Her father had called her all the way from Pallas to wish her a Merry Christmas and tell her about the ad campaign. Thirty minutes’ worth of transmission lag made real conversation impossible of course. He was there on business, but was calling from Ngu House. Llyra could see her mother in the background, not looking particularly unhappy about it. As far as Llyra was concerned, that was Christmas present enough.
“So be sure not to miss it tonight, baby,” he’d said. “We’ll be running it a lot over the holidays. They’ve also hired an artist, and you’re about to become the logo for the entire Ceres Terraformation Project.” His words had given her an indefinably odd feeling in her stomach.
Today—the morning after, as it were—the whole thing still didn’t seem real, although she’d recorded the commercial and watched it at least a dozen times last night. She’d been able to skate much better at Ceres’ one tenth of a standard gravity, of course, than she could at Luna’s one sixth, but most people wouldn’t understand that, and would want to see her equal the performance that they’d seen on 3DTV.
No pressure there, no pressure at all.
The next try, Llyra took off too late, slammed into the boards in the middle of her second turn, and fell onto her side from six feet in the air. She lay there on the ice for just a moment, “appreciating” her bruises (from the inside, of course—no professional athlete ever rubbed an injury in public) and trying to catch the breath that had been blasted out of her. Jasmeen skated up to her and took her hand.
“Are you going to live, my little?” she asked Llyra, hauling her up.
“Yeah,” Llyra said, on her feet again, “but I promise not to enjoy it.”
They both laughed.
Llyra shook herself and headed for the other corner to try the jump again.
***
Wilson said, “Download successful, Larsen Farside. Thank you very much.”
A pleasant female voice replied, “You’re welcome, Mighty Mouse’s Girlfriend—I just love the name of your ship!—we’ll send you our bill.”
Actually, she had already; it had been embedded in the downloaded data now streaming past his eyes on the control console. Exclusives were very expensive. If this hunt didn’t go well, his partner would be unhappy.
On the other hand, he caught himself wondering idly what the girl at the Larsen Farside end of the conversation was like. Pretty? Funny? Nice? Maybe it was a sign that he was finally getting over Amorie. He hadn’t heard from her since that last time on the ‘com. Her family’s ship Esmeralda had left Lunar space and was headed upsystem shortly afterward.
She might even be married by now.
Taking a last lovely bite of his handmade gourmet ham and cheese sandwich (one thing Julie wouldn’t let him scrimp on was food), and a last gulp of his Coke before letting them both float in their plastic baggies at the ends of their tethers—too short to interfere with the controls—Wilson attacked the keys before him, converting what Larsen Farside had just sent him into something his own navigational computer could use. He supposed he could have automated the process, but then he wouldn’t have known the data a fraction as well as he did by the time he’d finished their manual entry. His dad had taught him that.
Satisfied, he struck a virtual key relabeled “ANY”.
Seemingly all by herself, Mighty Mouse’s Girlfriend suddenly slewed downward and sideways some forty-three degrees, fifty-seven minutes, driven by a single engine and her attitude thrusters. There came a surge of acceleration as she came into the correct alignment and her other two engines cut in. She and her owner were off, in a blaze of fusion-heated reaction mass, after their first exclusive quarry.
The targeted object had been described as dark-colored and potato- shaped. That was an astronomer’s idea of a joke, of course. The same description applied to ninety-nine percent of all the asteroids and meteoroids and other space junk ever found. It was roughly forty feet along its longest axis, almost purely metallic, and unusually rich in palladium. It was estimated to be a monolith, rather than a loose aggregate, which meant that it would be much easier to capture and control.
Extra points, as well, because it was headed straight for the middle of L-Two, a sector of otherwise empty space that was occupied by some two hundred artificial habitations and fifty times that many people. For bounty purposes, L-Two was considered one of the Settled Worlds. This asteroid was no Diamond Rogue, but by every criterion meaningful to hunters, it was a find.
