m tired.”

  “Me, too,” Charlie said.

  “Go home and go to bed, then.”

  She nodded. “Only one more thing to do, Star.”

  “I know,” I said. “I’ll work up something in the morning.”

  She left. I followed her down the corridor in my mind. Simon put his arms around her. She snuggled into his shoulder. She tucked a leg in between his. He wrapped his arms loosely around her waist. They slept.

  Before it’s sex, before it’s companionship, before it’s friendship even, love is lying down next to him at the end of a long, hard day, with nothing more to look forward to but the steady beat of his heart against your ear, and an uninterrupted night’s sleep.

  · · ·

  I spent four hours the next morning writing and rewriting a short description of the find on 7877Tomorrow. I speculated on what it might mean. I summarized the dissenting opinions among my own crew. I listed the options we had considered.

  I explained the course of action we had decided on. I felt it was succinct, well reasoned, and sure to convince Helen that we were doing the right thing.

  “Dream on, Star,” Archy said.

  “Thanks a lot, Archy,” I said. “I appreciate your support.” And with that Maile forwarded my letter to Helen.

  Helen’s response was an unnerving silence.

  “Nothing?” Charlie said.

  “Not a word.”

  “When did you send the message, Star?”

  “A month ago.”

  “And nothing since?”

  “Like Simon said. Not a word.”

  “Oh.” Charlie thought. “Is the link down?” she said hopefully.

  Simon shook his head. “Maile says it’s traffic as usual, confirmations of composition-and-course schedules, personals for the crew, news. Nothing else.”

  “Hell,” Charlie said.

  “Yeah.”

  “I keep thinking about all those interviews and press conferences she gave for the Homemade.”

  “I know. So do I.”

  “She hates the press.”

  “That’s not quite fair, Charlie,” Simon said judiciously. “She doesn’t just hate the press. She hates, loathes, despises, detests, abhors, and abominates the press.”

  Charlie swallowed. She sat up and squared her shoulders. “Well. All that public relations business was her idea.”

  “It certainly was.”

  “And construction is progressing.”

  “It certainly is.”

  “It’s not as if we’ve trashed the entire schedule.”

  “Certainly not.”

  “She can’t kill us, after all. She can’t even eat us.”

  “No.” I could tell by the look in my sister’s apprehensive brown eyes that Simon didn’t sound as sure of himself as she would have liked.

  Five weeks, three days, and seventeen hours later, Helen Ricadonna, originator of the Big Lie, founding mother of Terranova and perpetrator of the Terranova Belt Expedition, disembarked from a Volksrocket at Ceres. She hopped a solarsled to Outpost, marched into the galley, planted herself across the table from me, and said grimly, “Now. Would you mind repeating that, please?”

  · · ·

  Two months later Frank arrived with a deputation from the British Museum, and we gladly turned Outpost’s Department of Archaeology over to them. The agrotech and the biotech returned to their respective departments. Mother, Leif, and Bob stayed with the team, and amused us at dinnertime with the latest theories propounded by the archaeology department on what had happened to the Belt civilization, if it hadn’t gone up with the bang. Six hundred years before Christ in Terran history, there was plenty of fodder for speculation that any survivors might have made their way there.

  Mostly I listened without comment, but one evening I said, “Have any of you ever heard of Ionia?”

  “Sounds Greek to me,” Simon said.

  “Ha, ha. Ionia was a community of Greeks who lived in the western islands of Greece from around 600 to 300 B.C. They were the radical scientific thinkers of their time. The Ionians didn’t buy the idea that the universe was a mystery to be divined only by the gods and taken on faith by humankind. They believed that there was reason in nature for those who studied it with care. For example. Did you know that Aristarchus, an Ionian, held that the sun rather than the earth was at the center of the planetary system, and that all the planets went around the sun rather than around the earth? Three hundred years before Christ? Eighteen hundred years before Copernicus?”

  “Is that right?” Charlie said. “Are you sure?”

  “Sam and Archy confirmed it for me independently. There was also Leucippus, who proposed the concept of the atom in the fifth century B.C. And, Charlie, there was a physician named Empedocles. He lived around 450 B.C., and believed that light travels very fast but not infinitely fast.” There was a stir when I said that. “That’s not all. He said that there were many more Terran species in far greater variety than had survived to his time, and that clearly, and here I’m quoting, ‘either craft or courage or speed’ were decisive factors in the survival of those species that had endured.”

  “Darwin alive and well in ancient Greece, two thousand years before he was born?” Simon murmured. “I like it.”

  “He killed himself jumping into Aetna,” Sam added. “Empedocles. No wonder no one took him seriously.”

  “Perhaps he slipped, dear, taking a closer look,” Mother suggested.

  “Like Pliny,” Claire said. “He died taking too close a look at Vesuvius.”

  “Maybe Empedocles did jump in,” Simon said thoughtfully. He met my startled gaze and added, “If what we’re thinking is true, wouldn’t you have?”

