Ceres

by L. Neil Smith

  The two young women were as surprised as Wilson, but tried to sit still, stoically restraining an urge to burst out laughing. Llyra glanced at Jasmeen. No Martian had any reason to love the Earthside media, who, during the long, deadly battle they’d fought for Martian independence—a necessity for survival on that planet—had acted like nothing more than a pack of jackals, howling and yapping for blood.

  Wilson allowed himself a grin. “Sounds like he has a pretty good idea about the individual right to privacy, though. Now look here, Mister … ”

  The reporter gulped, but stood his ground. “Lipton, New Angeles Online.”

  “Mister Lipton. My dad—Adam Ngu, Chief Engineer and Director of the Ceres Terraformation Project —has a press conference scheduled for a little while after we get back to the construction dome. I won’t offer to space you or anything, but I’d prefer that you news people all left my mother and sister and Miss Khalidov alone. That okay with you?”

  The reporter eyed Wilson’s revolver again. “Very well, Mr. Ngu. Thanks.”

  The man turned and went back to the other media people seated at the rear of the passenger insert. But to Llyra, he didn’t sound very grateful.

  ***

  Adam was waiting in the airlock tunnel when the gamera fitted out for passenger transport arrived. Unfortunately, the little elevator that connected the vehicle with the tunnel could only hold a few people at a time, and the machine had nearly emptied itself before its airtight door cycled for the dozenth time and he finally saw his family.

  “Daddy!” Llyra shouted when she saw him and came running at him. He’d thought he was prepared for how much she had grown in six months, but he wasn’t, nor for the unchildlike firmness of her arm muscles. Most people didn’t expect skating to produce strong arms, but one’s arms were what controlled one’s bodily attitude and added power to one’s jumps.

  “Baby! It’s so good to see you! Why did you three get off last?” She had her skate bag with her. Good. He had a little surprise for her, and it was something that he’d secretly asked Ardith to make sure of.

  Llyra backed up a little and reached up to straighten a strand of her father’s thinning hair. “Mother thought it would give us Ngus some privacy.”

  “What a good idea!” And so it had. The rest of the passengers had hustled themselves off to the dome, and the Ngus—and Jasmeen—had the tunnel to themselves. Abruptly he realized what was about to happen. His heart began to race and the muscles in his legs turned to water.

  He shook it off the best he could.

  Jasmeen had changed, too, Adam observed. Not in size or anything else that could be measured, but where there had been a pretty and precocious little girl, there now stood an exotically beautiful young woman. As the father of a daughter himself, he was sure it made her parents proud—and nervous. Jasmeen approached him a bit diffidently and thrust out a hand.

  How very Martian, he thought.

  “Is good to see you again, Dr. Ngu.”

  He seized the hand, bundling her into his arms. “Since when have I been ‘Doctor” to you, Jasmeen Khalidov? I’ve known you all your life, and your folks a long time before that. They changed my diapers and I changed yours—or I might have, anyway. Now you’re changing Llyra’s—don’t tell her I said that. You and your folks are family, young woman.”

  Still held within the circle of his arms, Jasmeen tried to look down at her shoes and murmured, “Please, Adam, you make my eyes to leak.”

  Adam laughed, gave her a final squeeze, and let her go. “Later on, I want to hear all about your folks, Jasmeen, how they are, what they’re doing, and Llyra’s skating. But I have to make other eyes leak first, if I can.”

  She laughed. “Including your own, I see. I think I’ll go to dome, now.” There was a little space between her upper two front teeth that had made her look cute as a little girl. Now it made her look sexy, and he experienced a moment of pity for the hordes of boys doomed to fall for her.

  “I’ll go with her!” Llyra exclaimed. “Wilson promised to show us around and find us the best room in the dormitory.” She looked back toward the lift at her brother and gave him some not very subtle signals that he should come, too, so their parents could have a rare private moment to themselves. To Wilson’s credit, he took the hint. The three of them gathered up hand baggage and were off down the tunnel.

  Suddenly they were alone, she where the lift had left, he ten feet away.

