Ceres

  Now and again, fine nozzles set in the handrail of a decorative elevated walkway above the Parque would create a brief, gentle shower of rain. Visitors who didn’t care to get wet heeded a warning peal of thunder that was always provided under darkening skies, and climbed one of several staircases, roughly wrought of meteoric iron, to watch for a while. There were tables distributed along the mezzanine, and various entrepreneurs to offer tea, coffee, soft drinks, cocktails, and other refreshments.

  Other times, people enjoyed numerous fountains scattered across the Parque, followed a small, meandering stream, or sat beside the tiny lake it fed. There were fiery-golden Chinese carp in the water, and a handful of mallard ducks, the males with their shiny green heads.

  The illusion of Earth was marred a trifle by the way the stars passed overhead. Wilson could just make out the cables, painted flat black, each as big around as his waist, that stretched from the rim of the Parque structure to a common point overhead, about a mile from where he stood. Its apex was connected with another, leading to another clutch of cables, fanning out to support a more conventional building housing Acme’s administrative offices and a hotel. Whirling around, opposite one another at just the speed to produce a Lunar one-sixth gee, the two facilities served a non-spinning complex at the juncture of the cables, where Fallon’s office was located. There were also hotel rooms in the center for those who preferred sleeping without gravity.

  “I love this place,” said Fallon. She and Wilson were on the walkway—the total circuit was a little over a third of a mile—not to avoid the rain, which wasn’t scheduled for another half hour, but to give Wilson a better view of the Parque. They had just finished one of the best meals either of them had ever had, at a place called Canyon Avenue, located on the other side of the hub. “It reminds me of home.”

  Up close, she was a lot of fun to look at, he thought. She had enormous blue eyes, almost like a cartoon character, and a wonderfully shaped face. Where Amorie had been all softly rounded curves, Wilson could see Fallon’s bone structure through her skin. Her cheeks dominated the shape of her face. Her nose turned up rather like his sister’s.

  “You’re from the Earth, then?” he asked. Somehow he was a little disappointed. He guessed that what he was feeling might be called bigotry.

  She said, “Oh, no. I’m from Pallas, Wilson, just like you are.”

  “No kidding!” He stopped walking and turned to face her. She was very pretty, he found himself deciding all over again, and best of all (at the moment) her eyebrows were copper-colored. It would have taken a year, he thought, to count all of her freckles—just the ones on her face, he meant. She kept her hair, which matched her eyebrows, pulled back in a ponytail that reached down to below her shoulder blades.

  She had worn a dress, sort of an odd choice for a low-gravity environment, he thought, but he liked it. It was blue and matched her eyes.

  He added, “I just realized that I don’t even know your last name.” She smelled nice, and he was suddenly glad that he’d taken the time to shower.

  “O’Driscoll,” she told him. “Fallon O’Driscoll of the Corner Brook O’Driscolls. My family runs a logging, lumbermill, and lumber company there. If you’re a gentlemen, I may even tell you my middle name, sometime.”

  Fallon thrust out a hand. He shook it, but didn’t let it go afterward.

  “Corner Brook … ” he mused. “That’s deep in the weyers, halfway around Pallas, down on the equator. The whole area is a huge evergreen forest, but I suppose you know that. I shot my first mule deer there, near Corner Brook, on a hunting trip with my two uncles, Lindsay and Arleigh.”

  “With that?” She indicated the big Grizzly in the holster low on his hip. “That’d spin even a big muley buck rack over teakettle, wouldn’t it?” He should have known she was Pallatian by the way she wore her own autopistol, in a canted high-ride, just behind her right hip.

  He shook his head. “This belonged to my great grandfather. I’ve only had it for a year,” he told her. “Corner Brook. I remember that I was ten years old, more or less, and I used my dad’s ten millimeter magnum.”

  She grinned. “That’s just around the time that I killed my first muley, myself,” she told him delightedly. “You know, Wilson, sometimes I miss home so much that it aches—I mean physically. You know the feeling?”

  “Not so much, to be honest. I never really wanted to be anything but a rock hunter, and it doesn’t matter much where I happen to do that. Also, I have family here, my sister, and, until recently, my grandmother.”

