“Oh, yes,” he interrupted me. “I’m fed, housed, educated, disciplined. You’d do the same for any member of your crew.”
Stung, I said, “It was your hands I pulled on when the twins were born.”
“Only because Caleb wasn’t there.”
“He’s my husband.”
“And I’m your son. Whether you like it or not, whether you want it or not, I’m your son.” He paused and then said, “Would you do that for me? Would you confront Lavoliere like that for me?” I opened my mouth to blister him and he said, “Of course you would. You’d do it for any member of your crew.”
We left it like that, for about nine thousand kilometers, the longest and quietest nine thousand kilometers I’d ever traveled. Leif broke the silence as we were approaching No Return. “You know what that business back on the Conestoga was, Star?”
“I don’t know, Leif, what was that?”
“That was an admission of failure of their reason for being here. They need a bigger gene pool, so they figured they could swipe a few cells for new DNA starters, and the twins would never miss them.”
I thought about it. He was probably right. I put it to Caleb when we arrived back at Hatsuko’s. Sometimes I think I have no tact. The thought of dozens of little Seans and Paddys running around the Conestoga busily cloning themselves into the millennium did not sit well with Caleb. He still wasn’t speaking to me when we left the next morning at 0600 sharp over Hatsuko’s protests; I wanted sanity and I wanted it now and I wanted it in my own home with my own people around me. We burned the sails off that Cub and caught our first glimpse of Outpost thirty-seven hours out of No Return. The squarish circle, revolving about a domed hub and cluttered with geodomes, reflectors, radiators, PVAs and antennae, the original lines of the two Express ships all but obscured, was developing a little halo from escaping atmosphere through lock ventings. It looked impossibly dear to me. In pressure suits in a Solar Cub traveling through black vacuum it is impossible to tell what a fellow passenger is thinking, but I imagined I felt an infinitesimal relaxation of the motionless figure sitting pharaoh-like in front of me. I nudged the chin switch inside my helmet. Archy came through in his usual exuberant fashion. “Hey, Star! We missed you! How was the trip?”
“Interesting, Archy. Everything okay here while we were gone?”
Archy sounded a trifle disgusted. “You always think the place is going to fall apart without you, Star. Of course we’re all right. We did have a little excitement yesterday, though.”
When I docked the Cub outside the main lock I saw what Archy meant. Across the main personnel airlock, broken in half by the crack of the lock but still readable, someone had stuck a rectangular yellow sign with black block printing on the hull of the station. Inside I shucked out of my p-suit, vented it into the station’s waste disposal system, and turned it over to a maintenance tech for its five-hundred-hour check. I ducked into the nearest shower. Paddy didn’t want to get out of the soothing, heated spray, and pouted a little when I insisted. Charlie was waiting in the dressing room with clean jumpsuits for five. Caleb and Sean merged from the next stall and Leif from a third. We dressed quickly and followed Charlie into the galley, where the scent of fresh coffee drove me into a feeding frenzy. The hospitality of the Belters was legendary and overwhelming, but none of them had fresh coffee, or F-B-E equipment for fresh milk, either. It was Simon’s turn for Alexei that day and the twins pounced on both of them with squeals of glee. I stretched and began to relax for the first time in what felt like months. “So, pray tell, who is this Save the Rock League slapping signs on our hull?”
Charlie smiled and Simon, emerging from a tangle of arms and legs, snorted. “It’s a branch of the Divine Brethren, as near as we can figure.”
“So what are we now? The first stop on the Hallelujah Trail?”
“It’s better than that. They’ve decided Outpost is endangering the livelihood of the average Belter by hogging all the good rocks. Not to mention the prospects of future generations of miners. A few of them seem to be worried that there won’t be enough asteroids left to show our great-great-greatgrandchildren the Belt in its natural state.”
“That’s ridiculous,” I said. “Why, our farthest probes haven’t progressed much more than twenty degrees downarm in either direction. We haven’t even catalogued half of the Sutter Cluster, much less mined it. Nobody’s even looked at the Carmack yet.”
