Saladin said, “We are then turning ranging laser on rock pirate: Kaboom!”
“And who is telling story?” Ali demanded. He shook his head and frowned. “Anyway, is coming no sound at all in vacuum.”
“Be that way,” Saladin shrugged. “Was certainly kaboom at their end!”
Ali laughed and slapped his partner on the back. “Very well, then, Kaboom!”
***
In the end, dinner had been wonderful.
Wilson had never had lobster before now. There was very little saltwater anywhere on Pallas, and not a single fish farm that he knew of. After disposing of three broiled tails and a considerable quantity of drawn butter, with a baked potato on the side and a salad that must have come from the garden wall behind him, he knew that he must have it again as soon as possible. He wasn’t prepared to say whether it was better than sex, but if sex was better than this, he might not survive it.
“I think we’ll wait a little for the dessert,” declared Amorie’s mother Valerie. That’ll give the gentlemen a chance for a nice smoke, while the daughter and I tidy up the table a bit. Grandma, you stay put.”
It appeared that Grandma—the old lady was actually Valerie’s great grandmother—was ready for a nice smoke, as well. She stuffed dark tobacco into a short clay pipe, almost black with age and use, while continuing to give Wilson the same evaluative look she d given him all through the meal. One of the “gentlemen” struck and held a match.
“An’ where was it ye said ye was born, then, darlin’?” she asked Wilson as she drew the flame into her pipe and got it burning to her liking. It smelled all right, he decided, maybe a little bit like dark chocolate. Her accent was the same as Valerie’s, only much harder to follow. She had a face all sucked into itself, Wilson thought, like a dried up apple. He guessed that she must be well over a hundred years old.
“Ngu House,” he told her for what he was certain must be the fourth time since he’d met her only an hour ago. “In Curringer, on Pallas.”
“I met Wild Bill Curringer once,” the old lady said, but then fell silent.
The “gentlemen” in question, sitting around the table with the women, were two of Amorie’s brothers, both older than she was, three of Amorie’s uncles—two were her father’s brothers and one was her mother’s—and Amorie’s maternal grandfather. With the uncles came their wives, three of Amorie’s aunts. Half a dozen small children—Wilson never did find out whose kids they were—had been given their own table. The men smoked pipes, cigars, and cigarettes. Wilson had declined.
Now the grandfather reached into a cabinet under the big table and pulled out a gigantic accordion, covered with mother-of-pearl and chromium.
“Ah,” said an uncle, grinning. “So that’s the way of it, is it?” He reached up to an overhead cupboard and extracted a violin—although it was likelier to be used as a fiddle, thought Wilson, who knew the difference. Another uncle fetched an Irish bouzouki and another a five-string banjo. “Survive this,” Amorie’s fiddle-playing uncle told him, “ye’re fit t’survive anything. The Star in E-flat, if ye please, gentlemen!”
There was a brief musical introduction—it was enough to raise the hair on the back of Wilson’s neck; he had never heard live acoustic music performed this close before—a charming, haunting waltz, then Amorie’s grandfather began singing in a surprisingly clear, sweet tenor:
“Ye ladies and ye gentlemen, I pray y’lend an ear,
While I locate the residence of a lovely charmer fair.
The curling of her yellow locks first stole me heart away,
And her place of habitation is down in Logy Bay.
“‘Twas on a summer’s evening, this little place I found.
I met her aged father, who did me sore confound.
Saying, “If you address my daughter, I’ll send her far away.
And she never will return again, while you’re in Logy Bay.”
The bouzouki and banjo had joined in by now, with Amorie’s uncles singing harmony. Wilson wondered what kind of music this was. He’d never hard anything like it. Maybe it was Amorie’s revenge for the nightclub. She seemed to know all the words, and as she helped her mother clear the dishes, sang along with them. Her voice was clearly untrained, but as pure and sweet as her grandfather’s, and an octave higher.
The men nodded to one another and stopped singing as Amorie continued.
“How could you be so cruel as to part me from my love?