  “I, er … ” Adam felt weak and flushed all over, and other things were –

  “Me, too!” Ardith exclaimed, grinning at him through her tears. She rushed to him and threw herself into his arms, squeezing him as hard as she could around the waist, trying to bury her face in his shoulder. Her eyes shut tightly. As Adam always did, he discovered he’d forgotten how beautiful Ardith was, how warm and soft against his body, and the way that she smelled. He crushed her to him and could actually feel her heartbeat in his own chest, through what they were wearing.

  After a few moments, he lifted her chin and kissed her deeply and passionately. As she always had, she returned his kiss with equal passion. The same thrill went through him that had been there the first time he kissed her, when she was sixteen, on her parents’ back verandah overlooking Lake Selous. That first time, they hadn’t gotten caught.

  When they broke for oxygen, Adam started to speak.

  “Shhh!” Ardith’s cheeks were wet and her eyes were still full of tears. Adam’s own face was wet, as well, but he couldn’t tell if it was from her tears or his own. All he really knew at the moment was that he adored this magical creature in his arms with all his heart and all his soul, and had been helpless for what seemed all of his life to do anything else. “Maybe,” she whispered, “if we don’t say anything … ”

  Adam nodded, understanding perfectly, and kissed her again. He knew how this would end, eventually, tomorrow, or the day after that, or the day after that, exactly as it had always ended, and always would.

  But just now, he didn’t care.

  ***

  “ … in an effort that makes the construction of the Pyramids in ancient Egypt or China’s Great Wall appear almost trivial, many more engineering operations like these will follow before people can come to live on Ceres and create a new future for themselves and their children … ”

  The area behind the decorative pool—now full and sparkling, with a little fountain at each end—where Honey Graham had asked that two man-sized planter-urns be rearranged to form a sort of stage, also had a nine foot high back wall, made of the same smoothly finished concrete as the pool and the planters, fabricated from local materials and colored an extremely pale blue, to work well with 3DTV cameras.

  Standing at that wall for the moment, Ingrid Andersson, the Chief Engineer’s assistant, was delivering a little lecture on the Ceres Terraformation Project, to provide background for the media people who had come here to report on Wilson’s Ngu’s award ceremony, planned for tomorrow.

  Earlier this morning, Ingrid had recruited some office help to bring out an old 3DTV flexscreen she’d found in a storage room, unroll it, and let it adhere itself to the wall. It was somewhat obsolete—only six feet high by eight wide, with a ten-foot diagonal, and it was a clumsy quarter of an inch thick, but it was wholly adequate for her purposes.

  She pointed to a floating diagram of the asteroid. “As you can see, this half represents Ceres before the terraformation process. The surface is bleak, airless, and cold. It looks like nighttime perpetually, although the sun can be seen when you’re at the right place.”

  She could see that several of the media people wanted to ask her questions already. She knew what most of those questions would be like. She prepared answers for at least one e-mail interview a day for her boss. He would look her answers over, make corrections if needed or okay what he’d originally taught her to say, and she’d send it away.

  “This half shows what it’ll be like a year or two after the new atmospheric canopy is put into p
lace, about four years from now. The sun shines, supplemented by a pair of orbiting aluminized plastic mirrors, three miles wide. Under the canopy, the daytime sky is a brilliant blue. Sometimes there are clouds and it rains. Lakes and rivers everywhere moderate the temperature and humidity. It’s warm. Green things grow—although trees are still only saplings at this point.”

  Off to one side, hidden from the reporters behind a big stack of construction materials, Ingrid could see Adam and his wife Ardith, standing with their son Wilson, who looked extremely nervous. And who could blame him? He was a very nice young man, very polite and as smart as his father. Very handsome, too. She was grateful that he’d never developed a crush on her. His uncles, Arleigh and Lindsay, were there, too. One of the girls with them, the younger one, must be their daughter Llyra. The older one, maybe three or four years younger than Ingrid, had to be the girl’s Chechen skating coach, Jasmeen Khalidov.

  Together, they made a fine-looking family group, she admitted to herself.

