“I know theory,” Jasmeen answered, thinking that her young student knew altogether too much, sometimes, for a thirteen-year-old. Oh well, she had been very much the same, herself, only six years ago, and it didn’t seem to have done her any harm. “Theory is interesting, but completely—”
“Wrong,” Llyra finished. “Because it turns out the Fallopian tubes are lined with ciliated cells, just like the bronchial tubes, and they whisk the egg along to the uterus whether there’s any gravity or not. Poor Mother.”
Jasmeen had never heard Llyra talk this way. “Poor Mother? Why poor Mother?”
Llyra responded with a humorless little laugh. “Isn’t that silly—no pun intended? Silly-ated. All those hours, days, and weeks spent working out in a giant rock tumbler—or just sitting in it knitting booties—and there wasn’t any need. By the time my folks decided to have me, they knew the scientific truth and they didn’t bother with a centrifuge.”
“I see,” Jasmeen nodded. “Although many would-be mothers still do. It has become superstition?”
“Well, you can’t blame them, I guess” Llyra said. “Not with the rate of miscarriages we have out here. We’re like Quito, Ecuador or Leadville, Colorado—only worse. Mother doesn’t know that I know she had four of them—spontaneous abortions—between my brother and me. My father told me. She’d die of embarrassment if she knew. I think a lot of women still believe this might be a way to prevent it, and would do anything.”
Jasmeen thought she heard an odd quality in Llyra’s voice, but, lying in these couches the way they were, couldn’t see her face. “Sad thing,” she said, “is that only time and evolution can do that. And science, perhaps.”
“Perhaps,” Llyra agreed. By now the noise of the centrifuge had steadied, their weight was on their feet, and what had been the wall now felt like a carpeted floor. “Tell you what, don’t unstrap—let’s skip Cerean gravity and head straight for the Moon—one sixth of a gee.”
***
The stateroom’s shape was difficult to get used to, its current occupant reflected. One end was very narrow, its short wall occupied only by an oval door to the circular hallway and the spiral escalator outside. He’d avoided coming here for as long as he could, sitting, instead, in the passenger lounge, listening carefully to the others talking.
The wall opposite was a good deal wider, nearly sixteen feet, the room’s occupant had calculated, and slightly curved, as it was a part of the ship’s circumference. A pair of twin beds were set against that wall, with a porthole between them over an item of bedside furniture offering three drawers and a reading lamp screwed to its surface. At the foot of each bed sat another small chest of drawers, along with a chair that could be moved only if a small lever at the end of each leg was thrown first.
On the counter-clockwise wall, another oval door led to a bathroom shared with the occupants of the room to the right. How many passengers tripped over that high, submarine-style threshold when they got up in the middle of the night, he wondered. A door in the left, or clockwise wall opened into a surprisingly roomy closet. The passenger was mildly curious about the arrangement in the room to the left, where the closet would be where this room’s righthand bed was.
There wasn’t much to see out the porthole, a twelve-inch disk of thick glass or plastic set in a heavy frame. It looked a bit odd here, lacking the traditional latch and hinges that would grace a seagoing window back on Earth. (The passenger had once stuffed a dead human body through such a porthole.) This one was on the “night” side of the ship; all that could be seen through it was an ocean of small pinpoints of light. Some of them must be asteroids and planets, the passenger realized, but there was no way he could tell one from another.
If this stateroom had been on the sunward side of the ship, he knew, even this far from the Solar System’s primary, the transparency would have darkened itself until he couldn’t see the stars. To anyone who was even mildly claustrophobic, as he happened to be, the idea was unthinkable.
Back inside, almost any portion of the walls on either side of the stateroom could be programmed to perform as a 3DTV screen, tapping into the ship’s supply of entertainment, or even realtime broadcasts from Earth, the Moon, Mars, and Pallas. At the moment, the walls were blank. The passenger had little use—and a great deal of contempt— for most of what was broadcast. The human race badly needed a wakeup call before disaster of unprecedented proportions became unavoidable back on the Mother Planet, and they weren’t getting it from the mass media.
