Ceres

by L. Neil Smith

  Surrounded by asteroid hunters, Lafcadio Guzman grinned and banged the little Japanese plastic noisemaking tube he’d been given on the next seat below him.

  It was great news footage, Honey thought, and an even greater story. Just too bad the whole thing was as phony as a three ruble note.

  “They can’t really jump to their feet, but how about one where they raise their arms and shout as if someone has just hit a home run?”

  It was Aaron Manzel, standing beside her, who made the suggestion—another great story she couldn’t tell. More than anyone except the vessel’s captain, he’d saved the lives of three hundred passengers. But he didn’t want anyone to know about it and wouldn’t tolerate being photographed.

  She passed Manzel’s idea on, took the pictures, and sent them to the wireless address specified. She was folding her headset camera and mike when Adam arrived at her side.

  “Thank you, Miss Graham,” he told her, lifting a hand to shake hers.

  She didn’t know what to say. In terms a professional journalist understands, she had sold out to this man and his family. She could continue her career only because nobody important in her circles knew what she had done to participate in the news, rather than simply record and comment on it. The trouble was that she knew.

  She had worse problems. “I guess you’re welcome, Dr. Ngu. I hope I never have to do anything like this again, for as long as I live.”

  “You’re saving lives,” he told her. His wife Ardith was beside him now, along with his son Wilson, and the two girls, Llyra and Jasmeen, whom Honey had thought of as Adam’s daughters since she’d met them on Ceres. “But you’re packing up. Aren’t you going to stay and watch the game?”

  “Whichever game you happen to mean, Dr. Ngu,” she replied. “No, I promised Arleigh I’d get back to Ceres as soon as possible. He says he misses me. And do you know what? I miss him, too. Now how the hell did that happen?”

  Adam and his family laughed. “I’ll see you back there in a few days. I can’t really thank you enough, Honey, I owe you a very big one.”

  “Yes,” she said. “And I plan to collect.”

  ***

  “We don’ need no stinkin’ tickets!” Krystal laughed. And she was right. When they’d gotten married in the storefront wedding parlor next door to the Chinese restaurant they’d had lunch in, they’d been given a week’s worth of complimentary passes to the Old Survivor stadium.

  Johnnie grinned at her. “No, all we need is these!” He flipped his jacket open to reveal, for just an instant, the autopistol he was carrying.

  They stood at the entrance of a tunnel that led to the first tier of the stadium’s left field seats. They’d seen that Honey woman on 3DTV, interviewing the Ngu family and others who had just arrived on Mars after their harrowing journey. They had been invited here today by the Coprates Warlords. Behind them had flapped an enormous banner, hanging from the second tier railing, proclaiming “City of Newark Survivors’ Day”.

  Krystal had a big smile on her face. Wearing sunglasses, no one would know she’d been hurt. “All you need is love—and a big enough weapon!”

  Through the dark tunnel, they could see the right field seats, jammed with spectators yelling their heads off, even though the teams were only warming up. From time to time, the name of one of the local heroes would be announced, he’d strike a pose, throw a ball, or swing a bat, and they’d go crazy. Johnnie tried to remember the name of the visiting team, but couldn’t. He was too nervous, and he didn’t really care.

  A huge 3DTV screen over on the other side filled itself with portraits and statistics that changed constantly. Crenicichla had always believed that baseball was a game invented for the benefit of accountants.

  At the sides at the opposite end of the tunnel, he could see big orange banners waving in the breeze, part of the decorations he’d seen on 3DTV, honoring the survivors. Their orange color was an insult and a perversion. It was the original color of the planet Mars before it had been contaminated and despoiled by the vile fungus covering it now.

  “Do you want this tunnel,” Krystal asked him now, “or should I take it?”

  “No, I’ll take it,” he told her, feeling his heart race, his knees shake.

  “It’s the right thing to do, you know.” She stood on her tiptoes and kissed his cheek. He took her in his arms and kissed her properly, just as he had in the marriage parlor. She was right. Others before yourself.