  And perhaps I would have. I like to think I’m strong enough to survive anything, Darwin’s theory upright and ambulatory, but I didn’t know. I’d had Orion on my shoulder now, and Sol at my feet. To be earthbound again, to never feel the jarring boot of an Express on kickoff, never again to be out in the Great Alone? If I had all that glory behind me, and Aetna and an end to the aching homesickness for the vast infinities of space before me? I wasn’t as sure of things as I had been.

  “It’s odd, the coincidences we’ve found in looking at those years on Terra,” Maggie said. “Lao Tzu, Confucius, Buddha, Zoroaster, and who was that pharaoh Ak was talking about? Necho? And now Star’s Ionians. It’s hard to believe all that spiritual and intellectual activity was unrelated.”

  “You think they went to Terra,” Helen stated.

  “Of course she does, dear.” Mother sounded smug.

  Maggie drew back. “We don’t know for sure that there was any ‘they,’ ” she said carefully. Maggie always hedged her bets. “We’ll probably never know. I am merely pointing out an interesting coincidence of events.”

  Mother said, “ ‘It is a heart strangely un-Christian that cannot thrill with
joy when the least of men begins to pull in the direction of the stars.’ ” Mother seemed to be experiencing an epiphany right in front of us. “Vernon Johns. You really should read up on your religious philosophers. They’re not all so stodgy as you seem to think.”

  Maggie, almost but not quite, snorted.

  Mother retaliated with, “ ‘And I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away.’ Revelations 21:1.”

  Bob cleared his throat, and said apologetically, “I would like to point out something that we have yet to discuss, and that is that mankind was evolving on Terra millennia before 600 B.C. The chances of two life forms evolving practically in parallel are—are—hell, they’re incalculable.”

  “Which makes it no chance at all,” Simon pointed out.

  “That divine spark from heaven,” Charlie said, looking at Mother. “Maybe heaven was closer than we thought.”

  “Prometheus,” Maggie said. “The fire from the gods.”

  Sam pointed at her and said, “You just named our hypothetical planet.”

  “Assuming our speculations are correct,” Simon said, “assuming the original Belters fled a decomposing planet or planets, and found refuge on Terra. A purely intellectual, hypothetical speculation only.”

  “Yes?”

  “Then what the hell happened?” he said. He was on his feet now, pacing between the crowded benches, his basso profundo voice frustrated, almost angry. “Not here, I mean on Terra. If, after breakup, a few of them made it to Terra somehow and started us on the road to scientific inquiry—come on, that’s what we’re all tiptoeing around saying, isn’t it? Well? How did our ancestors come to toss it all away? If they hadn’t, we could conceivably have had calculus by the time of Christ.”

  “Christ was what happened, Simon,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Christ. In person. Terran scientists call it the Great Interruption. Fourteen, fifteen, sixteen centuries of deliberate sabotage of what the ancients, whoever they were and wherever they came from, laid down for us. Sabotage by religious fanatics who were more concerned about the bad public relations inherent in Galileo scoring one off the Church than they were in the fact that he was right.”

  “Jesus preached love, Esther,” Mother said in gentle reproof. “Those who followed subverted his teachings for their own purpose.”

  “And they didn’t do it all by themselves,” Bob added. “It must have been a great comfort to the crowned heads of the times that their right to rule was anointed by God. Any doubt cast on Christianity would be doubt cast on their right to occupy their thrones. They would have defended the faith whether they believed in it or not.”

  But in the meantime, I thought, mankind lost eighteen hundred years. Less than a fraction of a second on the cosmic calendar, but, as Simon had pointed out, that second on Terra was the difference between having a little calculus with our Christ and the Dark Ages. Where would we be now, I wondered, if Aristarchus had prevailed over Aristotle? Would there have been Ptolemaic spheres to hold up the sun and the moon and the planets? Crystal spheres with sweet music to beguile mankind into a millennium of wrong thinking?

  “We might just make up for it,” Charlie said. “Here and now. The Belters.”

  “How so?”

  Charlie leaned forward, her eyes bright with a new idea. “Think about the first Renaissance. There was a renewed interest in the classics. There was a boom in the arts, in literature, Dante, Cervantes, Shakespeare. The sciences took off, Copernicus, Kepler, Brahe, Galileo, et al. And.” She held up a finger for emphasis. “At the same time there was a virtual explosion in the exploration of Terra, the circumnavigation of Africa, the discovery of the Americas.”

  “You’re making an argument for these movements having been codependent?” Maggie asked.

  Charlie nodded. “In the same way we’ve been saying the emergence of so many brilliant thinkers at roughly the same period in human history on Terra can’t be a coincidence.”

  “And you’re saying you think the same thing could happen here, now?” Simon said, his brow creased.

