Ceres

by L. Neil Smith

  Second only to venison sausage for breakfast.

  But now he wouldn’t be able to walk down the streets of Curringer any more without all kinds of people wanting to greet and talk to him. Mr. Sinclair put a big arm around his shoulder and presented him with a giant green plastic card, an official deposit receipt, he said, from the Miner’s Bank of Pallas, for four hundred ounces of platinum, 999 fine.

  Four hundred ounces!

  In a few days—weeks at most—he’d be master of his own ship! And who knew what could happen—maybe he’d find the Diamond Rogue!

  ***

  Sheridan Sinclair stepped backward, taking Wilson along with him, deferring to the Chief Engineer of the Ceres Terraformation Project, who raised both his hands, asking for silence and attention from the gathering. “Before we all go our separate ways this morning—this is not a holiday, and I’d remind you that we’re now behind schedule, placing survey transponders—I have one more happy item to attend to. Our guests may have noticed these four big hoses attached to those pieces of equipment over there, trailing across the plaza to what would be the corners of our little kidney-shaped decorative pool—if kidneys had corners.”

  There was general polite laughter. The machines that Adam referred to were the size of fifty-five gallon oil drums on wheels. They had been running quietly all this time, half hidden behind the concrete wall. Some of the media people had complained about having to step over the hoses. Honey Graham had twisted her decorative ankle on one of them last evening—Arleigh had taken care of her and gotten her to the medics– but was here this morning looking like a professional newsie.

  “Our construction personnel here know what these devices are,” Adam continued. “Although they may wonder why they’re being used like this today. I confess that it might be seen as a minor misappropriation of company resources, but we’ll enter it in the books under ‘Advance Publicity’.”

  And if the directors of the Curringer Corporation didn’t like that, he thought, they could go find themselves another boy. This was by far the most challenging, difficult, annoying—and satisfying—project he’d ever undertaken. But the notion of returning to Pallas with Ardith was becoming more attractive to him with every hour that passed. It was too early to tell, but maybe they were finally growing up.

  “Ordinarily, when we’re faced with drifts of dust or aggregations of loose rubble here on Ceres—or silt and mud on some other planet—and the blueprints call for putting a hole through the stuff, a hole that isn’t going to collapse on us while we’re working in it, we’ll saturate the area first with some kind of liquid, usually water, if it isn’t already wet, pull a cover over it so the liquid won’t evaporate or sublimate, and freeze it solid with machines like these, so the whole mess can be dug, cut, or drilled, just like ordinary rock or soil.” He turned to his wife, an expert in the field he was about to make reference to. “More or less the same process is commonly used before a loosely-aggregated asteroid or meteoroid can be deflected in one piece from a potentially lethal course and safely collected if it has value. We’ve been considering giving Ceres its own moon that way, like Pallas has.”

  Llyra had always believed that her daddy could have hung the Moon. She suddenly realized why it had felt so cold beside the little pool last evening. It hadn’t anything to do with the fountains—which had just been turned off, in any case. She also knew suddenly why Jasmeen had brought her skate bag with her. It had been a family conspiracy.

  “The sides of this decorative pool were designed with an outward slant,” Adam observed, “so that freezing—and expanding—the water within it couldn’t damage them. With four powerful heat pumps steadily removing energy from the pool, I calculate that it should freeze to a depth of about eighteen inches in just another five minutes, which is long enough for anybody who happens to have brought a pair of ice skates with them to lace them up and do a little preliminary stretching.”

  There was a burst of applause and delighted laughter. The media began swapping lenses on their equipment and making what adjustments they could for the harsh backlight that always made ice photography difficult.

  Jasmeen obeyed without further prompting, sitting down at the edge of the pool and disposing of her shoes. She opened her bag and pulled out a well-worn pair of lavender suede S.P. Teris, with MK “Outland” blades designed for low gravity. Jasmeen had always preferred skating barefoot inside her boots. Llyra chose to wear stockings. The younger girl’s heart began beating rapidly. She was about to skate on another world!

  And she loved skating with Jasmeen.