With a whoop, Wilson pursued his quarry, radar and lidar alive and singing to him from different portions of the musical scale. Unlike sonar, the actual returns occurred at the speed of light. They were only being simulated with sonar-like noises, rather like the false colors that are often useful in scientific photography. The return times kept getting shorter and shorter, until they froze and became a solid, disharmonious chord. He could see the target, now, through the curved plastic wall in front of him. Throwing switches, he armed the cable gun under the ship’s “chin” and prepared to throw a loop on his first rock.
“What the hell kind of a name is Mighty Mouse’s Girlfriend, anyway?” The harsh male voice came to him abruptly over his general address radio system. Unlike the encrypted female signal from Larsen Farside, it did not sound at all pleasant, and indeed, it wasn’t meant to.
“That all depends, I suppose,” Wilson replied evenly, stepping up his oxygen partial pressure. He wondered whether the guy was reading his transponder or could actually see him. “Who the hell wants to know?”
“Space Viper, out of Port Plato—the guy whose hunting territory you’re trespassing in, newbie! Let go of that rock, and make contrails!”
That was stupid. You only saw contrails in an atmosphere. And to his knowledge, there was no Port Plato—probably no Space Viper, either.
Wilson had been warned about this, during the hundreds of hours of classes he’d suffered through at the insistence of his grandmother and her insurance underwriter. (His certificate of completion sat in a frame, fastened to the wall near the edge of the dome.) Several portside bullies—including a couple he’d gone to shiphandling school with—had already tried to warn him not to hunt “their” territories, until somebody had told them who Emerson was and what he’d done on Ceres.
His great grandfather Emerson’s .45 Magnum Grizzly automatic pistol, hanging low on his right hip, had probably been persuasive, as well.
His grandmother told him that these people would probably have been muggers, politicians, or union bosses, back on Earth, in New Jersey.
Now Wilson laughed. “You know there’s no such thing as personal territory out here, Space Viper—and where’d you get a name like that, anyway, a bubble gum machine?—according to the Asteroid and Meteoroid Hunters’ and Miners’ Concurrence of 2097. I’ve got it right here, and could read you the relevant paragraphs, but why don’t you just fribble off, instead? Unless you want to be formally accused of piracy.”
A snarl: “Yeah? And just who’s gonna survive this to do that, Girlfriend?”
“I am,” said Wilson. Fingers flying on the keyboard, he rolled his ship to bring her dorsal surface to bear on the intruder, rotated a big item of equipment, and raised it until it pointed at the other vessel. “You sort of forgot the Mighty Mouse part, Viper. I’ve got a brand new Coprates Electric ninety gigawatt particle cannon here, in a spiffy universal swivel mount, trained on your front windows right now.”
Wilson flipped the red switch cover up and backward, and threw the arming toggle. An entire section of the control panel that had been dark before, now lit up like Armstrong’s Eagle Avenue on a Saturday night.
It was impressive, considering that the particle cannon was on backorder and wouldn’t be installed until late next week at the very earliest. All he had pointed at his adversary was the expensive swivel mounting.
He laughed. “What do you say, Viper, assuming that’s your real name?”
Without another word, the ship that called itself Space Viper veered o
ff and disappeared in a bright blast of fusion-heated reaction mass.
This is fun, thought Emerson, reaching for his ham and cheese sandwich.
***
The two men emerged from the freight elevator and stepped into the grimy alley behind the office building occupied, in part by the Mass Movement.
One of them immediately reached into a jacket pocket and extracted a package of cigarettes that would have cost him twenty East American dollars had he bought it in Amherst or anywhere in Massachusetts. He had bought in Wyoming, where it had cost about one percent of that amount.
“Careful, Paul,” the second man warned the first. “It’s illegal to be seen smoking in public in this town. There are cameras and mikes everywhere.”
Pulling the cellophane wrapper off, Luegner put it in his pocket and tapped the bottom of the pack until a single cigarette emerged. “Except for where people pay for them not to be, like this alley, for instance?”
Johnnie Crenicichla nodded. “Yeah, for instance. You get what we needed?”