No matter, he would provide such a wakeup call, himself. It was his duty, for which he was remarkably well paid, but it was also his pleasure.
He focused his attention on the stateroom’s righthand bed, where his suitcase still lay as the attendants had placed it, unopened. It was large, brown, and shiny, a stylish reproduction of the ancient classic Samsonite. Even if it had been inspected before boarding—
which local practices stupidly forbade—there was nothing in it or about it that might have given him away as an “asset” of Null Delta Em, not even the personal sidearm most of the idiots out here couldn’t seem to live without.
As important as it was for him to fit in, he could never bring himself to carry a gun. He’d used guns, of course, to accomplish certain tasks, then thrown them away as far and as soon as he could. The fools out here all thought they were Daniel Boone or somebody, he supposed. It was just like travelling west of the Mississippi, only worse. He’d hated every minute he’d been forced to live in Curringer on Pallas, working at an office job provided by his real employers back on Earth. He’d managed to acquire a lot of money during that time, however, and invest it in the system he was helping to destroy. He enjoyed the irony. When this job was over, he was headed back home for good.
Opening the suitcase, he removed most of its contents—shirts, socks, and underwear—and carefully distributed them among the three drawers in the bedside table. The inside of the suitcase smelled a little funny, he thought, but that was the only indication that it wasn’t exactly what it was supposed to be, and that could be taken care of simply by sprinkling a little cologne into the lining, which he did now.
The heavily-coded message sent from East America (anyone else who saw it would think it was merely birthday greetings from an aunt, which, in a way, it was) had given him a location—the Curringer Corporation’s construction dome on Ceres—a date and time that coincided with an event that was already the subject of excited talk everywhere among the Settled Worlds except for certain portions of the planet of humanity’s birth, and a two-digit number, eighty-six, that told him the sort of operation he was supposed to conduct: messy, with a maximum number of casualties.
His assignment was to teach these frontier throwbacks a lesson that they wouldn’t soon forget, that the price for defying Nature was too high to pay. His personal pleasure would be to make a murderous shambles of the award ceremony they were holding in young Wilson Ngu’s honor, for having murdered five brave activists for environmental sanity.
His electronic credentials had arrived the same day in a separate e-mail packet. They were necessary because, in violent disregard for decent, humane, and progressive United Nations policies going back more than a century and a half, the asteroid Ceres had been seized as private property (just as Pallas had been before it) and was being administered as such. As an environmentalist and someone who knew that all property is theft, that irked him deeply, but he was here to put a stop to it.
The upcoming gala, then, represented a rare opportunity to travel to Ceres, see what they were doing there, and possibly do something about it, without many questions being asked. He was now a bonafide stringer for Boston Magazine, practically the only openly socialist “dead tree” publication left in North America, and one of the Mass Movement’s staunchest editorial supporters—accompanied by his reservation for Ceres aboard the F.M.S.L. Beautiful Dreamer and a reasonably handsome letter of credit drawn on a Pallas bank. He was grateful he hadn’t had to pay f
or the ship passage himself. A double stateroom like this one was expensive enough, even with a roommate— which he could have afforded only if he’d killed him later—to share the cost. Some of the accommodations even had bunk beds to help spread the expense.
Once the deed had been done—whatever it turned out to be; that much had been left completely up to him, and he had just the method he’d been looking forward to trying—he’d been informed that getting away, off of Ceres, back to Pallas, and wherever after that, would be his own concern. He’d already made arrangements about that, of course, although he wasn’t absolutely certain how well those arrangements would hold, following the catastrophe he was planning for these damned cowboys.
He also had a backup plan.
And a plan to back that up.
Long-acquired habit made him want to take his personal computer from his jacket pocket, plug it into the inside of the suitcase, and submit the resulting combination to a battery of tests. Yet another ancient habit restrained him. He’d inspected this room thoroughly when he came aboard. There appeared to be no cameras or other spy devices trained on this little space. And if there had been, and the local passengers had discovered them, most likely they’d have spaced the crew and taken the ship back to Pallas to lynch the company’s other employees.
