There was a hatch set deep into the rock wall, a rectangular airlock with another dim red light beside it. I chuckled and pounded on the door. Caleb, feeling around beside me, twisted a knob. After a few minutes the hatch cracked and we stepped inside the lock. The door closed automatically behind us. We waited for the lock to pressure up. When the hissing of air stopped the opposite hatch opened. We hunched down and stepped through.
A bald man in shorts, shirt, and a scowl patted down our p-suits, one hand on the shooter clipped to his thigh. Inasmuch as a normal-sized person in a pressure suit looks like a marshmallow the size of Rhode Island, our outsized suits made him wary. When I finally made it all the way out of mine, he was at first startled and then appraising. “You looking for work?”
When Caleb emerged from his p-suit he sucked in an audible breath and said, “How about you?”
“No,” I said, trying not to laugh at Caleb’s expression, “we’re old friends of Maggie’s. She around?”
He seemed undecided and looked us over again. “What’s that you’ve got there?” he said, poking one finger at the bundle strapped against Caleb’s chest. Paddy gave an angry yell and he jumped. “Fer crissake! What was that?”
“Our daughter,” Caleb said, and pulled back the hood to show him.
The little man stared, slack-jawed.
“And our son,” I said proudly, as Sean began to cry on cue. The twins settled down after a few soothing pats and went back to sleep. They were good that way. I asked again where we might find Maggie.
“Through there,” the little man said weakly, and tottered over to collapse into a chair.
We entered a corridor and followed the lights and the noise until we emerged into a large room. It was decorated more like a suburban home than the only pleasure palace outsystem. Almost twelve meters square with a high, curved ceiling and walls with no corners, it was painted a soft cream in color. And—
“Windows?” I said incredulously. I went over to one and tried to draw the blinds, only to discover the cord was painted on the wall. So was the rest of the window. It was some of the best trompe l'oeil I’d ever seen. I gaped at it, and at Caleb.
“Whoever did this is wasting themselves out here,” Caleb said, “when they could be ripping off New York art galleries big time.”
The blind on this “window” was open and a bright yellow sun was setting into a lake between two forested mountains. Hidden lights mimicked sunshine and dappled the rug. There was actually a rug, a thin brown affair without any padding, not that any was really needed on Ceres—if you fell down you wouldn’t bump that hard. Leafy potted plants and enormous floor pillows in pastels and earth tones completed the decor.
A bar against one wall, tended by a very young, very pretty blonde who looked very tired, did steady business. Perched on a stool on a tiny stage against the opposite wall, a man with a grimy bandage around his eyes and an unsightly case of sun itch played a concertina. He sang lustily with his head back and his mouth wide open. The working girls and guys, there must have been at least twenty of them crowded around him, sang along with enthusiasm, some of them even in tune. There were many shapes and sizes and races, some pretty, some homely, some thin, some plump, all young. The girls were wrapped like candy in bright colors. The garments floated softly around them in graceful folds in the low gee whenever they turned abruptly, which they did often for just that effect, especially on the tiny dance floor I saw in the back of the room. The guys looked clean and masculine in crisp blue jumpsuits.
The rest of the room was taken up by Belters young and old, a few female, more male. All had silly grins on their faces as they clutched their paid companions closer with one hand and drank with the other. None seemed in much of a hurry to race upstairs, or wherever the equivalent was located at Maggie’s. They looked clean and smelled the same way, which after Piazzi City was a pleasant surprise. I saw the reason when one woman emerged in a cloud of steam from behind a door that said “Showers.”
A nice place, all told, Maggie’s. A place of business, true, but that business did not interfere with having a good time. I liked it. And then Maggie herself entered the room through a door in the opposite wall. Her eyes, and I didn’t blame them, barely bothered to register my existence on her peripheral vision before fastening on Caleb. The strong, silent type never goes out of style, and tall, dark, and handsome don’t hurt, either.
Maggie padded toward him, her interest and her intentions plain, and Caleb looked at me, registering mild alarm. I swallowed a giggle and took a smooth step forward, inserting myself between them. “Hey, Maggie Lu. Read any good books in the last million klicks?”
