We’ll go out someday and take a look.
But we need a better way of getting there, and in the meantime, we have other fish to fry. Deejay’s been filling our heads with lots of other weird and wonderful notions since Olongo finally invited us out to see for ourselves what Aphrodite, Ltd. was really all about. This necessitated another spaceship ride, aboard the less-luxurious (but roomier, owing to the highly select passenger list) Indomitable Spirit.
“Now you’re sure you have everything, dearest?” Last time we’d visited her folks in Antarctica, she’d forgotten diapers. It had been a long, long plane ride, subjectively, until we found a drugstore in Marie Byrd Land.
“You’re never going to let me live that down, are you?” She smiled sickly sweet, shut the suitcase, and turned to watch Lucille, who was doing her damnedest to eat the bedspread, little chenille balls and all.
“Forget it, honey. Vacations always seem like work to me, especially with our little friend here.” I took my lovely wife in my arms and squeezed her, suddenly regretting that we were leaving so soon. “This is certainly going to be a hell of a trip for her—something to tell her grandchildren.” I released Clarissa, lit a cigar, then turned up the bedroom ventilators to protect Lucille’s tiny, brand-new lungs—hardly out of warranty yet, seemed like a shame to spoil them.
Lucille kicked her naked little legs and giggled, drooling idiotically. The doorbell asked if we were expecting visitors, so I went downstairs to answer it. There was Ed, a rented Studebaker piled with baggage thrumming in the driveway behind him. And waiting in it—
“Lucy! Does this mean we don’t have to visit you in the hospital any more? I was getting pretty tired of the smell of disinfectant.”
“Now he tells me!” A slender, not quite pretty, dark-haired girl dismounted from the driver’s seat, smoothed her skirt down over boot-tops, and ran up the rubber-covered drive. She grabbed me crushingly around the neck and kissed me on both cheeks. “So much fer th’ formalities, Winnie—don’t stand there with yer choppers hangin’ out, I wanna see m’namesake!” She bolted through the door and upstairs to the bedroom.
I ran my tongue self-consciously over the cloned incisors Clarissa had implanted several months ago, imagining with a shudder what life would be like for “aged cripples” like Lucy and me or a billion others in the kind of paradise Malaise had wanted. Like the man said, nasty, brutish, and short.
Ed grinned, combed a hand through his hair and massaged the side of his nose, a gesture I recognized eerily as my own. “You realize how pleased she was you named your only-begotten after her?”
“How could it be otherwise? Lucy is Honorary Grandma, after all.”
“Which makes me Lucille’s accidental uncle and honorary grandfather at the same time. Sounds like incest. Well, Lucy may not look it any more, but at least she’s got enough seniority for the job. I’m only sixty—I sure don’t feel like a grandpa.”
“Let’s see...she’s now about twice your age. By the time you’re 160, she’ll only be 250—you’re gaining on her, slow but steady.”
He laughed. “First thing she does with her brand-new body is take me surfing in the Davis Strait Mitigation Zone—she broke seventeen bones. Good thing she isn’t any younger, I can’t keep up with her now!” We followed at a more sedate velocity to the second floor, where Clarissa had apparently finished packing.
“Well, sweetheart, about ready for another interplanetary voyage?”
“As long as we go together this time.” She looked down at our daughter and frowned. “And as soon as you’ve changed her—again. It was you who insisted that we pack all the diapers, wasn’t it?”
***
Let me warn you here and now that freefall sex is highly overrated. And extremely messy. If you time things wrong, you can even wind up on opposite sides of the room, just at the supreme moment.
Luckily, we spent most of the next thirty days at constant boost, where things like wives—and dirty diapers—stay more or less where you put them. Our voyage ended at a set of plastic handstraps hanging in the polarized windows of an orbiting junkyard where Indomitable Spirit had dropped us off—before fleeing prudently Outward once again.
I couldn’t decide whether it was harder getting used to Lucy as a healthy young woman again, or seeing my baby daughter wearing her very first smartsuit. At least it solved the changing problem, as I said, no small consideration in zero gravity. Until she was old enough to handle them intelligently for herself, her suit controls would be located in the middle of her back. In the meantime, I was trying to figure whether there was a market for computerized rubber didies back on Earth.
And wondering if anybody’s thought of making smartsuits for cats.
