Unclipping the computer from his jeans and placing it flat on the desktop before him—where it would draw power by induction—he pressed a tiny recessed button in one edge, and a viewing area, two feet square, nearly thirty-four inches in diagonal, sprang into being above it. Wilson’s idle screen display was a commercial hologram, set against a starry background, of a Ball 500 Asteroid Scout, one of the little fusion-ion rock hunting ships he dreamed of owning, and maybe of capturing the Diamond Rogue or some other legendary treasure with when he wasn’t occupied dreaming about something—or somebody—else. As usual, the hologram caused him to sigh resignedly. Even a used Ball 300 was far beyond his means, and likeliest to stay that way.
He only hoped the somebody he dreamed of having wasn’t equally unobtainable.
Between him and the tiny computer, the image of a control board flowed out across the tabletop. He usually preferred writing to dictating.
“SolarNet,” he told the computer, which promptly opened his ‘com program and opted, as it was instructed to do, for e-mail. To his utter astonishment, he had more than three thousand messages, the vast majority of which were from people he didn’t know, congratulating him for having saved the Percival Lowell and being properly recognized for it. The system told him he had another twenty thousand messages waiting that couldn’t be downloaded until he’d dealt with the first batch.
Twenty thousand?
On the other hand, at least half were from individuals who wanted to sell him something, or simply to beg him for money. And there were dozens of offers of marriage or some other intimate arrangement, not all of them from females. Some of them even included holograms of the senders, most—big mistake—without benefit of clothing.
A few were from sympathizers of the Mass Movement and Null Delta Em, accusing him of helping spoil whole worlds, and even of being a murderer.
One or two of those contained death threats.
He glanced at the .270 Herron StaggerCyl with which he’d earned all of this dubious attention, lying on the table beside the computer. He took considerable comfort in it, but found himself thinking that maybe he ought to get something a little bigger and a lot more powerful for indoors, where people didn’t wear envirosuits that could be punctured.
It occurred to him that he didn’t even have an indoor pistol belt and holster for the Herron yet. He’d been carrying it in a pocket of his envirosuit. Maybe he should get a belt with two holsters, one for the Herron and one for whatever larger-caliber gun he found. “Two-gun Ngu,” they’d call him, and he’d never be able to show his face in public again.
With a few keystrokes and verbal commands, Wilson persuaded the computer to set aside any e-mail he’d received in the past 24 hours from first-time correspondents. That seemed to take care of the bulk of it. If his father was willing, maybe he could ask Ingrid—Miss Anderson, he corrected himself—to help him answer it. In most cases, he didn’t have any idea what to say to these people who’d written to him. Besides being extremely decorative (his heart may have belonged to another, Wilson told himself, but he wasn’t blind—or dead), Ingrid was very efficient and struck him as having a lot of class.
But, remembering the other his heart belonged to, he searched the short remaining message queue for the only bit of correspondence he really wanted to see.
And there it was:
SUBJECT: YOU MAKE ME PROUD SENDER: AMORIE SAMSON
There were earlier messages from her. This one had been sent only an hour ago. He opened it and it unfolded to reveal a holorecording of her, and a paragraph of text, which was a written record of what she was saying now:
“Willie! I just heard of what’s going on there on Ceres, and what you did! I’m having a hard time not bragging about you to everybody I know!”
He hated being called Willie, but could never seem to talk Amorie out of it, and was reluctantly willing to make an exception in her case. He gazed at her hologram with an expression he knew his uncles would have made fun of. It was just that looking at her made him feel so … so …
Amorie had absolutely the sweetest face he’d ever seen, framed in fine, astonishingly waist-length light brown hair dancing with honey-colored highlights. Her cheekbones were pronounced and high, her nose almost straight, with a slight upward curve that made her look even younger than the sixteen standard years he knew her to be. She had a subtle dimple in her chin, and the kind of complexion that had once been described as “peaches and cream”, along with great big brown eyes, white, even teeth, and warm, moist, full lips he wished more than anything he could—
What was that she’d just said? He scrolled back to the place where he’d become distracted and lost track. ” … tried to persuade my folks to head for Ceres, but we’ve just come on an unexpected cluster of irons, and couldn’t have made it in time. My folks said to be sure to tell you you’re welcome to come stay and visit with us any time you can.”
Now Amorie leaned into the 3D camera built into her computer, so he almost felt he could touch those lips. He could also see far enough into the top of her blouse that, even in a room by himself, he blushed. “And Willie,” she almost whispered it. “If you want, you can stay in my quarters, with me.”
Wilson groaned. He wouldn’t be sleeping much tonight.
CHAPTER TWELVE: THE THINGS WE DO FOR LOVE
There are those who wish to kill us out of their hatred for us, or because we have something they want. There are others who end up killing us out of what they imagine is their regard for us. The assassin-fan who murders his beloved idol comes to mind, as well as many a mother or father.
Admittedly, there is a great deal of love in my life—my husband, my children, the surrogate parents who raised me —but in most circumstances, I would rather trust the profit motive than the vagaries of what others call love. —The Diaries of Rosalie Frazier Ngu
Ardith inspected the little stateroom one last time.