But you could never be too careful about things like that. The Fritz Marshall space lines—or the vile Curringer Corporation— might risk a hidden camera here and there to protect its ill-gotten property. They would certainly be doing a lot more things like that once he was through with them on Ceres. But meanwhile, you were dead a long time, and in prison, he knew from painful experience, even longer.
He closed the suitcase, patted it like an old familiar pet, and put it away where it belonged, in the closet. He put the clothes he hadn’t placed in the drawers on hangers and hung them up, partially concealing the suitcase.
Only then did he turn on the 3DTV, filling the lonely little cabin with color and sound. Onscreen, a gray cartoon cat chased a brown cartoon mouse in zero gravity. It was late, long past time to see about getting something to eat. An impossibly compact kitchenette adjoined the bath, but its cupboard and tiny refrigeration unit were empty.
He wondered what was available that he could bring back from the passenger lounge.
***
“My mother and father love each other,” Llyra said abruptly, her tone argumentative.
The statement struck Jasmeen as an awkward and uncomfortable one for two reasons. To begin with, they had been talking about something else altogether as they jogged along the three-hundred fourteen foot circumference of the Beautiful Dreamer’s centrifuge chamber at one-sixth of a standard Earth gravity—the gravity of Earth’s Moon—winding every foot of their way between the facility’s exercise machines. Jasmeen, whose native planet Mars had twice the gravity of Earth’s Moon, had been dismayed at how easily she’d become accustomed to far less. After only half an hour of light exercise, her calves and the backs of her thighs had begun to ache and threatened to knot up painfully.
Llyra stopped jogging and turned to face Jasmeen. Silence hung in the air between them. They could hear and feel the faint rumble of the centrifuge.
As a second generation Martian, the older girl was unused to naked declarations regarding one’s feelings. Her own people back home were so tight-lipped about their inner processes that the Earthers, mostly East Americans, had contemptuously declared the Red Planet “Marsboro Country”. For their part, the Martians had taken to heart what had been intended as an insult, and had gone far beyond merely glorying in it.
At the age of four, Jasmeen’s father had proudly taken her to the original seventh-colony landing site to see a fifty-foot sculpture of what purported to be an authentic West American cowboy, complete with faded jeans beneath sheepskin chaps, a brightly-colored plaid shirt, a huge clashing kerchief, and an outlandish hundred-gallon hat raised high above the cowboy’s head in one gloved hand. His other hand held a coil of rope supposedly made of braided horsehair. The Martians had added a low-slung cartridge-studded pistol belt, a big ivory-handled sixgun—something no Earthside advertising agency had ever had the stomach for—and a hand-rolled cigarette hanging from his lower lip, emitting real smoke.
For some reason, people said the cowboy’s name was Woody.
She and her people were stoics, having perfectly adapted themselves to harsh colonial conditions. Still, Jasmeen thought, it was her duty, as Llyra’s friend as well as her coach, to respond sympathetically, to try to understand her. The trouble was, in this particular context, she didn’t have the faintest idea how. Luckily, this time, Llyra made it unnecessary by going on.
“I know they love each other, Jasmeen,” she insisted. “I can see it on their faces—in their eyes—every time they’re back together again. My brother is there, too. We all have a big, fancy dinner, then they disappear together for twenty-four hours and when they reappear it’s like a party around our house for another day or two. But sooner or later, Mother starts yelling for some reason or another, it doesn’t seem to matter why, and Daddy stops saying anything at all. It always happens the same way. Sooner or later Mother locks herself in the bedroom, and Daddy goes back to Ceres.”
The younger girl sat sideways on the plastic-upholstered seat of one of the exercise devices, ignoring the machinery. Were those tears Jasmeen saw in Llyra’s eyes? That was another thing Martians simply didn’t do, and it was difficult to see it as anything but a sign of fatal weakness. A part of Jasmeen wanted to go to Llyra and hold her, comfort her.
