Something was very wrong with her, of that much she was aware, something that had caused her to ruin what would otherwise have been her idyllic marriage to Adam. Nobody knew that she’d tried psychiatric therapy a couple of times after Adam had had enough and gone to Ceres, but it hadn’t helped. She’d found that she couldn’t take advice about her life from individuals she perceived as less intelligent than she was.
She felt guilty about that, too.
Julie, whom she saw as at least an equal, might be of some help, but Ardith didn’t know how to ask her—didn’t even know how to begin.
Oh my god, she thought. I dreamed that Wilson was pregnant!
***
Krystal had been sitting on the cold metal bench for at least an hour. It was hard to tell, exactly. She’d been blindfolded before they brought her here, and in any case, she was pretty sure the room was dark. It was quiet and cold. The only reason she couldn’t hear her own heart beating was that it was drowned out by the chattering of her teeth.
Maybe she’d made a mistake this morning, calling an emergency number that had been tattooed upside-down and backwards on the inside of her eyelid, so she could flip the eyelid inside-out (you acquired a knack for it after a while) and read it in the bathroom mirror—provided you had magnifying spectacles and a source of ultraviolet light.
“Haircut,” she’d told the public payphone in a Tibetan restaurant they’d chosen because very few people, aside from Tibetans, liked Tibetan food, and none of the regulars spoke English. “This is Two Bits. Please let Shave know I’m red hot and want to come in from the cold.”
“Understood,” answered an electronically distorted voice. “Stay there.” The connection had clicked in Krystal’s ear. She bought a cup of some horrible tasting tea, sat down at a table in a corner, and waited.
They’d taken all of four minutes to come to her, three men in a late model ElectroLux with deeply smoked back windows. One of the men got out of the car, stepped halfway into the restaurant, looked around, and signaled for her to follow him. She abandoned the tea gratefully.
The instant she got into the car, they were on her, the one who’d fetched her from the restaurant and another, binding her hands behind her back with a plastic cable tie, shoving a black cloth bag over her head.
“What the hell do you people think you’re—”
She felt a sharp explosion of pain in her temple and saw little purple sparks before her eyes. “Keep that noise up and I’ll smash your head into a bag of chunky red paste. Nobody will complain and you won’t be missed.”
She nodded, afraid to say anything. While the man in front drove, the two in back with her went over her methodically and without regard to her dignity. They were wordless, swift, and thorough. They didn’t really hurt her and they didn’t bother her sexually. They found and took her phone, her PDA, her main weapon, her backup, and her backup’s backup. They found and took all four of the knives she kept handy on her person.
They found all of the normal things, as well, credit cards, keys, cosmetics, tissues. They took her shoes, hurting her a little as they did.
They didn’t find—better not to think about that right now. At some point the car stopped. Her captors pulled her out of it and into some building, to a fast elevator that went down and down, seemingly endlessly, until it came to a stop, a hundred floors, she guessed, below street level in Armstrong. She didn’t know anything in the Moon had ever been dug this deep. It made her wonder who she really worked for.
Now, after two hours of sitting on a hard metal bench in the cold, she heard a door unlatch, a metal door, she thought, and swing open. At least two men came toward her and stopped immediately in front of her.
One of then said, “You didn’t tie her ankles.” It was not a question.
“No reason to,” said the other man. “Where’s she gonna go?”
“Tie her ankles now, and get out of here.”
“Okay, okay!” The leader’s instructions were duly followed and in only an instant, she was even more uncomfortable than she’d been before.
“Krystal Sweet?” the man demanded. Now it began.
“Of the Sour Lake, Texas Sweets,” she replied, mustering all of her courage and trying to remain chipper. The back of a gloved hand smashing into the side of her face rocked her until her head hit the wall.
“I’d advise humility,” said the voice. “You’re here because your underling made several stupid mistakes for no apparent reason. We want to see if you’ve been irredeemably contaminated, or if you can be salvaged.”