There wasn’t much to inspect. She’d had it to herself while Llyra and Jasmeen had shared the adjoining cabin, and she’d never really unpacked. One double bed, just the way it was at home. After a long while, she’d finally gotten used to sleeping in the middle. Otherwise, these quarters were about as plain, she thought, as they could get without resembling a cell in a convent, or a medium security prison somewhere.
That was pretty much the way she liked her own bedroom.
The girls had hurried through their breakfast so they could watch the landing from the passenger lounge. Then they’d bustled excitedly down to the recreation deck to await arrival of several rocket-powered hovercraft—gamera they were called, for some obscure reason—that would carry them, along with the rest of Beautiful Dreamer’s passengers, to the Ceres Terraformation Project’s construction headquarters.
That phrase “the girls” had suddenly struck Ardith a bit oddly, this morning, although she employed it quite often—at least in her own mind—to indicate her daughter Llyra and her daughter’s tutor, Jasmeen.
It seemed the natural thing to do. There were times when it felt exactly as if she had two daughters. And she would have been as proud to have Jasmeen as her daughter as she was with her own daughter, Llyra. Jasmeen was a very fine young woman, honest, intelligent, and hard working. The standards that governed her personal behavior (and which served as an example to Ardith’s daughter) were of the highest order.
At other times it felt as if Jasmeen were Llyra’s mother. Ardith knew she had laid a great deal of the burden of raising Llyra on the older girl’s shoulders. She often felt bad about it, but what could she do?
What else could she do?
Not for the first time, Ardith reflected that Jasmeen seemed to be remarkably wise and patient for all that she was merely nineteen years old—fewer than eighteen months older than her son, Wilson. Possibly that came from being born and growing up on what was surely the most harsh and least forgiving frontier that humanity had ever attempted to conquer.
Or maybe it simply came from having Mohammed
and Beliita Khalidov—two old and valued friends of Adam’s father William, from his days on Mars—as her parents. Ardith recognized that she, herself, hadn’t been anywhere near that mature at nineteen—that was just about the time that she’d met and married Adam—although there were moments when she missed all of the energetic passions of her youth, however painful they had felt at times. It seemed like the only thing she ever felt these days was worry—with occasional flashes of inexplicable anger.
It was that anger, she knew, that had pushed the only man she’d ever loved away from her—hundreds of millions of miles away from her, in fact—and constantly kept the son and daughter she adored with all her heart and all her soul at arm’s length. She felt that she would give anything to know why she did it, why, after only a day or two of blissful reunion and renewal with her husband, she would let herself become infuriated by some casual remark that Adam thought was innocent.
Ardith had come from a very warm, close, loving family, herself, so it wasn’t that. Just now, thinking of her younger, more innocent self, of half a lifetime ago, she’d felt an overwhelming wave of … what?
Longing?
But for what?
What had she lost along the way, sometime after she was nineteen, that she still longed for now, even though she didn’t know what it was?
On the other hand, maybe knowing wouldn’t be enough. Sometimes the truth doesn’t set us free, but only makes our captivity that much more unbearable. Exhaling sharply, she tried to shake off all this useless prying and poking, all this unproductive pseudo-psychological scab- lifting, and forced herself to concentrate on practical matters at hand.
For some reason, she’d left her osmium wristwatch, the one Adam had given her when Wilson was born, on her desk back at the lab in Curringer. It seemed like too much bother to consult her computer—although it was only half the size of Wilson’s, and she wore it on a pin in her lapel, like a nurse’s watch. Unlike several of her younger colleagues, who looked forward to a day, not long from now, when it would be possible, she couldn’t bear the idea of getting a cerebral implant. True, it would place a computer several times more powerful than this one in direct contact with her brain. She’d never need to look at a watch or a calendar, or consult a map for directions or a dictionary, again.
She’d always be connected to the SolarNet wherever she went.
But Ardith’s was one of the “first families” on Pallas, after all; from her earliest years, she’d been taught the ways of governments too well. As long as even one of the things continued to exist, anywhere, it was too dangerous to wear an implant, which could become an open door to whatever some two-bit Napoleon wanted to do to one’s mind. The very thought made her shudder as if she’d found a garden slug in her salad.
So this morning she’d borrowed her daughter’s Timestamp (a recent high-tech Martian import) which was the last thing left sitting on the bedside table. She would drop it in her bag after using it and give it back.
She’d never played with one of these devices before, although the technology was very interesting, and she had always been curious about it. It was perfectly cylindrical, an inch and a half in diameter, and about three inches long. The flat top bore an image of what the stamp was all about—trust her Llyra to have selected the simplest pattern she could, an old-fashioned analog sweep-second clock dial without a date or any other information.
Ardith lifted the object from the table and took the cap off the bottom. It looked to her like an ordinary rubber stamp, with purple ink—again, typical of her daughter. She placed the working end on the back of her hand and pushed, firmly, just the way she’d seen her daughter do a hundred times. When she lifted the object from her hand, the purple clock image had been transferred to her skin. Amused and amazed, she watched the second hand rotate around the face for a little while, then put the cap back on and tucked the device in her large handbag.
