Second Star (Star Svensdotter #1)

by Dana Stabenow

  “They have to pay for it?”

  “That’ll be something for the colonists to decide among themselves. I would say the airlocks will probably be installed at need, at least at first, depending where the new owners work, inside or out.”

  We emerged from the house to stand blinking in the sunlight. “Is this where I’ll be living?”

  I stared at him. “Where have you been sleeping this last week?”

  “In my office.”

  “No,” I said, shaking my head.

  “Yes, I have.”

  “No, I meant that I try to discourage sleeping over the shop on Ellfive.”

  “Why?”

  I stopped and faced him. “You already live on the job. All the department heads are on call twenty-four hours a day. Archy can locate you immediately through this.” I tapped the communit strapped to his left arm.

  “Archy?”

  “Ellfive’s in-house computer and binary brat.”

  “I heard that!”

  “Archy, I thought I turned you off.”

  “I recognize the voice,” O’Hara said.

  “You should, you gave him a voiceprint and he confirmed your identity when you came on board. He runs the joint, and you’ll need him to help run your department. Have you given the security file an address yet?” The big man looked an inquiry and I said, “Really a personal password. Each department head has their own voice-keyed operating program. For example, mine is Archy. Ellfive’s medical library and personnel files are keyed under Blackwell—”

  “It would be useful if security had access to the medical files,” he said. “Do we?”

  “If you speak Tagalog.”

  “Pardon?”

  “Charlie—Dr. Quijance—is very firm about doctor-patient confidentiality. However, if she can be convinced that whatever information you want is necessary to Ellfive’s security, she will spring for information in English.”

  “If she can be convinced.”

  “You’re catching on. And if you’re at all interested in computers—”

  “Who isn’t!”

  “Put a lid on it, Archy—if you’re interested in computers, the compsci program can be found under ‘Frank.’ ” The big man looked puzzled and I said, “For Frankenstein. Look, the point I’m trying to make is that once you have a password, Archy can find you anywhere. From that moment on, believe me, you’re going to need a place separate from your office to go after work hours. People tend to be more wary of disturbing you after you’ve gone home for the night.” I reflected, and added, “At least they’ll hesitate all of one or two minutes before they put the call through, and maybe in that time they can figure out the answer to their question themselves.”

  “Anyone can call me, anytime?”

  “Anyone, anytime,” I said firmly. “Call signs are listed on Archy’s directory, and besides your communit there are view-screens about every ten meters all over the place. It is essential that all my section chiefs provide instant accessibility to everyone. We’re a team here, from me right down to the newest rigger. Nobody has to go through channels to get to me or to anyone else.”

  He nodded thoughtfully. I didn’t see any resistance to the idea, which took a load off my mind. Some of those Harvard Business School types we got at first were big on chain of command and weekly departmental meetings and goal orientation. They had done enough damage to morale before I managed to weed out the last of them and I wasn’t about to go through that again.

  “So,” he said, “I could move in here if I wanted to.”

  “Here or anywhere you like, as long as you don’t dispossess someone already in residence. As security supervisor you have certain privileges, although—” I hesitated.

  “What?”

  “I would think one of these homes would be a bit large for a single man.”

  “I like the patio.”

  “Oh? You a gardener?”

  And he utterly confounded me by saying, “I raise orchids.”

  “Oh,” I said. He grinned, and it was a wide grin that lit his face with warmth and intelligence. I was immediately on my guard. “Orchids?” I said. “You grow orchids?”

  “Yes.”

  “I thought I saw—yes, Archy said you went over the personal baggage limit by fifty-five kays. Orchid stuff?”

  “Orchid stuff,” he confirmed.

  “Orchids grow in New South Africa, do they?”

  “Orchids grow everywhere.”

  “Oh,” I said again. “We’d better get back in the air if we’re going to finish this tour before midnight.”

  We’d been cruising for five minutes when he said, “Where have I seen you before? I know you from somewhere, and not just from that garbage they put out over the trivee, either.”

  “We’ve never met,” I replied with exactitude.