  “Why not? The Belt is essentially a realm of islands, isolated from Terra and to a great extent from each other. Isolation guarantees free inquiry and breeds diversity. How many different political systems have you run across in your travels, Mother?”

  Mother thought. “I see what you mean, dear. But you are talking about mere microcosms of societal organizations.”

  “But every language, every idea, every prejudice, every god known to man, all of them are represented here in the Belt, aren’t they?”

  “To some extent, dear, yes.” Mother added, “And a few new ones I’ve never heard of before.”

  Charlie sat back, satisfied. “We may be in for some lively fights, but I’m betting on a boom time of exploration and inspiration in every field of human thought and endeavor.”

  “I Married an Optimist from Outer Space,” Simon said. Charlie glowered up at him, silently promising retribution. He laughed and hugged her close.

  “Terran hegemony doesn’t seem quite so far distant, now, does it?” Bob said. “With such an object lesson staring them in the face?”

  I laughed shortly. “I wouldn’t bet the farm on it. Terrans have been drinking buddies with Armageddon for so long, it’s not likely they’ll be kicking him out of the bar anytime soon.”

  “I Married an Optimist from Outer Space and Got a Pessimist for a Sister-in-Law,” Simon said.

  “Where did they come from?” Charlie said suddenly, unheeding.

  “Who?”

  “The Ionians. If they went from here to Terra, could they have come from even farther out to begin with?” She turned to Simon. “You know, maybe it’s not that generic imperative you keep talking about that sent Columbus to America and Magellan around the world and us out here.”

  “What is it, then?”

  “Maybe we’re lonely,” she said. “Maybe we’re looking for friends. Maybe—ancestors? Roots? Our place in the universe?”

  He smiled. “Like that poem you’re always quoting.”

  “T. S. Eliot’s ‘Little Gidding.’ Yes. Exactly. It’s funny, Star,” Charlie said to me. “On Terranova, you dragged us kicking and screaming into our future. And then you brought us out to the Belt and dragged us kicking and screaming into our past.”

  “It wasn’t anything I planned,” I said. And then I got out of there as fast as I could without running.

  Whitney Burkette was waiting for me. “Ah, Star,” he said as I opened the door to my cabin and motioned him inside. “I wondered, did you have a particular date set to begin breaking ground on the creeks in Homemade I?”

  He was too close to me. I shrugged irritably. “I don’t know, I haven’t thought much about it. Why do you ask?”

  And then he grabbed at me. His mustache scratched my face. He gripped me around the waist and pressed up against me.

  I don’t even remember moving. The next thing I knew, Whitney Burkette was lying in a crumpled heap in a corner of the room, one leg bent up behind him at an awkward angle. His face was bloody. He was missing teeth. He was unconscious and breathing stertorously.

  “Auntie!”

  I turned. Alexei was standing in the open doorway, his face white. “Go get your mother, Alex.”

  He swallowed hard and his eyes flickered between Burkette’s body and myself. “Are you okay?”

  “Go get your mother, Alex. Now.”

  “What’d he do?” Charlie wanted to know.

  I took a long time to answer. “He kissed me,” I said finally. “He touched me.”

  “Was it worth half killing him for?”

  “Yes.”

  She looked at me, anger and exasperation and a dreadful kind of pity in her eyes. “Star,” she said, placing a tentative hand on my arm. “Nothing worthwhile comes without cost.”

  I had to close my eyes against the wave of rage that swept over me then. When I opened them, Charlie
’s face changed. Her hand fell from my arm and she backed away from me. She didn’t ask me any more questions or make any more comments and I was grateful in a detached sort of way. I didn’t want to hurt anybody else. Not really. Not that day, anyway.

  · · ·

  The next rock due to be launched for Terranova would be a test run for Maggie’s processing plant. Although we were sacrificing the speed of an Express system for a propulsion plant that was incorporated into the refining process, adding six months to the time in-flight, when the rock arrived it would be about twenty-three percent near-pure grade silicon. Roger and Zoya were already inside Homemade I, breeding dead dust into living soil. Claire was out scouting around for the second new world. My, how life was moving right along.

  “I got an idea,” Lodge said one day. She wanted to start a delivery service, incorporating the Star Guard’s patrol routes. Every item would be C.O.D. I told her to go ahead with it as long as she didn’t need any help from me.

  The twins were into everything on board the station and off it. They’d had their own p-suits since they were two; they kept the techs busy enlarging them. “I guess it’s time I started thinking about some kind of training for the twins,” I said to Charlie one day.

  “You mean put them in school?”

  “That’s what I said.” She chuckled, and I said, “What?”

  “Nothing. They’re only four years old, Star.”

  “We were in school at four.”

  “That’s because we were both rabid overachievers.”

  “Roger tells me Sean’s showing a real aptitude in the geodomes, and Sam Holbrook says Paddy can already count in parsecs.”

  “What would you’ve done if one of them had wanted to teach twentieth-century American literature?”