Ceres
He nodded amiably, but was very nearly sick to his stomach. This sweet young couple were the enemy. He felt his head swim with utter revulsion.
The deck’s ceiling was so low it made him feel claustrophobic, creating room, no doubt, for the centrifuge over their heads. Through one transparent wall of the corridor they occupied, he could see the swimming pool—what a ridiculous waste of resources!—covered now with a big sheet of plastic, as was the hot tub standing beside it. He turned to look through the transparent wall on the other side of the corridor, where a dozen exercise machines stood motionless and silent, as they had been for most of the trip. Not many athletes in this lot, apparently.
Except, of course, for the ice skaters.
It had pained him deeply to let somebody else handle the single item of luggage he’d brought with him, his special shiny brown plastic suitcase that, despite his best efforts, still smelled a little funny. (”Luggage”—he thought about the word for the first time: that which one lugs.) Not only was it dangerous, it was undemocratic. People shouldn’t have to be one another’s servants—this he had believed all of his life—they should all be servants, in equality, to a benevolent State, instead.
Nor should they be permitted to go running away to the Asteroid Belt or other places like it, where their proper leaders couldn’t reach them, living any way that happened to come into their heads, and fomenting rebellion on Mars, among other places, opposing duly constituted government authority. Martian colonists had murdered his father, who had been a part of a United Nations military detachment sent to bring them back into line. It had been his lifelong dream to make them pay for it. If he had to do it here on Ceres, then that’s the way it would be.
He reached into his left inside jacket pocket to feel the worn, folded scrap of blue and white synthetic he always carried next to his heart. It was a lightweight, low-volume flag, shipped into low orbit by the tens of thousands and returned for sale or presentation on Earth.
His had been given to his mother the day they’d informed her that her husband was dead, and that his body couldn’t be recovered—another score he needed to settle with these self-made aliens. All during the memorial service, his mother had soaked it with her tears. He valued it as much for that as any purely ceremonial connection it had to his father.
He would have it with him when whatever happened.
***
“Here they come! I see them!” Llyra exclaimed redundantly. Her face was pressed against the plastic porthole in the outer airlock door.
The little airlock was unlit, so she could see outside better. Captain Gunther Quigley stood behind her, almost filling the rest of the closet-sized chamber, the inner door of which was open onto the well lit corridor behind him. He was not a native Pallatian, this short, heavyset individual of about sixty years’ age. He had a florid face, thinning red hair featuring more than a few silver strands, a big curly red beard and sideburns, and a cheek-appling, eye-crinkling smile, like the Santa Clauses in Coca-Cola ads. Llyra had liked him the first time she saw him.
“How far away are they now?” someone behind her shouted from the corridor.
“How many of them are there?” asked someone else.
By the powers vested in him by the Fritz Marshall Space Lines, the captain had informed the passengers lined up in the recreation deck, he was appointing the youngest person onboard the Beautiful Dreamer Official Lookout while they were waiting for the gamera to arrive. This was necessary because the only view of the outside, on this deck, was through a nine-inch disk of transparent plastic. This exit hadn’t originally been intended to be used as an airlock, he said, except in emergencies.
“They’re just over the horizon,” Llyra said, “Can’t tell how many yet.”
“Can you hear them, dear?” asked the woman from New Jersey. The girl bit her tongue and refrained from making the remark she felt was deserved. It was nothing but hard vacuum outside, and completely soundless. Didn’t the socialist schools teach people anything in East America?
Llyra answered politely, “No, ma’am, I can’t hear them.” Somebody laughed.
This ship had originally been intended to ply a Pallas-Luna route, she knew, but had been reassigned to Ceres before she’d actually been finished. Llyra had been told that there were larger, far more useful airlocks on each of the lower cargo decks. Passengers had always been meant to embark and disembark from decks higher up, through extendable tubes like the one they’d come aboard through at Port Peary. Changing circumstances had forced changes in design and use.
