The Venus Belt
“Elderly?” Olongo looked insulted, then philosophical. “Well, perhaps not all of that medical apparatus was window dressing.” He blew a smoke ring. “It was a bloody rough ride! I spent several days convalescing while Koko had to hop, keeping you—”
“Fat, dumb, and happy?” I essayed.
“Company,” insisted the gorilla, “also running errands trying to find out what was happening here on Bester. The Federalists’ ‘solar flare’ didn’t make that an easy task.”
I looked my erstwhile assistant over. “You forgot to mention committing burglaries, Uncle Fagin!”
They both shriveled. First time I’d ever had that effect on a gorilla. I kind of liked it. “Er, uh...” offered Koko.
“Umm, ahum!” Olongo added for clarification.
“Forget it, you two ratfinks. I finally figured it out, too: the Russian assassin dropped the wrong medallion for bait in the cargo hold. I wasn’t supposed to get a brain-bore controller. In fact I wasn’t supposed to get anything but dead. But it screwed up the Hamiltonians’ plans; their hitlady had to proceed thereafter, however inefficiently, on preprogrammed skulduggery. That’s why my luggage got swiped—and it’s why Koko turned my stateroom upside-down. You wanted that medal for your own investigation!”
Olongo spread his hands. “We’d heard about the brain-bore, and—”
“I said forget it. I might’ve done the same, in your place—though I’d probably have confided in my friends. Did I hurt you much, incompetent apprentice?”
She grinned. Apparently her smartsuit had repaired her knife wound well enough. I dabbed the blood leaking from beneath my own makeshift bandage. “Why’d you take so long getting out here yourselves? And why the Marine Corps assault?”
Koko snorted. “We sent three teams—borrowed from various registry patrols—and they vanished. We figured whatever we did next should either be very cautious or highly dramatic.”
The President chuckled. “Koko argued for dramatic, naturally. There’s very little else to tell: I used a lot of precious time and money importing a small army, and here we are. I’m sorry they wound up attacking an empty base—and innocent parties—believe me I am.”
Clarissa finished the last of the casualties, came in, and started on me. “I’d believe you a lot more readily—”
“Ouch, honey! That hurts!”
“Didn’t mean to take it out on you, dear—a lot more readily if you’d mentioned, any time in the last half hour, what Aphrodite’s real purpose is out here.”
Lucy pivoted, fixing her optical surfaces on the big simian. He glanced at Koko, who shrugged, then back at us: “Clarissa, Win—and you, especially, Lucy. You know I’ve fought the Hamiltonians in Congress, in Uganda, Antarctica, Hawaii. Have a little faith in me on that account, if no other. When I can speak freely...But there are partners, shareholders, parties sworn to mutual secrecy. Fortunes could be lost with a single careless word.”
I stomped my cigar out. “Which means you’re not going to tell us.”
“That’s what he means,” observed Lucy disgustedly. “My Eddie missin’, folks gettin’ murdered all over th’ place—Olongo, we deserve better’n this.”
The gorilla smiled and shook his head. “Indeed you do. I’ll make it up to all of you, rely on it. In the meantime, I have personnel combing every cubic inch of this rock. They’ll find Ed if anybody can. He’s my friend, too, my dears, a brother-in-arms on more than one occasion.”
The door slid open and Gunnison Griswold ran in. “Chief! Check the Telecom—channel 47-D!” He tried to stop, but slid around the desk and nearly crashed against the wall. Olongo reached out an easy hand, righted him as if he were a plastic chessman, and projected the suggested channel on a wall screen.
“Sector Nine,” said a disembodied voice, “we have a bandit breaking off, reference B for Bakunin...”
“Meteor watch?” I asked. Olongo nodded, shushing me. The viewpoint of the ‘com surged outward, centering on a shiny dot, which puffed up into the outline of a flivver—a big one, more of a bus, really. “Malaise! The bastard’s getting away!”
Olongo stabbed buttons. “Try and disable that—”
Flash! The spacebus vanished, leaving emptiness behind and little purple dots dancing on our retinas. “That was a Broach!” I said, unnecessarily. “He’s on the other side now, probably heading for his fleet.” Which meant they hadn’t taken off yet.
