The Venus Belt

by L. Neil Smith

  Giant squid? Well, maybe there are monsters in the depths of Earth’s great oceans who can lay better claim to the title; there’s plenty of evidence for horrors hundreds of squishy feet long. Navigation Rock’s were giant enough for me: four to six feet in length; just about right to make a swell pair of hands for killer whales. “Intelligent” peripherals. The nanoelectronics were anchored to the mantle of each cephalopod, tuned to the ultrasonic wishes of its Orca master: tote that barge; push that button and scratch...that’s right, a little lower and to the left...Ahh! At cetacean frequencies, an amazing volume of information can be conveyed in a short burst. What I’d first taken for Reeouhoo’s panicky shrilling had merely been ultrasonic marching orders for molluscs—I’d never have heard it at all if it weren’t for my smartsuit.

  We’d been whisked away by the armpits to the normal receiving area for folks with legs, a sort of south-polar high-rise, with a flivver-dock and airlock in its basement, jutting several hundred feet above the shallows that surrounded it. Naturally, this land-dweller’s motel is in freefall, being at the center of rotation, and the trouble with the sea—or rather, the horizon—is that there isn’t any. It keeps on going up and up and up until it’s hidden in the clouds. On a clear day, you can see the north pole.

  Having enjoyed my fill of weightlessness for the nonce—possibly for several nonces—I soon transferred to one of a string of houseboats tethered permanently at the equator. Oahu Wahoo was bright red with a phony sternwheel, a couple of potted palms on deck, and a little kitchen where I scrambled dinner for Koko and myself. (In return for which she daily hunted down the only fresh comestibles in twenty thousand miles. I had to do the gutting and scaling—she’s even more squeamish than her boss. Yechh.) I got regular sunburns up on the roof.

  Okay, technically they were radiation burns. The fusion torch, stuck high atop an impossibly tall and slender mast on the penthouse of the south pole hotel, had a slowly rotating cowl, so the lights went out every “night” and came back on every “morning.” During the dark periods, its reflection on the ocean surface high overhead provided a handy surrogate moon.

  Nice engineering.

  Once or twice a day, owing to hurried business requiring a shortcut—or maybe simply out of sheer high spirits—a killer whale would erupt explosively from the depths, surge high into the mist, and then, instead of splashing down again, keep sailing skyward with the spray until it plunged spectacularly into the waves on the opposite side of the world, gouging out a foamy bullseye. A mini-tidal wave raced and rang around the hollow sea until it lapped against my boat and rocked it gently half an hour later.

  The gap seemed impossibly wide, the trip often taking its passenger perilously close to the “sun,” but the asteroid’s gravity was low and an Orca’s aim unerringly accurate. They don’t call it Navigation Rock for nothing.

  Actual business was carried on far below in a series of peculiar offices. Yesterday, I’d hailed a passing Loligo and gone to take a peek, my apprentice tagging along. We descended until the gauges on my arm began complaining, and hovered a few dozen feet from the bottom, looking down at a sort of prestressed concrete floorplan: low walls delineating different areas of the operation; roofless cubicles filled with giant Orca-designed instrument consoles and desks. Everywhere squid were dusting away the steady rain of silt, skittering across pilot-lighted panels pushing buttons and twiddling knobs, typing, filing, hurrying plasticized memos back and forth, dodging stands of kelp, and batting at pesky fish who trespassed freely through the busy complex, often—mostly lunchtimes—to their startled demise.

  Every half-hour or so, one of the cetacean technicians or supervisors would rise abruptly, rocket to the surface for a breath of air or a snack taken on-the-fin, then dive back to its post, measuring, calculating, sending, and receiving vital data from all over the System. Somewhere, I knew, a marine accountant in a cluttered cubicle would be toting up the cost and mailing out the bills—computerwise, there’s no such thing as a free crunch.

  Lucy had helped erect a temporary north polar antenna. Reeouhoo and his colleagues were in the dark concerning the original’s destruction, an act of sabotage that hadn’t been limited only to broadcasting equipment. This we’d learned that first day as we lounged on a lower, open level of the southern residential tower, enjoying drinks beside a glass-topped table and chatting with the finny folk who relaxed upon a watery shelf at our feet, washed by coriolis currents.