  Her brow furrowed. “Oh, I’m sorry. When did she pass away?”

  He laughed. “She’ll outlive all of us. She went back to Mars to write children’s books. I don’t like to brag, but she’s Julie Segovia Ngu.”

  “You don’t like to brag must be the understatement of the century, Wilson. You may not know my family or anyone else in Corner Brook, but they know the Ngu family, from your great grandfather Emerson and your great grandmother Rosalie, through William and Brody who saved the seventh Martian expedition, right down to the young gunman of Ceres, who singlehandedly—”

  He put a gentle finger to her lips. “I don’t want to do this, Fallon.”

  She nodded and looked him in the eye. “I won’t mention it again, I promise. I just wanted you to know that I knew—except about your grandmother. I never made that connection. I think it’s really neat. I grew up on the Conchita and Desmondo books, and learned to read from them.”

  He laughed, “So did I.” The resumed their walk, still holding hands.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT: MEET THE PRESS, PART ONE

  I don’t know what it is about the mass media. Throughout history—certainly throughout my lifetime—in every possible social, political, and economic condition, they are enthusiastically hated, loathed, and despised by absolutely everyone. And for good reason. Almost without exception, they are corrupt, lazy, incompetent, vulgar, and dullwittedly arrogant swine—who happen to think they’re not doing their job unless everybody hates, loathes, and despises them. —The Diaries of Rosalie Frazier Ngu

  “Five, four, three…” the floor director counted the last beats silently.

  On the monitors, there had just been a cheerful commercial for a dogfood containing microscopic nanobots similar to those that kept spacesuit faceplates clean. They would lay dormant within the pet’s system all its life. When it died, they immediately went to work converting the animal from the inside, into a permanent taxidermic display.

  Aside from the fact that it sounded sad and disgusting (although he’d never been much for pets and wasn’t absolutely certain), Wilson was sure that he’d done business with individuals who had done that to themselves.

  “Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to another edition of Where Are They Now?“, originating from the studios of the Okohverik Beamcasting Company, here in beautiful downtown Armstrong City.”

  The speaker was a slender young man in a three-piece gray double- breasted suit at least a century and a half out of date. He had chosen a wide, tastefully patterned necktie in subdued colors. His hair was cut short, oiled slightly, and parted neatly in the middle. He wore small, round, rimless spectacles and spoke with an English accent he hoped would disguise the fact he’d been born and raised in Purdue, Indiana.

  In front of him, invisible to his 3DTV audience, stood an oddly lifelike three-legged robot about five feet tall, that shifted from side to side, backed away, or approached closely at the behest of the show’s director sitting in his glass booth overhead, at the back. It could also swivel and tilt its mantis-like head—consisting mostly of two enormous 3DTV camera “eyes”—and sometimes looked as if it might be peering hungrily at the guest, or even the host of the program.

  Two more just like it wandered the studio floor, peering at other things.

  “Our guest tonight…” The young host stood at stage right, a bulky and antiquated microphone in one hand, and in the other, a thick sheaf of papers that
he referred to as conspicuously as possible from time to time. Now he swept the hand full of the papers back and to his left, where, in a typical 3DTV studio talk show setting backdropped by a glorious Jovian sunrise (photographed early in the 21st century by an unmanned probe and projected on the studio wall), another young man sat nervously, his hands folded in his lap, in another glass booth, in an odd chair that looked a little like a giant black plastic martini glass.

  “…can’t hear us yet, in his soundproofed booth,” the host told his audience. In addition to whoever might be seeing the program at home, there was also a studio audience every afternoon, consisting of three or four dozen individuals who had not been selected for their manners, their grooming, their intelligence, or their beauty. One of the other cameras occasionally panned across the crowd, with merciful brevity.

  The host reflected that it was remarkably difficult finding people like these in the Moon—where one had to be reasonably bright to get here in the first place, or at least arrange to have been born to reasonably bright parents—and a desperate 3DTV search for their unsavory kind went on continually. Luckily, finding them was not his department—but God help us if they ever form a union!

