Their reasoning went like this: dismayed at what everyone else saw as progress, the Amish, along with Hutterites, Mennonites, and similar religious groups, had attempted to stop time—or the world, so they could get off—somewhere around the middle of the nineteenth century. Later groups, most of them religious as well, and suffering what would later be called “future shock”, had attempted to stop time at other points. In Amherst, where the dominant religion was Gaianism—Mother Earth worship—they’d voted to stop time in the last year of the twentieth.
“Would you young ladies mind if I joined you?” the old gentleman asked them politely, hooking his cane over one forearm and doffing his hat.
This close up, thought Ardith, it was impossible to mistake the old gentleman for anything but an Amherstian—and probably a college professor—in his college-professorly oatmeal-colored, elbow-patched tweed jacket, his blue, self-consciously proletarian denim work shirt, and his faded blue denim trousers—permanently pressed with a sharp crease. He also wore a bow tie, and on his head, a round floppy object that another generation had called a “boonie hat”, but which had been popular among academics and fishermen long before that.
“Not at all,” Ardith replied. She was something of an academic herself, of course, although she hoped it wasn’t that obvious. She was inclined toward bluejeans and sweaters when she was working in her lab, but tended to shift to skirts or dresses when out in public. “Please sit down.”
Both of the girls nodded cordial agreement with her. Curringer was a small town—all of Pallas put together amounted to little more than a small town—and they didn’t get a chance to see new faces very often.
Ardith sat comfortably on a deeply-cushioned leather-covered sofa with Jasmeen sitting at the other end. Llyra occupied an identical item of furniture opposite them. Between the two sofas stood a glass-topped coffee table. The lights had been lowered so that the passengers could enjoy the starry view outside. Classical music played softly throughout the room—Ardith had recognized Lennon and McCartney’s “Yesterday” and something she thought might be called “I Hope You Don’t Mind”.
The three of them had left the comfortable privacy of their suite and come up to the passenger lounge to have drinks and a snack before the girls went down for a swim in the ship’s “recreation-sized” pool, and Ardith returned to her cabin to work on her current scientific paper. They were pleasantly surprised to discover that in just a few minutes, when Turnover officially began, the drinks would be “on the house”.
They’d forgotten about Turnover.
Jasmeen observed, “They say they’re bringing champagne in a minute or two. And in glasses, not baggies!”
Llyra added, “To demonstrate that they can turn the ship over without spilling a drop! With their attitude controls they could do it all in a few seconds—and glue everything and everybody in here to the walls—but they say they’re going to take a gentle couple of hours.”
“That means the engines will be pushing us sideways,” her mother observed, leading the witness a little. “Won’t that put us off our course?”
“Not when they’ve allowed for it from the very beginning,” Llyra laughed.
“Very good, young lady,” the old man laughed with her. Back home on Pallas, Ardith thought, he might easily have been over a hundred years old. Coming from the Mother Planet, as she was certain he did, it was likelier he was only in his mid-seventies and possibly younger than that. Gravity is harmful to human beings and other living things, she misquoted deliberately. “I came up here to see it. Say, isn’t that spiral escalator something? I’ve never seen anything quite like it.” Somewhat stiffly, and with the aid of his cane, the old man sat down beside Llyra.
Ardith nodded. “It’s certainly something. My daughter, here,” she indicated Llyra, “has been riding it up and down all morning, trying to figure out where the stairsteps go at the top and bottom of the ride.”
“I think they must slide over sideways and go back the other way,” said the girl. “I was going to mark one with bubble gum and follow it, but—”
“But I would not let her,” Jasmeen finished. “Cruel monster that I am.”
Both girls laughed.
“Ah, science,” the old man said. “What’ll they think of next? Oh, excuse me. I failed to introduce myself.” He leaned across the table and offered a hand to Ardith, then to Jasmeen, and finally to Llyra at the other end of the sofa. “I’m Robert Fulton, the stringer, on Pallas, for several Earthside publications, mostly East American. I’m being sent out here by Boston Magazine to cover the award ceremony on Ceres.”