  “I know. Let’s do it.” He released her, turned, and started down the tunnel. He watched her walk to the next tunnel on his left and disappear into it. He looked at the crowd on the other side of the stadium, enjoying themselves so thoroughly their cheers and stomping made the stadium rattle. The giant 3DTV screen over right field, which had been showing someone at bat, was suddenly filled with colorful three-dimensional static.

  He ignored it.

  Unconsciously counting his steps, he came close to the end and finished his count. He took a deep breath, stepped out into the stadium and drew his gun, holding it in both hands as he swung left, taking the muzzle where he knew that it would find the key members of the abominable Ngu family.

  He saw Krystal doing the same at the next tunnel mouth, but swinging right, a few dozen yards away. Only there was nobody between them. The seats were completely empty.

  The giant screen behind him suddenly showed the image of a young Asian man a little older than Wilson. Beside him was a curly-haired brunette of about the same age, holding a baby in her arms. They looked strangely familiar.

  “What the hell?” Crenicichla demanded of nobody in particular, until Krystal yelled to look at the right field seats and the rest of the stadium. What he saw gave him the feel of icy fingertips up his spine.

  The entire stadium was empty. All the noise and shouting he’d been hearing were recorded, the spectators only a image being projected onto a huge translucent curtain hanging down from the tier of seats above. Only the flags and bunting flapping in the breeze around him, and the image on the giant screen behind were real. Everything else was—

  “It’s a fake!” Krystal screamed.

  The young man on the screen grinned. “Hello, people of the Solar System. I apologize for breaking into whatever you were watching. I’m Emerson Ngu, captain of the interstellar exploration ship, Fifth Force. This is my lovely wife Rosalie Frazier Ngu beside me, and our youngest son, Harrison, in her arms. We and our friends have been on a very long trip, and have returned now to tell you all about it.”

  Crenicichla rushed toward his new wife to comfort her. She rushed toward him. They met in the middle of the section, beside the bottom rail.

  “Oh, Johnnie, what are we going to do?”

  “You’re going to drop your weapons and put your hands on your heads,” said a commanding voice. It was the Captain of the goddamned City of Newark, pointing a pistol at them. He came out of the tunnel—there must have been a janitor’s room or something he’d been hiding in—and stepped into the seating section, ten or twelve rows above them.

  Unaware that nobody—at least in the Old Survivor Stadium—was paying attention, Emerson went on. “There’s a gigantic Drake-Tealy Object in the Cometary Halo, about as far from Pluto as Pluto is from the Sun. When we approached it too closely, it seemed to open out into a doughnut shape, and pulled us right in. When we saw the stars again, we were in a different Solar System, with not one but two lovely, livable worlds circling a warm, cheerful yellow star a lot like our own.”

  “Do what he said—drop your weapons!”

  Wilson Ngu had followed the Captain and now stood beside him. Others emerged from the tunnel Krystal had entered by. Together Johnnie and Krystal saw the entire Ngu family, except for the brother on Ceres, come out and stand on the same level as the Captain. Some of them were in wheelchairs. All of them were armed.

  “Lose the weapons now,” Wilson said, and live. Otherwise, you’ll die.”

  “We’ve spent the last decade and a half exploring those
worlds,” said Emerson, “while our physicists struggled to get us back home. There’s a giant Drake-Tealy Object there, too, and they think, somehow, its the same one that took us there.”

  Krystal looked at her husband. “I’ll get the two girls, you get the mother and the son. Then we’ll go for the grandmother and whoever else.”

  Emerson said, “We’re back, now—having left eight hundred folks on those two worlds—to invite more people to join us, to come and settle the new worlds.”

  “On the count of three!”

  They raised their guns and fired. The other side seemed slow to react—perhaps they were distracted by the return of the Fifth Force—but none of them fell. The one Krystal referred to as “the mother” pulled the trigger. Crenicichla watched a bullet take Krystal in the throat, just where her collarbones came together. As she fell backwards, over the rail, Ardith’s second shot took her in the solar plexus.