Fun with nanobots.
The microscopic machines would stay on her hand, racing across her skin, telling her the time—oh, dear, Curringer time, and the Pallas length of day—until they wore off molecule by molecule, or she washed them off on purpose. Technology was her business, but it surprised even her, sometimes.
Technology was her family’s whole—suddenly, Ardith noticed an emotion lurking inside herself that she’d been avoiding. Her entire family—Llyra, Wilson, Adam and his brothers, and yes, her “other daughter” Jasmeen—were about to be together for the first time in a long, long while, and she couldn’t feel anything. Well, not quite anything—the thought of seeing Adam again filled her with abject terror.
What was wrong with her?
Yet Adam was a good man—the very best of men, in fact—and the truth was that she had been his since the day they’d met on a museum tour, when she was only five years old and he was twelve. (He hadn’t really known that she existed for another decade.) Just the thought of him right now filled her full of fire and made her want to—no, no, this was not the time for that! She realized now that she’d been dawdling in the stateroom, putting off the ride to the construction dome for some reason.
She wondered if Adam had driven out to meet her and the girls.
What would it mean if he hadn’t?
***
Despite the ship’s gradual acceleration to match the gravity of Ceres, it was tiring, standing in line in the corridor that bisected the recreation deck, waiting for the shuttles, or whatever they were, that would take them to the only inhabited spot on this asteroid so far.
With any luck, it was the only one there ever would be.
“Oh, excuse me, sir!” said the middle-aged woman ahead of him, overweight, unattractive and a Pallatian, to judge from her own poor adjustment to the doubled gravity. “I didn’t mean to step on your foot.”
He lifted his hat. “I didn’t even feel it, my dear. Think nothing of it.” The gravity helped him maintain his imposture of a tired old man—although he didn’t need it. Most of the time he felt that way anyway.
For a while, he was “Robert Fulton” once again, although when the time came—if it was possible—he was prepared to change his name, his age, his height, his weight, his race, even his apparent sex, if need be, and to disappear forever, never to be heard of again by anyone, especially those accustomed to hiring him to do their dirty work.
This one assignment, and he would retire, All he wanted was to gaze at the sculpture and paintings he’d collected over the years, drink the wonderful Lunar greenhouse Merlot he favored, listen to Mozart, and tend the swordtails and black mollies he’d always wanted to raise.
“Something to drink, sir?” One of the attendants was passing along the corridor, offering the passengers small plastic baggies on a tray. “We have a little wine, a little whiskey, some apple juice, and some water.”
He took a small container of apple juice and sipped at it as he waited with the rest of the passengers. They’d been told it would take the machines from the dome fifteen minutes to reach them, and another five to couple up to the ship. Luggage transfer would take another ten.
Luggage.
If he couldn’t get cleanly away before the end, if his operation consumed him, too, it was something he could accept. He’d arranged for his possessions—safely stored in an ancient missile silo in Wyoming that he’d purchased and remodeled—to be passed on to someone who would appreciate them. That person didn’t even know him, wasn’t even aware that he existed, and would be extremely surprised when contacted by his lawyer. But the precious legacy, he knew, would be accepted and cherished, if not because it had been his, then for what it was, in itself.
The daughter he’d unwittingly helped to conceive in a moment of weakness twenty years ago, would have something of her father, after all.
What a night that had been. He’d been undercover, in white tie and tails like the fabled British spy, attending an enormous cocktail party in Denver. His assignment had been to ferret out the “secret leaders” of Sagebrush Rebellion II??
?that had stopped western states from sending representatives to Washington—and kill them, one by one.
The trouble was that, despite the fondly-cherished beliefs of the FBI, the CIA, the NSA, and others like them, those leaders didn’t exist. Sagebrush Rebellion II was the spontaneous effort of hundreds of thousands of men and women in the American west who wanted nothing more to do with the government in the east—a government capable of committing any atrocity, including sending an assassin to kill their leaders.
If only they’d had any.
He’d met a pretty girl there, a sort of West American counterspy, who’d known all about him and had almost—but not quite—convinced him to change sides. Afterward, he had never regretted letting her live.
He opened his eyes wide and took a deep breath, shaking off his reverie and returning to the present. Now, all the usual precautions were called for, and perhaps a little more. These were circumstances—it felt to him like last day of school—in which one could grow careless. He’d hurried to leave the ship with the other passengers, then held back so he wouldn’t be first. Always stay concealed in plain sight, inconspicuous in the middle, that was the key to survival in his trade. Always remain as average as possible, the average of the average.
“Excuse me, sir, would you mind?” He turned to the passengers behind him, a young couple who looked like they might be on their honeymoon—although why they would come to Ceres was beyond him. The young man held out a tiny camera and asked if he would take their picture.
“I’d be happy to,” he replied, finding them in the viewfield floating above the camera and pressing the release. He took three pictures and handed the camera back. “Not vacationing on Ceres, are you?”
The young woman grinned and shook her head. “Not really. We just got married, and we both have jobs here. I’m with the canopy welding crew, and Hamish, here, is a microbiologist assigned to atmosphere generation.”