Luegner held up his politically correct 1950s vintage Zippo lighter. “Got it in spades. If this operation goes all right, it’ll be bigger than September 11, 2001, or what happened to Denver. If it goes smoothly, then we’ll never need the stuff I recorded up there this morning.”
Crenicichla laughed. “And if it doesn’t, then, morally outraged at the crime your underlings committed without your knowledge consent, you’ll resign from NDE. The recording, properly edited, will deprive Annie of credible deniability, and hang the crime on her. When she’s out of the picture, you’ll reluctantly take over and head the Mass Movement.”
“Pretty damned slick,” Luegner agreed. “Except for one tiny little thing. Give me the recording you made, Johnnie, while I was making mine.”
“Paul!” Crenicichla pretended to wide-eyed, open-mouthed surprise astonishment, but not particularly well, Luegner thought. It was what came of not spending enough time around coeds, testing the extreme limits of their gullibility, “What in God’s name can you be talking about?”
Luegner drew a politically correct 1950s vintage .45 auto from inside his coat and thumbed the hammer back. He always carried a round in the chamber. “Come on, Johnnie, I know our bosses all too well. Do it, unless you’d like to give the city’s gunfire location system a test.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE: MOON OF EYES
Despite the voluminous and unmistakable evidence all around me, all my life, it has taken me the better part of sixty years to reach the conclusion that all government—no matter what kind it is or claims to be—is parasitic and evil in its primary nature, and that indeed, six thousand years of propaganda to the contrary, its exists for no other purpose than to be parasitic and evil.
My husband Emerson seems to have understood this since the day he was born. —The Diaries of Rosalie Frazier Ngu
Llyra stood in the gate, listening to horror stories.
“Of course we only had three sheets of ice back then,” one of the other coaches was telling Jasmeen. She was a slim, pretty, tiny woman with a young and energetic voice. Someone had told Jasmeen that she was in her forties, but she didn’t look it. Either living in the Moon was good for a person’s health, or it was simply having the right outlook.
“Back then”, of course, neither Mars nor Pallas had any rinks at all.
The coach said, “I think I was about twelve. Our annual ice show had a Blue Hawaii theme, and my mom had made me a little outfit with a grass skirt, a coconut bra, a big flower lei, you know, the whole thing. The night of the show, it was missing from my locker. My friends and I, my mom, my coach, we all looked everywhere, but no luck.”
Jasmeen nodded politely, and threw Llyra an anxious glance. The younger girl knew her coach would much rather be giving her a last- minute pep talk right now. Maybe this was just as well. Maybe they’d both feel less nervous this way—by now she knew girls who’d gotten ulcers just from these last few moments before competition—and they were making new friends in a field of endeavor where that could be important.
“What did you do?” Jasmeen asked the other coach. Llyra wondered, too.
“Oh, my mom had some material left over from my first costume and whipped up another. She’s great. But you haven’t heard the best part. Twenty years later, when they were building the other three rinks here, they had to tear down the girls’ locker rooms to relocate them. Guess what they found behind the lockers when they pulled them out.”
“Hawaiian costume,” Jasmeen guessed.
The coach laughed ruefully. “You bet they did, honey, still on its hanger in the bag. To this day, I don’t know why whoever did it did it.”
“Sometimes,” Jasmeen told her, “is no why.”
She turned to Llyra and reached up to put her hands on the girl’s shoulders. Not long ago, she could have leaned down and rested her forearms there, clasping her hands behind the nape of Llyra’s neck. “Skate as if you are only skater here today, my little. Skate as if is not competition, but exhibition. Skate your proudest, ignoring other skaters. If you compete with anybody, compete with yourself.” She stood on tiptoe to kiss Llyra’s forehead, then stepped back and grinned. “But try to make it friendly competition.”