Her tender heart beats in her breast as constant as a dove.
Oh Venus was no fairer, nor the lovely month of May.
May heaven above shower down its love, on the Star of Logy Bay”
Then they all joined in again.
“‘Twas on the very next morning he went to St. John’s town,
And engaged for her a passage in a vessel outward bound.
He robbed me of my heart’s delight, and sent her far away,
And he left me here downhearted for the Star of Logy Bay
“Oh now I’ll go a-roaming, I can no longer stay.
I’ll search the wide world over in every country.
I’ll search in vain through France and Spain, likewise Americay
’Till at last I sight my heart’s delight, the Star of Logy Bay.”
Finally, Amorie’s grandfather finished the tale:
“Now to conclude and finish, the truth to you I’ll tell.
Between Torbay and Outer Cove, ’tis there my love did dwell.
The finest girl e’er graced our isle, so every one did say.
May heaven above shower down its love, on the Star of Logy Bay.”
Everyone laughed and clapped, even those who’d performed. Amorie’s mother wiped her hands on her apron. She looked at her daughter and at Wilson and said, with a neutral expression, “Now I think it’s time for bed.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO: NEW HORIZONS
About a century and a quarter ago, there was a remarkable effort by a group of aggressively political females and their male submissives to force boys and young men to behave as if they were girls and young women.
Despite the futility of this experiment (not to mention its utter, self-evident stupidity), it continues to this day in East America, the precipitously declining birth rate of which seems to indicate that not all is well in the Kingdom of the Feminized.—The Diaries of Rosalie Frazier Ngu
The Chechen scientists and their guests from Mars and Pallas were on their way down one of the underground legs of the network of tunnels they called the “Spider” to see the System-famous Roger B. Culver Optical Telescope, when they first began to hear the screaming. It seemed to be several voices all at once, coming from the tunnel just ahead.
Llyra quickly found the compact ten millimeter pistol she’d used to good effect on Ceres. Unlike her grandmother Julie, she hadn’t noticed that their hosts, Saladin and Ali, didn’t seem particularly alarmed by the noise, although the larger of the pair of scientists appeared to wrinkle his enormous nose with something akin to disgust or embarrassment. She put her weapon away, hoping it hadn’t been noticed.
Like Llyra, Jasmeen had reached for her own personal weapon when she first heard the screaming, but had managed to stop short, just before the pistol cleared the discreet concealment of her clothing.
Suddenly, for a just a moment, it was completely quiet in the Spider. For the first time Llyra consciously noticed that large, colorful 3DTV displays lined all of the passageways they had been traveling through, offering real-time views of various places on Earth, on Mars, even on Pallas. Llyra thought she caught a glimpse of Lake Selous, from the east shore opposite Ngu House. Some simply showed what the surface cameras were seeing here at Larsen Farside. Life down here, she realized, would probably be intolerable without them.
It certainly would be for her, she thought.
Meanwhile, at something like a steady four or five miles an hour, the slidewalk had soon brought them to the source of the disturbance. A large, noisy group of y
oung people—Llyra guessed that they were all in their early twenties; most of them were boys, of course; and they were graduate students, almost certainly—seemed to be engaged in an unusually silly sport, even for a group of young male graduate students.
In each of the parallel slidewalks, their rubber-covered lefthand rails no more than six inches apart, starting about a hundred feet away from one another, the boys had placed what looked like ordinary plastic sawhorses with pillows fastened around the centers of their horizontal spans. As Llyra and the others watched, a boy leaped onto each of these contrivances. Somebody standing on the nonmoving floor beside the slidewalk handed him a long pole, apparently made from the same plastic tubing that contained the wire bundles on the ceiling overhead.
Each of the boys had a bright yellow construction-worker’s hardhat with its transparent plastic face shield pulled down. Each wore what amounted to the uniform of graduate students in the physical sciences: bluejeans, synthetic running shoes, and a plaid, short-sleeved shirt. Each wore as well, fastened around his left upper arm, a colorful silky scarf that would have looked more at home draped around woman’s neck.
