Ceres

by L. Neil Smith

  Things hadn’t turned out too badly, so far. Everything on Mars was fresh and new, compared to everything on Earth. So in spite of it all, the hotel room they’d chosen was clean and so was the doctor. He was also sober. When the window wasn’t blackened all the way, as it was now, you could look right down into the Old Survivor baseball stadium several stories below, with its highly unMartian emerald green field, and its impressive stainless steel statue—four times life size—in the forecourt.

  Just now there was no ball playing going on. Instead, machines and men labored over the grass, fighting to keep it alive in an unfriendly environment.

  The hotel even offered room service, of a sort, delivered from a cafe next door that specialized in soups made of macaroni plant. They created dozens of variations, the proprietress had told him on the phone, based on stock grown under glass so it would have less need to make oxygen and could dedicate itself to making protein. He had ordered a soup with mushrooms, turning down an offer of macaroni plant beer. The remnants of the meal he’d shared with Krystal were on a tray in the hall.

  The doctor raised an eyebrow. “You have a firstborn?” Scanning had indicated that despite being in her thirties, his latest patient was a virgin.

  “We have a firstborn?” Krystal asked. She was sitting in a hard, straightbacked chair near a dresser where the doctor had laid out his instruments. She’d been drugged heavily, both for the pain and the examination.

  Or the pain of the examination.

  “Oh, I see what you mean. The saying out here is ‘As long as it bends, it spends’. That doesn’t count government paper. The rule there is, ‘If it crinkles, it stinkles’. I’m just accustomed to being paid in platinum. The only individuals who ever use gold out here are you Earthers.”

  On Earth, at least in East America, gold was the officially favored “illegal” currency, and a legislated value had been established for it. Elsewhere in the System, the inflation caused by discovering so much of it among the asteroids had driven its value down considerably. Sitting on the nearby bed, Crenicichla sighed. “We’re really that obvious?”

  “I’m not from Earth,” Krystal protested with a slur. “I’m from Wisconsin.”

  “Obvious in small ways,” shrugged the doctor. “You still move as if you were born and raised in a full one-gee field, although you’ve both recently lived in less gravity than that. At a guess, I’d say the Moon?”

  “That’s some pretty damn good guessing.” He now had to decide whether to kill the man or not. For the time being, although he hated to admit it, even to himself, he’d had more than his fill of killing. Maybe when she was feeling better, Krystal would like to do it.

  “Not really. There’s a reward bulletin out on you. Two thousand platinum. It includes photos, artists’ sketches, backgrounds, and a fair estimate as to the young lady’s injuries. It seems you’re wanted for ship theft—my word, that was you two out in the desert, west of town, wasn’t it?—hijacking, hostage-taking, and murder.”

  “Now we have to kill him,” Krystal observed, but they both ignored her.

  Crenicichla nodded. “But, of course, Doctor, you’re far too humanitarian—”

  The doctor drew himself up into a semblance of dignity. “I happen to believe that everyone deserves whatever medical attention they require. Also, Mars is famous for being the place for a fresh start in life.”

  Crenicichla laughed. “Especially if you get paid up front, and in cash.”

  “Especially. Don’t worry, I won’t turn you in. I make more than this on the average plastic surgery, and I don’t want my reputation spoiled among people who need their faces and fingerprints changed quickly.”

  “So you do fingerprints, too,” Crenicichla shrugged. “I can see that.”

  The doctor nodded. “Well, I could keep this up all day, but do you want—”

  “Yeah,” said Crenicichla. “Give it to us, straight, doctor.”

  “Yeah, give it to us straight, dokker,” said Krystal. Crenicichla wasn’t amused to see her like this, in fact it hurt him a surprising amount.

  “Very well. Your young lady friend, here, is completely blind on one side, but needn’t be for all her life. The eye is thoroughly gone, of course. The vitreous humor looks as if it had been boiled, poaching the inside of the eye, including the retina. The good news is that the optic nerve is intact. It will take two weeks to clone her another eye.”