The whole youngest passenger production had impressed Llyra as more than a little childish. She hadn’t complained, because (as the captain knew perfectly well), she happened to be the youngest, and she wanted to see the gamera when they got here. She didn’t mind at all being the first person to do so. Of course her view of the surrounding “countryside” would actually have been a lot better from the forward passenger lounge, and better yet from the bridge, a few feet higher than the lounge. It was equipped with radar, lidar, and several different kinds of light amplification equipment.
And here they came, now, three, four, five, six sets of brilliant white headlights, exactly like cars on a highway—only this highway was twenty feet above the rugged airless surface of an asteroid, and she could see the blue-orange jets of the tiny rocket engines that kept the machines aloft—and, incidentally, were the source of the vehicle’s name.
“There are six gamera, I think,” she shouted back into the corridor. “Five are holding back while one is coming right up to the door!”
“That’s our cue, young lady,” the captain stage-whispered. “For safety’s sake, we’ll back off now and close the inner door, just in case.” He touched her shoulder with just the right amount of polite pressure.
The chances were better than even, she thought, that he’d arranged for her to be at the porthole, not because she was the youngest, but because she came from the richest, most important family on Pallas, and was the daughter of the Ceres Terraformation Project’s chief engineer. She hated making calculations like that, but had been taught by both parents to be careful and observant. It was often hard to tell who your real friends were.
Llyra nodded reluctantly and let herself be shown away from the porthole. She’d wanted to see if the smaller craft would hover on its jets as it linked to the ship and was being boarded, or if there was some other arrangement. Now she’d just have to ask someone. Llyra was the kind of person who would much rather see than ask, any day of the week.
“Well, I suppose they could hover,” Captain Quigley told her, once she’d asked. He nodded a little, then shook his head. It was a comical gesture and she decided she’d give him the benefit of the doubt. “But I think it would engender unnecessary risk, and use a lot of fuel. No my dear, they have all had landing jacks attached to the undersides of their hulls, those criss-cross scissory things, if you know what I’m talking about, that will bring them up to just the level they need to be on. But first, they’ll have to turn around and back up to the door.”
Llyra and Captain Quigley had moved a few feet away from the outer door at this point. The corridor, crammed with people, seemed hot and stuffy to the girl. A male attendant who had squeezed down the narrow passageway, past all of the increasingly impatient passengers, helped the captain swing the inner door shut and lock it securely. The instrument panel above the door indicated there was still air in the lock.
“And now,” Captain Quigley said with some sort of satisfaction, “if we have a little fender-bender, we won’t lose even a molecule of air.”
“Fender-bender?” the girl asked. “Isn’t a fender a fireplace thing?”
Quigley grinned. “It’s a turn of phrase my maternal grandfather favored. He migrated to Pallas from California, after the Big One. Maybe it’s something to do with that. I’m not certain what it means, myself.”
Maybe the woman from New Jersey knew. She had opened her mouth to speak, when suddenly, ev
eryone began to hear—and worse yet, to feel—a long series of loud, dull thumping noises, coming from outside the airlock. Given what the captain had said about “fender benders”, it was a little unnerving. Before anyone could tell Llyra that she couldn’t do it, she pressed her face against the porthole in the inner airlock door, just in time to see the outer door pop and swing away. The instrument panel above the door still showed nothing but green lights.
Beyond it, she could just make out the inside of another airlock, presumably the gamera’s. Standing just inside it, lifting a heavily booted foot over the coaming of both airlocks into the larger craft, was a very large man wearing an envirosuit. He inspected an electronic instrument of some kind held in his hand—checking the air, Llyra thought.
Then, clipping the object to his already crowded equipment belt, the man reached up with both gloved hands, gave his helmet a twist, lifted it off his shaggy head, and reached to open the inner airlock door.
