The Venus Belt

by L. Neil Smith

  My first medical adventure in the Confederacy had been different. After Clarissa had stapled me back together, I’d recovered in bed, at home. Probably cut my healing time in half.

  Now, I headed for the shower, not especially looking forward to the task. A mere tenth of a gee makes personal hygiene a messy, claustrophobic ordeal. Along the way to the bathroom, it gradually dawned on me that I didn’t really need a wash that badly. Strange, when I’d been cooped up in a rubber coverall since morning. Sure enough, on consultation with the owner’s program in my suit, I discovered that, in the asteroids, shower stalls will soon be relegated to museums.

  Except in hotels for flatlanders.

  Guess I wasn’t much more scandalized than those first Elizabethans when their vergin’ Queen installed a bathtub and started using it regularly, twice a year, whether she needed it or not. This smartsuit business would sure save time; maybe I could teach it shaving too. I wondered whether I could start a fashion trend back home, all by myself.

  There’s a lot to be admired about small-town convenience and honest courtesy. Suited up again, I stepped out in the sunshine to familiar grass-upholstered streets. A hovercabbie saved me half a tenth-bit by volunteering that Nivenville Emergency was within a minute’s walking distance, the small foamed-metal building right between the General Store and barbershop.

  Asteroiders must be a healthy crowd; the paramedic behind the counter was asleep. I cleared my throat. He jumped, reflexively extending a hand to keep his brains off the ceiling. “Well, well! Two customers today. Don’t look sick t’me, Mac. What can I do y’for?” He retrieved a ‘com pad from the floor where it had fallen, a crossword puzzle showing on the screen.

  “I’m here about your other customer, the one who collapsed in the hotel?” I glanced around at what looked more like a rustic veterinarian’s office: a couple of examination cubicles, a surgery, maybe three or four other rooms. The shingle on the door had read “G.A. Scott, H.D.”

  The paramedic’s smartsuit was rigged out in a traveling salesman’s horse-blanket plaid. He hooked a casual thumb over his shoulder. “Second cubby on the right,” and sat again, pulling a light-stylus from his pocket to resume Man’s ageless struggle against 37 down.

  Second on the right was an office. His suit display an unadorned surgical green, a Confederate medical circled cross on his shoulder, the Healer hunched over his desk, three different ‘com pads displaying textbook data.

  “Excuse me, I’m Win Bear.”

  “Doesn’t sound like too serious an offense. You’re here about the brain-bore case.” Scott, a big, tough-mannered, grizzle-bearded man, his forearms almost blackened by the sun, might have seemed more at home running a jackhammer on a demolition gang—or possibly on horseback, punching giant arctic hares. “Just checking with my reference books. Bet you didn’t know we do this before looking at a patient—sort of like cheating on an exam.”

  I grinned. “I’m married to a Healer; she swore me to undying secrecy. Find out anything interesting?”

  “What did you expect? Some bacillus-brain’s perverted a basically decent technology, useful in controlling domestic animals or giving porpoises and temporary amputees mobility. I’d heard rumors, but...” He slammed his palms on the desk, pushing himself erect. “Come across the hall and see for yourself.”

  The room was taken up by an oversize iron lung. Through the plastic observation port a young woman wearing coveralls was visible, a small area on the left side of her skull shaven clean for attachment of a familiarly sinister nanoelectronic device. Scott fussed with the machinery, adjusting dials microscopically with an air of weary concern.

  “Stasis, isn’t it?” I asked. “She looks just like the other one.”

  He swiveled to face me, his already angry manner hardening further. “What other one?”

  I explained about the girl aboard the Bonaventura, discovering in the process that I was telling him a lot more about my own affairs than I’d intended. Some Healers have that effect. “So I suggest you talk to Dr. Pololo. Not only does he feel the same way you do about this, but he’s probably going quietly nuts with his ship grounded.”

  He snatched a ‘com pad from the wall, punching numbers. Over his shoulder I saw a chimpanzee answer—at Gunter’s Landing, the star-filled sky icy black through the broad windows behind her. “Sarah, where do I find Bonaventura’s sawbones when he’s not busy committing malpractice?”