Llyra grinned back. She was aware that people were watching her this morning, curious about the “asteroid girl” (as she had heard herself called behind her back) and how she would fare in competition after arriving here the first time in a wheelchair. Some of them, she knew, wanted her to fail—that was something else she’d overheard—although she didn’t have the foggiest notion why. One or two, she knew, despised what they called “colonials”. Others simply hated the rich.
In general, Llyra didn’t understand how people could be cruel like that to one another, possibly because she didn’t have a cruel bone in her own body. Even her mother was honest enough with others, and herself, to realize that what happened between her and Adam—the bad stuff, Llyra thought to herself; she didn’t really want to know about anything else—was completely irrational, and to feel ashamed of it, afterward.
Llyra had heard another story she didn’t understand. One of the girls she shared contract ice with every morning was originally from West America. The day of her big sister’s most important competition—in some place called Omaha—she’d left her skate bag inside the girls’ locker room, believing it was safe. Minutes before her group was to take the ice, she discovered that somebody had taken her skates out of her bag and stomped them, over and over again, until the blades shattered.
Big sister had left competition and never skated again.
Llyra was about to say something to Jasmeen, when the announcer spoke, instead: “Our next skater is a member of the Lunar Figure Skating Club.” The amplified baritone voice reverberated through the cavernous facility. ”But her home ice is the Aloysius Brody Arena in Curringer, on Pallas. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Llyra Ayn Ngu!”
Jasmeen’s grin had become an annoyed scowl. The announcer had pronounced her student’s first name “Leera” and her middle name “Ann”, despite a note she’d written on the card, but by now Llyra was used to it.
Adrenaline pumping, oblivious to everything else around her, she was about to step onto the ice, had a leg raised to cross over the threshold, in fact, when she felt a tap on her shoulder. Jasmeen caught her eye, glanced down at her feet. Llyra still had the plastic guards on her blades, and would have wound up on her behind within a stroke or two. She’d done it before. Everybody did it at one time or another.
She stooped to slip the guards off—Jasmeen took them; there were at least a dozen other coaches along the boards, clutching pairs of skate guards to their heavily-coated bosoms—and then was gone, soaring across the rink in a position called a “spiral”, her torso parallel to the ice, one leg extended straight backward and as high as anatomically possible, arms extended outward like the wings of an airplane. That kind of thing had once been considered too flashy, but with the change in the s
tatus of judges, it had become increasingly common.
Llyra and her coach were both lovers of classical music. Over their weeks of practice for this event, Jasmeen had vetoed her student’s choices of Ravel’s “Bolero” and the version of Gordon Sumner’s “Roxanne” from Moulin Rouge! as inappropriate for a fourteen-year- old.
Jasmeen favored Deep Purple’s “Smoke on the Water”, but she liked anything with Richie Blackmoore’s guitar playing, while Llyra thought Lindsey Buckingham was the best guitarist who had ever lived, even counting 21st century stars like Kenji Yamagari and the six-fingered Maximillian Revo. With the introduction of a new kind of judging, the rule against lyrics in most skating music had been dropped. The girls had finally agreed on the Who’s “Won’t Get Fooled Again”, with its simple, pulsing organ introduction that was perfect for starting a routine.
Llyra quickly found the point on the blue line (all of these rinks were marked for hockey, just like at home) that she and Jasmeen had chosen and show-stopped to a halt, spraying ice crystals. There she waited for the referee to find her music in the system and reset the autojudge.
***
There was only a smattering of polite applause as Llyra’s name was mispronounced and she struck a dramatic starting pose. As with most lower level events like this one, despite the popularity of figure skating on 3DTV, the facility was only sparsely populated, mostly by the parents of the competitors, their brothers and sisters, and a few friends. Ten times this number would show up for the Lunar Youth Hockey game tomorrow.
In the highest, farthest corner of the Robert A. and Virginia Heinlein Memorial Ice Arena bleachers, the fastest gun in the Moon watched and learned and wondered how these young athletes—the best of them were here all the time and called themselves “rinkrats”—grew up eating food like this. He’d arrived hungry, but had had a hard time choosing the lesser of two evils, between a rinkburger and a rinkdog.