Engines very much like these had brought people to Pallas three generations ago.
As they approached the bullet-shaped bow, mostly constructed of once-transparent materials, they saw two manipulation arms, of which there were two, folded back in long grooves between engines. Along the underside, or “chin” of the command section, lay the “toolbox” containing various lasers, masers, and chainlink dispensers. This was where Wilson would put his particle cannon—if he could ever afford one.
“It’s an old General Systems Procyon, isn’t it?” Julie asked the salesbot in sudden recognition. “About a Mark IV, I’d guess. She’s been modified so much she’s almost unrecognizable.” Julie noted with approval that all of the vessel’s antennae, reception and transmission dishes, passive and active sensors, even handholds, had been mounted flush with the surface, an absolute necessity in denser areas of the Belt.
“An oldie but a goodie,” the salesbot replied. “The DC-3 of space, in her time!”
Lafcadio’s alter ego indicated the little ship’s finer points. She had what long-haul hunters called a “coffee grinder”, for example, to convert otherwise worthless bits of rock (as well as valuable ones in an emergency) to reaction mass. The ship’s manipulation arms could be rigged and charged to sweep spaceborne particles (one or two per cubic meter) into the engines, supplementing whatever reaction mass she carried.
The main airlock, appropriately enough, was on the portside of the ship. The sky-raft gave a nauseating little flip to match the docking machinery on its underside with the asteroid hunter’s. The handrail became a footrail as Wilson and Julie climbed up into the larger craft. The salesbot’s head separated from its torso and followed its customers on puffs of air.
The pilot’s seat was a flimsy, skeletal affair sitting on the end of a gracefully curved beam in the nose of the ship, surrounded on all sides but the back by glass. Wilson saw right away that the comm system needed updating. It consisted of nothing but audio and typo—no real video—and the sensor readouts were all flatscreens, limited to 2D. How they’d found and captured rocks with this stuff he couldn’t guess.
On the other hand, there were two big bunks aft of the control area, a dining table, and excellent sanitary facilities, including a shower that drew water from carbonaceous chondrites processed in the coffee grinder. Although the mechanical life support systems were more than adequate, the high circular wall of the living area was an airponics garden, at present brown and brittle, that modified and moisturized the air, and offered the hunter welcome items like big, red, beefsteak tomatoes.
There was also a closet-sized gymnasium with good, if very old equipment.
“I’m going to call her Mighty Mouse’s Girlfriend,” Wilson declared.
“What?” Julie blinked. It was as if the boy just come to life, she thought. She knew that look, all too well. It was a good thing. A very good thing. This little vessel wasn’t the Ball 500 Asteroid Scout she knew her grandson had dreamed of owning, or the Mitsubishi Rockhound 9000L he often talked about. But somewhere in the last five minutes, he’d stopped seeing this ancient, beat-up workhorse as she was, and had begun seeing her as he would make her. Her late husband Billy used to have that look a lot, maybe even once or twice—given her rough start on the mean New Jersey streets—about her. “Why not just call her Minnie?”
“Not Mickey Mouse’s girlfriend, Grandma, Mighty Mouse’s girlfriend. I don’t know what her name was. I don’t know if she even had a name. But he rescued her from being sacrificed to a volcano god one time. When I was little, I thought she was the cutest, sexiest thing I ever saw. I especially liked the way her little ears stuck out through her hair. I’ve tended to rate girls on a ‘Mighty Mouse’s Girlfriend Scale” ever since.”
Now that explains a lot, Julie thought, remembering the holograms he’d shown her of Amorie Samson. That one probably rated a Ten—maybe even an Eleven or a Twelve—on the Mighty Mouse’s Girlfriend Scale.
