A Handful of Stars (Star Svensdotter #2)

by Dana Stabenow

  The next step was to put out the photovoltaic array, and not before time as our batteries were beginning to run low. The nicest benefit of space industries is that, after the initial costs of setting up a solar power generator, the rest is gravy. A simple reflector, say a hundred meters square, weighs less than six tons and collects eleven thousand kilowatts per twenty-four-hour period. On Terra, similar output of KWH could use up seventy thousand barrels of oil a year, or forty-eight hours output of the F Pad wells in the ANWR#3 field in Alaska. No wear and tear from wind and weather, either, and solar receptors are notorious for their lack of moving parts, so nothing ever wore out.

  With the hexagonal PVAs unfolded inside and outside the perimeter of the station, we took on the look of a flat Mitchell Observatory, or less like a spiderweb and more like a soccer ball before it is sewn together and inflated. We didn’t have a cosmic anchor, and although we were dead in space relative to Ceres, we were still circling Sol within range of who knew how many other revolving bodies whose gravitational pulls would just love to screw up our orbit. Our position would be constantly monitored by Archy’s “what I tell you five times is true” orbital position program and the autogyros hooked into the hydrogen peroxide-powered vernier jets. I caught Simon in Archy’s stacks one day, pulling cards and poking at them with a tool that looked like a corkscrew. “Did you feel that?”

  “No-oo-oo,” Archy said doubtfully.

  Simon swore and pulled another card. “George, check the autocontrol on the 3-north thrusters.”

  “I just did!”

  “Then do it again!”

  Mumble, mumble over the communit. “Oh. I guess it wasn’t plugged in. Sorry, Simon.”

  “When all else fails,” Simon said grimly, “read the directions.” He plugged in the card. “How about now, Arch?”

  “Aw-right!”

  I left them to it.

  The last thing we did was stockpile our propulsion systems outside the hull in a clump that looked like a silver beehive. With full spin and halfgee and atmosphere fully established, we put away the gray tape and the bungee cords and began extending spokes to a central hub. This would equalize stress on the rim and provide us with a zerogee hangarlock and a space dock and was where later we would build on a zerogee recreation center. Tridee basketball was fun, and it didn’t matter how tall you were as long as the walls were padded.

  The cargo bays were gradually being cleaned out, and there the engineers and various technicians were assembling tools and setting up shops to thread screws and smelt plasteel and pour Leewall. It was time to give some thought to crew accommodations.

  As I’ve said before, an Orion Express looked like the bishop piece in a chess game, with an interior constructed of concentric rings of decks containing lockers, shops, cabins, controls, and one given over exclusively to a galley/recreation area. We’d packed everything we could think of into every available space, so on the way out there hadn’t been enough room anywhere to brush your teeth. After the companionway modules were extended and bolted into place, after the PVAs and the heat radiators were deployed, and after the Fuller geodomes were thrown up like mushroom caps from every available section of hull, the ships were pretty well emptied out. We started getting back a little of the elbow room we had lost when we put on spin and were reduced from three- to two-dimensional living again. I put everyone to work on the interior, primarily building and insulating crew cabins. After the Sisters of St. Anne moved down to Ceres, there were 138 women to 103 men (I didn’t count Leif) on board. Privacy was my number one priority.

  In-flight conditions aboard the Hokuwa’a had not lent themselves to romance, and when we were stationary— gawd. The ship’s bulkheads were thin to reduce weight and push price. At full pressure, the slightest sound traveled throughout the entire ship. During star sights or other kinds of navigational calibration, any and I mean any indoor activity was out of the question, since the slightest motion exerted against the hull of the ship could jiggle it and did register on the instruments and oh ho ho went Sam Holbrook. Romance was confined to meaningful winks. Take it from me, abstinence does make the heart grow fonder.

  Neither was freefall beneficial to anyone’s looks. Our bodily fluids rose upward, our legs got thinner, and our chests expanded. Our faces bloated up—“We look like a bunch of goddam chipmunks, for crissake,” Simon said disgustedly.