  “That’s not what I said. I know we’ve never met. I would remember.” I said nothing and he said slowly, “I’ll find out, you know. I always do.”

  “That’s your job,” I agreed. Star Svensdotter, Woman of Mystery. It was a silly game, but I enjoyed the edge it gave me over the big man all the same.

  We passed over two more housing developments and a wide, shallow stream. We were approaching a less finished-looking area of Valley One, planted with slender birch trees and low blueberry bushes just beginning to leaf out. Paths led through the forested area, and I could see a layer of soft moss appearing on some of the lunar boulders the landscaper had placed for artistic effect. The aircar thudded to a halt. O’Hara felt his jaw gingerly. “I think I chipped a tooth.”

  “Welcome to Heinlein Park.”

  Setting a grubby collection of clippings to one side with tender hands, Roger hurried toward us through the new green leaves. He was a thin, gangling man who always looked as if he were about to break into a run or burst into tears or both. “What’s wrong, Star?”

  Roger never greeted me any other way. Murphy wrote his law and Roger lived it. When the oak saplings made it up from Terra intact, Roger worried over whether they would take hold. When they took hold, Roger worried if we had enough water to keep them going. When the H2O shipment made it in from Luna in time, Roger worried if the solar windows let in the proper amount of light for healthy photosynthesis. If the sun shone down uninterrupted, Roger worried over the CO2 count. When the meteorologist pronounced the atmosphere in perfect balance, Roger took to worrying over the next shipment of seeds to be coddled into life.

  On the other hand Roger, immersed in the mysteries of deep-space propagation of Solanum tuberosum and Coffea arabica, would never concern himself over something as unimportant as the casual disposal of the odd Luddite. If I’d spaced something with leaves, it would have been a different story.

  “Nothing’s wrong, Roger,” I said patiently, because above all else dealing with Roger required patience. “I’d like you to meet Caleb O’Hara, our new security supervisor. Roger Lindbergh, our chief agronomist.”

  They shook hands, Roger first wiping his palm down the already-filthy leg of his green jumpsuit. “Nice to meet you,” O’Hara said. “Perhaps you could help me with my orchids.”

  Roger’s lugubrious expression changed, decreasing in gloom from acute depression all the way to mere dismay. “Dear me, yes, Orchidaceae. Epiphytes?”

  “I think I’d better leave the trees to themselves,” O’Hara said with a smile, “now that you’ve got them off to such a good start.”

  “Dear me, yes, what was I thinking of?” Roger murmured, going pink. “Saprophytes it is. You’ll need to talk to the sewage treatment people for compost. Any particular family?”

  “Cattleya labiata. Phalenopsis. Nothing very exotic.”

  “But such lovely colors, dear me, yes,” Roger said. “You might like to see a planter we’ve got that provides up to a hundred square feet of indoor growing space.” O’Hara looked interested and Roger grew positively loquacious. “It’s made of individual but connected pockets that hang together on a flat, vertical s
urface. Roberta McInerny and I designed it to fit on the average Ellfive living-room wall,” he added proudly.

  The big man was obviously impressed. “I would like to see it. I was concerned with available gardening space.”

  All this was fine but it wasn’t getting the job any forrader. “How’s the work coming, Roger?” I said.

  Roger’s face lapsed into its usual tragic lines. “We’re still having problems with the mameys in the Farthest Doughnut.”

  I groaned. “What’s the matter with them now?”

  “We don’t know exactly. All the growth seems to be going toward the roots instead of the leaves and buds.”

  “That happened once with a new species of orchid I was trying to grow,” O’Hara said unexpectedly.

  I raised my eyebrows at him but Roger, not so much of a snob, said eagerly, “Yes?”

  “I was giving it too much fertilizer. I cut back on feedings by half and had blooms all over the place.”

  Maybe he really did grow orchids, I thought, but Roger shook his head and said with regret, “We tried that. All the leaves fell off.”

  “So what are we going to do now?” I said.

  “We could phase out the mameys entirely,” Roger suggested.

  I thought. “I can’t remember for sure, but wouldn’t that put us below seven hundred on the edible plant list?”