CHAPTER NINETEEN: STARTING OVER
I was sixteen when my great aunt, Mary-Lou Altman Frazier—the woman who had raised me as her daughter—had a stroke and ended up in a nursing home. Her husband was long dead and all she had was me. All around her in that place, people were giving up and dying, but she wouldn’t. Whenever she couldn’t get them to put her in a wheelchair, she got out of bed and crawled, rather than be left helplessly dependent on others. In the end, she recovered nearly completely, It taught me a lesson I’ve never forgotten: anything is better than helplessness. —The Diaries of Rosalie Frazier Ngu
“Was that seven rotations, or eight?” Llyra asked in admiration—although back home she could have eventually worked up to twice that number.
Here on Earth’s Moon, it was a very different matter altogether. Bad enough that her legs ached and trembled from hip to ankle at the end of every day, she thought. It was even worse to begin the day that way, as she had done each and every morning since first coming to this place. Her legs had ached and trembled when she woke up, they’d ached and trembled all through this morning’s therapy session, they’d ached and trembled all the way over here, and they ached and trembled right now.
Probably thinking many of the same thoughts, Jasmeen answered somewhat abstractedly, “Was not counting, my little. Whoever she is, she is good skater. Will count next time.”
Eyes on the half dozen figures out on the ice, Llyra nodded. She’d been paying most attention to the landings, and to what was happening with her own body. Her back hurt, too, and her shoulders and arms. It seemed like months, but they’d been on the Moon less than a week. She thought Jasmeen was starting to recover, maybe because she’d been born and brought up in twice this much gravity. At least she was spending more time standing up, and once or twice had even crossed the living room of the little apartment they shared without one of the magnesium alloy walkers they were using these days to get around and see the sights.
“Me, too,” Llyra said. She wondered how these skaters, with their Lunar muscles, would fare on Ceres or Pallas. Probably land on their heads.
The sight they both wanted to see most was the sight they were seeing now and had longed to see every day until they’d been cleared to travel by themselves. They were visiting the Robert A. and Virginia Heinlein Memorial Ice Arena in a suburb of Armstrong, the principal city on the Moon—or “in the Moon”, as the natives insisted putting it, and with justice, since its main streets lay several hundred feet beneath that world’s surface, far from its heat, cold, radiation, and micrometeorites.
Heinlein had foreseen that. He was regarded here as one the great writers of the twentieth century, an early advocate of space travel and settling other worlds, a prophet. Julie had told them that there might never have been cities in the Moon—or much of anywhere else except for Earth—if he hadn’t lived. Most of what he’d written—especially about the Moon—had come true, and what he’d written about settling the moons of the gas giants had come true in the Asteroid Belt. He’d even predicted that someday people—like Julie, for instance—would be virtually immortal, although he’d thought the answer lay in selectively breeding people like hothouse plants, instead of in techniques like the various DeGrey therapies. When he’d first written on the subject, DNA hadn’t yet been discovered.
Heinlein and his wife had also been ice dancers where they lived in West America, another reason this cavernous facility bore their name. The space it occupied was artificial, according to a brochure Llyra still clutched, forgotten, in her hand, created by setting off some sort of thermal explosive in a hole drilled deep under the Moon’s surface. The walls of the cavern were fused into glass two feet thick, and the remainder of the vaporized rock had been allowed to vent into space.
“Look at that!” Llyra exclaimed. “An octuple Axel!” An Axel was a turn and half, which meant they had just seen a jump of twelve whole turns.
At the moment, she and Jasmeen leaned on their walkers, observing (not without envy) a “contract” session through the th
ick, heavy plastic transparencies around the rink, one of six at this facility. This was time that individual skaters had paid for in advance, so they could practice what they’d learned in their formal lessons—with a guarantee that there would never be more than a certain number of them on the ice at any given time. The skaters (mostly girls, just as it was everywhere else) were doing fabulous things: waltz jumps that covered half the rink, and ten-turn Salchows that carried them seventy feet into the air.
The rinks were laid out in two rows of three, separated by ranks of bleachers. Bleachers also ran around the perimeter of the facility. There were plans, the brochure said, to add another row of three rinks.
Exactly the same signs were hanging here that hung in the Brody Memorial rink at home: no stick-and-puck games off ice, no hanging from the overhead netting. And, just the way it was back home, the walls everywhere in the facility were covered with black neoprene marks.