  He pretended to consult his papers. “This young fellow enjoyed notoriety about a year ago, when he gunned down five environmentalist demonstrators on the faraway asteroid Ceres, where his father, as the director of terraformation and construction there, not only exonerated him for what he did, but also arranged for him to receive a solid gold medal and an immense cash reward from the Curringer Corporation, which the five bullet-riddled demonstrators had apparently been protesting against.”

  “A little while after that, still on Ceres…” He whisked the top paper to the back of the stack in his hand and appeared to read from the next sheet. In reality, nothing at all was written on it; the program’s directors and producers had found that many people tend to believe anything if it’s written down, and this was one way of taking advantage of that tendency. “…he was involved in yet another ugly incident, so far not explained satisfactorily, in which there was an explosion near the one settlement, and a tourist, come to witness the controversial terraformation for himself, was shot in the knee and crippled.”

  The audience had begun to grumble ominously among themselves. They were about ready. He looked back and raised a hand. “Daphne, if you will…”

  An exceptionally well-shaped young woman, blindingly blond and attired in what might have been a bathing suit—if there had been more of it—materialized from somewhere backstage and stationed herself decoratively to on side of the door of the glass isolation booth.

  The 3DTV host took a deep breath and loudly announced, “Ladies and gentlemen—and Daphne, Where Are They Now? is delighted to present you with that infamous space frontier gunfighter, Wilson ‘Willie the Kid’ Ngu!”

  Daphne opened the door. Wilson stumbled out of the booth, past the voluptuous and almost naked young woman (who seemed to be wearing too much perfume, possibly in compensation for the fact that she wasn’t wearing much of anything else) toward the program’s host and the 3DTV program that he’d been watching but so far had been unable to hear. All Wilson could hear now were the barnyard noises of the studio audience, laughing, applauding, cheering, whistling, and, oddly enough booing.

  Somebody shouted, “Murderer!” Suddenly, Wilson knew what this was all about. He’d had some misgivings about accepting this invitation, arranged for by the Curringer Foundation, to be on 3DTV in the first place. It certainly wouldn’t have any effect on his business, one way or another, and he was really sorry that he’d brought Fallon with him. The host led him to another martini glass chair and sat in one himself.

  “Wilson Ngu,” the host intoned as the audience was threatened to temporary silence by a couple of thick-necked individuals, unseen by the 3DTV cameras, who could have been bouncers in one of the tougher spaceport bars. “Grandson of Billy Ngu, instigator of the Martian Rebellion, and great grandson of Emerson Ngu, armsmaker and industrial giant.”

  “That’s right,” Wilson replied, undaunted. He leaned forward, into the face of the startled host. “Also great grandson of Rosalie Frazier Ngu, the notorious xenoarchaeologist, and grandson of Julie Segovia Ngu, the infamous writer of children’s books. Also, my dad is an engineer, terraforming Ceres, my mom is a mad scientist, and my baby sister is…” He lowered his voice to an ominous whisper, “…an ice skater!. We’re a dangerous breed, all right, the nefarious Ngus of Pallas!”

  Wilson had had to raise his voice a couple of times to keep from being interrupted. By the time he finished, the host looked exactly like he’d just sat on a potted cactus, Wilson thought. The “hanging audience” that had been carefully arranged for him seemed strangely quiet, as if they were waiting for something to happen that they could understand.

  “Erm, um…” said the host. Nobody had warned him about this guy, or he might have prepared himself with a bulletproof vest, or at least some tranquilizers. “We’ll be right back after this important message—or messages—from one of our sponsors. Any of our sponsors!.”

  Wilson looked toward the side of the studio where non-audience guests were seated. Fallon was beaming at him, and he grinned right back.

  Maybe now she’d tell him her middle name.

  ***

  “Good evening ladies and gentlemen of the Solar System and of the human race. I’m Lotus Morimura, of Japanese I: A Magazine of Asian Individualism.”

  There followed a burst of 3DTV shapes and colors that morphed into words, exploded in the viewer’s face, and then morphed into different words.