  Damn it.

  “Miss … ?”

  “Andersson,” she replied, blinking. The questioner was a middle- aged man, obviously Pallatian from his dress and the rake of the pistol on his belt. “Ingrid Andersson, with two esses. You have a question?”

  “Yes, I do, Miss Andersson. Marvin Challopy, representing KCUF, the oldest news multimedium on Pallas, and still the most connected with.”

  “Yes, Mr. Challopy, now that you’ve finished the commercial, your question?” Everyone laughed, including the middle-aged Pallatian correspondent.

  Then: “My question. Once the atmospheric canopy is in place around Ceres, will this asteroid experience the same colorful and beautiful sunrises and sunsets that make Pallas the best place to visit in the System?”

  There was twice as much laughter this time. Ingrid laughed, too, and smiled. She was recorded doing it by a dozen 3DTV cameras that, for the proverbial fifteen minutes, would make her the Solar System’s most desirable pinup girl.

  “Mr. Challopy, we just don’t know. Believe it or not, nobody knows why the canopy on Pallas does what it does, although generations of scientists have tried to find out and failed. I guess that we’ll just have to build the thing and find out.”

  There was general laughter again, and applause. Most of these people weren’t used to hearing a straight truth—like “I don’t know”—from members of whatever government ruled them or from corporate spokesmen.

  “And now,” Ingrid told them, “I’d like to introduce my boss, who will have some remarks of his own to make. Possibly he can give you a better answer to that question than I just did, although I doubt it very much.”

  More laughter.

  “Ladies and gentlemen of the press, Chief Engineer and Director of the Curringer Corporation’s Ceres Terraformation Project, Dr. Adam Ngu.”

  Ardith squeezed his hand in encouragement, and Adam stepped from the shadows, onto the little makeshift stage. “I’m afraid I don’t have a better answer for you about the canopy than Ingrid did. I can’t wait to find out, myself.”

  Everybody laughed.

  “However this is not the day,” Adam told them, “this is not the time, to consider technicalities like that, but to turn our attention to a young man who will stand in this place tomorrow morning, after his family’s had a chance to visit with him, to receive the highest tribute his employer, the Curringer Corporation, can offer him, as a token of appreciation for what he did for them and all of us last week.”

  He could feel tears welling up again—that made twice in one day!

  “I know you’re anxious to meet him.” Adam grinned, “He’s anxious to get it over with. I want to add that it makes me inexpressibly proud to be the father of such a young man. Please welcome Wilson Ngu.”

  Wilson stepped out, grateful that his father remained at his side. Now it began to sound like a genuine press conference, as each of the correspondents shouted for Wilson’s attention all at the same time. To Wilson, it was like facing an onrushing tidal wave (an experience he’d never had, but could imagine—it probably felt like holding a press conference).

  “Mr. Ngu! Mr. Ngu!” He wondered how you got them to shut up, and which one to call on first. He wished he was back outside, planting transponders.

  Adam raised a hand. “Miss Graham.”

  “Honey Graham,” she introduced herself. “Wilson, tell me, how does it feel, at the tender age of seventeen, to have shot five human beings to death?” She nodded toward the weapon he still wore on his thigh.

  Before Wilson could speak, his father, who had seen this sort of thing coming days ago, spoke instead. “If Wilson will please excuse me, I’ll ask you one, first, Miss Graham. You’re from Earth, aren’t you?”

  “Why, you know I am, Dr. Ngu,” she replied warily. “Why do you ask?”

  “Because anyone from any of the Settled Worlds—even in the news media—would have asked, ‘How does it feel to have saved the lives of 2400 people aboard the factory ship Percival Lowell?’ That’s why.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN: MADNESS AT MIDNIGHT

  There’s a big difference between keeping the peace, which is something folks do pretty well themselves, and enforcing the law, which is another thing altogether. Throughout most of West America—which seems to have learned the lesson— municipal police forces have been outlawed. The sheriff’s job, when he arrives, inevitably after the fact, is to make sure it was the badguy who got shot. That was the Pallatian custom to begin with, and Pallas has prospered accordingly. —The Diaries of Rosalie Frazier Ngu

  The individual who sometimes called himself Robert Fulton peered about in a darkness that resulted as much from the fact that most of the area lights in the big construction dome had been turned off, as from the fact that the sun shone presently on the uninhabited side of Ceres.