  She laughed. “Most of the crews out here are still aboard, trying not to overload our transient facilities. This weather’s causing all kinds of snarl.” She held a thick sheaf of hard copies to the pickup, then threw them back on the desk. “Know anyone who wants forty tons of slightly overripe bamboo shoots?”

  “Excuse me,” I began, then braced myself for another wisecrack from Scott, “but isn’t it dangerous for you people out there in the crater? After all, a solar flare—”

  “One of your less-successful operations, Doc, or just a gruboon? Listen, pal, the walls around the Landing are a lot better protection than any plastic atmospheric envelope. Now, how about both of you going away. I’m swamped.”

  As she switched off, the paramedic dashed in, crossword puzzle dangling from his fingers. “It’s an epidemic! Another clown out here wants to see you, Doc. Can you stand the grueling pace, or should I break out the uppers?”

  “Show him in, and show yourself out. And Dave, try to keep your knitting out of sight.” He indicated the puzzle on the pad screen. “We might as well attempt to maintain appearances.”

  “Anything you say, Chief.” He glanced down at the puzzle. “What’s a seven-letter word for ‘uncouth barbarian’?”

  “Y-E-R-S-E-L-F,” supplied the Healer.

  “Wise-ass,” the paramedic muttered disrespectfully. “Hey—that’s it! Or does a hyphen count as an extra letter?”

  “If you dash out of here, right now, I won’t tell on you. Git!”

  A moment later the rubbery slap of smartsuit feet in the hall outside announced the arrival of a familiar furry form. “Win Bear. We’ve got to stop meeting like this.”

  “Francis, I’ve had enough humor just now to—to keep me in stitches for a week. We were just trying to call you.”

  “Oh? Well, a Tursiops at Le Petit Prince beat you to it.” The gorilla paused, removed his wire-rims, and polished them. “Dr. Scott, I understand you’ve got another brain-bore victim. The last one didn’t survive Win’s amateur surgery.”

  “So I’m told.” He pointed to the stasis-tank. “I’m not sure this one’s much better off. Suspended this way, I can’t operate on her, and the instant I shut the field down, we’ll start losing her again.”

  Francis peered into the chamber over the tops of his glasses. “Young, female, human—exactly like the other. Right-handed, judging from the placement of the bore.” He reached into a pocket and extracted his little tin of cigarillos. I accepted, Scott refused with a professionally disapproving scowl. “I’ve had a chance to learn a little from the necropsy. This is an extremely sophisticated device we’re up against, an electronic parasite, really.”

  “Why do you say that?” I applied my Bic to both cigars.

  “Because, said the gorilla, “it’s more than just a simple implant. It grows.”

  “What?” Scott gasped. I wasn’t far behind him.

  “That’s right, not unlike the way in which a damaged smartsuit heals itself. But this thing leaches iron, trace copper, I don’t know what else, right out of the blood, always extending its hold. I found at least a hundred areas of the brain it had connected itself to. Makes me ill to think about it. Did you get pics on this one?”

  Scott leaned against the stasis-tank, shaking his head. Beneath his protective grouchiness was a little less professional detachment than I’d guessed. “She was sinking too fast. Those warped, perverted—”

  “You can’t shoot x-rays, or whatever, inside the tank, right?”

  He gave me that look physicians cultivate for mere layper
sons venturing medical opinions. “Without stasis, we’ve got perhaps five minutes. Any suggestions”—he glared at me again—”from qualified observers?”

  Francis answered: “I don’t even know what’s killing this one, although that blasted thing in there could do it a dozen different ways. What are the indications?”

  “Generally depressed everything—respiration, pulse, EEG, endocrine, lymphatic, even bone marrow, for Albert’s sake. It’s like—”

  “Like she was being shut off” I barged in. “And don’t give me that ‘qualified observer’ crap. I worked twenty-seven years in a related specialty—homicide.”

  “All right, all right.” Scott looked at me with dawning respect, while Francis chuckled, rummaging around for an ashtray. “Any suggestions—from anybody?”

  I thought about it. “As long as she’s in stasis, she’s okay, if you want to call that living. Try and help her, she dies, because that thing is ordering her to. It’s not the patient you guys should be working on, but that goddamned hunk of nanocircuitry.”