  Krystal flipped over the rail and fell fifty feet onto the top of a concrete dugout. There was a lot of blood. Crenicichla screamed and charged the Ngu family above him, leaping across the tops of the seats, firing as rapidly as he could at Ardith and Julie. He could see his bullets striking the seatbacks around them, chipping off bits, then the unnaturally young Ngu grandmother folded and fell, holding her belly.

  Adam, Wilson, Llyra, and Jasmeen pulled their triggers at the same time. Crenicichla saw the flashes, but never heard the noise of the gunshots.

  PART FOUR: ONE FULL GEE

  Since no government “Leviathan”—and very few corporations, if any—can be trusted to protect the Earth and its progeny from “Extinction Level Events” without exacting a price for such a service too terrible to pay, the question remains, who will do the job, and by what means.

  After long consideration, I have come here to propose that we limit ourselves to two measures, and otherwise let the market take its course. The first is that an observatory be established, probably on Earth’s Moon, with the idea of finding and tracking all sorts of space debris—planet-threatening or otherwise—and making this information available for a modest price.

  The second is that a fund be established—initially by the Curringer Foundation, but encouraging other corporations and individuals to contribute—rewarding those who capture or deflect celestial objects proven to be on a collision course with Earth or any Settled World.

  —Dr. Evgeny Zacharenko Addressing the Ashland Event Commission

  Of the Solar Geological Society Curringer, Pallas, August 9, 2095

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE: NGUS IN THE NEWS

  Ultimately, all individual behavior is about sex and all group behavior is about eating. All government behavior is also about eating—the individual. —The Diaries of Rosalie Frazier Ngu

  Adam and Ardith sat on their new front porch drinking Pallatian wine. It grew darker by the minute and they were waiting for the big show.

  “Someday, you know,” Adam spoke into the gathering evening air, mostly to himself, “there’ll be a highway running past this property, from the Construction Village three miles over that way—we took the dome down yesterday, it was almost sad—to wherever Cereans want to go.”

  “Cereans,” Ardith laughed. “And great big shade trees standing in our front yard, with tire swings hanging from their longest limbs, for grandchildren.”

  “More grandchildren?” Adam asked.

  “More grandchildren,” Ardith told him, as she glanced down at the visicard in her hand. About four by seven inches, it could be loaded from the SolarNet, then taken away to be viewed somewhere else at some other time. She’d already watched it several times, and would leave it on her nightstand. It was from her son Wilson, holding two-year-old Tieve in his arms. “It’s so hard to believe that it’s already 2136, Adam, three long, busy years after all the things that reshaped our lives there on Mars.”

  “Time flies when you’re having fun,” he told her. “They had just learned that Anna Wertham Savage, former leader of the now-defunct Mass Movement had been arrested for embezzling contributed funds. Also for smoking tobacco within the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. She’d gotten six months in prison for the former offense, and six years for the latter. “A little too fast to suit me. There’s so much left I want to do. And seeing my grandfather look the same age as my son helped me make a decision.”

  “And that would be?”

  “When we’re through with the aerial plantings, and the last of the watercourse surveys, you and I are going to the Moon for regeneration. Hell, we might even go out and take a look at the planets Emerson discovered.”

  “So you’d abandon me for a younger … me?”

  “I’d be younger, too. Maybe we could even … ”

  “More babies?” Ardith laughed. She’d finally come to understand that losing four out of six children had made her keep all that distance between herself and those she loved. It had made her crazy. It hurt too much to love someone and lose them.

  “Not unless you wanted them, too.”

  “More babies, then. Our children are a challenge we hurl in the face of a hostile universe.”

  “Wow! Who said that?”

  “I did, my darling Adam, I did. Hey, there goes one, now! See it?”

  “No, I—wow! Who could have predicted that?”

  They were looking up into the sky, their sky, the sky of Ceres. High above the rugged landscape, just beginning to be softened by teeming lifeforms—everything from earthworms to sequoia seedlings—the plastic atmospheric canopy was displaying behavior similar to that of Pallas.