  He called up Demeter on his communit. They conferred. “Yes, it would.”

  I shook my head. “Then no. We want maximum diversity of fruits and vegetables. It’s going to be hard enough to accustom people to eating meat and drinking milk out of the vats. The least we can do is offer alternatives.” I thought it over, frowning. “Listen, Roger, why don’t you call the University of Cuba in Havana? The mamey is the Cuban national fruit, isn’t it? Maybe they’ll have some ideas. What else?”

  “We still haven’t received our shipment of Triticum durum from Omaha Seed.”

  “That’s the stuff they make pasta out of, isn’t it?” He nodded. “Fear not, Roger. I get nasty without my fettucini. I’ll call Colony Control and have that seed shipped up on the next Express.”

  Relieved, he trotted back into the bushes as we lifted off. “A nice man,” O’Hara said, and I replied, “A genius in his field. He was a student of Richard Bradfield, the scientist who invented multiple cropping and double planting.”

  “Multiple cropping? Double planting?”

  “And you call yourself a gardener. Multiple cropping means that the farming toroids will be growing two crops in every field. Double planting means overlapping one growth cycle with another.”

  “In other words, planting the next crop before the first one is harvested.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Will Ellfive itself be doing any farming?”

  I shook my head. “Very little at first, and when the population is up to maximum none at all. For Bradfield’s projected four crops per year we’d have to keep the atmosphere low in oxygen and the ambient temperature at something like a constant ninety-five degrees.”

  “Sounds fine to me,” O’Hara said, and I remembered where he was from.

  “Not to me,” I said fervently. “I was born in Alaska, and I’m allergic to anything above fifty degrees.”

  From Heinlein Park we went to the oyster farm, where Elmo and Drake were having problems with the hardness of the oyster shells. They explained to me that the shells had to be precisely the right consistency or they would gum up the grinder that would be crunching them into fertilizer after we harvested the oysters. We talked it over and agreed to try a lower water temperature before calling in the genetechs. Why is nothing ever easy? O’Hara inquired hopefully after the possibility of harvesting some of the oysters then and there, and was obviously heartbroken to learn that the oysters had six months to go before they would be edible.

  Back in the air O’Hara was distracted, as if he were mentally working out a difficult problem. After a few moments he smiled proudly and cleared his throat.

  “Shellfish were along for the space ride,

  But no bivalves were ready to be fried.

  The Walrus said, ‘What?

  No oysters to be got?’

  And the Carpenter was fit to be tied.”

  He waited with a hopeful expression on his dark face. I maintained a dignified silence, but it was a struggle. He heaved a sad sigh and asked, “Does Ellfive have any lakes strictly for swimming and like that?”

  “Nothing is strictly for one purpose on Ellfive, but we do have a swimming lake.” I pointed. “Valley Two. That long skinny blue streak on our upper left. Loch Ness.”

  His eyes followed my pointing finger and he said, “Oh, I see. I—oh.” His sigh was long, drawn-out, and reverent. I smiled to myself.

  The South Cap sported rakish mountains three thousand meters high, rough-peaked. They marched around the South Cap in uneven rings, and they looked as if they had been old when the world was young. They were in fact just three years of age, planted with various species of fir and dotted with tiny lakes. I discovered I still enjoyed the expression on someone’s face when he was seeing them for the first time.

  When he spoke O’Hara’s voice was awed. “Where the hell did you find the material?”

  I tried hard to keep the proprietary pride out of my voice, but I had to admit that I sometimes felt as if I personally had put the Big Rock Candy Mountains together a stone at a time. “Some from Luna. Some from meteoroids and asteroids. Some from the remains of the comets.”

  “The remains of the what?”

  “Comets. We trapped half a dozen or so ten years into the project. The trap burned out on the seventh try or we would have trapped more.”

  “Uh-huh,” he said. “You trapped comets. You want to tell me how?”

  “I would if I could.”

  “What, is it a secret?”