“Who said it wasn’t ridiculous?” Simon grinned. “The League wanted to picket the station, I understand, but Brother Moses made the mistake of convening the meeting in Piazzi Square. He couldn’t get enough miners with transport out of the bars in time to form a line. So he came over himself, with half a dozen loyal followers, in an R-bus that looked like it came out on the Sagdeyev. They would have run into the station if Crip hadn’t gone EVA to take the controls. He brought them back down safely to Ceres.”
“How’d that sign get there if Crip waved them off?”
“Crip put it there for them.”
“He what?”
Charlie giggled, and Simon shrugged. “Well, they’d made such an effort, come a hell of a long way for nothing. He thought it was the least he could do. They went away happy.”
“Crip says he even got a blessing from Brother Moses,” Charlie added.
I stared at Simon. He stared back blandly.
I suppose I was tired. I started to laugh, and once I started I couldn’t stop. Paddy, bouncing up and down on my chest, thought it was all in fun and laughed, too. The next thing I knew the tears were running down my face and I could see Charlie visibly downshifting into doctor.
Gasping, I said, “It’s all right. I’m all right. Wait a minute.” I fought for control. “I’m sorry,” I said, wiping the last of the moisture from my face. “I’m afraid it was a—somewhat tiring trip.” I dredged up a smile. “I must be getting too old for two weeks in zerogee.”
Caleb, speaking for the first time, said, “Charlie, the twins need a checkup. Let’s go down to the dispensary.”
“What? Why, what’s wrong?”
“Let’s go down to the dispensary,” he repeated. He tucked Sean beneath one arm and held the other out for Paddy without meeting my eyes. I gave her to him and he left the galley, Charlie right behind them.
“What’s wrong with him?” Simon said, looking after the four of them.
“Everything,” I said wearily.
“That sounds fairly comprehensive. Tell Brother Simon all about it.”
So I told him about Lavoliere and the Conestoga, about Mother Juliet and Mother Eve, about Elaine and Eleanor and Eugenia, about David and Daniel and Douglas, about the barren, creeperless plain of 7877Tomorrow.
There was a brief silence while Simon assimilated all this. Finally he said, “And Caleb is angry that you insisted on dealing with Lavoliere.”
And for pulling rank on him, I thought, but said only, “Yes.”
Simon said shrewdly, “What did he really want? For you to blow them out of the sky?”
“He didn’t say so.”
Simon said firmly, “If you’d let Caleb go back breathing fire, he would have gotten himself killed.”
“I thought so. He didn’t.”
“And if you let him go back now, you’ll be advocating an act of deep-space piracy that would run contrary to everything Terranova and this expedition represents. The miners would shun us.”
“Agreed.”
Simon sat back, frowning. “I don’t like the idea of turning that Conestoga Frankenstein loose on unborn generations any more than you do, and Caleb is right to be furious about what happened to the twins, but you handled it the only way you could.”
I hadn’t realized until that moment how much in need of approval I’d been. I was afraid for a moment I was going to start crying again. “Thanks. Thanks, Simon.”
“No charge. We’ll put the word out, make the Conestoga off limits for the crew.” I looked toward the hatch that led toward the dispensary
, and Simon said soberly, “Caleb will get over it, Star.”
I stretched again, and groaned. I was sore from so many days of isometrics in little or no gravity. Any minute now Charlie would be harassing me to take a turn on a treadmill. “I don’t care what they manage to grow on that rock of theirs, Simon, we don’t trade with them.”
“Understood and agreed, Star,” he said. “But there’ll be plenty who will. Think of it, a slice of immortality for a slice of skin. That will sound like an attractive proposition to a lot of Belters.” He paused, and added, “I wonder what the Conestoga is going to be offering in trade?”
“So far all they’re growing is kids.” The silence stretched out between us, becoming heavier by the moment, and finally I blurted, “Don’t, Simon. Don’t say it. Don’t even think it.”
And then I remembered who Lavoliere reminded me of, with all that smooth charm and that disarming, infectious smile. He reminded me of Grays.