Ardith vaguely remembered seeing or hearing the man’s name before, but the champagne arrrived, Llyra wanted some, and there were other things to think about.
The sun and stars had slowly begun to swirl around the ship.
***
“Robert Fulton” was the working persona he most enjoyed adopting, in part because the original, historic Robert Fulton had been among the first to use technology to exploit and pollute the natural world. The little old man, at least twenty years older in appearance than his actual age, was the very picture of harmlessness, and tended to put individuals at their ease—just before he garroted, stabbed, shot, or poisoned them to death.
At the moment, as he watched the three females prattle without really listening to them, the younger man inside Robert Fulton was considering a radical change in the orders Null Delta Em had issued him. There might be an enormous advantage in just doing the job right here and now, to the family of the young “hero” on Ceres, and of the Terraformation Project’s Director and Chief Engineer. True, he himself would die. But in a sense, dying in the proper cause was everything he had ever lived for, and he had been fully prepared to do it for a long time.
Liver-spotted hands resting on the head of his cane, he leaned back and closed his eyes momentarily. The gesture was more genuine than feigned. Sometimes he felt as old as Robert Fulton was supposed to be. In a great many ways, he had begun to grow a bit tired of life lately, and putting an end to it now might actually represent something of a relief.
“Sir?” came a voice. He opened his eyes and looked up at a young woman holding a tray full of traditional glasses of champagne. The Ngu women and their servant were already opening their own. “Would you care for a free glass of champagne to help celebrate Turnover?”
He smiled and shook his head, but inwardly, preoccupied with his thoughts, he shuddered, as the saying went, as if someone had walked over his grave. He wasn’t afraid of dying for himself, he knew, not really. More than anything, what he feared was that, as all groups must, sooner or later, Null Delta Em would someday decide to try and “mainstream” itself, to try and soften its ideological edges for the sake of public relations—and above all, for purposes of fundraising —and begin to lose track of the reasons it had been created. He’d seen exactly the same thing happen again and again to dozens of other organizations.
At least if he were to destroy this spaceship and her passengers —including himself—he wouldn’t have to watch that happen to Null Delta Em. He was finding a great deal of comfort, somehow, in that idea.
“Mr. Fulton … ?”
He sat up and blinked. Apparently, he’d dozed off—a bad sign. Back in the world outside his thoughts, the cocktail waitress had moved along at last, and Ardith Ngu was introducing herself, her young daughter, and her daughter’s coach. The foolish woman needn’t have bothered, of course, although she had no way of knowing it. He’d done his homework thoroughly, as he always did when he had a contract like this one.
The woman herself, he was aware, spent most of her time locked in a sinister Frankenstein’s laboratory in Curringer, not far from the very offices where he sat every day and pretended to work, learning to extract more and more vile profit from a sky full of lovely, celestial objects that had gone untouched for so many ages before Man, pristine, and pure.
She was a wellspring, a veritable fountainhead, of evil
. She was the mother of the teenage murderer whose blood-drenched acts these frontier savages were about to advertise across the entire Solar System on 3DTV. She was the consort of the destroyer who had started to plunder and wreck the asteroid Ceres exactly as Pallas had been wrenched from the breast of Nature and exploited for mere human use a century ago.
Gaia alone knew what unnatural, greed-driven, materialistic, and inhumane purposes this creature was preparing her poor little daughter for, under the innocent-appearing guise of figure skating. The young coach, too, was irredeemably corrupt, a child of murderous Chechen rebels who became renegade Martian colonists. A child of violent anti-social refusniks. A child of defectors. A child of traitors. That alone should be enough to predict that nothing good could come from any of these three. Best to pinch their tawdry lives off now, before they could foster any more abominations.