  “Two weeks,” Krystal repeated.

  “Two weeks.” Cloning was against East American law, and among the major reasons people traveled to the Moon and Mars. “And until then?”

  “She can wear sun-glasses. Lots of Martians do. We don’t have a nice magnetic field like Earth, or a selectively permeable canopy like Pallas. We get higher doses of radiation, even down here in the gloom. She may prefer a rakish eyepatch, although it could give you both away.”

  “Sunglasses it is, then. How much do you want for the cloning, up front?”

  The doctor snapped his glove off. “Plenty.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE: OF FREE WILL AND CHOICES

  You can discover everything you need to know, about a people or their culture, simply from their attitude toward torture. Any group or nation with a policy that encourages—or even tolerates—torture is worse than any evil it claims to be fighting.

  The ends do not justify the means. The means help to insure that the ends are just. —The Diaries of Rosalie Frazier Ngu

  “Okay,” Wilson started. “Why?”

  “How about none of your fucking beeswax, you half-slant son of a chink?”

  “That’s one-eighth slant, Fatty, and great grandson. I think it’s important for people who fly spaceships to get the numbers and names right, don’t you agree?” It was the first time in Wilson’s life that anyone had ever referred to his racial background that way. He knew it was supposed to be painfully insulting. Pharch had already used the nastiest words for Asians that Wilson had heard of. But it only seemed pathetic.

  With the Captain and what remained of his bridge crew, they were gathered in the battered dining room of the City of Newark, most of Wilson’s gang still wearing parts of their suits, weapons of various kinds slanted across their hips, on their thighs, or carried in chest harnesses. They looked like gladiators, and maybe that was what they were.

  On the screen, and in real life, they were the cowboys of the twenty-second century.

  For the most part, the place had been cleaned up—the Captain had ordered it done, even at the cost of losing evidence—and the broken furniture and table furnishings ground up for reaction mass. There were dark, ugly stains in the carpet, however, that would never come out, no matter who the spacelines bought their nanotechnology from.

  With the exception of his weapons, which had been taken from him by Swede Vargas, Fatty was no different from the rest. They’d also taken his helmet, his gloves, and his boots, but none of them had been willing to go further than that. “The man smells bad enough,” Mikey had observed accurately, “with most of his blubber still sealed in his suit!”

  Pharch had been duct-taped securely into a straight-backed chair with arms, taken from one of the staterooms. The chair had been attached to the red brick base of the wrought-iron spiral staircase leading up to the lounge. Most of the observers stood by the walls or sat on the floor. Wilson paced a little in the open space between that they’d left for him.

  “Don’t call me ‘Fatty’!” the prisoner screamed. It was difficult not to, Wilson thought, looking at the man wearing pieces of at least two suits, cut and retailored to contain what he had let himself become.

  “You’d rather I called you ‘Pimble’? I think I’d rather be called ‘Fatty’. But I asked you a question, Pharch. You’re going to give me a real answer. Why did you sabotage this vessel? What did you stand to gain?”

  “Or what? You’ll talk me to death? I know your kind, Chinaman. You want people to believe it’s your ethics, or some damn high-falutin’ thing, but you’re just
too spineless, too gutless to go for what you want.”

  “We don’t have any more time for this,” Wilson spat impatiently. That wasn’t quite true. At the moment the passenger liner was being decelerated by six of the seven asteroid hunting vessels on remote control. Casey’s was being used as a shuttle between all of them and the larger ship, while Pharch’s and the Space Viper were being towed.

  Wilson glanced over at the Captain, who nodded magisterially, then at Scotty and Shorty. “Leave him in the chair, boys. Take him to the airlock.”

  There was a collective gasp from the liner crew as the two moved to comply, Shorty drawing a huge curved knife on his way across the room.

  “Bullshit!” yelled Fatty. “You’re bluffing!”