The annoyance she felt at being moved off target vanished when she looked at me again and recognized me the second time around. “Star!” she yelped, and threw herself forward. “It’s about time!”
She gave me a fierce hug and Sean started to cry again. More than one incredulous eye turned our way and we had to bring out both babies and show them off, always a chore. We took the opportunity to change their diapers and the whole room crowded around to ooh and ah. I reflected that in the business she was currently in, Maggie must have one hell of a medtech working for her for babies to be that much of a rarity. I’d seen more than a few kids racing around Piazzi City.
Maggie calmed the hubbub and commandeered us. “Step into my office.” We followed her, past one door opening onto a tiny theater with a tinier stage and another that opened into a kitchen where three cooks sweated and swore over pots that smelled of nectar and ambrosia, through a third, behind which was a large office. The giggles and curses and squeezebox arias shut off like a switch when the door closed. “Sit down, sit down,” she said, waving a hand. I forgot and sat down too hard and bounced up again. Maggie grinned. Maggie had a great grin, wide and wicked; she reminded me of Charlie that way. I sat down, slower this time, and put Sean to my breast while Caleb got out a bottle for Paddy. “She gets the bottle, he gets you? Doesn’t quite seem fair.”
“We trade off.” The wails shut up. Peace broke out. I leaned back and smiled at Maggie. She shook her head. “What?”
“You. With babies. I never thought I’d see the day.”
“I baby-sat Ellfive for some seventeen years,” I said dryly, “including two on Luna and thirteen on site. I used to go thirty hours without sleep and weeks without a bath and sometimes a whole month without an assassination attempt. I was exhausted, I smelled bad, and I was paranoid the whole time.”
“So?”
“So what makes you think motherhood is any different?”
“You’re still wearing it,” she said, pointing. She pushed her dark, straight hair back from her right ear and displayed the one-carat diamond solitaire in her right earlobe. “Me, too. She ever tell you about that?” This to Caleb. “I’ll never forget the expression on Sam’s face when we broke open the nucleus on that comet and found all that crystalline carbon, but you should have seen Star when they told her they were making earrings for the whole team.”
“Maggie, I—”
“One little hole,” she hooted, “and you would have thought someone was taking aim at her with a twelve-inch cannon.”
“You never told me this story,” Caleb said to me.
“Maggie,” I said, “as I have explained many times before, it is simply that I do not usually wear jewelry.”
“Uh-huh. You had to that time. After what you put the trapper team through to make that gizmo work, you could hardly refuse.” She smiled expectantly at Caleb. “I don’t believe we’ve met.”
“If I could get a word in edgewise,” I said. “Maggie, this is Caleb O’Hara. Security for my little expedition.”
“Her husband, too,” he added. Maggie made Caleb a little uneasy.
She looked at the twins, raised one eyebrow, and said, “Well, I should hope so.”
After we burped the babies and got them back to sleep, I leaned back and cast an appraising eye over her office. “What’s a nice girl lik
e you doing in a place like this? Are you—ah—working?”
She grinned again, as if I should have known better, and perhaps I should have. Maggie Lu was one of the freest people I’d ever met. She had discovered as a youth, she once informed me, that life was just one big fucking laugh. The realization was a strong and lasting one, so much so that she never got serious enough about anything to allow anyone to run her or her life. If someone tried, she simply downed tools and walked away. She was a wizard at R and D into adaptation of silicon and silicon compounds in vacuum, and she was never out of a job for long. But mention company loyalty or national pride or true love or anything involving a long-term commitment to a single cause in her presence and she was gone, all bills paid and all her belongings stuffed into an army surplus duffel bag that looked older than she did. If Maggie was afraid of anything, it was of staying in one place long enough to put down roots. “No need to be so delicate, Star,” she said, still grinning. “No, I just manage the place. I struck out prospecting pretty quick after I arrived. Processing silicates is one thing. Mining them is something else altogether.” She grimaced. “So I found out.”