It had sickened him to touch the foul hand of Ardith Zacharenko Ngu. At the same time, it had sent a perverse shock of desire through his body. Like most supremely evil things, he had discovered in his life, she was very beautiful. But his ultimate objective had required the hated contact.
That was another reason, perhaps, to fulfill his commission right now and be done with it. He would no longer suffer the need to resist the distractions and temptations that a perverse universe presented him with. He’d always much preferred working in Moslem countries, where they kept their women decently under cover. All modern women were whores, displaying themselves with utter abandon. If only there were some way, before he struck, to taste what this one blatantly offered to all comers.
For that matter, the young Chechen coach, with her slender waist, her narrow hips, and those remarkable breasts of hers would do very nicely.
Or even the woman’s little daughter.
Reason number three occurred to him just as he was imagining what each one of these females must look like underneath the shamefully skimpy clothing that they wore: the young “hero” and his father would be left behind by the deed, shaken by its unexpected suddenness, stunned by its ferocity, stopped by its finality, and possibly ruined for life.
The lesson would be learned by others, and it would never be forgotten.
***
“She doesn’t deserve him!”
The girl wailed angrily, then looked around, a little chagrined. She was safely in the privacy of a bedroom suite that, because she happened to be personal assistant to the project’s Chief Engineer, she didn’t have to share with anyone else. But these dormitory walls had been shipped here under circumstances in which every ounce and every square inch came at an enormous premium, and they were notoriously thin.
“Ingrid Andersson,” said a voice, “I’ve heard you say that at least ten times in the last hour, and that many times a day for the past two years. And it may even be true as far as it goes—I’m certainly no judge of matters like that. But hollering isn’t what makes it true, dear. Even if it was, what can you do? The man has been married for twenty years, however unhappily, and he has two beautiful children. You want to ruin their lives, just because you have an itch in your breeches?”
The voice Ingrid was hearing was her own, issuing from the audio pads of a Purse-O-Nal Systems Interactive Diary she’d been using for a decade, ever since she’d turned fifteen. Sitting open on her little desk, it was designed to destroy itself if anyone else attempted to tamper with it. Buying the device with money she had earned herself had been a major turning-point in her life. Its voice and outlook had matured with hers, as they were programmed to do, although sometimes, she admitted, it seemed like the AI itself was maturing faster than she was.
“A what in my what?” Ingrid’s tone was outraged. How could it possibly be so crude, if it based itself on her personality and vocabulary?
The device chuckled. “You heard me. Finally got your attention, didn’t I?”
Ingrid shook her head, otherwise ignoring the remark. “If I could only get him to look at me! I’m prettier than she is, at least I think I am, and I’m younger. I have a better shape, and a sweeter voice. I could even give him more children—another whole family! That’s important to Pallatians, isn’t it? You know I dream about that sometimes.”
“You don’t know for a fact that you could give the man children, Ingrid,” the diary replied evenly. “I know you’re aware that the rate of spontaneous abortion is high enough among native Pallatians, and Martians, and Mooners, let alone recent transplants from Earth like you.”
She huffed at it. “You’re not supposed to say ‘Mooners’. It implies—”
“I know what it implies, Ingrid. And if I’d been programmed with a sense of humor, I’d think it was funny. For what it’s worth, those who live on the Moon do. But very well, let’s make it the politically correct ‘Lunarians’. In either case, you know I’m right about the miscarriage—”
“I think maybe I should set your argument levels lower,” she told the device abruptly. The diary looked a little like a laptop computer of a century ago, except that it was much smaller and offered the user no keyboard, at least at the moment. The full color three dimensional screen served Ingrid mostly as a non-reversing mirror. “How would you like that?”
“You could do that, and I admit, I wouldn’t like it a bit,” said the diary, its mouth moving with the words it spoke. “But it wouldn’t change the truth, now, would it?” Its tone was a little smug. It often sounded that way when it knew she was coming around to its way of thinking.