It was almost as difficult accommodating to the scenery outside those windows. If anyone had ever told a certain overworked and tired Denver cop, a decade and a half ago, that someday he was going to see a sight like this, I’d have laughed myself straight into a coronary.
Now, here it was, a fuzzy ball of cotton, far too brilliant to bear looking at without dampering the windows. Through the deeply darkened plastic, the world below us seemed to occupy a starless void. The sun was on the other side of the station, and there’d never been a moon here. Until recently. I heard a door whoosh open behind me and swiveled on my handstrap just in time to catch Ooloorie entering the observation deck, followed closely by her partner.
“Well, my finely furred landlings,” said the porpoise, bobbing four feet off the grating, fluttering a suit-covered tail now and again to maintain that position, “how do you like my planet out there?” Her ventral impellers whispered briefly; she drifted to the windows, reaching out a suit-mounted manipulator to stop herself on a handstrap.
Deejay grinned. “Twenty-nine months in orbit, now she thinks she owns it!”
“Indeed, insubordinate calf, a full 51/4 percent, blue-chip, iron-bound, and potentially quite lucrative. The same as your share, my dear.”
The human physicist grinned again, at me this time. “I understand Olongo passed a little profit your way, too.”
“A tenth percent for each of us, provided this ridiculous scheme comes off on schedule.” I still didn’t know what we were being rewarded for. My own blunderings hadn’t accomplished that much. Evil has a habit, generally, of destroying itself—though it never hurts to help it along a little. “Personally, I’m not sure this neighborhood’s healthy, are you?” Even half a million miles away, the planet looked too big and deadly. Like a time bomb.
“Cowardice, from my Supreme Guru in Chief?” Koko ricocheted into the room behind her uncle, a jaunty yachting cap perched on her head.
“Simple caution, O Formerly Fired Flunky, that’s a dangerous toy down there.”
“Not near as dangerous,” Lucy observed, “as th’ toy that’s on its way. Sure wish you’d filled us in sooner, O Prime Pongid—(Shucks, now they got me doin’ it!)—I’d like to’ve checked yer ‘rithmetic.”
The ex-President thrust a stubby finger toward the physicists. “Their arithmetic, er...O Former Funnel. That’s why Ooloorie was stationed here so long, to make sure we had every motion, force, and vector nailed down. Consequently, in approximately...twenty-three minutes, we’ll each be several billion ounces richer—a cheerful prospect, and one, I trow, that merits a libation. Koko?”
“Not my department, Uncle Has-been, I’m a spitsole, now!”
“That’s ‘gumshoe’” Koko, and I’ll get the champagne, okay?”
“You’re the boss, Boss.” Puzzled, she inspected the bottoms of her feet.
“Also the waiter, it appears. Drinks for everyone?” Enthusiastic nods, even from the cetacean delegate. That should be interesting to watch. Lucille burbled and started nodding, too.
“Gets her alcoholic tendencies from her daddy,” Clarissa contributed. I stuck my tongue out, and started nursing gigglewater from a wall-tap. Other crewfolk joined us and the observation lounge began to fill as champagne baggies were quickly emptied
and replenished.
Five minutes to Zero.
Acceleration warnings sounded as the station began backing gently away from the planet. Windows became floors, tickling my acrophobia a little, but I couldn’t help staring down between my feet anyway.
Suddenly, the solitary globe below was joined by an intruder, rocketing from nowhere—though all of us knew where it had started, months ago. Now, at a carefully calculated fraction of lightspeed, the asteroid Bester, driven by ravening, matter-annihilating giant Broaches on its “stern,” was rapidly closing on Venus.
Venus: a world satisfactorily as close to hell as places ever get. The most inhospitable, desolate, useless, impossible planet in the System.
Venus: mass approximating Earth’s, probably quite close to that of whatever primordial body became the Asteroid Belt (or never quite became a planet), the same potential goldmine, a hundred times as rich.
Bester swelled with proximity, uninhabited now except for mechanisms maintaining its course, the glaring, pulsing drives still consuming mass as they had nearly half-devoured the asteroid already. With majestic, inexorable grace, it plunged into the planet. Even through the clouds, we watched the crust bulge upward, spewing magma, erupting outward at velocity sufficient to spread the worthless planet’s fragments out along its orbit, slowly cooling, hardening. A second Asteroid Belt, one that wouldn’t spend its wealth profligately gouging-raters from the moons and surfaces of other planets, or fling it wastefully toward the stars.