The two dozen onlookers began to holler and whoop, cheering their respective champions onward. As the pillow-saddled sawhorses and their valiant young passengers approached each other at an aggregate speed of eight or ten miles per hour, the boys lowered their plastic tubes (they were using them as lances, Llyra suddenly realized, the ends of which were amply padded) aiming at the unprotected torsos of their opponents.
Well before the two sawhorses could draw even with one another, there came a thump, a crash! and one of the boys was knocked off his sawhorse, onto the handrail, then onto the segmented surface of the slidewalk, to the utter and noisy delight of onlookers on both sides—some of whom were girls. The vanquished knight leaped quickly to his feet, grabbed his trusty “steed” before it was driven off the end of the slidewalk, and shouted, “Okay, then, the best five out of seven!”
Several of the audience booed him, although most of them laughed and clapped him on the back. The victorious sawhorseman dismounted from his charger when he was only a few feet from the visitors and their guides. He gave the two scientists a sheepish look—”Doctor Khalidov, Doctor Uzhakhov, welcome back!”—then, just before he collided with them, hopped over the rail, onto non-moving concrete, taking his well-padded sawhorse and his lance with him. He then jogged back to the terminus to join his excited friends, perhaps for another match.
“Is Society for Creative Anachronism,” Jasmeen’s uncle Saladin pronounced disgustedly, seeming to believe it was an explanation. “We try our best not to bring it here with us from Purdue, to suppress it when we find we have failed, but when subjected to scrutiny or other kinds of pressure, it breaks itself into independent cells and goes underground.”
“Is very much like slime-mold,” Ali suggested, “only a lot noisier.”
***
Around the circumference of Esmeralda’s common deck, where dinner had just been prepared and eaten, at least half a dozen open oval hatches stood in the floor, tight against the outer wall, with guard rails made of titanium pipe wrapped around them. They led down and aftward.
Aboard Wilson’s little vessel, Mighty Mouse’s Girlfriend, if she’d had hatches like these, they’d have opened directly into the engineering spaces. Here, he gathered, they led first to family and crew quarters, then probably to the cargo bays, and only then to the engines.
It was almost dark by now on the common deck, and the children had all been taken below. One by one the adults had begun drifting away, as well, either to bed, to their duty shifts, or to some appointment Moonside. Keeping a big ship like this in good working order, even when she was lying in port, was a full time job for many hands. Only the three family musicians—Amorie’s grandfather and her uncles—remained. To Wilson’s delight, they played a faster waltz now, that went:
Oh, this is the place where the rock hunters gather,
With magnetized boots and their suits battened down.
All sizes and figgers, their hands on the triggers,
They congregates here on the rock huntin’ ground.
He’d especially liked the lyric, “Some are mindin’ their consoles while others are yarnin’. There’s some standin’ up an’ some more lyin’ down … ” The verse reminded him of some of the people he’d met among the Ceres terraformation crew, who believed that only a truly lazy man could get the job done right, with the proper amount of labor-saving efficiency.
Amorie’s relatives had also played and sung, “I’s the Bye that Cons the Ship” and another with many verses about a legendary fistfight at a famous party called, remarkably enough, “Lafcadio’s Soiree”. It was all tremendous fun. Just now they were rendering a low, sweet ballad about a dying young asteroid hunter, apparently, called “Port Saint Mary’s”.
Wilson had never heard any of this music before, and wondered where it came from—although it did remind him of some of the stuff he’d heard issuing from inside the slatted swinging doors of Brody’s Saloon back home in Curringer. As a boy, he’d never been permitted inside, although he’d argued with his mother that it ought to be considered educational, since so much history had been made in the place.
The accent this music was being sung in had to be some kind of Gaelic, Wilson knew, but it wasn’t Scottish, he was fairly certain, and it wasn’t exactly Irish, either. He didn’t know what Welsh or Cornish sounded like, or even Breton, but made a mental note to feed some of the lyrics he’d heard into a search engine when he had a chance.