  “Chipmunks with the mumps,” Caleb grumbled.

  Chipmunks with the mumps and indigestion. Freefall encouraged a certain amount of flatulence as well. The ambience was less than arousing, a condition aggravated by the fact that taking a shower in freefall was a lot like going through a carwash on Terra, without the car. There were plenty among the crew who decided to hold out until the water streamed down again.

  The only sure way to enjoy freefall is de-nosed and deaf. Everyone was less grouchy when we put on spin.

  The ships had a diameter that would allow for two decks, so we built in a partition that became the floor of the interior deck and the ceiling of the exterior deck. We put living quarters on the outside and the work areas on the inside, turned the Voortrekker’s galley into a medical clinic for Charlie, and expanded the galley of the Hokuwa’a to feed and amuse the crews of both ships. We broke up the monotonous interior of the station by raising and lowering ceiling levels at odd intervals and putting doors and hatches and room dividers off center. We put down a roll of thin matting that added some texture to the visual look of the place, painted the multilayer ceilings and walls a variety of primary colors, and cut viewports into every bulkhead not otherwise occupied, oriented to receive sunlight reflected from mirrors outside. Roger and Zoya cobbled together window boxes and filled them with nasturtiums, marigolds, and dwarf sweet peas.

  “Nasturtiums!” I said in disgust. “Marigolds! You can’t eat sweet peas!”

  “They’re bright and pretty and they’ll grow anywhere,” Roger said, patiently for him.

  I grumped and harrumphed but in the end I made no official protest. Between Caleb’s orchids in our cabin and now the entire station decked out in window boxes full of inedible plant life, I was feeling like I was back in the Farthest Doughnut.

  In August, our chef, Edith Inouye, set up her meat and milk vats with more help than she considered absolutely necessary from Caleb, and promised the station biobeef within the month. We had a zoologist on board, one Domingo Esteban Santa Maria y Bravo from Los Angeles. He put his menagerie of halibut, oysters, and bees in neighboring compartments on the inside deck. For the first week everybody made excuses to stop by and see the flat fish in their plastigraph tanks swim cockeyed until they oriented themselves belly down to the bulkhead. Caleb introduced Paddy and Sean to each individual oyster, hovering over their pool every waking moment, until Steve managed to convince him that (a) their shells were too hard enough, (b) the water was too cold, and (c) red tide was unlikely to threaten marine life 1.8 astronomical units from its last known infestation. Charlie sweated whenever she got near the bees. Not me. They might have been a pain in the extra-Terran ass initially but after the help the honeybees gave Terranova in the One-Day Revolution, they and their descendants were welcome wherever I went from now on. I paid my respects often.

  I divided the crew into ten-hour, six-day shifts, put two to a cabin, tried to pair day sleepers with night sleepers, and tried to make sure that the quality snorers weren’t all roaring away on C Deck all at the same time. On the first day of spring in the Antarctic, researchers step outside and walk away in a straight line, without looking back, as far as they can on the ice, until they are out of sight of each other and their temporary homes. No endless icy landscapes on our station, but the privacy of the cabins was a good second substitute. I noticed that as soon as a cabin was completed the assigned crew member usually vanished inside it, neither to see nor to speak to another person outside of their jobs, until their roommate came off shift. It was a phase that seemed to last from about a week to ten days. They emerged looking rest
ed and with their senses of humor restored.

  · · ·

  Reconfiguring from ship to station took a while; our first twelve months in the Belt we were never without some kind of hammering from somewhere on board. Eventually, it stopped.

  Caleb smiled at me, a long, slow smile. “Now all we need is a baby-sitter.”

  “Oh,” I said innocently, “is love about to find a way?”

  “Archy?” Caleb said.

  “Yo.”

  “Ask Leif if he’ll take care of the twins until tomorrow.”

  If Archy hadn’t buzzed us at nine-thirty the next morning, I might still be in bed. Every woman should have her own Caleb.