  A little layer of fog began forming six inches above the surface of what had now become ice. “Do I have any takers?” her father asked, unnecessarily.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN: DOWNSYSTEM

  Sigmund Freud said it (or so the story goes): “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar”. So who was it who rushed to the unsupported conclusion that the so-called Venus of Willendorf—and many other objects like it that have been found—are “fertility symbols” or objects of worship? Feminists even like to cite them as evidence of some ancient, benevolent Goddess-religion, long since replaced by vile male-oriented beliefs.

  Doesn’t it make more sense—and strain credulity less—to suggest they were a caveman’s version of Playboy, passed from hand to hand around the campfire after the women and children had gone to bed, to be fondled and chuckled over licentiously? —The Diaries of Rosalie Frazier Ngu

  “Is it practical, Jasmeen?” asked Julie. “Can it be done?”

  With Llyra, they occupied a comfortable corner booth in the Ceres Terraformation Project cafeteria, which had been hastily refurbished for the benefit of the visiting media. The fresh colors were bright, the fixtures were shiny, the food was all right, and the media were gone—which suited everybody absolutely perfectly. There was even a big old Rock-o-la jukebox, anachronistically playing 21st century tunes.

  Llyra had just skated on the frozen pool for the third time in as many days—for the first time today without Honey Graham and the others there to fuss over her. The pool was tiny, compared to the rink back home, but she had it to herself, except for Jasmeen, and it was fun. And of course it was something that her father had done just for her.

  She wished his secretary didn’t look at him that way. It made her nervous. She’d meant to talk with Wilson about that, but he’d been busy.

  Now, over a vanilla milkshake almost as big as she was, and a big plate of French fries smothered in homemade ketchup, Llyra had just confessed to her grandmother Julie her ambition to skate, someday, on Earth.

  “Ngu family doctors say not,” Jasmeen answered. “Will injure or kill self, they say. Me, I don’t know, but nothing worthwhile is without serious risk.”

  “I agree with you completely.” Julie wrinkled her pretty nose. “In the end, doctors are just like lawyers,” she said. “They’re always ready to tell you what can’t be done—what you can’t do. They don’t remember that this isn’t what you hired them for. What would you girls say if I were to consult the people I pay to keep me young, inside and out?”

  Llyra looked at her beautiful grandmother, who didn’t yet look thirty, and her eyes grew large. “I’d say thanks, Grandma Julie! How soon—”

  “Well, there’s just a small hitch, Sweetheart. They’re down in the Moon. Your great grandfather, my father-in-law, is often credited with having invented the cellular regeneration process, just as he invented so many other things, firearms, vehicles, personal fliers. But this one improvement he paid to have done, and the DeGrey Foundation, the outfit that finally succeeded—”

  “It’s in the Moon?” Llyra was growing excited. “But that’s where I need to go next, anyway, Grandma Julie! My native asteroid Pallas at one twentieth of a gee, Ceres at one tenth—although I had a little bit of that on Pallas, you know! And then the Moon, at one sixth of a gee!”

  “Mars after that,” added Jasmeen, looking almost as happy as her student.

  Julie considered
it. “Your brother Wilson needs to go downsystem, because that’s the best place to buy a ship, at one of the Lagrange points. Your father asked me to go along and help him with that. I’m a pretty good bargainer. I don’t know if your father’s doing the right thing, not holding Wilson to his labor contract here on Ceres. I don’t know if I would—the poor boy certainly has the fever.”

  “Yeah,” Llyra said grimly, “and not just for a hunter ship, or even the Diamond Rogue! ‘Ooh, Willie!’” she cooed in falsetto. “‘I can hardly wait to see my little Willie!’”

  For some reason, Jasmeen colored, but said nothing. She wondered if Llyra knew what willie was a euphemism for. They didn’t discuss it much.

  “I need to go downsystem to sign papers and break ground on the new Wimpersnits and Oogies theme park,” Julie said, trying hard not to laugh at her granddaughter’s imitation of her brother’s girlfriend. “Of course I could do all that electronically, but I’d rather not. I really want to hear all the squawking from East America close up and personal.”