  A day would come, he was aware, when the towns here would never be this empty, when there were a hundred times as many workers on Ceres as there were now. That was their expectation, at least. His hope was to thwart their expectation, and they had been helpful enough—because they had dormitory rooms to spare at the moment—to give him one to himself on the ground floor, the closest room they had to the front entrance.

  He believed that nobody had seen him leave the building with his big, brown, shiny suitcase dangling from one hand. He believed that nobody had seen him cross what would someday be a street and enter the little plaza with its decorative pool and stage area, the latter set off by a pair of concrete planter urns the height of a big man and about the same number of feet in diameter. The miniature fountains were still, now, the surface of the water was as smooth as glass.

  For some reason, there were now four big black corrugated hoses of some kind snaking into the water at the closest thing the pool had to corners, from somewhere out of the light. They had nothing to do with him.

  It was good to be out of his disguise, if only for a little while. No one would see him here, so it wouldn’t matter. And it was much more comfortable.

  During the press conference in which he’d pretended to be the Pallas stringer for Boston Magazine, he’d finally had his inspiration. He knew, now, how he would go about fulfilling his commission to Null Delta Em. On closer inspection, after the conference had broken up (in confusion, because that idiot network newswoman didn’t know how to control an interview), he’d observed that the flowering plants growing out of the tops of the urns were actually bedded in metal pans no more than eight inches deep, designed to be set into the tops of the urns and stay there. The rest of the urns’ interiors were empty, filled only with air.

  A man could hide in there.

  Or hide a suitcase.

  Reaching the top of the urn wasn’t as difficult as he’d originally anticipated. This morning’s inspection had taught him that people here were careless, leaving items like tools and ladders around wherever they’d last used them or planned to use them again. That was probably a function of everybody knowing everybody else. Likewise, they
didn’t think twice about a stranger examining how something worked or had been built. The lighter gravity (lighter than Earth’s, anyway) helped, too, although working for almost a year on Pallas had weakened him horribly.

  He’d want a wheelchair or crutches for a while, and a lot of serious physical therapy, once he got back to Earth.

  Although it was a long reach from the stepladder to the top of the almost spherical urn, thanks also to the gravity, it was easy to pull the planter out of the top. He climbed back down and set it to one side. Opening the suitcase—his small computer was already in place and had started counting down the hours—he removed a small tool kit. Closing the case, he took a spool of synthetic cord from the tool kit and tied each end of a length of it to a couple of spots on the suitcase.

  Back up the ladder again, he had a bad moment when he thought the suitcase was too large to fit into the urn. Then, to his relief, it let itself be pushed through the short neck of the urn, into the space below. He lowered it with the cord, careful that the bottom of the suitcase was oriented away from the little stage, toward where he understood the 3DTV reporters would be all standing, especially Honey Graham.

  There was a titanium plate lining the bottom of the suitcase that would shape the explosion when it occurred tomorrow. It wouldn’t save the reporters, only delay the explosion’s wavefront reaching and killing them until their cameras had recorded the violent deaths of young Wilson Ngu and his family. Everyone on Earth—including most of East America, watching the ceremony illegally—would see their bodies shredded to bloody pulp, and then watch it again and again, probably in slow motion, as the media beat the story to death.

  The giant concrete pot would tamp the explosion—he planned to seal the planter pan in place with a tube of adhesive from his tool kit—and provide several hundred pounds of shrapnel to be thrown around at several thousand feet per second, killing everyone and obliterating everything within its reach. It was more than possible that the explosion would breach the dome itself. Meanwhile, if all went well, he would be well away from the cataclysm when it happened—by what he’d afterward call “sheer good luck”—strolling casually down an airlock tunnel, exploring the facilities that served the gamera.