“Then shoot me now, Jackoff! I’ll be damned if I’ll be threatened by some pussy who has to tie me up to hit me, and hired me to do his wetwork in the first place so he wouldn’t get his own precious pinkies soiled. Gimme that last cigarette, now, Dickless. I happen to like Birminghams.”
There was a long pause, during which Krystal expected to be shot, or at least stricken again, every second. Nothing like that happened. The metal door opened and swung shut again. There was something to be said, she thought to herself, for being badder than the rest of the badguys.
They came back for her in only a few moments, and when they did, they cut the wire-enforced plastic strips binding her ankles and her arms. They stood her up. The door swung open, and this time they took her through it into another room with carpet on the floor and decent heating.
They sat her in a leather-upholstered chair and left her. The room was silent, except for an old, familiar noise she hadn’t heard for years.
“You may remove your blindfold now, Krystal.” It was an old, familiar voice she hadn’t heard in weeks, that of P.E. “Honest Paul” Luegner, the leader of Null Delta Em and her boss for the past several years. She loosened the drawstring, skinned the bag off, and ran a hand through her short, pale blond hair. “We have a mess to straighten out.”
“And you’ve decided not to make me pay for it. That’s very good, Paul, because it wasn’t my fault—I don’t have any idea why it happened—and I was going to make it really expensive for you to blame it on me.”
Luegner nodded. “I’ll bet you would have, at that. My men are all terrified of you, you know, not just because you’re skilled and tough, but because you’re intelligent. You’re going to pay for what happened at the spaceport in a way though, Krystal, because it happened on your watch.”
“That’s acceptable,” she said, noticing her purse and all her personal possessions were laid out on Luegner’s antique walnut desk. Wood. The whole room was paneled with the stuff. It must have cost a king’s ransom—probably a real king’s ransom—to bring it all up from Earth.
There was the source of the noise, a real fire, burning in a real fireplace. Burning wood.
“For now, Krystal, I just want you to tell me what you think happened with Brian Downs. Why did he snap like that? The sonofabitch probably set the movement back fifty years, gunning down a pregnant girl, the way he did. The spaceport manager’s daughter, of all things! And, of course, we’ll have the goddamned Ngu family to contend with—again.”
Krystal shook her head ruefully. “I warned Brian about that very thing, Paul. I didn’t know him well, aside from his personnel jacket. I met him about a week before we went to Mars aboard the City of Newark.”
“And … ?”
“And, well, he complained about the assignment every inch of the way.”
“What did he complain about, specifically?”
“The fact that we had to stay with the ship for an immediate turnaround, and wouldn’t be taking a shuttle down to enjoy Mars like tourists.”
“I see, Still, it doesn’t sound like much to go on a killing spree over.”
“No, it doesn’t, does it? Do you have anything warming to drink? I’m still freezing to death. In the end, Brian was making Marxist noises, sort of, about the movement’s ‘fat cats’—that’s you, Paul—being able to go anywhere they want, do anything they want on the company expense account.”
“I’ve never
been to Mars,” Luegner went to a sideboard and poured them each a generous drink. As he handed Krystal’s glass to her, he said, “Jameson’s. Twenty-five years old. Say, those plastic binders really cut into your wrists, didn’t they? I’m almost sorry about that, but I had to determine that I was dealing with the Krystal Sweet I remembered.”
“Meaning … what?”
He reached into an antique wardrobe cabinet behind his desk and pulled out a light rug or small blanket, which he put over her lap. “Meaning if you hadn’t given my man such a hard time out there, daring him to go ahead and shoot you and all, I probably would have had you executed.”
“It’s nice to know I’m appreciated. But we were talking about Brian.”
“So we were. Do you know specifically what set him off?
“Well, he always had a sort of a special jones for Wilson Ngu and his family. Seeing him at the spaceport after two weeks confinement aboard ship—which he somehow twisted around to blame on the Ngu boy—that’s what seemed to make him … have a psychotic break, flip out, whatever.”