  “Well, I’ll be a wall-eyed wallaby! Them stinkers took us all in, fer fair!” Lucy had just returned from outside, accompanied by thruster-powered technicians. She’d discovered a second surprise package, about the size of a shoebox, at the south pole. She held it before us now, dangling by a number of carefully loosened wires.

  “So it would appear,” answered Reeouhoo. He sent a casual, many-tentacled “hand” racing over the waves behind him, seized an unwary surface-basking perch, retrieved it, and munched reflectively. “Of course we can repair the material damage, but I fear heartily for our reputation. Who would do such a thing?”

  “Hamiltonians!” I answered, “or maybe Aphrodite, Ltd.”

  “Could amount to th’ same thing,” Lucy advised.

  “I still don’t get it.” Koko was having trouble adjusting the straps of her wings, another experiment the enterprising Orcas hoped would stimulate a modest tourist trade.

  I raised a finger. “Let me try—just to see if I’ve got it right, myself. It would seem, loyal assistant, that someone wanted all transportation in and out of the Belt suspended for a while—”

  “Belt? Suspended? Boss, this conversation is going to waist!”

  “For what reason, we do not know. Sometime in the past few months, they planted that device near a sensor array. At the right time, it began making noises like a solar flare. Nobody noticed until a later package destroyed the transmission antenna.” Subsequent cross-checks with the Rock’s seventeen or eighteen major competitors—those who were back on the air—had revealed a System-wide pattern of treacherous sabotage.

  The Orca gave a sort of wallowing nod. “I am chagrined. There are only a handful of artisans capable of deceiving the instruments we employ. I can think of no one among them unethical enough...The damages to System commerce alone...”

  I stoked up a seaweed cigar and leaned back in the wire frame to which I’d strapped myself. “What I don’t understand is why this little goodie didn’t self-destruct when the rest of the fireworks went off.” At least a dozen minor explosions had shaken the asteroid, shattering communications, crippling the small fleet of private flivvers belonging to the residents.

  Lucy chuckled, a weird synthetic noise I still wasn’t used to. “It sure as shingles tried, Winnie. From th’ looks, I’d say it’s been out there more’n a few months—it’s pretty peppered up with micros.” She turned the dust-pocked gadget to display a particular module. “Got a little bitty metallic rockette right here, wedged ‘tween th’ chasis an’ th’ receiver—kinda shorted out th’ bang button.”

  “So,” I mused, “we have a sophisticated, intelligent enemy doing long-range planning—but who didn’t foresee a little item like the micrometeorite density in this region. Somebody who isn’t from the Belt?”

  “Good deducin’, sonny. We’re gonna need that devious mind of yers from here on out if we’re aimin’ at crackin’ this scheme.”

  Reeouhoo whistled for another snack and nodded at me again.

  ***

  Even such a puny effort of deduction jarred me badly: I was very well acquainted with at least one pair of Reeouhoo’s tiny handful who might be technically capable of faking a solar flare, two missing friends possibly involved with the apparent opposition, Aphrodite, Ltd.

  What’s worse, it made me realize how out of practice I’d become. Clarissa’s disappearance, assorted other traumatic events, the weirdly changing scenery, had combined to reduce my little gray cells to ineffectual sightseeing mush.

  Reeouhoo wasn’t the only
one who should be chagrined.

  Even more, I was shaken by the way I’d been taken, by friend and foe alike, for a fucking sleigh ride. Since leaving Laporte, I’d been harried and railroaded, steamrollered and run-around, always re-acting, never initiating anything. I’d been out of self-control and under the thumb of seen and unseen movers, as surely as if I’d been brain-bored myself.

  It was time to change my modus operandi, seize events, and try to figure out exactly what the hell was going on. This asteroid seemed a perfect place for it, so I dug in my heels and stayed to sit and think and plan.

  And get live seafood dropped in by a flying gorilla.

  Okay. Item: a number of good people, particularly my wife, were AWOL. Possibly, I reminded myself, for a variety of different reasons. Possibly not.

  Item: I myself had been the object of numerous, highly varied assaults upon my dignity, property, and continued longevity.