At last Amorie arose. He’d waited for her to do it for what had seemed like a century. She took Wilson by the hand, and pulled him up, out of his chair, and away from the table. Suddenly, remembering why he was here—or at least why he hoped he was here—his heart began pounding so hard he was surprised that she couldn’t hear it, surprised that it didn’t simply smash its way through his ribcage and out of his chest.
He couldn’t think straight like this, not when he was so nervous. His blood felt like molten lava in his veins. He wondered if it was like this every time, and if so, how the human race had managed to survive.
Giving him a big, reassuring smile—and just the merest hint of a flash of cleavage—Amorie led Wilson across the deck to one of the hatches he’d noticed. The hatch lid, he could see now, was tilted back against the wall on hinges the size of both his fists. Amorie placed a softly-shod toe on either side of the ladder, just below the level of the floor, put her little hands on either side of the ladder where it thrust up through the deck, and gracefully slid downward, to the deck below.
Wilson, who’d been practicing exactly the same maneuver daily, for many weeks, aboard Mighty Mouse’s Girlfriend, nevertheless surprised himself, in the circumstances, by following the girl’s example without mishap.
“This is B-deck, private quarters,” Amorie told him when his feet were safely on the floor again. Once more she took him by the hand. She indicated the many doors that lined the outside circumference of the circular hallway. He gathered that these were the less desirable billets, more subject to interplanetary radiation and micrometeorite penetration. He wondered what kind of crew people they put in these cabins.
“The young girls,” Amorie told him matter-of-factly when he asked about it. “These walls are pretty much self-sealing, so we don’t worry overly about micrometeorites. We keep hoping for some viable mutations, though, to add to our gene pool. We’re pretty isolated genetically here, you know, and have been for four or five generations. This is the first time the Esmeralda’s put in to port for more than three years.”
The opposite wall had fewer doors, of course, but was covered in colorful children’s drawings. “We had dinner on A-deck,” she went on, “and there are C-deck, D-deck, and E-deck below this one. Almost no one ever goes down to E-deck, it’s just too creepy down there. Four more decks for cargo storage, and then the engines. We have six of those.”
Amo
rie dimpled and curtsied sweetly. Wilson wanted her so much it hurt.
She folded herself into his arms. Her scent was intoxicating. His heart raced. She looked up at him and her eyes became his universe. “Do you want to see them now, or can you think of something better to do?”
***
“Is hard vacuum, other side of glass,” Ali told them.
Having left the makeshift jousters and their tournament behind in the Spider, the two scientists and their offworld guests had taken a brief elevator ride upward several floors and passed through a series of heavy bulkheads to enter a large circular chamber built directly on the Lunar surface. At their backs, through a curving wall of glass so thick it appeared to be tinted green, lay the lamp-lighted hills and rilles and craters they’d seen surrounding the observatory when they’d arrived.
What immediately seized their attention, however, lay outside as well, in the center of the circular walkway they all stood on at the moment, partitioned off by even more of the thick glass (the ceiling over their heads was also glass), so that they occupied, in effect, the inside of a very large, transparent, air-filled glass doughnut. In the center of the doughnut hole stood the very heart of the Culver Telescope, an enormous, unreal-looking bowl of scintillating glass or metal, sitting on stout gimbals above a massive titanium and concrete foundation.
High above it, on three deceptively spindly-looking legs, at the focal point of the parabola below, they saw a cluster of instruments, including several cameras of various kinds, thermocouples, and other devices.
Ali continued. “We are having many ‘System’s only’ or ‘System’s largest’ here at Larsen Farside Observatory. Roger B. Culver Telescope is both. Is system’s largest optical reflector, five thousand inches in diameter—which is also being twenty-seven meters—amounting to almost twenty million square inches. Also is System’s first and only ’smart’ mirror, consisting entirely of hair-fine hexagonal chromium wires, more than two trillion of them, each only three thousandths of inch across, all bundled together, their ends cut and polished by laser.”