“Olongo!” As quickly as I could, I summarized my conversation with the System’s Most Trusted Criminal. “You people have Broach equipment here, I saw it. Is there any way we can—” The gorilla pushed more buttons as we watched; a familiar cheerful voice answered. Olongo repeated what I’d told him, and, thirty seconds later, the office door slid aside again to admit an old friend.
Deejay Thorens.
“Hello, Win, Clarissa, and is that—Lucy! Olongo, I’m going to need another hour to calibrate before we can follow that flivver. Converting a stationary rig for mobile use...”
A small word about Deejay, who looks more out of place in a physics lab than I would in Haight-Ashbury. I’m told she’s one of the great theoretical minds of the age, with an added and unusual flair for the sort of applied tinkering American “pure” scientists frequently scorn. One look into those orchid-colored eyes and even Heisenberg would’ve known for sure.
I love my wife, but I’m not blind.
Deejay bent over Olongo’s desk, zipping facts and figures past a ‘com screen. Occasionally she’d stop to answer questions or issue orders to her crew, wherever they were hiding. I sat still, thinking furiously—or trying to—while Clarissa pulled little steel shotgun darts out of me. Reverse acupuncture.
“Ouch!” Plink! Good thing for me Olongo had brought his army from Earth; Gunny Griswold and his gang were sharp—”Ouch!” but here they were out of their element. Fléchettes need an atmosphere for their little stabilizing fins; in a hard vacuum, they’d tumbled randomly, which is why—”Ouch!”—I was still alive. Plink! Plink! Plink!
More or less.
One of the nasty little things had gone in fins-first backward!
“Ow!” A 230-ship fleet was parked out there invisibly, on the other side of reality. Were they piping Malaise aboard even now, for the long jump to the stars? “Ow!” That didn’t make much sense, for how could he be sure he wouldn’t materialize—”Ow!”— right inside one of his ships? Now that would be some explosion. “Ow!” Let’s see: the asteroid Bester probably existed on the other side as well, and—!
“Ouch! Goddammit, stop a minute, honey! Deejay, could you get a Broach cooking right here, and fast?” With the regiment of gunsels Olongo’d brought along, we might be able to cancel this Federalist excursion.
She turned to look at me, bewildered for a moment, then: “Of course! We have a battery of research machines. Come on down to the lab!” She was gone with a twinkle of smartsuit-covered ankles and a swirl of labcoattails. Clarissa smoothed a flap of suit material over my wound. Once again I gathered up my weapons and friends, following the physicist. Griswold glanced around at the bandaged, sleeping portion of his crew, then took up a disgruntled rear-guard.
Minutes later, with hardly a chance to admire Deejay’s shiny new laboratory, I stepped carefully between the pole-pieces of a freshly opened Broach, back into my home universe. Bester was here, too, all right, but the Hamiltonians’ ideas on architecture were markedly—and typically—different. I was in the middle of a wide, corrugated, barnlike structure, cruelly illuminated, divided, like a National Guard armory on 4-H day, into countless pens and cages, uninhabited, and unspeakably filthy. One whiff and I suddenly knew exactly what an eighteenth-century slaveship must have smelled like. The captives in their thousands were gone, but they’d left behind an almost tangible aura of the misery the Federalists and their allies had imposed on them.
And would continue to, unless we stopped it, now.
Somebody needed killing. I hoped I’d get the chance to do it.
&
nbsp; I turned and watched my friends step through a ghostly circle floating in midair. Deejay came last, pressing a hand-held control. The Broach shrank to an almost invisible dot, but didn’t quite vanish. Important, if we were going to get back home again.
We spread out through this harshly lit gallery of horror, grateful that our suits carried their own supply of fresh air. Everywhere I turned, a maze of excrement- and blood-encrusted bars confronted me, moldering remnants of food that was probably poor to begin with, skittering furry little things, and here and there the graying bones of a few potential breeding slaves who hadn’t survived.
Maybe they were the lucky ones.
Atop one skull, like a giant plastic leech, the casing of a brain-bore glittered obscenely. I finally reached the end of the enclosure where a door led to a series of corridors. I stepped inside and—
—found myself looking straight and stupid into the muzzle of the biggest little pocket pistol I’ve ever seen. Sixty caliber, and behind it stood a highly familiar-looking figure.