“What went wrong?”
“ ‘Wrong’?” She looked straight at me, but I got the feeling she was seeing something else. “Nothing went wrong, not exactly.” We waited. “It’s black out there, Star. And quiet. You’ve never heard such quiet. After you’ve been out for a while, you realize you’re the only living thing in an area the size of all Terra. You start wondering how you thought you could survive in this wasteland. You begin to fear death. To fear God, even if you don’t believe.” She shook herself and laughed a little. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to make a speech. I guess you could say I found out I was mortal.”
“ ‘Were you ever out in the Great Alone, when the moon was awful clear?’ ” I quoted softly. “ ‘And the icy mountains hemmed you in with a silence you most could hear?’ ”
“Yes,” she said, almost eagerly, “that’s it. That’s it exactly. ‘A silence you most could hear.’ ”
We sat quietly for a few moments before I said, “And then what happened?”
Her shoulders moved in something halfway between a shrug and a shudder, and she gave me a sheepish smile. “After I’d done pondering the mysteries of the universe, you mean? Well, I came in here one night to drown my sorrows. The guy who owned the place wanted to put me to work. He wasn’t real polite about asking. I wasn’t real polite about refusing. After he died, the girls offered to cut me in for a piece of the action if I’d stay on and run the place, and I thought, what the hell. It’s a good little business. It’s registered with the Magdalene Guild on Luna, and we make our own booze, so it’s been profitable.”
“This outbreak of Hudson’s Disease couldn’t have done you any good.”
Her smile faded. “No, and I have to thank you for getting us out of that mess, Star.” Later we found out that Maggie’s Place had turned itself into a hospital for the duration of the disease, cycling its locks to anyone who could make it that far. She even had an old ’02 Ford Flivver modified to run on raw uranium—the vehicle with the yellow pinwheel decals we had seen in the lock—that she used to haul in a group of Aussies from 8687Boomerang who were too sick to make it in on their own.
“We just came from speaking with Takemotu. From the way he talks you’d think there had never been anything wrong. No illness, no closed city, nothing. Butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth.”
Her eyes darkened. “So you’ve met him?”
“Today, for the first time. He doesn’t seem to have enough on the ball to be running Piazzi City.”
“He’s only been in charge a few weeks,” she said thinly. “Give him time.” And then she pointedly changed the subject. “I’ve heard some interesting things about you, Star.” I groaned and her hazel eyes twinkled. “Leading habitat revolutions against Terran tyranny. Establishing diplomatic relations with Galactic City Hall.” She demanded a firsthand description of the Librarian and her ship. She was disappointed when I told her the Librarians were disinterested in returning to our backwater section of the galaxy anytime soon, unless somebody threatened Archy, but she accepted their appearance the same way most spacers did—“It was only a matter of time before somebody showed up. We’re lucky we bored them.” She cocked an eye at me. “I heard about Grays, too, Star. I’m sorry.”
I shrugged. I was long over Grays’s betrayal and death. Or I had been until Leif showed up. “He wanted Terranova to round out his personal fiefdom. He just wouldn’t leave it alone.”
“He couldn’t,” she said. “That was Grays all over. He saw something he wanted, and if it wasn’t something he would inherit or could buy, then he’d just take it. Look at LEO Base. Look at HEO Base. He’s lucky he didn’t start a war when he moved in on HEO Base.” She shook her head firmly and summed up Grayson Cabot Lodge the Fourth’s career in two words. “Dumb fuck.”
I just hoped it wasn’t hereditary. “Charlie said about the same thing.”
“Wise woman, your sister,” she observed. “How is Charlie? And Simon?”
“Come on over and see for yourself.”
Maggie’s face lit up. “They’re here, too?”
I nodded. “And Crip, and I think you know Roger Lindbergh. Actually, Maggie, I had an ulterior motive in coming to see you.”
“Oh?”
“I remember you telling me, when you worked in the Frisbee, that you almost didn’t sign up for the job. You were always conducting other people’s experiments, you said, usually something typically idiotic dreamed up by Terran scientists.”