  Only different. It seemed to be a matter of magnitude and resonance. There would be no fantastic sunrises and sunsets on the largest of the asteroids. Instead, whenever the self-healing canopy was struck with even the smallest micrometeorite, it sent multicolored ripples outward in rainbow order, toward the entire horizon.

  The discovery had been made just after the harsh “primordial” reducing atmosphere of nitrogen, methane, and ammonia, generated by custom-tailored microbes feeding on the raw carbonaceous chondrite soil, had been replaced with a mixture of oxygen, nitrogen, and carbon dioxide, also manufactured by microorganisms. The larger the bit of rock, the faster it was going relative to Ceres, and the harder it impacted, the brighter the colors and the longer they lasted before fading.

  “It’s a hell of a show,” Adam told Ardith. He squeezed more wine from the commercial baggie through the valves of the baggies they were drinking from, then put an arm around his wife. “I wish I could claim credit.”

  “You can—it would never have happened without you.” She kissed him passionately. They occupied themselves that way for a considerable amount of time. Finally: “I think it’s time to go indoors, wouldn’t you say, dear?”

  “For more reasons than one. Here, hold this.” He gave her his drink and the larger baggie as well, then swept her off her feet into his arms. He strode across the porch—which was the only part of the house constructed yet—across a plank, and into a large, temporary yurt made from modern materials.

  Inside, they had a big roomful of inflatable furniture, and in the center, below the chimney hole, a tiny one-piece kitchen that also heated the place. They went to a beanbag sofa located in front of a twelve-foot 3DTV screen. They sat down and he fiddled with a remote control.

  “Knock, knock!” said a voice at the door. “Am I interrupting anything?”

  “Not yet,” Ardith replied. “Please come in, Julie. The show’s about to start.”

  “It’s actually been over for forty-five minutes already, but thank you.” Julie found a chair that suited her, pulled off her flying jacket, leather helmet, and goggles. “It’s maddening, the lightspeed lag, but so far, it’s all we’ve got.”

  It was highly possible, they all knew, that several discoveries made by the Fifth Force were about to give birth to instantaneous interplanetary communication. It was also possible that the velocities of spaceships were about to be raised several orders of magnitude: Earth to Ceres
in under an hour. Then they’d get to see their granddaughter a bit more frequently.

  Flaming red hair for the first time in the history of the Ngu family. Life was wonderfully unpredictable.

  “We’re back, again,” said the announcer, “At the EPIC Center in Fort Collins, Colorado, West America, to bring you the final event in Systemwide competition, the ladies’ long program. Eight women are just about to skate, and for the first time, one of them, the up-and-coming Llyra Ayn Ngu, wasn’t born on Earth. Here’s a video from yesterday as she prepared with her coach, Jasmeen Mohammedova Khalidova—a native of Mars—for her short program, which, as you may recall, she won handily.”

  There followed brief interviews with both Llyra and Jasmeen, then a series of what seemed to Ardith unusually obnoxious commercials. She noticed that Jasmeen’s pregnancy still wasn’t showing yet. The sooner she got off that godforsaken planet and out of its vile gravity well, the better.

  Looking into her lap, Ardith squeezed a corner of the visicard for perhaps the fiftieth time, as Adam rolled his eyes in disbelief—and then grinned. From the control space of Mighty Mouse’s Girlfriend, Wilson spoke for a while both to her and to his father, and also to Tieve, who held both her hands charmingly folded in front of her, made word-sounding noises at the audio pickup, and waved. Ardith’s heart melted all over again.

  “We’re completely outsystem, here, but almost finished,” Wilson said. We finally caught up with the Diamond Rogue again, and this time we were ready for it—show Grandma and Grandpa, Tieve.” Between the little hands was a raw diamond at least the size of a softball.

  “The whole asteroid is made of at least a million chunks that size. We even swept up the carbon matrix they were in, for later analysis. This should put DeBeers right out of business, while assuring our future.”