  “Tonight it’s my pleasure and honor to introduce you to one of the most amazing people,” Lotus declared, “and one of the most amazing stories, I’ve ever heard. I’m sitting rinkside at the Robert A. and Virginia Heinlein Memorial Ice Arena in Armstrong, the biggest city in the Moon, with Llyra Ayn Ngu, a young athlete whom local sportswriters have begun calling ‘the fourth or fifth best figure skater in the Moon.”

  Llyra hoped she wasn’t blushing; that would be too humiliating. Sitting with the beautiful and stylish correspondent on the lowest level of the Heinlein bleachers, close enough to touch the glass, she also tried not to squirm uncomfortably. At the same time that her feet were beginning to freeze, the 3DTV lights were extremely hot and blinding. Lotus, apparently accustomed to the lights, was wearing a well-tailored black coat with a real fur collar and seemed quite at home.

  Nobody was on the ice. High above them in the bleachers, sat half of the girls she knew at the rink, and all of the boys (both of them), plus their coaches and a smattering of parents. Among them were Kelly Tran, Danita Lopez, and the East American ambassador’s daughter Janna Kolditz, the girl she’d overheard on her first day here, whispering behind her back about “colonial trash”. There was an old song Llyra vaguely recalled…how did it go? Oh, yeah: “How do you like me now?”

  “Good evening, Llyra,” Lotus said with a big 3DTV smile. Llyra and Jasmeen had once watched an old 2D movie together in which one of the characters cynically described a Hollywood starlet’s process of being able to smile without involving—and therefore wrinkling—the flesh around the eyes. That was exactly what Lotus was doing now. “Thank you for being with us and for agreeing to answer a few questions for our ‘readers’.”

  That was the conceit, here, that this program was an old-fashioned “dead tree” magazine, being read by the individuals who were watching it.

  Llyra could go along with a gag. She smiled back, more genuinely, because she didn’t know how to do it any other way. “Thank you for asking, Lotus.” She felt pretty good, all things considered. She knew she looked all right. Jasmeen had brushed her hair until it shone like fine gold wire, and then had helped her pick out the white satiny competition dress—with its tiny decorative beads of real gold—that she had worn for the last event she’d skated in. She might not be quite as glamorous as Lotus Morimura, but she’d taken a first in the event.


  “Llyra, we’ve all seen the Curringer Corporation advertisements on 3DTV that show you skating so spectacularly on Ceres. They’re really quite breathtaking, with jumps and spins. It almost looks like you can fly—”

  Llyra laughed. “On Ceres, where the gravity is one tenth of that of the Moon, you almost can fly. You could do it, too, with a little practice.”

  “You don’t say—” Lotus blinked, momentarily taken aback, her eyes glazed, seeing a realm of possibilities she’d never considered before. With what amounted to a moral effort, she regained control of the interview and with it, her own composure. At twenty-nine, she thought, she was much too old to start something like ice skating, anyway.

  She pressed on: “Most people know by now that you came here from your native Pallas, second largest of the Belt asteroids, which has only one twentieth of a gee, to the Moon, with its one sixth of a gee. That’s over three times the pull of gravity you were born and raised in, Llyra. Isn’t it dangerous? How can you force yourself to do it?”

  Lotus paused and looked encouragingly at Llyra who nodded and said, “If you have to force yourself, you shouldn’t be doing it. You should be doing something else, instead, something you burn to be doing. It’s three and a third times, as a matter of fact, although I did skate that little bit you mentioned on Ceres at one tenth. And I admit I had some practice home on Pallas over a mascon near the South Pole.”

  “I see,” Lotus nodded. Maybe she was doing what she was meant to do, after all. Aside from doing interviews like this, with badguys, goodguys, and rare, sweet kids like Llyra, there was very little in life she cared about. She turned back toward the double-lensed camera strapped to her assistant’s head, and to her viewers. “Mascons are places where the local gravity is greater, owing to deposits of denser minerals.”

  Then she turned to Llyra. “But for all practical purposes, here in the Moon, only a little more than a year ago, you were a cripple—to use a very old-fashioned ugly word—or you could say, ‘gravitically challenged’. In any case, you and your coach Jasmeen Khalidov had only just graduated from wheelchairs to walkers when the two of you hobbled down here to the Heinlein and signed up as members of the ice skating club.”