“No, no, it wouldn’t.” A tear slid from the corner of one eye, down her cheek, followed closely by another. “I just wish she wasn’t coming here, that’s all. She belongs back on Pallas. Why does she have to come here and—”
“When you’ve had him all to yourself? It hasn’t done you a lot of good, though, has it? And you know perfectly well why she has to come here, Ingrid. It isn’t even necessarily to see him, is it? It’s to see her son—and his, of course—rewarded for saving lives at the risk of his own.”
A forlorn Ingrid looked at the only face her diary had been programmed to present. The eyes—which were usually extraordinarily beautiful, were red now, swollen with anguish. “Why do you always have to be so cruel?”
“Who set my parameters, Ingrid? Wasn’t it you? Didn’t you want me to serve as your reality check—because you deplored the way your mother always evaded the facts of reality and your father let her get away with it?”
She nodded. “Yes, yes, it’s true. I know it’s true.” Her father Thor (his mother had called him Takeshi) was plenty capable of evading the facts of reality, himself. He was a born crackpot of both the bow tie and the propeller beanie varieties, who had changed his ancient family name to Andersson because of a theory he had about the Vikings having discovered Japan. Despite centuries of anthropological evidence to the contrary, he even believed that the Ainu were the Vikings’ descendents.
She wondered why he cared. The whole family had lived in Connecticut for six generations.
“Sometimes that hurts you, I know,” said the diary with a more conciliatory tone of voice. “Believe me, if I were capable of feeling anything, I’d be happy to feel sorry for you, Ingrid, honestly I would. You know you’re not just important to me, you know, you’re all that’s important to me.”
Ingrid sniffed back her tears. “What a nice thing to say … ”
But it went on: “So let me ask you: this is a construction site, where men outnumber women a hundred to one. Why don’t you look around for somebody who isn’t married? Somebody who isn’t way too old for you?”
The diary had hit a nerve, a very tender nerve. “Wait a minute! He isn’t too—”
“He’s nineteen years older than you are, Ingrid. Admittedly, that’s not as bad as it once was, when people only lived to be seventy-five or so. But you should find someone who’s just starting out, like you—”
“So we could make all our life-altering mistakes together, like the blind leading the blind? Now who’s sounding like my mother???
? She shook her head. “Why don’t I find somebody else? Because I love him, that’s why, and nobody else! Human beings don’t choose to love the people we love!”
The diary asked, “So who does, Ingrid? Who chooses who it is you come to love?”
Ingrid took an annoyed breath. “Okay, that’s enough. Shut yourself off.” She resisted a temptation she often felt, to throw it across the room.
“You’re the boss,” it acknowledged. “And it’s your funeral, too, sweetie.”
***
The elderly-looking individual who occasionally introduced himself as Robert Fulton had returned to his stateroom on the passenger deck below and aft, without waiting for Turnover to be completed, or even for the escalator to move him at its own speed. He’d hurried straight to the closet, had his empty, odd-smelling suitcase open, his personal palm-sized computer locked into place within it, the paired wire leads attached and timer counting down, before a terrible thought occurred to him.
Done this way, it will only make people Systemwide, even back on Earth who were not ordinarily sympathetic to colonials, share the sorrow of the grieving husband and son, of the bereaved father and brother. Photographs of the martyred females would bring fools to tears everywhere.
Far better to obliterate them all at the same time, and their little Martian rebel bitch with them. They would be transformed into abstracts, a few among hundreds, possibly thousands of casualties, difficult to visualize, impossible to mourn. The Mass Movement’s supporters in the media would work the facts around and blame the victims, rather than Null Delta Em, making the lesson clear: this was a spoiled, ruthless, obscenely wealthy family, used to destroying whole worlds for profit. Instead of sainthood, the message would be, “This is the price for exploiting one’s fellow man and going against Nature.
“Go no further.
“Better yet, retreat.”