  Jasmeen laughed and clapped her hands, exactly like Llyra did sometimes.

  Llyra needed to go to the Moon as her next step upward in gravity. That was all she could focus on. She knew it could mean months, maybe years, of suffering and pain, even injury and death. Nevertheless, she waited breathlessly for the next thing her grandmother was about to say.

  “I’ll take you and your brother and you, too, Jasmeen, with me in the Curringer Foundation ship. Sherrie Sinclair owes me a favor or two, so we’ll draw on the available credit. What do you say, figure skater?”

  “I … I … ” She began to fight back tears.

  “Look, just between you and me and your little Russian coach, here—” She winked at Jasmeen, whose parents were old friends of hers.

  “Chechen,” Llyra corrected her reflexively.

  “Whatever—I started out half Puerto Rican, myself, and half Irish. Now I don’t know what I am, and I don’t care, because I’ve always known who I am. Anyway, you should be aware, my dear, that your kindly little old grandmother knows exactly how that Null Delta Em filth Fulton got himself shot—your father never could lie worth a damn to me—and how the shooter didn’t want to claim credit for it because she didn’t want to spoil her big brother Wilson’s award ceremony.”

  “Well, I … uh … ” Now it was Llyra’s turn to blush. Jasmeen hadn’t heard the whole story—she’d taken time to get dressed and hadn’t caught up yet—but had deduced all of the most important facts. It never occurred to her that much of Llyra’s character was her doing.

  “Don’t worry, your secret is safe with me,” Julie said, “But for that reason, and not just because you’re my cute little granddaughter and I love you to pieces—with your father’s approval—I’m going to pay the bills while you train, and compete, on the Moon. If you like, sweetheart, you may think of it as your four hundred ounces of platinum.”

  ***

  “Absolutely not!” Ardith shouted, the most furious expression on her face that Julie had ever seen—and she’d seen some of her best, she thought.

  For lack of any better place to gather privately, the Ngu family occupied a comfortable room in Adam’s office complex that he used for staff meetings, for dealing with the representatives of the Curringer Corporation and Foundation, and for confronting (his choice of words) the media. It was very clean—for being situated in the middle of a construction site—and surprisingly spacious, given the amount of room available under the dome, offering them a long conference table made of polished Cerean olivine, and twelve almost luxurious chairs. Between virtual windows on all four walls showing how Ceres would look once it was terraformed, there was a coffee maker and a generous wet bar.

  On his feet, pacing back and forth as if to make a poorer target, Adam spread both of his hands helplessly at waist level. “But I thought—”

  Ardith whirled on him, the violent motion adding emphasis to her outraged words and tone. “It was you who put them up to this, wasn’t it?”

  Adam’s eyes widened like a rodent suddenly aware a raptor was descending. Here it was at last, what he’d expected all along. What it seemed to be about didn’t matter at all.

  “Well,” she demanded, “wasn’t it?”

  “No, Ardith, my dear,” Julie answered before her eldest son dug his grave any deeper. It was remarkable, sometimes, what an efficient spade the human tongue made. She was sitting at the head of the table and had used both the coffee maker and the wet bar to make herself a mug of Irish coffee. Too bad there wasn’t any whipped cream for the top of the mug. “It was just little old me, your nosy, interfering mother-in-law. And for what it’s worth, my dear, I’d love it if you’d come downsystem with us, too. We haven’t had a real chance to visit in ages.”

  Ardith was seated halfway down the table, which she’d had made in her lab as a gift to Adam when he’d accepted this assignment, a lovely thing fashioned from the most useless kind of asteroid material. Something from nothing; she liked to think it was her specialty. She turned very slowly, looked her mother-in-law straight in the eye, and said, “No thank you, Julie, dear. Some of us still have real work to do.”