  Together, as he continued to abuse them verbally, questioning their manhood and ancestry, they wrenched Fatty free of the stairs, tilted his chair back and dragged him to the elevator. It wasn’t hard at one-third gee. Wilson, Mikey, and Marko crammed themselves into the car. The room emptied itself as everyone else joined them, some of them taking the elevator from the kitchen.

  As the elevator cycled closed, Fatty screamed, “You don’t have the nads!” He was still screaming when the doors opened on the airlock deck. Wilson pressed buttons that opened the inner door. Shorty and Scotty dragged Fatty, in his chair, into the center of the garage-like chamber.

  Here, too, the Captain had ordered the bloodstains cleaned up. The cleaners had enjoyed more luck with the stainless steel and titanium floor.

  While everyone watched him from the semicircular atrium between the airlock and the elevators, Wilson strode to Fatty with an electronic object in his hand, which he duct-taped to the front of the man’s suit. He pressed a button on it, and a small green light came on.

  “This is a walkie-talkie, Pimble,” he said. “As long as there’s air in this room, you can communicate with me. You’ll have about three minutes, which I’m sure will seem like three hours to you. Then it’ll be too late. We’ll pitch your dead body out, have your ship fumigated and rechristened—where’d you get that Lilac Waffle, anyway?—and be done with you. The Captain has okayed this and he’s the law out here.”

  Pharch sneered up into Wilson’s face. “I still say you don’t have the—”

  “Have it your way.” Wilson turned on his heel, walked to the inner door.

  “You don’t have the nads!” Pharch shouted at his back. The door closed and Pharch sat alone in the middle of the room. He tried to see if they were watching him through the porthole in the inner door, but it was bright in here and light reflected from the glass in the porthole.

  “You don’t have the nads,” he said quietly, almost to himself.

  Suddenly, there were klaxons sounding, so loud it hurt his teeth, and big red and yellow lights swirling and flashing. He began to reconsider.

  With a huge thump, the gaskets at the bottom of the outer airlock door unsealed, and a great rushing noise could be heard. The air was being spilled out into space. It grew colder almost instantly, and the noise of the klaxons grew less and less. There could be no question. They—or rather Wilson Ngu—was going to do it. He was going to die.

  “All right! All right!” he screamed. “I’ll tell you! I’ll tell you!”

  For a long, unendurable moment, it seemed as if he had waited too long, and nobody had heard him. As miserable as his life was, as it had always been, he didn’t want it to be over with. He tried his best not to whimper. He tried harder not to let his sphincters release. He failed in both of those efforts. He knew that he had been reduced to something less than human. The worst was that he knew that he deserved it.

  He was torn from his dying contemplations by another loud slamming noise. The outer door had fallen again and locked. The rushing sound was gone, as were the klaxons and the flashing lights. It began to feel warm again.

  The inner door opened and Wilson strode toward him. “Okay, Pimble, talk.”

  ***

  Krystal gradually awakened for the half-dozenth time so far tonight.

  Although it was very nice to have a mind again—drugs had never interested her much; she considered them obscene—she was having some trouble making hers up. Somehow, she and Johnnie had gotten clear of the absolute catastrophe that the City of Newark operation had become.

  She lay beside him now in the darkness of their rented room. A place like this on Earth or the Moon would smell bad, and they’d be unable to avoid hearing their neighbors arguing, watching 3DTV, having sex. But it was quiet here, and clean. She’d awakened several times as the drug wore off, sweating hard, thirsty as a camel, scarcely daring to reach up and touch the heavy bandages covering her nearly fatal injuries.

  On the table at her side of the bed, she found a self-cooling container full of sweet electrolyte replacement, she sipped through a straw. Johnnie had added ice, even though it wasn’t needed. He was so sweet. She loved ice. He’d told the doctor he wanted to buy her a new eye.

  She hoped it would be the same color as the original.

  She’d been told that she’d rescued both of them from the wreckage of the stolen yacht. It was true, she had extremely unfocused memories of being tied down, of chewing her way free—was that why her gums were so sore?—of struggling through a long tunnel that writhed and bucked and tossed her from side to side like some angry living thing, and finally of smacking somebody on the head with a frying pan, of all things.