  Scott snorted. “That’s a complicated, deadly little toy. You can’t just—”

  “Who’s opinionating outside his professional competence now?” Francis stepped into the office across the hall and stubbed his cigar out in Scott’s wastebasket. “I agree with Win. We need a specialist.”

  “I know a cybernetic engineer,” I volunteered, “although she never planned on ending up that way. If we spent one of this girl’s last five minutes scanning the device that’s killing her, then couldn’t you put her back on hold until we figured out how to exorcise it?”

  “Your patient, Healer,” Francis said.

  “No, I’m not,” retorted Scott, “but this child here doesn’t have much hope, no matter what we do.”

  ***

  Lucy wasn’t difficult to find. The Admiral Heinlein Arms informed me that she’d one-upped me in the pocket-pager department—didn’t even need pockets. Three words and she was on her way, my apprentice sulkily in tow. Fifteen minutes later, there was a real crowd around the stasis-tank, the Healers focusing at least half their perplexed attention on Lucy’s fascinating condition.

  “We’re ahead on one count,” she observed. “They made the case transparent. All I need’s a little elbow room—I got talents them fellers Gray an’ Bell an’ Edison never even dreamed about.”

  “Not to mention Don Ameche.”

  “Shut up, Winnie.” She shooed us all into the corridor. Neither Scott nor his assistant appeared too happy being pushed around on their own turf. We piled up in the doorway, elbows in each other’s ribs, while Lucy scooted up as close to the tank as her conical bulk allowed. Her “arms” began to telescope until her manipulators rested on the floor. Then, as her torso lifted, she tilted against the observation window, hung there a few moments, then lowered herself to the floor again.

  “Okay, ever-body, take a gander.” Like my brand-new smartsuit, Lucy’s hide had been a plain, undecorated silver-gray. Now it began to lighten, showing some color. I recognized the image of the brain-bore in its plastic shell, magnified thirty or forty diameters. It looked like a transistor radio with its back open.

  “See anything looks familiar?” She pointed out a central processor, surrounded by a dozen other chips.

  The capacity of this thing must have been enormous. “This here’s a Lonestar Instruments 4311-C. An’ here’s a paira Nanodata 6517s. Tells me plenty, right there.”

  Francis thrust his way into the tiny room, dug deep in a pocket and held an object, dangling from its loose wires, under Lucy’s figurative nose. “For whatever it’s worth, here’s the bore I removed aboard the Bonaventura.”

  “Well, call me a tie-dyed quark. Circuitry looks about th’ same. But then agin, this other one here’s still runnin’. That’n of yours is deader’n a democrat.” The image on her exterior changed, becoming far more schematic. “Hey, Scotty, gimme fifteen seconds with th’ stasis-power off. That oughta be enough t’trace th’ logic.”

  Scott squeezed into the room. “You’re sure that’s sufficient? I don’t want to have to do this twice. And, Mrs. Kropotkin, don’t call me Scotty.”

  “Don’t call me Mrs. Kropotkin! I’m Lucy—even if I do look like an Apollo capsule. Fifteen seconds oughta be fine—a lot of me runs in nanoseconds these days, an’ the rest’ll hafta catch it on th’ instant replay.”

  Scott stood by the end of the tank and flipped the safety cover off a switch while Lucy cranked herself back into position. “Now!” Nothing spectacular happened; I don’t know what I’d been expecting: weird purple rays, maybe theramin music; the Healer flipped the toggle off again and locked the cover down.

  “Okay,” said Lucy, “stray neutrinos, mag-fields, various other secondaries, comin’ up!” A new, indecipherable overlay began taking shape on her illustrated surface, parts of it in colors I don’t think I’d ever seen before. One by one, Lucy traced the whorls, isolating elements of the brain-bore’s function. “Got it! A minute or two t’dicker with th’ thing, an’ it’ll shut itself down, steada that little girl in there. Anybody got a drink?”

  Dave gave Lucy a skeptical look, then glanced at Scott, who nodded. A half-gallon baggie materialized from a file drawer, along with a small stack of metal cups. “The chief has me file it under L,” said the paramedic, “because it—”

  “Stands for Liquor?” Koko guessed.

  “Or Old Lysander?” ventured Lucy, referring to her favorite brand.

  “Or rots your liver?” offered Francis.