  Item: some of this seemed connected to Aphrodite, Ltd., and its elusive entrepreneur, who possibly had Hamiltonian motivations. Possibly not.

  Item: none of this made very much sense; if there was some conspiracy percolating, it was pretty disorganized. Take those attacks: somebody’d tried to eighty-six me with a tampered Webley (unless they’d been after Olongo), then sicced an undergunned and brain-bored pistolera on me in the bar. But smack between two murderous attempts, they’d rifled my room while I was sound asleep, without harming a single cilium on my defenseless pate—until I woke up and made a fuss.

  It sure as hell complicated things, but the only rational conclusion was that there were actually two conspiracies, one group a bunch of rats who clabbered other people’s brains and dropped shipping crates on mine. The other bunch, for reasons of their own, hesitated to kill but not to burgle—the chickens.

  The Chickens and the Rats, that was it.

  Fair enough: could I sort out all the things they’d done, determine which was done by whom? It might tell me what each group wanted, give me a clue to who they were. If the Rats had Ed, I’d probably never find him—better hope it was the Chickens. Olongo’s pistol? The Rats, though his disappearance presented the same unanswerable questions as Ed’s. The crate was a Rat-type notion, too, but it seemed sort of off-the-cuff, which clashed with the long-range attitude the solar-flare hoax implied. Did that mean the hoax was a Chicken job?

  Finally, Clarissa: same questions as Ed and Olongo, to tell the uncomfortable truth—reinforced by what they’d done to our home and Propertarian h.q. So: Chickens searched people’s rooms and planted fancy electronics on Navigation Rocks. With any luck (though I honestly doubted it), they also kidnapped people—and took very good care of them.

  Rats were arsonists, used the brain-bore, attempted murder—and, yes, left Hamiltonian medallions lying carelessly around. And that, I was afraid, was another point against Ed and Olongo.

  And Clarissa.

  For the hundred-thousandth time, I regretted bitterly making her stay behind. My reasons had certainly seemed good enough, and went far beyond the daughter she was carrying for us now.

  This wasn’t the first time we’d tried. And failed.

  Despite a medical technology that, from my viewpoint, borders on necromancy (or perhaps because of it), the Confederacy tends to bow to nature and let these tragedies happen as they will. Clarissa had suffered through three miscarriages, and I’d suffered right along beside her with all the guilt and shame and anger that’s normal, despite what each of us knew professionally about the psychology of the thing.

  We never came even remotely close to splitting up, as sometimes happens, but there was a strain, there was one hell of a strain.

  And then the Healer in her seemed to take over, tearfully stubborn and cold-blooded in the oddest of circumstances. That was when she informed me flatly that she’d been keeping tissue samples from the beginning. When I finally caught on to what she was saying, I—well, I couldn’t bear to watch her do the sections, but stared with fascination at the micrographs as she savagely hunted down the common genetic misprint at the center of our grief.

  Then she turned around and built us a daughter, chromosome by chromosome, searching for and banishing every weakness she could find, taking half from me and half from herself. She made me flip the coin—insisted it’s the father’s job to determine the sex of a child.

  Sentimental to the last, that girl.

  ***

  That afternoon I shared my inconclusions with Lucy. Koko was off aerial spearfishing; the Orcas were busy mending interplanetary fences. She shoved a cigarette-cassette into the appropriate slot. “Don’t know as I share yer reasonin’, Winnie. F’rinstance, one group coulda nabbed Clarissa, an’ another blew yer place up. Shows how bad things are when that seems like positive thinkin’.”

  “Yes, two separate outfits might have burgled Olongo and made him disappear—which implies the Chickens and the Rats are in conflict. You know, they could have blown up Navigation Rock altogether, if they’d wanted. That practically proves that—”

  “These Chickens of yers are only benevolent by comparison, boy. This hoax has cost us Belters zillions in lost opportunities alone.”

  I stubbed out my cigar. “Agreed. But what’s next? I can’t go home, now, you’ve got me about convinced that the answer’s out here. Lucy, it’s time I did something. Problem is, I can’t figure out what!”

  “Well, back when th’ taxpayers was involuntarily supportin’ you, what would you have done?”