“Hagrid!” Llyra threw herself into her Uncle Arleigh’s arms.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN: SURPRISE, SURPRISE
The weaker, more fragile sex are often accused of being shallow because the first thing they’re attracted to in a woman is her physical beauty (I’ve heard some cynics argue that it’s more likely to be her willingness), while women are more interested in a man’s character. But they’re after the same thing. What a man is looking for, although he probably doesn’t realize it, is good reproductive health, in whatever arbitrary terms his culture defines it. A woman looks for traits in a man that assure her he’ll be a good provider and defender to herself and her children. —The Diaries of Rosalie Frazier Ngu
“Next Monday,” Wilson exclaimed a bit breathlessly, “the factory ships will start lowering sections of the atmospheric canopy onto the surface, wrapping them around Ceres. I’ll be with the first welding crew—Arleigh and Lindsay showed me how, and I’ve been practicing for days.”
His sister asked, “That’s why you’ve got bandages on both thumbs?” The vehicle swayed a little as he stood beside them, hanging onto an overhead support. Llyra suspected that meant Ceres had its share of mascons, like Pallas, and wondered how high the gravity measured above them.
She and Jasmeen were sitting in the first row of seats in what had only recently been the cargo hold of the gamera they’d boarded, in a windowless prefabricated passenger section meant to be dropped into that part of the utility vehicle and connected with life support and power. A scattering of overhead 3DTV screens showed what the pilots were seeing. About half the seats were occupied by former passengers from the Beautiful Dreamer. Llyra spotted elderly Mr. Fulton sitting somewhere in the middle and waved to him. The old man smiled and waved back.
Wilson had greeted the girls and his mother as they’d stepped over the threshold, through both airlocks, and into the vehicle, which bounced alarmingly on its spindly uprights as it was boarded. For a while, the noise of passengers chattering while they found seats was intolerable, although it died down as the machine fired thrusters, retracted its legs, and began moving. Wilson made a mental note to talk to his father about acoustic spray for all of the insert’s hard surfaces.
Adam would ask Ingrid—Miss Andersson—to fill out requisition and work orders, and then Wilson would probably be assigned to do the job.
If Ardith had been disappointed that her husband wasn’t aboard the gamera to meet them, she hadn’t shown it. Her daughter had been disappointed but hadn’t said anything, either. She trusted her father and knew he must have a good reason for waiting to greet them until they’d gotten to the dome. Wilson was a pretty good substitute. If anything, her brother was even more handsome than when she’d last seen him.
He’d hugged his mother energetically (she was up forward at the moment, visiting with her husband’s brothers, Llyra’s uncles, for the first time in a long while, as they piloted the machine) and his sister, as well, as if he hadn’t seen them for years. It hadn’t quite amounted yet to six months. He’d awkwardly shaken hands with Llyra’s coach, as well. Unlike Arleigh, Wilson wasn’t wearing an envirosuit, but ordinary running shoes, faded bluejeans, and a brilliant scarlet t-shirt with the Ceres Terraformation Project’s logo printed on it in yellow.
Slanting from his left hip to his right thigh, he also wore a wide leather pistol belt with his long-barreled .270 Herron StaggerCyl riding in an open-topped holster—tied down to his leg just above the knee—and a pair of twelve-shot loaders high on the other side.
“How long will all this lowering and welding take?” Jasmeen asked politely. Her coach’s homeworld, her student knew, had been terraformed by an extremely different method that hadn’t involved wrapping the planet in a gigantic plastic bag. On such a scale, even her father probably couldn’t do it, Llyra thought.
Wilson looked at his feet and swallowed. “Uh, they say it’ll take about two years. That’s with full crews working in shifts around the clock.”
Llyra observed that her brother was a bit flushed following this conversational effort, mostly on the sides of his neck beneath his jawline. She’d noticed earlier that he’d kept his contact with Jasmeen as brief as possible, withdrawing his fingers as if he’d just plunged them into boiling water. And he couldn’t bring himself to meet her eyes.