  · · ·

  About two minutes after we put on spin the miners began visiting the station en masse, bringing with them their ill, their lonely, and their ore samples. I’d been a little nervous about allowing them the freedom of the house, so to speak. These people had been away from home and civilization a long time. I didn’t want to be unfriendly but I didn’t want to be foolhardy either. Caleb took the problem out of my hands by securing all our airlocks but two and setting a twenty-four-hour guard on each one.

  There never was a problem. We didn’t cure the Hudson’s epidemic to get the miners to sell their ore to us but the miners didn’t see it that way. From the day Claire set up shop, they brought in more high-grade ore than we could handle, and contracted with Claire to explore for more. This steady, incoming stream made me wonder if the miners didn’t feel as vengeful and vindictive toward Standard Oil and Solar and Terra-Luna Mines as they did grateful and appreciative toward us.

  Down on Ceres I had accepted with outward equanimity the absence of a free market and a hospital but I have never demonstrated more self-control than when I did not comment on the lack of a library. The only thing that keeps humankind a step ahead of the chimpanzees is the library, and the station’s library was usually any Belter’s first stop after the assay office. Armed with a credit voucher issued to them by Claire or one of her assistants, they descended like locusts on our stock of book and filmtapes. No one left the station without a borrowed tape clamped beneath one arm. That was the rule, one tape to a customer at a time. The penalty for not returning it within the prescribed period (eight weeks, to allow for travel time) was a revocation of all library privileges for the period of one year. We didn’t have a lot of trouble.

  Correction: We didn’t have any trouble, ever.

  Archy, acting librarian, was making a lot of new friends and conducting a sample census of the Belt while he was at it. When Archy was done with them, the galley was the next stop. Roger’s AgroAccel program had us harvesting coffee beans within a year of our arrival. Maile, who had grown up on a coffee plantation in Kealakekua, Hawaii, rigged up a vacuum bean roaster on one of the solar cells outside the hull, and soon we were selling as much Kona Premium as we were showtapes. Then a miner got loose in one of the geodomes and told the others about it and they all wanted a chance to smell the flowers and revel in the humidity.

  Roger got wind of this and informed me, through clenched teeth, that he would space the next miner who crushed one of his delicate seedlings beneath a clumsy boot. I said in that case he couldn’t be less than overjoyed that I was taking over one of his geodomes. Oh, I was, was I? he said. I was, and I was turning it into a kind of rock garden for recreation, to which, naturally, we would charge a small entrance fee. Roger said never mind the miners, I had better be careful how I stood next to airlocks in his company. I quoted him that bit from Thomas Brown about a garden is a lovesome thing, God wot. Roger said God wot eating was a lovesome thing, too, and how was he supposed to feed 252 people and God wot how many free-loading Belters if I persisted in turning every last square meter of his arable plots into frivolous parks? He also muttered something about starvation and famine and scurvy and general pestilence culminating in the end of civilization as we knew it, but being a large-minded person I ignored him. Central Park, as it came to be known, opened for picnics, parties, and two-by-two strolling on its tiny, winding path a month later. It paid for itself in six months, and at the very least it got all Caleb’s orchids out of our cabin. If I have to be married to a closet gardener, why can’t he grow something useful, like garlic for fried potatoes, or oregano for spaghetti sauce?

  Caleb made a point of personally meeting every new face that came aboard. He took them down to the galley, filled them full of coffee and fresh baked bread, and picked their brains clean of anything they knew about the Belt. There were rumors of homesteaders farther downarm. We had yet to meet one face-to-face, however, and I was inclined to regard as dubious anything we were told secondhand. Knowing is always better than not knowing, though, and Caleb coordinated what he learned in the galley over coffee with what Archy learned in the library over showtapes with what Claire learned on the road in the Belt, and we began to have a more complete overall picture of life beyond our bulkhead.