“So he was trying to shoot Wilson, rather than the O’Driscoll girl?”
“Yes, he was. Although if he’d realized that she was his girl and was carrying his child, he might well have chosen her as a primary target.”
“Well, it’s an incredible mess, that’s what it is, and there’s no time at present to clean it up. We won’t claim credit directly, but we’ll have Anna Savage denounce us as angrily as she can. In the meantime, it would have been nice to have two of you familiar with that ship, but you’ll just have to make do with the crew you’ve picked.”
“They’re all good people, Paul. They’ll do.”
“That’s what we thought about Brian Downs, isn’t it? Still, we have no choice. You have to be back on that ship, your crew in place, by—”
He named a date that made her gasp. “That soon?”
Luegner nodded. “Or it’ll be completely pointless. You have to teach them a lesson, Krystal. You have to make them all see the truth.”
“Count on me, Paul. Trust me. I’m a good teacher.”
PART THREE: ONE-THIRD GEE
Although we are unique in our species’ ability to foresee and even to forestall cataclysmic occurrences like the Permian-Triassic and Cretaceous-Tertiary Events, we face unique, unprecedented hazards, as well. The power to divert an asteroid or comet from its collision course with Earth is the power to divert an asteroid or comet onto a collision course with Earth.
There are plenty of individuals and groups, disappointed that the end of the world didn’t arrive on schedule, who would be perfectly satisfied to make up for nature’s shortcomings. And there are plenty of governments who have noticed that falling rocks smaller and slower than the P-T and K-T objects are capable of erasing limited portions of the Earth—an enemy country, for example—with none of the unpleasant side-effects of nuclear weapons.
Before we can approach the problem of preventing natural celestial disasters, we must first solve the perhaps greater problem that such a capability represents.
—Dr. Evgeny Zacharenko Addressing the Ashland Event Commission
Of the Solar Geological Society Curringer, Pallas, August 9, 2095
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE: CONFRONTATIONS
Some human beings seem to love competition, especially when it’s somebody else—their children, for example—who has to do the competing. I love a good hockey game, myself, and Martian baseball is a thing of beauty. On the other hand, I don’t know what it is about some of the members of our species who feel compelled to take every pleasant, impromptu activity, like sliding along a freshly-frozen body of water, and turn it into a life-and-death, bloody, cutthroat battle in order to “justify” it.
I’m not talking about hockey, here, of course, but figure skating. —The Diaries of Rosalie Frazier Ngu
“Here it is!” shouted Llyra.
Every sheet of glass in the lobby of the Robert A. and Virginia Heinlein Memorial Ice Arena—they were many and large—seemed to be covered with pieces of self-adhering typing paper. But they only adhered at the top—each time someone opened a door to the street or the cavernous rink below, they all flapped and fluttered in the breeze like so many flags.
Jasmeen answered, “Where is? I do not see!”
The place positively thundered with the presence of hundreds of young girls, from the age of four to the age of about nineteen, attired in flesh-colored tights, brightly-hued, highly stylized, traditional dresses with short skirts and plenty of sequins and glitter, standing in skates that made them look taller and even longer-legged than they were. The air was charged with the odors of hairspray, makeup, and perspired adrenaline.
Llyra was no different in many of these respects. Her hair was done up in a classic ponytail, slicked down with aerosol plastic, well garnished with fine gold glitter (buns and short haircuts were also acceptable). She wore an expensively tailored dress her grandmother had sent her, of fuchsia crushed velvet with spaghetti straps over her shoulders and a short, sheer skirt of paisley that complimented the bodice.
Like every girl there, she had put on enough makeup that morning, as her father had once observed, for the entire road company of The Mikado
Here and there, outnumbered at least a hundred to one and looking very self-conscious, were little boys in tight pants and baggy-sleeved shirts. They were tougher than they looked, willing to put up with constant teasing and bullying from non-skating boys, in order to skate.