“Ed!”
He grinned—my grin—and let his gun arm drop wearily. “Brother, it’s good to see your homely face again. Thought I was stranded out here forever. Where’s Lucy?”
“I,er...”
“Eddie!” Lucy wheeled through the door, nearly bowling me over. Clarissa joined us and I put my arm around her, turning so that Ed and Lucy could have some privacy. They were going to need it.
Olongo puffed into our ken, and if gorillas can look pale, that’s what I was seeing now. “I can’t believe it! There must have been thousands—”
“Tens of thousands,” Ed said grimly. Koko stumbled toward us, sobbing openly.
I felt my stomach turn over. “A quarter of a million was the figure Malaise mentioned. Ed, what are you doing running around loose?” I was beginning to experience an odd, calm, detached feeling about all this; I knew I’d pay for it later, in dreams that would haunt my nights for months.
“I’ve been free for days, hiding in broom closets, pantries, latrines—in a place this size, and with a smartsuit—besides, the prisoners were controlled, they thought. No need for guards.” He paused. “Where they went, well, come with me. You won’t believe it if I just tell you.”
A long, complicated tour found us in a smaller room, circular, with an enormous, generatorlike contraption in the center. Deejay inspected it carefully; the rest of us hardly noticed: outside, through wall-size windows, was the second-most impressive sight I’d ever seen. (The first? Clarissa coming through the ruined door of my cell.) A few miles away hung the Hamiltonian fleet, 230 metallic globes, each perhaps a quarter of a mile across. In countless minuscule rows, their portholes were alight. A hundred thousand flivvers stood away in silent, empty profusion, the last and nearest in line, Malaise’s network bus.
They were buttoning up for a giant leap.
“Reference!” At Deejay’s sudden shout, I gave a giant leap myself, and peeled Koko off the low ceiling. “They’ve cracked the navigation problem!”
“What?” I turned to watch her running hands over the infernal machine. Ablaze with twinkling lamps amidst a myriad knobs and buttons, it was shaped a bit like Lucy in her present incarnation, only four or five times bigger. It rested on the floor below us and protruded up into the room through a railed, circular opening.
“Look,” lectured our friendly neighborhood physicist, “the problem with traversing the Little Bang universe is that all its spatiotemporal points are geometrically common, so there’s no way to tell them apart, right?”
“That’s what they told me on Ceres,” I answered, “Which is why they gave up on the—”
“Well, this machine is the Hamiltonians’ navigational reference point. It generates a beacon of Broach noise so raw and loud that it can be used as a sort of compass, even in an alternate universe. This is how they’ll—”
“There they go!” Ed exclaimed. I could see it too, a faint bluish aura enveloping each starship as it warmed up, answered by a sort of coruscating, crawling surface-discharge from the machine in the center of the—
Kabo! Blam! DitDitDitDitDit! I guess everybody got the same idea at once. When the smoke cleared and I’d reholstered my Webley, I noticed Clarissa tucking away her little .11 caliber. Ed blinked and gave up jerking the trigger of his freshly emptied derringer. Even Deejay was standing with a slowly cooling laser in her hand. Olongo and Koko saluted each other with the muzzles of their guns over the wreckage of the Hamiltonian device, and Lucy’s Darling quick-shooter was folding back out of sight like the bellows on an old-timey Polaroid.
Griswold blew smoke through the barrel of his .476, let the slide down on a fresh magazine, and slammed the weapon back into its scabbard. Even he had been too slow; outside, like a flock of flashbulbs going off, the Federalist fleet winked out of existence.
Koko looked confused. “Did they blow up, too?”
“No,” answered Deejay, “they’ve gone to the stars, just as they planned. Only—well, none of them will wind up where they intended. Each ship will have to jump blindly, again and again, until it finds a habitable planet to settle. They’re scattered randomly across dozens of parsecs—and thousands of years—with no way to come home, ever again.”
“Good heavens!” shuddered Olongo.
“Good riddance!” snorted Lucy.
20: Will Ye All Be Kings and Captains?
Doomsday, 224 A.L.