  The outbreak of Hudson’s Disease had reduced the mining population by nearly twelve percent, according to Nora at Maggie’s place, who was feeding us demographics for a fee she took out in luxury comestibles. The percentage of male miners to female miners was something less than three to one, lower than we had expected. The majority of the miners were independents who staked their own claims and kept themselves very much to themselves. Claim jumping was not widespread but neither was it unknown. So far as we could detect, Standard Oil and Solar and Terra-Luna Mines had not made the least push either to buy into existing mining concerns or to develop any of their own. Instead, they remained bovinely on Ceres, chewing the cud the miners delivered to them and never seeking out any new pasture on their own. Neither had they bothered to set up a spaceport or a traffic coordination center or a space rescue unit or, as we already knew, a hospital.

  “I’ve seen this before, you know,” I told Caleb one day. “Back home, the Outsiders came and fished all the fish, cut down all the timber, and sucked up all the oil, sold it, and then left without making the slightest effort to provide for the future.”

  “You think it was any different before the Revolutionary War in New South Africa?” he replied, aiming a spoonful of pureed spinach at Paddy’s mouth. She rejected it with an indignation that splattered Caleb from breastbone to the scar on his eyebrow. “Dig up the diamonds and get out the gold and good-bye,” he said, wiping his face on his sleeve. “Rape and run. It’s the oldest human story there is.”

  “It’s going to be different here,” I said, strapping Sean into a new diaper. He watched my every move with enormous, thickly lashed blue eyes. “We aren’t going to exploit the Belt and then leave it flat to die of disuse and neglect. We aren’t leaving a ghost town behind us when we go. We are going to build an economically viable community that will be able to support itself and its children for generations to come.”

  “Congratulations,” he said, and smiled at me. “We’ll be the first.”

  “I’m sorry. Was I preaching?”

  “Relax, you only sounded a little like Brother Moses.” Paddy poured her milk over her head. It dripped down off her short black curls. She smiled blindingly up at her father. Caleb sighed heavily and reached for a sponge. Leif put one into his hand. “Thanks, kid.”

  “No problem.”

  “Want to feed her?”

  “Sure.”

  Caleb watched him for a few moments. “Want to baby-sit tonight, Leif?”

  “Sure.”

  “Caleb,” I said reprovingly.

  “What?”

  “Don’t take advantage of Leif. He might have his own plans for this evening.”

  Caleb looked at Leif. “Do you?”

  Leif looked at me. “No.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Okay, then. I guess.”

  Mother poked her head in. “Dears, I’m off.”

  “Where to?”

  “I’ve heard rumors of a circus on Vesta.”

  Caleb laughed. “I’ve heard rumors of a circus on every claimed ast
eroid in the Belt, Natasha.”

  “No, dear, a real circus. With a tightrope walker and performing dogs. Under a tent.”

  “Natasha, you have got to be kidding.”

  “No, dear. I’ve talked to several gentlemen who claim to have attended performances. They’re charging admission and you know Belters don’t joke about money, so that leads me to believe the stories are true. Interesting to speculate if this circus arrived in a ship of its own, or if it evolved out of the current population on Vesta. Hmm, yes, and why.” She shook her head and said briskly, “And Crippen tells me the station is as close to Vesta as we’ll get for the next year, and you know how you are, Esther dear, about fuel consumption. So I do think I should take advantage of our present location to see for myself, don’t you? Good-bye, dears.”

  “Mother!”

  She waved. The door closed silently behind her. Caleb took one look at my expression and roared.

  When Caleb and I were curled up next to each other in bed that night, he said into my hair, “I got an idea. Has to do with Patrolman Lodge. Every hear of Samuel Benton Steele?”

  I tilted my head back to stare at him. “Every Alaskan has. Superintendent of the Northwest Mounted Police during the Klondike Gold Rush, 1899 or thereabouts. Kept the peace. Kept Soapy Smith’s bunch on the American side of the border and out of the Klondike.”

  “Very good,” he said, complimentarily.

  “Thank you. Now quit stalling and tell me, what has the Lion of the Yukon got to do with Space Patrol Lieutenant Ursula Lodge?”

  “Space Patrol,” he said ruminatively. “Space Patrol. Means patrol of space, right?”