Jasmeen wore her customary “official” coach’s coat, long, black, almost ice-length. The only difference between hers and those of other coaches here today was that the other coaches wore quilted synthetics, fake furs, or heavy cloth, the only fur-bearing animals in the Moon being sheep and long-haired dogs. Jasmeen wore genuine Pallatian sable she’d paid for herself out of her first several paydays from the Ngus.
Some of these young athletes were about to skate, and were focused tightly on whatever it is inside a person that allows them to compete with others. Everywhere, signs had been posted: “NO FLOOR JUMPS”, and everywhere, just as many heads bumped by the ceiling because their owners had ignored the signs. Still, they had to warm up and get in some last-minute practice somehow. There was talk of building a high- ceilinged jump room.
Others here had already skated and were waiting for results, waiting to be photographed with their competitors, waiting to go home or back to their hotel. Many of them were red-faced and sobbing, having done less well than they—or their parents and coaches—had expected. In some, it was a reflexive, preemptive reaction, in order to avoid being scolded or yelled at.
The all-important results were what was printed in neat columns on the pieces of paper sticking to the glass. Each consisted of the place, date, and name of the event, the group if there were more than a dozen or so skaters in the same competitive category, the skater’s name, her placement within her group, and her “ordinals”—the place given her by each of the six automated judges that had watched her skate. Sometimes these numbers varied, owing to the different angle each judge saw her from, but disagreements like this were fairly unusual.
“Junior Ladies’ Final Round!” Llyra was so excited that she could hardly control herself, but didn’t want to shout her results to a roomful of girls who hadn’t done as well as she had. Jasmeen caught up in a heartbeat. “First Place!” Llyra seized Jasmeen’s arm and squeezed it.
“Oh, my little,” said Jasmeen. “Just look at the ordinals!”
All six robotic judges had given Llyra first place, just they had for her Long Program and her Short Program that had preceded it. Being the only figure skater on Pallas, Llyra had often wondered why, when the judges were completely cybernetic, the results were posted in such an old-fashioned manner. Shirlene Hofstaedter, of the Lunar Figure Skating Association, had explained that this 200-year-old touch was one of the things that had first made automated judging acceptable to skaters.
She remembered—partly
because it hadn’t been that long ago—the day she’d passed her Junior Ladies’ test, which had qualified her to compete at that level in this competition. It had been a general testing day, every testing skater and her coach horribly tense. The whole rink had been steeped in a mood to make this competition seem festive.
Jasmeen had been with her every step of the way, of course, watching her as she warmed up, offering final advice on the fine points of technique, reminding her, as every coach must remind her students, ”Smile!” The judges were actually programmed to watch for that.
It was a strange, strange world, she thought, and growing stranger daily.
She’d been well coached and had practiced hard, getting through the test with an ease that had made her feel unsettled and suspicious of herself. Some skaters were called back to reskate a portion of their test. Llyra was not, which could either mean she’d skated well or very badly.
They’d found a little niche just off the lobby by the snack bar in which to sit and wait. Jasmeen had gotten out her PDA and begun working this week’s Syrtis Major Times crossword puzzle, the only reason she subscribed. As with the old-fashioned posted scores, a real human being would come out in a little while to tell them how Llyra had fared.
The real human being, Mrs. Hofstaedter, as it turned out, had informed them that Llyra had passed brilliantly. “Although I must confess, I never held out much hope for either of you, that first week you were here.”
Llyra had laughed and let Mrs. Hofstaedter buy her a celebratory Coke.
Jasmeen had immediately pressed ENTER on her PDA, electronically sending Llyra’s entry form for the competition upstairs to Mrs. Hofstaedter’s office, a full three minutes before the deadline, six whole weeks before the event today, which Llyra had won with flying colors.
Now, standing at the windows, Jasmeen caught Llyra’s eye. “My little, you have just won tenth competition in Moon. You know what means?”
Still stunned at her results and filled with joy, Llyra shook her head, a smart-alecky remark about Disneyland dying unuttered on her lips.