D. Nolan Fraser got elected President last week. In the Confederacy, it’s “None of the Above” for the second time this century. Information specialists at the Emperor Norton University have finally deciphered those mysterious signals from the stars—with a little help from Deejay and her paratronics crew. It didn’t come as much of a surprise to hear Voltaire Malaise, deBroached and unscrambled at last, whimpering across the light-years for help! Any kind of help! The Confederacy—or anyone else, please?
Unfortunately, it’s stale news. He’s centuries dead by now. Radio’s notoriously slow at interstellar distances. There are scientist-entrepreneurs in the System groping toward a more reliable star drive, based on some entirely different principles, but old Voltaire’ll be centuries dead again by the time anybody gets to him and his makeshift, randomly established colony of would-be sultans.
At least he’d really had a chance to be the Voice of the Stars; you can still hear him on a quiet winter night. He hadn’t much chance at being anything else, especially an immortal god to helpless slaves and worshippers. Ed had seen to that; busiest little monkey-wrencher since FDR conned the Nipponese into ending a Depression the hard way.
Must’ve gotten pretty crowded out on Bester toward the end—that other Bester in the section of the cosmos where I used to hang my hat. Where the Federalists had built their ill-starred fleet. So full of brain-bored harem-candidates they’d had to put the overflow—like Lucy and me—in Aphrodite country, this side of the Broach.
In all that moving-day confusion, Ed had sprung himself, thanks to a trick he’d learned from me: a second, hidden gun. One night when they were feeding the First Class jailbirds, he blew away a pair of attendants and lit out for the nooks and crannies. They were suffering a manpower shortage at the time—one of his keepers was a former French-Canadian Prime Minister—and the electronic zombies weren’t doing any talking, so it was relatively easy for Ed to hit and run and hit again from hiding. Good thing he’d moved when he did: his final meal killed the four-legged rats who’d gotten to it. Swell bunch of guys, the Hamiltonians.
Ed didn’t waste the time he’d bought himself. Scraps of goonish conversation were enough to piece together what was just about to happen. I’m proud I taught the boy to hit below the belt: one by one he searched out every cache of geriatric goodies waiting to be loaded; one by one he substituted sugar, corn syrup, inert electronics—anything that looked right—for the real thing, which he smashed and flushed down the plumb-ing. At the time it must have seemed a small revenge, but it was something.
Ditto fo
r another item of adroit sabotage: brain-bores operate on guccione cells, just like Confederate flashlights and flivvers. Ordinarily, they last a long, long time. But all good things come to an end (or at least require recharging), and when the original power units begin to fail, the Hamiltonians will discover (have discovered—it’s a crazy universe) that what they’d thought were crates of new cells are actually my former partner’s last-minute rock collection. Plus emptyings from his smartsuit.
I like Ed, he reminds me of me.
Give ‘em two years at the outside. The tiny minority of male “gods” are going to wind up with an extremely large, angry female lynch mob on their hands. Ed couldn’t keep a quarter-million innocents from being shanghaied, not all by himself—but he’d given them the chance to seize control of their own lives again. And on an even basis with their kidnappers. That’s better than nothing—and a hell of a lot better than what Malaise and his gang had planned.
Which makes me wonder what’s transpired in the centuries since Voltaire discovered the mess he and his accomplices were in. What kinds of civilizations are growing up among the two hundred thirty random stars where the lost fleet has come to its scattered rest? Deejay tells me some of them may have flickered back in time as much as five or six thousand years. Others, having accidentally blinked into the future, won’t be arriving yet for an equal length of time.
Weird.
If they’d all been Confederates, there wouldn’t be much doubt about the kind of prosperous, aggressively progressive anarchistic societies they’ll have created by now. But the women are mostly from the United States and other countries in my homeworld, as are the bulk of bureaucrats and dictators who dreamed of owning worlds.
The few individuals from this side of reality—the Hamiltonians—are philosophical throwbacks.
Five thousand years. That’s a lot of time for the successive rise and fall of one perverted, totalitarian culture after another. Most of them will lose their grip—gradually, or all at once—on the very technology that took them to the stars. Maybe more than one world is a radioactive ruin already, while others struggle through a new Stone Age.