She shrugged. “I didn’t like it much, but I wanted to space. Everything’s a trade-off.”
“I was wondering—” I let my voice trail off artistically.
Her eyes narrowed. “Yes?”
“Well, I was wondering if you were at all interested in returning to your original line of work.” I added, “We saw your notice in the town square. It had a kind of wistful ring to it, I thought.”
Her feet slid down off the top of her desk. “Silicon teching? You mean it?”
“We can always use another silicon specialist, and you’ve actually mined it on Luna and worked with it in zerogee, as well as prospected for it here.”
“I’ve processed it here, too.”
“Well. That’s more experience than most of the people I brought along have.”
“What would I be doing?”
“We plan on shipping the silicon raw at first, but I want to see if we can’t design some kind of simple solar refining process to take place on or inside the raw rock, a process that ideally employs the slag for propulsion while leaving the refined silicon in place for delivery.”
“And that’s what I’d be doing?”
I nodded. “With your experience you can run your own show. We’re looking for ways to refine oh-two and hydrogen and nitrogen in transit, as well, so I think we can keep you interested.” I smiled when she expelled a large whoof of air. “Sign on with us, Maggie. We’re not much more than a couple of overgrown space trucks right now, and,” I added, grinning, “I doubt if I can match your wages here, but you get board and room and a salary to start.”
“Bonuses later?”
“Bonuses, my foot, you’ll be getting a piece of the action eventually. I’ve put the word out that I will entertain any idea, no matter how bizarre, that anyone has for utilizing our assets and our location to start up anything that looks remotely profitable.”
“Hell, Star,” she said, “wages are the last thing I’m worried about. I told you the truth, Maggie’s Place has a good gross, but I’m barely getting by.” She waved a disgusted hand. “I keep grubstaking miners with hard luck stories and the bastards pay me back by eloping with my employees. I feel like a goddam dating service. Besides, I always knew I could run a research and fabrication department better than those nerds I worked for in the Frisbee.” I opened my mouth and Maggie held up one hand palm out. “Stop. Put right out of your mind a
ny thoughts of advertising for help. You don’t have to ask me twice.” I shut my mouth obediently and she bellowed, “Nora!”
Nora was a busty Irish woman with a loud, merry laugh, shrewd blue eyes, and a business sense like Andrew Carnegie. The two of them had it all arranged and ready for thumbprints in about ten minutes. Nora insisted the business keep Maggie’s name. Maggie was appropriately touched. She packed a bag— still her old duffel—and we went out into the party room to baptize the birth of a new regime in alcohol.
Nora stood the room the first round. Everyone raised a glass in Maggie’s direction and Nora led the group in a chorus of “For She’s a Jolly Good Fellow.” They sang a verse or two of “The Day Star Went Nova” just to make me feel at home. The squat miner in the filthy jumpsuit came in, Nora got out the assay kit, the test tube bloomed red. There were loud hosannahs and more toasts and I didn’t think we were ever going to get out of there. At last sight the lucky miner was on her way upstairs (or wherever) with one of Nora’s boys in tow. I only hoped for the sake of her companion that they’d detour by way of the showers.
— 5 —
Paper Tiger
The asteroid belt… is a paper tiger. The material in it is strewn so widely over so vast a volume that any spaceship going through it is not at all likely to see anything of visible size.
—Isaac Asimov
AT TEN HUNDRED HOURS the following day I looked down at my assembled crew chiefs, half of them off the Voortrekker. “So. Have you folks had enough of practicing first aid?”
The response was long, loud, and unanimously in the affirmative and I had to grin. “All right, then, it’s show time. Perry, start working out a way to turn that rock loose in close orbit to Ceres. Caleb, you’d better detail someone to discourage any stray miners who might trip over it and try to sell it back to us. Crip, get the Voortrekker to moor parallel to us, and start the crew breaking out the companionway modules. You’re in sole charge of curing the intestinal gas of this expedition.”
A Handful of Stars (Star Svensdotter #2) Page 9