  Sitting directly across from Ardith, Llyra gasped audibly. She’d never heard her mother fight with her grandmother before now, or even imagined that such a thing was possible. At the end of the long table, in the chair nearest the door, she watched her uncle Arleigh look down intently at his heavy work shoes and put a hand across his forehead, covering his eyes. His brother, her other uncle Lindsay, had apparently discovered something fascinating to examine up in the corner, near the ceiling. At Llyra’s side, Jasmeen moved her chair a bit closer to her student’s and, in a very unMartian way took the younger girl’s hand in both of hers.

  She’ll definitely do, Julie thought. She approved of this young woman. And when she told them, once she got back to Mars, her parents Mohammed and Beliita would be proud of the way she’d grown in the last three years. It had cost them a great deal, emotionally, to send their only child to faraway Pallas, even to the home of longtime family friends.

  As the author of two dozen popular children’s books, Julie had been accused of not doing anything real for a living before, of spending her life behind a computer display instead of in the real world, even of corrupting the minds of babies with reactionary fantasies, but never by a member of her own family. She decided it was better not to say anything for the moment. She had a theory that Ardith was insane—at least temporarily—at times like this, and would later regret what she’d said, not only to her mother-in-law, but to everybody else in the room.

  Poor Adam, he loves Ardith so. And Ardith loves Adam. Julie could see it clearly, if nobody else here could. But Lennon and McCartney were wrong: love is not all you need. Most times you need more than love. Sometimes you need a lot more. Linda could have used a cure for cancer. John could have used a bulletproof vest. Yoko could have used a .45. Ardith could use a little perspective. If she wasn’t careful that overheated little assistant of Adam’s was going to snatch her man right away.

  That was easy to see clearly, too.

  ***

  Alone at last, Wilson didn’t waste another minute. Keeping the Grizzly, he handed his heavy gold medal and his Bank of Pallas deposit receipt over to Ingrid’s—Miss Andersson’s—safekeeping (in a real safe) and almost ran back to his dormitory room. Inside, with the door locked, his computer found his SolarNet account for him in record time.

  Not being the most introspective of human beings himself (Wilson liked to think of himself as a man of action), he didn’t like to contemplate what had just happened—what always seemed to happen—between his mother and his father. It had taken him a long, hard time to realize that their life was not his life, and that as sad (or dumb) as theirs might be in many respects, he had to put it to one side, and try to live his own. It was the only thing he had to power to do, really.

  He did know that he loved them both and refused to choose bet
ween them. He was pretty sure his younger sister Llyra had made the same decision.

  At last, his account began delivering the mail he wanted most to see. There she was, his Amorie, more beautiful, if such a thing was possible, than he’d ever seen her. “Hi, Willie!” her recording said, “I couldn’t wait to tell you that we all saw you on 3DTV! My whole family! You’re so handsome, it was just thrilling! You’re a real hero, Willie!”

  He’d always hated being called Willie, but Amorie’s teeth were white and perfect, her lips moist and full. Her soft brown eyes were big and bright. She had the cutest upturned nose. He loved the way her little ears peeked out of her hair. And the graceful curve of her shoulders, her delicate collarbones—he shook his head to keep it from spinning and began what would be his reply, bit by bit, to her message.

  She would receive it only forty-five minutes after he sent it.

  “Well,” he said into his computer. “I didn’t think much about what I did out there, you know, I just did it. People were going to die if I didn’t. I’m glad it worked, but anybody else would have done the same.”

  “I bet I know,” Amorie’s message went on, “what you’re planning to do with all that platinum and gold they gave you! Cash those receipts in, melt that gold down. I wanted to tell you that they’ve just upped the E.L.E. bounty by almost seventy-five percent for the diversion or destruction of rocks headed toward Earth or any other Settled World—and the hunter gets to keep the rock, regardless of its composition! Hurry downsystem, Willie, hurry! And we can talk about it all in real time!”

  Wilson knew from sad experience that Amorie didn’t have a clue who “they” were, who paid the bounty on Earth-threatening asteroids and meteoroids. She must be a hell of a pilot—or whatever she did for her family—if she didn’t follow the business details of her family trade any better than that. He’d have to do it all for himself. She never talked much about what she did, really, only about what he did, and what they’d both do provided they ever managed to get together physically.