  Oh yes, and kissing Johnnie in the airlock. He’d said she was his girl.

  Or something like that, anyway.

  However the last thing she remembered clearly was looking into the angry eyes—and the automatic pistol muzzle—of Jasmeen Khalidov, fresh out of ammo herself, and unable to reload in the awkward position she was in. Then came the unbearably bright flash, the roar, the pain. If it was the last thing Krystal did, Jasmeen was going to die as slowly as possible.

  Johnnie had been sleeping in a chair. She saw how uncomfortable he was and insisted that he sleep on the bed with her. He was a man of honor, she knew, and she wouldn’t really have minded much if he weren’t. Across the room, the 3DTV was playing with the sound turned down almost all the way. The captions were on and she’d awakened to an old movie about soldiers with little capes on their hats, fighting guys in dresses in the desert.

  What was that all about?

  By now, they’d both seen the horrible news that the passenger liner City of Newark had been snatched from extinction by a heroic squadron of asteroid hunters, led by that nasty little capitalist killer, Wilson Ngu. In a few days it would reach Phobos in a different way than Null Delta Em had meant, and, except for the shouting, the celebration, and the self-congratulatory media coverage, that would be that.

  It was going to be very painful—but irresistible—to watch. As far as they knew, she and Johnnie—and of course that horrible old woman in Amherst, Massachusetts—were the movement’s only surviving leaders. For some reason she hated that old woman as much as she did Jasmeen.

  She’d never realized that before.

  Of course on a personal note, it was nice for her and Johnnie that all life on Mars would not be annihilated. For some reason she had yet to fathom, he had come to love her. Of his sincerity, she was totally convinced, both by his manner and his deeds on her behalf. He was very chivalrous, and she was reasonably certain that she could come to love him, as well. Mars was a good place for new beginning. They were young. He could grow a beard, she could dye her hair, and they could start a macaroni farm and populate it with a dozen kids. She thought that might be very good.

  Or it might be just like the family farm life she’d escaped from back on Earth.

  On the other hand. there was Jasmeen, Wilson that nasty killer of a capitalist dog, his show-off sister, their smug, destructive parents, and that witch of a grandmother—where did she get off staying in her twenties for half a century?—all of them sitting around in some expensive restaurant probably this very minute, surrounded by servants and fawning
reporters, gobbling lobster farmed on Mars, with imported caviar and truffles, swilling champagne, laughing at her and Johnnie and all the brave martyrs of the Mass Movement and Null Delta Em.

  A small flame began to glow within her breast. Would it be right to run away and start a new life and do nothing about all that? Would they even have a right to a new life if they didn’t try to even the score?

  She looked over at the man sleeping so soundly, so sweetly beside her. Should they start a new life together, or finish the old one off properly?

  What would Johnnie think?

  ***

  “It was Null Delta Em,” Fatty began.

  Wilson pulled a folding metal chair up and sat down for the first time in hours. The cavernous passenger airlock was warm once again, and seemed almost festive, compared to the way it had seemed when his prisoner had been alone in here with the outer door slowly opening. It was festive compared with the dining room, the way it looked at the moment.

  Someone had brought folding tables, as well, and coffee urns, and heated frozen pastries from the kitchen. Almost all of the liner’s crew was here now, as they deserved to be, and some of the passengers, too. Most of the East Americans had declined the invitation with a shudder.

  Wilson had cut the tape holding Pharch’s hands to the chair (his torso and legs were still secured) and given him food and something to drink.

  “It was Null Delta Em,” Wilson repeated. The room was as silent as if no one else were in it. “Tell me exactly what you mean by that, Pharch.”

  “I couldn’t stand it. I stumbled in here, into this lock, when I thought everybody else was gone, looking for a way to get back to my ship and away from this place.”

  “Desertion?” Shorty shouted at him.