  I made a rude noise. “No way. There’s none of that top-secret crap on Ellfive. No, the comet trap was born of a brainstorming session between a Brazilian theoretical engineer, a Japanese mechanical engineer, an astronomer and an astrophysicist, both French, a Virginian architect who specialized in the design of zerogee structures, and Simon. I was there, too; I didn’t understand one word in ten, but I was in there pushing.”

  “So?”

  “So I didn’t understand one word in ten. The engineers called it an electromagnetic pseudo-gravitation broom star deception device. I called it a comet trap.”

  “I begin to see,” the big man murmured.

  “Yeah, they tried to explain it to me twice, both times in polysyllables. After the second try I said the hell with it, other than to thank God we had unlimited power from the paraboloidal mirror off the South Cap when we tried it.”

  “I can imagine. Or I can’t, because I’m not an engineer, but I suppose given enough power you can solve any engineering problem.”

  “So they tell me.” Our eyes met and we exchanged our first real smiles in a conspiratorial amusement over the universal damn-the-torpedoes, can-do, Tom-Swiftiness spirit of all engineers. “I guess we haven’t come that far, have we, from the days of the old Saturn V rockets, which at five gallons to the inch were slightly less than fuel efficient?”

  “Thorstein Veblen, where are you now?”

  “Ah, well. Truthfully, I don’t much care how they pulled it off, they filled an urgent material need for water and hydrogen and the Rock Candy Mountains. That was all that was really important.” I fingered the diamond in my right earlobe from habit.

  “I figure that to be a full carat,” he said.

  I dropped my hand and looked at him.

  “Well, I am from New South Africa,” he pointed out.

  “So you are.”

  “It’s nice. At a guess, I’d call it a flawless. Where’d you get it?”

  “It’s a bonus from the comet trap. We mined diamonds out of the nuclei of the comets.”

  “No kidding?”

  “No kidding. Everyone on the comet trap team got on
e.” I grinned at him. “I wear mine to remind myself to ignore theoretical physicists who insist a thing is physically impossible.” I pointed again. “See that opening? No, up farther, at the center of the endcap, surrounded by the peaks.”

  “That circular hole?”

  “That’s the zero-gravity corridor.”

  “What does it connect to?”

  “Nothing yet, it isn’t finished. When it is, it will link Ellfive to the zero-gravity industries module and the farming toroids, aka the Frisbee, the Nearest Doughnut, and the Farthest Doughnut. When Ellfive is commissioned that will be the way to work for most Fivers.”

  He looked from the valley floor to the endcap. “How will they get there from there?”

  “Look up. No, straight up, over our heads. That’s one way.”

  “What are those? Hang gliders?”

  “Some of them. Others wear just plain wings.”

  He snapped his fingers. “How could I forget—the Zerogee Club! I remember seeing something about it on the trivee.”

  “I should think so. It’s one of our best recruiting incentives. Your belt fastened? Hang on and don’t burp or the zero gee will make you fart.”

  “I have yet to be sick in zero gravity.”

  “Is that so?” I said politely. “And how many times before the trip upstairs have you experienced zero gravity?”

  “I went to Mitchell Observatory two days ago by scooter,” he replied, looking wounded.

  “I don’t call a half-hour trip out to the Warehouse Ring experiencing zero gravity. How many times altogether?”

  He made a production out of counting on his fingers. He caught me looking and grinned suddenly. “So, okay, today will be the third time.”

  “Congratulations. You’re holding up remarkably well,” I said, and pulled back on the yoke to hitch a fast ride on a thermal layer up to twenty-four hundred meters. He barely had time to swallow. Sometimes I think I am not a nice person.

  The farther we got from the rim, the more our gravity decreased, until at the axis there was none at all and our bodies started tugging at the seat harness. The increasing low gee made it easy to climb the Big Rock Candy Mountains, even carrying nine kays worth of plastigraph wings and straps and stirrups on your back. It was even easier to launch yourself into the air, and flyers were launching themselves into the air in record numbers that afternoon. “On Ellfive we say one flyer in the air is recreation, two is a race, and three is an airshow,” I said. “This looks like Oshkosh in August.”