She wondered if Jasmeen had noticed it, too. The younger of the girls knew exactly what it meant. It meant Wilson had just realized for the first time that Jasmeen was pretty. They’d known each other more than three standard years (the actual years of Mars and Pallas were much longer), but Wilson had only been fourteen and Jasmeen sixteen when they’d met, an unbridgeable gap at those ages. They’d spent most of the time that followed living on different worlds, growing up. In Wilson’s mind, noticing that Jasmeen was pretty probably constituted disloyalty to (what was her name?) that insipid girl on the SolarNet he thought he was in love with and wanted to marry.
Llyra sighed inwardly. The truth was that it wasn’t too early for Wilson to start entertaining feelings like that, whoever they happened to center on. Young men and women tended to marry much earlier than, say, Earthsiders, out here on what somebody had once called “the final frontier”. (Llyra and her brother had been brought up to think of it as merely the beginning of an endless frontier.) The general custom—in a place and time where there were far more customs than laws, and they were much more stringently enforced, by Mother Nature (or “Auntie Evolution”, as Llyra like to think of it) herself—was that they married for life, and they had the biggest families they could manage.
Even with today’s technology, taming a wilderness was a labor- intensive undertaking.
Somehow, she couldn’t see that creature … that Amorie Samson— that was her name—as anybody’s frontier wife and mother, for all that she had supposedly been born to a hardy asteroid-hunting family somewhere down Sunward. The holograms Emerson had sent home to Pallas made the girl look pampered and … well, useless, in some way Llyra couldn’t quite define, as if she were the asteroid-hunter family’s pet Persian kitten, rather than a daughter expected to pull her own full weight.
Yes, the girl had a pretty face, a very pretty face. But it was a smooth, featureless kind of pretty that wouldn’t last long, despite the anti-aging advances that medical science had made in the decades since her great-grandfather Emerson had underwritten the invention of full-body tissue regeneration. It certainly wasn’t like her mother’s ageless beauty. Young men still sent frankly speculative glances in Ardith’s direction wherever she went. Llyra had seen it, herself, and it gave her mixed feelings. Her grandmother Julie still looked like a young girl in her twenties.
Jasmeen, she thought, possessed that same kind of beauty. It began with stronger features than Amorie’s miniature ones, but most of it seemed to come from what was inside her and inexorably wrote itself on the outside, more clearly every year. Llyra loved her older brother and wished he’d wake up and take a look at what he was getting into.
Jasmeen had continued asking Wilson questions ab
out the process of terraformation. The boy hadn’t exactly stumbled through the answers, but Llyra could tell that he was extremely uncomfortable. She was about to join the conversation to take some of the pressure off him, when a man she recognized from the BeeDee approached the three of them.
He stopped short, as if he didn’t know whom to address, then saw the revolver Wilson carried, which he eyed with visible wariness. This was the weapon, he knew, with which the boy had killed five “murderous saboteurs”—his editors back home preferred the phrase “selfless environmental activists”—and spoiled the hopes on Ceres of Null Delta Em, perhaps forever. “Mr. Ngu,” he began. “I’m Tim Lipton of New Angeles Online. Do you think it would be all right to ask you and your sister a few questions, now?”
New Angeles was one of the makeshift cities that had risen slowly out of the smoking rubble that California’s “Big One” had made of what was sometimes called “Lost Angeles”. Despite being about as far west in West America as a geographic location could be, the new city’s people and institutions generally reflected the opinions and values of East America.
Wilson opened his mouth, but Jasmeen asked, “What do you mean, ‘now’?”
“Er, uh … ” the newsman cleared his throat nervously. “Well—Miss Khalidov, isn’t it, Jasmeen Khalidov? I only meant that we were all warned not to bother your party aboard the ship, but now that we’re on Ceres, a number of us … well, I’m the one who got the short straw.”
Releasing his hold on the overhead stanchion, Wilson leaned toward the correspondent. “You were warned? Who exactly was it that warned you?”
“Well, it’s just … just … that the captain—Captain Quigley—told us that if we ‘bothered’ any member of the Ngu family while we were aboard his vessel, that he’d … he’d ’space’ the offending individual. That man has absolutely no conception of freedom of the press.”