The Martian part restrained her.
It was all true, though. Jasmeen had seen—and lived through— the cycle Llyra was describing several times over the years she’d worked for them. She’d never quite understood it, herself. Her own mother and father, Mohammed and Beliita, were very similar to Adam and Ardith in more than one respect: they were both professionals, both academics, both intellectuals, she supposed. And they surely must have had their differences. But they had never yelled at one another in her memory, and they had never spent a single night apart, since they’d been married, even at IASA’s Siberian training facility.
Someday, when she found the right someone or the right someone found her, Jasmeen was grimly determined—especially since she’d come to know the Ngus so well—that it was going to be like that with them. They would be two halves of a single life, two breaths of a single soul.
Otherwise, she thought, what was the point in falling in love and getting married?
Now, overcoming the Martian part, she sat as close as she could to Llyra, on a chromium-plated steel crossbar near the padded seat. (A sixth of a gee made that sort of thing a good deal more comfortable than it might otherwise have been, she noted incongruously.) Reaching carefully through the machinery, she put an arm across the girl’s shoulders.
“You cannot live another person’s life for them,” she told Llyra. “Not even those you love most. Is hard, but when you hurt for them, you must say to yourself, ‘Not my life, not my life, not my life, not my life, not my life’. Five times, just like that. Will make you feel better.”
“Is that a Chechen thing?” Llyra asked through the tears now streaking her cheeks.
“No, is thing I read in ladies’ magazine at dentist’s office.” They both laughed.
“But I can’t do that, Jasmeen, I just can’t say, ‘Not my life’ like that.”
Jasmeen shrugged. “I said is hard. I didn’t say is easy.”
But Llyra was continuing, more to herself than to Jasmeen. “It’s like … it’s … oh, I don’t know. Somehow it feels like it’s my fault, them not getting along. Somehow it feels like I caused it. I don’t know how.”
Jasmeen sighed. “I hate to tell you, little one, but is not always about you.”
Llyra cracked a smile. “Okay, maybe it’s because I feel there must be something I could do, but I haven’t done it because I don’t know what it is.”
Jasmeen said no
thing. She knew something important was coming. She left the bar and knelt beside her student, putting both arms around her.
“I am going to fix it, you know,” Llyra insisted. “I’m going to go from world to world, if I have to, and you’re going with me. From Pallas to Ceres, from Ceres to Earth’s Moon, from the Moon to Mars, skating on each and every world until it feels just like my own. And then I’m going to skate on Earth, in the biggest, most important ice rink there is, in the biggest, most important competition they have. And I’m going to win that competition, Jasmeen, so my mother and daddy will—”
She’d begun weeping again; her shoulders shook within Jasmeen’s comforting arms.
“So they’ll what, my little? Is magnificent plan, I agree. Is very dangerous plan. But what can even that do to make those two act like grownups?”
“Oh, I don’t know, Jasmeen!” Llyra cried. “They’ll just have to, don’t you see? They’ll just have to!” The girl’s shoulders slumped. She bent her head to her chest and sobbed for half an hour in her teacher’s arms.
CHAPTER TEN: TURNOVER
Whether a political or philosophical undertaking happens to be for good or for evil, it’s eventually done in, not by its mortal enemies, but by the “moderates” and “gradualists” within its own ranks. Ideologically speaking, swimming upstream, against the current, for any length of time, is morally exhausting. Most individuals simply aren’t up to it. Sooner or later, they begin to look for excuses to drop out of the struggle and head for quieter waters, comfortably going nowhere. The trouble is, in order to feel right about it, they need everybody else to do it, too. —The Diaries of Rosalie Frazier Ngu
They could tell immediately that the old gentleman was from East America, specifically from the state of Massachusetts, and almost certainly from the legendarily silly Amherst area, which had led the state (and, to their enormous disappointment, nobody, anywhere else in the System) in what the West American media had described as the “new Amishness”.