  “Oh hell...There’s Tormount—a dead end. Even Voltaire Malaise couldn’t—”

  “Yeah, but Malaise sure knows more’n he can broadcast—always that way with newsies: lawsuits an’ so on.”

  “Chalk it up as a possible lead. What else have we got?”

  “A solid line right to th’ kidnappers. Ed found ‘em, didn’t he?”

  “They found him. If I retraced his steps, how could we avoid getting grabbed ourselves? Shit: loose ends scattered all over the System. A thousand detectives couldn’t—”

  “No, but how about a thousand ex-Congress critters? Looks like Hamiltonian trouble—betcha we could holler up a passel of help over that. Can’t do it from here, though. We’re too modulatin’ vulnerable, an’ I’d wanna use m’own I S & R jimcrackery, anyway.”

  “Information Storage and Retrieval—you mean on your own asteroid?”

  “Good ol’ Bulfinch—’thall th’ gods an’ goddesses they were namin’ rocks after, figured I’d just finish off th’ list in one swell foop. It’s real well defended, Winnie—if I’d stayed home, I’da never got gunned down in th’ first place.”

  “Now you’re talking. Let’s collect Koko. You start rounding up the cavalry, and I’ll follow Ed’s leads—very carefully. I’ll even brace Malaise and find out what he’s not telling civilization. How’s that sound?”

  “What I wanted t’do all along—only you were all fer hightailin’ it Earth-side.”

  I gathered my belongings and flagged a squid for transportation to the Airlock Motel while Lucy sank sedately beneath the waves to inform our hosts. She also put out a call for Koko.

  Seven hours later, my assistant still hadn’t shown up. The Orcas stopped looking when they found her wings folded and tucked beneath a submarine bush of some kind, and held down by a rock. A counter at the northern lock said someone had cycled it roughly two hours before Lucy and I decided it was time to leave.

  Ed’s Ad Astra was no longer in orbit around Navigation Rock. The only person besides the two of us who knew how to start the engines without being blown to confetti was my loyal assistant. In its place was a standard distress transponder flashing idiotically, its radio voice silenced by a slash of the sidecutters.

  Inside was a note, written on the kind of thermoplastic paper used inside the aquatic asteroid.

  Dear Boss and Lucy:

  I wish I could say how Sorry this makes me, but there really isn’t any choice. Some Things take precedence over others. If I could only tell you more—but
the Cause I’m working for is Important and we must have Secrecy for a while yet. Someday you all will be able to forgive me. At least I hope so.

  Koko

  12: That’s the Way It Looks

  Half an hour later the south pole airlock irised closed behind a spaceship twice the average flivver’s tonnage, which practically dismantled itself regurgitating Telecom equipment, makeup people, rewrite artists, flunkies, and technicians of at least four different species.

  And—last but not least—the august personage himself, Voltaire Malaise.

  August or September, the Most-Trusted-Newsman-In-The-System would’ve stood out in a crowd like that one, if for no other reason than that he alone, of all the participants and spectators (Lucy and me among them), disdained to wear a smartsuit. He stepped down in his legendary brown beat-up serape and battered gray Stetson, beneficently surveying the worshipful throng with visible satisfaction.

  Patton could have make an entrance like that. Or Alice Cooper.

  Bestowing upon his admirers one final noble gaze, he took the nearest elevator into the asteroid, and the crowd evaporated in a sort of reverential hush. I signaled Lucy and we drifted to the lift ourselves, half-expecting to be following a trail of rose petals.

  Five cigar butts and a fish sandwich later, I found myself staring down at my own business card, being returned to me in the service corridor where I’d been kept simmering for hours. One Roger Benton, a fellow with a permanently worried look, chief accomplice and weekend pinch-hitter to the Voice of the Stars, tendered his apologies. “Mr. Bear, I didn’t even get a chance to bring it up. He’s got a touch of bronchitis—the humidity in this impossible place—and needs a rest before beamtime.”

  Lucy was the smart one—she’d stepped out for a lube job or a henna rinse or whatever she was getting these days. “Look, did you say I was investigating Aphrodite, Ltd.? He did a couple of pieces on the subject not too long ago and came up pretty empty.’” There’ve been U.S. Presidents more accessible than Malaise was turning out to be.