— 8 —
Buckaroos and Bluenoses
Day after day for more than a month the international parade of boats continued… They brought sundowners, shantymen, sodbusters and shellbacks, buckaroos and bluenoses, vaqueros and maquereaus, Creoles and metis, Gaels, Kanakas, Afrikaners, and Suvanese. They brought wife-beaters, lady-killers, cuckolded husbands, disbarred lawyers, dance-hall beauties, escaped convicts, remittance men, cardsharps, Hausfraus, Salvation Army lasses, ex-buffalo-hunters, scullions, surgeons, ecclesiastics, gun-fighters, sob sisters, soldiers of fortune, and Oxford dons.
—Pierre Berton
IN THE THREE YEARS following our arrival in the Belt, SOS and T-LM Volksrockets arrived at irregular intervals, one approximately every three or four months. They docked in orbit around Ceres, into whose less than enthusiastic embrace they spilled payloads of prospective miners before loading payloads of refined ore and beating the solar winds back to Terra. Hundreds and eventually thousands of these prospective miners flooded into Piazzi City and bid fair to crowd out the original settlers. The old-timers did not take kindly to this influx, but they would have put up with it, grudgingly, if it hadn’t been only the first minuscule trickle of an overwhelming deluge.
They came on the ugly and trustworthy one-shot BDR, the ugly and powerful Kenilworth space tug, the utilitarian Boeing VLOCs, in sleek new SSI Skywagons and aboard tired old Ford TriDrives. It was the most bizarre and diverse flotilla ever to set sail, on land or sea, in air or space, and unquestionably the most hazardous. Outfitters on Terra with little or no experience in space travel underwrote bands of prospectors and underestimated what it would take to feed them. They starved in transit and in some cases resorted to eating each other. One inventor long on imagination but short on practicality put a hundred paying passengers into cryogenic sleep and stacked them like cordwood in a DC-110 Spaceliner designed for traversing low earth orbit. Three of the one hundred survived the trip. Some ships made it halfway and had to turn back because of low food stores, overcrowded passenger accommodations, or outright mutiny. Poorly maintained pusher plates gave and entire ships were lost in a single puff of nuclear dust. Life-support systems failed and asphyxiated whole crews and left floating coffins drifting in space.
And still they came. One morning I woke up to the reported sighting of an old STS shuttle, limping into Ceres orbit with a solar drive hanging off the stern. It looked like one of Rube Goldberg’s better ideas, and it leaked so much atmosphere that they were moving beneath a kind of cloud of dirty vapor. As soon as Perry Austin heard the news she commandeered a solarsled and paid a social call. “It’s a shuttle, all right,” she said when she came back, shaking her head. “The Resolution. I flew a mission aboard the Resolution twenty years ago. I thought they’d scrapped her for parts.”
“Who’s got her now?”
“A couple of The Seven’s kids went into business together and bankrolled this trip. They’ve been twelve months on the road here. The crew are all ex-Express and BDR.” She shook her head again. “I can’t think why they haven’t killed each other before now. Do you know how much space there isn’t on the middeck of an STS shuttle?”
“What are they doing here?”
“What’s anybody doing here? They’re looking for a way to make a quick buck. With thirty thousand kilograms of payload they may just do it, too. If they can hold her together long enough to get back.” She shook her head again. “Her interior bulkhead is covered with graphplex fixative and gray tape and they’re leaking so much oh-two they’ve got four AtPaks working twenty-four hours a day just so they can breathe without passing out.” And she shook her head a third time. “I don’t even want to know what their CO2 count is.”
Some of the new Belters were driven by the lust for gold or platinum or silicon, some by the lure of adventure, some by a quest for power. Others sought escape from nagging spouses, from collection agencies, some simply from the overall grayness of present-day life on Terra. A tenured professor of English at Harvard lost everything she had in the crash of ’99 and was seeking a quick return so she could go back and lose it all in the next. One man was fleeing seven wives on Terra and an eighth on Terranova, where they take a tolerant view of such things, but mostly a ninth on Luna, where they do not. Another man, an actor primarily famous for having been plucked clean in two successive palimony suits, had thrown up his career and come to the Belt where, he said acidly, he could pay someone to shoot him if he fell in heat a third time. He bought out a silicon claim on Vesta, sank a shaft next to the producing vein for living quarters, and put in a connecting shaft between the two. Whenever he ran out of vodka he strolled next door and hacked off another piece of ore to trade for his next liter. So far as I know he’s still there.