Abruptly, Llyra overheard a sort of stage whisper behind her back, in the narrow aisle between the boards—the walls of the rink—and the foot of the bleachers. “Why are those cripples hanging around here?” The rubber carpeting had kept her from hearing their approach, but Llyra didn’t need to turn to see who was behind her, ostensibly headed for one of the girls’ locker rooms under the bleachers. Their images were reflected in the transparent plastic in front of her face, almost as well as if it were a mirror. In any case, she’d seen these four young women huddled together in the lobby when she and Jasmeen had arrived. What she didn’t know was that they were a type that could be found at almost any rink. They were burdened with their coats, purses, skate bags, school books, and an attitude she thought could have used some adjustment.
“Shhh!” another of the girls insisted. “I heard at the desk that one of them is an Intermediate—or was it a Novice?—and the other is her coach.” That was the black girl speaking, Llyra was certain, with an English accent. One of the girls was Asian, and the other two were white, a tall blond and a redhead. Llyra was fairly certain the one who had spoken first was the redhead, skinny, covered in freckles, and with a small pointy nose and chin like a Japanese cartoon girl. They all wore the ponytail, tightly pulled back, that came close to being the uniform of figure skaters everywhere.
“I heard that, too,” said another of the girls, the Asian, Llyra thought. “I heard they’re from the Outer Worlds, somewhere. Maybe the Asteroid Belt or even the moons of Jupiter. Somebody said something about the Martian Figure Skating Association. I was never any good at geography.” They kept walking to their locker room, but Llyra could still hear them. This place served a second purpose, as an emergency air storage facility—another Heinlein prediction come true. The air pressure was about twice what was normal in the rest of Armstrong, and sound carried.
“Not geography, dummy,” The blond observed. She was tall and gangly, with angled features people sometimes refer to as “hatchet- faced”. “Planetography. The coach’s certification is Martian, all right, but she’s also registered with the SFSU. Say that ten times fast!”
“Yeah, and you can tell which one she is by the way she stands—even in a walker.” That was the redhead again. “I can recognize a born trouble-maker when I see one! Who does she think she is, the colonial trash!”
The blond snorted. “Just because your father’s the East American ambassador—”
“Ambassador of the United States of America—all sixty-five of them!”
“Whatever. Look, Janna Kolditz, you’re new out here. Maybe back where you come from, everything and everyone belongs to the government and people slink along the street with their heads down, like whipped dogs.”
“Why, I—!”
“Out here, in Free Space, in the Moon, way out in the Asteroids, everybody holds himself up proudly and walks like a free individual—especially the Martians, who had to win their independence the hard way, if you’ll recall your history. They belong to themselves, Janna, they believe in themselves. That’s what you’re seeing that you don’t like.”
The Asian girl added, “Danita is right. My parents were refugees from East America, you know. My guess is that these two are trying to get used to our Lunar gravity, like we’d have to do on Earth. I don’t envy them a bit, either. It must hurt all the time, even in their sleep.”
“Well I don’t care who or what they are, Kelly Tran. Or what their problems happen to be,” the redhead sniffed. “My father would know what to do with them back home, and they’d just better stay out of my way!”
The redheaded girl reached the end of the bleachers, pushed her way through the locker room door, and disappeared. The other girls followed her. Llyra gave Jasmeen a look of exasperated disbelief. The Martian atmosphere is thin, and Martians have excellent hearing as a result. Jasmeen had heard the whole thing, too, and shook her head in agreement. “I thought all that political stuff was settled long ago,” Llyra said.
Jasmeen said, “Politics is never settled.”
***
“Okay, folks, tellya what I’m gonna do … ” Lafcadio Guzman leaned back behind his desk and clasped his large hands, fingers interlaced, over his ample abdomen. It would have been a more effective posture, Wilson thought to himself, if the used spaceship salesman had been sitting on a reclining swivel chair, instead of the same thin air that he and his grandmother were sitting on. “Three hundred platinum for the ship,” Guzman suddenly looked serious. He was more impressive when his shriveled legs were hidden by his desk. “I’ll pay for half the repairs and refitting, up to another fifty.”