  “No, because Dave loves it so much” the Healer explained. “It takes his mind off crossword puzzles. Tell me, Lucy, how do you intend to drink it?”

  “A good question,” I agreed. “I thought you relied on datachips to satisfy your vices.”

  Lucy emitted an electronic harumph. “You boys’d better mind yer manners. An’ get me an eyedropper, Dave. I ain’t equipped t’handle cups.” She accepted a careful drop or two, then modestly turned her back. “Guess I’m a cheap date now. Ah! Right in th’ old nutrient solution!” She turned around to face us once again. “Say, what’s th’ matter, ain’t anybody else drinkin’?”

  ***

  I never did understand the brain-bore’s circuitry, just that it could be reprogrammed in a relatively short time once Lucy started “talking” to it. The real break was a radio link through which the victim presumably received occasional new instructions.

  “Hold on a minute.” I grabbed Lucy’s arm as she and Scott and Francis headed back for the stasis-tank. “Doesn’t that imply that whoever tried to kill me through a conditioned assassin might have been aboard the Bonaventura in person? I mean, after the first attempt failed...”

  “Dunno, Winnie,” answered Lucy. “Lemme think on that a bit. I ain’t convinced it was the same party tried t’get you all three times.”

  That was a wrinkle I hadn’t considered.

  “Of course it was,” said Koko. “Who else could it have been?”

  Francis looked up at her a moment, then dismissed the argument and shifted his attention back to the patient in the tank.

  Scott’s proprietary manner had returned. “She’ll be weak, you understand. If we can shut the bore off, she’s going straight back into stasis until I get a recovery system set up. This is going to be one sick little girl for a while.”

  Lucy stood before the tank and Scott beside the switch as Francis and Dave prepared to lift the lid. The word was given, the toggle thrown, and, as the mechanical coffin opened, a flood of signals began passing through the eighteen inches between Lucy and the diabolical device on the girl’s head. Slowly the fatal tension appeared to drain from her sickened body, a bit of color returned. She began breathing evenly, and Scott, consulting vital signs, looked satisfied.

  Suddenly the victim lurched upward on an elbow, confused terror brimming in her eyes. I took an unconscious step forward and she fixed on me, shrinking backward into the tank. Scott sprang to her side, trying to make her lie down
. The look of wild horror on her face intensified, she kept her eyes riveted on me.

  “You! I have to— What is this? Who are you people? I have to— Don’t you know what’s happening? Aphrodite doesn’t know what it is, but it frightens the voices falling from the stars!”

  She collapsed. Scott and Francis checked her signs as Dave prepared an injection. They gave it a few seconds to work, then closed the lid and switched the stasis field back on.

  “I think she’ll be all right, now,” Scott observed. “You sure that bore is thoroughly deactivated?”

  “Like a doornail,” Lucy answered, “except fer reabsorbin’ its intrusions in her brain. Give ‘er a day or two outa stasis, an’ likely it’ll just fall off.”

  “What do you suppose she meant?” asked Francis. “Did that rambling mean anything to you, Win?”

  “Some of it. Her disorientation was plain enough.”

  “As was her residual conditioning against you.” He scrubbed his glasses once again and set them on his nose. “Aphrodite, voices falling from the stars—what was that all about?”

  I thought about it. “You’ve seen more delirium than I have. Voices from the stars—those mysterious signals they’ve been picking up. And Aphrodite—well, at least we know the real villains, now.”

  “Or do we?” asked Koko. “Win, I have a scary thought—or maybe just a silly one. You guys said the brain-bore has a radio circuit, right?”

  “Right, but—oops! Koko, I hope that’s just a silly idea.”

  “So do I, Boss. I don’t like to think we’re being invaded from interstellar space. And by remote control!”

  9: One Born Every Minute

  “W

  innie, you been nekkid long enough!” Lucy grabbed my arm and started pushing smartsuit buttons.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” I snatched my arm away, but not in time to keep my feet from turning orange. I looked at them and shuddered. We’d returned to my room at Le Petit Prince, leaving the medical types to map out my suitcase burglar’s convalescence. Koko leaned back in a chair now—gorillas are another reason extraterrestrial furniture’s substantial—watching a movie on my Gigacom.