One woman went to work for Nora the day she arrived and proceeded to set an in-house record that stands today for volume of customers serviced per twenty-four-hour period. She returned to New York in two years’ time to open an Art Vieux furniture store catering exclusively to the very rich. She later became the much-revered patroness of a born-again sculptor who specialized in swaddling the Venus de Milo and Michelangelo’s David and suchlike in silk draperies.
They came with stardust in their eyes, what they owned on their backs, and the stub of a one-way ticket in their pockets. Maybe one in a hundred could tell a core driller from a leather punch. For some, the journey itself seemed to be the culmination of a dream—they were glad and proud to have made it that far, and they didn’t really care if they ever saw so much as an ounce of salable ore. In a backhanded kind of way, these turned out to be the smartest and luckiest of the bunch. Other optimistic new Belters upon arrival immediately staked out the nearest rock, oblivious to or contemptuous of any previous claim beacons, and where it may be said they were almost immediately buried. A third kind, according to Caleb, were the kind of people who are always caught out with forks when it’s raining soup—no food, no shelter, no money, no plans, only a dream of wealth and plenty, which all too often turned into a nightmare of starvation and death.
The smart ones sized up the situation quickly and went to work for SOS or T-LM or Robber Joe in the casino or Nora at Maggie’s. A few with a little capital tried their hands at grubstaking their less fortunate fellows, always for a percentage, and did fairly well. Half a dozen off the Resolution went partners and formed a taxi service that folded in less than a year. “No market and no product,” one of them explained laconically.
“No travelers and no place to go,” translated his friend.
“Your biggest problem is you were too early,” I told them. “Try again in ten years. There’ll be a fortune to be made in cheap, scheduled transportation out here.” I bought out their rolling stock and turned it over to Claire, and for the umpteenth time wished I had brought somebody from Boeing along. We could have used a trained, experienced transportation engineer.
Of all the oddities I saw come into the Belt, what we came to call the Love Boat was surely the strangest. It arrived in July of 2011, an old Express to her shame an
d embarrassment converted into a luxury liner. She settled into a parking orbit for a long stay. Aboard were Lady Margaret and Lady Melisande Arundel, two very short, very plump dames of the UER state of Britain, who claimed kinship with Charles III. With them, they brought two Great Danes, both snappishly spacesick, a parrot and several canaries that were more than snappish, a pair of hens but no rooster, a Pioneer octophonic sound system that at full volume caused the hull panels to vibrate ominously, AtPaks enough to supply the needs of half a dozen Express ships, a library larger than Outpost’s, two maids, a housekeeper, a butler, and twin braces of Purdy shotguns with a thousand rounds of ammunition. What big game they thought they might find to hunt in the Belt, I had no idea. I knew they must have had a pilot and crew but I never saw them. Probably not allowed abovestairs.
As chiefs respectively of Outpost and Piazzi City, Takemotu and I were invited to a state dinner. We were offered pate de foie gras, salmon en croute, and fresh broccoli with hollandaise sauce, with raspberry mousse for dessert, all served on Royal Dalton china. It was all washed down by Tattinger’s 1999 served in Waterford crystal stemware. The Lismore pattern, Lady Margaret was pleased to inform me. I was too busy trying to calculate the lift cost of one Continental Champagne Glass to pay much attention.
Our hostesses were attired in flowing silk gowns with long trains that provided the unwary with unexpected glimpses of acres of dimpled flesh. All too often said trains wrapped one or the other lady about the neck. When this happened, a little man stationed unobtrusively next to the hatch kicked off from his handhold, disentangled his mistress, and returned to his post. After dinner, the ladies strapped themselves into hammocks, stretched out languid arms for the French horn and oboe hanging conveniently nearby, and tootled out a mournful duet. They finally dozed off in mid-toot, leaving Takemotu and me to make friends with the Great Danes and effect an escape. At least I found out Takemotu could laugh. “Aw hell, Star,” he said, wiping tears away, “come on down to Piazzi City. The beer’s on me.”
A Handful of Stars (Star Svensdotter #2) Page 18