He’d nodded politely at Wilson before stating his proposition, but it was Wilson’s grandmother he was actually bargaining with, and all three of them knew it. Now, giving her some time to think his offer over, Lafcadio took a heroic gulp from a baggie of steaming, heavily creamed coffee that floated within easy reach, tethered near his right elbow. In the sudden quiet, Wilson took a sip from his own baggie. He had always been partial to mocha. He was glad that he had Julie with him. He felt a little disoriented by the conditions here. For a moment he’d considered asking the man to turn on the gravity. When they’d first come in, he’d noticed huge metal pivots on which this part of the building was hung. The room was basically cylindrical, and seemed to be designed to use the circumferential wall as a floor. But aside from this desk, with its steel top and magnetic paperweights, and assorted business machinery scattered here and there, there didn’t seem to be any furniture. The man’s disability might be why he preferred freefall. Also, the room had been turned (no coincidence there, Wilson knew) so he could look at the little asteroid hunter as they bargained over her. It would have been an effective tactic if his grandmother weren’t here.
“Two hundred,” Julie answered her old friend matter-of-factly. “And you’ll pay for all necessary repairs, no limit, until the ship passes a reputable insurer’s inspection. If you do the work yourself, which I’m pretty certain you planned to all along, Wilson can help you out.”
“What’s this?” Guzman’s eyes widened dramatically, and he swore briefly in what Wilson assumed was Puerto Rican Spanish. He waved his arms around, which set him drifting off at an angle. “A measly two hundred, and you would have me tutor this untried boy for nothing? Why do you always do this to me, Julie Segovia? How am I supposed to make any money out of the deal? What are my poor children supposed to live on?”
Lafcadio had precessed until the back of his head was toward them and he had to flail around and pull on the coffee tether anchored to his desk to face them once again. It was very funny, Wilson thought, but all of this harsh talk between old friends disturbed him—until he observed that both the salesman and his grandmother seemed to be enjoying the process immensely. It had to be a New Jersey thing, he concluded.
Julie laughed, “You don’t have any children, Lafcadio. I know your wife from the last Ganymede venture, remember? You keep Jack Russell terriers.”
“They seem to flourish,” the man admitted sheepishly, “in zero gravity.�
�� “And this ‘boy’, here is hardly untried. Think back to when you were seventeen, Lafcadio, back on the street in Newark. Were you a boy then or a man? He had a man’s job on the Ceres Terraformation Project, where he did for seven ecoterrorists singlehandedly, and captured the other five. That’s why he’s here; the Curringer Corporation gave him a reward.”
Lafcadio raised both of his hands, palms turned up and outward, in apparent anguish. “I know, Julie Ngu. I saw the whole thing on 3DTV. Still—”
“Still,” she told him, “you’ll end up making quite a tidy profit, my old friend, because when I get back to my apartment in Armstrong tonight, I’ll persuade the museum in Curringer—I’m on the board of directors—to take that mysterious white elephant of yours off your hands at a fair price, and cart it away to orbit Pallas. They’ll end up running two excursions a day and three on Saturdays and Sundays. I’ll even see that you’re mentioned as a contributor, with a big bronze plaque and everything.”
A look of astonishment and delight wrote itself briefly across the ship-trader’s features until he caught himself and erased it with the best poker face he had. “How much do you think they’ll pay?” he asked, trying to look shrewd. Will they spell my name right? One Z, and one N?”
Julie laughed. “They’ll spell your name right, Lafcadio, I’ll see to it myself. And we’ll repeat everything in Chinese ideograms. As to their price, well, I shouldn’t say it, but I happen to agree with you that it’s a genuine Drake-Tealy Object, absolutely the largest ever found. It could be important, and it begs for proper examination. I wish my mother-in-law could have seen it. Anyway, it’s priceless and unique, certainly worth at least five to ten times what you paid for it.”
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