Out there, somewhere, a thousand souped-up, toughened little fighting flivvers—Olongo’s “debris patrol,” an accidental parting gift from the Hamiltonians—were making sure nobody else’s territory got splashed. Otherwise, the lawsuits would eat up any profit this venture might show for the next couple of millennia. Koko had wanted to fly with the squadron—until Lucy pointed out that “ace” can be spelled and pronounced a couple of different ways.
“Listen, you guys,” I broke the utter silence aboard the outbound station. “I didn’t want to ask before, but—well, won’t this slop the whole gravitic balance of the Solar System out of kilter or something?”
“Oh, that,” muttered Lucy. “You want us to file EPA forms in triplicate? Only folks who’re interested in that kinda ritual are gone now with Malaise!”
“But you’ve got to admit,” I persisted, “it was one hell of an environmental impact!” Outside, Venus swelled into a cloud of glowing debris, a trillion tons of popcorn going off inside a nuclear explosion. Or, I remembered suddenly, like those high-speed photos Remington used to publish, of a high-velocity bullet hitting an orange. Splat.
And three-tenths of one percent of it (Olongo had insisted on a belated birthday present for Lucille) belonged to my family. Well, let the authoritarians have the stars a little while. Both systems were well rid of them; the progress of liberty back home would accelerate a thousandfold—a millionfold—without them in the way, breathing down everybody’s necks. Meantime, we’d have the Belts, half a million little worlds, to Malaise’s two hundred and thirty.
Lucy contemplated the Wagnerian scene below—or maybe “Kryptonian” is a better adjective. “Tell y’ what, Winnie. Haul th’ family out to th’ Old Belt agin while things’re coolin’ off down here. Planets’re obsolete. Shucks, we might’s well leave the Earth— it’s a water world, after all—to th’ porpoises!”
“Oh, no you don’t.” Ooloorie chuckled. “You seem to forget this whole thing began with cetaceans reaching for the stars. We’re built to live in freefall; you’re not going to stick us with a worn-out second-hand planet!”
I squished a little champagne out of my baggie, swirled it around in my mouth, and swallowed. “You still haven’t answered my question: aren’t we screwing up the Solar System?”
She turned to look at me. “Well, if it’ll make y’feel better, sonny, Mr. Tormount over there’s finally taken me on as an engineer. Next year, just t’ balance things out, we’re gonna blow up Neptune!”
Neptune? Well, raise the ante, then: a million little worlds, give or take, one for each and every man, woman, child—of whatever species—who wants one. I wondered how I’d like it, being sovereign of my own tiny planet.
The preservationists back home—what few hadn’t gone with Malaise—wouldn’t like it much. Once they found out: funny to think that stepping through a Broach out here would “bring” a solid, useless planet back into existence. But hell, all life has environmental impact, just by virtue of its being. Intelligence manipulates its environment, purposefully, instead of the other way around. The Ehrlichs, Commoners, Naders, and Gores to the contrary, to do less is to resign from being sentient. To denounce it is to renounce intelligence.
Which, I suspect, was their point all along. To hell with them; let the bastards freeze in the dark.
My daughter wanted down to see the pretty fireworks. Clarissa set her gently on the transparent floor. She reached out, trying to hold the glittering fragments in her hand.
She wouldn’t know it for a few years yet, but they were hers already.
*********
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Table of Contents
1: Espionage Confederate Style
2: Voices from the Stars
3: Gorilla My Dreams
4: Breakheart Hotel
5: The Blues My Naughty Sweetie Gives to Me
6: The Mind in the Pyramid
7: Take a Trog to Lunch
8: The Brain-Bore
9: One Born Every Minute
10: Swim the Friendly Skies
11: A Friend in Need
12: That’s the Way It Looks
13: Basalt of the Earth
14: Soup of the Morning, Poisonous Soup
15: Cut of a Thousand Deaths
16: Firing-Squad Morning
17: Durance Vile
18: Semper Fidelio
19: The Sheep from the Goats
20: Will Ye All Be Kings and Captains?
L. Neil Smith, The Venus Belt
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